Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions Volume I Part 5

This is no better verse, and possibly no worse, than much of the adolescent doggerel that is so often preserved by fond parents to prove that their child early gave signs of poetic and literary genius.

CHAPTER VI

CHOICE OF A PROFESSION

Eugene Field was in his twenty-first year when he turned his back upon the colleges and faced life. Roswell M. Field, Sr., had been dead two years, and the moderate fortune which he had left, consisting mostly of realty valued at about $60,000, had not yet been distributed among the legatees, Eugene and Roswell M. Field and Mary French Field. To the last named one-fifth had been willed in recognition of the loving care she had bestowed upon the testator's two motherless sons, each of whom was to receive two-fifths of the father's estate. Eugene therefore looked forward to the possession of property worth something like $25,000. In St. Louis, in 1871, this was regarded as quite a large fortune. It would have been ample to start any young man, with prudence, regular habits, and a small modic.u.m of business sense, well along in any profession or occupation he might adopt. But it was and would have been a bagatelle to Eugene though ten times the amount, unless surrounded with conditions as impenetrable as chilled steel to a pewter chisel to resist the seductive ingenuity of his spendthrift nature.

On first going to St. Louis to live, Eugene Field was peculiarly fortunate in being taken into the home and enduring friends.h.i.+p of Melvin L. Gray, the executor of his father's estate, and of Mrs. Gray. To the memory of the latter, on her death several years since, Eugene contributed a memorial from which I have already quoted and which in some respects is the most sincerely beautiful piece of prose he ever wrote. In that he refers to his first coming to St. Louis in the following terms:

My acquaintance with Mrs. Gray began in 1871. I was at that time just coming of age, and there were many reasons why I was attracted to the home over which this admirable lady presided. In the first-place Mrs. Gray's household was a counterpart of the households to which my boyhood life in New England had attracted me. Again both Mr. and Mrs. Gray were old friends of my parents; and upon Mr. Gray's accepting the executors.h.i.+p of my father's estate, Mrs. Gray felt, I am pleased to believe, somewhat more than a friendly interest in the two boys, who, coming from rural New England life into the great, strange, fascinating city, stood in need of disinterested friends.h.i.+p and prudent counsel. I speak for my brother and myself when I say that for the period of twenty years we found in Mrs. Gray a friend as indulgent, as forbearing, as sympathetic, as kindly suggestive and as disinterested as a mother, and in her home a refuge from temptation, care and vexation.

In the subscription edition of "A Little Book of Western Verse," of which I had all the labor and none of the fleeting fame of publisher, Field dedicated his paraphrase of the Twenty-third Psalm to Mr. Gray, and it was to this constant friend of his youth and manhood, who still survives (1901), that Field indited the beautiful dedication of "The Sabine Farm":

Come dear old friend! and with us twain To calm Digentian groves repair; The turtle coos his sweet refrain And posies are a-blooming there, And there the romping Sabine girls With myrtle braid their l.u.s.trous curls.

I have followed the original copy Field sent to Mr. Gray, which has several variations in punctuation from the version as printed in "The Sabine Farm," where the eighth line reads:

Bind myrtle in their l.u.s.trous curls, which the reader can compare with the original as printed above. In that same dedication Field referred to Mr. Gray as one

Who lov'st us for our father's sake.

In announcing to Mr. Gray by letter, June 28th, 1891, his intention to make this dedication, Field wrote:

It will interest, and we [Roswell was a joint contributor to "The Sabine Farm"] are hoping that it will please you to know that we shall dedicate this volume to you, as a slight, though none the less sincere, token of our regard and affection to you, as the friend of our father and as the friend to us. Were our father living, it would please him, we think, to see his sons collaborating as versifiers of the pagan lyrist whose songs he admired; it would please him, too, we are equally certain, to see us dedicating a result of our enthusiastic toil to so good a man and to so good a friend as you.

These quotations are interesting as indicating the character of the surroundings of Eugene Field's early life in St. Louis.

