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 of the 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 same genre as 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’s Friends on the Shelf and, 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 among literary 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 phenomena of 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!
III
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—here he 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 Eggleston wrote 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 and beat 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.