[In the following essay, Revell examines several key Victorian influences on Riley's poetry, noting that on several occasions the poet's verse very closely resembles the work of such “fireside poets” as Eliza Cook.]

In replying to a request from W. D. Howells for contributions to The Cosmopolitan, Riley asked: “But do you want dialect—or serious work—or both.”¹ The implication that work in dialect could not be serious is more typical of the general critical attitude of the late nineteenth century than of Riley's attitude to his own work (though perhaps one reason for his general tendency to deprecate its value). Serious poetry was that written in “correct” English, but there was plenty of scope within this style for a greater or lesser admixture of poetic diction for the advocates of simple and natural language, and for those who favored a more ornate style and the use of “classical” (that is, European) models.

As we have seen, Riley favored a plain style. The volume of his collected letters contains several to aspiring poets, in response to the kind of requests for advice which he had occasionally sent to established writers when himself a beginner. A letter to Mrs. R. E. Jones dated August 4, 1880, sets out very clearly Riley's views on this subject:

Another thing I speak of before leaving this modus-operandi outline of how I write for market—and that is: We are writing for today, and for the general reader—who, by the bye, is anything but a profound or classical scholar. Therefore, it has been, and is, my effort to avoid all phrases, words or reference of the oldtime order of literature; and to avoid, too, the very acquaintance of it—because we are apt to absorb more or less of the peculiar ideas, methods, etc. of those authors we read; and as everything is right in its place—so the old authors are right in the past—while new ones must be here in the present. … Whenever I am forced to say a commonplace thing it is my effort, at least, to say it as it never has been said before—if such a thing can be done without an apparent strain.²

Writing to the same person on December 22, 1880, Riley advises: “You must, in writing for our modern market, avoid most vigilantly all methods and mannerisms of the old writers in old words, phrases, etc.—for instance, such words as er'st, wa'st, Thou'rt—and the numberless others of that order … they can't be used without betraying affectation, strain, superfluity.”³

I. SOURCES

These letters were written comparatively early in Riley's career, but at a date when his newspaper reputation was consolidated and he was beginning to gain acceptance by the magazines. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Riley's advice, but, in writing “for market … for today—for the general reader,” he inevitably wrote (when not writing in dialect) in the currently popular style, which was one deriving—or degenerating—from the poets of early and mid-nineteenth-century England. Lowell, who has the last word on this subject in A Fable for Critics, says:

But what's that? a mass meeting? No, there come in lots
The American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts,
And in short the American everything-elses
.....With you every year a whole crop is begotten,
They're as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton;
Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties
That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;
I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,
.....A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons.(4)

Poe's essay “Mr. Griswold and the Poets” makes the same point. Even if the models were American, the sources of subject-matter and style were still likely to be European. Thus, Riley could advise his friend Elizabeth Kahle that “I'm going to positively forbid your reading that misanthropic old Byron, whose dark foreboding cheerless mutterings you sometimes quote to me; and instead command you to read my dear, rare, loveable Longfellow—who, however sad he gets, can always see a glorious promise somewhere on beyond.”⁵

Longfellow has the special merit of being both fundamentally optimistic and not belonging to the “old-time order of literature,” but Longfellow's work, as Newton Arvin reminds us, was saturated in the literature and culture of Western Europe.⁶ In dealing with native subjects, the popular writer of the Gilded Age, no less than one of the pre-Civil War period, was likely to adopt an “English” or “Victorian” style, even if it were obtained secondhand. Of the 159 obscure poetasters (of whom W. D. Howells is one) in the 688 closely printed pages in William T. Coggeshall's anthology The Poets and Poetry of the West,⁷ not one offers a single contribution in dialect. A few random samples suggest the typical treatment of American subjects: from Moses Brooks' “An Apostrophe to a Mound”—

Here stood a mound erected by a race
Unknown in history or poet's song,
Swept from the earth, nor even left a trace
Where the broad ruin rolled its tide along.
No hidden chronicle these piles among,
Or hieroglyphic monument survives
To tell their being's date or whence they sprung—
Whether from Gothic Europe's ‘northern hives’,
Or that devoted land where the dread siroc drives—

from Charles A. Jones' “Tecumseh”—

Where rolls the dark and turbid Thames
His consecrated wave along,
Sleeps one, than whose, few are the names
More worthy of the lyre and song;
Yet o'er whose spot of lone repose
No pilgrim eyes are seen to weep;
And no memorial marble throws
Its shadow where his ashes sleep—

or from Thomas Gregg's “Song of the Whippowil”—

The sun hath sunk beneath the west,
And dark the shadows fall;
I'll seek again my forest home,
And make my evening call.
The zephyr in the grove is hushed,
And every leaf is still;
So I will seek my wild retreat,
And chant my Whippowil.
                                                  Whippowil!(8)

