Chapter III: Preface (3)

Nietzsche was not, however, greatly interested in questions of government; he was far more deeply interested in questions of morals. In his treatment of morals--no doubt chiefly in the last period--there is a certain element of paradox. It must again be pointed out that this is to be explained by the organic demands of Nietzsche’s own nature. In attacking the excessive tendency to sympathy which he seemed to see around him he was hygienically defending himself from his own excessive sympathy. His sister quotes with a smile the declaration that his Paradise lay beneath the shadow of his sword; we scarcely need her assurance of his tender-hearted sensitiveness. He could attack relentlessly, but he never attacked a person save as the symbol of what he regarded as a false principle held in undeserved honour. When he realised that the subject of such attack was really a living person he was full of remorse. He attacked Strauss because Strauss was the successful representative of a narrow ideal of culture; a few months later Strauss died, having, it now appears, borne the onset philosophically enough, and Nietzsche was full of grief lest he had embittered the dying man’s last hours. It was because he had himself suffered from the excesses of his own sympathy that he was able so keenly to analyse the secrets of sympathy. He spoke as the Spanish poet says that every poet--and indeed every seer--must always speak, _por la boca de su herida_, through the mouth of his wound. That is why his voice is often so poignantly intimate; it is also why we sometimes find this falsetto note of paradox. In his last period, Nietzsche grows altogether impatient of morals, calls himself an immoralist, fervently exhorts us to become wickeder. But if any young disciple came to the teacher asking, “What must I do to become wickeder?” it does not appear that Nietzsche bade him to steal, bear false witness, commit adultery, or do any other of the familiar and commonly-accepted wickednesses. Nietzsche preached wickedness with the same solemn exaltation that Carducci lauded Satan. What he desired was far indeed from any rehabilitation of easy vice; it was the justification of neglected and unsanctified virtues.

At the same time, and while Nietzsche’s immoralist is just as austere a person as the mere moralists who have haunted the world for many thousand years, it is clear that Nietzsche wished strictly to limit the sphere of morals. He never fails to point out how large a region of life and art lies legitimately outside the moral jurisdiction. In an age in which many moralists desire to force morals into every part of life and art--and even assume a certain air of virtue in so doing--the “immoralist” who lawfully vindicates any region for free cultivation is engaged in a proper and wholesome task.

No doubt, however, there will be some to question the value of such a task. Nietzsche the immoralist can scarcely be welcome in every camp, although he remains always a force to be reckoned with. The same may be said of Nietzsche the freethinker. He was, perhaps, the typical freethinker of the age that comes after Renan. Nietzsche had nothing of Renan’s genial scepticism and smiling disillusionment; he was less tender to human weakness, for all his long Christian ancestry less Christian, than the Breton seminarist remained to the last. He seems to have shaken himself altogether free of Christianity--so free, that except in his last period he even speaks of it without bitterness--though by no means wholly untouched by that nostalgia of the cloister which now and then pursues even those of us who are farthest from any faith in Christian dogma. He never sought, as among ourselves Pater sought, the germ of Christianity in things pagan, the undying essence of paganism in things Christian. Heathen as he was, I do not think even Heine’s visions of the gods in exile could have touched him; he never felt the charm of fading and faded things. It is remarkable. It is scarcely less remarkable that, far as he was from Christianity, he was equally far from what we usually call “paganism,” the pasteboard paganism of easy self-indulgence and cheerful irresponsibility. It was not so that he understood Hellenism. Matthew Arnold once remarked that the Greeks were never sick or sad. Nietzsche knew better. The greater part of Greek literature bears witness that the Hellenes were for ever wrestling with the problems of pain. And none who came after have more poignantly uttered the pangs of human affairs, or more sweetly the consolations of those pangs, than the great disciples of the Greeks who created the Roman world. The classic world of nymphs and fauns is an invention of the moderns. The real classic world, like the modern world, was a world of suffering. The difference lay in the method of facing that suffering. Nietzsche chose the classic method from no desire to sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but because he had known forms of torture for which the mild complacencies of modern faith seemed to offer no relief. If we must regard Nietzsche as a pagan, it is as the Pascal of paganism. The freethinker, it is true, was more cheerful and hopeful than the believer, but there is the same tragic sincerity, the same restless self-torment, the same sense of the abyss.[4]

