Affirmations

THERE are few more delightful books in the world than Casanova’s Mémoires.—That is a statement I have long vainly sought to see in print. It is true, one learns casually that various eminent literary personages have cherished a high regard for this autobiography, have even considered it the ideal autobiography, that Wendell Holmes was once heard defending Casanova, that Thackeray found him good enough to steal from. But these eminent personages—and how many more we shall never know—locked up the secret of their admiration for this book in some remote casket of their breasts; they never confided it to the cynical world. Every properly constituted “man of letters” has always recognised that any public allusion to Casanova should begin and end with lofty moral reprobation of his unspeakable turpitude.

No doubt whatever—and this apart from the question as to whether his autobiography should be counted as moral or immoral literature—Casanova delivered himself bound into the hands of the moralists. He recognised this; his autobiography, as he himself truly said, was “a confession, if ever there was one.” But he wrote at the end of a long and full life, in the friendly seclusion of a lonely Bohemian castle, when all things had become indifferent to him save the vivid memories of the past. It mattered little to him that the whirlwind of 1789 had just swept away the eighteenth century together with the moral maxims that passed current in that century. We have to accept these facts at the outset when we approach Casanova. And if a dweller in the highly respectable nineteenth century may be forgiven a first exclamation of horror at Casanova’s wickedness, he has wofully failed in critical insight if he allows that exclamation to be his last word concerning these Mémoires.

There are at least three points of view from which Casanova’s Mémoires are of deep and permanent interest. In the first place they constitute an important psychological document as the full and veracious presentation of a certain human type in its most complete development. In the second place, as a mere story of adventure and without reference to their veracity, the Mémoiries have never been surpassed, and only equalled by books written on a much smaller scale. In the third place, we here possess an unrivalled picture of the eighteenth century in its most characteristic aspects throughout Europe.

I.

Casanova lived in an age which seems to have been favourable to the spontaneous revelation of human nature in literature. It was not only the age in which the novel reached full development; it was the age of diaries and autobiographies. Pepys, indeed, though he died in the eighteenth century, had written his diary long before; but during Casanova’s lifetime Boswell was writing that biography which is so wonderful largely because it is so nearly an autobiography. Casanova’s communicative countryman, Gozzi, was also his contemporary. Rousseau’s Confessions only preceded Casanova’s Mémoires by a few years, and a little later Restif de la Bretonne wrote Monsieur Nicolas, and Madame Roland her Mémoires Particulières. All these autobiographies are very unlike Casanova’s. They mostly seem to present the shady sides of otherwise eminent and respectable lives. The highly-placed government official of versatile intellectual tastes exhibits himself as a monster of petty weaknesses; the eloquent apostle of the return to Nature uncovers the corroding morbidities we should else never suspect; the philanthropic pioneer in social reform exposes himself in a state of almost maniacal eroticism; the austere heroine who was nourished on Plutarch confesses that she is the victim of unhappy passion. We are conscious of no such discords in Casanova’s autobiography. Partly it may be because we have no other picture of Casanova before our eyes. Moreover, he had no conventional ideals to fall short of; he was an adventurer from the first. “I am proud because I am nothing,” he used to say. He could not boast of his birth; he never held high position; for the greatest part of his active career he was an exile; at every moment of his life he was forced to rely on his own real and personal qualities. But the chief reason why we feel no disturbing discord in Casanova’s Mémoires lies in the admirable skill with which he has therein exploited his unquestionable sincerity. He is a consummate master in the dignified narration of undignified experiences. Fortified, it is true, by a confessed and excessive amour propre, he never loses his fine sense of equilibrium, his power of presenting his own personality broadly and harmoniously. He has done a few dubious things in his time, he seems to say, and now and again found himself in positions that were ridiculous enough; but as he looks back he feels that the like may have happened to any of us. He views these things with complete human tolerance as a necessary part of the whole picture, which it would be idle to slur over or apologise for. He records them simply, not without a sense of humour, but with no undue sense of shame. In his heart, perhaps, he is confident that he has given the world one of its greatest books, and that posterity will require of him no such rhetorical justification as Rousseau placed at the head of his Confessions.

In the preface to the Mémoires, Casanova is sufficiently frank. He has not scrupled, he tells us, to defraud fools and rascals, “when necessary,” and he has never regretted it. But such incidents have been but episodes in his life. He is not a sensualist, he says, for he has never neglected his duty—“when I had any”—for the allurements of sense; yet the main business of his life has ever been in the world of sense; “there is none of greater importance.” “I have always loved women and have done my best to make them love me. I have also delighted in good cheer, and I have passionately followed whatever has excited my curiosity.” Now in old age he reviews the joys of his life. He has learnt to be content with one meal a day, in spite of a sound digestion, but he recalls the dishes that delighted him: Neapolitan macaroni, Spanish olla podrida, Newfoundland cod, high-flavoured game, old cheese (has he not collected material for a Dictionnaire des Fromages?), and without any consciousness of abrupt transition he passes on to speak of the fragrant sweetness of the women he had loved. Then with a smile of pity he turns on those who call such tastes depraved, the poor insensate fools who think the Almighty is only able to enjoy our sorrow and abstinence, and bestows upon us for nought the gift of self-respect, the love of praise, the desire to excel, energy, strength, courage, and the power to kill ourselves when we will. And with the strain of Stoicism which is ever present to give fibre to his Epicureanism, he quotes the maxim which might well belong to both philosophies: “Nemo læditur nisi a seipso.”

The fact that Casanova was on one side a Venetian must count for something in any attempt to explain him. Not indeed that Venice ever produced more than one Casanova; I would imply no such disrespect to Venice—or to Casanova—but the racial soil was favourable to such a personality. The Venetians are a branch of a more northern people who long since settled by the southern sea to grow mellow in the sunshine. It suited them well, for they expanded into one of the finest races in Christendom, and certainly one of the least Christian races there, a solid, well-tempered race, self-controlled and self-respecting. The Venetian genius is the genius of sensuous enjoyment, of tolerant humanity, of unashamed earthliness. Whatever was sane and stable in Casanova, and his instinctive distaste for the morbid and perverse, he owes to his Venetian maternal ancestry. If it is true that he was not a mere sensualist, it was by no means because of his devotion to duty—“when I had any,”—but because the genuine sensualist is only alive on the passive side of his nature, and in Casanova’s nervous system the development of the sensory fibres is compensated and held in balance by the equal vigour of the motor fibres; what he is quick to enjoy he is strong and alert to achieve. Thus he lived the full and varied life that he created for himself at his own good pleasure out of nothing, by the sole power of his own magnificent wits. And now the self-sufficing Venetian sits down to survey his work and finds that it is good. It has not always been found so since. A “self-made” man, if ever there was one, Casanova is not revered by those who worship self-help. The record of his life will easily outlive the largest fortune ever made in any counting-house, but the life itself remains what we call a “wasted” life. Thrift, prudence, modesty, scrupulous integrity, strict attention to business—it is useless to come to Casanova for any of these virtues. They were not even in his blood; he was only half Venetian.

The Casanova family was originally Spanish. The first Casanova on record was a certain Don Jacobo, of illegitimate birth, who in the middle of the fifteenth century became secretary to King Alfonso. He fell in love with a lady destined to the religious life, and the day after she had pronounced her vows he carried her off from her convent to Rome, where he finally obtained the forgiveness and benediction of the Pope. The son of this union, Don Juan, killed an officer of the King of Naples, fled from Rome, and sought fortune with Columbus, dying on the voyage. Don Juan’s son, Marcantonio, secretary to a cardinal, was noted in his day as an epigrammatic poet; but his satire was too keen, and he also had to flee from Rome. His son became a colonel, and, unlike his forefathers, died peacefully, in extreme old age, in France. In this soldier’s grandson, Casanova’s father, the adventurous impulsiveness of the family again came out; he ran away from home at nineteen with a young actress, and himself became an actor; subsequently he left the actress and then fell in love with a young Venetian beauty of sixteen, Zanetta Farusi, a shoemaker’s daughter. But a mere actor could find no favour in a respectable family, so the young couple ran away and were married; the hero of these Mémoires, born on the 2nd April, 1725, was their first-born. There is probably no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of this family history, but if one desired to invent an ancestry for Casanova he could scarcely better it.

His race helps to account for Casanova, but the real explanation of the man can only lie in his own congenital organisation. That he was a radically abnormal person is fairly clear. Not that he was morbid either in body or mind. On the contrary, he was a man of fine presence, of abounding health—always looking ten years younger than his age—of the most robust appetites, a great eater, who delighted to see others, especially women, eat heartily also, a man of indubitable sexual vigour; however great the demands he made upon his physical energy it seldom failed to respond, and his capacity for rest was equally great; he could sleep nineteen hours at a stretch. His mental health was not less sound. The most punctilious alienist, with this frank and copious history before him, could not commit Casanova to an asylum. Whatever offences against social codes he may have committed, Casanova can scarcely be said to have sinned against natural laws. He was only abnormal because so natural a person within the gates of civilisation is necessarily abnormal and at war with his environment. Far from being the victim of morbidities and perversities, Casanova presents to us the natural man in excelsis. He was a man for whom the external world existed, and who reacted to all the stimuli it presents to the healthy normal organism. His intelligence was immensely keen and alert, his resourcefulness, his sagacious audacity, his presence of mind, were all of the first order. He was equally swift to feel, to conceive, and to act. His mental organisation was thus singularly harmonious, and hence his success in gratifying his eager and immense appetite for the world, an appetite unsatiated and insatiable even to the last, or he would have found no pleasure in writing these Mémoires. Casanova has been described as a psychological type of instability. That is to view him superficially. A man who adapts himself so readily and so effectively to any change in his environment or in his desires only exhibits the instability which marks the most intensely vital organisms. The energy and ability which Casanova displayed in gratifying his instincts would have sufficed to make a reputation of the first importance in any department, as a popular statesman, a great judge, a merchant prince, and enabled him to die worn out by the monotonous and feverish toil of the senate, the court, or the counting-house. Casanova chose to live. A crude and barbarous choice it seems to us, with our hereditary instinct to spend our lives in wasting the reasons for living. But it is certain that Casanova never repented his choice. Assuredly we need not, for few judges, statesmen, or merchants have ever left for the joy of humanity any legacy of their toil equal to these Mémoires.

