and duty surrendered to delight.
Mozart's Don Juan is the acknowledged hero, and the centre piece is the celebrated "Diary of a Seducer" in which an innocent girl falls under the aesthetic gaze of a writer for whom her innocence is both a promise of redemption and a challenge to destroy. In the second part a mild mannered judge moralises over the ethical life, and spells out the dull routines of marriage as the true re demption: the passage to community upon which life depends. There is no doubt where Kierkegaard's sympathies lay. The unutterable tediousness of the "or" contrasts with the intellec tual, poetic and yes ethical exhilaration of the Either and the reader is not surprised to learn that Kierkegaard himself pressed to marry the girl whose life he had ruined by his prom ses, would never give "yes for an answer 4 I am here trying to summarize a phenomenon described in an other but related way by Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony.