Part 2 (2/2)

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.

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