Part 3

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 the _dramatis 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 art and 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 Hoosier _lingua rustica_ to 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 Southwestern idiom 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 his youth 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 new era 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 preparation for 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; but there 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.

A Provincial Capital

A Provincial Capital

THE Hoosier is not so deeply wounded by the assumption in Eastern quarters that he is a wild man of the woods as by the amiable condescension of acquaintances at the seaboard, who tell him, when he mildly remonstrates, that his abnormal sensitiveness is provincial. This is, indeed, the hardest lot, to be called a “mudsill” and then rebuked for talking back! There are, however, several special insults to which the citizen of Indianapolis is subjected, and these he resents with all the strength of his being. First among them is the proneness of many to confuse Indianapolis and Minneapolis. To the citizen of the Hoosier capital, Minneapolis seems a remote place, that can be reached only by passing through Chicago. Still another source of intense annoyance is the persistent fallacy that Indianapolis is situated on the Wabash River. There seems to be something funny about the name of this pleasant stream,--immortalized in late years by a tuneful balladist,--which a large percentage of the people of Indianapolis have never seen except from a car window. East of Pittsburg the wanderer from Hoosierdom expects to be asked how things are on the Waybosh,--a pronunciation which, by the way, is never heard at home. Still another grievance that has embittered the lives of Indianapolitans is the annoying mispronunciation of the name of their town by benighted outsiders. Rural Hoosiers, in fact, offend the ears of their city cousins with Indianopolis; but it is left usually for the Yankee visitor to say _Injun_apolis, with a stress on _Injun_ which points rather unnecessarily to the day of the war-whoop and scalp-dance.

Indianapolis--like Jerusalem, “a city at unity with itself,” where the tribes assemble, and where the seat of judgment is established--is in every sense the capital of all the Hoosiers. With the exception of Boston, it is the largest state capital in the country; and no other American city without water communication is so large. It is distinguished primarily by the essentially American character of its people. A considerable body of Germans contributed much first and last to its substantial growth, not only by the example of their familiar industry and frugality, but in later years through their intelligent interest in all manner of civic improvement, in general education, and in music and art. Only in the past decade has there been any perceptible drift of undesirable immigrants from southeastern Europe to our city and the problems they create have been met promptly by wise agencies of social service. There was an influx of negroes at the close of the war, and the colored voters (about seventy-five hundred in 1912) add considerably to our political perplexities.

Indiana was admitted as a State in 1816, and the General Assembly, sitting at Corydon in 1821, designated Indianapolis, then a settlement of struggling cabins, as the state capital. The name of the new town was not adopted without a struggle, Tecumseh, Suwarro, and Concord being proposed and supported, while the name finally chosen aroused the hostility of those who declared it unmelodious and etymologically abominable. It is of record that the first mention of the name Indianapolis in the legislature caused great merriment. The town was laid out in broad streets, which were quickly adorned with shade trees that are an abiding testimony to the foresight of the founders. Alexander Ralston, one of the engineers employed in the first survey, had served in a similar capacity at Washington, and the diagonal avenues and the generous breadth of the streets are suggestive of the national capital. The urban landscape lacks variety: the town is perfectly flat, and in old times the mud was intolerable, but the trees are a continuing glory.

Central Indiana was not, in 1820, when the first cabin was built, a region of unalloyed delight. The land was rich, but it was covered with heavy woods, and much of it was under water. Indians still roamed the forests, and the builder of the first cabin was killed by them. There were no roads, and White River, on whose eastern shore the town was built, was navigable only by the smallest craft. Mrs. Beecher, in “From Dawn to Daylight,” described the region as it appeared in the forties: “It is a level stretch of land as far as the eye can reach, looking as if one good, thorough rain would transform it into an impassable morass. How the inhabitants contrive to get about in rainy weather, I can’t imagine, unless they use stilts. The city itself has been redeemed from this slough, and presents quite a thriving appearance, being very prettily laid out, with a number of fine buildings.” Dr. Eggleston, writing in his novel “Roxy” of the same period, lays stress on the saffron hue of the community, the yellow mud seeming to cover all things animate and inanimate.

