Comparative Critical Studies 10.2 (2013): 141–161 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2013.0085 C British Comparative Literature Association www.euppublishing.com/ccs
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Cosmopolitanism in Fin-de-Siècle Florence FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA
In the eighteenth century a distinct brand of Anglomania started to flourish in Italian literary circles, soon mirrored by a growing interest in Britain for all things Italian.1 Suffice to mention, as examples of these early, sporadic connections, Melchiorre Cesarotti’s acclaimed Italian translation of Ossian’s poems (1782) and, later, the exiled Ugo Foscolo’s essays on Dante and Petrarch published in the prestigious Edinburgh Review (1818). During the following decades a more sustained interest in Italian culture as a whole – as well as in the country’s political changes taking place through the Risorgimento – fostered more regular exchange between the Italian peninsula and Britain.2 Amongst the British elites, in particular, the intellectual, theorist and activist Giuseppe Mazzini and the writer Alessandro Manzoni rapidly achieved fame as iconic figures symbolizing Italy’s process of political liberation from foreign oppressors. In the years that followed the Italian unification, the city of Florence gained prominence as the geographical fulcrum of an activity of cosmopolitan cultural exchange between British and Italian intellectuals that had not had notable precedent in the history of the two nations. Late nineteenth-century Florence nurtured what has been described as ‘a distinct fin-de-siècle anglomania’:3 it was the Italian city where English culture circulated most extensively in its fashionable literary salons and lively publishing scene. These modern forms of transnational interactions (widespread in but not limited to Anglo-Italian circles) did not remain isolated, but rather played an important role in shaping the international literary profile of the Tuscan centre. This article discusses one of these cosmopolitan cultural exchanges between two leading figures in the fin-de-siècle Florentine Anglo-Italian 141
142 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA community: writer, essayist and journalist Carlo Placci and intellectual and writer Vernon Lee. More broadly, it shows how the tensions emerging from their partly unpublished correspondence reveal the complexities underpinning the ambitious aesthetic and ethical project of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism. How did Florentine intellectuals of the late nineteenth century understand the notion of cosmopolitanism? And what were its aesthetic practices and ethical dimensions? In his recent ‘Cosmopolitan Manifesto’, Ulrich Beck identifies two forms of cosmopolitan ‘modernity’: the first, which is relevant to the nineteenth century, is based on nation-state societies ‘where social relations, networks and communities are essentially understood in a territorial sense’, while the second supports the idea of ‘non-territorial communities of shared risks’.4 In his analysis, Beck draws further conclusions about the first ‘wave’ of cosmopolitanism, stressing how cosmopolitan movements, ‘even if they initially win over and mobilize only minorities for cosmopolitan interests, have the basis of their power in the act of opening out the transnational domain’.5 If, as we shall discuss, the exchange between Placci and Lee can be seen to operate within the first form of cosmopolitan modernity identified by Beck, their friendship also functioned according to the principles of what Kwame Anthony Appiah has described as the ethics of cosmopolitanism, grounded on the moral obligations and loyalties that link individuals together.6 This recent articulation of cosmopolitanism is based on the ethics of interconnectedness between strangers (albeit all citizens of the world) – seen as the privileged channel of social, aesthetic and cultural transgression of identity boundaries – rather than on spontaneous ‘republican’ exchanges taking place across borders. Appiah’s optimistic, progressive reflections propose a view of cosmopolitanism supported by an ethical imperative, which calls for moral obligations as well as for the right of individual freedom. The friendship between Placci and Lee exemplified not only how modern cosmopolitan communities, as argued by Beck, circulated aesthetic ideas but also, in Appiah’s terms, how they were placed at the core of the moral debate of their time. By being part of the fin-de-siècle Anglo-Florentine community, Placci and Lee inhabited a network of literary exchange and support based on intense aesthetic and ethical dialogues, which enabled them to interrogate the notion of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and, through this interrogation, to formulate a distinctive critique of key developments and debates shaping European literary and cultural milieus. Lee and Placci embodied the aspirations of a
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
143
group of Florence-based writers who, despite being linked to a particular historical moment and belonging to an elite social environment, constituted a significant and challenging model for twentieth-century cosmopolitan literary exchanges. 1.
ITALIAN COSMOPOLIS IN THEORY
In Italy, a nation that had been largely under foreign influence since the Renaissance, transnational cultural exchanges were the norm rather than the exception. In the late nineteenth century, though, following the process of national unification and the gaining of independence, Italy could start to engage in cross-border exchanges with other European nations as an equal. This period saw the emergence of an important discussion on the specific nature and shape of Italian cosmopolitanism. The debate was characterized by two main issues: on the one hand, we find the need to learn from foreign cultures in order to modernize the national field in aesthetic terms; on the other hand, the necessity of a political and moral grounding of the practice of cosmopolitanism as a guarantee of universal appeal among other nations to be considered as equal. Either way, during and after the unification process, cosmopolitanism was deemed fundamental to the literary life of the soon-to-be unified young Italian nation, which aspired to become modern and influential.7 In 1848, the Catholic intellectual and theoretician Vincenzo Gioberti had connected traditional elite cosmopolitanism and italianità because of the complementary roles of these two practices, which were for him similar in their cultural, moral and political aspirations. According to Gioberti, only by entering into dialogue with other European nations could Italy assert its ‘ascendancy’ (‘primato’) in political as well as artistic matters. This primato had to be both moral and civic in order to be effective. Gioberti believed that what gave Italy a better chance to achieve its primato was the presence of the Church, which guaranteed universalism and cosmopolitanism by faith and not only by virtue. Italian culture therefore could and should be seen as naturally cosmopolitan because of its deeply rooted connections with the ecumenical mission of the Roman Catholic Church.8 Not dissimilarly, but from an atheist perspective, Giuseppe Mazzini had praised ‘intellectual’ cosmopolitanism as a vigorous force for building any new nation and thus creating a much-needed sense of shared responsibility, a set of collective endeavours and a belief in ethical
144 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA missions. As an exile in England, Mazzini rejected nationalism in favour of the ideal of a nation’s right to belong to a universal political order of respect amongst peers. As Maurizio Isabella has argued, the position of the intellectual group revolving around the Mazzinian Risorgimento view was that ‘Italian literature, in order to become such, had to be more European’.9 Looking back to nineteenth-century Italian history from the 1930s, Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci noted that, from the 1880s to the end of the century, the cosmopolitan ideal enabled many Italian intellectuals to mediate between the global and the local because of its anti-essentialist ethos, which could freely and fluidly accommodate various identities and interests without vitally excluding ‘national’, religious and moral ones. According to Gramsci, cosmopolitanism was an historical as well as political and cultural endeavour, which in the particular case of latenineteenth-century Italy was closely connected to the ‘poor national and state spirit in the modern sense’ (‘scarso spirito nazionale e statale in senso moderno’) caused and fostered by the long-lasting ‘absence of an Italian “political and national” history’ (‘l’assenza di una “storia politica e nazionale” italiana’).10 In Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) (1934–35) and in his earlier notes on the Risorgimento (1932), Gramsci analysed this very phenomenon and explicitly wrote about the relationship between the process of Italian national unification and the elite practice of cosmopolitanism, which, from a Marxist perspective, he predictably associated with internationalism. He stated that ‘il cosmopolitismo italiano non può non diventare internazionalismo’ (‘Italian cosmopolitanism cannot but become internationalism’), while identifying the mission of the new Italian people ‘nella ripresa del cosmopolitismo romano e medioevale, ma nella sua forma moderna e avanzata’ (‘in re-enacting Roman and medieval cosmopolitanism, but in an advanced and modern form’).11 Thus Gramsci rejected forms of cultural nationalism which did not enter into dialogue with foreign cultures for, according to him, these cosmopolitan dialogues are indispensable to the progress of any modern nation state. In doing so, he unequivocally associated the idea of cosmopolitanism with that of territorial unity which defines any modern nation. Crucially, therefore, Gramsci understood the brand of cosmopolitanism practised by the elites up to the unification as playing a key role in the evolution of the cultural and political life of Italy. Gramsci also adopted the idea of a ‘nazione popolare’ (‘proletarian nation’) – a term first used by the poet Giovanni Pascoli in support
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
145
of the Italian campaign in Libya in 1911 – to describe Italy’s precarious international standing in comparison with much stronger European nations vis-à-vis their imperialist ambitions. While accepting the traditional expression of cosmopolitanism theorized during the Risorgimento by Mazzini and Gioberti as an elite practice necessary for consolidating Italy’s high cultural and moral profile amongst other European nations, Gramsci added a popular perspective. The difference between traditional cosmopolitanism and the modern one, he claimed, found its embodiment in the figure of the new ‘uomo-lavoro italiano’ (‘Italian work-man’), who was not ‘il cittadino del mondo in quanto civis romanus o in quanto cattolico, ma in quanto produttore di civiltà’ (‘a world citizen qua civis romanus or catholic, but rather qua producer of civilization’).12 Nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism could therefore be described by Gramsci as an evolving practice, which places nation states ‘nel fronte moderno di lotta per riorganizzare il mondo’ (‘in the modern battleground to reorganize the world’), while simultaneously linking them to their historical conditions of cultural production.13 In his brief comments, Gramsci connected the national to the international arena, re-introduced the tension between elite and popular, supported the moral dimension of cosmopolitanism and suggested a view of it as a means of cultural and political resistance rather than as a super-partes, apolitical Republic of Letters.14 2.
FLORENTINE COSMOPOLIS IN PRACTICE: PLACCI AND LEE
When, in 1865, Florence replaced Turin as the capital city of the Kingdom of Italy, a major project of reconstruction started to take place: areas of the old city, such as the market square, were demolished, while newly built, modern ones started to emerge, so that some of the medieval parts of the city, with their intricate alleys, were replaced by large Parisian-like boulevards.15 In 1871, however, the capital city moved again from Florence to Rome with a loss of some 30,000 diplomats, politicians and businessmen and the pressing need for urban modernization. By the 1880s the city was left with a population of about 120,000 people, compared to Rome’s 300,000 and Milan’s over 200,000. Although increasingly confined to the economic and political periphery of the state and somewhat weakened in its reputation as a romantic destination for foreign tourists, Umbertine Florence was the main entry point for English culture into Italy and remained the preferred Italian base for a fairly large community of well-to-do
146 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA expatriate English and American intellectuals and writers. As Medina Lasansky notes, ‘the so-called English colony [. . . ] comprised some six thousand British as well as American expatriates living in Florence in the late nineteenth century’.16 Anglophone Florence had its own villas, houses, castles as well as its own ‘public’ institutions: one could buy English goods and clothing in the Anglo-American Supply Stores in Via Cavour, or recreate British social practices in the Florence Club.17 Contact with Britain could be maintained by reading Florentine journals and newspapers written in English, such as The Florence Gazette (to be renamed The Italian Gazette), 1890–95, The Illustrated Florence News, 1894–95, Fiorenza, 1905–06, The Florence Directory, 1909–13 and The Florence Herald, 1909–17.18 If by the mid-1870s Florence had lost the appeal of, or the hope of ever becoming, a great modern capital city, it still retained the image of a city of culture – and of the Renaissance city par excellence. In the three decades from the unification to the fin de siècle, the city transformed itself into a lively, albeit somehow spartan, cultural centre, rivalling and, to a certain extent, winning over both the decadent scene of the Byzantine Rome of D’Annunzio, Angelo Sommaruga, Ferdinando Martini and Angelo Conti, and Milan – the soon-to-be modern capital of the publishing industry. After the unification, the Anglo-Americans in Tuscany were both politically more relaxed and financially more secure than their counterparts who had settled in Italy during the tumultuous years of the Risorgimento. This second generation of long- or short-term expatriates living in Florence was also more Italian in its outlook toward both national and international matters.19 In the 1880s, the homes of some of the notable members of this community, such as the novelist Linda Villari (English despite her name) and, of course, Vernon Lee, had become the meeting points not only for notable foreign visitors and the international community spread across the city and its surroundings, but also for members of the local intelligentsia, including Placci, critics Enrico Nencioni and Angelo de Gubernatis, writers Mario Pratesi and Gabriele D’Annunzio, painter Telemaco Signorini, scholar Pasquale Villari, and politician and historian Gaetano Salvemini among others.20 These interactions between Anglo-American expatriates and the locals happened on a more equal basis than before and were more effective in producing forms of cross-cultural exchange that led to the formulation of cosmopolitan ideals. This is the environment in which Placci and Lee developed their enduring if sometimes tempestuous friendship. Placci was born in London in 1861 of an Italian father (banker Gennaro Placci) and Mexican mother but was based in Florence for
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
147
all his adult life. He was introduced to English literature by the influential critic Enrico Nencioni, but his real education in this field took place through the Florentine Anglophone community. Placci was fluent in several European languages and his reading – impressive in its coverage of modern English literature and meticulously recorded in diaries that are preserved in Florence – reflects his internationalist outlook. He started publishing in the early 1880s, with a series of essays on modern English writers that came out in highbrow literary periodicals in Florence (Marzocco, Il Regno and Rassegna Nazionale) and Rome (Fanfulla della Domenica, Domenica del Capitan Fracassa and Cronaca Bizantina). Aside from foreign literatures (especially English and French) his other prominent lifelong interests were music criticism and travel sketches. Placci openly embraced a cosmopolitan identity in his private life (Hans von Bülow dubbed him, in a somewhat ambivalent way, ‘the cosmopolisson’, punning on the French word for ‘rogue’) as well as his activities as critic and novelist. In his two novels Un Furto (1892) and Mondo Mondano (1898) the cosmopolitan reality of Umbertine Italy is reflected in a rather realist, detail-driven manner which gives ample space to the development of intersecting plot-lines populated by thinly sketched, cosmopolitan characters.21 Placci’s representation of this international milieu was made of quick, photographic snapshots intertwined in multiple story lines and witty, superficial dialogues, resembling those he could hear in the city’s literary salons and in its upper-middle-class and aristocratic homes, where he was a well-known presence. Lee’s career is in many ways a mirror image of Placci’s. She was born in France of British parents and was based in Florence practically all her life, although she would spend several months travelling every year. Her wide output includes essays and books on aesthetics and art history as well as travel writing, short stories and two novels. There has been a revival of interest in Lee in recent years among literary critics, who have recovered her important role in the history of late-Victorian culture, situating her work in relation to crucial writers from this period including Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.22 Lee is considered an English writer – she published the vast majority of her works in England – but the complexities of her transnational affiliations have been underplayed in this recent revival.23 Like Placci, she also exploited her identity across nations and languages, bringing her special experience as a cosmopolitan woman writer into her work on aesthetics and using her international background to criticize the limitations of the English literary culture of
148 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA the fin de siècle. Unlike Placci, though, Lee was not fascinated by the glamour of international high society and the gossip of literary salons. Lee actively facilitated the publication of Italian writers in England (Placci being a case in point),24 while at the same time contributing to Italian cultural life by publishing in local periodicals and encouraging the reception of modern British writers. On 5 October [1894], for instance, writing from her Italian country house, Il Palmerino, she urged her friend ‘Professor’ Nencioni to consider publishing an article on the recently deceased Walter Pater as if it were almost a moral obligation. Lee wanted Nencioni to present her ‘poor, illustrious friend’ (‘povero illustre amico’) Pater to young and vulnerable Italians as a powerful means of building their own brand of aestheticism on solid moral grounds, in antithesis to the teachings of D’Annunzio. Lee describes Pater’s ‘spiritual career’ as a ‘pilgrim’s progress that gradually took him from the monstrous aestheticism of Swinburne to the highest moral aestheticism of Plato’, teaching him to understand beauty as coinciding with moral health.25 Lee’s mediation of English aestheticism into Italy, via Nencioni, shows her trying to limit the influence of D’Annunzio’s Nietzschean brand of Decadent aesthetics, a movement which had a great impact on the Italian literary field at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this way, Lee used her cosmopolitan identity to reconfigure Italian letters and put them on a transnational plane of action, without losing any nation-specific appeal, while stressing the importance of maintaining a universal moral stand for literary endeavour of merit. As Lee implicitly notes in her letter to Nencioni, what marked out Florence from other Italian literary cities of the day was not only its distinctive Anglo-American cosmopolitan milieu but, more importantly, its sanitized cultural flair, engaged, unlike the culture promoted by D’Annunzio, in fostering an ‘esteticismo morale’ (‘moral aestheticism’). It was precisely this attention to the moral virtues of the real over a simple aestheticization of the everyday, which allowed the city to preserve its reserves of transnational cultural capital gained during the Renaissance and to update it now into the modern era. As Lee’s words demonstrate, Florence was a successful cosmopolitan city because it carefully balanced the relationship between the national and the global, by profitably integrating Italian aesthetic and political preoccupations with those which were distinctively foreign. Placci and Lee met in 1880 and soon established a close friendship based on a mixture of camaraderie and intellectual exchange. In later
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
149
years, Lee would describe this relationship as ‘one of the deepest and most trusting friendships of [her] life’.26 From the 1880s Placci reviewed Lee’s English writings in Italy while Lee assumed towards him a mentoring role similar to the one she would later offer the young Mario Praz, another Florentine who was destined to become one of Italy’s most influential scholars of English literature.27 Placci initially accepted the position of mentee, seeking for instance Lee’s opinion of his stories. But the power relationship which saw Lee play the literary sage to the allegedly less experienced Placci by and by became unsustainable. As with other correspondents, Lee’s frankness was uncompromising and her criticisms bordered on scorn. Placci eventually felt insulted by her reiterated remarks about his lack of talent and accused Lee of abusive behaviour, declaring himself tired of being made to feel like ‘the scum of the earth’ by her.28 This was the eruption of a ‘psychological conflict’, as Placci called it, from which their friendship never recovered.29 Placci, for his part, was also trenchant about Lee’s writings, but his negative comments are in his unpublished diaries and we have every reason to suppose that Lee never saw them. Reading Belcaro (1881), for instance, Placci rather unflatteringly compares Lee to Ouida – the successful English popular novelist who was also resident in Florence in those years – and calls her style ‘rather monotonous for she eternally says the same thing in different variations and her same no-theory of art theory is in all the articles: she doesn’t feel art. I think she knows it well, that’s all’.30 In a similar vein, he complains of the essays in Juvenilia (1887) – a collection Lee dedicated to him – as being overstretched and overcooked.31 Matters were complicated further when Lee and her collaborator Clementina Anstruther-Thompson were accused of plagiarism by Bernard Berenson in 1897.32 Lee believed that Placci could have stepped in to give evidence in her favour, helping her clear the accusation by testifying that Lee had a long time earlier already discussed with him the ideas that she was alleged to have stolen from Berenson. But Placci refused to do so, probably out of a mixture of unwillingness to stand up for an alienated, difficult friend and fear to incur Berenson’s displeasure. Lee still kept reminding him of his betrayal as late as 1913.33 Despite a long trickle of letters into the twentieth century, in which they sometimes discuss challenging topics such as anti-Semitism, international politics and the novels of Joseph Conrad, the years of their real intellectual exchange were the late 1880s and early ’90s.
