James Whitcomb Riley

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The Hoosier Interpreted: James Whitcomb Riley

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SOURCE: Nicholson, Meredith. “The Hoosier Interpreted: James Whitcomb Riley.” In The Hoosiers, pp. 156-76. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1900.

[In the following essay, Nicholson argues that Riley is both an important regional and an important national writer.]

Crabbe and Burns are Mr. Riley's forefathers in literature. Crabbe was the pioneer in what may be called the realism of poetry; it was he who rejected the romantic pastoralism that had so long peopled the British fields with nymphs and shepherds, and introduced the crude but actual country folk of England. The humor, the bold democracy, and the social sophistication that he lacked were supplied in his own day by Burns, and Burns had, too, the singing instinct and the bolder art of which there are no traces in Crabbe. Something of Crabbe's realism and Burns's humor and philosophy are agreeably combined in Mr. Riley. His first successes were achieved in the portrayal of the Indiana country and village folk in dialect. He has rarely seen fit to vary his subject, and he has been faithful to the environment from which he derived his inspiration. James Whitcomb Riley is an interesting instance—perhaps, after Whittier, the most striking in our literature—of a natural poet, taking his texts from the familiar scenes and incidents of his own daily walks, and owing little or nothing to the schools. He was born at Greenfield, the seat of Hancock County, in 1849. His father, Reuben A. Riley, was a native of Pennsylvania, of Dutch antecedents, though there is a tradition of Irish ancestry in the family. He was a lawyer, who enjoyed a wide reputation as an advocate, and was long reckoned among the most effective political speakers in Indiana. He was a discriminating reader and an occasional writer of both prose and verse. The poet's mother was a Marine, of a family in which an aptness for rhyming was characteristic. 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 of education, but who walk through the world with their eyes open, adding daily to their stock of knowledge. Bagehot enlarges on this trait as he discovers it in Shakespeare, “throughout all whose writings,” he says, “you see an amazing sympathy with common people.” The common people caught and held the attention of Mr. Riley, and as the annalist of their simple lives he established himself firmly in public affection. The half a dozen colleges within a radius of fifty miles of his home did not attract him; he was bred to no business, but followed in a tentative way occupations that brought him into contact with people. He began to write because he felt the impulse, and not because he breathed a literary atmosphere or looked forward to a literary career. His imagination needed some outlet, and he made verses just as he drew pictures or acquired a knack at playing the guitar, taking one talent about as seriously as the other. A Western county seat, with its daily advent of pilgrims from the farms, affords an entertaining panorama for a bright boy, and Mr. Riley began in his youth that careful observation of the Indiana country folk, their ways and their speech, that was later to afford him a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material.

He had in his younger days something of Artemus Ward's fondness for a hoax, and he wrote “Leonaine,” in imitation of Poe's manner, with so marked success that several critics of discernment received the poem, and the story of its discovery in an old school reader, in good faith. In the experimental period of his career he read widely and to good purpose, learning the mechanics of prosody from the best models. His ear was naturally good, and he was distinctly original in his ideas of form. He delighted in the manipulation of words into odd and surprising combinations, and though the results were not always dignified, they were, nevertheless, curious and amusing, and brought him a degree of local fame. Mr. Riley's contributions were wholly to newspapers through many years, during which the more deliberate periodicals would have none of him. He printed poems in the Herald, an Indianapolis weekly paper, in which the poems of Edith M. Thomas and others who have since gained a literary reputation first saw the light; and having attracted the attention of E. B. Martindale, the owner of the Indianapolis Journal, he was regularly employed on that paper, between 1877 and 1885, printing many of his best pieces there. He had the pleasure of seeing his verses widely copied at that period, when the newspaper press was his only medium of communication, and before he had printed a volume. His first marked recognition followed the publication in the Journal of a series of poems signed “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone,” which not only awakened wide interest, but gave direction to a talent that had theretofore been without definite aim. He encouraged the idea that the poems were really the work of a countryman, and prefaced them with letters in prose to add to their air of authenticity, much as Lowell introduced the “Biglow Papers.” This series included “Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer,” “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” and “To My Old Friend, William Leachman,” which were winningly unaffected and simple, bearing out capitally the impression of a bucolic poet celebrating his own joys and sorrows. The charm of the “Benj. F. Johnson” series lay in their perfect suggestion of a whimsical, lovable character, and wherever Mr. Riley follows the method employed first in those pieces, he never fails of his effect.

It should be remembered, in passing from Riley masquerading as “Benj. F. Johnson” to Riley undisguised, that two kinds of dialect are represented. 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. Lowell, with his own New England particularly in mind, said that “almost every county has some good diesinker in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the whole neighborhood”; and this may be applied generally to the South and West. Mr. Riley writes always with his eye on a character; and those who question his dialect do not understand that there is ever present in his mind a real individual. The feeling and the incident are not peculiar to the type; they usually lie within the range of universal experience; but the expression, the manner, the figure of the subject, are suggested in the poem, not by speech alone, but by the lilt of the line and the form of the stanza. Mr. Riley is more interested in odd characters, possessing marked eccentricities, than in the common, normal type of the farm or the country town, and the dialect that he employs often departs from the usual vocabulary of the illiterate in the field he studies, and follows lines of individual idiosyncrasy. The shrewdly humorous farmer who is a whimsical philosopher and rude moralist delights him. This character appears frequently in his poems, often mourning for the old times, now delighting in “noon-time an' June-time, down around the river”; and again expressing contentment with his own lot, averring that “they's nothin' much patheticker 'n just a-bein' rich.” To these characters he gives a dialect that is fuller than the usual rural speech: ministratin' (ministering), resignated (resigned), artificialer (more artificial), competenter (more competent), tractabler (more tractable), and familiously (familiarly), not being properly in the Hoosier lingua rustica, but easily conceivable as possible deviations. Mr. Riley has been criticised for imputing to his characters such phrases as “when the army broke out” and “durin' the army,” referring to the Civil War, and many careful observers declare that he could never have heard these phrases; but very likely he has heard them from the eccentric countrymen for whom he has so strong an affinity; or he may have coined them outright as essential to the interpretation of such characters. In the main, however, he may be followed safely as an accurate guide in the speech of the Southeastern element of the population, and his questionable usages and inconsistencies are few and slight, as the phrase “don't you know,” which does not always ring true, or “again” and “agin,” used interchangeably and evidently as the rhyme may hint. The abrupt beginning of a sentence, frequently noticed in Mr. Riley's dialect verses, is natural. The illiterate often experience difficulty in opening a conversation, expressing only a fragment, to which an interlocutor must prefix for himself the unspoken phrases. There is no imposition in Mr. Riley's dialect, for his amplifications of it are always for the purpose of aiding in the suggestion of a character as he conceives it; he does not pretend that he portrays in such instances a type found at every cross-roads. “Doc Sifers” and “The Raggedy Man” are not peculiar to Indiana, but have their respective counterparts in such characters as Mark Twain's “Pudd'n-head Wilson” and the wayside tramp, who has lately been a feature of farce comedy rather than of our social economy. “Fessler's Bees,” “Nothin' to say,” “Down to the Capital,” “A Liz-town Humorist,” and “Squire Hawkins's Story” show Mr. Riley at his happiest as a delineator of the rural type. In these sketches he gives in brief compass the effect of little dramas, now humorous, now touched with simple and natural pathos, and showing a nice appreciation of the color of language which is quite as essential in dialect as in pure English. But it matters little that the dramatis personæ change, or that the literary method varies; the same kindliness, the same blending of humor and pathos, and the same background of “green fields and running brooks” characterize all. “The crude man is,” the poet believes, “generally moral,” and the Riley Hoosier is intuitively religious, and is distinguished by his rectitude and sense of justice.

Mr. Riley made his work effective through the possession of a sound instinct for appraising his material, combined with a good sense of proportion. His touch grew steadily firmer, and he became more fastidious as the public made greater demands upon him; for while his poems in dialect gained him a hearing, he strove earnestly for excellence in the use of literary English. He has written many poems of sentiment gracefully and musically, and with no suggestion of dialect. Abundant instances of his felicity in the strain of retrospect and musing might be cited. The same chords have been struck time and time again; but they take new life when he touches them, as in “The All-Golden”:—

I catch my breath, as children do
In woodland swings when life is new,
And all the blood is warm as wine
And tingles with a tang divine. …
O gracious dream, and gracious time,
And gracious theme, and gracious rhyme—
When buds of Spring begin to blow
In blossoms that we used to know,
And lure us back along the ways
Of time's all-golden yesterdays!

