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.