No More Learning

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.