Velázquez was a great lover of El Greco. Manuel Cossío tells us that in his private chambers at the Palace, the court painter had works of the great mystic. His love and study of his antithesis helped to confine him within his own domain. In his religious subjects, Velázquez shows the direct influence—chiefly in composition—of El Greco. And in these works, the graphic might of Velázquez fades: they are the least of his pictures. Where Velázquez is great, El Greco is excluded: the younger man seems willfully to avoid what he must have felt should denature his æsthetic. And in this response, Velázquez achieves once more the miracle of Spain: the infusing of a part with an intensity and essence of the Whole. El Greco is Spain of Africa and of the Semites, Spain the High Priest of Rome, the mystic Spain. And Velázquez is Spain of Europe: the land of analytic grace, of luxuriant elaborations, of immense exclusions.
Spain’s craft goes far, when Spain resolves to be “efficient.” StudyLas Hilanderas, Mercurio y Argos, the portrait of Margarita de Austria. This grace is the ecstasy of cool and obvious metals. It suggests the modern æsthetic of the Machine. Modeling and texture are composed of immediate masses which are self-sufficient. Neither in part nor in whole are they transmuted into the subjective. Or take the portrait of Mariana de Austria, Philip’s second wife. Of the woman there is naught save the weak face and the flat hands. But the black and silver gown is volumnear. Its fringes and its lace hold power that appears almost to be a symbol of this Court—this Court of Spain striving to hold a world within its forces.
The will of Velázquez, at least, does not falter.LasMeninasis forever a shut and earthly room. No glimpse here of the arcana of the soul, of the soul’s subtle modeling of arm and face. Think what El Greco would have done with that group: the royal family, the painter, the dwarf, the dog. How they would have flamed; how heaven and hell would have come in and metabolized these bodies!
. . . . . .
In the palace of the king of Spain, there were simpletons and dwarfs. They formed part of the Court and Velázquez painted them. He painted them so well because they were part of himself.
The forces which aspire beyond the body, beyond the domain of sense, died not in Velázquez. His æsthetic will allowed them no immediate word. This explains the cramped discomfort of his religious pictures. Here within him were these instincts, these intuitions, unable to speak, unable to die. And here were the twisted courtiers of the king. A good court painter could portray them; for they were of the palace. And since they were pitiful victims of Nature’s law, the despised and dispossessed, an artist’s soul could use them as a symbol.
In the world there lives a spirit whose name is Christ and his saints. When the world denies, that spirit ceases to be Christ: it becomes a dwarf and a madman. Velázquez has discovered this: he sets down his dark confession after all. Here is a record of the grotesque and the pitiful world, born of his deep denials.
What a page it is!El Bobo de Coria: the simplicity of the inane issuing from the breakdown of complex power: sweetness, candor, poetry and grace surviving in the death of idiocy.El Primo: a little man beside a gigantic book; pathos, tenderness, pride—the song of frustration.Don Sebastián de Mora: a huge body squats, the head empty, the outstretched legs short as a child’s—so eloquent, so helpless. And theNiño de Vallecas, most poignant of all, for he bespeaks fecundity without intelligence: he is the lush plasm of life, purposeless, spiritually bereft.
This is the confession of Velázquez, enacting Spain’s will to be Europe. This is a prophecy of Europe, whose life of mechanical perfection has turned the Christ and saints of its soul into such twisted creatures.
a. The Birth of the Herob. The Career of the Heroc. The Book of the Hero
a. The Birth of the Herob. The Career of the Heroc. The Book of the Hero
a. The Birth of the Herob. The Career of the Heroc. The Book of the Hero
Cervanteswas born in a Europe more than three centuries beyond the noon of chivalry. Knighthood north of Spain begot great books. TheChanson de Rolandin the form which we possess is earlier than 1100. In the last years of the twelfth century Chrétien de Troies—first master in an unbroken line that perhaps closed with Anatole France—put into gracious and fleet form the Arthurian cycle. A bit later, a profounder German, Wolfram von Eschenbach, composed from French materials the transfiguring masterwork of chivalry, the Poem of Parzival. Joinville’s portrait of Saint Louis and of his two Crusades was written about 1290. Thereafter Europe, north of Spain, begins the great decline into the modern era.
The last historic synthesis of western man lies in that Middle Age. It rose from the chaotic impact of the Roman Empire and the Teuton with Alexandria and Judah. Already ere the ancient world had fallen its architects were building. Origen, Tertullian, Jerome, Anthony, Gregory, Charlemagne—such were its foundation-makers. It reaches heights in Abélard, Aquinas, Francis, Dante: in the creators of the Gothic, in the great weavers of polyphonic music, in men of action—Godefroi de Bouillon and Saint Louis. And already, at this hey-day, from the disintegrant north come threats of dissolution in such figures as Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus who, positing the primacy of will over the intellect, declare Theology to be not science but revelation and foretell Luther and Kant—creators of the modern chaos.
European thought, after the Cathedrals, Dante, and the great scholastics, is a story of destruction. Men of ashigh genius as Albertus Magnus or Saint Thomas proceed by vision and by dialectic to take stone from stone in the dismantlement of Christian Europe. Here and there in the vast liquidation a prophet throws up a scheme for a new Synthesis—such a one was Spinoza: the world cannot accept him, neither can it lose him, from cosmic prescience of a future need.
The towers of this great House in which dwelt the soul of Europe touch the year 1300. Dante has devised his vision; Chartres lives upon the Ile-de-France; Saint Bernard in Clairvaux and Saint Francis in Assisi have filled the world with brothers; chivalry has brought war and love into the sacred symphony of Europe; the German foray is Crusade; lust of the flesh bears the Mystery of Tristan and Isolt, of Abélard and Héloïse. Now, the divine Structure nobly curves back to earth. By 1400, Europe dwells once more in the bowels of discord. By 1500, European man is a congeries of atomic wills: the unity of Christ has scattered into exploration, industry and science.
But in this destructive act, Europe is as creative as when the Fathers builded, out of the Prophets, Plato, Paul, the puissant Organism of medieval Europe. To tear down such a body is as divine an act as to build it. Systole and diastole are equal. Schopenhauer and Kant are brothers before God with Aquinas. The long ages of deliquescence from that peak of Rome rightly seem rich to our enlisted eyes since they are as full of saints and heroes consecrate to our work, as were the anchorites of the Thebaid to theirs.
For this is the mysterious law of history: that the divine is present in death even as in life, in the Nay equally with the Yea. God does not build His revelation upon earth and then turn away His face while man tears down. He is there, too, in the destruction. He was there when the Prophets created the Jew: He was there also when the Pharisees and the Essenic Christ destroyed the Jew. He was there when the saints and Fathers buildedCatholic Rome. He was there when Luther, Calvin, Goethe, Blake burned Rome away.
We see Him in the despair of Dostoievski no less than in the joy of Saint Francis. It was while the Jewish world drooped and retched, that the gospels of Jesus flowered. From that nadir was prepared the Dantean zenith. Once more an ebb of the Tide. Spain has become a befuddled chaos. Home from her mad anachronistic dream of establishing on earth what Europe has given up for centuries, she is already rotting. And now, from the bitterness of her awareness rises a new Word. It, too, is entextured of contemporary failure, and is implicit of revelation.
. . . . . .
Spain did not conform with the Middle Ages of the north. Roman Iberia received its dominant invasion from the south, whereas in Italy, Gaul and Britain the coefficient of transformation from Rome to Holy Rome was the same Teuton element which held the eastern marches beyond Roman rule. León, Aragon and Castile were medieval in so far as the Visigoth was strong in them. But even here, contact was as great with the Moslem foe of the south as with the brother northward.
Medievalism is an idealism forced upon the world of Appearance. It is a mystical conclusion by the Teuton will, drawn from the logical element of Latin, and the naturalistic element of Semitic, cultures. It is most powerful in the lands where the Teuton is strongest: Germany and England. In France, where the blend was fairest between Frank and Gallo-Roman, it is most balanced and most perfect. In Italy, medievalism is never great. And in a land whose conclusive elements are Semitic or harmonize with the Semitic, it is impossible. Such a land was Spain. The ethnic Iberian base of Spain is more African in nature than European; more aboriginally close to Semite than to German. Arab culture was always naturalistic. Judaism and Mohammedanism are pragmatic systems on different levels, yet both based uponempirical experience and natural law. In medieval Catholicism, the natural laws and the experience of the world are deformed by a mystic idealizing will. In Semitism, the ideal sense is made to converge with natural law: the mystic will is regarded as possessing its true form in the activity of nature.
Semitism in its several shades, or a spirit close to it, impeded Spain from becoming wholly medieval. It was culturally too strong to accept the neo-platonic House of the medieval God. But Semitism is politically weak. Medievalism, repugning the natural body of the world, creates an ideal Organism—a Church—which becomes politically real. Semitism, accepting Nature as God’s organic body, has no impulse to erect political substitutes for the wholeness of existence. Politically, it tends toward fragmentation: even as in art it remains lyrical and forms no such organic structures as the Gothic cathedral or the Dantean epic. This political weakness of the Spanish Semite impeded Spain from becoming wholly Semitic. Spain for centuries was in a state of continuous flux and of osmosis between the medieval north and the Semitic south. When at length there came a final issue the north won. Ferdinand and Isabel turned toward Europe. A revised medievalism, equipped with methods of the Renaissance, became the goal of the Spanish will. And at a time when it was already dead in Europe.
This is the year 1500. The Holy Roman Empire is in full liquidation. Luther and Calvin are rising. Copernicus is at work. America has been discovered. Now Spain pours her ideal energy and her blood into the tragic task of becoming medieval. Godefroi, Saint Louis, Parzival, Saint Francis and Aquinas have been dethroned and denied in the countries of their birth. They become the patterns and movers of Castile.
Lest the hostile—the Semitic elements, which in the noon of medieval Europe held Spain from her part in that great Synthesis, hold Spain back now, Isabel drives the Jew and Moslem from her realms. It is too late. Thedissident spirit is at work in Spain. And the heroic effort of this land to revive chivalry, to recreate Christ, to re-establish all the world as Christ’s Rock and Church becomes a divine farce, a sort of comic Mystery—Don Quixote.
. . . . . .
Perhaps Cervantes’ family was of gentle blood: but it had come to pitiful fortune when Miguel was born to the poor surgeon in Alcalá de Henares. The year was 1547: and the town upon thellanuraof Castile was the rival of Salamanca. Naught is more eloquent of the poverty of his people than the fact that Miguel was unable to attend the university round the corner. At twenty-two, however, he was a poet. He went to Italy as the body servant of the Papal Nuncio: later he rose to be a soldier. In 1571, the ships of Philip II defeated the Turk in the waters of Lepanto. A shot crippled the left hand of Cervantes. His officers ordered him below. He refused to leave the deck, and in his blood and pain fought to the close of the engagement. This is a better sign of his unusual nature than his verse. A man of high sensitivity, he exposed himself to physical suffering beyond the duty of a soldier. He was devoted passionately to the Catholic cause. And when in 1575 he took ship from Italy, he had letters to the king from Don Juan of Austria and the Duke of Sessa whom he had served in Naples. He was full of merit: and full of hope he went home for his reward. But the Berber pirates took the vessel and he and his brother, Rodrigo, became slaves in Algiers. Four times in five years Cervantes plotted to escape the stiflement of servitude in the Kasbah of that town which rises within a snow-crowned conch above the hard-blue sea, hiding its reek within the gleam of roofs. Cervantes’ sisters and mother bestirred themselves: scraped coin together, borrowed, and at last, ransomed Rodrigo. In 1580, a mendicant monk came to the aid of the sisters, and Cervantes was freed on the eve of his departure eastward. He went to Madrid. He sought protection,and he failed to find it. He had been a hero and a martyr: but such were cheap in Spain. The land swarmed with veterans of the wars which had spread Spain’s glory to the Pacific Ocean. Cervantes performed odd diplomatic jobs and tried to be a writer. From thirty-four to forty he wrote thirty plays; he had no financial success. But he wed a landed lady, Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano of Esquivias, a town on the fringe of the Manchegan desert which after twenty years was to be transfigured by a hero. At about the time of his marriage, another lady Doña Ana de Rojas bore him a natural daughter, Isabel, whose life was to be fateful in his own. Cervantes’ burdens were great as his means were small. He placed all his hopes on a novel in which he believed that he had lavished all his genius.La Galateaappeared in 1585, and was an unremunerativesuccès d’estime.
Now come twenty years of Gethsemane to Don Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. The silence of oblivion—el silencio del olvidowhereof he speaks—was their sweetest portion. We follow him hardly, for he had reason to hold to his obscurity. In 1588 he is a commissary in Seville. In 1592 he is in prison for a bungled sale of wheat. Later he is engaged in provisioning the Armada. He tries to get out of Spain: he seeks a post in Guatemala: but he lacks the influence to win it. Once more he sues the stage. Lope de Vega is the master of taste; and once more Cervantes fails. In 1594 he is a tax-collector in Granada: in disgrace: once more in prison. In 1597 we find him released on faith of his word that he will make good a deficit to the Treasury of the King. There is no trace, however, of his payment. For five years, he seems to have touched depths in Andalusia. An obscure actor, Tomás Gutiérrez (blessèd be his name) supports him. In 1603 he is in jail again, the bank in which he had deposited trusted monies having failed. He appears to have been under lock and key at this time, in both Seville and Argamasilla de Alba. This may have beenthe circumstance in which, judged by his own words, he began to writeDon Quixote.
In 1604, Part One of the work is written: has even been bruited about Madrid either in manuscript or in an edition prior to the first extant one which bears the date 1605. Lope de Vega is at his height. He is the Stage of Spain. His name outshines the king’s: his portrait stands beside a saint’s in myriad Spanish homes. Miguel de Cervantes is living in Vallodolid. With him are the two sisters who helped ransom him from slavery, a niece and Isabel; his natural daughter. His wife lives in indifferent ease on her estate in La Mancha. Cervantes is penniless. His labors as tax-farmer have earned him bread in prison and disgrace with the world. He has been forgotten as a writer. And he lives with women who support him. They are good women and he loves them: but they are women, like himself disgraced by fortune. His sisters, Magdalena de Sotomayor and Andrea de Cervantes, have been “kept” women. His niece Constanza is living now with a man to whom she is not married. Cervantes knows this, and eats their bread. His daughter, Isabel, is not of good repute; nor is Cervantes perfectly cleared of implication in her mercenary ways.
He is fifty-seven: he is broken utterly. And his bread is shame. Yet he is still the proud hidalgo who served Don Juan of Austria in Naples, who refused succor and relief at Lepanto: who led gallant sallies in Algiers. He is not Cervantes. He is Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra.
. . . . . .
This man looks out upon his world, with eyes of such a life, and decides, after twenty adverse years, again to write a book. He has read only the decadent offspring of chivalry’s literary flower. He does not know the originalchansons de gestenor the native water-clearromans d’aventure. The best he knows is the fifteenth century Romancero; is Ariosto and the ornate Italians; is the Castilian version of Amadís de Gaula which has come to Spain, over-blown, by Portugal out of Brittany and Wales.These are relatively pure beside their spawn of dull sons performing ridiculous wonders in a world of wooden magic. But the vogue of these knights is past. The books ofcaballería, which tempted the young Santa Teresa to go forth seeking martyrdom and adventure, have already ebbed. On the other hand,La Celestinawhich appeared along with the first Castilian Amadis has thriven and inspired the pícaro who lives still in Spanish and in European letters.
