And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and includes in himself the immortal soul of my people.  Perhaps the passion and death of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is the passion and death of the Spanish people, its death and resurrection.  And there is a Quixotesque philosophy and even a Quixotesque metaphysic, there is a Quixotesque logic, and also a Quixotesque ethic and a Quixotesque religious sense—­the religious sense of Spanish Catholicism.  This is the philosophy, this is the logic, this is the ethic, this is the religious sense, that I have endeavoured to outline, to suggest rather than to develop, in this work.  To develop it rationally, no; the Quixotesque madness does not submit to scientific logic.

And now, before concluding and bidding my readers farewell, it remains for me to speak of the role that is reserved for Don Quixote in the modern European tragi-comedy.

Let us see, in the next and last essay, what this may be.

FOOTNOTES: 

[54] Act II., Scene 4:  “I am dreaming and I wish to act rightly, for good deeds are not lost, though they be wrought in dreams.”

[55] Act III., Scene 10:  “Let us aim at the eternal, the glory that does not wane, where bliss slumbers not and where greatness does not repose.”

[56] “Se les muera,” y no solo “se muera.”

[57] Trabalhos de Jesus, part i.

[58] De Musset.

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 Boehme declared in his Aurora (chap xi., Sec. 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 (Sec. 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.