In 1888 the Harvard Monthly published a short story by Bernard Berenson, a recent graduate of the University. The story concerns the terrible fate of a young shtetl prodigy who, having enjoyed the culture of the gentile world, is overtaken by the revenge of the kahal. One day this young man, Israel Koppel, suddenly falls ill and is plunged into a deep coma. The chevra kedusha hastens to bury him. But when his father, himself a beadle of the brotherhood, comes home from the cemetery to a troubled sleep, he dreams that he is confined in a close space, in darkness of smothering density, so that he can scarcely move. At last the father awakes to a horrified realization. He demands that the coffin be opened, and when the lid is lifted, Israel Koppel’s battered, anguished face and contorted limbs testify to a hideous error: he has been buried alive.

The theme of the story, as well as its violence of expression, are hard to associate with the man we think of as the serene connoisseur who strolled with kings down the tree-lined walks of his villa, I Tatti, and who has been described as “the most sensitive precision instrument that has ever been applied to the study of Italian art.” Yet the motifs and mood of the story prefigure in a striking and somber way some of the concerns that obsessed Berenson throughout his life, and of which he was not always consciously aware. As a passionate representation of his deepest fears, the fable—in contrast to the polished superficiality of his other early fiction—exposes the feelings behind Berenson’s own repudiation of the ghetto and of his Jewish loyalties. The Jew who yearned for the culture of the gentile world and yet remained within the Jewish one would be, in the most harrowing psychological sense, buried alive.

In those early days Berenson knew of only one “buried life,” the “true self” which, as Matthew Arnold’s poetry taught him, yearned to seek out its “true, original course” and find in the best of art and culture mystic communion with the whole world. What he did not then so readily see was the possibility of another “buried life,” the one suppressed by the Jew who, adventuring out into the gentile world, buried his Jewish past. That he might be haunted by the vexatious ghost of an unrealized original self was something that he feared. That it would turn out to be his Jewish self was not what he had expected.

To a man’s friends his inner life is not usually familiar ground upon which to encounter him. And there is a customary reserve in the circle of a dead man’s friends which discourages any very close look at what may have been the main concern of his life. The biography by Sylvia Sprigge, for example, tenderly skirts the real issue, leaving the heart of Berenson’s personality a mystery. And when Meyer Schapiro suggested [Encounter, January 1961] that Berenson’s values were partially confused by an “uneasiness with his Jewish origins” as well as by the guilt of having exploited his gifts in the market place, the article was bitterly attacked by Berenson’s friends. He had his own apprehensiveness about falling into the hands of biographers and “interpreters.” What, after all, should these people know about what really counted, about the pain, the hopes, the ideals, the betrayals and self-betrayals, the effort and the cost, which he ceaselessly tried to square within himself while yet maintaining his cardinal belief that life was enhanced by being lived as an art?

If he felt all along that the problem of portraying him objectively was very difficult, it came to seem almost impossible after World War II. Suddenly he was prime copy for the slick picture magazines and the Sunday press. Here was not merely a relic of the gilded age, or an aesthete with a Midas touch, but a kind of mass media sage—invested with the special sanctity reserved for those whose worldly success is capped by the reputation for wisdom. From a distance his famous villa outside Florence took on the glamor of the legendary ivory tower, enchantingly indestructible though two armies had battered their way through the backyard. “I end,” Berenson commented dryly, “as a myth whose saga I can scarcely recognize as having any relation to what I feel or think I know about myself, my deep down self.”

