his heroic soul and his heroic age; he becomes the Body of sublime
acceptance--the symbol of what his misfortunes were to mock. Cervantes’
conscious will has no firm hold on Don Quixote. And this is plain almost
from the outset in the fact that the Manchegan knight, despite his
author’s assurance, _is not mad_. We had an inkling of this already in
the too conscious, too ironic naming of Rocinante. Soon the proofs
multiply; for the clown-blows that continue to rain upon Don Quixote in
Part One cannot hold him from his organic growth. With Part Two, written
ten years later, the blows and buffets are less frequent. Cervantes has
had time to catch up with and humbly to accept his son.
In the matter of the selecting of a Lady (that needed spur of every true
knight-errant) it is clear that Don Quixote knows the facts about
Aldonza Lorenzo, wench daughter of Lorenzo Cochuelo of El Toboso. Quite
consciously, he turns her into the divine Dulcinea whom henceforth he
will worship. Her he makes his “truth”; there is no evidence that the
_fact_ of the girl is ever hidden from him. He needs a helmet, indeed he
needs Mambrino’s magic helmet. A barber comes, riding an ass and on his
head (for it is raining) a copper bleeding-dish. This shall be the
golden helmet of Mambrino; and as such Don Quixote takes it. But in the
parley before and after with Sancho Panza, it is plain that the knight
accepts Sancho’s _fact_ about the dish: he merely turns the fact, for
his own purpose, into “truth.”
In the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote resolves to follow a tradition. He and
Sancho have reached the mountains that bar the smooth plains of La
Mancha from the fluid meads of Andalusia southward: mountains of rock
flung to sky, titanic gestures of rock, pourings of cosmic might into
the waste of rock. The Sierra, sudden beneath La Mancha, suggests
delirious excess. So here, Don Quixote will have his knightly spell of
madness, in anguish of his absent lady love. How does he set about it?
He debates the merits of two schools of madness. There was the furious
way of Roland after his Angelica had slept with the Moor Medoro. And
there was the quiet melancholy way of Amadis. Don Quixote is fifty: he
elects the quieter madness. He takes Sancho to witness of his straits,
ere he sends him off to beseech mercy of Dulcinea. Nor is he fooled by
Sancho’s meeting with the lady. The fact that Sancho has left behind him
the very letter which he describes as giving to Dulcinea does not
disturb Don Quixote. He is not dwelling with facts, but with truths of
his own conscious making. And he tells his squire, speaking in elegiac
temper of himself: “That if he did not achieve great matters, he died to
achieve them; and if I am indeed not disowned and disdained by Dulcinea
del Toboso, it sufficeth me ... to be absent from her.” Later he meets
the swine girl whom he has transfigured into princess. And since he
speaks of the magic making her appear as the facts (and Sancho) would
have it--a coarse and silly female with a breath of garlic--it is plain
that the facts are in his mind. He is not fooled. Nor is he lying when
he speaks of magic. Magic is the deep inner change of attitude. This is
the secret of the fakirs of the East. This is _true_ magic. Don
Quixote’s attitude changes the fact of the swine girl into his truth of
a princess.
The fooled is Sancho. For Sancho does not understand that fact and truth
may be foes. He takes one for the other. He believes that Dulcinea’s
enchantment, the Cave of Montesino, the Island which he is sent to
govern, the Empress whom his master is to wed are facts. As the tale
grows, poor Sancho is more and more enmired in confusion. He is in
danger of madness, losing his distinction between the world of shapes
and this world of ideas in which Don Quixote rides.
The old knight’s progress is willful. There is, for instance, the
wondrous ride on Clavileño, the wooden horse in the garden of the Duke,
upon which the pair are wafted through heaven and hell. Sancho claims to
have stolen a glimpse and to have seen them soaring through the
firmaments of fire. And Don Quixote answers:
“If you desire me to believe you in what you have just seen in the
sky, I desire that you should believe me in what I saw within the
Cave of Montesino. No need for me to say more....”
He is proposing to Sancho what is neither more nor less than a deal; he
will accept his squire’s lies, if Sancho accepts his own distinction
between a glorious truth and a drab world of facts. But Sancho’s mind
has no such athleticism. He is not Ramón Lull! He has never heard of
León Hebreo. He is forever mixing two insoluble realms.
