JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
ON a day in July, 1916, thirty-five thousand people passed under the dome of the Indiana capitol to look for the last time upon the face of James Whitcomb Riley. The best-loved citizen of the Hoosier commonwealth was dead, and laborers and mechanics in their working clothes, professional and business men, women in great numbers, and a host of children paid their tribute of respect to one whose sole claim upon their interest lay in his power to voice their feelings of happiness and grief in terms within the common understanding. The very general expressions of sorrow and affection evoked by the announcement of the poet’s death encourage the belief that the lines that formed on the capitol steps might have been augmented endlessly by additions drawn from every part of America. I frankly confess that, having enjoyed his friendship through many years, I am disqualified frompassing judgment upon his writings, into much of which I inevitably read a significance that may not be apparent to those capable of appraising them with critical detachment. But Riley’s personality was quite as interesting as his work, and I shall attempt to give some hint of the man as I knew him, with special reference to his whims and oddities.
My acquaintance with him dates from a memorable morning when he called on me in a law office where I copied legal documents, ran errands, and scribbled verses. At this time he was a regular contributor to the Sunday edition of the IndianapolisJournal—a newspaper of unusual literary quality, most hospitable to fledgling bards, who were permitted to shine in the reflected light of Riley’s growing fame. Some verses of mine having been copied by a Cincinnati paper, Riley asked about me at theJournaloffice and sought me out, paper in hand, to speak a word of encouragement. He was the most interesting, as he was the most amusing and the most lovable man I have known. No one was quite like Riley, and the ways in which he suggests other menmerely call attention to the fact that he was, after all, wholly different: he was Riley!
He was the best-known figure in our capital; this was true, indeed, of the entire commonwealth that he sang into fame. He was below medium height, neatly and compactly built; fair and of ruddy complexion. He had been a tow-headed boy, and while his hair thinned in later years, any white that crept into it was scarcely perceptible. A broad flexible mouth and a big nose were the distinguishing features of a remarkably mobile face. He was very near-sighted, and the rubber-rimmed glasses he invariably wore served to obscure his noticeably large blue eyes. He was a compound of Pennsylvania Dutch and Irish, but the Celt in him was dominant: there were fairies in his blood.
In his days of health he carried himself alertly and gave an impression of smartness. He was in all ways neat and orderly; there was no slouch about him and no Byronic affectations. He was always curious as to the origin of any garment or piece of haberdashery displayed by his intimates, but strangely secretive as to the source of his own supplies. He affectedobscure tailors, probably because they were likelier to pay heed to his idiosyncrasies than more fashionable ones. He once deplored to me the lack of attention bestowed upon the waistcoat by sartorial artists. This was a garment he held of the highest importance in man’s adornment. Hopkinson Smith, he averred, was the only man he had ever seen who displayed a satisfactory taste and was capable of realizing the finest effects in this particular.
He inspired affection by reason of his gentleness and inherent kindliness and sweetness. The idea that he was a convivial person, delighting in boon companions and prolonged sessions at table, has no basis in fact. He was a domestic, even a cloistral being; he disliked noise and large companies; he hated familiarity, and would quote approvingly what Lowell said somewhere about the annoyance of being clapped on the back. Riley’s best friends never laid hands on him; I have seen strangers or new acquaintances do so to their discomfiture.
No background of poverty or early hardship can be provided for this “poet of thepeople.” His father was a lawyer, an orator well known in central Indiana, and Riley’s boyhood was spent in comfortable circumstances. The curtailment of his schooling was not enforced by necessity, but was due to his impatience of restraint and inability to adjust his own interests to the prevailing curriculum. He spent some time in his father’s office at Greenfield, reading general literature, not law, and experimenting with verse. He served an apprenticeship as a house painter, and acquired the art of “marbling” and “graining”—long-abandoned embellishments of domestic architecture. Then, with four other young men, he began touring Indiana, painting signs, and, from all accounts, adding greatly to the gaiety of life in the communities visited. To advertise their presence, Riley would recite in the market-place, or join with his comrades in giving musical entertainments. Or, pretending to be blind, he would laboriously climb up on a scaffolding and before the amazed spectators execute a sign in his best style. There was a time when he seemed anxious to forget his early experiences as a wandering sign-painterand entertainer with a patent-medicine van, but in his last years he spoke of them quite frankly.
