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.