CONCLUSION DON QUIXOTE IN THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN TRAGI-COMEDY "A voice crying in the wilderness !"—ISA. xl. 3. NEED is that I bring to a conclusion, for the present at any rate, these essays that threaten to become like a tale that has no ending. They have gone straight from my hands to the press in the form of a kind of improvization upon notes collected during a number of years, and in writing each essay I have not had before me any of those that preceded it. And thus they will go forth full of inward contradictions-apparent contradictions, at any } rate-like life and like me myself. My sin, if any, has been that I have embellished them to excess with foreign quotations, many of which will appear to have been dragged in with a certain degree of violence. But I will explain this another time. A few years after Our Lord Don Quixote had journeyed through Spain, Jacob Böhme declared in his Aurora (chap xi., § 142) that he did not write a story or history related to him by others, but that he himself had had to stand in the battle, which he found to be full of heavy strivings, and wherein he was often struck down. to the ground like all other men; and a little further on (§ 152) he adds: "Although I must become a spectacle of scorn to the world and the devil, yet my hope is in God concerning the life to come; in Him will I venture to hazard it and not resist or strive against the Spirit. Amen." And like this Quixote of the German intellectual world, neither will I resist the Spirit. And therefore I cry with the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and I send forth my cry from this University of Salamanca, a University that arrogantly styled itself omnium scientiarum princeps, and which Carlyle called a stronghold of ignorance and which a French man of letters recently called a phantom University; I send it forth from this Spain-" the land of dreams that become realities, the rampart of Europe, the home of the knightly ideal," to quote from a letter which the American poet Archer M. Huntington sent me the other day -from this Spain which was the head and front of the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. And well they repay her for it! In the fourth of these essays I spoke of the essence of Catholicism. And the chief factors in de-essentialising it—that is, in de-Catholicizing Europe-have been the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution, which for the ideal of an eternal, ultra-terrestrial life, have substituted the ideal of progress, of reason, of science, or, rather, of Science with the capital letter. And last of all, the dominant ideal of to-day, comes Culture. And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in the popularization as in the vulgarization of science—or, rather, of pseudo-science-venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it were its function to come down to the people and subserve their passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations. All this led Brunetière to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this science-if you like to call it sciencedid in effect become bankrupt. And as it failed to auf-fos tivism. satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness, but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power, or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in culture. And the result was pessimism. Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve? Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the Kulturkampf did not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I call the final finality is the real ovτws Ŏv. And the famous maladie du siècle, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more plainly in Sénancour's Obermann than in any other character, neither was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul, in the human finality of the Universe. The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr. Faustus. This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?" "Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why he tempts us thus ?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers: "Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris," which, mistranslated into Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb-"The misfortune of many is the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell. is there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, . to which Faust answers that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who, although no doubt Marlowe never sus pected it, is none other than renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's Faust there is a scene that is worth the whole of the second part of the Faust of Goethe. Faust says to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss "-and he kisses her Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies! Give me my soul again !—the cry of Faust, the Doctor, when, after having kissed Helen, he is about to be lost eternally. For the primitive Faust has no ingenuous Margaret to save him. This idea of his salvation was the invention of Goethe. And is there not a Faust whom we all know, our own Faust? This Faust has studied Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even Theology, only to find that we can know nothing, and he has sought escape in the open country (hinaus ins weite Land) and has encountered Mephistopheles, the embodiment of that force which, ever willing evil, ever achieves good in its own despite. This Faust has been led by Mephistopheles to the arms of Margaret, child of the simple-hearted people, she whom Faust, the overwise, had lost. And thanks to her-for she gave herself to him—this Faust is saved, redeemed by the people that believes with a simple faith. But there was a second part, for that Faust was the anecdotical Faust and not the categorical Faust of Goethe, and he gave himself again to Culture, to Helen, and begot Euphorion upon her, and everything ends among mystical choruses with the discovery of the eternal feminine. Poor Euphorion! And this Helen is the spouse of the fair Menelaus, the Helen whom Paris bore away, who was the cause of the war of Troy, and of whom the ancient Trojans said that no one should be incensed because men fought for a woman who bore so terrible a likeness to the immortal gods. But I rather think that Faust's Helen was that other Helen who accompanied Simon Magus, and whom he declared to be the divine wisdom. And Faust can say to her: Give me my soul again! For Helen with her kisses takes away our soul. And what we long for and have need of is soul-soul of bulk and substance. But the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution came, bringing Helen to us, or, rather, urged on by Helen, and now they talk to us about Culture and Europe. Europe! This idea of Europe, primarily and immediately of geographical significance, has been converted for us by some magical process into a kind of metaphysical category. Who can say to-day-in Spain, at any rate-what Europe is? I only know that it is a shibboleth (vide my Tres Ensayos). And when I proceed to examine what it is that our Europeanizers call Europe, it sometimes seems to me that much of its periphery remains outside of it-Spain, of course, and also England, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia-and hence it is reduced to the central portion, Franco-Germany, with its annexes and dependencies. All this is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of internecine war, were twinbrothers, The Italians of the Renaissance were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head, regarded Luther, the German monk, as a barbarian, who derived his driving force from the cloister, as did Bruno and Campanella. But this barbarian was their twin-brother, and though their antagonist he was also the antagonist of the common enemy. All this, I say, is due to the Renaissance and the Reformation, and to what was the offspring of these two, the Revolution, and to them we owe also a new Inquisition, that of science or culture, which turns against those who refuse |