No More Learning

What is his law? An excuse for
hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming
without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures
of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot
because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an
evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the
pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering
questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery
saying--"Ask no questions and you will be told no lies. " I bought a
sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men
shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London
bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds
club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into
the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent
sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let
them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their
imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these
people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy
it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their
notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian
and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost,
filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was
not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in
the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven
by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that
the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not
know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever
succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest
form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is
murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and
pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God
and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles.
In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and
explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the
fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the
chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the
littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about
the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend
hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest
Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty
and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give
you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power
that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the
inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into
the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient
engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the
tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were
too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly,
more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that
something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows,
and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty,
patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever
enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most
destructive of all the destroyers.

DON JUAN. Pshaw! all this is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend,
is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation.
Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to
think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he
is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will
adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood
of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will
only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and
he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging
truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for
his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is
his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on
his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits
to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be
degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that
they themselves are forced to reform it.

THE DEVIL. Precisely. And these are the creatures in whom you discover
what you call a Life Force!

DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole
business.

THE STATUE. What's that?

DON JUAN. Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by simply
putting an idea into his head.

THE STATUE. Stuff! As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's as
universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But that about
putting an idea into a man's head is stuff and nonsense. In a battle all
you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that
it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

DON JUAN. That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men never
really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a
universal purpose--fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the
Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but
for the Cross. What force was it that met him with a valor as reckless
as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for
Islam. They took Spain from us, though we were fighting for our very
hearths and homes; but when we, too, fought for that mighty idea, a
Catholic Church, we swept them back to Africa.

THE DEVIL. [ironically] What! you a Catholic, Senor Don Juan! A devotee!
My congratulations.

THE STATUE. [seriously] Come come! as a soldier, I can listen to nothing
against the Church.

DON JUAN. Have no fear, Commander: this idea of a Catholic Church will
survive Islam, will survive the Cross, will survive even that vulgar
pageant of incompetent schoolboyish gladiators which you call the Army.

THE STATUE. Juan: you will force me to call you to account for this.

DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die
will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no
better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will
arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy
slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.

THE STATUE. Bosh!

DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for.
Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human
perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.

THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing
one another.

DON JUAN. What of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of
death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and
accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than
one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son
and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic
idea of abolishing slavery.

THE DEVIL. Yes, when the Liberty and Equality of which you prate shall
have made free white Christians cheaper in the labor market than by
auction at the block.

DON JUAN. Never fear! the white laborer shall have his turn too. But
I am not now defending the illusory forms the great ideas take. I am
giving you examples of the fact that this creature Man, who in his own
selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like
a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic.
He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen
to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what
he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later on call by many
new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to
himself personally.

ANA. Yes: he shirks all his responsibilities, and leaves his wife to
grapple with them.

THE STATUE. Well said, daughter. Do not let him talk you out of your
common sense.

THE DEVIL. Alas! Senor Commander, now that we have got on to the subject
of Woman, he will talk more than ever. However, I confess it is for me
the one supremely interesting subject.

DON JUAN. To a woman, Senora, man's duties and responsibilities begin
and end with the task of getting bread for her children. To her, Man is
only a means to the end of getting children and rearing them.

ANA. Is that your idea of a woman's mind? I call it cynical and
disgusting materialism.

DON JUAN. Pardon me, Ana: I said nothing about a woman's whole mind. I
spoke of her view of Man as a separate sex. It is no more cynical than
her view of herself as above all things a Mother. Sexually, Woman is
Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement. Sexually,
Man is Woman's contrivance for fulfilling Nature's behest in the most
economical way. She knows by instinct that far back in the evolutional
process she invented him, differentiated him, created him in order to
produce something better than the single-sexed process can produce.
Whilst he fulfils the purpose for which she made him, he is welcome to
his dreams, his follies, his ideals, his heroisms, provided that the
keystone of them all is the worship of woman, of motherhood, of the
family, of the hearth. But how rash and dangerous it was to invent a
separate creature whose sole function was her own impregnation! For mark
what has happened. First, Man has multiplied on her hands until there
are as many men as women; so that she has been unable to employ for her
purposes more than a fraction of the immense energy she has left at
his disposal by saving him the exhausting labor of gestation. This
superfluous energy has gone to his brain and to his muscle. He has
become too strong to be controlled by her bodily, and too imaginative
and mentally vigorous to be content with mere self-reproduction. He has
created civilization without consulting her, taking her domestic labor
for granted as the foundation of it.

