Figures of Several Centuries Part 2

It may be remembered that Casanova quarrelled with Voltaire, because Voltaire had told him frankly that his translation of _L'ecossaise_ was a bad translation. It is piquant to read another note written in this style of righteous indignation:

Voltaire, the hardy Voltaire, whose pen is without bit or bridle; Voltaire, who devoured the Bible, and ridiculed our dogmas, doubts, and after having made proselytes to impiety, is not ashamed, being reduced to the extremity of life, to ask for the sacraments, and to cover his body with more relics than St. Louis had at Amboise.

Here is an argument more in keeping with the tone of the _Memoirs_:

A girl who is pretty and good, and as virtuous as you please, ought not to take it ill that a man, carried away by her charms, should set himself to the task of making their conquest. If this man cannot please her by any means, even if his pa.s.sion be criminal, she ought never to take offence at it, nor treat him unkindly; she ought to be gentle, and pity him, if she does not love him, and think it enough to keep invincibly hold upon her own duty.

Occasionally he touches upon aesthetical matters, as in a fragment which begins with liberal definition of beauty:

Harmony makes beauty, says M. de S. P. (Bernardin de St. Pierre), but the definition is too short, if he thinks he has said everything. Here is mine. Remember that the subject is metaphysical. An object really beautiful ought to seem beautiful to all whose eyes fall upon it. That is all; there is nothing more to be said.

At times we have an anecdote and its commentary, perhaps jotted down for use in that latter part of the _Memoirs_ which was never written, or which has been lost. Here is a single sheet, dated 'this 2nd September, 1791,' and headed _Souvenir_:

The Prince de Rosenberg said to me, as we went down stairs, that Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the ill.u.s.tration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (_sic_) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a monument there which relates to him when he was Grand Duke.' 'In that case, His Majesty can also see my critical remarks on the Egyptian prints.'

The Emperor asked me this morning, 6th October, how I employed my time at Dux, and I told him that I was making an Italian anthology.

'You have all the Italians, then?' 'All, sire.' See what a lie leads to. If I had not lied in saying that I was making an anthology, I should not have found myself obliged to lie again in saying that we have all the Italian poets. If the Emperor comes to Dux, I shall kill myself.

'They say that this Dux is a delightful spot,' says Casanova in one of the most personal of his notes, 'and I see that it might be for many; but not for me, for what delights me in my old age is independent of the place which I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tired of dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all that my pen has vomited.' Here we see him blackening paper, on every occasion, and for every purpose. In one bundle I found an unfinished story about Roland, and some adventure with women in a cave; then a 'Meditation on arising from sleep, 19th May 1789'; then a 'Short Reflection of a Philosopher who finds himself thinking of procuring his own death. At Dux, on getting out of bed on 13th October 1793, day dedicated to St. Lucy, memorable in my too long life.' A big budget, containing cryptograms, is headed 'Grammatical Lottery'; and there is the t.i.tle-page of a treatise on _The Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe_.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear in half a dozen tentative forms:

_Sans mystere point de plaisirs,_ _Sans silence point de mystere._ _Charme divin de mes loisirs,_ _Solitude! que tu m'es chere!_

Then there are a number of more or less complete ma.n.u.scripts of some extent. There is the ma.n.u.script of the translation of Homer's _Iliad, in ottava rima_ (published in Venice, 1775-8); of the _Histoire de Venise_, of the _Icosameron_, a curious book published in 1787, purporting to be 'translated from English,' but really an original work of Casanova; _Philocalies sur les Sottises des Mortels_, a long ma.n.u.script never published; the sketch and beginning of _Le Polemarque, ou la Calomnie demasquee par la presence d'esprit. Tragicomedie en trois actes, composee a Dux dans le mois de Juin de l'Annee, 1791_, which recurs again under the form of the _Polemoscope: La Lorgnette menteuse ou la Calomnie demasquee_, acted before the Princess de Ligne, at her chateau at Teplitz, 1791. There is a treatise in Italian, _Delle Pa.s.sioni_; there are long dialogues, such as _Le Philosophe et le Theologien_, and _Reve: Dieu-Moi_; there is the _Songe d'un Quart d'Heure_, divided into minutes; there is the very lengthy criticism of _Bernardin de Saint-Pierre_; there is the _Confutation d'une Censure indiscrete qu'on lit dans la Gazette de Iena, 19 Juin 1789_; with another large ma.n.u.script, unfortunately imperfect, first called _L'Insulte_, and then _Placet au Public_, dated 'Dux, this 2nd March, 1790,' referring to the same criticism on the _Icosameron_ and the _Fuite des Prisons_.

_L'Histoire de ma Fuite des Prisons de la Republique de Venise, qu'on appelle les Plombs_, which is the first draft of the most famous part of the _Memoirs_, was published at Leipzig in 1788; and, having read it in the Marcian Library at Venice, I am not surprised to learn from this indignant doc.u.ment that it was printed 'under the care of a young Swiss, who had the talent to commit a hundred faults of orthography.'

III

We come now to the doc.u.ments directly relating to the _Memoirs_, and among these are several attempts at a preface, in which we see the actual preface coming gradually into form. One is ent.i.tled _Casanova au Lecteur_, another _Histoire de mon Existence_, and a third _Preface_.

There is also a brief and characteristic _Precis de ma vie_, dated November 17, 1797. Some of these have been printed in _Le Livre_, 1887.

But by far the most important ma.n.u.script that I discovered, one which, apparently, I am the first to discover, is a ma.n.u.script ent.i.tled _Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5_. It is written on paper similar to that on which the _Memoirs_ are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; and though it is described as _Extrait_, it seems to contain, at all events, the greater part of the missing chapters to which I have already referred, Chapters IV. and V. of the last volume of the _Memoirs_. In this ma.n.u.script we find Armelline and Scolastica, whose story is interrupted by the abrupt ending of Chapter III.; we find Mariuccia of Vol. VII., Chapter IX., who married a hairdresser; and we find also Jaconine, whom Casanova recognises as his daughter, 'much prettier than Sophia, the daughter of Therese Pompeati, whom I had left at London.'[3]

It is curious that this very important ma.n.u.script, which supplies the one missing link in the _Memoirs_, should never have been discovered by any of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over the Dux ma.n.u.scripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the case in which I found this ma.n.u.script contains some papers not relating to Casanova. Probably, those who looked into this case looked no further. I have told Herr Brockhaus of my discovery, and I hope to see Chapters IV.

and V. in their places when the long-looked-for edition of the complete text is at length given to the world.

Another ma.n.u.script which I found tells with great piquancy the whole story of the Abbe de Brosses' ointment, the curing of the Princess de Conti's pimples, and the birth of the Duc de Montpensier, which is told very briefly, and with much less point, in the _Memoirs_ (vol. iii., p.

327). Readers of the _Memoirs_ will remember the duel at Warsaw with Count Branicki in 1766 (vol. x., pp. 274-320), an affair which attracted a good deal of attention at the time, and of which there is an account in a letter from the Abbe Taruffi to the dramatist, Francesco Albergati, dated Warsaw, March 19, 1766, quoted in Ernesto Masi's _Life of Albergati_, Bologna, 1878. A ma.n.u.script at Dux in Casanova's handwriting gives an account of this duel in the third person; it is ent.i.tled, _Description de l'affaire arrivee a Varsovie le 5 Mars, 1766_. D'Ancona, in the _Nuova Antologia_ (vol. lxvii., p. 412), referring to the Abbe Taruffi's account, mentions what he considers to be a slight discrepancy: that Taruffi refers to the _danseuse_, about whom the duel was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In this ma.n.u.script Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is evidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of the text.

In turning over another ma.n.u.script, I was caught by the name Charpillon, which every reader of the _Memoirs_ will remember as the name of the harpy by whom Casanova suffered so much in London, in 1763-4. This ma.n.u.script begins by saying: 'I have been in London for six months and have been to see them (that is, the mother and daughter) in their own house,' where he finds nothing but 'swindlers, who cause all who go there to lose their money in gambling.' This ma.n.u.script adds some details to the story told in the ninth and tenth volumes of the _Memoirs_, and refers to the meeting with the Charpillons four and a half years before, described in Volume V., pages 482-485. It is written in a tone of great indignation. Elsewhere, I found a letter written by Casanova, but not signed, referring to an anonymous letter which he had received in reference to the Charpillons, and ending: 'My handwriting is known.' It was not until the last that I came upon great bundles of letters addressed to Casanova, and so carefully preserved that little sc.r.a.ps of paper, on which postscripts are written, are still in their places. One still sees the seals on the backs of many of the letters, on paper which has slightly yellowed with age, leaving the ink, however, almost always fresh. They come from Venice, Paris, Rome, Prague, Bayreuth, The Hague, Genoa, Fiume, Trieste, etc., and are addressed to as many places, often _poste restante_. Many are letters from women, some in beautiful handwriting, on thick paper; others on sc.r.a.ps of paper, in painful hands, ill-spelt. A Countess writes pitifully, imploring help; one protests her love, in spite of the 'many chagrins'

