In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra wrote the first part of his ingenious novel, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, known in English as Don Quixote. Written because Cervantes was in financial trouble and he needed to make some money, Don Quixote met with immediate commercial success.

Indeed, the novel was so popular that in 1614, another writer imitating Cervantes' subject and style published a book called Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. While imitation might be the most sincere form of flattery, Cervantes was not amused. Already working on the second volume of Don Quixote, he wrote into the book a chapter castigating the impostor and denigrating the imitative work. This second volume was published in 1615, and once again met with both critical and popular approval.

Since the seventeenth century, Don Quixote has grown to be one of the most regarded and highly influential novels in the western world. It continues to generate critical study and controversy, and has been called the most important novel ever written, particularly by South American writers. Indeed, important writers such as Michel Foucault and Jorge Luis Borges have both discussed Don Quixote at length.

What is there about the novel that makes it the subject of so many literary studies, centuries after its first publication? Perhaps it is because the novel offers readers nearly endless possibilities for interpretation. As Harold Bloom argues in The Western Canon: "No two readers ever seem to read the same Don Quixote…. Cervantes invented endless ways of disrupting his own narrative to compel the reader to tell the story in place of the wary author."

Further, a number of critics believe that it is the first modern novel. Carlos Fuentes, for example, in a foreword to the Tobias Smollet translation of Don Quixote, tells the reader that for him, "[T]he modern world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world, and discovers that the world does not resemble what he has read about it."

P. E. Russell, in his book Cervantes, also traces the connections between Don Quixote and the modern novel. Most interesting, however, are Russell's statements concerning how the book is not like the modern novel. For example, he argues that "A parodic or even a more generally comic stance is hardly the norm in the modern novel." Russell continues, "The ambiguity of the book is another feature that we scarcely associate with the modern novel."

The problem, of course, is how to reconcile Cervantes' multi-layered, highly ironic, playful text with the modern novel, which tries to preserve the illusion of the reality of its fictive world. Russell might meet with more success if he were to connect Don Quixote with the postmodern novel, what Russell refers to as "experimental fiction."

Postmodern literature is concerned with narrative and the disruption of narrative; with the connection between naming and reality; and with fiction that self-reflexively calls attention to itself as fiction. By examining each of these in turn, readers may find that Cervantes anticipates the postmodern moment in Don Quixote.

A narrative is, according to The Harper Handbook of Literature, an account of real or imaginary events, and a narrative perspective is the standpoint from which a story is told. A narrative demands a narrator, that is, a teller of the story. While this may seem self-evident, postmodernism has rendered the entire relationship between the narrator and the narrative problematic. Like a postmodernist himself, Cervantes plays with the relationship as well.

As the novel opens, Cervantes introduces himself to the reader through his prologue. Readers thus expect that Cervantes will be the voice narrating the tale. As E. Michael Gerli in his book Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes notes, however, "[T]he narrative structure of Don Quijote is exceedingly complex." The voice that opens the novel, introduces the characters, and recounts the action remains consistent for the first eight chapters.

Suddenly, however, Cervantes disrupts his own narrative, and informs the reader that he has been reading from a text that has suddenly come to an end, right in the middle of a battle. This disruption of the narrative throws the reader into confusion. Does this mean that Cervantes is not the narrator of his own story? Or that he is not the author of this text?

At the beginning of chapter nine, the battle suspended, the narrator goes in search of the rest of the story. He tells the reader that he is "always reading, even scraps of paper [he] finds in the street… ." He finds a set of notebooks, written in Arabic. Although the narrator is a voracious reader, he is unable to read the Arabic and must find a translator. He finds a Moor in the marketplace who translates the notebooks, which are, it appears, the work of the Arab historian Sidi Hamid Benengeli, who is the writer of the History of Don Quijote of La Mancha. With the translation finished, the original narrator resumes his story.

However, the disruption has served several purposes. First, it undermines the reliability of the narrator and of the text itself. Although the reader thought that the narrator and Cervantes were one and the same, clearly this is not the case. In addition, the text that the narrator reads from is located within the larger text Cervantes creates. Second, the disruption forces the reader to consider the reliability of sources and of history itself. Whose story is this anyway? What does it mean that the story was originally written in Arabic, translated by someone the narrator finds in the market, written in Spanish by Cervantes, and translated into English by any one of several translators?

