The History of a Literary Radical. The steps taken before the moment when Bourne became spokesman of moral authority were taken on the ground. Those taken from the hour when America went to war sound from the high bridge where men of stature march. There were only three or four; and then the reverberations ceased. But we know the clang of the stride; and from whence such clangours carry. A man of power had suddenly been co-ordinated in powerful complete release. The rhythm of The Seven Arts essays is freer, stronger, lighter by far than that underlying anything previously written by Bourne. Vanished is every trace of the gingerly Atlantic Monthly style, with its mincingness of persons perpetually afeared of stepping on eggs, vestiges of which still weave through Youth and Life. Vanished is the somewhat thin and colourless, if serviceable style, of The New Republic essays. A spirit has come out of America and stood in the place held at other times by the great humanists. Shod with irony and gay satiric laughter, humble weapons of those who combat with the intellect the beef of humanity, the sappy protagonist youth once again breathes, over a locked and chaotic and mechanized humanity, the sense of the scope and the possibility of life. This is no longer a "Defense of Irony." The soul has entered into iron indeed. It has taken the language of its opponents, their solemn phrases, their mouthings of democracy and liberty and conscience and love, and, tilting them just a little out of plumb, shown in what manner these words conceal from their users their own conduct. In these bright sentences, lyrical with lucid thought, there shine like a rising sun the forces of spiritual release, widening the horizon so piteously shrunken by the war-morale, and filling it again with colours and blooms and significances.
Passion accepted the challenge. Passion gave it back again. Passion for liberty said "No"; said it louder and more angrily than it had said it before the challenge came. All along the line, "Yes" was hastily being substituted for "No." Softly, subtly, insinuatingly, the crisis was stepping up to men, and asking them whether they could not reconsider their language, now that the stream was coursing contrary to them. And the majority of them changed, noble freemen! and for the best of reasons, of course. It was all like William James and the Philippine business. It was wrong to annex the islands before they were actually annexed. But