he has caused her; another asks 'how they are to live together'; another laments that a report has gone about that she is secretly living with him, which may harm _his_ reputation. Some are in French, more in Italian. _Mon cher Giacometto_, writes one woman, in French; _Carissimo e Amatissimo_, writes another, in Italian. These letters from women are in some confusion, and are in need of a good deal of sorting over and rearranging before their full extent can be realised. Thus I found letters in the same handwriting separated by letters in other handwritings; many are unsigned, or signed only by a single initial; many are undated, or dated only with the day of the week or month. There are a great many letters, dating from 1779 to 1786, signed 'Francesca Buschini,' a name which I cannot identify; they are written in Italian, and one of them begins: _Unico Mio vero Amico_ ('my only true friend').

Others are signed 'Virginia B.'; one of these is dated, 'Forli, October 15, 1773.' There is also a 'Theresa B.,' who writes from Genoa. I was at first unable to identify the writer of a whole series of letters in French, very affectionate and intimate letters, usually unsigned, occasionally signed 'B.' She calls herself _votre pet.i.te amie_; or she ends with a half-smiling, half-reproachful 'good-night, and sleep better than I.' In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes: 'Never believe me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall love you always.' In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, she writes: 'Be a.s.sured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing can change my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to change its master.' Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from Manon Baletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volume of the _Memoirs_. We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759, Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriage with 'M. Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy'; she returns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them.

Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burn them afterwards. Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters, promising to 'preserve them religiously all her life.' 'These letters,'

he says, 'numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of four pages.' Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seems to me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon's letters, and that it is these which I have found.

But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set of letters which I was most anxious to find: the letters from Henriette, whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented. Henriette, it will be remembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748; after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically _a propos_, twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanova proposing _un commerce epistolaire_, asking him what he has done since his escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him all that has happened to her during the long interval. After quoting her letter, he adds: 'I replied to her, accepting the correspondence that she offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes. She related to me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life. If she dies before me, I shall add these letters to these _Memoirs_; but to-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old.' It has never been known what became of these letters, and why they were not added to the _Memoirs_. I have found a great quant.i.ty of them, some signed with her married name in full, 'Henriette de Schnetzmann,' and I am inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the letters is dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova's death. They are remarkably charming, written with a mixture of piquancy and distinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end of the last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No, it is impossible to be sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious, it is you, my Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even if I were d.a.m.ned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de Schnetzmann.' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now, herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if the fifty years that had pa.s.sed were blotted out in the faithful affection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovers have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long correspondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not quite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, who perhaps of all others best understood what Sh.e.l.ley meant when he said:

True love in this differs from gold or clay, That to divide is not to take away.

But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most, they were only a certain proportion of the great ma.s.s of correspondence which I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was afterwards to bring the ma.n.u.script of the _Memoirs_ to Brockhaus; from Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the _Piombi_; from the Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is some account in the _Memoirs_; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from Zulian, brother of the d.u.c.h.ess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, _bel homme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le gout de la bonne societe_, who came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the Procurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the _Memoirs_ as his 'protector,' and as one of those through whom he obtained permission to return to Venice. His other 'protector,' the _avogador_ Zaguri, had, says Casanova, 'since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on a most interesting correspondence with me'; and in fact I found a bundle of no less than a hundred and thirty-eight letters from him, dating from 1784 to 1798. Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-two letters from Count Lamberg. In the _Memoirs_ Casanova says, referring to his visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761:

I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the Prince-Bishop with the t.i.tle of Grand Marshal. What particularly attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent. A first-rate scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much esteemed works. I carried on an exchange of letters with him which ended only with his death four years ago in 1792.

Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the early part of 1767, he 'supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week,'

during the four months he was there. It is with this year that the letters I have found begin: they end with the year of his death, 1792.

In his _Memorial d'un Mondain_ Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man known in literature, a man of profound knowledge.' In the first edition of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet have been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in the second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice. Then there are letters from Da Ponte, who tells the story of Casanova's curious relations with Mme. d'Urfe, in his _Memorie scritte da esso_, 1829; from Pittoni, Bono, and others mentioned in different parts of the _Memoirs_, and from some dozen others who are not mentioned in them. The only letters in the whole collection that have been published are those from the Prince de Ligne and from Count Koenig.

