“The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared serially in “Hearth and Home” in 1871. It was written in intervals of editorial work and was a tour de force for which the author expected so little publicity that he gave his characters the names of persons then living in Switzerland and Decatur counties, Indiana, with no thought that the story would ever penetrate to its habitat. But the homely little tale, with all its crudities and imperfections, made a wide appeal. It was pirated at once in England; it was translated into French by “Madame Blanc,” and was published in condensed form in the “Revue des Deux Mondes”; and later, with one of Mr. Aldrich’s tales and other stories by Eggleston, in book form. It was translated into German and Danish also. “Le Maître d’Ecole de Flat Creek” was the title as set over into French, and the Hoosier dialect suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange by its cruise into French waters. The story depicts Indiana in its darkest days. The State’s illiteracy as shown by the census of 1830 was 14.32 per cent as against 5.54 in the neighboring State of Ohio. The “no lickin’, no learnin’” period which Eggleston describes is thus a matter of statistics; but even before he wrote the old order had changed and Caleb Mills, an alumnus of Dartmouth, had come from New England to lead the Hoosier out of darkness into the light of free schools. The story escaped the oblivion which overtakes most books for the young by reason of its freshness and novelty. It was, indeed, something more than a story for boys, though, like “Tom Sawyer” and “The Story of a Bad Boy,” it is listed among books of permanent interest to youth. It shows no unusual gift of invention; its incidents are simple and commonplace; but it daringly essayed a record of local life in a new field, with the aid of a dialect of the people described, and thus became a humble but important pioneer in the development of American fiction. It is true that Bret Harte and Mark Twain had already widened the borders of our literary domain westward; and others, like Longstreet, had turned a few spadefuls of the rich Southern soil; but Harte was of the order of romancers, and Mark Twain was a humorist, while Longstreet, in his “Georgia Scenes,” gives only the eccentric and fantastic. Eggleston introduced the Hoosier at the bar of American literature in advance of the Creole of Mr. Cable or the negro of Mr. Page or Mr. Harris, or the mountaineer of Miss Murfree, or the delightful shore-folk of Miss Jewett’s Maine.
Several of Eggleston’s later Hoosier stories are a valuable testimony to the spiritual unrest of the Ohio Valley pioneers. The early Hoosiers were a peculiarly isolated people, shut in by great woodlands. The news of the world reached them tardily; but they were thrilled by new versions of the Gospel brought to them by adventurous evangelists, whose eloquence made Jerusalem seem much nearer than their own national capital. Heated discussions between the sects supplied in those days an intellectual stimulus greater than that of politics. Questions shook the land which were unknown at Westminster and Rome; they are now well-nigh forgotten in the valley where they were once debated so fiercely. The Rev. Mr. Bosaw and his monotonously sung sermon in “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” are vouched for, and preaching of the same sort has been heard in Indiana at a much later period than that of which Eggleston wrote. “The End of the World” (1872) describes vividly the extravagant belief of the Millerites, who, in 1842-43, found positive proof in the Book of Daniel that the world’s doom was at hand. This tale shows little if any gain in constructive power over the first Hoosier story, and the same must be said of “The Circuit Rider,” which portrays the devotion and sacrifice of the hardy evangelists of the Southwest among whom Eggleston had served. “Roxy” (1878) marks an advance; the story flows more easily, and the scrutiny of life is steadier. The scene is Vevay, and he contrasts pleasantly the Swiss and Hoosier villagers, and touches intimately the currents of local religious and political life. Eggleston shows here for the first time a capacity for handling a long story. The characters are of firmer fibre; the note of human passion is deeper, and he communicates to his pages charmingly the atmosphere of his native village,—its quiet streets and pretty gardens, the sunny hills and the broad-flowing river. Vevay is again the scene in “The Hoosier Schoolboy” (1883), which is, however, no worthy successor to “The Schoolmaster.” The workmanship is infinitely superior to that of his first Hoosier tale, but he had lost touch, either with the soil (he had been away from Indiana for more than a decade), or with youth, or with both, and the story is flat and tame. After another long absence he returned to the Western field in which he had been a pioneer, and wrote “The Graysons” (1888), a capital story of Illinois, in which Lincoln is a character. Here and in “The Faith Doctor,” a novel of metropolitan life which followed three years later, the surer stroke of maturity is perceptible; and the short stories collected in “Duffles” include “Sister Tabea,” a thoroughly artistic bit of work, which he once spoke of as being among the most satisfactory things he had written.
A fault of all of Eggleston’s earlier stories is their too serious insistence on the moral they carried—a resort to the Dickens method of including Divine Providence among the dramatis personæ; but this is not surprising in one in whom there was, by his own confession, a life-long struggle “between the lover of literary art and the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission.” There is little humor in these tales,—there was doubtless little in the life itself,—but there is abundant good nature. In all he maintains consistently the point of view of the realist, his lapses being chiefly where the moralist has betrayed him. There are many pictures which denote his understanding of the illuminative value of homely incident in the life he then knew best; there are the spelling-school, the stirring religious debates, the barbecue, the charivari, the infare, glimpses of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” and the “Hard Cider” campaign. Those times rapidly receded; Indiana is one of the older States now, and but for Eggleston’s tales there would be no trustworthy record of the period he describes.
