CASANOVA AT DUX: AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER OF HISTORY.
BY ARTHUR SYMONS. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 1919
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 realized that
"there are few more delightful books in the world," and he has
analyzed them in an essay on Casanova, published in "Affirma
tions," with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this es
say 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 so
ciety 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
Bias," or "Monte Cristo," or any of the imaginary travels, and
escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in imi
tation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved life pas
sionately 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 remem
bered now for his written account of his own life, 

READ ON