150 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA 3. THE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF A COSMOPOLITAN FRIENDSHIP
As a young author, Lee understood that in Florence, and in the young Italian nation more broadly, cultural cosmopolitanism represented a desirable ideal. This is why, in an 1875 contribution to the Florentine journal Rivista Europea, she advertises herself as ‘un cosmopolita’, using the masculine article in keeping with the masculine pseudonym she had chosen, ‘H. Vernon Lee’.34 Both in this piece, in which she laments the lack of ‘aesthetic culture’ among modern Italians – by which she means their failure to engage with their artistic heritage – and in her series for the same journal on contemporary female novelists from Britain and Germany, Lee uses cosmopolitanism as a positive identity and marker of authority through which she claims a place in the world of Italian periodical publishing. But Lee came to distrust the political and ethical connotations of the word ‘cosmopolitan’, systematically subjecting it to scrutiny in her writings. In this process of revision, she came to see Placci as the example of what seemed to her dangerous in the cosmopolitan ideal. This view of Placci is evident as early as 1886, in her essay ‘The Value of the Ideal’, one of the philosophical dialogues in her collection, Baldwin. The character of Baldwin is a slippery, partly autobiographical projection of the author: born in France like Lee, Baldwin has been carried ‘from country to country’ by ‘the accident of family circumstance, [which] has made this very English Briton see questions of all sorts through variously tinted cosmopolitan glasses’.35 Aptly described, in a photographic metaphor, as a ‘negative being’ to Lee’s positive identity, Baldwin is a complex creation, at once ‘fancy and fiction’, I and non-I, internal and external to the authorial voice assumed by Lee.36 In the course of the book, Baldwin engages in a series of dialogues with other characters loosely modelled on Lee’s friends and acquaintances. In ‘The Value of the Ideal’, Baldwin confronts a thinly fictionalized Placci in the form of a character named Carlo, an aspiring young writer described as ‘the curious arch-modern outcome of mixed nationalities’ and as being a ‘half English, half Italian, and wholly cosmopolitan lad’.37 As in the (self-)portrait of Baldwin, cosmopolitan identity connotes an appealing form of intellectual mobility but, in Carlo’s case, it also carries a less desirable tendency towards materialism to which Lee refers as ‘realism’. ‘The Value of the Ideal’ stages a debate between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ which, as Toril Moi has argued in her study of Ibsen, is a characteristic feature of the culture wars of the 1880s and will be
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
151
formative of the genealogy of modernism.38 While Baldwin/Lee remains technically super partes, providing a balanced assessment of the two schools, Carlo is strongly identified as a realist because of his commitment to precise representation and psychological study and his intellectual affinity with Zola’s Naturalist school. His rejection of the aesthetics of idealism, tellingly represented here by the figure of an ‘old painter’ (p. 249, our emphasis), is a function of his eagerness to embrace what appears to be the most modern trends in art or, as Lee puts it, of the fact that his mind is ‘saturated with cosmopolitan modernnesses’ (p. 259). The overthrow of idealism is therefore represented as somehow implicated in the progress of a cosmopolitan culture, of which Placci is the type (genetically as much as intellectually) and to which Lee looks with a measure of regret. Lee might also be hinting at the fact that the alliance between cosmopolitanism and modernity – the same one explored in contemporary Symbolist milieus in Paris – might be impossible to achieve in the relatively provincial setting of cosmopolitan Florence. All in all, though, Lee paints a positive portrait of the young Placci in Baldwin. First and foremost she pays him a compliment by making him the representative voice of modernity in such an important debate. But then her dialogue contains an affectionate, if also characteristically hierarchical, portrayal of their relationship, as Lee’s alter ego, Baldwin, is said to be ‘greatly tickled’ by ‘Carlo’s eagerness to become his disciple, his curious mental attitude, at once modest and militant, like that of Plato’s youths’ (p. 258). Their intellectual friendship is re-imagined in Socratic terms (their intimacy a displaced form of male same-sex eros), even as Lee makes use of arguments and ideas that she extracts from their private correspondence.39 The public performance of her dialogue with Placci took another form the following year, with the publication of Juvenilia, a collection of essays in two volumes which Lee dedicated to him. Unusually, the dedication takes the form of two short essays that bookend the collection. The introduction and conclusion in which Lee addresses her ‘dear Carlo’ directly encourage readers to see the printed texts of the essays as an extension of their intellectual conversation, posed ambiguously between the public and private spheres, the discourses of scholarship and emotion. In the introductory essay cum dedication Lee performs an important rite of passage, foreswearing her juvenile aesthetic phase (hence the title of the collection), characterized by a confusion of aesthetics and ethics typical of ‘the morality of youth’ in favour of
152 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA maturity, understood as commitment to social justice.40 In this new vision, in which pleasure has become subordinate to duty, the world is ‘no longer a mere storehouse of beautiful inanimate things’ but ‘a great living mass, travailing and suffering’:41 maturity brings Lee to a deeper understanding of modernity, which calls for ethical engagement in art and criticism. As in Baldwin, Lee assumes a Socratic role towards Placci, speaking from the point of view of experience and addressing her dedicatee as being in the process of ‘emerging from [. . . ] intellectual boyhood’.42 Rhetorically, therefore, she sets herself up as Placci’s guide into maturity/modernity but also perhaps, more endearingly, as his companion in a shared coming-of-age ritual performed by the publication of the book. In Juvenilia as in Baldwin, the portrayal of Placci fulfils an important rhetorical function in Lee’s ongoing dialogue with herself, acting as an idealized