"A voice crying in the wilderness!"--ISA. xl. 3.
Need is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these
essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have
gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of
improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in
writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded
it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions--apparent
contradictions, at any rate--like life and like me myself.
My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with
foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in
with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time.
A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain,
Jacob Böhme declared in his _Aurora_ (chap xi., § 142) that he did not
write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself
had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy
strivings, and wherein he was often struck down to the ground like all
other men; and a little further on (§ 152) he adds: "Although I must
become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is
in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it
and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this
Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the
Spirit.
And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and
I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that
arrogantly styled itself _omnium scientiarum princeps_, and which
Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of
letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this
Spain--"the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe,
the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the
American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day--from this
Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the
sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it!
In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And
the chief factors in _de-essentializing_ it--that is, in
de-Catholicizing Europe--have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and
the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial
life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or,
rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the
dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture.
And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially
unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by
historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in
the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of
pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and
propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it
were its function to come down to the people and subserve their
passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through
science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations.
All this led Brunetière to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this
science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt.
And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness,
but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power,
or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in
culture. And the result was pessimism.
Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve?
Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did
not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I
call the final finality is the real _hontôs hon_. And the famous _maladie
du siècle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more
plainly in Sénancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither
was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the
soul, in the human finality of the Universe.
The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr.
Faustus.
This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher
Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two
centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the
fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles
appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?"
"Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why
he tempts us thus?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers:
"_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_," which, mistranslated into
Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb--"The misfortune of many is
the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is
there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers
that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And
finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who,
although no doubt Marlowe never suspected it, is none other than
renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's _Faust_ there is a scene that is
worth the whole of the second part of the _Faust_ of Goethe. Faust says
to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss"--and he kisses
her--
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
Give me my soul again!--the cry of Faust, the Doctor, when, after having
kissed Helen, he is about to be lost eternally. For the primitive Faust
has no ingenuous Margaret to save him. This idea of his salvation was
the invention of Goethe. And is there not a Faust whom we all know, our
own Faust? This Faust has studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine,
and even Theology, only to find that we can know nothing, and he has
sought escape in the open country (_hinaus ins weite Land_) and has
encountered Mephistopheles, the embodiment of that force which, ever
willing evil, ever achieves good in its own despite. This Faust has been
led by Mephistopheles to the arms of Margaret, child of the
simple-hearted people, she whom Faust, the overwise, had lost. And
thanks to her--for she gave herself to him--this Faust is saved,
redeemed by the people that believes with a simple faith. But there was
a second part, for that Faust was the anecdotical Faust and not the
categorical Faust of Goethe, and he gave himself again to Culture, to
Helen, and begot Euphorion upon her, and everything ends among mystical
choruses with the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion!
And this Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the Helen whom Paris
bore away, who was the cause of the war of Troy, and of whom the ancient
Trojans said that no one should be incensed because men fought for a
woman who bore so terrible a likeness to the immortal gods. But I
rather think that Faust's Helen was that other Helen who accompanied
Simon Magus, and whom he declared to be the divine wisdom. And Faust can
say to her: Give me my soul again!
For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul. And what we long for and
have need of is soul--soul of bulk and substance.
But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing
Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us
about Culture and Europe.
Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical
significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a
kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day--in Spain, at any
rate--what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (_vide_ my
_Tres Ensayos_). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our
Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its
periphery remains outside of it--Spain, of course, and also England,
Italy, Scandinavia, Russia--and hence it is reduced to the central
portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies.
All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of
internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance
were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head,
regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his
driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this
barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was
also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the
Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these
two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of
science or culture, which turns against those who refuse to submit to
its orthodoxy the weapons of ridicule and contempt.
