Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 20
XX
DON QUIXOTE
No soy tan loco ni tan menguado como debo de haberle parecido.—Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XVII.
I
Great is the power of genius, even though it be constrained to inhabit the flesh of a swordsman, soldier, slave, accountant, adventurer, prisoner, wandering poet, and needy courtier by the name of Miguel Cervantes.
By virtue of this power the shade of Don Quixote has succeeded in deceiving us. We have been led to think that his life was full of deception in the sense that he was himself deceived by carnivorous men, decadent times, and impossible books. His life was indeed full of deception, but he was himself the deceiver, and we of the succeeding generations have been the ones deceived.
Cervantes does all he can to set before us—like a lank marionette decked out in obsessions and scraps of iron—a Don Quixote crazed through excessive reading, a Don Quixote magnified by his sapient eloquence and still more by his imitative madness. And we of the later generations have adored this Don Quixote as the martyr of a pure, militant, and derided Christianity at odds with the persistent and worldwide life of those baptized pagans for whom convention is truth, idleness is wisdom, comfort is goodness, and bread and meat are the only tangible essence of life. Every man who has challenged this common paganism has thought himself a knight, and has felt on his own shoulders the staves that beat him to the ground. In Don Quixote’s wise antique serenity, in his futile love of the good, we moderns have seen a reflection of Socrates and of Christ, both of whom went to death at man’s behest because they were better than other men.
Don Quixote has seemed to us but half a martyr: men left him his life—we said—but blows, torments, tortures, and mockeries fell to him as to his models, and at the end, his soul quenched by trickery, he survived only to regain the common imbecility of the world, and to die in his bed more lean than he was before.
This creed has been one of the many “dear illusions” which art, the rival of nature, has prepared for us in these three hundred years. Even Don Quixote has deceived us, and it is our own fault that we have not realized it before. Don Quixote too, like all those beings, created by God or by genius, who in one point at least attain the absolute, has a secret; and this secret he has at last revealed to me, whose fidelity had been proven in the many quixotic vigils of my youth.[1]
Don Quixote is not mad. He does not go mad in spite of himself. He belongs to the common type of the Brutuses and the Hamlets: he pretends that he is mad. He fashions an extravagant career for himself in order that he may escape the deadly monotony of Argamasilla. In the invention of his difficulties and misfortunes he is quite without fear, because he knows that he is the moving agent, conscious of what he is doing, and ready at any time to put on the brake or turn aside. That is why he is neither tragic nor desperate. His whole adventure is a deliberate amusement. He may well be serene, for he alone knows the truth of the game, and his soul has no room for veritable anguish.
Don Quixote is not in earnest.
II
In order to see clearly into so grievous a mystery, we must dismiss the ostensible evidence of the book itself.
Cervantes himself said, and scores of critics have said after him, that he really meant to destroy the genre of the romance of chivalry; but this is not to be believed for a moment. It is just another literary trick, akin to the device of “the manuscripts of Cid Hamet Benengeli”—just one of the many tricks to which Cervantes had recourse. The balanced and truly cultured brain of Cervantes could not possibly have harbored such a purpose. The book itself belies it. In the first place, Cervantes satirizes not the romances of chivalry alone, but all literary genres without exception. By parody or irony or direct criticism all contemporary literature is condemned, and in particular its most popular forms, the pastoral and the drama.
The chief accusation which Cervantes pretends to bring against the books of chivalry is their improbability. An extraordinary accusation to come from the mouth of him who began with the pastoral improbabilities of the Galatea, filled the Don Quixote itself with improbable tragic and pastoral adventures, composed a chivalric drama after finishing the first part and before beginning the second part of Don Quixote, and at the end of his life reworked, in the Trahajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, the intricate and improbable voyages of the fantastic Byzantine romance.
Cervantes, a man of taste and imagination, knew, as all of us know, that every work of art is by its very nature improbable, even as all those lives and actions and works are improbable which rise above the surface of that round stagnant swamp in which we live. Even in the Don Quixote Cervantes, with the justice of a competent artist, saves and defends more than one romance of chivalry. The only ones he throws into the fire are those whose existence is not justified by beauty of expression and imagination.[2]
Nor could he, accepting as reality the Spain of the seventeenth century, claim to regard as utterly improbable the mediæval knightly sagas of Brittany and the Ardennes. To us the contrast between daily life and the marvels of chivalry seems far greater than it really was in the Spain of Cervantes. The grotesque exploits of Don Quixote would be impossible in our well regulated lands. At his first sally gendarmes and doctors would have seized Rocinante and his rider. Even the attack on the windmills and the meeting with the Biscayan would have been impossible.
