Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/145

 Mr. Halderman-Julius and the rest. They have had the good sense not to be supinely happy in this most defective world; and they have raised a wail to rival that of Philoctetes. By that wail they have forced the Midwest into the centre of the national literary consciousness.

They have almost, I think, persuaded the country that it is going to be, as Dogberry would say, damned into everlasting redemption by men from these parts.

I for one do not agree with the critical sages who hold that we midwesterners are destroying literature. Whatever you may say of Chicago as a literary centre, you can't say of it, as you can say of one of our older literary capitals, that it is dead. Our midwestern literature is crude, hot, egotistical, hateful; but it ig quick, not dead; the pulse of life beats hard and fast in it. It is blind of one eye; by a kind of barbaric and brutal hate, it is blinded to most of the beauty and grace and promise now present in these midlands. But with its great illuminating passion of hate it has thrown a flood of new light upon the sort of man that the average American of our generation is. It has shown courage and talent in breaking through his superficial protective respectability and exhibiting the weltering chaos of his miscellaneous hungers and discontents. It has broken the long conspiracy of silence. This is a great service, which will be recognized by and by.

But this service of satire and iconoclasm, we midwesterners perform too exclusively in the spirit of