'Landscape. with Figures
The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760-1915. By Van Wyck
Brooks. (Dent, 25s.)
Tilt: ostensible subject of Mr. Van Wyck Brooks's new volume is the influence of Italy on Americans and on the art they produced.. Few subjects are more rewarding than the interaction of cultures as exhibited in art, but it must be said at once that this book wholly fails to provide any critical insight into the processes by which nineteenth- century American artists enlarged or altered their Practice under the impact of their Italian experi- ence. This should come as no surprise,, for Mr. Brooks long ago self-consciously abandoned the kind of writing that made America's Corning of Age and, later, The Ordeal of Mark Twain such distinguished books in faVour of a meandering, unfocused impressionism that has nothing to do with criticism or evaluation and which converts literary history into a gossip column. And it is a Zossip column—a very dull one—that he has given us here. I once walked through a room in a Washington museum that was filled with nothing but Monticellis, two dozen or more of them, whose colours ,fought a losing battle against, the dreary-wintry light of the Washington afternoon. The subjects were all of fetes champetres, fetes' galantes, 'departures for Cythera and pastoral masquerades. Only the demarcations of the chipping, tarnished frames told one where one picture ended and another began. Their variety was that of a pack•of playing cards. Reading The Dream of Arcadia is rather like walking through that unprepossessing room with its laboured effects of atmosphere, colour and artfully costumed gaiety. Mr. Brooks has provided us with a back- ground wash of contadine, crumbling fountains, artists' models, broken statues, cardinals in gilded chairs and a blur of mellow light and old gardens; but the Americans in the foreground are so insub- stantially present that they have no more reality than lay-figures decorated with a few strands of indiscriminate anecdotes. Only the demarcations of the chapter headings indicate where one American ends and another begins.
It is doubtful if Italy has ever been as im- portant to the American as to the English writer. D. H. Lawrence wrote in an early letter: 'One must love Italy.if one has lived there. It is so non- moral. It leaves the soul so free. Over these countries, Germany and England, like the grey skies, lies the gloom of the dark moral' judgment and condemnation and reservation of the people. Italy does not judge. I shall want to go back there.' The Englishman could find an exhilarating release 4:rom the inhibiting puritanism of his own society in Italy, but what the American was chiefly tempted by was the picturesque. in which his own country seemed so disastrously deficient. This was unfortunate, forcing the writer more than ever back into the arms of the romance from possibly finer achievements—back from The Scarlet Letter to The Marble Farrar. Undoubtedly the 'non- moral'. air of Italy gave Byron a freedom and poise that helped him arrive at his great style in Beppo and Don Juan; just as, a century later, it gaVe a vision and form to Forster's early 'novels. But the English artists came from a society for many generations seasoned and matured. They were not frightened by this freedom and they knew how to Use it for their art. What the AMerican artist, on the other hand, needed first was what England, not Italy. had to.give him. In Italy he tended to fall back on his puritanism, develop a picture-postcard imagination or simply go to pieces. Hilda and Kenyon in The Marble Farm find that Rome (with Hawthorne's blessing) merely confirms them in their New England Cal- vinism, and Henry 'James.; who always knows so much more than any of his compatriots, traces the dissolution of Roderick Hudson in Italy, both as an artist and as a personality.'
• There' is a book to be written about American artists in Italy, but this is not it. Such a book will be primarily a critical study, and it will be too dis- criminating to give as much space to Marion Crawford as to James and Berenson. It will be chiefly concerned with the effects of an unfamiliar culture on the sensibility of a race rather oddly unprepared to assimilate them, and it will sacri- fice the mellow voice of the 'raconteur for a serious analysis.of the art (for the mot .part dis- appointing and dull) that the Americans produced under the charm of Italy. Mr. Brooks quotes James as saying : 'A Roman villa . . . seems to me to have less of human and social suggestive- ness, a shorter, lighter reverberation, than an old English country-house, round which experience seems piled so thick.' This is the heart of the matter. The Americans needed a social density and tradition their own country could- not pro- vide and which England had. In the face of such a need, Piranesi ruins were a comparative indulgence.
MARIUS BEWLEY
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