Part III of the
Translator's
Preface for
Don Quixote
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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
e, 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.
The
extraordinary influence of the romances of
chivalry in his day is quite enough to account for the genesis of the book. Some idea of the
prodigious development of this branch of
literature in the sixteenth century may be obtained from the scrutiny of Chapter VII, if the reader
bears in mind that only a portion of the romances belonging to by far the largest group are enumerated. As to its effect upon the nation, there is abundant
evidence. From the time when the
Amadises and
Palmerins began to grow popular down to the very end of the century, there is a steady stream of
invective, from
men whose character and position lend weight to their words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation of their readers.
Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust.
That this was the task
Cervantes set himself, and that he had ample provocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently
clear to those who look into the
evidence; as it will be also that it was not
chivalry itself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the
absurdities that, thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no greater one than saying that "
Cervantes smiled
Spain's chivalry away." In the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away.
Spain's
chivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done when
Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature, it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the free institutions of
mediaeval Spain. What he did
smile away was not chivalry but a degrading mockery of it.
The true nature of the "
right arm" and the "
bright array," before which, according to the poet, "the world gave ground," and which
Cervantes' single
laugh demolished, may be gathered from the words of one of his own
countrymen,
Don Felix Pacheco, as reported by
Captain George Carleton, in his "
Military Memoirs from
1672 to
1713." "Before the
appearance in the world of that labour of
Cervantes," he said, "it was next to an impossibility for a
man to walk the
streets with any
delight or without danger. There were seen so many
cavaliers
prancing and curvetting before the windows of their
mistresses, that a
stranger would have imagined the whole nation to have been nothing less than a race of
knight-errants. But after the world became a little acquainted with that notable history, the
man that was seen in that once celebrated drapery was pointed at as a
Don Quixote, and found himself the
jest of high and
low. And I verily believe that to this, and this only, we owe that dampness and
poverty of
spirit which has run through all our councils for a century past, so little agreeable to those nobler actions of our famous ancestors."
To call "
Don Quixote" a
sad book, preaching a
pessimist view of life, argues a total misconception of its
drift. It would be so if its moral were that, in this world, true enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule and
discomfiture. But it
preaches nothing of the sort; its
moral, so far as it can be said to have one, is that the spurious
enthusiasm that is
born of vanity and
self-conceit, that is made an end in itself, not a means to an end, that acts on mere impulse, regardless of
circumstances and
consequences, is
mischievous to its owner, and a very considerable nuisance to the community at large. To those who cannot distinguish between the one kind and the other, no doubt "
Don Quixote" is a sad book; no doubt to some minds it is very sad that a
man who had just
uttered so beautiful a
sentiment as that "it is a hard case to make slaves of those whom
God and
Nature made
free," should be
ungratefully pelted by the
scoundrels his crazy
philanthropy had let loose on society; but to others of a more judicial cast it will be a matter of regret that
reckless self-sufficient enthusiasm is not oftener requited in some such way for all the
mischief it does in the world.
A very slight examination of the structure of "
Don Quixote" will suffice to show that
Cervantes had no deep
design or elaborate plan in his
mind when he began the book. When he
wrote those lines in which "with a few strokes of a great master he sets before us the
pauper gentleman," he had no idea of the
goal to which his imagination was leading him. There can be little doubt that all he
contemplated was a
short tale to range with those he had already
written, a tale setting forth the ludicrous results that might be expected to follow the attempt of a
crazy gentleman to act the part of a
knight-errant in modern
life.
It is
plain, for one thing, that
Sancho Panza did not enter into the
original scheme, for had
Cervantes thought of him he
certainly would not have omitted him in his hero's outfit, which he obviously meant to be
complete. Him we owe to the landlord's chance remark in Chapter III that knights seldom
traveled without squires. To try to think of a
Don Quixote without
Sancho Panza is like trying to think of a one-bladed pair of
scissors.
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