The History of Don Quixote, Vol. I, Complete - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
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Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonment
all trace of Cervantes in his official capacity disappears, from which it
may be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in Seville
in November 1598 appears from a satirical sonnet of his on the elaborate
catafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the death of
Philip II, but from this up to 1603 we have no clue to his movements. The
words in the preface to the First Part of "Don Quixote" are generally
held to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the book, and wrote
the beginning of it at least, in a prison, and that he may have done so
is extremely likely.
There is a tradition that Cervantes read some portions of his work to a
select audience at the Duke of Bejar's, which may have helped to make the
book known; but the obvious conclusion is that the First Part of "Don
Quixote" lay on his hands some time before he could find a publisher bold
enough to undertake a venture of so novel a character; and so little
faith in it had Francisco Robles of Madrid, to whom at last he sold it,
that he did not care to incur the expense of securing the copyright for
Aragon or Portugal, contenting himself with that for Castile. The
printing was finished in December, and the book came out with the new
year, 1605. It is often said that "Don Quixote" was at first received
coldly. The facts show just the contrary. No sooner was it in the hands
of the public than preparations were made to issue pirated editions at
Lisbon and Valencia, and to bring out a second edition with the
additional copyrights for Aragon and Portugal, which he secured in
February.
No doubt it was received with something more than coldness by certain
sections of the community. Men of wit, taste, and discrimination among
the aristocracy gave it a hearty welcome, but the aristocracy in general
were not likely to relish a book that turned their favourite reading into
ridicule and laughed at so many of their favourite ideas. The dramatists
who gathered round Lope as their leader regarded Cervantes as their
common enemy, and it is plain that he was equally obnoxious to the other
clique, the culto poets who had Gongora for their chief. Navarrete, who
knew nothing of the letter above mentioned, tries hard to show that the
relations between Cervantes and Lope were of a very friendly sort, as
indeed they were until "Don Quixote" was written. Cervantes, indeed, to
the last generously and manfully declared his admiration of Lope's
powers, his unfailing invention, and his marvellous fertility; but in the
preface of the First Part of "Don Quixote" and in the verses of "Urganda
the Unknown," and one or two other places, there are, if we read between
the lines, sly hits at Lope's vanities and affectations that argue no
personal good-will; and Lope openly sneers at "Don Quixote" and
Cervantes, and fourteen years after his death gives him only a few lines
of cold commonplace in the "Laurel de Apolo," that seem all the colder
for the eulogies of a host of nonentities whose names are found nowhere
else.
In 1601 Valladolid was made the seat of the Court, and at the beginning
of 1603 Cervantes had been summoned thither in connection with the
balance due by him to the Treasury, which was still outstanding. He
remained at Valladolid, apparently supporting himself by agencies and
scrivener's work of some sort; probably drafting petitions and drawing up
statements of claims to be presented to the Council, and the like. So, at
least, we gather from the depositions taken on the occasion of the death
of a gentleman, the victim of a street brawl, who had been carried into
the house in which he lived. In these he himself is described as a man
who wrote and transacted business, and it appears that his household then
consisted of his wife, the natural daughter Isabel de Saavedra already
mentioned, his sister Andrea, now a widow, her daughter Constanza, a
mysterious Magdalena de Sotomayor calling herself his sister, for whom
his biographers cannot account, and a servant-maid.
Meanwhile "Don Quixote" had been growing in favour, and its author's name
was now known beyond the Pyrenees. In 1607 an edition was printed at
Brussels. Robles, the Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet the
demand by a third edition, the seventh in all, in 1608. The popularity of
the book in Italy was such that a Milan bookseller was led to bring out
an edition in 1610; and another was called for in Brussels in 1611. It
might naturally have been expected that, with such proofs before him that
he had hit the taste of the public, Cervantes would have at once set
about redeeming his rather vague promise of a second volume.
But, to all appearance, nothing was farther from his thoughts. He had
still by him one or two short tales of the same vintage as those he had
inserted in "Don Quixote" and instead of continuing the adventures of Don
Quixote, he set to work to write more of these "Novelas Exemplares" as he
afterwards called them, with a view to making a book of them.
The novels were published in the summer of 1613, with a dedication to the
Conde de Lemos, the Maecenas of the day, and with one of those chatty
confidential prefaces Cervantes was so fond of. In this, eight years and
a half after the First Part of "Don Quixote" had appeared, we get the
first hint of a forthcoming Second Part. "You shall see shortly," he
says, "the further exploits of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza."
His idea of "shortly" was a somewhat elastic one, for, as we know by the
date to Sancho's letter, he had barely one-half of the book completed
that time twelvemonth.
But more than poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his dramatic
ambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable spirit that
kept him from despair in the bagnios of Algiers, and prompted him to
attempt the escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made him
persevere in spite of failure and discouragement in his efforts to win
the ear of the public as a dramatist. The temperament of Cervantes was
essentially sanguine. The portrait he draws in the preface to the novels,
with the aquiline features, chestnut hair, smooth untroubled forehead,
and bright cheerful eyes, is the very portrait of a sanguine man. Nothing
that the managers might say could persuade him that the merits of his
plays would not be recognised at last if they were only given a fair
chance. The old soldier of the Spanish Salamis was bent on being the
Aeschylus of Spain. He was to found a great national drama, based on the
true principles of art, that was to be the envy of all nations; he was to
drive from the stage the silly, childish plays, the "mirrors of nonsense
and models of folly" that were in vogue through the cupidity of the
managers and shortsightedness of the authors; he was to correct and
educate the public taste until it was ripe for tragedies on the model of
the Greek drama--like the "Numancia" for instance--and comedies that
would not only amuse but improve and instruct. All this he was to do,
could he once get a hearing: there was the initial difficulty.
He shows plainly enough, too, that "Don Quixote" and the demolition of
the chivalry romances was not the work that lay next his heart. He was,
indeed, as he says himself in his preface, more a stepfather than a
father to "Don Quixote." Never was great work so neglected by its author.
That it was written carelessly, hastily, and by fits and starts, was not
always his fault, but it seems clear he never read what he sent to the
press. He knew how the printers had blundered, but he never took the
trouble to correct them when the third edition was in progress, as a man
who really cared for the child of his brain would have done. He appears
to have regarded the book as little more than a mere libro de
entretenimiento, an amusing book, a thing, as he says in the "Viaje," "to
divert the melancholy moody heart at any time or season." No doubt he had
an affection for his hero, and was very proud of Sancho Panza. It would
have been strange indeed if he had not been proud of the most humorous
creation in all fiction. He was proud, too, of the popularity and success
of the book, and beyond measure delightful is the naivete with which he
shows his pride in a dozen passages in the Second Part. But it was not
the success he coveted. In all probability he would have given all the
success of "Don Quixote," nay, would have seen every copy of "Don
Quixote" burned in the Plaza Mayor, for one such success as Lope de Vega
was enjoying on an average once a week.
And so he went on, dawdling over "Don Quixote," adding a chapter now and
again, and putting it aside to turn to "Persiles and Sigismunda"--which,
as we know, was to be the most entertaining book in the language, and the
rival of "Theagenes and Chariclea"--or finishing off one of his darling
comedies; and if Robles asked when "Don Quixote" would be ready, the
answer no doubt was: En breve-shortly, there was time enough for that. At
sixty-eight he was as full of life and hope and plans for the future as a
boy of eighteen.
Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as Chapter LIX, which at
his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or
November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave lately
printed at Tarragona, and calling itself "Second Volume of the Ingenious
Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de
Avellaneda of Tordesillas." The last half of Chapter LIX and most of the
following chapters of the Second Part give us some idea of the effect
produced upon him, and his irritation was not likely to be lessened by
the reflection that he had no one to blame but himself. Had Avellaneda,
in fact, been content with merely bringing out a continuation to "Don
Quixote," Cervantes would have had no reasonable grievance. His own
intentions were expressed in the very vaguest language at the end of the
book; nay, in his last words, "forse altro cantera con miglior plettro,"
he seems actually to invite some one else to continue the work, and he
made no sign until eight years and a half had gone by; by which time
Avellaneda's volume was no doubt written.
In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere
continuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface to
it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned man
could pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost his
hand, with having been in prison, with being poor, with being friendless,
accuses him of envy of Lope's success, of petulance and querulousness,
and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay. Avellaneda's reason for
this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it is
clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's school, for he has the
impudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his
criticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best critics
and baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear
on it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes
knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an
invisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a
mosquito in the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of language
pronounces him to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself,
supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been an
ecclesiastic, a Dominican probably.