Derivative poetasting of this kind may be taken as typical of the inheritance of popular culture which the readers and writers of Middle Western newspaper verse would have possessed in the Gilded Age. Robert P. Roberts has emphasized the continuity of popular culture at this period: “The Gilded Age was to a great degree, particularly in the popular arts, a product of the techniques and tastes of pre-Civil War America.”⁹ Roberts remarks that a “phase of [American] culture rarely dealt with, especially in this period, is the extent to which the traditional classical culture of western Europe belonged to the people and flourished on a popular level,” while he notes “the extent to which the traditional cultures of the Western world, albeit sometimes in debased forms, continued to hold sway in America.” The great popularity of the derivative culture of English novels and poems in the America of the second half of the nineteenth century is indicated as much by the large number of reprints in America as by the general tendency of popular American writers to imitate these models.

But, if the work of James Whitcomb Riley is any indication, there was a general shift in taste in the Gilded Age. Riley would have rejected the pseudo-Byronic ponderosity of the first two examples quoted from Coggeshall's anthology and the Moore-like tinkle of the third. About half of Riley's total output of verse is in what may be called “literary” (nondialect) English. The greater part of this half consists of poems of “Love,” of “Bereavement,” of “Art, Poetry and Music,”¹⁰ either in a style of lush exoticism compounded of the Tennyson of “Now sleeps the crimson petal,” the Elizabeth Barrett Browning of the “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” the D. G. Rossetti of the sonnets from “The House of Life,” and the “Sonnets for Pictures”—or in the style of jingling, even doggerel, simplicity perpetrated ad nauseam by the school of Eliza Cook and Mrs. Felicia Hemans.

II. THE LOVE POEMS

The Tennysonian exoticism of the love poems frequently merges in Riley's work with a native strain derived from Poe. Two of the poems collected in Afterwhiles may be taken to illustrate this. “Illileo” sets the beloved in a Tennysonian moonlit garden but her name is Italianate. She is like Psyche, and her poem has the liquid consonantal flow of Poe:—

Illileo Legardi, in the garden there alone,
With your figure carved of fervor, as the Psyche carved of stone,
There came to me no murmur of the fountain's undertone
So mystically, musically mellow as your own.

As the consonants fade to a hush (with much alliterative play to flatter the reciter's art), the poem is suddenly charged with an image of suppressed eroticism such as Tennyson might have used—

… the echoes faltered breathless in your voice's vain pursuit;
And there died the distant dalliance of the serenader's lute:
And I held you in my bosom as the husk may hold the fruit.

In the concluding lines, the two effects are combined in a note of passion sick to excess—

A moan goes with the music that may vex the high repose
Of a heart that fades and crumbles as the crimson of a rose.

The poem is, of course, not a conscious reworking of two styles of love poetry, one native and the other foreign, but a conscious contriving of effects by manipulating the resources of the general mass of love poetry, both English and American, of the mid-nineteenth century. It is not likely that the readers of ladies' magazines would have made the distinction.

Riley's love poetry in general inclines toward the style of Rossetti and his school, often with the associations of antiquity favored by the Pre-Raphaelite poets. This inclination is particularly noticeable in Riley's love sonnets, for example in “Her Hair,” which begins:

The beauty of her hair bewilders me—
Pouring adown the brow, its cloven tide
Swirling about the ears on either side
And storming down the neck tumultuously:
Or like the lights of old antiquity
          Through mullioned windows, in cathedrals wide,
          Spilled moltenly o'er figures deified
In chastest marble, nude of drapery.

Not infrequently a sepulchral note is added to enrich the passionate mood with a sense of earthly passion enduring beyond the grave, as in the third of the three sonnets entitled “Has She Forgotten,” when the lover left alone by the death of the beloved expresses his desire to “Lift from the grave her quiet lips, and stun / My senses with her kisses.”

