Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/339

Rh unreal beings, imagined by the fancy of peoples and of poets. Incredible though it may seem, there are pages here in which, with an unprecedented refinement of malignity, he tears to bits the learned Dr. Faust and the melancholy Prince Hamlet.

The case is all the clearer since the men whom he praises are themselves calumniators: Swift, who calumniated man; Weininger, who calumniated woman; Cervantes, who mocked idealism; Remy de Gourmont, who performed the autopsy on Philistine thought; Tristan Corbiere, who ridiculed the whole of humanity, including himself.

Giovanni Papini knows only hatred. His one motive is wrath. He deals only in invective; he delights only in blasphemy. He has gathered the filth of Aretino, the drivel of Annibal Caro, the sinister humor of Antonfrancesco Doni, has beaten up this mess of infection with the whip of Baretti, and then tries to make us swallow it. But we writhe in revolt against the drink, for we, like the child of Tasso, desire a sweet draught, especially now that all these troubles are plunging the world into the darkness of grief.

It is perfectly right that boneheads should be given a drubbing, that undeserved reputations should be reduced to their true level, that the mediocre should be exposed, that bubbles should be pricked, and so on. That is all right. But