“Erotic excitement,” says Rosa Mayreder, “gives rise in these men to the lust of dominion; to them the relationship with women signifies a grasping possession, an enjoyment of power, and they are unable to think of women except as subject and dependent. Only in so far as woman adapts herself to them as a means do they know her; as a personality, with individual aims, she does not exist for them.”
This masterful eroticism exists among men of quite low social position, just as much as among men of high position.[234] Their diametrical opposite is the love-perception of delicately sensitive, erotical, highly differentiated men, whose highest type constitutes the “erotic genius.” Rosa Mayreder characterizes this latter type in the following terms:
“The increasing differentiation of erotic perception brings with it a new faculty, which extinguishes the consciousness of superiority and transforms the need for contrast into the need for community, for reciprocity—the capacity for devotion. Thus comes to pass the most remarkable phenomenon in the masculine psyche, the great miracle, which effects a complete transformation of the primitive mode of perception, a transformation of the teleological sexual nature.
“The erotic genius grasps the nature of the opposite sex with intuitive understanding, and is capable of assimilating it completely. The other sex is to him the primevally akin and primevally allied; his love-relationships are accompanied by ideas of enlargement, fulfilment, liberation of his own essential nature, or even by the idea of a mystical union. To him sexuality does not denote an annulment or limitation of personality, but rather an enlargement and enrichment by means of the individuals with which, in this way, his personality is associated.”
As an erotic genius of such a kind, Rosa Mayreder points to Richard Wagner, as he manifests himself in his letters to Mathilde Wesendonk.
The sensibility and refinement of the modern woman, her emergence as a personality, must continually repel the masterful type of erotic—although doubtless that type will never be entirely eliminated. I do not believe in a complete transformation of the teleological sexual nature of man, which has always assigned to him the active aggressive rôle. But it is true that the possibilities of existence for the masterful erotic, the Don Juan type, have become limited. He must, as Schmitz rightly insists, intellectualize himself if he wishes to continue to exist. This psychological satanism of the modern Don Juan is wonderfully described by Kierkegaard, in his “Diary of a Seducer.”[235]
The hero of this book learns best from the girls themselves how they can be betrayed; he develops in them “spiritual eroticism,” in order then suddenly to abandon them, but they themselves must loosen the tie. Woman and love are not to him in themselves the principal need; what is important to him is, as he says at the conclusion, that he has been able to enrich himself with numerous erotic perceptions. The modern Don Juan is, therefore, nothing more than a cold psychological experimenter. It is in this way that, with prophetic insight, Choderlos de Laclos has described him in the Vicomte de Valmont, the hero of his “Liaisons Dangereuses.”
Yet another interesting Don Juan type of our time has to be considered, one which indeed is not a genuine Don Juan, but a pseudo Don Juan, or rather a pseudo Casanova; and this type makes its appearance also in the female sex.
Like Rétif de la Bretonne, it is the man or woman seeking eternally for the ideal, for true love; a type which only, in consequence of the ever-repeated disillusions and errors, assumes a Don Juanesque character. At the present day, we meet this type very often. It is only the expression of the increasing difficulty of the proper love choice, owing to the progressive differentiation of our time; and it is not originated by the desire for sensual lust, but rather by the eternally disillusioned yearning for genuine individual love.
But we must return after this excursion to the consideration of the commonest type of public seduction by means of the sensual life of our time. It is significant that this also possesses its literary guides and course of instruction, in the form of the numerous printed handbooks for the world of pleasure. Among these we may mention, “Guides du Viveur,” “Guides de Plaisir,” “Führer durch das Nächtliche Berlin” (“Guide to Berlin by Night”), “New London Guide to the Night Houses,” “Die Geheimnisse der Berliner Passage” (“Secrets of the ‘Passage’ of Berlin”), “Paris by Night,” “The Swell’s Night Guide through the Metropolis,” “Bruxelles la Nuit, Physiologie des Établissements Nocturnes de Bruxelles” (for Englishmen of pleasure, published under the title of “Brussels by Gas-light”), “Paris and Brussels after Dark,” “The Gentleman’s Night Guide,” “Hamburgs galante Häuser bei Nacht und Nebel” (“Hamburg’s Fast Houses by Night and Cloud”), “Das Galante Berlin,” “Naturgeschichte der galanten Frauen in Berlin” (“Natural History of the Fast Women of Berlin”), “Paris Intime et Mystérieux,” “Guide des Plaisirs Mondains et des Plaisirs Secrets à Paris.” All these have appeared during the last thirty years, some of them in several editions. For Vienna, Buda-Pesth, St. Petersburg, Rome, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, Marseilles, Rotterdam, and New York, there also exist such guides to all open and secret enjoyments.