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James Whitcomb Riley.com brings you the treat of a dialogue between two of the Nineteenth Century's great literary lights: Hamlin Garland and James Whitcomb Riley, our boy. (But we do greatly admire the work of Hamlin Garland,(1860-1940) Riley's friend, and author of the highly acclaimed short stories, Main Traveled Roads published in 1991 and A Son of the Middle Border in 1917.) Garland is considered one of the great literary critics of American literature. This dialogue was one of several including another memorable one with U.S. Grant. PLEASE NOTE:  I will edit this better when I get out of a jury trial I am in. I kinda rushed this to put it on. TEQW.

MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE.

V1.. II                                 FEBRUARY, 1894.                                No. 3.

REAL CONVERSATIONS.--IV.

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY AND HAMLIN
GARLAND.

RECORDED BY MR. GARLAND.

iley's country, like most of the State of Indiana, has been won from the original forest by incredible toil. Three generations of men have laid their bones beneath the soil that now blooms into gold and lavender harvests of wheat and corn.
     The traveler today can read this record of struggle in the fringes of mighty elms and oaks and sycamores which form the grim background of every pleasant stretch of stubble or corn land.
     Greenfield, lying twenty miles east of Indianapolis, is today an agricultural town but in the days when Whitcomb riley lived here  it was only a half remove from the farm and the wood lot and the fact that he was brought up so near to the farm and yet not deadened and soured by its toil, accounts, in great measure at least, for his work.
     But Greenfield stands today, modernized and refined somewhat, is apparently the most umpromising field for literature, especially for poetry.  It has no hills, and no river nor lake.  Nothing but vast and radiant sky, and blue vistas of fields between noble trees.
     It has the customary main street with stores fronting upon it ; the usual small shops, and also its barrooms, swarming with loungers. It has its courthouse in the square, half hid by great trees—a grim and bare building, with its portal defaced and grimy. The people, as they pass you in the street, speak in the soft, high keyed nasal drawl which is the basis of the Hoosier dialect. It looks to be, as it is, halfway between the New England village and t he Western town.

     The life, like that of all small towns in America, is apparently slow moving, purposeless, and uninteresting ; and yet from this town, and other similar towns, has Whitcomb Riley drawn the sweetest honey of poesy—homey with a native delicious tang, as of buck wheat and basswood bloom. with hints of the mullein and the thistle of dry pastures.
     I found Mr. Riley sitting on the porch of the old homestead, which has been in alien hands for a long time, but which he has lately bought back In this house his childhood was passed, at a time when the street was hardly more than a lane in the woods. He bought it because of old time associations.
     "I am living here," he wrote me, "with two married sisters .keeping house for me during the summer: that is to say, I ply spasmodically between here and Indianapolis."
     I was determined to see the poet here, in the midst of his native suroundings, rather than at a hotel at Indianapolis. l was very glad to find him at home, for it gave me opportunity to study both the poet and his material.
     It is an unpretentious house of the usual village sort, with a large garden ; and his two charming sisters with their families (summering here) 'give him something more of a home atmosphere than he has had since he entered the lecturer's profession. Two or three children, nephews and nieces—companion also.
     After a few minutes' chat Riley said, with a comical side glance at me. "Come up into my library." I knew what sort of a library .to expect. It was a pleasant little upper room, with a bed and a small table in it, and about a dozen books.

Mr. Riley threw out his hand in a comprehensive gesture, and said : "This is as sumptuous a room as I ever get. 1 live most o' my time in a Pullman car or a hotel, and you know how blamed luxurious _.an ordinary hotel room is."

I refused to be drawn off into side discussions, and called for writing paper. Riley took an easy position on the bed, while I sharpened pencils, and studied him closely, with a view to let readers of McCLuRE's know how he looks.

He is a short man, with square shoulders and a large head. He has a very dignified manner—at times. His face is smoothly shaven, and, though he is not 'bald, the light color of his hair makes him seem so. His eves are gray and round, and generally solemn, and sometimes stern. His face is the face of a great actor— in rest, grim and inscrutable: in action, full of the most elusive expressions, capable of humor and pathos.  Like most humorists, he is sad in repose.  His language, when he chooses to have it so, is wonderfully concise and penetrating and beautiful.  He drops often into dialect, but always with a look on his face which shows he is aware of what he is doing. In other_, words, he is master of both forms of speech. His mouth is his wonderful feature : wide, flexible, clean cut. His lips are capable of the grimmest and the merriest lines. When he reads they pout like a child's, or draw down into a straight, grim line like a New England deacon's, or close at one side, and uncover his white and even teeth at the other, in the sly smile of "Benjamin F. Johnson," the humble humorist and philosopher. In his own proper person he is full of quaint and beautiful philosophy. He is wise rather than learned—wise with the quality that is in proverbs, almost always touched with humor.

His eyes are nearsighted and his nose prominent. His head is of the "tack hammer " variety, as he calls it. The public insists that there is an element of resemblance between Mr. Riley, Eugene Field and Bill Nye. He is about forty years of age and a bachelor—presumably from choice. He is a man of marked neatness of dress and delicacy of manner. I began business by asking if he remembered where we met last.

"Certainly - Kipling's. Great story teller, Kipling. I like to hear him tell about animals. Remember his story of the two elephants that lambasted the one that went 'must' ?"

" I guess I do. I have a suspicion, however, that Kipling was drawing a long bow for our benefit, especially in that story of the elephant that chewed a stalk of cane into a swab to wind in the clothing of his keeper, in order to get him within reach. That struck me as bearing down pretty hard on a a couple of simple Western boys like us."

" Waive the difference for genius. He made it a good story, anyway ; and, aside from his great gifts, I consider Kipling^. a lovely fellow. I like him because he's natively interested in the common man."

I nodded my assent, and Riley went on :

Kipling had the good fortune to get started early, and he's kept busy right along. A man who is great has

"Griggsby's Station" The old Riley House and present summer residence, Greenfield, Ind.

" Let's go avisitin' back to Griggsby's Station

Back where the latchstring's ahangin' from the door,
And ever' neighbor round the place is dear as a relation—
Back where we ust to be so happy and so pore !"

no time for anything else," he added, in that peculiarity of phrase and solemnity of utterance which made me despair of ever dramatizing him.

" He's going to do better," I replied. The best story in that book is His Private Honor.' That's as good as anybody does. What makes Kipling great is his fidelity to his own convictions and to his own conditions, his writing what he knows about. And, by the way, the Norwegians and Swedes at the World's Fair have read us a good lesson on that score. They've put certain phases of_. their life and landscape before us with immense vim and truth, while our American artists have mainly gone hunting for themes—Breton peasants and Japanese dancing girls."

     Riley sternly roused up to interrupt : " And ignoring the best material in the world. Material just out o' God's hand, lying around thick "—then quick as light he was Old Man Johnson again :

"Thick as clods in the fields and lanes
Er these ere little hop toads when it rains!"

     " American artists and poets have always known too much," I went on. " We've been so afraid the world would find us lacking in scholarship, that we've allowed it to find us lacking in creative work. We've been so very correct, that we've imitated. Now, if you'd had four or five years of Latin, Riley, you'd be writing Latin odes or translations."

     Riley looked grave. ".I don't know but you're right. Still, you can't tell. Sometimes I feel that I am handicapped by ignorance of history and rhetoric and languages:

     " 'Well, of course, I ought not to dis­cuss a thing like this in your presence, but I think the whole thing has worked out beautifully for the glory of Indiana and Western literature."

     There came a comical light into his eves, and his lips twisted up in a sly grin at the side, as he dropped into dialect : " I don't take no credit for my ignorance. Jest born thataway," and he added, a moment later, with a characteristic swift change to deep earnestness : " My work did. itself."

     As he lay, with that introspective look in his eyes, I took refuge in one of the questions I had noted down : " Did you ever actually live on a farm ?" •

     " No. All I got.of farm life I picked up right from this distance—this town —this old homestead. Of course, Greenfield was nothing but a farmer town then,. and besides, father had a farm just on the edge of town, and in corn plantin' times he used to press us boys into service, and we went very loathfully, at least I did. I. got hold of farm life some way—all ways, in fact. I might not have made use of .it if I had been closer to it than this."

     " Yes, there's something in that. You would have failed, probably, in your perspective. The actual work on a farm doesn't make poets. Work is a good thing in the retrospect, or when you can regulate the amount of it. Yes, I guess you had just the kind of a life to give you a hold on the salient facts of farm life. Anyhow, you've done it, that's settled."

     Riley was thinking about something which amused him, and he roused up to dramatize a little scene. " Sometimes some real country boy gives me the round turn on some farm points. For instance, here comes one stepping up to me : ' You never lived on a farm,' he says. Why not ?' says I. Well,' he says, a turkeycock gobbles, but he don't kyouck as your poetry says.' He had me right there. It's the turkey hen that 'kyoucks. Well, you'll never hear another turkeycock of mine kyouckin'," says I."

