Chapter V: Introduction (4)

Thus we see Don Quixote’s mockers mocked by him, quixotized in their own despite, joining in the fray and fighting with all their might to defend the Faith of the Knight, although without sharing it. I am convinced--although Cervantes does not tell us so--I am convinced that the partisans of the Knight, the quixotists or helmetists, after having received and administered punishment, began themselves to doubt whether the basin were a basin and to believe that it really was the helmet of Mambrino, for their ribs bore evidence of their belief. It must be affirmed here yet again that it is martyrs who create faith rather than faith that creates martyrs.

In few of his adventures does Don Quixote appear greater than in this one, in which he imposes his faith upon those who mocked at it, so that they are led to defend it with kicks and blows and to suffer for it.

And what was it that inspired them to do so? Simply his courage in affirming before everybody that that basin, which he no less than they saw with his own eyes to be a basin, was the helmet of Mambrino, for to him it served the office of a helmet.

This is the courage of the purest water--that which resists not merely a shock to the reason or decay of fortune or loss of honour, but also being taken for a madman and an idiot.

This is the courage that we need in Spain and our soul remains paralysed because of the lack of it. It is because of the lack of it that we are neither powerful nor wealthy nor cultured; it is because of the lack of it that we have no system of irrigation, no good harvests; it is because of the lack of it that it doesn’t rain more on our drought-parched fields, or that when it does rain it rains in torrents, sweeping away the manure and sometimes sweeping away the houses too.

This seems to you like a paradox? Go into the country and propose to any farmer some improvement in his methods of cultivation or the introduction of a new kind of crop or of a new agricultural machine, and he will say: “That doesn’t pay here.” “Have you tried it?” you ask, and he simply repeats: “That doesn’t pay here.” He doesn’t know whether it pays or whether it doesn’t pay, for he hasn’t tried it and doesn’t mean to try it. He would try it if he were sure of its success beforehand, but the prospect of the possibility of a failure, with the consequent mockery and derision of his neighbours, the possibility of their taking him for a deluded fool or a lunatic, this prospect terrifies him and so he doesn’t experiment. And then people are surprised at the triumph of those who have the courage to face ridicule serenely, of those who rid themselves of the herd-instinct.

In the province of Salamanca there was a remarkable man who rose from the greatest poverty to be a millionaire. The peasants of the district, with the sheep-like instincts of their kind, were only able to explain his success by supposing that in his younger days he had embezzled money, for these wretched peasants, crusted over with common sense and entirely lacking in moral courage, believe only in theft and the lottery. But one day I was told of a quixotic feat which this cattle farmer had performed. It seems that he had brought sea-bream’s spawn from the Cantabrian coast to put in one of his ponds! When I heard that, I understood everything. He who has the courage to face the jeers which are bound to be provoked by bringing the spawn of a salt-water fish to put in a pond in Castile, he who does that deserves his fortune.

But it was absurd, you say? And who knows what is absurd and what is not? And even if it were! Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible. There is only one way of hitting the nail on the head and that is by hammering on the shoe a hundred times. And there is only one way of achieving a real triumph and that is by facing ridicule with serenity. And it is because our agriculturists haven’t the courage to face ridicule that our agriculture languishes in its present backward condition.

Yes, all our ills spring from moral cowardice, from the individual’s lack of staunch resolution in affirming his own truth, his own faith, and defending it. The soul of this people, this flock of somnolent sheep, is smothered and swathed in falsehood, and their stupidity proceeds from their very excess of prudence.

It is claimed that there are certain principles that are beyond discussion and when anyone attempts to criticize them the air rings with shouts of protest. Not long ago I proposed that we should demand the abolition of certain of the articles of our law of Public Instruction, and a pack of poltroons began to bellow that such a course was inopportune and impertinent, not to mention stronger and more offensive epithets that were used. I am sick of hearing everything that is most opportune called inopportune, everything that tends to disturb the digestion of the full-bellied and infuriates fools. What are they afraid of? That it will result in a brawl? that a new civil war will break out? Better and better. That’s what we need.

Yes, that’s what we need--a new civil war. It is necessary to assert that basins ought to be and are helmets and to get up a fight about it like the fight they got up at the inn. A new civil war, let the weapons be what they will. Can’t you hear those spiritless creatures whose hearts are dried and shrivelled up reiterating that these kinds of disputes lead to nothing practical? What do they understand by practical? Can’t you hear them reiterating that there are discussions which ought never to be broached?

