A Writer's Recollections - Volume 2

CHAPTER VII

THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES

It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from the love-story of ChÂteaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a sheet of note-paper, led to the writing of Eleanor. Madame de Beaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman setting imposed itself, so to speak, at once. But to write in Rome itself, played upon by all the influences of a place where the currents of life and thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, or artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yet not too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get an apartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested an apartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known to many an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wife and children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. We found by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, who agreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provide against a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for villegiatura in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched.

The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained with the Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On a certain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all the furies were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, who had journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to his London work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon be back in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that first night!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare, comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to a distant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below the dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidable gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal wondering whether we could possibly stay it out.

But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished and
the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light
blazing on the Alban lake, and had but to cross the apartment to
find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our
feet, sparkling in a thousand colors to the sea. And outside was the
garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars--like the jars of
Knossos--but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias
be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals; its dark and
tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of
the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our
feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun,
open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering bambini; its
magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a
group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that
roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast
landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the CircÆan
promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch the
sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into
the shining bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea.

And in one day we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we were, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession for three months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty, antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome at our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work.

Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Henry James in a happier light. A new light, too. For here, in this Italian country, and in the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly known as a Londoner was far more at home than I; and I realized, perhaps more fully than ever before, the extraordinary range of his knowledge and sympathies.

Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid connaissances and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as rich elements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had read immensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once more gradually and delightfully clear on this new field. That he spoke French to perfection was of course quickly evident to any one who had even a slight acquaintance with him. M. Bourget once gave me a wonderful illustration of it. He said that Mr. James was staying with himself and Madame Bourget at their villa at Hyeres, not long after the appearance of Kipling's "Seven Seas." M. Bourget, who by that time read and spoke English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and declared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn. Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, fronting his hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomatic French--an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget. Something similar, it will be remembered, is told of Tennyson. "One evening," says F. T. Palgrave of the poet, "he read out, offhand, Pindar's great picture of the life of Heaven, in the Second Olympian, into pure modern prose splendidly lucid and musical." Let who will decide which tour de force was the more difficult.

But Mr. James was also very much at home in Italian, while in the literature, history, and art of both countries he moved with the well-earned sureness of foot of the student. Yet how little one ever thought of him as a student! That was the spell. He wore his learning--and in certain directions he was learned--"lightly, like a flower." It was to him not a burden to be carried, not a possession to be proud of, but merely something that made life more thrilling, more full of emotions and sensations--emotions and sensations which he was always eager, without a touch of pedantry, to share with other people. His knowledge was conveyed by suggestion, by the adroitest of hints and indirect approaches. He was politely certain, to begin with, that you knew it all; then to walk with you round and round the subject, turning it inside out, playing with it, making mock of it, and catching it again with a sudden grip, or a momentary flash of eloquence, seemed to be for the moment his business in life. How the thing emerged, after a few minutes, from the long involved sentences!--only involved because the impressions of a man of genius are so many, and the resources of speech so limited. This involution, this deliberation in attack, this slowness of approach toward a point which in the end was generally triumphantly rushed, always seemed to me more effective as Mr. James used it in speech than as he employed it--some of us would say, to excess--in a few of his latest books. For, in talk, his own living personality--his flashes of fun--of courtesy--of "chaff"--were always there, to do away with what, in the written word, became a difficult strain on attention.

I remember an amusing instance of it, when my daughter D----, who was housekeeping for us at Castel Gandolfo, asked his opinion as to how to deal with the Neapolitan cook, who had been anything but satisfactory, in the case of a luncheon-party of friends from Rome. It was decided to write a letter to the ex-bandit in the kitchen, at the bottom of the fifty-two steps, requesting him to do his best, and pointing out recent shortcomings. D----, whose Italian was then rudimentary, brought the letter to Mr. James, and he walked up and down the vast salone of the villa, striking his forehead, correcting and improvising. "A really nice pudding" was what we justly desired, since the Neapolitan genius for sweets is well known. Mr. James threw out half phrases--pursued them--improved upon them--withdrew them--till finally he rushed upon the magnificent bathos--"un dolce come si deve!"--which has ever since been the word with us for the tiptop thing.

