History of a literary radical, and other essays - Randolph Silliman Bourne

NOTE

Most of the papers included in this volume have already appeared in one or another of the following magazines: The Atlantic Monthly, The Dial, The New Republic, The Seven Arts, The Yale Review, The Columbia University Quarterly, and are reprinted here with the kind permission of the editors.

R. B.

Bitter-sweet, and a northwest wind
To sing his requiem,
Who was
Our Age,
And who becomes
An imperishable symbol of our ongoing,
For in himself
He rose above his body and came among us
Prophetic of the race,
The great hater
Of the dark human deformity
Which is our dying world,
The great lover
Of the spirit of youth
Which is our future’s seed....

James Oppenheim.

INTRODUCTION

Randolph Bourne was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, May 30, 1886. He died in New York, December 22, 1918. Between these two dates was packed one of the fullest, richest, and most significant lives of the younger generation. Its outward events can be summarized in a few words. Bourne went to the public schools in his native town, and then for some time earned his living as an assistant to a manufacturer of automatic piano music. In 1909 he entered Columbia, graduating in 1913 as holder of the Gilder Fellowship, which enabled him to spend a year of study and investigation in Europe. In 1911 he had begun contributing to The Atlantic Monthly, and his first book, “Youth and Life,” a volume of essays, appeared in 1913. He was a member of the contributing staff of The New Republic during its first three years; later he was a contributing editor of The Seven Arts and The Dial. He had published, in addition to his first collection of essays and a large number of miscellaneous articles and book reviews, two other books, “Education and Living” and “The Gary Schools.” At the time of his death he was engaged on a novel and a study of the political future.

It might be guessed from this that Bourne at thirty-two had not quite found himself. His interests were indeed almost universal: he had written on politics, economics, philosophy, education, literature. No other of our younger critics had cast so wide a net, and Bourne had hardly begun to draw the strings and count and sort his catch. He was a working journalist, a literary freelance with connections often of the most precarious kind, who contrived, by daily miracles of audacity and courage, to keep himself serenely afloat in a society where his convictions prevented him from following any of the ordinary avenues of preferment and recognition. It was a feat never to be sufficiently marvelled over; it would have been striking, in our twentieth century New York, even in the case of a man who was not physically handicapped as Bourne was. But such a life is inevitably scattering, and it was only after the war had literally driven him in upon himself that he set to work at the systematic harvesting of his thoughts and experiences. He had not quite found himself, perhaps, owing to the extraordinary range of interests for which he had to find a personal common denominator; yet no other young American critic, I think, had exhibited so clear a tendency, so coherent a body of desires. His personality was not only unique, it was also absolutely expressive. I have had the delightful experience of reading through at a sitting, so to say, the whole mass of his uncollected writings, articles, essays, book reviews, unprinted fragments, and a few letters, and I am astonished at the way in which, like a ball of camphor in a trunk, the pungent savor of the man spreads itself over every paragraph. Here was no anonymous reviewer, no mere brilliant satellite of the radical movement losing himself in his immediate reactions: one finds everywhere, interwoven in the fabric of his work, the silver thread of a personal philosophy, the singing line of an intense and beautiful desire.

What was that desire? It was for a new fellowship in the youth of America as the principle of a great and revolutionary departure in our life, a league of youth, one might call it, consciously framed with the purpose of creating, out of the blind chaos of American society, a fine, free, articulate cultural order. That, as it seems to me, was the dominant theme of all his effort, the positive theme to which he always returned from his thrilling forays into the fields of education and politics, philosophy and sociology. One finds it at the beginning of his career in such essays as “Our Cultural Humility,” one finds it at the end in the “History of a Literary Radical.” One finds it in that pacifism which he pursued with such an obstinate and lonely courage and which was the logical outcome of the checking and thwarting of those currents of thought and feeling in which he had invested the whole passion of his life. Place aux jeunes might have been his motto: he seemed indeed the flying wedge of the younger generation itself.