There are plenty of cowardly spirits who are always drilling it into us that we ought to leave religious questions on one side, that the first thing to do is to become powerful and wealthy. And the poltroons don’t see that it is just because we ignore what concerns our inward well-being that we are not and never shall be wealthy and powerful. I repeat it yet again, there will never be any agriculture or industry or commerce in our country, nor roads where there ought to be roads, until we have discovered our Christianity, which is Quixotic Christianity. We shall never have a powerful and splendid and glorious and strong external life until we have kindled in the hearts of our people the fire of the eternal disquietudes. We cannot be rich so long as our life is nothing but deceit, and deceit is our spirit’s daily bread.

Can’t you hear the solemn ass that opens his mouth and says: “It’s forbidden to say that here”? Can’t you hear all those who are bound with the fetters of falsehood talking about peace, a peace that is more deadly than death itself? That terrible and ignominious rule which figures in the list of regulations of almost all the social clubs in Spain, “political and religious discussions prohibited”--does that say nothing to you?

Peace! peace! peace! all the frogs of our national pond croak in chorus.

Peace! peace! peace! Yes, but peace established upon the triumph of sincerity, peace established upon the overthrow of falsehood. Peace, but not a peace of compromise, not a hollow political agreement, but a comprehensive peace. Peace, yes, but only after the pursuivants have recognized Don Quixote’s right to assert that the basin is a helmet; and, furthermore, only after the pursuivants themselves have admitted and affirmed that in the hands of Don Quixote the basin is a helmet. And the wretched crowd that shout “Peace! peace!” dare to take upon their lips the name of Christ! They forget that Christ said that He came not to bring peace but war, and that because of Him they of the same household should be divided against one another, father against son and brother against brother. And this should be because of Him, because of Christ, that His kingdom might be established, the social kingdom of Jesus--which is the very reverse of that which the Jesuits call the social kingdom of Jesus Christ--the kingdom of real sincerity and real truth and real love and real peace. In order that the kingdom of Jesus may be established, there must be war.

DON QUIXOTE’S NIECE[3]

The good Alonso Quixano went on with the dictation of his will and bequeathed all his estate to Antonia Quixano, his niece, but imposing it upon her, as a necessary condition of enjoying the bequest, that “if she is desirous of marrying, she marry none but a man who, upon strict inquiry, shall be found never to have read a book of knight-errantry in his life; and in case it appears that he has been conversant with such books, and that she persists in her resolution to marry him, she is then to forfeit all that I have bequeathed her, which in such case my executors shall dispose of to pious uses at their own discretion.”

How clearly Don Quixote recognized the violent mutual incompatibility that exists between the office of husband and that of knight-errant! And in dictating this clause, may not the good knight have been thinking of his Aldonza and of how, had he but ventured to break the seal of his too great love, he might have been spared all the misfortunes of his knight-errantry and remained by his own fireside a happy prisoner in the arms of his love?

Your will has been faithfully executed, Don Quixote, and the young men of this your country have renounced all knight-errantry so that they might enjoy the estates of your nieces--and among these must be counted almost all the women of Spain--and enjoy the nieces themselves too. In their arms all heroism is smothered. They tremble lest it should strike their lovers and husbands with its rushing wind as it struck their uncle. It is your niece, Don Quixote, it is your niece who rules and governs Spain to-day--it is your niece, not Sancho. It is the timorous, home-keeping, narrow-souled Antonia Quixano, she who feared lest you should turn poet, “a catching and incurable disease”; she who so zealously assisted the curate and the barber in burning your books; she who presumed to tell you to your face that all stories of knight-errantry were nothing but a pack of lies and fables--a maidenly audacity which provoked you to exclaim: “By the God that sustains me, wert thou not my proper niece, my own sister’s daughter, I would take such revenge for the blasphemy thou hast uttered as would resound through the whole world”; it is she, “the young baggage who scarce knows how to manage a dozen lace-work bobbins,” and who presumed to put in her oar and censure the histories of knights-errant, it is she who manages and dangles and juggles with the sons of your Spain as if they were puppets. It is not Dulcinea del Toboso, no. Neither is it Aldonza Lorenzo, she for whom you sighed for twelve years without seeing her more than four times and without ever confessing your love. It is Antonia Quixano, she who scarce knew how to manage a dozen lace-work bobbins, who controls your countrymen to-day.

