I.
And the youth returned to his village and found it vile. In the City he had seen visions of what a town might be.... Nicholas Vachel Lindsay had been studying Art in Chicago and on his return to Springfield published, in the fall of 1910, The Village Magazine: a scattering of verse, prose, sketches, and ornamental designs and propaganda. “Talent for poetry, deftness in inscribing, and skill in mural painting were probably gifts of the same person”, he tells us later, in speaking of the ancient Egyptians. “Let us go back”—the village must be redeemed. The first editorial in the magazine was On Conversion. The people of Springfield “should build them altars to the unknown God, the radiant one; He whom they radiantly worship should be declared unto them in His fullness.” The next was An Editorial on Beauty for the Village Pastor—it expressed the belief that the Sunday-school, the Christian Endeavor Society, the Brotherhood, Anti-Saloon League, and the Woman’s Aid were the forces that were to bring about beauty. Springfield was to be the new Athens! A broadside was distributed throughout the village: The Soul of the City receives the gift of the Holy Spirit:
Builders, toil on,
Make all complete.
Make Springfield wonderful
Make her renown
Worthy this day,
Till, at God’s feet—
(Etc., the poetry of the thing will not be spoiled by omitting some lines here.)
Heaven come down
City, dead city,
Arise from the dead.
Verses like the above aside, here was revealed to us a poet; the foundations were laid, it seemed, for a future. But the youth did dream and see visions. Much was said about Utopias and the New Jerusalem, and poetry languished in the youth that he might materialize some ultimate world state. The most inexcusable optimism of them all—“Rome was not built in a day.” True, but it was built: not merely talked about or prophesied. And the youth remembered not that it hath been said in Isaiah: “For, behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.” Yet the youth remembered the former still and did say much about the recoming of those civilizations which had been, at last to stay forever! His day, or the great poet who proceeded him by but a few years, he seemed to notice not:
What do you think endures?
Do you think a great city endures? ...
Away! these are not to be cherished in themselves,
They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them,
The show passes, all does well enough of course,
All does very well till one flash of defiance ...
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women;
If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
But the youth was at heart the poet, the dreamer, attempting to convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; not as the great Poet, by mere presence! Nor could he stand the offer of rough new prizes, preferring the smooth old prizes. He clung to the organizations of the day, and to augment their “influence toward the Millennium” he published The Village Magazine. That, gentle reader, was in 1910.