Don John of Austria, Cervantes,
and Don Quixote
TWO great alliances, of which you will read nothing in ordinary history-books, have pre-eminently influenced mankind. The first was between the Priest and the Woman, and seems to have begun in Neolithic times, when Woman was looked upon as a witch with some uncanny power of bewitching honest men and somehow bringing forth useless brats for no earthly reason that could be discovered. From this alliance grew the worship of Motherhood, and hence many more modern religions. When, on Sundays, you see ranks of men in stiff collars sitting in church though they would much rather be playing tennis, you know that they are expiating in misery the spankings inflicted by their Neolithic ancestors perhaps 10,000 years ago: their wives have driven them to church, and Woman, as usual, has had the last word.
But the other alliance, that between Man and Horse, has been a more terrible affair altogether, and has led to Chivalry, the cult of the Man on the Horse, of the Aristocrat, of the Rich Man. Though the Romans had a savage aristocracy they never had Chivalry, probably because they never feared the cavalryman. The Roman legion, in its open order, could face any cavalry, because the legionary knew that the man by his side would not run away; if he, being a misbegotten son of fear, did so, then the man behind him would take advantage of the plungings of the horse to drive his javelin into the silly animal while he himself would use his sword upon the rider. It was left for the Gran Catalan Company of Spain and the Scots under Wallace and Bruce to prove in mediæval times that the infantryman would beat the cavalryman.
The Romans never adopted the artificial rules of Chivalry; it was the business of the legions to win battles—to make money over the business if they could, but first and foremost to win battles. They had no ideas about the “point of honour” which has cost so many a man his life. The main thing was that the legions must not run away; it was for the enemy to do the running. To the Romans it never seems to have occurred that Woman was a creature to be sentimentally worshipped, or that it really mattered very much whether you spoke of a brace of grouse or a couple, of a mob of hounds or a pack; but to the Knight of Chivalry these were vital matters.
With Charlemagne and his Franks a new civilization came into full flower; and Chivalry—the “worship of God and the ladies,” to quote Gibbon’s ironic phrase—swayed the minds of Northern Europe for centuries.
Chivalry has been much misunderstood in modern times. We probably see Chaucer’s “varry parfit gentil knight” as poets and idealists would have us see him and not as he really was. There was no sentimentality about your knight. “Gentle” did not mean “kind”; it meant really “son of a landowner.” A knight had to do things in the manner considered fashionable by his class; he had to call things precisely by the names taught him by some older knight—his tutor and university combined; the slightest slip and he would be considered as the mediæval equivalent of our “bounder”; he had to wear the proper clothes at the proper time, and to obey certain arbitrary—often quite artificial—“manners and rules of good society,” or he would be considered lacking in “good form”; he must recognize the rights of the rich as against the poor, but it did not follow that he should recognize any rights of the poor as against the rich. Even Bayard, knight sans peur et sans reproche, would probably have seemed a most offensive fellow to a twentieth-century gentleman if he, with his modern ideas, could have met the Chevalier; and the sensation caused by the kindly conduct of Sir Philip Sidney in handing his drink of water to a wounded soldier at Zutphen shows how rare such a thing must have been. It was done a thousand times in the late war, and nobody thought anything about it. To the extent of the sensation of Zutphen Chivalry had debased mankind; the evil that it did lived after it. It did good in teaching the world manners and a certain standard of honourable conduct; it did not teach morality, or real religion, or real kindness. These things were left for the poor to teach the rich.
This unsentimental harangue leads us to “the last knight of Europe”—Don John of Austria, around whose name there still shines a glamour of romance like the sound of a trumpet. About nine years after the death of the Empress Isabel, Charles V went a-wandering, still disconsolate, through his mighty empire. He was sad and lonely, for it was about the time when the arterio-sclerosis which was to kill him began to depress his spirits. At Ratisbon, where he lay preparing for the great campaign which was to end in the glorious victory of Muhlburg, they brought to him to cheer him up a sweet singer and pretty girl named Barbara Blomberg, daughter of a noble family. She sang to the Emperor to such purpose that he became her lover, and in due course Don John was born. By this time Charles had discovered that his pretty nightingale was a petulant, extravagant, sensual young woman, by no means the sort of mother a wise man would select to bring up his son; so he took the boy from her care and sent him to a poor Spanish family near Madrid. Whatever Charles V did in his private life seems to have borne the stamp of wisdom and kindness, however little we may agree with some of his public actions. Probably Barbara did not object; it must have been rather alarming for the flighty young person to have the tremendous personality of the great Emperor constantly overlooking her folly; she married a man named Kugel, ruined him by her extravagance, and died penniless save for an annuity of 200 florins left her by the Emperor in his will. I read a touch of sentimentality into Charles’s character. It is difficult to wonder more at his memory of his old light-of-love in his will, or at his accurate and uncomplimentary estimate of her value. Probably he was rather ashamed of some of his memories; so far as I can find out there were not many such, and he wished to hush up the whole incident. Probably Barbara was not worth much more than 200 florins per annum.
