# Don Quixote (Cervantes/Ormsby)/Volume 1/"Don Quixote"

"DON QUIXOTE."
Nine editions of the First Part of "Don Quixote" had, as we have seen, already appeared before Cervantes died, thirty thousand copies in all, according to his own estimate, and a tenth was printed at Barcelona the year after his death. Of the Second Part, five had been published by the middle of the same year. So large a number naturally supplied the demand for some time, but by 1634 it appears to have been exhausted; and from that time down to the present day the stream of editions has continued to flow rapidly and regularly. The translations show still more clearly in what request the book has been from the very outset. Shelton's seems to have been made as early as 1607 or 1608; Oudin's, the first French one, in 1616; the first German in 1621, and Franciosini's Italian version in 1622; so that in seven years from the completion of the work it had been translated into the four leading languages of Europe. How translations and editions of translations multiplied as time went on will be seen by a glance at the list given in the Appendix, necessarily incomplete as it is. Except the Bible, in fact, no book has been so widely diffused as "Don Quixote." The "Imitatio Christi" may have been translated into as many different languages, and perhaps "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Vicar of Wakefield" into nearly as many, but in multiplicity of translations and editions "Don Quixote" leaves them all far behind.
Still more remarkable is the character of this wide diffusion. "Don Quixote" has been thoroughly naturalized among people whose ideas about knight-errantry, if they had any at all, were of the vaguest, who had never seen or heard of a book of chivalry, who could not possibly feel the humor of the burlesque or sympathize with the author's purpose. Another curious fact is that this, the most cosmopolitan book in the world, is one of the most intensely national. "Manon Lescaut" is not more thoroughly French, "Tom Jones" not more English, "Rob Roy" not more Scotch, than "Don Quixote" is Spanish, in character, in ideas, in sentiment, in local color, in everything. What, then, is the secret of this unparalleled popularity, increasing year by year for well-nigh three centuries? One explanation, no doubt, is that of all the books in the world, "Don Quixote" is the most catholic. There is ​something in it for every sort of reader, young or old, sage or simple, high or low. As Cervantes himself says with a touch of pride, "It is thumbed and read and got by heart by people of all sorts; the children turn its leaves, the young people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk praise it."
But it would be idle to deny that the ingredient which, more than its humor, or its wisdom, or the fertility of invention or knowledge of human nature it displays, has insured its success with the multitude, is the vein of farce that runs through it. It was the attack upon the sheep, the battle with the wineskins, Mambrino's helmet, the balsam of Fierabras, Don Quixote knocked over by the sails of the windmill, Sancho tossed in the blanket, the mishaps and misadventures of master and man, that were originally the great attraction, and perhaps are so still to some extent with the majority of readers. The bibliography of the book is a proof of this. There were ten editions of the First Part, but of the Second, where the humor is throughout much more akin to comedy than to farce, five only were printed. It is plain that "Don Quixote" was generally regarded at first, and indeed in Spain for a long time, as little more than a queer droll book, full of laughable incidents and absurd situations, very amusing, but not entitled to much consideration or care. All the editions printed in Spain from 1637 to 1771, when the famous printer Ibarra took it up, were mere trade editions, badly and carelessly printed on vile paper and got up in the style of chap-books intended only for popular use, with, in most instances, uncouth illustrations and clap-trap additions by the publisher. Those of Brussels and Antwerp were better in every way, neater and more careful, but still obviously books intended for a class of readers not disposed to be critical or fastidious so long as they were amused.
To England belongs the credit of having been the first country to recognize the right of "Don Quixote" to better treatment than this. The London edition of 1738, commonly called Lord Carteret's from having been suggested by him, was not a mere édition de luxe. It produced "Don Quixote" in becoming form as regards paper and type, and embellished with plates which, if not particularly happy as illustrations, were at least well intentioned and well executed, but it also aimed at correctness of text, a matter to which nobody except the editors of the Valencia and Brussels editions had given ​even a passing thought; and for a first attempt it was fairly successful, for though some of its emendations are inadmissible, a good many of them have been adopted by all subsequent editors. The example set was soon followed in the elegant duo-decimo editions with Coypel's plates published at the Hague and Amsterdam, and later in those of Ibarra and Sancha in Spain. But the most notable results were the splendid edition in four volumes by the Spanish Royal Academy in 1780, and the Rev. John Bowle's, printed at London and Salisbury in 1781. In the former a praiseworthy attempt was made to produce an authoritative text; but unfortunately the editors, under the erroneous impression that Cervantes had either himself corrected La Cuesta's 1608 edition of the First Part, or at least authorized its corrections, attached an excessive importance to emendations which in reality are entitled to no higher respect than those of any other printer. The distinguishing feature of Bowle's edition is the mass of notes, filling two volumes out of the six. Bowle's industry, zeal, and erudition have made his name deservedly venerated by all students of "Don Quixote;" at the same time it must be owned that the practical value of his notes has been somewhat overrated. What they illustrate is not so much "Don Quixote" as the annotator's extensive reading. The majority of them are intended to show the sources among the books of chivalry from which Cervantes took the incidents and ideas he burlesqued, and the connection is very often purely fanciful. They rendered an important service, however, in acting as a stimulus and furnishing a foundation for other commentaries; as, for example, Pellicer's, which, though it does not contain a fiftieth of the number of notes, is fifty times more valuable for any purpose of genuine elucidation, and Clemencin's, that monument of industry, research, and learning, which has done more than all others put together to throw light upon the obscurities and clear away the difficulties of "Don Quixote."