It is Antonia Quixano, who, because she has a small soul and no belief in her husband’s greatness, keeps him at home and hinders him from going forth to seek heroic adventures which would win him glory and an everlasting name. If it were only Dulcinea!... Dulcinea, yes, for however strange it may seem, Dulcinea can make a man renounce all glory, can make him choose the glory of renouncing glory. Dulcinea, or let us rather call her Aldonza, the ideal Aldonza might say to him: “Come, come to my arms and let all your wild longings melt away in tears upon my breast. Come to me. Yes, I see you set up on a lofty pinnacle for all time, I see all your brother men gazing up at you, I see you acclaimed by generations yet unborn--but come to me, renounce it all for my sake, and that will make you great, my Alonso, that will make you greater still. Take my mouth and cover it with warm kisses in silence, and renounce a cold eternity of fame in the mouths of those whom you will never know. Will you hear them speaking of you when you are dead? Bury all your love in my breast, and if it is a great love, it is better that you should bury it in me than that you should lavish it among men who easily forget and soon pass away. They are not worthy of admiring you, my Alonso, they are not worthy of it. You will live for me alone and so you will live more truly for all the universe and for God. So living, your might and your heroism will seem to be lost, but don’t mind that. Do you not know the infinite streams of life which flow from a silent and heroic love, flowing out in wave after wave beyond humanity to the orbit of the remotest of the stars? Do you not know that the silent and triumphant love of a happy pair of lovers is a fount of mysterious energy that irradiates a whole people and all generations to come to the end of time? Do you not know what it is to guard the sacred fire of life, fanning it to ever brighter flame in simple and silent worship? Love, the simple act of loving, without deeds, is itself a heroic deed. Come and renounce all your deeds in my arms--the dim obscurity of your repose in my arms will be a seed-time which will bear fruit in the deeds and glory of others to whom your very name will be unknown. When even the echo of your name is no longer borne upon the air, when there is no longer any air to bear the echo of it, the embers of your love will warm the ruins of perished worlds. Come and give yourself to me, Alonso, for though you should never ride abroad redressing wrongs, your greatness will not be lost, for in my heart nothing is lost. Come, rest your head upon my heart and I will carry you thence to the rest that has no ending.”

With such words Aldonza might speak, and in renouncing all glory in her arms Alonso would be truly great; but such words you can never speak, Antonia. You do not believe that love is of more worth than glory; what you believe is that neither love nor glory is worth as much as sleepy fireside peace and quiet, that neither love nor glory is worth as much as the certainty of the daily mess of pottage; you believe that those who don’t sleep easily in their beds come to a bad end, and you don’t know that love, like glory, never sleeps but watches.

THE RELIGION OF QUIXOTISM

I become more and more convinced that our philosophy, the Spanish philosophy, is liquescent and diffused in our literature, in our life, in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete. (And is there not perhaps as much philosophy or more in Goethe, for example, as in Hegel?) The poetry of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, _Don Quijote_, _La Vida es Sueño_, _La Subida al Monte Carmelo_, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life--_Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht_. This philosophy of ours could with difficulty formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was a-philosophical, positivist, technicist, given up to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimistic.

We shall find the hero of Spanish thought, perhaps, not in any philosopher who lived in flesh and bone, but in an entity of fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers--in Don Quixote. For there is doubtless a philosophic Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. Was not perhaps the philosophy of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and, above all, the philosophy latent in the abstract but passionate thought of our mystics, in its essence none other than this? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knight-errantry of the heart in the divine warfare?

And the feeling that animated Don Quixote cannot strictly be called idealism; he did not fight for ideas. It was spiritualism; he fought for the spirit.

Speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like practical Quixotism, foolishness, a daughter-foolishness to the foolishness of the cross. And therefore it is contemned by reason. Philosophy at bottom abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.

The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, sought by means of ridicule to turn it into comedy and conceived the farce of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, saying: “Behold the man!” But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, cried: “Crucify him! crucify him!” And the other tragedy, the human, the intra-human tragedy, is that of Don Quixote with his face lathered for the ducal servants to laugh at, and for the dukes, as much slaves as their servants, to laugh at too. “Behold the fool!”--so they would say. And the comic, the irrational tragedy is suffering beneath ridicule and contempt.

For an individual, as for a people, the highest heroism is being willing to face ridicule--still more, being willing to make oneself ridiculous and not flinching at the ridicule.