He had a natural talent for drawing; in fact, in his younger days he dabbled in most of the arts. He discoursed to me at length on one occasion of musical instruments, about all of which he seemed to have much curious lore. He had been able to play more or less successfully upon the violin, the banjo, the guitar, and (his humor bubbling) the snare and bass drum! “There’s nothing,” he said, “so much fun as thumping a bass drum,” an instrument on which he had performed in the Greenfield band. “To throw your legs over the tail of a band wagon and thump away—there’s nothing like it!” As usual when the reminiscent mood was upon him, he broadened the field of the discussion to include strange characters he had known among rural musicians, and these were of endless variety. He had known a man who was passionately fond of the bass drum and who played solos upon it—“Sacred music”! Sometimes the neighbors would borrow the drum, and he pictured the man’s chagrin whenafter a hard day’s work he went home and found his favorite instrument gone.
Riley acquired various mechanical devices for creating music and devoted himself to them with childish delight. In one of his gay moods he would instruct a visitor in the art of pumping his player-piano, and, having inserted a favorite “roll,” would dance about the room snapping his fingers in time to the music.
Riley’s reading was marked by the casualness that was part of his nature. He liked small books that fitted comfortably into the hand, and he brought to the mere opening of a volume and the cutting of leaves a deliberation eloquent of all respect for the contents. Always a man of surprises, in nothing was he more surprising than in the wide range of his reading. It was never safe to assume that he was unacquainted with some book which might appear to be foreign to his tastes. His literary judgments were sound, though his prejudices (always amusing and frequently unaccountable) occasionally led him astray.
While his study of literature had followed the haphazard course inevitable in one so uninfluenced by formal schooling, it may fairly be said that he knew all that it was important for him to know of books. He was of those for whom life and letters are of one piece and inseparable. In a broad sense he was a humanist. What he missed in literature he acquired from life. Shakespeare he had absorbed early; Herrick, Keats, Tennyson, and Longfellow were deep-planted in his memory. His excursions into history had been the slightest; biographies and essays interested him much more, and he was constantly on the lookout for new poets. No new volume of verse, no striking poem in a periodical escaped his watchful eye.
He professed to believe that Mrs. Browning was a poet greatly superior to her husband. Nevertheless he had read Robert Browning with some attention, for on one or two occasions he burlesqued successfully that poet’s mannerisms. For some reason he manifested a marked antipathy to Poe. And in this connection it may be of interest to mention thathe was born (October 7, 1849) the day Poe died! But for Riley’s cordial dislike of Poe I might be tempted to speculate upon this coincidence as suggesting a relinquishment of the singing robes by one poet in favor of another. Riley had, undoubtedly, at some time felt Poe’s spell, for there are unmistakable traces of Poe’s influence in some of his earlier work. Indeed, his first wide advertisement came through an imitation of Poe—a poem called “Leonanie”—palmed off as having been found written in an old schoolbook that had been Poe’s property. Riley long resented any reference to this hoax, though it was a harmless enough prank—the device of a newspaper friend to prove that public neglect of Riley was not based upon any lack of merit in his writings. It was probably Poe’s sombreness that Riley did not like, or possibly his personal characteristics. Still, he would close any discussion of Poe’s merits as a writer by declaring that “The Raven” was clearly inspired by Mrs. Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” This is hardly susceptible of proof, and Elizabeth Barrett’s gracious acceptance of thecompliment of Poe’s dedication of his volume containing “The Raven” may or may not be conclusive as to her own judgment in the matter.
Whitman had no attraction for Riley; he thought him something of a charlatan. He greatly admired Stevenson and kept near at hand a rare photograph of the Scot which Mrs. Stevenson had given him. He had recognized Kipling’s genius early, and his meeting with that writer in New York many years ago was one of the pleasantest and most satisfactory of all his literary encounters.
