The provincial American and other papers

by Meredith Nicholson

Fade into dimness apace,

Silent; hardly a shout

From a few boys late at their play!”

Brave airs of cityhood are apparent in the town, with its paved streets, fine hall and library; and everywhere are wholesome life, comfort, and peace. The train is soon hurrying through gray fields and dark woodlands. Farmhouses are disclosed by glowing panes; lanterns flash fitfully where farmers are making all fast for the night. The city is reached as great factories are discharging their laborers, and I pass from the station into a hurrying throng homeward bound. Against the sky looms the dome of the capitol; the tall shaft of the soldiers’ monument rises ahead of me down the long street and vanishes starward. Here where forests stood seventy-five years ago, in a State that has not yet attained its centenary, is realized much that man has sought through all the ages,—order, justice, and mercy, kindliness and good cheer. What we lack we seek, and what we strive for we shall gain. And of such is the kingdom of democracy.

Edward Eggleston

Edward Eggleston

THE safest appeal of the defender of realism in fiction continues to be to geography. The old inquiry for the great American novel ignored the persistent expansion by which the American States were multiplying. If the question had not ceased to be a burning issue, the earnest seeker might now be given pause by the recent appearance upon our maps of far-lying islands which must, in due course, add to the perplexity of any who wish to view American life steadily or whole. If we should suddenly vanish, leaving only a solitary Homer to chant us, we might possibly be celebrated adequately in a single epic, but as long as we continue malleable and flexible we shall hardly be “begun, continued, and ended” in a single novel, drama, or poem. He were a much-enduring Ulysses who could touch once at all our ports. Even Walt Whitman, from the top of his omnibus, could not see across the palms of Hawaii or the roofs of Manila; and yet we shall doubtless receive, in due course, bulletins from the Dialect Society with notes on colonial influences in American speech. Thus it is fair to assume that in the nature of things we shall rely more and more on realistic fiction for a federation of the scattered States of this decentralized and diverse land of ours in a literature which shall become our most vivid social history. We cannot be condensed into one or a dozen finished panoramas; he who would know us hereafter must read us in the flashes of the kinetoscope.

Important testimony to the efficacy of an honest and trustworthy realism has passed into the record in the work of Edward Eggleston, our pioneer provincial realist. Eggleston saw early the value of a local literature, and demonstrated that where it may be referred to general judgments, where it interprets the universal heart and conscience, an attentive audience may be found for it. It was his unusual fortune to have combined a personal experience at once varied and novel with a self-acquired education to which he gave the range and breadth of true cultivation, and, in special directions, the precision of scholarship. The primary facts of life as he knew them in the Indiana of his boyhood took deep hold upon his imagination, and the experiences of that period did much to shape his career. He knew the life of the Ohio Valley at an interesting period of transition. He was not merely a spectator of striking social phenomena; but he might have said, with a degree of truth, quorum pars magna fui; for he was a representative of the saving remnant which stood for enlightenment in a dark day in a new land. Literature had not lacked servants in the years of his youth in the Ohio Valley. Many knew in those days the laurel madness; but they went “searching with song the whole world through” with no appreciation of the material that lay ready to their hands at home. Their work drew no strength from the Western soil, but was the savorless fungus of a flabby sentimentalism. It was left for Eggleston, with characteristic independence, to abandon fancy for reality. He never became a great novelist, and yet his homely stories of the early Hoosiers, preserving as they do the acrid bite of the persimmon and the mellow flavor of the pawpaw, strengthen the whole case for a discerning and faithful treatment of local life. What he saw will not be seen again, and when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and “Roxy” cease to entertain as fiction they will teach as history.

