Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/651

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PAUL ROSENFELD
555

once they were taken, then, for some reason, it did not seem so wrong a thing at all. For, the "Yes" of America to the democratic ideal, to liberty of individual development, to freedom from ancient tyrannies, in the most of cases, had never been given from the centre of the being. It had been an assent given to something for the reason that this something existed, or seemed to exist, or seemed destined to exist. And now, since the stream commenced flowing away from this thing; since militarism, nationalism, patriotism, state mysticism, were coming to stand in its place, assent to the successor came quite as readily. No principles stood like steel girders in a conflagration. But in a few noble men and women, the crisis encountered a resistant force; in one man, at the very least, a force so intense that, like Greek fire, it flamed the fiercer for the water hurled upon it. In Bourne it came upon a passionate love of the image of freedom. It came upon a being given up entirely in passion for freedom for growth for himself and other people; in desire for free play to all the world, the five continents and seven seas, to expand human nature in numberless and even conflicting directions. It came in Bourne upon one Anglo-Saxon American, at least, who was not as yet ready to renounce the Englishman's heritage of liberty; an Anglo-Saxon American in whom there still burnt high the faith in the variations of character through self-reliance and perfection by standards voluntarily assumed that had once made the rebellions against the authority of Archbishop Laud and against the Divine Right of King George III. This passion so "nineteenth-century," as Bourne himself used ruefully to say, would not drop its arms since the battle was commencing to go against it, and fall to dreaming of an international congress of young radicals to follow upon the war when the liberal forces were going down in defeat. It was aggressive, being intense; summoned itself to ever greater effort since the house was afire at all corners. It defended, it glorified, it tried to summon men back to their allegiance to its object. In the midst of the mêlée, like the passion of a great European contemporary, it asserted in proud faithfulness, its ideal. The war had brought into play another of these beings who in defending their cause defended that of every man.

The age-old desire for the release of the capacities for impassioned living pent in the human frame, which spoke through Ran-