The Middle Western Pastoral
[In the following essay, Revell explicates the ways in which Riley's pastoral poems, particularly the “Johnson of Boone” poems, follow and adapt the generic formula of the pastoral.]
Riley's work in the pastoral form came to represent for his age “the essential Riley” and is, with a few exceptions from the rural narratives, the part most worth preserving of his total oeuvre. There are pastoral elements in much of his other work in dialect and even some pastoral poems in modern English. Riley was not above attempting to people the Middle Western landscape with mythological trappings, in such neo-Keatsian sonnets as “Pan,” which sees the god loitering
… listlessly by woody streams,
Soaking the lush glooms up with laziness;
Or drowsing while the maiden winds caress
Him prankishly, and powder him with gleams
Of sifted sunshine.
But this note was not the one to appeal to any but the more fastidiously literary of lady magazine readers. Riley's very popular pastoral “Out to Old Aunt Mary's” is also in modern English; in some respects it suggests Whittier's pastoral manner and calls for more detailed consideration later. Our task for the moment is to establish the setting for the uniquely Rileyan pastorals of 1882, for an extended consideration of these poems has been deferred to this chapter precisely because they represent the essential qualities of Riley's work, and thus an analysis of them profits from a preliminary survey of his work in other forms.
I. THE “JOHNSON OF BOONE” POEMS
In fact, the “Johnson of Boone” poems were Riley's first published book, The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems of 1883, which helped to establish his growing reputation and which led within four years to the triumphantly successful New York readings. By 1883, however, Riley had been published regularly in local newspapers for something like eight years, had a considerable reputation as a reader of his work, and was a salaried humorous writer for the Indianapolis Journal. The pastorals were, therefore, mature work. The twelve poems appeared in the Indianapolis Journal between June 17 and September 12, 1882, all being written in the few months following Riley's very successful appearance in Boston in January of that year. Riley's authorship was not acknowledged until the twelfth poem, “The Clover,” appeared.
The popularity of these poems with Middle Western readers was immediate, and a collected volume of them was proposed by a colleague on the Journal staff, George C. Hitt. When no publisher could be found, a privately published edition, printed in Cincinnati, of one thousand copies appeared in the summer of 1883, the costs being shared by Hitt and Riley. The success of this led to a second edition, published by Merrill, Meigs and Company, of Indianapolis; as already mentioned, this company later became the Bowen-Merrill Company (now the Bobbs-Merrill Company), and Riley's association with it lasted until his death. As we have also previously noted, the association was a close personal one and was astutely managed to the great profit of both parties, which may help to explain why so many of Riley's later books were first published in Indianapolis long after he had published successful volumes with the Century Company of New York and had begun the publication of his collected works with Scribner's. Riley did not abandon his regional origins nor his regional publisher; and there was no particular reason why he should since the regional aspects of his poetic personality had established his national popularity.
Copies of the first edition of the 1883 volume were sent to various writers and critics. Twain was immediately responsive; and his friendship with Riley, never close but always appreciative and respectful, dates from this time. John Hay also wrote his thanks. Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of Century magazine, reviewed the book, stating that he was “very much in sympathy with its substance” but found “a tendency to over-dramatise the close of a poem” and that in several cases he had a desire to draw a pencil through a final stanza. Joel Chandler Harris wrote that Riley had “caught the true American spirit and flavor.” Riley replied gratefully and declared that “The old classic splints are being taken off, as it were, and our modern authors are striking straight out from the shoulder.”1 Hamlin Garland's enthusiastic reaction to the appearance of the 1883 volume has already been discussed.
Riley felt that he was taking off “the old classic splints” in expressing the mood of a pastoral, paradisal yet nostalgic contentment “in character,” through the persona of a semi-illiterate old farmer who knows only the present and the recent past of his own immediate locality and whose sense of eheu fugaces comes out in this mock heroic form:
Oh! the old swimmin'-hole! whare the crick so still and deep
Looked like a baby-river that was laying half asleep,
And the gurgle of the worter round the drift jest below
Sounded like the laugh of something we onc't used to know
Before we could remember anything but the eyes
Of the angels lookin' out as we left Paradise;
But the merry days of youth is beyond our controle,
And it's hard to part ferever with the old swimmin'-hole.
In fact, Riley is adapting some of the traditional elements of pastoral in the classical or European form to an already well-established tradition in American literature and in the process radically transforming that tradition.
II. THE PASTORAL FORM
But, before discussing Riley's pastorals in detail, it is necessary to consider the traditional elements of this form. The pastoralist depicts a society apart from “the world,” a rural community in which the simple relationships of members of a family or of young lovers are uncomplicated by and unspoiled by the influences of more “civilized” or urbanized values. William Empson, in commenting on the implication of the “flower born to blush unseen” of Gray's Elegy, states that part of the meaning conveyed is that “it is lucky for the poor man that society keeps him unspotted from the world.”2 This antiurbanism, the wish to keep things simple, is omnipresent in Riley's work, where it often takes a comic form, comic-pathetic in “The Old Swimmin'-Hole,” for example—
Oh! The old swimmin'-hole! When I last saw the place,
The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face;
The bridge of the railroad now crosses the spot
Whare the old divin'-log lays sunk and fergot—
or comic-pugnacious in “The Little Town o' Tailholt,” that perfect expression of the anti-Algerism and antiprogressivism which was one aspect of the Gilded Age—
You kin boast about yer cities, and their stiddy growth and size,
And brag about yer County-seats, and business enterprise,
And railroads, and factories, and all sich foolery—
But the little Town o' Tailholt is big enough fer me!
