THE HOOSIER INTERPRETED
The rural type in Indiana has found notable interpretation at the
hands of two writers who, working independently of each other and at
different periods, have made records of great social and literary
value and interest. As already indicated, country life at the West and
Southwest has not varied widely in different communities. The same
social conditions and peculiarities of speech have been observable in
many regions deriving population from common sources; but the type
found in the Ohio Valley was best defined in Indiana, and it has gained
its greatest fame through the interpretations of Edward Eggleston and
James Whitcomb Riley. Their outlook on life has been wholly different,
and their literary methods have been antipodal; but they have both
been keen observers of the rural Indianians, though of different
generations. They meet in a strong affection for their native
soil, and in an appreciation of the essential domesticity and moral
enlightenment of the people they depict.
I. _Edward Eggleston_
Switzerland County lies in the far southeastern corner of the State,
and Vevay, its principal town and capital, is on the Ohio River. The
name of the county is explained by the fact of its settlement by Swiss
immigrants, who were drawn thither by the supposed adaptability of
the soil to the growth of the grape. Vevay lies about midway between
Louisville and Cincinnati, and the steamboats plying between these
two cities are its only medium of communication with the world, as no
railway touches it. It was to this pretty village that Joseph Cary
Eggleston, the father of Edward and George Cary Eggleston, came in
1832. The impression has been abroad that the author of “The Hoosier
Schoolmaster” was himself reared amid the squalor and ignorance which
he described so vividly, but this is without foundation of fact. The
Egglestons were of good Virginia stock, and the members of the Indiana
branch of the family were cultivated people. Joseph Cary was graduated
from William and Mary College in his seventeenth year with high honors.
He had studied law before he left Virginia, and the fourteen years
of his life that remained to him after his removal to Indiana were
spent in the successful practice of his profession. He was, moreover,
popular in the community, for he sat in both branches of the General
Assembly, and was nominated for representative in Congress, but failed
of election. He married, soon after reaching Indiana, the daughter of
George Craig, of Craig township, in Switzerland County. The Craigs were
of a distinguished Kentucky family, and, like the Egglestons, looked
back to a Virginia ancestry. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay in
1837, and has never failed to speak with great cordiality and affection
of the pretty river town whose chief distinction lies in his own
attainments. He has even taken occasion in recent years[41] to rebuke
“a certain condescension in New Englanders,” which had prompted the
_Atlantic Monthly_ to comment on the hardship it must have been “to a
highly organized man” to be born in southern Indiana in the crude early
years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Eggleston declares that he has
retained enough of local prejudice to feel that he would have lost more
than he could have gained had Plymouth Rock or Beacon Hill been his
birthplace rather than Vevay. He was sensitive to the loveliness of the
Indiana spring and summer, and has paid tribute to it in words which it
is a pleasure to repeat:--
“The sound of the anvil in the smithy, and the soft clatter of
remote cow-bells on the ‘commons,’ linger in my mind as memories
inseparable from my boyhood in Vevay. A certain poetic feeling
which characterized me from childhood, and which, perhaps, finally
determined my course toward literary pursuits, was nourished by my
delight in the noble scenery about Vevay, Madison, and New Albany,
in which places I lived at various times. My brother George and
myself were walkers, partly because our father had been one before
us. Nothing could be finer than our all-day excursions to the woods
in search of hickory-nuts, wild grapes, blackberries, paw-paws, or
of nothing at all but the sheer pleasure of wandering in one of
the noblest forests that it ever fell to a boy’s lot to have for a
playground. Then, too, when we had some business five or twenty miles
away, we scorned to take the steamboat, but just set out afoot along
the river bank, getting no end of pleasure out of the walk, and
out of that sense of power which unusual fatigue, cheerfully borne,
always gives.”[42]
Dr. Eggleston’s early life was full of vicissitude, but he has himself
disclaimed credit for being what is called “a self-made man.” It is
true that he had his own way to make, in great measure, but he began
with all the benefits of good ancestry, and he was, in his own phrase,
“born into an intellectual atmosphere.” Joseph Cary Eggleston, who
died when Edward was only nine years old, provided in his will for
the exchange of his law library for books of general interest, that
his children might have good literature about them in their formative
years--a direction that was followed faithfully by his widow. The boy
Edward grew up with the ideal of a scholarly father before him, and
with an ambition to know books and to read other languages than his
own. He learned also the mystery of type-setting, and contributed items
to the Vevay _Reveille_, duly “set up.” Dr. Eggleston records that in
his primary schooling, conducted by his mother, he proved himself a
dull scholar, but that some kind of climacteric was passed in his tenth
year, and that thenceforward he was the pride of his teachers. Manual
training was hardly dreamed of in those days, but Joseph Eggleston
had an appreciation of its value and left what Edward has described
as “a solemn injunction that his sons should be sent to the country
every summer and taught manual labor on a farm.” This injunction was
carefully obeyed, so that Edward Eggleston had an actual experience of
farming and a contact with farm folk that was a part of his preparation
for the writing of the tales that gave him his first fame. Judge Miles
Eggleston, Joseph’s brother, was more distinctly an Indianian than
any other member of the family by reason of his long residence in the
State and his public services. Guilford Eggleston, Joseph Eggleston’s
cousin, was identified with the family life at Vevay. He was a man of
many accomplishments, and left a deep impression on Edward Eggleston,
who has spoken of his brilliant talk as a perpetual inspiration: “He
incessantly stimulated my love for literature, guided my choice of
books, taught me to make a commonplace book of my reading, and by his
conversation and example made me feel that to lead an intellectual
life was the most laudable pursuit of a human being.” The direction
thus given to the boyish impulse, and the atmosphere of his home, were
of great importance to Edward, for of systematic schooling he was to
know little. He was never but once in his life able to spend three
consecutive months in school, and after he reached his tenth year the
sum of his schooling was only eighteen months.
Joseph Eggleston had foreseen his own death and provided in various
ways for the education of his sons. He purchased a scholarship in
Asbury (DePauw) College, but continued ill health made it impossible
for Edward to avail himself of its benefits, though his younger
brother, George Cary, became a student there. Just what Edward
Eggleston lost by his irregular schooling, which was almost wholly
independent of instructors in the usual sense of the term, is hardly
a profitable subject for speculation. By following his own bent, he
strengthened himself along lines of natural preference, and he formed
that habit of wise selection and rejection which in itself marks the
educated man. Although schoolhouse doors were closed against him on
account of his precarious health, he was nevertheless permitted to
court death by close application in home study. He acquired, by the
time he reached his twenty-fifth year, some knowledge of six or seven
languages, and a familiar acquaintance with classical English and
French poetry. He knew both the English and French dramatic literature,
though, having been bred in the strictest teaching of the Methodists of
that day, he read few novels, and he gives his own testimony that he
should have esteemed it “a damnable sin to see a play on the stage.”
When Edward Eggleston was in his twelfth year, his mother remarried,
taking for her husband the Rev. William Terrell, a Methodist minister.
This change brought with it a wider horizon for the boy, as his
stepfather’s duties led the family away from Vevay to Madison and New
Albany, also on the Ohio, but larger towns than Vevay. When sixteen,
he spent more than a year with his father’s family in Virginia. The
sharp transition from the conditions in the newer to those of the older
country quickened his powers of observation. The tribulations of the
Western pioneers had been discussed in his hearing by his elders during
the most impressionable years of his childhood; his grandfather Craig’s
stone house was a reminder of times not remote when the Indians were a
daily menace; and the recitals of the wandering apostles of Methodism
in his mother’s house had given him further contact with the adventure
and romance of pioneer life. Virginia opened new vistas, and the novel
conditions of life that he found there extended his knowledge of men
and manners, and afforded an opportunity for criticism and comparison
that was of definite value. He found himself cousin to a considerable
part of the population, and this wide relationship gave him an
acquaintance with the charming social life of old Virginia; but he
counted himself an abolitionist, he says, from the time of this visit.
The abundant vitality of Dr. Eggleston’s later years has been so
strikingly characteristic that it is difficult to believe that ill
health followed him from semi-invalid boyhood into manhood; but the
year after his return from Virginia he was sent to Minnesota in the
hope that the change might benefit him, and the kind fates thus threw
him into still other and different experiences. He was in the new
Northwest when the free-soil excitement in Kansas thrilled the country,
and he set out afoot, with a dirk knife as his only weapon, for the
scene of conflict. He has himself described the failure and result of
this excursion:--
“After weeks of weary walking and nights spent in the discomforts
of frontier cabins, I grew sick at heart and longed for the
companionship and refinements of home. I was rather glad to learn
that men from the free States were entirely shut out of the besieged
territory on the Iowa side. My moccasins were worn out, my feet
were sore, my little stock of money was failing, and I was tired of
husbanding it by eating crackers and cheese. I turned eastward at a
point west of Cedar Falls, crossed the Mississippi at Muscatine, and
after walking in all three or four hundred miles, I at length boarded
a railway train at a station near Galesburg, and reached my nearest
relatives after an enforced fast of twenty-four hours, without a cent
in my pocket, and looking, in my soiled and travel-worn garments,
like a young border ruffian. I had left home a pale invalid; I
returned sun-browned and well.”
But this gain in bodily strength was not to profit him long. He had
been bred in the Methodist faith; his stepfather was a minister of
wide reputation in this denomination, and the youth, with his studious
disposition and gift for speech, turned naturally to the ministry. He
has said of himself that an inward conflict between his predisposition
to literary work and the tendency to religion and philanthropy began
in boyhood and has continued throughout his life. There were times in
his youth when his love for literature seemed an idolatry, and once in
a repentant mood he destroyed his youthful manuscripts and resolved
to abandon literature. He was now launched upon the Methodist circuit
rider’s life of hardship and peril, covering a four weeks’ itinerary
in the county of which New Albany is the capital, and performing his
duties with such diligence that in six months he was again a wreck. He
therefore removed to Minnesota, and continued in the ministry, save
for intervals of physical prostration, until, in 1866, he accepted
the editorship of _The Little Corporal_, a popular juvenile periodical
published at Chicago, and from that beginning was irresistibly drawn
to the business of making books. In 1874, he became pastor of a church
in Brooklyn, to which he gave the name of the Church of Christian
Endeavor, and which sought to make sunshine in shady places. It was,
indeed, the “Church of the Best Licks,” of the “Hoosier Schoolmaster,”
slightly conventionalized. Dr. Eggleston continued in the pastorate for
five years, devoting himself to his work with his accustomed zeal and
enthusiasm, which resulted in another collapse. He then retired finally
from the ministry; but the phrase, “Christian Endeavor,” first applied
by Dr. Eggleston to his Brooklyn church, is widely known as the name of
a society of young people.
Unconscious preparation for a life-employment has rarely been more
clearly exemplified in American literature than in the case of Dr.
Eggleston. This is not true as to his novels of Western life merely,
but as to the later historical writing in which he has so successfully
detected and appraised various aspects of our social growth. His
early experiences at the West were indelibly written in his memory,
and though he did not at once transcribe them, his work as editor
sharpened his instincts and helped him to an appreciation of his own
material. His removal to New York in 1870 was another fortunate step
of preparation, for it gave him a perspective which he could not have
gained had he remained at the West. He wrote almost immediately “The
Hoosier Schoolmaster,” the first draft, designed for _Hearth and Home_,
being in the form of a short story, which he extended to its present
form at the suggestion of one of the proprietors of the periodical.
The reading of Taine’s “Art in the Netherlands” was the quickening
influence that led to the writing of the story. Dr. Eggleston learned
from Taine that an artist should paint what he sees, and he therefore
undertook to portray the illiterate people of southern Indiana. The
story was published in book form and gained wide popularity, which has
not diminished in the thirty years since its appearance. Dr. Eggleston
has been criticised severely in Indiana for the series of novels
that began with “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” but this criticism has
come largely from a new generation that does not view these tales in
the light of history, and is, therefore, hardly competent to pass on
their veracity. By the legal tests for expert witnesses Dr. Eggleston
is certainly qualified to speak; his own experience and the social
evolution of the people of Indiana contribute to the creation of his
competency; and when we add to these considerations his instinctive
interest in the beginnings and tendencies of American life, it is not
possible to reject him. He knew, as he says, “the antique Hoosier.” The
Indiana of 1850 was very different from that of 1870, and Dr. Eggleston
was looking backward a score of years when he created Ralph Hartsook,
the youthful schoolmaster, and threw about him an atmosphere of
ignorance and vice. The story is an instructive footnote to the history
of education in Indiana. “Bud Means” is of the second generation of
Hoosiers--the generation which, outside of the first social order, had
little or no benefit of education, and which sank to the condition
of illiteracy that awakened presently the efforts of the faithful few
who won the fight for free schools. Courage preceded knowledge as a
requirement of pedagogues in the period of which Dr. Eggleston wrote.
“‘Lickin’ and larnin’ goes together; no lickin’, no larnin’,’ declared
Pete Jones.” The student who may hereafter scan the educational history
of Indiana and read with dismay the statistics compiled by Mills, will
welcome this unadorned tale, that illuminates and confirms the dry
facts of the statistician. Eggleston, the novelist, kept Eggleston, the
preacher, well in hand, and there is no tedious moralizing in the book.
It is not difficult to understand the prompt recognition of the story
or its long-continued attraction. The subject was novel, the characters
were new, and the scene was set in a region that had never before been
seriously explored by the story-teller. It was, as an army officer put
it, a cavalry dash into literature. The incidents were linked together
with skill, and their air of entire credibility has not been lost in
the years that have passed since it surprised and delighted its first
readers. Enjoyment of the story was not limited to English readers.
It was translated into French by Madame Blanc, and was published in
condensed form in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ with the title “Le Maitre
d’École de Flat Creek.” German and Danish translations followed, so
that “Bud Means” has enjoyed opportunities for foreign travel quite
unusual among his neighbors.
“The End of the World” (1872) continued the series of stories which Dr.
Eggleston had begun in the “Schoolmaster.” Religious phenomena were
the most marked social expression in the time and place of which he
wrote. It was religion that offered to the isolated people of the new
frontier the only relief that their lives knew from toil, hardship, and
danger; and what appears now, at the distance of fifty years, to have
been a mania was with them a grave and vital matter. “The End of the
World” is a tale of the Millerite excitement, which swept the country
in 1842-1843, and Dr. Eggleston adapted it very entertainingly to the
purposes of fiction. “The Mystery of Metropolisville” (1873) led away
from Indiana into Minnesota, with which Dr. Eggleston had become
acquainted as a minister. Against a background of the land-booming
period, he illustrates the dangers and temptations of the pioneers; and
while the tale is less satisfactory than any of the Indiana series, it
remains after thirty years a readable novel. It was hardly possible
for Dr. Eggleston to forget wholly the people he had known on the
Ohio, and he introduces in “The Mystery of Metropolisville” a Hoosier
poet, who had left the “Waybosh” because his literary efforts were not
appreciated there. He carried his ambitions into Minnesota, became a
trapper and land speculator, and there, to quote from one of his own
stanzas,--
“His Hoosier harp hangs on the wild water-willer.”
Dr. Eggleston had been established at New York for eight years when
he wrote “Roxy” (1878), one of the best of his books, and one which
depicts even more vividly than “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” his early
environment. He was now forty-one, and the years that had added to the
sum of his experience had developed also his natural instinct for
character. The dramatic quality, too, shows strongly in this tale,
which is, in its moral relation, a kind of Western “Scarlet Letter.”
There is more or less of Vevay in this novel,--it is not important
to inquire too curiously whether it be more or less,--and the pretty
river village, with its slight foreign color, which was derived from
the Swiss residents, the mystery and novelty of the broad river
highway, the simplicity of the life, its lazy gossip and its religious
enthusiasms, are all depicted with fidelity. The Bonabys, father and
son, the lurking figure of Nancy, Twonnet, and Roxy, possess the
interest that attaches to fresh types. The introduction of the volatile
Twonnet, a member of the Swiss Colony, in contrast with the sober Roxy,
the unobtrusive presentation of the religious problems that held the
attention of the community, and the blending of the threads of young
Bonaby’s destiny, are accomplished with skill and power.
In “The Circuit Rider” (1874) Dr. Eggleston crossed the Indiana
boundary into southern Ohio, but for all critical purposes the type
remained the same. Political frontiers do not deter the novelist,
who enjoys extra-territorial privileges. “The Circuit Rider” is not
so entertaining a story as “Roxy.” The characters do not take hold of
the imagination here as in the later book, and those somewhat vague
qualities that combine to the creation of atmosphere are not blended
so effectively. But as a picture of the strenuous religious life of
the Ohio Valley in the early half of the century, the story is most
important. In “Roxy” the strife between Calvinism and Wesleyism is more
strongly contrasted; but “The Circuit Rider” gives a vivid impression
of a period that was made remarkable by the heroism and sacrifice of
the Methodist evangelists. After “Roxy” Dr. Eggleston did not return
to the field of his early successes until he wrote “The Graysons”
(1887). Like “The Circuit Rider” this story is not, geographically
speaking, of Indiana, but it is nevertheless of that broader Hoosierdom
which comprehended a small part of southern Ohio and considerably more
of Illinois. This is one of the best of all the Hoosier cycle, and,
indeed, one of the best of American novels. There is not an inartistic
line in the book, and the manner in which Lincoln is introduced
as a character,--appearing as the attorney for a boy charged with
murder, and winning his freedom by a characteristic resort to homely
philosophy,--is achieved so simply that the reader is left wondering
whether it could really have been the great Lincoln who participated
in one scene, performed his part, and thereupon disappeared from the
stage. A clumsy artist would have dwelt upon Lincoln, hinting at
his future greatness and reluctantly dismissing him; Dr. Eggleston
introduces the incident (which is based on fact) with an inadvertence
that enhances its interest and increases its suggestiveness. The
dialect in this tale is much more critical than that in any other
novel of Dr. Eggleston’s Western series. In his earlier stories,
written before the scientific study of American folk-speech had been
undertaken, the dialect is more general. Dr. Eggleston’s other works
of fiction are: “Mr. Blake’s Walking Stick” (1869); “Book of Queer
Stories” (1870); “The Schoolmaster’s Stories for Boys and Girls”
(1874); “Queer Stories for Boys and Girls” (1884); “The Faith Doctor”
(1891); “Duffels” (1893). “The Faith Doctor” is a novel of New York,
in which the prevailing interest in what Dr. Eggleston called “aerial
therapeutics” supplies the motive. “Duffels” is a collection of short
stories written at intervals throughout his literary career, with
scenes laid in many parts of the country, and illustrating happily the
versatility and the story-telling gift of the author.
Dr. Eggleston began in 1880 researches for a history of life in the
United States. He pursued his studies abroad, as well as in American
libraries, and assembled at his summer home on Lake George a large
collection of Americana. The only published result of these studies
thus far is “The Beginners of a Nation” (1896), the most serious,
searching, and exhaustive essay in _Kultur-Geschichte_ yet presented
by an American. The mere politics of our history and its military
incidents had long received the attention of students, to the exclusion
of the social and domestic. A work such as Dr. Eggleston has undertaken
is vastly more difficult and therefore more important, for it requires
original research in the strictest sense. His other historical works so
far completed are: “A History of the United States and its People for
the Use of Schools” (1888); “The Household History of the United States
and its People” (1888); and “A First Book in American History” (1889).
Dr. Eggleston’s life makes in itself a delightful story of aspiration
and achievement. Many Americans have experienced hardship and
discouragement, but few have profited so richly as this novelist and
historian by every whim of fortune. Ill health has menaced him all
his days, but physical infirmity has never conquered his ambition or
diminished his mental vitality. There is about him an exuberance of
spirits that is not only a distinguishing personal trait, but a quality
of all his stories. And if ill health in his youth and young manhood
interrupted the orderly course of education, it also brought him
opportunities for acquiring a broad knowledge of American provincial
life that no school could have given him. When Dr. Eggleston began to
write there was, outside of New England, little local literature, and
the value of dialect in interpretative fiction was only beginning to be
understood. Cable, Page, Harris, Murfree, “Octave Thanet,” were names
unknown to the catalogues when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte were well embarked upon their careers; but
the one was a humorist and the other a romanticist, and neither had
undertaken to reproduce local speech accurately. Dr. Eggleston was the
pioneer provincial realist; and if, as he says, the great American
novel is being written in sections, he certainly contributed early
chapters, and indicated the lines to be followed.
His marriage, in 1891, to Frances E. Goode, a granddaughter of his
father’s cousin, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, renewed ties with Indiana
that had never been wholly broken during long years of absence. He has
often been a visitor to Madison, which was Mrs. Eggleston’s home, and
he spent the winter of 1899 in that beautiful and tranquil town.
II. _James Whitcomb Riley_
Crabbe and Burns are Mr. Riley’s forefathers in literature. Crabbe
was the pioneer in what may be called the realism of poetry; it was
he who rejected the romantic pastoralism that had so long peopled the
British fields with nymphs and shepherds, and introduced the crude
but actual country folk of England. The humor, the bold democracy,
and the social sophistication that he lacked were supplied in his own
day by Burns, and Burns had, too, the singing instinct and the bolder
art of which there are no traces in Crabbe. Something of Crabbe’s
realism and Burns’s humor and philosophy are agreeably combined in
Mr. Riley. His first successes were achieved in the portrayal of the
Indiana country and village folk in dialect. He has rarely seen fit
to vary his subject, and he has been faithful to the environment
from which he derived his inspiration. James Whitcomb Riley is an
interesting instance--perhaps, after Whittier, the most striking in
our literature--of a natural poet, taking his texts from the familiar
scenes and incidents of his own daily walks, and owing little or
nothing to the schools. He was born at Greenfield, the seat of
Hancock County, in 1849. His father, Reuben A. Riley, was a native
of Pennsylvania, of Dutch antecedents, though there is a tradition
of Irish ancestry in the family. He was a lawyer, who enjoyed a wide
reputation as an advocate, and was long reckoned among the most
effective political speakers in Indiana. He was a discriminating
reader and an occasional writer of both prose and verse. The poet’s
mother was a Marine, of a family in which an aptness for rhyming was
characteristic. The Greenfield schools have always been excellent, and
young Riley was fortunate in having for his teacher Lee O. Harris,
himself a poet, who tried to adapt the curriculum of the Hancock
County schools to the needs of an unusual pupil in whom imagination
predominated to the exclusion of mathematics.
Learning is, as Higginson has aptly condensed it, not accumulation, but
assimilation; and “the Hoosier poet” was born one of those fortunate
men to whom schools are a mere incident of education, but who walk
through the world with their eyes open, adding daily to their stock
of knowledge. Bagehot enlarges on this trait as he discovers it in
Shakespeare, “throughout all whose writings,” he says, “you see an
amazing sympathy with common people.” The common people caught and
held the attention of Mr. Riley, and as the annalist of their simple
lives he established himself firmly in public affection. The half a
dozen colleges within a radius of fifty miles of his home did not
attract him; he was bred to no business, but followed in a tentative
way occupations that brought him into contact with people. He began
to write because he felt the impulse, and not because he breathed
a literary atmosphere or looked forward to a literary career. His
imagination needed some outlet, and he made verses just as he drew
pictures or acquired a knack at playing the guitar, taking one talent
about as seriously as the other. A Western county seat, with its daily
advent of pilgrims from the farms, affords an entertaining panorama for
a bright boy, and Mr. Riley began in his youth that careful observation
of the Indiana country folk, their ways and their speech, that was
later to afford him a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material.
He had in his younger days something of Artemus Ward’s fondness for a
hoax, and he wrote “Leonaine,” in imitation of Poe’s manner, with so
marked success that several critics of discernment received the poem,
and the story of its discovery in an old school reader, in good faith.
In the experimental period of his career he read widely and to good
purpose, learning the mechanics of prosody from the best models. His
ear was naturally good, and he was distinctly original in his ideas of
form. He delighted in the manipulation of words into odd and surprising
combinations, and though the results were not always dignified, they
were, nevertheless, curious and amusing, and brought him a degree of
local fame. Mr. Riley’s contributions were wholly to newspapers through
many years, during which the more deliberate periodicals would have
none of him. He printed poems in the _Herald_, an Indianapolis weekly
paper, in which the poems of Edith M. Thomas and others who have since
gained a literary reputation first saw the light; and having attracted
the attention of E. B. Martindale, the owner of the Indianapolis
_Journal_, he was regularly employed on that paper, between 1877 and
1885, printing many of his best pieces there. He had the pleasure of
seeing his verses widely copied at that period, when the newspaper
press was his only medium of communication, and before he had printed
a volume. His first marked recognition followed the publication in the
_Journal_ of a series of poems signed “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone,”
which not only awakened wide interest, but gave direction to a talent
that had theretofore been without definite aim. He encouraged the idea
that the poems were really the work of a countryman, and prefaced them
with letters in prose to add to their air of authenticity, much as
Lowell introduced the “Biglow Papers.” This series included “Thoughts
fer the Discuraged Farmer,” “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” and
“To My Old Friend, William Leachman,” which were winningly unaffected
and simple, bearing out capitally the impression of a bucolic poet
celebrating his own joys and sorrows. The charm of the “Benj. F.
Johnson” series lay in their perfect suggestion of a whimsical, lovable
character, and wherever Mr. Riley follows the method employed first in
those pieces, he never fails of his effect.
It should be remembered, in passing from Riley masquerading as “Benj.
F. Johnson” to Riley undisguised, that two kinds of dialect are
represented. The Boone County poet’s contributions are printed as
the old farmer is supposed to have written them, not as reported by
a critical listener. There is a difference between the attempt of an
illiterate man to express his own ideas on paper, and a transcript of
his utterances set down by one trained to the business--the vernacular
as observed and recorded by a conscious artist. In every community
there is a local humorist, a sayer of quaint things, whose oddities
of speech gain wide acceptance and circulation, and Mr. Riley is his
discoverer in Indiana. Lowell, with his own New England particularly
in mind, said that “almost every county has some good die-sinker
in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the whole
neighborhood”; and this may be applied generally to the South and
West. Mr. Riley writes always with his eye on a character; and those
who question his dialect do not understand that there is ever present
in his mind a real individual. The feeling and the incident are not
peculiar to the type; they usually lie within the range of universal
experience; but the expression, the manner, the figure of the subject,
are suggested in the poem, not by speech alone, but by the lilt of
the line and the form of the stanza. Mr. Riley is more interested in
odd characters, possessing marked eccentricities, than in the common,
normal type of the farm or the country town, and the dialect that he
employs often departs from the usual vocabulary of the illiterate in
the field he studies, and follows lines of individual idiosyncrasy.
The shrewdly humorous farmer who is a whimsical philosopher and rude
moralist delights him. This character appears frequently in his poems,
often mourning for the old times, now delighting in “noon-time an’
June-time, down around the river”; and again expressing contentment
with his own lot, averring that “they’s nothin’ much patheticker ’n
just a-bein’ rich.” To these characters he gives a dialect that is
fuller than the usual rural speech: _ministratin’_ (ministering),
_resignated_ (resigned), _artificialer_ (more artificial),
_competenter_ (more competent), _tractabler_ (more tractable), and
_familiously_ (familiarly), not being properly in the Hoosier _lingua
rustica_, but easily conceivable as possible deviations. Mr. Riley has
been criticised for imputing to his characters such phrases as “when
the army broke out” and “durin’ the army,” referring to the Civil War,
and many careful observers declare that he could never have heard
these phrases; but very likely he has heard them from the eccentric
countrymen for whom he has so strong an affinity; or he may have coined
them outright as essential to the interpretation of such characters.
In the main, however, he may be followed safely as an accurate guide
in the speech of the Southeastern element of the population, and his
questionable usages and inconsistencies are few and slight, as the
phrase “don’t you know,” which does not always ring true, or “again”
and “agin,” used interchangeably and evidently as the rhyme may hint.
The abrupt beginning of a sentence, frequently noticed in Mr. Riley’s
dialect verses, is natural. The illiterate often experience difficulty
in opening a conversation, expressing only a fragment, to which an
interlocutor must prefix for himself the unspoken phrases. There is no
imposition in Mr. Riley’s dialect, for his amplifications of it are
always for the purpose of aiding in the suggestion of a character as he
conceives it; he does not pretend that he portrays in such instances a
type found at every cross-roads. “Doc Sifers” and “The Raggedy Man” are
not peculiar to Indiana, but have their respective counterparts in such
characters as Mark Twain’s “Pudd’n-head Wilson” and the wayside tramp,
who has lately been a feature of farce comedy rather than of our social
economy. “Fessler’s Bees,” “Nothin’ to say,” “Down to the Capital,”
“A Liz-town Humorist,” and “Squire Hawkins’s Story” show Mr. Riley at
his happiest as a delineator of the rural type. In these sketches he
gives in brief compass the effect of little dramas, now humorous, now
touched with simple and natural pathos, and showing a nice appreciation
of the color of language which is quite as essential in dialect as
in pure English. But it matters little that the _dramatis personæ_
change, or that the literary method varies; the same kindliness, the
same blending of humor and pathos, and the same background of “green
fields and running brooks” characterize all. “The crude man is,” the
poet believes, “generally moral,” and the Riley Hoosier is intuitively
religious, and is distinguished by his rectitude and sense of justice.
Mr. Riley made his work effective through the possession of a sound
instinct for appraising his material, combined with a good sense
of proportion. His touch grew steadily firmer, and he became more
fastidious as the public made greater demands upon him; for while
his poems in dialect gained him a hearing, he strove earnestly for
excellence in the use of literary English. He has written many poems of
sentiment gracefully and musically, and with no suggestion of dialect.
Abundant instances of his felicity in the strain of retrospect and
musing might be cited. The same chords have been struck time and
time again; but they take new life when he touches them, as in “The
All-Golden”:--
“I catch my breath, as children do
In woodland swings when life is new,
And all the blood is warm as wine
And tingles with a tang divine....
O gracious dream, and gracious time,
And gracious theme, and gracious rhyme--
When buds of Spring begin to blow
In blossoms that we used to know,
And lure us back along the ways
Of time’s all-golden yesterdays!”
It is not the farmer alone whose simple virtues appeal to him; but
rugged manhood anywhere commands his tribute, and he has hardly written
a more touching lyric than “Away,” whose subject was an Indiana
soldier:--
“I cannot say, and I will not say
That he is dead--He is just away!”
He has his own manner of expressing an idea, and this individuality
is so marked that it might lead to the belief that he had little
acquaintance with the classic English writers. But his series of
imitations, including the prose of Scott and Dickens and the
characteristic poems of Tennyson and Longfellow, are certainly the
work of one who reads to good purpose and has a feeling for style.
When he writes naturally there is no trace of bookishness in his work;
he rarely or never invokes the mythologies, though it has sometimes
pleased him to imagine Pan piping in Hoosier orchards. He is read
and quoted by many who are not habitual readers of poetry--who would
consider it a sign of weakness to be caught in the act of reading
poems of any kind, but who tolerate sentiment in him because he makes
it perfectly natural and surrounds it with a familiar atmosphere
of reality. The average man must be trapped into any display of
emotion, and Mr. Riley spreads for him many nets from which there is
no escape, as in “Nothin’ to say, my daughter,” where the subject is
the loneliness and isolation of the father whose daughter is about
to marry, and who faces the situation clumsily, in the manner of all
fathers, rich or poor. The remembrance of the dead wife and mother
adds to the pathos here. The old man turns naturally to the thought of
her:--
“You don’t rickollect her, I reckon? No; you wasn’t a year old then!
And now yer--how old _air_ you? W’y, child, not ‘_twenty_’! When?
And yer nex’ birthday’s in Aprile? and you want to git married that
day?
I wisht yer mother was livin’!--but I hain’t got nothin’ to say!
Twenty year! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found!
There’s a straw ketched onto yer dress there--I’ll bresh it off--turn
round.
(Her mother was jest twenty when us two run away.)
Nothin’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say!”
The drolleries of childhood have furnished Mr. Riley subjects for some
of his most original and popular verses. Here, again, he does not
accept the conventional children of literature, whom he calls “the
refined children, the very proper children--the studiously thoughtful,
poetic children”; but he seeks “the rough-and-tumble little fellows ‘in
hodden gray,’ with frowzly heads, begrimed but laughing faces, and such
awful vulgarities of naturalness, and crimes of simplicity, and brazen
faith and trust, and love of life and everybody in it!” It is in this
spirit that he presents now the naïve, now the perversely erring, and
again the eerie and elfish child. He is a master of those enchantments
of childhood that transfigure and illumine and create a world of the
imagination for the young that is undiscoverable save to the elect few.
He does not write patronizingly to his audience; but listens, as one
should listen in the realm of childhood, with serious attention, and
then becomes an amanuensis, transcribing the children’s legends and
guesses at the riddle of existence in their own language. “The Raggedy
Man” is not a romantic figure; he is the shabby chore-man of the
well-to-do folk in the country town, and the friend and oracle of small
boys. His mind is filled with rare lore, he--
“Knows ’bout Giunts, an’ Griffuns an’ Elves
An’ the Squidgicum-Squees ’at swallers therselves!”
And he may be responsible, too, for “Little Orphant Annie’s” knowledge
of the “Gobble-uns,” which Mr. Riley turned into the most successful of
all his juvenile pieces. He reproduces most vividly a child’s eager,
breathless manner of speech, and the elisions and variations that make
the child-dialect. Interspersed through “The Child World,” a long poem
in rhymed couplets, are a number of droll juvenile recitatives; but
this poem has a much greater value than at first appears. It presents
an excellent picture of domestic life in a western country town, and
the town is Mr. Riley’s own Greenfield, on the National Road. This
poem is a faithful chronicle, lively and humorous, full of the local
atmosphere, and never dull. The descriptions of the characters are
in Mr. Riley’s happiest vein: the father of the house, a lawyer and
leading citizen; the patient mother; the children with their various
interests, leading up to “Uncle Mart,” the printer, who aspired to be
an actor--
“He joyed in verse-quotations--which he took
Out of the old ‘Type Foundry Specimen Book.’”
The poem is written in free, colloquial English, broken by lapses into
the vernacular. It contains some of his best writing, and proves him
to possess a range and breadth of vision that are not denoted in his
lyrical pieces alone. “The Flying Islands of the Night, a fantastic
drama in verse,” his only other effort of length, was written earlier.
