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 affected obscure 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 the people.” 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-painter and 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 when after 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.
II
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 that he 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 the compliment 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.