.....You kin smile and turn yer nose up, and joke and hev yer fun,
And laugh and holler “Tail-holts is better holts'n none!”
Ef the city suits you better, w'y, hit's where you'd ort'o be—
But the little Town o' Tailholt's good enough fer me!
The praise of simplicity which is so basic an element of pastoral traditionally is expressed in the form of the love of young shepherds and shepherdesses or of prince and country maid.3 There are admirable opportunities for burlesque here, which the Restoration dramatists, particularly Wycherley, exploited to the full. Riley, however, takes this element comparatively straight; and his young pastoral lovers, as we have seen from the discussion of the rural narratives, are pure and simple, and indeed their love frequently prevails by the strength of its purity and simplicity. This element also, of vicissitudes overcome by pure love, becomes an element of comedy—of romantic comedy.
In Riley's pastorals, the quality of simplicity is most strongly expressed in the persons of the old man and the boy, or we might make a composite old man / boy figure, since nearly all Riley's old men are boys at heart. The value of the old man as a pastoral character is that he is the repository of older, simpler values. The boy's values are also simple, but he has the freshness and vitality of youth. The combination of the two assures a freshness and charm in the treatment of pastoral themes (“charm” from the boyish simplicity of the old man's attitude) and also permits the frequent indulgence of nostalgia. Pastoral gaiety follows its traditional pattern in becoming tinged with an elegiac strain, or in this case with a note of nostalgic melancholy.
The traditional comic figure of pastoral is, of course, that of the boor or clown, whose natural roughness and clumsiness contrast with the natural sweetness and elegance of the shepherds and shepherdesses. As Empson notes, this character can provide the source of the satiric or didactic element in pastoral, in the conventional relationship of prince and clown. “The simple man,” Empson states, “becomes a clumsy fool who yet has better ‘sense’ than his betters and can say things more fundamentally true; he is ‘in contact with nature,’ which the complex man needs to be.”4 If, for the relationship of prince and clown, we substitute that of city man and country man, we are in the world of Riley's pastorals and in a position to determine the kind of relationship with his audience which the poet establishes in these poems. In writing for the newspaper of a large Middle Western city or for the lecture platforms of the larger cities throughout the United States, Riley adopts in these poems the persona of a pioneer rustic. Pioneer days were then only some fifty years in the past; although the audience of the 1880s had achieved a measure of progress, it was not far, therefore, from its pioneer origins. The effects of the Benjamin F. Johnson persona were thus flattering (you have achieved more sense), reassuring (your roots, so near, are sound, are “in contact with nature”), and reanimating (the sense of nature's plenitude which the clown enjoys can be shared).
That other traditional element of pastoral, the sense of independence, of freedom from the demands of “the world,” is also present in the Riley pastorals. Many of the poems are solitary reflections. But, in fact, the ties of family relationship and family love are never far away; therefore, this independence is a safe one, reassured by the presence of family loyalties.
In seeking to define the American tradition of pastoral in which Riley develops the Middle Western form (for it is his innovation), we may briefly consider first the work of two other practitioners of dialect who were contemporary with Riley—Twain and Joel Chandler Harris. In Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Harris' Uncle Remus stories (1883 and later) we have a boy and an old man who both “speak in dialect” and who are both for their authors a means of conveying truth artlessly and in such a manner that we have no cause to suspect their interpretations of life. Such simple characters have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. Twain satirizes the crudities of frontier culture (in the furnishings of the Grangerford home), of the Southern code of honor (in the feuds of the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons), and of the double standard of morality which condones slavery (in Huck's naïve reactions and troubled self-questionings concerning these things), but Harris drives home the fabulist's eternal lessons of human cupidity, vanity, and treachery in the old slave's animal tales. In both cases the source of the interpretation of life and of the advice—which is a matter of “reading into” their tales the simple moral truths they expose—is gently mocked by the author.5 But the validity of their interpretations is not in doubt. Both are simple souls in touch with the truth because they are near to nature.
Riley's Benjamin F. Johnson is no less “a simple soul in touch with the truth,” but his antecedents are somewhat different. Both Huck and Uncle Remus are individual creations, though they are also subdued versions of the folk hero. Huck, a kind of latter-day Bumppo, is independent, uncommitted except to his own code of natural values, which are not those of civilized society and especially not those of “the frontier” that is after all only civilization impinging on the wilderness. Uncle Remus is a source of folk wisdom, the folk being the subject race of Southern civilization. But there is not in Harris the same “play” as in Twain between “civilized” and “uncivilized” values, except on the elemental level of the fable. Benjamin F. Johnson, as a character type, derives somewhat more directly, with less individuation, from the folk figure of the crackerbarrel philosopher, who is traditionally in American literature a source of hard sense, however much of a buffoon he may become. T. C. Haliburton's Sam Slick shows him at his most sensible.
Jennette Tandy has described the origins of this type as follows: “Every age, every country has its imaginery representations of the boor, the clown, the peasant and the small bourgeois. Such groups of portraits often grow into recognized character types or are taken over by men of letters after a long existence in popular anecdote.”6 Some of these types are comic; some express “a personification of the folk,” a type “whose tricks and misfortunes, homely wisdom and shrewd observations on the life about him are given a certain moral, social or political significance.” “Such a folk hero, the homely American,” Miss Tandy continues, exists “behind a certain group of American character types. … With wise saws and rustic anecdotes and deliberately cruel innuendo he interprets the provincial eccentricities of American life and the petty corruptions of American political intrigue. Hosea Biglow, Josh Billings, Bill Arp, Mr. Dooley, Abe Martin, are successive incarnations of Uncle Sam, the unlettered philosopher.”
