This is a prophecy of Europe, whose life of mechanical perfection has
turned the Christ and saints of its soul into such twisted creatures.
_CHAPTER IX_
_THE WILL OF DON QUIXOTE_
_a. The Birth of the Hero_
_b. The Career of the Hero_
_c. The Book of the Hero_
_a. The Birth of the Hero_
Cervantes was born in a Europe more than three centuries beyond the noon
of chivalry. Knighthood north of Spain begot great books. The _Chanson
de Roland_ in the form which we possess is earlier than 1100. In the
last years of the twelfth century Chrétien de Troies--first master in an
unbroken line that perhaps closed with Anatole France--put into gracious
and fleet form the Arthurian cycle. A bit later, a profounder German,
Wolfram von Eschenbach, composed from French materials the transfiguring
masterwork of chivalry, the Poem of Parzival. Joinville’s portrait of
Saint Louis and of his two Crusades was written about 1290. Thereafter
Europe, north of Spain, begins the great decline into the modern era.
The last historic synthesis of western man lies in that Middle Age. It
rose from the chaotic impact of the Roman Empire and the Teuton with
Alexandria and Judah. Already ere the ancient world had fallen its
architects were building. Origen, Tertullian, Jerome, Anthony, Gregory,
Charlemagne--such were its foundation-makers. It reaches heights in
Abélard, Aquinas, Francis, Dante: in the creators of the Gothic, in the
great weavers of polyphonic music, in men of action--Godefroi de
Bouillon and Saint Louis. And already, at this hey-day, from the
disintegrant north come threats of dissolution in such figures as Roger
Bacon and Duns Scotus who, positing the primacy of will over the
intellect, declare Theology to be not science but revelation and
foretell Luther and Kant--creators of the modern chaos.
European thought, after the Cathedrals, Dante, and the great
scholastics, is a story of destruction. Men of as high genius as
Albertus Magnus or Saint Thomas proceed by vision and by dialectic to
take stone from stone in the dismantlement of Christian Europe. Here and
there in the vast liquidation a prophet throws up a scheme for a new
Synthesis--such a one was Spinoza: the world cannot accept him, neither
can it lose him, from cosmic prescience of a future need.
The towers of this great House in which dwelt the soul of Europe touch
the year 1300. Dante has devised his vision; Chartres lives upon the
Ile-de-France; Saint Bernard in Clairvaux and Saint Francis in Assisi
have filled the world with brothers; chivalry has brought war and love
into the sacred symphony of Europe; the German foray is Crusade; lust of
the flesh bears the Mystery of Tristan and Isolt, of Abélard and
Héloïse. Now, the divine Structure nobly curves back to earth. By 1400,
Europe dwells once more in the bowels of discord. By 1500, European man
is a congeries of atomic wills: the unity of Christ has scattered into
exploration, industry and science.
But in this destructive act, Europe is as creative as when the Fathers
builded, out of the Prophets, Plato, Paul, the puissant Organism of
medieval Europe. To tear down such a body is as divine an act as to
build it. Systole and diastole are equal. Schopenhauer and Kant are
brothers before God with Aquinas. The long ages of deliquescence from
that peak of Rome rightly seem rich to our enlisted eyes since they are
as full of saints and heroes consecrate to our work, as were the
anchorites of the Thebaid to theirs.
For this is the mysterious law of history: that the divine is present in
death even as in life, in the Nay equally with the Yea. God does not
build His revelation upon earth and then turn away His face while man
tears down. He is there, too, in the destruction. He was there when the
Prophets created the Jew: He was there also when the Pharisees and the
Essenic Christ destroyed the Jew. He was there when the saints and
Fathers builded Catholic Rome. He was there when Luther, Calvin,
Goethe, Blake burned Rome away.
We see Him in the despair of Dostoievski no less than in the joy of
Saint Francis. It was while the Jewish world drooped and retched, that
the gospels of Jesus flowered. From that nadir was prepared the Dantean
zenith. Once more an ebb of the Tide. Spain has become a befuddled
chaos. Home from her mad anachronistic dream of establishing on earth
what Europe has given up for centuries, she is already rotting. And now,
from the bitterness of her awareness rises a new Word. It, too, is
entextured of contemporary failure, and is implicit of revelation.
* * * * *
Spain did not conform with the Middle Ages of the north. Roman Iberia
received its dominant invasion from the south, whereas in Italy, Gaul
and Britain the coefficient of transformation from Rome to Holy Rome was
the same Teuton element which held the eastern marches beyond Roman
rule. León, Aragon and Castile were medieval in so far as the Visigoth
was strong in them. But even here, contact was as great with the Moslem
foe of the south as with the brother northward.