It was the hope of their father that one, if not both, of his sons would adopt the profession of the law, in which he and his brother Charles and their father before them had attained both distinction and something more than a competence. But neither Eugene nor his brother Roswell had the slightest predilection for the law. By nature and by a certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the simplest forms of justice.

The stage, on the other hand, possessed a fascination for Eugene. He was a mimic by inheritance, a comedian by instinct and unrestrained habit. Everything appealed to his sense of the queer, the fanciful, and the utterly ridiculous. He was a student of the whimsicalities of character and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or pen. Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte. He had inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy. His early love for reciting pa.s.sages from "Spartacus," referred to by the Rev. Mr. Tufts, showed the bent of his mind, and when he became master of his own affairs he sought out Edwin Forrest and confided to him his ambition to go on the boards. Would that I could reproduce Field's version of that interview! He approached the great tragedian with a sinking heart, for Forrest had a reputation for brusque roughness never exceeded on or off the stage. But Eugene managed to prefer his request for advice and an opening in Forrest's company. The dark-browed Oth.e.l.lo looked his visitor over from head to foot, and, in a voice that rolled through the flies of the stage where this little scene was enacted, exclaimed:

"Boy, return to your friends and bid them apprentice you to a wood-sawyer, rather than waste your life on a precarious profession whose successes are few and whose rewards are bankruptcy and ingrat.i.tude. Go! study and learn of Coriola.n.u.s."

This I repeat from memory, preserving the sense and the three words "boy," "wood-sawyer," and "Coriola.n.u.s," which always recurred in Field's various versions of "Why I did not go on the stage." Eugene returned to St. Louis and quietly disposed of the costumes he had prepared for such characters as Hamlet, Lear, and Spartacus.

Francis Wilson, in his "The Eugene Field I Knew," preserves the following story of Eugene's further venture in search of a profession:

He organized a company of his own in conjunction with his friend, Marvin Eddy, who tells of a comedy Field wrote in which the heroines were impersonated by Field himself to the heroes of the only other acting member of the cast-Mr. Eddy. A Madame Saunders was the orchestra, or rather the pianist, and Monsieur Saunders painted the posters which announced the coming of the "great and only" entertainment. Rehearsals were held in the hotel dining-rooms. While a darky carried a placard of announcement, the result of Saunders's artistic handiwork, the local band, specially engaged, played in front of the princ.i.p.al places in town. Mr. Eddy recalls that Field had a sweet ba.s.s voice which he used with much effect both in songs and recitations.

The season, confined to such towns in Missouri as Carrollton, Richmond, etc., lasted about two weeks and was what the papers would call a succes d'estime.

Which, being interpreted into the vernacular of the author of "Sharps and Flats," spelled a popular "frost" and a financial failure. And thus Missouri closed the door of comedy against Field, as Forrest had shut the gates of tragedy in his pale and intellectual face.

There was still one profession open to him in which he had made a few halting and tentative steps-that of journalism, with its broad entrance and narrowing perspective into the fair field of letters. While a soph.o.m.ore at Knox he had exercised his irrepressible inclination "to shoot folly as it flies" by contributions to the local paper of Galesburg, which had the piquant flavor of personal comment. His youthful dash at the door of the stage had brought him into the comrades.h.i.+p of Stanley Waterloo and several other young journalists in St. Louis, and he was easily persuaded to try his 'prentice hand as a reporter, under the tutelage of Stanley Huntley, of the "Sp.o.o.pend.y.k.e Papers" fame.

But Eugene Field was yet without the stern incentive of necessity that is the seed of journalism. Circ.u.mstances, however, were ripening that would soon leave him no excuse on that score for not buckling down to "sawing wood," as for twenty-three years he was wont to consider his daily work. When he reached his majority he was ent.i.tled to his share in the first distribution of his father's estate. Before this could be made, Mr. Gray had to dispose of a part of the land which he held as executor of Roswell M. Field. It was accordingly offered for sale at auction, and enough to realize $20,000 was sold. Under the will, Eugene's share of this was $8,000, and he immediately placed himself in the way of investing it where it would be the least inc.u.mbrance to him. While at Columbia he had met Edgar V. Comstock, the brother of his future wife, through whom it was that he made her acquaintance. Upon the first touch of the cash payment on his share of the executor's sale, Eugene at once proposed to young Comstock that they visit Europe in company, he bearing the expenses of the expedition. His friend did not need much persuasion to embark on what promised to be such a lark. And so, in the fall of 1872, the two, against the prudent counsels of Mr. Gray, set out to see the world, and they saw it just as far as Eugene's cash and the balance of that $8,000 would go.

In his "Auto-a.n.a.lysis," Field says: "In 1872 I visited Europe, spending six months and my patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and England." This is as near the sober truth as anything Field ever wrote about himself. The youthful spendthrift and his companion landed in Ireland, and by slow, but extravagant, stages reached Italy, taking the princ.i.p.al cities and sights of England and France en route. About the only letters that reached America from Field during this European trip (always excepting those that went by every mail-steamer to a young lady in St. Jo) were those addressed with business-like brevity to Mr. Gray, calling for more and still more funds to carry the travellers onward. Before they had reached Italy the mails were too slow to convey Field's importunity, and he had recourse to the cable to impress Mr. Gray with the dire immediateness of his impecuniosity. In order to relieve this Mr. Gray was forced to discount the notes for the deferred payments on the sale of the Field land, and when Eugene and his brother-in-law-to-be reached Naples their soulful appeals for more currency with which to continue their golden girdle of the earth were met with the chilling notice "No funds available." Happily, in their meteoric transit across Europe, they had invested in many articles of vertu and convertible souvenirs of the places they had visited. By the sale, or sometimes by the pledge, of these acc.u.mulated impedimenta of travel, Eugene made good his retreat to America, where he landed with empty pockets and an inexhaustible fund of mirthful stories and invaluable experience.

On arriving in New York, Field had to seek the Western Union Telegraph office to secure funds for the necessary transportation to St. Louis. These Mr. Gray furnished so liberally that Eugene promptly invested the surplus in a French poodle, which he carried in triumph back to Missouri as a memento of his sojourn in Paris. This costly pet, the sole exhibit of his foreign travel, he named McSweeny, in memory, I suppose, of the pleasant days he had spent in Ireland.

Years afterward I remember to have been with Field when he opened a package containing a watch, which for more than a decade had been an unredeemed witness to his triumphant entry into and impecunious exit from Naples or Florence-I forget which.

Mrs. Below, Field's sister-in-law, in her little brochure, "Eugene Field in His Home," preserves a letter written by him from Rome to a friend in Ireland, in which may be traced the bent of his mind to take a whimsical view of all things coming within the range of his observation. In this he bids farewell to political discussion:

For since the collapse of the Greeley and Brown movement I have given over all hope of rescuing my torn and bleeding country from Grant and his minions, and have resolved to have nothing more to do with politics. Methinks, my country will groan to hear this declaration!

And there is the following description of how he was enjoying himself in Italy, with the last remittances of his patrimony growing fewer and painfully less:

We have been two months in Nice and a month or so travelling in Italy. Two weeks we pa.s.sed in Naples, and a most delightful place we found it. Its natural situation is simply charming, though the climate is said to be very unhealthy. I climbed Vesuvius and peered cautiously into the crater. It was a glorious sight-nothing else like it in the world! Such a glorious smell of brimstone! Such enlivening whiffs of hot steam and sulphuric fumes! Then too the grand veil of impenetrable white smoke that hung over the yawning abyss! No wonder people rave about this crater and no wonder poor Pliny lost his life coming too near the fascinating monster. The ascent of Vesuvius is no mean undertaking, and I advise all American parents to train their children especially for it by drilling them daily upon their backyard ash-heaps.

His descent of Vesuvius was made "upon a dead run," and he "astonished the natives by my [his] celerity and recklessness."

