Chapter XXIV: Act II: Sc. 4

Other parallel passages might be cited; but it should not be
forgotten, that there is one striking difference between the
two; for that, whereas the Persiles is a book of great purity of
thought and feeling, “The Custom of the Country” is one of the
most indecent plays in the language; so indecent, indeed, that
Dryden rather boldly says it is worse in this particular than all
his own plays put together. Dryden’s Works, Scott’s ed., London,
1808, 8vo, Vol. XI. p. 239.

[161] In the Aprobacion, dated Sept. 9, 1616, ed. 1802, Tom. I.
p. vii.

But serious romantic fiction, which is peculiarly the offspring of modern civilization, was not yet far enough developed to enable one like Cervantes to obtain a high degree of success in it, especially as the natural bent of his genius was to humorous fiction. The imaginary travels of Lucian, three or four Greek romances, and the romances of chivalry, were all he had to guide him; for any thing approaching nearer to the proper modern novel than some of his own tales had not yet been imagined. Perhaps his first impulse was to write a romance of chivalry, modified by the spirit of the age, and free from the absurdities which abound in the romances that had been written before his time.[162] But if he had such a thought, the success of his own Don Quixote almost necessarily prevented him from attempting to put it in execution. He therefore looked rather to the Greek romances, and, as far as he used any model, took the “Theagenes and Chariclea” of Heliodorus.[163] He calls what he produced “A Northern Romance,” and makes its principal story consist of the sufferings of Persiles and Sigismunda,--the first the son of a king of Iceland, and the second the daughter of a king of Friesland,--laying the scene of one half of his fiction in the North of Europe, and that of the other half in the South. He has some faint ideas of the sea-kings and pirates of the Northern Ocean, but very little of the geography of the countries that produced them; and as for his savage men and frozen islands, and the wild and strange adventures he imagines to have passed among them, nothing can be more fantastic and incredible.

[162] This may be fairly suspected from the beginning of the 48th
chapter of the First Part of Don Quixote.

[163] Once he intimates that it is a translation, but does not
say from what language. (See opening of Book II.) An acute
and elegant critic of our own time says, “Des naufrages, des
déserts, des descentes par mer, et des ravissements, c’est donc
toujours plus ou moins l’ancien roman d’Héliodore.” (Sainte
Beuve, Critiques, Paris, 1839, 8vo, Tom. IV. p 173.) These words
describe more than half of the Persiles and Sigismunda. Two
imitations of the Persiles, or, at any rate, two imitations of
the Greek romance which was the chief model of the Persiles,
soon appeared in Spain. The first is the “Historia de Hipólito y
Aminta” of Francisco de Quintana, (Madrid, 1627, 4to), divided
into eight books, with a good deal of poetry intermixed. The
other is “Eustorgio y Clorilene, Historia Moscovica,” by Enrique
Suarez de Mendoza y Figueroa, (1629), in thirteen books, with
a hint of a continuation; but my copy was printed Çaragoça,
1665, 4to. Both are written in bad taste, and have no value as
fictions. The latter seems to have been plainly suggested by the
Persiles.

In Portugal, Spain, and Italy, through which his hero and heroine--disguised as they are from first to last under the names of Periandro and Auristela--make a pilgrimage to Rome, we get rid of most of the extravagances which deform the earlier portion of the romance. The whole, however, consists of a labyrinth of tales, showing, indeed, an imagination quite astonishing in an old man like Cervantes, already past his grand climacteric,--a man, too, who might be supposed to be broken down by sore calamities and incurable disease;--but it is a labyrinth from which we are glad to be extricated, and we feel relieved when the labors and trials of his Persiles and Sigismunda are over, and when, the obstacles to their love being removed, they are happily united at Rome. No doubt, amidst the multitude of separate stories with which this wild work is crowded, several are graceful in themselves, and others are interesting because they contain traces of Cervantes’s experience of life,[164] while, through the whole, his style is more carefully finished, perhaps, than in any other of his works. But, after all, it is far from being what he and his friends fancied it was,--a model of this peculiar style of fiction, and the best of his works.

[164] From the beginning of Book III., we find that the action
of Persiles and Sigismunda is laid in the time of Philip II. or
Philip III., when there was a Spanish viceroy in Lisbon, and the
travels of the hero and heroine in the South of Spain and Italy
seem to be, in fact, Cervantes’s own recollections of the journey
he made through the same countries in his youth; while Chapters
10 and 11 of Book III. show bitter traces of his Algerine
captivity. His familiarity with Portugal, as seen in this work,
should also be noticed. Frequently, indeed, as in almost every
thing else he wrote, we meet intimations and passages from his
own life.

This honor, if we may trust the uniform testimony of two centuries, belongs, beyond question, to his Don Quixote,--the work which, above all others, not merely of his own age, but of all modern times, bears most deeply the impression of the national character it represents, and has, therefore, in return, enjoyed a degree and extent of national favor never granted to any other.[165] When Cervantes began to write it is wholly uncertain. For twenty years preceding the appearance of the First Part he printed nothing;[166] and the little we know of him, during that long and dreary period of his life, shows only how he obtained a hard subsistence for himself and his family by common business agencies, which, we have reason to suppose, were generally of trifling importance, and which, we are sure, were sometimes distressing in their consequences. The tradition, therefore, of his persecutions in La Mancha, and his own averment that the Don Quixote was begun in a prison, are all the hints we have received concerning the circumstances under which it was first imagined; and that such circumstances should have tended to such a result is a striking fact in the history, not only of Cervantes, but of the human mind, and shows how different was his temperament from that commonly found in men of genius.

[165] My own experience in Spain fully corroborates the
suggestion of Inglis, in his very pleasant book, (Rambles in the
Footsteps of Don Quixote, London, 1837, 8vo, p. 26), that “no
Spaniard is entirely ignorant of Cervantes.” At least, none I
ever questioned on the subject--and their number was great in the
lower conditions of society--seemed to be entirely ignorant what
sort of personages were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

[166] He felt this himself as a dreary interval in his life,
for he says in his Prólogo: “Al cabo de tantos años como ha,
que duermo en el silencio del olvido,” etc. In fact, from 1584
till 1605 he had printed nothing except a few short poems of
little value, and seems to have been wholly occupied in painful
struggles to secure a subsistence.

His purpose in writing the Don Quixote has sometimes been enlarged by the ingenuity of a refined criticism, until it has been made to embrace the whole of the endless contrast between the poetical and the prosaic in our natures,--between heroism and generosity on one side, as if they were mere illusions, and a cold selfishness on the other, as if it were the truth and reality of life.[167] But this is a metaphysical conclusion drawn from views of the work at once imperfect and exaggerated; a conclusion contrary to the spirit of the age, which was not given to a satire so philosophical and generalizing, and contrary to the character of Cervantes himself, as we follow it from the time when he first became a soldier, through all his trials in Algiers, and down to the moment when his warm and trusting heart dictated the Dedication of “Persiles and Sigismunda” to the Count de Lemos. His whole spirit, indeed, seems rather to have been filled with a cheerful confidence in human virtue, and his whole bearing in life seems to have been a contradiction to that discouraging and saddening scorn for whatever is elevated and generous, which such an interpretation of the Don Quixote necessarily implies.[168]

[167] This idea is found partly developed by Bouterwek,
(Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, Göttingen, 1803, 8vo,
Tom. III. pp. 335-337), and fully set forth and defended by
Sismondi, with his accustomed eloquence. Littérature du Midi de
l’Europe, Paris, 1813, 8vo, Tom. III. pp. 339-343.

[168] Many other interpretations have been given to the Don
Quixote. One of the most absurd is that of Daniel De Foe, who
declares it to be “an emblematic history of, and a just satire
upon, the Duke de Medina Sidonia, a person very remarkable at
that time in Spain.” (Wilson’s Life of De Foe, London, 1830,
8vo, Vol. III. p. 437, note.) The “Buscapié”--if there ever was
such a publication--pretended that it set forth “some of the
undertakings and gallantries of the Emperor Charles V.” See
Appendix (D).

Nor does he himself permit us to give to his romance any such secret meaning; for, at the very beginning of the work, he announces it to be his sole purpose to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry, and, at the end of the whole, he declares anew, in his own person, that “he had had no other desire than to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry”;[169] exulting in his success, as an achievement of no small moment. And such, in fact, it was; for we have abundant proof that the fanaticism for these romances was so great in Spain, during the sixteenth century, as to have become matter of alarm to the more judicious. Many of the distinguished contemporary authors speak of its mischiefs, and among the rest the venerable Luis de Granada, and Malon de Chaide, who wrote the eloquent “Conversion of Mary Magdalen.”[170] Guevara, the learned and fortunate courtier of Charles the Fifth, declares that “men did read nothing in his time but such shameful books as ‘Amadis de Gaula,’ ‘Tristan,’ ‘Primaleon,’ and the like”;[171] the acute author of “The Dialogue on Languages” says that “the ten years he passed at court he wasted in studying ‘Florisando,’ ‘Lisuarte,’ ‘The Knight of the Cross,’ and other such books, more than he can name”;[172] and from different sources we know, what, indeed, we may gather from Cervantes himself, that many who read these fictions took them for true histories.[173] At last, they were deemed so noxious, that, in 1553, they were prohibited by law from being printed or sold in the American colonies, and in 1555 the same prohibition, and even the burning of all copies of them extant in Spain itself, was earnestly asked for by the Cortes.[174] The evil, in fact, had become formidable, and the wise began to see it.

