A Frenchman Looks at Fascism

I

You know it too well already from the photographs — that face with its frowning brow, its fiery glance, its firm-set jaw with lips tight closed on a brief and irrevocable command. It is a mask that says, ‘We must be firm, we must be hard.’ You run against it wherever you turn in Italy — in newspaper offices, tea rooms, barber shops, telephone booths, in the corner tobacco shop, and in the literary salon of Grazia Deledda. Its expression fairly haunts you. You wonder if he still wears it when he sleeps. But does he sleep? Even for minutes, does he ever put aside this rôle of a demigod propelled by a violent destiny?

I assure you that when he receives a Frenchman he is quite another person from the one in the portraits. I have seen him smile and heard him laugh; and then, I assure you, his features soften, his jaw relaxes, and he expresses himself with the gentlest voice imaginable, in a delicately modulated French that is almost like singing. No, he’s not a man who spends his life in a gloomy palace checking off lists of victims, nor yet on a balcony haranguing black caps and tricolored banners in convulsive strains of oratory. He came forward to meet me, stepping lightly with almost a dance step, elbows out, shoulders poised, gliding across the carpet of his huge office with the grace of supple muscles and well-oiled joints. We met in front of a celestial globe which stood on the floor with its stars twinkling in the soft light of the room, and it was across the stars that Mussolini offered me his hand.

Everyone who has been received in that room in the Chigi Palace has spoken of the bareness of the worktable. Not a paper, not a memorandum on it. This man does not write: he speaks, he gives commands. Attentive young men receive his orders and execute them. When I complimented him on the youthful zeal of his ministers and secretaries, he said: ‘Oh yes, the young men work and obey quite cheerfully.’ .

He is truly a prince of youth, this man sitting opposite me in his highbacked chair, a prince who is severe but is worshiped none the less, who is stern in his demands but finds them more than fulfilled. It is on youth that he depends, and to youth he gives his favors. This moulder of souls needs new, fresh wax, and the Italian women have taken it on themselves to provide it.

‘But women,’ I asked him, ‘have they no other mission than to guarantee recruits for the future militia?’

‘Women,’ he answered in his singing voice, ‘are meant to stay home and bear children.’

A phrase from the Arte Fascist a came into my head: ‘The Italian palaces of the future will be peopled with large families, the children bare and bronzed like Africans, while their mothers keep even into old age the steely eyes that express their invincible will to love and to create.’ Undoubtedly many fair Romans have eyes the color of steel, but the glances that they cast are only the tenderest.

Mussolini has waved love aside from his programme of regeneration: I mean the kind of love with its train of attendant excitements which the stage and the screen have taught us to know. When he uses the word ‘romantic’ you can catch a suggestion of sarcasm in his voice. He laughs with a big, quiet laugh, is silent, a moment, then goes on: —

‘Since I forbade the newspapers to write them up, there have been hardly any crimes of passion or romantic suicides in Italy. You know the Italian press is the freest in the world.’

‘That’s obvious, Monsieur le Président.’

‘Well, in spite of that, I had to suppress my brother Arnoldo’s paper, the Popolo d’ltalia, because it ran a story about a crime of passion.’

Mussolini grows more animated; I have opened a subject that is very dear to him. In a few imaginative strokes he gives a picture of suicide as practised by the disappointed lovers. His agile hands move swiftly over the table; he seems to be arranging a tribute of flowers around the desperate woman — I can see the tuberoses, the freesias, the white lilies, I can smell their scent of death; and now I can recognize the flask of veronal . . .

‘. . . And you can imagine,’ he says, ‘that a story like that encourages other women to go and do likewise.’

This pitiless man has declared war on romance. He scents it out and tracks it down. Lovers no longer dare to linger in the shadow of the Pincian. Hard-headed young men, severe in their black shirts, would find them and drive them out. In the Roman cinemas no caresses are exchanged, either on the screen or in the kindly darkness of the auditorium. There are more important things to be done in this Seventh Year of Fascism: the soul must be subdued, the heart made hard. Made hard for what struggles, I wonder.

‘As a result,’ I said, ‘Rome is a sad and solemn place to stay in.'

‘Rome,’ the Duce replied, ‘will become the most highly moral city in the world, the city where public life and the life of the streets will have the most superior tone. Rome is the capital of more than one hundred and fifty million men.’

(‘He’s anticipating,’I said to myself. ‘But with the Italian birth rate increasing as it is . . .’)

‘Of more than one hundred and fifty million Catholics,’ he concluded. (This was a bit of statistics that would surely delight the Vatican.)

The real result is that Rome is a city where you rarely hear the sound of open laughter, never hear a ragamuffin whistling in the streets or a lighthearted passer-by singing. Do you even hear voices speaking loud and free? I feel very sure that in the days of the Popes life was considerably more amusing. This ‘superior tone’ that the Duce boasts has a strange resemblance to boredom.

Mussolini the anti-romanticist is also, whatever one may expect, antifeminist. In that he appears to be caught in a contradiction. Either the tender nonsense of love is permitted to woman, so that she lacks the time and inclination to meddle with public matters, or else her heart is guided by her reason and the good of the State appears all-important to her. It is notorious that in the countries where feminism blows strongest, romance is in least favor.

‘You are right,’ Mussolini says, returning to the leitmotif of our conversation; ‘but motherhood turns women away from the need to romanticize their lives.’

And so in his fine handwriting, faithfully reproduced in millions of copies, he broadcasts over Italy Hegel’s formula: ‘No man is a man who is not a father.’ (Non e uomo chi non e padre.)

And is this commander obeyed when he preaches virtue to his troops? I want to believe so, because there is no topic in the Italian press so popular as the immorality of the neighboring countries, and he who points a finger at his neighbor’s faults proclaims that he himself is spotless. Has Italy, then, become the gloomy repository of all the virtues? Above a land grown suddenly cold the sky remains too soft and fair to allow me to be convinced. But one could easily believe it if one reasoned from the particular to the general — from Mussolini to those who hear and obey him.

It is not to be denied that this man sitting before me is an exemplar of virtue in a city where so many emperors before him have surrendered to the facile temptations of victory. His worst enemies will not gainsay his forthright courage or his fine indifference to worldly goods, which always astonishes those who confuse power with avarice. For all his leisure he is known to have only his horse, his violin, or his rapid motor in which he rides across country on the fine straight roads which he is so proud to have provided for his people. That is the sort of leisure that appeals to him. Compounded of vigor and suppleness, able to master a horse or draw song from a violin, he can rouse a crowd to frenzy with his words or charm a visiting Frenchman with the gracefulness of his manners. That is the secret of his success and the gauge of his permanence.

As he appeared to me, Mussolini seems set to rule indefinitely. He has given his people the proud belief that they are regenerating Europe, and the will to sacrifice themselves for this belief. But how long will this leader, whom I addressed democratically as ‘Monsieur le Président,’ content himself with a title that sets bounds to his greatness? One perceives in him reserves of energy which horseback riding may not sufficiently tax. If he ends by wearying of his victory, that is only the common fate of victors. But if his troops grow tired of the inaction which an orderly Italy imposes, that will be something more serious.

So I listen to Mussolini’s gentle voice talking to me of friendship, while my ears still ring with the death threats shouted last night under the windows of my countrymen by impatient youths who culled on their chief for action.

II

A good housekeeper plans her menus with an eye to her family’s health and tastes. Likewise the editors of Italian newspapers offer a daily fare designed to keep their readers in perpetual good spirits. As hors-d’œuvre, if I may say so, they serve up France — and they do not spare the pepper and vinegar. That is the everyday menu. For special occasions France becomes the pièce de résistance; once in a while it comes on as salad or dessert, but always there is some dish or other of Frenchman. Evidently we appeal to our neighbors’ palates for gustatory qualities not supplied by Englishmen or Germans or even Jugoslavs. In short, we make a first-rate feature, bring in a steady clientele; and certain houses like the Impero, the Tevere, and the Brillante draw their greatest success from serving this specialty.

All this is to be taken with a grain of salt. I am eager to believe that our Italian friends as a whole are not deceived by the appearance of these dishes. The very excess of seasoning must make them suspicious of their quality. Nevertheless, and no matter how skeptical its victims may remain, bad cooking always ends by affecting the stomach, poisoning the blood, and spoiling the disposition. This accounts for the fact that during my recent visit to Rome I often felt that the friendliness extended to me was touched with a silent resentment or a sort of secret reserve.

Forgetting as far as possible its political bearing, I have tried to find the reason for this. I believe I have discovered it in the Italians’ ignorance of the true feelings which we Frenchmen hold toward them. Not long ago I heard an excited crowd of youths calling our representatives to account for a verdict brought by a Parisian jury; I saw our flag trampled on, placards carried through the streets insulting and threatening France, our innocent students at the Villa Medici spat at and called from their quiet pursuit of beauty with cries of vengeance. But these insults and threats proffered by adolescents made me think more of the antics of my own university days than of any deep-seated popular indignation. The public in the streets watched the demonstrations unmoved; street-car conductors and taxi drivers let the youths surge past without daring to interfere. And the only real victims of these disorders were the algebra, geography, and history that the young people left behind with an easy conscience while they ran through the Corso shouting their insults at France. I myself, caught in the unconcerned crowd in the Piazza Colonna, watched the parade go by without feeling anything more serious than curiosity.

How did it happen that I could hear my country insulted without plunging in with both fists against these bad boys? Simply because I could not take them seriously, because I said to myself, ‘It’s just a little attack of spleen, and will soon be over,’ as I should have spoken of a small brother’s toothache. But in holding this very frame of mind, keeping my usual placid temper, and telling my Italian friends how unconcerned I had felt all through these agitated days, I unconsciously touched the sorest point in their quarrel with us. ‘You don’t take us seriously,’ they say. ‘You don’t realize at all the moral and material power of the new Italy. You underrate us — you must learn to know us better.’

That is one of their principal grievances. What are the others?

It is hard to make the Italians understand that we do not openly favor the anti-Fascist activities that are carried on in France. Recent incidents such as the clumsy and apparently prejudiced verdict of a French jury, the political murders committed on French territory by Italians against Italians, quantities of little daily happenings which pass unnoticed at home but are enlarged upon and broadcasted by the Italian press, all tend to confirm them in this error. Our inaction, they say, is the proof of our complicity,

‘Drive our enemies out of your country,’ they kept telling me. ‘That will give us a proof of the friendship that your ministers are always talking about when they come to inaugurate a border station or dedicate a statue to Petrarch. Otherwise what good does it do us?’

‘But France is a country where we still respect the law of hospitality.’

‘All right; but make your visitors respect it too. Forbid their newspapers to appear, their committees to meet, their orators to speak, and their partisans to kill our partisans.’

I have heard this kind of talk almost everywhere — even from writers, doctors, scholars, artists, people who can be counted upon for a certain independence of spirit. They seem to have given their allegiance to the Fascist régime voluntarily; their admiration for the head of the government has all the appearance of sincerity, and if they make reservations about his immediate followers, it is only to increase their praise for his personal qualities.

’What! ’ they say to me. ‘ Don’t you prefer our government to yours?’

‘It’s not easy for me to sacrifice my liberty.’

‘Liberty?’ one of them will answer. ‘What does that mean to you?’ And he smiles maliciously. I can foresee the case he is going to make out: our parliamentary system, with the bad people making the laws for the good. . . . His tone of voice when he talks of our politicians is eloquent.

It is among the young people, naturally, that you encounter the most ardent admiration for Mussolini. Their words often border on a sort of mystic worship. What they said often made me think of Salvation Army preachers — or would have done so but for their expressive faces and lively gestures and the swift fluency of their speech, which was always there to remind me that this was the land of Boccaccio.

Among these solemn young people, orderly and determined, we French are regarded as frivolous, coarse, and dissolute. When I gently protest that virtue is still to be found in France, sprouting as free as violets in spring, my contradictors unfold their newspapers and proceed to show me the evidence. It must be confessed that our poor France has sunk very low. A Parisian banker is cited in bankruptcy: evidently French finance is rotten through and through. Our Minister of Labor, Public Health, and Security has caught cold: of course, he spends all his nights on Montmartre. A road worker is killed in Syria in an encounter with the police: that’s the kind of civilization France is offering the Near East !

