380 



R O M A N C F. 



Romance, trast. How far he was himself aware of the extent to 

 { ***~Y~^* f which he was about to change the whole face of ro- 

 mantic literature, it is hard to say, for no great man 

 was more modest than he, not even his contemporary 

 Shakespeare. The result, however, is, that we have a 

 species of literature which the world had never had 

 before, and which appears to have a fa.ir chance of ul- 

 timately holding a rank not inferior to that of the 

 drama itself the prose epic of actual life a form of 

 composition which opens the widest field imaginative 

 genius has ever been engaged upon; which admits the 

 use of materials of at least as diverse character, and is 

 capable of rewarding the exertions of talents at least 

 as various as the stage ; and which permits manners, 

 feelings, characters, incidents, above all, the deve- 

 lopment of individual natures, and the picturesque of 

 manners, to be represented in a style infinitely more 

 full, satisfactory, and complete, than any other mode 

 of composition with which the world has ever been 

 acquainted. 



Don It would be ridiculous to enter into a particular de- 



Quixote, scription of a work so perfectly known to all who read 

 any thing, as this ; we shall only observe, Jirst, that it 

 is a total mistake to suppose that Cervantes intended 

 to attack the spirit of heroism ; on the contrary, in 

 Don Quixote himself, he is careful to make us revere 

 the high feelings of the Castilian gentleman, even 

 while we are smiling at the extravagancies of the 

 madman. It is equally wrong to suppose that he at- 

 tacked the real old stately romance of the middle ages : 

 on the contrary, he had at one time an intention to 

 write a solemn romance of that sort, himself; and 

 throughout all his books we have distinct laudations of 

 Amadis and Palmerin, and the truly excellent romances. 

 He caricatured indeed some of the incidents of the ori- 

 ginal Amadis, because they were universally familiar 

 to his readers, but his true object (and he himself says 

 so in his preface) was to put down the taste for the 

 bad imitations of Amadis with which Spain was at 

 that time actually deluged. His happy genius ren- 

 dered him incapable of executing this without doing 

 things infinitely better. He coiild not ridicule those 

 trashy romances, without producing a true romance 

 himself a romance in which the ludicrous and the 

 pathetic, the satirical and the poetical, the fulness of 

 narrative, land the clearness and terseness of dramatic 

 composition, were all for the first time blended together, 

 each element gaining life and beauty from the con- 

 trasts under which it is surveyed. 



Direct imi- This masterpiece has been imitated in the roost close 

 utions of and direct manner by many, and some of these works 

 Quixote. go composed, with the avowed purpose of laughing 

 down particular absurdities in the same way in which 

 Cervantes had exploded the romances of knight erran- 

 try, are by no means destitute of merit and interest. 

 The English Spiritual Quixote, in which, the enthusi- 

 asm and folly of the first itinerant Methodist preachers 

 was attacked ; the Sylvio de Rosalva of Wieland, di- 

 rected against the mania for Fairy Tales which pre- 

 vailed in those days in Germany ; The Heroine, a laugh- 

 able satire upon modern novel readers, by the late Mr. 

 Barrett ; and a crowd of other works of the same order 

 might be mentioned. By far the ablest and best of them 

 all, however, is scarcely known in this country even by 

 name the Don Gerundio of the Spanish Jesuit Ysla, a 

 work written with the view of ridiculing the various 

 jj on tricks of the Mendicant Friars, who still infest every 



Gerundio, quarter of the Peninsula. The author being a man of 

 Ac. true genius,, has done much more than his plan might 



seem to suggest so much that in its own country the Romance. 

 Don Gerundio has come to be generally talked of as the s -V ' 

 Quixote of Letters. Extent of 



But the influence of Cervantes has extended very far ence'ofc" 

 beyond all this. He had set the example of represent- vantes . 

 ing men and manners in a totally new sty.e a style 

 not essentially less captivating than that of the drama, 

 and admitting of a fulness of detail and execution far 

 beyond the limits of works intended for stage-repre- 

 sentation. His work, though designed for a main 

 comic purpose, contains, within itself, abundant speci- 

 mens of serious eloquence, and profound pathos, and, 

 written to ridicule one kind of romance, overflows with 

 every element of romantic interest, the loftiness of sen- 

 timent, and the picturesque of nature. In a word, it 

 may be doubted whether any one specimen of fictitious 

 narrative in prose, has since that time commanded real* 

 lasting success in any European country, the author of 

 which has not been in a high degree indebted to the 

 Cervantic model. The whole race of our modern novel 

 and romance writers are his imitators, in the just but 

 liberal sense of that term. He has taught every thing 

 to those whose genius was exclusively comic ; and to- 

 those whose turn of mind and purpose of writing are- 

 the most opposed to the comic to the most ardent 

 lovers of the tragic, the marvellous, the sentimental, 

 the passionate, he still continues to teach the great les 

 son of controlling the extravagances of enthusiasm. 

 It was he who revealed the secret of throwing an air 

 of truth and reality even over the wildest dreams of 

 imagination. 



It is true that Xenophon, in his Cyropaedia, set the Xenophon. 

 first example of attempting to attain a particular phi- 

 losophical purpose through the means of narrating the 

 life of a particular individual. But, to say nothing of 

 the important circumstance that after all Cyrus was a 

 real personage, and that we do not know how much, 

 or how little, of Xenophon's materials falls within the 

 proper limits of fiction, the lameness and total want of 

 dramatic power of his work are too obvious to be de- 

 nied by any one. He was not a man of sufficient ge- 

 nius to do a thing that had not been done before, so- 

 well as to make that often be done again. It is 

 doubtful whether Cervantes knew Xenophon at all. 

 It is certain that if the elegant Greek modelled a cold- 

 ly pleasing statue, he was the true Prometheus who 

 breathed the breath of life into it. 



The truth is, that refined as the arts of Greece were, Why no 

 the Greek nation was never in such a state of refine- tJreek Fo- 

 ment as to admit of this kind of composition becoming mance - 

 an effectual instrument of delight and instruction 

 among them. The drama was their romance. Their 

 imagination was more lively than their curiosity was 

 profound, and they preferred the visible representation 

 of a part to the complete exposition of a whole. In a 

 word, they were not a reading population ; and we hold 

 it to be equally clear, that a species of composition, such 

 as the modern fictitious narrative of Europe, could 

 never have become extensively popular among any 

 people, unless reading had come to be most extensive- 

 ly the amusement of that people ; in other words, we 

 consider this species of literatureas incapable of existing, 

 unless among nations far more thoroughly educated and 

 refined than any of the nations of classical antiquity could 

 have been. " The drama," says Goethe, in his Wilhdm 

 Meister, " has characters and deeds the field of ro- 

 mance is incident, feeling, and manners." The Greeks 

 were (when their literature flourished) a young peo 

 pie j they were almost ignorant of peace ; their proper 



