History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

IMPRESSIONS OF EUROPE 1913-14[1]

It was my good fortune as holder of the Gilder Fellowship in this University to spend in Europe the thirteen months immediately preceding the war. I used the opportunity for extensive travel and general acclimatization rather than for specialized research, and was thus able to get an extensive survey of the European scheme on the eve of a cataclysm from which it may emerge entirely altered. No one can predict how truly that year will mark the “end of an era.” It seems true, however, that most of the tendencies of democracy, social reform, and international understanding, to whose development I gave my most eager attention, have been snapped off like threads, perhaps never to be pieced together again. And the material development, so striking in Germany and Italy, the rebuilding of the cities and the undertaking of vast communal projects, will be indefinitely checked, from sheer want of capital, wasted in the war.

[1] Report to the Trustees of Columbia University, 1914.

No one was more innocent than I of the impending horror. In fact, this menacing “armed camp” actually seemed to bristle in less sharply defined lines when seen at close range. Public opinion seemed far less violent than I had expected. In England there was the persistent hostility to Compulsory Service, the gnawing compunction at the folly of the Boer War, the complete subsidence of the panic over German invasion. In France, there was the unyielding opposition to the new three-years’ military law, culminating in the radical victory at the April parliamentary elections, a clear national expression of reluctance at the increased military expenditures; there was the superb irony of the French press over the Zabern affair, where one would have expected a raging chauvinism; there was the general public deprecation of the activities of the royalists, and the constant discrediting of their Alsace-Lorraine propaganda. In Italy I had seen the wild outburst of reaction against the criminal Tripolitan war, and the great general strike of June, a direct popular uprising against war and militarism. Perhaps if I had spent the winter in Germany, I should have felt the drift towards war, but even there all the opinion I heard was of some gigantic slow-moving Slavic pressure, against which defence must be made. And if public and press were full of blatant world-defiance, the spirit certainly escaped my attention. My mind became quite reconciled to the fact of “armed peace.” My imagination unconsciously began to envisage armaments as mere frozen symbols of power, grim, menacing and costly, yet little more than graphic expressions, in a language that all the world could understand, of the relative strength and prestige of the nations. In spite of the uniforms that sprinkled the sidewalks and the wagon-trains that littered the streets, my imagination simply refused to take them as dynamic. And there was little in press and people to make me think that they themselves took them as dynamic. How I should have acted if I had known of the imminence of the world-war I do not know, but in the light of the event my rambles and interests take on the aspect of the toddlings of an innocent child about the edge of a volcano’s crater.

I can give, however, a few indications of what such an innocent mind might see and feel in Europe, this year of last breathless hush before the explosion. I concerned myself with getting, first, a clear impression of the physical body in which each country clothed itself,—the aspect of town and countryside, villages, farms, working-class quarters, factories, suburbs, plans of towns, styles of architecture, characteristic types and ways of living, of modern Europe; and, second, the attitudes, social and political, of various classes, the social psychology of the different peoples. Such acquisitions had, of course, to be the merest impressions. One could not get “data”; one’s tour could be little more than a perpetual “sizing-up.” The best one could do was to settle down in the various capitals for a few months, immerse oneself in the newspapers, talk with as many people as one could reach, read the contemporary novels and plays, attend political meetings and meetings of social reformers, go to church and court-house and school and library and university, and watch the national life in action. One could only cut oneself off from American interests, imagine that one had always lived in the foreign city, and try, by a reach of sympathy and appreciation, to assimilate the tone and spirit and attitudes of the people among whom one was living. Such an effort may result only in the most fantastic illusions. I am not trying to boast that I got any understanding of European countries,—a matter of years of acquaintance and not of months. I am merely indicating an attitude of approach. But it was an attitude I found none too common among American students abroad. Among the many who were conducting historical and political researches at the libraries, I was never able to find any student interested in the political meetings of the campaign, for instance, which I attended with so much ardor, as a revelation of French social psychology. The Americans I saw would have an enthusiasm for particular things, perhaps, that they were interested in, a patronizing attitude towards certain immoralities and inefficiencies that impressed them, but as for a curiosity about the French mind and the French culture as a whole, I could not find any interest that flowed along with mine. My curiosity, therefore, had to go its own gait. I seemed to have a singular faculty for not getting information. Unless one is fortunate enough to step into a social group, one must dig one’s way along unaided. By means of newspapers and magazines and guide-books, one hews out a little passage towards the center of things. Slowly a definite picture is built up of the culture and psychology of the people among whom one is living. There is no way, however, of checking up one’s impressions. One must rely on one’s intuition. Letters of introduction bring out only class or professional attitudes. Very few people are socially introspective enough to map out for you the mind of the society in which they live. Only the French seem to have this self-consciousness of their own traits, and the gift of expression, and that is why France is incomparably the most interesting and enlightening country for the amateur and curious American student to visit.

These considerations suggest the fact that I wish to bring out,—that my most striking impression was the extraordinary toughness and homogeneity of the cultural fabric in the different countries, England, France, Italy and Germany, that I studied. Each country was a distinct unit, the parts of which hung together, and interpreted each other, styles and attitudes, literature, architecture, and social organization. This idea is of course a truism, yet brought up, as most Americans are, I think, with the idea that foreigners are just human beings living on other parts of the earth’s surface, “folks” like ourselves with accidental differences of language and customs, I was genuinely shocked to find distinct national temperaments, distinct psychologies and attitudes, distinct languages that embodied, not different sounds for the same meanings, but actually different meanings. We really know all this; but when we write about the war, for instance, we insensibly fall back to our old attitude. Most American comment on the war, even the most intelligent, suggests a complete ignorance of the fact that there is a German mind, and a French mind and an English mind, each a whole bundle of attitudes and interpretations that harmonize and support each other. And each of these national minds feels its own reasons and emotions and justifications to be cosmically grounded, just as we ourselves feel that Anglo-Saxon morality is Morality, and Anglo-Saxon freedom Liberty. We do, of course, more or less dimly recognize these differences of national culture. We no longer think of other nations as “Barbarians,” unless they have a national scheme which is as much of a challenge to our own social inefficiency as is the German. We express our sense of the difference by a constant belittling. Foreigners are not monsters, but Lilliputians, dwarfs, playing with toys. We do not take other cultures seriously. We tend to dwell on the amusing, the quaint, the picturesque, rather than the intense emotional and intellectual differences. The opportunity to immerse oneself in these various cultures until one feels their powerful and homogeneous strength, their meaning and depth, until one takes each with entire seriousness and judges it, not in American terms, but in its own,—this is the educative value of a rapid, superficial European year such as mine. The only American book I have ever been able to find that deals with a foreign country in this adequate sense is Mr. Brownell’s “French Traits.” Almost all other writing, political, historical, descriptive, about European countries, must be read with the constant realization that the peculiar emotional and intellectual biases of the people, the temperamental traits, the soul which animates all their activities and expressions, have all been omitted from consideration by the author.

I can only give fragmentary hints in this short article of the incidents which built up my sense of these differences of national cultures. London was the place where I had the best opportunities for meeting people through letters of introduction. There were glimpses of the Webbs at a meeting of the Fabian Society, which seems to retain the allegiance of its old members rather than enlist the enthusiasm of the younger generation. At their house Mr. Webb talked, as he lectures, with the patient air of a man expounding arithmetic to backward children, and Mrs. Webb, passive by his side, spoke only to correct some slight slip on his part; there was another picture of her sweeping into the New Statesman office and producing a sudden panic of reverent awe among the editorial staff. Lectures by Shaw and Chesterton on succeeding nights—Shaw, clean, straight, clear and fine as an upland wind and summer sun; Chesterton, gluttonous and thick, with something tricky and unsavory about him—gave me a personal estimate of their contrasted philosophies. Then there was Professor Hobhouse, excessively judicial, with that high consciousness of excellence which the Liberal professor seems to exude; Graham Wallas, with his personal vivacity of expression and lack of any clear philosophy, who considered the American sociologist a national disaster; H. G. Wells, a suggestive talker, but very disappointing personally; John A. Hobson, whom I cannot admire too much, a publicist with immense stores of knowledge, poise of mind, and yet radical philosophy and gifts of journalistic expression, a type that we simply do not seem to be able to produce in this country.

I expected to find the atmosphere of London very depressing. On the contrary, a sort of fatuous cheerfulness seemed to reign everywhere on the streets, in middle-class homes, even in the slums. This impressed me as the prevailing tone of English life. Wells and Bennett seem to have caught it exactly. As for the world that Mr. Galsworthy lives in, though I looked hard for his people, I could find nothing with the remotest resemblance. Such a tone of optimism is possible only to an unimaginative people who are well schooled against personal reactions, and against the depressing influences of environment—slums and fog and a prevailing stodginess of middle-class life—that would affect the moods of more impressionable peoples. In certain educated circles this tone gave an impression of incorrigible intellectual frivolity. London has fashions in talk. Significant discussion almost did not exist. A running fire of ideational badinage, “good talk,” took its place. Every idea tended to go up in smoke. You found your tone either monstrously prophetic, as of a young Jeremiah sitting at the board, or else unpleasantly cynical. Irony does not seem to be known in England.

The impression one got from the newspapers and magazines and popular books was of a sort of exuberant irrelevance, a vivacity of interest about matters that seemed quite alien to the personal and social issues of life as one knew it. There seemed indeed to be a direct avoidance of these issues. One could never discover whether or how much an Englishman “cared.” The national mind seemed to have made a sort of permanent derangement of intellect from emotion. In no country is so large a proportion of the literary product a mere hobby of leisurely gentlemen whose interests are quite elsewhere. The literary supplements of the newspapers used to contain the greatest collection of futilities that I ever saw. One got the impression that the intellectual life of the country was “hobbyized,” that ideas were taken as sports, just as sports were taken as serious issues. This impression was rather confirmed at Oxford, where the anthropologist, Marrett, turned out to be a Jersey country gentleman, digging up prehistoric bones on his place, and mentioning Chesterton as “entertaining writer—even had him down here to lunch, but not a ‘gentleman,’ you know, not a ‘gentleman.’” Oxford itself seemed to be one long play of schoolboys in the soft damp November air. Schiller, who gave me a delightful morning, after I had attended his class where the boys came in their black gowns and sat at primitive desks in the low room before a blazing fire, from which one looked out on mouldering walls and dead ivy and the pale morning sun and wan sweet decay, drew a wicked picture of the dons satisfying their thwarted sporting instincts by putting their boys through their intellectual paces and pitting them against each other in scholastic competition like race-horses. Mr. McDougall, large and with an Irish courtliness, I heard and liked, and Mr. L. P. Jacks talked with me at Manchester College. A meeting of the Fabians at St. John’s and a lecture by Mrs. Pember Reeves on “Coöperation” attracted me, with her dramatic flaring out at the stolid audience for their “English” lack of imagination—she came from New Zealand—the inanely facetious comments of the dons, the lumbering discourses of certain beefy burgesses from the local “Coöperative,” who had not followed well the lady’s nimble thought. Every little incident of the Oxford week of classes and rambles fitted into a picture of the place as a perfect epitome of English life, past and present. It was even more than London a world.

Politically, London was dead that autumn. No parliament, and every one weary of politics. The bitter Dublin strike dragged along with its reverberations through the English labor situation, which showed unrest and dissatisfaction with its leaders and much more of “syndicalist” leaning than any one would admit. A debate, heard later in Paris, hit the English labor situation off beautifully,—Longuet, arguing that there was no syndicalism in England because all the leaders had written him there wasn’t; Joyaux, arguing that there was, because the unions were using forms of “direct action” and acting exactly “as if” syndicalist ideas were spreading.