CHAPTER LIX

WERTHER AND DON JUAN

Among young people, when they have done with mocking at some poor lover, and he has left the room, the conversation generally ends by discussing the question, whether it is better to deal with women like Mozart's Don Juan or like Werther. The contrast would be more exact, if I had said Saint-Preux, but he is so dull a personage, that in making him their representative, I should be wronging feeling hearts.

Don Juan's character requires the greater number of useful and generally esteemed virtues--admirable daring, resourcefulness, vivacity, a cool head, a witty mind, etc.

The Don Juans have great moments of bitterness and a very miserable old age--but then most men do not reach old age.

The lover plays a poor rôle in the drawing-room in the evening, because to be a success and a power among women a man must show just as much keenness on winning them as on a game of billiards. As everybody knows that the lover has a great interest in life, he exposes himself, for all his cleverness, to mockery. Only, next morning he wakes, not to be in a bad temper until something piquant or something nasty turns up to revive him, but to dream of her he loves and build castles in the air for love to dwell in.

Love _à la_ Werther opens the soul to all the arts, to all sweet and romantic impressions, to the moonlight, to the beauty of the forest, to the beauty of pictures--in a word, to the feeling and enjoyment of the beautiful,

[Pg 255] under whatever form it be found, even under the coarsest cloak. It causes man to find happiness even without riches.[1] Such souls, instead of growing weary like Mielhan, Bezenval, etc., go mad, like Rousseau, from an excess of sensibility. Women endowed with a certain elevation of soul, who, after their first youth, know how to recognise love, both where it is and what it is, generally escape the Don Juan--he is remarkable in their eyes rather by the number than the quality of his conquests. Observe, to the prejudice of tender hearts, that publicity is as necessary to Don Juan's triumph as secrecy is to Werther's. Most of the men who make women the business of their life are born in the lap of luxury; that is to say, they are, as a result of their education and the example set by everything that surrounded them in youth, hardened egoists.[2]

The real Don Juan even ends by looking on women as the enemy, and rejoicing in their misfortunes of every sort.

On the other hand, the charming Duke delle Pignatelle showed us the proper way to find happiness in pleasures,

[Pg 256] even without passion. "I know that I like a woman," he told me one evening, "when I find myself completely confused in her company, and don't know what to say to her." So far from letting his self-esteem be put to shame or take its revenge for these embarrassing moments, he cultivated them lovingly as the source of his happiness. With this charming young man gallant-love was quite free from the corroding influence of vanity; his was a shade of true love, pale, but innocent and unmixed; and he respected all women, as charming beings, towards whom we are far from just. (February 20, 1820.)

As a man does not choose himself a temperament, that is to say, a soul, he cannot play a part above him. J. J. Rousseau and the Duc de Richelieu might have tried in vain; for all their cleverness, they could never have exchanged their fortunes with respect to women. I could well believe that the Duke never had moments such as those that Rousseau experienced in the park de la Chevrette with Madame d'Houdetot; at Venice, when listening to the music of the _Scuole_; and at Turin at the feet of Madame Bazile. But then he never had to blush at the ridicule that overwhelmed Rousseau in his affair with Madame de Larnage, remorse for which pursued him during the rest of his life.

A Saint-Preux's part is sweeter and fills up every moment of existence, but it must be owned that that of a Don Juan is far more brilliant. Saint-Preux's tastes may change at middle age: solitary and retired, and of pensive habits, he takes a back place on the stage of life, while Don Juan realises the magnificence of his reputation among men, and could yet perhaps please a woman of feeling by making sincerely the sacrifice of his libertine's tastes.

After all the reasons offered so far, on both sides of the question, the balance still seems to be even. What makes me think that the Werthers are the happier, is

[Pg 257] that Don Juan reduces love to the level of an ordinary affair. Instead of being able, like Werther, to shape realities to his desires, he finds, in love, desires which are imperfectly satisfied by cold reality, just as in ambition, avarice or other passions. Instead of losing himself in the enchanting reveries of crystallisation, he thinks, like a general, of the success of his manoeuvres[3] and, in a word, he kills love, instead of enjoying it more keenly than other men, as ordinary people imagine.

