The best and wisest of men have their delusions—especially with respect to themselves and their capabilities—and Cervantes was not free from such natural infirmities. He made his first appearance in literature with a sonnet addressed to Philip II.’s third wife, Isabel de Valois, and as this poem is not included in any Spanish edition of his works, I make no apology for quoting it (in an English version by Norman MacColl which has not yet been published).

This is not a masterpiece in little, nor even a marvel of adroitness; but it is highly interesting as the earliest extant effort of one who was destined to become a master, and, moreover, it supplies us with his favourite poetical formulÆ. In his description of the Queen as the

in his allusion to the

Cervantes strikes the characteristic notes of devotion, patriotism, and loyalty to his sovereign. Though he vastly enlarged the circle of his themes later on, he was sufficiently representative of his own time and country to introduce these three motives into his subsequent writings whenever a plausible occasion offered. This is particularly notable in his fugitive verses. Sainte-Beuve says that nearly all men are born poets, but that, as a rule, the poet in us dies young. It was not so with Cervantes—so far as impulse was concerned. From youth to old age he was a persistent versifier. As we have seen, he first appeared in print with elegiacs on the death of Isabel de Valois; as a slave in Algiers he dedicated sonnets to Bartolomeo Ruffino, and from Algiers also he appealed for help to Mateo VÁzquez in perhaps the most spirited and sincere of his poetical compositions; he was not long free from slavery when he supplied Juan Rufo GutiÉrrez with a resounding patriotic sonnet, and Pedro de Padilla with devotional poems. As he began, so he continued. He has made merry at the practice of issuing books with eulogistic prefatory poems; but he observed the custom in his own Galatea, and he was indefatigable in furnishing such verses to his friends. All subjects came alike to him. He would as soon praise the quips and quillets of LÓpez Maldonado as lament the death of the famous admiral Santa Cruz, and he celebrated with equal promptitude a tragic epic on the lovers of Teruel and a technical treatise on kidney diseases. It must, I think, be allowed that Cervantes was readily stirred into song.At the end of his career, in his mock-heroic Viage del Parnaso, he cast a backward glance at his varied achievement in literature, and, with his usual good judgment, admitted wistfully that nature had denied him the gift of poetry. As the phrase stands, and baldly interpreted, it would seem that excessive modesty had led Cervantes to underestimate his powers. He was certainly endowed with imagination, and with a beautifying vision; but, though he had the poet’s dream, he had not the faculty of verbal magic. It was not given to him to wed immortal thoughts to immortal music, and this no doubt is what he means us to understand by his ingenuous confession. His verdict is eminently just. Cervantes has occasional happy passages, even a few admirable moments, but no lofty or sustained inspiration. He recognised the fact with that transparent candour which has endeared him to mankind, not dreaming that uncritical admirers in future generations would seek to crown him with the laurel to which he formally resigned all claim. Yet we read appreciations of him as a ‘great’ poet, and we can only marvel at such misuse of words. If Cervantes be a ‘great’ poet, what adjective is left to describe Garcilaso, Luis de LeÓn, Lope de Vega, GÓngora and CalderÓn?

A sense of measure, of relative values, is the soul of criticism, and we may be appreciative without condescending to idolatry, or even to flattery. Cervantes was a rapid, facile versifier, and at rare intervals his verses are touched with poetry; but, for the most part, they are imitative, and no imitation, however brilliant, is a title to lasting fame. Imitation in itself is no bad sign in a beginner; it is a healthier symptom than the adoption of methods which are wilfully eccentric; but it is a provisional device, to be used solely as a means of attaining one’s originality. It cannot be said that Cervantes ever acquired a personal manner in verse: if he had, there would be far less division of opinion as to whether he is, or is not, the author of such and such poems. He finally acquired a personal manner in prose, but only after an arduous probation.

There are few traces of originality in his earliest prose work, the First Part of La Galatea, the pastoral which Cervantes never found time to finish during more than thirty years. I do not think we need suppose that we have lost a masterpiece, though no doubt it would be profoundly interesting to see Cervantes trying to pour new wine into old bottles. The sole interest of the Galatea, as we have it, is that it is the first essay in fiction of a great creator who has mistaken his road. There does appear to have existed, long before the composition of the Homeric poems, a primitive pastoral which was popular in character. So historians tell us, and no doubt they are right. But the extant pastoral poetry of Sicily is the latest manifestation of Greek genius, an artistic revolt against the banal conventions of civilisation, an attempt to express a longing for a freer life in a purer air. In other words it is an artificial product. The Virgilian eclogues are still more remote from reality than the idyls of Theocritus: as imitations are bound to be. Artificiality is even more pronounced in the Arcadia of Sannazaro who ‘prosified’ the Virgilian eclogue during the late Renaissance: what else do you expect in an imitation of an imitation? Neither in Sannazaro, nor in his disciple Cervantes, is there a glimpse of real shepherds, nor even of the Theocritean shepherds,—

What we find in the Galatea is the imitation by Cervantes of Sannazaro’s prose imitation of Virgil’s imitation of Theocritus. To us who wish for nothing better than to read Cervantes himself, his ambition to write like somebody else seems misplaced, not to say grotesque. But then, for most of us, Sannazaro has only a relative importance: to Cervantes, Sannazaro was almost Virgil’s peer.

Everything connected with the Galatea is imitative—the impulse to write it, the matter, and the manner. The Galatea is no spontaneous product of the author’s fancy; it owes its existence to Sannazaro’s Arcadia, and to the early Spanish imitations of the Arcadia recorded in Professor Rennert’s exhaustive monograph. We shall not be far wrong in thinking that it might never have struggled into print, had not Cervantes been encouraged by the example of his friend Luis GÁlvez de Montalvo, who had made a hit with El Pastor de FÍlida. So, too, as regards the matter of the Galatea. The sixth book is a frank adaptation of the Arcadia; there are further reminiscences of Sannazaro’s pastoral in both the verse and the prose of the Galatea; other allusions are worked in without much regard to their appropriateness; LeÓn Hebreo is not too lofty, nor Alonso PÉrez too lowly, to escape Cervantes’s depredations. Lastly, the manner is no less imitative: construction, arrangement, distribution, diction are all according to precedent. MartÍnez Marina, indeed, held the odd view that there was something new in the style of the Galatea, and that Cervantes and Mariana were the first to move down the steep slope that leads to culteranismo. During the hundred years that MartÍnez Marina’s theory has been before the world it has made no converts, and therefore it needs no refutation. But, though the theory is mistaken, some of the facts advanced to support it are indubitable: the Galatea is deliberately latinised in imitation of Sannazaro who sought to reproduce the sustained and sonorous melody of the Ciceronian period. So intent is Cervantes upon the model that his own personality is overwhelmed. He probably never wrote with more scrupulous care than when at work on the Galatea, yet all his pains and all his elaborate finish are so much labour lost. Briefly, the Galatea is little more than the echo of an echo, and the individual quality of Cervantes’s voice is lost amid the reverberations of exotic music.

The sixteenth-century prose-pastoral was a barren product, rooted in a false convention. It was not natural, and it was not artistic: it failed to reproduce the beauty of the old ideal, and it failed to create a modern ideal. It satisfies no canon, and to attempt to make a case for it is to argue for argument’s sake. Had Cervantes continued to work this vein, he would never have found his true path, and must have remained an imitator till the end; and it is a mere chance that he did not return to the pastoral and complete the Galatea. It was far too often in his thoughts. As his butt Feliciano de Silva would have said, his reason saw ‘the unreason of the reason with which the reason is afflicted’ when given up to the composition of pastorals; and yet the pastoral romance had a fascination for him. Fortunately, he was saved from a fatal error by the fact that, for nearly twenty years after the publication of the Galatea, he was kept against his will in touch with the realities of life: realities often grim, squalid, fantastic, cruel and absurd, but preferable to the pointless philanderings of imaginary swains and nymphs in a pasteboard Arcadia. The surly taxpayers from whom Cervantes had to wring contributions, the clergy who excommunicated and imprisoned him, the alcaldes and jacks-in-office who made his life a burden, the cheating landlords and strumpets whom he met in miserable inns—these people were not the crown and flower of the human race, but they were not intangible abstractions, nor even persistent bores; they were plain men and women, creatures of flesh and blood, subject to all the passions of humanity, and using vigorous, natural speech instead of euphemisms and preciosities. It was by contact with these rugged folk that Cervantes amassed his wealth of observation, and slowly learned his trade. This was precisely what he needed. After his return from Algiers, and till his marriage, circumstances had thrown him into a literary clique, well-read and well-meaning, but with no vital knowledge of the past and no intellectual interest in the present. The destiny which drove Cervantes to collect provisions and taxes in the villages of the south saved him from the Byzantinism of the capital, and placed him once more in direct relation with nature—especially human nature. This was his salvation as an author. And eighteen years later he produced the First Part of Don Quixote.

It would be interesting to know the exact stages of composition of Don Quixote, but that is hopeless. We cannot be sure as to when Cervantes began the book, but we may hazard a conjecture. Bernardo de la Vega’s Pastor de Iberia, one of the books in Don Quixote’s library, was published in 1591, and this goes to prove that the sixth chapter was written after this date—probably a good deal later, for this pastoral was a failure, and therefore not likely to come at once into the hands of a busy, roving tax-gatherer. You all remember the incident of Sancho Panza’s being tossed in a blanket, and there is a very similar episode in the Third Book of GuzmÁn de Alfarache. Is there any relation between the two? Is it a case of unconscious reminiscence, or is it simple coincidence? It would be absurd to suppose that Cervantes deliberately took such a trifling incident from a book published six years before his own. Where Cervantes is imitative is in the dedication of the First Part of Don Quixote, which is pieced together from Herrera’s dedication of his edition of Garcilaso to the MarquÉs de Ayamonte, and from Francisco de Medina’s prologue to the same edition. If the tossing of Sancho Panza were suggested by GuzmÁn de Alfarache, it would follow that the seventeenth chapter of Don Quixote was written in 1599, or later, and a remark dropped by GinÉs de Pasamonte seems to show that Cervantes had read Mateo AlemÁn’s book without any excessive admiration. But the point is scarcely worth labouring. My own impression is that Don Quixote was progressing, but was not yet finished, in 1602.

Consider the facts a moment! So far as external evidence goes we have no information concerning Cervantes from May 1601 to February 1603, but I suggest that he was in Seville during 1602. We know that Lope de Vega was constantly in Seville from 1600 to 1604, and we know that Cervantes wrote a complimentary sonnet for the edition of the Dragontea issued by Lope in 1602. The inference is that Cervantes and Lope were on friendly terms at this date, and it is therefore incredible that Cervantes had written—or even contemplated writing—the sharp attack on Lope in the forty-seventh chapter of Don Quixote. During the course of 1602 differences arose to separate the two men, and thenceforward Cervantes felt free to treat Lope as an ordinary mortal, an author who invited trenchant criticism. This would lead us to suppose that Don Quixote was not actually finished till just before Cervantes’s departure to Valladolid at the beginning of 1603, and it would also explain how Lope de Vega became acquainted with the contents of Don Quixote before it was actually published. Cervantes is pleasantly chatty and confidential in print respecting the books upon which he is at work; he is not likely to have been more reserved in private conversation with a friend. And it is intrinsically probable that at this difficult period of his life Cervantes may have made many confidences to Lope concerning his projects.

At first sight it may seem odd that we hear nothing of Cervantes’s mingling in the literary circles of Seville; it may seem still more strange, if we take into consideration the fact that several of the poets whom he had praised in the Galatea were then living in Seville. But there is nothing strange about it, if we look at men and things from a contemporary point of view. The plain truth is that at this time Cervantes was a nobody in the eyes of educated people at Seville. His steps had been persistently dogged by failure. He had failed as a dramatist, and as a writer of romance; he had been discharged from the public service under a cloud, and his imprisonment would not recommend him to the Philistines. Highly respectable literary persons closed their doors to him, and in these circumstances Lope’s companionship would be most welcome. From these small details we may fairly infer that Don Quixote was not finished till the very end of 1602, and that the final touches were not given till Cervantes went to Valladolid in 1603, a perfectly insignificant figure in the eyes of literary men and literary patrons. He was still nothing but a seedy elderly hack when Don Quixote was licensed in September 1604. The book stole into the market at the beginning of 1605, with no great expectation of success on the part of the publisher who had it printed in a commonplace, careless fashion, and left it to take its chance on his counter at the price of eight and a half reales. We all know the result. From the outset Don Quixote was immensely popular, and from that day to this the author’s reputation has steadily increased—till now he ranks as one of the great immortals. The history of literature shows no more enduring triumph.

