[Illustration: Portrait of Eugene Field in 1885.]
EUGENE FIELD
A STUDY IN HEREDITY AND CONTRADICTIONS
By SLASON THOMPSON
With Portraits, Views and Fac-Simile Illustrations
VOLUME I
Published, December, 1901
Charles Scribner's Sons
New York
1901
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
Not as other memoirs are written would Eugene Field, were he alive,
have this study of his life. He would think more of making it reflect
the odd personality of the man than rehearse the birth, development,
daily life, and works of the author. If he had undertaken to write his
own life, as was once his intention, it would probably have been the
most remarkable work of fiction by an American author that ever
masqueraded in the quaker garments of fact. From title-page to
colophon--on which he would have insisted--the book would have been
one studied effort to quiz and queer (a favorite word of his) the
innocent and willing-to-be-deluded reader. "Tell your sister for me,"
I recall his saying, "what a kind, good, and deserving man I am. How I
love little children and [with a dry chuckle] elderly spinsters.
Relate how I was born of rich yet honest parents, was reared in the
'nurture and admonition of the Lord,' and, according to the bent of a
froward youth, have stumbled along to become the cynosure of a ribald
age."
Field's idea of a perfect memoir was that it should contain no facts
that might interfere with its being novel and interesting reading both
to the public and its subject. He set little store by genius, as he
tells us in one of his letters, and less by "that nonsense called
useful knowledge." His peculiar notions as to the field of biography
were once illustrated in one he furnished to a New York firm, which
proposed a series of biographies of well-known newspaper writers. It
was arranged that Field and William E. Curtis, the noted Washington
correspondent, should write each the other's biography for the series.
Mr. Curtis executed his sketch of Field in good faith; Field's sketch
of Mr. Curtis was a marvel of waggish invention. Through an actor of
the same name who some years before made quite a reputation as Samuel
of Posen, he traced Mr. Curtis's birth back to Bohemia, and carried
him at an early age to Jerusalem, where Curtis was said to have laid
the foundations of his fame and fortune peddling suspenders. Later he
sold newspapers on the streets, and, by practicing the shrewd and
self-denying habits of his race, quickly became the owner of the paper
for which he worked, which was called the New Jerusalem Messenger, the
recognized organ of the New Jerusalem Church.
Mr. Curtis's progressive tendencies, according to Field, quickly
involved him in trouble with the government; his paper was suppressed,
and he was banished from Jerusalem. When the special firmin of the
Sultan expelling Mr. Curtis from Turkish dominions was published, it
caused a great sensation in Chicago, where the Church of the New
Jerusalem was very strong, and created an immediate rivalry between
William Penn Nixon, editor of the Inter Ocean, and Melville E. Stone,
editor of the Morning News, to secure his services. Mr. Nixon sent him
a cablegram in Hebrew which was written by a Hebrew gentleman to whom
Nixon sold old clothes, while Mr. Stone's cablegram was prepared by
his father, the Rev. Mr. Stone, and was expressed in scriptural
phraseology which was not understood in Jerusalem as well as it was at
Galesburg, where Mr. Stone was then professor of the Hebrew language
and literature. Curtis accepted the offer couched in the language of
the Hebrew vender of old clothes and became a member of the editorial
staff of the Inter Ocean. His first effective work on that newspaper
was to convert Jonathan Young Scammon, then its owner, to the New
Jerusalem faith (Mr. Scammon, whose real name was John, was the most
prominent Swedenborgian in Chicago). Mr. Scammon was so grateful for
his conversion from infidelity that in a moment of religious
exaltation he raised Mr. Curtis's salary from $18 to $20.
And thus the biography of Mr. Curtis proceeded along lines that gave
the truth a wide berth, for Field held, with the old English jurists,
that the greater the truth the greater the libel.
At one time in our association Field, as seriously as he could,
entertained the thought of furnishing me with materials for an
extended sketch of his life, and I still have several envelopes on
which the inscription "For My Memoirs" bears witness to that purpose.
But after serving as a source of eccentric and roguish humor for
several months, the idea was suffered to lapse, only to be revived in
suggestive references as he consigned some bit of manuscript to my
care or criticism. Any study of Field's life and character based on
such materials as he thus furnished would have been absolutely
misleading. It would have eliminated fact entirely and substituted the
most fantastic fiction in its stead. It would have built up a
grotesque caricature of a staid, church-going, circumspect citizen and
author instead of the ever-fascinating bundle of contradictions and
irresponsibility Field was to his legion of associates and friends.
There were two Fields--the author and the man--and it is the purpose
of this study to reproduce the latter as he appeared to those who knew
and loved him for what he was personally for the benefit of those who
have only known him through the medium of his writings. In doing this
it is far from my intention and farther from my friendship to disturb
any of the preconceptions that have been formed from the perusal of
his works. These are the creations of something entirely apart from
the man whose genius produced them. His fame as an author rests on his
printed books, and will endure as surely as the basis of his art was
true, his methods severely simple, and his spirit gentle and pure. In
his daily work the dominant note was that of fun and conviviality. It
was free from the acrimony of controversy. He abominated speech-makers
and lampooned political oracles. He was the unsparing satirist of
contemporary pretense, which in itself was sufficient to account for
the failure of the passing generation of literary critics to accord to
him the recognition which he finally won in their despite from the
reading public. Neither a sinner nor a saint was the man who went into
an old book-store in Chicago and bewildered the matter-of-fact dealer
in old editions with the inquiry, "Have you an unexpurgated copy of
Hannah More's 'Letters to a Village Maiden'?"
Everything Field wrote in prose or verse reflects his contempt for
earth's mighty and his sympathy for earth's million mites. His art,
like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was "to
magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a
two-penny post communication." Sense of earthly grandeur he had little
or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life--those minor sympathies
that are common to all and finally swell into the major song of
life--of this sense he was compact. It was the meat and marrow of his
life and mind, of his song and story. With unerring instinct Field, in
his study of humanity, went to the one school where the emotions,
wishes, and passions of mankind are to be seen unobscured by the veil
of consciousness. He was forever scanning whatever lies hidden within
the folds of the heart of childhood. He knew children through and
through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He
associated with them on terms of the most intimate comradeship and
wormed his way into their confidence with assiduous sympathy. Thus he
became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and
griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.
"In wit a man, in simplicity a child," nothing gloomy, narrow, or
pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack
Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, "his finances,
alas! were always miserably low." This followed from his learning how
to spend money freely before he was forced to earn it laboriously. He
scattered his patrimony gaily and then when the last inherited cent
was gone, turned with, equal gayety to earning, not only enough to
support himself, but the wife and family that, with the royal and
reckless prodigality of genius, he provided himself with at the very
outset of his career.
If he set "no store by genius," he at least had that faith in his own
ability which "compels the elements and wrings a human music from the
indifferent air." From the time he applied himself to the ill-requited
work of journalism he never wavered or turned aside in his purpose to
make it the ladder to literary recognition. He was over thirty before
he realized that in three universities he had slighted the opportunity
to acquire a thorough equipment for literary work. But he was
undismayed, for did he not read in his beloved "Reliques of Father
Prout" how "Loyola, the founder of the most learned and by far the
most distinguished literary corporation that ever arose in the world,
was an old soldier who took up his 'Latin Grammar' when past the age
of thirty"?
It is the contrast and apparent contradiction between the individual
and the author that makes the character of Eugene Field interesting to
the student. If the man were simply any prosaic person possessed of
the gift of telling tales, writing stories, and singing lullabies,
this study of his life would have been left unwritten. Many authors
have I known who put all there was of them into their work, who were
personally a disappointment to the intellect and a trial to the flesh.
With Eugene Field the man was always a bundle of delightful surprises,
an ever unconventional personality of which only the merest suggestion
is given in his works.
In the study I have made of the life of Eugene Field in the following
pages I have received assistance from many sources, but none has been
of so great value as that from his father's friend, Melvin L. Gray, in
whose home Field found the counsel of a father and the loving sympathy
of a mother. The letters Mr. Gray placed at my disposal, whether
quoted herein or not, have been invaluable in filling in the portrait
of his beloved ward.
