The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume I Part 20

Remark the necessity under which we are of being sympathized with, fly as high into abstraction as we may, and how constantly the imagination is recalled to the ground of our common humanity! And note a little further on, the knight's easy vaunting of his balsam, and his quietly deferring the making and application of it.

(C. 3.) The speech before the goatherds:

"Happy times and happy ages," &c. [5]

Note the rhythm of this, and the admirable beauty and wisdom of the thoughts in themselves, but the total want of judgment in Don Quixote's addressing them to such an audience.

(B. III. c. 3.) Don Quixote's balsam, and the vomiting and consequent relief; an excellent hit at 'panacea nostrums', which cure the patient by his being himself cured of the medicine by revolting nature.

(C. 4.) "Peace! and have patience; the day will come," &c.

The perpetual promises of the imagination!

(Ib.) "Your Wors.h.i.+p," said Sancho, "would make a better preacher than knight errant!"

Exactly so. This is the true moral.

(C. 6.) The uncommon beauty of the description in the commencement of this chapter. In truth, the whole of it seems to put all nature in its heights and its humiliations, before us.

(Ib.) Sancho's story of the goats:

"Make account, he carried them all over," said Don Quixote, "and do not be going and coming in this manner; for at this rate, you will not have done carrying them over in a twelvemonth." "How many are pa.s.sed already?" said Sancho, &c.

Observe the happy contrast between the all-generalizing mind of the mad knight, and Sancho's all-particularizing memory. How admirable a symbol of the dependence of all 'copula' on the higher powers of the mind, with the single exception of the succession in time and the accidental relations of s.p.a.ce. Men of mere common sense have no theory or means of making one fact more important or prominent than the rest; if they lose one link, all is lost. Compare Mrs. Quickly and the Tapster. [6] And note also Sancho's good heart, when his master is about to leave him.

Don Quixote's conduct upon discovering the fulling-hammers, proves he was meant to be in his senses. Nothing can be better conceived than his fit of pa.s.sion at Sancho's laughing, and his sophism of self-justification by the courage he had shown.

Sancho is by this time cured, through experience, as far as his own errors are concerned; yet still is he lured on by the unconquerable awe of his master's superiority, even when he is cheating him.

(C. 8.) The adventure of the Galley-slaves. I think this is the only pa.s.sage of moment in which Cervantes slips the mask of his hero, and speaks for himself.

(C. 9.) Don Quixote desired to have it, and bade him take the money, and keep it for himself. Sancho kissed his hands for the favour, &c.

Observe Sancho's eagerness to avail himself of the permission of his master, who, in the war sports of knight-errantry, had, without any selfish dishonesty, overlooked the 'meum' and 'tuum.' Sancho's selfishness is modified by his involuntary goodness of heart, and Don Quixote's flighty goodness is debased by the involuntary or unconscious selfishness of his vanity and self-applause.

(C. 10.) Cardenio is the madman of pa.s.sion, who meets and easily overthrows for the moment the madman of imagination. And note the contagion of madness of any kind, upon Don Quixote's interruption of Cardenio's story.

(C. 11.) Perhaps the best specimen of Sancho's proverbializing is this:

"And I (Don Q.) say again, they lie, and will lie two hundred times more, all who say, or think her so." "I neither say, nor think so,"

answered Sancho: "let those who say it, eat the lie, and swallow it with their bread: whether they were guilty or no, they have given an account to G.o.d before now: I come from my vineyard, I know nothing; I am no friend to inquiring into other men's lives; 'for' he that buys and lies shall find the lie left in his purse behind; 'besides,' naked was I born, and naked I remain; I neither win nor lose; if they were guilty, what is that to me? Many think to find bacon, where there is not so much as a pin to hang it on: 'but' who can hedge in the cuckoo?

'Especially,' do they spare G.o.d himself?"

(Ib.) "And it is no great matter, if it be in another hand; for by what I remember, Dulcinea can neither write nor read," &c.

The wonderful twilight of the mind! and mark Cervantes's courage in daring to present it, and trust to a distant posterity for an appreciation of its truth to nature.

(P. II. B. III. c. 9.) Sancho's account of what he had seen on Clavileno is a counterpart in his style to Don Quixote's adventures in the cave of Montesinos. This last is the only impeachment of the knight's moral character; Cervantes just gives one instance of the veracity failing before the strong cravings of the imagination for something real and external; the picture would not have been complete without this; and yet it is so well managed, that the reader has no unpleasant sense of Don Quixote having told a lie. It is evident that he hardly knows whether it was a dream or not; and goes to the enchanter to inquire the real nature of the adventure.

[Footnote 1: 'Bien como quien se engendr en una carcel, donde toda incomodidad tiene su a.s.siento, y todo triste ruido hace su habitacion.' Like one you may suppose born in a prison, where every inconvenience keeps its residence, and every dismal sound its habitation. Pref. Jarvis's Tr. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: 'No estaba muy bien con'. Ed.]

[Footnote 3: Pero con todo. Ed.]

[Footnote 4: 'Donde no, conmigo sois en batalla, gente descomunal!'

Ed.]

[Footnote 5: 'Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, &c.' Ed.]

[Footnote 6: See the 'Friend', vol. iii. p. 138. Ed.]

SUMMARY ON CERVANTES.

A Castilian of refined manners; a gentleman, true to religion, and true to honour.

A scholar and a soldier, and fought under the banners of Don John of Austria, at Lepanto, lost his arm and was captured.

Endured slavery not only with fort.i.tude, but with mirth; and by the superiority of nature, mastered and overawed his barbarian owner.

Finally ransomed, he resumed his native destiny, the awful task of achieving fame; and for that reason died poor and a prisoner, while n.o.bles and kings over their goblets of gold gave relish to their pleasures by the charms of his divine genius. He was the inventor of novels for the Spaniards, and in his Persilis and Sigismunda, the English may find the germ of their Robinson Crusoe.

The world was a drama to him. His own thoughts, in spite of poverty and sickness, perpetuated for him the feelings of youth. He painted only what he knew and had looked into, but he knew and had looked into much indeed; and his imagination was ever at hand to adapt and modify the world of his experience. Of delicious love he fabled, yet with stainless virtue.

LECTURE IX.

ON THE DISTINCTIONS OF THE WITTY, THE DROLL, THE ODD, AND THE HUMOUROUS;

THE NATURE AND CONSt.i.tUENTS OF HUMOUR;--RABELAIS--SWIFT--STERNE.