It is already summer in Tuscany, the sun is hot, the earth is baked hard, and the soul has changed her rhythm. The nightingales sing all day and all night – not at all sadly, but brightly, vividly, impudently, with a trilling power of assertion quite disproportionate to the size of the shy bird. Why the Greeks should have heard the nightingale weeping or sobbing is more than I can understand. Anyhow, perhaps the Greeks were looking for the tragic, rather than the rhapsodic consummation to life. They were predisposed.
Tomorrow, however, is the first of May, and already summer is here. Yesterday, in the flood of sunshine on the Arno at evening, I saw two German boys steering out of the Por Santa Maria onto the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. They were dark-haired, not blonds, but otherwise the true Wandervögel type, in shirts and short trousers and thick boots, hatless, coat slung in the ruck-sack, shirt-sleeves rolled back above the brown muscular arms, shirt-breast open from the brown, scorched breast, and the face and neck glowing sun-darkened as they strode into the flood of evening sunshine, out of the narrow street. They were talking loudly to one another in German, as if oblivious of their surroundings, in that thronged crossing of the Ponte Vecchio. And they strode with strong strides, heedless, marching past the Italians as if the Italians were but shadows. Strong, heedless, travelling intently, bent a little forward from the rucksacks in the plunge of determination to travel onwards, looking neither to right nor left, conversing in strong voices only with one another, where were they going, in the last golden light of the sun-flooded evening, over the Arno? Were they leaving town, at this hour? Were they pressing on, to get out of the Porta Romana before nightfall, going southwards?
In spite of the fact that one is used to these German youths, in Florence especially, in summer, still the mind calls a halt each time they appear and pass by. If swans or wild geese flew honking, low over the Arno in the evening light, moving with that wedge-shaped, intent, unswerving progress that is so impressive, they would create the same impression on one. They would bring that sense of remote, far-off lands which these Germans bring, and that sense of mysterious, unfathomable purpose.
Now no one knows better than myself that Munich or Frankfort-am-Main are not far-off, remote, lonely lands: on the contrary: and that these boys are not mysteriously migrating from one unknown to another. They are just wandering for wandering’s sake, and moving instinctively, perhaps, towards the sun, and towards Rome, the old centre-point. There is really nothing more remarkable in it than in the English and Americans sauntering diffidently and, as it were, obscurely along the Lungarno. The English in particular seem to move under a sort of Tarnhelm, having a certain power of invisibility. They manage most of the time to efface themselves, deliberately, from the atmosphere. And the Americans, who don’t try to efface themselves, give the impression of not being really there. They have left their real selves way off in the United States, in Europe they are like rather void Doppelgänger. I am speaking, of course, of the impression of the streets. Inside the hotels, the trains, the tea-rooms and the restaurants, it is another affair. There you may have a little England, very insular, or a little America, very money-rich democratic, or a little Germany, assertive, or a little Scandinavia, domestic. But I am not speaking of indoor impressions. Merely of the streets.
And in the streets of Florence or Rome, the Wandervögel make a startling impression, whereas the rest of the foreigners impress one rather negatively. When I am in Germany, then Germany seems to me very much like anywhere else, especially England or America.
And when I see the Wandervögel pushing at evening out of the Por Santa Maria, across the blaze of sun and into the Ponte Vecchio, then Germany becomes again to me what it was to the Romans: the mysterious, half-dark land of the north, bristling with gloomy forests, resounding to the cry of wild geese and of swans, the land of the stork and the bear and the Drachen and the Greifen.
I know it is not so. Yet the impression comes back over me, as I see the youths pressing heedlessly past. And I know it is the same with the Italians. They see, as their ancestors saw in the Goths and the Vandals, i barbari, the barbarians. That is what the little policeman with his staff and his peaked cap thinks, as the boys from the north go by: i barbari! Not with dislike or contempt: not at all: but with the old, weird wonder. So he might look up at wild swans flying over the Ponte Vecchio: wild strangers from the north.
So strong is the impression the Wandervögel make on the imagination! It is not that I am particularly impressionable. I know the Italians feel very much as I do.
And when one sees English people with rucksacks and shirt-sleeves rolled back and hob-nailed boots, as one does sometimes, even in Tuscany, one notices them, but they make very little impression. They are rather odd than extraordinary. They are just gli escursionisti, quite comprehensible: part of the fresh-air movement. The Italians will laugh at them, but they know just what to think about them.
Whereas about the Wandervögel they do not quite know what to think, nor even what to feel: since we even only feel the things we know how to feel. And we do not know what to feel about these Wandervögel boys. They bring with them such a strong feeling of somewhere else, of an unknown country, an unknown race, a powerful, still unknown northland.
How wonderful it must have been, at the end of the old Roman Empire, for the Roman citizens to see the big, bare-limbed Goths, with their insolent-indifferent blue eyes, stand looking on at the market-places! They were there like a vision. Non angli sed angeli, as we were told the first great Pope said of the British slaves. Creatures from the beyond, presaging another world of men.
So it was then. So it is, to a certain extent, even now. Strange wanderers towards the sun, forerunners of another world of men. That is how one still feels, as one sees the Wandervögel cross the Ponte Vecchio. They carry with them another world, another air, another meaning of life. The meaning is not explicit, not as much as it is even in storks or wild geese. But there it lies, implicit.
Curious how different it is with the well-dressed Germans. They are very often quite domesticated, and in the sense that Ibsen’s people are ridiculous, just a little ridiculous. They are so bourgeois, so much more a product of civilization than the producers of civilization. They are so much buttoned up inside their waistcoats, and stuck inside their trousers, and encircled in their starched collars. They are not so grotesquely self-conscious and physically withered or non-existent as the equivalent English bourgeois tourist. And they are never quite so utterly domesticated as the equivalent Scandinavian. But they have so often the unsure look of children who have been turned out in their best clothes by their mama, and told to go and enjoy themselves: Now enjoy yourselves! That is a little absurd.
The Italians, whatever they are, are what they are. So you know them, you feel that they have developed themselves into an expression of themselves, as far as they go. With the English, weird fish as they are very often, you feel the same: whatever they are, they are what they are, they can’t be much different, poor dears. But with the Germans abroad, you feel: These people ought really to be something else. They are not themselves, in their Sunday clothes. They are being something they are not.
And one has the feeling even stronger, with many Russians. One feels: These people are not themselves at all. They are the roaring echoes of other people, older races, other languages. Even the things they say aren’t really Russian things: they’re all sorts of half-translations from Latin or French or English or God-knows-what.
Some of this feeling one has about the Germans one meets abroad: as if they were talking in translation: as if the ideas, however original, always had a faint sound of translations. As if they were never quite themselves.
Then, when one sees the Wandervögel, comes the shock of realization, and one thinks: There they go, the real Germans, seeking the sun! They have really nothing to say. They are roving, roving, roving, seeking themselves. That is it, with these ‘barbarians.’ They are still seeking themselves. And they have not yet found themselves. They are turning to the sun again, in the great adventure of seeking themselves.
Man does not start ready-made. He is a weird creature that slowly evolves himself through the ages. He need never stop evolving himself, for a human being who was completely himself has never even been conceived. The great Goethe was half-born, Shakespeare the same, Napoleon only a third-born. And most people are hardly born at all, into individual consciousness.
But with the Italians and the French, the mass-consciousness which governs the individual is really derived from the individual. Whereas with the German and the Russian, it seems to me not so. The mass-consciousness has been taken over, by great minds like Goethe or Frederick, from other people, and does not spring inherent from the Teutonic race itself. In short, the Teutonic mind, young, powerful, active, is always thinking in terms of somebody else’s experience, and almost never in terms of its own experience.
Then comes a great unrest. It seems to show so plainly in the Wandervögel. Thinking in terms of somebody else’s experience at last becomes utterly unsatisfactory. Then thought altogether falls into chaos – and then into discredit. The young don’t choose to think any more. Blindly, they turn to the sun.
Because the sun is anti-thought. Thought is of the shade. In bright sunshine no man thinks. So the Wandervögel turn instinctively to the sun, which melts thoughts away, and sets the blood running with another, non-mental consciousness.
And this is why, at times of great change, the northern nations turn to the sun. And this is why, when revolutions come, they often come in May. It is the sun making the blood revolt against old conceptions. And this is why the nations of the sun do not live the life of thought, therefore they are more ‘themselves.’ In the grey shadow the northern nations mould themselves according to a few ideas until their whole life is buttoned and choked up. Then comes a revulsion. They cast off the clothes and turn to the sun, as the Wandervögel do, strange harbingers.