CHAPTER V
THE HOOSIER INTERPRETED
THE rural type in Indiana has found notable interpretation at the hands of two writers who, working independently of each other and at different periods, have made records of great social and literary value and interest. As already indicated, country life at the West and Southwest has not varied widely in different communities. The same social conditions and peculiarities of speech have been observable in many regions deriving population from common sources; but the type found in the Ohio Valley was best defined in Indiana, and it has gained its greatest fame through the interpretations of Edward Eggleston and James Whitcomb Riley. Their outlook on life has been wholly different, and their literary methods have been antipodal; but they have both been keen observers of the rural Indianians, though of different generations. They meet in a strong affection for their native soil, and in an appreciation of the essential domesticity and moral enlightenment of the people they depict.
Switzerland County lies in the far southeastern corner of the State, and Vevay, its principal town and capital, is on the Ohio River. The name of the county is explained by the fact of its settlement by Swiss immigrants, who were drawn thither by the supposed adaptability of the soil to the growth of the grape. Vevay lies about midway between Louisville and Cincinnati, and the steamboats plying between these two cities are its only medium of communication with the world, as no railway touches it. It was to this pretty village that Joseph Cary Eggleston, the father of Edward and George Cary Eggleston, came in 1832. The impression has been abroad that the author of “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was himself reared amid the squalor and ignorance which he described so vividly, but this is without foundation of fact. The Egglestons were of good Virginia stock, and the members of the Indiana branch of the family were cultivated people. Joseph Cary was graduated from William and Mary College in his seventeenth year with high honors. He had studied law before he left Virginia, and the fourteen years of his life that remained to him after his removal to Indiana were spent in the successful practice of his profession. He was, moreover, popular in the community, for he sat in both branches of the General Assembly, and was nominated for representative in Congress, but failed of election. He married, soon after reaching Indiana, the daughter of George Craig, of Craig township, in Switzerland County. The Craigs were of a distinguished Kentucky family, and, like the Egglestons, looked back to a Virginia ancestry. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay in 1837, and has never failed to speak with great cordiality and affection of the pretty river town whose chief distinction lies in his own attainments. He has even taken occasion in recent years[41] to rebuke “a certain condescension in New Englanders,” which had prompted the Atlantic Monthly to comment on the hardship it must have been “to a highly organized man” to be born in southern Indiana in the crude early years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Eggleston declares that he has retained enough of local prejudice to feel that he would have lost more than he could have gained had Plymouth Rock or Beacon Hill been his birthplace rather than Vevay. He was sensitive to the loveliness of the Indiana spring and summer, and has paid tribute to it in words which it is a pleasure to repeat:—
“The sound of the anvil in the smithy, and the soft clatter of remote cow-bells on the ‘commons,’ linger in my mind as memories inseparable from my boyhood in Vevay. A certain poetic feeling which characterized me from childhood, and which, perhaps, finally determined my course toward literary pursuits, was nourished by my delight in the noble scenery about Vevay, Madison, and New Albany, in which places I lived at various times. My brother George and myself were walkers, partly because our father had been one before us. Nothing could be finer than our all-day excursions to the woods in search of hickory-nuts, wild grapes, blackberries, paw-paws, or of nothing at all but the sheer pleasure of wandering in one of the noblest forests that it ever fell to a boy’s lot to have for a playground. Then, too, when we had some business five or twenty miles away, we scorned to take the steamboat, but just set out afoot along the river bank, getting no end of pleasure out of the walk, and out of that sense of power which unusual fatigue, cheerfully borne, always gives.”[42]
Dr. Eggleston’s early life was full of vicissitude, but he has himself disclaimed credit for being what is called “a self-made man.” It is true that he had his own way to make, in great measure, but he began with all the benefits of good ancestry, and he was, in his own phrase, “born into an intellectual atmosphere.” Joseph Cary Eggleston, who died when Edward was only nine years old, provided in his will for the exchange of his law library for books of general interest, that his children might have good literature about them in their formative years—a direction that was followed faithfully by his widow. The boy Edward grew up with the ideal of a scholarly father before him, and with an ambition to know books and to read other languages than his own. He learned also the mystery of type-setting, and contributed items to the Vevay Reveille, duly “set up.” Dr. Eggleston records that in his primary schooling, conducted by his mother, he proved himself a dull scholar, but that some kind of climacteric was passed in his tenth year, and that thenceforward he was the pride of his