Riley’s talent as a reader (he disliked the term recitationist) was
hardly second to his creative genius. As an actor--in such parts, for
example, as those made familiar by Jefferson--he could not have failed
to win high rank. His art, apparently the simplest, was the result of
the most careful study and experiment; facial play, gesture, shadings
of the voice, all contributed to the completeness of his portrayals.
So vivid were his impersonations and so readily did he communicate
the sense of atmosphere, that one seemed to be witnessing a series of
dramas with a well-set stage and a diversity of players. He possessed
in a large degree the magnetism that is the birthright of great actors;
there was something very appealing and winning in his slight figure as
he came upon the platform. His diffidence (partly assumed and partly
sincere) at the welcoming applause, the first sound of his voice as he
tested it with the few introductory sentences he never omitted--these
spoken haltingly as he removed and disposed of his glasses--all tended
to pique curiosity and win the house to the tranquillity his delicate
art demanded. He said that it was possible to offend an audience by too
great an appearance of cock-sureness; a speaker did well to manifest a
certain timidity when he walked upon the stage, and he deprecated the
manner of a certain lecturer and reader, who always began by chaffing
his hearers. Riley’s programmes consisted of poems of sentiment and
pathos, such as “Good-bye, Jim” and “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,” varied
with humorous stories in prose or verse which he told with inimitable
skill and without a trace of buffoonery. Mark Twain wrote, in “How to
Tell a Story,” that the wounded-soldier anecdote which Riley told for
years was, as Riley gave it, the funniest thing he ever listened to.
In his travels Riley usually appeared with another reader. Richard
Malcolm Johnston, Eugene Field, and Robert J. Burdette were at various
times associated with him, but he is probably more generally known
for his joint appearances with the late Edgar W. (“Bill”) Nye. He had
for Nye the warmest affection, and in the last ten years of his life
would recount with the greatest zest incidents of their adventures on
the road--Nye’s practical jokes, his droll comments upon the people
they met, the discomforts of transportation, and the horrors of hotel
cookery. Riley’s admiration for his old comrade was so great that I
sometimes suspected that he attributed to Nye the authorship of some of
his own stories in sheer excess of devotion to Nye’s memory.
His first reception into the inner literary circle was in 1887, when
he participated in the authors’ readings given in New York to further
the propaganda of the Copyright League. Lowell presided on these
occasions, and others who contributed to the exercises were Mark Twain,
George W. Cable, Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry C.
Bunner, George William Curtis, Charles Dudley Warner, and Frank R.
Stockton. It was, I believe, Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson, then of the
_Century Magazine_ (which had just enlisted Riley as a contributor),
who was responsible for this recognition of the Hoosier. Nothing did
more to establish Riley as a serious contestant for literary honors
than his success on this occasion. He was greeted so cordially--from
contemporaneous accounts he “ran away with the show”--that on Lowell’s
urgent invitation he appeared at a second reading.
Riley’s intimate friendships with other writers were comparatively
few, due largely to his home-keeping habit, but there were some
for whom, without ever seeing much of them, he had a liking that
approached affection. Mark Twain was one of these; Mr. Howells and
Joel Chandler Harris were others. He saw Longfellow on the occasion of
his first visit to Boston. Riley had sent him several of his poems,
which Longfellow had acknowledged in an encouraging letter; but it was
not the way of Riley to knock at any strange door, and General “Dan”
Macaulay, once mayor of Indianapolis, a confident believer in the
young Hoosier’s future, took charge of the pilgrimage. Longfellow had
been ill, but he appeared unexpectedly just as a servant was turning
the visitors away. He was wholly kind and gracious, and “shook hands
five times,” Riley said, when they parted. The slightest details of
that call--it was shortly before Longfellow’s death--were ineffaceably
written in Riley’s memory--even the lavender trousers which, he
insisted, Longfellow wore!
Save for the years of lyceum work and the last three winters of his
life spent happily in Florida, Riley’s absences from home were
remarkably infrequent. He derived no pleasure from the hurried
travelling made necessary by his long tours as a reader; he was
without the knack of amusing himself in strange places, and the social
exactions of such journeys he found very irksome. Even in his active
years, before paralysis crippled him, his range of activities was most
circumscribed. The Lockerbie Street in which he lived so comfortably,
tucked away though it is from the noisier currents of traffic, lies,
nevertheless, within sound of the court-house bell, and he followed
for years a strict routine which he varied rarely and only with the
greatest apprehension as to the possible consequences.
It was a mark of our highest consideration and esteem to produce
Riley at entertainments given in honor of distinguished visitors,
but this was never effected without considerable plotting. (I have
heard that in Atlanta “Uncle Remus” was even a greater problem to
his fellow citizens!) Riley’s innate modesty, always to be reckoned
with, was likely to smother his companionableness in the presence of
ultra-literary personages. His respect for scholarship, for literary
sophistication, made him reluctant to meet those who, he imagined,
breathed a divine ether to which he was unacclimated. At a small dinner
in honor of Henry James he maintained a strict silence until one of the
other guests, in an effort to “draw out” the novelist, spoke of Thomas
Hardy and the felicity of his titles, mentioning _Under the Greenwood
Tree_ and _A Pair of Blue Eyes_. Riley, for the first time addressing
the table, remarked quietly of the second of these, “It’s an odd thing
about eyes, that they usually come in sets!”--a comment which did not,
as I remember, strike Mr. James as being funny.
Riley always seemed a little bewildered by his success, and it was far
from his nature to trade upon it. He was at pains to escape from any
company where he found himself the centre of attraction. He resented
being “shown off” (to use his own phrase) like “a white mouse with
pink eyes.” He cited as proof that he was never intended for a social
career the unhappy frustration of his attempt to escort his first
sweetheart to a party. Dressed with the greatest care, he knocked at
the beloved’s door. Her father eyed him critically and demanded: “What
you want, Jimmy?”
“Come to take Bessie to the party.”
“Humph! Bessie ain’t goin’ to no party; Bessie’s got the measles!”
V
In so far as Riley was a critic of life and conduct, humor was his
readiest means of expression. Whimsical turns of speech colored his
familiar talk, and he could so utter a single word--always with quiet
inadvertence--as to create a roar of laughter. Apart from the commoner
type of anecdotal humor, he was most amusing in his pursuit of fancies
of the Stocktonesque order. I imagine that he and John Holmes of Old
Cambridge would have understood each other perfectly; all the Holmes
stories I ever heard--particularly the one about Methuselah and the
shoe-laces, preserved by Colonel Higginson--are very similar to yarns
invented by Riley.
To catch his eye in a company or at a public gathering was always
dangerous, for if he was bored or some tedious matter was forward, he
would seek relief by appealing to a friend with a slight lifting of the
brows, or a telepathic reference to some similar situation in the past.
As he walked the streets with a companion his comments upon people and
trifling incidents of street traffic were often in his best humorous
vein. With his intimates he had a fashion of taking up without prelude
subjects that had been dropped weeks before. He was greatly given to
assuming characters and assigning parts to his friends in the little
comedies he was always creating. For years his favorite rôle was that
of a rural preacher of a type that had doubtless aroused his animosity
in youth. He built up a real impression of this character--a cadaverous
person of Gargantuan appetite, clad in a long black alpaca coat, who
arrived at farmhouses at meal-times and depleted the larder, while the
children of the household, awaiting the second table in trepidation,
gloomily viewed the havoc through the windows. One or another of us
would be Brother Hotchkiss, or Brother Brookwarble, and we were
expected to respond in his own key of bromidic pietism. This device,
continually elaborated, was not wholly foolishness on his part, but an
expression of his deep-seated contempt for cant and hypocrisy, which he
regarded as the most grievous of sins.
When he described some “character” he had known, it was with an amount
of minute detail that made the person stand forth as a veritable being.
Questions from the listener would be welcomed, as evidence of sympathy
with the recital and interest in the individual under discussion.
As I journeyed homeward with him once from Philadelphia, he began
limning for two companions a young lawyer he had known years before at
Greenfield. He carried this far into the night, and at the breakfast
table was ready with other anecdotes of this extraordinary individual.
When the train reached Indianapolis the sketch, vivid and amusing,
seemed susceptible of indefinite expansion.
In nothing was he more diverting than in the superstitions he affected.
No life could have been freer from annoyances and care than his, and
yet he encouraged the belief that he was pursued by a “hoodoo.” This
was the most harmless of delusions, and his nearest friends encouraged
the idea for the enjoyment they found in his intense satisfaction
whenever any untoward event--never anything important--actually befell
him. The bizarre, the fantastic, had a mild fascination for him; he
read occult meanings into unusual incidents of every kind. When Alfred
Tennyson Dickens visited Indianapolis I went with him to call on Riley.
A few days later Mr. Dickens died suddenly in New York, and soon
afterward I received a note that he had written me in the last hour of
his life. Riley was so deeply impressed by this that he was unable to
free his mind of it for several days. It was an astounding thing, he
said, to receive a letter from a dead man. For a time he found comfort
in the idea that I shared the malevolent manifestations to which he
fancied himself subject. We were talking in the street one day when
a brick fell from a building and struck the sidewalk at our feet. He
was drawing on a glove and quite characteristically did not start or
manifest any anxiety as to his safety. He lifted his head guardedly and
with a casual air said: “I see they’re still after you” (referring to
the fact that a few weeks earlier a sign had fallen on me in Denver).
Then, holding out his hands, he added mournfully: “They’re after me,
too!” The gloves--a pair brought him from London by a friend--were both
lefts.
A number of years ago he gave me his own copy of the _Oxford Book of
English Verse_--an anthology of which he was very fond. In it was
pasted a book-plate that had previously escaped me. It depicted an old
scholar in knee-breeches and three-cornered hat, with an armful of
books. When asked about the plate, Riley explained that a friend had
given it to him, but that he had never used it because, on counting the
books, there seemed to be thirteen of them. However, some one having
convinced him that the number was really twelve, the evil omen was
happily dispelled.
