The World Decision Part 2

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 cla.s.ses 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 t.i.tanic 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 cla.s.ses. Giolitti's a.s.sociations were of this cla.s.s. 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 "ingrat.i.tude" of siding against the people who had brought her prosperity. Grat.i.tude and ingrat.i.tude 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 a.s.sume 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 princ.i.p.al. 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 dispa.s.sionate 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. a.s.suming that there is something precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure in the instinct of nationality, as I a.s.sume, 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 compet.i.tion 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, cheris.h.i.+ng 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 princ.i.p.ality! 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 a.s.sumes, naturally, the aspects of "progress," and consists of the richer trading cla.s.s 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 debas.e.m.e.nt 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 n.o.bler 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 role! 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.

Circ.u.mstances 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 partic.i.p.ating 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 e un ritorno per una nova dipart.i.ta, 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 beat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sion 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 ma.s.sive 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 s.h.i.+ne above the sea of white faces. To most the arrival was evident merely from the swaying of the dense human ma.s.s, 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 ma.s.s. 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 Bulow 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sion and they touched into flame that something of heroic pa.s.sion 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 Bulow 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 ma.s.s of his countrymen responded.

D'Annunzio spoke again admirably at those great gatherings of concord when the citizens of Rome a.s.sembled 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 n.o.bly 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sume that the case of D'Annunzio was really the case of Italy itself--conversion? The deepest pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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.