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But American Reform is not a scheme; it is the service of an idea. It is made conservative by that which also makes it radical, by working in the interest of the moral sentiment. The Literature of the New World is also worthy of the New Man. We are quite aware that a large portion of this literature is trash. So was a large part in Shakspeare's, in Cervantes's, in Plato's age and place.
Isabel de Saavedra, the child of sin and poverty, was so ignorant she could not sign her name; while Lope's daughter, the lovely and gifted Marcela de Carpio, was rich in the genius of her father and the beauty of her mother, the high-born Maria de Lujan. Cervantes's child glided from obscurity to oblivion no one knew when, and the name she assumed with her spiritual vows is lost to tradition.
Yet Alcala, who spells his name wrong, calling him Carvantes, is certainly in the right, as the names of his father, mother, brothers, and sisters are also given in its records, and all doubt is now removed from the matter by the discovery of Cervantes's manuscript statement of his captivity in Algiers and his petition for employment in America, in both of which he styles himself "Natural de Alcala de Henares."
Lope de Vega was chairman of the committee of award, and Cervantes was one of the competitors. The prizes it must be admitted were very tempting: first, a silver pitcher; second, eight yards of camlet; and third, a pair of silk stockings. We hope Cervantes's poem was not the best.
The matter was presented to him by Cervantes's comrades, but he would do nothing. So that Don Roderick sold his estate and his sisters sacrificed their dowry to buy the freedom of the captive brothers. They came back to Spain still young enough to be fond of glory, and simple-hearted enough to believe in the justice of the great.
This is Cervantes's description of the national stage in the time of his immediate predecessor, Lope de Rueda. The Spanish zarzuela appears to have been the forerunner and origin of all musical farce and "opera comique," only naturalised in our country during the present generation.
I must not dwell further on Cervantes's minor works, but will pass to his great masterpiece, "Don Quixote." This work contains the hoarded experience of a life. It was written when its author was declining in years. No young man could have written it, because no young man can be a master, especially of humor and human nature. Don Quixote himself is a character of the most complex kind.
It was better that there should be perfect solitude and silence as we walked through the noble system of buildings and strove to re-create the student world of Cervantes's time. The chronicle which mentions the visit of Francis I. to Alcala, when a prisoner in Spain, says he was received by eleven thousand students. This was only twenty years before the birth of Cervantes.
Now the boy is as utterly gone as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died a very old man many years ago; and in the place of both is another old man trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain visited and unvisited. It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any lasting indignation with Valladolid because of the stench of Cervantes's house.
He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's treatment of him in the second part which followed the other after an interval of nearly eight years.
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