PARTISAN REVIEW
liked Jews who do not know their place; despite the magnificent pres–
ence, the
soigne
air, the echoes of Pater and Matthew Arnold, the great
fortune built up by Berenson as a consultant 'to millionaire collectors,
the villa, and the "Jewish aristocracy" of Lithuania, one is compelled,
after sixty years, to recall Berenson as a young immigrant given his start
by Mrs. Jack Gardner. But how he looks up to Santayana, and how he
rejects the faintest criticism of that great man, who is always the idol
of nonphilosophic minds who are never quite sure what he is getting at!
Berenson himself hadn't read the Santayana memoirs; his secretary
told him not to, he would be too distressed. And very pleasantly and
understandably, he didn't care about men like Whitehead-pure thinkers
who thought about thinking. Yet I was not to offer the slightest possible
irreverence on the subject of Santayana-my faint complaint being his
addiction to pseudo-classic Wisdom. In some way Santayana's life has
always been a touchstone for his own-the manner conceals an extra–
ordinary humility, it seems. And meanwhile there is Santayana in his
convent cell and Berenson in his villa: not "expatriates," not "Amer–
icans," simply unbound to any particular country. Both with that strange
formative early life in New England, and with no place to go back to,
the last New England heroes of the James saga, yet quietly and firmly
superior to all national limitations-truly citizens of the world, and dis–
coursing of essential things, above all contemporary battles, in an English
that comes straight down to us from the Boston of seventy years ago.
Florence, June 16--Cafe scene in the Piazza della Repubblica,
which everyone absentmindedly still calls the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
In the moonlight hundreds of people sitting at those long lines of tables,
row on row, between the hedges of rubber plants that mark off one
cafe from another; an audience waiting to make its own play. Won–
derful to watch the long appraising stares, like an expert judging horse–
flesh, with which these open-air troglodytes look each newcomer up and
down. No one misses a thing. They may look bored and weary
to
death,
with scales over their half-closed eyes, sipping indifferently at their
miniscule cup of
espresso
as if there were all the time in the world and
they had been sitting here, with that same cup of coffee, spoon, and
water carafe, since the Etruscans. But in the air the preparatory vapors
of a seduction; these are buds that open only at night. As soon as a new
one walks into the lighted den, making the grand tour up and around
the long line of tables, faint waves radiate from brains chattering with
thought and speculation. Ah, some more of the
Americani.
The waiter
in his soiled and patched evening clothes grins and bows; the three
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