His long list of books includes “Afterwhiles” (1887); “Pipes of Pan at Zekesbury” (1888); “Old-fashioned Roses” (1889); “Rhymes of Childhood” (1891); and “Poems Here at Home” (1897); and he has known the luxury of a cosmopolitan edition of his writings in a series that embraced the definitive Stevenson. Fame came to Mr. Riley when he was still young, and it is only a fair assumption that he has not exhausted his field, but that he will grow more and more secure in it. Serious work it has not always been possible for him to do, for his audience learned to expect humor in all his verses, and refused to be disappointed; but his ambition lies beyond humorous dialect, though he finds no fault with the public preference. All that he writes is welcome, for he is a preacher of sound optimism and a sincere believer in the final good that comes to all.
CHAPTER VI
CRAWFORDSVILLE
There is an ineffable charm about an old town that has outlived its ambition to be a great city, and Crawfordsville is a fine type of such a place. The region was settled in 1823, and the Montgomery County people, both farmers and townfolk, have long been counted among the sturdiest and most intelligent in the State. A cultivated society has always existed at Crawfordsville, and as the seat of Wabash College it acquired in its youth an academic air that it has never shaken off. The town has been called “The Hoosier Athens,” by envious and less favored neighbors. The analogy is not wholly fortunate, as there are neither porticoes nor statues on the college campus, and no Cimon found occupation here, as at the elder Athens, in tree-planting. Nature had anticipated the need of “groves of academe,” and the trees about the college and through the town are truly of the forest primeval, giving the agreeable impression of a rus in urbe. Crawfordsville has often sent young men elsewhere to find occupation; but if its commercial attractions have been slight, its educational advantages have been proportionately great, and Wabash is able to point to a long list of successful alumni. The spirit of change has rarely invaded the college, and men are now holding chairs who have grown old in its service. Wabash has been content to do honest college work and has never made false pretensions as to its ability to do more. “Mere literature,” as Bagehot fondly called it, has not been disregarded, and in no college of ampler endowment have the classics been taught more sympathetically or intelligently. It is one of the few colleges remaining at the West which close their doors to women, although importunate hands have long besought the wicket.
The honor and dignity of learning have come to have a real meaning here, not only to those who seek instruction at the college, but to the people of the town as well. Wabash may not have directly influenced those who made Crawfordsville a seat of authorship, but certainly a fortunate chance led makers of books to seek the congenial atmosphere created by the college. In such a place one may not grow rich, but one may dwell contented; and while coarser commerce has not flourished greatly, much valuable manuscript has freighted the east-bound mails from Crawfordsville. Authorship and scholarship alone have not engaged the inhabitants. Joseph E. McDonald, later a senator in Congress, once lived here, as did also John M. Butler, who became McDonald’s law partner at Indianapolis and one of the ablest men of the Western bar. Butler’s son, John Maurice Butler, was born at Crawfordsville, and his untimely death (1896) removed the man of most charming personality, and the keenest wit of his generation at the capital. Henry Beebee Carrington had identified himself with Indiana’s participation in the War of the Rebellion before he became (1870-1873) professor of military science at Wabash. His stay at Crawfordsville was brief, but the inhabitants prefer to believe that as he once breathed the Athenian air they are entitled to share with Connecticut, his native State and later home, in the credit for his writings. The Whitlocks and the Elstons were among the first settlers, and were prominent in all the earlier labors of the community. Henry S. Lane, General Wallace’s brother-in-law, was a senator in Congress (1860-1867), and lived and died here.
I. General Lew Wallace
General Lew Wallace, whose varied achievements have contributed so largely to the town’s fame, was not born at Crawfordsville, but at Brookville, in Franklin County, April 10, 1827. His father, David Wallace, had resigned from the regular army soon after his graduation from West Point in 1821. He studied law at Brookville, and soon began an interesting public career. He was one of the political giants of the State in his day, holding many offices and positions of honor. His first wife, General Wallace’s mother, was the daughter of John Test, of a family long prominent in the State. General Wallace was an adventurous boy, impatient of all restraint, and fond of wandering, and he therefore received little systematic education; but his father owned an excellent library, and, as has happened with other boys who have refused to submit to the schoolmaster, he found his own way to the book shelves. He was for a time a student at Hoshour’s school at Centerville; and he once ran away to join an older brother at Wabash; but he was either unwilling or unable to break his nomadic habits, and continued to roam the woods until, at sixteen, his school bills were audited for the last time. He was beset by several ambitions; literature, art, and a military career invited him. He had some skill at sketching, and painted a portrait of Black Hawk, the Indian chief, drawing on the family medicine chest for castor oil to use in mixing his colors. He also completed a novel, “The Man at Arms: A Tale of the Tenth Century,” of which he remembers little; but Sulgrove in one of his chronicles darkly hints that it was of the school of G. P. R. James. Robert Duncan, clerk of Marion County, in which Indianapolis is situated, employed him as copyist, and he varied this prosaic occupation by reading law in his father’s office. The Mexican War now broke upon the country, and as Lewis—the second syllable disappeared during the Civil War—had painted a picture and written a romance, he now turned naturally to his third ambition. He organized a company and went south with the First Indiana Infantry. The regiment saw little of the war, but the campaign and his personal experience in military matters confirmed young Wallace’s purpose to write a novel of Mexico, for which, by a kind of prevision and the inspiration of Prescott, he had already made tentative sketches. On his return to Indiana he again took up the law, and practised at Covington until 1852, when he removed to Crawfordsville, which has ever since been his home. He presently organized a military company, known as the “Montgomery Guards,” and equipped it with the Zouave uniform. This furnished an outlet for his ceaseless energy, and also for his pocket-book, as the State contributed nothing to the company’s support. He brought it to a high standard of efficiency, and at the outbreak of the Civil War it was one of the best-drilled military organizations in the country. Governor Morton appointed Mr. Wallace adjutant-general of the State at the first sign of hostilities, but he served in this capacity for a short time only, and organized the Eleventh Indiana Regiment, with his original Crawfordsville company as nucleus, and began an active and brilliant career in the army. Almost immediately his regiment distinguished itself in West Virginia. He was a brigadier-general before the capture of Fort Henry, and was made major-general for gallantry at Donelson. A year after Shiloh, a friend called General Wallace’s attention to the official reports of that engagement, and he learned for the first time that he had been censured for his conduct on the first day of the battle. He asked at once for a court of inquiry, which was denied, and a long controversy followed. This died out for a time, but was renewed when Grant began the serial publication of his memoirs. It was always maintained by General Wallace’s friends that Grant was unjust to Wallace; that the Indiana officer faithfully obeyed orders actually given him; and certainly no one who ever had any acquaintance with General Wallace would believe him capable of intentionally taking a circuitous route to a battle-field. The effective service of his command on the second day of the battle should forever have stilled criticism; as it was, Grant wrote in his memoirs—the last words that ever came from his pen—a footnote to his account of Pittsburg Landing that fairly acquitted General Wallace of all blame. Much has been written, by participants and others, touching the incident, and it has been made the subject of an exhaustive study by George F. McGinnis.[43] While stationed at Baltimore, in 1864, General Wallace prevented a Confederate descent upon Washington by intercepting Jubal Early at Monocacy. He threw 6,000 men against Early’s force of 28,000, suffering defeat, but detaining the enemy until Grant could send reënforcements from Virginia. This was one of the most important of all his military services, and he received for it Grant’s cordial praise. General Wallace was a member of the court that tried the conspirators implicated in the assassination of Lincoln; and he was president of the commission that tried and convicted Captain Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison.
When General Wallace returned to Crawfordsville at the close of the war he was thirty-eight; he had served creditably in one war and with enviable distinction in a second, and he turned to the arts of peace from a military experience that had given him wide reputation and acquaintance among public men of the Civil War period. He began industriously to reëstablish himself in his law practice, and varied his occupation with study and literary work. “The Man at Arms,” his youthful attempt at “A Tale of the Tenth Century,” had disappeared during his absence in Mexico; but the ambition to write a romance of the invasion of Cortez, and his manuscript beginnings of it, had survived two wars, and he now set about finishing the story. He had at this time no definite ambition to become an author, and he gave his evenings to the writing of “The Fair God” with little idea of ever publishing it. After its completion he carried it East with him on a business journey. Whitelaw Reid gave him an introduction to a Boston publisher, and the result was the appearance of the tale in 1873. He had spent in all about twelve years on the book, part having been written, as already stated, in his boyhood; and the author’s faithfulness to his early purpose through many years that had brought new duties and obligations is in keeping with his whole character.
The scenes of “The Fair God” were unfamiliar to the novel reader, and the very names in the book were somewhat disconcerting; but the tale was received in the beginning with a fair degree of interest, and it has ever since enjoyed a steady sale. The subsequent success of “Ben Hur” directed attention anew to General Wallace’s earlier tale, but the romance was something more than an amateur effort, and time has not diminished its entertaining qualities. As a picture of Aztecan civilization it is accurate, and the incidents are related in an orderly and natural manner that holds the attention. The devotion of the people to their religion is impressive; but the tale is essentially a military romance. The battle scenes following the appearance of Cortez and his Spaniards are described with an animation and an amplitude that impart to the reader the sense of beholding a series of great spectacles. The book is rich in those surprises which it is the business of the romancer to produce; and the chapters descriptive of the battle towers (mantas) which were among the European’s resources, and of the retreat of the invaders, are noisy with the clang of battle. The prophecies of the mystic priest Mualox, who sees through the eyes of a child the coming of the Spaniards, are interesting; and curiously enough they had their origin in an incident of General Wallace’s own experience in Indiana, showing how the imagination may play upon the commonplace. When he lived at Covington, he formed the acquaintance of a tailor who was deeply interested in the occult sciences, and who once invited General Wallace to his shop to witness manifestations of his powers. The tailor placed his apprentice under a kind of hypnotic influence, and told General Wallace to take the boy’s hand and to follow in his own mind some route with whose details he was familiar. General Wallace obeyed, mentally reviewing a highway that led to the house of a farmer client. The boy’s lips moved, and he coherently described the road, and presently the farmhouse, just as General Wallace saw them; then he abruptly ceased to follow the leader’s train of thought. He said that it was night; that some one came out of the house with a light, walked about inspecting the barnyard, and then returned to the house. The boy had now become exhausted; the tailor revived him, and General Wallace went on to his home. A few days later, when the countryman whose farm had figured in the incident came to town, General Wallace asked him if he had been at home at the hour mentioned; he replied that he had been at home and asleep. Further questioning elicited the statement that at about the time of the experiment at the tailor shop he had been aroused by noises in the barnyard, and that, fearing some marauder was after his fowls, he had taken a light and gone out to see that all was secure.