The contentions between Realism and Romanticism that occasionally enliven our periodical literature never roused his interest; his sympathies were with the conservatives and he preferred gardens that contained familiar and firmly planted literary landmarks. He knew his Dickens thoroughly, and his lifelong attention to “character” was due no doubt in some measure to his study of Dickens’s portraits of the quaint and humorous. He always confessed gratefully his indebtedness to Longfellow, and once, when we were speaking ofthe older poet, he remarked that Mark Twain and Bret Harte were other writers to whom he owed much. Harte’s obligations to both Dickens and Longfellow are, of course, obvious and Harte’s use of dialect in verse probably strengthened Riley’s confidence in the Hoosier speech as a medium when he began to find himself.
His humor—both as expressed in his writings, and as we knew it who lived neighbor to him—was of the samegenreas Mark Twain’s. And it is not surprising that Mark Twain and Riley should have met on grounds of common sympathy and understanding. What the Mississippi was to the Missourian, the Old National Road that bisected Greenfield was to Riley. The larger adventure of life that made Clemens a cosmopolitan did not appeal to Riley, with his intense loyalty to the State of his birth and the city that for thirty-eight years was his home.
It gave him the greatest pleasure to send his friends books that he thought would interest them. Among those he sent me are Professor Woodberry’s selections from Aubrey de Vere,whose “Bard Ethell” Riley thought a fine performance; Bradford Torrey’sFriends on the Shelfand, a few weeks before his death, a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s poems in which he had written a substitute for one of the lines. If in these gifts he chose some volume already known to the recipient, it was well to conceal the fact, for it was essential to the perfect course of his friendships that he be taken on his own terms, and no one would have had the heart to spoil his pleasure in a “discovery.”
He was most generous toward all aspirants in his own field, though for years these were prone to take advantage of his good nature by inflicting books and manuscripts upon him. I once committed the indiscretion of uttering a volume of verse, and observed with trepidation a considerable number of copies on the counter of the bookstore where we did much loafing together. A few days later I was surprised and for a moment highly edified to find the stock greatly depleted. On cautious inquiry I found that it was Riley alone who had been the investor—to the extent of seventy-five copies, which he distributed widely amongliterary acquaintances. In the case of another friend who published a book without large expectations of public favor, Riley secretly purchased a hundred and scattered them broadcast. These instances are typical: he would do a kind thing furtively and evince the deepest embarrassment when detected.
It is always a matter for speculation as to just what effect a college training would have upon men of Riley’s type, who, missing the inscribed portals, nevertheless find their way into the house of literature. I give my opinion for what it may be worth, that he would have been injured rather than benefited by an ampler education. He was chiefly concerned with human nature, and it was his fortune to know profoundly those definite phases and contrasts of life that were susceptible of interpretation in the art of which he was sufficiently the master. Of the general trend of society and social movements he was as unconscious as though he lived on another planet. I am disposed to think that he profited by his ignorance of such things, which left him to the peaceful contemplation of the simple phenomenaof life that had early attracted him. Nothing seriously disturbed his inveterate provincial habit of thought. He manifested Thoreau’s indifference—without the Yankee’s scorn—for the world beyond his dooryard. “I can see,” he once wrote me, “when you talk of your return and the prospective housewarming of the new home, that your family’s united heart is right here in old Indianapolis—high Heaven’s sole and only understudy.” And this represented his very sincere feeling about “our” town; no other was comparable to it!
He did his writing at night, a fact which accounted for the spacious leisure in which his days were enveloped. He usually had a poem pretty thoroughly fixed in his mind before he sought paper, but the actual writing was often a laborious process; and it was his habit, while a poem was in preparation, to carry the manuscript in his pocket for convenience of reference. The elisions required by dialect and his own notions of punctuation—herehe was a law unto himself—brought him into frequent collision with the lords of the proof desk; but no one, I think, ever successfully debated with him any point of folk speech. I once ventured to suggest that his use of the phrase “durin’ the army,” as a rustic veteran’s way of referring to the Civil War, was not general, but probably peculiar to the individual he had heard use it. He stoutly defended his phrase and was ready at once with witnesses in support of it as a familiar usage of Indiana veterans.
