Part 63 (1/2)

When I had read it, I wanted to rush outdoors and go down the street stopping people I met and telling them about it. Once in a very great while one does come on a book like this. One wants to write letters to the reviews. One does not know what one would not do to go down the long aimless Midway Plaisance of the modern books, to call attention to it.

One wishes there were a great bell up over the world.... One would reach up to it, and would say to all the men and the women and to the flocks of the smoking cities, ”Where are you all?” The bell would boom out, ”What are you doing? Why are you not reading this book?” One wonders if one could not get a coloured page in the middle of the _Atlantic_ or the _North American Review_ or _Everybody's_ and at least make a great book as prominent as a great soap--almost make it loom up in a country like a Felt Mattress or a Toothbrush.

The book that has made me feel like this the most is Charles Ferguson's ”Religion of Democracy.” I have always wondered why only people here and there responded to it. The things it made me vaguely see, all those huge ma.s.ses of real things, gigantic, half-G.o.dlike, looming like towers or mountains in a mist.... Well, it must have been a little like this that Columbus felt that first morning!

But as Columbus went on, what he struck after all was real land, some piece of real land in particular. The mist of vision did precipitate into something one could walk on, and I found as I went on with Mr.

Ferguson's book that if there was going to be any real land, somebody would have to make some.

But for the time being Charles Ferguson's book--all those glorious generalizings in behalf of being individual, all those beautiful, intoned, chanted abstractions in behalf of being concrete--came to me in my speechless, happy grat.i.tude as a kind of first sign in the heavens, as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, up over the place in the waste of water where land, Land! At last! Land again! will have to be.

If we ever have a literature in America, it will be found somewhere when the mist rolls away, right under Charles Ferguson's book.

It may be too soon just now in this time of transition in our land of piles and of derricks against the sky, for the book. All we are competent for now is to say that we want such a book, that we see what it will do for us.

When we want it, we will get it. Let the American people put in their order now.

In the meantime the Piles and the Derricks.

All these young and mighty derricks against the sky, all these soaring steel girders with the blue through them--America!

Ah, my G.o.d! is it not a hoping nation? Three thousand miles of Hope, from Eastport, Maine, to San Francisco--does not the very sun itself racing across it take three hours to get one look at our Hope?

Here it is!--Our World.

Let me, for one, say what I want.

It is already as if I had seen it--one big, heroic imagination at work at last like a sea upon our world, poetry grappling with the great cities, with their labour, with their creative might, full of their vast joys and sorrows, full of their tussle with the sea and with the powers of the air and with the iron in the earth!--the big, speechless cities that no one has spoken for yet, so splendid, and so eager, and so silent about their souls!

It is true we are crude and young.

Behold the Derricks like mighty Youths!

In our glorious adolescence so sublime, so ugly, so believing, will no one sing a hymn to the Derricks?

Where are the dear little Poets? Where are they hiding?

Playing Indian perhaps, or making Parthenons out of blocks.

Perhaps they might begin faintly and modestly at first.

Some dear, hopeful, modest American poet might creep up from under them, out from under the great believing, dumb Derricks standing on tiptoe of faith against the sky, and write a book and call it ”Beliefs American Poets Would Like to Believe if They Could.”

CHAPTER XII

NEWS-BOOKS II

A nation's religion is its shrewdness about its ideals, its genius for stating its ideals or news about itself, in the terms of its everyday life.