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The Mountain-top. The artist-prophet of Italy lives on a lonely mountain-top in Arezzo, not far from where St. Francis received the Stigmata. It is approached by a mule path. With him is Giacinta, the once beautiful peasant girl whom he married for " her chestnut mane and savage, beautiful teeth;" also his two daughters, both beautiful. There he reads omniverously, still desiring to know all. Once he desired to become God by writing an Encyclopedia of Enclycopedias. Now he is busy with La Seconda Nascita, sequel to his masterpiece, L'Uomo Finito; with the libretto of his opera, King Lear; and at odd moments, with his Dictionary.
America. The Dictionary of a Savage† says: " America is the land of millionaire uncles, the home of trusts, skyscrapers, phonographs, electric trams, lynch laws, of the insupportable Washington, the boring Emerson, the immoral Walt Whitman, the disgusting Longfellow, the angelic Wilson, the philanthropic Morgan and other great men of similar stripe. In compensation America produces poisonous tobacco, sticky chocolate, indigestible potatoes, and gave birth to the Declaration of Independence, which later produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
"From which it is evident that the discovery of America, although accomplished by a sane Italian, was willed by God in 1492 as a repressive and preventative punishment for all the other grand discoveries of the Renaissance: gunpowder, humanism and Protestantism."
Supplementing his Dictionary, he is now pointing an accusing finger across the Atlantic. "America," says he, " was responsible for the War. " Why ? Because the War was brought on by unchristian commercial competition, and it was America that forced the ruthless pace.
New Book. The world continues to wait with almost universal interest for Papini's new book on social questions which he calls a " modern Bible." His Life of Christ, like most books, has suffered in public esteem from misdirected advertisement. It was made to appear sensational; and it was not sensational. But it served to call attention to the apparent absence of Christ from Christendom. Similarly, his new book may serve to challenge the impotency of the Church in an age which has produced not one, but many Babylons.
*Giovanni Papini, who wrote the Life of Christ, published in March by Harcourt, Brace & Co.
† Papini calls himself " the Savage."