THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY
The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman,
came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not
confined to America. In the early seventies, as we have seen, Millet
and his Breton peasants for a time took possession of French art;
Hardy with his Wessex natives caught the ear of England; Bjornson made
the discovery that in the Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival
of the old Norse spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy
cast aside the old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the
peasant and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild and
unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The effeminacy of
early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of the mid-century annual,
Keatsism, _Hyperionism_, Heineism, had culminated in reaction. There
was a craving for the acrid tang of uncultivated things in borderlands
and fields unsown.
In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled the
newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine laughter which
was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio and the gold camps of
the Sierras. They were pioneers; they were looking for incongruities
and exaggerations, and quite by accident they discovered a new American
type, the Pike,--strange creature to inspire a new literature.
I
America has evolved four types, perhaps five, that are unique "new
birth of our new soil": the Yankee of the Hosea Biglow and Sam Lawson
variety; the frontiersman and scout exemplified in Leather Stocking;
the Southern "darky" as depicted by Russell, Harris, Page, and others;
the circuit rider of the frontier period; and the Pike.
"A Pike," says Bayard Taylor, "in the California dialect, is
a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern
Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were
from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County
man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it
was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.' Besides, the emigrants from
the aforementioned localities belonged evidently to the same
_genus_, and the epithet 'Western' was by no means sufficiently
descriptive.... He is the Anglo-Saxon relapsed into
semi-barbarism. He is long, lathy, and sallow; he expectorates
vehemently; he takes naturally to whisky; he has the 'shakes'
his life long at home, though he generally manages to get rid
of them in California; he has little respect for the rights of
others; he distrusts men in 'store clothes,' but venerates the
memory of Andrew Jackson."[50]
Although he had not yet been named, the Pike had already figured in
American literature. George W. Harris had published in 1867 _Sut
Lovengood's Yarns_, a true piece of Pike literature; Longstreet had
drawn the type with fidelity in _Georgia Scenes_, Baldwin's _Flush
Times_, and the sketches of such ephemeral writers as Madison Tensas,
Sol Smith, T. W. Lane, T. A. Burke, and J. L. McConnel, the author of
_Western Characters_, had drawn the first broad outlines. In all this
work he was simply the crude, uncouth Westerner, the antithesis of the
man of the East.
The first to discover him in his California phase and to affix to
him for the first time in any book of moment the name Pike was "John
Phoenix" who in _Phoenixiana_ drew, as we have seen, a sketch which has
scarcely been improved upon by later writers. It was not until 1871,
however, that the name Pike and the peculiar type denoted by the name
became at all known to the reading public.
The instant and enormous vogue of Pike literature came almost by
accident. Bret Harte late in the sixties had dashed off in a happy
moment a humorous account of an attempt made by two California gamblers
to fleece an innocent Chinaman who turned out to be anything but
innocent. He had entitled the poem "Plain Language from Truthful James"
and had thrown it aside as a trifle. Some months later during the last
exciting moments before going to press with an edition of the _Overland
Monthly_ it was discovered that the form was one page short. There
was nothing ready but this poem, and with misgivings Harte inserted
it. The result was nothing less than amazing. It proved to be the
most notable page in the history of the magazine. The poem captured
the East completely; it was copied and quoted and laughed at in every
corner of the country. It swept through England and beyond. _The Luck
of Roaring Camp_ and the two or three strong pieces that followed it
had given Harte a certain vogue in the East, but now he swiftly became
not only a national, but an international figure. The fame of the
"Heathen Chinee," as the poem was now called, brought out of obscurity
other poems written by Harte during his editorial days, among them
"The Society upon the Stanislaus," and it gave wings to other verses
that he now wrote in the "Heathen Chinee" meter and stanza--"Dow's
Flat" and "Penelope." Quickly there were added "Jim," "Chiquita," "In
the Tunnel," and "Cicely," all of them dealing not with the "heathen
Chinee" of his first great strike, but with that other picturesque
figure of early California, the Pike.
It was _gold_,--in the quartz,
And it ran all alike;
And I reckon five oughts
Was the worth of that strike;
And that house with the coopilow's his'n,--which the same isn't
bad for a Pike.
These poems with others were published in 1871 with the title _East and
West Poems_. The Pike County pieces in the volume number altogether
seven; John Hay's _Pike County Ballads_, which came out in book form at
almost the same moment, numbered six--thirteen rather remarkable poems
when one considers the furore that they created and the vast influence
they exerted upon their times.
For a decade and more Pike County colored American literature. In 1871
J. G. Holland summed up the situation:
The "Pike" ... has produced a strange and startling sensation
in recent literature.... With great celerity he has darted
through the columns of our newspapers, the pages of our
magazines, while quiet, well-behaved contributors have stood
one side and let him have his own wild way. And it began to
seem, at one time, as if the ordinary, decent virtues of
civilized society could stand no chance in comparison with the
picturesque heroism of this savage in dialect.[51]
Much of Harte's fiction deals with this type. Save for Yuba Bill, who
was evidently a Northerner, the New Orleans gamblers like Oakhurst and
Jack Hamlin, and the Spanish and Mexican natives, his characters were
prevailingly Pikes. The dialect in all of his work is dominated by
this Southwestern element. In _The New Assistant at the Pine Clearing
School_, for instance, the leader of the strike discourses like this:
"We ain't hankerin' much for grammar and dictionary hogwash, and we
don't want no Boston parts o' speech rung in on us the first thing in
the mo'nin'. We ain't Boston--We're Pike County--we are." Tennessee's
Partner was a Pike, and Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy, and Kentuck and
Sandy--glorified to be sure and transformed by California and the
society of the mines, but none the less Pikes.
Following Harte and Hay came the outburst of local color fiction.
_The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, _Cape Cod Folks_, _Sam Lawson's Fireside
Stories_, _Hoosier Mosaics_, _Deephaven_, _Old Creole Days_, _In the
Tennessee Mountains_ were but the beginning. For two decades and more
American fiction ran to the study of local types and peculiar dialect.
The movement was not confined to prose. The Pike County balladry was
continued by Sidney Lanier and Irwin Russell with their songs and
ballads of the negro quarters, Will Carleton with his farm ballads,
James Whitcomb Riley with his Hoosier studies, Drummond with his tales
of the "Habitant" of the Canadian frontier, and by Eugene Field, Sam
Walter Foss, Holman F. Day, and scores of others down to Robert W.
Service, the depicter of the Yukon and the types of the later gold rush.
II
Whether the Pike County balladry began with Bret Harte or with John
Hay, is a question at present unsettled. Mark Twain was positive that
Hay was the pioneer. His statement is important:
"It was contemporaneously supposed," he wrote after Hay's
death, "that the _Pike County Ballads_ were inspired or
provoked by the Pike County balladry of Bret Harte, and they
were first accepted as imitations or parodies. They were not
written later, they were written (and printed in newspapers)
earlier. Mr. Hay told me this himself--in 1870 or '71, I should
say. I believe--indeed, I am quite sure--that he added that
the newspapers referred to were obscure western back-woods
journals and that the ballads were not widely copied. Also he
said this: That by and by, when Harte's ballads began to sweep
the country, the noise woke his (Hay's) buried waifs and they
rose and walked."[52]
To this testimony may be added Howells's belief that Hay's ballads
were prior to Harte's and that "a comparative study will reveal their
priority,"[53] and the statement of W. E. Norris, a schoolmate of the
poet, that "the ballads appeared as fugitive pieces in the newspapers,
as I remember, and the attention they attracted induced the author to
compile them with others in book form."[54]
A comparative study of the poems certainly reveals the fact that one
set was influenced by the other. "Cicely" and "Little Breeches" have
very much in common. They are in the same meter, and in one place they
have practically identical lines:
But I takes mine straight without sugar, and that's what's the
matter of me.--_Cicely._
I want a chaw of terbacker,
And that's what's the matter with me.
--_Little Breeches._
There are similarities in others of the poems:
Don't know Flynn,--
Flynn of Virginia,--
Long as he's been 'yar?
Look 'ee here, stranger,
Whar _hev_ you been?
--_In the Tunnel._
Whar have you been for the last three year.
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the _Prairie Belle_?
