II
The successor of Carleton is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana, the leading producer during the later period of platform and newspaper balladry. The early life of Riley was urban rather than rural. His father was a lawyer at Greenfield, a typical Western county seat, and after sending the boy to the village school he sought to turn him to his own profession. But there was a stratum of the wayward and the unconventional in Riley even from the first. The professions and the ordinary occupations open to youth did not appeal to the imaginative lad. He learned the trade of sign-painting and then for a year traveled with a patent medicine "doctor" as advertising agent. Following this picturesque experience came three or four years as a traveling entertainer with a congenial troupe, then desultory newspaper work, and finally, from 1877 to 1885, a steady position on the Indianapolis Journal. His recognition as a poet came in the mid eighties, and following it came a long period on the lecture circuit, reading his own productions, at one time working in conjunction with Eugene Field and Edgar W. Nye,—"Bill Nye."
His earliest work seems to have been declamatory and journalistic in origin. "I was always trying to write of the kind of people I knew and especially to write verse that I could read just as if it were being spoken for the first time." And again, "I always took naturally to anything theatrical."[141] For years the newspaper was his only medium. He contributed to most of the Indiana journals with pseudonyms ranging all the way from "Edyrn" to "Jay Whitt" and "Benjamin F. Johnson of Boone," and it was while writing under the last of these for the Indianapolis Journal that he first became known beyond the confines of Indiana. The device of printing poems that ostensibly were contributed by a crude farmer from a back country was not particularly original. Lowell had used it and Artemus Ward. Moreover, the fiction of accompanying these poems with editorial comment and specimen letters from the author was as old at least as The Biglow Papers, but there was a Western, Pike County freshness about the Benjamin F. Johnson material. The first poem in the series, for instance, was accompanied by material like this:
Mr. Johnson thoughtfully informs us that he is "no edjucated man," but that he has, "from childhood up tel old enugh to vote, allus wrote more or less poetry, as many of an albun in the neghborhood can testify." Again, he says that he writes "from the hart out"; and there is a touch of genuine pathos in the frank avowal, "Thare is times when I write the tears rolls down my cheeks."
The poems that followed,—"Thoughts fer the Discuraged Farmer," "When the Frost is on the Punkin," "Wortermelon Time," and the others—were written primarily as humorous exercises just as Browne had written his first Artemus Ward contributions. There is a histrionic element about them that must not be overlooked. The author is playing a part. Riley, we know, had, at least in his youth, very little sympathy with farm life and very little knowledge of it: he was simply impersonating an ignorant old farmer. The dialect does not ring true. There never has been a time, for instance, when "ministratin'" for ministering, "familiously" for familiarly, "resignated" for resigned, and "when the army broke out" for when the war broke out, have been used in Indiana save by those with whom they are individual peculiarities. He is simply reporting the ignorance of one old man in the Artemus Ward fashion. Dialect with him is the record of a town man's mimicry of country crudeness. It is conventional rather than realistic. It is a humorous device like A. Ward's cacography. The first Johnson annotation will illustrate:
Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone County, who considers the Journal a "very valubul" newspaper, writes to inclose us an original poem, desiring that we kindly accept it for publication, as "many neghbors and friends is astin' him to have the same struck off."
He issued the series at his own expense in 1883 with the title The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems by Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone, and he continued the masquerade until after the publication of Afterwhiles in 1887. After the great vogue of this later volume he began to publish voluminously until his final collected edition numbered fourteen volumes.
Riley not only inherited Will Carleton's public entire, but he added to it very considerably. He too dealt freely in sentiment and he too wrote always with vocal interpretation in mind. Undoubtedly the wide vogue of his poems has come largely from this element. People have always enjoyed hearing the poems read with an appropriate acting out of the part more than they have enjoyed reading them for themselves. The poems, more over, appeared in what may be called the old homestead period in America. Denman Thompson first brought out his Joshua Whitcomb in 1875 and his The Old Homestead in 1886. Riley found a public doubly prepared. He revived old memories—the word "old" is almost a mannerism with him: "The Old Swimmin'-Hole," "Old Fashioned Roses," "The Old Hay-Mow," "The Old Trundle Bed," "Out to Old Aunt Mary's," "The Boys of the Old Glee Club," "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," etc. Especially did he appeal to those whose childhood had been spent in the country.