IV

Casanova tells us in his _Memoirs_ that, during his later years at Dux, he had only been able to 'hinder black melancholy from devouring his poor existence, or sending him out of his mind,' by writing ten or twelve hours a day. The copious ma.n.u.scripts at Dux show us how persistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in addition to the _Memoirs_, and to the various books which he published during those years. We see him jotting down everything that comes into his head, for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, and certainly without any thought of publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages, indeed with more patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues in which G.o.d and himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensive correspondence, both with distinguished men and with delightful women.

His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as the activity which he had expended in living a multiform and incalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, so in his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him; and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had welcomed adventures. Pa.s.sion has intellectualised itself, and remains not less pa.s.sionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with every one; and it is only after having spent seven years in heaping up miscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions, that he turns to look back over his own past life, and to live it over again in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what had interested him most in it. 'I write in the hope that my history will never see the broad daylight of publication,' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we may be sure, even in the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come to him. But if ever a book was written for the pleasure of writing it, it was this one; and an autobiography written for oneself is not likely to be anything but frank.

'Truth is the only G.o.d I have ever adored,' he tells us: and we now know how truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this article the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and dates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the ma.n.u.scripts we find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not always easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Casanova as he represents himself. It has been specially loth to believe that he is telling the truth when he tells us about his adventures with women. But the letters contained among these ma.n.u.scripts show us the women of Casanova writing to him with all the fervour and all the fidelity which he attributes to them; and they show him to us in the character of as fervid and faithful a lover. In every fact, every detail, and in the whole mental impression which they convey, these ma.n.u.scripts bring before us the Casanova of the _Memoirs_. As I seemed to come upon Casanova at home, it was as if I came upon an old friend, already perfectly known to me, before I had made my pilgrimage to Dux.

1902.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the account of this visit to Holland, and the reference to taking a pa.s.sport, _Memoirs_, v. 238.

[2] See Charles Henry, _Les Connaissances Mathematiques de Casanova_.

Rome 1883.

[3] See _Memoirs_, ix. 272, _et seq._

JOHN DONNE

I

Biography as a fine art can go no further than Walton's _Life and Death of Dr. Donne_. From the 'good and virtuous parents' of the first line to the 'small quant.i.ty of Christian dust' of the last, every word is the touch of a cunning brush painting a picture. The picture lives, and with so vivid and gracious a life that it imposes itself upon us as the portrait of a real man, faithfully copied from the man as he lived. But that is precisely the art of the painter. Walton's picture is so beautiful because everything in it is sacrificed to beauty; because it is a convention, a picture in which life is treated almost as theme for music. And so there remains an opportunity, even after this masterpiece, for a life of Donne which shall make no pretence to harmonise a sometimes discordant existence, or indeed to produce, properly speaking, a piece of art at all; but which shall be faithful to the doc.u.ment, a piece of history. Such a book has now been written by Mr. Gosse, in his _Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's_. It is perhaps the most solid and serious contribution which Mr. Gosse has made to English literature, and we may well believe that it will remain the final authority on so interesting and so difficult a subject. For the first time, in the light of this clear a.n.a.lysis, and of these carefully arranged letters, we are able, if not indeed to see Donne as he really was, at all events to form our own opinion about every action of his life. This is one of the merits of Mr. Gosse's book; he has collected his doc.u.ments, and he has given them to us as they are, guiding us adroitly along the course of the life which they ill.u.s.trate, but not allowing himself to dogmatise on what must still remain conjectural. And he has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a very ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive, somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh; pa.s.sing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous, large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloak folded elegantly about his uncovered throat, or the ruff tightening about his carefully trimmed beard; and ending with the ghastly emblem set as a frontispiece to _Death's Duel_, the dying man wrapped already in his shroud, which gathers into folds above his head, as if tied together like the mouth of a sack, while the sunken cheeks and hollow closed eyelids are mocked by the shapely moustache, brushed upwards from the lips. In the beautiful and fanciful monument in St. Paul's done after the drawing from which this frontispiece was engraved, there is less ghastliness and a more harmonious beauty in the brave att.i.tude of a man who dresses for death as he would dress for Court, wearing the last livery with an almost foppish sense of propriety. Between them these portraits tell much, and Mr. Gosse, in his narrative, tells us everything else that there is to tell, much of it for the first time; and the distinguished and saintly person of Walton's narrative, so simple, so easily explicable, becomes more complex at every moment, as fresh light makes the darkness more and more visible. At the end we seem to have become singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we try to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends.