“Every large town provides the means for a much more extensive stimulation of the senses than country life; and the alternate stimulation and deadening of the senses, characteristic of town life, has in the very large towns of our time reached an unheard-of degree of intensity. The town is the typical habitat of that sensual and nervous condition of irritability which historically characterizes our own generation; the townsman is the typical representative of “nervousness” in its modern form. The verbal connexion between “senses” and “sensuality” represents an actual transition; and in ordinary parlance, by the “sensual” we understand the “erotic.” Where the senses are more strongly stimulated, there erotic desire grows, there it loses its periodical course in favour of a continuous wakefulness, or, at any rate, in favour of a light slumber, which the slightest stimulus will disturb. And the townsman is more easily impelled to the sexual act, not merely because the town offers him prostitutes, “intimates,” etc., in much greater numbers, but also because his over-stimulated nervous system impels him much more powerfully to search for these objects, and makes it much more difficult for him to safeguard himself against their allurements.
“And town life is nocturnal life! The more so, the larger the town; and we see the extreme form of this in the great capitals of Europe. The consequences in regard to the opportunities for and incitations to sexual enjoyment are not lacking. First of all, nocturnal life gives rise to a summation of stimuli, to an incredible variety of nervous titillation, and this induces an increasing sensuality; and once the sensual life has become habitually nocturnal, now, by a vicious circle, all enjoyment is unavoidably fettered to the town. Natural recuperation has become a secondary consideration, and in place of the relief of tension, we have apparent restoration by means of variety. All, all, tends in favour of a sharpening of sensual stimuli, of arousing the wish for erotic pleasures. And the town is untiring, inexhaustible, in its discovery of means for the gratification of these instincts. Variety theatres, gin-palaces, low music-halls, and all the amusements of similar kind, are simply unthinkable without the sensual note; and even where they maintain themselves to be free from that note, it will be unconsciously sought by the audience, will be easily found, and if it were absent, its absence would be angrily resented. The same is true, more or less, of entertainments of a higher æsthetic rank. With very few exceptions, our theatres are compelled to take into consideration the instincts of the public, and the instincts of the population of our large towns are chiefly concerned with eroticism. Even where sexual questions are elevated into the sphere of the highest art, and by the artist himself the common is detested, the audience will, after their kind, merely extract erotic stimulation; and that the opera and the stage are sought by many merely on account of these accessory influences, is too well known to need proof—not to say a word regarding the pantomime and the ballet.
“Perhaps the worst of all is yet to come. In his public dinners, his parties, his clubs, his balls, etc., the man of the upper classes, and also the man of the middle classes, does not find the much-to-be-desired ethical counterpoise to this characteristic sensual life of our young men; but rather finds the prolongation of it in a somewhat more masked and artificial form. From the outset, the relationship between the sexes is of so suggestive, so purposive a character, that this exercises a gentle, stimulating influence upon desire; and a man is thrown into a state of tension for which he often finds only one outlet, sexual gratification—which he must either buy or obtain by cunning—and thus he passes straightway from the influences of the public sensual life, to become the customer of the prostitute, the partner in the “intimacy,” the seducer in the nocturnal life of the great town. He then either runs the danger of infection with venereal diseases, or he occupies himself with their dissemination; for the man suffering from venereal disease is not merely a victim: he is commonly also a focus of infection, one who finds new victims in the shape of girls hitherto uninfected.
“To this evil a remarkable trait in the sensual life of the simpler woman extends ready assistance—I mean that servility, that erotic obsequiousness which finds expression already in the gossip, and in the favourite reading of the lower classes, and which makes them feel to some extent flattered if they are treated as means of enjoyment by a man of good position. It is well known that the prostitute in her talk gladly makes her lover a baron; but, unfortunately, a similar tendency characterizes the feminine half of the lower classes throughout, and to our regret, this is more especially true of the German people. Our commercial-traveller nature, to which, according to Sombart, we owe a portion of our ascendancy in the markets of the world, finds its most regrettable and disastrous seamy side in the readiness with which the masses forget their pride and self-respect, when it is a question of snatching a pleasure. This characteristic has, in recent lustra, unfortunately become not better, but rather worse; the desire to look well at any cost, with which the simple girl so often makes herself laughable, inspires also her longing to ‘walk out’ with a distinguished admirer.”[221]
But not only does the simple girl of the people sacrifice her life and health in this pursuit of pleasure; the young men also are not behindhand in the pursuit, which they regard as “gentlemanlike,” of enjoyment and of women. It is astonishing what an increase in recent times there has been in the number of youthful embezzlers, learners and clerks in merchants’ offices, whose offences have been committed simply in order to provide funds for the gratification of their pothouse pleasures. Among them one meets lads between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years, a symptom of the earlier sexual maturity of the present day. When, as usually happens, they are arrested after a few days, it comes out in evidence that the embezzled money was squandered in the society of prostitutes, but we learn that the tendency to such excess had existed in the embezzler long before he actually committed a crime. If the heads of businesses were to keep themselves better informed regarding the mode of life of their employees, many a disillusion and many a loss would be spared them.
Sexual seduction is at the present time effected less by individuals than by the environment. The sensual life as such, the entire stimulating sensual atmosphere of that life, plays to-day a rôle which at an earlier time, when our social life and pleasures were less fully developed, fell to the “seducer,” the galant homme and Don Juan of earlier days. Our young people are subjected rather to the general influences of the pursuit of amusement, which fascinates all circles, than to the allurements of the habitual seducer. To-day, the victims of public seduction, by means of the sensual life characteristic of our time, are far more numerous than those seduced by isolated individuals, though such there have been, and will be, at all times.
Before I pass to the consideration of the individual influences of the modern sensual life, those by which wild love is especially favoured, and before I describe the general seduction of the present day, I propose to touch upon the interesting question of “professional seduction,” to consider Don-Juanism and the practice of the “ars amandi.”
It is remarkable how strongly the history of the art of seduction reflects the general tendency of the evolution of love from purely physical impulses to spiritual love. This we learn simply from the study of the numerous text-books of the art of love, the so-called “ars amandi.”
Whereas in the earlier text-books of this subject, from Ovid’s “Ars Amandi,”[222] widely celebrated in antiquity, to the “Practica Artis Amandi,”[223] the “Morale Galante, ou l’Art de Bien Aimer,”[224] of the seventeenth century, and Gentil Bernard’s “L’Art d’Aimer,”[225] of the eighteenth century, the principal stress was laid upon all the possible sensual stimuli, and upon the superficial gallantry associated with this; in the modern text-books, in that of Manso[226] (still belonging to the eighteenth century), but especially in the more recent works by Stendhal,[227] Paul Bourget,[228] A. Silvestre,[229] Catulle Mendés,[230] Robert Hessen,[231] and Hjalmar Kjölenson,[232] we find much more stress laid on all the spiritual influences of the art of love. In this way it is possible to follow in these works the whole course of the enrichment of the spiritual and emotional life in love.[233]
The same process of development can be recognized also in the figure of Don Juan. His type has undergone gradual alteration, always becoming more and more intellectual. The purely sensual Don Juan, as Lord Chesterfield, for example, characterizes and embodies him, is to-day quite out of date even among sensual men of the ordinary type; whereas though Kierkegaard’s “Diary of a Seducer” describes an extreme type, that of the purely reflective libertine, yet in this extreme, the author has very rightly recognized the general tendency of evolution.