Joseph Collins

“ In reality, he is but one of many who are proclaiming those tidings in Italy.
The distinction between what he would like to be and what he thinks he is, is not so marked as in more timid and less articulate souls. Substantially, it is this same calling of prophecy which is his aim. As for the man he is, time and his own accomplishments alone will show. Now, at the zenith of his creative power, he is still a man of promise, a carrier-pigeon freighted with an important message who, instead of delivering it, exhausts himself beating his wings in a luminous void. ”

“ The play to which he owed his first success, "A Game of Chess," had a remarkable career in Italy, and it still makes leading appeal to extravagant youth and romantic maturity, who see, in the lovely Iolande or in the dashing Fernando, prototypes who solve perplexing problems of life with an ease and readiness that is soul-satisfying. They also see in their experiences the smouldering or dying embers of their own passions, whose articulate breathings cause them to glow consumingly and pleasantly. ”

“ The day came when the conduct of a corrupt people in a decadent fictitious world no longer sufficed to divert him; having drunk from the poisoned springs of lust not only to satiety but to disgust, he, like his prototype of Huysmans's creation, "Des Esseintes," the Thebaide raffinée of "A Rebours," must hide himself away far from the world, in some retreat where he might deaden the discordant sounds of the rumblings of inflexible life, as one deadens the street with straw where an important or beloved one is sick. ”

“ This is not due entirely to the war. The war minted the meanings, but the gold was ready for the stamp. Liberty has come to mean that woman and man are not only equal before God but that they are equal before man. And, now that this admission has been wrung from unwilling man and imposed upon governments one after the other, what kind of a life do we wish? What are our visions? What are our sane and legitimate aspirations? Are we willing to yield supinely to the tyranny of state or of money? Are we content further to tolerate the infirmities and impotency of present-day education? ”

“ The purpose of fiction may be manifold, but it is read chiefly for distraction and diversion. The critic and interpreter read it to get the temper of the public mind and the trend of its projection, but the purchaser of it reads it to get surcease of the woes of life, whether they be the ruts worn by operating the daily treadmill or the despondencies thrust upon him by circumstances more inexorable than the tigers of Hyrcania. It is not likely that the occurrences in the life of another commonplace individual even though they are pieced with fiction will suffice to provide this. ”

“ I marvel how men in public life stand banquets, especially Italians, who take to them like babes to mothers' milk. I fancy they often long for a succulent chop and a baked potato, with a tray for mahogany and a book for company! But the banchetto gives them an alluring arena for oratory, and my deliberate conviction is that the Italian has more pleasure in speaking than in any other voluntary act. ”

“ She recalls also that when the Hague Tribunal practically decided in her favor, neither France nor England displayed the slightest graciousness.
Despite these stabs of yesterday, Italy must purge herself of distrust, which is the ferment and leaven of weakness. She must make good her alleged trust of France, her professed confidence in England, her hail of the United States as her deliverer. It is difficult for me to believe that often she has not had one language on her lips and another in her heart. The time has come when she must make the words of her heart and her tongue one. ”

“ In this state of mock humility he wrote: "I always feel above me the presence of the sacrifice of Christ. I see now that the glory of my life is not in the beauty of my possessions. I have never felt so miserable and at the same time so powerful. Never since I lived have I had within me an instinct, a need so deep and so storming. I am aware that a part of my being, maybe the best part, is deeply asleep within me." ”

“ To get the confidence of an individual or a country you must trust them, and the more implicitly you trust the greater will be the confidence and the finer the quality. Every one knows that Italy's alliance with Austria was an unnatural one and the majority of her people have always believed that the issue of it would be disastrous. Even the most shallow student of history knows that Austria stood menacingly over Italy during the entire period of the unholy alliance, but never more insultingly so than in 1912, when she veritably defended Turkey, while Italy was at war with that country. ”

“ If we had entered the war after the sinking of the Lusitania, when the wise men of the West say we should have gone in, countless lives and inestimable expenditures would have been spared. Where is the man in the United States of America to-day who has revealed the Jove-like mind that entitles him to make such sentient statement? When he is found, how can he possibly know? What delivery of thought, idea, conception, execution has he ever made that entitles him to be heard, not to say believed? ”

“ I am railing against those who believe that there should be one code of so-called morality for men and an entirely different one for women. If the code that is practically universally accepted to-day is proper for men, it is likewise proper for women, and I want to live to see the day when women will have as much freedom in their conduct in every walk of life as men have. The idea that woman's life centres in motherhood and that all her instincts and desires are directed, consciously or unconsciously, to that end is buncombe. ”

“ If Petronius was a good man, if he loved his fellow men, and if he did all that was within his power to do to make them better men, more capacious for a full life here and more worthy of eternal life, why should they not allow him to enjoy his reward in the bosom of the Lord? How can they enhance his happiness, what does mankind gain by taking the semblance of that which once formed a framework for his spirit and transferring it from one vessel to another while mumbling or chanting over it? ”

“ In recent days there have been countless numbers on this western continent who feel that Italy has not had recognition from the world of her decision, her valor, and her accomplishment in shaping the World War to a successful end. Their interest in her has been quickened and their pride enhanced. They look forward with confidence to the time when she will again have a measure of that supremacy in the field of art and literature which once made her the cynosure of all eyes, the loadstone of all hearts. ”

“ It is a true eucharistic sacrament, the closest and most complete communion of the spirit with beautiful Italy. There is no need of consecrating words; the tricolor wafer was converted through our faith into the living beauty of our country. We are purified, we are sundered from the shore and from our daily habits, separated from the land and all vulgar cares, from our homes and from all useless idleness, from profane love and all base desires; we are immune from the thought of return. ”

“ He knows that contests and strife elicit his most deforming qualities—intolerance, arrogance, and emotional sterility; hence he hedges himself about in every possible way to avoid them. He knows that the sure way for him is to play the game alone.
Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He loves them in the abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their destiny, their travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities, and prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal to him. ”

“ In the ecstasy of discovery he cannot resist smashing the idol of yesterday that his pedestal may be free for the more worthy one of to-day, and he cannot inhibit the impulse to rush off to the composing-rooms of La Voce to register his emotions in print.
In his desire to be famous he reminds one of those individuals who would be liked by every one, and who will do anything save cease making the effort. Pretending that he loves to have people hate him, he does not, but he would rather have hate and disparagement than indifference or neglect. ”

“ Intelligent, educated men who have never seen him, who know little of his career save that he was president of Princeton University and governor of the State of New Jersey and twice President of the United States, elected by the Democratic party, hate him as if he were a bitter personal enemy, malign him as if he had injured their reputation for honesty and probity, calumniate him as though he were a man without character, depreciate him as though his career were barren of signal accomplishment, and distrust his motives and procedures as though he had once, or many times, betrayed them. ”

“ Like this school the self-styled futuristic writers of Italy revolt against rhetoric and against tradition. Therefore they reject equally the ardent classicism of Carducci and D'Annunzio's decadent blend of idealism and realism, the crass, slavish Gallicism of Brocchi, the Scandinavian genuflections of Bracco and the Shavian imitations of Pirandello. In protest against all these they seek the full liberty of the written word, as the evangel of socialism seeks the liberty of the individual. ”

“ It is not sufficient that the principles of nationality defined by Mazzini shall be upheld—that is, that the peoples of one nationality shall not be dominated by the peoples of another. It is necessary, if such peoples are going to live in freedom, that they must not be dominated or enslaved by any mastodonic power which is protected from attack, such as capital. Had it not been for the determination of the people to have the right to live in freedom, the miracle that transpired in the closing months of 1918 in Europe would not have been wrought. ”

“ The time has come when the people are going to rule the world. They are going to administer its affairs in such a way that every man and woman capable of taking thought will have opportunity to be heard and will be privileged to live without authority, whose purpose it is to make the masses conform to a line of conduct that will make for the advantage of the few, favored by birth or fortune which may have been their birthright or their acquisition. For years the word socialism and that for which it stands have been redolent of bad odor. ”

“ Shall we be willing to submit to the restrictions that are put upon us by law and covenant concerning marriage and its entailments? Shall we bow down to autocratic governments whose rulers claim, and apparently have their claims allowed, to have divine guidance? Shall we be content with the concentration of property or of private capitalistic enterprise? Shall we be callous enough to see countless thousands of God's own, the poor, deprived of the advantages of food and clothing, education and the gifts of hygiene—in brief, of everything that makes life worth living? ”

“ She may not be designing in a malignant sense; she may merely enjoy the display of power. It is remarkable what a sentimentalist will put up with in the shape of indignity and inefficiency rather than run the risk of being impaired in the esteem of one who has this kind of influence over him. Emerson, one of our deepest thinkers, said: "Man is the will and woman is the sentiment. In this ship of humanity will is the rudder and sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only the masked sail." ”

“ I doubt that praise was ever given so lavishly, so widely, and so unjustifiably as was given to this series of romances, which to-day, a generation after their publication, are as constant a reminder of a wayward step which Italian literature took at the end of the nineteenth century as the linea alba on the torso of a woman whose reputation for virtue is established and admitted reminds her of a faux pas of her youth. ”

