Note the footnote on page 99 — Erratum

[2] Unamuno describes his “Commentary upon the Life of Don Quixote” as “a free and personal exegesis.” “I do not think I need repeat,” he says in his preface, “that I feel myself to be a Quixotist rather than a Cervantist and that I have allowed myself sometimes even to differ from the way in which Cervantes understood and dealt with his two heroes. The truth is, I believe that these fictitious personages possess a life of their own, with a certain autonomy, within the mind of the author who created them, and that they obey an inner logic of which the author himself is not wholly conscious.” Cervantes did not so much create them, he maintains, as derive them from the spiritual depths of the Spanish people, and therefore it is possible for us to understand them better even than their author. It may be conjectured that Unamuno can never quite forgive the slightly ironical attitude that Cervantes always adopts towards his hero.