“Yes, marry have I,” answered Sancho.
“But the same,” pursued Don Quixote, “happens in the comedy and commerce of this world, wherein some play the emperors, others the pontiffs; in short all the parts that can be introduced into a drama; but on reaching the end, which is when life is done, Death strips all of the robes which distinguished them, and they remain equal in the grave.”
“A brave comparison!” cried Sancho, “though not so new but that I have heard it many and divers times, like that of the game of chess,—how, so long as the game lasts, each piece has its particular office, and the game being finished, they are all mixed, shuffled, and jumbled, and put away into a bag, which is much like putting away life in the grave.”
“Every day, Sancho,” quoth Don Quixote, “thou becomest less simple and more wise.”
The passages in “Macbeth,” “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,” and “The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures,” find their counterparts in the following dialogue, in which Sancho says to his master:
“I only know that while I sleep I have no fear, nor hope, nor trouble, nor glory; and good luck to him who invented sleep, a cloak which covers all a man’s thoughts, the meat which takes away hunger, the water which quenches thirst, the fire which warms the cold, the cold which tempers the heat; to end up, the general coin with which all things are bought, the balance and weight which levels the shepherd with the king and the fool with the wise man. There is only one thing, as I have heard say, is bad about sleep, and it is that it looks like death, for between the sleeping and the dead there is very little difference.”
The great fault of “Don Quixote” is its excessive prolixity. Provided the best parts might be selected, it would be a better novel if it filled only half the space. The same moralizing by the knight and his squire is too often repeated; the same proverbs come forth again and again. This is the reason why the work is read far less at the present time than it used to be. In these busy days there is not much place for the four volume novel.
Then, too, the long episodes, the story of Cardenio, the tale of the captive and of Impertinent Curiosity, would be better told as separate narratives rather than as parts of a book with which they have no proper connection. The introduction of such stories was one of the tricks of the time, but it is an artistic blemish. On the other hand, Cervantes’s use of the Moorish historian, Ben Engeli, is a literary device admirably employed, and the point at which he first introduces Ben Engeli’s narrative is a delicious satire upon a literary trick common to novelists even of the present time. For it will be remembered that the terrible conflict between Don Quixote and the Biscayan was left suspended, as it were, in mid-air, each of the mighty combatants having raised his sword and being prepared to dash at the other, at which point the narrative was interrupted, the author being unable to learn anything of the outcome of the fray until he discovered in the Alcazar of Toledo the manuscript of the Arabian historiographer.
“Don Quixote” has been the model upon which many of the best works of fiction have been based. One can see distinct traces of Cervantes’s methods in “Pickwick Papers.” There are undoubtedly many points of difference between Mr. Pickwick and Don Quixote, yet the points of resemblance are very clear; and Sam Weller corresponds more nearly to Sancho than any character in modern fiction. The lugubrious episodes in the “Pickwick Papers” are not wholly unlike those in “Don Quixote,” and the solemnity of these episodes furnishes the same contrast to the merry absurdities of the narrative itself.
Ichabod Crane is in some respects a Yankee “Knight of the Sorrowful Figure,” though devoid of the madness and of the high spiritual aims of his Castilian prototype.