By Meredith Nicholson
THE PROVINCIAL AMERICAN AND OTHER PAPERS.
A HOOSIER CHRONICLE. With illustrations.
THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS. With illustrations.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
The Provincial American
The Provincial American
And Other Papers
By
Meredith Nicholson
[Illustration]
London
CONSTABLE & CO. LIMITED
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
To
George Edward Woodberry
Guide, Counselor
And the most inspiring of Friends
This Volume is Dedicated
With grateful and affectionate
Regard
_Indianapolis, September 1912._
Contents
THE PROVINCIAL AMERICAN 1
EDWARD EGGLESTON 33
A PROVINCIAL CAPITAL 55
EXPERIENCE AND THE CALENDAR 89
SHOULD SMITH GO TO CHURCH? 115
THE TIRED BUSINESS MAN 159
THE SPIRIT OF MISCHIEF: A DIALOGUE 187
CONFESSIONS OF A “BEST-SELLER” 205
These papers, with one exception, have appeared in the _Atlantic
Monthly_. A part of “Experience and the Calendar,” under another
title, was published in the _Reader Magazine_.
The Provincial American
And Other Papers
The Provincial American
_Viola._ What country, friends, is this?
_Captain._ This is Illyria, lady.
_Viola._ And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium.
_Twelfth Night._
I AM a provincial American. My forebears were farmers or country-town
folk. They followed the long trail over the mountains out of Virginia
and North Carolina, with brief sojourns in western Pennsylvania and
Kentucky. My parents were born, the one in Kentucky, the other in
Indiana, within two and four hours of the spot where I pen these
reflections, and I had voted before I saw the sea or any Eastern city.
In attempting to illustrate the provincial point of view out of my
own experiences I am moved by no wish to celebrate either the Hoosier
commonwealth--which has not lacked nobler advertisement--or myself; but
by the hope that I may cheer many who, flung by fate upon the world’s
byways, shuffle and shrink under the reproach of their metropolitan
brethren.
Mr. George Ade has said, speaking of our fresh-water colleges, that
Purdue University, his own _alma mater_, offers everything that Harvard
provides except the sound of _a_ as in “father.” I have been told that
I speak our _lingua rustica_ only slightly corrupted by urban contacts.
Anywhere east of Buffalo I should be known as a Westerner; I could not
disguise myself if I would. I find that I am most comfortable in a town
whose population does not exceed a fifth of a million,--a place in
which men may relinquish their seats in the street car to women without
having their motives questioned, and where one calls the stamp-clerk at
the post-office by his first name.
I
Across a hill-slope that knew my childhood, a bugle’s grieving melody
used to float often through the summer twilight. A highway lay
hidden in the little vale below, and beyond it the unknown musician
was quite concealed, and was never visible to the world I knew.
Those trumpetings have lingered always in my memory, and color my
recollections of all that was near and dear in those days. Men who had
left camp and field for the soberer routine of civil life were not yet
fully domesticated. My bugler was merely solacing himself for lost joys
by recurring to the vocabulary of the trumpet. I am confident that he
enjoyed himself; and I am equally sure that his trumpetings peopled the
dusk for me with great captains and mighty armies, and touched with a
certain militancy all my youthful dreaming.
No American boy born during or immediately after the Civil War can
have escaped in those years the vivid impressions derived from the
sight and speech of men who had fought its battles, or women who had
known its terror and grief. Chief among my playthings on that peaceful
hillside was the sword my father had borne at Shiloh and on to the sea;
and I remember, too, his uniform coat and sash and epaulets and the
tattered guidon of his battery, that, falling to my lot as toys, yet
imparted to my childish consciousness a sense of what war had been. The
young imagination was kindled in those days by many and great names.
Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman were among the first lispings of Northern
children of my generation; and in the little town where I was born
lived men who had spoken with them face to face. I did not know, until
I sought them later for myself, the fairy-tales that are every child’s
birthright; and I imagine that children of my generation heard less of
“old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,”--
and more of the men and incidents of contemporaneous history. Great
spirits still on earth were sojourning. I saw several times, in his
last years, the iron-willed Hoosier War Governor, Oliver P. Morton. By
the time I was ten, a broader field of observation opening through my
parents’ removal to the state capital, I had myself beheld Grant and
Sherman; and every day I passed in the street men who had been partners
with them in the great, heroic, sad, splendid struggle. These things
I set down as a background for the observations that follow,--less as
text than as point of departure; yet I believe that bugler, sounding
“charge” and “retreat” and “taps” in the dusk, and those trappings of
war beneath whose weight I strutted upon that hillside, did much toward
establishing in me a certain habit of mind. From that hillside I have
since ineluctably viewed my country and my countrymen and the larger
world.
Emerson records Thoreau’s belief that “the flora of Massachusetts
embraced almost all the important plants of America,--most of the oaks,
most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the
nuts. He returned Kane’s ‘Arctic Voyage’ to a friend of whom he had
borrowed it, with the remark that most of the phenomena noted might be
observed in Concord.”
The complacency of the provincial mind is due less, I believe, to
stupidity and ignorance, than to the fact that every American county
is in a sense complete, a political and social unit, in which the
sovereign rights of a free people are expressed by the court-house and
town hall, spiritual freedom by the village church-spire, and hope
and aspiration in the school-house. Every reader of American fiction,
particularly in the realm of the short story, must have observed the
great variety of quaint and racy characters disclosed. These are the
_dramatis personæ_ of that great American novel which some one has said
is being written in installments. Writers of fiction hear constantly of
characters who would be well worth their study. In reading two recent
novels that penetrate to the heart of provincial life, Mr. White’s “A
Certain Rich Man” and Mrs. Watts’s “Nathan Burke,” I felt that the
characters depicted might, with unimportant exceptions, have been found
almost anywhere in those American States that shared the common history
of Kansas and Ohio. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his admirable novels of
New England, has shown how closely the purely local is allied to the
universal.
When “David Harum” appeared, characters similar to the hero of that
novel were reported in every part of the country. I rarely visit
a town that has not its cracker-barrel philosopher, or a poet who
would shine but for the callous heart of the magazine editor, or an
artist of supreme though unrecognized talent, or a forensic orator
of wonderful powers, or a mechanical genius whose inventions are
bound to revolutionize the industrial world. In Maine, in the back
room of a shop whose windows looked down upon a tidal river, I have
listened to tariff discussions in the dialect of Hosea Biglow; and a
few weeks later have heard farmers along the un-salt Wabash debating
the same questions from a point of view that revealed no masted ships
or pine woods, with a new sense of the fine tolerance and sanity and
reasonableness of our American people. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, one of
our shrewdest students of provincial character, introduced me one day
to a friend of his in a village near Indianapolis who bore a striking
resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, and who had something of Lincoln’s
gift for humorous narration. This man kept a country store, and his
attitude toward his customers, and “trade” in general, was delicious in
its drollery. Men said to be “like Lincoln” have not been rare in the
Mississippi Valley, and politicians have been known to encourage belief
in the resemblance.
Colonel Higginson once said that in the Cambridge of his youth any
member of the Harvard faculty could answer any question within the
range of human knowledge; whereas in these days of specialization some
man can answer the question, but it may take a week’s investigation to
find him. In “our town”--“a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing,
sir, but mine own!”--I dare say it was possible in that _post-bellum_
era to find men competent to deal with almost any problem. These were
mainly men of humble beginnings and all essentially the product of our
American provinces. I should like to set down briefly the ineffaceable
impression some of these characters left upon me. I am precluded by a
variety of considerations from extending this recital. The rich field
of education I ignore altogether; and I may mention only those who have
gone. As it is beside my purpose to prove that mine own people are
other than typical of those of most American communities, I check my
exuberance. Sad, indeed, the offending if I should protest too much!
II
In the days when the bugle still mourned across the vale, Lew Wallace
was a citizen of my native town of Crawfordsville. There he had
amused himself, in the years immediately before the civil conflict,
in drilling a company of “Algerian Zouaves” known as the “Montgomery
Guards,” of which my father was a member, and this was the nucleus of
the Eleventh Indiana Regiment which Wallace commanded in the early
months of the war. It is not, however, of Wallace’s military services
that I wish to speak now, nor of his writings, but of the man himself
as I knew him later at the capital, at a time when, in the neighborhood
of the federal building at Indianapolis, any boy might satisfy his
longing for heroes with a sight of many of our Hoosier Olympians. He
was of medium height, erect, dark to swarthiness, with finely chiseled
features and keen black eyes, with manners the most courtly, and a
voice unusually musical and haunting. His appearance, his tastes, his
manner, were strikingly Oriental.
