The Main Streets I know do not strike me as a fit subject for
commiseration. I refuse to be sorry for them. I am increasingly
impressed by their intelligence, their praiseworthy curiosity as
to things of good report, their sturdy optimism, their unshakable
ambition to excel other Main Streets. There is, to be sure, a type of
village with a few stores, a blacksmith-shop, and a gasolene station,
that seems to express the ultimate in torpor. Settlements of this
sort may be found in every State, and the older the State the more
complete seems to be their inertia. But where five thousand people
are assembled--or better, when we deal with a metropolis of ten or
twelve thousand souls--we are at once conscious of a pulse that
keeps time with the world’s heart-beat. There are compensations for
those who abide in such places. In such towns, it is quite possible,
if you are an amiable being, to know well-nigh every one. The main
thoroughfare is a place of fascinations, the stage for a continuing
drama. Carrier delivery destroys the old joy of meeting all the folks
at the post-office, but most of the citizens, male and female, find
some excuse for a daily visit to Main Street. They are bound together
by dear and close ties. You’ve got to know your neighbors whether you
want to or not, and it’s well for the health of your soul to know them
and be of use to them when you can.
I should regard it as a calamity to be deprived of the felicity of my
occasional visits to a particular centre of enlightenment and cheer
that I have in mind. An hour’s journey on the trolley brings me to
the court-house. After one such visit the stranger needn’t trouble
to enroll himself at the inn; some one is bound to offer to put him
up. There is a dramatic club in that town that produces good plays
with remarkable skill and effectiveness. The club is an old one as
such things go, and it fixes the social standard for the community.
The auditorium of the Masonic Temple serves well as a theatre, and
our admiration for the club is enhanced by the disclosure that the
members design the scenery and also include in their membership capable
directors. After the play one may dance for an hour or two, though the
cessation of the music does not mean that you are expected to go to
bed. Very likely some one will furnish forth a supper and there will be
people “asked in” to contribute to your entertainment.
There are in this community men and women who rank with the best
talkers I have ever heard. Their neighbors are proud of them and
produce them on occasion to represent the culture, the wit and humor,
of the town. Two women of this place are most discerning students
of character. They tell stories with a masterly touch, and with the
economy of words, the whimsical comment, the pauses and the unforeseen
climaxes that distinguished the storytelling of Twain and Riley. The
inhabitants make jokes about their Main Street. They poke fun at
themselves as being hicks and rubes, living far from the great centres
of thought, while discussing the newest books and finding, I fancy, a
mischievous pleasure in casually telling you something which you, as
a resident of the near-by capital with its three hundred and twenty
thousand people, ought to have known before.
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.