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Man and Superman - Act III

1. Man and Superman

2. Act I

3. Act II

4. Act III

5. Act IV







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 horse-shoe, 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 far 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,
spunging 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 pre-eminently 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 mischievious.

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-DEM0CRAT. 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. [disguested] 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 to-morrow. 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. To-morrow 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 half-tone 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 Shakespear 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 Shakespear 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 blest 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

(a staff of music is supplied here)

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:--

(more music)

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 XV-XVI 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 XX 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
clarionet turning this tune into infinite sadness:

(Here there is another musical staff.)

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 new comer?

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, Senora?

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, Senora, 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, Senora, 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, Senora: 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, Senora, 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, Senora, 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, Senora; 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,
Senora. 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 with 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, Senora. 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, Senora: was not this true even when you lived
on earth? When you were 70, were you really older underneath your
wrinkles and your grey hams 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, Senora, 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. Dona 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. [reining 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 goodlooking 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 to-day, 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 goodnature 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,
Senora.

ANA. Are you--

THE DEVIL. [bowing] Lucifer, at your service.

ANA. I shall go mad.

THE DEVIL. [gallantly] Ah, Senora, 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, Senora; 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 for
ever.

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, Senor
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, Senora! 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 blest.

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, Senora. 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 blest, 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 to-day.

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. Senor 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 to-day 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, Senor 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 Mahomet, 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. Ay: 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! Senor 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, Senora, 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 to-day 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 tell-tale 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, Senor
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, Senora, 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--Dona 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, Senor 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 dulness 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, ay, 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 plain-spoken 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, Senora, 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, over-rides 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 for ever 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; tha t
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 pandar, 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, Senor Don Juan, that these
episodes in your earthly career and in that of the Senor
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] Senor 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, Senor 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,
Senor 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. Senor
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 Dona Ana] Senora: 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. Ay, Rembrandt. There a something unnatural about these
fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor 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, Senora, 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, Senora.

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
it 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 over-whelming
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, Senor 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.




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