A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
were true to the heart of Western life.
The new literature of the period was influenced more by the Pike County Ballads than by the East and West Poems. The ballads were something new in literature, something certainly not Bostonian, certainly not English—something that could be described only as "Western," fresh, independent, as the Pike himself was new and independent among the types of humanity. John Hay was therefore a pioneer, a creator, a leader. His was one of those rare germinal minds that appear now and then to break into new regions and to scatter seed from which others are to reap the harvest.
IV
In the same remarkable year in which appeared East and West Poems and Pike County Ballads and so many other notable first volumes, there began in Hearth and Home Edward Eggleston's study of early Indiana life, entitled The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Crude as the novel is in its plot and hasty as it is in style and finish, it nevertheless must be numbered as the third leading influence upon the literature of the period.
The extent to which it was influenced by Harte cannot be determined. The brother and biographer of the novelist insists that "the quickening influence that led to the writing of the story" was the reading of Taine's Art in the Netherlands. He further records that his brother one day said to him:
"I am going to write a three-number story founded upon your experiences at Ricker's Ridge, and call it The Hoosier Schoolmaster." Then he set forth his theory of art—that the artist, whether with pen or brush, who would do his best work, must choose his subjects from the life that he knows. He cited the Dutch painters and justified his choice of what seemed an unliterary theme, involving rude characters and a strange dialect perversion, by reference to Lowell's success with The Biglow Papers.[58]
If Eggleston was not influenced by Harte, then it is certain that he drew his early inspiration from the same fountain head as Harte did. Both were the literary offspring of Dickens. One cannot read far in The Hoosier Schoolmaster without recognizing the manner and spirit of the elder novelist. It is more prominent in his earlier work—in the short story, The Christmas Club, which is almost a parody, in the portraits of Shockey and Hawkins and Miranda Means, and in the occasional moralizing and goody-goodiness of tone.
There are few novelists, however, who contain fewer echoes than Eggleston. He was a more original and more accurate writer than Harte. We can trust his backgrounds and his picture of society implicitly at every point. Harte had saturated himself with the fiction of other men; he had made himself an artist through long study of the masters, and he looked at his material always with the eye of an artist. He selected most carefully his viewpoint, his picturesque details, his lights and shadows, and then made his sketch. Eggleston, on the other hand, had made no study of his art. He had read almost no novels, for, as he expressed it, he was "bred 'after the straitest sect of our religion' a Methodist." All he knew of plot construction he had learned from reading the Greek tragedies.
His weakness was his strength. He silenced his conscience, which rebelled against novels, by resolving to write not fiction but truth. He would make a sketch of life as it actually had been lived in Indiana in his boyhood, a sketch that should be as minute in detail and as remorselessly true as a Millet painting. It was not to be a novel; it was to be history. "No man is worthy," he declared in the preface to The Circuit Rider, "to be called a novelist who does not endeavor with his whole soul to produce the higher form of history, by writing truly of men as they are, and dispassionately of those forms of life that come within his scope."
When Eggleston, later in his life, abandoned fiction to become a historian, there was no break in his work. He had always been a historian. Unlike Harte, he had embodied in his novels only those things that had been a part of his own life; he had written with loving recollection; he had recorded nothing that was not true. He had sought, moreover, to make his novels an interpretation of social conditions as he had known them and studied them. "What distinguishes them [his novels]," he once wrote, "from other works of fiction is the prominence which they give to social conditions; that the individual characters are here treated to a greater degree than elsewhere as parts of a study of society—as in some sense the logical result of the environment."[59]
Novels like The End of the World and The Circuit Rider are in reality chapters in the history of the American people. They are realistic studies, by one to the manner born, of an era in our national life that has vanished forever.
V
Edward Eggleston was born in Vevay, Indiana, December 10, 1837. His father, a member of an old Virginia family, after a brilliant course at William and Mary College, had migrated westward, settled in Indiana, and just as he was making himself a notable figure in the law and the politics of his State, had died when his eldest son, Edward, was but nine years old. The son had inherited both his father's intellectual brilliancy and his frail physique. Though eager for knowledge, he was able all through his boyhood to attend school but little, and, though his father had provided for a college scholarship, the son never found himself able to take advantage of it. He was largely self-educated. He studied whenever he could, and by making use of all his opportunities he was able before he was twenty to master by himself nearly all of the branches required for a college degree.
His boyhood was a wandering one. After the death of his father, the family removed to New Albany and later to Madison. At the age of thirteen he was sent to southern Indiana to live with an uncle, a large landowner, and it was here in the lowlands of Decatur County that he had his first chance to study those primitive Hoosier types that later he was to make permanent in literature. Still later he lived for a year and a half with his father's people in Virginia.
Before he was nineteen he had chosen his profession. The tense Methodist atmosphere in which he had been reared had had its effect. He would be a preacher, a circuit rider, one of those tireless latter-day apostles that had formed so picturesque a part of his boyhood. "How did he get his theological education? It used to be said that Methodist preachers were educated by the old ones telling the young ones all they knew; but besides this oral instruction [he] carried in his saddle bags John Wesley's simple, solid sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns, and a Bible."[60]
Eggleston's saddle bags contained far more than these. He read Whitfield and Thomas à Kempis, the Œdipus Tyrannus in the Greek, and all the history and biography that he could buy or borrow. His "appointment" was in southeastern Indiana, a four-weeks' circuit with ten preaching places far apart in the Ohio River bottoms with their scattering population of malarial Pikes and their rude border civilization. He began his work with enthusiasm. He lived with his people; he entered intimately into their affairs; he studied at first hand their habits of life and of thought. It was an ideal preparation for a novelist, but the rough life was in no way fitted for his frail physique. After six months he broke down almost completely and was sent into the pine forests of Minnesota to recuperate. For several years he was connected with the Minnesota conference. He held pastorates in St. Paul and other places, but his health still continuing precarious, he at length retired to Chicago as an editor of the Little Corporal, a juvenile paper later merged in St. Nicholas. This step turned his attention to literature as a profession. From Chicago he was called to Brooklyn to the staff of the Independent, of which he later became the editor, and the rest of his life, save for a five years' pastorate in Brooklyn, he devoted to literature.
VI
The Western novels of Edward Eggleston are seven in number. One of them, The Mystery of Metropolisville, deals with frontier life in Minnesota, a stirring picture of a vital era; all the others are laid in Indiana or eastern Ohio in