LIVING IN ITALY
79
fame as an art expert "degenerated into a widespread belief that
if
only I could be approached in the right way I could order this
or that American millionaire to pay thousands upon thousands and
to attribute to a great master. Proposals of this nature ... became
a burden; and in the end I was compelled in self-defence to refuse
hundreds of thousands for any daub that I was bribed by the seller
to see people unless I was sure that they brought no 'great masters'
with them. Needless to say that every person I would not receive,
every owner whose picture I would not ascribe to Raphael or
Michaelangelo or Giorgione, Titian or Tintoretto ... turned into
an enemy."
Berenson's success, the money he made as a young man,
aroused supersitious twitchings among people everywhere, even
those who delighted in him as a friend, and certainly among his
colleagues. Hadn't life turned out to be too easy for this poor
Jewish fine arts scholar from Boston? Was knowledge, honestly
used, ever quite so profitable, especially knowledge of art? He had,
it was felt, sold himself to the devil by demanding life on his own
terms, by asking more than other scholars, by becoming a
padrone
instead of a simple professor. Italian critics were far from hospit–
able to his ideas and great feuds raged. They did not give over
their art to a foreigner without a fight, without accusations and
sneers.
Some of the uneasiness felt by the world will inevitably be felt
by the man himself. Stubbornness of attitude became a defense for
a whole life. A hardening and narrowing, repetition of positions
taken long ago, obstinate rejections disguised pain and fear of ob–
solescence. In Italy, the tremendousness of the past reinforces the
spirit in its old assumptions ; nothing new seems to be required. It
was part of Berenson's idyllic removal that he couldn't like much
of the art of his own time. The gods will not grant every gift. He
set himself against violence, fragmentation, improvisation, primi–
tivism. He couldn't accept Picasso, Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Kafka.
He was apprehensive about these productions, irked by the broken
forms. He liked Homer, Goethe and Proust, but Faulkner disposed
him to fretfulness. He looked upon so many contemporary things
with painful distaste and something like hurt feelings. He seemed