Vivid in Cervantes’ mind is the organic music—the first great Castilian prose—in which Fernando de Rojas sang the sordid fate of his Celestina. As with Amadis, this book has medieval roots. But unlike Amadis, it has classic form, and independent greatness. Amadis is a fatty degeneration of Roland, Parzival, Lancelot. La Celestina is a transfigurement of the comedy of Terence and Plautus, as well as of the romance of Aucassin and Nicolette, of Tristan and Isolt, of Romeo and Juliet. It is ironic, realistic, ruthlessly tragic as the romance was never. Chivalry expressed a childlike age which projected its own maturity into a Church and a Heaven. The romance at best was an adolescent form. As the Church dimmed and Heaven grew less sure and man began again to build upon himself, it was transfigured into the modern novel.La Celestinais the first towering adult of the childlike race of the fabliaux and romances.
Irony and a profound acceptance of natural justice—such are the transforming elements ofLa Celestina. Love’s medieval idyll is rotted and destroyed by the pragmatic world to which it has appealed for fulfillment. Loveliness is killed by lust. The whole infantile fantasy of the Middle Age is confronted with the fate of its own will: a fate of evil and of sordid passion. And Justice is implicit in the nature of events. This meeting of love and lust, of vice and beauty, this hot-and-cold inmixture of vision and of despair gives to the book of Rojas a dimension that relates it to Dostoievski and to Balzac.
The pícaro novels of Spain’s sixteenth century continuethe novel of Rojas and announceDon Quixote. Counterpoint of irony and naturalistic justice becomes the theme, variantly construed, ofLazarillo de Tormes, of Quevedo’sEl Buscón, of Delicado’sLozana Andaluza, of theGuzmánof Mateo Alemán.
This in the mind of Cervantes looking out upon his world. And with it, a parallel domain of literary expression: one that is not unrelated to the brutal picaresque and to the extravagant tales of chivalry: the mystic. Cervantes knew the renownedDiálogos de Amorof León Hebreo. And he knew Santa Teresa, Luis de León, Luis de Granada.
This man whom adversity for twenty years has silenced is a bookish man. But he has been a man of action. He has grown old with his own literary failure. But he has absorbed a century of literary success. He is no primitive. Mature in years and in events, he is the heir of a rich, various heritage of expression.
When he was born, Carlos I was king. His youth spanned the age of Felipe II. While he fought and was exiled, the Escorial rose, a last pinnacle of stone, from the Castilian Guadarrama. Now, in Cervantes’ broken age, the grotesque Felipe III leads Spain. Spain has gone on the Crusade Isabel dreamed; and Spain has come to this.
Cervantes looks back over the glorious madness of his land; and he has his earliest vision of the Knight: Quixote wearing a barber’s dish, mounted on a nag. For Spain was not like Europe at the dawn of chivalry. Europe then was dawn, itself. Old wines—the wines of the Prophets, of Plato and Saint Augustine—had raged in the young flesh of Teuton hordes. But Spain at this flush of her ambition was already old. Seven centuries of war with Islam, endless ages of conflict with a desert world have parched the skin and turned brittle the bone of this Quixotic hero, abroad in the world to make the world into the House of Christ.
Cervantes looks at Spain. Outward splendor flingsSpain’s canopy from Holland to Africa, from Florida to Santa Fe. Paul and the Apostles who voyaged over the world are dead fifteen hundred years; but Columbus charts his way to the Indies from study of the Scriptures. Roland blew his last horn six centuries since: but Cortés and Pizarro raze empires in Peru. The hermits of the Thebaid are buried under millennial dust; but Córdoba has its anchorites. Saint Anthony and Saint Elisabeth are old in Heaven; but here yesterday were Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Bernard of Clairvaux did not crush the Albigensians with more blood than Torquemada the Jews. Saint Louis of France announces Isabel of Spain. Pope Gregory has his brother—across seven hundred years—in Cisneros, Cardinal of Toledo.[24]
Cervantes looks within Spain. It is a squalid land. Men pray while it lies sterile. Old soldiers are vagabonds on the roads. Farms are waste while the lazy lords watch for gold-filled galleons from the Indies. It is a bloodless land. Women give themselves to Christ, and their wombs shrink. Carlos and Felipe pour the blood of Aragon and Castile into the Flemish sea.
Cervantes looks at himself. He, too, has been a hero. His maimed hand recalls the gesture of Lepanto. He has been a poet—in prison; a servant of the State—who starved. He has helped to provision the Armada whose splendor sank under the modern iron of stripped England. And now, he eats the shame-bread of his women.
Looking within himself or out upon his world, Cervantes sees one thing. Spain and he are home, ashen and sober, from a high Crusade. Spain and he are this single body of his bitterness. Such is the conjunction and dark omen of the birth of a hero.
Don Quixote is but the final name of the ingenious knight of La Mancha. In Chapter One of his book, it is set forth that he was known as Quijada, Quesada or Quejana. Four chapters later a worker in the neighboring fields addresses him as Quijana, and as Quijano he made his will at the end of his last journey. His Christian name was Alonso. Quixote (Quijote in modern Castilian) was the choice of the old man himself. And as Cervantes gives him birth, he is old—old for his fifty years in a frustrate Manchegan village. He is noble but poor. He is an eater of cheap meats. He is a cadaverous, lantern-jawed, brittle-boned, deep-eyed fellow. His house, one room of which is stocked with the chivalric books that have drawn his substance and addled his brains, is cared for by an old Nurse and a niece. There is as well a boy servant who disappears from the tale after the first chapter. Doubtless Cervantes meant to employ him as Don Quixote’s squire: but when the independent knight after his first sally made choice of Sancho Panza, there was naught left for the poormozo. Of course, in the stable stands a splay-hoof nag. After four days of meditation on such names as Bucephalus and Babieca (the stallion of the Cid), Quixote christens his jade Rocinante.Rocínmeans hack horse: wherefore Don Quixote meant that his mount wasbeforeall the other hacks of the world.
This detail, appearing in the first chapter of the Book, might give the canny reader pause. “Why,” he might ask, “if the deluded eyes—as we are told—of Don Quixote saw his hack as a mount equal to the steeds of Amadis or Alexander, as he was soon to be equal in renown, did he christen him with a name so comical and sorevealing?” The reader will be aware of a curious shift in this Don Quixote’s “madness”: a note shivering in at once of self-conscious irony.
However, the madman to whom Cervantes introduces us seems on the whole at first to be consistent. A poverty-struck Manchegan, finding his treeless world too empty for his senses, lets them roam in a realm of knight-errants, ogres, fairies, virgins, Magic. Until his senses are strayed. Whereupon, deeming himself a Roland or an Amadis, he buckles on his rusty sword, takes his nag from the stall and sallies forth into a Spain sordidly realistic, sick of heroes, to perform adventures. He cuts a ridiculous figure. And his fate is what a sane man might expect. He is unhorsed, drubbed, pounded. He loses teeth as his molested countrymen lose tempers. The ladies he meets are foul-breathed wenches; the lord of the Castle in which he takes his rest wants his pay, being the keeper of an inn. His battles are with goats, sheep, windmills and Biscayan servants. It is clear that some day his madness will discomfit him entire. At which time he will be forced back to his house where the good Nurse and the niece will staunch his wounds, bathe the dust from his mad eyes and put him to bed. Meantime, there is the tale to tell—with much laughter—of his absurd adventures. Cervantes wishes to laugh at this medieval scarecrow, jousting with the Modern. His fellow Spaniards, sick like himself of gestures and heroics, will roar along—will payrealesfor the book—will put money in the purse of a scribbler.
