Recently, Oscar A. H. Schmitz has published an extremely original and thoughtful study of “Don Juan, Casanova, and other Erotic Characters” (Stuttgart, 1906), in which he distinguishes very sharply the seducer type of a Casanova from the seducer-type of a Don Juan. Don Juan is a deceitful, cunning seducer, to whom the sense of possession associated with the attainment of his aim, the danger, the activity of his desires for power and dominance, are the principal matters, but who is in himself unerotic; whereas Casanova is pre-eminently the erotic, also crafty and deceitful, not, however, for the gratification of his need for power, but rather for the agreeable satisfaction of his need for sensual love. Don Juan knows only “women”; for Casanova each one is “the woman.” Don Juan is demoniacal, devilish he goes on to the complete destruction of the women seduced by him, deliberately he ensures their unhappiness; Casanova is human, cares always for the happiness of the women he loves, and devotes to them a tender reflection. Don Juan despises women, he is of the type of the misogynist, of the satanic woman-hater; Casanova is the typical feminist, he possesses a profound understanding of woman’s soul, is not disappointed by love, and needs for his life’s happiness continuous contact with feminine natures. Don Juan seduces by means of his own elemental nature, by the attractive power of brutal wild force; Casanova does so by means of the sensual atmosphere which surrounds him.
With an accurate psychological insight, Schmitz remarks:
“It seems as if the love of one, or, where possible, of several, women inoculates the man, as it were, with a vital fluid, and gives his glance a fire which at times makes him irresistible. Men of pleasure declare that after the most fortunate nights, when, exhausted, they were returning home to sleep, on the way the most eager and meaning glances were cast upon them by the women whom they passed.”
This distinction between the two types of seducer, which Schmitz makes in his original book, containing excellent observations on the psychology of love, is indeed not new. Stendhal, in the chapter “Werther and Don Juan” of his book, “Ueber die Liebe,” pp. 241-251 (German edition, Leipzig, 1903), points out the same types. “The genuine Don Juans,” he says, “ultimately come to regard women as their enemies, and find actual pleasure in their manifold unhappiness”; whereas Werther, the equivalent of Casanova, regards all women as entrancing beings, towards whom we are far too unjust. The love of Don Juan is “a similar feeling to the love of the chase”; Werther’s love is gentle, idealizes the reality, is full of tender and romantic impressions. Don Juan is the conqueror; Werther is the erotic.
I myself also, in my work on “Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., p. 159 (Berlin, 1903), have, earlier than Schmitz, clearly distinguished from one another these two seducer types, in a passage in which I depict the British Don Juan, in contrast to the French and Italian Don Juan.
The passage runs:
“The principal characteristic of the British Don Juans, who are completely distinct from the libertines of the Latin and of the other Teutonic countries, is the cold, brazen quietude with which they indulge in the sensual pleasures of life; love is much less to them an affair of passion than one of pride and of the gratification of their consciousness of power. The French, the Italian Don Juan is driven by ardent sensuality from conquest to conquest. This is the principal motive of their actions and of their mode of life. The English Don Juan seduces on principle, for the sake of experiment; he pursues love as a sport. Sensuality plays a part only in the second degree, and in the midst of his sensual enjoyment the coldness of his heart is still painfully apparent.
“This is the rake, the type of Lovelace, which Richardson, in his ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ has described with incomparable mastery.”
Taine, also, in his “History of English Literature,” has described this British Don-Juanism, which hates rather than loves.
Finally, we find these types also in Rosa Mayreder’s book, “Zur Kritik der Weiblicheit” (“Critique of Femininity,” Leipzig, 1905), especially in the chapter, “A Few Words on the Powerful Faust” (pp. 210-243). Her type of the “masterful erotic” closely resembles the Don Juan type of Schmitz, and my own British seducer type.