When I had read it, I wanted to rush outdoors and go down the street stopping people I met and telling them about it. Once in a very great while one does come on a book like this. One wants to write letters to the reviews. One does not know what one would not do to go down the long aimless Midway Plaisance of the modern books, to call attention to it.
One wishes there were a great bell up over the world.... One would reach up to it, and would say to all the men and the women and to the flocks of the smoking cities, "Where are you all?" The bell would boom out, "What are you doing? Why are you not reading this book?" One wonders if one could not get a coloured page in the middle of the _Atlantic_ or the _North American Review_ or _Everybody"s_ and at least make a great book as prominent as a great soap--almost make it loom up in a country like a Felt Mattress or a Toothbrush.
The book that has made me feel like this the most is Charles Ferguson"s "Religion of Democracy." I have always wondered why only people here and there responded to it. The things it made me vaguely see, all those huge ma.s.ses of real things, gigantic, half-G.o.dlike, looming like towers or mountains in a mist.... Well, it must have been a little like this that Columbus felt that first morning!
But as Columbus went on, what he struck after all was real land, some piece of real land in particular. The mist of vision did precipitate into something one could walk on, and I found as I went on with Mr.
Ferguson"s book that if there was going to be any real land, somebody would have to make some.
But for the time being Charles Ferguson"s book--all those glorious generalizings in behalf of being individual, all those beautiful, intoned, chanted abstractions in behalf of being concrete--came to me in my speechless, happy grat.i.tude as a kind of first sign in the heavens, as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, up over the place in the waste of water where land, Land! At last! Land again! will have to be.
If we ever have a literature in America, it will be found somewhere when the mist rolls away, right under Charles Ferguson"s book.
It may be too soon just now in this time of transition in our land of piles and of derricks against the sky, for the book. All we are competent for now is to say that we want such a book, that we see what it will do for us.
When we want it, we will get it. Let the American people put in their order now.
In the meantime the Piles and the Derricks.
All these young and mighty derricks against the sky, all these soaring steel girders with the blue through them--America!
Ah, my G.o.d! is it not a hoping nation? Three thousand miles of Hope, from Eastport, Maine, to San Francisco--does not the very sun itself racing across it take three hours to get one look at our Hope?
Here it is!--Our World.
Let me, for one, say what I want.
It is already as if I had seen it--one big, heroic imagination at work at last like a sea upon our world, poetry grappling with the great cities, with their labour, with their creative might, full of their vast joys and sorrows, full of their tussle with the sea and with the powers of the air and with the iron in the earth!--the big, speechless cities that no one has spoken for yet, so splendid, and so eager, and so silent about their souls!
It is true we are crude and young.
Behold the Derricks like mighty Youths!
In our glorious adolescence so sublime, so ugly, so believing, will no one sing a hymn to the Derricks?
Where are the dear little Poets? Where are they hiding?
Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks.
Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first.
Some dear, hopeful, modest American poet might creep up from under them, out from under the great believing, dumb Derricks standing on tiptoe of faith against the sky, and write a book and call it "Beliefs American Poets Would Like to Believe if They Could."
CHAPTER XII
NEWS-BOOKS II
A nation"s religion is its shrewdness about its ideals, its genius for stating its ideals or news about itself, in the terms of its everyday life.
A nation"s literature is its power of so stating its ideals that we will not need to be shrewd for them--its power of expressing its ideals in words, of tracing out ideals on white paper, so that ideals shall enthrall the people, so that ideals shall be contagious, shall breathe and be breathed into us, so that ideals shall be caught up in the voices of men and sung in the streets.
Ideals, intangible, electric, implacable irresistible, all-enfolding ideals, shall hold and grip a continent the way a climate grips a continent, like sunshine around a helpless thing, in the hollow of its hand, and possess the hearts of the people.
What our government needs now is a National band in Washington.
America is a Tune.
America is not a formula. America is not statistics, even graphic statistics. A great nation cannot be made, cannot be discovered, and then be laid coldly together like a census. America is a Tune. It must be sung together.
The next thing statesmen are going to learn in this country is that from a practical point of view in making a great nation only our Tune in America and only our singing our Tune can save us. A great nation can be made out of the truth about us. The truth may be--must be probably,--plain. But the truth must sing.
It will not be the government that first gets the truth that will govern us. The government that gets the truth big enough to sing first, and sings it, will be the government that will govern us. The political party in this country that will first be practical with the people, and that will first get what it wants, will be the political party that first takes Literature seriously. Our first great practical government is going to see how a great book, searching the heart of a nation, expressing and singing the men in it, governs a people. Being a President in a day like this, if it does not consist in being a poet, consists in being the kind of President who can be, at least, in partnership with a poet.
It is not every President who can be his own David, who can rule with one hand and write psalms and chants for his people with the other.
The call is out, the people have put in their order to the authors of America, to the boys in the colleges, and to the young women in the great schools--Our President wants a book.
Before much time has pa.s.sed, he is going to have one.
Being a President in this country has never been expressed in a book.
The President is going to have a book that expresses him to the people and that says what he is trying to do. He will live confidentially with the book. It shall be in his times of trial and loneliness like a great people coming to him softly. He shall feel with such a book, be it day or night, the nation by him, by his desk, by his bedside, by his silence, by his questioning, standing by, and lifting.
In the book the people shall sing to the President. He shall be kept reminded that we are there. He shall feel daily what America is like.
America shall be focussed into melody. We shall have a literature once more and the singers, as in Greece, as in all happy lands and in all great ages, shall go singing through the streets.
There is no singing for a President now. All a President can do when he is inaugurated, when he begins now, is to kiss helplessly some singing four thousand years old in a Bible by another nation.
When David sang to his people, he sang the news, the latest news, the news of what was happening to people about him from week to week.
Why is no one singing 1913, our own American 1913?
Why is no one stuttering out our Bible--one the President could have to refer to, our own Bible in our own tongue from morning to morning in the symbols that breathe to us out of the sounds in the street, out of the air, out of the fresh, bright American sky, and out of the new ground beneath our feet?
It is easy for a President to pile up three columns a morning of news about himself to us, show each man his face in the morning, but what is there he can do with twenty thousand newspapers at his breakfast table, to pick out the real news about us? Who shall paint the portrait of a people?
One could go about in the White House and study the portraits of the presidents, but where is the portrait of the people? The portrait of the people comes in little bits to the president like a puzzle picture. Each man brings in his little crooked piece, jig-sawed out from Iowa, South Dakota, Oklahoma or Aroostook County, Maine. This picture or vision of a nation, this wilderness of pieces, can be seen every day when one goes in, lying in heaps on the floor of the White House.
A literature is the expression on the face of a nation. A literature is the eyes of a great people looking at one.
It seems to be as we look, looking out of the past and faraway into the future.
A newspaper can set a nation"s focus for a morning, adjusting it one way or the other. A President can set the focus for four years. But only a book can set the focus for a nation"s next hundred years so that it can act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week and morning to morning. Only a book can make a vast, inspiring, steadfast, stage-setting for a nation. Only a book, strong, slow, reflective, alone with each man, and before all men, can set in vast still array the perspective, the vision of the people, can give that magnificent self-consciousness which alone makes a great nation, or a mighty man. At last humble, imperious, exalted, it shall see Itself, its vision of its daily life lying out before it, threading its way to G.o.d!