University of Santa Clara - Redwood Yearbook (Santa Clara, CA)

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JV Jfaie on flaptm s Jixit of (Kljmt HE book read and measured, we still have not compassed the writer of the book. There is an ultimate reticence in the man ' s fullest, most eager, confession; not conscious delicacy so much as an essential reserve in his nature. Where he stops, it is not only speech that is silent: the experience which he seeks to ex- plain meets his efforts by discreetly denying the word, even to thought ; it is a silence of the mind. How then shall he tell us the secret of his soul, when it is not unsecret to himself? A divine jealousy guards this sanctuary: only the priest may enter and look — even he cannot understand. To know thus the limits of candour — to see the inarticulate mind groping, not so much after the mysteries of the mind, as after some hinted, secret sense to take hold upon these mysteries — suggests to the critic that he be cautious in his approach to any book. The critic must come prepared to allow more in the man than will appear in the book. For he knows that not the brightest of words will discover the soul ' s mystery in its dark place; and yet no word comes to him quite free of that sense of nearness to a thought unexpressed, waiting upon a word unuttered — the mystery perpetually implicit in this language of exclu- sion. The poet has a word of just reproach for the ungenerous critic: Then I am small indeed, if words will say me. And how should we expect words to have said Papini? We are apt to put too large a significance into the circumstance that the Life of Christ followed shortly upon Papini ' s turning to the Church. We may permit ourselves to find in the Life a reflection of Papini ' s experience; it is in finding the entire experience, that we wrong him. For Papini may pass, indeed, behind the veil, but the veil is still there, and the place must still be greatly dark. And when, out of the shadow of that with- drawn sanctuary — that ground over which he passed intent, to find in inmost dimness the waiting Church — when he returns forth into the clear light of simpler communions, how much will he recall, or recalling have words to tell? There is a charming fitness in the refusal of such things to become unsecret: the note of secluded intimacy in them sound- ing in the figure often-used — that the neophyte encounters the Church like a bride . If we find, then, in Papini ' s picture, a Christ not filling the measure of our conception, foreshortened and disappointing, yet neither is He that compelling Christ whose attraction called Papini from atheism. Papini simply cannot echo the call, as we cannot in ourselves detect its particular voice — its way really unknown to us, Save only how it shivers through; The breast of us a sounded shell, The blood of us a lighted dew. 22

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Cafe ' s -pictures Life is an exquisite artist; A picture Ke paints of each day, Then commits it to Memory ' s keeping To be stored with her treasures away. His earliest works are his choicest When the pulse of youth throbs in his brush, His gold tints he steals from the sunset, His red from the dawn ' s maiden blush. His silver is filched from the moonbeams, His green from the banks of the rill; Ah, how deftly he blends them together With patient and marvelous skill. Such the tints that he used in my childhood When the world was a bright fairy land, All light without trace of a shadow, He painted with masterful hand. But alas! now his colors are fainter And his background is somber and gray; I see that his interest i s waning And he ' ll soon put his canvas away. But when his last picture is finished ' Twill matter but little to me, For a better life far will replace it In the realms of eternity. — Richard Mclnerney, ' 27 21

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One, whom the book vexes into metaphor, voices the capital objec- tion to Papini. Having discovered Jove in a thatched hut, is he not in- fernally concerned about the thatched hut? And the criticism sug- gests a further: Papini does not rise above the level of the thatched hut; his deity is not divine — the strong hand is not there, that hand which strowed forth the worlds in their sowing; nor the beauty, so dreadfully absurd in mean surroundings, harking back so poignantly to the heav- enly courts. And the objection is not light; to have expressed a thatched hut may be an excellent success for the artist; but the hut was there yesterday; tomorrow, we doubt not, it will be there — meanwhile, the heavenly visitant, a moment stopping, has gone. The first chapter, on the stable at Bethlehem, is a case directly in point. Papini has the knack of making vivid discoveries about what he describes, simply by being perfectly accurate; as when, having fol- lowed the scythed grass from the hillside and sun into the manger, he is able to see the animals take it slowly with their great black lips . And he makes the place intensely realistic — this earthly pig-sty, where no dec- orations or perfumes can hide the odor of filth . They say the chapter is more striking in the Italian, which enforces ugliness with the spiteful sibilant. No doubt it is very strong. Still, Papini might have spared us the ugly things, having a good example for the omission. It is only St. Luke, of the four evangelists, who mentions the circumstance of the stable at all, and then he mentions it quietly, in one sentence: And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. Economy is here, not of the lips merely, but also of the eyes them- selves, unwasteful even of a glance; graciously austere beside the prod- igality of Papini in passing the same way. Papini is an example of what may be done with a hint: the stable posited, he produces a description which, if excellent, is nevertheless clearly gratuitous; St. Luke, indeed, gave us the stable — one might almost say it had not been dirty until Papini gave us that also. But nay! second thought is sure Papini gave us nothing: describe a stable, forsooth — insist upon the nose of Cyrano! Now Papini may fairly be said to have drawn such an opinion down upon his own head, but we misgive but we must look in another quarter to justify the virulence we use in putting the opinion forward. The truth is, Papini had never offended us with writing of thatched huts, had not several critics praised him for so feckless an achievement. — As if the apprehending of externals had ever been hard ; or as if praise were not good enough to be earned! — Certainly we should expect in Papini a concern reaching beyond mere externals, since, with the externals of Christ, were not the Jews, after all, excellently acquainted? And it is written that Christ wept over Jerusalem, to whom it was given to see the Son of Man in her streets — and to spit upon Him. And better than 23