In his pockets days and days!”
The only poem he ever contributed to the Atlantic was “Old Glory,” and I recall that he held it for a considerable period, retouching it, 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, and with 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 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.
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.