Edward Eggleston
Edward Eggleston
THE safest appeal of the defender of realism in fiction continues to be to geography. The old inquiry for the great American novel ignored the persistent expansion by which the American States were multiplying. If the question had not ceased to be a burning issue, the earnest seeker might now be given pause by the recent appearance upon our maps of far-lying islands which must, in due course, add to the perplexity of any who wish to view American life steadily or whole. If we should suddenly vanish, leaving only a solitary Homer to chant us, we might possibly be celebrated adequately in a single epic, but as long as we continue malleable and flexible we shall hardly be “begun, continued, and ended” in a single novel, drama, or poem. He were a much-enduring Ulysses who could touch once at all our ports. Even Walt Whitman, from the top of his omnibus, could not see across the palms of Hawaii or the roofs of Manila; and yet we shall doubtlessreceive, in due course, bulletins from the Dialect Society with notes on colonial influences in American speech. Thus it is fair to assume that in the nature of things we shall rely more and more on realistic fiction for a federation of the scattered States of this decentralized and diverse land of ours in a literature which shall become our most vivid social history. We cannot be condensed into one or a dozen finished panoramas; he who would know us hereafter must read us in the flashes of the kinetoscope.
Important testimony to the efficacy of an honest and trustworthy realism has passed into the record in the work of Edward Eggleston, our pioneer provincial realist. Eggleston saw early the value of a local literature, and demonstrated that where it may be referred to general judgments, where it interprets the universal heart and conscience, an attentive audience may be found for it. It was his unusual fortune to have combined a personal experience at once varied and novel with a self-acquired education to which he gave the range and breadth of true cultivation, and, in special directions, the precision of scholarship. The primary facts of lifeas he knew them in the Indiana of his boyhood took deep hold upon his imagination, and the experiences of that period did much to shape his career. He knew the life of the Ohio Valley at an interesting period of transition. He was not merely a spectator of striking social phenomena; but he might have said, with a degree of truth,quorum pars magna fui; for he was a representative of the saving remnant which stood for enlightenment in a dark day in a new land. Literature had not lacked servants in the years of his youth in the Ohio Valley. Many knew in those days the laurel madness; but they went “searching with song the whole world through” with no appreciation of the material that lay ready to their hands at home. Their work drew no strength from the Western soil, but was the savorless fungus of a flabby sentimentalism. It was left for Eggleston, with characteristic independence, to abandon fancy for reality. He never became a great novelist, and yet his homely stories of the early Hoosiers, preserving as they do the acrid bite of the persimmon and the mellow flavor of the pawpaw, strengthen the whole case for a discerning andfaithful treatment of local life. What he saw will not be seen again, and when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and “Roxy” cease to entertain as fiction they will teach as history.
The assumption in many quarters that “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was in some measure autobiographical was always very distasteful to Dr. Eggleston, and he entered his denial forcibly whenever occasion offered. His own life was sheltered, and he experienced none of the traditional hardships of the self-made man. He knew at once the companionship of cultivated people and good books. His father, Joseph Cary Eggleston, who removed to Vevay, Indiana, from Virginia in 1832, was an alumnus of William and Mary College, and his mother’s family, the Craigs, were well known in southern Indiana, where they were established as early as 1799. Joseph Cary Eggleston served in both houses of the Indiana Legislature, and was defeated for Congress in the election of 1844. His cousin, Miles Cary Eggleston, was a prominent Indiana lawyer, and a judge in the early days, riding the long Whitewater circuit, which then extended through eastern Indiana from theOhio to the Michigan border. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay, December 10, 1837. His boyhood horizons were widened by the removal of his family to New Albany and Madison, by a sojourn in the backwoods of Decatur County, and by thirteen months spent in Amelia County, Virginia, his father’s former home. There he saw slavery practiced, and he ever afterward held anti-slavery opinions. There was much to interest an intelligent boy in the Ohio Valley of those years. Reminiscences of the frontiersmen who had redeemed the valley from savagery seasoned fireside talk with the spice of adventure; Clark’s conquest had enrolled Vincennes in the list of battles of the Revolution; the battle of Tippecanoe was recent history; and the long rifle was still the inevitable accompaniment of the axe throughout a vast area of Hoosier wilderness. There was, however, in all the towns—Vevay, Brookville, Madison, Vincennes—a cultivated society, and before Edward Eggleston was born a remarkable group of scholars and adventurers had gathered about Robert Owen at New Harmony, in the lower Wabash, and while theirexperiment in socialism was a dismal failure, they left nevertheless an impression which is still plainly traceable in that region. Abraham Lincoln lived for fourteen years (1816-30) in Spencer County, Indiana, and witnessed there the same procession of the Ohio’s argosies which Eggleston watched later in Switzerland County.
