Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

Cervantes strives hard to snuff out the aspiring hunger of his soul. For this, Don Quixote is bemuddied and deformed. But Don Quixote lives: and his chief enemy—Cervantes—gives him his blood and his passion, in order that he may triumph.

c. The Book of the Hero

Don Quixote is written in a prose majestical, dense, warm, lucid, still. It is the fulfillment of the Castilian music which Rojas’ La Celestina promised a century before. The tempo is slow. More correctly, the organic movement of the prose is slow; and the facet movements are swift and nervous. The Cervantine prose is a portrait of the soul of Spain whose cadences of desire and will resolve into an immobile whole.

The accentual music of this prose had already become the innate quality of Castilian. Cervantes heightened his inheritance. The natural genius of the language was already, in the mystics and novelists before him, one that made for a muscular, slow yet sharply surfaced prose. In Don Quixote, the music has as its base an almost cosmic beat, within which as in a firmament, the swifter, brighter, more fleeting qualities stand forth. Cervantes makes good use of the agglutinated verb and pronoun, of the syncopations within the general prose rhythm. Above all, he makes use of the loamy expressions of the people, transfiguring them, however, into a tonal design not remotely naturalistic and more akin to the prose of the religious writers than of the pícaro novelists who also helped themselves to the vernacular of the soil.

In the great novel of Rojas there is a like marriage of pungent and ironical stuffs in an exalted orchestration. The difference is one of quality and quantity. Cervantes’ instruments are more varied; his themes and the materials that build them are more numerous, even if no one is richer than the central form of La Celestina. Indeed, the earlier work is the intenser; its colors are more hot. There is in Cervantes a strain of the north which the Jew Rojas lacked; and which made his æsthetic action longer and slower. The art of the Semite is more lyrical, less architectonic. La Celestina is a bomb-like organ; a piston-strong machine driving hard and singly. It is the tale, moreover, of a city where life is vertical and packed. Its form is true to its theme. But Don Quixote is the story of a journey—of three journeys rather—over the plains and mountains of La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia. Its basal movement is panoramic, horizontal. Its loftier dimensions are attained by the associative power of its hero who, riding the roads of Spain, touches incessantly the spiritual realms of a people, of an age, of a soul. The formal values of La Celestina are more manifest. Very consciously, an intellectual, nervously coördinated man bound together the counterpoint of his design, so that each element partakes immediately of the whole. This is not the case in Don Quixote. The materials of the book—persons of the road, interpolated stories, situations—stand end to end, flat for the most part and quite episodic. The knight enters them organically. He transfigures them as a new element in a chemical solution. He enacts a continuous catalysis upon the parts of Spain which he encounters. The result of this is two-fold. There is created for the entire book a surface of action and a line of action. These hold the attention of the reader: these, indeed, caused the book’s popularity when it first appeared. The surface of action in the large is the Spain to which the Spanish people through the picaresque novel had been accustomed for over fifty years. The line of action is the pilgrimage of Quixote and Sancho.

But each of these two actions is complex. In consequence, their organic synthesis is often subtle and hidden. This synthesis gives to the work its unity: and one can enjoy Don Quixote without awareness of it. Indeed, the synthesis may take place in the reader’s mind, long after he has absorbed its elements and put the book aside.

Consciousness of the organic greatness of La Celestina must come at once; since that greatness is the result of a design preconceived and implicit in the book’s several scenes. Consciousness of the greatness of Don Quixote came late even to its author and not to Spain until a whole century had passed. For its parts have an immediate life of their own; only after they have become lost and merged in one another does the book’s unity, as a synthesis of all these parts, dawn on the reader.

The knight himself is not so much an organ in this ultimate synthesis as a dimension. The synthesis is not articulate in him alone, any more than in the episodes. But it is articulate in the book’s language. And the rare individual who understood the æsthetic nature of prose might tell from the first page that Don Quixote was a stupendously formal work of art.

This prose is a becoming prose. It is heavy and pregnant. It is the antithesis of the immediate prose of Santa Teresa or of the lapidic absoluteness of the verse of Luis de Góngora. It is attuned at every moment to the whole of the book. It lacks swiftness and often sharpness. It is frequently clumsy in the projecting of little scenes. The book abounds in episodes that Quevedo would have fleshed more brightly or the author of Lazarillo pointed to more effect.

Cervantes is forever after deeper game. If, for instance, he describes the cozy dinner at which Quixote and Sancho shared the meat and acorns of six goatherds, the prose is not fundamentally focused upon the genre: but upon the tragic implications of Don Quixote’s presence and upon the irony of the attitude of the goatherds.