I become more and more convinced that our philosophy, the Spanish
philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life,
in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in philosophical
systems. It is concrete. (And is there not perhaps as much philosophy
or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?) The poetry of Jorge
Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, _La Subida
al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of
life--_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_. This philosophy of ours could
with difficulty formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth
century, a period that was a-philosophical, positivist, technicist,
given up to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially
materialist and pessimistic.
We shall find the hero of Spanish thought, perhaps, not in any
philosopher who lived in flesh and bone, but in an entity of
fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers--in Don
Quixote. For there is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism, but there
is also a Quixotic philosophy. Was not perhaps the philosophy of the
Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and, above all,
the philosophy latent in the abstract but passionate thought of our
mystics, in its essence none other than this? What was the mysticism
of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the
divine warfare?
And the feeling that animated Don Quixote cannot strictly be called
idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was spiritualism; he fought
for the spirit.
Speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like practical Quixotism,
foolishness, a daughter-foolishness to the foolishness of the cross.
And therefore it is contemned by reason. Philosophy at bottom abhors
Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.
The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross.
Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, sought by means of ridicule
to turn it into comedy and conceived the farce of the king with the
reed sceptre and crown of thorns, saying: “Behold the man!” But the
people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, cried:
“Crucify him! crucify him!” And the other tragedy, the human, the
intra-human tragedy, is that of Don Quixote with his face lathered for
the ducal servants to laugh at, and for the dukes, as much slaves as
their servants, to laugh at too. “Behold the fool!”--so they would say.
And the comic, the irrational tragedy is suffering beneath ridicule and
contempt.
For an individual, as for a people, the highest heroism is being
willing to face ridicule--still more, being willing to make oneself
ridiculous and not flinching at the ridicule.
Antero de Quental, the tragic Portuguese who committed suicide, wrote
as follows, smarting under the ultimatum which England delivered to
his country in 1890: “An English statesman of the last century, also
certainly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole,
said that life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those
who think. Very well then, if we have to end tragically, we Portuguese,
we who _feel_, we much prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny to
that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for
England, the country that _thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny is
to end miserably and comically.” We may leave on one side the assertion
that England thinks and calculates, implying that she does not feel,
the injustice of which is explained by the circumstance that provoked
it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they
scarcely ever think or calculate--for we sister peoples of the Atlantic
have always been distinguished by a certain sentimental pedantry; but
there remains the terrible underlying idea, namely, that some, those
who put thought above feeling--I should say reason above faith--die
comically, and those die tragically who put faith above reason. For
it is the ridiculers who die comically, and God laughs at their
comic ending, while the portion, the noble portion, of those who are
ridiculed is tragedy.
And what we must look out for in the record of Don Quixote is ridicule.
* * * * *
The philosophy in the soul of my people presents itself to me as the
expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of
Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between the world as the
reason of science exhibits it to us and the world as we wish it to be,
as our religious faith tells us that it is. And in this philosophy is
to be found the secret of what is usually said about us, that we are
fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_, that is to say, that we do not
resign ourselves to it. No, Don Quixote resigns himself neither to the
world nor to its truth, neither to science nor to logic, neither to art
nor aesthetics, neither to morality nor to ethics.
“In any case the result of all this,” so I have been told more than
once and by more than one person, “will simply be to urge people on to
the maddest kind of Catholicism.” And they have accused me of being a
reactionary and even a Jesuit. So be it! And what then?
Yes, I know, I know that it is folly to seek to turn the waters of the
river back to their source, and that it is the crowd that seeks the
medicine for its ills in the past; but I know too that everyone who
fights for any ideal whatsoever, even though it may seem to belong
to the past, is urging the world on to the future, and that the only
reactionaries are those who find themselves at ease in the present.
Every pretended restoration of the past is a creation of the future,
and if the past is dream, something not properly known, so much the
better. As always, the march is towards the future; he who marches,
marches thither, even though he march backwards way--and who knows if
that is not the better way?
I feel that I have a mediæval soul and I believe that the soul of
my country is mediæval--that it has been forced to traverse the
Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution, learning from them,
yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the
spiritual heritage of those ages that are called dark. And Quixotism is
nothing but the most desperate phase of the struggle of the Middle Ages
against their offspring, the Renaissance.
And if some accuse me of furthering the cause of Catholic reaction,
perhaps the others, the official Catholics, accuse me of.... But
these, in Spain trouble themselves little about anything and are only
interested in their own quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor
folk, they are somewhat dull of understanding.
But the fact is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to
shatter the faith of both these and those and of others besides, faith
in affirmation, faith in negation and faith in abstention, and this
for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those
who resign themselves, whether to Catholicism or to rationalism or
to agnosticism; it is to make them all live lives of inquietude and
passionate desire.
Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the
immediate and visible efficacy of his work? It is greatly to be
doubted, and at any rate he did not risk putting the visor he had
made to the test by giving it a second blow. And many passages in his
history indicate that he did not believe much in the immediate success
of his design to restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter so
long as he himself thus lived and immortalized himself? And he must
have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his achievement would have
another and a higher efficacy--namely, that it would go on working
in the minds of all those who in the spirit of devotion read of his
exploits.
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous, but did he perchance know the most
tragic ridicule of all, the ridicule that is reflected in the eyes of
a man’s own soul, the ridicule with which a man sees his own self?
Transfer Don Quixote’s battlefield to his own soul; conceive him to
be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance,
not to lose the treasure of his infancy; turn him into an inward Don
Quixote--with his Sancho, a Sancho equally inward and equally heroical
at his side--and then talk to me of the comic tragedy.