Politics interested him not at all, except as to the personal
characteristics of men prominent in that field. He voted only once, so
he often told me, and that was at the behest of a friend who was a
candidate for some local office. Finding later that in his ignorance of
the proper manner of preparing a ballot he had voted for his friend’s
opponent, he registered a vow, to which he held strictly, never to
vote again. My own occasional dabblings in politics caused him real
distress, and once, when I had playfully poked into a hornet’s nest, he
sought me out immediately to warn me of the dire consequences of such
temerity. “They’ll burn your barn,” he declared; “they’ll kidnap your
children!”
His incompetence--real or pretended--in many directions was one of the
most delightful things about him. Even in the commonest transactions
of life he was rather helpless--the sort of person one instinctively
assists and protects. His deficiencies of orientation were a joke among
his friends, and though he insisted that he couldn’t find his way
anywhere, I’m disposed to think that this was part of the make-believe
in which he delighted. When he intrusted himself to another’s
leading he was always pleased if the guide proved as incapable as
himself. Lockerbie Street is a little hard to find, even for lifelong
Indianapolitans, and for a caller to confess his difficulties in
reaching it was sure to add to the warmth of his welcome.
Riley had no patience for research, and cheerfully turned over to
friends his inquiries of every sort. Indeed he committed to others
with comical light-heartedness all matters likely to prove vexatious
or disagreeable. He was chronically in search of something that might
or might not exist. He complained for years of the loss of a trunk
containing letters from Longfellow, Mark Twain, and others, though his
ideas as to its genesis and subsequent history were altogether hazy.
He was a past master of the art of postponement, but when anything
struck him as urgent he found no peace until he had disposed of it.
He once summoned two friends, at what was usually for him a forbidden
hour of the morning, to repair forthwith to the photographer’s, that
the three might have their pictures taken, his excuse being that one or
another might die suddenly, leaving the desired “group” unrealized--a
permanent sorrow to the survivors.
His portrait by Sargent shows him at his happiest, but for some reason
he never appeared to care for it greatly. There was, I believe, some
vague feeling on his part that one of the hands was imperfect--a little
too sketchy, perhaps. He would speak cordially of Sargent and describe
his method of work with characteristic attention to detail; but when
his opinion of the portrait was solicited, he would answer evasively or
change the subject.
He clung tenaciously to a few haunts, one of these being for many years
the office of the _Journal_, to which he contributed the poems in
dialect that won his first recognition. The back room of the business
office was a favorite loafing place for a number of prominent citizens
who were responsive to Riley’s humor. They maintained there something
akin to a country-store forum of which Riley was the bright particular
star. A notable figure of those days in our capital was Myron Reed,
a Presbyterian minister of singular gifts, who had been a captain
of cavalry in the Civil War. Reed and William P. Fishback, a lawyer
of distinction, also of the company, were among the first Americans
to “discover” Matthew Arnold. Riley’s only excursion abroad was in
company with Reed and Fishback, and surely no more remarkable trio
ever crossed the Atlantic. It is eloquent of the breadth of Riley’s
sympathies that he appreciated and enjoyed the society of men whose
interests and activities were so wholly different from his own. They
made the usual pious pilgrimages, but the one incident that pleased
Riley most was a supper in the Beefsteak Room adjoining Irving’s
theatre, at which Coquelin also was a guest. The theatre always had a
fascination for Riley, and this occasion and the reception accorded
his reading of some of his poems marked one of the high levels of his
career. Mr. Fishback reported that Coquelin remarked to Irving of
Riley’s recitations, that the American had by nature what they had been
twenty years acquiring.
In keeping with the diffidence already referred to was his dread
of making awkward or unfortunate remarks, and it was like him to
exaggerate greatly his sins of this character. He illustrated Irving’s
fine nobility by an incident offered also as an instance of his own
habit of blundering. Riley had known for years an English comedian
attached to a stock company at Indianapolis, and he mentioned this
actor to Irving and described a bit of “business” he employed in the
part of First Clown in the graveyard scene in “Hamlet.” Irving not only
professed to remember the man, but confirmed in generous terms Riley’s
estimate of his performance as the grave-digger. When Riley learned
later that what he had believed to be the unique practice of his friend
had been the unbroken usage of the stage from the time of Shakespeare,
he was inconsolable, and his blunder was a sore point with him to the
end of his days.
Though his mail was enormous, he was always solicitous that no letter
should escape. For a time it pleased him to receive mail at three
points of delivery--his house, his publisher’s, and the office of a
trust company where a desk was reserved for him. The advantage of this
was that it helped to fill in the day and to minimize the disparity
between his own preoccupations and the more exacting employments of his
friends. Once read, the letters were likely to be forgotten, but this
did not lessen his joy in receiving them. He was the meek slave of
autograph-hunters, and at the holiday season he might be found daily
inscribing books that poured in remorselessly from every part of the
country.