Eric's Reviews > William Wetmore Story and His Friends, Vol. 1 of 2: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections

The whole matter - whether the Roman and Venetian residence of certain American artists of the 1850s was a severe academy of greatness or a cloudy bath of sociable dilettantism - is rather phantasmagoric; the artist-life, in the romantic conditions and in the romantic good faith, is a thing of the past. Is it? James goes on to say that Italy as of his writing - 1903 - is too touristic to be a site of pure artistic pilgrimage. I can't believe that Henry James, of all people, would sound so final on so rich a question, even if he was feeling old - and so on to volume 2!