teachers. Manual training was hardly dreamed of in those days, but Joseph Eggleston had an appreciation of its value and left what Edward has described as “a solemn injunction that his sons should be sent to the country every summer and taught manual labor on a farm.” This injunction was carefully obeyed, so that Edward Eggleston had an actual experience of farming and a contact with farm folk that was a part of his preparation for the writing of the tales that gave him his first fame. Judge Miles Eggleston, Joseph’s brother, was more distinctly an Indianian than any other member of the family by reason of his long residence in the State and his public services. Guilford Eggleston, Joseph Eggleston’s cousin, was identified with the family life at Vevay. He was a man of many accomplishments, and left a deep impression on Edward Eggleston, who has spoken of his brilliant talk as a perpetual inspiration: “He incessantly stimulated my love for literature, guided my choice of books, taught me to make a commonplace book of my reading, and by his conversation and example made me feel that to lead an intellectual life was the most laudable pursuit of a human being.” The direction thus given to the boyish impulse, and the atmosphere of his home, were of great importance to Edward, for of systematic schooling he was to know little. He was never but once in his life able to spend three consecutive months in school, and after he reached his tenth year the sum of his schooling was only eighteen months.
Joseph Eggleston had foreseen his own death and provided in various ways for the education of his sons. He purchased a scholarship in Asbury (DePauw) College, but continued ill health made it impossible for Edward to avail himself of its benefits, though his younger brother, George Cary, became a student there. Just what Edward Eggleston lost by his irregular schooling, which was almost wholly independent of instructors in the usual sense of the term, is hardly a profitable subject for speculation. By following his own bent, he strengthened himself along lines of natural preference, and he formed that habit of wise selection and rejection which in itself marks the educated man. Although schoolhouse doors were closed against him on account of his precarious health, he was nevertheless permitted to court death by close application in home study. He acquired, by the time he reached his twenty-fifth year, some knowledge of six or seven languages, and a familiar acquaintance with classical English and French poetry. He knew both the English and French dramatic literature, though, having been bred in the strictest teaching of the Methodists of that day, he read few novels, and he gives his own testimony that he should have esteemed it “a damnable sin to see a play on the stage.”
When Edward Eggleston was in his twelfth year, his mother remarried, taking for her husband the Rev. William Terrell, a Methodist minister. This change brought with it a wider horizon for the boy, as his stepfather’s duties led the family away from Vevay to Madison and New Albany, also on the Ohio, but larger towns than Vevay. When sixteen, he spent more than a year with his father’s family in Virginia. The sharp transition from the conditions in the newer to those of the older country quickened his powers of observation. The tribulations of the Western pioneers had been discussed in his hearing by his elders during the most impressionable years of his childhood; his grandfather Craig’s stone house was a reminder of times not remote when the Indians were a daily menace; and the recitals of the wandering apostles of Methodism in his mother’s house had given him further contact with the adventure and romance of pioneer life. Virginia opened new vistas, and the novel conditions of life that he found there extended his knowledge of men and manners, and afforded an opportunity for criticism and comparison that was of definite value. He found himself cousin to a considerable part of the population, and this wide relationship gave him an acquaintance with the charming social life of old Virginia; but he counted himself an abolitionist, he says, from the time of this visit.
The abundant vitality of Dr. Eggleston’s later years has been so strikingly characteristic that it is difficult to believe that ill health followed him from semi-invalid boyhood into manhood; but the year after his return from Virginia he was sent to Minnesota in the hope that the change might benefit him, and the kind fates thus threw him into still other and different experiences. He was in the new Northwest when the free-soil excitement in Kansas thrilled the country, and he set out afoot, with a dirk knife as his only weapon, for the scene of conflict. He has himself described the failure and result of this excursion:—
“After weeks of weary walking and nights spent in the discomforts of frontier cabins, I grew sick at heart and longed for the companionship and refinements of home. I was rather glad to learn that men from the free States were entirely shut out of the besieged territory on the Iowa side. My moccasins were worn out, my feet were sore, my little stock of money was failing, and I was tired of husbanding it by eating crackers and cheese. I turned eastward at a point west of Cedar Falls, crossed the Mississippi at Muscatine, and after walking in all three or four hundred miles, I at length boarded a railway train at a station near Galesburg, and reached my nearest relatives after an enforced fast of twenty-four hours, without a cent in my pocket, and looking, in my soiled and travel-worn garments, like a young border ruffian. I had left home a pale invalid; I returned sun-browned and well.”
But this gain in bodily strength was not to profit him long. He had been bred in the Methodist faith; his stepfather was a minister of wide reputation in this denomination, and the youth, with his studious disposition and gift for speech, turned naturally to the ministry. He has said of himself that an inward conflict between his predisposition to literary work and the tendency to religion and philanthropy began in boyhood and has continued throughout his life. There were times in his youth when his love for literature seemed an idolatry, and once in a repentant mood he destroyed his youthful manuscripts and resolved to abandon literature. He was now launched upon the Methodist circuit rider’s life of hardship and peril, covering a four weeks’ itinerary in the county of which New Albany is the capital, and performing his duties with such diligence that in six months he was again a wreck. He therefore removed to Minnesota, and continued in the ministry, save for intervals of physical prostration, until, in 1866, he accepted the editorship of The Little Corporal, a popular juvenile periodical published at Chicago, and from that beginning was irresistibly drawn to the business of making books. In 1874, he became pastor of a church in Brooklyn, to which he gave the name of the Church of Christian Endeavor, and which sought to make sunshine in shady places. It was, indeed, the “Church of the Best Licks,” of the “Hoosier Schoolmaster,” slightly conventionalized. Dr. Eggleston continued in the pastorate for five years, devoting himself to his work with his accustomed zeal and enthusiasm, which resulted in another collapse. He then retired finally from the ministry; but the phrase, “Christian Endeavor,” first applied by Dr. Eggleston to his Brooklyn church, is widely known as the name of a society of young people.
Unconscious preparation for a life-employment has rarely been more clearly exemplified in American literature than in the case of Dr. Eggleston. This is not true as to his novels of Western life merely, but as to the later historical writing in which he has so successfully detected and appraised various aspects of our social growth. His early experiences at the West were indelibly written in his memory, and though he did not at once transcribe them, his work as editor sharpened his instincts and helped him to an appreciation of his own material. His removal to New York in 1870 was another fortunate step of preparation, for it gave him a perspective which he could not have gained had he remained at the West. He wrote almost immediately “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” the first draft, designed for Hearth and Home, being in the form of a short story, which he extended to its present form at the suggestion of one of the proprietors of the periodical. The reading of Taine’s “Art in the Netherlands” was the quickening influence that led to the writing of the story. Dr. Eggleston learned from Taine that an artist should paint what he sees, and he therefore undertook to portray the illiterate people of southern Indiana. The story was published in book form and gained wide popularity, which has not diminished in the thirty years since its appearance. Dr. Eggleston has been criticised severely in Indiana for the series of novels that began with “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” but this criticism has come largely from a new generation that does not view these tales in the light of history, and is, therefore, hardly competent to pass on their veracity. By the legal tests for expert witnesses Dr. Eggleston is certainly qualified to speak; his own experience and the social evolution of the people of Indiana contribute to the creation of his competency; and when we add to these considerations his instinctive interest in the beginnings and tendencies of American life, it is not possible to reject him. He knew, as he says, “the antique Hoosier.” The Indiana of 1850 was very different from that of 1870, and Dr. Eggleston was looking backward a score of years when he created Ralph Hartsook, the youthful schoolmaster, and threw about him an atmosphere of ignorance and vice. The story is an instructive footnote to the history of education in Indiana. “Bud Means” is of the second generation of Hoosiers—the generation which, outside of the first social order, had little or no benefit of education, and which sank to the condition of illiteracy that awakened presently the efforts of the faithful few who won the fight for free schools. Courage preceded knowledge as a requirement of pedagogues in the period of which Dr. Eggleston wrote. “‘Lickin’ and larnin’ goes together; no lickin’, no larnin’,’ declared Pete Jones.” The student who may hereafter scan the educational history of Indiana and read with dismay the statistics compiled by Mills, will welcome this unadorned tale, that illuminates and confirms the dry facts of the statistician. Eggleston, the novelist, kept Eggleston, the preacher, well in hand, and there is no tedious moralizing in the book. It is not difficult to understand the prompt recognition of the story or its long-continued attraction. The subject was novel, the characters were new, and the scene was set in a region that had never before been seriously explored by the story-teller. It was, as an army officer put it, a cavalry dash into literature. The incidents were linked together with skill, and their air of entire credibility has not been lost in the years that have passed since it surprised and delighted its first readers. Enjoyment of the story was not limited to English readers. It was translated into French by Madame Blanc, and was published in condensed form in the Revue des Deux Mondes with the title “Le Maitre d’École de Flat Creek.” German and Danish translations followed, so that “Bud Means” has enjoyed opportunities for foreign travel quite unusual among his neighbors.
“The End of the World” (1872) continued the series of stories which Dr. Eggleston had begun in the “Schoolmaster.” Religious phenomena were the most marked social expression in the time and place of which he wrote. It was religion that offered to the isolated people of the new frontier the only relief that their lives knew from toil, hardship, and danger; and what appears now, at the distance of fifty years, to have been a mania was with them a grave and vital matter. “The End of the World” is a tale of the Millerite excitement, which swept the country in 1842-1843, and Dr. Eggleston adapted it very entertainingly to the purposes of fiction. “The Mystery of Metropolisville” (1873) led away from Indiana into Minnesota, with which Dr. Eggleston had become acquainted as a minister. Against a background of the land-booming period, he illustrates the dangers and temptations of the pioneers; and while the tale is less satisfactory than any of the Indiana series, it remains after thirty years a readable novel. It was hardly possible for Dr. Eggleston to forget wholly the people he had known on the Ohio, and he introduces in “The Mystery of Metropolisville” a Hoosier poet, who had left the “Waybosh” because his literary efforts were not appreciated there. He carried his ambitions into Minnesota, became a trapper and land speculator, and there, to quote from one of his own stanzas,—
“His Hoosier harp hangs on the wild water-willer.”
Dr. Eggleston had been established at New York for eight years when he wrote “Roxy” (1878), one of the best of his books, and one which depicts even more vividly than “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” his early environment. He was now forty-one, and the years that had added to the sum of his experience had developed also his natural instinct for character. The dramatic quality, too, shows strongly in this tale, which is, in its moral relation, a kind of Western “Scarlet Letter.” There is more or less of Vevay in this novel,—it is not important to inquire too curiously whether it be more or less,—and the pretty river village, with its slight foreign color, which was derived from the Swiss residents, the mystery and novelty of the broad river highway, the simplicity of the life, its lazy gossip and its religious enthusiasms, are all depicted with fidelity. The Bonabys, father and son, the lurking figure of Nancy, Twonnet, and Roxy, possess the interest that attaches to fresh types. The introduction of the volatile Twonnet, a member of the Swiss Colony, in contrast with the sober Roxy, the unobtrusive presentation of the religious problems that held the attention of the community, and the blending of the threads of young Bonaby’s destiny, are accomplished with skill and power.
In “The Circuit Rider” (1874) Dr. Eggleston crossed the Indiana boundary into southern Ohio, but for all critical purposes the type remained the same. Political frontiers do not deter the novelist, who enjoys extra-territorial privileges. “The Circuit Rider” is not so entertaining a story as “Roxy.” The characters do not take hold of the imagination here as in the later book, and those somewhat vague qualities that combine to the creation of atmosphere are not blended so effectively. But as a picture of the strenuous religious life of the Ohio Valley in the early half of the century, the story is most important. In “Roxy” the strife between Calvinism and Wesleyism is more strongly contrasted; but “The Circuit Rider” gives a vivid impression of a period that was made remarkable by the heroism and sacrifice of the Methodist evangelists. After “Roxy” Dr. Eggleston did not return to the field of his early successes until he wrote “The Graysons” (1887). Like “The Circuit Rider” this story is not, geographically speaking, of Indiana, but it is nevertheless of that broader Hoosierdom which comprehended a small part of southern Ohio and considerably more of Illinois. This is one of the best of all the Hoosier cycle, and, indeed, one of the best of American novels. There is not an inartistic line in the book, and the manner in which Lincoln is introduced as a character,—appearing as the attorney for a boy charged with murder, and winning his freedom by a characteristic resort to homely philosophy,—is achieved so simply that the reader is left wondering whether it could really have been the great Lincoln who participated in one scene, performed his part, and thereupon disappeared from the stage. A clumsy artist would have dwelt upon Lincoln, hinting at his future greatness and reluctantly dismissing him; Dr. Eggleston introduces the incident (which is based on fact) with an inadvertence that enhances its interest and increases its suggestiveness. The dialect in this tale is much more critical than that in any other novel of Dr. Eggleston’s Western series. In his earlier stories, written before the scientific study of American folk-speech had been undertaken, the dialect is more general. Dr. Eggleston’s other works of fiction are: “Mr. Blake’s Walking Stick” (1869); “Book of Queer Stories” (1870); “The Schoolmaster’s Stories for Boys and Girls” (1874); “Queer Stories for Boys and Girls” (1884); “The Faith Doctor” (1891); “Duffels” (1893). “The Faith Doctor” is a novel of New York, in which the prevailing interest in what Dr. Eggleston called “aerial therapeutics” supplies the motive. “Duffels” is a collection of short stories written at intervals throughout his literary career, with scenes laid in many parts of the country, and illustrating happily the versatility and the story-telling gift of the author.
Dr. Eggleston began in 1880 researches for a history of life in the United States. He pursued his studies abroad, as well as in American libraries, and assembled at his summer home on Lake George a large collection of Americana. The only published result of these studies thus far is “The Beginners of a Nation” (1896), the most serious, searching, and exhaustive essay in Kultur-Geschichte yet presented by an American. The mere politics of our history and its military incidents had long received the attention of students, to the exclusion of the social and domestic. A work such as Dr. Eggleston has undertaken is vastly more difficult and therefore more important, for it requires original research in the strictest sense. His other historical works so far completed are: “A History of the United States and its People for the Use of Schools” (1888); “The Household History of the United States and its People” (1888); and “A First Book in American History” (1889).
Dr. Eggleston’s life makes in itself a delightful story of aspiration and achievement. Many Americans have experienced hardship and discouragement, but few have profited so richly as this novelist and historian by every whim of fortune. Ill health has menaced him all his days, but physical infirmity has never conquered his ambition or diminished his mental vitality. There is about him an exuberance of spirits that is not only a distinguishing personal trait, but a quality of all his stories. And if ill health in his youth and young manhood interrupted the orderly course of education, it also brought him opportunities for acquiring a broad knowledge of American provincial life that no school could have given him. When Dr. Eggleston began to write there was, outside of New England, little local literature, and the value of dialect in interpretative fiction was only beginning to be understood. Cable, Page, Harris, Murfree, “Octave Thanet,” were names unknown to the catalogues when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared. Mark Twain and Bret Harte were well embarked upon their careers; but the one was a humorist and the other a romanticist, and neither had undertaken to reproduce local speech accurately. Dr. Eggleston was the pioneer provincial realist; and if, as he says, the great American novel is being written in sections, he certainly contributed early chapters, and indicated the lines to be followed.
His marriage, in 1891, to Frances E. Goode, a granddaughter of his father’s cousin, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, renewed ties with Indiana that had never been wholly broken during long years of absence. He has often been a visitor to Madison, which was Mrs. Eggleston’s home, and he spent the winter of 1899 in that beautiful and tranquil town.
