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Modifying the Eighteenth Century

Casanova’s Homecoming by Arthur Schnitzler. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Privately printed for subscribers only

The Dial, December 1921, 707–710

There is one species of poet who, if he quarrels with his mistress in the morning—supposing that poets still possess such lovely baggage—writes a poem that day on quarrelling with his mistress; whereas, if he had been awakened by a piano playing next door, he would have composed some Variations on Being Awakened by a Piano. In a much broader way, Schnitzler’s procedure has about it something analogous to this. Since as a much younger man, that is, Schnitzler wrote Anatol and Reigen, as an older man he writes Casanova’s Homecoming. If this method succeeds, which it seems to have done in Schnitzler’s case, the artist must have one highly consoling thought as he looks back over the range of his productions: he has made the world observe with interest the milestones of his own personal journey.

Casanova himself, belonging to a rather more glorious century, and one which could not go sour on the scientific dethronement of man, found the meditation of his earlier fougues an occupation of such a delightful nature that he simply could not help retailing them for everyone. For, as he explains in his capacity as a somewhat facile philosopher, the joys of his past are still with him because he can live them again in his memory, whereas the pains are no longer operative since he is so conscious of their being gone. But then, Casanova was not particularly interested in the Orphic, that peculiar pudency which was to capture the following century and which manifested itself in the tendency to qualify to the point of disintegration, to behold with a divided attitude, thus feeling ashamed. He was content with his facile philosophy.

The comparison is inevitable, since in Casanova’s Homecoming Schnitzler sees so markedly nineteenth century an ending for so eighteenth century a celebrity. Where Casanova himself—if we take him at his word—found a perfect satisfaction in recalling an adventurous past which he could no longer duplicate—Schnitzler sees the chevalier broken and hideous, stripped of human dignity, and at fifty-three manoeuvring to prolong those pleasures which he had accepted with confidence fifteen years earlier. He reduces the adventurer by a series of final qualifications, when he has lost the very essence of his glory; he imagines Casanova as an old man trying to carry off an existence which sits well with a much, younger man.

Casanova is decidedly moth-eaten. What money he gets comes for the most part from petty gambling. He has two suits, one for everyday and one “for occasions.” At this point he meets an old school friend, Olivo, who insists that Casanova come stay with him for a few days on his estate. There is a young woman here, Marcolina; Casanova forthwith becomes pre-occupied with this Marcolina exclusively. She, however, is completely neglectful of his prestige; she treats him with a mixture of politeness and indifference which turns to something like revulsion when he makes a few tentative moves. Also, there is Lorenzi, a young lieutenant whom Casanova suspects of being in love with her, perhaps successfully.

Sneaking out at dawn, to see if he can catch sight of Marcolina in her room, he finds the shutters closed and barred. But after a time there is a noise; dropping behind a bench, Casanova spies Lorenzi taking leave of her. His desire for Marcolina becomes intense, almost a necessity. . . . Schnitzler next centres his attention on getting Lorenzi into a gambling debt, which in a moment of beau geste, of the old feudal honour, Lorenzi claims he will redeem the following morning. But he has no money, and is leaving for war the next day. Casanova, who has won the thousand ducats that Lorenzi needs, in what is perhaps the most skilfully executed portion of the story, makes Lorenzi a strictly business proposition: he will give Lorenzi the money if Lorenzi pledges his word that he will arrange to have Casanova enter Marcolina’s room that night, posing as her lover. Lorenzi agrees; the plan succeeds; Casanova is accepted in the darkness as the lieutenant.

It is from this point that Schnitzler begins pursuing the wretch in earnest. After describing in a highly romantic vocabulary what happened in that pitch-black room, Schnitzler begins tracing a set of wild images in Casanova’s brain—a mixture of day-dreams and nightmare—Casanova awakes, stifling . . . dawn is penetrating the thick curtain, and Marcolina is looking at him in horror, at his yellow, wrinkled face. He sees, by her mute agony, the monstrosity of his age. Then Marcolina turns her face to the wall, while this lean, worn frame pulls itself out of the bed, clasps on its sword, throws on Lorenzi’s robe, and leaps through the window.

