ot immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often takes it
for granted that an allusion will be generally understood which is only
intelligible to a few. For example, on many of his readers in Spain, and
most of his readers out of it, the significance of his choice of a
country for his hero is completely lost. It would be going too far to say
that no one can thoroughly comprehend "Don Quixote" without having seen
La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of La Mancha will give an
insight into the meaning of Cervantes such as no commentator can give. Of
all the regions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of
romance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the
dullest tract. There is something impressive about the grim solitudes of
Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and
dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in
relics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan
landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the
few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace,
there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the
picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village,
Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim
regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very
windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind.

To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "Don
Quixote of La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once. La
Mancha as the knight's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece
with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire,
knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victims of
oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote's world
and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as
they were.

It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the whole
humour 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 the