Part 3 (1/2)
In the poet's writing there are pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 Friedrichstra.s.se, 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 amba.s.sador, 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 pa.s.sion 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, pus.h.i.+ng a whole nation into the b.l.o.o.d.y 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.
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 Bulow 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-cla.s.s 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 Amba.s.sador, 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 premiers.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sionately, 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.
The const.i.tution 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s of common citizens.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.ses 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 ”cla.s.ses” rather than the ma.s.ses. 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 Cafe Arragno. The worst that could be said against these casual gatherings was their youth.
It is the way of youth to vent its pa.s.sion 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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.
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 pa.s.sionately.
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.
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 const.i.tution 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.