Antero de Quental, the tragic Portuguese who committed suicide, wrote as follows, smarting under the ultimatum which England delivered to his country in 1890: “An English statesman of the last century, also certainly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we have to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who _feel_, we much prefer this terrible, but noble, destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that _thinks_ and _calculates_, whose destiny is to end miserably and comically.” We may leave on one side the assertion that England thinks and calculates, implying that she does not feel, the injustice of which is explained by the circumstance that provoked it, and also the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying that they scarcely ever think or calculate--for we sister peoples of the Atlantic have always been distinguished by a certain sentimental pedantry; but there remains the terrible underlying idea, namely, that some, those who put thought above feeling--I should say reason above faith--die comically, and those die tragically who put faith above reason. For it is the ridiculers who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the portion, the noble portion, of those who are ridiculed is tragedy.

And what we must look out for in the record of Don Quixote is ridicule.

* * * * *

The philosophy in the soul of my people presents itself to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between the world as the reason of science exhibits it to us and the world as we wish it to be, as our religious faith tells us that it is. And in this philosophy is to be found the secret of what is usually said about us, that we are fundamentally irreducible to _Kultur_, that is to say, that we do not resign ourselves to it. No, Don Quixote resigns himself neither to the world nor to its truth, neither to science nor to logic, neither to art nor aesthetics, neither to morality nor to ethics.

“In any case the result of all this,” so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, “will simply be to urge people on to the maddest kind of Catholicism.” And they have accused me of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. So be it! And what then?

Yes, I know, I know that it is folly to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is the crowd that seeks the medicine for its ills in the past; but I know too that everyone who fights for any ideal whatsoever, even though it may seem to belong to the past, is urging the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at ease in the present. Every pretended restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past is dream, something not properly known, so much the better. As always, the march is towards the future; he who marches, marches thither, even though he march backwards way--and who knows if that is not the better way?

I feel that I have a mediæval soul and I believe that the soul of my country is mediæval--that it has been forced to traverse the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution, learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual heritage of those ages that are called dark. And Quixotism is nothing but the most desperate phase of the struggle of the Middle Ages against their offspring, the Renaissance.

And if some accuse me of furthering the cause of Catholic reaction, perhaps the others, the official Catholics, accuse me of.... But these, in Spain trouble themselves little about anything and are only interested in their own quarrels and dissensions. And besides, poor folk, they are somewhat dull of understanding.

But the fact is that my work--I was going to say my mission--is to shatter the faith of both these and those and of others besides, faith in affirmation, faith in negation and faith in abstention, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who resign themselves, whether to Catholicism or to rationalism or to agnosticism; it is to make them all live lives of inquietude and passionate desire.

Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the immediate and visible efficacy of his work? It is greatly to be doubted, and at any rate he did not risk putting the visor he had made to the test by giving it a second blow. And many passages in his history indicate that he did not believe much in the immediate success of his design to restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter so long as he himself thus lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his achievement would have another and a higher efficacy--namely, that it would go on working in the minds of all those who in the spirit of devotion read of his exploits.

Don Quixote made himself ridiculous, but did he perchance know the most tragic ridicule of all, the ridicule that is reflected in the eyes of a man’s own soul, the ridicule with which a man sees his own self? Transfer Don Quixote’s battlefield to his own soul; conceive him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, not to lose the treasure of his infancy; turn him into an inward Don Quixote--with his Sancho, a Sancho equally inward and equally heroical at his side--and then talk to me of the comic tragedy.

And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer that he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other peoples have left principally institutions, books--we have left souls. St. Teresa is worth any institution, any “Critique of Pure Reason.”

Don Quixote was converted? Yes, but only to die. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us, breathing his spirit into us, this Don Quixote was never converted, this Don Quixote goes on inciting us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don Quixote--he who was converted only to die--was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, not his death or his conversion, that immortalized him and earned for him the forgiveness of the crime of having been born. _Felix culpa!_ Neither was his madness cured but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure--in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.

This Don Quixote died and descended into hell, and he entered it lance on rest and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley-slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down from them the scroll that Dante saw there, and replaced it by one on which was written “Long live hope!” and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed at him paternally and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with desperation. Is not despair the mainspring of his fighting? How is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our tongue--_siesta_, _camarilla_, _guerilla_ and the like--there occurs this word _desperado_? This inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own comicness, is he not a man of despair--_desesperado_? A desperado, yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola. But “despair is the master of impossibilities,” as Salazar y Torres tells us, and it is despair and despair alone from whence springs heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. _Spero quia absurdum_, it ought to be said, rather than _credo_.

