XII. Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragicomedy

“A voice crying in the wilderness!”

Isaiah 40:3

FORCIBLY must I bring to an end, for the time being at least, this series of essays which threaten to turn into a tale without end. They have gone from my hands direct to the printer in a kind of improvised commentary upon notes gathered over a period of years, so that I have not had before me, as I wrote each essay, those that preceded it. And thus they go forth full of quintessential contradictions—apparent contradictions, at any rate—like life and like myself.

My fault, if one is to be picked out, has been to interlard an excess of remote citations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in with a certain degree of force. I will explain some other time.

A few short years after Our Lord Don Quixote went riding through Spain, Jacob Böhme told us, in his Aurora, that he was not writing a story related to him by others, but was himself forced to take part in the battle, fighting furiously, and often beaten down, like all other men: and he added, farther on in his text: “Although I must become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard all and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen.” And like this Quixote of the German world of thought, neither will I resist the Spirit.

And I therefore raise my voice, to clamor in the wilderness, and I raise my voice from here, from the University of Salamanca, which had the arrogance to style itself Omnium scientiarum princeps, and which Carlyle called a Fortress of Ignorance, and which a Frenchman of letters recently labeled a phantom university; I raise my voice from out of Spain, “the land of dreams which become realities; the defender of Europe, the home of the ideal of chivalry” (to quote from a letter sent me the other day by Archer M. Huntington, the Hispanist); from this Spain which was the head and font of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. And Spain is still paying the price!

In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And in de-essentializing it—that is, de-Catholicizing Europe—the chief agents have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution, as they substituted the ideal of progress, reason, and science, or rather, of Science with a capital S, for the ideal of an eternal ultra-terrestrial life. Now, for the moment, the latest, most popular notion is that of Culture.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially unphilosophical and given to technique, dominated by a myopic specialization and historical materialism, this scientific ideal took a practical form, not so much of the popularization, as of the vulgarization of science—or rather of pseudoscience—and expressed itself in a proliferation of democratic sets of cheap popular and propagandist literature. Science was thus thought to be achieving popularity, as if it were its function to lower itself to the level of the people and serve their passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through science rise to higher levels still, to new and profounder aspirations.

These developments led Brunetière to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this science, or whatever it was, did in effect become bankrupt. And as it failed to give satisfaction, men continued their search for felicity, but it was not found, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power, or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good moral conscience, or in culture. And the result was an access of pessimism.

The Gospel of Progress did not satisfy either. Why progress? Man refused to be satisfied with rationalism; the Kulturkampf did not suffice; so men sought to lend life a final finality, that final finality which is the real And the famous mal du siècle, whose note was sounded in Rousseau and was echoed more clearly than anywhere in Sénancour’s Obermann, was in reality nought but the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul, in the human end-purpose of the Universe.

Its symbol, its true symbol is a fictional creation, Dr. Faustus.

This immortal Dr. Faustus, product of the Renaissance and the Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when, in 1604, he is introduced to us by Christopher Marlowe. This is the same Faust whom Goethe will rediscover two centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier is the fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him appears Mephistophilis, to whom Faust puts the question: “Stay, Mephistophilis, and tell me, what good will my soul do thy lord?” To which Mephistophilis replies: “Enlarge his kingdom.” And the Doctor again asks: “Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?” Whereupon the evil spirit answers: “Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris,” a sentence which, mistranslated into the vernacular, yields our common proverb: “The misfortune of many is the consolation of fools.” Mephistophilis adds to his part of the dialogue: “In one self place; for where we are is hell,/And where hell is, there must we ever be.” And then Faust says that he believes that Hell is a fable, and asks Mephistophilis who made the world. This tragic Doctor, tortured by our selfsame torture, in the end finds Helen, who is none other—though Marlowe perhaps never suspected the truth-—than renascent Culture. And here in Marlowe’s Faust there is a scene worth the whole of the Second Part of the Faust of Goethe: Faust says to Helen “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss”—and he kisses her:

Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!—

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

“. . . give me my soul again.” Such is the cry of Faust the Doctor, when, after kissing Helen, he goes to his perdition. For there is no ingenuous Margaret at all to save him. The idea of Faust’s salvation was Goethe’s invention. And who does not know this Faust of Goethe’s, our Faust, who studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even Theology, only to find we cannot know anything, and who sought a way out into the open country (hinaus ins weite Land) and there encountered Mephistopheles, the embodiment of that force which, ever willing evil, achieves good in spite of itself; and Mephistopheles led him to the arms of Margaret, child of the simplehearted people, whom the wise Faust had lost; and thanks to her, who gave herself to him, Faust is saved, redeemed by the people which believes with a simple faith. But there was that second part, for the other Faust was the anecdotic Faust and not the categorical one of Goethe, and he gave himself over again to Culture, to Helen, and begot Euphorion with her, and so everything ends among mystical choruses with the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion!

This Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the Helen whom Paris bore away, who was the cause of the Trojan War, and of whom the ancient Trojans said that it was not unseemly that men should fight over a woman who in her countenance bore such an awesome likeness to the immortal gods. But I rather think that Faust’s Helen was really the one who accompanied Simon Magus, and whom he declared to be the divine intelligence. And Faust could say to her: . give me my soul again.”

For Helen with her kisses sucks away our soul. And what we need and want is soul, a soul with some substance.

But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing Helen with them; or rather these phenomena were brought upon us by Helen. And now they talk to us of Culture and of Europe.

Europe! The primitively and immediately geographic idea of Europe has been transformed for us, as if by magic, into an almost metaphysical category. Who can say today (at least in Spain) what Europe is? I know only that it is a shibboleth, or schibolet as I have called it elsewhere. And when I proceed to examine what our Europeanizers mean by “Europe,” it often strikes me that they leave out a good deal of the periphery: Spain of course, but also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia. Thus Europe is reduced to the central core: Franco-Germany and its annexes and dependencies.

