The Hoosiers

by Meredith Nicholson

When President Garfield appointed General Wallace minister to Turkey, he wrote across his commission “Ben Hur.” General Wallace called at the White House, just before leaving for his post, to pay his respects to the President, and Garfield said to him: “I expect another book from you. Your official duties will not be so onerous that you cannot write it. Make the scene Constantinople.” The opportunity thus presented for further literary work was a consideration in accepting the post. The Turkish occupation of Constantinople is an incident of great historical importance, and in his search for material for a new romance, General Wallace determined to write a tale that should present a picture of the fierce struggle between Christian and Moslem. His studies at Constantinople led to the writing of “The Prince of India.” The Prince is “The Wandering Jew.” He appears as a man of mysterious gifts, who wields great wealth and power. He has discovered what he believes to be common ground upon which all the spiritually minded may meet, irrespective of religion. He appears before the Emperor Constantine and presents his plan for a universal religious union, but he horrifies the theologians, and finding the Christians unsympathetic, he turns to Mohammed, and bestows upon him the sword of Solomon, the sign of conquest, which he had found in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre. The tale has neither the interest of “Ben Hur” nor the novelty and military ardor of “The Fair God.” The subject required deliberate treatment, and the hero, who is a scholar and a mystic, naturally deals in words oftener than in actions.

General Wallace’s other writings are “The Boyhood of Christ” (1889), and “The Wooing of Malkatoon: a Turkish Tale, with Commodus, a Play” (1898), both in blank verse.

There is nothing in General Wallace’s literary career to encourage hasty and careless workmanship. His methods have been, from the beginning, those of a conscientious artist, who strives for excellence and is capable of cheerfully casting aside the work of many days if, by additional labor, he can gain better results. He parleys with a sentence or debates with a synonym with a caution that is akin to Oriental diplomacy. He has probably never written even a social letter carelessly, and if his correspondence were to be collected, it would prove to be of the same quality as his best printed work. There has always been a dignity in his ambitions. Military leadership came to him naturally, and when he took up literature, it was in a serious way, with subjects that were new and daring. By making every stroke count, and paying no heed to changing literary fashions, he has, in the intervals of unusually varied and exacting employments, cultivated the literary art with enviable success.

Heredity and environment explain nothing in General Wallace. He is an estray from the Orient, whom Occidental conditions have influenced little. This is proved by all his imaginative writing, by his military tastes, by many qualities of his personality, and by his appearance and bearing. He has never written of American life, and the attraction of Mexico as a field for fiction lay in the splendor and remoteness of the early civilization of the country, combined with the romance of its conquest by soldiers of Spain. In like manner, “Ben Hur” and “The Prince of India” are such subjects as would naturally appeal to him. His fancy has delighted always in the thought of pageantry, conquest, mystery, and mighty deeds; it has pleased him to contemplate the formal social life of the old heroic times. The beginning of his friendship with the Sultan illustrates a sympathy, native in him, with the Oriental character. General Wallace had reached Constantinople after his appointment as minister, but had not been formally received. On Friday, the Moslem Sunday, he went with the multitude to see the Sultan go to prayer. General Wallace was entitled, by act of Congress, to wear the uniform of a major-general in the United States army, and he was clad in all the regalia of the rank. Between the gate of the imperial park and the Mosque which the Sultan attended was a small house, with a platform in front of it, set apart to strangers, and there General Wallace viewed the procession. The dark man in the rich uniform attracted the attention of the Sultan as he passed, and from the Mosque he sent Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna, then marshal of the palace, to learn the identity of the stranger. On finding that he was the new American minister awaiting audience, the Sultan sent an invitation to General Wallace to accompany him on his return to the palace, an honor never before accorded to a minister not yet received. A carriage was sent for the American, who returned in the brilliant cortège next to the carriage of the Sultan. The reception at the palace was particularly distinguished, and thereafter the relations between the two were intimate and cordial. The Sultan often summoned the minister to the palace, sometimes requesting interviews at the dead of night. All their conversation was through an interpreter, as the Sultan knew no English and General Wallace did not speak French.

There was early stamped upon General Wallace an air of authority that went well with the military profession; but later years have softened this into a courtliness and grace of manner wholly charming. The Oriental strain in him has become more and more pronounced, suggesting that the years spent in the study of Eastern history, and his actual contact with Oriental peoples, have emphasized it.

Mrs. Wallace (born Susan Arnold Elston) is a native of Crawfordsville. Her father was a pioneer of central Indiana. The homes of his descendants are grouped in Elston Grove, one of the prettiest spots in Crawfordsville. General and Mrs. Wallace were married in 1852, and she is “the wife of my youth,” to whom “Ben Hur” was dedicated. He received so many consolatory letters based on this inscription, which seemed to be misunderstood, that in later editions he changed it, adding “who still abides with me.” Mrs. Wallace began writing at an early age, both prose and verse. She has never collected her poems, though several of them, as “The Patter of Little Feet,” written years ago, are frequently brought to the attention of a new audience by the newspapers. She has printed one book of fiction, “Ginevra” (1887), and three books of travel sketches, “The Storied Sea” (1884); “The Land of the Pueblos” (1888); and “The Repose in Egypt” (1888). Mrs. Wallace has a happy manner of describing places and incidents, and the papers in these volumes show the spontaneity and ease of good letters, and are without the guide-book taint. They were intended, as the author stated in the preface to “The Storied Sea,” for patient, gentle souls seeking rest “from that weariness known in our dear native land as mental culture.” Mrs. Wallace shares her husband’s liking for Eastern subjects, and her Egyptian and Turkish papers, in particular, are delightful reading.

