The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

THE SINGER OF THE OLD SWIMMIN’ HOLE

MANY years ago I said to one of Walt Whitman’s biographers: “Whitman may, as you claim, be the poet of democracy, but he is not the poet of the American people. He is the idol of a literary culte. Shall I tell you who the poet of the American people is just at present? He is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana.” Riley used to become quite blasphemous when speaking of Whitman. He said that the latter had begun by scribbling newspaper poetry of the usual kind – and very poor of its kind – which had attracted no attention and deserved none. Then he suddenly said to himself: “Go to! I will discard metre and rhyme and write something startlingly eccentric which will make the public sit up and take notice. I will sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and the world will say – as in fact it did – ‘here is a new poetry, lawless, virile, democratic. It is so different from anything hitherto written, that here must be the great American poet at last.’ ”

Now, I am not going to disparage old Walt. He was big himself, and he had an extraordinary feeling of the bigness of America with its swarming multitudes, millions of the plain people, whom God must have loved, said Lincoln, since he made so many of them. But all this in the mass. As to any dramatic power to discriminate among individuals and characterize them singly, as Riley does, Whitman had none. They are all alike, all “leaves of grass.”

Well, my friend, and Walt Whitman’s, promised to read Riley’s poems. And shortly I got a letter from him saying that he had read them with much enjoyment, but adding, “Surely you would not call him a great national poet.” Now since his death, the newspaper critics have been busy with this question. His poetry was true, sweet, original; but was it great? Suppose we leave aside for the moment this question of greatness. Who are the great poets, anyway? Was Robert Burns one of them? He composed no epics, no tragedies, no high Pindaric odes. But he made the songs of the Scottish people, and is become a part of the national consciousness of the race. In a less degree, but after the same fashion, Riley’s poetry has taken possession of the popular heart. I am told that his sales outnumber Longfellow’s. This is not an ultimate test, but so far as it goes it is a valid one.

Riley is the Hoosier poet, but he is more than that: he is a national poet. His state and his city have honored themselves in honoring him and in keeping his birthday as a public holiday. The birthdays of nations and of kings and magistrates have been often so kept. We have our fourth of July, our twenty-second of February, our Lincoln’s birthday; and we had a close escape from having a McKinley day. I do not know that the banks are closed and the children let out of school – Riley’s children, for all children are his – on each succeeding seventh of October; but I think there is no record elsewhere in our literary history of a tribute so loving and so universal to a mere man of letters, as the Hoosier State pays annually to its sweet singer. Massachusetts has its poets and is rightly proud of them, but neither Bryant nor Emerson nor Lowell nor Holmes, nor the more popular Longfellow or Whittier, has had his natal day marked down on the calendar as a yearly state festa. And yet poets, novelists, playwriters, painters, musical composers, artists of all kinds, have added more to the sum of human happiness than all the kings and magistrates that ever lived. Perhaps Indianians are warmer hearted than New Englanders; or perhaps they make so much of their poets because there are fewer of them. But this is not the whole secret of it. In a sense, Riley’s poems are provincial. They are intensely true to local conditions, local scenery and dialect, childish memories and the odd ways and characters of little country towns. But just for this faithfulness to their environment these “poems here at home” come home to others whose homes are far away from the Wabash, but are not so very different after all.

America, as has often been said, is a land of homes: of dwellers in villages, on farms, and in small towns. We are common people, middle-class people, conservative, decent, religious, tenacious of old ways, home-keeping and home-loving. We do not thrill to Walt Whitman’s paeans to democracy in the abstract; but we vibrate to every touch on the chord of family affections, of early friendships, and of the dear old homely things that our childhood knew. Americans are sentimental and humorous; and Riley abounds in sentiment – wholesome sentiment – and natural humor, while Whitman had little of either.

To all Americans who were ever boys; to all, at least who have had the good luck to be country boys and go barefoot; whether they dwell in the prairie states of the Middle West, or elsewhere, the scenes and characters of Riley’s poems are familiar: Little Orphant Annie and the Raggedy Man, and the Old Swimmin’ Hole and Griggsby’s Station “where we ust to be so happy and so pore.” They know when the frost is on the “punkin,” and that the “Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out”; and how the old tramp said to the Raggedy Man: —

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.

Riley’s work was anything but academic; and I am therefore rather proud of the fact that my university was the first to confer upon him an honorary degree. I cannot quite see why geniuses like Mark Twain and Riley, whose books are read and loved by hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, should care very much for a college degree. The fact remains, however, that they are gratified by the compliment, which stamps their performances with a sort of official sanction, like the couronné par l’Académie Française on the title-page of a French author.

