among these are several attempts at a preface, in which we see the
actual preface coming gradually into form. One is entitled _Casanova au
Lecteur_, another _Histoire de mon Existence_, and a third _Preface_.
There is also a brief and characteristic _Précis de ma vie_, dated
November 17, 1797. Some of these have been printed in _Le Livre_, 1887.
But by far the most important manuscript that I discovered, one which,
apparently, I am the first to discover, is a manuscript entitled
_Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5_. It is written on paper similar to that on
which the _Memoirs_ are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; and
though it is described as _Extrait_, it seems to contain, at all events,
the greater part of the missing chapters to which I have already
referred, Chapters IV. and V. of the last volume of the _Memoirs_. In
this manuscript we find Armelline and Scolastica, whose story is
interrupted by the abrupt ending of Chapter III.; we find Mariuccia of
Vol. VII., Chapter IX., who married a hairdresser; and we find also
Jaconine, whom Casanova recognises as his daughter, 'much prettier than
Sophia, the daughter of Thérèse Pompeati, whom I had left at London.'[3]
It is curious that this very important manuscript, which supplies the
one missing link in the _Memoirs_, should never have been discovered by
any of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over the
Dux manuscripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the case
in which I found this manuscript contains some papers not relating to
Casanova. Probably, those who looked into this case looked no further. I
have told Herr Brockhaus of my discovery, and I hope to see Chapters IV.
and V. in their places when the long-looked-for edition of the complete
text is at length given to the world.
Another manuscript which I found tells with great piquancy the whole
story of the Abbé de Brosses' ointment, the curing of the Princess de
Conti's pimples, and the birth of the Duc de Montpensier, which is told
very briefly, and with much less point, in the _Memoirs_ (vol. iii., p.
327). Readers of the _Memoirs_ will remember the duel at Warsaw with
Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted
a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account
in a letter from the Abbé Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati,
dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's _Life of
Albergati_, Bologna, 1878. A manuscript at Dux in Casanova's handwriting
gives an account of this duel in the third person; it is entitled,
_Description de l'affaire arrivée à Varsovie le 5 Mars, 1766_. D'Ancona,
in the _Nuova Antologia_ (vol. lxvii., p. 412), referring to the Abbé
Taruffi's account, mentions what he considers to be a slight
discrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the _danseuse_, about whom the duel
was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In
this manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is
evidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of the text.
In turning over another manuscript, I was caught by the name Charpillon,
which every reader of the _Memoirs_ will remember as the name of the
harpy by whom Casanova suffered so much in London, in 1763-4. This
manuscript begins by saying: 'I have been in London for six months and
have been to see them (that is, the mother and daughter) in their own
house,' where he finds nothing but 'swindlers, who cause all who go
there to lose their money in gambling.' This manuscript adds some
details to the story told in the ninth and tenth volumes of the
_Memoirs_, and refers to the meeting with the Charpillons four and a
half years before, described in Volume V., pages 482-485. It is written
in a tone of great indignation. Elsewhere, I found a letter written by
Casanova, but not signed, referring to an anonymous letter which he had
received in reference to the Charpillons, and ending: 'My handwriting is
known.' It was not until the last that I came upon great bundles of
letters addressed to Casanova, and so carefully preserved that little
scraps of paper, on which postscripts are written, are still in their
places. One still sees the seals on the backs of many of the letters, on
paper which has slightly yellowed with age, leaving the ink, however,
almost always fresh. They come from Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague,
Bayreuth, The Hague, Genoa, Fiume, Trieste, etc., and are addressed to
as many places, often _poste restante_. Many are letters from women,
some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on scraps of
paper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully,
imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins'
he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; another
laments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living with
him, which may harm _his_ reputation. Some are in French, more in
Italian. _Mon cher Giacometto_, writes one woman, in French; _Carissimo
e Amatissimo_, writes another, in Italian. These letters from women are
in some confusion, and are in need of a good deal of sorting over and
rearranging before their full extent can be realised. Thus I found
letters in the same handwriting separated by letters in other
handwritings; many are unsigned, or signed only by a single initial;
many are undated, or dated only with the day of the week or month. There
are a great many letters, dating from 1779 to 1786, signed 'Francesca
Buschini,' a name which I cannot identify; they are written in Italian,
and one of them begins: _Unico Mio vero Amico_ ('my only true friend').
Others are signed 'Virginia B.'; one of these is dated, 'Forli, October
15, 1773.' There is also a 'Theresa B.,' who writes from Genoa. I was at
first unable to identify the writer of a whole series of letters in
French, very affectionate and intimate letters, usually unsigned,
occasionally signed 'B.' She calls herself _votre petite amie_; or she
ends with a half-smiling, half-reproachful 'good-night, and sleep better
than I.' In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes: 'Never
believe me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall love
you always.' In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, she
writes: 'Be assured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing can
change my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to change its
master.' Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from Manon
Baletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volume
of the _Memoirs_. We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759,
Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriage
with 'M. Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy'; she
returns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them.
Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burn
them afterwards. Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters,
promising to 'preserve them religiously all her life.' 'These letters,'
he says, 'numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of four
pages.' Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seems
to me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon's
letters, and that it is these which I have found.
But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set of
letters which I was most anxious to find: the letters from Henriette,
whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented. Henriette, it will be
remembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748;
after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically _à propos_,
twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanova
proposing _un commerce épistolaire_, asking him what he has done since
his escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him all
that has happened to her during the long interval. After quoting her
letter, he adds: 'I replied to her, accepting the correspondence that
she offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes. She related
to me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life. If
she dies before me, I shall add these letters to these _Memoirs_; but
to-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old.' It has
never been known what became of these letters, and why they were not
added to the _Memoirs_. I have found a great quantity of them, some
signed with her married name in full, 'Henriette de Schnetzmann,' and I
am inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the letters
is dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova's death. They are
remarkably charming, written with a mixture of piquancy and
distinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end of
the last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No, it is impossible to
be sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious, it is you, my
Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even if I were
damned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de
Schnetzmann.' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now,
herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if
the fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithful
affection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovers
have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long
correspondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not
quite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, who
perhaps of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said:
True love in this differs from gold or clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most,
they were only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondence
which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was
afterwards to bring the manuscript of the _Memoirs_ to Brockhaus; from
Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the _Piombi_; from the
Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is
some account in the _Memoirs_; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished
man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same
volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from
Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, _bel
homme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le goût de la bonne société_, who
came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the
Procurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the _Memoirs_ as his
'protector,' and as one of those through whom he obtained permission to
return to Venice. His other 'protector,' the _avogador_ Zaguri, had,
says Casanova, 'since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on a
most interesting correspondence with me'; and in fact I found a bundle
of no less than a hundred and thirty-eight letters from him, dating
from 1784 to 1798. Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-two
letters from Count Lamberg. In the _Memoirs_ Casanova says, referring to
his visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761:
I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house
of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the
Prince-Bishop with the title of Grand Marshal. What particularly
attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent. A first-rate
scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much
esteemed works. I carried on an exchange of letters with him which
ended only with his death four years ago in 1792.
Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the early
part of 1767, he 'supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week,'
during the four months he was there. It is with this year that the
letters I have found begin: they end with the year of his death, 1792.
In his _Mémorial d'un Mondain_ Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man
known in literature, a man of profound knowledge.' In the first edition
of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet
have been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in the
second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice. Then
there are letters from Da Ponte, who tells the story of Casanova's
curious relations with Mme. d'Urfé, in his _Memorie scritte da esso_,
1829; from Pittoni, Bono, and others mentioned in different parts of the
_Memoirs_, and from some dozen others who are not mentioned in them. The
only letters in the whole collection that have been published are those
from the Prince de Ligne and from Count Koenig.
IV
Casanova tells us in his _Memoirs_ that, during his later years at Dux,
he had only been able to 'hinder black melancholy from devouring his
poor existence, or sending him out of his mind,' by writing ten or
twelve hours a day. The copious manuscripts at Dux show us how
persistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in
addition to the _Memoirs_, and to the various books which he published
during those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes into
his head, for his own amusement, and certainly without any thought of
publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on
abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before
Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages,
indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues
in which God and himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensive
correspondence, both with distinguished men and with delightful women.
His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as
the activity which he had expended in living a multiform and
incalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, so
in his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him;
and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had
welcomed adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remains
not less passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with every
one; and it is only after having spent seven years in heaping up
miscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions,
that he turns to look back over his own past life, and to live it over
again in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what had interested
him most in it. 'I write in the hope that my history will never see the
broad daylight of publication,' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we may
be sure, even in the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come to
him. But if ever a book was written for the pleasure of writing it, it
was this one; and an autobiography written for oneself is not likely to
be anything but frank.
'Truth is the only God I have ever adored,' he tells us: and we now know
how truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this article
the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and
dates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the manuscripts we
find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as
testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already
known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not always
easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about
themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Casanova as
he represents himself. It has been specially loth to believe that he is
telling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women. But
the letters contained among these manuscripts show us the women of
Casanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity which
he attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of as
fervid and faithful a lover. In every fact, every detail, and in the
whole mental impression which they convey, these manuscripts bring
before us the Casanova of the _Memoirs_. As I seemed to come upon
Casanova at home, it was as if I came upon an old friend, already
perfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux.
