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some cryptic political allegory about the Duke of Medina Sidonia, but the story of human life as it comes out from the placing of these fanciful persons and events in the light of truth. Seen in this way, the very extravagances of Don Quixote, the extraordinary credulity of Sancho Panza, unite with all that we are shown of the sane and healthy personages of the story to give a true picture of human nature, its weakness, its folly, its courage, its beauty, its wisdom, its serious faith and inward glee'. It can be grave and sad enough. There are moments when its reader's musing comment might take the form of the Preacher's vanity of vanities', or of Burke's words at Bristol What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue!' Yes: but there are also moments when the book fills us with a sense of the fineness of the quality of man's nature, a sense of life as a thing infinitely interesting and delightful, and not without some glimpses of the divine: moments in which the note it strikes is not so absurdly out of tune with Hamlet's 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'

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The quoting of these famous words naturally brings me to what one can hardly avoid to-day, the comparison between the two greatest geniuses of Spain and England, who died, as it were on the same day, three hundred years ago. To compare them is to find more unlikeness than likeness. The first unlikeness is connected with that very fact of their deaths. They died at the same time but not of the same age. Shakespeare was just fifty-two when he died. Cervantes was fifty-seven when he produced the First Part of Don Quixote, and sixty-eight when he produced the Second Part, the publication of which he only survived a few months. In that article to which I have already referred Sir Walter Raleigh suggested that, if the question whether we should

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rather devote ourselves to Shakespeare or to Cervantes had been one of those put to Sancho in the days of his government, he might have answered: read Shakespeare till you are fifty-two and after that read Cervantes!' That, as he admits, is rather hard on those who do not live past fifty-two. But it is true, I think, that the special quality of Don Quixote is one which appeals particularly to the right sort of old age. For old age to be lived well ripeness is all the mellowness and sweetness of that which has long experienced both the storms and the sunshine of life. There is a peculiar reasonableness, tolerance, good humour and charity which is the reward of having lived long enough to see how manycoloured a thing life is, how much there is to be said on both sides of most questions, what a soul of goodness there is in things evil, what folly in learning, what weakness in power, what wisdom in folly. Youth sees only its own passions and opinions can seldom see any place in the world for any faith but its own. It has hardly any notion of the complexities and difficulties and compromises which necessarily beset the path of the enthusiast in a world in which men differ so widely. Youth, in fact, often so nobly idealist, is inevitably narrow and generally intolerant. Old age is often disappointed and cynical; but, if it has not lost faith and hope, it brings to them an added charity unknown to youth. It has learned at last to say: this is my way of living: but it is not the only way: other ways for other men. For this sort of old age Don Quixote is a book of consolation and delight. Even in Shakespeare, who did not live to old age, there is something akin to this temper in the serenity and beauty of the ultimate outlook of his last plays, and particularly of Prospero in The Tempest.1

1 Since this lecture was first delivered Mr. Lytton Strachey has questioned the truth of this generally accepted account of the temper of the final plays. He finds them characterized, not merely by a return to unreality and the impossibilities of fairy land, but by exceptionally vicious characters (Cloten, Iachimo, Leontes, Caliban, Antonio, and others),

A greater contrast between the two than that of age is to be found in the fact that Shakespeare is perhaps the greatest of all poets, while Cervantes is scarcely a poet at all, and knew it. In his Voyage of Parnassus we find Apollo showing him the glorious figure of True Poesy; on which his comment is that she had never shown herself to him except in undress. The higher regions of poetry were inconceivable to a man who could write, as Cervantes wrote, a sonnet introductory to a Treatise on Diseases of the Kidney. He has nothing whatever of Shakespeare's infinite depths and heights and his variety, such as it is, disappears altogether when placed side by side with the inexhaustible versatility of Shakespeare. In spite of some high authorities it seems to me quite impossible to place his genius at all on the same level as that of the greatest men of some other nations, such men as Shakespeare or Dante, for instance. That bold saying which I quoted from Sir Walter Raleigh about 'the wisest and most splendid book in the world' seems to me to go much too far. I do not understand what he can have meant by most splendid'. Wisest may possibly be true if wisdom lie in an easy, natural, kindly, universal humanity. Perhaps the heights and depths are not so available for the uses of every day as the golden mediocrity loved of Horace, who will always have many more readers than Lucretius. It was one of the deepest of English poets who avoided ' moving accidents' and preferred to set his poetry in

the very world which is the world

Of all of us-the place where, in the end,
We find our happiness or not at all.