The friendly reception of “The Fair God” did not awaken any unusual interest in General Wallace as a writer. He continued at Crawfordsville the life of a lawyer of polite tastes, keenly interested in politics. “The Fair God” out of the way, he began almost immediately to cast about for some new literary employment. In about 1874 it occurred to him to write a novelette, whose principal incident should be the meeting of the Wise Men in the Desert and the birth of Christ. The brief account in the Gospels had long appealed to his imagination, and he wrote what is now the first book of “Ben Hur,” intending to offer it to some magazine for publication as a sketch, with illustrations. While the manuscript still lay in his desk, he met on a railway journey an old friend, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and in the course of conversation the famous sceptic touched on the subject of Christianity. General Wallace had always been indifferent in religious matters, neither denying nor affirming; but Ingersoll’s downright iconoclasm alarmed him. He determined to investigate the subject and form his own conclusions; and he began researches and studies which continued through five years. When he had concluded, he fully accepted the tenets of Christian faith, and he had amplified his sketch of the Wise Men into the novel “Ben Hur.” Continuous labor had not been possible during the writing of this tale: he had been busy with everyday affairs; politics received a share of his attention; and he became, in 1878, by appointment of President Hayes, governor of New Mexico Territory. He lived at Santa Fé for three years, and much of “Ben Hur” was written in the governor’s house there. General Wallace had never visited Palestine when he wrote “Ben Hur,” but there are points of resemblance between the landscape of New Mexico and that of the Holy Land, and these were of assistance. He procured a profile map of Palestine, and was so attentive to topographical detail that later, when he visited the scenes of his story in company with a recognized authority in ancient history, every feature of the country as described in the book was verified. An immense amount of labor is represented in this novel. Many volumes were consulted in the search for antiquarian lore, that it might lack nothing that would aid in conveying an accurate impression of the period.
The book was capitally planned, striking episodes falling into place naturally, and not too abundantly. The meeting of the Wise Men, the sea fight, and the chariot race are dramatic to a degree; but the sombre picture of the crucifixion is unmarred by excess. The reverence which characterizes every mention of the Saviour is the author’s happiest achievement in the story. The subject is difficult, but it is handled with admirable taste and refinement. However, the book does not depend for continued attention on its interest as a religious novel; it is equally noteworthy for its comprehensive grasp of the politics of the period, its picture of the various peoples that flowed through the streets of Jerusalem and Antioch, and the suggestion of a romantic commerce whose exploits lay in strange seas and beyond the deserts. Nothing in the book is accomplished more skilfully than the slow extinction of the idea of the coming of a great ruler of the world, to rebuild the throne of Solomon, and the gradual acceptance of the spiritual significance of Christ’s advent; and it may be taken, in connection with the history of the novel, as a revelation of the growth in the author’s own mind of a belief in the divine Saviour. Historical novels, particularly those that look to antiquity for subjects, follow necessarily certain traditions, and these are observed carefully by General Wallace. Scott, more than any other, helped him, and “Ivanhoe,” in particular, was his model. The writing in “Ben Hur” is uniformly good, and the dialogue in archaic speech is well sustained. General Wallace wrote out of an ample vocabulary enriched by the constant reading of Oriental narrative, and in his descriptions the epithets are always apposite. The success of “Ben Hur” was not immediate. It sold slowly for several years, but it gained steadily in popularity and continues in favor with the booksellers. It has been translated into all the European languages, into Arabic and Japanese, and it is accessible to the blind in raised-letter. The sale of the copyright edition in America (1900) exceeds 1,200,000, which is probably greater than that of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Many playwrights and actors proposed to General Wallace from time to time the dramatization of “Ben Hur,” but he feared that the spirit of reverence, which he had so consistently communicated to the novel, would be lost in any play founded upon its incidents. He declined all offers until, in 1899, a plan was submitted which met his approval, and in the fall of that year the play was given its first presentation at New York.