On Exhibition; THE HOUSE OF LIFE. By Mario Praz.
Translated from the ltalian, “La Casa della Vita,” by Angus Davidson.
Illustrated. 360 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $10.
Nov. 8,
1964
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“I AM going
to build a little I Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill. If you can pick me up any
fragments of old painted glass, arms or anything, I shall be excessively
obliged.” Many years ago I read those lines in a volume of Horace Walpole's
letters. From then on, night after night, I built and furnished Strawberry Hill
with him, till the fatal day when the explosion of a gunpowder deposit blew
down its sham battlements and shattered its stained‐glass windows. It provided
me with one of the greatest pleasures to be found in English literature. I
never hoped to repeat the experience. In the first of these books, “The House
of Life,” Mario Praz has given me that pleasure all over again, and more
besides.
The house
of the title is an apartment in the Palazzo Ricci, in Rome. The book tells how
the author furnished it over the years with a vast number of pieces of
furniture, pictures and knick‐knacks belonging to the period known to collectors
as Empire, largely in the neoclawcal style. Many of the pieces he collected
have a high artistic value: some are so‐so; and some have no value at all
except in the eyes of Mario Praz, for like all great collectors, including
Walpole, Praz has a weakness for the occasional piece of junk.
Part of
this remarkable book, then, is the description of the joys, the agonies, and
the downright pottiness of a devoted collector. It is brilliantly done. Praz
tells how he operates, but never makes the mistake of saying why. A collector's
mania can never be explained. It must remain a mystery, as William Ewart
Gladstone knew. In the millions of words that fell from his lips in his
lifetime, Mr. Gladstone never once explained why he went out into the streets
at night and collected London prostitutes.
He used to
put them in a Home, and we may suppose he was happy that they were off the
streets and safe under a roof, just as Mario Praz is probably happy when a sofa
is safe out of the hands of some vandal of an antique dealer and in the Palazzo
Ricci. However, Gladstone did not say so, and neither does Praz. We collect
with him as we read, we thoroughly enjoy doing it and we do not know why.
THE description
of his collection is only the frame for a series of portraits in words of the
people he has met in the course of his life. If, as he says, some of his Empire
pieces are “unfortunately defective” ” these human portraits are of a dazzling
perfection; good enough, one might almost say, to be put up at Sotheby's.
The major
figures in this part of the book are the women with whom he fell in love. Mario
Praz has a soft spot in his heart for a flawed antique, but for the defects of
his mistresses (if they ever became that) he has a practised eye and a prose
style as sharp and smooth as a chisel. The best of these portraits is that of
Doris, a married woman in Liverpool (Much of the book deals with the author's
long stay in England).
As Praz's
English friends said, Doris was a silly women. He insisted that she had great
intelligence. Doris, unfortunately, entirely agreed with his English friends.
She clearly liked her Italian lover, up to a point. She was happy when he
called her beautiful but with Liverpudlian commonsense, she drew the line when
he called her brainy. Finaliy, exhausted by the mental effort, she broke off
the relationship.
Only one
person, in a whole gallery of portraits, is vaguely drawn. This is the woman
who became his wife. The marriage broke up. He says very little about the lady,
but she seems to have been of an obliging disposition. He does not tell us of
the final cause of the rupture, but to judge from the photographs in the book,
it is possible that she courteously moved out to provide more room for her
husband's rapidly ex panding collection of objets d'art.
The
break‐up provides Praz with one of his finest passages of exquisite irony. His
wife is sitting opposite him in the apartment, embroidering. “Perhaps,” says
Praz, I abdicated my position as a man for the first time on that fatal day,
when, not satisfied with the way in which my wife had worked a rose, I took it
upon myself to instruct her. As I managed to make a rose less like a cabbage
than hers had been, I grew proud. . . I betrayed something feminine in myself,
such as exists in anyone who has a feeling for the arts. But this discovery of
my skill was like the discovery of the lure of a vicious inclina tion. I in the
blindness of my understanding, whetted my sight upon the bewitching wools” —
and he worked a sofa cover. In the picture it looks very well done, but it cost
him his wife. She took the hint and ultimately left him.
That, then,
is a sample of Praz on himself. He is as good, and even better, in a hundred
other little scenes: a Pre‐Raphaelite gathering in England, witih William
Morris's daughter, wearing amber beads, an eyeglass, and an almost white
moustache; a meeting with John Masefield, “dressed like a porter on Sunday ..
with a lock of hair falling down his forehead as if he had just come out of the
water,” a meeting in which Masefield's wife did all the talking; some haunting
glimpses of Rome during the war, and a lyrical journey down the River Thames.
Slowly, as one turns the pages of this beautifully produced book, one realizes
that it is not a description of a house or an autobiography, but something much
more. It is a masterly example of that most difficult of all things to write,
the long essay.
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