The World Decision

by Robert Herrick

While the big theater rocked and stormed with passion, 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 passion, 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 mass of his countrymen responded.

* * * * *

D'Annunzio spoke again admirably at those great gatherings of concord when the citizens of Rome assembled 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 nobly 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 passion 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 assume that the case of D'Annunzio was really the case of Italy itself—conversion? The deepest passion 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 passion 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.

In the poet's writing there are passages 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 passages 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 passion 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 passion 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.