Part 2

Many complain that we Americans give too much time to politics, but there could be no safer outlet for that “added drop of nervous fluid” which Colonel Higginson found in us and turned over to Matthew Arnold for further analysis. No doubt many voices will cry in the wilderness before we reach the promised land. A people which has been fed on the Bible is bound to hear the rumble of Pharaoh’s chariots. It is in the blood to resent the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely. The winter evenings are long on the prairies, and we must always be fashioning a crown for Cæsar or rehearsing his funeral rites. No great danger can ever seriously menace the nation so long as the remotest citizen clings to his faith that he is a part of the governmental mechanism and can at any time throw it out of adjustment if it doesn’t run to suit him. He can go into the court-house and see the men he helped to place in office; or if they were chosen in spite of him, he pays his taxes just the same and waits for another chance to turn the rascals out.

Mr. Bryce wrote: “This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the Multitude.” It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena of the score of years that has elapsed since Mr. Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the crushing weight of the mass. It has been with something of a child’s surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose mechanism had baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after all, the individual counts. The pressure of the mass will yet be felt, but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the individual is asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it. With all our faults and defaults of understanding,--populism, free silver, Coxey’s army, and the rest of it,--we of the West have not done so badly. Be not impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows his way to the oak tree!

Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of “silent” voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have sent to Washington seven Presidents, elected for ten terms. Without discussing the value of their public services it may be said that it has been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people of the closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of their own soil have been chosen to the seat of the Presidents; and it is creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully acquiesced. In Lincoln the provincial American most nobly asserted himself, and any discussion of the value of provincial life and character in our politics may well begin and end in him. We have seen verily that

“Fishers and choppers and ploughmen Shall constitute a state.”

Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world’s tour, declared that it was not that the hero had walked “with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade”;--

“But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings, Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front, Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade, Were all so justified.”

What we miss and what we lack who live in the provinces seem to me of little weight in the scale against our compensations. We slouch,--we are deficient in the graces,--we are prone to boast,--and we lack in those fine reticences that mark the cultivated citizen of the metropolis. We like to talk, and we talk our problems out to a finish. Our commonwealths rose in the ashes of the hunter’s camp-fires, and we are all a great neighborhood, united in a common understanding of what democracy is, and animated by ideals of what we want it to be. That saving humor which is a philosophy of life flourishes amid the tall corn. We are old enough now--we of the West--to have built up in ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part of the continuing, unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these days to “wobble right” than we are to stand fast or march forward like an army with banners.

We provincials are immensely curious. Art, music, literature, politics--nothing that is of contemporaneous human interest is alien to us. If these things don’t come to us, we go to them. We are more truly representative of the American ideal than our metropolitan cousins, because (here I lay my head upon the block) we know more about, oh, so many things! We know vastly more about the United States, for one thing. We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows it, because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have no terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia seems to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western school-teachers who don’t see Europe for three hundred dollars every summer get at least as far East as Concord, to be photographed “by the rude bridge that arched the flood.”

That fine austerity which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering on the Boston and New York express is lost utterly at Pittsburg. From gentlemen cruising in day-coaches--dull wights who advertise their personal sanitation and literacy by the toothbrush and fountain-pen planted sturdily in their upper left-hand waistcoat pockets--one may learn the most prodigious facts and the philosophy thereof. “Sit over, brother; there’s hell to pay in the Balkans,” remarks the gentleman who boarded the interurban at Peru or Connersville, and who would just as lief discuss the Papacy or child labor, if revolutions are not to your liking.

In Boston a lady once expressed her surprise that I should be hastening home for Thanksgiving Day. This, she thought, was a New England festival. More recently I was asked by a Bostonian if I had ever heard of Paul Revere. Nothing is more delightful in us, I think, than our meekness before instruction. We strive to please; all we ask is “to be shown.”

Our greatest gain is in leisure and the opportunity to ponder and brood. In all these thousands of country towns live alert and shrewd students of affairs. Where your New Yorker scans headlines as he “commutes” homeward, the villager reaches his own fireside without being shot through a tube, and sits down and reads his newspaper thoroughly. When he repairs to the drug-store to abuse or praise the powers that be, his wife reads the paper, too. A United States Senator from a Middle Western State, making a campaign for renomination preliminary to the primaries, warned the people in rural communities against the newspaper and periodical press with its scandals and heresies. “Wait quietly by your firesides, undisturbed by these false teachings,” he said in effect; “then go to your primaries and vote as you have always voted.” His opponent won by thirty thousand,--the amiable answer of the little red school-house.

V

A few days ago I visited again my native town. On the slope where I played as a child I listened in vain for the mourning bugle; but on the college campus a bronze tablet commemorative of those sons of Wabash who had fought in the mighty war quickened the old impressions. The college buildings wear a look of age in the gathering dusk.

“Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of withered leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!”

Brave airs of cityhood are apparent in the town, with its paved streets, fine hall and library; and everywhere are wholesome life, comfort, and peace. The train is soon hurrying through gray fields and dark woodlands. Farmhouses are disclosed by glowing panes; lanterns flash fitfully where farmers are making all fast for the night. The city is reached as great factories are discharging their laborers, and I pass from the station into a hurrying throng homeward bound. Against the sky looms the dome of the capitol; the tall shaft of the soldiers’ monument rises ahead of me down the long street and vanishes starward. Here where forests stood seventy-five years ago, in a State that has not yet attained its centenary, is realized much that man has sought through all the ages,--order, justice, and mercy, kindliness and good cheer. What we lack we seek, and what we strive for we shall gain. And of such is the kingdom of democracy.

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 doubtless receive, 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 life as 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 and faithful 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 the Ohio 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 their experiment 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 his curiosity 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 a nature 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 a _tour de force_ for 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 a much 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 successor to “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.

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