I beg to be allowed to draw a picture of my most intimate friend.
Don Juan renounces all the duties which bind him to the rest of men. In the great market of life he is a dishonest merchant, who is always buying and never paying. The idea of equality inspires the same rage in him as water in a man with hydrophobia; it is for this reason that pride of birth goes so well with the character of Don Juan. With the idea of the equality of rights disappears that of justice, or, rather, if Don Juan is sprung from an illustrious family, such common ideas have never come to him. I could easily believe that a man with an historic name is sooner disposed than another to set fire to the town in order to get his egg cooked.[8] We must excuse him; he is so possessed with self-love that he comes to the point of losing all idea of the evil he causes, and of seeing no longer anything in the universe capable of joy or sorrow except himself. In the fire of youth, when passion fills our own hearts with the pulse of life and keeps us from mistrust of others, Don Juan, all senses and apparent happiness, applauds himself for thinking only of himself, while he sees other men pay their sacrifices to duty. He imagines that he has found out the great art of living. But, in the midst of his triumph, while still scarcely thirty years of age, he perceives to his astonishment that life is wanting, and feels a growing disgust for what were all his pleasures. Don Juan told me at Thorn, in an access of melancholy: "There are not twenty different sorts of women, and once you have had two or three of each sort, satiety sets in." I answered: "It is only imagination that can for ever escape satiety. Each woman inspires a different interest, and, what is more, if chance throws the same woman in your way two or three years earlier or later in the course of life, and if chance means you to love, you can love the same woman in different manners. But a woman of gentle heart, even when she loved you, would produce in you, because of her pretensions to equality, only irritation to your pride. Your way of having women kills all the other pleasures of life; Werther's increases them a hundredfold."
This sad tragedy reaches the last act. You see Don Juan in old age, turning on this and that, never on himself, as the cause of his own satiety. You see him, tormented by a consuming poison, flying from this to that in a continual change of purpose. But, however brilliant the appearances may be, in the end he only changes one misery for another. He tries the boredom of inaction, he tries the boredom of excitement—there is nothing else for him to choose.
At last he discovers the fatal truth and confesses it to himself; henceforward he is reduced for all his enjoyment to making display of his power, and openly doing evil for evil's sake. In short, 'tis the last degree of settled gloom; no poet has dared give us a faithful picture of it—the picture, if true, would strike horror. But one may hope that a man, above the ordinary, will retrace his steps along this fatal path; for at the bottom of Don Juan's character there is a contradiction. I have supposed him a man of great intellect, and great intellect leads us to the discovery of virtue by the road that runs to the temple of glory.[9]
La Rochefoucauld, who, however, was a master of self-love, and who in real life was nothing but a silly man of letters,[10] says(267): "The pleasure of love consists in loving, and a man gets more happiness from the passion he feels than from the passion he inspires."
Don Juan's happiness consists in vanity, based, it is true, on circumstances brought about by great intelligence and activity; but he must feel that the most inconsiderable general who wins a battle, the most inconsiderable prefect who keeps his department in order, realises a more signal enjoyment than his own. The Duc de Nemours' happiness when Madame de Clèves tells him that she loves him, is, I imagine, above Napoleon's happiness at Marengo.
Love à la Don Juan is a sentiment of the same kind as a taste for hunting. It is a desire for activity which must be kept alive by divers objects and by putting a man's talents continually to the test.
Love à la Werther is like the feeling of a schoolboy writing a tragedy—and a thousand times better; it is a new goal, to which everything in life is referred and which changes the face of everything. Passion-love casts all nature in its sublimer aspects before the eyes of a man, as a novelty invented but yesterday. He is amazed that he has never seen the singular spectacle that is now discovered to his soul. Everything is new, everything is alive, everything breathes the most passionate interest.[11] A lover sees the woman he loves on the horizon of every landscape he comes across, and, while he travels a hundred miles to go and catch a glimpse of her for an instant, each tree, each rock speaks to him of her in a different manner and tells him something new about her. Instead of the tumult of this magic spectacle, Don Juan finds that external objects have for him no value apart from their degree of utility, and must be made amusing by some new intrigue.
Love à la Werther has strange pleasures; after a year or two, the lover has now, so to speak, but one heart with her he loves; and this, strange to say, even independent of his success in love—even under a cruel mistress. Whatever he does, whatever he sees, he asks himself: "What would she say if she were with me? What would I say to her about this view of Casa-Lecchio?" He speaks to her, he hears her answer, he smiles at her fun. A hundred miles from her, and under the weight of her anger, he surprises himself, reflecting: "Léonore was very gay that night." Then he wakes up: "Good God!" he says to himself with a sigh, "there are madmen in Bedlam less mad than I."
"You make me quite impatient," said a friend of mine, to whom I read out this remark: "you are continually opposing the passionate man to the Don Juan, and that is not the point in dispute. You would be right, if a man could provide himself with passion at will. But what about indifference—what is to be done then?"—Gallant-love without horrors. Its horrors always come from a little soul, that needs to be reassured as to its own merit.