THE COUNT OF VILLAMEDIANA
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ever, he represented a reality: the whole daring, romantic theatrical
machinery whose end was the seduction of women. Nowadays that
machinery is obsolete. What was once stealthy intrigue and heroic
adventure has now dwindled to a few words over the telephone
and a quick ride in a car to the edge of town. It would be interesting
to enlarge upon the fact that so elemental an emotion as love has
been changed more by two purely mechanical inventions, the auto–
mobile and the telephone, than by any spiritual influence. These
two have killed Celestina and Ciutti, the old abettors, and to a
certain extent creators, of "The Seducer's" prestige.
But it would be an exaggeration to say that Don Juan has
finally passed into history. Man's attitudes toward love are always
the same, and they swing like a pendulum between two unchanging
extremes: either love is dearly bought and is sublimated, or else love
is cheap and is profaned. The latter is the case at the moment. Don
Juan has hardly any reason to exist. Yet no one can be certain that
his
day may not come again.
Unselective sexuality: a theory.
I myself once made the
mistake of thinking that donjuanism must always follow a fixed pat–
tern, a pattern which must condition forever the love life of its pos–
sessor. Such absolutely consistent characters are frequent on the stage,
but in life they are extremely rare. For life is much longer and more
complex than a play, and in life many Don Juans ahandon the role
entirely, long before the final curtain.
For example, many men go through a typical donjuanesque
phase, during their adolescence and early youth. These are the
episodic, youthful Don Juans. Zorilla's Don Juan Tenorio, the best
and most popular of the literary ones, is a Don Juan only in
his
youth. No sooner does he see Dona Ines through a lattice, than
he falls in love with her, utterly and slavishly, thereby abdicating
his
donjuanism. From then on,
his
exploits are mere gasconades,
performed simply to keep up his prestige, his legend, "to shock the
people of Seville" or of Naples, and above all, to justify in
his
own
eyes his inner surrender. Many men have retraced the same cycle.
Actually, this ephemeral donjuanism of youth, which is the most fre–
quent sort, corroborates my theory about Don juan's lack of virility,
for adolescence is normally the indeterminate period of sexual vacil-