When Mr. Riley came on to New Haven to take his Master’s degree, he was a bit nervous about making a public appearance in unwonted conditions; although he had been used to facing popular audiences with great applause when he gave his delightful readings from his own poems, with humorous impersonations in prose as good as Beatrice Herford’s best monologues. He rehearsed the affair in advance, trying on his Master’s gown and reading me his poem, “No Boy Knows when He Goes to Sleep,” which he proposed to use if called on for a speech. He asked me if it would do: it did. For at the alumni dinner which followed the conferring of degrees, when Riley got to his feet and read the piece, the audience broke loose. It was evident that, whatever the learned gentlemen on the platform might think, the undergraduates and the young alumni knew their Riley; and that his enrolment on the Yale catalogue was far and away the most popular act of the day. For in truth there is nothing cloistral or high and dry among our modern American colleges. A pessimist on my own faculty even avers that the average undergraduate nowadays reads nothing beyond the sporting columns in the New York newspapers. There were other distinguished recipients of degrees at that same Commencement. One leading statesman was made a Doctor of Laws: Mr. Riley a Master of Arts. Of course a mere man of letters cannot hope to rank with a politician. If Shakespeare and Ben Butler had been contemporaries and had both come up for a degree at the same Commencement – supposing any college willing to notice Butler at all – why Ben would have got an LL.D. and William an M.A. Yet exactly why should this be so? For as I am accustomed to say of John Hay, anybody can be Secretary of State, but it took a smart man to write “Little Breeches” and “The Mystery of Gilgal.”

EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS

THE publication of Emerson’s journals,[1] kept for over half a century, is a precious gift to the reading public. It is well known that he made an almost daily record of his thoughts: that, when called upon for a lecture or address, he put together such passages as would dovetail, without too anxious a concern for unity; and that from all these sources, by a double distillation, his perfected essays were finally evolved.

Accordingly, many pages are here omitted which are to be found in his published works, but a great wealth of matter remains – chips from his workshop – which will be new to the reader. And as he always composed carefully, even when writing only for his own eye, and as consecutiveness was never his long suit, these entries may be read with a pleasure and profit hardly less than are given by his finished writings.

The editors, with excellent discretion, have sometimes allowed to stand the first outlines, in prose or verse, of work long familiar in its completed shape. Here, for instance, is the germ of a favorite poem:

“It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English church and hear the liturgy read. Yet nothing would induce me to be the English priest. I find an unpleasant dilemma in this nearer home.”

This dilemma is “The Problem.” And here again is the original of “The Two Rivers,” “as it came to mind, sitting by the river, one April day” (April 5, 1856):

“Thy Voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee, as thou through Concord plain.

“Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it.

“I see thy brimming, eddying stream, and thy enchantment. For thou changest every rock in thy bed into a gem; all is real opal and agate, and at will thou pavest with diamonds. Take them away from thy stream, and they are poor shards and flints: So is it with me to-day.”

These journals differ from common diaries in being a chronicle of thoughts, rather than of events, or even of impressions. Emerson is the most impersonal of writers, which accounts in part, and by virtue of the attraction of opposites, for the high regard in which he held that gossip, Montaigne. Still, there are jottings enough of foreign travel, lecture tours, domestic incidents, passing public events, club meetings, college reunions, walks and talks with Concord neighbors, and the like, to afford the material of a new biography,2 which has been published uniformly with the ten volumes of journals. And the philosopher held himself so aloof from vulgar curiosity that the general reader, who breathes with difficulty in the rarefied air of high speculations, will perhaps turn most readily to such more intimate items as occur. As where his little son – the “deep-eyed boy” of the “Threnody” – being taken to the circus, said à propos of the clown, “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Emerson adds that he and Waldo were of one mind on the subject; and one thereupon recalls a celebrated incident in the career of Mark Twain. The diarist is not above setting down jests – even profane jests – with occasional anecdotes, bons mots, and miscellaneous witticisms like “an ordinary man or a Christian.” I, for one, would like to know who was the “Miss – of New Haven, who on reading Ruskin’s book [presumably “Modern Painters”], said ‘Nature was Mrs. Turner.’ ” Were there such witty fair in the New Haven of 1848?

In the privacy of his journals, every man allows himself a license of criticism which he would hardly practise in public. The limitations or eccentricities of Emerson’s literary tastes are familiar to most; such as his dislike of Shelley and contempt for Poe, “the jingle man.” But here is a judgment, calmly penned, which rather takes one’s breath away: “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” This, to be sure, was in 1842, eight years before the appearance of “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet, to the last, the romancer’s obsession with the problem of evil affected the resolved optimist as unwholesome. Indeed he speaks impatiently of all novels, and prophesies that they will give way by and by to autobiographies and diaries. The only exception to his general distaste for fiction is “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which he mentions repeatedly and with high praise, comparing it with Aeschylus.

The entry concerning Moore’s “Life of Sheridan” is surprisingly savage – less like the gentle Emerson than like his truculent friend Carlyle: “He details the life of a mean, fraudulent, vain, quarrelsome play-actor, whose wit lay in cheating tradesmen, whose genius was used in studying jokes and bons mots at home for a dinner or a club, who laid traps for the admiration of coxcombs, who never did anything good and never said anything wise.”

Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which translate the Kantian Vernunft and Verstand.) Dialectics he eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism: they were borne in upon him – revelations. At New Bedford he visited the meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of the inner light.