Bab Bab 8 · 第3章（4）

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; that 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. I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure, my own

health, my own fortune, I have never known happiness. It was not love

for Woman that delivered me into her hands: it was fatigue, exhaustion.

When I was a child, and bruised my head against a stone, I ran to the

nearest woman and cried away my pain against her apron. When I grew up,

and bruised my soul against the brutalities and stupidities with which

I had to strive, I did again just what I had done as a child. I have

enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very

prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the

circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of

Europe. That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly

to me. It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that

strange monster called a Devil. It is the success with which you have

diverted the attention of men from their real purpose, which in one

degree or another is the same as mine, to yours, that has earned you the

name of The Tempter. It is the fact that they are doing your will, or

rather drifting with your want of will, instead of doing their own, that

makes them the uncomfortable, false, restless, artificial, petulant,

wretched creatures they are.

THE DEVIL. [mortified] Senor Don Juan: you are uncivil to my friends.

DON JUAN. Pooh! why should I be civil to them or to you? In this Palace

of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the

dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated.

They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not

dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated

they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only

pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not

virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are

only "frail." They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are

not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are

only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only

patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only

obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only

obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not

social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent,

only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative,

only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only

propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at

all--liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.

THE STATUE. Your flow of words is simply amazing, Juan. How I wish I

could have talked like that to my soldiers.

THE DEVIL. It is mere talk, though. It has all been said before; but

what change has it ever made? What notice has the world ever taken of

it?

DON JUAN. Yes, it is mere talk. But why is it mere talk? Because,

my friend, beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art,

patriotism, bravery and the rest are nothing but words which I or anyone

else can turn inside out like a glove. Were they realities, you

would have to plead guilty to my indictment; but fortunately for your

self-respect, my diabolical friend, they are not realities. As you

say, they are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting

civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and

enslaved. That is the family secret of the governing caste; and if we

who are of that caste aimed at more Life for the world instead of at

more power and luxury for our miserable selves, that secret would make

us great. Now, since I, being a nobleman, am in the secret too, think

how tedious to me must be your unending cant about all these moralistic

figments, and how squalidly disastrous your sacrifice of your lives to

them! If you even believed in your moral game enough to play it fairly,

it would be interesting to watch; but you don't: you cheat at every

trick; and if your opponent outcheats you, you upset the table and try

to murder him.

THE DEVIL. On earth there may be some truth in this, because the people

are uneducated and cannot appreciate my religion of love and beauty; but

here--

DON JUAN. Oh yes: I know. Here there is nothing but love and beauty.

Ugh! it is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a

fashionable play, before the complications begin. Never in my worst

moments of superstitious terror on earth did I dream that Hell was so

horrible. I live, like a hairdresser, in the continual contemplation

of beauty, toying with silken tresses. I breathe an atmosphere of

sweetness, like a confectioner's shopboy. Commander: are there any

beautiful women in Heaven?

THE STATUE. None. Absolutely none. All dowdies. Not two pennorth of

jewellery among a dozen of them. They might be men of fifty.

DON JUAN. I am impatient to get there. Is the word beauty ever

mentioned; and are there any artistic people?

THE STATUE. I give you my word they won't admire a fine statue even when

it walks past them.

DON JUAN. I go.

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.

DON JUAN. Good. [saluting Dona Ana] Senora: your servant.

ANA. But I am going with you.

DON JUAN. I can find my own way to heaven, Ana; but I cannot find yours

[he vanishes].

ANA. How annoying!

THE STATUE. [calling after him] Bon voyage, Juan! [He wafts a final

blast of his great rolling chords after him as a parting salute. A faint

echo of the first ghostly melody comes back in acknowledgment]. Ah!

there he goes. [Puffing a long breath out through his lips] Whew! How he

does talk! They'll never stand it in heaven.

THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep

these Life Worshippers: they all go. This is the greatest loss I have

had since that Dutch painter went--a fellow who would paint a hag of 70

with as much enjoyment as a Venus of 20.

THE STATUE. I remember: he came to heaven. Rembrandt.

THE DEVIL. Ay, Rembrandt. There a something unnatural about these

fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is

dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an

indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and

cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman,

men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This

Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here

was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the

exclusively human character of the soul.