And this state of things is the consequence of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which were twin brothers, though they lived in an apparent state of internecine war. The Italians of the Renaissance were all of them Socinians. The humanists, with Erasmus at their head, considered Luther, the German monk, a barbarian—Luther, who derived his strength from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But the barbarian was their twin brother: while he fought them, he fought alongside them against the common enemy. The Renaissance and the Reformation, I say, along with their daughter the Revolution, have brought us all these things, and they have also brought us a new Inquisition: that of science and culture, which turns its weapons of ridicule and contempt against whoever does not submit to its orthodoxy.

When Galileo sent his treatise on the earth’s motion to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he wrote him that it was only proper to obey and believe in the decisions of one’s superiors, and that he, Galileo, considered his own treatise to be “like poetry or a dream and as such I desire your highness to accept it.” And at other times he calls it a “chimera” or a “mathematical caprice.” And in the same way, in these essays, from fear also—why not confess it?—of the Inquisition, but of today’s Inquisition, the scientific Inquisition, I proffer what springs from the deepest part of me as poetry, dream, chimera, or mystical caprice. And I say with Galileo, “Eppur si muove!” And yet, is it solely fear that moves me to subterfuge? Ah, no! There exists another, more tragic Inquisition, I mean the Inquisition that the modern man, the man of culture, the European man—which is what I am, whether I want to be one or not—carries within him. There exists a more terrible ridicule, and that is the ridicule of one’s self which one sees in one’s own eyes. My reason makes mock of my faith and despises it.

And here I must have recourse to my Lord Don Quixote to learn how to face ridicule and overcome it, to best a ridicule he may perhaps—who knows?—not ever have known.

Yes, yes, of course my reason must smile at these pseudo-philosophical constructs of mine, these dilettante attempts at mysticism, which contain everything but patient study, objectivity, and method—scientific method. And nevertheless: Eppur si muove!

Eppur si muove! Yes! And I have recourse to dilettantism, to what a pedant would call demi-mondaine philosophy, as a refuge against the pedantry of specialists, against the philosophy of professional philosophers and the theology of the theologians. And who knows? . . . Progress usually comes from the barbarians, while there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians. And let them talk to us of Europe! The civilization of Tibet is parallel to our own, and men have lived and live there who disappear like ourselves. And over all civilizations hovers the shadow of Ecclesiastes, with the admonition of “how dieth the wise man?—as the fool” (2:16).

There is an admirable reply current among the people of my nation to the customary question “How are you?” and it consists in answering “One lives.” And so it is—one lives, we live much as others do. And what more can one ask? And what Spaniard would not know this verse?

Every time that I consider

that I am going to die

I spread my cape upon the ground

and sleep till life is by.

But no, not to sleep, rather to dream; to dream life, since life is a dream.

It is also proverbial to say that the point is to pass the time, that is, to kill time. And in fact we make time, find time—to kill time. But there is something else which has always concerned us as much or more than passing the time, which is a formula covering an aesthetic position, and that is to gain eternity, a formula covering the religious position. And in truth we jump from the aesthetic and the economic to the religious plane, passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.

A Spanish novelist, Ramón Pérez de Ayala, in his novel La pata de la raposa, tells us that the idea of death is a trap, while the spirit is the vixen, that is, the wary wisdom with which to step around the ambushes of fate, and he adds:

Caught in the trap, weak men and weak nations lie prone on the ground; and lying there they dream a cowardly dream, imagining that a bountiful and providential hand holds them down only to lead them to a new and more fortunate existence. Stout spirits and vigorous nations are shocked into clear-headed insight by the presence of danger. They gain a sudden insight into the enormous beauty of life, and put behind them forever their primitive wild carelessness; they slip the trap with muscles taut and ready for action, the wellsprings of their spirits more potent, effective, impelling.

But, wait, let us see: “weak men” . . . “weak nations” . . . “strong spirits” . . . “strong nations” . . , What does it all mean? I do not know. What I think I do know is that some individuals and nations have not yet seriously considered death and immortality, have not felt them; and that others have ceased to think about them, or rather ceased to feel them. And the fact that they have never passed through a religious age is not, I think, cause for boasting in either men or nations.

The “enormous beauty of life” is all very well in literature, and there are, indeed, people who resign themselves and accept life as they find it, and there are even those who would persuade us that the question of a trap is no problem. But Calderón told us:

For ill luck it’s no consolation—

but an added bit of ill luck—

to try to persuade its bearers

that the ills they bear are not such.

And, furthermore, “nothing can speak to a heart but another heart,” as Fray Diego de Estella wrote.

Not long ago, a statement of mine, replying to those who reproached us Spaniards for our scientific incapacity, appeared to scandalize a certain few. After having made the observation that electric light shines as brightly and locomotives run as well here as in the countries where they were invented, and that we make use of logarithms just as effectively as in the place where they were conceived, I exclaimed, notoriously, “Let others invent!” And I do not now retract that paradoxical expression. We Spanish ought to appropriate to ourselves in some good measure the sage counsels which Count Joseph de Maistre offered the Russians, a people cast in our likeness. In his admirable letters to Count Rasoumowsky on public education in Russia, he wrote that a nation should not think the worse of itself merely because it was not made for science. The Romans had no proficiency in the mechanical arts, and they boasted of no mathematician; but this fact did not prevent them playing their part in the world. We should particularly take to heart everything he said about that crowd of arrogant sciolists who act like idolators when confronted with foreign tastes, foreign fashions, and foreign languages, and who are always ready to tear down whatever they misunderstand, which is everything.

We have no scientific spirit, they say. What of it, as long as we have some spirit? And who knows whether our spirit is or is not compatible with the scientific spirit?

