Church disapproved of literature as such, and approved it only in so far
as it was made the instrument of a propaganda. Its discipline required
that each person upon being "received into full membership"--the
Methodist equivalent of confirmation--should take a vow not "to read
such books or sing such songs as do not pertain to the glory of God." I
quote the phrase from memory, but accurately I think. That prohibition,
as interpreted by clerical authority at the time, had completely closed
to me the treasures of the library my scholarly father had collected,
and to which, under his dying instructions, my mother had added many
scores of volumes of the finest English literature, purchased with the
money for which his law books had been sold after his death.
I had read a little here and there in those books, and had been
fascinated with the new world they opened to my vision, when, at the
ripe age of ten or twelve years, I was compelled by an ill-directed
clerical authority to submit myself to the process of being "received
into full membership," under the assumption that I had "reached the age
of responsibility."
After that the books I so longed to read were forbidden to me--especially
a set entitled "The British Drama," in which appeared the works of
Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and a long list
of other classics, filling five thick volumes. By no ingenuity of
construction could such books be regarded as homilies in disguise, and
so they were Anathema. So was Shakespeare, and so even was Thiers'
"French Revolution," of which I had devoured the first volume in delight,
before the inhibition fell upon me, blasting my blind but eager aspiration
for culture and a larger knowledge of the world and of human nature.
XI
[Sidenote: Culture by Stealth]
After I made up my mind to accept damnation as my appointed portion,
I felt myself entirely free to revel at will in the reading that so
appealed to my hungry mind; free, that is to say, so far as my own
conscience was concerned, but no freer than before so far as the
restraints of authority could determine the matter. I had no hesitation
in reading the books when I could do so without being caught at it, but
to be caught at it was to be punished for it and, worse still, it was to
have the books placed beyond my reach, a thing I dreaded far more than
mere punishment. Punishment, indeed, seemed to me nothing more than a
small advance upon the damnation I must ultimately suffer in any case.
The thing to be avoided was discovery, because discovery must lead to
the confiscation of my books, the loss of that liberty which my
acceptance of damnation had given to me.
To that end I practised many deceits and resorted to many subterfuges.
I read late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I smuggled books
out into the woods and hid them there under the friendly roots of trees,
so that I might go out and read them when I was supposed to be engaged
in a search for ginseng, or in a hunt for the vagrant cow, to whose
unpunctuality in returning to be milked I feel that I owe an appreciable
part of such culture as I have acquired.
The clerical hostility to literature endured long after the period of
which I have been writing, long after the railroad and other means of
freer intercourse had redeemed the West from its narrow provincialism.
Even in my high school days, when our part of the country had reached
that stage of civilization that hangs lace curtains at its windows,
wears store clothes of week days, and paints garden fences green instead
of white, we who were under Methodist dominance were rigidly forbidden
to read fiction or anything that resembled fiction, with certain
exceptions. The grown folk of our creed permitted themselves to read the
inane novels of the Philadelphia tailor, T. S. Arthur; the few young men
who "went to college," were presumed to be immune to the virus of the
Greek and Latin fictions they must read there--probably because they
never learned enough of Greek or Latin to read them understandingly--and
finally there were certain polemic novels that were generally permitted.
Among these last the most conspicuous example I remember was a violently
anti-Roman Catholic novel called "Danger in the Dark," which had a vogue
that the "best-sellers" of our later time might envy. It was not only
permitted to us to read that--it was regarded as our religious duty in
order that we might learn to hate the Catholics with increased fervor.
The religious animosities of that period, with their relentless
intolerance, their unreason, their matchless malevolence, and their
eagerness to believe evil, ought to form an interesting and instructive
chapter in some history of civilization in America, whenever a scholar
of adequate learning and the gift of interpretation shall undertake that
work. But that is a task for some Buckle or Lecky. It does not belong to
a volume of random reminiscences such as this is.
