Chapter IV: Introduction (3)

And, to apply this to our own people, why must we persist in distorting our inner nature and rejecting what it gives us in order to try to force it to give us something else?

Our defects, or what others call our defects, are usually the root of our excellencies; the qualities that are censured as our vices are the foundation of our virtues. It is not a universal æsthetic, applicable to all peoples alike, a pure æsthetic--for I doubt whether such an æsthetic exists or even can exist--that has condemned our conceptism and gongorism, for example, and that has decreed that our genuine and natural instinct for emphasis is in bad taste. It is not a universal æsthetic, valid for all peoples alike, but the æsthetic of other peoples, or rather of one other people, the French, that has imposed this canon upon so many of us. The literary and artistic vices of this terribly logical, desperately geometrical, Cartesian people are certainly not those of conceptism or gongorism, and this people has succeeded in great measure in teaching us its virtues and in teaching us its vices. There is nothing more intolerable than gallicized Spanish literature; nothing more false, more futile, more displeasing, than Spanish writers who have formed themselves by imitating French literature.

Emphasis? But what if emphasis is natural to us? What if emphatic expression is the spontaneous expression of our nature? What if emphasis is the form of passion, just as what is called naturalness is the expression of sensuality and of good sense? What I am sure of is that when a man is really irritated or really enthusiastic, he does not express himself in concise, clear, logical, transparent phrases, but he breaks out into emphatic exclamations, into redundant dithyrambs. What I know, and what everybody knows, is that in love-letters, if the love be real love, tragic love, love that cannot be happy, everything is poured forth in a flood of burning commonplaces.

I have often thought that gongorism and conceptism are, in a certain mode, expressions of passion. I affirm it of conceptism, arbitrarily, of course. Almost all the great men of passion that I am acquainted with in the history of human thought, including the great African of whom I have already spoken, have been conceptists, have poured forth their longings, their aspirations, in antitheses, in paradoxes, in phrases that at first sight seem to be merely ingenious. Perhaps this is owing to the fact that passion is the enemy of logic, in which it sees a tyrant, for passion desires that what it desires should exist, and does not desire what must exist, and conceptism in its essence is a violation of logic for the sake of logic itself. He plays with concepts and does violence to ideas who is impeded by concepts and ideas, for he is unable to make them comply with the demands of his passion.

I need the immortality of my soul, the indefinite persistence of my individual consciousness--I need it. Without it, without faith in it, I cannot live, and doubt, the inability to believe that I shall attain it, torments me. And since I need it, my passion leads me to affirm it, and to affirm it arbitrarily, and when I attempt to make others believe, to make myself believe, I do violence to logic and make use of arguments which are called ingenious and paradoxical by those unfortunate people who have no passion and who contemplate their ultimate dissolution with resignation.

The man of passion, the arbitrary man, is the only real rebel, and nothing makes a more grotesque impression upon me than when I come across those--usually gallicized--individuals who proclaim themselves emancipated from all tyrannies, lovers of liberty, _esprits forts_, anarchists sometimes, frequently atheists, but who nevertheless are the faithful devotees of logic and of the code of good taste.

Yes, emphasis, turgidity, conceptism, paradoxism, these are the language passion speaks, and, on the other hand, there is nothing less natural, for us Spaniards at any rate, than that which the French call _naturel_ and which is usually the refined product of an exquisite and artificial elaboration.

Some Frenchman has said that French literature is that which gives the most eloquent expression to the great commonplaces of humanity; but I would say that it is in this literature, which has done and still does so much harm in Spain, that all middling ideas and middling feelings find their most adequate form and expression, and that it is hostile to extreme ideas and extreme feelings.

Observe that the French spirit has produced no great mystic, no really great pure mystic. Observe that upon Pascal, although he was somewhat arbitrary and passionate, geometry made a profound impression. And consider the fact that Pascal is one of the French spirits that we are best able to appropriate. It is to this most profound and tortured spirit that we owe two great and profound instances, among others, of tormentingly arbitrary utterance: that of the _pari_ or wager, and that of _il faut s’abêtir_, “we must become as fools”--in order to believe, beginning with acting as if we did believe. But I don’t know of any great mystic, any really pure mystic, who was a Frenchman. And here I should like to say something about the gentle, tranquil, sensual and logical St. Francis of Sales, so full of common sense and of a spiritual _via media_, but I must leave it for some other time.

And it is the æsthetic of this people, so opposed to our own, in spite of all that nonsense about the Latin sisterhood--I don’t know whether they are Latin, I don’t know whether we are, and as regards myself personally, I believe that there is nothing Latin about me--it is the æsthetic of this people that is deforming the fruit of our spirit as it is expressed in many of our spiritual creators.

Latins. Latins? And why, if we are really Berbers, must we not feel and assert that we are Berbers, and why must not the poetry in which we endeavour to give expression to our sorrows and our consolations conform to the Berber æsthetic?

