DON QUIXOTE BECOMING AWARE OF THE CURDS IN HIS HELMET.
Copenhagen, 1865-1869.
54th Edition.
rival to contend with, and that rival was himself. He had, properly speaking, exhausted his originality in the first part, together with his store of situations, his brilliancy of wit, his freshness of imagery, his peculiar power of delineating singular characters, and placing them in singular circumstances. There is wit in the second part, but it is pale; comedy, but it is forced; vivacity, but it is artificial. You discover nearly everywhere comparative poverty of invention, but a perpetual tendency to imitate himself.”
What shall be said of Don Quixote that has not been said already? or why should we marvel because different men have read it differently? Is it the joyfullest of books, as Carlyle calls it, or do we find it, with Sismondi and De Amicis, the most melancholy of histories? Humour it has, the ripest and rarest that has ever been translated into our language, and pathos that touches the depths of the human emotion. Sir Walter Scott speaks of Cervantes’ humour as “the very poetry of the comic, founded on a tender sympathy with all forms of existence, though displaying itself in sportive reflection, and issuing, not in superficial laughter, but in still smiles, the source of which lies far deeper”; yet others have declared that it lacks “a thread of pathos.” Edward Fitzgerald praised it as “the most delightful of books.” Dr. Johnson declared it to be one of the three books written by a man which the reader wishes to be longer. From Swift to Heine, from Charles Lamb to Sainte-Beuve, from Johnson to Schlegel, the literary giants of all ages and all nationalities have joined in praise of Don Quixote.
In England and France and Germany it is still regarded as a romance, unapproachable in its genre; a work of true genius, supreme, imperishable. But in Spain it has passed from romance, in the national mind, into the realms of reality. In La Mancha the people point to the windmills as proof of the Don’s existence; in Argamasilla they show you the house in which the Knight lived, and draw attention to the ruins of a large, round window, out of which the curate and the barber consigned Don Quixote’s library to the flames. Here is the sluggish Guadiana, in which Sancho Panza’s daughter washed the family linen, and the parish church which guards the veritable portrait of Rodrigo Pacheco, alias Alonzo Quixano, known to fame as Don Quixote de la Mancha, and variously styled the Knight of the Lions and the Knight of the Rueful Countenance. These good, simple Manchegans, who are too wise to mistake Don Quixote for clumsy satire, and recognise the nobility, and wisdom, and virtue of the gallant, fantastic knight-errant, who is “nobly wild—not mad,” have not failed to detect the moral for the age, indeed for all ages, which Mr. Austin Dobson has used as the kernel of his sonnet on the Don:
“Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest!
Yet would to-day, when courtesy grows chill
And life’s fine loyalties are turned to jest,
Some fire of thine might burn within us still!
Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest,
And charge in earnest—were it but a mill!”
