EDWARD EGGLESTON.
“THE HOOSIER SCHOOL-BOY.”
ERDER says with truth that “one’s whole life is but the interpretation of the oracles of his childhood,” and those who are familiar with the writings of Edward Eggleston see in his pictures of country life in the Hoosier State the interpretation and illustration of his own life with its peculiar environment in “the great interior valley” nearly a half-century ago. The writers who have interpreted for us and for future generations the life and the characteristic manners which prevailed in the days when our country was new and the forests were yielding to give place to growing cities and expanding farms have done a rare and peculiar service, and those sections which have found expression through the genius and gifts of novelist or poet are highly favored above all others.
Edward Eggleston has always counted it a piece of good-fortune to have been born in a small village of Southern Indiana, for he believes that the formative influences of such an environment, the intimate knowledge of simple human nature, the close acquaintance with nature in woods and field and stream, and the sincere and earnest tone of the religious atmosphere which he breathed all through his youth, are better elements of culture than a city life could have furnished.
He was born in 1837 in Vevay, Indiana, and his early life was spent amid the “noble scenery” on the banks of the Ohio River. His father died while he was a young boy, and he himself was too delicate to spend much time at school, so that he is a shining example of those who move up the inclined plane of self-culture and self-improvement.
As he himself has forcefully said, through his whole life two men have struggled within him for the ascendency, the religious devotee and the literary man. His early training was “after the straitest sect of his religion”—the fervid Methodism of fifty years ago, and he was almost morbidly scrupulous as a boy, not even allowing himself to read a novel, though from this early period he always felt in himself a future literary career, and the teacher who corrected his compositions naively said to him: “I have marked your composition very severely because you are destined to become an author.”
At first the religious element in his nature decidedly held sway and he devoted himself to the ministry, mounting a horse and going forth with his saddle-bags as a circuit preacher in a circuit of ten preaching places. This was followed by a still harder experience in the border country of Minnesota, where in moccasins he tramped from town to town preaching to lumbermen and living on a meagre pittance, eating crackers and cheese, often in broken health and expecting an early death.