When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth's motion to the Grand Duke
of Tuscany, he told him that it was meet that that which the higher
authorities had determined should be believed and obeyed, and that he
considered his treatise "as poetry or as a dream, and as such I desire
your highness to receive it." And at other times he calls it a "chimera"
or a "mathematical caprice." And in the same way in these essays, for
fear also--why not confess it?--of the Inquisition, of the modern, the
scientific, Inquisition, I offer as a poetry, dream, chimera, mystical
caprice, that which springs from what is deepest in me. And I say with
Galileo, _Eppur si muove!_ But is it only because of this fear? Ah, no!
for there is another, more tragic Inquisition, and that is the
Inquisition which the modern man, the man of culture, the European--and
such am I, whether I will or not--carries within him. There is a more
terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule with which a man
contemplates his own self. It is my reason that laughs at my faith and
despises it.
And it is here that I must betake me to my Lord Don Quixote in order
that I may learn of him how to confront ridicule and overcome it, and a
ridicule which perhaps--who knows?--he never knew.
Yes, yes--how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque,
would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there
is anything rather than patient study and--shall I say
scientific?--objectivity and method? And nevertheless ... _eppur si
muove!_
_Eppur si muove!_ And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant
would call _demi-mondaine_ philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry
of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers.
And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there
is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and
the theology of the theologians.
Let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Thibet is parallel
with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are
living by it. And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of
Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, "How dieth the wise man?--as the
fool" (ii. 16).
Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the
customary interrogation, "How are you?"[59] and it is "Living." And that
is the truth--we are living, and living as much as all the rest. What
can a man ask for more? And who does not recollect the verse?--
_Coda vez que considero
que me tengo de morir,
tiendo la capa en el suelo
y no me harto de dormir._[60]
But no, not sleeping, but dreaming--dreaming life, since life is a
dream.
Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly passed into current
usage, the expression "It's a question of passing the time," or "killing
the time." And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it. But there is
something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than passing
the time--a formula which denotes an esthetical attitude--and that is,
gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious attitude. The
truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious,
passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.
One of our younger novelists, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, in his recent novel,
_La Pata de la Raposa_, has told us that the idea of death is the trap,
and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the
ambushes set by fatality, and he continues: "Caught in the trap, weak
men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and
strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they
quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and
renouncing for ever their original hastiness and folly, emerge from the
trap with muscles taut for action and with the soul's vigour, power, and
efficiency increased a hundredfold." But let us see; weak men ... weak
peoples ... robust spirits ... strong peoples ... what does all this
mean? I do not know. What I think I know is that some individuals and
peoples have not yet really thought about death and immortality, have
not felt them, and that others have ceased to think about them, or
rather ceased to feel them. And the fact that they have never passed
through the religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men or
peoples to boast about.
The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and
there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to it and accept it as it
is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the
"trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man
that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not
console him for them, but is another misfortune in addition."[61] And,
furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de
Estella said (_Vanidad del Mundo_, cap. xxi.).
A short time ago a reply that I made to those who reproached us
Spaniards for our scientific incapacity appeared to scandalize some
people. After having remarked that the electric light and the steam
engine function here in Spain just as well as in the countries where
they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms as much as they
do in the country where the idea of them was first conceived, I
exclaimed, "Let others invent!"--a paradoxical expression which I do not
retract. We Spaniards ought to appropriate to ourselves some of those
sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre gave to the Russians, a
people not unlike ourselves. In his admirable letters to Count
Rasoumowski on public education in Russia, he said that a nation should
not think the worse of itself because it was not made for science; that
the Romans had no understanding of the arts, neither did they possess a
mathematician, which, however, did not prevent them from playing their
part in the world; and in particular we should take to heart everything
that he said about that crowd of arrogant sciolists who idolize the
tastes, the fashions, and the languages of foreign countries, and are
ever ready to pull down whatever they despise--and they despise
everything.
We have not the scientific spirit? And what of that, if we have some
other spirit? And who can tell if the spirit that we have is or is not
compatible with the scientific spirit?
