Shortly after landing in Paris at 6:45 in the evening after the ambassador’s fateful luncheon, Locke was taking in an opera, Maeterlinck’s Momma Verna. Locke loved to hit the ground running whenever he began a trip, an approach to self-care that was becoming his preferred pattern of travel—plan ahead, attend as many of one’s favorite cultural activities as possible, and chase away any feelings of loneliness. Indeed, this trip revived pleasant memories of the previous summer’s trip with his mother. He stayed at the same hotel, where they had roomed, and visited old haunts they had enjoyed together. “I smiled as I passed places we had seen together—you do not know the pleasure of such memories,” he wrote his mother, encouraging her to begin planning her return to Europe, and especially to Paris, the coming summer.1 A life of beauty had its rewards.
After lounging in his favorite cafe, the Mi Carena, where he and Downes had had such a rollicking good time the year before, Locke settled down to plan his trip south in his “Grand Tour” through France, Switzerland, and the great cities of Italy. He had maps, guidebooks, and a letter of introduction to a Mrs. Alexander of Florence from Sydney Franklin, who had promised to accompany Locke to Italy over the Christmas vacation, but who now was stuck in London with his law practice. The trip threatened to be lonely until Lionel de Fonseka showed up on March 18, just as Locke had all but “given him up” as unable to make the trip. Saddled comfortably with a traveling companion, Locke took the night train for Bale, Switzerland.
With little more than a museum and a few old churches to detain them at Bale, Locke and de Fonseka left the next day for Lucerne. Their approach from the west initially obscured their view of the mountains; but, as they rounded a bend halfway through the climb up the Swiss side of the Alps, Locke and de Fonseka got their first thrill of the trip—a “magnificent view” of some of the most beautiful mountains Locke had ever seen. Once at Lucerne they spent the next three days soaking up the views. One day, after being frustrated that he could not go climbing, Locke took the cable railway, the Rigi, up the side of the mountain and was rewarded with a view of the mountains that was nothing less than “shudderingly beautiful—quite awesome.” He had always known that he would love the Alps, he confided to his mother, and was pleasantly surprised that the altitude did not affect his heart negatively—given that some reported the climb produced palpitations. Locke was enlivened by the mountain air and lamented only that his mother was not there to share it. To compensate, he detailed his movements through the trip and the scenery with as much literary flare as he could muster. “A bright Sunday morning we took the boat down the Lake of Lucerne or the Lake of the Four Cantons to Flüelen—23 miles on a calm blue lake simply hemmed in by mountain peaks—some of them towards the tail end extremely high—we could see peaks twenty and thirty miles away in the clear air, and the dazzling snow-fields with blue-grey cloud shadows and a few of the higher peaks with two cloud belts and the peak still visible above them was an inspiring sight.”2
While Locke had planned his trip around art museums and cathedrals, the landscape most enthralled him. His aesthetic sense had been crafted by the preferred recreation of Black Victorians who grew up on promenades through Philadelphia parks. He now reveled in the grander park of the Swiss Alps. To keep up the rationale of Grand Tour education, they chose routes that were most historically significant. Once their boat trip down Lake Lucerne dead-ended at Flüelen, they elected a train route to Goeschen that took them over the St. Gotthard pass, the route that Hannibal took when he invaded Rome, and that “Goethe took his Werther and his whole army of sentiments over it with the famous song on his life, Kennst du das Land—it is the only way to Italy for a students wander-jahr,” Locke informed his mother.3
After stopping briefly at Goeschen for lunch at 3,700 feet above sea level, Locke and de Fonseka went down the other side of the Alps on a train whose brakes screeched and clawed at the mountain to manage a sensible rate of descent. Locke was awestruck by the sight of the snow-capped mountains, which “looked like peppermint candy or mounds of sugar and contrasted with the jagged rock-salt of the Swiss side. I can’t tell you how I felt—I was drawn through my eyes like thread through a needle.” Eager to reach Italy, they hurried through the Italian Lake District and took the overnight to Milan. Milan did not have enough historical sites to detain them very long, although Locke remarked to his mother that they saw the “wonderful cathedral” there.4 That remark says something about his taste: unlike Oscar Wilde, who declared the ornate and elaborate Duomo Cathedral an abysmal “failure,” Locke’s response echoed that of the romantic poet Elizabeth Browning, who had found the spires and pinnacles of this Gothic cathedral almost as glorious as the Alps.
