Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/79

 Rh whole humor and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the 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 humor 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 Doré's drawing of Don Quixote watching his armor 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 armor. Gustave Doré 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. Gustave Dore might as well have turned La Tolosa and La Molinera into village maidens of the opera type in ribbons and roses.

No humor suffers more from this kind of treatment than that of Cervantes. Of that finer and more delicate humor through which there runs a thread of pathos he had but little, or, it would be fairer to say, shows but little. There are few indications in "Don Quixote" or the novelas of the power that produced that marvellous scene in "Lazarillo de Tormes," where the poor hidalgo paces the patio, watching with his hungry eyes his ragged little retainer munching the crusts and cowheel. Cervantes' humor 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.