He had a strong theatric instinct, and his life was filled with
drama--with melodrama, even. His curiosity led him into the study
of many subjects, most of them remote from the affairs of his day.
He was both dreamer and man of action; he could be “idler than the
idlest flowers,” yet his occupations were many and various. He was an
aristocrat and a democrat; he was wise and temperate, whimsical and
injudicious in a breath. As a youth he had seen visions, and as an old
man he dreamed dreams. The mysticism in him was deep-planted, and he
was always a little aloof, a man apart. His capacity for detachment was
like that of Sir Richard Burton, who, at a great company given in his
honor, was found alone poring over a puzzling Arabic manuscript in an
obscure corner of the house. Wallace, like Burton, would have reached
Mecca, if chance had led him to that adventure.
Wallace dabbled in politics without ever being a politician; and
I might add that he practiced law without ever being, by any high
standard, a lawyer. He once spoke of the law as “that most detestable
of human occupations.” First and last he tried his hand at all the
arts. He painted a little; he moulded a little in clay; he knew
something of music and played the violin; he made three essays in
romance. As boy and man he went soldiering; he was a civil governor,
and later a minister to Turkey. In view of his sympathetic interest in
Eastern life and character, nothing could have been more appropriate
than his appointment to Constantinople. The Sultan Abdul Hamid,
harassed and anxious, used to send for him at odd hours of the night
to come and talk to him, and offered him on his retirement a number of
positions in the Turkish Government.
With all this rich experience of the larger world, he remained the
simplest of natures. He was as interested in a new fishing-tackle as in
a new book, and carried both to his houseboat on the Kankakee, where,
at odd moments, he retouched a manuscript for the press, or discussed
politics with the natives. Here was a man who could talk of the “Song
of Roland” as zestfully as though it had just been reported from the
telegraph-office.
I frankly confess that I never met him without a thrill, even in his
last years and when the ardor of my youthful hero-worship may be said
to have passed. He was an exotic, our Hoosier Arab, our story-teller
of the bazaars. When I saw him in his last illness, it was as though
I looked upon a gray sheik about to fare forth unawed toward unmapped
oases.
No lesson of the Civil War was more striking than that taught by the
swift transitions of our citizen soldiery from civil to military life,
and back again. This impressed me as a boy, and I used to wonder, as I
passed my heroes on their peaceful errands in the street, why they had
put down the sword when there must still be work somewhere for fighting
men to do. The judge of the federal court at this time was Walter Q.
Gresham, brevetted brigadier-general, who was destined later to adorn
the Cabinets of Presidents of two political parties. He was cordial and
magnetic; his were the handsomest and friendliest of brown eyes, and a
noble gravity spoke in them. Among the lawyers who practiced before him
were Benjamin Harrison and Thomas A. Hendricks, who became respectively
President and Vice-President.
Those Hoosiers who admired Gresham ardently were often less devotedly
attached to Harrison, who lacked Gresham’s warmth and charm. General
Harrison was akin to the Covenanters who bore both Bible and sword
into battle. His eminence in the law was due to his deep learning
in its history and philosophy. Short of stature, and without grace
of person,--with a voice pitched rather high,--he was a remarkably
interesting and persuasive speaker. If I may so put it, his political
speeches were addressed as to a trial judge rather than to a jury, his
appeal being to reason and not to passion or prejudice. He could, in
rapid flights of campaigning, speak to many audiences in a day without
repeating himself. He was measured and urbane; his discourses abounded
in apt illustrations; he was never dull. He never stooped to pietistic
clap-trap, or chanted the jaunty chauvinism that has so often caused
the Hoosier stars to blink.
