WHO IS CRAZY?
When civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, the fighting man went
about with a hard-shell covering, like a crab, and was called a knight.
Both he and his horse underwent a long training, and when it was
finished he was a fighting engine which could roll over anything else
existing in the world. He went on crusades, and drove back the Saracen
and the Turk from Europe. In these days of real and cruel danger he
produced a genuine Art of Power: for example, “The Song of Roland,” an
eleventh century French poem, telling of a terrific all-day battle
against invading infidel hordes.
But afterwards, when chivalry had become established, it developed its
Art of Beauty; a fantastic literature about ideal beings, who conformed
to an artificial and complicated code of etiquette, and spent their time
rescuing beautiful young ladies from the claws of various monsters.
There grew up a whole genealogy of these literary knights, and enormous
long poems were composed about them. When I was at Columbia University,
acquiring culture, one of the tasks set me was the reading of Ariosto,
an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, and I valiantly struggled
through a dozen cantos of these absurd adventures. They resemble a
Griffith moving picture, in which there is a villain engaged in an
elaborate process of raping a beautiful virgin, while the gallant hero
is galloping on his way to a rescue. But Ariosto regales us with more
details of the attempted rape; for in these old times people were not
afraid of the animal aspects of life.
In the distant island of Britain some rough country fellows trained
themselves to shoot arrows through the joints of the knightly armor. A
little later came the invention of gunpowder, and that finished the
hard-shell crabs on horseback. But the literary world also resembles a
crab, in that it walks backward, with its eyes on the past. Invariably
you find that what is called scholarship and culture is several
generations behind the practical life of men; and so the poets went on
composing elaborate and fantastic romances of chivalry. The test of
excellence in literature was the refinement and elegance and remoteness
from life of this perverted leisure-class art: until Cervantes came
along and laughed it to death.
He was born in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, noble but
poor. He first lived his great book, and then in old age he wrote it. He
went to Rome in the retinue of a papal ambassador, and later on took up
the chivalrous career, a crusade. The Turks were in possession of the
Mediterranean, and the Spaniards were trying to drive them out;
Cervantes, though ill of a fever, fought desperately at the battle of
Lepanto, and was twice wounded. After five years of such war he was
sailing home, when the Turks captured him, and for several years he was
a slave in Algiers--a gallant and romantic slave, the darling of his
companions and the terror of his masters. He made several attempts to
escape, and finally was ransomed by his relatives, and came home to
Spain, crippled and poor--to reflect, like so many returned soldiers,
upon the bitterness of dead glory.
He became a government agent, collecting naval stores. He was not a
great success: one of his subordinates defaulted, and he was put in
prison. He lived in straitened circumstances, in a household with five
women relatives and his sense of humor. Then he tried writing; for
twenty years he wrote every kind of thing which a man of his time could
imagine would bring a living, but all in vain. He was not a university
man and so the critics of his time considered him presumptuous in
attempting to break into their sacred ranks. Until he was fifty-eight
his life was a failure.
Then he hit upon the idea of ridiculing the established literature of
chivalry, by bringing it into contact with the every-day realities of
Spain. He created a character very much like himself; except that the
old Don Quixote had read so many romances that his head was turned, and
he began to take them seriously, mounted his old nag and rode out to
rescue damsels, and to mistake a barber’s basin shining in the sun for a
helmet, and wind-mills for giants who must be overthrown. The story
rambles along from one comical adventure to the next, and brings in
almost every type of person in Spain. It became an instant and
enormously popular success; but poor Cervantes got practically nothing
out of it, because editions were pirated all over the country. He was a
failure to the end--and curiously enough, did not get any satisfaction
even from his fame. He was ashamed of his popular book, and quite sure
that mankind would some day appreciate his long poems, “The Journey to
Parnassus,” and the pastoral romance, “Galatea,” and the romantic poem,
“Persiles and Sigismunda.”
Many of the world’s greatest writers have thus fallen victim to
culture-snobbery. Shakespeare was despised by the academic critics of
his own time, and apparently did not think enough of his own plays to
see that posterity got a correct edition of them. When I was a boy we
all read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” and “laughed our heads
off” over them; but if anybody had suggested to us that Mark Twain
might be one of the world’s great writers, we should have thought it a
Mark Twain joke.
“Don Quixote” was produced, definitely and deliberately, as a piece of
propaganda. We no longer know even the names of these long-winded
romances of chivalry, so we do not realize that the author, in
ridiculing them, is trying to teach us something. Also, there is another
kind of propaganda that Cervantes put into the book, his ideas
concerning one of the gravest problems confronting mankind through the
ages. What shall be the relation of the idealist, the dreamer of good
and beautiful things, to the world of ugliness and greed in which he
finds himself? He has a vision of something splendid, but the world
knows nothing about that vision, and cannot be made to understand it; if
he tries to apply it, the world will call him crazy, it will treat him
so badly that before he gets through he may be really crazy. But what,
after all, is it to be crazy? Is it to believe in the possibility of
something splendid in life? Or is it to believe that life must always be
the hateful and ugly thing we now see it?
Nobody can be sure just how much Cervantes realized all this himself.
There are many cases of men of genius writing, out of their sorrow and
their laughter, things more wise and more deep than they know. Did
Shakespeare intend Shylock to be a comic character, to be howled at and
pelted by the Jew-hating mob of his time, or did he realize that in this
half-comic, half-tragic figure he was voicing the grief and protest of a
persecuted race?
What Cervantes has done in “Don Quixote” is to supply the critics and
interpreters with material for speculation through many ages to come. He
gave his crack-brained old gentleman a devoted servant, with no particle
of his master’s idealism or insanity. Sancho Panza is entirely normal,
from the world’s point of view, a sturdy and practical fellow; yet he
gets into just as many absurd scrapes as his master--because he is
ignorant, and is betrayed by his own greed. So we are brought back again
and again to the question: Who is it that is really crazy in this
shifting and uncertain world? Is a reader of literature insane because
he sets out to apply the ideas of that literature in real life? Or does
insanity lie with writers who produce and critics who praise literature
which cannot be applied to real life, and is not intended to be so
applied? If, as I believe, the latter answer is correct--then how many
foolish persons there are writing books today!
It is interesting to note how many of the world’s great monuments of art
were produced by men who saw their country traveling the road to ruin,
and pleaded in vain with the ruling classes. Cervantes himself was a
devout Catholic, and would not have understood us if we had told him
that Don Quixote typified the Spain of his time; the Spain which
believed that the human mind could be shackled by religious bigotry, and
forced by dungeon and torture and the stake to accept a set of
theological dogmas. The Spaniards slaughtered or drove into exile their
most intelligent population, the Moors; and Cervantes approved it. They
set out to conquer the world for their hateful faith, and Cervantes saw
their powerful Armada overthrown and destroyed by the little ships of
sturdy, independent Englishmen, who had recently kicked out the pope
from their country and taken charge of their own thinking. This pope had
by formal decree presented England to Spain; but the old, crack-brained
Don Quixote empire had been unable to take possession, and the sad
gentleman-soldier, Cervantes, died without having understood any of
these world-events.