But in saying "Let others invent!" I did not mean to imply that we must
be content with playing a passive rôle. No. For them their science, by
which we shall profit; for us, our own work. It is not enough to be on
the defensive, we must attack.
But we must attack wisely and cautiously. Reason must be our weapon. It
is the weapon even of the fool. Our sublime fool and our exemplar, Don
Quixote, after he had destroyed with two strokes of his sword that
pasteboard visor "which he had fitted to his head-piece, made it anew,
placing certain iron bars within it, in such a manner that he rested
satisfied with its solidity, and without wishing to make a second trial
of it, he deputed and held it in estimation of a most excellent
visor."[62] And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself
immortal--that is to say, he made himself ridiculous. For it was by
making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his immortality.
And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ... Cournot
said _(Traité de l'enchaînement des idées fondamentales_, etc., § 510):
"It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the
probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace;
the public will revenge itself with ridicule." True, and therefore it is
said that we must live as the age lives. _Corrumpere et corrumpi sæculum
vocatur_ (Tacitus: _Germania_ 19).
It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only
to others but to ourselves. And more than ever to-day, when there is so
much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized
peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we
have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we
had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of
our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first
task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been
woven around it.
Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti
dell'affannosa grandiositá spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_)
that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of
thought, had her Cervantes." But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated
phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation? That
an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted
against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain _non ebbe
egemonia mai di pensiero_ is, however, readily comprehended. Was there
no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the
Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point
of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential
chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?
Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good
or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of
Trent? Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and
unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between
immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes
themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical
truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula
_salva fide_. But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council
came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and
religion. And does not the fact that this change was brought about,
thanks principally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to
hegemony?
Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the
course that it did actually follow? Without the Counter-Reformation
might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have
perished in the gross rationalism of the _Aufklärung_, of the age of
Enlightenment? Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles
I., no Philip II., our great Philip?
A negative achievement, it will be said. But what is that? What is
negative? what is positive? At what point in time--a line always
continuing in the same direction, from the past to the future--does the
zero occur which denotes the boundary between the positive and the
negative? Spain, which is said to be the land of knights and rogues--and
all of them rogues--has been the country most slandered by history
precisely because it championed the Counter-Reformation. And because
its arrogance has prevented it from stepping down into the public
forum, into the world's vanity fair, and publishing its own
justification.
Let us leave on one side Spain's eight centuries of warfare against the
Moors, during which she defended Europe from Mohammedanism, her work of
internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies--for this
was the achievement of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama--let us leave all this, and more than this, on one side, and it
is not a little thing. Is it not a cultural achievement to have created
a score of nations, reserving nothing for herself, and to have begotten,
as the Conquistadores did, free men on poor Indian slaves? Apart from
all this, does our mysticism count for nothing in the world of thought?
Perhaps the peoples whose souls Helen will ravish away with her kisses
may some day have to return to this mysticism to find their souls again.
But, as everybody knows, Culture is composed of ideas and only of ideas,
and man is only Culture's instrument. Man for the idea, and not the idea
for man; the substance for the shadow. The end of man is to create
science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God
in order, as I wrote years ago in my novel, _Amor y Pedagogia_. Man,
apparently, is not even an idea. And at the end of all, the human race
will fall exhausted at the foot of a pile of libraries--whole woods
rased to the ground to provide the paper that is stored away in
them--museums, machines, factories, laboratories ... in order to
bequeath them--to whom? For God will surely not accept them.
That horrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture,
which the loss of our last American colonies provoked, led us into the
pedantry of extolling persevering and silent effort--and this with great
vociferation, vociferating silence--of extolling prudence, exactitude,
moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the social
virtues, and the chiefest advocates of them were those of us who lacked
them most. Almost all of us Spaniards fell into this ridiculous mode of
literature, some more and some less. And so it befell that that
arch-Spaniard Joaquín Costa, one of the least European spirits we ever
had, invented his famous saying that we must Europeanize Spain, and,
while proclaiming that we must lock up the sepulchre of the Cid with a
sevenfold lock, Cid-like urged us to--conquer Africa! And I myself
uttered the cry, "Down with Don Quixote!" and from this blasphemy, which
meant the very opposite of what it said--such was the fashion of the
hour--sprang my _Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho_ and my cult of Quixotism
as the national religion.
