These successive attempts at completeness are typical of Papini's far-reaching ambitions. "The Played-Out Man" is a record of his plunge into one absorption after another. He discovered evil, and planned not only individual suicide but suicide of the people en masse. Next came the desire for love. His instincts were of a sort not to be satisfied by the conventional sweetness of "I Promessi Sposi," but from Poe, Walt Whitman, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, and Anatole France he got a vicarious appeasement of the sentiment he craved. Then he encountered "dear Julian." "We never kissed each other and we never cried together," but he could not forgive Julian for allowing his friend to learn of his matrimony only through the Corriere della Sera.
The brief emotional episode past, Papini's life interest swung back to philosophy. He discovered Monism, and believed it like a religion. Then Kant became his ideal, then Berkeley, Mill, Plato, Locke, culminating in the glorified egotism of Max Stirner. After Stirner philosophy has no more to say. Down with it all! It is necessary to liberate the world from the yoke of these mumblers, just as Papini has liberated himself. But how to do it! Ah, yes! Found a journal that will purge the world of its sins, as the Great Revolution purged France of royalty.
Thus Papini's literary work had its beginning. It takes several tempestuous chapters of the autobiography to describe the launching of the Leonardo by himself and a few congenial souls. Nine numbers marked the limit of its really vigorous life, but it ran, with Papini as its chief source of material, for five years. Ultimately, with the dissipation of the author's youthful energy, this child of his bosom had to be interred. But Papini still goes to its grave.
The tumultuous, introspective life of the author continued. He went through a period of self-pity and neurasthenia, then one of intense hero-worship directed toward all radicals, including William James, whom he had once seen washing his neck. Then came an immense desire for action, hindered, however, by the fact that the author could not decide whether to found a school of philosophy, become the prophet of a religion, or go into politics. His only inherent conviction concerns the stupidity of the world and his own calling to rise above it. This long, internal history ends with a period of sweeping depression, out of which the author at last emerges with the intense conviction that he is not, after all, played out, that there is still matter in him to give the world. He feels welling up within him a stream of arrogance and self-confidence that is not to be dammed. He has not yet delivered his message; people have not yet understood him.
"They cannot grasp it, cannot bear to listen.
The thing I have to tell, unthought before,
Demands another language."
So he goes back to the market-place of Florence, shouting: "I have not finished. I am not played out. You shall see." And it is at this stage that Signor Papini's work now stands. We wait to see.
The "L'Uomo Finito" is Signor Papini's G. P. No. 2. It is not fiction in the ordinary use of the term; any more than "Undying Fire" of Mr. Wells is. In a measure it is fiction like "The Way with All Flesh" of Samuel Butler. But in point of interest and workmanship it is far inferior to the former and in purposefulness, character delineation, orientation, resurrection, and reform it is not to be compared with the latter.
Although it is the book by which Signor Papini is best known, it is not his love-child. "The Twilight of the Philosophers" is. He is proud to call it his intellectual biography, but it would be much truer to call it an index of his emotional equation. "This is not a book of good faith. It is a book of passion, therefore of injustice, an unequal book, partisan, without scruples, violent, contradictory, unsolid, like all books of those who love and hate and are not ashamed of their love or their hatred." This is the introductory paragraph of the original preface.
In reality it is a cross between a philosophic treatise and a popular polemic, with the technical abstruseness of the one and the passion of the other, and its purpose is to show that all philosophy is vain and should make way for action. Although it indicates wide and attentive reading and a certain erudition, the only indication of constructive thought that it reveals is a rudimentary attempt to adjust the philosophic system of each man to the temperamental bias of the author. Others, Santayana for instance, have done this so much better that there is scarcely justification for his pride. He could have carried his point quite as successfully by stating it as by laboring it through a whole volume devoted largely to railing both at philosophers and at their philosophy.
From the point of view of the philosopher this book is "popular." From the standpoint of the people it is "philosophical." It is really a testimonial to the author's breathless state of emotional unrest. He is like a bird in a cage and he feels that he must beat down the barriers in order to accomplish freedom, but when they are fractured and he is apparently free there is no sense of liberation. He is in a far more secure prison than he was before, and to make matters worse he cannot now distinguish the barriers that obstacle his freedom. The wonder is not that a man of the temperament and intellectual endowment of Signor Papini has this feeling, but that he can convince himself that any one else should be interested in his discovery.