Lorenzi is waiting, with his sword. Casanova, a bit cynically, pulls back his robe and shows that he is naked; whereupon, Lorenzi undresses as well. Scene: the two men facing each other, stark naked, the one young, fresh, full-muscled, the other slightly spavined with age and usage; the cool, moist lawn; the dawn still pale in the east; fencing. Lorenzi is stabbed through the heart; Casanova kisses his dead face; after which the flight to Venice begins. We end with him established as a spy, in mean quarters, preparing to give information against people who trust him implicitly.

In Casanova’s Homecoming Schnitzler has produced both the triumph and the reduction to absurdity of his method. The story has been so simplified, so thoroughly focussed on the one subject of Casanova’s decay, that every element of it shows up as an accessory. Certain parts plainly exist, for instance, to establish in the reader’s mind just how splendid a figure Casanova used to be, so that we get the full force of his going to seed. As the most aggressive instance of this might be cited the staging of a sight-seeing trip to a convent, so that, as Casanova is leaving, one of the nuns can break her vow of silence by whispering his name, the name which belongs not to him as he is now, but to his former reputation. Other parts exist for the machinery of the plot, as for instance the first evening of gambling, which leads imperceptibly into the second evening of gambling, which leads to a gambling debt, by which Schnitzler can get Casanova into Marcolina’s room; Schnitzler gives us one evening of gambling so that we accept the second. Or again, we have Casanova see himself in the mirror, and for no other reason than that the next morning, when he awakes with Marcolina looking at him in horror, Schnitzler can give us a cut-back to the face in the mirror, thus making the point more forceful than if he had tried to get the full significance of Casanova’s wrinkles across at the last moment. So thoroughly has Schnitzler been permeated by stage technique—the painless method of insinuation, that is—that we find it again in such things as this: the story begins with our being told twice that Casanova has not seen Amalia—whom he had seduced just before her marriage—for over fifteen years, while her eldest child is only thirteen; at which point, gentlemen, we have a perfect right to await the seduction of this eldest daughter, which comes in time.

I do not recall ever having seen before a structure so elaborately propped and counter-propped. Nor a piece of prose fiction which was so much like a play with the he-saids and the she-saids written in. Schnitzler has become so thoroughly accustomed to objectivization that even when Casanova thinks, he thinks visually. Still, it should be pointed out that the plot is thoroughly in keeping with the theme, for this is the sequence to eight volumes of more or less elaborate intrigue; a plea which Schnitzler himself makes as skilfully as anything in the story, by bringing up here and there various high points out of the Memoires.

Significantly enough, a somewhat analogous theme has been handled by Schnitzler’s one superior as a craftsman of German prose; I refer to Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. Here, however, the raisonneur has been complicated and diseased by years of devotion to literature; and quite in keeping with the intricacy of von Aschenbach’s brain—over against the flat “dramatic conflict” of Casanova with an eyetooth missing—the plot centres on, not a beautiful young woman, but a beautiful young Polish boy, the entire story working among half-stifled and purely cerebral transgressions.

Mann’s treatment is that of a musician, rather than a playwright, which, I think, will always be the case of a subjective writer who has gone to the bottom of his methods. Whereas Schnitzler has produced something as objective as a movie scenario, Mann turns rather to orchestration, to harmonization, putting out elements not as “plants,” but as themes to be picked up and developed later, and assembling his material until he has brought the very air and water of Venice to bear upon his story. Mann goes for an almost austere dignity; Schnitzler gets a clarity of evidence which might be found in the reviewer’s vade mecum, I believe, under “Depiction, relentless.” But if Mallarme’s claim is just and the artist should accept first of all those properties which are fundamental to his medium, Mann is more in his province than Schnitzler, for prose fiction is as inherently subjective as the stage is inherently objective.