The Continuing Tradition: Sentimental Humor
[In the following excerpt, Kindilien catalogues those attributes that make Riley's poetry sentimental, notes the enormous popularity of sentimental literature in the late Victorian era, and ultimately dismisses Riley's “hundreds of verses” as having “no claim to distinction as poetry.”]
Most of the poetry of the Nineties was a sentimental expression. The successful poets had learned in newspaper offices that the sympathetic emotion could be marketed and they were willing to accentuate its place in literature. They had little reason to balk when they saw the success of Will Carleton and Jim Riley. Carleton had parlayed the emotional distortions of sentimentalism and cleaned the board when he turned up the old homestead. America's most popular poet of the Seventies, Will Carleton sold forty thousand copies of his Farm Ballads in eighteen months, and by the time of his death in 1912 over six hundred thousand copies of his books had been circulated. His “Over the Hill to the Poor-house” capsuled the appeal to the heart that became his stock in trade. Doting on the homely and the sentimental, he worked over the small town instincts with a catalog of banalities that were to become the stock in trade of the popularizers of rural domestic life in every section of America. James Whitcomb Riley, “the barefoot boy of Indiana,” had his first literary recognition during the Eighties when he wrote a series of letters in rustic dialect for an Indianapolis paper. Cashing in on the efforts of Lowell and Artemus Ward, he soon concentrated on the audience that had been prepared by Will Carleton. Once established in the old homestead period of American poetry, Riley gave up his former occupations—acting in a patent medicine show and painting advertisements on barns—and became a full time poet with a creed:
What We want, as I sense it, in the line
O' poetry is somepin' Yours and Mine—
Somepin' with live-stock in it, and out-doors,
And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores. …
Putt in old Nature's sermonts,—them's the best,—
And 'casion'ly hang up a hornets' nest
'At boys 'at's run away from school can git
At handy-like—and let 'em tackle it. …
We want some poetry 'at 's to Our taste,
Made out o' truck 'at 's to Our taste. …(1)
Riley spelled out for his school the “truck” that a market would accept. A versifier might vary the ingredients, but he had to make some appeal to the provincial heart. Riley's motto was “The heart is all,” and he touched it via the emotional stimuli of common objects, ordinary experience, and nostalgic reveries. In the framework of a summer day he could set a galley of barefoot boys, crippled children, and small-town characters that could not fail to find a response. He wrote his verses with his eye always on character; a reader would forget the rhyme and message, when he would not part with the “Ragged Man,” “Doc Sifers,” or “Little Orphant Annie.” The reader's attention had to be fixed on a person with whom he might come in sentimental rapport. Again, such an object as a trundle bed or a little white hearse or a place like the old swimming hole might be used as the emotional correlative. To this focal point, Riley adhered while he elaborated in a form that emphasized the common nature of the experience. Colloquial language, even illiteracies, brought the subject closer to the average reader who would have both his common feeling and his superior intellect thoroughly satisfied. The reader, triggered for a conditioned response, was eased into his reaction by the series of conventional images, rhyme schemes, and familiar subjects.
In the score of volumes which Riley published around the turn of the century he returned again and again to his three obsessions: childhood, family life, and the “Days gone by.” His longing for the past accounted for his representative subjects and moods. Sitting before the fireplace that did not cool off during this decade, Riley dozed and dreamed (in print) of the world of his youth: a world peopled with “dewy eyed” girls, “cooing” babies, and “barefooted, hungry, lean, or'n'ry boys.” The “old gang” itself was left to the readers' imagination; it did not guarantee the emotional kickback of a child in his coffin or of a “happy little cripple.” For a while a modern reader can accept the extravagant sentimentality of Riley's childhood world as the work of an oversensitive soul; but when he discovers Riley writing of a crippled child who thinks of his dead mother and his drunken father while he hums the refrain, “I got 'curv'ture of the spine,” the bottom has dropped out of emotional response. Riley has been remembered for two or three poems of childhood which are only slightly typical of his large effort in this type of verse. He was not interested, as Eugene Field was, in expanding or exploring a child's imagination; he looked only for a situation that would bring tears to a reader's eyes. The poem was never written for the child; it was written to commercialize the child's feelings.
While he concentrated on the youngsters, Riley did not neglect the sentimental possibilities of American family life. He was more careful in these poems not to distress his readers too deeply with pathos. The face of his mother looked out of the fireplace (“through the mist / Of the tears that are welling”), old friends wandered in and out of his verses, and he cataloged household furnishings with the zeal of a poetic auctioneer. Even more of his attention was devoted to a general groan for the happy days gone by. For the clear expression of this emotion, in such a poem as “The Old Swimmin'-Hole,” Riley does deserve a word of praise; but the trite figures of speech and the confused point of view of this poem make a word adequate. Although he was sincere enough in his regret at the passing of the “golden olden glory,” sincerity can not justify his presentation.
In a few of his volumes, Riley deserted these themes to write of “natchur” and “sparkin' days.” He tried to be a Hoosier Madison Cawein, just as earlier he had kept in mind the romantic verses of Keats and Longfellow (“John Alden and Percilly”). He wrote “An Idyl of the King” in Tennysonian blank verse, he paid his respects to John Brown, and he even had some lines for the Wandering Jew. He used conventional forms throughout, although he did add a trademark with his ladder stanza. Poetry for Riley was a matter of finding unpretentious rhyme words that gave his lines the effect of a nursery rhyme. Many of his verses were prepared for public recital; he appeared frequently on the platform with his friend Bill Nye. The attention given to dialect and oral effects in his verses was the result of his interest in the stage and in newspaper humor. He experimented with various idioms and with numerous dialects in his attempts to rework his limited interests. He padded his volumes with the rankest imitations, for there were only so many variations on the old routines of childhood, family, and the lost past.
Riley's hundreds of verses have no claim to distinction as poetry. He was popular because he gave the audience the emotional needle it wanted and because he demanded nothing but a relaxed mind. Some place might be made for him in the tradition of dialect verse which began in America with Lowell, for his dialect verses reflect his only originality. While he exploited his region as a local colorist might have, he showed no concern for a faithful reproduction. In the end, his subjects, his attitudes, and his language were keyed to the sentimental tradition. Sentimentalism was the marketable commodity which “Sunny Jim” Riley picked up at the beginning of his career and successfully peddled during the Nineties. In the fourteen volumes of his collected work, a reader of American poetry may see the last full expression of the sentimental tradition in American poetry—and the reasons for its disappearance.
Local color poems, dialect verses, lullabies, burlesques, and parodies, and a variety of sentimental subjects became the order of the day for young writers who saw the success of Carleton and Riley. The journalization of literature went forward in every region of the United States during the Nineties as writers made their way to the front by touching the funny bones of the sentimental reader.
Note
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James Whitcomb Riley, Poems Here at Home (New York, 1893), pp. 8-9.
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