Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/26

 xvi sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against which the nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced no Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y Siscar, to whom the task was intrusted, or any of those who followed him, Rios, Pellicer, or Navarrete, could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes makes to himself in his various prefaces with such pieces of documentary evidence bearing upon his life as they could find.

This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer to such good purpose that, while he has superseded all predecessors, he has left it somewhat more than doubtful whether any successor will ever supersede him. Thoroughness is the chief characteristic of Navarrete's work. Besides sifting, testing, and methodizing with rare patience and judgment what had been previously brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found, and all the research of the sixty-five years that have elapsed since the publication of his "Life of Cervantes" has been able to add but little or nothing of importance to the mass of facts he collected and put in order. Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no fault of his if he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says of Shakespeare may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes: "It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary has been produced." By the irony of fate all or almost all we know of the greatest poet the world has ever seen is contained in documents the most prosaic the art of man can produce, and he who of all the men that ever lived soared highest above this earth is seen to us only as a long-headed man of business, as shrewd and methodical in money matters as the veriest Philistine among us. Of Cervantes we certainly know more than we do of Shakespeare, but of what we know the greater part is derived from sources of the same sort, from formal documents of one kind or another. Here, however, the resemblance ends. In Shakespeare's case the documentary evidence points always to prosperity and success; in the case of Cervantes it tells of difficulties, embarrassments, or struggles.