NEWS-BOOKS
The most practical thing that could happen now in the economic world in America would be a sudden, a great national, contemporary literature.
America, unlike England, has no recognized cultured class, and has no aristocracy, so called, with which to keep mere rich men suitably miserable—at least a little humble and wistful. Our greatest need for a long time has been some big serene, easy way, without half trying, of snubbing rich men in America. All these overgrown, naughty fellows one sees everywhere like street boys on the corners or on the curbstones of society, calling society names and taking liberties with it, tripping people up; hoodlums with dollars, all these micks of money!—O, that society had some big, calm, serene way like some huge hearty London policeman, of taking hold of them—taking hold of them by the seats of their little trousers if need be, and taking them home to Mother—some way of setting them down hard in their chairs and making them thoughtful! Nothing but a national literature will do this. "Life," (which is, with one exception, perhaps, the only religious weekly we have left in America) succeeds a little and has some spiritual value because it succeeds in making American millionaires look funny, and in making them want to get away and live in Europe. But "Life" is not enough; it merely hitches us along from day to day and keeps our courage up. We want in America a literature, we want the thing done thoroughly and forever and once for all. We want an Aristophanes, a master who shall go gloriously laughing through our world, through our chimneys and blind machines, pot-bellied fortunes, empty successes, all these tiny, queer little men of wind and bladder, until we have a nation filled with a divine laughter, with strong, manful, happy visions of what men are for.
All we have to do is to have a News-book—a bookful of the kind of rich men we want, then we will have them. We will see men piling over each other all day to be them. Men have wanted to make money because making money has been supposed to mean certain things about a man. The moment it ceases to mean them, they will want to make other things.
Where is the news about what we really want?
——, when I took him to the train yesterday, spoke glowingly of the way the Standard Oil Trust had reduced oil from twenty-nine cents to eleven cents.
There was not time to say anything. I just thought a minute of how they did it.
Why is it that people—so many good people will speak of oil at eleven cents in this way, as if it were a kind of little kingdom of heaven?
I admit that eleven cents from twenty-nine cents leaves eighteen cents.
I do not deny that the Standard Oil Trust has saved me eighteen cents. But what have they taken away out of my life and taken out of my sense of the world and of the way things go in it and out of my faith in human nature to toss me eighteen cents?
If I could have for myself and others the sense of the world that I had before, would I not to-day, day after day, over and over, gallon by gallon, be handing them their eighteen cents back?
What difference does it make to us if we are in a world where we can buy oil for eleven cents a gallon instead of twenty-nine, if we do not care whether we are alive or dead in it and do not expect anything from ourselves or expect anything of anybody else? I submit it to your own common sense, Gentle Reader. Is it any comfort to buy oil to light a room in which you do not want to sit, in which you would rather not see anything, in which you would rather not remember who you are, what you do, and what your business is like, and what you are afraid your business is going to be like?
I have passed through all this during the last fifteen years and I have come out on the other side. But millions of lives of other men are passing through it now, passing through it daily, bitterly, as they go to their work and as they fall asleep at night.
The next thing in this world is not reducing the price of oil. It is raising the price of men and putting a market-value on life.
What makes a man a man is that he knows himself, knows who he is, what he is for and what he wants. Knowing who he is and knowing what he is about, he naturally acts like a man, knows what he is about like a man, and gets things done.
A nation that does not know itself shall not be itself.
A nation that has a muddle-headed literature, a nation that to say nothing of not being able to express what it has, has not even made a beginning at expressing what it wants; a nation that has not a great, eager, glowing literature, a sublime clear-headedness about what it is for—a nation that cannot put itself into a great book, a nation that cannot weave itself together even in words into a book that can be unfurled before the people like a flag where everybody can see it and everybody can share it, look up to it, live for it, sleep for it, get up in the morning and work for it—work for the vision of what it wants to be—cannot be a great nation.
A masterpiece is a book that has a thousand years in it. No man has a right to say where these thousand years in it shall lie, whether in the past or in the future. It is the thousand years' worth in it that makes a masterpiece a masterpiece. In America we may not have the literature of what we are or of what we have been, but the literature of what we are bound to be, the literature of what WE WILL, we will have, and we will have to have it before we can begin being it.
First the Specifications, then the House.
From the practical or literary point of view the one sign we have given in this country so far, that the stuff of masterpieces is in us and that we are capable of a great literature, is that America is bored by its own books.
We let a French parson write a book for us on the simple life. We let a poor suppressed Russian with one foot in hell reach over and write books for us about liberty which we greedily read and daily use. We let a sublimely obstinate Norwegian, breaking away with his life, pulling himself up out of the beautiful, gloomy, morose bog of romance he was born in—express our American outbreak for facts, for frank realism in human nature.
America is bored by its own books because every day it is demanding gloriously from its authors a literature—books that answer our real questions, the questions the people are asking every night as they go to sleep and every morning when they crowd out into the streets—Where are we going? Who are we? What are we like? What are we for?
A—— C——, the little stoopy cobbler on —— street in ——, bought some machines to help him last year before I went away and added two or three slaves to do the work. I find on coming back that he has moved and has two show windows now, one with the cobbling slaves in it cobbling, and the other (a kind of sudden, impromptu room with a show window in it) seems to be straining to be a shoe store. When you go in and show C—— in his shirt sleeves,—your old shoes hopefully, he slips over from his shining leather bench to the shoe-store side and shows you at the psychological moment a new pair of shoes.
He is in the train now with me this morning, across the aisle, looking out of the window for dear life, poor fellow, for all the world as if he could suck up dollars and customers—and people who need shoes—out of the fields as he goes by, the way the man does mists, by looking hard at them.
I watched him walking up and down the station platform before I got on, with that bent, concentrated, meek, ready-to-die-getting-on look. I saw his future while I looked. I saw, or thought I saw, windows full of bright black shoes, I saw the cobbler's shop moved out into the ell at the back, and two great show windows in front. A—— C—— looks like an edged tool.
Millions of Americans are like A—— C——, like chisels, adzes, saws, scoops. You talk with them, and if you talk about anything except scooping and adzing, you are not talking with just a man, but a man who is for something and who is not for anything else. He is not for being talked with certainly, and alas! not for being loved. At best he is a mere feminine convenience—a father or a cash secreter; until he wears out at last, buzzes softly into a grave.
An Englishman of this type is a little better, would be more like one of these screw-driver, cork-screw arrangements—a big hollow handle with all sorts of tools inside.
Is this man a typical American? Does he need to be?
What I want is news about us.
All an American like C—— needs is news. His eagerness is the making of him. He is merely eager for what he will not want.
All he needs is the world's news about people, about new inventions in human beings, news about the different and happier kinds of newly invented men, news about how they were thought of, and how they are made, and news about how they work.
I demand three things for A—— C——:
I want a novel that he will read which will make him see himself as I see him.
I want a moving picture of him that he will go to and like and go to again and again.
I want a play that will send him home from the theatre and keep him awake with what he might be all that night.
I want a news-book for A—— C——, a news-book for all of us.
I read a book some years ago that seemed a true news-book and which was the first suggestion I had ever received that a book can be an act of colossal statesmanship, the making or remaking of a people—a masterpiece of modern literature, laying the ground plan for the greatness of a nation.
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 masses of real things, gigantic, half-godlike, 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 gratitude 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 God! 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."