SOURCE: Beveridge, Albert J. “Address by Albert J. Beveridge.” In In Honor of James Whitcomb Riley: A Meeting of Indiana State Teachers' Association, pp. 10-18. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1906.

[In the following speech, Indiana Senator Beveridge's hails Riley as “the people's poet,” suggesting that Riley is not only a Hoosier poet but has a universal appeal.]

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen—It would seem that Indiana and the Middle West, the center of the republic geographically, the center of the republic numerically, is becoming the center of the republic intellectually. Only in America could the center of culture follow close on the heels of the moving center of population; because only in America is learning equally distributed among the people, so that where the center of population is, the center of intelligence must be.

At any rate Indiana at this hour is giving more creative literature to the English-speaking world than any single portion of the republic. Charles Major, the American Dumas; Meredith Nicholson, our latter-day Hawthorne; George Ade and Nesbit and McCutcheon, whose true humor sets the land aglee; Booth Tarkington, whose genius expresses itself in the most finished art of any contemporaneous novelist; David Graham Phillips, whose savage force and masterfulness are elemental and epochal—all these and more are children of Indiana.

And dean of all, first of all and dearest of all is that American Burns, whom Indiana has given to the nation—James Whitcomb Riley. I say given by Indiana to the nation; for all that Indiana has and is belongs to the republic as a whole. And, besides, our joy and pride in this master singer of the people is too great to be provincial. Only the heart of the nation is great enough to share and hold it.

Dearer to the universal man than soldier, statesman or scholar are the world's poets; for the poet interprets the soul of man to itself and makes immortal the wisdom of the common mind. After all, the source of all poetry is in the hearts of the people. In the consciousness of the masses is that intelligence of the higher truths of the universe, of which this life is but a reflection; and it is this intelligence, uttered in words of music, that constitutes real poetry.

So he who knows not the people nor loves them can not sing that song to which their very natures are attuned. The aristocrat may make verses whose perfect art renders them immortal like Horace, or state high truths in austere beauty like Arnold. But only the brother of the common man can tell what the common heart longs for and feels, and only he lives in the understanding and affection of the millions. Only the man who is close to the earth and, therefore, close to the skies, knows the mysteries and beauties of both. Only he who is close to humanity is close to humanity's God.

That is why the true poet is so dear to the man in the furrow and the street—he listens and hears a voice of beauty singing the very thoughts his locked lips have not uttered and the yearnings that have filled him always. The poet is our soul's interpreter, voice of our spirit, evangel of our higher and our real life, utterer of the prophecy which God has planted in our breasts.

The poet of the people is a part of the people, and their better part; and that is why the people love him. That is why we love James Whitcomb Riley. He has understood us—understood us because he is of us; and, understanding us, has told us of ourselves, of our ideal selves, and therefore of our truly real selves. For only that is real in the soul of man which, to the mind of man, is ideal.

That is why the poet of the people becomes the poet universal. He gives that touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. Everybody knows Burns. His verse has gone into our common speech. We quote him without knowing it. Burns is human and says things we understand and things we need. Omar Khayyam's song of poise and resignation rises above the clattering footfalls of the centuries, and the modern world is listening to him now.

Riley is of this quality. He is the sentiment and wisdom of the universal common man, stated in terms of Americanism. There is something in him of Burns and something of the Tentmaker and a dash of Villon, and yet all Riley, all original, all born of our own home soil—every atom pure Indiana American.

What I like most in Riley is his sympathy with everybody and everything that needs or deserves it. The best things in Burns are his songs to a homeless mouse and a mountain daisy crushed beneath his plow. Riley is full of that same thing. He sympathizes with an old horse turned out to pasture.

Sympathy is the divinest faculty of man. It is a suggestion of Heaven. It sweetens misfortune and makes adversity smile. Toil turns to play beneath sympathy's touch, and the thorns of difficulty bear roses. There is nothing so fine as that friendliness of soul that knows and understands the sorrows, troubles, temptations, joys, hopes, aspirations and all the emotions of other souls.

Nothing is so splendid as to love things. These are qualities of the common people and the quiet homes. These qualities do not live in rich abodes—exclusiveness starves them. They are qualities growing out of the soil, and so out of the heart of God.

Take all your fine statements of high truths, but leave me the living speech of human sympathy. That is Riley's kind of speech. He is so full of it that it masters him and makes him write it out in poetry. That is how we have Griggsby's Station and Nothin' to Say and The Old Band and Lockerbie Street, and that very tenderest of all his lines expressing a new idea in literature—the sorrow of a childless one, who at heart and in longing and in loving capacity is a parent, for the real parent over the loss of a real child:

Let me come in where you sit weeping,—aye,
Let me, who have not any child to die,
Weep with you for the little one whose love I have known nothing of.

We have these and a hundred others like them, and thank God for them, and so thank God for Jim Riley.

Riley is more the poet of the people than Burns was in this: he is the poet of the children. The plain people love children more than all things else. Only God and country are dearer to the common heart than the infant race growing up to take our place when, like old trees, we shall fall at last. Children are visible immortality. The beauty of youth is the loveliest thing in human life; and in the heart of childhood abides the future.

The common people know children and understand them; and so does Riley. Shelley's genius arranged brilliant words and amazing thoughts, but he never got as near to the human heart as the man who wrote Fool Youngens and Old Man Whiskery-Whee-Kum-Wheeze or The Raggedy Man. I would rather be the interpreter of childhood than to be the author of Manfred. What said the sacred Word—Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Riley speaks our tongue. His words are the language of the people. He is the interpreter of the common heart. That is why he is so full of that sane fatalism called resignation—submission to the eternal forces of whom he would make friends, not enemies.

When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,
                              W'y, rain's my choice,

—says Riley, echoing the man of the fields, who, like Riley, would a good deal rather be “Knee Deep in June.”

But this voice of our ordinary American millions utters the depths of our soul and searches the heights of our faith when he tells of our trust in and reliance on the good God who, we know, with the wisdom of the heart, surely exists and surely cares for us. There are some of us who owe more personally to James Whitcomb Riley for that priceless thing—an unquestioning faith in God and Christ and immortality—than can well be put in words. The people who have not abandoned that wisest of wisdoms, the wisdom of the heart, don't argue about or question these infinite truths. And Riley, the people's voice, asserts them. The poet does not syllogize about these eternal realities—the poet knows.

It is these people—these millions of common people—who pay the tribute of their love and admiration to James Whitcomb Riley today. For this meeting is held by the State Teachers' Association, and no body of men and women so truly represents the people as the teachers. Walking along a country lane in Germany one day, a German statesman said to me, pointing to a modest-appearing man, “There goes the German people—there walks the soul of the German nation.”

And in answer to my look of inquiry he said:

“That is a typical German teacher; he is the bulwark of the fatherland.”

This is truer of the American republic than of the German empire. A republican form of government rests on the citizen, and the teacher ought to be and is the maker of the citizen. So the teacher is the truest representative of the people; and thus it is that when the teachers of Indiana greet James Whitcomb Riley, the people greet their poet. “May he live long and prosper,” and his true song be sung for many a year to come, and its music echo for ever in the souls of the people!