The Frontier and James Whitcomb Riley
[In the following essay, Farrell analyzes the sociological significance of Riley's sentimentality and nostalgia at a time when America was becoming increasingly urban and industrial.]
II
One of the problems of cultural history and analysis which is all too infrequently dealt with in America is this—how does the consciousness of writers evolve, develop, take shape in this country? Here, however, I can only suggest that such a problem should be posed and dealt with, and that it is also pertinent to the works of James Whitcomb Riley.
The analysis presented above should suggest the kind of cultural climate in which Riley grew up. Riley spoke at length of his boyhood, and his remarks are copiously quoted in Marcus Dickey's, The Youth of James Whitcomb Riley. Riley loved nature. He loved the streams, the fields. He hated and resented school. In after years, he spoke of school with contempt, because of the discipline of the three R's, the whippings, the floggings, and the boresomeness of the appeal to pure verbal authority.
“Omit the schoolmarm from my history entirely,” he said to Marcus Dickey, “and the record of my career would not be seriously affected.” Reading this and other and longer statements which he made to Marcus Dickey, I am inclined to suspect that he was overstating his resentment, and that there is in his words something of the affected note of a man consciously speaking to impress an audience by an appeal to stereotyped attitudes.
However, I do believe that there was no such affectation in another of his remarks to Mr. Dickey when he said of himself that he “was a timid boy as I have been a bashful man.” To me, the over-crystallized nostalgia for his own boyhood at a time when dreams and anticipations never came true strongly suggests timidity. Likewise, his stereotyped poems sentimentally dismissing the attractions of fame, suggest the desire for fame on the part of one who, while bashful and timid, is also highly self-centered and ambitious.
However, these remarks can lead us into psychological speculation. Let it suffice for our purposes here that we accept his own statement about his timidity.
Marcus Dickey remarked of Riley that “The pioneer past was a rich landscape for” him. At the time Riley attended school—school that was pretty much of a closed and narrowed universe for him—there was that continuing flow of new pioneers, roustabouts, itinerants, nondescripts and others, past the schoolhouse. School and knowledge signified a discipline of the three R's imposed by adults. But outside the wagons flowed on to the West.
Besides, there was that world of nature he loved. Here was a rich and open world of material to feed the senses of boys. The world of pioneer America was a rich one for boys because there was so much upon which the senses could feed, so much upon which the imagination could fasten. There was the awesome beauty of nature, there was a sense of space, there was the animal world, and there was the opportunity for free and wide-ranging play.
Along with this, there was a social world of building, of motion, which embodied a genuine confidence in the future. Careers were open. To the West there was free land. Many who were dissatisfied could pick up and move on. These boys were the sons or the grandsons of those who had left their homes to forge ahead through the Cumberland Gap and over the Alleghenies to this new world.
We see then that there was a social basis for the kind and quality of dreams and experiences of many boys in the American Midwest, prior to the Civil War. All of us are, more or less, nostalgic for our childhood. This note of nostalgia for childhood, which was expressed by Howells, by Mark Twain, and which was one of the major, if stereotyped, themes of James Whitcomb Riley, can, in the light of these remarks, become doubly understandable to us.
I have mentioned James Whitcomb Riley's resentment of school. This seems to be part of a commonplace and possibly affected resentment of authority which we can find in his life, but not in his work. The Rileys were poor in the post-Civil War days. Riley's father, a village lawyer, never recouped what he lost by serving in the Union Army.
One night in his youth, Riley dressed up to go out: he was dressed very shabbily. His father, noticing this, told him that he could come into the garden and hoe. Riley obeyed. But suddenly, he threw his hoe over the fence and into the garden of a neighbor. This was his declaration of independence.
At a later date, when speaking of this incident in his life, he said: “I used language that would sear the walls of a synagogue. I resolved never to work with a hoe again—and I never did.” After throwing the hoe over the fence, Riley marched off, resolute and angry. From this time on, his relationships with his father were strained.
During this youthful period, he worked at various jobs, and then he became an itinerant. When he first began to write verse, his father believed that this was not a proper career for a young man. But while Riley avowed that he had no objection, per se, to working with a hoe, he did not want this kind of work for himself.
We cannot attempt to analyze this action of Riley's fully, but we can note that involved in it was the dawning of cultural aspiration. And this dawning of cultural aspiration in American youth is something much more common than many may be aware of. There have been American youths throwing away their hoes, literally or symbolically, for many decades. This is a natural, normal, and fairly characteristic aspect of American experiences. Riley's action here forms the pattern for the actions of many American writers of widely varying degrees of talent and achievement.
Since Horace Gregory and Mrs. Jeannette Nolan have discussed Riley's verse in detail in the other chapters of this book, I shall confine myself to a few rather general and characterizing observations.
Riley's verse emphasizes a feeling for security. It gives almost endless expression to received sentiments. It tends to ritualize human emotions in terms of accepted sentimentalities. I have already spoken of the awesomeness of the open world of pioneer America. Life was, as it were, very new and very young and it was changing and full of motion. But there is, also, much evidence to suggest that many hungered for security. The history of the building of the American continent shows how many went so far, emigrated, set up their stakes in a new place and there settled down, wanting, for themselves, no more change and uncertainty.
This desire for security has permeated small town life. The sentimentality of Riley—at times his verse became like a fog of sentimentality—seems to me to be but one of many expressions of this feeling for security. The emotions which he expressed are usually safe. They are lost in nostalgia, quilted in formalized reveries, and they are rarely spontaneous.
Insecurity, adventure, freedom is expressed, largely, in the image of the ragged and shabby itinerant who is a stage or typed character. Riley's verses are highly self-centered, and again and again, satisfaction is expressed in terms of cliché. In particular, love is rendered into a cozy cliché. Thus, these concluding stanzas from “An Old Sweetheart of Mine”:
When we should live together in a cozy little cot
Hid in a nest of roses, with a fairy garden spot,
Where the vines were ever fruited, and the weather ever fine,
And the birds were ever singing for that old sweetheart of mine.
When I should be her lover forever and a day
And she my faithful sweetheart till the golden hair was gray;
And we should be so happy that when either's lip were dumb
They would not smile in Heaven till the other's kiss had come.
Many favor Riley's dialect poems and value them more highly than his formal verse. These offended such an Easterner as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, whom I have quoted above. In these, something of the life and interests of the farmers and of small town life creeps into the lines, but these are also usually stereotyped. They contain lines which are also fresh or perceptive, but as a whole, this dialect poetry is contrived and artificial. However, it does reveal something of the life, the character, the social relationships and interests of the farmers and small town people of his time. It gives a mirror—often distorted by sentimentality and artificiality, however—of the times.
Donald Culross Peattie, in his Preface, “Riley as a Nature Poet,” to The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley, divided nature poets into two schools: “ … those who find in Nature, a reflection of their own moods or a sermon for human betterment, like Wordsworth, and that rarer sort that tries to echo Nature with her own voice. It is a comparatively easy and pleasant thing to talk about one's self; apparently it is harder, as the naturalists already know, to report Nature.”1 Peattie, in this brief Preface, was setting up a misleading contrast here, for he used this contrast in order to establish Riley's reputation as a nature poet.
This is unnecessary, and like most such comparisons and contrasts, when used to hail a writer, it lacks validity. It is open to question as to whether or not we can say that nature has moods. The major illustration from Riley's poems which Peattie cited, was a descriptive one, delineating a blue jay. Peattie's inconsistency here suggests the misleading character of his unnecessary comparison with Wordsworth. I should agree with Peattie that Riley was a nature poet. His observation of phases of nature, of birds, of trees, fields, streams and sky was often very clear. And he, at times, registered seasonal changes with high suggestive power. I would here especially cite his poem, “August.”
But Riley talked about himself in his nature poetry, as much as, if not more than, did Wordsworth. And usually he talked about himself less interestingly. He often used nature as a means of alluding to banal reveries which he allegedly had. He marred his nature poetry with accounts of his ever-recurrent and weak nostalgia for the boyhood and the boyhood dreams and visions, which “never came true.”
Riley's poetry is part of the regional literature of the Midwest, generally characterized by Frederick Jackson Turner in the quotation which I have cited above. It was largely “imitative and reflective of common things in a not uncommon way.” It contained, in some of the dialect poetry, especially “Little Orphant Annie,” elements of a new expression, and of native humor. And it contained passages of true nature poetry, revealing feeling for the barnyards, fields, trees, streams, and skies of Indiana. This contrasted with his many crystallized sentimentalities.
Furthermore, he was, at times, bumptious and bucolic. His feeling of individualism at times approaches a rigid self-centeredness, as well as a confidence about the community in which he lived. This spilled over into parochialism. His work can be related to that of such writers as George Ade and Booth Tarkington, but this is a task that must be left for another occasion.
Riley can also be seen as a Midwestern phenomenon at a time of change. There is, in my mind, a sociological significance in his sentimentality, in his demonstration of a will for security in a world of change. He reveals an inner world at great variance with a changing outer world. He drew on the sources of culture brought into the West with the pioneers, and added to these touches of the new and evolving life which was being created all about him.
But he closed out of his verse more of this new world than he let into it. Again and again he tamed this world, and locked it up safely in his clichés of emotion, as Whitman and as Mark Twain did not do. We can here note how he reveals the dissociation which I have commented on above. He drew on resources from without, from English literature in particular, but only to make of these an imputation which was not individualized, not used as a cultural heritage to be assimilated as part of the cultural background from which the New World culture would be created.
After all, he wrote very many poems like “A Life-Lesson,” which I quote in full:
There! little girl; don't cry!
They have broken your doll, I know;
And your tea-set blue,
And your play-house too,
Are things of the long-ago;
But childish troubles will soon pass by—
There! little girl; don't cry!
There! little girl; don't cry!
They have broken your slate, I know;
And the glad, wild ways
Of your schoolgirl days
Are things of the long ago;
But life and love will soon come by—
There! little girl; don't cry!
There! little girl; don't cry!
They have broken your heart, I know;
And the rainbow gleams
Of your youthful dreams
Are things of the long ago;
But Heaven holds all for which you sigh—
There! little girl; don't cry!
The “long ago” of Riley was usually the dreamed-of “never was,” which walled out the spontaneous welling up of dream and feeling and emotion and aspiration which is, or should be, part of every human life. The “long ago” was a dream of false inner security.
III
Writing about “An American Literature” in Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman stated:
What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local courage, sanity, of our own. … But always, instead, a parcel of dandies and ennuyees, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rhymes, the five-hundredth importation—or whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women.
And in contrast to this, Whitman spoke of the possibilities of a great new poetry in this country. “America,” he asserted, in this same essay,
demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest models of the past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only.
And he also declared that this prophetic poetry which he called “the divine pride of man in himself” should be placed “in the van.”
What Whitman called for, in such lines as those I have quoted, should be regarded as a perspective, and not as a rigidly accepted program. And the most important emphasis in Whitman's perspective is on the meaningfulness of the experiences of Americans in their new world. Whitman was profoundly aware that a new world was in the making. He hailed science and technology. But more than anything else, he emphasized the importance, the dignity of each and every human being.
In another portion of Democratic Vistas, he wrote:
As I perceive, the tendencies of our day, in the States (and I entirely respect them) are toward those vast and sweeping movements, influences, moral and physical, of humanity … on the scale of the impulses of the elements. Even for the treatment of the universal, in politics, in metaphysics, or anything, sooner or later, we come down to one single, solitary soul.
Many others beside Whitman have stressed the need for a new culture in America. I have chosen to cite and quote Whitman here because he perceived, so clearly, that men must be seen as ends, not as means or instruments, and that a new culture must celebrate the dignity of men and women. This truism is at the roots of all great cultural traditions.
However, I think it necessary to add that dignity is not to be seen in an honorific sense. One does not attribute dignity to men and women by flattering them, by falsifying the nature of their emotions, or by neglecting to try and understand more than we now do of the nature of their experience. It is not by mere elegance of language, by hymns of virtue and purity, by an ostrich-like attitude toward what is weak in men that we see their real, or their potential dignity. In substance, we can state that Whitman called for a poetry, a literature that would honestly explore the nature of experience in America.
