THE QUEST OF COURTESY
The History of Don Quixote. Translated by Thomas Shelton. (Navarre Society. £3 3s.) This superb edition by the Navarre. Society of Shelton's translation of Don Quixote, has given us the occasion to re-read it once again. The prose of Shelton is not so much noble as splendid, and not so much splendid as full-blooded and free-minded. It is a full diet of that rich, golden-crusted English just out of the oven of the Renaissance bakery.
It is welinigh impossible to credit the legend that Shelton made his translation of the first part of Don Quixote in forty days, especially as his life, spent as an agent acting with the Countess of Suffolk in the pay of Philip of Spain, must have been very hazardous. A modern scholar would lavish his best- years on the task and might die leaving the second part unfinished. But to do it in forty days—the writer no doubt sitting with his sword between his teeth—was a typical Elizabethan gesture. This first part was published in 1812, some seven years after the appearance of the original. On the publication by Cervantes of the second part—that great work of indignation against the imposter Avellaneda of Tordesillas- Shelton followed in a more leisurely fashion with his trans- lation, which did not appear until 1620.
The fuller the heart, the more dumb-smitten is the tongue. So one feels when leaving the trimmings of the subject, and approaching the great book itself. Its overwhelming univer- sality beggars the poor reader while enriching him, just as a dozen years of real life do when considered in retrospect. They seem to be just a vague, golden haze of revelations, cosmic kindnesses, oppressions hardly to be distinguished from caresses. They seem to be a great ocean of light through which a little, half-drowned ego is drifting and swimming in a progress of mingled fate and will. All we can do is to look back through the tears of the soul, subdued by awe and wonder, to a state of half-intelligence in which memory and reason function spasmodically.
So we look back on the Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Lear, and Don Quixote. All that we can say about them appears to be trite and personal. In the atmosphere in which they move, one's own personality, in spite of its sacredness, is something to be kept in the background, for it is so pathetically shabby in that clear air.
It is a habit of commentators to treat of the adventure of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as intended allegories ; but that seems to be at best an utilitarian habit. Certainly one may fantasize to one's own taste after sharing the realities in which these two immortals move : but the allegory and moral afterthought must be one's own. For Cervantes was more than a moralist ; he was a religious man, steeped in the mystery of experience. His book was the fruit of sixty years crowded with heroic events and the searching lethargies of poverty and mischance. The self-consciousness of his art, therefore, had its roots in a stratum of his being deeper than intellect, conviction, and moral opinion. He wrote with an open mind ; and the processes and output of that mind were real events, like the growth of a tree, or the common functions of the human being, such as eating, sleeping, praying, and loving. His irony is so deep-founded that it appears to have the unconsciousness and impersonality of the irony of nature. The mind, in trying to fit a precise significance to it, is baffled as by an act of God. Nothing could be more grim, for instance, than the fact that in Don Quixote's first adventure, when he set out alone to achieve knighthood, he should receive the accolade at the hands of an innkeeper, and that his sword should be buckled on by two Magdalens who • witnessed the ceremony. Meanings and significances go reverberating back from that event—it can hardly be called fiction. It has something of the dark portent, the soul-searching power of the story of the box of spikenard. It has an explosive,
subvertive content, and carries a hidden warning for those who would stabilize ethics.
In plunging down like this, however, we are losing sight of the wide, sunny panorama of the work, and forgetting the great individuals who move in it. Their actions and thoughts are not those of characters in fiction. What they say, do, and think are so direct that they are very life itself. Sancho is the crown of this reality. Not once, but on every occasion, he reacts with all the subtle simplicity of a living man. He is the embodiment of the plain, everyday, honest knave whom we call the man-in-the-street. And his mundane common sense drives him to follow that unhappy knight, the ridicule of the world, the fool of imagination, the vain hunter after perfect courtesy. That is a notable paradox.
What was the summoning power of that knight who could call forth this comfortable fellow, this man-ordinary, from his home and security, to follow a chimera of magnificent virtues and rewards, and to learn at last so perfect a love for his master as to be indifferent to the failure of his earthly hopes ? That power was the spiritual strength of a man who, in his own world, was master of himself ; one who had subdued his appetites, and directed them towards the nourishment of his
soul, denying himself food and sleep—the deepest bodily cravings—to further that purpose ; one who could proclaim himself to be " a minister of God on earth and the arms wherewith He executeth here His judgment." What matter though the machinery with which he worked was crazy. If we laugh at that, we laugh at the child Coleridge who, running along the Strand waving his arms, said that " he was swimming the Hellespont " ; we laugh at the clumsy efforts of Leonardo to fly ; we laugh at the rustic setting into which Christ was born.
RIGUARD C111:1WILt
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