Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/646

550 Alongside of himself, he wanted people developing infinite varieties of character, expanding in directions perhaps contrary to his own, for the reason that to such people he could give life, and from them get it in exchange, and through the intercourse grow the larger in himself.

Hence, he had had to suffer long the punishment of hostile indifference and subtle humiliation his environment deals out to rebels such as he. He had had to suffer long from the profoundest loneliness and helplessness; the want of any corroboration of his vague struggling feelings; the want of any insight into his own condition; the want of the immense encouragement which comes from finding a fellow-journeyer. People were afraid of growing and of those who grew. Had but some voice, some book, come at the time and told young Randolph Bourne that his terrible discomfort resulted from the inertia of American civilization, from the resistance of lower-middle-class life to the life of ideas and of spiritual distinction; told him that he suffered because something within him was attempting to start an evolution toward fineness against the weight of society organized for business only, he might not have lost the years of his youth spent in ineffectual groping. He might have found his own way much earlier. But during the nineteen-hundreds, there were no such voices and no such books. There was a thin movement of social uplift. But there was no movement toward spiritual growth; no movement toward a new form of society flowing from the soul. Literature was playing the procurer. Literature was pretending the universal dun was colour of roses; pretending that the stagnation was movement upward into the sunny blue. Literature was content in being mediocre: in being part of the mediocre immobile form. There were no people. There were no individuals in America. The men who were to make that new literature of rebellion and democratic idealism were themselves, like Bourne himself, trying to co-ordinate their faculties in motion. So, the first twenty-three years of Bourne's life went in dazed wandering. The next five or six, better directed though they were, were passed in a half-ignorance of what it was that repressed, and what it was that drove. Bourne felt himself alone at Columbia. He felt himself alone while travelling in Europe as the Gilder Scholar for 1913. It was only during the last four years of his life that he met on the common meeting ground the men who were