Arts and Letters

Bernard Berenson was elected to the Academy in 1937. He died two months ago at the age of ninety-four.

I first read Berenson when I was a boy in the nineteenth century. I was fourteen, I had spent a year largely in Italy and, excited by Italian painting, I had pored over Berenson's handbooks in their first burnt-sienna bindings. A few years later, when I was at Harvard, Berenson was already a legend partly because he had selected most of the pictures in Mrs. Jack Gardner's Fenway Court. There I had seen the lady whom he called Boston's pre-cinema star, seated on her throne, observing the observers. Fifty years later still I read Berenson again at a time when he felt "outmoded in the Angry-Saxon world." He had retained his old belief in liberalism and humanism, and he corroborated my own feeling that these were permanent realities instead of what others regarded as Victorian illusions. I was all for his faith in "life-enhancement" as the final aim of art, the task of trying to humanize mankind, and there was something spacious, something Goethean, unique in our time, a marvelous breadth and freshness in his note. What vitality there also was in this man approaching ninety who was to be active still at ninety-three! In the circle of my friends there were four of his regular correspondents, and he began to write to me after I had sent him a book with a few pages devoted to his own writing. He sent me four books of his, inscribing one with the Virgin Mary's words to Saint Bernard in a vision, Bene scripsiti de me.

When later I spent a winter in Rome, he wrote to my wife and me inviting us to spend four days at Settignano, at the Villa i Tatti where he had lived since 1900, eleven years after he had first settled in Florence. The villa stood on a hill where Mark Twain had also lived, like Leigh Hunt and John Addington Symonds before him and where had supposedly stood the villa in which the tales of the Decameron were told. The frail little man, scarcely more than five feet tall, moved swiftly, with bird-like steps and the silence of a shadow, and at table he sat bolt upright, as if carved in ivory, and spoke with a clear and finished enunciation. Later, with a plaid rug over his knees and a hot-water bottle in his lap, he received, like another Voltaire, the pilgrims from all the world who filled the house at lunch, tea, and dinner. One was Arturo Loria, the Florentine professor, who translated him into Italian and who died soon after. His talk was concrete—he disliked what he called "metafussics"—and, with his incessant activity of mind, he discussed all manner of subjects, science-fiction, the history of trade, the Risorgimento. I did not understand his distrust of Mazzini and Garibaldi—he seemed to feel that the Italian people had been better off before they were united—and I could hardly believe that B. B. would have liked a time when Mazzini was imprisoned simply for being "a thinker." But there was great sweetness and liberality in almost all he said, and I could see why my friends George Biddle and Walter Pach always spoke of Berenson as "the dear old man." He quoted Ovid freely, with Platen and German poetry, and, deeply read in the history of the Fuggers and the Medici, he remarked that a knowledge of the history of trade was indispensable for one who wished to know art history. I remembered what he had written somewhere, "I was born for conversation and not for writing books." In fact, he had written to me, "Comparing small with great, I should have had, like Saint Augustine, four or five amanuenses to take down talk. I am really a born talker, not a born writer."

He worked every morning on his three-volume catalogue of Italian paintings, hoping to complete it in three or four years. After that he expected to go back to writing. In addition, he kept a daily journal, one page each morning when he woke up, for he still lived wholly in the present and the future. Every day at 12:30 we met him at the front door and climbed into the old Ford station wagon, driven by the stout Welsh chauffeur Parry, who had been in his employ for forty years. At a certain point we all dismounted for a walk, though, small as an atom and almost as light, he had expressed a fear that a wind might rise and blow him away. Standing on a ridge, he pointed to the city of Florence below, creeping out like a tide to swallow him up, and he was afraid it might engulf i Tatti if Harvard, to which he had left it, sold his land. One day the station wagon stopped in a farmyard—one of those shabby, half-barbaric farmyards that had once delighted Henry James—and Berenson, drawing a great key out of his pocket, unlocked a green wooden gate in a high stone wall. He threw open the gate and there within stood the castle of Vincigliata, an old feudal stronghold, long a ruin, that had been restored by an eccentric Englishman a hundred years ago. This John Temple Leader had also built a romantic grey turret on the edge of a large dark rocky pool, the old quarry, no less, from which Donatello had got the pietra serena he used in his sculpture.

