This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he had freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written “Long live hope!” and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven.  And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with desperation.  And does he not fight out of despair?  How is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our language, such as siesta, camarilla, guerrilla, there is to be found this word desperdo?  Is not this inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own tragic comicness, a man of despair (desesperado).  A desperado—­yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola.  But “despair is the master of impossibilities,” as we learn from Salazar y Torres (Elegir al enemigo, Act I.), and it is despair and despair alone that begets heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. Spero quia absurdum, it ought to have been said, rather than credo.

And Don Quixote, who lived in solitude, sought more solitude still; he sought the solitudes of the Pena Pobre, in order that there, alone, without witnesses, he might give himself up to greater follies with which to assuage his soul.  But he was not quite alone, for Sancho accompanied him—­Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the simple.  If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant himself.  And at any rate he is waiting for some other mad knight to follow again.

And there is also a tragedy of Sancho.  The other Sancho, the Sancho who journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote—­it is not certain that he died, although some think that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance and believing in the truth of all those things which his dying and converted master had denounced and abominated as lies.  But neither is it certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber, or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the heroical Sancho has to contend.

Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude.  And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers, creating for ourselves a Quixotesque Spain which only exists in our imagination?

And again we shall be asked:  What has Don Quixote bequeathed to Kultur?  I answer:  Quixotism, and that is no little thing!  It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole esthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic—­above all, a whole religion—­that is to say, a whole economy of things eternal and things divine, a whole hope in what is rationally absurd.

For what did Don Quixote fight?  For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival.  Not for Iseult, who is the eternal flesh; not for Beatrice, who is theology; not for Margaret, who is the people; not for Helen, who is culture.  He fought for Dulcinea, and he won her, for he lives.