But such swift energy of vital action and reaction, such ardour of deed in keeping pace with desire, are in themselves scarcely normal. Casanova’s abnormality is suggested by the tendency to abnormality which we find in his family. We have seen what men his ancestors were; in reading the Mémoires we gather incidentally that one of his brothers had married, though impotent, and another brother is described as a somewhat feeble-minded ne’er-do-well. All the physical and mental potency of the family was intensely concentrated in Casanova. Yet he himself in early childhood seems to have been little better than an idiot either in body or mind. He could recall nothing that happened before he was eight years of age. He was not expected to live; he suffered from prolonged hæmorrhages from the nose, and the vision of blood was his earliest memory. As a child he habitually kept his mouth open, and his face was stupid. “Thickness of the blood,” said the physicians of those days; it seems probable that he suffered from growths in the nose which, as we now know, produce such physical and mental inferiority as Casanova describes. The cure was spontaneous. He was taken to Padua, and shortly afterwards began to develop wonderfully both in stature and intelligence. In after years he had little cause to complain either of health or intellect. It is notable, however, that when, still a boy, he commenced his ecclesiastical training (against his wishes, for he had chosen to be a doctor), he failed miserably as a preacher, and broke down in the pulpit; thus the Church lost a strange ornament. Moreover, with all his swift sensation and alert response, there was in Casanova an anomalous dulness of moral sensibility. The insults to Holy Religion which seem to have brought him to that prison from which he effected his marvellous escape, were scarcely the serious protests of a convinced heretic; his deliberate trickery of Mme. d’Urfé was not only criminal but cruel. His sense of the bonds of society was always somewhat veiled, and although the veil never became thick, and might be called the natural result of an adventurer’s life, one might also, perhaps, maintain that it was a certain degree of what is sometimes called moral imbecility that made Casanova an adventurer. But while we thus have to recognise that he was a man of dulled moral sensibility, we must also recognise that he possessed a vigorous moral consciousness of his own, or we misunderstand him altogether. The point to be remembered is that the threshold of his moral sensibility was not easily reached. There are some people whose tactile sensibility is so obtuse that it requires a very wide separation of the æsthesiometer to get the right response. It was so with Casanova’s moral sensitiveness. But, once aroused, his conscience responded energetically enough. It seems doubtful whether, from his own point of view, he ever fell into grave sin, and therefore he is happily free from remorse. No great credit is thus due to him; the same psychological characteristic is familiar in all criminals. It is not difficult to avoid plucking the apples of shame when so singularly few grow on your tree.

Casanova’s moral sensibility and its limits come out, where a man’s moral sensibility will come out, in his relations with women. Women played a large part in Casanova’s life; he was nearly always in love. We may use the word “love” here in no euphemistic sense, for although Casanova’s passions grew and ripened with the rapidity born of long experience in these matters, so fresh is the vitality of the man that there is ever a virginal bloom on every new ardour. He was as far removed from the cold-blooded libertine typified in Laclos’s Valmont, unscrupulously using women as the instruments of his own lust, as from Laura’s sonneteering lover. He had fully grasped what the latest writer on the scientific psychology of sex calls the secondary law of courting, namely, the development in the male of an imaginative attentiveness to the psychical and bodily states of the female, in place of an exclusive attentiveness to his own gratification. It is not impossible that in these matters Casanova could have given a lesson to many virtuous husbands of our own highly moral century. He never sank to the level of the vulgar maxim that “all’s fair in love and war.” He sought his pleasure in the pleasure, and not in the complaisance, of the women he loved, and they seem to have gratefully and tenderly recognised his skill in the art of love-making. Casanova loved many women, but broke few hearts. The same women appear again and again through his pages, and for the most part no lapse of years seems to deaden the gladness with which he goes forth to meet them anew. That he knew himself well enough never to take either wife or mistress must be counted as a virtue, such as it was, in this incomparable lover of so many women. A man of finer moral fibre could scarcely have loved so many women; a man of coarser fibre could never have left so many women happy.

This very lack of moral delicacy which shuts Casanova off from the finest human development is an advantage to the autobiographer. It insures his sincerity because he is unconscious of offence; it saves us from any wearisome self-justification, because, for all his amused self-criticism, he sees no real need for justification. In Rousseau’s Confessions we hear the passionate pleader against men at the tribunal of God; here we are conscious neither of opponent nor tribunal. Casanova is neither a pillar of society nor yet one of the moral Samsons who delight to pull down the pillars of society; he has taken the world as it is, and he has taken himself as he is, and he has enjoyed them both hugely. So he is free to set forth the whole of himself, his achievements, his audacities, his failures, his little weaknesses and superstitions, his amours, his quarrels, his good fortune and his bad fortune in the world that on the whole he has found so interesting and happy a place to dwell in. And his book remains an unending source of delightful study of the man of impulse and action in all his moods. The self-reliant man, immensely apt for enjoyment, who plants himself solidly with his single keen wit before the mighty oyster of the world, has never revealed himself so clearly before.

