Vernon Lee

IT is so long now since the point was virtually conceded by the world, that women may learn what they like and do what they can, that it is quite time to begin to look for the fruit, in them and their doings, of multiplied opportunities and a broader and deeper culture. From fifteen to twenty years oE the so-called higher education, and of the atmosphere of freedom which it implies (for the education open to girls during that period has undoubtedly been more liberal than the old, if still less “ high ” than many desire), means a period covering the exclusively studious years of many women now in the full vigor of early middle life, from some of whom we have a right to expect, if the new theories be sound, more virile and important performance in letters and in art than was possible to their less fortunate elder sisters. Leaving out of the question those very rare geniuses of the first order, the heaven-

appointed, who have always and everywhere made good their claim and received their meed, and of whom there seems, as yet, no good reason to believe that the generation of which we are speaking will furnish even one, there ought, by this time, to be a certain number, amounting to a class, of professional writers, for example, capable of the sustained production of valuable work,— of work which should rival in even excellence the regular contributions to the leading and long-established reviews. Let us take the great English periodicals as the best type of these, or at least the one best known to ourselves; for Blackwood, the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the Contemporary, the Fortnightly, and their fellows still guide the judgment of American readers in many lines, and furnish a standard for American magazine writers. We all know what admirable work even the dull numbers of these reviews usually contain, and what brilliant work their best; what keen thought on contemporary things, and what patient research into those which are bygone ; great resources unostentatiously used ; great beauty of fitness, often, in the form into which they are thrown. We all know, too, that, up to the present time, so immense a proportion of this best periodical literature has been the work of men that the feminine writers would have counted for nothing in a general view of it; and we know, too, that a good deal of it has been merely the incidental, anonymous, and gratuitous work of men whose chief energies were absorbed by other and larger affairs.

What we would like to inquire is, how far the emancipated, encouraged, and enlightened women of the now rising literary generation are beginning to find places among this excellent stock company of writers, and of bow many the actual quality of their published work seems to entitle them to such places.

The essays of certain Englishwomen occur at once to the memory, and from these we propose to select, for a somewhat careful consideration, those of the remarkably endowed and equipped being who writes under the masculine pseudonym of Vernon Lee. We like the instinct in her, old-fashioned though it be, which led her to desire, at first, wholly to hide her personality ; and if there were still the shadow of a secret about it we would scrupulously respect the same.

As it is, there is no need to say more than that Vernon Lee is a young lady of English parentage, born, we believe, and certainly bred, in Italy, who has made such good use of uncommon powers and opportunities that she has been able, at an age when most girls have barely realized their emancipation from the school-room, to shed light on the annals of a comparatively neglected period, and to make a fresh and important contribution to the literature of that vast but always interesting subject, the History of Italian Art.

Her first book,¹ Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was published four years ago. The half dozen essays of which it is composed are preceded by an introductory chapter, in which the writer tells us clearly enough, albeit with a little harmless pomp of manner, the object of a work which she fears will strike its readers, at first sight, as “both heterogeneous and anomalous.” It is to call attention to the fact that a hundred years ago, in Italy, long after the decline of the plastic and pictorial art of the Renaissance, there was another “ spontaneous efflorescence ” of national art on that favored soil, — of art, musical and dramatic; that fusion of arts, that dual art, which culminated in the complete Italian opera. In this way she gives herself great scope, and is able to embrace, in her extensive outlook over the last century, both literature and music; being, as she goes on to say, still with magnificent modesty, “ neither a literary historian nor a musical critic, but an æsthetician,” and finding both literature and music within the “ æsthetician’s ” domain.

