GIOVANNI PAPINI AND THE FUTURISTIC LITERARY MOVEMENT IN ITALY
In one of his "Appreciations"--depreciations would be the more fitting
word--Signor Papini says he seems to have read or to have said that in
every man there are at least four men: the real man, the man he would
like to be, the man he thinks he is, and the man others think he is. He
is sure to have read it, for he has read widely. Undoubtedly he has also
said it, for he has made a specialty of saying things that have been
said before--even that he has said before.
As for the man he thinks he is, he has written a long autobiography with
plentiful data, from which it may be deduced that he is a man with great
possibilities and a great mission, to wit, to precipitate in Italy a
spiritual revolution, to bring to his countrymen the gospel that it is
time to be up and doing and that intoxication with past successes will
not condone present inertness. He has been chosen to teach men that the
best of life is to be found in purposeful action regardless of
inconsistencies, contradictions, and imperfections; that the ego should
be guided peripherally not centrically; that introspection is the
stepping-stone to mental involution. In reality, he is but one of many
who are proclaiming those tidings in Italy.
The distinction between what he would like to be and what he thinks he
is, is not so marked as in more timid and less articulate souls.
Substantially, it is this same calling of prophecy which is his aim. As
for the man he is, time and his own accomplishments alone will show.
Now, at the zenith of his creative power, he is still a man of promise,
a carrier-pigeon freighted with an important message who, instead of
delivering it, exhausts himself beating his wings in a luminous void.
In Giovanni Papini these four aspects stand out very distinctly. Let us
take them up in inverse order, since what others think of a man is soon
stated and what he really is is a vague goal, to be approached only
distantly, even at the end of this paper. Mr. Reginald Turner says:
"Papini is by far the most interesting and most important living writer
of Italy. 'L'Uomo Finito' has become a classic in Italy; it is written
in the most distinguished Italian; it can be read again and again with
increasing profit and interest ... its Italian is impeccable and clear.
Mr. J. S. Barnes calls him the most notable personality on the stage of
Italian letters to-day," and Signor G. Prezzolini writes: "His mind is
so vast, so human, that it will win its way into the intellectual
patrimony of Europe." I cannot go all the way with these adherents of
Signor Papini. I have talked with scores of cultured Italians about his
writings and I have heard it said, "He has acquired an enviable mastery
of the Italian language," but I have never once heard praise of his
"impeccable and clear Italian"; nor do I hold with Mr. Barnes that he is
unquestionably the most notable personality save D'Annunzio on the stage
of Italian letters to-day. We would scarcely call Mr. Shaw the most
notable personality on the stage of English letters to-day. Surely it
would be an injustice to Mr. Kipling, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Conrad. It
might be unjust to Mr. Swinnerton.
Signor Papini is an interesting literary figure, particularly as a sign
of the times. During the past generation there has been in Italy a
profound revolt against what may be called satisfaction with and
reverence for past performances and against slavish subscription to
French, German, and Russian realism. It is to a group of writers who
call themselves Futurists and who see in the designation praise rather
than opprobrium that this salutary, beneficial, and praiseworthy
movement is due.
Signor Papini has publicly read himself out of the party, but apostasy
of one kind or another is almost as necessary to him as food, and most
people still regard him as a Futurist, though he refuses to subscribe to
the clause in the constitution of the literary Futurists of Italy
bearing on love, published by their monarch Signor Marinetti in that
classic of Futuristic literature "Zang Tumb Tumb" and in "Democrazia
Futurista."
It is now twenty years since there appeared unheralded in Florence a
literary journal called the _Leonardo_, whose purpose in the main seemed
to be to overthrow certain philosophic and socialistic doctrines,
Positivism and Tolstoian ethics. The particularly noteworthy articles
were signed Gian Falco. It soon became known that the writer was one
Giovanni Papini, a contentious, self-confident youth of peculiarly
inquisitive turn of mind, and of sensitiveness bordering on the
pathological, an omnivorous reader, an aggressive debater. He was hailed
by a group of youthful literary enthusiastics as a man of promise.
In the twenty years that have elapsed since then he has written more
than a score of books, short stories, essays, criticisms, poetry,
polemics, some of which, such as "L'Uomo Finito" ("The Played-Out Man"),
"Venti Quattro Cervelli" ("Twenty-four Minds"), and "Cento Pagine di
Poesia" ("One Hundred Pages of Poetry"), have been widely read in Italy
and have known several editions. Save for a few short stories, he has
not appeared in English, though there seems to be propaganda in his
behalf directed by himself and by his friends of his publishing-house in
Florence to make him known to foreigners. Like other Italian propaganda
it has not been very successful and this is to be regretted. It is due
in part to the fact his advocates have claimed too much for him.
Signor Papini is like Mr. Arnold Bennett in that they both know the
reading public are personally interested in authors. From the beginning
he and his friends have capitalized his poverty of pulchritude and his
pulchritudinous poverty. Signor Giuseppe Prezzolini, in a book entitled
"Discorso su Giovanni Papini" has devoted several pages to his person,
which, he writes, "is like those pears, coarse to the touch but sweet to
the palate," yet I am moved to say that the eye long habituated to
resting lovingly upon somatic beauty does not blink nor is it pained
when it rests upon Giovanni Papini.
In one of his latest books--it is never safe to say which is really his
last, unless you stand outside the door of the bindery of _La Voce_--in
one of his latest books, entitled "Testimonials," the third series of
"Twenty-four Brains," he reverts to this, and says that his person is
"so repugnant that Mirabeau, world-famed for his ugliness, was compared
with him an Apollo."
He does not get the same exquisite pleasure from deriding his qualities
of soul, but, as the face is the mirror of the soul, no one is
astonished to learn that "this same Papini is the gangster of
literature, the tough of journalism, the Barabbas of art, the dwarf of
philosophy, the straddler of politics, and the Apache of culture and
learning." Nevertheless, no prudent, sensitive man should permit himself
to say this or anything approximating it in Papini's hearing, for not
only has he a card index of substantives that convey derogation, but he
has perhaps the fullest arsenal of adjectives in Italy, and has
habituated himself to the use of them, both with and without
provocation.
I have been told by his schoolmates and by those whom he later essayed
to teach that as a youth he was inquisitive about the nature of things
and objects susceptible to physical and chemical explanation. His
writings indicate that his real seduction was conditioned by philosophic
questions. Early in life he displayed a symptom which is common to many
psychopaths--an uncontrollable desire to read philosophical writers
beyond their comprehension. In the twenty years that he has been
publishing books he has constantly returned to this practice, as shown
by his "Twilight of the Philosophers," "The Other Half," and
"Pragmatism."
His first articles in the _Leonardo_, which now make up the volume known
as "Il Tragico Quotidiano e il Pilota Cieco" ("The Tragedy of Every Day
and the Blind Pilot"), are sketches and fantasies of a personal kind,
some of them fanciful and charming, some with a touch of inspired
extravagance that recall Baudelaire and Poe, and faintly echo Oscar
Wilde's "Bells and Pomegranates," Dostoievsky's "Poor People," and
Leonida Andreieff's "Little Angel." Some of the stories have a weird
touch. Others are founded in obsession that form the ancillæ of
psychopathy. Take, for instance, the man with a feeling of unreality who
did not really exist in flesh and blood but was only a figure in the
dream of some one else, and who felt that he would be vivified if only
he could find the sleeper and arouse him. This idea is not of infrequent
occurrence in that strange disorder, dementia precox; take again the man
who found his life dull and who covenanted with a novelist to do his
bidding in exchange for being made an interesting character; and the two
men who changed souls; and the talks with the devil interpreting
scripture. All these awaken an echo in the reader's mind of either
having been heard before or they bring the hope that they never will be
heard again.
Although his early writings had an arresting quality, it was not until
he undertook to edit some Italian classics published under the title of
"I Nostri Scrittori" ("Our Writers") that they began to take on the
features that have since become characteristic and which have been
described by his admirers as "rugged, vigorous, virile, rich,
neologistic," and everything else the antithesis of pussy-foot. This
feature, if feature it can be called, showed itself first in "L'Uomo
Finito," a book which is admitted to be an autobiography. It introduces
us to an ugly, sensitive, introspective, mentally prehensile child of
shut-in personality who is not only egocentric at seven but who loves
and exalts himself and despises and disparages others.