What manner of man Casanova seemed to his contemporaries has only been discovered of recent years; and while the picture which we obtain of him has been furnished by his enemies, and was not meant to flatter, it admirably supports the Mémoires. In 1755 a spy of the Venetian Inquisition reported that Casanova united impiety, imposture, and wantonness to a degree that inspired horror. It was in that same year that he was arrested, chiefly on the charge of contempt for religion, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Fifteen months later he had effected his famous escape, and was able to pursue his career as an assured and accomplished adventurer who had brilliantly completed his apprenticeship. It is not until many years later, in 1772, when his long efforts to obtain pardon from his country still remained unsuccessful, that we obtain an admirable picture of him from the Venetian agent at Ancona. “He comes and goes where he will,” the agent reports, “with open face and haughty mien, always well equipped. He is a man of some forty years at most [really about forty-eight, thus confirming Casanova’s statement that he was always taken for some ten years younger than his years], of lofty stature, of fine and vigorous aspect, with bright eyes and very brown skin. He wears a short, chestnut-coloured peruke. I am told that his character is bold and disdainful, but especially that he is full of speech, and of witty and well-instructed speech.” Two years later Casanova was at last permitted to return to Venice. He there accepted the post of secret agent of the State Inquisition for service within the city. Like Defoe and Toland, who were also secret political agents, he attempted to justify himself on grounds of public duty. In a few years, however, he was dismissed, perhaps, as Baschet suggests, on account of the fact that his reports contained too much philosophy and not enough espionage; probably it was realised that a man of such powerful individuality and independence was not fitted for servile uses. Finally, in 1782, he was banished from Venice for an offence to which the blood of the Casanovas had always been easily inclined—he published an audacious satire against a patrician. From Venice he went to Trieste, and thence to Vienna. There he met Count Waldstein, a fervent adept of Kabbalistic science, a subject in which Casanova himself claimed to be proficient; he had found it useful in certain dealings with credulous people. In 1784 the count offered him the post of librarian, with a salary of one thousand florins, at his castle of Dux, in Bohemia. It is said to be a fine castle, and is still noted for its charming park. Here this prince of Bohemians spent the remainder of his life, devoting seven years to the Mémoires, on which he was still engaged at his death. A terra-cotta bust discovered at the castle (and etched some years ago for Le Livre) shows him in mature age, a handsome, energetic, and imposing head, with somewhat deep-set eyes; it is by no means the head of a scamp, but rather that of a philosopher, a philosopher with unusual experience of affairs, a successful statesman, one might say. A medallion portrait, of later date, which has also been reproduced, shows him at the age of sixty-three with lean, eager face, and lofty, though receding forehead, the type of the man of quick perception and swift action, the eagle type of man. The Prince de Ligne has also left a description of him as he appeared in old age, now grown very irritable, ready to flare up at any imagined insult, engaged in perpetual warfare with domestics, but receiving the highest consideration from those who knew how to appreciate the great qualities of the man and his unequalled experiences, and who knew also how to indulge his susceptibilities and smile at his antique fashions. Once he went off in a huff to Weimar, and was graciously received by the Duke, but he soon came back again; all the favours there were showered on a certain court favourite, one Goethe. It is clear, as we read the Prince de Ligne’s detailed description, that the restless old adventurer had need, even in the peaceful seclusion of Dux, of all the consolation yielded by Socrates, Horace, Seneca, and Boethius, his favourite philosophers. Here, at Dux, on the 4th of June 1798, Casanova died. “Bear witness that I have lived as a philosopher and die as a Christian;” that, we are told, was his last utterance after he had received the sacraments.

From that moment Casanova with everything that concerned him was covered by a pall of oblivion. He seems to have been carelessly cast aside, together with the century of which he was so characteristic, and, as it now appears, so memorable a child. The world in which he had lived so joyously and completely had been transformed by the Revolution. The new age of strenuous commercialism and complacent philanthropy was in its vigorous youth, a sword in its right hand and a Bible in its left. The only adventurer who found favour now was he who took the glad news of salvation to the heathen, or mowed them down to make new openings for trade. Had he been born later, we may be well assured, Casanova would have known how to play his part; he would not have fallen short of Borrow, who became an agent of the Bible Society. But as it was, what had the new age to do with Casanova? No one cared, no one even yet has cared, so much as to examine the drawers and cupboards full of papers which he left behind at Dux. Only on the 13th of February, 1820, was the oblivion a little stirred. On that date a certain Carlo Angiolieri appeared at Leipzig in the office of the famous publisher, Brockhaus, carrying a voluminous manuscript in the handwriting (as we now know) of Casanova and bearing the title, Histoire de ma Vie jusqu’à l’an 1797.

But even the appearance of Carlo Angiolieri failed to dissipate the gloom. Fifty years more were to pass before the figure of Casanova again became clear. This man, so ardently alive in every fibre, had now become a myth. The sagacious world—which imparts the largest dole of contempt to the pilgrim who brings back to it the largest gifts—refused to take Casanova seriously. The shrewd critic wondered who wrote Casanova, just as he has since wondered who wrote Shakespeare. Paul Lacroix paid Stendhal the huge compliment of suggesting that he had written the Mémoires, a sufficiently ingenious suggestion, for in Stendhal’s Dauphiny spirit there is something of that love of adventure which is supremely illustrated in Casanova. But we now know that, as Armand Baschet first proved, Casanova himself really wrote his own Mémoires. Moreover, so far as investigation has yet been able to go, he wrote with strict regard to truth. Wherever it is possible to test Casanova, his essential veracity has always been vindicated. In the nature of things it is impossible to verify much that he narrates. When, however, we remember that he was telling the story of his life primarily for his own pleasure, it is clear that he had no motive for deception; and when we consider the surpassingly discreditable episodes which he has recorded, we may recall that he has given not indeed positive proof of sincerity, but certainly the best that can be given in the absence of direct proof. It remains a question how far a man is able to recollect the details of the far past—the conversations he held, the garments he wore, the meals he ate—so precisely as Casanova professes to recollect them. This is a psychological problem which has not yet been experimentally examined. There are, however, great individual differences in memory, and there is reason to believe that an organisation, such as Casanova’s, for which the external world is so vivid, is associated with memory-power of high quality. That this history is narrated with absolute precision of detail Casanova himself would probably not have asserted. But there is no reason to doubt his good faith, and there is excellent reason to accept the substantial accuracy of his narrative. It remains a personal document of a value which will increase rather than diminish as time goes by. It is one of the great autobiographical revelations which the ages have left us, with Augustine’s, Cellini’s, Rousseau’s, of its own kind supreme.

II.

The Mémoires are authentic; they give us what they profess to give us—the true story of a man who unites (as it has been well said) the characters of Gil Blas and of Figaro. Thus Casanova was the incarnation in real life of the two most typical imaginative figures of his century. Yet even if the Mémoires had been the invention of some novelist of surpassing genius they would still possess extraordinary interest. We may forget that the book is an autobiography, and still find it, as a story of adventure, the apotheosis of the picaresque novel.

