Chapter II: Part ONE: Italy (2)

It is important to realize what happened overnight. Giolitti had become the most hated, most denounced man in all Italy, and in so far as he represented honest _neutralista_ sentiment the cause was dead. If that was what the Salandra Government wanted to achieve, they had got their desire. If, as the politicians say, they were "feeling out" popular sentiment, they need no longer doubt what it was. Columns of vituperation appeared in the anti-German newspapers, crowds began to form and shout in the streets. "_Traditore_," hissed with every accent of hate and scorn, filled the air. Giolitti's life was seriously in danger--or the Government preferred to think so. The great apartment house on the Via Cavour in which he lived was cordoned off by double lines of troops. Cavalry kept guard, all day and half the night, before the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore, ready to sweep through the crowded streets in case the mob got out of hand. Other troops poured out of the barracks over the city, doing _piquet a mato_ on all the main streets and squares of the city.

Giolitti had, indeed, swayed events,--"told the people what they wanted,"--but not in the expected manner. He had revealed the nation to itself, drifting on the verge of war, and they knew now that they wanted nothing of Giolitti or neutrality or German compromises. They wanted war with Austria. The remarkable fact is that a nation which had submitted in passivity to absolute ignorance of the diplomatic exchanges, waiting dumbly the decision that should determine its fate,--of which it could be said that a large number, perhaps a majority, were neutral at heart,--suddenly overnight awoke to a realization of the political situation and rejected the prudent advice of their popular politician, denounced him, and inferentially proclaimed themselves for war. At last they had seen: they saw that the Salandra Government in which they had confidence had come to the parting of the ways with Austria, and they saw the hand of Giolitti trying to play the game of their ancient enemy.

Then the Salandra Government did a bold, a dramatic thing: it resigned in a body, leaving the King free to choose ministers who could obtain the support of the Giolitti following in Parliament. It was inevitable, it was simple, it was sincere, and it was masterly politics. The public was aghast. At the eleventh hour the state was left thus leaderless because its real desires were to be thwarted by a politician who took his orders from the German Embassy.

Thereupon the "demonstrations" against Giolitti, against Austria and Germany, began in earnest.

* * * * *

The first popular "demonstration" which I saw in Rome was a harmless enough affair, and for that matter none of them were really serious. The Government always had the situation firmly in hand, with many regiments of infantry, also cavalry, to reinforce the police, the secret service, and the _carabinieri_, who alone might very well have handled all the disorder that occurred. Never, I suspect, was there any more demonstrating than the Government thought wise. The first occasion was a little crowd of boys and youths,--not precisely riff-raff, rather like our own college boys,--and they did less mischief than a few hundred freshmen or sophomores would have done. They marched down the street from the Piazza Tritone, shouting and carrying a couple of banners inscribed with "Abasso Giolitti." They stoned a few signs, notably the one over the empty office of the Austrian-Lloyd company, then, being turned from the Corso and the Austrian Embassy by the police, they rushed back up the hill to the Salandra residence, to hang about and yell themselves hoarse in the hope of evoking something from the former Premier. The two poles of the following "demonstrations" were the Salandra and the Giolitti residences with occasional futile dashes into the Corso....

For the better part of a week these street excitements kept up, not merely in Rome, but all over Italy: for that one week, while the King sent for various public men and offered them the task of forming a new ministry, which in every case was respectfully declined--as was expected.

* * * * *

Why did the King not send for Giovanni Giolitti, the one statesman who under ordinary circumstances might have expected a summons? Neither Giolitti nor any of his intimates was invited to form a cabinet and reëstablish constitutional government. Nothing would appear to be more natural than that the leader of the Opposition, controlling a majority of the Deputies, who avowedly represented a policy opposed to that of the ministers who had resigned, should be asked himself to take charge. But Giolitti was never asked, and daily the shouting in the streets grew louder, more menacing, and the mood of the public more tense. Nothing was plainer than that if Giolitti had a majority of the Deputies, the people were not for him and his policies. The House of Savoy, as the King so well put it, rules by expressing the will of the people. Each day it was more evident what that will was. Giolitti, the master politician, was being outplayed by mere honest men. They had used him--as Germany had used him--to try out the temper of the nation. With him they drew the _neutralista_ and pro-German fire beforehand, prudently, not to be defeated by hostile party criticism in the Chamber. And when they got through with the politician, they threw him out: literally they intimated through the Minister of Public Safety that they would not be responsible any longer for his personal safety. There was nothing for him but to go--before Parliament had assembled!

As Italy seethed and boiled, threatening to break into revolutionary violence, while the King received one respectable nonentity after another, who each time after a very brief consideration declined the proffered responsibility, Giolitti must have thought that the life of the politician is not an easy one. He was stoned when he appeared on the streets in his motor. He had to sneak out of the city at dawn that last day. Where was all the _neutralista_ sentiment so evident the first months of the war? And where was the German influence supposed to be so strong in the upper commercial classes? Germans as well as Austrians were scurrying out of Italy as fast as they could. Their insinuating multiplicity was proved by the numbers of shuttered shops. More hotels along the Pincian, whose "Swiss" managers found it prudent to retire over the Alps, were closed. Angry crowds swarmed about the Austrian and German consulates, also the embassies when they could get through the cordons of troops on the Piazza Colonna. Noisy Rome these days might very well give rise to pessimistic reflections on the folly of popular government to politicians like Giolitti and the Prince von Bülow, whose obviously prudent policies were thus being upset by the "voice of the piazza" led by a very literary poet! No doubt at this moment they would point to Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the King of Greece as enlightened monarchs who know how to secure their own safety by ignoring the will of their peoples. But the end for Ferdinand and Constantine is not yet.

* * * * *

The trouble with the politician as with the trained diplomat is that he never goes beneath the surface. He takes appearances for realities. He has often lost that instinct of race which should enable him to understand his own humanity. To a Giolitti, adept in the trading game of political management, it must seem insane for Italy to plunge into the war against powerful allies, who at just this time were triumphing in West and East alike--all the more when the sentimental and trading instincts of the populace might be partly satisfied with the concessions so grudgingly wrung from Austria. It was not only rash: it was bad politics!

But what Giolitti and men of his stripe the world over cannot understand is that the people are never as crafty and wise and mean as their politicians. The people are still capable of honest emotions, of heroic desires, of immense sacrifices. They love and hate and loathe with simple hearts. The politician like the popular novelist makes the fatal mistake of underrating his audience. And his audience will leave him in the lurch at the crisis, as Italy left Giolitti. Italy was never enthusiastic, as its enemies have charged, for a war of mere aggression, for realizing the "aspirations" because Austria was in a tight place, even for redeeming a million and a half more or less of expatriated Italians in Austrian territory. Politicians and statesmen talked of these matters, perforce; the people repeated them. For they were tangible "causes." But what Italians hated was Austrian and German leadership--were the "_barbari_" themselves, their ancient foe; and when told that they had better continue to make their bed with the "_barbari_," they revolted.

There are many men in every nation,--some of the politician type, some of the aristocratic type, some of the business type,--who by interest and temperament are timid and fundamentally cynical. They are pacifists for profit. About them gather the uncourageous "intellectuals," who believe in the potency of all established and dominating power whatever it may be. But these "leading citizens" fortunately are a minority in any democracy. They do most of the negotiating, much of the talking, but when the crisis comes,--and the issue is out in the open for every one to see,--they have to reckon with the instinctive majority, whose emotional nature has not been dwarfed. That majority is not necessarily the "rabble," the irresponsible and ignorant mob of the piazza as the German Chancellor sees them: it is the great human army of "little people," normal, simple, for the most part honest, whose selfish stake in the community is not large enough to stifle their deepest instincts. In them, I believe, lies the real idealism of any nation, also its plain virtues and its abiding strength.

The Italian situation was a difficult one, obviously. Public opinion had been perplexed. There were the classes I have just mentioned, by interest and temperament either pro-German or honestly neutral. There was the radical mob that the year before had temporarily turned Italy into republics. There was the unreliable South. And the hard-ground peasants who feared, justly, heavier taxes and the further hardships of war. And there were the millions of honest but undecided Italians who hated Teutonism and all its deeds, who were intelligent enough to realize the exposed situation of Italy, who felt the call of blood for the "unredeemed," and the vaguer but none the less powerful call of civilization from their northern kin--above all who responded to the fervid historical idealism of the poet voicing the longing of their souls to become once more the mighty nation they had been. These were the people whose change of hearts and minds surprised Giolitti and the Germans.

What had been going on in those hearts of the plain people all these months of the great war, Giolitti could not understand. It was another Italy from the one he had charmed that rose at his prudent advice and threw the bitter word "_traditore_" in his teeth and howled him out of Rome. Traitor, yes! traitor to the loftier, bolder, finer longings of their hearts to take their stand at all cost with their natural allies in this last titanic struggle with the barbarians. It was this sort of public that spoke in the piazza and whose voice prevailed.

* * * * *

The diplomat deals too exclusively with conventional persons, with the sophisticated. The politician deals too exclusively with the successful, with the commercial and exploiting classes. Giolitti's associations were of this class. Like any other _bourgeoisie_ of finance and trade, "big business" in Italy was on the side of the big German battalions, who at this juncture were winning victories. Italy was peculiarly under the influence of German and Austrian finance. One of its leading lending banks--the Banca Commerciale--was a German concern. Most of its newer developments had been accomplished with German capital, were run by German engineers, equipped with German machines. Germany has bitterly reproached her former ally for the "ingratitude" of siding against the people who had brought her prosperity. Gratitude and ingratitude in business transactions are meaningless terms. The lender gets his profit as well as the borrower, usually before the borrower. If Italy has needed German capital, Germany has needed the Italian markets and Italian industries for her capital. The Germans surely have used Italy as their commercial colony. Italy bought her bathtubs, her electric machines, her coal, and her engines from Germany. For the past generation the German commercial traveler has been as common in Italy as the German tourist. In fact, was there ever a German tourist who was not in some sense a commercial agent for the Fatherland?

To the international financier all this is simply intelligible--a matter of mutually desirable exchange. No debtor nation should feel aggrieved with a creditor nation: rather it should rejoice that it has attracted the services of foreign capital. Is the international economist right in his reasoning? Why does the delusion persist among plain people that the creditor is not always a benefactor? It is a very old and persistent delusion, so strong in the Middle Ages that interest was considered illegal and the despised Jews were the only people who dared finance the world. Abstractly the economists are undoubtedly right, yet I am fain to believe that the popular notion has some ground of truth in it too. Obviously, according to modern notions a country rich in natural resources, but poor in capital, inherited savings, must borrow money to "develop" itself. But granting for the moment that material exploitation of a country is as desirable as our modern notions assume it to be, even then there are reasons for grave suspicion of foreign lenders. Take abused Mexico. Its woes are in good part traceable to the pernicious influence upon its domestic politics of the foreign capital which its riches have attracted. One might instance the United States as an example of beneficial exploitation by foreign capital, but with us it must be remembered the lender has had neither industrial nor political power. We have always been strong enough to manage our affairs ourselves and satisfy our creditors with their interest--if need be with their principal. We have drawn on the European horde as upon an international bank, but we have absolutely controlled the disposition of the moneys borrowed. A weak country can hardly do that. Mexico could not. It had to suffer the foreign exploiter, with his selfish intrigues, in person. Italy has never been as weak as Mexico: it has maintained its own government, its own civilization. But the increasing amount of foreign investment, the increasing number of foreign "interests" in Italy, has been evident to every Italian. The hotels, the factories, the shops all testify patently to the presence of the stranger within the gates looking after his own interests, breeding his money on Italian soil.

But why not? the dispassionate internationalist may ask. Why should not the Italian hotels be in the hands of Austrians, Germans, and Swiss; the new electrical developments be installed and run by Germans; the shops for tourists and Italians be owned by foreigners? There we cross the unconscious instinct of nationality, which cannot be ignored. Assuming that there is something precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure in the instinct of nationality, as I assume, there are grave dangers in too much friendly commercial "infiltration" from the outside. The indirect influences of commercial exploitation with foreign capital are the insidious, the dangerous ones. The dislike of the foreign trader, the foreign creditor, may voice itself crudely as mere envy, know-nothingism, but it has a healthy root in national self-preservation. For an Italian the German article should be undesirable, especially if its possession means accepting the German and his way of life along with his goods. The small merchant and the peasant express their resentments of foreign competition rawly, no doubt. Consciously it is half envy of the more efficient stranger. Unconsciously they are voicing the deep traditions of their ancestors, vindicating their race ideals, cherishing what is most enduring in themselves. They would not see their country given over to the stranger, whose life is not their life.

One unpleasant aspect of the commercial invasion of Italy by the Teuton was his liking to live there, and consequently the amount of real estate which he was collecting on the Latin peninsula--so much that the lovely environs of Naples were fast becoming a German principality! These invaders were not traders, nor workers, but capitalists and exploiters. The process is known now as "infiltration." The German had filtered into Italy in every possible way, was supplanting its own native life with the Teutonic thing, as it had in France so largely. Italy could well profit from that experience of its sister nation. The Germans who filtered into French life, commercial, industrial, social, were German first and last. When the crisis came they turned from their adopted land, where they had lived on terms of cordial hospitality for ten, twenty, thirty years, and took themselves back to Germany, in many cases to reappear as the invader at the head of armed troops. The experience of France proved that the peaceful German resident was a German all the years of his life, not a loyal, vital factor in his adopted country--too often something of a spy as well. Therefore Italy might well be disturbed over the presence of so much Teutonic "infiltration" in her own beloved land. And why should Germany call her ungrateful when she sought to rid herself of her unwelcome creditors? German capital had made its five per cent on its investments, and better: it should not expect to absorb the life of the nation also.

* * * * *

In every debtor nation there must be an element which profits directly from the creditor relation. It assumes, naturally, the aspects of "progress," and consists of the richer trading class and bankers, sustainers of politicians. Such, I take it, were the followers of Giolitti, and such was Giolitti himself, a sincere admirer of Teutonic success and believer in the economic help which Germany could render to his kind of Italian. Such men as Giolitti are easily impressed by evidences of German superiority: they identify progress with the rapid introduction of German plumbing, German hotel-keeping, German electric devices, German banks. All these, they believe, help a "backward country" to come forward. They do not understand the finer spiritual risks that such material benefits may involve. They are not as sensitive as the humble peasant, as simpler citizens, to the gradual sapping of the precious national roots, of the internal debasement that may be going on through the process of "infiltration." They are too prosperous, too cosmopolitan to feel losses in national individuality. They realize merely the better hotels, the better railways, the improved plumbing in their country. Their souls are already half-Teutonized.

In his dignified answer to the German Chancellor's vulgar attack on him in the Reichstag, Salandra referred to the long history of the Italian people, who "were civilized and leaders of the world" when the Teuton hordes were still savage. It was the spirit of that ancient civilization which did not consist primarily of industrial development that stirred in the souls of true Italians and made them scorn the advice of the Teutonized politician. He was "_traditore_" to all that nobler Italians hold dear--to the Latin tradition.

III

_The Poet Speaks_

The poet prophet has so long abdicated his rights among us moderns that we are incredulous when told that he has again exercised his function. That is the reason why the story of a poet's part in leading the Italian people toward their decision is received by Americans with such skeptical humor. And Gabriele d' Annunzio in the rôle! A poet who is popularly supposed to be decadent, if not degenerate, gossipingly known for his celebrated affair with a famous actress, whose novels and plays, when not denounced for their eroticism, are very much caviar to the "wholesome" man, so full are they of a remote symbolism, so purely "literary." "Exotic" is the chosen word for the more tolerant American minds with which to describe the author of "Il Fuoco" and "San Sebastian."

In recent years the Italian poet has abandoned his native land, living in Paris, writing his last work in French, having apparently exiled himself for the rest of his life and renounced his former Italianism. Circumstances were stronger than the poet. The war came, and D'Annunzio turned back to his native land.

* * * * *

He came to Italy at a critical moment and characteristically he filled the moment with all the drama of which it was capable. His reappearance in Italy, as every one knows, was due to the ceremonies in connection with the unveiling of a monument to the famous Garibaldian band,--the Thousand,--in the little village of Quarto outside of Genoa, from which Garibaldi and his Thousand set forth on their march of liberation fifty-five years ago. The monument had been long in the making. The opportunity for patriotic instigation was heightened by the crisis of the great war. The King and his ministers had indicated, previously, their intention of participating in this national commemoration, but as the day grew near and the political situation became more acute, it was announced that the urgency of public affairs would not permit the Government to leave Rome. It may have been the literal fact that the situation precipitated by the presence of Giolitti demanded their constant watchfulness. Or it may well have been that the King and the Salandra Government had no intention of allowing their hand in this dangerous game to be forced by any reckless fervor of the poet. They were not ready, yet, to countenance his inflammation. At any rate, they left the occasion solely to the poet.

How he improved it may best be gathered from his address. To the American reader, accustomed to a blunter appeal, the famous _Sagra_ will seem singularly uninflammatory--intensely vague, and literary. One wonders how it could fire that, vast throng which poured out along the Genoa road and filled the little Garibaldian town. But one must remember that nine months of hesitation had prepared Italian minds for the poet's theme--the future of Italy. He linked the present crisis of choice with the heroic memories of that first making of a nation, "_Oggi sta sulla patria un giorno di porpora; e questo é un ritorno per una nova dipartita, o gente d'Italia!_"--A purple day is dawning for the Fatherland and this is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy! The return for the new departure--to make a larger, greater Italy, just as the Thousand had departed from this spot to gather the fragments of a nation into one. "All that you are, all that you have, and yourselves, give it to the flame-bearing Italy!" And in conclusion he invoked in a new beatitude the strong youth of Italy who must bear their country to these new triumphs: "O happy those who have more because they can give more, can burn more.... Happy those youths who are famished for glory, because they will be appeased.... Happy the pure in heart, happy those who return with victory, because they will see the new face of Rome, the recrowned brow of Dante, the triumphal beauty of Italy."

The youth of Italy avidly seized upon the poet's appeal. The _Sagra_ was read in the wineshops of little villages, on the streets of the cities. The voice of the poet reached to that fount of racial idealism, of patriotism, that glows in the hearts of all real Italians. He tied their heroic past with the heroic opportunity of the present. And he did not speak of the "unredeemed" or of the "aspirations." Instead, "This is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!"

The politician, awaiting in Rome the effect of his advice to choose the safe path, must have wondered, as too many Americans wondered, how this poet fellow could stir such mad passion by his fine figures of birds and sea! But there was a spirit abroad in Italy that would not be appeased with "compensations": the poet had the following of all "young Italy."

* * * * *

D'Annunzio came to Rome. Not at once. A whole week elapsed after the _Sagra_ at Quarto, the 5th of May, before he reached Rome--a week of growing tumult, of anti-Giolitti demonstrations, in which his glowing words could sink like hot wine into the hearts of the people. The delay was well considered. If the poet had seized the occasion of Quarto, he made his appearance on the larger scene after the interest of the whole nation had been heightened by reading his address.

I was one of the immense throng that awaited the arrival of the train bringing D'Annunzio to the capital. The great bare place before the terminal station was packed with a patient crowd. The windows of the massive buildings flanking the square were filled with faces. There were faces everywhere, as far as the recesses of the National Museum, around the flamboyant fountain, up the avenues. There were soldiers also, many of them, inside and outside of the station, to prevent any excessive disturbance, part of the remarkable precaution with which the Government was hedging every act. But the soldiers were not needed. The huge throng that waited hour after hour to greet the poet was not rabble: it was a quiet, respectable, orderly concourse of Romans. There was a preponderance of men over women, of youth over middle age, as was natural, but so far as their behavior went, they were as self-contained a "mob" as one might find in Berlin.

The train arrived about dusk, as the great electric lamps began to shine above the sea of white faces. To most the arrival was evident merely from the swaying of the dense human mass, from the cadence of the Garibaldian Hymn that rose into the air from thousands of throats. As room was made for the motor-car, one could see a slight figure, a gray face, swallowed up in the surging mass. Then the crowd broke on the run to follow the motor-car to the hotel on the Pincian where the poet was to stay. The newspapers said there were a hundred and fifty thousand people before the Regina Hotel in the Via Veneto and the adjacent streets. I cannot say. All the way from the Piazza Tritone to the Borghese Gardens, even to the Villa Malta where Prince von Bülow lived, the crowd packed, in the hope of hearing some words from the poet. The words of Mameli's "L'Inno" rose in the twilight air. At last the little gray figure appeared on the balcony above the throng....

It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the effect of what D'Annunzio said. His words fell like moulded bronze into the stillness, one by one, with an extraordinary distinctness, an intensity that made them vibrate through the mass of humanity. They were filled with historical allusions that any stranger must miss in part, but that touched the fibers of his hearers. He seized, as he had at Quarto, on the triumphant advance of the liberating Thousand and recounted the inspiring incidents of that day fifty years and more ago. As I stood in that huge crowd listening to the poet's words as they fell into the thirsty hearts of the people,--who were weary with too much negotiation,--I realized as never before that speech is given to man for more than reason. The words were not merely beautiful in themselves: they flamed with passion and they touched into flame that something of heroic passion in the hearts of all men which makes them transcend themselves. The crowd sighed as if it saw visions, and there rose instinctively in response the familiar strains of the Garibaldian Hymn.

Italy had found its voice! The poet did not speak of "compensations," a little more of Trent and Trieste, of a more strategic frontier. He stirred them with visions of their past and their future. He voiced their scorns. "We are not, we will not be a museum, an inn, a picnic ground, an horizon in Prussian blue for international honeymoons!... Our genius calls us to put our imprint on the molten matter of the new world.... Let there breathe once more in our heaven that air which flames in the prodigious song of Dante in which he describes the flight of the Roman eagle, of your eagle, citizens!... Italy is arming, not for the burlesque, but for a serious combat.... _Viva, viva Roma_, without shame, _viva_ the great and pure Italy!"

That was the voice which called Italy into the war: the will that Italy should live "ever grander, ever purer, without shame." The poet spoke to the Latin in the souls of his hearers.

* * * * *

He spoke again a number of times. In those feverish days when the nation was in a ferment, the restless youth of Rome would rush in crowds to the hotel on the Pincian and wait there patiently for their poet to counsel them. He gratified their desire, not often, and each time that he spoke he stung them to a fuller consciousness of will. He spoke of the larger Italy to be, and they knew that he did not mean an enlargement of boundaries. He spoke clearly, briefly, intensely. It was once more the indubitable voice of the poet and prophet raised in the land of great poetry.

D'Annunzio grew bolder. He recognized openly his antagonist--the traitor. The most dramatic of his little speeches was at the Costanzi Theater where a trivial operetta was being given, which was quickly swept into the wings. After the uproar on his entrance had been somewhat stilled, he spoke of Von Bülow and Giolitti and their efforts to thwart the will of the nation.

"This betrayal is inspired, instigated, abetted by a foreigner. It is committed by an Italian statesman, a member of the Italian Parliament in collusion with this foreigner to debase, to enslave, to dishonor Italy.".... _Traditore!_ I never thought to hear the word off the operatic stage. From D'Annunzio's lips it fell like a wave of fire upon that inflammable audience. A grizzled, well-dressed citizen suddenly leaped to his feet, yelling,--"I will drink his blood, the traitor.... Death to Giolitti!"....

While the big theater rocked and stormed with passion, outside on the Via Viminale barricades were being hastily thrown up. The cavalry, that had been sitting their mounts all day before Santa Maria Maggiore guarding the unwelcome Giolitti from the angry mob, had charged the packed street, sweeping it clear with the ugly sound of horses' hoofs on pavement and cries of hunted men and women. That was the end. The next morning, be it remembered, the politician sneaked away, and two days afterwards the Salandra Government returned to power. Rome, all Italy, became suddenly calm, purged of its passion, awaiting confidently the reopening of Parliament.

The Government had won. The people had won. The poet had beaten the politician. For his was the voice to which the great mass of his countrymen responded.

* * * * *

D'Annunzio spoke again admirably at those great gatherings of concord when the citizens of Rome assembled in the Piazza del Popolo and in the Campidolgio. The poet had made himself the spokesman of the new Italy which had found itself in the storm of the past agonizing weeks, and as such he was recognized by the Government. The King and the ministers accorded him audiences; he was given a commission in the army and attached to the general staff. Wherever he appeared he was received with acclamations, with all the honor that is accorded the one who can interpret nobly the soul of a nation. And the poet deserved all the recognition which he received--the throngs, the flowers, the _vivas_, the adoration of Italian youths. For he alone, one might say, raised the crisis from the wallow of sordid bargaining, from the tawdriness of sentiment, to a purer passion of Latin ambition and patriotism. He loftily recalled to his countrymen the finer ideals of their past. He made them feel themselves Latin, guardians of civilization, not traders for safety and profit.

