The Hoosiers

by Meredith Nicholson

The drolleries of childhood have furnished Mr. Riley subjects for some of his most original and popular verses. Here, again, he does not accept the conventional children of literature, whom he calls “the refined children, the very proper children—the studiously thoughtful, poetic children”; but he seeks “the rough-and-tumble little fellows ‘in hodden gray,’ with frowzly heads, begrimed but laughing faces, and such awful vulgarities of naturalness, and crimes of simplicity, and brazen faith and trust, and love of life and everybody in it!” It is in this spirit that he presents now the naïve, now the perversely erring, and again the eerie and elfish child. He is a master of those enchantments of childhood that transfigure and illumine and create a world of the imagination for the young that is undiscoverable save to the elect few. He does not write patronizingly to his audience; but listens, as one should listen in the realm of childhood, with serious attention, and then becomes an amanuensis, transcribing the children’s legends and guesses at the riddle of existence in their own language. “The Raggedy Man” is not a romantic figure; he is the shabby chore-man of the well-to-do folk in the country town, and the friend and oracle of small boys. His mind is filled with rare lore, he—

“Knows ’bout Giunts, an’ Griffuns an’ Elves

An’ the Squidgicum-Squees ’at swallers therselves!”

And he may be responsible, too, for “Little Orphant Annie’s” knowledge of the “Gobble-uns,” which Mr. Riley turned into the most successful of all his juvenile pieces. He reproduces most vividly a child’s eager, breathless manner of speech, and the elisions and variations that make the child-dialect. Interspersed through “The Child World,” a long poem in rhymed couplets, are a number of droll juvenile recitatives; but this poem has a much greater value than at first appears. It presents an excellent picture of domestic life in a western country town, and the town is Mr. Riley’s own Greenfield, on the National Road. This poem is a faithful chronicle, lively and humorous, full of the local atmosphere, and never dull. The descriptions of the characters are in Mr. Riley’s happiest vein: the father of the house, a lawyer and leading citizen; the patient mother; the children with their various interests, leading up to “Uncle Mart,” the printer, who aspired to be an actor—

“He joyed in verse-quotations—which he took

Out of the old ‘Type Foundry Specimen Book.’”

The poem is written in free, colloquial English, broken by lapses into the vernacular. It contains some of his best writing, and proves him to possess a range and breadth of vision that are not denoted in his lyrical pieces alone. “The Flying Islands of the Night, a fantastic drama in verse,” his only other effort of length, was written earlier. It abounds in the curious and capricious, but it lacks in simplicity and reserve—qualities that have steadily grown in him.

Humor is preëminent in Mr. Riley, and it suggests that of Dickens in its kinship with pathos. It seems to be peculiar to the literature of lowly life that there is heartache beneath much of its gayety, and tears are almost inevitably associated with its laughter. Mr. Riley never satirizes, never ridicules his creations; his attitude is always that of the kindly and admiring advocate; and it is by enlisting the sympathy of his readers, suggesting much to their feeling and imagination, and awakening in them a response that aids and supplements his own work, that Mr. Riley has won his way to the popular heart. The restraints of fixed forms have not interfered with his adequate expression of pure feeling. This is proved by the sonnet, “When She Comes Home Again,” which is one of the tenderest of his poems. In the day that saw many of his contemporaries in the younger choir of poets carving cherry stones of verse after French patterns he found old English models sufficient, and his own whim supplied all the variety he needed. Heroic themes have not tempted him; he has never attained sonority or power, and has never needed them; but melody and sweetness and a singular gift of invention distinguish him.

Many imitators have paid tribute to Mr. Riley’s dialect verse, for most can grow the flowers after the seed have been freely blown in the market-place. Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid to Mr. Riley’s essential veracity is to compare the verse of those who have made attempts similar to his own. He is, for example, a much better artist than Will Carleton, who came before him, and whose “Farm Ballads” are deficient in humor; and he possesses a breadth of sympathy and a depth of sincerity that Eugene Field did not attain in dialect verse, though Field’s versatility and fecundity were amazing. There is nowhere in Mr. Riley a trace of the coarse brutality with which Mr. Hamlin Garland, for example, stamps the life of a region lying farther west. There is no point of contact between Lowell and Mr. Riley in their dialectic performances, as civic matters do not interest the Indianian; and his view of the Civil War becomes naturally that of the countryman who looks back with wistful melancholy, not to the national danger and dread, but to the neighborhood’s glory and sorrow, as in “Good-by, Jim.” It might also be said that Mr. Riley has never put the thoughts of statesmen into the mouths of countrymen, as Lowell did, consistency being one of his qualities. There has sprung up in Mr. Riley’s time a choir of versifiers who are journalistic rather than literary, and who write for the day, much as the reporters do. Mr. Riley, more than any one else, has furnished the models for these, and it would seem that verses could be multiplied interminably, or so long as such refrains as “When father winds the clock” and “The hymns that mother used to sing” can be found for texts.

With the publication of the “Benj. F. Johnson” poems in a paper-covered booklet, Mr. Riley’s literary career began. The intervening years have brought him continuous applause; his books of verse have been sold widely in this country and in England, and that, too, in “the twilight of the poets,” with its contemporaneous oblivion for many who have labored bravely in the paths of song. He early added to his reputation as a writer that of a most successful reader of his own poems, and on both sides of the Atlantic his work and his unique personality have won for him the friendship of many distinguished literary men of the day. It is to be said that the devotion of the people of his own State to their poet, from first to last, has been marked by a cordiality and loyalty that might well be the envy of any man in any field of endeavor. No other Western poet has ever occupied a similar place; and the reciprocal devotion, on the other hand, of the poet to his own people, is not less noteworthy or admirable. He has always resented the suggestion that he should leave Indiana for Boston or New York, where he might be more in touch with the makers of books; and in recent years he purchased the old family residence at Greenfield, to which he returns frequently for rest and inspiration. For fifteen years he has been the best-known figure in Indianapolis, studying with tireless attention the faces in the streets, nervously ranging the book-stores, and often sitting down to write a poem at the desk of some absentee in the Journal office. His frequent reading and lecturing tours have been miserable experiences for him, as he is utterly without the instinct of locality, and has timidly sat in the hotels of strange towns for many hours for lack of the courage requisite for exploration. Precision and correctness have distinguished him in certain ways, being marked, for example, in matters of dress and in his handwriting; his manuscripts are flawlessly correct, and the slouch and negligence of the traditional poet are not observed in him.