Still another source of European exoticism in the popular love poetry of the Gilded Age was the lyrics and tales of Eastern passion typified by Byron's “Hebrew Melodies” and “Turkish Tales” and by Moore's “Lalla Rookh.” This strain was acclimated in the American tradition by such writers as William Wetmore Story, Bayard Taylor, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, all writers of the generation immediately preceding Riley's who produced their mature work in the 1850s and 1860s. Alfred Kreymborg interprets their choice of material as a means of handling the rawness of the American setting, simply by turning their backs on it.¹¹ In Story's hands, the style becomes almost an athletic school of love poetry: for example in his “Cleopatra,” which describes the meditations of the forsaken queen:

I will lie and dream of the past time,
          Aeons of thought away …
When, a smooth and velvety tiger
          … fierce in a tyrannous freedom,
I knew but the law of my moods …
Till I heard my wild mate roaring,
As the shadows of night came on …
Then I roused and roared in answer …
And wandered my mate to greet.
We toyed in the amber moonlight,
          Upon the warm flat sand,
And struck at each other our massive arms—
          How powerful he was and grand!
Then like a storm he seized me,
          With a wild triumphant cry,
And we met, as two clouds in heaven
          When the thunders before them fly.(12)

Though Riley was clearly anxious to set the pulses of his lady readers a-flutter in his love verses, there is very little material in this style in his work and none in the volume of Riley Love Lyrics, in which his verses of this type were collected in 1899. The style was evidently a fashion which was passing, but Riley could work it with the best, as may be illustrated with a quotation from his “The Bedouin”:

O love is like an untamed steed!—
So hot of heart and wild of speed,
.....… Ah, that my hands
Were more than human in their strength,
That my deft lariat at length
Might safely noose this splendid thing
.....To grapple tufts of tossing mane—
To spurn it to its feet again,
And then, sans saddle, rein or bit,
To lash the mad life out of it!

The taste of the Gilded Age preferred a more familial type of passion, with only a mild titillation of the wandering fancy, a fact attested by the immense popularity, in books and as a recitation piece, of Riley's “An Old Sweetheart of Mine.” No better example could be found of the popular poem of this period. It unites the themes of love, family security, the joys of childhood, and the power of contented middle-class respectability in eighteen fourline stanzas¹³ of quietly meditative semidoggerel. The metre is of the type preferred by Eliza Cook and other lady poets of Victorian England, and it would offer no surprises to an American audience.

The situation is that of a settled, mature family man who sits meditating in his study—

As one who cons at evening, o'er an album, all alone,
And muses on the faces of the friends that he has known,
So I turn the leaves of Fancy, till, in shadowy design,
I find the smiling features of an old sweetheart of mine.

The dreamer is, it vaguely transpires, a poet (awakening suggestions of the appeal of the “artistic” life for the popular audience) and thus the more inclined perhaps to give his “truant fancies” rein—

Though I hear beneath my study, like a fluttering of wings,
The voices of my children and the mother as she sings—
I feel no twinge of conscience to deny me any theme
When Care has cast her anchor in the harbor of a dream.

The sweetheart was a childhood one and recollections of “childhood-days enchanted” follow, of “The old school bell,” the exchange of gifts and kisses, and the future planned “When we should live together in a cozy little cot / Hid in a nest of roses, with a fairy garden-spot.”

If there is any hint of unquiet in this quiet enumeration of the standard pleasures of a normal and happy life depicted in clichés which were part of the standard language of the sentimental balladry and song of the time, it lies in the suggestion that the dreamer only dreams these things as a possibility other than the direction his real life has taken. Doubt is removed in the gentle twist of the last stanza—

But ah! my dream is broken by a step upon the stair,
And the door is softly opened, and—my wife is standing there:
Yet with eagerness and rapture all my visions I resign,—
To greet the living presence of that old sweetheart of mine.

The cliché is rounded out, and the dream of love becomes reality in a picture of domestic contentment that justifies the truant fancies, innocent though these were.

“An Old Sweetheart of Mine” is a variation in verse on the typical themes of the sentimental-moralistic novels that were a staple of the weekly story papers and of publishers' lists throughout the second half of the nineteenth century; and the hint of “realism” in the suggestion of marital discontent is itself the cause of the “charm” of the conclusion: the husband's gentle deception becomes a gentle deception of the reader.

