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 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!