From craving to enjoyment thus I reel,
     And in enjoyment languish for desire.

He is insatiable, but not as the primitive hedonist, whose natural element is pleasure, but because he again and again mistakes pleasure for love.  He knows only “women,” and thus he sins against personality and the love which is the outcome of personality.

The opinion that Don Juan is no more than a votary of pleasure is not worthy of criticism; the famous Casanova, for instance, has nothing in common with him.  Casanova was a sensualist without psychical complexity and without tragedy.  His sole endeavour was to wring the utmost measure of enjoyment out of life.  He knew the woman of reality and did not waste his time in running after phantoms.  In his old age he revelled in the after-taste and settled down to write his memoirs.  Don Juan, on the contrary, has such a loathing for all the women he betrays, that he hardly remembers them, and certainly has the strongest disinclination to evoke their memory.  Casanova was an entirely unmetaphysical and unproblematical nature.  His philosophy is clearly expressed in the preface to his Memoirs:  “I always regarded the enjoyment of sensual pleasures as my principal object; I never knew a more important one.”  Casanova, who, strange to say, enjoys such high erotic honours, was merely an ordinary, very successful man of the world, and is of no importance to the subject in hand.  But even the greater and wilder Vicomte de Valmont (the hero of the famous novel of Choderlos de Laclos) is in spite of all his art and esprit and perverse principles no seeker of love and no Don Juan, but a fop and a braggart, seducing women in order to boast of his success.  He is moreover only a representative of the bored Upper Ten of the ancien regime, and not by any means unique.

Thoughtful critics contend that Don Juan was an autocrat, a destroyer, a criminal nature with satanic tendencies, bent on the enslavement of women, on their social and moral death; that conquest only, not enjoyment, was his passion.  I do not altogether reject this interpretation, but it fastens too exclusively on the external and the obvious, and overlooks the essential.  What is the reason of his preposterous procedure?  Is he really actuated by the evil desire to injure the women he woos?  Such a motive may occur occasionally (the Vicomte de Valmont was so constituted), but it cannot be regarded as the guiding principle of a life—­and above everything its pettiness is the exact reverse of so great and demoniacal a character as Don Juan.  Were he conqueror in the highest sense, then—­ascetic and proud—­he would be content with the mere consciousness of victory.  But his whole attitude belies the idea of a conqueror; he is not in the least interested in the women to whom he makes love.  They are as necessary to him as “the air he breathes,” but they are unable to give him what he seeks.  At the moment of disappointment he abandons them in disgust, innocent of any despotic desires (which would pre-suppose interest).  As far as he is concerned, women exist only for the purpose of quickening something in his soul.  But his soul remains dead; divine love has no part in him, he cannot be saved and is doomed to eternal damnation.