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JOHN A. HOWLAND'S MEMOIR ON RILEY

Part 1

Riley: the Poet and Man

     The unhappy subject of this sketch was born so long ago that he persists in never referring to the date. Citizens of his native town of Greenfied, Ind., while warmly welcom­ing his advent, were no less demonstra­tive some few years since to 'speed the parting guest.' It seems in fact that as they came to know him better the more resigned they were to give him up. He was ill-starred from the cradle, it appears. One day while but a toddler he climbed, unseen, to an open window where some potted flowers were ranged and while leaning from his high chair far out to catch some dainty gilded butterfly, per­chance, he lost his foothold and with a piercing shriek, fell headlong to the grav­eled walk below and when, an instant later, the affrighted parents picked him up he was a poet."

In this humorous, characteristic paragraph James Whitcomb Riley has de‑

    scribed himself. Like most men who undertake their own lives in a sentence, he has sacrificed a few truths for the sake of humor—a not astounding circumstance in the case of Riley who refused to look on life as a serious struggle.

" Unhappy " he has not been. " III-starred" he certainly was not. Greenfield, far from "speeding the parting guest" has proven false the declaration concerning the prophet and his own country. He never has been given up. He has no more sincere admirers, no warmer friends than the citizens of his native town.

Yet in this paragraph one may see a bit reflecting the irresponsibility of his early life of the instability, which pre­vented him from becoming a village tradesman because he was to be a great poet; of the humor which rivals the pathos in his poems.

If James Whitcomb Riley had not been intended to be a poet who should

" The bridge of the railroad now covers the spot " Where the old divin'-log lays sunk and forgot."

reach the hearts of men, he probably-would have been the good natured -v il­lage grocery wit whose stories held sym­pathetic audiences through long winter evenings, whose sayings would have been repeated with laughter by his towns peo­ple, whose happy, shiftless life would have caused many wiseacres to shake their heads and say:

"If Jim Riley'd only work he'd make his mark, but you can't get him to work."

He might have been the soft hearted Rip Van Winkle of a little Indiana town, a man whose efforts were ready in behalf of a friend and slothful for self interest; the man about whom the children would cluster and concerning whom the house­wives would shake their heads.

After his successful poems had placed him in the front rank of American poets who find their themes in the lives of the humble there arose many to declare that what was gained by poetry was lost by the stage; that James Whitcomb Riley would have put his name alongside

Riley's home in Greenfield.

Booth's if he had not written it with Longfellow's.

This, however, was a discovery made after the poet had attained his mark of fame. Every circumstance of his early life pointed to a career of unprofitable, unstable, kindly, joyous local brilliance.

Fate had marked Riley as a poet. Circumstance was endeavoring to make him fit in the business life of a small country town. And he wouldn't fit. Accordingly he appeared as unstable.

He was the son of erratic father, if local tradition may be accepted as trust­worthy. Reuben Riley was a brilliant lawyer, but it is still said of him that any time he " would leave a law suit to carve an ax handle." Riley's mother was not a- strong woman physically and had the care of five children.

The father's ambition was that the

boy should succeed him in law. The boy's ambition was to play the banjo and the drum. The father had his way fur a time and the boy realized his desire later.

The boy would rather fish than sit in the little red school house. He preferred the dusty roads and the sweet smelling grass of the fields to the text books. Later in life he chose the wandering life of a strolling musician and the tramp ex­istance of a traveling sign painter to the tedium of humdrum village work.

As a boy you may see him getting close to the poetry of things which lay about him, the poetry of fields of corn, of farm houses, of river and ford, the poetry of the unheroic as judged by the standards of poetic heroism.

You may imagine the boy filled with the unrest which comes from poetic feel­ing without the ability of poetic expres­sion, feeling the poetry of the corn grow- --- ing in the heat, of the bees in the sw clover, of the cows knee deep of the river cool in the shade, olvie

" There the bull rushes groomed."

hanging willows. This unrest would be sufficient to make him unstable as a work­man in any line offered by the small town. It is small wonder that he worked fitfully as he grew into young manhood. It is less wonder that he was found beating a drum at the tail end of a medicine seller's organization of musicians. It was just Riley's protest against being fitted into the life which did not belong to him and could not be made his.

When his triumph came it did not come with a rush. The story of his suc­cess is a story of long effort and disap­pointment. A genius was not discovered. with Riley's first poem. A group of per­simmon trees is pointed out to the visitor in Greenfield. Under these trees, it is said, Riley wrote his first verses. That was in the early days when efforts to express were struggling with feeling.

These poems came into a world which heeded them little. Rejected by magazine editors and publishers some of them met an untimely end. Others found their

" Green woods and clear skies "And unwrit poetry by the cave."

" Why don't the magazines take your poems if they are so good ? " asked por­tions of the public.

"Jim " set his mouth firmly and de­clared that his poetry was good, as good as that which had made men eternally famous. The " Leonainie " poem was the result—the Poe-poem which was greeted as a long lost song of the great writer of mystics. It is said to have cost Riley his position on the Anderson paper with which he was employed but that is more than likely a gentle fiction built to cover another reason.

Riley did lose his position but he was taken to Indianapolis where he and his poetry soon received the first genuine rec­ognition. Since the publication of the " Old Swimmin' Hole and Eleven More Poems," his place is American literature has been recognized.

Ask the care worn man who sits down to forget his troubles over a volume of poetry that takes him back to his bare foot days who is the American poet.

Ask the man who has the still un­healed wound which a child's death has left in his breast.

Ask the man who feels that the lattet days of his life have not realized th,T, promise of his earlier years.

Ask the man who can remember his

 "In the green, grassy lap of the medder."

own small town and the creek and the swimming hole.

Ask the man who retains even the smallest bit of youthful sentiment in his breast.

Riley has given them their own lives, their own feelings, their own thoughts, the things they felt and understood and could not express. His reputation does not rest only on his humor. His songs in the purest English would have made him if he never had used the Hoosier dialect. His pathos and sentiment would have given him his name if he never had drawn laughter with his wit and humor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once classed Riley as a later Hosea Biglow, quite as original and more versatile. Dr. Holmes owned to a " great deal of enthusiasm for this later production of Indiana soil, this delineator of lowly humanity, who sings

with so much fervor, pathos humor and grace."Riley puts his finger on spots in the heart of humanity which may have been untouched for years in the struggle of the world but which confess their existence as he reaches them. Poets have been more analytical, more mystical, more emotional, more dramatic, more heroic but none has been more human. It is on the last quality that Riley may be placed as the great American poet—the distinctively American poet, the poet of a dialect which is becoming extinct but which will never be unintelligible, the poet of pathos and humor which are essentially human and therefor eternal.

CONTINUED IN PART 2.