I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of ‘Don
Quixote,’ while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly with
anybody’s authorship. I was still too young to conceive of authorship,
even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion of
literature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually come
out rightly rhymed and measured. The moment was at the close of a
summer’s day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlessly
late, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about her
work, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brother
and me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of a
book that he had once read. We boys were all shelling peas, but the
story, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever our
fingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land of
adventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight truly
without fear and without reproach burned itself out. I dare say that my
father tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book.
I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant to
ridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do at
once was to get that book and plunge into its story. He told us at
random of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of the
night in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of the
inn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of the
island that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at the
duke’s and duchess’s, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of the
capture of Mambrino’s helmet, and of Sancho’s invention of the enchanted
Dulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in the
most wonderful and delightful book in the world. I do not know when or
where my father got it for me, and I am aware of an appreciable time that
passed between my hearing of it and my having it. The event must have
been most important to me, and it is strange I cannot fix the moment when
the precious story came into my hands; though for the matter of that
there is nothing more capricious than a child’s memory, what it will hold
and what it will lose.
It is certain my Don Quixote was in two small, stout volumes not much
bigger each than my Goldsmith’s ‘Greece’, bound in a sort of law-calf,
well fitted to withstand the wear they were destined to undergo. The
translation was, of course, the old-fashioned version of Jervas, which,
whether it was a closely faithful version or not, was honest eighteenth-
century English, and reported faithfully enough the spirit of the
original. If it had any literary influence with me the influence must
have been good. But I cannot make out that I was sensible of the
literature; it was the forever enchanting story that I enjoyed.
I exulted in the boundless freedom of the design; the open air of that
immense scene, where adventure followed adventure with the natural
sequence of life, and the days and the nights were not long enough for
the events that thronged them, amidst the fields and woods, the streams
and hills, the highways and byways, hostelries and hovels, prisons and
palaces, which were the setting of that matchless history. I took it as
simply as I took everything else in the world about me. It was full of
meaning that I could not grasp, and there were significances of the kind
that literature unhappily abounds in, but they were lost upon my
innocence. I did not know whether it was well written or not; I never
thought about that; it was simply there in its vast entirety, its
inexhaustible opulence, and I was rich in it beyond the dreams of
avarice.
My father must have told us that night about Cervantes as well as about
his ‘Don Quixote’, for I seem to have known from the beginning that he
was once a slave in Algiers, and that he had lost a hand in battle, and I
loved him with a sort of personal affection, as if he were still living
and he could somehow return my love. His name and nature endeared the
Spanish name and nature to me, so that they were always my romance, and
to this day I cannot meet a Spanish man without clothing him in something
of the honor and worship I lavished upon Cervantes when I was a child.
While I was in the full flush of this ardor there came to see our school,
one day, a Mexican gentleman who was studying the American system of
education; a mild, fat, saffron man, whom I could almost have died to
please for Cervantes’ and Don Quixote’s sake, because I knew he spoke
their tongue. But he smiled upon us all, and I had no chance to
distinguish myself from the rest by any act of devotion before the
blessed vision faded, though for long afterwards, in impassioned
reveries, I accosted him and claimed him kindred because of my fealty,
and because I would have been Spanish if I could.
I would not have had the boy-world about me know anything of these fond
dreams; but it was my tastes alone, my passions, which were alien there;
in everything else I was as much a citizen as any boy who had never heard
of Don Quixote. But I believe that I carried the book about with me most
of the time, so as not to lose any chance moment of reading it. Even in
the blank of certain years, when I added little other reading to my
store, I must still have been reading it. This was after we had removed
from the town where the earlier years of my boyhood were passed, and I
had barely adjusted myself to the strange environment when one of my
uncles asked me to come with him and learn the drug business, in the
place, forty miles away, where he practised medicine. We made the long
journey, longer than any I have made since, in the stage-coach of those
days, and we arrived at his house about twilight, he glad to get home,
and I sick to death with yearning for the home I had left. I do not know
how it was that in this state, when all the world was one hopeless
blackness around me, I should have got my ‘Don Quixote’ out of my bag;
I seem to have had it with me as an essential part of my equipment for my
new career. Perhaps I had been asked to show it, with the notion of
beguiling me from my misery; perhaps I was myself trying to drown my
sorrows in it. But anyhow I have before me now the vision of my sweet
young aunt and her young sister looking over her shoulder, as they stood
together on the lawn in the summer evening light. My aunt held my Don
Quixote open in one hand, while she clasped with the other the child she
carried on her arm. She looked at the book, and then from time to time
she looked at me, very kindly but very curiously, with a faint smile, so
that as I stood there, inwardly writhing in my bashfulness, I had the
sense that in her eyes I was a queer boy. She returned the book without
comment, after some questions, and I took it off to my room, where the
confidential friend of Cervantes cried himself to sleep.
In the morning I rose up and told them I could not stand it, and I was
going home. Nothing they could say availed, and my uncle went down to
the stage-office with me and took my passage back.
The horror of cholera was then in the land; and we heard in the stage-
office that a man lay dead of it in the hotel overhead. But my uncle led
me to his drugstore, where the stage was to call for me, and made me
taste a little camphor; with this prophylactic, Cervantes and I somehow
got home together alive.
The reading of ‘Don Quixote’ went on throughout my boyhood, so that I
cannot recall any distinctive period of it when I was not, more or less,
reading that book. In a boy’s way I knew it well when I was ten, and a
few years ago, when I was fifty, I took it up in the admirable new
version of Ormsby, and found it so full of myself and of my own
irrevocable past that I did not find it very gay. But I made a great
many discoveries in it; things I had not dreamt of were there, and must
always have been there, and other things wore a new face, and made a new
effect upon me. I had my doubts, my reserves, where once I had given it
my whole heart without question, and yet in what formed the greatness of
the book it seemed to me greater than ever. I believe that its free and
simple design, where event follows event without the fettering control of
intrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and conditions,
is the supreme form of fiction; and I cannot help thinking that if we
ever have a great American novel it must be built upon some such large
and noble lines. As for the central figure, Don Quixote himself, in his
dignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devotion
to them, he is always heroic and beautiful; and I was glad to find in my
latest look at his history that I had truly conceived of him at first,
and had felt the sublimity of his nature. I did not want to laugh at him
so much, and I could not laugh at all any more at some of the things done
to him. Once they seemed funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, so
that it was strange to realize his qualities and indignities as both
flowing from the same mind. But in my mature experience, which threw a
broader light on the fable, I was happy to keep my old love of an author
who had been almost personally, dear to me.