History of a literary radical, and other essaysBourne, Randolph Silliman
General
History of a literary radical, and other essays
Bourne, Randolph Silliman
American essays -- 20th century
It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this
cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful
purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting, with the study
of modern history and politics, the modern literatures, economic
geography, the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook such as the people
of no other nation of to-day in Europe can possibly secure. 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. His
provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his
imagination.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a
vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among
his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the
acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them
he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the
children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his
old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious
to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so
provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from
the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has
scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes
a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for
unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton
philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world. He
may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all
the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at
least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential
to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western
world of ours from suicide. His new friends have gone through a similar
evolution. America has burned most of the baser metal also from them.
Meeting now with this common American background, all of them may yet
retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and their national
spiritual slants. They are more valuable and interesting to each other
for being different, yet that difference could not be creative were it
not for this new cosmopolitan outlook which America has given them and
which they all equally possess.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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