ABSTRACT
Throughout nearly everything Spanish there runs chiaroscuro, the intense play of light and shade. Spanish society, which until had no middle class, suggested to Cervantes the perfect antithesis of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; and in Sancho Panza himself, the Spanish peasant of Cervantes' time, there is the contrast between his shrewd mother wit and his ignorance and credulity. In certain essential traits the Spanish differ from the French almost as much as the Hindus from the Chinese, and in somewhat the same manner. The Spanish classic theater revolves almost entirely around this sentiment of honor, which is medieval and Gothic, and the sentiment of jealousy, which is Oriental. The splendid sonorities of the Spanish language serve in its poetry as a substitute for the exact rendering of nature, and take the place of a precise mastery of facts in the speech of the orator in Cortes.