In the matter of our Hoosier folk speech he was an authority, though the subject did not interest him comparatively or scientifically. He complained to me bitterly of an editor who had directed his attention to apparent inconsistencies of dialect in the proof of a poem. Riley held, and rightly, that the dialect of the Hoosier is not fixed and unalterable, but varies in certain cases, and that words are often pronounced differently in the same sentence. Eggleston’s Hoosier is an earlier type than Riley’s, belonging to the dark years when our illiteracy staggered into high percentages. And Egglestonwrote of southern Indiana, where the “poor white” strain of the South had been most marked. Riley not only spoke for a later period, but his acquaintance was with communities that enjoyed a better social background; the schoolhouse and the rural “literary” were always prominent in his perspective.
He had preserved his youth as a place apart and unalterable, peopled with folk who lived as he had known them in his enchanted boyhood. Scenes and characters of that period he was able to revisualize at will. When his homing fancy took wing, it was to bear him back to the little town’s dooryards, set with mignonette, old-fashioned roses, and borders of hollyhocks, or countryward to the streams that wound their way through fields of wheat and corn. Riley kept his place at innumerable firesides in this dream existence, hearing the veterans of the Civil War spin their yarns, or farmers discuss crop prospects, or the whispers of children awed by the “woo” of the wind in the chimney. If Pan crossed his vision (he drew little upon mythology) it was to sit under a sycamore above a “ripple” in the creek andbeat time rapturously with his goat hoof to the music of a Hoosier lad’s willow whistle.
The country lore that Riley had collected and stored in youth was inexhaustible; it never seemed necessary for him to replenish his pitcher at the fountains of original inspiration. I have read somewhere a sketch of him in which he was depicted as walking with Wordsworthian calm through lonely fields, but nothing could be more absurd. Fondly as he sang of green fields and running brooks, he cultivated their acquaintance very little after he established his home at Indianapolis. Lamb could not have loved city streets more than he. Much as Bret Harte wrote of California after years of absence, so Riley drew throughout his life from scenes familiar to his boyhood and young manhood, and with undiminished sympathy and vigor.
His knowledge of rural life was intimate, though he knew the farm only as a country-town boy may know it, through association with farm boys and holidays spent in visits to country cousins. Once at the harvest season, as we were crossing Indiana in a train, he begandiscoursing on apples. He repeated Bryant’s poem “The Planting of the Apple Tree,” as a prelude, and, looking out over the Hoosier Hesperides, began mentioning the varieties of apples he had known and commenting on their qualities. When I expressed surprise at the number, he said that with a little time he thought he could recall a hundred kinds, and he did in fact name more than fifty before we were interrupted.
The whimsicalities and comicalities and the heart-breaking tragedies of childhood he interpreted with rare fidelity. His wide popularity as a poet of childhood was due to a special genius for understanding the child mind. Yet he was very shy in the presence of children, and though he kept track of the youngsters in the houses of his friends, and could establish himself on good terms with them, he seemed uncomfortable when suddenly confronted by a strange child. This was due in some measure to the proneness of parents to exhibit their offspring that he might hear them “recite” his own poems, or in the hope of eliciting some verses commemorative of Johnny’s or Mary’sprecocity. His children were country-town and farm children whom he had known and lived among and unconsciously studied and appraised for the use he later made of them. Here, again, he drew upon impressions fixed in his own boyhood, and to this gallery of types he never, I think, added materially. Much of his verse for children is autobiographical, representing his own attitude of mind as an imaginative, capricious child. Some of his best character studies are to be found among his juvenile pieces. In “That-Air Young-Un,” for example, he enters into the heart of an abnormal boy who
“Come home onc’t and said ’at heKnowed what the snake-feeders thoughtWhen they grit their wings; and knowedTurkle-talk, when bubbles rizOver where the old roots growedWhere he th’owed them pets o’ his—Little turripuns he caughtIn the County Ditch and packedIn his pockets days and days!”
