Epistle and Dedicatory

TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

My dear Walkley:

You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with
which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this
time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived:
here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit
per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its
manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to
justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you
knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of
the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets,
made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by
making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you
cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion.
You meant me to epater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer
him to you as the accountable party.

I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall
suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The
fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such
becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and
comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do
grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately
Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your
chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that
new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event
its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its
portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum
into naughtiness by criticisms which 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,