Furthermore, no absolute contrast between the dreams of Don Quixote and ordinary life is to be found in the novel itself. The inn-keeper and the curate second Don Quixote’s whims for reasons of their own; the ducal party and the bachelor and the banditti of Barcelona merely order affairs in such a way that Don Quixote may have reason to believe himself to be what he claims to be. They think him their fool, but they are the slaves of his fooleries.
But this makes little difference. Even from the point of view of that moment and that milieu, there is so much that is improbable in the story of the Manchegan that we cannot reasonably believe that Cervantes really meant to exterminate the absurdities of chivalry in the name of a new realism which, in the last analysis, is but partial and sporadic. Those who hold such an opinion have not reached even the understanding of the letter, and there is little hope of bringing them to admit the probability of other meanings.
Equally wide of the mark are those who see or seek some symbolism in Cervantes’ novel. The most frequent of these symbolistic errors, due to the fatuous desire for profundity, is the worn-out legend that the Don Quixote is a modernized version of the mediæval theme of the conflict betwixt soul and body. The lank master is supposed to be the spirit, the ideal, always contradicted by the rotund servitor who represents the flesh and base reality. All other mystic explanations of the Don Quixote are of this order: Don Quixote is the ascetic, holy and mad; his companions are sensible, Philistine and mundane.
To attribute a philosophy to the Don Quixote is the surest way to falsify it. Any one may take these creatures of the book and make them symbols of whatsoever he chooses, even of the most abstract terms. But in this case it is the book that is lending its names to the speculative dreamer; the man is not interpreting the book. We must endeavor to see Don Quixote as he is, and not regard him as an empty lantern in which we may put any candle that we choose, to give light to those that wander.
I cannot even see the literal Don Quixote as the mystics see him. He is not single-minded and disinterested enough for a supreme incarnation of idealism. He is by no means the Christian altruist that he is made out to be.
If he seeks to cast down the strong and to defend the weak, it is simply because that is the tradition handed down in the tales of knightly deeds. He is an imitator. He has before him a whole gallery of models. If Amadis had been pitiless and unfaithful, he too would have been pitiless and unfaithful. He is vain and proud, he thinks constantly of earthly glory,[3] he aspires to material conquests, he is capable of fictitious inventions.[4]
Nor can Sancho Panza be fairly regarded as the representative of common sense and materialism. Sancho has more actual belief than Don Quixote. Don Quixote believes (or professes to believe) in the olden cavaliers; but Sancho believes in Don Quixote, and that is a much more difficult faith. Sancho finds in his increasing veneration for his master a terrestrial ideal far removed from his sure possessions. He dreams a dream; and when—in his island—his dream comes true he reveals himself more enamored of justice than of gain. In short, the only real madman in the book is Sancho, and the usual contrasts between him and his master are utterly invalid.[5]
III
The substance of the book—if we may linger for a moment on this theme before returning to our hero and his deceptions—is by no means such as the allegorists would lead us to believe. The work cannot be regarded as a unity, and the part that still lives for us amounts to perhaps one-third of the whole. The Don Quixote is a miscellany which may be easily resolved into its elements. It contains:
| Madrigals and burlesque lyrics. |
| Tales: tragic, pathetic, or romantic. |
Literary criticism (reviews and opinions on literary types and individual works—novels, poems, pastorals. At times the expression of opinion takes the form of parody).
|
Silva de varias lecciones (oratorical tirades on the usual themes: the Golden Age, poverty, ideal government, marriage, the relative excellence of arms and letters, etc.; a repertory of mediæval and humanistic commonplaces).
|
If you take away all this stuffing there remains the story of the two travelers—a journey, in short. This motif of the journey brings the Don Quixote into line with the great books of humanity. The most profound and the most popular of those books are narratives of journeys: the Odyssey, the Æneid, the Divine Comedy, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, the Tales of Sinbad, the Persian Letters, Faust, Dead Souls. For every great book is a timid anticipation of the Last Judgment, and the journey is better adapted than any other device to afford opportunity for the judging of all sorts and conditions of men. The journey means variety and the transcending of limits. Man himself has been represented a thousand times as a pilgrim—a pilgrim with sin for a wallet and death for his goal.
