The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

The value of a local literature, where it is honest, is that it preserves a record of change. It is a safe prediction that some later chronicler of Gopher Prairie will present a very different community from that revealed in Main Street. Casting about for an instance of a State whose history is illustrated by its literature, I pray to be forgiven if I fall back upon Indiana. Edward Eggleston was an early, if not indeed the first, American realist. It is now the habit of many Indianians to flout the Hoosier Schoolmaster as a libel upon a State that struts and boasts of its culture and refuses to believe that it ever numbered ignorant or vulgar people among its inhabitants. Eggleston’s case is, however, well-supported by testimony that would pass muster under the rules of evidence in any fair court of criticism. Riley, coming later, found kindlier conditions, and sketched countless types of the farm and the country town, and made painstaking studies of the common speech. His observations began with a new epoch—the return of the soldiers from the Civil War. The veracity of his work is not to be questioned; his contribution to the social history of his own Hoosier people is of the highest value. Just as Eggleston and Riley left records of their respective generations, so Mr. Tarkington, arriving opportunely to preserve unbroken the apostolic succession, depicts his own day with the effect of contributing a third panel in a series of historical paintings. Thanks to our provincial literature, we may view many other sections through the eyes of novelists; as, the Maine of Miss Jewett, the Tennessee of Miss Murfree, the Kentucky of James Lane Allen, the Virginia of Mr. Page, Miss Johnston, and Miss Glasgow, the Louisiana of Mr. Cable. (I am sorry for the new generation that doesn’t know the charm of Old Creole Days and Madame Delphine!) No doubt scores of motorists traversing Minnesota will hereafter see in every small town a Gopher Prairie, and peer at the doctors’ signs in the hope of catching the name of Kennicott!

An idealism persistently struggling to implant itself in the young soil always has been manifest in the West, and the record of it is very marked in the Mississippi Valley States. Emerson had a fine appreciation of this. He left Concord frequently to brave the winter storms in what was then pretty rough country, to deliver his message and to observe the people. His philosophy seems to have been equal to his hardships. “My chief adventure,” he wrote in his journal of one such pilgrimage, “was the necessity of riding in a buggy forty-eight miles to Grand Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, and the next morning back to Kalamazoo in time for the train hither at twelve.” Nor did small audiences disturb him. “Here is America in the making, America in the raw. But it does not want much to go to lectures, and ’tis a pity to drive it.”

There is, really, something about corn—tall corn, that whispers on summer nights in what George Ade calls the black dirt country. There is something finely spiritual about corn that grows like a forest in Kansas and Nebraska. And Democracy is like unto it—the plowing, and the sowing, and the tending to keep the weeds out. We can’t scratch a single acre and say all the soil’s bad;—it may be wonderfully rich in the next township!

It is the way of nature to be perverse and to fashion the good and great out of the least promising clay. Country men and small-town men have preponderated in our national counsels and all things considered they haven’t done so badly. Greatness has a way of unfolding itself; it remains true that the fault is in ourselves, and not in our stars, that we are underlings. Out of one small town in Missouri came the two men who, just now, hold respectively the rank of general and admiral of our army and navy. And there is a trustworthy strength in elemental natures—in what Whitman called “powerful uneducated persons.” Ancestry and environment are not negligible factors, yet if Lincoln had been born in New York and Roosevelt in a Kentucky log cabin, both would have reached the White House. In the common phrase, you can’t keep a good man down. The distinguishing achievement of Drinkwater’s Lincoln is not merely his superb realization of a great character, but the sense so happily communicated, of a wisdom deep-planted in the general heart of man. It isn’t all just luck, the workings of our democracy. If there’s any manifestation on earth of a divine ordering of things, it is here in America. Considering that most of the hundred million trudge along away back in the line where the music of the band reaches them only faintly, the army keeps step pretty well.

IV

“Myself when young did eagerly frequent” lecture-halls and the abodes of the high-minded and the high-intentioned who were zealous in the cause of culture. This was in those years when Matthew Arnold’s criticisms of America and democracy in general were still much discussed. Thirty years ago it really seemed that culture was not only desirable but readily attainable for America. We cherished happy illusions as to the vast possibilities of education: there should be no Main Street without its reverence for the best thought and noblest action of all time. But those of us who are able to ponder “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world” in the spirit of that period must reflect, a little ruefully, that the new schemes and devices of education to which we pointed with pride have not turned the trick. The machinery of enlightenment has, of course, greatly multiplied. The flag waves on innumerable schoolhouses; literature, art, music are nowhere friendless. The women of America make war ceaselessly upon philistinism, and no one attentive to their labors can question their sincerity or their intelligence. But these are all matters as to which many hear the call but comparatively few prostrate themselves at the mercy-seat. Culture, in the sense in which we used the word, was not so easily to be conferred or imposed upon great bodies of humanity; the percentage of the mass who are seriously interested in the finest and noblest action of mankind has not perceptibly increased.

Odd as these statements look, now that I have set them down, I hasten to add that they stir in me no deep and poignant sorrow. My feeling about the business is akin to that of a traveller who has missed a train but consoles himself with the reflection that by changing his route a trifle he will in due course reach his destination without serious delay, and at the same time enjoy a view of unfamiliar scenery.

Between what Main Street wants and cries for and what Main Street really needs there is a considerable margin for speculation. I shall say at once that I am far less concerned than I used to be as to the diffusion of culture in the Main Streets of all creation. Culture is a term much soiled by ignoble use and all but relegated to the vocabulary of cant. We cannot “wish” Plato upon resisting and hostile Main Streets; we are even finding that Isaiah and St. Paul are not so potent to conjure with as formerly. The church is not so generally the social centre of small communities as it was a little while ago. Far too many of us are less fearful of future torment than of a boost in the price of gasolene. The motor may be making pantheists of us: I don’t know. Hedonism in some form may be the next phase; here, again, I have no opinion.

V

Mr. St. John Ervine complains that we of the provinces lack individuality; that we have been so smoothed out and conform so strictly to the prevailing styles of apparel that the people in one town look exactly like those in the next. This observation may be due in some measure to the alien’s preconceived ideas of what the hapless wights who live west of the Hudson ought to look like, but there is much truth in the remark of this amiable friend from overseas. Even the Indians I have lately seen look quite comfortable in white man’s garb. To a great extent the ready-to-wear industry has standardized our raiment, so that to the unsophisticated masculine eye at least the women of Main Street are indistinguishable from their sisters in the large cities. There is less slouch among the men than there used to be. Mr. Howells said many years ago that in travelling Westward the polish gradually dimmed on the shoes of the native; but the shine-parlors of the sons of Romulus and Achilles have changed all that.