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,