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.
“Singing is sweet; but be sure of this,
Lips only sing when they cannot kiss.”
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.