Finally, he added to Carleton's devices a metrical facility and a jigging melody that is perhaps his most original contribution to the period. More than any one else Riley is responsible for the modern newspaper type of ballad that is to poetry what ragtime is to music. There is a fatal facility to such a melody as,
Old wortermelon time is a-comin' round again,
And there ain't no man a-livin' any tickleder'n me,
Fer the way I hanker after wortermelons is a sin—
Which is the why and wharefore, as you can plainly see.
Or this,
I ain't, ner don't p'tend to be,
Much posted on philosofy;
But thare is times, when all alone,
I work out idees of my own.
And of these same thare is a few
I'd like to jest refer to you—
Pervidin' that you don't object
To listen clos't and rickollect.
In his preference for native themes and homely, unliterary treatment of seemingly unpoetic material he continued the work of the Pike County balladists. As the Nation, reviewing his Old Fashioned Roses, expressed it, he finds pleasure in "some of the coarser California flavors." His own standards for poetry he has given clearly, and they are in full accord with the spirit of the period:
The poems here at home!—Who'll write 'em down,
Jes' as they air—in Country and in Town?—
Sowed thick as clods is 'crost the fields and lanes,
Er these-'ere little hop-toads when it rains!—
Who'll "voice" 'em? as I heerd a feller say
'At speechified on Freedom, t'other day,
And soared the Eagle tel' it 'peared to me,
She wasn't bigger'n a bumblebee!
What We want, as I sense it, in the line
O' poetry is somepin' Yours and Mine—
Somepin' with live-stock in it, and outdoors,
And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores:
Putt weeds in—pizen-vines, and underbresh,
As well as Johnny-jump-ups, all so fresh
And sassy-like!—and groun'-squir'ls,—yes, and "We,"
As sayin' is,—"We, Us and Company!"
But one cannot be sure of him. He is an entertainer, an actor, a mimicker. Does his material really come "from the hart out" or is he giving, what one always suspects, only excellent vaudeville? Even in his most pathetic moments we catch for an instant, or we feel that we do, a glimpse of the suave face of the platform entertainer.
Once in a while his childhood lyrics ring true. A little note of true pathos like this from Poems Here at Home is worth a library of The Flying Islands of the Night and of his other voluminous echoes of Alice in Wonderland:
Let me come in where you sit weeping,—aye,
Let me, who have not any child to die,
Weep with you for the little one whose love
I have known nothing of.
The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed
Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used
To kiss.—Such arms—such hands I never knew.
May I not weep with you?
Fain would I be of service—say some thing,
Between the tears, that would be comforting,—
But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I,
Who have no child to die.
Despite his enormous vogue, Riley must be dismissed as artificial and, on the whole, insincere. He seems always to be striving for effect—he is an entertainer who knows his audience and who is never for a moment dull. He has little of insight, little knowledge of the deeps of life and the human soul, little of message, and he wrote enormously too much. He must be rated finally as a comedian, a sentimentalist, an entertainer.
His influence has been great. A whole school of imitators has sprung up about him, the most of whom have perished with the papers to which they have contributed. The strongest of them all undoubtedly was Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911) whose Back Country Poems were genuine and distinctive. Drummond's Habitant ballads, which rank with the strongest dialect poetry of the century, belong to Canadian rather than American literature. Stedman's praise of them is none too high: "Most of us are content if we sing an old thing in a new way, or a new thing in an old way. Dr. Drummond has achieved the truest of lyrical successes; that of singing new songs, and in a new way. His poems are idyls as true as those of Theocritus or Burns or our own poet of The Biglow Papers."[142]