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.