inspiring personality of the Emperor’s bastard, who now, at the summit
of human glory, saw himself condemned to retire into the position of
a subject. The rest of the life of the “man who would be king” is the
record of thwarted ambition and disappointed hopes. Spain and Venice
quarrelled, and Lepanto was not followed up; Philip lost the chance
of retrieving 1453 and of changing the history of Europe in Spain’s
favour ever since. Christian set once more to killing Christian in
the old melancholy way; Venice made peace with the Sultan, and Don
John set about carving out a kingdom for himself. In dreams he saw
himself monarch of Albania, or of the Morea; and in body he actually
recaptured Tunis, once so gloriously held by his father. But Philip
would not support him and he had to retire. Cervantes, in _Don
Quixote_, evidently thinks Philip quite right. Tunis was a “sponge
for extravagance, and a moth for expense; and as for holding it as a
monument to Charles V, why, what monument was necessary to glory so
eternal?” Don John returned home without a kingdom to his brother,
who no doubt let him see that he was becoming rather a nuisance with
his expensive dreams. In 1576 he was placated by an appointment as
Governor-General to the Netherlands, where he quickly found himself
confronted by a much greater, though less romantic, man than himself.
William of Orange was now the unquestioned leader of the revolt of the
Dutch against the Roman Catholic power of Philip, and when Don John
reached the Netherlands he found himself Governor with no subjects.
After fruitless negotiations he retired, a very ill man, to Namur;
he had become thin and pale, and lost his vivacity. His heart was
not in his task. He was meditating the extraordinary “empresa de
Inglaterra”--the “enterprise of England”--which now seems to us so
fantastic. The Spanish army was to evacuate the Netherlands and to be
rapidly ferried across to Yorkshire; by a lightning stroke it was to
release Mary Queen of Scots, that romantic Queen, and marry her to Don
John, the romantic victor of Lepanto; Elizabeth was to be slain, and
the Pope was to bless the union of romance with romance. But Elizabeth
would have taken a deal of slaying. One cannot help surmising that
Don John may have dreamed this fantasy because he had been educated
by Quixada; it was a dream that might have passed through the addled
brain of Don Quixote himself. The victor of Lepanto should better have
understood the mighty power of the sea; the galleys which had done so
well in the Mediterranean would have been worse than useless in the
North, where the storms are a worse enemy than the Turks.
But Philip, either through timidity, or jealousy, or wisdom, would
have none of it; after long delay he sent an important force to the
Netherlands under the command of Don John’s cousin, Alexander Farnese,
Prince of Parma, the greatest general Spain ever produced. Don John
abandoned his dreams to fall with this army upon the Protestants at
Gemblours, where he, or Farnese--opinions differ--won a really great
victory, the last that was to honour his name.
A curious incident in this campaign was that the Spaniards were
attacked by a small Scottish force at a place called Rejnements. The
Scotsmen began, _more Scotorum_, by singing a psalm. Having thus
prepared the way spiritually, they prepared it physically by casting
off their clothes, and to the horror of the modest Spaniards attacked
naked with considerable success. Many of us, no doubt, remember how the
Highlanders in the late war were said to have stained their bodies with
coffee or Condy’s fluid and, under cover of a Birnam’s wood composed of
branches of trees, emulated the bold Malcolm and Macduff by creeping
upon the Germans attired mainly in their boots and identity disks; a
sparse costume in which to appear before nursing sisters should they
be wounded. I had the honour of operating upon one hefty gentleman who
reached the C.C.S. in this attire, sheltered from the bitter cold by
blankets supplied by considerate Australians in the field ambulance.
We from a southern land considered the habit more suitable for the
hardy Scot than for ourselves; though we remembered that an Australian
surgeon at Gallipoli, finding that his dressings had run short, tore
his raiment into strips and, when the need came, charged the Turks
berserk attired in the costume of Adam before the Fall. But we did not
remember that gallant Scotsmen had done something similar in 1578. No
doubt the sight of a large man, dressed in cannibal costume and dancing
horribly on the parapet while he poured forth a string of uncouth Doric
imprecations, led to the tale that the British Army was employing
African natives to devour the astonished Bosche.
Don John could not follow up the victory of Gemblours. He had neither
money nor sufficient men; the few short months remaining to him were
spent in imploring aid from his brother. Philip did nothing; possibly
he was jealous of Don John; possibly he was fully occupied over the
miserable affair of Antonio Perez and the Princess of Eboli. One would
like to think that he had lucid intervals in which he recognized the
insensate folly of the whole business; but like his father he was
spurred on by his conscience. In addition to the other troubles of
Don John his army began to waste away with pestilence, no doubt, it
being now autumn, with typhoid, that curse of armies before the recent
discovery of T.A.B. inoculation. Don John fell sick, in September,
1578, of a fever, but, his doctors considering the illness trifling,
continued to work. One Italian, indeed, said that he would die, whereas
another sick man, believed to be _in articulo mortis_, would recover.
The guess proved right, and when Don John died the Italian surgeon’s
fortune was made. Thus easily are some reputations gained in our
profession; it is easier to make a reputation than to keep it.
For nearly three weeks Don John struggled to work, encouraged by his
physicians; there came a day, towards the end of September, when he,
being already much wasted by his illness, was seized by a most violent
pain and immediately had to go to bed. He became delirious, and babbled
of battle-fields and trumpet-calls; he gave orders to imaginary lines
of battle; he became unconscious. After two days of muttering delirium
he awakened, and, as he was thought to be _in extremis_, took extreme
unction. Next day the dying flicker continued, and he heard the priest
say mass; though his sight had failed and he could not see, he had
himself raised in the bed, feebly turned his head towards the elevation
of the Host and adored the body of Christ with his last glimmer of
consciousness. He then fell back unconscious, and sank into a state
of coma, from which he never rallied. In all, he had been ill about
twenty-four days.
These events could be easily explained on the supposition that
this young man’s brave life was terminated by that curse of young
soldiers--ruptured typhoid ulcer in ambulatory typhoid fever. His army
was dwindling with pestilence; he himself walked about feeling feverish
and “seedy” and losing weight rapidly for a fortnight; he was just
at the typhoid age, in the typhoid time of the year, and in typhoid
conditions; his ulcer burst, causing peritonitis; the tremendous shock
of the rupture, together with the toxæmia, drove him delirious and then
unconscious; being a very strong young man he woke up again as the
first shock passed away; as the shock passed into definite peritonitis
unconsciousness returned, and he was fortunate in being able to hear
his last mass before he died. I see no flaw in this reasoning.
The rest of the story is rather quaint. By next spring Philip had
given orders for the embalmed body to be brought to Spain, and it
was considered rather mean of him that the body of his brother was
to be brought on mule-back. But Philip was at his wits’ end for
money to prosecute the war, and no doubt he himself looked upon his
“meanness” as a wise economy. The body was exhumed, cut into three
pieces--apparently by disjointing it at the hips--and stuffed into
three leather bags which were slung on mule-back in a pack-saddle. When
it came within a few miles of the Escorial it was put together again,
laid upon a bier, and given a noble funeral in a death-chamber next to
that which had been reserved for the great Emperor his father. There I
believe it still lies, the winds of the Escorial laughing at its dreams
of chivalrous glory.
Philip, suspicious of everybody and everything, had given orders that,
should Don John die, his confessor was to keep an accurate record of
the circumstances; and it is from the report of this priest that the
above account has been drawn by Stirling-Maxwell, so we can look upon
it as authoritative. Philip was accused of poisoning him, and for a
moment this supposition was borne out by the extreme redness of the
intestines; but this is much more easily explained by the peritonitis.
Again, Philip’s enemies have said that Don John died of a broken
heart, because the priest reported that one side of his heart was
dry and empty; but this too is quite natural if we suppose that the
last act of Don John’s life was for his heart to pump its blood into
his arteries, as so often happens in death. Young men do not die of
broken hearts; “Men have died and worms have eaten them--but not for
love!” as Rosalind says in her sweet cynicism. In elderly men with high
blood-pressures it is quite possible that grief and worry may actually
cause the heart to burst, and to that extent novelists are right in
speaking of a “broken heart.” Otherwise the disease, or casualty, is
unknown to medicine. No amount of worry, or absence of worry, would
have had any effect upon Don John’s typhoid ulcer.
Besides the suspicion of poisoning, Don John was rumoured to have died
of the “French disease,” even the name of the lady being mentioned.
While he was certainly no more moral than any other gay and handsome
young prince of his time, there is not the slightest reason for
supposing the rumour to have been anything but folly. Syphilis does
not kill a man as Don John died, while ambulatory typhoid fever most
assuredly does. Therefore the lady in question must remain without her
glory so far as this book is concerned, though her name has survived,
and not only in Spanish.
