The more I contemplate the eighteenth century the more interesting I
find it. In my youth it seemed to me unworthy of a glance. The books
and the men, Shelley above all, who stirred my young blood belonged to
the early nineteenth century. I was led to regard the last century as
a dull period of stagnation and decay, a tomb into which the spirit
of man sank after the slow death which followed the Renaissance. The
dawn of the nineteenth century was an Easter Day of the human soul,
rising from the sepulchre and flinging aside the old eighteenth century
winding-sheet.
I have nothing yet to say against the early nineteenth century, which
was indeed only the outcome of the years that went before, but I have
gained a new delight in the men of the eighteenth century. It was in
that age that the English spirit found its most complete intellectual
expression, unaffected by foreign influence. When that spirit, reviving
after the wars that lamentably cut short the development of Chaucer’s
magnificent song, again began its free literary development--no doubt
with some stimulus from Humanism--it was suddenly smothered at birth
by the Renaissance wave from Italy and France. We may divine how it
would have developed independently if we think of John Heywood’s
dramatic sketches--pale as those are after the Miller’s tale in which
for the first and last time Chaucer perfectly mated English realism to
the lyric grace of English idealism--and to some extent, also, when
we turn to the later Heywood’s plays, or Dekker’s, and especially to
the robust and tolerant humanity, the sober artistic breadth of the
one play of Porter’s which has come down to us. But the intoxicating
melodies of Ronsard and his fellows were heard from over sea, and the
men of the English Renaissance arose--Lyly and Lodge and Campion with
their refinements, Greene and Nash with their gay and brilliant music,
Marlowe with his arrogant, irresistible energy--and brought to birth
an absolutely new spirit, which may have been English enough in its
rich and virginal elements, but received the seminal principle from
abroad. It needed a century and more for that magnificent tumult to
subside, and for the old English spirit to reappear and reach at last
full maturity, by happy chance again in association with France, though
this time it is England that chiefly plays the masculine part and
impregnates France. Thus the eighteenth century was an age in which the
English spirit found complete self-expression, and also an age in which
England and France joined hands intellectually, and stood together at
the summit of civilisation, with no rivals, unless Goethe and Kant may
suffice to stand for a whole people. In the great Englishmen of these
days we find the qualities which are truly native to Britain, and which
have too often been torn and distracted by insane aberrations. There
is a fine sobriety and sagacity in the English spirit, a mellow human
solidity, such as the Romans possessed always, but which we in our
misty and storm-swept island have often exchanged, perhaps for better,
but certainly for other qualities. It was not so in the eighteenth
century, and by no accident the historian who has most finely expressed
the genius of Rome was an eighteenth century Englishman. All the most
typical men of that age possessed in varying degree the same qualities:
Locke, Swift, Fielding, Hume, Richardson, Goldsmith, Hogarth, Johnson,
Godwin. Thus the eighteenth century should undoubtedly be a source of
pride to the British heart. England’s reputation in the world rests
largely on our poetic aptitudes and our political capacity. Eighteenth
century England is not obviously pre-eminent in either respect,
although it was the great age of our political development and the
seed-time of our second great poetic age; it produced scarcely more
than a single first-class poet exclusively within its limits, and it
lost America. Yet our greatest philosopher, our greatest historian,
our greatest biographer, nearly all our greatest novelists, our great
initiators in painting, who were indirectly the initiators of the
greater art of France, belong wholly to this century, and an unequalled
cluster of our greatest poets belongs to its close. And these men were
marked by sanity and catholicity, a superb solidity of spirit; they
became genuinely cosmopolitan without losing any of their indigenous
virtues. Without the eighteenth century we should never have known
many of the greatest qualities which are latent, and too often only
latent, in our race. Landor and Wordsworth alone were left to carry
something of the spirit of the English eighteenth century far on into
the literature of our own wholly alien century.
And their brothers of France were their most worthy peers. This spirit,
indeed, which we see so conspicuously in the finest men of their age
in England and France, was singularly widespread throughout Europe, a
cheerful sobriety, a solid humanity, little troubled by any of those
“movements” which were to become so prolific and so noisy in the next
century. Christianity, it seemed, was decaying. Diderot, well informed
on English affairs, wrote to a friend that in a few years it would be
extinct, and looking at the state of the English Church at that time,
no one could reasonably have surmised that Zinzendorf in Germany,
and after him Wesley in England on a lower plane and Law on a higher
plane, had already initiated that revival of Christianity which in
our own century was destined to work itself out so obstreperously.