* * * * *

Germans, naturally, have had bitter things to say about D'Annunzio. German sympathizers in America as well as the German Chancellor have sneered at the influence wielded in Italy's crisis by a "decadent" poet. Even among American lovers of Italy there has been skepticism of the sincerity of a national mind so easily swayed by a man who "is not nice to women." A peculiarly American view that hardly needs comment!

Is it not wiser to assume that the case of D'Annunzio was really the case of Italy itself--conversion? The deepest passion in the poet's life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France, he witnessed the splendid reawakening of French spirit in face of awful danger. Living in Paris during the early months of the cataclysm, witness of the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and the turn at the Marne, the heroic struggle for national existence in the winter trenches, he saw with a poet's vision what France was at death-grips with, what the Allies were fighting for, was not territorial gains or glory or even altogether selfish self-preservation, but rather, more deeply, for the existence of a certain humanity. This world war he realized is no local quarrel: it is the greatest of world decisions in the making. And the man himself was transfigured by it: he found himself in his greatest passion as Italy found herself at her greatest crisis. Latin that he is, he divined the inner meaning of the confused issues presented to the puzzled world. He was fired with the desire to light from his inspiration his own hesitant, confused people, to voice for them the call to the Latin soul that he had heard. For Italy, most Latin of all the heirs of Rome, with her tragic and heroic past, the war must be not a winning of a little Austrian territory, the redeeming of a few lost Italians, but a fight for the world's best tradition against the forces of death. Once more it was "_Fuori i barbari_," as it had been with her Latin ancestors.

It seems to me no great mystery.

In the poet's writing there are passages of a large historical understanding. Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition. Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to proclaim once more the cause of Latin civilization, should be the ardor of fighting in his own manner with his weapon of inspired words the world battle? So it seemed to me as I listened to his voice in the stillness of that May night. The voice of Roman glory, of ancient ideals awoke an answering passion in the hearts of the thousands who had gathered there. "_Una grande e pura Italia ... sensa onta_." And it would be a lasting shame for Italy to keep out of the struggle that the allied nations were making, to take her "compensations" prudently and shrink back within a cowardly neutrality. Better any other fate.

So it seemed to that throng of eager, soul-hungry Italians who stood beneath the balcony of the hotel on the Pincian and drank the poet's fiery message like a full-bodied wine. At last they had found themselves.

IV

_The Piazza Speaks_

"The voice of the piazza prevailed," the German Chancellor sneered in his denunciation of Italy at the conclusion. It can easily be imagined, the picture he made to himself, in his ugly northern office on Friedrichstrasse, of the influence that upset all German pressure and sent Italy into the war on the side of the Allies; that defeated the industry of the skilled ambassador, the will of the wily politician. The Chancellor saw one of those large public squares in which Latin countries abound, open centers in their close-built cities, where so much of the common life of the people goes on, now as it has for hundreds of years. For the piazza, descending in direct tradition from the ancient Forum, is the public hall of citizens, where they trade, gossip, quarrel, plot, love, and hate, from the crone sunning herself in a sheltered nook over her bag of chestnuts to the grandee whose palace windows open above the noisy commonalty. The Chancellor saw this common meeting-ground, this glorified street, filled with a ragged mob of "the baser quality," as on the operatic stage, emptily vocal or evilly skulking for mischief, like the _mafia_, the _apache_. He saw this loose gathering of irresponsibles suddenly stirred to evanescent passion against the real benefactors of their country by the secret agents of the Allies, "corrupted by English gold," in the mechanical melodrama of the German imagination, marching to and fro, attacking the shops and homes of worthy Germans, howling and stoning, by mere noise drowning the sober protests of reflecting citizens, intimidating a weak king, connived at by a bought government, pushing a whole nation into the bloody sacrifice of war out of mere recklessness of rioting--a piazza filled with the rabble minority who have nothing to lose because they neither fight nor pay.

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Such a picture, reflected in Bethmann-Hollweg's splenetic phrase, is a complete delusion of the German mind. I was in Rome and saw the real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night, and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations" did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince von Bülow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politician's intention of defeating the Salandra Government in its preparations for war became evident. At no time did the rioting in the streets equal the violence of what a third-class strike in an American mill town can produce. Such as it was the Government showed the determination and ability to keep it strictly within bounds. Rome was filled with troops. Alleyways and courtyards oozed troops at the first shouts from the piazza: the danger points of the Corso, especially the Piazza Colonna on which the Chigi Palace, the residence of the Austrian Ambassador, fronts, were kept almost constantly empty by cordons of troops. All told, the destruction done by the mobs could not have amounted to several hundred dollars--a few signs and shop windows smashed, a few pavements torn up in the Via Viminale. It is true that after war was declared upon Austria there was some pillage of Austrian and German shops in Milan, which has been greatly exaggerated by the German and pro-German press; it was nothing worse than what happened in Berlin to English residents in August, 1914. And the Italian Government immediately took severe measures with the officials who had permitted the disorders--removing the prefect and the military commander of Milan.

There is no saying, of course, what might have happened had the King offered the premiership to Giolitti, and had that astute politician been rash enough to accept the responsibility of forming a government in accord with his own _neutralista_ sympathies. It is more than likely that revolution would have ensued: possibly Italy would have entered the war as a republic. For the Italians are not Greeks, as has been amply proved. But the King of Italy, whatever his own sympathies may have been, showed plainly that he had enough political understanding not to run counter to the expressed will of his people, to deal with the "traitor." After a week of tempestuous inter-regnum, in which the piazza expressed itself passionately, the Salandra Government returned to power with all which that implied in foreign policy. Then the piazza became quiet. If the piazza must shoulder the responsibility of Italy's decision, it must be credited with knowing marvelously well its own mind.

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The constitution of this "mob" is worth attention. I saw it at many angles. I followed its first erratic flights through the streets when Salandra resigned and a gaping void opened before the nation. I waited for the poet's arrival at the Roman station, for hours, while the dense throng of men and women pressed into the great square and swelled like a dark pool into the adjoining streets. And I followed with the "piazza" in its instinctive rush to the hotel on the Pincian Hill to hear the voice of its spokesman. Again I was in the Corso when the plumed cavalry cleared the surging mass from the Piazza Venezia to the Piazza Colonna. I heard the people yell, "Death to the traitor Giolitti!" and "_Fuori i barbari!_" and sing Mameli's "L'Inno." I saw the uproar melt away in the soft darkness of the Roman nights, leaving the cavalry at their vigil before Santa Maria Maggiore, guarding the repose of Giovanni Giolitti.

I can testify that the "piazza" was composed very largely of perfectly respectable folk like myself. It varied more or less as chance gatherings of men will vary. Sometimes there were more workingmen in dirty clothes, sometimes more youths and boys with their banners, sometimes more shouters and fewer actors. But the core of it was always that same mass of common citizenship that gathered anciently in the Forum, that to-day goes orderly enough to the polls in New York or Chicago,--plain men, rather young than old, who are so distinctly left on the outside of affairs, who must perforce turn to the newspaper for information and to the open street for expression, who relieve themselves of uncomplex emotions by shouting, and who symbolize the things they hate to the depth of their souls with personalities like Giolitti and occasionally shy bricks at the guarded home of authority. All this, yes, but not "riff-raff," not anarchist, nor _mafia_, nor _apache_. Nothing of that did I see those days and nights.

The greeting to D'Annunzio was made by men of the professional and intellectual classes I should say, having wormed my way in and out of that vast piazza gathering. The daily crowds before the poet's hotel were composed chiefly of youths, at school or college, others in working dress. The noisiest, most inflammable of all these mobs was that in the Costanzi Theater the evening of D'Annunzio's appearance there. They were citizens--and their wives--who could afford to pay the not inconsiderable price charged--and seats were at a premium. The men around me in evening dress, who were by no means silent, came from the "classes" rather than the masses. The crowds that hung about the Corso and the adjacent squares were more mixed, but they held a goodly proportion of the frequenters of the Café Arragno. The worst that could be said against these casual gatherings was their youth. It is the way of youth to vent its passion in speech, to move and not to stand. Middle age stood on the sidewalks and watched, sympathetically. Old age looked down from the windows, contemplatively. But both old age and middle age consorted with youth in the great meetings of consecration in the Piazza del Popolo and the Campidolgio, after the will of the people had prevailed. And after all, youth must fight the wars, and pay for them for long years afterwards--why should it not have its say in the making of them as well as middle age and old age? The youths in the ranks of the patient, good-natured soldiers who did _piquet a mato_ all day and half the night in the Roman streets during that vocal week while the piazza spoke, were openly sympathetic with the mobs they were holding down. I knew some of the gray-clad boys. I strolled along the lines and saw the smiles, heard the chaffing give-and-take of citizen and soldier as the mob tried to rush through the double ranks that cordoned the streets. There was no hatred there, no violent conflict with authority. Each understood the other. The young officers seemed to say to the crowd,--"You may howl all you like, you fellows, but you mustn't throw stones or make a mess.... What's the good! War is coming anyway in a few days--they can't talk it away!" And the crowd replied heartily,--"You are all right. We understand each other. You are doing your duty. Soon you will be doing something better worth while than policing streets and saving that traitor Giolitti's skin from us. You will be chasing the Austrians out of Italian territory, and many of us will be with you then!" And the young officers looked the other way when the members of the "mob" offered the tired soldiers cigarettes and chocolate, and sometimes slipped through the cordon on private business within the forbidden area. Only once, once only in all the excitement did the long-haired horsemen clatter through the streets in a serious charge, scattering the shrieking pedestrians. That was by way of warning, possibly as much to the Government as to the populace.

Then the decision was made, and after the Salandra Ministry, in whom the people had confidence, had returned to power, the ministry that had broken with Austria and refused her grudging compromises, the piazza purred like doves and listened to long patriotic speeches from "representative citizens." No soldiers were needed to keep order in these immense gatherings. For all were citizens, then, piazza and palace alike in the face of war.

