Meredith Nicholson

“ The Boone County poet’s contributions are printed as the old farmer is supposed to have written them, not as reported by a critical listener. There is a difference between the attempt of an illiterate man to express his own ideas on paper, and a transcript of his utterances set down by one trained to the business—the vernacular as observed and recorded by a conscious artist. In every community there is a local humorist, a sayer of quaint things, whose oddities of speech gain wide acceptance and circulation, and Mr. Riley is his discoverer in Indiana. ”

“ Willson marked the beginning of better things, and a livelier fancy and a keener critical spirit is henceforward observable—in the writings of a veteran like Parker, and in the new company of writers that was forming. The Civil War had profoundly moved the Central States, and Indiana had perhaps felt it more than her neighbors. Willson had lifted his voice for the Union while the war cloud still lay upon the land, and the Thompson brothers spoke for the South from Indiana soil on the arrival of the era of better feeling. ”

“ The spirit of change has rarely invaded the college, and men are now holding chairs who have grown old in its service. Wabash has been content to do honest college work and has never made false pretensions as to its ability to do more. “Mere literature,” as Bagehot fondly called it, has not been disregarded, and in no college of ampler endowment have the classics been taught more sympathetically or intelligently. It is one of the few colleges remaining at the West which close their doors to women, although importunate hands have long besought the wicket. ”

“ The Greenfield schools have always been excellent, and young Riley was fortunate in having for his teacher Lee O. Harris, himself a poet, who tried to adapt the curriculum of the Hancock County schools to the needs of an unusual pupil in whom imagination predominated to the exclusion of mathematics.
Learning is, as Higginson has aptly condensed it, not accumulation, but assimilation; and “the Hoosier poet” was born one of those fortunate men to whom schools are a mere incident [158] of education, but who walk through the world with their eyes open, adding daily to their stock of knowledge. ”

“ He was a man of many accomplishments, and left a deep impression on Edward Eggleston, who has spoken of his brilliant talk as a perpetual inspiration: “He incessantly stimulated my love [139] for literature, guided my choice of books, taught me to make a commonplace book of my reading, and by his conversation and example made me feel that to lead an intellectual life was the most laudable pursuit of a human being.” The direction thus given to the boyish impulse, and the atmosphere of his home, were of great importance to Edward, for of systematic schooling he was to know little. ”

“ A president and a vice-president of the United States have been on the club’s rolls, as have cabinet officers, senators in Congress and foreign ministers; but literary and ethical questions, oftener than political problems, have vexed its discussions, and it has been more interested as a society in Newman, Arnold, and Emerson, and in the thwarting of the Zeitgeist, than in material things. The women of Indiana have been important contributors to all agencies that tend toward ideal living, and at Indianapolis they have exerted an intelligent and beneficent influence in literature. ”

“ There is an ineffable charm about an old town that has outlived its ambition to be a great city, and Crawfordsville is a fine type of such a place. The region was settled in 1823, and the Montgomery County people, both farmers and townfolk, have long been counted among the sturdiest and most intelligent in the State. A cultivated society has always existed at Crawfordsville, and as the seat of Wabash College it acquired in its youth an academic air that it has never shaken off. The town has been called “The Hoosier Athens,” by envious and less favored neighbors. ”

“ The educational features of the community were, from all testimony, a great failure and disappointment. It was one thing to assemble distinguished scientists, and quite another to organize them into an effective teaching corps. The school taught by d’Arusmont lasted but a short time, and Robert Dale Owen, who was himself a teacher in one of the community schools, while admitting the man’s good qualities, described him as “a wrong-headed genius, whose extravagance and wilfulness and inordinate self-conceit destroyed his usefulness.” ”

“ The friends of education were to meet with further trials and discouragements; but the pioneer work in Indiana education closed when the new constitution had been ratified by the people. It is clear that any examination of the forces that raised Indiana into an enlightened community must comprehend a knowledge of these early struggles, and that the showier attainments of later citizens cannot obscure for the sincere student the services of those who dared to stand for the cause of free schools in the day of their peril.
Mills is an especially admirable and winning figure. ”

“ It is all poetry, and the very romance of poetry, the conception of romantic and imaginative minds, dictated less by religious sentiment than by a fondness for show and gaudy display. Instead of the decoration concentrating the attention devoutly on the great and glorious fact which flowers are erroneously supposed to symbolize, it is far more likely to divert it, and impair the true spiritual emotions and impressions, which the commemorative services of the day (Easter) are destined to awaken and deepen.... ”

