Part One cannot hold him from his organic growth. With Part Two, written

ten years later, the blows and buffets are less frequent. Cervantes has had time to catch up with and humbly to accept his son.

In the matter of the selecting of a Lady (that needed spur of every true knight-errant) it is clear that Don Quixote knows the facts about Aldonza Lorenzo, wench daughter of Lorenzo Cochuelo of El Toboso. Quite consciously, he turns her into the divine Dulcinea whom henceforth he will worship. Her he makes his “truth”; there is no evidence that the _fact_ of the girl is ever hidden from him. He needs a helmet, indeed he needs Mambrino’s magic helmet. A barber comes, riding an ass and on his head (for it is raining) a copper bleeding-dish. This shall be the golden helmet of Mambrino; and as such Don Quixote takes it. But in the parley before and after with Sancho Panza, it is plain that the knight accepts Sancho’s _fact_ about the dish: he merely turns the fact, for his own purpose, into “truth.”

In the Sierra Morena, Don Quixote resolves to follow a tradition. He and Sancho have reached the mountains that bar the smooth plains of La Mancha from the fluid meads of Andalusia southward: mountains of rock flung to sky, titanic gestures of rock, pourings of cosmic might into the waste of rock. The Sierra, sudden beneath La Mancha, suggests delirious excess. So here, Don Quixote will have his knightly spell of madness, in anguish of his absent lady love. How does he set about it? He debates the merits of two schools of madness. There was the furious way of Roland after his Angelica had slept with the Moor Medoro. And there was the quiet melancholy way of Amadis. Don Quixote is fifty: he elects the quieter madness. He takes Sancho to witness of his straits, ere he sends him off to beseech mercy of Dulcinea. Nor is he fooled by Sancho’s meeting with the lady. The fact that Sancho has left behind him the very letter which he describes as giving to Dulcinea does not disturb Don Quixote. He is not dwelling with facts, but with truths of his own conscious making. And he tells his squire, speaking in elegiac temper of himself: “That if he did not achieve great matters, he died to achieve them; and if I am indeed not disowned and disdained by Dulcinea del Toboso, it sufficeth me ... to be absent from her.” Later he meets the swine girl whom he has transfigured into princess. And since he speaks of the magic making her appear as the facts (and Sancho) would have it--a coarse and silly female with a breath of garlic--it is plain that the facts are in his mind. He is not fooled. Nor is he lying when he speaks of magic. Magic is the deep inner change of attitude. This is the secret of the fakirs of the East. This is _true_ magic. Don Quixote’s attitude changes the fact of the swine girl into his truth of a princess.

The fooled is Sancho. For Sancho does not understand that fact and truth may be foes. He takes one for the other. He believes that Dulcinea’s enchantment, the Cave of Montesino, the Island which he is sent to govern, the Empress whom his master is to wed are facts. As the tale grows, poor Sancho is more and more enmired in confusion. He is in danger of madness, losing his distinction between the world of shapes and this world of ideas in which Don Quixote rides.

The old knight’s progress is willful. There is, for instance, the wondrous ride on Clavileño, the wooden horse in the garden of the Duke, upon which the pair are wafted through heaven and hell. Sancho claims to have stolen a glimpse and to have seen them soaring through the firmaments of fire. And Don Quixote answers:

“If you desire me to believe you in what you have just seen in the sky, I desire that you should believe me in what I saw within the Cave of Montesino. No need for me to say more....”

He is proposing to Sancho what is neither more nor less than a deal; he will accept his squire’s lies, if Sancho accepts his own distinction between a glorious truth and a drab world of facts. But Sancho’s mind has no such athleticism. He is not Ramón Lull! He has never heard of León Hebreo. He is forever mixing two insoluble realms.

