mockingly presents Christ
to them, saying, "Behold the man!" the people mutinies and shouts
"Crucify him! Crucify him!" The people does not want comedy but tragedy.
And that which Dante, the great Catholic, called the Divine Comedy, is
the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written.

And as I have endeavoured in these essays to exhibit the soul of a
Spaniard, and therewithal the Spanish soul, I have curtailed the number
of quotations from Spanish writers, while scattering with perhaps too
lavish a hand those from the writers of other countries. For all human
souls are brother-souls.

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
improviza