I wrote that book in order to rethink _Don Quixote_ in opposition to the
Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what
was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to
me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he
actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover
in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and
under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to hunt down
our philosophy in it.
For the conviction continually grows upon me that our philosophy, the
Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our
life, in our action, in our mysticism, above all, 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_, the
_Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept
of life (_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_). And it was difficult for
this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the
nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist,
technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period
essentially materialist and pessimist.
Our language itself, like every cultured language, contains within
itself an implicit philosophy.
A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek
language which discourses in Plato, unfolding its secular metaphors;
scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages
wrestling with the popular tongues; the French language discourses in
Descartes, the German in Kant and in Hegel, and the English in Hume and
in Stuart Mill. For the truth is that the logical starting-point of all
philosophical speculation is not the I, neither is it representation
(_Vorstellung_), nor the world as it presents itself immediately to the
senses; but it is mediate or historical representation, humanly
elaborated and such as it is given to us principally in the language by
means of which we know the world; it is not psychical but spiritual
representation. When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we
know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by
others who came before us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance.
Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau,
who thought in English and French respectively. And did not Spinoza
think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch?
Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pass into language.
To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the _idola
fori_. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in
Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to
read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (_reine
Erfahrung_), of this prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius,
who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon
the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical
implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.
All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with
its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, opens wide the door
to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History
is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical
ideas are not strictly owing to something akin to rhyme, to the
necessity of rightly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a
great deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme.
Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason itself--which
is simply internal language--a social and racial product, and race, the
blood of the spirit, is language, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and
as I have often repeated.
It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first
became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness
by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly
significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and
normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as
Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas,
which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they
may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing
less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a
mere vehicle of reality, but as its true flesh, of which all the rest,
dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus
logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the
word, and not upon the brute perception.
And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that
it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee! In Stendhal's
novel, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, it is with a very profound intuition
that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he
believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is
made to say, "I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess,
simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate,
and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give
a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a
moment all the consequences will follow."
Even so--all things were made by the word, and the word was in the
beginning.
Thought, reason--that is, living language--is an inheritance, and the
solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as
absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the
methodical and ideal, is: _homo sum, ergo cogito_. To feel oneself a man
is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the
process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only
in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man,
each individual. _Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de
Unamuno_. The individual is the end of the Universe.
And we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end
of the Universe. The introspective individuality of the Spaniard was
pointed out by Martin A.S. Hume in a passage in _The Spanish
People_,[63] upon which I commented in an essay published in _La España
Moderna_.[64]
And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has not
permitted the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical--or,
rather, metaphysical--systems. And this in spite of Suárez, whose formal
subtilties do not merit the name of philosophy.
Our metaphysics, if we can be said to possess such a thing, has been
metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists--or,
rather, humanists--in the most comprehensive sense of the term.
Menéndez de Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce very truly said (_Estetica_,
bibliographical appendix), was inclined towards metaphysical idealism,
but he appeared to wish to take something from other systems, even from
empirical theories. For this reason Croce considers that his work
(referring to his _Historia de las ideas estéticas de España_) suffers
from a certain uncertainty, from the theoretical point of view of its
author, Menéndez de Pelayo, which was that of a perfervid Spanish
humanist, who, not wishing to disown the Renaissance, invented what he
called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other
reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of
the Renaissance. And it is true that Menéndez de Pelayo, whose
philosophy is certainly all uncertainty, educated in Barcelona in the
timidities of the Scottish philosophy as it had been imported into the
Catalan spirit--that creeping philosophy of common sense, which was
anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which
is so well exemplified in Balmes--always shunned all strenuous inward
combat and formed his consciousness upon compromises.
Angel Ganivet, a man all divination and instinct, was more happily
inspired, in my opinion, when he proclaimed that the Spanish philosophy
was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Cordoba, whom not a few
Christians regarded as one of themselves, a philosophy lacking in
originality of thought but speaking with great dignity of tone and
accent. His accent was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, not Hellenic,
and there are echoes of him in Tertullian--Spanish, too, at heart--who
believed in the corporal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and
who was a kind of Don Quixote in the world of Christian thought in the
second century.
But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any
actual flesh-and-bone philosopher, but in a creation of fiction, a man
of action, who is more real than all the philosophers--Don Quixote.
There is undoubtedly a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a
Quixotic philosophy. May it not perhaps be that the philosophy of the
Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and above all, in
the order of abstract but deeply felt thought, that of our mystics, was,
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 philosophy of Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he
did not fight for ideas. It was of the spiritual order; he fought for
the spirit.
Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation--as he
himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief
which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their
village church[65]--imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon
eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the
dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun
which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John's companion in
the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and scrutinize its
spots. He leaves to Athena's owl--the goddess with the glaucous, or
owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of
noon--he leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus the task
of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for the prey wherewith to
feed its young.
And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like the practical
Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross. And
therefore it is despised by the reason. At bottom, philosophy 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, by making a mockery of it,
sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of
the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried "Behold
the man!" But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts
for tragedy, shouted, "Crucify him! crucify him!" And the human, the
intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was
daubed with soap in order that he might make sport for the servants of
the dukes and for the dukes themselves, as servile as their servants.
"Behold the madman!" they would have said. And the comic, the
irrational, tragedy is the tragedy of suffering caused by ridicule and
contempt.
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people,
can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to
make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.
I have already spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese,
Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the
plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890,
he wrote as follows:[66] "An English statesman of the last century, who
was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace
Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy
for those who think. Very well, then, if we are destined to end
tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we would far rather 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 it is to finish miserably and
comically." We may leave on one side the assertion that the English are
a thinking and calculating people, implying thereby their lack of
feeling, the injustice of which is explained by the occasion which
provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying
that they do not think or calculate--for we twin-brothers of the
Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry
of feeling; but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible
idea--namely, that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I
should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically
who put faith above reason. For the mockers are those who die comically,
and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of
tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery.
The mockery that underlies the career of Don Quixote is what we must
endeavour to discover.
And shall we be told yet again that there has never been any Spanish
philosophy in the technical sense of the word? I will answer by asking,
What is this sense? What does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian
of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (_Was ist
Philosophie_? in the first volume of his _Präludien_) tells us that "the
history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural
significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains
an independent existence as a desire for knowledge for the sake of
knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge
as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general
knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as
scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or
religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life
or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the
scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its
character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it
abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory
of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the
history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval
scholasticism upon which it endeavoured to establish religious beliefs.
But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be
to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been
studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith,
between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this
conflict?
Later on Windelband says: "By philosophy in the systematic, not in the
historical, sense, I understand the critical knowledge of values of
universal validity (_allgemeingiltigen Werten_)." But what values are
there of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking
before all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of
the soul--or, in other words, the human finality of the Universe--and
that of the human reason denying the rationality and even the
possibility of this desire? What values are there of more universal
validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or
teleological value of the Universe in conflict with one another?
For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are
only three normative categories, three universal norms--those of the
true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or
evil. Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics,
accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality. Another category
remains excluded--namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or
the agreeable and the disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The
hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it
cannot be normative. "Whosoever throws upon philosophy," wrote
Windelband, "the burden of deciding the question of optimism and
pessimism, whosoever demands that philosophy should pronounce judgement
on the question as to whether the world is more adapted to produce pain
than pleasure, or _vice versa_--such a one, if his attitude is not
merely that of a dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding
an absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable man has
ever looked for one." It remains to be seen, nevertheless, whether this
is as clear as it seems, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the
same time reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which of course
would be the abomination of desolation.