At last Don Quixote meets his fate. In Barcelona, having been acclaimed by crowds with mingled laughter and devotion which they can never understand, he is challenged to combat by the Knight of the White Moon. He is worsted, of course: and this is his end. For the _caballero de la luna blanca_ is none other than the bachelor Sansón Carrasco. The goodly Don Antonio cannot understand this medieval nonsense in his busy modern seaport. Carrasco explains:

“My lord, know that I, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, am of the same place as Don Quixote de la Mancha, whose simplicity and madness have moved to tears all of us who know him: and among these none has wept more than I: and believing that there lay his health and peace, in that he should reside in his own land and house, I determined to return him thither; and so three months since I went upon the road as a knight-errant, calling myself _el caballero de los espejos_, meaning to fight him, vanquish him without hurt, and having put as the condition of our encounter that the vanquished remain in the discretion of the victor: and what I thought to demand of him (for I judged him beforehand already vanquished) was that he should return to his home, and sally not forth from it for a whole year; in which time he might be cured; but fate ordered otherwise, for I was the defeated. I was hurled from my horse, and hence my purpose could not take effect; he went his way, and I returned, beaten, bruised, mashed by my fall which to be sure was dangerous enough; but for this I did not give up my meaning which was to seek him out once more and defeat him, as you have seen me do this day. And since he is so punctilious in all that pertains to the knight-errant, without doubt soever he will obey the order I have given him, in honor of his word. This, my lord, is what has passed, without my need to say another thing; I beseech you, do not discover me nor say to Don Quixote who I am, in order that these my good intentions may have effect, and that there may return to reason a man so excellent in reason, when he is left alone by the unreasons of chivalry....”

Carrasco reveals that his deep instinct against Don Quixote is buttressed by a shallow understanding. When the old knight saw the familiar face of his friend within the vizor of the defeated _caballero de los espejos_, he was not troubled: he knew that magic had turned the truth of the defeated warrior into the face of his neighbor, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco. Had he now been told that the Knight of the White Moon appeared to others as this same bachelor, he would have found a similar solution--and obeyed the knight, though his heart broke.

So now, stripped of his harness, Don Quixote makes his ashen way homeward from Barcelona. He does not yet know that he is vanquished for good. His word binds him for a year: thereafter, can he not sally forth again? Meantime, he need not stay idle in a gross world of facts. “If it seem well to thee,” he tells his squire, “I should like that we turn pastors even for the time I am caught up.” He makes his plans. “I shall buy a few sheep and all other things needed for the pastoral life.” His friends will share this new transfiguration which has the advantage of being more sociable than the life of the knight-errant. He will become the pastor _Quixotiz_; Sancho will become _Pancino_. Sancho’s wife Teresa will be _Teresona_. The bachelor Carrasco will be known as _Sansonino_ or _Carrascón_: being a learned man, he shall take his choice. The priest (_el cura_) he might call, not knowing his true name, _el pastor Curiambro_.

These persons, being facts, must change their names ere they can enter his truthful pastoral Eden. Dulcinea remains Dulcinea: for already _she_ is of the world of his truth. With this last lucid statement of his mind, the old man comes upon his home where soon he is to die. No more may he be a knight, dispensing Justice in a real world inhabited by such true concepts as ogres, virgins, sorcerers. Even the little interlude of pastor is denied him. He languishes; and with his strength, his creative will expires.

The child returneth to the mother. Don Alonso Quijano el Bueno lies upon a death-bed and renounces Don Quixote. Again Cervantes’ child shrinks to the arms of his parent. He abjures the careers of all knights-errant:

“Ya soy enemigo de Amadís de Gaula y de toda la infinita caterva de su linaje; ya me son odiosas todas las historias profanas de la andante caballería; ya conozco mi necedad y el peligro en que me pusieron harlas leído; ya por misericordia de Díos, escarmentando en cabeza propia, las abomino....”

* * * * *

Don Quixote, as he emerges unscathed from the mind of his author, is a man possessed: not a madman. He is a man possessed as were the Hebrew prophets, or Jesus, or Vardhamana, or Boehme or Plotinus, or any poet.... The difference is subtle but is clear beyond the logical distinctions of man’s reason. No atheist would call Amos mad, but a man possessed. To Jesus saying: “When ye have lifted up the Son of God, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as my Father hath taught me” no Jew would ascribe madness, but possession. Quixote is possessed of an Ideal. And since this ideal was mothered of the world struggling toward light, and since now it mothers him entire, becoming his truth and his world, Don Quixote takes his place among the broken and triumphant prophets. Even the alienist durst not call him mad, for in the drama which he enacts he knows his part: and the more fully senses what he calls the truth, knowing its bodily difference from the facts about him.