Still keeping secret the parentage of the child, whom he called Jeronimo after his favourite saint, Charles handed him over to the care of his steward, Don Luis de Quixada, asking that Maddalena his wife should regard Jeronimo as her own son. Quixada had not been married very long, and naturally Maddalena wondered whence came this cheery little boy of which Quixada seemed so fond; nor would he gratify her curiosity, but hushed her with dark sayings; she kissed the baby in public, but wept in secret for jealousy of the wicked female who had evidently borne a son in secret to her husband before he had married his lawful wife. One night the castle caught fire, and Quixada, flower of Spain’s chivalry though he was, rescued the child before he returned to save Maddalena. It is wrong to call him a “grandee of Spain,” for “grandee” is a title much the same as our “duke”; had he been a grandee I understand that his true name would have been “Señor Don Quixada, duca e grandi de España.” One would think that this action would have added fuel to Maddalena’s jealousy, but she believed her husband when he told her that Jeronimo was a child of such surpassing importance to the world that it had been necessary for a Quixada to save him even before he saved his wife, and quite probably she then, for the first time, began to suspect his real parentage. Charles V was then the great Catholic hero, and the whole Catholic world was weeping for his abdication. So Maddalena developed a strong love for Jeronimo, which died only with herself. She lived for a great many years and bore no children; Jeronimo remained to her as her only son. He always looked upon her as his mother, and throughout his life wrote to her letters which are still delightful to read; whatever duty he had, in whatever part of the world, he always found time to write to Maddalena in the midst of it, and, like a real mother, she kept the letters.
It is said that Charles when dying kissed Jeronimo and called him son; he certainly provided for him in his will. After his death Quixada at first tried to keep the matter secret, but afterwards sent him to live at the Court with his brother Philip II, who treated him as he treated everybody else but Charles V—“the one wise and strong man whom he never suspected, never betrayed, and never undervalued,” as Stirling-Maxwell says. Jeronimo was then openly acknowledged by Philip as Charles’s natural son, being called Don John of Austria. Philip’s own son, a youth of small intelligence, who afterwards died under restraint—Philip was of course accused of poisoning him—once called him bâtarde et fils de putaine—bastard and strumpet’s son. The curly-headed little boy kept his hands by his side and quietly replied, “Possibly so; but at any rate I had a better father than you!” Even by that time he had begun to see that his mother was no saint, and could tell between a great man and a little. Philip could never forgive Don John for being a gallant youth such as his father had hoped that Philip would be and was not; and Don John, conscious of his mighty ancestry, ardently longed to be a real gallant King of Romance, such as his father had hoped Philip would become. Charles, in his will, had expressed a hope that he would be a monk, and Philip actively fought for this, though Charles had left the decision to Don John’s own wishes. In Philip’s eyes no doubt a gay and bold younger brother would be less dangerous to the State—i.e. to Philip—as a monk than as a soldier; yet is it not possible that Philip only thought he was loyally helping to follow out his father’s wishes? He was generally a “slave of duty,” though his slavery often led him into tortuous courses. The Church is a great leveller, and religion is a pacifying and amaranthine repast. But no monkish cowl would suit Don John; his locks were fair and hyacinthine, and no tonsure should degrade them. After a struggle Philip yielded, and Don John was sent in command of the galleys against the Algerian pirates. He did well, and next year he commanded the land forces against the rebel Moriscoes of Granada. Here, in his very first battle, he lost his foster-father and mentor, Quixada, who died a knightly death in rallying the army when it meditated flight. A true knight of Spain, this Quixada, from the time when he took the little son of imperial majesty under his care till the time when he gave up his life lest that little son, now become a radiant young man, should suffer dishonour by his army running away. All Spain, from Philip downward, mourned the death of this most valiant gentleman, which is another thing that makes me think that Philip’s conduct towards Don John was not quite so black as it has been painted. He could certainly recognize worth when it did not conflict with his own interests—that is to say, with the interests of Spain as he saw them. Quixada’s action in concealing the parentage of Don John from his wife was just the sort of loyal and unwise thing that might have been expected from a chivalrous knight, using the word “chivalrous” as it is commonly understood to-day; a dangerous thing, for many a woman would not have had sufficient faith in her husband to believe him when he suddenly produced an unexplained and charming little boy soon after he was married. Maddalena de Ulloa acted like an angel; Don Quixada acted like—Don Quixote! Now we see why I asked you particularly to note the name when we first came across it in the essay on Charles V. Whence did Cervantes get the idea for Don Quixote if not from the foster-father of Don John?
