by Stefan Zweig
Thus the accurate yardstick of art discloses to us even more surely than life itself how immense a difference there is between mere eroticism and love in the true sense of the term; between that which wins all and retains nothing, and that which achieves little but by spiritual power makes the transient perdurable. One single experience of Stendhal’s (in truth, no hero in the field of love) contains through sublimation, more spiritual substance than three thousand nights of Casanova’s. As for the possibilities of love’s most blissful spiritual ecstasies, Casanova’s sixteen volumes give us less of an inkling of them than the briefest of Goethe’s lyrics. Casanova’s memoirs, therefore, regarded from the upland, are seen to be a statistical work of reference rather than a romance, the history of a campaign rather than a work of creative authorship; they are a codex eroticus, an occidental Kama-sutra, an Odyssey of the wanderings of the flesh, an Iliad of the eternal masculine rut for the eternal Helen. Their value depends upon quantity, not quality; upon multiformity, and not upon spiritual significance.
For the very reason that his sexual experiences were so multifarious, for the very reason that his physical potency was so unexampled, to our world, which is for the most part only interested in “records” and rarely measures spiritual capacity, Giacomo Casanova has become symbolic as phallic conqueror, has become proverbial, thus receiving the crown of popular acclamation. When we speak of a Casanova, we mean an irresistible champion, a devourer of women, a master seducer. In masculine mythology, the name is the counterpart of Helen, or Phryne, or Ninon de Lenclos, in feminine. The son of a Venetian strolling player has received the unexpected honor of being incarnated as an amatory hero for all time. No doubt he has to share his pedestal with a companion, in this case a legendary figure. Beside him stands a man of bluer blood, obscurer nature, and more demonic type — his Spanish rival, Don Juan. The latent contrast between these two masters in the art of seduction has often been pointed out (most happily, as far as I know, by Oscar A. H. Schmitz); but the comparison, or rather the antithesis, has no more been exhausted than has the antithesis between Leonardo and Michelangelo, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Plato and Aristotle.
The comparison between Casanova and Don Juan is reiterated generation after generation, each generation in turn being fascinated by the diversity-in-likeness of these two primal forms of eroticism. Although Casanova and Don Juan resemble one another in this respect, that they are both birds of prey, so far as women are concerned, continually pouncing on victims whose alarm is tinctured with delight, there is an essential distinction between the two types. As contrasted with Casanova, easygoing, unprincipled, free from inhibitions, Don Juan is cribbed by the regulations of a caste; Don Juan is a hidalgo, a Spanish nobleman, and even in revolt he remains a Catholic by sentiment. As a Spaniard pur sangre, in the depths of his heart he is profoundly influenced by the concept of honor; and as a medieval Catholic he unwittingly accepts the ecclesiastical valuation of all carnality as “sin.” From this transcendental perspective of Christianity, extraconjugal love is satanic, is forbidden by God’s ordinances, is a heresy of the flesh — and is all the more alluring in consequence! Casanova, the freethinker, a child of the Renaissance, laughs heartily at such antiquated ideas. For Don Juan, woman is the instrument of sin, and exists only to subserve the purposes of “evil.” Her very being is a seduction and a danger, so that what seems to be the most perfect virtue in a woman is but a semblance, and the trail of the serpent is over it all. Don Juan does not believe in the purity, the chastity, of any of this devil’s brood; he knows that under their clothes they are all equally naked, all equally accessible to seduction. He is urged on by an inner impulse to prove woman’s fatal weakness by a thousand and one instances; to convince himself, the world, and God that all these unapproachable doñas, these professedly faithful wives, these ingenuous girls, these brides of Christ, are without exception willing to admit the right sort of wooer to their beds; he wants to prove that they are only “anges à l’église et singes au lit.” Such a conviction, such a determination, is what drives him onward incessantly to renewed and reiterated acts of seduction.
Nothing, therefore, could be more misguided than to represent Don Juan, the archenemy of the female sex, as amoroso, as the universal lover of women, seeing that he is never moved by true love towards any of them. The elemental force that impels him against women is the primal hate that inspires the male. When he takes possession of a woman, he is not seizing that which he wishes to have for himself, but is taking away from her something he wishes to deprive her of, is despoiling her of her most precious treasure, her honor. His lust is not, like Casanova’s, an affair of the seminal vesicles, but an affair of the brain. Spiritually, though not corporeally, he is a sadist, eager to degrade, to shame, to humiliate femininity at large. His enjoyment is reached by devious paths; it depends upon an imaginative anticipation of the despair the woman will feel when she has been possessed, dishonored, disclosed in all her fleshliness. For Don Juan, therefore, the pleasures of the chase are intensified by its difficulties, in contrast with Casanova, who enjoys most the quarry which he finds easiest to run down. For the Spaniard, the more unapproachable a woman, and the more unlikely it seems that he will be able to win her, the greater and more convincing (as proof of his thesis) the ultimate triumph. Where there is no resistance, Don Juan finds no attraction. We cannot fancy him spending the night, like Casanova, with a harlot in a common stew. His senses are only stimulated when he is engaged in the devilish work of debasing what he enjoys, of pushing his partner into sin, of leading her to commit a unique offense, one that can never be repeated, that of the first act of adultery, that of surrendering her virginity, or that of violating her sacred vow of chastity. As soon as he has had his will of such a woman, the experiment is finished, and the object of seduction has become a mere number in a register. He never wants to look caressingly again on the companion of last night, the one and only night. As little as the sportsman cares for the bird he has brought down, just so little does this professional seducer care about his victim once the experiment is over. He must go on with the hunt, must sacrifice the greatest possible number to his primal impulse, must continue forever and a day to prove that all women are frail. Don Juan knows no rest, and in truth finds no enjoyment. He is the sworn enemy of woman, and the devil has equipped him with everything he needs for the campaign: wealth, youth, birth, bodily charm, and, most important of all, absolute callousness.
In actual fact a woman, as soon as she has been defeated by his coldly calculating technique, regards Don Juan as the devil incarnate. All his victims hate today as ardently as they loved yesterday their archenemy, who on the morning after possession wounds them to the heart with his cold and scornful laughter. (Mozart has immortalized it!) They are ashamed of their weakness; they rail at the villain who has deceived them; and in his person they loathe the whole male sex. Doña Anna, Doña Elvira, and all the rest, having once yielded to his calculated impetuosity, remain thenceforward embittered, poisoned in spirit. The women, on the other hand, who have given themselves to Casanova, thank him as if he were a god, glad to remember his ardent embraces, for he has done nothing to wound their feelings, nothing to mortify them in their womanhood; he has bestowed upon them a new confidence in their own personality. The very thing which the Spanish satanist, Don Juan, forces them to despise as the depth of debasement, as bestial rut, as the most devilish of woman’s weaknesses — the glowing ardors of the moment of surrender — Casanova, delicate master of the erotic art, persuades them to recognize as the true meaning, the holiest duty, of their feminine nature. Refusal, unwillingness to surrender, says this gentle priest and vigorous epicurean, is the sin against the holy ghost of the flesh, against the god-given significance of nature. Thanks to his thankfulness, rapt by his raptures, they feel themselves freed from all blame and unloosed from every inhibition. With a caressive hand, when he strips them of their clothing he strips them of all shyness and all anxiety — these half-women, who do
not become wholly women until they have given themselves. He fills them with delight because he is himself delighted; he exculpates them for their enjoyment by his own grateful ecstasies. Casanova does not fully enjoy himself with a woman unless she shares his delight. “Four-fifths of my pleasure has always consisted in making women happy.” For him, pleasure must be set off with pleasure, just as the lover demands love in return. His Herculean labors are undertaken to exhaust and delight not so much his own body as that of the woman he clasps in his arms.
Since he is thus an altruist in love, it would obviously be absurd for him to use force or artifice in order to secure the physical enjoyment he covets. Never, like Don Juan, does he desire crude possession; he must have a willing surrender. We have no right, therefore, to style him a seducer. He invites a woman to join him in a new and fascinating game, in which he would like the weary old world (burdened by inhibitions and scruples) to participate, finding a fresh impetus in Eros. Freedom from scruples, this and nothing else releases us from the chains which bind us to earth. Every woman who gives herself to him becomes more fully a woman, because she has grown more fully conscious, more pleasure-loving, freer from restraints. In her body, which she has hitherto regarded with indifference, she now discovers new and surprising sources of delight. For the first time, beneath the veil of shame she sees the beauty of her own femininity. A master spendthrift has taught her how to spend, how to give pleasure for pleasure, and not to ask for any meaning beyond that which she feels quickening in her senses. But it is not really he who has won the woman; her conquest has been effected by this joyfully accepted form of enjoyment. Hence new devotees of the faith become propagandists. A sister brings a sister to the altar, a mother hands her daughter over to this gentle teacher, every one of his mistresses invites others to join in the dance. Just as the sisterhood of women, in one of its manifestations, leads each of Don Juan’s victims to warn (how vainly!) her sisters against the enemy of their sex, so does this same sense of sisterhood, in another of its manifestations, make the women who have been loved by Casanova proclaim him as the man who showers divine blessings on their sex. Just as he, when he loves a woman, loves in her woman as a whole, so do women love in him the symbol of the loving man and master.
As conqueror, then, Casanova is not a magician, not a wonder-worker in the realm of love. His powers of conquest are nature personified, they are nature’s kindly powers; and the secret of his success is his amazing virility. Thoroughly natural in his desires, perfectly straightforward in his sensuality, he brings into love an admirable common sense, an accurate vital balance. He does not lift women to the level of saints, nor does he lower them to that of demons; he merely desires them on the earthly plane as companions in the game of love, as the god-given complements of male energy and desire. Although a more ardent being than all the lyric poets, he never exaggerates the idea of love to make of it the essential meaning of the world, for whose sake the stars circle around our little globe, for whose sake the seasons wax and wane, for whose sake mankind breathes and dies; never, like the pious Novalis, does he make of love the “Amen of the universe.” With Hellenic frankness he looks upon Eros as nothing more and nothing less than the most entrancing enjoyment earth has to offer. Thus does Casanova bring love down out of imaginary heavens, down into the life of this world, where he can enjoy it in the person of every woman who has the courage and the will for joy. At the very time when Rousseau the Frenchman was discovering sentimentalism in love, and when Werther the German was discovering enthusiastic melancholy, Casanova the Italian was, by the impetus of his life, demonstrating the pagan cheerfulness of love to be the best helper in the ever necessary work of freeing the world from its burdens.
YEARS IN OBSCURITY
How often in my life have I done something which was repugnant to me, and which I could not understand. But I was driven onward by a secret power, which, wittingly, I was unable to resist.
CASANOVA, IN THE MEMOIRS
You have no right to blame women for surrendering so easily to the great seducer. Every woman who encounters him falls into temptation, and is ready to be enthralled by the fiery charm of his art of life. Let us admit the fact that it is hard for a man to read Casanova’s memoirs without envy. Who is there, engaged in routine occupations in this fenced and specializing century of ours, who is not seized from time to time by the spirit of adventure? In such moments, our thoughts turn to the mad doings of this arch-adventurer; his life filled full of snatchings and enjoyments, his thoroughgoing epicureanism, seem to us wiser and more real than our own orderly preoccupation with the things of the spirit; his philosophy seems more vital than the peevish doctrines of Schopenhauer or the cold dogmatism of Kant. What a poor thing at such moments appears our existence, safeguarded only by renunciation, when compared with his! It is with a sore heart that we recognize all we are paying for our spiritual poise and our life of moral endeavor — we are paying for it in restraints!
Such is our fate. In so far as we try to look beyond the fleeting hour and to direct our endeavors towards some future aim, we deprive this present hour of some of its vitality; and in so far as we seek to transcend the present, we rob ourselves of present enjoyment. We look before and after, and the ball-and-chain of conscience clanks at our heels as we walk. We have surrendered ourselves as prisoners to our own selves, and that is why we are so heavy-footed. But Casanova is light-hearted and light-footed; he makes all women his own; he speeds across all lands; he drifts before the winds of chance through all the heavens and all the hells. No real man, therefore, I repeat, can read Casanova’s memoirs in certain moods without feeling envious, without feeling himself to be a bungler as compared with this master of the art of life. Often — again and again and again — one would rather be Casanova than be Goethe, Michelangelo, or Balzac. Smile though we may, a little cynically, at the literary affectations and the rodomontade of this philosophically draped rascal, nevertheless in the sixth, the tenth, the twelfth volumes we are often inclined to regard him as the wisest man in the world, and to look upon his philosophy of superficiality as the shrewdest and most entrancing of all doctrines.
