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

Imagine Don Quixote turning his heart to religious speculation—­as he himself once dreamed of doing when he met those images in bas-relief which certain peasants were carrying to set up in the retablo of their village church[65]—­imagine Don Quixote given up to meditation upon eternal truths, and see him ascending Mount Carmel in the middle of the dark night of the soul, to watch from its summit the rising of that sun which never sets, and, like the eagle that was St. John’s companion in the isle of Patmos, to gaze upon it face to face and scrutinize its spots.  He leaves to Athena’s owl—­the goddess with the glaucous, or owl-like, eyes, who sees in the dark but who is dazzled by the light of noon—­he leaves to the owl that accompanied Athena in Olympus the task of searching with keen eyes in the shadows for the prey wherewith to feed its young.

And the speculative or meditative Quixotism is, like the practical Quixotism, madness, a daughter-madness to the madness of the Cross.  And therefore it is despised by the reason.  At bottom, 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, by making a mockery of it, sought to convert it into a comedy; he conceived the farcical idea of the king with the reed sceptre and crown of thorns, and cried “Behold the man!” But the people, more human than he, the people that thirsts for tragedy, shouted, “Crucify him! crucify him!” And the human, the intra-human, tragedy is the tragedy of Don Quixote, whose face was daubed with soap in order that he might make sport for the servants of the dukes and for the dukes themselves, as servile as their servants.  “Behold the madman!” they would have said.  And the comic, the irrational, tragedy is the tragedy of suffering caused by ridicule and contempt.

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 shrink from the ridicule.

I have already spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese, Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand.  Feeling acutely for the plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he wrote as follows:[66] “An English statesman of the last century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for those who think.  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 at no very remote future date, for England,