It was my good fortune as holder of the Gilder Fellowship in this
University to spend in Europe the thirteen months immediately preceding
the war. I used the opportunity for extensive travel and general
acclimatization rather than for specialized research, and was thus
able to get an extensive survey of the European scheme on the eve of
a cataclysm from which it may emerge entirely altered. No one can
predict how truly that year will mark the “end of an era.” It seems
true, however, that most of the tendencies of democracy, social reform,
and international understanding, to whose development I gave my most
eager attention, have been snapped off like threads, perhaps never to
be pieced together again. And the material development, so striking in
Germany and Italy, the rebuilding of the cities and the undertaking of
vast communal projects, will be indefinitely checked, from sheer want
of capital, wasted in the war.
[1] Report to the Trustees of Columbia University, 1914.
No one was more innocent than I of the impending horror. In fact,
this menacing “armed camp” actually seemed to bristle in less sharply
defined lines when seen at close range. Public opinion seemed far
less violent than I had expected. In England there was the persistent
hostility to Compulsory Service, the gnawing compunction at the folly
of the Boer War, the complete subsidence of the panic over German
invasion. In France, there was the unyielding opposition to the new
three-years’ military law, culminating in the radical victory at
the April parliamentary elections, a clear national expression of
reluctance at the increased military expenditures; there was the superb
irony of the French press over the Zabern affair, where one would have
expected a raging chauvinism; there was the general public deprecation
of the activities of the royalists, and the constant discrediting of
their Alsace-Lorraine propaganda. In Italy I had seen the wild outburst
of reaction against the criminal Tripolitan war, and the great general
strike of June, a direct popular uprising against war and militarism.
Perhaps if I had spent the winter in Germany, I should have felt the
drift towards war, but even there all the opinion I heard was of some
gigantic slow-moving Slavic pressure, against which defence must be
made. And if public and press were full of blatant world-defiance, the
spirit certainly escaped my attention. My mind became quite reconciled
to the fact of “armed peace.” My imagination unconsciously began to
envisage armaments as mere frozen symbols of power, grim, menacing and
costly, yet little more than graphic expressions, in a language that
all the world could understand, of the relative strength and prestige
of the nations. In spite of the uniforms that sprinkled the sidewalks
and the wagon-trains that littered the streets, my imagination simply
refused to take them as dynamic. And there was little in press and
people to make me think that they themselves took them as dynamic. How
I should have acted if I had known of the imminence of the world-war
I do not know, but in the light of the event my rambles and interests
take on the aspect of the toddlings of an innocent child about the edge
of a volcano’s crater.
I can give, however, a few indications of what such an innocent
mind might see and feel in Europe, this year of last breathless
hush before the explosion. I concerned myself with getting, first,
a clear impression of the physical body in which each country
clothed itself,--the aspect of town and countryside, villages,
farms, working-class quarters, factories, suburbs, plans of towns,
styles of architecture, characteristic types and ways of living, of
modern Europe; and, second, the attitudes, social and political, of
various classes, the social psychology of the different peoples. Such
acquisitions had, of course, to be the merest impressions. One could
not get “data”; one’s tour could be little more than a perpetual
“sizing-up.” The best one could do was to settle down in the various
capitals for a few months, immerse oneself in the newspapers, talk
with as many people as one could reach, read the contemporary novels
and plays, attend political meetings and meetings of social reformers,
go to church and court-house and school and library and university,
and watch the national life in action. One could only cut oneself off
from American interests, imagine that one had always lived in the
foreign city, and try, by a reach of sympathy and appreciation, to
assimilate the tone and spirit and attitudes of the people among whom
one was living. Such an effort may result only in the most fantastic
illusions. I am not trying to boast that I got any understanding of
European countries,--a matter of years of acquaintance and not of
months. I am merely indicating an attitude of approach. But it was an
attitude I found none too common among American students abroad. Among
the many who were conducting historical and political researches at
the libraries, I was never able to find any student interested in the
political meetings of the campaign, for instance, which I attended
with so much ardor, as a revelation of French social psychology.