The truth is that she has qualifications of no mean order for both the offices which she disclaims. There is a deal of curious learning, not ungracefully employed, in the picturesque résumé, with which her volume opens, of the history of the Arcadian Academy at Rome ; that musty and shadowy institution, whose annals are so obscure and its local habitation so problematical that it would puzzle some of its own honored members, we fancy, to give a clear account of it without the help of Vernon Lee. The great days of the Academy live again under this vivacious pen. The mouldering old villa on the Janiculum, hard by the Corsini Palace, where its sessions used to be held, is searched and illuminated in every corner by the light of a vivid and irrepressible curiosity ; the prone statues in the garden wilderness are freed from their entangling vines, and made to shine upright; the peasants, who have stored their fruit and vegetables in the classic halls, to decamp ; the faded portraits, to come down from their crumbling frames, and move and speak once more “ each in his own tongue.” Queen Christina is reanimated, mid Crescimbeni, and Gravina, the pèrn adoptif of Metastasio ; Carlo Maratta, and his beautiful daughter Faustina, and her husband, the clever and elegant Imolese poet, Zappi, beside a stately procession of Odescalchi, Ottoboni, Albani, and Corsiui, variously eminent in their day, and more or less respectable ; the great improvisatore Perfetti, who was crowned, in good faith, upon the Capitol, and that Maria Morelli, surnamed Gorilla, whose almost farcical coronation, fifty years later, was idealized by Madame de Staël into the triumph of Corinne. Of all these diverse characters the intellectual or artistic pedigree is unrivaled, the near relations are explained, and the remoter divined; the busy and buoyant imagination of the writer sees not merely the world of Italy around each successive figure, but the world of Europe around that; and she is incessantly trying, by means of episodes and excursions, to make her reader share the extent and the completeness of her own view. There is a sketch, in this essay on the Arcadian Academy, of the general social condition and life of Italy, in the last century, outside the four great cities of Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice, visited by the ordinary traveler, which is a perfect marvel of lively realization and telling detail. It is a great deal too long to quote ; and the fact that it is so points to one of the faults of Vernon Lee’s style, — a sort of riotous verbiage and eager habit of iteration and reiteration, of which we shall have occasion to speak later on. But here is an aside brief enough to be detached : —

“ There remains yet another figure in the Rome of those days, which, although scarcely noticed, was a more important one than all the cardinals and pretenders : a German priest, — a hanger-on, first of Cardinal Archinto, and then of Cardinal Alessandro Albani; a sort of pedant, after the German fashion; a kind of humble companion, eating what the charity of his employer gave him, and wedging his way into the company’ of his employer’s grand friends ; a cynical, pleasure-loving, information-seeking man, hanging on to the rich and intelligent painter Raphael Mengs, and who yet gave himself strange airs toward Roman artists and antiquaries. There he was, continually poring over books, though no lover of literature ; continually examining works of art, though no artist, clambering on to the pedestals of statues and into the holes of excavations. What was he about ? What was he trying to do ? The Romans got the answer, although they probably did not fully understand it, when there appeared the first volumes of A History of Art among the Ancients, and when it became known that, in the midst of the cockleshell and mirror art of the eighteenth century, Winckelmann had discovered the long-lost art of antiquity.”

To catch so good a likeness of a mere passer-by, to dash in with so much of spirit a figure so merely incidental and subordinate, and a hundred others equally so, shows a discursive habit of mind, perhaps, but still a brain teeming with information, and of almost superabundant activity. Yet, clever as this initial article on the Arcadian Academy is, and exhaustive and crowded with queer lore, it is not even here that the young essayist shows herself at her very best. In the two which follow, The Musical Life and Metastasio and the Opera, she is more sober, more concentrated ; subdued into genuine reverence before the great musical composers of the last century through a patient study of their mighty works, and furthermore steadied by the sincere conviction that she has a neglected truth to bring to the attention of the world. What that truth is we will try to let her tell in her own lusty words. It is not easy, we repeat, to select such words, because it is so uncommonly difficult for her ever to put her living, rustling, bustling, growing, and blowing thought into a nutshell; for one reason, perhaps, that, in the natural order of things, the nut comes with the fall of the leaf and after the death of the flower. But by snatching a phrase here and a paragraph there, we shall be able to construct for ourselves her musical creed, and come at the gist of her purpose.