To Edward D. Cowen, whose intimate friendship with Field covered a
period of nearly fifteen years in three cities and under varying
circumstances, these pages owe very much. From his brother, Roswell
Field, I have had the best sort of sympathetic aid and counsel in
filling out biographical detail without in any way committing himself
to the views or statements of this study.
Dr. Frank W. Reilly, to whom Field not only owed his vitalized
familiarity with Horace, "Prout," and "Kit North," but that
superficial knowledge of medical terms of which he made such constant
and effective use throughout his writings, has also placed me under
many obligations for data and advice.
To these and the others whose names are freely sprinkled through this
study I wish to make fitting acknowledgment of my many obligations,
and I trust the reader will share my grateful sentiments wherever the
faithful quotation marks remind him that such is their due.
SLASON THOMPSON.
CHICAGO, September 30th, 1901.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PEDIGREE 1
II. HIS FATHER'S FIRST LOVE-AFFAIR 13
III. THE DRED SCOTT CASE 36
IV. BIRTH AND EARLY YOUTH 49
V. EDUCATION 73
VI. CHOICE OF A PROFESSION 91
VII. MARRIAGE AND EARLY DOMESTIC LIFE 103
VIII. EARLY EXPERIENCES IN JOURNALISM 126
IX. IN DENVER, 1881-1883 143
X. ANECDOTES OF LIFE IN DENVER 158
XI. COMING TO CHICAGO 183
XII. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 206
XIII. RELATIONS WITH STAGE FOLK 224
XIV. BEGINNING OF HIS LITERARY EDUCATION 271
XV. METHOD OF WORK 294
XVI. NATURE OF HIS DAILY WORK 314
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF EUGENE FIELD IN 1885 _Frontispiece_
_Photogravure._
DRAWINGS AND FAC-SIMILES PAGE
"THE PEAR" IN FIELD'S GREEK TEXT 140
DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL COUNCIL OF WAR 213
_From a drawing by Eugene Field._
COMMODORE CRANE 236
_From a drawing by Eugene Field._
FIELD WITNESSING MODJESKA AS CAMILLE 244
_From a drawing by Eugene Field._
TWO PROFILES OF EUGENE FIELD 247
_The upper one drawn in pencil by Field himself;
the lower one drawn by Modjeska. Reproduced from
a flyleaf of Mrs. Thompson's volume of autograph
verse._
A BAR OF MUSIC 295
_Written by Eugene Field._
TWO GOOD KNIGHTS AT FEAST 297
_From a drawing by Eugene Field._
HALF-TONE PLATES FACING PAGE
GENERAL MARTIN FIELD 6
_Eugene Field's Grandfather._
ESTHER S. FIELD 10
_Eugene Field's Grandmother._
ROSWELL MARTIN FIELD 18
_Eugene Field's Father._
CHARLES KELLOGG FIELD 46
EUGENE FIELD'S MOTHER 50
_From a Daguerreotype taken a year or two before
his birth._
EUGENE FIELD'S COUSINS, MARY FIELD FRENCH
AND HER YOUNGER HALF-SISTER, AUGUSTA JONES 54
_From a Daguerreotype taken before Eugene and
Roswell became members of Miss French's family
in Amherst, on the death of their mother._
THE FIELD HOMESTEAD AT NEWFANE, VT. 56
THE HOMESTEAD AT AMHERST, MASS. 60
_Now owned by Mr. Hiram Eaton, of New York._
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF MONSON, MASS. 74
THE REV. JAMES TUFTS 78
WILLIAMS COLLEGE BUILDINGS, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. 82
THE OLD KNOX COLLEGE BUILDINGS, GALESBURG, ILL. 86
STATE UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS AT COLUMBIA, MO. 88
EARLY PORTRAITS OF EUGENE FIELD 92
MELVIN L. GRAY 96
MRS. MELVIN L. GRAY 100
MRS. EUGENE FIELD 110
ROBSON AND CRANE IN "SHARPS AND FLATS" 204
FIELD AT WORK 218
_The caricature from a drawing by Sclanders._
FRANCIS WILSON 228
WILLIAM J. FLORENCE 234
MODJESKA 242
JESSIE BARTLETT DAVIS 256
SOL SMITH RUSSELL 266
DR. FRANK W. REILLY 280
"FATHER PROUT" 288
_Francis Mahony._
EUGENE FIELD
CHAPTER I
PEDIGREE
"Sir John Maundeville, Kt.," was his prototype, and Father Prout was
his patron saint. The one introduced him to the study of British
balladry, the other led him to the classic groves of Horace.
