Man and Superman

By George Bernard Shaw.

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My dear Walkley:

You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived: here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets, made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion. You meant me to épater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer him to you as the accountable party.

I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero’s mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty. The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don’t like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful, we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelette-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married or “betrayed,” quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good looks are more desired than histrionic skill.

Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the fool’s cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.

I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure. But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit⁠—you now, I hope, feel its inconvenience⁠—of not explaining yourself, I have had to discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense.

Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the sixteenth century by a Spanish monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama, growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don Juan’s account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police, temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for tomorrow it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart’s content.

But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own Devil’s Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Molière’s Don Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms? “Oui, ma foi! Il faut s’amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous.” After Molière comes the artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero’s spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live piously ever after.

After these completed works Byron’s fragment does not count for much philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and Byron’s hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb: he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova, tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then, leave Byron’s Don Juan out of account. Mozart’s is the last of the true Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics, high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe’s Faust and Mozart’s Don Juan were the last words of the eighteenth century on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the nineteenth century, ignoring William Blake as superficially as the eighteenth had ignored Hogarth or the seventeenth Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenev stage, and were confronted with philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen’s and Tolstoy’s, Don Juan had changed his sex and become Doña Juana, breaking out of the Doll’s House and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral pageant.

Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the twentieth century to ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the eighteenth century, have they not Molière and Mozart, upon whose art no human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I dealt in duels and ghosts and “womanly” women. As to mere libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of Molière is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan’s supernatural antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, how much is left that could be used in a play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those forces of middle class public opinion which hardly existed for a Spanish nobleman in the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant everywhere. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, “marchesane, principesse, cameriere, cittadine” and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group themselves pathetically to sing “Protegga il giusto cielo”: they grasp formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as they are, than be brought to the bar of the nonconformist conscience by Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as it was in the tenth century.

As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events the enormous superiority of Woman’s natural position in this matter is telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the nonconformist conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the Commandant’s statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan’s own beard that is in danger of plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared, he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him. His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take some of the jests of Mr. W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his daredevil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor’s mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespeare’s tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan whom Shakespeare palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor Macbeth off as a murderer. Today the palming off is no longer necessary (at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the hero of Mozart.

And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel sure you would like to know more of that statue⁠—to draw him out when he is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick of the strolling theatrical manager who advertises the pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of secondhand picture posters designed for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.

But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this essence I have no control. You propound a certain social substance, sexual attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it for you. I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor dilute it with romance and water; for I am merely executing your commission, not producing a popular play for the market. You must therefore (unless, like most wise men, you read the play first and the preface afterwards) prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of modern London life, a life in which, as you know, the ordinary man’s main business is to get means to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary woman’s business is to get married. In 9,999 cases out of 10,000, you can count on their doing nothing, whether noble or base, that conflicts with these ends; and that assurance is what you rely on as their religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their reputation, their honor and so forth.

On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition. The secret of the prosaic man’s success, such as it is, is the simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic man’s failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see that it does not pay to sponge and beg and lie and brag and neglect his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman’s reproach to your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not misunderstand me in the other direction either: if I appreciate the vital qualities of the Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning.

The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women’s business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespeare’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, like Mariana; but in every case the relation between the woman and the man is the same: she is the pursuer and contriver, he the pursued and disposed of. When she is baffled, like Ophelia, she goes mad and commits suicide; and the man goes straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature, with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming: Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All’s Well That Ends Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception, Petruchio, is not a real one: he is most carefully characterized as a purely commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has seen her. In real life we find not only Petruchios, but Mantalinis and Dobbins who pursue women with appeals to their pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling to them in a romantically infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count in the world scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into the jaws of Mrs. MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did in the plays of Shakespeare.

And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the tragicomic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which finally overtakes him. The woman’s need of him to enable her to carry on Nature’s most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their mortal personal purposes.

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some of our own sex who are shocked at the “unscrupulousness,” meaning the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when man’s sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. When the terrible moment of birth arrives, its supreme importance and its superhuman effort and peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf him into the meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the humblest petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and speaking of Woman’s “sphere” with condescension, even with chivalry, as if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace “slice of life.” The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand, attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman must marry because the race must perish without her travail: if the risk of death and the certainty of pain, danger and unutterable discomforts cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we assume that the force that carries women through all these perils and hardships, stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero, shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil about him until he is secured forever!

If the really impressive books and other artworks of the world were produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women’s pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot produce really impressive artworks. Those who can are men of genius: that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the “self-sacrifice” (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and the like, as mere hors d’oeuvres.

I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of life and the woman who incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and all women. Hence it is that the world’s books get written, its pictures painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex. Which leads us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art, instead of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and asceticism, amorism and puritanism are equally unreal in the great philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow’s head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle.

Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of genius does not share the common man’s danger of capture, nor the woman of genius the common woman’s overwhelming specialization. And that is why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety (“the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” said William Blake; for “you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough”).

There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity. It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity, without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives, because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.

When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected class bred by political marriages. The commercial class had not then completed the first twenty-five years of its new share of political power; and it was itself selected by money qualification, and bred, if not by political marriage, at least by a pretty rigorous class marriage. Aristocracy and plutocracy still furnish the figureheads of politics; but they are now dependent on the votes of the promiscuously bred masses. And this, if you please, at the very moment when the political problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and occasional interference, mostly by way of jobbing public appointments, in the mismanagement of a tight but parochial little island, with occasional meaningless prosecution of dynastic wars, has become the industrial reorganization of Britain, the construction of a practically international Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized powers. Can you believe that the people whose conceptions of society and conduct, whose power of attention and scope of interest, are measured by the British theatre as you know it today, can either handle this colossal task themselves, or understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are all now under what Burke called “the hoofs of the swinish multitude.” Burke’s language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended, in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and flunkeyism. It is no better today and never will be any better: our very peasants have something morally hardier in them that culminates occasionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this aristocracy, which was overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle class, has come back to power by the votes of “the swinish multitude.” Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular eloquence. The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship. Well, we two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of “the nail and sarspan business as he got his money by.” Do you know whether to laugh or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! Will drive a team of continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate our colonies into a world-power of the first magnitude? Give these people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch missionary into crude African idolatry.

I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of heredity has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is no hereditary “governing class” any more than a hereditary hooliganism. We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found today? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth cooperatively. Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.

Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct. Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously, like the knights in Don Quixote’s books of chivalry.

The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for the spending money of the American trusts. What is all this growing love of pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising and uncovering at a wave from a flag or a blast from a brass band? Imperialism: Not a bit of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr. Carnegie rattled his millions in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires) left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich man’s solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and the backs soon bowed themselves back into their natural shape.

But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all this tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only made my Don Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way of appendix. You will find it at the end of the book. I am sorry to say that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the reader’s imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to yourself ruefully that but for the author’s solemn preliminary assurance you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists’ handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if you care to read it. And in that handbook you will find the politics of the sex question as I conceive Don Juan’s descendant to understand them. Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespeare had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.

You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into politics was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex, because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to, and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore possibly suggestive to the philistine. Every man who records his illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence, and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books as read and my genius for granted, trusting me to put forth work of such quality as shall bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on our own plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in the third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate production at a popular theatre we need not contradict him. Napoleon provided Talma with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma’s acting is not recorded. As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this is a play for such a pit.

I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of Mr. H. G. Wells’s anticipation of the efficient engineering class which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of civilization. Mr. Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs, delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr. Sidney Webb were sowing our political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three Musketeers, without any prevision of the surprising respectability of the crop that followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and inexhaustible, to form himself into a company for the benefit of the shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I hereby authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing “Dalla sua pace” (if he can) at any convenient moment during the representation. Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr. William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan Renaissance fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to myself “Why not Everywoman?” Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann; but Ann is Everywoman.

That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only sort of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr. Johnson, impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a performance of Mozart’s Zauberflote, I have been proof against the garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence. Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespeare without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens’s sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespeare’s pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in preeminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr. Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespeare a great “stage of fools” on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in “The Chimes” by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper. Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion: they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all Shakespeare’s projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is delightful as the whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse’s widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who smothers babies and offs with people’s heads, we are revolted at the imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus, Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespeare’s comedies; but description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing, you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a Horatio or “Charles his friend” what they call on the stage a feeder.

Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers. You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Put your Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside Mr. Valiant and Mr. Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan’s coward stirs your blood more than Shakespeare’s hero, who actually leaves you cold and secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespeare, with all his flashes and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan’s hero, look back from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his pilgrimage, and say “yet do I not repent me”; or, with the panache of a millionaire, bequeath “my sword to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.” This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man’s work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.

It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan’s perception that righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr. Legality in the village of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion, his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr. Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker’s theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-nineteenth century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to call Justification by Faith “Wille,” and Justification by Works “Vorstellung.” The sole use of the novelty is that you and I buy and read Schopenhaur’s treatise on Will and Representation when we should not dream of buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom the controversy is the same, and the dramatic results are the same. Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible or better conducted than Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Mr. W. W.’s worst enemies, as Mr. Embezzler, Mr. Never-go-to-Church-on-Sunday, Mr. Bad Form, Mr. Murderer, Mr. Burglar, Mr. Corespondent, Mr. Blackmailer, Mr. Cad, Mr. Drunkard, Mr. Labor Agitator and so forth, can read The Pilgrim’s Progress without finding a word said against them; whereas the respectable people who snub them and put them in prison, such as Mr. W. W. himself and his young friend Civility; Formalist and Hypocrisy; Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatic (who were clearly young university men of good family and high feeding); that brisk lad Ignorance, Talkative, By-Ends of Fairspeech and his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and other reputable gentlemen and citizens, catch it very severely. Even Little Faith, though he gets to heaven at last, is given to understand that it served him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all the literature which is great enough and old enough to have attained canonical rank, officially or unofficially, were it not that books are admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being committed to any complicity in Micah’s furiously radical opinions. Why, even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility, find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of nonresistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call law and industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of exclaiming “Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake,” the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing “another book by this brilliant and thoughtful writer.” And the ordinary citizen, knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.

However, I am digressing, as a man with a grievance always does. And after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality of a book is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that the writer has opinions. The old lady from Colchester was right to sun her simple soul in the energetic radiance of Bradlaugh’s genuine beliefs and disbeliefs rather than in the chill of such mere painting of light and heat as elocution and convention can achieve. My contempt for belles lettres, and for amateurs who become the heroes of the fanciers of literary virtuosity, is not founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence of those forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to communicate my bent to my fellows. To younger men they are already outmoded; for though they have no more lost their logic than an eighteenth century pastel has lost its drawing or its color, yet, like the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with Bunyan’s, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the loud bassoon. But “for art’s sake” alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence. I know that there are men who, having nothing to say and nothing to write, are nevertheless so in love with oratory and with literature that they keep desperately repeating as much as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime. I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity their dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true original style is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man’s act of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not even make money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains. Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto’s beliefs, and correct his perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can get Bunyan’s or Shakespeare’s style without Bunyan’s conviction or Shakespeare’s apprehension, especially if he takes care not to split his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who, with their collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn the art of Palestrina from Cherubim’s treatise. All this academic art is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the eighteenth century, though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest outpouring of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities. And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach and all the people who don’t want to learn agree with him emphatically.

I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you study the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, you will find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light whatever. But here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible, intensely resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful to you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat. Now if I am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a luminous author, I must also be a most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities. These are the faults of my qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike myself so much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment to pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and get what work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for there is community of material between us: we are both critics of life as well as of art; and you have perhaps said to yourself when I have passed your windows, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” An awful and chastening reflection, which shall be the closing cadence of this immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,

Dramatis Personae

• Roebuck Ramsden

• Parlormaid

• Octavius Ramsden

• John Tanner

• Ann Whitefield

• Mrs. Whitefield

• Miss Ramsden

• Violet Robinson

• Henry Straker

• Hector Malone

• Mr. Malone

• Mendoza

• Anarchist

• Duval

• Rowdy Social-Democrat

• Sulky Social-Democrat

• Goatherd

• An Officer

Act I

Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study, handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck’s head is polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors, an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers, neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet today; so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the hearthrug. Surmising that he has no valet, and seeing that he has no secretary with a shorthand notebook and a typewriter, one meditates on how little our great burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new fashions and methods, or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel companies which sell you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a real gentleman for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.

How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself as an advanced thinker and fearlessly outspoken reformer.

Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit. On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door not quite in the middle, but somewhat further from him. Against the wall opposite him are two busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright; the other, to his right, of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an engraved portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau, Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories by Mr. G. F. Watts (for Roebuck believes in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who does not understand them), and an impression of Dupont’s engraving of Delaroche’s Beaux Artes hemicycle, representing the great men of all ages. On the wall behind him, above the mantelshelf, is a family portrait of impenetrable obscurity.

A chair stands near the writing table for the convenience of business visitors. Two other chairs are against the wall between the busts.

Act II

On the carriage drive in the park of a country house near Richmond a motor car has broken down. It stands in front of a clump of trees round which the drive sweeps to the house, which is partly visible through them: indeed Tanner, standing in the drive with the car on his right hand, could get an unobstructed view of the west corner of the house on his left were he not far too much interested in a pair of supine legs in blue serge trousers which protrude from beneath the machine. He is watching them intently with bent back and hands supported on his knees. His leathern overcoat and peaked cap proclaim him one of the dismounted passengers.

Act III

Evening in the Sierra Nevada. Rolling slopes of brown, with olive trees instead of apple trees in the cultivated patches, and occasional prickly pears instead of gorse and bracken in the wilds. Higher up, tall stone peaks and precipices, all handsome and distinguished. No wild nature here: rather a most aristocratic mountain landscape made by a fastidious artist-creator. No vulgar profusion of vegetation: even a touch of aridity in the frequent patches of stones: Spanish magnificence and Spanish economy everywhere.

