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 modicum 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 friendship 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 executorship 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 friendship 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.
[Illustration: EARLY PORTRAITS OF EUGENE FIELD.]
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 lustrous 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 lustrous 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 passages 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 Othello 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
ingratitude. Go! study and learn of Coriolanus."
This I repeat from memory, preserving the sense and the three words
"boy," "wood-sawyer," and "Coriolanus," 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.
[Illustration: MELVIN L. GRAY.]
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 principal places in town. Mr. Eddy recalls that Field
had a sweet bass 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
_succès 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 sophomore 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
comradeship 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 "Spoopendyke
Papers" fame.
But Eugene Field was yet without the stern incentive of necessity that
is the seed of journalism. Circumstances, 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 entitled 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 incumbrance 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-Analysis," 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 principal 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 accumulated
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.
[Illustration: MRS. MELVIN L. GRAY.]
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 passed 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 Washington'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.