Don Quixote gave himself to make the world One, through the application of measures that strike us as shoddy and unreal. His were the old “magics” of chivalry--of a Europe peopled by Germanic children and schooled by adolescents from Athens, Alexandria and Rome. The magics no longer _worked_: had indeed not worked to build a universal House, since Dante. But we, laughing betimes at Quixote, patronizing Dante, have for five hundred years been struggling to construct our house with materials equally inadequate. The primacy of reason or of subjective intuition, the autonomy of science or of economic purpose, the ideal of the State or social interstate, the dream of communism or the return to nature--one and all are magics as impotent and as unreal as those of the old knight who rode La Mancha on a bony nag, with a barber’s dish on his brow, and in his head a neo-platonic vision. * * * * * Don Quixote and Faust are the great antistrophes to the Commedia of Dante. The body of Dante’s poem had the same elements as the body of Dante’s world. They were the Judæo-Christian revelation, Aristotelian logic, Euclidean Nature, the Ptolemaic cosmos. They cracked, and with them Catholic Europe passed. Only in Dante and in certain other art forms, like the Gothic churches, has that body lived. Don Quixote and Faust are bodies of Europe’s dissolution--forms of our modern formlessness and of our need to be whole. They are perhaps the most vital æsthetic organs of the activity into which modern man was thrown by the deliquescence of his medieval world. As a poem, the Spanish work is the greater. Faust is the child of personal lyrism and speculative will. His sources, like the Knight’s, are medieval. He seeks knowledge and through knowledge personal redemption. He knows that he cannot be redeemed, save by a cosmic understanding; and his sense of understanding is in this, the mystic’s: that it implies possession of what is understood, and a dynamic act. But Faust remains the atom, the unfertile seed of human will. His way to unify the world is to dominate and absorb it within the complex of personal volition. This is heroic, but it is savage. It ignores the fundamental wisdom of the Jews and Hindus which taught that the health of the personal will lies through the threshold of its death. Faust seeks knowledge through its extended acquisition. Mefisto is the symbol of his faith in the reality of extension. If he can garner the right catchwords, he can swallow the world; and the world will become one within him. This bluntly is the means toward a new synthesis adapted by all the centuries of Europe that intervene between the Renaissance and us: and it is Kabbalistic! The personal will, in its endeavor to achieve fusion with the world, has concocted formulæ that were to act directly on the world, and by magic to control it. These formulæ of course became external organisms: they became a machine, an empire or empiric law.