Such a Quixote is the child of Cervantes, and is the subject of the early chapters. And now a fundamental difference sets in, marking off this character from others. Most literary creations remain their maker’s. As he willed, modeled, developed them, so they live—or die. This is true in great books. The evolution of the hero is explicit in the poet’s mind or at least in the action’s threshold. But for the analogue to Don Quixote we must go to biology, rather than to art. The mother forms the babyin her womb. It is organically hers, and so for a brief time it will remain. But she has endowed it with a principle which will make her child recede ever more from being her creation. This inner life, seeking substance in the world of sense and of impression, becomes itself. The mother has created a babe—only to lose it. Similar is the fate of Quixote with Cervantes. From the womb of his will and bitter fancy comes the child. But Don Quixote is no sooner set on earth, than he proceeds by an organic evolution, by a series of accretions, assimilations, responses, to change wholly from the intent of his author—to turn indeed against him. He does not lose organic contact with his source, even as the man is child of his own childhood and of his parents in a way deeper than the parents’ conscious will or than biologic pattern. But above all, the child becomes himself. He has transcended vastly the amorphous thing lodged in his mother’s womb. So Don Quixote is transfigured beyond the sprightly scheme of his maker.
He was conceived and formed, as a broken writer’s bitter turning against his heroic soul and his heroic age; he becomes the Body of sublime acceptance—the symbol of what his misfortunes were to mock. Cervantes’ conscious will has no firm hold on Don Quixote. And this is plain almost from the outset in the fact that the Manchegan knight, despite his author’s assurance,is not mad. We had an inkling of this already in the too conscious, too ironic naming of Rocinante. Soon the proofs multiply; for the clown-blows that continue to rain upon Don Quixote in Part One cannot hold him from his organic growth. With Part Two, written ten years later, the blows and buffets are less frequent. Cervantes has had time to catch up with and humbly to accept his son.
In the matter of the selecting of a Lady (that needed spur of every true knight-errant) it is clear that Don Quixote knows the facts about Aldonza Lorenzo, wench daughter of Lorenzo Cochuelo of El Toboso. Quite consciously, he turns her into the divine Dulcinea whomhenceforth he will worship. Her he makes his “truth”; there is no evidence that thefactof the girl is ever hidden from him. He needs a helmet, indeed he needs Mambrino’s magic helmet. A barber comes, riding an ass and on his head (for it is raining) a copper bleeding-dish. This shall be the golden helmet of Mambrino; and as such Don Quixote takes it. But in the parley before and after with Sancho Panza, it is plain that the knight accepts Sancho’sfactabout the dish: he merely turns the fact, for his own purpose, into “truth.”
In the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote resolves to follow a tradition. He and Sancho have reached the mountains that bar the smooth plains of La Mancha from the fluid meads of Andalusia southward: mountains of rock flung to sky, titanic gestures of rock, pourings of cosmic might into the waste of rock. The Sierra, sudden beneath La Mancha, suggests delirious excess. So here, Don Quixote will have his knightly spell of madness, in anguish of his absent lady love. How does he set about it? He debates the merits of two schools of madness. There was the furious way of Roland after his Angelica had slept with the Moor Medoro. And there was the quiet melancholy way of Amadis. Don Quixote is fifty: he elects the quieter madness. He takes Sancho to witness of his straits, ere he sends him off to beseech mercy of Dulcinea. Nor is he fooled by Sancho’s meeting with the lady. The fact that Sancho has left behind him the very letter which he describes as giving to Dulcinea does not disturb Don Quixote. He is not dwelling with facts, but with truths of his own conscious making. And he tells his squire, speaking in elegiac temper of himself: “That if he did not achieve great matters, he died to achieve them; and if I am indeed not disowned and disdained by Dulcinea del Toboso, it sufficeth me ... to be absent from her.” Later he meets the swine girl whom he has transfigured into princess. And since he speaks of the magic making her appear as the facts (and Sancho) would have it—a coarse and silly female with a breath of garlic—it is plainthat the facts are in his mind. He is not fooled. Nor is he lying when he speaks of magic. Magic is the deep inner change of attitude. This is the secret of the fakirs of the East. This istruemagic. Don Quixote’s attitude changes the fact of the swine girl into his truth of a princess.
The fooled is Sancho. For Sancho does not understand that fact and truth may be foes. He takes one for the other. He believes that Dulcinea’s enchantment, the Cave of Montesino, the Island which he is sent to govern, the Empress whom his master is to wed are facts. As the tale grows, poor Sancho is more and more enmired in confusion. He is in danger of madness, losing his distinction between the world of shapes and this world of ideas in which Don Quixote rides.
The old knight’s progress is willful. There is, for instance, the wondrous ride on Clavileño, the wooden horse in the garden of the Duke, upon which the pair are wafted through heaven and hell. Sancho claims to have stolen a glimpse and to have seen them soaring through the firmaments of fire. And Don Quixote answers:
“If you desire me to believe you in what you have just seen in the sky, I desire that you should believe me in what I saw within the Cave of Montesino. No need for me to say more....”
“If you desire me to believe you in what you have just seen in the sky, I desire that you should believe me in what I saw within the Cave of Montesino. No need for me to say more....”
He is proposing to Sancho what is neither more nor less than a deal; he will accept his squire’s lies, if Sancho accepts his own distinction between a glorious truth and a drab world of facts. But Sancho’s mind has no such athleticism. He is not Ramón Lull! He has never heard of León Hebreo. He is forever mixing two insoluble realms.
At last Don Quixote meets his fate. In Barcelona, having been acclaimed by crowds with mingled laughter and devotion which they can never understand, he is challenged to combat by the Knight of the White Moon. He isworsted, of course: and this is his end. For thecaballero de la luna blancais none other than the bachelor Sansón Carrasco. The goodly Don Antonio cannot understand this medieval nonsense in his busy modern seaport. Carrasco explains:
“My lord, know that I, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, am of the same place as Don Quixote de la Mancha, whose simplicity and madness have moved to tears all of us who know him: and among these none has wept more than I: and believing that there lay his health and peace, in that he should reside in his own land and house, I determined to return him thither; and so three months since I went upon the road as a knight-errant, calling myselfel caballero de los espejos, meaning to fight him, vanquish him without hurt, and having put as the condition of our encounter that the vanquished remain in the discretion of the victor: and what I thought to demand of him (for I judged him beforehand already vanquished) was that he should return to his home, and sally not forth from it for a whole year; in which time he might be cured; but fate ordered otherwise, for I was the defeated. I was hurled from my horse, and hence my purpose could not take effect; he went his way, and I returned, beaten, bruised, mashed by my fall which to be sure was dangerous enough; but for this I did not give up my meaning which was to seek him out once more and defeat him, as you have seen me do this day. And since he is so punctilious in all that pertains to the knight-errant, without doubt soever he will obey the order I have given him, in honor of his word. This, my lord, is what has passed, without my need to say another thing; I beseech you, do not discover me nor say to Don Quixote who I am, in order that these my good intentions may have effect, and that there may return to reason a man so excellent in reason,when he is left alone by the unreasons of chivalry....”
“My lord, know that I, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, am of the same place as Don Quixote de la Mancha, whose simplicity and madness have moved to tears all of us who know him: and among these none has wept more than I: and believing that there lay his health and peace, in that he should reside in his own land and house, I determined to return him thither; and so three months since I went upon the road as a knight-errant, calling myselfel caballero de los espejos, meaning to fight him, vanquish him without hurt, and having put as the condition of our encounter that the vanquished remain in the discretion of the victor: and what I thought to demand of him (for I judged him beforehand already vanquished) was that he should return to his home, and sally not forth from it for a whole year; in which time he might be cured; but fate ordered otherwise, for I was the defeated. I was hurled from my horse, and hence my purpose could not take effect; he went his way, and I returned, beaten, bruised, mashed by my fall which to be sure was dangerous enough; but for this I did not give up my meaning which was to seek him out once more and defeat him, as you have seen me do this day. And since he is so punctilious in all that pertains to the knight-errant, without doubt soever he will obey the order I have given him, in honor of his word. This, my lord, is what has passed, without my need to say another thing; I beseech you, do not discover me nor say to Don Quixote who I am, in order that these my good intentions may have effect, and that there may return to reason a man so excellent in reason,when he is left alone by the unreasons of chivalry....”