Medievalism is an idealism forced upon the world of Appearance. It is a
mystical conclusion by the Teuton will, drawn from the logical element
of Latin, and the naturalistic element of Semitic, cultures. It is most
powerful in the lands where the Teuton is strongest: Germany and
England. In France, where the blend was fairest between Frank and
Gallo-Roman, it is most balanced and most perfect. In Italy, medievalism
is never great. And in a land whose conclusive elements are Semitic or
harmonize with the Semitic, it is impossible. Such a land was Spain. The
ethnic Iberian base of Spain is more African in nature than European;
more aboriginally close to Semite than to German. Arab culture was
always naturalistic. Judaism and Mohammedanism are pragmatic systems on
different levels, yet both based upon empirical experience and natural
law. In medieval Catholicism, the natural laws and the experience of the
world are deformed by a mystic idealizing will. In Semitism, the ideal
sense is made to converge with natural law: the mystic will is regarded
as possessing its true form in the activity of nature.
Semitism in its several shades, or a spirit close to it, impeded Spain
from becoming wholly medieval. It was culturally too strong to accept
the neo-platonic House of the medieval God. But Semitism is politically
weak. Medievalism, repugning the natural body of the world, creates an
ideal Organism--a Church--which becomes politically real. Semitism,
accepting Nature as God’s organic body, has no impulse to erect
political substitutes for the wholeness of existence. Politically, it
tends toward fragmentation: even as in art it remains lyrical and forms
no such organic structures as the Gothic cathedral or the Dantean epic.
This political weakness of the Spanish Semite impeded Spain from
becoming wholly Semitic. Spain for centuries was in a state of
continuous flux and of osmosis between the medieval north and the
Semitic south. When at length there came a final issue the north won.
Ferdinand and Isabel turned toward Europe. A revised medievalism,
equipped with methods of the Renaissance, became the goal of the Spanish
will. And at a time when it was already dead in Europe.
This is the year 1500. The Holy Roman Empire is in full liquidation.
Luther and Calvin are rising. Copernicus is at work. America has been
discovered. Now Spain pours her ideal energy and her blood into the
tragic task of becoming medieval. Godefroi, Saint Louis, Parzival, Saint
Francis and Aquinas have been dethroned and denied in the countries of
their birth. They become the patterns and movers of Castile.
Lest the hostile--the Semitic elements, which in the noon of medieval
Europe held Spain from her part in that great Synthesis, hold Spain back
now, Isabel drives the Jew and Moslem from her realms. It is too late.
The dissident spirit is at work in Spain. And the heroic effort of this
land to revive chivalry, to recreate Christ, to re-establish all the
world as Christ’s Rock and Church becomes a divine farce, a sort of
comic Mystery--_Don Quixote_.
* * * * *
Perhaps Cervantes’ family was of gentle blood: but it had come to
pitiful fortune when Miguel was born to the poor surgeon in Alcalá de
Henares. The year was 1547: and the town upon the _llanura_ of Castile
was the rival of Salamanca. Naught is more eloquent of the poverty of
his people than the fact that Miguel was unable to attend the university
round the corner. At twenty-two, however, he was a poet. He went to
Italy as the body servant of the Papal Nuncio: later he rose to be a
soldier. In 1571, the ships of Philip II defeated the Turk in the waters
of Lepanto. A shot crippled the left hand of Cervantes. His officers
ordered him below. He refused to leave the deck, and in his blood and
pain fought to the close of the engagement. This is a better sign of his
unusual nature than his verse. A man of high sensitivity, he exposed
himself to physical suffering beyond the duty of a soldier. He was
devoted passionately to the Catholic cause. And when in 1575 he took
ship from Italy, he had letters to the king from Don Juan of Austria and
the Duke of Sessa whom he had served in Naples. He was full of merit:
and full of hope he went home for his reward. But the Berber pirates
took the vessel and he and his brother, Rodrigo, became slaves in
Algiers. Four times in five years Cervantes plotted to escape the
stiflement of servitude in the Kasbah of that town which rises within a
snow-crowned conch above the hard-blue sea, hiding its reek within the
gleam of roofs. Cervantes’ sisters and mother bestirred themselves:
scraped coin together, borrowed, and at last, ransomed Rodrigo. In 1580,
a mendicant monk came to the aid of the sisters, and Cervantes was freed
on the eve of his departure eastward. He went to Madrid. He sought
protection, and he failed to find it. He had been a hero and a martyr:
but such were cheap in Spain. The land swarmed with veterans of the wars
which had spread Spain’s glory to the Pacific Ocean. Cervantes performed
odd diplomatic jobs and tried to be a writer. From thirty-four to forty
he wrote thirty plays; he had no financial success. But he wed a landed
lady, Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano of Esquivias, a
town on the fringe of the Manchegan desert which after twenty years was
to be transfigured by a hero. At about the time of his marriage, another
lady Doña Ana de Rojas bore him a natural daughter, Isabel, whose life
was to be fateful in his own. Cervantes’ burdens were great as his means
were small. He placed all his hopes on a novel in which he believed that
he had lavished all his genius. _La Galatea_ appeared in 1585, and was
an unremunerative _succès d’estime_.