Edward Eggleston attended school for not more than eighteen months after his tenth year, and owing to ill health he never entered college, though his father, who died at thirty-four, had provided a scholarship for him. But he knew in his youth a woman of unusual gifts, Mrs. Julia Dumont, who conducted a dame school at Vevay. Mrs. Dumont is the most charming figure in early Indiana history, and Dr. Eggleston’s own portrait of her is at once a tribute and an acknowledgment. She wrote much in prose and verse, so that young Eggleston, besides the stimulating atmosphere of his own home, had before him in his formative years a writer of somewhat more than local reputation for his intimate counselor and teacher. His schooling continued to be desultory, but hiscuriosity was insatiable, and there was, indeed, no period in which he was not an eager student. His life was rich in those minor felicities of fortune which disclose pure gold to seeing eyes in any soil. He wrote once of the happy chance which brought him to a copy of Milton in a little house where he lodged for a night on the St. Croix River. His account of his first reading of “L’Allegro” is characteristic: “I read it in the freshness of the early morning, and in the freshness of early manhood, sitting by a window embowered with honeysuckles dripping with dew, and overlooking the deep trap-rock dalles through which the dark, pine-stained waters of the St. Croix River run swiftly. Just abreast of the little village the river opened for a space, and there were islands; and a raft, manned by two or three red-shirted men, was emerging from the gorge into the open water. Alternately reading ‘L’Allegro’ and looking off at the poetic landscape, I was lifted out of the sordid world into a region of imagination and creation. When, two or three hours later, I galloped along the road, here and there overlooking the dalles and river, the glory of anature above nature penetrated my being; and Milton’s song of joy reverberated still in my thoughts.” He was, it may be said, a natural etymologist, and by the time he reached manhood he had acquired a reading knowledge of half a dozen languages. We have glimpses of him as chain-bearer for a surveying party in Minnesota; as walking across country toward Kansas, with an ambition to take a hand in the border troubles; and then once more in Indiana, in his nineteenth year, as an itinerant Methodist minister. He rode a four-week circuit with ten preaching places along the Ohio, his theological training being described by his statement that in those days “Methodist preachers were educated by the old ones telling the young ones all they knew.” He turned again to Minnesota to escape malaria, preaching in remote villages to frontiersmen and Indians, and later he ministered to churches in St. Paul and elsewhere. He held, first at Chicago and later at New York, a number of editorial positions, and he occasionally contributed to juvenile periodicals; but these early writings were in no sense remarkable.
“The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared serially in “Hearth and Home” in 1871. It was written in intervals of editorial work and was atour de forcefor which the author expected so little publicity that he gave his characters the names of persons then living in Switzerland and Decatur counties, Indiana, with no thought that the story would ever penetrate to its habitat. But the homely little tale, with all its crudities and imperfections, made a wide appeal. It was pirated at once in England; it was translated into French by “Madame Blanc,” and was published in condensed form in the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and later, with one of Mr. Aldrich’s tales and other stories by Eggleston, in book form. It was translated into German and Danish also. “Le Maître d’Ecole de Flat Creek” was the title as set over into French, and the Hoosier dialect suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange by its cruise into French waters. The story depicts Indiana in its darkest days. The State’s illiteracy as shown by the census of 1830 was 14.32 per cent as against 5.54 in the neighboring State of Ohio. The “no lickin’, no learnin’”period which Eggleston describes is thus a matter of statistics; but even before he wrote the old order had changed and Caleb Mills, an alumnus of Dartmouth, had come from New England to lead the Hoosier out of darkness into the light of free schools. The story escaped the oblivion which overtakes most books for the young by reason of its freshness and novelty. It was, indeed, something more than a story for boys, though, like “Tom Sawyer” and “The Story of a Bad Boy,” it is listed among books of permanent interest to youth. It shows no unusual gift of invention; its incidents are simple and commonplace; but it daringly essayed a record of local life in a new field, with the aid of a dialect of the people described, and thus became a humble but important pioneer in the development of American fiction. It is true that Bret Harte and Mark Twain had already widened the borders of our literary domain westward; and others, like Longstreet, had turned a few spadefuls of the rich Southern soil; but Harte was of the order of romancers, and Mark Twain was a humorist, while Longstreet, in his “Georgia Scenes,” gives only the eccentric and fantastic.Eggleston introduced the Hoosier at the bar of American literature in advance of the Creole of Mr. Cable or the negro of Mr. Page or Mr. Harris, or the mountaineer of Miss Murfree, or the delightful shore-folk of Miss Jewett’s Maine.