IV
In the midst of this mobile and universal judgment of mankind—goatherds and friars, muleteers and dukes, clodhoppers and gentlemen, lovers and landlords, brigands and bachelors—stands one old man with a secret. He is a case for the psychologists: he attempts to deceive the whole world. But he is not so sly that you cannot catch him at his game. Here and there he betrays himself. The main lines of his plot appear now and then in his words. The threads of his veil of deception are revealed by flashes of full light.
Don Quixote is the man grown tired of the life of every-day.
His poor, homely, respectable life with his curate and his womenfolk bores him to death. All his restricted provinciality, with its scanty moments of relief in hunting or reading, palls upon him. He wants to amuse himself for a while. Chivalry, as he has learned it in the great romances, offers him the bright path of a masquerade without peril. As a man of letters and of experience he understands that he cannot suddenly change his way of life without a pretext. And he sees just one harmless path of liberation: madness.
Partly in earnest and partly in fun he therefore feigns that he is mad. His madness is as noble and as literary as the man himself. It does not interfere with his Catholic faith, so necessary to one who seeks to live without disaster; indeed it takes on the aspect of an evangelical crusade, so far as it may do so within the limits of the indispensable imitation.
But if Don Quixote had been so pure and sincere a Christian as ingenuous readers have believed, he would not have needed the camouflage of chivalry. He might just as well have dedicated himself to God and to the Poor (God’s other name) without helmet and lance. He might even have stayed in Argamasilla. He might have spent himself, with a martyr’s humility, in the service of those who suffer; he might have remedied injustice; he might have filled simple hearts with a renewing emotion. Instead of imitating knights-errant, he might have imitated the saints who brought salvation. Others had trod this path before his time. They had followed a model, and in their following they had been great and sad. St. Francis, who resolved to imitate Jesus, and willed to imitate him even in the wounds of his hands and his feet, was a purer Don Quixote. Rienzi, whose soul was fired with the reading of Roman history, who dreamed of being the consul of a new republic, was another Don Quixote, more unfortunate, but more authentic. And other great men, like these two, have been exalted by the examples of the past, and have given life and strength without reserve, resplendent even in defeat.
But Don Quixote is more modest and less serious. He is an artist, a charlatan. There are certain elements of sincerity in his behavior: he would really like to be something of a warrior, something of an adventurer, something of a benefactor. But all this is superficial: there is just enough of it to give a tone to his words and a justification to his enterprise.
On close examination his madness appears to be a clever excuse for going about the world and getting into varied and easily soluble difficulties. There is indeed an element of spiritual and bodily brutality in his enterprise, a confused desire to behold disasters and to share in them—provided he may escape without serious consequences. The very fact that he plays the part of an aristocratic paladin saves him from dangerous plights. It is not permissible for him to fight with boors—yet he knows from the first that he will have chiefly to deal with boors.
Don Quixote decides to seem mad because he desires to seem mad. If he were not believed to be mad, he could not amuse himself, could not wander in the free air, could not expose himself to the chances of the unforeseen. He would be shut in by immediate restraints. He would find no pardon and no sport in those that he might meet.
All this explains why the madness of Don Quixote never seems grave or tragic. If it were a true and serious madness, there would be some reaction, some sorrow, some pain now and then, at the end of a scuffle, or in the presence of a hard reality. On the contrary, whenever men or events show him that he has made a mistake, Don Quixote remains perfectly calm. He admits the mistake at once, and drops back into the commonplace. At times he himself laughs at his feigned error. At other times he takes refuge in the device of the malevolent enchanters—a story that serves well enough for Sancho, who first believes it and finally makes use of it, turning it against his master when he tells him that the three peasant girls on their donkeys are princesses on their palfreys.[6]
Don Quixote’s returns to the truth are painless. A man truly mad, a hero with convictions, would experience distress and anguish at so many material denials, would suffer a thousand deaths in finding himself so obstinately contradicted. But Don Quixote, who knows his own game, and is befooling friends and strangers alike, is never moved to grief. He accepts his defeats as perfectly natural, and regrets only his bumps and bruises—inevitable inconveniences, the small change with which he pays the cost of his unusual pastime. Don Quixote is capable of laughter. He makes fun of Sancho and of himself. His spirit is free. He carries pleasant invention to the utmost, but he cannot carry his pretense to the point of grief, which is inimitable. He moves us to laughter because he himself cannot weep. V
This is no calumny. If you want the proofs, all you have to do is to reread the book with an unprejudiced spirit.
There is in the Don Quixote a central point the importance of which has not been recognized by the commentators. This central point, which supplies the key to the whole book, is the deliberate madness assumed in the Sierra Morena.[7] All readers will recall the scene. When they have reached the barren mount of desolation, Don Quixote announces to Sancho that he intends to play the madman to the honor and glory of Dulcinea until Sancho returns. The deceiver reveals himself to the simple spectator. He inserts a confessed madness in the midst of his general pretended madness.
He begins by announcing that he will follow the method of imitation, but that his imitation will be restrained—not too exhausting nor too perilous:
I intend to imitate Amadis, playing here the desperate, raving, and furious lover, so that I may imitate at the same time the valiant Don Roland.
But he will imitate judiciously. Roland’s madness went too far:
And although I do not intend to imitate Roland completely, in all his mad deeds and words and thoughts, yet I will copy as best I can all that seems to me most essential.
And he concludes with the definite statement of his clear resolution:
Mad I am and mad I must be until thou shalt return with the reply. … If the reply be kindly, I shall cease playing the madman. If it be unkind, I shall go mad in very truth, and thus I shall suffer no consciousness of my pain.
One could not ask a more explicit revelation of Don Quixote’s secret. He knows that he is not mad, but he wishes to behave as if he were, and his mad exploits are to be merely in imitation of the exploits of famous madmen. The method which he confesses in this one case of deliberate madness superposed upon his primary madness is the very method which he follows in all the other cases in which he does not confess.
In this same passage is to be found his theory—one of the profoundest in the book—as to going mad without cause or reason. On Sancho’s asking him why he undertakes so hard a penance when Dulcinea has given him no cause, Don Quixote answers:
There lies the point and the very excellence of my intent. For the knight-errant who goes mad for just cause deserves no thanks; but to go mad without just cause is notable indeed.
Proofs that the madness of Don Quixote is deliberate and not inevitable are to be found on every page. He is well aware of the transformation which real objects must undergo to be adapted to the comedy he is playing. He knows perfectly well, for instance, what sort of a person Dulcinea really is.[8] But he is not satisfied with the image of the gross, hard-working peasant girl whom he, in the refinement of his irony, has chosen to be the lady of his thought. He explains to Sancho that since there cannot be any perfect woman in the world, he has chosen the lowest of them all that he may the better prove the power of his deforming and reforming imagination: “I have fashioned her in my imagination as I would desire her to be.” When Sancho brings his report of his mission to the fair one, Don Quixote translates it phrase for phrase into his own language, for he knows that Sancho is describing the truth as he saw it. And later on, when the peasant girls appear on the road at dawn, and Sancho would have Don Quixote believe that they are Dulcinea and her maidens, Don Quixote refuses to accept the hallucination, for the reason that it is imposed upon him by another. He sees the women as they really are, and in order not to reveal his trickery, he has recourse to the old story of the enchanters who transform objects in his very presence. But he finally admits that Dulcinea is a fantastic and imaginary personage—and this no real madman would ever have done.[9]
In still other cases Don Quixote confesses that he has been mistaken, and is conscious, as he says, of the deceit into which he has fallen.[10] But whenever it suits his fancy he sees things as they are. The tavern is to him a tavern and not a castle; and he recognizes that the helmet of Mambrino is a barber’s basin. His principle, which should have revealed the seam of his fiction, is this (and it is the one truly idealistic motive in the whole book): that objects in themselves have no fast and inalienable character, but vary as different men behold them. His system might be defined as an instance of “the will to believe,” an anticipation, by three centuries, of the theories of pragmatism—unless it be a reflection, after twenty centuries, of the theories of Protagoras.
This view explains, moreover, the obvious common sense of Don Quixote. All whom he meets are astonished at the good sense of his discourse when it does not refer to matters of chivalry. They call him “a wise fool.” And at the end, sincere once more, he proclaims that he is not mad. Does he not openly confess that he invented outright the marvelous phantasmagoria of the Cave of Montesinos?