II. Maurice Thompson

No other Indianian has lived so faithfully as Maurice Thompson a life devoted to literary ideals, and none of his contemporaries among writers of the West and South has been more loyally devoted to pure belles-lettres than he. Abstract beauty has appealed to him more strongly than to any other writer of the Indiana group, and he has expressed it in his poems, through media suggested by his own environment, with charm and grace. He is a native of Indiana, having been born at Fairfield, near Brookville, September 9, 1844. His father was of Scotch-Irish ancestry; his maternal grandfather was of Dutch origin; and both lines were represented in the Southwestern migration at the beginning of the century. In Maurice’s childhood his father, who was a Baptist clergyman, made several changes of residence, all tending southward, removing first to southeastern Missouri, then to Kentucky, and again within a few years to the valley of the Coosawattee in northern Georgia. Here the senior Thompson became a planter, and Maurice enjoyed thereafter, until he reached manhood, a life in which the study of books was ideally blended with the freedom of the country. He has always expressed great obligations to his mother’s influences during these years; her literary tastes were sound, and she imparted to her children the love of good books, overcoming by her own encouragement and guidance the absence of schools in their neighborhood. Tutors were procured for higher mathematics and the languages; but the chief impulse to the study of the old literatures lay in the youth’s own taste and temperament. Like Lanier, Hayne, Esten Cooke, John B. Tabb, and others who were to become known in literature, he entered the Confederate army (1862), and saw hard service until the surrender. Even these years of soldier experience did not interrupt wholly his studies, for he usually managed to carry with him some book worth reading, the essays of De Quincey and Carlyle belonging to this period. Mr. Thompson returned to his father’s plantation at the close of the war, and remained there for three years, continuing his studies as before, but substituting hard manual labor for the life of pleasant adventure by field and flood that had given him from boyhood into early manhood an intimate acquaintance with wild things. He now began, of necessity, to accommodate himself to the changed conditions of the community and of his own family. He had studied engineering, and he perfected himself in it, and read law. Reconstruction moved forward slowly, and wishing to get as quickly as possible into a region where his material prospects could be improved, he went to Crawfordsville, without fixed purpose, and found employment with a railway surveying party. He supported himself by engineering until he felt justified in taking up the law, in which he was successful, and to which he was constant until the increase of literary reputation and steady employment in more congenial labor made it possible for him to abandon it. His marriage to a daughter of John Lee, an influential citizen of the county, fixed him as a resident of Crawfordsville, which has since remained his home. For a number of years he was prominent in local politics. He sat once in the State legislature, and he was appointed State geologist in 1885.

Mr. Thompson had written experimentally in boyhood, and after his removal to Indiana he continued the cultivation of his gifts, and beginning slowly, attained to an abundant production, in both prose and poetry, that made him through many years the Western author whose name most frequently occurred in the indices of the best magazines. During his youth in the Cherokee country he had been initiated into the mysteries of archery by a hermit who lived in the midst of a pine forest near his home. Mr. Thompson and his brother, Will H. Thompson, were both enthusiastic archers and hunters, and their adventures in the wilds of Florida were full of romantic interest. The bow was with them a kind of protest against the shot-gun, and assured a less murderous extirpation of game. Their own skill with the primitive weapon was remarkable, and as a recurrence of interest in the bow in this country is not imminent, they may be considered the last of American archers. Proficiency in this sport and the acquaintance with woodcraft to which it led were important influences in Mr. Thompson’s first literary work. In the seventies, a great revival in archery swept the country, and this was wholly due to a series of articles on archery and on hunting with the long bow which Mr. Thompson printed in the periodicals. These papers were gathered into a book (1878), and although he had published three years before a volume of sketches called “Hoosier Mosaics,” his writings on this subject, with the attractive title “The Witchery of Archery,” gave him his first footing as an author. The long bow has again fallen into disuse, but the freshness and zest of those sketches have not passed away. However, the archer had found in his woodlands more important material than he had yet made use of; for while he was following Robin Hood, he was also the servant of Theocritus and Meleager, and he wrote at this period many lyrics that suggested, by their spirit at least, the Greek pastoral poetry more than anything in English. They were published under the descriptive title “Songs of Fair Weather” (1883), and are included also in a larger volume of Mr. Thompson’s verse, “Poems” (1892). E. S. Nadal writes[44] that he has never known any scenery so classical as the glades which border the forests of Ohio and Indiana. In fancy, he is able to people them with figures of mythology, and in no other spots, he says, has his imagination been equal to this task. It is pleasant to find this comment running into a reference to Mr. Thompson: “When I was the literary reviewer of a New York daily,” says Mr. Nadal, “I was always on the lookout for the verses of a young poet who lived in this part of the world. I remember that one of his poems related how that once when Diana was at her bath in some clear spring, no doubt known to the poet, a sort of sublimated Hoosier of the fancy, himself quite nude and classic, passed near by. He quickly, however, ran away far through the green thick groves of May,—

“‘Afeard lest down the wind of Spring