8

Black Cosmopolitan

It probably came as a surprise to Mary Locke that her son was taking such an extensive trip at the end of his first term. The previous month she had written and asked for money and he had written back that he was broke. Mary had been strapped for funds since his leaving, since fewer students were coming to the after-school tutoring and music lessons she relied on for extra money. With some justice, she might have felt that given his full scholarship, he could help her out financially and reimburse her for the money she had sent him the previous summer when he could not find work in Cambridge. But Locke’s mind was made up about his vacation: he had sent his mother £18 in October and was not about to sacrifice his vacation with Downes to send her more. And he justified the vacation trip by arguing it was cheaper to live outside of Oxford. In fact, it was: he and Downes were able to board for a pound a week each while living at the Bay View Inn on Jersey. But economizing was not the major motivation. Away from Oxford, he would avoid the southerners and would be able to spend time alone with Downes, his closest friend at Oxford and probably his lover by this time. Perhaps if the affair blossomed on the trip, his creative abilities might flourish, and, in the shadow of “the beautiful cathedrals that we want to see,” he might become a short-story writer and escape an academic career altogether.

True to Locke’s word, he left for London on December 7, where he and Downes stayed again at the Ward Hotel, seeing the sights for five days, until they “crossed the English channel—and such a crossing—a terrible gale—decks awash all the way over—I was not seasick only sick of the sea.” After landing safely, they spent the next three weeks on Jersey, “a beautiful island—cliffs and sun and sea … flowers are blooming here—imagine it,” as he wrote to his mother along with best wishes for a happy Christmas.¹ Locke did not write his mother again until January 3, perhaps a result of Downes’s impatience with Locke’s letter writing. That impatience may signal that Downes saw loosening the umbilical cord with Mary as a condition of their greater intimacy. Locke also may have refrained from writing because there were few interesting sightseeing details to relay to his mother while he was sequestered with Downes on Jersey.

Yet even at this distance Locke remained unconsciously connected with his mother as an incident he relayed to her on January 3, 1908, attests. “I thought of you on New Years Eve—and strange I woke up at 5 a.m., the exact midnight with you [Camden time]—and thought of you—rolled over in a mechanical way and said our New Year’s prayers—stopped my watch—for it was too dark to see the time—and when I awoke next morning found the watch stopped at exactly 5.” After waking up early that morning, he and Downes had gone “for a 12 mile tramp over the Northwestern corner of the island.” They located the romantic Castle Grosnez, but Locke found it “decidedly disappointing.” It was the walk he enjoyed, “one of the best I ever took—we went right cross country—past the beautiful old Medieval manor house of St. Owens,” set against the backdrop of the spectacular surf in the bay. They returned to their hotel in time to gobble down a sumptuous New Year’s dinner “which started the gastronomic orgy” that eventually gave him indigestion. New Year’s evening they packed and, after “a gorgeous lunch” at a French restaurant in the capital city of St. Helier, sailed to the coast of France. The heavy lunch combined with another rough crossing aggravated his stomach distress. Although it was not enough to make him seasick (which Locke boasted he never was), he and Downes remained on the deck during the crossing. They were rewarded with a spectacular sky that “was beautifully blue and spotted with large white sailing clouds—and the sea! It was beautiful—the Breton sea is noted for its emerald green-color and with the gulls and the sunlit green and the white crests of choppy waves to set off the contrast—it was as beautiful a marine picture as I have ever seen.”²

His first trip to the Continent brought out the romantic in Locke and cultivated a different side of his personality. Traveling with his friend Downes opened up his senses to the landscape, castles, flora, and foreign peoples before him. Freed from the constraints of Oxford and race conflict, Locke became intoxicated with the rhythm of traveling and sightseeing, and an uninterrupted love affair with Downes. For the first time in his life, he could be really free in expressing his sexuality, away from the probing glances of acquaintances. That experience ushered in a new consciousness of sexual and artistic freedom that became the touchstone of his lifelong love affair with Europe. Finally, he was enjoying a measure of openness that put him at ease. And face-to-face with the art and culture of Europe, he was at home. He would continually return to Europe to renew that connection and openness to nature and others that occurred on his first trip abroad.

Locke’s mood seemed to sink once they were on the move again. After a rough crossing of the channel, he was angered by the treatment he received from French customs officials. “The French inspector asked me questions as if he thought I was a smuggler and I surly answered non, non and wished I was able to curse him in French—he poked around my trunk and disarranged my things and then passed me.”³ Was this racial? He could not tell and grumbled all the way to their stopping place, the Hotel de l’Universiti in St. Malo. Just off the coast of France in its famous fortress-island city, Locke also had trouble settling his stomach. A “heavy French supper” sent Locke out into the streets looking for pepsin tablets, which he found, “big as a nickel.” After swallowing “one with great difficulty,” he went to bed and was much improved the next day. His mood improved too when Downes and he toured the town of St. Malo:

[It is] a very quaint typically French garrison town and we spent most of the afternoon walking around the ramparts—the town is surrounded by a sturdy medieval wall about twelve or fifteen feet thick overlooking the bay. We did go to the Cathedral church of Saint Vincent—but it is a miserable specimen—the nave is rather old, but they have spoiled it with barbarous additions—among them a spire that must pierce the heavens like a barbed lancet. We walked over to Saint Serran [to the southwest], where there is a Roman basilica style of church[—] much better—we struck it about sunset with the sun streaming like molten gold through some very fine stained glass windows—and some quaint old Breton women (fisherman’s wives I daresay) were praying at the fisherman’s altar. It was a very pretty night.⁴

Here was a nearly perfect aesthetic scene for a young man on his Grand Tour of France—a medieval church, a Roman town, and picturesque peasant women kneeling in prayer.

Locke and Downes left St. Malo on January 4 for Dol, another “quaint medieval town with a good Gothic cathedral,” and then hurried on to Dinan, the prettiest of Brittany’s medieval towns. There they hunted down its cathedral and “fine chateau,” worked their way east, visited Mont St. Michel and Coutances, and another “fine Gothic cathedral,” and then prepared to go on to Cherbourg before returning to England.⁵ Although Paris was their stated destination, no mention of it appears in his few surviving letters. Interestingly, as they began their return to England, the volume of his letters to Mary Locke increased. He wrote just before crossing the channel that he hoped to get “a bigger boat and better weather” for their return trip, for he had decided that traveling on the small boat had caused him “too much nervous tension and strain.”⁶ On the return, however, he experienced considerable rocking and became seriously seasick. One wonders if it was the crossing or the prospect of returning to Oxford that really sickened him.

The month-long trip had been a success, not only because of what it did to achieve with Downes a level of intimacy that may have rivaled what he shared with his mother. Mary Locke seemed to sense that Downes was becoming a competitor for her son’s attentions when she wrote to Locke after his return, “Oxford must be the most formal of places and I am glad you could escape and live your own life for a time—I am greatly indebted to Downes—but I may have cause to regret his kindness, should he develop you into a first class artist—and—I have to undergo the penalty of seeing my handsome (3) walls decorated with your sketches.”⁷ She could see that Downes was influencing her son toward aestheticism and the life of drift and artistry that came with it. As any mature woman of her time knew, that was a dangerous direction for a young man. Not only was it irresponsible and potentially immoral but also it was not very practical as a career for a Black intellectual. Mary Locke could be enthusiastic about the Rhodes Scholarship because of the honor that came with this “holiday” from responsible work; but she was also concerned that her son would become so intoxicated with European aestheticism that he would lose all professional aspiration. Her worries were not groundless. As Locke later remarked about his Rhodes Scholarship years in his second Harvard Class report, “instead of transferring my allegiance from scholarships to scholarship itself, as would have been best, I temporarily abandoned formal education for the pursuit of culture—yet fortunately, without money enough to collect blue china.”⁸

But just as significant, the trip had not turned him into a creative writer. Undertaken ostensibly to get some short stories written, none survived the trip and no mention of any completed works appeared in his correspondence. A paradox had emerged that would continue in his mature years: he had difficulty translating the sexual and intellectual freedom he experienced in Europe into creative works of art. Europe opened his mind, but seldom his muse. While Europe seemed to be an essential stimulus, it made Locke content and less interested in work. Whether he knew it or not, Locke needed conflict to be productive; freed in Europe from the kind of race and academic obligations he resented, he simply enjoyed life. Just as important, intimacy with Downes had not translated into the completed short story or novel he had hoped to write while abroad.

