Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions Volume II Part 19

"Adieu, Sweet Love."

QUARTETTE

"The Old Love."

"The Parent's Voice."

QUINTETTE

"Oh, What Were Life."

Field always insisted that Messrs. Smith and DeKoven got the t.i.tle, if not some of the inspiration, for their opera "The Begum" from the argument of his "Buccaneer," the scheme of which he showed to Harry B. Smith, then a member of the Morning News staff. But the reason for his failure to carry out his operatic venture is obvious in the argument itself. It is intrinsically deficient in the elements of surprise, novel situations, and dramatic action necessary for stage effect. Field would have made it rich in lyrics, but as has been often proved, lyrics alone cannot make a successful opera. He quickly appreciated this and abandoned the work with "Oh, What Were Life?"

There never was any doubt of Field's "shocking taste in dress," and he never sought to cultivate or reform it. But what will those who knew him say of the statement, "I am a poor diner, and I drink no wine or spirits of any kind; I do not smoke tobacco." Field was, by the common verdict of those who had the pleasure of meeting him at any dinner company, the best diner-out they ever knew. He had a keen enjoyment of the pleasures of the table, and but for that wretched stomach would have been as much of an authority on eating as he came to be on collecting. He loved to discuss the art of dining, although he was forbidden to practise it heartily.

His favorite gift-books "appertained" to the art of cooking, in one of which (Hazlitt's "Old Cooking Books") I find inscribed to Mrs. Thompson:

Big bokes with nony love I send To those by whom I set no store- But see, I give to you, sweete friend, A lyttel boke and love gallore!

E.F.

Field gave up drinking wine and all kinds of alcoholic liquors, as has been related, before coming to Chicago. And yet I have seen him sniff the bouquet of some rare wine or liquor with the quivering nostril of a connoisseur, but-and this was the marvel to his a.s.sociates-without "the ruby," as d.i.c.k Swiveller termed it, being the least temptation to his lips.

Eugene Field "not smoke tobacco"! He was one of the most inveterate smokers in America. If he had been given his choice between giving up pie or tobacco, I verily believe he would have thrown away the pie and stuck to the soothing weed out of which he sucked daily and hourly comfort. He had acquired the Yankee habit of ruminating with a small quid of tobacco in his cheek when a good cigar was not between his teeth. He consumed not only all the cigars that fell to his share in a profession where cigars are the invariable concomitants of every chance meeting, every social gathering, and every public function, but also those that in the usual round of our life fell to me. And I was not his only abetter in despoiling the Egyptians who thought to work the freedom of the press with a few pa.s.ses of the narcotic weed. It is a curious fact that Field's pretended aversion to tobacco persists through all his writings, from the Denver Primer sketches down. In those we find him attributing the authors.h.i.+p of this warning to children to S.J. Tilden:

Oh, children, you Must never chew Tobacco-it is Awful!

The Juice will Quickly make you Sick If once you get your Maw Full.

He never ceased having discussions with himself over the wording or authors.h.i.+p of the famous lines attributed to "Little Robert Reed," as in the following:

Lo and behold! This is the way the St. Louis Republican mangles an old, quaint, beautiful, and popular poem:

"I would not use tobacco," said Little Robert Reed.

"I would not use tobacco, for 'Tis a nasty weed."

We protest against this brutal mutilization of a grand old cla.s.sic. The quatrain should read, as in the original, thus:

"I'll never chew tobacco-no, It is a filthy weed; I'll never put it in my mouth,"

Said little Robert Reed.

By the way, who was the author of the poem of which the foregoing is the first stanza?

I need scarcely refer the reader to Field's confession in his letter of December 12th, 1891, to Mr. Gray of his struggle to give up the use of tobacco, and to the photograph of Field at work, to indicate that his "I do not smoke tobacco" was but one more of those harmless hoaxes he took such pains to carry through at the expense of an ever-credulous public.

Only one more point in regard to the "Auto-a.n.a.lysis," and I am through with that whimsical concoction; and that is in reference to his att.i.tude toward children. Knowing full well that his inquiring admirers expected him to rhapsodize upon his love for children, he deliberately set about disappointing them with:

I do not love all children.

