There is a difficulty in speaking of Don Quixote. One has to come after Fielding and Scott, Heine, Thackeray, and Sainte-Beuve, not to mention many others hardly less illustrious. These are great names, and it may seem that after they have spoken there is nothing left to say. The first duty which this position imposes is not to endeavour deliberately to be different, in the vain hope of attaining originality. But the cloud of witnesses who might be summoned to prove the enduring interest of Don Quixote is itself a part of the critical history of the book, and a tribute to its solitary place in Spanish literature. The ascetic and so-called mystic writers had their day of influence among us in the seventeenth century. Crashaw alone is enough to prove that here, and in a certain section of English life and literature, Santa Teresa and Juan de la Cruz were living forces. Quevedo had his day, and the Novela de Pícaros their following. During the romantic movement, the dramatists were much in men’s mouths. But in each case the Spaniard remained only for a time. Calderon once had his place in Lord Tennyson’s Palace of Art, but he fell out, and that has been the fate of all things Spanish in literature. They have given an indication, have been used—and forgotten, or they have been welcomed as strange, mysterious, probably beautiful, and then silently dropped as too exclusively Spanish, too entirely belonging to a long past century. But Don Quixote has been always with us since Shelton’s translation of the first part appeared in 1612. This of itself is proof enough that there is something in Don Quixote which is absent from other Spanish work, whether his own or that of other men.

No words need be wasted in controverting the guesses of those who wish to account for the greatness of a great piece of literature by some hidden quality not literary. They have ranged from the fantastic supposition that Cervantes was ridiculing Charles V. down to the amazing notion that he was attacking the Church. Nor need much respect be shown to the truth that Don Quixote was meant to make fun of the books of chivalry. This would be self-evident even if Cervantes had not said so. It may be that this was all he meant, and then he builded better than he knew. The work of burlesque, though often necessary, and, when decently done, amusing, is essentially of the lower order. In this case it was not necessary, for the Libros de Caballerías were already dying out before the sordid rivalry of the Novelas de Pícaros. It was the less necessary, because it was no reform. The Spain of the Libros de Caballerías was the Spain of Santa Teresa and Luis de Leon, of the great scholars of the stamp of Francisco Sanchez El Brocense, of Diego de Mendoza, of Cortés and Pizarro and Mondragon—the Spain which Brantôme saw, “brave, bravache et vallereuse et de belles paroles proférées à l’improviste.” It was a better country than that in which the Count Duke of Olivares had to complain that he could find “no men.” The follies of the Libros de Caballerías were a small matter. It was not a small matter that a nation should replace Amadis of Gaul by Paul of Segovia, should pass from the lofty romantic spirit of Garcia Ordoñes to the carcajada—the coarse, braying, animal, and loveless guffaw of Quevedo.

In so far as Cervantes forwarded that change he did evil and not good. He did help to laugh Spain’s chivalry away. But in truth it was dying, and the change would have come without him. He is great in literature, because while consciously doing a very small, unnecessary, and partially harmful thing, he created a masterpiece of that rare and fine faculty which while thinking in jest still feels in earnest (the definition of what is, it may be, undefinable is taken from Miss Anne Evans), and which we call humour. Elsewhere in Spanish literature we find a type fixed and unvarying, or even a mere puppet, met through a succession of events, and moved about by them. In Don Quixote we have two characters acting on one another, and producing the story from within. And these two characters are types of immortal truth—the one a gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of good faculty, for whom a slight madness has made the whole world fantastic; the other an average human being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere coward, and ignorant, yet not unkindly, nor incapable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what his limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his greed. The continual collisions of these two with the real world make the story of Don Quixote. Cervantes had a fine inventive power, the adventures are numerous and varied, yet the charm lies not in the incidents, but in the reality and the sympathetic quality of the persons. We have no grinning world of masks made according to a formula. The country gentlemen, priests, barbers, shepherds, innkeepers, tavern wenches, lady’s-maids, domestic curates, nobles, and officials are living human beings, true to the Spain of the day no doubt, but also true to the humanity which endures for ever, and therefore intelligible to all times. In the midst is honest greedy Sancho with his peering eyes, so shrewd, and withal so capable of folly, the critic, and also the dupe of the half-crazed dreamer, by whom he rides, and will ride, as long as humanity endures, in this book, and under every varying outward form in the real earth. As for Don Quixote, is he not the elder brother of Sir Roger de Coverley, of Matthew Bramble, of Parson Adams, of Bradwardine, of Colonel Newcome, and Mr Chucks, the brave, gentle, not over-clever, men we love all the more because we laugh at them very tenderly?[46]