The only way of entering into vital relations with another is the aggressive way; only those succeed in mutually penetrating one another, in forming a spiritual brotherhood, who strive to subjugate one another spiritually, whether in the case of individuals or of peoples. It is only when I strive to put my spirit into the spirit of my neighbour that I receive my neighbour’s spirit in mine. The apostle is blessed in receiving in himself the souls of those whom he converts; in this consists the nobility of proselytizing.

No, none of this _laissez-faire_ and _laissez-aller_--don’t let us shrug our shoulders at the ideas, still less at the feelings, of others, but rather try to wound them. It is thus and only thus that they will wound ours and keep them awake within us. For my part I know that those to whom I owe most are those who have acted as if they rejected, who have wished to reject, what I offered to them. The deep moral life is a life of aggression and mutual penetration. Everyone must endeavour to make others in his own image and likeness, as God is said to have made us in His image and likeness.

The condemnation of him who tries to mould himself upon another lies in the fact that he will cease to be himself without succeeding in being the other whom he takes as his model, and so he will be nobody.

Unquestionably there is something, there are many things, in modern European culture and in the modern European spirit that it behoves us to receive into ourselves in order that we may convert them into our flesh, just as we receive the flesh of various kinds of animals into our body and convert it into our flesh. With the brains of oxen I nourish my brain, with the ribs of hogs I make my heart beat, with fish and birds I feed my body so that my spirit can plunge into the deeps and swim in them and ascend to the heights and fly there. And must we not eat the modern European spirit? Yes, but we first kill these oxen, hogs, fishes and birds, upon which we nourish ourselves, imposing our will upon them, and we must deal with this spirit in the same way before eating it.

I am profoundly convinced, arbitrarily of course--the more profoundly, the more arbitrarily, as is always the case when truths of faith are concerned--I am profoundly convinced that the real and deep Europeanization of Spain, that is to say, our digestion of that part of the European spirit which it is possible to convert into our spirit, will not begin until we strive to impose ourselves upon the European spiritual order, to make the Europeans swallow our spirit, that which is genuinely ours, in exchange for theirs, until we strive to Spaniardize Europe.

And to-day--I say it with shame and sorrow--when a Spaniard seeks to enter into the European world, that is to say, in the case of men of letters, when he wishes to be translated, all that he is concerned about is to deform himself, to de-Spaniardize himself, to leave the translator nothing to do but to translate the letter, the external language. And thus it is that one hears remarks like that which a Frenchman made to me the other day, when, speaking of the translation of a contemporary Spanish novel, he stated that it was better in French than in Spanish. To this I replied that it had been translated back into its original language.

Each human faculty has its method, that is to say, its procedure, its mode of action. That which we call logic is the method of reason, the way of discovering conclusions satisfactory to reason. In this way science is made. But when it is a question neither of addressing nor satisfying reason, there is no need of logic. And for my part, I rarely, very rarely, address myself to the reason of those who hear or read me, and when I do so, it is not I myself who speak or write, but rather an artificial self--and because artificial, therefore detachable--which those who hear or read me impose upon me.

It has been said that the heart has its logic, but it is dangerous to call the method of the heart logic; it would be better to call it _cardiac_.

And there is also the method of passion, which is arbitrariness and which must not be confounded with caprice, as often happens. It is one thing to be capricious and another very different thing to be arbitrary.

Arbitrariness, the brusque affirmation of a thing because I wish it to be so, because I need it to be so, the creation of our vital truth--truth being that which makes us live--is the method of passion. Passion affirms and the proof of its affirmation is founded upon the energy with which it is affirmed. It needs no other proofs. When some poor intellectual, some modern European, opposes ratiocinations and arguments to any of my affirmations, I say to myself: reasons, reasons, and nothing more than reasons!

Although he deserved to have been a Spaniard for writing them, it was not a Spaniard but an Englishman who wrote these lines:

For nothing worthy proving can be proven
Nor yet disproven; wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.

It was Lord Tennyson who wrote these pregnant lines, and in the same poem, “The Ancient Sage,” he tells us that “knowledge is the swallow on the lake that stirs and sees the surface-shadow there, but never yet hath dipt into the abysm.”

Let, then, my last words here, while I am preparing to consider how it is possible to Spaniardize Europe, be that nothing worthy proving can be proven nor yet disproven.

THE SPANISH CHRIST

He was a foreigner, a South American, and he came from Paris. “But these Christs!--Good God!” he said to me, as we stood before one of the bloodiest of those that are to be found in our cathedrals, “this thing repels, revolts----”

“It revolts him who knows nothing of the cult of suffering,” I said. And he replied: “But suffering is not blood. There is bloodless suffering, serene suffering.” ...

And we began to talk about it.

I confessed to him that I have the soul of my people, and that I like these livid Christs, emaciated, purple, bloody, these Christs that someone has called ferocious. Lacking in art? Barbarous? I don’t know. And I like these harsh Marias Dolorosas, rigid with grief.

