XX

DON QUIXOTE

No soy tan loco ni tan menguado como debo de haberle parecido.-Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XVII.

I

GREAT is the power of genius, even though it be constrained to inhabit the flesh of a swordsman, soldier, slave, accountant, adventurer, prisoner, wandering poet, and needy courtier by the name of Miguel Cervantes.

By virtue of this power the shade of Don Quixote has succeeded in deceiving us. We have been led to think that his life was full of deception in the sense that he was himself deceived by carnivorous men, decadent times, and impossible books. His life was indeed full of deception, but he was himself the deceiver, and we of the succeeding generations have been the ones deceived.

Cervantes does all he can to set before uslike a lank marionette decked out in obsessions and scraps of iron-a Don Quixote crazed

through excessive reading, a Don Quixote magnified by his sapient eloquence and still more by his imitative madness. And we of the later generations have adored this Don Quixote as the martyr of a pure, militant, and derided Christianity at odds with the persistent and worldwide life of those baptized pagans for whom convention is truth, idleness is wisdom, comfort is goodness, and bread and meat are the only tangible essence of life. Every man who has challenged this common paganism has thought himself a knight, and has felt on his own shoulders the staves that beat him to the ground. In Don Quixote's wise antique serenity, in his futile love of the good, we moderns have seen a reflection of Socrates and of Christ, both of whom went to death at man's behest because they were better than other men.

Don Quixote has seemed to us but half a martyr: men left him his life-we said-but blows, torments, tortures, and mockeries fell to him as to his models, and at the end, his soul quenched by trickery, he survived only to regain the common imbecility of the world, and to die in his bed more lean than he was before.

This creed has been one of the many "dear illusions" which art, the rival of nature, has prepared for us in these three hundred years. Even Don Quixote has deceived us, and it is our own fault that we have not realized it before. Don

Quixote too, like all those beings, created by God or by genius, who in one point at least attain the absolute, has a secret; and this secret he has at last revealed to me, whose fidelity had been proven in the many quixotic vigils of my youth.1

Don Quixote is not mad. He does not go mad in spite of himself. He belongs to the common type of the Brutuses and the Hamlets: he pretends that he is mad. He fashions an extravagant career for himself in order that he may escape the deadly monotony of Argamasilla. In the invention of his difficulties and misfortunes he is quite without fear, because he knows that he is the moving agent, conscious of what he is doing, and ready at any time to put on the brake or turn aside. That is why he is neither tragic nor desperate. His whole adventure is a deliberate amusement. He may well be serene, for he alone knows the truth of the game, and his soul has no room for veritable anguish. Don Quixote is not in earnest.

II

In order to see clearly into so grievous a mystery, we must dismiss the ostensible evidence of the book itself.

As long ago as 1911 I had come to realize that Don Quixote was not mad, and had said that "the structure of his mind and life was perfectly normal” (L'altra metà, p. 134), but I did not then insist on the true nature of his apparent madness.

Cervantes himself said, and scores of critics have said after him, that he really meant to destroy the genre of the romance of chivalry; but this is not to be believed for a moment. It is just another literary trick, akin to the device of "the manuscripts of Cid Hamet Benengeli"just one of the many tricks to which Cervantes had recourse. The balanced and truly cultured brain of Cervantes could not possibly have harbored such a purpose. The book itself belies it. In the first place, Cervantes satirizes not the romances of chivalry alone, but all literary genres without exception. By parody or irony or direct criticism all contemporary literature is condemned, and in particular its most popular forms, the pastoral and the drama.

The chief accusation which Cervantes pretends to bring against the books of chivalry is their improbability. An extraordinary accusation to come from the mouth of him who began with the pastoral improbabilities of the Galatea, filled the Don Quixote itself with improbable tragic and pastoral adventures, composed a chivalric drama after finishing the first part and before beginning the second part of Don Quixote, and at the end of his life reworked, in the Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, the intricate and improbable voyages of the fantastic Byzantine romance.

Cervantes, a man of taste and imagination, knew, as all of us know, that every work of art

is by its very nature improbable, even as all those lives and actions and works are improbable which rise above the surface of that round stagnant swamp in which we live. Even in the Don Quixote Cervantes, with the justice of a competent artist, saves and defends more than one romance of chivalry. The only ones he throws into the fire are those whose existence is not justified by beauty of expression and imagination.1

Nor could he, accepting as reality the Spain of the seventeenth century, claim to regard as utterly improbable the mediæval knightly sagas of Brittany and the Ardennes. To us the contrast between daily life and the marvels of chivalry seems far greater than it really was in the Spain of Cervantes. The grotesque exploits of Don Quixote would be impossible in our well regulated lands. At his first sally gendarmes and doctors would have seized Rocinante and his rider. Even the attack on the windmills and the meeting with the Biscayan would have been impossible.

Furthermore, no absolute contrast between the dreams of Don Quixote and ordinary life is to be found in the novel itself. The inn-keeper and the curate second Don Quixote's whims for reasons of their own; the ducal party and the bachelor and the banditti of Barcelona merely order affairs in such a way that Don Quixote

Part I, Chapter VII.