MRS. OLIPHANT'S " CERVANTES."
Tins is a very readable little book, on one of the most readable of great writers. The better one knows Cervantes, the more one enjoys his book,—a rare and happy state of things. A writer's imaginative works are often the best part of him, be- cause imagination gives men wings, to soar above their work-a- day level. They apply imagination not to their actual selves and circumstances, of which they are tired, but to that racier state of being to which they never practically attain. It is apparently a paradox, but really the broad statement of a philosophic truth, that every man is all that he is, and also all that he is not. In other words, the human nature of which each one of us is a special version contains the sum of all human attributes ; but in any particular man, only a few of these qualities are active, while the rest are latent. A complete man would differ from non-complete men, not as possessing a dif- ferent nature, but as possessing a full development of the same nature. The incomplete man, therefore, has developed only a few of those possibilities all of which he contains. Each of us has an intuition more or less clear of his universal inheritance, and imagination helps us spiritually to enjoy those regions from which we are practically excluded. And the reason why good imaginative work wears an aspect so much fairer than actual experience is, that the spiritual apprehension of life is so much loftier and lovelier than its material conditions.
But the actual experience of Cervantes seems to have been no less brilliant than his literary imaginings, though the latter are among the most charming in literature ; his own nature was of such full growth, that he needed not to forage outside of it ; he was so pleased with what he felt himself to be, as to put the direct outcome of himself into his books. We find the man in his writings, whereas most writers are found in their books only negatively,—by attributing to them whatever the books have not. The imagination of Cervantes, lacking that great stimulus which the consciousness of natural restrictions gives, was, in truth, his weakest point. It was not creative nor inventive, but expended itself in manipulating with delightful ait and humour the materials he had at hand. Mrs. Oliphant says that, although not Shakespeare's equal, *" it was in the nature of Shakespeare that Cervantes was made." If this handsome phrase has any meaning, it indicates, first, that Mrs. Oliphant's admiration of Cervantes is great; and secondly, that she thinks he reached out in the same directions as Shakespeare, though with fewer and shorter arms. Our own opinion is that the genius of the two men differed even more in kind than in degree. Shakespeare was nobody in himself, the personal element in him was insignificant
• Cervantes. By Mrs. Olipbant. (Blackwood's Series of "Foreign Classics for 'English Readers.")
and flexible; but he had an extraordinary power of throwing himself into the being of other people than himself, and the atmosphere of other times and spheres than his own. His work was so imaginative, that there was next to nothing of himself in it. He had an unmistakable literary style, but it was un- mistakable precisely by dint of not being individual or humor- ous, because the expression was invariably the most transparent possible verbal equivalent of the thing or the thought expressed.
Cervantes, on the other hand, was before all things a person, a man of vigorous individual flavour,—strong, elastic, ardent, and cheerful. The reality of the world, to him, was contingent upon its likeness or unlikeness to himself; he was the gauge and stan- dard, the centre and the circumference, of whatever life he knew. His vanity would have been absurd and intolerable, if it had not been so irresistibly ingenuous and guileless. The fact that it was founded upon the possession of qualities really great and brilliant was a mere accident, having no bearing upon the conceit itself. It is to be observed, however, that the conceit of Cervantes was a conceit of qualities, not of self. He recognised, as all great minds do, that the selfhood of man is but an instru- ment, mean and poor in itself, but which may have the good- fortune to be the means whereby noble ends are accomplished. Cervantes felt that this good-fortune was his, and rejoiced accordingly, and called upon others to observe and rejoice like- wise ; but had he not at the same time perceived that what even he was in himself was ludicrously incommensurate with what was accomplished through him, be would not have been, as he was, one of the greatest of humourists. To be a humourist, one must get such an outlook over life as to be able to smile at the pathetic absurdity of man's naive delusion that he is the respon- sible author of all the results whereof he is at most but the agent.
Plainly, however, there is nothing in Cervantes of the Shake- spearean method or attitude; on the contrary, one of the main charms of his work is the constant appearance in it of the lovable nature of the author himself. Cervantes is his own Knight of La Mancha, and the great romance is the criticism of his experience upon his own faithful and never extinguished enthusiasm for all noble and impracticable things. As Mrs. Oliphant well ex- presses it, " That Quixote who is himself, who can be no other than himself, calls from him the heartiest glee of laughter.
What folly all those old chimaeras were, how supremely ludicrous ! What fun, to be so oddly, so absurdly taken in !
But yet there he stands, in spite of all, always the same Miguel Cervantes, not beaten yet, nor intending to be beaten, and free to laugh till the tears come into his eyes, seeing through it all, but finding no grievance, bitter against no one, blaming no one, not even himself. We know no other example of ridicule so kindly, so good-humoured, yet so restrained."
The volume before us begins with the history of Cervantes' life, and a picture of the man. It is admirably done in small space, and is, perhaps, the best and newest part of the book.
It shows us the valiant and indomitable young Spanish gentle- man fighting gloriously against the Paynim at Lepanto, de- sperately wounded there, but letting hopes flow in quicker than the blood flowed out. On the voyage back to Spain, the Algerian pirates capture him, and he is led into his five years of slavery. That singular community of robbers, the like of
which history holds no record of, is set before us; the strange anomalies of their commercial dealings with their-enemies, their
cruelty and audacity; the division of their captives into the ransomable and unransomable ; the schemes of Cervantes to escape, and his truly Quixotic bearing when his schemes were frustrated ; all these and many other features of this stirring episode of Cervantes' career are described with vividness and effect. At length the hero is ransomed, in the very nick of time, and to the relief of his captors as well as of him- self, for his indomitable and contriving spirit has caused them no small trouble and anxiety. Arrived in Spain, with a mighty purpose to lead the whole nation in arms against the detestable Moors and Turks, who still hold 20,000 of his fellow-Christians iu bondage, Cervantes meets with only neglect or rebuffs. Thereupon he sets to work to rouse the dormant spirit of his King and countrymen with his pen, and indites a number of harrowing poems and tragedies on the basis of his Algerian experience. But nothing comes of it,—not even lite- rary renown. Then again he joins the army ; but his deeds of arms, though doubtless valiant, are now forgotten, as are almost the very objects and results of the wars in which he fought. To Spain he returns once more, obtains some minor official work, and for twenty years history is almost silent about him. And then, when between fifty and sixty years of age, though still bright of eye and stout of heart, the epoch of the immortal romance begins. Never did author have a happier inspiration, or was better furnished with the resources of heart, head, and experience to carry it out. The years which followed were full of literary labour, and Cervantes died still hopefully planning future work. But he had done his share.
A good deal of the volume is taken up by analyses of the less-known writings of Cervantes,—writings which more or less bear trace of his intellectual vigour and his keenness of obser- vation, but which are destitute of the humour and breadth of view of the one great work. Some notice of these productions was, no doubt, necessary, even in so brief a biographical work as this ; but we should have been willing to see the extracts and comments considerably abridged, and more enlargement given to other aspects of the man. A school of Cervantes students has arisen of late, who are very learned and dogmatic on their subject, and savagely critical of any one who ventures to admire him or refer to him otherwise than as they shall dictate. This sort of thing has always been and always will be the delight of barren brains, which, having nothing of original value to put forth, burrow amidst the greatness of the past, in the hope that some dust of it may stick to them. There is no harm in this employment of theirs, except in so far as they may dis- tract for a time the attention of reasonable people from the con- templation and enjoyment of what is really good, to worthless side-issues. In the present instance, it is probably the pressure of these shrill students which has caused Mrs. Oliphant to devote so much of her valuable space to investigations which are devoid of genuine value, and which satisfy neither the reasonable people nor the students. Who that has read Don Quixote cares`whether or not Cervantes wrote the Tia Fingida, or would love him one bit the less or more, if he did write it P But there is always the consolation of remembering that the essential Cervantes will for indefinite ages survive his most inveterate contemporary monopoliser.
The chapters devoted to Don Quixote are excellent, and scarcely less interesting than the biographical details already referred to. The extracts are well chosen, the comments full of sympathy and of intelligence ; and the effect of them probably will be to set us all to reading once again the sweet old comedy itself. Cervantes was one of those men whose biography it was quite worth while to write, and it was quite worth while that Mrs. Oliphant should write it. She is a little too unfalteringly eulogistic, perhaps, and her work bears occasional signs of hurry ; but she sees the true value of things, and does not easily lend herself to vain inquiries.
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