Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

But Cervantes never states these deeper implications. His prose creates them. And creates them, by the immanent and abstract nature of its music. This immanence runs throughout the work, and thereby Cervantes is permanently saved the unæsthetic makeshift of statement. His direct attention goes unhindered to the presentment of the action. The action’s significance, one might say its soul, is implicit as is the significance of life implicit and unasserted in material substance and in specific action.

But as in all great art, this deep effect is won at sacrifice of a lesser. Analogously, El Greco maintains the larger anatomy of his vision throughout the details of his paintings, although he loses thereby the grace and accuracy of the anatomy of his subjects.

There are still cavilers at El Greco’s drawing; and there have always been depreciators of Cervantes’ prose. Lope de Vega whose prosody was an immediate lyric flow of two dimensions, was perhaps sincere in his denigration of Cervantes. And even today Miguel de Unamuno, for all his adoration of Don Quixote, decries the language of Cervantes, for a similar reason: Unamuno’s lyric mood can not span the parabolas in which the figure of Don Quixote is limned.

These parabolas are the lines of the prose: and they are not, like simpler curves, to be plotted in the segment of any specific action in the book. But they are to be felt in every page. That is why the first chapter of Don Quixote announces the inscrutable tragi-comedy, although Cervantes when he wrote it had no knowledge of his undertaking. The music of his prose is the mother of his book. It is the beginning of the book’s significance, and it is the conclusion. Nor can it be translated.

. . . . . .

A work of art in whose making significant forces have not played is inconceivable. The veriest trash, the most incompetent effort must in some wise have issued from a man’s life, from a people’s will, from an epoch’s spirit. What lies between such work and work significant in itself is not difference of material, but form. The poor work is one in which the elements of life are inchoate and, failing to achieve a unity of form, cannot be said to achieve life itself. The real work of art is that in which these elements achieve a body: is that of which these elements are the body. But the bodies of men and age whence its elements of life have sprung will rot away. Other men and other ages will succeed; and these in their will to know essential union with all men and all ages preserve the true work of art. For in it only, do those moldered lives of other men and ages touch them. The real work of art, builded of the substances of time, therefore alone does not exist in time. And a consideration of the work of art, whose basis is not equally beyond time—is not metaphysical or religious—is inadequate to art’s function in the world of time.

Before all else, Don Quixote is in form the life of Cervantes.

Toward the end of his last adventure, on the way to Barcelona, Don Quixote with Sancho attempts to hold the road against a herd of bulls. But they are overturned, trampled, bemudded. They find a limpid spring garlanded with trees and wash the blood and mire from their sore bodies. Sancho brings food from the saddlebags. But his master is too disconsolate to eat. Sancho waits patiently: seeing no end to Don Quixote’s sorrow nor to his own hunger, he falls to.

“Eat, friend Sancho,” says Don Quixote. “Sustain the life which means more to you than to me, and leave me to die in the embrace of my thoughts and in the power of my disgraces. I, Sancho, was born to live dying; you, to die eating. And that you may see how I speak truth in this, behold me printed in history, celebrated in arms, commended in all my acts, respected in principles, desired by damsels; from end to end, whilst I awaited the palms, triumphs and crowns merited by my valorous deeds, you have seen me as this morning laid low, outraged and ground down, under the hoofs of obscene and filthy brutes....”

The roars and blows that greet the Sorrowful Knight might, in the jargon of our day, be termed Cervantes’ masochistic satisfaction. Cervantes ridicules himself for the dreaming fool he has been. But the strain is too deep. This figure that he sets going to make mock of is after all his soul. He grows away from his embittered pose. He can still laugh at his creature; still gather him at the end back into the logic of his story. But in Part Two, he is seen defending him against the laughter of others. He is seen regarding his knight, for all his folly, as purer than the sensible world: and at the last, more real.