Carrasco reveals that his deep instinct against Don Quixote is buttressed by a shallow understanding. When the old knight saw the familiar face of his friend within the vizor of the defeatedcaballero de los espejos, he was not troubled: he knew that magic had turned the truth of the defeated warrior into the face of his neighbor, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco. Had he now been told that the Knight of the White Moon appeared to others as this same bachelor, he would have found a similar solution—and obeyed the knight, though his heart broke.
So now, stripped of his harness, Don Quixote makes his ashen way homeward from Barcelona. He does not yet know that he is vanquished for good. His word binds him for a year: thereafter, can he not sally forth again? Meantime, he need not stay idle in a gross world of facts. “If it seem well to thee,” he tells his squire, “I should like that we turn pastors even for the time I am caught up.” He makes his plans. “I shall buy a few sheep and all other things needed for the pastoral life.” His friends will share this new transfiguration which has the advantage of being more sociable than the life of the knight-errant. He will become the pastorQuixotiz; Sancho will becomePancino. Sancho’s wife Teresa will beTeresona. The bachelor Carrasco will be known asSansoninoorCarrascón: being a learned man, he shall take his choice. The priest (el cura) he might call, not knowing his true name,el pastor Curiambro.
These persons, being facts, must change their names ere they can enter his truthful pastoral Eden. Dulcinea remains Dulcinea: for alreadysheis of the world of his truth. With this last lucid statement of his mind, the old man comes upon his home where soon he is to die. No more may he be a knight, dispensing Justice in a real world inhabited by such true concepts as ogres, virgins, sorcerers. Even the little interlude of pastor is denied him. Helanguishes; and with his strength, his creative will expires.
The child returneth to the mother. Don Alonso Quijano el Bueno lies upon a death-bed and renounces Don Quixote. Again Cervantes’ child shrinks to the arms of his parent. He abjures the careers of all knights-errant:
“Ya soy enemigo de Amadís de Gaula y de toda la infinita caterva de su linaje; ya me son odiosas todas las historias profanas de la andante caballería; ya conozco mi necedad y el peligro en que me pusieron harlas leído; ya por misericordia de Díos, escarmentando en cabeza propia, las abomino....”
“Ya soy enemigo de Amadís de Gaula y de toda la infinita caterva de su linaje; ya me son odiosas todas las historias profanas de la andante caballería; ya conozco mi necedad y el peligro en que me pusieron harlas leído; ya por misericordia de Díos, escarmentando en cabeza propia, las abomino....”
. . . . . .
Don Quixote, as he emerges unscathed from the mind of his author, is a man possessed: not a madman. He is a man possessed as were the Hebrew prophets, or Jesus, or Vardhamana, or Boehme or Plotinus, or any poet.... The difference is subtle but is clear beyond the logical distinctions of man’s reason. No atheist would call Amos mad, but a man possessed. To Jesus saying: “When ye have lifted up the Son of God, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as my Father hath taught me” no Jew would ascribe madness, but possession. Quixote is possessed of an Ideal. And since this ideal was mothered of the world struggling toward light, and since now it mothers him entire, becoming his truth and his world, Don Quixote takes his place among the broken and triumphant prophets. Even the alienist durst not call him mad, for in the drama which he enacts he knows his part: and the more fully senses what he calls the truth, knowing its bodily difference from the facts about him.
Reality for the medieval soul was neo-platonic. The conceptual was real: all else was merely fact. The bitter apartness of Jew and Arab from medieval Europe was due to the failure of the Semite, despite Philo and Al Gazali, to assimilate neo-platonism deeply. Plotinus, Porphyry, Augustine, Iamblicus created the psychology ofa thousand years of Europe. The real is not this world. We are snared and mired in a viscous web of seeming. All congeries of sense is this. And knowledge tends, not to a translating of this factual film into the real but to the piercing it, the abandoning it altogether. This attitude is far from the naturalistic mysticism of the Hebrew, from the intellectual mysticism of Plato; from the profound nihilism of the Hindu who recognized the unity of the ideal and the factual, interpreting one always in terms of the other. Medievalism is a child—and a childish offshoot—of all these. It declares: There is a real world, and it is not this one. Man can reach the real world, by various means. He must crucify the fact, he must worship the saints, he must lose his body in order to save his soul.
Don Quixote moves through a world neo-platonically real. He is as aware as Sancho of sheep, windmills, inns, country wenches. He chooses to disregard these lies of fact. He erects a systematic symbol whereby his senses vault the phenomena about him, and deliver him the truth. Thereby, the windmill serves him as a giant; the sheep as enchanted armies; the empty cave of Montesino as the scene of Glory, and Maritornes the whore as the virgin lady languishing in love. He has elected to do Justice upon earth. These giants, armies and disasters serve him as means to that end.
By a similar process, the medieval mind made all history into parable and symbol. The medieval mind is subjectivism carried to the intense conclusion made possible by the barbarous Germanic will. Philo’s allegories of the Scripture, the Book of Zohar, the way of Egypt and India with all written words, treating them as intricate and recondite symbols, obsessed the mind of medieval Europe. No act is simple, no name is simply a name. The world becomes a dramatic Mystery, with every scene bearing upon the central Plot: the soul’s salvation. For a thousand years, literature and art, to be serious, had to be allegory.
The mood of medieval symbolism, while it was fatheredby Plato and the Jews, is neither Greek nor Jewish. With these two adult peoples, symbolism held its place: it remained a relative and ancillary life within the mastering testimony of the world. Already in Plotinus and Saint Augustine, the balance is lost. When we are deep in the Middle Ages, we are deep in an allegoric jungle: the paths of fact are gone; there comes no daylight of reason in this tangle of monster foliage and whelming branches.
Don Quixote’s world is medievally real. It is a hypertrophy of such births as Chivalry, Romance and Sainthood. In its character of wholeness, of deliberate disregard for fact, it springs from the fountainhead of neo-platonic thought.
But if this transfiguring of the world to his own will is a medieval act, Don Quixote’s impulse is not medieval, is not even Christian. The medieval will, myriad in its flowerings, was childishly simple in its seed: the soul’s salvation. Nothing else counted: or rather, everything had its sole significance, indeed its reality, as it bore on this monomaniac problem of each soul: to be saved. That a man’s soul might be saved, all acts since Adam had been apportioned. For this, the Hebrews lived, the Prophets preached, Christ died: for this, Peter builded his Church and the Jews remained outside in perpetual testimony of damnation. For this, men went on Crusades, conquered heathens, gave birth to children in holy wedlock. For this there was love and justice: for this there was life and death. But Don Quixote is no more centrally concerned with his soul’s salvation than if he had been a Jew. He believes in his soul; he hopes it shall be saved. But his acts are motived by a will far less personal: the enacting of Justice.
Don Quixote looks upon himself as the instrument of Justice. He is the embodied and moving will of Justice. The neo-platonic Christian lived justly, that he might pierce better the Phenomenal Lie and win salvation. The Arab warrior spread justice with his sword because the Prophet was just, and he must serve the Prophet to be saved. Theknight of the Round Table of King Arthur performed deeds of justice—rescuing the virgin, slaying the bad giant—because it was good sport and because it was a way to his salvation. But Don Quixote wills Justice upon earth, because he hungers after Justice, because there is naught else true save Justice. If, by the sheer testimony of his words and deeds, we analyze this passion of Don Quixote, we learn that for him instinctively Justice meant Unity. The world must become One: and the means thereto is Justice.
The symbols with which he works are medieval Christian; his mental mechanism is neo-platonic: his knightly attitude is more Moorish than Teutonic (as contrasted with the Germanic tenor of the freebooting Cid). But this heart of his will is Hebrew. The parabolic line of its enactment in his life links Don Quixote with the Prophets.