Certainly, the layering of text upon text serves to distance Cervantes from his story. However, at the same time, it calls attention to Cervantes as a writer of fiction. The disruption in the narrative reminds the reader that Don Quixote is a character in a novel, not a real human being. It also reminds the reader that the narrator, the translator, and Sidi Hamid Benengeli are all fictional characters, created by Cervantes for his novel.

In addition, the fictional Moorish translator forces readers to consider the role of the real English translators who undertake to interpret and render meaningful texts separated from their readers by culture, space, and time. How does reading a novel in translation differ from reading it in the original language? What is the relationship between the text itself and the translation? For that matter, what is the text itself? These are questions that postmodern writers and readers find most intriguing.

Postmodernism is also concerned with the process of naming. As Brenda Marshall suggests in Teaching the Postmodern, "Naming must occur from a position 'outside' of a moment, and it always indicates an attempt to control… . Only from a fictional, removed, and separate point of perspective do we name (identify) the framework or paradigm within which people have lived in the past."

Cervantes calls attention to the power of naming by first creating doubt over the name of his fictional character: "It's said his family name was Quijada, or maybe Quesada: there's some disagreement among the writers who've discussed the matter. But more than likely his name was really Quejana." By introducing this moment of doubt, Cervantes suggests that he has less control over his story than one might think. Always there is the possibility of not being able "to tell things as faithfully as you can."

As Michel Foucault argues in The Order of Things, Don Quixote is a novel about the rupture between words and meaning, between names and identity. Reality depends on the ability to name, to identify, and to tell a story faithfully. The rupture evident in the novel suggests that there may be more than one reality.

Brenda Marshall continues, "But the traditional process of naming—a belief in the identity of things with names, so that 'reality' may be known absolutely—provides a space of interrogation for postmodernism, which asks: whose 'reality' is to be represented through the process of naming?"

The importance of names is especially clear when Alonso Quejana renames himself, his servant, his lady, and his horse. In so doing, he creates identities for them that have meaning within the "frame-work or paradigm within which people have lived in the past." Cervantes makes it clear that names have consequences: once Don Quixote becomes Don Quixote, he enters into a different reality and becomes a knight-errant. Don Quixote, through the process of naming, creates a reality that requires particular action on his part. Likewise, the naming of Don Quixote as "mad" requires a different understanding of reality on the part of his friends.

The kind of fiction described above can be called "metafiction." Metafiction asks readers to recognize that what they are reading is fiction, not reality, in order to help readers explore the relationship between fiction and reality. Throughout Don Quixote, Cervantes says as much about the nature of fiction as he does about the adventures of Don Quixote. For example, at the beginning of chapter twenty-four, he tells the reader,

He who translated this great history from its Arabic original, written by its primal author, Sidi Hamid Benengeli, tells us that, when he got to this chapter about the adventure in Montesinos' Cave, he found, written in the margins, and in Sidi Hamid's own handwriting, "I cannot persuade myself nor quite believe that the valiant Don Quixote in fact experienced literally everything written about in the aforesaid chapter, because everything else that has happened to him, to this point, has been well within the realm of possibility and verisimilitude, but I find it hard to accept as true all these things that supposedly happened in the cave, for they exceed all reasonable bounds."

This intrusion reminds the reader that the translator, the Arabic original, the marginal notes, and Sidi Hamid Benengeli are also fictional creations of Cervantes, just as Don Quixote is a fictional creation. In addition, while a fictional text may seem to be true because of verisimilitude, that is, its imitation of reality, all fictional texts "exceed all reasonable bounds." In other words, a text that seems true is no truer than a fictional text that does not seem true; both only exist in the world of fiction.

Don Quixote, then, is a work that continues to speak to its readers. Through its play with narration, its exploration of the power of naming, and its attention to metafictional concerns, the novel seems acutely appropriate for reading in the postmodern moment. Nevertheless, if, as Harold Bloom contends, no two readers ever read the same Don Quixote, future readers will also find much to interest them, for with each reading, the novel grows in richness and complexity.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.
Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College. She holds a Ph.D. in literature and writes widely for educational publishers.

[Today], there is scarcely a literature that yields less individual and more insipid works than that of Spain, and there is scarcely a cultured nation—or one that passes for such—where there is such a manifest incapacity for philosophy.

[This] philosophical incapacity which Spain has always shown, as well as a certain poetic incapacity—poetry is not the same as literature—has allowed a host of pedants and spiritual sluggards, who constitute what might be called the school of the Cervantist Masora, to fall upon Don Quixote.

The Masora was, as the reader will doubtless remember, a Jewish undertaking, consisting of critical annotations to the Hebrew text of Holy Scripture, the work of various rabbis of the school at Tiberias during the eighth and ninth centuries. The Masoretes, as these rabbis were called, counted all the letters which compose the Biblical text and determined the incidence of each letter and the number of times each one was preceded by one of the others, and other curious matters of this type.

The Cervantist Masoretes have not yet indulged in such excesses with Don Quixote; but they are not far off. As regards our book, all manner of unimportant minutiae and every kind of insignificant detail have been recorded. The book has been turned upside down and considered from every angle, but scarcely anyone has examined its entrails, nor entered into its inner meaning.

Even worse: whenever anyone has attempted to plumb its depths and give our book a symbolic or tropological sense, all the Masoretes and their allies, the pure litterateurs and the whole coterie of mean spirits, have fallen upon him and torn him to bits or have ridiculed him. From time to time, some holy man from the camp of the wise and shortsighted pedants comes along and informs us that Cervantes neither could nor would mean to say what this or that symbolist attributed to him, inasmuch as his sole object was to put an end to the reading of books of chivalry.

Assuming that such was his intent, what does Cervantes' intention in Don Quixote, if he had any intention, have to do with what the rest of us see in the book? Since when is the author of a book the person to understand it best?

Ever since Don Quixote appeared in print and was placed at the disposition of anyone who would take it in hand and read it, the book has no longer belonged to Cervantes, but to all who read it and feel it. Cervantes extracted Don Quixote from the soul of his people and from the soul of all humanity, and in his immortal book he returned him to his people and all humanity. Since then, Don Quixote and Sancho have continued to live in the souls of the readers of Cervantes' book and even in the souls of those who have never read it. There scarcely exists a person of even average education who does not have some idea of Don Quixote and Sancho.

Cervantes wrote his book in the Spain of the beginnings of the seventeenth century and for the Spain of that time; but Don Quixote has traveled through all the countries of the world in the course of the three centuries that have passed since then. Inasmuch as Don Quixote could not be the same man, for example, in nineteenth century England as in seventeenth century Spain, he has been transformed and modified in England, giving proof thereby of his powerful vitality and of the intense realism of his ideal reality.

It is nothing more than pettiness of spirit (to avoid saying something worse) that moves certain Spanish critics to insist on reducing Don Quixote to a mere work of literature, great though its value may be, and to attempt to drown in disdain, mockery, or invective all who seek in the book for meanings more intimate than the merely liberal.

If the Bible came to have an inestimable value it is because of what generations of men put into it by their reading, as their spirits fed there; and it is well known that there is hardly a passage in it that has not been interpreted in hundreds of ways, depending on the interpreter. And this is all very much to the good. Of less importance is whether the authors of the different books of the Bible meant to say what the theologians, mystics, and commentators see there; the important fact is that, thanks to this immense labor of generations through the centuries, the Bible is a perennial fountain of consolation, hope, and heartfelt inspiration. Why should not the same process undergone by Holy Scripture take place with Don Quixote, which should be the national Bible of the patriotic religion of Spain?

Perhaps it would not be difficult to establish a relation between our weak, soft, and addled patriotism and the narrowness of vision, the wretchedness of spirit, and the crushing vulgarity of Cervantist Masoretism and of the critics and litterateurs of this country who have examined our book.

I have observed that whenever Don Quixote is cited with enthusiasm in Spain, it is most often the least intense and least profound passages that are quoted, the most literary and least poetic, those that least lend themselves to philosophic flights or exaltations of the heart. The passages of our book which figure in the anthologies, in the treatises of rhetoric—they should all be burned!—or in the selections for school reading, seem specially picked out by some scribe or Masorete in open warfare with the spirit of the immortal Don Quixote, who continues to live after having risen again from the sepulcher sealed by Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, after the hidalgo had been entombed there and his death certified.

