The man in the street: Papers on American topics

by Meredith Nicholson

III

He did his writing at night, a fact which accounted for the spacious leisure in which his days were enveloped. He usually had a poem pretty thoroughly fixed in his mind before he sought paper, but the actual writing was often a laborious process; and it was his habit, while a poem was in preparation, to carry the manuscript in his pocket for convenience of reference. The elisions required by dialect and his own notions of punctuation—here he was a law unto himself—brought him into frequent collision with the lords of the proof desk; but no one, I think, ever successfully debated with him any point of folk speech. I once ventured to suggest that his use of the phrase “durin’ the army,” as a rustic veteran’s way of referring to the Civil War, was not general, but probably peculiar to the individual he had heard use it. He stoutly defended his phrase and was ready at once with witnesses in support of it as a familiar usage of Indiana veterans.

In the matter of our Hoosier folk speech he was an authority, though the subject did not interest him comparatively or scientifically. He complained to me bitterly of an editor who had directed his attention to apparent inconsistencies of dialect in the proof of a poem. Riley held, and rightly, that the dialect of the Hoosier is not fixed and unalterable, but varies in certain cases, and that words are often pronounced differently in the same sentence. Eggleston’s Hoosier is an earlier type than Riley’s, belonging to the dark years when our illiteracy staggered into high percentages. And Eggleston wrote of southern Indiana, where the “poor white” strain of the South had been most marked. Riley not only spoke for a later period, but his acquaintance was with communities that enjoyed a better social background; the schoolhouse and the rural “literary” were always prominent in his perspective.

He had preserved his youth as a place apart and unalterable, peopled with folk who lived as he had known them in his enchanted boyhood. Scenes and characters of that period he was able to revisualize at will. When his homing fancy took wing, it was to bear him back to the little town’s dooryards, set with mignonette, old-fashioned roses, and borders of hollyhocks, or countryward to the streams that wound their way through fields of wheat and corn. Riley kept his place at innumerable firesides in this dream existence, hearing the veterans of the Civil War spin their yarns, or farmers discuss crop prospects, or the whispers of children awed by the “woo” of the wind in the chimney. If Pan crossed his vision (he drew little upon mythology) it was to sit under a sycamore above a “ripple” in the creek and beat time rapturously with his goat hoof to the music of a Hoosier lad’s willow whistle.

The country lore that Riley had collected and stored in youth was inexhaustible; it never seemed necessary for him to replenish his pitcher at the fountains of original inspiration. I have read somewhere a sketch of him in which he was depicted as walking with Wordsworthian calm through lonely fields, but nothing could be more absurd. Fondly as he sang of green fields and running brooks, he cultivated their acquaintance very little after he established his home at Indianapolis. Lamb could not have loved city streets more than he. Much as Bret Harte wrote of California after years of absence, so Riley drew throughout his life from scenes familiar to his boyhood and young manhood, and with undiminished sympathy and vigor.

His knowledge of rural life was intimate, though he knew the farm only as a country-town boy may know it, through association with farm boys and holidays spent in visits to country cousins. Once at the harvest season, as we were crossing Indiana in a train, he began discoursing on apples. He repeated Bryant’s poem “The Planting of the Apple Tree,” as a prelude, and, looking out over the Hoosier Hesperides, began mentioning the varieties of apples he had known and commenting on their qualities. When I expressed surprise at the number, he said that with a little time he thought he could recall a hundred kinds, and he did in fact name more than fifty before we were interrupted.

The whimsicalities and comicalities and the heart-breaking tragedies of childhood he interpreted with rare fidelity. His wide popularity as a poet of childhood was due to a special genius for understanding the child mind. Yet he was very shy in the presence of children, and though he kept track of the youngsters in the houses of his friends, and could establish himself on good terms with them, he seemed uncomfortable when suddenly confronted by a strange child. This was due in some measure to the proneness of parents to exhibit their offspring that he might hear them “recite” his own poems, or in the hope of eliciting some verses commemorative of Johnny’s or Mary’s precocity. His children were country-town and farm children whom he had known and lived among and unconsciously studied and appraised for the use he later made of them. Here, again, he drew upon impressions fixed in his own boyhood, and to this gallery of types he never, I think, added materially. Much of his verse for children is autobiographical, representing his own attitude of mind as an imaginative, capricious child. Some of his best character studies are to be found among his juvenile pieces. In “That-Air Young-Un,” for example, he enters into the heart of an abnormal boy who

“Come home onc’t and said ’at he

Knowed what the snake-feeders thought

When they grit their wings; and knowed

Turkle-talk, when bubbles riz

Over where the old roots growed

Where he th’owed them pets o’ his—

Little turripuns he caught

In the County Ditch and packed

In his pockets days and days!”

The only poem he ever contributed to the Atlantic was “Old Glory,” and I recall that he held it for a considerable period, retouching it, and finally reading it at a club dinner to test it thoroughly by his own standards, which were those of the ear as well as the eye. When I asked him why he had not printed it he said he was keeping it “to boil the dialect out of it.” On the other hand, “The Poet of the Future,” one of his best pieces, was produced in an evening. He was little given to displaying his poems in advance of publication, and this was one of the few that he ever showed me in manuscript. It had been a real inspiration; the writing of it had given him the keenest pleasure, and the glow of success was still upon him when we met the following morning. He wrote much occasional and personal verse which added nothing to his reputation—a fact of which he was perfectly aware—and there is a wide disparity between his best and his poorest. He wrote prose with difficulty; he said he could write a column of verse much more quickly than he could produce a like amount of prose.

His manuscripts and letters were works of art, so careful was he of his handwriting—a small, clear script as legible as engraving, and with quaint effects of capitalization. In his younger days he indulged in a large correspondence, chiefly with other writers. His letters were marked by the good-will and cordiality, the racy humor and the self-mockery of his familiar talk. “Your reference”—this is a typical beginning—“to your vernal surroundings and cloistered seclusion from the world stress and tumult of the fevered town comes to me in veriest truth

“‘With a Sabbath sound as of doves

In quiet neighborhoods,’

as that grand poet Oliver W. Longfellow so tersely puts it in his inimitable way.” He addressed his correspondents by names specially designed for them, and would sign himself by any one of a dozen droll pseudonyms.