But the world seemed none the worse for the apparent subsidence
of Christianity; in the opinion of many it seemed to be very much
the better. The tolerant paganism of classic days appeared to be
reasserting itself, robustly in England, with a delicate refinement
in France,--setting the paganism of Watteau against the paganism
of Fielding--while Goethe and the Germans generally were striving
to rescue and harmonise the best of Christianity with the best of
antiquity. European civilisation was fully expanded; for a long time
no great disturbing force had arisen, and though on every side the
tender buds of coming growths might have been detected, they could not
yet reveal their strength. Such a period certainly has its terrible
defects; mellowness is not far from rottenness. But then youth also has
its defects, and its crude acidity is still further from perfection.
The nineteenth century has a higher moral standard than the eighteenth,
so at least we in our self-righteousness have been accustomed to
think. But even if so, the abstract existence of a high moral standard
is another thing from the prevalence of high moral living. Whatever
the standard may be, it is a question whether the lives are much
different. In the one case the standard is much above the practice,
in the other only a little above it--that is the chief difference.
And the advantages of winding the standard up to the higher pitch are
not so unmixed as is sometimes assumed. One need not question these
advantages, well recognised in the present century. But the advantages
of a lower standard are less often recognised. There is especially
the great advantage that we attain a higher degree of sincerity, and
sincerity, if not itself the prime virtue, is surely, whatever the
virtue may be, its chief accompaniment. A life that is swathed and
deformed in much drapery is not so wholesome or so effective as one
that can live nearer to the sun. And the unrecognisable villain is
most pernicious; the brigand who holds a revolver at your head is
better than the sleek and well-dressed thief who opens the proceedings
with prayer. The eighteenth has been called a gross and unintelligent
century. In the department of criticism, indeed, this century in
England (for it was far otherwise in Germany) comes very short of our
own century, and it is largely this failure to measure the precise
value of things in æsthetic perception which now makes that age seem
so shocking. From this point of view every great age--and not least
our own greatest Elizabethan age--is equally defective. A period
of energetic life cannot afford to spend much time on the solitary
contemplation of its own bowels of æsthetic emotion. To produce a Pater
is the one exquisite function of a spiritually barren and exhausted
age. And still the eighteenth century redeems its critical grossness
by making even this later development possible; it lifted the man of
letters from the place of a dependent to the place of a free man boldly
prophesying in his own right; and, moreover, it was the first century
which dared to claim the complete equality of men and women with all
which that involves.
If it has required a certain insight for the child of our own century
to discover the great qualities of the last century, there cannot be
much doubt about the final judgment of the most competent judges.
The eighteenth was, as Renouvier has called it, the first century
of humanity since Christ, while at the same time, as Lange has said,
it was penetrated through by the search for the ideal, or, as a more
recent thinker concludes, it was a century dominated by the maxim
_Salus populi suprema est lex_, holding in its noble aspirations
after general happiness the germs of all modern socialism. In art and
literature it saw the fresh spring of those blossoms which opened so
splendidly and faded so swiftly in our century; it was the century not
only of Hogarth and Fielding and Voltaire, but of Blake and Rousseau,
of Diderot, of Swedenborg and Mesmer, of the development of modern
music with Mozart and Beethoven, of the unparalleled enthusiasm
awakened by the discovery of the Keltic world. And as its crowning
glory the eighteenth century claims Goethe. Men will scarcely look
back to our own century as so good to live in. One may well say that
he would have gladly lived in the thirteenth century, perhaps the most
interesting of all since Christ, or in the sixteenth, probably the most
alive of all, or the eighteenth, surely the most human. But why have
lived in the nineteenth, the golden age of machinery, and of men used
as machines?
Eighteenth century Europe, being what it was, formed a perfect stage
for Casanova to play his part on. With his Spanish and Italian blood,
he was of the race of those who had come so actively to the front
in the last days of old classic Rome, and his immediate ancestors
had lived in the centre of the pagan Rome of the Renaissance. Thus
he carried with him traditions which consorted well with much in
the eighteenth century. And he had that in him, moreover, which no
tradition can give, the incommunicable vitality in the presence of
which all tradition shrivels into nothingness.