Cervantes himself tells us that Don Quixote is, ‘from beginning to end, an attack upon the books of chivalry,’ and no doubt he means this assertion to be taken literally. But, as I have said elsewhere, the statement must be interpreted rationally in the light of other facts. It is quite true that books of chivalry had been a public pest, that grave scholars and theologians thundered against them, and that legislation was invoked to prevent their introduction into the blameless American colonies. The mystic MalÓn de Chaide, writing in 1588, declared that these extravagances were as dangerous as a knife in a madman’s hand; but MalÓn de Chaide lived sequestered from the world, and was evidently not aware that public taste had changed since he was young. It is a significant fact that no romance of chivalry was printed at Madrid during the reign of Philip II., and the natural conclusion is that such publications were then popular only in country districts. The previous twenty years of Cervantes’s life had been passed in the provinces, and one might be tempted to imagine that he was unaware of what was happening elsewhere. This would be an error: the fact that he mentions his own Rinconete y Cortadillo in Don Quixote proves that he knew there was a demand for picaresque stories, and that he was prepared to satisfy it. The probability is that Cervantes, who lived much in the past, had intended to write a short travesty of a chivalresque novel, and that his original intention remained present in his mind long after he had exceeded it in practice. If any one chooses to insist that Cervantes gave the romances of chivalry their death-blow, we are not concerned to deny it; if he had done nothing more, it would have been an inglorious victory, for they were already at the last extremity: but in truth, though he himself may have been unconscious of it, in writing Don Quixote Cervantes signalised the triumph of the modern spirit over mediÆvalism.

He had set out impelled by the spirit of burlesque, and perhaps had met in his wanderings on the King’s commission some quaint belated personage who seemed a survival from a picturesque, idealistic age, and who invited good-natured caricature. With some such intention, Cervantes began a tale, which, so far as he could foresee, would be no longer than some of his Exemplary Novels (of which one, at least, was already written); but the experiment was a new one, and the author himself was at the mercy of accidents. He saw little more than the possibilities of his central idea: a country gentleman who had become a monomaniac by incessant pondering over fabulous deeds, and who was led into ridiculous situations by attempting to imitate the imaginary exploits of his mythical heroes. Cervantes sets forth light-heartedly; pictures his gaunt hero arguing with Master NicolÁs, the village barber, over the relative merits of PalmerÍn and AmadÍs; and finally presents him aflame with an enthusiasm which drives him to furbish up his great-grandfather’s armour, to go out to right every kind of wrong, and to win everlasting renown (as well as the empire of Trebizond). Parodies, burlesque allusions, humorous parallels crowd upon the writer, and his pen flies trippingly along till he reaches the third chapter. At this point Cervantes perceives the subject broadening out, and the landlord accordingly impresses on Don Quixote the necessity of providing himself with a squire.It is a momentous passage: there and then the image of Sancho Panza first flashed into the author’s mind, but not with any definition of outline. Cervantes does not venture to introduce Sancho Panza in person till near the end of the seventh chapter, and he is visibly ill at ease over his new creation. It is quite plain that, at this stage, Cervantes knew very little about Sancho Panza, and his first remark is that the squire was an honest man (if any poor man can be called honest), ‘but with very little sense in his pate.’ This is not the Sancho who has survived: honesty is not the most pre-eminent quality of the squire, and if anybody thinks Sancho Panza a born fool he must have a high standard of ability. In the ninth chapter Cervantes goes out of his way to describe Sancho Panza as a long-legged man: obviously, up to this point, he had never seen the squire at close quarters, and was as yet not nearly so well acquainted with him as you and I are. He was soon to know him more intimately. Perceiving his mistake, he hustled the long-legged scarecrow out of sight, observed the real Sancho with minute fidelity, and created the most richly humorous character in modern literature. The only possible rival to Sancho Panza is Sir John Falstaff; but Falstaff is emphatically English, whereas Sancho Panza is a citizen of the world, stamped with the seal of universality.

It can scarcely be doubted that Don Quixote contains many allusions to contemporaries and contemporary events. We can catch the point of his jests at Lope de Vega’s fondness for a classical reference, or at a geographical blunder made by the learned Mariana; but probably many an allusion of the same kind escapes us in Cervantes’s pages. The same may be said of Shakespeare, and hence both Cervantes and Shakespeare have been much exposed to the attentions of commentators. In a celebrated passage of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream Oberon addresses Puck:—

An ordinary reader would be content to admire the lines as they stand, but a commentator is an extraordinary reader, who feels compelled to justify his existence by identifying the mermaid with Mary Queen of Scots, the dolphin with her first husband the Dauphin of France, and the certain stars with Mary’s English partisans. In precisely the same way Don Quixote has been identified with the Duke of Lerma, Sancho Panza with Pedro Franqueza, and the three ass-colts—promised by the knight to the squire as some compensation for the loss of Dapple—have been flatteringly recognised as the three Princes of Savoy, Philip, Victor Amadeus, and Emmanuel Philibert. These identifications seem quite as likely to be correct in the one case as in the other. We need not discuss them. But if A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and Don Quixote were really intended as a couple of political pasquinades, they must be classed as complete failures: the idea that Cervantes and Shakespeare were a pair of party pamphleteers is a piece of grotesque perversity.

Apart from the matter of Don Quixote, the diversity of its manner is arresting. Even those who most admire the elaborate diction of the Galatea are compelled to admit its monotony. The variety of incident in Don Quixote corresponds to a variety of style which is a new thing in Spanish literature. Still there are examples of deliberate imitation, not only in the travesties of the romances of chivalry, but in such passages as Don Quixote’s famous declamation on the happier Age of Gold:—

Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients gave the name of golden, not because in that fortunate age the gold so coveted in this our iron one was gained without labour, but because they that lived in it knew not the two words ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’ In that blessed age all things were in common; to win the daily food no toil was needed from any man but to stretch out his hand and pluck it from the mighty oaks that stood there generously inviting him with their sweet ripe fruit. The crystal streams and rippling brooks yielded their clear and grateful waters in splendid profusion. The busy and wise bees set up their commonwealth in the clefts of the rocks and the hollows of the trees, offering without usance to every hand the abundant produce of their fragrant toil.... Fraud, deceit, or malice had not as yet tainted truth and sincerity. Justice held her own, untroubled and unassailed by the attempts of favour and interest, which so greatly damage, corrupt, and encompass her about....

And so forth. It is a fine piece of embroidered rhetoric, which is fairly entitled to the place it holds in most anthologies of Spanish prose. But it is not specially characteristic of Cervantes: it is a brilliant passage introduced to prove that the writer could, if he chose, rival Antonio de Guevara as a virtuoso in what is thought the grand style. Nor is Cervantes himself in the points and conceits which abound in Marcela’s address to Ambrosio and the assembled friends of the dead shepherd Chrysostom:—

By that natural understanding which God has given me I know that everything beautiful attracts love, but I cannot see how, by reason of being loved, that which is loved for its beauty is bound to love that which loves it.... As there is an infinity of beautiful objects there must be an infinity of inclinations, and true love (so I have heard it said) is indivisible, and must be voluntary and uncompelled.... I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside.... Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk leave me alone as a thing noxious and evil.

To the mind of an English reader, this passage recalls the recondite preciosity of Juliet:—

These exhibitions of verbal ingenuity are a blemish in the early chapters of Don Quixote and in Romeo and Juliet. At this stage of their development both Cervantes and Shakespeare were struggling to disengage their genius from the clutch of contemporary affectation, and both succeeded. As Don Quixote progresses the parody of the books of chivalry becomes less insistent, the style grows more supple and adaptable, reaches a high level of restrained eloquence in the knight’s speeches, is forcible and familiar in expressing the squire’s artful simplicity, is invariably appropriate in the mouths of men differing so widely from each other as Vivaldo and the Barber, GinÉs de Pasamonte and Cardenio, Don Fernando and the left-handed landlord, the Captive and the village priest. The dramatic fitness of the dialogue in Don Quixote, its intense life and speedy movement are striking innovations in the development of the Spanish novel, and give the book its abiding air of modernity. Cervantes had discovered the great secret that truth is a more essential element of artistic beauty than all the academic elegance in the world.But the immediate triumph of Don Quixote was not due—or, at least, was not mainly due—to strictly artistic qualities. These make an irresistible appeal to us, who belong to a more analytic and sophisticated generation. To contemporary readers the charm of Don Quixote lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite sympathy, and its pervasive humour. There was no question then as to whether Don Quixote was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad AndrÉs, flayed in the grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich, of Quintanar; the goatherds seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering; the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of CÓrdoba; the midnight procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together like beads on an iron chain—all these are observed and presented with masterly precision of detail. But the really triumphant creations of the book are, of course, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—the impassioned idealist and the incarnation of gross common-sense. They were instantly accepted as great representative figures; the adventures of the fearless Manchegan madman and his timorous practical squire were speedily reprinted in the capital and the provinces; and within six months a writer in Valladolid assumed as a matter of course that his correspondent in the Portuguese Indies must have made the acquaintance of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

One of the most attractive characteristics of Don Quixote is its maturity; it may not have taken more than three or four years to write, but it embodies the experience of a lifetime, and it breathes an air of urbanity and leisure. Cervantes was not an exceptionally rapid writer, and—if he thought about the matter at all—probably knew that masterpieces are seldom produced in a hurry. His great rival Lope de Vega easily surpassed him in brilliant facility: Cervantes’s mind was weightier, less fleet but more precise. In the closing sentences of Don Quixote he had half promised a continuation, and no doubt it occupied his thoughts for many years. He had set himself a most formidable task—the task of equalling himself at his best—and he may well have shrunk from it, for he was risking his hard-won reputation on a doubtful hazard. He was in no haste to put his fortune to the touch. He sank into a pregnant silence, pondered over the technique of his great design, and, with the exception of an occasional sonnet, published nothing for eight years. At last in 1613 he issued his Novelas Exemplares, twelve short stories, the composition of which was spread over a long space of time. One of these, Rinconete y Cortadillo, is mentioned in Don Quixote, and must therefore date from 1602 or earlier; a companion story, the Coloquio de los Perros, is assigned to 1608; and the remaining ten are plausibly believed to have been written between these dates. The two tales just mentioned are the gems of the collection, but La Gitanilla and El Celoso extremeÑo are scarcely less striking, and certainly seven out of the dozen are models of realistic art. Cervantes was never troubled by mock-modesty, and ingenuously asserts that he was ‘the first to attempt novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many which wander about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages, while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.’ There were earlier collections of stories (from one of which—Eslava’s Noches de Invierno—Shakespeare contrived to borrow the plot of The Tempest), but they are eclipsed by the Novelas Exemplares. These, in their turn, are overshadowed by Don Quixote, but they would suffice to make the reputation of any novelist by their fine invention and engaging fusion of truth with fantasy. The harshest of native critics yielded to the spell, and the Novelas Exemplares were skilfully exploited by John Fletcher and by Middleton and Rowley in England, as well as by Hardy in France.

Cervantes had now so unquestionably succeeded in prose that he was tempted to bid for fame as a poet. He mistrusted his own powers, and, as the event proved, with reason. His Viage del Parnaso, published in 1614, commemorated the most prominent versifiers of the day in a spirit of mingled appreciation and satirical criticism. It is very doubtful whether there have been so many great poets in the history of the world as Cervantes descried among his Spanish contemporaries, and his compliments are too effusive and too universal to be effective. A noble amateur, a potential patron, is lauded as extravagantly as though he were the equal of Lope or GÓngora, and the occasional excursions into satire are mostly pointless. There are more wit, and pungency, and concentrated force in any two pages of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers than in all the cantos of the Viage del Parnaso put together. It cannot be merely owing to temperamental differences that Byron succeeds where Cervantes fails. There are splenetic passages in the Viage relating to such writers as Bernardo de la Vega and the author of La PÍcara Justina, but they miss their mark. The simple truth is—not that Cervantes was willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, but—that he had no complete mastery of his instrument.