interlocutor but also as an outlet for the didactic voice that is in evidence in many of her writings. The critique of Placci’s realism articulated in ‘The Value of the Ideal’ assumes a much more scathing tone in their epistolary exchange, in the early 1890s, over some of the short stories that Placci would go on to publish in Mondo mondano, on which he had asked Lee’s opinion. Mondo mondano, as the title indicates, develops the cosmopolitan setting of international dandies and socialites that was already present in his earlier novel, Un Furto. The Zola-like Naturalism evident in Un Furto, which Lee affectionately criticized in Baldwin as a hallmark of the young Placci, has however been largely expunged out of these later texts, which are closer in style to the Bourget of Cosmopolis. Lee’s critique focuses on a short story called ‘Nozze d’argento’ (‘Silver wedding’), which she finds wanting in the ‘moral atmosphere’ of some of his earlier work. She accuses Placci of excessive detachment and, in terms of narrative style, of having become a mere recorder of facts, without a philosophical or sympathetic investment in his tales. Lee argues that readers ‘require the contact of other human beings’, which Placci fails to deliver because he approaches his characters as phenomena, privileging abstract analysis and craftsmanship over and above ‘human feeling’. In the most damning section of the letter, generalizing from her criticisms of ‘Nozze d’argento’, Lee takes the opportunity to deliver a chilling critique of his investment in cosmopolitanism: You cannot yet be a good or tolerable novelist because you still look upon life as so much material, as something for you to employ, as distinguished from something to employ you, to fill your heart and mind with problems. [. . . ] Now you seem to me never to let yourself go to life. You find it interesting, but not absorbing.
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
153
[. . . ] your cosmopolitanism, your constant moving about, your constantly seeking and surrendering to new impressions and influences, all that makes you intelligent and lively, is a great danger for you. Your greatest danger is a tendency to say this or that bores me. It is when you have rooted out of yourself the last traces of dilettantism that you will become a true novelist, a novelist for people who live and feel, not for dilettantes.43
In her earlier public writings Lee had already played with the idea that Placci’s cosmopolitanism might represent a distraction to his work. Here though, in the more sheltered forum of private correspondence, she is quite uncompromising in depicting cosmopolitanism as an obstacle in the way of literature becoming an effective medium of psychological or social study. The type of cosmopolitanism embodied by Placci is not a tenable position for Lee, either philosophically or aesthetically. In his fiction, essays and short stories Placci was trying to use cosmopolitanism as a privileged point of view that captured a trend made inevitable by modernization – a post-national social order in which intellectuals have abandoned their allegiances to the local. But Lee connects the cosmopolitan register adopted by Placci with superficiality, frivolity and egotism. Its energy has a dispersive effect on the critical mind, which, for Lee, should seek deep engagement precisely because the forces of modernity pull it the other way. In the extract Lee therefore formulates an ethical critique of cosmopolitanism, which operates on two separate but related dimensions: one linked to identity and the other to literary form. On the level of identity, Lee criticizes the materialistic attitude towards experience that brings Placci as cosmopolitan subject/author to relate to life not as a set of ‘problems’ that require engagement, solutions and action, but as material to use for the obtainment of individual pleasure. In Lee’s critique, Placci’s cosmopolitanism is related to the Epicurean philosophy that she had criticized in the ideology of art for art’s sake, which Lee had herself found enabling in some respects but had eventually come to distrust. The position articulated here therefore repeats the critique of aestheticism in the introduction cum dedication to Juvenilia, where Lee had used the example of Pater, a critic towards whom she built a complex relationship of, at the same time, discipleship and hostility, to warn Placci and her readers against using art as a way of avoiding ethical engagement. In that essay as in her letter, Lee argues that the critic should not become a seeker after beauty, as some strands of aestheticism would have it, but rather accept ugliness and ‘problems’ as part of the acts of careful observation and discrimination that are for her intrinsic
154 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA to the process of criticism. This view requires the critic to take moral responsibility and, if required, political action for the improvement of society. Indeed, in a letter to Placci written some months later, shortly after Pater’s death, speaking of Epicureanism, Lee comments on Pater’s ‘splendid evolution from the cheap aestheticism of the Renaissance Studies [sic] to the aestheticism, which is ethical like all the highest’, of his last book, Plato and Platonism (1893).44 This reading of Pater’s moral trajectory – the same she wanted Nencioni to publicize as an alternative to D’Annunzio – is not uncontroversial, but it throws light on Lee’s investment in the notion of an ethical aestheticism and, in the context of their previous exchanges, reads like another warning to her Italian friend. It is noticeable that, in the quoted passage, Placci’s cosmopolitanism is described by Lee as a constant ‘seeking and surrendering to new impressions and influences’, a formulation that deliberately recalls the ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, where Pater had urged readers ‘to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions’ and to approach the world of experience by ‘gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch’.45 Lee redirects towards Placci the language and arguments that had been used by hostile British critics in the 1870s to accuse Pater of hedonism and immorality. Unlike many criticisms of art for art’s sake, though, Lee’s moral critique is not formulated from a Christian perspective. She portrays Placci as a refined aesthete who puts his social privilege and culture to bad use: according to her special metaphor, by ‘moving about’ too quickly, the cosmopolitan constantly skims the surface of life, unable to reach its depth. Propelled by ennui rather than real intellectual curiosity, the cosmopolitan paradoxically accumulates sensations and experiences only to reduce and stereotype experience. He misses altogether the transformative power of the encounter with the Other, which is for Lee at the root of criticism. This negative image of Placci as collector of impressions was elaborated years later by Mario Praz, who devotes to Placci a brief obituary essay entitled ‘Un cortegiano moderno’ (‘A modern courtesan’) (1941), in which he ironically dubs Placci a ‘professor of enjoyment’ and compares him to the famous British dilettante and society host Richard Monckton Milnes.46 Consciously or unconsciously, Praz closely repeats Lee’s assessment of Placci as unwilling or unable to enter maturity. In his portrait, Placci approaches life as ‘a game’ (‘gioco’ is a word that is repeated several times) and classifies all that exists as either ‘enjoyable’ or ‘boring’, having become adept at disposing of the
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
155
latter and arranging for himself various combinations of the former (pp. 231–232). In fact, Praz radicalizes Lee’s critique by describing Placci’s materialist and Epicurean proclivities as a type of mania (he speaks of Placci as ‘collezionista maniaco’, a manic collector, which is rather ironic, given Praz’s own well-documented passion for collecting). According to Praz, Placci’s Epicurean attitude towards life is best reflected in his gourmandise, of which he makes a lot in his brief essay. The general drift of Praz’s assessment is ambiguous. On the one hand, he canonizes Placci as belonging to the ‘grandi dilettanti’ (‘high dilettantism’), a typology that he finds lacking in the Italian tradition (p. 234), and therefore presents him as breaking new ground in Italian culture. On the other, he paints a faintly ridiculous image of an orally fixated, voracious consumer condemned to obscurity or, at best, to the status of a ‘minor’ figure. Translated back to the question of identity politics raised by Lee, Praz’s essay confirms her suspicions that Placci’s cosmopolitanism would lead to artistic marginalization. His portrait concludes with a memorable image of Placci’s unwritten memoirs as a heap of old calling cards: ephemeral, dull lists of names devoid of any real literary content. Going back to Lee’s letter, we can see her making a similar critique of the undesirable connection between cosmopolitan lifestyle and literary form. Lee criticizes Placci’s dilettantism, which she sees as perverting the proper function of the novelist. In her critique Lee redeploys a locus classicus of the British nineteenth-century debate around the novel, a literary form that, in seeking to mediate between the competing values of subjectivity and objectivity, investigated the desirability of detachment as both aesthetic practice and tool for ethical understanding. This ambivalence is best exemplified by George Eliot, who was critical of detachment as potentially weakening the moral faculty but at the same time believed, in line with the post-Enlightenment scientific culture of her times, that the power of observation is sharpened by critical distance.47 In her assessment of Placci’s novelistic technique, Lee, who was keen to introduce Eliot to Italian readers, comes uncharacteristically close to Eliot in arguing that Placci’s cosmopolitanism upsets this delicate balance. By severing all connections and loyalties to the local, his cosmopolitanism becomes effectively a form of ignorance: it is no longer a point of view that enables a desirable authorial impartiality, but rather a strategy of disengagement that disables him from achieving the real ethical knowledge of life, rooted in ‘emotional perception [. . . ] which makes the great novelist’.48
156 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA Lee sees a connection between the type of cosmopolitanism adopted by Placci (partly derived from Bourget) and radicalized positions of art for art’s sake and Decadence. Her characterization of Placci as ennuyé seeker for sensations reminds us of des Esseintes, the anti-hero of J. K. Huysmans’s classic Decadent novel A Rebours (1884), who completely withdraws from society in order to cultivate a lifestyle of pleasure and aesthetic refinement. Through the covert analogy with A Rebours, Lee warned Placci that the Decadent experiment is bound to end in selfdestruction. She moreover implies that Placci’s cosmopolitan literary style is closely related to Huysmans’s school of Decadent writing; in particular, it inherits its aristocratic detachment from social concerns and its programmatic dismissal of the problems associated with ‘the real’ that had plagued earlier generations of writers. Like Decadent writing, the cosmopolitan point of view advocates an aesthetics of detachment and alienation rather than sympathy, investigating the demands of pleasure rather than duty: the cosmopolitan narrator in this critique is little more than a collector of impressions and sensations, a cold dandy and cataloguer of humanity. As Praz would do more than half a century later, Lee exposes the paradox whereby the compulsive international socializer (‘the modern courtesan’) is, fundamentally, a misanthrope. Lee’s negative critique of cosmopolitanism needs to be read against the positive cosmopolitan practice she adopts in her own work on art and aesthetics. At a time of a sharp rise in aggressive nationalism (which she staunchly deplored), Lee does not advocate the value of allegiance to the nation; but she does believe in the importance of keeping writing rooted in a notion of community founded on the ideals of friendship, hospitality and cultural exchange: indeed, she values literature precisely as a means of building communities across national and political divides, as will be seen in her pacifist efforts during the First World War.49 Cosmopolitanism, for Lee, is first and foremost an opportunity for ethical self-development that works by constantly transforming and enlarging the self through sympathetic contact with what is foreign and other. According to Lee, Placci betrays this ideal, perverting it into inward-looking materialism and egotism – a moral failure that is the cause of the aesthetic failure of his writings. In attacking Placci’s cosmopolitanism Lee therefore reflects on her own identity and practice as a writer: she does not want to destroy cosmopolitanism as an ideal, but rather anchor it in an ethical dimension.
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee 4.