There still remains Nietzsche, the apostle of culture, the philosopher engaged in the criticism of life. From first to last, wherever you open his books, you light on sayings that cut to the core of the questions that every modern thinking man must face. I take, almost at random, a few passages from a single book: of convictions he writes that “a man possesses opinions as he possesses fish, in so far as he owns a fishing-net; a man must go fishing and be lucky, then he has his own fish, his own opinions; I speak of living opinions, living fish. Some men are content to possess fossils in their cabinets--and convictions in their heads.” Of the problem of the relation of science to culture he says well: “The best and wholesomest thing in science, as in mountains, is the air that blows there. It is because of that air that we spiritual weaklings avoid and defame science;” and he points out that the work of science--with its need for sincerity, infinite patience, complete self-abnegation--calls for men of nobler make than poetry needs. When we have learnt to trust science and to learn from it, then it will be possible so to tell natural history that “every one who hears it is inspired to health and gladness as the heir and continuer of humanity.” This is how he rebukes those foolish persons who grow impatient with critics: “Remember that critics are insects who only sting to live and not to hurt: they want our blood and not our pain.” And he utters this wise saying, himself forgetting it in later years: “Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness.” Nietzsche desires to prove nothing, and is reckless of consistency. He looks at every question that comes before him with the same simple, intent, penetrative gaze, and whether the aspects that he reveals are new or old, he seldom fails to bring us a fresh stimulus. Culture, as he understood it, consists for the modern man in the task of choosing the simple and indispensable things from the chaos of crude material which to-day overwhelms us. The man who will live at the level of the culture of his time is like the juggler who must keep a number of plates spinning in the air; his life must be a constant training in suppleness and skill so that he may be a good athlete. But he is also called on to exert his skill in the selection and limitation of his task. Nietzsche is greatly occupied with the simplification of culture. Our suppleness and skill must be exercised alone on the things that are vital, essential, primitive; the rest may be thrown aside. He is for ever challenging the multifarious materials for culture, testing them with eye and hand; we cannot prove them too severely, he seems to say, nor cast aside too contemptuously the things that a real man has no need of for fine living. What must I do to be saved? What do I need for the best and fullest life?--that is the everlasting question that the teacher of life is called upon to answer. And we cannot be too grateful to Nietzsche for the stern penetration--the more acute for his ever-present sense of the limits of energy--with which he points from amid the mass to the things which most surely belong to our eternal peace.

Nietzsche’s style has often been praised. The style was certainly the man. There can be little doubt, moreover, that there is scarcely any other German style to compare with it, though such eminence means far less in a country where style has rarely been cultivated than it would mean in France or even England. Sallust awoke his sense for style, and may account for some characteristics of his style. He also enthusiastically admired Horace as the writer who had produced the maximum of energy with the minimum of material. A concentrated Roman style, significant and weighty at every point, _ære perennius_, was always his ideal. Certainly the philologist’s aptitudes helped here to teach him the value and force of words, as jewels for the goldsmith to work with, and not as mere worn-out counters to slip through the fingers. One may call it a muscular style, a style wrought with the skilful strength of hand and arm. It scarcely appeals to the ear. It lacks the restful simplicity of the greatest masters, the plangent melody, the seemingly unconscious magic quivering along our finest-fibred nerves. Such effects we seem to hear now and again in Schopenhauer, but rarely or never from any other German. This style is titanic rather than divine, but the titanic virtues it certainly possesses in fullest measure: robust and well-tempered vigour, concentration, wonderful plastic force in moulding expression. It becomes over-emphatic at last. When Nietzsche threw aside the dancer’s ideal in order to “philosophise with the hammer,” the result on his style was as disastrous as on his thought; both alike took on the violent and graceless character of the same implement. He speaks indeed of the virtue of hitting a nail on the head, but it is a less skilled form of virtue than good dancing.

Whether he was dancing or hammering, however, Nietzsche certainly converted the whole of himself into his work, as in his view every philosopher is bound to do, “for just that art of transformation _is_ philosophy.” That he was entirely successful in being a “real man” one may doubt. His excessive sensitiveness to the commonplace in life, and his deficiency in the sexual instinct--however highly he may have rated the importance of sex in life--largely cut him off from true fellowship with the men who are most “real” to us. He was less tolerant and less humane than his master Goethe; his incisive insight, and, in many respects, better intellectual equipment, are more than compensated by this lack of breadth. But, as his friend the historian Burckhardt has said, he worked mightily for the increase of independence in the world. Every man, indeed, works with the limitations of his qualities, just as we all struggle beneath the weight of the superincumbent atmosphere; our defects are even a part of our qualities, and it would be foolish to quarrel with them. Nietzsche succeeded in being himself, and it was a finely rare success. Whether he was a “real man” matters less. With passionate sincerity he expressed his real self and his best self, abhorring, on the one hand, what with Voltaire and Verlaine he called “literature,” and, on the other, all that mere indigested material, the result of mental dyspepsia, of which he regarded Carlyle as the supreme warning. A man’s real self, as he repeated so often, consists of the things which he has truly digested and assimilated; he must always “conquer” his opinions; it is only such conquests which he has the right to report to men as his own. His thoughts are born of his pain; he has imparted to them of his own blood, his own pleasure and torment. Nietzsche himself held that suffering and even disease are almost indispensable to the philosopher; great pain is the final emancipator of the spirit, those great slow pains that take their time, and burn us up like green wood. “I doubt whether such pain betters us,” he remarks, “but I know that it deepens us.” That is the stuff of Nietzsche’s Hellenism, as expressed in the most lighthearted of his books. _Virescit volnere virtus._ It is that which makes him, when all is said, a great critic of life.

It is a consolation to many--I have seen it so stated in a respectable review--that Nietzsche went mad. No doubt also it was once a consolation to many that Socrates was poisoned, that Jesus was crucified, that Bruno was burnt. But hemlock and the cross and the stake proved sorry weapons against the might of ideas even in those days, and there is no reason to suppose that a doctor’s certificate will be more effectual in our own. Of old time we killed our great men as soon as their visionary claims became inconvenient; now, in our mercy, we leave the tragedy of genius to unroll itself to the bitter close. The devils to whom the modern Faustus is committed have waxed cunning with the ages. Nietzsche has met, in its most relentless form, the fate of Pascal and Swift and Rousseau. That fact may carry what weight it will in any final estimate of his place as a moral teacher: it cannot touch his position as an aboriginal force. He remains in the first rank of the distinguished and significant personalities our century has produced.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This statement (made at the end of 1895) has ceased to be true, but it explains the genesis of this study, and I leave it standing.]

[Footnote 2: The most convincing word-portrait of Nietzsche I have met with (by M. Schuré) dates from the visit to Bayreuth:--“I was struck both by the superiority of his intellect and the strangeness of his face. A broad forehead, short hair brushed back, the prominent cheek-bones of the Slav. The heavy moustache and the bold outline of the face would have given him the aspect of a cavalry officer if it had not been for his timid and haughty air. The musical voice and slow speech indicated the artist’s organisation, while the circumspect meditative carriage was that of a philosopher. Nothing more deceptive than the apparent calm of his expression. The fixed eye revealed the painful travail of thought. It was at once the eye of an acute observer and a fanatical visionary. The double character of this gaze produced a disquieted and disquieting impression, all the more so since it seemed to be always fixed on a single point. In moments of effusion this gaze was softened to a dream-like sweetness, but soon became hostile again.” This picture is confirmed by Nietzsche’s sister, who also refers to his “unusually large, beautiful, and brilliant eyes.”]

[Footnote 3: One may be allowed to regret that Nietzsche was not equally discriminating in his judgment of our country. Had he not been blinded by the spiritual plebeianism of the nineteenth century in England, he might also have discerned in certain periods some of the same ardent and heroic qualities which he recognised in sixteenth century France, the more easily since at that time the same Renaissance wave had effected a considerable degree of spiritual union between France and England. In George Chapman, for instance, at his finest and lucidest moments the typical ethical representative of our greatest literary age, Nietzsche would have found a man after his own heart, not only one who scarcely yielded to himself in generous admiration of the great qualities of the French spirit but a man of “absolute and full soul” who was almost a precursor of his own “immoralism,” a lover of freedom, of stoic self-reliance, one who was ever seeking to enlarge the discipline of a fine culture in the direction of moral freedom and dignity.]

[Footnote 4: Pater’s description of the transition we may trace from the easy prose of Pascal’s first book to the “perpetual _agonia_” of his later work, applies with scarcely a change to the similar transition in Nietzsche:--“Everywhere in the _Letters_ he had seemed so great a master--a master of himself--never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with so light a heart: in the great Atlantean travail of the _Thoughts_ his feet sometimes ‘are almost gone.’ In his soul’s agony theological abstractions seem to become personal powers.... In truth, into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem, of the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not merely the personal feelings, the temperament of an individual, but his malady also, a physical malady.”]

CASANOVA.

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.

I.

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.

II.

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.