78
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
is a captivity into which uneasiness creeps. Americans who removed
themselves to England were usually seeking manners, civilization,
congenial spirits; in Italy the senses were enchanted, brought under
the spell of the great sun, the heart-breaking landscape, the sweet–
ness of peasant faces, toiling and enduring, the lemon tree against
the wall.
It
appears that an American cannot become an Italian–
property, marriage to the aristocracy, nothing seems to insure as–
similation. And the answer must be that Americans want to live in
Italy but do not wish to become Italians. Many once wished to be–
come Englishmen and succeeded; foreigners from every land have
become Frenchmen of a sort. The Italian exile, with his nostalgic,
feudal temperament, is also a person with a wound, not so very dif–
ferent in his feelings from those beachcombers and divorcees in the
Caribbean, all who seek to soothe their hurt spirits with the sun,
with flowering winters, with white houses opened to the new air and
entangled with old vines. Everywhere in Italy, among the American
colony, one's envy is cut short time and time again by a sudden feel–
ing of sadness in the air, as of something still alive with the joys of
an Italian day and yet somehow faintly withered, languishing. Un–
happiness, disappointment support the exile in his choice. Even the
endlessly productive Santayana revealed at times his wounds from
America and Harvard. Of his career at Harvard he wrote dryly,
that it had been "slow and insecure, made in an atmosphere of
mingled favour and distrust." He pretended not to care. He made
very little use of Italy; it was a refuge in which he wrote his books,
tirelessly.
Was Berenson shady, crooked? Did he make his fortune with
the help of willfully false as well as genuine attributions? Whatever
the truth, certainly large numbers of his critics and his admirers
accepted the charge of profitable dishonesties back in his past. By
choosing to use his knowledge for the sale of works of art he
brought himself under the suspicion of financial immorality. The
"attribution" of venality clung to this famous humanist. Old scan–
dal, dubious gains, lingering doubts, gave a drama and tension to
his life; but his work, his books were authentic and he was, himself,
a pure creation-that everyone agreed. Berenson lamented that his