[169] In the Prólogo to the First Part, he says, “_No mira á
mas_ que á deshacer la autoridad y cabida, que en el mundo y _en
el vulgo_ tienen los libros de Caballerías”; and he ends the
Second Part, ten years afterwards, with these remarkable words:
“_No ha sido otro mi deseo_, que poner en aborrecimiento de los
hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias de los libros de
Caballerías, que por las de mi verdadero Don Quixote van ya
tropezando, y han de caer del todo sin duda alguna. Vale.” It
seems really hard that a great man’s word of honor should thus be
called in question by the spirit of an over-refined criticism,
two centuries after his death. D. Vicente Salvá has partly, but
not wholly, avoided this difficulty in an ingenious and pleasant
essay on the question, “Whether the Don Quixote has yet been
judged according to its merits”;--in which he maintains, that
Cervantes did not intend to satirize the substance and essence
of books of chivalry, but only to purge away their absurdities
and improbabilities; and that, after all, he has given us only
another romance of the same class which has ruined the fortunes
of all its predecessors by being itself immensely in advance of
them all. Ochoa, Apuntes para una Biblioteca, Paris, 1842, 8vo,
Tom. II. pp. 723-740.

[170] Símbolo de la Fé, Parte II. cap. 17, near the end.
Conversion de la Magdalena, 1592, Prólogo al Letor. Both are
strong in their censures.

[171] “Vemos, que ya no se ocupan los hombres sino en leer libros
que es affrenta nombrarlos, como son Amadis de Gaula, Tristan de
Leonis, Primaleon,” etc. Argument to the Aviso de Privados, Obras
de Ant. de Guevara, Valladolid, 1545, folio, f. clviii. b.

[172] The passage is too long to be conveniently cited, but it is
very severe. See Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. II. pp. 157, 158.

[173] See _ante_, Vol. I. pp. 249-254. But, besides what is said
there, Francisco de Portugal, who died in 1632, tells us in his
“Arte de Galantería,” (Lisboa, 1670, 4to, p. 96), that Simon de
Silveira (I suppose the Portuguese poet who lived about 1500;
Barbosa, Tom. III. p. 722) once swore upon the Evangelists, that
he believed the whole of the Amadis to be true history.

[174] Clemencin, in the Preface to his edition of Don Quixote,
Tom. I. pp. xi.-xvi., cites many other proofs of the passion for
books of chivalry at that period in Spain; adding a reference
to the “Recopilacion de Leyes de las Indias,” Lib. I. Tít. 24,
Ley 4, for the law of 1553, and printing at length the very
curious petition of the Cortes of 1555, which I have not seen
anywhere else, and which would probably have produced the law it
demanded, if the abdication of the Emperor, the same year, had
not prevented all action upon the matter.

To destroy a passion that had struck its roots so deeply in the character of all classes of men,[175] to break up the only reading which at that time could be considered widely popular and fashionable,[176] was certainly a bold undertaking, and one that marks any thing rather than a scornful or broken spirit, or a want of faith in what is most to be valued in our common nature. The great wonder is, that Cervantes succeeded. But that he did there is no question. No book of chivalry was written after the appearance of Don Quixote, in 1605; and from the same date, even those already enjoying the greatest favor ceased, with one or two unimportant exceptions, to be reprinted;[177] so that, from that time to the present, they have been constantly disappearing, until they are now among the rarest of literary curiosities;--a solitary instance of the power of genius to destroy, by a single well-timed blow, an entire department, and that, too, a flourishing and favored one, in the literature of a great and proud nation.

[175] Allusions to the fanaticism of the lower classes on the
subject of books of chivalry are happily introduced into Don
Quixote, Parte I. c. 32, and in other places. It extended, too,
to those better bred and informed. Francisco de Portugal, in the
“Arte de Galantería,” cited in a preceding note, and written
before 1632, tells the following anecdote: “A knight came home
one day from the chase and found his wife and daughters and
their women crying. Surprised and grieved, he asked them if any
child or relation were dead. ‘No,’ they answered, suffocated
with tears. ‘Why, then, do you weep so?’ he rejoined, still more
amazed. ‘Sir,’ they replied, ‘Amadis is dead.’ They had read so
far.” p. 96.

[176] Cervantes himself, as his Don Quixote amply proves, must,
at some period of his life, have been a devoted reader of the
romances of chivalry. How minute and exact his knowledge of them
was may be seen, among other passages, from one at the end of
the twentieth chapter of Part First, where, speaking of Gasabal,
the esquire of Galaor, he observes that his name is mentioned
_but once_ in the history of Amadis of Gaul;--a fact which the
indefatigable Mr. Bowle took the pains to verify, when reading
that huge romance. See his “Letter to Dr. Percy, on a New and
Classical Edition of Don Quixote.” London, 1777, 4to, p. 25.

[177] Clemencin, in his Preface, notes “D. Policisne de Boecia,”
printed in 1602, as the _last_ book of chivalry that was written
in Spain, and adds, that, after 1605, “_no se publicó_ de nuevo
libro alguno de caballerías, y _dejaron de_ reimprimirse los
anteriores.” (p. xxi.) To this remark of Clemencin, however,
there are exceptions. For instance, the “Genealogía de la
Toledana Discreta, Primera Parte,” por Eugenio Martinez, a tale
of chivalry in octave stanzas, was reprinted in 1608; and “El
Caballero del Febo,” and “Claridiano,” his son, are extant in
editions of 1617. The period of the passion for such books in
Spain can be readily seen in the Bibliographical Catalogue, and
notices of them by Salvá, in the Repertorio Americano, London,
1827, Tom. IV. pp. 29-74. It was eminently the sixteenth century.

The general plan Cervantes adopted to accomplish this object, without, perhaps, foreseeing its whole course, and still less all its results, was simple as well as original. In 1605,[178] he published the First Part of Don Quixote, in which a country gentleman of La Mancha--full of genuine Castilian honor and enthusiasm, gentle and dignified in his character, trusted by his friends, and loved by his dependants--is represented as so completely crazed by long reading the most famous books of chivalry, that he believes them to be true, and feels himself called on to become the impossible knight-errant they describe,--nay, actually goes forth into the world to defend the oppressed and avenge the injured, like the heroes of his romances.

[178] See Appendix (E).

To complete his chivalrous equipment--which he had begun by fitting up for himself a suit of armour strange to his century--he took an esquire out of his neighbourhood; a middle-aged peasant, ignorant and credulous to excess, but of great good-nature; a glutton and a liar; selfish and gross, yet attached to his master; shrewd enough occasionally to see the folly of their position, but always amusing, and sometimes mischievous, in his interpretations of it. These two sally forth from their native village in search of adventures, of which the excited imagination of the knight, turning windmills into giants, solitary inns into castles, and galley-slaves into oppressed gentlemen, finds abundance, wherever he goes; while the esquire translates them all into the plain prose of truth with an admirable simplicity, quite unconscious of its own humor, and rendered the more striking by its contrast with the lofty and courteous dignity and magnificent illusions of the superior personage. There could, of course, be but one consistent termination of adventures like these. The knight and his esquire suffer a series of ridiculous discomfitures, and are at last brought home, like madmen, to their native village, where Cervantes leaves them, with an intimation that the story of their adventures is by no means ended.

From this time we hear little of Cervantes and nothing of his hero, till eight years afterwards, in July, 1613, when he wrote the Preface to his Tales, where he distinctly announces a Second Part of Don Quixote. But before this Second Part could be published, and, indeed, before it was finished, a person calling himself Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, who seems, from some provincialisms in his style, to have been an Aragonese, and who, from other internal evidence, is suspected to have been a Dominican monk, came out, in the summer of 1614, with what he impertinently called “The Second Volume of the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha.”[179]

[179] Cervantes reproaches Avellaneda with being an Aragonese,
because he sometimes omits the article where a Castilian would
insert it. (Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 59.) The rest of the
discussion about him is found in Pellicer, Vida, pp. clvi.-clxv.;
in Navarrete, Vida, pp. 144-151; in Clemencin’s Don Quixote,
Parte II. c. 59, notes; and in Adolfo de Castro’s Conde Duque de
Olivares, Cadiz, 1846, 8vo, pp. 11, etc. This Avellaneda, whoever
he was, called his book “_Segundo_ Tomo del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don
Quixote de la Mancha,” etc., (Tarragona, 1614, 12mo), and printed
it so that it matches very well with the Valencian edition,
1605, of the First Part of the genuine Don Quixote;--both of
which I have. There are editions of it, Madrid, 1732 and 1805;
and a translation by Le Sage, 1704, in which,--after his manner
of translating,--he alters and enlarges the original work with
little ceremony or good faith. The edition of 1805, in 2 vols.
12mo, is expurgated.

Two things are remarkable in relation to this book. The first is, that, though it is hardly possible its author’s name should not have been known to many, and especially to Cervantes himself, still it is only by remote conjecture that it has been sometimes assigned to Luis de Aliaga, the king’s confessor, a person whom, from his influence at court, it might not have been deemed expedient openly to attack; and sometimes to Juan Blanco de Paz, a Dominican friar, who had been an enemy of Cervantes in Algiers. The second is, that the author seems to have had hints of the plan Cervantes was pursuing in his Second Part, then unfinished, and to have used them in an unworthy manner, especially in making Don Alvaro Tarfe play substantially the same part that is played by the Duke and Duchess towards Don Quixote, and in carrying the knight through an adventure at an inn with play-actors rehearsing one of Lope de Vega’s dramas, almost exactly like the adventure with the puppet-show man so admirably imagined by Cervantes.[180]

[180] Avellaneda, c. 26.

But this is all that can interest us about the book, which, if not without merit in some respects, is generally low and dull, and would now be forgotten, if it were not connected with the fame of Don Quixote. In its Preface, Cervantes is treated with coarse indignity, his age, his sufferings, and even his honorable wounds, being sneered at;[181] and in the body of the book, the character of Don Quixote, who appears as a vulgar madman, fancying himself to be Achilles, or any other character that happened to occur to the author,[182] is so completely without dignity or consistency, that it is clear the writer did not possess the power of comprehending the genius he at once basely libelled and meanly attempted to supplant. The best parts of the work are those in which Sancho is introduced; the worst are its indecent stories and the adventures of Barbara, who is a sort of brutal caricature of the graceful Dorothea, and whom the knight mistakes for Queen Zenobia.[183] But it is almost always wearisome, and comes to a poor conclusion by the confinement of Don Quixote in a mad-house.[184]

[181] “Tiene mas lengua que manos,” says Avellaneda, coarsely.

[182] Chapter 8;--just as he makes Don Quixote fancy a poor
peasant in his melon-garden to be Orlando Furioso (c. 6);--a
little village to be Rome (c. 7);--and its decent priest
alternately Lirgando and the Archbishop Turpin. Perhaps the most
obvious comparison, and the fairest that can be made, between the
two Don Quixotes is in the story of the goats, told by Sancho,
in the twentieth chapter of the First Part in Cervantes, and
the story of the geese, by Sancho, in Avellaneda’s twenty-first
chapter, because the latter professes to improve upon the former.
The failure to do so, however, is obvious enough.

[183] The whole story of Barbara, beginning with Chapter 22, and
going nearly through the remainder of the work, is miserably
coarse and dull.

[184] In 1824, a curious attempt was made, probably by some
ingenious German, to add two chapters more to Don Quixote, as if
they had been suppressed when the Second Part was published. But
they were not thought worth printing by the Spanish Academy. See
Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. VI. p. 296.

Cervantes evidently did not receive this affronting production until he was far advanced in the composition of his Second Part; but in the fifty-ninth chapter, written apparently when it first reached him, he breaks out upon it, and from that moment never ceases to persecute it, in every form of ingenious torture, until, in the seventy-fourth, he brings his own work to its conclusion. Even Sancho, with his accustomed humor and simplicity, is let loose upon the unhappy Aragonese; for, having understood from a chance traveller who first brings the book to their knowledge, that his wife is called in it Mary Gutierrez, instead of Teresa Panza,--

“‘A pretty sort of a history-writer,’ cried Sancho, ‘and a deal must he know of our affairs, if he calls Teresa Panza, my wife, Mary Gutierrez. Take the book again, Sir, and see if I am put into it, and if he has changed my name, too.’ ‘By what I hear you say, my friend,’ replied the stranger, ‘you are, no doubt, Sancho Panza, the esquire of Don Quixote.’ ‘To be sure I am,’ answered Sancho, ‘and proud of it, too.’ ‘Then, in truth,’ said the gentleman, ‘this new author does not treat you with the propriety shown in your own person; he makes you a glutton and a fool; not at all amusing, and quite another thing from the Sancho described in the first part of your master’s history.’ ‘Well, Heaven forgive him!’ said Sancho; ‘but I think he might have left me in my corner, without troubling himself about me; for, _Let him play that knows the way_; and, _Saint Peter at Rome is well off at home_.’”[185]

[185] Parte II. c. 59.

