squire is a true disciple? Sancho Panza seems to have come latterly to
Cervantes. Indeed, this loamy son of the Manchegan desert is less
immediate altogether to the world illumined by Don Quixote. That
treeless, sapless plain whose horizons are beyond eye, whose winters are
blasts of ice, whose summers are fire, whose indeterminate panorama of
details--dust, men, towns, roads--is chaos, is the true mother of Don
Quixote. La Mancha is a defeated desert: neither waste nor garden, it
imposes the way of gardens upon the mood of the desert. Don Quixote
transfigures its inns and sordid villages, its hard-fist peasants and
its heavy girls into a ruthless psychic unity; much as the son of the
true desert drew its vast horizons and its breastlike slopes into the
body of God. But how in this world was Sancho Panza born? For not
Falstaff of verdant England is more robustly gay, not Panurge of
luxuriant France more subtly sensual.
Sancho is wholly the creation of Cervantes. Don Quixote, born of his
author, outgrew him. Sancho, too, grows organically. Contact with his
master determines this. But none the less he lies ever full within
Cervantes’ will: he is the sheer miraculous birth of gayety from the
frustrate desert of Cervantes’ life.
To Sancho, the “phenomenal” world, the world of facts is everything.
Since he conceives no other, and since his master continuously lives
within another of his own conceiving, Sancho is held busy translating
into factual terms the entire adventure which he rides with Don Quixote.
A vertiginous effort it is, and it ends by making Sancho more nearly mad
than his knight. He believes factually in his Island. He believes
himself its governor, though he has crossed no water to attain it. The
maid who is to wed Don Quixote after he has gone to Africa to slay her
foe is factually to him the Princess Micomacoma. This enchantment must
be a fact, like the one which befell Dulcinea, turning her into the
wench Aldonza. Sancho vacillates forever between the credulity and the
skepticism of the literal mind: ignorance is so clearly the matrix of
his sanity that the delusions of his master become wise by contrast.
There are no dimensions to his thinking. Don Quixote is mad--or he is a
true knight-errant: the adventure is wild,--or there will be a veritable
island.
His dominant impulse, either way, is greed. Greed makes him doubt: greed
makes him trust his master. Yet underneath, there works subtly upon
Sancho a sweeter influence: his indefeasible respect for Don Quixote.
Howsoever he argue, howsoever clear he see, howsoever he sicken from
constant thumpings and sparse earnings, howsoever wry are the pleasures
of his Island, Sancho cannot altogether free himself from the dominion
of an idealizing will which he can never understand. In a directer way
(since he is no intellectual) than that of Sansón Carrasco, he is held
and haunted by Don Quixote. When he is absent from his master he is
lost. When, in a scene more touching than the pathos of two quarreling
lovers, Don Quixote gives him leave to depart homeward, promising him
reward for his past service, Sancho bursts into tears and vows that he
cannot forsake him.
He loves his master. Not greed alone, or if so, the greed of devotion to
an ungrasped grandeur, holds him astride his dappled ass to follow Don
Quixote to the sea. And yet, he despises him; and he betrays him. He
judges him, and he exploits him. He makes sure of his reward in Don
Quixote’s will, and he gives up the comfort of his wife to follow him
through ridiculous dangers. He is this sensual, lusty, greedy oaf of the
soil. And yet in the love that masters him he is Cervantes, himself:
Cervantes who created Don Quixote to laugh and to mock--and who remained
to worship.
For this is the crux of the matter. Cervantes needed Sancho to keep Don
Quixote in the perspective for laughter. “Common-sense” rides along with
the “madman,” and constantly shows him up. But here is Sancho, shown up
himself! Here is Cervantes, shown up! For Cervantes accepts Don Quixote.
And that is why we accept him. Cervantes builds up these countless
reasons for rejecting him: the havoc wrought by his acts, the shoddy
stuff of his dream, the addled way of his brain. It avails naught.
Cervantes ends with love. And we--the more humbly in that we have mocked
and roared--avow our veneration.
Of such stuff is made the holiness of Don Quixote: mildewed notions,
slapstick downfalls. We laugh at his unfitness to impose his dream upon
a stubborn world: we see well enough that Rocinante is a nag and the
knight himself, helmeted with a dish, a mangy addled fellow. And we
accept, in order that he may live this nonsense, the disruption of inns,
the discomfiture of pilgrims, the routing of funerals, the breaking of
bones!