The assumption in many quarters that “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was in some measure autobiographical was always very distasteful to Dr. Eggleston, and he entered his denial forcibly whenever occasion offered. His own life was sheltered, and he experienced none of the traditional hardships of the self-made man. He knew at once the companionship of cultivated people and good books. His father, Joseph Cary Eggleston, who removed to Vevay, Indiana, from Virginia in 1832, was an alumnus of William and Mary College, and his mother’s family, the Craigs, were well known in southern Indiana, where they were established as early as 1799. Joseph Cary Eggleston served in both houses of the Indiana Legislature, and was defeated for Congress in the election of 1844. His cousin, Miles Cary Eggleston, was a prominent Indiana lawyer, and a judge in the early days, riding the long Whitewater circuit, which then extended through eastern Indiana from the Ohio to the Michigan border. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay, December 10, 1837. His boyhood horizons were widened by the removal of his family to New Albany and Madison, by a sojourn in the backwoods of Decatur County, and by thirteen months spent in Amelia County, Virginia, his father’s former home. There he saw slavery practiced, and he ever afterward held anti-slavery opinions. There was much to interest an intelligent boy in the Ohio Valley of those years. Reminiscences of the frontiersmen who had redeemed the valley from savagery seasoned fireside talk with the spice of adventure; Clark’s conquest had enrolled Vincennes in the list of battles of the Revolution; the battle of Tippecanoe was recent history; and the long rifle was still the inevitable accompaniment of the axe throughout a vast area of Hoosier wilderness. There was, however, in all the towns—Vevay, Brookville, Madison, Vincennes—a cultivated society, and before Edward Eggleston was born a remarkable group of scholars and adventurers had gathered about Robert Owen at New Harmony, in the lower Wabash, and while their experiment in socialism was a dismal failure, they left nevertheless an impression which is still plainly traceable in that region. Abraham Lincoln lived for fourteen years (1816-30) in Spencer County, Indiana, and witnessed there the same procession of the Ohio’s argosies which Eggleston watched later in Switzerland County.

Edward Eggleston attended school for not more than eighteen months after his tenth year, and owing to ill health he never entered college, though his father, who died at thirty-four, had provided a scholarship for him. But he knew in his youth a woman of unusual gifts, Mrs. Julia Dumont, who conducted a dame school at Vevay. Mrs. Dumont is the most charming figure in early Indiana history, and Dr. Eggleston’s own portrait of her is at once a tribute and an acknowledgment. She wrote much in prose and verse, so that young Eggleston, besides the stimulating atmosphere of his own home, had before him in his formative years a writer of somewhat more than local reputation for his intimate counselor and teacher. His schooling continued to be desultory, but his curiosity was insatiable, and there was, indeed, no period in which he was not an eager student. His life was rich in those minor felicities of fortune which disclose pure gold to seeing eyes in any soil. He wrote once of the happy chance which brought him to a copy of Milton in a little house where he lodged for a night on the St. Croix River. His account of his first reading of “L’Allegro” is characteristic: “I read it in the freshness of the early morning, and in the freshness of early manhood, sitting by a window embowered with honeysuckles dripping with dew, and overlooking the deep trap-rock dalles through which the dark, pine-stained waters of the St. Croix River run swiftly. Just abreast of the little village the river opened for a space, and there were islands; and a raft, manned by two or three red-shirted men, was emerging from the gorge into the open water. Alternately reading ‘L’Allegro’ and looking off at the poetic landscape, I was lifted out of the sordid world into a region of imagination and creation. When, two or three hours later, I galloped along the road, here and there overlooking the dalles and river, the glory of a nature above nature penetrated my being; and Milton’s song of joy reverberated still in my thoughts.” He was, it may be said, a natural etymologist, and by the time he reached manhood he had acquired a reading knowledge of half a dozen languages. We have glimpses of him as chain-bearer for a surveying party in Minnesota; as walking across country toward Kansas, with an ambition to take a hand in the border troubles; and then once more in Indiana, in his nineteenth year, as an itinerant Methodist minister. He rode a four-week circuit with ten preaching places along the Ohio, his theological training being described by his statement that in those days “Methodist preachers were educated by the old ones telling the young ones all they knew.” He turned again to Minnesota to escape malaria, preaching in remote villages to frontiersmen and Indians, and later he ministered to churches in St. Paul and elsewhere. He held, first at Chicago and later at New York, a number of editorial positions, and he occasionally contributed to juvenile periodicals; but these early writings were in no sense remarkable.