I was saying that all the harm comes out of the newspapers, and that bad cooking finally tells on the best of stomachs. The Italians complain that we do not understand them; but how badly they understand us! Yet the desire for good will is just as sincere on both sides. I can even say that I find something spontaneous and hearty in the friendship they offer us that no other races can make us feel quite so strongly. I myself was welcomed by them, fêted, honored, and covered with kindnesses so fine and moving that I am forced to believe they were intended for my country rather more than for me. They are aware of all the literary and artistic currents of France. Our authors are read in Rome, Milan, Turin, Florence, Naples, their works are talked about, studied in the literary circles, criticized in the journals. But what do we know about Italian authors ? What do we do for them? There are other writers in Italy besides d’Annunzio and Pirandello.

I remember one of those evenings in Rome when a group of my friends were trying to find the cure for the irritation between our two countries.

‘You must give more recognition to the greatness and beauty of our work,’ they told me.

‘I should like to,’ I answered. ’But you must let us dance our own little jig without criticizing our music.’

It was a beautiful night and we decided to go and watch the moon rise through the cypresses of the Appian Way. A light carriage quickly took us there. The Campagna was bathed in a vast serenity. We said nothing, but our silence established a sort of sympathy between us.

‘Oh,’ exclaimed one of my friends who did not wear the Fascist insignia in his lapel, ‘how good it would be to be good friends.’

I clasped his hand and there were tears in our eyes. We knew that we were kept apart more by ideas than by feelings, that our hearts beat in harmony, and that there was no real breach between us.

III

After spending more than a fortnight in Rome, one feels the need of going out into the fields and breathing the country air. In the city the political atmosphere keeps your spirits in a sort of oppression which soon gives you, like any other prisoner, a craving to escape.

It was one of those November mornings of Italy that are washed in the softest of sunlight when I left gloomy Rome behind me and set out for the little town of Orvieto. My imagination and the eloquence of the Blue Guide held it before me as an infinitely precious and distinguished pearl set by the hand of God and the splendor of the Popes on a hilltop terraced with abundant vineyards. I was looking forward, as soon as the train pulled out, to all the joys of escape — I wanted to run from one window to the other, lean out in spite of all the warnings, hold my face full-front to the cinders and the joyful impact of the open air. These hopes were effectively dashed, however, by the presence in the corridors of the sinister militiamen who patrol back and forth from one platform to the other, peering into each compartment with a look of disturbing curiosity. In the corridor they brush past you so close that the butts of their revolvers play a tune on your ribs; and, since the word ‘Pardon’ has been scratched from the Fascist vocabulary, they tread on your toes without your knowing whether to take it as an accident or a threat. So it is better to stay seated. And I did so.

The fast express for Florence sped at its thirty-five miles an hour along the muddy channel of the Tiber. Watching the loamy fields of the ager romanus, now worked by long-horned water buffalo, now by women bent over heavy hoes, I had the feeling that the same silent and wholly disciplined activity reigned here that had struck me in the streets of Rome. Not that there were many people in these fields, but the workers that I saw gave me the impression of fulfilling a duty rather than merely doing a job. I remembered the phrase that the Italian post office includes in its postmark on letters: E’l dovere di tutti gli agricoltori italiani contribuire alla vittoria del grano. (‘It is the duty of every Italian farmer to contribute to the victory of the grain.’) This order, this call, seemed to have been heard by men, women, and children working the land, and they were answering it with great good will.

But I was recalled from this sight and the pastoral fancies into which it was leading me by the singular conversation going on just then between my fellow travelers in the compartment. They were two large men of easy-going appearance, well dressed, and wearing the Fascist insignia in their buttonholes. One of them was a senator, and he addressed his companion with the title of Commendatore, or Captain. They had exhausted the morning papers, exchanged with each other the Popolo d’Italia, the Tribuna, the Impero; and now they were exchanging ideas. The commendatore had a generous vocabulary: words like putrefazione, ministero rubatore, and scandali recurred frequently; and these putrefactions and scandals referred to France — there could be no doubt of it. The senator nodded his head in reply or shook it with an expression of doleful despair; he dropped in a phrase or two that echoed with a funereal ring, and it was evident, that he considered France to be in a very bad way and was much affected by it. But the other rubbed his hands and went on saying . . scandali . . . putrefazione . . .'

This dialogue continued all the time I was in the train. Far from irritating me, it taught me a salutary lesson.

‘Here’s a senator and some sort of lawyer,’ I said to myself, ‘in a country where people have a passion for talking politics, yet they do not dare to discuss the acts of their own government in a public railway train, for fear a man in a black shirt will come and join in the conversation in a not too respectful manner. They find an outlet for their suppressed passion in criticizing the politics of their neighbors. It has no importance at all: it’s just a sort of mental game, an oratorical tilt.’ And I resumed my train of rural fancies until we reached Orvieto.

The countryside of Orvieto is scented with licorice. The Umbrians, like the Tuscans, — perhaps others also, only I did not go to see, — have a way of making fodder by storing it up for years, packing it down, letting it simmer quietly under the basting of winter rains and the slow cooking of the summer sun; it becomes thoroughly mixed and solid, and ends by forming a marvelous cake of grain, cornflowers, thistles, and marguerites, which is fed out to the animals in slices cut off with a saw. And it is this grass pudding that gives the air you breathe around Orvieto the scent of a sprig of spice.

I was so taken with these odors that I wandered from farm to farm and from vineyard to vineyard until I found myself far away from the base of the rock where, like the tabernacle on the altar, in its gilt and mosaic coating, sits the cathedral that I had come to visit. I strolled along paths that were full of the unexpected, climbing slopes and turning corners according to their whim along the flank of the Umbrian hills. Everything in this Franciscan landscape told of the beneficence of love, the delights of charity. Hedges of brush and tall grasses growing high and close together sheltered the vineyards from the mountain winds; mulberries were planted to give shade to the young artichokes; the brook ran by to refresh the mulberries; and to make the charitable path of the brook less difficult, the hillside sloped at an accommodating angle. Birds flew about overhead, settled down upon a stalk, uttered a little whistle and darted to another stalk. At every turn I expected to come upon Saint Francis, with Brother Leo, Brother Bernard, or Brother Masseo, the converted Wolf of Gubbio, or the tame turtledoves. Them I did not meet, but as I was passing near an old chapel lost among olives I ran against a group of young people going toward the town. They took up the full width of the path, and as each one carried a large green umbrella under one arm, using the other to gesticulate with, the space for me to pass them in was somewhat confined. They paid no attention to the strait I was in and pushed roughly past me along their way, talking, as nearly as I could make out, of movies and farm machinery.

Whereupon I promptly emerged from my Franciscan dream. The bushes became bushes just like any others, the brook watered the mulberries because it could not do otherwise, and the obliging angle of the slope meant nothing to the brook.

I could see other groups of men with green umbrellas mounting the winding road toward the gates of Orvieto. As the day was waning and the country no longer held its charm for me, I turned about and followed them up the road to the little town.

From the hotel keeper in the Piazza Garibaldi I learned that there was to be a traveling movie that evening, given by the Luce (L’Unione Cincmatografica Educativa). The people of the district were invited to come for distraction and for instruction — distraction from the need of going to look for jobs in the cities, and instruction in the policies of the new régime, with its beauties, its benefits, and the latest discoveries of agricultural mechanics and chemistry. The municipal band was to help in the evening’s entertainment.

I was struck with admiration for Mussolini’s effectiveness, his keen sense of the moment, his awareness of the people’s needs, and that creative will of his which for seven years has worked untiringly to improve and develop the work he undertook at the beginning. This Luce, for example, was his own conception : it was he who gave it in a very few months its tremendous development, strictly along the lines of popular education, social and intellectual; and it was he who wisely turned it over to younger men, fired with enthusiasm for their important task — to such men as Alessandro Sardi, receptive as he is to all that pertains to the arts, the sciences, politics, and on whose lips the word ’progress’ is daily reëndowed with its old magic.

There was something beautiful about this slow progression of the people up from the fields toward the silver screen of the Luce. Along the same paths where their forebears had followed the Poverello and harkened to his mystic counsel, these fellows were moving toward the light of modernity. Miracles, whether Heaven-sent or earthly, will always win the enthusiasm of the masses. And indeed there was something miraculous about this motor truck charged with electricity which came to present to these dwellers of the Umbrian hills the living image of the New God and the truly moving pictures of his gospel. To-night they would be shown the parable of the good Italian grain, the marvelous story of the plough that works by itself, and those promised lands of the future held out to the faithful: Tunis, Albania, Corsica.

Through the Porta Cassia and the Porta Maggiore, little bands of men of all ages were flowing into the narrow and trafficless streets of the old town. Their buttonholes did not bear the fascio, but their manners were more expressive of their secret convictions than the little enamel badge, which has always been held somewhat suspect outside of the cities.

Observing their serious and determined faces, I understood that the country, too, had been touched by the grace of Fascism, that these people were somehow conscious of the solemn purpose which their chief had imposed on them, and that their children in turn would grow to be men.

So I walked on through the darkness toward the station, the local musicians sounding in my ears the light and laughing Fascist hymn, Giovinezza, which expresses — in spite of the austere uses to which it has been put — the true spirit of a race devoted to music and the dance.

IV

It is not at Naples that you should look for little girls marching military fashion or old gentlemen bowing to each other with the sweeping Roman gesture. March time is made impossible by the badly fitted lava blocks of the pavements, and the graceful gesture is hindered by the human hurlyburly of the streets. Perhaps there are other reasons, too.

It goes without saying that I am speaking of the old Naples, the true Naples, the Naples of the Bourbons, with its conglomeration of palaces, churches, and tenements along streets so dark and narrow that they seem like underground passages, streets in which six or seven hundred thousand mortals come and go, singing, crying, shouting, laughing, enjoying, and despairing. This is where you will find Naples, not on the famous colored postcard sent by a traveling friend. This is Naples with its variegated past, its tumultuous present, with its cloisters of majolica and its sidewalk fish stalls, its tombs of the Angevin kings and its shops of the coffin merchants.

And is this Naples Fascist? Do these people belong to the faithful — these vegetable peddlers with voices like Caruso, these impresarios of tensou puppet shows, these vendors of sacred relics sitting in their anatomical shops, the walls bedecked with arms and legs, round bellies and flat chests, all warranted of silver? Does anyone know? Here is a city that has belonged to all the world, to the Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, Germans, and Angevins, the Spanish, the Austrians, and the French, yet has always remained itself. What can we know about it?

Mussolini has said: ‘Fascism brings a kind of style into the lives of the people; it gives them a line of conduct that has color, force, picturesqueness, the quality of the unexpected, and the quality of mysticism — in fact, everything that matters to the soul of the masses.’

The Neapolitans are not interested in that kind of style. They carry with them their color and their picturesqueness; they show no taste for the exactions of force; and they know too well, from being surrounded with more or less extinct volcanoes, that no good is to be expected of the unexpected. And as for mysticism, they have private views on that score which are worth pausing over.

In Naples Fascism has found a formidable adversary: God. The God of the Neapolitans is kindly and familiar. He walks the streets in the garb of a monk; he is easy in his ways and helpful, always ready to comfort the unfortunate, cure the scrofula, and offer consolation for a broken heart. He runs a bureau of charity in each of his three hundred and fifty churches, and he never takes a vacation. The Virgin works at his side in the guise of a good Sister. For assistants he has a crowd of famous saints. In addition he has set up countless first-aid stations: there’s not a street corner or a public square without its miracle-working image, adorned with flowers and lights, to offer its services to the ailing and the outcast. He knows how to hold his people, too. No frowning brows for him, no rolling eyeballs or thrusting out of jaw. He too has his militiamen, but they do not go about in black shirts with revolvers in their belts. They wear burlap gowns and their wide sleeves are full of scapularies and holy medals.

The god of the young Romans cries: ‘We must be firm, we must be hard!’ The God of the Neapolitans is not Nietzschean: he is Franciscan. I think the people of Naples are more inclined to follow the latter than the former. The slow procession suits them better than the military march.

See how they all go strolling in the streets, helter-skelter, eyes peering, ears alert, sniffing up the wind, hunting whatever offers itself in the way of a free show — a hurdy-gurdy turning out a waltz, a whiff of frying that will lead to a good meal. They are a lovable lot, and if you mix among them and follow them it is rarely that they will fail to lead you to some street corner where a friendly fight enlivens the scene or a band of serenaders sings to the sun, moon, and stars. Their laugh is contagious, their carefree ways make you hopeful. And when you return to the gloomy region of hotels and tourist agencies, silent and deserted, you take with you a splendid harvest of new vigor, a few extra fleas, and some counterfeit five-lira notes in your pocket.