It abounds in the curious and capricious, but it lacks in simplicity
and reserve--qualities that have steadily grown in him.
Humor is preëminent in Mr. Riley, and it suggests that of Dickens in
its kinship with pathos. It seems to be peculiar to the literature of
lowly life that there is heartache beneath much of its gayety, and
tears are almost inevitably associated with its laughter. Mr. Riley
never satirizes, never ridicules his creations; his attitude is always
that of the kindly and admiring advocate; and it is by enlisting
the sympathy of his readers, suggesting much to their feeling and
imagination, and awakening in them a response that aids and supplements
his own work, that Mr. Riley has won his way to the popular heart.
The restraints of fixed forms have not interfered with his adequate
expression of pure feeling. This is proved by the sonnet, “When She
Comes Home Again,” which is one of the tenderest of his poems. In the
day that saw many of his contemporaries in the younger choir of poets
carving cherry stones of verse after French patterns he found old
English models sufficient, and his own whim supplied all the variety
he needed. Heroic themes have not tempted him; he has never attained
sonority or power, and has never needed them; but melody and sweetness
and a singular gift of invention distinguish him.
Many imitators have paid tribute to Mr. Riley’s dialect verse, for
most can grow the flowers after the seed have been freely blown in
the market-place. Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid to
Mr. Riley’s essential veracity is to compare the verse of those who
have made attempts similar to his own. He is, for example, a much
better artist than Will Carleton, who came before him, and whose “Farm
Ballads” are deficient in humor; and he possesses a breadth of sympathy
and a depth of sincerity that Eugene Field did not attain in dialect
verse, though Field’s versatility and fecundity were amazing. There is
nowhere in Mr. Riley a trace of the coarse brutality with which Mr.
Hamlin Garland, for example, stamps the life of a region lying farther
west. There is no point of contact between Lowell and Mr. Riley in
their dialectic performances, as civic matters do not interest the
Indianian; and his view of the Civil War becomes naturally that of the
countryman who looks back with wistful melancholy, not to the national
danger and dread, but to the neighborhood’s glory and sorrow, as in
“Good-by, Jim.” It might also be said that Mr. Riley has never put the
thoughts of statesmen into the mouths of countrymen, as Lowell did,
consistency being one of his qualities. There has sprung up in Mr.
Riley’s time a choir of versifiers who are journalistic rather than
literary, and who write for the day, much as the reporters do. Mr.
Riley, more than any one else, has furnished the models for these, and
it would seem that verses could be multiplied interminably, or so long
as such refrains as “When father winds the clock” and “The hymns that
mother used to sing” can be found for texts.
With the publication of the “Benj. F. Johnson” poems in a paper-covered
booklet, Mr. Riley’s literary career began. The intervening years have
brought him continuous applause; his books of verse have been sold
widely in this country and in England, and that, too, in “the twilight
of the poets,” with its contemporaneous oblivion for many who have
labored bravely in the paths of song. He early added to his reputation
as a writer that of a most successful reader of his own poems, and on
both sides of the Atlantic his work and his unique personality have
won for him the friendship of many distinguished literary men of the
day. It is to be said that the devotion of the people of his own State
to their poet, from first to last, has been marked by a cordiality
and loyalty that might well be the envy of any man in any field of
endeavor. No other Western poet has ever occupied a similar place; and
the reciprocal devotion, on the other hand, of the poet to his own
people, is not less noteworthy or admirable. He has always resented
the suggestion that he should leave Indiana for Boston or New York,
where he might be more in touch with the makers of books; and in recent
years he purchased the old family residence at Greenfield, to which
he returns frequently for rest and inspiration. For fifteen years he
has been the best-known figure in Indianapolis, studying with tireless
attention the faces in the streets, nervously ranging the book-stores,
and often sitting down to write a poem at the desk of some absentee
in the _Journal_ office. His frequent reading and lecturing tours
have been miserable experiences for him, as he is utterly without the
instinct of locality, and has timidly sat in the hotels of strange
towns for many hours for lack of the courage requisite for exploration.
Precision and correctness have distinguished him in certain ways, being
marked, for example, in matters of dress and in his handwriting; his
manuscripts are flawlessly correct, and the slouch and negligence of
the traditional poet are not observed in him.
His long list of books includes “Afterwhiles” (1887); “Pipes of Pan at
Zekesbury” (1888); “Old-fashioned Roses” (1889); “Rhymes of Childhood”
(1891); and “Poems Here at Home” (1897); and he has known the luxury of
a cosmopolitan edition of his writings in a series that embraced the
definitive Stevenson. Fame came to Mr. Riley when he was still young,
and it is only a fair assumption that he has not exhausted his field,
but that he will grow more and more secure in it. Serious work it has
not always been possible for him to do, for his audience learned to
expect humor in all his verses, and refused to be disappointed; but
his ambition lies beyond humorous dialect, though he finds no fault
with the public preference. All that he writes is welcome, for he is
a preacher of sound optimism and a sincere believer in the final good
that comes to all.