The next day, they pushed on, taking the train through Verona and Padua to Venice, Locke’s city of dreams, where they would take rooms along the Riva degli Schiavoni, on the southern tip of the Piazza San Marco, overlooking the Grand Canal. They stayed in Venice four or five days, soaking up art, but mostly the views. At first, Venice was something of a letdown, Locke confessed: his first gondola ride was rather routine, and the famous buildings, galleries, and even its Basilica di San Marco seemed dirty and depressing in daylight. However, by the second day, he “began to know the fine points of view and the proper time of day to go to see them,” mainly in the early evening, when the spectacular sunsets produced deeply hued skies—“the sky and the mist and the sun make Venice, and say what you will moonlight remakes it.” Venice became a work of art for Locke in those evenings, “a dream city on a lovely night and my very best impression came sitting at Florio’s a fashionable cafe in the Piazza San Marco and watching the rectangular patch of sky go through all the tones from pale mauve to purple black after the sunset.” Such views brought to his mind Turner’s paintings, which, as a true aesthete, Locke thought superior in some cases to the original. “The actual sunset from St. Georgio campanile over Maria del Saluti is striking enough—but Turner has made it too accessible. I had rather see his paintings of it; the sky at San Marco piazza no one can paint—it is not a scene, [but] simply a chromatic scale of colour with the same group of buildings to frame it—it is lovely.”5
The piazzas, the cafes, and the water that seemed to buoy the entire city stimulated the romantic in Locke. That may account for why Locke wrote Sydney Franklin that he preferred Venice to Florence: Venice was more romantic, not only because of its views but also because of its men. After chiding Locke for his preference, Franklin teased Locke for “throwing your money at the first passersby.” As John Addington Symonds wrote in his memoirs, Venice was a city preferred by traveling homosexual men, because of its wealth of lithe, strong, sinewy gondola men. Given that Locke’s preference ran to tall, slender men, it seems unlikely that Locke would not have taken advantage of public sources of affection while visiting the city.
Locke’s interest in the men of Venice may be related to the coolness of his traveling companion, Lionel de Fonseka. As Locke informed his mother, his trip with de Fonseka was not as intimate as it had been the year before with Downes in another romantic city, Paris. Downes and Locke had gone everywhere together, but de Fonseka and Locke went their separate ways during mornings, only to encounter and pass each other in squares in the afternoons. Locke and de Fonseka do not seem to have been lovers, at least on this trip, which came relatively early in their relationship. Like Locke, de Fonseka was an aesthete and a gifted wit and ironist, who could match Locke for pointed remarks and repartee. Born in Ceylon, de Fonseka was one of the funniest ironists of the Cosmopolitan Club, whose hysterical critiques of Western aesthetic hypocrisy made his companion, Locke, laugh giddily. But as a Catholic, de Fonseka found in the Roman Church what some Oxford aesthetes before him found there—a religious outlet for some of the sexual energy that accompanied aestheticism. Indeed, one of de Fonseka’s reasons for making the trip was that he was interested in meeting up with his religious mentors in Rome.
Locke and de Fonseka reached Florence in early April. As before, they went their separate ways during the day and dined together in the evenings, a plan that Locke explained to his mother suited him fine—“one needs to be alone in Italy. I never spent such a profitable ten days anywhere as at Florence. I really studied.” His attention shifted from the landscape to the art in Florence, as he attacked the museums, galleries, and especially the churches soaking up all that Donatello, Michelangelo, and Ghirlandaio could teach him. Florence was the “real” Renaissance, as he might have reminded Mukerjea and El Alaily, a special period in world history according to its historians when the superlative secular individual could realize all aspects of his or her intellect, from literature to art to science, and through such personal fulfillment, transform his or her culture. Locke was preparing himself to be a Black Lorenzo, whose love of curiosity, experimentalism, and art for art’s sake would carry on the work of the Florentine patron. Ironically what seemed to hold Locke’s attention the most in Florence were the “old church frescoes, particularly the Ghirlandaio frescoes in Santa Maria Novella.” He returned to view the marvelous interior of Santa Maria Novella several times and seemed to be captivated by the lifelike spiritual dramas that unfolded on the ceilings. For Locke could not help noticing the African faces and rotund bodies in the frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, evidence that Ghirlandaio’s figures reflected African and Muslim influences. Seeing the Negro inserted in the pictures of his celebrated Renaissance connected these religious frescoes to him emotionally and reconnected him to the Christian mysticism of his mother. Locke felt much more comfortable in Italy than he felt in England, because he could feel himself part of Italy and see a Renaissance that had included his own, even if only at its margins.
