CERVANTES 353 style, its unbecoming subject, and its bizarre title, there can be no doubt of the extraordinary popularity achieved by Don Quixote on its first appearance. No fewer than six impressions of the first edition of 1605 are extant, of which two were issued at Madrid, two at Valencia, and two at Lisbon. There had appeared up to that date no book since the invention of printing which had so many readers. To that artificial age, reared in the insipid ex travagances of the successors of Amadis, Don Quixote was as the dawn of a new revelation. The humour, equally simple and deep, the easy, careless grace of the narrative, the fine wisdom and tenderness, the true charity, of this book which professed to be a burlesque of the romances of chivalry, were qualities as rare as they were delightful in Spanish literature. Even those who missed the allegory and were insensible to the satire could not but enjoy the story with its fresh and lively pictures of national life and character. That which has become, to use the phrase of Sainte-Beuve, " the book of humanity," was no less successful in its age as a book of popular recreation. The author himself was probably amazed at his own success. Like his great contemporary Shakespeare, while careful of his lesser works he seems to have abandoned his master piece to the printers with scarcely a thought of his literary reputation. All the first editions of Don Quixote swarm with blunders of the most extraordinary kind, proving that Cervantes could never have revised the printing, even if he had looked through his manuscript before committing it to the press. He is made to forget in one chapter what he had written in another. He confounds even the names of his characters, calling Sancho s wife Theresa in one place and Maria in another the very blunders of which he afterwards accused his enemy .Avellaiieda. He makes Sancho ride his ass immediately after it had been stolen by Gines de Passamonte, and bewail its loss when it had been recovered. He confounds time, place, and persons, and abounds in inaccuracies and anachronisms, to the distrac tion of his readers, the perturbation of his critics, and the serious grief of his admirers. The style of this first part of Don Quixote, in spite of occasional passages of beauty which are among the models of the Castiliau tongue, is loose, slovenly, and inartistic. Even in the second edition, published in 1608 and revised by the author, a great many patent blunders were suffered to stand, over which Cervantes himself makes merry in the second part. All this is unfavourable to the theoiy which some critics have formed that there was a purpose in the book other than what appears on the surface. There is no reason to doubt Cervantes s own declaration, several times repeated, that in writing Don Quixote he had no other design than to destroy the credit of those romances of chivalry whose reading was so pernicious to the taste and morals of the age, and to furnish " a pastime for melancholy and gloomy spirits." The idea of Byron that Cervantes "laughed Spain s chivalry away" is not more absurd than some recent conjectures that Don Quixote was intended as a satire upon certain leading personages of the Spanish court, especially upon the Duke de Lerma. The chivalry of Spain was already gone before Cervantes wrote. Had it not been gone Don Quixote would not have been written, nor would it have fallen to Cervantes, the most chivalrous of men, to deliver its death stroke. Not chivalry, but the foolish and extravagant romances of . chivalry it was which Cervantes undertook to destroy ; and so completely was his work done that none of them ap peared after 1 604. There was no man of that age more deeply imbued, as his life bears witness, with the true chivalrous spirit, nor was there any better affected, as his book shows, to all the literature of chivalry. Don Quixote itself is a romance of chivalry, certainly not less inspired with the purest sentiment of honour, or furnishing a less exalted model of knighthood than Amadis of Gaul or Palmerin of England. Every passage of it proves how carefully and sympathetically Cervantes had studied his originals. For the romance of Amadis itself, as contained in the four first books of Garci-Ordonez, Cervantes always professed a high respect. What he intended to ridicule was the continuation of Amadis in all the endless series of his descendants, each surpassing its predecessor in extravagance and folly.. The theory that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in order to revenge himself on the Duke de Lerma and his satellites, which has been revived in these latter days, scarcely deserves serious refutation. To those who are able to believe that in the character of the knight of La Mancha the author intended to portray his mortal enemy the more material improbabilities which surround this hypo thesis will present no difficulty. In one sense Don Quixote is indeed a satire ; but the follies it ridicules are those com mon to all humanity and to every age, and the satire is of that rare kind which moves not to depreciation but to love and pity of the object to sympathy rathe* than to contempt, and to tears as well as laughter. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are permanent types individualized. They are as true for all time as for the sixteenth century for all the world as for Spain. The antithesis of the pure imagina tion without understanding and the commonplace good sense without imagination which these two represent is the eternal conflict which possesses the world. The secret of the marvellous success of Don Quixote, of the extraor dinary popularity which makes it not only the great book of Spain but a book for all mankind, has been aptly de scribed by Coleridge to lie in the rare combination of the permanent with the individual which the genius of the author has been enabled to achieve. Don Quixote is not only the perfect man of imagination, less the understand ing, but he is a living picture of the Spanish hidalgo of the time of Philip II. Sancho is the ideal commonplace man of sense, less the imagination, and also the pure Man- chegan peasant. In the carrying out of his happy con ception Cervantes was doubtless careless of his own main purpose, so that this burlesque of romance has become a real picture of life this caricature of chivalry the truest chivalric model this life of a fool the wisest of books. The fame acquired by the publication of the first part of Don Quixote does not appear to have contributed mate rially to the improvement of the author s fortunes. In 1 605 he was still living at Valladolid, where, with his usual ill- luck, he was involved in a painful incident which brought him once more, though perfectly innocent, into collision with the authorities. A young nobleman of the court, being wounded in a street brawl, was carried into the house where Cervantes lodged to be tended, and died there of his hurts. Cervantes and his family, with the other inmates of the house, were cast into prison, according to the rough process of Spanish law, until they could be examined before the alcalde. From the depositions of the witnesses, which are extant, we learn that at this time Cervantes s household consisted of his wife, his natural daughter Isabel, over 20 years old, his widowed sister Andrea, with her daughter Constanza, and another sister, Magdalena, with one female servant; and that he made his living by writing and general agency. In May of this year there arrived at Madrid the earl of Huntingdon with a retinue of 600 persons from England, bearing a message of congratulation to the king on the birth of his heir, after wards Philip IV., on which occasion were given a series of magnificent entertainments. On the strength of an allu sion in a satirical sonnet by Gongara, a narrative of the festivities, published in 1605 and still extant, has been attri buted to Cervantes, but it bears no marks of his style, and it
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