The Americans I saw would have an enthusiasm for particular things,
perhaps, that they were interested in, a patronizing attitude towards
certain immoralities and inefficiencies that impressed them, but as for
a curiosity about the French mind and the French culture as a whole, I
could not find any interest that flowed along with mine. My curiosity,
therefore, had to go its own gait. I seemed to have a singular faculty
for not getting information. Unless one is fortunate enough to step
into a social group, one must dig one’s way along unaided. By means
of newspapers and magazines and guide-books, one hews out a little
passage towards the center of things. Slowly a definite picture is
built up of the culture and psychology of the people among whom one is
living. There is no way, however, of checking up one’s impressions.
One must rely on one’s intuition. Letters of introduction bring out
only class or professional attitudes. Very few people are socially
introspective enough to map out for you the mind of the society in
which they live. Only the French seem to have this self-consciousness
of their own traits, and the gift of expression, and that is why France
is incomparably the most interesting and enlightening country for the
amateur and curious American student to visit.
These considerations suggest the fact that I wish to bring out,--that
my most striking impression was the extraordinary toughness and
homogeneity of the cultural fabric in the different countries,
England, France, Italy and Germany, that I studied. Each country was
a distinct unit, the parts of which hung together, and interpreted
each other, styles and attitudes, literature, architecture, and social
organization. This idea is of course a truism, yet brought up, as
most Americans are, I think, with the idea that foreigners are just
human beings living on other parts of the earth’s surface, “folks”
like ourselves with accidental differences of language and customs,
I was genuinely shocked to find distinct national temperaments,
distinct psychologies and attitudes, distinct languages that embodied,
not different sounds for the same meanings, but actually different
meanings. We really know all this; but when we write about the war,
for instance, we insensibly fall back to our old attitude. Most
American comment on the war, even the most intelligent, suggests a
complete ignorance of the fact that there is a German mind, and a
French mind and an English mind, each a whole bundle of attitudes
and interpretations that harmonize and support each other. And each
of these national minds feels its own reasons and emotions and
justifications to be cosmically grounded, just as we ourselves feel
that Anglo-Saxon morality is Morality, and Anglo-Saxon freedom Liberty.
We do, of course, more or less dimly recognize these differences of
national culture. We no longer think of other nations as “Barbarians,”
unless they have a national scheme which is as much of a challenge to
our own social inefficiency as is the German. We express our sense of
the difference by a constant belittling. Foreigners are not monsters,
but Lilliputians, dwarfs, playing with toys. We do not take other
cultures seriously. We tend to dwell on the amusing, the quaint,
the picturesque, rather than the intense emotional and intellectual
differences. The opportunity to immerse oneself in these various
cultures until one feels their powerful and homogeneous strength,
their meaning and depth, until one takes each with entire seriousness
and judges it, not in American terms, but in its own,--this is the
educative value of a rapid, superficial European year such as mine.
The only American book I have ever been able to find that deals with
a foreign country in this adequate sense is Mr. Brownell’s “French
Traits.” Almost all other writing, political, historical, descriptive,
about European countries, must be read with the constant realization
that the peculiar emotional and intellectual biases of the people, the
temperamental traits, the soul which animates all their activities and
expressions, have all been omitted from consideration by the author.
I can only give fragmentary hints in this short article of the
incidents which built up my sense of these differences of national
cultures. London was the place where I had the best opportunities for
meeting people through letters of introduction. There were glimpses of
the Webbs at a meeting of the Fabian Society, which seems to retain the
allegiance of its old members rather than enlist the enthusiasm of the
younger generation. At their house Mr. Webb talked, as he lectures,
with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward
children, and Mrs. Webb, passive by his side, spoke only to correct
some slight slip on his part; there was another picture of her sweeping
into the _New Statesman_ office and producing a sudden panic of
reverent awe among the editorial staff. Lectures by Shaw and Chesterton
on succeeding nights--Shaw, clean, straight, clear and fine as an
upland wind and summer sun; Chesterton, gluttonous and thick, with
something tricky and unsavory about him--gave me a personal estimate
of their contrasted philosophies. Then there was Professor Hobhouse,
excessively judicial, with that high consciousness of excellence
which the Liberal professor seems to exude; Graham Wallas, with his
personal vivacity of expression and lack of any clear philosophy,
who considered the American sociologist a national disaster; H. G.
Wells, a suggestive talker, but very disappointing personally; John A.
Hobson, whom I cannot admire too much, a publicist with immense stores
of knowledge, poise of mind, and yet radical philosophy and gifts of
journalistic expression, a type that we simply do not seem to be able
to produce in this country.