And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer that he has left
himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and
all philosophies. Other peoples have left principally institutions,
books--we have left souls. St. Teresa is worth any institution, any
“Critique of Pure Reason.”
Don Quixote was converted? Yes, but only to die. But the other,
the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us,
breathing his spirit into us, this Don Quixote was never converted,
this Don Quixote goes on inciting us to make ourselves ridiculous,
this Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don
Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was
mad, and it was his madness, not his death or his conversion, that
immortalized him and earned for him the forgiveness of the crime of
having been born. _Felix culpa!_ Neither was his madness cured but only
transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure--in dying he
stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.
This Don Quixote died and descended into hell, and he entered it lance
on rest and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley-slaves,
and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down from them the scroll that
Dante saw there, and replaced it by one on which was written “Long
live hope!” and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing
at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed at him paternally and this
divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.
And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with
desperation. Is not despair the mainspring of his fighting? How
is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our
tongue--_siesta_, _camarilla_, _guerilla_ and the like--there
occurs this word _desperado_? This inward Don Quixote that I
spoke of, conscious of his own comicness, is he not a man of
despair--_desesperado_? A desperado, yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola.
But “despair is the master of impossibilities,” as Salazar y Torres
tells us, and it is despair and despair alone from whence springs
heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to
be said, rather than _credo_.
And Don Quixote, who lived solitary, sought more solitude still, sought
the solitudes of the Peña Pobre in order that there, alone, without
witnesses, he might plunge into yet wilder extravagances to the easing
of his soul. Yet he was not quite solitary, for Sancho accompanied him,
Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the simple. If, as some
say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved,
for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant himself. At
any rate he is waiting for some other mad knight to follow yet again.
And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who
journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it does not appear certain that
he died, although some say that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his
lance, and believing that all those things which on his death-bed his
converted master abominated as lies had been really true. But neither
does it appear certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the
curate, or the barber, or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with
these that the heroic Sancho has to fight.
Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his
solitude. And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers creating
for ourselves a quixotesque Spain which exists only in our imagination?
And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to
_Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing. It is a
whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole aesthetic, a whole logic,
a whole ethic, above all a whole religion, that is to say, a whole
economy of things human and divine, a whole hope in the rationally
absurd.
For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for
survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice,
who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen,
who is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.
And what is greatest in him is his having been ridiculed and overcome,
for it is in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame the world by
making it laugh at him.
And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his
efforts so far as temporal issues are concerned; he sees himself from
without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, that is to say,
to alienate himself from himself instead of to enter into himself,
and in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a
bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be an inward
Margutte, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die bursting with
laughter, but with laughter at himself. _E riderá in eterno_, he will
laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not
hear the laughter of God?
The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, understood his own comicness and wept
for his sins; but the immortal Don Quixote understands and rises above
his comicness and triumphs over it without renouncing it.
But now Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine
laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in eternal
life, he has to fight, attacking the modern scientific inquisitorial
orthodoxy by adducing a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic,
contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola--an Italian Quixote
of the end of the fifteenth century--he fights against this Modern Age
which began with Machiavelli and which will end comically. He fights
against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of
consciousness, reconciliation between reason and faith, are now, thanks
to the providence of God, impossible. The world must be as Don Quixote
wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight against
it and will, to all appearances, be overcome, but he will triumph by
making himself ridiculous. He will triumph by laughing at himself and
making himself laughed at.
“Reason speaks and feeling bites,” said Petrarch; but reason also bites
and bites in the heart of hearts. And more light does not make more
warmth. “Light, light, more light!” they tell us that the dying Goethe
cried. No, warmth, warmth, more warmth, for we die of cold and not of
darkness. It is not the night but the frost that kills.
* * * * *
The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration,
in its essence mystical, mediæval, quixotesque, has been called
_demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_,
mundane. Mundane--yes, for the world and not for philosophers, just as
chemistry ought not to be for chemists alone. The world wishes to be
deceived--_mundus vult decipi_--either with the illusion antecedent to
reason, which is poetry, or with the illusion subsequent to reason,
which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to
deceive will always find someone who will let himself be deceived.
And blessed are those who are made fools of. A Frenchman, Jules de
Gaultier, has said that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n’être
pas dupe_--not to be taken in. A sorry privilege!
Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. “Then let
him not demand it,” it will be said, “let him resign himself, let him
accept life and truth as they are.” But he does not accept them as
they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho who stands
by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what
those understand who talk thus to him, those who are able to resign
themselves and to accept rational life and rational truth. No, it is
that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows?
And in this critical century Don Quixote, who has contaminated himself
with criticism also, has to attack his own self, the victim of
intellectualism and sentimentalism, and it is when he wishes to be most
spontaneous that he appears most affected. And the poor fellow wishes
to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
sinks into the inner despair of the critical century whose two greatest
victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through despair he attains the
heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that Don Quixote of the mind
who escaped from the cloister--and he becomes an awakener of sleeping
souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican said of
himself. “Heroic love,” Bruno wrote, “is the property of those superior
natures called insane [_insano_]--not because they do not know [_non
sanno_], but because they over-know [_soprasanno_].”
But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines--at any rate they
have stated on the inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo
dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, that it is dedicated to him by the age
which he foretold (_il secole da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote,
the Don Quixote who has risen from the dead, the inward Don Quixote,
the Don Quixote who is conscious of his own comicness, does not believe
that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of
it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world
wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire to the mountain,
fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired
alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes,
they sought to proclaim Him king. He left the title of king to be
written upon the cross.
What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote in the world of to-day?
To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But the wilderness hears,
though men do not hear, and one day it will be transformed into a
sounding forest, and this solitary voice that falls upon the wilderness
like seed, will yield a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand
tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death.