Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/209

Edward Eggleston 191 own without loss of the best things in the old school — ^vigour, harmony, and colour. Edward Eggleston entered history through the door of fiction. ' He was born in Indiana of the Western branch of a leading Virginia family, had scant educational opportunities, spent several years as an itinerant Methodist minister, became an editor in Chicago and New York, and in 187 1 published the widely read story of frontier life, The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Two years later he retired from the profession of editor, and became pastor of a Brooklyn Congregational church, with the expressed understanding that he was not to conform to specific dogmas. Increasing skepticism made him give up this position in 1 879. The step was taken after internal struggles which left him in a state of nervous prostration. Rest brought restoration and he turned to history as a serious study. Fiction he still followed as a breadwinning art, but from 1880 to his death in 1902 he considered himself primarily a historian. Social history was his field. What his Hoosier stories did for the Indiana backwoods, he wished his histories to do in simple narrative for the life of all the people. To his brother he described his plan in the following words : I am going to write a series of volumes which together shall constitute a History of Life in the United States — not a history of the United States, bear in mind, but a history of the life there, the life of the people, the soxu-ces of their ideas and habits, the course of their development from beginnings. These beginnings will be carefully studied in the first volume. Beyond that my plans for the ordering of the material are not fully formed. It will be a work designed to answer the questions "How?" and "Whence?" and "Why?" All this will require a great deal of research, but I stand ready to give ten years of my life to the task, if necessary. Ten years allow brief space to write such a history for a man of less desultory habits of work than Eggleston had. At the end of twenty-two years he had finished only two of the pro- posed volumes. The Beginners of a Nation (1897) and The Transit of Civilization (1901). They carried the story of colonial life to the year 1640. Had the work proceeded on the same scale to the end of the nineteenth century it would have ' See also Book III, Chap. xi. '