Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/70

 lx utters when he announces his intention of taking his ass with him. "About the ass," we are told, "Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying whether he could call to mind any knight-errant taking with him an esquire mounted on ass-back; but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at a glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself. This is Sancho's mission throughout the book: he is an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master's aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some unintentional ad ahsurdum, always bringing him back to the world of fact and commonplace by force of sheer stolidity.

The burlesque, it will be observed, is not steadily kept up even throughout the First Part. Cervantes seems, as in fact he confesses in the person of Cid Hamet in chapter xliv. of the Second Part, to have grown weary before long of the restrictions it imposed upon him, and to have felt it, as he says himself, "intolerable drudgery to go on writing on one subject," chronicling the sayings and doings of the same two characters. It is plain that, as is often the case with persons of sanguine temperament, sustained effort was irksome to him. For thirty years he had contemplated the completion of the "Galatea," unable to bring himself to set about it. He had the "Persiles," which he looked upon as his best work—in prose at least—an equal length of time on his hands. The Second Part of "Don Quixote" he wrote in a very desultory fashion, putting it aside again and again to turn to something else. And when he made an end, it was always a hasty one. Each part of "Don Quixote" he finishes off with a wild flourish, and seems to fling down his pen with a "whoop" like a schoolboy at the end of a task he has been kept in for. Even the "Viaje del Parnaso," a thing entered upon and written con amore, he ends abruptly as if he had got tired of it.

It was partly for this reason, as he himself admits, that he inserted the story of "Cardenio and Dorothea," that with the untranslatable title which I have ventured to call the "Ill-advised Curiosity," and "The Captive's Story," that fill up the greater part of the last half of the volume, as well as the "Chrysostom and Marcela" episode in the earlier chapters. But of course there were other reasons. He had these stories ready written, and it seemed a good way of disposing of them.