Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions Volume I Part 3

Equal and illusive doubt hangs over the date of Eugene Field's birth. Was it September 2d or 3d, 1850? In his "Auto-a.n.a.lysis," of which we shall hear more further along, Field himself gives preference to the latter figure. But as his preference more than half the time went by the rule of contraries, that would be prima-facie evidence that he was born on the earlier date. There again the testimony of the younger brother is to the effect that in their youth the anniversary of Eugene's birth was held to be September 2d. Their father said he could not reconcile his mind to the thought that one of his children was born on so memorable an anniversary as September 3d, the day of Cromwell's death. I have little doubt that Field himself fostered the irrepressible conflict of dates, on the theory that two birthdays a year afforded a double opportunity to playfully remind his friends of the pleasing duty of an interchange of tokens on such anniversaries. If they forgot September 2d, he could jog their memories that Cromwell's death on September 3d, two centuries before, was no excuse for ignoring his birth on September 3d, 1850.

Whether born on the anniversary of Cromwell's death or in the boiler-shop, no stories of the youthful precocity of Eugene Field survive to entertain us or to suggest that he gave early indication of the possession either of unusual talent or of that unique personality that were to distinguish him from the thousands born every day.

But Eugene and Roswell, Jr., were not long to know the watchful tenderness and ambitious solicitude of that "mother love" of which the elder has so sweetly sung. In November, 1856, when Eugene was six years old, their mother died and their father's thoughts instinctively turned to his sister, hoping to find with her, amid scenes familiar to his own youth, a home and affectionate care for his motherless boys. How the early loss of his mother affected the life of Eugene Field it is impossible to tell. Not until the boy of six whom she left had become a man of forty did he attempt to pay a tribute of filial love to her memory. The following lines, under the simple t.i.tle, "To My Mother," first appeared in his "Sharps and Flats" column, October 25th, 1890. It was reprinted in his "Second Book of Verse." The opening lines summon up a tender picture of a "grace that is dead":

How fair you are, my mother!

Ah, though 'tis many a year Since you were here, Still do I see your beauteous face And with the glow Of your dark eyes cometh a grace Of long ago.

The Mistress French of our earlier acquaintance, who was a widow when we last knew her in Newfane, had married again and, as Mistress Thomas Jones, had moved with her daughter, Mary Field French, to Amherst, Ma.s.s. To the home of Mrs. Jones and the loving care of Miss French, Eugene and Roswell, Jr., were entrusted. Miss French was at this time a young woman, a spinster-Eugene delighted to call her-of about thirty years. His old Munson tutor thus describes her:

"Mary Field French, a daughter of Mrs. Jones by her first husband, was a lady of strong mind, and much culture, with a sound judgment and decision of character and very gracious manners. She was always sociable and agreeable and so admirably adapted to the charge of the two brothers." They retained through manhood the warmest affection for this cousin-mother, and never wearied in showing toward her the grateful devotion of loyal sons.

"Here," continues Dr. Tufts, "in this charming home, under the best of New England influences and religious instruction, with nothing harsh or repulsive, the boys could not have found a more congenial home. Indeed, few mothers are able or even capable of doing so much for their own children as Miss French did for these two brothers, watching over them incessantly, yet not spoiling them by weak indulgence or repelling them by harsh discipline."

Here it was that Eugene was brought up in the "nurture and admonition of the Lord," as he would often declare with a mock severity of tone, that left a mixed impression as to the beneficence of the nurture and the abiding quality of the admonition. Here he spent his school days, not in acquiring a broad or deep basis for future scholars.h.i.+p, but in studying the ways and whims of womankind, in practising the subtile arts whereby the boy of from six to fifteen attains a tyrannous mastery over the hearts of a feminine household, and in securing the leaders.h.i.+p among the daring spirits of his own age and s.e.x, for whom he was early able to furnish a continuous programme of entertainment, adventure, and mischief.

Of this period of Eugene Field's life we get the truest glimpse through the eyes of his brother, who has written appreciatively of their boyhood spent in Amherst. "His boyhood," writes Roswell, "was similar to that of other boys brought up with the best surroundings in a Ma.s.sachusetts village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had his boyish pleasures and his trials, his share of that queer mixture of nineteenth century worldliness and almost austere Puritanism, which is yet characteristic of many New England families."

