No More Learning

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.