Chapter X: Part THREE: Beyond Spain (7)

Cervantes looks at Spain. Outward splendor flings Spain’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.

_b. The Career of the 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 poor _mozo_. 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. _Rocín_ means hack horse: wherefore Don Quixote meant that his mount was _before_ all 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 so revealing?” 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 pay _reales_ for 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 baby in 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 whom henceforth he will worship. Her he makes his “truth”; there is no evidence that the _fact_ of 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’s _fact_ about 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 plain that 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 is _true_ magic. 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....”

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 is worsted, of course: and this is his end. For the _caballero de la luna blanca_ is 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 myself _el 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 defeated _caballero 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 pastor _Quixotiz_; Sancho will become _Pancino_. Sancho’s wife Teresa will be _Teresona_. The bachelor Carrasco will be known as _Sansonino_ or _Carrascón_: 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 already _she_ is 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. He languishes; 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....”

* * * * *

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 of a 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 fathered by 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. The knight 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 and the 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 Don Quixote. 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 of compromise--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.

_c. The Book of the Hero_

_Don Quixote_ is written in a prose majestical, dense, warm, lucid, still. It is the fulfillment of the Castilian music which Rojas’ _La Celestina_ promised 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. In _Don 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 of _La Celestina_. Indeed, the earlier work is the intenser; its colors are more hot. 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 Celestina_ is 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. But _Don Quixote_ is 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 of _La Celestina_ are more manifest. Very consciously, an intellectual, nervously coördinated man bound together the counterpoint of his design, so that each element partakes _immediately_ of the whole. This is not the case in _Don 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 a _surface of action_ and a _line 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 enjoy _Don Quixote_ without 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 of _La Celestina_ must 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 of _Don Quixote_ came 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 that _Don Quixote_ was a stupendously formal work of art.

This prose is a _becoming_ prose. 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 the _genre_: but upon the tragic implications of Don Quixote’s presence and upon the irony of the attitude of the goatherds.

But Cervantes never _states_ these deeper implications. His prose _creates_ them. 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 its _soul_, is implicit as is the significance of life implicit and _unasserted_ in 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 the _lines_ of 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 be _felt_ in every page. That is why the first chapter of _Don Quixote_ announces 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 elements _are_ the 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 Quixote_ is 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. He can 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 longer _worked_: had indeed not worked to build a universal House, since Dante. But we, laughing betimes at Quixote, patronizing Dante, have for five hundred years been 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.

* * * * *

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 the world; 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.

The legend of Christ was deeper: deeper the blundering way of Quixote. For he sought the grace of union not by absorbing the world into himself, but by transmuting himself into an impersonal symbol of the world.

He failed; but his book lives; for with the failure is the triumphant impulse that led up to it. The effect of the crusade was death; the cause was life.

The magics of Don Quixote are as absurd as our own. But his impulse was as true as the Prophets’. The Old and the New Testaments also are a tale of sins and follies. But these are visible, because the light of God shines on them. In the effect that passes, all the prophets and all the Christs have failed. None of them has failed, in the cause that remains. The cause of Don Quixote’s life strikes us as truer than the realities which brought about his death. This is the pitiful best that we can say for him--or for any of the prophets.