Now come twenty years of Gethsemane to Don Miguel de Cervantes y
Saavedra. The silence of oblivion--_el silencio del olvido_ whereof he
speaks--was their sweetest portion. We follow him hardly, for he had
reason to hold to his obscurity. In 1588 he is a commissary in Seville.
In 1592 he is in prison for a bungled sale of wheat. Later he is engaged
in provisioning the Armada. He tries to get out of Spain: he seeks a
post in Guatemala: but he lacks the influence to win it. Once more he
sues the stage. Lope de Vega is the master of taste; and once more
Cervantes fails. In 1594 he is a tax-collector in Granada: in disgrace:
once more in prison. In 1597 we find him released on faith of his word
that he will make good a deficit to the Treasury of the King. There is
no trace, however, of his payment. For five years, he seems to have
touched depths in Andalusia. An obscure actor, Tomás Gutiérrez (blessèd
be his name) supports him. In 1603 he is in jail again, the bank in
which he had deposited trusted monies having failed. He appears to have
been under lock and key at this time, in both Seville and Argamasilla de
Alba. This may have been the circumstance in which, judged by his own
words, he began to write _Don Quixote_.
In 1604, Part One of the work is written: has even been bruited about
Madrid either in manuscript or in an edition prior to the first extant
one which bears the date 1605. Lope de Vega is at his height. He is the
Stage of Spain. His name outshines the king’s: his portrait stands
beside a saint’s in myriad Spanish homes. Miguel de Cervantes is living
in Vallodolid. With him are the two sisters who helped ransom him from
slavery, a niece and Isabel; his natural daughter. His wife lives in
indifferent ease on her estate in La Mancha. Cervantes is penniless. His
labors as tax-farmer have earned him bread in prison and disgrace with
the world. He has been forgotten as a writer. And he lives with women
who support him. They are good women and he loves them: but they are
women, like himself disgraced by fortune. His sisters, Magdalena de
Sotomayor and Andrea de Cervantes, have been “kept” women. His niece
Constanza is living now with a man to whom she is not married. Cervantes
knows this, and eats their bread. His daughter, Isabel, is not of good
repute; nor is Cervantes perfectly cleared of implication in her
mercenary ways.
He is fifty-seven: he is broken utterly. And his bread is shame. Yet he
is still the proud hidalgo who served Don Juan of Austria in Naples, who
refused succor and relief at Lepanto: who led gallant sallies in
Algiers. He is not Cervantes. He is Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra.
* * * * *
This man looks out upon his world, with eyes of such a life, and
decides, after twenty adverse years, again to write a book. He has read
only the decadent offspring of chivalry’s literary flower. He does not
know the original _chansons de geste_ nor the native water-clear _romans
d’aventure_. The best he knows is the fifteenth century Romancero; is
Ariosto and the ornate Italians; is the Castilian version of Amadís de
Gaula which has come to Spain, over-blown, by Portugal out of Brittany
and Wales. These are relatively pure beside their spawn of dull sons
performing ridiculous wonders in a world of wooden magic. But the vogue
of these knights is past. The books of _caballería_, which tempted the
young Santa Teresa to go forth seeking martyrdom and adventure, have
already ebbed. On the other hand, _La Celestina_ which appeared along
with the first Castilian Amadis has thriven and inspired the pícaro who
lives still in Spanish and in European letters.
Vivid in Cervantes’ mind is the organic music--the first great Castilian
prose--in which Fernando de Rojas sang the sordid fate of his Celestina.
