Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  Casanova loves towns for the sake of their thronging population. In the towns are women as he enjoys them, in the plurality which saves him from the risk of monotony. Among towns, he likes best of all court towns, towns where luxury is rife, for there the voluptuous is sublimated into the artistic. Casanova, sensual though he be, is not a crude sensualist. An aria, beautifully sung, can charm him; a poem can captivate him; agreeable conversation warms his wine for him. To converse with clever men about books, or to listen to music while, in a box at the opera, he sits closely pressed against a fascinating woman; these intensify his joy in life. But we must not make any mistake here. Casanova’s love for art is merely sportive, and never gets beyond the pleasure of a dilettante. For him, the spirit must serve life, since he will never live in order to serve the spirit. For him, therefore, art is nothing more than the finest and most subtle of aphrodisiacs; a means for stimulating the senses, for heightening enjoyment. It is a prelude to passion, a prelude that will enhance the subsequent joys of the flesh.

  He will write a little poem, and will hand it, with a garter, to a lady whom he covets; he will recite some verses of Ariosto, to inflame her passion; with gentlemen, he will converse wittily about Voltaire and Montesquieu, that he may put himself on a good footing with them intellectually, and mask his designs on their purses. But this sensualist, a lazy southerner, never troubles himself about art or science when these demand pains and thoroughness, when they have to be pursued as ends in themselves and as disciplines having a worldwide significance. One who has no thought beyond amusement, he shuns depths because he is content with the surface of things, with the frothy and perfumed upper levels of existence, with chance flirtations. He is always enjoying himself as a dilettante, and that is why he is so light on the wing, can flit so easily from blossom to blossom. Just as Dürer’s Fortuna speeds barefoot over the spinning earth, borne up by her pinions, wafted onward by any wind that blows, settling nowhere, faithful to none, so does Casanova skim over the surface of life, forming no ties, but changing ever. Change is for him “the salt of pleasure,” and pleasure is the only meaning of the world.

  Buoyant on the wing as a mayfly, empty as a soap bubble, sparkling in the light of passing events, he flutters on his way. Can we say that he has a character at all, seeing that it varies from hour to hour, and has no substance we can grasp? What is Casanova at bottom? Is he good or evil? Is he an honest man or a knave, a hero or a scamp? He is one or the other as the hour may dictate. Chameleon-like he takes his color from circumstances, changing as the background varies. When he is in funds, you will not find anywhere a more distinguished gentleman. With charming profusion, with a radiant grandeur, amiable as some great prelate and merry as a page, he scatters his money with both hands. “I was never one to trouble about thrift.” Like a highborn patron, he invites casual strangers to dinner, presents them with jeweled snuffboxes and rouleaux of ducats, does everything he can to delight them. But if you meet Casanova when his pockets are empty, and when unpaid bills are accumulating, I would advise you to avoid playing cards with this galantuomo. He will be in the mood to cheat you at every turn, will get you to change forged notes for him, will trade off his mistress, will play you the most scurvy tricks. As undependable as a throw of the dice, he will today be the best and most entertaining companion in the world, and tomorrow a villainous robber; on Monday he will pay court to a woman with all the delicacy of an Abelard, and on Tuesday he will play the pimp and sell her favors to anyone willing to give him a ten-pound note.

  You cannot say that Casanova has either a good character or a bad one; he has no character at all. Character and spiritual substance are not among his attributes, any more than fins are proper to a mammal. His actions are neither moral or immoral; they are simply amoral. Whatever he does is the reflex outcome of his physical make-up, and is quite uninfluenced by reason, logic, or ethical considerations. Let him catch sight of a woman, and all his pulses are beating; blindly he moves towards her under the urge of his temperament. When he comes across a gaming table, his hand is instantly in his pocket, and before he knows it he has staked his money. Do something that annoys him, and his fury has no bounds, his eyes flash, his cheeks flame, he clenches his fist and strikes out madly, charges “come un bue,” as his fellow countryman and brother adventurer Benvenuto Cellini says. It is absurd, therefore, to hold Casanova accountable for what he does. It is not he who acts, but the hot blood within him, and there is no “he” to cope with its elemental impulses. “I never have been and never shall be able to master myself.” He does not reflect and he never looks forward. When he is in a tight place, some brilliant flash of insight will often get him out of the difficulty, but he never calculates, never tries to plan before difficulties come. He is too impatient for that. Read the memoirs, and you will see that all his decisive actions, ranging from absurd practical jokes to the most outrageous rascalities, were the outcome of explosions of caprice, and were never dictated by intelligent calculation. Impulsively, one day, he casts aside the abbot’s frock; on another occasion, when he is a soldier at the front, he sets spurs to his horse and canters over the lines in order to surrender to the enemy; he sets off for Russia or for Spain, following his nose, carrying no letters of recommendation, and without having troubled to ask himself why he is going or whither. All his decisions are like unexpected pistol shots, the fruit of a sudden whim, of a determination to escape from boredom. So unexpectedly do these impulses hurl him out of one situation into another, that he is often startled, and rubs his eyes in his surprise. Indeed, he has to thank his bold reliance upon casual promptings for the richness of his experience. One who acts logically, one who calculates every step, does not become an adventurer; and a careful strategist will never enjoy such wonderful chances.

  Nothing, therefore, could be more fallacious than the way in which many of our imaginative writers who choose Casanova as a hero of a play or a novel depict him as endowed with a thoroughly alert intelligence, as being of a reflective type, as Faust and Mephistopheles rolled into one. All his impetus is the outcome of his failure to reflect, of his amoral heedlessness. Instill no more than a drop or two of sentimentality into his blood, burden him with self-knowledge and a sense of responsibility, and he will no longer be Casanova; drape him Byronically, add a conscience to the ingredients of which he is composed, and you will have an alien being. His essence is unreflection. Unreflectingly, he grasps at every toy that comes within his reach; at women, at pleasures, at other people’s purses. In this, he is not driven by demonic, by elemental forces; the only elemental force that drives Casanova has a commonplace name and a familiar, stupid countenance — is nothing other than boredom. Since he has an absolutely vacant mind, has no inner resources, he can only escape infinite boredom by an incessant recurrence of objective experiences; without the oxygen of adventure, he is suffocated. Hence his insatiable greed for whatever he has not yet had, for anything different from what he has known; hence his unappeasable hunger for new experiences. Having no inner source of productivity, he must unceasingly assimilate vital substance from without; but this voracious appetite is utterly different from the demonic urge of the essentially masterful and acquisitive temperament — that of a Napoleon, who must add land to land and kingdom to kingdom, impelled by a thirst for infinity; or that of a Don Juan, who must seduce one woman after another, that he may know himself to be autocrat of another infinity, the world of woman. Casanova, who is nothing more than a pleasure-seeker, does not traffic in such superlatives; he is merely on the lookout for a continuity of pleasure. He is not like the man of action, not like the man of the spirit, whom a fanatical illusion drives on towards a dangerous tension of feeling; he wants nothing more than the genial warmth of enjoyment, the sparkling delight of the game; adventures, adventures, adventures, ever varying; occupation for the ego, reinforcement of life. Above all, not to be alone; not to shiver in a frosty vacancy of solitude!

  Look at Casanova when entertainment is lacking. Then,
every sort of rest becomes to him a terrible unrest. He arrives at eventide in a strange town. Nothing will induce him to spend the last hours of the day in his room, communing with his thoughts, or reading a book. He snuffs the wind eagerly, to see if it brings with it any scent of amusement. In default of better, the chambermaid at the inn can help to keep him warm as he lies abed that night. Lounging at the bar, he will hold converse with chance comers; he will play faro with cardsharpers in any low gaming house; will spend the night with the most pitiful harlot rather than sleep alone: always the sense of inner vacancy drives him into converse with his fellows, for only through friction with other living creatures can his own vitality be kept up. Directly he is alone, he becomes one of the gloomiest, one of the most bored of men. We see this in his writings, the memoirs alone excepted. It is plain during the lonely years at Dux, where he speaks of boredom as “hell,” as “the inferno which Dante forgot to describe.” Just as a whipping-top must be incessantly lashed if it is to be kept spinning, so Casanova needs an incessant spurring from without. Like so many other adventurers, he is an adventurer because of his lack of spiritual energy.

  That is why, as soon as the natural tension of life begins to flag, he has recourse to the artificial tension of gaming. At the gaming table he can find an abbreviated recapitulation of the tension of life, artificial dangers and artificial rescues. The gaming table is the asylum of all men of the fleeting hour, the perpetual solace of the idle. At the gaming table, he can enjoy a stormy ebb and flow of the feelings; the empty seconds, the weary hours, are filled with the titillation of anxiety, with shuddering expectation. Gambling, therefore, like nothing else in the world with the doubtful exception of women, solaces with spurious adventures the man who is weary of himself, and serves better than anything else to occupy one who has no inner resources and occupations. Never was any one more hopelessly subject to the lure of the gaming table than Casanova. Just as he cannot look on a woman without longing to possess her, so he cannot see money on a gaming table without putting fingers into his pockets to take out his own stake. Even when he recognizes in the man keeping the bank a notorious plunderer, a colleague in cardsharping, he will still hazard his last ducat, knowing perfectly well that he will lose it. Casanova himself, beyond question — although the memoirs are chary of acknowledging that which police records place beyond dispute — was one of the cleverest cardsharps of his day; and for all his skill in other forms of roguery, and his incidental earnings as a souteneur, cardsharping was his chief means of subsistence. Nothing, then, can show his obsession with the passion for gambling, nothing can manifest his craze for games of chance, more plainly than this, that, although he was himself a plunderer, he would continually allow himself to be plundered because he could not resist the gambler’s lure. Just as a prostitute, whose money is earned laboriously enough, will hand over these hard-earned gains to her bully simply in order to experience in actuality the pleasures she stimulates in intercourse with her ordinary clients, so does Casanova disburse to past masters at the game the funds he has impudently filched from novices. Not once, but twenty times, a hundred times, does he lose on the turn of a card all that he has gained by arduous cheating. This is what stamps him as gambler in blood and bone, that he does not play in order to win (how tedious that would be!) but in order to play; just as he does not live in order to be rich, happy, and comfortable, but simply in order to live, being here likewise the born gambler. He never looks for a final relief of tension. What he wants is perpetual tension, the unceasing alternation of red and black, of spades and diamonds. Only in these perpetual ups and downs does he find contentment for his nerves.

  In ordinary life, as at the gaming table, he needs these gains and losses, the conquest and discarding of women, the contrast between poverty and riches, unending adventure. Inasmuch as even such a life as his, ceaselessly varying though it be like a moving picture on the screen, nevertheless has intervals, sudden breaks, sudden surprises, and sudden storms, he fills in these empty pauses with the artificial tension of the gaming table. Thanks to his mad ventures here, he is able to achieve the amazing oscillations of fortune, his swift ascents to the zenith, and his no less swift plunges to the nadir. Today his pockets are stuffed with gold, he is a grand seigneur, with two servants standing at the back of his coach; tomorrow he has had to sell his diamonds to a Jew, and even to pawn his breeches, (this is not written in jest, but is literally true, for the pawn-ticket was found at Zurich). That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune. Enjoying hazard for its own sake, again and again he stakes his life upon a cast. Ten times, in duels, he stood in the very jaws of death. A score of times he was in imminent danger of the penitentiary or the galleys. Millions passed into his hands and out again, and he never troubled to save. For the very reason that he gave himself thus unreservedly to the game of life, enjoying to the full every woman, every moment, every adventure; for that very reason, though he was to drag out his declining years as a poor pensioner in a strange land, he attained his highest aim — an infinite abundance of life.

