Casanova
Casanova. By Bonamy Dobree. (Peter Davies. as.) THE Venetian spies, who had followed at Casanova's heels from grandee's palace to stew, from stew to ambassador's casino, reported to the Chief Inquisitor : "You can tell by talking to the said Casanova that he carries unbelief, shame- lessness and debauchery to such a point as to arouse horror." How valuable if his biographer could hold that attitude to- day, but it is almost impossible. Mr. Dobree has been faced with an absurd task, for he cannot feel horror at the unbelief or disgust at the debauchery. His attitude is the natural one, an amused and graceful tolerance. He can only retell Casanova's story in much the same way as Casanova first told it ; and as a great part of the Memoirs has been published in a popular edition, the object of the biography is a little difficult to discover.
Lawrence could have written a valuable study of Casanova, for his reaction had some of the vehemence of the Venetian spies. "I tried Casanova," he wrote in a letter, "but he smells. One can be immoral if one likes, but one must not-be a creeping, itching, fingering, inferior being. . . without pride or cleanness of soul." From this clash of opposing views a living, even if a distorted, character might have emerged. It would not have been the man who wrote : "To the shame of my whole life I must proclaim a truth which my readers will find it hard to believe, namely, that virtue has always seemed to me preferable to vice, and that I have been wicked (when I have been wicked) only from lightness of heart; a fact which many will no doubt find reprehensible." But nor is Mr. Dobree's Casanova the undistorted man ; this graceful fairy (" for a long time his grave was lost ; how should a fairy have a grave ? "), who flits from country to country and from woman to woman, with an aerial sensuality, this winged financier and ethereal buffoon. One needs to remind oneself of "the worst inn's worst room," where the great stupid body of the man lay so often diseased, the " iexual athlete" defeated.
Casanova, Mr. Dobree remarks, - " had no atom, not the smallest residue of a sense of sin in making love " ; he had no inkling of Baudelaire's spiritual sensuality : "in volupte unique at supreme de l'amour git dans in certitude de fake le
.mal " ; be was all body. 'Phe biograpber's task is partly critical, and the ideal biography would not reflect so closely Casanova's own image of himself. If it were possible, the biographer would-attach the faces of individual women, with a capacity for suffering, on to the series of bare magnificent bodies described by Casanova. But it is not Mr. Dobree's fault that he cannot do this. "Even history," he writes, "cannot always draw the curtains of the bed," and one must accept his portrait of a fairy for its grace and wit. It is the only attitude he has found it possible to take up, and he has expended on the subject more ingenuity than it deserves, for Mr. Dobree has described the whole depth of wanton dullness in Casanova's character when he writes, "He pursued the obvious easy happiness as directly as he could, and the astonishing truth is that he caught it." For this man's sole magnificence was a magnificence of insensibility ; all the women he knew might equally well have served as models for Praxiteles ; in reading the Memoirs one meets only one Woman with individuality, La Charpillon, who had enough of his own grossness and insensibility to outwit him ; for the rest, it is to walk down a cold museum corridor lined with the plaster casts of antique torsos. His insensibility showed itself in other ways than lust ; he recorded of his conversation with Voltaire : "He always drew a wrong conclusion. I let him chatter his nonsense," and like Boswell in the same circum- stances he did not hear the faintest runtOur of posterity's
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