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What he feared others might miss or misunderstand was that identity—his identity—was fantastically complicated and not something that could be tagged by simple labels. From beginning to end he showed a remarkable concern with that intractable problem. His earlier books explore the possibilities and manifestations of identity with a professional detachment that does not quite conceal his own involvement with his subjects. But in the last years of his long life (he died at the age of ninety-four) his concern for the truth about his “deep down self” led him to return over and over again to reflecting upon the root of the matter—his origins—and in particular upon the questions of Jewishness and assimilation.¹ This was also the substance of a ten-year correspondence he carried on with the widow of a German rabbi, Frau Mally Dienemann, who had read his Sketch for a Self Portrait and asked him to clarify a certain ambiguity: in what sense that he would admit, could he be called a Jew? The answer was not then, or ever, direct or simple, but it was no longer a question he could or wished to avoid. Everywhere he tried to answer that question almost in the same breath that he tried to account to himself for the sense of failure that dogged his life, despite every outward sign of success. Yet he never once would link the two. The connection, however, cries out, almost in anguish, in everything that he wrote about himself. For his failure was the failure of his convictions, and his convictions derived from the innermost attempt to free himself of the burden of his Jewish identity.

He had been born and spent his early childhood in the shtetl of Butremanz in Lithuania. When he was ten, his family emigrated and he felt as if he were being born all over again. To Frau Dienemann he confided that in his first year in Boston he led a completely double life. By day he learned English and tried to adjust to American ways, but at night he dreamed of the flat gray landscapes of his native village and of the life there to which he had so indivisibly belonged. As his family sank into the settled poverty of immigrant Jewish life in the 1870’s, the conflict in him grew sharper. Between the ages of ten and twenty, he lived, as he wrote in a post-Harvard piece on Matthew Arnold, “alone with my thoughts and anguish and despair.”

Confronting him was a world of values which denied that what he was, a poor East European Jewish immigrant boy, had any other but a marginal, negligible significance. Nonetheless he already was passionately absorbing the art and literature of that world to which he was an outsider and an object, as he imagined, of contempt. Even in what he absorbed he was rejected, for in that art and literature the Jew figured as a despised outcast. And it was that world, that culture, he felt he had to possess or die. He resolved the dilemma by accepting the gentile valuation as his own; he learned first to hate, and then to reject himself. Almost seventy years later he was to understate the case remarkably to Frau Dienemann: “We Jews tend to think of ourselves as prejudice paints us.”

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Yet if Berenson could no longer accept himself as a Jew, the very tension generated by the problem of his identity came to serve him as a source of creativity. Even the self-detachment he learned as a means of defense during those adolescent years was converted into the introspective objectivity that marked his style for the rest of his life. More importantly, the inner urgency to shape somehow a new identity to replace the old one—to discover his buried self—supplied the energy of will for wreaking that astonishing transformation upon himself and his life style that remains Berenson’s sizable, not to say staggering, achievement.

To some extent, Berenson’s essential problem—and its paradoxically energizing consequences—was the typical experience of those marginal Jews formed by the Enlightenment, though his solution was a good deal more dramatic. The liberal individualist ethos of the 19th century endlessly repeated one basic lesson which Berenson, like his fellow outsiders, passionately absorbed. The highest aim of society was to encourage full development of the best potentialities of man’s nature. But each choice involves suppression of alternative possibilities; hence, a man must be strong enough to destroy the inert selves which keep him from freedom. “A complete life,” he eventually wrote in the Self Portrait, “may be one ending in so full an identification with the not-self that there is no self left to die.” Troubled by this, and no doubt unversed in the conventions of the debate, Frau Dienemann asked the pertinent question. Who then is the “I,” the true self? To this Berenson replied that all the selves we recognize within us are real. “The mystery is why we choose one and suppress the other.”

Berenson’s choice was more radical than that required of most other emancipated Jewish intellectuals and is hard to think of as a “mystery.” From the outset, his yearning was not merely the ambition of the immigrant boy fired by the American myth of opportunity, but a hunger for identification with the best of art and life and learning, to which he appeared hopelessly an outsider. Nothing his Jewishness could offer seemed adequate compensation for what it took away, and nothing but a thorough suppression of his Jewish “self” would enable him to satisfy his yearning. It was no mere accident that soon led him to choose painting—perhaps the art form most alien to the Jewish tradition as he knew it at the time—as the particular province of his self-development.

