History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

And the war has come, hot upon her enthusiasms. She must have been long since in the field, either at the army stations, or moving about among the hospitals of Paris, her heart full of pride and pity for the France which she loved and felt so well, and of whose deathless spirit she was, for me, at least, so glowing a symbol.

FERGUS

My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney, its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat.

The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future. His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school. The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced him. On his parents’ anxiety that he “make something of himself” he looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance broker’s office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music notebook and Gomperz’s “Greek Thinkers” were rarely out of his hand.

Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory, but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music, somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two, and he could not grasp or control it.

When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours of one’s every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest of his pastoral day for writing music.

Before I could communicate to him my friends’ reluctance to this proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum, discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him. Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his own historic galleries.

When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather as one who had been bereft of all these things.

Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him.

He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and he gave the work up.