And Don Quixote, who lived solitary, sought more solitude still, sought the solitudes of the Peña Pobre in order that there, alone, without witnesses, he might plunge into yet wilder extravagances to the easing of his soul. Yet he was not quite solitary, for Sancho accompanied him, Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant himself. At any rate he is waiting for some other mad knight to follow yet again.

And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote--it does not appear certain that he died, although some say that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance, and believing that all those things which on his death-bed his converted master abominated as lies had been really true. But neither does it appear certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber, or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the heroic Sancho has to fight.

Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude. And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers creating for ourselves a quixotesque Spain which exists only in our imagination?

And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to _Kultur_? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing. It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole aesthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic, above all a whole religion, that is to say, a whole economy of things human and divine, a whole hope in the rationally absurd.

For what did Don Quixote fight? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival. Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who is culture. He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.

And what is greatest in him is his having been ridiculed and overcome, for it is in being overcome that he overcame; he overcame the world by making it laugh at him.

And to-day? To-day he feels his own comicness and the vanity of his efforts so far as temporal issues are concerned; he sees himself from without--culture has taught him to objectify himself, that is to say, to alienate himself from himself instead of to enter into himself, and in seeing himself from without he laughs at himself, but with a bitter laughter. Perhaps the most tragic character would be an inward Margutte, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die bursting with laughter, but with laughter at himself. _E riderá in eterno_, he will laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not hear the laughter of God?

The mortal Don Quixote, in dying, understood his own comicness and wept for his sins; but the immortal Don Quixote understands and rises above his comicness and triumphs over it without renouncing it.

But now Don Quixote hears his own laughter, he hears the divine laughter, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in eternal life, he has to fight, attacking the modern scientific inquisitorial orthodoxy by adducing a new and impossible Middle Age, dualistic, contradictory, passionate. Like a new Savonarola--an Italian Quixote of the end of the fifteenth century--he fights against this Modern Age which began with Machiavelli and which will end comically. He fights against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of consciousness, reconciliation between reason and faith, are now, thanks to the providence of God, impossible. The world must be as Don Quixote wishes it to be, and inns must be castles, and he will fight against it and will, to all appearances, be overcome, but he will triumph by making himself ridiculous. He will triumph by laughing at himself and making himself laughed at.

“Reason speaks and feeling bites,” said Petrarch; but reason also bites and bites in the heart of hearts. And more light does not make more warmth. “Light, light, more light!” they tell us that the dying Goethe cried. No, warmth, warmth, more warmth, for we die of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night but the frost that kills.

* * * * *

The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, in its essence mystical, mediæval, quixotesque, has been called _demi-mondaine_ philosophy. Leave out the _demi_; call it _mondaine_, mundane. Mundane--yes, for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought not to be for chemists alone. The world wishes to be deceived--_mundus vult decipi_--either with the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or with the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whosoever wishes to deceive will always find someone who will let himself be deceived. And blessed are those who are made fools of. A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, has said that it was the privilege of his countrymen _n’être pas dupe_--not to be taken in. A sorry privilege!

Science does not give Don Quixote what he demands of it. “Then let him not demand it,” it will be said, “let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are.” But he does not accept them as they are, and he asks for signs, urged thereto by Sancho who stands by his side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those understand who talk thus to him, those who are able to resign themselves and to accept rational life and rational truth. No, it is that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows?

And in this critical century Don Quixote, who has contaminated himself with criticism also, has to attack his own self, the victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, and it is when he wishes to be most spontaneous that he appears most affected. And the poor fellow wishes to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into the inner despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through despair he attains the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that Don Quixote of the mind who escaped from the cloister--and he becomes an awakener of sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican said of himself. “Heroic love,” Bruno wrote, “is the property of those superior natures called insane [_insano_]--not because they do not know [_non sanno_], but because they over-know [_soprasanno_].”

But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines--at any rate they have stated on the inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, that it is dedicated to him by the age which he foretold (_il secole da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who has risen from the dead, the inward Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who is conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim Him king. He left the title of king to be written upon the cross.

What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote in the world of to-day? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But the wilderness hears, though men do not hear, and one day it will be transformed into a sounding forest, and this solitary voice that falls upon the wilderness like seed, will yield a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death.

