ns, urged thereto by Sancho, who stands by his
side. And it is not that Don Quixote does not understand what those
understand who talk thus to him, those who succeed in resigning
themselves and accepting rational life and rational truth. No, it is
that the needs of his heart are greater. Pedantry? Who knows!...

And in this critical century, Don Quixote, who has also contaminated
himself with criticism, has to attack his own self, the victim of
intellectualism and of sentimentalism, and when he wishes to be most
spontaneous he appears to be most affected. And he wishes, unhappy man,
to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he
sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest
victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through this despair he reaches
the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke--that intellectual Don
Quixote who escaped from the cloister--and becomes an awakener of
sleeping souls (_dormitantium animorum excubitor_), as the ex-Dominican
said of himself--he who wrote: "Heroic love is the property of those
superior natures who are called insane (_insano_) not because they do
not know (_no sanno_), but because they over-know (_soprasanno_)."

But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines; at any rate the
inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite
the Vatican, states that it has been dedicated to him by the age which
he had foretold (_il secolo da lui divinato_). But our Don Quixote, the
inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does
not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they
are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the
world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the
mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as
Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the
loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title
of king for the inscription written over the Cross.

What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, to-day, in this world? To
cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But though men hear not, the
wilderness hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding
forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering over the wilderness
like seed, will fructify into a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred
thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life