“Come home onc’t and said ’at heKnowed what the snake-feeders thoughtWhen they grit their wings; and knowedTurkle-talk, when bubbles rizOver where the old roots growedWhere he th’owed them pets o’ his—Little turripuns he caughtIn the County Ditch and packedIn his pockets days and days!”
“Come home onc’t and said ’at he
Knowed what the snake-feeders thought
When they grit their wings; and knowed
Turkle-talk, when bubbles riz
Over where the old roots growed
Where he th’owed them pets o’ his—
Little turripuns he caught
In the County Ditch and packed
In his pockets days and days!”
The only poem he ever contributed to theAtlanticwas “Old Glory,” and I recall that he held it for a considerable period, retouchingit, and finally reading it at a club dinner to test it thoroughly by his own standards, which were those of the ear as well as the eye. When I asked him why he had not printed it he said he was keeping it “to boil the dialect out of it.” On the other hand, “The Poet of the Future,” one of his best pieces, was produced in an evening. He was little given to displaying his poems in advance of publication, and this was one of the few that he ever showed me in manuscript. It had been a real inspiration; the writing of it had given him the keenest pleasure, and the glow of success was still upon him when we met the following morning. He wrote much occasional and personal verse which added nothing to his reputation—a fact of which he was perfectly aware—and there is a wide disparity between his best and his poorest. He wrote prose with difficulty; he said he could write a column of verse much more quickly than he could produce a like amount of prose.
His manuscripts and letters were works of art, so careful was he of his handwriting—a small, clear script as legible as engraving, andwith quaint effects of capitalization. In his younger days he indulged in a large correspondence, chiefly with other writers. His letters were marked by the good-will and cordiality, the racy humor and the self-mockery of his familiar talk. “Your reference”—this is a typical beginning—“to your vernal surroundings and cloistered seclusion from the world stress and tumult of the fevered town comes to me in veriest truth
“‘With a Sabbath sound as of dovesIn quiet neighborhoods,’
“‘With a Sabbath sound as of dovesIn quiet neighborhoods,’
“‘With a Sabbath sound as of doves
In quiet neighborhoods,’
as that grand poet Oliver W. Longfellow so tersely puts it in his inimitable way.” He addressed his correspondents by names specially designed for them, and would sign himself by any one of a dozen droll pseudonyms.
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—hecould 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 thestage, 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 hisold 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 theCentury 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 writerswere 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 inFlorida, 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-literarypersonages. 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, mentioningUnder the Greenwood TreeandA 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 thegreatest 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!”
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 publicgathering 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 carethan 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 ormanifest 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 theOxford 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 ofa 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 acaller 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 appearedto 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 theJournal, 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 Reedand 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 companyat 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 themeek 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.
The cheery optimism, tolerance, and mercy that are the burden of his verse summed up his religion. He told me once that he was a Methodist; at least, he had become a member of that body in his youth, and he was not aware, as he put it, that they had ever “fired” him. For a time he was deeply interested in Spiritualism and attended séances; but I imagine that he derived no consolation from these sources, as he never mentioned the subject in later years. Though he never probed far into such matters, speculations as to immortality always appealed to him, and he often reiterated his confidence that we shall meet and recognize, somewhere in the beyond, those who are dear to us on earth. His sympathy for bereaved friends was marked by the tenderest feeling. “It’s all right,” he would say bravely, and hedid believe, sincerely, in a benign Providence that makes things “right.”
Here was a life singularly blessed in all its circumstances and in the abundant realization of its hopes and aims. Few poets of any period have received so generous an expression of public regard and affection as fell to Riley’s lot. The very simplicity of his message and the melodious forms in which it was delivered won him the wide hearing that he enjoyed and that seems likely to be his continuing reward far into the future. Yale wrote him upon her rolls as a Master of Arts, the University of Pennsylvania made him a Doctor of Letters. The American Academy of Arts and Letters bestowed upon him its gold medal in the department of poetry; his last birthdays were observed in many parts of the country. Honor, love, obedience, troops of friends were his happy portion, and he left the world richer for the faith and hope and honest mirth that he brought to it.