_Concerning my Physical and Mental Qualities._
In the course of these Memoirs I have promised more than once to give an
exact description of my external appearance and internal qualities, and
also to narrate the story of my love-affairs.
In stature I am tall. Of this I am made conscious by the large amount of
cloth needed for my cloaks, and by the frequent knocks I give my
forehead on entering rooms with low doors. I have the good luck to be
neither crook-backed, lame, blind, nor squint-eyed. I call this good
luck; and yet if I were afflicted with one or other of these
deformities, I should bear it with the same lightness of heart at Venice
as Scarron put up with his deformities in Paris.
This is all I know or have to say about my physical frame. From early
youth I have left to women the trouble of telling me that I was
handsome with a view to flatter me, or that I was ugly with a view to
irritate, in neither of which attempts have they succeeded. Dirt and
squalor I always loathed. Otherwise, if I ever chanced to wear clothes
of a new cut, this was due to my tailor, and not to my orders. Ask
Giuseppe Fornace, my rogue of a snip for over forty years, if I ever
racked my brains about such matters, as so many do. From the year 1735
to 1780, at which date I am writing, I stuck to the same mode of
dressing my hair with heroic constancy. Fashion has changed perhaps a
hundred times during this period, yet I have never deviated from my
adopted style of coiffure. In like manner I have worn the same type of
buckles; except when I happened to break a pair, and was forced to
change them from square to oval; and then I did so at the instance of
the goldsmith, who made me take the lightest in his shop, because they
would break sooner and give him more to do in mending them.
Men who talk little and think much, to which class, peradventure, I
belong, being immersed in their own meditations, catch the habit of
knitting their brows in the travail of reflection. This gives them an
air of savagery, sternness, almost ferocity. Though I am gay by nature,
as appears from my published writings, yet the innumerable thoughts
which kept my brains in a turmoil, through anxieties about our family,
lawsuits, schemes of economy, literary plans, and so forth, bred in me
a trick of contracting my forehead and frowning, which, combined with my
slow gait, taciturnity, and preference for solitary places, won me the
reputation among those who were not my familiar friends of being a
surly, sullen, unapproachable fellow, perhaps even an enemy of mankind.
Many who have come upon me, pondering, with knitted brows and gloomy
downcast eyes, will have suspected that I was planning how to kill an
enemy, while really I was constructing the plot of my _Green Bird_.
In the society of people new to me, I always appeared drowsy, stupid,
silent, and lethargic, until I had studied their characters and ways of
thinking. Afterwards I turned out quite the opposite; not, however, that
I may not have remained a fool; but I was one of those fools who utter
laconisms, less tiresome to the company than interminable flowery
speeches.
I was not miserly, because I always loathed that vice, nor prodigal, for
the sole reason that I was not rich. I cannot form any conception of the
influence which wealth might have exercised over my imagination and my
moral nature, both being doubtless not more free from foibles than in
the case of other men and women.
I might have earned considerably by my numerous published works, but I
made a present of them all to comedians and booksellers, or to persons
who sought to profit by giving them to the press. Perhaps I shall not
be believed when I say that I invariably refused such profit for myself.
Yet this is the fact. Some who are aware that I was far from rich, will
take me to task for my indifference to gain; they will attribute my
generosity to vainglory or to stupidity. I had, however, my own reasons,
which were as follows. My writings were always marked by freedom,
boldness, pungency, and satire upon public manners; at the same time,
moral and playful in expression. Being unpaid, they gained the advantage
of a certain decent independence, which secured for them toleration,
appreciation, and applause on their own merits. Had I been paid for
them, they would have lost their prestige; my antagonists might have
stigmatised them as a parcel of insufferable mercenary calumnies, and I
should have been exposed to universal odium.
In addition to this: there is no degradation for men of letters in Italy
worse than that of writing for hire in the employ of publishers or of
our wretched comedians. The publishers begin by caressing authors, with
a view to getting hold of their works; then they turn round and cast
their pretended losses in the author's teeth. To hear them, you would
imagine that books for which they had begged on their knees before they
sent them to press, were now a load of useless stones encumbering their
shelves. The wretched pence they fling at a writer for some masterpiece
on which he has distilled the best part of his brains, are doled out
with the air of bestowing alms. More fuss is made about it, and it costs
more effort, than if the money were being paid for masses for the dead,
who have no need to clothe and feed themselves. All this is bad enough.
But Apollo protect a poet from being reduced to serve a troop of our
comedians at wages! There is not a galley-slave more abjectly condemned
to servitude than he. There is not a stevedore who carries half the
weight that he does; not an ass who gets more blows and fouler language,
if his drama fails to draw the whole world in a fever of excitement to
the theatre.
For these reasons, I have always shrunk from letting out my pen to hire.