"I am a Yankee by pedigree and education," wrote Eugene Field to Alice
Morse Earle, the author of "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," and
other books of the same flavor, "but I was born in that ineffably
uninteresting city, St. Louis."
How so devoted a child of all that is queer and contradictory in New
England character came to be born in "Poor old Mizzoorah," as he so
often wrote it, is in itself a rare romance, which I propose to tell
as the key to the life and works of Eugene Field. Part of it is told
in the reports of the Supreme Court of Vermont, part in the most
remarkable special pleas ever permitted in a chancery suit in America,
and the best part still lingers in the memory of the good people of
Newfane and Brattleboro, Vt., where "them Field boys" are still
referred to as unaccountable creatures, full of odd conceits, "an'
dredful sot when once they took a notion."
"Them Field boys" were not Eugene and his brother Roswell Martin
Field, the joint authors of translations from Horace, known as "Echoes
from the Sabine Farm," but their father, Roswell Martin, and their
uncle, Charles Kellogg, Field of Newfane aforesaid.
These two Fields were the sons of General Martin Field, who was born
in Leverett, Mass., February 12th, 1773, and of his wife, Esther Smith
Kellogg, who was the grandmother celebrated in more than one of Eugene
Field's stories and poems. Through both sides of the houses of Field
and Kellogg the pedigree of Eugene can be traced back to the first
settlers of New England. But there is no need to go back of the second
generation to find and identify the seed whence sprang the strangely
interesting subject of this study.
At the opening of the nineteenth century, as now, Newfane, then
Fayetteville, was a typical county seat. This pretty New England
village, which celebrated the centennial of its organization as a town
in 1874, is situated on the West River, some twelve miles from
Brattleboro, at which point that noisy stream joins the more sedate
Connecticut River. It nestles under the hills upon which, at a
distance of two miles, was the site of the original town of
Newfane--not a vestige of which remains to remind the traveller that
up to 1825 the shire town of Windham County overlooked as grand a
panorama as ever opened up before the eye of man. The reason for
abandoning the exposed location on the hills for the sheltered nook by
the river may be inferred from the descriptive adjectives. The present
town of Newfane clusters about a village square, that would have
delighted the heart of Oliver Goldsmith. The county highway bisects
it. The Windham County Hotel, with the windows of its northern end
grated to prevent the escape of inmates--signifying that its keeper is
half boniface and half county jailer--bounds it on the east, the Court
House and Town Hall, separate buildings, flank it on the west. The
Newfane Hotel rambles along half of its northern side, and the Field
mansion, with its front garden stretching to the road, does the same
for the southern half. In the rear, and facing the opening between the
Court House and the Town Hall, stands the Congregational Church, where
Eugene Field crunched caraway-seed biscuits when on a visit to his
grandmother, and back of this stands another church, spotless in the
white paint of Puritan New England meeting-houses, but deserted by its
congregation of Baptists, which had dwindled to the vanishing point.
In the centre of the village green is a grove of noble elms under
whose grateful shade, on the day of my visit to Newfane, I saw a
quartette of gray-headed attorneys, playing quoits with horse-shoes.
They had come up from Brattleboro to try a case, which had suffered
the usual "law's delay" of a continuance, and were whiling away the
hours in the bucolic sport of their ancestors, while the idle
villagers enjoyed their unpractised awkwardness. They all boasted how
they could ring the peg when they were boys.
Hither General Martin Field brought the young, and, as surviving
portraits testify, beautiful Mistress Kellogg to be his wife. Here to
them were born "them Field boys," Charles K. (April 24th, 1803) and
Roswell M. (February 22d, 1807), destined to be thorns in their
father's flesh throughout their school-days, his opponents in every
justice's court where they could volunteer to match their wits against
his, and, in the person of Roswell Martin, to be the distraction and
despair of the courts of Windsor County and Vermont, until a decision
of the Supreme Court so outraged that son's sense of the sacredness of
the marriage vow, that he shook the granite dust of Vermont from his
feet, and turned his face to the west, where he became the original
counsel in the Dred Scott case, married and had sons of his own.
[Illustration: GENERAL MARTIN FIELD.
_Eugene Field's Grandfather._]
But before taking up the thread of Roswell Martin Field's strange and
unique story, let me give a letter written by his father to his
sister, Miss Mary Field, then at the school of Miss Emma Willard in
Troy, N.Y., as exhibit number one, that Eugene Field came by his
peculiarities, literary and otherwise, by direct lineal descent.
Roswell was a phenomenal scholar, as his own eldest son was not. At
the age of eleven he was ready for college, and entered Middlebury
with his brother Charles, his senior by four years. How they conducted
themselves there may be judged from this letter to their sister:
Newfane, March 31st, 1822.
Dear Mary:
I sit down to write you my last letter while you remain at Troy.
Yours by Mr. Read was received, in which I find you allude to the
"severe and satyrical language" of mine in a former letter. That
letter was written upon the conduct of my children, which is an
important subject to me. If children are disobedient, a parent has a
right to be severe with them. If I recollect right I expressed to
you that your two oldest brothers' conduct was very reprehensible,
and I there predicted their ruin. But I then little thought that I
should soon witness the sad consequences of their ill-conduct. I
received a letter from President Bates about two weeks since and
another from Charles the same day, that Charles had been turned away
and forever dismissed from the college for his misconduct; Roswell
must suffer a public admonition and perhaps more punishment for his
evil deeds. Charles was turned out of college the 7th of March, and
I wrote on the week after to have him come directly home, but we
have heard nothing from him since. Where he is we can form no
conjecture. But probably he is five hundred miles distant without
money and without friends. I leave you to conjecture the rest.
Roswell is left alone at the age of fifteen to get along, if he is
permitted to stay through college.
These, Mary, are the consequences of dissipation and bad conduct.
And seeing as I do the temper and disposition of my children, that
they "are inclined to evil and that continually," can you wonder
that I write with severity to them? Our hopes are blasted as relates
to Charles and Roswell, and you cannot conceive the trouble which
they have given us. Your mother is almost crazy about them; nor are
we without fears as to you. I say now, as I said in my former
letter, that I wish my children were all at home at work. I am
convinced that an education will only prove injurious to them. If I
had as many sons as had the patriarch Jacob not one should ever
again go nigh a college. It is not a good calculation to educate
children for destruction. The boys' conduct has already brought a
disgrace upon our family which we can never outgrow. They
undoubtedly possess respectable talents and genius, but what are
talents worth when wholly employed in mischief?
I have expended almost two thousand dollars in educating the boys,
and now just at the close they are sent off in disgrace and infamy.
The money is nothing in comparison to the disgrace and ruin that
must succeed. Mary, think of these things often, and especially when
you feel inclined to be gay and airy. Let your brother's fate be a
striking lesson to you. For you may well suppose that you possess
something of the same disposition that he does, but I hope that you
will exercise more prudence than he has. You must now return home
with a fixed resolution to become a steady, sober, and industrious
girl. Give up literary pursuits and quietly and patiently follow
that calling which I am convinced is most proper for my children.
It does appear to me that if children would consider how much
anxiety their parents have for them they would conduct themselves
properly, if it was only to gratify their parents. But it is not so.
Many of them seem determined not only to wound the feelings of the
parents in the most cruel manner but also to ruin themselves.
Remember us respectfully to Dr. and Mrs. Willard, and I am your
affectionate father
MARTIN FIELD.