The zeal of publishers, editors, and annotators brought about a remarkable change of sentiment with regard to "Don Quixote." A vast number of its admirers began to grow ashamed of laughing over it. It became almost a crime to treat it as a humorous book. The humor was not entirely denied, but, according to the new view, it was rated as an altogether secondary quality, a mere accessory, nothing more than ​the stalking-horse under the presentation of which Cervantes shot his philosophy or his satire, or whatever it was he meant to shoot; for on this point opinions varied. All were agreed, however, that the object he aimed at was not the books of chivalry. He said emphatically in the preface to the First Part and in the last sentence of the Second, that he had no other object in view than to discredit these books, and this, to advanced criticism, made it clear that his object must have been something else.
One theory was that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth the eternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit of poetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy never evolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its inner consciousness. Something of the antagonism, no doubt, is to be found in "Don Quixote," because it is to be found everywhere in life, and Cervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in which the never-ceasing game of cross purposes between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote would not be recognized as true to nature. In the stone age, among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who never could see the facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could see nothing else. But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself to expound any such idea in two stout quarto volumes is to suppose something not only very unlike the age in which he lived, but altogether unlike Cervantes himself, who would have been the first to laugh at an attempt of the sort made by any one else.
Another idea, which apparently had a strange fascination for some minds, was that there are deep political meanings lying hidden under the drolleries of "Don Quixote." This, indeed, was not altogether of modern growth. If we believed, what nobody believes now, the Buscapié to be genuine, some such notion would seem to have been current soon after the appearance of the book. At any rate Defoe, in the preface to the "Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe," tells us that though thousands read "Don Quixote" without any suspicion of the fact, "those who know the meaning of it know it to be an emblematic history of, and a just satire upon, the Duke of Medina Sidonia." That the "Duke of Lerma"'was the original of "Don Quixote" was a favorite theory with others who, we must ​suppose, saw nothing improbable in the Archbishop of Toledo making a protégé of the man that according to them had ridiculed and satirized his brother. Other suggestions were that Cervantes meant Charles V., Philip II., Ignatius Loyola; while those who were not prepared to go so far as to declare the whole book to be a political satire, applied their ingenuity to the discovery of allusions to the events and personages of the day in almost every incident of the story. It became, in short, a kind of pastime with literary idlers to go a mare's-nesting in "Don Quixote," and hunt for occult significations in the bill of ass-colts delivered to Sancho Panza, the decision on the pack-saddle and basin question, the names and arms of the chieftains in the encounter with the sheep, or wherever the ordinary reader in his simplicity flattered himself that the author's drift was unmistakable. In fact, to believe these scholiasts, Cervantes was the prince of cryptographers, and "Don Quixote" a tissue of riddles from beginning to end.
The pursuit has evidently attractions inexplicable to the uninitiated, but perhaps its facility may have something to do with its charm, for in truth nothing is easier than to prove one's self wiser than the rest of the world in this way. All that is necessary is to assert dogmatically that by A the author means B, and that when he says "black" he means "white." If some future commentator chooses to say that "Pickwick" is an "emblematic history" of Lord Melbourne; that Jingle, with his versatility, audacity, and volubility, is meant for Lord Brougham; Sam Weller for Sydney Smith, the faithful joker of the Whig party; and Mr. Pickwick's mishap on the ice for Lord Melbourne's falling through from insufficient support in 1834; and that he is a blockhead who offers to believe otherwise; who shall say him nay? It will be impossible to confute him, save by calling up Charles Dickens from his grave in Westminster Abbey.
According to others, there are philosophical ideas of a startling kind to be found in abundance in "Don Quixote" by those who choose to look for them, ideas that show Cervantes to have been far in advance of his time. The precise nature of these ideas is in general rather vaguely intimated; though, to be sure, in one instance it is claimed for Cervantes that he anticipated Descartes. "Don Quixote," it will be remembered, on awaking in the cave of Montesinos was at first doubtful of his own identity, but on feeling himself all over and observing ​"the collected thoughts that passed through his mind," he was convinced that he was himself and not a phantom, which, it has been urged plausibly, was in effect a practical application of the Cartesian "Cogito, ergo sum." But for the most part the expositors content themselves with the assertion that running through "Don Quixote" there is a vein of satire aimed at the Church, dogma, sacerdotalism, and the Inquisition. This, of course, will at once strike most people as being extremely unlikely. Cervantes wrote at about the most active period of the Inquisition, and if he ventured upon satire of this sort he would have been in the position of the reduced gentlewoman who was brought down to selling tarts in the street for a livelihood, and who used to say to herself every time she cried her wares, "I hope to goodness nobody hears me."
There is, moreover, something very characteristic of nineteenth century self-conceit in the idea that it was reserved for our superior intelligence to see what those poor, blind, stupid officers of the Inquisition could not perceive. Any one, however, who, for instance, compares the original editions of Quevedo's "Visions" with the authorized Madrid edition will see that these officials were not so very blind, but that on the contrary their eyes were marvellously keen to detect anything that had the slightest tincture of disrespect or irreverence. Nay, "Don Quixote" itself is a proof of their vigilance, for three years after the Second Part had appeared they cut out the Duchess's not very heterodox remark that works of charity done in a lukewarm way are of no avail. It may be said that Sancho's observations upon the sham sambenito and mitre in chapter lxix., Part II., and Dapple's return home adorned with them in chapter lxxiii., are meant to ridicule the Inquisition; but it is plain the Inquisition itself did not think so, and probably it was as good a judge as any one nowadays.