Poor Richard, the saw-sayer of the Farmer's Almanack, and Jack Downing of Downingsville are other examples of the same type. Moreover, the “rustic” aspects of Franklin and Lincoln are emphasized so that “popular myth makes these men rustic critics, backwoods philosophers, instead of politicians and men of the world.” In American literature and the subliterature of newspaper writing, there is a long succession of these personages. They began to emerge from the oral subliterary written tradition about 1830. From 1830 to 1865-67, in Miss Tandy's view, this company made up a body of historically significant political caricatures of some literary merit. During the 1860s and 1870s Josh Billings and Artemus Ward excelled in social caricature. In the 1880s and 1890s, “The unlettered philosopher existed only in minor capacities and a multiplicity of sub-types.”
In the most developed form, the unlettered philosopher, the Uncle Sam type, “embodies our sardonic trustfulness, our matter-of-fact idealism, our exuberance and our Puritanism.” But it is as one of the multiplicity of subtypes that Benjamin F. Johnson represents the unlettered philosopher, and there is considerable muting of his traditional elements.
III. ANTECEDENTS IN LOWELL
Though Riley claimed to have a poor opinion of Lowell's use of dialect in the Biglow Papers, it is in these and particularly in the second series that we find the nearest recognizable antecedent of Benjamin F. Johnson. There is, of course, in Riley nothing of Lowell's polemic intent and none of the biting irony of “Nimepence a day fer killin' folks comes kind o' low fer murder.” Nor is there anything of the characteristic Hudibrastic rattle of the Biglow verses—
I du believe in Freedom's cause,
Ez fur away as Paris is;
I love to see her stick her claws
In them infarnal Pharisees
nor much of Biglow's comically elaborate rhymes. But there is a general resemblance in Biglow's fondness for expressive rustic similes, of which examples are legion—
Take them editors that's crowin'
Like a cockerel three months old,
or—
Wen an Arnold the star-spangled banner bestains,
Holl Fourth o' Julys seems to bile in my veins,
or—
Pledges air awfle breachy cattle
Thet preudunt farmer's don't turn out.(7)
Lowell's “Second Letter From Birdofredum Sawin” (describing “a miles emeritus returning to the bosom of his family” and cataloguing his missing limbs, eye, and fingers) utilizes an apparently traditional tale of a comically mutilated soldier which Riley made the subject of a very popular prose piece in his readings, entitled “The Old Soldier's Story.”8 Twain celebrates Riley's storytelling skill with this yarn in “How to Tell A Story.”9 But Lowell's use of the comic countryman is, of course, as one who “had by rights the ear of many who were deaf to the ordinary appeals of editor and orator. He could insinuate many things forbidden. The rustic observer could innocently betray official double-dealing. He could poke fun wherever he chose, tell all manner of slighting stories about the great.”10 Hosea Biglow does not so much insinuate as shout; and Birdofredum Sawin, in his descent from clown to comic rascal, himself embodies official double-dealing. In the second series of Biglow Papers, however, in the picture of pastoral content after martial strife,11 we see the same softening of the satiric element in the unlettered philosopher that Riley was to develop in the character of Benjamin F. Johnson.
The partnership of Bill Nye and Riley on the reading platform was based on this existence of a hard and a soft aspect of the tradition of the unlettered philosopher. Much of Bill Nye's humor depends on comic exaggeration, but there is some sharp social satire in his sketches of Long Island foxhunting and in his portraits of Jay Gould, “The great railroad swallower and amateur Philanthropist,”12 while he is capable of the Twain-like scorn of this passage: “In this period of progress and high-grade civilization, when Satan takes humanity up to the top of a high mountain and shows his railroads and his kerosene oil and his distilleries and his coffers filled with pure leaf lard and says: ‘All this will I give for a seat on the Senate’. …”13
In their partnership for public readings, Nye presented the satire and grotesquerie of the crackerbarrel tradition, while Riley, in his readings of pieces like “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” presented its blander aspects, what Jennette Tandy calls its “matter-of-fact idealism” and “exuberance.”
IV. THE ELIMINATION OF SATIRE
In Riley's dialect pastorals there is no “innocent” (because “uninvolved”) comment on social wrongs and affectations and none of the shrewd, blunt, or ironic social criticism of the crackerbarrel philosopher. Instead, there is the innocence of genial contentment. Thus Riley constructs his dialect pastorals out of materials that are in their origins humorous and satiric. The satire is removed, and the humor lies not in the ironic bite of the rustic philosopher's outspoken comments, but in the simplicity and naïveté of the contented rustic's daydreaming. The crudities of the rustic's utterance are in a sense turned against him and in a sense sentimentalized. They are comic but quaint. The sensibilities of the sophisticated reader or listener are touched rather than shaken by the crudities of utterance. The realism of regional literature is giving place to the charm of the “local-color” school, a shift of emphasis more readily apparent in the contemporary novel.
This shift of emphasis is also clearly the result of a change in taste, itself the result of social change. An amusing illustration of the contemporary social attitude to change is supplied in the description of a large sign painted at South Bend, Indiana, in 1873, by Riley the signpainter:
Its dimensions were astounding. … It was a series of pictures apparently in one—“The Contrast of Forty Years”—South Bend in 1833 when a few log cabins stood on the River St. Joe, and South Bend, the prosperous city of 1873. Over against the pioneer, surrounded by the crude implements of his time, stood the man of fortune surrounded by modern conveniences. Left and right respectively, were an ox cart and a Studebaker wagon; a bear and a fat cow; a fur trading post surrounded by Indians and a commercial emporium surrounded by pleased customers; a well-sweep and a gushing fountain; a judge holding court in a shanty by the river and a modern stone court house; a flatboat and a steam boat; a boarding house and a big hotel; a prairie swamp and a Brussels carpet; a stump and a cushioned rocking chair; an ax and a goldheaded cane; the log hut and the palace; a family with no news at all and one with books and the daily paper.14
The increasing urbanization and social sophistication of the community were cause for pride, so that there was an element of patronage toward pioneer beginnings in the audience of the 1880s. On the other hand, the living survivors of those early days were still a part of the community. If their ignorance was childlike, it represented the childhood of the community and of the state; and the childlike old pioneer farmer thus became the almost symbolic object of sentimental regard and affectionate respect. The generation of the 1880s wanted to retain and develop the material benefits of the present, but it also wanted to keep the strength of the rural virtues of simplicity and satisfaction with the little that God's bounty afforded for a life of toil—hence the coexistence of the Alger myth and the “Little Town o' Tailholt” view of antiprogress. But the latter was subject for humor rather than for serious exposition, and the Gilded Age took the standard of personal, material success with deadly seriousness. Riley's poems do not so much mock this standard as those who would question it. There is, however, throughout his work, and throughout his life, a note of wistful regret for the lost simplicity of childhood, which can be transferred with no sense of strain to a nostalgia for “the airly days,” the childhood of the community.
These preliminary observations on certain changes in the taste of the Gilded Age are necessary if the “Johnson of Boone” pastorals are not to be regarded simply as crude specimens of newspaper humor in verse. Riley plays with great skill upon the mingled feelings of his audience with regard to their pioneer past. We may choose to regard this as manipulation, but Riley himself shared these feelings and had in his own life made the transition from the near-pioneer conditions of Greenfield in the 1850's to the comparative urban sophistication of Indianapolis in the 1880's.
V. THE COMIC PERSONA
The Preface to Neghborly Poems and Dialect Sketches (1891), in which the poems of 1883 were reprinted with additional material, sets the attitude toward the persona of Benjamin F. Johnson. The “country poet” is recalled from “as far back into boyhood as the writer's memory may intelligently go”—“He was, and is, as common as the ‘country fiddler’ and as full of good old-fashioned music.” Riley's purpose in “this series of dialectic studies” is “simply … to reflect the real worth of this homely child of nature, and to echo faithfully, if possible, the faltering music of his song.”
Riley goes on to reprint in its entirety the article “A Boone County Pastoral,”15 with which the series was introduced in the Indianapolis Journal. In this article the text of the rustic poet's supposed letters sent to accompany the poems, in the semiliterate style of Petroleum V. Nasby, is set out with editorial comment: “In all sincerity, Mr. Johnson, we are glad to publish the poem you send, and just as you have written it. That is its greatest charm. Its very defects compose its excellence. You need no better education than the one from which emanates ‘The Old Swimmin' Hole.’ It is real poetry, and all the more tender and lovable for the unquestionable evidence it bears of having been written ‘from the hart out’.” The second poem is described as “this later amaranth of blooming wildwood verse.” This editorial setting of educated comment recalls that of the Biglow Papers, except that Riley, unlike Lowell, presents no mockery of the “educated comment” itself.
In “The Old Swimmin'-Hole,” the comic crudity of the poet's language, his bumbling metre and the predominant note of nostalgia for “the airly days,” should not be allowed to obscure the emphasis on the sense of paradisal innocence in pioneer childhood: “Before we could remember anything but the eyes / Of the angels lookin' out as we left Paradise.” This version of the American Adam as a comic old man recalling his Hoosier boyhood is consistently borne out. Like Whitman's “myself,” he is given to solitary reflection and narcissistic reverie:
Oh! it showed me a face in its warm sunny tide
That gazed back at me so gay and glorified,
It made me love myself, as I leaped to caress
My shadder smilin' up at me with sich tenderness.
But this is a paradise lost, for where
… the bullrushes growed, and the cattails so tall,
And the sunshine and shadder fell over it all;
And it mottled the worter with amber and gold
Tel the glad lillies rocked in the ripples that rolled
there is now a shattered and denuded scene:
… When I last saw the place,
The scenes was all changed, like the change in my face;
The bridge of the railroad now crosses the spot
Whare the old divin'-log lays sunk and fergot.
And I stray down the banks whare the trees ust to be—
But never again will theyr shade shelter me!
And I wish in my sorrow I could strip to the soul,
And dive off in my grave like the old swimmin'-hole.
The hint of morbidity in the wistful nostalgia, a desire to escape into innocence from the consequences of experience, is also a characteristic of some of these pastorals and perhaps explains Robert Underwood Johnson's desire to “draw a pencil through” some of their final stanzas.
In general, however, the quality of affirmation and the sense of nature's abundance are predominant and make a large part of the rustic poet's humor. The first stanza of “Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer” may illustrate this characteristic:
The summer winds is sniffin' round the bloomin' locus' trees;
And the clover in the pastur is a big day for the bees,
And they been a-swiggin' honey, above board and on the sly,
Tell they stutter in theyr buzzin' and stagger as they fly.
The flicker on the fence-rail 'pears to jest spit on his wings
And roll up his feathers, by the sassy way he sings;
And the hoss-fly is a-whettin'-up his forelegs fer biz,
And the off-mare is a-switchin' all of her tale they is.
If the drunken bees of the first lines recall Emily Dickinson's drunken butterflies, the comic picture of Nature as a busy workshop in which work gives nothing but pleasure—described with the typically rustic similes of Josh Billings, Artemus Ward, and the like—is much more typical of this group of poems. The moral of “Ort a mortul be complainin' when dumb animals rejoice” is driven home in a wealth of illustration from farm life:
… it's when I git my shotgun drawed up in stiddy rest,
She's as full of tribbelation as a yeller-jacket's nest
.....Does the medder-lark complane, as he swims high and dry
Through the waves of the wind and the blue of the sky?
.....Is the chipmuck's health a-failin'?—Does he walk, er does he run?
Don't the buzzards ooze around up thare jest like they've allus done?
There is here, as elsewhere, little distinction between wild nature and the domesticated nature of farm life. In fact, wild nature has not any “untamed” quality, unless in the marauding bears of pioneer days. If we may borrow the terminology of Radcliffe Squire's book on Frost, the quality emphasized is one of “chubby complacency,” and there is no hint of “the impression that nature is faithful only to herself.”16 Nature has more the quality of faithful friend; and, though the task of subduing it is work, the farmer of “A Summer Day” can indulge in a reverie of childhood as he works:
Yit, as I work, I have my fun,
Jest fancyin' these furries here
Is childhood's paths onc't more so dear:—
And so I walk through medder-lands,
And country lanes, and swampy trails
Whare long bullrushes bresh my hands
… I wunder still
Whichever way a boy's feet will—
Whare trees has fell, with tangled tops
Whare dead leaves shakes, I stop fer breth,
Heerin' the acorn as it drops.
The reader is never allowed to become too serious about the sense of communion with nature, even if the dialect would let him; and the mood is always pushed into humor by a typical “homely” simile:
Whare pig-tracks, pintin' to'rds the crick,
Is picked and printed in the fresh
Black bottom-lands, like wimmern pick
Theyr pie-crusts with a fork, some way
When bakin' fer camp-meetin' day.
“A Hymb of Faith” is a plain statement of the “Benjamin F. Johnson” philosophy, to “Be more and more contenteder, / Without a-astin' why,” with only the faintest hint of the sardonic underneath the simplicity in such lines as—
They's times, of course, we grope in doubt,
And in afflictions sore;
So knock the louder, Lord, without,
And we'll unlock the door.
or—
O, Thou who doth all things devise
And fashion fer the best,
He'p us who sees with mortul eyes
To overlook the rest.
The irony implicit in these last lines is a reminder of the “country poet's” origin in the sardonic and shrewd figure of the cracker-barrel philosopher. But such touches are rare and much more prevalent is the exuberant geniality of poems like “Wortermelon Time,” proclaiming the joys of appetite, or “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” a comic paean in jingling doggerel for the joys of summer's fulfillment:
The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries—kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill.
The “Johnson of Boone” poems are a series of variations on the theme of contentment. In such as “My Philosofy” the contentment is one of accepting the petty meanness of human nature and “doing your best” in spite of it:
My doctern is to lay aside
Contensions, and be satisfied:
Jest do your best, and praise er blame
That follers that, counts just the same.
I've allus noticed grate success
Is mixed with troubles, more er less,
And it's the man who does the best
That gits more kicks than all the rest.
“Being satisfied” is not therefore a doctrine of stolid mediocrity; it is one of personal fulfillment which accepts that nothing we do will please everybody and that the better we do, the more some will be displeased. It would obviously be false to equate the overall “moral” of the “Johnson of Boone” poems with the antiprogressive self-satisfaction of “The Little Town o' Tailholt.”
In “Wortermelon Time,” the contentment is one of enjoyment of nature in its most lush and prodigal mood. In “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” another kind of contentment appears in the picture of nature conserving its richness in the “coolin' fall,” with “The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover overhead,” the gathered apples, the “strawstack in the medder,” the cidermaking over, and the “souse and saussage too.” The poem creates a Breughel-like picture of rough and vigorous rural abundance to which the rough and vigorous metre adds the touch of comic rusticity. This picture is not “the only justification” for the dialect form, as the Boston reviewer might have remarked; but it is a natural and appropriate subject for its use. It is also entirely correct in a literary sense, in view of the example of Spenser in the Shepheards Calender, which was probably unknown to Riley and possibly also to the Boston reviewer.
There are a few later poems in Hoosier dialect (but without the semi-illiterate misspellings of the “Johnson of Boone” poems), in which the lushness and prodigality of the Indiana summer creates a mood of total laziness—“At Utter Loaf,” to borrow the title of one of them. Two of the most popular of these, “Knee-deep in June” and “On the Banks o' Deer Crick,” were both published in the Indianapolis Journal during 1885. In the first of these, the sense of Nature's richness is the source of a comic mood of acceptance—
… some afternoon
Like to jes' git out and rest,
And not work at nothin' else!
—in which the activity of nature can be appreciated in idleness—
Pee-wees' singin', to express
My opinion's second class,
Yit you'll hear 'em more er less;
Sapsuck's gittin' down to biz,
Weedin' out the lonesomeness;
Mr. Bluejay, full o' sass,
In them base-ball clothes o' his,
Sportin' round the orchard jes'
Like he owned the premises!
Sun out in the fields kin sizz,
But flat on yer back, I guess,
In the shade's where glory is!
These poems were never included in the “Johnson of Boone” series, however. Their exuberant laziness is not of a piece with the old man's exuberance, which is a sense of the rich rewards of quiet work, as well as of the openhandedness of nature. The old man's outlook is also rarely untouched by sorrow, whether of regret that “the merry days of youth is beyond our controle” or of simple grief for the dead.
Two of the twelve poems of the original “Johnson of Boone” series express this simple grief. “On the Death of Little Mahala Ashcraft” is a kind of rustic foretaste of John Crowe Ransom's “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter” and a skillful exercise in the comedy of bathos:
“Little Haly! Little Haly!” cheeps the robin in the tree;
“Little Haly!” sighs the clover, “Little Haly!” moans the bee;
“Little Haly! Little Haly!” calls the kill-dee at twilight;
And the katydids and crickets hollers “Haly!” all the night.
As in “Dot Leedle Boy,” the sense of grief is intended to be augmented by the comedy of its utterance; and it is a purer grief for being so artless. Riley does not achieve the almost whimsical use of pathetic fallacy of Ransom's poem, but it is a similar mood he works towards in lines like these—
And the little Banty chickens kindo' cutters faint and low,
Like the hand that now was feedin' 'em was one they didn't know.
“To My Old Friend, William Leachman” is a tribute to the loyalty of a lifelong friend which also contains a Victorian genre piece on the theme of sorrow and family grief. The scene of the burial of “my first womern” is one of the few winter scenes in the dialect pieces. Again the simplicity of the grief tends towards bathos, but Riley lifts it above triteness with some realistic touches:
… the snowflakes whirlin', whirlin' and the fields a frozen glare,
And the neghbors' sleds and wagons congergatin' ev'rywhare.
And the clock, like ice a-crackin', clickt the icy hours in two.
The tribute of friendship produces a series of shared recollections of days in the old settlement which creates the background of the old farmer as a kind of Founding Father of the community. The “message” of these poems, that the qualities of the old man are those on which the community was built, is completed in this poem.
VI. DIFFICULTIES OF INTERPRETATION
There are special difficulties in judging a body of verse which takes the form of the work of a semi-illiterate versifier. It must obviously be true to the standard of its own semi-illiteracy. Any attempt to extend the vocabulary or the choice of similes beyond the limited range likely to the supposed creator would falsify the verse. In this respect, the “Johnson of Boone” poems succeed admirably. They fulfill Riley's own strict requirements for what is “natural” in dialect verse. But how far must verse of this kind be true to its own ineptitude? When the amateur versifier attempts a literary effect and merely burlesques it, how is the reader to decide whether this is a skillful guying of the versifier's lack of skill or a piece of overwriting on Riley's part that detracts from the “serious” content of the verse, which must, if the poems are fully to succeed, constantly be balanced against the ludicrous aspects?
There are many instances where it is impossible to decide. In “On the Death of Little Mahala Ashcraft,” the diction of such a line as “And the katydids and crickets hollers ‘Haly!’ all the night” can be considered an example of skillful ridicule in that the ludicrous inappropriateness of a word like “hollers” turns towards laughter a situation which calls only for the simple grief the rustic poet feels and tries to express with “art” (in the use of pathetic fallacy), but can express only with the artlessness which is natural to him. But, when later in the poem, we find the following stanza—
Did her father er her mother ever love her more 'n me,
Er her sisters er her brother prize her love more tendurly?
I question—and what answer?—only tears, and tears alone,
And ev'ry neghbor's eyes is full o' tear-drops as my own
—we may feel that the grief is too plainly stated, the treatment too flat and bald, and the poem is turned toward mawkishness. There is here no comic point to the inept versification; and, since the taste of the age consistently inclined toward the mawkish in its obituary verse, we may suspect that the flatness of the verse in this instance is the fault of Riley, not of his persona.
Almost none of these poems is free from defects of this kind. As another instance, we may cite the concluding lines of “Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer”:
Sich fine circumstances ort to make us satisfied;
Fer the world is full of roses, and the roses full of dew,
And the dew is full of heavenly love that drips fer me and you.
This phraseology can be taken as the rustic versifier's attempt at the literary, but these concluding lines are the moral of the poem; they sum up its content, and it may be felt that this serious content is marred by an image of such ugliness. This is, however, a matter of taste; and the fact that these lines became a popular quotation suggests that the taste of the age was moved rather than bothered by an image which may seem overstated and excessive to our own age.
The poems most free from defects of this kind are those, like “My Philosofy” and “A Hymb of Faith,” which approach nearest to plain statement, which do not attempt the literary and thus create a sense of doubt as to whose ineptitude is being exposed, the poet's or that of his comic persona. We could argue that the point does not matter, that the verses are meant only to be enjoyed, and that to establish fine distinctions of this sort is to take them too seriously. The distinction, however, is one between the comic and the merely ludicrous. Riley's purpose in this series of poems is the serious one of creating an authentic comic folk hero, as his own statement indicates:
“Johnson of Boone” has a claim on our respect because he is true to nature. I do not believe in dressing up nature. Nature is good enough for its Creator—it is good enough for me. To me the man Johnson is a living figure. I know what he has read. People seem to think that if a man is out of plumb in his language, he is likewise in his morals. Now the Old Man looks queer, I admit. His clothes do not fit him. He is bent and awkward. But that does not prevent his having a fine head and deep and tender eyes, and a soul in him you can recommend.17
In general, it may be stated that, while none of the poems in the series achieves a perfect balance of the comic and the serious, Riley does succeed in creating the figure of Johnson of Boone, largely by the quality of backbone which the poems of plain statement give to a characterization otherwise tending toward an excess of folksy sentiment.