That Mary did return home to be the mediator between her incensed and
stern father and his wayward and mischievous, but not incorrigible
sons, is part of the sequel to this letter. What her daughter, Mary
Field French, afterwards became to the sons of the younger of the
reprehensible pair of youthful collegians will appear later on in this
narrative. It is beautifully acknowledged in the dedication of Eugene
Field's "Little Book of Western Verse," which I had the honor of
publishing for the subscribers in 1889, more than three score years
after the date of the foregoing letter. In that dedication, with the
characteristic license of a true artist, Field credited the choice of
Miss French for the care of his youthful years to his mother:
_A dying mother gave to you
Her child a many years ago;
How in your gracious love he grew,
You know dear, patient heart, you know._
* * * * *
_To you I dedicate this book,
And, as you read it line by line.
Upon its faults as kindly look
As you have always looked on mine._
In truth, however, it was the living bereaved father who turned in the
bewilderment of his grief to the "dear patient heart" of his sister,
to find a second mother for his two motherless boys. To Martin Field,
Mary was a guardian daughter, to Charles K. and Roswell M. 1st, she
was a loyal and mediating sister, and to Eugene and Roswell M. 2d, she
was a loving aunt, as her daughter Mary was an indulgent mother and
unfailing friend. The last name survived "the love and gratitude" of
Eugene's dedication ten years.
As may have been surmised the parental forebodings of the grieved and
satirical General Field were not realized in the eternal perdition of
his two sons. Education did not prove their destruction. With more
than respectable talents Charles was reinstated at Middlebury, and
four months later graduated with high honors, while Roswell took his
degree when only fifteen years old, the plague and admiration of his
preceptors, and, we may well suppose, the pride and joy of the
agonized parents, who welcomed the graduates to Newfane with all the
profusion of a prodigal father and the love of a distracted but doting
mother. They never had any reason to doubt the nature of sister Mary's
reception.
Charles and Roswell studied law with their father in the quaint little
office detached from the Field homestead at Newfane. The word edifice
might fittingly be applied to this building which, though only one
room square and one story high, has a front on the public square,
with miniature Greek columns to distinguish it from the ordinary
outbuildings that are such characteristic appendages of New England
houses. The troubles of General Field with his two sons were not to
end when he got them away from the temptations of college life, for
they were prone to mischief, "and that continually," even under his
severe and watchful eye. This took one particular form which is the
talk of Windham County even yet. By reason of their presence in
General Field's office they were early apprised of actions at law
which he was retained to institute; whereupon they sought out the
defendant and offered their services to represent him gratis. Thus
the elder counsellor frequently found himself pitted in the justice's
courts against his keen-witted and graceless sons, who availed
themselves of every obsolete technicality, quirk, and precedent of
the law to obstruct justice and worry their dignified parent, whom
they addressed as "our learned but erring brother in the law." Not
infrequently these youthful practitioners triumphed in these legal
tilts, to the mortification of their father, who, in his indignation,
could not conceal his admiration for the ingenuity of their
misdirected professional zeal.
[Illustration: ESTHER S. FIELD.
_Eugene Field's Grandmother._]
Two years after his graduation, and when only seventeen years of age,
Eugene Field's father was sufficiently learned in the law to be
admitted to the bar of Vermont. They wasted no time in those good old
days. Before he was thirty, Roswell M. Field had represented his
native town in the General Assembly, had been elected several times
State's Attorney, and in every way seemed destined to play a notable
part in the affairs of Vermont, if not on a broader field. He was not
only a lawyer of full and exact learning, an ingenious pleader, and
a powerful advocate, but an exceptionally accomplished scholar. His
knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and German rendered their
literature a perennial source upon which to draw for the illumination
and embellishment of the pure and virile English of which he was
master. It was from him that Eugene inherited his delight in queer and
rare objects of vertu and that "rich, strong, musical and sympathetic
voice" which would have been invaluable on the stage, and of which he
made such captivating use among his friends. Would that he had also
inherited that "strong and athletic" frame which, according to his
aged preceptor, enabled Roswell M. Field to graduate at the age of
fifteen. It is not, however, for his learning and accomplishments of
mind and person that we are interested in Roswell Martin Field, but
for the strange incident in his life that uprooted him from the
congenial environments of New England and the career opening so
temptingly before him, to transplant him to Missouri, there to become
the father of a youth, who, by all laws of heredity and by the
peculiar tang of his genius, should have been born and nurtured amid
the stern scenes and fixed customs of Puritan New England. That story
must be told in another chapter.