“ A hundred years ago,” she says, “ musical amateurs were rarer than now, and to be one involved more responsibility. For, among the Italians of the eighteenth century, music was at once more common and more prized than among us; it was a necessity to the greater part of the nation, but it was an art, a profession rather than an amusement or an accomplishment. All young ladies were not taught music; not, as Baretti most falsely and preposterously pretended, because the morals of professional musicians were too slack, but because people had not yet conceived the modern notion of culture, which often consists merely in giving slovenly cultivation to endowments which deserve no cultivation at all. But where real musical talent existed it was usually made the most of; and it must he remembered that the study of music was, at that time, far more arduous than in these happy days of classes, piano arrangements, manuals of harmony, and other royal roads to mediocrity. The musical education of professionals ; the seven or eight years spent in learning to sing by men who were to be composers; the two or three years spent in learning composition by those who were to be mere performers ; the inexorably complete system, according to which one branch of the art could not be mastered without a knowledge of the others, — all this reacted on the education of the nonprofessional musicians. The music which people heard was too good to permit them to enjoy music which was bad ; the masters were too thoroughly trained to submit, to slovenly pupils.” There follows a very clever and amusing analysis of the capacities and the limitations of the harpsichord, after which the happy warrior comes down in the following forcible fashion upon its admired and omnipresent successor : " An instrument like our pianoforte, with a loud, thick, muffly tone, on which you could execute, with considerable disadvantage, the music written for other instruments, beside the sentimental and thundering imbecility written expressly for it; with sufficient power of expression to supersede other instruments, and with power of mechanical dexterity unlimited enough to ruin itself,— such an instrument, such a compromise, could not have existed in the eighteenth century, and could not, therefore, usurp all musical privileges, make people lose all notion of adaptation of sound and style, accustom them to unlimited noise and to dubious tone, and foster that wholesale ignorance of music in general which is inevitable where a performer need aim only at mechanical dexterity ; arranged pieces, pedals, and tuners having relieved him from the necessity of learning harmony, of studying expression by means of the voice, and of obtaining a correct ear by tuning his own instrument; where, above all, everything having been done for him by others, he has been educated to a total want of musical endeavor.” And again, in the final summing up of her case, “ The younger musicians, yet children in the conservatori, were destined to activity about the year 1800, exactly the moment when classic music melted into nothing, when Italy ceased to he spontaneously creative. . . . Some persons, nay many, nay perhaps most, from that moment date the real existence of music, — at least of the music which will last; and Hegel, we know, distinctly said that music was essentially a romantic art, which only means that it thrives best when not cultivated for its own sake, and that it is most valuable in the days when composers aim at scenic effects and philological distinctions ; when they build up their works out of the fragments left by various preceding generations, to the accompaniment of a chorus of critics ; when art is born spontaneously nowhere, but exists equally artificially everywhere ; when, therefore, composers who are putting together forms originally created by Italians talk loudly of German music, and Italians who have learned all their newest tricks from Germans cry out that foreign music should be banished ; when, in short, criticism and eclecticism are playing at the game of original creation.”

It is plain that we have here an earnest student, who is both a skeptic wiih regard to the music of the present and an agnostic as to that of the “ future; ” and who would as soon think of turning from Raphael to Caravaggio as from Mozart to Wagner for authority and inspiration. Whether or no she is right in this position (our own untutored sympathies are entirely with her), she supports it with a torrent of eloquence and an amazing array of learning. Taking Dr. Burney’s History of Music for her text, she follows him stop by step through that interesting tour undertaken in 1770, “ when Alpine roads were unknown as yet, and Alpine scenery unnoticed,” Along with the enterprising doctor, she penetrates not only the great academies of Bologna and Venice, but all the lesser circoli and private musical cliques all over the peninsula, making the acquaintance of the leading artists and composers in person ; and of each, as she had done in the case of the Arcadian academicians, she sketches the biography and patiently analyzes the chief compositions. Where, as in the case of Metastasio, the great librettist, the details of personal adventure are authentic, abundant, and in themselves dramatic, she shows much of that felicity of choice and arrangement which constitutes the special skill of the biographer; and we are convinced that she might do far more excellent things in that high department of letters than she has done as yet. The whole tremendous task is executed con amore, with unstinted pains and unflagging enthusiasm, and such a bubble of wit and gush of epithets from beginning to end as suggest an inexhaustible spring.