I have tried to a.n.a.lyze my feelings toward children, and I think I discover that I love them in so far as I can make pets of them.

Of course this was received with a chorus of incredulity-as it was intended it should be. The autograph hunters who had formed their conception of Field from his lullabies, his "Little Boy Blue," his "Krinken," his "Wynken," and his score of other poems, all proving his mastery over the strings that vibrate with the rocking of the cradle, at once p.r.o.nounced this the most delicious. .h.i.t of their author's humor. They knew that such songs could only emanate from a man whose heart overflowed with the warmest sentiment to all childhood. They were convinced that Field must love all children, and nothing he could say could change their conviction.

And yet those words, "I do not love all children," are the truest six words in his "Auto-a.n.a.lysis." Field not only did not love all children, he truly loved very few children. His own children were very dear to him, both those that came in his early wedded life and the two who were born to him after his return from Europe. They were a never-failing source of interest and enjoyment to him. They were the human doc.u.ments he loved best to study. They wore no masks to conceal their emotions, and he hated masks-on others. But above all, they were bone of his bone and flesh of his love, the pledges and hostages he had given to fortune, and they were the children of her to whom he had vowed eternal faith "when their two lives were young." But Field's fondness for other people's children was like that of an entomologist for bugs-for purposes of study, dissection, and cla.s.sification. He delighted to see the varying shades of emotion chase each other across their little tell-tale faces. This man, who could not have set his foot on a worm, who shrank from the sight of pain inflicted on any dumb animal, took almost as much delight in making a child cry, that he might study its little face in dismay or fright, as in making it laugh, that he might observe its method of manifesting pleasure. He read the construction of child-nature in the unreserved expressions of childish emotions as he provoked or evoked them. Thus he grew to know children as few have known them, and his exceptional gift of writing for and about them was the result of deliberate study rather than of personal sympathy. That his own children were sometimes a trial to their "devoted mother" and "fond father," as he described their parents, may be inferred from the facts which were the basis of such bits of confidence between Field and the readers of his "Sharps and Flats" as this:

An honest old gentleman living on the North Side has two young sons, who, like too many sons of honest gentlemen, are given much to boyish worldliness, such as playing "hookey" and manufacturing yarns to keep themselves from under the maternal slipper. The other day the two boys started out, ostensibly for school, but as they did not come home to dinner and were not seen by their little sister about the school-grounds, the awful suspicion entered the good mother's mind that they had again been truant. Along about dark one of them, the younger, came in blue with cold.

"Why, Pinny," said the mother, "where have you been?"

"Oh, down by the lake, getting warm," said the youngster.

"Down by the lake?"

"Yes; we were cold, and we saw the smoke coming up from the lake, so we went down there to get warm. And," he continued, in a propitiatory tone, "we thought we'd catch some fish for supper."

"Fish?" exclaimed the mother.

"Yes; Melvin's comin' with the fish."

At this juncture the elder boy walked in triumphantly holding up a dried herring tied to the end of a yard or so of twine.

That night, when the honest old gentleman reached home, the young men got a warming without having to go to the steaming lake.

But all of Field's keen a.n.a.lytical comprehension of child-nature is purified and exalted in his writings by his unalloyed reverence for motherhood. The child is the theme, but it is almost always for the mother he sings. Even here, however, he could not always resist the temptation to relieve sentiment with a piece of humor, as in the following clever congratulations to a friend on the birth of a son:

A handsome and lively, though wee body Is the son of my friend, Mrs. Peabody- It affords me great joy That her son is a boy, And not an absurd little she-body.