Moreover, when I said “Let others invent!”, I did not mean to imply that we should content ourselves with a passive role. Rather, let the others dedicate themselves to science, and let us take advantage of the results; meanwhile, let us cultivate our own spirit. Defensive action is not enough, we must also attack.

But we must attack wisely and carefully. Reason must be our weapon. Reason is the weapon even of the fool and madman. Our sublime fool and madman, our model, the exemplary Don Quixote, after destroying with two strokes of his sword the pasteboard visor he had fitted to his steel helmet, “made it anew, placing certain iron bars within it, in such mode that he stayed satisfied with its strength, without needing to make any further trials, and he deputed it to be and held it to be a most splendid piece of joinery.” And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself immortal. That is, he first made himself ridiculous. For it was by making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved immortality.

And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous! . . . Cournot wrote: “It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the probabilities of death: princes will punish this temerity with disgrace; the public will revenge itself with ridicule.” True, and therefore it is rightly said that one must live with the age. “Corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur,” as Tacitus wrote.

One must know how to make oneself appear ridiculous, and not only in the eyes of others but also in one’s own eyes. And more than ever today, when there is so much loose talk about our backwardness compared with other civilized peoples; today when a packet of shallow-pates who know nothing of our true history—which is yet to be written, after the webs of Protestant calumnies around it have first been swept away—tell us we have had neither science, nor art, nor philosophy, and no Renaissance either (though one would have thought we have had a little too much of the latter).

Carducci, who spoke of the “contorcimenti dell’affannosa grandiosità spagnola,” “the contortions of zealous Spanish grandeur,” also wrote, in Mosche cocchiere, that “even Spain, which never possessed hegemony of thought, can count on Cervantes.” But was Cervantes a solitary phenomenon, perchance, isolated and rootless, without ancestral stock or foundation? It is understandable, after all, for an Italian rationalist, remembering it was Spain which reacted against the Italian Renaissance, to say that Spain “non ebbe egemonia mai di pensiero.” But yet, was there nothing of importance, nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the leader and which in point of fact began with the Spanish Sack of Rome, a providential chastisement of the city of pagan popes cast up by a pagan Renaissance? Leaving aside the question of whether or not the Counter-Reformation was good or bad, was there not something culturally hegemonic in Loyola and the Council of Trent? Previous to the Council, Italy was witness to an unnatural embrace and concubinage between Christianity and Paganism, or rather between immortalism and mortalism, a union entertained in the very souls of some of the Popes. Theological error served as philosophical truth, and everything was made right with the formula salva fide. But it was otherwise after the Council: then came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, between science and religion. And the fact that the change was wrought mainly by Spanish obduracy, is not this hegemonic?

Without the Counter-Reformation, the Reformation would not have taken the course it did; without the Counter-Reformation, the Reformation, lacking the buttress of pietism, might perhaps have waned in the gross rationalism of the Aufklärung, the Age of Enlightenment. Would the world have been the same without our Charles I, without our Philip II, our great Philip?

A negative labor ours, someone will say. And what is that? What is a negative labor? What is a positive labor? At what point in time—which is a line proceeding always in the same direction, from the past to the future—does the zero occur to mark the boundary between the positive and the negative? Spain, land of knights and knaves, they say—and both categories knavish—has been the country most calumniated in history precisely because it led the Counter-Reformation, and because its arrogance prevented it from appearing in the public forum, in Vanity Fair, to defend and justify itself.

Let us leave to one side Spain’s eight centuries of warfare against the Moors, her defense of Europe against Mohammedanism, her labor of internal unification, her discovery of America and the Indies—for this was the work of Spain and Portugal, and not of Columbus and Vasco da Gama—let us leave all this and more aside, and it will be not a little leaving. Is it nothing in the cultural sphere to have created a score of nations, reserving nothing for oneself, and to have begotten, as the Conquistadores did, free men upon benighted Indian girls? And, apart from all these things, does not our mysticism count for something in the world of thought? Perhaps one day the people whose souls are ravished by Helen’s kisses may have to return to our mysticism to search for their souls.

But—as everyone, of course, must know—Culture is composed of ideas and solely of ideas, and man is only an instrument of Culture. Man is made for the idea, and not the idea for man: the substance is made for the shadow. The end of man is to make science, to catalogue the Universe so that it may be handed back to God in good order (as I wrote in my novel Amor y pedagogía). Man is not, apparently, even an idea. And in the end, the human race will fall exhausted at the foot of a library of libraries, entire forests having been leveled to make the paper stored in the libraries in the form of printed books, fall at the foot of museums, machines, factories, laboratories, which have been erected as a legacy for . . . whom? For God will not receive them.

That terrible regenerationist literature, almost all of it an imposture, which the loss of our last American colonies provoked in Spain, led us into the pedantic practice of writing about silent, persevering effort—vociferating, silently vociferous—into the practice of concerning ourselves with prudence, exactitude, moderation, spiritual fortitude, synteresis, equanimity, the “social” virtues. And the chiefest vociferators were those most lacking in these virtues. Almost all we Spanish fell into the habit of this ridiculous genre, some of us to a greater degree, some to a lesser. And so it came about that the arch-Spaniard Joaquin Costa, one of the least European spirits we have ever boasted, invented the notion of our Europeanizing ourselves and, while acting the Cid, he proclaimed at the same time that we must lock up the sepulcher of the Cid with the seven keys, and . . . conquer Africa! And I myself, I uttered my cry of “Down with Don Quixote!” This blasphemy, which meant the very opposite of what it seemed to mean (such was the state we had gotten ourselves into at the time), led to my writing The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho and to my proposing the cult of Quixotism as the national religion.

