economy--Tragic ridicule--Quixotesque philosophy--Mission of Don
Quixote to-day 297-330




INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO


I sat, several years ago, at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, under the
vast tent in which the Bard of Wales was being crowned. After the small
golden crown had been placed in unsteady equilibrium on the head of a
clever-looking pressman, several Welsh bards came on the platform and
recited little epigrams. A Welsh bard is, if young, a pressman, and if
of maturer years, a divine. In this case, as England was at war, they
were all of the maturer kind, and, while I listened to the music of
their ditties--the sense thereof being, alas! beyond my reach--I was
struck by the fact that all of them, though different, closely resembled
Don Miguel de Unamuno. It is not my purpose to enter into the wasp-nest
of racial disquisitions. If there is a race in the world over which more
sense and more nonsense can be freely said for lack of definite
information than the Welsh, it is surely this ancient Basque people,
whose greatest contemporary figure is perhaps Don Miguel de Unamuno. I
am merely setting down that intuitional fact for what it may be worth,
though I do not hide my opinion that such promptings of the inner,
untutored man are worth more than cavefuls of bones and tombfuls of
undecipherable papers.