Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/65

 Rh "the collected thoughts that passed through his mind," he was convinced that he was himself and not a phantom, which, it has been urged plausibly, was in effect a practical application of the Cartesian "Cogito, ergo sum." But for the most part the expositors content themselves with the assertion that running through "Don Quixote" there is a vein of satire aimed at the Church, dogma, sacerdotalism, and the Inquisition. This, of course, will at once strike most people as being extremely unlikely. Cervantes wrote at about the most active period of the Inquisition, and if he ventured upon satire of this sort he would have been in the position of the reduced gentlewoman who was brought down to selling tarts in the street for a livelihood, and who used to say to herself every time she cried her wares, "I hope to goodness nobody hears me."

There is, moreover, something very characteristic of nineteenth century self-conceit in the idea that it was reserved for our superior intelligence to see what those poor, blind, stupid officers of the Inquisition could not perceive. Any one, however, who, for instance, compares the original editions of Quevedo's "Visions" with the authorized Madrid edition will see that these officials were not so very blind, but that on the contrary their eyes were marvellously keen to detect anything that had the slightest tincture of disrespect or irreverence. Nay, "Don Quixote" itself is a proof of their vigilance, for three years after the Second Part had appeared they cut out the Duchess's not very heterodox remark that works of charity done in a lukewarm way are of no avail. It may be said that Sancho's observations upon the sham sambenito and mitre in chapter lxix., Part II., and Dapple's return home adorned with them in chapter lxxiii., are meant to ridicule the Inquisition; but it is plain the Inquisition itself did not think so, and probably it was as good a judge as any one nowadays.

For one passage capable of being tortured into covert satire against any of these things, there are ten in "Don Quixote" and the novels that show—what, indeed, is sufficiently obvious from the little we know of his life and character—that Cervantes was a faithful son of the Church. As to his having been in advance of his age, the line he took up on the expulsion of the Moriscoes disposes of that assertion. Had he been the far-seeing philosopher and profound thinker the Cervantists strive to make him out, he would have looked