We are familiar enough with the general nature of the changes which have come about, not only in America but in the entire world, during the hundred years since James Whitcomb Riley was born. These have come “on a scale of the impulses of the elements.” Thus, the beginnings of the discovery concerning the use of atomic energy.
We seem more than a century away from our forbears of 1851. Our inner world seems to us to be different from theirs. Collectively, we possess much more power than they possessed: individually, we feel much less confident, much less secure than they felt. Collectively, we live in a world of greater danger and menace than they did: individually and in a temporary social sense, we seem to be more secure from visible dangers. We face no dangers of the wilderness. Our wilderness is ourselves, our emotions, our fears, our anxieties, our despairs, our individual and lonely fears, in the face of the collective power of man to utilize the very “impulses of the elements” in a way that can destroy us all.
Materially, we have seen the day when many of the promises of American life have been fulfilled. Socially, and in a human sense, we are far, very far from achieving even an approximation of these promises. Some of the best of our modern American literature, for instance the work of Theodore Dreiser and of Sherwood Anderson, has dramatized this fact. It has dramatized something of the story of what the development of American civilization has cost in terms of the quality of ideals in America, and in terms, also, of what this has meant emotionally and psychologically.
The type of security which was reflected in Riley's writings—and about which I have commented above—is non-existent. His verse here might be described as an unreal little dream village in a world of social and psychological wilderness. And this social and psychological wilderness might also be described as the new American frontier of our day.
When Riley was born, there was a great physical and material unknown not far beyond the Indiana horizon. Today, we can say that there is a great psychological and social unknown and that it is in ourselves, and in each and every “single, solitary soul.” America was discovered by Columbus. It was conquered and built up to its present state of power and greatness by the pioneers and by many of the sons and daughters of the pioneers. The new discovery of America, the re-discovery of America, awaits us and our children. And this re-discovery must involve the winning of a greater sense of what all of this has meant, and what all of this felt like, not only to masses, but again, to the single, solitary soul, to many single solitary souls. And literature is one of the most powerful of human inventions which permit us to make such revelations.
We are still linked with our pioneer and our frontier past. It is our social and cultural womb. Its democratic hopes, its independence, its courage, all of this has been passed on to us. And this legacy has been personified for us most admirably in such great figures as Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain.
The American past, the American present, the American future are all part of an undiscovered cultural world. The “long ago” of our history was a world of human beings as complex, as fallible, as psychologically complicated as we are, or as we may deem ourselves to be. What they did needs to be understood.
That increased understanding can amount to an enlargement and to a re-discovery of the past. The past, coming down to us in traditions, should not be a dead and rigid system of formal wisdom, of sentiments hallowed by honorific words, of merely received opinions and received sentiments. Rather, it should be part of a living tradition that transmits what has been done, what has been thought, what has been experienced and felt. In our culture, in our literature, we can strive to carry this on, and we can strive to transmit something of what we have done, what we have thought, what we have experienced and felt.
But to try and achieve this, we need to stimulate new and sincere cultural impulses all over this country. Some inspiration—much inspiration—can be drawn from the frontier and pioneer past. But this should be an inspiration to encourage us in using our own eyes and in seeing with them. We can continue the best of this tradition by trying to clear and to conquer our own social and psychological wilderness. To do this, we need to understand more, and to feel more deeply. And a frank and fearless contemporary literature can help us to try and do this.
Writing of “The West and American Ideals,” Frederick Jackson Turner took Tennyson's Ulysses as a symbol. These lines of Tennyson which he quoted are so appropriate that I shall re-quote them here.
… I am become a name
For always roaming with an hungry heart,
Much have I seen and known …
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch, where thro'
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a shining star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
… Come my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the Western stars until I die
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.
American literature, can seek, like Ulysses, to become that name for the experiences of the men and women who live as citizens of the nation that has been built out of a wilderness.
Note
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The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley. Copyright, 1937. Used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.
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