The picaresque novel—although a Frenchman brought it to perfection in Gil Blas—arose and flourished in Spain, Casanova’s ancestral country, and its piquancy, variety, and audacity seem to have been very congenial to the Spanish spirit and the Spanish soil. Casanova’s Mémoires carry this form of story on to a broader and in some respects higher plane. The old picaro never dared affront the world; he cringed before it and slunk behind its back to make grimaces. Casanova, too, was an adventurer living by his wits, but he approached the world with the same self-confidence as he approached a beautiful woman, and having won its favours treats it with the same consideration. Unlike the picaro whose delight it is to reveal the pettinesses of the men he has duped, Casanova shows his magnificence in adventure by regarding the world as a foeman worthy of all his courtesy; and with incomparable impartiality, as well as skill, he presents to us the narrative of all the perils he encountered or sought. Few old men sitting down in the evening of their days to chatter of old times have been so free as Casanova from the vices of senile literature. He never maunders of the things that are so dear to the aged merely because they are past; he introduces no superfluous reflections or comments. We recognise that the hand which keeps this pen so surely to the point is the hand of a man of action. Casanova’s skill in narrative is conspicuously shown in the love-adventures which form so large and important a part of his book, as of his life. (Men usually regard love as a bagatelle, he says somewhere, but, for his own part, he adds, he has found no more important business in life.) There would seem to be nothing so difficult as to tell a long series of amours, unshrinkingly, from first to last, without drawing a curtain at any stage. Nearly every writer in fiction or in autobiography who has attempted this has only produced an effect of weary monotony or else of oppressive closeness. But Casanova succeeds. Partly this is due to the variety and individuality he is able to give, not only to every incident, but to every woman he meets; so that his book is a gallery of delightful women, drawn with an art that almost recalls his great contemporary, Goethe. Partly it seems he was aided by his vivid and sympathetic Venetian temperament; his swift, unliterary style finds time for no voluptuous languors. He was aided even by his immodesty, for in literature as in the plastic arts and in life itself, the nude is nearer to virtue than the décolleté. The firm and absolute precision of every episode in these Mémoires leaves no room for any undue dallying with the fringes of love’s garments. Casanova tells his story swiftly and boldly, with no more delay than is needed to record every essential detail; he is the absolute anti-type to Sterne as a narrator; the most libertine of authors, he is yet free from prurience. Thus the man of action covers the romancer with confusion; this supreme book of adventures is a real man’s record of his own real life.

But let us forget that it is an autobiography and take it merely as a story. Its immense range of human interest, its audacious realism, its freedom from perversity, entitle us to regard it as a typical story of adventure. And I ask myself: What is the relation of such a book to life? what is the moral worth of Casanova’s Mémoires?

A foolish, superfluous question, I know, it seems to many. And I am willing to admit that there may possibly be things in life which it is desirable to do, and yet undesirable to moralise over; I would even assert that the moral worth of many of our actions lies precisely in their unconsciousness of any moral worth. Yet beneath the freest moral movements there must be a solid basis of social law, just as beneath the most gracious movements of the human body there lies the regulated play of mechanical law. When we find it assumed that there are things which are good to do and not good to justify we may strongly suspect that we have come across a mental muddle.

To see the matter rightly we must take it at the beginning. No one can rightly see the moral place of immoral literature—the literature of adventure—in the case of adults unless he sees it in the case of children. Of late years the people who write in newspapers and magazines have loudly abused all stories of the crudely heroic order, the stories of impossible virtue and unheard-of villainy in far-away lands, of marvellously brave bands under extravagantly reckless leaders, who march on through careless bloodshed to incredible victory or incalculable treasure. The hero of the average boy—magnificent sombrero on head, pistols in belt, galloping off on his mighty charger, a villain grasped by the scruff of the neck in each outstretched hand—has been severely mauled. The suggestions offered for the displacement of this literature furnish documents for the psychologist. Let us have cheap lives of Jesus and the Apostle Paul! let us flood the world with the sober romances licensed by religious societies!—say those good people in the newspapers and the magazines. If they have ever themselves been children, and if so, how they came into the world shrouded in an impenetrable caul which will for ever shut them out from insight into the hearts of the young, is not known, and perhaps is no matter. Putting aside these estimable persons, there is in every heart a chamber dedicated to the impossible, and the younger the heart the larger is this golden ventricle. For the child who can just read, Jack the Giant-killer, and the story of those human-souled swans which make the swan a mystic bird for all our lives, are better worth knowing than any fact of the visible world. Some day the Life of Jesus, and even perhaps the Life of Paul, will seem to be among the sweetest and strangest of the world’s fairy-tales; but that day will hardly come until every church and chapel has been spiritually razed to the ground. It cannot come to the generation which has had the name of Jesus thrust down its throat in Sunday-schools and board-schools. We English are a practical, common-sense people, and we cure our children of any hearty taste for religion as confectioners are said to cure their assistants of any excessive taste for sweets, by a preliminary surfeit. No doubt we are very wise, but we postpone indefinitely the day when children will come to our religious tales in the pure gladness of their joy in the marvellous.

In the meantime there ought not to be any doubt that children should be fed on fairy-tales as their souls’ most natural food. Nothing can make up for the lack of them at the outset, just as no later supply of milk can compensate for the starvation involved in feeding infants on starch. The power of assimilating fairy-tales is soon lost, and unless the child has a rarely powerful creative imagination its spiritual growth on this side at least remains for ever stunted.

If then childhood needs its pure fairy-land, and youth its fairy-land of impossible adventure, what fairy-land is left for adult age? Scarcely the novel. The modern novel in its finest manifestations, however engrossingly interesting, takes us but a little step from the passionate interests of our own lives. If I turn to the two recent novels which have most powerfully interested me—Huysmans’ En Route and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure—I find that their interest lies largely in the skill with which they present and concentrate two mighty problems of actual life, the greatest of all problems, religion and sex. In adult life we seek a fairy-land occupied by beings at once as real as ourselves, and yet far removed from the sphere of our own actual interests and the heavy burden of the atmosphere under which we live; only so can it fascinate the imaginations of those who have outgrown the simple imaginative joys of early life. Casanova’s Mémoires is the perfected type of the books which answer these requirements. It is unflinchingly real, immensely varied, the audaciously truthful narrative of undeniably human impulses. And yet it carries us out of relation with the problems of our actual life; it leads us into the realm of fairy-land.

