The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1892-02-11
CULTURE, EAST AND WEST.

The Reverend Brooke Hereford recently
! sailed from Boston for England, but be
| fore he left he preached on Things that
! have Stirred Me. 1t transpired that the
thing which had most stirred the preacher
in Boston was its ignorance: its blind
senseless ignorance 1T is pitiful, said he,
1.-THE way Boston society talks and thinks
about the West" Mr.. Hereford then
went on to stir Boston for the way Boston
had stirred him. He described the Bos-
tonians as speaking of the West as the
! fashionable Romans of the later Empire
| talked of the Germans and the Goths who
were yet stronger than they and were to
| be the very makers of the new and greater
world"
Go in, Mr. Hereford, go in. The west is
rejoiced to find a defender.
The west and its manners are daily cru
CITED at the hands of the shrewd wits of
the east Our representatives are made to
carry on their conversations in the most
chaotic jumbles of pominatives plural
and past participles singular, and are dec
Grated in the comic papers in the most
startling executions of linguistic fire
works.
We are pictured as desperadoes who
are wild-eyed with native abandon and
hump-shouldered with the excessive
weight of shooting irons"
The literature of a country is undoubt-
edly the foundation of its culture while
the very soul and final of an aggravated
orm of towering culture is the effect of
the reIgning poets idealisms 1t is I'M
necessary to reflect that the east has and
will depend upon the west for a great
amount of the pith and marrow of its lit
erary being and hence cultivated taste. 1t
is well known that the country boy trans
ferred TO a great city has much keener in
sight into the peculiarities and charac-
teristics of city than the urban-born and
bred; just as the greatest landscape paint
ing has come, not from the rural dweller.
but the intense longing for green fields and
clear streams of men tired to death of the
smoke and smut Of dingy cities
The western man can be found every
where in the east today, propelling society
with wits that have been sharpened by
contact with rough experience. Pointed
satire and derision are sent out like poi
sons shafts to kill the latest foible. This
is almost all from the western man moved
east. The eastern man is unfit for the
task. He has the difficulty OF environ
ment To illustrate take the aristocracy of
family in the east.
There is price on all aristocracy in this
country 1t is an unwritten crime to
know anything definite about your great
grandfather.
The eastern man, born and bred under
or in sight of an aristocracy Of family and
affected heraldry, sometimes emblazoned
on coach doors, submits in silence; the
western man comes in, and, in his rugged
democracy of spirit, laughs and writes the
folly to scorn. 1t is on this line that the
west gives an invaluable lift to culture,
though il receives little credit.
The west has no poet-that is, no reign
ing poet. But give the west time. The
poet will come some day. There is poetry
here, and the right man will strike the
Tyre someday and great will be his fame
There is poetry in the hush of Kansas
July day; a soothing harmony in the sweet
Seventies of moonlit prairie; there is in
SEPARATION in the shadowy visions of our
deepening twilights and Homeric rhythm
in the barring symphony of insects on the
darkling roadside.
The poetry is here. 1t only awaits the
singer.