Idling in Italy Part 4

Signor Papini is an interesting literary figure, particularly as a sign of the times. During the past generation there has been in Italy a profound revolt against what may be called satisfaction with and reverence for past performances and against slavish subscription to French, German, and Russian realism. It is to a group of writers who call themselves Futurists and who see in the designation praise rather than opprobrium that this salutary, beneficial, and praiseworthy movement is due.

Signor Papini has publicly read himself out of the party, but apostasy of one kind or another is almost as necessary to him as food, and most people still regard him as a Futurist, though he refuses to subscribe to the clause in the const.i.tution of the literary Futurists of Italy bearing on love, published by their monarch Signor Marinetti in that cla.s.sic of Futuristic literature "Zang Tumb Tumb" and in "Democrazia Futurista."

It is now twenty years since there appeared unheralded in Florence a literary journal called the Leonardo, whose purpose in the main seemed to be to overthrow certain philosophic and socialistic doctrines, Positivism and Tolstoian ethics. The particularly noteworthy articles were signed Gian Falco. It soon became known that the writer was one Giovanni Papini, a contentious, self-confident youth of peculiarly inquisitive turn of mind, and of sensitiveness bordering on the pathological, an omnivorous reader, an aggressive debater. He was hailed by a group of youthful literary enthusiastics as a man of promise.

In the twenty years that have elapsed since then he has written more than a score of books, short stories, essays, criticisms, poetry, polemics, some of which, such as "L'Uomo Finito" ("The Played-Out Man"), "Venti Quattro Cervelli" ("Twenty-four Minds"), and "Cento Pagine di Poesia" ("One Hundred Pages of Poetry"), have been widely read in Italy and have known several editions. Save for a few short stories, he has not appeared in English, though there seems to be propaganda in his behalf directed by himself and by his friends of his publis.h.i.+ng-house in Florence to make him known to foreigners. Like other Italian propaganda it has not been very successful and this is to be regretted. It is due in part to the fact his advocates have claimed too much for him.

Signor Papini is like Mr. Arnold Bennett in that they both know the reading public are personally interested in authors. From the beginning he and his friends have capitalized his poverty of pulchritude and his pulchritudinous poverty. Signor Giuseppe Prezzolini, in a book ent.i.tled "Discorso su Giovanni Papini" has devoted several pages to his person, which, he writes, "is like those pears, coa.r.s.e to the touch but sweet to the palate," yet I am moved to say that the eye long habituated to resting lovingly upon somatic beauty does not blink nor is it pained when it rests upon Giovanni Papini.

In one of his latest books-it is never safe to say which is really his last, unless you stand outside the door of the bindery of La Voce-in one of his latest books, ent.i.tled "Testimonials," the third series of "Twenty-four Brains," he reverts to this, and says that his person is "so repugnant that Mirabeau, world-famed for his ugliness, was compared with him an Apollo."

He does not get the same exquisite pleasure from deriding his qualities of soul, but, as the face is the mirror of the soul, no one is astonished to learn that "this same Papini is the gangster of literature, the tough of journalism, the Barabbas of art, the dwarf of philosophy, the straddler of politics, and the Apache of culture and learning." Nevertheless, no prudent, sensitive man should permit himself to say this or anything approximating it in Papini's hearing, for not only has he a card index of substantives that convey derogation, but he has perhaps the fullest a.r.s.enal of adjectives in Italy, and has habituated himself to the use of them, both with and without provocation.

I have been told by his schoolmates and by those whom he later essayed to teach that as a youth he was inquisitive about the nature of things and objects susceptible to physical and chemical explanation. His writings indicate that his real seduction was conditioned by philosophic questions. Early in life he displayed a symptom which is common to many psychopaths-an uncontrollable desire to read philosophical writers beyond their comprehension. In the twenty years that he has been publis.h.i.+ng books he has constantly returned to this practice, as shown by his "Twilight of the Philosophers," "The Other Half," and "Pragmatism."

His first articles in the Leonardo, which now make up the volume known as "Il Tragico Quotidiano e il Pilota Cieco" ("The Tragedy of Every Day and the Blind Pilot"), are sketches and fantasies of a personal kind, some of them fanciful and charming, some with a touch of inspired extravagance that recall Baudelaire and Poe, and faintly echo Oscar Wilde's "Bells and Pomegranates," Dostoievsky's "Poor People," and Leonida Andreieff's "Little Angel." Some of the stories have a weird touch. Others are founded in obsession that form the ancillae of psychopathy. Take, for instance, the man with a feeling of unreality who did not really exist in flesh and blood but was only a figure in the dream of some one else, and who felt that he would be vivified if only he could find the sleeper and arouse him. This idea is not of infrequent occurrence in that strange disorder, dementia prec.o.x; take again the man who found his life dull and who covenanted with a novelist to do his bidding in exchange for being made an interesting character; and the two men who changed souls; and the talks with the devil interpreting scripture. All these awaken an echo in the reader's mind of either having been heard before or they bring the hope that they never will be heard again.

Although his early writings had an arresting quality, it was not until he undertook to edit some Italian cla.s.sics published under the t.i.tle of "I Nostri Scrittori" ("Our Writers") that they began to take on the features that have since become characteristic and which have been described by his admirers as "rugged, vigorous, virile, rich, neologistic," and everything else the ant.i.thesis of p.u.s.s.y-foot. This feature, if feature it can be called, showed itself first in "L'Uomo Finito," a book which is admitted to be an autobiography. It introduces us to an ugly, sensitive, introspective, mentally prehensile child of shut-in personality who is not only egocentric at seven but who loves and exalts himself and despises and disparages others.

This unlovable child with an insatiate appet.i.te for information found his way to a public library and determined to write an encyclopaedia of all knowledge. His juvenile frenzy came its first cropper when he reached the letter "B," and he was submerged with the Bible and with G.o.d. The task was too big, he had to admit, but his ambition to accomplish some great and thorough piece of work was undaunted. He began a compendium of religions, then of literature, and last of the Romance languages.

These successive attempts at completeness are typical of Papini's far-reaching ambitions. "The Played-Out Man" is a record of his plunge into one absorption after another. He discovered evil, and planned not only individual suicide but suicide of the people en ma.s.se. Next came the desire for love. His instincts were of a sort not to be satisfied by the conventional sweetness of "I Promessi Sposi," but from Poe, Walt Whitman, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, and Anatole France he got a vicarious appeas.e.m.e.nt of the sentiment he craved. Then he encountered "dear Julian." "We never kissed each other and we never cried together," but he could not forgive Julian for allowing his friend to learn of his matrimony only through the Corriere della Sera.

The brief emotional episode past, Papini's life interest swung back to philosophy. He discovered Monism, and believed it like a religion. Then Kant became his ideal, then Berkeley, Mill, Plato, Locke, culminating in the glorified egotism of Max Stirner. After Stirner philosophy has no more to say. Down with it all! It is necessary to liberate the world from the yoke of these mumblers, just as Papini has liberated himself. But how to do it! Ah, yes! Found a journal that will purge the world of its sins, as the Great Revolution purged France of royalty.

Thus Papini's literary work had its beginning. It takes several tempestuous chapters of the autobiography to describe the launching of the Leonardo by himself and a few congenial souls. Nine numbers marked the limit of its really vigorous life, but it ran, with Papini as its chief source of material, for five years. Ultimately, with the dissipation of the author's youthful energy, this child of his bosom had to be interred. But Papini still goes to its grave.

The tumultuous, introspective life of the author continued. He went through a period of self-pity and neurasthenia, then one of intense hero-wors.h.i.+p directed toward all radicals, including William James, whom he had once seen was.h.i.+ng his neck. Then came an immense desire for action, hindered, however, by the fact that the author could not decide whether to found a school of philosophy, become the prophet of a religion, or go into politics. His only inherent conviction concerns the stupidity of the world and his own calling to rise above it. This long, internal history ends with a period of sweeping depression, out of which the author at last emerges with the intense conviction that he is not, after all, played out, that there is still matter in him to give the world. He feels welling up within him a stream of arrogance and self-confidence that is not to be dammed. He has not yet delivered his message; people have not yet understood him.

"They cannot grasp it, cannot bear to listen.

The thing I have to tell, unthought before, Demands another language."

So he goes back to the market-place of Florence, shouting: "I have not finished. I am not played out. You shall see." And it is at this stage that Signor Papini's work now stands. We wait to see.

The "L'Uomo Finito" is Signor Papini's G. P. No. 2. It is not fiction in the ordinary use of the term; any more than "Undying Fire" of Mr. Wells is. In a measure it is fiction like "The Way with All Flesh" of Samuel Butler. But in point of interest and workmans.h.i.+p it is far inferior to the former and in purposefulness, character delineation, orientation, resurrection, and reform it is not to be compared with the latter.

Although it is the book by which Signor Papini is best known, it is not his love-child. "The Twilight of the Philosophers" is. He is proud to call it his intellectual biography, but it would be much truer to call it an index of his emotional equation. "This is not a book of good faith. It is a book of pa.s.sion, therefore of injustice, an unequal book, partisan, without scruples, violent, contradictory, unsolid, like all books of those who love and hate and are not ashamed of their love or their hatred." This is the introductory paragraph of the original preface.

In reality it is a cross between a philosophic treatise and a popular polemic, with the technical abstruseness of the one and the pa.s.sion of the other, and its purpose is to show that all philosophy is vain and should make way for action. Although it indicates wide and attentive reading and a certain erudition, the only indication of constructive thought that it reveals is a rudimentary attempt to adjust the philosophic system of each man to the temperamental bias of the author. Others, Santayana for instance, have done this so much better that there is scarcely justification for his pride. He could have carried his point quite as successfully by stating it as by laboring it through a whole volume devoted largely to railing both at philosophers and at their philosophy.

From the point of view of the philosopher this book is "popular." From the standpoint of the people it is "philosophical." It is really a testimonial to the author's breathless state of emotional unrest. 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.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words, and the mistake is to consider words linked up as subject, predicate, and object, especially if the substantives are qualified by lurid adjectives, the equivalent of knowledge. He knows the "ars scrivendi" as Aspasia knew the "ars amandi"; Papini knows the value of symbolic, eye-arresting, suggestive t.i.tles. He realizes the importance of overstatement and of exaggerated emphasis; he is cognizant of the insatiateness of the average human being for gossip and particularly gossip about the great; he recognizes that there is no more successful way of flattering the mediocre than by pointing out to him the shortcomings of the G.o.ds, for thus does he identify their possessions with his own and convince himself that he also is a G.o.d. Papini's sensitive soul whispers to him that the majority of people will think him brave, courageous, valorous, resolute, virtuous, and firm if he will adopt a certain pose, a certain manner, a certain swagger that will convey his grim determination to carry his mission to the world though it takes his last breath, the last glow of his mortal soul.

"They wished me to be a poet; here, therefore, is a little poetry," is the opening line of his book called "Cento Pagine di Poesia," and this, though not in verse, is characterized by such imaginative beauty, more in language, however, than in thought, that it is worthy to be called a poem. More than any other of his books it reveals the real Papini. Here he is less truculent, less Nietzschian, less self-conscious of understudying and attempting to act the parts of Jove. He is more like the Papini that he is by nature, and therefore more human, more kind and gentle-would I could add modest-more potent and convincing, than in any of his other books. It is especially in the third part, under the general t.i.tle of "Precipitations," that the author gives the freest rein to his fantasy and is not always endeavoring to explain or tell the reason why, but abandons himself to the production of words which will present rhythmically the emotions that are springing up within him. It is difficult to believe that the same hand penned these poems and the open letter to Anatole France beginning: "In these days Anatole France is in Rome, and perhaps returning he will stop in Florence, but I beg him fervently not to seek me out. I could not receive him." That quality of delusion of grandeur I have seen heretofore only in victims of a terrible disease.

Signor Papini is never so transparent as he is in his "Stroncatura" and in his excursions into the realm of philosophy. His attack on Nietzsche is most illuminating. In fact, Giovanni Papini is Frederick Nietzsche viewed through an inverted telescope. "Nietzsche's volubility (indication of easy fatigue) makes him prefer the fragmentary and aphoristic style of expression; his incapacity to select from all that which he has thought and written leads him to publish a quant.i.ty of useless and repeated thought; his reluctance to synthetize, to construct, to organize, which gives to his books an air of oriental stuff, a mixture of old rags and of precious drapery, jumbled up without order, are the best arguments for imputing to him a deficiency of imperial mentality, a reflex of the general weakness of philosophy. But the most unexpected proof of this weakness consists in his incapacity to be truly and authentically original. The highest and most difficult forms of originality are certainly these two: to find new interpretation and solution of old problems, to pose new problems and to open streets absolutely unknown."

No one can examine closely the writings of Signor Papini without recognizing that he has shown himself incapable of selecting from that which he has written and thought and of setting it forth as a statement of his philosophy or as an Apologia pro Sua Vita. Constant republication of the same statements and the same ideas dressed up with different synonyms is a charge that can be brought with justice. It can be substantiated not only by his books but by La Vraie Italie, an organ of intellectual liaison between Italy and other countries directed by Signor Papini, which had a brief existence in 1919, a considerable portion of which was taken up with republication of the old writings of the director.

Even the most intemperate of his admirers would scarcely contend that he merits being called original, judged by his own standards. At one time in his life Nietzsche was undoubtedly his idol, and I can think of the juvenile Papini No. 3 suggesting that he model himself after the Teutonic descendant of Pasiphae and the bull of Poseidon. Thus did he appease his morbid sensitiveness and soothe his pathological erethism by enveloping himself in an armor made up of rude and uncouth words, of sentiment and of disparagement; of raillery against piety, reverence, and faith; of contempt for tradition. In fact, he seemed equipped with a special apparatus for pulling roots founded in the tender emotions. He would pretend that he is superior to the ordinary mortal to whom love in its various display, sentiment in its manifold presentations, dependence upon others in its countless aspects are as essential to happiness as the breath of the nostrils is essential to life. In secret, however, he is not only dependent upon it, he is beholden to it.

When he a.s.sumes his most callous and indifferent air, when he is least cognizant of the sensitiveness of others, when in brief he is speaking of his fellow countrymen, Signore D'Annunzio, Mazzoni, Bertacchi, Croce, and up until recently when he speaks of G.o.d or religion, he reminds me of that extraordinary and inexplicable type of individual whom we have had "in our midst" since time immemorial, but who had greater vogue in the time of Petronius than he has to-day.

Although the majority of these persons are au fond proud of their endowment, the world at large scoffs at them; and in primitive countries such as our own it kicks at them; therefore they are quick to see the advantage of a.s.suming an air of cra.s.s indifference and, with the swagger of the social corsair, to express a brutal insensitiveness to the aesthetic and the hedonistic to which in reality they vibrate. They never deceive themselves, and Signor Papini does not deceive himself. He knows his limitations, and the greatest of them are that he is timid, lacking in imagination, in sense of humor, and in originality. He is as dependent upon love as a baby is upon its bottle.

When writing about himself he hopes the reader will identify him only with the characters whose thoughts and actions are flattering, but the real man is to be identified with some of the characters whom he desires his public to think fict.i.tious. In one of his short stories he narrates a visit to a world-famed literary man. He describes his trip to the remote city that he may lay the modest wreath plated from the pride of his mind and his heart at the feet of his idol. He finds him a commonplace, almost undifferentiated lump of clay with a more commonplace, slatternly wife and even more hopelessly commonplace children. His repute is dependent wholly upon the skill with which he manipulates a card index and pigeon-holes. Papini fled to escape contemplation of himself and the fragments of the sacred vessel.

Signor Papini has been an omnivorous reader along certain lines; he has been a tireless writer, and he is notorious for his neologistic logorrhea, but the possession which stands in closest relation to his literary reputation is his indexed collection of words, phrases, and sentences. This, plus knowing by heart the poetry of Carducci, and his envy of Benedetto Croce for having obtained the repute of being one of the most fertile philosophic minds of his age, and his advocacy of the gospel of strenuousness, is the framework upon which he has ensheathed his house of letters.

No study of the man or of his work can neglect one aspect of his career-his constant change of position. He knocks with breathless anxiety at the door of some new world, and no sooner does he secure entrance and see the pleasant valley of Hinnom than he feels the lure of black Gehenna and is seized with an uncontrollable desire to explore it. When he returns he hastens to the public forum and announces his discoveries, preferring to tell of the gewgaws which he discovered than to expatiate on the few jewels which he gathered.

His last production augurs well for him, because it indicates that finally he will bathe in the pool of the five porches at Jerusalem, the World War having troubled its water instead of an angel. November 30, 1919, he published in the most widely circulated and influential newspaper of Central Italy, the Resto del Carlino, an article ent.i.tled "Amore e Morte" ("Love and Death"), which sets forth that he has had that experience which the Christian calls "seeing a great light, knowing a spiritual reincarnation," and which those whom Papini has been supposed to represent call a pitiable defalcation, a spiritual bankruptcy.

On February 21, 1913, he proclaimed in the Costanzi Theatre of Rome that "in order to reach his power man must throw off religious faith, not only Christianity or Catholicism, but all mystic, spiritualistic, theosophic faiths and beliefs." Now he has discovered Jesus. 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 ma.s.sacre 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. The road over which we must travel is bordered on either side by seductive pastures from which gush life-giving springs, topped with luxurious trees of soul-satisfying color that protect from the blazing sun or the congealing wind, and on either side are pathways so softly cus.h.i.+oned that even the most tender feet may tread them without fear of wound or blister. The sign-posts to this road are the four little volumes written two thousand years ago.