But—analysing the matter a little more closely—it may still fairly be asked whether a book which, in spite of its remoteness, represents a form of human life, must not have a certain bearing on morals. Is not a part of its attraction, and indeed that of all fairy-lands, the existence of a different code of morals? It seems to me that this is so. But precisely in that lies the moral value of such literature. Indeed the whole question of the moral value of art—that is to say, of æsthetic enjoyment—is really involved here. The matter is worth looking into.

It is one of Schopenhauer’s unforgettable sayings, that whatever course of action we take in life there is always some element in our nature which could only find satisfaction in an exactly contrary course; so that, take what road we will, we yet always remain restless and unsatisfied in part. To Schopenhauer that reflection made for pessimism; it need not. The more finely and adequately we adjust ourselves to the actual conditions of our life the larger, no doubt, the unused and unsatisfied region within us. But it is just here that art comes in. Art largely counts for its effects on playing on these unused fibres of our organism, and by so doing it serves to bring them into a state of harmonious satisfaction—moralises them, if you will. Alienists have described a distressing form of insanity peculiar to old maids who have led honourable lives of abstinence and abnegation. After years of seeming content with the conditions of their lot they begin to manifest uncontrollable obsessions and erotic impulses; the unused elements of life, which they had shut down in the cellars of their souls and almost forgotten, have at last arisen in rebellion, clamouring tumultuously for satisfaction. The old orgies—the Saturnalian festival at Christmas and the Midsummer Festival on St. John’s Day—bear witness that the ancients in their wisdom recognised that the bonds of the actual daily moral life must sometimes be relaxed lest they break from over-tension. We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have art. Our respectable matrons no longer send out their daughters with torches at midnight into the woods and among the hills, where dancing and wine and blood may lash into their flesh the knowledge of the mysteries of life, but they take them to Tristan, and are fortunately unable to see into those carefully brought-up young souls on such occasions. The moralising force of art lies, not in its capacity to present a timid imitation of our experiences, but in its power to go beyond our experience, satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activities of our nature. That art should have such an effect on those who contemplate it is not surprising when we remember that, to some extent, art has a similar influence on its creators. “Libertin d’esprit mais sage de mœurs,” it was said of Watteau. Mohammed when he wrote so voluptuously of the black-eyed houris of Paradise was still young and the blameless husband of an aged woman.

It has been said of Wagner that he had in him the instincts of an ascetic and of a satyr, and the first is just as necessary as the second to the making of a great artist. It is a very ancient observation that the most unchaste verse has often been written by the chastest poets, and that the writers who have written most purely have found their compensation in living impurely.[5] In the same manner it has always been found in Christendom, both among Catholics and Protestants, that much of the most licentious literature has been written by the clergy, by no means because the clergy are a depraved class, but precisely because the austerity of their lives renders necessary for them these emotional athletics. Of course, from the standpoint of simple nature, such literature is bad, it is merely a form of that obscenity which, as Huysmans has acutely remarked, can, only be produced by those who are chaste; in Nature desire passes swiftly into action, leaving little or no trace on the mind. A certain degree of continence—I do not mean merely in the region of sex but in the other fields of human action also—is needed as a breeding-ground for the dreams and images of desire to develop into the perfected visions of art. But the point of view of society is scarcely that of unadulterated nature. In society we have not always room for the swift and free passage of impulse into action; to avoid the evils of repressed impulse this play of the emotions on a higher and serener plane becomes essential. Just as we need athletics to expand and harmonise the coarser unused energies of the organism, so we need art and literature to expand and harmonise its finer energies, emotion being, as it may not be superfluous to point out, itself largely a muscular process, motion in a more or less arrested form, so that there is here more than a mere analogy. Art from this point of view is the athletics of the emotions.

The adventures of fairy-land—of which for our age I take Casanova’s Mémoires as the type—constitute an important part of this athletics. It may be abused, just as we have the grosser excesses of the runner and the cyclist; but it is the abuse and not the use which is pernicious, and under the artificial conditions of civilisation the contemplation of the life and adventures of the heroically natural man is an exercise with fine spiritual uses. Such literature thus has a moral value: it helps us to live peacefully within the highly specialised routine of civilisation.

That is the underlying justification for Casanova’s Mémoires as moral literature. But there is no reason why it should emerge into consciousness when we take up these Mémoires, any more than a man need take up a branch of physical athletics with any definite hygienic aim. It is sufficient to be moved by the pure enjoyment of it. And there must be something unwholesome and abnormal—something corrupt at the core—in any civilised man or woman who cannot win some enjoyment from this book.

III.

The more I contemplate the eighteenth century the more interesting I find it. In my youth it seemed to me unworthy of a glance. The books and the men, Shelley above all, who stirred my young blood belonged to the early nineteenth century. I was led to regard the last century as a dull period of stagnation and decay, a tomb into which the spirit of man sank after the slow death which followed the Renaissance. The dawn of the nineteenth century was an Easter Day of the human soul, rising from the sepulchre and flinging aside the old eighteenth century winding-sheet.

