No More Learning

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.