Locke also enjoyed taking extensive daytrips, particularly after de Fonseka went on ahead of him to Rome. Locke would often enter a church or gallery, wander about, and let the historical associations wash over him, returning to his hotel and cafe at evening. He realized that the typical traveler’s program of going “to the spot where Savonarola was buried or to try to pick out the spot on the Ponte Veechio where Dante stood or Michelangelo leaned is futile and soul wearing—but to cross it haphazard and the associations flit across your mind—to lean on the bridge to look at the sunset in the Arno Valley and suddenly to think Dante & Angelo and the rest of them did the same—that’s really worthwhile—it enlarges the mood without prescribing it.” While using his guidebook to find a particular church or museum, or to find his way home, he preferred to wander aimlessly, stumbling into interesting situations. For “fashionable crowds I have a scent for them,” he confessed to his mother, and for tramping up back streets of Florence “startling the peasants—I love to puzzle them—they don’t see many of our kind.”6
Locke took the slow road to Rome, stopping along the way at the hill towns of Perugia and Assisi. His two days in Assisi were some of the best of his trip. He had heard about Assisi as a youngster from a lecture by Griggs on St. Francis of Assisi, probably delivered at Philadelphia’s Ethical Culture Society. One beautiful day he departed from the train and trudged “like [a] pilgrim[,] a tiresome climb up the hill to the town … half way up I hired an Italian laborer to carry my bag—this barefooted urchin tugged alongside with my overcoat and just at dusk with a marvelous sunset behind us, we trudged up the hill, saluting Mary at the crossroads … until just as we were getting into St. Peters gate the purple night was down upon the valley. It was an experience I shall never forget.”7 It was difficult to tear himself away from Assisi.
But with excellent timing, Locke arrived in Rome at the beginning of Easter Week and reconnected with de Fonseka, who was the guest of the Zaluetas, cousins of Cardinal Merry del Val. Through de Fonseka, Locke was able to get special permits for all of the Easter services. De Fonseka attended the opening of the Vatican gallery and had a private audience with the pope, while Locke attended church services in St. Peter’s on Palm Sunday. On Good Friday he went to Mass at St. John Lateran and then over to the Scala Santa, “the stairs that are reputed to have been those of Plater palace down which Christ went after the condemnation. The stairway was jammed with loyal Catholics going up on their knees, there being no other way to get up. I went up in a spirit of emotional sincerity if not of devotional belief and found the Crucifix exposed at the head of the steps. Afterwards I took a long ramble in the Campayne with a very engaging Italian youth Umberto Zanucchi with whom I scraped acquaintance on the Pucio. We became very friendly and used to ramble out into the Campayne almost every afternoon after that.”8
Locke also found companions among de Fonseka’s friends in Rome. Rising early to view the art in museums and galleries with the best morning light, Locke would catch up with de Fonseka and schmooze with fashionable society in the afternoon at the cafes. Locke informed his mother that one evening his table contained two counts, a duke, and several Harvard classmates. Clearly, access to the elite in Rome came easily for Locke. “Rudyard Kipling was at a nearby table the other evening … Richard Strauss the great musician was involved in conversation with Arthur Lee, a Norwegian art student who is one of our party at nights and was introduced all round. These with de Fonseka’s friends make a set the like of which Mothers darling hasn’t heretofore entered.” Of course, there were the unavoidable encounters with White Americans who resented seeing an African American abroad—“some of them look sick,” he confided to his mother; but he seemed to enjoy frustrating their sense of who and what was an American. Such social conquests did not force him to entirely neglect his cultural education. “The Vatican and of course the Sistine Chapel have claimed the most of my attention.” But Locke was tiring from weeks of sight-seeing and had much less energy to track down all of the famous sights; moreover, after Florence, he found Rome to be more confusing to study. Christian churches were piled on top of pagan temples, and Christian traditions were rich with pagan heritages. More tantalizing was sitting at the cafes, wiling away the afternoons, sketching out story lines and titles, with the dream of a novel taking shape in his head. His first trip to Italy had provided numerous inspirations, and rather confidently, he predicted that his first novel would be “brought forth there.”9
Italy had stimulated Locke’s sensitivity to visual beauty. As he traveled home by train through France, he continued to be moved by the landscape, especially of the Loire Valley with its “brilliant flowers sunlit against a bewildering background of greens ranging from the dark glassy green of orange leaves and rubber plants to the high pitched yellow green of flog grass—the most striking color [and] a dream country for whoever likes profusion and sharp contrast and I love both.”10 Locke was beginning to find a language to express the kind of impressionism nature and art elicited from him. Not surprisingly, the trip had restored his positive outlook and interest in his work. After a brief stop in Paris, where he watched a beautiful sunset over the Seine, and in London, where he picked up Seme, Locke returned to Oxford by the last week of April in excellent spirits.
Such a wonderful trip posed a series of challenges for Locke as Trinity term 1909 began. First, he had to resist the temptation to continue vacationing and its reverie for living. This was especially so, given that Oxford was sunny and bright that spring. His first letter to his mother from Oxford signaled the tension. Yes, he had an “enormous amount of work to do,” but “I shall play tennis and boat a good deal—the youngsters—the Addis boys play tennis well and boat—they can pull and paddle me to their hearts content.”11 By the second week after his return, invigorating weather seemed to inspire him finally to tackle his thesis. But a second, higher hurdle lay in his path. His philosophical interests in aesthetics, both in the subject matter for his reflections, and also the style of writing it brought out in him, diverged sharply from what Oxford expected. From Italy, he had been able to voice to his mother his growing alienation from the academic approach to his subject. “I told you my thesis subject was ‘The Concept of Value,’ a study in the correlation of Logical, Ethical and Aesthetic values. If it doesn’t suggest any definite idea to you, it’s just what it doesn’t to me. That’s partly what makes it such a big subject—people have been writing all around it lately. A French doctorate thesis has come out in the last few months and missed fire. Prof. [Wilbur] Urban has a new book at which I am chiefly angry because I must buy it to say I have read it—I am sure it is bosh.”12 Instead of writing another boring academic treatise on the classification of values, Locke wanted to make an introspective psychological study of how we learn to value. His Italian trip had sharpened that sense in him, for as he had soaked up impressions from the art and landscapes, he had begun to believe that the ability to take such an aesthetic attitude on one’s experience was at the root of valuation. What Locke wanted to create in value theory was analogous to what the Impressionists were creating for art theory—an investigation that ignored what we already know about objects and made visible what we feel when we sense something is of a higher value than something else. Locke’s intention actually had the closest affinity to what William James had achieved in The Principles of Psychology and was light years away from the kind of work that Cook Wilson, a logician, or F. C. S. Schiller, a blinkered pragmatist, could sympathize with. Accordingly, Locke began to dream again of going to Paris to work with the rebel philosopher, Henri Bergson, but such an option was impossible without financial support for a year at the Sorbonne. Locke’s class position limited his ability to realize these philosophical aspirations.
Locke began to despair of his capacity for scholarly work. “I have realized definitely and finally at Oxford,” he wrote his mother early in May, “that I am cast for a practical career, and my scholastic pretensions have dwindled to mere ideals of personal culture.” For the first time, he longed “to get back to America, and into my position—it will be a stormier and shorter reign than Booker’s, but so much the better. I want a long arm and the will to use it.” Locke still had the possibility of race service to fall back onto. Yet as the reference to Booker T. Washington suggested, and the subsequent discussion confirmed, Locke imagined a grandiose role for himself in African American affairs. “The danger is where as with you and papa and all the rest of us before you—you have allowed yourselves to get into too small, too petty an environment and strength, will and aristocracy are tragically useless and at the same time grotesquely comic when exercised in the cramped environment. I am as I have always told you going to hold out uncompromising until my situation comes to me—for in the meantime, I shall have as much as I can do ruling myself—a turbulent battlefield of contrasted heredities.”13
It is doubtful Momma was pleased to have her life work as a teacher characterized as “tragically useless” and “grotesquely comic.” But Locke was expressing a truth about the Reconstruction generation shared by others of his generation. His mother’s generation after the Civil War had compromised with advancing segregation in the late nineteenth century to survive. Of course, Locke and many of his generation ignored that their parents had had little choice in the matter. But it was crucial for Locke to believe that he could avoid falling into the kind of career quagmire that had destroyed his father. Locke found himself thinking a great deal about his father in the days following his Italian trip, in part because, though he could not admit it to his mother, he was himself in a quagmire. He was failing at the one task over which only he had control—“ruling myself—a turbulent battlefield of contrasted heredities.” “Heredities” cloaked the real contrasts—the demand to be a race leader and suppress his sexual orientation versus continuing the life of a homosexual dilettante in Europe; the near self-destructive desire to frolic with delinquent English teenagers versus putting in the hard work necessary for scholarly production; the desire for power in human affairs versus an inclination for disappearing into cloistered study, etc.—that only a strong “will” could resolve. A strong will was precisely what Booker T. Washington had and exercised to create space for himself and his race. Locke’s usual strength of will and purpose seemed to have deserted him at Oxford. What would he do? That remained unclear, and ironically, Locke’s purpose in these remarks was in part to fend off any expectation on his mother’s part that he would be returning home soon.
Oxford might offer a path to that “practical” career rather than a scholarly one. “Chesterton is right about Oxford—it is a training-school for the governing classes—and has taught your son its lesson. … Every blasted one of the young race-leaders here at Oxford would like to see me secured for his work, his field—to such an extent that I have made up my mind to serve a great apprenticeship—to travel round the world, stopping with them in their Asiatic and African homes, before returning to America.”14 Seme and El Alaily seemed to have been the “young race leaders” most eager for him to join their liberation movements, and Seme, in particular, seemed responsible for Locke’s latest conviction that he was set for a practical career: presumably after this world tour, Locke could take the bachelors degree in civil law, the degree that Seme was reading for at Oxford. Not only would law help him in the United States but also might allow him to “dabble a bit in international law—formulating plans for the admission of Asiatic and African peoples into the jurisdiction of international law. It is a subject where the legal scholars make history—Seme is making a specialty of it, as indeed he needs to for his home situation.”15 Oxford symbolized the mythic possibility that Locke could gain power as a Black man—indeed, because of the situation of Black Diasporic peoples around the globe—and live the life of the queer international tethered ever so loosely to his “home situation.”
