journeyman baker, and was a Socialist or near-Socialist. He would
gladly extend credit to any writer who talked Karl Marx to him. So
Gene and I, towards the end of each week, when there was hardly enough
money left for car fare--ourselves had passes, but the women needed
coin--talked socialism by the ream, according to the extent of our
appetite, asserting loudly that “Property was Theft,” one of Gene’s
bright ideas, purloined, I suppose.
Gene’s palate addressed itself almost exclusively to pies and coffee
and that worked his undoing in the end. For Henrici’s coffee was
stewing all day, which made it no healthy drink, and they served a big
chunk of cheese with every ten-cent parcel of pie--a diet that would
have given indigestion to an ostrich in the long run.
And Gene’s stomach was “as touchy as his bank account,” he used to say.
I said good-by to him in January, 1888.
“First thing you do when you strike London, get me a job there,” he
said. “The pay envelope in this here town is too small for words,
let alone a man with a growing family. If I once get into London
and establish a reputation there, I can lay down the law to Lawson
(publisher of the News) and squeeze this bunch here as they have been
squeezing me.”
That wasn’t meant as viciously as it sounded. The News paid as well,
or a little better, than the other Chicago papers, but the Chicago
newspaper man that made from forty to fifty dollars a week was a
crackerjack-first-rater in those days.
One trouble with Eugene Field was that, at his office, he devoted
too much time to practical jokes, private versifying and general
tomfoolery. So when he had to do his column, his fagged brain needed
the stimulant of coffee or whiskey, or he thought it did. And black
coffee was usually sent for across the street. Moreover, he was very
fond of the theatre and wasted much time chatting behind the scenes, in
the auditorium and with the managers in front. In short, he could have
done much more work than he did, but it’s doubtful whether that would
have increased his compensation, which was as high as the paper thought
it could afford--i. e., as low as could in decency be offered to a man
with Field’s following.
In New York, I heard of Eugene’s health-troubles off and on, but
thought little of these reports since I had never known him otherwise
than active and laughing at the ills human flesh is heir to.
If I had known, or suspected, that Eugene had a tendency to lung
trouble, I would have written to Mrs. Field warning her against the
British climate in winter time, for I had lived in London during
several winters and knew what rain and sleet and fog meant there, while
Gene’s Chicago friends had not the slightest notion of English weather
conditions.
In 1889 I had been in Paris for a couple of weeks, helping to establish
an English news service there, when Davison Dalziel, afterwards British
M. P., but in our Chicago days editor of the News Letter there, told me
that Eugene Field had come to London with his family and meant to set
the Thames on fire with his jokes and verses.
“He lives at 20 Alfred Street, Bedford Square,” said Davison Dalziel,
“and doesn’t live well, I am afraid. Three boys, a wife and a female
relative into the bargain--it’s too much for one poor pencil-pusher, a
stranger to London ways.”
To show how Gene was forever hampered by the lack of funds, it is only
necessary to point out that his salary was paid over to Mrs. Field
week after week, and that Gene had the time of his life persuading the
cashier to let him have a few dollars in advance. I don’t know whether
the News sent Gene’s salary to Mrs. Field while they were in London. At
any rate, what Gene got out of it was entirely inadequate and he had no
chance to add to his salary in England.
MORE OF EUGENE FIELD’S TRIALS IN LONDON
When I saw Gene in London about November, or the end of October, 1889,
his enthusiasm for life in highbrow Grubb Street was already on the
wane. Funds were low, so were his spirits, and the hopes he had set on
James Gordon Bennett’s enterprise had come to naught.
Mr. Bennett had been running the--or a--New York Herald in London for
some time, kidding himself that London would accept a daily with so
incongruous a title as a rival to the Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and
so forth. And Eugene Field tried to persuade Bennett’s representative,
that it could be done _provided_ that he had a column or a column and
a half on the editorial page. His London Sharps and Flats were to be
syndicated in America, the Chicago Daily News having the preference.
And Gene hoped to get at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week out
of the enterprise.
If he only had the money to go to Paris and stay there long enough
to plead with James Gordon in person! But James Gordon, already a
middle-aged man, continued to play the young buck and was seldom in his
office for two consecutive days.
At one time, when Eugene had a hundred dollars laid aside for Paris,
he received word, just in the nick of time, that the “Commodore” was
off on his yacht for Monte Carlo, and would probably stay there--“until
they kick him out,” snapped Eugene savagely. “I hope they do.”
And a week later he was much elated because they had done so. At the
Eccentric Club he let the yarn loose before an audience dying with
laughter.
“My unwilling Chief,” he began, “James Gordon, I mean, went to the
Casino in Monte Carlo in a high state of intoxication, and raised
Hades with all the trimmings imaginable, until thrown out. Then,
still yelling for ‘the frog-eaters’’ blood and Monsieur Blanc’s in
particular, he was carried to the yacht, relieved of his clothes, and
treated to a cold bath, his usual medicine under like circumstances.
After the bath he put on a kimona and airs and bawled for his
secretary. That individual was yanked out of bed by the ears and
Bennett dictated to him a proclamation in the style of a South American
general starting a revolution.
“‘Monsieur Blanc and his associates,’ demanded the proclamation, ‘must
send three of the directors to Mr. Bennett’s yacht, making abject
apology for the insults heaped upon Mr. Bennett. And unless this
apology is forthcoming without evasion or delay, the Commodore will be
pleased to blow the Casino into smithereens--he has the guns, powder
and shot.’
“At nine o’clock in the morning the directors were handed this
ultimatum and they had to act by eleven or prepare to meet their maker,
roulettes and all.
“Naturally the directors thought it a drunken joke, but at eleven
sharp, Bennett began bombarding the Casino--with blank cartridges.
Hence at eleven-ten, five directors instead of three raced to the
Harbor in carriages, and tumbled head over heels into a white-flagged
steam-pinnace.
“Well,” said Field, “Bennett kept them maneuvering around his yacht
for a good fifteen minutes, while clearing decks and with much
ostentation making ready for bombardment. When he finally _did_ admit
the directors, he exacted even harder terms than he had first proposed,
namely: A perpetual card of admission for James Gordon Bennett and
friends and, for the present, a solemn invitation to Bennett to come to
the Casino and do as he liked there.
“After this,” concluded Eugene, “I suppose these directors lent him
their best grand piano for the uses he put Phil May’s mother’s piano
to.”
The above was a good story, but unprintable at the time, and it was all
Eugene ever got out of Bennett. So most other London enterprises, Gene
tried to float, proved barren.
GENE, A “SUCCESS OF CURIOSITY”
The fact was, poor Eugene was no business man and, unlike Mrs. Clemens,
pretty Mrs. Field, as far as I could make out, had no eye or head
for business either. His London writings hardly ever appealed to a
more international audience than Chicago and the West, willy-nilly,
furnished. Syndicating was in its infancy and the papers printed
nothing but news and again news. Even the New York Herald’s Sunday
edition contained hardly a line unconnected with the news of the day.
And Eugene said himself he was no newsmonger. Then London society,
or near-society, tried to make him out a funny man. He was much in
demand as a diner-out, and like an honest man, paid for his dinners and
suppers in “his own coin,” stories and jokes.
These stories were all extravaganzas of the most extravagant kind. “I
talked to the duchesses as I talk to my children when in pinafores,” he
used to tell me, “and the harder I lie, the more natural my American
yarns sound to them, for their ignorance of America is as profound as
mine of Mars.”
Poor Gene, I am afraid, often accepted dinner invitations “to save
grubbing at home,” for his finances were on the downgrade most of the
time. In his talks with American friends he often regretted having left
Chicago, “where one can always make a touch, if not at the office,
then in the Clark Street Emporium” (meaning Mike McDonald’s saloon).
And all the time his health severely suffered from the damp and wet,
the sleet and raw winds, the river fogs and the smoke fogs.
“I thought if I got away from coffee and Chicago pies, my stomach
would act decently again,” he moaned sometimes; “but the eternal tea
of Britain is as bad as our coffee, and its meat pies are even more
alluring and digestion-disturbing. I will never get well until I can
pay a cook a hundred dollars a week and a doctor fifty to tell me what
to avoid.”
There was a tendency in London then, among literary people and others,
to treat American men of letters not with scant courtesy exactly, but
as successes of curiosity. Eugene felt that after a while and it made
him sore on London and made him long still more for the fleshpots of
Chicago. Of course he returned a broader-minded and a better informed
man, but consider the cost to him! The English climate, so healthful
to Londoners as to make the town’s death rate the lowest in Europe,
wrecked what was left of Eugene’s frail health. But for London he
might have lived ten or more years longer. Yet he never could forgive
Bennett for turning him down, though I often explained to him that his
application may have never reached Bennett’s own desk.
In a measure, too, Eugene Field was responsible for many of his
discomforts in London, for he allowed a friend to select most dismal
quarters for him and stuck to them instead of getting out and moving
to one of the suburbs. “Richmond would be the place for you,” we often
told him.
“I am the Duke of Bedford’s tenant,” he joked, “and his Grace is
pleased to have my name on his rent roll, so what can I do?” And then
he would go into the Bedford family history and count up its fortunes,
its land, and estates, in London and out. “Ah,” he would say, “it
stands to reason that among Bedford’s ancestors were no penny-a-liners
or blue stockings.”
DIRE CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN HORSEPLAY
At the time when Eugene Field was in London, Oscar Wilde and Henry
Irving were undoubtedly leaders of the intellectual circles, and with
both of these men Gene had quarreled. No open rupture, but he had
played practical jokes on them--during their American tours--something
an Englishman never forgives. And if he wanted to, his friends and
compatriots wouldn’t let him.
It may be true or not that Henry Irving laughed at Gene’s caricatures
of himself, done before his very eyes, as well as behind his back in
Chicago, but that doesn’t argue that Irving did not resent Gene’s
merrymaking. Irving had many eccentricities in person and speech, but
still more dignity. And the dignity of his profession was very dear to
his heart. Hence there was no companionship between the Chicago writer
and the great English actor-manager while Gene was trying to establish
himself in London. If he had come to London under an engagement as
critic or editorial writer, it would have been different, but Gene was
only a struggling literary man like so many others. So the Henry Irving
literary circles were closed against the Chicago newspaper man as a
matter of course.
But that didn’t sour Gene’s judgment of Irving’s art. I remember a
Macbeth night at the Lyceum Theatre. As a production, Irving’s Macbeth
was the last word in stage effects. I reminded Gene of the sensation
caused in Chicago by the red velvet draw curtain which Irving had
brought from London. Up to that time Chicago had only known paper or
canvas curtains, variously painted.
“Look at the scenery,” Gene kept on saying at the Lyceum. “It’s all
solid, vast, monumental. Chicago would go crazy about that set piece.”
In the lobby we met several critics, among them the critic of the
Standard. The Standard man repeated his published charge, namely, that
Irving was sinning against tradition, that Macready and Kemble alone
had understood how to present Macbeth. Irving, this critic insisted,
ought to know “that his Macbeth was unacceptable to the best judgment.”
“Best judgment--fiddlesticks! You merely state your personal opinion.
We all do so. For my part I like Irving’s reading with its poetry
and romanticism,” said Field hotly. “The King of Scots was full of
irresolution, but was often dejected in spirits--Irving’s portrait of
a shrinking, faltering King is what it ought to be, since it holds the
mirror up to history. As to tradition--that be damned--it is largely in
the critic’s mind and nowhere else, except perhaps with some dotard,
gabbing about old times.”
That was Gene all over. If the cause was just he would as lief fight
the battles of a man like Irving, who ignored him, as of his best
friend.
Here is another illustration of that golden rule--by contrary.
He liked Ellen Terry, liked her immensely, but he did not fail to
criticise her severely. You may remember Macbeth’s line:
“What if we fail?”
Lady Macbeth answers:
“We fail--”
Now Terry pronounced these two words as if she meant to indicate--well
if we fail there’s an end to it.
“All wrong,” said Gene. “She ought to pronounce it:
“_We_ fail!”
“It ought to sound like: ‘Failure is a thing not to be thought of.’”
“I will tell Terry about it when I see her,” he said. Whether he
carried out that intention or not I don’t know. He always spoke about
Ellen Terry as the wonderful woman on the stage. “Think what she makes
her body do, how she makes it respond to the demands of every role. Her
eyes are pale, her nose is too long, her mouth is only ordinary, yet
she makes these faulty features tell on the stage, and the audience
never knows how deficient she is as to mouth, eyes and nose. And her
complexion isn’t good--naturally that doesn’t matter so much. Her hair
is an indecent tow color. And how she makes that lean and bony figure
of hers cut ice is wonderful. I forgot about her feet. But her hands
are too large for a woman. Indeed they are masculine, yet her audience
is never allowed to see that. She gets you, and she entrances you by
her innate grace--such grace as graces the world only once in a hundred
years.”
