CHAPTER XXII.

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY.

BIRTHPLACE AND BOYHOOD

LEANINGS-A EPISODE-PER

HIS WORK IN WHAT

A POETIC INTERPRETATION OF SUCCESS —A PICTURE OF HIS CHILDHOOD EARLY THEATRICAL PRACTICAL JOKER-SCHOOL DAYS THE "LEONAINIE SONAL APPEARANCE PREEMINENT QUALITIES OF HIS UNIQUENESS LIES "POEMS HERE AT HOME"OF MR. RILEY'S POETRY AS A BALLADIST -HIS LYRICS THE POET OF THE PEOPLE CHARACTERISTICALLY AMERICAN.

THE TWO CLASSES

PERSONAL

PURITY AND

I believe a man prays when he does well. I believe he worships God when his work is on a high plane. When his attitude towards his fellow men is right, I guess God is pleased with him.

AMES WHITCOMB RILEY, the "Hoosier Poet," was born at Greenfield, Indiana, and there, too, spent the years of his boyhood. His father was an attorney of some prominence, and a genius in mechanics, having the ability to imitate in construction almost anything that can be made with hands a trait which his son inherits as a mental, though not manual, characteristic. The father was impatient to see his son, of whom he was very fond, in masculine attire; and long before the child had reached the age when the pinafore is usually discarded, determined to gratify this desire. He therefore bought the small amount of material necessary, and himself cut and made for the coming poet and humorist a wonderful suit. It consisted of trousers reaching to the feet, and a coat of the "shad-belly" variety, adorned with the bright brass buttons then in fashion for gentlemen.

At that age the child's hair was almost as white as wool, and his face was covered with freckles of generous size and pronounced color. He was chubby, and the grotesqueness of this ensemble must have twanged a sympathetic chord in his infantile breast. When attired in his new suit he bore a striking resemblance in miniature to Judge Wick, a ponderous jurist and politician prominent in that section and throughout the West at that time. The similarity of initials as well as of person suggested the whim to the rustic wits, and Judge Wick became his nickname and remained with him after he had reached his teens, and then, it may be said, became his nom de guerre, for by that name he fought and conquered in his more mature boyhood. He was his father's constant companion, and on county court days no end of merriment was aroused when a conjunction of these two unique personages with judicial titles forced a comparison and provoked the risibles of the dullest. When the business of litigation was on, the boy was left to his own devices. Perched in some obscure niche or window, he imitated every movement of the court, lawyers and witnesses, and there his studies of dialect and human nature of the Hoosier variety were made, to be reproduced on the platform and in print in later years.

As he grew older he took part in boy-theatricais, and always as the "star." His preference was for portrait-painting as a vocation, but sign-painting offered a more quickly remunerative field, and to this he turned his attention for

a while. He even descended to lettering on fences, and the highways of Hancock and adjoining counties were picturesque with the results of his genius. This became monotonous, and he again turned his attention to the stage. He joined a strolling company and became its genius. Finding his lines. faulty or unsuitable, he rewrote them, and sometimes recast the entire play abridging, brightening, or throwing into prominence unique characters as his ideas of consistency demanded. At one time he attached himself to a combination in which the payment of salaries depended on the amount of patent medicines sold between acts. The stage was a large wagon drawn by horses gayly caparisoned. On this was mounted a large blackboard, on which sketches in black and white were displayed. Riley was artist, orator, and musician in turn, drawing illustrations and caricatures of persons in the motley audience, lauding the virtues of his wares, improvising additional verses to a song, or playing accompaniments on violin or guitar, and joining in the chorus. It was a happy, vagabond life, a rebound from the repression of his earlier years. It made him familiar with his kind, and enriched his dialect vocabulary and his studies of human nature from life.

During his sign-painting career he sometimes posed as "the celebrated blind sign-painter." Pretending to be stone blind, he bewildered the crowds which collected to watch him work. Mr. Riley was continually playing practical jokes. Perhaps the most ludicrous was one he played on the Methodist church congregation of his native town. The story is told by a relative of the poet that this church needed repairing badly, and a committee went about soliciting aid. Mr. Riley, who was handy at any kind of work, could not help in a financial way, but volunteered to repair the church clock. The committee consented. Just before the reopening of the church he brought the clock back and carefully hung it in its accustomed place high on the wall over the pulpit. At eleven o'clock, when the minister was warming to his subject, the old clock began striking. It struck fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and kept on striking. The minister stopped. The clock did not. It was far out of reach and no ladder was near. The congregation had to be dismissed.

He rarely attended school with any degree of regularity, but he learned much from his father, and seemed to absorb

knowledge without effort. From early boyhood his thoughts fell into line in rhythm. Even his first crude rhyming was not deficient in this respect. His poems are thought out as he travels or walks the street, and when their time is fully come he gives them birth regardless of surroundings — at an office desk in the hum of business, in the waiting room of a railway station, on the corner of a busy editor's table, or seated on a low stool with his manuscript on his knees — it is all one to him. At other times he is very sensitive to surroundings. His reading has taken a wide range, but has been somewhat discursive, and he has been restrained from thorough study of any model through fear that his strong imitative bent might mar his originality of expression. In response to the challenge of a friend, he once wrote what professed to be a newly discovered manuscript poem of the late Edgar Allan Poe, entitled "Leonainie," and so perfect was his work that so capable a judge as William Cullen Bryant pronounced it genuine and criticised it at some length as such. When this unknown Western upstart declared himself the author of it, he was denounced as a would-be plagiarist.

Mr. Riley 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 eyes 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 expression 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, penetrating, and beautiful. He drops often into dialect but always with a look on his face which shows that he is aware of what he is doing. In other words, he is himself in both forms of speech. His mouth is his wonderful feature, wide, flexible, clean cut. His lips are capable of the grimmest and merriest lines. He has lips that pout like a child's or draw down into the 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 style, slightly, 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 the Proverbs,— almost always touched with humor.

Even if Mr. Riley's poetry - which, along with his prose, now has been brought out in a beautiful uniform edition had no claim to distinction in itself, the fact of its unrivaled popularity would challenge consideration. But, fortunately, his work does not depend on so frail a tenure of fame as the vogue of a season or the life of a fad. The qualities which secure for it a wider reading and a heartier appreciation than are accorded to any other living American poet are rooted deep in human nature; they are preeminently qualities of wholesomeness and common sense, those qualities of steady and conservative cheerfulness which ennoble the average man, and in which the man of exceptional culture is too often lacking. Its lovers are the ingenuous home-keeping hearts, on whose sobriety and humor the national character is based. And yet, one has not said enough when one says it is poetry of the domestic affections, poetry of sentiment; for it is much more than that.

Poetry which is free from the unhappy spirit of the age, free from dejection, from doubt, from material cynicism, neither tainted by the mould of sensuality nor wasted by the maggot of "reform," is no common product, in these days. So much of our art and literature is ruined by self-consciousness, running to the artificial and the tawdry. It is the slave either of commercialism, imitative, ornate, and insufferably tiresome, or of didacticism, irresponsible and dull. But Mr. Riley at his best is both original and sane. He seems to have accomplished that most difficult feat, the devotion of one's selt to an art without any deterioration of health. He is full of the sweetest vitality, the soundest merriment. His verse is not strained with an overburden of philosophy, on the one hand, nor debauched with maudlin sentimentalism, on the other. Its robust gayety has all the fascination of artlessness and youth. It neither argues, nor stimulates, nor denounces, nor exhorts; it only touches and entertains us. And, after all, few things are more humanizing than innocent amusement.

It is because of this quality of abundant good nature, familiar, serene, homely, that it seems to me no exaggeration to call Mr. Riley the typical American poet of the day. True, he does not represent the cultivated and academic classes; he