“Eat, friend Sancho,” says Don Quixote. “Sustain the life which means more to you than to me, and leave me to die in the embrace of my thoughts and in the power of my disgraces. I, Sancho, was born to live dying; you, to die eating. And that you may see how I speak truth in this, behold me printed in history, celebrated in arms, commended in all my acts, respected in principles, desired by damsels; from end to end, whilst I awaited the palms, triumphs and crowns merited by my valorous deeds, you have seen me as this morning laid low, outraged and ground down, under the hoofs of obscene and filthy brutes....” The roars and blows that greet the Sorrowful Knight might, in the jargon of our day, be termed Cervantes’ masochistic satisfaction. Cervantes ridicules himself for the dreaming fool he has been. But the strain is too deep. This figure that he sets going to make mock of is after all his soul. He grows away from his embittered pose. He can still laugh at his creature; still gather him at the end back into the logic of his story. But in Part Two, he is seen defending him against the laughter of others. He is seen regarding his knight, for all his folly, as purer than the sensible world: and at the last, more real. But the times were out of joint. Spain and Don Quixote were pitted against Reasons: the logic of their ideal against the reasons of a world breaking from the unity of God which once had been the Roman Church, into a multiverse of fragmentary facts which is our modern crisis. Frustrate brilliance, seeking to be healed, is the one unity of the modern story. Since Columbus voyaged, we have voyaged and bruised ourselves in spiritual chaos: seeking the salvation of wholeness and seeking it in vain. From our search has come the national concept of the State, for instance: a degenerate medievalism, this--a wistful effort to achieve the wholeness of Rome without the holiness that informed it. Has come the Marxian Internation--an inverted idealism which put up the economic process in place of the Hegelian Spirit. Has come the faith in science as Revelation. Has come with Rousseau, the seeking of salvation through the return to the unity of man’s primordial needs: with Nietzsche, the same seeking in the but seeming opposite direction of the superman. And finally, Darwin inspired us to hope that God might be inserted as the principle of flux in biologic process. All these prophecies and dogmatic actions strove alike to enlist mankind once more in a full unity of life and impulse. All who believed in them, to the extent of their devotion, have been Quixotes.