If the reader wishes to know more of the New England atmosphere, in which Eugene Field was permitted to have pretty much his own sweet way by his cousin and aunt, let him have recourse to Mrs. Earle's "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," which I find in my library commended to my perusal, "with Eugene Field's love, December 25th, 1891"-and to other books by the same author. In a letter to Mrs. Earle, from which I quoted in the opening paragraph of this narrative, I find the following reference to the period of his life which we are now considering:

"Fourteen years of my life were spent in Newfane, Vt., and Amherst, Ma.s.s. My lovely old grandmother was one of the very elect. How many times have I carried her footstove for her and filled it in the vestry-room. I have frozen in the old pew while grandma kept nice and warm and nibbled lozenges and ca.s.sia cakes during meeting. I remember the old sounding-board. There was no melodeon in that meeting-house; and the leader of the choir pitched the tune with a tuning-fork. As a boy I used to play hi-spy in the horse-shed. But I am not so very old-no, a man is still a boy at forty, isn't he?"

Eugene Field would have been a boy at fifty and at eighty had he lived, and he was very much of a boy at the period of which he wrote to Mrs. Earle. I have no doubt that he was a very circ.u.mspect lad while under the loving yet stern glance of that dear old grandmother, in whose kindly yet dignified presence three generations of Fields moved with varying emotions of love and circ.u.mspection. "Her husband" (General Martin Field of our acquaintance), wrote "Uncle Charles Kellogg," "was genial and social, full of humor and mirth, oftentimes filling the house with his jocund laugh." She, however, "true to her refined womanly instinct, her sense of propriety, rarely disturbed by his merry and harmless jests, with great discretion pursued 'the even tenor of her way.' Patiently and with unfaltering devotion to the higher and n.o.bler purposes of life, she always maintained her self-possession, strenuously avoided all levity and frivolity, rarely relaxed the gravity of her deportment, and never failed in the end of controlling both husband and household."

Eugene's own picture of his grandmother is contained in the following pa.s.sage in an article contributed by him to the Ladies' Home Journal:

"Grandma was a pillar in the Congregational Church. At the decline and disintegration of the Universalist society, she rejoiced cordially as if a temple of Baal or an idol of Ashtaroth had been overturned. Yes, grandma was Puritanical-not to the extent of persecution, but a Puritan in the severity of her faith and in the exacting nicety of her interpretation of her duties to G.o.d and mankind. Grandma's Sunday began at six o'clock Sat.u.r.day evening; by that hour her house was swept and garnished, and her lamps trimmed, every preparation made for a quiet, reverential observance of the Sabbath Day. There was no cooking on Sunday. At noon Mrs. Deacon Ranney and other old ladies used to come from church with grandma to eat luncheon and discuss the sermon and suggest deeds of piety for the ensuing week. I remember Mrs. Deacon Ranney and her frigid companions very distinctly. They never smiled and they wore austere bombazines that rustled and squeaked dolorously. Mrs. Deacon Ranney seldom noticed me further than to regard me with a look that seemed to stigmatize me as an incipient vessel of wrath that was not to be approved of, and I never liked Mrs. Deacon Ranney after I heard her reminding grandma one day that Solomon had truly said, 'spare the rod and spoil the child.' I still think ill of Mrs. Deacon Ranney for having sought to corrupt dear old grandma's gentle nature with any such incendiary suggestions. The meeting-house was cold and draughty, and the seats, with their straight backs, were oh, so hard. Grandma's pew was near the pulpit. I remember now how ashamed I used to be to carry her footstove all the way up that long aisle for her-I was such a foolish little boy then-and now, ah me, how ready and glad and proud I should be to do that service for dear old grandma!

"When grandma went to meeting she carried a lovely big black velvet bag; it had a bouquet wrought in beads of subdued color upon it, and it hung by two sombre silk puckering ribbons over grandma's arm. In the bag grandma carried a supply of crackers and peppermint lozenges, and upon these she would nibble in meeting whenever she felt that feeling of goneness in the pit of her stomach, which I was told old ladies sometimes suffer with. It was proper enough, I was a.s.sured, for old ladies to nibble at crackers and peppermint lozenges in meeting, but that such a proceeding would be very wicked for a little boy."

From which it might appear that the atmosphere of Newfane, under the grave and serious deportment of his grandmother, must have been a change from the freedom Eugene and his brother enjoyed under the fond rule of Miss French at Amherst. But when I was in Newfane in 1899 I was informed by a dear old lady in bombazine, who remembered their visits distinctly, that "Eugene and Roswell were wild boys. Not bad, but just tew full of old Nick for anything."

