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.