Lowell had made American dialect respectable, and had used it as the vehicle for his political gospel; but Eggleston invoked the Hoosier lingua rustica to aid in the portrayal of a type. He did not, however, employ dialect with the minuteness of subsequent writers, notably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley; but the Southwestern idiom impressed him, and his preface and notes in the later edition of “The Schoolmaster” are invaluable to the student. Dialect remains in Indiana, as elsewhere, largely a matter of observation and opinion. There has never been a uniform folk-speech peculiar to the people living within the borders of the State. The Hoosier dialect, so called, consisting more of elisions and vulgarized pronunciations than of true idiom, is spoken wherever the Scotch-Irish influence is perceptible in the West Central States, notably in the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It is not to be confounded with the cruder speech of the “poor-whitey,” whose wild strain in the Hoosier blood was believed by Eggleston to be an inheritance of the English bond-slave. There were many vague and baffling elements in the Ohio Valley speech, but they passed before the specialists of the Dialect Society could note them. Mr. Riley’s Hoosier is more sophisticated than Eggleston’s, and thirty years of change lie between them,—years which wholly transformed the State, physically and socially. It is diverting to have Eggleston’s own statement that the Hoosiers he knew in his youth were wary of New England provincialisms, and that his Virginia father threatened to inflict corporal punishment on his children “if they should ever give the peculiar vowel sound heard in some parts of New England in such words as ‘roof’ and ‘root.’”
While Eggleston grew to manhood on a frontier which had been a great battle-ground, the mere adventurous aspects of this life did not attract him when he sought subjects for his pen; but the culture-history of the people among whom his life fell interested him greatly, and he viewed events habitually with a critical eye. He found, however, that the evolution of society could not be treated satisfactorily in fiction, so he began, in 1880, while abroad, the researches in history which were to occupy him thereafter to the end of his life. His training as a student of social forces had been superior to any that he could have obtained in the colleges accessible to him, for he had seen life in the raw; he had known, on the one hand, the vanishing frontiersmen who founded commonwealths around the hunters’ camp-fires; and he had, on the other, witnessed the dawn of a new era which brought order and enlightenment. He thus became a delver in libraries only after he had scratched under the crust of life itself. While he turned first to the old seaboard colonies in pursuit of his new purpose, he brought to his research an actual knowledge of the beginnings of new States which he had gained in the open. He planned a history of life in the United States on new lines, his main idea being to trace conditions and movements to remotest sources. He collected and studied his material for sixteen years before he published any result of his labors beyond a few magazine papers. “The Beginnings of a Nation” (1896) and “The Transit of Civilization” (1901) are only part of the scheme as originally outlined, but they are complete as far as they go, and are of permanent interest and value. History was not to him a dusty lumber room, but a sunny street where people came and went in their habits as they lived; and thus, in a sense, he applied to history the realism of fiction. He pursued his task with scientific ardor and accuracy, but without fussiness or dullness. His occupations as novelist and editor had been a preparation for his later work, for it was the story quality that he sought in history, and he wrote with an editorial eye to what is salient and interesting. It is doubtful whether equal care has ever been given to the preparation of any other historical work in this country. The plan of the books is in itself admirable, and the exhaustive character of his researches is emphasized by copious notes, which are hardly less attractive than the text they amplify and strengthen. He expressed himself with simple adequacy, without flourish, and with a nice economy of words; but he could, when he chose, throw grace and charm into his writing. He was, in the best sense, a humanist. He knew the use of books, but he vitalized them from a broad knowledge of life. He had been a minister, preaching a simple gospel, for he was never a theologian as the term is understood, but he enlisted zealously in movements for the bettering of mankind, and his influence was unfailingly wholesome and stimulating.
His robust spirit was held in thrall by an invalid body, and throughout his life his work was constantly interrupted by serious illnesses; but there was about him a certain blitheness; his outlook on life was cheerful and sanguine. He was tremendously in earnest in all his undertakings and accomplished first and last an immense amount of work,—preacher, author, editor, and laborious student, his industry was ceaseless. His tall figure, his fine head with its shock of white hair, caught the attention in any gathering. He was one of the most charming of talkers, leading lightly on from one topic to another. No one who ever heard his voice can forget its depth and resonance. Nothing in our American annals is more interesting or more remarkable than the rise of such men, who appear without warning in all manner of out-of-the-way places and succeed in precisely those fields which environment and opportunity seemingly conspire to fortify most strongly against them. Eggleston possessed in marked degree that self-reliance which Higginson calls the first requisite of a new literature, and through it he earned for himself a place of dignity and honor in American letters.
A Provincial Capital
A Provincial Capital
THE Hoosier is not so deeply wounded by the assumption in Eastern quarters that he is a wild man of the woods as by the amiable condescension of acquaintances at the seaboard, who tell him, when he mildly remonstrates, that his abnormal sensitiveness is provincial. This is, indeed, the hardest lot, to be called a “mudsill” and then rebuked for talking back! There are, however, several special insults to which the citizen of Indianapolis is subjected, and these he resents with all the strength of his being. First among them is the proneness of many to confuse Indianapolis and Minneapolis. To the citizen of the Hoosier capital, Minneapolis seems a remote place, that can be reached only by passing through Chicago. Still another source of intense annoyance is the persistent fallacy that Indianapolis is situated on the Wabash River. There seems to be something funny about the name of this pleasant stream,—immortalized in late years by a tuneful balladist,—which a large percentage of the people of Indianapolis have never seen except from a car window. East of Pittsburg the wanderer from Hoosierdom expects to be asked how things are on the Waybosh,—a pronunciation which, by the way, is never heard at home. Still another grievance that has embittered the lives of Indianapolitans is the annoying mispronunciation of the name of their town by benighted outsiders. Rural Hoosiers, in fact, offend the ears of their city cousins with Indianopolis; but it is left usually for the Yankee visitor to say Injunapolis, with a stress on Injun which points rather unnecessarily to the day of the war-whoop and scalp-dance.