Masters of the Theatre

by Delphi Classics

  DON JUAN. He condescends to look in upon us here from time to time. Heaven bores him. So let me warn you that if you meet him he will be mortally offended if you speak of me as his murderer! He maintains that he was a much better swordsman than I, and that if his foot had not slipped he would have killed me. No doubt he is right: I was not a good fencer. I never dispute the point; so we are excellent friends.

  ANA. It is no dishonor to a soldier to be proud of his skill in arms.

  DON JUAN. You would rather not meet him, probably.

  ANA. How dare you say that?

  DON JUAN. Oh, that is the usual feeling here. You may remember that on earth — though of course we never confessed it — the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

  ANA. Monster! Never, never.

  DON JUAN. [placidly] I see you recognize the feeling. Yes: a funeral was always a festivity in black, especially the funeral of a relative. At all events, family ties are rarely kept up here. Your father is quite accustomed to this: he will not expect any devotion from you.

  ANA. Wretch: I wore mourning for him all my life.

  DON JUAN. Yes: it became you. But a life of mourning is one thing: an eternity of it quite another. Besides, here you are as dead as he. Can anything be more ridiculous than one dead person mourning for another? Do not look shocked, my dear Ana; and do not be alarmed: there is plenty of humbug in hell (indeed there is hardly anything else); but the humbug of death and age and change is dropped because here WE are all dead and all eternal. You will pick up our ways soon.

  ANA. And will all the men call me their dear Ana?

  DON JUAN. No. That was a slip of the tongue. I beg your pardon.

  ANA. [almost tenderly] Juan: did you really love me when you behaved so disgracefully to me?

  DON JUAN. [impatiently] Oh, I beg you not to begin talking about love. Here they talk of nothing else but love — its beauty, its holiness, its spirituality, its devil knows what! — excuse me; but it does so bore me. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I do. They think they have achieved the perfection of love because they have no bodies. Sheer imaginative debauchery! Faugh!

  ANA. Has even death failed to refine your soul, Juan? Has the terrible judgment of which my father’s statue was the minister taught you no reverence?

  DON JUAN. How is that very flattering statue, by the way? 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!