“Have you ever been in Dodge City, Kansas?” he inquired eagerly.
I modestly replied that I had only passed through on the railway, but I was familiar with other Kansas towns, and, reasoning from analogy, I could tell what manner of place it was. This was enough. I had experienced the West. I was one of the initiated. I could enter into that state of mind represented by the term Dodge City. It appeared that in the golden age, when he and Dodge City were both young, he had sought his fortune for some months in Kansas. He had experienced the joys of civic newness, a newness such as had not been in England since the Heptarchy. He discoursed of the mighty men of those days when every man did what was right in his own eyes, and good-humoredly allowed his neighbor to do likewise. As we parted, he said, with mournful acquiescence in his present estate, “Oxford does very well, you know, but it isn’t Dodge City.” If poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity, what could be more poetical than Dodge City remembered in the tranquillity of Oxford quadrangles?
In this case the poetical view was a sound one. The traveler across the newly developed States of the West has the traveler’s license to contrast unfavorably that which he sees with that which he left behind him in his home country. He may say a dozen uncomplimentary things, and each one of them may be true. He may exhaust all his stock adjectives, as “crude” and “raw” and the like. But when he remarks, as did a certain critic, that because the country lacks “distinction” it is uninteresting, he betrays his own limitations.
It is just that lack of distinction that makes America interesting. Here, no longer distracted by what is exceptional, one may take the welfare of the masses of men seriously.
Here the doings of men correspond to the broad doings of the day and the night,
Here is what moves in magnificent masses, careless of particulars.
When Shelley was an undergraduate he was attracted to a lecture on mineralogy. It seemed to him a subject full of poetical suggestiveness. His expectations were disappointed, and he unceremoniously bolted and returned to his room. “What do you think the man talked about? Stones!—stones!—stones! I tell you stones are not interesting—in themselves.”
Shelley was right. Stones are not interesting in themselves; neither are railroads, nor stockyards, nor new unpainted buildings, nor endless cornfields. But for that matter, neither are crumbling columns, nor old manuscripts, nor the remains of feudal castles interesting—in themselves. Things become interesting only when seen in relation to the people whose thoughts they have stimulated and whose imaginations they have stirred.
America is a fresh field for human endeavor. Here are men busily making roads, bridging rivers, building new cities. They have been given the task of subduing a continent. But in such conflicts with Nature the conquered influences the conquerors. What impress does the continent make upon the minds of the hardy men who are mastering it? What visions of the future do they see which transform their drudgery into an heroic adventure?
In the case of the older nations such questions about the beginnings and the ideals of the beginners cannot be answered. The formative period, with all its significant aspirations, is buried in oblivion. “Who thinks any more as they thought?” we ask in regard to the pioneer of Britain. Poetry has license to picture him as a knight in armor and to tell how in romantic fashion he pitched