ich the traditions of the paper do not
allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the
most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this
is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was
at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When
I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of
twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not
be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero's
mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let
me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it
is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but
explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable,
fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a
reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the
temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt
that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public
distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none
the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is
always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who
discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty.
The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your
wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic
temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the
cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my
conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people
comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making
them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't
like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of
our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with
cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents
of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that
I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat
this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough
to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we
have plenty o