Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone at evening in the streets of an American town.
American towns, and in particular American towns of the Middle West of twenty years ago, were not built for beauty, they were not built to be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physical escape, must have got, like a disease, into our father’s brains. How they pitched the towns and cities together! What an insanity! The lad we have together invented, to walk at evening in the streets of such a town, must of necessity be more beautiful than all the hurriedly built towns and cities in which he may walk. True immaturity of the body and the spirit is more beautiful than mere tired-out physical maturity: the physical maturity of men and women that has no spiritual counterpart within itself falls quickly into physical and ugly decay—like the cheaply constructed frame houses of so many of our towns.
The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly thrown together, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue for a long time to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap, hurried, ugly construction of America’s physical life still goes on and on. The idea of permanent residence has not taken hold on us. Our imaginations are not yet fired by love of our native soil.
The American boy of our mutual imaginative creation is walking in the streets of an Ohio town, after the factories have begun coming and the day of the hustlers is at hand, the houses of the town pushed up quickly, people swarming into the town who have no notion of staying there—a surprising number of them will stay, but they have, at first, no intention of staying.
Before the boy’s day how slow the growth of the towns! There were the people of an older generation, coming out slowly to the Middle West, from New York state, from Pennsylvania, from New England—a great many to my own Ohio country from New England. They had come drifting in slowly, bringing traces of old customs, sayings, religions, prejudices. The young farmers came first, glad of the rich free soil and the friendlier climate—strong young males that were to come in such numbers as to leave New England, with its small fields and its thinner, stonier soil, a place of aging maiden ladies—that old-maid civilization that was, nevertheless, to be the seat of our American culture. An insane fear of the flesh, a touch of transcendentalism, a reaching always up into the sky. In the ground underfoot there is only fear, poverty, hardship. One must look upward, always upward.
What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavor on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the play of muscles through the bodies of men?
The cry of fear—“that way lies sin.”
In the new land, in that older time, too much maleness. Deep mud in the streets of the little towns, built in the forest along rivers or on the stage roads. Bearded, rough-handed men gathered about the saloons. Abe Lincoln proving his manhood by lifting a barrel of whisky and drinking from the bunghole. The ruffian of the frontier, father of the modern gunman of our cities, proving his manhood by murder—Blinky Morgan of Ohio, Jesse James of Missouri, Slade of the Overland Route to the gold and silver camps of the Far West—these the heroes of that life.
A slow culture growing up, however—growing as culture must always grow—through the hands of workmen.
In the small towns artisans coming in—the harness-maker, the carriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, the maker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too.