VII
The novels of Eggleston have not the compression, the finish, the finesse of Harte's. Some of his works, notably The Hoosier Schoolmaster, were written at full speed with the press clattering behind the author. Often there is to the style a mawkish Sunday-school juvenile flavor. There is often a lack of art, of distinction, of constructive skill. But there are compensations even for such grave defects. There is a vividness of characterization and of description that can be compared even with that of Dickens; there is the ability to sketch a scene that clings to the memory in all its details. The trial scene in The Graysons is not surpassed for vividness and narrative power in any novel of the period. And, finally, there is a realism in background and atmosphere that makes the novels real sources of history.
The influence of Eggleston's work was enormous. He helped to create a new reading public, a public made up of those who, like himself, had had scruples against novel reading. He was an influence in the creating of a new and healthy realism in America. What Hay was to the new school of local color poets, Eggleston was to the new school of novelists. Harte was a romanticist; Eggleston was a realist. From Harte came the first conception of a new and powerful literature of the West. Eggleston was the directing hand that turned the current of this new literature into the channel of realism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Hay. (1838–1905.) The Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces, (167 pages), 1871; Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle, and Little Breeches, illustrated by Eytinge (23 pages), 1871; Castilian Days, 1871; The Bread-winners, 1883; Poems by John Hay, 1890 and 1899; A Poet in Exile: Early letters of John Hay. Edited by Caroline Ticknor, 1910.
Edward Eggleston. (1837–1902.) Mr. Blake's Walking-Stick, 1870; The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 1871; The End of the World, 1872; The Mystery of Metropolisville, 1873; The Circuit Rider, 1874; The Schoolmaster's Stories, 1874; Roxy, 1878; The Hoosier Schoolboy, 1883; Queer Stories, 1884; The Graysons, 1888; The Faith Doctor, 1891; Duffels (short stories), 1893; The First of the Hoosiers, by George Cary Eggleston, 1903.
[CHAPTER VI]
JOAQUIN MILLER
The work of Harte and even of Hay is the work of an onlooker rather than a sharer. One feels that both were studying their picturesque surroundings objectively for the sake of "copy"; but Joaquin Miller, like Mark Twain, may be said to have emerged from the materials he worked in. He could write in his later years, "My poems are literally my autobiography." "If you care to read further of my life, making allowance for poetic license, you will find these [poems] literally true." In some ways he is a more significant figure than either Harte or Hay. No American writer, not even Thoreau or Whitman, has ever been more uniquely individual, and none, not even Mark Twain, has woven into his writings more things that are peculiarly American, or has worked with a more thorough first-hand knowledge of the picturesque elements that went into the making of the new West. He is the poet of the American westward march, the poet of "the great American desert," the poet preëminently of the mountain ranges from Alaska to Nicaragua as John Muir is their prose interpreter.