James Whitcomb Riley

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Vision of His Mission

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SOURCE: Dickey, Marcus. “Vision of His Mission.” In The Youth of James Whitcomb Riley: Fortune's Way With the Poet From Infancy to Manhood, pp. 271-82. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1919.

[In the following essay, Dickey describes how as a young man of twenty-seven, Riley had a vision in which he was called to be a voice for “the inarticulate masses.”]

Walking one April morning through an orchard with a friend, his eyes on the blossoming trees and his thoughts in the sky, Riley suddenly pitched forward into a post-hole. In the twinkling of an eye the Tennysonian sentiment came to his lips:—

O let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.

The lines, repeated at random, were an innocent prelude to his “prolific decade”—the ten years of poetic effusion, whose natal days, in the providence of Heaven, mantled with rapture the summer of 1876. A glimpse of that rapture is seen in his remarks, three years following, to the Thousandth Man, Myron Reed. One winter night they were talking on the significance of dreams. Riley was in a state of ecstasy over a vision that had crossed his path. “Nor was I on the road to Damascus,” said he, “unless all men travel that way. I was vibrating between the woods and the law office, had no company except my own thoughts; but my ears were opened; I heard a voice—heard it for several days. Why it should call, so unexpectedly, to me, an obscure mortal in a backwoods corner of the world, is beyond my comprehension.”

“Pleasures and visions,” returned Reed, “are come upon, or they come upon you. Only one man has seen Niagara Falls, and he was in search of something else—something prosaic, something that had work in it; and all of a sudden he heard the steady throb and pound, and a little later saw the blue and white wonder.”

And what was the vision? Just the plain simple fact that he was to write poetry. “Jay Whit,” the sign-painter, the Argonaut, was to be the humble instrument for the transmission of song to men; a voice he was to be for the “inarticulate masses—the soiled and the pure—the rich and the poor—the loved and the unloved.” Whence the songs? The Argonaut did not know—

All hitherward blown
From the misty realm, that belongs
To the vast Unknown.
The voices pursue him by day,
And haunt him by night,
And he listens, and needs must obey
When the Angel says, ‘Write!’

His fortunate opportunity had come. Not in a moment, like Hugh Wynne's, but in a fortnight he had made a decisive resolution, which, once made, controlled him, and permitted no future change of plan.

                              Then straightway before
His swimming eyes, all vividly was wrought
A vision that was with him evermore.

Now that he had a definite object, his character and purpose were to be written broadly on his face. No waste of time in platitudes; none of the inexpressive similarity that obscures the men and women who go in public to see and be seen. He was to be an individual doing the work Heaven designed him to do, and in doing it, he was to give expression to truth. The vision supplied him with the sides of a ladder, but, as Dickens had told him in the old Shoe-Shop, the cleats were to be made of stuff to stand wear and tear, and the Argonaut was to make and nail them on.

His personal reference to the vision was always virile and stimulating. “I had a dream once years and years ago,” he wrote a friend after he had tamed the lion of public recognition, “a vision that I should some day be just what I am this minute, and it made me a different person.” He was an impatient wind from inland regions come suddenly to the seaside, a wind that had been retarded by tanglewood and ridges. There was a call from the deep; the prospect was divine as his own lines attest:

And the swelling sea invited me
With a smiling, beckoning hand,
And I spread my wings for a flight as free
As ever a sailor plans,
When his thoughts are wild and his heart beguiled
With a dream of foreign lands.

The dream was the more perfect image of the dream he had when the musician played—the “fine frenzy” that entranced him while under the sway of Ole Bull's magic wand.

Writing the “Golden Girl,” he was pleased to tell her that he had been busily occupied with literary matters, that he had had (as we have seen) “a perfect hemorrhage of inspiration.” “Crowding measures” had gushed like a fountain from his heart. He had produced poems of better quality than ever, and had sent “samples of his fancy work” to Trowbridge and Longfellow. The vision was “heaven's own baptismal rite.” In the Indianapolis Journal office in after years, he was wont to call it, “My Vision of Summer”:

'Twas a marvelous vision of Summer—
That morning the dawn was late,
And came like a long dream-ridden guest
Through the gold of the Eastern gate.
And back from the lands enchanted,
Where my earliest mirth was born,
The thrill of a laugh was blown to me
Like the blare of an elfin horn.

The tuneful flame had the fervor of the “poetic rage” that flowed from the heart of Burns when the Scottish Muse came to the clay cottage to bind the holly round his brow. It was the gleam that Tennyson saw in the summer-morn of life.

As Riley said in “The Shower,” he was transfigured; his empty soul brimmed over; he was drenched with the love of God. He was also aware of a happiness in his work hitherto unknown. What he did was interesting—“interesting,” said he, “because I was happy in my thoughts. The more interesting my thoughts, the happier I was.”

“A vision may beget some wonder and well it may,” said Ike Walton, “for most of our world are at present possessed with an opinion that visions and miracles are ceased.” “They have not ceased,” said Riley. “Again and again I have been guided by an invisible Destiny. There has almost always come to me a forecast of events in my life. I once told my brother that if I put several of my stories and poems together and gave attention to delivery, I could succeed on the platform. He laughed derisively and for a time that was the end of that dream. My old schoolmaster, Lee O. Harris, used to send poems to the Indianapolis Sentinel and get beautiful notices. I wondered whether the day would come when I should contribute to the Journal and read praise of my work. I like to believe as the pious men of old that every man has a particular guardian angel—his Dæmon—to attend him in all his dangers, both of body and soul. There have been crises in my life when I was awed by what I saw. Like Job—a spirit passed before my face; my hair stood up; fear and trembling came upon me, and made all my bones to shake.”

The Argonaut had dreams while drifting about with the “Graphics”—not a vision, however; not the clear, decisive disclosure of what he was to do.

He had a dream when he received a talisman (as he thought) in the letter from Hearth and Home—his first check for a poem. An air-castle it was with tissue of riches. He saw himself an Aladdin with the magic ring on his finger, in a garden, among trees with fruits of many colors, their foliage beautifully blended with emeralds, pearls and rubies. In fancy he filled his pockets with diamonds from the trees and afterward, by scattering them right and left in handfuls, gained the affections of the people as the young Aladdin had done. It was dawn, midday and moonlight—all in one:

A thousand fairy throngs
Flung at him, from their flashing hands,
The echoes of their songs.

Throughout his “misty years” his mind was a nursery for “thick-coming fancies.” He pleased his whimsical tendency with one from the “British Book.” The gay John Flaxman, fond of merry legends, had invented for the amusement of his family the story of the Chinese Casket, giving its genealogy, locating the original in the bowers of Paradise and afterward a reproduction of it, made of scented wood and precious gems, in China. There it was protected in a sanctuary by a princess, who, understanding the language of the birds, had been taught to prize it by what she heard in the song of the nightingale. The Casket was to contain the verse and maxims of poets and philosophers. There coming a day when the treasure was unsafe in China, being exposed to the malice of magicians, the princess carried it to Mount Hermon and deposited it on “a high and holy hill.” There Sadi wrote for the Casket while a guardian angel watched over it. The poet died and Hafiz wrote, but when loose visions floated before his sight and his strains lost their purity and virtue, indignant angels snatched the Casket away, resolved to bear it to a distant isle, where virtuous works of art and virtuous people abound. The angelic keepers floated with their treasure over inland vales toward the Golden West. The Muses saluted the flying pageant as it passed, the Colossus of Rhodes bowed his head and the gods of Greece clapped their hands. The fleets of nations waved their pennants in approval and in due season

The godlike genius of the British Isle
Received the Casket with benignant smile.

Flaxman's story ended with Britain but Riley and an early booklover of his native town, whose fancy was capricious like his own, carried the Casket across the Atlantic. Longfellow had written his sweetest verse for it and both thanked Heaven the poet had kept it free from the taint of corruption and vice. “My boy,” said his friend half-seriously, “the day will come when you will write songs for the Casket.” The friend (an intuitive young woman) was not certain that he would succeed Longfellow but certain she was he would do what he could, and that what he did would be musical. “It was the thought of an idle moment,” said Riley, “a joke taken seriously”—seriously, just as one other time he was capering along the street with some friends, talking about a wondrous casket he had found and his purpose to fill it with verse—the friends thinking him in earnest when he was “only joking.”

It may be true that “God hides the germs of every living thing, that no record holds the moment by the clock, of any discovery”; but surely, if mortal ever knew he was born again, ever knew he was face to face with a turning-point in his career, Whitcomb Riley knew it the summer of 1876. A period in his life had come when he lived years in a few weeks. Henceforth his faith seldom failed. Misgivings became less numerous. The vision was

The fountain light of all his day,
The master light of all his seeing.

“I had come through life,” he said, “just dallying in the shallow eddies of a brook; now I was a river. I yearned to float and flow out God-ward. Life was richer than ever I dreamed it could be when I was a trustful child peering out across the future. There is no rapture like the joy of finding your place and the assurance that you have found it. It is to be transported from midnight to the rosy light of morning.”

A great ripe radiance grew at last
And burst like a bubble of gold,
Gilding the way that the feet danced on—
And that was the dawn—the Dawn!

That Riley concealed the particulars of his vision from his friends has since been thought rather too diplomatic for one who usually did things in the open. Whisper it to no one, said the prudent Longfellow—keep your plans a secret in your own bosom—the moment you uncork them the flavor escapes. Riley proceeded to act accordingly, not only with reference to the vision but in other ways. His brother, as we have seen, ridiculed an early dream and others had treated his forecasts of a career for himself with similar indifference. Such had been his humiliation that he resolved to go alone. “I did not go round sounding a timbrel in the people's ears,” he said, “but clung to my purpose and kept my own counsel”—and doubtless he did. Myron Reed seems to have been the first friend to know of the vision as a revelation. And, characteristically, he gave the Argonaut another bit of wisdom for his log-book. “The Cunard Line,” said Reed, “has never lost a passenger. That is not a matter of good luck; that is a matter of good oak, and good iron, and good seamanship.” Fortunately the Argonaut was provided with a shield and boom both made of iron—an “iron mask” and an iron will. The former kept him from the intrusions of strangers and friends. With the latter he stuck to his purpose through all kinds of weather, with all sorts and conditions of men. Through all the vicissitudes of his literary fortune, his will, like a Richard Doubledick, was his unsleeping companion—“firm as a rock, and true as the sun.” It was not a blustering will; rather was it like the steady tug of gravitation. With that and a little motto from Bleak House—“Trust in Providence and Your Own Efforts”—he went forth to transmute the white moments of existence into music for the sons and daughters of men.

He needed the iron will from the beginning. His friends tempted him with “that object of universal devotion, the almighty dollar.” Counselors came to persuade him that fame (as they thought of his future) was “the satellite of fashion,” that the applause of the crowd was worth more than the silent devotion to an ideal, and his father discouraged his venture in the new field:

                              My son! the quiet road
Which men frequent, where peace and blessings travel,
Follows the river's course, the valley's bending.

A rover, with whom Riley had once toured a few Indiana towns, was “not making a dollar with his present show in Pittsburg.” He was “waiting for something to turn up. We are going to take a ‘Rip Van Winkle Company’ out in three weeks. We will do the small towns. You can have any part you want except Rip. Rip is the best drawing bill in America.”

The “Golden Girl,” a talented musician, who also had dreams of the stage, sought him for a rôle in “The Star of Mystery Company,” or rather the fragments of the company. There was to be Mirth—Music—Magic—and Mystery. “Should I,” she wrote, “secure a position for you with good salary, will you go? That is my hope of seeing you. Won't we have fun? You will carry my grip and go to breakfast with me and take me to the opera house. Yes, and waltz with me behind the scenes while the orchestra plays ‘The Blue Danube,’ and people go wild with expectation waiting for the ‘show to begin,’ and little boys grow impatient and pummel each other on the front seats. And we will go down the street the next day and see the people. You will get mad at everybody I don't like and I'll like everybody you do. Life will be enchantment.”

Nor did the proffers of advice cease with Riley's choice of the literary field. He was annoyed with “overtures from foreign lands,” as he phrased his temptations, till the publication of his first book. “The lecture field is the place for you—and don't you forget it,” wrote a literary aspirant three years after his vision. “Writing is a starvation process. A fellow is likely to die of inanition. As a friend of mine says, ‘Fate overtakes him so dern sudden’; and it makes no difference how good the writing may be. A writer must run the gauntlet that looks to the beginner like the track of the Union Pacific railway stretching in a straight line clear across the western edge of space, and all the way up hill.

The Argonaut was unshaken. None of these things moved him, nor others of like nature though ever so numerous and persistent. He gave heart and soul to his poems, thinking about them and writing them while painting signs for his daily bread.

There was singleness of purpose in the vision. It did not trouble Riley with thoughts of being a great man. Launcelot said it not more humbly than he:

                              In me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great.

Seldom if ever was a young man of genius more ignorant of his powers. He was not certain that he possessed genius. That “gift of God” might be his; time would tell. For many years he had doubts of the value of what he wrote and its reception by the world, but never after the vision had he a shadow of doubt that he was commissioned to sing.

Riley had a vision of his mission, but not a vision of the obstacles. Whatever situation in life you ever wish or propose for yourself, said the old poet Shenstone, acquire a clear and lucid idea of the inconveniences attending it. Riley acquired no such lucid idea but plunged at once into a sea of troubles—or rather some invisible something forced him into it. He did not count the cost. After he had been buffeted on the sea, and his work was practically done, he saw that the vision had shown but one side of the picture. It was significant, he thought, that the Golden Fleece—his fanciful name for poetry—had been nailed to a tree in the grove of the war-god. The lesson was this, that poetry is an inaccessible thing. “The people think the way of the singer is the way of peace,” he remarked after he had practically fulfilled his mission. “They are mistaken. From first to last the poet has to war against discouragement, nightmares, blockades, and other perverse conditions.” It was another way of his saying that the poet is a Pilgrim.

“The peculiar thing about us,” wrote his friend Reed, “is our disobedience. We see the light and hear the voice but heed it not. We are woefully afraid of being alone with God and the vision of our province.” The advice was timely. Riley had written on the tablet of his being—obedience to the light, but like all aspiring men, his pure mind was refreshed when stirred up by way of remembrance. Thus was he launched on a literary career, looking ever upward and always with a true sense of the dignity of his mission, though at intervals he “played with jingle” for relaxation and amusement. True he was to have little rest and less peace; but he was to “enjoy the fiery consciousness of his own activity.” The vision was an abiding comfort. He was twenty-six years old. What a day of rapture had been his had he been permitted to part the veil of the future, and see on the further shore of his career, one of his beautiful books, and read from the author of Pike County Ballads, perhaps the most cordial letter he ever received—“the finest letter ever penned,” was Riley's word. Longfellow wrote him the year of the vision that he had “the true poetic faculty and insight.” Then was the dawn—he was beginning to do the thing. When Hay wrote him, twenty-six years later, he had done it:

                                                                      Washington, D. C., Nov. 12, 1902.

Dear Mr. Riley—


I thank you most cordially for thinking of me and sending me your “Book of Joyous Children.” I was alone last night—my joyous little people have grown up and left me. My fine boy is dead—my two girls are married, my young son is away at school—and so I read, in solitary enjoyment, these delightful lyrics, so full of feeling and easy natural music. It is a great gift you have, and you have not been disobedient to the heavenly vision. Long may you live to enjoy it, and share it in your generous way with others.

Yours faithfully,

John Hay.

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