Cervantes strives hard to snuff out the aspiring hunger of his soul. For
this, Don Quixote is bemuddied and deformed. But Don Quixote lives: and
his chief enemy--Cervantes--gives him his blood and his passion, in
order that he may triumph.
_c. The Book of the Hero_
_Don Quixote_ is written in a prose majestical, dense, warm, lucid,
still. It is the fulfillment of the Castilian music which Rojas’ _La
Celestina_ promised a century before. The tempo is slow. More correctly,
the organic movement of the prose is slow; and the facet movements are
swift and nervous. The Cervantine prose is a portrait of the soul of
Spain whose cadences of desire and will resolve into an immobile whole.
The accentual music of this prose had already become the innate quality
of Castilian. Cervantes heightened his inheritance. The natural genius
of the language was already, in the mystics and novelists before him,
one that made for a muscular, slow yet sharply surfaced prose. In _Don
Quixote_, the music has as its base an almost cosmic beat, within which
as in a firmament, the swifter, brighter, more fleeting qualities stand
forth. Cervantes makes good use of the agglutinated verb and pronoun, of
the syncopations within the general prose rhythm. Above all, he makes
use of the loamy expressions of the people, transfiguring them, however,
into a tonal design not remotely naturalistic and more akin to the prose
of the religious writers than of the pícaro novelists who also helped
themselves to the vernacular of the soil.
In the great novel of Rojas there is a like marriage of pungent and
ironical stuffs in an exalted orchestration. The difference is one of
quality and quantity. Cervantes’ instruments are more varied; his themes
and the materials that build them are more numerous, even if no one is
richer than the central form of _La Celestina_. Indeed, the earlier work
is the intenser; its colors are more hot. There is in Cervantes a
strain of the north which the Jew Rojas lacked; and which made his
æsthetic action longer and slower. The art of the Semite is more
lyrical, less architectonic. _La Celestina_ is a bomb-like organ; a
piston-strong machine driving hard and singly. It is the tale, moreover,
of a city where life is vertical and packed. Its form is true to its
theme. But _Don Quixote_ is the story of a journey--of three journeys
rather--over the plains and mountains of La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia.
Its basal movement is panoramic, horizontal. Its loftier dimensions are
attained by the associative power of its hero who, riding the roads of
Spain, touches incessantly the spiritual realms of a people, of an age,
of a soul. The formal values of _La Celestina_ are more manifest. Very
consciously, an intellectual, nervously coördinated man bound together
the counterpoint of his design, so that each element partakes
_immediately_ of the whole. This is not the case in _Don Quixote_. The
materials of the book--persons of the road, interpolated stories,
situations--stand end to end, flat for the most part and quite episodic.
The knight enters them organically. He transfigures them as a new
element in a chemical solution. He enacts a continuous catalysis upon
the parts of Spain which he encounters. The result of this is two-fold.
There is created for the entire book a _surface of action_ and a _line
of action_. These hold the attention of the reader: these, indeed,
caused the book’s popularity when it first appeared. The surface of
action in the large is the Spain to which the Spanish people through the
picaresque novel had been accustomed for over fifty years. The line of
action is the pilgrimage of Quixote and Sancho.
But each of these two actions is complex. In consequence, their organic
synthesis is often subtle and hidden. This synthesis gives to the work
its unity: and one can enjoy _Don Quixote_ without awareness of it.
Indeed, the synthesis may take place in the reader’s mind, long after he
has absorbed its elements and put the book aside.
Consciousness of the organic greatness of _La Celestina_ must come at
once; since that greatness is the result of a design preconceived and
implicit in the book’s several scenes. Consciousness of the greatness of
_Don Quixote_ came late even to its author and not to Spain until a
whole century had passed. For its parts have an immediate life of their
own; only after they have become lost and merged in one another does the
book’s unity, as a synthesis of all these parts, dawn on the reader.
The knight himself is not so much an organ in this ultimate synthesis as
a dimension. The synthesis is not articulate in him alone, any more than
in the episodes. But it is articulate in the book’s language. And the
rare individual who understood the æsthetic nature of prose might tell
from the first page that _Don Quixote_ was a stupendously formal work of
art.
This prose is a _becoming_ prose. It is heavy and pregnant. It is the
antithesis of the immediate prose of Santa Teresa or of the lapidic
absoluteness of the verse of Luis de Góngora. It is attuned at every
moment to the whole of the book. It lacks swiftness and often sharpness.
It is frequently clumsy in the projecting of little scenes. The book
abounds in episodes that Quevedo would have fleshed more brightly or the
author of Lazarillo pointed to more effect.
Cervantes is forever after deeper game. If, for instance, he describes
the cozy dinner at which Quixote and Sancho shared the meat and acorns
of six goatherds, the prose is not fundamentally focused upon the
_genre_: but upon the tragic implications of Don Quixote’s presence and
upon the irony of the attitude of the goatherds.
But Cervantes never _states_ these deeper implications. His prose
_creates_ them. And creates them, by the immanent and abstract nature of
its music. This immanence runs throughout the work, and thereby
Cervantes is permanently saved the unæsthetic makeshift of statement.
His direct attention goes unhindered to the presentment of the action.
The action’s significance, one might say its _soul_, is implicit as is
the significance of life implicit and _unasserted_ in material substance
and in specific action.
But as in all great art, this deep effect is won at sacrifice of a
lesser. Analogously, El Greco maintains the larger anatomy of his vision
throughout the details of his paintings, although he loses thereby the
grace and accuracy of the anatomy of his subjects.
There are still cavilers at El Greco’s drawing; and there have always
been depreciators of Cervantes’ prose. Lope de Vega whose prosody was an
immediate lyric flow of two dimensions, was perhaps sincere in his
denigration of Cervantes. And even today Miguel de Unamuno, for all his
adoration of Don Quixote, decries the language of Cervantes, for a
similar reason: Unamuno’s lyric mood can not span the parabolas in which
the figure of Don Quixote is limned.
These parabolas are the _lines_ of the prose: and they are not, like
simpler curves, to be plotted in the segment of any specific action in
the book. But they are to be _felt_ in every page. That is why the first
chapter of _Don Quixote_ announces the inscrutable tragi-comedy,
although Cervantes when he wrote it had no knowledge of his undertaking.
The music of his prose is the mother of his book. It is the beginning of
the book’s significance, and it is the conclusion. Nor can it be
translated.
* * * * *
A work of art in whose making significant forces have not played is
inconceivable. The veriest trash, the most incompetent effort must in
some wise have issued from a man’s life, from a people’s will, from an
epoch’s spirit. What lies between such work and work significant in
itself is not difference of material, but form. The poor work is one in
which the elements of life are inchoate and, failing to achieve a unity
of form, cannot be said to achieve life itself. The real work of art is
that in which these elements achieve a body: is that of which these
elements _are_ the body. But the bodies of men and age whence its
elements of life have sprung will rot away. Other men and other ages
will succeed; and these in their will to know essential union with all
men and all ages preserve the true work of art. For in it only, do those
moldered lives of other men and ages touch them. The real work of art,
builded of the substances of time, therefore alone does not exist in
time. And a consideration of the work of art, whose basis is not equally
beyond time--is not metaphysical or religious--is inadequate to art’s
function in the world of time.
Before all else, _Don Quixote_ is in form the life of Cervantes.
Toward the end of his last adventure, on the way to Barcelona, Don
Quixote with Sancho attempts to hold the road against a herd of bulls.
But they are overturned, trampled, bemudded. They find a limpid spring
garlanded with trees and wash the blood and mire from their sore bodies.
Sancho brings food from the saddlebags. But his master is too
disconsolate to eat. Sancho waits patiently: seeing no end to Don
Quixote’s sorrow nor to his own hunger, he falls to.
“Eat, friend Sancho,” says Don Quixote. “Sustain the life which means
more to you than to me, and leave me to die in the embrace of my
thoughts and in the power of my disgraces. I, Sancho, was born to live
dying; you, to die eating. And that you may see how I speak truth in
this, behold me printed in history, celebrated in arms, commended in all
my acts, respected in principles, desired by damsels; from end to end,
whilst I awaited the palms, triumphs and crowns merited by my valorous
deeds, you have seen me as this morning laid low, outraged and ground
down, under the hoofs of obscene and filthy brutes....”
