From a Bygone Age

The transatlantic tourists of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad were distinguished by invincible ignorance: of their surroundings, of art, music, history, and especially of the foreign languages assaulting their confused American ears. But there were notable exceptions to this provincialism among that small minority of Americans who not only knew their way around Europe but made their lives there. Of these none were more at home abroad than Margaret Terry Chanler, whose double memoir, Roman Spring (1934) and Autumn in the Valley (1936), records an extraordinary life in the transnational social and intellectual beau monde of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Margaret Chanler makes a brief appearance in Edith Wharton’s A Backward Glance and Van Wyck Brooks’s The Dream of Arcadia, but she is not to be found in the Harvard University Press’s Notable American Women or in the Dictionary of American Biography. She is worthy of a place in both.

Born in 1862, daughter of a Rome-based American painter and descended from the Connecticut clockmaker Eli Terry, Margaret’s education and rearing were polylingual. She was tutored in Rome with French and German governesses and came of age fluent in four languages. “I cannot remember,” she wrote, “having to learn to speak French, German, or Italian. English was taken for granted. We spoke it with a foreign accent, but it was the mother tongue. To this day, I cannot refrain from a sense of pity for those who grow up with only one language. What pleasure do I not owe to this freedom of the Western world!” A freedom, it may be said, accessible up to the First World War to persons of sufficient means and cultivation but increasingly curtailed if not closed off in the 1920s and ’30s, and barely imaginable in our own beleaguered, mass-entertainment century.

With a gift for music Margaret studied piano with an eminent pupil of Franz Liszt, and she took special delight in mastering a Bach gavotte, a Scarlatti scherzo. But, when in her girlhood Liszt himself was a household visitor, a sprained wrist spared her the agony, as she remembered, of having to perform in his presence. Her family’s home in the Palazzo Odescalchi, and the presence there of her older half-brother, the novelist F. Marion Crawford, brought a stream of distinguished visitors, among them Henry James, Henry Adams and his friend Moncton Milnes, the travel writer Augustus Hare, the actress Fanny Kemble, and Edward Lear, who sang her “The Owl and the Pussycat” and made her a nonsense alphabet, a to z, drawn on odd scraps of paper.

In the early 1880s Margaret found herself in love with a spirited Harvard graduate of the class of 1885, Winthrop Chanler, and they were married a year later; but there were complications, family objections (on his side) to be faced down. Wintie Chanler, as he was always known, had been reared in a rigidly Protestant and puritanical household, which seems, however, to have left no mark on his effortlessly adaptable spirit. But Margaret, unhappy with the drab services at the bleak Protestant church outside papal Rome and drawn to the beauty, pageantry, and spiritual intensity of Rome’s churches, had turned to the Catholic faith and later described herself as possessing an “anima naturaliter cattolica.” That made no difference to her future husband, who, she wrote, “would have been just as light-hearted about it had I been a Buddhist or a Mahometan.” But in deference to his family Wintie asked a Protestant clergyman who was a sporting friend if he would undertake to “reason” Margaret back into the Protestant fold. The response was blunt: “My dear fellow, I would not dream of doing anything of the sort! All the good arguments are on their side.” Steadfast in her faith, Margaret’s respect for the Roman Church itself was distinctly measured, as is evident in her voiced dismay at the Vatican’s proscription of the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose writings she valued and whose friendship, in Paris and subsequently on his visit to New York, she cherished.

Marriage opened Margaret’s life to an...