For one passage capable of being tortured into covert satire against any of these things, there are ten in "Don Quixote" and the novels that show—what, indeed, is sufficiently obvious from the little we know of his life and character—that Cervantes was a faithful son of the Church. As to his having been in advance of his age, the line he took up on the expulsion of the Moriscoes disposes of that assertion. Had he been the far-seeing philosopher and profound thinker the Cervantists strive to make him out, he would have looked ​with contempt and disgust upon an agitation as stupid and childish as ever came of priestly bigotry acting on popular fanaticism and ignorance; and if not moved by the barbarous cruelty of the measure, he would have been impressed by its mischievous consequences to his country, as all the best statesmen of the day were. No loyal reader of his will believe for a moment that his vigorous advocacy of it was undertaken against his convictions and solely in order to please his patron, the leader of the movement. The truth is, no doubt, that in the Archbishop's ante-chamber he heard over and over again all the arguments he has reproduced in "Don Quixote" and in the novel of the "Colloquy of the Dogs," and that his opinions, as opinions so often do, took their complexion from his surroundings. There is no reason to question his sincerity, but the less that is said of his philosophy and foresight the better. He was a philosopher in one and perhaps the best sense, for he knew how to endure the ills of life with philosophy; his knowledge of human nature was profound, his observation was marvellous; but life never seems to have presented any mystery to him, or suggested any problem to his mind.
It does not require much study of the literary history of the time, or any profound critical examination of the work, to see that these elaborate theories and ingenious speculations are not really necessary to explain the meaning of "Don Quixote" or the purpose of Cervantes. The extraordinary influence of the romances of chivalry in his day is quite enough to account for the genesis of the book.
Some idea of the prodigious development of this branch of literature in the sixteenth century may be obtained from the sketch given in the Appendix, if the reader bears in mind that only a portion of the romances belonging to by far the largest group are enumerated. As to its effect upon the nation, there is abundant evidence. From the time when the Amadises and Palmerins began to grow popular down to the very end of the century, there is a steady stream of invective, from men whose character and position lend weight to their words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation of their readers. It would be easy to fill a couple of pages with the complaints that were made of the mischief produced by the inordinate appetite for this kind of reading, especially among the upper classes, who, unhappily for ​themselves and their country, had only too much time for such pursuits under the rule of Charles V. and his successors. As Pedro Mexia, the chronicler of Charles V. puts it, there were many who had brought themselves to think in the very style of the books they read, books of which might often be said, and with far more truth, what Ascham said of the "Morte d'Arthur," that "the whole pleasure standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open manslaughter and bold bawdrye."
Ticknor, in his second volume, cited some of the most notable of these predecessors of Cervantes; but one not mentioned by him, or, so far as I am aware, by any other writer on the subject, may be quoted here as having been perhaps the immediate predecessor of, and using language curiously like that in, "Don Quixote." I mean Fray Juan de Tolosa, who says he wrote his fantastically entitled religious treatise, the "Aranjuez del Alma" (Saragossa, 1589), in order to "drive out of our Spain that dust-cloud of books of chivalries, as they call them (of knaveries, as I call them), that blind the eyes of all who, not reflecting upon the harm they are doing their souls, give themselves up to them, and waste the best part of the year in striving to learn whether Don Belianis of Greece took the enchanted castle, or whether Don Florisel de Niquea, after all his battles, celebrated the marriage he was bent upon." Good Fray Juan did not choose the right implement. Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust.
That this was the task Cervantes set himself, and that he had ample provocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently clear to those who look into the evidence; as it will be also that it was not chivalry itself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the absurdities that, thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no greater one than saying that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." In the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain's chivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done when Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature, it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the free institutions of mediaeval Spain. What he did smile away was not chivalry but a degrading mockery of it; it would be just as reasonable to say that England's chivalry was smiled away by the ridicule showered in "Punch" upon the men in block-tin who ride in the Lord Mayor's Show.
The true nature of the "right arm" and the "bright array," ​before which, according to the poet, "the world gave ground," and which Cervantes' single laugh demolished, may be gathered from the words of one of his own countrymen, Don Felix Pacheco, as reported by Captain George Carleton, in his "Military Memoirs from 1672 to 1713." "Before the appearance in the world of that labor of Cervantes," he said, "it is next to an impossibility for a man to walk the streets with any delight or without danger. There were seen so many cavaliers prancing and curvetting before the windows of their mistresses, that a stranger would have imagined the whole nation to have been nothing less than a race of knight-errants. But after the world became a little acquainted with that notable history, the man that was seen in that once celebrated drapery was pointed at as a Don Quixote, and found himself the jest of high and low. And I verily believe that to this, and this only, we owe that dampness and poverty of spirit which has run through all our councils for a century past, so little agreeable to those nobler actions of our famous ancestors."
To call "Don Quixote" a sad book, preaching a pessimist view of life, argues a total misconception of its drift. It would be so if its moral were that, in this world, true enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule and discomfiture. But it preaches nothing of the sort; its moral, so far as it can be said to have one, is that the spurious enthusiasm that is born of vanity and self-conceit, that is made an end in itself, not a means to an end, and that acts on mere impulse, regardless of circumstances and consequences, is mischievous to its owner, and a very considerable nuisance to the community at large. To those who cannot distinguish between the one kind and the other, no doubt "Don Quixote" is a sad book; no doubt to some minds it is very sad that a man who had just uttered so beautiful a sentiment as that "it is a hard case to make slaves of those whom God and Nature made free," should be ungratefully pelted by the scoundrels his crazy philanthropy had let loose on society; but to others of a more judicial cast it will be a matter of regret that reckless self-sufficient enthusiasm is not oftener requited in some such way for all the mischief it does in the world.
​A very slight examination of the structure of "Don Quixote" will suffice to show that Cervantes had no deep design or elaborate plan in his mind when he began the book. When he wrote those lines in which "with a few strokes of a great master he sets before us the pauper gentleman," he had no idea of the goal to which his imagination was leading him. There can be little doubt that all he contemplated was a short tale to range with those he had already written—"Rinconete and Cortadillo," "The Generous Lover," "The Adventures of Cardenio and Dorothea," the "Ill-advised Curiosity," "The Captive's Story"—a tale setting forth the ludicrous results that might be expected to follow the attempt of a crazy gentleman to act the part of a knight-errant in modern life.
It is plain, for one thing, that Sancho Panza did not enter into the original scheme, for had Cervantes thought of him he certainly would not have omitted him in his hero's outfit, which he obviously meant to be complete. Him we owe to the landlord's chance remark in chapter iii. that knights seldom travelled without squires. It is needless to point out the difference this implies. To try to think of a Don Quixote without Sancho Panza is like trying to think of a one-bladed pair of scissors.
The story was written at first, like the others, without any division, as may be seen by the beginnings and endings of the first half-dozen chapters; and without the intervention of Cid Hamet Benengeli; and it seems not unlikely that Cervantes had some intention of bringing Dulcinea, or Aldonza Lorenzo, on the scene in person. It was probably the ransacking of the Don's library and the discussion on the books of chivalry that first suggested it to him that his idea was capable of development. What, if instead of a mere string of farcical misadventures, he were to make his tale a burlesque of one of these books, caricaturing their style, incidents, and spirit? In pursuance of this change of plan, he hastily and somewhat clumsily divided what he had written into chapters on the model of "Amadis," invented the fable of a mysterious Arabic manuscript, and set up Cid Hamet Benengeli in indtation of the almost invariable practice of the chivalry-romance authors, who were fond of tracing their books to some recondite source. In working out the new idea, he soon found the value of Sancho Panza. Indeed, the keynote, not only to Sancho's part, but to the whole book, is struck in the first words Sancho ​utters when he announces his intention of taking his ass with him. "About the ass," we are told, "Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying whether he could call to mind any knight-errant taking with him an esquire mounted on ass-back; but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book: he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad ahsurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact and commonplace by force of sheer stolidity.
The burlesque, it will be observed, is not steadily kept up even throughout the First Part. Cervantes seems, as in fact he confesses in the person of Cid Hamet in chapter xliv. of the Second Part, to have grown weary before long of the restrictions it imposed upon him, and to have felt it, as he says himself, "intolerable drudgery to go on writing on one subject," chronicling the sayings and doings of the same two characters. It is plain that, as is often the case with persons of sanguine temperament, sustained effort was irksome to him. For thirty years he had contemplated the completion of the "Galatea," unable to bring himself to set about it. He had the "Persiles," which he looked upon as his best work—in prose at least—an equal length of time on his hands. The Second Part of "Don Quixote" he wrote in a very desultory fashion, putting it aside again and again to turn to something else. And when he made an end, it was always a hasty one. Each part of "Don Quixote" he finishes off with a wild flourish, and seems to fling down his pen with a "whoop" like a schoolboy at the end of a task he has been kept in for. Even the "Viaje del Parnaso," a thing entered upon and written con amore, he ends abruptly as if he had got tired of it.
It was partly for this reason, as he himself admits, that he inserted the story of "Cardenio and Dorothea," that with the untranslatable title which I have ventured to call the "Ill-advised Curiosity," and "The Captive's Story," that fill up the greater part of the last half of the volume, as well as the "Chrysostom and Marcela" episode in the earlier chapters. But of course there were other reasons. He had these stories ready written, and it seemed a good way of disposing of them. ​It is by no means unlikely that he mistrusted his own powers of extracting from Don Quixote and Sancho material enough to fill a book; but above all it is likely he felt doubtful of his venture. It was an experiment in literature far bolder than "Lazarillo de Tornies" or "Guzman de Alfarache;" he could not tell how it would be received; and it was as well, therefore, to provide his readers with something of the sort they were used to, as a kind of insurance against total failure.
The event did not justify his diffidence. The public, he acknowledges, skimmed the tales hastily and impatiently, eager to return to the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho; and the public has ever since done much the same. He himself owns that they are altogether out of place, and nothing but the natural reluctance of editors and translators to mutilate a great classic has preserved them, for in truth they are not only out of place, but positive blemishes. An exception might be made in favor of the story of the Captive, which has an interest in itself independent of the autobiographical touches it contains, and is in the main told in a straightforward soldierly way.
