No More Learning

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?