Stimulated by the appearance of this rival work, as well as offended with its personalities, Cervantes urged forward his own, and, if we may judge by its somewhat hurried air, brought it to a conclusion sooner than he had intended.[186] At any rate, as early as February, 1615, it was finished, and was published in the following autumn; after which we hear nothing more of Avellaneda, though he had intimated his purpose to exhibit Don Quixote in another series of adventures at Avila, Valladolid, and Salamanca.[187] This, indeed, Cervantes took some pains to prevent; for--besides a little changing his plan, and avoiding the jousts at Saragossa, because Avellaneda had carried his hero there[188]--he finally restores Don Quixote, through a severe illness, to his right mind, and makes him renounce all the follies of knight-errantry, and die, like a peaceful Christian, in his own bed;--thus cutting off the possibility of another continuation with the pretensions of the first.

[186] See Appendix (E).

[187] At the end of Cap. 36.

[188] When Don Quixote understands that Avellaneda has given an
account of his being at Saragossa, he exclaims, “Por el mismo
caso, no pondré los pies en Zaragoza, y así sacaré á la plaza del
mundo la mentira dese historiador moderno.” Parte II. c. 59.

This latter half of Don Quixote is a contradiction of the proverb Cervantes cites in it,--that second parts were never yet good for much. It is, in fact, better than the first. It shows more freedom and vigor; and if the caricature is sometimes pushed to the very verge of what is permitted, the invention, the style of thought, and, indeed, the materials throughout, are richer, and the finish is more exact. The character of Samson Carrasco, for instance,[189] is a very happy, though somewhat bold, addition to the original persons of the drama; and the adventures at the castle of the Duke and Duchess, where Don Quixote is fooled to the top of his bent; the managements of Sancho as governor of his island; the visions and dreams of the cave of Montesinos; the scenes with Roque Guinart, the freebooter, and with Gines de Passamonte, the galley-slave and puppet-show man; together with the mock-heroic hospitalities of Don Antonio Moreno at Barcelona, and the final defeat of the knight there, are all admirable. In truth, every thing in this Second Part, especially its general outline and tone, show that time and a degree of success he had not before known had ripened and perfected the strong manly sense and sure insight into human nature which are visible everywhere in the works of Cervantes, and which here become a part, as it were, of his peculiar genius, whose foundations had been laid, dark and deep, amidst the trials and sufferings of his various life.

[189] Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 4. The style of both parts of the
genuine Don Quixote is, as might be anticipated, free, fresh, and
careless;--genial, like the author’s character, full of idiomatic
beauties, and by no means without blemishes. Garcés, in his
“Fuerza y Vigor de la Lengua Castellana,” Tom. II., Prólogo, as
well as throughout that excellent work, has given it, perhaps,
more uniform praise than it deserves;--while Clemencin, in his
notes, is very rigorous and unpardoning to its occasional defects.

But throughout both parts, Cervantes shows the impulses and instincts of an original power with most distinctness in his development of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho; characters in whose contrast and opposition is hidden the full spirit of his peculiar humor, and no small part of what is most characteristic of the entire fiction. They are his prominent personages. He delights, therefore, to have them as much as possible in the front of his scene. They grow visibly upon his favor as he advances, and the fondness of his liking for them makes him constantly produce them in lights and relations as little foreseen by himself as they are by his readers. The knight, who seems to have been originally intended for a parody of the Amadis, becomes gradually a detached, separate, and wholly independent personage, into whom is infused so much of a generous and elevated nature, such gentleness and delicacy, such a pure sense of honor, and such a warm love for whatever is noble and good, that we feel almost the same attachment to him that the barber and the curate did, and are almost as ready as his family was to mourn over his death.

The case of Sancho is again very similar, and perhaps in some respects stronger. At first, he is introduced as the opposite of Don Quixote, and used merely to bring out his master’s peculiarities in a more striking relief. It is not until we have gone through nearly half of the First Part that he utters one of those proverbs which form afterwards the staple of his conversation and humor; and it is not till the opening of the Second Part, and, indeed, not till he comes forth, in all his mingled shrewdness and credulity, as governor of Barataria, that his character is quite developed and completed to the full measure of its grotesque, yet congruous, proportions.

Cervantes, in truth, came, at last, to love these creations of his marvellous power, as if they were real, familiar personages, and to speak of them and treat them with an earnestness and interest that tend much to the illusion of his readers. Both Don Quixote and Sancho are thus brought before us, like such living realities, that, at this moment, the figures of the crazed, gaunt, dignified knight and of his round, selfish, and most amusing esquire dwell bodied forth in the imaginations of more, among all conditions of men throughout Christendom, than any other of the creations of human talent. The greatest of the great poets--Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton--have no doubt risen to loftier heights, and placed themselves in more imposing relations with the noblest attributes of our nature; but Cervantes--always writing under the unchecked impulse of his own genius, and instinctively concentrating in his fiction whatever was peculiar to the character of his nation--has shown himself of kindred to all times and all lands; to the humblest degrees of cultivation as well as to the highest; and has thus, beyond all other writers, received in return a tribute of sympathy and admiration from the universal spirit of humanity.