This unlovable child with an insatiate appetite for information found
his way to a public library and determined to write an encyclopædia of
all knowledge. His juvenile frenzy came its first cropper when he
reached the letter "B," and he was submerged with the Bible and with
God. The task was too big, he had to admit, but his ambition to
accomplish some great and thorough piece of work was undaunted. He began
a compendium of religions, then of literature, and last of the Romance
languages.
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.
He that hath knowledge spareth his words, and the mistake is to consider
words linked up as subject, predicate, and object, especially if the
substantives are qualified by lurid adjectives, the equivalent of
knowledge. He knows the "ars scrivendi" as Aspasia knew the "ars
amandi"; Papini knows the value of symbolic, eye-arresting, suggestive
titles. He realizes the importance of overstatement and of exaggerated
emphasis; he is cognizant of the insatiateness of the average human
being for gossip and particularly gossip about the great; he recognizes
that there is no more successful way of flattering the mediocre than by
pointing out to him the shortcomings of the gods, for thus does he
identify their possessions with his own and convince himself that he
also is a god. Papini's sensitive soul whispers to him that the majority
of people will think him brave, courageous, valorous, resolute,
virtuous, and firm if he will adopt a certain pose, a certain manner, a
certain swagger that will convey his grim determination to carry his
mission to the world though it takes his last breath, the last glow of
his mortal soul.
"They wished me to be a poet; here, therefore, is a little poetry," is
the opening line of his book called "Cento Pagine di Poesia," and this,
though not in verse, is characterized by such imaginative beauty, more
in language, however, than in thought, that it is worthy to be called a
poem. More than any other of his books it reveals the real Papini. Here
he is less truculent, less Nietzschian, less self-conscious of
understudying and attempting to act the parts of Jove. He is more like
the Papini that he is by nature, and therefore more human, more kind and
gentle--would I could add modest--more potent and convincing, than in
any of his other books. It is especially in the third part, under the
general title of "Precipitations," that the author gives the freest rein
to his fantasy and is not always endeavoring to explain or tell the
reason why, but abandons himself to the production of words which will
present rhythmically the emotions that are springing up within him. It
is difficult to believe that the same hand penned these poems and the
open letter to Anatole France beginning: "In these days Anatole France
is in Rome, and perhaps returning he will stop in Florence, but I beg
him fervently not to seek me out. I could not receive him." That quality
of delusion of grandeur I have seen heretofore only in victims of a
terrible disease.
Signor Papini is never so transparent as he is in his "Stroncatura" and
in his excursions into the realm of philosophy. His attack on Nietzsche
is most illuminating. In fact, Giovanni Papini is Frederick Nietzsche
viewed through an inverted telescope. "Nietzsche's volubility
(indication of easy fatigue) makes him prefer the fragmentary and
aphoristic style of expression; his incapacity to select from all that
which he has thought and written leads him to publish a quantity of
useless and repeated thought; his reluctance to synthetize, to
construct, to organize, which gives to his books an air of oriental
stuff, a mixture of old rags and of precious drapery, jumbled up without
order, are the best arguments for imputing to him a deficiency of
imperial mentality, a reflex of the general weakness of philosophy. But
the most unexpected proof of this weakness consists in his incapacity to
be truly and authentically original. The highest and most difficult
forms of originality are certainly these two: to find new interpretation
and solution of old problems, to pose new problems and to open streets
absolutely unknown."
No one can examine closely the writings of Signor Papini without
recognizing that he has shown himself incapable of selecting from that
which he has written and thought and of setting it forth as a statement
of his philosophy or as an Apologia pro Sua Vita. Constant republication
of the same statements and the same ideas dressed up with different
synonyms is a charge that can be brought with justice. It can be
substantiated not only by his books but by _La Vraie Italie_, an organ
of intellectual liaison between Italy and other countries directed by
Signor Papini, which had a brief existence in 1919, a considerable
portion of which was taken up with republication of the old writings of
the director.
