Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/63

 Rh the stalking-horse under the presentation of which Cervantes shot his philosophy or his satire, or whatever it was he meant to shoot; for on this point opinions varied. All were agreed, however, that the object he aimed at was not the books of chivalry. He said emphatically in the preface to the First Part and in the last sentence of the Second, that he had no other object in view than to discredit these books, and this, to advanced criticism, made it clear that his object must have been something else.

One theory was that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth the eternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit of poetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy never evolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its inner consciousness. Something of the antagonism, no doubt, is to be found in "Don Quixote," because it is to be found everywhere in life, and Cervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in which the never-ceasing game of cross purposes between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote would not be recognized as true to nature. In the stone age, among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who never could see the facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could see nothing else. But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself to expound any such idea in two stout quarto volumes is to suppose something not only very unlike the age in which he lived, but altogether unlike Cervantes himself, who would have been the first to laugh at an attempt of the sort made by any one else.

Another idea, which apparently had a strange fascination for some minds, was that there are deep political meanings lying hidden under the drolleries of "Don Quixote." This, indeed, was not altogether of modern growth. If we believed, what nobody believes now, the Buscapié to be genuine, some such notion would seem to have been current soon after the appearance of the book. At any rate Defoe, in the preface to the "Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe," tells us that though thousands read "Don Quixote" without any suspicion of the fact, "those who know the meaning of it know it to be an emblematic history of, and a just satire upon, the Duke of Medina Sidonia." That the "Duke of Lerma"'was the original of "Don Quixote" was a favorite theory with others who, we must