But the founders possessed faith, courage, and hardihood, and “the capital in the woods” grew steadily. The pioneers were patriotic and religious; their patriotism was, indeed, touched with the zeal of their religion. For many years before the Civil War a parade of the Sunday-school children of the city was the chief feature of every Fourth of July celebration. The founders labored from the first in the interest of morality and enlightenment. The young capital was a converging point for a slender stream of population that bore in from New England, and a broader current that swept westward from the Middle and Southeastern States. There was no sectional feeling in those days. Many of the prominent settlers from Kentucky were Whigs, but a newcomer’s church affiliation was of far more importance than his political belief. Membership in a church was a social recommendation in old times, but the importance of religion seemed to diminish as the town passed the two-hundred-thousand mark. Perhaps two hundred thousand is the dead-line--I hope no one will press me too hard to defend this suggestion--beyond which a community loses its pristine sensitiveness to benignant influences; but there was indubitably in the history of our capital a moment at which we became disagreeably conscious that we were no longer a few simple and well-meaning folk who made no social engagements that would interfere with Thursday night prayer-meeting, but a corporation of which we were only unconsidered and unimportant members.

The effect of the Civil War upon Indianapolis was immediate and far-reaching. It emphasized, through the centralizing there of the State’s military energy, the fact that it was the capital city,--a fact which until that time had been accepted languidly by the average Hoosier countryman. The presence within the State of an aggressive body of sympathizers with Southern ideas directed attention throughout the country to the energy and resourcefulness of Morton, the War Governor, who pursued the Hoosier Copperheads relentlessly, while raising a great army to send to the seat of war. Again, the intense political bitterness engendered by the war did not end with peace, or with the restoration of good feeling in neighboring States, but continued for twenty-five years more to be a source of political irritation, and, markedly at Indianapolis, a cause of social differentiation. In the minds of many, a Democrat was a Copperhead, and a Copperhead was an evil and odious thing. Referring to the slow death of this feeling, a veteran observer of affairs who had, moreover, supported Mr. Cleveland’s candidacy twice, recently said that he had never been able wholly to free himself from this prejudice. But the end really came in 1884, with the reaction against Blaine, which was nowhere more significant of the flowering of independence than at Indianapolis.

Following the formative period, which may be said to have ended with the Civil War, came an era of prosperity in business, and even of splendor in social matters. Some handsome habitations had been built in the _ante-bellum_ days, but they were at once surpassed by the homes which many citizens reared for themselves in the seventies. These remain, as a group, the handsomest residences that have been built at any period in the history of the city. Life had been earnest in the early days, but it now became picturesque. The terms “aristocrats” and “first families” were heard in the community, and something of traditional Southern ampleness and generosity crept into the way of life. No one said _nouveau riche_ in those days; the first families were the real thing. No one denied it, and misfortune could not shake or destroy them.

A panic is a stern teacher of humility, and the financial depression that fell upon the country in 1873 drove the lesson home remorselessly at Indianapolis. There had been nothing equivocal about the boom. Western speculators had not always had a fifty-year-old town to operate in,--the capital of a State, a natural railway centre,--no arid village in a hot prairie, but a real forest city that thundered mightily in the prospectus. There was no sudden collapse; a brave effort was made to ward off the day of reckoning; but this only prolonged the agony. Among the victims there was little whimpering. A thoroughbred has not proved his mettle until he has held up his head in defeat, and the Hoosier aristocrat went down with his flag flying. Those that had suffered the proud man’s contumely then came forth to sneer. An old-fashioned butternut Democrat remarked, of a banker who failed, that “no wonder Blank busted when he drove to business in a carriage behind a nigger in uniform.” The memory of the hard times lingered long at home and abroad. A town where credit could be so shaken was not, the Eastern insurance companies declared, a safe place for further investments; and in many quarters Indianapolis was not forgiven until an honest, substantial growth had carried the lines of the city beyond the _terra incognita_ of the boom’s outer rim.

Many of the striking characteristics of the true Indianapolitan are attributable to those days, when the city’s bounds were moved far countryward, to the end that the greatest possible number of investors might enjoy the ownership of town lots. The signal effect of this dark time was to stimulate thrift and bring a new era of caution and conservatism; for there is a good deal of Scotch-Irish in the Hoosier, and he cannot be fooled twice with the same bait. During the period of depression the town lost its zest for gayety. It took its pleasures a little soberly; it was notorious as a town that welcomed theatrical attractions grudgingly, though this attitude must be referred back also to the religious prejudices of the early comers. Your Indianapolitan who has personal knowledge of the panic, or who had listened to the story of it from one who weathered the storm, has never forgotten the discipline of the seventies: though he has reached the promised land, he still remembers the hot sun in the tyrant’s brickyards. So conservatism became the city’s rule of life. The panic of 1893 caused scarcely a ripple, and the typical Indianapolis business man to this day is one who minds his barometer carefully.

Indianapolis became a city rather against its will. It liked its own way, and its way was slow; but when the calamity could no longer be averted, it had its trousers creased and its shoes polished, and accepted with good grace the fact that its population had reached two hundred thousand, and that it had crept to a place comfortably near the top in the list of bank clearances. A man who left Indianapolis in 1885, returned in 1912--the Indianapolitan, like the cat in the ballad, always comes back; he cannot successfully be transplanted--to find himself a stranger in a strange city. Once he knew all the people who rode in chaises; but on his return he found new people flying about in automobiles that cost more than any but the most prosperous citizen earned in the horse-car days; once he had been able to discuss current topics with a passing friend in the middle of Washington Street; now he must duck and dive, and keep an eye on the policeman if he would make a safe crossing. He is asked to luncheon at a club; in the old days there were no clubs, or they were looked on as iniquitous things; he is carried off to inspect factories which are the largest of their kind in the world. At the railroad yards he watches the loading of machinery for shipment to Russia and Chili, and he is driven over asphalt streets to parks that had not been dreamed of before his term of exile.

Manufacturing is the great business of the city, still sootily advertised on the local countenance in spite of heroic efforts to enforce smoke-abatement ordinances. There are nearly two thousand establishments within its limits where manufacturing in some form is carried on. Many of these rose in the day of natural gas, and it was predicted that when the gas had been exhausted the city would lose them; but the number has increased steadily despite the failure of the gas supply. There are abundant coal-fields within the State, so that the question of fuel will not soon be troublesome. The city enjoys, also, the benefits to be derived from the numerous manufactories in other towns of central Indiana, many of which maintain administrative offices there. It is not only a good place in which to make things, but a point from which many things may be sold to advantage. Jobbing flourished even before manufacturing attained its present proportions. The jobbers have given the city an enviable reputation for enterprise and fair dealing. When you ask an Indianapolis jobber whether the propinquity of St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Cleveland is not against him, he answers that he meets his competitors daily in every part of the country and is not afraid of them.

Indianapolis was long a place of industry, thrift, and comfort, where the simple life was not only possible but necessary. Its social entertainments were of the tamest sort, and the change in this respect has come only within a few years,--with the great wave of growth and prosperity that has wrought a new Indianapolis from the old. If left to itself, the old Indianapolis would never have known a horse show or a carnival,--would never have strewn itself with confetti, or boasted the greatest automobile speedway in the world; but the invading time-spirit has rapidly destroyed the walls of the city of tradition. Business men no longer go home to dinner at twelve o’clock and take a nap before returning to work; and the old amiable habit of visiting for an hour in an office where ten minutes of business was to be transacted has passed. A town is at last a city when sociability has been squeezed out of business and appointments are arranged a day in advance by telephone.

The distinguishing quality of Indianapolis continues, however, to be its simple domesticity. The people are home-loving and home-keeping. In the early days, when the town was a rude capital in the wilderness, the citizens stayed at home perforce; and when the railroad reached them they did not take readily to travel. A trip to New York is still a much more serious event, considered from Indianapolis, than from Denver or Kansas City. It was an Omaha young man who was so little appalled by distance that, having an express frank, he formed the habit of sending his laundry work to New York, to assure a certain finish to his linen that was unattainable at home. The more the Hoosier travels, the more he likes his own town. Only a little while ago an Indianapolis man who had been in New York for a week went to the theatre and saw there a fellow-townsman who had just arrived. He hurried around to greet him at the end of the first act. “Tell me,” he exclaimed, “how is everything in old Indianapolis?”