This seems to me unanswerable. And there is another reason, which is no less so in my eyes, though, thanks to the malignity of Providence, we must pardon men for not recognising it. The habit of justice is, to my thinking, apart from accidents, the most assured way of arriving at happiness--and a Werther is no villain.[4]

To be happy in crime, it is absolutely necessary to have no remorse. I do not know whether such a creature can exist;[5] I have never seen him. I would bet that the affair of Madame Michelin disturbed the Duc de Richelieu's nights.

One ought either to have absolutely no sympathy or be able to put the human race to death--which is impossible.[6]

People who only know love from novels will experience

[Pg 258] a natural repugnance in reading these words in favour of virtue in love. The reason is that, by the laws of the novel, the portraiture of a virtuous love is essentially tiresome and uninteresting. Thus the sentiment of virtue seems from a distance to neutralise that of love, and the words "a virtuous love" seem synonymous with a feeble love. But all this comes from weakness in the art of painting, and has nothing to do with passion such as it exists in nature.[7]

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

[Pg 259] 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

[Pg 260] 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

[Pg 261] 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.

To continue.--The Don Juans must find great difficulty

[Pg 262] in agreeing with what I was saying just now of this state of the soul. Besides the fact that they can neither see nor feel this state, it gives too great a blow to their vanity. The error of their life is expecting to win in a fortnight what a timid lover can scarcely obtain in six months. They base their reckoning on experience got at the expense of those poor devils, who have neither the soul to please a woman of feeling by revealing its ingenuous workings, nor the necessary wit for the part of a Don Juan. They refuse to see that the same prize, though granted by the same woman, is not the same thing.

L'homme prudent sans cesse se méfie. C'est pour cela que des amants trompeurs Le nombre est grand. Les dames que l'on prie Font soupirer longtemps des serviteurs Qui n'ont jamais été faux de leur vie. Mais du trésor qu'elles donnent enfin Le prix n'est su que du cœur qui le goûte; Plus on l'achète et plus il est divin: Le los d'amour ne vaut pas ce qu'il coûte.[12]

(Nivernais, _Le Troubadour Guillaume de la Tour_, III, 342.)

Passion-love in the eyes of a Don Juan may be compared to a strange road, steep and toilsome, that begins, 'tis true, amidst delicious copses, but is soon lost among sheer rocks, whose aspect is anything but inviting to the eyes of the vulgar. Little by little the road penetrates into the mountain-heights, in the midst of a dark forest, where the huge trees, intercepting the daylight with their shaggy tops that seem to touch the sky, throw a kind of horror into souls untempered by dangers.

[Pg 263] After wandering with difficulty, as in an endless maze, whose multiple turnings try the patience of our self-love, on a sudden we turn a corner and find ourselves in a new world, in the delicious valley of Cashmire of Lalla Rookh. How can the Don Juans, who never venture along this road, or at most take but a few steps along it, judge of the views that it offers at the end of the journey?...

* * * * *

So you see inconstancy is good:

"Il me faut du nouveau, n'en fût-il plus au monde."[13]

Very well, I reply, you make light of oaths and justice, and what can you look for in inconstancy? Pleasure apparently.

But the pleasure to be got from a pretty woman, desired a fortnight and loved three months, is different from the pleasure to be found in a mistress, desired three years and loved ten.

If I do not insert the word "always" the reason is that I have been told old age, by altering our organs, renders us incapable of loving; myself, I don't believe it. When your mistress has become your intimate friend, she can give you new pleasures, the pleasures of old age. 'Tis a flower that, after it has been a rose in the morning--the season of flowers--becomes a delicious fruit in the evening, when the roses are no longer in season.[14]

A mistress desired three years is really a mistress in every sense of the word; you cannot approach her without trembling; and let me tell the Don Juans that a man who trembles is not bored. The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fear.

The evil of inconstancy is weariness; the evil of passion is despair and death. The cases of despair are noted and become legend. No one pays attention to the

[Pg 264] weary old libertines dying of boredom, with whom the streets of Paris are lined.

"Love blows out more brains than boredom." I have no doubt of it: boredom robs a man of everything, even the courage to kill himself.

