The Pritchett Century (94 page)

It has been said that Meredith is not a story-teller—but a story need not depend very much on plot; it can and does in Meredith depend on pattern and the disclosure of character through events. The weakness is that the fantastic father engrosses the great part of the interesting incident; when he is off-stage our interest flags. Meredith’s narrative is not a straight line; it is a meandering back and forth in time, a blending of events and commentary and this Meredith must have gone for instinctively, because he is wooden in straightforward narration. We follow an imagination that cannot bear precision. He depends on funking scenes, on an increasing uncertainty about how exactly events did occur. There is a refusal to credit reality with importance until it has been parcelled out between two or three minds and his own reflections on it. Even in the duel scene in Germany, the excellence is due to the ironical telescoping of the event; we are hearing Meredith on the duel, telling us what to look at and what not to bother about. The effect is of jumping from one standstill scene to another. Life is not life, for him, until it is over; until it is history. (One sees this method in the novels of William Faulkner.) The movement is not from event to event, but from situation to situation, and in each situation there is a kernel of surprising incident. In realism he is tedious. One can almost hear him labouring at what he does not believe in and depending on purely descriptive skill.

The love scenes in
Harry Richmond
present a double difficulty to ourselves. The mixture of realism and high romance is awkward; we are made to feel the sensuality of lovers in a way remarkable to mid-Victorian novels; their words appear to be a highfalutin way of taking the reader’s mind off it and, in this respect, Meredith’s pagan idealism is no more satisfactory than the conventional Christian idealism of other novelists. Like Scott, Meredith is always better at the minor lovers than the major ones. His common sense, touched by a half-sympathetic scorn, is truer than his desire, which is too radiantly egocentric. In Meredith’s personal life, his strongest and spontaneous feelings of love were those of a son and a father, and this is, of course, the theme of
Harry Richmond
. That is why, more than any of his other works, this one appears to be rooted in a truth about the human heart. In erotic love, Meredith never outgrew his early youth and the fact over-exhilarates and vulgarises him by turns.

Harry Richmond
is thought to be less encumbered than Meredith’s other novels because it is written in the first person. Unfortunately, as Mr Percy Lubbock pointed out some years ago in
The Craft of Fiction
, the first person has to be both narrator and actor in his own story, and in consequence stands in his own light. I do not believe that this is a serious fault in
Harry Richmond
as a story, for what carries us forward is Meredith’s remarkable feeling for the generosity, impulsiveness and courage of youth and its splendid blindness to the meaning of its troubles. Harry is blinded by romantic love for his father and the German princess; he is weak in not facing the defects of the former and in not being “great” enough for the latter; but both these sets of behaviour are honourable and have our sympathy. With his father he shares a propensity for illusion and romance and is cured of them. Since he is the narrator we have only his word for it, and one is far from convinced that Harry Richmond has been cured or even examined. Put the story in Henry James’s hands and one sees at once that the whole question of illusion or romance would have been gone into far more deeply. It is the old Meredithean trouble; he is an egoistical writer, fitted out with the egoistical accomplishments, and one who can never be sufficiently unselfed to go far into the natures of others. His portraits start from him, not from them, and the result is that he is only picturesque, a master of ear and eye, a witty judge of the world, a man a good deal cutting a figure in his own society; we are given brilliant views of the human heart, but we do not penetrate it. He has no sense of the calamitous, no sense of the broken or naked soul, and—fatally—no sense of evil. More than any other novelist of his age, he has the Victorian confidence and in a manner so dazzling and profuse that it is natural they called him Shakespearean. In the effusive Victorian sense, he was; but Shakespearean merely linguistically, glamorously, at second hand, without any notion of human life as passion or of suffering as more than disappointment. He is a very literary novelist indeed.

(1965)

Don Quixote
has been called the novel that killed a country by knocking the heart out of it and extinguishing its belief in itself for ever. The argument might really be the other way on.
Don Quixote
was written by the poor soldier and broken tax-collector with the hand maimed in his country’s battles because the Spanish dream of Christian chivalry and total power had passed the crisis of success. The price of an illusion was already being paid and Cervantes marked it down. When Don Quixote recovered his sanity, his soul lost its forces, and he died. What must strike the foreign reader is the difference between the book as it appears to Spaniards and as it appears to the world outside of Spain. The difference is that in Spain
Don Quixote
had a basis in contemporary fact; outside Spain it is morality, metaphysics, fable. The romances of chivalry were read during the Counter-Reformation and specifically moved two of the Spanish saints to action—St Teresa and St Ignatius de Loyola. Longing for the freedom of a man as her brothers went off to the New World, St Teresa read these books with excitement, and Loyola’s famous vigil at Manresa was made consciously in imitation of Amadis, and might be a chapter of
Don Quixote
.

Outside Spain, the novel began a new life in countries where the idea of chivalry had no tradition of national awakening and power, where the tragic core was missing. To the English and French translators who got to work a few years after the book was published,
Don Quixote
was simply the greatest of the picaresque novels, indeed the only great one in a genre which elsewhere kept strictly to exaggeration, meaninglessness and popular anarchy. The book became farce—though the contemporary Shelton sins far less than Motteux who translated the book at the beginning of the eighteenth century—a string of adventures and scenes of horseplay tied up with ironical conversations about the noble disadvantages of idealism and its conflict with proverbial self-interest. If we turn to the English novelists who, in the early eighteenth century, were deeply influenced by the tale, we can see how they altered the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho to suit the new middle-class morality. Don Quixote, especially, the violent and subtle madman with his visions of the lost Golden Age, becomes in England a mere eccentric, an unaccountable squire, a hilarious Scot in Smollett, an unworldly but rough-and-tumble clergyman in Fielding. Figures like Parson Adams are misfits, cranks, clowns, often enlightened but always simple and without authority; whereas Don Quixote’s mind is darkened and dignified by the counsels of his madness. He has the endless resource of the neurotic; he has pride and the habits of pride and command. In England, the ingenious gentleman is opposed by the worthy forces of self-interest, so much admired in Cheapside. The question is practical: idealism or realism? The answer always sentimental: failure is lovable and what is lovable is commercial. These imitators in the sensible eighteenth century delight in freaks because they love individuality; but they do not enter, as Cervantes in his great mercy did, into that universal region of the human spirit where the imagination reigns like an ungovernable and fretful exile in a court of shadows.

The late Samuel Putnam translated
Don Quixote
and three of the
Exemplary Novels
. They were published in handsome volumes printed on a fine large page—a great advantage—and contain a critical account of many earlier translations and a very large collection of valuable notes; altogether a scholarly piece of work by an American amateur. He had translated a good deal of Brazilian literature. Mr
Putnam believed
Don Quixote
to be one of the dying classics and thought an accurate and contemporary translation might revive it. Compared with Shelton, the abominated Motteux—the one guessed and the other added colour—with Ormsby, Jervas and even the Penguin done efficaciously (especially in the dialogue) by J. M. Cohen, Putnam’s translation is toned down. This means that the fine shading of the irony of Cervantes becomes clear and Mr Putnam has taken great trouble with the difficult proverbs. A few contemporary colloquialisms, mainly American, surprise but do not seem out of place; there is often a mildness in Mr Putnam which leads him to choose a weak word or phrase where the Castilian is strong, terse and concrete; and in straining after accuracy he has missed sometimes the note of repartee or satirical echo in the conversations of Don Quixote and Sancho. In the scene at the inn with Maritornes and the muleteer, and in the chapter following, Motteux, Jervas and Cohen—to take only three—are superior in vigour to Mr Putnam, whose colloquial phrases have a citified smoothness from easy over-use. To give an example: Don Quixote is about to reveal that the daughter of the supposed Castilian had come to him in the night, but stops to make Sancho swear that he will tell no one about this until after the Knight is dead, for he will not allow anyone’s honour to be damaged. Sancho replies, without tact, that he swears, but hopes that he will be free to reveal the secret tomorrow, on the grounds that: “It’s just that I am opposed to keeping things too long—I don’t like them to spoil on my hands.”

Both Motteux and Cohen stick closer to the more vigorous original image. The Spanish word is “go mouldy” or even “rot,” and not “spoil.” Literally “go mouldy on me.” In the earlier chapter one can catch Motteux adding direct, eighteenth-century animal coarseness where Cervantes is not coarse at all; in fact,
Don Quixote
is unique in picaresque literature in its virtual freedom from obscenity, except in some of the oaths. When Maritornes rushes to Sancho’s bed to hide there from her angry master, Motteux writes:

This is picturesque, but it has arisen from the mistranslation of two words in the text. Possibly it is an improvement on Cervantes who wrote merely that “she went to Sancho’s bed and curled up in a ball.” Mr Putnam’s pedantry spoils his accuracy here for, instead of “ball,” he writes, “ball of yarn.” The objection to Motteux is that in making Cervantes picturesque and giving him Saxon robustness, he endangers the elegance and the finely drawn out subtleties of the original. Motteux was half-way to Smollett, which is a long way from Cervantes. The picturesque and pungent in Cervantes lie wholly in Sancho’s proverbs, where Mr Putnam excels. When Doña Rodriguez says that she can see “the advantage which a maiden duenna has over a widow, but he who clipped us kept the scissors,” Sancho comes out strong and to the life:

Don Quixote
begins as the description of a shy, timid, simple, eccentric provincial gentleman who, after the first clash with reality, develops an always growing complexity of mind that is the satisfying and diverting substance of the book. For as he goes deeper into delusion, so he is dogged by a dreadful doubt and self-knowledge. At the end, when Sancho returns home leading his master, with their roles reversed—for it is he, the realist, who has triumphed, having governed an island and having even rescued maidens in distress—Don Quixote is said to have failed in all, but to have known glory and to have won the supreme victory: victory over himself. The novel is a powerful example of the process of the growth of a work of art in a writer’s mind, and of the luck of writing. For at the end of the first part, which Cervantes at one time regarded as the end of the book, one can see the idea in crisis and at the point of breaking down. Some critics have thought that the irrelevant stories stuffed into the end of the First Part show a fear that the reader will be bored by the colloquies of two characters only: and that he also wished to show that he was not a mere
popular writer, but could write a polished, psychological short story in the best manner of the time. (He, indeed, succeeded in the story of Don Fernando and Dorothea and, in the latter, drew a delightful analytical portrait of cleverness in women.) But in the long interval between the two parts, the idea matured and became richer in fantasy, invention and intellectual body; the range of character became wider and success—so bitterly delayed in Cervantes’s life—released confident powers that delight us because they delight in themselves. Not only does Don Quixote’s own case branch into its full intricacy; not only are we now taken into all the casuistries of the imaginative life; by a master-stroke, Sancho is infected. The peasant gets his dream of material power, like some homely Trade Unionist, to put against the gentleman’s dream of glory. Realism turns out to be as contagious to fantasy as idealism is.
Don Quixote
begins as a province, turns into Spain and ends as a universe, and far from becoming vaguer as it becomes more suggestive, it becomes earthier, more concrete, more certain in real speech and physical action.
Don Quixote
does not collapse, as the Second Part of Gogol’s
Dead Souls
does, because Cervantes is not mad. He remains pragmatic, sceptical and merciful; whereas Gogol got the Russian Messianic bit between his teeth and went off his head. Spanish fantasy goes step by step with Spanish sanity. Nor, if we read
Don Quixote
truly, can it be described as a work of disillusion, if we mean by that the spiritual exhaustion which follows a great expense of spirit. The Spanish crack-up had begun, but it had only just begun. The force of that national passion was still felt. Though Cervantes was the broken soldier, though he was imprisoned, hauled before the Inquisition, and knew all the misery and confusion that the Spanish expansion abroad had left behind at home, he was not the enemy of the Spanish idea. He valued arms more than literature, as he explicitly said—incidentally in the character of Cardenio he drew an excellent portrait of a coward. What
Don Quixote
does is to enact the tragedy of experience as something still passionate though commingled with reflection: experience now more deeply felt. The comic spirit of the book is not satirical or tired, but is vital, fully engaged and positive. The wisdom runs with the events, not after them. It is stoical, not epicurean; sunlit, not eupeptic; civilised,
not merely robust.
Don Quixote
bridges the gulf between two cultures, not by an inhuman cult of the people, but by excellence of intellect; by the passion a writer has for his means; by irony and love.