Instead of getting to the poetry in Don Quixote, the truly eternal and universal element in it, we tend to become enmeshed in its literature, in its temporal and particular elements. In this regard, nothing is more wretched than to consider Don Quixote a language text for Spanish. The truth is that our book is no such thing, for in point of language there are many books which can boast a purer and more correct Spanish. And as regards the style, Don Quixote is guilty of a certain artificiality and affectation.

I have no doubt in my mind but that Cervantes is a typical example of a writer enormously inferior to his work, to his Don Quixote. If Cervantes had not written this book, whose resplendent light bathes his other works, he would scarcely figure in our literary history as anything more than a talent of the fifth, sixth, or thirteenth order. No one would read his insipid Exemplary Novels, just as no one now reads his unbearable Voyage to Parnassus, or his plays. Even the novellas and digressions which figure in Don Quixote, such as that most foolish novella, Foolish Curiosity, would not warrant the attention of any reader. Though Don Quixote sprang from the creative faculty of Cervantes, he is immensely superior to Cervantes. In strict truth, it cannot be said that Don Quixote is the child of Cervantes; for if Cervantes was his father, his mother was the country and people in which he lived and from which Cervantes derived his being; and Don Quixote has much more of his mother about him than of his father.

I suspect, in fact, that Cervantes died without having sounded the profundity of his Don Quixote and perhaps without even having rightly understood it. It seems to me that if Cervantes came back to life and read his Don Quixote once again, he would understand it as little as do the Cervantist Masoretes, and that he would side with them. Let there be no doubt that if Cervantes returned to the world he would be a Cervantist and not a Quixotist. It is enough to read our book with some attention to observe that whenever the good Cervantes introduces himself into the narrative and sets about making observations on his own, it is merely to give vent to some impertinence or to pass malevolent and malicious judgments on his hero. Thus, for example, when he recounts the beautiful exploit wherein Don Quixote addresses a discourse on the Golden Age to some goatherds who could not possibly understand it in the literal sense—and the harangue is of a heroic order precisely because of this incapacity— Cervantes labels it a purposeless discourse. Immediately afterwards he shows us that it was not purposeless, for the goatherds heard him out with openmouthed fascination, and by way of gratitude they repaid Don Quixote with pastoral songs. Poor Cervantes did not attain to the robust faith of the hidalgo from La Mancha, a faith which led him to address himself to the goatherds in elevated language, convinced that if they did not understand the words they were edified by the music. And this passage is one of many in which Cervantes shows his hand.

None of this should surprise us, for as I have pointed out, if Cervantes was Don Quixote's father, his mother was the country and people of which Cervantes was part. Cervantes was merely the instrument by which sixteenth-century Spain gave birth to Don Quixote. In this work Cervantes carried out the most impersonal task that can be imagined and, consequently, the most profoundly personal in another sense. As author of Don Quixote, Cervantes is no more than the minister and representative of humanity; that is why his work was great.

The genius is, in effect, an individual who through sheer personality achieves impersonality, one who becomes the voice of his country and people, one who succeeds in saying what everybody thinks though they have never been able to say it.

There are lifelong geniuses, geniuses who last throughout their lives and who manage during all that period to be ministers and spiritual spokesmen for their country and people, and there are temporary geniuses, who are geniuses only once in their lives. Of course, that one occasion may be more or less long-lasting and boast greater or lesser import. And this fact should serve as consolation to us earthenware mortals when we consider those of finest porcelain. For who has not at some time been, even if only for a quarter hour, a genius of his people, and even though his people only number three hundred neighbors? Who has not been a hero for a day or for five minutes? And thanks to the fact that we can all be temporary geniuses, though it be only for a few moments, we can understand the lifelong, the lifetime geniuses, and be enamored of them.

Cervantes was, then, a temporary genius; and if he appears to us an absolute and lasting genius, as greater than most of the lifelong geniuses, it is because the work he wrote during his season of genius is a work not merely lifelong but eternal.

Consider what there is of genius in Cervantes, and consider what his inward relation is to his Don Quixote. Such considerations should indeed move us to leave Cervantism for Quixotism, and to pay more attention to Don Quixote than to Cervantes. God did not send Cervantes into the world for any other purpose than to write Don Quixote; and it seems to me that it would have been an advantage for us if we had never known the name of the author, and our book had been an anonymous work, like the old ballads of Spain and, as many of us believe, the Iliad.

I may indeed write an essay whose thesis will be that Cervantes never existed but Don Quixote did. In any case, inasmuch as Cervantes exists no longer, while Don Quixote continues alive, we should all abandon the dead and go off with the living, abandon Cervantes and follow Don Quixote.

Before finishing I must make a declaration to the effect that everything I have said here about Don Quixote is applicable to his faithful and most noble squire Sancho Panza, even worse known and more maligned than his lord and master. This disfavor blighting the memory of the good Sancho Panza descends to us directly from Cervantes, who, if he did not rightly understand his Don Quixote did not even begin to comprehend his Sancho, and if he was sometimes malicious as regards the master, he was almost always unjust to the servant.

One of the obvious truths which leaps to our attention while reading Don Quixote is the incomprehension shown by Cervantes of the soul and character of Sancho, whose sublime heroism was never understood by his literary father. Cervantes maligns and ill-treats Sancho without rhyme or reason; he persists in not seeing clearly the motivations behind his acts, and there are occasions when one feels tempted to believe that, impelled by incomprehension, he alters the facts and makes the good squire say and do things he never could have said or done, and which, therefore, he never did say or do.

So cunning was malicious Cervantes in twisting Sancho's intentions and shuffling his purposes that the noble squire has gotten an unmerited reputation, from which we Quixotists will redeem him, I trust, since a good Quixotist has to be a Sanchopanzist as well.

Fortunately, since Cervantes was, as I said, only in part—and in very small part—the author of Don Quixote, all the necessary elements to reinstate the true Sancho and give him the fame he deserves remain at hand in the immortal book. For if Don Quixote was enamored of Dulcinea, Sancho was no less so, with the difference that the master quit his house for love of glory and the servant did so for pay; but the servant began to get a taste for glory, and in the end he was, in the heart of him, and though he would have denied it, one of the most unmercenary men the world has ever known. And by the time Don Quixote died, grown sane again, cured of his madness for glory, Sancho had gone mad, raving mad, mad for glory; and while the hidalgo was cursing books of chivalry the good squire begged him, with tears in his eyes, not to die, but to go on living so they might sally forth along the roads in search of adventure.

Inasmuch as Cervantes did not dare kill Sancho, still less bury him, many people assume that Sancho never died, and even that he is immortal. When we least expect it, we will see him sally forth, mounted on Rocinante, who did not die either, and he will be wearing his master's armor, cut down to size by the blacksmith at El Toboso. Sancho will take to the road again to continue Don Quixote's glorious work, so that Quixotism may triumph for once and all time on this earth. For let there be no doubt that Sancho, Sancho the good, Sancho the discreet, Sancho the simple, Sancho who went mad beside the deathbed of his master dying sane, Sancho, I say, is the man charged by God definitively to establish Quixotism on earth. Thus do I hope and desire, and in this and in God do I trust.

And if some reader of this essay should say that it is made up of contrivances and paradoxes, I shall reply that he does not know one iota about matters of Quixotism, and repeat to him what Don Quixote said on a certain occasion to his squire: Because I know you, Sancho, I pay no attention to what you say.

Source: Miguel de Unamuno, "On the Reading and Interpretation of Don Quixote," in Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno: Our Lord Don Quixote, Vol. 3, edited by Anthony Kerrigan and Martin Kozick, translated by Anthony Kerrigan, Bollingen Series LXXXV, Princeton University Press, 1967, pp. 445-66.

There can be no doubt, Don Quixote is the world's greatest and most typical novel. There are other novels which are finer works of art, more exquisite in style, of more perfect architectonic plan. But such books appeal less to the world at large than to the literary critic; they are not equally amusing, equally profound, to the men of all nations, and all ages, and all degrees of mental capacity. Even if we put aside monuments of literary perfection, like some of the novels of Flaubert, and consider only the great European novels of widest appeal and deepest influence, they still fall short of the standard which this book, their predecessor and often their model, had set. Tristram Shandy, perhaps the most cosmopolitan of English novels, a book that in humour and wisdom often approaches Don Quixote, has not the same universality of appeal. Robinson Crusoe, the most typical of English novels, the Odyssey of the Anglo-Saxon on his mission of colonising the earth—Godfearing, practical, inventive—is equally fascinating to the simplest intellect and the deepest. Yet, wide as its reputation is, it has not the splendid affluence, the universal humanity, of Don Quixote. Tom Jones, always a great English novel, can never become a great European novel; while the genius of Scott, which was truly cosmopolitan in its significance and its influence, was not only too literary in its inspirations, but too widely diffused over a wilderness of romances ever to achieve immortality. La Nouvelle Héloïse, which once swept across Europe and renewed the novel, was too narrow in its spirit, too temporary in its fashion, to be enduring. Wilhelm Meister, perhaps the wisest and profoundest of books in novel form, challenges a certain comparison, as the romance of the man who, like Saul the son of Kish, went forth to seek his father's asses and found a kingdom; it narrates an adventure which is in some sense the reverse of Don Quixote's, but in its fictional form it presents, like the books of Rabelais, far too much that is outside the scope of fiction ever to appeal to all tastes. The Arabian Nights, which alone surpasses Don Quixote in variety and universality of interest, is not a novel by one hand, but a whole literature. Don Quixote remains the one great typical novel. It is a genuine invention; for it combined for the first time the old chivalrous stories of heroic achievement with the new picaresque stories of vulgar adventure, creating in the combination something that was altogether original, an instrument that was capable of touching life at every point. It leads us into an atmosphere in which the ideal and the real are equally at home. It blends together the gravest and the gayest things in the world. It penetrates to the harmony that underlies the violent contrasts of life, the only harmony which in our moments of finest insight we feel to be possible, in the same manner and, indeed, at the same moment—for Lear appeared in the same year as Don Quixote—that Shakespeare brought together the madman and the fool on the heath in a concord of divine humour. It is a storybook that a child may enjoy, a tragicomedy that only the wisest can fully understand. It has inspired many of the masterpieces of literature; it has entered into the lives of the people of every civilised land; it has become a part of our human civilisation.

It was not to be expected that the author of such a book as this, the supreme European novel, an adventure book of universal human interest, should be a typical man of letters, shut up in a study, like Scott or Balzac or Zola. Cervantes was a man of letters by accident.

He was a soldier, a man of action, who would never have taken up the pen, except in moments of recreation, if a long chain of misfortunes had not closed the other avenues of life. Before he wrote of life he had spent his best years in learning the lessons of life.

Seldom has any great novel been written by a young man: Tristram Shandy, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Wilhelm Meister, were all written by mature men who had for the most part passed middle age. Don Quixote—more especially the second and finer part—was written by an old man, who had outlived his ideals and his ambitions, and settled down peacefully in a little home in Madrid, poor of purse but rich in the wisdom garnered during a variegated and adventurous life. Don Quixote is a spiritual autobiography. That is why it is so quintessentially a Spanish book.

Cervantes was a Spaniard of Spaniards. The great writers of a nation are not always its most typical representatives. Dante could only have been an Italian, and Goethe only a German, but we do not feel that either of them is the representative man of his people. We may seek to account for Shakespeare by appealing to various racial elements in Great Britain, but Shakespeare—with his volubility and extravagance, his emotional expansiveness, his lightness of touch, his reckless gaiety and wit— was far indeed from the slow, practical, serious Englishman. Cervantes, from first to last, is always Spanish. His ideals and his disillusions, his morality and his humour, his artistic methods as well as his style—save that he took a few ideas from Italy—are entirely Spanish. Don Quixote himself and Sancho Panza, his central personages, are not only all Spanish, they are all Spain. Often have I seen them between Madrid and Seville, when travelling along the road skirting La Mancha, that Cervantes knew so well: the long solemn face, the grave courteous mien, the luminous eyes that seem fixed on some inner vision and blind to the facts of life around; and there also, indeed everywhere, is the round, wrinkled, good-humoured face of the peasant farmer, imperturbably patient, meeting all the mischances and discomforts of life with a smile and a jest and a proverb. Don Quixote! I have always exclaimed to myself, Sancho Panza! They two make Spain in our day, perhaps, even more than in Cervantes's day; for, sound as Spain still is at the core, the man of heroic action and fearless spirit, the conquistador type of man, is nowadays seldom seen in the land, and the great personalities of Spain tend to become the mere rhetorical ornaments of a rotten political system. Don Quixote, with his idealism, his pride of race and ancestry, his more or less dim consciousness of some hereditary mission which is out of relation to the world of today, is as inapt for the leadership of the modern world as Sancho Panza, by his very virtues, his brave acceptance of the immediate duty before him, his cheerful and uncomplaining submission to all the ills of life, is inapt for the ordinary tasks of progress and reform. The genius of Cervantes has written the history of his own country.