It was with a very profound insight that Benedetto Croce, in his
philosophy of the spirit in relation to esthetics as the science of
expression and to logic as the science of pure concept, divided
practical philosophy into two branches--economics and ethics. He
recognizes, in effect, the existence of a practical grade of spirit,
purely economical, directed towards the singular and unconcerned with
the universal. Its types of perfection, of economic genius, are Iago and
Napoleon, and this grade remains outside morality. And every man passes
through this grade, because before all else he must wish to be himself,
as an individual, and without this grade morality would be inexplicable,
just as without esthetics logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of
the normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the hedonic, was
not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who
speculated so fearlessly with regard to _virtù_, practical efficiency,
which is not exactly the same as moral virtue.
But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary state of the
religious grade. The religious is the transcendental economic or
hedonic. Religion is a transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which
man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own
individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science,
nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor
art, nor ethics; what necessitates God is religion. And with an insight
that amounts to genius our Jesuits speak of the grand business of our
salvation. Business--yes, business; something belonging to the economic,
hedonistic order, although transcendental. We do not need God in order
that He may teach us the truth of things, or the beauty of them, or in
order that He may safeguard morality by means of a system of penalties
and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may
not let us die utterly. And because this unique longing is the longing
of each and every normal man--those who are abnormal by reason of their
barbarism or their hyperculture may be left out of the reckoning--it is
universal and normative.
Religion, therefore, is a transcendental economy, or, if you like,
metaphysic. Together with its logical, esthetic, and ethical values, the
Universe has for man an economic value also, which, when thus made
universal and normative, is the religious value. We are not concerned
only with truth, beauty, and goodness: we are concerned also and above
all with the salvation of the individual, with perpetuation, which those
norms do not secure for us. That science of economy which is called
political teaches us the most adequate, the most economical way of
satisfying our needs, whether these needs are rational or irrational,
beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral--a business economically good may be
a swindle, something that in the long run kills the soul--and the
supreme human _need_ is the need of not dying, the need of enjoying for
ever the plenitude of our own individual limitation. And if the Catholic
eucharistic doctrine teaches that the substance of the body of Jesus
Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host, and in each
part of it, this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole
Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it. And
this is, fundamentally, not a logical, nor an esthetic, nor an ethical
principle, but a transcendental economic or religious principle. And
with this norm, philosophy is able to judge of optimism and pessimism.
_If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or
hedonistically good; if not, it is bad_. And the meaning which pessimism
and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical
sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense. Good is that which satisfies
our vital longing and evil is that which does not satisfy it.
Philosophy, therefore, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a
reflection upon the tragic sense of it. An essay in this philosophy,
with its inevitable internal contradictions and antinomies, is what I
have attempted in these essays. And the reader must not overlook the
fact that I have been operating upon myself; that this work partakes of
the nature of a piece of self-surgery, and without any other anesthetic
than that of the work itself. The enjoyment of operating upon myself has
ennobled the pain of being operated upon.
And as for my other claim--the claim that this is a Spanish philosophy,
perhaps _the_ Spanish philosophy, that if it was an Italian who
discovered the normative and universal value of the economic grade, it
is a Spaniard who announces that this grade is merely the beginning of
the religious grade, and that the essence of our religion, of our
Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its being neither a science,
nor an art, nor an ethic, but an economy of things eternal--that is to
say, of things divine: as for this claim that all this is Spanish, I
must leave the task of substantiating it to another and an historical
work. But leaving aside the external and written tradition, that which
can be demonstrated by reference to historical documents, is there not
some present justification of this claim in the fact that I am a
Spaniard--and a Spaniard who has scarcely ever been outside Spain; a
product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition of the living tradition, of
the tradition which is transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, and
not in texts that sleep?
