[2] Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, explicada y comentada, por M. de Unamuno:  Madrid, Fernando Fe, 1905.

[3] These three novels appeared together as Tres Novelas y un Prologo Calpe, Madrid, 1921.

[4] “Me va interesando ese Dean Inge,” he wrote to me last year.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I intended at first to write a short Prologue to this English translation of my Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida, which has been undertaken by my friend Mr. J.E.  Crawford Flitch.  But upon further consideration I have abandoned the idea, for I reflected that after all I wrote this book not for Spaniards only, but for all civilized and Christian men—­Christian in particular, whether consciously so or not—­of whatever country they may be.

Furthermore, if I were to set about writing an Introduction in the light of all that we see and feel now, after the Great War, and, still more, of what we foresee and forefeel, I should be led into writing yet another book.  And that is a thing to be done with deliberation and only after having better digested this terrible peace, which is nothing else but the war’s painful convalescence.

As for many years my spirit has been nourished upon the very core of English literature—­evidence of which the reader may discover in the following pages—­the translator, in putting my Sentimiento Tragico into English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts and feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression.  Or retranslated them, perhaps.  Whereby they emerge other than they originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

The fact that this English translation has been carefully revised here, in my house in this ancient city of Salamanca, by the translator and myself, implies not merely some guarantee of exactitude, but also something more—­namely, a correction, in certain respects, of the original.

The truth is that, being an incorrigible Spaniard, I am naturally given to a kind of extemporization and to neglectfulness of a filed niceness in my works.  For this reason my original work—­and likewise the Italian and French translations of it—­issued from the press with a certain number of errors, obscurities, and faulty references.  The labour which my friend Mr. J.E.  Crawford Flitch fortunately imposed upon me in making me revise his translation obliged me to correct these errors, to clarify some obscurities, and to give greater exactitude to certain quotations from foreign writers.  Hence this English translation of my Sentimiento Tragico presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that of the original Spanish.  This perhaps compensates for what it may lose in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is scarcely translatable.