The remaining essays in this first volume, namely on Goldoni. Gozzi, and the Realistic, and Fairy Comedy of Venice are only a trifle less elaborate than those which we have reviewed. They would seem, however, to have been subsequently prepared as supplementary to the earlier ones, and are somewhat less astonishing, for the reason that they cover ground more frequently traversed before. But they are marked by the same strong characteristics of thorough investigation, independent judgment, and fluent, not to say exuberant, diction. Taking the book as a whole, its matter and its workmanship, let us cordially admit that it is a great feat to have been performed by a girl in her earliest twenties. The critical faculty is lower than the creative, and usually, although not always, of later development, and there are hundreds of bright scholars and bright talkers for one born maker ; but the thing which this young woman has accomplished would have been creditable to a mature man who had spent his life in the same line of research, and it is relatively as remarkable, in its lesser way, as the renowned precocities of production of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Keats.

How can such promise be sustained, how has it been sustained, by Vernon Lee ; or is this sort of pre-maturity really promising at all ? We must confess that in our own case a sense, which we believe to be wholesome, of something very like relief blends with the disappointment with which we find her second volume of essays, bearing the fanciful title of Belcaro,² very much more youthful and less weighty than her first. It is more youthful, and it is much more feminine, intensely subjective, and at the same time gloriously lawless. It is all about herself and her emotions and her speculations, with something concerning those of the adored friend to whom she dedicates the book, whose idealized personality seems to hover behind her own as he whom we so desire to call Guido Cavalcanti hovers behind Dante in the Bargello at Florence, and with whose spirit she directly converses in a certain Dialogue on Poetic Morality, which attracted no little attention when it first appeared in an English magazine. Belcaro, like its predecessor, treats of things “ æsthetical,” but in a looser and more general way; with painting and sculpture chiefly, in place of musical and dramatic art. The book does not assume to be technical, but it is full of artistic intelligence and a cultivated susceptibility to beauty. It is redolent of Italy, also, in a charming way, each paper having its separate framework of delicately wrought Italian scenery ; for the writer has learned, and learned well, from the illustrious artcritic whom she professes, in the essay on Ruskinism, to have so far outgrown, the art of landscape painting in words. There is a certain fervor and honesty of purpose, also, discernible amid its rather scatter-brained declamation, —a desire to shake herself free of artistic affectations and conventionalisms, and to enter into the heart, and fathom for herself the sublime secret of those great antiques which she so truly loves to contemplate and to talk about. But still this hook is not intrinsically important, like the first. It is all compact, as we have said, of imagination, emotion, and theory, with flashes of keen discernment here and there, and some few fresh and happy suggestions in the way of specific criticism (particularly in the chapter entitled In Umbria, which deals with the man Perugino and his work), but with much also that is tumid, and much that is, we fear, preposterous. The author indeed insists with vehemence, both in the Preface and in the Apology or Postscript to Belcaro, that she has had a fixed purpose, running straight amid all the anomalies of her hook, and unifying all its vagaries ; and we are, in fact, enabled to conclude from the whole that just at present she believes in art for art’s sake, its own “ excuse for being ” and its own exceeding great reward, while her friend and interlocutor ever maintains that art should be modified by moral considerations and exert a moral influence. “ I have never pretended ” (we quote from the Postscript to Belcaro) “ that I am not as bad as my neighbors; but the whole gist of these my theorizings is that, people should try and take art more simply than they do ; that, if not called upon to try and persuade others to simpler courses, they should not theorize themselves. By theorizing, I mean, incorrectly perhaps, all manner of irrelevant fantasticating, whether it take the shape of seeking, in art, for hidden psychological meanings or moral values, or of using art merely as a suggestion of images and emotions, the perception of which infallibly interferes with, and sometimes entirely replaces, the perception of art itself.” This is all right, although it might possibly he more simply put. But we are even better pleased with the naïveté of the confession at the very end of this same postscript, in which the author owns, in words of much tenderness and beauty, that the loveliness of the scenes amid which these thoughts “ æsthetical ” of hers were born, and the sweetness of the companionship which fostered them, have a lasting power over her own spirit, far greater than that of the theories and conclusions themselves.

