shall not do. My love for Whitman is too deep. His poetry is not such that it can be reduced to a coherent system and subjected to dialectic criticism. Whitman's soul is as vast as the world, as all-enfolding as God. It includes everything -joy and grief, body and spirit, liberty and discipline, pride and humility, God and the blade of grass. One must accept it as one accepts the universe, without regard for the cleavages that men have made in the world.

But Whitman's soul is not merely a gigantic lake of love. It is composed of qualities, sentiments, passions that may inspire men, excite them to action, to life, render them saner, stronger, purer, better. 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.

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. In our dried veins-sleek, feminine, civilian dilettantes that we are—we need a little of the blood of peasants, of mountaineers, of the rabble. It is not enough to "open our windows," as Orsini said. We must go forth, leave the city, feel things and love things immediately, whether they be fair or foul. And we must express our love without respect of persons, without sweetish words, without metrical hair-splitting, without too much thought of the holy traditions, the honorable conventions, and the stupid rules of good society. If we would find again the poetry we have lost we must go back a little toward barbarism-even toward savagery.

If Walt Whitman does not teach us this at least, translations and interpretations will avail nothing.

XI

CROCE 1

THERE are still in Italy a number of more or less youthful men of letters, many secondary professors in secondary schools, and and a few journalists with a smattering of philosophy, who really attribute great importance to Benedetto Croce and his Esthetics. That book, published ten years ago, has reached its fourth edition, and is considered, by those to whom I have referred, as the unbreakable table of artistic law, as the most refined and exquisite essence of European thought, as the eternal gospel of all criticism. In their eyes Croce is the one licensed guide of the present generation, the perpetual dictator of our culture, the high and mighty mas

1 Written à propos of Croce's Breviario di estetica (“The Breviary of Esthetic"), Bari, 1913.

The lectures composing this treatise were written for the opening of the Rice Institute (October, 1912). They appear, in an English translation by Douglas Ainslie, in The Book of the Opening of The Rice Institute, Vol. II, pp. 430–517, and in The Rice Institute Pamphlet (December, 1915), pp. 223-310. In the present translation the passages of Croce's Italian text quoted by Papini are replaced by the corresponding passages of Ainslie's translation. The page references in the footnotes are to that translation as it appears in The Rice Institute Pamphlet.

ter of a boarding-school which all good little Italians should attend.

In other countries the revelation according to Croce has aroused no such wonder. The Esthetics has been translated into four or five languages; but we may safely affirm that France, England, and Germany have marveled rather at our admiration than at the value of Croce's theories. Not a single philosopher has accepted them, and not one has discussed them at length save the illustrious Cohen, who slashes them through several pages of his last treatise on æsthetics.

Texas appears to be the only foreign land that rivals central and southern Italy in their incautious and prostrate devotion. Croce was invited some time ago to deliver at the Rice Institute, in Houston, four lectures which should at last reveal the true nature of art to an anxious nation. He was unable, for personal reasons, to undertake the long voyage to the Gulf of Mexico, but he sent over the four lectures that had been requested; and now, lest a grateful fatherland should suffer from their loss, he has printed them in the original Italian. In this Breviary, he writes, "I have not only condensed the more important concepts of my earlier volumes on the same subject, but have set them forth in better organization and with greater clearness than in my Esthetics." And he is so

well pleased with the little book that he hopes to introduce it into the schools "as collateral reading for literary and philosophic studies." That is a serious menace; and it behooves us to stop for a moment to consider the real value of the æsthetic system of Croce, which seems likely, through newspapers and schools, to lead the mass of our young compatriots astray for twenty years to come.

The Breviary examines in turn the nature of art, prejudices relating to art, the place of art in the spirit and in human society, and, finally, criticism and the history of art. All the points of the system are indeed set forth with greater brevity, if not with greater clearness, than hitherto. Every difficulty is dispelled in a twinkling, and with the most elegant ease. Problems are solved with that smile of superiority which seems to say: "There; do you mean to admit that you hadn't realized a truth as simple as this?"

Here again we find not only the familiar ideas, but the familiar mental method of Croce, which consists chiefly in multiplying distinctions just in order to deny them, in scattering equality signs right and left, in that pleasant little game in which you announce that a thing is white and black at the same time, and that it is white precisely because it is black, and black precisely because it is white. The summit of truth, for example, is so situated that the conqueror "reaches