The age of chivalry, as depicted in romances, could never, of course,
have had any real existence; but the sentiments which are described as
animating that age have been found more or less operative in different
countries and different periods of society. In Spain, especially, this
influence is to be discerned from a very early date. Its inhabitants
may be said to have lived in a romantic atmosphere, in which all the
extravagances of chivalry were nourished by their peculiar situation.
Their hostile relations with the Moslem kept alive the full glow of
religious and patriotic feeling. Their history is one interminable
crusade. An enemy always on the borders invited perpetual displays of
personal daring and adventure. The refinement and magnificence of the
Spanish Arabs throw a luster over these contests such as could not be
reflected from the rude skirmishes with their Christian neighbors.
Lofty sentiments, embellished by the softer refinements of courtesy,
were blended in the martial bosom of the Spaniard, and Spain became
emphatically the land of romantic chivalry.
[Footnote 69: From the "Biographical and Critical Miscellanies," which
were collected by the author for publication in England in 1845. This
essay, and the others in the volume, with one exception, had been
published originally in _The North American Review_.]
The very laws themselves, conceived in this spirit, contributed
greatly to foster it. The ancient code of Alfonso X, in the thirteenth
century, after many minute regulations for the deportment of the good
knight, enjoins on him to "invoke the name of his mistress in the
fight, that it may infuse new ardor into his soul and preserve him
from the commission of unknightly actions." Such laws were not a dead
letter. The history of Spain shows that the sentiment of romantic
gallantry penetrated the nation more deeply and continued longer than
in any other quarter of Christendom....
The taste for these romantic extravagances naturally fostered a
corresponding taste for the perusal of tales of chivalry. Indeed, they
acted reciprocally on each other. These chimerical legends had once,
also, beguiled the long evenings of our Norman ancestors, but, in the
progress of civilization, had gradually given way to other and more
natural forms of composition. They still maintained their ground in
Italy, whither they had passed later, and where they were consecrated
by the hand of genius. But Italy was not the true soil of chivalry,
and the inimitable fictions of Bojardo, Pulci, and Ariosto were
composed with that lurking smile of half-supprest mirth which, far
from a serious tone, could raise only a corresponding smile of
incredulity in the reader.
In Spain, however, the marvels of romance were all taken in perfect
good faith. Not that they were received as literally true; but the
reader surrendered himself up to the illusion, and was moved to
admiration by the recital of deeds which, viewed in any other light
than as a wild frolic of imagination, would be supremely ridiculous;
for these tales had not the merit of a seductive style and melodious
versification to relieve them. They were, for the most part, an
ill-digested mass of incongruities, in which there was as little
keeping and probability in the characters as in the incidents, while
the whole was told in that stilted "Hercles' vein" and with that
licentiousness of allusion and imagery which could not fail to debauch
both the taste and the morals of the youthful reader. The mind,
familiarized with these monstrous, over-colored pictures, lost all
relish for the chaste and sober productions of art. The love of the
gigantic and the marvelous indisposed the reader for the simple
delineations of truth in real history....
Cervantes brought forward a personage, in whom were embodied all those
generous virtues which belong to chivalry; disinterestedness, contempt
of danger, unblemished honor, knightly courtesy, and those aspirations
after ideal excellence which, if empty dreams, are the dreams of a
magnanimous spirit. They are, indeed, represented by Cervantes as too
ethereal for this world, and are successively dispelled as they come
in contact with the coarse realities of life. It is this view of the
subject which has led Sismondi, among other critics, to consider that
the principal end of the author was "the ridicule of enthusiasm--the
contrast of the heroic with the vulgar"--and he sees something
profoundly sad in the conclusions to which it leads. This sort of
criticism appears to be over-refined. It resembles the efforts of some
commentators to allegorize the great epics of Homer and Virgil,
throwing a disagreeable mistiness over the story by converting mere
shadows into substances, and substances into shadows.
The great purpose of Cervantes was, doubtless, that expressly avowed
by himself, namely, to correct the popular taste for romances of
chivalry. It is unnecessary to look for any other in so plain a tale,
altho, it is true, the conduct of the story produces impressions on
the reader, to a certain extent, like those suggested by Sismondi. The
melancholy tendency, however, is in a great degree counteracted by the
exquisitely ludicrous character of the incidents. Perhaps, after all,
if we are to hunt for a moral as the key of the fiction, we may with
more reason pronounce it to be the necessity of proportioning our
undertakings to our capacities.
