had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a
philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and
useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without
the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant
unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than
Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but
as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent
Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did
it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then,
leave Byron's Don Juan out of account. Mozart's is the last of the true
Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the
hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his
reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics,
high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and
recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe's
Faust and Mozart's Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century
on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century,
ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth
or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage
and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with
philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had
changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House
and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral
pageant.

Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to
ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey
that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and
if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the
eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no
human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I
dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism,
you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of
Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous
sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on
the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan
play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural