Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions Volume I Part 13

Now William is not handsome-he's told he's just like me.

And in one respect I think he is, for he's as good as good can be!

Yet, while I find my chances with the girls are precious slim, The women-folks go wildly galivanting after him: And after serious study of the problem I have guessed That the secret of this frenzy is the Will J. Davis vest.

I've stood in Colorado and looked on peaks of snow While prisoned torrents made their moan two thousand feet below: The Simplon pa.s.s and prodigies Vesuvian have I done, And gazed in rock-bound Norway upon the midnight sun- Yet at no time such wonderment, such transports filled my breast As when I fixed my orbs upon a Will J. Davis vest.

All vainly have I hunted this worldly sphere around For a waistcoat like that waistcoat, but that waistcoat can't be found!

The Frenchman shrugs his shoulders and the German answers "nein,"

When I try the haberdasheries on the Seine and on the Rhine, And the truckling British tradesman having trotted out his best Is forced to own he can't compete with the Will J. Davis vest.

But better yet, Dear William, than this garb of which I sing Is a gift which G.o.d has given you, and that's a priceless thing.

What stuff we mortals spin and weave, though pleasing to the eye, Doth presently corrupt, to be forgotten by and by.

One thing, and one alone, survives old time's remorseless test- The valor of a heart like that which beats beneath that vest!

Playgoers of these by-gone days will remember the name of Kate Claxton with varying degrees of pleasure. She was an actress of what was then known as the Union Square Theatre type-a type that preceded the Augustin Daly school and was strong in emotional roles. With the late Charles H. Thorne, Jr., at its head, it gave such plays as "The Banker's Daughter," "The Two Orphans," "The Celebrated Case," and "The Danicheffs," their great popular vogue. Miss Claxton was what is known as the leading juvenile lady in the Union Square Company, and her Louise, the blind sister, to Miss Sara Jewett's Henrietta in "The Two Orphans," won for her a national reputation. She was endowed by nature with a superb shock of dark red hair, over which a t.i.tian might have raved. This was very effective when flowing loose about the bare shoulders of the blind orphan, but afterward, when Miss Claxton went starring over the country and had the misfortune to have several narrow escapes from fire, the newspaper wits of the day could not resist the inclination to ascribe a certain incendiarism to her hair, and also to her art. And Field, who was on terms of personal friendship with Miss Claxton, led the cry with the following:

BIOGRAPHY OF KATE CLAXTON

This famous conflagration broke out on May 3d, 1846, and has been raging with more or less violence ever since. She comes of a famous family, being a lineal descendant of the furnace mentioned in scriptural history as having been heated seven times hotter than it could be heated, in honor of the tripart.i.te alliance of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. One of her most ill.u.s.trious ancestors performed in Rome on the occasion of the Emperor Nero's famous violin obligato, and subsequently appeared in London when a large part of that large metropolis succ.u.mbed to the fiery element. This artist is known and respected in every community where there is a fire department, and the lurid flames of her genius, the burning eloquence of her elocution, and the calorific glow of her consummate art have acquired her fame, wherever the enterprising insurance agent has penetrated. Mrs. O'Leary's cow vainly sought to rob her of much of her glory, but through the fiery ordeal of jealousy, envy, and persecution, has our heroine pa.s.sed, till, from an incipient blaze, she has swelled into the most magnificent holocaust the world has ever known. And it is not alone in her profession that this gifted adustion has amazed and benefited an incinerated public: to her the world is indebted for the many fire-escapes, life-preservers, salamander safes, improved pompier ladders, play-house exits, standpipes, and Babc.o.c.k extinguishers of modern times. In paying ardent homage, therefore, to this incandescent crematory this week, let us recognize her not only as the reigning queen of ignition, diathermancy, and transcalency, but also as the promoter of many of the ingenious and philanthropic boons the public now enjoys.

This was written in November, 1883, and is worthy of remark as an ill.u.s.tration of how in that day Field began deliberately to multiply words, each having a slight difference of meaning, as an exercise in the use of English-a practice that eventually gave him a vocabulary of almost unlimited range and marvellous accuracy.

The patience of the reader forbids that I should attempt an enumeration of all Field's friendships with stage folk, or of the unending flow of good-natured raillery and sympathetic comment that kept his favorites among them ever before the public eye. When it came Field's time, all untimely, to pay the debt we all must pay, it was left for Sir Henry Irving, the dean of the English-speaking profession, to acknowledge in a brief telegram his own and its debt to the departed poet and paragrapher in these words:

The death of Eugene Field is a loss not only to his many friends, but to the world at large. He was distinctly a man of genius, and he was dowered with a nature whose sweetness endeared him to all who knew him. To me he was a loved and honored friend, and the world seems vastly the poorer without him.