The duality of this early period in his life is vividly dramatized by a story Sylvia Sprigge tells. The young Berenson, then an undergraduate at Harvard and already a sometime visitor to the salons of Back Bay Boston, was being entertained in the parlor of Louisa May Alcott. During the visit an itinerant peddler who occasionally appeared at the Alcotts’ came to the back door with his pack. It was none other than Berenson’s father, known generally to his customers as a philosophical “character.” Miss Alcott, ignorant of the relationship, guilelessly remarked on the coincidence—a young and clever man, also called Berenson, was just then being entertained in the front of the house. Berenson the elder immediately gathered up his wares and fled in confusion.

Tacitly father and son felt the bond to each other and to the past to be a bond of shame and constraint. Nevertheless Berenson seemed in retrospect to have sensed the pathos of what had happened. A book he recommended to Sylvia Sprigge as an exact representation of his childhood, L’Ombre de la Croix, by Jerome and Jean Tharaud, describes the death of a ghetto youth to Judaism and his rebirth into the gentile world with its wider horizons. At the end of the novel the apparition—an emancipated Jew whose assimilation has enabled him to become a force in the world—confronts the old Jew who had raised him and who pitiably reminds him of the past. The Tharauds wrote with that peculiar mixture of love-hate that marks the philo-Semite who is in the process of turning into an anti-Semite. But they caught the dilemma in all its intense ambivalent strength. Which was the young Jew to choose—the ghetto and superstitious “Rabbinism,” or the free life of culture and art?

Berenson chose the free life and became an ardent advocate of assimilation. He was convinced that only the negative forces of Rabbinism and persecution had effectively kept the Jews together after Christianity had, in effect, relegated them to the limbo of historical anachronisms. He wondered whether it was still desirable for Judaism to survive. Might it not better die, mourir en beauté, and release into the stream of a greater, freer life all those restless souls who yearned to realize their “best” selves?

The dead weight of Jewishness inhibiting freedom became for him the bogey of Rabbinism. Just as art was for him “life-enhancing,” rabbinical orthodoxy represented the spirit of life-diminishment. In his early writings one finds Rabbinism symbolized repeatedly in terms of oppressive physical and spiritual constraint. Convinced, as he later was, that beauty of worship justifies even the absence of faith, he had long since been permanently alienated from Jewish ritual by what he felt to be its lack of external beauty and character, represented by the hole-in-the-corner little shulen in the Boston slums where he grew up. They were shabby and durable, and to the young aesthete the two Jewish qualities seemed one and the same. Thus his first sight of one of the great Reform synagogues of Berlin came as a shock; for the first and last time he shed his customary reticence about discussing Jewish matters with his Boston patroness, the famous Isabella Gardner. He described to her in a letter the surprising beauty of the synagogue, the choir, and the formal service. Yet no sooner had he said this than he found it necessary to mock his own response. Despite their attempts to achieve elegance, the letter continues, “the worshippers . . . as my Norwegian friend remarked, seemed to be selling old clothes.” A man can conceive so intense a self-hatred, Berenson would later write to Frau Dienemann, that only self-destruction appears as a solution. But self-destruction can take several forms, one of them being a prelude to the rebirth of conversion.

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Berenson’s first conversion was a token one; at Harvard (where no one really believed it) he passed as a nominal Episcopalian, listing his birthplace as Lithuania and his mother tongue as German. Yet even during this period he could not escape his own ambivalence and was drawn again and again to examine the way other Jewish intellectuals had faced the problem of self-realization. This is the point of a long essay he wrote in 1888 for the Andover Theological Review on the then current renaissance in Hebrew fiction, and the meaning of the emergence of such writers as Mapu, Smolenskin, Shaikevitsch, and Buch-binder. At the start Berenson assumed a foppish anti-Semitic pose, which gradually fell away as he warmed to his subject. In these writers Berenson discovered a heartening precedent—Jewish intellectuals and artists were breaking from the rabbinical tyranny of the kahal (those “communes where no individuality was possible”) to encounter the gentile world. Smolenskin’s story, “The Ass’s Burial,” brought to his mind the chevra kedusha, the burial society through which rabbinical Judaism “exercised a most tyrannical rule through the Jewish communities in Russia.” Not long after, Berenson wrote “The Death and Burial of Israel Koppel.”

