The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

260 chapter 21Catalan country priest anxious to get to dinner rushing to set out anotherwooden Jesus whose feet could be kissed when the line of worshipers infront of the first one, brought in earlier with all slow solemnity, appeared tothe priest inefficiently long. “Perhaps only in Catalunya,” Hughes observes,“the first industrial region of Spain, could time-and-motion study be soquickly and instinctively applied to piety.” 27 It’s seny, as against the Castilianlack of it.Consider, for example, that noble Castilian, Don Quixote de la Mancha.His courage is unquestionable, though exercised against phantasms, aswhen he meets a cart filled with actors and takes it to be Death and company.“The knight’s spirit mounted with the belief there was some newand perilous adventure presenting itself.” And he is of course exacting injustice, too—his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, in sober fact a milkmaid, mustalways receive her just due, as surely will by way of just revenge any foulgiant or contemptuous knight who balks at acknowledging her excellence.(Likewise in a gesture to knightly manners in the cowboy myth the WalterBrennan/Judge Roy Bean character in The Westerner [1940] extractsobeisance to posters of Lillie Langtry put up behind his bar.) And the Donis disciplined by temperance, his cowboy-like willingness to live a hardlife: “Labor, unease, and arms alone were designed and made for thosethe world calls knights errant,” he declares, willing with the other Shanes ofthe world to bed down rough in the barn, weapon at the ready.Sancho Panza is a peasant or a bourgeois (one imagines that he musthave had Catalan blood)—anyway, a practical man, pleno de seny, a manof prudence, ready with proverbial wisdom, ever articulating profanevalue: “I renounce the governorship of the promised isle [which glorythe Don supposes throughout is Sancho’s true goal], and all I want inpayment . . . is . . . the recipe for that marvelous liquor . ..worth morethan two reals an ounce”; or, lovingly, “The well-being of a single [selfappointed]knight errant is worth more than all the enchantments . . .on earth.” Don Quixote, whose mind is on higher things, hushes him,as he does always when prudence breaks in—though even a knighterrant feels practical wisdom somehow necessary, as he shows by offeringcrackpot rationalizations for his adventures, prudence within a worldof madness.No seny. 28