It is impossible to say, of course, what he would have become if his life had been spared. The war had immensely stimulated his “political-mindedness”: he was obsessed, during the last two years of his life, with a sense of the precariousness of free thought and free speech in this country; if they were cut off, he foresaw, the whole enterprise, both of the social revolution and of the new American culture, would perish of inanition; he felt himself at bay. Would he, with all the additional provocation of a hopelessly bungled peace settlement, have continued in the political field, as his unfinished study on “The State” might suggest? Or would that activity, while remaining vivid and consistent, have subsided into a second place behind his more purely cultural interests?
Personally, I like to think that he would have followed this second course. He speaks in the “History of a Literary Radical” of “living down the new orthodoxies of propaganda” as he and his friends had lived down the old orthodoxies of the classics, and I believe that, freed from the obsessions of the war, his criticism would have concentrated more and more on the problem of evoking and shaping an American literature as the nucleus of that rich, vital and independent national life he had been seeking in so many ways to promote. Who that knew his talents could have wished it otherwise? Already, except for the poets, the intellectual energy of the younger generation has been drawn almost exclusively into political interests; and the new era, which has begun to draw so sharply the battle-line between radicals and reactionaries, is certain only to increase this tendency. If our literary criticism is always impelled sooner or later to become social criticism, it is certainly because the future of our literature and art depends upon the wholesale reconstruction of a social life all the elements of which are as if united in a sort of conspiracy against the growth and freedom of the spirit: we are in the position described by Ibsen in one of his letters: “I do not think it is of much use to plead the cause of art with arguments derived from its own nature, which with us is still so little understood, or rather so thoroughly misunderstood.... My opinion is that at the present time it is of no use to wield one’s weapons for art; one must simply turn them against what is hostile to art.” That is why Bourne, whose ultimate interest was always artistic, found himself a guerilla fighter along the whole battlefront of the social revolution. He was drawn into the political arena as a skilful specialist, called into war service, is drawn into the practice of a general surgery in which he may indeed accomplish much but at the price of the suspension of his own uniqueness. Others, at the expiration of what was for him a critical moment, the moment when all freedom seemed to be at stake, might have been trusted to do his political work for him; the whole radical tide was flowing behind him; his unique function, meanwhile, was not political but spiritual. It was the creation, the communication of what he called “the allure of fresh and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling and feeling given fiber and outline by intelligence.” Was it not to have been hoped, therefore, that he would have revived, exemplified among these new revolutionary conditions, and on behalf of them, the lapsed rôle of the man of letters?
For if he held a hammer in one hand, he held in the other a divining-rod. He, if any one, in the days to come, would have conjured out of our dry soil the green shoots of a beautiful and a characteristic literature: he knew that soil so well, and why it was dry, and how it ought to be irrigated! We have had no chart of our cultural situation to compare with his “History of a Literary Radical,” and certainly no one has combined with an analytical gift like his, and an adoration for the instinct of workmanship, so burning an eye for every stir of life and color on the drab American landscape. I think of a sentence in one of his reviews: “The appearance of dramatic imagination in any form in this country is something to make us all drop our work and run to see.” That was the spirit which animated all his criticism: is it not the spirit that creates out of the void the thing it contemplates?
To have known Randolph Bourne is indeed to have surprised some of the finest secrets of the American future. But those who lived with him in friendship will remember him for reasons that are far more personal, and at the same time far more universal, than that: they will remember him as the wondrous companion, the lyrical intellect, the transparent idealist, most of all perhaps as the ingenuous and lonely child. It is said that every writer possesses in his vocabulary one talismanic word which he repeats again and again, half unconsciously, like a sort of signature, and which reveals the essential secret of his personality. In Bourne’s case the word is “wistful”; and those who accused him of malice and bitterness, not realizing how instinctively we impute these qualities to the physically deformed who are so dauntless in spirit that they repel our pity, would do well to consider that secret signature, sown like some beautiful wild flower over the meadow of his writings, which no man can counterfeit, which is indeed the token of their inviolable sincerity. He was a wanderer, the child of some nation yet unborn, smitten with an inappeasable nostalgia for the Beloved Community on the far side of socialism, he carried with him the intoxicating air of that community, the mysterious aroma of all its works and ways. “High philosophic thought infused with sensuous love,” he wrote once, “is not this the one incorrigible dream that clutches us?” It was the dream he had brought back from the bright future in which he lived, the dream he summoned us to realize. And it issues now like a gallant command out of the space left vacant by his passing.
Van Wyck Brooks.
CONTENTS
HISTORY OF A LITERARY RADICAL
For a man of culture, my friend Miro began his literary career in a singularly unpromising way. Potential statesmen in log-cabins might miraculously come in touch with all the great books of the world, but the days of Miro’s young school life were passed in innocence of Homer or Dante or Shakespeare, or any of the other traditional mind-formers of the race. What Miro had for his nourishment, outside the Bible, which was a magical book that you must not drop on the floor, or his school-readers, which were like lightning flashes of unintelligible scenes, was the literature that his playmates lent him—exploits of British soldiers in Spain and the Crimea, the death-defying adventures of young filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. Miro gave them a languid perusing, and did not criticize their literary style. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer somehow eluded him until he had finished college, and no fresher tale of adventure drifted into his complacent home until the era of “Richard Carvel” and “Janice Meredith” sharpened his wits and gave him a vague feeling that there was such a thing as literary art. The classics were stiffly enshrined behind glass doors that were very hard to open—at least Hawthorne and Irving and Thackeray were there, and Tennyson’s and Scott’s poems—but nobody ever discussed them or looked at them. Miro’s busy elders were taken up with the weekly Outlook and Independent and Christian Work, and felt they were doing much for Miro when they provided him and his sister with St. Nicholas and The Youth’s Companion. It was only that Miro saw the black books looking at him accusingly from the case, and a rudimentary conscience, slipping easily over from Calvinism to culture, forced him solemnly to grapple with “The Scarlet Letter” or “Marmion.” All he remembers is that the writers of these books he browsed among used a great many words and made a great fuss over shadowy offenses and conflicts and passions that did not even stimulate his imagination with sufficient force to cause him to ask his elders what it was all about. Certainly the filibusters were easier.
At school Miro was early impressed with the vast dignity of the literary works and names he was compelled to learn. Shakespeare and Goethe and Dante lifted their plaster heads frowningly above the teacher’s, as they perched on shelves about the room. Much was said of the greatness of literature. But the art of phonetics and the complications of grammar swamped Miro’s early school years. It was not until he reached the High School that literature began really to assume that sacredness which he had heretofore felt only for Holy Scripture. His initiation into culture was made almost a religious mystery by the conscientious and harassed teacher. As the Deadwood Boys and Henty and David Harum slipped away from Miro’s soul in the presence of Milton’s “Comus” and Burke “On Conciliation,” a cultural devoutness was engendered in him that never really died. At first it did not take Miro beyond the stage where your conscience is strong enough to make you uncomfortable, but not strong enough to make you do anything about it. Miro did not actually become an omnivorous reader of great books. But he was filled with a rich grief that the millions pursued cheap and vulgar fiction instead of the best that has been thought and said in the world. Miro indiscriminately bought cheap editions of the English classics and read them with a certain patient incomprehension.