Untimely papers

BY RANDOLPH BOURNE
UNTIMELY PAPERS
FOREWORD BY THE EDITOR JAMES OPPENHEIM
NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH MCMXIX
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY B. W. HUEBSCH PRINTED IN U. S. A.
Van Wyck Brooks has said of Randolph Bourne that he was the very type of that proletarian-aristocrat which is coming into being. When Brooks and Waldo Frank and Louis Untermeyer and Paul Rosenfeld and I—a nucleus at the heart of a group including so many of the “younger generation”—were joyfully publishing The Seven Arts we inevitably found the phrase “the young world,” and by this phrase we characterized nothing local, but a new international life, an interweaving of groups in all countries, the unspoiled forces everywhere who share the same culture and somewhat the same new vision of the world. There was in it the Russian mixture of art and revolution, the one a change in the spirit of man, the other a change in his organized life.
At first Randolph Bourne was separated from us. He had not yet ended his apprenticeship to that “liberal pragmatism” which he effectually destroys in “Twilight of Idols.” He was still relying on the intellect as a programme-maker for society. But when America entered the war, his apprenticeship ended. That shock set him free, and it was inevitable then that he should not only join The Seven Arts but actually in himself gather us all together, himself, in America, the very soul of “the young world.” No nerve of that world was missing in him: he was as sensitive to art as to philosophy, as politically-minded as he was psychologic, as brave in fighting for the conscientious objector as he was in opposing current American culture. He was a flaming rebel against our crippled life, as if he had taken the cue from the long struggle with his own body. And just as that weak child’s body finally slew him before he had fully triumphed, so the great war succeeded in silencing him. When Randolph Bourne died on December 22, 1918, all of us of the “younger generation” felt that a great man had died with a great work unfinished.