His instinct was right; he moves uneasily in the fetters of verse, and only becomes himself in the prose appendix to the Viage which (as the internal evidence discloses) was written side by side with the Second Part of Don Quixote. His true vehicle was prose, but he was reluctant to abide by the limitations of his genius, and while the sequel to Don Quixote was maturing, he produced a volume of plays containing eight formal full-dress dramas and eight sparkling interludes. By sympathy and by training Cervantes belonged to the older school of dramatists, and his attempts to rival Lope de Vega on Lope’s own ground are mostly embarrassed and, in some cases, curiously maladroit; yet he displays a happy malicious humour in the less ambitious interludes, and, when he betakes himself to prose, he captivates by the spontaneous wit and nimble gaiety of his dialogue. These thumbnail sketches, like the kit-cats of the Novelas Exemplares, may be regarded as so many studies for the Second Part of Don Quixote, at which Cervantes was still working.

This tardy sequel, which followed the First Part at an interval of ten years, might never have seen the light but for the publication of Avellaneda’s apocryphal Don Quixote with its blustering and malignant preface. Cervantes’s gentle spirit survived unembittered by a heavy burden of trials and humiliations; but the proud humility with which (in the preface to his Second Part) he meets Avellaneda’s attack shows how profoundly he resented it. It would have been well had he preserved this attitude in the text. He was taken by surprise and, goaded out of patience, flung his other work aside, and brought Don Quixote to a hurried close. Was Avellaneda’s insolent intrusion a blessing in disguise, or was it disastrous in effect? It is true that but for Avellaneda we might have lost the true sequel as we have lost the Second Part of the Galatea, the Semanas del Jardin, and the rest. It is no less true that, but for Avellaneda, the sequel might have been even better than it actually is. Cervantes had steadily refused to be hurried over his masterpiece, and, so long as he followed his own bent, his work is almost flawless. But Avellaneda suddenly forced him to quicken his step, and in the last chapters Cervantes manifestly writes in furious haste. His art suffers in consequence. His bland amenity deserts him; his eyes wander restlessly from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Avellaneda, whom he belabours out of season. He allows himself to be out-generalled, recasting his plan because his foe had stolen it—as though the plan and not the execution were the main essential! He advances, halts, and harks back, uncertain as to his object; he introduces irrelevant personalities and at least one cynical trait unworthy of him. Obviously he is anxious to have the book off his hands, so as to bring confusion on Avellaneda.

That these are blemishes it would be futile to deny; but how insignificant they are beside the positive qualities of the Second Part! Unlike some of his admirers, Cervantes was not above profiting by criticism. He tells us that objection had been taken to the intercalated stories of the First Part, and to some scenes of exuberant fun bordering on horse-play. These faults are avoided in the sequel, which broadens out till it assumes a truly epical grandeur. The development of the two central characters is at once more logical and more poetic; Don Quixote awakens less laughter, and more thought, while Sancho Panza’s store of apophthegms and immemorial wisdom is more inexhaustible and apposite than ever. Lastly, the new personages, from the Duchess downwards to Doctor Pedro Recio de AgÜero—the ill-omened physician of Barataria—are marvels of realistic portraiture. The presentation of the crazy knight and the droll squire expands into a splendid pageant of society. And, as one reads the less elaborate passages, one acquires the conviction that the very dust of Cervantes’s writings is gold. The Second Part of Don Quixote was the last of his works that he saw in print. His career was over, and it closed in splendour. His battle was fought and won, and he died, as befits a hero, with the trumpets of victory ringing in his ears.

His labyrinthine romance, Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, appeared in 1617. Even had this posthumous work been, as Cervantes half hoped, ‘the best book of its kind,’ it could scarcely have added to his glory. Though distinctly not the best book of its kind, the great name on its title-page procured it a respectful reception, and it was repeatedly reprinted within a short time of its publication. But it was soon lost in the vast shadow of Don Quixote: no one need feel guilty because he has not read it. The world, leaving scholars and professional critics to estimate the writer’s indebtedness to Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, has steadily refused to be interested in Persiles y Sigismunda; and in the long run the world delivers a just judgment. It is often led astray by gossip, by influence, by publishers’ tricks, by authors who press their own wares on you with all the effrontery of a cheap-jack at a fair; but the world finds out the truth at last. An author’s genius may be manifest in most or all of his works; but it is wont to be conspicuous in one above the rest. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet: one Hamlet. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote—two Don Quixotes: a feat unparalleled in the history of literature. The one is the foremost of dramatists, and the other the foremost of romancers: and it is to a single masterpiece that each owes the greater part of his transcendent fame.