It is not the farmer alone whose simple virtues appeal to him; but rugged manhood anywhere commands his tribute, and he has hardly written a more touching lyric than “Away,” whose subject was an Indiana soldier:—

I cannot say, and I will not say
That he is dead—He is just away!

He has his own manner of expressing an idea, and this individuality is so marked that it might lead to the belief that he had little acquaintance with the classic English writers. But his series of imitations, including the prose of Scott and Dickens and the characteristic poems of Tennyson and Longfellow, are certainly the work of one who reads to good purpose and has a feeling for style. When he writes naturally there is no trace of bookishness in his work; he rarely or never invokes the mythologies, though it has sometimes pleased him to imagine Pan piping in Hoosier orchards. He is read and quoted by many who are not habitual readers of poetry—who would consider it a sign of weakness to be caught in the act of reading poems of any kind, but who tolerate sentiment in him because he makes it perfectly natural and surrounds it with a familiar atmosphere of reality. The average man must be trapped into any display of emotion, and Mr. Riley spreads for him many nets from which there is no escape, as in “Nothin' to say, my daughter,” where the subject is the loneliness and isolation of the father whose daughter is about to marry, and who faces the situation clumsily, in the manner of all fathers, rich or poor. The remembrance of the dead wife and mother adds to the pathos here. The old man turns naturally to the thought of her:—

You don't rickollect her, I reckon? No; you wasn't a year old then!
And now yer—how old air you? W'y, child, not ‘twenty’! When?
And yer nex' birthday's in Aprile? and you want to git married that day?
I wisht yer mother was livin'!—but I hain't got nothin' to say!
Twenty year! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found!
There's a straw ketched onto yer dress there—I'll bresh it off—turn round.
(Her mother was jest twenty when us two run away.)
Nothin' to say, my daughter! Nothin' at all to say!

The drolleries of childhood have furnished Mr. Riley subjects for some of his most original and popular verses. Here, again, he does not accept the conventional children of literature, whom he calls “the refined children, the very proper children—the studiously thoughtful, poetic children”; but he seeks “the rough-and-tumble little fellows ‘in hodden gray,’ with frowzly heads, begrimed but laughing faces, and such awful vulgarities of naturalness, and crimes of simplicity, and brazen faith and trust, and love of life and everybody in it!” It is in this spirit that he presents now the naïve, now the perversely erring, and again the eerie and elfish child. He is a master of those enchantments of childhood that transfigure and illumine and create a world of the imagination for the young that is undiscoverable save to the elect few. He does not write patronizingly to his audience; but listens, as one should listen in the realm of childhood, with serious attention, and then becomes an amanuensis, transcribing the children's legends and guesses at the riddle of existence in their own language. “The Raggedy Man” is not a romantic figure; he is the shabby chore-man of the well-to-do folk in the country town, and the friend and oracle of small boys. His mind is filled with rare lore, he—

Knows 'bout Giunts, an' Griffuns an' Elves
An' the Squidgicum-Squees 'at swallers therselves!

And he may be responsible, too, for “Little Orphant Annie's” knowledge of the “Gobbleuns,” which Mr. Riley turned into the most successful of all his juvenile pieces. He reproduces most vividly a child's eager, breathless manner of speech, and the elisions and variations that make the child-dialect. Interspersed through “The Child World,” a long poem in rhymed couplets, are a number of droll juvenile recitatives; but this poem has a much greater value than at first appears. It presents an excellent picture of domestic life in a western country town, and the town is Mr. Riley's own Greenfield, on the National Road. This poem is a faithful chronicle, lively and humorous, full of the local atmosphere, and never dull. The descriptions of the characters are in Mr. Riley's happiest vein: the father of the house, a lawyer and leading citizen; the patient mother; the children with their various interests, leading up to “Uncle Mart,” the printer, who aspired to be an actor—

He joyed in verse-quotations—which he took
Out of the old “Type Foundry Specimen Book.”

The poem is written in free, colloquial English, broken by lapses into the vernacular. It contains some of his best writing, and proves him to possess a range and breadth of vision that are not denoted in his lyrical pieces alone. “The Flying Islands of the Night, a fantastic drama in verse,” his only other effort of length, was written earlier. It abounds in the curious and capricious, but it lacks in simplicity and reserve—qualities that have steadily grown in him.

Humor is preëminent in Mr. Riley, and it suggests that of Dickens in its kinship with pathos. It seems to be peculiar to the literature of lowly life that there is heartache beneath much of its gayety, and tears are almost inevitably associated with its laughter. Mr. Riley never satirizes, never ridicules his creations; his attitude is always that of the kindly and admiring advocate; and it is by enlisting the sympathy of his readers, suggesting much to their feeling and imagination, and awakening in them a response that aids and supplements his own work, that Mr. Riley has won his way to the popular heart. The restraints of fixed forms have not interfered with his adequate expression of pure feeling. This is proved by the sonnet, “When She Comes Home Again,” which is one of the tenderest of his poems. In the day that saw many of his contemporaries in the younger choir of poets carving cherry stones of verse after French patterns he found old English models sufficient, and his own whim supplied all the variety he needed. Heroic themes have not tempted him; he has never attained sonority or power, and has never needed them; but melody and sweetness and a singular gift of invention distinguish him.

Many imitators have paid tribute to Mr. Riley's dialect verse, for most can grow the flowers after the seed have been freely blown in the market-place. Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid to Mr. Riley's essential veracity is to compare the verse of those who have made attempts similar to his own. He is, for example, a much better artist than Will Carleton, who came before him, and whose “Farm Ballads” are deficient in humor; and he possesses a breadth of sympathy and a depth of sincerity that Eugene Field did not attain in dialect verse, though Field's versatility and fecundity were amazing. There is nowhere in Mr. Riley a trace of the coarse brutality with which Mr. Hamlin Garland, for example, stamps the life of a region lying farther west. There is no point of contact between Lowell and Mr. Riley in their dialectic performances, as civic matters do not interest the Indianian; and his view of the Civil War becomes naturally that of the countryman who looks back with wistful melancholy, not to the national danger and dread, but to the neighborhood's glory and sorrow, as in “Good-by, Jim.” It might also be said that Mr. Riley has never put the thoughts of statesmen into the mouths of countrymen, as Lowell did, consistency being one of his qualities. There has sprung up in Mr. Riley's time a choir of versifiers who are journalistic rather than literary, and who write for the day, much as the reporters do. Mr. Riley, more than any one else, has furnished the models for these, and it would seem that verses could be multiplied interminably, or so long as such refrains as “When father winds the clock” and “The hymns that mother used to sing” can be found for texts.

With the publication of the “Benj. F. Johnson” poems in a paper-covered booklet, Mr. Riley's literary career began. The intervening years have brought him continuous applause; his books of verse have been sold widely in this country and in England, and that, too, in “the twilight of the poets,” with its contemporaneous oblivion for many who have labored bravely in the paths of song. He early added to his reputation as a writer that of a most successful reader of his own poems, and on both sides of the Atlantic his work and his unique personality have won for him the friendship of many distinguished literary men of the day. It is to be said that the devotion of the people of his own State to their poet, from first to last, has been marked by a cordiality and loyalty that might well be the envy of any man in any field of endeavor. No other Western poet has ever occupied a similar place; and the reciprocal devotion, on the other hand, of the poet to his own people, is not less noteworthy or admirable. He has always resented the suggestion that he should leave Indiana for Boston or New York, where he might be more in touch with the makers of books; and in recent years he purchased the old family residence at Greenfield, to which he returns frequently for rest and inspiration. For fifteen years he has been the best-known figure in Indianpolis, studying with tireless attention the faces in the streets, nervously ranging the book-stores, and often sitting down to write a poem at the desk of some absentee in the Journal office. His frequent reading and lecturing tours have been miserable experiences for him, as he is utterly without the instinct of locality, and has timidly sat in the hotels of strange towns for many hours for lack of the courage requisite for exploration. Precision and correctness have distinguished him in certain ways, being marked, for example, in matters of dress and in his handwriting; his manuscripts are flawlessly correct, and the slouch and negligence of the traditional poet are not observed in him.

His long list of books includes Afterwhiles (1887); Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury (1888); Old-fashioned Roses (1889); Rhymes of Childhood (1891); and Poems Here at Home (1897); and he has known the luxury of a cosmopolitan edition of his writings in a series that embraced the definitive Stevenson. Fame came to Mr. Riley when he was still young, and it is only a fair assumption that he has not exhausted his field, but that he will grow more and more secure in it. Serious work it has not always been possible for him to do, for his audience learned to expect humor in all his verses, and refused to be disappointed; but his ambition lies beyond humorous dialect, though he finds no fault with the public preference. All that he writes is welcome, for he is a preacher of sound optimism and a sincere believer in the final good that comes to all.

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