When Edward Eggleston was in his twelfth year, his mother remarried, taking for her husband the Rev. William Terrell, a Methodist minister. This change brought with it a wider horizon for the boy, as his stepfather’s duties led the family away from Vevay to Madison and New Albany, also on the Ohio, but larger towns than Vevay. When sixteen, he spent more than a year with his father’s family in Virginia. The sharp transition from the conditions in the newer to those of the older country quickened his powers of observation. The tribulations of the Western pioneers had been discussed in his hearing by his elders during the most impressionable years of his childhood; his grandfather Craig’s stone house was a reminder of times not remote when the Indians were a daily menace; and the recitals of the wandering apostles of Methodism in his mother’s house had given him further contact with the adventure and romance of pioneer life. Virginia opened new vistas, and the novel conditions of life that he found there extended his knowledge of men and manners, and afforded an opportunity for criticism and comparison that was of definite value. He found himself cousin to a considerable part of the population, and this wide relationship gave him an acquaintance with the charming social life of old Virginia; but he counted himself an abolitionist, he says, from the time of this visit.
The abundant vitality of Dr. Eggleston’s later years has been so strikingly characteristic that it is difficult to believe that ill health followed him from semi-invalid boyhood into manhood; but the year after his return from Virginia he was sent to Minnesota in the hope that the change might benefit him, and the kind fates thus threw him into still other and different experiences. He was in the new Northwest when the free-soil excitement in Kansas thrilled the country, and he set out afoot, with a dirk knife as his only weapon, for the scene of conflict. He has himself described the failure and result of this excursion:—
“After weeks of weary walking and nights spent in the discomforts of frontier cabins, I grew sick at heart and longed for the companionship and refinements of home. I was rather glad to learn that men from the free States were entirely shut out of the besieged territory on the Iowa side. My moccasins were worn out, my feet were sore, my little stock of money was failing, and I was tired of husbanding it by eating crackers and cheese. I turned eastward at a point west of Cedar Falls, crossed the Mississippi at Muscatine, and after walking in all three or four hundred miles, I at length boarded a railway train at a station near Galesburg, and reached my nearest relatives after an enforced fast of twenty-four hours, without a cent in my pocket, and looking, in my soiled and travel-worn garments, like a young border ruffian. I had left home a pale invalid; I returned sun-browned and well.”
But this gain in bodily strength was not to profit him long. He had been bred in the Methodist faith; his stepfather was a minister of wide reputation in this denomination, and the youth, with his studious disposition and gift for speech, turned naturally to the ministry. He has said of himself that an inward conflict between his predisposition to literary work and the tendency to religion and philanthropy began in boyhood and has continued throughout his life. There were times in his youth when his love for literature seemed an idolatry, and once in a repentant mood he destroyed his youthful manuscripts and resolved to abandon literature. He was now launched upon the Methodist circuit rider’s life of hardship and peril, covering a four weeks’ itinerary in the county of which New Albany is the capital, and performing his duties with such diligence that in six months he was again a wreck. He therefore removed to Minnesota, and continued in the ministry, save for intervals of physical prostration, until, in 1866, he accepted the editorship of The Little Corporal, a popular juvenile periodical published at Chicago, and from that beginning was irresistibly drawn to the business of making books. In 1874, he became pastor of a church in Brooklyn, to which he gave the name of the Church of Christian Endeavor, and which sought to make sunshine in shady places. It was, indeed, the “Church of the Best Licks,” of the “Hoosier Schoolmaster,” slightly conventionalized. Dr. Eggleston continued in the pastorate for five years, devoting himself to his work with his accustomed zeal and enthusiasm, which resulted in another collapse. He then retired finally from the ministry; but the phrase, “Christian Endeavor,” first applied by Dr. Eggleston to his Brooklyn church, is widely known as the name of a society of young people.
Unconscious preparation for a life-employment has rarely been more clearly exemplified in American literature than in the case of Dr. Eggleston. This is not true as to his novels of Western life merely, but as to the later historical writing in which he has so successfully detected and appraised various aspects of our social growth. His early experiences at the West were indelibly written in his memory, and though he did not at once transcribe them, his work as editor sharpened his instincts and helped him to an appreciation of his own material. His removal to New York in 1870 was another fortunate step of preparation, for it gave him a perspective which he could not have gained had he remained at the West. He wrote almost immediately “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” the first draft, designed for Hearth and Home, being in the form of a short story, which he extended to its present form at the suggestion of one of the proprietors of the periodical. The reading of Taine’s “Art in the Netherlands” was the quickening influence that led to the writing of the story. Dr. Eggleston learned from Taine that an artist should paint what he sees, and he therefore undertook to portray the illiterate people of southern Indiana. The story was published in book form and gained wide popularity, which has not diminished in the thirty years since its appearance. Dr. Eggleston has been criticised severely in Indiana for the series of novels that began with “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” but this criticism has come largely from a new generation that does not view these tales in the light of history, and is, therefore, hardly competent to pass on their veracity. By the legal tests for expert witnesses Dr. Eggleston is certainly qualified to speak; his own experience and the social evolution of the people of Indiana contribute to the creation of his competency; and when we add to these considerations his instinctive interest in the beginnings and tendencies of American life, it is not possible to reject him. He knew, as he says, “the antique Hoosier.” The Indiana of 1850 was very different from that of 1870, and Dr. Eggleston was looking backward a score of years when he created Ralph Hartsook, the youthful schoolmaster, and threw about him an atmosphere of ignorance and vice. The story is an instructive footnote to the history of education in Indiana. “Bud Means” is of the second generation of Hoosiers—the generation which, outside of the first social order, had little or no benefit of education, and which sank to the condition of illiteracy that awakened presently the efforts of the faithful few who won the fight for free schools. Courage preceded knowledge as a requirement of pedagogues in the period of which Dr. Eggleston wrote. “‘Lickin’ and larnin’ goes together; no lickin’, no larnin’,’ declared Pete Jones.” The student who may hereafter scan the educational history of Indiana and read with dismay the statistics compiled by Mills, will welcome this unadorned tale, that illuminates and confirms the dry facts of the statistician. Eggleston, the novelist, kept Eggleston, the preacher, well in hand, and there is no tedious moralizing in the book. It is not difficult to understand the prompt recognition of the story or its long-continued attraction. The subject was novel, the characters were new, and the scene was set in a region that had never before been seriously explored by the story-teller. It was, as an army officer put it, a cavalry dash into literature. The incidents were linked together with skill, and their air of entire credibility has not been lost in the years that have passed since it surprised and delighted its first readers. Enjoyment of the story was not limited to English readers. It was translated into French by Madame Blanc, and was published in condensed form in the Revue des Deux Mondes with the title “Le Maitre d’École de Flat Creek.” German and Danish translations followed, so that “Bud Means” has enjoyed opportunities for foreign travel quite unusual among his neighbors.
“The End of the World” (1872) continued the series of stories which Dr. Eggleston had begun in the “Schoolmaster.” Religious phenomena were the most marked social expression in the time and place of which he wrote. It was religion that offered to the isolated people of the new frontier the only relief that their lives knew from toil, hardship, and danger; and what appears now, at the distance of fifty years, to have been a mania was with them a grave and vital matter. “The End of the World” is a tale of the Millerite excitement, which swept the country in 1842-1843, and Dr. Eggleston adapted it very entertainingly to the purposes of fiction. “The Mystery of Metropolisville” (1873) led away from Indiana into Minnesota, with which Dr. Eggleston had become acquainted as a minister. Against a background of the land-booming period, he illustrates the dangers and temptations of the pioneers; and while the tale is less satisfactory than any of the Indiana series, it remains after thirty years a readable novel. It was hardly possible for Dr. Eggleston to forget wholly the people he had known on the Ohio, and he introduces in “The Mystery of Metropolisville” a Hoosier poet, who had left the “Waybosh” because his literary efforts were not appreciated there. He carried his ambitions into Minnesota, became a trapper and land speculator, and there, to quote from one of his own stanzas,—
“His Hoosier harp hangs on the wild water-willer.”
Dr. Eggleston had been established at New York for eight years when he wrote “Roxy” (1878), one of the best of his books, and one which depicts even more vividly than “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” his early environment. He was now forty-one, and the years that had added to the sum of his experience had developed also his natural instinct for character. The dramatic quality, too, shows strongly in this tale, which is, in its moral relation, a kind of Western “Scarlet Letter.” There is more or less of Vevay in this novel,—it is not important to inquire too curiously whether it be more or less,—and the pretty river village, with its slight foreign color, which was derived from the Swiss residents, the mystery and novelty of the broad river highway, the simplicity of the life, its lazy gossip and its religious enthusiasms, are all depicted with fidelity. The Bonabys, father and son, the lurking figure of Nancy, Twonnet, and Roxy, possess the interest that attaches to fresh types. The introduction of the volatile Twonnet, a member of the Swiss Colony, in contrast with the sober Roxy, the unobtrusive presentation of the religious problems that held the attention of the community, and the blending of the threads of young Bonaby’s destiny, are accomplished with skill and power.
In “The Circuit Rider” (1874) Dr. Eggleston crossed the Indiana boundary into southern Ohio, but for all critical purposes the type remained the same. Political frontiers do not deter the novelist, who enjoys extra-territorial privileges. “The Circuit Rider” is not so entertaining a story as “Roxy.” The characters do not take hold of the imagination here as in the later book, and those somewhat vague qualities that combine to the creation of atmosphere are not blended so effectively. But as a picture of the strenuous religious life of the Ohio Valley in the early half of the century, the story is most important. In “Roxy” the strife between Calvinism and Wesleyism is more strongly contrasted; but “The Circuit Rider” gives a vivid impression of a period that was made remarkable by the heroism and sacrifice of the Methodist evangelists. After “Roxy” Dr. Eggleston did not return to the field of his early successes until he wrote “The Graysons” (1887). Like “The Circuit Rider” this story is not, geographically speaking, of Indiana, but it is nevertheless of that broader Hoosierdom which comprehended a small part of southern Ohio and considerably more of Illinois. This is one of the best of all the Hoosier cycle, and, indeed, one of the best of American novels. There is not an inartistic line in the book, and the manner in which Lincoln is introduced as a character,—appearing as the attorney for a boy charged with murder, and winning his freedom by a characteristic resort to homely philosophy,—is achieved so simply that the reader is left wondering whether it could really have been the great Lincoln who participated in one scene, performed his part, and thereupon disappeared from the stage. A clumsy artist would have dwelt upon Lincoln, hinting at his future greatness and reluctantly dismissing him; Dr. Eggleston introduces the incident (which is based on fact) with an inadvertence that enhances its interest and increases its suggestiveness. The dialect in this tale is much more critical than that in any other novel of Dr. Eggleston’s Western series. In his earlier stories, written before the scientific study of American folk-speech had been undertaken, the dialect is more general. Dr. Eggleston’s other works of fiction are: “Mr. Blake’s Walking Stick” (1869); “Book of Queer Stories” (1870); “The Schoolmaster’s Stories for Boys and Girls” (1874); “Queer Stories for Boys and Girls” (1884); “The Faith Doctor” (1891); “Duffels” (1893). “The Faith Doctor” is a novel of New York, in which the prevailing interest in what Dr. Eggleston called “aerial therapeutics” supplies the motive. “Duffels” is a collection of short stories written at intervals throughout his literary career, with scenes laid in many parts of the country, and illustrating happily the versatility and the story-telling gift of the author.
Dr. Eggleston began in 1880 researches for a history of life in the United States. He pursued his studies abroad, as well as in American libraries, and assembled at his summer home on Lake George a large collection of Americana. The only published result of these studies thus far is “The Beginners of a Nation” (1896), the most serious, searching, and exhaustive essay in Kultur-Geschichte yet presented by an American. The mere politics of our history and its military incidents had long received the attention of students, to the exclusion of the social and domestic. A work such as Dr. Eggleston has undertaken is vastly more difficult and therefore more important, for it requires original research in the strictest sense. His other historical works so far completed are: “A History of the United States and its People for the Use of Schools” (1888); “The Household History of the United States and its People” (1888); and “A First Book in American History” (1889).