IV
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!”