The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Of these reasons Cervantes himself suggests the simplest. He remarks, in the second chapter of Part 2, "No sooner do [people] see any lean hack than they cry out: There goes Rosinante/" In other words, his book is crowded with immedi- ately recognizable human types, and in this case a nonhuman type. The whole world understands at once what we mean when we call someone quixotic or say that he tilts at windmills. There are really only a few literary characters we think of as permanently alive. Hamlet [39] is one, Don Quixote surely another.

The second reason is no less simple. Don Quixote, once you allow for its leisurely tempo, is one of the best adventure sto­ries ever written, perhaps the best after the Odyssey. That is what makes it a classic for the young. When you reread it years later you perceive that it is also a great adventure story of the mind, for some of its most exciting events occur during the conversations between the knight and his loquacious squire, two of the best talkers who ever used their vocal cords cre- atively.

The third reason sounds simple but is not so.

Don Quixote is a supremely humorous novel. A familiar anecdote tells us that when King Philip III of Spain noticed a man reading beside the road and laughing so much that the tears were rolling down his cheeks, he said, "That man is either crazy or he is reading Don Quixote " Some readers laugh aloud, others grin, some smile externally, others internally. And some read it with a curious emotion mingling delight and sorrow. Cervantes's humor is hard to define because it is not a "character trait" in him; it is the man himself, hence a mystery. The best clue to his humor is Walter Starkie^ remark. He calls Cervantes a humorist, "which meant that he could see more than one thing at a time.^,>

This brings us to the deepest of ali the reasons for Don Quixote^ys greatness—the fact that, though it is not obscure, its meanings seem to change with each generation, indeed with each reader, and none of these meanings is trivial.

We ali know that Cervantes started out to write a satire on chivalric romances. Or so he seems to say. Don Quixote him­self, the lean, grizzled Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, began his life as a figure of fun. So did his earthy, stocky, proverb-crammed squire, Sancho Panza. Yet, by the end of the book, both have become something else, as well as more like each other, as the critic Salvador de Madariaga remarks. Together they seem to sum up, roughly, the warring elements in ali of us: our defiance of society and our acceptance of it; our love of the heroic and our suspicion of it; our passion for

creating worlds of the imagination and our rueful compromise with the status quo.

And so we come to the Don Quixote "problem," as fascinat- ing as the Hamlet "problem." Is this book a burlesque of chivalry? Or is it the most persuasive of pleas for the chivalric attitude, apart from any specific time or institution? Is it a satire on dreamers? Or is it a defense of dreaming? Is it a sym­bol of the tragic soul and history of Spain? If so, why does it speak so clearly to men of ali nations and races? Is it the authors spiritual autobiography? A study of insanity? Or of a higher sanity? Or is it, couched in terms of picaresque inci- dent, a dramatized treatise on illusion and reality, akin to the plays of Pirandello? Finally—just to indicate how complex interpretation may become—is Don Quixote, as Mark Van Doren thinks, a kind of actor, who chooses his role because by so doing he can absorb life and reflect on it in a way denied to the single, unvarying personality?

I leave you to the golden book that Macaulay thought "the best novel in the world, beyond comparison."

C.F.

PART THREE

— i

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

1564-1616 Complete Works

Enjoying Shakespeare is a little like conquering Everest: much

depends on the approach. Let's clear away a few common mis-

conceptions.

He was a man, not a demigod. He was not "myriad-minded,^,> even though Coleridge [65] said he was. He does not "out-top knowledge," even though Matthew Arnold said he does. He was not infallible—merely a genius, one of many the human race has produced. He was also a practicing theater craftsman, a busy actor, and a shrewd, increasingly prosperous businessman. A genius may live a quite conventional life, and Shakespeare (unless you are terribly shocked at his leaving his young wife and children for some years) seems to have done so.

He is our greatest English poet and dramatist. But he is not always great. He often wrote too quickly, with his eye not on pos- terity but on a deadline. Some of his comic characters have lost ali power to amuse, and it is best to admit it. His puns and wordplay are frequently tedious. He can be obscure rather than profound.