History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

I shall never forget my first meeting with him, that odd little apparition with his vibrant eyes, his quick, birdlike steps and the long black student’s cape he had brought back with him from Paris. It was in November, 1914, and we never imagined then that the war was going to be more than a slash, however deep, across the face of civilization, we never imagined it was going to plough on and on until it had uprooted and turned under the soil so many green shoots of hope and desire in the young world. Bourne had published that radiant book of essays on the Adventure of Life, the Two Generations, the Excitement of Friendship, with its happy and confident suggestion of the present as a sort of transparent veil hung up against the window of some dazzling future, he had had his wanderyear abroad, and had come home with that indescribable air of the scholar-gypsy, his sensibility fresh, clairvoyant, matutinal, a philosopher of the gaya scienza, his hammer poised over the rock of American philistinism, with never a doubt in his heart of the waters of youth imprisoned there. One divined him in a moment, the fine, mettlesome temper of his intellect, his curiosity, his acutely critical self-consciousness, his aesthetic flair, his delicate sense of personal relationships, his toughness of fiber, his masterly powers of assimilation, his grasp of reality, his burning convictions, his beautifully precise desires. Here was Emerson’s “American scholar” at last, but radiating an infinitely warmer, profaner, more companionable influence than Emerson had ever dreamed of, an influence that savored rather of Whitman and William James. He was the new America incarnate, with that stamp of a sort of permanent youthfulness on his queer, twisted, appealing face. You felt that in him the new America had suddenly found itself and was all astir with the excitement of its first maturity.

His life had prepared him for the rôle, for the physical disability that had cut him off from the traditional currents and preoccupations of American life had given him a poignant insight into the predicament of all those others who, like him, could not adjust themselves to the industrial machine—the exploited, the sensitive, the despised, the aspiring, those, in short, to whom a new and very different America was no academic idea but a necessity so urgent that it had begun to be a reality. As detached as any young East Sider from the herd-unity of American life, the colonial tradition, the “genteel tradition,” yet passionately concerned with America, passionately caring for America, he had discovered himself at Columbia, where so many strains of the newer immigrant population meet one another in the full flood and ferment of modern ideas. Shut in as he had been with himself and his books, what dreams had passed through his mind of the possibilities of life, of the range of adventures that are open to the spirit, of some great collective effort of humanity! Would there never be room for these things in America, was it not precisely the task of the young to make room for them? Bourne’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been doughty preachers and reformers: he had inherited a certain religious momentum that thrust him now into the midst of the radical tide. Above all, he had found companions who helped him to clarify his ideas and grapple with his aims. Immigrants, many of them, of the second generation, candidates for the “melting-pot” that had simply failed to melt them, they trailed with them a dozen rich, diverse racial and cultural tendencies which America seemed unable either to assimilate or to suppress. Were they not, these newcomers of the eleventh hour, as clearly entitled as the first colonials had been to a place in the sun of the great experimental democracy upon which they were making such strange new demands? They wanted a freer emotional life, a more vivid intellectual life; oddly enough, it was they and not the hereditary Americans, the “people of action,” who spoke of an “American culture” and demanded it. Bourne had found his natural allies. Intensely Anglo-Saxon himself, it was America he cared for, not the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which had apparently lost itself in the pursuit of a mechanical efficiency. It was a “trans-national” America of which he caught glimpses now, a battleground of all the cultures, a super-culture, that might perhaps, by some happy chance, determine the future of civilization itself.