Any merit Avellaneda has is reflected from Cervantes, and he is too dull
to reflect much. "Dull and dirty" will always be, I imagine, the verdict
of the vast majority of unprejudiced readers. He is, at best, a poor
plagiarist; all he can do is to follow slavishly the lead given him by
Cervantes; his only humour lies in making Don Quixote take inns for
castles and fancy himself some legendary or historical personage, and
Sancho mistake words, invert proverbs, and display his gluttony; all
through he shows a proclivity to coarseness and dirt, and he has
contrived to introduce two tales filthier than anything by the sixteenth
century novellieri and without their sprightliness.
But whatever Avellaneda and his book may be, we must not forget the debt
we owe them. But for them, there can be no doubt, "Don Quixote" would
have come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even if
Cervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he would
have left off with a promise of a Third Part, giving the further
adventures of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It is
plain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the pastoral
romances as he had dealt with the books of chivalry, and but for
Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more likely
that, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume would
have remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have never
made the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with Sancho to
Barataria.
From the moment the book came into his hands he seems to have been
haunted by the fear that there might be more Avellanedas in the field,
and putting everything else aside, he set himself to finish off his task
and protect Don Quixote in the only way he could, by killing him. The
conclusion is no doubt a hasty and in some places clumsy piece of work
and the frequent repetition of the scolding administered to Avellaneda
becomes in the end rather wearisome; but it is, at any rate, a conclusion
and for that we must thank Avellaneda.
The new volume was ready for the press in February, but was not printed
till the very end of 1615, and during the interval Cervantes put together
the comedies and interludes he had written within the last few years,
and, as he adds plaintively, found no demand for among the managers, and
published them with a preface, worth the book it introduces tenfold, in
which he gives an account of the early Spanish stage, and of his own
attempts as a dramatist. It is needless to say they were put forward by
Cervantes in all good faith and full confidence in their merits. The
reader, however, was not to suppose they were his last word or final
effort in the drama, for he had in hand a comedy called "Engano a los
ojos," about which, if he mistook not, there would be no question.
Of this dramatic masterpiece the world has no opportunity of judging; his
health had been failing for some time, and he died, apparently of dropsy,
on the 23rd of April, 1616, the day on which England lost Shakespeare,
nominally at least, for the English calendar had not yet been reformed.
He died as he had lived, accepting his lot bravely and cheerfully.
Was it an unhappy life, that of Cervantes? His biographers all tell us
that it was; but I must say I doubt it. It was a hard life, a life of
poverty, of incessant struggle, of toil ill paid, of disappointment, but
Cervantes carried within himself the antidote to all these evils. His was
not one of those light natures that rise above adversity merely by virtue
of their own buoyancy; it was in the fortitude of a high spirit that he
was proof against it. It is impossible to conceive Cervantes giving way
to despondency or prostrated by dejection. As for poverty, it was with
him a thing to be laughed over, and the only sigh he ever allows to
escape him is when he says, "Happy he to whom Heaven has given a piece of
bread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but Heaven itself."
Add to all this his vital energy and mental activity, his restless
invention and his sanguine temperament, and there will be reason enough
to doubt whether his could have been a very unhappy life. He who could
take Cervantes' distresses together with his apparatus for enduring them
would not make so bad a bargain, perhaps, as far as happiness in life is
concerned.
Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in
accordance with his will, in the neighbouring convent of Trinitarian
nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an
inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another
convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of
Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clue
to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes
perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect
brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good
deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would
suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against
his memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits, and left
him to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard life and
unworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done to
distinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning a
precarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had been
wounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country's cause,
but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had written a
mediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some plays which
manifestly did not comply with the primary condition of pleasing: were
the playgoers to patronise plays that did not amuse them, because the
author was to produce "Don Quixote" twenty years afterwards?
The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on
the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to
its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes
a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly
received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of
wigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the
sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all against
him, it was because "Don Quixote" was what it was; and if the general
public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of his
days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than the
English-speaking public that did not pay off Scott's liabilities. It did
the best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, and
encouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others.
It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected no
monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, of
him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las
Cortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been set
up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is not
worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such
weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except
testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si
monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show
what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote."
