Randolph Silliman Bourne

“ Europe is to us the land of history, of mellow tradition, of the arts and graces of life, of the best that has been said and thought in the world. To Europe we are the land of crude racial chaos, of skyscrapers and bluff, of millionaires and “bosses.” A French philosopher visits us, and we are all eagerness to get from him an orientation in all that is moving in the world of thought across the seas. But does he ask about our philosophy, does he seek an orientation in the American thought of the day? ”

“ Aunt Nan and Garna were away for a vacation. The world was a great vacuum with nothing to experience and nothing to do.
And if a summer afternoon could produce so appalling a sense of eternity, what must heaven be like, where you went so infallibly when you were dead? Either because lovely Garna and mild Miss Fogg had kept Gilbert from the terrors of hell, or it was his natural ego, it never occurred to him that he was not destined for heaven, or that there was any way of avoiding it. And the thought of eternal life seemed to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. ”

“ He is at great pains to tell us that the Church is infallible only in her expressly declared doctrine. It is only over a few and definite dogmas that she presides infallibly. You surrender to infallibility only those cosmic ideas it would do you no good to talk of anyway. In the vast overflowing world of urgent practical life you are free to speculate as you will. Underneath the eternal serene of dogma is the darting vivid web of casuistry. Relieved of the inanity of theological discussion, the Catholic may use his intellect on the human world about him. ”

“ We must see if the lesson of the war has not been for hundreds of these later Americans a vivid realization of their trans-nationality, a new consciousness of what America means to them as a citizenship in the world. It is the vague historic idealisms which have provided the fuel for the European flame. Our American ideal can make no progress until we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.
All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community. ”

“ We were to acquire culture at any cost, and we had no doubt that we had discovered the royal road to it. We followed it, at any rate, with eye single to the goal. The naturally sensitive, who really found in the European literature and arts some sort of spiritual nourishment, set the pace, and the crowd followed at their heels.
This cultural humility of ours astonished and still astonishes Europe. In England, where “culture” is taken very frivolously, the bated breath of the American, when he speaks of Shakespeare or Tennyson or Browning, is always cause for amusement. ”

“ Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus’s family was away, Garna and Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew that was as big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for your feet. In front of you was the clock, the face of which you could not see, for it looked out straight towards the minister, but whose ticking you could hear. Gilbert felt very public and self-conscious when he sat there, under the high ceiling, with two long arms of the gallery, crowded with its two tiers of people, stretching away on either hand. ”

“ Bourne had published that radiant book of essays on the Adventure of Life, the Two Generations, the Excitement of Friendship, with its happy and confident suggestion of the present as a sort of transparent veil hung up against the window of some dazzling future, he had had his wanderyear abroad, and had come home with that indescribable air of the scholar-gypsy, his sensibility fresh, clairvoyant, matutinal, a philosopher of the gaya scienza, his hammer poised over the rock of American philistinism, with never a doubt in his heart of the waters of youth imprisoned there. ”

“ Music, poetry, philosophy, have been singularly fertile and new. Strangely enough, American genius has flared forth just in those directions which are least understanded of the people. If the American note is bigness, action, the objective as contrasted with the reflective life, where is the epic expression of this spirit? Our drama and our fiction, the peculiar fields for the expression of action and objectivity, are somehow exactly the fields of the spirit which remain poor and mediocre. ”

“ If he is still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, but of many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown into cosmopolitanism, and his motherhood is not one nation, but all who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit. That vague sympathy which the France of ten years ago was feeling for the world—a sympathy which was drowned in the terrible reality of war—may be the modern American’s, and that in a positive and aggressive sense. If the American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. ”

“ OUR CULTURAL HUMILITY
It was Matthew Arnold, read and reverenced by the generation immediately preceding our own, who set to our eyes a definition and a goal of culture which has become the common property of all our world. To know the best that had been thought and said, to appreciate the master-works which the previous civilizations had produced, to put our minds and appreciations in contact with the great of all ages,—here was a clear ideal which dissolved the mists in which the vaguenesses of culture had been lost. ”

“ Every new generation finds some new way of sacrifice. Every new triumphant assertion of life is counter-balanced by some new denial. In Europe this most proud and lusty young generation goes to its million-headed slaughter, and in America the social consciousness arises to bewilder and deflect the essor towards life. Just when convention seemed to be on the run, and youth seemed to be facing a sane and candid attitude towards sex, we find idealistic girls and men coming out of the colleges to tell us of our social responsibility to the race. ”

“ Such an international art exhibition as was held recently in New York, with the frankly avowed purpose of showing American artists how bad they were in comparison with the modern French, represents an appalling degradation of attitude which would be quite impossible in any other country. Such groveling humility can only have the effect of making us feeble imitators, instead of making us assert, with all the power at our command, the genius and individuality which we already possess in quantity, if we would only see it. ”

“ Europe, we continue to strangle whatever native genius springs up. Is it not a tragedy that the American artist feels the imperative need of foreign approval before he can be assured of his attainment? Through our inability or unwillingness to judge him, through our cultural humility, through our insistence on the objective standard, we drive him to depend on a foreign clientèle, to live even in foreign countries, where taste is more confident of itself and does not require the label, to be assured of the worth of what it appreciates. ”

“ By fixing our eyes humbly on the ages that are past, and on foreign countries, we effectually protect ourselves from that inner taste which is the only sincere “culture.”
Our cultural humility before the civilizations of Europe, then, is the chief obstacle which prevents us from producing any true indigenous culture of our own. I am far from saying, of course, that it is not necessary for our arts to be fertilized by the civilizations of other nations past and present. The culture of Europe has arisen only from such an extensive cross-fertilization in the past. ”

“ Let those who feel the inferiority of the non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant contemplate that region of the States which has remained the most distinctively “American,” the South. Let him ask himself whether he would really like to see the foreign hordes Americanized into such an Americanization. Let him ask himself how superior this native civilization is to the great “alien” states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, where Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans have self-consciously labored to preserve their traditional culture, while being outwardly and satisfactorily American. ”

“ When the doctrine is put forth that in one American flows the mystic blood of all our country’s sacred honor, freedom, and prosperity, so that an injury to him is to be the signal for turning our whole nation into that clan-feud of horror and reprisal which would be war, then we find ourselves back among the musty schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and not in any pragmatic and realistic America of the twentieth century. ”

“ I soon felt an intellectual vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel ideas, that integrated again the spiritual world as I knew it, and wiped out those irrelevances and facetiousnesses and puzzle-interests and sporting attitudes towards life, that so got on one’s nerves in England. Here was also a democracy, not a society all shot into intellectual and social castes, where one lived shut in with ideas and attitudes that, like the proverbial ostrich, annihilated the rest of the world. ”

“ I can feel somewhat of the same excitement in this Dostoevsky stream, though I cannot pretend that the great Russian will ever become a popular American classic. Yet in the progress from Dickens to Dostoevsky there is a symbol of the widening and deepening of the American imagination. We are adrift on a far wider sea than our forefathers. We are far more adventurous in personal relations, far more aware of the bewildering variousness of human nature. If you have once warmed to Dostoevsky, you can never go back to the older classic fiction on which we were brought up. ”

“ One of the basic grievances of this older generation against the younger of to-day, with its social agitation, its religious heresy, its presumptive individuality, its economic restlessness, is that all this makes it uncomfortable. When you have found growing older to be a process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life, it is decidedly disconcerting to have some youngster come along and point out the irreconcilable things in the universe. ”

“ We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. ”

“ That is why good Christian people can never get over the idea that Socialism means simply the triumph of one class over another. To-day the proletarian is down, the capitalist up. To-morrow the proletarian will be up and the capitalist down. To pull down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree is the highest pitch to which Christian ethics ever attained. The failure of the older generation to recognize a higher ethic, the ethic of democracy, is the cause of all the trouble. ”

“ The young men of that time are still a race apart. Through these literary masters they touched the intimate life of literature; they knew Kipling and Stevenson, Arthur Symons and the great Frenchmen, and felt themselves one with the charmed literary brotherhood throughout the world. It was still the time when, free from philosophic or sociologic taint, our American youth was privileged to breathe in from men like Henry van Dyke and Charles Eliot Norton the ideals of the scholar and the gentleman. ”