Fortunately Casanova himself cures our prompting towards undue admiration. His register of the art of life has one serious flaw in it — he has forgotten old age. An epicurean technique of enjoyment, a technique entirely concerned with the sensual, the palpable, is exclusively based upon young and vigorous senses, upon the circulation of a young and vigorous bodily sap. As soon as the flame of life ceases to burn with youthful ardor, the whole philosophy of sensual pleasure will be found to have become an insipid, unpalatable broth. Only with tense muscles, with firm, white teeth, can we master life in Casanova’s fashion. Woe to the epicurean when the muscles grow flaccid, when the teeth begin to fall out, when the senses lose their keenness; for then this agreeable, this comfortable philosophy will certainly be found to have lost its savor. In the man of pleasure (I use that term in its cruder sense), the curve of existence is inevitably a declining one. The spendthrift has no reserves, he squanders his substance in riotous living; whereas the man of the spirit, ostensibly practicing renunciation, is really storing up an ample supply of energy in an accumulator. One who has devoted himself to the things of the spirit will, even in his declining years, and often (like Goethe) at a patriarchal age, be able to experience transformations, sublimations, purifications, and transfigurations. Though his blood has cooled, his life can still rise to dizzy heights of intellectual experience; and the bold play of his thoughts compensates him for the reduced intensity of bodily function. The man who has lived only for the pleasures of the senses, on the other hand, the man to whom nothing can appeal but corporeal impacts from without, sticks fast in old age like a waterwheel when the brook that should turn it has dried up. For him, to grow old is a decline into nullity instead of a transition to novelty. Life, an inexorable creditor, demands back from him with interest what his uncontrolled senses have spent too early and too quickly. Thus it is th
at Casanova’s wisdom ends with his happiness, his happiness with his youth. He only seems wise as long as he is handsome, victorious, and in the full possession of his bodily energies. You may envy him until he is forty years of age, but you can only pity him for the rest of his life.
Casanova’s carnival, the most brightly colored of any ever celebrated in Venice, ends prematurely and sadly upon a somber Ash Wednesday. We watch the shadows slowly creeping across his narrative, just as wrinkles form upon an aging face. He has fewer and fewer triumphs to report, and more and more vexations to record. We find an ever more frequent mention of disagreeables (for which, of course, he is never to blame) in connection with spurious bills of exchange, false banknotes, pawned jewels; and we read less often of visits to princely courts. From London, he finds it necessary to steal away by night and in a fog, to escape the arrest that would have been inevitable a few hours later, and would have been a prelude to the gallows. From Warsaw, he is hunted away like a criminal. He is expelled both from Vienna and from Madrid. In Barcelona, he spends forty days under lock and key. Florence gives him notice to quit. In Paris, he receives a “lettre de cachet,” and has no choice but to leave the beloved city. Casanova is unwanted, is as unwelcome as a louse.
We are puzzled, at first, and ask ourselves what can be amiss that, suddenly, the world should prove so ungracious to its former favorite, should talk so much about good morals. Has there been a change for the worse in his character, that people should cold-shoulder him in this way? No, he is the same as ever, is what he will be to the end of the chapter. He has always been a humbug. What is wrong with him is that he is beginning to lack self-confidence, the victorious self-confidence of youth. Where he has sinned most, there he finds his punishment. The women are the first to forsake their darling. A poor, pitiful little Delilah inflicts a terrible wound upon this Samson in the lists of love — (a crafty, good-for-nothing baggage, Charpillon by name, in London). This episode, the most effectively narrated of all in his memoirs, sketched with perfect artistry, is the turning point. For the first time the experienced seducer is tricked by a woman, and not by a woman of standing, inaccessible, virtuous, and therefore refusing her favors, but by a spiteful little harlot, who makes him crazy with desire, strips him of his last coin, and refuses to allow him to lay so much as a finger upon her lecherous body. A Casanova who is contemptuously rejected though he pays and overpays; a Casanova despised, and compelled to look on while an impudent young fellow, a hairdresser’s assistant, is made happy by the possession of all that he vainly covets and has paid for in hard coin — this is Casanova, wounded to the quick in his most tender place, his vanity; and thenceforward he can never feel confident. Prematurely, when he is forty years of age, he is terrified to discover that the motor upon which his victorious progress through the world has depended is no longer working properly, and he becomes afraid that his progress will soon be arrested. “What troubled me most of all was that I must inevitably admit the beginnings of that loss of power which is associated with the oncoming of age. I no longer had the careless confidence of youth.” A Casanova without self-confidence, a Casanova without the overwhelming virility which has hitherto charmed women, lacking beauty and potency and money, no longer able to plume himself on being the darling both of Priapus and of Fortuna — what is he, now that he has lost this trump card?