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 and of death.
And now to you, the younger generation, bachelor Carrascos of a Europeanizing regenerationism, you who are working after the best European fashion, with scientific method and criticism, to you I say: Create wealth, create nationality, create art, create science, create ethics, above all create—or rather, translate—Kultur, and thus kill in yourselves both life and death. Little will it all last you!...
And with this I conclude—high time that I did!—for the present at any rate, these essays on the tragic sense of life in men and in peoples, or at least in myself—who am a man—and in the soul of my people as it is reflected in mine.
I hope, reader, that some time while our tragedy is still playing, in some interval between the acts, we shall meet again. And we shall recognize one another. And forgive me if I have troubled you more than was needful and inevitable, more than I intended to do when I took up my pen proposing to distract you for a while from your distractions. And may God deny you peace, but give you glory!
SALAMANCA,
In the year of grace 1912.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] "Que tal?" o "como va?" y es aquella que responde: "se vive!"
[60] Whenever I consider that I needs must die, I stretch my cloak upon the ground and am not surfeited with sleeping.
[61]>] No es consuelo de desdichas—es otra desdicha aparte—querer a quien las padece—persuadir que no son tales (Gustos y diogustos no son niés que imaginatión, Act I., Scene 4).
[62] Don Quijote, part i., chap, i.