Locke returned to Oxford around January 9 and wrote his mother that he planned to remain there before term began and catch up on his reading. He planned to stay at Merton with Downes, but Locke seemed too restless to remain the entire time in Oxford. A letter from Kallen brought an opportunity to escape again: “Dear Locke and Downes, or Downes and Locke etc,” Kallen wrote from London. “Have just returned from Croydon and go to London to live in Toynbee Hall, 28 Commonweal St. until the end of vacation.”⁹ By January 17 Locke was writing his mother on Toynbee Hall stationery that he was back in London, having just spent the night there with Kallen. A letter fragment, also on Toynbee Hall stationery, supplies a clue why he had returned: “Dear Mr. Whitehouse: A sudden panic—about going up to Oxford.” Mr. Whitehouse has disappeared into history, but the letter’s mention of Locke’s “panic” about returning to Oxford signifies he had not completely gotten over the Thanksgiving dinner incident and related conflicts of Oxford the previous term. Plus, he felt more comfortable in London and its more diverse and interesting mix of English culture than in Oxford. A modernist movement in the arts was emerging in London, and Locke met one of its contributors, Jewish modern artist Louis Kronberg, and visited his studio with Downes during this brief stay in London.

On January 18, when Locke returned to Oxford, he was rewarded this time with a letter from his friend Dap Pfromm that announced that Locke had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He wrote his mother exuberantly about his pleasure in receiving the award: “it puts the stamp on me that even Oxford cannot ignore.” Locke confided to his mother that “the one disappointment of Dr. Brandt’s career was that he had not gotten the Phi Beta Kappa key.”¹⁰ Now, Locke had it or would have it as soon as he could raise the money to purchase it. Since he had not yet found his academic niche at Oxford, it was pleasing to have yet another confirmation from Harvard that he was special. It certainly reinforced his status among the other Harvard men with whom he continued to socialize at Oxford. Dap also told him that people at Harvard were still eager for news about him from Oxford. But Locke was not eager to create any. “They needn’t expect anything startling from over here for quite a while. I do feel and have felt ever since I’ve been here that I need a little restful retirement—I would give anything to stay out of the public eye for a year or so for I want to yawn badly. Oxford is a jolly asylum—things that go on in the world are like the far-off rumblings of a volcano or the unrestrained wind—colic of the vulgar.”¹¹

Locke vacillated between his sense of Oxford as a comfortable “asylum” and a cold and insensitive place. When thrown together with other Americans, most of whom he knew from Harvard, his conversation often centered on the comparative advantages of the American and Oxford systems. Invited to tea with Haring on February 13 (along with Downes), Locke recalled afterward, “I asked of Harvard and Oxford contrasts—and as usual Oxford made a very effective background.” Six days later he accepted an invitation to visit the Cairds of Balliol College and jotted on the back of that invitation, “Yesterday I went to lunch with the Cairds[;] they have been very nice … they are Scotch and have all the Scotch heartiness and very little of the Oxford superficiality and insincerity[.]”¹² By the middle of his second term, Locke was becoming a bit cynical about Oxford, perhaps because he was beginning to realize that much of the attention of the first term had been “superficial” interest in him. Prominent people continued to send him invitations; one of the most important that term came from the niece of Alfred Lord Tennyson, who, upon the suggestion of Mrs. Caird, invited Locke to come to tea at her home on Iffley Road. Locke visited her on January 26 and enjoyed himself, as would be expected of one who had devoted so much time and energy to a study of Tennyson in his Bowdoin Prize essay. Yet what could be the long-range benefits of such isolated contacts? In fact, he had gotten the invitation only because Tennyson’s niece was a close friend of Mrs. Caird, already part of his luncheon circle. Locke’s circle of contacts among the British was not expanding. In fact, by the end of the first year, Dicey, Dyer, and Caird would all be dead, and Locke would not be able to replace them with men of equal importance and sensitivity.

Freshmen commoners at Oxford were generally limited in their social opportunities, because they were on the bottom of Oxford’s social hierarchy. They generally socialized with other members of their class in their college. Locke had greater access to clubs at Oxford because his BA from Harvard placed him in a higher class than the typical fresher. Nevertheless, most first-year students centered their social lives in their colleges, and Locke remained something of an outsider in his, because he was older and a Rhodes Scholar. His best opportunity to establish himself in the college came when he was selected to “cox the Togger eight” of his college. The college crew wanted him “because I am so light,” as he notified his mother. But Locke could not swim, and furthermore, he wrote:

[I] could not get ready, with the short notice they gave me, to pass the swimming test. I worked frightfully hard—every morning I went down to the Merton baths and was dangled on the end of a pole and belt, like a scared fish—the swimming master is awfully good. I undressed in the Turkish bath rooms and he took great care I should not get a chill—but I did several times. I really hate the water and am afraid of it—though I can swim a few strokes now and am still taking lessons.¹³

But he had to withdraw after three weeks: not only could he not swim but also he was exhausted by the physical exertion required to prepare for crew, even as a coxswain. “I was breaking under the strain—swimming in the morning—coxing in the afternoon—why I was living either in or on the water or worse had water on the brain so to speak all day long.” An Oxford doctor’s examination confirmed the state of his health: “poorly developed heart and valves, from longstanding heart problems,” concluded Dr. Collier. “How this man got selected a Rhodes Scholar surpasses me.”¹⁴

That he wanted to participate in crew is certain, because, as he noted to his mother, he would have been “entitled to wear my boating uniform and the college arms (white flannels with red braid binding and the college arms embroidered on the breast pocket).” Although Locke tried out again for coxing the following term, his health prevented serious participation. The avenue of athletics, through which many Rhodes Scholars found acceptance in their colleges, was closed to him. Such failures may explain, in part, why Locke remained so critical of college athletics throughout his life. At Oxford his failure at his college athletics confirmed that he was an outsider. Not surprisingly, at the end of his third term, Locke applied for and was granted permission to seek lodgings in town. If he didn’t fit in, it was best to get away from his college and create a place of his own for himself and his friends.

Locke had an energetic circle of English, American, and colonial friends and he generally was content to let common interests dictate those whom he selected as friends. An accomplished classical pianist from his years at Central High, Locke rented a white baby grand piano that brought him into contact with

a most lovable Englishman (a sort of contradiction in terms) but really a thoroughly cultivated classmate named Garratt, whom I hope you’ll meet some day, [who] comes in now and then and plays with me. He plays the clarinet—rather well. Its an instrument I can’t tolerate unless played well, but sometimes he pipes like Pan himself and I am learning to play in tune by playing accompaniments.¹⁵

He was even making a few friends among the Rhodes Scholars. Samuel Ely Eliot, the son of a Swedenborgian clergyman and a third-year scholar from Oregon, was also a resident of Hertford and went out of his way to befriend Locke. Eliot regularly invited Locke to lunch and by the second term was a regular member of the Downes-Kallen-Locke contingent. But Eliot was the exception: by and large, the Rhodes Scholar community was not Locke’s. He felt comfortable only with a select few—handsome, aesthetic, and homosexual young men. While his homosexuality gave him more access to English males than he would have had otherwise, it did not translate into access to the Eton or Harrow underground of homosexuals at Oxford during his second term.