Late in life Berenson would remark that Jewishness could no longer be shed merely by conversion, but as a young man this was not as obvious to him, even though his conversion to Episcopalianism had scarcely been a spiritual experience. In the generally accepted sense he did not have faith nor would he ever achieve it, but his aesthetic response to Christianity seemed in the 1880’s tolerably good grounds for a conversion. (Walter Pater gave no better reason for offering himself to Benjamin Jowett as a candidate for holy orders in the Anglican Church, and, as Berenson wrote Frau Dienemann, he shared with Pater’s Marius the Epicurean a “tropism toward Christianity.”) In “The Third Category,” another story written for the Harvard Monthly, Beren-son’s hero, Christie, is described as having “no religious feelings or beliefs, but he had the profoundest admiration for Christianity . . . he thought [it] the greater part of all the beautiful things the mind and hand of man have created during the past fifteen hundred years.”

After he left Harvard to discover art and life in Europe, Berenson met Mary Pearsall Smith, then married to Frank Costelloe, a prominent Irish barrister practicing in London. Of a wealthy American Quaker family, Mary was the sister of the scholar-critic Logan Pearsall Smith and was to be the sister-in-law of Bertrand Russell. Her children by Frank Costelloe were also to relate her to the Stracheys and the Stephenses, Virginia Woolf’s family. The society for whom art existed, for whose sake it might almost be said art was created, was now not only open to Berenson, but welcomed him avidly. “When this beautiful and mysterious youth appeared, for whom nothing in the world existed except a few lines of poetry which he held to be perfect, . . . I felt like a dry sponge that was put into water,” Mary later wrote.

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Berenson’s second conversion—to Catholicism—coincided with the period of his most intense study of Renaissance painting. At Spoleto he experienced a “direct contact with otherness . . . [that] made me feel as if I had emerged into the light after long groping in the darkness . . . every outline, every edge, and every surface was in a living relation to me and not as hitherto, in a merely cognitive one.” As he felt the barrier of self dissolving by the death of the old Jewish Adam there were other occasions for joy. Shortly after his conversion he wrote Mary a euphoric letter from Perugia. He was lost in the bliss of belonging at last. “How I used to loathe myself for being one of those whom. . . Heaven rejects and Hell disdains. . . . Today I felt so at one with everybody. I even felt reconciled to the brass band. . . . Why not walk in step with it sweetly and gladly, instead of paralyzing my legs by trying to march in another step?” Strolling along with the crowds in the Corso of a Sunday afternoon after Mass, Berenson seemed once and for all to have escaped the clutches of the chevra kedusha. Five years later, after the death of her husband in 1899, Mary Costelloe became Mary Berenson.

The religious impulse which brought Berenson to the Roman Catholic Church did not last very long and his innate skepticism soon reasserted itself. Yet he continued to venerate Christianity as the source of ritual and art, the formal means by which, as he claimed, the self in all its limitations could be transcended. It was as he developed this conviction that he discovered his vocation. The letters to Isabella Gardner gradually change in tone as self-pity and uncertainty give way to enthusiasm. More or less simultaneously he found himself in love with Renaissance painting, with Catholicism, and with Mary Costelloe. The first two were for him indistinguishable, for he could never accept Catholicism as a body of doctrine. To Frau Dienemann he wrote in 1950: “I share your aversion to the dogma of a mediator and to any notion that weakens the sense of individual responsibility. In fact I cannot understand how people whose intelligence in other matters I respect can put up with any kind of theology, Christian in particular.” And when the Church that year proclaimed the Dogma of the Assumption of the Madonna, Berenson marveled at the childishness of Catholic theologians, who were wasting their “energies on justifying the childish fairy-world cry for a goddess. For that is what the Virgin is—as pagan as Aphrodite.”