The philosophy in the soul of my people appears 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 what the world is as
scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be, as
our religious faith affirms it to be. And in this philosophy is to be
found the explanation of what is usually said about us--namely, that we
are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_--or, in other words, that we
refuse to submit to it. No, Don Quixote does not resign himself either
to the world, or to science or logic, or to art or esthetics, or to
morality or ethics.
"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by
more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing
will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been
accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so! And what
then?
Yes, I know, I know very well, that it is madness to seek to turn the
waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the
ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills;
but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although
his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the
future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at
home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a
creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is
a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. The march, as
ever, is towards the future, and he who marches is getting there, even
though he march walking backwards. And who knows if that is not the
better way!...
I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the
soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the
Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution--learning from them,
yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the
spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark
Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle
between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the offspring of
the Middle Ages.
And if some accuse me of subserving the cause of Catholic reaction,
others perhaps, the official Catholics.... But these, in Spain, trouble
themselves little about anything, and are interested only in their own
quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they have neither eyes
nor ears!
But the truth is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to
shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in
affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and
this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all
those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to
agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and
passionate desire.
Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the
immediate apparential efficacy of his work? It is very doubtful, and at
any rate he did not by any chance put his visor to the test by slashing
it a second time. And many passages in his history show that he did not
look with much confidence to the immediate success of his design to
restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter to him so long as thus
he lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in
fact surmise, that his work would have another and higher efficacy, and
that was that it would ferment in the minds of all those who in a pious
spirit read of his exploits.
Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic
ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self
to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's
battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul
to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure
of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho, at his
side, inward and heroical too--and tell me if you find anything comic in
the tragedy.
And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left
himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and
all philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books;
we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any _Critique
of Pure Reason_.
But Don Quixote was converted. Yes--and died, poor soul. But the other,
the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives amongst us,
animating us with his spirit--this Don Quixote was not converted, this
Don Quixote continues to incite 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, and not his death nor his conversion that
immortalized him, earning him forgiveness for the crime of having been
born.[67] _Felix culpa!_ And neither was his madness cured, but only
transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure; in dying he
stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.
This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered
lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley
slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down 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 paternally at him, and this
divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.
And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with
desperation. And does he not fight out of despair? How is it that among
the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as _siesta,
camarilla, guerrilla_, there is to be found this word _desperdo_? Is not
this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic
comicness, a man of despair (_desesperado_). A _desperado_--yes, like
Pizarro and like Loyola. But "despair is the master of impossibilities,"
as we learn from Salazar y Torres (_Elegir al enemigo_, Act I.), and it
is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad
hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to have been said, rather than
_credo_.
And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he
sought the solitudes of the Peña Pobre, in order that there, alone,
without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with
which to assuage his soul. But he was not quite alone, 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. And at any rate he is waiting for some other mad
knight to follow again.
And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who
journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it is not certain that he died,
although some think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance
and believing in the truth of all those things which his dying and
converted master had denounced and abominated as lies. But neither is it
certain that the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber,
or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the
heroical Sancho has to contend.
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 only exists 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 esthetic, a whole logic, a
whole ethic--above all, a whole religion--that is to say, a whole
economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is
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 the greatest thing about him was his having been mocked and
vanquished, for it was in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame
the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him.
And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his
endeavours so far as their temporal results are concerned; he sees
himself from without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, to
alienate himself from himself instead of entering into himself--and in
seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter
laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte
of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of
laughter, but of 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, realized his own comicness and bewept
his sins; but the immortal Quixote, realizing his own comicness,
superimposes himself upon it and triumphs over it without renouncing it.
And Don Quixote does not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and
he fights on. He is not a pessimist, because pessimism is begotten by
vanity, it is a matter of fashion, pure intellectual snobbism, and Don
Quixote is neither vain nor modern with any sort of modernity (still
less is he a modernist), and he does not understand the meaning of the
word "snob" unless it be explained to him in old Christian Spanish. Don
Quixote is not a pessimist, for since he does not understand what is
meant by the _joie de vivre_ he does not understand its opposite.