Naples claims the most musical origin in the world: its cradle was a siren’s tomb. Music flows through it like the blood in our veins. Going up on the heights of the Castle of St. Elmo, and listening to the hum of the huge city, you hear it as a song made up from the voices of children, the chiming of bells, the calls of peddlers, the horns of autos, and the plaints of Barbary organs, with the sound of the sea as a muted accompaniment. It is completely pervaded with music, which rises up to you as a synthesis of the griefs and joys, desires and delights, of a vibrant, passionate, and sensuous people.

Will the Puritans from Rome succeed in suppressing all this joy of living? It appears that they are not seriously trying; for Naples they have introduced a special kind of Fascism. ‘We play all the strings of the lyre,’Mussolini has said — ‘the violent, the religious, the artistic, the political.’ It is clear that violence would remain ineffective here. So they are playing the good fellow instead. They have washed and scrubbed the boulevards of the newer quarter, but have left supreme in the little streets of the old city those odors of burning charcoal, melted cheese, and rotten tomatoes without which a Neapolitan would not feel at home. On the heights of Vomero they have built fine buildings with running water and free light and air, but they have not demolished any of the pestridden hovels where a prodigiously fecund race is born and reared and dies, and where the nightly slumbers are enjoyed by families of eight or ten children, with mother, father, boys, and girls all breathing the same narrow air under the eye of a Madonna feebly lighted by an oxygen-burning lamp.

‘Are you a Fascist?’ I asked a young Neapolitan of middle class.

‘I am, violently,’ he answered.

‘And by that you mean —’

‘That I’m crazy about football, swimming, and motor boats.’

‘And is your city Fascist?’

‘Is it! What a question! Just come and see for yourself to-morrow at the Villa Nazionale.’

Next morning my curiosity and my expectation of seeing one of those demonstrations that the new Italy is so fond of led me in good season toward the charming public garden near the water front. But I was vigorously prevented from getting very near by the strict militiamen who guarded all the approaches. Besides, I could hear a sound of violent explosions rapidly repeated which gave the impression that this peaceful spot was witnessing a battle of machine guns and grenades. After many detours I reached the Villa Nazionale. There, in one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes, and under the eyes of a hundred or so gaping spectators, two dozen motor cyclists were competing in speed tests, fighting for the inside track, passing and repassing each other, and sending up an infernal racket.

‘Well,’ my friend called out when he spotted me, ‘how’s that for a sight? You were looking for a Fascist show, and there you have it.’

He explained to me that this was a championship race, that there was a cup, that the thing went on for two whole days, that they were fighting for the honor of Naples, and that I must stay there until the end to see the city’s colors triumph. I had to do some rather clever acting to keep my face with this enthusiast.

That day and the following, a whole section of Naples was dedicated to speed and the open throttle.

On the evening of the following day, when the noisy circuit had been interrupted, a chance stroll brought me back to that vicinity. The wind from the sea had cleared away the fumes. The thousand lights of Posilipo were twinkling in the distance. Floating sparks seemed to glide over the unseen waters of the bay; for it was the hour when the Neapolitans go fishing with lanterns.

Just then, in the silence of the mild winter night, the sound of a mandolin arose.

‘Naples is still Naples,’ I told myself. ‘And Italy still has a place for dreaming.’

V

The last few days of my stay in Italy were spent at Ravello, above the Gulf of Salerno. There, among laden orange trees and blossoming Japanese medlars, far from the pomp of Rome and the sputter of Naples, one can meditate on the new Italy. From the rock on which the town is built, a thousand feet up from the sea, you look out upon a horizon of bare mountains and fruitful orchards, craggy bays and wild valleys, a view so vast and of such impressive aspect that you are exalted and invigorated by it. I could hardly have hoped for a better observation post from which to start exploring Italy, or one that would make it easier for me to overcome my prejudices. I set out on a fine December afternoon, vibrant with light and touched with the delicate scent of lingering roses and early violets.

