It was with something like a shock of revelation that I became aware many years ago that the issue in Don Quixote is not a willed opposition between idealism and realism as these were then understood, but rather between Aristotelian historic truth on the one hand and Aristotelian poetic truth on the other. Perhaps the first person to show this was Giuseppe Toffanin in La fine del umanesimo (1920). Five years later it was brilliantly demonstrated by Américo Castro in El pensamiento de Cervantes. Leo Spitzer, in the second essay of his book Linguistics and Literary History (1948), gave to the idea a new dimension by putting these words in Cervantes' mouth: ‘See, reader, this is not life, but a stage, a book: art; recognize the life-giving power of the artist’ (p. 70).