something of an adventurer, something of a benefactor. But all this is superficial: there is just enough of it to give a tone to his words and a justification to his enterprise.
On close examination his madness appears to be a clever excuse for going about the world and getting into varied and easily soluble difficulties. There is indeed an element of spiritual and bodily brutality in his enterprise, a confused desire to behold disasters and to share in them—provided he may escape without serious consequences. The very fact that he plays the part of an aristocratic paladin saves him from dangerous plights. It is not permissible for him to fight with boors—yet he knows from the first that he will have chiefly to deal with boors.
Don Quixote decides to seem mad because he desires to seem mad. If he were not believed to be mad, he could not amuse himself, could not wander in the free air, could not expose himself to the chances of the unforeseen. He would be shut in by immediate restraints. He would find no pardon and no sport in those that he might meet.
All this explains why the madness of Don Quixote never seems grave or tragic. If it were a true and serious madness, there would be some reaction, some sorrow, some pain now and then, at the end of a scuffle, or in the presence of a hard reality. On the contrary, whenever men or events