But then he wrote: “In the cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges I felt exalted, transfigured, and could not but be deeply grateful to the inspiration which produced them. No dogmatic, metaphysical, or historical considerations can contradict the revelation of the visual, the verbal, the musical arts. . . I am happy to find God sub speciae of Christ, the Virgin, the Saints, and for me they are TRUTHS without being FACTS.” No one ever uttered the creed of fin de siècle romantic aestheticism more forcefully—and this so long past its heyday. Yet when he wrote this he had long realized that his conviction was no longer quite adequate. The band was still playing on the Corso, but now, as originally, he was out of step. “I feel Christian,” he insisted to Frau Dienemann, “although no Christian Church would accept me. Ich bleib jenseits—!”

His dilemma, in one sense, may be most clearly recognized in terms of his assumptions about art. What Berenson believed was that aesthetic experience was the great reality, and religious conviction was merely a series of constructive momentary illusions based upon it. The illusions were constructive, or “life-enhancing,” because the pursuit of aesthetic certainties was for Berenson a quest, in the extended sense of that term in Victorian art, where the end pursued in the aesthetic experience is sacred by virtue of the faith that its attainment must produce a revelation that would bind together the dissevered parts of the self and also establish its harmony with the universe. This was the heart of Berenson’s aesthetic creed, and he expressed it in the literal, physical terms he had used to express his problem of identity.

As in “Israel Koppel” the oppressive account of being buried alive betrayed Berenson’s horror of being hemmed in, imprisoned within himself and within the ghetto of Jewish identification; so too the sense of liberation from self and communion with the limitless via the apprehension of art, carried with it physical sensations of well-being, of easy breathing, of heightened sensitivity bordering on the mystical. Two of his key aesthetic principles—“space composition” and “tactile values”—are based upon this translation of the gesture of perception into psycho-physiological and quasi-mystical terms.

Space composition . . . woos us away from our tight, painfully limited selves, dissolving us into the space presented, until at last we seem to become its permeating indwelling spirit . . . this wonderful art can take us away from ourselves and give us, while we are under its spell, the feeling of being identified with the universe, perhaps even of being the soul of the universe.

Tactile values refer to our corporeal contacts with the outside world; visceral values refer to the feeling of comfort or discomfort inside our bodies; respirational values (which I equivalate with spatial ones) refer to our feelings of liberation, of freedom from heaviness, and to the illusion of soaring into harmonious relations with sky and horizon.

These ideas are closely related to the thought of Pater, Matthew Arnold, and most importantly, William James, whose psychology course at Harvard Berenson, like Santayana, absorbed thoroughly. Both James and Santayana expounded a naturalistic aesthetics, correlating the stimuli of art with linked physiological reactions, emotions, and heightened, pleasurable intellectual apperceptions. But one consistent emphasis was uniquely Berenson’s—the central identification of the whole aesthetic process with the transcendence of self.

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Berenson’s aesthetic theories assumed the reality and hence the intrinsic validity of the aesthetic experience, but at the same time they granted that the experience is compounded of illusions. Thus, he had to admit that in the end art proved nothing beyond itself, and that the possibilities it offered of self-transcendence were painfully limited. “Man’s problem,” he wrote to Frau Dienemann, “is his relation to a universe which is, so far as we can understand, no cosmos.”

The ultimate failure of art to provide certainties, the sense of moral compromise in the pursuit of his career, the elusiveness of that identity he had so relentlessly tracked, and the baleful reflected light which Nazi anti-Semitism cast upon his own self-repudiation, burdened Berenson’s later years with an unshakable sense of failure. While he continued to plead the faith of his youth—that the human will, intellect, and heart were sufficient to create all the values by which men could live—Berenson now set out on a personal exploration with a detachment so profound it was mistaken by most readers for serenity. The monographs on identification and attribution were followed by Sketch for a Self Portrait, Rumour and Reflection, One Year’s Reading, The Passionate Sightseer, and the publication of whole sections of his diary; the brilliant specialist seemed to have assumed his right to comment on existence as a whole. However, it was not commentary so much as a more urgent self-exploration. His life now as he summed it up represented not a clear progress toward fulfillment, but rather could be read as a desolate acknowledgment of incoherence in the self and its world. His one major speculative work to find completion in this period, Aesthetics and History, is less a treatise on the relationship of history and aesthetics than the unraveling of a highly personal train of thought around those two fixed points of reference for his unsuccessful attempts to define himself.

