I
CERTAIN questions lie dormant for long periods and then, often with no apparent provocation, assume an acute phase and cry insistently for attention. The failure of the church to adjust itself to the needs of the age; the shiftlessness of the new generation; the weaknesses of our educational system—these and like matters are susceptible of endless debate. Into this general classification we may gaily sweep the query as to whether a small town is as promising a habitat for an aspiring soul as a large city. When we have wearied of defending or opposing the continuance of the direct primary, or have found ourselves suddenly conscious that the attempt to decide whether immortality is desirable is unprofitable, we may address ourselves valiantly to a discussion of the advantages of the provinces over those of the seething metropolis, or take the other way round, as pleases our humor. Without the recurring stimulus of such contentions as these we should probably be driven to the peddling of petty gossip or sink into a state of intellectual coma.
There are encouraging signs that we of this Republic are much less impatient under criticism than we used to be, or possibly we are becoming more callous. Still I think it may be said honestly that we have reached a point where we are measurably disposed to see American life steadily and see it whole. It is the seeing it whole that is the continuing difficulty. We have been reminded frequently that our life is so varied that the great American novel must inevitably be the work of many hands, it being impossible for one writer to present more than one phase or describe more than one geographical section. This is “old stuff,” and nothing that need keep us awake o’ nights. One of these days some daring hand capable of wielding a broad brush will paint a big picture, but meanwhile we are not so badly served by those fictionists who turn up their little spadefuls of earth and clap a microscope upon it. Such novels as Miss Lulu Bett and Main Street or such a play as Mr. Frank Craven’s The First Year, to take recent examples, encourage the hope that after all we are not afraid to look at ourselves when the mirror is held before us by a steady hand.
A serious novel that cuts close to the quick can hardly fail to disclose one of our most amusing weaknesses—our deeply ingrained local pride that makes us extremely sensitive to criticism in any form of our own bailiwick. The nation may be assailed and we are philosophical about it; but if our home town is peppered with bird shot by some impious huntsman we are at once ready for battle. We do like to brag of our own particular Main Street! It is in the blood of the provincial American to think himself more happily situated and of a higher type than the citizens of any other province. In journeys across the continent, I have sometimes thought that there must be a definite line where bragging begins. I should fix it somewhere west of Pittsburgh, attaining its maximum of innocent complacency in Indiana, diminishing through Iowa and Nebraska, though ranging high in Kansas and Colorado and there gathering fresh power for a dash to the coast, where stout Cortez and all his men would indeed look at each other with a mild surmise to hear the children of the Pacific boast of their landscape and their climate, and the kindly fruits of their soil.
When I travel beyond my State’s boundaries I more or less consciously look for proof of Indiana’s superiority. Where I fail to find it I am not without my explanations and excuses. If I should be kidnapped and set down blindfolded in the midst of Ohio on a rainy night, I should know, I am sure, that I was on alien soil. I frequently cross Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, and never without a sense of a change of atmosphere in passing from one to the other. Kansas, from territorial days, has been much more strenuously advertised than Nebraska. The very name Kansas is richer in its connotations. To think of it is to recall instantly the days of border warfare; John Brown of Osawatomie, the New England infusion, the Civil War soldiers who established themselves on the free soil after Appomattox; grasshoppers and the days of famine; populism and the Sockless Socrates of Medicine Lodge, the brilliant, satiric Ingalls, Howe’s Story of a Country Town, William Allen White of Emporia, and A Certain Rich Man, down to and including the present governor, the Honorable Henry J. Allen, beyond question the most beguiling man to sit at meat with in all America.