THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES
It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from the
love-story of Châteaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a
sheet of note-paper, led to the writing of _Eleanor_. Madame de
Beaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman setting
imposed itself, so to speak, at once. But to write in Rome itself,
played upon by all the influences of a place where the currents of life
and thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, or
artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew,
impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yet
not too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get an
apartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested an
apartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known to
many an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wife
and children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. We
found by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, who
agreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provide
against a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for
_villegiatura_ in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or
stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched.
The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained with
the Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On a
certain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all the
furies were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, who
had journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to his
London work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon be
back in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that first
night!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare,
comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to a
distant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below
the dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidable
gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal
wondering whether we could possibly stay it out.
But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished and
the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light
blazing on the Alban lake, and had but to cross the apartment to
find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our
feet, sparkling in a thousand colors to the sea. And outside was the
garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars--like the jars of
Knossos--but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias
be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals; its dark and
tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of
the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our
feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun,
open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering _bambini_; its
magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a
group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that
roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast
landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the Circæan
promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch the
sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into
the shining bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea.
And in one day we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had
been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to
burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into
something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we
were, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession for
three months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty,
antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome at
our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work.
Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Henry James in a
happier light. A new light, too. For here, in this Italian country, and
in the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly known as a
Londoner was far more at home than I; and I realized, perhaps more fully
than ever before, the extraordinary range of his knowledge and
sympathies.
Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the
personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid
_connaissances_ and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as rich
elements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had read
immensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once more
gradually and delightfully clear on this new field. That he spoke French
to perfection was of course quickly evident to any one who had even a
slight acquaintance with him. M. Bourget once gave me a wonderful
illustration of it. He said that Mr. James was staying with himself and
Madame Bourget at their villa at Hyeres, not long after the appearance
of Kipling's "Seven Seas." M. Bourget, who by that time read and spoke
English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and
declared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn.
Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, fronting
his hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomatic
French--an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget. Something
similar, it will be remembered, is told of Tennyson. "One evening," says
F. T. Palgrave of the poet, "he read out, offhand, Pindar's great
picture of the life of Heaven, in the Second Olympian, into pure modern
prose splendidly lucid and musical." Let who will decide which _tour de
force_ was the more difficult.
But Mr. James was also very much at home in Italian, while in the
literature, history, and art of both countries he moved with the
well-earned sureness of foot of the student. Yet how little one ever
thought of him as a student! That was the spell. He wore his
learning--and in certain directions he was learned--"lightly, like a
flower." It was to him not a burden to be carried, not a possession to
be proud of, but merely something that made life more thrilling, more
full of emotions and sensations--emotions and sensations which he was
always eager, without a touch of pedantry, to share with other people.
His knowledge was conveyed by suggestion, by the adroitest of hints and
indirect approaches. He was politely certain, to begin with, that you
knew it all; then to walk _with you_ round and round the subject,
turning it inside out, playing with it, making mock of it, and catching
it again with a sudden grip, or a momentary flash of eloquence, seemed
to be for the moment his business in life. How the thing emerged, after
a few minutes, from the long involved sentences!--only involved because
the impressions of a man of genius are so many, and the resources of
speech so limited. This involution, this deliberation in attack, this
slowness of approach toward a point which in the end was generally
triumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as Mr. James
used it in speech than as he employed it--some of us would say, to
excess--in a few of his latest books. For, in talk, his own living
personality--his flashes of fun--of courtesy--of "chaff"--were always
there, to do away with what, in the written word, became a difficult
strain on attention.
I remember an amusing instance of it, when my daughter D----, who was
housekeeping for us at Castel Gandolfo, asked his opinion as to how to
deal with the Neapolitan cook, who had been anything but satisfactory,
in the case of a luncheon-party of friends from Rome. It was decided to
write a letter to the ex-bandit in the kitchen, at the bottom of the
fifty-two steps, requesting him to do his best, and pointing out recent
shortcomings. D----, whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought the
letter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast _salone_ of the
villa, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. "A really nice
pudding" was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius for
sweets is well known. Mr. James threw out half phrases--pursued
them--improved upon them--withdrew them--till finally he rushed upon the
magnificent bathos--"_un dolce come si deve_!"--which has ever since
been the word with us for the tiptop thing.