Even the most intemperate of his admirers would scarcely contend that he
merits being called original, judged by his own standards. At one time
in his life Nietzsche was undoubtedly his idol, and I can think of the
juvenile Papini No. 3 suggesting that he model himself after the
Teutonic descendant of Pasiphae and the bull of Poseidon. Thus did he
appease his morbid sensitiveness and soothe his pathological erethism by
enveloping himself in an armor made up of rude and uncouth words, of
sentiment and of disparagement; of raillery against piety, reverence,
and faith; of contempt for tradition. In fact, he seemed equipped with a
special apparatus for pulling roots founded in the tender emotions. He
would pretend that he is superior to the ordinary mortal to whom love in
its various display, sentiment in its manifold presentations, dependence
upon others in its countless aspects are as essential to happiness as
the breath of the nostrils is essential to life. In secret, however, he
is not only dependent upon it, he is beholden to it.
When he assumes his most callous and indifferent air, when he is least
cognizant of the sensitiveness of others, when in brief he is speaking
of his fellow countrymen, Signore D'Annunzio, Mazzoni, Bertacchi, Croce,
and up until recently when he speaks of God or religion, he reminds me
of that extraordinary and inexplicable type of individual whom we have
had "in our midst" since time immemorial, but who had greater vogue in
the time of Petronius than he has to-day.
Although the majority of these persons are _au fond_ proud of their
endowment, the world at large scoffs at them; and in primitive countries
such as our own it kicks at them; therefore they are quick to see the
advantage of assuming an air of crass indifference and, with the swagger
of the social corsair, to express a brutal insensitiveness to the
æsthetic and the hedonistic to which in reality they vibrate. They never
deceive themselves, and Signor Papini does not deceive himself. He knows
his limitations, and the greatest of them are that he is timid, lacking
in imagination, in sense of humor, and in originality. He is as
dependent upon love as a baby is upon its bottle.
When writing about himself he hopes the reader will identify him only
with the characters whose thoughts and actions are flattering, but the
real man is to be identified with some of the characters whom he desires
his public to think fictitious. In one of his short stories he narrates
a visit to a world-famed literary man. He describes his trip to the
remote city that he may lay the modest wreath plated from the pride of
his mind and his heart at the feet of his idol. He finds him a
commonplace, almost undifferentiated lump of clay with a more
commonplace, slatternly wife and even more hopelessly commonplace
children. His repute is dependent wholly upon the skill with which he
manipulates a card index and pigeon-holes. Papini fled to escape
contemplation of himself and the fragments of the sacred vessel.
Signor Papini has been an omnivorous reader along certain lines; he has
been a tireless writer, and he is notorious for his neologistic
logorrhea, but the possession which stands in closest relation to his
literary reputation is his indexed collection of words, phrases, and
sentences. This, plus knowing by heart the poetry of Carducci, and his
envy of Benedetto Croce for having obtained the repute of being one of
the most fertile philosophic minds of his age, and his advocacy of the
gospel of strenuousness, is the framework upon which he has ensheathed
his house of letters.
No study of the man or of his work can neglect one aspect of his
career--his constant change of position. He knocks with breathless
anxiety at the door of some new world, and no sooner does he secure
entrance and see the pleasant valley of Hinnom than he feels the lure of
black Gehenna and is seized with an uncontrollable desire to explore it.
When he returns he hastens to the public forum and announces his
discoveries, preferring to tell of the gewgaws which he discovered than
to expatiate on the few jewels which he gathered.
His last production augurs well for him, because it indicates that
finally he will bathe in the pool of the five porches at Jerusalem, the
World War having troubled its water instead of an angel. November 30,
1919, he published in the most widely circulated and influential
newspaper of Central Italy, the _Resto del Carlino_, an article entitled
"Amore e Morte" ("Love and Death"), which sets forth that he has had
that experience which the Christian calls "seeing a great light, knowing
a spiritual reincarnation," and which those whom Papini has been
supposed to represent call a pitiable defalcation, a spiritual
bankruptcy.
On February 21, 1913, he proclaimed in the Costanzi Theatre of Rome that
"in order to reach his power man must throw off religious faith, not
only Christianity or Catholicism, but all mystic, spiritualistic,
theosophic faiths and beliefs." Now he has discovered Jesus. In his
literary ruminations he has come upon the gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John, which set forth the purpose and teachings of our Lord
and which have convinced countless living and dead of His divinity. We
must forswear egocentrism; we must stop making obeisance to materialism;
we must cease striving for success, comfort, or power. Such efforts led
to the massacre of yesterday, to the agony of to-day, and are
conditioning our eternal perdition. Salvation is within ourselves, the
Kingdom of Heaven is within our hearts, he who seeks it without is a
blind man led by a blind guide. The road over which we must travel is
bordered on either side by seductive pastures from which gush
life-giving springs, topped with luxurious trees of soul-satisfying
color that protect from the blazing sun or the congealing wind, and on
either side are pathways so softly cushioned that even the most tender
feet may tread them without fear of wound or blister. The sign-posts to
this road are the four little volumes written two thousand years ago.
