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.
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.
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.