it or penetrates democracy with the wisdom that came to
Lincoln in his loneliness: "As I would not be a SLAVE, so I
would not be a MASTER. This expresses my idea of democracy.
Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference,
is no democracy." The mountains, the caves, the forests, the
deserts have had no prophets to interpret either their silences
or their voices. In short, these books are mostly only the stuff
of literature, not literature itself, not the very stuff of life,
not the distillations of mankind's "agony and bloody sweat."

An ignorant person attaches more importance to the
chatter of small voices around him than to the noble language
of remote individuals. The more he listens to the small, the
smaller he grows. The hope of regional literature lies in out-
growing regionalism itself. On November 11, 1949, I gave a
talk to the Texas Institute of Letters that was published in
the Spring 1950 issue of the _Southwest Review_. The paragraphs
that follow are taken therefrom.

Good writing about any region is good only to the extent
that it has universal appeal. Texans are the only "race of
people" known to anthropologists who do not depend upon
breeding for propagation. Like princes and lords, they can
be made by "breath," plus a big white hat--which
comparatively few Texans wear. A beef stew by a cook in San
Antonio, Texas, may have a different flavor from that of a
beef stew cooked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but the essential
substances of potatoes and onions, with some suggestion
of beef, are about the same, and geography has no effect on
their digestibility.