No one unfamiliar with that strange disorder of the mind called the
manic depressive psychosis can fully understand Signor Papini. There is
no one more sane and businesslike than the former Futurist, yet the
reactions of his supersensitive nature have some similarity with this
mental condition present, in embryo, in many people. In that mysterious
malady there is a period of emotional, physical, and intellectual
activity that surmounts every obstacle, brushes aside every barrier,
leaps over every hurdle. During its dominancy the victim respects
neither law not convention; the goal is his only object. He doesn't
always know where he is going and he isn't concerned with it; he is
concerned only with going. When the spectator sees the road over which
he has travelled on his winged horse he finds it littered with the
débris that Pegasus has trampled upon and crushed.
This period of hyperactivity is invariably followed by a time of
depression, of inadequacy, of emotional barrenness, of intellectual
sterility, of physical impotency, of spiritual frigidity. The sun from
which the body and the soul have had their warmth and their glow falls
below the horizon of the unfortunate's existence and he senses the
terrors of the dark and the rigidity of beginning congelation. Then,
when hope and warmth have all but gone and only life, mere life without
color or emotion remains, and the necessity of living forever in a world
perpetually enshrouded in darkness with no differentiation in the débris
remaining after the tornado, then the sun gradually peeps up,
illuminates, warms, revives, fructifies the earth, and the sufferer
becomes normal--normal save in the moments or hours of fear when he
contemplates having again to brave the hurricane or to breast the
deluge. But once the wind begins to blow with a velocity that bespeaks
the readvent of the tornado, he throws off inhibition and goes out in
the open, holds up the torch that shall light the whole world, and with
his megaphone from the top of Helicon shouts: "This way to the
revolution."
In a relative sense, this is the mode of Signor Papini. He is fascinated
by the beauty and perfections of an individual or of a school and he
will enroll himself a member, but before he gets thoroughly initiated he
gets word of another individual or another school which must be
investigated. In the intoxication he defames and often slays his
previous mistress. Thus his whole life has been given to the task of
discovering a new philosophy, a new poetry, a new romance, a new
prophecy, and their makers. In the ecstasy of discovery he cannot resist
smashing the idol of yesterday that his pedestal may be free for the
more worthy one of to-day, and he cannot inhibit the impulse to rush off
to the composing-rooms of _La Voce_ to register his emotions in print.
In his desire to be famous he reminds one of those individuals who would
be liked by every one, and who will do anything save cease making the
effort. Pretending that he loves to have people hate him, he does not,
but he would rather have hate and disparagement than indifference or
neglect. He desires power, that unattainable he will be satisfied with
notoriety. He does not agree with a fellow poet that
"On stepping stones we reach to higher dreams,
And ever high and higher must we climb,
Casting aside our burdens as we go,
Till we have reached the mountain-tops sublime,
Where purged from care and dross the free winds flow."
Were he a genius and at the same time had the industry that he has
displayed, he would be the equal of H. G. Wells, possibly the peer of
Bernard Shaw, but he is neither. He is simply a clever, industrious,
versatile, sensitive, emotional man of forty, whose mental juvenility
tends to cling to him. He has so long habituated himself to
overestimation and his admiring friends have been so injudicious in
praising his productions for qualities which they do not possess and
neglecting praiseworthy qualities which they do possess, that he is like
an object under a magnifying-glass out of focus.
But, as Papini himself says, he has not finished. He is still
comparatively a young man and the world awaits his accomplishment. If
the function he has chosen is that of agitation rather than
construction, of preparation rather than of building, he cannot be
totally condemned for that. His environment is in a condition where much
destruction is necessary before anything real can be evolved. And as the
apostle of this destruction Papini must be accepted. He stands as a
prophet, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 'Prepare ye the
way--'"; and the generations will show whether it is indeed a highway he
has opened.