Question me no more, dear friend. When you force me to speak of these things, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my heart, sick with the atmosphere of conventionality that harasses and oppresses me on all sides, sick with the slime of the slough of falsehood in which we are mired, sick with scrabbling cowardice which shows itself on every hand, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my sick heart visions without reason, concepts without logic, things of which I know not the meaning and whose meaning I do not wish to try to fathom. What do you mean by that? you ask me yet again. And I reply: Perhaps I don’t even know myself. No, my friend, no. The meaning of many of these utterances of my spirit I do not know myself, or rather it is not I who know them. There is someone within me who dictates them to me, who speaks them to me. I obey him and I never penetrate within to behold his face or to ask his name. Only I know that if I beheld his face and if he told me his name, I should die that he might live. I am ashamed of having sometimes created fictitious beings, the personages of my novels, in order that I might put into their mouths that which I dare not put into my own and make them say in jest what I feel in deadly earnest. You know me, and you know how far I am from intentionally going in search of paradoxes, extravagances, and mannerisms--whatever some dull fools may think. You and I, my good friend, my only absolute friend, have often debated between ourselves as to what madness really is, and we have commented upon that saying of Ibsen’s Brand, the spiritual son of Kierkegaard, to the effect that the man who is mad is the man who is alone. And we have agreed that madness ceases to be madness when it becomes collective, when it is the madness of a whole people, of the whole human race perhaps. In so far as a hallucination becomes collective, becomes popular, becomes social, it ceases to be a hallucination and becomes a reality, something that is external to each one of those who share it. And you and I are agreed that the multitudes, the people, our Spanish people, must be inoculated with some madness or other, the madness of some one of its members who is mad--but really mad, not mad only in jest. Mad, and not foolish. You and I, my good friend, have been scandalized at that which they call here fanaticism and which--to our shame be it said--is not fanaticism at all. No, nothing is fanaticism that is regulated and restrained and directed by bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and dukes; nothing is fanaticism that carries a banner inscribed with logical formulas, nothing that has a program, nothing that holds out for to-morrow merely a proposition that an orator can develop methodically in a speech.