There is also no question that, in this series of poems, Riley set a highly influential precedent in the depiction of farm life and reworked the traditional character of the crackerbarrel philosopher into a substantially different form. In the process, he created what was virtually a new form in American poetry, the Middle Western pastoral, which developed the comic aspects of the New England pastoral (found, for example, in Lowell's “The Courtin'”), avoided its “cultivated” attitudes,18 and emphasized that tendency in American literature (found especially in Irving and Crevecoeur) toward praise of a settled and abundantly prosperous rural life.
VII. THE EXAMPLE OF WHITTIER
Riley did, however, to some extent work within the tradition of pastoral inherited from the New England poets, primarily from Whittier. There is little difficulty in applying to Riley's work John B. Pickard's general summation of Whittier's literary attitudes: “The best of Whittier's genre pieces and his ballads illustrate the essential truth … that underneath the most commonplace objects lay beauty, rich treasures of life's tragedy and comedy. His regional works reveal the inner love of a man for the environment that molded him, the tradition that inspired him and the people that loved him.”19 Riley is perhaps more concerned with the worth than with the beauty of the commonplace, though, in terms of this type of moral thinking, worth is beauty. It expresses the beauty of God's design for mankind.
There are certain similarities in form between Whittier's pastorals and some of Riley's dialect poems, though Whittier actually employs dialect only in “Skipper Ireson's Ride.” These similarities do not extend to the “Johnson of Boone” poems, but the octosyllabic couplets of Whittier's “The Barefoot Boy” and “Maud Muller” are frequently the form chosen for Riley's rural narratives, if to different effect. The limpid, even flow of Whittier's couplets and the “cultivated” phrasing of such lines as these from “The Barefoot Boy”—
Flight of fowl and habitude,
Of the tenants of the wood
.....Of the black wasp's cunning way
Mason of his walls of clay,
And the architectural plans
Of gray hornet artisans
—these are qualities quite distinct from the brisk, apparently slapdash style of Riley's couplets and his skillful efforts to reproduce the natural cadences of speech. The origins of Whittier's pastoral style are in the tradition of English pastoral stemming from Milton's “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and their Elizabethan antecedents and maintained through the eighteenth century in such pieces as John Dyer's “Grongar Hill.” The origins of Riley's pastoral style, as I have indicated, are in the literature of American vernacular humor and satire.
The exception to this generalization is his poem “Out to Old Aunt Mary's,” which might be called Riley's “Snowbound” if it were in any way equal to Whittier's masterpiece. It is one of Riley's very few extensive pastoral pieces not in dialect, and its purpose is to recall “those old days of the lost sunshine / Of youth,” as Whittier's is to create “These Flemish pictures of old days” for one “Dreaming in throngful city ways / Of winter joys his boyhood knew.” The reason for Riley's choice of modern English is indicated in a note on the poem in the Biographical edition: “My boys and girls are town boys and girls, not children living in the country. They touch the country but are not actually of it. Were they country boys and girls, they would not, as I take it, see any novelty in country life.”20
The poem was an extremely popular one in Riley's public readings and may be regarded, like “An Old Sweetheart of Mine,” as an extended genre piece, this time on the theme of nostalgia for childhood days, and intended for the most “general” reader or listener, one who might be troubled even by the mildly literary flavor of a poem like “Snowbound,” with its diction:
Yet, haply, in some lull of life,
Some Truce of God which breaks its strife,
The Worlding's eyes shall gather dew
—and its inversions:
Or lilies floating in some pond,
Wood-fringed, the wayside gaze beyond.
There are only the faintest hints of diction and the plainest imagery in “Out to Old Aunt Mary's,” while the stanzas move at a comfortable ballad trot completely unlike the stately, melancholy flow of Whittier's couplets, as the following typical stanzas show:—
The few last houses of the town;
Then on, up the high creek-bluffs and down;
Past the squat toll-gate, with its well-sweep pole;
The bridge, and “the old ‘baptizin'-hole’,”
Loitering, awed, o'er pool and shoal,
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
.....And then in the dust of the road again;
And the teams we met, and the countrymen;
And the long highways, with sunshine spread
As thick as butter on country bread,
Our cares behind, and our hearts ahead
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
Riley's poem, like Whittier's, is concerned with the joys of childhood in a farm home; but, where Whittier's poem is so constructed as to separate the limited world of “home,” symbolically warmed by the woodfire, from “the world” outside, and to describe “the inevitable impingement of the world upon the quiet of wintry, rural solitude,” Riley's poem merely enumerates a number of specific sources of joy, with no attempt to impose a deeper meaning or more universal application on its theme. The joys of food and play—
The jelly—the jam and the marmalade,
And the cherry and quince “preserves” she made!
.....The honey, too, in its amber comb
.....[The] swooping swing in the locust trees
.....The talks on the back porch, in the low
Slanting sun and the evening glow—
are described merely for their own sake and have no deeper significance. Riley is, of course, not a poet of “deeper significances,” though there are occasional hints, even in this poem, of an awareness of these, as in these lines:
And the old spring-house, in the cool green gloom
Of the willow trees,—and the cooler room
Where the swinging shelves and the crocks were kept,
Where the cream in a golden languor slept,
While the waters gurgled and laughed and wept.