Nine editions of the First Part of "Don Quixote" had already appeared
before Cervantes died, thirty thousand copies in all, according to his
own estimate, and a tenth was printed at Barcelona the year after his
death. So large a number naturally supplied the demand for some time, but
by 1634 it appears to have been exhausted; and from that time down to the
present day the stream of editions has continued to flow rapidly and
regularly. The translations show still more clearly in what request the
book has been from the very outset. In seven years from the completion of
the work it had been translated into the four leading languages of
Europe. Except the Bible, in fact, no book has been so widely diffused as
"Don Quixote." The "Imitatio Christi" may have been translated into as
many different languages, and perhaps "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Vicar of
Wakefield" into nearly as many, but in multiplicity of translations and
editions "Don Quixote" leaves them all far behind.
Still more remarkable is the character of this wide diffusion. "Don
Quixote" has been thoroughly naturalised among people whose ideas about
knight-errantry, if they had any at all, were of the vaguest, who had
never seen or heard of a book of chivalry, who could not possibly feel
the humour of the burlesque or sympathise with the author's purpose.
Another curious fact is that this, the most cosmopolitan book in the
world, is one of the most intensely national. "Manon Lescaut" is not more
thoroughly French, "Tom Jones" not more English, "Rob Roy" not more
Scotch, than "Don Quixote" is Spanish, in character, in ideas, in
sentiment, in local colour, in everything. What, then, is the secret of
this unparalleled popularity, increasing year by year for well-nigh three
centuries? One explanation, no doubt, is that of all the books in the
world, "Don Quixote" is the most catholic. There is something in it for
every sort of reader, young or old, sage or simple, high or low. As
Cervantes himself says with a touch of pride, "It is thumbed and read and
got by heart by people of all sorts; the children turn its leaves, the
young people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk praise
it."
But it would be idle to deny that the ingredient which, more than its
humour, or its wisdom, or the fertility of invention or knowledge of
human nature it displays, has insured its success with the multitude, is
the vein of farce that runs through it. It was the attack upon the sheep,
the battle with the wine-skins, Mambrino's helmet, the balsam of
Fierabras, Don Quixote knocked over by the sails of the windmill, Sancho
tossed in the blanket, the mishaps and misadventures of master and man,
that were originally the great attraction, and perhaps are so still to
some extent with the majority of readers. It is plain that "Don Quixote"
was generally regarded at first, and indeed in Spain for a long time, as
little more than a queer droll book, full of laughable incidents and
absurd situations, very amusing, but not entitled to much consideration
or care. All the editions printed in Spain from 1637 to 1771, when the
famous printer Ibarra took it up, were mere trade editions, badly and
carelessly printed on vile paper and got up in the style of chap-books
intended only for popular use, with, in most instances, uncouth
illustrations and clap-trap additions by the publisher.
To England belongs the credit of having been the first country to
recognise the right of "Don Quixote" to better treatment than this. The
London edition of 1738, commonly called Lord Carteret's from having been
suggested by him, was not a mere edition de luxe. It produced "Don
Quixote" in becoming form as regards paper and type, and embellished with
plates which, if not particularly happy as illustrations, were at least
well intentioned and well executed, but it also aimed at correctness of
text, a matter to which nobody except the editors of the Valencia and
Brussels editions had given even a passing thought; and for a first
attempt it was fairly successful, for though some of its emendations are
inadmissible, a good many of them have been adopted by all subsequent
editors.
The zeal of publishers, editors, and annotators brought about a
remarkable change of sentiment with regard to "Don Quixote." A vast
number of its admirers began to grow ashamed of laughing over it. It
became almost a crime to treat it as a humorous book. The humour was not
entirely denied, but, according to the new view, it was rated as an
altogether secondary quality, a mere accessory, nothing more than the
stalking-horse under the presentation of which Cervantes shot his
philosophy or his satire, or whatever it was he meant to shoot; for on
this point opinions varied. All were agreed, however, that the object he
aimed at was not the books of chivalry. He said emphatically in the
preface to the First Part and in the last sentence of the Second, that he
had no other object in view than to discredit these books, and this, to
advanced criticism, made it clear that his object must have been
something else.
One theory was that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth the
eternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit of
poetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy never
evolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its inner
consciousness. Something of the antagonism, no doubt, is to be found in
"Don Quixote," because it is to be found everywhere in life, and
Cervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in which
the never-ceasing game of cross-purposes between Sancho Panza and Don
Quixote would not be recognized as true to nature. In the stone age,
among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don Quixotes and
Sancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who never could see
the facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could see nothing else.
But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself to expound any such
idea in two stout quarto volumes is to suppose something not only very
unlike the age in which he lived, but altogether unlike Cervantes
himself, who would have been the first to laugh at an attempt of the sort
made by anyone else.