I wrote that book in order to think my way through Don Quixote again, in the face of Cervantists and scholars, and to resurrect a living work out of what was and is a dead letter for most people. What do I care what Cervantes did or did not mean to put into that book or what he actually did put into it? The living part of it for me is whatever I discover in it —whether Cervantes put it there or not-—and it is whatever I myself put into or under or over it, and whatever we all of us put into it. And I sought to track down our philosophy in it.

For I increasingly harbor the conviction that our philosophy, Spanish philosophy, is to be found diffused. and liquescent in our literature, in our collective life, in our action, above all in our mysticism, and not in any philosophical system whatsoever. And it is concrete. For that matter, is there not perhaps as much or more philosophy in Goethe, for example, than in Hegel? The “Elegy” of Jorge Manrique, the Romancero, Don Quixote itself, La vida es sueño, the Subida al Monte Carmelo, imply an intuition of the world and a concept of life, Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht. It was difficult for this Spanish philosophy to formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period basically materialistic and pessimistic.

Our language itself, like any civilized language, implies a philosophy.

A language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. Platonism is the Greek language which speaks through Plato, developing in him its ancient metaphors. Scholasticism is the philosophy of the dead Latin of the Middle Ages struggling against the various vernacular languages. French discourses through Descartes; German through Kant and Hegel; English through Hume and John Stuart Mill. The logical point of departure for all philosophical speculation is not the I, nor is it representation ( Vorstellung), that is, the world as it immediately appears to the senses, but rather is it a mediate or historical representation, humanly elaborated and given us principally in the language through which we know the world; the point of departure is not psychical but spiritual representation. Each one of us in thinking sets out from a point of departure based—whether we know it or not and whether we want to or not—on what others before us or around us have thought. Thought is our inheritance. Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau, who thought in English and French respectively. And Spinoza—did he not think in his Judeo-Portuguese, inhibited by and in contention with his Dutch?

Thought rests upon pre-judices, and prejudices are embodied in the language. Bacon was right to ascribe to language not a few errors of the idola fori. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in Esperanto? One need only read Avenarius on the critique of pure experience, reine Erfahrung, which is a prehuman—that is to say, an inhuman—experience, to see whither that notion can lead. And even Avenarius himself, who was obliged to invent a language, was forced to invent one based on Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical force a content of impure experience, of human social experience.

All philosophy, then, is essentially philology. And philology, with its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, gives its head to chance, and to the irrational, to the absolutely immeasurable. History is not mathematics, and neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical ideas are due, strictly speaking, to something akin to rhyme, to the necessity of correctly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a great deal of this aesthetic symmetry, of “rhyme.”

Representation is, then, as is language, as is reason itself—which is simply internal language—-a social and racial product. “Race is . . .” Language!—-the “blood of the soul,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Yankee, exclaimed and as I have often repeated.

It was in Athens, with Socrates, that our Western philosophy first matured, and became conscious of itself; and it arrived at this consciousness by means of dialogue, social conversation. And it is profoundly significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism later knew as Realism, should have been formulated in dialogue. And these ideas, which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism demonstrated; and the question is not whether they be no more than names, flatus vocis, but whether they be nothing less than names. Language is what gives us reality, and it does so not as a mere vehicle of reality, but as the true flesh of reality, of which all the rest, dumbshow or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton. And thus logic operates upon aesthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the word, and not upon the brute perception.

And this is true even in the matter of love. Love does not discover that it is love until it speaks, until it says, “I love you!” It is with a profound intuition that Stendhal, in his novel The Charterhouse of Parma, makes Conte Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love he believes unites the Duchessa Sanseverina with her nephew Fabrizio, say to himself: “I must calm myself; if I behave rudely, the Duchessa is quite capable, simply out of injured vanity, of following him to Belgirate; and there, or on the way there, a chance word may be spoken which will give a name to what they now feel for one another; and after that, in a moment, all the consequences.”

And so it is: everything made was made by the word, and the Word was in the beginning.

Thought, reason, that is, living language, is an inheritance, and thus the solitary thinker invented by Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the methodical and ideal, is homo sum, ergo cogito. To feel oneself a man is more immediate than to think. But, on the other hand, History, the cultural process, finds its perfection and full effectiveness only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de Unamuno. The individual is the end-purpose of the Universe.

That the individual is the end-purpose of the Universe is something we Spanish feel very strongly. The introspective individuality of the Spanish was sharply delineated by Martin A. S. Hume in his Preface to The Spanish People, and I commented on his book in my essay “Spanish Individuality.”

And it is perhaps this same introspective individualism which has inhibited the growth on Spanish soil of strictly philosophical—or rather metaphysical—systems. And this fact is true in despite of Suárez, whose formal subtleties do not warrant the name of philosophy.

Our metaphysics, if it is anything, has been metanthropics, and our metaphysicians have been philologists, or rather, humanists, in the most comprehensive sense.

Menéndez y Pelayo, as Benedetto Croce truly said of him, was inclined toward metaphysical idealism, but he seemed to want to take something from other systems, even from empirical theories. For this reason, Croce considers that his work (he was referring to the Historia de las ideas estéticas en España) was weakened by a degree of uncertainty, given its author’s theoretical point of view. Menéndez y Pelayo, a perfervid Spanish humanist, unwilling to disown the Renaissance, invented what he called Vivism, the philosophy of Luis Vives, and perhaps for no other reason than because he himself, like Vives, was an eclectic Spaniard of the Renaissance. The philosophy of Menéndez y Pelayo was, in truth, all incertitude: he had been educated in Barcelona in the uncertainties of the Scottish school as grafted on the Catalan spirit, in that uninspired philosophy of “common sense,” which was anxious not to compromise itself and yet was all compromise, and which was well-exemplified by Balmes. And he always shunned any wholehearted inner struggle and formed his conscience upon compromises.

More happily inspired, in my opinion, was Angel Ganivet, a man all instinct and divination, when he proclaimed that Spanish philosophy was that of Seneca, the pagan Stoic of Córdoba, whom not a few Christians looked upon as one of themselves. This philosophy was lacking in originality of thought but splendid as regards tone and accent. Seneca’s accent, in truth, was a Spanish, Latino-African accent, and not a Hellenic one, and there are echoes of Seneca in Tertullian—also so very Spanish—who believed in the corporeal and substantial nature of God and the soul, and who was a kind of Don Quixote of Christian thought in the second century.

But perhaps we must look for the hero of Spanish thought, not in any flesh-and-blood philosopher, but in a creation of fiction and yet man of action, more real than all the philosophers: Don Quixote. Doubtless there exists a philosophical Quixotism, but there is also a Quixotic philosophy. Is it not essentially that of the Conquistadores, of the Counter-Reformers, of Loyola, and, above all, in the order of abstract yet deeply felt thought, that of our mystics? What was the mysticism of St. John of the Cross but a knighterrantry in the divine sense?

And the philosophy of Don Quixote cannot, strictly speaking, be called idealism: he did not fight for ideas. It was of a spiritual order: he fought for the spirit.

Imagine Don Quixote given to religious speculation, as he himself once dreamed as a role for himself when he came across those images carved in bas-relief which some peasants were carrying for the high altar of their village church; imagine him meditating on eternal truths, and imagine him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the dark night of the soul, to watch from there, from its summit, the rising of the sun which never sets, and, like the eagle which accompanied St. John on the island of Patmos, gazing upon it face to face and scrutinizing its spots. For he leaves to the owl which in Olympus accompanies Athena—she, the goddess of the glaucous, or owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but is dazzled by the light of the moon—he leaves to Athena’s owl the task of sharp-eyed searching among the shades for the prey to feed its young.

And speculative or meditative Quixotism, like Quixotism in practice, is a madness, a child of the madness of the Cross. And thus it is disdained by reason. Fundamentally, philosophy abhors Christianity, and well did the gentle Marcus Aurelius prove it.

The tragedy of Christ, the divine tragedy, is the tragedy of the Cross. Pilate, the sceptic, the man of culture, sought to make it into a comedy by making mock of it, and thought up the farce of the king with the reed scepter and crown of thorns, and he cried out “Behold the man!” But the people, more human than he and thirsting for tragedy, raised their own cry: “Crucify him!” The other tragedy, the human tragedy, the intra-human tragedy, is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was daubed with soap that he might make sport for the servants of the Duke and Duchess, while the masters, who were as servile as their own servants, might cry out “Behold the madman!” And the comic tragedy, the irrational tragedy, is the passion following on mockery and ridicule.

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to fear the consequent ridicule.

I have previously mentioned the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese suicide Antero de Quental. Sorrowing for his country at the time of the British ultimatum of 1890, he wrote:

An English statesman of the last century, who was also indeed a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and for those who think, a comedy. Very well, then: if we are destined to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we would far rather prefer this terrible, but noble destiny, to that which is reserved, and perhaps in a not too remote future, for England, the country which thinks and calculates, and whose destiny it is to end miserably and comically.

Let us leave to one side the assertion that England thinks and calculates, implying thereby that she does not feel, the injustice of which is explained by the provocative situation at the time, and also let us put aside the assertion that the Portuguese feel, implying thereby that they scarcely think or calculate, for our Atlantic-seaboard brothers have always presumed of a certain sentimental pedantry, and let us keep only the essence of this terrible idea, which is that some people, those who put thought above feeling, or as I would say, reason above faith, die comically, while those who put faith above reason die tragically. For the mockers die comically, and God laughs at them finally, and the tragic, noble fate is reserved for those who endured mockery.

And we, following in the footsteps of Don Quixote, must seek out mockery.

And shall we again be told that there has never been any Spanish philosophy in the technical sense of the word? And I say: what sense is that? And what does philosophy mean? Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy, tells us that “the history of the word ‘philosophy’ is the history of the cultural significance of science.” And he adds:

When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently integral knowledge divides into branches, philosophy becomes the general knowledge of the world, embracing all other knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again to become a means to ethics or a medium for religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of living or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And then, when scientific life again regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its nature as an independent knowledge of the world, and whenever it begins to abandon the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself.

Here we have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, passing through the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavored to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy not perhaps some other role to play? May its role not also be to characterize the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate the conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to sustain this conflict?

Windelband goes on to say: “By philosophy in the systematic sense, not in the historical sense, I understand only the critical knowledge of values possessing a universal validity [allgemeingiltigen Werten].” But what values exist of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking before and above all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of the soul, that is, a human finality to the Universe, or than that of human reason denying the rationality and even the possibility of this desire? What values exist of a more universal validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or teleological value of the Universe in conflict one with the other?

For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are only three normative categories, three universal norms: the true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or evil. Philosophy is reduced to logic, aesthetics, and ethics, depending on whether the study is science, art, or morality. A further category remains excluded: that of the gratifying and the ungratifying, pleasing and the unpleasing, that is, the hedonic category is excluded. The hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it cannot be normative. “Whoever places upon philosophy the burden of deciding the question of optimism or pessimism,” wrote Windelband, “whoever asks philosophy to render judgement on whether the world is more propitious for producing pain or pleasure, such a person, if he attempts to go beyond the position of a dilettante, labors on the phantom task of finding an absolute determination in a terrain where no reasonable man has ever sought one.” It remains to be seen, however, whether this pronouncement is as clear as it seems to be, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the same time reasonable and yet nothing but a dilettante, which amounts to “the abomination of desolation.”

