ve the vast
incongruities of human character been set forth with so masterly a
hand. It is in virtue of the new insight which his humour opens to
us of the immensity and variety of man's life that Cervantes makes
us feel that he is _great_: not delightful merely--not even eternally
delightful only, and secure of immortality through the perennial human
need of joy--but _great_, but immortal, in right of that which makes
Shakspeare and the Greek dramatists immortal, namely, the power, not
alone over the pleasure-loving part of man's nature, but over that
equally universal but more enduring element in it, his emotions of
wonder and of awe. It is to this greater power--this control over a
greater instinct than the human love of joy, that Cervantes owes his
greatness; and it will be found, though it may seem at first a hard
saying, that Sterne shares this power with Cervantes. To pass from
Quixote and Sancho to Walter and Toby Shandy involves, of course, a
startling change of dramatic key--a notable lowering of dramatic
tone. It is almost like passing from poetry to prose: it is certainly
passing from the poetic in spirit and surroundings to the profoundly
prosaic in fundamental conception and in every individual detail.
But those who do not allow accidental and external dissimilarities to
obscure for them the inward and essential resemblances of things, must
often, I think, have experienced from one of the Shandy dialogues the
same _sort_ of impression that they derive from some of the most nobly
humorous colloquies between the knight and his squire, and must have
been conscious through all outward differences of key and tone of a
common element in each. It is, of course, a resemblance of _relations_
and not of personalities; for though there is something of the Knight
of La Mancha in Mr. Shandy, there is nothing of Sancho about his
brother. But the serio-comic game of cross-purposes is the same
between both couples; and what one may call the irony of human
intercourse is equally profound, and pointed with equal subtlety,
in each. In the Spanish romance, of course, it is not likely to be
missed. It is enough in itself that the deranged brain which takes
windmills for giants, and carriers for knights, and Rosinante for a
Bucephalus, has fixed upon Sancho Panza--the crowning proof of its
mania--as the fitting squire of a knight-errant. To him--to this
compound of somnolence, shrewdness, and good nature--to this creature
with