ANA. THAT is true, at all events.

THE DEVIL. Yes; and this civilization! what is it, after all?

DON JUAN. After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces
on; but BEFORE all, it is an attempt on Man's part to make himself
something more than the mere instrument of Woman's purpose. So far, the
result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to
achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness,
is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of
Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders,
mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite of the commanders.

THE STATUE. That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on.

DON JUAN. It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still,
you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can
win battles when the enemy's general is a little stupider.

THE STATUE. [very seriously] Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys
have amazing luck.

DON JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the
forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all
the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of
fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival
of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best
fed riflemen is assured.

THE DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of
Life but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to
my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not
to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.

DON JUAN. Oh come! who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax
your intellect, you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty
and the rest of your favorite boredoms.

THE DEVIL. [much offended] This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I
am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than
I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, utterly refuting you.
Let us go on for another hour if you like.

DON JUAN. Good: let us.

THE STATUE. Not that I see any prospect of your coming to any point in
particular, Juan. Still, since in this place, instead of merely killing
time we have to kill eternity, go ahead by all means.

DON JUAN. [somewhat impatiently] My point, you marbleheaded old
masterpiece, is only a step ahead of you. Are we agreed that Life is a
force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself; that
the mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium, the flies and
the fleas and the Fathers of the Church, are all more or less successful
attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals,
the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and
withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a god?

THE DEVIL. I agree, for the sake of argument.

THE STATUE. I agree, for the sake of avoiding argument.

ANA. I most emphatically disagree as regards the Fathers of the Church;
and I must beg you not to drag them into the argument.

DON JUAN. I did so purely for the sake of alliteration, Ana; and I
shall make no further allusion to them. And now, since we are, with that
exception, agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that Life
has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or
bodily perfection of the result, since in both these respects the birds,
as our friend Aristophanes long ago pointed out, are so extraordinarily
superior, with their power of flight and their lovely plumage, and,
may I add, the touching poetry of their loves and nestings, that it is
inconceivable that Life, having once produced them, should, if love
and beauty were her object, start off on another line and labor at the
clumsy elephant and the hideous ape, whose grandchildren we are?

ANA. Aristophanes was a heathen; and you, Juan, I am afraid, are very
little better.

THE DEVIL. You conclude, then, that Life was driving at clumsiness and
ugliness?

DON JUAN. No, perverse devil that you are, a thousand times no. Life
was driving at brains--at its darling object: an organ by which it can
attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding.

THE STATUE. This is metaphysics, Juan. Why the devil should--[to the
Devil] I BEG your pardon.

THE DEVIL. Pray don't mention it.
I have always regarded the use of my
name to secure additional emphasis as a high compliment to me. It is
quite at your service, Commander.

THE STATUE. Thank you: that's very good of you. Even in heaven, I never
quite got out of my old military habits of speech. What I was going to
ask Juan was why Life should bother itself about getting a brain. Why
should it want to understand itself? Why not be content to enjoy itself?

DON JUAN. Without a brain, Commander, you would enjoy yourself without
knowing it, and so lose all the fun.

THE STATUE. True, most true. But I am quite content with brain enough to
know that I'm enjoying myself. I don't want to understand why. In
fact, I'd rather not. My experience is that one's pleasures don't bear
thinking about.

DON JUAN. That is why intellect is so unpopular. But to Life, the force
behind the Man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders
into death. Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful
bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it
was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid
a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving to-day a
mind's eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of
Life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead
of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as
at present. Even as it is, only one sort of man has ever been happy, has
ever been universally respected among all the conflicts of interests and
illusions.

THE STATUE. You mean the military man.

DON JUAN. Commander: I do not mean the military man. When the military
man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its
womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man:
he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world,
in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in
action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of all other sorts
of men I declare myself tired. They're tedious failures. When I was on
earth, professors of all sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy
spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me
consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for
imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they
called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade
me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual
hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself
about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After
them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature,
and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care
whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me Mugwump and went
his way. Then came the romantic man, the Artist, with his love songs and
his paintings and his poems; and with him I had great delight for many
years, and some profit; for I cultivated my senses for his sake; and
his songs taught me to hear better, his paintings to see better, and
his poems to feel more deeply. But he led me at last into the worship of
Woman.

ANA. Juan!

DON JUAN. Yes: I came to believe that in her voice was all the music of
the song, in her face all the beauty of the painting, and in her soul
all the emotion of the poem.

ANA. And you were disappointed, I suppose. Well, was it her fault that
you attributed all these perfections to her?

DON JUAN. Yes, partly. For with a wonderful instinctive cunning, she
kept silent and allowed me to glorify her; to mistake my own visions,
thoughts, and feelings for hers. Now my friend the romantic man was
often too poor or too timid to approach those women who were beautiful
or refined enough to seem to realize his ideal; and so he went to his
grave believing in his dream. But I was more favored by nature and
circumstance. I was of noble birth and rich; and when my person did
not please, my conversation flattered, though I generally found myself
fortunate in both.

THE STATUE. Coxcomb!

DON JUAN. Yes; but even my coxcombry pleased. Well, I found that when I
had touched a woman's imagination, she would allow me to persuade myself
that she loved me; but when my suit was granted she never said "I am
happy: my love is satisfied": she always said, first, "At last, the
barriers are down," and second, "When will you come again? "

ANA. That is exactly what men say.

DON JUAN. I protest I never said it. But all women say it. Well, these
two speeches always alarmed me; for the first meant that the lady's
impulse had been solely to throw down my fortifications and gain my
citadel; and the second openly announced that henceforth she regarded me
as her property, and counted my time as already wholly at her disposal.

THE DEVIL. That is where your want of heart came in.

THE STATUE. [shaking his head] You shouldn't repeat what a woman says,
Juan.

ANA. [severely] It should be sacred to you.

THE STATUE. Still, they certainly do always say it. I never minded the
barriers; but there was always a slight shock about the other, unless
one was very hard hit indeed.

DON JUAN. Then the lady, who had been happy and idle enough before,
became anxious, preoccupied with me, always intriguing, conspiring,
pursuing, watching, waiting, bent wholly on making sure of her prey--I
being the prey, you understand. Now this was not what I had bargained
for. It may have been very proper and very natural; but it was not
music, painting, poetry and joy incarnated in a beautiful woman. I ran
away from it. I ran away from it very often: in fact I became famous for
running away from it.

ANA. Infamous, you mean.

DON JUAN. I did not run away from you. Do you blame me for running away
from the others?

ANA. Nonsense, man. You are talking to a woman of 77 now. If you had had
the chance, you would have run away from me too--if I had let you. You
would not have found it so easy with me as with some of the others. If
men will not be faithful to their home and their duties, they must be
made to be. I daresay you all want to marry lovely incarnations of music
and painting and poetry. Well, you can't have them, because they
don't exist. If flesh and blood is not good enough for you you must
go without: that's all. Women have to put up with flesh-and-blood
husbands--and little enough of that too, sometimes; and you will have to
put up with flesh-and-blood wives. The Devil looks dubious. The Statue
makes a wry face. I see you don't like that, any of you; but it's true,
for all that; so if you don't like it you can lump it.

DON JUAN. My dear lady, you have put my whole case against romance into
a few sentences. That is just why I turned my back on the romantic man
with the artist nature, as he called his infatuation. I thanked him
for teaching me to use my eyes and ears; but I told him that his beauty
worshipping and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a
dump as a philosophy of life; so he called me Philistine and went his
way.

ANA. It seems that Woman taught you something, too, with all her
defects.

DON JUAN. She did more: she interpreted all the other teaching for me.
Ah, my friends, when the barriers were down for the first time, what
an astounding illumination! I had been prepared for infatuation, for
intoxication, for all the illusions of love's young dream; and lo! never
was my perception clearer, nor my criticism more ruthless. The most
jealous rival of my mistress never saw every blemish in her more keenly
than I. I was not duped: I took her without chloroform.

ANA. But you did take her.

DON JUAN. That was the revelation. Up to that moment I had never lost
the sense of being my own master; never consciously taken a single step
until my reason had examined and approved it. I had come to believe that
I was a purely rational creature: a thinker! I said, with the foolish
philosopher, "I think; therefore I am. " It was Woman who taught me to
say "I am; therefore I think. " And also "I would think more; therefore I
must be more. "

THE STATUE. This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you
would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form
of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your
conversation would be easier to follow.

DON JUAN. Bah! what need I add? Do you not understand that when I stood
face to face with Woman, every fibre in my clear critical brain warned
me to spare her and save myself. My morals said No. My conscience said
No. My chivalry and pity for her said No. My prudent regard for myself
said No. My ear, practised on a thousand songs and symphonies; my eye,
exercised on a thousand paintings; tore her voice, her features, her
color to shreds. I caught all those tell-tale resemblances to her father
and mother by which I knew what she would be like in thirty years time.
I noted the gleam of gold from a dead tooth in the laughing mouth: I
made curious observations of the strange odors of the chemistry of the
nerves. The visions of my romantic reveries, in which I had trod the
plains of heaven with a deathless, ageless creature of coral and ivory,
deserted me in that supreme hour. I remembered them and desperately
strove to recover their illusion; but they now seemed the emptiest of
inventions: my judgment was not to be corrupted: my brain still said No
on every issue. And whilst I was in the act of framing my excuse to the
lady, Life seized me and threw me into her arms as a sailor throws a
scrap of fish into the mouth of a seabird.

THE STATUE. You might as well have gone without thinking such a lot
about it, Juan. You are like all the clever men: you have more brains
than is good for you.

THE DEVIL. And were you not the happier for the experience, Senor Don
Juan?

DON JUAN. The happier, no: the wiser, yes. That moment introduced me for
the first time to myself, and, through myself, to the world. I saw then
how useless it is to attempt to impose conditions on the irresistible
force of Life; to preach prudence, careful selection, virtue, honor,
chastity--

ANA. Don Juan: a word against chastity is an insult to me.

DON JUAN. I say nothing against your chastity, Senora, since it took the
form of a husband and twelve children. What more could you have done had
you been the most abandoned of women?

ANA. I could have had twelve husbands and no children that's what I
could have done, Juan. And let me tell you that that would have made all
the difference to the earth which I replenished.

THE STATUE. Bravo Ana! Juan: you are floored, quelled, annihilated.

DON JUAN. No; for though that difference is the true essential
difference--Dona Ana has, I admit, gone straight to the real point--yet
it is not a difference of love or chastity, or even constancy; for
twelve children by twelve different husbands would have replenished the
earth perhaps more effectively. Suppose my friend Ottavio had died when
you were thirty, you would never have remained a widow: you were too
beautiful. Suppose the successor of Ottavio had died when you were
forty, you would still have been irresistible; and a woman who marries
twice marries three times if she becomes free to do so. Twelve lawful
children borne by one highly respectable lady to three different fathers
is not impossible nor condemned by public opinion. That such a lady may
be more law abiding than the poor girl whom we used to spurn into the
gutter for bearing one unlawful infant is no doubt true; but dare you
say she is less self-indulgent?

ANA. She is less virtuous: that is enough for me.

DON JUAN. In that case, what is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the
married? Let us face the facts, dear Ana. The Life Force respects
marriage only because marriage is a contrivance of its own to secure
the greatest number of children and the closest care of them. For honor,
chastity and all the rest of your moral figments it cares not a rap.
Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions--

ANA. Juan!

THE STATUE. [protesting] Really! --

DON JUAN. [determinedly] I say the most licentious of human
institutions: that is the secret of its popularity. And a woman seeking
a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey. The
confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the
conscience of the human race than any other single error. Come, Ana!
do not look shocked: you know better than any of us that marriage is
a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive
idealizations. When your sainted mother, by dint of scoldings and
punishments, forced you to learn how to play half a dozen pieces on the
spinet which she hated as much as you did--had she any other purpose
than to delude your suitors into the belief that your husband would have
in his home an angel who would fill it with melody, or at least play him
to sleep after dinner? You married my friend Ottavio: well, did you ever
open the spinet from the hour when the Church united him to you?

ANA. You are a fool, Juan. A young married woman has something else to
do than sit at the spinet without any support for her back; so she gets
out of the habit of playing.

DON JUAN. Not if she loves music. No: believe me, she only throws away
the bait when the bird is in the net.

ANA. [bitterly] And men, I suppose, never throw off the mask when
their bird is in the net. The husband never becomes negligent, selfish,
brutal--oh never!

DON JUAN. What do these recriminations prove, Ana? Only that the hero is
as gross an imposture as the heroine.

ANA. It is all nonsense: most marriages are perfectly comfortable.

DON JUAN. "Perfectly" is a strong expression, Ana. What you mean is that
sensible people make the best of one another. Send me to the galleys and
chain me to the felon whose number happens to be next before mine; and I
must accept the inevitable and make the best of the companionship. Many
such companionships, they tell me, are touchingly affectionate; and
most are at least tolerably friendly. But that does not make a chain
a desirable ornament nor the galleys an abode of bliss. Those who talk
most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows
are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and
the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly
asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is
happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?