And that, in spite of Don Quixote's madness, is where Cervantes takes us and not, as Shakespeare so largely does, to a world outside or above us, far intenser than our own,

which hardly suggest a serene outlook upon life. The answer to this is, I think, that the end of all the crimes in the final plays is not mere death, as in the great tragedies: it is repentance and peace.

to such loves as those of Romeo and Juliet, to such agony as Othello's, to such torment of intellectual and moral crisis as we see in Hamlet. Cervantes never travels to these far countries. The very genius of his book is to set us in the life we know--primarily, of course, the life which he saw about him in Spain, but also the life of all times and countries-and to heighten the sense of that familiar life by placing in it something which is alien to it, a stranger and a pilgrim, a 'pure fool', a Parsifal, what seems madness and slowly reveals itself as having a wisdom of its own above the wisdom of this world. By the creation of Don Quixote Cervantes became indirectly the creator of a long line of loved figures, not one of which would have been what it is if Don Quixote had not been before them: of Bunyan's Pilgrim, of Addison's Sir Roger, of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield; even, we may almost say, of more recent simplicities like Thackeray's Dobbin and the 'Holy Man of Mr. Kipling's Kim. Of all these, in different degrees, we feel, as we feel of Don Quixote, that, though the world may call them mad, in the end we who read are driven to ask ourselves which is the greater madman, the world which believes only in what its five senses can tell it, or the Don Quixotes and the Charles Primroses, who are so easily taken in by those who use their senses shrewdly, but who see another vision for which the world has no eyes.

That takes us to religion, in which the contrast between Cervantes and Shakespeare is very striking. Of Shakespeare's religion we know almost nothing. Some of us may feel fairly sure that he was not a man either to doubt the importance of religion, or to quit conformity with the church of his country on any small point, or to submit his private opinions altogether to the obedience of any official or ecclesiastical creed. But all that is mere conjecture. The characters in his greatest plays-the scene of Desdemona's death is a partial exception-very rarely speak of the

ultimate issues of life in language which is definitely Christian, still less in the language of any particular Church. The note struck is that of 'Out, out, brief candle' and 'the rest is silence'. But Cervantes is always an orthodox and pious Catholic who loves to take opportunities of using the language of faith and devotion. This may be due to the circumstances in which he wrote, when the power of the Spanish Inquisition was at its height, or to convictions sincerely held, or possibly even to dramatic instinct. For while Hamlet and Lear and the rest may be said not to belong, except for a few externals, to any defined age or country, Don Quixote is most definitely a Spaniard of the time of Philip III. We should feel him to be appreciably less probable if he were not a devout Catholic. Anyhow that is what he is throughout. We find him puzzled by Sancho's argument that it might be more religious to be a friar than a knight-errant. We find him discoursing about the Christian and un-Christian reasons for going to war, and delivering a noble panegyric of four great Saints at the sight of their pictures. And finally, what I cannot but regret, we find him on his deathbed making a pious recantation of his belief in books of chivalry, with a 'Blessed be Almighty God who has vouchsafed me so great a good' as to make me see that books of knight-errantry are fictions.

In all this, in his orthodoxy of temper and in the everydayness of the world in which he lived, Cervantes is far more like Scott than Shakespeare. Indeed there is probably no great writer whom he resembles so much as Scott. Lockhart tells us that 'Scott always expressed the most unbounded admiration for Cervantes, and said that the novelas of that author had first inspired him with the ambition of excelling in fiction.' One has no difficulty in imagining his enjoyment of a thing of such fine humour as the Coloquio de los Perros, and even of some of the more purely picaresque stories a taste for which is less easy to recover to-day. The

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