Chapter II: Finding the Poet

FLORA, Illinois, where one changes for Springfield, has a Main Street, and, like many a little town of the Middle West of America, looks rather self-consciously askance at visitors, like the village that voted the earth was flat in Kipling’s tale. For the novel of the hour is called _Main Street_ and is sold to hundreds of thousands of people and read by every American who reads anything, and is bitterly or jocularly discussed at every tea-table. It sheds a bright light on the life of a typical little town in the Middle West. It names the town Gopher Prairie--because the Middle West is prairie land and the gopher-rats or marmots live there in myriads in their little burrows. The novelist seems to suggest that the people themselves are a species of gopher, a little people, limited of view, good-natured, of the earth earthy, but always bobbing-up. Because of the criticism implied in this novel the Middle West would rather now be called the “Central West.”

These Main Streets, however, except for the sophisticated eyes of a college girl inauspiciously married, are probably not so bad as the realist paints them. They are dull, but genuine. They exhibit our modern civilisation without too many shams. See the people working in the heat. The minds of the young are set on their dull jobs and not thinking of drink or sex--it is sufficiently wonderful. There are “Main Street” towns in every country in Europe, and life is dull in them though adorned by fights and drinks and “hussies”--but where will you find such an unexhausted _élan_ and zest for the unornamented reality that America affords? Where else moreover will you find the working-men to-day working in silk shirts? Life in Main Street seems worth while, at least to those who live there.

It’s a by-line from Flora to Springfield, and you plough iron slowly through Illinois corn. An old mechanical car-conductor with grey straw hat and fat stubby face calls the stations one by one in an outlandish accent which to a stranger is entirely baffling. He collects the tickets, and if you are for Springfield he puts a red check in your hat-band; if you are for anywhere else it is a white check. Springfield is now in the mind’s eye as a large place and is printed everywhere in big type. The Springfield _Register_ and the Springfield _Journal_ make showing.

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