Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 46

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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.