The roars and blows that greet the Sorrowful Knight might, in the jargon
of our day, be termed Cervantes’ masochistic satisfaction. Cervantes
ridicules himself for the dreaming fool he has been. But the strain is
too deep. This figure that he sets going to make mock of is after all
his soul. He grows away from his embittered pose. He can still laugh at
his creature; still gather him at the end back into the logic of his
story. But in Part Two, he is seen defending him against the laughter of
others. He is seen regarding his knight, for all his folly, as purer
than the sensible world: and at the last, more real.
But the times were out of joint. Spain and Don Quixote were pitted
against Reasons: the logic of their ideal against the reasons of a world
breaking from the unity of God which once had been the Roman Church,
into a multiverse of fragmentary facts which is our modern crisis.
Frustrate brilliance, seeking to be healed, is the one unity of the
modern story. Since Columbus voyaged, we have voyaged and bruised
ourselves in spiritual chaos: seeking the salvation of wholeness and
seeking it in vain.
From our search has come the national concept of the State, for
instance: a degenerate medievalism, this--a wistful effort to achieve
the wholeness of Rome without the holiness that informed it. Has come
the Marxian Internation--an inverted idealism which put up the economic
process in place of the Hegelian Spirit. Has come the faith in science
as Revelation. Has come with Rousseau, the seeking of salvation through
the return to the unity of man’s primordial needs: with Nietzsche, the
same seeking in the but seeming opposite direction of the superman. And
finally, Darwin inspired us to hope that God might be inserted as the
principle of flux in biologic process. All these prophecies and dogmatic
actions strove alike to enlist mankind once more in a full unity of life
and impulse. All who believed in them, to the extent of their devotion,
have been Quixotes.
Don Quixote gave himself to make the world One, through the application
of measures that strike us as shoddy and unreal. His were the old
“magics” of chivalry--of a Europe peopled by Germanic children and
schooled by adolescents from Athens, Alexandria and Rome. The magics no
longer _worked_: had indeed not worked to build a universal House, since
Dante. But we, laughing betimes at Quixote, patronizing Dante, have for
five hundred years been struggling to construct our house with
materials equally inadequate. The primacy of reason or of subjective
intuition, the autonomy of science or of economic purpose, the ideal of
the State or social interstate, the dream of communism or the return to
nature--one and all are magics as impotent and as unreal as those of the
old knight who rode La Mancha on a bony nag, with a barber’s dish on his
brow, and in his head a neo-platonic vision.
* * * * *
Don Quixote and Faust are the great antistrophes to the Commedia of
Dante. The body of Dante’s poem had the same elements as the body of
Dante’s world. They were the Judæo-Christian revelation, Aristotelian
logic, Euclidean Nature, the Ptolemaic cosmos. They cracked, and with
them Catholic Europe passed. Only in Dante and in certain other art
forms, like the Gothic churches, has that body lived.
Don Quixote and Faust are bodies of Europe’s dissolution--forms of our
modern formlessness and of our need to be whole. They are perhaps the
most vital æsthetic organs of the activity into which modern man was
thrown by the deliquescence of his medieval world. As a poem, the
Spanish work is the greater. Faust is the child of personal lyrism and
speculative will. His sources, like the Knight’s, are medieval. He seeks
knowledge and through knowledge personal redemption. He knows that he
cannot be redeemed, save by a cosmic understanding; and his sense of
understanding is in this, the mystic’s: that it implies possession of
what is understood, and a dynamic act. But Faust remains the atom, the
unfertile seed of human will. His way to unify the world is to dominate
and absorb it within the complex of personal volition. This is heroic,
but it is savage. It ignores the fundamental wisdom of the Jews and
Hindus which taught that the health of the personal will lies through
the threshold of its death. Faust seeks knowledge through its extended
acquisition. Mefisto is the symbol of his faith in the reality of
extension. If he can garner the right catchwords, he can swallow the
world; and the world will become one within him. This bluntly is the
means toward a new synthesis adapted by all the centuries of Europe that
intervene between the Renaissance and us: and it is Kabbalistic! The
personal will, in its endeavor to achieve fusion with the world, has
concocted formulæ that were to act directly on the world, and by magic
to control it. These formulæ of course became external organisms: they
became a machine, an empire or empiric law. Instead of lending
themselves to a solution, they spawned a multitude of problems. They
could not fecundate the personal will, from which they issued. For it is
the Law that from personal will, alone when it is rendered fertile by
its own disaster (like a rotted seed) can cosmic will and a cosmic
synthesis arise.