This letter was written on Was.h.i.+ngton's birthday, 1873, and in later years the omission of any reference to the anniversary would have thrown suspicion on its genuineness; but Field had not yet begun to reckon life by anniversaries. Neither is there in it a shadow of the impending crisis in his finances nor a suggestion of another reason that robbed his return voyage of all distressing thoughts of retreat.

CHAPTER VII

MARRIAGE AND EARLY DOMESTIC LIFE

And now I come to that event in the life of Eugene Field which has naturally attracted the widest interest among all who have delighted in his written tributes to womankind and mother love. In his memorial to Mrs. Gray, Field has given expression to his special reverence for the love between parent and child. "For my dear mother," he wrote, "went from me so many years ago that when I come to speak of the blessedness of a mother's love, I hardly know whereof I speak, it is all so far, so very far away, and withal so precious, so sacred a thing." This note recurs constantly through his writings, and it is not to be wondered at that the love of a man for a woman should have come early to a youth whose heart had always felt the yearning for something more tender and personal than the utmost kindness of those upon whose affections others had equal or greater claims.

Through his boyhood and school days, Field's affection for the petticoated s.e.x had been tempered by an irresistible impulse to tease all the daughters of Eve. It is doubtful if his affections were ever more seriously engaged by the girls of Amherst or the young ladies of Williams and Knox than was his attention by the regular studies of school or college. He came to both in his own way and time; with the difference that when he once felt the touch of the inevitable maiden's hand in his, he responded with an immediate ardor far different from the slow and eccentric manner in which he wooed the love of scholars.h.i.+p and letters.

It was while a junior at the University of Missouri that Eugene Field made the acquaintance of Edgar V. Comstock, the sharer of the European trip and experiences. Now Edgar's parents lived at St. Joseph, and with them five sisters, the Misses Ida, Carrie, Georgia, Julia Sutherland, and Gussie Comstock, and the fairest of them all was Julia, albeit, at the time her brother was in college, she was still in short dresses. What more natural than that Edgar's elder sisters should visit him during his college term and there meet and be attracted by the gaunt, yet already unique and striking, figure of Eugene Field, the most unscholarly student and most incorrigible wag in Columbia? Julia was too young at this time, in the estimation of her sisters, to travel so far from St. Jo. Besides, what interest would a little girl in short skirts take in the grave and intellectual life of the brother and his undergraduate friends?

Out of the friends.h.i.+p of Eugene and Edgar and the visit of Edgar's sisters to Columbia, fate was weaving a web for the unsuspecting subject of this narrative which was not to be denied or altered by leaving little Julia to rusticate at home like another pretty little Cinderella. But this is not a fairy tale. It has no prince or gla.s.s slippers or pumpkin coaches, with which Field's fancy could have invested it. When the two friends separated on Commencement Day, after Field had delivered an oration that impressed Miss Ida (Mrs. Below), because of "his pale face and deep voice," a promise had been extorted that he would visit the Comstocks in their home in St. Joseph.

In the usual course of human events nothing further of concern to us would have come from the exchange of these common civilities of student life. Edgar would have returned to his home and forgotten Eugene, and Eugene would have gone his way and never known that Edgar had a younger sister Julia sitting at the gate awaiting the coming of her prince. But shortly after returning to St. Louis, Field was inspired by his natural roving restlessness-the French call it Fate-to run clear across the state of Missouri, some three hundred miles, to see what kind of a town St. Joseph was and incidentally to visit his college friend. Nearly twenty years later, in the gathering gloom of a rented apartment in London, the still-constant lover wrote of what happened when he first saw "Saint Jo, Buchanan County," in the early seventies. There he first met "the brown-eyed maiden" of his song, the Julia of numberless valentines that ran the gamut of grave and gay through the intervening years, the heroine of frequent drives which they "snailed along," as their proper horse went slow,

In those leafy aisles, where Cupid smiles In Lover's Lane, Saint Jo.

Ah! sweet the hours of springtime When the heart inclines to woo, And it's deemed all right for the callow wight To do what he wants to do.

In his "Auto-a.n.a.lysis" Field says, "I favor early marriage." Even if Edgar Comstock's elder sisters had known this, it is doubtful whether the thought would have crossed their minds that their brother's chum of twenty-one would overlook their more mature charms (they were all fair to look upon), to be more than gracious to their fourteen-year-old sister. Time out of mind sophisticated sisters of sixteen and eighteen have regarded younger sisters as altogether out of the sphere of those attentions which find their echo in wedding bells, only to awake some bright morning to find the child a woman and the attentive friend an accepted lover.

So it happened in this case. While her sisters were thinking how good it was of Field to take so much interest in a mere child, their long afternoon drives together down "Lovers' Lane, Saint Jo," had come to that happy turn that ignores all immaturities of age and lays the life of a man at the feet of the maid-albeit, the feet are still strangers to the French heels and have not yet known the witchery that goes with long dresses. Once sure of himself, Field lost no time in making his wishes known not only to Mistress Julia, but to her astonished family. She listened and was lost and won. Her parents expostulated that she was but a child. Field had no difficulty in convincing them that she would outgrow that. He pleaded for an immediate marriage, but her father firmly insisted that though Julia might not be too young to love and be loved, she was "o'er young to marry yet." Field was forced to accept the sensible decree against the early realization of his hopes and returned to St. Louis with the understanding that he should establish himself in business and wait until Miss Comstock was eighteen.

Whether this had anything to do with Field's going to Europe or not I cannot say. It had nothing to do with his return, for his term of waiting for his modern Rachel had still two years to run when he got back from Europe. There is a pretty story told that after all arrangements were made for his European trip and he and Edgar Comstock, accompanied by Miss Ida, had reached New York, she and her brother were amazed to receive a note by mail saying, "Important business has called me back to St. Joseph; I hope you will pardon my sudden leave-taking." They knew the nature of his important business and had to wait with what patience they could command while he posted fifteen hundred miles and returned with barely time, if all connections served, to catch the steamer.

Field never dreamed of fulfilling that condition of his probation which required him to become established in business. If he had done so the date of his marriage would have been indefinitely postponed. He returned from Europe, as we have seen, sans the better part of his patrimony, in the spring of 1873, and instead of attempting to establish himself in business, immediately set himself to secure an abridgment of his term of waiting. The years between fourteen and eighteen run slow. To every true lover Time moves with leaden feet. As Rosalind tells us, "Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized: if the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year." What wonder then if the four years they were pledged to wait seemed an eternity, and that both set themselves to abridge it by all the arts and persuasion of young lovers. They pleaded and contrived so cunningly and successfully that the obdurate parents finally acceded to their wishes, and Eugene Field and Julia Sutherland Comstock were married at St. Joseph on October 16th, 1873. The bride "at that time was a girl of sixteen," is the laconic and only comment of the "Auto-a.n.a.lysis." This he supplemented with the further information, "we have had eight children-three daughters and five sons."

But this is jumping from Saint Jo into the future more than a score of years in advance of our story. The young couple spent their honeymoon in the East. Field took especial delight in showing his bride of sixteen the wonders of New York and in playing practical jokes upon her unsophisticated nature, thereby keeping her in a perpetual state of amazement or of terror as to what he would do next. He sought to make her at home at Delmonico's by ordering "boiled pig's feet a la Saint Jo," with a gravity of countenance that tested the solemnity of the waiters and provoked the protest, "Oh, Eugene!" that was to be the feminine accompaniment to his boyish humor throughout their married life. No matter how often Field played his antics before or on his wife, they always seemed to take her by surprise and evoked a remonstrance in which pride over his mirthfulness mollified all displeasure.

By the time Field returned to St. Louis his ready funds were exhausted and he had to appeal to Mr. Gray to raise more by mortgaging the balance of his interest in his father's property. This is as good a place as any to take leave of the patrimony that came to Field at the death of his father, for he was never to see any more dividends from that source. When the loans fell due there were no funds to pay them, nor equity in the land to justify their renewal. So the land was sold and bid in by Mr. Gray, who holds it yet and would gladly dispose of it for what he paid out of his pocket and the goodness of his heart.