LARGE AND SMALL TOWNS

I regret that I have not by me a certain essay dealing with this subject by Guglielmo Ferrero. I read it in some review the name of which I have forgotten, but I preserve a clear recollection of it, for it interested me greatly. Ferrero treated the subject from the historical and sociological point of view, and I, who am neither an historian nor a sociologist, intend to treat it, as is my custom, from the point of view of purely personal opinion and individual impression. (This is my custom, and yet in spite of the fact I cannot prevent people from insisting on calling me a savant and talking about my theories. I have no theories. I have only impressions and sensations.)

But, since I am unable to put some quotation from Ferrero at the head of this essay--this habit of basing our assertions upon authority is the conventional way of giving them a deceptive air of objectivity--I will head it by a sentence from George Meredith, that extremely subtle English novelist. In “The Egoist” it is stated that Willoughby “abandoned London as the burial-place of the individual man.”

I, to-day, am one with Willoughby in believing that great cities de-individualize, or rather de-personalize, us. This may perhaps be due to the fact that, though not an egoist like the hero of Meredith’s novel, I still remain, according to Ramiro de Maeztu, an incorrigible egotist.

Great cities are levelling; they lift up the low and depress the high; they exalt mediocrity and abase superlativeness--the result of the action of the mass, as powerful in social life as in chemistry.

Soon after I came to this ancient city of Salamanca which has now become so dear to me, a city of some thirty thousand souls, I wrote to a friend and told him that if after two years’ residence here he should be informed that I spent my time playing cards, taking siestas and strolling round the square for a couple of hours every day, he might give me up for lost; but if at the end of that time I should still be studying, meditating, writing, battling for culture in the public arena, he might take it that I was better off here than in Madrid. And so it has proved to be.

I remember that Guglielmo Ferrero’s conclusion, based upon a review of ancient Greece, of the Italy of the Renaissance and of the Germany of a century ago, is that for the life of the spirit, small cities of a population like that of Salamanca are the best--better than very small towns or large ones of over a hundred thousand inhabitants.

This depends, of course, upon the quality of the spirit in question. I am convinced that the monastic cloister, which so often atrophies the soul and reduces the average intelligence to a lamentable slavery to routine, has in certain exceptional cases exalted the spirit by its arduous discipline.

Great cities are essentially democratic, and I must confess that I feel an invincible platonic mistrust of democracies. In great cities culture is diffused but vulgarized. People abandon the quiet reading of books to go to the theatre, that school of vulgarity; they feel the need of being together; the gregarious instinct enslaves them; they must be seeing one another.

I think it was Taine who observed that the majority of French geniuses were either themselves country-born or the sons of country-born parents. And I assure you that I should find it difficult to believe in the genius of a Parisian born of Parisians.

Guerra Junqueiro once said to me: “You are fortunate in living in a city in which you can walk along the streets dreaming, without fear of people disturbing your dream!” And certainly in Madrid it is impossible to walk along the streets dreaming, not so much for fear of motors, trams and carriages as because of the continual stream of unknown faces. The distraction of a great city, so agreeable to those who must have something, no matter what, to occupy their imagination, is necessarily vexatious to those whose chief concern is not to have their imagination diverted. Personally I find nothing more monotonous than a Paris boulevard. The people seem to me like shadows. I cannot endure a crowd of unknown faces.

I am afraid of Madrid. That is to say, I am afraid of myself when I go there. It is easy to say that in great cities everyone can live the life that suits him best, but it is easier to say it than to do it. When I am in the capital, I return home every night regretting having gone to the party or to the meeting that I went to and resolving never to go again, but only to break my vow the very next day. I am surrounded, hemmed in and invaded by a lethal atmosphere of compliance, an atmosphere that is generated by this so-called life of society.

I have always felt an aversion from this so-called life of society, which has for its object the cultivation of social relationships. Is there anything more terrible than a “call”? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centres for the propagation of platitudes.

A man of society, a drawing-room man who can make himself agreeable to women when he pays a call, is always a man whose principal concern is to suppress any arresting spontaneity, not to let his own personality show through. For it is a man’s own personality that people find irritating. People like to meet the average man, the normal man, the man who has nothing exceptional about him. The exception is always irritating. How many times I have heard the terrible phrase: “This man irritates me.” Yes, it is “the man” that irritates, and the hardest fight for the man who feels that he is a man is the fight to win respect for his own individuality.