The Spanish Christ--so Guerra Junqueiro has often said to me--was born in Tangiers. Perhaps. Perhaps He is an African Christ. Would He be more Christ if He were an Attic or a Parisian or an English Christ? For the other Christ, the Galilean, the historical, we must bid farewell to. And as for history as applied to Christianity.... This history is the history of the last twenty centuries, and here, in Spain, history is Spanish. He was born then, perhaps, in Tangiers. Not very far from Tangiers was born St. Augustine.

Bloodless, serene, purified suffering.... Yes, yes, “stylistic”--or shall we say, artistic?--suffering. The cry of suffering breathed into a flute and become a dirge. Very good. All that the Laocoön inspired in Lessing was just that.

Very good. But it is the same with this kind of suffering as with irony. Usually ironists are people who are never angry. He who is angry is insulting. The ironist forgives everything and says that it is because he understands everything. And what if it is because he understands nothing? I don’t know.

This harsh, raw manner of ours--I said to my friend, the South American--not everyone can bear it. It has been said that hate is rife in Spain. Perhaps. Perhaps we begin by hating ourselves. You will find many here, a great many, who dislike themselves. We follow the precept of “love thy neighbour as thyself,” and since, in spite of inevitable egoism, we do not love ourselves, so neither do we love our neighbours. The ascetic and the egoist are made in the same way. Not that the ascetic is not an egoist; egoistic he may indeed be, and with a vengeance. But even when an egoist, he does not know how to love himself.

When you see a bull-fight, I continued, you will understand these Christs. The poor bull is also a kind of irrational Christ, a propitiatory victim, whose blood cleanses us from not a few of the sins of barbarism. And leads us, nevertheless, to others. But is it not true that forgiveness leads us--unhappy humans!--to sin again?

My friend saw a bull-fight in Madrid and wrote to me as follows;

“You are right. The Spanish people likes violent spectacles, which
beget the emotion of tragedy, or rather of ferocity. I had no
difficulty in understanding this at the bull-fight last Sunday. I
understood it also when I conversed with various people, and in
particular with literary people, who tear one another to pieces
with unparalleled ferocity. Poor Christ, pierced and bathed with
blood! There is no hope that His wounds will ever heal in these
Spanish cathedrals or that the grimace of His frenzied pain will
ever relax--for here there is no knowledge of the return of Jesus
to heaven, after His martyrdom.”

Perhaps--who knows?--our heaven is martyrdom itself.

Not a few foreigners who have learnt to know us have been struck with this ferocity with which, here in Spain, men of letters destroy one another. Yes, here all men, but particularly artists and writers, destroy one another with the ferocity of bull-fighters--or it may be with the Christian ferocity of our Tangerine Christianity.

And I, who do not like bull-fights and never go to see them, I, who do not like flaying my fellow writers (for the office of executioner dirties the hands), I like these Tangerine Christs, purple, livid, blood-stained and blood-drained. Yes, I like these bleeding and exsanguious Christs.

And the smell of tragedy! Above all, the smell of tragedy!

* * * * *

You should read the great Sarmiento’s comparison between bull-fights and tragedy, in his account of his journey in Spain about the middle of the last century. In the bull-fight there is none of the insupportable unities of the pseudo-classical tragedy, and there is, moreover, real dying. Real dying, and, above all, real killing. The bull is killed just as an infidel dog was killed by a good Spanish Christian in the good old days--really killed.

For many people, perhaps for my friend the American, all this creates an atmosphere difficult to breathe, an acrid atmosphere. But if you take away the taste, other atmospheres too become insipid. It is like the austere beauty of our bleak upland deserts. He who tempers his soul, or distempers it--I know not which--in the contemplation of these blood-stained and blood-drained Christs, never accustoms himself afterwards to others.

And this hate, this same hate that circulates everywhere here, like a subterranean stream of lava, this same hate ...

It has its source in what is deepest in ourselves; we hate ourselves and not one another only, but each one his own self.

“But you people have no real love of life, although you are tenacious of it,” another foreigner said to me once, a Frenchman, as one who makes a discovery. And I replied: “Perhaps!” He exclaimed again: “But this is a veritable cult of death!” And I answered: “Of death, no--of immortality!” The fear that if we die, we die utterly and altogether, makes us cling to life, and the hope of living another life makes us hate this one.

_La joie de vivre._ It has been translated _la alegría de vivir_. But it is only a translation. This _alegría de vivir_--let them say what they like--is a gallicism. It is not an authentic Spanish phrase. I do not remember to have met with it in any of our classics. For man’s greatest crime is that of having been born.[1] Indeed it is!

And this same literary ferocity with which our men of letters bite and tear and flay and quarter one another is not without its sharp voluptuousness for the spectator. And it is in this strife that our masterminds are tempered. Many of their ripest have been produced in the atmosphere of defamatory coteries. And they carry with them, naturally enough, the acrid flavour of their origin. They smell of hate. And the public, scenting hate, becomes excited and applauds. Applauds as it does at the bull-fight when it smells blood. Blood of the body or blood of the soul, what is there else?

