rivate juries of
matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of
fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness,
of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as
familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented
those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the
mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.

I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want
that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes
obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the
experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure.
But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit--you now, I
hope, feel its inconvenience--of not explaining yourself, I have had to
discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what
is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity
is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is
impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire
the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources
without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the
philosophic sense.

Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be
exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows
his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law;
and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious
instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don
Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing
institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously
as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The
prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish
monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy
of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama,
growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don
Juan's account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police,
temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private
redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until
the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form
of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into
hell. The moral is a m