Neither does he understand futurist fooleries. In spite of
Clavileño,[68] he has not got as far as the aeroplane, which seems to
tend to put not a few fools at a still greater distance from heaven. Don
Quixote has not arrived at the age of the tedium of life, a condition
that not infrequently takes the form of that topophobia so
characteristic of many modern spirits, who pass their lives running at
top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to
which they are going, but from hatred of the place they are leaving
behind, and so flying from all places: which is one of the forms of
despair.
But Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter,
and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he
has to fight, attacking the modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy
in order to bring in 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 that
began with Machiavelli and that will end comically. He fights against
the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind,
reconciliation between reason and faith--this, thanks to the providence
of God, is no longer possible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes
it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight with it and will,
to all appearances, be vanquished, but he will triumph by making himself
ridiculous. And he will triumph by laughing at himself and making
himself the object of his own laughter.
"Reason speaks and feeling bites" said Petrarch; but reason also bites
and bites in the inmost heart. 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 kills, but the frost. We must liberate the enchanted
princess and destroy the stage of Master Peter.[69]
But God! may there not be pedantry too in thinking ourselves the objects
of mockery and in making Don Quixotes of ourselves? Kierkegaard said
that the regenerate (_Opvakte_) desire that the wicked world should mock
at them for the better assurance of their own regeneracy, for the
enjoyment of being able to bemoan the wickedness of the world
(_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_, ii., Afsnit ii., cap. 4,
sect. 2, b).
The question is, how to avoid the one or the other pedantry, or the one
or the other affectation, if the natural man is only a myth and we are
all artificial.
Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is partly the word. And there is an
advantage in its very lack of precision. Against romanticism the forces
of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have
latterly been unchained. Romanticism itself is merely another form of
pedantry, the pedantry of sentiment? Perhaps. In this world a man of
culture is either a dilettante or a pedant: you have to take your
choice. Yes, René and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were
all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation.
The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration,
essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a
_demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_,
mundane. Mundane--yes, a philosophy for the world and not for
philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The
world desires illusion (_mundus vult decipi_)--either the illusion
antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to
reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever
wishes to delude will always find someone willing to be deluded. Blessed
are they who are easily befooled! A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, 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 make the demand," 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 succeed in resigning
themselves and accepting 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 also contaminated
himself with criticism, has to attack his own self, the victim of
intellectualism and of sentimentalism, and when he wishes to be most
spontaneous he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy man,
to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest
victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches
the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that intellectual Don
Quixote who escaped from the cloister--and becomes an awakener of
sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican
said of himself--he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those
superior natures who are called insane (_insano_) not because they do
not know (_no sanno_), but because they over-know (_soprasanno_)."
But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines; at any rate the
inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite
the Vatican, states that it has been dedicated to him by the age which
he had foretold (_il secolo da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the
inward, the immortal Don Quixote, 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 alone 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 for the inscription written over the Cross.
What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, to-day, in this world? To
cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But though men hear not, the
wilderness hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding
forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering over the wilderness
like seed, will fructify into a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred
thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of
death.
And now to you, the younger generation, bachelor Carrascos of a
Europeanizing regenerationism, you who are working after the best
European fashion, with scientific method and criticism, to you I say:
Create wealth, create nationality, create art, create science, create
ethics, above all create--or rather, translate--_Kultur_, and thus kill
in yourselves both life and death. Little will it all last you!...
And with this I conclude--high time that I did!--for the present at any
rate, these essays on the tragic sense of life in men and in peoples, or
at least in myself--who am a man--and in the soul of my people as it is
reflected in mine.
I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in
some interval between the acts, we shall meet again. And we shall
recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than
was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my
pen proposing to distract you for a while from your distractions. And
may God deny you peace, but give you glory!
SALAMANCA, _In the year of grace_ 1912.