Don John was a handsome young man, graceful and strong. There are many
contemporary portraits of him, perhaps the best being a magnificent
statue at Messina, which he saved from the Turks at Lepanto. He had
frank blue eyes and yellow curls, and a very great charm of manner;
but he was liable to attacks of violent pride which estranged his
friends. He was the darling of the ladies, and was esteemed the flower
of chivalry in his day; but William of Orange warned his Netherlanders
not to be deceived by his appearance; in his view Philip had sent
a monster of cruelty no less savage than himself. But William was
prejudiced, and Don John is still one of the great romantic figures of
history. It is difficult to speculate reasonably on what might have
happened if he had not died. It has been thought that he might have led
the Armada, in which case that most badly-managed expedition would at
least have been well led, and no doubt England would have had a more
determined struggle; but it seems to me more likely that Don John and
Philip would have quarrelled, and that Fortune would have been even
less kind to Spain than she was. Those who love Spain must be on the
whole rather glad that Don John died before he had been able to cause
more trouble than he did. It is difficult to agree entirely with those
who would put the blame entirely on Philip for the troubles between him
and Don John, or would interpret every act of Philip to his detriment.
The whole story might be equally interpreted as the effort of a most
conscientious and narrow-minded man endeavouring to follow out what he
thought to be his father’s wishes and at the same time to keep a wild
young brother from kicking over the traces. Compare Butler’s, _The Way
of All Flesh_.
But the real interest to us of Don John is in his relations with
Cervantes.
Cervantes on his galley puts his sword into its sheath
(_Don John of Austria rides homewards with a wreath_),
And he sees across a weary land a winding road in Spain
Up which a lean and foolish knight rides slowly up in vain.
And it will be a sad world indeed when Don Quixote at last reaches the
top of that winding road and men cease to love him.
At Lepanto Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (please pronounce the “a’s”
separately) was about twenty-five years of age, and was lying below
deck sick of a fever. When he heard the roar of the guns of Don John
he sprang from his bed and rushed on deck in spite of the orders of
his captain; he was put in charge of a boat’s crew of twelve men and
went through the thick of the fighting. Every man in Don John’s fleet
was fired with his religious enthusiasm, and Cervantes’ courage was
only an index of the wild fervour that distinguished the Christians on
that most bloody day. He was wounded in the left hand, “for the greater
glory of the right,” as he himself quaintly says, and never again could
he move the fingers of the injured hand; no doubt the tendon sheaths
had become septic, and he was lucky to have kept the hand at all. It
has been sapiently remarked that the world would have had a great loss
if it had been the right hand; but healthy people who lose the right
hand can easily learn to write with the left. Cervantes remained in
the fleet for some years until, on his way home, he was captured by
Algerian pirates; put to the service of a Christian renegade--a man
who had turned Mussulman to save his life or from still less worthy
motive--Cervantes made several attempts to escape, but these were
unsuccessful, and he remained in captivity for some years until his
family had scraped up enough to ransom him. In _Don Quixote_ there is
a good deal about the renegadoes, and much of the well-known story of
the “escaped Moor” is probably autobiographical; from these hints we
gather that the renegadoes were not quite so bad as has been generally
thought, or else that Cervantes was far too big-minded a man to believe
unnecessary evil about anybody.
Back in Spain, he went into the army for two years, until, in 1582, he
gave up soldiering and took to literature. He found the pen “a good
stick but a bad crutch,” and in 1585 returned to the public service as
deputy-purveyor of the fleet. In 1594 he became collectors of revenues
in Granada, and in 1597 he became short in his accounts and fell into
jail. There he seems to have begun _Don Quixote_; he somehow obtained
security for the repayment of the missing money, was released penniless
into a suspicious world, and published the first part of _Don Quixote_
in 1605. It was enormously well received, and from that day to this has
remained one of the most successful of all books. Ten years later he
found that dishonest publishers were issuing spurious second parts, so
he sat himself down to write a genuine sequel. This differs from most
sequels in that it is better than the original; it is wiser, mellower,
less ironical; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still more lovable
than they were before, and one imagines that Cervantes must have spent
the whole ten years in collecting--or inventing--the wonderful proverbs
so wisely uttered by the squire.
Though Cervantes wrote many plays he is now remembered mainly by his
one very great romance, which is read lovingly in every language of
every part of the world, so that the epithet “Quixotic” is applied
everywhere to whatsoever is both gallant and foolish; an epithet which
reflects the mixture of affection and pity in which the old Don is
universally held, and is more often considered to be a compliment than
the reverse. Curiously enough, women seldom seem to like Don Quixote;
only the other day a brilliant young woman graduate told me that she
thought he was a “silly old fool!” That was all she could see in him;
but he is universally now thought to represent the pathos of the man
who is born out of his time. As has been so well said, “This book
is not meant for laughter--it is meant for tears.” I can do no more
than advise everybody to get a thin-paper copy and let it live in the
pocket for some months, reading it at odd moments; it is the wisest and
wittiest book ever published. “Blessed be the man who invented sleep,”
is a typical piece of Panzan philosophy with which most wise men will
agree.
But when we have done sentimentalizing over the hidden meaning that
undoubtedly underlies Don Quixote, we must not forget that it is
extraordinarily funny even to a modern mind. The law that the humour of
one generation is merely grotesque to the next does not seem to apply
to _Don Quixote_; and I dare swear that the picture of the mad old Don,
brought home from the inn of Maritornes, looking so stately in a cage
upon a bullock-wagon, guarded by troopers of the Holy Brotherhood, and
escorted by the priest and the barber, with the distracted Sancho Panza
buzzing about wondering what has become of his promised Governorship,
is absolutely the funniest thing in all literature; all the funnier
because the springs of our laughter flow from the fount of our tears.
Now I cannot help thinking that when Cervantes began to write _Don
Quixote_ in prison, feeling bitter and sore against a world which had
imprisoned him, and stiffened his hand for him, and condemned him to
poverty and imprisonment, he must have had in his mind the story of
the young bastard of Imperial Majesty who had risen to such heights
of glory over Lepanto. It is not contended that Don Quixote was
consciously intended to be a characterizature of Don Quixada or Don
John, though his real name was Alonzo Quixana or Quixada, Don Quixote
being a _nom de guerre_ born of his frenzy; but I find it hard to
believe that Cervantes had not heard of the foolish loyalty of Quixada
in the matter of Jeronimo, or of the romantic dreams of Don John. It
would seem that in these two incidents we find the true seeds of _Don
Quixote_. It is not true that “Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry
away.” Chivalry, meaning the social order of the true crusades, had
long been dead even in Spain, the most conservative of nations. What
really laughed Spain’s chivalry away was the gay and joyous laugh of
Don John himself, who would have plunged her into a great war for a
dream. The man who seriously thought of dashing across the North Sea to
marry Mary Queen of Scots would have been quite capable of tilting at
windmills. In his inmost heart Cervantes must have seen his folly.
The death of Don Quixote is probably the most generally famous in
literature, vying with that of Colonel Newcome, though more impressive
because it is less sentimental. Cervantes had begun by rather jeering
at his old Don, and subjecting him to uncalled-for cudgellings and
humiliations; he then fell in love with the brave old lunatic, as
everybody else has fallen in love with him ever since, and by the time
that he came to die had drawn him as a really noble and beautiful
character, who shows all the pathos of the idealist who is born out of
his time. The death of Don Quixote is, except the death of one other
Idealist, the most affecting death in all literature; the pathos is
secured by means similarly restrained. The Bachelor Samson Carrasco,
in his determination to cure Don Quixote of his knight-errant folly,
had dressed himself up as “The Knight of the White Moon,” and vowed
that there was another lady more fair than Dulcinea del Toboso. At
that blasphemy Don Quixote naturally flew to arms and challenged the
insolent knight. By that time Rosinante was but old bones, so the
Bachelor, being well-mounted on a young charger, overthrew the old
horse and his brave old rider, and Don Quixote came to grass with a
terrible fall. Then the Bachelor made Don Quixote vow that he would
cease from his knight-errantry for a whole year, by which time it was
hoped that he would be cured. They lifted his visor and found the
old man “pale and sweating”; evidently Cervantes had seen some old
man suffering from shock, and described what he saw in three words.
From this humiliation Don Quixote never really recovered. He reached
home and formed the mad idea of turning shepherd with Sancho and the
Bachelor, and living out his penance in the fields. But Death saw
otherwise, and the old man answered his call before he could do as he
wished. He was seized with a violent fever that confined him to his
room for six days; finally he slept calmly for some hours, and again
awakened, only to fall into one attack of syncope after another until
he died; the sanguine assurance of Sancho Panza that Dulcinea had been
successfully disenchanted could not save him. Like most idealists he
died a sad and disappointed man, certain of one thing only--that he was
out of touch with the majority of mankind.
Cervantes was far too great an artist to kill his old hero by some such
folly as “brain fever”--which nonsense I guess to have been typhoid. I
believe that in describing the death of Don Quixote he was thinking of
some old man whom he had seen crawl home to die after a severe physical
shock, disappointed and disillusioned in a world of practical youth in
which there is no room for romantic old age--probably some kind old
man whom he himself had loved. These old men usually die of hypostatic
pneumonia, which has been called the “natural end of man,” and is
probably the real broken heart of popular medicine. The old man, after
a severe shock, is affected by a weakened circulation; the lungs are
attacked by a slow inflammation, and he dies, usually in a few days,
in much the same way as died Don Quixote. Cervantes did not know that
these old men die from inflammation of the lungs; no doubt he observed
the way they die, and immortalized his memories in the death of Don
Quixote. I have written this to point out Cervantes’ great powers of
observation. He would probably have made a good doctor in our day.
This theory of _Don Quixote_, that at its roots lie memories of Don
John and Don Quixada, is in no way inconsistent with Cervantes’ own
statement that he wrote the book to ridicule the romances of Chivalry
which were so vitiating the literary taste of seventeenth-century
Spain; at the back of his mind probably lay his own memories of foolish
and gallant things, quite worthy of affectionate ridicule such as he
has lavished on his knight-errant.
Philip II and the Arterio-Sclerosis of Statesmen
When the Empress Isabel was pregnant with the child which was to be
Philip II, she bethought her of the glory that was hers in bearing
offspring to a man so famous as the Roman Emperor, and she made up her
mind that she would comport herself as became a Roman Empress. When,
therefore, her relations and midwives during the confinement implored
her to cry out or she would die, the proud Empress answered, “Die I
may; but call out I _will not_!” and thus Philip arrived into the world
sombre son of a stoical mother and heroic father. Doubtless she thought
that she would show a courage equal to his father’s, hoping that the
son would then prove not unworthy. Though she was very beautiful, as
Titian’s famous portrait shows, she seems to have been a gloomy and
austere woman, and Charles, being absent so long from her side at his
wars, had to leave Philip’s education mainly to her. His part consisted
of many affectionate letters full of good and proud advice. Yet Philip
grew up to be a merry little golden-haired boy enough, who rode about
the streets of Toledo in a go-cart amidst the crowds that we are told
pressed to see the Emperor’s son. The calamity of his life was that
Charles had bequeathed to him the kingdom of the Netherlands. Charles
himself was essentially a Fleming, who got on exceedingly well with
his brother Flemings, Reformation or no Reformation; they were quite
prepared to admit that the great man might have some good reason for
his religious persecution, peculiar though it no doubt seemed. But
Philip was a foreigner; and a foreigner of the race of Torquemada who,
so they heard, had so strengthened the Inquisition less than a century
before that now it was really not safe to think aloud in matters of
religion. So the Dutch rose in revolt under William of Orange, and
the Dutch Republic came into being. Philip was only able to save the
southern Netherlands from the wreck, which ultimately formed the
kingdom of Belgium. Philip always thought that if he could only get
England on his side the pacification of the Netherlands would be easy;
so, at the earnest request of Charles, he married Mary Tudor, a woman
twelve years older than himself, a marriage which turned out unhappily
from every point of view, and has wrongly coloured our general opinion
of Philip’s character. The unfortunate attempt to conquer England by
the Armada, a fleet badly equipped and absurdly led, has also led
us to despise both him and his Spaniards, whence came the general
English schoolboy idea that the Spanish were a nation of braggarts
ruled by a murderous fool, whose only thirst was for Protestant gore.
But this idea was very far from being true. Philip was no fool; he
was an exceedingly learned, conscientious, hard-working, careful, and
painstaking bureaucrat, who might have done very well indeed had he
been left the kingdom of Spain alone; but had no power of attracting
foreigners to his point of view. He always did his best according to
his lights; and if his policy sometimes appears tortuous to us, that
is simply because we forget that it was then thought perfectly right
for kings to do tortuous things for the sake of their people, just as
to-day party leaders sometimes do extraordinarily wicked things for the
sake of what they consider the principles of their party. Unfortunately
for Philip he often failed in his efforts; and the man who fails is
always in the wrong.