Epistle and Dedicatory - Page 2

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 of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must
accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people
whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage
laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the
tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful,
we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the
sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is
why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the
countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness
to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and
Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress.
The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental
relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made
love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married
or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console
ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our
starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because
she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with