I expected to find the atmosphere of London very depressing. On the
contrary, a sort of fatuous cheerfulness seemed to reign everywhere on
the streets, in middle-class homes, even in the slums. This impressed
me as the prevailing tone of English life. Wells and Bennett seem to
have caught it exactly. As for the world that Mr. Galsworthy lives in,
though I looked hard for his people, I could find nothing with the
remotest resemblance. Such a tone of optimism is possible only to an
unimaginative people who are well schooled against personal reactions,
and against the depressing influences of environment--slums and fog
and a prevailing stodginess of middle-class life--that would affect
the moods of more impressionable peoples. In certain educated circles
this tone gave an impression of incorrigible intellectual frivolity.
London has fashions in talk. Significant discussion almost did not
exist. A running fire of ideational badinage, “good talk,” took its
place. Every idea tended to go up in smoke. You found your tone either
monstrously prophetic, as of a young Jeremiah sitting at the board, or
else unpleasantly cynical. Irony does not seem to be known in England.
The impression one got from the newspapers and magazines and popular
books was of a sort of exuberant irrelevance, a vivacity of interest
about matters that seemed quite alien to the personal and social issues
of life as one knew it. There seemed indeed to be a direct avoidance
of these issues. One could never discover whether or how much an
Englishman “cared.” The national mind seemed to have made a sort of
permanent derangement of intellect from emotion. In no country is so
large a proportion of the literary product a mere hobby of leisurely
gentlemen whose interests are quite elsewhere. The literary supplements
of the newspapers used to contain the greatest collection of futilities
that I ever saw. One got the impression that the intellectual life of
the country was “hobbyized,” that ideas were taken as sports, just
as sports were taken as serious issues. This impression was rather
confirmed at Oxford, where the anthropologist, Marrett, turned out
to be a Jersey country gentleman, digging up prehistoric bones on
his place, and mentioning Chesterton as “entertaining writer--even
had him down here to lunch, but not a ‘gentleman,’ you know, not a
‘gentleman.’” Oxford itself seemed to be one long play of schoolboys
in the soft damp November air. Schiller, who gave me a delightful
morning, after I had attended his class where the boys came in their
black gowns and sat at primitive desks in the low room before a blazing
fire, from which one looked out on mouldering walls and dead ivy and
the pale morning sun and wan sweet decay, drew a wicked picture of the
dons satisfying their thwarted sporting instincts by putting their
boys through their intellectual paces and pitting them against each
other in scholastic competition like race-horses. Mr. McDougall, large
and with an Irish courtliness, I heard and liked, and Mr. L. P. Jacks
talked with me at Manchester College. A meeting of the Fabians at St.
John’s and a lecture by Mrs. Pember Reeves on “Coöperation” attracted
me, with her dramatic flaring out at the stolid audience for their
“English” lack of imagination--she came from New Zealand--the inanely
facetious comments of the dons, the lumbering discourses of certain
beefy burgesses from the local “Coöperative,” who had not followed well
the lady’s nimble thought. Every little incident of the Oxford week of
classes and rambles fitted into a picture of the place as a perfect
epitome of English life, past and present. It was even more than London
a world.
Politically, London was dead that autumn. No parliament, and every one
weary of politics. The bitter Dublin strike dragged along with its
reverberations through the English labor situation, which showed unrest
and dissatisfaction with its leaders and much more of “syndicalist”
leaning than any one would admit. A debate, heard later in Paris,
hit the English labor situation off beautifully,--Longuet, arguing
that there was no syndicalism in England because all the leaders had
written him there wasn’t; Joyaux, arguing that there was, because the
unions were using forms of “direct action” and acting exactly “as if”
syndicalist ideas were spreading.
The Lloyd George land campaign for the bettering of rural labor
conditions was beginning, but was arousing so little enthusiasm that,
with the intense dissatisfaction over the Insurance Acts that rose from
every class, one wondered if the energy of the Liberal social program
had about spent itself. The London press, solidly Tory--extraordinary
situation for a Liberal country--was finding, besides its social
grievances, the Ulster theme to play upon. Indefatigable industry,
worthy of a better cause, was apparently being exercised to drum up
reluctant English sentiment against Home Rule. All that autumn we lived
ostensibly on the brink of a civil war, whose first mutterings did not
even occur till the next July.
The suffragettes were quiescent, but their big meetings at
Knightsbridge gave one a new insight into the psychology of the
movement. As one watched this fusion of the grotesque and the tragic,
these pale martyrs carried in amidst the reverent hush of a throng as
mystically religious as ever stood around the death-bed of a saint; or
as one heard the terrific roars of “Shame!” that went up at the mention
of wrongs done to women, one realized that one was in the presence of
English emotion, long starved and dried from its proper channels of
expression, and now breaking out irrepressibly into these new and wild
ways. It was the reverse side of the idolized English “reticence.” It
was a pleasant little commentary on the Victorian era. Suffragettism
is what you get when you turn your whole national psychic energy into
divorcing emotion from expression and from intellect.
A hysterical Larkin meeting in Albert Hall; meetings of the Lansbury
people in the East End, with swarms of capped, cheerful, dirty, stodgy
British workmen; a big Churchill meeting at Alexandra Palace, from
which seventeen hecklers were thrown out, dully, one after the other,
on their heads, after terrific scrimmages in the audience; quieter
lectures at the Sociological Society, etc.; churches and law-courts,
and tutorial classes, and settlements, and garden cities, and talks
with many undistinguished people, rounded out my London impression, and
in December I moved my stage to Paris.
The weeks of getting a hearing acquaintance with the language were
spent in reading sociology at the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève,
exchanging conversation with students at the Sorbonne, and attending
still not understood lectures, in the hope that some day the electric
spark of apprehension might flash. I soon felt an intellectual
vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel
ideas, that integrated again the spiritual world as I knew it, and
wiped out those irrelevances and facetiousnesses and puzzle-interests
and sporting attitudes towards life, that so got on one’s nerves
in England. Here was also a democracy, not a society all shot into
intellectual and social castes, where one lived shut in with ideas and
attitudes that, like the proverbial ostrich, annihilated the rest of
the world. In England, unless you were a “social reformer,” you did
not know anything about anybody but your own class; in France there
seemed to be scarcely any social reformers, but everybody assumed an
intelligent interest in everything. In short, a democracy, where you
criticized everything and everybody, and neither attempted to “lift”
the “lower orders” nor “ordered yourself lowly and reverently towards
your betters.” There was a solid, robust air of equality, which one
felt in no other country, certainly not our own. The labor movement
had an air of helping itself, and its leaders showed an intellectuality
that ranked them with the professional men. In fact, the distinction
between the “intellectual” and the non-intellectual seems to have
quite broken down in France. Manners, styles of speech, pronunciation,
ideas, the terms in which things are phrased, seem to flow rather
freely over all the classes. Class-distinctions, which hit you in the
face in England and America--I mean, differences of manner and speech,
attitudes of contempt or admiration for other types--are much blurred.
The language has remained simple, pure, usable without the triteness
and vulgarity which dogs English, and which constitutes the most subtle
evidence of our inherent Anglo-Saxon snobbery. It was a new world,
where the values and the issues of life got reinstated for me into
something of their proper relative emphasis.
With few letters of introduction, acclimatization was much more
difficult than in London. One had to hew one’s way around by the aid
of the newspapers. These are infinitely more expressive of every
shade of political opinion than is the London press. They provided
a complete education in the contemporary world. Supplemented by
the interesting symposiums in the reviews, and the mapping-out of
the various French intellectual worlds which the young _agrégés_
and instructors I met were always eager to give me, the Paris press
provided a witty, interpretative daily articulation of the French
mind at work. It is a very self-conscious and articulate mind,
interested in the psychological artistic aspects of life rather than
the objective active aspects which appeal to the English. Life to
the Anglo-Saxon is what people are doing; to the Latin, rather the
stream of consciousness, what individuals and also what groups are
thinking and feeling. This all makes for clear thinking, constant
interpretation--I noticed that my young lawyer friend was all the
time saying “Voilà! mon explication!”--and an amount of what might be
called social introspection that makes France the easiest as well as
the most stimulating country to become acquainted with. The French are
right in telling you that their scholarship is not the collection of
insignificant facts, but the interpretation of significant ones, the
only kind of scholarship that is worth anything.
In Paris, I continued my general policy of running down the various
social institutions, churches, courts, schools, political meetings,
model tenements, etc., in order to get, at least, a taste of French
society in operation. I poked about the various quarters of town and
countryside, and talked to as many people as I could meet. After the
lectures at the Sorbonne became intelligible, I followed the public
courses of Bouglé and Delacroix and Burkheim in sociology, and when
the campaign for the parliamentary election came I plunged into that,
following the bulletin boards of the parties, with their flaring
manifestoes--among them the royalists’ “A Bas La République!” calmly
left posted on the government’s own official bulletin-board, as
evidence of the most superb political tolerance I suppose any country
has ever shown!--and attending the disorderly meetings held in the
dingy playrooms of the public schoolhouses or in crowded cafés. French
freedom of speech has been struggled for too long not to be prized
when won, and the refusal to silence interrupters made each meeting a
contest of wits and eloquence between the speaker and his audience. The
most extraordinary incident of “fair play” I ever saw--Anglo-Saxons
simply do not know what “fair play” is--was at one of Bouglé’s
meetings, where the chairman allowed one of his political opponents,
who had repeatedly interrupted Bouglé, to take the platform and hold
it for half an hour, attacking Bouglé and stating his own creed. When
he had finished Bouglé took him up point by point, demolished him, and
went on with his own exposition. This at his own meeting, called by his
own Radical Party, to forward his candidature! When I left at 12:45 A.
M. the meeting was still in progress. At a Socialist meeting an old
Catholic, looking exactly like Napoleon III, was allowed to hold forth
for several minutes from a chair, until the impatient audience howled
him off. _Young normaliennes_, representing the suffrage movement,
appeared at meetings of all the parties, and were given the platform
to plead the cause of women as long as the crowd would listen. These
young girls were treated exactly as men; there was no trace of either
chivalry or vulgarity, the audience reacted directly and intensely to
their ideas and not to them. The first impulse of a Frenchman actually
seems to be, when he hears something he doesn’t like, not to stop
the other fellow’s mouth, but to answer him, and not with a taunt,
or disarming wit, but with an argument. In the Chamber of Deputies
the same spirit prevailed. The only visible signs of parliamentary
order were Deschanel’s clashing of his big bell and his despairing
“Voulez-vous écouter! Voulez-vous écouter!” The speaker in the tribune
held it as long as he was permitted by his hearers; his interrupter
would himself be interrupted and would exchange words across the
chamber while the official speaker looked resignedly on. The Left would
go off as one man in violent explosions of wrath, shake their fists
at the Center, call out epithets. Yet this was a dull session that
I saw, only a matter of raising the pay of generals. Certainly the
campaign of that election against the new Three Years’ Military Law
seems very far away now. The crowd outside the Mairie of the Vᵐᵉ the
night of the election shouting “A--Bas--Les-Trois-Ans,” in the same
rhythmic way that the law-students a few weeks earlier had marched down
rue St. Jacques yelling “Cail--laux--as-sassin!” knew no more than I
how soon they would need this defence of more soldiers. The cheers of
the crowd as the splendid cortege of the English sovereigns swept
along the streets seem more important than they did to me at the time.
Doumergue’s stand-pat ministry, with which my stay in Paris almost
exactly coincided, and during which the income-tax, lay-instruction,
and proportional representation issues slowly made progress, appears
now in the light of a holding everything safe till the election was
over, and the President could stem the tide of reaction against the new
military laws. France was waiting for the blow to fall that might be
mortal.
On the first of May I was in Nîmes, delightful Southern city,--where
gaunt Protestants gave out tracts in the cars, and newspapers devoted
to bull-fighting graced the news-stands,--reading the big red posters
of the socialist mayor, summoning all the workmen to leave off work and
come out to celebrate the International. Indeed a foreign land!
I arrived in Genoa the evening the Kaiser landed from Corfu, and
witnessed the pompous and important event. In Pisa, I stepped into
a demonstration of students, who were moving rapidly about the city
closing the schools and making speeches to each other, as a protest
against harsh treatment of Italians by the Austrian government in
Trieste, the passionate _leit motiv_ of Italia Irredenta that runs
through all current Italian thought and feeling. In Florence I began to
understand “futurism,” that crude and glaring artistic expression which
arises from the intolerable ennui of the ancient art with which the
young Italian is surrounded, the swarms of uncritical foreigners, the
dead museums. That Mona Lisa smile of Florence drove me soon to Rome,
where I sensed the real Italy, with its industrial and intellectual
ferment, its new renaissance of the twentieth century.
Rome is not a city, it is a world. Every century, from the first to the
twentieth, has left its traces. It is the one city in Europe to study
western civilization, an endless source of suggestion, stimulation and
delight. It is the one city where the ancient and the ultra-modern live
side by side, both brimming over with vitality. The Church and the most
advanced and determined body of social revolutionists living side by
side; the Vatican galleries faced by the futurist; a statue of Ferrer
just outside Bernini’s colonnade; rampant democracy confronting Prince
Colonnas and Borgheses; Renaissance palaces, and blocks of monstrous
apartments built in the mad speculation after 1870; all the tendencies
and ideas of all Europe contending there in Rome, at once the most
ancient and the most modern city we know. What is a month in Rome!
I could do little more than disentangle the political currents, get
familiar with certain names in the intellectual world, and plot
out the city, historically and sociologically, after a fashion. A
noted psychologist, Dr. Assagioli in Florence, had gone over the
philosophical situation for me; and in Rome, Professor Pettazoni of
the university told me of the political tendencies. A young Modernist
priest, discharged from his theological professorship for suspected
connection with the “Programma,” who talked about as much English as I
did Italian, proved very friendly and informing, and gave me a sense
of that vast subterranean, resistless, democratizing and liberalizing
movement in the Church. Various types, Italian cavalry officers,
professors of pedagogy, Sicilian lawyers, an emotional law student
from Lecce, who took me to the university and talked republicanism to
me, passed through the pension. And in Rome anyway you simply seeped
Italy in, from the newspapers, as vivid and varied as those in Paris,
and the host of little democratic and political weeklies, most of
them recent, but fervent and packed with ideas that indicated a great
ferment of young intellectual Italy. The young Florentine Papini gives
in his picturesque books the picture of the Italian soul struggling
with French, English and German ideas, and trying to hew some sort
of order out of the chaos. One got the impression that Nietzsche was
raging through the young Italian mind. But I was all for the candor and
sympathy and personality of this expression. Papers like “La Voce,”
published by Papini’s friends, have an idealistic sweep such as we
simply cannot imagine or, I suppose, appreciate in this country. I had
touched a different national mind. Expressions which seem wild to us
fell there into their proper and interpretative order.
My impression was that almost anything might happen in Italy. While
I was in Rome, the Pope was drawing protests from even the most
conservative clerical dailies for his obscurantism. The country seemed
to be disillusionizing itself about representative government, which,
though it had become perfectly democratic, and had the most sweeping
program of social reform, was clumsy and ineffective, and had utterly
failed to carry out the popular hopes. The Crown scarcely seemed to be
taken much more seriously than in Norway. Republican sentiment cropped
up in unexpected places. Nationalism grew apace, cleverly stimulated
by the new capitalistic bourgeoisie and the new industry, which first
impressed you as you came through the long string of gayly-colored,
swarming factory towns on the coast between Ventimiglia and Genoa.
Political parties, Nationalist, Constitutionalist, Republican,
Socialist, etc., seemed as numerous as in France, but there was not the
same fluctuation, for the expert governmental hand kept a majority, in
the Camera. This body gave little of the impression of dignity that one
had felt in the French Chamber. One felt that while in Italy democratic
feeling was almost as genuine and universal as in France, political
democracy had by no means proved its worth. That Latin passion for
intellectual sincerity and articulation--that quality which makes the
Latin the most sympathetic and at the same time the most satisfactory
person in the world, because you can always know that his outward
expression bears some relation to his inward feeling--had resulted, as
in France, in the duplication of parties, which were constantly holding
congresses and issuing programs, and then splitting up into dissentient
groups. This trait may be unfortunate politically; but it certainly
makes for sincerity and intelligence, and all the other virtues which
our Anglo-Saxon two-party system is well devised to destroy.
This Latin quality of not being reticent, of reacting directly and
truthfully, had its most dramatic expression in the great general
strike of June, which I witnessed in Rome. Disgust and chagrin at
the Tripolitan war, a general reaction against militarism, had been
slowly accumulating in the working classes, and the smouldering feeling
was touched off into a revolutionary explosion by the shooting of
two demonstrators at Ancona by the police on the festival day of the
Statuto. This was followed in Rome, as in most of the other cities
of Italy, by a complete suspension of work. No cars or wagons moved
for three days; no shops or stores opened their doors; none of the
public services were performed; the only newspaper was a little red
“bolletino” which told of the riots of the day before. One did nothing
but walk the garbage-littered streets, past the shuttered windows and
barricaded doors, and watch the long lines of infantry surrounding
the public squares, and the mounted carabinieri holding the Piazza
del Popolo, to prevent meetings and demonstrations. The calm spirit
of the troops, surrounded by the excited crowds, was admirable. And
the overwhelming expression of social solidarity displayed by this
suspended city made one realize that here were radical classes that had
the courage of their convictions. On the third day, the conservative
classes recovered their breath, and I saw the slightly fearful
demonstration of shouting youths who moved down the Via del Tritone
while great Italian flags swung out from one window after another,
greeted with wild hand-clapping from every thronged bourgeois balcony.
The next day the darting trolley-cars told the strike was over, but
two days later I alighted at the Naples station into a fortress held
by Bersaglieri against a mob who had been trying all day to burn the
station. The shooting kept us inside until the last rioters were
dispersed, and the great protest was over, though it was days before
the people of the Romagna, where railroads and telegraphs were cut,
were convinced that the monarchy had not fallen and a republic been
proclaimed. The government had kept very quiet, except for the floods
of oratory that rolled through the Camera; if it had not, there might
have been a real revolution, instead of merely the taste and thrill of
one.
My last political experience in Italy was election night in Venice,
with the triumph of the conservatives, who had made no bones of the
economic interpretation of politics, but had placarded the city with
posters recalling to gondolieri, hotel-keepers and shop-keepers, the
exact amount of money they had lost by reason of the general strike and
the wild scurry of foreigners out of the country. This rather appalling
sum was apparently a final and clinching argument, and we heard the
gratitude of the Patriarch from his balcony by San Marco expressed to
the citizens who had “saved” their country. Such incidents are symbols
of the candors and delights of the Latin temperament and of everything
in the Latin countries.
Switzerland, besides its holidaying, contributed the Bern Exposition,
the intensely significant spectacle of a nation looking at itself.
If, as was said, every Swiss schoolchild saw the exposition not once
but three times, our day was one of those times. All Switzerland was
there studying and enjoying itself. In this little epitome of its life,
one had a sense of the refreshing value of living in a small country
where its activities and spirit could all, in some sort of fashion, be
grasped, understood, contemplated, as one might a large picture. Most
suggestive, perhaps, were the great water-power development projects,
electrical engineering schemes, and mountain railroading, planned ahead
in a broad way for fifty years or so. A country that knew what it was
about, that knew how to use its resources for large social ends!
My German tour of the last two weeks of July, cut short by the war,
was more definitely sociological. I had been through the Rhine country
to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, and Munich, the preceding summer. This trip
went straight north from Friedrichshafen to Berlin. There were the
famous town-planned cities to be seen, and housing-schemes, which I had
followed rather closely in all the countries, and a general “sizing-up”
of German “Kultur.” I missed my settling down in Berlin; newspapers
and people had to be taken on the wing. But then the German spirit and
expression was much more familiar to me through study than had been the
French and Italian. My most striking impression was of the splendor of
the artistic renaissance, as shown particularly in the new architecture
and household and decorative and civic art. These new and opulent
styles are gradually submerging that fearful debauch of bad taste which
followed the French war, and which makes the business quarters of the
German cities so hideous. But the newer quarters, monuments, public
buildings of the last ten years have a massive, daring style which
marks an epoch in art. I have yet to come across an American who likes
this most recent German architecture; but to me buildings like the
University at Jena, the Stuttgart theater, the Tietz shops, etc., with
their heavy concrete masses and soaring lines, speak of perfectly new
and indigenous ideas. And if artistic creation is a mark of a nation’s
vitality, the significance of this fine flare and splurge of German
style, the endless fecundity of decorative design in printing and
furniture, etc., the application of design to the laying out of towns
and suburbs, the careful homogeneity and integrity of artistic idea,
should not be overlooked. These things are fertile, are exhilarating
and make for the enhancement of life. The Germans are acting exactly
as if they no longer believed, as we do, that a high quality of urban
life can be developed in a rag-tag chaos of undistinguished styles and
general planlessness.
Specifically, I visited the municipal workingmen’s cottages in Ulm
and saw the town-planning charts of the city in the office of the
_Stadtbaurat_; the huge apartments, municipally built and owned,
in Munich; the big _Volksbad_ in Nuremberg, and the garden-city
workingmen’s suburb at Lichtenhof, with the schoolchildrens’ garden
allotments; the model garbage-disposal plant at Furth, a miracle of
scientific resource and economy; the extraordinary model municipal
slaughter-house at Dresden, so characteristically German with its
_Schlachthof_ and _Direktorhaus_ at the entrance; and, lastly the
famous garden-city of Hellerau, inferior, however, on the whole, to
the English Hampstead Suburb at Golders Green. Towns like Rothenburg
and Nordlingen were little laboratories of mediæval and modern
town-planning. The _Stadtbaurat_ at Rothenburg went over for us the
development of the city, and gave us considerable insight into the
government, policy and spirit of a typical little German municipality.
Undemocratic in political form, yet ultra-democratic in policy and
spirit, scientific, impartial, giving the populace--who seemed to have
no sense of being excluded from “rights”--what they really wanted, far
more truly than our democracies seem to be able to secure, this epitome
of the German political scheme served to convince us that we were in a
world where our ordinary neat categories of political thought simply
didn’t apply. It was futile to attempt an interpretation in Anglo-Saxon
terms. There was no objective evidence of the German groaning under
“autocracy” and “paternalism.” One found oneself for the first time in
the presence of a government between whom and the people there seemed
to exist some profound and subtle sympathy, a harmony of spirit and
ends.
It was dramatic to sweep up through the endless billowing fields and
carefully tended forests and imposing factory towns--Germany, caught at
mid-summer, in the full tide of prosperity--and come into Berlin on
the morning of “the historic day,” July 31st, 1914, with the agitated
capital on the brink of war; to see the arrival of the Kaiser and
the princes at the Schloss; to watch the Crown Prince’s automobile
blocked twenty feet away from us by the cheering crowd;--“der _wahre_
Kriegesmann,” as the papers were calling him in contemptuous contrast
to his peaceful father; to hear the speech of the latter--grim,
staccato-voiced, helmeted figure, very symbol of war--from the balcony
of the palace; to watch next day the endless files of reservists
marching through the streets to the casernes to “einkleiden”; and
then to hear the finally fatal news of Russia’s refusal with the
swarming crowds on Unter den Linden, hysterical from both fervor and
anxiety. If ever there was a tense and tragic moment, when destiny
seemed concentrated into a few seconds of time, it was that 5 P. M. on
the afternoon of August first, at the corner of Unter den Linden and
Friedrichstrasse, in Berlin.
A midnight flight to Sweden, with a motley horde of scared Russians
and Scandinavians, and two weeks in the distressed and anxious
northern countries ended my year. Nothing but the war; regiments
of flaxen-haired Danish boys, mobilizing along the country roads of
Denmark, the _Landsturm_ lolling along the Stockholm streets, even the
Norwegians drilling against none knew what possible attack. The heavens
had fallen. An interview with Herr Branting, the Swedish Socialist
leader, and the depth of his personal feeling and the moving eloquence
with which he went over the wreck of socialist and humanitarian hopes,
gave us the vividest sense of the reverberations of the shock on a
distinguished cosmopolitan mind. The librarian of the Royal Library
in Copenhagen, the pastor of the Swedish church, and the editor of
“Dagens Nyheter,” in Stockholm, whom we were able to talk with, very
kindly answered our questions on Scandinavian affairs. And we have
the pleasantest memories of Herr Hambro in Christiania, editor of
the leading Conservative daily, who had just finished La Follette’s
autobiography, and would have preferred to talk about America even
to showing us how the Radical parties in Norway were lording it over
their opponents. One got the sense in these countries of the most
advanced civilization, yet without sophistication, a luminous modern
intelligence that selected and controlled and did not allow itself to
be overwhelmed by the chaos of twentieth-century possibility. There
was a mood of both gravity and charm about the quality of the life
lived, something rather more Latin than Teutonic. This is an intuition,
reinforced by a sense that nowhere had I seen so many appealing people
as on the streets of Copenhagen. Valid or not, it was the pleasantest
of intuitions with which to close my year.
This sketch, I find, has, in fact, turned out much more impressionistic
than I intended. But impressions are not meant to be taken as dogmas.
I saw nothing that thousands of Americans have not seen; I cannot
claim to have brought back any original contribution. There was only
the sense of intimate acquaintance to be gained, that feeling of
at-homeness which makes intelligible the world. To the University which
made possible the rare opportunity of acquaintance with these various
countries and cultures, the contact with which has been so incompletely
suggested in this sketch, my immeasurable thanks!