"[62] And with the pasteboard visor on his head he made himself
immortal--that is to say, he made himself ridiculous. For it was by
making himself ridiculous that Don Quixote achieved his immortality.
And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ... Cournot
said _(Traite de l'enchainement des idees fondamentales_, etc., Sec. 510):
"It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the
probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace;
the public will revenge itself with ridicule." True, and therefore it is
said that we must live as the age lives. _Corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum
vocatur_ (Tacitus: _Germania_ 19).
It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only
to others but to ourselves. And more than ever to-day, when there is so
much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized
peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we
have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we
had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of
our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first
task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been
woven around it.
Carducci, the author of the phrase about the _contorcimenti
dell'affannosa grandiosita spagnola_, has written (in _Mosche Cochiere_)
that "even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of
thought, had her Cervantes.
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