There is a certain type of character which can find pleasure only in variety. A man who cries up Champagne at the expense of Bordeaux is only saying, with more or less eloquence: "I prefer Champagne."

Each of these wines has its partisans, and they are all right, so long as they quite understand themselves, and run after the kind of happiness best suited to their organs[15] and their habits. What ruins the case for inconstancy is that all fools range themselves on that side from lack of courage.

But after all, everyone, if he will take the trouble to look into himself, has his ideal, and there always seems to me something a little ridiculous in wanting to convert your neighbour.

[1] See the first volume of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_. I should say every volume, if Saint-Preux had happened to have the ghost of a character, but he was a real poet, a babbler without resolution, who had no courage until he had made a peroration--yes, a very dull man. Such men have an immense advantage, in not upsetting feminine pride, and in never giving their mistress a fright. Weigh the word well; it contains perhaps the whole secret of the success of dull men with distinguished women. Nevertheless love is only a passion in so far as it makes one forget one's self-love. Thus they do not completely know love, these women, who, like L., ask of it the pleasures of pride. Unconsciously, they are on the same level as the prosaic man, the object of their contempt, who in love seeks love plus vanity. And they too, they want love and pride; but love goes out with flaming cheeks; he is the proudest of despots; he will be all, or nothing.

[2] See a certain page of André Chénier (Works, p. 370); or rather look at life, though that's much harder. "In general, those whom we call patricians are much further than other men from loving anything," says the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. (_Meditations_.)

[3] Compare Lovelace and Tom Jones.

[4] See the _Vie privée du duc de Richelieu_, nine volumes in 8vo. Why, at the moment that an assassin kills a man, does he not fall dead at his victim's feet? Why is there illness? And, if there is illness, why does not a Troistaillons die of the colic? Why does Henry IV reign twenty-one years and Lewis XV fifty-nine? Why is not the length of life in exact proportion to the degree of virtue in each man? These and other "infamous questions," English philosophers will say there is certainly no merit in posing; but there would be some merit in answering them otherwise than with insults and "cant."

[5] Note Nero after the murder of his mother, in Suetonius, and yet with what a fine lot of flattery was he surrounded.

[6] Cruelty is only a morbid kind of sympathy. Power is, after love, the first source of happiness, only because one believes oneself to be in a position to command sympathy.

[7] If you offer the spectator a picture of the sentiment of virtue side by side with the sentiment of love, you will find that you have represented a heart divided between two sentiments. In novels the only good of virtue is to be sacrificed; _vide_ Julie d'Étanges.

[8] _Vide_ Saint-Simon, _fausse couche_ of the Duchesse de Bourgoyne; and Madame de Motteville, _passim_: That princess, who was surprised to find that other women had five fingers on their hands like herself; that Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother of Lewis XIII, who found it quite easy to understand why his favourites went to the scaffold just to please him. Note, in 1820, these fine gentlemen putting forward an electoral law that may bring back your Robespierres into France, etc., etc. And observe Naples in 1799. (I leave this note written in 1820. A list of the great nobles in 1778, with notes on their morals, compiled by General Laclos, seen at Naples in the library of the Marchese Berio--a very scandalous manuscript of more than three hundred pages.)

[9] The character of the young man of the privileged classes in 1820 is pretty correctly represented by the brave Bothwell of _Old Mortality_.

[10] See Memoirs of de Retz and the unpleasant minute he gave the coadjutor at the Parliament between two doors.

[11] Vol. 1819. Honeysuckle on the slopes.

[12] [A prudent man continually mistrusts himself. 'Tis the reason why the number of false lovers is great. The women whom men worship, make their servants, who have never been false in their life, sigh a long time. But the value of the prize that they give them in the end, can only be known to the heart that tastes it; the greater the cost, the more divine it is. The praises of love are not worth its pains.--Tr.]

[13] [I must have novelty, even if there were none left in the world.--Tr. ]

[14] See the Memoirs of Collé--his wife.

[15] Physiologists, who understand our organs, tell you: "Injustice, in the relations of social life, produces harshness, diffidence and misery."

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