MANY years ago I said to one of Walt Whitman’s biographers: “Whitman
may, as you claim, be the poet of democracy, but he is not the poet of
the American people. He is the idol of a literary _culte_. Shall I tell
you who the poet of the American people is just at present? He is James
Whitcomb Riley of Indiana.” Riley used to become quite blasphemous when
speaking of Whitman. He said that the latter had begun by scribbling
newspaper poetry of the usual kind—and very poor of its kind—which had
attracted no attention and deserved none. Then he suddenly said to
himself: “Go to! I will discard metre and rhyme and write something
startlingly eccentric which will make the public sit up and take notice.
I will sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and the world
will say—as in fact it did—‘here is a new poetry, lawless, virile,
democratic. It is so different from anything hitherto written, that here
must be the great American poet at last.’”
Now, I am not going to disparage old Walt. He was big himself, and he
had an extraordinary feeling of the bigness of America with its swarming
multitudes, millions of the plain people, whom God must have loved, said
Lincoln, since he made so many of them. But all this in the mass. As to
any dramatic power to discriminate among individuals and characterize
them singly, as Riley does, Whitman had none. They are all alike, all
“leaves of grass.”
Well, my friend, and Walt Whitman’s, promised to read Riley’s poems. And
shortly I got a letter from him saying that he had read them with much
enjoyment, but adding, “Surely you would not call him a great national
poet.” Now since his death, the newspaper critics have been busy with
this question. His poetry was true, sweet, original; but was it great?
Suppose we leave aside for the moment this question of greatness. Who
are the great poets, anyway? Was Robert Burns one of them? He composed
no epics, no tragedies, no high Pindaric odes. But he made the songs of
the Scottish people, and is become a part of the national consciousness
of the race. In a less degree, but after the same fashion, Riley’s
poetry has taken possession of the popular heart. I am told that his
sales outnumber Longfellow’s. This is not an ultimate test, but so far
as it goes it is a valid one.
Riley is the Hoosier poet, but he is more than that: he is a national
poet. His state and his city have honored themselves in honoring him and
in keeping his birthday as a public holiday. The birthdays of nations
and of kings and magistrates have been often so kept. We have our fourth
of July, our twenty-second of February, our Lincoln’s birthday; and we
had a close escape from having a McKinley day. I do not know that the
banks are closed and the children let out of school—Riley’s children,
for all children are his—on each succeeding seventh of October; but I
think there is no record elsewhere in our literary history of a tribute
so loving and so universal to a mere man of letters, as the Hoosier
State pays annually to its sweet singer. Massachusetts has its poets and
is rightly proud of them, but neither Bryant nor Emerson nor Lowell nor
Holmes, nor the more popular Longfellow or Whittier, has had his natal
day marked down on the calendar as a yearly state _festa_. And yet
poets, novelists, playwriters, painters, musical composers, artists of
all kinds, have added more to the sum of human happiness than all the
kings and magistrates that ever lived. Perhaps Indianians are warmer
hearted than New Englanders; or perhaps they make so much of their poets
because there are fewer of them. But this is not the whole secret of it.
In a sense, Riley’s poems are provincial. They are intensely true to
local conditions, local scenery and dialect, childish memories and the
odd ways and characters of little country towns. But just for this
faithfulness to their environment these “poems here at home” come home
to others whose homes are far away from the Wabash, but are not so very
different after all.
America, as has often been said, is a land of homes: of dwellers in
villages, on farms, and in small towns. We are common people,
middle-class people, conservative, decent, religious, tenacious of old
ways, home-keeping and home-loving. We do not thrill to Walt Whitman’s
paeans to democracy in the abstract; but we vibrate to every touch on
the chord of family affections, of early friendships, and of the dear
old homely things that our childhood knew. Americans are sentimental and
humorous; and Riley abounds in sentiment—wholesome sentiment—and
natural humor, while Whitman had little of either.
To all Americans who were ever boys; to all, at least who have had the
good luck to be country boys and go barefoot; whether they dwell in the
prairie states of the Middle West, or elsewhere, the scenes and
characters of Riley’s poems are familiar: Little Orphant Annie and the
Raggedy Man, and the Old Swimmin’ Hole and Griggsby’s Station “where we
ust to be so happy and so pore.” They know when the frost is on the
“punkin,” and that the “Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out”;
and how the old tramp said to the Raggedy Man:—
You’re a _purty_ man!—_You_ air!—
With a pair o’ eyes like two fried eggs,
An’ a nose like a Bartlutt pear!
They have all, in their time, followed along after the circus parade,
listened to the old village band playing tunes like “Lily Dale” and “In
the Hazel Dell my Nellie’s Sleeping” and “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower”;
have heard the campaign stump speaker when he “cut loose on monopolies
and cussed and cussed and cussed”; have belonged to the literary society
which debated the questions whether fire or water was the most
destructive element; whether town life was preferable to country life;
whether the Indian or the negro had suffered more at the hands of the
white man; or whether the growth of Roman Catholicism in this country is
a menace to our free institutions. And _was_ the execution of Charles
the First justifiable? Charles is dead now; but this good old debate
question will never die. They knew the joys of “eatin’ out on the porch”
and the woes of having your sister lose your jackknife through a crack
in the barn floor; or of tearing your thumb nail in trying to get the
nickel out of the tin savings bank.
The poets we admire are many; the poets we love are few. One of the
traits that endear Riley to his countrymen is his cheerfulness. He is
“Sunny Jim.” The south wind and the sun are his playmates. The drop of
bitterness mixed in the cup of so many poets seems to have been left out
of his life potion. And so, while he does not rouse us with “the thunder
of the trumpets of the night,” or move us with the deep organ tones of
tragic grief, he never fails to hearten and console. And though tragedy
is absent from his verse, a tender pathos, kindred to his humor, is
everywhere present. Read over again “The Old Man and Jim,” or “Nothin’
to Say, my Daughter,” or any of his poems on the deaths of children; for
a choice that poignant little piece, “The Lost Kiss,” comparable with
Coventry Patmore’s best poem, “The Toys,” in which the bereaved father
speaks his unavailing remorse because he had once spoken crossly to his
little girl when she came to his desk for a good-night kiss and
interrupted him at his work.
Riley followed the bent of his genius and gave himself just the kind of
training that fitted him to do his work. He never had any regular
education, adopted no trade or profession, never married and had
children, but kept himself free from set tasks and from those
responsibilities which distract the poet’s soul. His muse was a truant,
and he was a runaway schoolboy who kept the heart of a boy into manhood
and old age, which is one definition of genius. He was better employed
when he joined a circus troupe or a travelling medicine van, or set up
as a sign painter, or simply lay out on the grass, “knee deep in June,”
than if he had shut himself up in a school or an office. He did no
routine work, but wrote when he felt like it, when he was in the mood.
Fortunately the mood recurred abundantly, and so we have about two dozen
volumes from him, filled with lovely poetry. Most of us do hack work,
routine work, because we can do nothing better. But for the creative
artist, hack work is a waste. Creative work, when one is in the mood, is
more a pleasure than a toil; and Riley worked hard at his verse-making.
For he was a most conscientious artist; and all those poems of his,
seemingly so easy, natural, spontaneous, were the result of labor,
though of labor joyously borne. How fine his art was perhaps only those
can fully appreciate who have tried their own hands at making verses.
Some of the things that he said to me about the use and abuse of dialect
in poetry and concerning similar points, showed me how carefully he had
thought out the principles of composition.
He thought most dialect poetry was overdone; recalling that delightful
anecdote about the member of the Chicago Browning Club who was asked
whether he liked dialect verse, and who replied: “Some of it. Eugene
Field is all right. But the other day I read some verses by a fellow
named Chaucer, and he carries it altogether too far.”
In particular, Riley objected to the habit which many writers have of
labelling their characters with descriptive names like Sir Lucius
O’Trigger and Birdofredum Sawin. I reminded him that English comedy from
“Ralph Roister Doister” down had practised this device. (In Ben Jonson
it is the rule.) And that even such an artist as Thackeray employed it
frequently with droll effect: Lady Jane Sheepshanks, daughter of the
Countess of Southdown, and so forth. But he insisted that it was a
departure from _vraisemblance_ which disturbed the impression of
reality.
In seeking to classify these Hoosier poems, we are forced back
constantly to a comparison with the Doric singers: with William Barnes,
the Dorsetshire dialect poet; and above all with Robert Burns.
Wordsworth in his “Lyrical Ballads,” and Tennyson in his few rural idyls
like “Dora” and “The Brook” dealt also with simple, country life, the
life of Cumberland dalesmen and Lincolnshire farmers. But these poets
are in another class. They are grave philosophers, cultivated scholars,
university men, writing in academic English; writing with sympathy
indeed, but from a point of view outside the life which they depict. In
our own country there are Will Carleton’s “Farm Ballads,” handling the
same homely themes as Riley’s; handling them truthfully, sincerely, but
prosaically. Carleton could not
. . . add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet’s dream.