With the country people he was simplicity and friendship itself. I recollect him in close talk with a brown-frocked, barefooted monk, coming from the monastery of Palazzuola on the farther side of the Alban lake, and how the super-subtle, supersensitive cosmopolitan found not the smallest difficulty in drawing out the peasant and getting at something real and vital in the ruder, simpler mind. And again, on a never-to-be-forgotten evening on the Nemi lake, when, on descending from Genzano to the strawberry-farm that now holds the site of the famous temple of Diana Nemorensis, we found a beautiful youth at the fattoria, who for a few pence undertook to show us the fragments that remain. Mr. James asked his name. "Aristodemo," said the boy, looking, as he spoke the Greek name, "like to a god in form and stature." Mr. James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside the lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from the furrows through which the plow had just passed, bits of the innumerable small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are now mingled with the fragole in the rich alluvial earth. It was a wonderful evening; with a golden sun on the lake, on the wide stretches where the temple stood, and the niched wall where Lord Savile dug for treasure and found it; on the great ship timbers also, beside the lake, wreckage from Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest depth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsini villa; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. I presently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely, a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for the winged feet and helmet of the messenger god! Mr. James paused--his eyes first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" he murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word. "What a name! What a place!"

On another occasion I recall him in company with the well-known antiquary, Signer Lanciani, who came over to lunch, amusing us all by the combination of learning with le sport which he affected. Let me quote the account of it given by a girl of the party:

Signor Lanciani is a great man who combines being the top
authority in his profession with a kindness and bonhomie which
make even an ignoramus feel happy with him--and with the frankest
love for flÂnerie and "sport." We all fell in love with him. To
hear him after lunch, in his fluent, but lisping English, holding
forth about the ruins of Domitian's villa--"what treasures are still
to be found in ziz garden if somebody would only dig!"--and saying
with excitement--"ziz town, ziz Castello Gandolfo was built upon the
site of Alba Longa, not Palazzuola at all. Here, Madame, beneath
our feet, is Alba Longa"--And then suddenly--a pause, a deep sigh
from his ample breast, and a whisper on the summer air--"I
vonder--vether--von could make a golf-links around ziz garden!"

And I see still Mr. James's figure strolling along the terrace which roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor--the short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, observant; the face of a satirist--but so human!--so alive to all that underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained--meetings at Stocks and in London; letters and talks that were landmarks in my literary life and in our friendship. Later on I shall quote from his Eleanor letter, the best, perhaps, of all his critical letters to me, though the Robert Elsmere letters, already published, run it hard. That, too, was followed by many more. But as I do not intend to give more than a general outline of the years that followed on 1900, I will record here the last time but one that I ever saw Henry James--a vision, an impression, which the retina of memory will surely keep to the end. It was at Grosvenor Place in the autumn of 1915, the second year of the war. How doubly close by then he had grown to all our hearts! His passionate sympathy for England and France, his English naturalization--a beau geste indeed, but so sincere, so moving--the pity and wrath that carried him to sit by wounded soldiers and made him put all literary work aside as something not worth doing, so that he might spend time and thought on helping the American ambulance in France--one must supply all this as the background of the scene.

It was a Sunday afternoon. Our London house had been let for a time, but we were in it again for a few weeks, drawn into the rushing tide of war-talk and war anxieties. The room was full when Henry James came in. I saw that he was in a stirred, excited mood, and the key to it was soon found. He began to repeat the conversation of an American envoy to Berlin--a well-known man--to whom he had just been listening. He described first the envoy's impression of the German leaders, political and military, of Berlin. "They seemed to him like men waiting in a room from which the air is being slowly exhausted. They know they can't win! It is only a question of how long, and how much damage they can do." The American further reported that after his formal business had been done with the Prussian Foreign Minister, the Prussian, relaxing his whole attitude and offering a cigarette, said, "Now then, let me talk to you frankly, as man to man!"--and began a bitter attack on the attitude of President Wilson. Colonel---- listened, and when the outburst was done, said: "Very well! Then I, too, will speak frankly. I have known President Wilson for many years. He is a very strong man, physically and morally. You can neither frighten him nor bluff him--"

And then, springing up in his seat, "And, by Heaven! if you want war with America, you can have it to-morrow!"

Mr. James's dramatic repetition of this story, his eyes on fire, his hand striking the arm of his chair, remains with me as my last sight of him in a typical representative moment.