Berenson was aware that he had failed to achieve a masterwork and the awareness hinted further at some basic incoherence undermining his philosophy. When he is not dealing with the methods and techniques of connoisseurship, the characteristic quality of his writings is the absence of any coherence save that imposed by the force of the observing personality. His thought is fragmentary, apparently desultory, epigrammatic, conveying withal a sense of composure. It was as though he thought to preside over the incoherence of the self by the sheer force of that structuring intelligence with which he had commanded the world of connoisseurship. His explicit aim had always been to make of his life a work of art and he now probed at his failure to do so, much as had formerly dissected the inadequacies of this or that minor master. What he recorded was simply the incompatible bases of his convictions and how each in turn had failed him. On the one hand the aesthetic experience, the experience of art, was direct, intuitive, life-enhancing, and suggested a freedom which was denied, on the other hand, by his whole sense of history and his sense of having been himself historically defined. The insights of Aesthetics and History could not be reconciled, for the former was the basis of his freedom, while the latter marked him as a Jew.

It was history, the Nazi occupation of Italy, which turned him into a Jewish fugitive, and so he tried to define himself more precisely in terms of the past that was punishing him—to force from history, as it were, the justification of his act of self-repudiation. This need explains the curiously extended discussion in Rumour and Reflection, his wartime diary, of the complex relationship of Judaism and Christianity, which he continued subsequently in his books, diaries, and in the letters to Frau Dienemann.

Historically Christianity grew, he suggested, out of the irrepressible tendency within Judaism toward assimilation. For Judaism the tropism was self-destructive and inevitably resisted from within, so that for the sake of an ethnic identity of questionable value the “civilizing” influences of other cultures in antiquity were rejected. Perhaps poor Ahab and Jezebel, so blackened by the anti-assimilationists of Scripture, represented a wholesome cosmopolitan impulse, while between them Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabees cut short what might have become a remarkable pre-Christian fusion of Judaeo-Hellenic civilization. It was Jesus, however, the absolute Jew and the absolute universal man, who allowed Jewish genius its proper sphere, a world culture it could absorb and reshape in its own terms. Christianity was therefore the greatest triumph of Judaism, despite Jewish reluctance to accept the fact. But Judaism’s rabbinical leaders, with a shrewd sense of the power of the word over Jews, buried Jesus by a conspiracy of silence. Down through the ages “Rabbinism” continued to be both the source and expression of Judaism’s retrograde tendencies, the tyrannical power which sought to destroy free spirits like Uriel da Costa and Spinoza.

In the modern world, however, the tyranny of the rabbis had been brought under restraint (except in the state of Israel, where Berenson saw the Orthodox rabbinate as more dangerous to the state than the Arabs). Moreover, it had become outdated to look, as he had done in his youth, to conversion and absolute assimilation as a means of liberation. He now felt it possible that by preserving their identity the Jews could express in a new way the immemorial universalizing impulse of their people. They were to become the new humanists, liberated from petty nationalisms, preaching the unity of culture and the worth of the tradition Judaism had helped call into being.

Along with this vague ethical culturism Berenson demanded that Jews should cease to justify the anti-Semites’ charges of vulgarity and social aggressiveness. The portrait he had in mind clearly reflects the prejudices most fashionable in high society before 1914, and to the end he could never rid himself of the standards he had first used in his act of self-repudiation. But increasingly, and particularly in the late 40’s and 50’s, he found more and more to admire in the accomplishments of Jewish scholarship and literature. To Frau Dienemann he wrote that he wished he had known men like her husband earlier. Frequently he discussed with great warmth the developments in Jewish life that impressed him most: the new state of Israel (which brought him around to ardent Zionism), Martin Buber, Joseph Klausner and Jewish historiography, COMMENTARY, and the emerging crop of American Jewish writers.