Casanova knew not only Italy, France, England, Germany, and Holland;
he had visited Spain, Russia, Poland, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor.
He was received by Benedict XII., by Frederick II. of Prussia, by the
Empress Catherine, by Joseph II. He was at home in Paris, in London,
in Berlin, in Vienna; he knew Munich, Dresden, Moscow, St. Petersburg,
Warsaw, Barcelona. His picture of London is of great interest. He
spent much of the year 1763 there, and some of his most interesting
experiences, romantic and psychological, occurred during that period.
He even dated the close of what he calls the second act in the comedy
of his life from that visit to London, the next and concluding act
being one of slow declination. So profound was his depression at this
time that one day he went towards the Thames at the Tower with the
deliberate intention of drowning himself, having first filled his
pockets with bullets to ensure sinking. Fortunately an English friend
(to whom the world owes thanks) met him on the way, read his resolve
in his face, and insisted on carrying him off to a very convivial
party, whose indecorous proceedings, although Casanova only remained
a passive witness, served to dissipate all thoughts of suicide. He
is not, however, prejudiced against England; on the contrary, he
finds that no nation offers so many interesting peculiarities to the
attentive observer. As usual, in London Casanova mixed indiscriminately
with the best and the worst society; his wit, his knowledge, his
imperturbable effrontery, his charming conversation, served to open
any door that he desired to open. He gives us curious glimpses into
the lives of English noblemen of the day, and not less intimate
pictures of the _chevaliers d’industrie_ who preyed upon them.
In the course of one adventure with people of the latter sort he was
haled before the eminent blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, whom
he seems to have mistaken, though this is not quite clear, for his
yet more eminent brother Henry. He also met Kitty Fischer, the most
fashionable _cocotte_ of her day, whom we may yet see as Reynolds
caught her in a well-inspired moment, dilating her sensitive nostrils,
radiantly inhaling the joy of life, and he tells us anecdotes of her
extravagance, of the jewels she wore, of the thousand guinea banknote
which she ate in a sandwich.[6]
Throughout Europe Casanova knew many of the most celebrated people
of his time, though it is clear--as one would expect from a man of
his impartial humanity--he seldom went out of his way to meet them.
His visit to Voltaire is a distinct contribution to our knowledge
of that sage; he admired Helvetius, and wondered how a man of so
many virtues could have denied virtue; D’Alembert he thought the
most truly modest man he had ever met, an interesting tribute from
the most truly immodest man of that period. The value of Casanova’s
record of the eighteenth century lies, however, by no means in the
glimpses he has given us of great personalities: that has been much
better done by much more insignificant writers. It is as a picture of
the manners and customs of the eighteenth century throughout Europe
that the _Mémoires_ are invaluable. Casanova saw Europe from
the courts of kings to the lowest _bas fonds_. He lived in the
castles of French and Italian nobles, in the comfortable homes of
Dutch merchants, in his own house in Pall Mall, in taverns and inns
and peasants’ cottages anywhere. He had no intellectual prejudices,
he had an immense versatility in tastes and practical aptitudes, he
was genuinely interested in all human things. Thus he approached life
with no stereotyped set of opinions, but with all the aloofness of an
unclassed adventurer, who was at the same time a scholar and a man of
letters. It can scarcely be that there is any record to compare with
this as a vivid and impartial picture of the eighteenth century, in its
robust solidity, its cheerful and tolerant scepticism, its serene and
easy gaiety, its mellow decay. That is our final debt to this unique
and immortal book.
What should be our last word about Casanova? It is true that
although--if indeed one should not say because--he was so heroically
natural Casanova was not an average normal man. It is scarcely given
to the average man to expend such versatile and reckless skill in the
field of the world, or to find so large a part wherein to play off that
skill. But neither are the saints and philosophers normal; St. Bernard
was not normal, nor yet Spinoza. And surely it is a poor picture of
the world which would show us St. Bernard and Spinoza and shut out
Casanova. “Vous avez l’outil universel,” Fabrice said to Gil Blas.
Casanova’s brain was just such a tool of universal use, and he never
failed to use it. For if you would find the supreme type of the human
animal in the completest development of his rankness and cunning, in
the very plenitude of his most excellent wits, I know not where you may
more safely go than to the _Mémoires_ of the self-ennobled Jacques
Casanova Chevalier de Seingalt.