At last Don Quixote meets his fate. In Barcelona, having been acclaimed
by crowds with mingled laughter and devotion which they can never
understand, he is challenged to combat by the Knight of the White Moon.
He is worsted, of course: and this is his end. For the _caballero de la
luna blanca_ is none other than the bachelor Sansón Carrasco. The goodly
Don Antonio cannot understand this medieval nonsense in his busy modern
seaport. Carrasco explains:
“My lord, know that I, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, am of the same
place as Don Quixote de la Mancha, whose simplicity and madness
have moved to tears all of us who know him: and among these none
has wept more than I: and believing that there lay his health and
peace, in that he should reside in his own land and house, I
determined to return him thither; and so three months since I went
upon the road as a knight-errant, calling myself _el caballero de
los espejos_, meaning to fight him, vanquish him without hurt, and
having put as the condition of our encounter that the vanquished
remain in the discretion of the victor: and what I thought to
demand of him (for I judged him beforehand already vanquished) was
that he should return to his home, and sally not forth from it for
a whole year; in which time he might be cured; but fate ordered
otherwise, for I was the defeated. I was hurled from my horse, and
hence my purpose could not take effect; he went his way, and I
returned, beaten, bruised, mashed by my fall which to be sure was
dangerous enough; but for this I did not give up my meaning which
was to seek him out once more and defeat him, as you have seen me
do this day. And since he is so punctilious in all that pertains to
the knight-errant, without doubt soever he will obey the order I
have given him, in honor of his word. This, my lord, is what has
passed, without my need to say another thing; I beseech you, do not
discover me nor say to Don Quixote who I am, in order that these my
good intentions may have effect, and that there may return to
reason a man so excellent in reason, when he is left alone by the
unreasons of chivalry....”
Carrasco reveals that his deep instinct against Don Quixote is
buttressed by a shallow understanding. When the old knight saw the
familiar face of his friend within the vizor of the defeated _caballero
de los espejos_, he was not troubled: he knew that magic had turned the
truth of the defeated warrior into the face of his neighbor, the
bachelor Sansón Carrasco. Had he now been told that the Knight of the
White Moon appeared to others as this same bachelor, he would have found
a similar solution--and obeyed the knight, though his heart broke.
So now, stripped of his harness, Don Quixote makes his ashen way
homeward from Barcelona. He does not yet know that he is vanquished for
good. His word binds him for a year: thereafter, can he not sally forth
again? Meantime, he need not stay idle in a gross world of facts. “If it
seem well to thee,” he tells his squire, “I should like that we turn
pastors even for the time I am caught up.” He makes his plans. “I shall
buy a few sheep and all other things needed for the pastoral life.” His
friends will share this new transfiguration which has the advantage of
being more sociable than the life of the knight-errant. He will become
the pastor _Quixotiz_; Sancho will become _Pancino_. Sancho’s wife
Teresa will be _Teresona_. The bachelor Carrasco will be known as
_Sansonino_ or _Carrascón_: being a learned man, he shall take his
choice. The priest (_el cura_) he might call, not knowing his true name,
_el pastor Curiambro_.
These persons, being facts, must change their names ere they can enter
his truthful pastoral Eden. Dulcinea remains Dulcinea: for already _she_
is of the world of his truth. With this last lucid statement of his
mind, the old man comes upon his home where soon he is to die. No more
may he be a knight, dispensing Justice in a real world inhabited by such
true concepts as ogres, virgins, sorcerers. Even the little interlude of
pastor is denied him. He languishes; and with his strength, his
creative will expires.
The child returneth to the mother. Don Alonso Quijano el Bueno lies upon
a death-bed and renounces Don Quixote. Again Cervantes’ child shrinks to
the arms of his parent. He abjures the careers of all knights-errant:
“Ya soy enemigo de Amadís de Gaula y de toda la infinita caterva de
su linaje; ya me son odiosas todas las historias profanas de la
andante caballería; ya conozco mi necedad y el peligro en que me
pusieron harlas leído; ya por misericordia de Díos, escarmentando
en cabeza propia, las abomino....”
* * * * *
Don Quixote, as he emerges unscathed from the mind of his author, is a
man possessed: not a madman. He is a man possessed as were the Hebrew
prophets, or Jesus, or Vardhamana, or Boehme or Plotinus, or any
poet.... The difference is subtle but is clear beyond the logical
distinctions of man’s reason. No atheist would call Amos mad, but a man
possessed. To Jesus saying: “When ye have lifted up the Son of God, then
shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as my
Father hath taught me” no Jew would ascribe madness, but possession.
Quixote is possessed of an Ideal. And since this ideal was mothered of
the world struggling toward light, and since now it mothers him entire,
becoming his truth and his world, Don Quixote takes his place among the
broken and triumphant prophets. Even the alienist durst not call him
mad, for in the drama which he enacts he knows his part: and the more
fully senses what he calls the truth, knowing its bodily difference from
the facts about him.
Reality for the medieval soul was neo-platonic. The conceptual was real:
all else was merely fact. The bitter apartness of Jew and Arab from
medieval Europe was due to the failure of the Semite, despite Philo and
Al Gazali, to assimilate neo-platonism deeply. Plotinus, Porphyry,
Augustine, Iamblicus created the psychology of a thousand years of
Europe. The real is not this world. We are snared and mired in a viscous
web of seeming. All congeries of sense is this. And knowledge tends, not
to a translating of this factual film into the real but to the piercing
it, the abandoning it altogether. This attitude is far from the
naturalistic mysticism of the Hebrew, from the intellectual mysticism of
Plato; from the profound nihilism of the Hindu who recognized the unity
of the ideal and the factual, interpreting one always in terms of the
other. Medievalism is a child--and a childish offshoot--of all these. It
declares: There is a real world, and it is not this one. Man can reach
the real world, by various means. He must crucify the fact, he must
worship the saints, he must lose his body in order to save his soul.
Don Quixote moves through a world neo-platonically real. He is as aware
as Sancho of sheep, windmills, inns, country wenches. He chooses to
disregard these lies of fact. He erects a systematic symbol whereby his
senses vault the phenomena about him, and deliver him the truth.
Thereby, the windmill serves him as a giant; the sheep as enchanted
armies; the empty cave of Montesino as the scene of Glory, and
Maritornes the whore as the virgin lady languishing in love. He has
elected to do Justice upon earth. These giants, armies and disasters
serve him as means to that end.
By a similar process, the medieval mind made all history into parable
and symbol. The medieval mind is subjectivism carried to the intense
conclusion made possible by the barbarous Germanic will. Philo’s
allegories of the Scripture, the Book of Zohar, the way of Egypt and
India with all written words, treating them as intricate and recondite
symbols, obsessed the mind of medieval Europe. No act is simple, no name
is simply a name. The world becomes a dramatic Mystery, with every scene
bearing upon the central Plot: the soul’s salvation. For a thousand
years, literature and art, to be serious, had to be allegory.
The mood of medieval symbolism, while it was fathered by Plato and the
Jews, is neither Greek nor Jewish. With these two adult peoples,
symbolism held its place: it remained a relative and ancillary life
within the mastering testimony of the world. Already in Plotinus and
Saint Augustine, the balance is lost. When we are deep in the Middle
Ages, we are deep in an allegoric jungle: the paths of fact are gone;
there comes no daylight of reason in this tangle of monster foliage and
whelming branches.
Don Quixote’s world is medievally real. It is a hypertrophy of such
births as Chivalry, Romance and Sainthood. In its character of
wholeness, of deliberate disregard for fact, it springs from the
fountainhead of neo-platonic thought.
But if this transfiguring of the world to his own will is a medieval
act, Don Quixote’s impulse is not medieval, is not even Christian. The
medieval will, myriad in its flowerings, was childishly simple in its
seed: the soul’s salvation. Nothing else counted: or rather, everything
had its sole significance, indeed its reality, as it bore on this
monomaniac problem of each soul: to be saved. That a man’s soul might be
saved, all acts since Adam had been apportioned. For this, the Hebrews
lived, the Prophets preached, Christ died: for this, Peter builded his
Church and the Jews remained outside in perpetual testimony of
damnation. For this, men went on Crusades, conquered heathens, gave
birth to children in holy wedlock. For this there was love and justice:
for this there was life and death. But Don Quixote is no more centrally
concerned with his soul’s salvation than if he had been a Jew. He
believes in his soul; he hopes it shall be saved. But his acts are
motived by a will far less personal: the enacting of Justice.
