Don Quixote has a
double meaning. We are always attaching meanings to works of genius.
But you can not tie any writer's utterance down to some poor altitude.
Great utterances have at least a half-infinite application. Tennyson
felt this, saying--as we read in his son's biography of him--regarding
explanations of his "Idyls of the King:" "I hate to be tied down to
'this means that,' because the thought within the image is much more
than any one interpretation;" and, "Poetry is like shot-silk, with many
glancing colors. Every reader will find his own interpretation
according to his ability, and according to his sympathy, with the
poet." What is true of poetry is true of all imaginative literature.
An author may not have analyzed his own motive in its entirety. In any
case, we may hold to this, Don Quixote was a gentleman, and is the
first gentleman whose portrait is given us in literature. We have
laughed at Don Quixote, but we have learned to love him. The "knight
of the rueful countenance," as we see him now, is not himself a jest,
but one of literature's most noble figures; and we love him because we
must. Was it mere chance that in drawing this don, Cervantes clothed
him with all nobilities, and shows him--living and dying--good,
courageous, pure; in short, a man? This scarcely seems a happening.
Seas have subtle undercurrents. I venture, Don Quixote has the same,
and marks the appearance of a gentleman in literature, since which day
that person has been a recurring, ennobling presence on the pages of
fiction and poetry.

A gentleman is a comparatively recent creation in life, as in letters.
Christ was the foremost and first gentleman. After him all gentility
patterns. With the law of the imagination we are familiar, which is
this: Imagination deals only with materials supplied by the senses.
Imagination, in other words, is not strictly originative, but, rather,
appropriative, giving a varied placing to images on hand, just as the
kaleidoscope makes all its multiform combinations with a given number
of pieces. Imagination does not make materials, is no magician, but is
an architect. Admitting this law, we can readily see how the creation
of a gentleman does not lie in the province of imagination. Homer's
heroes are the men Homer knew, with a poetic emphasis on strength,
stature, prowess. His era grew warriors and nothing else, and so Homer
paints nothing else. Human genius has limits. Man is origina