But Riley’s world of common things and plain folks is always lit up by
the lamp of beauty. Then there is Whittier. He was a farmer lad, and was
part of the life that he wrote of. He belonged; and, like Riley, he knew
his Burns. I think, indeed, that “Snow-Bound” is a much better poem than
“The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Whittier’s fellow Quaker, John Bright, in
an address to British workingmen, advised them to read Whittier’s poems,
if they wanted to understand the spirit of the American people. Well,
the spirit of New England, let us say, if not of all America. For
Whittier is in some ways provincial, and rightly so. But though he uses
homely New England words like “chore,” he does not, so far as I
remember, essay dialect except in “Skipper Ireson’s Ride”; and that is
Irish if it is anything. No Yankee women known to me talk like the
fishwives of Marblehead in that popular but overrated piece. Then there
are the “Biglow Papers,” which remind of Riley’s work on the humorous,
as Whittier’s ballads do on the serious side. Lowell made a careful
study of the New England dialect and the “Biglow Papers” are brilliantly
true to the shrewd Yankee wit; but they are political satires rather
than idyls. Where they come nearest to these Hoosier ballads or to
“Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line” is where they record old local ways and
institutions. “This kind o’ sogerin’,” writes Birdofredum Sawin, who is
disgustedly campaigning in Mexico, like our National Guards of
yesterday:—
This kind o’ sogerin’ aint a mite like our October trainin’,
A chap could clear right out from there ef ’t only looked like
rainin’,
An’ th’ Cunnles, tu, could kiver up their shappoes with bandanners,
An’ send the insines skootin’ to the bar-room with their banners
(Fear o’ gittin’ on ’em spotted), . . .
Isn’t that something like Riley? Lowell, of course, is a more imposing
literary figure, and he tapped intellectual sources to which the younger
poet had no access. But I still think Riley the finer artist. Benjamin
F. Johnson, of Boone, the quaint, simple, innocent old Hoosier farmer,
is a more convincing person than Hosea Biglow. In many of the “Biglow
Papers” sentiment, imagery, vocabulary, phrase, are often too elevated
for the speaker and for his dialect. Riley is not guilty of this
inconsistency; his touch here is absolutely correct.
Riley’s work was anything but academic; and I am therefore rather proud
of the fact that my university was the first to confer upon him an
honorary degree. I cannot quite see why geniuses like Mark Twain and
Riley, whose books are read and loved by hundreds of thousands of their
countrymen, should care very much for a college degree. The fact
remains, however, that they are gratified by the compliment, which
stamps their performances with a sort of official sanction, like the
_couronné par l’Académie Française_ on the title-page of a French
author.
When Mr. Riley came on to New Haven to take his Master’s degree, he was
a bit nervous about making a public appearance in unwonted conditions;
although he had been used to facing popular audiences with great
applause when he gave his delightful readings from his own poems, with
humorous impersonations in prose as good as Beatrice Herford’s best
monologues. He rehearsed the affair in advance, trying on his Master’s
gown and reading me his poem, “No Boy Knows when He Goes to Sleep,”
which he proposed to use if called on for a speech. He asked me if it
would do: it did. For at the alumni dinner which followed the conferring
of degrees, when Riley got to his feet and read the piece, the audience
broke loose. It was evident that, whatever the learned gentlemen on the
platform might think, the undergraduates and the young alumni knew their
Riley; and that his enrolment on the Yale catalogue was far and away the
most popular act of the day. For in truth there is nothing cloistral or
high and dry among our modern American colleges. A pessimist on my own
faculty even avers that the average undergraduate nowadays reads nothing
beyond the sporting columns in the New York newspapers. There were other
distinguished recipients of degrees at that same Commencement. One
leading statesman was made a Doctor of Laws: Mr. Riley a Master of Arts.
Of course a mere man of letters cannot hope to rank with a politician.
If Shakespeare and Ben Butler had been contemporaries and had both come
up for a degree at the same Commencement—supposing any college willing
to notice Butler at all—why Ben would have got an LL.D. and William an
M.A. Yet exactly why should this be so? For as I am accustomed to say of
John Hay, anybody can be Secretary of State, but it took a smart man to
write “Little Breeches” and “The Mystery of Gilgal.”