Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro Read online

  H. James jr.

  NOTES

  1. William James (1842–1910), James’s oldest brother, a professor at Harvard. A famous pragmatist philosopher and psychologist, he was the author of many important studies, among which Principles of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1907). His Correspondence is also of the greatest interest.

  2. Hotel Barbesi was at San Samuele, on the Grand Canal, with annexed bathing facilities.

  3. John La Farge (1835–1910), the American painter. He gave painting lessons to Henry and William at Newport in 1860–1862 and greatly influenced Henry, also through the choice of readings he advised him on.

  4. William Dean Howells (1837–1920), the American writer and critic, the champion of “genteel” realism in the U.S., extremely influential in the field of literature.

  5. Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828–1893), the French writer and critic, whose Italy, Rome and Naples, James had reviewed in 1868.

  6. “The traveller who really loves painting ought to get leave to come to this room whenever he chooses; and should pass the summer sunny mornings there again and again, wandering now and then in the Anti-Collegio, and Sala dei Pregadi, and coming back to rest under the wings of the crouched lion at the feet of the “Mocenigo”. He will not otherwise enter so deeply into the heart of Venice” in The Complete Works of John Ruskin cit., vol. XI, p.376. The second reference (to the three artists one should see in Venice) is on p.359. The description of Tintoretto’s San Cassiano Crucifixion is on pp.366–367. On Tintoretto and English and American writers see Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, “Tintoretto e gli angloamericani nell’Ottocento”, in Annali di Ca’ Foscari, XXV, 1–2, 1996, pp.189–224, and Anna Laura Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, Ravenna, Longo, 1983.

  7. “Rages”: James may have chosen this verb basing himself on Taine, or on the definition of Tintoret as “l’irato” (ira=rage) used in XIX century guidebooks. See Giulio Lecomte, Venezia, Cecchini, 1844, p.377 (“… the passion of the one his contemporaries called il furioso, l’irato …”) (my translation).

  8. James clearly means Giovanni Bellini, and not Jacopo; moreover Giovanni is the third great painter named by Ruskin.

  9. Gustave Doré (1832–1883). James loved this artist whose illustrations of Perrault’s Contes and Dante’s Commedia he had much appreciated as a child. He often referred to Doré even after 1900. See A. Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James, Preface by Leon Edel, Ann Arbour, UMI Research Press, 1986, pp.18–21.

  10. Titian’s Assumption, now in the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari church, was at the time in the Accademia Gallery, where it remained until 1919. The hall, as it was, is represented in M. Moro and G. Brizeghel’s lithograph, “The Hall of the Assumption in The Venice Academy”, reproduced in Venezia nell’Ottocento cit., p.129. The Presentation of the Virgin was, and still is, in its original place, i.e. the “Sala dell’Albergo” of the Scuola della Carità, now the Accademia Gallery. Tintoretto’s Presentation is in the church of the Madonna dell’Orto.

  11. James wrote several times on Gautier, whom he admired with some reservations, however, on his moral sense, as in this very passage. James found Gautier particularly clever in his descriptions of bodies: “Flesh and blood, noses and bosoms, arms and legs were a delight to him, and it was his mission to dilate upon them”, as he wrote in 1873 (French Writers in Literary Criticism cit., p.367.)

  12. At the Accademia Gallery, just as the Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, which are however at eye level now, quite visible. Tintoretto’s Annunciation is in the lower hall of the Scuola di San Rocco.

  13. The church of San Cassiano (or San Cassano). This Crucifixion is described at length in The Stones of Venice by Ruskin, while the one in the Scuola di San Rocco has only two lines: “I must leave this picture to work its will on the spectator; for it is beyond all analysis, and above all praise” (Venetian Index, entry “Rocco, Scuola di”).

