A Guest at the Ludlow, and Other Stories by Bill Nye (ebook reader for comics txt) 📕

patrolman is all the time; also as to his temperature, pulse, perspiration and breath. It keeps a record of this at the main office on a ticker of its own, and the information may be published in the society columns of the papers in the morning. It enables a citizen to use his own discretion about sounding an alarm. He has only to be a citizen. He need not be a tax-payer or a vox populi. Should he be a citizen, or declare his intention to become such, or even though he be a voter only, without any notion of ever being a citizen, he can help himself to the fire department or anything else by ringing up the central station.

Electricity and spiritualism have arrived at that stage of perfection where a coil of cop[Pg 262]per wire and a can of credulity will accomplish a great deal. The time is coming when even more surprising wonders will be worked, and with electric wires, the rapid transit trains, and the English sparrows all under the ground, the dawn of a better and brighter day will be ushered in. The car-driver and the truck-man will then lie down together, Boston will not rise up against London, he that heretofore slag shall go forth no more for to slug, and the czar will put aside his tailor-made boiler-iron underwear and fearlessly canvass the nihilist wards in the interest of George Kennan and reform, nit.

THE END.

[Pg 263]

An Article on the Writings of

James Whitcomb Riley

By "Chelifer"

[Pg 264]

THE AMBROSIA OF JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.

"Chelifer" in "The Bookery."—Godey's Magazine.

There are writers that take Pegasus on giddier flights of fancy, and writers that sit him more grandly, and writers that put him through daintier paces, and writers that burden him with anguish nearer that of the dread Rider of the White Horse, and there are writers that make him a very bucking broncho of wit, but there is no one that turns Pegasus into just such an ambling nag of lazy peace and pastoral content as James—I had almost said Joshua Whitcomb—Riley. If you want a panacea for the bitterness and the fret and the snobbishness and pretension and unsympathy and the commercial ambition and worry and the other cankers that gnaw and gnaw the soul, just throw a leg over the back of Riley's Pegasus, "perfectly safe for family driving," let the reins hang loose as you sag limply in your saddle, and gaze through drowsy eyes while the amiable old beast jogs down lanes blissful with rural quietude, through farmyards full of picturesque rustics and through the streets of quaint villages. Then utter rest and a peace akin to bliss will possess your soul.

To make readers content with life and glad to live is one of the most dazzlingly magnificent deeds in the power of an artist. This is too little appreciated in the melodramatic theatricism of our life. This genius for soothing the reader with a pathos that is not anguish and a humor that is not cynicism, this genius be[Pg 265]longs to Mr. Riley in a degree I have found in no other writer in all literature.

Of course, Mr. Riley is essentially a lyric poet. But his spirit is that of Walt Whitman; he speaks the universal democracy, the equality of man, the hatred of assumption and snobbery, that our republic stands for, if it stands for anything. Now downright didacticism in a poet is an abomination. But if a poet has no right to ponder the meanings of things, the feelings of man for man and the higher "criticism of life," then no one has. If to Pope's "The proper study of mankind is man," you add "nature" and "nature's God," you will fairly well outline the poet's field.

Mere art (Heaven save the "mere"!) is not, and has never been, enough to place a poet among the great spirits of the world. It has furnished a number of nimble mandolinists and exquisite dilettants for lazy moods. But great poetry must always be something more than sweetmeats; it must be food—temptingly cooked, winningly served, well spiced and well accompanied, but yet food to strengthen the blood and the sinews of the soul.

Therefore I make so bold as to insist that even in a lyrist there should be something more than the prosperity or the dirge of personal amours: there should be a sympathy with the world-joy, the world-suffering, and the world-kinship. It is this attitude toward lyric poetry that makes me think Mr. Riley a poet whose exquisite art is lavished on humanity so deep-sounding as to commend him to the acceptance of immortality among the highest lyrists.

Horace was an acute thinker and a frank speaker on the problems of life. This didacticism seems not to[Pg 266] have harmed his artistic welfare, for he has undoubtedly been the most popular poet that ever wrote. Consider the magnitude and the enthusiasm of his audience! He has been the personal chum of everyone that ever read Latinity. But Horace, when not exalted with his inspired preachments on the art of life and the arts of poetry and love, was a bitter cynic redeemed by great self-depreciation and joviality. The son of a slave, he was too fond of court life to talk democracy.

Bobby Burns was a thorough child of the people, and is more like Mr. Riley in every way than any other poet. Yet he, too, had a vicious cynicism, and he never had the polished art that enriches some of Mr. Riley's non-dialectic poetry, as in parts of his fairy fancy, "The Flying Islands of the Night."

Burns never had the versatility of sympathy that enables Mr. Riley to write such unpastoral masterpieces as "Anselmo," "The Dead Lover," "A Scrawl," "The Home-going," some of his sonnets, and the noble verses beginning

"A monument for the soldiers!
And what will ye build it of?"

Yet it must be owned that Burns is in general Mr. Riley's prototype. Mr. Riley admits it himself in his charming verses "To Robert Burns."

"Sweet singer, that I lo'e the maist
O' ony, sin' wi' eager haste
I smacket bairn lips ower the taste
O' hinnied sang."

The classic pastoral poets, Theokritos, Vergandil, the others, sang with an exquisite art, indeed, yet their[Pg 267] farm-folk were really Dresden-china shepherds and shepherdesses speaking with affected simplicity or with impossible elegance. Theokritos, like Burns and Riley, wrote partly in dialect and partly in the standard speech, and to those who are never reconciled to anything that can quote no "authority," there should be sufficient justification for dialect poetry in this divine Sicilian musician of whom his own Goatherd might have said:

"Full of fine honey thy beautiful mouth was, Thyrsis, created
Full of the honeycomb; figs �gilean, too, mayest thou nibble,
Sweet as they are; for ev'n than the locust more bravely thou singest."

I have no room to argue the pro's of dialect here, but it always seems strange that those lazy critics who are unwilling to take the trouble to translate the occasional hard words in a dialect form of their own tongue, should be so inconsistent as ever to study a foreign language. Then, too, dialect is necessary to truth, to local color, to intimacy with the character depicted. Besides, it is delicious. There is something mellow and soul-warming about a plebeian metathesis like "congergation." What orthoepy could replace lines like these?:

"Worter, shade and all so mixed, don't know which you'd orter
Say, th' worter in the shadder—shadder in the worter!"

One thing about Mr. Riley's dialect that may puzzle those not familiar with the living speech of the Hoosiers, is his spelling, which is chiefly done as if by the illiterate speaker himself. Thus "rostneer-time" and "ornry" must be �olic Greek to those barbarians who[Pg 268] have never heard of "roasting-ears" of corn or of that contemptuous synonym for "vulgar," "common," which is smoothly elided, "or(di)n(a)ry." Both of these words could be spelled with a suggestive and helpful use of apostrophes: "roast'n'-ear," and or'n'ry.

Jumbles like "jevver" for "did you ever?" and the like can hardly be spelled otherwise than phonetically, but a glossary should be appended as in Lowell's "Biglow Papers," for the poems are eminently worth even lexicon-thumbing. Another frequent fault of dialect writers is the spelling phonetically of words pronounced everywhere alike. Thus "enough" is spelled "enuff," and "clamor," "clammer," though Dr. Johnson himself would never have pronounced them otherwise. In these misspellings, however, Mr. Riley excuses himself by impersonating an illiterate as well as a crude-speaking poet. But even then he is inconsistent, and "hollowing" becomes "hollerin'," with an apostrophe to mark the lost "g"—that abominable imported harshness that ought to be generally exiled from our none too smooth language. Mr. Riley has written a good essay in defense of dialect, which enemies of this form of literature might read with advantage.

[Pg 269]

But Mr. Riley has written a deal of most excellent verse that is not in dialect. One whole volume is devoted to a fairy extravaganza called "The Flying Islands of the Night," a good addition to that quaint literature of lace to which "The Midsummer Night's Dream," Herrick's "Oberon's Epithalamium," or whatever it is called, Drake's "Culprit Fay," and other bits of most exquisite foolery belong. While hardly a complete success, this diminutive drama contains some curiously delightful conceits like this "improvisation:"

"Her face—her brow—her hair unfurled!—
And O the oval chin below,
Carved, like a cunning cameo,
With one exquisite dimple, swirled
With swimming shine and shade, and whirled
The daintiest vortex poets know—
The sweetest whirlpool ever twirled
By Cupid's finger-tip—and so,
The deadliest maelstrom in the world!"

It is a strange individuality that Mr. Riley has, suggesting numerous other masters—whose influence he acknowledges in special odes—and yet all digested and assimilated into a marked individuality of his own. He has studied the English poets profoundly and improved himself upon them, till one is chiefly impressed, in his non-dialectic verse, with his refinement, subtlety, and ease. He has a large vocabulary, and his felicity is at times startling. Thus he speaks of water "chuckling," which is as good as Horace's ripples that "gnaw" the shore. Note the mastery of such lines as

"And the dust of the road is like velvet."

"Nothin' but green woods and clear
Skies and unwrit poetry
By the acre!"

"Then God smiled and it was morning!"

Life is "A poor pale yesterday of Death."

"And O I wanted so
To be felt sorry for!"

"Always suddenly they are gone,
The friends we trusted and held secure."

"At utter loaf."

"Knee-deep in June."

—But I can not go on quoting forever.[Pg 270]

Technically, Mr. Riley is a master of surpassing finish. His meters are perfect and varied. They flow as smoothly as his own Indiana streams. His rimes are almost never imperfect. To prove his own understanding he has written one scherzo in technic that is a delightful example of bad rime, bad meter, and the other earmarks of the poor poet. It is "Ezra House," and begins:

"Come listen, good people, while a story I do tell
Of the sad fate of one I knew so passing well!"

The "do" and the "so" are the unfailing index of crudity. Then we have rimes like "long" and "along" (it is curious that modern English is the only tongue that finds this repetition objectionable); "moon" and "tomb," "well" and "hill," and "said" and "denied" are others, and the whole thing is an enchanting lesson in How Poetry Should Not be Written.

Mr. Riley is fond of dividing words at the ends of lines, but always in a comic way, though Horace, you remember, was not unwilling to use it seriously, as in his

"——U-
Xorius amnis."

Mr. Riley's animadversions on "Addeliney Bowersox" constitute a fascinating study in this effect. He is also devoted to dividing an adjective from its noun by a line-end. This is a trick of Poe's, whose influence Mr. Riley has greatly profited by. In his dialect poetry Mr. Riley gets just the effect of the jerky drawl of the Hoosier by using the end of a line as a knife, thus:

"The wood's