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lation. The genuine male, upon reaching maturity, ceases to be a
Don Juan. Those who remain Don Juans to the end of their lives do
so because they never outgrow the sexual indeterminatism of youth.
And this is precisely the secret of their powers of seduction.
There are, of course, cases of belated donjuanism which seem
to contradict this interpretation: men whose luck with women be–
gins only in full maturity. Yet these cases must be carefully examined.
The attractiveness of older men springs almost always from sources
which have nothing to do with donjuanism, though there is a bio–
logical explanation for this too: men normally achieve success only
in
maturity, and it is their success, rather than a handsome face,
which renders them attractive in their riper years. The only danger
in this quite normal phenomenon is that the gentleman concerned
may not recognize the cause of his good fortune, and may regard
himself as still being a Don Juan.
Still, having granted all those provisos, the theory I once set
forth of the equivocal virility of Don Juan seems to me to be more
incontestable than ever, though its application should be tactfully re–
stricted to a well-defined group of examples-the more characteris–
tic ones. In this essay I do not intend to return to the biological con–
sideration of Don Juan, but rather to deal with some interesting
aspects of the legend. Two, in particular: the nationality of the
legend, and the identity of the man who served as a model for Tirso
de Molina's original Don Juan. However, it might make the body
of this essay somewhat clearer if I were to provide a brief resume
of my theory, here at the start.
Don Juan is obsessed with women, and passes from one to
another without ever remaining faithful to any. This is not because
none of them satisfy him (as is hinted by some who confuse Don
Juan with another sexual type, with which he has something in
common), but, on the contrary, because Don Juan's rudimentary
urge can be satisfied by any woman at all, princess or fish-wife, as
we are emphatically told by Zorrilla's Tenorio. Now, what typifies
the true male is precisely the high degree of selectivity he exercises
in choosing the object of his love, and the localization of his desire
in a precise feminine type which admits of slight variation, and often
of none at all. The love of the true male is either strictly monogamous,
or else reduces its preferences to a small number of women who