Six months later, on March 6, 1916, my daughter and I were guests at the British Headquarters in France. I was there at the suggestion of Mr. Roosevelt and by the wish of our Foreign Office, in order to collect the impressions and information that were afterward embodied in England's Effort. We came down ready to start for the front, in a military motor, when our kind officer escort handed us some English telegrams which had just come in. One of them announced the death of Henry James; and all through that wonderful day, when we watched a German counter-attack in the Ypres salient from one of the hills southeast of Poperinghe, the ruined tower of Ypres rising from the mists of the horizon, the news was intermittently with me as a dull pain, breaking in upon the excitement and novelty of the great spectacle around us.

"A mortal, a mortal is dead!"

I was looking over ground where every inch was consecrated to the dead sons of England, dead for her; but even through their ghostly voices came the voice of Henry James, who, spiritually, had fought in their fight and suffered in their pain.

One year and a month before the American declaration of war. What he would have given to see it--my dear old friend--whose life and genius will enter forever into the bonds uniting England and America!

Yes!--
... He was a priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
Which we saw with his eyes and were glad.

For that was indeed true of Henry James as of Wordsworth. The "wonder and bloom," no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, like the disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weave them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art. Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in The Wings of a Dove--the most exquisite, in some ways, of all his women--Roderick Hudson, St. George, the woman doctor in the Bostonians, the French family in the Reverberation, Brooksmith--and innumerable others--it was the wealth and facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observation of character in a chapter of the Bostonians, a story he thought little of, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novel of the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalism in the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation. Ann Veronica and the New Machiavelli, and several other tales by the same writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the same characters under different names. Of an art so false and confused Henry James could never have been capable. His people, his situations, have the sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--of nature, which does not mix her molds.

As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficult problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, in their very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he often said to me, he could never read a novel that interested him without taking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some of his letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his. Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; important as they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought very little consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought a great deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In The Wings of a Dove, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is almost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for a scene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book is shattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the two fiancÉ's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathy as a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in the very presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, is in some ways a tour de force of construction. It is the central point on which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to my mind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is here writing as a virtuoso, and not as the great artist we know him to be. And the same, I think, is true of The Golden Bowl. That again is a wonderful exercise in virtuosity; but a score of his slighter sketches seem to me infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. The book in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended--at any rate, among the later novels--is The Ambassador. There, the skill with which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points of view, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by the personality of the "Ambassador" and by the mystery to which every character in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, not the master, of the theme. And the climax--which is the river scene, when the "Ambassador" penetrates at last the long-kept secret of the lovers--is as right as it is surprising, and sinks away through admirable modulations to the necessary close. And what beautiful things in the course of the handling!--the old French Academician and his garden, on the rive gauche, for example; or the summer afternoon on the upper Seine, with its pleasure-boats, and the red parasol which finally tells all--a picture drawn with the sparkle and truth of a Daubigny, only the better to bring out the unwelcome fact which is its center. The Ambassador is the masterpiece of Mr. James's later work and manner, just as The Portrait of a Lady is the masterpiece of the earlier.

And the whole?--his final place?--when the stars of his generation rise into their place above the spent field? I, at least, have no doubt whatever about his security of fame; though very possibly he may be no more generally read in the time to come than are most of the other great masters of literature. Personally, I regret that, from What Maisie Knew onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first discussed the pros and cons of dictation, on the fell above Cartmel Chapel, when he was with us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than he could have produced without it. Also, that in the use of dictation, as in everything else, he showed himself the extraordinary craftsman that he was, to whom all difficulty was a challenge, and the conquest of it a delight. Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than checked by the new method; and one is jealous of anything whatever that may tend to stand between him and the unstinted pleasure of those to come after.

But when these small cavils are done, one returns in delight and wonder to the accomplished work. To the wealth of it, above all--the deep draughts from human life that it represents. It is true indeed that there are large tracts of modern existence which Mr. James scarcely touches, the peasant life, the industrial life, the small-trading life, the political life; though it is clear that he divined them all, enough, at least, for his purposes. But in his vast, indeterminate range of busy or leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backed with ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works," young girls and youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcely anything in human feeling, normal or strange, that he cannot describe or suggest. If he is without passion, as some are ready to declare, so are Stendhal and TurguÉnieff, and half the great masters of the novel; and if he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it is perhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he may evoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies the necessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art.

And all through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James" speaking--Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human heart we are in contact. There is much that can be learned in fiction; the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism, are endless; we see them in scores of modern books. But at the root of every book is the personality of the man who wrote it. And in the end, that decides.

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