The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

It was to do battle with this brood of fabled monsters, against whom the pulpit and the parliament had preached and legislated in vain, that Cervantes took up his pen. The adventure was one reserved for his single arm; and it was achieved with a completeness of success such as must have astonished our hero himself, as we know by many signs that it disgusted and irritated many of his literary rivals. The true nature of the service performed, as well as Cervantes' motive in undertaking it, has been greatly misrepresented. Nothing can be more certain than that his aim in Don Quixote was, primarily, to correct the prevailing false taste in literature. What moral and social results followed were the necessary consequences of the employment of his rare wit and humor on such a work. There is no reason to believe that Cervantes, at first, had any more serious intention than that which he avowed, namely, to give "a pastime to melancholy souls"[19] in destroying "the authority and influence which the books of chivalries have in the world and over the vulgar." That he was not impelled to this work by any antipathy to knightly romances as such—still less by any ambition to repress the spirit of chivalry, or to purge the commonwealth of social and political abuses—is abundantly proved by the whole tenor of his book, if not by the evidence of his life. His own tastes strongly inclined him to books of romance. Perhaps no one in that age had read more of those books, or was so deeply imbued with their spirit.

The opinion of an acute Spanish writer, Don Vicente de Salva, on this point we hold to be a very sensible one—"Cervantes did not intend to satirize the substance and essence of books of chivalries, but only to purge away their follies and impossibilities." What is Don Quixote itself, it is shrewdly added, but a romance of chivalry, "which has ruined the fortunes of its predecessors by being so immensely in advance of them"?[20] What was Cervantes' own last book, as we shall presently show, but in some kind a romance of chivalry—not free, alas! from some of the very errors he had himself burlesqued? Nay, what was Cervantes' own life but a romance of chivalry?

That, after all, the overthrow of the books of chivalries was but a small part of the good work which Cervantes performed in Don Quixote is only to say that, like all great writers, he "builded better than he knew." The pen of the genius, as Heine says, is ever greater than the man himself. Rejecting all the many subtle and ingenious theories as to what was Cervantes' object in writing his book; that it was a crusade against enthusiasm, as even Heine seems to suspect; that it was a missionary tract, intended to destroy popery and throw down antichrist, as some, even bearded men, have dared to suggest; that it was a programme of advanced liberalism artfully veiled under a mask of levity, and, indeed, the forerunner of that gospel of sentimental cosmopolitanism since preached by other eminent persons supposed to resemble Cervantes in their characters or Don Quixote in their careers—I hold that the author wrote but out of the fulness of his own heart, giving us, by a happy impulse, a fable in which are transparently figured his own character, his own experiences, and his own sufferings. What is the key but this to the mystery which makes this book, on a purely local subject of passing interest, the book of humanity for all time—as popular out of Spain as among Spaniards? A mere burlesque would have died with the books which it killed. A satire survives only so long as the person or the thing satirized is remembered. But Don Quixote lives, and, by a miracle of genius, keeps Amadis and Palmerin alive.