Is this cultured? is this civilized? is this European? I don’t know. But it is Spanish.

Ought we to be ashamed of it? Why? Better to probe into it, scrutinize it, stir up the depths of it, make ourselves fully conscious of this hatred of our own selves. The evil lies in our being unconscious of it, for once it is revealed to us for what it is, a hatred and abhorrence of our own selves, it is already in the way of becoming ennobling and strengthening and redeeming. Do you not remember that terrible paradox of the Gospels about having to hate father and mother and wife and children in order to take up the cross, the blood-stained cross, and follow the Redeemer? Hatred of ourselves, when it is unconscious, obscure, purely instinctive, almost animal, engenders egoism; but when it becomes conscious, clear, rational, it is able to engender heroism. And there is a rational hatred, yes, there is.

Yes, there is a triumphant, heavenly, glorious Christ, He of the Transfiguration, He of the Ascension, He who sits at the right hand of the Father; but He is for when we shall have triumphed, for when we shall have been transfigured, for when we shall have ascended. But for here and now, in this bull-ring of the world, in this life which is nothing but tragic bull-fighting, the other Christ, the livid, the purple, the bleeding and exsanguious.

THE SEPULCHRE OF DON QUIXOTE

You ask me, my friend, if I know of any way of loosing a delirium, a vertigo, any kind of madness, upon these poor ordered and tranquil multitudes who are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die. Is there no means, you ask me, of reproducing the epidemic of the Flagellants or of the Tarantists? And you talk of the millennium.

Like you, I often feel a nostalgia for the Middle Ages; like you, I should like to live in the throes of the millennium. If we could make people believe that on a given day, say the 2nd of May, 1908,--the centenary of our shout of independence--Spain would come to an end for ever, that on that day we should be scattered like sheep, then I believe that the 3rd of May, 1908, would be the greatest day of our history, the dawn of a new life.

But now it’s all hopeless, utterly hopeless. Nothing whatever matters to anybody. And if any isolated individual attempts to agitate any problem or question, he is supposed to be prompted either by self-interest or by a thirst for notoriety and a passion for singularizing himself.

Not even madness is understood here to-day. Even of the madman they say that there is method and reason in his madness. The wretched multitude takes for granted the reason of unreason. If our Lord Don Quixote were to rise again and return to this Spain of his, they would go about looking for some ulterior purpose in his noble extravagances. If any one denounces an abuse, attacks injustice, fustigates orthodox platitudes, the slavish crowd asks: What is his object in that? What is he aiming at? Sometimes they believe and say that he does it in the hope of being paid to keep quiet; sometimes that he is actuated by base and despicable passions of vengeance and envy; sometimes that his motive is vainglory, that he only wants to make a stir in order to get himself talked about; sometimes that he does it for the sake of killing time, for amusement, for sport. Pity that there are so few who go in for this kind of sport!

Mark this well!--When confronted by any act of generosity, of heroism, of madness, all these stupid bachelors, curates and barbers of to-day think only of asking: Why does he do it? And as soon as they think they have discovered the reason of the action, whether their supposition is correct or not, they exclaim: Bah! he has done it for the sake of this or for the sake of that. As soon as they know the _raison d’être_ of a thing, that thing has lost all its value for them. Such are the uses of logic, filthy logic.

To understand is to forgive, it has been said. And these mean souls need to understand in order to forgive their being humiliated, to forgive the indirect reproach of deeds and words that show up their own meanness.

When it has occurred to them to ask themselves, stupidly enough, why God made the world, they have answered: For His own glory! And the fools are as pompously satisfied with the answer as if they knew what is meant by the glory of God.

Things are made first, their wherefore comes afterwards. Give me any new idea about anything and it will tell me its wherefore afterwards.

Whenever I put forward some project, something which it appears to me ought to be done, there is always somebody who is sure to ask me: And afterwards? To such a question the only possible reply is another question. To the “And afterwards?” one can only ripost by an “And before?”

There is no future, there is never any future. This thing that is called the future is one of the greatest of deceptions. The real future is to-day. What is going to happen to us to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What is happening to us to-day? That is the only question.

And so far as to-day is concerned, all these petty souls are quite content because to-day they exist. Existing suffices them. Existence, sheer, naked existence, fills their whole soul. They don’t feel that there is something more than existing.

But do they exist? Do they really exist? I believe not. For if they existed, if they really existed, they would suffer because they existed, existing would not content them. If they really and truly existed in time and in space they would suffer because they did not exist in eternity and in infinity. And this suffering, this passion, which is nothing other than the passion of God in us, of God who in us suffers at feeling Himself imprisoned in our finitude and our temporality, this divine suffering would cause them to break all those paltry logical chains with which they seek to bind their paltry memories to their paltry hopes, the illusion of their past to the illusion of their future.

“Why does he do it?” Did Sancho, perchance, never inquire why Don Quixote did the things that he did?

And to return to your question, to your preoccupation: With what collective madness could we inoculate these tranquil multitudes? With what delirium?

You yourself have hinted at a solution in one of those letters in which you bombard me with questions. “Do you not believe,” you asked me, “that it might be possible to start some new crusade?”

Yes, I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of Don Quixote from the dominion of the bachelors, curates, barbers, dukes and canons who have taken possession of it. I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly from the dominion of the mandarins of Reason.

They will defend their usurpation, naturally, and will endeavour to prove with many and elaborate reasons that the guard and custody of the sepulchre belongs to them. They guard it in order that the Knight shall not rise again.

These reasons must be answered with insults, with stone-throwings, with shouts of passion, with lance-thrusts. These people are not to be reasoned with. If you try to reason against their reasons, you are lost.

If they ask you, as they usually do, by what right you claim the sepulchre, answer nothing. They will find out afterwards. Afterwards ... perhaps when both they and you no longer exist, at any rate not in this world of appearances.

And this holy crusade has one great advantage over those other holy crusades which spread the dawn of a new life upon this old world. Those other ardent crusaders knew where the sepulchre of Christ was, where it was said that it was; but our new crusaders will not know where the sepulchre of Don Quixote is to be found. It must be sought for in the act of fighting to redeem it.

Your quixotesque madness has led you more than once to speak to me of quixotism as of a new religion. And I must tell you that this new religion which you propose, if it should ever come to materialize, would have two notable characteristics. First, that we are not sure whether its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote--not Cervantes, of course--was a real man, a man of flesh and bone; indeed, we rather suspect that he was a pure fiction. And second, that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet; the butt and laughing-stock of the world.

It is courage that we need most of all--courage to face ridicule. Ridicule is the weapon wielded by all the miserable bachelors, barbers, curates, canons and dukes who guard the hidden sepulchre of the Knight of Folly. The Knight who made all the world laugh but never made a joke himself. He had too great a soul to make jokes. He was laughed at for his seriousness.

Begin then, my friend, to play Peter the Hermit and call the people to join you, to join us, and let us all go to redeem this sepulchre which lies we know not where. The crusade itself will reveal the holy place to us.

You will see that as soon as the sacred squadron begins to march, a new star will appear in the sky, a bright and sounding star, which will sing a new song in the long night that encompasses us, and the star will begin to move when the squadron of the crusaders begins to march, and when they have conquered in their crusade, or when they have all succumbed--which is perhaps the only way of truly conquering--the star will fall from the sky, and the place where it falls will be the place of the sepulchre. The sepulchre will be where the squadron dies.

And where the sepulchre is, there is the cradle, there is the birth-place. And from there the bright and sounding star will mount again heavenwards....

Question me no more, dear friend. When you force me to speak of these things, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my heart, sick with the atmosphere of conventionality that harasses and oppresses me on all sides, sick with the slime of the slough of falsehood in which we are mired, sick with scrabbling cowardice which shows itself on every hand, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my sick heart visions without reason, concepts without logic, things of which I know not the meaning and whose meaning I do not wish to try to fathom.

What do you mean by that? you ask me yet again. And I reply: Perhaps I don’t even know myself.

No, my friend, no. The meaning of many of these utterances of my spirit I do not know myself, or rather it is not I who know them. There is someone within me who dictates them to me, who speaks them to me. I obey him and I never penetrate within to behold his face or to ask his name. Only I know that if I beheld his face and if he told me his name, I should die that he might live.

I am ashamed of having sometimes created fictitious beings, the personages of my novels, in order that I might put into their mouths that which I dare not put into my own and make them say in jest what I feel in deadly earnest.

You know me, and you know how far I am from intentionally going in search of paradoxes, extravagances, and mannerisms--whatever some dull fools may think. You and I, my good friend, my only absolute friend, have often debated between ourselves as to what madness really is, and we have commented upon that saying of Ibsen’s Brand, the spiritual son of Kierkegaard, to the effect that the man who is mad is the man who is alone. And we have agreed that madness ceases to be madness when it becomes collective, when it is the madness of a whole people, of the whole human race perhaps. In so far as a hallucination becomes collective, becomes popular, becomes social, it ceases to be a hallucination and becomes a reality, something that is external to each one of those who share it. And you and I are agreed that the multitudes, the people, our Spanish people, must be inoculated with some madness or other, the madness of some one of its members who is mad--but really mad, not mad only in jest. Mad, and not foolish.

You and I, my good friend, have been scandalized at that which they call here fanaticism and which--to our shame be it said--is not fanaticism at all. No, nothing is fanaticism that is regulated and restrained and directed by bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and dukes; nothing is fanaticism that carries a banner inscribed with logical formulas, nothing that has a program, nothing that holds out for to-morrow merely a proposition that an orator can develop methodically in a speech.

