"Trim those lamps there!" exclaimed the barber at this; "so you are of
the same fraternity as your master, too, Sancho? By God, I begin to see
that you will have to keep him company in the cage, and be enchanted like
him for having caught some of his humour and chivalry. It was an evil
hour when you let yourself be got with child by his promises, and that
island you long so much for found its way into your head."
"I am not with child by anyone," returned Sancho, "nor am I a man to let
myself be got with child, if it was by the King himself. Though I am poor
I am an old Christian, and I owe nothing to nobody, and if I long for an
island, other people long for worse. Each of us is the son of his own
works; and being a man I may come to be pope, not to say governor of an
island, especially as my master may win so many that he will not know
whom to give them to. Mind how you talk, master barber; for shaving is
not everything, and there is some difference between Peter and Peter. I
say this because we all know one another, and it will not do to throw
false dice with me; and as to the enchantment of my master, God knows the
truth; leave it as it is; it only makes it worse to stir it."
The barber did not care to answer Sancho lest by his plain speaking he
should disclose what the curate and he himself were trying so hard to
conceal; and under the same apprehension the curate had asked the canon
to ride on a little in advance, so that he might tell him the mystery of
this man in the cage, and other things that would amuse him. The canon
agreed, and going on ahead with his servants, listened with attention to
the account of the character, life, madness, and ways of Don Quixote,
given him by the curate, who described to him briefly the beginning and
origin of his craze, and told him the whole story of his adventures up to
his being confined in the cage, together with the plan they had of taking
him home to try if by any means they could discover a cure for his
madness. The canon and his servants were surprised anew when they heard
Don Quixote's strange story, and when it was finished he said, "To tell
the truth, senor curate, I for my part consider what they call books of
chivalry to be mischievous to the State; and though, led by idle and
false taste, I have read the beginnings of almost all that have been
printed, I never could manage to read any one of them from beginning to
end; for it seems to me they are all more or less the same thing; and one
has nothing more in it than another; this no more than that. And in my
opinion this sort of writing and composition is of the same species as
the fables they call the Milesian, nonsensical tales that aim solely at
giving amusement and not instruction, exactly the opposite of the
apologue fables which amuse and instruct at the same time. And though it
may be the chief object of such books to amuse, I do not know how they
can succeed, when they are so full of such monstrous nonsense. For the
enjoyment the mind feels must come from the beauty and harmony which it
perceives or contemplates in the things that the eye or the imagination
brings before it; and nothing that has any ugliness or disproportion
about it can give any pleasure. What beauty, then, or what proportion of
the parts to the whole, or of the whole to the parts, can there be in a
book or fable where a lad of sixteen cuts down a giant as tall as a tower
and makes two halves of him as if he was an almond cake? And when they
want to give us a picture of a battle, after having told us that there
are a million of combatants on the side of the enemy, let the hero of the
book be opposed to them, and we have perforce to believe, whether we like
it or not, that the said knight wins the victory by the single might of
his strong arm. And then, what shall we say of the facility with which a
born queen or empress will give herself over into the arms of some
unknown wandering knight? What mind, that is not wholly barbarous and
uncultured, can find pleasure in reading of how a great tower full of
knights sails away across the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and will
be to-night in Lombardy and to-morrow morning in the land of Prester John
of the Indies, or some other that Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo
saw? And if, in answer to this, I am told that the authors of books of
the kind write them as fiction, and therefore are not bound to regard
niceties of truth, I would reply that fiction is all the better the more
it looks like truth, and gives the more pleasure the more probability and
possibility there is about it. Plots in fiction should be wedded to the
understanding of the reader, and be constructed in such a way that,
reconciling impossibilities, smoothing over difficulties, keeping the
mind on the alert, they may surprise, interest, divert, and entertain, so
that wonder and delight joined may keep pace one with the other; all
which he will fail to effect who shuns verisimilitude and truth to
nature, wherein lies the perfection of writing. I have never yet seen any
book of chivalry that puts together a connected plot complete in all its
numbers, so that the middle agrees with the beginning, and the end with
the beginning and middle; on the contrary, they construct them with such
a multitude of members that it seems as though they meant to produce a
chimera or monster rather than a well-proportioned figure. And besides
all this they are harsh in their style, incredible in their achievements,
licentious in their amours, uncouth in their courtly speeches, prolix in
their battles, silly in their arguments, absurd in their travels, and, in
short, wanting in everything like intelligent art; for which reason they
deserve to be banished from the Christian commonwealth as a worthless
breed."