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.