Like Seme, Locke saw Booker T. Washington as a role model and peppered his mother with questions about Washington and his plans in his May and June letters. Locke particularly wanted to know whether Washington would be coming to Europe soon, for he wanted to meet him in Europe, “on neutral ground,” as he put it. Locke did not want his own aspirations for a position through Washington to be mixed up with those “Nigger pretenders,” like Roscoe Conkling Bruce or Emmett J. Scott, who were scheming, in Locke’s opinion, to replace Washington once he died. “The bigger shoes he leaves the harder they will be to fill—They will play dice for his toga when he dies and then find that no one of them can wear it. He is really a big man.”16 That Locke saw Booker T. Washington as a “big man” contrasted sharply with W. E. B. Du Bois’s and even T. Thomas Fortune’s views of him in 1909 and suggests something of the persistently conservative nature of Locke’s racial vision. In 1906, Washington had surely seemed a “big man,” perhaps the only Black man in America who could have gone to Atlanta and spoken to both Black and White camps in the aftermath of the race riot. But after President Theodore Roosevelt’s dismissal of Black troops in the Brownsville incident, Washington’s standing among African Americans had slipped, as his so-called power with Roosevelt seemed confined to the minutiae of handing out minor patronage jobs to those loyal to the Tuskegee machine. The 1909 Springfield race riot had led young Black and White progressives to come together and form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization Washington immediately and consistently opposed. In siding with Washington, and against W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, Locke was showing that he was a bit out of touch with progressive race forces in America and more concerned with the opportunity to use Washington and his philanthropic friends to advance the cause of Alain Locke than becoming a leader of the race back home.
Locke’s academic dilettantism was not going unnoticed by the Oxford authorities. The word was getting around in that May that he was not a serious student. Hertford College was not satisfied with him as a student and George Parkin could not wait to communicate that information to President Harrison of the Pennsylvania committee that had selected Locke as a Rhodes Scholar. The meddlesome Parkin wanted to drive home with Harrison what a “mistake” it had been to select Locke and ensure something like it would not happen again. Apparently, Locke’s Hertford tutor, Rev. Williams, had not forgiven Locke for abandoning the BA program and was probably behind the rumor that Locke was a slacker. Locke may have inadvertently reinforced that opinion when he petitioned Hertford that term to be exempted from paying college tuition, because he was neither studying under a college tutor nor attending inter-collegiate lectures. But the reality was that he was also not studying closely under his non-college tutors either. Rather than hugging closely to them to get clear instructions on how to approach his topic, he was avoiding them because of the difficulties he had. Not surprisingly, Locke had little more than a rough draft of the introduction to show for his efforts by the end of Trinity term. Rather than spend the summer working on the thesis, as he had promised his mother in an earlier letter, he began in June to harangue her repeatedly about making the trip over for the summer. This time she had her own reasons for wanting to spend the summer in Europe. The Claphans, the owners of the rooming house she resided in in Camden, were going to be away that summer, so they would be closing up their house. If she remained in Camden, she would have to spend the summer at her cousin Varick’s, an option she “detested.” So, she made the trip over, but this time accompanied by one of her closest friends, Helen Irvin, a fellow teacher at Mt. Vernon School. Mary Locke knew how possessive Locke could be and had broached the subject gingerly with him, but surprisingly, Locke was very gracious. He liked the light-skinned, refined, and respectable Mrs. Irvin, and he welcomed her, as long as she understood that “you and I will expect to have our usual honeymoon privacy in any event.”17 In the end, encouraged by Mary, Helen accompanied her friend to England, where they arrived around July 20 to begin a glorious summer vacation.
