romising to
his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of
pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche,
studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead
of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his
dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the
rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more
Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor's mouth to
indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most
part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the
word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real
hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of
inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through
five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's
tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and
physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian
tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose
instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan
is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan
whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor
Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary
(at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer
misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in
his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring
him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern
English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the
hero of Mozart.

And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse
of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel
sure you would like to know more of that statue--to draw him out when he
is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick
of the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of
Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed
for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of
diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to
the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by
thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a