a first
attempt it was fairly successful, for though some of its emendations are
inadmissible, a good many of them have been adopted by all subsequent
editors.

The zeal of publishers, editors, and annotators brought about a
remarkable change of sentiment with regard to "Don Quixote." A vast
number of its admirers began to grow ashamed of laughing over it. It
became almost a crime to treat it as a humorous book. The humour was not
entirely denied, but, according to the new view, it was rated as an
altogether secondary quality, a mere accessory, nothing more than 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 anyone else.

The extraordinary influence of the romances of chivalry in his day is
quite enough to account for the genesis of the book. Some idea of the
prodigious development of this branch of literature in the sixteenth
century may b