ven?

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