An Unpublished Chapter of History, By Arthur Symons


I

The Memoirs of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a bad
reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students of
literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books in
the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova, published
in Affirmations, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this
essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to take
Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in his
relation to human problems. And yet these Memoirs are perhaps the most
valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one
of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are
more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary
travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in
imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved life
passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most
important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live to
write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no longer.