III. POETRY OF CONSOLATION

Riley was not above mere pastiche in his adaptation of popular Victorian English styles for the North American reader. “The Old Trundle Bed” is in diction, metre, and tone simply a rechauffé—and a slight improvement—on Eliza Cook's “The Old Arm Chair.” The opening stanzas of the two poems read:

(MRS. Cook)
I love it—I love it, and who shall dare
To chide me for loving that old arm-chair!
I've treasured it long as a sainted prize—
I've bedewed it with tears, I've embalmed it with sighs,
'Tis bound by a thousand bands to my heart,
Not a tie will break, not a link will start;
Would you learn the spell?—A mother sat there,
And a sacred thing is that old arm-chair.(14)
(J. W. Riley)
O the old trundle-bed, where I slept when a boy!
What canopied king might not covet the joy?
The glory and peace of that slumber of mine,
Like a long, gracious rest in the bosom divine!
The quaint, homely couch, hidden close from the light,
But daintily drawn from its hiding at night.
O a nest of delight, from the foot to the head,
Was the queer little, dear little, old trundle-bed.

The trundle-bed was a common item of furniture in the Middle Western homestead of the nineteenth century, where families were large and space was short. It consisted simply of a single bed with a second mattress and bedding fitted into a drawer which slid under the main part of the bed. By day, the drawer would be closed to allow more space in the bedroom; by night, it would be pulled out to provide a bed.

Mrs. Cook's concern is with recollections of a long-dead mother; Riley's, with a long past Hoosier boyhood. He slows the breathless twitter of Mrs. Cook's verse and describes a past lingeringly recollected rather than sharply recalled. But, in making this talismanic quality of the furnishings of “the old home” a theme of verse, he is clearly treading on Victorian English ground. Thackeray's “The Cane-Bottomed Chair” is another example of the same type and in the same comforting jog-trot metre.

This Victorian tendency to poeticize the commonplace details of life and to imbue them with personal significance, with memory and the hard-won truth of experience, is a common nineteenth-century American habit. We have only to recall some of Whittier's and Longfellow's popular pieces to recognize that, in this respect, the English and American national psyches had much in common in the late nineteenth century. Longfellow, at least, was as much a Fireside Poet for England as he was for America.

The corollary of this habit of mind is a sense of what we may call “the ubiquity of poesy.” For the reader of newspaper and magazine verse in the late nineteenth century, in both England and America, poetry was something that commented on and conveyed wisdom about many aspects of day-to-day experience and about the emotional situations and dilemmas of an average life. Popular poetry was the repository of popular wisdom—a common man's or woman's oracle on how life should be lived. It performed, in fact, some of the functions now alloted to the advice columns of popular journalism.

This rôle of poetry may help to account for the great popularity in Riley's time of an early piece, “If I Knew What Poets Know,” a popularity which has not endured. Marcus Dickey records that it was written during Riley's brief period in a law office and that it was one of the poems he sent to Longfellow in 1876 with a letter seeking advice and encouragement.¹⁵ In spite of its comparatively inept phrasing, the poem is a statement of the popular Victorian idea of poetry as a source of wisdom and consolation:

Where I found a heart in pain
I would make it glad again;
.....And the world would better grow
If I knew what poets know.

With youthful modesty, the poet disclaims any healing power in his own work while asserting the consciously ameliorative function of poetry to gladden the heart, even if, as a result, “the false should be the true.” In other words, poetry can rose-tint the harsh picture of reality until it is falsified, if the deluded reader is gladdened by the finished picture. Because of this view, it is possible to distinguish at once the source of the appeal of popular poetry to the late nineteenth-century audience and the cause of its wholesale rejection by later generations. The falsity and oversweetness at the heart of popular verse in the latter half of the nineteenth century effectively killed the popular muse for the twentieth century. Poetry acquired a reputation for softness which it is apparently in no danger of losing. Edgar Guest's newspaper verse, which achieved considerable popularity with a certain type of reader in the 1920s and 1930s, continued the tradition of the popular poet as source of the wisdom of familiar experience. But Guest's work represents this tradition drained even of that vitalizing contact with native American humor which Riley's “philosophical” dialect pieces possess. Guest was the pale successor of a relatively distinguished line of popular poets, as Elbert Hubbard was a late and uninspiring survivor of the robust tradition of rustic humor.

