Immortal Lunatic
Tim literary supplement of a great New York daily recently published the answers of a representative group of American authors to the searching question : What famous books have you never read ? Don Quixote figured prominently in these lists as the most conspicuous gap in the reading of men whose job is literature. And this is not altogether surprising, for it is true that Don Quixote is a book so familiar to everyone from childhood up, so easy to grasp and even to appreciate without reading, that it is continually mentioned, quoted and praised—and seldom opened. No other book is taken for granted quite in this way. It might perhaps be retorted that this is not such a pity as it seems : we may suppose that we are sufficiently well acquainted with the book to comprehend its significance, because we do, after all, know the " feel " of it. But we are wrong if we think this, as Professor Madariaga's admirable essay successfully shows. The outstanding merit of this talented piece of literary criticism, which was published last year in a beautiful de luxe edition by the Gregynog Press at two guineas, and is now available to anyone who can afford last week's'best-seller, is that it will send the reader hurrying back to the first and still the finest of modern novels. Written originally in Spanish and translated into graceful English by the author and his wife, it is an introduction to Don Quixote which should stand next to Cervantes himself on every bookshop and library shelf.
The greatness of Don Quixote is the greatness of the man who wrote it. So true and intricate is this identification of Cervantes with the untidy masterpiece he composed that; little though we know of the man himself—and not all of it is to his credit—we can say of him what cannot be said with equal confidence of most other writers of genius : that his personal character was as fine as his creative gift. Throughout her history Spain has excelled in producing great men who have themselves produced nothing : that has been the curious hallmark of her genius. Perhaps it is for this very reason that two great Spaniards—the two greatest—happen to have come as near to absolute, almost living creation in art as ever pen or paintbrush accomplished.
" Don Quixote, Sancho, Hamlet, Don Juan and Faust," says this critic, " are the five great men created by man." Despite much in Don Quixote that is boring today and much that was faulty from the start, it is this superlative act of creation that has enabled the book to grow even since Cer- vantes finished writing it. That is at once Professor Madariaga's first claim for it and his excuse for an interesting commentary. It is the specific nature of a work of art that
long after its creator has shed his mortal garment, it con- tinues to grow." Don Quixote, he asserts,, is greater now " than when, armed cap-h-pie, he came out of Cervantes' imagination—greater for all the wealth of experience and adventure which he has gone -through while riding for three hundred years over the boundless fields of the human spirit."
If this is true, it is because " works of genius attract all mankind : the high, the low, and the average—in which they differ froni works of mere talent, which only interest the average." But, although it has been said that the chief merit of Don Quixote lay in " the extreme, simplicity of the characters," this is not se. Don Quixote "owes its popularity, not its merit, to the fact that the characters are capable of simplification and once simplified continue to be of the greatest interest. Superficial tradition has reduced its marvellous psychological fabric to a line of simplest melody : valiant knight and idealist ; matter-of- fact and 'cowardly rustic." Actually this design; which on a "first impression is based on contraSt, resolves itself into a " complicated and delicate parallel," 'the subtle development
of which " shows Sancho, up to a point, a transposition of Don Quixote in a different key." That much perhaps we had already guessed ; but Don Salvador contrives to be illumin- ating both when we agree with his conelusions and when we may tend to consider their very neatness controversial.
By apt and telling quotation he proves to us that Don Quixote is forever tilting against the dragon of doubt within
himself ; he is, in fact, forced tSbelieVe in Dulcinea " in order to believe in himself, whereas 'Sancho has to believe in Don Quixote in order to believe in the island." For Sancho seeks power where his master seeks glory. The knight's is a sad, eventful quest which leads him gradually "away from his old idealism and delicacy" ; and so, in the course of their joint foraging, " while Sancho's spirit rises from reality, to illusion, Don. Quixote descends from illusion to reality." These two curves cross "in that saddest of adventures, the cruellest in the book "—Sancho's " enchantment " of Dulcinea—an episode which, as the author says of another adventure, " is full of the realism of the epoch—and of all Spanish epochs." It is here that the sharpest duality is reached as "the noblest of knights, for love of the. urest illusion, sinks to his knees before the most repulsive of realities : a Dulcinea, coarse, uncouth, and smelling of. garlic."
What delight the " twofold nature " of Cervantes must have experienced in writing this passage ! His own haphazard; unhappy life had taught him to respect reality; to accept it with open arms, to temper it with cynicism. He had gained clear sight ; but he was also, in Professor Madariaga's words, " an idealist disillusioned who took refuge in a human and indulgent humour." In doing so he thought to satirise the silly, Books of Chivalry—they were then what we now call thrillers—and the result we smile at still, wishing that we could
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