Two years later he got the real chance of his life. The Turks, having recovered from the shock inflicted on them by Charles V, captured Cyprus and seemed about to conquer all the little republics of the Adriatic. The Pope, Pius V, organized the “Holy League” between Spain and Venice, between the most fiercely monarchical of countries and the most republican of cities; and Don John was appointed Admiral-in-chief of the combined fleets of the “Last Crusade,” as the enterprise is called from its mingled gallantry and apparent unity and idealism. For the last time men stood spellbound as Christendom attacked Mohammed.
sings Chesterton in Lepanto, one of the most stirring battle-poems since the Iliad.
It is difficult for us nowadays to realize the terror of the Turks that possessed Europe in the sixteenth century; mothers quieted their children by the dreadful name, and escaped sailors recounted indescribable horrors in every little seaport from Albania to Scotland. Many thousands of Christian slaves laboured at the oars of the war-galleys, not, as is generally thought, as hostages that these galleys might not be sunk. They were the private property of the captains, who treated their own property better than they treated the property of the Grand Turk. Thus, it was not the worst fate for a Christian galley-slave to serve in the galley of his owner. He would not be exposed to reckless sinking at any rate; if the galley sank, it would be because the owner could not help it. Nor would he be likely to be impaled upon a red-hot poker or thrown upon butchers’ hooks, as might happen to the slave of the Sultan. So it would seem that some unnecessary pity has been spilt upon the slaves of the galleys. Their lot might have been worse, to put things in their most favourable light.
This “last crusade” culminated in the great battle of Lepanto, in 1571, where the Turks lost about 35,000 men and their whole battle fleet except forty galleys which crawled home disabled. There was a good deal of discussion about the action of an Italian galley under Doria, but Cervantes, in Don Quixote, seems to have been quite satisfied with it. No such wonderful battle was fought at sea until the Nile itself, which is the most perfect of all sea-fights.
The sensation throughout Europe was indescribable. Everything helped to make the victory romantic—the gallant young bastard admiral compared with the unattractive king under whom he served, the sudden relief from terrible danger, and the victory of Christ over Mahound, so dramatic and complete, all combined to stir the pulses of Christendom as they had never been stirred before—even in the earlier Crusades when the very tomb of Christ was the point under dispute. Men said that Mahound, when he heard the guns of Don John, wept upon the knees of his houris in his Paradise; black Azrael, the angel of death, had turned traitor upon his worshippers.
This glorious victory was won largely by the extraordinary daring and inspiring personality of the Emperor’s bastard, who now, at the summit of human glory, saw himself condemned to retire into the position of a subject. The rest of the life of the “man who would be king” is the record of thwarted ambition and disappointed hopes. Spain and Venice quarrelled, and Lepanto was not followed up; Philip lost the chance of retrieving 1453 and of changing the history of Europe in Spain’s favour ever since. Christian set once more to killing Christian in the old melancholy way; Venice made peace with the Sultan, and Don John set about carving out a kingdom for himself. In dreams he saw himself monarch of Albania, or of the Morea; and in body he actually recaptured Tunis, once so gloriously held by his father. But Philip would not support him and he had to retire. Cervantes, in Don Quixote, evidently thinks Philip quite right. Tunis was a “sponge for extravagance, and a moth for expense; and as for holding it as a monument to Charles V, why, what monument was necessary to glory so eternal?” Don John returned home without a kingdom to his brother, who no doubt let him see that he was becoming rather a nuisance with his expensive dreams. In 1576 he was placated by an appointment as Governor-General to the Netherlands, where he quickly found himself confronted by a much greater, though less romantic, man than himself. William of Orange was now the unquestioned leader of the revolt of the Dutch against the Roman Catholic power of Philip, and when Don John reached the Netherlands he found himself Governor with no subjects. After fruitless negotiations he retired, a very ill man, to Namur; he had become thin and pale, and lost his vivacity. His heart was not in his task. He was meditating the extraordinary “empresa de Inglaterra”—the “enterprise of England”—which now seems to us so fantastic. The Spanish army was to evacuate the Netherlands and to be rapidly ferried across to Yorkshire; by a lightning stroke it was to release Mary Queen of Scots, that romantic Queen, and marry her to Don John, the romantic victor of Lepanto; Elizabeth was to be slain, and the Pope was to bless the union of romance with romance. But Elizabeth would have taken a deal of slaying. One cannot help surmising that Don John may have dreamed this fantasy because he had been educated by Quixada; it was a dream that might have passed through the addled brain of Don Quixote himself. The victor of Lepanto should better have understood the mighty power of the sea; the galleys which had done so well in the Mediterranean would have been worse than useless in the North, where the storms are a worse enemy than the Turks.
But Philip, either through timidity, or jealousy, or wisdom, would have none of it; after long delay he sent an important force to the Netherlands under the command of Don John’s cousin, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, the greatest general Spain ever produced. Don John abandoned his dreams to fall with this army upon the Protestants at Gemblours, where he, or Farnese—opinions differ—won a really great victory, the last that was to honour his name.
A curious incident in this campaign was that the Spaniards were attacked by a small Scottish force at a place called Rejnements. The Scotsmen began, more Scotorum, by singing a psalm. Having thus prepared the way spiritually, they prepared it physically by casting off their clothes, and to the horror of the modest Spaniards attacked naked with considerable success. Many of us, no doubt, remember how the Highlanders in the late war were said to have stained their bodies with coffee or Condy’s fluid and, under cover of a Birnam’s wood composed of branches of trees, emulated the bold Malcolm and Macduff by creeping upon the Germans attired mainly in their boots and identity disks; a sparse costume in which to appear before nursing sisters should they be wounded. I had the honour of operating upon one hefty gentleman who reached the C.C.S. in this attire, sheltered from the bitter cold by blankets supplied by considerate Australians in the field ambulance. We from a southern land considered the habit more suitable for the hardy Scot than for ourselves; though we remembered that an Australian surgeon at Gallipoli, finding that his dressings had run short, tore his raiment into strips and, when the need came, charged the Turks berserk attired in the costume of Adam before the Fall. But we did not remember that gallant Scotsmen had done something similar in 1578. No doubt the sight of a large man, dressed in cannibal costume and dancing horribly on the parapet while he poured forth a string of uncouth Doric imprecations, led to the tale that the British Army was employing African natives to devour the astonished Bosche.
Don John could not follow up the victory of Gemblours. He had neither money nor sufficient men; the few short months remaining to him were spent in imploring aid from his brother. Philip did nothing; possibly he was jealous of Don John; possibly he was fully occupied over the miserable affair of Antonio Perez and the Princess of Eboli. One would like to think that he had lucid intervals in which he recognized the insensate folly of the whole business; but like his father he was spurred on by his conscience. In addition to the other troubles of Don John his army began to waste away with pestilence, no doubt, it being now autumn, with typhoid, that curse of armies before the recent discovery of T.A.B. inoculation. Don John fell sick, in September, 1578, of a fever, but, his doctors considering the illness trifling, continued to work. One Italian, indeed, said that he would die, whereas another sick man, believed to be in articulo mortis, would recover. The guess proved right, and when Don John died the Italian surgeon’s fortune was made. Thus easily are some reputations gained in our profession; it is easier to make a reputation than to keep it.
For nearly three weeks Don John struggled to work, encouraged by his physicians; there came a day, towards the end of September, when he, being already much wasted by his illness, was seized by a most violent pain and immediately had to go to bed. He became delirious, and babbled of battle-fields and trumpet-calls; he gave orders to imaginary lines of battle; he became unconscious. After two days of muttering delirium he awakened, and, as he was thought to be in extremis, took extreme unction. Next day the dying flicker continued, and he heard the priest say mass; though his sight had failed and he could not see, he had himself raised in the bed, feebly turned his head towards the elevation of the Host and adored the body of Christ with his last glimmer of consciousness. He then fell back unconscious, and sank into a state of coma, from which he never rallied. In all, he had been ill about twenty-four days.
These events could be easily explained on the supposition that this young man’s brave life was terminated by that curse of young soldiers—ruptured typhoid ulcer in ambulatory typhoid fever. His army was dwindling with pestilence; he himself walked about feeling feverish and “seedy” and losing weight rapidly for a fortnight; he was just at the typhoid age, in the typhoid time of the year, and in typhoid conditions; his ulcer burst, causing peritonitis; the tremendous shock of the rupture, together with the toxæmia, drove him delirious and then unconscious; being a very strong young man he woke up again as the first shock passed away; as the shock passed into definite peritonitis unconsciousness returned, and he was fortunate in being able to hear his last mass before he died. I see no flaw in this reasoning.
The rest of the story is rather quaint. By next spring Philip had given orders for the embalmed body to be brought to Spain, and it was considered rather mean of him that the body of his brother was to be brought on mule-back. But Philip was at his wits’ end for money to prosecute the war, and no doubt he himself looked upon his “meanness” as a wise economy. The body was exhumed, cut into three pieces—apparently by disjointing it at the hips—and stuffed into three leather bags which were slung on mule-back in a pack-saddle. When it came within a few miles of the Escorial it was put together again, laid upon a bier, and given a noble funeral in a death-chamber next to that which had been reserved for the great Emperor his father. There I believe it still lies, the winds of the Escorial laughing at its dreams of chivalrous glory.
Philip, suspicious of everybody and everything, had given orders that, should Don John die, his confessor was to keep an accurate record of the circumstances; and it is from the report of this priest that the above account has been drawn by Stirling-Maxwell, so we can look upon it as authoritative. Philip was accused of poisoning him, and for a moment this supposition was borne out by the extreme redness of the intestines; but this is much more easily explained by the peritonitis. Again, Philip’s enemies have said that Don John died of a broken heart, because the priest reported that one side of his heart was dry and empty; but this too is quite natural if we suppose that the last act of Don John’s life was for his heart to pump its blood into his arteries, as so often happens in death. Young men do not die of broken hearts; “Men have died and worms have eaten them—but not for love!” as Rosalind says in her sweet cynicism. In elderly men with high blood-pressures it is quite possible that grief and worry may actually cause the heart to burst, and to that extent novelists are right in speaking of a “broken heart.” Otherwise the disease, or casualty, is unknown to medicine. No amount of worry, or absence of worry, would have had any effect upon Don John’s typhoid ulcer.
Besides the suspicion of poisoning, Don John was rumoured to have died of the “French disease,” even the name of the lady being mentioned. While he was certainly no more moral than any other gay and handsome young prince of his time, there is not the slightest reason for supposing the rumour to have been anything but folly. Syphilis does not kill a man as Don John died, while ambulatory typhoid fever most assuredly does. Therefore the lady in question must remain without her glory so far as this book is concerned, though her name has survived, and not only in Spanish.
Don John was a handsome young man, graceful and strong. There are many contemporary portraits of him, perhaps the best being a magnificent statue at Messina, which he saved from the Turks at Lepanto. He had frank blue eyes and yellow curls, and a very great charm of manner; but he was liable to attacks of violent pride which estranged his friends. He was the darling of the ladies, and was esteemed the flower of chivalry in his day; but William of Orange warned his Netherlanders not to be deceived by his appearance; in his view Philip had sent a monster of cruelty no less savage than himself. But William was prejudiced, and Don John is still one of the great romantic figures of history. It is difficult to speculate reasonably on what might have happened if he had not died. It has been thought that he might have led the Armada, in which case that most badly-managed expedition would at least have been well led, and no doubt England would have had a more determined struggle; but it seems to me more likely that Don John and Philip would have quarrelled, and that Fortune would have been even less kind to Spain than she was. Those who love Spain must be on the whole rather glad that Don John died before he had been able to cause more trouble than he did. It is difficult to agree entirely with those who would put the blame entirely on Philip for the troubles between him and Don John, or would interpret every act of Philip to his detriment. The whole story might be equally interpreted as the effort of a most conscientious and narrow-minded man endeavouring to follow out what he thought to be his father’s wishes and at the same time to keep a wild young brother from kicking over the traces. Compare Butler’s, The Way of All Flesh.
