Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions Volume I Part 1

Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions.

by Slason Thompson.

VOLUME I

Published, December, 1901 Charles Scribner's Sons New York

1901

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Not as other memoirs are written would Eugene Field, were he alive, have this study of his life. He would think more of making it reflect the odd personality of the man than rehea.r.s.e the birth, development, daily life, and works of the author. If he had undertaken to write his own life, as was once his intention, it would probably have been the most remarkable work of fiction by an American author that ever masqueraded in the quaker garments of fact. From t.i.tle-page to colophon-on which he would have insisted-the book would have been one studied effort to quiz and queer (a favorite word of his) the innocent and willing-to-be-deluded reader. "Tell your sister for me," I recall his saying, "what a kind, good, and deserving man I am. How I love little children and [with a dry chuckle] elderly spinsters. Relate how I was born of rich yet honest parents, was reared in the 'nurture and admonition of the Lord,' and, according to the bent of a froward youth, have stumbled along to become the cynosure of a ribald age."

Field's idea of a perfect memoir was that it should contain no facts that might interfere with its being novel and interesting reading both to the public and its subject. He set little store by genius, as he tells us in one of his letters, and less by "that nonsense called useful knowledge." His peculiar notions as to the field of biography were once ill.u.s.trated in one he furnished to a New York firm, which proposed a series of biographies of well-known newspaper writers. It was arranged that Field and William E. Curtis, the noted Was.h.i.+ngton correspondent, should write each the other's biography for the series. Mr. Curtis executed his sketch of Field in good faith; Field's sketch of Mr. Curtis was a marvel of waggish invention. Through an actor of the same name who some years before made quite a reputation as Samuel of Posen, he traced Mr. Curtis's birth back to Bohemia, and carried him at an early age to Jerusalem, where Curtis was said to have laid the foundations of his fame and fortune peddling suspenders. Later he sold newspapers on the streets, and, by practicing the shrewd and self-denying habits of his race, quickly became the owner of the paper for which he worked, which was called the New Jerusalem Messenger, the recognized organ of the New Jerusalem Church.

Mr. Curtis's progressive tendencies, according to Field, quickly involved him in trouble with the government; his paper was suppressed, and he was banished from Jerusalem. When the special firmin of the Sultan expelling Mr. Curtis from Turkish dominions was published, it caused a great sensation in Chicago, where the Church of the New Jerusalem was very strong, and created an immediate rivalry between William Penn Nixon, editor of the Inter Ocean, and Melville E. Stone, editor of the Morning News, to secure his services. Mr. Nixon sent him a cablegram in Hebrew which was written by a Hebrew gentleman to whom Nixon sold old clothes, while Mr. Stone's cablegram was prepared by his father, the Rev. Mr. Stone, and was expressed in scriptural phraseology which was not understood in Jerusalem as well as it was at Galesburg, where Mr. Stone was then professor of the Hebrew language and literature. Curtis accepted the offer couched in the language of the Hebrew vender of old clothes and became a member of the editorial staff of the Inter Ocean. His first effective work on that newspaper was to convert Jonathan Young Scammon, then its owner, to the New Jerusalem faith (Mr. Scammon, whose real name was John, was the most prominent Swedenborgian in Chicago). Mr. Scammon was so grateful for his conversion from infidelity that in a moment of religious exaltation he raised Mr. Curtis's salary from $18 to $20.

And thus the biography of Mr. Curtis proceeded along lines that gave the truth a wide berth, for Field held, with the old English jurists, that the greater the truth the greater the libel.

At one time in our a.s.sociation Field, as seriously as he could, entertained the thought of furnis.h.i.+ng me with materials for an extended sketch of his life, and I still have several envelopes on which the inscription "For My Memoirs" bears witness to that purpose. But after serving as a source of eccentric and roguish humor for several months, the idea was suffered to lapse, only to be revived in suggestive references as he consigned some bit of ma.n.u.script to my care or criticism. Any study of Field's life and character based on such materials as he thus furnished would have been absolutely misleading. It would have eliminated fact entirely and subst.i.tuted the most fantastic fiction in its stead. It would have built up a grotesque caricature of a staid, church-going, circ.u.mspect citizen and author instead of the ever-fascinating bundle of contradictions and irresponsibility Field was to his legion of a.s.sociates and friends.