It was with some such vision as this that he had gone abroad. If that super-culture was ever to come it could only be through some prodigious spiritual organization of the youth of America, some organization that would have to begin with small and highly self-conscious groups; these groups, moreover, would have to depend for a long time upon the experience of young Europe. The very ideas of spiritual leadership, the intellectual life, the social revolution were foreign to a modern America that had submitted to the common mould of business enterprise; even philosophers like Professor Dewey had had to assume a protective coloration, and when people spoke of art they had to justify it as an “asset.” For Bourne, therefore, the European tour was something more than a preparation for his own life: he was like a bird in the nesting season, gathering twigs and straw for a nest that was not to be his but young America’s, a nest for which old America would have to provide the bough! He was in search, in other words, of new ideas, new attitudes, new techniques, personal and social, for which he was going to demand recognition at home, and it is this that gives to his “Impressions of Europe 1913-1914”—his report to Columbia as holder of the Gilder Fellowship—an actuality that so perfectly survives the war. Where can one find anything better in the way of social insight than his pictures of radical France, of the ferment of the young Italian soul, of the London intellectuals—Sidney Webb, lecturing “with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward children,” Shaw, “clean, straight, clear, and fine as an upland wind and summer sun,” Chesterton, “gluttonous and thick, with something tricky and unsavory about him”; of the Scandinavian note,—“one got a sense in those countries of the most advanced civilization, yet without sophistication, a luminous modern intelligence that selected and controlled and did not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the chaos of twentieth century possibility”? We see things in that white light only when they have some deeply personal meaning for us, and Bourne’s instinct had led him straight to his mark. Two complex impressions he had gained that were to dominate all his later work. One was the sense of what a national culture is, of its immense value and significance as a source and fund of spiritual power even in a young world committed to a political and economic internationalism. The other was a keen realization of the almost apostolic rôle of the young student class in perpetuating, rejuvenating, vivifying and, if need be, creating this national consciousness. No young Hindu ever went back to India, no young Persian or Ukrainian or Balkan student ever went home from a European year with a more fervent sense of the chaos and spiritual stagnation and backwardness of his own people, of the happy responsibility laid upon himself and all those other young men and women who had been touched by the modern spirit.

It was a tremendous moment. Never had we realized so keenly the spiritual inadequacy of American life: the great war of the cultures left us literally gasping in the vacuum of our own provincialism, colonialism, naïveté, and romantic self-complacency. We were in much the same position as that of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of 1866-1870, if we are to accept George Brandes’ description of it: “While the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to victory—and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant.” It was through a great effort of social introspection that Scandinavia had roused itself from the stupor of this optimistic idealism, and at last a similar movement was on foot in America. The New Republic had started with the war, The Masses was still young, The Seven Arts and the new Dial were on the horizon. Bourne found himself instantly in touch with the purposes of all these papers, which spoke of a new class-consciousness, a sort of offensive and defensive alliance of the younger intelligentsia and the awakened elements of the labor groups. His audience was awaiting him, and no one could have been better prepared to take advantage of it.

It was not merely the exigencies of journalism that turned his mind at first so largely to the problems of primary education. In Professor Dewey’s theories, in the Gary Schools, he saw, as he could see it nowhere else, the definite promise, the actual unfolding of the freer, more individualistic, and at the same time more communistic social life of which he dreamed. But even if he had not come to feel a certain inadequacy in Professor Dewey’s point of view, I doubt if this field of interest could have held him long. Children fascinated him; how well he understood them we can see from his delightful “Ernest: or Parent for a Day.” But Bourne’s heart was too insistently involved in the situation of his own contemporaries, in the stress of their immediate problems, to allow him to linger in these long hopes. This young intelligentsia in whose ultimate unity he had had such faith—did he not see it, moreover, as the war advanced, lapsing, falling apart again, reverting into the ancestral attitudes of the tribe? Granted the war, it was the business of these liberals to see that it was played, as he said, “with insistent care for democratic values at home, and unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace that should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.” Instead, the “allure of the martial” passed only to be succeeded by the “allure of the technical,” and the “prudent, enlightened college man,” cut in the familiar pattern, took the place of the value-creator, the path-finder, the seeker of new horizons. Plainly, the younger generation had not begun to find its own soul, had hardly so much as registered its will for a new orientation of the American spirit.

Had it not occurred before, this general reversion to type? The whole first phase of the social movement had spent itself in a sort of ineffectual beating of the air, and Bourne saw that only through a far more heroic effort of criticism than had yet been attempted could the young intelligentsia disentangle itself, prevail against the mass-fatalism of the middle class, and rouse the workers out of their blindness and apathy. Fifteen years ago a new breath had blown over the American scene; people felt that the era of big business had reached its climacteric, that a new nation was about to be born out of the social settlements, out of the soil that had been harrowed and swept by the muck-rakers, out of the spirit of service that animated a whole new race of novelists, and a vast army of young men and young women, who felt fluttering in their souls the call to some great impersonal adventure, went forth to the slums and the factories and the universities with a powerful but very vague desire to realize themselves and to “do something” for the world. But one would have said that movement had been born middle-aged, so earnest, so anxious, so conscientious, so troubled, so maternal and paternal were the faces of those young men and women who marched forth with so puzzled an intrepidity; there was none of the tang and fire of youth in it, none of the fierce glitter of the intellect; there was no joyous burning of boats; there were no transfigurations, no ecstasies. There was only a warm simmer of eager, evangelical sentiment that somehow never reached the boiling-point and cooled rapidly off again, and that host of tentative and wistful seekers found themselves as cruelly astray as the little visionaries of the Children’s Crusade. Was not the failure of that movement due almost wholly to its lack of critical equipment? In the first place, it was too naïve and too provincial, it was outside the main stream of modern activity and desire, it had none of the reserves of power that result from being in touch with contemporary developments in other countries. In the second place, it had no realistic sense of American life: it ignored the facts of the class struggle, it accepted enthusiastically illusions like that of the “melting-pot,” it wasted its energy in attacking “bad” business without realizing that the spirit of business enterprise is itself the great enemy, it failed to see the need of a consciously organized intellectual class or to appreciate the necessary conjunction in our day of the intellectuals and the proletariat. Worst of all, it had no personal psychology. Those crusaders of the “social consciousness” were far from being conscious of themselves; they had never broken the umbilical cord of their hereditary class, they had not discovered their own individual lines of growth, they had no knowledge of their own powers, no technique for using them effectively. Embarked in activities that instantly revealed themselves as futile and fallacious, they also found their loyalties in perpetual conflict with one another. Inevitably their zeal waned and their energy ebbed away, and the tides of uniformity and commercialism swept the American scene once more.

No one had grasped all these elements of the social situation so firmly as Bourne. He saw that we needed, first, a psychological interpretation of these younger malcontents, secondly, a realistic study of our institutional life, and finally, a general opening of the American mind to the currents of contemporary desire and effort and experiment abroad. And along each of these lines he did the work of a pioneer.

Who, for example, had ever thought of exploring the soul of the younger generation as Bourne explored it? He had planned a long series of literary portraits of its types and personalities: half a dozen of them exist (along with several of quite a different character!—the keenest satires we have), enough to show us how sensitively he responded to those detached, groping, wistful, yet resolutely independent spirits whom he saw weaving the iridescent fabric of the future. He who had so early divined the truth of Maurice Barrès’ saying, that we never conquer the intellectual suffrages of those who precede us in life, addressed himself exclusively to these young spirits: he went out to meet them, he probed their obscurities; one would have said that he was a sort of impresario gathering the personnel of some immense orchestra, seeking in each the principle of his own growth. He had studied his chosen minority with such instinctive care that everything he wrote came as a personal message to those, and those alone, who were capable of assimilating it; and that is why, as we look over his writings to-day, we find them a sort of corpus, a text full of secret ciphers, and packed with meaning between the lines, of all the most intimate questions and difficulties and turns of thought and feeling that make up the soul of young America. He revealed us to ourselves, he intensified and at the same time corroborated our desires; above all, he showed us what we had in common and what new increments of life might arise out of the friction of our differences. In these portraits he was already doing the work of the novelist he might well have become,—he left two or three chapters of a novel he had begun to write, in which “Karen” and “Sophronisba” and “The Professor” would probably have appeared, along with a whole battle-array of the older and younger generations; he was sketching out the rôle some novelist might play in the parturition of the new America. Everything for analysis, for self-discovery, for articulation, everything to put the younger generation in possession of itself! Everything to weave the tissue of a common understanding, to help the growth and freedom of the spirit! There was something prophetic in Bourne’s personality. In his presence one felt, in his writings one realizes, that the army of youth is already assembling for “the effort of reason and the adventure of beauty.”

I shall say little of his work as a critic of institutions. It is enough to point out that if such realistic studies as his “Trans-National America” and his “Mirror of the Middle West” (a perfect example, by the way, of his theory of the book review as an independent enquiry with a central idea of its own), his papers on the settlements and on sociological fiction had appeared fifteen years ago, a vastly greater amount of effective energy might have survived the break-up of the first phase of the social movement. When he showed what mare’s-nests the settlements and the “melting-pot” theory and the “spirit of service” are, and what snares for democracy lie in Meredith Nicholson’s “folksiness,” he closed the gate on half the blind alleys in which youth had gone astray; and he who had so delighted in Veblen’s ruthless condensation of the mystical gases of American business implied in every line he wrote that there is a gulf fixed between the young intellectual and the unreformable “system.” The young intellectual, henceforth, was an unclassed outsider, with a scent all the more keenly sharpened for new trails because the old trails were denied him, and for Bourne those new trails led straight, and by the shortest possible route, to a society the very reverse of ours, a society such as A.E. has described in the phrase, “democratic in economics, aristocratic in thought,” to be attained through a coalition of the thinkers and the workers. The task of the thinkers, of the intelligentsia, in so far as they concerned themselves directly with economic problems, was, in Bourne’s eyes, chiefly to think. It was a new doctrine for American radicals; it precisely denoted their advance over the evangelicism of fifteen years ago. “The young radical to-day,” he wrote in one of his reviews, “is not asked to be a martyr, but he is asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader.... The labor movement in this country needs a philosophy, a literature, a constructive socialist analysis and criticism of industrial relations. Labor will scarcely do this thinking for itself. Unless middle-class radicalism threshes out its categories and interpretations and undertakes this constructive thought it will not be done.... The only way by which middle-class radicalism can serve is by being fiercely and concentratedly intellectual.”

Finally, through Bourne more than through any other of our younger writers one gained a sense of the stir of the great world, of the currents and cross-currents of the contemporary European spirit, behind and beneath the war, of the tendencies and experiences and common aims and bonds of the younger generation everywhere. He was an exception to what seems to be the general rule, that Americans who are able to pass outside their own national spirit at all are apt to fall headlong into the national spirit of some one other country: they become vehement partisans of Latin Europe, or of England, or of Germany and Scandinavia, or, more recently, of Russia. Bourne, with that singular union of detachment and affectionate penetration which he brought also to his personal relationships, had entered them all with an equal curiosity, an impartial delight. If he had absorbed the fine idealism of the English liberals, he understood also the more elemental, the more emotional, the more positive urge of revolutionary Russia. He was full of practical suggestions from the vast social and economic laboratory of modern Germany. He had caught something also from the intellectual excitement of young Italy; most of all, his imagination had been captivated, as we can see from such essays as “Mon Amie,” by the candor and the self-consciousness and the genius for social introspection of radical France. And all these influences were perpetually at play in his mind and in his writings. He was the conductor of innumerable diverse inspirations, a sort of clearing-house of the best living ideas of the time; through him the young writer and the young thinker came into instant contact with whatever in the modern world he most needed. And here again Bourne revealed his central aim. He reviewed by choice, and with a special passion, what he called the “epics of youthful talent that grows great with quest and desire.” It is easy to see, in his articles on such books as “Pelle the Conqueror” and Gorky’s Autobiography and “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists,” that what lured him was the common struggle and aspiration of youth and poverty and the creative spirit everywhere, the sense of a new socialized world groping its way upward. It was this rich ground-note in all his work that made him, not the critic merely, but the leader.