1902.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See the account of this visit to Holland, and the reference to
taking a passport, _Memoirs_, v. 238.
[2] See Charles Henry, _Les Connaissances Mathématiques de Casanova_.
Rome 1883.
[3] See _Memoirs_, ix. 272, _et seq._
JOHN DONNE
I
Biography as a fine art can go no further than Walton's _Life and Death
of Dr. Donne_. From the 'good and virtuous parents' of the first line to
the 'small quantity of Christian dust' of the last, every word is the
touch of a cunning brush painting a picture. The picture lives, and with
so vivid and gracious a life that it imposes itself upon us as the
portrait of a real man, faithfully copied from the man as he lived. But
that is precisely the art of the painter. Walton's picture is so
beautiful because everything in it is sacrificed to beauty; because it
is a convention, a picture in which life is treated almost as theme for
music. And so there remains an opportunity, even after this masterpiece,
for a life of Donne which shall make no pretence to harmonise a
sometimes discordant existence, or indeed to produce, properly speaking,
a piece of art at all; but which shall be faithful to the document, a
piece of history. Such a book has now been written by Mr. Gosse, in his
_Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's_. It is perhaps the
most solid and serious contribution which Mr. Gosse has made to English
literature, and we may well believe that it will remain the final
authority on so interesting and so difficult a subject. For the first
time, in the light of this clear analysis, and of these carefully
arranged letters, we are able, if not indeed to see Donne as he really
was, at all events to form our own opinion about every action of his
life. This is one of the merits of Mr. Gosse's book; he has collected
his documents, and he has given them to us as they are, guiding us
adroitly along the course of the life which they illustrate, but not
allowing himself to dogmatise on what must still remain conjectural. And
he has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest
importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a
very ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive,
somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so
tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh;
passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous,
large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloak
folded elegantly about his uncovered throat, or the ruff tightening
about his carefully trimmed beard; and ending with the ghastly emblem
set as a frontispiece to _Death's Duel_, the dying man wrapped already
in his shroud, which gathers into folds above his head, as if tied
together like the mouth of a sack, while the sunken cheeks and hollow
closed eyelids are mocked by the shapely moustache, brushed upwards from
the lips. In the beautiful and fanciful monument in St. Paul's done
after the drawing from which this frontispiece was engraved, there is
less ghastliness and a more harmonious beauty in the brave attitude of a
man who dresses for death as he would dress for Court, wearing the last
livery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them these
portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us
everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time;
and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so
simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as
fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem
to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling
creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we
try to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends.
Donne's mind, then, if I may make my own attempt to understand him, was
the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer; he is a
poet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in the
abstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because he
has observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellect
to satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh which
speaks in his verse, the curiosity of woman, which he has explored in
the same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him for
love's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally,
religion, taken up with the same intellectual interest, the same subtle
indifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. A
few poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries;
some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship or
for money. But he writes nothing 'out of his own head,' as we say;
nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake.
He speaks, in a letter, of 'descending to print anything in verse'; and
it is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry,
or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others.
He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the whole
force of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine,
he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means of
expressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prose
was another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events and
persons scarcely less important to him, in the building up of himself.
And he was interested in everything. At one moment he is setting himself
to study Oriental languages, a singularly difficult task in those days.
Both in poetry and divinity he has more Spanish than English books in
his library. Scientific and technical terms are constantly found in his
verse, where we should least expect them, where indeed they are least
welcome. In _Ignatius--his Conclave_ he speaks with learned enthusiasm
of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and of his own immediate contemporaries,
then but just become famous, Galileo ('who of late hath summoned the
other worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account
of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no
new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes
himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an
hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At
twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on
the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over
many parts of the Continent, with rich patrons or on diplomatic offices.
Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrote
books on controversial subjects, against his old party, before he had
taken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbid
speculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's training
for dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the dark
business of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in the
midst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I must
shipwreck, I would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency might
have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so
much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something,
but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a
planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he
confesses later in the same letter.
No doubt some of this feverish activity, this uncertainty of aim, was a
matter of actual physical health. It is uncertain at what time the
wasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems
to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times
depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole
organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him
to write his _Biathanatos_, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and
at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying,
was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to
which so many of his poems and so many of his letters bear witness.
'Sometimes,' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myself
transported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels,
and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, of
a friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of a
family; when sadness dejects me, either I countermine it with another
sadness, or I kindle squibs about me again, and fly into sportfulness
and company.'