Dark Horse Scripture: Shakespeare & Cervantes Would Be Proud

When he wrote those lines in which "with a few strokes of a great master he sets before us the pauper gentleman," he had no idea of the goal to which his imagination was leading him. There can be little doubt that all he contemplated was a short tale to range with those he had already written—"Rinconete and Cortadillo," "The Generous Lover," "The Adventures of Cardenio and Dorothea," the "Ill-advised Curiosity," "The Captive's Story"—a tale setting forth the ludicrous results that might be expected to follow the attempt of a crazy gentleman to act the part of a knight-errant in modern life.

It is plain, for one thing, that Sancho Panza did not enter into the original scheme, for had Cervantes thought of him he certainly would not have omitted him in his hero's outfit, which he obviously meant to be complete. Him we owe to the landlord's chance remark in chapter iii. It is needless to point out the difference this implies. To try to think of a Don Quixote without Sancho Panza is like trying to think of a one-bladed pair of scissors. The story was written at first, like the others, without any division, as may be seen by the beginnings and endings of the first half-dozen chapters; and without the intervention of Cid Hamet 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 Cid Hamet Benengeli in indtation 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 idea, 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. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book: The burlesque, it will be observed, is not steadily kept up even throughout the First Part.

Cervantes seems, as in fact he confesses in the person of Cid Hamet in chapter xliv. It is plain that, as is often the case with persons of sanguine temperament, sustained effort was irksome to him. For thirty years he had contemplated the completion of the "Galatea," unable to bring himself to set about it. He had the "Persiles," which he looked upon as his best work—in prose at least—an equal length of time on his hands. The Second Part of "Don Quixote" he wrote in a very desultory fashion, putting it aside again and again to turn to something else.

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And when he made an end, it was always a hasty one. Each part of "Don Quixote" he finishes off with a wild flourish, and seems to fling down his pen with a "whoop" like a schoolboy at the end of a task he has been kept in for. Even the "Viaje del Parnaso," a thing entered upon and written con amore , he ends abruptly as if he had got tired of it.

It was partly for this reason, as he himself admits, that he inserted the story of "Cardenio and Dorothea," that with the untranslatable title which I have ventured to call the "Ill-advised Curiosity," and "The Captive's Story," that fill up the greater part of the last half of the volume, as well as the "Chrysostom and Marcela" episode in the earlier chapters.

But of course there were other reasons. He had these stories ready written, and it seemed a good way of disposing of them. It is by no means unlikely that he mistrusted his own powers of extracting from Don Quixote and Sancho material enough to fill a book; but above all it is likely he felt doubtful of his venture. It was an experiment in literature far bolder than "Lazarillo de Tornies" or "Guzman de Alfarache;" he could not tell how it would be received; and it was as well, therefore, to provide his readers with something of the sort they were used to, as a kind of insurance against total failure.

The event did not justify his diffidence. The public, he acknowledges, skimmed the tales hastily and impatiently, eager to return to the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho; and the public has ever since done much the same. He himself owns that they are altogether out of place, and nothing but the natural reluctance of editors and translators to mutilate a great classic has preserved them, for in truth they are not only out of place, but positive blemishes. An exception might be made in favor of the story of the Captive, which has an interest in itself independent of the autobiographical touches it contains, and is in the main told in a straightforward soldierly way.

But the others have nothing to recommend them. They are commonplace tales of intrigue that might have been written by any tenth-rate story-teller. With a certain pretence of moral purpose, the "Ill-advised Curiosity" is a nauseous story, and the morality of Dorothea's story is a degree worse than that of Richardson's "Pamela;" it is, in fact, a story of "easy virtue rewarded.

The reader will observe the difference between the Dorothea of the tale and the graceful, sprightly, natural Dorothea who acts the part of the Princess Micomicona with such genuine gayety and fun. But it is in style that these tales offend most of all. They are not worth telling, and they are told at three times the length that would have been allowable if they were.

No device known to prolixity is omitted. Verbs and adjectives always go in pairs like panniers on a donkey, as if one must inevitably fall to the ground without the other to balance it. Nobody ever says or sees anything, he always declares and asserts it, or perceives and discerns it. If a thing is beautiful it must likewise be lovely, and nothing can be odious without being detestable too; though as a rule adjectives are seldom used but in the superlative degree. Everything is said with as much circumlocution and rodomontade as possible, as if the lavish expenditure of words were the great object.

And yet, following immediately upon these tawdry artificial productions, we have the charming little episode of Don Luis and Dona Clara, as if Cervantes wished to show that when he chose he could write a love story in a simple, natural style. The latter portion of the First Part is, in short, almost all episodes and digressions; no sooner are the tales disposed of, than we have the long criticism on the chivalry romances and the drama, interesting and valuable no doubt, but still just as much out of place, and that is followed by the goat-herd's somewhat pointless story.

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 favor, but had already become, what they have never since ceased to be, veritable entities to the popular imagination.

Touchstones

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.

Cervantes and English literature of the seventeenth century - Persée

In all that he says and does he is simply repeating the lesson he has learned from his books; and therefore, as Hallam with perfect justice maintains, 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 succor 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! In this respect he remains unchanged in the Second Part; but at the same time 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.

He thus invests Don Quixote with a dignity which was wholly wanting to him in the First Part, and at the same time reserves to himself the right of making him speak and act not only like a man of sense, but like a man of exceptionally clear and acute mind, whenever it may become desirable to travel outside the limits of the burlesque. 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 favorite with his creator even before he had been taken into favor 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, as may be seen in his explanation of Don Quixote's bruises in chapter xvi. 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.

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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. 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' humor 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. There will always be a difference of opinion as to the relative merits of the First and Second Parts of "Don Quixote.

Another reason why the Second Part has less of the purely ludicrous element in it is that Cervantes, having a greater respect for his hero, is more careful of his personal dignity. In the interests of the story he has to allow Don Quixote to be made a butt of to some extent, but he spares him the cudgellings and cuffings which are the usual finale of the poor gentleman's adventures in the First Part.

There can be no question, however, as to the superiority of the Second Part in style and construction. It is one of the commonplaces of criticism to speak of "Don Quixote" as if it were a model of Spanish prose, but in truth there is no work of note in the language that is less deserving of the title. There are of course various styles in "Don Quixote. I have already spoken of the wearisome verbosity of the inserted novels, but the narrative portions of the book itself, especially in the First Part, are sometimes just as long-winded and wordy.

Cervantes and English literature of the seventeenth century

In both the style reminds one somewhat of that of the euphuists, and of their repugnance to saying anything in a natural way, and their love of cold conceits and verbal quibbles. These were the besetting sins of the prose of the day, but Cervantes has besides sins of his own to answer for.

He was a careless writer at all times, but in "Don Quixote" he is only too often guilty of downright slovenliness. The word is that of his compatriot and stanch admirer Clemencin, or I should not venture to use it, justifiable as it may be in the case of a writer who deals in long sentences staggering down the page on a multiplicity of "ands," or working themselves into tangles of parentheses, sometimes parenthesis within parenthesis; who begins a sentence one way and ends it another; who sends relatives adrift without any antecedent to look to; who mixes up nominatives, verbs, and pronouns in a way that would have driven a Spanish Cobbett frantic.

Here is an example of a very common construction in "Don Quixote: Nor are his laxaties of this sort only; his grammar is very often lax, he repeats words and names out of pure heedlessness, and he has a strange propensity to inversion of ideas, and a curious tendency to say the very opposite of what he meant to say. His blind worshippers, with whom it is an axiom that he can do no wrong, make an odd apology for some of these slips. They are only his fun, they say; in which case Cervantes must have written with a prophetic eye to the friends of Mr. Peter Magnus, for assuredly no others of the sons of men would be amused by such means.

