where he and his companion spent their first two days, reminded him of Quebec, with its ancient, narrow, "prim" streets, and its squares and fountains and trees along the boulevards, and it delighted him to watch the people having their coffee and wine, in the true Parisian fashion, at the little tables "on the narrowest of side walks", and to be waited upon by clerks in the department stores wearing Prince Alberts of the most elegant cut, and to see the kiosks with their brightly coloured posters, and the little boys with bare knees and precocious countenances -- indeed all delighted him, and he felt at once a natural affinity for Paris and the French people.

In Brussels he was struck by the "kindness and geniality" of the people "quite different from the grasping extortion which we were taught to expect from our travelling friends at home."

"It is a marvellously prosperous-looking city with many old houses and beautiful gardens and parks", he writes to his mother, "We saw many beautiful Rubens, and the great church of Gudule, which we entered while a most impressive funeral mass was in progress, with the chanting priests and unearthly bell."

aim

His *pursuit* was to acquire a geographical and aesthetic sense of each place they visited, and to fill in the gaps of his knowledge later on. "Ward makes a fearful fuss because I walk along the street with an open map," he writes to his mother; and one gathers that Randolph, with his deformity that *centered at*-at-tention upon him, his unabashed use of his umbrella as a walking stick, his irrepressible and irresponsible pleasures, which made of each moment an end in itself, his resolute intention of letting

49 26

nothing escape him, his open senses and his open maps, his ironies
and his ardors so confusingly intermingled, was a source of con-
tinual embarrassment to his friend, especially me, who is only a child.

An amusing commentary on their association is here given, although
it may be thought by some to be rather risqué.

"At Ghent we were attacked upon leaving the station by a red-coated
hotel agent, who implored us in the most tearful voice to come
with him. I had visions of a big hotel, and besides the price was
too high. So we said no and started off, with him at our heels,
beseeching and imploring. My friend tall, lanky, lugubrious, and
red-haired, lost his head and started off at a breakneck pace
through the town. Every time we stopped for breath, the fellow
was upon us, ready to pounce, whenever he saw us stop to look
at a map or directory. My friend's terror of him was awfully
funny. We actually drew the wretch over half a mile into the
town before we could summon the proper authority in our voices
to bid him begone forever. When he left us we sank exhausted
into the first place we saw. . . " "As for the trip", he goes
on, "It is all that I looked forward to and more. Every moment
is interesting, and there is just enough of the familiar and
the anticipated, and the unexpected and disturbing to make the
experience very piquant. . . I am enjoying the travelling very
much; the trolleys are delightful, and the railroad cars built
so you obtain the finest views, as fine as you would almost from
an observation car. I always did adore going and seeing new
sights; just the physical sensation of riding in a railway car
is as keenly delightful as it was when I was ever so little."

50 27

And to start off for a stroll around a strange city simply dilates the heart ..." And to me he wrote, "One of the delights of travelling is that youx forget yourself so completely. It all seems so completely its own excuse for being, and to me it never leaves a taste of futility behind, like some other pleasures, although I realize there is nothing remaining but memories and pictures -- nothing tangible has been created. I can go for hours and hours without fatigue. Of course one reason for the pleasantness is that it is all so easy, provided you are of my sex and travel with little baggage and surprisingly cheap".

Antwerp he found "very gay, with a big parade and great Belgian flags of red, yellow, and black, floating everywhere. The twilights here are wonderful, still a light in the Western sky at 10 o'clock, and that Saturday night with the great tower of the cathedral seen in the setting sun from the river, with the flags flying and the bands playing and the brilliant streets thronged with people was one of the great moments of the trip."

At Rotterdam, while walking along the Aude Dijk, / his grey hat blew off into *the* one of the canals, and was rapidly doughty sailing away. "I had given it up for lost, when a *passerby* ran for a rake, and to the encouragement of a crowd of little *boys*, fished it out for me. It dried coming homw in the trolley, and is as good as ever it was, though in spite of Ruth's admiration not much at that."

"In Bruges, *where* I poked about in the rain through the old streets of one storey cottages, where women were sitting at the doorways making lace in the most

primitive fashion, with dozens of little spindles which they
worked with lightning speed. All the old-world life, the milk
carts in the morning, the postman, the policeman, the trolley
conductors, the shops and streets and vistas, the village roofs
and churches and gardens -- this is what interests me, and what,
I am sure, the person who whisks from one grand hotel to another
must miss. And then I have a deep sociological interest, even
though an amateur one: I am constantly trying to gauge the pros-
perity, the living conditions, get some feeling for the classes
and social divisions, and the daily common life of them all, and
I am constantly trying to compare and contrast what I see with
what I know at home. So far I cannot get over the incredibly
bright, animated, brilliant appearance of the cities we have
seen, to which there is nothing comparable in New York. . .
Antwerp and Brussels, with their streets of creamy colored houses
and their miles of small shining shops (shops such as would only
be seen on Fifth Avenue in New York) most brilliantly illuminated
at night, made a great impression on me. Such troops of people,
such absence of heavy traffic, such speed and ease of their trolley-
cars, such politeness -- everything that one thinks of as "charm"
(to which I find myself peculiarly responsive) is here."

The Cologne cathedral was one of the things he had been
most looking forward to visit in Europe. My first sight of it
was disappointing. "It is very fine," he wrote his mother, "but
somehow lacks the grim majesty of those churches of Ghent and
Bruges!" When, however, on the following morning he was able
to enter it, he found "its interior quite indescribably impressive."

52 29

The most wonderful lofty reaches and forest of pillars and arches,
all blending in such harmony and sublimity! It was quite the
most beautiful church we had seen. I find the picture post card
a most ingenious liar, and some of my most piquant moments are
when I see the long-familiar building or square (long familiar
through a post card) as it is, and note how much more homely or
gross or colored or splendid it is than I had conceived it".

Of an expedition on the Rhine he writes to Earl Zigrosser:
"I had heard that the Rhine was disappointing to those who had
seen the Hudson, but the characters are so different that it is
unprofitable to compare them. Certainly the lovely rocky vine-
yard terraces, and the little valleys, and old ruins, and incred-
ible mediaeval villages, and stately towns, all seen under the
most brilliant summer sun with fleecy clouds all over the sky --
this is a Rhine which I had hardly dreamed of, and which is far
more picturesque than any scene on the Hudson. For I am very
partial to architecture, and feel a landscape incomplete without
a cluster of houses. And all the country is so gloriously peopled.
Villages and towns flung in the greatest profusion, each with
its personality and individuality, indeed, almost every house with
its own. And great stately vistas that I delight in, and culti-
vated land, and dignity and style! These things our American scene
lacks, and it is what I came to Europe to see." "Those Americans",
he writes to his mother, "who are disappointed in the Rhine must
be insensible to enchantment."

At Heidelberg he found "the students the most picturesque
featu-re of the place. Dressed in blue coats or Prince Alberts,
with the most outlandish caps of all colors on their heads . . .

R3 30

and their faces all smeared with salve pastes. They salute each other on the streets or take off their hats with a very low flourish, and are sufficiently theatrical and picturesque to satisfy the most romantic. We saw one of their 'Kammers' Sunday morning on the terrace of the castle, where they entertained their lady friends with beer and song. The girls with their mothers or chapersones came in and were introduced with funny little bows and duckings of the head. Then they all sat down at long tables, and were served with flaming flagons of beer, everybody. Then there were speeches, and songs and much drinking in Honor of old Heidelberg. The rabble outside, of which we were two, watched the proceedings with much interest. In the evening I went to the open-air concert of the city orchestra, held in a beautiful garden, with lights. The music was very fine, and the scene most brilliant, with the people promenading ceaselessly about, and the bright blue coats of the army officers and cadets giving color to the scene."

It is sad to read¹ of these old German cities as they were in those days. "Stuttgart is an unexpectedly delightful characteristically German city, with great palaces and gardens, and fine old market-place and castle, with a beautiful courtyard and old, old houses, each storey overlapping the one below it, and crowds of soldiers, with bands playing, and streets of the striking new German architecture, built in large masses and strong fine lines . . ."

Of music in Münich [he writes to Arthur Merloch: "I had seen few Americans except for isolated individuals, until we got to Münich, where parties were being hustled through the

54 31

Pinakothek, you can tell them anywhere. I was sitting in a Platz in Münich when along came the heartiest happiest chubby college freshman, and lo! his watch fob displayed a large enamelled star-spangled Banner. We helped a minister buy some large cherries at a station in Germany and added confusion to the situation of a minister in Cologne who had left his shirt behind and was trying to get it forwarded to him, and we lunched in Mainz with a man from Massachusetts, and an old minister from Pittsburgh who was wondering whether it would hurt his morals to try one glass of German beer before he left the country. Ward and I had to take in a beer garden in Münich and heard a very fine concert. But the beer becomes positively oppressive, it is so ubiquitous and they slop it around so; it is a sight that you want to see but once, the great Hoffbrauhaus at noon with its thousands (literally) of guzzlers and the reeking old stone floors. And a nation that will serve up "Ochsenfleisch" as a course in a fine table d'hôte dinner with a pork chop following, and a heavy soup preceding, and a salad and a currant pie at the end and a liter of beer all the time absolutely surpasses comprehension, yet twice I paid 2.50 m. for such a dinner in Heidelberg and Stuttgart. But the people look very fine, so many fine, clear-headed women of forty to fifty and clean, charming children, and striking modern architecture and cheap railway fares ...

At Münich Randolph parted with his companion, who went on to Grenoble to take a course in French. "At first," he wrote to his brother, "I felt a little timid about starting out alone. But I had no difficulty, except sometimes in finding cheap restaurants, and have found the last week most enjoyable."

55 32

I came down through the Tyrol stopping at Innsbruck and Bozen, in the loveliest of vine-covered valleys with towering mountains and vistas of snow peaks and the great shining rocky Dolomites, and villages perched on the hills. The weather was gorgeous too."

In Milan he found the cathedral "incredibly beautiful, with its myriad of little Gothic spires and richly decorated tower, and noble interior. The whole church is so beautiful as positively to overcome you. Mass was being said in the morning with organ and male choir, very sumptuous, and in the evening I was in a little old stone church at Bellagio, dimly lighted at the side by an electric arc light. The walls were very bare and dingy but the altar very rich and golden with many candles and/kneeling priest was saying mass in a loud nasal voice, with the congregation making responses, until all of a sudden they burst into a wonderful strident chant which rose and fell and wandered, with just the men's voices and then the women's voices, a sound unlike anything I ever heard before. The village people kept coming and going, the girls all with black kerchiefs on their heads, the children making their funny little duckings before the altar, and being suddenly cuffed if they did not dip their hand in the holy water and make the cross properly"

as cited

His pleasure in the Italian lakes is somewhat spoiled by "weather that would disgrace Scotlan" and by the American tourist parties he keeps running into, "whose inane remarks, inappropriate dress, and hazy knowledge of where they are or just where they are going gives me a kind of sick feeling. 'There but for the grace of God!'" And to his mother he comments on these same tourists -- "They are funny . . . and have the general look of a

56 33

herd that feels all right as long as it is together, but would be
wholly lost if separated. How much more fun to plunge ahead alone,
reading your own time tables and street signs and asking for
your rooms, and ordering your own dinner."

He had made arrangements to take a three weeks' vacation
course at the University of Lausanne, where he arrived on August
9th -- the heart of the summer. There he discovered "two charming
girls", American acquaintances, and his studies fell into a
subsidiary place, for it seemed that on almost every other day
an expedition of some sort was planned. He managed to dash off
"a lot of letters" on his travels to the local Bloomfield paper
--- "the only one I could think of to take them" --; and to Simon
Pelham Barr he writes of "a wonderful mountain excursion" he went
with Professor Dickinson Miller. "He read me at intervals along
the way from Matthew Arnold's _Obermann_ Stanzas and _Obermann_ Once
More, written about all the familiar places and mountains that we were
in the heart of. Well, it was thrilling! The glorious scenery and the
poetry and the impressive depth of Miller's voice get fused into a
quite unforgettable picture and feeling."

After completing his course, he went with his two acquaintances
"to Geneva and Chamonix, at the foot of Mt Blanc, where we took the
most amazing walk along a ridge 7500 ft. high, in full view of the
great line of needles that are perfectly formed as Cathedral towers,
which make up the Mount Blanc chain with the great snow-covered domes
of Mt. Blanc at the end. Lunch on the tough mossy grass above the tree
line, with a glacier below us, and the village like a map at our feet,
and huge bare mountains across the valley, and this majestic line

5A 34

of snow-dusted peaks rising above us . . . And the next day we walked down from Chamonix to the Rhone valley, through a lovely road that ran high above one of the most enchanting valleys in Switzerland, through villages of weather-black chalets and quaint market-places. It was so wonderful that I fear it has discontented me for any other life, and made study a fearful bore."

Chapter IV

ENGLAND

To the student of human nature, the avowed analyst, the ardent
and perceptive young American balancing every ounce of experience
for all that it could give back in illumination, there could hardly
have been a more instructive initiation into English social life than
the one that was in store for Randolph Bourne. He had reviewed a book
called _The Desire for Qualities_ by S.M. Bligh for _The Journal of
Philosophy_, and this had led to a voluminous correspondence with the
author, who, on hearing that he was soon to set sail for Europe, had
invited him for a fortnight's visit in his country home in Wales.
The anticipation of this visit had enlivened Randolph's spirits and
had emboldened him to hope for some lucky introductions into English
literary and artistic circles. What he had been little prepared for
was the country house life "with visitors and much riding and fishing
and banter and the informal daring English manners and help yourself
breakfasts, and lunches, and dogs, and people who are like you, but
just aren't . . ." into which he was at once plunged on his arrival.
The whole absorbing story, as it later developed, is unfolded in a
letter to his mother written from Ricksmansworth, Herts., where he
had gone to stay with an American friend "to recover the life of irony".

"I reached Cilnery about 5, having been going about 32 hours.
Mr. Bligh met me in a funny old trap, drawn by two horses. He had
with him a Welsh girl of the neighborhood, very charming, with a
mass of red hair . . . He himself is large, with a brown beard and
funny little spectacles; he wears atrociously shabby clothes and
talks all the time. He reminded me of . . . all the dominating
people who have put it over me in the past. In other words,
instead of the shy, sympathetic student that I had pictured him

36

from his letters and books, the congenial and understanding soul
whose interests and ideals matched mine, I found a masterful English
country gentleman, tremendously interested in making money, despising
anybody who couldn't make money and surrounded by a circle of very
successful and sophisticated people, as unlike anybody I knew or
can handle as anything in the world. Well, you can imagine the result.
I put myself in wrong from the start. The funny thing was
they didn't abash me at all. I talked at them all with rather more
fluency and lucidity than usual. The first night after dinner we
got on war; I went after militarism hardly realizing that Mrs. B.
was the daughter of a general and all the guests were believers in
England's military and naval power. We had a great argument; they
didn't get mad. English people never get ruffled in the slightest
way, but I was exposed to their minds as some kind of foreign lunatic
whom it was hardly profitable to bother with . . . After Sunday
morning he completely lost interest in me, and a great art critic
from London arriving, but who seemed to me an insufferable snob
and filled with the most amazing platitudes; I was left to read
or write or walk. The other people were civil, but made no attempt
to get me in. I didn't mind particularly, for when I did get a
hearing, for some reason, I talked, as it seemed to me, rather
well. But it was all a different language; they couldn't or wouldn't
understand. I had two very delightful walks with the red-haired
girl Hilda. . . I got all sorts of sympathy from her and understanding, so that I did not feel lonely. The climax came Tuesday
when Mrs. B. said she hoped I would not think her inhospitable, but
her parents were coming down suddenly and would my visit terminate
on Thursday? . . . I told him later that I was sorry I had to leave

37

so soon, and all he said was that his wife had just told him.

I can't make out whether they did need the room, and the barbarian,
who had no claims and no rights and no feelings, was the one to
be thrown overboard, or whether I was such a case that I had to be
packed off as soon as
possible. Anyway it was all most amazing.

I felt horribly chagrined, but I could not see how I had not be-
haved with dignity and all the good manners I possess, and so I
soon recovered, after a talk with Hilda who apologized for the
English nation, and gave me a beautiful psychological sketch of
her own class -- the country gentleman. The whole experience
was most educational; the talk around the table was brilliant,
and I got an insight into the English mind that was quite unsur-
passed. Mr. B. gave me a lot of good advice about becoming strong
and decided and definite and rich like himself, and my general
childishness did show up in striking contrast to him. He made
it quite plain that I could expect nothing from his London set
(and they must be monstrously successful and clever and as it
seems to me, quite futile) and told me all about London society
and his whole life, revealing a wholly new world to me. Withal
it was a great experience. . ."

