through excessive reading, a Don Quixote magnified by his sapient eloquence and still more by his imitative madness. And we of the later generations have adored this Don Quixote as the martyr of a pure, militant, and derided Christianity at odds with the persistent and worldwide life of those baptized pagans for whom convention is truth, idleness is wisdom, comfort is goodness, and bread and meat are the only tangible essence of life. Every man who has challenged this common paganism has thought himself a knight, and has felt on his own shoulders the staves that beat him to the ground. In Don Quixote’s wise antique serenity, in his futile love of the good, we moderns have seen a reflection of Socrates and of Christ, both of whom went to death at man’s behest because they were better than other men.
Don Quixote has seemed to us but half a martyr: men left him his life—we said—but blows, torments, tortures, and mockeries fell to him as to his models, and at the end, his soul quenched by trickery, he survived only to regain the common imbecility of the world, and to die in his bed more lean than he was before.
This creed has been one of the many “dear illusions” which art, the rival of nature, has prepared for us in these three hundred years. Even Don Quixote has deceived us, and it is our own fault that we have not realized it before. Don