Once--do you remember?--we saw a group of eight or ten youths and one of them said: “Let’s do something rash!” and the others followed him. And you and I long for the people to get together and shout: “Let’s do something rash!” and begin to march. And if any bachelor, any barber, any curate, any canon or any duke should stop them and say: “My children, that’s right! I see that you are bursting with heroism and righteous indignation. I also will go with you. But before we all go, and I along with you, to do this rash deed, don’t you think that we ought to agree as to the rashness that we are going to commit?”--if any of these mandarins should stop them and say that, then they ought to knock him down on the spot and walk over him, trampling on him, and that would be a beginning of the heroic rashness. Don’t you think, my friend, that there are many lonely souls amongst us whose heart craves for some rashness, something to set it aflame? Go then and see if you can’t gather them together and form them into a squadron and start us on the march--for I will go with them and march behind you--to redeem the sepulchre of Don Quixote, which lies, thank God, we know not where. The bright and sounding star will tell us.

But--you say in your hours of depression, when your spirit fails you--may it not be that when we think we are marching forward into new countries, we are really all the time revolving round the same spot? In that case the star will rest quietly over our heads and the sepulchre will be within us. And then the star will fall, but it will fall in order that it may bury itself in our souls. And our souls will be turned to light, and when they are all fused together in the bright and sounding star, the star will mount upwards, brighter still, and it will change into a sun, a sun of eternal melody, to lighten the sky of our redeemed country.

Forward then! And take care that no bachelors, barbers, curates, canons or dukes disguised as Sancho Panzas join the sacred squadron of crusaders. No matter if they ask you for islands; what you have got to do is to throw them out directly they ask to be informed of the itinerary of the march, directly they begin to talk about a program, directly they whisper to you and ask you, maliciously, to tell them the whereabouts of the sepulchre. Follow the star! And do like the Knight--redress the wrong that lies in front of you. Do now what is to be done now; do here what is to be done here.

Begin the march! Where are we going? The star answers: To the sepulchre! What are we going to do on the way, as we march? What? Fight! Fight, and how?

How? If you come across a man who is telling lies, shout out Liar! in his face, and forward! If you come across a man who is stealing, shout out Thief! and forward! If you come across a man who is talking fool-talk to a crowd listening with gaping mouths, shout out Idiots! and forward! Always forward!

“And is this the way,” a would-be crusader asks me, “that you propose to abolish lying and thieving and foolishness from the world?” Why not? The most pusillanimous of all pusillanimities, the most detestable and pestilent sophistry of cowardice, is that of saying that it is no use denouncing a thief because others will go on stealing, that nothing is gained by calling a fool a fool to his face, for this will not lessen the sum of foolishness in the world.

Yes, it has got to be repeated a thousand and one times--if you can finish once, only once, utterly and for ever, with only one liar, then you will have finished with lying for good and all.

March then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those who begin to pay too much attention to the step that has to be kept on the march, to its time and rhythm. Above all, out with those who are always talking about rhythm. They will turn your squadron into a quadrille and the march into a dance. Out with them! Let them go and sing to the flesh somewhere else.

Those who would seek to turn your marching squadron into a quadrille call themselves and call one another poets. They are not. They are anything else you like. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what it is like, to get a new sensation, and to amuse themselves on the way. Out with them!

They it is whose Bohemian tolerance contributes to the maintenance of cowardice and falsehood and all the other ignominies that overwhelm us. When they preach liberty, the only liberty they are thinking about is that of making free with their neighbour’s wife. They are compact of sensuality, and they have a sensual attitude even to the great ideas that they are enamoured of. They are incapable of marrying themselves to any great and pure idea and begetting a family upon it; they only intoxicate themselves with ideas. They make mistresses of them, and sometimes tire of them after a single night. Out with them!

If when on the march anyone wants to pluck a flower that smiles by the roadside, let him pluck it, but in passing, without stopping, and let him follow the squadron, whose leader must not take his eyes off the bright and sounding star. And if he fastens the flower to his breastplate, not to look at himself but for others to look at, out with him! Let him go off, with his flower in his buttonhole, and dance somewhere else.

Listen, my friend. If you wish to fulfil your mission and serve your country, you must needs make yourself hateful to all those sensible young men who see the world only through the eyes of the woman they love. Or worse still: your words must be strident and bitter in their ears.

The squadron must halt only at night, at the edge of the wood or in the shadow of the mountain. The crusaders will pitch their tents, they will wash their feet, they will sup on what their wives have prepared for them, and afterwards they will beget sons on them, they will give them a kiss, and then they will fall asleep and the following day they will continue their march. And when any one of them dies, they will leave him by the roadside, shrouded in his armour, to the mercy of the ravens. Let the dead bury their dead.

If during the march anyone essays to play the fife or the pipe or the flute or the guitar or whatever it may be, break his instrument and throw him out of the ranks, for he hinders the others from hearing the song of the star. And, what is more, he himself does not hear it. And he who does not hear the celestial song must not go in quest of the sepulchre of the Knight.