As with Amadis, this book has medieval roots. But unlike Amadis, it has
classic form, and independent greatness. Amadis is a fatty degeneration
of Roland, Parzival, Lancelot. La Celestina is a transfigurement of the
comedy of Terence and Plautus, as well as of the romance of Aucassin and
Nicolette, of Tristan and Isolt, of Romeo and Juliet. It is ironic,
realistic, ruthlessly tragic as the romance was never. Chivalry
expressed a childlike age which projected its own maturity into a Church
and a Heaven. The romance at best was an adolescent form. As the Church
dimmed and Heaven grew less sure and man began again to build upon
himself, it was transfigured into the modern novel. _La Celestina_ is
the first towering adult of the childlike race of the fabliaux and
romances.
Irony and a profound acceptance of natural justice--such are the
transforming elements of _La Celestina_. Love’s medieval idyll is rotted
and destroyed by the pragmatic world to which it has appealed for
fulfillment. Loveliness is killed by lust. The whole infantile fantasy
of the Middle Age is confronted with the fate of its own will: a fate of
evil and of sordid passion. And Justice is implicit in the nature of
events. This meeting of love and lust, of vice and beauty, this
hot-and-cold inmixture of vision and of despair gives to the book of
Rojas a dimension that relates it to Dostoievski and to Balzac.
The pícaro novels of Spain’s sixteenth century continue the novel of
Rojas and announce _Don Quixote_. Counterpoint of irony and naturalistic
justice becomes the theme, variantly construed, of _Lazarillo de
Tormes_, of Quevedo’s _El Buscón_, of Delicado’s _Lozana Andaluza_, of
the _Guzmán_ of Mateo Alemán.
This in the mind of Cervantes looking out upon his world. And with it, a
parallel domain of literary expression: one that is not unrelated to the
brutal picaresque and to the extravagant tales of chivalry: the mystic.
Cervantes knew the renowned _Diálogos de Amor_ of León Hebreo. And he
knew Santa Teresa, Luis de León, Luis de Granada.
This man whom adversity for twenty years has silenced is a bookish man.
But he has been a man of action. He has grown old with his own literary
failure. But he has absorbed a century of literary success. He is no
primitive. Mature in years and in events, he is the heir of a rich,
various heritage of expression.
When he was born, Carlos I was king. His youth spanned the age of Felipe
II. While he fought and was exiled, the Escorial rose, a last pinnacle
of stone, from the Castilian Guadarrama. Now, in Cervantes’ broken age,
the grotesque Felipe III leads Spain. Spain has gone on the Crusade
Isabel dreamed; and Spain has come to this.
Cervantes looks back over the glorious madness of his land; and he has
his earliest vision of the Knight: Quixote wearing a barber’s dish,
mounted on a nag. For Spain was not like Europe at the dawn of chivalry.
Europe then was dawn, itself. Old wines--the wines of the Prophets, of
Plato and Saint Augustine--had raged in the young flesh of Teuton
hordes. But Spain at this flush of her ambition was already old. Seven
centuries of war with Islam, endless ages of conflict with a desert
world have parched the skin and turned brittle the bone of this Quixotic
hero, abroad in the world to make the world into the House of Christ.
Cervantes looks at Spain. Outward splendor flings Spain’s canopy from
Holland to Africa, from Florida to Santa Fe. Paul and the Apostles who
voyaged over the world are dead fifteen hundred years; but Columbus
charts his way to the Indies from study of the Scriptures. Roland blew
his last horn six centuries since: but Cortés and Pizarro raze empires
in Peru. The hermits of the Thebaid are buried under millennial dust;
but Córdoba has its anchorites. Saint Anthony and Saint Elisabeth are
old in Heaven; but here yesterday were Saint John of the Cross and Saint
Teresa. Bernard of Clairvaux did not crush the Albigensians with more
blood than Torquemada the Jews. Saint Louis of France announces Isabel
of Spain. Pope Gregory has his brother--across seven hundred years--in
Cisneros, Cardinal of Toledo.[24]
Cervantes looks within Spain. It is a squalid land. Men pray while it
lies sterile. Old soldiers are vagabonds on the roads. Farms are waste
while the lazy lords watch for gold-filled galleons from the Indies. It
is a bloodless land. Women give themselves to Christ, and their wombs
shrink. Carlos and Felipe pour the blood of Aragon and Castile into the
Flemish sea.
Cervantes looks at himself. He, too, has been a hero. His maimed hand
recalls the gesture of Lepanto. He has been a poet--in prison; a servant
of the State--who starved. He has helped to provision the Armada whose
splendor sank under the modern iron of stripped England. And now, he
eats the shame-bread of his women.
Looking within himself or out upon his world, Cervantes sees one thing.
Spain and he are home, ashen and sober, from a high Crusade. Spain and
he are this single body of his bitterness. Such is the conjunction and
dark omen of the birth of a hero.
_b. The Career of the Hero_
Don Quixote is but the final name of the ingenious knight of La Mancha.
In Chapter One of his book, it is set forth that he was known as
Quijada, Quesada or Quejana. Four chapters later a worker in the
neighboring fields addresses him as Quijana, and as Quijano he made his
will at the end of his last journey. His Christian name was Alonso.
Quixote (Quijote in modern Castilian) was the choice of the old man
himself. And as Cervantes gives him birth, he is old--old for his fifty
years in a frustrate Manchegan village. He is noble but poor. He is an
eater of cheap meats. He is a cadaverous, lantern-jawed, brittle-boned,
deep-eyed fellow. His house, one room of which is stocked with the
chivalric books that have drawn his substance and addled his brains, is
cared for by an old Nurse and a niece. There is as well a boy servant
who disappears from the tale after the first chapter. Doubtless
Cervantes meant to employ him as Don Quixote’s squire: but when the
independent knight after his first sally made choice of Sancho Panza,
there was naught left for the poor _mozo_. Of course, in the stable
stands a splay-hoof nag. After four days of meditation on such names as
Bucephalus and Babieca (the stallion of the Cid), Quixote christens his
jade Rocinante. _Rocín_ means hack horse: wherefore Don Quixote meant
that his mount was _before_ all the other hacks of the world.
This detail, appearing in the first chapter of the Book, might give the
canny reader pause. “Why,” he might ask, “if the deluded eyes--as we are
told--of Don Quixote saw his hack as a mount equal to the steeds of
Amadis or Alexander, as he was soon to be equal in renown, did he
christen him with a name so comical and so revealing?” The reader will
be aware of a curious shift in this Don Quixote’s “madness”: a note
shivering in at once of self-conscious irony.
However, the madman to whom Cervantes introduces us seems on the whole
at first to be consistent. A poverty-struck Manchegan, finding his
treeless world too empty for his senses, lets them roam in a realm of
knight-errants, ogres, fairies, virgins, Magic. Until his senses are
strayed. Whereupon, deeming himself a Roland or an Amadis, he buckles on
his rusty sword, takes his nag from the stall and sallies forth into a
Spain sordidly realistic, sick of heroes, to perform adventures. He cuts
a ridiculous figure. And his fate is what a sane man might expect. He is
unhorsed, drubbed, pounded. He loses teeth as his molested countrymen
lose tempers. The ladies he meets are foul-breathed wenches; the lord of
the Castle in which he takes his rest wants his pay, being the keeper of
an inn. His battles are with goats, sheep, windmills and Biscayan
servants. It is clear that some day his madness will discomfit him
entire. At which time he will be forced back to his house where the good
Nurse and the niece will staunch his wounds, bathe the dust from his mad
eyes and put him to bed. Meantime, there is the tale to tell--with much
laughter--of his absurd adventures. Cervantes wishes to laugh at this
medieval scarecrow, jousting with the Modern. His fellow Spaniards, sick
like himself of gestures and heroics, will roar along--will pay _reales_
for the book--will put money in the purse of a scribbler.
Such a Quixote is the child of Cervantes, and is the subject of the
early chapters. And now a fundamental difference sets in, marking off
this character from others. Most literary creations remain their
maker’s. As he willed, modeled, developed them, so they live--or die.
This is true in great books. The evolution of the hero is explicit in
the poet’s mind or at least in the action’s threshold. But for the
analogue to Don Quixote we must go to biology, rather than to art. The
mother forms the baby in her womb. It is organically hers, and so for a
brief time it will remain. But she has endowed it with a principle which
will make her child recede ever more from being her creation. This inner
life, seeking substance in the world of sense and of impression, becomes
itself. The mother has created a babe--only to lose it. Similar is the
fate of Quixote with Cervantes. From the womb of his will and bitter
fancy comes the child. But Don Quixote is no sooner set on earth, than
he proceeds by an organic evolution, by a series of accretions,
assimilations, responses, to change wholly from the intent of his
author--to turn indeed against him. He does not lose organic contact
with his source, even as the man is child of his own childhood and of
his parents in a way deeper than the parents’ conscious will or than
biologic pattern. But above all, the child becomes himself. He has
transcended vastly the amorphous thing lodged in his mother’s womb. So
Don Quixote is transfigured beyond the sprightly scheme of his maker.