Thirty Years of Cervantes Criticism

T IS a gratifying fact that Cervantes, four hundred years after his birth, has not diminished but increased in general interest and admiration. To prove this point no method seems to me more appropriate than to review the criticism of Cervantes since the tercentenary of his death in 1916. Writers from all nations and of all possible convictions have declared Cervantes to be the mouthpiece of their creed and Don Quijote the symbol of their ideals. There is of course a scholarly and an impressionistic criticism. Whereas the latter sees Cervantes apart from the limits of epoch, nationality, and belief, the former never loses sight of the fact that the critic is confronted with a Spaniard, a Catholic and a man belonging to the Siglo de Oro. The problem is complicated by the circumstance that the values historically realized in Classical Spain and in the work of Cervantes coincide with the ideals which man at his best has everywhere and at all times pursued, the same ideals which Father David Rubio has characterized as the philosophy of El Quijote: filosofia de la fe en el ideal, en el valor del esfuerzo, en el triunfo de la justicia, en el merito del sacrificio.' In the same year 1924, when those words were first written, the late Professor Cesare de Lollis of the University of Rome, while not denying these ideals of Cervantes, regretted that they were not counterbalanced by some of the pagan ideas of the Italian Renaissance. He called his book accordingly Cervantes Reazionario.2

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