It was in Amherst, however, and not in Newfane, from Cousin Mary, and not from his dear Grandmother Esther, that Eugene got the New England "bent" in his Missouri mind. It is hard to separate the fact from the fancy in his story of "My Grandmother." His youth from 1856 to 1865 was lived in Amherst. His only visit to the Field homestead in Newfane was when he was nine years old. And of this he has written, "we stayed there seven months and the old lady got all the grandsons she wanted. She did not invite us to repeat the visit." He also confessed that all his love for nature dated from that visit. As a boy he would never have been permitted to indulge the fondness for animal pets under "the dark penetrating eyes" of his grandmother, that was tolerated and became a life-habit by the "gracious love" of Mary Field French. Of this fondness for pets, Roswell has written that it amounted to a pa.s.sion. "But unlike other boys he seemed to carry his pets into a higher sphere and to give them personality. For each pet, whether dog, cat, bird, goat, or squirrel-he had the family distrust of a horse-he not only had a name, but it was his delight to fancy that each possessed a peculiar dialect of human speech, and each he addressed in the humorous manner conceived. When in childhood he was conducting a poultry annex to the homestead, each chicken was properly instructed to respond to a peculiar call, and Finniken, Minniken, Winniken, Dump, Poog, Boog seemed to recognize immediately the queer intonations of their master with an intelligence that is not usually accorded to chickens."

I cannot forbear to introduce here a characteristic bit of evidence from Eugene Field's own pen of the survival of the pa.s.sion for pets to which his brother testifies:

"It is only under stress," said he in his allotted column in the Chicago Record of January 9th, 1892, "nay, under distress, that the mysterious veil of the editorial-room may properly be thrown aside and the secret thereof disclosed. It is under a certain grievous distress that we make this statement now:

"For a number of months the silent partner in the construction of this sporadic column of 'Sharps and Flats' has been a little fox terrier given to the writer hereof by his friend, Mr. Will J. Davis. We named our little companion Jessie, and our attachment to her was wholly reciprocated by Jessie herself, although (and we make this confession very shamefacedly) our enthusiasm for Jessie was by no means shared by the prudent housewife in charge of the writer's domestic affairs. Jessie contributed to and partic.i.p.ated in our work in this wise: She would sit and admiringly watch the writer at his work, wagging her abridged tail cordially whenever he bestowed a casual glance upon her, threatening violence to every intruder, warning her master of the approach of every garrulous visitor, and oftentimes, when she felt lonely, insisted on climbing up into her master's lap and slumbering there while he wrote and wrote away. We have tried our poems on Jessie, and she always liked them; leastwise she always wagged her tail approvingly and smiled her flatteries as only a very intelligent little dog can. Some folk think that our poetry drove Jessie away from home, but we know better; Jessie herself would deny that malicious imputation were she here now and could she speak.

"To this little companion we became strongly, perhaps foolishly, attached. She walked with us by day, hunting rats and playing famously every variety of intelligent antics. Whither we went she went, and at night she shared our couch with us. Though only nine months old Jessie stole into this life of ours so very far that years seemed hardly to compa.s.s the period and honesty of our friends.h.i.+p.

"Well, last Tuesday night Jessie disappeared-vanished as mysteriously as if the earth had opened up and swallowed her. She had been playing with a discreet dog friend in Fullerton Avenue, and that was the last seen of her! Where can she have gone? It is very lonesome without Jessie. Moreover there are poems to be read for her approval before they can be printed; the great cause of literature waits upon Jessie. She must be found and restored to her proper sphere.

"Jessie perhaps was not beautiful, yet she was fair to her master's eyes. She was white with yellow ears and a brownish blaze over her left eye and warty cheek. She weighed perhaps twenty pounds (for Jessie never had dyspepsia), and one mark you surely could tell her by was the absence of a nail from her left forepaw, the honorable penalty of an encounter with an enraged setting hen in our barn last month.

"Jessie's master is not rich, for the poetry that fox terriers approve is not remunerative; but that master has acc.u.mulated (by means of industrious application to his work and his friends) the sum of $20, which he will cheerfully pay to the man, woman, or child who will bring Jessie back again. For he is a weak human creature, is Jessie's master, in his loneliness, without his faithful, admiring little dumb friend."

Two days later Field printed the following letter and his answer thereto, both written by the same hand in his column:

CHICAGO, January 10th.

To the Editor: I am very sorry for the gentleman who writes your Sharps and Flats, for I know what it is to lose a little dog. I had one once and some boy I guess took it off and never brought it back again. I have got a maltese cat and four beautiful kittens, and should like to send the gentleman one of the kittens if he wants one. Maybe he would get to like the kitten as much as he did the little dog. Respectfully, your little friend,

EDITH LONG.

