OSPREY NOTES

Edith Wharton

Introduction by

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

c 2021 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

General editors: Réka M. Cristian & Zoltán Dragon

c Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

Cover image: Benedictine Monastery, Monreale. © Matthias Süssen

Language editor: William Potter

ISBN: 978-615-5423-70-3 (.mobi); 978-615-5423-71-0 (.epub);

978-615-5423-69-7 (PoD)

AMERICANA eBooks is a division of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, published by the Department of American Studies,

University of Szeged, Hungary.

http://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu

C

This book is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 – Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licene. For more information, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.hu

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: Edith Wharton’s quest for historical continuity in the Aegean

Osprey Notes 1926

Penelope

“Education through the Eyes”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University has provided the time, space, and support for me to be able to peruse chunks of its enormous Wharton Collection. In person, I am to thank especially Elizabeth Frengel, on account of the company and discussions, and Allison Van Rhee, for helping with practical issues. I am grateful for the Watkins and Loomis Agency and Julia Masnik for the seamless flow of information about and assistance with publishing the manuscripts. I am also very grateful for William Potter’s advice on how to revise the final draft of my introduction. The editors of Americana eBooks, my colleagues Réka Mónika Cristian and Zoltán Dragon, have encouraged me with the project, waited for the manuscript patiently and provided invaluable help with the practical details of the publication process.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Cathedral of Syracuse, Sicily by pjt56

2. Benedictine Monastery, Monreale. © Matthias Süssen

3. Greek Theatre, Taormina Sicily by Evan Erickson

4. Capella Palatina, Palermo Sicily by by Nikos Konstantinidis

5. Temple of Concordia, Agrigento Sicily by Berthold Werner

6. Stavronikita, Mount Athos by Michalis Famelis

7. The gulf of Aegina (Saronic Gulf)

8. Tholos, Delphi by by Bernard Gagnon

9. Temple of Aphaea, Aegina by Runner1928

10. Telesterion, Eleusis by Carole Raddato

11. Kaisariani Monastery, near Athens by C. Messier

12. Acropolis, Athens by Salonika84

Copyright: Wikimedia Commons.

PREFACE

The primary aim of this collection is to publish the text of Edith Wharton’s manuscript notebook titled Osprey Notes from 1926. The body of Wharton’s travel writing consists of five volumes so far: Italian Backgrounds (1904), Italian Villas (1905), A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), In Morocco (1920), and The Cruise of the Vanadis (2002). Related texts include her The Decoration of Houses (1899), Fighting France (1915), and French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). Additionally, an article about Morocco, an essay on France, and two fragments about her travels in Spain have also been published lately. The Osprey Notes belongs to the list of recently published short archival fragments related to Wharton that should expand our knowledge of Wharton’s professional output as a travel author. The introduction to the volume positions the Notes at the intersection of Wharton’s other travel writing and her ideas about visual art. Apart from the Notes, two more short manuscript texts related to it thematically and located at the Beinecke are included in this collection. First to follow the Osprey Notes is the early poem “Penelope” that reflects Wharton’s early concern with Odysseus’ journey, rendered from the perspective of the domestic wife. The poem was not dated but assigned “Cannes,” and the subsequent folder of the Wharton Collection, a similar early poem titled “Treasure,” is written on Cannes hotel stationary from 1881, so the two are probably contemporaneous. The second piece is another early text, an essay from the young Wharton’s time at Newport as a married society lady who helps the community with decorating the local school titled “Education through the Eyes” from cc. 1890. The essay charts basic principles about the education of a child’s point of view, which presupposes a commitment to the moral and social values of visual beauty.

INTRODUCTION: EDITH WHARTON’S QUEST FOR HISTORICAL CONTINUITY IN THE AEGEAN

The notebook titled Osprey Notes has been lying quietly in a box of the Wharton Collection at the Beinecke Library of Yale University since 1939. It contains ten handwritten entries about Edith Wharton’s trip to the Aegean in 1926. Wharton chartered the yacht Osprey and cruised the Mediterranean in the company of her friends Daisy Chanler, Robert Norton and two more gentlemen, Logan Pearshall Smith and Henry Lawrence in April and May 1926. The notes document the first part of the cruise, from the Gulf of Aegina to Athens, ending in medias res with a caption on the Parthenon at moonlight. The cursory and highly revised notes have been acknowledged by Wharton scholars-biographers from R. W. B. Leavis to Hermione Lee, and Sarah Bird Wright to Myrto Drizou as part of Wharton’s personal Odyssey, but so far have remained unpublished.

Part of the reason why the notes have remained in obscurity for so long is due to their fragmentary nature. The descriptive passages offer little in the way of personal commentary and one needs to familiarize oneself with the details of the trip to actually see what places and scenes they are about. Another, and perhaps more fundamental, reason is that the notes are encoded in Wharton’s implicit language of architecture she adopted from John Ruskin’s observations on visual art, especially Stones of Venice. Also, Wharton wrote an extensive journal during her 1888 trip to the Aegean, part of which overlaps with the Osprey fragments and provides reference points for reading the latter. This essay places the Notes in the context of what I would like to call Wharton’s “architectural vision” of writing travel, and of her published Aegean travel account. This context highlights the place of the Osprey Notes in relation to Wharton’s other travel texts and also in relation to her theories about visual art and architecture.

Edith Wharton is usually thought of as the author of early twentieth-century novels of manners although her reception in the past thirty years has been challenging this exacting view from many directions. Back in 1995, Carol Singley argued persuasively for the need to see Wharton as a reflexive thinker who was interested in questions of scientific, philosophical, religious, and ethical thinking of her time. For Singley, Wharton’s metaphysical and religious concerns are echoed in her fiction (Singley 1995). Singley’s reading paints a new image of Wharton as someone whose novelistic production was of a much larger scope than that of a turn of the century female novelist of social mores. Using resonant spatial metaphors much loved by Wharton, Singley argues that “[w]e have looked for Edit Wharton in the drawing room; we must also seek her in the library” (xi). The phrase is resonant as it taps into the question of female space versus male space, which is an important theme for Wharton, and also into the question of architectural vision Wharton applied repeatedly in her novels, where the spaces characters occupy serve to characterize them socially. Explaining the opposition between drawing room and library further, Singley notes that the little information generally known about Wharton’s non-literary aspirations includes her interest in travel, gardening, interior decoration, characteristically female gentile themes, “but few realize how deeply she was drawn to metaphysical questions, and that her library contained more books on religion than on any other subject” (Ibid.). In this formulation, travel and the study of architecture, gardens and interior design appear as surface level phenomena against the backdrop of serious philosophical and religious thought. Branching out from this compelling multidisciplinary framework, I will argue that in Wharton’s case, the opposition of the two spaces is not always easy to maintain. To develop one aspect of the work on Wharton the reflexive thinker, I will investigate how her travel writing is infused by contemporary theoretical ideas about architecture and its cultural significance.

Several key studies have been published on Wharton and her work focusing on its ethical, scientific, artistic, feminine aspects as part of the interdisciplinary contextualizing approach since the 1990s. In addition to later essays by Singley, some trends relevant from the perspective of travel writing and the criticism of culture include the analysis of Wharton’s philanthropic and literary work during the Great War by Alan Price (1995) and Julie Olin-Ammentorp (2004). In relation to scientific thinking about human culture, Paul Ohler discussed the role of evolutionary theory in her fictional work and her critique of social Darwinism (Ohler 2006). In relation to theories of art, Sarah Bird Wright surveyed Wharton as a cultured amateur in her travel writing (Wright 1997). In addition, Emily Orlando has revealed the role contemporary visual culture played in the way she portrayed her heroines (Orlando 2007). Extending the scope of texts for analysis, Laura Rattray has examined her not only as a novelist but also as a playwright, poet, travel author, architectural designer, auto/biographer, and literary critic as well (Rattray 2020). Related to these new approaches, different sections of her texts have been analysed, especially her short stories and her work from the thirties, as well as archival material (Ohler 2019).

Wharton’s travel writing offers an area of her texts to generate critical interest from an interdisciplinary perspective that involves theories of visual art and architectural space. During her lifetime, she published five travel books and two related volumes about her Italian, French, and Moroccan trips and themes, and a typed account of her 1888 Aegean cruise was published posthumously. These volumes document not only her actual trips and impressions but also the way she makes sense of and experiences visual art, especially architecture. They also contain comments about art history and the art of writing art history. These texts place Wharton the travel author and art historian at the meeting point of different traditions of writing about art: the picturesque tradition, Ruskin’s moral theory of art, and move away from morals into an aestheticizing or, conversely, into a scientific, direction.

Wharton made two trips to the Aegean, the first one on the chartered yacht the Vanadis in 1888 as a young married woman and the second one on the Osprey in 1926 as an elderly divorced lady. Her account about her first trip The Cruise of the Vanadis was published in 1994 after Claudine Lesage recovered it by chance at the library of Hyères, the location of Wharton’s Riviera home after the war. Wharton’s notebook with entries on the second cruise Osprey Notes forms part of the Beinecke Wharton Collection at Yale, the core of which was acquired from Wharton’s friend Gaillard Lapsley in 1939 as part of Wharton’s legacy.

The problem in the Aegean texts is that they only articulate part of the actual significance of the cruises for Wharton. As Claudine Lesage wisely pointed out in her “Introduction” to The Cruise of the Vanadis, a large portion of Wharton’s experience actually remains unsaid: “what matters most is not what she says or even alludes to but what is obviously missing. And, as if to counterbalance what she did not wish to reveal, she accumulates historical details and descriptions, using for this purpose her diary as if it was a camera and taking photos of the most striking views she encounters” (Lesage 2004, 23). Similarly, Louis Auchincloss’ “Preface” to the 2004 edition of the volume sees the value of the script not so much in what it actually says but rather in what its trained eye foreshadows from the art of the later novelist: how she will grasp “overstuffed” Victorian scenes and interiors (Auchincloss 2004, 17). The Osprey Notes from 1926 do not curb this tendency. Although they supplement the earlier text through overlaps and extensions, the fragmented nature of the entries does little to actually provide a more complete picture of the cruises as one would expect them to. If anything, they prove to be even more fragmentary than the longer earlier piece.

Wharton critics have addressed this problem of “encoding” implicitly by looking at the Aegean travel texts as an element of Wharton’s literary Odyssey. Lesage referred to this possible subtext in her introduction to Vanadis (op. cit., 24), Sarah Bird Wright discussed it in the conclusion to her Wharton’s Travel Writing (Wright 1997, 156). It was Mirto Drizou, however, who explicated the Odyssey motif in both Wharton’s literary and travel writing to argue that Wharton’s aestheticizing vision comes to the fore even more remarkably in the Osprey Notes than in the 1888 travel diary (Drizou 2019, 75). Laura Rattray's chapter on Wharton's travel writings provides an excellent view of Wharton the independent thinker who refuses to conform to earlier opinion (2020, 100) and relies on the modernist collage effect in her The Cruise of the Vanadis already (98). The inclusion of the Osprey Notes among Wharton's travel writings expands upon this enterprise by  involving issues of art history and continuity in the discussion.

Simultaneously, the Aegean travel text from 1926 can also be read in the context of Wharton’s other travel writing. One promising direction within the analysis of Wharton’s travel writing is linked to the story of her professionalization and her ongoing argument with contemporary theories of art (Wright, 1997). As part of this enterprise, Ruskin’s practice of “observation”, along with his idea of “watchful wandering” exerted a profound influence on the young Wharton and remained issues for debate in her later travel writing, as the essay will show. Stephen Kite’s argument about Ruskin’s observations on architecture, in Kite’s terms his “watching architecture,” proves to be a fruitful way to approach the potential meaning architecture carries for Wharton, too. Kite explains that for Ruskin, architecture bore the story of the past that was to be read by the observant visitor sensitive to history (Kite 2009, 106-7). The surfaces, materials, patters and even colors of buildings carry stories whose sense is made by the actual onlooker (Kite 2012, 11).

Wharton’s concern with Ruskin began in her father’s library. In her autobiographical fragment “Life and I” she reflects on Ruskin as a powerful influence. She also devotes a chapter of Italian Backgrounds (1905) to her criticism of Ruskin under the misleading title “Picturesque Milan”. In her French travel book A Motor Flight (1908), she elaborates on a Ruskinian version of architecture parlante that she also relies on in her wartime piece Fighting France (1915). However, there are no direct references to Ruskin in the Aegean texts. In Wharton criticism, Susan Bird Wright acknowledges Wharton’s divided relation to Ruskin but does not pursue this relation in detail, while William Blazek points out direct links from Ruskin to Norton and then to Wharton in their thinking about visual arts (Blazek 2016). Others consider this connection a dead end instead. Emily Orlando claims Wharton was through with Ruskin after The Decoration of Houses (1899) (Orlando 2007, 175) and explains Wharton’s critical engagement with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood Ruskin championed. Robert Burden also emphasizes Wharton’s ambiguous shift from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold in the direction of Pater’s aestheticism in the course of her writing career (Burden, 2015, 213). Analysis of the textual descriptions of architecture and scenery in Wharton’s Aegean texts, I argue, reveals a connection between Wharton and Ruskin early on and again much later in her professional career.

The specific addressed in this essay is how the fragmentary Osprey Notes of 1926 can be explicated at the intersection of Wharton’s earlier text about the Aegean, her other travel writing, and Ruskin’s method of  “watching architecture” and his rhetoric thereof. My hypothesis is that there is an implied Ruskin-related model of observing architecture in Wharton’s late travel account that provides a matrix for understanding the fragmentary notes. To present this argument, the essay surveys Ruskin’s ideas on architecture and their relation to Wharton first. Then it proceeds to the analysis of Wharton’s architectural vision in The Cruise of the Vanadis and her Osprey Notes. Eventually, in a gesture inspired by Wharton’s comments, it makes an attempt at reconstructing missing parts of the archival text as a hypothetical extension of the research. In general, the reconstruction aims at forging a reading of the fragments that positions them as part of Wharton’s quest for continuity by “watching architecture.”

1. Edith Wharton’s Argument with Ruskin

John Ruskin’s work represents a complex symbolic understanding of the visual world for Wharton’s generation of Anglo-American writers. Ruskin is an influential painter, critic of art and architecture and social thinker. For Wharton, his aesthetic theories and methods were an early inspiration that she kept referring to throughout her travel writing.

Ruskin on reading architecture

Ruskin uses the analytical skills of the natural scientist in his readings of painting and architecture, and in both areas he tries to go beyond the superficial aspect of the picturesque. His accounts of architecture from the 1850s-80s describe layers of stone, eventually telling the life story of a building. Buildings of the Gothic and the early Renaissance present the most organic examples of such architectural stories. Although Ruskin relies on several disciplines in his observations, as Stephen Kite in Building Ruskin’s Italy puts it, he never identifies with any of them, he remains an amateur (Kite 2012, 2).

Ruskin’s descriptions not only focus on the visual and tactile accounts of visual art but also the emotional effect and the moral or religious values a work carries. Robert Hewison claims that “in Ruskin’s visual imagination each fact finds its place in three orders of truth: truth of fact, truth of thought, and finally the truth of symbol” (Hewison 1975, ch 8). The three orders of truth can be related to Pascal’s three orders of the body, the mind and the heart (Pavlovits 1999, 286). These orders are manifest in the same work of visual art, their understanding or reading depends on the work of the observer, in other words, how the observer relates to the object. This observation is a process that starts with facts.

Hewison’s foundational book from 1975 follows the procedural change from picturesque to beauty and moral imagination in Ruskin that eventually turns to the question of beauty in a given social order. As the beginning of a widening interest, the relation of the picturesque and the beautiful in Ruskin is analyzed by Hewison in detail. The picturesque, situated between Burke’s beautiful and sublime, is concerned with a way of seeing:

The literary and theoretical background however is less important than the practical effect the popularization of the picturesque had on people's way of seeing. As the word implies, it is essentially a visual theory. Whereas Burke's categories were concerned with reason and emotion, that is with internal operations of the mind, the followers of the picturesque were concerned with a way of looking, and the significant influences were paintings rather than books. (Hewison 1975, 34)

According to Hewison, Ruskin criticizes landscape painters of the picturesque tradition as “not true” because they are “superficial” (Hewison 42 and 46), to contrast them with Turner’s landscapes he considers ‘true’ because they use energy and light as symbols of God’s will (Hewison 43). In other words, if the visual features of the picturesque are not put to further use, then it is only superficially “picturesque”, while a “noble picturesque” work has an ability to feel with the subject (Hewison 49). It is in this context that Ruskin thinks of “beauty” as expressive of the nature of God but having an existence of its own (Hewison 55).

After his groundbreaking Modern Painters, Ruskin applied his threefold approach to material qualities of visual beauty expressive of a higher order to studying architecture. On Ruskin’s turn to architecture as an area of the visual Kite writes that Ruskin “reads” the language of architecture (Kite 2012, 9) related to three orders of truth.

Ruskin formulates his threefold method of watching and reading architecture elaborately in his The Seven Lamps of Architecture. He presupposes a harmony between divine and human work, nature and culture: “there is no branch of human work” he writes, “whose constant laws have not close analogy with those which govern every other mode of man’s exertion.” (Ruskin 1886, 12) This is valid for practical work, art, and intellectual activity in the same way, because “the truth, decision, and temperance, which we reverently regard as honourable conditions of the spiritual being, have a representative or derivative influence over the works of the hand, the movements of the frame, and the action of the intellect” (Ruskin 1886, 12). All human things, therefore, can be recommended and judged in two ways: by their inherent virtue and by their relation to “higher orders of human virtue” (Ruskin 1886, 13). In the rest of the volume, architecture is shown to be related to a basic set of seven virtues that connect it to orders of thought and spirituality.

As one of these, Ruskin explains a special relation between architecture and memory in the chapter on “The Lamp of Memory.” He explains that a serious study of architecture reveals architecture’s role in our remembrance of the past: “we cannot remember without her (architecture). How cold is all history how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!” (Ruskin 7, 169), Ruskin writes. The sensory input architecture provides results in an experience related to the men and the cultures of the past “against forgetfulness” by subsequent generations (Ibid.), he maintains.

Ruskin develops his argument about the spiritual value of architecture in the three volumes of his subsequent The Stones of Venice (1851-3), volumes 2 and 3 of which provide actual examples of virtues in the architecture of Venice. For the Ruskin of The Stones of Venice, architectural forms are related to moral life the same way as other human constructs are. Ruskin finds the arch the key element of architecture, which metaphorically represents human morals (Ruskin 1851-3, vol. 1 126) as it fights against gravity and weight as humans fight against each other and sin, and even the history of the arch in architecture reflects this fight against sin (Ruskin 1851-3, vol. 1 15). Volume 2 discusses various orders of Byzantine and Gothic arches in Venice, documenting a local preference for the Byzantine even at the time when the Gothic had become mainstream on the mainland. Ruskin’s account of early Renaissance classicism is titled “The Fall” in volume 3, a fall of ornament, first through reverting to Byzantine examples, then to Roman ones. The early Renaissance represents a corruption of the Gothic variety of arches, a poorer architecture (Ruskin 1851-3, vol. 3 3). The high Renaissance is portrayed as a tired version of its original examples, whose immoral elements are pride and infidelity (Ruskin 1851-3, vol. 3, 34-5). Finally, he despises the last phase, what he calls the Grotesque Renaissance, for being totally without moral character, seeking only pleasure (Ruskin 1851-3, vol. 3, 112). This is the phase normally called the Baroque today, the style that will come under scrutiny by Wharton, too.

Stephen Kite’ s Building Ruskin’s Italy: Watching Architecture surveys Ruskin’s practice of “visual thinking as related to architecture” (Kite 2012, 2) on the basis of his books and also archival material. Kite starts out with the statement that Ruskin inherited the idea that architecture is to be read like literature from de Quincy (1803) and Victor Hugo (1831-2) (Kite 2012, 10), whose idea was that the vision of architecture provides the story of the nation. This model implies that if buildings are to be read, then similarly, texts are to be built as buildings, and indeed, Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, for instance, is constructed like an edifice, from foundation to roof, from stone to structure. Kite connects the impulse to read architecture to a theological aim, a reading of God’s meaning in the surface of the cities (Kite, 2012, 10), which means that the layered meanings of reading art in general explained above are valid in the case of architecture as well, for instance when reading facades in cities like pages of a book. In particular, Kite distinguishes four different kinds of symbolic language in Ruskin’s writing about architecture: the language of sculpture and pictorial iconography, of the picturesque, of stones, and of theology (Kite 2012, 10). He links this symbolic arrangement of meaning to previous terms in Ruskin criticism, on the one hand to Hewison’s idea of the coexistence of two discourses, the technical and the rhetorical, in Stones (Kite 2012, 11), and on the other hand, to J. B. Bullen’s term Ruskin’s “synechdochic method” which explains how, in Ruskin, a fragment or a part can represent the whole, together with its romantic-imaginative, analytical, and symbolic aspects of meaning (Kite 2008, 106).

Kite adds that the different aspects that construct the meaning of visions of architecture work together in actual experience. As he puts it, “Ruskin’s complex way of reading things can only be understood in their phenomenological actuality,” (Kite 2008, 107 and Kite 2012, 11) in the watching or strolling on the part of the observer of architecture. The experience of the watcher is modelled on Ruskin’s personal example both in his books and in his Notebooks that combine words and pictures to make up “his language of architecture” (Smith 2016, 557). In this way, Ruskin’s complex idiosyncratic language of architecture seems to have a intermedial aspect when it represents the observer’s experience. Kite argues that Ruskinian scenes of imaginative observation are not only actual but also contemplative and rely on the sense of colour (Kite 2012, 16). The cathedrals of France and the palaces of Venice are watched and written about in this manner, aiming to represent the experience of the observer.

Ruskin’s three orders of art create a symbolic way of thinking that remains adaptable in other walks of life apart from architecture, too. Raymond Williams explained the significance of Ruskin’s framework in 1960 in relation to the keyword culture: “Ruskin is best understood, and necessarily read, as a major contributor to the development of our complex ideas of Culture,” Williams wrote in Culture and Society (144). Williams was interested in Ruskin’s theory of art from the perspective of his theory of society: Ruskin the social thinker as related to the well-known art critic because he thought Ruskin’s social criticism of industrialization can be understood “from his kind of thinking about the purposes of art” (Williams 1960, 145). The conditions for perfection that a well-designed social order should provide for man are present in art, the two areas being different “applications” (146) of the same divine principle of Beauty. Williams widens the relevance of Ruskin ’s model and helps us gauge the stakes of his enterprise. The questions which emerge from this reach well beyond meticulous descriptions of stone arches into the directions of metaphysics, but also into the direction of the study of culture as a way of life. In Hungary, Ruskin’s model of art has been analyzed from the perspective of contemporary German idealism on art (Gyenge 2018, 29-33), focusing on how, instead of creating a philosophical model, his work sustained a culture of “applied art” (op. cit., 34). For Wharton, it was Ruskin the art critic whose point of view remained influential.

Wharton’s travel writing and Ruskin’s eye

Wharton’s published travel pieces constitute what I propose calling “the Wharton map.”  Wharton’s published travel texts cover three European areas. First, she wrote about Italy and the presence of the Renaissance and Baroque past in Italian scenes in her Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and its companion piece Italian Backgrounds (1905). Secondly, she concentrated on France, exploring historical continuity in French landscapes and architecture, especially cathedrals in her A Motor–Flight through France (1908) and Fighting France (1915). Her French Ways and their Meaning (1919) is not a travel text but an ethnographically oriented account of French national traits as such. Thirdly, she wrote about her trip to Morocco, then a French protectorate, producing the first tourist book of the country in English In Morocco (1920) in order to report on “the strange survival of mediaeval life” (Wharton 1996, x) in the country before tourists and modernization erased it (Ibid.). This map is to be extended by her Aegean writing, the way her late interest in Spain has been documented by Fra López (2011).

Academic research has added further travel pieces to this set of five, expanding the Wharton map with previously unknown texts. In 1992, Wharton’s diary of her 1888 Aegean titled The Cruise of the Vanadis was published (Lesage 2004 (1992)). Frederick Wegener republished Wharton’s celebratory essay on French colonial administration in a piece linked to Wharton’s accounts of Morocco (Wharton 1998 (1918)). In 2011 Patricia Fra López published Wharton’s 1925 diary of her trip to Compostela with Walter Berry and an unfinished essay titled “Back to Compostela” with a long introduction about Wharton’s visits to and notions of Spain. Also, a translated section of Wharton’s article in French titled “America at War” that eventually became part of her French Ways and Their Meaning was published in the TLS in 2018 (Ricard 2018). As the list shows, new items from the archive continue to shape and sharpen our knowledge of Wharton as an author and a person (Ohler 2019, 28).

At present, the Osprey Notes exists as a notebook in a folder of the Beinecke Library at Yale. It contains fifteen handwritten pages of sites Wharton visited in 1926. There are ten entries altogether but only nine descriptive passages of visits on the Ionian Sea and in and around Athens, ten pages of typescript altogether. The fragments capture visual impressions of a specific landscape or architectural sight and catalogue the presence or lack of beauty, peace, mystery experienced during the visit. The last entry titled “Moonlight on the Parthenon” remains only a caption, as it was never completed. A fragment itself, the Osprey Notes cannot function as a full-fledged travel book, nor does it develop a sustained argument about classical Greece or its retrieval in the present. However, the passages highlight certain sites and share a language of admiration that hint at the wider importance of the Greek impressions for Wharton the traveler. Also, in subsequent commentaries Wharton always speaks highly of the trip. Despite the scant amount of actual text, the later significance of the Osprey Notes make is reason to reconstruct the actual context of the fragment and try to relate its entries to Wharton’s earlier travel output and also speculate its possible place in Wharton’s relation to traditions of writing about art and travel.

Placing the Osprey Notes on the Wharton map indicates the importance of classical Greece in Wharton’s quest for cultural continuity. In particular, an overview of the actual contexts of the trip suggests it is related to Wharton’s effort to grapple with her devastating experience of the Great War. Wharton’s non-fiction war writings have spurred a debate on her relation to cultural loss and modernism in general, and, as part of this, on what kind of feminine vision of the war behind the lines she represented (Kovács 2017, 545). If the Osprey Notes is considered from this perspective, I argue, the fragments of the notebook may reflect Wharton’s way of securing a sense of cultural and historical continuity after the cataclysm of WWI. The role of Ruskin’s way of seeing within this enterprise, quite popular in recent articles, is in particular focus now.

The way Wharton and her travel books are related to Ruskin’s writings on watching architecture seems a somewhat obscure area of Wharton criticism. One reason may be that Wharton herself remains vague on the issue. In her official autobiography A Backward Glance from 1934, she writes that by the time she was seventeen, Ruskin “fed me visions of Italy for which I have never ceased to pine” (Wharton 1990, 838), and that before Ruskin “the average well-educated tourist of any country was prepared to observe and enjoy” very little (Wharton 1990, 832). Then she mentions that as a young woman she followed Ruskin’s itineraries in Stones of Venice and Walks in Florence with her ailing father (op. cit., 851). Later on, Wharton situates writing Villas and Backgrounds as part of a discussion in the 1870s on whether travel writing and art criticism belonged to the domain of the cultured amateur or the technically educated expert, but here she makes no explicit reference to John Ruskin:

In the ’seventies and the ’eighties there had appeared a series of agreeable volumes of travel and art criticism of the cultured dilettante type, which have found thousands of eager readers. From Pater’s “Renaissance’, and Symonds’ “Sketches in Italy and Greece”, to the deliciously desultory volumes of Vernon Lee, and Bourget’s delicate “Sensations d’Italie”, though ranging through varying degrees of erudition, they all represented a high but unspecialized standard of culture; all were in a sense the work of amateurs, and based on the assumption that it is mainly to the cultured amateur that the creative artist must look for appreciation, and that such appreciation ought to be, and often is, worth recording.

But while the cultivated reader continued to enjoy these books, and to ask for more, the voice of the trained scholar was sounding the note of resistance. Literary “appreciations” of works of art were being smiled away by experts trained in Bertillon-Morelli methods, and my deep contempt for picturesque books about architecture naturally made me side with those who wished to banish sentiment from the study of painting and sculpture. Then, with the publication of Berenson’s first volumes on Italian painting, lovers of Italy learned that aesthetic sensibility may be combined with the sternest scientific accuracy (889-90).

Wharton defines herself as the exponent of the scientific method in travel writing as opposed to writers of subjective impression, yet she has a nostalgia for earlier sentiments (op.cit., 890). In her “Life and I”, her personal autobiography published posthumously, she writes about Ruskin with admiration: “His wonderful cloudy pages gave me back the image of the beautiful Europe I had lost, & woke in me the habit of precise visual observation. The ethical and aesthetical fatras were easily enough got rid of later, & as an interpreter of visual impressions he did me incomparable service” (op. cit., 1084). There seems to have been an early engagement with Ruskin’s views on Wharton’s part that she was not so willing to provide details about in her official autobiography, as if she wanted to play down his influence on her work.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the only monograph on Wharton’s travel writing so far by Sarah Bird Wright (1997) identifies Wharton as a connoisseur in terms of Ruskin’s idea of the amateur. Wright emphasizes Wharton’s resistance to American travel authors of the picturesque and highlights Ruskin as the influence that triggered Wharton’s criticism of the belletristic tradition (Wright 1997, ix). She argues that Ruskin helped Wharton to move toward a more scientific register of travel writing expected by US journals in the 1880s (op. cit., 37). Robin Peel also asserts that Wharton’s enthusiasm for Italy was enhanced by Ruskin, so much so that Italy became a “place of enchantment” for her (Peel 2012, 287). William Blazek implies the view that the relation between Wharton and Ruskin was influential when he discusses Wharton’s friendship with Charles Eliot Norton who mediated Ruskin’s ideas in the US (Blazek 2016, 68).

Somewhat differently, Robert Burden’s Travel, Modernism and Modernity from 2015 stresses the different examples Ruskin and later Walter Pater presented for Wharton. Burden identifies Ruskin’s (and Matthew Arnold’s) theories as an insistence on the moral function of art (Burden 2015, 209-10). In contrast, he identifies Pater as the representative of on art for art’s sake (op. cit., 210). In Wharton’s travel writing, Burden claims, the two different influences create an ambiguity: her need for balance and harmony is in contrast with her enjoyment of the emotional and ornamental Baroque (op. cit., 211). Burden argues that Wharton develops modernist themes and styles of presentation both in her fiction and her travel writing, and her developing penchant for Pater and the Baroque in her travelogues is a sign of this change (213). When Emily Orlando writes that Wharton “challenged Ruskin’s views “in her The Decoration of Houses” (Orlando 2007, 175) published in 1899, she seems to suggest that Wharton was through with Ruskin by 1900s and that her critique of the Pre-Raphaelites’ rhetoric and repertoire of imaging women, inspired by Gothic and late medieval art (Orlando 2007, 13) was connected to that critical breach as well.

In contrast to Burden and possibly Orlando, who distance Wharton from Ruskin, Alexandra Peat’s Travel and Modernist Literature interprets modernist travel fiction in terms of a secular pilgrimage that would position Wharton closer to a theological tradition as well. When Peat considers the possible reasons for the recurring theme of travel in various modernist texts, she finds that making a journey usually comes with an ethical dimension for the protagonist in the face of a lost sacred reason (Peat 2011, 12), as movement in space results in reflection and questioning one’s own values. Although Peat never mentions Wharton’s books, yet, an investigation into how Wharton processes Ruskin’s spiritually loaded method of watching and reading architecture may position Wharton’s Aegean travel pieces in Peat’s framework of modernist travel writing.

The question to explore further is the extent of Ruskin’s implicit influence in Wharton’s Aegean texts, where the presence and extent of the “architectural vision” she learnt from Ruskin is under investigation. Her representation of Antique ruins and scenes, her comments on the coexistence of styles forms a part of this problematic. In particular, the question is: is it possible to read Wharton’s Aegean text and fragments as passages as constructed along the lines of Ruskin’s idea of watchful wandering in the field, an experience ripe with imaginative and moral implications? Would such a framework make one comprehend the fragments better? What difference would such an understanding make in the way travel texts are seen within Wharton’s oeuvre?

2. Experiencing Homer’s Greece in Wharton’s Aegean travel texts

Traveling to Greece has a long history of associations as the journey offers glimpses into the legacy of classical Greek culture, which is visible both in the ruins and through the stories connected to the sites. Most importantly, the mythical settings of stories of Olympian gods and goddesses and heroes are interposed on peaceful sceneries of crumbling ruins, olive groves, cliffs, islands and bays, offering possibilities to reflect on tradition passed on and lost while watching a perfectly composed natural scenery or a set of ruins. Ancient Greek learning and culture as the cradle of Western civilization has created countless nostalgic journeys and accounts, the historical bent of Romantic authors spurring further interest, a trend that eventually resulted in English, German, French, and American traditions of writing about the return to ancient Greece.

As Roderick Beaton writes in The Oxford Handbook of Romanticism: “[t]he projection of the contemporary Greek nation back through three thousand years of history is an essentially Romantic endeavour. In literature, the effects of Romanticism are slow to fade” (Beaton 2016). In particular, David E. Roessel’s In Byron’s Shadow shows how Byron’s image of Greece as an ancient concept whose rebirth in the present literary men should fight for influenced English and American writing about Greece until WWII, when Henry Miller in the Colossus of Maroussi “constructed a new concept of modern Greece in writing in English where one went to escape from” having to fight (Roessel 2001, 4). Roessel’s model contrasts Byron’s Greece to Homer’s Greece, as defined by Victor Hugo.

In Wharton, the influence of Homer’s Greece is palpable through her references and visits to key scenes of Odysseus’ journey in her two travel accounts of the Aegean from 1888 and 1926, while she disparages scenes of Modern Greece.

Picturesque scenes and observing architecture in The Cruise of the Vanadis

Wharton comments on her cruise with the Vanadis as the “crowning wonder of my life” (Lee 2008, 81). The cruise between Feb 17 and May 7 on the Aegean is documented by a full volume of descriptive notes about all the stops of the journey that also allows for rhetorical analysis. The notes were recovered by Claudine Lesage and printed by a university press in 1992, then reprinted in 2004. Welcoming the new edition in The Guardian, Hermione Lee described the volume as Wharton’s first text as a mature artist, and Wharton’s perspectives as “steeped in Ruskin and Homer and Goethe” (Lee 2004).

Claudine Lesage states in her introduction to the 2004 edition that Wharton’s text is a “camera diary” (Lesage 2004, 24). This means not only the obvious idea that the account enumerates descriptions of spectacular scenes as if it was a camera taking pictures, but also that the text leaves out the personal commentary (Lesage 2004, 23), the part Lesage would consider most important in a travel account (Ibid.). Similarly, Louis Auchincloss points out that “beauties of nature and ancient civilization speak for themselves” (Auchincloss 2004, 16) in Wharton’s prose. In addition, a closer look at the actual scenes both Lesage and Auchincloss highlight reveals recurring themes and rhetorical patterns connected to a pilgrimage in the land of the past.

The aim of the book is referred to in the context of personal impressions, specific sites, and also as an escape from modern life. The aim of writing is specified as “to note as exactly as possible the impressions which I myself received” (67) even if they clash with impressions formed by others. Wharton mentions three important specific sites the trip targeted to elicit her impressions: the Cathedral of Monreale in Sicily, the monasteries of Mount Athos, and the Campanile and the ancient ruins in Spalato (65). In more general terms, she is interested in ruins and sceneries connected to the past, not the achievement of modern life and technology (105, 41), as she hopes “to leave practical realities of life behind” (105). Additional zest is given to travel to unchartered territory, which for her means the lack of travel books about the place (106).

In her journal, Wharton takes account of basic oppositions like Western and Oriental, the everyday and the picturesque, and civilization versus modernization in order to establish seemingly simple sets of value. Primarily, she seems drawn to Oriental scenes and markets and to their difference from colonial (French) scenes (in Algiers, Tunis, Smyrna). She records picturesque scenes with lively groups of people wearing colourful local costumes or striking sceneries with varied forms and colors (be it in Tunis, Palermo, Amorgos or Rhodes). However, she does not always equate picturesque scenes with Oriental impressions or stereotypes: in Smyrna she comments that the “bazaars are less Oriental than those of Tunis” (148, emphasis mine) but she finds them and the people bright and picturesque (149), and she finds some scenes simply picturesque too, like in Palermo (65). In Tunis she wonders at the Oriental scene unchanged by modern French innovations, and here she labels the Oriental scene uncivilized: “and the step through the Bab-el-Bahr to the Boulevard de la Marine, brought us back to civilization as abruptly as we had left it” (41).

Yet, the lack of “civilization”, that is of Western civilization, and the presence of an Oriental past seems not to vex Wharton too much. This comes to the fore when the presence of the past is contrasted to modern Western technological achievements like industrial plants of newly engineered cities which she dislikes immensely (105). Her notion of civilized life comes to the fore in Montenegro, as she describes a desolate Cettinje: the town “which does not boast a single shop, café, garden, a place of amusement” (207), the houses are not fit for civilized people: no walks, rides or drives, no books or papers, no social possibility” (208). Wharton is enchanted by Oriental scenes and impressions the way she is drawn to picturesque scenes, which goes against the grain of modern technological advancement and the lack of cultural and social activity which she sees as more opposed to values of Western civilization than Oriental culture.

Throughout the cruise, Wharton’s interest lies in finding traces of the past in the present, a continuity of past forms of life that withstand time in forms as various as costume, ritual, and architecture. Her interest in costumes intensifies when she describes them as part of a festival or rite, as in Corfu and Tenos (198, 138), in detail. One of her major destinations, the monasteries of the Mount Athos, “have existed as we now see them since the tenth century” (117) she writes with admiration.

Historical continuity in architecture presents an ongoing fascination for her both in its material form and as an intellectual challenge. She is quick to point out diverse ways in which old stones have been captured in subsequent constructions, as at Girgenti the temple of Concord preserves in its walls “the complete skeleton of a Doric temple” (71) or also at Mitylene where slabs of marble are “encrusted in the walls with bas-reliefs on them” (153). At Lindos, a more metaphorical inclusion is described. The church is supposed to be Byzantine, but Wharton traces its Eastern lines to have arrived on a more complicated route: “[it] is evident that the pointed tunnel-vaulting of this church must have traveled from the East to the West and back again, instead of being taken direct from the Saracen, like the pointed arches of Monreale and Lazisa” (129). She attributes the vaulting to the Provençal grand masters, the pointed arch of Lindos having done a “double journey” from the East to Provence and back to Rhodes. Similarly, actual and metaphorical continuity meet in the case of the Cathedral of Syracuse as well:

Whose ugly Renaissance façade is placed like a mask before the cella and peristyle of the Doric temple of Athene. It is interesting to see how much of the temple is preserved – the columns of the peristyle embedded in the outer wall of the church, and the cella cut through to form the piers of the nave – and sad to note how cruelly the Christian adapter handled his materials (53).

Continuity here is achieved through a brutal handling of the original Greek structure. Of course, the (late) Renaissance façade referred to in the passage is one we today identify as Baroque, described as ugly by the young Wharton. In Malta, she finds the cathedral in Valetta ugly in a similar way, as it is from the end of the seventeenth century, and she misses the traces of the cathedral by Norman kings from the twelfth century (48). She prefers the church of St. John from the end of the sixteenth century with is “sculptured stone” and delicate coloring and carvings (49). In Spalato, she spots “the survival of Renaissance forms in Dalmatia long after they have fallen into disuse elsewhere” (217) and then in Zara she is quick to find another example for the survival of an earlier style: the Romanesque arches of the Doumo from the thirteenth century repeated in the forms of the façade of the Church St. Chrysogonus nearby, built 200 years later (200). So both materially and metaphorically, Wharton is on the lookout for the coexistence and continuity of stones and styles in architecture as marks of the past.

Wharton is ready to question previous written opinion about famous architectural monuments not only through reimagining their history but also through her own impressions. She defies the general high opinion of the Cathedral of Monreale, as she finds it “a disappointment from the outside,” while its magnificent inside “lacks variety and colour” (65), she writes. At Milo, the island where the Venus of Milo was found, she is disappointed again: “I have read so much of the beauties of Milo that my first impression was disappointment” (100) she confesses, like in Monreale. However, she is quick to discover new locations of interest. Instead of the cathedral of Monreale, she finds reason to spend time in the Benedictine monastery next door that conveys a sense of “shadow and mystery in the blaze of colour” (67). Her reference to the “zest” of travel on land not reported about as discovery at Santorini (106) explains her eagerness to communicate new opinions.

Although she tries to argue against the opinion of some of her traveling predecessors, her own writing is framed by several references to art and literature that find their way into her commentary. She recognizes the Campanile at Ragusa on the basis of Freeman’s sketch (213). She recalls a chapter from Lady Brassey’s Sunshine and Storm when its character, captain Mansell appears in person (182). She is aware of her predecessors writing about the Aegean, Curzon (179) and Hare (70). The most influential reference, however, is to the Odyssey. The travelers drink sweet wine like Ulysses and his crew (103), they view the shores of the gulf of Molo as “under these trees Ulysses is to have lain” (194). The whole trip is referred to as her maiden Odyssey (Lesage 2004, 24) because the itinerary follows stops of the great wanderer.

The culminating experience of the cruise for Wharton comes from scenes of “mystery” and “beauty” she records regularly. She writes as if she were on the lookout for memorable scenes with contemplative potential. As Herimone Lee puts it: “Wharton’s appetite for scenery was insatiable” (Lee 2007, 94), and Lee draws attention to Wharton’s keen eye for gardens and plants in particular. But this appetite also involved monuments, historic towns, lookout posts, views to be remembered. One notes that her impressions of Sicily, the Ionian and Aegean islands, of Athens, and of Dalmatia are all strewn by descriptive scenes of pleasurable scenery which, in turn, show remarkable similarities. It is worth lingering on them, as they are the most spectacular items of Wharton’s “photo diary” (Lesage 2004, 23) that show not only the scenery but indicate patterns of Wharton’s emerging architectural vision as well.

In Sicily, Wharton was both disappointed and enchanted by the scenery several times. The Cathedrale of Monreale did not live up to her expectations but she was impressed by the perfect scene at the Benedictine monastery beside it, and her impression takes the form of a detailed visual report of the site and the building. Wharton starts out with describing the layout of the building, then adds details about plants, and finally she writes about the arches and the columns of the structure. An appreciation of the view crowns the passage with an exclamation “and what a view the monks had from their marble seats along the parapet!” and the passage ends with an appreciation of the view (65-7). At Taormina a visit to the ruins of the Greek theatre is introduced by the view of ascending to the site and the vegetation, then the description of the actual ruins and the rosy colour of the arches are, and of the local plants gilded by the golden color of the oranges in the nearby groves. This leads to a brief emotional exclamation that punctuates the account: “No words of mine can give any idea of the beauty of it all” (62), where Wharton seems to sigh perhaps not so much in resignation but rather in admiration about this “concentrated beauty” (63). In the Royal Palace of Palermo the Capella Palatina is described as an interior scene by itself. First the light is shown, then the walls stone by stone to explain this “tiny epitome of the mystery and splendor of St. Mark’s” with the golden light varying with shade, and different colours of marble that resemble Monreale (67-8). Here the scene does not include the emotional commentary but an estimation of its effect, the “cool brilliance” of colourful stone.

A miniature description of the Citadel at Mitylene combines the elements of stone, vegetation, view, and impression that have appeared before. First, Wharton notes “slabs of marble encrusted in the walls” (153) as marks of continuity, and she goes on to assess the view: gardens, the strait, the sea, the coast as the eye sweeps along it, and eventually she surveys the vegetation. Her evaluation of the scene follows: “Mithylene is the most beautiful island of the Aegean” (153). The effect returns several times in descriptions of monasteries, especially at Amorgos (111-3) and Stavroniketa (175) on Mount Athos.

The crowning experience of visual beauty, however, is staged in the description of the visit to the Acropolis. The passage is introduced by a survey of the colours marble takes, it surveys the scenery, and then sums up the effect. The hues and tints of the marble vary as time passes: the new building blocks of the Athens Academy, constructed between 1861-85, seem to offer the colours as they must have been: stone of soft ivory, gold in the inscriptions, blue as decorating background for the sculptures of the pediment. In contrast, up at the ruins of the Acropolis, the marble “has taken a primrose hue, now fading to ivory, now deepening to russet, and the columns absolutely glow in the sunshine against the blue sky” (198). The stones of the Acropolis exhale beauty with their ripples of colour.

The scenery is surveyed with precision, each geographical or architectural item tagged with its name for identification. The wide view of the hills and the bay opens the description: on the left Hymettus, Lycabettus, and the bay of Eleusis, opposite the islands and hills (Psyttaleia, Salamis, Aegina). Then follows the closer view of the plain just under the Acropolis with background and foreground (189), just to be swept further away towards the sea, to the left and the right (ibid.). The impression of the scene is summarized by yet another image, that of the white Acropolis by moonlight surrounded by the twinkling lights and shadows of Athens and by the dark forms of the surrounding mountains.

The scenes surveyed so far have all communicated actual experiences of beauty in a compact way. The description of the scenery included views, verdure, stone and colour. Lingering at the spot is one sign of the effect made on her, another was the occasional exclamation about beauty. In general, it is more the exquisite terms of the description that convey the sense of beauty experienced rather than the actual aesthetic judgements, but the experience of beauty is always emphasized.

Architectural vison in the Osprey Notes

In 1926 Wharton set out for another Aegean cruise, a sunset party to take inventory of many of the sites she saw and experienced in 1888. Between April 1, 1920 and May 30, 1926 the Osprey took five travellers around the Aegean and the Easter Mediterranean. They cruised the Ionian islands, the Aegean islands, Rhodes, Gulf of Aegina and Athens again, added Crete but left out Mount Athos. The way Wharton reconstructed her visual experience in 1926 shows remarkable similarities to her early text, despite the 38 years between the two journeys and her recent devastating experience of the loss of historical continuity in the Great War.

The itinerary of the Osprey can be traced not so much on the basis of the Osprey Notes but rather by relying on extra documentation. First and foremost, Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance (Wharton 1990a, 1058-60) points out the significance of the cruise and its relation to the 1888 visit to the Aegean. Yet, this account articulates the significance of the journey to Wharton rather than its particulars. Various biographies also help to chart the scope, if not the details, of the enterprise. In terms of dates and sites and impressions, it is Margaret Chanler’s Autumn in the Valley (1936) that provides the most practical information about the design of the journey and also about the kind of art historical running commentary the connoisseur travellers must have made during their visits to sights. Last but not least, Wharton’s 1888 diary of the cruise with the Vanadis help the work of reconstruction in that some of its chapters overlap with the Notes. Wharton’s letters also provide clues about her experience, if not the details again, of the trip.

The ten fragmented notes of the Osprey Notebook cover only a section of Wharton’s second journey on the Aegean. The headings are the following: Gulf of Aegina, Cephalonia, Olympus, Delphi, Athens, Aegina, Eleusis, Kayseriané, Mendéli, Parthenon by moonlight.  Fortunately, her travelling companion, Daisy Chanler wrote a detailed account of the trip in her Autumn in the Valley, which provides a full itinerary (see the map enclosed). On the basis of Chanler’s book it is possible to determine the part of the journey and even the dates the fragments belong to. When compared to the full itinerary reconstructed above, it becomes obvious that the notes cover only a small portion of the actual cruise, namely the visits between the island of Cephalonia and the days in and around Athens. Possibly, the writing of the entries began after arriving at Athens as the sea of Aegina is described by reference to sculptures at the Parthenon. Also, the final entry “Parthenon by moonlight” must be either a reference to the evening Daisy Chanler also remembered fondly from April 27 (Chanler 1936, 220) or the day after when they visited again, so the coverage ends before sailing for the Aegean islands.

The ten fragmented passages of the Osprey Notes represent different levels of picturesque description. Three entries are practically empty: Cephalonia (1) and Athens (5) are short notes about the itinerary only, while “The Parthenon by moonlight” (10) has no note at all, only a title. Among the remaining seven entries one can find full descriptions of seascape or landscape, architecture, vegetation and in some cases also the impressions these scenes make. On the basis of the quantity of reflection, it is the Delphi (4) and the Mendéli (9) segments that stand out as the fullest, while the description of the gulf of Aegina (1) Olympia (3), Kayseriané (8) and Eleusis (7) contain some features of what I would call Wharton’s “picturesque scene”.

The Delphi (4) note presents a picturesque scene in detail. The passage begins with the travellers watching the land from the yacht, then landing at Itea, in the bay underneath the hills of Delphi, taking in the view of the olive orchards of Apollo, the bay and the mountains with snow caps. Then follows the visual description of the ascent to the shrine, the elevation leading to commentary: “Unimaginable beauty -- up and up.” (Delphi). Moving closer, the landscape and the ruins are named and described until a quiet sort of verbal ecstasy is reached: “Below the spring we lunched under huge olives on the slope just above the ruins of the Gymnasium, where the great circular swimming-pool is still well-preserved. All was beauty, serenity and awe. A matchless landscape.” (Delphi) In other words, the scene is watched, the visual image is considered and taken in to be measured up in the form of an evaluative impression. The account of an afternoon stroll repeats the elements of the first impression, however, the evaluative part is not repeated, only the visual. Finally, an additional sober sequence breaks the awe of the fragment about items of art at the museum that cannot compare to the Apollo of Olympia.

In a letter addressed to Gaillard Lapsley on April 11, 1926 Wharton described the visit to Delphi in a slightly modified way and the differences between the text of the note and the letter shed light on what a picturesque entry remembers and what an entertaining anecdote retells. Despite the opening that “[n]o words can express Delphi, nor tell you the beauty of the approach by the bay of Itea, with the snowy Acrocoraunian mountains in our rear, across the gulf, & ahead of us, over frowning Delphi, Parnassus all with snow” (Lewis and Lewis 1988, 489), Wharton is at pains to flesh out the details of the “day of loveliness” (Ibid.). She mentions the pie from the luncheon-basket consumed among olive trees to create a contrast to the 200 tourists of the (British) Hellenic Association who lunched at a hotel. The travellers of the Osprey tried to hide from the tourists but could not and had to listen to how they did their Aegean tour in 10 days. Wharton comments on the contrast between tourists and travellers in banter “I told them Americans were the only people left who understood the meaning of Leisure” (Ibid., 490). She exploits the contrast between the British tourists and themselves, the (American) travellers, further. She writes Lapsley (one of Wharton’s literary wives as Nicky Mariano put it) about how her companion Robert Norton (British, devout bachelor, another of the literary wives) was shaken by the spectacle of 150 ladies in their travel gear at the monument to declare that “he would foreswear his nationality & take out Greek (or American, I forget which) papers” (Ibid., 490). So not only traditional tourists are made fun of here, but traditional middle-class roles and Norton’s lack of interest in the women as well. Wharton implies the good laughs the travellers must have had when she refers to the ladies as “bawny nymphs” and tells how they tried to mockingly console Robert who brooded over the fact that “he might have been married to one of them” (Ibid., 490). In the letter, the approach and visit to Delphi are recorded as an experience of beauty, but the focus of the description is on the fact that this experience belongs to the leisurely traveler not to the tourist hurrying along her scheduled itinerary. The anecdote of the letter accentuates the contrast between tourist and traveler at the shrine, while the note records some of the awe and wonder that only the traveller can experience and that lies at the heart of the distinction.

The Mendéli (9) fragment represents a visit to Mendéli monastery that also reports about an experience of beauty. In this note, the description of the approach to the monastery begins with the identification of the hills and elevations and is then punctuated by the view of the actual monastery. The complete and prosperous shape of the buildings offers no picturesque quality, yet “there is beauty” in the symmetry of the building, its relation to the vegetation and to the silver water flowing by the building. The valuable impression of the landscape is collected during a walk above the monastery in the hill, the view of the orchards and forest, hills, plains, sea (all identified by name), a new story at every turn. As a culmination, Wharton reflects: “What a landscape!”. As an addition, she identifies the impression through a literary allusion to Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “As we returned, the air was full of sweet bells, and a flock of black goats with undulating horns came down the hill tended by a tiny boy and girl, and followed by a flock of honey-brown sheep with long hieratic fleeces. – ‘O little town??...’ It was all saturated with Keats.” The timeless quality of the picturesque scene is not spelled out explicitly, only the reference to the scene as similar to the one on the urn in Keats, which implies Keats’ sense of timelessness:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The Attic shape of the typically Greek picturesque scene evokes an impression of the Romantic notion of timeless imaginative beauty in the observer.

In the companion piece to this fragment, Kayseriané (8), the impression of security and dreams created by the picturesque scene is explicated by the image of the beehive.

No view, but huge shady plane trees in the outer court, and the usual impression of coolness, meditation, security and dreams. Very picturesque inner courts, wildly irregular with deep archways, overhanging loggias, old crumbling stone stairways, and the low-arched cloister preceding the little church, so honey-brown, domed, embroidered, with comb-like traceries? , that it might have been made by the bees, the celebrated bees of Hymettus – and the monks after all might be compared to them, with their patient building-up and their storing of sweetness, in all the wild warring times. (Kayseriané)

The building of the church looks like a beehive, and also functions like a beehive in the image: the monks are identified with bees and are storing the sweet peace of the past during the wild “warring” time of the present.

The fragment about Eleusis further explains the quality of the saturated impression of the peace of the past. The approach, the landscape and ruins are also described here, but, surprisingly, the lack of vegetation and water results in the comment that the effect is useless: “not mysterious enough. There are no trees, no waters, to help one to dream back into the past.” (Eleusis, Wharton’s emphasis). It follows from this that the impression created by the approach through the view, the landscape, the vegetation and the water serves a definite purpose: it is supposed to help the observer “dream back into the past,” imagine to be present in the past for a short mysterious moment in time. Again, this is an instance where a picturesque scene could mysteriously evoke the timeless harmony of ancient Greece like it did in Keats’s poem. Unfortunately, the model is present only in its absence, as Wharton laments the lack of the experience this time, but even this absence helps one assess the expected content of a “picturesque scene.”

The picturesque scene à la Wharton consists of basic identifiable parts whose mixture can result in an impression. The description begins with an approach: how the traveller, arriving, takes in the whole scenery and what view s/he sees. The description of different elements of the landscape complete with names and shapes is normally followed by a catalogue of the vegetation, trees and especially flowers are identified. If applicable, the main contours of a building or some ruins are added. A stream or brook on the premises is always highlighted as part of the landscape and view. Finally, the spectator/s reflection is enabled by looking at the view at length, sitting on a bench or drinking coffee or having a picnic. It is this final point of reflection that results in a personal impression about the picturesque scene. The impression can be general (timeless beauty) or architectural, even literary. The present and the past meet in an experience of timeless beauty that is both mysterious and dreamlike and enables the traveller to visit the past imaginatively. In some passages, the picturesque scene is coupled with the story of the visit to the Museum on the site.

3. Absence and presence of the past in Athens and Crete

Unfortunately, the entry on the Parthenon is missing from the Notes although it would undoubtedly be an ideal site for a picturesque scene and an experience of continuity between past and present. Therefore, it comes as a disappointment that there is only the promising heading “The Parthenon by moonlightMoonlight on the Parthenon.” that ends the notebook. It makes one ask how moonlight at the scene might enhance the mystery of the presence of past harmony at the Parthenon, as Wharton observed it. Regrettably, the Parthenon is only referred to earlier, via its horses and other sculpture when the waves of the gulf of Aegina are described in the first entry. However, there is some external evidence at hand to consider a possible impression the travellers experienced at the Parthenon.

Firstly, we know that Daisy Chanler’s account contains a passage about April 27, when the Acropolis was open at night because of the full moon and the friends visited it. Interestingly, Chanler describes the event in a passage that bears some features of Wharton’s picturesque scenes. She writes:

That evening, after dinner, three of us went ashore to see the Acropolis by moonlight; it was indescribably beautiful. The Propilaea have a magical whiteness, a sort of unearthly light. The Parthenon glows more warmly in the moonlight. Its marble has weathered to pinky-brown which seems alive, especially the western end. It was all transporting; one seemed to be in Eternity. On the three nights of the full moon the Acropolis is thrown open to the public and the temples come to life with Athenians of all classes wandering in and out of them.  On ordinary days, when one pays for admission, the place is full of tourists with their Baedekkers and no Athenian goes near it. We got back to the ship near twelve o’clock but could not get to sleep for a long time, thinking or rather feeling the beauty of it. (Chanler 1936, 220)

The account describes an experience of beauty in full that shows remarkable similarities to Wharton’s scenes. It starts out with a view of the temples, then charts the colours and the light that trigger an emotional response, which brings an impression of the dead ruin coming back to life, especially as Greek people wander around in it. The term “Eternity” indicates that the experience seems to transport travelers beyond everyday time. This experience is contrasted to the ordinary view tourists can get of the same site for a fee by daylight, seeing it as a dead place of the past. Chanler’s passage contains a brief description of the approach to the Acropolis, a view of the temples, an impression of beauty and of the continuity between past and present together with the hint that this rare experience belongs only to the traveller. It does not draw on Wharton’s sometimes flamboyant language, but all the important themes of a picturesque scene can be identified in it.

Secondly, Wharton’s 1888 Vanadis diary has a passage about the Acropolis (Wharton 2004, 189), the rhetoric of which is similar. This passage begins with an approach from the direction of the Academy of Sciences, a reproduced Greek building of Ionic order (Ibid., 188). Then the building is compared to those of the Acropolis: the marble of the buildings at the Acropolis have lost its original tints, and “has taken a primrose hue, now fading to ivory, now deepening to russet, and the columns absolutely glowing the sunshine against the blue sky” (Ibid., 189). The view is surveyed all round, with all the place of interest identified. Then comes the description of the view on the night of a full-moon: “the temples seem made of ivory, and far beneath lies Athens, twinkling with hundreds of lights, with shadowy clumps of trees rising between the house-roofs, and a misty wall of mountains all around” (Ibid., 189). The passage closes with an account of the Museums and Athens the travellers had no time to seen because of their concentration of the Acropolis. The passage in The Vanadis has the elements of a picturesque scene, without the crowning impression of timeless beauty that would summarize the significance of experience.

In addition to the passage about the Acropolis, Wharton’s Vanadis includes several passages of picturesque views with detailed descriptions of the landscape. For instance, a scene at Rhodes nature is described in a manner similar to the later notes:

Then we went on by more leafy lanes, and at last reached the little café of Simbulli, built on a terrace shaded by great plane-trees. Nothing can be imagined more deliciously cool and green than this place, nor more picturesque than the little stream close by, shaded by overleaning trees and spanned by the arch of a Roman aqueduct. We sat there for a long time on a stone bench against the wall of the house, drinking Turkish coffee, and listening to the tinkle of water into a square tank under the plane-trees; then we returned to Rhodes by a lower road, and stopped on our way at the English Consulate to see some more Lindos plates. (Ibid., 128)

There is an approach to the scene that prepares the event, the picturesque site is shady, with leafy vegetation, water and view that enables reflection. Yet, again, the scene is not crowned by the representation of an experience of beauty; instead, as in the case of the Acropolis, a piece of travel related information gives the passage a businesslike ending.

The idea of a descriptive picturesque scene that comes with the experience of timeless beauty helps one contextualize one more absence in the Osprey Notes (while leaving many others). The scene in question is Wharton’s visit to Hagia Triada in Crete. The visit is of course described by Daisy Chanler, and is also mentioned by Wharton in her last letter to Bernard Berenson in 1937. The two references, together with the notion of Wharton’s picturesque scene developed above, add a further clue to the possible significance of the emotional experience the Aegean cruise provided Wharton with.

On the way to Hagia Triada, Daisy Chanler describes a natural scene with measured enthusiasm. She saw a “heavenly place” with a view, vegetation, color, water perfectly fit for a pause, but moved on easily:

It took us a little over two hours to reach a heavenly valley where we sat in the shade of large olive trees and listened to a chorus of nightingales; each tree seemed to have its oven singer. A brook, the first we have seen in Greece, ran babbling by, bordered by pink oleanders that grew in great profusion along its meandering banks as far as the eye could reach. There we lunched, and then went on to Hagia Triada (Chanler 1936, 236)

At this point, Daisy was probably more interested in comparing Sir Evan’s methods of reconstructing Minos’s palace at Knossos with the Italian excavators’ different practice than this scene (Ibid., 236). Nevertheless, her description helps in locating Wharton’s reference to this scene in 1937.

Wharton’s reference to Crete opens up links to emotional experience, Emerson, and pilgrimage. In April 1937, four months before her death, Wharton had to cancel her trip to the Berensons due to illness. In her letter of April 9 she gives her reasons and wishes Berenson all the best for their travels later. Then she adds:

But by all means see Crete too – &don’t fail, on the way from Candia to the Italian excavations, on the other side of the island, to stop & picnic beside a stream smothered in blossoming oleander, with snow-covered Ida soaring in the blue above.

Oh me, how thankful I am to remember that, whether as to people or as to places & occasions, I’ve always known the gods the moment I met them. Oh how clearly I remember saying to myself that day by the stream, as I looked up at the snow through the pink oleanders: “Old girls, this is one of the pinnacles—” as I did the last time I was at Compostela. (Lewis and Lewis 1989, 604-5)

Wharton is referring to the site mentioned in Daisy Chanler’s account: she gives the bare minimum of visual input about it but adds an explicit explanation about its significance: “I’ve always known the gods the moment I met them,” a pinnacle, like a pilgrimage to Compostela. In their introduction to the last section of Wharton’s letters, the Lewises write that this “was a far-echoing remark, and one that connected up half a lifetime: reevoking a passage from Emerson she had first drawn upon, in late February 1908, to tell Morton Fullerton of the nature of her love for him” (Ibid., 512). Wharton’s letter implies that there is a site in nature where a powerful emotional experience can be attained just by going there and looking, like at a pilgrimage.

Wharton’s reference to Compostela is linked to the element of pilgrimage and emotional experience. Fra López has written about Wharton’s two trips to Compostela, the first with Walter Berry in 1925, the second in 1928 and published Wharton’s “Spanish Diary” of the 1925 journey and her essay of the second trip “Back to Compostela” written around 1930. López writes that Compostela moved the agnostic Wharton emotionally, and Gómez Reus argues “there is little in the ‘Spain Diary’ and in ‘Back to Compostela’ that suggests that Wharton’s interest in the Way of St. James went any deeper than the historical and the artistic” (216). It goes beyond the frame of the current study, but it is worth mentioning Alexanda Peat in her Travel and Modernist Literature complicated the dichotomy between traveller and pilgrim “by tracing the various ways in which the sacred journey is transformed and rerouted in the secular spaces of modernity” (Peat, 2011, 4 and 9), and Wharton’s agnostic travel accounts may provide another example beyond those of Peat’s. As for contextualizing the Osprey Notes, the element of pilgrimage results in an emotional experience that links it to the “Spanish Diary” and “Back to Compostela”, the three texts written in 1926, 1925, and 1930, respectively.

Our imaginative reconstruction of the Hagia Triada scene of Wharton’s 1926 Aegean cruise that she never actually wrote down in the form of a notebook entry teaches us several lessons. The reconstruction makes it evident that the Osprey Notes is a fragment in several senses. First of all, it does not cover the whole of the cruise and key scenes are absent from it, not only the “Acropolis by moonlight” the title of which is actually there, but also “Hagia Triada” that does not even appear as a title but is known from other sources. Secondly, the notes that we actually have are not fully elaborate renderings of the visits but simply notes, i.e. reminders for a fuller later version. It is only the visit to Dephi that is documented in a way that gives a hint of the value of the emotional experience there. Thirdly, one needs a philological background to be able to locate the Notes as far as themes and style of presentation goes. A familiarity with Wharton’s The Cruise of the Vanadis, her letters, her autobiography, and other travel writing are inevitably needed for contextualizing the remarks and to assess their value for the map of Wharton studies.

Conclusion

Edith Wharton the travel author, if she is known at all in this capacity, is recognized for her work on Italy, France, and Morocco based on her five published travel books. She wrote these between 1905 and 1920, and her travel related output remains limited to her fiction afterwards. Prompted by Susan Schriber, Wharton scholars know that the romance of travel was lost for Wharton after the Great War, so despite the fact that she continued to travel frequently, she did not publish travel related texts after In Morocco. This view was not challenged in 2002 when Lesage recovered the typescript of Wharton’s detailed journal about her cruise in the Mediterranean and published it under the title The Cruise of the Vanadis. The account showed how well prepared the young Wharton was for writing the romance of travel in the early years of her marriage already at the age of 26, well before she began publishing her fiction in earnest.

However, researchers in the archives have long known about Wharton’s short travel texts after 1920, and one volume was published with her two Spanish fragments by Patrician Fra López in 2011. That volume, Back to Compostela, put Spain on the map of Wharton’s travel writing, and its introductory essay provided a detailed account of Wharton’s connection to Spain in general and to the Pilgrimage of Compostela in particular and documented Wharton’s interests in Spanish locations using a wide array of materials. The essay did not argue for an explicit religious interest in the sites, but it definitely showed a renewed interest in the romance of travel for Wharton in the 1920s.

This essay has tried to document Wharton’s interest in travel in the Aegean after 1920 by incorporating her fragment Osprey Notes from 1926 into the body of Wharton’s travel writing. The Osprey Notes provide the elderly Wharton’s representations of sites of her youth in a string of flamboyant descriptive passages. The Osprey Notes are fragments in several senses of the term: they only cover part of the journey, they are obviously not finished, and they need a context in which they can be attributed a significance. In order to be able to position the fragments in the body of Wharton’s travel writing, the essay argued, scholars need to be aware of the contexts of both her other travel pieces and her method I have called architectural vision she adopted from Ruskin. The main question was how earlier methods and inspirations for travel familiar from Vanadis and the other travel books possibly recur in the Osprey Notes.

The concern with architectural vision abounds in Wharton’s published travel texts. In general, the term refers to a way of looking at architectural space and space constructed architecturally that is connected to John Ruskin’s ideas about observing architecture. Ruskin proposed a synecdochic reading of visual art in general. This model presupposes a that each “thing” seen has three areas of significance related to it: a specific material observation is connected to an aesthetic experience Ruskin thought symbolized a theological message. Ruskin used the same three aspects for analyzing architecture, he not only studied the actual stones of a building but also the effect it made on the viewer and the general connection it had to what he called God’s order. Robert Hewison and Stephen Kite analysed how this model represented a turn away from early nineteenth-century picturesque tradition to a morally invested view of beauty in painting and in the study of architecture, respectively. The distinction between the notions “surface picturesque” and “deep picturesque” in the rendering of a scene or in the construction of a building indicate Ruskin’s shift of interest from a sight itself to the extra implications a picturesque visual impression carries, both materially and spiritually. Wharton’s ongoing references to Ruskin’s ideas and picturesque scenes in her travel and travel-related texts offered a perspective to study her travel books, her early and late Aegean texts in particular.

The early and the late Aegean texts contain many picturesque scenes. The Cruise of the Vanadis from 1888 lists verbal picture after verbal picture about spectacular well-known sites and also little known impressive sceneries. The descriptions share a specific textual construction: the approach and the scenery are described beside a ruin, very often together with a detailed account of the vegetation. The term “picturesque” is used quite often, but specific references to the quality of the beauty experienced remain sparse. In the Osprey Notes from 1926 the construction of the descriptive passages shows a remarkable similarity to those in the earlier text, with the addition that the approach becomes more enhanced. The most important addition, however, is the heightened sense of the aesthetic experience that is indicated both by the dramatic vocabulary and the references to beauty and not to the picturesque. The most acute impression, that of the Parthenon by moonlight, is there only as a caption, a fragmented ruin, and the experience at Hagia Triada Crete Wharton referred to several times later is absent altogether.

The scenes of the two Aegean travel journals offer picturesque views that shift from surface to deep senses of the term. When in the early account the picturesque is an epithet, when a picturesque scene is shown but not commented on from the perspective of experience, its extra implications are not referred to. I think these are the instances Lesage referred to, saying the important elements of Vanadis were left unsaid (Lesage 2004, 23). Yet, there is clearly a tendency to find such scenes and also a tendency to indicate the importance of such events with mentioning the extra time spent at these locations. In the Osprey Notes the fragments all target impressions of scenes of beauty and experiences of beauty. I think Robert Burden would identify these passages as written in a Pateresque manner (Burden 2015, 209-10). Yet the structural similarities between the passages of the earlier journal and the later one suggest to me that what is at stake here is the rendering of a deep sense of the picturesque, the physical, the aesthetic and the implied moral significances of a given scene represented together. The aim of the journey is to collect sceneries to remember and enjoy again, or, as the roughly contemporary fragment, “Back to Italy,” would have it: “retrospection in enjoyment” (Beinecke 19: 604).

Beside the theoretical and the textual contexts of the Osprey Notes, it can also be considered in relation to other travel related texts from the Wharton Collection at Beinecke or other archives, opening up further vistas of academic research. The most obvious texts to include would be the Spanish fragments “Back to Compostela” (1925) and Wharton’s diary of her first trip to Spain with Walter Berry published by Fra López in 2011. Also, with its Spanish scenes, the text of the fragment “A Motor-Flight through Spain” belongs to this field. From 1934, Wharton’s “Back to Italy” is a short essay on methods of travel writing similar to Wharton’s summary of traditions of writing travel in The Backward Glance, no wonder Hermione Lee dates it to October 1934 (Lee 2008, 732). The question to explore is whether the late fragments can be read in the framework of a secular pilgrimage.

In this volume, beside the Osprey Notes you will find the early essay “Education through the Eyes” comes from Wharton’s time as a married woman at Newport, in which she puts forward her idea about how one can learn to see order and values of the past, an argument that helps place the intellectual position of the young Wharton among different schools of architectural thinking in the US. Her poem from the 1880s, “Penelope,” reflects her early concern with Ulysses’s travel from a feminine perspective.

Yet another area of further research is the relevance of the notion of architectural vison in Wharton’s other nonfiction or even fiction. It would seem that the interest in the experience of visual culture and within it, the implied significance of architecture, is a basic theme Wharton liked to make use of and explore. At present, the short pieces from the archive offer only glimpses of the visual interest in Wharton’s travel and related texts in order to enter them into the arena of scholarly discussion.

Appendix

1. Cathedral of Syracuse

2. Benedictine Monastery, Monreale

3. Ruins of the Greek Theatre, Taormina

4. Cappella Palatina, Palermo

5. Concordia, Agrigento

6. Monastery Stavroniketa, Mount Athos

7. Gulf of Aegina (Saronic Gulf)

8. Tholos, Delphi by Bernard Gagnon

9. Temple of Apollo or Aphaea, Aegina

10. Telestherion, Eleusis

11. Kaisariani Monastery

12. Acropolis

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Beinecke Library Edith Wharton Collection Box 51, Folder 1535

OSPREY NOTES 1926

Gulf of Aegina.

In this strange climate, the sea, that unstable and transparent element, is often like carved marble, with hard waves of blue crusted with fierce silver flutings like ridged manes of the Parthenon horses, or else they are undulations of molten bronze flushed with worn gliding--while the sky which creates them and of which one  expects a corresponding hardness, density and   gloomy opaqueness, is most often like the veils on Praxitelean nymphs, these subtle transparencies of the declining art, woven of rain mist, sunshimmer and racing cloud-shadows--so that, rowing back to the yacht, and climbing in one little boat those tall and massive walls of purple wave, I have looked back to a Parthenon livid aganst black valpours, sulphurous on banks of slaty storm, tossed in on rushing streams of air, but hardly ever set in solid sculpture aginst a solid sky. This curious unrelatedness of sea and of sky is a peculiarity of the Attic landscape, where sometimes all is marble, sometimes all mist and shadow, and most often both in a strange inversion.

One of the most most characteristic things about the sleek scene is that the shapes of the hills and islands are as noble as their names--, and when a landscape has to live up to such words of beauty and doom as Sunium, Salamis, Eleusis, Lycabettus, Marathon, and triumphs over them to the extent that they seem to have been born of its magic outlines as Aphrodite was born of its sea – then it must indeed be a memorable land.

The waves sometimes look like flocks of frightened sea-creatures racing shoreward in the vain effort to escape the silver reticulating web of some mighty net that has been flung over leagues of sea, and gathering in innumerable green transparencies that leap and bound to free themselves from their glittering prison-.

Cephalonia. Wonderful drive accross island--Zantés. Lovely little port. Roads hopeless.

Olympia. The drive from Katákolo- through rich country--across the blosomladen lemons and oranges. Groves and rows of slender cypresses, Persian miniature style, little farm-houses smothered in green, acacias, medlars, olive-groves, etc–an exquisite church with white and blue belfry and gateway overhung with vistaria in full bloom.–Then a beautiful mountain pass, masses of the feathery “Isthuiran” (?)[1] pine, (p. Laricia?),[2] Turneresque, velvety, vast-spreading–then the view widening on the beautiful vale of Olympia, with the Alpheus and the         joining[3] below the sacred enclosure raised on a gentle height just under the Sacred Hill (on top of which ruins of an ancient altar.) – On high knoll at entrance of vale, above modern village, stand the hotel and museum.

Museum – great impression of pediments of temple of Apollo. The incomparable Apollo - the head of the funny king (?)[4]- Hermes of Prax. Moved out after earthquake into separate building.  The last end of a dying great art, lost in sweetness.

The ruins lonely, feathered with frail grasses – sage, little pink convolvulus, a frail small asphodel, yellow anthenisia – most flowers past. -- Temple of Hera, most of its columns standing, oldest Temple in Greece in such preservation – Beautiful.  Ruins of little Byzantine church, built on ruins of a small temple. Lovely bits of Byzantine open work and vine-friezes, and ancient Greek sculpture, all tossed together among the wild flowers.

The whole shaded with great pines, and backed by the wooded Sacred Hill. Harmony, peace, unbroken by any noise or ugliness.

Delphi.  From the yacht -- the scenes of Parnassus. Itea - the mighty forest of olives filling the plain, stretching away through the pass to Salena, and climbing up toward Krysa – Parnassus lost to sight, but incomparable views of the bay of Itea, mountains accross the gulf of Corinth, snow on the Akrokeraunian mountains. Unimaginable beauty -- up and up. Bare slopes, perfumed with sweet herbs and sun. Mountain air. Krysa, picturesque mountain village. A further climb to the modern village of Delphi, then the shoulder of the hill turned, and the great sanctuary there before us, lifted high on the bare hill-side over the deep gorge of                    and[5] backed by the perpedicular twin cliffs of the Phaedrides, golden streaked with slate-grey, between whose narrow cleft the Castalian spring flows down to a rock- hewn pool. Below the spring we lunched under huge olives on the slope just above the ruins of the Gymnasium, where the great circular swimming-pool is still well-preserved. All was beauty, serenity and awe. A matchless landscape.

In the afternoon we wandered among the ruins of the sacred Enclosure, and up and up, above the roofs of the new village, and round the grassy shoulder of the mountain, till the bay of Itea lay far below us, with the great velvet sweep of olive orchards, the blue glitter of the gulf, the Akrokeranuian suns.

In the Museum, best were the reliefs of the treasures of Siphnos and the lovely late dancing girls (Karyatids) – the charioteer is too petticoated and stupid-looking for my liking – there is nothing to approach the Olympia Apollo.

Athens. We stayed 10 days in Athens – or rather at Phaleron, and Piraeus. Our only excursions were to Aegina, Daphni and Eleusis, and the monastéries of Kaysériané on Hymettus and Mendéli on Lycabettus Pentelions.

The rest of the time we spent on the Acropolis and in the Museums, especially the archaic Museum on the Acropolis, and the archaic and Mycenaean rooms of the National Museum.

Acropolis morning and afternoon and by moonlight, the night before we left.

Aegina. We sailed there one enchanted afternoon from Phaleron. Donkeys met us in the little bay of Hagia Maria, and we rode up through the perfumed macchi, full of little rosy-salmon citrus unknown to me, to the glorious temple on the top, from which the eye ranges over the whole gulf, Athens, Lycabettus, Pontelius, over the western fertile plains of the island, and beyond them Corynth to Parnassus and Helicon, then Salamis, Eleusis, and Megara. On the other side a great pine clothed promontery (highest point of Aegina) stretches into the blue sea, and the eye sweeps from there to Sunium and the shadowy islands at the entrance to the straits of Ereboea. All was silence, warmth, scent of aromatic herbs and pines, hum of insects, and quiet peasants leaning on the mighty fallen columns and smiling at us without speaking.

The wind rose, and we went over to Salamis and lay there.

Daphni and Eleusis. Fine drive through the wooded gorges of the Sacred Way, but road a right maze of dust -- and discomfort. Daphni near the road, enclosed in high brown crenallated walls, (probably fortified by Turks?[6]) with guardian cypresses, big fig-trees, shady courts, and the brown domed church rising above them. All quiet, ruinous, with irregular clustered buildings, tumble down flights of steps and woodden balconies. Interior of the church, big noble late Byzantine frescoes, freed from white-wash and over-restored. Much more naturalistic and full of flowing movement than the great period (e.g. Monreale the upper tiers, creation of Aoul[7]), but full of the beauty of richly armoured funny saints, prophets in gorgeous embroidered mantles, a real lively Presentation in the Temple, etc. – we stayed a long time.

Then on to Eleusis. It must have been very beautiful, lying on a gentle slope above the shore and looking accross the gulf at Salamis and the solemn mountainous outline of the Peloponnesus. But a squalid village and several factory chimneys fringe the shore – the only classical site in Greece we have seen so dishonoured. The great hall of the Initiation, with its mighty flights of steps at the back on each side, where the audience is supposed to have sat, is very impressive, but not mysterious enough. There are no trees, no waters, to help one to dream back into the past. In the little Museum there is nothing of great interest. It is too near Athens, and the glorious Demeter, Persephone and Triptolemus is there.

Kaperionné. The Typical little cypresshidden Greek monastery, so small that it seems like a toy-model. Hidden away in a wooded fold of the bare Hymettus, built, of course, around a spring, as they always were. No view, but huge shady plane trees in the outer court, and the usual impression of coolness, meditation, security and dreams. Very picturesque inner courts, wildly irregular with deep archways, overhanging loggias, old crumbling stone stairways, and the low-arched cloister preceding the little church, so honey-brown, domed, embroidered, with comb-like traceries, that it might have been made by the bees, the celebrated bees of Hymettus – and the monks after all might be compared to them, with their patient building-up and their storing of sweetness, in all the wild warring times. Kaperiané is a big old foundation.

The last Archbishop of Athens before the Frankish invasion rebuked the abbot for stealing other peoples’ honey! See Miller, Latins in the Levant.) - Intérior of the church dim, perfumed, hive-like – nothing of special artistic interest --

Mendéli. The richest monastery in Greece. On the slopes of Pentelious, the road goes toward Kephissia (the Athenian “summer-frische”), and then brances to the right, up the piny lower slopes of Pentelions. The Attic plain toward Kephissia is full of fruit-trees and country houses – a relief from the glaring aridity of the coast – about Piraeus and Phaleron, and on that side of Athens.

The road continues to rise, and comes out at last on a grassy clearing shaded with giant plane-trees, where the walled facade of the monastery stands. Too big, too much restored, too well-kept – but there is beauty in the wide long entrance court, surrounded by a double arcade, with shrubs and flowers growing neglected in the rich earth, and a perennial spring rushing forth into a basin in the wall, and running in a sparkling stream along the edge of the path. One must have fed for ten days on the dust of Athens to appreciate it.

Nothing of interest in the church.

From the plane-tree clearing a path climbs through rich maquis the flank of the hill which shelters the monastic building on the south. Thence we looked over the walled orchards and kitchen gardens, full of fig, peach, apricot, and plum trees, and backed by the white marble quarries and abrupt pine-clad precipices of Pentéleions. The path rose and wound about the hill; and now we looked on the rich undulating plain between Pantelions and Marathon, and out toward Sunium; then on the northern flank of Hymettus, under which the road runs from Athens to Marathon, through forests of pine and olive. And another turn brought us out above the plain between Athens and Pentelieons, and we saw Lycabettus, the new polis, and the blue gulf with Gregina and the faint line of the Peloponnesos. What a landscape!

As we returned, the air was full of sweet bells, and a flock of black goats with undulating horns came down the hill tended by a tiny boy and girl, and followed by a flock of honey-brown sheep with long hieratic fleeces. – “O little town??.....” It was all saturated with Keats.

Below, in the pine-forest, the ruined marble palace of the mad Duchesse de Plaissance (see Bouchon’s diary) who died in the forties and no doubt made this beautiful walk on her estate.

The Parthenon by moonlightMoonlight on the Parthenon.

Notepaper:

Nauplia

Tiryus

Mycenae

Epidaurus

Straits of

Sunium

Straits of Euboea

Chalecis-

Church – old mosques

Museum (Theseus and Antiope)-

Drive accross island

Athens to Delos –Patmos (Holy Saturday)

Beinecke Library Edith Wharton Collection Box 63, Folder 1783

PENELOPE

What sacrifice, Ulysses, shall I yield

To win thee back from the unquiet see,

For whose tumultuous breast thou hast forsaken

The steadfast bosom of thy wife and Queen?

