onkish one: repent and reform now; for to-morrow
it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is
sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks
damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that
repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart's
content.

But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world
chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El
Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but
the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own
Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became
such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled
him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for
his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English
journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere's Don
Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he
falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms?
"Oui, ma foi! il faut s'amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette
vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous." After Moliere comes the
artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero's
spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as
of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in
morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you,
attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero
with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish
daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live
piously ever after.

After these completed works Byron's fragment does not count for much
philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from
that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and
Byron's hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb:
he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the
fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova,
tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is
no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of
wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether
we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness