Four and Twenty Minds

Front matter

FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS

Copyright, 1922, Br THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Preface

PREFACE

The first ten of the essays here translated are from Papini's 24 Cervelli ("Four and Twenty Minds"), the next six from his Stroncature ("Slashings"), and the last eight from his Testimonianze ( "Testimonies" ).

In the Preface to 24 Cervelli, Papini writes:

These essays deal with twenty-four men—poets, philosophers, imaginary beings, scientists, mystics, painters—grouped without regard to logical classifications or to their relative importance. Some of the essays are tributes of affection, some are slashings; some reveal neglected greatness, others demolish undeserved reputations. Some are long, and represent careful study, others are brief and slight. … I have surveyed these four and twenty souls not with the scrupulous exactitude of the pure scholar, nor with the definitive cocksureness of the professional critic, but as a man seeking to penetrate deeply into the lives of other men in order to discern and to reveal their lovableness or their hatefulness. The essays, then, are for the most part impassioned, subjective, partial—lyric, in a sense—and not critical.

These essays had been written between 1902 and 1912: 24 Cervelli was published in the latter year. The book proved very successful; and in 1916 Papini brought out a second set of twenty-four similar essays, to which he gave the title Slashings. In this volume, as the title indicates, attack and demolition have a larger place, and the style is at times vituperative in the extreme. Many of the essays, nevertheless, are friendly and constructive. Papini's caricature of himself (from Testimonies), which appears as the last essay in the present translation, was written soon after the publication of Slashings, and reflects the sensation made by that book.

Testimonies, published in 1918, is a third set of twenty-four essays. They are of the same general character as those contained in Slashings, though the part of invective is somewhat less, and the tone of the book as a whole is quieter.

In selecting the essays to be included in this translation I have chosen, naturally, those which seemed to hold greatest interest for American readers. Most of the persons discussed are figures of world-wide significance; in the few other cases there has seemed to be something of special value in the content of the essay itself.

The translation is deliberately free; for I have endeavored to find the true English expression for Papini's thought.

E. H. W.

Chapter 1

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I

THE UNKNOWN MAN

Modern critics have the most unfortunate custom of discussing only men who are well known, men of whose existence they are absolutely sure. The result is that no one hitherto has taken the trouble to write the biography of the Unknown Man. I am not referring to the ordinary unknown person who may at any time be brought into the commonplace class of the known and the recognized. I mean the Unknown Man himself, the authentic Unknown Man whom nobody knows.

The critics, one and all, write only about the prominent, the illustrious, or at least about beings known to the police and listed in the directories. Far be it from them to waste ink for a man without a name—for a man who does not even possess one of those trivial pairs of names which the papers print just once: in the column of death notices.

What if they ask: "How can we write the life of the Unknown Man, since the very fact that he is unknown prevents us from knowing anything about him"? A foolish excuse! The most highly educational biographies are those of men of whom little or nothing is known. Those are the books that set forth the human ideal, that tell us what a man ought to be.

The critics may go their way, and I'll go mine. And you will see that I do not need to resort to fiction.

If it be true that men are known by their works, how much we know of the Unknown Man! I might maintain that he has been the most important personage in history, the greatest hero of humanity. If you don't believe it, I don't mind. But I do ask that you lend me your ears, you slaves of the known, you devotees of the catalogue!

The Unknown Man is very ancient. He appeared, indeed, in the first human tribe. In the earliest times he busied himself chiefly with chemistry and metallurgy. He invented the wheel, and discovered the use of iron. Later he concerned himself with clothes, devised money, and started agriculture. But he soon tired of these material interests, and became a poet. Through the centuries he has traveled hither and yon. He conceived the myths of our religions; he fashioned the Vedas and the Orphic hymns; he wove the legends of the north; he improvised the themes of folk poetry. In the Middle Ages he carved the numberless statues of the Romanesque and the Gothic cathedrals, and covered chapel and refectory walls with unsigned frescoes. Then, too, he composed tales and legends: all those great books that bear no author's name are his.

But with the approach of modern times, when the stupid craze for signature came in, the Unknown Man ceased his activity, and was content to rest. An immense throng of vain fellows, of men who had a name or sought to make a name, began to paint, invent, carve, write. They had less genius than the Unknown Man, and they had also less modesty: they proclaimed to all the winds that they, and none but they, had done these things. They worked not only for their own joy or for others' benefit, but that the world might know that they, and none but they, had done the work.

But the Unknown Man did not remain permanently inactive. With the coming of democracy he turned to politics. The great modern revolutions have been due to him. The English Puritans, the American Revolutionists, the French Sansculottes, the Italian Volunteers were his followers. Under the names of Mob and People he frightened kings, overthrew demagogues, and resolved to turn the world upside-down.

But these great concerns do not dim his memory of the good old times. Often, deep in thought, he walks through ancient streets which he laid out, stops to delight in the simple forms of vases such as he first modeled, and now and again turns into some pleasant courtyard, remembering the distant time when he, in his childhood, invented houses, on the model of woods and caves.

He lives still, and he cannot die. The frightful progress of pride and of advertisement will limit his activity more and more; but he will be forever what silent men were to Carlyle: the salt of the earth. Now and then, to tell the truth, I am moved to fear that his enforced idleness and the trend of the times have turned him into evil ways. When the newspapers attribute thefts or assaults to "the usual unknown parties" I am always a little afraid that he is involved. But that plural reassures me.

Judging from his portraits, I should not think him capable of baseness. Have you not noticed, in the great galleries, those canvases which catalogues and labels call "Portrait of an Unknown Man?" These portraits are all different, to be sure, and pedantic critics maintain that they represent different persons not as yet identified. 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.

You may think that I am jesting, after the fashion of Swift or Carlyle. No: I desire, seriously, to suggest a matter for serious thought. We are in general too much inclined to attribute importance to all that has a name, to all that is legitimized by a signature, by print, by foolscap. We fail to realize that most of what we call civilization has been produced by people of whose lives and personalities we know absolutely nothing. Those who remain anonymous and unknown have done far more for us than all the men whose fame fills biographical dictionaries. The fairest fancies, the simplest melodies, the most enduring phrases, the fundamental inventions, are the work of the Unknown Man, to whom historians and panegyrists give no heed.

We are guilty, in this case, of an ingratitude reënforced by laziness. We remember things more readily when they have a name; it is easier to be grateful when we have before us a definite being to whom we may address our praise, in whom we may take pride. The Unknown Man, who thought and wrought without labeling his works, without sending communiqués to the papers, is too evanescent, too easily forgotten. All men, Jews and Protestants included, must have images when they attempt adoration. If they do not know the name and the features of the man who has achieved, they cannot fix their thought upon him, they cannot direct toward him the current of their affection or their enthusiasm. It is our ineradicable laziness that has led us to forget the Unknown Man, the age-long benefactor of the human race.

In our public squares we behold—unfortunately—numberless equestrian or pedestrian statues of men who have merely written a tiresome tragedy or given a lucky sabre-thrust. The Greeks had at least the profound and prudent idea of raising an altar to the Unknown God. Should not we forgetful moderns erect a monument to the Unknown Man?

Chapter 2

II

DANTE

I

The Divine Comedy is not yet complete. When the disdainful poet wrote that last fair starry line, he had merely finished the fundamental theme on which other men were to execute complicated variations. For a great book is only an initial motif, a starting point from which later generations proceed to develop all the possible themes of a perennial symphony. Every man who reads a great work, even though he be poor in spirit, adds to it some meaning, some pause, some intonation of his own; something of what he feels enters into it and is borne on to those who are to read thereafter.

The greatest books, then, such as the Divine Comedy, are to be considered not as mere personal creations, but rather as artistic structures of a special type in which an original central block has been so enlarged, by the addition of stratum after stratum, that the primitive form is wholly changed. Even if we read the Commedia without a commentary, it is impossible for us to forget all that has been said of Dante, all the interpretations of his vast work. We may indeed forget the marginalia of pedants, the minutiæ of casuists, the erudition of philologians, the glosses of fanatics; but we cannot forget the conceptions expressed, and thus imposed upon the sacred poem, by certain men of outstanding intellectual power. We view Dante through them as we view the heavens through Newton, and God through Dionysius the Areopagite.

And we may do better than forget: we may continue the work of such collaborators of Dante. It is indeed our proper task to find a new interpretation of his soul and of his work, an interpretation more rich in truth than all those we have inherited. In a recent book I asserted that modern Italy cannot understand Dante—and certain scholars took offense at this simple statement of fact. Yet if they would sincerely examine their own consciences they would be obliged to agree with me that the so-called "cult of Dante" is primarily a pretext for the composition of works of criticism, or history, or philology, in which there is no authentic trace of a true understanding of Dante. Critics in general study Dante just as they might study an obscure mock-heroic poet or an insignificant question of Greek epigraphy. In the presence of one of the most terrible creations of man they have not trembled.