Among the Democratic leaders of that period, Hendricks was one of the
ablest, and a man of many attractive qualities. His dignity was always
impressive, and his appearance suggested the statesman of an earlier
time. It is one of immortality’s harsh ironies that a man who was a
gentleman, and who stood moreover pretty squarely for the policies that
it pleased him to defend, should be published to the world in a bronze
effigy in his own city as a bandy-legged and tottering tramp, in a
frock coat that never was on sea or land.
Joseph E. McDonald, a Senator in Congress, was held in affectionate
regard by a wide constituency. He was an independent and vigorous
character who never lost a certain raciness and tang. On my first
timid venture into the fabled East I rode with him in a day-coach from
Washington to New York on a slow train. At some point he saw a peddler
of fried oysters on a station platform, alighted to make a purchase,
and ate his luncheon quite democratically from the paper parcel in his
car seat. He convoyed me across the ferry, asked where I expected to
stop, and explained that he did not care for the European plan himself;
he liked, he said, to have “full swing at a bill of fare.”
I used often to look upon the towering form of Daniel W. Voorhees, whom
Sulgrove, an Indiana journalist with a gift for translating Macaulay
into Hoosierese, had named “The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.” In a
crowded hotel lobby I can still see him, cloaked and silk-hatted, the
centre of the throng, and my strict upbringing in the antagonistic
political faith did not diminish my admiration for his eloquence.
Such were some of the characters who came and went in the streets of
our provincial capital in those days.
III
In discussions under captions similar to mine it is often maintained
that railways, telegraphs, telephones, and newspapers are so knitting
us together, that soon we shall all be keyed to a metropolitan pitch.
The proof adduced in support of this is the most trivial, but it
strikes me as wholly undesirable that we should all be ironed out and
conventionalized. In the matter of dress, for example, the women of our
town used to take their fashions from “Godey’s” and “Peterson’s” _via_
Cincinnati; but now that we are only eighteen hours from New York, with
a well-traveled path from the Wabash to Paris, my counselors among the
elders declare that the tone of our society--if I may use so perilous
a word--has changed little from our good old black alpaca days. The
hobble skirt receives prompt consideration in the “Main” street of any
town, and is viewed with frank curiosity, but it is only a one day’s
wonder. A lively runaway or the barbaric yawp of a new street fakir may
dethrone it at any time.
New York and Boston tailors solicit custom among us semi-annually, but
nothing is so stubborn as our provincial distrust of fine raiment.
I looked with awe, in my boyhood, upon a pair of mammoth blue-jeans
trousers that were flung high from a flagstaff in the centre of
Indianapolis, in derision of a Democratic candidate for governor, James
D. Williams, who was addicted to the wearing of jeans. The Democrats
sagaciously accepted the challenge, made “honest blue jeans” the
battle-cry, and defeated Benjamin Harrison, the “kid-glove” candidate
of the Republicans. Harmless demagoguery this, or bad judgment on the
part of the Republicans; and yet I dare say that if the sartorial issue
should again become acute in our politics the banner of bifurcated
jeans would triumph now as then. A Hoosier statesman who to-day
occupies high office once explained to me his refusal of sugar for his
coffee by remarking that he didn’t like to waste sugar that way; he
wanted to keep it for his lettuce! I do not urge sugared lettuce as
symbolizing our higher provincialism, but mayonnaise may be poison to
men who are nevertheless competent to construe and administer law.
It is much more significant that we are all thinking about the same
things at the same time, than that Farnam Street, Omaha, and Fifth
Avenue, New York, should vibrate to the same shade of necktie. The
distribution of periodicals is so managed that California and Maine
cut the leaves of their magazines on the same day. Rural free delivery
has hitched the farmer’s wagon to the telegraph-office, and you can’t
buy his wife’s butter now until he has scanned the produce market in
his newspaper. This immediacy of contact does not alter the provincial
point of view. New York and Texas, Oregon and Florida will continue to
see things at different angles, and it is for the good of all of us
that this is so. We have no national political, social, or intellectual
centre. There is no “season” in New York, as in London, during which
all persons distinguished in any of these particulars meet on common
ground. Washington is our nearest approach to such a meeting-place,
but it offers only short vistas. We of the country visit Boston
for the symphony, or New York for the opera, or Washington to view
the government machine at work, but nowhere do interesting people
representative of all our ninety millions ever assemble under one roof.