More than thirty years since the late Professor John Fiske, when asked to write out an account of his daily life for publication, did very much the same thing as Field palmed off on his correspondents in his "Auto-a.n.a.lysis." He gave some "sure-enough" facts as to his birth, education, and manner of life, but mixed in with the truth such a medley of grotesque falsehoods about his habits of study, eating, and drinking, that he supposed the whole farrago would be thrown into the waste-paper basket. For thirty years he lived in the serene belief that such had been its fate. But one day he was unpleasantly reminded of his mistake. The old ma.n.u.script had been resurrected "from the worm-hole of forgotten years," and he was published widecast as a glutton, not only of work, but in eating, drinking, and sleeping. A man who defied all the laws of hygiene, of moderation, and of rest. And when he died, from heat prostration-an untimely death, that robbed his country of its greatest student mind, while yet his energies were boundless-that thoughtless story of thirty years ago was revived, to justify the "I told you sos" of the public press.

His "Auto-a.n.a.lysis" was not the only hoax of this description in which Eugene Field indulged. In 1893 Hamlin Garland contributed an article to McClure's Magazine, ent.i.tled, "A Dialogue Between Eugene Field and Hamlin Garland." It purported to be an interview which the latter had with the former in his "attic study" in Chicago. Field was represented surrounded by "a museum of old books, rare books, Indian relics, dramatic souvenirs, and bric-a-brac indescribable." The result is a most remarkable jumble of misinformation and fiction, with which Field plied Garland to the top of his bent. What Garland thought were bottom facts were really sky-sc.r.a.ping fiction. As if this were not enough, Garland made Field talk in an approach to an illiterate dialect, such as he never employed and cordially detested. Garland represented Field as discussing social and economic problems-why not the "musical gla.s.ses," deponent saith not. The really great and characteristic point in the dialogue was where something Field said caused "Garland to lay down his pad and lift his big fist in the air like a maul. His enthusiasm rose like a flood." The whole interview was a serious piece of business to the serious-minded realist. To Field, at the time, and for months after, it was a huge and memorable joke.

But there are thousands who accept the Eugene Field of the "Auto-a.n.a.lysis" and of the Garland dialogue as the true presentment of the man, when the real man is only laughing in his sleeve at the reader and the interviewer in both of them.

CHAPTER X

LAST YEARS

If this were a record of a life, and not a study of character, with the side-lights bearing upon its development and idiosyncrasies, there would remain much to write of Eugene Field after his return from abroad. Much came to him in fame, in fortune, in his friends.h.i.+ps, and in his home. Two more children were born to brighten his hearthstone and refresh his memories of childhood and the enchanting ways of children. The elder of these two, a son, was named Roswell Francis, a combination of the names of Field's father and mother, with the change of a vowel to suit his s.e.x; the younger, his second daughter, was christened Ruth, after Mrs. Gray, in whose home Field had found, more than a score of years before, the disinterested affection of a mother, "a refuge from temptation, care, and vexation."

Although immediately upon getting back Field resumed his daily grind of "Sharps and Flats" for the Chicago Record, his paragraphs showed more and more the effects of his reading and his withdrawal from the activities and a.s.sociations of men. Mankind continued to interest him as much as ever, but books wearied him less, and in his home were more easily within reach. This home was now at 420 Fullerton Avenue, an old-fas.h.i.+oned house on the northern limit of old Chicago, rather off the beaten track. It was the fifth place the Field household had set up its lares and penates since coming to Chicago. In consequence of his collecting mania, his impedimenta had become a puzzle to house and a domestic cataclysm to move.

By 1891 Field realized, as none of his family or friends did, that his health would never be better, and that it behooved him to put his house in order and make the most of the strength remaining. If he needed the words of a mentor to warn him, he could have found them in the brief memoir his uncle, Charles Kellogg, had written of his father. In that I find this remarkable antic.i.p.ation of what befell his son, written of Roswell M. Field-who, be it remembered, started in life with a healthy and vigorous body, whereas uncertain health and a rebellious stomach were Eugene Field's portion all the days of his life.