I have nothing yet to say against the early nineteenth century, which was indeed only the outcome of the years that went before, but I have gained a new delight in the men of the eighteenth century. It was in that age that the English spirit found its most complete intellectual expression, unaffected by foreign influence. When that spirit, reviving after the wars that lamentably cut short the development of Chaucer’s magnificent song, again began its free literary development—no doubt with some stimulus from Humanism—it was suddenly smothered at birth by the Renaissance wave from Italy and France. We may divine how it would have developed independently if we think of John Heywood’s dramatic sketches—pale as those are after the Miller’s tale in which for the first and last time Chaucer perfectly mated English realism to the lyric grace of English idealism—and to some extent, also, when we turn to the later Heywood’s plays, or Dekker’s, and especially to the robust and tolerant humanity, the sober artistic breadth of the one play of Porter’s which has come down to us. But the intoxicating melodies of Ronsard and his fellows were heard from over sea, and the men of the English Renaissance arose—Lyly and Lodge and Campion with their refinements, Greene and Nash with their gay and brilliant music, Marlowe with his arrogant, irresistible energy—and brought to birth an absolutely new spirit, which may have been English enough in its rich and virginal elements, but received the seminal principle from abroad. It needed a century and more for that magnificent tumult to subside, and for the old English spirit to reappear and reach at last full maturity, by happy chance again in association with France, though this time it is England that chiefly plays the masculine part and impregnates France. Thus the eighteenth century was an age in which the English spirit found complete self-expression, and also an age in which England and France joined hands intellectually, and stood together at the summit of civilisation, with no rivals, unless Goethe and Kant may suffice to stand for a whole people. In the great Englishmen of these days we find the qualities which are truly native to Britain, and which have too often been torn and distracted by insane aberrations. There is a fine sobriety and sagacity in the English spirit, a mellow human solidity, such as the Romans possessed always, but which we in our misty and storm-swept island have often exchanged, perhaps for better, but certainly for other qualities. It was not so in the eighteenth century, and by no accident the historian who has most finely expressed the genius of Rome was an eighteenth century Englishman. All the most typical men of that age possessed in varying degree the same qualities: Locke, Swift, Fielding, Hume, Richardson, Goldsmith, Hogarth, Johnson, Godwin. Thus the eighteenth century should undoubtedly be a source of pride to the British heart. England’s reputation in the world rests largely on our poetic aptitudes and our political capacity. Eighteenth century England is not obviously pre-eminent in either respect, although it was the great age of our political development and the seed-time of our second great poetic age; it produced scarcely more than a single first-class poet exclusively within its limits, and it lost America. Yet our greatest philosopher, our greatest historian, our greatest biographer, nearly all our greatest novelists, our great initiators in painting, who were indirectly the initiators of the greater art of France, belong wholly to this century, and an unequalled cluster of our greatest poets belongs to its close. And these men were marked by sanity and catholicity, a superb solidity of spirit; they became genuinely cosmopolitan without losing any of their indigenous virtues. Without the eighteenth century we should never have known many of the greatest qualities which are latent, and too often only latent, in our race. Landor and Wordsworth alone were left to carry something of the spirit of the English eighteenth century far on into the literature of our own wholly alien century.

And their brothers of France were their most worthy peers. This spirit, indeed, which we see so conspicuously in the finest men of their age in England and France, was singularly widespread throughout Europe, a cheerful sobriety, a solid humanity, little troubled by any of those “movements” which were to become so prolific and so noisy in the next century. Christianity, it seemed, was decaying. Diderot, well informed on English affairs, wrote to a friend that in a few years it would be extinct, and looking at the state of the English Church at that time, no one could reasonably have surmised that Zinzendorf in Germany, and after him Wesley in England on a lower plane and Law on a higher plane, had already initiated that revival of Christianity which in our own century was destined to work itself out so obstreperously. But the world seemed none the worse for the apparent subsidence of Christianity; in the opinion of many it seemed to be very much the better. The tolerant paganism of classic days appeared to be reasserting itself, robustly in England, with a delicate refinement in France,—setting the paganism of Watteau against the paganism of Fielding—while Goethe and the Germans generally were striving to rescue and harmonise the best of Christianity with the best of antiquity. European civilisation was fully expanded; for a long time no great disturbing force had arisen, and though on every side the tender buds of coming growths might have been detected, they could not yet reveal their strength. Such a period certainly has its terrible defects; mellowness is not far from rottenness. But then youth also has its defects, and its crude acidity is still further from perfection. The nineteenth century has a higher moral standard than the eighteenth, so at least we in our self-righteousness have been accustomed to think. But even if so, the abstract existence of a high moral standard is another thing from the prevalence of high moral living. Whatever the standard may be, it is a question whether the lives are much different. In the one case the standard is much above the practice, in the other only a little above it—that is the chief difference. And the advantages of winding the standard up to the higher pitch are not so unmixed as is sometimes assumed. One need not question these advantages, well recognised in the present century. But the advantages of a lower standard are less often recognised. There is especially the great advantage that we attain a higher degree of sincerity, and sincerity, if not itself the prime virtue, is surely, whatever the virtue may be, its chief accompaniment. A life that is swathed and deformed in much drapery is not so wholesome or so effective as one that can live nearer to the sun. And the unrecognisable villain is most pernicious; the brigand who holds a revolver at your head is better than the sleek and well-dressed thief who opens the proceedings with prayer. The eighteenth has been called a gross and unintelligent century. In the department of criticism, indeed, this century in England (for it was far otherwise in Germany) comes very short of our own century, and it is largely this failure to measure the precise value of things in æsthetic perception which now makes that age seem so shocking. From this point of view every great age—and not least our own greatest Elizabethan age—is equally defective. A period of energetic life cannot afford to spend much time on the solitary contemplation of its own bowels of æsthetic emotion. To produce a Pater is the one exquisite function of a spiritually barren and exhausted age. And still the eighteenth century redeems its critical grossness by making even this later development possible; it lifted the man of letters from the place of a dependent to the place of a free man boldly prophesying in his own right; and, moreover, it was the first century which dared to claim the complete equality of men and women with all which that involves.