The words God and Christ are surprisingly seldom on the old knight’s lips. He cites Roland and Amadis more often than the Saints. They, indeed, are his saints. But his God is Justice. And so impersonal, so monotheistic is He, that He wants more than a body; almost He lacks a name. Or rather His body is the world: His name is Justice.
The eidolon-making Greeks said in wonder of the Jews: “They are a people who see God everywhere and localize him nowhere.” So Don Quixote created for himself a world that should consist solely of opportunities for Justice. To this end he rejects, selects and builds in the world which meets his eyes. His mind works like the instinct of an artist. But he is a peculiar sort of artist. His ethical purpose, the intensity with which he imbues every action with his vision and turns the social fact into a spiritual Word, recalls the Prophets. Amos, too, looked out on a world made wholly the matrix for the vision of God: and moved in Israel as a flame within the burning wood. To Hosea, even the wife of his bed was a symbol of the intention of the Lord. Every detail of the Prophet’s life—even the silence and the dark, even the failure andthe sin—is caught in the unity of his vision and becomes a Word to express it. Thus Don Quixote sets forth to perform Justice. He must perform it constantly. The world must become material—a continuum of material—for his performance. But like every artist and like every prophet Don Quixote must translate his vision into the accepted formulæ of his mind. In his case, these formulæ are the shoddy regalia of decadent knighthood. Justice is to be performed by rescuing virgins, unseating ogres, slaying giants, despiting necromancers. Don Quixote rides through Spain. Along these highways graze sheep, trudge merchants: there are inns but no castles. Don Quixote does not see the enactment of Justice in such terms as these. So he transforms them.
His Justice is an attempt at unity. But it is very simple. The real world of Don Quixote is no intricate entexture of hierarchic values. It is not like the mazed affluence of life which the Hindu fused into One. It has none of the deep involument of souls and states fused by Hebrew and Hellene into God. It is a simple pyramid. At the base are knights and villains, virgins and married ladies, angels, enchanters, demons, ogres. And at the pyramid’s peak is the ideal of all this homogeneous matter: freedom and liberty. This ideal is uncorrupted by any political or sectarian dogma. It is never more clear than in the adventure with the convicts. With clinking chains, this squad of scoundrels is led south by the soldiers of the King, to meet the galley in which they must serve their terms. Here are men in chains: Don Quixote’s ideal of Justice demands that chains be stricken off. The soldiers protest that these chains are virtuous and lawful: it avails not. The freed rascals repay their liberator with a shower of stones and make off with Sancho’s ass: this avails nothing. Don Quixote will not be swerved from his immaculate conception of Justice.
In such episodes as this, we touch the core of the miracle of Don Quixote. His nature is ridiculously funny, and is Christlike. The freeing of legally judged robbers,the letting of lions out of cages, is farce: and yet illumes a justice above laws whose vision is Christlike and whose enactment brings upon the knight a Christlike fate. In laughing at Don Quixote, we crucify him. Mockery and buffets create the knight of the Sorrowful Figure: our own roars of glee at his well-earned mishaps hail the ridiculous Christ.
And here we come back into the medieval. The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels is a dominant unbroken man. The Passion on the Cross is a mystic interlude—probably an interpolation—which rends the Temple far more than it does Jesus. His cry, about the ninth hour; “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” is a shredding weakness against the serenity and might of the historic Man. Jesus in his true character is almost wholly Hebrew Prophet. With the Lord in his mouth, he is imperious, even overbearing. The Hebrew spirit is as adverse from ill-health—from martyrdom as an end-in-itself—as the Greek. But with the infantilization of the West, with the upshowing of the childish spirit within the iron carapace of Rome, Jesus becomes pitiful. Medieval art makes him lean and ugly; asceticism borrowed from the Hindus and Egyptians mangles his body. Within the splendor of the Gothic church there comes to live a shrunken Christ. And as medievalism stumbled southward, the process gathered. The baroque churches of Seville are fantasmagoria of tropic wealth, writhed like a forest about the Sensitive Plant: Christ, milkpale, blood-spotted.
So at the end, Don Quixote. He is laughter-spotted, blood-spotted. Reason bespatters him and makes him comic. But since in the minds of men this reason is profane, and his mad impulse holy, he is a Christ—a medieval, an unjewish Christ.
. . . . . .
His deeds get him into trouble. Part One abounds in buffets that unhorse him, knock out his teeth, bathe him in blood and muddy him all over. Part Two has a less rollicking mood. Cervantes has been affected by DonQuixote. But there is worse: Don Quixote, enacting Justice, brings trouble to others—and to the best of them. There is the boy whom he frees from a flogging master, and who is flogged the worse, in payment for the humiliation the master has suffered from Don Quixote. There is the freeing of the convicts—a menace to every household in the land. There is the freeing of the lion, to the probable disgrace of the poor keeper. Don Quixote wrecks funerals: he maims an innocent Penitent for life. He unhinges Sancho’s peace: brings the anarchy of ambition into the breast of this sweet clod of the earth. He visits destruction upon the unfortunate inns which he takes for castles. He robs a barber of his copper dish. He drubs innocent servants. He smashes the sole fortune of Maese Pedro—his set of puppets. He commits sacrilege even: plunging full-tilt upon a pilgrimage of disciplinants, breaking legs and wresting from the outraged hand of a priest an image of the Virgin.
Though he offends many and amuses more, he convinces no one. That a prophet should inspire jeers and hatred is natural: but that he should have not one disciple? and that at the end of his mission, he should recant, and call his mission folly? How can such win the love of the world?
The strong whom he encounters laugh at him. The weak flee from him. The Nurse and his niece do not laugh: they weep and tear their hair for his unseemly conduct. In the bachelor Carrasco he inspires a nagging irritation. This man is common sense incarnate: he is ill-at-ease before the irreducible vision of the artist. He goes out of his way to down him: dons the armor of folly in order to bring home the fool. This must not be construed as altruism. Carrasco pays tribute to Don Quixote, in despite of himself. It is his own peace he is after. He is aware, albeit far too rational ever to admit it to himself, that this utter idealist stalking La Mancha robs his small reality of ease. Common sense—the sense of approximation and ofcompromise—is fragile and is nervous. It must sequester the poet-prophet in his home town.
Perhaps the ugliest episode in the book treats of the knight’s entertainment in the castle of the Duke and Duchess. They are the worldly-wise, the worldly-cultured, even as Carrasco is the pragmatist. They take Don Quixote in; and make him a show for their own genteel delectation. They are the perpetual patron of the artist. They feed him, flatter him, serve him: everything but believe him. Their minds hold him safe from their hearts. And nowhere does the knight of the Sorrowful Figure appear so pathetic, so ridiculous, so disarmed, as under this ducal roof where he is lionized and where whole pageantries are enacted to pander to his need of enacting Justice.
Quixote survives the sophistical salon of the Duchess and of her lecherous ladies. But while he is among them, he is shrunken. He goes forth at last, aware of the subtle poison of their praise, to seek the adventure of Justice—to be laid low by the bachelor Carrasco.
But there is his squire? are there not moments at least in which the squire is a true disciple? Sancho Panza seems to have come latterly to Cervantes. Indeed, this loamy son of the Manchegan desert is less immediate altogether to the world illumined by Don Quixote. That treeless, sapless plain whose horizons are beyond eye, whose winters are blasts of ice, whose summers are fire, whose indeterminate panorama of details—dust, men, towns, roads—is chaos, is the true mother of Don Quixote. La Mancha is a defeated desert: neither waste nor garden, it imposes the way of gardens upon the mood of the desert. Don Quixote transfigures its inns and sordid villages, its hard-fist peasants and its heavy girls into a ruthless psychic unity; much as the son of the true desert drew its vast horizons and its breastlike slopes into the body of God. But how in this world was Sancho Panza born? For not Falstaff of verdant England is more robustly gay, not Panurge of luxuriant France more subtly sensual.