In the distance the charming town of Salerno went peacefully about its business of noodles and cotton. At my feet, on the dark sand of the little beaches bordering the bay, golden scaffolds of macaroni were drying in the sun. Some fishermen were dragging a loaded seine ashore, surrounded with impatient and noisy boys. To shelter their orange crop from the coolness of the night, the people of Maiori were covering it with branches of dry leaves. Round about me, near each of the little white cottages scattered over the slopes of the mountain, workers were busy turning up their fields, seeding them, smoking the trunks of their olive trees, or leading their goats to pasture. There did not seem to be a corner of this earth, arid as it appeared, which was not made productive by the tricks of fertilizing and the wonders of human patience.

And to think of all that has been said and written about the laziness of the South Italians! Those who still cherish that old platitude from their albums of ready-made ideas will do well to travel about in the country near Naples and see the orchards that have been won back so often and with such pains from the lava, or the orange groves of the coast of Salerno, gained foot by foot and terrace by terrace from the rock. There are fine examples here of what can be accomplished by the stubborn toil and ingenuity of the Campanians. The fact that they work with a song on their lips does not mean that they work less well.

Sitting at a turn in the path, between the roots of an ancient olive, I had abandoned myself to such thoughts as these when a young girl came by, carrying on her head a heavy basket of loam. She was pale and beautiful, with the pallor that belongs to a people nourished on pasty foods, and with the beauty that Lamartine immortalized in Graziella.

‘ Buona sera,’ she greeted me.

And she went on, smiling under her burden, to which her graceful bearing gave the air of a sacred offering. Presently I saw her dump it out in a tiny niche between two rocks on the mountainside. During the time that I remained there she made several trips, and by the end of an hour her tirelessness had turned a sterile spot into a foothold for another olive tree. You could say of her that she had added to her native land.

Watching her work, I felt myself carried away toward the north, toward Rome and Florence and Milan. I thought of this corner of Europe where a whole race of people, inspired with the beauty of their labor, were busy seeking to make their country greater; all of them, like this girl of Ravello, giving to this noble task the slow and determined effort of their daily toil. I thought of the Duce and his scorn for idealists and dreamers and builders of Utopias. I thought of the ardent youths who for seven years have tirelessly worked to improve themselves and their country, on the moral plane and on the practical, with a perseverance and a faith in the outcome that are very impressive to the observer. Such is their confidence in their chief that they have given up to him liberty itself, the liberty that we French consider the highest good. Is this a sign, as many good people choose to believe, that the character of the race has degenerated? That question should not be asked of an Italian: as well ask a Benedictine if he does not think he has been degraded by subscribing to the rule of Saint Benedict.

A willingly accepted discipline, in spite of appearances, keeps the spirits high. Fascist Italy is under Mussolini’s orders as a football team is under the orders of its captain.

We are quick to judge that a country is not free if, when we travel in a train, we cannot light a cigarette in a compartment marked ‘No smoking,’ and cannot put our feet up on the seats. This is the point of view that makes the Frenchman so ill at ease when he travels in Italy — not that he finds any systematic pleasure in breaking rules, but that he does not enjoy being called to order for trifles by a guard armed to the teeth. The good nature of our gendarmes does more for French law and order than strictness or brutality would.

But we have done business with liberty for a very long time; she’s an old connection of ours. We know what we can take and what we must leave: we are not of these younger peoples whose heads are turned by her like a schoolboy with his first cigarette. Liberty does not play tricks on us as she has on the Italians; so we do not feel the need of getting rid of her, whereas Italy has acclaimed her disappearance and does not ask for her return.

‘ Fascism cannot be transplanted outside of Italy,’ Mussolini has said. Certainly it is in its proper setting there; it is there that it has its greatness and its beauty. There also, perhaps, it has its necessity.

But when a Frenchman leaves Italy after a visit of several weeks and crosses the border into France, tell me if the air does not suddenly seem to flow more easily into his lungs, and if he is not suddenly seized with a desire, just for the fun of it, to march up and down in the corridors of the train, from which the armed guards have finally disappeared. Tell me if he does not at once hunt up a fellow passenger and start a conversation in which he can criticize — out loud and to his heart’s content — the policy of Monsieur Poincaré, and run down his own government without fear of exile or deportation.

Tell me if he is not delighted to be a Frenchman.