With profound insight, Benedetto Croce, considering the philosophy of the spirit joined to aesthetics to be the science of expression and the philosophy of the spirit joined to logic as the science of pure concept, divided practical philosophy into two branches: economics and ethics. He recognizes, in effect, the existence of a practical order of spirit, purely economic, directed toward the singular and unconcerned with the universal. Iago and Napoleon are types of perfection, of economic genius, and this order of spirit remains outside morality. And every man passes through this order, because before all else he must wish to be himself, qua individual, and without this order, morality would be inexplicable, just as without aesthetics logic would lack meaning. And the discovery of the normative value of the economic order, which seeks the hedonic, was not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who speculated so fearlessly with virtù, practical efficiency, which is not exactly moral virtue.

But this economic order is essentially nothing but an inchoate religious order. The religious order is the transcendental, economic, or hedonic. Religion is a transcendental economy of hedonism. In religion, in religious faith, man seeks to save his own individuality, to make it eternal—something he cannot achieve through science, or through art, or through morality. Neither science, nor art, nor morality requires God; it is only religion which requires God. So that the Jesuits, with the insight of genius, speak of the grand commerce of our salvation. Commerce, yes, commerce, something in the economic, hedonistic order, albeit transcendental. We do not need God in order that He may teach us the truth of things, or their beauty, or that He may safeguard morality by penalties and punishments, but in order that He may save us, in order that He may not let us die utterly. And this singular longing, because it is a longing in each and every normal man—those who are abnormal by reason of their barbarism or their hyperculture do not count—is universal and normative.

Religion, then, is a transcendental economy, or a transcendental metaphysic, if you like. The Universe has for man, along with its logical, aesthetic, and ethical values, an economic value as well, which when thus made universal and normative, becomes the religious value. For us it is not solely a question of truth, beauty and goodness: it is also a question, above all else, of the salvation of the individual, of perpetuation, which those norms do not assure for us. So-called political economy shows us the most adequate, most economic mode of satisfying our needs, whether or not they be rational, beautiful or ugly, moral or immoral—a sound commercial transaction may amount to a swindle, something which in the long run destroys the soul—and the supreme human need is the need not to die, the need to enjoy forever the plenitude of one’s own individual limitation. The Catholic eucharistic doctrine holds that the substance of the body of Jesus Christ is present whole and entire in the consecrated Host and whole and entire in each part of it, and this means that God is wholly and entirely in the whole Universe and also in each one of the individuals that compose it. And this principle is essentially not a logical, nor an aesthetic, nor an ethical one, but an economic principle of a transcendental or religious nature. And with this norm, philosophy is able to judge as to optimism and pessimism. If the human soul is immortal, the world is economically or hedonistically good; if not, it is bad. And the meaning which optimism and pessimism assign to the categories of good and evil is a meaning which is not ethical but economic and hedonistic. Whatever satisfies our vital longing is good, and whatever does not satisfy it is evil.

Philosophy, then, is also the science of the tragedy of life, a reflecting upon the tragic sense of life. And what I have attempted in these essays is an exercise in this philosophy, with its inevitable contradictions or inner antinomies. And the reader will not miss the fact that I have been operating upon myself; or that this work has been in the nature of self-surgery, without any anesthetic but the work itself. The pleasure of operating upon myself has sublimated the pain of being operated upon.

And as regards my other contentions, that what I have outlined above is Spanish philosophy, perhaps the Spanish philosophy, and that while if it was up to an Italian to discover the normative and universal value of the economic order, it is natural for a Spaniard to enunciate that this order is merely the beginning of the religious principle and that the essence of our religion, of our Spanish Catholicism, consists precisely in its being neither a science, nor an art, nor a morality, but a political economy of the eternal, that is, of the divine. The question of whether this is an essentially Spanish contribution I leave for another, historical, work. But for now, leaving aside the written and external tradition, the tradition expressed in historical documents, I merely express myself as a Spaniard, a Spaniard, moreover, who has scarcely ever been outside Spain, a product, therefore, of the Spanish tradition, of the living Spanish tradition, as transmitted in feelings and ideas that dream, rather than in texts that sleep.

The philosophy in the soul of my people seems to me the expression of an inner tragedy analogous to the tragedy in the soul of Don Quixote, the expression of a conflict between what the world appears scientifically to be and what we want the world to be in accord with the faith of our religion. And in this philosophy lies the secret of the judgement made of us to the effect that we are basically irreducible to Kultur: in other words that we will not submit to it. No, Don Quixote will not submit to the world, nor to its “truth,” nor to science or logic, nor to art or aesthetics, nor to morality or ethics.

“The upshot of all this,” I have been told more than once by more than one person, “is that you will only succeed in driving people to the most desperate Catholicism.” Meanwhile I have also been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. So be it! And so?

Yes, I know, I know it is madness to try to drive the waters of a river back to their source, and that it is only the populace who rummages in the past for a cure to its ills. But I also know that whoever does battle for any ideal whatsoever, though the ideal seem to belong to the past, is a person who drives the world on into the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at ease in the present. Any presumed restoration of the past is a pre-creation of the future, and if the past is a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better. Inasmuch as we necessarily march into the future, whoever walks at all is walking into the future even if he walks backwards. And who is to say that this is not the better way to walk?

I feel within me a medieval soul, and I feel that my country’s soul is also medieval, that this soul has perforce lived through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution, learning from them, certainly, but never allowing the essence of the soul to be changed, always preserving intact the spiritual inheritance derived from the so-called Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the battle of the Middle Ages against its offspring the Renaissance.

And if some were to accuse me of being in the service of Catholic reaction, perhaps others, the official Catholics . . . well, but these, in Spain, scarcely notice anything and busy themselves only with their own dissensions and sectarian quarrels. And besides, poor folk, they have so little understanding!