Don Quixote looks upon himself as the instrument of Justice. He is the
embodied and moving will of Justice. The neo-platonic Christian lived
justly, that he might pierce better the Phenomenal Lie and win
salvation. The Arab warrior spread justice with his sword because the
Prophet was just, and he must serve the Prophet to be saved. The knight
of the Round Table of King Arthur performed deeds of justice--rescuing
the virgin, slaying the bad giant--because it was good sport and because
it was a way to his salvation. But Don Quixote wills Justice upon earth,
because he hungers after Justice, because there is naught else true save
Justice. If, by the sheer testimony of his words and deeds, we analyze
this passion of Don Quixote, we learn that for him instinctively Justice
meant Unity. The world must become One: and the means thereto is
Justice.
The symbols with which he works are medieval Christian; his mental
mechanism is neo-platonic: his knightly attitude is more Moorish than
Teutonic (as contrasted with the Germanic tenor of the freebooting Cid).
But this heart of his will is Hebrew. The parabolic line of its
enactment in his life links Don Quixote with the Prophets.
The words God and Christ are surprisingly seldom on the old knight’s
lips. He cites Roland and Amadis more often than the Saints. They,
indeed, are his saints. But his God is Justice. And so impersonal, so
monotheistic is He, that He wants more than a body; almost He lacks a
name. Or rather His body is the world: His name is Justice.
The eidolon-making Greeks said in wonder of the Jews: “They are a people
who see God everywhere and localize him nowhere.” So Don Quixote created
for himself a world that should consist solely of opportunities for
Justice. To this end he rejects, selects and builds in the world which
meets his eyes. His mind works like the instinct of an artist. But he is
a peculiar sort of artist. His ethical purpose, the intensity with which
he imbues every action with his vision and turns the social fact into a
spiritual Word, recalls the Prophets. Amos, too, looked out on a world
made wholly the matrix for the vision of God: and moved in Israel as a
flame within the burning wood. To Hosea, even the wife of his bed was a
symbol of the intention of the Lord. Every detail of the Prophet’s
life--even the silence and the dark, even the failure and the sin--is
caught in the unity of his vision and becomes a Word to express it. Thus
Don Quixote sets forth to perform Justice. He must perform it
constantly. The world must become material--a continuum of material--for
his performance. But like every artist and like every prophet Don
Quixote must translate his vision into the accepted formulæ of his mind.
In his case, these formulæ are the shoddy regalia of decadent
knighthood. Justice is to be performed by rescuing virgins, unseating
ogres, slaying giants, despiting necromancers. Don Quixote rides through
Spain. Along these highways graze sheep, trudge merchants: there are
inns but no castles. Don Quixote does not see the enactment of Justice
in such terms as these. So he transforms them.
His Justice is an attempt at unity. But it is very simple. The real
world of Don Quixote is no intricate entexture of hierarchic values. It
is not like the mazed affluence of life which the Hindu fused into One.
It has none of the deep involument of souls and states fused by Hebrew
and Hellene into God. It is a simple pyramid. At the base are knights
and villains, virgins and married ladies, angels, enchanters, demons,
ogres. And at the pyramid’s peak is the ideal of all this homogeneous
matter: freedom and liberty. This ideal is uncorrupted by any political
or sectarian dogma. It is never more clear than in the adventure with
the convicts. With clinking chains, this squad of scoundrels is led
south by the soldiers of the King, to meet the galley in which they must
serve their terms. Here are men in chains: Don Quixote’s ideal of
Justice demands that chains be stricken off. The soldiers protest that
these chains are virtuous and lawful: it avails not. The freed rascals
repay their liberator with a shower of stones and make off with Sancho’s
ass: this avails nothing. Don Quixote will not be swerved from his
immaculate conception of Justice.
In such episodes as this, we touch the core of the miracle of Don
Quixote. His nature is ridiculously funny, and is Christlike. The
freeing of legally judged robbers, the letting of lions out of cages,
is farce: and yet illumes a justice above laws whose vision is
Christlike and whose enactment brings upon the knight a Christlike fate.
In laughing at Don Quixote, we crucify him. Mockery and buffets create
the knight of the Sorrowful Figure: our own roars of glee at his
well-earned mishaps hail the ridiculous Christ.