But the real interest to us of Don John is in his relations with Cervantes.
And it will be a sad world indeed when Don Quixote at last reaches the top of that winding road and men cease to love him.
At Lepanto Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (please pronounce the “a’s” separately) was about twenty-five years of age, and was lying below deck sick of a fever. When he heard the roar of the guns of Don John he sprang from his bed and rushed on deck in spite of the orders of his captain; he was put in charge of a boat’s crew of twelve men and went through the thick of the fighting. Every man in Don John’s fleet was fired with his religious enthusiasm, and Cervantes’ courage was only an index of the wild fervour that distinguished the Christians on that most bloody day. He was wounded in the left hand, “for the greater glory of the right,” as he himself quaintly says, and never again could he move the fingers of the injured hand; no doubt the tendon sheaths had become septic, and he was lucky to have kept the hand at all. It has been sapiently remarked that the world would have had a great loss if it had been the right hand; but healthy people who lose the right hand can easily learn to write with the left. Cervantes remained in the fleet for some years until, on his way home, he was captured by Algerian pirates; put to the service of a Christian renegade—a man who had turned Mussulman to save his life or from still less worthy motive—Cervantes made several attempts to escape, but these were unsuccessful, and he remained in captivity for some years until his family had scraped up enough to ransom him. In Don Quixote there is a good deal about the renegadoes, and much of the well-known story of the “escaped Moor” is probably autobiographical; from these hints we gather that the renegadoes were not quite so bad as has been generally thought, or else that Cervantes was far too big-minded a man to believe unnecessary evil about anybody.
Back in Spain, he went into the army for two years, until, in 1582, he gave up soldiering and took to literature. He found the pen “a good stick but a bad crutch,” and in 1585 returned to the public service as deputy-purveyor of the fleet. In 1594 he became collectors of revenues in Granada, and in 1597 he became short in his accounts and fell into jail. There he seems to have begun Don Quixote; he somehow obtained security for the repayment of the missing money, was released penniless into a suspicious world, and published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605. It was enormously well received, and from that day to this has remained one of the most successful of all books. Ten years later he found that dishonest publishers were issuing spurious second parts, so he sat himself down to write a genuine sequel. This differs from most sequels in that it is better than the original; it is wiser, mellower, less ironical; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still more lovable than they were before, and one imagines that Cervantes must have spent the whole ten years in collecting—or inventing—the wonderful proverbs so wisely uttered by the squire.
Though Cervantes wrote many plays he is now remembered mainly by his one very great romance, which is read lovingly in every language of every part of the world, so that the epithet “Quixotic” is applied everywhere to whatsoever is both gallant and foolish; an epithet which reflects the mixture of affection and pity in which the old Don is universally held, and is more often considered to be a compliment than the reverse. Curiously enough, women seldom seem to like Don Quixote; only the other day a brilliant young woman graduate told me that she thought he was a “silly old fool!” That was all she could see in him; but he is universally now thought to represent the pathos of the man who is born out of his time. As has been so well said, “This book is not meant for laughter—it is meant for tears.” I can do no more than advise everybody to get a thin-paper copy and let it live in the pocket for some months, reading it at odd moments; it is the wisest and wittiest book ever published. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep,” is a typical piece of Panzan philosophy with which most wise men will agree.
But when we have done sentimentalizing over the hidden meaning that undoubtedly underlies Don Quixote, we must not forget that it is extraordinarily funny even to a modern mind. The law that the humour of one generation is merely grotesque to the next does not seem to apply to Don Quixote; and I dare swear that the picture of the mad old Don, brought home from the inn of Maritornes, looking so stately in a cage upon a bullock-wagon, guarded by troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and escorted by the priest and the barber, with the distracted Sancho Panza buzzing about wondering what has become of his promised Governorship, is absolutely the funniest thing in all literature; all the funnier because the springs of our laughter flow from the fount of our tears.