--_Jim Bludso._
It must be confessed that a study of the ballads and of the other
poetical works of the two poets leaves one with the impression that
Harte was first in the field. Hay's six Pike County ballads stand
isolated among his poems. Everything he wrote before them and after
them is in an utterly different key. One feels as he reads him straight
through--the earlier lyrics, _Castilian Days_, the later lyrics, _The
Bread-winners_, _The Life of Lincoln_--that these poems came from an
impulse, that they must have been thrown off in quick succession all
at one time in answer to some sudden impression. One feels, therefore,
more like trusting a contemporary biographical sketch than the
unsupported impressions of contemporaries thirty years after the event.
A sketch of John Hay, written by Clarence King in April, 1874, records
that when Hay returned from Spain in 1870
All the world was reading Mr. Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee"
and Mr. Hay did what all the world was doing.... He read
all the poems, but "Chiquita" and "Cicely," which gave him
particular pleasure, puzzled him and set him to thinking....
He saw how infinitely nobler and better than nature they were,
but, having been born and brought up as a Pike himself, he saw
that they were not nature. He wrote "Little Breeches" for his
own amusement--at least we have heard this is his account of
the matter--to see how a genuine Western feeling expressed in
genuine Western language, would impress Western people.... The
ballads were written within a few days of each other: two of
them in a single evening.[55]
This seems all the more reasonable after we have considered Hay's
earlier poetic ideals. He had been born into a refined home in the
middle West, the son of a doctor and a New England mother, and he had
grown up amid books and intellectual ideals. At the age of thirteen
he had been sent to his uncle in Pike County, Illinois, to attend a
private school which proved to be of such excellent quality that three
years later he was prepared to enter the Sophomore class at Brown.
His life at Providence awakened within him new ideals. He was invited
into the literary circle of the little city where he came to know Mrs.
Whitman, whose life at one time had touched that of Poe, and more
significant still, Nora Perry, the poet, a kindred soul. Graduating at
nineteen, the poet of his class, he went back to Warsaw, the little
Mississippi River town of his boyhood, dreaming the dreams of a poet.
But the outlook for the young dreamer was a depressing one. "I am
removed to a colder mental atmosphere," he wrote to Miss Perry. In
the West, "I find only a dreary waste of heartless materialism, where
great and heroic qualities may indeed bully their way up into the
glare, but the flowers of existence inevitably droop and wither."[56]
He wrote much poetry during this early period--translations of Heine,
Longfellow-like poems of beauty, and stirring lyrics to Miss Perry,
who kept alive his poetic dreams with letters and poems, among them
her "After the Ball" which she had shown him before it appeared in the
_Atlantic_. No Pike County notes in this period: he was filled with
the vision that even then was inspiring the little transition school
of poets struggling along the old paths: Stedman, Stoddard, Aldrich,
Hayne, Sill, and the others.
But there was no place in the young West for such dreams. He burned
much of the poetry he had written and set out sternly to study law in
his uncle's office. "I feel that Illinois and Rhode Island are entirely
antipathetic," he confessed to Miss Perry. Within him he felt the fires
even of genius, he wrote, "but when you reflect how unsuitable such
sentiments are to the busy life of the Mississippi Valley, you may
imagine then what an overhauling I must receive--at my own hands too.
There is, as yet, no room in the West for a genius."[57]
No more poetry. He turned from it out of sheer sense of duty and began
with the law. But he was to be no lawyer. In his uncle's office in
Springfield he came into intimate contact with Lincoln, and before his
law studies had matured at all, he found himself in Washington, the
assistant secretary of the new President. Poetry now was out of the
question. The war took his every moment, and after the war there was
diplomatic service abroad, at Paris, at Vienna, at Madrid. The literary
product of this latter period is as far from Pike work as Rhode Island
was from Illinois. One may find it in the section of his poems headed
"Wanderlieder"--beautiful lyrics of the Longfellow type--"Sunrise in
the Place de la Concorde," "The Monks of Basle," "Ernst of Edelsheim,"
and the like. He brought with him too when he returned in 1870 his
Spanish _Sketch Book_, _Castilian Days_, the work of a poet, golden
atmosphered, vivid, delightful. In the five years that followed on the
_Tribune_ staff he wrote for the magazines his best poems. He was a
lyrist with a pen of gold, impassioned at times and impetuous:
Roll on, O shining sun,
To the far seas,
Bring down, ye shades of eve,
The soft, salt breeze!
Shine out, O stars, and light
My darling's pathway bright,
As through the summer night
She comes to me.
And this entitled "Lacrimas":
God send me tears!
Loose the fierce band that binds my tired brain,
Give me the melting heart of other years,
And let me weep again!
* * * * *
We pray in vain!
The sullen sky flings down its blaze of brass;
The joys of life are scorched and withery pass:
I shall not weep again.
Strange company indeed for the Pike County poems. Hay himself was
silent about the ballads; he seemed reluctant to talk about them; in
later days we know he viewed them with regret.
With Harte the problem is simpler. He wrote from the first all
varieties of humorous verse: broad farce like the "Ballad of the Emeu"
and the "California Madrigal"; rollicking parodies like "The Tale of
a Pony," "The Willows. After Edgar A. Poe," and "The Lost Tails of
Miletus"; extravaganzas like "The Stage-Driver's Story" and "To the
Pliocene Skull." His Pike verses are in full accord with the greater
part of all he wrote both in verse and prose. They are precisely what
we should expect from the author of the California Pike tales. That
he was in one small part of his work an echo of Hay is exceedingly
unlikely. If the _Pike County Ballads_ were, as Mark Twain averred,
first published in "obscure Western backwoods journals" before "The
Heathen Chinee" had appeared, the chances that Harte saw them are
so small that it is hardly worth taking the time to consider them,
especially when it is further averred that they "were not widely
copied." At present the advantage is all with Harte; at present he may
be hailed as the father of the Pike balladry and so of the realistic
school of poetry in America. The question is not closed, however,
nor will it be until the letters and journals of John Hay have been
finally given to the world.
III
But even though the _Pike County Ballads_ were not the first in the
field, even though they were suggested by Harte's work, they were none
the less valuable and influential. Hay wrote them from full experience.
They rang true at every point as Harte's sometimes did not. Their
author had lived from his third until his thirteenth year in full
view of the Mississippi River; like Mark Twain he had played about
the steamboat wharf, picking up the river slang and hearing the rude
stories of the pilots and the deck hands. Warsaw, moreover, was on the
trail of the Western immigration, a place where all the border types
might be studied. Later, in Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County,
he saw the Pike at home untouched by contact with others--the Golyers,
the Frys, the Shelbys, and all the other drinkers of "whisky-skins."
Hay has painted a picture not only of a few highly individualized
types; he has drawn as well a background of conditions. He has made
permanent one brief phase of middle Western history. It was this
element of truth to nature--absolute realism--that gave the poems their
vogue and that assured them permanence. Harte's ballads were read as
something new and astonishing and theatric; they created a sensation,
but they did not grip and convince. Hay's ballads were true to the
heart of Western life.
The new literature of the period was influenced more by the _Pike
County Ballads_ than by the _East and West Poems_. The ballads were
something new in literature, something certainly not Bostonian,
certainly not English--something that could be described only as
"Western," fresh, independent, as the Pike himself was new and
independent among the types of humanity. John Hay was therefore a
pioneer, a creator, a leader. His was one of those rare germinal minds
that appear now and then to break into new regions and to scatter seed
from which others are to reap the harvest.
IV
In the same remarkable year in which appeared _East and West Poems_ and
_Pike County Ballads_ and so many other notable first volumes, there
began in _Hearth and Home_ Edward Eggleston's study of early Indiana
life, entitled _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_. Crude as the novel is in
its plot and hasty as it is in style and finish, it nevertheless must
be numbered as the third leading influence upon the literature of the
period.
The extent to which it was influenced by Harte cannot be determined.
The brother and biographer of the novelist insists that "the quickening
influence that led to the writing of the story" was the reading of
Taine's _Art in the Netherlands_. He further records that his brother
one day said to him:
"I am going to write a three-number story founded upon your
experiences at Ricker's Ridge, and call it _The Hoosier
Schoolmaster_." Then he set forth his theory of art--that the
artist, whether with pen or brush, who would do his best work,
must choose his subjects from the life that he knows. He cited
the Dutch painters and justified his choice of what seemed
an unliterary theme, involving rude characters and a strange
dialect perversion, by reference to Lowell's success with _The
Biglow Papers_.[58]
If Eggleston was not influenced by Harte, then it is certain that he
drew his early inspiration from the same fountain head as Harte did.
Both were the literary offspring of Dickens. One cannot read far in
_The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ without recognizing the manner and spirit
of the elder novelist. It is more prominent in his earlier work--in
the short story, _The Christmas Club_, which is almost a parody, in
the portraits of Shockey and Hawkins and Miranda Means, and in the
occasional moralizing and goody-goodiness of tone.
There are few novelists, however, who contain fewer echoes than
Eggleston. He was a more original and more accurate writer than Harte.
We can trust his backgrounds and his picture of society implicitly at
every point. Harte had saturated himself with the fiction of other men;
he had made himself an artist through long study of the masters, and he
looked at his material always with the eye of an artist. He selected
most carefully his viewpoint, his picturesque details, his lights and
shadows, and then made his sketch. Eggleston, on the other hand, had
made no study of his art. He had read almost no novels, for, as he
expressed it, he was "bred 'after the straitest sect of our religion'
a Methodist." All he knew of plot construction he had learned from
reading the Greek tragedies.
His weakness was his strength. He silenced his conscience, which
rebelled against novels, by resolving to write not fiction but truth.
He would make a sketch of life as it actually had been lived in Indiana
in his boyhood, a sketch that should be as minute in detail and as
remorselessly true as a Millet painting. It was not to be a novel; it
was to be history. "No man is worthy," he declared in the preface to
_The Circuit Rider_, "to be called a novelist who does not endeavor
with his whole soul to produce the higher form of history, by writing
truly of men as they are, and dispassionately of those forms of life
that come within his scope."
When Eggleston, later in his life, abandoned fiction to become a
historian, there was no break in his work. He had always been a
historian. Unlike Harte, he had embodied in his novels only those
things that had been a part of his own life; he had written with loving
recollection; he had recorded nothing that was not true. He had sought,
moreover, to make his novels an interpretation of social conditions
as he had known them and studied them. "What distinguishes them [his
novels]," he once wrote, "from other works of fiction is the prominence
which they give to social conditions; that the individual characters
are here treated to a greater degree than elsewhere as parts of a study
of society--as in some sense the logical result of the environment."[59]
Novels like _The End of the World_ and _The Circuit Rider_ are in
reality chapters in the history of the American people. They are
realistic studies, by one to the manner born, of an era in our national
life that has vanished forever.
V
Edward Eggleston was born in Vevay, Indiana, December 10, 1837. His
father, a member of an old Virginia family, after a brilliant course at
William and Mary College, had migrated westward, settled in Indiana,
and just as he was making himself a notable figure in the law and the
politics of his State, had died when his eldest son, Edward, was but
nine years old. The son had inherited both his father's intellectual
brilliancy and his frail physique. Though eager for knowledge, he was
able all through his boyhood to attend school but little, and, though
his father had provided for a college scholarship, the son never found
himself able to take advantage of it. He was largely self-educated. He
studied whenever he could, and by making use of all his opportunities
he was able before he was twenty to master by himself nearly all of the
branches required for a college degree.
His boyhood was a wandering one. After the death of his father, the
family removed to New Albany and later to Madison. At the age of
thirteen he was sent to southern Indiana to live with an uncle, a large
landowner, and it was here in the lowlands of Decatur County that he
had his first chance to study those primitive Hoosier types that later
he was to make permanent in literature. Still later he lived for a year
and a half with his father's people in Virginia.
Before he was nineteen he had chosen his profession. The tense
Methodist atmosphere in which he had been reared had had its effect. He
would be a preacher, a circuit rider, one of those tireless latter-day
apostles that had formed so picturesque a part of his boyhood. "How did
he get his theological education? It used to be said that Methodist
preachers were educated by the old ones telling the young ones all they
knew; but besides this oral instruction [he] carried in his saddle bags
John Wesley's simple, solid sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns, and a
Bible."[60]
Eggleston's saddle bags contained far more than these. He read
Whitfield and Thomas a Kempis, the _OEdipus Tyrannus_ in the Greek,
and all the history and biography that he could buy or borrow. His
"appointment" was in southeastern Indiana, a four-weeks' circuit
with ten preaching places far apart in the Ohio River bottoms with
their scattering population of malarial Pikes and their rude border
civilization. He began his work with enthusiasm. He lived with his
people; he entered intimately into their affairs; he studied at first
hand their habits of life and of thought. It was an ideal preparation
for a novelist, but the rough life was in no way fitted for his frail
physique. After six months he broke down almost completely and was sent
into the pine forests of Minnesota to recuperate. For several years he
was connected with the Minnesota conference. He held pastorates in St.