“ He is like a bird in a cage and he feels that he must beat down the barriers in order to accomplish freedom, but when they are fractured and he is apparently free there is no sense of liberation. He is in a far more secure prison than he was before, and to make matters worse he cannot now distinguish the barriers that obstacle his freedom. The wonder is not that a man of the temperament and intellectual endowment of Signor Papini has this feeling, but that he can convince himself that any one else should be interested in his discovery. ”

“ In addition to this, he has an extraordinary sense of the fantastic, the grotesque, the panoplied. His eye is microscopic and his mind is telescopic, and his soul waves tend to a rhythm which is akin to that of genius when he reveals them and describes them to others, as he does, for instance, in the "Villa Celeste" ("The Celestial House") ; the average man (who is attuned to interpret some poetic waves) realizes that the soul of this young man is the generating station of genuine poetical energy. He puts a reflector before his soul and it reflects the waves in our direction. ”

“ If there were any indications of sincere desire to establish an honest form of democratic government in Germany, there is no doubt that its originators and the whole German people would soon realize that they were dealing with a magnanimous conqueror, but in view of the fact that the wild beast has now in its agonal days the same snarl, the same venom, and the same sharp teeth that it had when it was lusty and well-nourished, it is necessary that the conquerors should harden their hearts and judiciously guard the springs and cisterns of their generosity. ”

“ He told me what he knew about the frescoes; he bemoaned the evil days upon which the world had fallen, and he expressed the hope that peace and tranquillity would soon again be ours; but when I attempted to talk to him about the significance of the war and the universal awakement to man's rights that would flow from it, I found that his comments were ejaculatory and that his reflections had no root in thought or reason. It is incredible that a person so naïve and so lacking in every display of intelligence, culture, and perspicacity can be a spiritual teacher or guide. ”

“ In his literary ruminations he has come upon the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which set forth the purpose and teachings of our Lord and which have convinced countless living and dead of His divinity. We must forswear egocentrism; we must stop making obeisance to materialism; we must cease striving for success, comfort, or power. Such efforts led to the massacre of yesterday, to the agony of to-day, and are conditioning our eternal perdition. Salvation is within ourselves, the Kingdom of Heaven is within our hearts, he who seeks it without is a blind man led by a blind guide. ”

“ Even below the stature of the average Italian of the South, the large, shapely, and well-poised head, surmounted with thick, closely cropped gray hair brushed pompadour, the sparkling eyes, ruddy face, and genial expression give you at once the feeling that you are in the presence of a man of power, of resourcefulness, and of facility. No one could mistake that he is a man of the people. ”

“ Opponents of feminism have busied themselves with extraordinary industry and tireless assiduity to point out the differences between man and woman, always to the disadvantage of the latter. Their mental endowment is inferior to man; their physical strength is less; their moral caliber more attenuated; their emotional nature shallower. Why should any one take the trouble to deny any of these? He who maintains that every specimen of the human species endowed with average reasoning power should live in the enjoyment of freedom and liberty should not allow himself the trouble of denying them. ”

“ He has seen fit to publish them without saying whether it was art or bread that was the incentive, and they constitute a serious charge against society. The wonder is that if such things exist the social fabric conserves the appearance of well-being. In truth, life is not a mask behind which the wearer laughs, if this diary is to be believed. It is in reality a tragedy made up of a tissue of hypocrisies, banalities, sordid commonplaces, inimical to joy, subversive of pleasure, and destructive of happiness. ”

“ What will this new world that is arisen from the destruction of empires and from the ashes of tyrannical institutions be like? In what way will it be better and more satisfying than the one that existed previous to the war? What are the benefits that will flow from the sacrifices that have been made? What are the rewards that will follow the labor and effort expended to win the war? ”

“ At the same time no one can abrogate the right of the conquerors to see to it that the form of government which she institutes and which she attempts to carry into operation shall not be one that militates against the success of the ideals for which the Allies have striven, not for themselves alone but for the whole world. It needs no prophetic vision to discern in the expressions of dictatorial arrogance of those who have taken the government in hand in Germany the same assumption of superiority which led to their defeat, the greatest the world has ever seen. ”

“ From that period until to-day Carducci's fame as a poet has steadily gained ground in Italy, so that it is no exaggeration to say that many accord him the crown worn by Petrarch and Tasso. Those who fulsomely praise his memory see in him not only a poet but a learned man who was able to strain classic erudition through his understanding mind to such effect that the average individual could avail himself of it to satisfaction and to advantage. They also see in him the noblest work of God, an honest man. ”