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!