His troubles in America with Oscar Wilde closed another set of literary
salons in Eugene’s face while in London. For it must be remembered that
Oscar’s disgrace took place years later, in 1895, and that until his
quarrel with Lord Queensbury, he was a figure to be reckoned with in
London society. He was at least as important in certain social circles
as Lillie Langtry, and was a Mason-brother of the Prince of Wales.
“What a fool I was, estranging Oscar,” Gene confessed. “At the time I
thought it exquisitely funny, but the British can’t see through our
American horseplay. They think it undignified and that’s enough to kill
even the loudest laugh.”
“What did you do to Oscar?” I asked.
“The day before his arrival in Denver, where I was doing the Tribune
Primer, I impersonated Oscar in the mask of Bunthorne of Patience,
driving through Denver in an elegant landau and pair, and creating a
riot of mirth. Oscar thought it a good advertisement for his lecture,
and as a matter of fact it was, but as to the humor of the thing, he
hadn’t the slightest notion, and treated me, who had made hundreds for
him, with studied coldness.”
“Yet,” continued Gene, “for all I know he may be living on the proceeds
of my joke even now, for they say he earns next to nothing and depends
on the money he saved in the United States, from the proceeds of his
tour. But give the devil his due, Oscar does the Prince-chap business
in great style. His game is to impress ordinary folks, the grocer and
the glovemaker, that a litterateur is not necessarily a Bohemian living
in a garret, sporting frayed collars, having no money for cigarettes
in the morning and no dinner money in the evening. And to demonstrate,
he dines at the swellest hotels and restaurants and tries to cut a big
swath everywhere.”
On another occasion, Gene told a few things about Oscar that he had
heard at the Herald office. “Our fine American girl, Mary Anderson, has
given that fop Oscar a commission, duly signed, to write a drama for
her. It’s going to be called ‘The Duchess of Padua.’ Oscar may make
five or ten thousand dollars out of it. If I wasn’t by nature so much
inclined to humor, I might get an honorable commission like that. But
people think I am only fit for cracking jokes and writing jocular and
sentimental poetry.”
“Well,” I said, “Gene, everybody to his groove. While Oscar does the
highfalutin’, you make people laugh. If you really want to make money
you ought to go on the stage. There your gift of mimicry and imitation
ought to get you big returns, for you could hold your own with Goodwin
and Henry Dixey.”
“I have been told that before,” said Gene; “they drummed it into my
head in Denver and in Chicago, but somehow or other I prefer the
writing game to any other, even if it keeps one on a level with
proletarians.”
Though not mixing with Oscar Wilde’s crowd, Gene heard a lot of
gossip concerning the author of “Salome,” and “Lady Windermere’s
Fan.” Likewise some stories about Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, a most
eccentric woman, whose motto was said to be: “Only shopkeepers are
respectable.”
“Why, in his own mother’s house, Oscar started a ‘Society for the
Suppression of Virtue,’” vowed Gene.
Then there was the famous yarn about original sin that we heard right
off the griddle. It ran this way:
Said a Famous Beauty, friend of the Prince of Wales, to Wilde:
“Is it not a fact that original sin began with Adam and came down
direct to you, Oscar?”
Oscar, shielding his mouth with his hand, for he had bad teeth,
responded:
“No, my dear, sin commenced with Eve, Cleopatra carried it on and with
our dear Lillie the future of sin may be safely left, being in expert
hands.”
FIELD’S LIBRARY OF HUMOR
While in Germany, Gene had read up on ideas of humor, and entertained
the notion that a “History of Humor” would prove a good seller.
The book was to start with “The Smile,” such chapters to follow
as: “Feeling Good;” “Pleasant Thoughts;” “Why We Laugh Over the
Ridiculous;” “Whims;” “Practical Jokes;” “Fixed Ideas;” “_Naiveté_;”
“Blue-stockings;” “Old Maids,” and so forth.
He jotted these chapters down on the marble top of our table in
the Cafe Royal, and I copied the list. I think the above is pretty
complete.
