Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
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.
The Critic of Dostoevsky
Still Life by J. Middleton Murry. E. P. Dutton and Company
The Things We Are by J. Middleton Murry. E. P. Dutton and Company
The Dial, December 1922, 671–674
In Still Life Mr. Murry gives us: an English critic’s version in novel form of England’s own particularly highly sophisticated type of post-war, out-of-nowhere-into-nothingness, the book ending with one lost hysterical soul weeping in perfect iambs. In The Things We Are Mr. Murry seems to have undergone an idyllic reaction against his own previous effort, and in expiation steers a mysteriously awakened Mr. Boston into a wife, and the company of wholesome, big-bosomed Mrs. Williams. And to our astonishment and shamefaced confusion, just when the lovers have been united, this very Mrs. Williams comes into the room and places a steaming pudding on the table. Which makes one feel that if we are to preserve Mr. Murry as a Platonist we must maintain the balance between dualities by throwing one of his novels on each side of the scale, and letting the bitterness of the one counterbalance the sweetness of the other.
As a portrait of English society, I am willing to take Mr. Murry as gospel. The sterile self-analysis in Still Life, the futile conversations, the almost vulgar self-consciousness: it has always been my fond belief that contemporary drawing-room England is precisely that. Yet, building upon this fundament, Mr. Murry has contrived to wind up a story with a positively astonishing skill. For the first seven or eight chapters we follow him as he takes on one responsibility after another; but unfortunately, once Mr. Murry has finished winding up his story, there is nothing to do but let it run down. Before the story is finished every last one of the characters has told us far too much about himself; and for the last hundred pages they are nothing but voices. Still, these statements are unfair; as they make no allowance for the really keen strokes which Mr. Murry keeps turning up continually, and for the discretion and freshness with which the old triangle theme is handled.
But The Things We Are, as I have said, starts out very plainly to supply the antidote to Still Life. Mr. Boston, far from deluging us with self-analyses, is an unusually rigid and silenced man, a man in whom all impressions lie buried and unuttered. Then suddenly, about half-way through the book, Mr. Boston begins to unbend; he acquires a virulent attack of normality, goes out among good wholesome people, picks up a couple of buns, falls in love with a girl, and analyzes himself as expertly as though he had been at it all his life, or as though he had been carried over bodily from Mr. Murry’s earlier novel. Thus, there are simply two Mr. Bostons: one is made to feel the potentialities of this first Boston, and to see the second Boston kinetically, but one does not feel that the potential energy of the first Boston is the kinetic energy of the second. The accepted methods of effecting a character’s rejuvenation are (a) to have him meet a Salvation Army lass, or (b) to have him awakened by the war. Mr. Murry’s invention of simply having the character rejuvenated is more cautious, perhaps, but no more contenting.
On taking up these books of Mr. Murry’s one automatically returns to the question of Dostoevsky. Mr. Murry, to be sure, has done a remarkably thorough job at making the Russian less uncouth and reducing his frenzy to the proportions proper to an English drawing-room; but the principle underlying both authors is the same. It calls, I think, for a distinction between the psychology of form and the psychology of subject-matter. Or between the psychologism of Dostoevsky and the psychologism of, say, a Greek vase. By the psychology of subject-matter I mean, I believe, what Mrs. Padraic Colum has defined