Even in the minute details of his great book we may detect the peculiarly national character of the mind of Cervantes, and his thoroughly Spanish tastes. To mention only one trifling point, we may observe his preference for the colour green, which appears in his work in so many different shapes. Perhaps the Moors, for whom green is the most sacred of colours, bequeathed this preference to the Spaniards, though in any case it is the favourite colour in a dry and barren land, such as is Spain in much of its extent. Cervantes admires green eyes, like many other Spanish poets, though unlike the related Sicilians, for whom dark eyes alone are beautiful; Dulcinea's eyes are verdes esmeraldas [green emeralds]. Every careful reader of Don Quixote, familiar with Spain, cannot fail to find similar instances of Cervantes's Españolismo.

And yet, on this intensely national basis, Don Quixote is the most cosmopolitan, the most universal of books. Not Chaucer or Tolstoy shows a wider humanity. Even Shakespeare could not dispense with a villain, but there is no Iago among the six hundred and sixty-nine personages who, it is calculated, are introduced into Don Quixote. There is no better test of a genuinely human spirit than an ability to overcome the all-pervading influences of religious and national bias. Cervantes had shed his blood in battle against the infidel corsairs of Algiers, and he had been their chained captive. Yet— although it is true that he shared all the national prejudices against the Moriscoes in Spain—he not only learned and absorbed much from the Eastern life in which he had been soaked for five years, but he acquired a comprehension and appreciation of the Moor which it was rare indeed for a Spaniard to feel for the hereditary foes of his country. Between Portugal and Spain, again, there was then, to an even greater extent than today, a spirit of jealousy and antagonism; yet Cervantes can never say too much in praise of Portugal and the Portuguese. If there was any nation whom Spaniards might be excused for hating at that time it was the English. Those pirates and heretics of the north were perpetually swooping down on their coasts, destroying their galleons, devastating their colonial possessions; Cervantes lived through the days of the Spanish Armada, yet his attitude towards the English is courteous and considerate.

It was, perhaps, in some measure, this tolerant and even sympathetic attitude towards the enemies of Spain, as well as what seemed to many the ridicule he had cast upon Spanish ideas and Spanish foibles, which so long stood in the way of any enthusiastic recognition by Spain of Cervantes's supreme place in literature. He was for some centuries read in Spain, as Shakespeare was at first read in England, as an amusing author before he was recognised as one of the world's great spirits. In the meanwhile, outside Spain, Don Quixote was not only finding affectionate readers among people of all ages and all classes; it was beginning to be recognised as a wonderful and many-sided work of art, a treasure-house in which each might find what he sought, an allegory, even, which would lend itself to all interpretations…. It is not alone the pioneer in life, the adventurous reformer, the knight of the Holy Ghost, who turns to Don Quixote, the prudent and sagacious man of the world turns thither also with a smile full of meaning, as the wise and sceptical Sydenham turned when an ambitious young practitioner of medicine asked him what he should read: Read Don Quixote. It is a good book. I read it still. And when we turn to the noble ode—etania de Nuestro Señor Don Quijote—which Ruben Dario, the most inspired poet of the Spanish-speaking world of today, has addressed to Don Quixote, we realise that beyond this Cervantes has created a figure with even a religious significance for the consolation of men. Don Quixote is not only the type and pattern of our greatest novels; it is a vision of the human soul, woven into the texture of the world's spiritual traditions. The Knight of La Mancha has indeed succeeded in his quest, and won a more immortal Dulcinea than he ever sought.

Source: Havelock Ellis, "Don Quixote," in The Soul of Spain, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908, pp. 223+43.
Ellis was a pioneering sexual psychologist and a respected English man of letters.