124
REUBEN A. BROW ER
ticle--the dream of a scholar's life in a Palace of Art. There are the
evenings of reading aloud in books from one of three or four languages,
the rambles in garden and countryside, the endless conversations on every–
thing under the sun. There are also the "black serpent days," when
B.B.
is in a foul mood, and when nothing goes right. There is the constant
stream of guests, the "names" that crowd the later pages of this memoir,
among them the many women who adored B.B. and by whom he was
amused, the members of his "orchestra." In his relations with women as
with books and paintings, "culture" was always in the air. The highest
praise apparently of a woman was to call her "a complete work of art."
We think of Yeats in "Men Improve with the Years" contemplating
his
"pictured beauty," and of Pater and Gilbert Osmond.
Berenson was completely at home in the society of "culture" as it
lives in the fiction of James, and as
it
existed in fact in great and less
great houses in England and on the Continent at the end of the century
and a little beyond. Miss Mariano gives a perfect picture of it in her chap–
ter on Edith Wharton, which is easily the masterpiece of the book. There
they sit in the twilight-it always seems to be twilight or firelight or
candlelight-descanting on art and song, reading aloud from a classic or
hearing Edith read from her "latest," criticising and offering improve–
ments, or, books put aside, deep in nuances of gossip. Life in these per–
fectly decorated rooms, Miss Mariano makes clear, was not free from
tensions and ordinary irritations and disappointments. Berenson was a
difficult guest, and he knew
it,
and Edith a demanding hostess. The
personage who swooped down on James and carried him off in the "great
winged chariot" (Jamesian for a car) is there to delight and direct.
After this final impression of Berenson's world, we may draw one
more contrast with Frost. For Berenson there
was
a society of writers and
worldly persons, however effete and inadequate it may now seem. We have
only to think of the impossible picture of Frost in Edith Wharton's New–
port, or at Amy Lowell's "cut-glass dinners," which he detested, to
measure the distance between the two lives. Frost found a society at home,
beginning with 1917, at about the time Nicky Mariano was being
in–
troduced to I Tatti, in Amherst, Michigan and other colleges and uni–
versities. He was one of the founders of the society of writers-in-residence,
teachers and students, a thoroughly American institution, belonging to
the new world in more than one sense of the word.