But the others have nothing to recommend them. They are commonplace tales of intrigue that might have been written by any tenth-rate story-teller. With a certain pretence of moral purpose, the "Ill-advised Curiosity" is a nauseous story, and the morality of Dorothea's story is a degree worse than that of Richardson's "Pamela;" it is, in fact, a story of "easy virtue rewarded." The characters are utterly uninteresting; the men, Cardenio and Don Fernando, Anselmo and Lothario, are a contemptible set; and the women are remarkable for nothing but a tendency to swoon away on slight provocation, and to make long speeches the very adjectives of which would be enough for a strong man. The reader will observe the difference between the Dorothea of the tale and the graceful, sprightly, natural Dorothea who acts the part of the Princess Micomicona with such genuine gayety and fun.
But it is in style that these tales offend most of all. They are not worth telling, and they are told at three times the length that would have been allowable if they were. No device known to prolixity is omitted. Verbs and adjectives always go in pairs like panniers on a donkey, as if one must inevitably fall to the ground without the other to balance it. Nobody ever says or sees anything, he always declares and ​asserts it, or perceives and discerns it. If a thing is beautiful it must likewise be lovely, and nothing can be odious without being detestable too; though as a rule adjectives are seldom used but in the superlative degree. Everything is said with as much circumlocution and rodomontade as possible, as if the lavish expenditure of words were the great object. And yet, following immediately upon these tawdry artificial productions, we have the charming little episode of Don Luis and Dona Clara, as if Cervantes wished to show that when he chose he could write a love story in a simple, natural style.
The latter portion of the First Part is, in short, almost all episodes and digressions; no sooner are the tales disposed of, than we have the long criticism on the chivalry romances and the drama, interesting and valuable no doubt, but still just as much out of place, and that is followed by the goat-herd's somewhat pointless story.
By the time Cervantes had got his volume of novels off his hands, and summoned up resolution enough to set about the Second Part in earnest, the case was very much altered. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had not merely found favor, but had already become, what they have never since ceased to be, veritable entities to the popular imagination. There was no occasion for him now to interpolate extraneous matter; nay, his readers told him plainly that what they wanted of him was more Don Quixote and more Sancho Panza, and not novels, tales, or digressions. To himself, too, his creations had become realities, and he had become proud of them, especially of Sancho. He began the Second Part, therefore, under very different conditions, and the difference makes itself manifest at once. Even in translation the style will be seen to be far easier, more flowing, more natural, and more like that of a man sure of himself and of his audience. Don Quixote and Sancho undergo a change also. In the First Part, Don Quixote has no character or individuality whatever. He is nothing more than a crazy representative of the sentiments of the chivalry romances. In all that he says and does he is simply repeating the lesson he has learned from his books; and therefore, as Hallam with perfect justice maintains, it is absurd to speak of him in the gushing strain of the sentimental critics when they dilate upon his nobleness, disinterestedness, dauntless courage, and so forth. It was the business of a knight-errant to right wrongs, redress injuries, and succor the ​distressed, and this, as a matter of course, he makes his business when he takes up the part; a knight-errant was bound to be intrepid, and so he feels bound to cast fear aside. Of all Byron's melodious nonsense about Don Quixote, the most nonsensical statement is that "'t is his virtue makes him mad!" The exact opposite is the truth; it is his madness makes him virtuous.
In this respect he remains unchanged in the Second Part; but at the same time Cervantes repeatedly reminds the reader, as if it was a point upon which he was anxious there should be no mistake, that his hero's madness is strictly confined to delusions on the subject of chivalry, and that on every other subject he is "discreto," one, in fact, whose faculty of discernment is in perfect order. He thus invests Don Quixote with a dignity which was wholly wanting to him in the First Part, and at the same time reserves to himself the right of making him speak and act not only like a man of sense, but like a man of exceptionally clear and acute mind, whenever it may become desirable to travel outside the limits of the burlesque. The advantage of this is that he is enabled to make use of Don Quixote as a mouthpiece for his own reflections, and so, without seeming to digress, allow himself the relief of digression when he requires it, as freely as in a commonplace book.
It is true the amount of individuality bestowed upon Don Quixote is not very great. There are some natural touches of character about him, such as his mixture of irascibility and placability, and his curious affection for Sancho, together with his impatience of the squire's loquacity and impertinence; but in the main, apart from his craze, he is little more than a thoughtful, cultured gentleman, with instinctive good taste and a great deal of shrewdness and originality of mind.
As to Sancho, it is plain, from the concluding words of the preface to the First Part, that he was a favorite with his creator even before he had been taken into favor by the public. An inferior genius, taking him in hand a second time, would very likely have tried to improve him by making him more comical, clever, amiable, or virtuous. But Cervantes was too true an artist to spoil his work in this way. Sancho, when he re-appears, is the old Sancho with the old familiar features; but with a difference; they have been brought out more distinctly, but at the same time with a careful avoidance of anything like caricature; the outline has been filled in where ​filling in was necessary, and, vivified by a few touches of a master's hand, Sancho stands before us as he might in a character portrait by Velazquez. He is a much more important and prominent figure in the Second Part than in the First; indeed it is his matchless mendacity about Dulcinea that to a great extent supplies the action of the story.
His development in this respect is as remarkable as in any other. In the First Part he displays a great natural gift of lying, as may be seen in his explanation of Don Quixote's bruises in chapter xvi., and above all in that marvellous series of lies he strings together in chapter xxxi. in answer to Don Quixote's questions about Dulcinea. His lies are not of the highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly indulge in; like Falstaff's, they resemble the father that begets them; they are simple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But in the service of such a master as Don Quixote he develops rapidly, as we see when he comes to palm off the three country wenches as Dulcinea and her ladies in waiting. It is worth noticing how, flushed by his success in this instance, he is tempted afterwards to try a flight beyond his powers in his account of the journey on Clavileño.
In the Second Part it is the spirit rather than the incidents of the chivalry romances that is the subject of the burlesque. Enchantments of the sort travestied in those of Dulcinea and the Trifaldi and the cave of Montesinos play a leading part in the later and inferior romances, and another distinguishing feature is caricatured in Don Quixote's blind adoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of chivalry love is either a mere animalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a coarse-minded man would care to make merry with the former, but to one of Cervantes' humor the latter was naturally an attractive subject for ridicule. Like everything else in these romances, it is a gross exaggeration of the real sentiment of chivalry, but its peculiar extravagance is probably due to the influence of those masters of hyperbole, the Provencal poets. When a troubadour professed his readiness to obey his lady in all things, he made it incumbent upon the next comer, if he wished to avoid the imputation of tameness and commonplace, to declare himself the slave of her will, which the next was compelled to cap by some still stronger declaration; and so expressions of devotion went on rising one above the other like biddings at an auction, and a conventional language of gallantry and theory ​of love came into being that in time permeated the literature of Southern Europe, and bore fruit, in one direction in the transcendental worship of Beatrice and Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which found exponents in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what Cervantes deals with in Don Quixote's passion for Dulcinea, and in no instance has he carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea in the background, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very existence we are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote's worship of her virtues and charms with an additional extravagance, and gives still more point to the caricature of the sentiment and language of the romances.
There will always be a difference of opinion as to the relative merits of the First and Second Parts of "Don Quixote." As naturally follows from the difference in aim between the two Parts, the First is the richer in laughable incidents, the Second in character; and the First will always be the favorite with those whose taste leans to humor of a farcical sort, while the Second will have the preference with those who incline to the humor of comedy. Another reason why the Second Part has less of the purely ludicrous element in it is that Cervantes, having a greater respect for his hero, is more careful of his personal dignity. In the interests of the story he has to allow Don Quixote to be made a butt of to some extent, but he spares him the cudgellings and cuffings which are the usual finale of the poor gentleman's adventures in the First Part.
There can be no question, however, as to the superiority of the Second Part in style and construction. It is one of the commonplaces of criticism to speak of "Don Quixote" as if it were a model of Spanish prose, but in truth there is no work of note in the language that is less deserving of the title. There are of course various styles in "Don Quixote." Don Quixote's own language (except when he loses his temper with Sancho) is most commonly modelled on that of the romances of chivalry, and many of the descriptive passages, like those about the sun appearing on the balconies of the east, and so forth, are parodies of the same. I have already spoken of the wearisome verbosity of the inserted novels, but the narrative portions of the book itself, especially in the First Part, are sometimes just as long-winded and wordy. In both the style reminds one somewhat of that of the euphuists, and of their repugnance to saying anything in a natural way, ​and their love of cold conceits and verbal quibbles. These were the besetting sins of the prose of the day, but Cervantes has besides sins of his own to answer for. He was a careless writer at all times, but in "Don Quixote" he is only too often guilty of downright slovenliness. The word is that of his compatriot and stanch admirer Clemencin, or I should not venture to use it, justifiable as it may be in the case of a writer who deals in long sentences staggering down the page on a multiplicity of "ands," or working themselves into tangles of parentheses, sometimes parenthesis within parenthesis; who begins a sentence one way and ends it another; who sends relatives adrift without any antecedent to look to; who mixes up nominatives, verbs, and pronouns in a way that would have driven a Spanish Cobbett frantic. Here is an example of a very common construction in "Don Quixote:" "The host stood staring at him, and entreated with him that he would rise; but he never would until he had to tell him that he granted him the boon he begged of him." Here, as Cobbett would have said, "is perfect confusion and pell-mell," though no doubt the meaning is clear.
Nor are his laxaties of this sort only; his grammar is very often lax, he repeats words and names out of pure heedlessness, and he has a strange propensity to inversion of ideas, and a curious tendency to say the very opposite of what he meant to say. His blind worshippers, with whom it is an axiom that he can do no wrong, make an odd apology for some of these slips. They are only his fun, they say; in which case Cervantes must have written with a prophetic eye to the friends of Mr. Peter Magnus, for assuredly no others of the sons of men would be amused by such means.
But besides these two, there is what we may call Cervantes' own style, that into which he falls naturally when he is not imitating the romances of chivalry, or under any unlucky impulse in the direction of fine-writing. It is almost the exact opposite of the last. It is a simple, unaffected, colloquial style, not indeed a model of correctness, or distinguished by any special grace or elegance, for Cervantes always wrote hastily and carelessly, but a model of clear, terse, vigorous expression. To an English reader, Swift's style will, perhaps, convey the best idea of its character; at the same time, though equally matter-of-fact, it has more vivacity than Swift's.
​This is the prevailing style of the Second Part, which is cast in the dramatic form to a much greater extent than the First, consisting, indeed, largely of dialogue between master and man, or of Don Quixote's discourses and Sancho's inimitable comments thereon. Episodes, Cid Hamet tells us, have been sparingly introduced, and he adds significantly, "with no more words than suffice to make them intelligible," as if even then the verbosity of the novels had proved too much for some of the readers of the First Part. The assertion, however, is scarcely borne out by the fair Claudia's story in chapter lx., or that prodigious speech which Ana Felix delivers with the rope round her neck in chapter lxiii.
