cervantes: spanish fathers and sons

In what sense was Spain, in the years of Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote a schizophrenic society? If we look closely, there is an answer…

In Cervantes lifetime, Spain had two very different moods. They were the moods of two successive but antithetical generations. The generation of the fathers was bound together by one set of experiences which created one kind of mood, a mood of fantastic confidence, heroic tension, intoxicating romance. The generation of the sons had different experiences, and consequently a different mood. Immune from their father,s experiences, they knew only defeat, disappointment, disillusion; and their mood was one of cynical realism, passivity, emptiness. Now the life of Cervantes straddled both these generations, and in his own person he experienced, directly, both the heroism of the fathers and the disillusion of the sons. In his book, which is in some ways an autobiography, or at least a slf-portrait, he expressed- sympathetically, because he had felt them both- the two mutually opposing moods, moods which met in his lifetime and, particularly, in him.

---Emperor Charles V by Titian, c.1532-33. (Madrid, Prado)---click image for source...

—Emperor Charles V by Titian, c.1532-33. (Madrid, Prado)—click image for source…

First, let us take the generation of the fathers, the men who grew up during the reign of Charles V, “the Emperor”; for he was Holy Roman Emperor while king of Spain. Under the Emperor, Spain found itself suddenly a world power. Not long before, it had been a poor, rural appendix at the back end of Europe; now its armies fought and conquered on the Rhine and the Danube, in Italy and Africa, against german heretics and Turkish infidels. Spanish adventurers were conquering hug empires, and huge estates for themselves in new-found America; and the wealth of America, spent on armies, fleets, and the imperial court, sustained and inflated an archaic feudal society, with chivalric notions imported from the magnificent Burgundy of Jean Froissart and Comines.

---Diego Velázquez Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618) National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh---click image for source...

—Diego Velázquez
Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618)
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh—click image for source…

It was an astonishing change, astonishing in its suddenness, comparable with the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries; and the Spaniards who witnessed or achieved it were inspired by a sense of divine mission and superhuman power. God was behind them, they felt, and nothing beyond them. They flinched before no obstacle, accepted no authority except that of their own king. Even the pope received scant respect from them: when he was tiresome, the imperial court, inspired by the exciting, liberal doctrines of Erasmus, did not hesitate to strike at him, and the imperial armies seized and sacked the Holy City itself. Only the Emperor himself commanded unconditional respect; and he commanded it the more because, from a foreigner, a Fleming who knew no Spanish, he had become a Spaniard: he refused, even to the Pope’s ambassador, to speak any language but the Spanish he had lately learned.

---Unknown (Spanish) Falconer 17th century---click image for source...

—Unknown (Spanish)
Falconer
17th century—click image for source…

It was this mood of exaltation in the time of the Emperor which found its popular expression in the famous “romances of chivalry.” ( to be continued)…

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