157
ON HOW TO BE A COSMOPOLITAN
Placci and Lee theorized and practised the art of cosmopolitanism in a distinctly modern way, putting forward a view of cosmopolitan encounters as a means of developing aesthetic as well as ethical practices, which were not rooted in nation-specific cultural or literary models. Their multi-layered dialogues, while rooted in fin-de-siècle Florence, were defined by a lack of territorial or spatial dimension (i.e. they were attached to a communal sense of belonging to super-national communities), and were strongly driven by moral imperatives. In nineteenth-century Florence cosmopolitanism could not exist outside a national and ethical perspective. The significance of modern, egalitarian cosmopolitanism as a mode of writing and aesthetic practice for the newly built Italian nation is testified by a volume of essays by the realist (verista) writer Luigi Capuana, Gli ‘ismi’ contemporanei (‘The contemporary “isms”’) (1898), published in Catania, Sicily. Contemporaneous with the Placci-Lee exchanges, this volume, too, addressed cosmopolitanism in relation to national and international literary trends and viewed it as one of the distinctive features of contemporary culture. Alongside those on Symbolism and Verism, an entire belligerent chapter of the book, ‘Idealismo e cosmopolitismo’ (‘Idealism and cosmopolitanism’), is dedicated to the emerging trend of cosmopolitan writing. Like Lee in her critique of Placci, Capuana criticizes cosmopolitanism because of its lack of individuality and its elitist attitude – attributes which, to his mind, rendered it vague, ineffective and abstract. While Capuana was happy to recognize the importance cosmopolitanism had gained in Italian and European letters, he still considered it detrimental to the development of national literature, since ‘in politics it denies the idea of homeland, in the arts that of national literature’.50 Capuana’s position is partially a response to writer and critic Ugo Ojetti (a good friend of Placci’s) who had provocatively stated in the Revue de Paris that Italian letters would not produce any modern literature of international standing unless they embraced a cosmopolitan perspective.51 Despite their different views on the role of cosmopolitanism for the life of the nation and for its international role, Capuana and Ojetti, like Lee, stress the importance of its ethical dimension as a modus vivendi and operandi. As the micro-history of the crisis in Lee and Placci’s friendship would seem to indicate, at the
158 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA turn of the century Italian letters were cosmopolitan in aspiration but were often not able to integrate the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of cosmopolitanism in a way that would produce literary innovation and transgress national boundaries.* *The authors wish to thank the British Academy for supporting the research for this article.
NOTES 1 Arturo Graff, L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Turin: Loescher, 1911). Graff explains the growing phenomenon of Anglomania in Italy as a response to a weak and precarious national tradition. 2 On this point, see R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 159–166. 3 Costanza Pasquali, ‘Anglomania “fin-de-siècle”’, English Miscellany, 7 (1961), 284. 4 Ulrich Beck, ‘Cosmopolitan Manifesto’, in The Cosmopolitanism Reader, edited by Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), pp. 217–228 (p. 217, p. 227). 5 Beck, ‘Cosmopolitan Manifesto’, p. 226. In the present essay, transnational is defined as the analytical effort of tracing flows of meaning across and within national variations, following the leading trajectory delineated by any given paradigm which in our case is determined by issues informing the dialogic exchanges between Placci and Lee. 6 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. xv-xvi. 7 On this rather broad issue, see Mario Albertini, Il Risorgimento e l’unità europea (Naples: Guida editori, 1979); and Clemente Galligani, L’Europa e il mondo nella tormenta (Rome: Armando editore, 2012), pp. 145–148. Very few critical studies have focused on Italian cosmopolitan exchanges in the fin de siècle. In this critical vacuum see, for a recent assessment of the Italian phenomenon, Angela Taraborelli, Il cosmopolitismo contemporaneo (Bari: Laterza, 2011). 8 Vincenzo Gioberti, ‘L’Italia è principe nella arti belle e nelle lettere amene’, in Scritti scelti, edited by Augusto Cuzzo (Turin: UTET, 1954), pp. 623–657. See also Andrea Battistini, ‘La cultura cattolica italiana tra cosmopolitismo e identità nazionale’, Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea, 10 (2004), 547–554. 9 Maurizio Isabella, ‘Mazzini’s Internationalism in Context’, in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, edited by C. A. Bayly and Eugenio F. Biagini (London: Proceedings of the British Academy, OUP, 2008), p. 43. 10 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), vol. 1, p. 325. 11 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 2, p. 1190, and vol. 3, p. 1988. 12 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 3, p. 1988. 13 Ibid., p. 1989.
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
159
14 For Gramsci’s reflections on French intellectuals and cosmopolitanism, see Quaderni del carcere, vol. 1, p. 225. 15 Architect Giuseppe Poggi had clear plans for the urban renovation of Florence, as outlined in a series of articles published in La Nazione from 12 February 1865 onwards. For a discussion of how, in 1897, the Anglo-American community in Florence opposed the demolition of Florence’s historical centre, see D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected. Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 25–33. On the role played by Lee in inviting London’s elites to mount a public campaign to preserve medieval Florence, see Lasansky, Renaissance Perfected, pp. 33–36. 16 Lasansky, Renaissance Perfected, p. 37. 17 The Florence Club was established in 1897; six of its twelve founding members were British citizens. 18 For further details, see AA.VV., Inghilterra e Italia nel ’900. Atti del convegno di Bagni di Lucca (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973). The Florence Gazette was ‘distributed to public reading rooms and hotels throughout Austria, Australia, England, Egypt, Germany, and France as well as Italy’, Lasansky, Renaissance Perfected, p. 31. Florence has also been described as a ‘marriage market’ for English and American aristocratic families; see “‘Beauty Athwart the Darkness”: Constructing Florence in Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Writing’, in Gli anglo-americani a Firenze. Idee e costruzione del Rinascimento, edited by Marcello Fantoni (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), p. 72. 19 Sybille Pantazzi, ‘Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee: Their Letters and their Friends’, English Miscellany. A Symposium of History, Literature and the Arts, 12 (1961), 97–122 (pp. 97–98). The private residences of the wealthy Anglo-American community were often designed to welcome Italian friends and Italophiles and they were used as settings for exhibitions of private collections and for literary and artistic debates. 