They are telling a thousand cities and villages about our new President, the one they are making this minute, down in Washington, for these United States. With his hand lifted up he has just taken his oath, has sworn before God and before his people to serve the destinies of a nation. And now along a hundred thousand miles of wire on dumb wooden poles, a hope, a prayer, a kind of quiet, stern singing of a mighty people goes by. And I am sitting here in my study window wondering what he will be like, what he will think, and what he will believe about us.
What will our new President do with these hundreds of miles of prayer, of crying to God, stretched up to him out of the hills and out of the plains?
Does he really overhear it—that huge, dumb, half-helpless, half-defiant prayer going up past him, out of the eager, hoarse cities, out of the slow, patient fields, to God?
Does he overhear it, I wonder? What does he make out that we are like?
I should think it would sound like music to him.
It would come to seem, I should think, when he is alone with his God (and will he not please be alone with his God sometimes?), like some vast ocean of people singing, a kind of multitudinous, faraway singing, like the wind—ah, how often have I heard the wind like some strange and mighty people in the pine treetops go singing by!
I do not see how a President could help growing a little like a poet—down in his heart—as he listens.
If he does, he may do as he will with us.
We will let him be an artist in a nation.
As Winslow Homer takes the sea, as Millet takes the peasants in the fields, as Frank Brangwyn lifts up the labour in the mills and makes it colossal and sublime, the President is an artist, in touching the crowd's imagination with itself—in making a nation self-conscious.