Things near & far Chapter 12: Part 12

troubling what it was, what it was about, not caring two straws that I had not the thread of the narrative, nor worrying over the fact that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic “M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose singular adventures I now plunged gaily. Thus I began the translation of the famous “Memoirs of Casanova,” and I think the money balance between the Brothers and myself was readjusted. For if I had been dear as a cataloguer, at thirty shillings a week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator. Casanova is a work that runs into twelve sizeable volumes, and the task of turning it into English took me a year, and I think the cost to the firm will be held to have been strictly moderate. And what about these strange Memoirs of the charlatan adventurer? Well, not long ago I was called upon to write an introduction to a reissue of the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found this an extremely difficult task. The obvious solution of the difficulty, the writing a sort of _précis_ of the book and calling it an Introduction, did not appeal to me. It was some time before the “moral” of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction when written proved to be an essay on the futility of trying to tell the whole truth about the relations between men and women. This is what Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain sense, for the undertaking, tried to do; and the more “frank,” the more “outspoken” his page the more the secret escapes from it; the more openly he reveals, the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. For the fact is that all the real secrets are ineffable; the secrets of love, and the secrets of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the secrets of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith. As I point out in my Introduction, you can enumerate the scientific facts--such of them as are known--relating to any subject. You can define a horse, for example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.” “Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.” And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done, you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter, nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things, which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry, Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle, and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old “Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness. There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect; the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms. And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams. And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time: “Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time. No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny the existence of either, since he has walked from point to point in one and seen the other measured before his eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so. “It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial: it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe; and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face confronts you.” And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery, and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say, in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter; he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of the scum of the eighteenth-century earth. One cannot understand the period as a whole without knowing Casanova. So I translated and translated day after day; but in a few months’ time the black hole in which I worked began very violently to disagree with me. I got ill, and it was clear that some change must be made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and considerate: why not do the work at home? I assented very willingly, worked at the task for five hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel of copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the week’s wages. And here I must make a boast, which is not wholly a boast: the second part of this sentence I shall explain no farther. I finished the translation of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately issued. On the completion of my job the Brothers needed me no more. I imagine that they wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary man of sorts; and my having worked for them for some months at my own home and not in the shop made it easy for them to get rid of me quietly; rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion of firmness, much less of harshness. And they were always very glad to see me when I chose to look them up, either on business or merely as a friendly caller. I remember, for example, that when I had finished the translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the book with “the trade,” I called at the shop and was received with a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not forgotten, though it is a long time since 1890; but then I do not forget. And lest it should be suspected by some persons that under a veil of benignity I am “getting at” the Brothers all the time, I hasten to say that this is not so; to say this in the strongest manner possible. True, thirty shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English translating, even in 1889; but it was the wages that I had asked myself, having been thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the six preceding years that I was such a dismal and incapable ass that if I just managed to escape the Governorship of the Island of Farre Joyaunce--otherwise the ditch or the workhouse--it was as much as I could expect. So I asked my thirty shillings a week and hoped in my heart that it was not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers in the least because they did not press more upon me. And, however that may be, they were always courteous and kindly in all communications that passed between us; and for that they shall be in my grateful memory so long as I live. I have said already, I think, how once during the last year of my employment on the “Evening News,” finding myself in old haunts of long ago,