The day after they arrived, Locke whisked them away on a Thomas Cook tour through more than a dozen cities in Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, before returning to Paris and London. Mary Locke kept a detailed journal that shows this was her “Grand Tour.” Leaving England for the Hook of Holland, they traveled through Leiden to Amsterdam where they visited the Rijks Museum and reveled in all of the Rembrandts and Van Dykes. They left Amsterdam by boat and toured the island of Marken, took Mass at a local Catholic church, and went on wonderful walks to Edam, “maker of cheese.” In almost every city, they followed Locke’s ritual of visiting the churches, especially if an interesting cathedral was located there, and visiting the museums and the galleries. But Mary was just as interested in the quaint customs and interesting peasants they saw, and the shops and diamond cutters in the Jewish ghettos of cities like Amsterdam. Leaving Holland, they headed south to Belgium and Brussels, a city that “compared well with Paris” in her estimation. It was interesting and alive, and she particularly liked Leopold’s Palace and the Negro Slave Bronzes. But it was Germany that captured her strongest attention. Arriving in Cologne on the evening of August 3, they all got their first glimpse of the famous cathedral that evening and of the Rhine the next day. “Crossed iron bridge and bridge of boats—came back to Cathedral [and] stood 4 or 5 hours to see ‘Vannutelli’ and cardinals. City bright with Ecclesiastics, visited Wallraf’s Rickartz Museum, [saw] paintings of Leo & Bismarck. [Witnessed] the choons by priests on the steps of the cathedral, [went] back to Hotel for Air Ship [show], invited on the roof by proprietor, who opened champagne for party.” Mary Locke had developed a taste for champagne on the previous year’s visit to Paris. The “roofs, chimneys, towers, [were] crowded. [There were] cheers, wildest excitement, [at the] magnificent sight— [of the Zeppelin] containing 24 German officers. [Demonstration was] successful from every point [of view].”18
They followed the Rhine southward, stopping at Wiesbaden, where they dipped in the hot thermal springs and strolled in the Kochbrunnen, “the largest Kursall—beautiful gardens & shady parks.” They left Wiesbaden the next day by train, stopping briefly in Mayence and at Frankfurt am Main, before spending two days in Heidelberg, where they fantasized about Locke attending the university. Mary particularly enjoyed Baden Baden’s “lovely valley” and “hot mineral spring park.” She and Alain went on lovely “river shady promenades” and said goodbye to Helen, who went on to Paris, while they headed south by train to the Swiss Alps. The Lockes revisited Zurich, Zug, Lucerne, Interlaken, Bern, Lausanne, and Geneva before turning northward for Paris. On such a glorious “honeymoon,” Mary Locke must have felt blessed that she had a son so interested in sharing the high points of his cultural life with her. Her diary suggests that she approached the beautiful views and dramatic sites, with their literary and historical associations, with an enthusiasm that matched his. “Aug. 23 [Took the] train to Zug, capital of the Canton on Lake of Zug. Fine view of Rigi Pilatus and the Bernese Alps—old houses, remains of fortifications. For Catholic festival, town beautifully decorated. Lake of Lucerne or Lake of 4 Forest Cantors most beautiful scenery, described by Schiller in Wm. Tell. Got out at Tell’s Platte walked to Tell’s Chapel a ledge of rocks at the base of the Axenberg shaded by trees. … The morning went to Thurn, saw the Lake of Thurn by moonlight. … From Bern to Lausanne staid over night went by train. Cathedral, handsome view of Alps and Town. University and library finest I have seen. … Saw the Castle of Chillon on the way to Geneva by boat, stands on an isolated rock from the bank connected by bridge—‘Bonivard’ confined 6 yrs in dungen by Duke of Savoy, sometimes confused with Byrons ‘prisoner of Chillon.’ Went on boat to Geneva, a long, chilly sail. Mountains only partially visible, walked to R.R. stations up high steps. The Rhone divides the town into 2 parts. … Took 9 p.m. train to Paris, met Helen.”19 These sightseeing trips through German and Swiss cities would create memories for Mary Locke for the rest of her life.
The trip was good for Locke too. He had been able to study the Dutch painters up close in Holland, and on his first trip to Germany, he had fallen in love with Deutschland. The Zeppelin show had impressed him particularly with the technical proficiency of the Germans; the quaint cities along the Rhine had impressed him with their order, cleanliness, and friendliness. The Black Forest had moved him as powerfully as the Rhine: both were beauties of the natural landscape that rivaled the more monumental sights he revisited in Switzerland with “Ma.” But as was always the case, these honeymoons came to an end, and after seeing his mother and Helen off to America, he returned to Oxford and Mrs. Dine’s rooming house the first week of September.
Locke would soon move into more fashionable living quarters at 10 Turl Street. It was now the third and final year of his Rhodes Scholarship, and he had not progressed further than an introduction to his thesis. Earlier in February, he had told his mother that he planned to write the thesis over the summer and stand for the degree in October, with the possibility of a year at the Sorbonne; but that had been jettisoned for summer travels with her. It was becoming frighteningly clear to him that he was blocked. He read books, began writing pages, balled up the results, and threw them in the wastepaper basket, only to go out to play tennis, go riding, or escape into his fantasy world with one or more of the “children.” His relations with his supervisors deteriorated as he cut appointments, came unprepared but talked brilliantly, and generally confirmed the opinion growing steadily in the minds of Schiller and Wilson that he lacked the necessary intellectual power to pull off the thesis.
As was often the case for Locke, when he despaired most about Oxford and his thesis, his thoughts turned to America. Those thoughts coalesced this time into writing what became his first major article on the American character, “The American Temperament.” First delivered before the Rationalists Club in November 1909 and later to the Cosmopolitan Club in January, Locke had been searching for a way to announce himself as a new voice on the American cultural scene and found it in “The American Temperament,” eventually published in August 1911 by the prestigious and conservative North American Review. In 1909, when he could not find his philosophical footing, he found his voice as a cultural critic. Locke adopted the detached but sympathetic tone of Alexis de Tocqueville (whom he quoted in the essay) to argue that not only was the American character distinctive but it was also America’s most recognizable product. Although long-lived, that character was not genetic, but a construction that at best was pliable enough to be quickly adopted by visitors and that at its worse became an unconscious performance by Americans to conform to European prejudices about Americans. “It is a curious but inevitable irony that the American temperament, so notorious for its overweening confidence and self-esteem, should be of all temperaments least reflective, and for all its self-consciousness, should know itself so ill. When criticised, it is either perplexed or amused; when challenged, apologetically boastful, and seemingly delights in misconception and misrepresentation. A striking instance of this singular trait is the way Americans abroad exaggerate their native mannerism and become veritable caricatures of themselves in good-natured mimicry of the national type.”
Here, Locke put to good use his observations of those Americans he had encountered in Rome and probably as recently as the preceding summer’s travels with his mother. It may have been on that trip that Locke, while observing American behavior, and particularly White American behavior toward him and his mother, conceived this piece. Self-caricature by Americans abroad must have been particularly irksome to a thoroughly Europeanized American like Locke, and he took advantage of the opportunity provided by this essay to deliver a telling judgment on such behavior. “In its extreme form the tendency might be characterized as living up to a libel to save the trouble and expense of legal proceedings.” Such sentences also revealed Locke’s ironic temperament and his emerging style, one that combined subtle humor with a stinging wit. There was, of course, a serious philosophical consequence of such superficiality, for “if only by the reactions of others do we achieve any definite notion of what we ourselves are, it is small wonder that we have cultivated the actor’s manner and practice his art, only it is a strange art for an otherwise inartistic nation, a curious dependence for a free people.”20
America had not declared its intellectual independence more than a century after it had separated politically and economically from Europe, but instead of developing a solid high culture had allowed the American national type or self-image to be defined by the purveyors of mass culture—the journalists, cartoonists, and stump politicians who painted a portrait of the American at odds with that of the elite, the artist, or the intellectual. In one sense, this was lamentable; but in a maneuver that characterized the entire essay, Locke also found a way to laud the American temperament.
[Americans were wise] after all, in preferring to remain artless and unenlightened rather than accept contemporary art as a serious expression of itself. Drawn by detached and almost expatriated aesthetes at the commands of the most disinterested class of art patrons ever in existence, it has no real claims except upon the curiosity of the people. To force an art first to digest its civilization in all its crude lumpiness is, after all, a good and sound procedure, and it is safe to prophesy that in America either the result will be representative and unique or that there will emerge no national art at all.21
Locke knew that Americans abhorred criticism and would scarcely accept blanket condemnation from a Negro Rhodes Scholar. But something more was at work here than preparing a text the culturally conservative North American Review would publish. Locke was separating himself from the long line of Boston aesthetes who had made expatriate careers out of looking down their noses at America, people like Henry James, Henry Adams, and Bernard Berenson. Despite all of his internal battles, Locke was an optimist and believed Americans could foster the conditions for the development of serious art, if they based it on its indigenous Negro aesthetics. “American Temperament” was the place where he put into theoretical practice what he had declared in “Oxford Contrasts,” that England had made him an American despite its superficiality and racism. Whether standing before the Rationalist and Cosmopolitan Clubs or editing the piece for publication in the North American Review, Locke was revealing the self-knowledge he had gained at Oxford and clearing the ground for an intellectual return to America.
But he was not ready to return yet. Locke was convinced that he might be able to support himself indefinitely in Europe on magazine commissions. He needed a unique angle, however, and thought he had it in his scheme to travel throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, record his impressions of the race attitudes and living conditions of various nationalities, and write a series of articles on the global nature of race. By comparing how race functioned in different cultures, Locke believed his findings would be both a serious sociological contribution and a popular press item that would fund his continued European expatriation. Not only did he need a new project, he desperately needed a new source of income. As he entered Hilary term, he was running out of money, Rhodes support was nearly at the end, and his debts in Oxford were mounting. On November 18, 1909, he had been required to appear before the Vice Chancellor’s Court because of an unpaid debt owed to an unknown W. H. Walker. Locke signed a note to make payment of the £3, 12 s owed, plus 9 s in court costs, by January 20, 1910. Clearly, things were getting tight for the Rhodes Scholar, who lived and traveled first class: he needed a new benefactor, a new patron for his ruminations. So, early in February 1910, he made plans to return to the United States to hunt up magazine work and to try to obtain support for his plan from the most powerful Black man in America, Booker T. Washington.