If it has required a certain insight for the child of our own century to discover the great qualities of the last century, there cannot be much doubt about the final judgment of the most competent judges. The eighteenth was, as Renouvier has called it, the first century of humanity since Christ, while at the same time, as Lange has said, it was penetrated through by the search for the ideal, or, as a more recent thinker concludes, it was a century dominated by the maxim Salus populi suprema est lex, holding in its noble aspirations after general happiness the germs of all modern socialism. In art and literature it saw the fresh spring of those blossoms which opened so splendidly and faded so swiftly in our century; it was the century not only of Hogarth and Fielding and Voltaire, but of Blake and Rousseau, of Diderot, of Swedenborg and Mesmer, of the development of modern music with Mozart and Beethoven, of the unparalleled enthusiasm awakened by the discovery of the Keltic world. And as its crowning glory the eighteenth century claims Goethe. Men will scarcely look back to our own century as so good to live in. One may well say that he would have gladly lived in the thirteenth century, perhaps the most interesting of all since Christ, or in the sixteenth, probably the most alive of all, or the eighteenth, surely the most human. But why have lived in the nineteenth, the golden age of machinery, and of men used as machines?

Eighteenth century Europe, being what it was, formed a perfect stage for Casanova to play his part on. With his Spanish and Italian blood, he was of the race of those who had come so actively to the front in the last days of old classic Rome, and his immediate ancestors had lived in the centre of the pagan Rome of the Renaissance. Thus he carried with him traditions which consorted well with much in the eighteenth century. And he had that in him, moreover, which no tradition can give, the incommunicable vitality in the presence of which all tradition shrivels into nothingness.

Casanova knew not only Italy, France, England, Germany, and Holland; he had visited Spain, Russia, Poland, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor. He was received by Benedict XII., by Frederick II. of Prussia, by the Empress Catherine, by Joseph II. He was at home in Paris, in London, in Berlin, in Vienna; he knew Munich, Dresden, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Barcelona. His picture of London is of great interest. He spent much of the year 1763 there, and some of his most interesting experiences, romantic and psychological, occurred during that period. He even dated the close of what he calls the second act in the comedy of his life from that visit to London, the next and concluding act being one of slow declination. So profound was his depression at this time that one day he went towards the Thames at the Tower with the deliberate intention of drowning himself, having first filled his pockets with bullets to ensure sinking. Fortunately an English friend (to whom the world owes thanks) met him on the way, read his resolve in his face, and insisted on carrying him off to a very convivial party, whose indecorous proceedings, although Casanova only remained a passive witness, served to dissipate all thoughts of suicide. He is not, however, prejudiced against England; on the contrary, he finds that no nation offers so many interesting peculiarities to the attentive observer. As usual, in London Casanova mixed indiscriminately with the best and the worst society; his wit, his knowledge, his imperturbable effrontery, his charming conversation, served to open any door that he desired to open. He gives us curious glimpses into the lives of English noblemen of the day, and not less intimate pictures of the chevaliers d’industrie who preyed upon them. In the course of one adventure with people of the latter sort he was haled before the eminent blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, whom he seems to have mistaken, though this is not quite clear, for his yet more eminent brother Henry. He also met Kitty Fischer, the most fashionable cocotte of her day, whom we may yet see as Reynolds caught her in a well-inspired moment, dilating her sensitive nostrils, radiantly inhaling the joy of life, and he tells us anecdotes of her extravagance, of the jewels she wore, of the thousand guinea banknote which she ate in a sandwich.[6]

Throughout Europe Casanova knew many of the most celebrated people of his time, though it is clear—as one would expect from a man of his impartial humanity—he seldom went out of his way to meet them. His visit to Voltaire is a distinct contribution to our knowledge of that sage; he admired Helvetius, and wondered how a man of so many virtues could have denied virtue; D’Alembert he thought the most truly modest man he had ever met, an interesting tribute from the most truly immodest man of that period. The value of Casanova’s record of the eighteenth century lies, however, by no means in the glimpses he has given us of great personalities: that has been much better done by much more insignificant writers. It is as a picture of the manners and customs of the eighteenth century throughout Europe that the Mémoires are invaluable. Casanova saw Europe from the courts of kings to the lowest bas fonds. He lived in the castles of French and Italian nobles, in the comfortable homes of Dutch merchants, in his own house in Pall Mall, in taverns and inns and peasants’ cottages anywhere. He had no intellectual prejudices, he had an immense versatility in tastes and practical aptitudes, he was genuinely interested in all human things. Thus he approached life with no stereotyped set of opinions, but with all the aloofness of an unclassed adventurer, who was at the same time a scholar and a man of letters. It can scarcely be that there is any record to compare with this as a vivid and impartial picture of the eighteenth century, in its robust solidity, its cheerful and tolerant scepticism, its serene and easy gaiety, its mellow decay. That is our final debt to this unique and immortal book.

What should be our last word about Casanova? It is true that although—if indeed one should not say because—he was so heroically natural Casanova was not an average normal man. It is scarcely given to the average man to expend such versatile and reckless skill in the field of the world, or to find so large a part wherein to play off that skill. But neither are the saints and philosophers normal; St. Bernard was not normal, nor yet Spinoza. And surely it is a poor picture of the world which would show us St. Bernard and Spinoza and shut out Casanova. “Vous avez l’outil universel,” Fabrice said to Gil Blas. Casanova’s brain was just such a tool of universal use, and he never failed to use it. For if you would find the supreme type of the human animal in the completest development of his rankness and cunning, in the very plenitude of his most excellent wits, I know not where you may more safely go than to the Mémoires of the self-ennobled Jacques Casanova Chevalier de Seingalt.