A History of Story-telling: Studies in the development of narrative

by Arthur Ransome

Three hundred years after the Bachelor, we too are satisfied with Sancho's chatter, and his master's Quixoteries, because they are both pretty closely connected with humanity. If Don Quixote is among the clouds, Sancho Panza sits firm upon his donkey, and between the two of them the book itself moves spaciously upon a mellowed earth. There is a perpetual interplay between dignity and impudence, the ridiculous and the sublime, and the partners, as if at tennis, lend vigour and give opportunity to each other. Sancho is not a mere village bellyful of common sense, whose business is to make the Knight of the Doleful Countenance appear ridiculous. He, too, has his delusions; he, too, prefers sometimes those two birds twittering distantly in the bush; Romance, smilingly enough, has touched his puzzled forehead also. And Don Quixote, with ideals no less noble than those of Amadis of Gaul or Don Belianis of Greece, with notions of life no less exaggerated than those in the interminable pastorals, is yet a man of blood and bone. His ideals and notions are properly fleshed, and are in the book as a soul in a body. Don Quixote is a book of dreams set upon earth, and earthly shrewdness reaching vainly after dreams. The rogue novels and the romances were, either of them, the one without the other.

The ideal not spoilt by the reality.

We see Don Quixote's adventures with the realist's eye of disillusion, and find that external perfection does not matter to our dreams. ''Tis not the deed but the intent.' The gorgeous charger of the knight of chivalry is become a poor old starveling hack that should have been horsemeat these dozen years. Mambrino's helmet is but a barber's bason after all. Lancelot's Guinevere is Dulcinea of the Mill. Her feet are large and her shoulders one higher than the other. The castle is a wayside inn, the routed army a flock of luckless sheep. The goatherds do not talk after the fashion of the Court, like those in Galatea; but, 'with some coarse compliment, after the country way, they desired Don Quixote to sit down upon a trough with the bottom upwards.' Gone are the rose-flecked cloudy pinnacles of dawn; we know them now for drenching rain. And yet—the play's the thing, and is not judged by its trappings, but by its beating heart. Not one scene in the Romances, not one glimpse of the Happy Valley in the Pastorals, has ever moved us like this book, which is so near life that when we close it we seem not to have flown on an enchanted carpet from a thousand leagues away, but to have stepped merely from one room to another of our own existence.

The Exemplary Novels.

The Exemplary Novels were begun before Don Quixote, and published afterwards. They are examples rather of a form in story-telling than of any particular piety. Cervantes was, he tells us, 'the first to essay novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many novels which go about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages, while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.' He took the form of the Italian short story, not the episode but the nouvelle, the little novel that had inspired the Elizabethans. He took this form and filled it with his own material, told in his own manner. In thinking of that manner I am reminded of the band of Spanish village musicians who seemed at first to have no obvious connection with my subject. There were perhaps a dozen of them grouped on the stage of a London music hall, and they played small windy tunes, occasionally blaring out with trumpets, using a musical scale entirely different from our own. I remembered a Japanese I had heard playing on a bamboo flute, and then the semitones of a little henna-stained flageolet from Kairouan. For theirs was Eastern music, and I wondered if these Spaniards still owed their scale to the old rulers of Granada. They set me thinking whether the peculiar movement of Cervantes' narrative had not also an Eastern origin. The facts favour the supposition. Up to the battle of Lepanto the Turks were so far a ruling nation as to be the supreme sea-power; until even later the most likely of incidents for the use of the story-teller was that which happened to Cervantes himself—capture by a Moslem pirate and imprisonment in Algiers. Only a hundred years had passed since the Moors had been driven from Granada. It would indeed be surprising if in Cervantes' work we found no sign of Eastern influence. 'I tell it you,' quoth Sancho of his tale, 'as all stories are told in my country, and I cannot for the blood of me tell it in any other way, nor is it fit I should alter the custom.' Many characteristics of Cervantes' narrative remind us that he was writing in a country only recently freed from the Moors, and in a time when it took the united forces of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy to beat the Turks at sea.

Oriental story-telling.

Cervantes is not ignorant, for example, of the literary trick of letting his heroes quote from the poets, after the engaging, erudite manner of the heroes of the Arabian Nights. Sancho Panza's conversation is an anthology of those short wisdom-laden maxims that had been the staple of Hebrew and Arabic literature. 'Set a hen upon an egg'; 'While a man gets he never can lose'; 'Where there is no hook, to be sure there can hang no bacon'; shrewd Ali and careful Hakim exchange such sentences to-day in the market-places of the East. But these are small things and beside the main point. I want to suggest that Cervantes had caught, whether in his Algerine prison, or in his Morocco-Spanish Spain, the yarning, leisurely, humanity-laden, unflinching atmosphere of Oriental story-telling. The form of the nouvelle, Eastern in origin, had been passed on from Naples to Paris and to London, without noticeable improvement, but it seems to me that now in Spain it met the East again, and was accordingly recreated. It is just the element of Eastern narrative, accidental in the genius of Cervantes, that makes his examples of that form so infinitely more important than those of the English Elizabethans. Scott told Lockhart that the reading of the Exemplary Novels first turned his mind to the writing of fiction, and in Scott there is precisely the mood of uninterruptible story-telling that Cervantes shares with the Princess Scherazada.

The novels are delightful specimens of ambling, elaborate narrative, full of the easiest, most confident knowledge of humanity, illustrating with serene clarity a point of view that is to-day as refreshing as it is surprising. The happy endings, when the seducer falls in love at sight on meeting the seduced of years before, and satisfies all her scruples, and turns her sorrow to unblemished joy by marrying her, show an ethic of respectability no less assured than Richardson's. They are enriched by passages whose observation is as minute as Fielding's. They are never tales about nothing. There is always meat on their bones. They are among the few stories that can be read on a summer afternoon under an apple-tree, for they will bear contact with nature, and are never in a hurry. Even if Cervantes had not written Don Quixote, the Exemplary Novels would have assured him a place in the history of his art. There is no cleverness in them, any more than in the greater book. The whole body of Cervantes' work is an illustration of the impregnable advantage that plain humanity possesses over intellect.

The portrait of Cervantes.

And now, after these various questions for the schoolmen, questions to more than one of which the cautious man must answer with Sir Roger, that 'much might be said on both sides,' let us return to the old story-teller himself, who will survive by innumerable generations our little praises and discussions as he has lived benevolent and secure through the centuries that have already passed over his grave. The only authentic portrait of Cervantes is in his own words. A hundred artists have tried to supplement these words with paint, and their pictures have at least a family likeness. The portrait made by Miss Gavin after a careful comparison parison of many others represents very fairly the traditional Cervantes type, and does not materially belie the lineaments that he describes:—'He whom you here behold, with aquiline visage, with chestnut hair, smooth and unruffled brow, with sparkling eyes, and a nose arched though well proportioned, a silver beard, although not twenty years ago it was golden, large moustache, small mouth, teeth not important, for he has but six of them, and those in ill condition and worse placed because they do not correspond the one with the other, the body between two extremes, neither large nor small, the complexion bright, rather white than brown, somewhat heavy-shouldered, and not very nimble on his feet; this, I say, is the portrait of the author of the Galatea and of Don Quixote de la Mancha.' That is the sort of statement of himself that an honest humorous man might make to a friend. Part of the satisfaction given by his books is due to the comfortable knowledge that there is a man behind them, a man who knew the world and had not frozen in it. Cervantes, for all his intimacy with life, never became worldly enough to believe in hatred. He assumed that all his readers were his friends, and made them so by the assumption.