THOSE GERMAN PROFESSORS
When Gene Field returned from Hanover, where he had placed his children
in school, he was full of the German professors he had met.
I reminded him that Lord Palmerston had called Germany “that damned
land of Professors.”
“I know the woods are full of them. I have seen them in droves,
good, bad and indifferent, but I put my kids with the human kind of
professor, and, besides, those youngsters can take care of themselves.
I am told of a private tutor who, on applying for a job at a country
house, thought his future paymaster as big a brute as himself.
Accordingly, while the rich man was drawing up a contract, this tutor
fell upon the boys, his future charges, as he thought, and began to
thrash them without any cause whatever in the most cruel and barbarous
fashion.
“The children’s howls brought the father to the scene, who seized the
scoundrel by the neck and demanded what he meant by assaulting his boys.
“‘Well,’ answered the tutor, ‘I meant to show them right away that I am
master.’
“‘And I will show you who is master here,’ shouted the father, and gave
that tutor the licking of his life. Then he kicked him out of doors,
and said: ‘Now run, for in five minutes I will loose my dogs, and if
they catch you, God have mercy upon your soul.’”
EUGENE FIELD AND NORTHERN LORE
While in London Eugene Field was always talking about the Orkney
Islands, the dreariest, foggiest, most uninteresting patches of land
in the wet you want to see. He had discovered somehow that Queen Mary
of Scots had created that brute Bothwell, duke of Orkney, a title
reserved for members of the reigning family. Hence her bestowal of the
title helped to emphasize still more the hatred of the nobles against
her husband. He chewed the matter over for a month, then one rainy
afternoon, at the Cafe Royal, he got it off his chest.
“I want to go to the Orkney Islands to find traces of Bothwell and
perhaps get a new angle on that fearless lass--as fearless as she was
vindictive--Mary. When the Queen was taken prisoner, Bothwell made
for the Orkneys and chose one of the smaller islands to assemble a
piratical navy. Instead of stealing queens, he meant to steal goods
and chattels of merchantmen passing the Northern Seas and the Channel.
He had been a pirate before Mary took him up and was a robber baron by
birth. Wonder if his remains rest in the Orkneys or at the bottom of
the sea.”
“He was buried in some small Danish seaboard town and in a church at
that.”
“Perhaps he died in the odor of sanctity,” laughed Gene; “that would
make it only the more interesting. Anyhow from the Orkneys I can
easily get to Denmark and from there I can almost swim over to Sweden.
I want to dig deep into Northern lore--there are unexplored tons of it,
full of the most sublime poetry, and when I return to America and have
time to look over my notes, there will be something doing, I promise
you, my boy.”
Returning to Bothwell, Field asked:
“By the way, I read somewhere that Mary was divorced from Bothwell
while in English captivity.”
“If you can get hold of the Vatican records about that divorce,” I
answered, “the fortune of your book amongst scholars is made. What do
you suppose was the cause of the divorce granted by the Roman Court?”
“Why, the murder of Mary’s second husband, the Earl of Darnley, at
which she and Bothwell had connived.”
“Wrong.”
“Or the fact that Bothwell was a Protestant, a heretic.”
“Wrong again.”
“Then because Bothwell was still the husband of Ann Thorssen when he
married the Queen.”
“Wrong the third time. The divorce was granted on evidence that
Bothwell had intercourse with Mary before marriage.”
One of these Northern lore stories Field wrote for a little book of
Christmas tales, but having been unable to carry out his intention as
above set forth, the yarn was of small account. It lacked local color
and the naturalness that made most of his stories so delightful.
LITTLE BOY BLUE
It has been forgotten by this time that Gene lost a son while the boy
was at school in Hanover--the most promising of his boys, it was said.
But at the time when the grieving father brought the body of his boy
home, a great many lovers of his poetry associated the child’s death
with the famous “Little Boy Blue.”
As a matter of fact, however, “Little Boy Blue” was not the echo of
a fond parent’s sorrow, but was written when all his children were
flourishing. At the time Gene was simply in a sentimental mood. Maybe,
too, some newspaper story he read was responsible. At any rate, “Little
Boy Blue” was published and admired and beloved a year or two, or
longer, before Gene went to Europe, and while all his children enjoyed
good health.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation
has been standardized. Spelling has been retained as in the original
except for the following: