THE DEVIL.
Don Juan : shall I be Frank with you?
DON JUAN.
Were you not so before?
THE DEVIL.
As far as I went, yes.
But I will now go further,
and confess to you that
men get tired of everything,
of heaven no less than of hell;
and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world
between these two extremes.
An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum;
and each generation thinks The World is progressing
because it is always moving.
But when you are as old as I am;
when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander,
and a thousand times wearied of hell,
as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from Heaven to hell is an emancipation,
every swing from hell to heaven An Evolution.
Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man
on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things,
you will see nothing but
an infinite comedy of illusion.
You will discover the profound Truth
of the saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun. Vanitas vanitatum—
DON JUAN.
[out of all patience]
By Heaven, this is worse than your cant about love and beauty.
Clever dolt that you are,
is A Man no better than a worm, or a dog than a wolf,
because he gets tired of everything?
Shall he give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act of gratifying it?
Is a field idle when it is fallow?
Can the Commander expend his hellish energy here without accumulating heavenly energy for his next term of blessedness?
Granted that the great Life Force
has hit on the device of the clockmaker's pendulum,
and uses the earth for its bob;
that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us the actors,
is but the history of the last oscillation repeated;
nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time
the sun throws off the earth and catches it again a thousand times
as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that the total of all our epochs
is
but the moment between the toss and the catch,
has the colossal mechanism no purpose?
THE DEVIL.
None, my friend.
You Think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one.
You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.
DON JUAN.
But I should not have them if they served no purpose.
And I, my friend, am as much a part of Nature
as my own finger is a part of me.
If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandoline,
my brain is the organ by which
Nature strives to understand itself.
My dog's brain serves only my dog's purposes;
but my brain labors at a knowledge which does nothing for me personally but make my body bitter to me and my decay and death a calamity.
Were I not possessed with
A Purpose Beyond My Own
I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher;
for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher,
eats more, sleeps better, and rejoices in the wife of his bosom
with less misgiving.
This is because the philosopher is
in the grip of the Life Force.
This Life Force says to him
"I have done a thousand wonderful things unconsciously by merely willing to live and following the line of least resistance :
now I want to know myself and my destination,
and choose my path;
so I have made a special brain—
a philosopher's brain
—to grasp this knowledge for me
as the husbandman's hand grasps the plough for me.”
“And this" says the Life Force to the philosopher
"must thou strive to do for me until thou diest,
when I will make another brain
and another philosopher
to carry on the work."
THE DEVIL.
What is the use of knowing?
DON JUAN.
Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage
instead of yielding in the direction
of the least resistance.
Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither?
The Philosopher is Nature's Pilot.
And there you have our difference :
To be in Hell is to Drift : To be in Heaven is to STEER.
THE DEVIL.
On The Rocks, most likely.
DON JUAN.
Pooh! Which Ship goes oftenest
on the rocks or to the bottom —
the drifting ship or the ship with a pilot on board?
THE DEVIL.
Well, well, go Your Way, Senor Don Juan.
I prefer to be my own master
and not the tool of any blundering universal force.
I know that Beauty is Good to Look at;
that Music is Good to Hear;
that Love is Good to Feel;
and that they are all
Good to Think about and talk about.
I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies
is to be a refined and cultivated being.
Whatever they may say of me
in churches on earth,
I know that it is universally admitted
in good society that
The Prince of Darkness
is A Gentleman;
and that is Enough for Me.
As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible,
it is the most resistible thing in The World
for a person of any character.
But if You are Naturally Vulgar and Credulous,
as all Reformers are,
it will thrust you first into Religion,
where you will Sprinkle Water on Babies to Save Their Souls from Me;
then it will drive you from Religion into Science,
where you will SNATCH The Babies from The Water-sprinkling
and Inoculate them with Disease to Save Them from catching it accidentally;
then you will take to Politics,
where you will become The Catspaw of Corrupt Functionaries
and The Henchman of Ambitious Humbugs;
and The End will be Despair and Decrepitude,
Broken Nerve and Shattered Hopes,
Vain Regrets for that Worst and Silliest of Wastes and Sacrifices,
The Waste and Sacrifice of
The POWER of ENJOYMENT :
In a Word, The Punishment of The Fool
who pursues The Better
before he has secured The Good.
DON JUAN.
But at least I shall not be bored.
The Service of the Life Force
has that advantage, at all events.
So fare you well, Senor Satan.
THE DEVIL.
[amiably]
Fare you well, Don Juan.
I shall often think of our interesting chats about things in general.
I wish you every happiness :
Heaven, as I said before,
suits some people.
But if you should change your mind, do not forget that the gates are always open here to the repentant prodigal.
If you feel at any time that warmth of heart,
sincere unforced affection, innocent enjoyment,
and warm, breathing, palpitating reality—
DON JUAN.
Why not say flesh and blood at once,
though we have left those two greasy commonplaces behind us?
THE DEVIL. [angrily]
You throw my friendly farewell back in my teeth, then, Don Juan?
DON JUAN.
By no means. But though there is much to be learnt
from a cynical devil, I really cannot stand
a sentimental one.
Senor Commander : you know the way to
The frontier of hell and heaven.
Be good enough to direct me.
THE STATUE.
Oh, The Frontier is only the difference between
two ways of looking at things.
Any road will take you across it
if you really want to get there.
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