Our private notion is that Vernon Lee took what may be called her intellectual “ fling ” in Belcaro, and that the preternatural weight and wisdom of her first publication not only entitled her to such a fling, but rendered it almost inevitable. Antics are ever a proof of strength, and it is a great deal easier to reduce an excess than to supply a lack. We remember an excellent old singingmaster who used always to say, “ Give me a big, rough voice to prune and polish, never a slender one to develop.” The rampant verbiage of Vernon Lee’s style, for example, implies at least a marvelously rich vocabulary; and what so natural as that she should be prone, coming so early into such a heritage, to fling her wealth about a little wildly and wastefully ? Extravagance is so much more proper to well-endowed youth than parsimony, and so much the more engaging fault of the two, that it is hard to quarrel with it. If only the fortune be not all spent in that first “fling”! If only there be left what may be called the principal of mental riches, together with the will and the power to increase the same by diligent study, while practicing that wise economy of ornament which results in the utmost beauty of literary form !

We fancy that Vernon Lee is going to show herself capable of this, and if so there is hardly anything which may not be hoped from a writer with her beginnings. Since the appearance of Belcaro she has published a novelette entitled Ottilia, a Life of the Countess of Albany, and Euphorion. Ottilia is a simple story, simply told, careful and even subtle in its delineation of character, humorous and humane. It is not very strong, but it is very symmetrical, and free, even singularly free, from extravagance, whether of sentiment or style. The Life of the Countess of Albany ³ is a contribution to the Eminent Women Series, a flourishing list of biographies of women by women. In her preface the author tells us that she considers the present sketch a needful complement to her previous eighteenth-century studies ; and certainly that thorough knowledge of the Italy of a hundred years ago, which wo so heartily respect and admire, renders her fitter, perhaps, than any other living person to write tho Countess of Albany’s life, provided that life were worth writing once again.

This, however, is a point so obviously doubtful that one is half tempted to fancy that the book was compiled for the sake of the material on hand, — on the good old household principle of letting nothing be wasted. That Louise, Countess of Albany, née Von Stolberg, was also born a fine and clever creature; that it was a heartless and wicked arrangement by virtue of which she was married, in her tender youth, to the Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, in bis besotted middle age ; that she was, upon the whole, in her checkered career, more sinned against than (even) sinning, we are quite prepared to believe. But after all, she owes her notoriety to the fact that she was first the wife of Charles Edward, and afterwards the mistress of Alfieri ; and it does not seem to us that these accidents make her, in the strict sense of the term, an exemplary character. The subject of one of the earlier numbers of the Eminent Women biographies did also, unhappily, live for many years as the wife of an eminent man, without a previous marriage ceremony. But George Eliot was the author of work so powerful and so wholly unapproachable in its own line that it compels the attention of the world ; and even the interesting and in some respects melancholy features of her private history sink into insignificance by comparison with it.

Here, however, is Vernon Lee’s Countess of Albany, learned and analytical, lively and pictorial also, and still too heavily charged with words, — a vigor ous epitome of all the author’s literary virtues and vices. She does not formally constitute herself the apologist of the Countess of Albany; she is much too proud and independent, too modern in her spirit and enamored of a grand impartiality, to do that. But she is able to feel for her subject that degree of sympathy which renders her image a warm and breathing one, and a passage like the following suggests the fancy that her sympathy is not wholly perfunctory, either, but is founded in a certain intellectual kinship : “ She could read the books of four nations, — a very rare accomplishment in her day ; and she was, moreover, one of those women, rarer even in the eighteenth century than nowadays, whose nature, while unproductive in any particular line, is intensely and almost exclusively intellectual, and in the intellectual domain even more intensely and almost exclusively literary, — women who are born readers, to whom a new poem is as great an excitement as a new toilette, a treatise of philosophy (we shall see the countess devouring Kant long before he had been heard of out of Germany) more exquisitely delightful than a symphony. And this woman, thus educated, with this immense fund of intellectual energy, was living, not a normal life, with the normal distracting influences of an endurable husband, of children and society, but a life of frightful mental and moral isolation by the side, or rather in the loathsome shadow, of a degraded, sordid, violent, and jealous brute, from the reality of whose beastly excesses and bestial fury, of whose vomitings and oaths and outrages and blows, she could take refuge only in the world of books.”