Reality for the medieval soul was neo-platonic. The conceptual was real: all else was merely fact. The bitter apartness of Jew and Arab from medieval Europe was due to the failure of the Semite, despite Philo and Al Gazali, to assimilate neo-platonism deeply. Plotinus, Porphyry, Augustine, Iamblicus created the psychology of a thousand years of Europe. The real is not this world. We are snared and mired in a viscous web of seeming. All congeries of sense is this. And knowledge tends, not to a translating of this factual film into the real but to the piercing it, the abandoning it altogether. This attitude is far from the naturalistic mysticism of the Hebrew, from the intellectual mysticism of Plato; from the profound nihilism of the Hindu who recognized the unity of the ideal and the factual, interpreting one always in terms of the other. Medievalism is a child--and a childish offshoot--of all these. It declares: There is a real world, and it is not this one. Man can reach the real world, by various means. He must crucify the fact, he must worship the saints, he must lose his body in order to save his soul.

Don Quixote moves through a world neo-platonically real. He is as aware as Sancho of sheep, windmills, inns, country wenches. He chooses to disregard these lies of fact. He erects a systematic symbol whereby his senses vault the phenomena about him, and deliver him the truth. Thereby, the windmill serves him as a giant; the sheep as enchanted armies; the empty cave of Montesino as the scene of Glory, and Maritornes the whore as the virgin lady languishing in love. He has elected to do Justice upon earth. These giants, armies and disasters serve him as means to that end.

By a similar process, the medieval mind made all history into parable and symbol. The medieval mind is subjectivism carried to the intense conclusion made possible by the barbarous Germanic will. Philo’s allegories of the Scripture, the Book of Zohar, the way of Egypt and India with all written words, treating them as intricate and recondite symbols, obsessed the mind of medieval Europe. No act is simple, no name is simply a name. The world becomes a dramatic Mystery, with every scene bearing upon the central Plot: the soul’s salvation. For a thousand years, literature and art, to be serious, had to be allegory.

The mood of medieval symbolism, while it was fathered by Plato and the Jews, is neither Greek nor Jewish. With these two adult peoples, symbolism held its place: it remained a relative and ancillary life within the mastering testimony of the world. Already in Plotinus and Saint Augustine, the balance is lost. When we are deep in the Middle Ages, we are deep in an allegoric jungle: the paths of fact are gone; there comes no daylight of reason in this tangle of monster foliage and whelming branches.

Don Quixote’s world is medievally real. It is a hypertrophy of such births as Chivalry, Romance and Sainthood. In its character of wholeness, of deliberate disregard for fact, it springs from the fountainhead of neo-platonic thought.

But if this transfiguring of the world to his own will is a medieval act, Don Quixote’s impulse is not medieval, is not even Christian. The medieval will, myriad in its flowerings, was childishly simple in its seed: the soul’s salvation. Nothing else counted: or rather, everything had its sole significance, indeed its reality, as it bore on this monomaniac problem of each soul: to be saved. That a man’s soul might be saved, all acts since Adam had been apportioned. For this, the Hebrews lived, the Prophets preached, Christ died: for this, Peter builded his Church and the Jews remained outside in perpetual testimony of damnation. For this, men went on Crusades, conquered heathens, gave birth to children in holy wedlock. For this there was love and justice: for this there was life and death. But Don Quixote is no more centrally concerned with his soul’s salvation than if he had been a Jew. He believes in his soul; he hopes it shall be saved. But his acts are motived by a will far less personal: the enacting of Justice.

Don Quixote looks upon himself as the instrument of Justice. He is the embodied and moving will of Justice. The neo-platonic Christian lived justly, that he might pierce better the Phenomenal Lie and win salvation. The Arab warrior spread justice with his sword because the Prophet was just, and he must serve the Prophet to be saved. The knight of the Round Table of King Arthur performed deeds of justice--rescuing the virgin, slaying the bad giant--because it was good sport and because it was a way to his salvation. But Don Quixote wills Justice upon earth, because he hungers after Justice, because there is naught else true save Justice. If, by the sheer testimony of his words and deeds, we analyze this passion of Don Quixote, we learn that for him instinctively Justice meant Unity. The world must become One: and the means thereto is Justice.

The symbols with which he works are medieval Christian; his mental mechanism is neo-platonic: his knightly attitude is more Moorish than Teutonic (as contrasted with the Germanic tenor of the freebooting Cid). But this heart of his will is Hebrew. The parabolic line of its enactment in his life links Don Quixote with the Prophets.