Paul and other places, but his health still continuing precarious, he
at length retired to Chicago as an editor of the _Little Corporal_, a
juvenile paper later merged in _St. Nicholas_. This step turned his
attention to literature as a profession. From Chicago he was called to
Brooklyn to the staff of the _Independent_, of which he later became
the editor, and the rest of his life, save for a five years' pastorate
in Brooklyn, he devoted to literature.
VI
The Western novels of Edward Eggleston are seven in number. One of
them, _The Mystery of Metropolisville_, deals with frontier life in
Minnesota, a stirring picture of a vital era; all the others are laid
in Indiana or eastern Ohio in that malarial, river-bottom, Pike area
that had been familiar to his boyhood. Two of them are historical
novels: _The Circuit Rider_, which deals with Indiana life during the
early years of the century before the War of 1812, and _The Graysons_,
a stirring tale involving Abraham Lincoln, who had lived in the State
from 1816 to 1830. _The End of the World_ described the Millerite
excitement of Eggleston's early boyhood; the others, _The Hoosier
Schoolmaster_, _Roxy_, and _The Hoosier Schoolboy_, were studies of
sections of life that he had known intimately. One other novel he
wrote, _The Faith Doctor_, the scene of which is laid in New York, and
many short stories and juveniles.
The atmosphere and the characters of these Western stories strike us
as strangely unreal and exaggerated to-day. In his short story, _The
Gunpowder Plot_, Eggleston complained that "whenever one writes with
photographic exactness of frontier life he is accused of inventing
improbable things." It seems indeed like a world peopled by Dickens,
these strange phantasmagoria, "these sharp contrasts of corn-shuckings
and camp-meetings, of wild revels followed by wild revivals; these
contrasts of highwayman and preacher; this _melange_ of picturesque
simplicity, grotesque humor, and savage ferocity, of abandoned
wickedness and austere piety."[61] But grotesque and unreal as it is,
it is nevertheless a true picture of the West in which Lincoln spent
his boyhood. Every detail and every personage in all the novels had an
exact counterpart somewhere in that stirring era.
The novelist, however, is not content with a mere graphic picture.
He is a philosopher. _The Circuit Rider_, for instance, the most
valuable study in the series, brings home to the reader the truth of
the author's dictum that "Methodism was to the West what Puritanism was
to New England." "In a true picture of this life," he adds, "neither
the Indian nor the hunter is the center-piece, but the circuit rider.
More than any one else, the early circuit preachers brought order out
of this chaos. In no other class was the real heroic element so finely
displayed."
The figure of the circuit rider as he strides through the book,
thundering the "Old Homeric epithets of early Methodism, exploding them
like bomb-shells--'you are hair-hung and breeze-shaken over hell,'"
has almost an epic quality. "Magruder was a short stout man, with wide
shoulders, powerful arms, shaggy brows, and bristling black hair.
He read the hymns two lines at a time, and led the singing himself.
He prayed with the utmost sincerity, but in a voice that shook the
cabin windows and gave the simple people a deeper reverence for the
dreadfulness of the preacher's message."
It was his business to preach once or twice a day and three times
on the Sabbath in a parish that had no western bounds. He talked of
nothing but of sin and wrath and judgment to come. His arrival in
the settlement cast over everything an atmosphere of awe. He aroused
violent antagonisms. The rough element banded together to destroy
his influence. They threatened him with death if he entered certain
territory, but he never hesitated. He could fight as well as he could
pray. They would fall broken and bruised before his savage onslaught
and later fall in agony of repentance before his fiery preaching. His
sermons came winged with power.