He [Field's father] made the perusal of the Greek and Latin cla.s.sics his most delightful pastime. In fact, he resorted to this scientific research, particularly in the department of mathematics, for his chief mental recreation. It is greatly to be regretted that he neglected to combine, with his cessation from professional labor, some employment which would have revived and strengthened his physical frame. He was averse to active exercise, and for some years before his death he lived a life of studious seclusion which would have been philosophical had he not violated, in the little care he took of his health, one of the most important lessons which philosophy teaches. At a comparatively early age he died of physical exhaustion, a deterioration of the bodily organs, and an incapacity, on their part, to discharge the vital functions-a wearing out of the machine before the end of the term for which its duration was designed. He was eminently qualified to serve, as well as to adorn, society, and in all likelihood he would have found in a greater variety of occupation some relief from the monotonous strain under which his energies prematurely gave way.

But the conditions that confronted Eugene Field at the age of forty-one were very different from those under which his father succ.u.mbed prematurely at sixty-one. He had made a name and fame for himself, but had not stored any of the harvest his writings were beginning to yield. He could write, as he did, that he expected to do his best literary work when a grandfather, but he had no belief that he would live to enjoy that happy Indian summer of paternity. He was tired of being moved from rented flat to rented house with his acc.u.mulated belongings, and he yearned with the "sot" New England yearning for a permanent home, a roof-tree that he could call his own, a patch of earth in which he could "slosh around," with no landlord to importune for grudging repairs.

And so Field's life during his last years has to be considered as a struggle with physical exhaustion, fighting off the inevitable reckoning until he could provide himself and his family with a home and leave to his dear ones the means of retaining it, with the opportunities of education for the juniors. And bravely and cheerily he faced the situation. Neither in his social relations nor in his daily task was there observable any trace of the tax he was putting upon his over-strained energy. He could not afford to make the study of cla.s.sics a delightful pastime, as his father did, but he made it contribute a constant and delightful fund of reference and allusion in his column. His first books were selling steadily, and he worked a.s.siduously to make hay while the sun was still above the horizon. In quick succession, "Echoes from the Sabine Farm," "With Trumpet and Drum," the "Second Book of Verse," "The Holy Cross and Other Tales," and "Love Songs of Childhood," with few exceptions, collected from his daily contributions to the Chicago Record, were issued from the press in both limited and popular editions.

On the top of his regular work, which in collected form began to be productive beyond his fondest expectations, Field allowed himself to be over-persuaded into entering the platform field. The managers of reading-bureaus had been after him for years; but he had resisted their alluring offers, because he would not make a show of himself, and the exertion f.a.gged him. But in the later years of his life they came at him again, with the promise of more pay per night than he could get by writing in a week, and he reluctantly made occasional engagements, which were a drain on his vitality as well as an offence to his peculiar notions of personal dignity. After each of these excursions into the platform field, either in the triple alliance with "Bill" Nye and James Whitcomb Riley, or with George W. Cable, in a most effective combination, Field returned to his home in Chicago richer in pocket and interesting experiences, but distinctly poorer in the vital reserve necessary to prolong the battle with that rebellious stomach.

The presidential campaign of 1892 quite revived his interest in politics and politicians, and drew him away from the a.s.sociation with books at home and with the Saints and Sinners at McClurg's. For a time it looked as if he had been weaned from the circle of collectors, and never had his column held up to ridicule so fiercely the humbug and hypocricy of political methods as during that summer. One day after the nomination of Harrison and Reid, at Minneapolis, his column contained no fewer than forty-one political paragraphs, each one "ringing the bell" of mirth or scorn, as the subject warranted.

In the following winter there came the first hiatus in his regular contributions to the Record. But he resumed work in May, his return being heralded by a paragraph beginning, "This is a beautiful world, and life herein is very sweet," a note theretofore seldom heard in his paragraphs, though often struck in his "Profitable Tales"; and thenceforward in his daily work his thoughts recur to the beauty of the world and his gladness to be in it. Thus in the following July he wrote:

What beautiful weather this is! How full of ozone the atmosphere is; how bright the suns.h.i.+ne is, and how blue this n.o.ble lake of ours lies under the cloudless sky! It is simply ideal weather. Who does not rejoice in the change from the oppressive heat of last week? Vigor is restored to all. Commerce revives, and humanity is hopeful and cheering again.