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, Señor 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, Señora! 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 blessed.
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
Comments (0)