     While I laughed, Riley became serious again. " But generally I hit on the right symbols. 1 get the frost on the pumpkin and the fodder in the shock ; and I see the frost on the old axe they split the pumpkins with for feed, and I get the smell of the fodder and the cattle, so that it brings up the right picture in the mind of the reader. I don't know how I do it. It ain't me."

His voice took on a deeper note, and his face shone with a strange sort of mysticism which often comes out in his earnest moments. He put his fingers to his lips in a descriptive gesture, as if he held a trumpet. " I'm only the 'willer' through which the whistle comes."

     " The basis of all art is spontaneous observation," I said, referring back a little. "If a man is to work out an individual utterance with the subtlety and suggestion of life, he can't go diggin' around among the bones of buried prophets. I take it you didn't go to school much."

     " No, and when I did I was a failure in everything—except reading, maybe. I liked to read. We had McGuffey's Series, you know, and there was some good stuff there. There was Irving and Bryant and Cooper and Dickens -"

  " And Lochiel's Warning               "

     He accepted the interruption. " And The Battle of Waterloo,' and ' The Death of Little Nell '--"

     I rubbed my knees with glee as I again interrupted : " And there was Marco Bozzaris,' you know, and Rienzi.' You recollect that speech of Rienzi's—' I come not here to talk,' etc.? I used to count the class to see if Rouse, ye Slaves,' would conic to me. It was capitalized, you remember. It always scared me nearly to death to read those capitalized passages.

Riley mused. " Pathos seems to be the worst with me. I used to run away when we were to read Little Nell.' I knew I couldn't read it without crying, and I knew they'd all laugh at me and make the whole thing ridiculous. I couldn't stand that. My teacher, Lee 0. Harris, was a friend to me and helped me in many ways. He got to understand me beautifully ! He knew I couldn't learn arithmetic. There wasn't any gray matter in that part of my head. Perfectly empty ! But I can't remember when I wasn't a declaimer. I always took natively toanything theatrical. History I took a dislike to, as a thing without juice, and so I'm not particularly well stocked in dates and events of the past."

" Well, that's a good thing, too, I guess," I said, pushing my point again. It has thrown you upon the present, and kept you dealing with your own people. Of course, I don't mean to argue that perfect ignorance is a thing to be desired, but there is no distinction in the historical poem or novel to my mind.  Everybody's done that."

     Riley continued:  "Harris, in addition to being a scholar and a teacher, was, and is, a poet.  He was also a playwright, and made me a success in a comedy part which he wrote for me, in our home theatricals."
     "Well, now, that makes me think.  It was your power to recite that carried you into the patent medicine cart wasn't it?  And how about that sign painting?  Which came first.

" The sign painting. I was a boy in my teens when I took up sign painting.'

" Did you serve a regular apprenticeship ? "

" Yes, I learned my trade of an old Dutchman here, by the name of Keefer, who was an artist in his way. I had a natural faculty for drawing. I suppose I could have illustrated my books if I had given time to it. It's rather

"Milroy's Grove" and old National Road Bridge, Brandywine

'' Where the dusky turtle lies basking on the gravel
Of the sunny sandbar in the middle tide,
And the ghostly dragonfly pauses in his travel
To rust like a blossom where the waterlily died,"

— Babyhood

curious but I hadn't been with the old fellow much more than a week before I went to him and asked him why he didn't make his own letters.  I couldn't see why he copied from the same old forms all the time.  I hated to copy anything."

     "Well now, I want to know about that patent-medicine peddling."

     Something in my tone made him reply quickly.

     "That has been distorted.  It was really a very simple matter, and followed the sign painting naturally. After the ' trade' episode I had tried to read law with my father, but / didn't seem to get anywhere. Forgot as diligently as I read. So far as school equipment was concerned, I was an advertised idiot^., so what was the use? I had a trade, but it was hardly what I wanted to do always, and my health was bad—very bad—bad as I was ! •

"A doctor here in Greenfield advised me to travel. But how in the world was I to travel without money ? It was just at this time that the patent medicine man came along. He needed a man, and I argued this way: • This man is a doctor, and if I must travel, better travel with a doctor.' He had a fine team, and a nice looking lot of fellows with him ; so I „plucked up courage to ask if I couldn't go along and paint his advertisements for him."

Riley smiled with retrospective amusement. " I rode out of town behind those horses without saying goodbye to anyone. And though my patron wasn't a diplorma'd doctor, as I found out, he was a mighty fine man, and kind to his horses, which was a recom­mendation. He was a man of good habits, and the .whole company was made up of good straight boys."

    " How long were you with him ?"

