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: