LIVING IN ITALY
81
calIon him in Rome, where he was installed for his yearly state
visit like Queen Victoria on her business-like holidays, when the
news came that Croce had died. "I should have gone
first! The dear man was younger than I!" Berenson said with
feeling. Everyone smiled. It was not only that Berenson had lived
so long but his wanting to go on living still longer that annoyed
certain people. Age was another of his slightly disreputable
luxuries.
When he died, at ninety-four, he left, besides his books and the
pleasure he had given people, a peculiar monument. He left his
villa, his library, to Harvard, the home of his lost youth, so that
gifted young Americans, interested in
art
and history, might look
out on the Tuscan landscape and be saved from barbarism and
provinciality. Berenson seemed to want to leave his very daily exist–
ence to America, his setting, his chosen life. Like all his gifts to the
world, this too was received with misgivings and hesitation. Did
he have enough money to make such a gift? Before she could be
accepted the gift must have a dowry, money for her own upkeep, as
if
she were a bride. "We will all starve! For Harvard!" they used to
say in his household. The arrangements were made and the site
created by sheer force of personal will and longing would be re–
turned to its source, to be preserved as a little pocket of American
intellectual industry, a bit of foreign investment, in the busy Appen–
nines. What endurance and genius had kept alive would go along
smoothly, buzzing like the lawn mowers in front of the White
House, with the efficient routine of public domesticity. Institu–
tionalized, the villa would soon remind one of those inns taken over
by
a conquering army. Its occupants will have been chosen and as–
signed. All those hundreds upon hundreds of guests of the past–
the surly writers and old ' ladies from Boston, the dons, the pansies,
the actresses, the historians-won't be coming back to gossip, in a
whisper in the halls, about how fortunes were made, to sneak into
Florence to get drunk at the Excelsior, and to see the unique Beren–
son, leading his curious life. At the end, the Pope sent his blessing.
