Part IV of the
Translator's
Preface for
Don Quixote
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Don Quixote
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The story was written at
first, like the
others, without any
division and without the intervention of
Cide Hamete Benengeli; and it seems not
unlikely that
Cervantes had some intention of bringing
Dulcinea, or
Aldonza Lorenzo, on the scene in
person. It was
probably the
ransacking of the
Don's
library and the
discussion on the books of
chivalry that first
suggested it to him that his idea was capable of development. What, if instead of a mere
string of
farcical misadventures, he were to make his tale a
burlesque of one of these
books,
caricaturing their style, incidents, and
spirit?
In
pursuance of this
change of plan, he hastily and somewhat clumsily divided what he had written into chapters on the model of "
Amadis," invented the fable of a mysterious
Arabic manuscript, and set up
Cide Hamete Benengeli in imitation of the almost
invariable practice of the chivalry-romance authors, who were fond of tracing their books to some recondite source. In working out the new ideas, he soon found the value of Sancho Panza. Indeed, the keynote, not only to Sancho's part, but to the whole book, is struck in the first words Sancho utters when he announces his intention of taking his
ass with him. "About the ass," we are told, "
Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying whether he could call to mind any
knight-errant taking with him an
esquire mounted on ass-back; but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a glance, the stolid
unconsciousness of
Sancho and the
perplexity of his master, upon whose
perception the
incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book;
he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some
unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact and
commonplace by force of sheer
stolidity.
By the time
Cervantes had got his
volume of
novels off his hands, and summoned up resolution enough to set about the Second Part in
earnest, the case was very much altered.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had not merely found favour, but had already become, what they have never since ceased to be, veritable
entities to the popular
imagination. There was no occasion for him now to
interpolate extraneous matter; nay, his readers told him plainly that what they
wanted of him was more
Don Quixote and more
Sancho Panza, and not
novels,
tales, or
digressions. To himself, too, his creations had become
realities, and he had become proud of them, especially of Sancho. He began the
Second Part, therefore, under very different conditions, and the difference makes
itself manifest at once. Even in translation the style will be seen to be far easier, more flowing, more
natural, and more like that of a
man sure of himself and of his audience.
Don Quixote and Sancho undergo a change also. In the First Part,
Don Quixote has no character or individuality whatever. He is nothing more than a crazy representative of the sentiments of the chivalry romances. In all that he says and does he is simply repeating the lesson he has
learned from his books; and therefore, it is absurd to speak of him in the gushing strain of the sentimental critics when they dilate upon his nobleness, disinterestedness, dauntless courage, and so forth. It was the business of a knight-errant to right wrongs, redress injuries, and succour the distressed, and this, as a matter of course, he makes his business when he takes up the part; a knight-errant was bound to be intrepid, and so he feels bound to cast
fear aside. Of all
Byron's melodious nonsense about
Don Quixote, the most
nonsensical statement is that "'t is his virtue makes him mad!" The exact
opposite is the truth; it is his madness makes him
virtuous.
In the Second Part,
Cervantes repeatedly reminds the reader, as if it was a point upon which he was anxious there should be no mistake, that his hero's
madness is strictly confined to delusions on the subject of
chivalry, and that on every other
subject he is
discreto, one, in fact, whose
faculty of
discernment is in
perfect order. The
advantage of this is that he is enabled to make use of
Don Quixote as a
mouthpiece for his own reflections, and so, without seeming to
digress, allow
himself the relief of digression when he
requires it, as freely as in a
commonplace book.
It is true the amount of individuality bestowed upon
Don Quixote is not very great. There are some
natural touches of character about him, such as his mixture of
irascibility and placability, and his
curious affection for Sancho together with his impatience of the squire's
loquacity and
impertinence; but in the main, apart from his craze, he is little more than a thoughtful, cultured gentleman, with
instinctive good taste and a great deal of
shrewdness and originality of mind.
As to
Sancho, it is plain, from the concluding words of the preface to the First Part, that he was a
favourite with his
creator even before he had been taken into favour by the public. An
inferior genius, taking him in hand a second time, would very likely have tried to improve him by making him more
comical,
clever,
amiable, or
virtuous. But
Cervantes was too true an
artist to spoil his work in this way. Sancho, when he re
appears, is the old
Sancho with the old familiar features; but with a difference; they have been brought out more distinctly, but at the same time with a
careful avoidance of anything like caricature; the outline has been filled in where filling in was
necessary, and, vivified by a few touches of a master's hand,
Sancho stands before us as he might in a character portrait by
Velazquez. He is a much more important and
prominent figure in the Second Part than in the First; indeed, it is his matchless
mendacity about
Dulcinea that to a great extent
supplies the action of the story.
His development in this respect is as remarkable as in any other. In the First Part he displays a great
natural gift of lying. His lies are not of the highly imaginative sort that liars in
fiction commonly indulge in; like
Falstaff's, they resemble the father that begets them; they are simple, homely,
plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But in the service of such a master as
Don Quixote he
develops rapidly, as we see when he comes to palm off the three
country wenches as
Dulcinea and her ladies in waiting. It is worth noticing how, flushed by his success in this
instance, he is tempted afterwards to try a flight beyond his powers in his account of the
journey on
Clavileno.
In the Second Part it is the
spirit rather than the incidents of the chivalry romances that is the subject of the burlesque. Enchantments of the sort travestied in those of
Dulcinea and the
Trifaldi and the cave of
Montesinos play a
leading part in the later and inferior romances, and another distinguishing feature is caricatured in
Don Quixote's
blind adoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of
chivalry love is either a mere animalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a coarse-minded
man would care to make merry with the former, but to one of
Cervantes'
humour the latter was naturally an attractive subject for ridicule. Like
everything else in these romances, it is a gross exaggeration of the real sentiment of chivalry, but its peculiar
extravagance is probably due to the influence of those masters of hyperbole, the
Provencal poets. When a
troubadour professed his
readiness to obey his lady in all things, he made it incumbent upon the next comer, if he wished to avoid the imputation of tameness and commonplace, to declare himself the slave of her will, which the next was compelled to cap by some still stronger
declaration; and so
expressions of devotion went on rising one above the other like biddings at an auction, and a
conventional language of
gallantry and theory of
love came into being that in time permeated the
literature of Southern Europe, and bore fruit, in one direction in the
transcendental worship of
Beatrice and
Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which found exponents in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what
Cervantes deals with in
Don Quixote's passion for
Dulcinea, and in no instance has he carried out the
burlesque more happily. By keeping
Dulcinea in the background, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very existence we are left in doubt, he invests
Don Quixote's
worship of her
virtues and charms with an additional
extravagance, and gives still more point to the caricature of the sentiment and language of the
romances.
One of the great
merits of "
Don Quixote," and one of the qualities that have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. There are, of course, points
obvious enough to a
Spanish seventeenth century audience which do not immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and
Cervantes often takes it for granted that an
allusion will be generally understood which is only intelligible to a few. For example, on many of his readers in
Spain, and most of his readers out of it, the
significance of his choice of a country for his hero is completely lost. It would he going too far to say that no one can thoroughly comprehend "
Don Quixote" without having seen
La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of
La Mancha will give an insight into the meaning of
Cervantes such as no commentator can give. Of all the regions of
Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of romance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the dullest tract. There is something impressive about the grim solitudes of Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and
dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in relics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan landscape; it has all the
sameness of the desert without its dignity; the few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace, there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of
poverty; indeed,
Don Quixote's own village, Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive
respectability in the prim regularity of its streets and houses; everything is
ignoble; the very windmills are the
ugliest and shabbiest of the
windmill kind.
To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "
Don Quixote of
La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once.
La Mancha as the knight's
country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire, knighthood conferred by a rascally
ventero, convicts taken for victims of
oppression, and the rest of the
incongruities between
Don Quixote's world and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as they were.
It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the whole
humour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the majority of those who have
undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It has been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure, the great majority of the artists who
illustrated "
Don Quixote" knew nothing whatever of
Spain. To them a venta conveyed no idea but the abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do full justice to the
humour of Don Quixote's
misconception in taking it for a castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal. But even when better informed they seem to have no apprehension of the full force of the discrepancy. Take, for instance, Gustave Dore's drawing of
Don Quixote watching his armour in the inn-yard. Whether or not the Venta de Quesada on the Seville road is, as tradition maintains, the inn described in "
Don Quixote," beyond all question it was just such an inn-yard as the one behind it that
Cervantes had in his
mind's eye, and it was on just such a rude stone trough as that beside the
primitive draw-well in the corner that he meant
Don Quixote to deposit his armour. Gustave Dore makes it an elaborate fountain such as no arriero ever watered his mules at in the corral of any venta in
Spain, and thereby entirely misses the point aimed at by
Cervantes. It is the mean, prosaic, commonplace character of all the surroundings and circumstances that gives a significance to
Don Quixote's vigil and the
ceremony that follows.
Cervantes'
humour is for the most part of that broader and simpler sort, the strength of which lies in the
perception of the incongruous. It is the incongruity of Sancho in all his ways, words, and works, with the ideas and aims of his master, quite as much as the
wonderful vitality and truth to nature of the character, that makes him the most humorous creation in the whole range of fiction. That
unsmiling gravity of which
Cervantes was the first great master, "
Cervantes' serious air," which sits naturally on
Swift alone, perhaps, of later humourists, is
essential to this kind of
humour, and here again
Cervantes has suffered at the hands of his interpreters.
Nothing, unless indeed the coarse
buffoonery of
Phillips, could be more out of place in an attempt to represent
Cervantes, than a
flippant, would-be
facetious style, like that of
Motteux's version for example, or the sprightly,
jaunty air,
French translators sometimes adopt. It is the grave matter-of-factness of the narrative, and the apparent unconsciousness of the author that he is saying anything ludicrous, anything but the merest commonplace, that give its peculiar flavour to the
humour of
Cervantes. His, in fact, is the exact opposite of the
humour of Sterne and the self-conscious humourists. Even when Uncle Toby is at his best, you are always aware of "the
man Sterne" behind him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect he is producing.
Cervantes always leaves you alone with
Don Quixote and Sancho. He and Swift and the great
humourists always keep themselves out of sight, or, more properly speaking, never think about
themselves at all, unlike our latter-day school of
humourists, who seem to have revived the old horse-collar method, and try to raise a
laugh by some
grotesque assumption of
ignorance,
imbecility, or bad taste.
It is true that to do full justice to
Spanish humour in any other language is well-nigh an
impossibility. There is a
natural gravity and a sonorous stateliness about
Spanish, be it ever so
colloquial, that make an absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the most preposterous statement. This is what makes Sancho Panza's drollery thedespair of the conscientious translator. Sancho's curt comments can
never fall flat, but they lose half their flavour when
transferred from their native
Castilian into any other
medium. But if
foreigners have failed to do justice to the
humour of
Cervantes, they are no worse than his own countrymen. Indeed, were it not for the
Spanish peasant's relish of "
Don Quixote," one might be tempted to think that the great humourist was not looked upon as a humourist at allin his own
country.
The craze of
Don Quixote seems, in some instances, to have
communicated itself to his critics, making them see things that are not in the book and run full tilt at
phantoms that have no existence save in their own
imaginations. Like a good many critics
now-a-days, they forget that screams are not criticism, and that it is only vulgar tastes that are influenced by strings of superlatives, three-piled hyperboles, and
pompous epithets. But what strikes one as particularly strange is that while they deal in extravagant
eulogies, and ascribe all
manner of imaginary ideas and qualities to
Cervantes, they show no perception of the quality that ninety-nine out of a hundred of his readers would rate highest in him, and hold to be the one that raises him above all rivalry.
To speak of "
Don Quixote" as if it were merely a humorous book would be a manifest
misdescription.
Cervantes at times makes it a kind of commonplace book for occasional essays and criticisms, or for the
observations and
reflections and gathered wisdom of a long and stirring life. It is a mine of
shrewd observation on
mankind and
human nature. Among modern novels there may be, here and there, more elaborate studies of character, but there is no book richer in
individualised character. What
Coleridge said of
Shakespeare in minimis is true of
Cervantes; he never, even for the most temporary purpose, puts forward a lay figure. There is life and individuality in all his
characters, however little they may have to do, or however short a time they may be before the reader.
Samson Carrasco, the
curate,
Teresa Panza,
Altisidora, even the two students met on the road to the cave of
Montesinos, all live and move and have their being; and it is characteristic of the broad humanity of
Cervantes that there is not a hateful one among them all. Even
poor Maritornes, with her deplorable morals, has a kind
heart of her own and "some faint and distant resemblance to a
Christian about her;" and as for Sancho, though on dissection we fail to find a
lovable trait in him, unless it be a sort of
dog-like affection for his
master, who is there that in his
heart does not
love him?
But it is, after all, the
humour of "
Don Quixote" that
distinguishes it from all other books of the
romance kind. It is this that makes it, as one of the most
judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, "the best novel in the world beyond all comparison." It is its varied
humour, ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as
Shakespeare's or
Moliere's that has naturalised it in every country where there are readers, and made it a
classic in every language that has a
literature.
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