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; Björnson 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.
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 Phœnix" who in Phœnixiana 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.
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.
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.
There are similarities in others of the poems:
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:
And this entitled "Lacrimas":
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.
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.
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.
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 à Kempis, the Œdipus 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.
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 mélange 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.
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.
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.
The work of Harte and even of Hay is the work of an onlooker rather than a sharer. One feels that both were studying their picturesque surroundings objectively for the sake of "copy"; but Joaquin Miller, like Mark Twain, may be said to have emerged from the materials he worked in. He could write in his later years, "My poems are literally my autobiography." "If you care to read further of my life, making allowance for poetic license, you will find these [poems] literally true." In some ways he is a more significant figure than either Harte or Hay. No American writer, not even Thoreau or Whitman, has ever been more uniquely individual, and none, not even Mark Twain, has woven into his writings more things that are peculiarly American, or has worked with a more thorough first-hand knowledge of the picturesque elements that went into the making of the new West. He is the poet of the American westward march, the poet of "the great American desert," the poet preëminently of the mountain ranges from Alaska to Nicaragua as John Muir is their prose interpreter.
The life of Miller is a series of foot-notes to his poems. He was born on the line of the westward march. In the valuable autobiographical preface to the Bear edition of his poems he writes: "My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio." That was in 1841, and the name given him was Cincinnatus Hiner Miller. His parents, like those of Mark Twain, were of that restless generation that could abide nowhere long, but must press ever on and on westward. His mother's people had migrated from the Yadkin River country in North Carolina with the Boones, "devoted Quakers in search of a newer land"; his grandfather Miller was a Scotchman, a restless pioneer who had fallen at Fort Meigs, leaving a family of small children to come up as they could in the wilderness. One of them, the father of the poet, picked up in a varied career along the border certain elements of book learning that enabled him to teach school in the settlement towns of Ohio and Indiana.
The boy's earliest memories were of the frontier with its land clearing, its Indian neighbors, and its primitive hardships. Schooling he received at the hands of his father. The first book that he could remember was Frémont's Explorations, read aloud to the family by the father until all knew it literally by heart, maps and all. Lured by its enthusiastic descriptions and by reports of a former pupil who had gone to Oregon and by the new act of Congress which gave to every homesteader six hundred and forty acres of land free, on March 17, 1852, with "two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride," the family set out across the wild continent of America. "The distance," he records, "counting the contours of often roundabout ways, was quite, or nearly, three thousand miles. The time was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. We had only the road as nature had made it. Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smoldering camp-fires of the day before."
That heroic journey into the unknown West with its awful dangers, its romantic strangeness, its patriarchal conditions, its constant demand for self-dependence, made an indelible impress on the young lad. It was a journey of Argonauts, one of the thousands of journeys that made picturesque a whole epoch. He has described it in some of the most stirring of his poems. All through his poetry occur stanzas like this:
He has described it too in prose that is really stirring. His dedicatory preface to The Ship in the Desert, London, 1876, is a poem of the Whitman order. Note a stanza like this:
How dark and deep, how sullen, strong and lionlike the mighty Missouri rolled between his walls of untracked wood and cleft the unknown domain of the middle world before us! Then the frail and buffeted rafts on the river, the women and children huddled together, the shouts of the brawny men as they swam with the bellowing cattle, the cows in the stormy stream eddying, whirling, spinning about, calling to their young, their bright horns shining in the sun. The wild men waiting on the other side; painted savages, leaning on their bows, despising our weakness, opening a way, letting us pass on to the unknown distances, where they said the sun and moon lay down together and brought forth the stars. The long and winding lines of wagons, the graves by the wayside, the women weeping together as they passed on. Then hills, then plains, parched lands like Syria, dust and alkali, cold streams with woods, camps by night, great wood fires in circles, tents in the center like Cæsar's battle camps, painted men that passed like shadows, showers of arrows, the wild beasts howling from the hills.