“ Tarkington emphasizes the homogeneity of the Middle Western folk; and this is warranted fully by the statisticians. The people of his town live together like a great, kind family, who are sufficient unto themselves. He has thrown into the story the sincerity, affection, and loyalty that are their attributes; and he adds, moreover, the atmosphere of the Indiana landscape, with a nice appreciation of its loveliness, sometimes hinted and often charmingly expressed. ”

“ As the leaves have fallen through a century in the Wabash country, they have buried words that will never reappear; and the change will continue, old words vanishing and new ones taking their places, so long as tradition and heredity yield to the schoolmaster, that ruthless forester who grafts and trims to make all trees uniform. ”

“ The “knights in fustian” are “Knights of the Golden Circle,” a treasonable society which menaced Indiana during the Civil War. The principal characters are the fatuous rustics, who indulge their crude taste for the mysterious in the secret meetings and sonorous ritual of the society. Miss Krout knows the people of her own soil thoroughly, and the particular type that has attracted her is set out in her pages with photographic accuracy. The tale is true to history and to the local life, and its literary excellence places the author’s name high on the roll of Western writers. ”

“ The so-called Hoosier dialect, where it survives at all, is the speech of the first American settlers in Indiana, greatly modified by time and schooling, but retaining, both in the employment of colloquial terms and in pronunciation, the peculiarities that were carried westward from tide water early in the nineteenth century. The distinctive Indiana countryman, the real Hoosier, who has been little in contact [47] with the people of cities, speaks a good deal as his Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Kentucky grandfather or great-grandfather did before him, and has created nothing new. ”

“ No reader of Hoosier chronicles can fail to be impressed by the relation of the great forests to the people who came to possess and tame them. Before they reached the Indiana wilderness in their advance before civilization, the stalwart pioneers had swung their axes in Pennsylvania or Kentucky, and had felt the influence of the great, gloomy woodlands in their lives; but in Indiana this influence was greatly intensified. They experienced an isolation that is not possible to-day in any part of the country, and the loss of nearly every civilizing [37] agency that men value. ”

“ Local history has not, unfortunately, attracted the literary fledgling in Indiana so often as could have been desired, though the field is inviting, and thorough work of this kind is far likelier to enjoy permanency than fair or indifferent fiction or mediocre verse. Criticism is naturally last to receive [215] attention, and little critical writing can be credited to the State. It is, however, remarkable that so much good work is done in the several departments, the inference being that where so many are moved to make experiments, the general average of cultivation must be high. ”

“ All slang shares a feeling for the balance and nice adjustment of words, and slang phrases are rarely clumsy. The cry of a boy calling his mate has its peculiar crescendo, and pedlers the world over run the scale of human expression in pursuit of odd effects. The drawl of the Southerner and Southwesterner is not unmusical, though it may try the patience of the stranger. Even cultivated Indianians, particularly those of Southern antecedents, have the habit of clinging to their words; they do not bite them off sharply. ”

“ He was a student of human nature rather than of books, but his literary instincts were true, and in the two weekly newspapers, the Herald and the Review, which he conducted, he was at once the inspiration and the terror of his contributors. Some of the sketches in a volume of his “Miscellaneous Writings” (1882) show an agreeably humorous turn. He had the trained journalist’s appreciation of condensed wisdom. It was his habit to repeat, week after week, a satirical paragraph in which some individual [241] was pilloried until the victim’s name became a by-word and a hissing in the community. ”

“ Episcopalians were few among the first Indiana colonists. The diocese of Indiana was created in 1838, and many earnest men have given their [65] labor to its service first and last; but the slow progress of the Episcopal Church in the commonwealth has been due to conditions antedating the settlement of the Ohio Valley, running back, indeed, to the efforts of James I. to establish Scotch and English colonies in Ireland, the most turbulent part of his kingdom, and thus forming the base for a migration to America that was to color the life and thought of a vast area of new soil. ”

“ The rise of Indiana as an enlightened commonwealth has been accompanied by phenomena of unusual interest and variety, and whatever contributions the State may make to the total of national achievement in any department of endeavor are to be appraised in the light of her history and development. ”

“ It is likely that during the next quarter of a century the continued fusion of the various elements of Western population will create a dead level of speech, approximating accuracy, so that in a typical American State like Indiana local usages will disappear, and the only oddities discernible will be those of the well-nigh universal slang, which even now reach Colorado and California almost as soon as they are known at the Atlantic seaboard. At the South and in New England, where there is less mingling of elements, the old usages will probably endure much longer ”