Randolph was to revert often and at length to this experience.
It influenced his judgment of the English character. If his sur-
prise at discovering a large, worldly country gentleman in place
of the shy, retiring philosopher he had been all the time pic-
turing, was sharp, what must the surprise of his host -- or even
more, his host's wife, this daughter of a General -- have been
on ushering into their home this odd figure with his humped back,
his social simplicities, and his revolutionary views? It showed

a host rare generosity hospitality to have invited a stranger --
and an American at that -- for a whole fortnight into your inti-
mate circle on the mere gratification of seeing your name lauded
in a review, but have we not been led to suppose that an English-
man honours his engagements, holds on, at whatever the cost, to
the bitter end? It was a situation that would have been relished
by Henry James.

What Randolph Bourne found so baffling, and so entirely
alien in the Englishman, was his habit of divorcing his intellect
from the deeper layers of his nature. That his judgement was
not free of bias need hardly be stressed. America's greatest
epic -- her one supreme adventure as a nation -- had been her
resistance to the political and economic domination of Great
Britain. The values Randolph Bourne attacked in England -- spi-
ritual complacency and Anglo-Saxon snobbery -- were the same that
he had been consistently rebelling against in his own country.
For Americans, it is difficult to realize to what an extent social
snobbishness and respect for the individual have always gone side
by side in England. When Benjamin Constant visited England in
the early nineteenth century he was amazed by the rigidity of the
class-system and equally amazed by the extent to which the liberty
of the individual was safeguarded, more, he felt, than in any
other country in the world. This anomaly has been many times
remarked by foreigners. To-day the caste system is in a state
of dissolution and the liberty of the individual in a state of
jeopardy, though this is only a reflection of what is taking place
the world over.

39

At the time Randolph Bourne visited England the old inequalities were still flaunting themselves -- the rich in no country more arrogant and protected, nor the poor more exploited and oppressed, and to a sensitive young American, bent on uncovering shams, and fired with an exalted purpose, it was this view of things that remained uppermost. That one so far from being "insensible to enchantment" failed to do justice to the beauties of the English countryside, and to old towns like Bath and Norwich, is due to the fact that he had so little opportunity of exploring in other than those counties where cities had been steadily encroaching.

The following extracts from his letters reflect his impressions during his three months' stay in London in the autumn and early winter of 1913.

[To Mrs. Bourne] I am now completely settled at Mrs. Schwarz in Gordon Place recommended by Cushing of Columbia . . . I have a big room looking out on a garden with trees; there is a big double window reaching down to the floor, and a big double bed. Mrs. Schwarz, being from the continent, gives us a much better and abundant fare than do the frugal English . . . Sunday I had a bus ride of 15 miles out through Kew, Richmond, and Twickenham to Hampton Court Palace, which had just been reopened, on account of a lull in the suffragette storm which had caused most of the palaces to be closed to the public. The old villages are built up almost solid, and old England is rarely in evidence, though there are some beautiful public parks and commons still kept, with noble beach trees, and birches, and graceful feathery trees which make the scene quite different from our woods at home. Hampton has the loveliest gardens and lawns, bright with flowers of all kinds, and quantities of roses though

40

it was the last of September. And thousands of people strolled over the lawns and through the walks and down the great avenue of beech trees, making it look like a great house party. And in the Thames there were many boats and the banks covered with people, so that it seemed all England must be out making holiday . . . London is a city of contrasts -- noble streets and mansions and parks juxtaposed to the dingiest and most unattractive little streets in the world. Most of the main streets leading to the city (the financial center) are narrow, so that the traffic is enormous and enormously congested, and travel is slow unless you take the underground which is at a tremendous distance below the ground (with elevators at each station) and besides is so fearfully and wonderfully made that you need a map all the time to get around.

"I have been pleasantly occupied this week visiting people to whom I have cards of introduction, but I found them so stiff and insular, not at all interested on the broad outlook on the world and the curiosity about it and the readiness to discuss any aspect of it, that I and my New York friends are accustomed to. These people, although intellectual and several of them distinguished, are quite provincial in their views, never seem to have let their thoughts stray off their little island except to fear Germany's going to eat 'em up, and are narrow in their sympathies and quite without imagination . . . Mr. Horwill, the London correspondent of the *Evening Post*, was very nice, but he had lived in New York for several years and had broadened out a little. He had me down to tea last Saturday, and took me over the beautiful botanical garden of Kew . . . Sunday I called on the Webbs who are very great people, Fabian

socialists . . . Their positiveness and masterful qualities of leadership make them unpopular outside their circle of radical writers and politicians, but they seem to enjoy this unpopularity, and are very influential just the same . . . Mr. Webb talked very informingly and pleasantly to me, Mrs. W. went to sleep. Tuesday I went to lunch at the Alison Phillips. He is one of the editors of the London Times, but quite too conservative for me. His wife and her sisters were very charming and I would like to see more of them . . . Thursday night I did a stupid thing, which almost queered me with a rather interesting friend Professor Montagu had given me a letter to. This Mr. Kemp wrote me an amusing note saying he would call on me and take me out to dinner. I, who had been calling on so many people all the week, stupidly read it "call on him", so we both went at the appointed hour and sat in each other's halls, waiting vainly for each other. He wrote me a clever note the next day in which he expressed doubt of my existence and dark suspicions of the Hand of the Evil One in it all, and turned up at noon and took me to a very famous inn, a favourite of Dr. Samuel Johnson's, the Cheshire Cheese, where we had a pigeon pie and beer and Cheshire cheese. Here I met Walter Lippman, a young writer whom I saw in New York last spring . . . We walked along the Embankment down to Chelsea, where we saw Carlyle's house, and had tea at a quaint tea room along the river. He offered to take me to a literary club that meets every Thursday night.

"Today I have been through the Parliament buildings, with the House of Commons and Lords and galleries, all very fine, but not particularly imposing. Everyone remarks on the small size of the

42

House of Commons; it is a tiny rooms compared with the great halls
of Washington."

To [C. L. Greener]: . . . I am now in the least pleasant land of
my travels . . . Conditions of living seem awfully primitive; the
nation eats in the most meagre fashion -- as if it were on the verge
of starvation; the houses, though dignified outside, betray inside
all the evidences of mid-Victorian commercial greed and jerry-building;
and the people are quite as insular and foreign as if they spoke
an unintelligible language . . . . London is nice to look at, with
its black palaces and churches and lovely parks . . . The finest
things are the 18th century churches, with their slender and deli-
cately tall white towers, and their classically elegant exteriors.
And they stand in the center of open spaces -- some of them -- so
that the whole perfection of their outline can be seen. . . West-
minster Abbey I knew I should not like, no imagination can make it
anything but a rather mediocre Gothic church, and the plaster statues
of the great men give me the chills. I would much rather go home
and read a living book by one of the poets than see the Poet's Corner.
That region, however, is full of noble vistas -- the Parliament
Houses, Westminster Bridge, Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, with Buck-
ingham Palace not far away -- that are as fine as anything I saw in
Europe. But the suburbs are quite awful -- neat enough but offen-
sively dull, with their little brick houses and shops -- and per-
fectly endless so that the old villages like Richmond and Kew and
Twickenham are completely swamped . . . I have done some walking
around the country through the footpaths -- which are amazingly public

43

in this land of property -- and through the beech-woods, but the
landscape is very tame and flat and monotonous, few gardens, many
sheep, but in general a land of cities with poorly productive
fields between them . . . . I felt on the Continent how much life
was enriched by a natural sensitiveness to art as evidenced in
the charming villages and the carefully laid-out towns, and even
the modern architecture, and how the complete lack of it here in
England brutalizes the people. So if you can do anything towards
spreading that sensitiveness at home you have a work before you
as important of the best social reformer. Any improvement in
taste means a rise in the standard of living, and this rise is
<u>the</u> fulcrum, I am convinced, in the social advance. I am immensely
interested in civic art, town planning and kindred movements over
here, and shall use all my opportunities to study them. Architec-
ture, with communal art, landscape gardening, etc., I am ready
to believe is the King of arts, because of its completely social
nature. . . . I find myself dropping into a pretty good imitation
of my New York life -- reading at the British Museum, hearing
lectures and speeches where I can, calling on people and reading
at home, and there is always an interesting walk to be had through
old London streets in the soft sunshine. The twilights are indes-
cribably lovely, with a soft bluish mist and brilliant, slowly
fading western sky. The city has a general charm, but the people
lack the charm of the continent, and the institutions are very
repellent to me . . . . the average intellectual Liberal seems
to be a very complacent sort of person, quite convinced that
England is getting along all right, very impatient with theorists
and extremists of all sorts, busy and happy and uncritical just

like our American friends. I will say, however, that they have
here much better intellectual machines, can turn their minds to
almost any subject and write clearly and pertinently, if somewhat
superficially, about it. This fluency and articulateness I admire,
and I feel we lack it almost entirely in America. The middle-class
Socialists are many of them hard-headed people, thoroughly sat-
urated with economics and history, and used to addressing working-
class audiences without a trace of that patronage one might expect.
These radicals are much superior to our rather childish people,
who talk with a bravado as if they were doing the most desperate
thing in the world in being Socialists at all. These people over
here take the thing much more naturally and coolly, and have much
more of a standing. The Socialist speaking and writing seems to
me on a much higher plane than at home, much more direct and defi-
nite and intellectual. At the same time it is thoroughly seasoned
with revolt. Socialism is a word you seldom hear. . . . You
don't know what a relief it is to have all the scandal and mud-
throwing and disaster sifted out coming across the sea, for the
English papers print only the most important political news and
nothing else. Here the press is in a conspiracy to make England
appear a Paradise, where no misery, poverty or corruption ever
enters in, so one's nerves are not kept raw by reading the papers
as they are at home. . . .

I had an interview with Havelock Ellis the other day, but
it wasn't very satisfactory, because these Englishmen don't know
how to flow genially, and you have to conduct a cross-examination
as if you were a newspaper reporter. . . He is a very fine tall

45

figure with bushy grey hair, and a fine white beard; looks very much like Bernard Shaw, but much more retiring and gentle ...

[To P.W.] "England, whihh I hated at first, is growing on me, though I shall never like it as I do my dear Switzerland. . . The militant suffrage movement is tremendously thrilling! It is a sort of guerilla revolution against the Liberal government, and the passion and enthusiasm that are excited in hosts of women quite outdoes anything that I have seen before. . . These heroic women are real martyrs, for the government treats them with great violence and at the same time refuses to prosecute the Ulster people who are threatening to resist the Home Rule Bill. The militant suffrage movement is the only live thing I can discover in England, and it makes the blood run faster to see what conventions and even laws these finely bred women will shatter to bits in a concerted campaign to make suffrage the livest issue in England. You can hardly go to church without having a woman make a speech in the most solemn part of the proceedings, or, if it is an episcopal church, chant a prayer for the women in prison. You can imagine the horror of the audience at such a breach of propriety and the real courage that it takes a woman to defy this sentiment. ... It is a liberal education to watch them."

[To me.] "London has a soft and gracious charm and there are so many people to see, and things to visit and books to read that I do not do any steady work which will amount up to anything. . . One thing London has done for me -- immensely strengthened my radicalism. The old institutions, though they may have a glamor from afar, are so cruel and unlovely on closer acquaintance that I am no longer assailed by doubts that did strike me occasionally

46

established
at home, whether I am not assailing the best possible/order of
things . . .

"I realized with a start the other day that in all my literary
Pantheon there was not a single English writer, except perhaps
Hazlitt, because of his artistic sensitiveness and superb psycho-
logy and undeviating radicalism . . . and Lamb for his irony and
exquisite charm. Of all the rest of the English classical canon,
I don't think, outside of some poems by Keats and Browning, that
I ever read a page with real pleasure. Of course there are many
smaller writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century that
I delight in, but they never got into the official canon as
taught by those pernicious priests of bad morality and bad psy-
chology, the professors of English literature in colleges. . .
Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, William James, Henry James, Royce, San-
tayana have delighted me infinitely more than all my official
reading . . . The first six express the American genius and those
ideals of adventurous democracy that we are beginning to lose
. . . Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, W. James could only have been
written here; and Henry James, too, though it sounds surprising
to say so, was perhaps the most thoroughly American with that
wonderful sensitiveness to the spiritual differences between our-
selves and the older world, and the subtle misunderstandings
that follow our contact with it. I have read him in London with
the keenest glow and appreciation, feeling constantly how im-
possible it would have been for any English person to have seen
or felt the things he pictures so delicately and truthfully.
To be sure, where the English writer usually caricatures the
American, he always makes the Englishman too charming; but then

his Americans are apt to be too charming too, so I suppose the
proportion is kept right."

[To A.M., written from Paris.] "I learned so much in England that I should love to write a book about the English temperament and character, treating them in the purely impersonal and sociological way that one would discuss the customs and beliefs of the Melanesians. For the whole country does impress me as so entirely alien to my own -- as I flatter myself -- rather Gallic temperament, that I should love to present it as a peculiar, isolated, eccentric socio-psychological phenomenon, working by its own variations and laws, which are different from the bulk of human nature; in fact as a sort of evolutionary sport. For a country like our own which makes a fetish of English law, 'Anglo-Saxon Institootians', the English literature (which more and more impresses itself upon me as exceedingly weird psychologically speaking) and which has a strong admiration for what is called English culture, this point of view regarding England would be exceedingly novel, wouldn't it? My view would be quite scientific and impersonal for, as a matter of fact, I was well treated in England, barring my first experience with Bligh. I saw everybody I wanted to, found them agreeable and willing to talk to me, and in one or two cases, almost oppressively anxious to show me things that I wasn't really interested in. I followed my usual precarious but highly interesting practice of flying round picking up samples of every kind of sociological phenomena I heard of, -- socially four days in a country house; suppers and teas with a lower middle-class family in Clapton; a week at Oxford with a middle-class family, Tory and High-Anglican; lunch with a Tory leader writer for The

Times, lunches with the Bohemians of _the New Statesman_; an evening
with H.G. Wells with polished radicals; evening with a club of
journalists at an old tavern, supper at home of Oxford classical
professor -- a supreme type: Lunch in the Temple with Jewish bar-
risters discussing Isaacs and Zúonism; tea with the Webbs in the
temple of Fabianism; evening with a psychologically inclined surgeon
in Harley Street; to mention a few random samples . . . And politi-
cal meetings -- suffrage meetings Mrs. Despard and Annie Kenney
(brought in on 2 stretchers); Ben Tillett and Lansbury at suffrage-
socialist meetings at Shoreditch; Winston Churchill at great
Liberal demonstration, interrupted constantly by male suffragettes,
who were thrown out with the greatest violence; great Darkin meet-
ings at Albert Hall, during which raid was made by medical students,
and repulsed by the audience with the wildest excitement I have
ever witnessed. Add to this a few theatres and concerts, church
at the big places, reading at the British Museum, walks around
London seeing the sights, teas and talks with half a dozen more
obscure friends and humble friends, and a little writing, and you
have a summary of my London life . . . The weather was delightful,
belying all predictions; very little rain, and only three fogs,
none of them of the notorious impenetrable kind. Except for the
discomforts of a boarding house which ran steadily down hill
while I was there, and yet was superior to about a dozen I looked
at, and had several delightful people coming and going, I could
not have asked for a busier and more interesting time,"

In one pregnant paragraph Randolph Bourne sums up his
final impression of the English nation: "Paris is a great

49

feel
spiritual relief after London, in whose atmosphere I began to/suf-
focated. The impersonality, the deeply ingrained caste-system,
the incorrigible moral optimism, the unproductive intellectualism,
the lack of emotion or sensuousness the barbarity of the outer
aspects of English living, the insensitiveness to art, the in-
sularity to ideas -- all exasperated my feelings . . . The irony
and vivacity of the French temperament delight me, their total
absence in England made it seem the most alien of countries I
had seen."

"For the insistent fact remains", he was later to write, "that
England, in spite of her incomparable industrial wealth, the in-
personal
telligence and/idealism of her directing classes, her free govern-
ment and humanitarian religion, has failed to secure for more
than a minority of her people anything more than a filthy carica-
ture of human life. Up through the beauty of park and palace
rises the stench of proletarian poverty."

It is interesting to speculate what Randolph Bourne would
make of the England of to-day could he return to visit it,
where the lady of the manor is, with her own "lily-white" hands,
scouring out her own greasy pots in the scullery of her ex-butler's
abandoned cottage, and the great historic mansions are being
rapidly turned into public institutions, or gravitating towards the
rapacious mallet of the bawling auctioneer; and where those
elusive charms that caused Henry James his famous "serrements de
coeur", inseparable from a corrupt society, are, like the last
pale primrose tints that precede the setting of the sun, being
gradually swallowed up in darkness.

Chapter V

Paris

"Though I had an exciting and enjoyable time in England", Randolph writes to Dorothy Teall, "I feel really happy in France". His former travelling companion met him at the station on a damp, cheerless night "for which I was very grateful", [he writes to A.M.] "I found him completely Gallicized, lodged in a charming room, with a vivacious pension lady, talking French. My overtures were severely frowned down upon by him; he did not want any English-speaking person around the place, corrupting his French. So I am very comfortably fixed in a hotel near the Sorbonne, and take my meals at restaurants . . . I am exchanging conversation with a couple of French students who come every day . . . I have been writing and reading a good deal since I have been here, and also given myself a debauch of the wonderfully cheap opera."

Randolph's admiration for French civilization, "its intellec-
ual power, its amenity of life, and its capacity for new ideas and
social change", is the dominant note in most of the letters he
writes home at this time. "The University (the Sorbonne) is inspir-
ing . . . the crowds of eager people waiting at the doors and rush-
ing in for seats half an hour before the lecture begins; the con-
course of students of all nationalities, men and women, wonderful
types, in the courts and corridors; the distinction and elegant
diction of the Professors; the tremendous list of courses and the
strong psychological and sociological bias of the thinking. Paris
must be the greatest university in the world . . . And the treasures
of libraries and special schools and *musees* are colossal; the con-

51

trast with London is almost unbelievable . . . For here in this in-
comparable university free to everyone . . ."

His criticism of the English, which he had been exercising
in so sprightly a vein, now turns ruefully upon his own countrymen.
"I meet Americans", [he writes to A.M.] "mostly the art colony people
and the idle people who come to Paris for the winter, and they make
me almost blue with their mediocrity. I sometimes shudder for my
country, that sends such brainless people around the world. They
exhibit a fatuous incapacity for ideas, a lack of personal response
to what Paris has to offer (except what is starred in the guide book)
an intellectual childishness, which, I must say, I have been spared
from seeing at home. They attend lectures at the American Club
on "How to see Europe Intelligently", and come away stuffed with
indigestible historical facts and artists' biographies which re-
presents to them an immersion in the culture of the Old World. They
are exactly the sort of Americans you read about in English satires
-- a sort that I was always patriotic to believe never really ex-
isted. It wouldn't be so bad if they were little humble people,
but as far as I can judge, they are the cream of the Montparnasse
quarter which swarms with them as the east side of New York does
with Jews . . . I am perhaps unduly pessimistic about my country-
men from just having heard a lecture by an M.A. of the University
of Pennsylvania. He is giving a course in American literature
under the auspices of a society for the propagation of languages
to France, and he is listened to by a large number of students of
all countries, who are trying to learn English. His subject was
Benjamin Franklin, and his treatment was almost exactly what one
would present to a class in the fifth grade -- childish, incoherent,

flippant, utterly without point or intellectual grasp. Even making excuses of the condescension which an M.A. from the U. of P. must naturally feel in addressing an audience of Russian, Polish, and French candidates for degrees at the Sorbonne, how was one to explain such phrases as 'The more educated, better classes', 'His paper made a hit', 'Franklin was the kind of man who knew how to sell you a thing', 'He used no literary language, but in spite of that, became a very prominent speaker', 'He did not dress too much; not like Rousseau, who went with one pants red, and the other pants green', 'He took part in many prominent positions', 'was representative for quite a few years'. Do you get the purity and precision of the style, the dignity with which our American literature and the quality of the American mind are being presented to audiences in Paris? If I had not had my note book -- and even then I could not keep pace with him → I should have burned up with humiliation. Fortunately he spoke very indistinctly, and the audience, in spite of its rapt attention, must have lost much of it, and perhaps wouldn't have felt the sticky triteness and banality that I did.

Hearing Professor Legouis the next night, who was exchange Professor at Harvard last year, lecture on his impressions, which were most unfavourable -- I was gååd it was not Columbia -- made me feel anew, or rather for the first time, because I did not feel the superiority of the English intellect -- how much we have to learn from the usually minimized Frenchmen who think and feel in incomparable unity of expression, envisage everything as philosophers and artists, and do not slice their souls up as we Anglo-Saxons do. Legouis found the Harvard professors laborious and detailed, but deficient in imaginative grasp and personal assimilation and

53

interpretation; too much of the Teuton and not enough of the Latin.

He greatly admired the social life of Harvard, the clubs and sports
-- a rather doubtful compliment when he emphasized at the same time
the very uneven intellectual preparation of the students.

"So you see that this past week, my American intellectual
patriotism, which had reached a high pitch after my observation
of the University of London and Oxford has had a dreadful slump . . ."

Randolph returns many times to this subject of his country--
and his are
men, / comments / not without bearing on his later thought and
writing. "Your mention of Mr. . . . . impresses me anew with our
horrible American inarticulateness", [he writes to me]. "The con-
nection between the thought or the feeling and the expression seems
so tenuous with us, while here in France I am convinced it is as
true as an electric current. They are so much more intellectually
honest than the Anglo-Saxon -- if the Anglo-Saxon's dishonesty
is not really an 'expressional paralysis'. If you contradict an
American, or state your opinion boldly, you either wound him, or you
make him sullenly angry with you. If you contradict an Englishman,
he will be rather amused the first time at your vagaries; but if
you repeat the attitude, he will soon cease to pay any attention
to you. And if you challenge the opinion of the Anglo-Saxon, he
has the hardest work rallying his intellectual defences, and hates
you for putting him to the trouble of doing so. Here in France
I seem to find it all so different. You can state your opinion
with the utmost frankness, and if your friend does not agree, he
will contradict you passionately with a dozen 'non, non, nons', and
he will, moreover, continue to battle with inexhaustible ardor till

54

some compromise is reached. He can rally his reasons and rather enjoys being challenged than left tenderly in possession, as I find myself always leaving Americans. My American friends soon weary of an argument, or insist on making it a personal matter, with slightly ruffled feelings on both sides. The Frenchman's amour-propre somehow does not seem to be situated in his head; his soul is more robust than ours . . ."

"I am apt to be a little harsh with my country now after this little contact with the lucid, direct, incomparably understanding French", [he writes to P.W.J., "and feel her spiritual and intellectual vices now more keenly than I did when I was at home. Certainly, sentimentality, which is only a disinclination to look truth in the face, is the chief of them; and springing out of that is our horrible inarticulateness of expression, for obviously, if we can't see things as they are, we can't express ourselves clearly and accurately. With the French there seems to be the directest communication between the inner thought and the feeling, and the outer expression in speech, gesture, writing, art; the result is their matchless sincerity. With the Anglo-Saxon that chain seems broken; our inner life makes its connection with action of some kind, and not with direct expression, which is extremely difficult for most of us. When we try to express directly what we think or feel, we are apt to be either cheap or insincere."

still "The Americans are/a great trial", [he continues to me]. "They unanimously denounce the French temperament and all its ways, and none of them seems to see the intellectual and literary side that I admire so much. They are all concerned with the horrible

immorality, and the contrast and beauty of the American home. I
can never discover why they all so unanimously leave the American
home and come over here to expose themselves to the dangers,
or why so many of them live permanently among a people whose faith-
lessness they abhor, whose political corruption they shudder at,
whose abused femininity they shudder over, whose inefficiency en-
rages them, and whose literature they would sooner think of burn-
ing than reading. They occupy a position something like the Christ-
ians in the Roman Empire, in the world, but not of the world, I
suppose. And their outraged morality glows to so white a heat
that I seem like a perfect cynic when I make any attempt to really
appreciate or understand what I see around me . . . I wish there
was to be some forum from which I could preach some disagreeable
truths to my countrymen. I am almost beginning to feel like a man
without a country . . . A charming young American artist has just
come in and cheered me up by agreeing with me on almost every
point I have mentioned above . . ."

"All this month it has been delightful and springlike", [he
writes to C.Z.] "Simply calling for strolls and sight seeing. . .
The French mind is very congenial to me, but I do not quite 'get'
the personality. As others have told me there is always something
withheld, a reserve which is combined, however, with a frankness
of speech and interest of manner. It is very curious, the touch
of inscrutability, it is the immortal Latin touch of the Joconde
in contact with the Anglo-Saxon.

"I have met a number of young Professors, highly cultivated
and delightful, and as most of the University people seem to speak
English, we get along very well, though I try to talk as much

French as possible. The Professor of English, who has recently returned from Harvard and Columbia, fixed up a soirée for me at a society of French students of English. I held forth from the Tribunal of one of the Amphitheatres at the Sorbonne on the ideals of American and French youth, and then in reply to questions, sailed off into expositions of the philosophy of James and the poetry of Whitman. Of course I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

"I don't know whether I told you about the philosophic Brahmin I went around with here last month. Educated at Edinburgh, he spoke perfect English and knew Western philosophy much better than I did. I expounded American philosophy, and we became very enthusiastic about the similarity of Eastern and Western ideas. When he left for India I presented him with a copy of Whitman to read on his way, so that he could see the rapprochement of thought of the very oldest Eastern country and the newest Western.

"I have been so interested in reading the newest schools of French literature -- some of them showing and acknowledging the strongest influence of Whitman, by the way -- that I have neglected sociology, but lately a very serious and finely spirited English woman has taken me in hand, and we are seeing model tenements and similar social institutions. I must say I like the English abroad infinitely better than the Americans, who are a silly lot. Instead of staying at home and appreciating their own genius, they rush over here, sit at the feet of Old Masters, attend lectures at the Bureau of University Travel by awful illiterates, and expect culture to rub off them somehow. The French conserve their genius, listen to nothing but French music, fill their galleries with French pictures, erect the most charming statues to

every artist and writer of any genius at all, and consequently have
a rich and delightful culture which saturates the nation. We have,
I am sure, at least one genius in every form of art -- excepting
Rodin -- who is as good as any French genius living, but where
are our statues and our praise? Our uninspired millionaires are
paying millions for some Italian painting of the 15th century, or
presenting priceless sets of armor to some museum. It is enough
to make angels weep."

"The impression is general over here", he writes to Edward
Murphy, "that Americans regard Europe as a huge museum, the inhab-
itants being very much more interested in the busy modern life
around them than in the mediaeval relics of the country naturally
resent that attitude . . . And one of the chief delights of this
modern European life is that it is going on in the old cities with
the timeless charm of their old architecture, and in the disciplined
and composed countryside, which goes on invariably producing as it
has for so many centuries. Neither in America or in England does
one get either of these charms; there the process is to destroy
or alter the old art, vulagrize the cities, and devastate the country,
while clinging stupidly to archaic, religious, political, etc.
On the Continent the tendency is the reverse -- to conserve the
old style in building and civic art, and to make radical revolutions
in ideas and social institutions . . . The good things in the Amer-
ican temperament and institutions are not English I discover, but
are the fruit of our far superior cosmopolitanism which makes one
more au courant with the world in New York than in the most en-
lightened circles in London. Paris, of course, is the capital

of the world; its cosmopolitanism, however, is too bewilderingly
various to grasp. One is sad to think how much one misses through
one's puny powers of assimilation."

He pays a visit to Jules Romains, then a passionate exponent
of Unanisme -- "a sort of Gallicized Whitman" -- and writes an
article on his poems "though I doubt very much whether it will suit;
it must strike the normal American as very bizarre, for he is not
used to feeling the social reverberations and the intoxications of
camaraderie."

Randolph had intended to leave Paris the second week in March
and spend the spring in Italy, but he lingered on for another month
following up new acquaintances, going to meetings, attending a
socialist school, "unearthing many interesting Frenchmen", and soak-
ing himself in the literature of the country.

"I tried to get into a socialist meeting last night", [he writes
to A?M.] "at which Anatole France, Jaurès, and Guesde were scheduled
to speak, but as half Paris was trying to get there too, I had to
give up. The crowd, however, was interesting and educational as
would have been the speakers. The French workingman is a picturesque
and rather distinguished looking person in his corduroy suit, and
he talks with an unquenchable vivacity which makes me envy the in-
tellectual verve that it seems there must be behind it . . .

"It is a very delightful experience to read French history,
quite the most instructive history in the world, with all the Parisian
spots and the types of people and the methods of expression daily
unrolling before your eyes. It all takes on an entirely different
color. The constant marvel to me is that after so many cataclysms
there should be anything left. The Tuilleries is gone, and you

5-9

do not expect to find your Bastille, but the Hotel de Ville was
rebuilt practically after the original design, and, with few ex-
ceptions, all the rest of your Paris is intact, after innumerable
revolutions and two sieges. The old Paris is going very fast, but
you can construct it almost from the 13th century, from the little
old churches and old houses and crooked streets and mouldering
hotels. But they are letting the sunlight through very fast, and
putting up in their place vulgar white apartment houses as banal
and 'New Yorkais' as you could wish. Modern architecture seems
to be going to the dogs everywhere, though there are some good
things in Germany. The Parisians are certainly working hard to
destroy their city. It will be a long time, however, before the
lovely silver-grey streets of about Louis-Philippe's time will
have disappeared; and as for the very old quarters, far better the
vulgarest apartments than the incredible rookeries which are dis-
appearing. I should say that there is much more building going on
here than in New York. I expected to find stable, dignified cities
in Europe, and I find Europe almost impossible with building and
relaying streets, and making two new subways and changing the
trolley system. One wonders if the city hasn't got the barricade
habit, or whether the story of the street barricades is not a myth
invented to explain this passion for tearing everything up . . . "

In these extracts from letters some idea may be had of Ran-
dolph Bourne's myriad contacts and interests, the ardor with which
he followed up every clue that might help him to push wider open
the doors of knowledge and understanding. During all his European
travels, what most engaged him was the fervour of the young --and

Perhaps Randolph Bourne's most lasting impression of France
may be summed up in a paragraph from an essay of his on *Maurice
Barres and the Youth of France*. (1) "In this wondrous city of
Paris, where art is the occasion for continual intellectual warfare,
and ideas cause *debacles*, one cannot read the journals or see
the plays, or even walk the streets, yellow with their flood of
books, without seeming to touch everywhere the soul of France . . .
there is a language here that conserves all these attitudes and
nuances of feeling, and may still, unlike our modern English,
express both simplicity and ardor with perfect freedom from
banality.

1. *Atlantic Monthly*, September 1914.

Chapter VI

Farewell to Europe

Randolph Bourne left Paris on the last day of April 1914.
"It was very hard to leave Paris", he writes to C.Z., "and I dal-
lied along making so many farewells to my friends as to weary them
a little and make them taunt me about my cowardice in setting out
from the warm milieu I had formed there out into the cold world
. . . . I really haven't the sightseer's instinct, for I much prefer
to go sauntering about the streets, looking at all sorts of charm-
ing and obscure scenes, than to dash madly about from one celebrated
monument to another, and I enjoy poking about a hidden little vil-
lage often as much as some busy city square. One of the tragedies
of travelling is that one can't spend, without infinite trouble
and cost, more time in the countryside -- as lovely in Italy as
anywhere in the world, I suppose -- but must forever have cities
and more cities, with the countryside as something to be whisked
longingly through on the way to a new city."

"My journey down from Paris was as strikingly picturesque as
anything could well be imagined. First a long day's journey to
Toulouse through rolling country of silver rivers and grey towns
and ruined castles making pictures that vied with Maxfield Parish.
Towards the end of the day a most romantically foreign, Spanish-
looking country with low houses and brown corrugated roofs and
curious open barns. Then Toulouse, a city with a character all its
own -- fine old Renaissance palaces and Romanesque churches with
fine arcaded towers. Then through a delicious vineyard country to
Carcassonne, the famous and theatrical mediaeval walled town on the a
hill.

63

The imagination could not ask anything more satisfying than these
mighty towers and splendid ramparts, grey and worn, yet perfectly
sullen and intact, and without that hideous paste-board look that
so many churches and walls in France have where Biollet-le-Duc put
yet
his healing but destroying hand...

"Next Nimes, all of white-gray stone with red roofs and yellow-
ish façades, quite modern, yet as charming a town as you could
wish, with its quiet provincial life and French mellowness and
culture. A Roman arena and the exquisite Roman temple called Maison
Carrière, both just sufficiently ruined, and yet with a curious vir-
gin-like innocence and freshness in their lovely lines and propor-
tions. My early morning tour of Nimes and its terraced environs
with their olives and vineyards under the deepest of blue skies
represents the high-water mark of my tour, for charm, and satis-
faction with life. Daudet's Beaucaire and Tarascon, whitish-gray
and dusty, with their castles, looked very charming, but I went
on to Avignon, where everybody goes, and which really is not worth
the trouble. The Popes were satisfied with a blank, bare, mounting
fortress for a palace, but my exacting eye looked in vain for
anything picturesque. The rest of the town was either evilly
squalid or blaringly commercial, and the restored town walls un-
usually shiny and artificial.

"Marseilles is a very crowded and dusty hole, with a most pic9
turesque oriental-looking port, and fierce Moors and Arabs coming
suddenly out at you from side streets. A troup to the island gave
me a view of the bay really grandiose bay, with the long line of

64

white bare cliffs running out on one side, and the huge Riviera
mountains stretching away on the other, and an unbelievable and al-
most chromo-like blue sea. Then all along the Riviera to Monaco.
Everything quite as painted, the colors exageratedly red and blue,
palms and roses and firs and olives in abundance, one succession
of delicious sea and mountain views. In the perfect sunlight,
everything had a cleanness and intensity of outline that I have seen
nowhere else. Baedaker added a touch of HUMOR unconscious humor
by saying at the point where the train leaves Antibes and comes
suddenly out on the bay of Nice to one of the really greatest views
in the world: "The country now becomes more beautiful."

"All these towns are quite spoiled, of course, by popularity,
and have become very large and crowded, but Monaco is an unbeliev-
ably model little city set on a high rock, jutting out into the
Mediterranean, with the neatest little comic-operá palace at one
end, and a square with a view of the coast so beautiful that one
had to pinch oneself to believe it was really R.S.B. who was en-
joying such beauty. And at the seaward side, spreading down over
the side of the cliff, are the loveliest gardens of geraniums and
cacti and roses that I have ever seen, with all sorts of walks
and nooks overlooking the blue sea. Wholly enchanting. As I
sat in those gardens nothing that was not altogether lovely seemed
to have any reality, and the world and all its complications
seemed a bad and fantastic dream. And while the stupid crowd was
at Monte Carlo across the bay, this perfect place was almost
deserted all the enchanting afternoon.

"To Genoa then on a sullen afternoon, in which I missed the

radiance of the Riviera di Bonente, but saw the striking evidences
of the great Italian renaissance in a long chain of striking vil-
lages and towns, with prosperous market-gardens and fine new ten-
ement-houses, and great factories -- a great impression of the
throbbing life that is making the Socialist party strong and pow9
erful, and also including that blatant capitalistic nationalism
that made the Tripolitan war. Genoa is a very splendid city --
finely built and incredibly prosperous-looking, quite putting
Marseilles in the shade. I had expected something old and swarming
and unhealthy, and found a modern town, apparently administered
with almost a German cleanliness and efficiency. As in every
large city I tried to see samples of every kind of quarter, and
I am still amazed to ferret out real squalor.

"Even after seeing Florence and Rom- I still think of Pisa,
where I stopped for a day, as one of the most charming towns I
have ever seen. Touristically it seems not to be a la mode at
present, the leaning Tower, I presume, having become so hackneyed.
But for all the eyes that have looked on it, it is still quite
unspoiled; the group of Tower, Cathedral, and Baptistry, in their
soft mellowed marble and exquisite forms, standing in their meadow
by the old city walls, remains one of the supremely lovely crea-
tions of the human soul, and the view from the Tower still one
of the loveliest in the world. There is no jarring note in
Pisa. Nobody has learned how to exploit the natural resources
of the place; there are no cafés in the Cathedral square (one
must walk half a mile to get lunch as I found); there are no
new buildings or hotels around the famous Tower; everything is
at least a century old. The town has a saturating quality, a

66

quiet, prosperous, sweet, highly civilized and genial life.

"Florence was hard and grim after it, and ruined by the incredible number of most objectionable tourists -- mother and the girls, well fed, worldly, and vacant-brained, "doing" Europe, while Father stays at home and earns the money -- a social situation which the Europeans seem to be unanimous in regarding as highly immoral. I should say "makes" the money, for he is usually, I presume, a highly predatory capitalist.

"They have driven me to Rome of whose manifold charms and intricacies I will write later. Having lost my note-book in Florence, in which I had my jottings of my tour, I am trying to get up courage to/construct it and send some letters to the Newark Times or, if they won't take them, to the Bloomfield papers.

"... My observations over here lead me to the belief that if, as I see it, the path of progress is away from a Christian civilization and all it implies, towards a Socialistic civilization and all it implies,-- then France and Italy are the most advanced countries to-day, with less complications and impediments to the forward march. England and Germany are headed in the same direction, but with a thousand thwarting traditions and strongly tenacious aristocratic bonds to make the progress slow and hesitating. While America lags woefully behind, hardly yet conscious of the situation, as they are so clearly conscious here. And with our deep-seated distrust of social equality, our incapacity for political life, our genius for race-prejudice, our inarticulateness and short-sightedness, it seems highly probable that we shall evolve away from democracy instead of towards it."

67

An event to which Randolph had been looking forward with increasing impatience was the arrival in Europe, with his mother, of "my beloved Arthur Macmahon, one of the greatest men in the world, both brilliant and thoughtful and eternally fine and good." From Paris he had written to Mrs. Macmahon, "I had hoped to hear from Arthur before this that you were really coming over, and that I would have the pleasure of travelling with you in Germany. And now I cannot help writing to make my appeal of persuasion that you will not let anything keep you away . . . it will make all the difference in the world to me if you and Arthur are here." In the end Mrs. Macmahon was prevented from accompanying her son, and Randolph went to meet his friend in Naples on June 17th.

The ostensible purpose of their trip was a study of some
of the municipal schemes for which German cities were being at
that time so widely acclaimed, but they were tempted to linger
on in Italy and Switzerland. Everything that Randolph had been
hoping for in a fellow companion he now found in his friend. They
both liked to drift and observe, to reflect and analyze, to pur-
sue dramatic contrasts and draw significant conclusions. They
were both young and eager, curious and susceptible and gay. During
the three months that they were together they shared the same
room and frequently the same bed. Indeed there was something un-
usually charming in Arthur Macmahon's protectiveness towards Ran-
dolph, who was, incidentally, four years his senior.

"The magnificence of Venice", Randolph writes to me from
Zermatt, "was quite amazing, and it delighted me, contrary to my
expectations, more than any other of the Italian cities . . .
Rome had a peculiar fascination for me, because it was so in-

68

tensely alive in a modern way, and yet had all the materials for an imaginative reconstruction of the successive layers of its ancient life. And I would give one little orange-colored street or piazza in Rome for most of the dark brown streets of Florence.

"Siena, where we spent a day, pleased me much more, though it is Florentine in style. But it seemed to me richer and more imaginative, and the delightful way in which the Tuscan countryside washes right up to the walls of the city would itself make Siena one of the loveliest Italian cities. The annoying thing about the big cities is that you cannot get the country without passing through miles of straggling outskirts, quite as hopeless, I think, as anything we have in America. But at Siena we would step straight off into it and have a long sunset walk that will be one of the most charming of my Italian memories."

"On the way from Venice to Milan we had a whole day on Lake Garda with its shimmering opal water and its magnificent cliffs. Half a day in Milan and a record breaking stop at Baveho to visit the lovely garden on Isola Bella, one of the things I had most looked forward to seeing in Europe, then to Iselie (?) (Fiesole?) that same evening, where we took the diligence over the Simplon pass next morning. Here again, starting in gloomy rain, we had a magical clearing, so that the summit at noon was glorious, and we could hardly bring ourselves to leave. My friend had his picture taken sitting in a snow bank in the most orthodox fashion; we had our lunch of warm milk and cheese and bread in the intoxicating air and sunlight, and then rolled swiftly down to Briz.?)

From Kandersteg in Switzerland he writes to Carl Zigrosser

69

"... We had an almost cloudless day for our excursion to the Gomergrat, where the whole sublime panorama of snow-mountains was visible in the clear sunlight, something that happens, I suppose, only once or twice a month. Mac insisted on walking up, while I rode in the train and then walked down with him, or rather the last two thirds of the way, for the upper part was covered with snow, and the slushy paths went at times through banks three feet deep. I was prepared for cold and giddiness at 10,300 ft., but neither of us felt it at all and the air was even warmer than down in the valley. The walk down over the bare slopes with the incredibly huge Matterhorn ... looming ahead, was splendid. It was the nearest thing to flying, I suppose, that I shall ever experience. We found so many varieties of Alpine flowers in a little space of a few feet up above the tree line that we filled our Baedaker with them to bulging and then had to stop counting.

"We had a great tour through Italy. I don't know whether I wrote you after I met Mac Mac at Naples. I wanted to meet him and so dallied longer in Rome than I had intended to, and this meant seeing both Rome and Florence over again on the way north with him. But I do not consider my month in Rome wasted, for besides seeing all the sights, which are themselves an education, I picked up a good deal of Italian, and succeeded in getting through several books, besides small oceans of newspapers and journals. I met some interesting people, among them a modernist priest. . . As Paris contributed to my experience a Parliamentary election, so Rome enlightened me with a general strike, which had enough elements of a revolution to give me a very good idea of the beginning of one. . . In some provinces the Republic was proclaimed and organized for a few days, and the papers were

70

full of the most interesting stories that took me back to the atmosphere of the French Revolution. Nobody knew at first who was at the bottom of it all, but the final conclusions were that it was a rather well organized anarchist and republican revolt, with the moral support of the socialists and labor federations, who jumped at the idea of a general strike to show their power and strike terror into the hearts of the bourgeoisie. The anarchists and republicans seem really to have believed that they could overthrow the state, and touching tales were told of the disappointment of some communities when communications were restored and they found Victor Emmanuel still reigned in Italy."

From Dresden Randolph wrote to his mother: "We have managed to see many interesting things, though hampered by the weather. We spent a day and a half in Nurembourg, but found it so big and繁瑣 bustling and spoiled by ugly modern buildings as to be little like the quaint old town we/imagined. We stopped at Bamberg, a pleasant small city with an old castle and a big cathedral, and then went to Coburg, one of the most splendid of the mediaeval castles, though unfortunately for us the interior was being restored, and we could not get inside. We saw, however, the interior of the Wartburg at Eisenbach where Luther translated the Bible, but our little walk in the Thuringian Forest was sadly marred by rain. Weimar and Jena proved interesting, though we landed in Weimar in the middle of a big gymnastic festival and had some difficulty in securing a room. We went through Goethe's house, which has been restored as much as possible in the manner of his life there, and visited all the classic haunts

of his friends. . . Last night the streets were filled with crowds
until 2 in the morning, singing patriotic songs and cheering for
Austria, which had just declared war on Serbia. The situation looks
very dubious, and I am afraid these belligerent Germans will start
a conflict that might easily become one of the most disastrous wars
the world has ever seen. The whole German atmosphere is most unsym-
pathetic to me, and while I am glad to have seen this part of the
world, I doubt if I should ever be tempted to come here again. The
towns and countryside in Southern Germany are very charming, and
the people much more genial, but above Rothenberg, everything seemed
to change, and you get the modern, pushing, pleasure-loving German
at his worst."

Two days later (which he wrote to me, also from Dresden:
"I am beginning to look homeward already and find it very pleasant,
though I should never have anticipated when I left Paris in the
Spring, that I should ever be enthusiastic about coming home. But
being in Paris and being in Germany are two different things, and
as these northern big cities get drabber and drabber, I begin to
think even of New York as rather picturesque, and to imagine living
there as interesting. The weather --which has been abominable ex-
cept for the three little mediaeval towns of Nordlingen, Dinkelsbuhl
and Rothenberg --- . . . undoubtedly has been a factor in my dis-
taste for Germany, but there's the language, which -- though I have
really studied, in contrast to French and Italian, which I just
picked up -- I cannot handle . . . And there's the threatened war,
which has already damaged the Socialist Congress that I anticipated
attending at Viehna, and which seems about to set the whole world

72

crazy. It make me very blue to see the crowds of youths parading
the streets long after midnight the other night, singing "Die Wacht
am Rhein." It will give these statesmen who will play their military
pawns against each other such a splendid excuse for their folly,
for they can say that they were pushed into it by the enthusiastic
demands of the people. So war, weather, and everything conspire
to make me think that, if I can possibly secure passage, I will be
home before the first of September. . . When I think how I always
longed for Europe, and then had this unexpected and impossible chance
of luxuriating with a year of time, going about where I wanted, and
being perfectly free to choose out what I should see and do, I be-
gin to regret that I came away with so little knowledge and so many
illusions, and to be sorry I haven't economized my resources better
and gotten more at the heart of congenial things. And I am rather
annoyed with myself for getting so blase towards the end of the
trip, though this perhaps isn't a bad preparation for the home-coming
of an over-critical person like myself. There is one thing that
I do hug myself about rather, and that is that I stayed in Paris
as long as I did, and didn't fly off as I thought of doing, to one
of those German cities or universities, where I know I shouldn't have
been content at all. I do like very much the clean and massive lines
of the new German architecture and the boldness and versatility of
the household art and decorative work, and I am enthusiastic about
their municipal science, and their sense of efficiency and their
instinct for machinery which makes their factories and workshops
look like laboratories or hospitals, so clean and professional
are they. But there are too many traces left of that horrible age

of materialism and barbarous taste that must have followed the French
war, and it will be a long time before that truly glorious Germany,
towards which everything seems to be converging, will be perfect.
But there is something in the soul of the people which I can't make
articulate, but which I know I don't like -- a sort of thickness
and sentimentality and a lack of critical sense, which puts them
apart from the ever-intelligent and expressive French . . . We had
a happy time in Venice and Switzerland and Bavaria, and it is only
this soaking in central Germany that has really brought out all my
latent weariness with the European scene. . ."

The day after this letter was written (July 31) the two young
men arrived in Berlin and went to look up their friend, Harry Dana
(Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana) at his pension, where
they could overhear his landlady sobbing in an adjoining room because
her son had just been called to join his regiment. The three friends
listened together to the famous speech of the Kaiser from the balcony
of the Royal Palace in which he proclaimed "for six and twenty years
I have kept the peace and now they thrust the sword into my hand."

From Copenhagen, Randolph writes to his mother, "We got away
from Germany on the last boat for Sweden, having a most adventurous
trip, and going without sleep for two nights. We were in Berlin
right at the height of the crisis, and saw all the excitement. There
must be hundreds of scared Americans marooned there now . . . We had
one delightful day on in Sweden at Malmo . . . I have engaged pass-
sage on the Oscar II of the Scandinavian American Line, due to
sail from here on the 13th . . . I hope you have not all been wor-
rying about us, for we do not know what alarming reports may have

gotten into the American newspapers about the stranded Americans.
As for ourselves we have so far been as comfortable and easy as we
could wish. Yesterday we had a little run out to an old Danish
town and a long walk along the water in the breeze and sunlight. We
hope also to take a trip up through Sweden and Norway . . . . Do
not worry about me, for I am at least booked for home, and this is
one port in Europe where perhaps there are the best chances of
getting away.

Chapter VII

Home Coming

With his perceptions sharpened, his culture immeasurably en-
riched, his memory full of the sights he had seen, the ideas he had
been absorbing, Randolph Bourne stepped again on to his native
shore. "It is taking us a long time to get home", he wrote to me
from the steamer, "and I don't like these great gulfs between
my European experiences and New York life again. I want to step
back with everything fresh in my soul . . . I never expected to
be so glad to come back to America . . . the wheels of the clock
have so completely stopped in Europe, and this civilization that
I have been admiring so much seems so palpably about to be torn
to shreds that I do not even want to think about Europe until the
war is over and life running again. I wish now I could find some
way to see America as extensively as I have been seeing Europe,
and feel its currents as sympathetically as I have been trying
to feel those abroad. Do you think perhaps I have been almost
too snobbishly Utopian with regard to things American, and so
have missed many good things and people that I really should have
admired if I hadn't suspected their bourgeois label? I am be-
ginning to wonder whether the utter *defaillance* of the Socialists
in Europe under the war situation will not give me an excuse for
a little holiday, when I can try to understand more sympathetically
what other kinds of people are doing . . . New York always scared
and confused me a little. I wonder why it was that I found the
atmosphere of the foreign cities so much more friendly and sym-
pathetic, even though I didn't know any people. Well, to-morrow
I shall see New York again, and, trying to treat it like a

76

tourist city, I shall make the experiment of seeing how gently it
receives
~~txxxxx~~ me . . . I hope I have not been away so long as to lose
touch with my friends, for I think of them as the real home to
which I am returning."

Between this letter and his next one I had been made a swift
journey to Europe. "I quite understand", he wrote, "how you
shudder a little at taking up your struggle once more against sor-
didness and indifference, trying to convert people who are too
how
miserable to know ~~txxxxx~~ miserable they are. What little I
saw of Connecticut town life from the train on my way to Danbury
last week seemed almost too grotesquely squalid to be true --
the unkempt station surroundings and unhealthy factories, and
dingy workmen's houses. All this after Germany rather hit
me like a sharp blow. I have been trying ever since to explain to
myself our hideous objective, if not subjective, or actual poverty
... I am learning to do what I suppose all Americans do, that
is, pass through streets and cities without seeing anything, or
allowing anything at least to sink in, whereas on the continent
I was always absorbing and assimilating, here I find myself con-
stantly rejecting, denying the admission of the squalor and vul-
garity that press on every side. But I don't see what can be done
but slowly sting people into new ideals and tastes, and meanwhile
certainly not let one's soul be poisoned by the hostile environ-
ment. I find myself bracing against the war in much the same
fashion, using my energy not in despair and recrimination, but
only in an attempt to understand. While the clock of Europe has
stopped, we can learn many useful things, and at least look for-

77

ward to the momentous readjustment."

It was inevitable that Randolph should suffer some disilu-
ionment on his return to New York. "It is bad enough to be lonely
away from one's friends", he wrote to me, "but what are you to do
when you find yourself lonely in the midst of them? They used
to satisfy me so wonderfully, but now I find myself listening for
responses that do not come, and feeling a sort of hunger that
my old excitement of friendship doesn't appease . . . I wish I
some sort of
could beat into/expression my frictions and rebounds from the world.
I almost think if I could do that I should find it all worth while."

[And to P.W.] "I hope if you come to New York you will like
it better than you did. I really despise it after Paris and Rome,
and am trying to decide where, and under what circumstances I
could be happy. People here are too industrious or too sophis-
ticated to go deeply into that rather ruminative, searching, per-
sonal life that I got more and more immersed in when I was abroad."

It was his friend, Carl Zigrosser, who came to his rescue.
This friend had been closely associated with him at Columbia,
and Randolph had spent the summer of 1912 with him on his father's
farm in Ulster County, N.Y. at the foot of the Catskill Mountains
in beautiful rolling country. It was here that he had written
the final essays for Youth and Life, and that he had prepared
the volume for its publication, After this visit he wrote
to Carl: "I can never thank all of you enough for your kind-
ness . . . I don't know what I should have done if I had not
been able to come to your place, whatever else happened I should

79

handsome man with an air of smouldering potency and universal bene-
volence; also Professor J. Selwyn Schapiro, the historian, of whom
Randolph wrote to me: "I went out to dinner with Schapiro the other
night and found he had an astonishing number of my ideas. His re-
actions to Europe came out almost in my very words, and he is writ-
ing articles on them which are the veriest plagiarisms. I like him
very much." On one occasion Vachel Lindsay read his famous _Gen-
eral Booth Enters Heaven_, of which Randolph later wrote -- "They
(the verses) sound as if they had been shouted to the winds and the
clouds their gaudy rhythms marking time for the slow roll of the
sun over the blistering sky."

None of his anxious hopes of securing a teaching position,
or other regular employment, seemed on the way to materialize.
To me he had written from Paris, "There are no signs of encouraging
news from home, my good friends ignoring all my delicate suggestions
for a humble place at Columbia, and my bad friends telling me -- as
one of them did -- that I had as much chance of obtaining a place
in his department as Voltaire had of obtaining a bishopric . . .
My perfect fatality of unsuccess in the past of getting any sort
of a small editorial position, etc. makes me positively tremble
at the prospects."

Mr. Sedgwick was the only one of Randolph's influential friends
who put himself seriously out to help him. Now, by some stroke
of luck, little more than a month after his return to America, a
new periodical was about to make its interesting debut, and Mr.
Sedgwick's diligence had been rewarded for it was through his re-
commendation that Randolph was asked to be one of its contributing
editors.

The New Republic -- "this journal of opinion which seeks to meet the challenge of a new time" -- included a notable group as editors, headed by that truly good man, Mr. Herbert Croly, whose ponderous volumes -- The Promise of American Life and Progressive America -- are little lexicons of useful research and enlightened counsel. With Mr. Croly were Mr. Walter Lippmann, then a young man of exceptional brilliance; Mr. Francis Hackett, whose Irish vivacity had won him nation wide recognition as critic on a Chicago newspaper; Mr Philip Littell, the accomplished literary critic, suave and discreet, with an irony distinctly not of the same mint as Randolph's; Dr. Alvin Johnson -- but to whom does not the name of Dr. Johnson represent all that is most generous, most out giving, most grandly magnanimous in the America of the last forty years? Mr. Walter Weyl, who had recently published a volume on American democracy, finished off the list of impressive names.

To Randolph Mr. Croly had written as early as September 15, 1914: "You will be exceedingly useful to the paper in case you can include a more or less systematic dealing with educational and religious topics." This was encouraging if sobering, and as far as education was concerned he had no doubts of himself, but in the matter of religion, in any orthodox sense of the word, there is little, or nothing to be discovered in his writing. As a boy he had passed through a phase of piety, but by the time he reached college he was writing "The Prayer of a Rationalist" -- "O World, which has out of the dim vastness of Eternity, and the ceaseless whirl of clashing atoms, evolved marvellously my consciousness, the one ultimate Reality which gives me power to recognize thy reality -- I worship thee." He was essentially a follower of William James

and believed in an "open universe". The religious feeling he identified with "that beautiful romance of thought we call wonder."

In a review of a book by Paul Claudel (The East I knew) he refers to "the strange power and beauty of the dramas, with the implication that people are more than themselves, are inextricably woven with a glamor that is deeper than life itself." It is this mystery that he feels behind everything, this "cosmic splendor", and it is just this poetic touch, this poetic approach to life, that gives him his unusual distinction. Baudelaire has defined genius as childhood retrouvee a volonte, and Randolph Bourne never lost the power of seeing through the eyes of a child. He was an idealist, but an idealist, who, while searching for wide laws and happy solutions, wanted to strip truth to the quick. "Our purpose (that of his generation) "early became to trace the world relentlessly down to its lair. We were resolute to find out the facts no matter how barren and sinister they proved themselves."

The very first issue of The New Republic (Nov. 7, 1914) had in it an article of Randolph Bourne's in which he describes a visit to his old high school. It set the tone for others that were to follow. "Call this thing that goes on in the modern school room schooling if you like, only don't call it education."

From the apostle of the young he had now temporarily changed his role to that of a leader of educational reform. Articles and reviews followed one upon the other, in which a scathing analysis of the failures in the public educational system was combined with an ardent revolutionary confidence in its correction.

It is hardly necessary for me to recall the part he played in pop-ularizing the Gary Plan, which he considered at that time "the

82

biggest thing in the country." Professor Filler, in his life of
Randolph Bourne, has covered this subject at length. _The New Re_
public sent him to Gary, Indiana, to investigate the schools, and
his papers were ultimately gathered into a book and published under
the title of _The Gary Schools_. Only recently, in a fascinating
volume, entitled _Reflections on our Age_, a collection of addresses
delivered by delegates to Unesco at the Sorbonne in Paris, I read
a paper by that lone warrior for the good life, Mr. Herbert Read,
in which he describes the purposes of education in almost identical
terms as those used by Randolph Bourne more than a quarter of a
century ago. "Everything has been said, but since no one listens, it
is necessary to go on repeating it", Andre Gide reminds
us. That there were those that did listen to Randolph/ is proven
by the letters that came to him from teachers, educational author-
ities, and parents in all parts of the country. Many of these letters
I have had an opportunity of examining, and they reflect the minds
of men and women who, too eager to break through the barriers of
officialdom behind which they felt themselves helplessly imprisoned.
It was with a renewed hope that they turned toward this inspiring
young prophet. That he made enemies is to be taken for granted:

> Truth like a bastard comes into the world
> Never without ill-fame to him who gives him birth.

When these essays were collected, with others, and published
under the title of _Education and Living_, they aroused widespread
recognition. A critic in _The Living Age_ wrote "It is impossible in
a few lines to express the spirit of so revolutionary a volume

> It will help to awaken a new interest in teaching and change
> both theory and practice for modern education."

From _The Call_

83

"Children of America could they know the service performed for them by Randolph Bourne would rise up and offer a vote of thanks . . . It would be well for every teacher in the United States to read and ponder over this book." From _The Birmingham Age Herald_, "A series of constructive studies . . . by the most brilliant American educational critic of the younger generation. . . Mr. Bourne's book will find its mark among all students of education, while its sensitive and stimulating style and the wide range of the author's knowledge and sympathies make it equally attractive to the general reader." The book was published in 1917, and though it might be said that his educational theories were based largely on his close and sympathetic study of John Dewey and William James, he brought a fervour, a lightness of touch, a flash and flair and atmosphere to his treatment of this hoary subject that were uniquely his own, and that did more to engage the public interest than had the more academic expositions of Professor Dewey.

And all the time that he was seeking to fulfill this some-
what wearying role that had been so arbitrarily thrust upon him,
his mind was turning round and round like the weathercock on a
church steeple, to catch every changing current of the intellectual
and artistic life of his time. As one reads over his literary
reviews and random essays in _The New Republic_, and the fortnightly
_Dial_, one is struck by the profligate freshness of the writing,
the abundance and vigor of the ideas, and the clarity and pre-
cision with which they are developed. Nor could one suspect that
the writer of these gay digs at dozing professors, this relentless
tracker down of the sentimental, the otiose, the pedantic, the hypo-

critical, the life-choking, this glancing master of the ironic
muse, wielding his weapons with so lively a flourish and so un-
erring a thrust, was a man so bitterly handicapped, so unremit-
tingly goaded, seated in his small, bare room before his inexorable
work table, racking his brains for new "leads", often a prey
to misgivings of the darkest sort. "I have not got over my old
feeling that everything I write is my last, and approach each
new one with the same trepidation, as if it were breaking entirely
new paths", [he wrote to Dorothy Teal], "There is nothing in this
experience and practice business. I never learn to write, no matter
how much I do."

There is scarcely a topic to which he does not bring some ori-
ginal slant -- from town planning to college reform, from the
function of criticism to continental cultures, from syndicalism
to socialism, from humanism to pageantry. He was among the first to
appraise
WRITEN with sympathetic insight the novels of Theodore Dreiser, and
his essays on Dostoevsky and Cardinal Newman would alone establish
him as a critic of subtlety and imagination. De Quincey has
somewhere written that "Style consists in the disentangling of
thoughts and ideas reciprocally involved in one another", and if
anyone could do this delicate task of unravelling it was Randolph
Bourne. The most complex questions took on clarity under his
prolonged scrutiny. His versatility is misleading for if one comes
to examine all his sketches, essays, reviews, portraits, it will
be found that each is a link in the same chain -- his belief in
the good life and his effort to stimulate people's desires to
want this life, and to educate their tastes to recognize it.

Satisfactions he had, to be sure, for Randolph Bourne

was becoming better and better known, especially among the students
in the colleges, and during the winter of 1915 he was invited to
make a speech at the University of Chicago. This trip turned out
an exceedingly happy one as is reflected in the letter posted to
me from Milwaukee: "... This region is one of the few American
scenes where I am appreciated, and I have just slid along from one
hospitality to another, losing track of the days. The trouble
started in Chicago when the president of a small girl's college
was in the audience. She is an impressive person, and she literally
abducted me. I had a Sunday of great honor at the college, spoke
in the afternoon before the girls, spent the night there, encom-
passed by 350 of them, and was handed on the next morning to the
Unitarian minister, who is one of the most industrious propagandists
for Youth and Life.

"Tuesday I was lured to Madison, where I have a number of
friends at the University (of Wisconsin), and spent several most
delightful days of conversation and investigating. Madison is
unique, a great tone to it for an American city, the provincial
capital in all its brilliance, and a pretty good fm brilliance
for this country too. You get a taste of what New York would be
if the national or even only the State government were only there.
My judgments are notoriously untrustworthy, but it seems to me
now that my little group of friends there exceeds in charming
soundness anything I even remotely apprehended at Columbia or in-
deed anywhere in New York. I thought so before when I was there,
but I am sure of it now, I renounce Boston for Madison, as my
city of refuge. There was a charm in four days, stimulating and

exclusively masculine society, a rather rare experience for me.

"I was put up at the University Club, and had all my obvious instincts of amour-propre continually satisfied. Max Eastman was also there all the time, making his usual innocent commotion in the University by getting the University building closed against him as a "propagandist". This was my first chance to get acquainted with him, our village lines never having crossed. We discovered the firm bond of a common enemy. I liked him. His tempo seems even slower than mine. There was much sitting and waiting around in Horace Kallen's room with him and with admiring students of the Forum and Lit. Magazine circles. Then I pursued industrial education at the capitol, with the enfant terrible McCarthy blarneying me pressible Irish brogue. . . I also had long hours with the philosophy professor. . . He is the most charming soul, German, spiritual, wistful, innocent, embroiled by the material complications of life. Circumstantially he has almost everything I have not but want to complete my life (except that we are both wifeless), and I have everything that he has not. Perhaps I was over-impressed with his charming house, full of windows that looked to the South over a wild and frozen lake, and the model and comfortable and devoted sister who kept house for him. He has just been through a crisis at the University when the rabble of local ministers got after him for preaching atheism in his courses, and tried to have him put out. He stuck to his guns and routed them. . . He sheds an amazing influence. . ."

"Milwaukee I like immensely. Social service loses its hectic, priggish note here. It's been worked into the life, a hard-headed Socialist administration of practical idealists

and efficient laborites gives a tone to the place. We went to
see Berger, a great character, passe intellectually, but a study
in political intuition. The Unitarian minister is a jolly little
Nantucketer, transplanted to the Middle West. He has all the
social and political ropes in his hands, and has a fine time
with life. It makes my flesh creep to see some of the amiable
and altruistic bourgeois with whom he has to associate . . . Do
you know this Mid-West innocence? It is even worse in Chicago.
(1)
Wirt is a perfect type. You get it in Victor Narro's (?) letters
in the Evening Post. It goes to my head like wine . . . This
should have been the soil in which I was raised."

(1) Originator of the Gary Schools

## Chapter VIII
### A Happy Summer

Summers were to Randolph a perpetual problem. The heat and noise of the city made him long desperately for the country, but his "horror" of finding himself with people "who freeze one up", the smallness and uncertainty of his income, his dependence on the community of friends, and the fear lest, if he was too far from New York, he would be unable to attend the weekly meetings of The New Republic, narrowed his choice of possible places of escape.

Through his connexion with the New Republic, he had made a friend of Miss Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, whose French literary criticisms and articles on France, that appeared with such regularity in the pages of the New Republic, will be remembered for their de-lightful literary quality. It was just this belief in permanent literary values, combined with a desire to contribute to the social and intellectual currents of the age, that formed so strong an al-liance between her and Randolph Bourne. At the time that he knew her she had no settled home in New York and they met seldom, but her sympathetic understanding of his problems, and her desire to further his interests as a creative writer made her one of the most valued of his correspondents. She now set resolutely to work to find just the place he needed and was successful beyond all expec-tation in securing for him the use of a friend's log cabin in the woods of Dublin, New Hampshire.

Here, during the first week of August in 1915, he went with his friend Edward Murray, an accomplished violinist, and came im-mediately under the protection of the painter, Abbot Thayer, and

89

His son Gerald, artists who combined style and culture with the most gypsy-like indifference to worldly values. George de Forest Brush, who used as his studio the barn behind Randolph's cabin, was another/of the little group whose warm hearts and unconventional manners made him feel completely at home. Since the most exclusive ladies of Dublin, those who called in white kid gloves and drove in pomp to lectures at the Lake Club, were entranced to meet any of the Thayer's friends, however "different", Randolph was protected against shocks to his self-esteem.

"I am becoming a kind of Lotus-Eater, very much reconciled to life", he wrote to me, "forgetting that I am poor, or that anybody else is poor or ever has been poor. A society that is rich and also cultivated is a very demoralizing thing. I have never come across this kind of people. Perhaps they do not exist out of New England. But the people here get things off with such taste and simplicity and pose so little that one is fairly seduced by such an aristocracy. There are a few nouveaux from St. Louis and Baltimore, just to furnish the dark background, but the general background here is most charming. Look around you as you will, you will not find a false or ugly note in the place, woods, houses, roads, lakes. The occasional flashy houses are hidden in the trees. The wood-road winds unspoiled around the lake close to its shore. You may wander through private woods and estates at will. The mountain looms grandly from many points, and all my best friends seem to have appropriated the most charming houses and the best views . . . You get invited to dinners and teas where you do not feel your lack of clothes, and you

don't care whether you make a hut or not. The electric lights
on the wood road are symbolic of this quite unusual mixture of
beautiful wild nature and a serene and informal, yet pleasantly
ordered life. There may be other American summer places with
such a tone, but I have never seen them. Our house is plain
weathered boards inside, and furnished with just everything you
want. We are in a broad meadow by the lake, with golden-rods
and asters and dotted with pine-trees, private, yet near the road
and just the right distance from the village. Our best friends,
the Abbot Thayers, live in a delightful nest of studios and un-
furnished rooms, in the woods, and are such serious, impractical,
unworldly people. George de Forest Brush, the painter, ...
is a most charming person, full of socialistic ideas, and the
raciest, tangiest talk and expression."

Among the noted and notorious summer residents of Dublin
was Miss Amy Lowell, who lived "in a big house on the hill".
With her bluest of Boston-blue-blood, her servants, horses, and
most formidable dogs, her bold, bald retorts and her high, saucy
claims as a free verse poet, leader of the Imagists, she was
a target for gossip in all circles. Randolph describes his
first meeting with her in a letter to Miss Sergeant: "Other social
adventures last week were a call from Miss Eugenia Frothingham,
whom I liked, and dinner with Miss Amy Lowell who seems to
share with the Germans the faculty of letting off dynamite bombs
in peaceful social groups. Mrs. Gerald (Thayer) came home from
Miss Lowell's talk at the Club Saturday quite beside herself
with fury, and a mild Harvard professor was stirred to warmth

9/1

in recounting her atrocities on ship board. I went to her house
in considerable trepidation expecting to be pummelled and overawed.
Instead I spent a wholly delightful evening. She walked right
at me as one of the oldest of friends, and we had a truly grand
gossip. . . I found her immensely witty and keen, and ready
to spread out the contents of her mind before you. Surprisingly
fair and a lover of all sorts of queer and little people, whom
she touches off inimitably. She has a delightful zest of life
and would be a much greater person without her money and position,
which apparently give people these extraordinary reactions and
breed popularity for her. She seems quite innocent of this however."

On a later occasion, when he attended a lecture at the club
house where Professor Richard Burton and Major Putnam were the
speakers, this so flattering impression became considerably
modified. "Miss Lowell jumped up and walloped Mr. Burton after
his speech. This was one of her unfavourable manifestations. If
you don't know her I'm sure you wouldn't like her. Perhaps she
has two phases, the Lowell-arrogant one, and Imagist-kindly
Shavian one. I got her only in the last. . . She even looked
(at dinner in her own charming house, almost handsome, and reminded me strongly of a gay and heroic
young woman friend of mine who had just died.)"

One of the happiest of all Randolph's experiences during
this privileged summer was a visit he paid to the Macdowell
Colony with his friends, Edward Murray and Carl Zigrosser, who
had joined them for a short visit. "One day -- did I tell you?"
[he writes to Miss Sergeant] "we drove to Peterboro' to the Macdowell
Colony, which I very much wanted to see. Ridgely Torrence and

92

his wife were there, and after a long search which took us over the
woods and fields, we found them in their studio about lunch time.
I wanted to stay and roam around, but my friends had the burden of
the unfed horse on their hands, minds, and we had to make for the
tavern in the village while the horses were being cared for. We
met Torrence again, and took him home, he telling us his marvellous
tales all along the way. He showed us Macdowell's grave, and the
log cabin, and for me it was a real pilgrimage . . . The log-cabin
looking out over the pines "towards the westering sun" has all the
atmosphere of a holy place, silent and undisturbed. In it was com-
posed the noblest music yet thought in this country. Very noble too
is the great rock in the hedge-close that marks the grave. There
is a high plateau with meadows that reminds me of Switzerland, and
a background of forest with a great sweep of mountains. It is all
quite different from Dublin, but very distinctive. The artists
are few but real ones, working in the semi-solitude that seems
to me the high, heroic test of personality."

Though what with accompanying Bach and Schubert sonatas for
his friend Murray at the Thayers, who delighted in these musical
evenings, he and lingering before the fire of pine
logs, and going on moon light expeditions with Gladys Thayer, the
romantic daughter of Mr. Abbot Thayer -- "grave, strong, and naïve,
a creature of the woods, wistful for experience and freedom" --
it would seem that work took up only a small portion of Randolph's
attention in these favoured weeks of late summer and early autumn.
But even here he was never quite free of anxiety. To Miss Sergeant
he had written when she was looking for a place for him to stay:
"If you did find the place and my ideas didn't sprout, and I am

93

not confident that they would, then I would most desperately have
deluded you, and the working of your wits would have been in vain
. . . . I cannot think what I have done with my winter. It is
discouraging to look back on one's self objectively. All I can find
is my having written about 31,000 words for the *New Republic* that
got printed, and about half as much more that didn't see the light,
and some scattering shots of dubious value. My Western trip was
a brightness though I was scarcely responsible for that."

Now he was getting his book on the Gary Schools in its final
shape. "I meant to answer your kind inquiries about the Gary man-
uscript", he writes to Miss Sergeant. "I finished it in a wild
burst of speed on Saturday, and had to pay with a lame back that
has kept me sitting round with pillows ever since . . . I tried to
be official and descriptive and to quench all unqualified enthusiasm,
with the result that I am dulle than the most cautious schoolman.
And now an agent has put over a Gary article of mine on Scribner's
which is thoroughly characterless. I shall never touch Gary again."

First his friend Carl had to return to New York, and then
Murray, and he went to stay at a boarding house where he was soon
joined by Mr. Eastman Chase. There must be many alive still who
can remember this remarkable old man, tough as a hickory knob
gathered from a Vermont wood, genial and sagacious, witty, humo-
rous, and enigmatical. He had once managed a picture gallery in
Boston, but had moved to New York and converted an old stable in
Macdougall alley into a large-sized studio, where he gave many
delightful parties over which he presided in the manner of a Chi-
nese sage borne in a Maine backwoods and educated by his own sharp
senses to discriminate with a most exquisite edge. He was seventy-

four years old when Randolph knew him, but "distinctly not of the
older generation". He cooked delicious meals for them both, and
they spent hours discussing music and poets before a wood fire and
going on long, leisurely walks through the woods. [To C.Z. Randolph
writes]: "Last week Chase and I gave a dinner party to the Geralds
(Thayer) and Gladys. We drove to Keen for our provisions, and
Chase did up a fine banquet of chops, sweet potatoes, peas, baked
apples. He had a quart bottle of whiskey, too, which was imposed
on us all, and we sat for hours gossiping . . . Chase in fine form,
recalling all the artists and Boston notables of bygone days. He
is a Mr. Roberts, but the real stuff, perfectly genuine, with an
amazing knowledge and taste in pictures and music and verse."

This congenial companion was, in his turn, however, forced
to forsake Randolph, who writes to me: "He (Chase) started out
this morning to walk to Peterboro, eight miles, to get his train.
I walked a couple of miles with him down the delightful Dublin hill
with its little old houses and pleasant meadows, It was almost
like June, so green and fresh and not a touch of autumn color yet.
There were rounded hills in the distance that looked like Wales,
and here and there lovely old flower gardens, bright with purple
and yellow asters. Now I am back, quite desolate before the fire,
doomed to a week at the boarding house, in a faint hope of a friend's
coming in a few days."

Hixx A letter to me, written shortly before his return to
New York is a fitting conclusion to those favoured weeks: "My
last week up here has really been a debauch of laziness . . . Four
of the most perfect days. . . Brightest of yellow sunlight, brightest
of white moonlight, and the woods and hills nobler than ever . . .

Tuesday I discovered a new road and walked along it, with tanta-
lizing views through the trees, until I came to the fairest meadow
with a view which is like nothing so much as that across the Roman
Campagna from the Janiculum, the same valley, the same contours of
hills, even jagged St. Soracte, called in New Hampshire Crotched
Mountain. Only the city and St. Peter's were absent. Instead, to
the left some hills that looked like Wales. I lay in the warm grass
for hours, dreaming and hearing the foxes barking in the woods be-
hind me. Wednesday there was another ride through the woods
around the
lake and to Jaffrey, through the woods where sun and shade through
the trees fairly intoxicated the senses. . . Yesterday morning I
lay in bed and saw the most glorious dawn -- deep orange springing
from the deepest of blue hills, with the picturesque village church
silhouetted black against it. To lie warmly in bed and see this
amazing glory of color and form was the rarest of experiences.
Then in the afternoon to my field again, warmer and even lovelier,
and then to the Thayers. An hour watching the mountain turn purple
in the sunset, and the golden clouds through the western pines,
and then a talk by the fire about country houses and Dublin views,
and a walk under the belated moon along the lake and wood road,
with mysterious shadows and sudden white forms of birches and queer
luminous patches in the forest and calm outline of the hills under
the stars. My conscience tells me of some contribution due for
these stolen delights."

Chapter IX

Thy Friends are Exultations

"Beware of showing too much zeal", Talleyrand admonished,
and Randolph was always showing too much zeal. "Denunciations of
my recent articles continue to come in", he wrote to Miss Sergeant
as early as October 1915. "I have become an impious, ungrateful,
pro-German, venomous viper. This sums up my college, <u>Atlantic</u>
and German articles, and gives me a Byronic reputation that I
shall have work living down, even if I wanted to."

If it had been only a matter of defending himself against
his critics, he would have risen eagerly to the challenge, but
there was always the haunting anxiety that he would not be able
to place his articles, and the necessity of keeping a roof over
his head, and even the roof eluded him. "I am about to desert
my empty Phipps apartment", he wrote to Miss Sergeant, "but I am
not able to find any decent rooms that I can afford. I have to
give so much psychic energy to the mere problem of getting a place
to live that I haven't any left for work. It is hideous . . . !"
And to me, where I was visiting a friend in Scotland: "I wish
I could go straight to Nassau or Honolulu for the rest of the
winter . . . Pray for me in my troubles, O, for that calm stability
of comfort, place, and mood, which I keep looking forward to, where I can work and really live! Do you think it will
ever come?"

It was shortly after this, on my return from abroad, that
I came to know Randolph Bourne most intimately. He had at last
installed himself in two small rooms in Bank Street, and I was
living within a few minutes' walk of him in Miligan Place, where

he frequently dropped in to share my meals with me, or to accompany
me to a nearby restaurant. He was always free to bring his friends
for a late tea, or for an evening party to this sheltered alley,
where the small brick houses retained the picturesque charm of an
earlier day, and the noises of the city were but faintly audible.

As I recall those gatherings, fresh currents of ideas were
always entering in to give point and liveliness to the conversation,
but the effervescent optimism combined with an overweening moral
earnestness (and how well Mr. Brooks has defined earnestness as
"seriousness without a sense of humour") that I read of in certain
memoirs of that *極* period does not strike a note of response in
me. I remember an article of Logan Pearsall Smith's about the
"gay nineties", in which he alludes to the intense seriousness of
those flaunting years, with what desperate application, often driven
by the direst poverty, the young writers of those days anxiously
pursued their elusive muses. That we reflect all through our own
temperaments is to be taken into account, and perhaps mine, which
steers the uneven team of high spirits and "unyielding despair"
--- "a head of feathers and a heart of lead" -- is not to be trusted
when it comes to giving any reliable account of the secretive past.
We were, as I recall, both serious and gay, and though we had not
yet reached that enviable state of being able to analyze ourselves
out of existence altogether, short of that there was nothing we
were not willing to attempt.

Randolph was the perfect blend of an all-round intellect in-
terested in every phase of existence. Not only did he have that
personal awareness, which to many is an end in itself -- the open-
ness of the senses, the receptivity of the mind, the suspension

of the judgment, the perpetual pursuit of drama and the perpetual
brooding upon experience -- but he had the historian's wider grasp
as well. "You evidently do just as I do, use people and your per-
sonal reactions to them as guide-posts to general understandings,"
he had written to me from Paris, "and you let small, significant im-
pressions light up long vistas of meaning. But I sometimes wonder
if I haven't a little the advantage of you, through my enthusiasm
for sociology, in getting besides the personal reverberations, certain
general social reverberations, of types and groups and classes and
social milieus. This sounds so cold and I wonder if I can make
you see what I mean, For these broader reactions are sometimes quite
as vivid as the personal and if they are clear, give me so intense
a satisfaction, the scientific one I suppose, of having sensed a
connection, a law -- although one cannot use the scientific terms
in this connection, for my sociology is not coldly fakking away
by the intellect but warmly felt."

Art and science he kept on two quite separate planes. Psycho-
analysis, then just beginning to come into vogue, and in which he
was well versed, he used as a means of illumination and enhancement,
rather than an end in itself, and he was opposed to its obtrusion
into works of the imagination.

To every subject he approached he brought a most engaging,
and sometimes a most disconcerting irony. Mr. Brooks has fittingly
rebuked those people who accused Randolph Bourne of malice and
bitterness, pointing out how tempting it is to attribute qualities
to the physically deformed "who are so dauntless in spirit that
they repel our sympathy", and Dr. Edith Sitwell has made a similar

observation in writing of Pope. Randolph Bourne's irony was like a shimmering light playing subtly, weaselessly, almost imperceptibly over the incongruities of human nature and the injustices of human society. Irony was his salvation from despair and wit the flash point of his moral judgment. Nor was his humour ever cynical or cruel. There was always at the bottom of his nature a saving grace, an innocence and candour that nothing could corrupt.

The following quotations from his essay, *The Life of Irony*, convey something of the quality that made his conversation such a delight to his friends:

> Not until I read the Socrates of Plato did I fully appreciate that this irony, -- this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent judging of experience, this sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less heart-breaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one's world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by being translated into and defined in each other's terms, -- that this was a life, and a life of beauty, that one might discover one's self living it all unawares.

> Irony . . . is an exquisite sense of proportion, a sort of spiritual tact in judging the values and significances of experience.

> Nothing human is alien to the ironist, the whole world is thrown open naked to the play of his judgment.

> He -- the ironist -- has a great conviction of the significance of all life, the lack of which conviction is the most saddening feature of the religious temperament.

Randolph's enunciation was not always clear, and as no one wanted to miss any of his words, there was apt to be a hush while he was talking.

> I remember an intellectual Roumanian Jew -- his name has now gone from me -- a brilliant economist who held some important position in an institution of learning. He had arrived in America

100

without friends or money, and with only one English phrase at his disposal, consisting of the three magical words, "Is that so?" These words, with every variation of emphasis, and on every embarrassing occasion, he had brought boldly and hopefully out, with the result that he had, on his applications for work, been shown the door by more irate employers than would have made up the bread line in the worst days of unemployment. By wit, industry, and mathematical genius he had risen gradually to a position of enviable eminence, from where he could conjure the most abstruse figures to unravel the most recalcitrant problems. He had an a-moral, sardonic, undercutting wit which brought out in vivid contrast Randolph's subtler, more widely philosophic cosmopolitanism. It was a source of entertainment and instruction to take part in their discussions.

Mr. Charles Merz was an acquaintance Randolph brought on a number of occasions to my parties, a dashing, friendly young man, whose good looks, easy command of life, and air of having just stepped from some secret council chamber of state where decisions had been made that were to turn the world upside down, was always a little dazzling and intimidating to Randolph.

"The New Republic continues to side track me", he had written to Miss Sergeant, "And I haven't a show anywhere else. There is a new wizard down there named Merz who can do everything from writing advertisements, running the business department, editing the magazine to doing articles far cleverer than any of us can do. However, he has no bashfulness in him, ... and we tremble for our futures ..."

Paul Rosenfeld was a friend to whom Randolph introduced me, and to whose delightful rooms on Irving Place we were frequently

101

invited together. Paul would also come to my parties at Milligan Place, and he and Randolph remained devoted friends up to Randolph's death.

Another friendship that held firm was that between Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks. Mr. Brooks' unfailing response to original writers, the pleasure with which he welcomed any fresh glimmer of light on the American scene, made him peculiarly susceptible to Randolph Bourne's bold and lucid thought. When, a few weeks before the close of the war, he went with his family to Carmel, Cal., Randolph wrote to his mother: "Van Wyck Brooks has finally gone with his wife and two little boys to Carmel, Cal. for the winter . . . I shall miss him tremendously, because of all my men friends I like and admire him most, I think. We used to have lunch here together in New York, or tea after his work. It is a mutual admiration . . ."

My first meeting with Mr. Brooks was when I dropped in to see Randolph in his rooms on Bank Street. Brooks was at that time Acting Editor of the *Century Magazine*, and I remember feeling exceedingly shy with this disconcertingly cultured and reserved young man, who, for all his attainments, seemed himself strangely shy. I went on several occasions to see Randolph when he was staying with Eleanor and Van Wyck Brooks in their home at Sound Beach, Conn., where they entertained him with so much generosity on so many occasions. Mr. Brooks is that rare combination of a man-of-letters, who, in spite of a fame he never coveted -- that he sought, indeed, resolutely to avoid -- has had that fame thrust upon him, and has conserved his essential modesty, his spontaneous kindness, and the

syncratic. Character was, he asserted, what he valued most
in human beings -- the courage to be oneself as well as to
have a self to be -- and it was this indifference to the
opinion of others that he found so often lacking in his country-
men. With his high claims, his imperious voice, his corro-
sive wit, his general air of privilege and weariness and
remote inner blaze, a blaze that gave out no heat, he created
confusion in the judgment of many. Mary Colum, in her
*Life and the Dream*, has written with rare insight of this
most gifted and most unfortunate young man. That he showed
such warm friendship for Randolph, and stood behind him
with so much vigor and generosity at the most critical mo-
ment of his career, should be proof, were any needed, of
his goodness of heart and sincerity of purpose. I remember
his saying to me that he was always proud to be seen
with Randolph and considered him distinguished in appearance.

When it comes to Randolph's appearance, al-
most everyone that has written of him has made much of the
long, black cape he wore after his return from Europe. This
cape gave him a kind of brave style. Randolph's friends,
once they had accustomed themselves to his appearance,
were captivated by his charm, and came gradually to forget
the image he presented to strangers. I remember the shock
of indignant surprise I experienced when my dentist, to
whom I had sent him, said to me with an air of indescribly
solemn self-~~gratulation~~: "When we see such a one as he,
we should give thanks to our Creator for making us as we are."

I was able to share with Randolph many of his literary ex-
citements. Among them was Lytton Strachey's _Eminent Victorians_,
which created a sensation in the literary world when it first came
out, but how quickly do the marvels of one age become the ribald
targets for the following one! Dorothy Richardson is another
writer whose books Randolph brought to me, and nobody that has grown
up under the influence of Joyce and Proust can realize how original
she, who preceded them both, appeared to the young people of our
generation. Henry James, Dostoevsky, Nietszche were all shared en-
thusiasms of ours. Veblen, Freud, and Adler we read at the same
time, and I remember Randolph coming into my room with a copy of
Adler under his arm, and saying with a look both grim and rueful,
"He has described me exactly." We had both read -- struggled
with would be more appropriate for me -- Marx before we knew one
another, and Bergson's _Creative Evolution_ as well, which he re-
ferred to frequently when he distinguished between qualitative
and quantitative experience, the Prejudice sense; Bertrand
Russell's, _A Free Man's Worship_, had a penetrating effect on the
young radicals of our day, as did Professor Beard's _Economic In-
terpretation of the Constitution_, and Randolph always retained his
fearless and
fealty for this/magnanimous historian, whose generosity, and that
of his wife, Mary Beard, I received intimate knowledge of when, in
my suffrage days, they entertained me with such inspiring hos-
pitality in their summer home in New Milford, Conn.

It would be tempting to continue my reminiscences in the
present vein, but even at best I should be able to give small in-
dication of Randolph's contacts and intellectual interests. Many
of his friends I never knew, and it was only after his death that

I came fully to realize how wide his net had been cast, or rather
how many there had been, especially among the young, to turn with
their hopes and their fears, their enthusiasms and their rebellions
to this man, both so vulnerable and so intrepid, who had always
remained faithful to the words written in one of his earliest es-
says in the first flush of his youth: "Society . . . is one vast
conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes, and
then placing it in the most convenient niche it has. But for us,
not the niche but the open road, with the spirit always traveling,
always criticizing, always learning, always escaping the pressures
that threaten its integrity. With its own fresh power it will
keep true to the journey's end."

Chapter X

Love Like a Shadow Flies

From Paris Randolph had written to his friend, Simon Pelham Barr: "This purely spiritual ideal of love with which English literature has perverted Anglo-Saxondom I cannot understand. Whitman . . . is the glorious prophet of the true and perfect fusion of spiritual and physical camaraderie. It is a very high and perhaps impossible ideal, much higher than either of the separate ones, one of which deludes and tortures, and the other of which satiates and palls . . . You make me seem suddenly very old and bitterly handicapped and foolish to have any dreams left of the perfect comrade who is, I suppose, the deepest craving of my soul. It is her I write to, meet casually in strange faces in the street, touch in novels, feel beside me in serene vistas and city landscapes, grasp in my dreams. She wears a thousand different masks, and eludes me ever. In half a dozen warm friends the mask is very thin, but it is always a mask. To touch it chills my blood, and I am touching it constantly when my eager exasperated curiosity about all her comings and goings, my jealous desire to envisage all her life, meets nothing but cool, kindly response."

And to me he had written at about the same time: "About the comradeship of men and women, I have a few such wonderful women friends that I begin to think that perfect play of idea and appreciation is making an ideal real, -- when up springs eternal, invariable desire, the realization of which, inhibited to me, sets the old problem recurring poignantly, and makes me wonder whether Shaw's preface to "Getting Married" is not the profoundest and wisest word on the matter ever written. It is a subject to make one's

thoughts, indeed, go round and round without satisfaction, and par-
ticularly when one is a man, and a man cruelly blasted by powers
that brought him into the world in a way that makes him both impossible
to be desired and yet -- cruel irony that wise Montaigne knew
about -- doubly endowed with desire. Give him an extreme fastidious-
ness of idealism, and you have a soul that should satisfy the most
ironical of the Gods. Encase that soul, which is myself, in Puritan
morality and you produce a refined species of spiritual torture, which
is relieved only by demands and appeals, fortunately strong, of
philosophy and music and heaven-sent irony which softens and heals
the wounds. But, to complete the job, make him poor and deny him
the thorough satisfaction of the higher appeals, deny him steady
work and thus make easy the sway of desire, and you force all his
self-impelled action, all his thinking and constructive work to be
done in hampering struggle with this unrealized desire, which yet
-- another irony -- colors all his appreciations, motivates his love
of personality, and fills his life with a kind of smouldering
beauty. This is a complete, if perhaps too dark picture. But like
many things in life it and the other side are true.

"So much of the cruelty of human relations seems to spring
from the unequal endowment of desire and appreciation in men and
women, and this arises largely from the inequalities of position
and social milieu. That is why . . . the feminist movement is so
inspiring, for it is going, I hope, to assert the feminine point
of view -- the more personal, social, emotional attitude toward
things, and so soften the crudities of this hard, hierarchical,
over-organized, anarchic, -- in the sense of split-up into uncom-

108

prehending groups -- civilization which masculine domination has
created in Anglo-Saxondom."

In Randolph's life, girls Beckoned or they eluded. He
could charm them to him at any moment by his audacious thought and
his power of revealing them to themselves, but he had only to ven-
ture an inch over a forbidden line to have them fly from him like
shy birds startled from their leafy bower. His capacity for suffering,
his hunger for love, the inflammability of his senses, the fastid-
iousness of his taste, the loneliness of his situation, the delicacy
and depth of his affections -- these are, I think, what few of his
friends ever fully realized.

In a long dramatic poem, a very early work never published,
Randolph reveals in the person of a poet seated at a piano finishing
the last measures of a Bach capriccio, his own secret longings.

To Myrrah, who represents for him "spiritual love", the poet says:

When I play to you
Life does take
That cool and luminous current.
I am like an evening in the Parthenon,
Where the pure, irrevocable ruins
Still guard the soul of clarity and beauty
That was Greece.

Apris enters dancing on to the stage in a long red robe. Her
features resemble those of Myrrah, but her eyes are shining, she is
panting, her hair in disorder, her cheeks flushed, and she Casts upon
the poet her carnal spell:

What is there good upon the earth
But love and warm flesh
And clinging embraces?

Now Myrrah, goaded by the sight of her rival, undergoes a
transformation, and with her "luminous intellect" she is made to
combine the dizzy allurements of the flesh. The poem culminates

with their sinking voluptuously into one another's arms, while
Myrrah murmurs,

This is the major chord,
The love of the body and the love of the soul,
Apris has opened your heart
Close it not to me.

It is a naïve presentation, but the ideal was one that through
all the thwartings he was to encounter he never abandoned. It
was to exceptional girls ~~anix~~ that he was attracted. He fed their
minds, wooed them with his music, gave them good advice, and his
reward was a friendly, gentle evasiveness, or they melted alto-
gether from his horizon.

"There was a girl from North Dakota up at Barnard", [he writes
to Miss Sergeant] who was exactly this poem" -- *Prairie Spring* by
Willa Cather -- "glowing and earthy and passionately intelligent,
one of the most beautiful persons I have ever looked upon." And he
goes on to express the difficulty he has in "disentangling" such
persons from his emotions. This girl never ~~anxiously~~ suspected
the ~~feeling~~ she had aroused in him, taking it for granted that his
handicaps precluded him from "falling in love".

When he did at last fall seriously, desperately, into this un-
comfortable state, it was with a girl whose peculiar blend of imagi-
native compassion and almost morbid self-depraisal caused her
to suppress for a time her true feelings. To me he wrote during
this crisis, "My spirit will be torn and torn until I decide the
pursuit is quite hopeless . . . the poignant thing is to have
glimpsed it and lost it."

The best cure for an unrequited love is to transfer the af-
fections elsewhere. I have in a previous chapter referred to
two friends of Randolph's who came to play a critical part in

his life. Agnes de Lima, with her Latin charm and her rich, warm, magnanimous nature welcomed him to her apartment on West 10th Street where, in spite of her pressing public responsibilities, she was never too busy to prepare a delicious dinner for her friends, or too weary to enliven them with her contagious gaiety. She was interested in education and had been first attracted to Randolph by reading his articles in the *New Republic*. With her was living Esther Cornell, a girl with Irish green-blue eyes and hair like spider web filaments of shimmering copper gold, bewitchingly provocative and provokingly enigmatic. Like many beautiful women, uncertain of their intellectual powers, she had an exasperated respect for things of the mind. From the first she was held in thrall by Randolph's wit, his culture, his disturbing insights, his easy mingling with men and women of note, his bold and original attacks on institutions it had never occured to her to question. He initiated her into entirely new realms of thought, took her out of her depths, liberated her imagination, and he was so charming a companion, so appreciative, so entertaining, so unpredictable.

It was a singular courtship, Randolph holding his breath, hardly daring to credit that a girl of her attractiveness, so much courted -- one young man is said to have committed suicide for love of her -- could come really to care for him; and she, advancing and receding, drawing back, beguiled and reluctant, de-voted yet evasive, profoundly unsettled in her own heart yet in-creasingly entangled and dependent on his adoration.

Some of the quality of their relationship may be gathered from the few letters of his to her that remain: "I don't know whether to enjoy the full implications of what you told me on

111

Sunday. It would be so very easy for me to delude myself into think-
ing that you cared for me more constantly than you do, and really
even imagined marrying me. When I come to my senses it seems gro-
teque for me to imagine your being willing. You are so radiantly
adequate for any fortune. There is nothing I would not wish for
you. But there is also nothing I would not wish for myself. And
I go right on having delusions of grandeur that you could lofe me
and be happy with me. All my life I have alternated delusions of
greatness with the most cowering and abject feeling of worthless-
ness. I turn cold when I think that some day you might find me
out and drive me into this latter state again. But sometimes my
society seems to keep you in a low lying state. Oh, what an ad-
venture it would be to try to get the most out of life together!
We could be very wise, and we are already so very intelligent and
so very reasonable. . . I really get a physical sensation from
your intelligence, your arrested glowing inquiring look that makes
me feel a flexible, poised instrument within. For you do under-
stand when you will -- and that is what counts. Your quality means
light and air to me."

. . . . . . . . .

"I am determined that you shall not forget me. If necessary
I will write to you all the time. It is far more uncomfortable
to be away from you this time . . . I take a far less fatalistic
attitude towards your fading away out of my life. When I was in
Boston it seemed too much to expect that you wouldn't keep out
of it. It was safer to hold my breath. But when I got back I
found you so very much more caring than I had dared to hope. And

now I find I can't hold my breath this time. I'm becoming horribly
afraid of boring you. I have pictures of you gradually receding
from me, gently and tenderly perhaps, but still receding, when
you find the qualities you imagined in me aren't there, and my
wickedness seems all predominant. . . If I emphasize my wickedness
it is only because my special circumstances make me more suspicious
of being understood and responded to in that way. Other people
would take things for granted, but I have always to be convinced
anew. I don't think my spirit is naturally roaming, but it just
has had to be restless because it does so awfully want an abiding
place and has not found it. Or if it did it was torn and harried
and treated more like a wayfarer taken in for the night than the
friend found at last. And until it finds such gay peace with you
that I cannot imagine it's going unless you expelled it. . . You
must like me a great deal, and yet my sober reason balks at imagin-
ing that you could like me enough. And yet I have become so strangely
unflustered about you. I am feeding on the illusion that, even
if you didn't straighten out all your complications and we stayed
in this wistful borderland, you wouldn't recede so long as I was
fair and giving, ♃ and I should be. I have to think for myself.
Well, can I live on that? And it doesn't seem as if I couldn't
for awhile. That is, if you aren't going to try to forget me."

This letter was written in the late winter of 1916, and he
had already hinted to his mother and Natalie the possibility of
his marriage. I recall his telling me that he had consulted a
doctor about marriage, fearing lest he might carry still the
tuberculous germs that had caused the curvature to his spine. This
doctor had apparently reassured him.

113

In the matter of his love, Randolph confessed, he was
more apt to be exhilarated than happy, and there were long
periods when his confidence entirely forsook him. He did
not feel at all assured, indeed, until shortly before his death
that the marriage would, in very truth, ever take place.

## Chapter XI
### Summer in Caldwell

When, in the summer of 1916, Randolph was invited to share a house -- advertised by its owner as "the home of simple elegance" -- with his friends, Agnes and Esther, he consented with alacrity. Another unusually attractive young woman, Miss Frances Anderson, on the staff of the New Republic, joined them and he found himself surrounded by three most attractive hand maidens. To add to the last touch, a perfect coloured cook, who always referred deferentially to him as "the Master", had been a legacy with the house. There was every comfort, indeed every luxury -- and every temptation as well, including a Chickering grand piano -- and the days were hot and enervating. "I meant to write a book", he tells Miss Sergeant, "and here I am living just as intensely and imaginatively as ever in the muddle of last year's life."

To heap temptation upon temptation their house, wrapped round with honeysuckle vines that gave out so intoxicating a scent in the sultry summer evenings, became a centre of attraction for week end visitors, including some of the editors of, and contributors to, the New Republic, and the nervous energy and intellectual vivacity that might have gone into writing were dissipated in discussions where Randolph was so much in his element.

This was a situation too delightful to last for long and in the autumn he found himself once more in his chronic state of homelessness and uncertainty. [To Miss Sergeant he writes:] "The New Republic which never knew quite what to do with me is getting

restive under the burden of paying me a hundred dollars a month
-- mere living wage -- for work they can't find space for. So
my "job" is trembling . . . If I was in Europe, there are a
thousand little hotels where I could go peacefully and live alone.
But in this country is there one single place where I could go
that I could afford where I wouldn't die of sheer nervousness?
. . . Life is always tugging at my moorings and calling my adven-
turousness out to sea. I just get reconciled to riding safely
at anchor when something happens. And my last thrilling run be-
fore the glowering storm leaves me hopelessly desiring" -- this
is an allusion to Esther -- "I'm afraid what I shall probably have
to do, however, is to return to Greenwich Village, but take my-
self austerely in hand, live a Spartan life alone, deprive myself
of my piano, turn myself into a journalist trying to cling to
the New Republic by my wits. I think I can do this, but it will
be hard . . . I have been besieging Alvin Johnson and others
to get me axjuk teaching jobs, but I never get anything I ap-
ply for. I seem to be permanently side-tracked from activity,
and not quite able to make my private side-tracked career."

Mr. Ellery Sedgwick thought that Randolph Bourne's em-
ployers "constantly high-hatted him". It is perhaps not quite
as simple as that. Certainly no one in authority, familiar
with his krikkiant attainments, could have doubted his capacity
to fill any teaching position brilliantly. But his physical
handicap, combined with his subversive views, could, whatever
his friends might do to push his interests, hardly have failed
to prejudice against him the final arbiters of any solid aca-

amedic body of learning. He had struck the dangerous note at Columbia when he had brought notoriety to the university by his plea to raise the pay of scrub women. Worse offences were two character sketches he wrote for the *New Republic*, in one of which he exposed to mockery his late professor of English, and in the other the venerable head of the university itself. Hazlitt's attacks on his adversaries could be countered, for they mentioned names and hit -- however savage the blow -- square on the target. But what defence was there against a sting so cunningly done up in a net work of words that the meaning, unmistakable to the initiated, remained ambiguous to the general reader? Yet it cannot be maintained that Randolph's attacks were motivated by personal malice. They were in the interests of the values he upheld, and wherever he saw these values threatened he was out with his Toledo blade. He was too honest a thinker and too good an analyst to get things for long out of focus, and he had, besides, a fund of lively spirits and a natural sweetness of nature that asserted themselves at the first opportunity.

For some weeks, in the late autumn of 1916, while I was paying a visit to my brother in Colorado Springs, Randolph made his headquarters in my rooms in Milligan Place. The little theatres were then much in vogue, and a visit to one of them brought from him the following comments: "Strange how the American spirit cannot see anything between the eternity and sentimentality of bourgeois alliance and the cheapness and vulgarity with which the Washington Square Players poisoned my evening last night through the caricature of love . . . I pray that sometime I shall meet people who have some kind of high ser-

iousness about personal relations which is not metallic and which
fuses the sensuous with it. Probably America doesn't produce it,
or at least pure America, xxxx. then I pray that something will get
me to the continent. . . I am thinking of writing an article on
"The Menace of the Washington Square Players."

This article was duly written and appeared in *The Dial*. "The
current popularity of verse, the vogue of the little theatre and
the little magazines, reveal a public that is almost pathetically
receptive to anything ~~that~~ which has the flavor of the pretension
of literary art. The striving artist is faced with no stony and
uncomprehending world -- almost anyone can win recognition and ad-
miration. But where is the criticism that will discriminate between
what is fresh, sincere, and creative, and what is merely blatantly
rebellious?"

Miss Harriet Monroe, Editor of *Poetry, a Magazine of Verse*,
rushed to the defence of the little theatres and magazines, and
Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks published, on their parts, a joint
reply to Miss Monroe, ending with the words: "~~ movement will pass, but ~~
beauty endures. But age will endure in the beauty it creates, and
that beauty, its essential movement will be expressed. ~~ It
was the old controversy that recurs in every generation between
poetry as a fine art, "shut up in its own world", and poetry as
an expression of life.~~"

On my return from my visit to the West, Randolph went to stay
with Elsie Clews Parsons. "Here I forget all my troubles", [he writes
to me] "write serenely, and endow myself with a mood which
I always think is going to carry permanently over when I get back
. . . I am trying to enjoy the present and not look ahead into my

futureless future. I must always expect to be poor and unloved and obscure. I shall probably have enough to be thankful for if I am warm and fed, and may creep into the public library now and then to read with the other forlorn, poor, and obscure ... You are right. Poverty is a hideous thing. Not to have enough to command the resources of mere getting around, of having what you need is appalling. And still worse to have the slender minimum resources that you have so uncertain. One takes a certain satisfaction, I suppose, in the discovery that one's problems are hopeless. When one has decided that, then they become interesting as problems, as intricate designs which one can study out and comprehend, though one can't take them to pieces."

An invitation to address the Harvard Menorah Society took him to Boston where he stayed with his friend, Mrs. E.H. James, in Milton. "I was introduced in the most cosmic terms", he writes to me of this meeting; "Never have I ever conceived of myself such an international figure, and the reverential awe that surrounded me was thickly oppressive. My Atlantic article was the basis of the invitation, and I find it still reverberating around these parts. I am enjoying myself so much that I am thinking of coming to Cambridge for the winter. ... I really must have a complex on New York, for when I get away, I have an entirely new sense of freedom and command of my own resources. I pick up new acquaintances and converse with ease. Here I am seeing some of the N.R.'s friends, who terrify me when I see them in New York but who make me wholly buoyant here. Felix Frankfurter, for instance, who teaches law at Harvard; Harold Laski, an Oxford Jew, now teaching history at Harvard ... an incredibly brilliant specimen of the young English

radical school. These two with W.L. (Walter Lippmann) make up
a Jewish trinity which is the wonder of the world, or at least
of my world. . . Boston seems so smiling and restful and yet
modernly intelligent. I lose all that hectic, anxious note of
New York. People have much more time. One feels so much more
of a person. And then the eye is constantly charmed by noble
old houses and gracious expanses and wonderful white steeples.
Milton is the last word in patrician dignity and gets away with
it without seeming stodgy. Mrs. James you should know -- the
bluest Boston blood, serious almost tragic feeling, socialistic,
Cosmopolitan, with little of the intellectual training to carry
it off, yet with a sheer nobility of emotion really doing it.
She is starting a socialistic salon to discuss the Industrial
Relations Report. My relatively greater acquaintance with con-
crete things, the placing of people and books, makes me a little
fountain of light."

From Boston he went to Hampton, Virginia to visit his
sister and brother-in-law, the Rev. Laurence Fenninger, who was
chaplain at the Institute for Colored Peoplex there. "Such
weather I have never been able to dream of," [he writes to Esther
Cornell,] "Soft cloudless skies, the temperature exactly neither
too warm nor too cool, a hint of sea air. I could not ask for
anything better. Autos here are plentiful and the people lei-
surely. The other day we had a pleasant ride in the sunset, white
straggling roads with negroes going home from work, flat ploughed
country dotted with cedar clumps against the broom. The shining
magnolias and live oaks give a fine greenness to the landscape
and make winter seem only a temporary doze."

120

It was during this visit that Randolph wrote his essay on Cardinal Newman, contained in *The History of a Literary Radical*.

From Hartsdale, New York, where he went on his return from the South for a short stay with Miss de Lima and Miss Cornell, he sends to Miss Sergeant a vivid description of Hampton Institute.

"Since I left Milton I have been off to Virginia and back. Hampton is a most interesting school to look at, and a Utopia of a place to live in. My sister's husband is the liveliest kind of a modern chaplain, very modern in his theology and sociology. They have a charming new home and a marvellous baby. All sorts of grateful negro slaves, earning their way through school by labor; community heating plant; community restaurant if you want it; illimitable food raised on the model farm as part of the education purveyed; charming water front and old houses: place and the knowledge that you are in the only school I know of where *practically everything* is worth the doing and all the energy goes into living value. The ubiquitous Flexner has rightly discovered in it an example of his 'modern school', and is about to make it his own after he finishes Gary.

"I take very kindly to the black man, and took great delight in my sister's inviting the black commandant and his wife to dinner. I think the Southern white man's policy of keeping down a race whose infectious personal qualities he never was really able to resist is the least defensible thing in the world. 'The white race had an instinctive personal antipathy to the' -- and yet fills Southern homes with black servants, gives its children to black women to nurse, fornicates with them, and altogether admits the black race constantly to about as human and personal relationships

122

and I have had three delightful days walking along Cape Cod, and
are now immured for a few days in this questionably delightful
place, where Greenwich Villagers are as thick as the mosquitoes.
On a station platform en route we met your friend Griffen Barry,
whom Brooks knew. Mary Heaton Vorse is here, with an old house
of her own. Susan Glaspell has another. Donald Tucker is writing
his history of co-operative banking. What's the difference? I
long for a solitary sand-dune. But we had to see Provincetown, and
we are romantically settled high up over the water, overlooking
the water. Brooks is in the next room leading "la vie litteraire"
with many groans . . ."

To Agnes de Lima he wrote from Hampton, where he paid another
visit in September: "Brooks has gone back after a very rarified
two weeks . . . We met a charming couple called the Ordway Teads
who would be perfect for a colony and are keen for it and whom I
wish to get for that farm which I go right on believing Esther
is going to manage. Brooks and I did a lot of enthusiastic talking
about it, and it seems to be our salvation. We have a nucleus in
the Brooks and Teads. We could probably rent an old house with
ten acres of land in Westchester. We could afford an expensive
cook and perhaps a community auto. Then we could add people in
the summer . . . The possibilities are endless . . . I should be
back in White Plains looking for houses. My imagination takes
wing . . . and I am already recovered from my depression."
This scheme, unfortunately, XXXXXXXXXXXX never materialized.

Chapter X/II

A Brave Choice

A modicum of security, a congenial friend, and pleasant surroundings seldom failed to restore Randolph's spirits. Part of the summer of 1918 he spent in Sound Beach with the Brooks beginning a novel and working on a French translation which Eleanor Brooks had been commissioned to do, and which she magnanimously shared with him in order to help him financially. Since March, 1917, he had been a contributing editor to *The Dial*, now transferred from its headquarters in Chicago to New York, with Martyn Johnson as Manager and Harold Stearns as editor.

"Am I missing much in not being round for *The Dial* debut?" he writes to me from Sound Beach. "Harold as a dude must be an even more eccentric spectacle than as Chatterton or Francis Thompson . . . Your salon is still the center of all intellectual life apparently . . . I shall be turned out of this little paradise next week and Heaven knows where I shall go then. . . Nothing but work I see ahead of me now. If I could always work under the pleasant conditions I am working under now, I should want nothing more in life."

Randolph Bourne's attraction for his friends may be somewhat judged by the manner in which they put themselves out for him. In this case it was James Oppenheim and Dr. Florence Hinkle who discovered a place near them in Washington, Conn. "I begin to feel a little like a parasite", he writes to me, "enjoying the hospitality of this youngish lady I have never met before . . .

Next week I am going to be left here by my hostess who returns for three weeks to her family. The farmers are to take care of me, and Oppenheim and Dr. Hinkle are not far away. But I expect to expire of melancholy and be driven away from this lovely country."

It was soon after this, in the early autumn of 1918, when his intransigent stand on the war had caused the Department of Justice to make inquiries about him, that Randolph went on his famous walking expedition with his two friends, Agnes and Esther. The nights they had planned to spend in small wayside inns, and their goal was Martha's Vineyard.

One early twilight evening, they were enjoying a stroll along a deserted rock-strewn beach at Cos Cob, Conn., when it came into Esther's head to practise some of the steps of rythmic dancing she had been recently learning, and she began to leap from rock to rock, her arms waving in unison with her body. Suddenly, to Randolph's alarm, he caught sight of a gun boat in the bay. "Don't do that", he warned her", but this seemed to spur her to even greater abandon, until, to the dismay of all three, they saw the boat swerve abruptly round and move slowly along with them as they walked.

At Martha's Vineyard Miss de Lima received a telegram calling her back to New York, and soon after her departure Randolph and Esther were halted in the street by a naval officer, closely questioned, their papers examined, and the fact commented upon that one of their party was no longer with them. The next day this same officer accompanied a much chastened young woman, and a very agitated young man to Boston from where they were in-

tending to travel back to New York. Upon reaching the station, Esther, with her most irresistible charm, suggested that they all have lunch together. The result was, that after half an hour's subjection to her railleries, the young officer's defences melted completely away, and turning with a grin to Randolph, he said, "How comes it you can get <u>two</u> girls to walk with you? I can't even get one." Later they heard him mutter into the telephone -- "Just a couple a nuts."

This incident was amusing in retrospect, but it had a sin-
ister foundation and added fuel to Randolph's apprehensions.

Mr. Sedgwick, in his engaging autobiography, <u>A Happy Profession</u>, concludes his sympathetic references to Randolph Bourne with the words: "Had he (R.B.) been born a Valentine instead of an Orson, the milk within him would not have curdled. He might even have lived to be a reactionary." The comparison is puzzling, for it is <u>unrelated</u> of being brought up in a privileged environment, that makes a man reactionary. What turned Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a great aristocrat, and, according to Lady Oxford, the handsomest man in England, into a rebel against his nation and his class, and Cunningham Grahame the same, and Bertrand Russell, this son of an Earl, who went to prison for his "sour" opinions during the first world war, and Sir Osbert Sitwell, that staunch fighter for lost causes, and our own Jack Reed, brought up in plenty, and as handsome as a young Greek athlete in the times of Pericles? It is always tempting to attribute "sourness" to a man whose beliefs go contrary to those of the majority, or, more particularly, to those of the men of prestige, and especially is this the case when his physical disabilities fix him into a popular preconception of "sourness". Sour would,

126

however, be almost too mild a word to describe Randolph's feelings when, after his anti-war articles had been appearing in _the Seven Arts_, he received one of his most accomplished essays (that on Cardinal Newman) back from _the Atlantic Monthly_, with an embarrassed letter from Mr. Sedgwick saying that owing to the objections of subscribers it would be impossible for him to use any of his work until the war was over. Randolph had looked upon Mr. Sedgwick as the father of his literary career, and this was a crushing blow, and seemed to bring home to him in a new and final way the extent of his isolation.

To me he had written in the early days of our correspondence, "I am so sensitive to social milieus that the mere thought of some of my truest and most convinced ideas rubbing up against the contempt of certain of the little groups, university, family, town, etc., makes me turn pale and momentarily wilts the idea. What a shock to realize that I, the preacher of faith to one's inmost truth, am letting these alien standards affect me so savagely". How little are these the words of a "cantankerous" man, who exults in diverging from others!

Like a great tidal wave the war had carried away his ideals, his memories of the Europe he had treasured, his belief in the promise of American life. It placed him in the dilemma of having either to withdraw to that "ivory tower" he had been so studious to undermine, or to stand out alone, an impotent and inglorious figure against the whirling cyclone of American thought. It was this that his conscience exacted of him. As Waldo Frank summed it up: "The war which drove all the world mad including Dewey drove Bourne sane."

127

From Hampton, Va., he had written to me, "I seem to disagree on the war with every rational and benevolent person I meet. I crave some pagan monastery, some 'great good place' where I can go and stay till the war is all over." And to his childhood friend, Everett Benjamin, then serving in France -- "I feel very much secluded from the world, very much out of touch with my times . . . The magazines I write for die violent deaths, and all my thoughts seem unprintable and if I start to write on public affairs I discover that my thoughts are seditious, and if I start to write a novel I discover that my outlook is immoral, if not obscene. What then is a literary man to do if he has to make his living with his pen?"

To the impassioned converts of America's entrance into the war, with their uneasy hearts and their piping hot convictions, Randolph Bourne became more and more inconvenient, until he was at last like a veritable burr sticking to the tender flesh. When, on October 20, 1917, he came out with a strong letter of protest against the dismissal of Professors Dana and Cattell from their teaching posts at Columbia because of their opposition to the war, his fate, as far as the New Republic was concerned, was virtually sealed, though his footing there had been for some time precarious, and had it not been for Mr. Croly's benevolent interest in him, he might not have held it as long as he did.

It was now to the Seven Arts, this group of young men led by Waldo Frank and James Oppenheim, with Van Wyck Brooks, Louis Untermeyer, and Paul Rosenfeld on the editorial staff, that he turned, and it was in this magazine -- to come, alas! like so many other brave experiments in the arts, to so untimely an end --

that his most subversive and damaging articles appeared, articles
that stiffened the resolution of young people in all parts of the
country. Randolph's reply to his assailants was always to think
more deeply, more clearly. Thought was his arsenal where he sharp-
ened and burnished his weapons for battle. "All that I hate now",
he wrote to a friend, "Is not opposing ideas but muddiness of
thinking." As Charles A. Madison has emphasized, "His mind was
never clearer, his logic never keener or more eloquent." In a
review of a book by Hugo Munsterberg — *The War and America* —
that appeared as early as Nov. 28, 1914 — he had written:
"From a psychological point of view this war presents a problem
in mass action and mass sentiment such as the world has rarely
seen. It is only through a psychological interpretation that we
shall be able to explain satisfactorily to ourselves the origin
and machinery of all this bewildering madness . . . One recalls
with difficulty any serious attempt of a scientific mind to put
into intellectual order the personal or social motives, instincts,
emotions, interests, customs, leadership, mass suggestions, group
antagonisms and co-operations that have produced the war or are
likely to result from it . . . The only contribution most of us
can make towards the present tragic occasion is a clear and reso-
lute understanding of its human and social significance. We want
an analysis of the social and psychological influences that have
produced the *war* which is like any other result from a contrasting
civilizations that now purport to be fighting each other . . .
We want to know the connection between the initiating and di-
recting groups in the different countries and the rushing de-
lirious masses . . . We want, in other words, an orderly plotting