It is not easy to believe, that, when he had finished such a work, he was insensible to what he had done. Indeed, there are passages in the Don Quixote itself which prove a consciousness of his own genius, its aspirations, and its power.[190] And yet there are, on the other hand, carelessnesses, blemishes, and contradictions scattered through it, which seem to show him to have been almost indifferent to contemporary success or posthumous fame. His plan, which he seems to have modified more than once while engaged in the composition of the work, is loose and disjointed; his style, though full of the richest idiomatic beauties, abounds with inaccuracies; and the facts and incidents that make up his fiction are full of anachronisms, which Los Rios, Pellicer, and Eximeno have in vain endeavoured to reconcile, either with the main current of the story itself, or with one another.[191] Thus, in the First Part, Don Quixote is generally represented as belonging to a remote age, and his history is supposed to have been written by an ancient Arabian author;[192] while, in the examination of his library, he is plainly contemporary with Cervantes himself, and, after his defeats, is brought home confessedly in the year 1604. To add further to this confusion, when we reach the Second Part, which opens only a month after the conclusion of the First, and continues only a few weeks, we have, at the side of the same claims of an ancient Arabian author, a conversation about the expulsion of the Moors,[193] which happened after 1609, and a criticism on Avellaneda, whose work was published in 1614.[194]

[190] The concluding passages of the work, for instance, are in
this tone; and this is the tone of his criticism on Avellaneda.
I do not count in the same sense the passage, in the Second
Part, c. 16, in which Don Quixote is made to boast that thirty
thousand copies had been printed of the First Part, and that
thirty thousand thousands would follow; for this is intended as
the mere rhodomontade of the hero’s folly; but I confess I think
Cervantes is somewhat in earnest when he makes Sancho say to his
master, “I will lay a wager, that, before long, there will not
be a two-penny eating-house, a hedge tavern, or a poor inn, or
barber’s shop, where the history of what we have done shall not
be painted and stuck up.” Parte II. c. 71.

[191] Los Rios, in his “Análisis,” prefixed to the edition
of the Academy, 1780, undertakes to defend Cervantes on the
authority of the ancients, as if the Don Quixote were a poem,
written in imitation of the Odyssey. Pellicer, in the fourth
section of his “Discurso Preliminar” to his edition of Don
Quixote, 1797, follows much the same course; besides which, at
the end of the fifth volume, he gives what he gravely calls
a “Geographico-historical Description of the Travels of Don
Quixote,” accompanied with a map; as if some of Cervantes’s
geography were not impossible, and as if half his localities were
to be found anywhere but in the imaginations of his readers. On
the ground of such irregularities in his geography, and on other
grounds equally absurd, Nicholas Perez, a Valencian, attacked
Cervantes in the “Anti-Quixote,” the first volume of which was
published in 1805, but was followed by none of the five that
were intended to complete it; and received an answer, quite
satisfactory, but more severe than was needful, in a pamphlet,
published at Madrid in 1806, 12mo, by J. A. Pellicer, without
his name, entitled “Exámen Crítico del Tomo Primero de el
Anti-Quixote.” And finally, Don Antonio Eximeno, in his “Apología
de Miguel de Cervantes,” (Madrid, 1806, 12mo), excuses or defends
every thing in the Don Quixote, giving us a new chronological
plan, (p. 60), with exact astronomical reckonings, (p. 129),
and maintaining, among other wise positions, that Cervantes
_intentionally_ represented Don Quixote to have lived both in an
earlier age and in his own time, in order that curious readers
might be confounded, and, after all, only some imaginary period
be assigned to his hero’s achievements (pp. 19, etc.). All this,
I think, is eminently absurd; but it is the consequence of the
blind admiration with which Cervantes was idolized in Spain
during the latter part of the last century and the beginning of
the present;--itself partly a result of the coldness with which
he had been overlooked by the learned of his countrymen for
nearly a century previous to that period. Don Quixote, Madrid,
1819, 8vo, Prólogo de la Academia, p. [3].

[192] Conde, the learned author of the “Dominacion de los Árabes
en España,” undertakes, in a pamphlet published in conjunction
with J. A. Pellicer, to show that the name of this pretended
Arabic author, _Cid Hamete Benengeli_, is a combination of
Arabic words, meaning _noble, satirical, and unhappy_. (Carta
en Castellano, etc., Madrid, 1800, 12mo, pp. 16-27.) It may
be so; but it is not in character for Cervantes to seek such
refinements, or to make such a display of his little learning,
which does not seem to have extended beyond a knowledge of the
vulgar Arabic spoken in Barbary, the Latin, the Italian, and the
Portuguese. Like Shakspeare, however, Cervantes had read and
remembered nearly all that had been printed in his own language,
and constantly makes the most felicitous allusions to the large
stores of his knowledge of this sort.

[193] Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 54.

[194] The criticism on Avellaneda begins, as we have said, Parte
II. c. 59.

But this is not all. As if still further to accumulate contradictions and incongruities, the very details of the story he has invented are often in whimsical conflict with each other, as well as with the historical facts to which they allude. Thus, on one occasion, the scenes which he had represented as having occurred in the course of a single evening and the following morning are said to have occupied two days;[195] on another, he sets a company down to a late supper, and, after conversations and stories that must have carried them nearly through the night, he says, “It began to draw towards evening.”[196] In different places he calls the same individual by different names, and--what is rather amusing--once reproaches Avellaneda with a mistake which was, after all, his own.[197] And finally, having discovered the inconsequence of saying seven times that Sancho was on his mule after Gines de Passamonte had stolen it, he took pains, in the only edition of the First Part that he ever revised, to correct two of his blunders,--heedlessly overlooking the rest; and when he published the Second Part, laughed heartily at the whole,--the errors, the corrections, and all,--as things of little consequence to himself or any body else.[198]

[195] Parte I. c. 46.

[196] “Llegaba ya la noche,” he says in c. 42 of Parte I., when
all that had occurred from the middle of c. 37 had happened after
they were set down to supper.

[197] Cervantes calls Sancho’s wife by three or four different
names (Parte I. c. 7 and 52, and Parte II. c. 5 and 59); and
Avellaneda having, in some degree, imitated him, Cervantes makes
himself very merry at the confusion; not noticing that the
mistake was really his own.

[198] The facts referred to are these. Gines de Passamonte,
in the 23d chapter of Part First, (ed. 1605, f. 108), steals
Sancho’s ass. But hardly three leaves farther on, in the same
edition, we find Sancho riding again, as usual, on the poor
beast, which reappears yet six other times out of all reason. In
the edition of 1608, Cervantes corrected _two_ of these careless
mistakes on leaves 109 and 112; but left the _five_ others just
as they stood before; and in Chapters 3 and 27 of the Second
Part, (ed. 1615), jests about the whole matter, but shows no
disposition to attempt further corrections.

The romance, however, which he threw so carelessly from him, and which, I am persuaded, he regarded rather as a bold effort to break up the absurd taste of his time for the fancies of chivalry than as any thing of more serious import, has been established by an uninterrupted, and, it may be said, an unquestioned, success ever since, both as the oldest classical specimen of romantic fiction, and as one of the most remarkable monuments of modern genius. But though this may be enough to fill the measure of human fame and glory, it is not all to which Cervantes is entitled; for, if we would do him the justice that would have been dearest to his own spirit, and even if we would ourselves fully comprehend and enjoy the whole of his Don Quixote, we should, as we read it, bear in mind, that this delightful romance was not the result of a youthful exuberance of feeling and a happy external condition, nor composed in his best years, when the spirits of its author were light and his hopes high; but that--with all its unquenchable and irresistible humor, with its bright views of the world, and its cheerful trust in goodness and virtue--it was written in his old age, at the conclusion of a life nearly every step of which had been marked with disappointed expectations, disheartening struggles, and sore calamities; that he began it in a prison, and that it was finished when he felt the hand of death pressing heavy and cold upon his heart. If this be remembered as we read, we may feel, as we ought to feel, what admiration and reverence are due, not only to the living power of Don Quixote, but to the character and genius of Cervantes;--if it be forgotten or underrated, we shall fail in regard to both.[199]

[199] Having expressed so strong an opinion of Cervantes’s
merits, I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of citing the words
of the modest and wise Sir William Temple, who, when speaking
of works of satire, and rebuking Rabelais for his indecency and
profaneness, says: “The matchless writer of Don Quixote is much
more to be admired for having made up so excellent a composition
of satire or ridicule without those ingredients; and seems to be
the best and highest strain that ever has _or will be_ reached
by that vein.” Works, London, 1814, 8vo, Vol. III. p. 436. See
Appendix (E).