Not very far north of a spot at which the high road over one of the passes crosses a tunnel on the railway from Malaga to Granada, is one of the mountain amphitheatres of the Sierra. Looking at it from the wide end of the horseshoe, one sees, a little to the right, in the face of the cliff, a romantic cave which is really an abandoned quarry, and towards the left a little hill, commanding a view of the road, which skirts the amphitheatre on the left, maintaining its higher level on embankments and on an occasional stone arch. On the hill, watching the road, is a man who is either a Spaniard or a Scotchman. Probably a Spaniard, since he wears the dress of a Spanish goatherd and seems at home in the Sierra Nevada, but very like a Scotchman for all that. In the hollow, on the slope leading to the quarry-cave, are about a dozen men who, as they recline at their cave round a heap of smouldering white ashes of dead leaf and brushwood, have an air of being conscious of themselves as picturesque scoundrels honoring the Sierra by using it as an effective pictorial background. As a matter of artistic fact they are not picturesque; and the mountains tolerate them as lions tolerate lice. An English policeman or Poor Law Guardian would recognize them as a selected band of tramps and ablebodied paupers.

This description of them is not wholly contemptuous. Whoever has intelligently observed the tramp, or visited the ablebodied ward of a workhouse, will admit that our social failures are not all drunkards and weaklings. Some of them are men who do not fit the class they were born into. Precisely the same qualities that make the educated gentleman an artist may make an uneducated manual laborer an ablebodied pauper. There are men who fall helplessly into the workhouse because they are good for nothing; but there are also men who are there because they are strongminded enough to disregard the social convention (obviously not a disinterested one on the part of the ratepayer) which bids a man live by heavy and badly paid drudgery when he has the alternative of walking into the workhouse, announcing himself as a destitute person, and legally compelling the Guardians to feed, clothe and house him better than he could feed, clothe and house himself without great exertion. When a man who is born a poet refuses a stool in a stockbroker’s office, and starves in a garret, sponging on a poor landlady or on his friends and relatives rather than work against his grain; or when a lady, because she is a lady, will face any extremity of parasitic dependence rather than take a situation as cook or parlormaid, we make large allowances for them. To such allowances the ablebodied pauper and his nomadic variant the tramp are equally entitled.

Further, the imaginative man, if his life is to be tolerable to him, must have leisure to tell himself stories, and a position which lends itself to imaginative decoration. The ranks of unskilled labor offer no such positions. We misuse our laborers horribly; and when a man refuses to be misused, we have no right to say that he is refusing honest work. Let us be frank in this matter before we go on with our play; so that we may enjoy it without hypocrisy. If we were reasoning, farsighted people, four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief, and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial reconstructive results. The reason we do got do this is because we work like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter at all. Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, and who, applying the Kantian test to his conduct, can truly say to us, If everybody did as I do, the world would be compelled to reform itself industrially, and abolish slavery and squalor, which exist only because everybody does as you do, let us honor that man and seriously consider the advisability of following his example. Such a man is the able-bodied, able-minded pauper. Were he a gentleman doing his best to get a pension or a sinecure instead of sweeping a crossing, nobody would blame him; for deciding that so long as the alternative lies between living mainly at the expense of the community and allowing the community to live mainly at his, it would be folly to accept what is to him personally the greater of the two evils.

We may therefore contemplate the tramps of the Sierra without prejudice, admitting cheerfully that our objects⁠—briefly, to be gentlemen of fortune⁠—are much the same as theirs, and the difference in our position and methods merely accidental. One or two of them, perhaps, it would be wiser to kill without malice in a friendly and frank manner; for there are bipeds, just as there are quadrupeds, who are too dangerous to be left unchained and unmuzzled; and these cannot fairly expect to have other men’s lives wasted in the work of watching them. But as society has not the courage to kill them, and, when it catches them, simply wreaks on them some superstitious expiatory rites of torture and degradation, and than lets them loose with heightened qualifications for mischief, it is just as well that they are at large in the Sierra, and in the hands of a chief who looks as if he might possibly, on provocation, order them to be shot.

This chief, seated in the centre of the group on a squared block of stone from the quarry, is a tall strong man, with a striking cockatoo nose, glossy black hair, pointed beard, upturned moustache, and a Mephistophelean affectation which is fairly imposing, perhaps because the scenery admits of a larger swagger than Piccadilly, perhaps because of a certain sentimentality in the man which gives him that touch of grace which alone can excuse deliberate picturesqueness. His eyes and mouth are by no means rascally; he has a fine voice and a ready wit; and whether he is really the strongest man in the party, or not, he looks it. He is certainly, the best fed, the best dressed, and the best trained. The fact that he speaks English is not unexpected in spite of the Spanish landscape; for with the exception of one man who might be guessed as a bullfighter ruined by drink and one unmistakable Frenchman, they are all cockney or American; therefore, in a land of cloaks and sombreros, they mostly wear seedy overcoats, woollen mufflers, hard hemispherical hats, and dirty brown gloves. Only a very few dress after their leader, whose broad sombrero with a cock’s feather in the band, and voluminous cloak descending to his high boots, are as un-English as possible. None of them are armed; and the ungloved ones keep their hands in their pockets because it is their national belief that it must be dangerously cold in the open air with the night coming on. (It is as warm an evening as any reasonable man could desire).

Except the bullfighting inebriate there is only one person in the company who looks more than, say, thirty-three. He is a small man with reddish whiskers, weak eyes, and the anxious look of a small tradesman in difficulties. He wears the only tall hat visible: it shines in the sunset with the sticky glow of some sixpenny patent hat reviver, often applied and constantly tending to produce a worse state of the original surface than the ruin it was applied to remedy. He has a collar and cuff of celluloid; and his brown Chesterfield overcoat, with velvet collar, is still presentable. He is preeminently the respectable man of the party, and is certainly over forty, possibly over fifty. He is the corner man on the leader’s right, opposite three men in scarlet ties on his left. One of these three is the Frenchman. Of the remaining two, who are both English, one is argumentative, solemn, and obstinate; the other rowdy and mischievous.