And here we come back into the medieval. The Jesus of the Synoptic
Gospels is a dominant unbroken man. The Passion on the Cross is a mystic
interlude--probably an interpolation--which rends the Temple far more
than it does Jesus. His cry, about the ninth hour; “Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani” is a shredding weakness against the serenity and might of
the historic Man. Jesus in his true character is almost wholly Hebrew
Prophet. With the Lord in his mouth, he is imperious, even overbearing.
The Hebrew spirit is as adverse from ill-health--from martyrdom as an
end-in-itself--as the Greek. But with the infantilization of the West,
with the upshowing of the childish spirit within the iron carapace of
Rome, Jesus becomes pitiful. Medieval art makes him lean and ugly;
asceticism borrowed from the Hindus and Egyptians mangles his body.
Within the splendor of the Gothic church there comes to live a shrunken
Christ. And as medievalism stumbled southward, the process gathered. The
baroque churches of Seville are fantasmagoria of tropic wealth, writhed
like a forest about the Sensitive Plant: Christ, milkpale,
blood-spotted.
So at the end, Don Quixote. He is laughter-spotted, blood-spotted.
Reason bespatters him and makes him comic. But since in the minds of men
this reason is profane, and his mad impulse holy, he is a Christ--a
medieval, an unjewish Christ.
* * * * *
His deeds get him into trouble. Part One abounds in buffets that unhorse
him, knock out his teeth, bathe him in blood and muddy him all over.
Part Two has a less rollicking mood. Cervantes has been affected by Don
Quixote. But there is worse: Don Quixote, enacting Justice, brings
trouble to others--and to the best of them. There is the boy whom he
frees from a flogging master, and who is flogged the worse, in payment
for the humiliation the master has suffered from Don Quixote. There is
the freeing of the convicts--a menace to every household in the land.
There is the freeing of the lion, to the probable disgrace of the poor
keeper. Don Quixote wrecks funerals: he maims an innocent Penitent for
life. He unhinges Sancho’s peace: brings the anarchy of ambition into
the breast of this sweet clod of the earth. He visits destruction upon
the unfortunate inns which he takes for castles. He robs a barber of his
copper dish. He drubs innocent servants. He smashes the sole fortune of
Maese Pedro--his set of puppets. He commits sacrilege even: plunging
full-tilt upon a pilgrimage of disciplinants, breaking legs and wresting
from the outraged hand of a priest an image of the Virgin.
Though he offends many and amuses more, he convinces no one. That a
prophet should inspire jeers and hatred is natural: but that he should
have not one disciple? and that at the end of his mission, he should
recant, and call his mission folly? How can such win the love of the
world?
The strong whom he encounters laugh at him. The weak flee from him. The
Nurse and his niece do not laugh: they weep and tear their hair for his
unseemly conduct. In the bachelor Carrasco he inspires a nagging
irritation. This man is common sense incarnate: he is ill-at-ease before
the irreducible vision of the artist. He goes out of his way to down
him: dons the armor of folly in order to bring home the fool. This must
not be construed as altruism. Carrasco pays tribute to Don Quixote, in
despite of himself. It is his own peace he is after. He is aware, albeit
far too rational ever to admit it to himself, that this utter idealist
stalking La Mancha robs his small reality of ease. Common sense--the
sense of approximation and of compromise--is fragile and is nervous. It
must sequester the poet-prophet in his home town.
Perhaps the ugliest episode in the book treats of the knight’s
entertainment in the castle of the Duke and Duchess. They are the
worldly-wise, the worldly-cultured, even as Carrasco is the pragmatist.
They take Don Quixote in; and make him a show for their own genteel
delectation. They are the perpetual patron of the artist. They feed him,
flatter him, serve him: everything but believe him. Their minds hold him
safe from their hearts. And nowhere does the knight of the Sorrowful
Figure appear so pathetic, so ridiculous, so disarmed, as under this
ducal roof where he is lionized and where whole pageantries are enacted
to pander to his need of enacting Justice.
Quixote survives the sophistical salon of the Duchess and of her
lecherous ladies. But while he is among them, he is shrunken. He goes
forth at last, aware of the subtle poison of their praise, to seek the
adventure of Justice--to be laid low by the bachelor Carrasco.