Jason Edwards: An Average Man
(There are people and people in the world. Jason Edwards i...)
There are people and people in the world. Jason Edwards is, of course, only a Western farmer by removal, but in all his types of the simon-pure, rural midlander Mr. Garland seems to have found his material in the lowest strata of our intellectual development, in the poverty-stricken renter and the mismanaging, much-mortgaged incapable, whose fortunes no country, however rich in resources, could mend. He leaves wholly out of account the great majority of industrious, progressive, wealth-producing men who have made our Valley States to blossom as the rose. And, at this moment, the dominant element in this prosperous and wealthy prairie country is the new generation born and reared between the Missouri and the Great Lakes — brought up, as we say, in the atmosphere of comfortable homes, in the shadow of the school-house,— intelligent, reading, thinking young men and women. Our author, entertaining as he is, and dramatic to intensity at times, is manifestly unfair in presenting the people of the Middle-West. He is a special pleader for a cause on one hand, and an artist with a mole's eye on the other. In his search for the true type of the Western farmer, it is as if a sculptor, wanting to model a single piece which should typify the animal life of this Upper Mississippi country, had dug in the muck of the river and brought forth a burrowing snail.
In this talk, the young ranchman had arisen from an easy-chair at the table and assumed a favorite attitude,— his back in the glow of the base-burner, his hands locked behind him, and one foot slightly advanced. His bronzed face lighted as he talked with the play of intelligent and refined expression. His youthful listeners sat with eyes fixed earnestly upon him, drinking at the fountain of his thought, their own faces aglow, mirrored in its reflection....
—The Midland Monthly [1896]
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