They will talk to you, these poet-dancers. Pay no heed to them. He who begins to play his Pan-pipes beneath the sky of heaven and does not hear the music of the spheres, does not deserve to hear it. He does not know the abyss-deep depths of the poetry of fanaticism, he does not know the infinite poetry of empty temples, without lights, without ornament, without images, without pomps, without incense, without anything of what is called art.

Throw all these Pan-pipe dancers out of the squadron. Throw them out before they leave you for a mess of pottage. They are the cynical philosophers, the tolerant Bohemians, the good fellows who understand everything and forgive everything. And he who understands everything understands nothing and he who forgives everything forgives nothing. They have no scruples about selling themselves. As they live in two worlds at the same time, they are able to preserve their liberty in the other world and sell themselves as slaves in this. They serve art and at the same time they are the servants of López or Pérez or Rodriguez.

It has been said that hunger and love are the two mainsprings of human life. Of this low human life, of the life of earth. The dancers dance only because of hunger or because of love; hunger of the flesh, love also of the flesh. Throw them out of the squadron and let them dance their fill in yonder meadow, while one plays the pipe, another claps his hands to the music, and another sings in praise of his pottage or of his mistress’s thighs. And there let them invent new dancesteps, new pirouettes, new figures of a rigadoon.

And if anyone shall come to you and say that he knows how to construct bridges and that perhaps a time will come when you will wish to avail yourself of his science in order to cross over a river, out with him! Out with the engineer! Rivers will be crossed by wading or swimming them, even if half the crusaders drown themselves. Let the engineer go off and build bridges somewhere else, where they are badly wanted. For those who go in quest of the sepulchre, faith is bridge enough.

* * * * *

My friend, if you want to fulfil your task duly, distrust art, distrust science, or at any rate distrust that which is called art and science and which is nothing but a wretched mockery of true art and true science. Let your faith suffice you. Your faith will be your art, your faith will be your science.

More than once, when I observed what pains you take in composing your letters, I have doubted whether you would be able to accomplish your work. They are full of erasures, emendations, corrections, Pan-pipings. They don’t jet forth violently, driving out the plug. Occasionally your letters degenerate into literature, into that filthy literature which is the natural ally of all slaveries and of all ignominies. Slavedrivers know well enough that when the slave is singing a hymn to liberty, he is consoling himself for his slavery and not thinking about breaking his chain.

But at other times I regain my faith and hope in you when I feel beneath the hurrying, spontaneous, cacophonous words the voice trembling with the fever that consumes you. There are times when your speech may be said to belong to no determinate language. Let everyone translate it into his own.

Aim at living in a continual vertigo of passion, be the passion that dominates you what it may. Only men of passion achieve works that really live and bear fruit. When you hear it said of someone that his works are impeccable, in whichever sense that stupid word is employed, fly from him--above all if he is an artist. Just as the man who is most a fool is he who has never done or said a foolish thing, so the artist who is least a poet, most anti-poetic--and among artists anti-poetic natures are common--is the impeccable artist, the artist whom the Pan-pipe dancers decorate with the pasteboard laurel crown of impeccability.

You are consumed, my friend, with a perpetual fever, with a thirst for unfathomable, shoreless oceans, with a hunger for universes, with a home-sickness for eternity. Reason is suffering to you. And you don’t know what you want. And now, now you want to go to the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly and there dissolve yourself in tears, consume yourself in fever, die of your thirst for oceans, of your hunger for universes, of your home-sickness for eternity.

Begin to march, alone. All the other lonely souls will march by your side, even though you don’t see them. Each one will think that he marches alone, but together you will form a sacred battalion, the battalion of the holy and unending crusade.

You don’t yet understand, my good friend, how all lonely souls, without knowing one another, without beholding one another’s face, without knowing one another’s names, journey together and lend one another mutual support. The others, those who are not lonely, talk about one another, offer one another their hands, congratulate one another, belaud and denigrate one another, chatter among themselves--and each one goes his own way. And they all fly from the sepulchre.

You don’t belong to the coterie but to the battalion of free crusaders. Why do you hover round the walls of the coterie to hear what they are cackling about inside? No, my friend, no! When you pass close to a coterie, stop your ears, fling your word and go straight on, on to the sepulchre. And let the word that you fling vibrate with all your thirst, with all your hunger, with all your home-sickness, with all your love.

I remember that unhappy letter that you wrote me when you were on the point of succumbing, of yielding, of joining the confraternity. I saw then how much your solitude weighed upon you, that solitude which must be your consolation and your strength.

You had arrived at the most terrible and desolating state of all; you had approached the brink of the precipice of your perdition; you had come to doubt your solitude, you had come to believe that you were surrounded by companions. “May not this notion that I am alone,” you said, “be mere cavilling, the fruit of pride, of petulance, perhaps of madness? For when I am tranquil, I see myself companioned, I feel my hand warmly clasped, I hear voices of encouragement, words of sympathy, I receive all kinds of proofs that I am not alone--far from it.” And I saw you deceived and lost, I saw you flying from the sepulchre.