It may be, as Hallam says, that in the incidents of the Second Part there is not the same admirable probability there is in those of the First; though what could be more delightfully probable than the sequel of Sancho's unlucky purchase of the curds in chapter xvii. for example? But it must be allowed that the Second Part is constructed with greater art, if the word can be applied to a story so artless. The result of Sancho's audacious imposture at El Toboso, for instance, its consequences to himself in the matter of the enchantment of Dulcinea and the penance laid upon him, his shifts and shirkings, and Don Quixote's insistence in season and out of season, are a masterpiece of comic intrigue. Not less adroit is the way in which encouragement is doled out to master and man from time to time, to keep them in heart. Even with all due allowance for the infatuation of Don Quixote and the simplicity and cupidity of Sancho, to represent them as holding out under an unbroken course of misfortune would have been untrue to human nature. The victory achieved in such knightly fashion over the Biscayan, supports Don Quixote under all the disasters that befall him in the First Part; and in the Second his success against the Knight of the Mirrors, and in the adventure with the lion, and his reception as a knight-errant by the Duke and Duchess, serve to confirm him in his idea of his powers and vocation. Material support was still more needful in Sancho's case. It is plain that a prospective island would not have kept his faith in chivalry alive, had it not been for the treasure-trove of the Sierra Morena and the flesh-pots of Camacho's wedding.
One of the great merits of "Don Quixote" and one of the ​qualities that have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. As Samson Carrasco says, "There's nothing in it to puzzle over." The bachelor's remark, however, cannot be taken literally, else there would be an impertinence in notes and commentaries. There are, of course, points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth-century audience which do not immediately strike a reader nowadays, and Cervantes often takes it for granted that an allusion will be generally understood which is only intelligible to a few. For example, on many of his readers in Spain, and most of his readers out of it, the significance of his choice of a country for his hero is completely lost. It would be going too far to say that no one can thoroughly comprehend "Don Quixote" without having seen La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of La Mancha will give an insight into the meaning of Cervantes such as no commentator can give. Of all the regions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of romance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the dullest tract. There is something impressive about the grim solitudes of Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in story and rich in relics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace, there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village, Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind.
To any one who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "Don Quixote of La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once. La Mancha as the knight's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-laborer on ass-back for a squire, knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victims of oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote's world and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as they were.
It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the ​whole humor and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It has been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure, the great majority of the artists who illustrated "Don Quixote" knew nothing whatever of Spain. To them a venta conveyed no idea but the abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do full justice to the humor of Don Quixote's misconception in taking it for a castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal. But even when better informed they seem to have no apprehension of the full force of the discrepancy. Take, for instance, Gustave Doré's drawing of Don Quixote watching his armor in the inn-yard. Whether or not the Venta de Quesada on the Seville road is, as tradition maintains, the inn described in "Don Quixote," beyond all question it was just such an inn-yard as the one behind it that Cervantes had in his mind's eye, and it was on just such a rude stone trough as that beside the primitive draw-well in the corner that he meant Don Quixote to deposit his armor. Gustave Doré makes it an elaborate fountain such as no arriero ever watered his mules at in the corral of any venta in Spain, and thereby entirely misses the point aimed at by Cervantes. It is the mean, prosaic, commonplace character of all the surroundings and circumstances that gives a significance to Don Quixote's vigil and the ceremony that follows. Gustave Dore might as well have turned La Tolosa and La Molinera into village maidens of the opera type in ribbons and roses.
No humor suffers more from this kind of treatment than that of Cervantes. Of that finer and more delicate humor through which there runs a thread of pathos he had but little, or, it would be fairer to say, shows but little. There are few indications in "Don Quixote" or the novelas of the power that produced that marvellous scene in "Lazarillo de Tormes," where the poor hidalgo paces the patio, watching with his hungry eyes his ragged little retainer munching the crusts and cowheel. Cervantes' humor is for the most part of that broader and simpler sort, the strength of which lies in the perception of the incongruous. It is the incongruity of Sancho in all his ways, words, and works, with the ideas and aims of his master, quite as much as the wonderful vitality and truth to nature of the character, that makes him the most humorous creation in the whole range of fiction.
​That unsmiling gravity of which Cervantes was the first great master, "Cervantes' serious air," which sits naturally on Swift alone, perhaps, of later humorists, is essential to this kind of humor, and here again Cervantes has suffered at the hands of his interpreters. Nothing, unless indeed the coarse buffoonery of Phillips, could be more out of place in an attempt to represent Cervantes, than a flippant, would-be facetious style, like that of Motteux's version for example, or the sprightly, jaunty air, French translators sometimes adopt. It is the grave matter-of-factness of the narrative, and the apparent unconsciousness of the author that he is saying anything ludicrous, anything but the merest commonplace, that give its peculiar flavor to the humor of Cervantes. His, in fact, is the exact opposite of the humor of Sterne and the self-conscious humorist. Even when Uncle Toby is at his best, you are always aware of "the man Sterne" behind him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect he is producing. Cervantes always leaves you alone with Don Quixote and Sancho. He and Swift and the great humorists always keep themselves out of sight, or, more properly speaking, never think about themselves at all, unlike our latter-day school of humorists, who seem to have revived the old horse-collar method, and try to raise a laugh by some grotesque assumption of ignorance, imbecility, or bad taste.