Several of Eggleston’s later Hoosier stories are a valuable testimony to the spiritual unrest of the Ohio Valley pioneers. The early Hoosiers were a peculiarly isolated people, shut in by great woodlands. The news of the world reached them tardily; but they were thrilled by new versions of the Gospel brought to them by adventurous evangelists, whose eloquence made Jerusalem seem much nearer than their own national capital. Heated discussions between the sects supplied in those days an intellectual stimulus greater than that of politics. Questions shook the land which were unknown at Westminster and Rome; they are now well-nigh forgotten in the valley where they were once debated so fiercely. The Rev. Mr. Bosaw and his monotonously sung sermon in “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” are vouched for, and preaching of the same sort has been heard in Indiana at amuch later period than that of which Eggleston wrote. “The End of the World” (1872) describes vividly the extravagant belief of the Millerites, who, in 1842-43, found positive proof in the Book of Daniel that the world’s doom was at hand. This tale shows little if any gain in constructive power over the first Hoosier story, and the same must be said of “The Circuit Rider,” which portrays the devotion and sacrifice of the hardy evangelists of the Southwest among whom Eggleston had served. “Roxy” (1878) marks an advance; the story flows more easily, and the scrutiny of life is steadier. The scene is Vevay, and he contrasts pleasantly the Swiss and Hoosier villagers, and touches intimately the currents of local religious and political life. Eggleston shows here for the first time a capacity for handling a long story. The characters are of firmer fibre; the note of human passion is deeper, and he communicates to his pages charmingly the atmosphere of his native village,—its quiet streets and pretty gardens, the sunny hills and the broad-flowing river. Vevay is again the scene in “The Hoosier Schoolboy” (1883), which is, however, no worthy successorto “The Schoolmaster.” The workmanship is infinitely superior to that of his first Hoosier tale, but he had lost touch, either with the soil (he had been away from Indiana for more than a decade), or with youth, or with both, and the story is flat and tame. After another long absence he returned to the Western field in which he had been a pioneer, and wrote “The Graysons” (1888), a capital story of Illinois, in which Lincoln is a character. Here and in “The Faith Doctor,” a novel of metropolitan life which followed three years later, the surer stroke of maturity is perceptible; and the short stories collected in “Duffles” include “Sister Tabea,” a thoroughly artistic bit of work, which he once spoke of as being among the most satisfactory things he had written.
A fault of all of Eggleston’s earlier stories is their too serious insistence on the moral they carried—a resort to the Dickens method of including Divine Providence among thedramatis personæ; but this is not surprising in one in whom there was, by his own confession, a life-long struggle “between the lover of literary artand the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission.” There is little humor in these tales,—there was doubtless little in the life itself,—but there is abundant good nature. In all he maintains consistently the point of view of the realist, his lapses being chiefly where the moralist has betrayed him. There are many pictures which denote his understanding of the illuminative value of homely incident in the life he then knew best; there are the spelling-school, the stirring religious debates, the barbecue, the charivari, the infare, glimpses of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” and the “Hard Cider” campaign. Those times rapidly receded; Indiana is one of the older States now, and but for Eggleston’s tales there would be no trustworthy record of the period he describes.
Lowell had made American dialect respectable, and had used it as the vehicle for his political gospel; but Eggleston invoked the Hoosierlingua rusticato aid in the portrayal of a type. He did not, however, employ dialect with the minuteness of subsequent writers, notably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley; but the Southwesternidiom impressed him, and his preface and notes in the later edition of “The Schoolmaster” are invaluable to the student. Dialect remains in Indiana, as elsewhere, largely a matter of observation and opinion. There has never been a uniform folk-speech peculiar to the people living within the borders of the State. The Hoosier dialect, so called, consisting more of elisions and vulgarized pronunciations than of true idiom, is spoken wherever the Scotch-Irish influence is perceptible in the West Central States, notably in the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It is not to be confounded with the cruder speech of the “poor-whitey,” whose wild strain in the Hoosier blood was believed by Eggleston to be an inheritance of the English bond-slave. There were many vague and baffling elements in the Ohio Valley speech, but they passed before the specialists of the Dialect Society could note them. Mr. Riley’s Hoosier is more sophisticated than Eggleston’s, and thirty years of change lie between them,—years which wholly transformed the State, physically and socially. It is diverting to have Eggleston’s own statement that the Hoosiers he knew in hisyouth were wary of New England provincialisms, and that his Virginia father threatened to inflict corporal punishment on his children “if they should ever give the peculiar vowel sound heard in some parts of New England in such words as ‘roof’ and ‘root.’”
While Eggleston grew to manhood on a frontier which had been a great battle-ground, the mere adventurous aspects of this life did not attract him when he sought subjects for his pen; but the culture-history of the people among whom his life fell interested him greatly, and he viewed events habitually with a critical eye. He found, however, that the evolution of society could not be treated satisfactorily in fiction, so he began, in 1880, while abroad, the researches in history which were to occupy him thereafter to the end of his life. His training as a student of social forces had been superior to any that he could have obtained in the colleges accessible to him, for he had seen life in the raw; he had known, on the one hand, the vanishing frontiersmen who founded commonwealths around the hunters’ camp-fires; and he had, on the other, witnessed the dawn of a newera which brought order and enlightenment. He thus became a delver in libraries only after he had scratched under the crust of life itself. While he turned first to the old seaboard colonies in pursuit of his new purpose, he brought to his research an actual knowledge of the beginnings of new States which he had gained in the open. He planned a history of life in the United States on new lines, his main idea being to trace conditions and movements to remotest sources. He collected and studied his material for sixteen years before he published any result of his labors beyond a few magazine papers. “The Beginnings of a Nation” (1896) and “The Transit of Civilization” (1901) are only part of the scheme as originally outlined, but they are complete as far as they go, and are of permanent interest and value. History was not to him a dusty lumber room, but a sunny street where people came and went in their habits as they lived; and thus, in a sense, he applied to history the realism of fiction. He pursued his task with scientific ardor and accuracy, but without fussiness or dullness. His occupations as novelist and editor had been a preparationfor his later work, for it was the story quality that he sought in history, and he wrote with an editorial eye to what is salient and interesting. It is doubtful whether equal care has ever been given to the preparation of any other historical work in this country. The plan of the books is in itself admirable, and the exhaustive character of his researches is emphasized by copious notes, which are hardly less attractive than the text they amplify and strengthen. He expressed himself with simple adequacy, without flourish, and with a nice economy of words; but he could, when he chose, throw grace and charm into his writing. He was, in the best sense, a humanist. He knew the use of books, but he vitalized them from a broad knowledge of life. He had been a minister, preaching a simple gospel, for he was never a theologian as the term is understood, but he enlisted zealously in movements for the bettering of mankind, and his influence was unfailingly wholesome and stimulating.
His robust spirit was held in thrall by an invalid body, and throughout his life his work was constantly interrupted by serious illnesses; butthere was about him a certain blitheness; his outlook on life was cheerful and sanguine. He was tremendously in earnest in all his undertakings and accomplished first and last an immense amount of work,—preacher, author, editor, and laborious student, his industry was ceaseless. His tall figure, his fine head with its shock of white hair, caught the attention in any gathering. He was one of the most charming of talkers, leading lightly on from one topic to another. No one who ever heard his voice can forget its depth and resonance. Nothing in our American annals is more interesting or more remarkable than the rise of such men, who appear without warning in all manner of out-of-the-way places and succeed in precisely those fields which environment and opportunity seemingly conspire to fortify most strongly against them. Eggleston possessed in marked degree that self-reliance which Higginson calls the first requisite of a new literature, and through it he earned for himself a place of dignity and honor in American letters.