I have had rather a wonderful morning. I was taken to the apartment of a man who collects Italian primitives. He is young, as yet only about twenty-seven, and one of the amazing products of this country. His mother, they say, was a washer-woman, (why not?) and he determined to go through college. At Harvard he paid his own way by buying up the trouser press industry and syndicating it, and putting himself at the head. He made a fortune by pressing the undergraduates’ trousers. This is the “on-dit,” probably it is quite inaccurate, and he would tell a very different story. Anyway it’s a good story, and the fundamental thing is that he arose, from nowhere, out of the blue, so to speak. What his work is now I didn’t hear, but he is collecting Italian primitives. We saw them all before he came in. There were Botticelli’s, Fra Angelico’s, Filippo Lippi, Bellini, and countless others. Each one was lovely, and one felt much loved. The rooms were simply but beautifully furnished with Italian pieces. In the dining-room the table was laid, and next to the owner’s place was a book from which he reads out a little prayer, for grace, before each meal. It sounded affected, but I was assured it came from a deeply fervent spirit. I marvelled much over this young man before I saw him. His bedroom was chaste and hung with Madonnas, he had tall candles and things that suggested holiness! There was only one personal note in the whole place, the photograph of a very modern lovely girl.
Later, the owner arrived, a perfectly simple, unaffected, enthusiastic boy, who knew all about his treasures and could tell about them. He had the face of a Mantegna picture, and the stiff white modern collar made him of today. Otherwise he was quite in keeping. There certainly was no pose about him, and no suggestion of nouveau-riche.
Every day that I am in this country I am more amazed. What has produced this curious type, that earns millions and prefers to spend on pre-Raphaelites rather than on race horses?
I lunched with Emil Fuchs, who had a nice party, among whom Frank Munsey, a curious personality. Intellectual but so, so cold. I managed once to make him half smile. He came afterwards to Knoedler’s, he looked at everything, silently, and left hurriedly without any expression of opinion.
I dined with the Rosens, and Benjy Guiness and McEvoy and Purcell Jones were of the party. While they went on to the box that Laurette Taylor had given me for “Peg of My Heart” I went to the Town Hall and made a Pacifist speech at a Disarmament meeting.
Sunday, April 3, 1921.
Dined with the Swopes, it being Mrs. Swope’s birthday party.
I had a long talk with Barney Baruch who came in afterwards. I had not seen him since that bewildering night when I first arrived, and thought he was Mr. Brooke! I’ve never forgotten him, he has a dominating personality, and a nose and a brow that I keep modelling in my mind while I am talking to him. But he is “the king with two faces,” he can look hard and Satanic one minute, kind and gentle the next. He has a great love of Winston, and a loyalty to Wilson. His ideas about life and the world in general are fine. He has the dynamic force of a Revolutionary, but his idealism is to get the world straight sanely, calmly and constructively, not violently, bitterly and destructively. He believes in an ideal League of Nations, and in reasoning rather than arming. The answer to all that is, that nothing gets done at all except by force, bitterness and violence, and so Russia is the only one among us who has gotten something done! Perhaps if there were more Barney Baruchs in the world something might evolve, who knows. I don’t really know enough about him and his life, and to what purpose he puts his activities.
He talked to me a good deal about his father and mother, especially his mother. He has that Jewish love of family. I always like to hear a man eulogise his mother, it makes me realize my own responsibility towards Dick. If a man can remember the things his mother said to him in early life, then my talking to Dick is not as vain as it would seem.
Jews are wonderful parents, and wonderful children. Moreover they are the cultured people in the world. They chiefly are our Art patrons. It always amuses me in this country when people ask me if Russia is entirely run by Jews. I didn’t meet half as many there as I have met here!