If, on the contrary, the power of morbid analysis displayed in tracing the degrading effects of sensual vice on both the heroes of the story is such that we forget sometimes the age and sex of the writer, and are a little startled by anything which recalls it, the proof is abundant that her own moral perceptions have been in no degree blunted by the inevitably revolting character of some of her investigations. Take one more passage as an illustration of this : “ Social misarrangements which are crimes toward the individual are invariably partially righted — made endurable — by individual arrangements which are crimes toward society. The woman was not consulted by her parents before her marriage, she was not restrained by her conscience afterwards : she was given, for ambition, to a man whose tenure of her received legal and religious sanction ; she gave herself, for love, to a man whose possession of her was against society and against religion ; but society received her to its parties, and the church gave her its communion. And thus, in Italy and in the eighteenth century, where no one had found any fault at a girl of nineteen being married by proxy to a man who turned out to be a disgusting and brutal sot, no one also could find any fault at a young man of twenty-eight seeking and obtaining the love of a married woman of twenty-five. The immoral law had produced the immoral lawlessness.” This is a good summing up of the case, and here, by the way, the expression is as terse as could be desired.

Perhaps, after all, this is to be a notable part of woman’s new mission, — the power to touch pitch with no speck of defilement, to explore loathsome places with a degree of delicacy and detachment impossible to the average man, and to extract with unexampled neatness whatever is to be learned therein. Again, and always, let us hope.

At all events, there are aspects, in no way dubious, in which Vernon Lee seems to us fit, to be held up as an example to all ambitious and inexperienced writers, and particularly to certain beginners in letters among ourselves in America. The impression is rather too prevalent at home, just now, that a large literary business may be done on a very small literary capital.

The fashion of the day is for Chinese carving, — an indefinite number of ivory balls, one inside the other. No matter how trivial the subject, or tiny the tools, or meagre the preparation, the result, it is thought, will be artistic, provided the workmanship be sufficiently fine. Now there is no doubt that pretty and ingenious toys may be thus made, but toys only ; nothing fit for lasting use, or even for the purposes of robust play. All critical and historical work of positive worth presupposes a long apprenticeship at severe and in itself often distasteful labor. The eighteenth-century studies reveal on every page the results of such an apprenticeship,—of a rare power of attention and acquisition, submissively applied and resolutely concentrated. We have said that Vernon Lee’s verbiage is of the sort that implies a rich vocabulary ; and that vocabulary, in its turn, implies a knowledge of many books in many tongues and an enormously retentive memory. It implies, also, hard work at the technicalities of more than one great art. These are parts of the indispensable drill of any didactic writer, man or woman, old or young, who would really deserve the name. There is no royal road to the levels from which a comprehensive outlook may be gained over any province of human affairs, and even the most daring and agile imagination has to be supplied with facts before it can transmute them into shapes of real significance and power. The little story of Ottilia, already briefly mentioned, simple as it is, and so much less dramatic than the real life of the Countess of Albany, derives, no less than the latter, a wonderful charm from its author’s perfect acquaintance with the period in which the scene is laid. All the dry research which had to precede the essays on the Musical Life and the Venetian Comedy helps to enrich the background of this quiet tale, giving depth to its landscape, body to its color, and reality to its quaint figures. One might smile at the ambitious nature of Vernon Lee’s initial enterprise, if one were not constrained thoroughly to respect in her the serious and patient courage which, earlier yet, had attacked and gone triumphantly through such a world of preliminary toil. The charge of self-conceit cannot lie heavily against one who is even more eager to learn than she is impatient to teach ; and however bold in announcing her own conclusions, she is keenly attentive to the conclusions of others. On the whole, therefore, we decline to believe that she has exhausted her possibilities at twenty-five. Instead, we look forward with confidence to seeing her take a permanent place among those most helpful and indeed indispensable of modern writers, whose personality is of less moment to us than their message, with whom as much may be learned as enjoyed, and who increase our possessions while they consume our time.

Harriet Waters Preston .