On the one side the awakening consciousness of the age shows a necessary tendency to treat as ridiculous all that is capricious in the adventurous feats of the Middle Ages, all that is fantastic and exaggerated in chivalry, all that is merely formal in the independence and personal isolation of the heroes, and which is now contained within a social reality embracing more abundance of national conditions and interest; a consciousness which further brings this entire world before our vision in the light of comedy, which does this, however much what is really genuine within it is also asserted, with seriousness and delight. As the culminating points of this genial conception of the entire world of chivalry I have already pointed to Ariosto and Cervantes. I will therefore in the present passage merely draw attention to the brilliant facility, the charm and wit, the loveliness and intense ingenuousness, with which Ariosto, whose poem still hovers among the poetic aims of the Middle Ages, merely in a more veiled and humorous fashion makes what is fantastic vanish away by means of the incredibility of his nonsense, while the profounder romance of Cervantes already assumes knight-errantry to be a Past behind it; which, consequently, can only enter into the real prose and presence of life as vanity in its isolation and fantastic folly; yet at the same time it gives equal prominence to its great and noble aspects in their contrast to what is awkward, stupid, devoid of reason and order in this very prosaic reality, making the defects of the same live before our eyes.