  HOMO EROTICUS

  Seducer, say you? No, I was but there

  When Nature, with her splendid witchery,

  Began her work. Nor must you dub me false,

  For I am ever thankful in my heart.

  ARTHUR SCHNITZLER: CASANOVA IN SPA

  He is a dilettante, and generally a second-rate one at that, in all the arts God has created: he writes lame verses and dull philosophical disquisitions; he can play the fiddle passably; and the best one can say of his conversation is that it shows an encyclopedic smattering. He may count as an expert in all the games of the devil’s making, such as faro, biribi, dicing, dominoes, the confidence trick, alchemy, and diplomacy. But in the art of love, Casanova excels all his rivals. Here his manifold talents, which are fragmentary and botched for the most part, combine with a subtle chemistry to make of him the perfect erotist; in this matter, he is indisputably a genius of first rank. His physique is enough to show that he was designed for the service of Cytherea. Nature, parsimonious as a rule, has been free-handed here, equipping him liberally with sap, sensuality, vigor, and beauty; a man apt to delight women’s hearts, a thoroughly masculine creature, strong and supple as steel, a well-tempered example of his sex, massive in mold, and yet admirable in form. You would make a big mistake were you to imagine Casanova, the conqueror of women, to have been of the delicate type of male beauty which is nowadays in vogue. This bel uomo is no ephebe; nothing of the sort! He is a stallion of a man, with the shoulders of the Farnese Hercules, the muscles of a Roman wrestler, the bronzed beauty of a gypsy lad, the impudence and audacity of a condottiere, and the sexual ardor of a satyr. His powers of resistance are stupendous. Four attacks of venereal disease, two doses of poison, a dozen sword thrusts, the terrible years passed in the Leads at Venice and in pestilential Spanish jails, hurried journeys from Sicilian heats to the frosts of Muscovy — none of these things abate his phallic energy by a jot. No matter when or where, the merest spark from a woman’s eyes, the first intimation of a woman’s nearness, suffices to set his invincible sexuality aflame. For a busy quarter of a century he is invariably the Messer Sempre Pronto, the Mr. Ever Ready, of the Italian farces, indefatigably teaches women the higher mathematics as the most efficient of their lovers, and up till the age of forty knows only by hearsay of that distressing fiasco which Stendhal, in his treatise, De l’amour, thinks important enough to discuss in a supplementary section. A body that is never weary when appetite calls, an appetite which never fails, a passion which no extravagance can impoverish, a gambler’s impulse that shrinks from no hazard — rarely indeed has nature bestowed upon any master so perfectly stringed and sensitive a bodily instrument, so splendid a viola d’amore for playing all the tunes of love. In any and every profession, for perfect mastery there is requisite, not only inborn talent, but also incessant concentration upon the pursuit. There must be a monogamic dev
otion to the chosen occupation, complete absorption in some particular direction; through that alone can absolute proficiency be secured. As the musician cultivates music, as the poet gives himself up to writing of verses or the miser to the hoarding of money, as the fanatic for sport throws everything else aside in his passion to break the record, an amorist who is to outdo all others must regard the wooing, the coveting, and the possession of woman as the most important, no as the only, good in the world. The passions are jealous one of another, and for this reason he must have nothing to do with any other passion than that of love, must find therein the whole meaning of the world. Casanova, fickle though he be, remains constant in his passion for woman. Offer him the doge’s ring of Venice, all the wealth of the Fuggers, a patent of nobility, a house and a comfortable appointment, fame as a general or an author; he will contemptuously throw aside these worthless trifles to hurl himself into the chase of some woman he has not yet possessed, to enjoy her feminine aroma, the delicious thrill of certain-uncertainty that she will yield to him in the end. Everything else the world can promise — honor, office and dignity, wealth, any pleasure you like to name — he will disregard for the sake of a love adventure, and even for the barest possibility of such. He does not need to be positively in love; the mere inkling that a love adventure is at hand is enough to arouse anticipatory delight.