" About a year. Went home with him, and was made same as one of his own lovely family. He lived at Lima, Ohio. My experience with him put an idea in my head—a business idea, for a wonder—and the next year I went down to Anderson and sent into partnership with a young fellow to travel, organizing a scheme of advertising with paint, which we called The Graphic Company.' We had five or six young fellows, all musicians as well as handy painters, and we used' to capture the towns with our music. One fellow could whistle like a nightingale, another sang like an angel, and another played the banjo. 1 scuffled with the violin and guitar."

" I thought so, from that poem on ' The Fiddle' in ' The Oki Swimmin' Hole.'"    •

    'Our only dissipation was clothes. We dressed loud. You could hear our clothes an incalculab^re distance. We had an idea it helped business. Our plan was to take one firm of each business in a town, painting its advertisements on every road leading into the town : • Go to ';Mooney'",' and things like that, you understand. We made a good thing at it."

" How long did you do business?"

     " Three or four years, and we had more fun than anybody.'  He turned another comical look on me over his.pinch nose eyeglasses. " You've heard this story about _.my travelling all over the State as a blind signpainter ? Well, that started this way. One day we were in a small town somewhere, and a great crowd watching us breathless wonder and curiosity' ; and one of our' party said : 'Riley, let me introduce you as a blind sign painter.' so just for mischief I put on a crazy look in the eyes and pretended to be blind. They led me carefully to the ladder, and handed me my brush and paints. It was great fun. I'd hear them saying as I worked, ^•That feller ain't blind," Yes, he is.  See his eyes.'
• No, he ain't, I tell you, he's playin' off."I tell you he is blind. Didn't you see him fall over a box there and spill all his paints ?'"

    Riley rose here and laughingly reenacted the scene, and I don't wonder that the villagers were deceived, so perfect was his assumption of the patient, weary look of a blind person.

I laughed at the joke. It was like the tricks boys play at college.

     Riley went on. " Now, that's all. there. was to it. I was a blind sign painter one day, and forgot it the next. We were all boys, and jokers, naturally enough, but not lawless. All were good fellows. All had nice homes and good people."

Were you writing any at this time?"    •

"Oh, yes, I was always writing for purposes of recitation. I couldn't find printed poetry that was natural enough to speak. From a child I had always flinched at false rhymes and inversions. I liked John G. Saxe because ^.he had a jaunty trick of rhyming artlessly ;

"The Old Swimmin' Hole as it now appears (August 10, 1893)

Childish voices, further on,
Where the truant stream has gone,
Vex the echoes of the wood
Till no word is understood -
Save that we are all aware
Happiness is hiding there : -
There, in leafy coverts, nude
Little bodies poise and leap,
Spattering the solitude.

And if the silence everywhere -
Mimic monsters of the deep! -
Wallowing in sandy shoals -
Plunging headlong out of sight.
And with spurting of delight,
Clutching hands and slippery soles,
Climbing up the treacherous steep
Over which the springboard spurns
Each again as he returns"
                  - In Swimming-Time

made the sense demand the rhyme—like 'Young Peter Pyramus—1 call him Peter, Not for the sake of the rhyme or the metre, But merely to make the name completer.'

    I liked those classic travesties, too—he poked fun at the tedious old themes, and that always pleased me." Riley's voice grew stern, as he said : "I'm against the fellows who celebrate the old to the neglect of our own kith and kin. So I was always trying to write of the kind of people I knew, and especially to write verse that I could read just as if it were being spoken for the first time."

" I saw in a newspaper the other day that you began your journalistic work in Anderson."

" That's right. When I got back from my last trip with The Graphic Company,' young Will M. Croan offered me a place on a paper he was just connecting himself with. He had heard that I could write, and took it for granted I would be a valuable man in the local and advertising departments. I was. I inaugurated at once a feature of free doggerel advertising, for our regular advertisers. I wrote reams and miles of stuff like this :

"'O Yawcob Stein,
   Dot frint of mine
He got dot Cloding down so fine
   Dot efer'body bin a-buyin'
   Fon goot old Yawcob Stein.'"

     "I'd like to see some of those old papers.  I suppose they're all down there on file."
     ""I'm afraid they are.  It's all there.  Whole hemorrhages of it."

     He nodded.

     "How did you come to go?  Did you go on the venture?"

     "No, it came this way.  I had a lot of real stuff, as I fancied, quite different from the doggerel I've just quoted and when I found something pleased the people,k as I'd hold 'em up and read it to 'em, I'd send it off to a magazine, and it would come back quite promptly by return ma