The legend of Christ was deeper: deeper the blundering way of Quixote.
For he sought the grace of union not by absorbing the world into
himself, but by transmuting himself into an impersonal symbol of the
world.
He failed; but his book lives; for with the failure is the triumphant
impulse that led up to it. The effect of the crusade was death; the
cause was life.
The magics of Don Quixote are as absurd as our own. But his impulse was
as true as the Prophets’. The Old and the New Testaments also are a tale
of sins and follies. But these are visible, because the light of God
shines on them. In the effect that passes, all the prophets and all the
Christs have failed. None of them has failed, in the cause that remains.
The cause of Don Quixote’s life strikes us as truer than the realities
which brought about his death. This is the pitiful best that we can say
for him--or for any of the prophets.
One and all, they encountered _reasons_ which put their _truth_ to
flight. And the world was able to live whole within their truth only in
ages which willfully made reason servile. In the violence of his divorce
from the world which he aspired to unite, in the ridiculousness of his
discord from it, Don Quixote stands the last prophet of our historic
Order. He bespeaks our need: a dynamic understanding which shall enlist
ideal and reason, thought and act, knowledge and experience; which shall
preserve the personal within the mystical will; which shall unite the
world of fact in which we suffer all together, with the world of dream
in which we are alone....
_CHAPTER X_
_THE WILL OF GOD_
_a. The Bull Fight_
_b. Man and Woman_
_c. Madrid_
_a. The Bull Fight_
The bull fight is older than Spain; the art of the bull fight has little
more than a hundred years of history. Perhaps Crete, which gave El Greco
to Toledo, gave the bull worship to Tartessos. Perhaps the Romans turned
the bull rite into spectacle. The Visigoths assuredly had bull fights:
and the medieval lords of Spain jousted with bulls as Amadis with
dragons. The _toreo_ was held in the public squares of towns,
alternating possibly with _autos de fe_. In the one sport, the actors
were nobles and the victims were bulls. In the other, officiated
captains of the Church and the victims were Jews. In both, the religious
norm was more or less lost sight of, as the spectacular appeal grew
greater. But no æsthetic norm had been evolved to take its place. The
bull fight was a daredevil game to which the young bloods of the
Court--in their lack of Moors to fight--became addicted after the
Reconquest. It was a dangerous sport, and it cost the kings of Spain
many good horses and not a few good soldiers. Still, it throve until in
1700 a puritan, Philip V, ascended to the throne. He disliked the bull
fight. It lost caste among the nobles. But its usage was too deeply, too
immemorially engrained. The gentleman _toreador_ went out: the
professional _torero_ and _banderillero_ came in.
Francisco Goya has recorded in genial sketches and engravings the nature
of this bull fight. It was still chiefly a game of prowess. If an art,
it was more allied to the art of the clown and acrobat than to the dance
or the drama. The professional torero was a gymnast. He had to risk his
skin in elaborate ways: and skill was primarily confined to his grace in
going off unhurt. He fought the bull, hobbled on a table, or lashed to
a chair, or riding a forerunner in a coach, or saddled to another bull.
Only after the War of Independence against the French and after the
lapse caused by Napoleon, whose generals disapproved of so barbarous an
art, did Spain’s popular tragedy arise: the modern, profound _corrida_.
Its birthday was the same as that of the jota of Aragon which sprang
directly from the incitement against the French. Like the jota, the bull
fight was new only as an integration of old elements. And like the
ancient bull-rite of Tartessos it reached its climax in Andalusia: more
particularly in the Province of Seville.
* * * * *
The _plaza de toros_ is of course the Roman circus. Rome created no more
powerful form for an æsthetic action than this rounded, human mass
concentered on sand and blood. With its arena, the bull fight wins a
vantage over such western spectacles as cricket, baseball, the theater.
In all of these, the audience is a partial unit: it is not above the
action, but beside it. The arena of the bull fight is a pith of passion,
wholly fleshed by the passionate human wills around it.