But besides these two, there is what we may call Cervantes' own style, that into which he falls naturally when he is not imitating the romances of chivalry, or under any unlucky impulse in the direction of fine-writing. It is almost the exact opposite of the last. It is a simple, unaffected, colloquial style, not indeed a model of correctness, or distinguished by any special grace or elegance, for Cervantes always wrote hastily and carelessly, but a model of clear, terse, vigorous expression. To an English reader, Swift's style will, perhaps, convey the best idea of its character; at the same time, though equally matter-of-fact, it has more vivacity than Swift's.



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This is the prevailing style of the Second Part, which is cast in the dramatic form to a much greater extent than the First, consisting, indeed, largely of dialogue between master and man, or of Don Quixote's discourses and Sancho's inimitable comments thereon. Episodes, Cid Hamet tells us, have been sparingly introduced, and he adds significantly, "with no more words than suffice to make them intelligible," as if even then the verbosity of the novels had proved too much for some of the readers of the First Part. The assertion, however, is scarcely borne out by the fair Claudia's story in chapter lx.

It may be, as Hallam says, that in the incidents of the Second Part there is not the same admirable probability there is in those of the First; though what could be more delightfully probable than the sequel of Sancho's unlucky purchase of the curds in chapter xvii. But it must be allowed that the Second Part is constructed with greater art, if the word can be applied to a story so artless.

The result of Sancho's audacious imposture at El Toboso, for instance, its consequences to himself in the matter of the enchantment of Dulcinea and the penance laid upon him, his shifts and shirkings, and Don Quixote's insistence in season and out of season, are a masterpiece of comic intrigue. Not less adroit is the way in which encouragement is doled out to master and man from time to time, to keep them in heart. Even with all due allowance for the infatuation of Don Quixote and the simplicity and cupidity of Sancho, to represent them as holding out under an unbroken course of misfortune would have been untrue to human nature.

The victory achieved in such knightly fashion over the Biscayan, supports Don Quixote under all the disasters that befall him in the First Part; and in the Second his success against the Knight of the Mirrors, and in the adventure with the lion, and his reception as a knight-errant by the Duke and Duchess, serve to confirm him in his idea of his powers and vocation.

Material support was still more needful in Sancho's case. It is plain that a prospective island would not have kept his faith in chivalry alive, had it not been for the treasure-trove of the Sierra Morena and the flesh-pots of Camacho's wedding. 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.

As Samson Carrasco says, "There's nothing in it to puzzle over. There are, of course, points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth-century audience which do not immediately strike a reader nowadays, 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 be 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 story 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 any one 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-laborer 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 humor and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote. 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 humor 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. 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 armor. 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.

Gustave Dore might as well have turned La Tolosa and La Molinera into village maidens of the opera type in ribbons and roses. No humor suffers more from this kind of treatment than that of Cervantes. Of that finer and more delicate humor through which there runs a thread of pathos he had but little, or, it would be fairer to say, shows but little. There are few indications in "Don Quixote" or the novelas of the power that produced that marvellous scene in "Lazarillo de Tormes," where the poor hidalgo paces the patio, watching with his hungry eyes his ragged little retainer munching the crusts and cowheel.

Cervantes' humor is for the most part of that broader and simpler sort, the strength of which lies in the perception of the incongruous. It was a difficult task, particularly because the students chose from 3, years of literature.

Miguel de Cervantes

But the students finished the course having contributred to something lasting. Gwen Squyres, a senior majoring in English from Lancaster, Calif. The class of 45 students broke up into five groups. Each group researched, presented and defended their choices first to their group and then to the class. The surviving choices were tabulated and combined. It is, as Squyres and Sexson point out, a riotous salad of selections. Although it is not the list I would make all by myself. And if the list sparks controversy, even heated debate, so much the better, he said. It will inspire strengthening of the list.