It is no wonder, then, that the greatest works of Spanish genius have coincided with the periods of crisis and decadence of Spanish society. The Arcipreste de Hita’s Libro de Buen Amor saves and translates into Spanish the literary influences of the Caliphate of Cordoba after the brilliant world of the Omeya dynasty in Al Andalus has been destroyed by the Almoravide and Almohad invasions. Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina is the masterpiece of Jewish Spain: it coincides with the expulsion and persecution of the Spanish Hebrews and of the conversos. The whole Golden Age of Spanish literature — Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón — flowers as the power of Spain withers. Velázquez is the painter of the crepuscular court of Philip IV, and Goya the contemporary of the blind and venal Bourbons, Charles IV and Fernando VII, who lose their crown to Joseph Bonaparte and their American empire to the rebellious creoles. And only when Spain lost the remnants of empire in the Spanish-American War did the dearth of her nineteenth-century culture give way to an extraordinary assertion of thought, science, and art: Unamuno, Valle Inclán, Ramón y Cajal, Ortega y Gasset, Buñuel, Miró, and the poetic generation of García Lorca. The absolute value of art has always shone in Spain at its brightest when its political, economic, and technical fortunes have been at their lowest.
So Cervantes is no exception to a general rule. But what are the particular values he instates in the heart of reality, he, the orphan child of both the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation; he who cannot proceed to the rational clarity and self-contention of a Madame de Lafayette or the pragmatic efficiency of a Defoe? I have recalled the influence of Erasmus on Cervantes. Don Quixote, a Spanish extension of the Praise of Folly identical to the praise of Utopia, contains an ethic of Love and Justice. A moral reality occupies the center of Cervantes’s imagination, since it cannot occupy the center of the society he lives in.
Love and Justice. Don Quixote, the madman, is mad not only because he has believed all he has read. He is also mad because he believes, as a knight-errant, that justice is his duty and that justice is possible. Again and again, he proclaims his credo: “I am the valiant Don Quixote de la Mancha, undoer of wrongs and torts”: “The duty of my office is to correct injustices and fly to help the needy.” We know the sort of gratitude Don Quixote receives from those he succors: he is beaten and mocked by them. Cervantes’s social irony reaches a high pitch indeed in these scenes. The poor and miserable and wronged ones Don Quixote aids do not want to be saved by him. Perhaps they want to save themselves. This is an open question. In any case, there is not a shred of a Polyanna in Cervantes: he sees the common people capable of being every bit as cruel as their oppressors. But then, does this not pose the implicit commentary that an unjust society perverts all of its members, the mighty and the weak, the high and the lowly?
Don Quixote, in spite of his recurrent disasters as a do-gooder, never fails in his faith in the ideal of justice. He is a Spanish hero: the transcendent idea cannot be wounded by the accidents of ordinary reality. And what is the ideology that sustains Don Quixote’s search for Justice? It is the utopia of the Golden Age:
A happy age, and happy centuries, those that the ancients called golden, and not because gold, so esteemed in our iron age, was to be found without any hardship in that felicitous age, but because those who then lived knew not these two words yours and mine. All things, in that holy age, were common … The clear fountain and the flowing rivers offered men, in magnificent abundance, their tasty and transparent waters … All was peace then, all friendship, all concord … Then were the loving concepts of the soul dressed in simplicity, as the loving soul conceived them … Fraud and mendacity were unknown, malice did not then parade as truth and sincerity. Justice was faithful to its name, and men of favor and interest did not dare perturb what today they so discredit, disturb and persecute …
None of this, Don Quixote ends by saying, is true “in our detestable times,” and so he has become a knight-errant in order to “defend young women, protect widows, and bring help to the orphaned and the needy.” Don Quixote’s concept of Justice is thus a Concept of Love. And through Love, Don Quixote’s abstract Justice achieves its full realization.
The power of Don Quixote’s image as a madman who constantly confuses reality with imagination has made many a reader and commentator forget what I consider an essential passage of the book. In Chapter XXV of the first part of the novel, Don Quixote decides to do penance, dressed only in his nightshirt, in the craggy cliffs of the Sierra Morena. He asks Sancho to go off to the village of El Toboso and inform the knight’s lady Dulcinea of the great deeds and sufferings with which he honors her. Since Sancho knows of no highly placed lady called Dulcinea in the miserable hamlet of El Toboso, he inquires further. Don Quixote, at this extraordinary moment, reveals that he knows the truth: Dulcinea, he says, is none other than the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo; it is she Sancho must look for. This provokes gales of laughter in the roguish squire: he knows Aldonza welclass="underline" she is common, strong as a bull, dirty, can bellow to the peasants from the church tower and be heard a league away; she’s a good one at exchanging pleasantries and, in fact, is a bit of a whore.
Don Quixote’s response is one of the most moving declarations of love ever written. He knows who and what Dulcinea really is; yet he loves her, and because he loves her, she is worth as much as “the most noble princess in all the world.” He admits that his imagination has transformed the peasant girl Aldonza into the noble lady Dulcinea: but is not this the essence of love, to transform the loved one into something incomparable, unique, set above all considerations of wealth or poverty, distinction or commonness? “Thus, it is enough that I think and believe that Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and honest; the question of class is of no consequence … I paint her in my imagination as I desire her … And let the world think what it wants.”
The social, ethical, and political content of Don Quixote is obvious in this reunion of Love and Justice. The myth of the Golden Age is its ideological core: a utopia of brotherhood, equality, and pleasure. Utopia is to be achieved not in a nihilistic sweeping away of the past and starting from scratch to build a brave new world, but in a fusion of the values that come to us from the past and those we are capable of creating in the present. Justice, Don Quixote insists, is absent from the present times; only Love can give Justice actuality, and the Love Don Quixote speaks of is a democratic act, an act surpassing class distinctions, a truth to be found in the lowliest of peasant girls. But to this love must be brought the constant, aristocratic values of chivalry, personal risk in the quest for justice, integrity, and heroism. In Don Quixote, the values of the age of chivalry acquire, through Love, a democratic resonance; and the values of the democratic life acquire the resonance of nobility. Don Quixote refuses both the cruel power of the mighty and the herd instinct of the lowly: his vision of humanity is based not on the lowest common denominator but on the highest achievement possible. His conception of Love and Justice saves both the oppressors and the oppressed from an oppression that perverts both.