BOOKS AND WRITERS
WHEN a version of Don Quixote was performed by the Vic-Wells Ballet one or two critics complained that it was not funny. The idea that the story is a comic strip goes back to the Restoration and Milton's reprobate nephew, John Phillips ; it became the rule to see nothing in Cervantes but facetiousness, though the one thing that the Spanish original never is, by any possible chance, is facetious. Yet of all the versions and perversions which have appeared of late years, the only two which show real understanding of what Cervantes had in mind are the puppet-opera by Manuel de Falb (performed about twenty- five years ago at the Court Theatre, Sloane Square, and, in 1947, at Westminster School) and the Vie-Wells ballet by Ninette de Valois and Roberto Gcrhard. The adventure of the puppet-show which occupies chapters 25 and 26 of the Second Part of the story gives the essence of Don Quixote's madness ; for the subject of Don Quixote is not the adventures of a pair of clowns, but the interaction between appearance and reality.
Don Quixote has a vivid imagination. Whatever he sees, thinks or imagines seems to take place as his books tell him ; and since his favourite reading has been chivalrous romance, whenever he sees anything which reminds him of his books, he believes that it is true, and that he is bound to behave like a knight of King Arthur's Round Table One evening he and Sancho Panza come to an inn where a travelling showman is giving a puppet-play on the old ballad of Melisendra, carried off from Paris by Moors from over the Pyrenees and rescued by Don Gaiferos, a knight at the court of Charlemagne. The show goes on until the escape is discovered, and it looks as if the Moors will overtake the Christian lovers and bring them back tied to their horse's tail, " which would be a horrid spectacle." This is too much for Don Quixote's imagination. For him the puppet-play has suddenly become the real world, and he acts as if it were all, in fact, true: attacking with his sword and destroying the puppet- show and all the puppets. A moment later he is " sane " again, looking at reality from the other side, and behaving as if the show were only a show and all the Moors merely puppets.
It is easy to say that Don Quixote is mad or that he has hallucina- tions. But what exactly is Don Quixote's madness ? It consists in seeing certain things connected with the age of chivalry from a different point of view from that of the other people he meets, of see- ing things concerning his own subject from a different angle from that of the practical politicians and enhistorical fact-finders. In the First Part a gleam of sunshine after a shower catches a travelling barber with his brass basin on his head. It reminds Don Quixote of the golden helmet of the giant Mambrino in Ariosto. Something happens in his mind, and immediately the basin has become (and, so far as he is concerned, really is) the helmet of Mambrino, which he must win ; while to Sancho it is still, what it was at first, a barber's basin. In the same way the windmills remind him of giants, and instantly become giants ; the flocks of sheep are like armies, and therefore arc real armies ; the inn they leach at sundown should be a castle, and therefore is a castle.
This is not merely pleasant fooling. One of the questions which occupied thinking men of the time, especially in Italy, where Cervantes spent several years, was the nature of truth. Is what seems true to me equally true to you ? Is it equally true for both of us ? Or can it be that there are two kinds of truth: truth of reason and truth of belief, truth of fact and truth of value ? The theory of double truth was convenient, not only in philosophy but also in daily life ; the Inquisition was active, and persecution of those who could not keep their mouths shut was frequent, as it is in many places today. Cervantes was not writing philosophy but fiction, and in Don Quixote he has dramatised the philosophical argument. Don Quixote and Sancho do not talk philosophy ; they act it. The basin (or helmet) is a piece of bright metal which, for Sancho, is a basin, while for Don Quixote it is a helmet. It is
easy to say that Don Quixote is out of his mind because he thinks one way while everyone else thinks another. An equally sound explanation, and a -more reasonable one, is that while the barber's basin is, in fact, a basin, in value it is a helmet. Cervantes has made us see that for him, and also for us, it can be both a basin and a helmet at the same time. Sometimes Don Quixote admits that he has been deceived ; admits, that is to say, that there is another point of view beside his own. His ideal fades. He can no longer believe. The inn is only an inn, and Gaiferos, Melisendra and all the Moors are only puppets. In the end he loses faith in his ideals, while Sancho Panza is convinced and converted—a moment which is brought out superbly at the end of the ballet by the visions of the real and ideal Dulcinea.
"Cervantes was a humorist," W. P. Ker remarked: " that is, he could think of more than one thing at a time." Many com- mentators, he added, are without this faculty ; they are easily taken in and led to follow a single line of intention when the author is really working on a number of different lines at once. Those who despise Cervantes often fail to follow him when the twinkle is most obvious. In the adventure of the Duke and Duchess in the Second Part the ducal household (all of whom have seen the First Part in print) receive Don Quixote and Sancho in the way an English house- hold might receive a couple of eccentrics posing as Mr. Jorrocks and James Pigg, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Everyone in the house knows the story, everyone recognises the visitors and knows what sort of things they are likely to say and do, so that it is not difficult to act up to them. This adventure culminates in the appointment of Sancho to be governor of an " island " on the Duke's property, where his complete serious- ness and common sense go entirely beyond the expectation of those who thought they were making fun of him.
Mr. J. M. Cohen* has had a task more difficult than that of translating Homer. The translator of Cervantes must be master not of one style of English but of three: Don Quixote's, Sancho Panza's and that of the world in general, while Don Quixote and Sancho have each two different styles of their own. Yet the new Penguin translation reads more easily and more naturally than any other, which means that it is more like Cervantes, whose voice is always the voice of someone speaking. Mr. Cohen's introduction, his suggestions for what may be omitted on a first reading, are excellent. There is only one point on which one would disagree with him: the pastoral convention. To Cervantes that was no more silly or pointless than it was to Milton calling his Cambridge friends " shepherds " in Lycidas. Cervantes made fun of most things on earth—and in heaven, too—but he never made fun of the pastoral, ideal world of pure poetry ; and that was the one ideal in which Don Quixote, too, never lost faith.
Mr. Gerald Brenan remarks somewhere in his new book, The Face of Spain, that Cervantes was more complicated than most Spanish people. He had the sociable, positive, animated qualities, together with the poetic overtones and arabesque manner which we find in the poetry of Gong= ; but he knew that other side of the Spanish nature which is not always noticed because it seldom shows itself on the surface, though it gives Spanish things the strange, unaccountable accent which everyone recognises. Mr. Brenan calls it the " night side " of Spanish life ; but it might equally have been called the police-state side, because, though involving contempt for life, it implies saying less than you mean, fpr walls have ears. Cervantes shows both sides ; but the night side does not lead him to mysticism or fanaticism but to a Spanish Arcadia of pure poetry. Cervantes' ideal is not Don Quixote but the Man in the Green Cloak ; an Arcadian Shepherd who has married and settled down.
J. B. TREND.
* The Adventures of Don Quixote. By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Translated by J. M. Cohen. (Penguin Classics. 5s.)
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