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 therefore do full justice to the humour 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 armour in the innyard. 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 innyard 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 armour. 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.
Cervantes’ humour 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.