All our capitals are, as Lowell put it, “fractional,” and we shall
hardly have a centre while our country is so nearly a continent.
Nothing in our political system could be wiser than our dispersion into
provinces. Sweep from the map the lines that divide the States and we
should huddle like sheep suddenly deprived of the protection of known
walls and flung upon the open prairie. State lines and local pride
are in themselves a pledge of stability. The elasticity of our system
makes possible a variety of governmental experiments by which the
whole country profits. We should all rejoice that the parochial mind
is so open, so eager, so earnest, so tolerant. Even the most buckramed
conservative on the eastern coast-line, scornful of the political
follies of our far-lying provinces, must view with some interest the
dallyings of Oregon with the Referendum, and of Des Moines with the
Commission System. If Milwaukee wishes to try socialism, the rest of us
need not complain. Democracy will cease to be democracy when all its
problems are solved and everybody votes the same ticket.
States that produce the most cranks are prodigal of the corn that pays
the dividends on the railroads the cranks despise. Indiana’s amiable
feeling toward New York is not altered by her sister’s rejection or
acceptance of the direct primary, a benevolent device of noblest
intention, under which, not long ago, in my own commonwealth, my fellow
citizens expressed their distrust of me with unmistakable emphasis. It
is no great matter, but in open convention also I have perished by the
sword. Nothing can thwart the chastening hand of a righteous people.
All passes; humor alone is the touchstone of democracy. I search the
newspapers daily for tidings of Kansas, and in the ways of Oklahoma
I find delight. The Emporia “Gazette” is quite as patriotic as the
Springfield “Republican” or the New York “Post,” and to my own taste,
far less depressing. I subscribed for a year to the Charleston “News
and Courier,” and was saddened by the tameness of its sentiments; for
I remember (it must have been in 1883) the shrinking horror with which
I saw daily in the Indiana Republican organ a quotation from Wade
Hampton to the effect that “these are the same principles for which
Lee and Jackson fought four years on Virginia’s soil.” Most of us are
entertained when Colonel Watterson rises to speak for Kentucky and
invokes the star-eyed goddess. When we call the roll of the States, if
Malvolio answer for any, let us suffer him in patience and rejoice in
his yellow stockings. “God give them wisdom that have it; and those
that are fools, let them use their talents.”
Every community has its dissenters, protestants, kickers, cranks; the
more the merrier. My town has not lacked impressive examples, and I
early formed a high resolve to strive for membership in their execrated
company. George W. Julian,--one of the noblest of Hoosiers,--who had
been the Free-Soil candidate for Vice-President in 1852, a delegate to
the first Republican convention, five times a member of Congress, a
supporter of Greeley’s candidacy, and a Democrat in the consulship of
Cleveland, was a familiar figure in our streets. In 1884 I was dusting
law-books in an office where mug-wumpery flourished, and where the
iniquities of the tariff, Matthew Arnold’s theological opinions, and
the writings of Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley were discussed at intervals
in the days’ business.
IV
Many complain that we Americans give too much time to politics, but
there could be no safer outlet for that “added drop of nervous fluid”
which Colonel Higginson found in us and turned over to Matthew Arnold
for further analysis. No doubt many voices will cry in the wilderness
before we reach the promised land. A people which has been fed on the
Bible is bound to hear the rumble of Pharaoh’s chariots. It is in the
blood to resent the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely.
The winter evenings are long on the prairies, and we must always be
fashioning a crown for Cæsar or rehearsing his funeral rites. No great
danger can ever seriously menace the nation so long as the remotest
citizen clings to his faith that he is a part of the governmental
mechanism and can at any time throw it out of adjustment if it doesn’t
run to suit him. He can go into the court-house and see the men he
helped to place in office; or if they were chosen in spite of him, he
pays his taxes just the same and waits for another chance to turn the
rascals out.
Mr. Bryce wrote: “This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this
sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the
affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied
but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the
Multitude.” It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena
of the score of years that has elapsed since Mr. Bryce’s “American
Commonwealth” appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the
crushing weight of the mass. It has been with something of a child’s
surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose
mechanism had baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after
all, the individual counts. The pressure of the mass will yet be felt,
but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the
individual is asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable
acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it.
