Giovanni Papini

“ The world is not "a datum imposed upon us ready-made, but the fruit of a long evolution, of a strenuous struggle"—the struggle of consciousness with consciousness, of spirit with things, of man with the world.
Such is the philosophy which comes to us from Oxford under the fair name of Humanism, dear to our Latin memories. Italian humanism was the resurrection of a distant and unfamiliar world; Anglo-Saxon humanism is the announcement of a new world, still unfamiliar, but no longer distant: a world in which the soul is master. ”

“ It is not precious stones that shine in the works of Farinelli, but fragments and gems of poetry, of many kinds and of many ages. This jeweler of the spirit has in store all the treasures of thought, and he offers them by the handful, by the shovelful, by the cartful, making them sparkle under the eager eyes of his readers. For him there are no Alps nor Pyrenees, no chains that cannot be broken, no oceans that separate. Every realm pays him tribute, every land offers him its tithe of beauty. He has dug deeply in fields where others have but turned the sod. ”

“ Berkeley was one of those men who cannot or will not decide whether to devote themselves to thought or to action. They are enamored of ideas, but they would have ideas triumph at once in the reality of daily life. They would influence men, they would transform the world, but they rely on thought and word as instruments. They know the pleasure of intellectual activity and the joy of discovery, but they soon weary of solitary meditation. ”

“ And since the face is the mirror of the soul, as the infinite wisdom of the race informs us in one of its proverbial condensations of experience, no one will be surprised to learn that this Papini is the scoundrel of literature, the blackguard of journalism, the Barabbas of art, the thug of philosophy, the bully of politics, the Apaché of culture, and that he is inextricably involved in all the enterprises of the intellectual underworld. ”

“ This second Leonardo is neither a pure scientist nor a pure artist—much less is he an engineer or a courtier. He is the complete type of the inner man—unwilling to reveal himself too rich in spiritual fruit, lest greedy folk should ruin him. He loves solitary toil, and feels himself diminished by the presence of others; he knows the power of silence; he gathers for his own sake, and does not cast the treasure of his thoughts amid the crowd. In that first life that was his youth he meditated more than all his fellows, yet he did not publish a single book ”

“ Don Quixote is the man grown tired of the life of every-day.
His poor, homely, respectable life with his curate and his womenfolk bores him to death. All his restricted provinciality, with its scanty moments of relief in hunting or reading, palls upon him. He wants to amuse himself for a while. Chivalry, as he has learned it in the great romances, offers him the bright path of a masquerade without peril. As a man of letters and of experience he understands that he cannot suddenly change his way of life without a pretext. And he sees just one harmless path of liberation: madness. ”

“ NIETZSCHE [1]
We owe a debt of love, all of us, to Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is time to pay it. His brain stopped thinking in January, 1889; his heart stopped beating in August, 1900. Ten years, twenty years, have passed; and we may smile again with the wise, sad smile of a poor Zarathustra who fainted on the mountain-tops for holy envy of heaven, a loving spirit eternally repulsed by fellow men unworthy of his love, a convalescent Siegfried banished to the pensions de luxe of the Darwinian and Wagnerian Europe of our childhood. ”

“ Oriani did not write any one novel that can be called a masterpiece, but in every one of his novels there are pages in which nature lives in its full freshness of sound and color, pages of relentless and cruel psychology in which the wretched souls of wretched men are revealed with a homicidal lucidity. When the definitive history of the Italian novel of the nineteenth century shall be written, the importance of Oriani will inevitably be recognized, and he will receive the place to which the profundity of his genius and the vigor of his art entitle him. ”

“ Dante knows that the world has not come to an end, that the roll of the dead is not yet complete; but he takes all peoples, all generations, from the Hebrew patriarchs to the leaders of his own day, and distributes them in the three realms even as God would have done. He takes the place of God, forestalls the great Assize, exalts to the spheres or thrusts down into infernal caverns the souls of cowardly Popes, proud emperors, rapacious captains, enamored ladies, saints and warriors, hermits and thinkers, poets and politicians. No one is overlooked. ”

“ But his dominant passion is painting: he marvels at the beauty of the visible world, he yearns continually to copy it, to make it over, to transfer its color and its charm to bits of canvas. In his most constant essence he is a man enamored of reality, and served by two eyes and a hand. He hungers for visual reality as a libertine for his prey, as a scholar for books, as a peasant for land. ”

“ Armando Spadini, like all who work by inspiration and by instinct rather than by deliberate will, is still a child, despite his five and thirty years; a child spoiled by life, by suffering, by men; a restless child, a melancholy child, but a child with all that is good and all that is ill in the madness and the divinity of childhood. He does not advance by plans and calculations, as do serious men, convinced seekers, self-made men. ”

“ Death and tragedy spring from the clash between passion and discipline. But today we have lost faith and morality. We have no law, no discipline: the myths and divinities of all the ages are dead and turned to clay. We are beyond struggle, beyond stageable tragedy, beyond the capacity for sharing with eager passion in the old dramatic antitheses. The drama is receding from us, and with it Shakespeare too recedes. ”

“ Think for a moment, think intensely of the real implications of these words: "The whole world is composed of spirit." All that had seemed solid and foreign becomes fluid, becomes immediately personal; the contrast between the ego and the world is diminished; the immense and formidable mass of matter is transmuted into a moving picture within the mind; the ego is no longer a drop in the sea or a leaf in the forest, but a marvelous mirror, able to create for itself the images that appear in it. You are master of the world; you hold within yourself the whole range of future possibility. ”

“ Remy de Gourmont wrote so much—and not always of his own free will or for his own pleasure—that one naturally finds passages which do not rest on thought, improvisations without structure. But if one follows the main brie of his thought, even in his fantastic deviations, even in the weary efforts of piece-work, one can trace a penetrating certainty, a thread woven of eagerly disinterested meditation, a sad and personal profundity under a surface so clear that there seems to be no substance beneath, a passionate pursuit of truth amid a nomadism that has the look of vagabondage. ”

“ Shakespeare refers to him in Love’s Labour Lost.
Mediocre enough as a poet, Maeterlinck has not even any great aptitude for metaphysics, whatever his French and German admirers may say. He is a parlor occultist, a moralist for old ladies, a syrupy philosopher, a friar without faith, a scientist without clearness, a poet without imagination, a casuist for idle consciences, a fakir of facile marvels. To read him after reading a great philosopher is like smoking opium after climbing a mountain. To read him after reading a great poet is like drinking a cup of camomile after a goblet of old wine. ”

“ But I have no use for the critics, and I have perfect faith in the multiplicity of my hero's faces. How noble and how beautiful his countenance! Sometimes he is represented as a gentleman deep in thought. Sometimes he is a pale youth seen in profile against a window. Sometimes he is a wise, mature man toying with a glove or a falcon. But you can always see in his face that aristocracy of soul and that natural reserve which have made him unwilling to let his name be trumpeted by the vulgar mouth of fame. ”

“ I intend no offense to free Switzerland, who calls herself free precisely because she has always sent her children to be the armed servants of the most reactionary kings of Europe, from the Bourbons of Paris to the Bourbons of Naples. And there can be no offense to any one in the statement of this historic truth: that since Switzerland (thanks to the apple of Tell) withdrew from European civilization, she has contributed little or nothing to that civilization. Not one great writer, not one great artist, not one great philosopher. ”

“ Despotism is the only practical ideal of anarchy. Alexander the Great, for instance, was far more free than any citizen of modern Europe, precisely because he stood alone, or almost alone, in the power to command and to possess. True individualism consists, then, in counseling subjection, not rebellion; in making slaves, not revolutionists; instruments, not critics. Individualism, the affirmation of full personal power, is in the nature of things reserved for the few, and it is well that the rest of mankind should not get the idea of liberty into their heads. ”

“ But we do not turn to a philosopher to learn that art is art, and that art is a portion of reality. So much we may infer for ourselves, with our own weak powers, even without recourse to Vico or to Baumgarten. From the philosopher we seek something more. We seek, for instance, some explanation of the phenomenon of art which shall be new and constructive even though it be incomplete. We seek primarily to ascertain whether or not there exists a sure and certain standard by which we may judge the beauty and the ugliness of works of art. But Croce gives us no help. ”

“ For Cosima-Ariadne was to him humanity itself, joyous, laughing, full of life and strength—that same humanity that had been the support of Wagner in his triumph.
For Nietzsche, that support had failed. His love had found no chance to spend itself in fullness and in liberty. It was indeed of love, shut in and unappeased, that Nietzsche died. We slew him—all of us—by our common human behavior. Nor will he be our last victim. ”

“ We are growing away from Shakespeare. That terrible old dramatic world of his, compact of grandeur and nocturnal dread, is beginning to make us smile. There is too much machinery and scene-painting in his work. We of today want things in essence. His fancy, even when it soars most wildly, is fashioned and controlled by the specific social forms of theatrical action. His lyric, even when it seems to win an independent life, is the poetry of an alchemist—ornate, Parnassian. It tends toward the madrigal and the tour de force. And we want things in their essence. The drama is composite. ”

“ Spadini does not turn, for elements of interest or novelty, to history, mythology, or legend, nor—as is now the fashion—to the composition and dissection of unusual objects, to the bones of manikins, to the deformations of still life, to the design of abstract forms. If painting is to be independent of its subject, there is no reason, so it seems to him, why he should not make use of the eternal model, the human figure. ”

“ But the true and complete artist—the lyrist, in short, whether he expresses himself in signs, in colors, or in words—is the rarest creature in the whole world. Few, indeed, are those who live from morning to night ready to see impartially and to express with utter truth.
Among these few Soffici is one of the most fortunate. Free and alone, a man of few needs, accustomed to a simple, wandering life, poverty has not defeated him, obscurity has not discouraged him. ”

“ In the sleepy world of modern philosophy F. C. S. Schiller stands for an idea which is very simple, and has for that very reason been long forgotten: the idea that theories should lead to practical results. Philosophy should be one of the moving forces of the world. Even speculative thought should be an instrument of change. Pure reason, rigid and static rationalism, and prudent objectivism are but myths or absurdities. There is no such thing as pure reason: reason is always impure, at least if one regards sentiment, purpose, and will, as elements of impurity. ”

“ Men who do not feel, as they read Whitman, that the flame of life grows broader and shines more brilliantly, as if it were carried into a better air, who are not conscious of an intense regret that it was not for them to know and embrace the author of certain of these songs, who are shocked by the coarseness, the violence, the shamelessness, the energy of the poems, and would have the man calmer and more refined, more prudent and less rough—such men understand Whitman not at all, will never understand him, and are not worthy to understand him. ”

“ The period we are wont to call the Renaissance appears, then, to be in certain respects a period of weakening and decline. And if Italy would return to a life more intense and more energetic than that which now she leads amid verbal pyrotechnics and the academic discourses of Parliament, she must resolutely expel the dangerous maladies which the Renaissance introduced into her blood, must return to deeper and more bitter springs, must forget the lust of ornament and the delights of rhetoric, must set herself to action rather than to speech, to new achievement rather than to admiration. ”

“ We are then in the realm of the elementary and savage law of retribution: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. But Prince Hamlet is by no means a primitive man. He has studied philosophy; he has spent the best years of his life amid the wisdom of Wittenberg; he is capable of general ideas. He therefore colors his vengeance with the motive of justice, and seeks to act not as a rabid brute, but as a man pure in the assurance and the majesty of his right. ”

“ To form a fair judgment of Spadini, one must know the man, and not merely his painting, which in itself might seem so facile and so commonplace as to deserve only a word and a glance. And the principle that you must know a man in order to understand his work has special force when that work is not the labored product of a brain, but a free expression of nature incarnate in a complete personality. ”

“ Nor does it avail to say that Shakespeare is modern and eternal, that his restlessness is our restlessness, that his fear is our fear. For we are changing, and those who are to come after us will change still more. Day by day we are becoming harder to satisfy, more refined, more discontented. Fewer things give us pleasure, and fewer still will please us as time goes on: a painful condition, but a condition that is inevitable if we are to create more than we have found, if we are to add new treasure to the inheritance we have received from those who, though dead, are yet immortal. ”

“ Here at last poetry is sound, color, form, word, a complex reflected image, an immense net of suggestions and reminiscences—freedom within an infinite wealth of forms and shadows. Soffici, with the sensitive spirit of the liberated lyrist, sets himself in the centre of the world, and so manipulates rays and gems and lights as to construct a super-universe more spiritual, more compact, more subtle, and more gorgeous than the real universe. ”

“ Shall we say that he disregards men? Not that, for an individualism which simply carried off a little slice of the world would be the individualism of a mole. The individualist considers men as servitors, as instruments to grasp, as animals to drive in leash, and not as objects of knowledge. In a word, your true individualist does not write history: he makes it. He lives the life of society, and does not stop to theorize. He is a Pandolfo Petrucci or a Napoleon, not a Comte or a Spencer. ”

“ Cervantes, a man of taste and imagination, knew, as all of us know, that every work of art is by its very nature improbable, even as all those lives and actions and works are improbable which rise above the surface of that round stagnant swamp in which we live. Even in the Don Quixote Cervantes, with the justice of a competent artist, saves and defends more than one romance of chivalry. The only ones he throws into the fire are those whose existence is not justified by beauty of expression and imagination. ”

“ Whitman is a good plebeian who sings unashamed all the things of the world. And the most significant counsel that he gives us—after the counsel that we love one another—is that we wash away the literary rheum that fills our eyes and keeps from us the sight of things as they are. We Italians—and not we alone—are too literary, too polite. We are gentlemen even in the presence of nature, which asks no compliments. We are gentlemen even within the world of poetry, which asks no elegance. ”

“ He is as greedy as a child, greedy not only for meat and wine, but for color and form. The world is to him an earthly paradise which he desires to clutch, to squeeze, to bite, to possess completely. Women, animals, plants, children: the nearest things, the things in reach, the things he can grasp most easily. His painting is a continual conquest, an almost sensual enjoyment renewed till weariness sets in. ”

“ In order to avoid compromising himself he attributes these mistakes to his madness. But they are not casual: they reveal the hidalgo as a critical and unprejudiced judge. In reality, so he thinks, soldiers are sheep led to the slaughter; lordly castles are but taverns in disguise, where hospitality must be paid for by servility; giants are windmills living on wind and theft; social status is no guarantee of purity; maids are quite as lovable as their mistresses; an ignorant peasant girl, if she be honest and unspoiled, may be the inspiration of a genius that can recognize her worth ”