Of what singular materials and contradictory natures was their friendship compact. From the day Henry Irving first landed in New York until Field's pen was laid aside forever the actor's physical peculiarities and vocal idiosyncrasies were the constant theme of diverting skits and life-like vocal mimicry. Field, however, always managed to mingle his references to Mr. Irving's unmatched legs and eccentric elocution with some genuine and unexpected tribute to his personal character and histrionic genius. Nat Goodwin and Henry Dixey were the two comedians whose imitations of Mr. Irving's peculiarities of voice and manner were most widely accepted as lifelike, while intensely amusing. But neither of them could approach Field in catching the subtile inflection of Henry Irving's "Naw! Naw!" and "Ah-h! Ah-h!" with which the great actor prefixed so many of his lines. With a daring that would have been impertinent in another, Field gave imitations of Mr. Irving in Louis XI and Hamlet in his presence and to his intense enjoyment. It is a pity, however, that Sir Henry could not have been behind the screen some night at Billy Boyle's to hear Field and Dixey in a rivalry of imitations of himself in his favorite roles. Dixey was the more amusing, because he did and said things in the Irvingesque manner which the original would not have dreamed of doing, whereas Field contented himself with mimicking his voice and gesture to life.

When Irving reached Chicago, Field and I, with the connivance of Mr. Stone, lured him into a newspaper controversy over his conception and impersonation of Hamlet, which ended in an exchange of midnight suppers and won for me the sobriquet of "Slaughter Thompson" from Mistress Ellen Terry, who enjoyed the splintering of lances where all acknowledged her the queen of the lists.

I have reserved for latest mention the one actor who throughout Field's life was always dearest to his heart. Apart, they seemed singularly alike; together, the similarities of Eugene Field and Sol Smith Russell were overshadowed by their differences. There was a certain resemblance of outline in the general lines of their faces and figures. Both were clean-shaven men, with physiognomies that responded to the pa.s.sing thought of each, with this difference-Field's facial muscles seemed to act in obedience to his will, while Russell's appeared to break into whimsical lines involuntarily. Russell has a smile that would win its way around the world. Field could contort his face into a thunder-cloud which could send children almost into convulsions of fear. There was one story which they both recited with invariable success, that gave their friends a great chance to compare their respective powers of facial expression. It was of a green New England farmer who visited Boston, and of course climbed up four flights of stairs to a skylight "studio" to have his "daguerotype took." After the artist had succeeded in getting his subject in as stiff and uncomfortable position as possible, after cautioning him not to move, he disappeared into his ill-smelling cabinet to prepare the plate. When this was ready he stepped airily out to the camera and bade his victim "look pleasant." Failing to get the impossible response the artist bade his sitter to smile. Then the old farmer with a wrathful and torture-riven contortion of his mouth e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "I am smiling!"

In rendering this, "I am smiling!" there was the misery of pent-up mental woe and physical agony in Russell's voice and face. There was something ludicrously hopeless about the attempt, as Russell's face mingled the lines of mirth and despair in a querulous grin that seemed to say, "For heaven's sake, man, don't you see that I am laughing myself to death?" Field's "I am smiling!" was almost demoniacal in its mixture of wrath, vindictiveness, and impatience. There was the snarl of a big animal about the grin with which he exposed his teeth in the mockery of mirth. His whole countenance glowered at the invisible artist in lines of suppressed rage, that seemed to bid him cut short the exposure or forfeit his life.

All Field's most successful bits of mimicry and stories were learned from Sol Smith Russell, and very many of the latter's most successful recitations were written for him by Field. They talked them over together, compared their versions and methods, and stimulated each other to fresh feats of mimicry and eccentric character delineation. Many a night, and oft after midnight, in the rotunda of the Tremont House, when John A. Rice of bibliomaniac fame, was its lessee, I was the sole paying auditor of these seances, the balance of the audience consisting of the head night clerk, night watchman, and "scrub ladies."

It may be recalled that Field's "Our Two Opinions" written in imitation of James Whitcomb Riley's most successful manner, was dedicated to Sol Smith Russell, and he for his part put into its recitation a subdued dramatic force and pathos that won from Henry Irving the comment that it was the greatest piece of American characterization he had ever witnessed.

Whenever Russell came to town Field spent all the time he could spare, when Russell was not acting or asleep, in his company. They exchanged all sorts of stories, but delighted chiefly in relating anecdotes of New England life and character. As Russell had for years travelled the circuit of small eastern towns, he had an exhaustless repertory of these, that smacked of salt codfish and chewing-gum, checkerberry lozenges, and that shrewd, dry Yankee wit that is equal to any situation. Between the two of them they perfected two stories that have been heard in every town in the Union where Russell has played or Field read, "The Teacher of Ettyket" and "The Old Deacon and the New Skule House." These were originally Russell's property, and he was inimitable in telling them. But having once caught Field's fancy, he proceeded to elaborate them in a way to establish at least a joint ownership in them.

I wish I could remember the speech against the new school-house. It may be in print for ought I know, but I have never run across it. He opened with the declaration, "Fellow Citizens, I'm agin this yer new skule house." Then he went on to say that "the little old red skule house was good enuff fur them as c.u.m afore us, it was good enuff fur us, an' I reckon its good enuff fur them as c.u.m arter us." Before proceeding he would take a generous mouthful of loose tobacco. Next he told how he had never been to school more than a few weeks "atween seasons, and yet I reckon I kin mow my swarth with the best of them that's full of book-larnin an' all them sort of jim-cracks." Then he proceeded to ill.u.s.trate the uselessness of "book-larnin" by referring to "Dan'l Webster, good likely a boy ez wus raised in these parts, what's bek.u.m ov him? Got his head full of redin, ritin, cifern, and book-larnin. What's bek.u.m of him, I say? Went off to Boston and I never hearn tell of him arterwards."

Russell's version of the story ended here with an emphatic declaration that the old deacon voted "No!" Field, on the contrary, when the laugh over Daniel Webster's disappearance subsided, and, seemingly as an after-thought, before taking his seat mumbled out, "By the way, I did hear somebody tell Dan'l had written a dictionary on a bridge, huh!"

Field's attentions to Russell did not end with their personal a.s.sociation. Week after week and month after month he sent apocryphal stories flying through the newspapers about wonderful things that never happened to Sol and his family. At one time he had Russell on the high road to a Presidential nomination on the Prohibition ticket. He solemnly recorded generous donations that Russell was (not) constantly making to philanthropic objects, with the result that the gentle comedian was pestered with applications for money for all sorts of inst.i.tutions. In order to provide Russell with the means to bestow unlimited largess, Field endowed him with the touch of Midas. He would report that the matchless exponent of "Shabby Genteel" bought lead mines, to be disappointed by finding tons of virgin gold in the quartz. Like Bret Harte's hero of Downs Flat, when Russell dug for water his luck was so contrary that he struck diamonds. When he ordered oysters each half sh.e.l.l had its bed of pearls. One specimen will do to ill.u.s.trate the character of the gifts Field bestowed on Russell "as from an exhaustless urn":

Sol Smith Russell's luck is almost as great as his art. Last week his little son Bob was digging in the back yard of the family residence in Minneapolis, and he developed a vein of coal big enough to supply the whole state of Minnesota with fuel for the next ten years. Mr. Russell was away from home at the time, but his wife (who has plenty of what the Yankees call faculty) had presence of mind not to say anything about the "Find" until, through her attorney, she had secured an option on all the real estate in the locality.

They never had any differences of opinion like "me 'nd Jim."

So after all it's soothin' to know That here Sol stays 'nd yonder's Jim- He havin' his opinyin uv Sol, 'Nd Sol havin' his opinyin uv him.

CHAPTER XIV

BEGINNING OF HIS LITERARY EDUCATION

Before he came to Chicago, pretty much all that Eugene Field knew of literature and books had been taken in at the pores, as Joey Laddle would say, through a.s.sociation with lawyers, doctors, and actors. His academic education, as we have seen, was of the most cursory and intermittent nature. When he left the University of Missouri it was without a diploma, without studious habits, and without pretensions to scholarship. His trip to Europe dissipated his fortune, and his early marriage rendered it imperative that he should stop study as well as play and go to work. His father's library was safely stored in St. Louis for the convenient season that was postponed from year to year, until a score were numbered ere the nails were drawn from the precious boxes. Every cent of the salary that might have been squandered(?) in books was needed to feed and clothe the ravenous little brood that came faster than their parents "could afford," as he has told us. What time was not devoted to them and to the daily round of newspaper writing was spent in conversing with his fellows, studying life first hand, visiting theatres and enjoying himself in his own way generally. All the advance that Field had made in journalism before the year 1883 was due to native apt.i.tude, an unfailing fund of humor and an inherited turn for literary expression. Without ever having read that author, he followed Pope's axiom that "the proper study of mankind is man." This he construed to include women and children. The latter he had every opportunity to study early and often in his own household, and most thoroughly did he avail himself thereof. As for books, his acquaintance with them for literary pleasure and uses seemed to have begun and ended with the Bible and the New England Primer. They furnished the coach that enabled his fancy "to take the air."

His knowledge of Shakespeare, so far as I could judge, had been acquired through the theatre. The unacted plays were not familiar to him. Few people realize what a person of alert intelligence and retentive memory can learn of the best English literature through the theatre-going habit. Measuring Field's opportunity by my own, during the decade from 1873 to 1883, here is a list of Shakespearian plays he could have taken in through eyes and ears without touching a book: "The Tempest," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Measure for Measure," "The Comedy of Errors," "Much Ado About Nothing," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Merchant of Venice," "As You Like It," "The Taming of the Shrew," "Twelfth Night," "Richard II," "Richard III," "Henry IV," "Henry V," "Coriola.n.u.s," "Romeo and Juliet," "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Oth.e.l.lo," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Cymbeline."

This list, embracing two-thirds of all the plays Shakespeare wrote, and practically all of his dramatic work worth knowing, covers what Field might have seen and, with a few possible exceptions, unquestionably did see, in the way calculated to give him the keenest pleasure and the most lasting impressions. These plays, during that decade, were presented by such famous actors and actresses as Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, Barry Sullivan, George Rignold, E.L. Davenport, Ristori, Adelaide Neilson, Modjeska, Mary Anderson, Mrs. D.P. Bowers, and Rose Eytinge in the leading roles. It is impossible to overestimate the value of listening night after night to the great thoughts and subtle philosophy of the master dramatist from the lips of such interpreters, to say nothing of the daily a.s.sociation with the men and women who lived and moved in the atmosphere of the drama and its traditions. So, perhaps, it is only fair to include Shakespeare and the contemporaneous drama with the Bible and the New England Primer as the only staple foundations of Field's literary education when he came to Chicago. If this could have been a.n.a.lyzed more closely, it would have shown some traces of what was drilled into him by his old preceptor, Dr. Tufts, and many odds and ends of the recitations from the standard speaker of his elocutionary youth, but no solids either of Greek or Latin lore and not a trace of his beloved Horace.

Now it so happened that all I had ever learned in school or college of Greek and Latin had slid from me as easily as running water over a smooth stone, leaving me as innocent of the cla.s.sics in the original as Field. But, unlike Field, when our fortunes threw us together, I had kept up a close and continuous reading and study of English language and literature. The early English period had always interested me, and we had not been together for two months before Field was inoculated with a ravenous taste for the English literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its quaintness and the unintentional humor of its simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to escape. He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical versions of the almost undecipherable Saxon English to the polished and perfect measure of the late English laureate. For three years Mallory's "History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table" was the delight of his poetic soul and the text-book for his conversation and letters, and its effect was traceable in almost every line of his newspaper work. Knights, damosells, paynims, quests, jousts, and tourneys, went "rasing and trasing" through his ma.n.u.script, until some people thought he was possessed with an archaic humor from which he would never recover.

But Sir Thomas Mallory was not his only diet at this time. He discovered that the old-book corner of A.C. McClurg & Co.'s book-store was a veritable mine of old British ballads, and he began sipping at that spring which in a few years was to exercise such a potent influence on his own verse. It was from this source that he learned the power of simple words and thoughts, when wedded to rhyme, to reach the human heart. His "Little Book of Western Verse" would never have possessed its popular charm had not its author taken his cue from the "Grand Old Masters." He caught his inspiration and faultless touch from studying the construction and the purpose of the early ballads and songs, ill.u.s.trative of the history, traditions, and customs of the knights and peasantry of England. Where others were content to judge of these in such famous specimens as "Chevy Chase" and "The Nut Brown Maid," Field delved for the true gold in the neglected pages of Anglo-Saxon chronicle and song. He did not waste much time on the unhealthy productions of the courtiers of the time of Queen Elizabeth, but chose the ruder songs of the bards, whose hearts were pure even if their thoughts were sometimes crude, their speech blunt, and their metre queer. Who cannot find suggestions for a dozen of Field's poems in this single stanza from "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament":

Balow, my babe, lye still and sleipe!

It grieves me sair to see thee weipe: If thoust be silent Ise be glad, Thy maining maks my heart ful sad.

Balow, my boy, thy mother's joy, Thy father breides me great annoy.

Balow, my babe, ly still and sleipe, It grieves me sair, to see thee weipe.

Or where could writer go to a better source for inspiration than to ballads preserving in homely setting such gems as this, from "Bartham's Dirge":

They buried him at mirk midnight, When the dew fell cold and still, When the aspin gray forgot to play, And the mist clung to the hill.

When you have mingled the simple, bald, and often beautiful pathos of this old balladry with the fancies of fairy-land which Field invented, or borrowed from Hans Andersen's tales, you have the key to much of the best poetry and prose he ever wrote. The secret of his undying attachment to Bohn's Standard Library was that therein he found almost every book that introduced him to the masters of the kind of English literature that most appealed to him. Here he unearthed the best of the ancients in literal English garb, from aeschylus to Xenophon, to say nothing of a dictionary of Latin and of Greek quotations done into English with an index verborum. More to the purpose still, Bohn put into his hands Smart's translation of Horace, "carefully revised by an Oxonian." In the cheap, uniform green cloth of Bohn, he fell in with Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English," Bell's "Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England," Bede's "Ecclesiastical History," Marco Polo's "Travels," Keightly's "Fairy Mythology," and renewed his acquaintance with Andersen's "Danish Legends and Fairy Tales," and Grimm's "Fairy Tales," and last, but not least, with one of the best editions of Isaac Walton's "Complete Angler," wherein he did some of his best fishing.

It has been a common impression that Field was attracted to the old-book corner of McClurg's store by the old and rare books displayed there. These were not for him, as he had not then learned that bibliomania could be made to put money in his purse or to wing his shafts of irony with feathers from its favorite nest. He went to browse among the dark green covers of Bohn and remained years after to prey upon the dry husks of the bibliomaniacs.

Among the cherished relics of those days there lies before me as I write "The Book of British Ballads," edited by S.C. Hall, inscribed on the t.i.tle page:

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit."

To Slason Thompson from Eugene Field.

Christmas, 1885.

This volume Field had picked up in some secondhand book-store for a quarter or a dime. He had erased the pencilled name of the original owner on the fly-leaf and had written mine and the date over it in ink. Then turning to the inside of the back cover he had rubbed out the price mark and ostentatiously scrawled "$2.50." This "doctoring" of price marks was a favorite practice of Field's, perfectly understood among his friends as a token of affectionate humor and never dreamed of as an attempt at deception. By such means he added zest to the exchange of those mementoes of friendship, which were never forgotten as Christmas-tide rolled round, to the end of the chapter. The day has indeed come when it is "a pleasure to remember these things."

The Latin motto on this particular copy of ballads reminds me, among other pleasant memories, that during the year 1885 there came into Field's life and mine an intimate friendship that was to exercise a more potent influence on Field's literary bent than anything in his experience. I have before me the following description of "The Frocked Host of Watergra.s.shill":

Prout had seen much of mankind, and, in his deportment through life, showed that he was well versed in all those varied arts of easy, but still gradual, acquirement which singularly embellished the intercourse of society: these were the results of his excellent continental education-

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But at the head of his own festive board he particularly shone; for, though in ministerial functions he was exemplary and admirable, ever meek and unaffected at the altar of his rustic chapel, where

"His looks adorned the venerable place,"

still, surrounded by a few choice friends, the calibre of whose genius was in unison with his own, with a bottle of his choice old claret before him, he was truly a paragon.

Subst.i.tute a physician for the priest; change the scene from the neighborhood of the Blarney stone to a bas.e.m.e.nt chop and oyster house in Chicago; instead of a continental education give him an American experience as a surgeon in the Civil War, in the hospitals of Cincinnati, and on the yellow fever commission that visited Memphis in 1867, and you have the Dr. Frank W. Reilly, to whom Field owed more than to all the schools, colleges, and educational agencies through which he had flitted from his youth up. When I first knew Dr. Reilly he was Secretary of the Illinois State Board of Health, located at Springfield, and an occasional correspondent of the Chicago Herald. The State of Illinois owes to him its gradual rescue from a dangerous laxity in the matter of granting medical licenses, until to-day the requirements necessary to practise his profession in this state compare favorably with those of any other state of the Union. Shortly after I went from the Herald to the News, as related in a previous chapter, Dr. Reilly changed his correspondence to the latter paper. In 1885 he resigned his position on the State Board of Health, and, coming to Chicago, formed an editorial connection with the News that continued until he was appointed Deputy Commissioner of Health for Chicago. In this last position, which he occupies to-day, I do not hesitate to say that he has done more to promote its health, cleanliness, and consequent happiness, than any other single citizen of Chicago. If the sanitary ca.n.a.l was not his child, it was pushed to completion through the fostering hand of his adoption. The Lincoln Park Sanitarium for poor children, and other similar agencies exploited by the Daily News, were born of his suggestions and were nurtured by his personal supervision. It is impossible, and would be out of place here, to specify what Dr. Reilly has done for the sanitation of Chicago as Chief Deputy in the Health Office. Administrations may come and go. Would that he could sip the elixir of life, that he might go on forever!