As the invitations fell off in his second term, the challenge was for him to find friends who could sustain him socially and intellectually through the next two and a half years at Oxford. Of course, his American friends, especially Kallen, continued to provide him access to a broader intellectual circle. During Lent term, Kallen, for example, took Locke to meet Bertrand Russell, whom Kallen had met through William James. Kallen consulted with Russell about epistemology and pragmatism, subjects Kallen was writing about in his dissertation, and he found the Cambridge philosopher an engaging and interesting critic of James’s pragmatism. Kallen also seems to have introduced Locke to F. C. S. Schiller, Oxford’s resident pragmatist. Among the Americans, Locke found support for his criticisms of Oxford and for his sense of himself as an American. He also began to look for ways in which a new conception of American culture might bring greater recognition of the African American contribution. Locke wrote his mother that he had become interested in the music of MacDowell (who had just died, his mother informed him) because Kallen had introduced him to it. In addition to MacDowell, the “Wa Wau people—the society of young American composers” were beginning to interest Locke as they were “trying to found an American school of music on Indian and Negro melodies. I am going to get in close touch with their work,” he wrote his mother. “You know MacDowell and Dvorak were pioneers in the movement.”¹⁶ Either in their company or at their suggestion, Locke’s American friends encouraged him to find examples of cultural pluralism. And Americans were his most constant companions on a daily basis: every Sunday, for example, Downes and Locke attended the Balliol College Musical Society program and often visited Kallen’s rooms before or afterward. On February 9, for example, Kallen had Locke and Downes over for coffee, along with two of his out-of-town guests, one a minister from the United States.

Crucial for Locke during this second Hilary term was to make inroads into another community to sustain him. This he began to find at the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club. The papers often given there were either idealistic proposals for a “World Literature,” as delivered by Queen’s professor H. G. Fieldler in Locke’s second term or self-interested celebrations of emerging national literatures, as delivered by the Norwegian D. B. Burchardt and the Indian Satya Mukerjea that summer term. Burchardt, for example, heralded the “new movement” in Norwegian literature of younger writers who rejected the “problem literature” of Ibsen and instead portrayed the lives and culture of Norwegian people in naturalistic novels and poetry. Mukerjea’s paper claimed that Bankim was a representative artist of a Bengali cultural renaissance with far-reaching effects on Indian and “world literature.” These papers confirmed Locke’s belief that art was a source of national pride and racial renewal, and also, perhaps, that he could blend racial feeling with a personal commitment to a “cosmopolitan” lifestyle through aesthetics. The club seemed to take to him as well. At its March 10, 1908, meeting he was pleasantly surprised to be elected to its executive board.

The most significant friend Locke met through the Cosmopolitan Club that Hilary term was Percy J. Philip, then club secretary. In a March letter to his mother, Locke confided:

I see I have begun a letter on this sheet to Philip—the Scotchman. Have I told you of him? I will—I met him through the Cosmopolitan Club. He is one of the best finds yet. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University who is helping Dr. Murray edit the New Oxford dictionary. I told you about going to see the workshop didn’t I? Well, Philip is a charming fellow—with lots of experience. He has tramped about, lived a regular Bohemian life for several years though he is the youngest son of a Covenanter Scotch family, the very best type of democratic aristocrat. He is just a bit younger than me though I mistook him for much older. Downes, he, and I go out walking almost every Sunday—he is a capital fellow for tramping—a disciple of Thoreau.¹⁷

Some of that “bohemianism” surfaced in a paper Philip read before the club that praised Thoreau for “advocating absolute independence from tradition and from convention in the choice of his career by every individual.” Philip had put Thoreau’s experiment into practice, according to Locke, for “he has spent days and nights in the open air—I think I shall go camping with him sometime—I should feel safe with him—a strange pair we should make though—he is a giant of a sandy-haired Scotchman.” Philip and Locke would become even closer in the next term when Philip would enlist Locke to take over the editing of the first issue of the club’s new magazine.

Locke’s friendship with Isaka Seme, another member of the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, also intensified during the spring of 1908. Indeed, by March the Zulu from Swaziland had replaced Harley as Locke’s favorite Black friend at Oxford. As Locke confided to his mother, unlike Harley, Seme was refined and cultured, a thoroughly Anglicized South African. As photographs of Seme from this period show, he was as fond of formal dress as Locke; but he had something Locke lacked—a royal attitude that commanded respect and almost homage, even from Whites. Kallen conveyed something of this playfully in a letter when he asked Locke how “His Majesty Seme” was doing. Although Seme played the role for all it was worth, it was not entirely an act: Seme could convince others that he was royalty, because he had already convinced himself.

Already a graduate of Columbia University, where he had received an AB in 1906, Seme was older than most other students at Oxford and well respected by the members of the Cosmopolitan Club, who elected him treasurer. But Seme had his eye on a higher goal: he planned to start his own African fellowship society, which would present papers to its members, like the Cosmopolitan Club, but whose real purpose would be to bring together persons of African descent in England to work for the redemption of the African continent. A card in Locke’s scrapbooks noted that Locke and Seme “breakfasted” on March 3 and “talked of Tuskegee (Board of Trustees idea).” Seme was already corresponding with Booker T. Washington and had visited Tuskegee, which his cousin attended. Like many other Black South African intellectuals, Seme admired Washington for what he had accomplished at Tuskegee and may have seen it as a model for what he wished to achieve in South Africa. Seme may have hoped that Locke could assist him in gaining Washington’s support for the African Society; at the very least, Locke’s participation in the venture would show that the organization embraced distinguished African Americans. As Seme wrote to Washington on April 15, the African society was to be formed in England because “here are to be found the future leaders of African nations temporarily thrown together and yet coming from widely different sections of that great and unhappy continent[;] and … these men will, in due season, return each to a community that eagerly awaits him and perhaps influence its public opinion.”¹⁸ Seme wanted Washington to endorse the African Union Society, but Washington demurred and wrote back urging that any such organization avoid militancy or violence. Perhaps Washington detected something of the young man’s fiery temperament even at this early stage or that the organization was potentially an African version of the Niagara Movement, the militant Black protest organization founded in 1905 by W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Trotter. Seme would continue to try to win Washington’s support until a meeting in person finally convinced him that it was pointless. Actually, Seme’s movement was closer to the ideology of the Niagara Movement, which also sought to bring together the “future leaders” of the race in a society.

Though Locke disliked militancy and race organizations, he was drawn to Seme and may have been sexually attracted to him, which may have made it easier for Locke to become involved in Seme’s organizational planning. As a cultured Black Edwardian, Seme confirmed Locke’s belief that one did not have to sacrifice personal standards to embark on a career as a Black leader; Seme saw himself as an eventual leader of his people. In addition, through Seme, Locke became aware of the imperialist underpinnings of his sojourn in England and gained a clearer understanding of why he seemed not to fit in in England. Perhaps with Seme, more than anyone else, Locke began to connect the two sides of the Black Victorian legacy in his own experience—a sumptuous comfort and decorous lifestyle on the one hand, and the exploitation of peoples of color around the world on the other. While both were seduced by Edwardian dress, decorum, and decadence, their association reminded each of how personally connected they were to the imperialism they abhorred. More than anyone except Kallen, Seme reminded Locke that he could become a leader of his people and a power to reckon with once he returned home.

During the second week of March, however, Locke was more focused on his vacation plans to return to France with Downes. This time, before departing, Locke held a typical end-of-term dinner with his friends at Buolo, a favorite restaurant of English undergraduates at Oxford. It became an American celebration when Lionel de Fonseka, whom Locke met through the Cosmopolitan Club, was unable to attend because he had already left Oxford. Indeed, the Ceylonese student might have felt out of place among the rakish Americans on March 14.

Saturday night Kallen[,] the Jew Harvard instructor in philosophy who is making such an impression here—Eliot[,] the Rhodes man whom I have told you of—Downes and myself had a splurge dinner at Buolo—we were late getting off—I had been over to Harley’s to tea, and it takes me so long to dress—besides I had to hurry over to Merton to try and put Downes in good humor—he always gets miff[ed] when he has to put on a dress suit—I met him on his way over—with his back collar button undone as usual—well we got off[,] had a good dinner—were considerably boozed and startled ourselves and our neighbors by boarding a tram car, going up top and singing American college songs all the way down the High and over to East Oxford when we went to the East Oxford theatre and amused ourselves by throwing break lump sugar and cheese done up in empty match boxes at the stage … we had a great time—and danced our way back to sober Oxford and serenaded the balcony windows of All Souls and Hertford.¹⁹

Locke could feel good about the term for a number of reasons, especially about his progress in easing the situation with the other Rhodes Scholars.

Needless to say I was late getting up Sunday morning—Downes came over and we went out to tea to Kallen—met some more Rhodes men—they are very nice and cordial, those whom I have met—I have made up my mind to make them come to me—several have asked to meet me—two came round to call a week or so before term end—fortunately I was having Downes and De Fonseka and Garratt to coffee—and I sat them down to coffee and biscuits, port wine and fruit cake as if it were a nightly affair.²⁰

Yet as he made plans to leave on vacation, he could not help acknowledging that the term had not been very productive intellectually. He had a hard time explaining, to his mother and perhaps to himself, just why this was so. “I have been very lazy mentally—the slack of Oxford is very hard to shake off—the effect is purely physical—but it cripples you mentally—the Summer term will be much better—but the weather of the winter term is shocking—fog rain and mist all the week long—not a flake of snow—but not a speck of sunshine. I could not have stood 2 weeks more of it.” Instead, he escaped to London with Downes the day after writing his mother. Kallen, by contrast, stayed behind to finish his doctoral thesis, and de Fonseka planned to rendezvous with them later in Paris.

Before leaving for the Continent, Downes and Locke renewed old acquaintances in London, especially with their painter friend Kronberg. He invited them over for tea one afternoon and promised to meet them in Paris, where he would “show us the life of the Latin Quarter.” After time with Kronberg, Locke and Downes continued their investigation of London sights and culture.

We went to the Empire—a rather trashy Variety Theatre in London—a great resort of the demi-monde on the sea … we were terribly bored with the performance—we went up into the Promenade—all those theatres have promenades where the men and the women parade up and down during the performance. We were enjoying ourselves immensely, laughing at the women, their gay flashy clothes and crude wiles—when we saw a young girl so obviously different from the rest that we immediately decided she must be respectable—yet couldn’t account for her being there. We went up to her—asked her what she was doing there and asked her to come out to supper—and stumbled on this very interesting story. It was quite worth while—either one of us or both of us will put her into a novel yet and told her so. It seems she is the daughter of a Danish nobleman who ran away from home with her tutor at 17—she is not only 18—has of course been deserted and was on the edge—the very edge of the London whirlpool when we chanced along—She is obviously true because we persuaded her to write back home to her parents—wrote a note ourselves and posted the letter ourselves. What do you think of that for an adventure—it fell right into our hands—fake or no fake … it was an interesting story and that’s what we are looking for—strange stories—strange people[—]strange impressions. … We haven’t heard anymore about her and are just as glad of it—to get an inside look at everything without doing ourselves or anyone else any harm that is our problem and our object—a rather cynical attitude is an invariable consequent—but you cannot write without experience and cynicism—self esteem and even a self-centered interest in life are a cheap price to pay for experience.²¹

Like many other young writers of their generation, Locke and Downes shared the idea that experience, especially of the sordid, was essential to modern writing, but one wonders what Mary Locke thought of his “adventure.” Did she approve of her son’s slumming? Was he in England to pick up destitute young women in trashy theaters? Again, it must have raised her concern about Downes’s influence on her son. The episode reveals that another side of Locke’s personality was given free rein in Europe: his attraction to the seamy side of life that stood in sharp contrast to the Victorian pose of the Black Philadelphian. Perhaps such escapades were a needed counterweight to his more rigid, principled, and overly mature side, but it must have seemed to Mary that Locke was concerned with everything but his studies. That was true.

Locke stumbled into a more political adventure when Downes and he visited Toynbee Hall the next evening.

We heard a most excellent debate on socialism and nearly got ourselves into another rich experience. The man Watts, who was to open the debate, hadn’t turned up when we arrived and Harvey, the warden, was quite at a loss what to do—400 working men and boys were already assembled in the Hall. I went into the lavatory to hang up my hat and coat when the door suddenly opened. Harvey had an inspiration: “Locke, won’t you help us out—the speaker hasn’t come—talk to them—about anything in the social line—the race question if you like—they would be interested.” I was in the throes of indecision rather inclining toward not doing it for I [had earlier] heard them rag Kallen who is really a capable speaker—I was in the throes when Mr. Whats his name arrived—I did promise to come down and talk to them sometime later but with that short notice, Good Lord deliver me! We staid [sic] for tea (pm o’clock tea) bid Harvey and our good friends goodbye and hurried home to pack for Paris.²²

One wonders what Locke would have said. As in his Harvard days, Locke seemed too timid to grasp the political spotlight when it was offered him. But the fact that he was at Toynbee Hall, this time without Kallen, suggests that he did feel some connection to the radical intellectual community associated with the settlement house.

Locke and Downes arrived in Paris during the first week of April, settled into a hotel on the Boulevard de Courcelles, and began sightseeing. Kronberg also knew Henry Ossawa Tanner, the renowned African American expatriate artist from Philadelphia who lived in Paris. It is quite possible that Kronberg wrote Tanner after Locke’s visit and introduced the Black Rhodes Scholar to Tanner, for shortly after Locke arrived in Paris, he received an invitation from Tanner to come to tea. Locke received the news with aplomb. “I shall go,” he wrote his mother, “and after will have him out to dinner with Kronberg and Downes.”²³ Locke did spend the afternoon of April 9 with Tanner. A rumor survives that Locke asked Tanner to return to the United States and lead a Black artistic movement. Tanner refused, the story goes, but this seems more likely to have occurred, if at all, later. At this point Locke seemed on the verge of a Tanner-like expatriation. Even in the literary arena, he was more interested in gathering stories of the urban life of London and Paris than of any other Black American community.

Locke was also visually stimulated by this trip to Paris, more so by its artistic avant-garde than by Tanner’s work in 1908.

We are in Paris at just the right time—the famous Art Salon will open in a few days—the exhibition of Independent artists[,] the crazy freaks and rebelling geniuses[,] who cannot get into the Salon past the academic criticism of the Hanging Committee[,] have a vast exhibition—the strangest freakiest mixture of good and bad painting one has ever seen—we have been twice to it. … You can imagine what a collection … they hang everything—many of the things they should hang the artist himself as a more fitting tribute to art—but it’s excruciatingly funny.²⁴

By contrast, there was no mention in his letters to his mother of trips to the more conventional art repositories such as the Louvre or any discussion of paintings hanging in Tanner’s studio.