No, you are not deceived in the accesses of your fever, in the agonies of your thirst, in the anguish of your hunger; you are alone, eternally alone. Not only are the bites that you feel really bites, but those that seem like kisses are bites too. Those who applaud you are hissing you, they want to stop you marching to the sepulchre when they shout “Forward!” Stop your ears. And, above all, beware of a terrible temptation--however much you may try to shake it off, it will return to you with the pertinacity of a fly--beware of the temptation to concern yourself with how you appear to others. Think only of how you appear to God, think only of the idea that God has of you.

You are alone, much more alone than you imagine, and yet, even so, you have not arrived at absolute, utter, real solitude. Absolute, utter, real solitude consists in not being even with yourself. And you will not be really, utterly, absolutely alone until you have emptied yourself of yourself, by the side of the sepulchre. Holy Solitude!

* * * * *

All this I said to my friend, and he answered me, in a long letter, full of furious dismay, in these words:

“All that you say is good, very good. But don’t you think that
instead of going in quest of the sepulchre of Don Quixote and
redeeming it from the bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and
dukes, we ought to go in quest of the sepulchre of God and rescue
it from the atheists and deists who occupy it, and there, giving
voice to our supreme despair and dissolving our heart in tears,
wait for God to rise again and save us from nothingness?”

THE HELMET OF MAMBRINO

_“Pray, good gentlemen,” said the barber,[2] “let us have your opinion in this matter. I suppose you will grant this same helmet to be a basin?” “He that dares grant any such thing,” said Don Quixote, “must know that he lies plainly, if he is a knight; but, if a squire, he lies abominably.”_

That’s right, my lord Don Quixote, that’s right. It is courage, it is the barefaced courage that is ready to affirm a thing aloud and before all the world and to defend the affirmation of it to the death, it is courage that creates all truths. Things are so much the truer the more they are believed, and it is not intelligence but will that imposes them upon the world.

“Now I swear before you all,” said Don Quixote, “by the order of knighthood which I profess, that that is the same individual helmet which I won from him, without the least addition or diminution.” To which Sancho added, in timid support of his master: “That I will swear, for since my lord won it, he never fought but once in it, and that was the battle wherein he freed those ungracious galley-slaves, who by the same token would have knocked out his brains with a shower of stones, had not this same honest basin-helmet saved his skull.”

In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says: “I wrote my _Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho_ 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 track down our philosophy in it.”

Readers of Don Quixote will recall the encounter between the Knight of La Mancha and the barber who had clapped his brass basin on his head to keep his hat from being spoiled by the rain. Having routed his enemy, the Knight seized the basin, which he asserted to be the golden helmet of Mambrino, a famous Saracen (see _Orlando Furioso_, Canto I). When afterwards the barber met Don Quixote at an inn and claimed his basin, the dispute as to whether it was really a basin or a helmet was referred to the rest of the company, some of whom sided with the Knight and others with the barber.

Basin-helmet? Basin-helmet, Sancho? We must not do you the injustice to suppose that your calling it a basin-helmet was one of your sly jokes--no, it marks the progress of your faith. You were unable to pass from what your eyes assured you of, showing you the object in dispute in the likeness of a basin, to what faith in your master assured you, showing it to you in the likeness of a helmet, without catching at this compromise of a basin-helmet. In this respect there are many Sanchos like you and you have invented this notion that virtue consists in the _via media_. No, friend Sancho, no, there is no basin-helmet that is worth a straw. It is a helmet or it is a basin according to him who uses it, or rather it is basin and helmet at the same time for it serves both turns. Without the least addition or diminution it can and ought to be both helmet and basin, all of it helmet and all of it basin; but what it can never be nor ought to be, however much be added to it or taken away from it, is basin-helmet.

The barber to whom the basin belonged found the other barber, Master Nicolas, and Don Fernando and the curate and Cardenio and the judge more emphatic, for to the amazement of all the others who were present they insisted that it was a helmet. One of the four pursuivants, regarding this as a laborious joke, became annoyed and treated those who said it was a helmet as if they were drunk. Don Quixote called him a liar and hurled himself upon him; both sides prepared for battle and fell to blows. Then it was that Don Quixote, thinking that he was certainly involved in the disorder and confusion of King Agramant’s camp, lifted up his voice and quieted the tumult.

What! it surprises you that the question as to whether the basin was a basin or a helmet should have given rise to a general dispute? Other and more involved disputes have broken out in the world with regard to other basins and those not belonging to Mambrino. As to whether bread is bread and wine wine and the like. Human sheep flock round Knights of the Faith and maintain for various reasons or for no reason at all, that the basin is a helmet, as the Knights assert, and they are surprisingly rewarded for so maintaining it, and the strange thing is that most of those who contend that it is a helmet really believe it to be a basin. The heroism of Don Quixote communicated itself to his mockers, who became quixotized in spite of themselves, and Don Fernando made one of the pursuivants measure his length on the ground because he had dared to maintain that the basin was not a helmet but a basin. Heroical Don Fernando!