This image of richness extracted and retained within the heat of summer sums up the previous enumeration of pleasures, but it is not developed beyond this. As so often in Riley, joy must end in pathos; and the poem concludes with Aunt Mary's death, though joy to come is assured:
… she waits today
To welcome us:—Aunt Mary fell
Asleep this morning, whispering, “Tell
The boys to come” … And all is well
Out to Old Aunt Mary's.
This conclusion simply keeps the poem within the genre category; it is the expected mingling of sorrow with joy and the expected touch of pathos to give the joy an extra “lift.” It does not detract from the overall sense of exuberance found as much in this “modern English” pastoral as in Riley's dialect pastorals.
It is this quality that most sharply distinguishes what may be called the Middle Western pastoral from the New England pastoral. In subject matter there are few essential differences. Riley's tale of “barefoot boys in the days gone by,” as it were, covers the same ground as Whittier's
Barefoot boy, with cheeks of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes.
But Riley is free of the relentless moralizing of Whittier; he does not contrast the stern and sinful adult world with the innocence of childhood, as Whittier does again and again in such lines as
Let the million-dollared ride!
Barefoot, trudging at his side,
Thou hast more than he can buy
In the reach of ear and eye—
or the concluding lines of the same poem, with their melancholy picture of a dark future for the barefoot boy, one in which
All too soon these feet must hide
In the prison cells of pride
.....Happy if their track be found
Never on forbidden ground;
Happy if they sink not in
Quick and treacherous sands of sin.
Ah! that thou could'st know thy joy
Ere it passes, barefoot boy!(21)
The sentiment of Whittier's “Maud Muller” is again totally unlike the typically euphoric mood of Riley's rural narratives in its moral overtones, its melancholy appraisal of the deluded dreams of youth, and its wistful hope that our dreams of happiness may be fulfilled in “the hereafter.” In “Telling The Bees” and “Skipper Ireson's Ride,” Whittier does not append a moral, but the elegiac tone of the first and the hard lesson of the second are again very unlike the type of treatment Riley might conceivably have given to such subjects.
Riley's work in pastoral form is, of course, full of moralizing, but this is expressed in terms of the moral maxims, the conventionally uplifting sentiments that support the good life. Whittier is just as much a poet of the good life, but his moralizing is tinged with a latent melancholy and an inescapable sense that life is a vale of tribulation in which we can at best hope for interludes of joy. Yet, of all the New England poets, it is Whittier who may most aptly be compared with Riley. The points of similarity with Lowell and Holmes have been previously noted.
Notes
-
Quoted in Dickey, Maturity, 165.
-
William Empson, English Pastoral Poetry (New York, 1938), p. 4.
-
Cf. Whittier's “Maud Muller” as a variation on this theme.
-
Empson, op. cit., 14.
-
Cf. Huck's self-questionings concerning Jim, or the opening of Harris's “How Mr. Rabbit Saved His Meat” where “the little boy” picks up Uncle Remus on a point.
-
Jennette Tandy, Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire (New York, 1925), p. ix.
-
James Russell Lowell, Complete Poetical Works (Cambridge, Mass., n.d.). The “Cambridge Edition.” Quotations are from pp. 182, 184, 192, 204.
-
Biog., VI, 378-81.
-
The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York, 1963), pp. 155-59.
-
Tandy, op. cit., p. 25.
-
Lowell, op. cit., p. 233. 2nd series, no. II.
-
James Whitcomb Riley and Bill Nye, Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Chicago, 1905), p. 180. This is a later version of Nye and Riley's Railway Guide (Chicago, 1888).
-
Riley and Nye, op. cit., 187.
-
Dickey, Youth, 143.
-
Not included in later collected editions.
-
Radcliffe Squires, The Major Themes of Robert Frost (Ann Arbor, 1963), p. 56.
-
Quoted in Dickey, Maturity, 148.
-
Cf. Leary, op. cit., 144: “in even the simplest of [Whittier's] pastoral poems the attitudes are cultivated.”
-
John B. Pickard, “The Basis of Whittier's Critical Creed: The Beauty of the Commonplace and the Truth of Style,” Rice Institute Pamphlet, 47 (Oct., 1960), 34-50.
-
Biog., III. 522.
-
The Complete Poetical Works of Whittier (Cambridge, Mass., n.d.), The “Cambridge Edition.”
Works Cited
The Lockerbie Book, Containing Poems Not in Dialect. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1911.
The Hoosier Book, Containing Poems in Dialect. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1916.
Homestead edition. The Poems and Prose Sketches of James Whitcomb Riley. 16 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897-1914.
Greenfield edition. 14 vols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1900-16. A reissue in uniform bindings of selected individual volumes. No collective title.
Biographical edition. The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley. ed. Edmund H. Eitel. 6 vols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1913. The definitive text; includes a biographical sketch by Eitel. The Memorial edition, 1916, is textually identical.
The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1937. (Later reprints published by Grosset and Dunlap, New York). The most easily obtainable modern edition; reprints the text of the Biographical edition without the notes.
Letters of James Whitcomb Riley. ed. William Lyon Phelps. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1930.
“Letters of Riley and Bill Nye,” by Edmund H. Eitel. Harper's Magazine, 138 (1919).
Love Letters of the Bachelor Poet, James Whitcomb Riley to Miss Elizabeth Kahle. Boston, Bibliophile Society, 1922.
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The Victorian Poet
Poet As Entertainer: Will Carleton, James Whitcomb Riley, and the Rise of the Poet-Performer Movement