A week later Locke was on his way back to Oxford after another rough crossing of the channel. Such a passage made him at least thankful to reach Oxford this time, where he could admit to his mother that “I have had a vacation year of it—the change—the delightful leisure,” which he deserved, he believed, “after last year’s hard work that told on me more than I suspected.” He planned to get down to work during the summer term when the weather was warm and sunny and finally invigorating. Here Locke was not simply making excuses; many other Americans found the Oxford weather debilitating, though he seemed, for someone of his frail health, to have enormous resources of energy while vacationing. “After I am thoroughly tired out I go on a long bit on my nerves—I found that out in Paris—Downes would be absolutely done out—I would be as fresh as ever—till I got home: then I would keel over and sometimes he would have to help me off with my undershirt— (you remember I could never get them off anyway).”²⁵ Once again Locke seemed to be admitting that Downes was performing what had commonly been Mary’s role in his life. But what Downes could not supply was the stabilizing sense of direction to get down to work that Mary had given him. Evidently, when Locke indulged the pleasure-seeking side of his personality without restraint, he ran ragged until he could not take adequate care of himself.

Not only did Locke still need his mother’s stabilizing influence, she needed him as well. During the preparation for his vacation, Mary Locke had peppered him with letters asking his approval to move their home at 417 Stevens Street in Camden, New Jersey, to Clapham’s at 517 on the same street. The former, Yeocum’s house, had been their home for almost ten years, but it had a leaking roof, among other chronic problems in need of repair. Now that her son was not living with her, there was really no need for her to rent a house. Her bills were piling up, and she had had to buy and cook her own food. At Clapham’s she could get prepared meals for $16 a week. She could also sell her furniture, since Clapham’s second-floor rooms were furnished; she could even sublet one of them to Mr. Bush until her son returned from England—if he ever did. He, of course, had agreed with her decision and confessed that he felt a bit guilty that she had had to move their household by herself, while he had been “roaming Parisian picture galleries and going to Paris Operas.”²⁶ Locke knew that his mother needed to be around other people, and she would have that at Clapham’s. Moreover, her salary barely paid her expenses, and with his vacationing, entertaining, and socializing lifestyle, he barely had enough left over to send her. So, she had “gathered up the deserted household goods,” as he put it, and moved down the street, an ordeal he admitted he could “hardly understand how she” managed. While he was at Harvard, he had micromanaged her every decision about the household, down to which chairs should be reupholstered and with what color fabric. He was much less concerned about such issues at this distance. He advised her to “keep cheery and do the best under the circumstances.”²⁷

Locke’s Paris vacation also made him miss an important meeting held by his friend Isaka Seme. Apparently, Seme had tired of waiting for Locke to return from Paris and hosted a meeting on April 10 at the York House in London for all those interested in his plan to establish an African society. The meeting had apparently been well attended, and those present had voiced their support for the venture. Seme planned to hold another meeting at which the organization would be formally launched and asked Locke if he would be willing to serve as honorary secretary and assist Seme in arranging the next meeting. Seme wanted to do an extensive mailing to ensure all interested Africans in England would attend.

Locke jumped at the opportunity and may have co-drafted the invitation that Seme sent out. “We and all the friends of Africa must be filled with joy at the successful initial result of our movement. It seems to me that we have now sufficiently digested the matter, and that therefore we must meet and apply our seal to the organization” the letter claimed. The date set was Friday, May 15, at 8 p.m. What was not yet clear was where the meeting was going to be held, and Locke may have been asked by Seme to locate a suitable meeting place. Apparently, a delegation of Africans, perhaps from South Africa, was due to arrive in England, perhaps as early as June of that year, and Seme wanted them to “find us already organized and prepared to greet them.” The “Vice-Chancellor of Oxford” had apparently chosen a “well-known native African Bishop to deliver a University sermon in his place” on the occasion of the delegation’s visit to campus, and Seme wanted to be able to meet the delegation as the head of the African Union Society.²⁸ The assembled would not only decide the name of the organization and approve its constitution but also elect officers of the organization and hear Seme deliver a paper titled “The Fatherland.”

While the text of that address has not been located, its title suggests that Seme had already moved beyond his earlier goal of uniting the Zulus in South Africa to a broader notion of Pan Africanism analogous to Kallen’s Zionism—a call on all of African descent, regardless of their origins within the Diaspora, to look upon Africa as their homeland. Although clearly the organization was Seme’s idea, that Locke signed the printed letter of invitation with his name first and then Seme’s suggests Locke was committed to the effort.

When the constitution of the organization was printed, Locke’s name appeared as honorary secretary of the organization and presumably the document’s author. Clearly the launching of the African Union Society was a defining moment in Locke’s career. For the first time in his life, he had publicly committed himself to working in a politically oriented Black organization. By identifying with the cause of African liberation, he seemed to have made the ideological step that Kallen had been urging him to take, to identify with his race as a source of political and intellectual strength. Yet it was Seme who had been able to move Locke beyond dialogue to activism and toward viewing Africa as his “Fatherland.”

This step suggests something of the “double consciousness” of Locke’s first year at Oxford. He was both a Europeanizing cosmopolitan and a burgeoning Black internationalist. Having spent the vacation enjoying the bohemianism and cosmopolitanism of European modernism, Locke had returned to Oxford in mid-April to begin formalizing an African identity for himself by launching an African Diaspora organization. “His Highness Seme” was the catalyst, because, unlike Downes, Seme showed that Locke’s desire to live a cultivated lifestyle, to be a homosexual, to be an aesthete did not have to exclude a commitment to the redemption of Africa on a global scale. In a sense, Locke was still struggling to combine the aestheticism he enjoyed with his friend Downes with the political commitment he had begun to acknowledge with Seme and Kallen. The problem for these ethnic intellectuals abroad was that they had to find a way to make their immersion in high art and even higher living relevant to the worlds of those in their homelands whose life experience was meager if not mean by comparison. The African Union Society was a step in that direction, but still an association of elite Africans—educated Africans living in England or able to travel there easily, Afro-Cosmopolitans open to the idea of finding in their study of the Europeans the logic of African liberation.

Such a step reflected the racial fissure within the Cosmopolitan Club itself—and hence the need for an independent African club. As the Cosmopolitan Club papers generally suggested, the Europeans, and especially the English, were not truly cosmopolitan, but fiercely nationalistic and jingoistic in elevating England’s interest above all others. The English were always cosmopolitan when it came to other people’s countries, but not their own. What Seme proposed was for Africans to begin doing the same thing, to begin to rescue the “unhappy Fatherland,” as he put it, from the kind of underdevelopment that European cosmopolitanism had brought to it. Apparently, Seme was not alone in this opinion: on May 18, H. El Alaily, an Egyptian student at Wadham, and Mukerjea, Locke’s Indian friend, held a meeting to discuss forming an Oriental Club at Oxford to address the same issues in relation to the Indian and Muslim world. What made Locke’s predicament perhaps more difficult was that the road he sought to carve out was as yet relatively uncharted—that of using art to activate an anti-imperialist African Diaspora renaissance centered in America. Of his friends at Oxford that summer term, perhaps only Mukerjea could provide Locke with a model of what that might look like.

Locke also began to face the problem of his academic drift at Oxford that Trinity term. He was not making sufficient progress in his Greek tutoring to be able to pursue the intensive reading of ancient texts required for his Greats BA, let alone a BLitt in the subject. His real problem was he had difficulty learning the language; but several other factors conspired to increase his difficulties. As one of his comments in “Oxford Contrasts” suggested, Locke did not think much of his tutor’s pedagogical ability: “The ability to parse Greek sentences is thought to imply the ability to teach the parsing of Greek sentences.”²⁹ Race could have added an additional complication; Mary Church Terrell recalled that when Matthew Arnold visited her class at Oberlin, he was surprised to hear her pronounce Greek because, as he remarked, he thought that Blacks were physically incapable of Greek pronunciation. The fact that an intellectual liberal like Arnold believed this suggests that it may have been widely accepted by Oxford dons during Locke’s tenure. Why should his tutor expend any extraordinary effort in teaching Locke something that was believed to be impossible anyway? Such factors do not explain why Locke had difficulty, but do suggest why his environment likely would not provide him more resources to overcome it.

This was also Locke’s first experience of academic difficulty. Learning always had come easily to him; but now, it was difficult, and he had no other comparable experience of overcoming great difficulty in his educational past. His lack of success raised the issue of his competence in a particularly embarrassing context: the southerners had already raised the issue of whether he deserved to be at Oxford, albeit without any reference to his academic ability. His difficulty with Greek could add fuel to the still-smoldering controversy over whether he “belonged” at Oxford at all. Moreover, the longer Locke remained at Oxford, the less he was interested in Greek and ancient history. Given his personal situation as a Black intellectual, what good was successful parsing of Greek sentences? He had already reached the pinnacle of education for a Black man; success at Greek was not going to win him a post as a classicist at one of the better American universities; and it also was unlikely to win even a temporary appointment at Oxford, even if he earned a Greats BA. Why should he marshal the Herculean effort to master something that would make him only more of an anomaly? His intellectual interests lay in literary and artistic modernism of the type that he had seen in London and in Paris, and in the counter-nationalism of the Cosmopolitan Club and African Union Society, where his Egyptian, Indian, and South African friends were his real intellectual tutors.

Locke’s personal copy of the Oxford University Gazette for Trinity term 1908 suggests the shift in his educational attention and priorities away from Greek literature and history, and toward the modern study of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, and anthropology. From the faculty of Literae Humaniores, Locke planned to attend such lectures as Introduction to Philosophy by Dr. F. C. S. Schiller; Philosophy of Religion by the liberal Platonist, J. A. Smith; and Anthropology: Early Stages of Art and Knowledge by Edward B. Tylor, one of the founders of modern anthropology. From the faculty of English and Modern Literature and Languages, he had checked The Philosophy of Poetry and Criticism from Oxford’s only philosopher of aesthetics, E. F. Carritt, and a course in Schiller’s Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung from the Taylorian professor of German, H. G. Fieldler. Unmistakably, Locke was leaving Greek literature and culture behind.

Of the choices Locke listed, the most intriguing is Tylor’s anthropology course. Although we have no way of knowing if he attended Tylor’s lectures, his selection in the catalog suggests that Locke was beginning to think seriously about anthropology for the first time. Moreover, if Locke’s first formal exposure to anthropology came at Tylor’s feet in the lecture hall of the Ashmolean, that would explain in part the quasi-evolutionary character of Locke’s mature conception of culture. Tylor believed that European civilization was the highest expression of culture, and that “primitive” cultures—whether created by savage or barbarous peoples—were always earlier forms of civilization. Listening to Tylor would have helped Locke break free of the humanist notion that culture was merely the best art and literature that had been produced toward the anthropological notion that culture was “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society,” as Tylor had defined it in his 1871 magnum opus, Primitive Culture. But Tylor’s lectures would have also sanctioned an evolutionary view of humanity, the Tylorian view of culture as “progressive human development” from savagery through barbarism to modern civilization.³⁰ Tylor’s belief in a hierarchy of culture reinforced an unfortunate tendency already evident in Black Victorian culture—that assimilating European cultural values proved Black people could be civilized. Such a philosophy of cultivation informed Seme’s project as well as that of the Indian students Locke met at the Cosmopolitan Club. To assimilate was to show that one’s people would progress if granted opportunity, a belief that sanctioned the sartorial indulgence and almost comically civilized manner of colonials at Oxford. No better example can be found than a photograph of a Cosmopolitan Club dinner probably held in 1908: the often lauded variety of faces and skin color of those arrayed around the table is unified by formal dress of almost smirking Edwardian self-indulgence. They all assumed in their dress, deportment, and manners a hierarchy of values and were certain that they, as the elite of their races, personified the best of humankind.

But these overly sophisticated British colonials also educated Locke about the contradictions of the Victorian rule, that no matter how dressed up they were, they were still emissaries of inferior cultures according to the British. As Lord Macaulay famously put it, he had never found an expert on Oriental literatures “who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”³¹ But because of their successful assimilation of European culture, colonial members of the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club disagreed and used the club to advance a counterargument for a cultural renaissance emerging from Indian and Arabian traditions. At the first meeting of the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club for this term, held on May 5, Mukerjea read his paper on “The Bengali Novel: Bankim” that signaled the beginnings of an independent cultural renaissance in India. The old hierarchy in which European and English values and cultural products automatically stood at the top to be worshipped by all, including the colonials, was being called into question by that collection of intellectuals assembled around the table at Buolo’s in Oxford. Of course, one would not know it from simply observing the social life of the group. To the end, Locke and Seme still indulged in the symbols of European cultivation, for by identifying with them, they conferred status and equality on their efforts. In criticism, it could be argued that Locke, Seme, and Mukerjea merely wanted a colonial culture that met European standards, and in their expectations lay a profound alienation from the actual indigenous culture of their peoples. But they believed that by meeting the standards of English society and culture, they removed the stigma of inferiority from themselves and their peoples, and subtly undermined the whole project of European cultural superiority.

Beneath the swirling sea of socializing and partying lay an awakening that the old value system was crumbling and the traditional Eurocentric hierarchy was a lie. Culture, despite Tylor, could decline and turn back toward less sophisticated impulses, and that was precisely what these young colonial intellectuals believed was occurring in English culture in the period of imperialism. Locke, therefore, was too skeptical to embrace Tylor’s social Darwinism, but he may have seen that in Tylor’s notion that culture passes through stages an opportunity to view African American culture as an authentic “complex whole” that would evolve and progress, especially under the tutelage and stewardship of men like Locke.

Locke’s immediate problem was that study for Literae Humaniores was no longer a reasonable option for him by the end of Trinity term 1908 and studying formally anthropology was not an option at Oxford either. Locke probably would have been reluctant to do the latter, as he continued to favor literature and philosophy with increasing emphasis on philosophy. In Locke’s day, however, the only way to study philosophy on the undergraduate level was in Greats. The possibility did exist that Locke could study philosophy as a graduate student if he could present a thesis subject and get it approved for an advanced bachelor of science degree in philosophy. Locke would have to transfer out of his undergraduate concentration and obtain university authorization to read for the graduate degree. Given that he already possessed a BA from Harvard, his admission to the graduate program depended merely on his finding tutors who would agree to direct his research. Here again, his friend Horace Kallen came to his aid.

In April, Locke appears to have discussed the issue with Kallen, who wrote him afterward that he’d “told Schiller of y’r proposed change. Now you’d better write him a note and ask for an appointment to talk things over.” Schiller had been educated at Balliol College and had taught philosophy at Cornell University where he met and befriended William James. When Schiller became a tutor at Corpus Christi College in 1897, he was already a pragmatist who believed that the truth of an idea came down to its usefulness in human affairs. Schiller’s pragmatism made him an outsider at an Oxford dominated by idealism. While loyal to James, in 1903 Schiller adopted the name of humanism for his brand of pragmatism to emphasize his main concern that philosophy should be relevant to the human condition as lived by ordinary persons. He was an excellent person for Locke to work with, for much of the Rhodes Scholar’s academic alienation at Oxford came from the irrelevance of his course of study to his experience as an American.

Locke wrote to Schiller shortly after Kallen’s note and received an appointment to tea with Schiller at Corpus Christi on May 18. The meeting was very significant for Locke, as his notes on the back of Schiller’s invitation suggest: “the 18th—Found Dr. Schiller alone—very cordial—very American—welcomed my plans—spoke very frankly about Oxford inattention etc.—selected subject The Concept of Value in philosophy—Stewart Williams & Schiller—Thanked him most heartily and walked over with S to James lectures. This is a great day—when I met Schiller—the whole prospect of my work and life seemed different.” Schiller met a number of Locke’s needs: he was a role model, for though he “spoke frankly of Oxford’s inattention”—he was also successful at Oxford, and that success suggested Locke could succeed in its inhospitable environment. What Locke desperately needed was someone who would take him on seriously as a budding intellectual, to demand hard work from him, but also to do so with sympathetic understanding of the psychic pressures he was under. In May 1908, Schiller seemed to be that man.

Locke’s choice of subject is revealing. By focusing on the “Concept of Value,” Locke avoided a direct engagement of the traditional disputes between the Idealists and the Pragmatists over the meaning of truth or the absolute, and instead charted new waters in the emerging discipline of value theory coming out of Germany. While the works of Meinong and Ehrenfels, the two principal Austrian philosophers of value, were being read at Oxford, they were not the subject of heated debate. Moreover, values as a subject also reflected Locke’s emerging sense of being at the vortex of social change.

As Locke’s “note” revealed, he left Schiller’s to walk over and attend the third lecture of William James’s Hibbert Lectures in Oxford, which may have had some long-lasting influence on his emerging philosophical orientation. After talking throughout the year with Kallen about the conflicting appeals of Absolute Idealism and Pragmatic Pluralism, it must have been a treat to hear James’s third lecture, “Hegel and His Method.” Locke was attracted to Absolute Idealism, which he had learned from Josiah Royce at Harvard, because it was part of a system of certainty, which Locke instinctively and temperamentally preferred. The Absolute was the Great Mother in whom all contradictions were taken up, all conflict resolved, all emotions soothed, and all peoples regarded as one. For nineteenth-century thinkers, the Absolute gave a sense of ultimate integration that certainly was not lost on Locke’s Black self. Of course, Absolute Idealism could be exclusive and dominating, demanding a kind of subservience to a higher power that smacked of the force of God in organized religion. But Absolute Idealism also contained that revolutionary element of a grand dialectical system that could accommodate the contradictions that constituted Black life and serve, as it did when adapted by Marx to dialectical materialism, as an intellectual weapon of analysis against naive believers in one thesis or another.

Sitting in the front seats of the auditorium with Kallen, literally at the feet of the master of the pragmatic method, a method that tested ideas by examining their meaning in daily practice, Locke was pried a bit further from the bosom of Absolute Idealism by hearing James argue it was not so much the dialectical method as the Absolute that made Hegel and Hegelianism untenable. Indeed, by suggesting the convergence of the Hegelian dialectic with the changing world of pure experience, James confirmed Locke could still hold onto the dialectical method of reasoning while jettisoning the Absolute and its metaphysical baggage. From James, Locke learned the dialectic was not locked up in conceptual categories, as Hegel had claimed, but was immanent in our experience. That recognition began Locke’s process of shifting from the transcendent categories of the good, the true, and the beautiful into the world of his own experience, which he could access through introspection. James’s example in Principles of Psychology modeled for the introspective methodology Locke would use in his thesis.

Most important, James, along with Schiller, showed Locke that philosophy was relevant to his life. Like James, who had undergone a spiritual crisis in his early adulthood, Locke found that he needed a philosophical answer to the crisis he experienced at Oxford. Finding a sense of professional grounding in pragmatic philosophy and in studying value theory with Schiller did not solve all of Locke’s problems, certainly: he was still a Black man in a racist world. But hearing James reminded Locke that he was part of a Harvard tradition that could support him as he developed a more radical philosophy of racial modernity than Absolute Idealism would ever allow.

Two events occurred just after James’s May 18 lecture that reinforced the importance of that day’s events for Locke. First, Locke learned that Kallen, who had completed his thesis, was returning home to Boston to be examined by his doctoral committee at Harvard. As a parting request, Kallen asked Locke to gather up as many of the Americans as he could locate for the degree-granting ceremony for James the following week. With Kallen gone, Locke would be on his own managing his social relationships with Americans still at Oxford. Kallen’s departure also meant that Locke would be even more dependent on his new relationship with Schiller to sustain his development into a pragmatic philosopher of pluralism. Second, upon returning home that Monday evening, Locke found an invitation from Farid Nameh, Satya Mukerjea, and H. El Alaily to come to tea to discuss their plan of forming an Oriental Club at Oxford. This club would be a statement of Orientalism from the perspective of the colonized, not the colonizer, and also boldly assert the superiority of Oriental forms of art over those of the European. For Locke, this club symbolized the maturation of a pluralistic philosophy wedded to anti-imperialism and counter-renaissance—a different notion of the meaning of “radical empiricism” than James had had in mind during his lectures. It would be radical in that it would narrate the experience of the West from the perspective of the non-Western. It was easier for Locke to become militant about imperialism than about American racism, and similarly, it was through the eyes of the colonized that Locke could begin to see his way toward acceptance of the criticality inherent in the African American tradition. Imperialism gave him just enough of a vantage point on racism and cosmopolitanism to allow him to begin to formulate a “critical Black pluralism” to sustain him philosophically for the rest of his life.

Locke delivered his maiden critique of the imperialist conceit when he contributed an “Epilogue” to the first issue of The Oxford Cosmopolitan, published in June 1908. Apparently, the “Epilogue” was an excerpt from a paper “Cosmopolitanism,” which he had delivered at the club’s May 29 meeting. Locke did not plan to publish his paper in the first issue, perhaps because as editor, he did not wish to appear to be promoting his own work, and perhaps because, in his own judgment, the paper, while “clever and suggestive,” was also “hard to follow.” Yet, once edited down into a conclusion to the rather eclectic volume, “Epilogue” was an important pluralistic statement of cosmopolitanism that resembled James’s popular essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” Locke criticized the common-sense notion of cosmopolitanism, calling it the illusion that travel and exposure enables one to understand other people. As a doctrine, it was little more than a disciplinary exercise for idealistic youth. He wrote:

There are certain honest people who think otherwise, but they seem to be misled by a false analogy much after the fashion of the man who travels to “enlarge his horizons.” It is all a shifting of the attention and interest, a juggling with the centre of a pre-determined but movable circle, and most of us are convinced and some of us perplexed on finding that we carry our horizons with us and are unable to see through any other eyes than our own. It is the pathetic fallacy of the sympathetic temperament to think otherwise.³²

As James had asserted, all human beings were afflicted with a “blindness” that prevented them from seeing the world from the other person’s perspective.

On a philosophical level, Locke was arguing for humans’ inability to transcend their own subjective perspectives and thus to attain a cosmopolitan or “absolute” perspective. What was needed, Locke argued, was not the illusion of perspicacity, but the acknowledgment and acceptance of one’s own cultural tradition and its limitations. Only through such self-knowledge could the truly honest social observer begin to understand what separated him or her from other peoples and cultures.

Cosmopolitan culture, then, if it is to be truly cultivating, is a sense of value contrasts and a heightened and rationalized self-centralization … [because] few Cosmopolitans have been able to escape the exchange-formula of the simple proposition: as x is to you, so is y to me. The beautiful law of this cosmopolitan equation is that each unknown is or ought to be well known on its side of the equation. The only possible solution is an enforced respect and interest for one’s own tradition, and a more or less accurate appreciation of its contrast values with other traditions.³³

After three terms at Oxford, Locke had become more skeptical of the ideal of cosmopolitanism. While “Oxford Contrasts” had positively portrayed the Rhodes Scholarship as fostering a “patriotic cosmopolitan,” “Epilogue” can be read as a critique of cosmopolitanism as essentially a disguised imperialism. On one level, the British were cosmopolitan because they traveled and ruled the world. But such cosmopolitanism was little more than “carrying their horizons with them,” a perspective he tellingly called “a moveable circle.” The British retained their essential self-centeredness even if it was enlarged by worldliness. Their ethnocentrism and belief in the superiority of British traditions actually justified their ability to invade, take over, and assimilate another country’s land and folkways. The operational definition of the cosmopolitan was the imperialist.

The colonized who wanted to become a real cosmopolitan was tempted to become as ethnocentric about the superiority of his or her own roots as the English. But that was not necessarily easy to do. Cosmopolitanism gave the colonized, like him, “the very rare opportunity to choose deliberately what I was born, but what the tyranny of circumstances prevents many of my folk from ever viewing as the privilege and opportunity of being an Afro-American.”³⁴ The richest phrase here is the “tyranny of circumstances,” the reality that the “Afro-American” was himself or herself caught in a web of economic, political, and discursive “circumstances” that taught him or her over and over again that he or she was inferior, taught him or her to run as fast as possible away from “what I was born.” Locke had been doing just that his first year at Oxford chasing European gaze and avoiding his own. But his “Epilogue” suggested Locke now realized it was a hopeless chase. The cosmopolitanism where one lost oneself in a smorgasbord of other people’s cultures led to a dead end. Without the self-confidence of being English, without the arrogant traditions of domination and exploitation to anchor one’s subjectivity, Locke and the colonials could never really reproduce the European approach to cosmopolitanism, which was to survey civilization and call it their own. The material conditions of cosmopolitanism were utterly different for the colonized.

Interestingly, it was in the journal of the Cosmopolitan Club that Locke publicly testified to the tragedy of that first year for him as a Black subject abroad. Not in the Independent but only in a paper delivered to other, similarly sophisticated Brown Edwardians could he state how out of place they were, despite being Oxford dandies and aesthetes. Encountering what constituted English cosmopolitanism forced one back on “one’s own tradition, and a more or less accurate appreciation of its contrast values with other traditions.” What was that contrast? That he, as an “Afro-American,” lacked the kind of arrogant, global, self-validating traditions the English took for granted. For that matter, Americans lacked them too in 1908, if his article for the Independent was to be believed.³⁵

Coming to Oxford was not a waste, however, but an opportunity to forge something transformative out of their newly discovered pluralism. The transnationalism of his experience was returning him to the value of the local, to the indigenous, to a sense of community that was his new emotional home. A later metaphor Locke used to describe Harlem was appropriate here. Oxford had become a “crucible” of Black and Brown Cosmopolitans, because imperialism—including Rhodes’s—had brought them together in that one place.³⁶ The Cosmopolitan Club was the manifestation of this new community, which emerged out of their transnationalism, their ability through education to leave home and find a new one in their shared predicament. Their and his dilemma would define the outlook of the organization going forward. Could Locke and his new friends be Brown and cosmopolitan and yet avoid being a fig leaf for imperialism and global arrogance? Could the Cosmopolitan Club outline a path to a new humanism based on the “value contrasts” made visible by imperialism? Perhaps. And perhaps Locke’s work on value with Schiller could be the philosophical foundation of such a new humanism. If so, it would emerge in dialogue with the more radical and critical essays on British colonialism he would hear in the club. But to do that work, Locke would have to sit still.

That would be difficult. Kallen, his one trusted White interlocutor, was leaving Oxford. Another bosom friend was also leaving that summer. “Downes leaves for Italy in a week,” Locke informed his mother in a letter written June 18, “to spend a few weeks with his uncle who is painting there—but returns to America by the middle of July—I shall miss him very greatly—he and I have been inseparable all this year[.]”³⁷ Downes was headed to California to spend a year teaching and taking care of his invalid sister before returning to Harvard in the fall of 1909.

Downes’s impending departure was more significant than Kallen’s. The love affair with Downes had been a bulwark against the emotional cruelties of Oxford. His impending departure exposed the crux of Locke’s adult emotional life. He longed for someone who would love him unconditionally as his mother did. Downes was not that person, and even more, he was a sign of the intense loneliness of adult love for Locke—it was never unconditional and never absolute, for if it were, they would never leave him.

But Downes was leaving and as his departure approached, Locke began demanding his mother come over and spend the summer with him in Europe. In a May 27 letter, he reacted with horror when he learned that she had pneumonia: “Do write immediately how you are—I am so fearful of sickness—why on earth do you not take good care of yourself … if you knew how important it was for you to keep hearty and well and happy—you would—take all precautions.” Panic erupted in him: he needed her more than ever now that his closest friends were leaving. Nothing, not even her illness, could be allowed to prevent her from spending the summer with him. After reading her many objections to coming—her lack of funds, her lack of proper clothes, her poor health—Locke countered, “the 20 days at sea—10 days coming and going will take your whole vacation and make a good trip for you. … You would need only one good dress—the crepe de chine for dinners and that sort of thing—You need more underwear than anything else.”³⁸ Mary, however, was afraid to come: she had little money and did not believe that it was worth the expense. But he was unyielding: “I am talking facts[;] if you can get your round trip ticket American Line leaving Philadelphia for Liverpool 2nd class $80 or less and enough clothes to be comfortable I can with what money I actually have (for I have gotten my vacation allowance) can manage comfortable six or eight weeks in Europe for you.”³⁹

Locke’s need for his mother to replace his departing lover reminds us of the comment by his friend Douglas Stafford that Locke regarded it remarkable, after his first sexual experience, that he was able to be so close to another human being other than his mother. Downes, it appears, had become that person, had taken the place of his mother, which suggests a sexual subtext in this mother-son relationship. Now that Downes was going, Locke was emotionally exposed and desperate for “Momma.”

Finally, Mary relented, and on July 4 departed New York as a second cabin passenger on the RMS Etruria, in spite of her health and the counsel of friends. Such friends did not realize perhaps the strength of Mrs. Locke’s desire to see her “one and only.” For his part, Locke garnered enough money, principally from his Rhodes summer allowance, to take care of him and his mother for the summer. When she arrived in Liverpool on July 11, Locke whisked her away to an organ recital in St. George’s Hall and then to the Bradford Hotel in Liverpool for the night. He would take her to the Royal Leamington Spa to enjoy its restorative waters and then to the local summer concerts. During her eight-week stay, the two of them took in several musical concerts, visited several spas, and enjoyed evenings in Oxford with Locke’s friends, Harley, Seme, Mukerjea, and Philip, who frequently invited them for dinner. By the end of July, Locke had moved out of Hertford and into Dines’s Board and Lodging House, where he and his mother rested up until the second week of August.

By then Mary Locke had recovered from her illness and was ready for the second phase of her European trip—a trip to the Continent. After a brief stop in London, where the two of them took in the galleries, Locke and his mother went on to Southampton, and then across the channel to France. The high point of the trip came on September 1, when the two of them sat in the Grand Concert Hall on the Boulevard de Strasbourg in Paris, listening to Beethoven’s Third Symphony and sipping champagne. Certainly, the little boy and his Philadelphia mother had come a long way.

Shortly, however, the reality of his mother’s impending departure set in. Still in Paris on September 3 with her ship, the Lusitania, scheduled to leave Liverpool at 6 p.m. on September 5, Locke and his mother dashed madly across France and then a choppy, tempestuous English Channel to get her to Liverpool in time. In fact, when Locke returned to Oxford, he was not sure she had made the sailing. He was relieved, of course, to get her telegram telling him she had made it, but the rush, the rough channel crossing, and the overall vacation, during which he had “overdone it a bit towards the end,” left him “nervous in the extreme.”⁴⁰ During her summer visit, he had nurtured his mother back to health and she had fed him emotionally. Her departure suddenly reminded him, like a child who had gotten too far away from his mother, that he was frightfully alone. The question he had to answer now was this: was the emotional refueling of the summer enough to enable him to get down to work?

Percy J. Philip and Locke on horses. Oxford, ca. 1909. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.