No one unfamiliar with that strange disorder of the mind called the manic depressive psychosis can fully understand Signor Papini. There is no one more sane and businesslike than the former Futurist, yet the reactions of his supersensitive nature have some similarity with this mental condition present, in embryo, in many people. In that mysterious malady there is a period of emotional, physical, and intellectual activity that surmounts every obstacle, brushes aside every barrier, leaps over every hurdle. During its dominancy the victim respects neither law not convention; the goal is his only object. He doesn't always know where he is going and he isn't concerned with it; he is concerned only with going. When the spectator sees the road over which he has travelled on his winged horse he finds it littered with the debris that Pegasus has trampled upon and crushed.

This period of hyperactivity is invariably followed by a time of depression, of inadequacy, of emotional barrenness, of intellectual sterility, of physical impotency, of spiritual frigidity. The sun from which the body and the soul have had their warmth and their glow falls below the horizon of the unfortunate's existence and he senses the terrors of the dark and the rigidity of beginning congelation. Then, when hope and warmth have all but gone and only life, mere life without color or emotion remains, and the necessity of living forever in a world perpetually enshrouded in darkness with no differentiation in the debris remaining after the tornado, then the sun gradually peeps up, illuminates, warms, revives, fructifies the earth, and the sufferer becomes normal-normal save in the moments or hours of fear when he contemplates having again to brave the hurricane or to breast the deluge. But once the wind begins to blow with a velocity that bespeaks the readvent of the tornado, he throws off inhibition and goes out in the open, holds up the torch that shall light the whole world, and with his megaphone from the top of Helicon shouts: "This way to the revolution."

In a relative sense, this is the mode of Signor Papini. He is fascinated by the beauty and perfections of an individual or of a school and he will enroll himself a member, but before he gets thoroughly initiated he gets word of another individual or another school which must be investigated. In the intoxication he defames and often slays his previous mistress. Thus his whole life has been given to the task of discovering a new philosophy, a new poetry, a new romance, a new prophecy, and their makers. In the ecstasy of discovery he cannot resist smas.h.i.+ng 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. He desires power, that unattainable he will be satisfied with notoriety. He does not agree with a fellow poet that

"On stepping stones we reach to higher dreams, And ever high and higher must we climb, Casting aside our burdens as we go, Till we have reached the mountain-tops sublime, Where purged from care and dross the free winds flow."

Were he a genius and at the same time had the industry that he has displayed, he would be the equal of H. G. Wells, possibly the peer of Bernard Shaw, but he is neither. He is simply a clever, industrious, versatile, sensitive, emotional man of forty, whose mental juvenility tends to cling to him. He has so long habituated himself to overestimation and his admiring friends have been so injudicious in praising his productions for qualities which they do not possess and neglecting praiseworthy qualities which they do possess, that he is like an object under a magnifying-gla.s.s out of focus.

But, as Papini himself says, he has not finished. He is still comparatively a young man and the world awaits his accomplishment. If the function he has chosen is that of agitation rather than construction, of preparation rather than of building, he cannot be totally condemned for that. His environment is in a condition where much destruction is necessary before anything real can be evolved. And as the apostle of this destruction Papini must be accepted. He stands as a prophet, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 'Prepare ye the way-'"; and the generations will show whether it is indeed a highway he has opened.

CHAPTER VI TWO NOISY ITALIAN SCHOOLMASTERS

The most diverting and conspicuous figures in the literary world of Italy to-day are two old school-teachers, Alfredo Panzini, humanist, and Luigi Pirandello, satirist. Both of them have earned a permanent fame and their fecundity seems to be increasing with age.

Alfredo Panzini, a pedagogue by profession, is a writer by dint of long training. Born in Senigaglia, a small town in the Province of Ancona, in 1863, he called Carducci master. After serving a long literary apprentices.h.i.+p compiling grammars, readers, dictionaries, anthologies, his name began to appear in journals and magazines, and gradually he has forged his way to the front rank as an episodist, an interpreter of the feelings and sentiments of the average man and woman and their spokesman, and as a master of prose.

In appearance he is a typical lower middle-cla.s.s Italian, short, stout, and ruddy, a kindly, benevolent face, with contented eyes that look at you uninquiringly from behind gold-rimmed spectacles. One might gather from looking at him that he had asked but little from the world and got more than he asked.

His writings display an intimate familiarity with a few cla.s.sic writers, especially of Greece and Italy, which he reveals by frequent and appropriate quotations and references, contrasting the sayings and doings of the venerated ancients with those of the not always deprecated modern. He knows the emotional desires and reactions of the average man; he senses his aspirations and his appeas.e.m.e.nts; he has keen understanding of his virtues and his infirmities. He knows his potential and actual pleasures, and he reveals this understanding of his fellows to us in a diverting and instructive way and at the same time shows us idealistic vistas of life and conduct that are most refres.h.i.+ng. It is to be regretted that he is not equally enlightened about women. If he knows their aspirations he denies the legitimacy of them; if he discerns their future he refuses to forecast it; if he knows feminine psychology his writings do not reveal it. He is the traveller ascending from the plains whose pleasure is in looking backward to survey the paths over which he has travelled, to describe the beauty of the country and its a.s.sociations, and to moralize about them. Elevations in front of him from which one may legitimately antic.i.p.ate more comprehensive vistas he refuses to consider, or, if constrained to do so, denies that what shall be seen from them will compare with what he sees and has seen.

His two most successful and commendable books are "La Lanterna di Diogene" ("Diogenes' Lantern") and "Xantippe." The first is a narrative of sentimental wandering in which he describes the commonplace world and the homely conflict of those whom he encounters, and in which he displays not only tolerance, but love of his fellow men. He is sometimes playful, more often ironical, but never disparaging or vituperative, and his prose is clear, limpid-sometimes, indeed, sparkling.

His "Xantippe" does not deal particularly with the virtues or infirmities of that renowned shrew. It recounts many incidents in the life, trial, and incarceration of Socrates which, while still redounding to his fame, are made to show by contrasting them with man's conduct and customs to-day the weaknesses, inconsistencies, and fallacies of many conventions of the twentieth century.

"Il Viaggio di un Povero Letterato" ("The Wanderings of a Poor Writer") shows the same simple-minded, charming vagabondage as "Diogenes' Lantern." It was published in 1912, when many readers did not share his distrust of Germany or hold with him in his forecasts. Many of his statements are to-day prophecies fulfilled.

It is not an imaginary man of letters who starts on a trip in obedience to a doctor's orders. It is Alfredo Panzini, exhausted from many labors. He goes wherever his fancy takes him, to Vicenza, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, and it is with the literary memories of these places that he is chiefly concerned. At Pisa it is Leopardi, Sh.e.l.ley, and Byron; at Vicenza, Fogazzaro; but at Bologna the memories become more personal. Here he sat at the feet of Carducci and learned to love and respect him; here his budding fancies first showed indications of blooming; here he first essayed amatory flights. He chances upon an old flame of his student days leading the old life in the old home, except that she had taken to writing poems and insists on having his opinion of them. His account of how he succeeded in meeting her wishes and still maintained his self-respect is a masterpiece of ingenuousness. The least thing suffices to start a train of thought and reflection or to decide his next tarrying-place. The volume ends with an interesting account of a visit to the birthplace of Pascoli, the socialist and idealist poet of the Romagna.

In his "Piccole Storie del Mondo Grande" he describes a pilgrimage to the country of Leopardi, and to Umbria. It is filled with little anecdotes of literary immortals who wandered there, and of references that are more significant to Italians than to foreigners, and through it all there is a strange, melancholy humor which is quite characteristic of Panzini.

The two novels which he has written show that he has the art of the story-teller in narration, sequence, and constructiveness, but they lack what the dramatists call action. "Io Cerco Moglie" ("I Seek a Wife") is his best work. Ginetto Sconer, who oozes prosperity and self-satisfaction, proceeds in a businesslike way to select a wife. He consults a pastry-cook and a doctor, to the great glee of the reader. He sees women in three categories: those who presume to disturb the dreams of anchorites and are still men's pleasure and despair; the aristocratic blue-stocking; and the domestic paragon. He had not contemplated marrying a blue-stocking or even aspiring to blue blood, but when he meets Countess Ghiselda he realizes that ambition expands with amatory awakement. Her freedom is handicapped by the attentions of a Futuristic poet whose intellectual productions and antics are amusing to every one save Cavaliere Sconer. He has peeps into spiritual and emotional vistas, but he yields finally to the flesh-box and woos the daughter of the woman who places a caramel in the mouth of her husband every morning before he goes to his office.