XII
[Sidenote: Civilization on Wheels]
Though the railroads, when at last they came to us, failed utterly in
their promise of transportation at the rate of "a mile a minute," they
did something else, presently, that was quite as remarkable and far
worthier in its way. They ran down and ran over, and crushed out of
existence a provincialism that had much of evil promise and very little
of present good in it. With their coming, and in some degree in advance
of their coming, a great wave of population poured into the West from
all quarters of the country. The newcomers brought with them their
ideas, their points of view, their convictions, their customs, and
their standards of living. Mingling together in the most intimate ways,
socially and in business pursuits, each lost something of his prejudices
and provincialism, and gained much by contact with men of other ways of
thinking and living. Attrition sharpened the perceptions of all and
smoothed away angles of offense. A spirit of tolerance was awakened
such as had never been known in the Western country before, and as
the West became populous and prosperous, it became also more broadly
and generously American, more truly national in character, and more
accurately representative of all that is best in American thought and
life than any part of the country had ever been. It represented the
whole country and all its parts.
The New Englanders, the Virginians, the Pennsylvanians, the Carolinians,
the Kentuckians, who were thus brought together into composite
communities with now and then an Irish, a French, a Dutch, or a German
family, a group of Switzers, and a good many Scotchmen for neighbors
and friends, learned much and quickly each from all the others.
Better still, each unlearned the prejudices, the bigotries, and the
narrownesses in which he had been bred, and life in the great West took
on a liberality of mind, a breadth of tolerance and sympathy, a generous
humanity such as had never been known in any of the narrowly provincial
regions that furnished the materials of this composite population. It
seems to me scarcely too much to say that real Americanism, in the broad
sense of the term, had its birth in that new "winning of the West,"
which the railroads achieved about the middle of the nineteenth century.
With the coming of easier and quicker communication, not only was the
West brought into closer relations with the East, but the West itself
became quickly more homogeneous. There was a constant shifting of
population from one place to another, much traveling about, and a free
interchange of thought among a people who were eagerly alert to adopt
new ideas that seemed in any way to be better than the old. As I recall
the rapid changes of that time it seems to me that the betterments came
with a rapidity rarely if ever equaled in human history. A year or
two at that time was sufficient to work a revolution even in the most
conservative centers of activity. Changes of the most radical kind and
involving the most vital affairs, were made over-night, as it were, and
with so little shock to men's minds that they ceased, almost immediately,
to be topics of conversation. The old had scarcely passed away before
it was forgotten, and the new as quickly became the usual, the ordinary,
the familiar order of things.
XIII
I do not mean to suggest that the West, or indeed any other part of the
country, at once put aside all its crudities of custom and adopted the
ways of living that we are familiar with in this later time. All that
has been a thing of gradual accomplishment, far slower in its coming
than most people realize.
I remember that when Indianapolis became a great railroad center and a
city of enormous proportions--population from 15,000 to 20,000, according
to the creative capacity of the imagination making the estimate--a
wonderful hotel was built there, and called the Bates House. Its splendors
were the subject of wondering comment throughout the West. It had
washstands, with decorated pottery on them, in all its more expensive
rooms, so that a guest sojourning there need not go down to the common
washroom for his morning ablution, and dry his hands and face on a
jack-towel. There were combs and brushes in the rooms, too, so that
if one wanted to smooth his hair he was not obliged to resort to the
appliances of that sort that were hung by chains to the washroom walls.
[Sidenote: A Breakfast Revolution]
Moreover, if a man going to the Bates House for a sojourn, chose to pay
a trifle extra he might have a room all to himself, without the prospect
of being waked up in the middle of the night to admit some stranger,
assigned by the hotel authorities to share his room and bed.
All these things were marvels of pretentious luxury, borrowed from
the more "advanced" hostelries of the Eastern cities, and as such they
became topics of admiring comment everywhere, as illustrations of the
wonderful progress of civilization that was taking place among us.
But all these subjects of wonderment shrank to nothingness by
comparison, when the proprietors of the Bates House printed on their
breakfast bills of fare, an announcement that thereafter each guest's
breakfast would be cooked after his order for it was given, together
with an appeal for patience on the part of the breakfasters--a patience
that the proprietors promised to reward with hot and freshly prepared
dishes.
This innovation was so radical that it excited discussion hotter even
than the Bates House breakfasts. Opinions differed as to the right
of a hotel keeper to make his guests wait for the cooking of their
breakfasts. To some minds the thing presented itself as an invasion
of personal liberty and therefore of the constitutional rights of the
citizen. To others it seemed an intolerable nuisance, while by those
who were ambitious of reputation as persons who had traveled and were
familiar with good usage, it was held to be a welcome advance in
civilization. In approving it, they were able to exploit themselves as
persons who had not only traveled as far as the state capital, but while
there had paid the two dollars a day, which the Bates House charged
for entertainment, instead of going to less pretentious taverns where
the customary charge of a dollar or a dollar and a half a day still
prevailed, and where breakfast was put upon the table before the gong
invited guests to rush into the dining room and madly scramble for what
they could get of it.
In the same way I remember how we all wondered over the manifestation of
luxury made by the owners of a newly built steamboat of the Louisville
and Cincinnati Mail Line, when we heard that the several staterooms
were provided with wash-basins. That was in the fifties. Before that
time, two common washrooms--one for men and the other for women--had
served all the passengers on each steamboat, and, as those washrooms
had set-bowls with running water, they were regarded as marvels of
sumptuousness in travel facilities. It was partly because of such
luxury, I suppose, that we called the steamboats of that time "floating
palaces." They seemed so then. They would not impress us in that way
now. Perhaps fifty years hence the great ocean liners of the present,
over whose perfection of equipment we are accustomed to wonder, will
seem equally unworthy. Such things are comparative and the world
moves fast.
XIV
[Sidenote: A Bathroom Episode]
The crudities here referred to, however, are not properly to be reckoned
as belonging exclusively to the West, or as specially indicative of the
provincialism of the West. At that time and for long afterward, it was
usual, even in good hotels throughout the country, to assign two men,
wholly unacquainted with each other, to occupy a room in common. It
was expected that the hotel would provide a comb and brush for the use
of guests in each room, as the practice of carrying one's own toilet
appliances of that kind had not yet become general. Hotel rooms with
private bathrooms adjoining, were wholly unknown before the Civil War,
and the practice of taking a daily bath was very uncommon indeed. A hotel
guest asking for such a thing would have been pointed out to bystanders
as a curiosity of effete dandyism. Parenthetically, I may say that as
late as 1886 I engaged for my wife and myself a room with private bath
on the first floor of the Nadeau House, then the best hotel in Los
Angeles, California. The man at the desk explained that the bathroom did
not open directly into the room, but adjoined it and was accessible
from the dead end of the hallway without. We got on very well with this
arrangement until Saturday night came, when, as I estimated the number,
all the unmarried men of the city took turns in bathing in my private
bathroom. When I entered complaint at the desk next morning, the clerk
evidently regarded me as a monster of arrogant selfishness. He explained
that as I had free use of the bathroom every day and night of the week,
I ought not to feel aggrieved at its invasion by other cleanly disposed
persons on "the usual night for taking a bath."
The experience brought two facts to my attention: first, that in the
opinion of the great majority of my fellow American citizens one bath a
week was quite sufficient, and, second, that the fixed bathtub, with hot
and cold water running directly into it, is a thing of comparatively
modern use. I suppose that in the eighteen-fifties, and quite certainly
in the first half of that decade, there were no such appliances of
luxurious living in any but the very wealthiest houses, if even there.
Persons who wanted an "all-over bath," went to a barber shop for it, if
they lived in a city, and, if they lived elsewhere, went without it, or
pressed a family washtub into friendly service.
So, too, as late as 1870, in looking for a house in Brooklyn, I found it
difficult to get one of moderate rent cost, that had other water supply
than such as a hydrant in the back yard afforded.
XV
To return to the changes wrought in the West by the construction of
railroads and the influx of immigration from all parts of the country.
In nothing else was the improvement more rapid or more pronounced
than in education. Until the early fifties, and even well into them,
educational endeavors and educational methods were crude, unorganized,
wasteful of effort, and utterly uncertain of result. From the very
beginning the desire for education had been alert and eager in the West,
and the readiness to spend money and effort in that behalf had been
unstinted. But the means were lacking and system was lacking. More
important still there was lack of any well-considered or fairly uniform
conception of what education ought to aim at or achieve.
In the rural districts schools were sporadic and uncertain. When a
"master" was available "school kept," and its chief activity was to
teach the spelling of the English language. Incidentally it taught
pupils to read and the more advanced ones--ten per cent. of all,
perhaps, to write. As a matter of higher education rudimentary
arithmetic had a place in the curriculum. Now and then a schoolmaster
appeared who essayed other things in a desultory way but without results
of any consequence. In the villages and towns the schools were usually
better, but even there the lack of any well-ordered system was a blight.
[Sidenote: School Methods]
The schoolmasters were frequently changed, for one thing, each newcoming
one bringing his own notions to bear upon problems that he was not
destined to remain long enough to solve. Even in the more permanent
schools, kept by very young or superannuated preachers, or by Irish
schoolmasters who conducted them on the "knock down and drag out" system,
there was no attempt to frame a scheme of education that should aim at
well conceived results. In every such school there were two or three
boys taking "the classical course," by which was meant that without the
least question or consideration of their fitness to do so, they had
dropped all ordinary school studies and were slowly plodding along in
rudimentary Latin, in obedience to some inherited belief on the part of
their parents that education consists in studying Latin, that there is
a benediction in a paradigm, and that fitness for life's struggle is
most certainly achieved by the reading of "Historia Sacra," "Cornelius
Nepos," and the early chapters of "Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic
War."
Other pupils, under the impression that they were taking a "scientific
course," were drilled in Comstock's Physiology and Natural Philosophy,
and somebody's "Geography of the Heavens." The rest of the
school--plebeians all--contented themselves with reading, writing,
arithmetic, geography, and a vain attempt to master the mysteries and
mists of Kirkham's Grammar.
The railroads quickly changed all this. They brought into the West
men and women who knew who Horace Mann was, and whose conceptions of
education in its aims and methods were definite, well ordered, and
aggressive.
These set to work to organize graded school systems in the larger towns,
and the thing was contagious, in a region where every little town was
confidently ambitious of presently becoming the most important city in
the state, and did not intend in the meantime to permit any other to
outdo it in the frills and furbelows of largeness.
With preparatory education thus organized and systematized, and with
easy communication daily becoming easier, the ambition of young men
to attend colleges and universities was more and more gratified, so
that within a very few years the higher education--so far as it is
represented by college courses--became common throughout the country,
while for those who could not achieve that, or were not minded to do so,
the teaching of the schools was adapted, as it never had been before,
to the purpose of real, even if meager education.
Even in the remotest country districts a new impetus was given to
education, and the subjection of the schools there to the supervision
of school boards and professional superintendents worked wonders of
reformation. For one thing the school boards required those who wished
to serve as teachers to pass rigid examinations in test of their
fitness, so that it was no longer the privilege of any ignoramus who
happened to be out of a job to "keep school." In addition to this
the school boards prescribed and regulated the courses of study, the
classification of pupils, and the choice of text-books, even in country
districts where graded schools were not to be thought of, and this
supervision gave a new and larger meaning to school training in the
country.