Crabbe and Burns are Mr. Riley’s forefathers in literature. Crabbe was the pioneer in what may be called the realism of poetry; it was he who rejected the romantic pastoralism that had so long peopled the British fields with nymphs and shepherds, and introduced the crude but actual country folk of England. The humor, the bold democracy, and the social sophistication that he lacked were supplied in his own day by Burns, and Burns had, too, the singing instinct and the bolder art of which there are no traces in Crabbe. Something of Crabbe’s realism and Burns’s humor and philosophy are agreeably combined in Mr. Riley. His first successes were achieved in the portrayal of the Indiana country and village folk in dialect. He has rarely seen fit to vary his subject, and he has been faithful to the environment from which he derived his inspiration. James Whitcomb Riley is an interesting instance—perhaps, after Whittier, the most striking in our literature—of a natural poet, taking his texts from the familiar scenes and incidents of his own daily walks, and owing little or nothing to the schools. He was born at Greenfield, the seat of Hancock County, in 1849. His father, Reuben A. Riley, was a native of Pennsylvania, of Dutch antecedents, though there is a tradition of Irish ancestry in the family. He was a lawyer, who enjoyed a wide reputation as an advocate, and was long reckoned among the most effective political speakers in Indiana. He was a discriminating reader and an occasional writer of both prose and verse. The poet’s mother was a Marine, of a family in which an aptness for rhyming was characteristic. The Greenfield schools have always been excellent, and young Riley was fortunate in having for his teacher Lee O. Harris, himself a poet, who tried to adapt the curriculum of the Hancock County schools to the needs of an unusual pupil in whom imagination predominated to the exclusion of mathematics.
Learning is, as Higginson has aptly condensed it, not accumulation, but assimilation; and “the Hoosier poet” was born one of those fortunate men to whom schools are a mere incident of education, but who walk through the world with their eyes open, adding daily to their stock of knowledge. Bagehot enlarges on this trait as he discovers it in Shakespeare, “throughout all whose writings,” he says, “you see an amazing sympathy with common people.” The common people caught and held the attention of Mr. Riley, and as the annalist of their simple lives he established himself firmly in public affection. The half a dozen colleges within a radius of fifty miles of his home did not attract him; he was bred to no business, but followed in a tentative way occupations that brought him into contact with people. He began to write because he felt the impulse, and not because he breathed a literary atmosphere or looked forward to a literary career. His imagination needed some outlet, and he made verses just as he drew pictures or acquired a knack at playing the guitar, taking one talent about as seriously as the other. A Western county seat, with its daily advent of pilgrims from the farms, affords an entertaining panorama for a bright boy, and Mr. Riley began in his youth that careful observation of the Indiana country folk, their ways and their speech, that was later to afford him a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material.
He had in his younger days something of Artemus Ward’s fondness for a hoax, and he wrote “Leonaine,” in imitation of Poe’s manner, with so marked success that several critics of discernment received the poem, and the story of its discovery in an old school reader, in good faith. In the experimental period of his career he read widely and to good purpose, learning the mechanics of prosody from the best models. His ear was naturally good, and he was distinctly original in his ideas of form. He delighted in the manipulation of words into odd and surprising combinations, and though the results were not always dignified, they were, nevertheless, curious and amusing, and brought him a degree of local fame. Mr. Riley’s contributions were wholly to newspapers through many years, during which the more deliberate periodicals would have none of him. He printed poems in the Herald, an Indianapolis weekly paper, in which the poems of Edith M. Thomas and others who have since gained a literary reputation first saw the light; and having attracted the attention of E. B. Martindale, the owner of the Indianapolis Journal, he was regularly employed on that paper, between 1877 and 1885, printing many of his best pieces there. He had the pleasure of seeing his verses widely copied at that period, when the newspaper press was his only medium of communication, and before he had printed a volume. His first marked recognition followed the publication in the Journal of a series of poems signed “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone,” which not only awakened wide interest, but gave direction to a talent that had theretofore been without definite aim. He encouraged the idea that the poems were really the work of a countryman, and prefaced them with letters in prose to add to their air of authenticity, much as Lowell introduced the “Biglow Papers.” This series included “Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer,” “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” and “To My Old Friend, William Leachman,” which were winningly unaffected and simple, bearing out capitally the impression of a bucolic poet celebrating his own joys and sorrows. The charm of the “Benj. F. Johnson” series lay in their perfect suggestion of a whimsical, lovable character, and wherever Mr. Riley follows the method employed first in those pieces, he never fails o