Two years with his parents on the new Oregon farm, and the lad ran away to the mines. "Go, I must. The wheels of the covered wagon in which I had been born were whirling and whirling, and I must be off." For a time he was cook in a mining camp, but it was work impossible for a boy of thirteen, and soon he was on his wanderings again, first with one Ream, an adventurer, then with Mountain Joe, a trader in half-wild horses. He was drawn into Gibson's fight with the Modocs, was wounded frightfully by an arrow that pierced close to the base of the brain, and later was nursed back to life by a squaw who had adopted him in place of her son who had fallen in the battle. "When the spring came and Mount Shasta stood out white and glorious above the clouds, I hailed him as a brother." And again he stole away and joined another band of Indians. "When the Modocs arose one night and massacred eighteen men, every man in the Pit River Valley, I alone was spared and spared only because I was Los bobo, the fool. Then more battles and two more wounds." For a long time his mind was like that of a child. The Indians indeed, as he records, treated him "as if [he] had been newly born to their tribe."
Soon I was stronger, body and soul. The women gave me gold—from whence?—and I being a "renegade," descended to San Francisco and set sail for Boston, but stopped at Nicaragua with Walker. Thence up the coast to Oregon, when strong enough. I went home, went to college some, taught school some, studied law at home some; but ever and ever the lure of the mountains called and called, and I could not keep my mind on my books. But I could keep my mind on the perils I had passed. I could write of them, and I did write of them, almost every day. The Tale of the Tall Alcalde, Oregonian, Californian, With Walker in Nicaragua—I had lived all these and more; and they were now a part of my existence.... Meantime I was admitted to the bar. Then came the discovery of gold in Idaho, Montana, and so on, and I was off like a rocket with the rest.
To call Miller illiterate, as many, especially in printing offices which have handled his copy, have done, is hardly fair. His father, it must be remembered, was a schoolmaster with the Scotch reverence for serious books and for education, and the boy's early schooling was not neglected. To say, on the other hand, as many, including the poet himself, have said, that he received a college education, is also to speak without knowledge. He did complete a course in Columbia University, Eugene, Oregon, in 1859, but it was an institution in no way connected with the present University of Oregon. It was, rather, a mission school maintained by the Methodist Church South, and, according to Professor Herbert C. Howe of the University of Oregon, "its instruction was, at its utmost stretch, not enough to carry its pupils through the first half of a high school course, and most of its pupils were of grammar grade." It was closed suddenly early in the Civil-War period because of the active Southern sympathies of its president, who was himself very nearly the whole "university." It is significant that at almost the same time the Eugene Democratic Register edited by Miller was suppressed for alleged disloyalty to the Union.
For a period the poet undoubtedly did apply himself with diligence to books. Of his fellow students at Eugene he has recorded, "I have never since found such determined students and omnivorous readers. We had all the books and none of the follies of the great centers." The mania for writing had seized him early. Assisted by his father, he had recorded the events of his trip across the plains in a journal afterwards burned with his parental home in Oregon. "The first thing of mine in print was the valedictory class poem, 'Columbia College.'" Undoubtedly during this period he read widely and eagerly. "My two brothers and my sister were by my side, our home with our parents, and we lived entirely to ourselves, and really often made ourselves ill from too much study. We were all school teachers when not at college."
Living away from the centers of culture, with books as exotic things that came from without, almost as from another world, Miller, like many another isolated soul, grew to maturity with the feeling that something holy lay about the creation of literature and that authors, especially poets, were beings apart from the rest of men. Poetry became to him more than an art: it became a religion. "Poetry," he declared in his first London preface, "is with me a passion which defies reason." It was an honest declaration. During the sixties as express messenger in the Idaho gold fields, as newspaper editor, and judge, he wrote verse continually—"I lived among the stars"—but he preserved of all he wrote only a few rather colorless pieces which he published in 1868 with the title Specimens. The next year he issued at Portland, Oregon, Joaquin et al, a book of one hundred and twenty-four pages. It was his salute to the literary world. He addressed it "To the Bards of San Francisco Bay," and his address sheds light upon the timid young poet: