To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "Don

Quixote of La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once. La

Mancha as the knight's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece

with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire,

knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victims of

oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote's world

and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as

they were.

It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the whole

humour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the

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majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It has

been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure,

the great majority of the artists who illustrated "Don Quixote" knew

nothing whatever of Spain. To them a venta conveyed no idea but the

abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do full

justice to the humour of Don Quixote's misconception in taking it for a

castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal.

But even when better informed they seem to have no apprehension of the

full force of the discrepancy. Take, for instance, Gustave Dore's drawing

of Don Quixote watching his armour in the inn-yard. Whether or not the

Venta de Quesada on the Seville road is, as tradition maintains, the inn

described in "Don Quixote," beyond all question it was just such an

inn-yard as the one behind it that Cervantes had in his mind's eye, and

it was on just such a rude stone trough as that beside the primitive

draw-well in the corner that he meant Don Quixote to deposit his armour.

Gustave Dore makes it an elaborate fountain such as no arriero ever

watered his mules at in the corral of any venta in Spain, and thereby

entirely misses the point aimed at by Cervantes. It is the mean, prosaic,

commonplace character of all the surroundings and circumstances that

gives a significance to Don Quixote's vigil and the ceremony that

follows.

Cervantes' humour is for the most part of that broader and simpler sort,

the strength of which lies in the perception of the incongruous. It is

the incongruity of Sancho in all his ways, words, and works, with the

ideas and aims of his master, quite as much as the wonderful vitality and

truth to nature of the character, that makes him the most humorous

creation in the whole range of fiction. That unsmiling gravity of which

Cervantes was the first great master, "Cervantes' serious air," which

sits naturally on Swift alone, perhaps, of later humourists, is essential

to this kind of humour, and here again Cervantes has suffered at the

hands of his interpreters. Nothing, unless indeed the coarse buffoonery

of Phillips, could be more out of place in an attempt to represent

Cervantes, than a flippant, would-be facetious style, like that of

Motteux's version for example, or the sprightly, jaunty air, French

translators sometimes adopt. It is the grave matter-of-factness of the

narrative, and the apparent unconsciousness of the author that he is

saying anything ludicrous, anything but the merest commonplace, that give

its peculiar flavour to the humour of Cervantes. His, in fact, is the

exact opposite of the humour of Sterne and the self-conscious humourists.

Even when Uncle Toby is at his best, you are always aware of "the man

Sterne" behind him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect he

is producing. Cervantes always leaves you alone with Don Quixote and

Sancho. He and Swift and the great humourists always keep themselves out

of sight, or, more properly speaking, never think about themselves at

all, unlike our latter-day school of humourists, who seem to have revived

the old horse-collar method, and try to raise a laugh by some grotesque

assumption of ignorance, imbecility, or bad taste.




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