With the country people he was simplicity and friendship itself. I
recollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked, barefooted monk,
coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Alban
lake, and how the super-subtle, supersensitive cosmopolitan found not
the smallest difficulty in drawing out the peasant and getting at
something real and vital in the ruder, simpler mind. And again, on a
never-to-be-forgotten evening on the Nemi lake, when, on descending from
Genzano to the strawberry-farm that now holds the site of the famous
temple of Diana Nemorensis, we found a beautiful youth at the
_fattoria_, who for a few pence undertook to show us the fragments that
remain. Mr. James asked his name. "Aristodemo," said the boy, looking,
as he spoke the Greek name, "like to a god in form and stature." Mr.
James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside the
lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from the
furrows through which the plow had just passed, bits of the innumerable
small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are
now mingled with the _fragole_ in the rich alluvial earth. It was a
wonderful evening; with a golden sun on the lake, on the wide stretches
where the temple stood, and the niched wall where Lord Savile dug for
treasure and found it; on the great ship timbers also, beside the lake,
wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest
depth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsini
villa; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. I
presently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely,
a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for the
winged feet and helmet of the messenger god! Mr. James paused--his eyes
first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" he
murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the
word. "What a name! What a place!"
On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known
antiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all by
the combination of learning with _le sport_ which he affected. Let me
quote the account of it given by a girl of the party:
Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being _the_ top
authority in his profession with a kindness and _bonhomie_ which
make even an ignoramus feel happy with him--and with the frankest
love for _flânerie_ and "sport." We all fell in love with him. To
hear him after lunch, in his fluent, but lisping English, holding
forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa--"what treasures are still
to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only _dig_!"--and saying
with excitement--"ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the
site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. _Here_, Madame, beneath
our feet, is Alba Longa"--And then suddenly--a pause, a deep sigh
from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air--"I
vonder--vether--von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!"
And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace which
roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--the
short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now
alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly,
observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all that
underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and
women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other
happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetings
at Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in my
literary life and in our friendship. Later on I shall quote from his
_Eleanor_ letter, the best, perhaps, of all his critical letters to me,
though the _Robert Elsmere_ letters, already published, run it hard.
That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to give
more than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I will
record here the last time but one that I ever saw Henry James--a vision,
an impression, which the retina of memory will surely keep to the end.
It was at Grosvenor Place in the autumn of 1915, the second year of the
war. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! His
passionate sympathy for England and France, his English
naturalization--a _beau geste_ indeed, but so sincere, so moving--the
pity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made him
put all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that he
might spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance in
France--one must supply all this as the background of the scene.
It was a Sunday afternoon. Our London house had been let for a time, but
we were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rushing tide of
war-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in.
I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soon
found. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy to
Berlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. He
described first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, political
and military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a room
from which the air is being slowly exhausted. They _know_ they can't
win! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can
do." The American further reported that after his formal business had
been done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing his
whole attitude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk to
you frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the attitude
of President Wilson. Colonel ---- listened, and when the outburst was
done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known
President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and
morally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--"
And then, springing up in his seat, "And, by Heaven! if you want war
with America, you can have it to-morrow!"
Mr. James's dramatic repetition of this story, his eyes on fire, his
hand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight of
him in a typical representative moment.
Six months later, on March 6, 1916, my daughter and I were guests at the
British Headquarters in France. I was there at the suggestion of Mr.
Roosevelt and by the wish of our Foreign Office, in order to collect the
impressions and information that were afterward embodied in _England's
Effort_. We came down ready to start for the front, in a military motor,
when our kind officer escort handed us some English telegrams which had
just come in. One of them announced the death of Henry James; and all
through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in
the Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, the
ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was
intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement
and novelty of the great spectacle around us.
"_A mortal, a mortal is dead_!"
I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the dead
sons of England, dead for her; but even through their ghostly voices
came the voice of Henry James, who, spiritually, had fought in their
fight and suffered in their pain.
One year and a month before the American declaration of war. What he
would have given to see it--my dear old friend--whose life and genius
will enter forever into the bonds uniting England and America!
* * * * *
Yes!--
... He was a priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
Which we saw with his eyes and were glad.
For that was indeed true of Henry James as of Wordsworth. The "wonder
and bloom," no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, like
the disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weave
them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art.
Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in _The Wings of a Dove_--the
most exquisite, in some ways, of all his women--Roderick Hudson, St.
George, the woman doctor in the _Bostonians,_ the French family in the
_Reverberation_, Brooksmith--and innumerable others--it was the wealth
and facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observation
of character in a chapter of the _Bostonians,_ a story he thought little
of, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novel
of the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalism
in the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation.
_Ann Veronica_ and the _New Machiavelli_, and several other tales by the
same writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the same
characters under different names. Of an art so false and confused Henry
James could never have been capable. His people, his situations, have
the sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--of
nature, which does not mix her molds.
As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficult
problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress,
published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, in
their very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he often
said to me, he could never read a novel that interested him without
taking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some of
his letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his.
Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; important
as they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought very
little consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought a
great deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In _The
Wings of a Dove_, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is
almost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for a
scene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book is
shattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the two
fiancé's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathy
as a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in the
very presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, is
in some ways a _tour de force_ of construction. It is the central point
on which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to my
mind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is here
writing as a _virtuoso_, and not as the great artist we know him to be.
And the same, I think, is true of _The Golden Bowl._ That again is a
wonderful exercise in virtuosity; but a score of his slighter sketches
seem to me infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. The
book in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended--at
any rate, among the later novels--is _The Ambassador_. There, the skill
with which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points of
view, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by the
personality of the "Ambassador" and by the mystery to which every
character in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, not
the master, of the theme. And the climax--which is the river scene, when
the "Ambassador" penetrates at last the long-kept secret of the
lovers--is as right as it is surprising, and sinks away through
admirable modulations to the necessary close. And what beautiful things
in the course of the handling!--the old French Academician and his
garden, on the _rive gauche_, for example; or the summer afternoon on
the upper Seine, with its pleasure-boats, and the red parasol which
finally tells all--a picture drawn with the sparkle and truth of a
Daubigny, only the better to bring out the unwelcome fact which is its
center. _The Ambassador_ is the masterpiece of Mr. James's later work
and manner, just as _The Portrait of a Lady_ is the masterpiece of
the earlier.
And the whole?--his final place?--when the stars of his generation rise
into their place above the spent field? I, at least, have no doubt
whatever about his security of fame; though very possibly he may be no
more generally read in the time to come than are most of the other great
masters of literature. Personally, I regret that, from _What Maisie
Knew_ onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and
an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed
by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first
discussed the _pros_ and _cons_ of dictation, on the fell above Cartmel
Chapel, when he was with us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted by
the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed
to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than
he could have produced without it. Also, that in the use of dictation,
as in everything else, he showed himself the extraordinary craftsman
that he was, to whom all difficulty was a challenge, and the conquest of
it a delight. Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the
natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than
checked by the new method; and one is jealous of anything whatever that
may tend to stand between him and the unstinted pleasure of those to
come after.
But when these small cavils are done, one returns in delight and wonder
to the accomplished work. To the _wealth_ of it, above all--the deep
draughts from human life that it represents. It is true indeed that
there are large tracts of modern existence which Mr. James scarcely
touches, the peasant life, the industrial life, the small-trading life,
the political life; though it is clear that he divined them all, enough,
at least, for his purposes. But in his vast, indeterminate range of busy
or leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backed
with ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works," young girls
and youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcely
anything in human feeling, normal or strange, that he cannot describe or
suggest. If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so are
Stendhal and Turguénieff, and half the great masters of the novel; and
if he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it is
perhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he may
evoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies the
necessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art.
And all through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James"
speaking--Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human
heart we are in contact. There is much that can be _learned_ in fiction;
the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism,
are endless; we see them in scores of modern books. But at the root of
every book is the personality of the man who wrote it. And in the end,
that decides.