"Many thanks to our charming little correspondent; she has a gentle heart, we know. What havoc one of those mischievous creatures would make! In the first place it would accomplish the destruction of these little canaries of ours which now flit about this lovely disordered room, perching confidently upon folios and bric-a-brac and hopping blithely over the ma.n.u.scripts and papers on the table. In the bas.e.m.e.nt against the furnace, three beautiful fleecy little chickens have just hatched out. How long do you suppose it would be before that wicked little kitten discovered and compa.s.sed the demolition of those innocent baby fowls? Then again there are rabbits in the stable and very tame pigeons and the tiniest of bantams. It would be very dreadful to introduce a truculent kitten (and all felines are naturally truculent) into such society. And our blood fairly congeals when we think that perhaps (oh, fearful possibility) that kitten might nose out and wantonly destroy the too lovely b.u.t.terflies stored away in yonder closet, which we have appropriately named the cage of gloom.

"Miss Edith must keep her kitten and may she have the pleasure of its pretty antics. However, she must bear this in mind, that sooner or later our pets come to grief.

"Very, very many years ago, we read and cried over a little book written by Grace Greenwood and ent.i.tled 'The History of My Pets.' Even as a child we wondered why it was that evil invariably befell the pets of youth.

"We all know that most little folks are tender-hearted, yet there are some who seem indifferent to pets, to have little sympathy with the pathos of dumb animals. And we have so often wondered whether after all these latter did not get more of pleasure or should we say less of pain out of life than the others. The tender heart seldom hardens; in maturer years its comprehensions and sympathies broaden, and this of course involves pain. Are the delights of sympathy a fair offset to the pains thereof?"

The boy at Amherst was the father of the man at forty-two. It was to the prototype of "The Bench-Legged Fyce," known in Miss French's household as "Dooley," that the boy Eugene attributed his first verse, a parody on the well-known lines, "Oh, had I the wings of a dove!" Dooley's song ran:

Oh, had I wings like a dove I would fly Away from this world of fleas; I'd fly all round Miss Emerson's yard And light on Miss Emerson's trees.

It was rank disloyalty to the memory of "Dooley" to rename the bench-legged fyce "Sooner" and locate the scene of his "chronic repose" in St. Jo rather than under the flea-proof tree of Mrs. Emerson in Amherst. But who regrets the poetic license as he reads:

We all hev our choice, an' you like the rest, Allow that dorg which you've got is the best; I wouldn't give much for the boy 'at grows up With no friends.h.i.+p subsistin' 'tween him and a pup; When a fellow gits old-I tell you it's nice To think of his youth and his bench-legged fyce!

Although Eugene Field never forgot or forgave the terrors of the New England Sabbath, its strict observance, its bad singing, doleful prayers and interminable sermons, the impress of those all-day sessions in church and Sunday-school was never eradicated from his life and writings. Nothing else influenced his work or affected his style as much as the morals and the literature of the Bible and the sacred songs that were lined out week after week from the pulpit under which he literally and figuratively sat when a youth. "If," he has said, "I could be grateful to New England for nothing else I should bless her forevermore for pounding me with the Bible and the Spelling-Book."

There is in the possession of the family the "Notes of a Sermon by E.P. Field," said to have been written by Eugene at the age of nine, when he affected the middle initial of P in honor of Wendell Phillips. It was more probably written when he was twelve or fourteen, as he showed at nine none of the signs of precocity which such a composition indicates. The youthful Channing took for his text the fifteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of Proverbs: "Good understanding giveth favor: but the way of transgressors is hard." Upon this he expounded as follows:

"The life of a Christian is often compared to a race that is hard and to a battle in which a man must fight hard to win, these comparisons have prevented many from becoming Christians.

"But the Bible does not compare the Christian's path as one of hard labor. But Solomon says wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness and her paths are peace. Under the word transgressor are included all those that disobey their maker, or, in shorter words, the unG.o.dly. Every person looking around him will see many who are transgressors and whose lot is very hard.

"I remark secondly that conscience makes the way of transgressors hard; for every act of pleasure, every act of guilt his conscience smites him. The last of his stay on earth will appear horrible to the beholder. Sometimes, however, he will be stayed in his guilt. A death in a family of some favorite object, or be attacked by some disease himself, is brought to the portals of the grave. Then for a little time, perhaps, he is stayed in his wickedness, but before long he returns to his worldly l.u.s.ts. Oh, it is indeed hard for a sinner to go down into perhaps perdition over all the obstacles which G.o.d has placed in his path. But many, I am afraid, do go down into perdition, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in after it.

"Suppose now there was a fearful precipice and to allure you there your enemies should scatter flowers on its dreadful edge, would you if you knew that while you were strolling about on that awful rock that night would settle down on you and that you would fall from that giddy, giddy height, would you, I say, go near that dreadful rock? Just so with the transgressor, he falls from that height just because he wishes to appear good in the sight of the world. But what will a man gain if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul."

Whenever this was written it shows on its face that it is more an effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty years ago on the impressionable mind of youth, than the original production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of life and judgment to come. Mark how the stock words of the pulpiteer, "transgressor," "worldly l.u.s.ts," "dreadful," "awful," "perdition" stalk fiercely through the sermon of the youthful saint or sinner!

Roswell Field says that his brother without instruction early acquired the habit of drawing amusing pictures of his playmates and his pets, and that later in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer. But Eugene's drawings at all periods were never more than grotesque or fanciful ill.u.s.trations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting everything that came to his attention.

In after life Eugene Field gave frequent proof that he cherished contradictory sentiments toward Vermont and New England. One view was tinged, I think, with the recollection of the wrong his father suffered at the hands of the Green Mountain courts, and reflects the general tenor of his comment whenever Vermont men or affairs came under discussion in the public press. It is ill.u.s.trated in the following paragraph:

The Vermont papers agreed that Colonel Aldace Walker is the very best man in Vermont for the Inter-State Commerce Commission. This may be true. At the same time, however, we fail to see what interest Vermont can possibly take in inter-state commerce. She has no commerce of her own, and she probably never will have. There is a bobbin factory at Williamsville, and a melodeon factory at Brattleboro, but the commerce resulting from them is not worthy of mention. There is talk about the maple-sugar that Vermont exports, but we have noticed that all the "genuine Vermont maple-sugar" in the Western market comes from the South, and is about as succulent as the heel of a gum-boot. In all the State of Vermont there is but one railroad, the Vermont Central; it begins at Grout's Corner, Ma.s.s., and runs in a bee-line north until it reaches the southern end of the Montreal bridge. This remarkable road has a so-called branch operating once per week between White River Junction and Montpelier, and a triweekly branch extending to Burlington. Montpelier is the home of Hiram Atkins, the famous "Nestor uv Checkerberry Journalism," and White River Junction is the whistling station and water-tank from which our country gets its election returns every four years. Burlington is located on Lake Champlain, and contains the summer residence of that grand old survivor of the glacial period, George F. Edmunds. Thus in a brief paragraph have we compressed all that can be said of the commerce and the railways of Vermont.

The other view is softened with the haze that hangs over the scenes of childhood in the minds of all men of feeling when interpreted by an artist in expressing the thought "that unbidden rises and pa.s.ses in a tear." It is from Field's little-known memorial to Mrs. Melvin L. Gray, written while he was in Southern California:

The quiet beauty of these scenes recalls a time which, in my life, is so long ago that I feel strangely reverential when I speak of it. I find myself thinking of my boyhood, and of the hills and valleys and trees and flowers and birds I knew when the morning of my life was fresh and full of exuberance. Those years were spent among the Pelham hills, very, very far from here; but memory o'erleaps the mountain ranges, the leagues upon leagues of prairie, the mighty rivers, the forest, the farming lands, o'erleaps them all; and to-day, by that same sweet magic that instantaneously undoes the years and s.p.a.ce, I seem to be among the Pelham hills again. The yonder glimpse of the Pacific becomes the silver thread of the Connecticut, seen, not over miles of orange-groves, but over broad acres of Indian corn; and instead of the pepper and eucalyptus, the lemon and the palm, I see (or I seem to see) the maple once more, and the elm and the chestnut trees, the s.h.a.gbark walnut, the hickory, and the birch. In those days, these rugged mountains of this south land were unknown to me; and the Pelham hills were full of marvel and delight, with their tangled pathways and hidden stores of wintergreen and wild strawberries. Furtive brooks led the little boy hither and thither in his quest for trout and dace, while to the gentler-minded the modest flowers of the wild-wood appealed with singular directness. A partridge rose now and then from the thicket and whirred away, and with startled eyes the brown thrush peered out from the bushes. I see these pleasant scenes again, and I hear again the beloved sounds of old; and so with reverence and with welcoming I take up my task, for it was among these same Pelham hills that the dear lady of whom I am to speak was born and spent her childhood.

CHAPTER V