But the truth is that my work—my mission, I was about to say—is to shatter the faith of men, left, right, and center, their faith in affirmation, their faith in negation, their faith in abstention, and I do so from faith in faith itself. My purpose is to war on all those who submit, whether to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism. My aim is to make all men live a life of restless longing.

Will such a purpose prove effective? Did Don Quixote, now, believe his purpose was of any immediately apparent effectiveness? It is very doubtful; in any event he did not repeat a second time—just in case—the experiment of slicing his pasteboard visor in two. And many passages in his history reveal that he did not consider it a matter of great moment to achieve immediate success in his purpose of restoring knight-errantry. And of what moment was it truly, so long as he lived as he would, and made himself immortal? And he must have guessed, and did in fact guess, that his labor possessed another and higher effectiveness, which was that it would have effective influence on all those who piously read of his exploits.

Don Quixote made himself ridiculous—but was he aware of the most tragic ridicule of all, the ridicule reflected in oneself, the ridiculousness of a man in his own eyes, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote’s battlefield to be in his own soul; imagine him fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, fighting to save the treasury of his childhood; imagine him an inner Don Quixote—with his Sancho, an inner Sancho, too, and a heroic one as well, at his side—and then tell me if there is anything comic in this tragedy.

“And what has Don Quixote left us?” you may well ask. And I shall answer that he has left us himself. And a man, a living, eternal man, is worth all theories and philosophies. Other nations have bequeathed us, in the main, institutions and books, we have left souls. Teresa of Avila is worth any school or institute, any Critique of Pure Reason whatsoever.

Of course, Don Quixote reformed. Yes, only in order to die, the poor man. But the other Don Quixote, the real one, the one who remained on earth and lives among us, inspiring us with his spirit—that one never reformed, that one goes on inciting us to make ourselves ridiculous, that Don Quixote should never die. The Don Quixote who converted and reformed in order to die may have reformed because he was mad, and it was his madness, in any case, and not his reformation or his death, which made him immortal, earning him a pardon for the crime of having been born. Felix culpa! And his madness was not cured either: he merely exchanged one type of madness for another. His death was his final knightly adventure: with it he stormed heaven, which suffers violence.

Don Quixote, then, died and went down into Hell, which he entered, lance on rest, and there he freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley slaves, and he closed the gates of Hell, and took down the inscription Dante saw there, “Abandon all hope!,” and replaced it with one reading “Long Live Hope!” And then, escorted by the souls he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to Heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal felicity.

And the other Don Quixote remained here, among us, fighting with desperation. For does he not fight from despair? Is it not only natural that among the words which English has taken from Spanish there should figure—among such words as siesta, camarilla, guerrilla—the word desperado? Is not this inward-turning Quixote of whom I spoke, a man conscious of his own tragic comical quality, is he not a desperado, a Spanish des-esperado? A desperado, indeed, like Pizarro and like Loyola. But “despair is the master of the impossible,” as we learn from Agustín de Salazar y Torres. And it is despair and despair alone which engenders heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. Spero quia ahsurdum is what we should say rather than Credo quia absurdum.

And Don Quixote, who lived alone, sought more solitude still; he sought the solitude of Peña Pobre, where, alone and without witnesses, he might give himself over to ever greater follies, for the relief of his soul. But he was not quite alone, for Sancho was at his side: Sancho the good, Sancho the believer, Sancho the simple. If, as some say, Don Quixote is dead in Spain and only Sancho lives on, then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knighterrant himself. Or at any rate he awaits some other mad lord to follow again.

And there is also the tragedy of Sancho. For there is no recorded evidence of the death of the Sancho who traveled with the Don Quixote who died, though there are those who believe he did die, a raving madman, calling for a lance and believing in the truth of everything his master had denounced as abominable lies at his deathbed conversion. But neither is it recorded anywhere that the graduate Samson Carrasco died, or that the curate did, or the barber, or the Duke and Duchess or the canons—and it is against them that the heroic Sancho must do battle.

.Don Quixote traveled alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude. And shall not we, his fond admirers, also travel alone as we forge a Quixotic Spain from out of our imagination?

And again we shall be asked: “What has Don Quixote bequeathed to Kultur?” And I shall answer: “Quixotism! Isn’t that enough?” And 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 total economy of the eternal and the divine, a total hope in the rationally absurd.

Why did Don Quixote do battle? He fought for Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for eternal survival. Not for Iseult, who is 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 won her, for he lives in her.

And his greatest attribute was that he was mocked and conquered: for being conquered was his way of conquering; he mastered the world by giving the world cause to laugh at him.

And now, today? Today he feels how comic, how vain were his feats on the temporal plane. He sees himself from outside himself—culture has taught him how to objectify himself, that is, how to alienate himself from himself, rather than how to steep himself in himself—and on seeing himself from outside, he has to laugh at himself, but with a certain bitterness. Perhaps the most tragic character would be a species of Margutte of the inner man, a Margutte who, like Pulci’s, would die bursting of laughter, laughter at himself. “E riderà in eterno,” and he will laugh through all eternity, as the Angel Gabriel said of Margutte. And do you not hear the laughter of God?

Dying, the mortal Don Quixote realized how comical he was, and he wept for his sins. But the immortal Don Quixote, understanding this same comical nature, superimposes himself upon the comedy and, without ever renouncing it, triumphs.

And Don Quixote will not surrender, because he is not a pessimist, and he fights on. He is not a pessimist because pessimism is the child of vanity and a question of fashion, pure snobbism, and Don Quixote is neither vain nor frivolous, nor modern in any way—and even less a modernist—and does not understand the meaning of the word “snob” unless it be explained to him in good Old-Christian Spanish. Don Quixote is no pessimist, for since he does not understand what is meant by joie de vivre, neither does he understand its opposite. And neither does he understand anything about futurist follies. In spite of Clavileño, he has not got as far as the airplane, which seems to carry a shipload of fools ever farther from heaven. Don Quixote has not arrived at the age of taedium vitae, which is commonly manifested among not a few modern spirits in the form of topophobia: these people spend their lives running at top speed from one place to another, not from any love of the place to which they are going, but from odium of the place they are leaving behind, thus fleeing all places, which is one of the forms of despair.

Don Quixote already hears the sound of his own laughter, and he hears the divine laughter too, and since he is not a pessimist, since he believes in life eternal, he is forced to fight without quarter against modern, scientific, inquisitorial orthodoxy, in the interests of restoring a new and impossible Middle Ages, dualistic, contradictory, impassioned. Like a new Savonarola—that Italian Quixote of the end of the fifteenth century—he does battle against this Modern Age which began with Machiavelli and will end in farce. He fights against the rationalism inherited from the eighteenth century. Peace of mind, conciliation between reason and faith, all of that—by the grace of a provident God—is no longer possible. The world will have to be as Don Quixote wants it to be, and inns perforce will have to be castles, and he will do battle with the world and he will, to all appearances, be bested, but in making himself ridiculous, he will triumph. And he will triumph over himself by laughing at himself, and making himself laughable.

“Reason speaks and feeling bites,” Petrarch said. But reason also bites, and it bites in the innermost depths of the heart. And more light does not make for more warmth. “Light, light, more light!” they say the dying Goethe cried. “Warmth, warmth, still more warmth!” we should cry, for we die of cold and not of the dark. It is not the night that kills, but the hoarfrost. And we must free the enchanted princess and destroy Master Peter’s puppet show.

And yet, may it not be just as pedantic to act the part of Quixote, to imagine oneself ridiculed and mocked? Kierkegaard said that the regenerate (Opvakte in Danish) desire that the wicked world should mock them, the better to assure themselves of their own regeneracy as they see themselves mocked, and thus to enjoy the advantages of being able to chide the world’s impiety.

If it is true that the natural man is only a myth and we are all of us more or less artificial, then the question is how to avoid the one pedantry or the other, the one or the other affectation.

Romanticism! Yes, perhaps that is the word, in part, for what we seek. And it serves us all the more and all the better by reason of its very lack of precision. Against all this, against this romanticism, the forces of rationalist and classicist pedantry, especially in France, have lately been unleashed. Is romanticism, then, another form of pedantry, a sentimental pedantry? Perhaps it is. In this world, a man of culture is either a dilettante or a pedant: you have to take your choice. Yes, perhaps Chateaubriand’s René, and Constant’s Adolphe, and Sénancour’s Obermann, and Byron’s Lara were all of them pedants. The point is to seek consolation in desolation.

Bergson’s philosophy, which is a matter of spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotic, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Take away the demi, and you have mondaine, mundane. Mundane, yes, a philosophy 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 by the deception anterior to reason, which is poetry, or by the deception subsequent to reason, which is religion. And Machiavelli has said that whoever wishes to practice deception will always find someone willing to be deceived. And blessed are those who are easily duped! A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, said that it was the privilege of his countrymen not to be taken in, n'être pas dupe. A sorry privilege indeed!

Science does not give Don Quixote what he requires of it. “Then let him not make such demands,” it will be said. “Let him resign himself, let him accept life and truth as they are!” But he will not accept them as they are, and he asks for some sign, urged on by Sancho, who is at his side. And it is not a question of Don Quixote’s not understanding whatever is understood by those who speak to him of resignation and acceptance of a reasonable life and a rational truth. Not at all; the truth is that his needs are greater, his affective needs are greater. A piece of pedantry, someone says? Who is to say?

And in this critical century, Don Quixote, himself touched by the critical spirit, must struggle against himself, a victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, and the more he tries to be spontaneous, the more he appears affected. And he tries, unhappy man, to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he falls into the intimate despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoy. And through despair he reaches the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke, that Bruno who was a Don Quixote of the mind escaped from a monastery, and he becomes an awakener of sleeping souls, dormitantium animorum excubitor, as the ex-Dominican said of himself. And Bruno also wrote: “Heroic love belongs to those superior natures called insane [insane in the Italian], not because they do not know [non sanno], but because they more-than-know [soprasanno].”

But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines. Or, at least, the inscription placed at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, not too far from the Vatican, states that the memorial is raised to him by the century he foresaw, il secolo da lui divinato. But our reborn Don Quixote, the self-searching Don Quixote conscious of his own comedy, cannot believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, for his doctrines are not of this world. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retreat to the woods in flight from the mob of king-makers and king-killers, just as Christ withdrew to the mount when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim Him king. He left the title of king to be used as inscription above the Cross.

What, then, is Don Quixote’s new mission in the world today? To cry aloud, to clamor in the wilderness. And the wilderness heeds, though men hear not, and one day it will grow into a resounding forest, and the solitary voice which falls like a seed upon the desert will bear fruit in the form of a gigantic cedar singing, with its infinity of tongues, an eternal hosanna to the Master of life and of death.

And as for you, graduate Carrasco of a pan-European regenerationism, you youths working with critical method, in the European fashion, you scientists, to you I say: create wealth, create nationality, create art, create science, create ethics, above all create—or rather transpose—Kultur, and thus kill off both life and death. Considering how long all that will last us . . . !

* * *

And on this note I temporarily break off—high time perhaps—these essays on the tragic sense of life in men and in nations, or at least in me—a man—and in the soul of my countrymen as it is mirrored in mine.

I trust, reader, that we shall meet again in the course of our tragedy, while the drama is being played out, in some interval between the acts. We shall recognize each other. Forgive me if I have disturbed you more than was necessary or inevitable, more than I intended when I took up my pen to distract you awhile from your distractions.

And may God give you no peace but glory!

Salamanca, in the year of grace 1912.