There were two Fields-the author and the man-and it is the purpose of this study to reproduce the latter as he appeared to those who knew and loved him for what he was personally for the benefit of those who have only known him through the medium of his writings. In doing this it is far from my intention and farther from my friends.h.i.+p to disturb any of the preconceptions that have been formed from the perusal of his works. These are the creations of something entirely apart from the man whose genius produced them. His fame as an author rests on his printed books, and will endure as surely as the basis of his art was true, his methods severely simple, and his spirit gentle and pure. In his daily work the dominant note was that of fun and conviviality. It was free from the acrimony of controversy. He abominated speech-makers and lampooned political oracles. He was the unsparing satirist of contemporary pretense, which in itself was sufficient to account for the failure of the pa.s.sing generation of literary critics to accord to him the recognition which he finally won in their despite from the reading public. Neither a sinner nor a saint was the man who went into an old book-store in Chicago and bewildered the matter-of-fact dealer in old editions with the inquiry, "Have you an unexpurgated copy of Hannah More's 'Letters to a Village Maiden'?"

Everything Field wrote in prose or verse reflects his contempt for earth's mighty and his sympathy for earth's million mites. His art, like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was "to magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a two-penny post communication." Sense of earthly grandeur he had little or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life-those minor sympathies that are common to all and finally swell into the major song of life-of this sense he was compact. It was the meat and marrow of his life and mind, of his song and story. With unerring instinct Field, in his study of humanity, went to the one school where the emotions, wishes, and pa.s.sions of mankind are to be seen un.o.bscured by the veil of consciousness. He was forever scanning whatever lies hidden within the folds of the heart of childhood. He knew children through and through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He a.s.sociated with them on terms of the most intimate comrades.h.i.+p and wormed his way into their confidence with a.s.siduous sympathy. Thus he became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.

"In wit a man, in simplicity a child," nothing gloomy, narrow, or pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, "his finances, alas! were always miserably low." This followed from his learning how to spend money freely before he was forced to earn it laboriously. He scattered his patrimony gaily and then when the last inherited cent was gone, turned with, equal gayety to earning, not only enough to support himself, but the wife and family that, with the royal and reckless prodigality of genius, he provided himself with at the very outset of his career.

If he set "no store by genius," he at least had that faith in his own ability which "compels the elements and wrings a human music from the indifferent air." From the time he applied himself to the ill-requited work of journalism he never wavered or turned aside in his purpose to make it the ladder to literary recognition. He was over thirty before he realized that in three universities he had slighted the opportunity to acquire a thorough equipment for literary work. But he was undismayed, for did he not read in his beloved "Reliques of Father Prout" how "Loyola, the founder of the most learned and by far the most distinguished literary corporation that ever arose in the world, was an old soldier who took up his 'Latin Grammar' when past the age of thirty"?

It is the contrast and apparent contradiction between the individual and the author that makes the character of Eugene Field interesting to the student. If the man were simply any prosaic person possessed of the gift of telling tales, writing stories, and singing lullabies, this study of his life would have been left unwritten. Many authors have I known who put all there was of them into their work, who were personally a disappointment to the intellect and a trial to the flesh. With Eugene Field the man was always a bundle of delightful surprises, an ever unconventional personality of which only the merest suggestion is given in his works.

In the study I have made of the life of Eugene Field in the following pages I have received a.s.sistance from many sources, but none has been of so great value as that from his father's friend, Melvin L. Gray, in whose home Field found the counsel of a father and the loving sympathy of a mother. The letters Mr. Gray placed at my disposal, whether quoted herein or not, have been invaluable in filling in the portrait of his beloved ward.

To Edward D. Cowen, whose intimate friends.h.i.+p with Field covered a period of nearly fifteen years in three cities and under varying circ.u.mstances, these pages owe very much. From his brother, Roswell Field, I have had the best sort of sympathetic aid and counsel in filling out biographical detail without in any way committing himself to the views or statements of this study.

