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.