The mind of the hero, Don Quixote, is an ideal world into which
Cervantes has poured all the rich stores of his own imagination, the
poet's golden dreams, high romantic exploit, and the sweet visions of
pastoral happiness; the gorgeous chimeras of the fancied age of
chivalry, which had so long entranced the world; splendid illusions,
which, floating before us like the airy bubbles which the child throws
off from his pipe, reflect, in a thousand variegated tints, the rude
objects around, until, brought into collision with these, they are
dashed in pieces and melt into air. These splendid images derive
tenfold beauty from the rich antique coloring of the author's
language, skilfully imitated from the old romances, but which
necessarily escapes in the translation into a foreign tongue. Don
Quixote's insanity operates both in mistaking the ideal for the real,
and the real for the ideal. Whatever he has found in romances he
believes to exist in the world; and he converts all he meets with in
the world into the visions of his romances. It is difficult to say
which of the two produces the most ludicrous results.
For the better exposure of these mad fancies Cervantes has not only
put them into action in real life, but contrasted them with another
character which may be said to form the reverse side of his hero's.
Honest Sancho represents the material principle as perfectly as his
master does the intellectual or ideal. He is of the earth, earthy.
Sly, selfish, sensual, his dreams are not of glory, but of good
feeding. His only concern is for his carcass. His notions of honor
appear to be much the same with those of his jovial contemporary
Falstaff, as conveyed in his memorable soliloquy. In the sublime
night-piece which ends with the fulling-mills--truly sublime until we
reach the denouement--Sancho asks his master: "Why need you go about
this adventure? It is main dark, and there is never a living soul sees
us; we have nothing to do but to sheer off and get out of harm's way.
Who is there to take notice of our flinching?" Can anything be
imagined more exquisitely opposed to the true spirit of chivalry? The
whole compass of fiction nowhere displays the power of contrast so
forcibly as in these two characters; perfectly opposed to each other,
not only in their minds and general habits, but in the minutest
details of personal appearance.
It was a great effort of art for Cervantes to maintain the dignity of
his hero's character in the midst of the whimsical and ridiculous
distresses in which he has perpetually involved him. His infirmity
leads us to distinguish between his character and his conduct, and to
absolve him from all responsibility for the latter. The author's art
is no less shown in regard to the other principal figure in the piece,
Sancho Panza, who, with the most contemptible qualities, contrives to
keep a strong hold on our interest by the kindness of his nature and
his shrewd understanding. He is far too shrewd a person, indeed, to
make it natural for him to have followed so crack-brained a master
unless bribed by the promise of a substantial recompense. He is a
personification, as it were, of the popular wisdom--a "bundle of
proverbs," as his master somewhere styles him; and proverbs are the
most compact form in which the wisdom of a people is digested. They
have been collected into several distinct works in Spain, where they
exceed in number those of any other, if not every other country in
Europe. As many of them are of great antiquity, they are of
inestimable price with the Castilian jurists, as affording rich
samples of obsolete idioms and the various mutations of the language.
"Don Quixote" may be said to form an epoch in the history of letters,
as the original of that kind of composition, the novel of character,
which is one of the distinguishing peculiarities of modern literature.
When well executed, this sort of writing rises to the dignity of
history itself, and may be said to perform no insignificant part of
the functions of the latter. History describes men less as they are
than as they appear, as they are playing a part on the great
political theater--men in masquerade. It rests on state documents,
which too often cloak real purposes under an artful veil of policy, or
on the accounts of contemporaries blinded by passion or interest. Even
without these deductions, the revolutions of states, their wars, and
their intrigues do not present the only aspect, nor, perhaps, the most
interesting, under which human nature can be studied. It is man in his
domestic relations, around his own fireside, where alone his real
character can be truly disclosed; in his ordinary occupations in
society, whether for purposes of profit or pleasure; in his every-day
manner of living, his tastes and opinions, as drawn out in social
intercourse; it is, in short, under all those forms which make up the
interior of society that man is to be studied, if we would get the
true form and pressure of the age--if, in short, we would obtain clear
and correct ideas of the actual progress of civilization.
But these topics do not fall within the scope of the historian. He can
not find authentic materials for them. They belong to the novelist,
who, indeed, contrives his incidents and creates his characters, but
who, if true to his art, animates them with the same tastes,
sentiments, and motives of action which belong to the period of his
fiction. His portrait is not the less true because no individual has
sat for it. He has seized the physiognomy of the times. Who is there
that does not derive a more distinct idea of the state of society and
manners in Scotland from the "Waverley Novels" than from the best of
its historians? Of the condition of the Middle Ages from the single
romance of "Ivanhoe" than from the volumes of Hume or Hallam? In like
manner, the pencil of Cervantes has given a far more distinct and a
richer portraiture of life in Spain in the sixteenth century than can
be gathered from a library of monkish chronicles.