It is true that to do full justice to Spanish humor in any other language is well-nigh an impossibility. There is a natural gravity and a sonorous stateliness about Spanish, be it ever so colloquial, that make an absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the most preposterous statement. This is what makes Sancho Panza's drollery the despair of the conscientious translator. Sancho's curt comments can never fall flat, but they lose half their flavor when transferred from their native Castilian into any other medium. But if foreigners have failed to do justice to the humor of Cervantes, they are no worse than his own countrymen. Indeed, were it not for the Spanish peasant's hearty relish of "Don Quixote," one might be tempted to think that the great humorist was not looked upon as a humorist at all in his own country. Any one knowing nothing of Cervantes, and dipping into the extensive exegetical literature that has grown up of late years round him and his works, would infallibly carry away the idea that he was one of the most obscure writers that ever spoiled paper, that if he had a meaning his chief endeavor was to ​keep it to himself, and that whatever gifts he may have possessed, humor was most certainly not one of them. The craze of Don Quixote seems, in some instances, to have communicated itself to his critics, making them see things that are not in the book, and run full tilt at phantoms that have no existence save in their own imaginations. Like a good many critics nowadays, they forget that screams are not criticism, and that it is only vulgar tastes that are influenced by strings of superlatives, three-piled hyperboles, and pompous epithets. But what strikes one as particularly strange is that while they deal in extravagant eulogies, and ascribe all manner of imaginary ideas and qualities to Cervantes, they show no perception of the quality that ninety-nine out of a hundred of his readers would rate highest in him, and hold to be the one that raises him above all rivalry. If they are not actually insensible to his humor, they probably regard it as a quality which their own dignity as well as his will not allow them to recognize, and I am inclined to suspect that this feeling has as much to do with their bitterness against Clemencin, as his temerity in venturing to point out faults in the god of their idolatry. Clemencin, if not the only one, is one of the few Spanish critics or commentators who show a genuine and hearty enjoyment of the humor of "Don Quixote." Again and again, as he is growling over Cervantes' laxities of grammar and construction, he has to lay down his pen, and wipe his eyes that are brimming over at some drollery or naïveté of Sancho's, and it may well be that this frivolous behavior is regarded with the utmost contempt by men so intensely in earnest as the Cervantistas.
To speak of "Don Quixote" as if it were merely a humorous book, would be a manifest misdescription. Cervantes, at times, makes it a kind of commonplace book for occasional essays and criticisms, or for the observations and reflections and gathered wisdom of a long and stirring life. It is a mine of shrewd observation on mankind and human nature. Among modern novels there may be, here and there, more elaborate studies of character, but there is no book richer in individualized character. What Coleridge said of Shakespeare in minimis is true of Cervantes; he never, even for the most temporary purpose, puts forward a lay figure. There is life and individuality in all his characters, however little they may have to do, or however short a time they may ​be before the reader. Samson Carrasco, the curate, Teresa Panza, Altisidora, even the two students met on the road to the cave of Montesinos, all live and move and have their being; and it is characteristic of the broad humanity of Cervantes that there is not a hateful one among them all. Even poor Maritornes, with her deplorable morals, has a kind heart of her own and "some faint and distant resemblance to a Christian about her;" and as for Sancho, though on dissection we fail to find a lovable trait in him, unless it be a sort of doglike affection for his master, who is there that in his heart does not love him?
But it is, after all, the humor of "Don Quixote" that distinguishes it from all other books of the romance kind. It is this that makes it, as one of the most judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, "the best novel in the world beyond all comparison." It is its varied humor, ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as Shakespeare's or Moliere's, that has naturalized it in every country where there are readers, and made it a classic in every language that has a literature. We are sometimes told that classics have had their day, and that the literature of the future means to shake itself loose from the past, and respect no antiquity and recognize no precedent. Will the coming iconoclasts spare "Don Quixote," or is Cervantes doomed with Homer and Dante, Shakespeare and Moliere? So far as a forecast is possible, it seems clear that their humor will not be his humor. Even now, persons who take their idea of humor from that form of it most commonly found between yellow and red boards on a railway book-stall may be sometimes heard to express a doubt about the humor of "Don Quixote," and the sincerity of those who profess to enjoy it, they themselves being, in their own phrase, unable to see any fun in it. The humor of "Don Quixote" has, however, the advantage of being based upon human nature, and as the human nature of the future will probably be, upon the whole, much the same as the human nature of the past, it is, perhaps, no unreasonable supposition that what has been relished for its truth may continue to find some measure of acceptance. If it be not presumptuous to express any solicitude about ​the future, let us hope so; for, it must be owned, its prophets do not encourage the idea that liveliness will be among its characteristics. The humor of Cervantes may have its uses too, even in that advanced state of society. The future, doubtless, will be great and good and wise and virtuous, but being still human, it will have its vanities and self-conceits, its shams, humbugs, and impostures, even as we have, or haply greater than ours, for everything, we are told, will be on a scale of which we have no conception; and against these there is no weapon so effective as the old-fashioned one with which Cervantes smote the great sham of his own day.
* ↑ This book, it may be as well to remind some readers, is not, as it is still often described, one of Defoe's novels, but the genuine experiences of an English officer in Spain during the Succession War.
* ↑ I am going through Don Quixote again, and admire it more than ever. It is certainly the best novel in the world beyond all comparison. — Macaulay, Life and Letters.