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During his lifetime he was called saint, Devil's apostle, infidel, and a man with a spark of divine guidance. Whatever the appropriate description, it remains still the face of a writer whose pen not only turned brother against brother in faraway England but so split a Texas town into fist-fighting, gun- toting factions that finally, on April 1, 1898, a bullet ripped into his back "right where the suspenders crossed" as he walked down a sunny street.
[Charles Carver, in preface to Bran & the Iconoclast (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957).]
James Whitcomb Riley, the poetical ass with the three story name, which he invariably inflicts upon the public in full has broken out again. He grasps his cornstalk fiddle and twitters:
"Oh, her beautiful eyes! They are as blue as the dew
On the violet's bloom when the morning is new,
And the light of their love is the gleam of the sun
O'er the meadows of spring where the quick shadows run.
As the morn shifts the mists and the clouds from the skies--
So I stand in the dawn of her beautiful eyes."
Beautiful! Slides off slick as grease! But we are pained, Jamesie, absolutely pained to learn that "the light of their love" is intermittent. But perchance you couldn't stand to have the calcium turned on all the time. We learn from the following stanza that even a semi-occasional burst of splendor is too much for you, --causes you to wilt like turnip tops in a green-grocer's window:
"And her beautiful eyes are as midday to me,
When the lily-bell bends with the weight of the bee,
And the throat of the thrush is a-pulse in the heat,
And the senses are drugged with the subtle and sweet
And delirious breaths of the air's lullabies--
So I swoon in the noon of her beautiful eyes."
Ah, God! a little ice water and a fan, please. Chafe his throbbing temples with a Posey county corncob, and if that doesn't bring him 'round slap a "half- chawed chaw o' nateral leaf" in his left eye! Ah, that fixes him! He revives, he totters to his feet, he smites his breast, he gropes hither and yon in his delirious ecstasy. Once more he speaks, and his words are hoarse with the passion that causes him to wobble in his walk and catch his perfumed breath on the installment plan:
"Oh, her beautiful eyes! They have smitten mine own
As a glory glanced down from the glare of the throne;
And I reel, and I falter and fall as afar
Fell the shepherds that looked on the mystical star,
And yet dazed in the tidings that bade them arise,
As I grope through the night of her beautiful eyes."
Well, dodgast our fool luck, he's squatted again! Stun blind and
digging at the roots of the daisies with his finger nails like Romeo pawing up
the pave in Friar Laurence's cell! Knocked out and completely done for by
a glance from a girl who may have holes in her stockings and a hiatus in her
head! Perhaps she was cross-eyed and that tangled him up. We hope the
smitten Hoosier will recover the use of both legs and eyes,--that his falling
sickness may not become chronic. Perhaps he can persuade his star-eyed
charmer to wear green goggles or only squint at him through a piece of
smoked glass. He might try splitting a thousand blackjack fence rails as a
bracer. By the time he finished the task he would probably tumble to the
fact that he-poets-of-passion are not in demand. Anacreon was the last one
that could get the erotic jim-jams without also getting guyed. Somebody
should take the whole tribe of he-warblers aside and inform them that
writing poetry even good poetry, without any love swoons in it--is devilish
poor business for grown-up men. If the poetic muse will persist in haunting
a fellow he is excusable for occasionally breaking into song while he draws a
fat bacon rind down the shining blade of his bucksaw; but he would not get
into the habit of it. When a sure-enough man cannot do anything but warble
he needs medical treatment.
False Pride is the father of humbuggery, the parent of Fraud. We are Humbugs because we desire that our fellows think us better, braver, brighter, perhaps richer than we really are. We practice humbuggery to attain social position to which we are entitled by neither birth nor brains, to acquire wealth for which we render no equivalent, to procure power we cannot wisely employ.
While proclaiming love of democracy we purchase peers for our daughters. While boasting liberty of speech we assail like demons those who presume to dissent from our opinions in either religion or politics.
History is full of Humbugs and liberty itself ofttimes but a gilded lie. No man is really free who is dependent upon the good will of others for employment. There can be no true liberty where Prejudice usurps the throne of Reason. Men are slaves instead of sovereigns when they suffer themselves to be held in iron thrall by political dogma or religious creed, blinding accepting ipse dixit of others instead of exercising to the utmost the intelligence which God hath given them.
I have said that charity itself is ofttimes a Humbug. It is so when it becomes the handmaid of ostentation instead of the true almoner of the heart; or when men give to the poor only because it is "lending to the Lord," then expect compound interest.
That philanthropist is a fraud who, after piling up a colossal fortune at the
expense of the common people, leaves it to be found an educational or
eleemosynary institute when death calls him across the dark river. Knowing
that Charon's boat is purely a passenger packet--that it carries no freight,
however precious--he drops his dollars with a sigh; but, determined to reap
some benefit from boodle his itching hand can no longer hold, he decrees
that it be used to found some charitable fake to prevent himself being
forgotten--some pitiful institute where a few of the wretched victims of his
rapacious greed may get a plate of starvation soup, or a prayer-book, and
bless their benefactor's name. The very monument erected over bones of
the sanctimonious old skin-flint is a fraud; flaunts a string of colossal
falsehoods in the face of the world; piously points to heaven--perhaps to
indicate that Satan refused to receive him and sent him back to St. Peter
with a request that he make other arrangements.
I have frequently been called a "chronic kicker," but do not object to the epithet. There's need of good lusty kickers, those whose No. 10 tootsie- wootsies are copper-toed, for the world is full of devilish things that deserve to die. Lest any should accuse me of the awful sin of using slang, and thereby break my heart, I hasten to say that the Bible twice employs the word "kick" in the same sense that I used it here. In fact, a goodly proportion of our so-called slang is drawn from the same high source, being vinegar to the teeth of pietistical purists, but quite good enough for God. Some complain that I should build instead of tearing down, should preserve and not destroy. The complaint is well founded if it be wrong to attack falsehood, to exterminate the industrial wolves and social rottenness, to destroy the tares sown by the devil and give dollar wheat a chance to arise and hump itself. In determining what should be preserved and what destroyed, we may honestly disagree; but I think all will concede that what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is pre-eminently an age of artificiality--that there is little genuine left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even that has been called in question by certain unchivalrous old bachelors, those unfortunates whom the ladies of Boston propose to expel from politics for dereliction of duty. Somehow an old bachelor always reminds me of a rainbow; not because he looks like one in the least, but rather because he's so utterly useless for all practical purposes. He also reminds me of a rainbow-chaser, because what he is compelled to admire is beyond his reach. When hope deferred hat made him heart-sick he begins to growl at the girls--and for the same reason that a mastiff barks at the moon. You will notice that a mastiff seldom barks much at anything he can get hold of and bite.