Sancho is wholly the creation of Cervantes. Don Quixote, born of his author, outgrew him. Sancho, too, grows organically. Contact with his master determines this. But none the less he lies ever full within Cervantes’ will: he is the sheer miraculous birth of gayety from the frustrate desert of Cervantes’ life.
To Sancho, the “phenomenal” world, the world of facts is everything. Since he conceives no other, and since his master continuously lives within another of his own conceiving, Sancho is held busy translating into factual terms the entire adventure which he rides with Don Quixote.
A vertiginous effort it is, and it ends by making Sancho more nearly mad than his knight. He believes factually in his Island. He believes himself its governor, though he has crossed no water to attain it. The maid who is to wed Don Quixote after he has gone to Africa to slay her foe is factually to him the Princess Micomacoma. This enchantment must be a fact, like the one which befell Dulcinea, turning her into the wench Aldonza. Sancho vacillates forever between the credulity and the skepticism of the literal mind: ignorance is so clearly the matrix of his sanity that the delusions of his master become wise by contrast. There are no dimensions to his thinking. Don Quixote is mad—or he is a true knight-errant: the adventure is wild,—or there will be a veritable island.
His dominant impulse, either way, is greed. Greed makes him doubt: greed makes him trust his master. Yet underneath, there works subtly upon Sancho a sweeter influence: his indefeasible respect for Don Quixote. Howsoever he argue, howsoever clear he see, howsoever he sicken from constant thumpings and sparse earnings, howsoever wry are the pleasures of his Island, Sancho cannot altogether free himself from the dominion of an idealizing will which he can never understand. In a directer way (since he is no intellectual) than that of Sansón Carrasco, he is held and haunted by Don Quixote. When he is absent from his master he is lost. When, in a scene more touching than the pathos of two quarreling lovers,Don Quixote gives him leave to depart homeward, promising him reward for his past service, Sancho bursts into tears and vows that he cannot forsake him.
He loves his master. Not greed alone, or if so, the greed of devotion to an ungrasped grandeur, holds him astride his dappled ass to follow Don Quixote to the sea. And yet, he despises him; and he betrays him. He judges him, and he exploits him. He makes sure of his reward in Don Quixote’s will, and he gives up the comfort of his wife to follow him through ridiculous dangers. He is this sensual, lusty, greedy oaf of the soil. And yet in the love that masters him he is Cervantes, himself: Cervantes who created Don Quixote to laugh and to mock—and who remained to worship.
For this is the crux of the matter. Cervantes needed Sancho to keep Don Quixote in the perspective for laughter. “Common-sense” rides along with the “madman,” and constantly shows him up. But here is Sancho, shown up himself! Here is Cervantes, shown up! For Cervantes accepts Don Quixote. And that is why we accept him. Cervantes builds up these countless reasons for rejecting him: the havoc wrought by his acts, the shoddy stuff of his dream, the addled way of his brain. It avails naught. Cervantes ends with love. And we—the more humbly in that we have mocked and roared—avow our veneration.
Of such stuff is made the holiness of Don Quixote: mildewed notions, slapstick downfalls. We laugh at his unfitness to impose his dream upon a stubborn world: we see well enough that Rocinante is a nag and the knight himself, helmeted with a dish, a mangy addled fellow. And we accept, in order that he may live this nonsense, the disruption of inns, the discomfiture of pilgrims, the routing of funerals, the breaking of bones!
Cervantes strives hard to snuff out the aspiring hunger of his soul. For this, Don Quixote is bemuddied and deformed. But Don Quixote lives: and his chief enemy—Cervantes—gives him his blood and his passion, in order that he may triumph.
Don Quixoteis written in a prose majestical, dense, warm, lucid, still. It is the fulfillment of the Castilian music which Rojas’La Celestinapromised a century before. The tempo is slow. More correctly, the organic movement of the prose is slow; and the facet movements are swift and nervous. The Cervantine prose is a portrait of the soul of Spain whose cadences of desire and will resolve into an immobile whole.
The accentual music of this prose had already become the innate quality of Castilian. Cervantes heightened his inheritance. The natural genius of the language was already, in the mystics and novelists before him, one that made for a muscular, slow yet sharply surfaced prose. InDon Quixote, the music has as its base an almost cosmic beat, within which as in a firmament, the swifter, brighter, more fleeting qualities stand forth. Cervantes makes good use of the agglutinated verb and pronoun, of the syncopations within the general prose rhythm. Above all, he makes use of the loamy expressions of the people, transfiguring them, however, into a tonal design not remotely naturalistic and more akin to the prose of the religious writers than of the pícaro novelists who also helped themselves to the vernacular of the soil.
In the great novel of Rojas there is a like marriage of pungent and ironical stuffs in an exalted orchestration. The difference is one of quality and quantity. Cervantes’ instruments are more varied; his themes and the materials that build them are more numerous, even if no one is richer than the central form ofLa Celestina. Indeed, the earlier work is the intenser; its colors are morehot. There is in Cervantes a strain of the north which the Jew Rojas lacked; and which made his æsthetic action longer and slower. The art of the Semite is more lyrical, less architectonic.La Celestinais a bomb-like organ; a piston-strong machine driving hard and singly. It is the tale, moreover, of a city where life is vertical and packed. Its form is true to its theme. ButDon Quixoteis the story of a journey—of three journeys rather—over the plains and mountains of La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia. Its basal movement is panoramic, horizontal. Its loftier dimensions are attained by the associative power of its hero who, riding the roads of Spain, touches incessantly the spiritual realms of a people, of an age, of a soul. The formal values ofLa Celestinaare more manifest. Very consciously, an intellectual, nervously coördinated man bound together the counterpoint of his design, so that each element partakesimmediatelyof the whole. This is not the case inDon Quixote. The materials of the book—persons of the road, interpolated stories, situations—stand end to end, flat for the most part and quite episodic. The knight enters them organically. He transfigures them as a new element in a chemical solution. He enacts a continuous catalysis upon the parts of Spain which he encounters. The result of this is two-fold. There is created for the entire book asurface of actionand aline of action. These hold the attention of the reader: these, indeed, caused the book’s popularity when it first appeared. The surface of action in the large is the Spain to which the Spanish people through the picaresque novel had been accustomed for over fifty years. The line of action is the pilgrimage of Quixote and Sancho.
But each of these two actions is complex. In consequence, their organic synthesis is often subtle and hidden. This synthesis gives to the work its unity: and one can enjoyDon Quixotewithout awareness of it. Indeed, the synthesis may take place in the reader’s mind, long after he has absorbed its elements and put the book aside.
Consciousness of the organic greatness ofLa Celestinamust come at once; since that greatness is the result of a design preconceived and implicit in the book’s several scenes. Consciousness of the greatness ofDon Quixotecame late even to its author and not to Spain until a whole century had passed. For its parts have an immediate life of their own; only after they have become lost and merged in one another does the book’s unity, as a synthesis of all these parts, dawn on the reader.
The knight himself is not so much an organ in this ultimate synthesis as a dimension. The synthesis is not articulate in him alone, any more than in the episodes. But it is articulate in the book’s language. And the rare individual who understood the æsthetic nature of prose might tell from the first page thatDon Quixotewas a stupendously formal work of art.
This prose is abecomingprose. It is heavy and pregnant. It is the antithesis of the immediate prose of Santa Teresa or of the lapidic absoluteness of the verse of Luis de Góngora. It is attuned at every moment to the whole of the book. It lacks swiftness and often sharpness. It is frequently clumsy in the projecting of little scenes. The book abounds in episodes that Quevedo would have fleshed more brightly or the author of Lazarillo pointed to more effect.
