FOUR AND TWENTY BLACKBIRDS
Four and Twenty Minds. By Giovanni Papini. Selected and translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins. 12mo. 324 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell Company. $2.50.
HAVING swaggered in and out of a whole streetful of philosophies, brawled with d'Annunzio, assaulted Senator Croce, composed a titanic biography of Christ, and finally burnt himself out in a meteoric fall into the Church of Rome; Italy's popular young iconoclast with this collection of essays now makes his first bow to an American audience: (hats off gents to) Signor Giovanni Papini![1]
His critical method is as old as puritanism. It consists in peering at art through moral binoculars, and in lifting the bars of Lodge 69 of the Ancient Order of Olympians only to those lucky poets, philosophers, or even fictitious personages who come up to the Papini entrance requirements of Moral Beauty. Thus Nietzsche because, even "if you will not respect his philosophy . . . you must at least respect the soul of him who thought and wrote it," finds himself unanimously elected; while Hamlet, whose "killing of Ophelia is the most useless and the most monstrous of all the cruelties," finds himself unanimously blackballed.
This moral attitude towards literature lowers criticism to its most vulgar and vicarious form. It becomes no more valuable than the judgement of an unimaginative nurse-girl, to whom a work of literature is beautiful only in so far as the hero of it symbolizes those qualities of moral splendour which she admires in her policeman. It is an attitude which refuses to accept a work of art as a complete and self-sufficient organism, but attempts to judge its beauty by those values which art in its creation merely utilizes as subject-matter. It judges Polonius by the truth of his paternal advice, rather than by the aesthetic importance of that device in the artistic creation of his personality.
- ↑ Another view of this author, following his work to the Life of Christ (a translation of which is announced) will appear shortly in The Dial.—The Editors.