The words God and Christ are surprisingly seldom on the old knight’s lips. He cites Roland and Amadis more often than the Saints. They, indeed, are his saints. But his God is Justice. And so impersonal, so monotheistic is He, that He wants more than a body; almost He lacks a name. Or rather His body is the world: His name is Justice.

The eidolon-making Greeks said in wonder of the Jews: “They are a people who see God everywhere and localize him nowhere.” So Don Quixote created for himself a world that should consist solely of opportunities for Justice. To this end he rejects, selects and builds in the world which meets his eyes. His mind works like the instinct of an artist. But he is a peculiar sort of artist. His ethical purpose, the intensity with which he imbues every action with his vision and turns the social fact into a spiritual Word, recalls the Prophets. Amos, too, looked out on a world made wholly the matrix for the vision of God: and moved in Israel as a flame within the burning wood. To Hosea, even the wife of his bed was a symbol of the intention of the Lord. Every detail of the Prophet’s life--even the silence and the dark, even the failure and the sin--is caught in the unity of his vision and becomes a Word to express it. Thus Don Quixote sets forth to perform Justice. He must perform it constantly. The world must become material--a continuum of material--for his performance. But like every artist and like every prophet Don Quixote must translate his vision into the accepted formulæ of his mind. In his case, these formulæ are the shoddy regalia of decadent knighthood. Justice is to be performed by rescuing virgins, unseating ogres, slaying giants, despiting necromancers. Don Quixote rides through Spain. Along these highways graze sheep, trudge merchants: there are inns but no castles. Don Quixote does not see the enactment of Justice in such terms as these. So he transforms them.

His Justice is an attempt at unity. But it is very simple. The real world of Don Quixote is no intricate entexture of hierarchic values. It is not like the mazed affluence of life which the Hindu fused into One. It has none of the deep involument of souls and states fused by Hebrew and Hellene into God. It is a simple pyramid. At the base are knights and villains, virgins and married ladies, angels, enchanters, demons, ogres. And at the pyramid’s peak is the ideal of all this homogeneous matter: freedom and liberty. This ideal is uncorrupted by any political or sectarian dogma. It is never more clear than in the adventure with the convicts. With clinking chains, this squad of scoundrels is led south by the soldiers of the King, to meet the galley in which they must serve their terms. Here are men in chains: Don Quixote’s ideal of Justice demands that chains be stricken off. The soldiers protest that these chains are virtuous and lawful: it avails not. The freed rascals repay their liberator with a shower of stones and make off with Sancho’s ass: this avails nothing. Don Quixote will not be swerved from his immaculate conception of Justice.

In such episodes as this, we touch the core of the miracle of Don Quixote. His nature is ridiculously funny, and is Christlike. The freeing of legally judged robbers, the letting of lions out of cages, is farce: and yet illumes a justice above laws whose vision is Christlike and whose enactment brings upon the knight a Christlike fate. In laughing at Don Quixote, we crucify him. Mockery and buffets create the knight of the Sorrowful Figure: our own roars of glee at his well-earned mishaps hail the ridiculous Christ.

And here we come back into the medieval. The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels is a dominant unbroken man. The Passion on the Cross is a mystic interlude--probably an interpolation--which rends the Temple far more than it does Jesus. His cry, about the ninth hour; “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” is a shredding weakness against the serenity and might of the historic Man. Jesus in his true character is almost wholly Hebrew Prophet. With the Lord in his mouth, he is imperious, even overbearing. The Hebrew spirit is as adverse from ill-health--from martyrdom as an end-in-itself--as the Greek. But with the infantilization of the West, with the upshowing of the childish spirit within the iron carapace of Rome, Jesus becomes pitiful. Medieval art makes him lean and ugly; asceticism borrowed from the Hindus and Egyptians mangles his body. Within the splendor of the Gothic church there comes to live a shrunken Christ. And as medievalism stumbled southward, the process gathered. The baroque churches of Seville are fantasmagoria of tropic wealth, writhed like a forest about the Sensitive Plant: Christ, milkpale, blood-spotted.

So at the end, Don Quixote. He is laughter-spotted, blood-spotted. Reason bespatters him and makes him comic. But since in the minds of men this reason is profane, and his mad impulse holy, he is a Christ--a medieval, an unjewish Christ.

* * * * *

His deeds get him into trouble. Part One abounds in buffets that unhorse him, knock out his teeth, bathe him in blood and muddy him all over.