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One easily understands the German Chancellor's scorn over any irregular expression of public opinion, his disgust that the loose public in the streets dares to vent any emotion or will other than that suggested to it by a strong government, above all daring to voice it passionately. In a nation such as Germany, where the franchise is so hedged about that even those who have it cannot effectively express their wills, where political opinion is supplied from a central fount of authority, where the nation goes into war at the command of the Kaiser and his military advisers, where a war of "defense" and all other national interests are controlled by the "high commandment," consisting at the most of forty or fifty men, while the remaining sixty-five millions of the people are obedient puppets, nourished on falsehoods, where the popular emotion can be turned on like an electric current at the order of the "high commandment,"--now against this enemy, now against that one,--first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of Americans--it is natural that a high government functionary should despise all popular effervescence and misread its manifestations as merely the meretricious, bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in the Southern temperament and badly controlled by a weak, and probably corrupt, government. The elements in the piazza have no power in the close organization of Germany, no political expression whatever: all good citizens are instructed by a carefully controlled press how to think and feel and speak. To my thinking it is rather to the glory of the Latin temperament that it cannot be throttled and guided like the more docile Teuton nature, that when it feels vividly it will express itself, and that it can feel vividly, unselfishly in international concerns. The Latin cannot be made to march in blind obedience into the jaws of death. The piazza merely shouted what Italy had come to feel, that Teutonic domination would be intolerable, that at all cost the Austro-German ambitions must be checked, and the Latin tradition vindicated and made to endure. It was proved by the marvelous content, the fervid unanimity of patriotism that spread over Italy, once the great decision had been made.

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Since those full May weeks the world has had an example of what no doubt the Imperial Chancellor considers the suitable method of dealing with popular sentiment. The sympathies of Greeks and Rumanians have been, since the opening of the war, with the allied nations, yet their Teutonized sovereigns have kept both countries from declaring themselves in favor of the Allies. The King of Greece has stretched the constitution to preserve a distasteful neutrality, which, if it were not for the failure of the Allies to make impressive gains in the first year of the war, would have doubtless cost him his crown. The Balkan States are near enough the actual theater of war to suffer acutely from fear, and a natural timidity worked upon by many German agents, more successfully than Prince von Bülow, has thus far kept the people of Rumania and Greece passive in a false neutrality. Bulgaria is a fine example of the perfect working of the German method. The piazza certainly had no hand in the intrigues of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The representatives of his people urged him to maintain at least neutrality, not to put the nation at war with its blood kin, against its best interest. But the thing had all been "arranged" between the German King of Bulgaria and the German Government through "negotiation." Germany had been successful in buying the coöperation of Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at the expense of Austria. There were other factors in the case of Bulgaria that worked to the German advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice of the piazza, but the secret agreement of "responsible government," in other words, the control of despotic, German rulers. Italy may well be proud that she has a sovereign who faithfully interprets his responsibility of rule in a constitutional state and executes the will of his people--who listens also to the voice of the piazza, not merely to the arguments of the foreign diplomat. And Italy may also be proud that the piazza spoke at a dark hour in the Allies' cause, if not the darkest, when German arms were prevailing in the East; if the dangers of German conquest were not as close to Italy as with the Balkan States, they were not remote, as German threats too plainly showed.

The Venezelos-Zaimis situation was impossible in Italy, though the circumstances were almost parallel, with Salandra and Giolitti. The piazza knew the deep Biblical truth, "He who is not for me is against me," and execrated the professed _neutralista_ Giolitti. But the Greeks, it seems, are more easily managed by a "strong" government and a German king. The end, however, is not yet in sight. It remains to be seen whether the path of prudent passivity is the safe one, even selfishly.

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Why, after all, should we feel so apologetic for the voice of the piazza? All popular government, even in the limited form of a constitutional monarchy such as Italy, is a rough, uncertain affair. "The House of Savoy rules by executing the will of the Italian people." Good! But how is that popular will to be determined? Not, surely, by taking a poll of the five hundred-odd Deputies of the Italian Parliament elected two years before the world was upset by the Teuton desire to rule. Those Deputies were chosen, as we Americans know only too well how, by mean intrigues of party machines, by clever manipulation of trained politicians like Giovanni Giolitti, who by their control of appointed servants--the prefects of the provinces--can throw the elections as they will, can even disfranchise unfriendly elements of the population. Manhood suffrage is not a precise, a scientific method of getting at public opinion. It is possibly the least accurate method of gauging the will of a people. Something other than the poll is needed to resolve the will of a nation. And when that will is determined it makes little odds what instrumentality expresses it. Even the Giolittian Deputies, when brought to the urn for a secret vote on the Salandra measures a week after the lively expression of popular will in the piazza, voted--secretly--against their neutral leader, in favor of war! They had been converted by the voice of the piazza--by other things also in all likelihood. If their votes had been taken ten days before, when Giolitti first arrived in Rome, the result would have been far different: as Salandra and his colleagues knew. In the end the Italian Parliament merely registered the will of the people, both men and women, which expressed itself, as it always must, in diverse ways, through the press, by the voice of the piazza, in public and private discussion, flightily, weightily, passionately, timidly.

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