From the time when he issues from the subterranean world, Sancho himself doubts his truthfulness, and at the Duke’s, Don Quixote makes a cynical compact with his squire: “If you will believe my Montesinos story, I will believe your story about Heaven.”[11] But the shameless invention stands, and the implied confession was in reality superfluous.[12]
Don Quixote does not succeed in remaining within the limits of perfect pretense. And these slips in his part give a double reënforcement to our discovery: he did not take his game so seriously as to carry it too far. Don Quixote is a pretended madman who betrays himself by his mirth. His tranquillity and his wit depose against him: there is no conflict in his soul. Where there is no seriousness there can be no conflict. Don Quixote jests: true madmen never jest.
VI
The profundity of Don Quixote—and there is an element of profundity in the joker of La Mancha—lies elsewhere. For the methods of Don Quixote—deformation and symbolism—are the very methods of modern art, and have a significance which goes far beyond the superficial contrasts hitherto seen in the grotesque epic.
The voluntary deformation of objects has its beginning in arbitrary idealism, and has come to be recognized as an essential characteristic of all creative art. It is that process by which you see only what you want to see, represent only what you want to represent, changing, exaggerating, or reducing even that, according to the internal necessities of the creative will. Don Quixote is in this sense an artist, an artist in life though of literary origin, a true modern artist.
He is a symbolist as well, and a satiric symbolist. His voluntary errors follow a preëstablished plan. They are organically related, and grow directly out of an ironic judgment on the life of mankind. His apparently mad confusions reflect the discovery of hidden likenesses, and are necessary consequences of his skepticism. Consider the best known of these pretended errors in recognition: sheep to him are soldiers; windmills are robber giants; taverns are castles; inn-keepers are knights; basins are helmets; harlots are courtly damsels; serving-maids are enamored ladies; peasant girls are Beatrices; galley-slaves are innocent men.
In order to avoid compromising himself he attributes these mistakes to his madness. But they are not casual: they reveal the hidalgo as a critical and unprejudiced judge. In reality, so he thinks, soldiers are sheep led to the slaughter; lordly castles are but taverns in disguise, where hospitality must be paid for by servility; giants are windmills living on wind and theft; social status is no guarantee of purity; maids are quite as lovable as their mistresses; an ignorant peasant girl, if she be honest and unspoiled, may be the inspiration of a genius that can recognize her worth; prisoners in chains upon the roadside may be more innocent than the jailors who are dragging them to the galleys.
These deliberate identifications, between beings for the most part remote and unlike, allow us to perceive what Don Quixote really thought of men. He had meditated in his loneliness, and he had come at last to know them as they are. Like all those who finally discover the nature of their fellow-beings, he had no choice save to hate them or to make fun of them. He was not a hero of the highest order; he preferred to laugh. So he decided to turn knight, that others, while thinking him their fool, might serve as the toys of his amusement.
His vengeance was successful—for it has remained undiscovered until the present day. But Don Quixote was born to be my brother, first according to the letter, now according to the spirit. He and I understand each other.
- ↑ As long ago as 1911 I had come to realize that Don Quixote was not mad, and had said that “the structure of his mind and life was perfectly normal” (L’altra metà, p. 134), but I did not then insist on the true nature of his apparent madness.
- ↑ Part I, Chapter VII.
- ↑ Instances in Part I, Chapters I and V, and Part II, Chapters V and XXXIX.
- ↑ With regard to the Cave of Montesinos “he said that he had invented it because it seemed to him in keeping with matters that he had read in his romances”: Part II, Chapter XXIV.
- ↑ “I am madder than he, since I follow and serve him”: Part II, Chapter X.
- ↑ Part II, Chapter X.
- ↑ Part I, Chapter XXV.
- ↑ “It is enough for me to think and to believe that she is beautiful and virtuous”: Part I, Chapter XXV.
- ↑ Part II, Chapter XXXII.
- ↑ Instances in Part I, Chapter XLV, and Part II, Chapter XI.
- ↑ “Sancho, since you desire me to believe what you saw in Heaven, I desire you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos”: Part II, Chapter XLI.
- ↑ See Part II, Chapter XXV.