The newspaper poet in the age of popular poetry was, in short, expected to provide the spiritual tempering of an advice column as well as the vicarious emotional experiences and humorous footnotes on life that might be thought of as more naturally his province. The strain this placed on his abilities must at times have been very considerable, and we find Riley apparently near to breaking under it during the time when he was establishing his name on the Indianapolis Journal. “O my friend,” he writes in a letter of 1880, “if you only knew how they exasperate me—these people I work for and who pay so little—and how exacting they all are—and how everybody wants theirs to be better than all the others—and how little time they have to wait—and how I have to jump from dirges and dead marches to jingles and jimcracks, etc., world without end.”¹⁶

In these circumstances, it may seem surprising that so many of Riley's occasional verses should have had as much contemporary life as they did. One poem of condolence, “Away,” was much admired in its time. Its combination of consolations for the bereaved with simple faith in the hereafter is, for its time, remarkably free from cloying sentiment:

I can not say, and I will not say
That he is dead.—He is just away!
With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand,
He has wandered into an unknown land,
And left us dreaming how very fair
It needs must be, since he lingers there.

The poem, originally a Memorial Day commemoration, first appeared in the Indianapolis Journal for May 31, 1884. Like the equally popular dialect piece “The Old Man and Jim,” its intent was the consolation of the survivors of Civil War dead; later lines speak of the dead man: “… loyal still, as he gave the blows / Of his warrior strength to his country's foes.” In edited versions, using the opening and closing lines only, the poem is frequently printed today on cards intended to be sent to bereaved persons. Unlike most of Riley's nondialect poems, with the exception of some of the children's verse, this one poem, which is very much a typical message of condolence of its time, has not dated too much and still conveys an acceptable sentiment.

IV. THE OBITUARY LAUREATE

The same cannot be said of Riley's numerous patriotic and obituary tributes which he produced more frequently from the 1890s on, as the role of “people's laureate” became more securely his own. A much admired patriotic poem was “The Name of Old Glory.” This had first appeared in the December, 1898, number of Atlantic Monthly, which had only once before printed a Riley poem and did not print another. “The Name of Old Glory” was a considerable success, however, and its publication in the Atlantic represented for its author the attainment of the last citadel of literary reputation. It became another of Riley's popular recitation pieces, and a comment in the Indianapolis Journal in 1899 suggests his style as public laureate: “His gestures in reciting this heroic poem are a marvel of grace. Two simple movements of his arms illustrate the waving of a flag from the halyards in a remarkably impressionistic manner, and another and equally simple movement limns the outlines of the flag as it droops. … There is a peculiar quality to his voice … that really thrills, a quality that actually inspires patriotism.”¹⁷

Riley later recited this poem at the dedication of the monuments on Shiloh battlefield and on other patriotic occasions; for, by the 1890s, Riley was a well-established speaker at banquets and official functions. With the success of “The Name of Old Glory,” he was frequently called on to write and recite obituary tributes. He read “The Home Voyage,” a tribute to General Henry W. Lawton, who fell at the battle of San Mateo, at the unveiling of a statue of General Lawton in Indianapolis; and his poem “William McKinley” was read at the dedication of the McKinley Memorial in Canton, Ohio. On both these occasions President Theodore Roosevelt spoke.

Riley took very seriously his role of obituary laureate, and he rarely missed the occasion to write a testamentary ode or sonnet when a particular hero or close friend died. But his tributes to Longfellow, President Benjamin Harrison (who had been a close friend of Riley in his early years in Indianapolis), General Lew Wallace, Henry Irving, Lee O. Harris, Eugene Field, and numerous others are no better than the usual versified obituaries; they seek fitting phrases for the occasion but achieve no larger statement.

Yet another form of neo-Victorian verse is found in the once very popular “Lockerbie Street.” The form could best be described as the “urban pastoral,” and there is nothing else like it in Riley's work except its very poor sequel “Lockerbie Fair.” There are not, indeed, many examples in nineteenth-century poetry of the concept of the city as a place of serenity and harmony. Wordsworth's “Westminster Bridge” sonnet is one glowing example, and Arnold's “Scholar Gypsy” makes the city of Oxford a part of the pastoral harmonies of its surrounding countryside.

Riley's use of the idea is on a level altogether different from these examples. Its jog-trot metre and bouncing tone owe more to Eliza Cook than to the English Romantics, and the theme is more that of an island of pastoral pleasure in the “clangor and din / Of the heart of the town” than of the city itself as a place of harmonious contentment. Riley had written the poem in 1880, thirteen years before himself taking up residence on Lockerbie Street. At this time, the street was not in fact part of the city but a suburban development in the process of absorption. Riley deliberately burlesques his theme by overstating his “rhyme-haunted raptures,” and the phrases used are typical of contemporary love-poetry:

… the nights that come down the dark pathways of dusk,
With the stars in their tresses, and odors of musk
In their moon-woven raiments, bespangled with dews,
And looped up with lilies for lovers to use
In the songs that they sing to the tinkle and beat,
Of their sweet serenadings through Lockerbie Street.

Noting the date of the poem, we may consider it to be an early attempt by Riley to find a pastoral mode acceptable to urban or semiurban taste. Its use of alliteration and light consonantal sounds is, like the phraseology, more typical of some of Riley's love lyrics. As the quoted lines demonstrate, it was a poor thing; but it was popular. Riley did not attempt to develop this form, and it does not appear to have offered much scope for development. His other adventures in pastoral are almost entirely in dialect and derive their subject matter from far different sources.

V. THE VICTORIAN DIALECT POETS

Riley's use of dialect does not supply any evidence of debt to the Victorian English dialect poets. Tennyson's Northern Farmer and William Barnes' Dorset rustics speak dialect that a Middle Westerner would find extremely difficult to read and to understand. The Northern Farmer—Old or New Style—is an altogether more real creation than Riley's musing semi-illiterate rustic. The harsh Lincolnshire dialect is matched by a harsh sense of social realism—of the duties of the old-style farmer in a rigidly ordered society or the energetic opportunism of his new-style successor. Hard toil and hard bargaining are not a part of the Hoosier pastoral world.

The Dorset farmer is much more the spiritual brother of the Hoosier farmer of Riley's Middle Western pastorals. He has the same sense of serene independence—“I got two vields, an' I don't ceäre / What squire mid have a bigger sheäre.”¹⁸—the same nostalgia for a happy past—

In happy days when I wer young
An' had noo ho, and laugh'd an' zung,
The maid were merry by her cow,
An' men wer merry wi' the plough.(19)

—and the same sense of the consolations of family ties in alleviating the stings of time:

The bloom that woonce did overspread
          Your rounded cheäk, as time went by,
A-shrinkèn to a patch o' red,
          Did feäde so soft's the evenèn sky:
The evenèn sky, my faithful wife,
O' days as feäir's our happy life.(20)

To offset these striking similarities of tone and feeling, there are, however, notable differences. Barnes is a much more descriptive poet, and in poem after poem—“The Evenen Star O' Zummer” is an example—he creates a pastoral scene almost as a painter creates a canvas of closely observed detail. And the social milieu of Barnes' Hwomely Rhymes (1859) and Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1862) is a different world from that of Riley's Neghborly Poems and many later volumes. The innocent peasants of Barnes are of the same blood as John Clare's and Thomas Hardy's peasants, rooted in the soil they work and a part of the nature they move in. Riley simply does not describe the Indiana scene often or closely enough to merit serious consideration as a nature poet. His humor and pastoral sentiment are essentially expressions of character, and his characters are pioneers, or their children, with a stronger sense of the claims of family and community than of the soil.

As early as 1888, a collection of Riley's poems, Old-Fashioned Roses, was published in England by Longmans and Co., as a result of Charles Longmans' being “very much taken with J. Whitcomb Riley's poems” while on a trip to America in that year, as reported in the Chicago Herald. The collection had some success; a second edition appeared in 1891; the book remained in print until 1928, and it was last reprinted in 1912. A birthday book of Riley quotations, The Golden Year, appeared in London in 1898; and some of the later American volumes were sold in England by Longmans.

It cannot be said, however, that Riley achieved, or sought, a British reputation. He did not, apparently, attempt to publish his work in British magazines. On his visit to Scotland and England in 1891, his chief purpose seems to have been to visit the birthplace and the last home of Burns, though he also took the opportunity to renew old acquaintances in London. He gave a reading in the Beefsteak Room of the Lyceum Theatre for Irving, Constant Coquelin, Bram Stoker and other distinguished guests. Irving, along with Ellen Terry, had been captivated by Riley's reading of “The Old Man and Jim” a few years previously in New York, and Irving apparently persuaded Riley to repeat the performance at a dinner he gave for him at the Savoy. But there was no question of Riley's achieving the same popular acceptance by the London public as Twain and Artemus Ward had at their public readings. Despite the fact that Riley in his nondialect poems borrowed many elements of style from popular Victorian versifiers and despite the immense vogue in Victorian England of the American Fireside Poets, who appeared in ornate English editions alongside Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Milton, there was little in Riley's particular brand of sentimentalized humor to exert any strong appeal to English popular taste in the 1890s.

Since the “Victorian” aspect of Riley is perhaps the least known to modern readers, I have quoted generously from many pieces which may not appear to merit extensive discussion. As the quotations have indicated, Riley, in his nondialect verses, genre pieces for the newspapers and magazines, is generally working at the level of what Newton Arvin called “masscult poetry”—“A kind of cheaply-manufactured, as it were machine-produced ‘poetry’—newspaper verse, domestic doggerel, rhymes about miners and prospectors and the like.”²¹ He was writing “for market,” and we may choose to adopt the castigating tone of Roy Harvey Pearce and place him in the lowest level of nineteenth-century American poetry (lower than the “élite” poets, “Emerson and his kind,” and lower than the Fireside Poets, who strove to write for a truly popular “middle” audience) with “Mrs. Sigourney and her kind who, lacking the intelligence to assume their proper responsibilities, catered to and exploited the general (or generalized) reader.”²² But the situation would not have been so interpreted by the more socially elevated of Riley's “general (or generalized)” readers. For them, particularly for “the middle-class readers (mostly women) of the Atlantic Monthly,”²³ the pieces in Hoosier dialect were the lowest form of current poetic art, a form without edification or the “lift” of a truly literary style. Riley's success in establishing himself as a writer of “correct” English, as well as of dialect, played an important part in his popular acceptance.

Although in his dialect pieces Riley was working within an established and fertile American tradition, critical opinion was slow in accepting the validity of this tradition but Riley in his turn was not slow to assert his claim to propriety as a writer of “literary” poems in approved diction. As such, he was one of a host of minor American poets and novelists of the period who strove “to preserve the sweeter morals and records of the Republic and worked to transplant those of Victorian England.”²⁴

Notes

1. Ibid., 157.

2. Ibid., 26.

3. Ibid., 31.

4. James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (London, 1890), p. 93.

5. Love Letters … to E. Kahle, 132. Letter dated March 15, 1881.

6. Newton Arvin, Longfellow, His Life and Work (Boston, 1963). See especially p. 59, on Longfellow's The Poets and Poetry of Europe.

7. William T. Coggeshall, The Poets and Poetry of the West (Columbus, Ohio, 1860).

8. The three quotations are from Coggeshall, op. cit., pp. 115, 209, 239.

9. Robert P. Roberts, “Gilt, Gingerbread and Realism: The Public and its Taste,” The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal, ed. H. Wayne Morgan (Syracuse, N. Y., 1963), 169-95.

10. Borrowing the headings of the “Index by Topics” in Biog., 6, 541-83.

11. Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength (New York, 1929), 235.

12. Bliss Carman, ed. The Oxford Book of American Verse (New York, 1927), p. 186.

13. The poem was extended in later versions. See Russo, op. cit., 92.

14. Eliza Cook, “The Old Arm Chair,” The Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, vol. [8] Joanna Baillie to Jean Ingelow, ed. Alfred H. Miles (London, n.d.), p. 280.

15. Dickey, Youth, 325.

16. Letters, 30. Letter to Mrs. R. E. Jones, December 22, 1880.

17. Quoted in Crowder, op. cit., 197.

18. William Barnes, “I got two vields,” Selected Poems, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1950), p. 101.

19. Ibid., “The Happy Days when I wer Young,” 107.

20. Ibid., “The New House a-getten Wold,” 180.

21. Arvin, op. cit., 328.

22. Pearce, op. cit., 197.

23. Robert Falk, “The Search for Reality: Writers and their Literature,” The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal, ed. H. Wayne Morgan (Syracuse, N. Y., 1963), pp. 196-220. See p. 208.

24. Kreymborg, op. cit., 232.