  14. Mr. and Mrs. Bronson: the American Katherine de Kay (1834–1901) married Arthur Bronson in 1855. Mr. Bronson died in Paris in 1885. From 1875 they lived in Europe, and Mrs. Bronson, from 1876, lived in Casa Alvisi, formerly a palazzo Giustinian, right across from the Salute church, on the Grand Canal. James was a guest at Casa Alvisi in 1887, and of Mrs. Bronson’s house he wrote in the essay “Casa Alvisi” (1902). Mrs. Bronson’s daughter, Edith, born in 1861, married Cosimo Rucellai, of the noble Florentine family, in 1895, and lived in Tuscany, where her mother died. On Mrs. Bronson see More than Friend, edited by M. Meredith and R. S. Humphrey, also on her friendship with Robert Browning (Armstrong Browning Library and Wedgestone Press, 1985).

  15. “Brother of mine” in Italian.

  II

  To Isabella Stewart Gardner1

  May 2nd [1884]

  (I.S.G.M. Ms.)

  3 Bolton St. Piccadilly

  Dear Mrs. Gardner –

  I ought to have answered before this your terrible little letter from Agra—but you mentioned the 1st of May as the first moment, probably, at which you would find my own epistle (at Venice:) and I reflect that this is only May 2nd and that people never arrive in Venice as soon as they expect to. As you must have been dallying with the Orientals on the way, you probably won’t get there for another week or so. I am myself, as you see, a striking example of the truth of that axiom—that one doesn’t get to Venice as soon as one expected to the year before. I shall not get there for a long time, my dear lady—till a long time after you have left. I shall see you before that, here in London, and will then explain to you the source of my little delays. You will talk perhaps about broken vows—or you would, at least, if you were not a woman of infinite tact. We must break something, sometimes, and if I didn’t smash a promise occasionally, I should fracture something more valuable still. I won’t ask you to forgive me—for you will pretend you won’t—even long after you have really done so—and the plea of extenuating circumstances sounds weak. I would much rather pose as a faithless friend—I so seldom have the opportunity. It is true that I haven’t the excitement of believing that you miss me—on the lagoon—for I know too well that you don’t miss any thing or any one in this preposterously pleasant career of yours. You have everything, you do everything, you enjoy everything, and if you don’t happen to find an extra-post-horse at Venice to pull your triumphal car—to tow your gondola—you may be sure the poor patient beast will be waiting at the next étape. In other words I shall be waiting in London, and shall get into harness when you arrive. In the meanwhile have pity on the place where the collar has rubbed. I wear a collar always: que dis-je? I wear half a dozen. They are piled up round my poor old head, and when you see me you will scarce distinguish the tip of my nose. I am a ruminant quadruped, too, and I turn it over in my mind that, really, I, at least, am too good a friend of yours to lend a further hand—or hoof—in spoiling you. I have heard about the King of Cambodia—and the Nizam of Hyderabad (?)—about all your adventures and entertainments and I feel kind of savage at the thought that you have had this lovely time while I have had a rude workaday life, jolting and scraping from one dull day to the other. I don’t pity you, dear lady—though I appreciate you as much as ever. I send you herein a line from Mrs. Bronson, who, however, is so absurdly easy to know that you will throw it overboard. Take it out of me here, and believe me ever yours unfaithfully,

  Henry James

  NOTE

  1. Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), the famous collector and founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum at Fenway Court in Boston. Her extraordinary collection was put together mainly on the advice of Bernard Berenson. She arrived in Venice for the first time on May 13, 1884—later than planned, as James foresaw—coming from Constantinople by sea, after a long trip in the East. With Mr. Gardner, she had been received by two kings of Cambodia, she had been to China, and at Hyderabad, not finding any hotels, they had had to sleep in tent n.7 at the Public Gardens. This long trip had been made on the advice of Mrs. Gardner’s doctor, after Mrs
. Gardner had suffered from depression following the death of her child. Mrs. Gardner rented several times Palazzo Barbaro from the Curtises. Part of this letter was published by L. Hall Tharp, op.cit., p.104.

  III

  To Grace Norton1

  February 27th [1887]

  (Edel III)

  Venice, Palazzino Alvisi

  My dear Grace.

  Yesterday comes in your delightful letter of February 8th, following (at a shorter interval than I deserved), a most benevolent one of November 23d, which reached me in Florence shortly after I had written to you at Pisa. […] I came to this place five days ago—after spending some ten weeks in Florence. I left England for six or eight—but it is now my hope that I may remain away till the summer. Alice2 has kindly taken my rooms and servants off my hands and this simplifies the problems connected with an empty habitation and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (my domestics!) demoralized by the master’s long absence. As I dislike the Season, in London, “worse and worse,” I felicitate myself on escaping it this year. The first month I was in Florence I had a villa at Bellosguardo, kindly sublet to me by a friend (Constance Fenimore Woolson3 the novelist—an excellent woman, of whom I am very fond, though she is almost impracticably deaf), who had taken it for three years and was not yet ready to go into it, having another on her hands. A cook went with it—a venerable—and veritable chef—so that I was very comfortable—and blissfully lifted out of that little simmering social pot—a not very savoury human broth—into which Florence resolves itself today. It is a pity it is personally so tiresome, for (allowing for the comparative ugliness of its winter phase, with hard cold and dusty tramontana) it had never seemed to me, naturally and artistically, more delightful. And the views from the villas on the hills (I was at a good many) are as beautiful—really—as your memory must tell you. On January 1st my friend came into her villa and I descended into Florence—where (I am told) I went “out” a good deal. Why, I don’t know—as it was very exactly what I had left London not to do. I am also told I was “lionized”—and the wherefore of this I know still less. On reflection, in fact, I greatly doubt it. But I did see a great many people; too many, for what they were. I won’t tell you their names, or more than that they were members of the queer, promiscuous polyglot (most polyglot in the world) Florentine society. The Russians are the great factor there and the two pleasantest houses are supposed to be that of Mme de Tchiatchef and that of the Marchesa Incontri. The former is a remarkably nice and sympathetic Englishwoman married to a rich and retired Russian diplomatist; the latter a singularly clever and easy Russian, (with a beautiful villa outside of Porta S. Gallo) who, divorced from her first husband, Prince Galitzin, married a Florentine and became his widow. Mme de T. is very good (and yet not dull) and Mme Incontri I suspect of being bad—though not dull either. The latter receives both the serious and the “smart” people, is literary (writes poorish novels, under false names, in English, which she speaks in absolute perfection) and also, I think, rather dangerous. The most intelligent person in Florence is Violet Paget4 (Vernon Lee) who has lived there all her life, and receives every day, from 4 to 7, and as often in the evening as people will come to her. She is exceedingly ugly, not “well off,” disputatious, contradictious and perverse; has a clever, paralysed half-brother, Edward Hamilton, formerly in diplomacy—who is always in her salon, bedridden or rather sofa-ridden—and also a grotesque, deformed, invalidical, posing little old mother, and a father in the highest degree unpleasant, mysterious and sinister, who walks all day, all over Florence, hates his stepson, and hasn’t sat down to table with his family for twenty years. Yet in spite of these drawbacks, Miss Paget’s intellectual and social energy are so great, that she attracts all the world to her drawing room, discusses all things in any language, and understands some, drives her pen, glares through her spectacles and keeps up her courage. She has a mind—almost the only one in Florence. I saw also something of a very clever, natural, exuberant Countess Gamba who is one of the figures of the place—niece by her husband of Byron’s Guiccioli5 (she has a lot of his letters to the G. which she declares shocking and unprintable—she took upon herself to burn one of them up!) and putative natural daughter of Giuseppe Giusti, the satiric Tuscan poet. (Her mother was some fine Florentine lady to whom G. was much devoted, and she—the “Euphrosyne”—is said much to resemble him.) She was the most of a “nature” of anyone I saw. I encountered no interesting man save [Adolf von] Hildebrand,6 the admirable, original German sculptor, who has the feeling of the Greeks and that of the early Tuscans too, by a strange combination, but is so little known, owing to his scorn of the usual claptrap and catchpenny arts. Willard Fiske7 our compatriot, a child of “Cornell,” and supposed Icelandic scholar, who lives in Mr. Marsh’s8 old villa, and has filled it with 5000 volumes of the Sagas and of Petrarch (!!) is, though friendly and hospitable, an absolutely colourless little personage. The other Americans there are nil. (I am staying here—provisionally—with my old friend Mrs. Bronson (who lived, a thousand years ago, at Newport and has lived here for ten). Her house directly faces the big doors of the Salute Church—and is next to the Pension Suisse, where I think you once stayed. But I am lodged in an old palazzo Giustinian-Recanati, which, in her rear, forms a kind of detached wing or appendage to her premises. It contains a very snug and comfortable little apartment of several rooms, including a private theatre, very well mounted, which she most benevolently puts at the service of her friends. Browning9 has often staid here—by the month at a time (he is a great friend of the padrona) and written crabbed verses at the table at which I sit. His son has been staying here for three months and departed just before I came in. They are looking for a palace—he and Robert—want to buy one—and thought they had, last year, till the vendor backed out. Mr. “Peabody Russell”10 of the U.S. has just bought two Contarini palaces, and is going to “knock them into one”! I tremble for what that one will be. This visit of mine (to Mrs. B.) has been promised again and again—but I shall make it short and soon look out for an independent lodging. Mrs. Bronson is a most benevolent, injudiciously (even) generous woman, adored by all the common people of Venice—and preyed upon by her servants. “Society” here presses more or less into her saloons—Layards, Hurtados, Mocenigos, Metternichs, Don Carlos (!!)11 etc.—but I have kept out of them, mostly, save when she is alone (with her only daughter, a plain but pleasant girl, whose hand is sought here by penniless patricians who think her richer than she is, and whom she doesn’t at all fancy. She doesn’t like Venice—and would fain live in England.) I am overdone with people and aspire to be quiet here, and do my work and possess my soul.—Yes, London is a man’s city (not a woman’s)—but even a man may sometimes be glad of something smaller. I am happy to say, however, that I always remain of the mind that if one can only have—or if I can only have—one domicile, London is the best place to have it. There it covers most ground. England is interesting at present—because it is heaving so, and cracking and fermenting. But the fissures are mainly political, and the exhalations often foul. Besides, I miss there the literary sense. Il n’y en a plus!—nor anywhere else, that I can see. I shall be delighted to see Lowell and Lily—so that I talk with her—and with him—about you. I envy you immensely your long reads; that is the curse of London—it is the worst place in the world for reading. Ever my dear Grace, your affectionate

  Henry James

  NOTES

  1. Grace Norton (1834–1926), the sister of Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), the Harvard art historian, translator of Dante and the founder of The Nation.

  2. Alice James (1848–1892), sister of William and Henry, invalid since her father’s death; she was the author of a Diary which was published only in 1964 by Leon Edel. She arrived in England in 1884: from her invalid room she kept in touch with the world.

  3. Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), the American writer, a close friend of James. She committed suicide in Venice (see Introduction).

  4. Violet Paget (Verno
n Lee) (1856–1935), the English writer who lived in Florence. Her brother Eugene Lee Hamilton (1845–1907) told the anecdote that gave James the idea for The Aspern Papers (Letters, III, p.167). As is well known, James transferred the story of the precious letters from Florence to Venice.

  5. Teresa Guiccioli Gamba, the famous last mistress of Lord Byron.

  6. Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921), a German sculptor who lived between Florence and Munich.

  7. Willard Fiske (1831–1904), a scholar of the literature of Iceland, where he sojourned and kept a notebook of his 1879 stay; of Petrarch and Dante, of the Egyptian alphabet, and of the game of chess (he was editor of the American Chess Monthly in 1857, and in 1858–60 with P. Morphy). He left his Icelandic literature and his Dante collections to Cornell University; in the 1880s he printed several books in Florence. Cornell University Press published several catalogues of the collections he bequeathed to the Library.

  8. George Perkins Marsh (1800–1882), minister to Italy 1861–1862.