XVI
It was my fortune to be the first certified teacher under this system
in a certain rural district where the old haphazard system had before
prevailed, and my experience there connects itself interestingly, I
think, with a bit of literary history. It was the instigation of my
brother, Edward Eggleston's, most widely popular story, "The Hoosier
Schoolmaster," which in its turn was the instigation of all the
fascinating literature that has followed it with Hoosier life conditions
for its theme.
[Sidenote: "The Hoosier Schoolmaster"]
My school district lay not many miles from the little town in which my
family lived, and as I had a good pair of legs, well used to walking, I
went home every Friday night, returning on Monday morning after a four
o'clock breakfast. On these week-end visits it was my delight to tell of
the queer experiences of the week, and Edward's delight to listen to
them while he fought against the maladies that were then threatening his
brave young life with early extinction.
Years afterwards he and I were together engaged in an effort to
resuscitate the weekly illustrated newspaper _Hearth and Home_, which
had calamitously failed to win a place for itself, under a number of
highly distinguished editors, whose abilities seemed to compass almost
everything except the art of making a newspaper that people wanted and
would pay for. Of that effort I shall perhaps have more to say in a
future chapter. It is enough now to say that the periodical had a weekly
stagnation--it will not do to call it a circulation--of only five
or six thousand copies, nearly half of them gratuitous, and it had
netted an aggregate loss of many thousands of dollars to the several
publishers who had successively made themselves its sponsors. It was our
task--Edward's and mine--to make the thing "pay," and to that end both
of us were cudgeling our brains by day and by night to devise means.
One evening a happy thought came to Edward and he hurriedly quitted
whatever he was doing to come to my house and submit it.
"I have a mind, Geordie," he said, "to write a three number story,
called 'The Hoosier Schoolmaster,' and to found it upon your experience
at Riker's Ridge."
We talked the matter over. He wrote and published the first of the
three numbers, and its popularity was instant. The publishers pleaded
with him, and so did I, to abandon the three number limitation, and
he yielded. Before the serial publication of the story ended, the
subscription list of _Hearth and Home_ had been many times multiplied
and Edward Eggleston was famous.
He was far too original a man, and one possessed of an imagination too
fertilely creative to follow at all closely my experiences, which had
first suggested the story to him. He made one or two personages among
my pupils the models from which he drew certain of his characters, but
beyond that the experiences which suggested the story in no way entered
into its construction. Yet in view of the facts it seems to me worth
while to relate something of those suggestive experiences.
I was sixteen years old when I took the school. Circumstances
had compelled me for the time to quit college, where, despite my
youthfulness, I was in my second year. The Riker's Ridge district
had just been brought under supervision of the school authorities at
Madison. A new schoolhouse had been built and a teacher was wanted
to inaugurate the new system. I applied for the place, stood the
examinations, secured my certificate, and was appointed.
[Sidenote: The Riker's Ridge District]
On my first appearance in the neighborhood, the elders there seemed
distinctly disappointed in the selection made. They knew the school
history of the district. They remembered that the last three masters had
been "licked" by stalwart and unruly boys, the last one so badly that
he had abandoned the school in the middle of the term. They strongly
felt the need, therefore, of a master of mature years, strong arms, and
ponderous fists as the person chosen to inaugurate the new system. When
a beardless boy of sixteen presented himself instead, they shook their
heads in apprehension. But the appointment had been made by higher
authority, and they had no choice but to accept it. Appreciating the
nature of their fears, I told the grave and reverend seigniors that my
schoolboy experience had shown my arms to be stronger, my fists heavier,
and my nimbleness greater perhaps than they imagined, but that in the
conduct of the school I should depend far more upon the diplomatic
nimbleness of my wits than upon physical prowess, and that I thought I
should manage to get on.
There was silence for a time. Then one wise old patriarch said:
"Well, may be so. But there's Charley Grebe. You wouldn't make a
mouthful for him. Anyhow, we'll see, we'll see."
Charley Grebe was the youth who had thrashed the last master so
disastrously.
Thus encouraged, I went to my task.