Dr. Frank W. Reilly, to whom Field not only owed his vitalized familiarity with Horace, "Prout," and "Kit North," but that superficial knowledge of medical terms of which he made such constant and effective use throughout his writings, has also placed me under many obligations for data and advice.

To these and the others whose names are freely sprinkled through this study I wish to make fitting acknowledgment of my many obligations, and I trust the reader will share my grateful sentiments wherever the faithful quotation marks remind him that such is their due.

SLASON THOMPSON.

CHICAGO, September 30th, 1901.

CHAPTER I

PEDIGREE

"Sir John Maundeville, Kt.," was his prototype, and Father Prout was his patron saint. The one introduced him to the study of British balladry, the other led him to the cla.s.sic groves of Horace.

"I am a Yankee by pedigree and education," wrote Eugene Field to Alice Morse Earle, the author of "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," and other books of the same flavor, "but I was born in that ineffably uninteresting city, St. Louis."

How so devoted a child of all that is queer and contradictory in New England character came to be born in "Poor old Mizzoorah," as he so often wrote it, is in itself a rare romance, which I propose to tell as the key to the life and works of Eugene Field. Part of it is told in the reports of the Supreme Court of Vermont, part in the most remarkable special pleas ever permitted in a chancery suit in America, and the best part still lingers in the memory of the good people of Newfane and Brattleboro, Vt., where "them Field boys" are still referred to as unaccountable creatures, full of odd conceits, "an' dredful sot when once they took a notion."

"Them Field boys" were not Eugene and his brother Roswell Martin Field, the joint authors of translations from Horace, known as "Echoes from the Sabine Farm," but their father, Roswell Martin, and their uncle, Charles Kellogg, Field of Newfane aforesaid.

These two Fields were the sons of General Martin Field, who was born in Leverett, Ma.s.s., February 12th, 1773, and of his wife, Esther Smith Kellogg, who was the grandmother celebrated in more than one of Eugene Field's stories and poems. Through both sides of the houses of Field and Kellogg the pedigree of Eugene can be traced back to the first settlers of New England. But there is no need to go back of the second generation to find and identify the seed whence sprang the strangely interesting subject of this study.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, as now, Newfane, then Fayetteville, was a typical county seat. This pretty New England village, which celebrated the centennial of its organization as a town in 1874, is situated on the West River, some twelve miles from Brattleboro, at which point that noisy stream joins the more sedate Connecticut River. It nestles under the hills upon which, at a distance of two miles, was the site of the original town of Newfane-not a vestige of which remains to remind the traveller that up to 1825 the s.h.i.+re town of Windham County overlooked as grand a panorama as ever opened up before the eye of man. The reason for abandoning the exposed location on the hills for the sheltered nook by the river may be inferred from the descriptive adjectives. The present town of Newfane cl.u.s.ters about a village square, that would have delighted the heart of Oliver Goldsmith. The county highway bisects it. The Windham County Hotel, with the windows of its northern end grated to prevent the escape of inmates-signifying that its keeper is half boniface and half county jailer-bounds it on the east, the Court House and Town Hall, separate buildings, flank it on the west. The Newfane Hotel rambles along half of its northern side, and the Field mansion, with its front garden stretching to the road, does the same for the southern half. In the rear, and facing the opening between the Court House and the Town Hall, stands the Congregational Church, where Eugene Field crunched caraway-seed biscuits when on a visit to his grandmother, and back of this stands another church, spotless in the white paint of Puritan New England meeting-houses, but deserted by its congregation of Baptists, which had dwindled to the vanis.h.i.+ng point. In the centre of the village green is a grove of n.o.ble elms under whose grateful shade, on the day of my visit to Newfane, I saw a quartette of gray-headed attorneys, playing quoits with horse-shoes. They had come up from Brattleboro to try a case, which had suffered the usual "law's delay" of a continuance, and were whiling away the hours in the bucolic sport of their ancestors, while the idle villagers enjoyed their unpractised awkwardness. They all boasted how they could ring the peg when they were boys.

Hither General Martin Field brought the young, and, as surviving portraits testify, beautiful Mistress Kellogg to be his wife. Here to them were born "them Field boys," Charles K. (April 24th, 1803) and Roswell M. (February 22d, 1807), destined to be thorns in their father's flesh throughout their school-days, his opponents in every justice's court where they could volunteer to match their wits against his, and, in the person of Roswell Martin, to be the distraction and despair of the courts of Windsor County and Vermont, until a decision of the Supreme Court so outraged that son's sense of the sacredness of the marriage vow, that he shook the granite dust of Vermont from his feet, and turned his face to the west, where he became the original counsel in the Dred Scott case, married and had sons of his own.

But before taking up the thread of Roswell Martin Field's strange and unique story, let me give a letter written by his father to his sister, Miss Mary Field, then at the school of Miss Emma Willard in Troy, N.Y., as exhibit number one, that Eugene Field came by his peculiarities, literary and otherwise, by direct lineal descent. Roswell was a phenomenal scholar, as his own eldest son was not. At the age of eleven he was ready for college, and entered Middlebury with his brother Charles, his senior by four years. How they conducted themselves there may be judged from this letter to their sister:

Newfane, March 31st, 1822.

Dear Mary:

I sit down to write you my last letter while you remain at Troy. Yours by Mr. Read was received, in which I find you allude to the "severe and satyrical language" of mine in a former letter. That letter was written upon the conduct of my children, which is an important subject to me. If children are disobedient, a parent has a right to be severe with them. If I recollect right I expressed to you that your two oldest brothers' conduct was very reprehensible, and I there predicted their ruin. But I then little thought that I should soon witness the sad consequences of their ill-conduct. I received a letter from President Bates about two weeks since and another from Charles the same day, that Charles had been turned away and forever dismissed from the college for his misconduct; Roswell must suffer a public admonition and perhaps more punishment for his evil deeds. Charles was turned out of college the 7th of March, and I wrote on the week after to have him come directly home, but we have heard nothing from him since. Where he is we can form no conjecture. But probably he is five hundred miles distant without money and without friends. I leave you to conjecture the rest. Roswell is left alone at the age of fifteen to get along, if he is permitted to stay through college.

These, Mary, are the consequences of dissipation and bad conduct. And seeing as I do the temper and disposition of my children, that they "are inclined to evil and that continually," can you wonder that I write with severity to them? Our hopes are blasted as relates to Charles and Roswell, and you cannot conceive the trouble which they have given us. Your mother is almost crazy about them; nor are we without fears as to you. I say now, as I said in my former letter, that I wish my children were all at home at work. I am convinced that an education will only prove injurious to them. If I had as many sons as had the patriarch Jacob not one should ever again go nigh a college. It is not a good calculation to educate children for destruction. The boys' conduct has already brought a disgrace upon our family which we can never outgrow. They undoubtedly possess respectable talents and genius, but what are talents worth when wholly employed in mischief?

I have expended almost two thousand dollars in educating the boys, and now just at the close they are sent off in disgrace and infamy. The money is nothing in comparison to the disgrace and ruin that must succeed. Mary, think of these things often, and especially when you feel inclined to be gay and airy. Let your brother's fate be a striking lesson to you. For you may well suppose that you possess something of the same disposition that he does, but I hope that you will exercise more prudence than he has. You must now return home with a fixed resolution to become a steady, sober, and industrious girl. Give up literary pursuits and quietly and patiently follow that calling which I am convinced is most proper for my children.

It does appear to me that if children would consider how much anxiety their parents have for them they would conduct themselves properly, if it was only to gratify their parents. But it is not so. Many of them seem determined not only to wound the feelings of the parents in the most cruel manner but also to ruin themselves.

Remember us respectfully to Dr. and Mrs. Willard, and I am your affectionate father

MARTIN FIELD.

That Mary did return home to be the mediator between her incensed and stern father and his wayward and mischievous, but not incorrigible sons, is part of the sequel to this letter. What her daughter, Mary Field French, afterwards became to the sons of the younger of the reprehensible pair of youthful collegians will appear later on in this narrative. It is beautifully acknowledged in the dedication of Eugene Field's "Little Book of Western Verse," which I had the honor of publis.h.i.+ng for the subscribers in 1889, more than three score years after the date of the foregoing letter. In that dedication, with the characteristic license of a true artist, Field credited the choice of Miss French for the care of his youthful years to his mother:

A dying mother gave to you Her child a many years ago; How in your gracious love he grew, You know dear, patient heart, you know.

To you I dedicate this book, And, as you read it line by line.

Upon its faults as kindly look As you have always looked on mine.

In truth, however, it was the living bereaved father who turned in the bewilderment of his grief to the "dear patient heart" of his sister, to find a second mother for his two motherless boys. To Martin Field, Mary was a guardian daughter, to Charles K. and Roswell M. 1st, she was a loyal and mediating sister, and to Eugene and Roswell M. 2d, she was a loving aunt, as her daughter Mary was an indulgent mother and unfailing friend. The last name survived "the love and grat.i.tude" of Eugene's dedication ten years.

As may have been surmised the parental forebodings of the grieved and satirical General Field were not realized in the eternal perdition of his two sons. Education did not prove their destruction. With more than respectable talents Charles was reinstated at Middlebury, and four months later graduated with high honors, while Roswell took his degree when only fifteen years old, the plague and admiration of his preceptors, and, we may well suppose, the pride and joy of the agonized parents, who welcomed the graduates to Newfane with all the profusion of a prodigal father and the love of a distracted but doting mother. They never had any reason to doubt the nature of sister Mary's reception.

Charles and Roswell studied law with their father in the quaint little office detached from the Field homestead at Newfane. The word edifice might fittingly be applied to this building which, though only one room square and one story high, has a front on the public square, with miniature Greek columns to distinguish it from the ordinary outbuildings that are such characteristic appendages of New England houses. The troubles of General Field with his two sons were not to end when he got them away from the temptations of college life, for they were p.r.o.ne to mischief, "and that continually," even under his severe and watchful eye. This took one particular form which is the talk of Windham County even yet. By reason of their presence in General Field's office they were early apprised of actions at law which he was retained to inst.i.tute; whereupon they sought out the defendant and offered their services to represent him gratis. Thus the elder counsellor frequently found himself pitted in the justice's courts against his keen-witted and graceless sons, who availed themselves of every obsolete technicality, quirk, and precedent of the law to obstruct justice and worry their dignified parent, whom they addressed as "our learned but erring brother in the law." Not infrequently these youthful pract.i.tioners triumphed in these legal tilts, to the mortification of their father, who, in his indignation, could not conceal his admiration for the ingenuity of their misdirected professional zeal.

Two years after his graduation, and when only seventeen years of age, Eugene Field's father was sufficiently learned in the law to be admitted to the bar of Vermont. They wasted no time in those good old days. Before he was thirty, Roswell M. Field had represented his native town in the General a.s.sembly, had been elected several times State's Attorney, and in every way seemed destined to play a notable part in the affairs of Vermont, if not on a broader field. He was not only a lawyer of full and exact learning, an ingenious pleader, and a powerful advocate, but an exceptionally accomplished scholar. His knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and German rendered their literature a perennial source upon which to draw for the illumination and embellishment of the pure and virile English of which he was master. It was from him that Eugene inherited his delight in queer and rare objects of vertu and that "rich, strong, musical and sympathetic voice" which would have been invaluable on the stage, and of which he made such captivating use among his friends. Would that he had also inherited that "strong and athletic" frame which, according to his aged preceptor, enabled Roswell M. Field to graduate at the age of fifteen. It is not, however, for his learning and accomplishments of mind and person that we are interested in Roswell Martin Field, but for the strange incident in his life that uprooted him from the congenial environments of New England and the career opening so temptingly before him, to transplant him to Missouri, there to become the father of a youth, who, by all laws of heredity and by the peculiar tang of his genius, should have been born and nurtured amid the stern scenes and fixed customs of Puritan New England. That story must be told in another chapter.

CHAPTER II