20 For a vignette of these cosmopolitan salons, see Carlo Placci, ‘Firenze 1880’, La Nazione, 12 December 1961, and ‘Inglesi a Firenze’, La Nazione, 23 December 1961. For a list of salons and notable Anglo-American expatriates living in Florence until 1860, see Giuliana Artom Treves, Gli anglo-fiorentini di cento anni fa, 1847–1862 (Florence: Sansoni, 1953). For further details on these communities in Italy, see Giuliana Pieri, Italy, Britain and the Pre-Raphaelites (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), especially pp. 21–56. For further details on the role played by Nencioni as cultural mediator, see Isabella Nardi, Enrico Nencioni. Un critico vittoriano a Firenze (Perugia: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1985), pp. 17–41. In Florence, Nencioni had been mentoring (and occasionally gently criticizing) Placci. 21 Marie-José Cambieri Tosi, Carlo Placci maestro di cosmopoli nella Firenze di Ottocento e Novecento (Florence: Vallecchi, 1984). 22 See for instance Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, edited by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetic, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003). 23 A notable exception is Hilary Fraser, ‘Interstitial Identities: Vernon Lee and the Spaces in-between’, in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative
160 FRANCESCA BILLIANI AND STEFANO EVANGELISTA
24
25
26 27
28 29 30 31
32
33 34 35 36 37 38
39
40
Selves, and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930, edited by Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 114–133. Lee to Placci, 2 December 1883; Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence, Carte Placci 690.2. Lee used her contacts to help Placci publish in the Academy. The correspondence between Lee and Placci that forms the historical archive of the present article has been reconstructed from the holdings of the Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence, and Somerville College, Oxford. On their friendship see also Pantazzi, ‘Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee’. Pantazzi’s approach is biographical and her article includes a useful selection of Lee’s letters to Placci, most of which remain unpublished. ‘[L]a carriera spirituale, direi quasi il pilgrim’s progress del Pater, principiando dal mostruoso esteticismo Swinburniano, e appurandosi mano mano nell’altissimo esteticismo morale di Platone.’ Lee to Nencioni, 5 October [1894]; Biblioteca Marucelliana, CNE.1.12.5. Lee to Placci, 20 January 1906; Biblioteca Marucelliana, Carte Placci 690.15. Praz and Lee got to know each other around 1920 and their correspondence lasts until 1933. Praz would pay tribute to Lee in his autobiography, where he refers to her as ‘la scrittrice inglese che m’introdusse nel mondo letterario anglo-sassone’ (‘the English writer who introduced me into the Anglo-Saxon literary world’). Mario Praz, La casa della vita (Milan: Adelphi, 2003), p. 263. Placci to Lee, 17 June 1896; Vernon Lee Papers, Somerville College, Oxford. Ibid. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Carte Placci 39. 73. These essays are said to be ‘un po’ tirati sia come stile e un po’ troppo evidentemente cucinati’ (‘a little overstretched in their style and too clearly overcooked’). Marucelliana, Carte Placci 41. 9. An account of this episode can be found in Alison Brown, ‘Vernon Lee and the Renaissance: from Burckhardt to Berenson’, in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, edited by John E. Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 184–209. See her letter to him of 29 May 1913; Biblioteca Marucelliana, Carte Placci 690.26. H. Vernon Lee, ‘Sulla necessità della coltura estetica in Italia: Lettera di un Cosmopolita’, Rivista Europea, 4.3 (1875), 434–441. Lee, Baldwin (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886), p. 5. Lee, Baldwin, p. 13, p. 3. Lee, Baldwin, p. 250, p. 256. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford and New York: OUP, 2006), especially pp. 67–91. Moi shows that ‘idealism’ as an aesthetic term, although crucial to nineteenth-century debates about art and literature throughout Europe, has subsequently almost completely been written out of literary histories. See for instance an early undated latter from Lee to Placci, which precedes Baldwin, in which she criticizes his work, Convalescenza. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Carte Placci 690.1. Lee, Juvenilia: Being a Second Series of Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), vol. 1, p. 9. This is the same evolution that is played out by the eponymous heroine in Lee’s novel Miss Brown (1884). It is
Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee
41 42 43 44
45
46
47
48 49
50
51
161
worth noting that the rejection of the aesthetic sphere is mitigated in the epilogue to Juvenilia, also addressed to Placci, in which Lee concedes that art and pleasure do perform a beneficial function on the individual also in adult life. Lee, Juvenilia, vol. 1, p. 20. Lee, Juvenilia, vol. 1, p. 5. Lee to Placci, 3 January [1893?]. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Carte Placci 690.5. Lee to Placci, 9 August [1894]. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Carte Placci 690.7. On Lee’s relation to Pater, see also Maurizio Ascari, ‘The Fortune of The Renaissance in Italian Art Criticism, 1894–1944’, in The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe, edited by Stephen Bann (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 34–61; and Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 55–92. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, edited by Donald L. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p. 189. This passage appears unaltered from the first edition of 1873. Mario Praz, ‘Un cortegiano moderno’, in Fiori freschi (Milan: Garzanti, 1982), pp. 231–235 (p. 231). Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–1885) was a British author, politician, socialite and bibliophile who delighted in bringing together the celebrities of his day at his London breakfast parties. Amanda Anderson has shown that Victorian cosmopolitanism was shaped by the debate around desirable and undesirable forms of detachment in literature and criticism. Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). The discussion in this paragraph is indebted to her. For Lee’s Italian mediation of Eliot, see Lee, ‘George Eliot’, La Domenica del Fracassa, 2.14 (1885), p. 1. Lee to Placci, 3 January [1893?]. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Carte Placci 690.5. Cf. Matthew Potolsky, ‘The Decadent Counterpublic’, Victorianism and Romanticism on the Net, 48, < http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/017444ar > [accessed 12 December 2012]. Potolsky sees Lee as an exponent of a ‘decadent cosmopolitanism’ comparable to the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Our reading of Lee’s cosmopolitanism is not incompatible with Potolsky’s; they can be reconciled if we take account of Lee’s ambiguous relationship towards Decadence, which oscillated between loose affiliation and vocal rejection. ‘Nella politica esso nega il concetto di patria, nell’arte il concetto di letteratura nazionale.’ Luigi Capuana, ‘Idealismo e cosmopolitismo’, in Gli ‘ismi’ contemporanei (Milan: Fabbri, 1973), pp. 8–39 (p. 14). Capuana, ‘Idealismo e cosmopolitismo’, pp. 13–14.