He hit right and left. The excitable crowd swayed with
consternation, as in a rapid and vehement utterance, he
denounced their sins, with the particularity of one who had
been familiar with them all his life.... Slowly the people
pressed forward off the fences. All at once there was a loud
bellowing cry from some one who had fallen prostrate outside
the fence, and who began to cry aloud as if the portals of an
endless perdition were yawning in his face.... This outburst of
agony was fuel to the flames, and the excitement now spread to
all parts of the audience.... Captain Lumsden ... started for
his horse and was seized with that curious nervous affection
which originated in these religious excitements and disappeared
with them. He jerked violently--his jerking only adding to his
excitement.
Eggleston has caught with vividness the spirit of this heroic age and
brought it to us so that it actually lives again. The members of the
conference at Hickory Ridge have gathered to hear the bishop read the
appointments for the year:
The brethren, still in sublime ignorance of their destiny, sang
fervently that fiery hymn of Charles Wesley's:
Jesus, the name high over all,
In hell or earth or sky,
Angels and men before him fall,
And devils fear and fly.
And when they reached the last stanzas there was the ring of
soldiers ready for battle in their martial voices. That some
of them would die from exposure, malaria, or accident during
the next year was probable. Tears came to their eyes, and they
involuntarily began to grasp the hands of those who stood next
to them as they approached the climax of the hymn....
Happy if with my latest breath
I may but gasp His name,
Preach Him to all, and cry in death,
"Behold, behold the Lamb!"
Then, with suffused eyes, they resumed their seats, and the
venerable Asbury, with calmness and a voice faltering with age,
made them a brief address:
"General Wolfe," said the British Admiralty, "will you go and
take Quebec?" "I'll do it or die," he replied. Here the bishop
paused, looked round about upon them, and added, with a voice
full of emotion, "He went and did both. We send you first to
take the country allotted to you. We want only men who are
determined to do it or die! Some of you, dear brethren, will
do both. If you fall, let us hear that you fell like Methodist
preachers at your post, face to the foe, and the shout of
victory on your lips!"
The effect of this speech was beyond description. There were
sobs, and cries of "Amen," "God grant it," "Hallelujah!" from
every part of the old log church. Every man was ready for the
hardest place, if he must.
With the circuit rider Eggleston undoubtedly added another type to the
gallery of American fiction.
VII
The novels of Eggleston have not the compression, the finish,
the finesse of Harte's. Some of his works, notably _The Hoosier
Schoolmaster_, were written at full speed with the press clattering
behind the author. Often there is to the style a mawkish Sunday-school
juvenile flavor. There is often a lack of art, of distinction, of
constructive skill. But there are compensations even for such grave
defects. There is a vividness of characterization and of description
that can be compared even with that of Dickens; there is the ability to
sketch a scene that clings to the memory in all its details. The trial
scene in _The Graysons_ is not surpassed for vividness and narrative
power in any novel of the period. And, finally, there is a realism in
background and atmosphere that makes the novels real sources of history.
The influence of Eggleston's work was enormous. He helped to create
a new reading public, a public made up of those who, like himself,
had had scruples against novel reading. He was an influence in the
creating of a new and healthy realism in America. What Hay was to the
new school of local color poets, Eggleston was to the new school of
novelists. Harte was a romanticist; Eggleston was a realist. From Harte
came the first conception of a new and powerful literature of the West.
Eggleston was the directing hand that turned the current of this new
literature into the channel of realism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JOHN HAY. (1838-1905.) _The Pike County Ballads and Other
Pieces_, (167 pages), 1871; _Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle,
and Little Breeches_, illustrated by Eytinge (23 pages), 1871;
_Castilian Days_, 1871; _The Bread-winners_, 1883; _Poems by John
Hay_, 1890 and 1899; _A Poet in Exile: Early letters of John
Hay._ Edited by Caroline Ticknor, 1910.
EDWARD EGGLESTON. (1837-1902.) _Mr. Blake's Walking-Stick_, 1870;
_The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, 1871; _The End of the World_, 1872;
_The Mystery of Metropolisville_, 1873; _The Circuit Rider_,
1874; _The Schoolmaster's Stories_, 1874; _Roxy_, 1878; _The
Hoosier Schoolboy_, 1883; _Queer Stories_, 1884; _The Graysons_,
1888; _The Faith Doctor_, 1891; _Duffels_ (short stories), 1893;
_The First of the Hoosiers_, by George Cary Eggleston, 1903.