The squat
little Spanish peasant is not more gloriously incapable of following
the chivalric vagaries of his master than the simple soldier is of
grasping the philosophic crotchets of his brother. Both couples are
in sympathetic contact absolute and complete at one point; at another
they are "poles asunder" both of them. And in both contrasts there
is that sense of futility and failure, of alienation and
misunderstanding--that element of underlying pathos, in short, which
so strangely gives its keenest salt to humour. In both alike there is
the same suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite
of resemblance--of the Incommensurable in man and nature, beside which
all minor uniformities sink into insignificance.
The pathetic element which underlies and deepens the humour is, of
course, produced in the two cases in two exactly opposite ways. In
both cases it is a picture of human simplicity--of a noble and artless
nature out of harmony with its surroundings--which moves us;
but whereas in the Spanish romance the simplicity is that of the
_incompris_, in the English novel it is that of the man with whom
the _incompris_ consorts.
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