Far stronger are the vigorous lyrics of Maurice Thompson, whose work is to be found in so many literary fields of the period. His poetry, small in quantity, has a spirit of its own that is distinctive. It is tonic with the out-of-doors and it is masculine. One stanza from the poem "At Lincoln's Grave," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard in 1893, voices the new Western soul:
His humor, born of virile opulence,
Stung like a pungent sap or wild-fruit zest,
And satisfied a universal sense
Of manliness, the strongest and the best;
A soft Kentucky strain was in his voice,
And the Ohio's deeper boom was there,
With some wild accents of old Wabash days,
And winds of Illinois;
And when he spoke he took us unaware,
With his high courage and unselfish ways.
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.