In China our poets and literary men have
taught their successors for long generations, to
look for good not in wealth, not in power, not in
miscellaneous activity, but in a trained, a
choice, an exquisite appreciation of the most
simple and universal relations of life. To feel,
and in order to feel, to express, or at least to
understand the expression, of all that is lovely
in nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive
in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end....
The pathos of life and death, the long embrace,
the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that
glides forever away, with its freight of music
and light, into the shadow and bush of the
haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes
us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the
gale--to all these things we are trained to
respond, and the response is what we call
literature.
Among Mr. Riley's many distinguished faculties of execution in
expressing, in stimulating, "an exquisite appreciation of the most
simple and universal relations of life," one faculty has been, in so far
as I know, very little mentioned--I mean his mastery in creating
character. Mr. Riley has expressed, has incarnated in the melodies and
harmonies of his poems, not merely several living, breathing human
creatures as they are made by their destinies, but a whole world of his
own, a vivid world of country-roads, and country-town streets, peopled
with farmers and tramps and step-mothers and children, trailing clouds
of glory even when they boast of the superiorities of "Renselaer," a
world of hardworking women and hard-luck men, and poverty and
prosperity, and drunkards and raccoons and dogs and grandmothers and
lovers. To have presented through the medium of rhythmic chronicle, a
world so sharply limned, so funny, so tragic, so mean, so noble, seems
to us in itself a striking achievement in the craft of verse.
No mere word of criticism can of course evoke, at all as example can,
Mr. Riley's genius of identification with varied human experiences, the
remarkable concentration and lyric skill of his characterization. Here
are two poems of his on the same general theme--grief in the presence of
death. We may well speak our pride in the wonderful range of inspiration
and the poetic endowment which can create on the same subject musical
stories of the soul as diverse, as searching, as fresh and true, as the
beloved poems of _Bereaved_ and _His Mother_.