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.