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villainous -like the windmills - he resorts to the test of strength. But
we best understand his character in the way he responds to efforts to
free him from the illusions he holds . These are not petty, but gran–
diose. Which is why he cannot do without them. He cannot be cured
of his beliefs by any evidence that they are false, like the petit
bourgeois Hjalmir Ekdal in Ibsen's
The Wild Duck,
or the trivial
bums in O'Neill's
The Iceman Cometh .
When Sancho Panza presents a
snub-nosed farm girl without delicacy or beauty to the knight as the
Dulcinea of his dreams , saying that she has been transformed by an
evil enchanter, Don Quixote sees nothing false in the explanation ,
and is simply saddened by Dulcinea's fate. As for Sancho Panza, he
permits himself to laugh at the knight's credulity and then strives on
some other occasion to be as credulous.
Now no hero of tragedy would cling to the illusions to which
Don Quixote holds fast. But then Don Quixote is an artist, which a
hero of tragedy may be by chance, but is certainly never obliged to
be . What is the knight's art?
It
is the art of playing with life. The no–
tion that there is such an art was formulated by Max Scheler-"The
Artist in the Art of Playing with Life" was the title for an essay
he planned but never actually wrote . A similar idea was envis–
aged by Baudelaire in his essay, "The Painter and Modern Life."
And I think the notion of such an art is implicit in the behavior of
certain exceptional personalities , fictional and historical . Is it not
implicit in the tales of Lord Genji's many affairs? Closer to us in time
and culture there is Cardinal Retz , who opened the gates of the pal–
ace to revolutionary mobs. Then there are Stendhal, and his hero,
Count Mosca. And we might add to the list Lord Byron and Oscar
Wilde . The art of playing with life is a literary art, requiring that one
turn a chance event into an advantage, as a writer must do at all
times. We admire Cyrano as he does this when anyone dares to af–
front him. We have to admire the way he is able to find an artistic
outcome in what at first looks like an insult to him.
And Don Quixote? He has given himself the role oflooking for
adversaries; it is not his duty to do this . For whatever befalls him, he
has no one to blame but himself, and , in fact , he is uncomplaining.
And as Nabokov points out against Joseph Wood Krutch , he is often
victorious. The number of his victories is equal to the number of
his defeats . So Rosa Luxemburg's gibe against the Knight recoils
against her. She ridiculed those who ride off on "that old nag Rosi-