	The chief, with a magnificent fling of the end of his cloak across his left shoulder, rises to address them. The applause which greets him shows that he is a favorite orator.
The Chief	Friends and fellow brigands. I have a proposal to make to this meeting. We have now spent three evenings in discussing the question Have Anarchists or Social-Democrats the most personal courage? We have gone into the principles of Anarchism and Social-Democracy at great length. The cause of Anarchy has been ably represented by our one Anarchist, who doesn’t know what Anarchism means Laughter.⁠—
The Anarchist	Rising. A point of order, Mendoza⁠—
Mendoza	Forcibly. No, by thunder: your last point of order took half an hour. Besides, Anarchists don’t believe in order.
The Anarchist	Mild, polite but persistent: he is, in fact, the respectable looking elderly man in the celluloid collar and cuffs. That is a vulgar error. I can prove⁠—
Mendoza	Order, order.
The Others	Shouting.
	Order, order.
	Sit down.
	Chair!
	Shut up.
	The Anarchist is suppressed.
Mendoza	On the other hand we have three Social-Democrats among us. They are not on speaking terms; and they have put before us three distinct and incompatible views of Social-Democracy.
The Majority	Shouting assent.
	Hear, hear!
	So we are.
	Right.
The Rowdy Social-Democrat	Smarting under oppression. You ain’t no Christian. You’re a Sheeny, you are.
Mendoza	With crushing magnanimity. My friend; I am an exception to all rules. It is true that I have the honor to be a Jew; and, when the Zionists need a leader to reassemble our race on its historic soil of Palestine, Mendoza will not be the last to volunteer Sympathetic applause⁠—hear, hear, etc. But I am not a slave to any superstition. I have swallowed all the formulas, even that of Socialism; though, in a sense, once a Socialist, always a Socialist.
The Social-Democrats	Hear, hear!
Mendoza	But I am well aware that the ordinary man⁠—even the ordinary brigand, who can scarcely be called an ordinary man Hear, hear!⁠—is not a philosopher. Common sense is good enough for him; and in our business affairs common sense is good enough for me. Well, what is our business here in the Sierra Nevada, chosen by the Moors as the fairest spot in Spain? Is it to discuss abstruse questions of political economy? No: it is to hold up motor cars and secure a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The Sulky Social-Democrat	All made by labor, mind you.
Mendoza	Urbanely. Undoubtedly. All made by labor, and on its way to be squandered by wealthy vagabonds in the dens of vice that disfigure the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. We intercept that wealth. We restore it to circulation among the class that produced it and that chiefly needs it⁠—the working class. We do this at the risk of our lives and liberties, by the exercise of the virtues of courage, endurance, foresight, and abstinence⁠—especially abstinence. I myself have eaten nothing but prickly pears and broiled rabbit for three days.
The Sulky Social-Democrat	Stubbornly. No more ain’t we.
Mendoza	Indignantly. Have I taken more than my share?
The Sulky Social-Democrat	Unmoved. Why should you?
The Anarchist	Why should he not? To each according to his needs: from each according to his means.
The Frenchman	Shaking his fist at the anarchist. Fumiste!
Mendoza	Diplomatically. I agree with both of you.
The Genuinely English Brigands	Hear, hear!
	Bravo, Mendoza!
Mendoza	What I say is, let us treat one another as gentlemen, and strive to excel in personal courage only when we take the field.
The Rowdy Social-Democrat	Derisively. Shikespear.
	A whistle comes from the goatherd on the hill. He springs up and points excitedly forward along the road to the north.
The Goatherd	Automobile! Automobile! He rushes down the hill and joins the rest, who all scramble to their feet.
Mendoza	In ringing tones. To arms! Who has the gun?
The Sulky Social-Democrat	Handing a rifle to Mendoza. Here.
Mendoza	Have the nails been strewn in the road?
The Rowdy Social-Democrat	Two ahnces of em.
Mendoza	Good! To the Frenchman. With me, Duval. If the nails fail, puncture their tires with a bullet. He gives the rifle to Duval, who follows him up the hill. Mendoza produces an opera glass. The others hurry across to the road and disappear to the north.
Mendoza	On the hill, using his glass. Two only, a capitalist and his chauffeur. They look English.
Duval	Angliche! Aoh yess. Cochons! Handling the rifle. Faut tire, n’est-ce-pas?
Mendoza	No: the nails have gone home. Their tire is down: they stop.
Duval	Shouting to the others. Fondez sur eux, nom de Dieu!
Mendoza	Rebuking his excitement. Du calme, Duval: keep your hair on. They take it quietly. Let us descend and receive them.
	Mendoza descends, passing behind the fire and coming forward, whilst Tanner and Straker, in their motoring goggles, leather coats, and caps, are led in from the road by brigands.
Tanner	Is this the gentleman you describe as your boss? Does he speak English?
The Rowdy Social-Democrat	Course he does. Y’don’t suppowz we Hinglishmen lets ahrselves be bossed by a bloomin Spenniard, do you?
Mendoza	With dignity. Allow me to introduce myself: Mendoza, President of the League of the Sierra! Posing loftily. I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.
Tanner	Promptly. I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands.
The English Social-Democrats	Hear, hear!
	General laughter and good humor. Tanner and Mendoza shake hands. The Brigands drop into their former places.
Straker	Ere! Where do I come in?
Tanner	Introducing. My friend and chauffeur.
The Sulky Social-Democrat	Suspiciously. Well, which is he? Friend or show-foor? It makes all the difference you know.
Mendoza	Explaining. We should expect ransom for a friend. A professional chauffeur is free of the mountains. He even takes a trifling percentage of his princpal’s ransom if he will honor us by accepting it.
Straker	I see. Just to encourage me to come this way again. Well, I’ll think about it.
Duval	Impulsively rushing across to Straker. Mon frere! He embraces him rapturously and kisses him on both cheeks.
Straker	Disgusted. Ere, git out: don’t be silly. Who are you, pray?
Duval	Duval: Social-Democrat.
Straker	Oh, you’re a Social-Democrat, are you?
The Anarchist	He means that he has sold out to the parliamentary humbugs and the bourgeoisie. Compromise! That is his faith.
Duval	Furiously. I understand what he say. He say Bourgeois. He say Compromise. Jamais de la vie! Miserable menteur⁠—
Straker	See here, Captain Mendoza, ow much o this sort o thing do you put up with here? Are we avin a pleasure trip in the mountains, or are we at a Socialist meetin?
The Majority	Hear, hear!
	Shut up.
	Chuck it.
	Sit down, etc. etc.
	The Social-Democrats and the Anarchist are hurtled into the background. Straker, after superintending this proceeding with satisfaction, places himself on Mendoza’s left, Tanner being on his right.
Mendoza	Can we offer you anything? Broiled rabbit and prickly pears⁠—
Tanner	Thank you: we have dined.
Mendoza	To his followers. Gentlemen: business is over for the day. Go as you please until morning.
	The Brigands disperse into groups lazily. Some go into the cave. Others sit down or lie down to sleep in the open. A few produce a pack of cards and move off towards the road; for it is now starlight; and they know that motor cars have lamps which can be turned to account for lighting a card party.
Straker	Calling after them. Don’t none of you go fooling with that car, d’ye hear?
Mendoza	No fear, Monsieur le Chauffeur. The first one we captured cured us of that.
Straker	Interested. What did it do?
Mendoza	It carried three brave comrades of ours, who did not know how to stop it, into Granada, and capsized them opposite the police station. Since then we never touch one without sending for the chauffeur. Shall we chat at our ease?
Tanner	By all means.
	Tanner, Mendoza, and Straker sit down on the turf by the fire. Mendoza delicately waives his presidential dignity, of which the right to sit on the squared stone block is the appanage, by sitting on the ground like his guests, and using the stone only as a support for his back.
Mendoza	It is the custom in Spain always to put off business until tomorrow. In fact, you have arrived out of office hours. However, if you would prefer to settle the question of ransom at once, I am at your service.
Tanner	Tomorrow will do for me. I am rich enough to pay anything in reason.
Mendoza	Respectfully, much struck by this admission. You are a remarkable man, sir. Our guests usually describe themselves as miserably poor.
Tanner	Pooh! Miserably poor people don’t own motor cars.
Mendoza	Precisely what we say to them.
Tanner	Treat us well: we shall not prove ungrateful.
Straker	No prickly pears and broiled rabbits, you know. Don’t tell me you can’t do us a bit better than that if you like.
Mendoza	Wine, kids, milk, cheese and bread can be procured for ready money.
Straker	Graciously. Now you’re talking.
Tanner	Are you all Socialists here, may I ask?
Mendoza	Repudiating this humiliating misconception. Oh no, no, no: nothing of the kind, I assure you. We naturally have modern views as to the justice of the existing distribution of wealth: otherwise we should lose our self-respect. But nothing that you could take exception to, except two or three faddists.
Tanner	I had no intention of suggesting anything discreditable. In fact, I am a bit of a Socialist myself.
Straker	Drily. Most rich men are, I notice.
Mendoza	Quite so. It has reached us, I admit. It is in the air of the century.
Straker	Socialism must be looking up a bit if your chaps are taking to it.
Mendoza	That is true, sir. A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.
Tanner	But are your brigands any less honest than ordinary citizens?
Mendoza	Sir: I will be frank with you. Brigandage is abnormal. Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.
Straker	Take care! Some o the dregs’ll hear you.
Mendoza	It does not matter: each brigand thinks himself scum, and likes to hear the others called dregs.
Tanner	Come! You are a wit. Mendoza inclines his head, flattered. May one ask you a blunt question?
Mendoza	As blunt as you please.
Tanner	How does it pay a man of your talent to shepherd such a flock as this on broiled rabbit and prickly pears? I have seen men less gifted, and I’ll swear less honest, supping at the Savoy on foie gras and champagne.
Mendoza	Pooh! They have all had their turn at the broiled rabbit, just as I shall have my turn at the Savoy. Indeed, I have had a turn there already⁠—as waiter.
Tanner	A waiter! You astonish me!
Mendoza	Reflectively. Yes: I, Mendoza of the Sierra, was a waiter. Hence, perhaps, my cosmopolitanism. With sudden intensity. Shall I tell you the story of my life?
Straker	Apprehensively. If it ain’t too long, old chap⁠—
Tanner	Interrupting him. Tsh-sh: you are a Philistine, Henry: you have no romance in you. To Mendoza. You interest me extremely, President. Never mind Henry: he can go to sleep.
Mendoza	The woman I loved⁠—
Straker	Oh, this is a love story, is it? Right you are. Go on: I was only afraid you were going to talk about yourself.
Mendoza	Myself! I have thrown myself away for her sake: that is why I am here. No matter: I count the world well lost for her. She had, I pledge you my word, the most magnificent head of hair I ever saw. She had humor; she had intellect; she could cook to perfection; and her highly strung temperament made her uncertain, incalculable, variable, capricious, cruel, in a word, enchanting.
Straker	A six shillin novel sort o woman, all but the cookin. Er name was Lady Gladys Plantagenet, wasn’t it?
Mendoza	No, sir: she was not an earl’s daughter. Photography, reproduced by the halftone process, has made me familiar with the appearance of the daughters of the English peerage; and I can honestly say that I would have sold the lot, faces, dowries, clothes, titles, and all, for a smile from this woman. Yet she was a woman of the people, a worker: otherwise⁠—let me reciprocate your bluntness⁠—I should have scorned her.
Tanner	Very properly. And did she respond to your love?
Mendoza	Should I be here if she did? She objected to marry a Jew.
Tanner	On religious grounds?
Mendoza	No: she was a freethinker. She said that every Jew considers in his heart that English people are dirty in their habits.
Tanner	Surprised. Dirty!
Mendoza	It showed her extraordinary knowledge of the world; for it is undoubtedly true. Our elaborate sanitary code makes us unduly contemptuous of the Gentile.
Tanner	Did you ever hear that, Henry?
Straker	I’ve heard my sister say so. She was cook in a Jewish family once.
Mendoza	I could not deny it; neither could I eradicate the impression it made on her mind. I could have got round any other objection; but no woman can stand a suspicion of indelicacy as to her person. My entreaties were in vain: she always retorted that she wasn’t good enough for me, and recommended me to marry an accursed barmaid named Rebecca Lazarus, whom I loathed. I talked of suicide: she offered me a packet of beetle poison to do it with. I hinted at murder: she went into hysterics; and as I am a living man I went to America so that she might sleep without dreaming that I was stealing upstairs to cut her throat. In America I went out west and fell in with a man who was wanted by the police for holding up trains. It was he who had the idea of holding up motors cars⁠—in the South of Europe: a welcome idea to a desperate and disappointed man. He gave me some valuable introductions to capitalists of the right sort. I formed a syndicate; and the present enterprise is the result. I became leader, as the Jew always becomes leader, by his brains and imagination. But with all my pride of race I would give everything I possess to be an Englishman. I am like a boy: I cut her name on the trees and her initials on the sod. When I am alone I lie down and tear my wretched hair and cry Louisa⁠—
Straker	Startled. Louisa!
Mendoza	It is her name⁠—Louisa⁠—Louisa Straker⁠—
Tanner	Straker!
Straker	Scrambling up on his knees most indignantly. Look here: Louisa Straker is my sister, see? Wot do you mean by gassin about her like this? Wot she got to do with you?
Mendoza	A dramatic coincidence! You are Enry, her favorite brother!
Straker	Oo are you callin Enry? What call have you to take a liberty with my name or with hers? For two pins I’d punch your fat ed, so I would.
Mendoza	With grandiose calm. If I let you do it, will you promise to brag of it afterwards to her? She will be reminded of her Mendoza: that is all I desire.
Tanner	This is genuine devotion, Henry. You should respect it.
Straker	Fiercely. Funk, more likely.
Mendoza	Springing to his feet. Funk! Young man: I come of a famous family of fighters; and as your sister well knows, you would have as much chance against me as a perambulator against your motor car.
Straker	Secretly daunted, but rising from his knees with an air of reckless pugnacity. I ain’t afraid of you. With your Louisa! Louisa! Miss Straker is good enough for you, I should think.
Mendoza	I wish you could persuade her to think so.
Straker	Exasperated. Here⁠—
Tanner	Rising quickly and interposing. Oh come, Henry: even if you could fight the President you can’t fight the whole League of the Sierra. Sit down again and be friendly. A cat may look at a king; and even a President of brigands may look at your sister. All this family pride is really very old fashioned.
Straker	Subdued, but grumbling. Let him look at her. But wot does he mean by makin out that she ever looked at im? Reluctantly resuming his couch on the turf. Ear him talk, one ud think she was keepin company with him. He turns his back on them and composes himself to sleep.
Mendoza	To Tanner, becoming more confidential as he finds himself virtually alone with a sympathetic listener in the still starlight of the mountains; for all the rest are asleep by this time. It was just so with her, sir. Her intellect reached forward into the twentieth century: her social prejudices and family affections reached back into the dark ages. Ah, sir, how the words of Shakespeare seem to fit every crisis in our emotions! I loved Louisa: 40,000 brothers Could not with all their quantity of love Make up my sum. And so on. I forget the rest. Call it madness if you will⁠—infatuation. I am an able man, a strong man: in ten years I should have owned a first-class hotel. I met her; and you see! I am a brigand, an outcast. Even Shakespeare cannot do justice to what I feel for Louisa. Let me read you some lines that I have written about her myself. However slight their literary merit may be, they express what I feel better than any casual words can. He produces a packet of hotel bills scrawled with manuscript, and kneels at the fire to decipher them, poking it with a stick to make it glow.
Tanner	Clapping him rudely on the shoulder. Put them in the fire, President.
Mendoza	Startled. Eh?
Tanner	You are sacrificing your career to a monomania.
Mendoza	I know it.
Tanner	No you don’t. No man would commit such a crime against himself if he really knew what he was doing. How can you look round at these august hills, look up at this divine sky, taste this finely tempered air, and then talk like a literary hack on a second floor in Bloomsbury?
Mendoza	Shaking his head. The Sierra is no better than Bloomsbury when once the novelty has worn off. Besides, these mountains make you dream of women⁠—of women with magnificent hair.
Tanner	Of Louisa, in short. They will not make me dream of women, my friend: I am heartwhole.
Mendoza	Do not boast until morning, sir. This is a strange country for dreams.
Tanner	Well, we shall see. Goodnight. He lies down and composes himself to sleep.
	Mendoza, with a sigh, follows his example; and for a few moments there is peace in the Sierra. Then Mendoza sits up suddenly and says pleadingly to Tanner⁠—
Mendoza	Just allow me to read a few lines before you go to sleep. I should really like your opinion of them.
Tanner	Drowsily. Go on. I am listening.
Mendoza	I saw thee first in Whitsun week Louisa, Louisa⁠—
Tanner	Roaring himself. My dear President, Louisa is a very pretty name; but it really doesn’t rhyme well to Whitsun week.
Mendoza	Of course not. Louisa is not the rhyme, but the refrain.
Tanner	Subsiding. Ah, the refrain. I beg your pardon. Go on.
Mendoza	Perhaps you do not care for that one: I think you will like this better. He recites, in rich soft tones, and to slow time. Louisa, I love thee. I love thee, Louisa. Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee. One name and one phrase make my music, Louisa. Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee. Mendoza thy lover, Thy lover, Mendoza, Mendoza adoringly lives for Louisa. There’s nothing but that in the world for Mendoza. Louisa, Louisa, Mendoza adores thee. Affected. There is no merit in producing beautiful lines upon such a name. Louisa is an exquisite name, is it not?
Tanner	All but asleep, responds with a faint groan.
Mendoza	O wert thou, Louisa, The wife of Mendoza, Mendoza’s Louisa, Louisa Mendoza, How blessed were the life of Louisa’s Mendoza! How painless his longing of love for Louisa! That is real poetry⁠—from the heart⁠—from the heart of hearts. Don’t you think it will move her? No answer. Resignedly. Asleep, as usual. Doggrel to all the world; Heavenly music to me! Idiot that I am to wear my heart on my sleeve! He composes himself to sleep, murmuring. Louisa, I love thee; I love thee, Louisa; Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I⁠—
	Straker snores; rolls over on his side; and relapses into sleep. Stillness settles on the Sierra; and the darkness deepens. The fire has again buried itself in white ash and ceased to glow. The peaks show unfathomably dark against the starry firmament; but now the stars dim and vanish; and the sky seems to steal away out of the universe. Instead of the Sierra there is nothing; omnipresent nothing. No sky, no peaks, no light, no sound, no time nor space, utter void. Then somewhere the beginning of a pallor, and with it a faint throbbing buzz as of a ghostly violoncello palpitating on the same note endlessly. A couple of ghostly violins presently take advantage of this bass.
	And therewith the pallor reveals a man in the void, an incorporeal but visible man, seated, absurdly enough, on nothing. For a moment he raises his head as the music passes him by. Then, with a heavy sigh, he droops in utter dejection; and the violins, discouraged, retrace their melody in despair and at last give it up, extinguished by wailings from uncanny wind instruments, thus:⁠—
	It is all very odd. One recognizes the Mozartian strain; and on this hint, and by the aid of certain sparkles of violet light in the pallor, the man’s costume explains itself as that of a Spanish nobleman of the fifteenth-sixteenth century. Don Juan, of course; but where? Why? How? Besides, in the brief lifting of his face, now hidden by his hat brim, there was a curious suggestion of Tanner. A more critical, fastidious, handsome face, paler and colder, without Tanner’s impetuous credulity and enthusiasm, and without a touch of his modern plutocratic vulgarity, but still a resemblance, even an identity. The name too: Don Juan Tenorio, John Tanner. Where on Earth⁠—or elsewhere⁠—have we got to from the twentieth century and the Sierra?
	Another pallor in the void, this time not violet, but a disagreeable smoky yellow. With it, the whisper of a ghostly clarinet turning this tune into infinite sadness:
	The yellowish pallor moves: there is an old crone wandering in the void, bent and toothless; draped, as well as one can guess, in the coarse brown frock of some religious order. She wanders and wanders in her slow hopeless way, much as a wasp flies in its rapid busy way, until she blunders against the thing she seeks: companionship. With a sob of relief the poor old creature clutches at the presence of the man and addresses him in her dry unlovely voice, which can still express pride and resolution as well as suffering.
The Old Woman	Excuse me; but I am so lonely; and this place is so awful.
Don Juan	A newcomer?
The Old Woman	Yes: I suppose I died this morning. I confessed; I had extreme unction; I was in bed with my family about me and my eyes fixed on the cross. Then it grew dark; and when the light came back it was this light by which I walk seeing nothing. I have wandered for hours in horrible loneliness.
Don Juan	Sighing. Ah! You have not yet lost the sense of time. One soon does, in eternity.
The Old Woman	Where are we?
Don Juan	In Hell.
The Old Woman	Proudly. Hell! I in Hell! How dare you?
Don Juan	Unimpressed. Why not, Señora?
The Old Woman	You do not know to whom you are speaking. I am a lady, and a faithful daughter of the Church.
Don Juan	I do not doubt it.
The Old Woman	But how then can I be in Hell? Purgatory, perhaps: I have not been perfect: who has? But Hell! Oh, you are lying.
Don Juan	Hell, Señora, I assure you; Hell at its best⁠—that is, its most solitary⁠—though perhaps you would prefer company.
The Old Woman	But I have sincerely repented; I have confessed.
Don Juan	How much?
The Old Woman	More sins than I really committed. I loved confession.
Don Juan	Ah, that is perhaps as bad as confessing too little. At all events, Señora, whether by oversight or intention, you are certainly damned, like myself; and there is nothing for it now but to make the best of it.
The Old Woman	Indignantly. Oh! And I might have been so much wickeder! All my good deeds wasted! It is unjust.
Don Juan	No: you were fully and clearly warned. For your bad deeds, vicarious atonement, mercy without justice. For your good deeds, justice without mercy. We have many good people here.
The Old Woman	Were you a good man?
Don Juan	I was a murderer.
The Old Woman	A murderer! Oh, how dare they send me to herd with murderers! I was not as bad as that: I was a good woman. There is some mistake: where can I have it set right?
Don Juan	I do not know whether mistakes can be corrected here. Probably they will not admit a mistake even if they have made one.
The Old Woman	But whom can I ask?
Don Juan	I should ask the Devil, Señora: he understands the ways of this place, which is more than I ever could.
The Old Woman	The Devil! I speak to the Devil!
Don Juan	In Hell, Señora, the Devil is the leader of the best society.
The Old Woman	I tell you, wretch, I know I am not in Hell.
Don Juan	How do you know?
The Old Woman	Because I feel no pain.
Don Juan	Oh, then there is no mistake: you are intentionally damned.
The Old Woman	Why do you say that?
Don Juan	Because Hell, Señora, is a place for the wicked. The wicked are quite comfortable in it: it was made for them. You tell me you feel no pain. I conclude you are one of those for whom Hell exists.
The Old Woman	Do you feel no pain?
Don Juan	I am not one of the wicked, Señora; therefore it bores me, bores me beyond description, beyond belief.
The Old Woman	Not one of the wicked! You said you were a murderer.
Don Juan	Only a duel. I ran my sword through an old man who was trying to run his through me.
The Old Woman	If you were a gentleman, that was not a murder.
Don Juan	The old man called it murder, because he was, he said, defending his daughter’s honor. By this he meant that because I foolishly fell in love with her and told her so, she screamed; and he tried to assassinate me after calling me insulting names.
The Old Woman	You were like all men. Libertines and murderers all, all, all!
Don Juan	And yet we meet here, dear lady.
The Old Woman	Listen to me. My father was slain by just such a wretch as you, in just such a duel, for just such a cause. I screamed: it was my duty. My father drew on my assailant: his honor demanded it. He fell: that was the reward of honor. I am here: in Hell, you tell me that is the reward of duty. Is there justice in Heaven?
Don Juan	No; but there is justice in Hell: Heaven is far above such idle human personalities. You will be welcome in Hell, Señora. Hell is the home of honor, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues. All the wickedness on Earth is done in their name: where else but in Hell should they have their reward? Have I not told you that the truly damned are those who are happy in Hell?
The Old Woman	And are you happy here?
Don Juan	Springing to his feet. No; and that is the enigma on which I ponder in darkness. Why am I here? I, who repudiated all duty, trampled honor underfoot, and laughed at justice!
The Old Woman	Oh, what do I care why you are here? Why am I here? I, who sacrificed all my inclinations to womanly virtue and propriety!
Don Juan	Patience, lady: you will be perfectly happy and at home here. As saith the poet, “Hell is a city much like Seville.”
The Old Woman	Happy! Here! Where I am nothing! Where I am nobody!
Don Juan	Not at all: you are a lady; and wherever ladies are is Hell. Do not be surprised or terrified: you will find everything here that a lady can desire, including devils who will serve you from sheer love of servitude, and magnify your importance for the sake of dignifying their service⁠—the best of servants.
The Old Woman	My servants will be devils!
Don Juan	Have you ever had servants who were not devils?
The Old Woman	Never: they were devils, perfect devils, all of them. But that is only a manner of speaking. I thought you meant that my servants here would be real devils.
Don Juan	No more real devils than you will be a real lady. Nothing is real here. That is the horror of damnation.
The Old Woman	Oh, this is all madness. This is worse than fire and the worm.
Don Juan	For you, perhaps, there are consolations. For instance: how old were you when you changed from time to eternity?
The Old Woman	Do not ask me how old I was as if I were a thing of the past. I am 77.
Don Juan	A ripe age, Señora. But in Hell old age is not tolerated. It is too real. Here we worship love and beauty. Our souls being entirely damned, we cultivate our hearts. As a lady of 77, you would not have a single acquaintance in Hell.
The Old Woman	How can I help my age, man?
Don Juan	You forget that you have left your age behind you in the realm of time. You are no more 77 than you are 7 or 17 or 27.
The Old Woman	Nonsense!
Don Juan	Consider, Señora: was not this true even when you lived on Earth? When you were 70, were you really older underneath your wrinkles and your grey hairs than when you were 30?
The Old Woman	No, younger: at 30 I was a fool. But of what use is it to feel younger and look older?
Don Juan	You see, Señora, the look was only an illusion. Your wrinkles lied, just as the plump smooth skin of many a stupid girl of 17, with heavy spirits and decrepit ideas, lies about her age? Well, here we have no bodies: we see each other as bodies only because we learnt to think about one another under that aspect when we were alive; and we still think in that way, knowing no other. But we can appear to one another at what age we choose. You have but to will any of your old looks back, and back they will come.
The Old Woman	It cannot be true.
Don Juan	Try.
The Old Woman	Seventeen!
Don Juan	Stop. Before you decide, I had better tell you that these things are a matter of fashion. Occasionally we have a rage for 17; but it does not last long. Just at present the fashionable age is 40⁠—or say 37; but there are signs of a change. If you were at all good-looking at 27, I should suggest your trying that, and setting a new fashion.
The Old Woman	I do not believe a word you are saying. However, 27 be it. Whisk! The old woman becomes a young one, and so handsome that in the radiance into which her dull yellow halo has suddenly lightened one might almost mistake her for Ann Whitefield.
Don Juan	Doña Ana de Ulloa!
Ana	What? You know me!
Don Juan	And you forget me!
Ana	I cannot see your face. He raises his hat. Don Juan Tenorio! Monster! You who slew my father! Even here you pursue me.
Don Juan	I protest I do not pursue you. Allow me to withdraw Going.
Ana	Seizing his arm. You shall not leave me alone in this dreadful place.
Don Juan	Provided my staying be not interpreted as pursuit.
Ana	Releasing him. You may well wonder how I can endure your presence. My dear, dear father!
Don Juan	Would you like to see him?
Ana	My father here!!!
Don Juan	No: he is in Heaven.
Ana	I knew it. My noble father! He is looking down on us now. What must he feel to see his daughter in this place, and in conversation with his murderer!
Don Juan	By the way, if we should meet him⁠—
Ana	How can we meet him? He is in Heaven.
Don Juan	He condescends to look in upon us here from time to time. Heaven bores him. So let me warn you that if you meet him he will be mortally offended if you speak of me as his murderer! He maintains that he was a much better swordsman than I, and that if his foot had not slipped he would have killed me. No doubt he is right: I was not a good fencer. I never dispute the point; so we are excellent friends.
Ana	It is no dishonor to a soldier to be proud of his skill in arms.
Don Juan	You would rather not meet him, probably.
Ana	How dare you say that?
Don Juan	Oh, that is the usual feeling here. You may remember that on Earth⁠—though of course we never confessed it⁠—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.
Ana	Monster! Never, never.
Don Juan	Placidly. I see you recognize the feeling. Yes: a funeral was always a festivity in black, especially the funeral of a relative. At all events, family ties are rarely kept up here. Your father is quite accustomed to this: he will not expect any devotion from you.
Ana	Wretch: I wore mourning for him all my life.
Don Juan	Yes: it became you. But a life of mourning is one thing: an eternity of it quite another. Besides, here you are as dead as he. Can anything be more ridiculous than one dead person mourning for another? Do not look shocked, my dear Ana; and do not be alarmed: there is plenty of humbug in Hell (indeed there is hardly anything else); but the humbug of death and age and change is dropped because here we are all dead and all eternal. You will pick up our ways soon.
Ana	And will all the men call me their dear Ana?
Don Juan	No. That was a slip of the tongue. I beg your pardon.
Ana	Almost tenderly. Juan: did you really love me when you behaved so disgracefully to me?
Don Juan	Impatiently. Oh, I beg you not to begin talking about love. Here they talk of nothing else but love⁠—its beauty, its holiness, its spirituality, its devil knows what!⁠—excuse me; but it does so bore me. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I do. They think they have achieved the perfection of love because they have no bodies. Sheer imaginative debauchery! Faugh!
Ana	Has even death failed to refine your soul, Juan? Has the terrible judgment of which my father’s statue was the minister taught you no reverence?
Don Juan	How is that very flattering statue, by the way? Does it still come to supper with naughty people and cast them into this bottomless pit?
Ana	It has been a great expense to me. The boys in the monastery school would not let it alone: the mischievous ones broke it; and the studious ones wrote their names on it. Three new noses in two years, and fingers without end. I had to leave it to its fate at last; and now I fear it is shockingly mutilated. My poor father!
Don Juan	Hush! Listen! Two great chords rolling on syncopated waves of sound break forth: D minor and its dominant: a round of dreadful joy to all musicians. Ha! Mozart’s statue music. It is your father. You had better disappear until I prepare him. She vanishes.
	From the void comes a living statue of white marble, designed to represent a majestic old man. But he waives his majesty with infinite grace; walks with a feather-like step; and makes every wrinkle in his war worn visage brim over with holiday joyousness. To his sculptor he owes a perfectly trained figure, which he carries erect and trim; and the ends of his moustache curl up, elastic as watchsprings, giving him an air which, but for its Spanish dignity, would be called jaunty. He is on the pleasantest terms with Don Juan. His voice, save for a much more distinguished intonation, is so like the voice of Roebuck Ramsden that it calls attention to the fact that they are not unlike one another in spite of their very different fashion of shaving.
Don Juan	Ah, here you are, my friend. Why don’t you learn to sing the splendid music Mozart has written for you?
The Statue	Unluckily he has written it for a bass voice. Mine is a counter tenor. Well: have you repented yet?
Don Juan	I have too much consideration for you to repent, Don Gonzalo. If I did, you would have no excuse for coming from Heaven to argue with me.
The Statue	True. Remain obdurate, my boy. I wish I had killed you, as I should have done but for an accident. Then I should have come here; and you would have had a statue and a reputation for piety to live up to. Any news?
Don Juan	Yes: your daughter is dead.
The Statue	Puzzled. My daughter? Recollecting. Oh! The one you were taken with. Let me see: what was her name?
Don Juan	Ana.
The Statue	To be sure: Ana. A good-looking girl, if I recollect aright. Have you warned Whatshisname⁠—her husband?
Don Juan	My friend Ottavio? No: I have not seen him since Ana arrived.
	Ana comes indignantly to light.
Ana	What does this mean? Ottavio here and your friend! And you, father, have forgotten my name. You are indeed turned to stone.
The Statue	My dear: I am so much more admired in marble than I ever was in my own person that I have retained the shape the sculptor gave me. He was one of the first men of his day: you must acknowledge that.
Ana	Father! Vanity! Personal vanity! From you!
The Statue	Ah, you outlived that weakness, my daughter: you must be nearly 80 by this time. I was cut off (by an accident) in my 64th year, and am considerably your junior in consequence. Besides, my child, in this place, what our libertine friend here would call the farce of parental wisdom is dropped. Regard me, I beg, as a fellow creature, not as a father.
Ana	You speak as this villain speaks.
The Statue	Juan is a sound thinker, Ana. A bad fencer, but a sound thinker.
Ana	Horror creeping upon her. I begin to understand. These are devils, mocking me. I had better pray.
The Statue	Consoling her. No, no, no, my child: do not pray. If you do, you will throw away the main advantage of this place. Written over the gate here are the words “Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.” Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself. Don Juan sighs deeply. You sigh, friend Juan; but if you dwelt in Heaven, as I do, you would realize your advantages.
Don Juan	You are in good spirits today, Commander. You are positively brilliant. What is the matter?
The Statue	I have come to a momentous decision, my boy. But first, where is our friend the Devil? I must consult him in the matter. And Ana would like to make his acquaintance, no doubt.
Ana	You are preparing some torment for me.
Don Juan	All that is superstition, Ana. Reassure yourself. Remember: the Devil is not so black as he is painted.
The Statue	Let us give him a call.
	At the wave of the statue’s hand the great chords roll out again but this time Mozart’s music gets grotesquely adulterated with Gounod’s. A scarlet halo begins to glow; and into it the Devil rises, very Mephistophelean, and not at all unlike Mendoza, though not so interesting. He looks older; is getting prematurely bald; and, in spite of an effusion of good nature and friendliness, is peevish and sensitive when his advances are not reciprocated. He does not inspire much confidence in his powers of hard work or endurance, and is, on the whole, a disagreeably self-indulgent looking person; but he is clever and plausible, though perceptibly less well bred than the two other men, and enormously less vital than the woman.
The Devil	Heartily. Have I the pleasure of again receiving a visit from the illustrious Commander of Calatrava? Coldly. Don Juan, your servant. Politely. And a strange lady? My respects, Señora.
Ana	Are you⁠—
The Devil	Bowing. Lucifer, at your service.
Ana	I shall go mad.
The Devil	Gallantly. Ah, Señora, do not be anxious. You come to us from Earth, full of the prejudices and terrors of that priest-ridden place. You have heard me ill spoken of; and yet, believe me, I have hosts of friends there.
Ana	Yes: you reign in their hearts.
The Devil	Shaking his head. You flatter me, Señora; but you are mistaken. It is true that the world cannot get on without me; but it never gives me credit for that: in its heart it mistrusts and hates me. Its sympathies are all with misery, with poverty, with starvation of the body and of the heart. I call on it to sympathize with joy, with love, with happiness, with beauty.
Don Juan	Nauseated. Excuse me: I am going. You know I cannot stand this.
The Devil	Angrily. Yes: I know that you are no friend of mine.
The Statue	What harm is he doing you, Juan? It seems to me that he was talking excellent sense when you interrupted him.
The Devil	Warmly shaking the statue’s hand. Thank you, my friend: thank you. You have always understood me: he has always disparaged and avoided me.
Don Juan	I have treated you with perfect courtesy.
The Devil	Courtesy! What is courtesy? I care nothing for mere courtesy. Give me warmth of heart, true sincerity, the bond of sympathy with love and joy⁠—
Don Juan	You are making me ill.
The Devil	There! Appealing to the statue. You hear, sir! Oh, by what irony of fate was this cold selfish egotist sent to my kingdom, and you taken to the icy mansions of the sky!
The Statue	I can’t complain. I was a hypocrite; and it served me right to be sent to Heaven.
The Devil	Why, sir, do you not join us, and leave a sphere for which your temperament is too sympathetic, your heart too warm, your capacity for enjoyment too generous?
The Statue	I have this day resolved to do so. In future, excellent Son of the Morning, I am yours. I have left Heaven forever.
The Devil	Again grasping his hand. Ah, what an honor for me! What a triumph for our cause! Thank you, thank you. And now, my friend⁠—I may call you so at last⁠—could you not persuade him to take the place you have left vacant above?
The Statue	Shaking his head. I cannot conscientiously recommend anybody with whom I am on friendly terms to deliberately make himself dull and uncomfortable.
The Devil	Of course not; but are you sure he would be uncomfortable? Of course you know best: you brought him here originally; and we had the greatest hopes of him. His sentiments were in the best taste of our best people. You remember how he sang? He begins to sing in a nasal operatic baritone, tremulous from an eternity of misuse in the French manner. Vivan le femmine! Viva il buon vino!
The Statue	Taking up the tune an octave higher in his counter tenor. Sostegno a gloria D’umanita.
The Devil	Precisely. Well, he never sings for us now.
Don Juan	Do you complain of that? Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?
The Devil	You dare blaspheme against the sublimest of the arts!
Don Juan	With cold disgust. You talk like a hysterical woman fawning on a fiddler.
The Devil	I am not angry. I merely pity you. You have no soul; and you are unconscious of all that you lose. Now you, Señor Commander, are a born musician. How well you sing! Mozart would be delighted if he were still here; but he moped and went to Heaven. Curious how these clever men, whom you would have supposed born to be popular here, have turned out social failures, like Don Juan!
Don Juan	I am really very sorry to be a social failure.
The Devil	Not that we don’t admire your intellect, you know. We do. But I look at the matter from your own point of view. You don’t get on with us. The place doesn’t suit you. The truth is, you have⁠—I won’t say no heart; for we know that beneath all your affected cynicism you have a warm one.
Don Juan	Shrinking. Don’t, please don’t.
The Devil	Nettled. Well, you’ve no capacity for enjoyment. Will that satisfy you?
Don Juan	It is a somewhat less insufferable form of cant than the other. But if you’ll allow me, I’ll take refuge, as usual, in solitude.
The Devil	Why not take refuge in Heaven? That’s the proper place for you. To Ana. Come, Señora! Could you not persuade him for his own good to try a change of air?
Ana	But can he go to Heaven if he wants to?
The Devil	What’s to prevent him?
Ana	Can anybody⁠—can I go to Heaven if I want to?
The Devil	Rather contemptuously. Certainly, if your taste lies that way.
Ana	But why doesn’t everybody go to Heaven, then?
The Statue	Chuckling. I can tell you that, my dear. It’s because Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation: that’s why.
The Devil	His excellency the Commander puts it with military bluntness; but the strain of living in Heaven is intolerable. There is a notion that I was turned out of it; but as a matter of fact nothing could have induced me to stay there. I simply left it and organized this place.
The Statue	I don’t wonder at it. Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.
The Devil	Oh, it suits some people. Let us be just, Commander: it is a question of temperament. I don’t admire the Heavenly temperament: I don’t understand it: I don’t know that I particularly want to understand it; but it takes all sorts to make a universe. There is no accounting for tastes: there are people who like it. I think Don Juan would like it.
Don Juan	But⁠—pardon my frankness⁠—could you really go back there if you desired to; or are the grapes sour?
The Devil	Back there! I often go back there. Have you never read the book of Job? Have you any canonical authority for assuming that there is any barrier between our circle and the other one?
Ana	But surely there is a great gulf fixed.
The Devil	Dear lady: a parable must not be taken literally. The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on Earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that. Have you ever been in the country where I have the largest following⁠—England? There they have great racecourses, and also concert rooms where they play the classical compositions of his Excellency’s friend Mozart. Those who go to the racecourses can stay away from them and go to the classical concerts instead if they like: there is no law against it; for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do. And the classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic, intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse. But do the lovers of racing desert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they. They would suffer there all the weariness the Commander has suffered in Heaven. There is the great gulf of the parable between the two places. A mere physical gulf they could bridge; or at least I could bridge it for them (the Earth is full of Devil’s Bridges); but the gulf of dislike is impassable and eternal. And that is the only gulf that separates my friends here from those who are invidiously called the blessed.
Ana	I shall go to Heaven at once.
The Statue	My child; one word of warning first. Let me complete my friend Lucifer’s similitude of the classical concert. At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in Heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in Heaven. They are almost all English.
The Devil	Yes: the Southerners give it up and join me just as you have done. But the English really do not seem to know when they are thoroughly miserable. An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
The Statue	In short, my daughter, if you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there.
Ana	And who dares say that I am not naturally qualified for it? The most distinguished princes of the Church have never questioned it. I owe it to myself to leave this place at once.
The Devil	Offended. As you please, Señora. I should have expected better taste from you.
Ana	Father: I shall expect you to come with me. You cannot stay here. What will people say?
The Statue	People! Why, the best people are here⁠—princes of the Church and all. So few go to Heaven, and so many come here, that the blessed, once called a Heavenly host, are a continually dwindling minority. The saints, the fathers, the elect of long ago are the cranks, the faddists, the outsiders of today.
The Devil	It is true. From the beginning of my career I knew that I should win in the long run by sheer weight of public opinion, in spite of the long campaign of misrepresentation and calumny against me. At bottom the universe is a constitutional one; and with such a majority as mine I cannot be kept permanently out of office.
Don Juan	I think, Ana, you had better stay here.
Ana	Jealously. You do not want me to go with you.
Don Juan	Surely you do not want to enter Heaven in the company of a reprobate like me.
Ana	All souls are equally precious. You repent, do you not?
Don Juan	My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose Heaven is like Earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: Heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither.
Ana	Thank you: I am going to Heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on Earth.
Don Juan	Then you must stay here; for Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from Heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from Earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The Earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on Earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on”⁠—without getting us a step farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise!
Ana	But if Hell be so beautiful as this, how glorious must Heaven be!
	The Devil, the Statue, and Don Juan all begin to speak at once in violent protest; then stop, abashed.
Don Juan	I beg your pardon.
The Devil	Not at all. I interrupted you.
The Statue	You were going to say something.
Don Juan	After you, gentlemen.
The Devil	To Don Juan. You have been so eloquent on the advantages of my dominions that I leave you to do equal justice to the drawbacks of the alternative establishment.
Don Juan	In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are your glory. If the play still goes on here and on Earth, and all the world is a stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes. But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation⁠—
The Statue	Ugh!
Don Juan	Señor Commander: I do not blame your disgust: a picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things namely, life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself. What made this brain of mine, do you think? Not the need to move my limbs; for a rat with half my brains moves as well as I. Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do, lest in my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself.
The Statue	You would have slain yourself in your blind efforts to fence but for my foot slipping, my friend.
Don Juan	Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.
The Statue	Ha ha! Do you remember how I frightened you when I said something like that to you from my pedestal in Seville? It sounds rather flat without my trombones.
Don Juan	They tell me it generally sounds flat with them, Commander.
Ana	Oh, do not interrupt with these frivolities, Father. Is there nothing in Heaven but contemplation, Juan?
Don Juan	In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. But there is the work of helping life in its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters itself, how it raises up obstacles to itself and destroys itself in its ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this irresistible force, lest in its ignorance it should resist itself. “What a piece of work is man!” says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other of its own defect: Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge, and Imagination all the intelligence.
The Devil	And a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust’s, that all Man’s reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent philosophers.
Don Juan	You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the Earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings. Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to live; but for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their purpose, and so destroyed themselves.
The Devil	And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the Earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man’s wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt today eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady’s bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man’s industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of life of which you boast is a force of death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is his religion? An excuse for hating me. What is his law? An excuse for hanging you. What is his morality? Gentility! An excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery saying⁠—“Ask no questions and you will be told no lies.” I bought a sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London bricklayer’s laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent sevenpence on her children’s schooling: the law had to force her to let them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power that governs the Earth is not the power of life but of death; and the inner need that has nerved life to the effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
Don Juan	Pshaw! All this is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation. Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to reform it.
The Devil	Precisely. And these are the creatures in whom you discover what you call a life force!
Don Juan	Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole business.
The Statue	What’s that?
Don Juan	Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by simply putting an idea into his head.
The Statue	Stuff! As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it’s as universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But that about putting an idea into a man’s head is stuff and nonsense. In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.
Don Juan	That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose⁠—fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but for the Cross. What force was it that met him with a valor as reckless as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for Islam. They took Spain from us, though we were fighting for our very hearths and homes; but when we, too, fought for that mighty idea, a Catholic Church, we swept them back to Africa.
The Devil	Ironically. What! You a Catholic, Señor Don Juan! A devotee! My congratulations.
The Statue	Seriously. Come come! As a soldier, I can listen to nothing against the Church.
Don Juan	Have no fear, Commander: this idea of a Catholic Church will survive Islam, will survive the Cross, will survive even that vulgar pageant of incompetent schoolboyish gladiators which you call the Army.
The Statue	Juan: you will force me to call you to account for this.
Don Juan	Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Muhammad, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.
The Statue	Bosh!
Don Juan	What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for. Later on, liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.
The Devil	Aye: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing one another.
Don Juan	What of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic idea of abolishing slavery.
The Devil	Yes, when the liberty and equality of which you prate shall have made free white Christians cheaper in the labor market than by auction at the block.
Don Juan	Never fear! The white laborer shall have his turn too. But I am not now defending the illusory forms the great ideas take. I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God’s work to do, and what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.
Ana	Yes: he shirks all his responsibilities, and leaves his wife to grapple with them.
The Statue	Well said, daughter. Do not let him talk you out of your common sense.
The Devil	Alas! Señor Commander, now that we have got on to the subject of Woman, he will talk more than ever. However, I confess it is for me the one supremely interesting subject.
Don Juan	To a woman, Señora, man’s duties and responsibilities begin and end with the task of getting bread for her children. To her, Man is only a means to the end of getting children and rearing them.
Ana	Is that your idea of a woman’s mind? I call it cynical and disgusting materialism.
Don Juan	Pardon me, Ana: I said nothing about a woman’s whole mind. I spoke of her view of Man as a separate sex. It is no more cynical than her view of herself as above all things a mother. Sexually, Woman is Nature’s contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement. Sexually, Man is Woman’s contrivance for fulfilling Nature’s behest in the most economical way. She knows by instinct that far back in the evolutional process she invented him, differentiated him, created him in order to produce something better than the single-sexed process can produce. Whilst he fulfils the purpose for which she made him, he is welcome to his dreams, his follies, his ideals, his heroisms, provided that the keystone of them all is the worship of woman, of motherhood, of the family, of the hearth. But how rash and dangerous it was to invent a separate creature whose sole function was her own impregnation! For mark what has happened. First, Man has multiplied on her hands until there are as many men as women; so that she has been unable to employ for her purposes more than a fraction of the immense energy she has left at his disposal by saving him the exhausting labor of gestation. This superfluous energy has gone to his brain and to his muscle. He has become too strong to be controlled by her bodily, and too imaginative and mentally vigorous to be content with mere self-reproduction. He has created civilization without consulting her, taking her domestic labor for granted as the foundation of it.
Ana	That is true, at all events.
The Devil	Yes; and this civilization! What is it, after all?
Don Juan	After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces on; but before all, it is an attempt on Man’s part to make himself something more than the mere instrument of Woman’s purpose. So far, the result of life’s continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of death and degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite of the commanders.
The Statue	That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on.
Don Juan	It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still, you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can win battles when the enemy’s general is a little stupider.
The Statue	Very seriously. Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys have amazing luck.
Don Juan	Well, the life force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the forces of death and degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the time. And so life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best fed riflemen is assured.
The Devil	Exactly! The survival, not of the most effective means of life but of the most effective means of death. You always come back to my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.
Don Juan	Oh come! Who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax your intellect, you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty and the rest of your favorite boredoms.
The Devil	Much offended. This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, utterly refuting you. Let us go on for another hour if you like.
Don Juan	Good: let us.
The Statue	Not that I see any prospect of your coming to any point in particular, Juan. Still, since in this place, instead of merely killing time we have to kill eternity, go ahead by all means.
Don Juan	Somewhat impatiently. My point, you marbleheaded old masterpiece, is only a step ahead of you. Are we agreed that life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself; that the mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium, the flies and the fleas and the Fathers of the Church, are all more or less successful attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals, the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a god?
The Devil	I agree, for the sake of argument.
The Statue	I agree, for the sake of avoiding argument.
Ana	I most emphatically disagree as regards the Fathers of the Church; and I must beg you not to drag them into the argument.
Don Juan	I did so purely for the sake of alliteration, Ana; and I shall make no further allusion to them. And now, since we are, with that exception, agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that life has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or bodily perfection of the result, since in both these respects the birds, as our friend Aristophanes long ago pointed out, are so extraordinarily superior, with their power of flight and their lovely plumage, and, may I add, the touching poetry of their loves and nestings, that it is inconceivable that life, having once produced them, should, if love and beauty were her object, start off on another line and labor at the clumsy elephant and the hideous ape, whose grandchildren we are?
Ana	Aristophanes was a heathen; and you, Juan, I am afraid, are very little better.
The Devil	You conclude, then, that life was driving at clumsiness and ugliness?
Don Juan	No, perverse devil that you are, a thousand times no. Life was driving at brains⁠—at its darling object: an organ by which it can attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding.
The Statue	This is metaphysics, Juan. Why the devil should⁠—to the Devil I beg your pardon.
The Devil	Pray don’t mention it. I have always regarded the use of my name to secure additional emphasis as a high compliment to me. It is quite at your service, Commander.
The Statue	Thank you: that’s very good of you. Even in Heaven, I never quite got out of my old military habits of speech. What I was going to ask Juan was why life should bother itself about getting a brain. Why should it want to understand itself? Why not be content to enjoy itself?
Don Juan	Without a brain, Commander, you would enjoy yourself without knowing it, and so lose all the fun.
The Statue	True, most true. But I am quite content with brain enough to know that I’m enjoying myself. I don’t want to understand why. In fact, I’d rather not. My experience is that one’s pleasures don’t bear thinking about.
Don Juan	That is why intellect is so unpopular. But to life, the force behind the Man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders into death. Just as life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving today a mind’s eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as at present. Even as it is, only one sort of man has ever been happy, has ever been universally respected among all the conflicts of interests and illusions.
The Statue	You mean the military man.
Don Juan	Commander: I do not mean the military man. When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of all other sorts of men I declare myself tired. They’re tedious failures. When I was on Earth, professors of all sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they called me ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself about that either; so they called me atheist and went their way. After them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature, and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me mugwump and went his way. Then came the romantic man, the artist, with his love songs and his paintings and his poems; and with him I had great delight for many years, and some profit; for I cultivated my senses for his sake; and his songs taught me to hear better, his paintings to see better, and his poems to feel more deeply. But he led me at last into the worship of Woman.
Ana	Juan!
Don Juan	Yes: I came to believe that in her voice was all the music of the song, in her face all the beauty of the painting, and in her soul all the emotion of the poem.
Ana	And you were disappointed, I suppose. Well, was it her fault that you attributed all these perfections to her?
Don Juan	Yes, partly. For with a wonderful instinctive cunning, she kept silent and allowed me to glorify her; to mistake my own visions, thoughts, and feelings for hers. Now my friend the romantic man was often too poor or too timid to approach those women who were beautiful or refined enough to seem to realize his ideal; and so he went to his grave believing in his dream. But I was more favored by Nature and circumstance. I was of noble birth and rich; and when my person did not please, my conversation flattered, though I generally found myself fortunate in both.
The Statue	Coxcomb!
Don Juan	Yes; but even my coxcombry pleased. Well, I found that when I had touched a woman’s imagination, she would allow me to persuade myself that she loved me; but when my suit was granted she never said “I am happy: my love is satisfied:” she always said, first, “At last, the barriers are down,” and second, “When will you come again?”
Ana	That is exactly what men say.
Don Juan	I protest I never said it. But all women say it. Well, these two speeches always alarmed me; for the first meant that the lady’s impulse had been solely to throw down my fortifications and gain my citadel; and the second openly announced that henceforth she regarded me as her property, and counted my time as already wholly at her disposal.
The Devil	That is where your want of heart came in.
The Statue	Shaking his head. You shouldn’t repeat what a woman says, Juan.
Ana	Severely. It should be sacred to you.
The Statue	Still, they certainly do always say it. I never minded the barriers; but there was always a slight shock about the other, unless one was very hard hit indeed.
Don Juan	Then the lady, who had been happy and idle enough before, became anxious, preoccupied with me, always intriguing, conspiring, pursuing, watching, waiting, bent wholly on making sure of her prey⁠—I being the prey, you understand. Now this was not what I had bargained for. It may have been very proper and very natural; but it was not music, painting, poetry and joy incarnated in a beautiful woman. I ran away from it. I ran away from it very often: in fact I became famous for running away from it.
Ana	Infamous, you mean.
Don Juan	I did not run away from you. Do you blame me for running away from the others?
Ana	Nonsense, man. You are talking to a woman of 77 now. If you had had the chance, you would have run away from me too⁠—if I had let you. You would not have found it so easy with me as with some of the others. If men will not be faithful to their home and their duties, they must be made to be. I daresay you all want to marry lovely incarnations of music and painting and poetry. Well, you can’t have them, because they don’t exist. If flesh and blood is not good enough for you you must go without: that’s all. Women have to put up with flesh-and-blood husbands⁠—and little enough of that too, sometimes; and you will have to put up with flesh-and-blood wives. The Devil looks dubious. The Statue makes a wry face. I see you don’t like that, any of you; but it’s true, for all that; so if you don’t like it you can lump it.
Don Juan	My dear lady, you have put my whole case against romance into a few sentences. That is just why I turned my back on the romantic man with the artist nature, as he called his infatuation. I thanked him for teaching me to use my eyes and ears; but I told him that his beauty worshipping and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a dump as a philosophy of life; so he called me philistine and went his way.
Ana	It seems that Woman taught you something, too, with all her defects.
Don Juan	She did more: she interpreted all the other teaching for me. Ah, my friends, when the barriers were down for the first time, what an astounding illumination! I had been prepared for infatuation, for intoxication, for all the illusions of love’s young dream; and lo! Never was my perception clearer, nor my criticism more ruthless. The most jealous rival of my mistress never saw every blemish in her more keenly than I. I was not duped: I took her without chloroform.
Ana	But you did take her.
Don Juan	That was the revelation. Up to that moment I had never lost the sense of being my own master; never consciously taken a single step until my reason had examined and approved it. I had come to believe that I was a purely rational creature: a thinker! I said, with the foolish philosopher, “I think; therefore I am.” It was Woman who taught me to say “I am; therefore I think.” And also “I would think more; therefore I must be more.”
The Statue	This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.
Don Juan	Bah! What need I add? Do you not understand that when I stood face to face with Woman, every fibre in my clear critical brain warned me to spare her and save myself. My morals said no. My conscience said no. My chivalry and pity for her said no. My prudent regard for myself said no. My ear, practised on a thousand songs and symphonies; my eye, exercised on a thousand paintings; tore her voice, her features, her color to shreds. I caught all those telltale resemblances to her father and mother by which I knew what she would be like in thirty years time. I noted the gleam of gold from a dead tooth in the laughing mouth: I made curious observations of the strange odors of the chemistry of the nerves. The visions of my romantic reveries, in which I had trod the plains of Heaven with a deathless, ageless creature of coral and ivory, deserted me in that supreme hour. I remembered them and desperately strove to recover their illusion; but they now seemed the emptiest of inventions: my judgment was not to be corrupted: my brain still said No on every issue. And whilst I was in the act of framing my excuse to the lady, life seized me and threw me into her arms as a sailor throws a scrap of fish into the mouth of a seabird.
The Statue	You might as well have gone without thinking such a lot about it, Juan. You are like all the clever men: you have more brains than is good for you.
The Devil	And were you not the happier for the experience, Señor Don Juan?
Don Juan	The happier, no: the wiser, yes. That moment introduced me for the first time to myself, and, through myself, to the world. I saw then how useless it is to attempt to impose conditions on the irresistible force of life; to preach prudence, careful selection, virtue, honor, chastity⁠—
Ana	Don Juan: a word against chastity is an insult to me.
Don Juan	I say nothing against your chastity, Señora, since it took the form of a husband and twelve children. What more could you have done had you been the most abandoned of women?
Ana	I could have had twelve husbands and no children that’s what I could have done, Juan. And let me tell you that that would have made all the difference to the Earth which I replenished.
The Statue	Bravo Ana! Juan: you are floored, quelled, annihilated.
Don Juan	No; for though that difference is the true essential difference⁠—Doña Ana has, I admit, gone straight to the real point⁠—yet it is not a difference of love or chastity, or even constancy; for twelve children by twelve different husbands would have replenished the Earth perhaps more effectively. Suppose my friend Ottavio had died when you were thirty, you would never have remained a widow: you were too beautiful. Suppose the successor of Ottavio had died when you were forty, you would still have been irresistible; and a woman who marries twice marries three times if she becomes free to do so. Twelve lawful children borne by one highly respectable lady to three different fathers is not impossible nor condemned by public opinion. That such a lady may be more law abiding than the poor girl whom we used to spurn into the gutter for bearing one unlawful infant is no doubt true; but dare you say she is less self-indulgent?
Ana	She is less virtuous: that is enough for me.
Don Juan	In that case, what is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married? Let us face the facts, dear Ana. The life force respects marriage only because marriage is a contrivance of its own to secure the greatest number of children and the closest care of them. For honor, chastity and all the rest of your moral figments it cares not a rap. Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions⁠—
Ana	Juan!
The Statue	Protesting. Really!⁠—
Don Juan	Determinedly. I say the most licentious of human institutions: that is the secret of its popularity. And a woman seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey. The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error. Come, Ana! Do not look shocked: you know better than any of us that marriage is a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive idealizations. When your sainted mother, by dint of scoldings and punishments, forced you to learn how to play half a dozen pieces on the spinet which she hated as much as you did⁠—had she any other purpose than to delude your suitors into the belief that your husband would have in his home an angel who would fill it with melody, or at least play him to sleep after dinner? You married my friend Ottavio: well, did you ever open the spinet from the hour when the Church united him to you?
Ana	You are a fool, Juan. A young married woman has something else to do than sit at the spinet without any support for her back; so she gets out of the habit of playing.
Don Juan	Not if she loves music. No: believe me, she only throws away the bait when the bird is in the net.
Ana	Bitterly. And men, I suppose, never throw off the mask when their bird is in the net. The husband never becomes negligent, selfish, brutal⁠—oh never!
Don Juan	What do these recriminations prove, Ana? Only that the hero is as gross an imposture as the heroine.
Ana	It is all nonsense: most marriages are perfectly comfortable.
Don Juan	“Perfectly” is a strong expression, Ana. What you mean is that sensible people make the best of one another. Send me to the galleys and chain me to the felon whose number happens to be next before mine; and I must accept the inevitable and make the best of the companionship. Many such companionships, they tell me, are touchingly affectionate; and most are at least tolerably friendly. But that does not make a chain a desirable ornament nor the galleys an abode of bliss. Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
Ana	At all events, let me take an old woman’s privilege again, and tell you flatly that marriage peoples the world and debauchery does not.
Don Juan	How if a time comes when this shall cease to be true? Do you not know that where there is a will there is a way⁠—that whatever Man really wishes to do he will finally discover a means of doing? Well, you have done your best, you virtuous ladies, and others of your way of thinking, to bend Man’s mind wholly towards honorable love as the highest good, and to understand by honorable love romance and beauty and happiness in the possession of beautiful, refined, delicate, affectionate women. You have taught women to value their own youth, health, shapeliness, and refinement above all things. Well, what place have squalling babies and household cares in this exquisite paradise of the senses and emotions? Is it not the inevitable end of it all that the human will shall say to the human brain: Invent me a means by which I can have love, beauty, romance, emotion, passion without their wretched penalties, their expenses, their worries, their trials, their illnesses and agonies and risks of death, their retinue of servants and nurses and doctors and schoolmasters.
The Devil	All this, Señor Don Juan, is realized here in my realm.
Don Juan	Yes, at the cost of death. Man will not take it at that price: he demands the romantic delights of your Hell whilst he is still on Earth. Well, the means will be found: the brain will not fail when the will is in earnest. The day is coming when great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six roomed villa will rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, art, and of love, will all oppose to the force of life the device of sterility.
The Statue	That is all very eloquent, my young friend; but if you had lived to Ana’s age, or even to mine, you would have learned that the people who get rid of the fear of poverty and children and all the other family troubles, and devote themselves to having a good time of it, only leave their minds free for the fear of old age and ugliness and impotence and death. The childless laborer is more tormented by his wife’s idleness and her constant demands for amusement and distraction than he could be by twenty children; and his wife is more wretched than he. I have had my share of vanity; for as a young man I was admired by women; and as a statue I am praised by art critics. But I confess that had I found nothing to do in the world but wallow in these delights I should have cut my throat. When I married Ana’s mother⁠—or perhaps, to be strictly correct, I should rather say when I at last gave in and allowed Ana’s mother to marry me⁠—I knew that I was planting thorns in my pillow, and that marriage for me, a swaggering young officer thitherto unvanquished, meant defeat and capture.
Ana	Scandalized. Father!
The Statue	I am sorry to shock you, my love; but since Juan has stripped every rag of decency from the discussion I may as well tell the frozen truth.
Ana	Hmf! I suppose I was one of the thorns.
The Statue	By no means: you were often a rose. You see, your mother had most of the trouble you gave.
Don Juan	Then may I ask, Commander, why you have left Heaven to come here and wallow, as you express it, in sentimental beatitudes which you confess would once have driven you to cut your throat?
The Statue	Struck by this. Egad, that’s true.
The Devil	Alarmed. What! You are going back from your word. To Don Juan. And all your philosophizing has been nothing but a mask for proselytizing! To the Statue. Have you forgotten already the hideous dullness from which I am offering you a refuge here? To Don Juan. And does your demonstration of the approaching sterilization and extinction of mankind lead to anything better than making the most of those pleasures of art and love which you yourself admit refined you, elevated you, developed you?
Don Juan	I never demonstrated the extinction of mankind. Life cannot will its own extinction either in its blind amorphous state or in any of the forms into which it has organized itself. I had not finished when His Excellency interrupted me.
The Statue	I begin to doubt whether you ever will finish, my friend. You are extremely fond of hearing yourself talk.
Don Juan	True; but since you have endured so much you may as well endure to the end. Long before this sterilization which I described becomes more than a clearly foreseen possibility, the reaction will begin. The great central purpose of breeding the race, aye, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a mephitic cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will break through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization of boys’ and girls’ dreams of bliss, or the need of older people for companionship or money. The plainspoken marriage services of the vernacular churches will no longer be abbreviated and half suppressed as indelicate. The sober decency, earnestness and authority of their declaration of the real purpose of marriage will be honored and accepted, whilst their romantic vowings and pledgings and until-death-do-us-partings and the like will be expunged as unbearable frivolities. Do my sex the justice to admit, Señora, that we have always recognized that the sex relation is not a personal or friendly relation at all.
Ana	Not a personal or friendly relation! What relation is more personal? More sacred? More holy?
Don Juan	Sacred and holy, if you like, Ana, but not personally friendly. Your relation to God is sacred and holy: dare you call it personally friendly? In the sex relation the universal creative energy, of which the parties are both the helpless agents, overrides and sweeps away all personal considerations and dispenses with all personal relations. The pair may be utter strangers to one another, speaking different languages, differing in race and color, in age and disposition, with no bond between them but a possibility of that fecundity for the sake of which the life force throws them into one another’s arms at the exchange of a glance. Do we not recognize this by allowing marriages to be made by parents without consulting the woman? Have you not often expressed your disgust at the immorality of the English nation, in which women and men of noble birth become acquainted and court each other like peasants? And how much does even the peasant know of his bride or she of him before he engages himself? Why, you would not make a man your lawyer or your family doctor on so slight an acquaintance as you would fall in love with and marry him!
Ana	Yes, Juan: we know the libertine’s philosophy. Always ignore the consequences to the woman.
Don Juan	The consequences, yes: they justify her fierce grip of the man. But surely you do not call that attachment a sentimental one. As well call the policeman’s attachment to his prisoner a love relation.
Ana	You see you have to confess that marriage is necessary, though, according to you, love is the slightest of all the relations.
Don Juan	How do you know that it is not the greatest of all the relations? Far too great to be a personal matter. Could your father have served his country if he had refused to kill any enemy of Spain unless he personally hated him? Can a woman serve her country if she refuses to marry any man she does not personally love? You know it is not so: the woman of noble birth marries as the man of noble birth fights, on political and family grounds, not on personal ones.
The Statue	Impressed. A very clever point that, Juan: I must think it over. You are really full of ideas. How did you come to think of this one?
Don Juan	I learnt it by experience. When I was on Earth, and made those proposals to ladies which, though universally condemned, have made me so interesting a hero of legend, I was not infrequently met in some such way as this. The lady would say that she would countenance my advances, provided they were honorable. On inquiring what that proviso meant, I found that it meant that I proposed to get possession of her property if she had any, or to undertake her support for life if she had not; that I desired her continual companionship, counsel and conversation to the end of my days, and would bind myself under penalties to be always enraptured by them; and, above all, that I would turn my back on all other women forever for her sake. I did not object to these conditions because they were exorbitant and inhuman: it was their extraordinary irrelevance that prostrated me. I invariably replied with perfect frankness that I had never dreamt of any of these things; that unless the lady’s character and intellect were equal or superior to my own, her conversation must degrade and her counsel mislead me; that her constant companionship might, for all I knew, become intolerably tedious to me; that I could not answer for my feelings for a week in advance, much less to the end of my life; that to cut me off from all natural and unconstrained relations with the rest of my fellow creatures would narrow and warp me if I submitted to it, and, if not, would bring me under the curse of clandestinity; that, finally, my proposals to her were wholly unconnected with any of these matters, and were the outcome of a perfectly simple impulse of my manhood towards her womanhood.
Ana	You mean that it was an immoral impulse.
Don Juan	Nature, my dear lady, is what you call immoral. I blush for it; but I cannot help it. Nature is a pander, time a wrecker, and death a murderer. I have always preferred to stand up to those facts and build institutions on their recognition. You prefer to propitiate the three devils by proclaiming their chastity, their thrift, and their loving kindness; and to base your institutions on these flatteries. Is it any wonder that the institutions do not work smoothly?
The Statue	What used the ladies to say, Juan?
Don Juan	Oh, come! Confidence for confidence. First tell me what you used to say to the ladies.
The Statue	I! Oh, I swore that I would be faithful to the death; that I should die if they refused me; that no woman could ever be to me what she was⁠—
Ana	She? Who?
The Statue	Whoever it happened to be at the time, my dear. I had certain things I always said. One of them was that even when I was eighty, one white hair of the woman I loved would make me tremble more than the thickest gold tress from the most beautiful young head. Another was that I could not bear the thought of anyone else being the mother of my children.
Don Juan	Revolted. You old rascal!
The Statue	Stoutly. Not a bit; for I really believed it with all my soul at the moment. I had a heart: not like you. And it was this sincerity that made me successful.
Don Juan	Sincerity! To be fool enough to believe a ramping, stamping, thumping lie: that is what you call sincerity! To be so greedy for a woman that you deceive yourself in your eagerness to deceive her: sincerity, you call it!
The Statue	Oh, damn your sophistries! I was a man in love, not a lawyer. And the women loved me for it, bless them!
Don Juan	They made you think so. What will you say when I tell you that though I played the lawyer so callously, they made me think so too? I also had my moments of infatuation in which I gushed nonsense and believed it. Sometimes the desire to give pleasure by saying beautiful things so rose in me on the flood of emotion that I said them recklessly. At other times I argued against myself with a devilish coldness that drew tears. But I found it just as hard to escape in the one case as in the others. When the lady’s instinct was set on me, there was nothing for it but lifelong servitude or flight.
Ana	You dare boast, before me and my father, that every woman found you irresistible.
Don Juan	Am I boasting? It seems to me that I cut the most pitiable of figures. Besides, I said “when the lady’s instinct was set on me.” It was not always so; and then, Heavens! What transports of virtuous indignation! What overwhelming defiance to the dastardly seducer! What scenes of Imogen and Iachimo!
Ana	I made no scenes. I simply called my father.
Don Juan	And he came, sword in hand, to vindicate outraged honor and morality by murdering me.
The Statue	Murdering! What do you mean? Did I kill you or did you kill me?
Don Juan	Which of us was the better fencer?
The Statue	I was.
Don Juan	Of course you were. And yet you, the hero of those scandalous adventures you have just been relating to us, you had the effrontery to pose as the avenger of outraged morality and condemn me to death! You would have slain me but for an accident.
The Statue	I was expected to, Juan. That is how things were arranged on Earth. I was not a social reformer; and I always did what it was customary for a gentleman to do.
Don Juan	That may account for your attacking me, but not for the revolting hypocrisy of your subsequent proceedings as a statue.
The Statue	That all came of my going to Heaven.
The Devil	I still fail to see, Señor Don Juan, that these episodes in your Earthly career and in that of the Señor Commander in any way discredit my view of life. Here, I repeat, you have all that you sought without anything that you shrank from.
Don Juan	On the contrary, here I have everything that disappointed me without anything that I have not already tried and found wanting. I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding. It was the supremacy of this purpose that reduced love for me to the mere pleasure of a moment, art for me to the mere schooling of my faculties, religion for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved. I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure, my own health, my own fortune, I have never known happiness. It was not love for Woman that delivered me into her hands: it was fatigue, exhaustion. When I was a child, and bruised my head against a stone, I ran to the nearest woman and cried away my pain against her apron. When I grew up, and bruised my soul against the brutalities and stupidities with which I had to strive, I did again just what I had done as a child. I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian’s Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe. That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly to me. It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that strange monster called a Devil. It is the success with which you have diverted the attention of men from their real purpose, which in one degree or another is the same as mine, to yours, that has earned you the name of The Tempter. It is the fact that they are doing your will, or rather drifting with your want of will, instead of doing their own, that makes them the uncomfortable, false, restless, artificial, petulant, wretched creatures they are.
The Devil	Mortified. Señor Don Juan: you are uncivil to my friends.
Don Juan	Pooh! Why should I be civil to them or to you? In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all⁠—liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
The Statue	Your flow of words is simply amazing, Juan. How I wish I could have talked like that to my soldiers.
The Devil	It is mere talk, though. It has all been said before; but what change has it ever made? What notice has the world ever taken of it?
Don Juan	Yes, it is mere talk. But why is it mere talk? Because, my friend, beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art, patriotism, bravery and the rest are nothing but words which I or anyone else can turn inside out like a glove. Were they realities, you would have to plead guilty to my indictment; but fortunately for your self-respect, my diabolical friend, they are not realities. As you say, they are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved. That is the family secret of the governing caste; and if we who are of that caste aimed at more life for the world instead of at more power and luxury for our miserable selves, that secret would make us great. Now, since I, being a nobleman, am in the secret too, think how tedious to me must be your unending cant about all these moralistic figments, and how squalidly disastrous your sacrifice of your lives to them! If you even believed in your moral game enough to play it fairly, it would be interesting to watch; but you don’t: you cheat at every trick; and if your opponent outcheats you, you upset the table and try to murder him.
The Devil	On Earth there may be some truth in this, because the people are uneducated and cannot appreciate my religion of love and beauty; but here⁠—
Don Juan	Oh yes: I know. Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh! It is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a fashionable play, before the complications begin. Never in my worst moments of superstitious terror on Earth did I dream that Hell was so horrible. I live, like a hairdresser, in the continual contemplation of beauty, toying with silken tresses. I breathe an atmosphere of sweetness, like a confectioner’s shopboy. Commander: are there any beautiful women in Heaven?
The Statue	None. Absolutely none. All dowdies. Not two pennorth of jewellery among a dozen of them. They might be men of fifty.
Don Juan	I am impatient to get there. Is the word beauty ever mentioned; and are there any artistic people?
The Statue	I give you my word they won’t admire a fine statue even when it walks past them.
Don Juan	I go.
The Devil	Don Juan: shall I be frank with you?
Don Juan	Were you not so before?
The Devil	As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of Heaven no less than of Hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of Heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of Hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from Heaven to Hell is an emancipation, every swing from Hell to Heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion. You will discover the profound truth of the saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun. Vanitas vanitatum⁠—
Don Juan	Out of all patience. By Heaven, this is worse than your cant about love and beauty. Clever dolt that you are, is a man no better than a worm, or a dog than a wolf, because he gets tired of everything? Shall he give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act of gratifying it? Is a field idle when it is fallow? Can the Commander expend his Hellish energy here without accumulating Heavenly energy for his next term of blessedness? Granted that the great life force has hit on the device of the clockmaker’s pendulum, and uses the Earth for its bob; that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the Earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that the total of all our epochs is but the moment between the toss and the catch, has the colossal mechanism no purpose?
The Devil	None, my friend. You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.
Don Juan	But I should not have them if they served no purpose. And I, my friend, am as much a part of Nature as my own finger is a part of me. If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandoline, my brain is the organ by which Nature strives to understand itself. My dog’s brain serves only my dog’s purposes; but my brain labors at a knowledge which does nothing for me personally but make my body bitter to me and my decay and death a calamity. Were I not possessed with a purpose beyond my own I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher; for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher, eats more, sleeps better, and rejoices in the wife of his bosom with less misgiving. This is because the philosopher is in the grip of the life force. This life force says to him “I have done a thousand wonderful things unconsciously by merely willing to live and following the line of least resistance: now I want to know myself and my destination, and choose my path; so I have made a special brain⁠—a philosopher’s brain⁠—to grasp this knowledge for me as the husbandman’s hand grasps the plough for me. And this” says the life force to the philosopher “must thou strive to do for me until thou diest, when I will make another brain and another philosopher to carry on the work.”
The Devil	What is the use of knowing?
Don Juan	Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in Hell is to drift: to be in Heaven is to steer.
The Devil	On the rocks, most likely.
Don Juan	Pooh! Which ship goes oftenest on the rocks or to the bottom⁠—the drifting ship or the ship with a pilot on board?
The Devil	Well, well, go your way, Señor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on Earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your life force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.
Don Juan	But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the life force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Señor Satan.
The Devil	Amiably. Fare you well, Don Juan. I shall often think of our interesting chats about things in general. I wish you every happiness: Heaven, as I said before, suits some people. But if you should change your mind, do not forget that the gates are always open here to the repentant prodigal. If you feel at any time that warmth of heart, sincere unforced affection, innocent enjoyment, and warm, breathing, palpitating reality⁠—
Don Juan	Why not say flesh and blood at once, though we have left those two greasy commonplaces behind us?
The Devil	Angrily. You throw my friendly farewell back in my teeth, then, Don Juan?
Don Juan	By no means. But though there is much to be learnt from a cynical devil, I really cannot stand a sentimental one. Señor Commander: you know the way to the frontier of Hell and Heaven. Be good enough to direct me.
The Statue	Oh, the frontier is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. Any road will take you across it if you really want to get there.
Don Juan	Good. Saluting Doña Ana. Señora: your servant.
Ana	But I am going with you.
Don Juan	I can find my own way to Heaven, Ana; but I cannot find yours He vanishes.
Ana	How annoying!
The Statue	Calling after him. Bon voyage, Juan! He wafts a final blast of his great rolling chords after him as a parting salute. A faint echo of the first ghostly melody comes back in acknowledgment. Ah! There he goes. Puffing a long breath out through his lips. Whew! How he does talk! They’ll never stand it in Heaven.
The Devil	Gloomily. His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep these life worshippers: they all go. This is the greatest loss I have had since that Dutch painter went⁠—a fellow who would paint a hag of 70 with as much enjoyment as a Venus of 20.
The Statue	I remember: he came to Heaven. Rembrandt.
The Devil	Aye, Rembrandt. There a something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Señor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.
The Statue	And who the deuce is the Superman?
The Devil	Oh, the latest fashion among the life force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman⁠—what was his name? Nietzsche?
The Statue	Never heard of him.
The Devil	Well, he came here first, before he recovered his wits. I had some hopes of him; but he was a confirmed life force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.
The Statue	Superman is a good cry; and a good cry is half the battle. I should like to see this Nietzsche.
The Devil	Unfortunately he met Wagner here, and had a quarrel with him.
The Statue	Quite right, too. Mozart for me!
The Devil	Oh, it was not about music. Wagner once drifted into life force worship, and invented a Superman called Siegfried. But he came to his senses afterwards. So when they met here, Nietzsche denounced him as a renegade; and Wagner wrote a pamphlet to prove that Nietzsche was a Jew; and it ended in Nietzsche’s going to Heaven in a huff. And a good riddance too. And now, my friend, let us hasten to my palace and celebrate your arrival with a grand musical service.
The Statue	With pleasure: you’re most kind.
The Devil	This way, Commander. We go down the old trap. He places himself on the grave trap.
The Statue	Good. Reflectively. All the same, the Superman is a fine conception. There is something statuesque about it. He places himself on the grave trap beside The Devil. It begins to descend slowly. Red glow from the abyss. Ah, this reminds me of old times.
The Devil	And me also.
Ana	Stop! The trap stops.
The Devil	You, Señora, cannot come this way. You will have an apotheosis. But you will be at the palace before us.
Ana	That is not what I stopped you for. Tell me where can I find the Superman?
The Devil	He is not yet created, Señora.
The Statue	And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire will make me sneeze. They descend.
Ana	Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. Crossing herself devoutly. I believe in the life to come. Crying to the universe. A father⁠—a father for the Superman!
	She vanishes into the void; and again there is nothing: all existence seems suspended infinitely. Then, vaguely, there is a live human voice crying somewhere. One sees, with a shock, a mountain peak showing faintly against a lighter background. The sky has returned from afar; and we suddenly remember where we were. The cry becomes distinct and urgent: it says Automobile, Automobile. The complete reality comes back with a rush: in a moment it is full morning in the Sierra; and the brigands are scrambling to their feet and making for the road as the goatherd runs down from the hill, warning them of the approach of another motor. Tanner and Mendoza rise amazedly and stare at one another with scattered wits. Straker sits up to yawn for a moment before he gets on his feet, making it a point of honor not to show any undue interest in the excitement of the bandits. Mendoza gives a quick look to see that his followers are attending to the alarm; then exchanges a private word with Tanner.
Mendoza	Did you dream?
Tanner	Damnably. Did you?
Mendoza	Yes. I forget what. You were in it.
Tanner	So were you. Amazing.
Mendoza	I warned you. A shot is heard from the road. Dolts! They will play with that gun. The brigands come running back scared. Who fired that shot? To Duval. Was it you?
Duval	Breathless. I have not shoot. Dey shoot first.
Anarchist	I told you to begin by abolishing the State. Now we are all lost.
The Rowdy Social-Democrat	Stampeding across the amphitheatre. Run, everybody.
Mendoza	Collaring him; throwing him on his back; and drawing a knife. I stab the man who stirs. He blocks the way. The stampede is checked. What has happened?
The Sulky Social-Democrat	A motor⁠—
The Anarchist	Three men⁠—
Duval	Deux femmes⁠—
Mendoza	Three men and two women! Why have you not brought them here? Are you afraid of them?
The Rowdy One	Getting up. Thyve a hescort. Ow, de-ooh lut’s ook it, Mendowza.
The Sulky One	Two armored cars full o soldiers at the end o the valley.
Anarchist	The shot was fired in the air. It was a signal.
	Straker whistles his favorite air, which falls on the ears of the brigands like a funeral march.
Tanner	It is not an escort, but an expedition to capture you. We were advised to wait for it; but I was in a hurry.
The Rowdy One	In an agony of apprehension. And Ow my good Lord, ere we are, wytin for em! Lut’s tike to the mahntns.
Mendoza	Idiot, what do you know about the mountains? Are you a Spaniard? You would be given up by the first shepherd you met. Besides, we are already within range of their rifles.
The Rowdy One	Bat⁠—
Mendoza	Silence. Leave this to me. To Tanner. Comrade: you will not betray us.
Straker	Oo are you callin comrade?
Mendoza	Last night the advantage was with me. The robber of the poor was at the mercy of the robber of the rich. You offered your hand: I took it.
Tanner	I bring no charge against you, comrade. We have spent a pleasant evening with you: that is all.
Straker	I gev my and to nobody, see?
Mendoza	Turning on him impressively. Young man, if I am tried, I shall plead guilty, and explain what drove me from England, home and duty. Do you wish to have the respectable name of Straker dragged through the mud of a Spanish criminal court? The police will search me. They will find Louisa’s portrait. It will be published in the illustrated papers. You blench. It will be your doing, remember.
Straker	With baffled rage. I don’t care about the court. It’s avin our name mixed up with yours that I object to, you blackmailin swine, you.
Mendoza	Language unworthy of Louisa’s brother! But no matter: you are muzzled: that is enough for us. He turns to face his own men, who back uneasily across the amphitheatre towards the cave to take refuge behind him, as a fresh party, muffled for motoring, comes from the road in riotous spirits. Ann, who makes straight for Tanner, comes first; then Violet, helped over the rough ground by Hector holding her right hand and Ramsden her left. Mendoza goes to his presidential block and seats himself calmly with his rank and file grouped behind him, and his Staff, consisting of Duval and the Anarchist on his right and the two Social-Democrats on his left, supporting him in flank.
Ann	It’s Jack!
Tanner	Caught!
Hector	Why, certainly it is. I said it was you, Tanner, We’ve just been stopped by a puncture: the road is full of nails.
Violet	What are you doing here with all these men?
Ann	Why did you leave us without a word of warning?
Hector	I want that bunch of roses, Miss Whitefield. To Tanner. When we found you were gone, Miss Whitefield bet me a bunch of roses my car would not overtake yours before you reached Monte Carlo.
Tanner	But this is not the road to Monte Carlo.
Hector	No matter. Miss Whitefield tracked you at every stopping place: she is a regular Sherlock Holmes.
Tanner	The life force! I am lost.
Octavius	Bounding gaily down from the road into the amphitheatre, and coming between Tanner and Straker. I am so glad you are safe, old chap. We were afraid you had been captured by brigands.
Ramsden	Who has been staring at Mendoza. I seem to remember the face of your friend here. Mendoza rises politely and advances with a smile between Ann and Ramsden.
Hector	Why, so do I.
Octavius	I know you perfectly well, Sir; but I can’t think where I have met you.
Mendoza	To Violet. Do you remember me, madam?
Violet	Oh, quite well; but I am so stupid about names.
Mendoza	It was at the Savoy Hotel. To Hector. You, sir, used to come with this lady Violet to lunch. To Octavius. You, sir, often brought this lady Ann and her mother to dinner on your way to the Lyceum Theatre. To Ramsden. You, sir, used to come to supper, with dropping his voice to a confidential but perfectly audible whisper several different ladies.
Ramsden	Angrily. Well, what is that to you, pray?
Octavius	Why, Violet, I thought you hardly knew one another before this trip, you and Malone!
Violet	Vexed. I suppose this person was the manager.
Mendoza	The waiter, madam. I have a grateful recollection of you all. I gathered from the bountiful way in which you treated me that you all enjoyed your visits very much.
Violet	What impertinence! She turns her back on him, and goes up the hill with Hector.
Ramsden	That will do, my friend. You do not expect these ladies to treat you as an acquaintance, I suppose, because you have waited on them at table.
Mendoza	Pardon me: it was you who claimed my acquaintance. The ladies followed your example. However, this display of the unfortunate manners of your class closes the incident. For the future, you will please address me with the respect due to a stranger and fellow traveller. He turns haughtily away and resumes his presidential seat.
Tanner	There! I have found one man on my journey capable of reasonable conversation; and you all instinctively insult him. Even the New Man is as bad as any of you. Enry: you have behaved just like a miserable gentleman.
Straker	Gentleman! Not me.
Ramsden	Really, Tanner, this tone⁠—
Ann	Don’t mind him, Granny: you ought to know him by this time She takes his arm and coaxes him away to the hill to join Violet and Hector. Octavius follows her, doglike.
Violet	Calling from the hill. Here are the soldiers. They are getting out of their motors.
Duval	Panicstricken. Oh, nom de Dieu!
The Anarchist	Fools: the state is about to crush you because you spared it at the prompting of the political hangers-on of the bourgeoisie.
The Sulky Social-Democrat	Argumentative to the last. On the contrary, only by capturing the state machine⁠—
The Anarchist	It is going to capture you.
The Rowdy Social-Democrat	His anguish culminating. Ow, chock it. Wot are we ere for? Wot are we wytin for?
Mendoza	Between his teeth. Goon. Talk politics, you idiots: nothing sounds more respectable. Keep it up, I tell you.
	The soldiers line the road, commanding the amphitheatre with their rifles. The brigands, struggling with an overwhelming impulse to hide behind one another, look as unconcerned as they can. Mendoza rises superbly, with undaunted front. The officer in command steps down from the road in to the amphitheatre; looks hard at the brigands; and then inquiringly at Tanner.
The Officer	Who are these men, Señor Ingles?
Tanner	My escort.
	Mendoza, with a Mephistophelean smile, bows profoundly. An irrepressible grin runs from face to face among the brigands. They touch their hats, except the Anarchist, who defies the state with folded arms.

Act IV

The garden of a villa in Granada. Whoever wishes to know what it is like must go to Granada and see. One may prosaically specify a group of hills dotted with villas, the Alhambra on the top of one of the hills, and a considerable town in the valley, approached by dusty white roads in which the children, no matter what they are doing or thinking about, automatically whine for halfpence and reach out little clutching brown palms for them; but there is nothing in this description except the Alhambra, the begging, and the color of the roads, that does not fit Surrey as well as Spain. The difference is that the Surrey hills are comparatively small and ugly, and should properly be called the Surrey Protuberances; but these Spanish hills are of mountain stock: the amenity which conceals their size does not compromise their dignity.

This particular garden is on a hill opposite the Alhambra; and the villa is as expensive and pretentious as a villa must be if it is to be let furnished by the week to opulent American and English visitors. If we stand on the lawn at the foot of the garden and look uphill, our horizon is the stone balustrade of a flagged platform on the edge of infinite space at the top of the hill. Between us and this platform is a flower garden with a circular basin and fountain in the centre, surrounded by geometrical flower beds, gravel paths, and clipped yew trees in the genteelest order. The garden is higher than our lawn; so we reach it by a few steps in the middle of its embankment. The platform is higher again than the garden, from which we mount a couple more steps to look over the balustrade at a fine view of the town up the valley and of the hills that stretch away beyond it to where, in the remotest distance, they become mountains. On our left is the villa, accessible by steps from the left hand corner of the garden. Returning from the platform through the garden and down again to the lawn (a movement which leaves the villa behind us on our right) we find evidence of literary interests on the part of the tenants in the fact that there is no tennis net nor set of croquet hoops, but, on our left, a little iron garden table with books on it, mostly yellow-backed, and a chair beside it. A chair on the right has also a couple of open books upon it. There are no newspapers, a circumstance which, with the absence of games, might lead an intelligent spectator to the most far reaching conclusions as to the sort of people who live in the villa. Such speculations are checked, however, on this delightfully fine afternoon, by the appearance at a little gate in a paling on our left, of Henry Straker in his professional costume. He opens the gate for an elderly gentleman, and follows him on to the lawn.

This elderly gentleman defies the Spanish sun in a black frock coat, tall silk bat, trousers in which narrow stripes of dark grey and lilac blend into a highly respectable color, and a black necktie tied into a bow over spotless linen. Probably therefore a man whose social position needs constant and scrupulous affirmation without regard to climate: one who would dress thus for the middle of the Sahara or the top of Mont Blanc. And since he has not the stamp of the class which accepts as its life-mission the advertizing and maintenance of first rate tailoring and millinery, he looks vulgar in his finery, though in a working dress of any kind he would look dignified enough. He is a bullet cheeked man with a red complexion, stubbly hair, smallish eyes, a hard mouth that folds down at the corners, and a dogged chin. The looseness of skin that comes with age has attacked his throat and the laps of his cheeks; but he is still hard as an apple above the mouth; so that the upper half of his face looks younger than the lower. He has the self-confidence of one who has made money, and something of the truculence of one who has made it in a brutalizing struggle, his civility having under it a perceptible menace that he has other methods in reserve if necessary. Withal, a man to be rather pitied when he is not to be feared; for there is something pathetic about him at times, as if the huge commercial machine which has worked him into his frock coat had allowed him very little of his own way and left his affections hungry and baffled. At the first word that falls from him it is clear that he is an Irishman whose native intonation has clung to him through many changes of place and rank. One can only guess that the original material of his speech was perhaps the surly Kerry brogue; but the degradation of speech that occurs in London, Glasgow, Dublin and big cities generally has been at work on it so long that nobody but an arrant cockney would dream of calling it a brogue now; for its music is almost gone, though its surliness is still perceptible. Straker, as a very obvious cockney, inspires him with implacable contempt, as a stupid Englishman who cannot even speak his own language properly. Straker, on the other hand, regards the old gentleman’s accent as a joke thoughtfully provided by Providence expressly for the amusement of the British race, and treats him normally with the indulgence due to an inferior and unlucky species, but occasionally with indignant alarm when the old gentleman shows signs of intending his Irish nonsense to be taken seriously.