But my purpose is not merely to say that Dante is not rightly understood, that men fail to comprehend his apostleship of moral grandeur. I desire to indicate a new conception of his work, a new view-point from which we may behold his great figure towering against the background of eternity.

II

The best proof of my thesis that the modern world is in general unable truly to understand the Divine Comedy lies in the limited nature of the ideas regarding Dante which have been held by certain very intelligent men. Some, like Carlyle, have seen in him a prophet; some, like Mazzini, an apostle of Italian unity; some, like Rossetti, an adept in strange mysteries; some, like Aroux, a heretic and precursor of the Reformation; some, like De Sanctis, simply a very great artist. But all such men are merely attributing to Dante purposes and qualities which many other writers have possessed as well. And we all tend to forget that Dante was something apart, a man unique. We assign him to one of the several classes into which we so readily divide the host of the workers of the spirit. Be his birth and since his death there have been great poets, great prophets, great reformers; and we are content to ask to which of these groups he belongs, and to what extent and in what way he is superior to his fellows in that group.

But to my mind Dante was great because he claimed and fulfilled a function claimed by no other man before or since his time. He is indeed a great poet and a great mystic, but that which differentiates him from all other men is not his poetry nor his mysticism. Art, theology, politics, are for him means subordinate to one supreme purpose: he sought to be the vicar of God on earth.

Dante was a sincere son of the Church, and for that very reason he was conscious of the enormous decadence of the Papacy. The concept of the Pope as the vicar of Christ was a noble one: had it been conserved in its purity there would have been nothing strange in the lordship which the Pope sought to exercise, by the sheer power of his word, over all the kingdoms of the earth. But the Papacy itself had become earthy, had fed on gold, had sold its right to the spiritual dominion of the entire world that it might gain material dominion over one small portion of the world. It had rendered itself liable to judgment, to condemnation, and had lost thereby its true raison d'être, its mis as the supreme judge of men. The Popes, faithless to Hun who gave them their commission, could no longer claim to be His representatives on earth.

In the soul of Dante there rose instinctively the desire to take the place of these faithless vicars, and to judge them as God Himself would have judged them. He desired to exercise to the full extent of his power that judicial authority which the Popes had forgotten. But he was none the less resolved to remain within the Church, since for all its decadence it still represented the unbroken Christian tradition. He had no wish to become the leader of a revolt, or to overthrow the existing hierarchy. He chose the instrument which was most familiar to him—art—and composed a poem which is not, as certain critics maintain, an anticlerical pamphlet, but rather a true actus pontificalis.

But if we are thoroughly to understand the significance of this act of his we must realize that his idea of divine vicarage was very different from that represented by the Roman tradition. The Catholic church was primarily a continuation of the apostolic service of Christ, and the Pope, as vicar of Christ, devoted himself especially to the spiritual education of men. The institution of the Mass as a daily symbol of man's redemption from sin, the confessional, the propagation of the faith among the heathen—all these are proofs of the primarily pedagogical and moralizing purpose of the church. The church was the teacher of the world, and in Christ the church saw primarily the teacher of moral and eternal truths.

Dante, on the other hand, had in mind a part of the doctrine of Christ to which the Popes had given relatively slight importance: the idea of the Last Judgment. God is not only the God who enlightens and saves mankind, but the God who, on a terrible distant day, will judge the quick and the dead. The idea of the Last Judgment, so tragically expressed throughout the Middle Ages in hymns, in mosaic, and in painting, had not been hitherto associated with the idea of the Papacy.

Dante, aware that God is not only a teacher but a judge, and believing it necessary that God should have a vicar on earth, chose to represent Him rather as judge than as teacher. In this intent he conceived the Divine Comedy, which is, in fact, an anticipatory Last Judgment.

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. Beside the queens of the thirteenth century appear the women of the Old Testament; beside the consuls of Rome, the painters of Tuscany. The king but newly dead converses with the Greek or Roman poet; the Christian martyr with the Florentine warrior.

Each has his penalty or his reward. Dante walks among them all in the guise of a spectator, but he is in reality their judge. The Divine Comedy is the Dies irae of a great spirit which cannot wait for the manifestation of divine wrath, and assigns a place provisionally to every man. It is an incomplete Vale of Jehoshaphat, in which all the dead are gathered, while beyond the dread hills the renewal of life goes on.

Dante felt that his genius was a divine investiture which gave him the right to judge those who had lived before his time. He was so sure of being a better representative of God than the venal priests and intriguing Popes of his experience that he did not hesitate to thrust into Hell men who passed themselves off before their fellow men as vicars and ministers of God. Thus from a lofty throne, more enduring than bronze, the Florentine poet pronounces terrible condemnations which have not yet been canceled. He seems verily, by the power of his art, to compel God to ratify his sentences.

III

Only one man since Dante's time has achieved a conception of equal grandeur—and that man is Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel is the only worthy illustration of the Divine Comedy.

I have sometimes imagined a tremendous drama of the Last Judgment, the words to be written by Dante, the music to be composed by Palestrina—save that for the trumpets of the angel who is to wake the dead (think of the sound of trumpets that will wake even from the sleep of death!) I should have sought the aid of Richard Wagner.

Should there come to the throne of St. Peter a Pope with daring and initiative, he might well cover the quattrocentist frescoes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel—frescoes that yield but incidental charm—and in their place inscribe, in fair red characters, the whole Divine Comedy, in the presence of its only worthy interpretation: the Last Judgment of Michelangelo.

Chapter 3

III

LEONARDO DA VINCI

"Philosophieren ist vivificieren."

—Novalis.

I

Historians affirm with a surprising unanimity that in the Year of Grace 1452 there was born in the town of Vinci a child who received the fair name of Leonardo, and became famous throughout Italy and beyond the Alps. And they go on to tell how he was taken to Florence and apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio, how he began to paint with marvelous skill, how he went to the court of Milan—and many other things which the reader surely knows much better than I. If he doesn't, he may find them duly set forth by the said historians—from the beloved unknown writer of the Gaddi manuscript, or the popular Vasari (equally famous for his horrible frescoes and his extraordinary misinformation), down to the latest biographers of Leonardo, whom I will not even name, lest I seem too erudite.

But my Leonardo is not the Leonardo of the historians. Their Leonardo, Ser Pietro's son, who lived his mortal life from 1452 to 1519, I gladly leave to all those honest men who turn to history for facts, and worship documentary evidence. For myself I have fashioned another and a different Leonardo. And since he is my creation, I love him the more, like a dutiful father, and am very fond of his company.

I don't mean to say that the Leonardo of the historians is to be forgotten. If I had had the luck to live in his generation, it would not have been hard for me to regard him as the dearest of my friends. And since he loved the spirits of those who seek, perhaps he would have taken me with him on some of his thoughtful walks among those Tuscan hills that gladden his canvases with their pale azure. And he would have talked to me, in his clear, rich voice, of his anatomical researches and his architectural plans. Some day, perhaps, he would have taken me to the bare summit of Monte Ceceri, whence he hoped to fly to Florence in a mysterious machine of his own invention. And as his glance and his gesture followed the flight of birds through my Florentine sky, I would have repeated to him Alexandrian subtleties learned from some disciple of Ficino.

But the times have changed too much. Amid the relentless progress of our day it would be mad to regret the bloody and barbaric age of the Renaissance. In the streets of Florence, cluttered with cabs and bicycles, one can no longer spin a quiet syllogism, one can no longer enjoy in silence the red glow of sunset on the noble dark-browed palaces. The Leonardo of the fifteenth century, with his fine raiment and his great dreams, would not now be at home in that Milan to which he gave so many gentle images. And Milan would be too busy with municipal elections and the exportation of rubber to take any interest in him.

If Leonardo is to live on as something more than a subject for theses and for lantern slides, he must be transformed, must be given a spiritual existence. This transformation is what I have sought to achieve.

II

In the real Leonardo, as revealed by his writings and by other records, there are some elements that I do not find sympathetic. He had too much of a mania for science. His disheveled books are too full of observations and of tiny facts. It seems as though this man, whose father and grandfather had been notaries, were possessed by an atavistic desire to undertake an in of the universe. That passion for detail which has dulled the spirits of so many of his successors had seized him all too firmly. In a certain sense (and I am sincerely sorry to speak so ill of him) he was a positivist long before the time of positivism. For that reason, perhaps, he is held in high esteem by our own scientists. Every now and then one of these gentlemen discovers that Leonardo was the founder of some science or other, and salutes him as father and master of the experimental method.

There is doubtless a certain amount of exaggeration in this point of view. I am even inclined to believe that Leonardo was much less of a positivist than the moderns would have us think—some of his cosmological conceptions, for instance, are hopelessly marked by animism and anthropocentrism. Nevertheless, one can but recognize that he deserves the title of scientist, that he is even more of a scientist than an artist—and for that I cannot forgive him. Even his painting, though he poured into it the treasure of his dreams, was to him primarily a form of science, destined to reproduce the aspects of nature with the most scrupulous fidelity. All his studies, even those which were directly related to his work as painter, led in reality toward a complete knowledge of the universe. And this constant preoccupation, which wins the plaudits of the scientists, tends on the contrary to repel those who love æsthetic and metaphysical unreality, as I do.

Had he been rather a philosopher than an artist I could willingly have pardoned him: I could indeed have praised him without reserve. But his philosophy, it must be confessed, does not amount to much. In its essence it consists of the old Greek idea of the world as a living organism; and his acceptance of this idea is inconsistent with his criticism of those thinkers whose theories are not supported by experiment. Now a man who has not reached that aristocratic intellectuality which treats ideas as of supreme interest in themselves, without the least thought of their relation to facts, has not attained the greatest heights.

Perhaps, too, those delicate lovers of strange souls who, like Walter Pater, have admitted the wondrous Leonardo into their intimate circle of great spirits, have not fully realized that this man was too much inclined to practical and mathematical interests. Much of his research was devoted to the invention of machinery and apparatus for canals or sluices, or to the construction of engines which could kill or defend, or to the designing of wonderful vehicles. He is forever saying that one must think of practical utility; and much as he loved knowledge in itself, I suspect that many of his experiments were tried for purely practical ends. And it sometimes saddens me to think that the man who left us the "Adoration of the Magi" is famous also for the canals of Lombardy.

Such criticism may lead the reader to think that I am incapable of appreciating versatility. Had I the time, I might answer that the problem is really one of quantity and quality. It is not the number of things that a man has done that matters, but their excellence. I could wish that Leonardo had painted one more canvas and left a hundred less precepts; and I could indeed willingly dispense with that praise of his universality which is so showered upon him by men who do not realize the meaning of their words. Botanists and engineers of our own day can draw plants and plans of fortresses; but for the painting of certain mountainous backgrounds and for the writing of certain pensées there has been none save Leonardo—and it is sad to think that so much of his time was spent on things unworthy of his powers.

So too I regret the excessive time he spent in companionship with other men, and the hours that he wasted in the courts of Milan and of France at repartee with ladies and with princes. He was delightful in conversation—so the historians say—and those ambiguous prophecies of his, which at times seem weighty with hidden meaning, were but riddles devised to sharpen courtly wit. I cannot imagine my Leonardo, author of the most profound of all eulogies of solitude, as the entertainer of a fashionable company. In the spiritual biography of my Leonardo I have canceled the hours which the historic Leonardo spent in society; and have sent him instead over mountain slopes and summits, searching for wild flowers and watching the flight of royal eagles.

III

But it is high time that I should turn to my own Leonardo and his secret.

Unlike the Leonardo of history, mine did not die on the second of May, 1519, in the melancholy castle of Cloux. He is still living, and very much alive; he is within me; he is a part of myself, a precious fragment of my spirit.

He dwells as of old in his fair Italy, and stirs me to pulsing meditation in the keen Tuscan springtime. He repeats to me some of his profoundest sayings; he helps me to realize the full wonder of certain sunsets. In the Pantheon of my soul he is one of the most inspiring geniuses, one of the most adored divinities. His image, beside that of his younger brother, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and opposite that of the Olympian Goethe, illumines the current of my thoughts and charms the tapestry of my unwearying dreams.

Literal folk who consider great men as external and independent beings will reproach me for sacrilege, and express surprise at this adaptation of a genius to the spiritual needs of one obscure soul. They may protest as loudly as they will: they have failed to understand that the great men of the past are in reality instruments of the present, themes on which we may build personality, fragments of olden time through which we may learn to analyze ourselves, dead bodies to which we may give new life. If we content ourselves with knowing the external vicissitudes of the great, the scenes in which they moved, the lists of their works, their characteristic traits of style, we are simply gathering erudition, we are approaching the temple without prayer, we are entering the orchard without tasting its fruit. But if we seek to know the heroes of the past truly and profoundly, we shall make them members of ourselves, our own instruments of joy—we shall save their treasure by enabling them to live again in us. A great man may be known either through dead words and documents or through present and individual consciousness. Only the poor and the timid choose the former way.