Behold each day when first the dawn begins

To widen o’er the waters, I arise

From my unshared couch, sit me down

Alone beside the window, seaward-turned,

Watching the sails that cross the rippled plain,

If haply one be thine and bear thee home.

But many months unwearied have I watched

The equal rolling of the foam-fringed blue.

I have beheld it dimpling in the sun,

And flaked with snowy birds that dip and fly

That pasture in those upper fields of heaven,

And sheeplike before the driving wind,

And I have seen the stormy crested flood

Arise and battle with whirlwinds might,

Or rocking softly on its soothed breast

The untroubled image of the summer moon

As some great mother rocks her sleeping child,

An I, as that same mother, might have watched

The everchanging features of her child,

Have watched the sea in all its shifting moods

Of peace and storm, until I know it well.

And many sails have I beheld, that rise

And pass and vanish, NONE HATH TARRIED YET.

The tawny sails of fishing-boats at dawn

That put forth from our own indented isle,

And futher still, the sails of merchantmen,

And distant fares o’er the watery roads,

All these here I beheld with wistful eyes,

Pass like the sudden smiles upon a face,

That fading, leave it meaningless and pale –

But thee my eyes behold not, and in vain

Have I besought the everliving gods

To yield thee back to my unwearied prayers,

For fatholess are their dealings with mankind.

Perchance, thy prow shall touch no more

The rocky edge of the deserted home,

It may be, in some dim, enchanted tale,

A sorceress hathbound thee to their side,

Or storms have tost thee on some burning coast,

Where, slaving undr a barbarian King

Thy life wears downward to a shameful grave,

Perchance thou liest the great sea,

While many ships pass o’er thy sleeping head

And thy uncanny spirit roams the halls

Of death as here it roamed the happy earth.

Or else thy ship hath gained the happy isles

Which often, musing thou hast thought to see

At sunset floating in a golden space

‘Twixt sea and sky; and now thou feastest there

With crowned brows, and songs upon thy lips,

But weresoe’er thy wandering back is led,

But little thinks thou of the faithful wife,

Who seaward sits and waits for thy return,

For thou wert never cast in lover’s mould,

And men at best have much to wean their hearts

From home, and from the fireside’s placid joys,

Theirs are the schemes of warfare and adventure

And toiling voyages upon the sea,

Building of ships, and law, and merchandise,

All these are theirs; while in their empty homes

The women sit, and muse upon their love,

And wear their heartwith waiting and their eyes

With gazing o’er the irresponsive sea.

Beinecke Library Edith Wharton Collection Box 51, Folder 1525

The News Newport

“EDUCATION THROUGH THE EYES”

Mrs. Wharton addresses the Teachers on art in the Schoolroom

In response to an invitation to listen to a paper by Mrs. Edward R. Wharton on “Schoolroom Decoration,” the teachers of the public schools almost without exception gathered in the large West room of the Clarke street schoolhouse yesterday afternoon, filling it completely. Besides the teachers there were present Messr. Horton, Perry and Bacheller of the school committee and a few other guests. The room is one that has been decorated by the association of which Mrs Wharton is the head, and the photographs and plaster casts were much admired by all present.

Mrs. Wharton, Mr. Harper Pennington, Mrs Victoria Sorchan and Superintendent Baker occupied seats on the platform, and Mr. Baker spoke briefly, saying that while the teachers and scholars had been enjoying their vacation two ladies had been very busy in the work of decorating the schoolrooms. Their labor has been for the teachers and the scholars, all of whom owe to them a deep debt of gratitude. He then introduced Mrs Wharton, who addressing herself to the teachers spoke substantially as follows:

I want your help in completing the decoration of the Newport schools; not your contribution but your personal cooperation in making your pupils and their parents understand the purpose of our undertaking: In making the people feel that to put some beauty into the bare rooms of Newport is not only a good thing but a neccessary thing, and neccessary not only on artistic grounds but on moral grounds as well. Our object in decorating the schoolrooms is not to turn all the school children into painters and sculptors or to teach them history, but to surround them with such representations of beauty as in older civilizations the streets, the monuments, and galleries of almost every city provide. In our country the conditions are unfavourable to the development of taste. We must teach our children to care for beauty before great monuments and noble buildings arise. There are signs of improvements; the desire for beauty is increasing and people are beginning to understand the immense educational value of good architecture and art. Our object is to advance this development of taste by surrounding our school children with an atmosphere of beauty, by putting in the rooms representations of the best works of art. If with your aid we can prove to the fathers and mothers that in sorrounding the children with beauty we are also protecting them from ugliness – the ugliness of indifference, of disorder, the ugliness of evil; having done this our cause is gained.

Beautiful pictures and statues may influence conduct as well as taste. To keep children out of mischief they must be kept busy. Every one knows the ceaseless, irrepressible activity of children’s hands and tongues. The hands are always investigating, the tongue is always asking questions, and the more thoughtful parent realizes that the child’s eyes are equally busy; and to supply fitting objects for its investigationis one of the most important duties of parents and teachers. In decorationg the schoolrooms we stride to provide answers for the questions which the child’s eye is always asking. No child will sit with his eyes perpetually glued to his lesson-book. Now and then his glance will wander, and his thoughts with it. These distractions will not be met by a bare expanse of dreary, white-washed wall, but rather by some object which will instantly present to the child’s mind an image of beauty, heroism, wisdom or virtue. We have learned to make the schoolbook interesting, and the next stop forward in the science of education is to make the schoolroom interesting, too.

Education is the discipline of learning, the train of thought aroused by what is learned, the formation of a child’s character. The fact that schooling is a means, not an end -- the means of making efficient, enlightened and useful citizens – has almost become a truism. The tendency of modern education is rather towards the harmonious development of the whole character than the acquisition of any set of facts. The value of object lessons is more generally recognized. The underlying principle of the kindergarten system is applied to the higher branches of education. Everywhere the exaction of the eye is considered—that is, everywhere except on the school room walls. But even these, happily, are no longer always bare. In several cities the change has been made.

In time perhaps the need for which we are pleading will be recognized by the municipalites. But first the citizen must educate the city; we must prove our readiness to be taxed for beautiful as well as for useful things, or rather we must prove that beauty is useful. Thrift, order, refinement, ambition, and the countles daily pleasures of the observant eye are qualities which are kept alive by the miraculous influence of beauty. Every woman knows how hard it is to take pride in a house that hasn’t a single pretty thing in it, and many a man, who may never have thought about the matter, and may appear quite insensible to such things, is unconsciously influenced by the beauty and refinement of his home. We all know how children, so unmerciful to torn carpets and shabby furniture, can be taught to respect what is fresh and pretty and to take a pride in helping to keep it so.

And this is the way in which beauty fosters the civic virtue. Who can long be rough and slatternly and indifferent in a pretty, well-kept house? If a little of the prettiness and order is allowed to overflow into each room, each member of the family will come to regard himself as holding a share in the capital of beauty, and as vitally interested in preserving and increasing that capital. Every woman who knows the truth of what I have been saying, takes pains to surround her children with beautiful things. They teach them to love and reverence beauty, as they love and reverence goodness. The child who is shut out from beauty during a great part of each day, in the schoolroom with its bare walls, will soon lose his feeling for it, and become indifferent to the graces and refinement of his home.

The importance of beautiful surroundings in making study interesting and teaching easy is another point worth considering. How it helps a teacher, who is talking of art, or history, or literature, to point to some noble bas-relief or picture, to some portrait of the poet or hero in question. And how easily the child remembers the lesson so aptly illustrated. Some of you have anticipated the work of this association by hanging photography, prints and various decorations of your own making. Every attempt of this kind made by a teacher is direct evidence of the need, the vital need, of the work we have undertaken. To those who have been the pioneers in this work I wish to point out the fact that beauty, as a means of education, performs a double office. True beauty teaches not only love of itself but hatred of ugliness, and not only of positive ugliness but of the negative kind which is less perceptible to the untrained eye, but really just as harmful and deteriorating.

In art, as in literature and in conduct, the child must be taught to care only for the best. It is as easy to buy a plaster cast or a photograph of some really great work of art as a foolish pink and white chromo. It pays to buy the best. Care only for the best and be content to go without art rather than tolerate its inferior forms. Don’t indulge your pupils in a diet of trashy prettiness. Such a diet is as harmful as a perpetual nibbling of sugar plums. It destroys the healthy appetite for beauty, as eating sweets between meals destroys the appetite for wholesome food. Beauty is not a sugar-plum; it is sterner fare. Feeding on this trashy beauty may be compared to the perpetual reading of trash. Every teacher knows how soon such reading destroys a taste for the best literature. Better bare walls in the schoolroom than bad art. But nowadays there is no excuse for either. The best reproduction in plaster or in photographs can be obtained for a small amount of money. The best is within reach; let us for ourselves and for our children refuse anything less than the best. In conclusion Mrs Wharton said: Ladies and Gentlemen: You now see what it is we ask of you. We want you to join us in giving a series of object-lessons in beauty, not only to the school children of Newport but to the public and to the municipality. We want to teach this lesson of beauty so clearly and so forcibly that, when Newport builds her next school, a special appropriation for decorating it with works of art will be regarded as a matter of course; and meanwhile we want you to help our association in carrying on the work that has begun.

I have ony to add that the rooms which we have decorated were selected entirely with reference to their size, their lighting, or soem such practial conditions. Our object was to decorate first the rooms most likely to produce a good effect, and the choice was left entirely to us by the school committee and the superintedent. Next year we hope that all the rooms will be done, and that all will give satisfaction to both teachers and pupils.

Following Mrs. Wharton, Mr. Harper Pennington, the well known artist, spoke briefly. He said that in furtherance of Mrs. Wharton’s paper it might be pointed out that the artist’s mission is not only to make what is beautiful but to destroy what is ugly. By showing what is beautiful we will in time put aside all that is ugly. It is evident that no artist designed the ordinary stove, and even that might be made a thing of beauty. It is better to put the very best things befre the people, and gradually they will refuse to look at what is ugly, and gradually, perhaps very gradually, to appreciate what is beautiful. Hideous representations are to be avoided. The children will come to appreciate the beautiful very slowly, and we must constantly surround them with beautiful things in order to make them appreciate them.

Superintendent Baker spoke of the ways in which the teachers might help the association, by securing small contibutions from their friends, by arranging the details for the decoration of the school rooms, and by selecting what is appropriate to the rooms in which they are located. They should always remember that the movement is for their own benefit and that of the scholars.

A suggestion made by Miss Currin, one of the teachers, that a teachers’ fair might result in raising a considerable sum for the object, seemed to meet with favor, Mrs Wharton saying that she intended to remain in Newport until the middle of December and would gladly assist in the undertaking.

Hon. J W Horton of the school committee, Alderman Fred M. Hammett and Mr Henry W Cirke spoke briefly, and the meeting was closed with a manifest increase in the interest in the work which has been so auspiciously began by Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Sorchan, and in which, heretofore, the citizens of Newport have apparently taken but little interest.

The following additional contributions to the fund for decorating the schools have been received:

Mrs. J. Lanier                $  5.00

Major T. K. Gibbs              20.00

Previously acknowledged        767.00                      E. WHARTON, Secretary

Megjegyzések

[←1]

Question mark appears as in the original.

[←2]

Question mark appears as in the original.

[←3]

Hiatus appears as in the original.

[←4]

Question mark appears as in the original.

[←5]

Hiatus appears as in the original.

[←6]

Question mark appears as in the original.

[←7]

The handwriting indicates Aoul or Anul.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: Edith Wharton’s quest for historical continuity in the Aegean

Osprey Notes 1926

Penelope

“Education through the Eyes”