The next book, a very small one, "La Giostra dei Sensi" ("The Joust of the Senses"), is a portrayal of the capacity shown by a "lost soul" for radiating unselfish love upon an individual who comes to her for meretricious contact but who stays to add to his spiritual stature. The scene is laid in Naples and the author utilizes the sheer beauty of the place and picturesqueness of the people to give an artistic setting for the description of the jousts. It could not possibly be published in England unless the publisher aspired to "languish" in prison.
Of the many questions I have asked in Italy none has been so unsatisfactorily answered as "Do you let your young folk read that book and what effect does it have?" No one could think of calling Soffici a pornographic writer. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he is one of the most respected and admired of all the young school of Italian writers, and yet there are passages in the book now under discussion coarser and more vulgar than any in the "Satyricon." Despite this it is not a circumstance to the recent book of a seventeen-year-old girl of Rome, Margherita Emplosi Gherardi, entitled "Il Nudo nelle Anime." It is dedicated to all those who deny that the youthful mind has not the capacity, discernment, liberty, and daring to envisage and interpret the painful mysteries of the human soul. There are few things more disgusting in literature, "Gamiana" excluded, than the sketch entitled "The Impure Hour," for women only.
His remaining books, "Statue e Fantocci" ("Statues and Dolls"), are made up chiefly of critical reviews, many of which have appeared in journals. They show that the writer has a mastery of literary technic and an understanding of modern art and literature creditable to himself and to his country. He can be satirical, caustic, sarcastic, but he is never brutal. He can be an ardent admirer, a valorous champion, a sympathetic interpreter, a critical friend, and a prejudiced judge, but he is never an implacable, insensate enemy, nor a literary fiend. Moreover, one does not gather from his writings that he is what is called the "whole thing" from the literary standpoint.
Signor Soffici has got some bad habits from Papini. Among these are: saying old things as if they never had been said before; taking on an air of complacency after the delivery of a sentiment or a conviction in no wise epoch-making; believing that all his geese are swans and the geese of others decoys; that his every thought is a jewel which people are frenzied to possess unless they are too stupid; and saying trivial things with the subtly conveyed insinuation that the reader should, if he is perspicacious and cultured, find a deep significance in them.
He is yet a long way from his full stature, but he is growing.
Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-) is one of the youngest of the Futuristic group who has gained enduring fame as a poet. His first volume of verses, "Cavalli Bianchi" ("White Horses"), which was published when he was twenty years old, showed him to be a youth of sensibility and originality, with capacity for tuneful verse and for dainty sentiment daintily expressed. The publication of a second volume, entitled "Lanterna" ("The Lantern"), two years later, fully justified the expectations of those who were attracted by the little gems of his early verse. But it was not until 1909, on the publication of a volume entitled "The Poems of Aldo Palazzeschi," that it was realized that there had come upon the scene a poet who might quite easily get a fame equal to that of Carducci or Pascoli.
His poems not only showed the influence of Apollinaire and Marinetti, but also of Whitman, of Mallarmé, of Rimbaud, of Laforgue, and of other French writers. The dyed-in-the-wool critics saw in much of his work clownishness and infantilism, especially in such productions as "E lasciatemi divertire." They thought it should be construed: "And let me divert myself with insane-asylum poetry." They were quite right from their standpoint, but a fellow poet whose emotional mechanism is not so equilibrated as that of the sort of man called normal, would be likely to see in it something of beauty and of merit which the latter could not see, and ask: "Why should not the poet divert himself?" It is to him what exercise is to the average man, and he speaks of it, in fact is proud of it, just as the average man is proud of his golf score when he gets it in that Elysian field, "under ninety."
Those who do not see in Palazzeschi's poetry an adhesion to a certain school of philosophy, an advocacy of certain ethical systems, a restatement of others' thoughts and teachings, miss the very essence of his contribution. This is his capacity to present the world around us in colors which, if not new, at least have been recognized only since the advent of the impressionistic painter. So illuminated, it presents facets of beauty that make appeal to that which within us mediates and interprets pleasure.
In addition to this, he has an extraordinary sense of the fantastic, the grotesque, the panoplied. His eye is microscopic and his mind is telescopic, and his soul waves tend to a rhythm which is akin to that of genius when he reveals them and describes them to others, as he does, for instance, in the "Villa Celeste" ("The Celestial House"); the average man (who is attuned to interpret some poetic waves) realizes that the soul of this young man is the generating station of genuine poetical energy. He puts a reflector before his soul and it reflects the waves in our direction.
"Io metto una lente
dinanzi al mio cuore,
per farlo vedere alla gente."