Henry Beers - The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

They have all, in their time, followed along after the circus parade, listened to the old village band playing tunes like “Lily Dale” and “In the Hazel Dell my Nellie’s Sleeping” and “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower”; have heard the campaign stump speaker when he “cut loose on monopolies and cussed and cussed and cussed”; have belonged to the literary society which debated the questions whether fire or water was the most destructive element; whether town life was preferable to country life; whether the Indian or the negro had suffered more at the hands of the white man; or whether the growth of Roman Catholicism in this country is a menace to our free institutions. And was the execution of Charles the First justifiable? Charles is dead now; but this good old debate question will never die. They knew the joys of “eatin’ out on the porch” and the woes of having your sister lose your jackknife through a crack in the barn floor; or of tearing your thumb nail in trying to get the nickel out of the tin savings bank.

The poets we admire are many; the poets we love are few. One of the traits that endear Riley to his countrymen is his cheerfulness. He is “Sunny Jim.” The south wind and the sun are his playmates. The drop of bitterness mixed in the cup of so many poets seems to have been left out of his life potion. And so, while he does not rouse us with “the thunder of the trumpets of the night,” or move us with the deep organ tones of tragic grief, he never fails to hearten and console. And though tragedy is absent from his verse, a tender pathos, kindred to his humor, is everywhere present. Read over again “The Old Man and Jim,” or “Nothin’ to Say, my Daughter,” or any of his poems on the deaths of children; for a choice that poignant little piece, “The Lost Kiss,” comparable with Coventry Patmore’s best poem, “The Toys,” in which the bereaved father speaks his unavailing remorse because he had once spoken crossly to his little girl when she came to his desk for a good-night kiss and interrupted him at his work.

Riley followed the bent of his genius and gave himself just the kind of training that fitted him to do his work. He never had any regular education, adopted no trade or profession, never married and had children, but kept himself free from set tasks and from those responsibilities which distract the poet’s soul. His muse was a truant, and he was a runaway schoolboy who kept the heart of a boy into manhood and old age, which is one definition of genius. He was better employed when he joined a circus troupe or a travelling medicine van, or set up as a sign painter, or simply lay out on the grass, “knee deep in June,” than if he had shut himself up in a school or an office. He did no routine work, but wrote when he felt like it, when he was in the mood. Fortunately the mood recurred abundantly, and so we have about two dozen volumes from him, filled with lovely poetry. Most of us do hack work, routine work, because we can do nothing better. But for the creative artist, hack work is a waste. Creative work, when one is in the mood, is more a pleasure than a toil; and Riley worked hard at his verse-making. For he was a most conscientious artist; and all those poems of his, seemingly so easy, natural, spontaneous, were the result of labor, though of labor joyously borne. How fine his art was perhaps only those can fully appreciate who have tried their own hands at making verses. Some of the things that he said to me about the use and abuse of dialect in poetry and concerning similar points, showed me how carefully he had thought out the principles of composition.

He thought most dialect poetry was overdone; recalling that delightful anecdote about the member of the Chicago Browning Club who was asked whether he liked dialect verse, and who replied: “Some of it. Eugene Field is all right. But the other day I read some verses by a fellow named Chaucer, and he carries it altogether too far.”

In particular, Riley objected to the habit which many writers have of labelling their characters with descriptive names like Sir Lucius O’Trigger and Birdofredum Sawin. I reminded him that English comedy from “Ralph Roister Doister” down had practised this device. (In Ben Jonson it is the rule.) And that even such an artist as Thackeray employed it frequently with droll effect: Lady Jane Sheepshanks, daughter of the Countess of Southdown, and so forth. But he insisted that it was a departure from vraisemblance which disturbed the impression of reality.

In seeking to classify these Hoosier poems, we are forced back constantly to a comparison with the Doric singers: with William Barnes, the Dorsetshire dialect poet; and above all with Robert Burns. Wordsworth in his “Lyrical Ballads,” and Tennyson in his few rural idyls like “Dora” and “The Brook” dealt also with simple, country life, the life of Cumberland dalesmen and Lincolnshire farmers. But these poets are in another class. They are grave philosophers, cultivated scholars, university men, writing in academic English; writing with sympathy indeed, but from a point of view outside the life which they depict. In our own country there are Will Carleton’s “Farm Ballads,” handling the same homely themes as Riley’s; handling them truthfully, sincerely, but prosaically. Carleton could not

But Riley’s world of common things and plain folks is always lit up by the lamp of beauty. Then there is Whittier. He was a farmer lad, and was part of the life that he wrote of. He belonged; and, like Riley, he knew his Burns. I think, indeed, that “Snow-Bound” is a much better poem than “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Whittier’s fellow Quaker, John Bright, in an address to British workingmen, advised them to read Whittier’s poems, if they wanted to understand the spirit of the American people. Well, the spirit of New England, let us say, if not of all America. For Whittier is in some ways provincial, and rightly so. But though he uses homely New England words like “chore,” he does not, so far as I remember, essay dialect except in “Skipper Ireson’s Ride”; and that is Irish if it is anything. No Yankee women known to me talk like the fishwives of Marblehead in that popular but overrated piece. Then there are the “Biglow Papers,” which remind of Riley’s work on the humorous, as Whittier’s ballads do on the serious side. Lowell made a careful study of the New England dialect and the “Biglow Papers” are brilliantly true to the shrewd Yankee wit; but they are political satires rather than idyls. Where they come nearest to these Hoosier ballads or to “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line” is where they record old local ways and institutions. “This kind o’ sogerin’,” writes Birdofredum Sawin, who is disgustedly campaigning in Mexico, like our National Guards of yesterday: —

Isn’t that something like Riley? Lowell, of course, is a more imposing literary figure, and he tapped intellectual sources to which the younger poet had no access. But I still think Riley the finer artist. Benjamin F. Johnson, of Boone, the quaint, simple, innocent old Hoosier farmer, is a more convincing person than Hosea Biglow. In many of the “Biglow Papers” sentiment, imagery, vocabulary, phrase, are often too elevated for the speaker and for his dialect. Riley is not guilty of this inconsistency; his touch here is absolutely correct.