And in a small town? Its stage is very restricted; the players soon tire of playing the parts allotted to them and the real men begin to appear underneath, with all their weaknesses--that is to say, with precisely that which makes them men. I have a great liking for provincial life, for there it is easiest to discern tragedy lurking beneath an appearance of calm. And just as much as I abhor comedy, I love tragedy. And, above all, tragi-comedy.

I have heard it said that there are no such seething intestine rancours and dissensions as in a merchant vessel or a monastery; that whenever men are obliged to live together, cut off from the rest of the world, their personalities, their most real and intimate selves, immediately clash against one another. And I dare say that this is the only way of attaining that knowledge of ourselves which ought to be our chief aim. It seems to me scarcely possible that a man should get to know himself by shutting himself up in the wilderness, contemplating--what? The best way of knowing one’s self is to clash, heart against heart, that is to say, rock against rock, with one’s fellow.

I know that I shall be told that I am indulging my love of paradox, but nevertheless I maintain that if it is true that the most ardent admirations are those which are disguised in the form of envy, very often the strongest attractions are those which take the appearance of hate. In one of these tragi-comic, or rather comi-tragic, small towns I know two men who, though obliged to see one another constantly in the way of business, never greet one another in the street and profess a mutual detestation. Nevertheless at bottom they feel themselves reciprocally attracted to one another and each one is continually preoccupied by the other.

These irreconcilable feuds into which small towns are so often divided are much more favourable to the development of strong personalities than the bland comedy of a great metropolis, where those who fight a duel to the death on the public stage embrace one another behind the scenes. Do you suppose that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is possible in a city that counts its inhabitants by the million?

And I ask you, do you suppose that anyone who sees a multitude of people in the course of the day, listens to this man to-day, to another man to-morrow and to another man the day after, and attends twenty or thirty conferences--do you think that such a one can preserve his spiritual integrity without any leakage? In such a life a hedgehog would end by becoming a lamb, its quills would turn into softest fleece, and for my part I would rather be a hedgehog than a lamb.

I understand why Willoughby fled from London as from the burial-place of the individual man. Is it not a terrible thing to walk through two or three miles of city streets and pass two or three thousand people without meeting a single known face to set a spark to a train of human thought? A glance of hate from a known enemy is sweeter than a glance of indifference, if not of disdain, from an unknown stranger. For man has acquired the habit of disdaining those whom he does not know, and seems to suppose that every stranger must be presumed to be an imbecile until he proves himself otherwise.

And those who say that they are bored in a small town? The reason is because they have not dug down to its tragic roots, to the august severity of the depths of its monotony.

It is my belief that in great cities proud natures become vain, that is to say, the quills become fleece.

And for the man who is engaged in any kind of work in which he can exercise his influence from a distance, for the writer or the painter, the small town offers the inestimable advantage of enabling him to live far from his public and of its being possible that the effects which his work produces either do not reach him or reach him only after a searching process of filtration. He can live more or less independently of his public, without allowing himself to be influenced by it, and this is the only way of making a public for oneself instead of adapting oneself to it.

If this be the case, it may be urged that a village would be better than a small town, a hamlet or perhaps even a remote farm-house. But no, for then there would be lacking that minimum of organic society without which our personality runs as much risk as it runs in the heart of a metropolis.

Essentially, in the sphere of psychologico-sociological relations--this is for the benefit of those who insist on labelling me savant--it is a question of what is perhaps the most fundamental of all problems, the problem of maxima and minima. This is the problem that is the nerve of physical mechanics and the nerve also of social mechanics or economics. The problem always is how to obtain the maximum result or profit with the minimum effort or expense, the largest return with the least expenditure. It is also the fundamental problem of æsthetics; it is at the root of all the problems of life.

And with regard to the subject I am now considering, it is a question of obtaining the maximum of our own personality with the minimum of others’ society. Less society, or a society less complex, would diminish our personality, and so also would more society, or a society apparently more complex. And I say apparently, for I am not aware that an elephant is more complex than a fox.

Very well then--he who has no sense of his own personality and is willing to sacrifice it on the altar of sociability, let him go and lose himself among the millions of a metropolis. For the man who has a longing for Nirvana the metropolis is better than the desert. If you want to submerge your own “I,” better the streets of a great city than the solitudes of the wilderness.

It is not a bad thing now and again to visit the great city and plunge into the sea of its crowds, but in order to emerge again upon terra firma and feel the solid ground under one’s feet. For my part, since I am interested in individuals--in John and Peter and Richard, in you who are reading this book--but not in the masses which they form when banded together, I remain in the small town, seeing every day at the same hour the same men, men whose souls have clashed, and sometimes painfully, with my soul; and I flee from the great metropolis where my soul is whipped with the icy whips of the disdainful glances of those who know me not and who are unknown to me. People whom I cannot name ... horrible!

TO MY READERS

Yes, I know it--I am not sympathetic to all those who read me, perhaps not even to the majority of them. But what I am to do?... So long as they go on reading me.... For the fact is I would rather that they should find me not sympathetic and nevertheless go on reading me than that they should find me sympathetic and cease to read me. Sympathy is often purchased at the cost of authority and respect. I confess that the quality of being sympathetic does not appear to me to be a very desirable thing in a writer. It is perhaps the beginning of discredit, a discredit that is none the less profound because it wears a gilded disguise.

Yes, I know that I am not sympathetic, that I have perhaps succeeded in making myself antipathetic to many of those who read me and who in spite of this antipathy--or rather because of it--still continue to read me.

A short time ago a friend wrote to me saying that although he often disagrees with me he reads me because his reaction to my opinions stimulates ideas in him. I profess myself well content with this, to beget ideas in those who read me, although these ideas should be the contrary of those which I expound and defend.

But there are many, very many readers who don’t like being obliged to think and who only want to be told what they already know, what they have already thought. In order to become sympathetic a writer has only to flatter and confirm his readers’ preconceptions, clinching the commonplaces to which their minds have given assent. That is the way for a writer to become sympathetic and it is also the way for him to become soon tedious, so that the reader remarks: “Ah, yes, a very sympathetic writer, very understanding!” and ceases to read him.

Most people--I have said this more than once before and as I am an insistent writer, another quality which does not help to make me sympathetic, I shall have to repeat it many times more--most people read in order not to be informed. Yes, literally, not to be informed. The worthy Fulánez takes the paper or the review at breakfast-time and reads it as he would listen to a waltz-tune, in order to while away the time. He dislikes being agitated, he dislikes being contradicted; but most of all he dislikes being told something that he has never thought of before.

There is a spiritual pain analogous to physical pain; there is a spiritual pain when the tissues of the soul are torn away. For just as the body has its tissues of cells and filaments, so the soul has its tissues of impressions, memories, sensations and ideas. The breaking of an association of ideas is like the breaking of an association of bodily cells and may produce anything from a slight irritation to the most acute pain.

It is a matter of common observation that the pain which we feel at the death of someone dear to us, with whom we have lived together, at first goes on increasing until it reaches a point when it begins to diminish. Its progress might be described by a rapidly ascending and gradually descending curve. The first effect is one of stupor. The pain becomes most acute when we feel the gap that has been left in our existence, when we feel the rupture of our associations of ideas and feelings. The image of the loved one was intimately woven into the spiritual tissue of our life, and death cannot tear it away without destroying the tissue.

And every rupture of an association of ideas and feelings is accompanied by a disturbance which varies in degree from the pain that we feel at the death of a father, husband, wife, brother or son, to the minor irritation which is caused by the exploding of some commonplace that had become a habit of our mind. And we writers who are given to breaking these associations--and that is why we are called paradoxists--jar on people and incur their antipathy. It is our fate.

And they tell us that what jars is not so much what we say as our way of saying it. Yes, it is because instead of cutting these associations with surgical delicacy, first chloroforming or hypnotizing the patient, we tear them roughly and when he is most wide awake. It is a question of method, and it is a question of temperament. Chloroform, the clinical as well as the literary variety, has its inconveniences, and there are cases in which the patient has to suffer pain. To irritate people may even become a duty binding upon the conscience, a painful duty, but a duty none the less.

And then there is another thing which makes me antipathetic, I know, and that is my lack of impersonality, my incapacity to produce what is called objective work, my putting my whole self, more or less, into all my writings, my egotism, as it is called. But what am I to do?... I am amazed at those who are able to eliminate their own selves, I am amazed, but I don’t imitate them and I don’t wish to imitate them.

I don’t know how it may be elsewhere, but here in Spain the man, the individual man, irritates us. And as I believe that the great battle is how to win respect for man, respect for individuality, I for my part irritate the myriad-headed, anonymous multitude. Let them respect me. Thus they will learn to respect every individual, to respect themselves as individuals.