34
PARTISAN REVIEW
pIe, his imagination as active, and his humor as subtle as those of
Shakespeare ." Oh no-even if we limit Shakespeare to his come–
dies, Cervantes lags behind in all those things.
Don Quixote
but
squires
King
Lear-and
squires him well. The only matter in which
Cervantes and Shakespeare are equals is the matter of influence, of
spiritual irrigation-I have in view the long shadow cast upon recep–
tive posterity of a created image which may continue to live indepen–
dently from the book itself. Shakespeare's plays, however, will con–
tinue to live, apart from the shadow they project.
It
has been noted that both writers died on St . George ' s Day,
1616, "after having joined to slay the dragon of false appearances"
as Bell puts it whimsically but incorrectly: far from slaying the drag–
on, Cervantes and Shakespeare each in his own way paraded the
lovely beast, leading it on a leash to have its iridescent scales and
melancholy eye enjoyed through the eternity of letters. (Incidentally,
although the twenty-third of April is taken to be the date of both
men's death-and is my birthday-Cervantes and Shakespeare died
by different calendars; there is a ten-day gap between the two dates.)
Around
Don Quixote
we hear a plangent clash of opinions–
sometimes with the ring of Sancho's sturdy but pedestrian mind and
sometimes reminding us of Don Quixote's fury in attacking wind–
mills. Catholics and Protestants, lean mystics and fat statesmen,
well-meaning but verbose and stone-dead critics of the Sainte-Beuve,
Turgenev, or Brandes type, and quadrillions of quarrelsome scholars
have expressed their conflicting views about the book and the man
who made it. There are those like Aubrey Bell, who thinks that no
great masterpiece can be composed without the help of a universal
church; he praises "the broad-minded tolerant spirit of the ecclesias–
tical censors in Spain" and maintains that Cervantes and his hero
were good Catholics in the bosom of the good Counter Reformation.
There are others-crusty Protestants-who on the contrary insinu–
ate that Cervantes may have been in touch with the Reformers. Bell
also holds that the lesson of the book is Don Quixote's presump–
tion-the folly of aiming at the general good, a field of endeavor that
belongs to the Church alone. The same school maintains that
Cervantes bothered as little about the Inquisition as did the play–
wright Lope de Vega or the painter Velazquez so that whatever fun is
poked at the priests in the book is good-natured, family fun, strictly
an internal affair, cloister quips, jollities in the rose garden. But
other critics harshly adopt a directly opposite point of view and try to
