The Mist of the Past
MELLOW, JAMES R.
The Mist of the Past THE HOUSE OF LIFE By Mario Praz Translated by Angus Davidson Oxford. 360 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by JAMES R. MELLOW Executive Editor, "Arts Magazine" Mario Praz is the...
...Praz writes of her: ". . . she had assumed an air of positively hostile detachment which displayed itself in the acid expression of her face, now devastated, alas, by old age and having come to resemble Voltaire when old, or even perhaps that of a pithecanthrope...
...she has an almost white moustache...
...The book is, in reality, an autobiography...
...But with his contemporaries—and with himself— there is an icy detachment which lets no one off the hook easily...
...In 1934, when he returned to Italy to take up a career of teaching and writing, he settled into an apartment in the ancient Palazzo Ricci on the Via Giulia, a street in which he says, "the mist of the past has lingered and stagnated...
...A professor of Italian in England for 10 years during the '20s, he was subsequently a professor of English in Italy...
...to me...
...acid sketches of the life of the literati...
...Even the novelist Vernon Lee, a helpful friend for many years, for whom Praz obviously felt some admiration, must be put through every mordant detail of that last scene when old, hard of hearing and bitter in her solitude, she is led off into a luxuriant springtime garden...
...Chapter by chapter, one shuffles through the entrance hall, the dining room, the bedrooms, the drawing room, the boudoir, as the author confides to the reader the "story" of his collection of portrait waxes, a Jacob bed, a replica of Canova's Laura, a marble statue of Cupid by a follower of Thorwaldsen...
...Despite its harmless setting, it is not an easy book to like...
...And it is this quality which gives the autobiography its stature and provides nearly all of the unforgettable vignettes: the description of the meeting of the last dregs of Pre-Raphaelite society in London in 1923, with the daughter of William Morris presiding—"Miss Morris has a strong look of her father about the eyes and nose...
...that the Piazza Ricci with its parked automobiles is more a garage than a courtyard of palaces, that the unpleasant realities of present-day life inexorably sift through the chinks in his walls like the bad smells of cooking and the snatches of mean and degrading arguments...
...Her stringy neck writhed inside her starched white piqué collar, with the white cravat and the usual cameo, but what impressed me most was her hat of limp cigar-colored felt with its crumpled, shapeless brim like the edge of an ear...
...it tries to be that, but a 20th-century malaise pervades it...
...That is the prevailing mood conveyed by The House of Life...
...arguments against his critics...
...For all his attempts to live back into the times of Byron or Caroline Murat, for all his efforts to shore up these fragments against his—and our—ruin in time, Praz seems to recognize that the battle is futile...
...Stylistically, it is a masterpiece of the genre...
...to me...
...The House of Life is in fact a long descriptive ramble, room by room, through that apartment with its Empire and Regency furnishings to which the author has devoted a lifetime of collecting...
...Praz comes closest to one of those amiable human emotions when he is imagining himself into some moment out of the favored past—the tenderness, for example, of his associations with a small painting of Caroline Murat at her writing table...
...the life is in the man with his pitiless observations...
...There are many aspects of the author's character that put one off—a niggling kind of vanity, a perpetual fussiness over his antiques, a lack of the warmer human responses like simple affection...
...the sketches of Belloc—"a face like one of Napoleon's marshals, except that when you see him standing up, you realize that the contour is that of a parish priest...
...to me...
...In the end one realizes that the apartment, a shell of the past, is not a house of life...
...accounts of wars, deaths, occupying armies...
...Reviewed by JAMES R. MELLOW Executive Editor, "Arts Magazine" Mario Praz is the author of The Romantic Agony, that collection of sinister examples of the decline of the Romantic movement from ardent idealism to interesting, but often perverse, decadence...
...It would be a mistake to write off this merciless sketch as cynicism or bitterness...
...It seemed as though her hardness of hearing had left its impression all over her and over her clothes as well, so that she was no longer a person but the diffused degeneration of an organ...
...to me...
...Ibsen...
...One is tempted to say: a 19th-century masterpiece...
...or the visits with Masefield and Robert Bridges and the brief glimpse of the tragic figure of F. O. Mathiessen...
...An authority on NeoClassic taste, he has also written on the relations of Italian and English literature (The Flaming Heart) and on the Victorian novel (The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction...
...Floating up from this long rumination on the objects of the past are bits and pieces of the author's life: observations on an unsatisfactory marriage: memories of unhappy love affairs...
...It is a matter of rigid and painful honesty...
...Bjornson...
...Not the tedium of a bad style—every reader experiences that often enough—but the tedium of a sedentary life on any of its ordinary days...
...These sketches relieve the tedium of Praz' book, for it is full of that tedium which modern authors avoid at all costs...
...or Edmund Gosse, displaying his collection of autographs—"Tolstoy...
...Mallarm...
...her curly hair, once brown is going gray...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 26