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By then he was also ready to admit that his self-repudiation had made him socially and psychologically vulnerable, that he had paid too high a price for access to that world which had seemed so impossibly distant in his youth. To be sure, he had been welcomed and genuinely befriended by many, but he had also been endlessly snubbed, insulted, and mocked, or accepted with reservations, spoken and unspoken. In the end he doubted that this precarious relation to the fashionable world of art and wealth was the freedom he had dreamed of. No intelligence or talent substituted for the birth and breeding he lacked and which made his relationship with Henry Adams, for example, painful. To justify his “natural aristocracy,” Berenson reclaimed his Jewish heritage, an aristocracy of race which could not be denied him by external appraisal.

Now the buried Jewish self came into its own as a guardian of his self-integrity. But its strength wavered against the detached self-hatred of the other Berenson who ruthlessly pursued the logic of assimilation. It had been a continual torment to him to live in the estimation of others who projected back to him an image of himself that he could neither accept nor, in his self-repudiation, reject. He was snubbed as an outsider and a Jew, and he could not protest since he had concurred too long in society’s right to limit the access of outsiders and Jews. Over and over again, particularly in the Self Portrait, and in the diary, he came back to his perennial pain at having to accept as his real self the image he saw reflected in the eyes of others. The pain was sharpened by the life-long habit acquired in those years between ten and twenty, when he had learned to look at himself with a hostile, alienated gaze. By an effort of will he had sought then to transform himself into something else—a work of art he could, by loving, accept. But this was, he saw, a new narcissism. For what, in fact, was the rapture of Narcissus? “Neither self-admiration nor auto-eroticism, but concentrated absorption in the problem of what relation there was between the self that he carried in his body and the reflected likeness.”

When Berenson was a young man, in the 80’s and 90’s of the last century, a talented outsider could not only take heart from the creed of the limitless potentialities of human nature but also from the fashionable paradox that life imitated art. Joyously Berenson set out upon a voyage of self-discovery which was also to be a work of self-creation in the spirit of the artistic Zeitgeist. He proved the paradox, but not as he had expected. For the art that followed in the wake of the aestheticism which had created Bernard Berenson expressed and foreshadowed far different human potentials than had been dreamed of in the languorous 19th-century religion of Beauty. As a major symbol of that art, T. S. Eliot took Joseph Conrad’s Mister Kurtz, whose exploration of self in The Heart of Darkness culminated in those famous whispered last words, “The Horror! The Horror!” In the still and absolutely untroubled waters of the pool of Narcissus neither Mister Kurtz nor Berenson nor the Western world heading toward 1939, could hold on to the Romantic faith in the limitless goodness of man.

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The last thing Berenson ever wrote (a diary entry, at the age of ninety-three) was a terrible final look into the pool of Narcissus. “Short of violence, I seem to have been capable of any sin, any misdemeanor, any crime. With horror I think what I should have been if I had lived the life of an ill-paid professor, or struggling writer, how rebellious if I had not lived a life devoted to great art, and the aristocratically pyramidal structure of society it serves, and worse still if I had remained in the all but proletarian condition I lived in as a Jewish immigrant lad in Boston. So I remain skeptical about my personality . . . expecting little and trying to be thankful for that, the serenity for which I am now admired. But I keep hearing the furies, and never forget them.”

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¹ See particularly the Sketch for a Self Portrait (Pantheon Books, 1949) and Rumour and Reflection (Simon and Schuster, 1952). Where it is not from unpublished letters, the material quoted or paraphrased here is largely drawn from these works as well as Aesthetics and History (Pantheon Books, 1948) and the recently collected Bernard Berenson Treasury, edited by Dr. Hanna Kiel (Simon and Schuster, 1962). The Treasury provides a good deal of fragmentary, hitherto unpublished correspondence and diary entries. Some of Berenson's most interesting criticism, long out of print, is also now republished in The Sense of Quality and Rudiments of Connoisseurship (Schocken Books, 1962).