COMING TO CHICAGO
What I have written thus far of Eugene Field has been based upon what
the lawyers call hearsay or documentary evidence. It has for the most
part been directly heard or confirmed from his own lips. In the early
days of our acquaintance the stories of his life in Denver were rife
through every newspaper office and green-room in the United States. No
one who had spent any time in Colorado came East without bringing a
fresh budget of tales of the pranks and pasquinades of Eugene Field,
of the Denver Tribune. The clipping vogue of his Primer series had
given him a newspaper reputation wide as the continent. He was far
more quoted, however, for what he said and did than for anything he
wrote. Had his career ended in 1883, before he came to Chicago, there
would have been little or nothing left of literary value to keep his
memory alive, beyond the regretful mention in the obituary columns of
the western press.
And it came near ending, like the candle exposed to the gusts of
March, or a bubble that has danced and glistened its brief moment in
the sun. The boy who was too delicate for continued application to
books in Amherst, who had outgrown his strength so that his entrance
at Williams was postponed a year, whose backwardness at his books
through three colleges had been excused on the plea of ill-health, had
been living a pace too fast for a never strong and always rebellious
stomach. He was not intemperate in eating or drinking. It was not
excess in the first that ruined his digestion, nor intemperance in the
other that caused him to become a total abstainer from all kinds of
intoxicating beverages. He simply became a dyspeptic through a weird
devotion to the pieces and pastries "like Mary French used to make,"
and he became a teetotaler because the doctors mistook the cause of
his digestive distress.
The one thing of which Eugene Field was intemperate in Denver was of
himself. He gave to that delicate machinery we call the body no rest.
It was winter when he did not see the sun rise several times a week,
and the hours he stole from daylight for sleep were too few and
infrequent to make up for the nights he turned into day for work and
frolic. Thus it came about that in the summer of 1883 Eugene Field had
reached the end of his physical tether, and some change of scene was
necessary to save what was left of an impaired constitution.
From what has been said, it is easy to understand how Field's
abilities were diverted into a new and deeper channel in 1883.
"Stricken by dyspepsia," writes Mr. Cowen, "so severely that he fell
into a state of chronic depression and alarm, he eagerly accepted the
timely offer of Melville E. Stone, then surrounding himself with the
best talent he could procure in the West, of a virtually independent
desk on the Chicago Morning News. There he quickly regained health,
although he never recovered from his ailment."
How Mr. Stone came to be the "Fairy Godmother" to Field at this
turning-point in his life may be briefly related, and partly in Mr.
Stone's own words. He and Victor F. Lawson had made a surprising
success in establishing the Chicago Daily News, in December, 1875, the
first one-cent evening paper in Chicago. It is related that in the
early days of their enterprise they had to import the copper coins for
the use of their patrons--the nickle being up to that time the
smallest coin in use in the West, as the dime, or "short bit," was
until a more recent date on the Pacific coast. The Daily News was more
distinguished for its enterprise in gathering news and getting it out
on the street before the comparative blanket sheets of the early
eighties than for its editorial views or literary features.
In January, 1881, Messrs. Lawson & Stone conceived the idea of
printing a morning edition of their daily, to be called the Morning
News. As it was to be sold for two cents, it was their purpose to make
it better worth the price by a more exacting standard in the manner of
presenting its news and by the employment of special writers for its
editorial page. Just then, however, the crop of unemployed writers of
demonstrated ability or reputation was unusually short, and the
foundation of the Chicago Herald in May of the same year, by half a
dozen energetic journalists of local note, did not tend to overstock
the market with the talent sought for by Messrs. Lawson & Stone. It
was the rivalry between the Morning News (afterwards the Record) and
the Herald, that sent Mr. Stone so far afield as Denver for a man to
assist him in realizing the idea cherished by him and his associate.
An interesting story could be told of that rivalry, which has just
ended by the consolidation of the two papers (March, 1901) into the
Chicago Record-Herald, but only so much of it as affects the life and
movements of Eugene Field concerns us here.
In the early summer of 1883 Mr. Stone, who had been watching with
appreciative newspaper sense the popularity of the Tribune Primer
skits, cast an acquisitive net in the direction of Denver. He had
known Field in St. Louis, and describes their first meeting thus: "I
entered the office of the Dispatch to see Stillson Hutchins, the then
proprietor of that paper. It was in the forenoon, the busy hour for an
afternoon newspaper. A number of people were there, but as to the
proprietor, clerks, and customers, none was engaged in any business,
for, perched on the front counter, telling in a strangely resonant
voice a very funny story, sat Eugene Field. He was a striking figure,
tall, gaunt, almost bald (though little more than twenty years of
age), smooth shaven, and with a remarkable face, which lent itself to
every variety of emotion. In five minutes after our introduction I
knew him. There was no reserve about him. He was of the free,
whole-souled western type--that type which invites your confidence in
return for absolute and unstinted frankness."
Instead of broaching his purpose by letter, Mr. Stone slipped off to
Denver for a personal interview with his intended victim, and, as I
have already intimated, he arrived just in the nick of time to find
Field ready for any move that would take him away from the killing
kindness and exhilarating atmosphere of the Colorado capital. "The
engagement," says Mr. Stone, "was in itself characteristic. Field
wanted to join me. He was tired of Denver and mistrustful of the
limitations upon him there. But if he was to make a change, he must be
assured that it was to be for his permanent good. He was a newspaper
man not from choice, but because in that field he could earn his daily
bread. Behind all he was conscious of great capability--not vain or by
any means self-sufficient, but certain that by study and endeavor he
could take high rank in the literary world and could win a place of
lasting distinction. So he stipulated that he should be given a column
of his own, that he might stand or fall by the excellence of his own
work. Salary was less an object than opportunity."
Mr. Stone gave the necessary assurances, both as to salary--by no
means princely--and opportunity as large as Field had the genius to
fill. As quickly as he could, Field closed up his Denver connections
and prepared for the last move in his newspaper life. How he survived
the round of farewell luncheons, dinners, and midnight suppers given
for and by him was a source of mingled pride and amusement to the
chief sufferer. It was with feelings of genuine regret that he turned
his back on Denver and gave up the jovial and congenial association
with the Tribune and its staff. Although its chief editorial writer,
O.H. Rothacker, had a national reputation, Field was the star of the
company that gave to the Tribune its unique reputation among the
journals of the West, and all classes of citizens felt that something
picturesquely characteristic of the liberty and good-fellowship of
their bustling town was being taken from them. Field's departure meant
the closing of the hobble-de-hoy period in the life of Denver as well
as in his own. His life there had been exactly suited to his
temperament, to the times, and to the environment. It is doubtful if
it would have been possible to repeat such an experience in Denver
five years later, and it is certain that in five years Field had
developed whole leagues of character beyond its repetition.
It was in August, 1883, that Eugene Field, with his family and all his
personal effects, except his father's library, moved to Chicago. That
library was destined to remain safely stored in St. Louis for many
years before he felt financially able to afford it shelter and
quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of
associations. So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and
less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close
and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago,
are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity
by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the
human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very little
assistance through pouring over the printed observations of others. He
was not a classical scholar in the sense of having acquired any
mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin or Greek writers.
Language, all languages, was a study that was easy to him, and he
acquired facility in translating any foreign tongue, living or dead,
with remarkable readiness by the aid of a dictionary and a nimble wit.
Student in St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver he was not, any more than
at Williams, Galesburg, or Columbia. But I have no doubt that when
Eugene Field left Denver he had a fixed intention, as suggested in the
words of Mr. Stone, by study and endeavor to take high rank in the
literary world and to "win a place of lasting distinction."
When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their
four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far
as the children were concerned, endowed with appetites and a digestion
the envy and despair of their father. "Trotty," the eldest, was by
this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, "Pinny"
(Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and "Daisy" (Fred), his
mother's boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful
summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat
on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than
a mile's walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to
exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a
chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago. It occurred to him
one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a
stranger in town. So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster,
buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head,
and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his
hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to
the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or
pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of
the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office
he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed
with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn
perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the
fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished
faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms,
where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things,
the success of his joke.
Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl,
and he was very fond of little girls. Even then she favored her father
in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same
large innocent-looking blue eyes. But even she had to serve his
disposition to extract humor from every situation. Before Field had
been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious
miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary
was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not
sufficed to meet Field's bills in Denver, and the promised salary,
that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles,
proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys
and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was
not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an
appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise
and declaim with great effect:
"The Lord will provide, my father can't!"
The means Field took to bring the insufficiency of his salary to the
attention of Mr. Stone were as ingenious as they were frequent. I
don't think he would have appreciated an increase of salary that came
without some exercise of his wayward fancy for making mirth out of any
embarrassing financial condition.
It is more than probable that Eugene Field chose Chicago for the place
of his permanent abode after deliberately weighing the advantages and
limitations of its situation with reference to his literary career. He
felt that it was as far east as he could make his home without coming
within the influence of those social and literary conventions that
have squeezed so much of genuine American flavor out of our
literature. He had received many tempting offers from New York
newspapers before coming to Chicago, and after our acquaintance I do
not believe a year went by that Field did not decline an engagement,
personally tendered by Mr. Dana, to go to the New York Sun, at a
salary nearly double that he was receiving here. But, as he told
Julian Ralph on one occasion, he would not live in, or write for, the
East. For, as he put it, there was more liberty and fewer literary
"fellers" out West, and a man had more chance to be judged on his
merits and "grow up with the country."
The Chicago to which Eugene Field came in 1883 was a city of something
over six hundred thousand inhabitants, and pulsing with active
political and commercial life. It had been rebuilt, physically, after
the fire with money borrowed from the East, and was almost too busy
paying interest and principal to have much time to read books, much
less make them, except in the wholly manufacturing sense. It had
already become a great publishing centre, but not of the books that
engage the critical intelligence of the public. The feverish devotion
of its citizens to business during the day-time drove them to bed at
an unseasonably early hour, or to places of amusement, from which they
went so straight home after the performances that there was not a
single fashionable restaurant in the city catering to supper parties
after the play. Whether this condition, making theatre-going less
expensive here than in other large cities, conduced to the result or
not, it was a fact that in the early eighties Chicago was the best
paying city on the continent for theatrical companies of all degrees
of merit. The losses which the best artists and plays almost
invariably reported of New York engagements were frequently recouped
in Chicago.
Chicago never took kindly to grand opera, and probably for the same
reason that it patronized the drama. It sought entertainment and
amusement, and grand opera is a serious business. As Field said of
himself, Chicago liked music "limited"; and its liking was generally
limited to light or comic opera and the entertainments of the Apollo
Club, until Theodore Thomas, with admirable perseverance, aided by the
pocket-books of public-spirited citizens rather than by enthusiastic
music-lovers, succeeded in cultivating the study and love of music up
to a standard above that of any other American city, with the possible
exception of Boston.
I have referred to the theatrical and musical conditions in Chicago in
1883, because it was in them that Eugene Field found his most
congenial atmosphere and associations when he came hither that year.
These were the chief reminders of the life he had left behind when he
turned his back on Denver, and I need scarcely say that they continued
to afford him the keenest pleasure and the most unalloyed recreation
to the end.
Architecturally, Chicago was no more beautiful and far less impressive
than it is now. It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or
private, worthy of a second glance. Its tallest skyscraper stopped at
nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest
rival. The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of
the city were turned slowly and laboriously by hand, and the joke was
current that a Chicagoan of those days could never hear a bell ring
without starting on a run to avoid being bridged. The cable-car was an
experiment on one line, and all the other street-cars were operated
with horses and stopped operation at 12.20 A.M., as Field often
learned to his infinite disgust, for he hated walking worse than he
did horses or horse-cars. In many ways Chicago reminded Field of
Denver, and in no respect more than in its primitive ways, its assumed
airs of importance, and its township politics. Despite its forty odd
years of incorporated life, Chicago, the third city of the United
States, was still a village, and Field insisted on regarding it as
such.
Transplanted from the higher altitude at the foot of the Rockies to
the level of Lake Michigan, I think nothing about Chicago struck him
more forcibly than the harshness of its variable summer climate.
Scarcely a week went by that his column did not contain some reference
in paragraph or verse to its fickle alarming changes. He had not
enough warm blood back of that large gray face to rejoice when the
mercury dropped in an hour, as it often did, from 88 or 90 degrees to
56 or 60 degrees. Such changes, which came with the whirl of the
weather vane, as the wind shifted from its long sweep over the
prairies, all aquiver with the heat, to a strong blow over hundreds of
miles of water whose temperature in dog days never rose above 60
degrees, provoked from him verses such as these, written in the
respective months they celebrate in the year 1884:
_CHICAGO IN JULY
The white-capp'd waves of Michigan break
On the beach where the jacksnipes croon--
The breeze sweeps in from the purple lake
And tempers the heat of noon:
In yonder bush, where the berries grow,
The Peewee tunefully sings,
While hither and thither the people go,
Attending to matters and things.
There is cool for all in the busy town--
For the girls in their sealskin sacques--
For the dainty dudes idling up and down,
With overcoats on their backs;
And the horse-cars lurch and the people run
And the bell at the bridgeway rings--
But never perspires a single one,
Attending to matters and things.
What though the shivering mercury wanes--
What though the air be chill?
The beauteous Chloe never complains
As she roams by the purpling rill;
And the torn-tit coos to its gentle mate,
As Chloe industriously swings
With Daphnis, her beau, on the old front gate,
Attending to matters and things.
When the moon comes up, and her cold, pale light
Coquettes with the freezing streams,
What care these twain for the wintry night,
Since Chloe is wrapt in dreams,
And Daphnis utters no plaint of woe
O'er his fair jack full on kings,
But smiles that fortune should bless him so,
Attending to matters and things.
CHICAGO IN AUGUST
When Cynthia's father homeward brought
An India mull for her to wear,
How were her handsome features fraught
With radiant smiles beyond compare!
And to her bosom Cynthia strained
Her pa with many a fond caress--
And ere another week had waned
That mull was made into a dress.
And Cynthia blooming like a rose
Which any swain might joy to cull,
Cried "How I'll paralyze the beaux
When I put on my India mull!"
Now let the heat of August day
Be what it may--I'll not complain--
I'll wear the mull, and put away
This old and faded-out delaine!
Despite her prayers the heated spell
Descended not on mead and wold--
Instead of turning hot as--well,
The weather turned severely cold,
The Lake dashed up its icy spray
And breathed its chill o'er all the plain--
Cynthia stays at home all day
And wears the faded-out delaine!
So is Chicago at this time--
She stands where icy billows roll--
She wears her beauteous head sublime,
While cooling zephyrs thrill her soul.
But were she tempted to complain,
Methinks she'd bid the zephyrs lull,
That she might doff her old delaine
And don her charming India mull!_
But there was another feature of Chicago that from the day of his
arrival to the day of his departure to that land where dust troubleth
not and soot and filth are unknown, filled his New England soul and
nostrils with ineffable disgust. He never became reconciled to a
condition in which the motto _in hoc signo vinces_ on a bar of
soap had no power to inspire a ray of hope. He had not been here a
month before his muse began to wield the "knotted lash of sarcasm"
above the strenuous but dirty back of Chicago after this fashion:
_Brown, a Chicago youth, did woo
A beauteous Detroit belle,
And for a month--or, maybe, two--
He wooed the lovely lady well.
But, oh! one day--one fatal day--
As mused the belle with naught to do,
A local paper came her way
And, drat the luck! she read it through.
She read of alleys black with mire--
A river with a putrid breath--
Streets reeking with malarial ire--
Inviting foul disease and death.
Then, with a livid snort she called
Her trembling lover to her side--
"How dare you, wretched youth," she bawled,
"Ask me to be your blushing bride?
Go back unto your filthy town,
And never by my side be seen,
Nor hope to make me Mrs. Brown,
Until you've got your city clean!"_
Eugene Field made his first appearance in the column of the Morning
News August 15th, 1883, in the most modest way, with a scant column of
paragraphs such as he had contributed to the Denver Tribune, headed
"Current Gossip" instead of "Odds and Ends." The heading was only a
makeshift until a more distinctive one could be chosen in its stead.
On August 31st, 1883, the title "Sharps and Flats" was hoisted to the
top of Field's column, and there it remained over everything he wrote
for more than a dozen years.
There have been many versions of how Field came to hit upon this
title, so appropriate to what appeared under it. The most ingenious of
these was that evolved by John B. Livingstone in "An Appreciation" of
Eugene Field, published in the Interior shortly after his death. In
what, on the whole, is probably the best analysis of Field's genius
and work extant, Mr. Livingstone goes on to say:
"What Virgil was to Tennyson, Horace was to Field in one aspect at
least of the Venusian's character. He could say of his affection for
the protegé of Mæcenas, as the laureate said of his for the 'poet of
the happy Tityrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has
been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early
eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram
and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the
versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer
to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr.
Phillips Francis's translation of the eighth of the first book of
Horatian Satires:
_Not to be tedious or repeat
How Flats and Sharps in concert meet._
"Field's knowledge of Horace and of his translators was complete,
probably not equalled by that of any other member of his craft. He
made a specialty of the study, a hobby of it. And it is more likely,
as it is more gratifying, to believe that he caught his famous caption
(Sharps and Flats) from a paraphrase of his favorite classic poet than
from the play bill of a modern and ephemeral farce."
Unfortunately for this pretty bit of speculation, which Field would
have enjoyed as another evidence of his skill in imposing upon the
elect of criticism, it has no foundation in fact, and its premises of
Field's intimate knowledge and devotion to Horace anticipates the
period of his Horatian "hobby," as Mr. Livingstone so well styles it,
by at least five years. It was not until the winter of 1888-89 that
paraphrases of Horace began to stud his column with the first-fruits
of his tardy wandering and philandering with Dr. Frank W. Reilly
through the groves and meadows of the Sabine farm. But that is another
story.
According to M.E. Stone, the title of the column which Field established
when he came to the Chicago Morning News was borrowed from the name of
a play, "Sharps and Flats," written by Clay M. Greene and myself, and
played with considerable success throughout the United States by
Messrs. Robson and Crane.
[Illustration: Robson. Crane.--Crane. Robson.
ROBSON AND CRANE IN THE PLAY "SHARPS AND FLATS"]
It may be set down here as well as elsewhere, and still quoting Mr.
Stone, that not only did Field write nearly every line that ever
appeared in the "Sharps and Flats" column, but that practically
everything that he ever wrote, after 1883, appeared at one time or
another in that column.
To which it may be added that it has been the custom of those writing
of Eugene Field to surround and endow him throughout his career with
the acquirement of scholarship, and pecuniary independence, which he
never possessed before the last six years of his life.
Practically all Field's scholarship and mental equipment, so far as
they were obtained from books, were acquired after he came to Chicago,
and he was never lifted above the ragged edge of impecuniosity until
he began to receive royalties from the popular edition of "A Little
Book of Western Verse" and "A Little Book of Profitable Tales." His
domestic life was spent in flats or rented houses until less than five
months before his death. The photographs taken a few months before his
death of Eugene Field's home and the beautiful library in which he
wrote are ghastly travesties on the nomadic character of his domestic
arrangements for many years before June, 1895--dreams for which he
longed, but only lived to realize for four brief months. All the best
Field wrote previous to 1890--and it includes the best he ever wrote,
except "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac"--was written in a room to
which many a box stall is palatial, and his sole library was a
dilapidated edition of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Cruden's
"Concordance of the Bible," and a well-thumbed copy of the King James
version of the Bible. He detested the revised version. The genius of
this man at this time did not depend on scholarship or surroundings,
but on the companionship of his fellows and the unconventionality of
his home life.