Cervantes is forever after deeper game. If, for instance, he describes the cozy dinner at which Quixote and Sancho shared the meat and acorns of six goatherds, the prose is not fundamentally focused upon thegenre: but upon the tragic implications of Don Quixote’s presence and upon the irony of the attitude of the goatherds.
But Cervantes neverstatesthese deeper implications. His prosecreatesthem. And creates them, by the immanent and abstract nature of its music. This immanence runs throughout the work, and thereby Cervantes is permanently saved the unæsthetic makeshift of statement. His direct attention goes unhindered to the presentment of the action. The action’s significance, one might say itssoul,is implicit as is the significance of life implicit andunassertedin material substance and in specific action.
But as in all great art, this deep effect is won at sacrifice of a lesser. Analogously, El Greco maintains the larger anatomy of his vision throughout the details of his paintings, although he loses thereby the grace and accuracy of the anatomy of his subjects.
There are still cavilers at El Greco’s drawing; and there have always been depreciators of Cervantes’ prose. Lope de Vega whose prosody was an immediate lyric flow of two dimensions, was perhaps sincere in his denigration of Cervantes. And even today Miguel de Unamuno, for all his adoration of Don Quixote, decries the language of Cervantes, for a similar reason: Unamuno’s lyric mood can not span the parabolas in which the figure of Don Quixote is limned.
These parabolas are thelinesof the prose: and they are not, like simpler curves, to be plotted in the segment of any specific action in the book. But they are to befeltin every page. That is why the first chapter ofDon Quixoteannounces the inscrutable tragi-comedy, although Cervantes when he wrote it had no knowledge of his undertaking. The music of his prose is the mother of his book. It is the beginning of the book’s significance, and it is the conclusion. Nor can it be translated.
. . . . . .
A work of art in whose making significant forces have not played is inconceivable. The veriest trash, the most incompetent effort must in some wise have issued from a man’s life, from a people’s will, from an epoch’s spirit. What lies between such work and work significant in itself is not difference of material, but form. The poor work is one in which the elements of life are inchoate and, failing to achieve a unity of form, cannot be said to achieve life itself. The real work of art is that in which these elements achieve a body: is that of which these elementsarethe body. But the bodies of men and age whence its elements of life have sprung will rot away.Other men and other ages will succeed; and these in their will to know essential union with all men and all ages preserve the true work of art. For in it only, do those moldered lives of other men and ages touch them. The real work of art, builded of the substances of time, therefore alone does not exist in time. And a consideration of the work of art, whose basis is not equally beyond time—is not metaphysical or religious—is inadequate to art’s function in the world of time.
Before all else,Don Quixoteis in form the life of Cervantes.
Toward the end of his last adventure, on the way to Barcelona, Don Quixote with Sancho attempts to hold the road against a herd of bulls. But they are overturned, trampled, bemudded. They find a limpid spring garlanded with trees and wash the blood and mire from their sore bodies. Sancho brings food from the saddlebags. But his master is too disconsolate to eat. Sancho waits patiently: seeing no end to Don Quixote’s sorrow nor to his own hunger, he falls to.
“Eat, friend Sancho,” says Don Quixote. “Sustain the life which means more to you than to me, and leave me to die in the embrace of my thoughts and in the power of my disgraces. I, Sancho, was born to live dying; you, to die eating. And that you may see how I speak truth in this, behold me printed in history, celebrated in arms, commended in all my acts, respected in principles, desired by damsels; from end to end, whilst I awaited the palms, triumphs and crowns merited by my valorous deeds, you have seen me as this morning laid low, outraged and ground down, under the hoofs of obscene and filthy brutes....”
The roars and blows that greet the Sorrowful Knight might, in the jargon of our day, be termed Cervantes’ masochistic satisfaction. Cervantes ridicules himself for the dreaming fool he has been. But the strain is too deep. This figure that he sets going to make mock of is after all his soul. He grows away from his embittered pose. Hecan still laugh at his creature; still gather him at the end back into the logic of his story. But in Part Two, he is seen defending him against the laughter of others. He is seen regarding his knight, for all his folly, as purer than the sensible world: and at the last, more real.
But the times were out of joint. Spain and Don Quixote were pitted against Reasons: the logic of their ideal against the reasons of a world breaking from the unity of God which once had been the Roman Church, into a multiverse of fragmentary facts which is our modern crisis.
Frustrate brilliance, seeking to be healed, is the one unity of the modern story. Since Columbus voyaged, we have voyaged and bruised ourselves in spiritual chaos: seeking the salvation of wholeness and seeking it in vain.
From our search has come the national concept of the State, for instance: a degenerate medievalism, this—a wistful effort to achieve the wholeness of Rome without the holiness that informed it. Has come the Marxian Internation—an inverted idealism which put up the economic process in place of the Hegelian Spirit. Has come the faith in science as Revelation. Has come with Rousseau, the seeking of salvation through the return to the unity of man’s primordial needs: with Nietzsche, the same seeking in the but seeming opposite direction of the superman. And finally, Darwin inspired us to hope that God might be inserted as the principle of flux in biologic process. All these prophecies and dogmatic actions strove alike to enlist mankind once more in a full unity of life and impulse. All who believed in them, to the extent of their devotion, have been Quixotes.
Don Quixote gave himself to make the world One, through the application of measures that strike us as shoddy and unreal. His were the old “magics” of chivalry—of a Europe peopled by Germanic children and schooled by adolescents from Athens, Alexandria and Rome. The magics no longerworked: had indeed not worked to build a universal House, since Dante. But we, laughing betimes at Quixote, patronizing Dante, have for five hundred yearsbeen struggling to construct our house with materials equally inadequate. The primacy of reason or of subjective intuition, the autonomy of science or of economic purpose, the ideal of the State or social interstate, the dream of communism or the return to nature—one and all are magics as impotent and as unreal as those of the old knight who rode La Mancha on a bony nag, with a barber’s dish on his brow, and in his head a neo-platonic vision.
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Don Quixote and Faust are the great antistrophes to the Commedia of Dante. The body of Dante’s poem had the same elements as the body of Dante’s world. They were the Judæo-Christian revelation, Aristotelian logic, Euclidean Nature, the Ptolemaic cosmos. They cracked, and with them Catholic Europe passed. Only in Dante and in certain other art forms, like the Gothic churches, has that body lived.
Don Quixote and Faust are bodies of Europe’s dissolution—forms of our modern formlessness and of our need to be whole. They are perhaps the most vital æsthetic organs of the activity into which modern man was thrown by the deliquescence of his medieval world. As a poem, the Spanish work is the greater. Faust is the child of personal lyrism and speculative will. His sources, like the Knight’s, are medieval. He seeks knowledge and through knowledge personal redemption. He knows that he cannot be redeemed, save by a cosmic understanding; and his sense of understanding is in this, the mystic’s: that it implies possession of what is understood, and a dynamic act. But Faust remains the atom, the unfertile seed of human will. His way to unify the world is to dominate and absorb it within the complex of personal volition. This is heroic, but it is savage. It ignores the fundamental wisdom of the Jews and Hindus which taught that the health of the personal will lies through the threshold of its death. Faust seeks knowledge through its extended acquisition. Mefisto is the symbol of his faith in the reality of extension. If he can garner the right catchwords, he can swallow theworld; and the world will become one within him. This bluntly is the means toward a new synthesis adapted by all the centuries of Europe that intervene between the Renaissance and us: and it is Kabbalistic! The personal will, in its endeavor to achieve fusion with the world, has concocted formulæ that were to act directly on the world, and by magic to control it. These formulæ of course became external organisms: they became a machine, an empire or empiric law. Instead of lending themselves to a solution, they spawned a multitude of problems. They could not fecundate the personal will, from which they issued. For it is the Law that from personal will, alone when it is rendered fertile by its own disaster (like a rotted seed) can cosmic will and a cosmic synthesis arise.