His tents beside the forest. And he drave
The heathen, and he slew the beast, and felled
The forest, and let in the sun.
It was all a long time ago, and the men who did these things are not clearly revealed. Not being able to get at their ideals, we attribute to them those which we think appropriate.
The historians are troubled by their lack of authentic material. They are like the magicians, astrologers, sorcerers, and Chaldeans of the court of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that he knew was very important, but before he could get it interpreted by his wise men he forgot what it was. They were good at interpretations, and could have made one to fit if only the king had brought the dream with him so that they could try it on. But that was the very thing he could not do.
The founders of London and Paris had doubtless their dreams of the future; but alas! they have long since been forgotten. But Chicago has not had time to forget. Everything is still vivid. Men walk the streets of the great city who remember it when it was no bigger than the Londinium of the time of the Cæsars. They have with their own eyes watched every step in the civic development and they have been a part of all that they have seen. The Londoner has seen only a passing phase of his London; the greater part of its history is received on hearsay evidence. The Chicagoan sees his Chicago steadily and sees it whole. No wonder that there is a self-consciousness about the new metropolis that is not to be found in the old. Its greatness has been thrust upon it suddenly, and there is a full realization of its value.
The genuine American who is the maker of the new fortunes of the world, and who is in love with his work, has not been adequately portrayed in literature. It requires an ample imagination to do justice to his character. There must be a mingling of realism and romance. The realism must not be the minute, painstaking portraiture of a Miss Austen, but the hearty, out-of-door reality of a Fielding. The American Fielding has not yet appeared, but what a good time he will have when he comes! What a host of characters after his own heart he will find! The American Scott, too, is called for to give us a story of American life which will read as well on the edge of a clearing in the forest as “The Lady of the Lake” did in the trenches of Torres Vedras, when the soldiers forgot the enemy’s shells as they gave a glorious shout over the poet’s lines, which their captain was reading to them. I like that story, in spite of the fact that a recent critic declares that to like it shows an uncultivated taste. “This is not,” he says, “a test of poetry. An audience less likely to be critical, a situation less likely to induce criticism, can hardly be imagined.” Nevertheless, Scott would much rather have written lines that rang true to soldiers in the hour of battle, than to have been given a high mark by the most competent corrector of daily themes.
The imagination of Hawthorne, brooding over the past, repeopled the House of the Seven Gables with the successive generations. But there is another kind of romance, in which the imagination is projected into the future. Looking at the new house not yet enclosed against the storm, it dreams dreams and sees visions. There is a story there, also, and the best of it is that it is to be continued.
******
A shrewd old New England farmer recounted to me the warlike exploits of his family. He himself had been in Gettysburg, and each generation since the time of the French and Indian wars had had its soldier. His son had been shot at Santiago. “The bullet went clean through his body,” he said, indicating a course which seemed to me necessarily fatal. I expressed sympathy. “Oh, it didn’t hurt him much,” he said, “it seemed to go through a vacant spot.”