Insanely glad, in fact.
And why? Because on that selfsame day
His mother-in-law had sailed
To a tropical climate, far away,
Where tigers and snakes prevailed.”
He first most loves his father,—then his mother,—then his father-in-law and mother-in-law,—then his children,—and lastly, his wife. His wife is not of the family proper,—a stranger,—not of the blood of the ancestors,—how can he love her like his own parents!
Now I half suspect the Oriental is right.
To him the people of the West with their novels and poems about love seem a race of very lascivious people. If indeed he should think more kindly of them at all, it would be through pity,—as a race of sexually starved beings, frantic with nymphomania and all forms of erotomania, through refusal to obey the laws of nature. “They talk about their wives!—they write novels about their lusts!—they do not support their parents!—they do not obey their mothers-in-law! Truly they are savages!” Now they write love-stories in Japan. But who are the women of these love-stories? Dancing-girls. “If one must write stories about the passion of sex, let him at least not write such things about wives and daughters of honest men—let him write about whores! A whore’s business is to excite passion. That of a pure woman is to quench it. What horribly immoral people the Western people are!”
—Don Juan is the imagination of the West. No Japanese Don Juan—no Chinese Don Juan—ever existed or could exist. He is a common type at home. But the Orient rejoices also in exemption from one of the most terrible creations of Western life;—no Oriental is haunted by “the Woman thou shalt never know.”
What a curse and a delusion is that beautiful spectre! How many lives she makes desolate! How many crimes does she inspire, “the Woman thou shalt never know!”—the impossible ideal, not of love, but of artistic passion, pursued by warm hearts from youth till age, always in vain. As her pursuer grows more old, she becomes ever more young and fair. He waits for her through the years,—waits till his hair is grey. Then,—wifeless, childless, blasé, ennuyé, cynical, misanthropic,—he looks in the glass and finds that he has been cheated out of youth and life. But does he give up the chase? No!—the hair of Lilith—just one—has been twisted round his heart,—an ever-tightening fine spider-line of gold. And he sees her smile just ere he passes into the Eternal darkness.