In the
confusion that attends the meeting here of all the races it is
something to cling to; it is our own.
THANKS TO THE ARTISTS
It would be a wise American town that gave up paying "boosters"
and began to support its artists. A country is just so much
country until it has been talked about, painted, or put into
literature. A town is just so many brick and wood squares,
inhabited by human animals, until some one's creative and
interpretative mind has given it "atmosphere," by which we mean
significance.
America was not mere wild land to the early colonists: it was a
country that had already been seen through the eyes of
enthusiastic explorers and daring adventurers, whose airs were
sweeter than Europe's, whose fruits were richer, where forest and
game, and even the savage inhabitant, guaranteed a more exciting
life, full of chance for the future.
New England was not just so much stony acre and fishing village
for the men of the 'twenties and 'forties. It was a land haloed by
the hopes and sufferings of forefathers, where every town had its
record of struggle known to all by word of mouth or book.
And when the New Englanders pushed westward, it was to a
wilderness which already had its literature, along trails of which
they had read, and into regions familiar to them in imagination.
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