Passing up a chance to return to Italy over Christmas vacation in 1909 with Sydney Franklin, Locke saved his money and planned to sail to America on March 12. In the interim, he revised his synopsis and drafted the first five chapters of his thesis for Schiller and Cook Wilson. He had conferences with his supervisors, reported on his progress, and began translating a Latin poem for the Newdigate Prize. His main goal before leaving was “to get my thesis so under way that I can work on it at home and so the trip will not prejudice my chances for a degree. Of course, if I fail I can represent the thesis when I wish, but I should like to get the degree first shot—especially as every year delays my getting the doctorate: one cannot take the Oxford doctorate till five years after admission to the Bachelors.”22 Locke was not clear on the requirements: he could not submit the degree whenever he wished, for his college or the university could, for a variety of reasons, send him down without a degree if it so desired. Locke’s error was understandable, given that the rules of the graduate program were notoriously hazy and many students were relatively unfamiliar with them. Locke’s confidence was misplaced: he had not finished the thesis yet, and he was already planning on the doctorate and the opportunity to wear Oxford’s “scarlet and grey gown.”
On the eve of Locke’s first trip home in nearly three years, his thesis was not uppermost in his mind. He began the reorganization, rushed through the drafts, but spent less and less time on it as his trip loomed. He got photographs made, “as the demand will be rather great,” reworked his Cosmopolitanism essay for the “Fortnightly and Harvard club,” sketched a couple speeches for Black associations in Washington and Philadelphia, and said goodbye to friends. Seme spent a whole day with Locke, in part to enlist Locke’s help in his attempt to float a loan, since Seme did not yet have the money to return home. Locke even asked Sydney Franklin how might Seme borrow on his land in South Africa. Just as important, Seme wanted to get Locke to commit to coming to South Africa after he returned from America. Locke was interested, but for his own reasons: his main goal in going to America was to try and obtain writing commissions from New York newspapers, and a trip to South Africa for a brief travelogue would suit Locke just fine. He was already beginning to put together a list of places he could travel to, sketch their life and culture, and translate it all into paying newspaper articles.
On March 12, he set sail from Liverpool. Waiting until the last possible dramatic moment, he cabled Booker T. Washington from the ship.
My dear Sir, I should be forwarding your letter of introduction from Dr Parkin of the Rhodes Trust and from my friend and fellow-student Mr. Isaka Seme, did I not prefer to go upon the assumption that you will require none of any young man, seriously contemplating race work who asks your counsel. I am returning to America after two and a half years absence to get into practical touch with race affairs, and with the express purpose of meeting certain of our representative men. I am hoping you will be disposed and able to grant me a personal interview, and will undertake to present myself at your convenience and appointment, should you happen to be in New York, Philadelphia or Washington anytime between now and April 16th.23
Less interested in meeting “our representative men,” Locke was more interested in meeting Washington alone and discussing with him his elaborate plan. But that would have to wait until later in the trip. Upon landing in New York, Locke threw himself into his first order of business—the hunt for editors of America’s elite magazines who would be interested in publishing his articles. It seems likely he visited the Century, Harper’s, and certainly the North American Review. Then, he left New York for a visit with his mother, and possibly a lecture before the Phillis Wheatley Society in Philadelphia.
More intriguing than where Locke went on the trip is how it made him feel to be back in the United States. It must have seemed noisy to Locke after his sensitive sensibilities had been honed by the beautiful, pre-industrial cities of Europe. Then too, there was the confrontation with racism, the recognition that everything was suddenly different, that he was now an inferior in the eyes of even the commonest White man on the streets of Philadelphia no less than New York. Being back in America in 1910 was a sharp contrast to the liberal cosmopolitanism he enjoyed in Europe. He didn’t fit in, but then again, this was a business trip for Locke.
On April 18, Washington telegrammed Locke at Thomas Cook & Sons that he would meet him that evening at the Hotel Manhattan.24 The talk went well, for afterward Mary wrote that she was surprised that “he bit so fast.”25 Evidently Washington, beleaguered on the educational front in 1910 by the emergence of not only the NAACP but also the Crisis, started that year by Du Bois, and increasing criticism from such Black intellectuals as Ida B. Wells, was eager to get a scholar of Locke’s renown for his team, for Tuskegee perhaps. But Locke did not yet want a job. What he wanted was Booker T. Washington’s endorsement of his scheme and perhaps even funding for a revolutionary comparative study of racial attitudes and race relations in different European countries. Washington, with his access to Andrew Carnegie, seemed a likely touch for funds, and Washington, perhaps thinking of the possibility of Locke on his team, endorsed, at least rhetorically, Locke’s plan. The Wizard and the Fox, as his adversaries would later call Washington and Locke, had met and each had found a potential compatriot.
Locke, however, was not yet ready to return home; but he had learned an important lesson—in order to survive in Europe, he needed to keep stoking the fires of America. In “Oxford Contrasts,” he had articulated a principle that was even truer now that the Rhodes was coming to an end. His value was greater in America than it was in Europe, and his continued survival as a transnational African American depended on his ability to find new sources of acclaim and support from the American side. The question left unanswered was, would Washington really bite and fund the ambitious plans of the Black Rhodes Scholar?