Berenson had been "in hiding" in the Second World War—when he said he was a "carbuncle on Mussolini's neck"—and he showed in Rumor and Reflection, written at that time, how far outside of art he was accustomed to ranging. That book, he told me, had been refused by all the English and American publishers, when a young man came to see him, read it, accepted it and sold about twenty thousand copies; it had become the most popular of all his books. He was indignant with a young critic who had also come to see him and had betrayed his confidence about Santayana. The young critic had sworn not to mention Berenson's relations with Santayana, with whom he had never had a quarrel, but it was obvious that he disliked this other old savant of the time who had once been, like him, an "awe-stricken pilgrim" in Europe. Both of these men had crossed all the frontiers, but, while Salvemini was Berenson's dear friend—that other great liberal and humanist—he remembered William James's saying, "George keeps his heart on ice." Berenson remarked, "I would go further and say he had no heart—he was all pen. There is a French saying, Il gagne à être connu. Of Santayana I would say, Il gagne à ne pas être connu." I do not know whether there was anything personal in this adverse feeling, or in his memory of the illiberal Irving Babbitt as a "dull heavy sulker," or in his remark that T. S. Eliot was his "mortal enemy." No one in his time at Harvard, alert and zestful as one might have been, felt that in youth there was anything enviable. Youth was looked upon as a causeway between boyhood and manhood, not as a state that anyone wished to prolong, and no one that he remembered shared the cult of youth of Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Edna Millay. I recalled Joel Spingarn's essay on the fashionable theory of the twenties that all art and wisdom are the products of physical youth and that nothing can be really good unless men still young have done it or like it.

Many scraps of Berenson's talk later came back to me, observations that he made while I sat beside him or, now and then, in his letters. He said that as a boy in Boston he had gloated over Cudjo's Cave in a long-forgotten monthly called Our Young Folks. He spoke of the well-known affinity between the English and the Arabs, connecting this with the homosexuality that is supposed to flourish in English public schools. He was much taken with Mary McCarthy, who had recently visited him and who had just published her book on Venice—he was presently going there himself, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, planning to revise his own early books. He was hoping to spend the following summer rediscovering Florence, almost forgotten in years of travelling elsewhere. He said that, by way of courting him, Mabel Dodge had remarked to him, "You are the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln." At the moment he was excited by a Chinese novel: "Never was I so admitted to the intimacy of the Chinese mind and heart," but Italy was never long out of his mind. When I sent him The Dream of Arcadia, he said that sixty years before he had urged his brother-in-law Logan Pearsall Smith to write about Americans in Italy. He continued, "On a lawn in front of the cemetery church at Ferrara there is (I hope still) a beautiful Canovaesque sarcophagus containing the body of a young Bostonian who died there in the twenties of the nineteenth century. As a Protestant he could not be buried in holy ground, the cemetery itself. I have often itched to write a Pateresque imaginary portrait of this young pilgrim to the land of his spiritual ancestors." He asked, "How early did continental Europe distinguish between an Englishman from Great Britain and one from America? Stendhal was perfectly aware of the difference."

Sometimes Berenson wrote to me from his woodsy retreat at Vallombrosa. There, surrounded by the forest, his only neighbors were the parish priest and the men who were in charge of the forest nursery garden. In his summer cottage W. W. Story had died, and he said, "It was Story's book Fiammetta which ranked high among those that gave me a longing for Italy." Already deaf, he feared that blindness was also coming on, and in that case he "would be as good as cut off from the Not-me… rather a dreary prospect for one who is still so passionately interested in the world at large as I am." Again he wrote from Tripoli, from the marvelous ruins of Leptis Magna, and I remembered what his wife had said in Across the Mediterranean about an earlier journey to Tunisia and Algiers: "My husband was like a war-horse scenting the battle…. His remorseless energy and curiosity invest every step of art history with fascination… with his insatiable curiosity about the genesis, the affiliations, the inter-influence of all forms of art… In a museum… he is so full of excitement that he stays on and on, and is capable, even, of persuading the caretakers of out-of-the-way little collections to let him go on by the light of a candle…" Yet it was part of his great strength that, ranging over all the arts, he clung on the whole so closely to his own parish, Italian painting after and before Giotto. There was much in his career that was ambiguous, no doubt, but his interests were unquestionably universal, and I could well believe what Edith Wharton is supposed to have said, "My other friends are ponds. Berenson is an ocean."