With all our faults and defaults of understanding,--populism, free
silver, Coxey’s army, and the rest of it,--we of the West have not done
so badly. Be not impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows
his way to the oak tree!
Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The
campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of
“silent” voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the
managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the
Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously
hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he
advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention
succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois
have sent to Washington seven Presidents, elected for ten terms.
Without discussing the value of their public services it may be said
that it has been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people
of the closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of
their own soil have been chosen to the seat of the Presidents; and
it is creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully
acquiesced. In Lincoln the provincial American most nobly asserted
himself, and any discussion of the value of provincial life and
character in our politics may well begin and end in him. We have seen
verily that
“Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state.”
Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world’s tour, declared
that it was not that the hero had walked “with kings with even pace the
round world’s promenade”;--
“But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the
front,
Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round
world’s promenade,
Were all so justified.”
What we miss and what we lack who live in the provinces seem to me of
little weight in the scale against our compensations. We slouch,--we
are deficient in the graces,--we are prone to boast,--and we lack
in those fine reticences that mark the cultivated citizen of the
metropolis. We like to talk, and we talk our problems out to a finish.
Our commonwealths rose in the ashes of the hunter’s camp-fires, and
we are all a great neighborhood, united in a common understanding of
what democracy is, and animated by ideals of what we want it to be.
That saving humor which is a philosophy of life flourishes amid the
tall corn. We are old enough now--we of the West--to have built up in
ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part
of the continuing, unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these
days to “wobble right” than we are to stand fast or march forward like
an army with banners.
We provincials are immensely curious. Art, music, literature,
politics--nothing that is of contemporaneous human interest is alien to
us. If these things don’t come to us, we go to them. We are more truly
representative of the American ideal than our metropolitan cousins,
because (here I lay my head upon the block) we know more about, oh,
so many things! We know vastly more about the United States, for one
thing. We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows
it, because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have
no terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia
seems to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western
school-teachers who don’t see Europe for three hundred dollars every
summer get at least as far East as Concord, to be photographed “by the
rude bridge that arched the flood.”
That fine austerity which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering
on the Boston and New York express is lost utterly at Pittsburg. From
gentlemen cruising in day-coaches--dull wights who advertise their
personal sanitation and literacy by the toothbrush and fountain-pen
planted sturdily in their upper left-hand waistcoat pockets--one may
learn the most prodigious facts and the philosophy thereof. “Sit over,
brother; there’s hell to pay in the Balkans,” remarks the gentleman who
boarded the interurban at Peru or Connersville, and who would just as
lief discuss the Papacy or child labor, if revolutions are not to your
liking.
In Boston a lady once expressed her surprise that I should be hastening
home for Thanksgiving Day. This, she thought, was a New England
festival. More recently I was asked by a Bostonian if I had ever heard
of Paul Revere. Nothing is more delightful in us, I think, than our
meekness before instruction. We strive to please; all we ask is “to be
shown.”
Our greatest gain is in leisure and the opportunity to ponder and
brood. In all these thousands of country towns live alert and shrewd
students of affairs. Where your New Yorker scans headlines as he
“commutes” homeward, the villager reaches his own fireside without
being shot through a tube, and sits down and reads his newspaper
thoroughly. When he repairs to the drug-store to abuse or praise the
powers that be, his wife reads the paper, too. A United States Senator
from a Middle Western State, making a campaign for renomination
preliminary to the primaries, warned the people in rural communities
against the newspaper and periodical press with its scandals and
heresies. “Wait quietly by your firesides, undisturbed by these false
teachings,” he said in effect; “then go to your primaries and vote
as you have always voted.” His opponent won by thirty thousand,--the
amiable answer of the little red school-house.
V
A few days ago I visited again my native town. On the slope where I
played as a child I listened in vain for the mourning bugle; but on the
college campus a bronze tablet commemorative of those sons of Wabash
who had fought in the mighty war quickened the old impressions. The
college buildings wear a look of age in the gathering dusk.
“Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn evening. The field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of withered leaves, and the elms,
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.
“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.