On the frequent occasions when family affairs and litigation have
emptied my purse, I always chose rather to borrow from friends than to
plunge into the mire and rake up a few filthy stinking sequins. In the
one case I incurred the pleasing burden of gratitude to my obligers; in
the second I should have bent beneath the weight of shameful
self-abasement.
Not even the brotherly terms on which I lived with comedians, nor my
free gift to them through five-and-twenty years of all my writings for
the stage, preserved me from the acts of ingratitude, and the annoyances
which are described in the ensuing chapters of my Memoirs. Think then
what would have become of me if I had been their salaried poet!
Italy lacks noblemen, to play the part of Mecaenas, and to protect men of
letters and the theatre. Had there been such, and had they thought me
worthy of their munificence, I should not have blushed to receive it.
Knowing my country, however, and Venice in particular, I never allowed
myself to indulge flattering dreams of any such honourable patronage.
Sustained by my natural keen sense of the ludicrous, I have never even
felt saddened by seeing the morality, which I held for sound and sought
to diffuse through my writings, turned upside down by the insidious
subtleties and sophisms of our century. On the contrary, it amused me
vastly to notice how all the men and all the women of this age believed
in good faith that they had become philosophers. It has afforded me a
constant source of indescribable recreation to study the fantastic
jargons which have sprung up like mushrooms, the obscure and forced ways
of expressing thoughts, spawned by misty self-styled science, invested
with bombastic terms and phrases alien to the genius of our language.
Not less have I diverted myself with the spectacle of all the various
passions to which humanity is subject, suddenly unleashed, playing their
parts with the freedom of emancipated imps, let loose from their
hiding-place by famous discoverers--just like those devils in the tale
of Bonaventura des Periers, whom Solomon sealed up in a caldron and
buried beneath the ground until a pack of wiseacres dug them up and sent
them scampering across the world again.[1]
The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both
men and women turned into monkeys; all of them immersed in discoveries
and inventions and the kaleidoscopic whirligigs of fashion; corrupting
and seducing one another with the eagerness of hounds upon the scent;
vying in their lusts and ruinous extravagances; destroying the fortunes
of their families by turns; laughing at Plato and Petrarch; leaving real
sensibility to languish in disuse, and giving its respectable name to
the thinly veiled brutality of the senses; turning indecency into
decency; calling all who differ from them hypocrites, and burning
incense with philosophical solemnity to Priapus:--these things ought
perhaps to have presented themselves to my eyes in the form of a
lamentable tragedy; yet I could never see in them more than a farce,
which delighted while it stupefied me.
I have made but few intimate friendships, being of opinion that a man of
many friends is the real friend of none. Neither time, nor distance,
nor even occasional rudeness, interrupted the rare friendships which I
contracted for life, and which are still as firm as ever.
Now and then, I have given way to angry impulses on sustaining affronts
or injuries; and at such times men of phlegmatic temper are more decided
in their action than the irascible. Reflection, however, always calmed
me down; nor was I ever disposed to endure the wretchedness which comes
from fostering rancour or meditating revenge.
I am inclined to laugh both at _esprits faibles_, who believe in
everything, and at _esprits forts_, who pretend that they believe in
nothing. Yet I hold that the latter are really weaker, and I am sure
that they do more harm, than the former.
Notwithstanding my invincible habit of laughing, I am firmly persuaded
that man is a sublimely noble animal, raised infinitely far above the
brutes. Consequently I could not condescend to regard myself as a bit of
dung or mud, a dog or a pig, in the humble manner of freethinkers. In
spite of all the pernicious systems generated by men of ambitious and
seductive intellect, we are forced to believe ourselves higher in the
scale of beings, and more perfect, than they are willing to admit.
Although we may not be able to define with certainty what we are, we
know at any rate beyond all contradiction what we are not. Let the
freethinking pigs and hens rout in their mud and scratch in their
midden; let us laugh and quiz them, or weep and pity them; but let us
hold fast to the beliefs transmitted to us by an august line of
philosophers, far wiser, far more worthy of attention, than these sages
of the muck and dungheap. The modern caprice of turning all things
topsy-turvy, which makes Epicure an honest man, Seneca an impostor;
which holds up Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Mirabeau, &c., to our
veneration, while it pours contempt upon the fathers of the Church; this
and all the other impious doctrines scattered broadcast in our century
by sensual fanatics, more fit for the madhouse than the university, have
no fascination for my mind. I contemplate the disastrous influence
exercised by atheism over whole nations. This confirms me still more in
the faith of my forefathers. When I think of those fanatics, the sages
of the muck and midden, when I think of mankind deceived by them, I
repeat in their behoof the sacred words of Christ upon the cross:
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Finally, I
assert that I have always kept alive in me the flame of our august
religion, and that this has been for me my greatest stay and solace
during every affliction. The philosophers of the moment may laugh at me;
I am quite contented for them to regard me as a dullard, besotted by
what they choose to stigmatise as prejudice.