Now I cannot help thinking that when Cervantes began to write Don Quixote in prison, feeling bitter and sore against a world which had imprisoned him, and stiffened his hand for him, and condemned him to poverty and imprisonment, he must have had in his mind the story of the young bastard of Imperial Majesty who had risen to such heights of glory over Lepanto. It is not contended that Don Quixote was consciously intended to be a characterizature of Don Quixada or Don John, though his real name was Alonzo Quixana or Quixada, Don Quixote being a nom de guerre born of his frenzy; but I find it hard to believe that Cervantes had not heard of the foolish loyalty of Quixada in the matter of Jeronimo, or of the romantic dreams of Don John. It would seem that in these two incidents we find the true seeds of Don Quixote. It is not true that “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away.” Chivalry, meaning the social order of the true crusades, had long been dead even in Spain, the most conservative of nations. What really laughed Spain’s chivalry away was the gay and joyous laugh of Don John himself, who would have plunged her into a great war for a dream. The man who seriously thought of dashing across the North Sea to marry Mary Queen of Scots would have been quite capable of tilting at windmills. In his inmost heart Cervantes must have seen his folly.
The death of Don Quixote is probably the most generally famous in literature, vying with that of Colonel Newcome, though more impressive because it is less sentimental. Cervantes had begun by rather jeering at his old Don, and subjecting him to uncalled-for cudgellings and humiliations; he then fell in love with the brave old lunatic, as everybody else has fallen in love with him ever since, and by the time that he came to die had drawn him as a really noble and beautiful character, who shows all the pathos of the idealist who is born out of his time. The death of Don Quixote is, except the death of one other Idealist, the most affecting death in all literature; the pathos is secured by means similarly restrained. The Bachelor Samson Carrasco, in his determination to cure Don Quixote of his knight-errant folly, had dressed himself up as “The Knight of the White Moon,” and vowed that there was another lady more fair than Dulcinea del Toboso. At that blasphemy Don Quixote naturally flew to arms and challenged the insolent knight. By that time Rosinante was but old bones, so the Bachelor, being well-mounted on a young charger, overthrew the old horse and his brave old rider, and Don Quixote came to grass with a terrible fall. Then the Bachelor made Don Quixote vow that he would cease from his knight-errantry for a whole year, by which time it was hoped that he would be cured. They lifted his visor and found the old man “pale and sweating”; evidently Cervantes had seen some old man suffering from shock, and described what he saw in three words. From this humiliation Don Quixote never really recovered. He reached home and formed the mad idea of turning shepherd with Sancho and the Bachelor, and living out his penance in the fields. But Death saw otherwise, and the old man answered his call before he could do as he wished. He was seized with a violent fever that confined him to his room for six days; finally he slept calmly for some hours, and again awakened, only to fall into one attack of syncope after another until he died; the sanguine assurance of Sancho Panza that Dulcinea had been successfully disenchanted could not save him. Like most idealists he died a sad and disappointed man, certain of one thing only—that he was out of touch with the majority of mankind.
Cervantes was far too great an artist to kill his old hero by some such folly as “brain fever”—which nonsense I guess to have been typhoid. I believe that in describing the death of Don Quixote he was thinking of some old man whom he had seen crawl home to die after a severe physical shock, disappointed and disillusioned in a world of practical youth in which there is no room for romantic old age—probably some kind old man whom he himself had loved. These old men usually die of hypostatic pneumonia, which has been called the “natural end of man,” and is probably the real broken heart of popular medicine. The old man, after a severe shock, is affected by a weakened circulation; the lungs are attacked by a slow inflammation, and he dies, usually in a few days, in much the same way as died Don Quixote. Cervantes did not know that these old men die from inflammation of the lungs; no doubt he observed the way they die, and immortalized his memories in the death of Don Quixote. I have written this to point out Cervantes’ great powers of observation. He would probably have made a good doctor in our day.
This theory of Don Quixote, that at its roots lie memories of Don John and Don Quixada, is in no way inconsistent with Cervantes’ own statement that he wrote the book to ridicule the romances of Chivalry which were so vitiating the literary taste of seventeenth-century Spain; at the back of his mind probably lay his own memories of foolish and gallant things, quite worthy of affectionate ridicule such as he has lavished on his knight-errant.