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