BEGINNING OF HIS LITERARY EDUCATION
Before he came to Chicago, pretty much all that Eugene Field knew of
literature and books had been taken in at the pores, as Joey Laddle
would say, through association with lawyers, doctors, and actors. His
academic education, as we have seen, was of the most cursory and
intermittent nature. When he left the University of Missouri it was
without a diploma, without studious habits, and without pretensions to
scholarship. His trip to Europe dissipated his fortune, and his early
marriage rendered it imperative that he should stop study as well as
play and go to work. His father's library was safely stored in St.
Louis for the convenient season that was postponed from year to year,
until a score were numbered ere the nails were drawn from the precious
boxes. Every cent of the salary that might have been squandered(?) in
books was needed to feed and clothe the ravenous little brood that came
faster than their parents "could afford," as he has told us. What time
was not devoted to them and to the daily round of newspaper writing was
spent in conversing with his fellows, studying life first hand,
visiting theatres and enjoying himself in his own way generally. All
the advance that Field had made in journalism before the year 1883 was
due to native aptitude, an unfailing fund of humor and an inherited
turn for literary expression. Without ever having read that author, he
followed Pope's axiom that "the proper study of mankind is man." This
he construed to include women and children. The latter he had every
opportunity to study early and often in his own household, and most
thoroughly did he avail himself thereof. As for books, his acquaintance
with them for literary pleasure and uses seemed to have begun and ended
with the Bible and the New England Primer. They furnished the coach
that enabled his fancy "to take the air."
His knowledge of Shakespeare, so far as I could judge, had been
acquired through the theatre. The unacted plays were not familiar to
him. Few people realize what a person of alert intelligence and
retentive memory can learn of the best English literature through the
theatre-going habit. Measuring Field's opportunity by my own, during
the decade from 1873 to 1883, here is a list of Shakespearian plays he
could have taken in through eyes and ears without touching a book: "The
Tempest," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Measure for Measure," "The
Comedy of Errors," "Much Ado About Nothing," "A Midsummer Night's
Dream," "The Merchant of Venice," "As You Like It," "The Taming of the
Shrew," "Twelfth Night," "Richard II," "Richard III," "Henry IV,"
"Henry V," "Coriolanus," "Romeo and Juliet," "Julius Cæsar," "Macbeth,"
"Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," "Antony and Cleopatra," and
"Cymbeline."
This list, embracing two-thirds of all the plays Shakespeare wrote, and
practically all of his dramatic work worth knowing, covers what Field
might have seen and, with a few possible exceptions, unquestionably did
see, in the way calculated to give him the keenest pleasure and the
most lasting impressions. These plays, during that decade, were
presented by such famous actors and actresses as Edwin Booth, Lawrence
Barrett, John McCullough, Barry Sullivan, George Rignold, E.L.
Davenport, Ristori, Adelaide Neilson, Modjeska, Mary Anderson, Mrs.
D.P. Bowers, and Rose Eytinge in the leading rôles. It is impossible to
overestimate the value of listening night after night to the great
thoughts and subtle philosophy of the master dramatist from the lips of
such interpreters, to say nothing of the daily association with the men
and women who lived and moved in the atmosphere of the drama and its
traditions. So, perhaps, it is only fair to include Shakespeare and the
contemporaneous drama with the Bible and the New England Primer as the
only staple foundations of Field's literary education when he came to
Chicago. If this could have been analyzed more closely, it would have
shown some traces of what was drilled into him by his old preceptor,
Dr. Tufts, and many odds and ends of the recitations from the standard
speaker of his elocutionary youth, but no solids either of Greek or
Latin lore and not a trace of his beloved Horace.
Now it so happened that all I had ever learned in school or college of
Greek and Latin had slid from me as easily as running water over a
smooth stone, leaving me as innocent of the classics in the original as
Field. But, unlike Field, when our fortunes threw us together, I had
kept up a close and continuous reading and study of English language
and literature. The early English period had always interested me, and
we had not been together for two months before Field was inoculated
with a ravenous taste for the English literature of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Its quaintness and the unintentional humor of its
simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to
escape. He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur
and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical
versions of the almost undecipherable Saxon English to the polished and
perfect measure of the late English laureate. For three years Mallory's
"History of King Arthur and of the Knights of the Round Table" was the
delight of his poetic soul and the text-book for his conversation and
letters, and its effect was traceable in almost every line of his
newspaper work. Knights, damosells, paynims, quests, jousts, and
tourneys, went "rasing and trasing" through his manuscript, until some
people thought he was possessed with an archaic humor from which he
would never recover.
But Sir Thomas Mallory was not his only diet at this time. He
discovered that the old-book corner of A.C. McClurg & Co.'s book-store
was a veritable mine of old British ballads, and he began sipping at
that spring which in a few years was to exercise such a potent
influence on his own verse. It was from this source that he learned the
power of simple words and thoughts, when wedded to rhyme, to reach the
human heart. His "Little Book of Western Verse" would never have
possessed its popular charm had not its author taken his cue from the
"Grand Old Masters." He caught his inspiration and faultless touch from
studying the construction and the purpose of the early ballads and
songs, illustrative of the history, traditions, and customs of the
knights and peasantry of England. Where others were content to judge of
these in such famous specimens as "Chevy Chase" and "The Nut Brown
Maid," Field delved for the true gold in the neglected pages of
Anglo-Saxon chronicle and song. He did not waste much time on the
unhealthy productions of the courtiers of the time of Queen Elizabeth,
but chose the ruder songs of the bards, whose hearts were pure even if
their thoughts were sometimes crude, their speech blunt, and their
metre queer. Who cannot find suggestions for a dozen of Field's poems
in this single stanza from "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament":
_Balow, my babe, lye still and sleipe!
It grieves me sair to see thee weipe:
If thoust be silent Ise be glad,
Thy maining maks my heart ful sad.
Balow, my boy, thy mother's joy,
Thy father breides me great annoy.
Balow, my babe, ly still and sleipe,
It grieves me sair, to see thee weipe._
Or where could writer go to a better source for inspiration than to
ballads preserving in homely setting such gems as this, from "Bartham's
Dirge":
_They buried him at mirk midnight,
When the dew fell cold and still,
When the aspin gray forgot to play,
And the mist clung to the hill._
When you have mingled the simple, bald, and often beautiful pathos of
this old balladry with the fancies of fairy-land which Field invented,
or borrowed from Hans Andersen's tales, you have the key to much of the
best poetry and prose he ever wrote. The secret of his undying
attachment to Bohn's Standard Library was that therein he found almost
every book that introduced him to the masters of the kind of English
literature that most appealed to him. Here he unearthed the best of the
ancients in literal English garb, from Æschylus to Xenophon, to say
nothing of a dictionary of Latin and of Greek quotations done into
English with an index verborum. More to the purpose still, Bohn put
into his hands Smart's translation of Horace, "carefully revised by an
Oxonian." In the cheap, uniform green cloth of Bohn, he fell in with
Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English," Bell's "Ballads and Songs of the
Peasantry of England," Bede's "Ecclesiastical History," Marco Polo's
"Travels," Keightly's "Fairy Mythology," and renewed his acquaintance
with Andersen's "Danish Legends and Fairy Tales," and Grimm's "Fairy
Tales," and last, but not least, with one of the best editions of Isaac
Walton's "Complete Angler," wherein he did some of his best fishing.
It has been a common impression that Field was attracted to the
old-book corner of McClurg's store by the old and rare books displayed
there. These were not for him, as he had not then learned that
bibliomania could be made to put money in his purse or to wing his
shafts of irony with feathers from its favorite nest. He went to browse
among the dark green covers of Bohn and remained years after to prey
upon the dry husks of the bibliomaniacs.
Among the cherished relics of those days there lies before me as I
write "The Book of British Ballads," edited by S.C. Hall, inscribed on
the title page:
"_Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit._"
To Slason Thompson
from
Eugene Field.
Christmas, 1885.
This volume Field had picked up in some secondhand book-store for a
quarter or a dime. He had erased the pencilled name of the original
owner on the fly-leaf and had written mine and the date over it in ink.
Then turning to the inside of the back cover he had rubbed out the
price mark and ostentatiously scrawled "$2.50." This "doctoring" of
price marks was a favorite practice of Field's, perfectly understood
among his friends as a token of affectionate humor and never dreamed of
as an attempt at deception. By such means he added zest to the exchange
of those mementoes of friendship, which were never forgotten as
Christmas-tide rolled round, to the end of the chapter. The day has
indeed come when it is "a pleasure to remember these things."
The Latin motto on this particular copy of ballads reminds me, among
other pleasant memories, that during the year 1885 there came into
Field's life and mine an intimate friendship that was to exercise a
more potent influence on Field's literary bent than anything in his
experience. I have before me the following description of "The Frocked
Host of Watergrasshill":
Prout had seen much of mankind, and, in his deportment through life,
showed that he was well versed in all those varied arts of easy, but
still gradual, acquirement which singularly embellished the intercourse
of society: these were the results of his excellent continental
education--
[Greek] Pollon d' anthropn idon astea, kai noon egno.
But at the head of his own festive board he particularly shone; for,
though in ministerial functions he was exemplary and admirable, ever
meek and unaffected at the altar of his rustic chapel, where
"_His looks adorned the venerable place,_"
still, surrounded by a few choice friends, the calibre of whose genius
was in unison with his own, with a bottle of his choice old claret
before him, he was truly a paragon.
Substitute a physician for the priest; change the scene from the
neighborhood of the Blarney stone to a basement chop and oyster house
in Chicago; instead of a continental education give him an American
experience as a surgeon in the Civil War, in the hospitals of
Cincinnati, and on the yellow fever commission that visited Memphis in
1867, and you have the Dr. Frank W. Reilly, to whom Field owed more
than to all the schools, colleges, and educational agencies through
which he had flitted from his youth up. When I first knew Dr. Reilly
he was Secretary of the Illinois State Board of Health, located at
Springfield, and an occasional correspondent of the Chicago Herald.
The State of Illinois owes to him its gradual rescue from a dangerous
laxity in the matter of granting medical licenses, until to-day the
requirements necessary to practise his profession in this state
compare favorably with those of any other state of the Union. Shortly
after I went from the Herald to the News, as related in a previous
chapter, Dr. Reilly changed his correspondence to the latter paper. In
1885 he resigned his position on the State Board of Health, and,
coming to Chicago, formed an editorial connection with the News that
continued until he was appointed Deputy Commissioner of Health for
Chicago. In this last position, which he occupies to-day, I do not
hesitate to say that he has done more to promote its health,
cleanliness, and consequent happiness, than any other single citizen
of Chicago. If the sanitary canal was not his child, it was pushed to
completion through the fostering hand of his adoption. The Lincoln
Park Sanitarium for poor children, and other similar agencies
exploited by the Daily News, were born of his suggestions and were
nurtured by his personal supervision. It is impossible, and would be
out of place here, to specify what Dr. Reilly has done for the
sanitation of Chicago as Chief Deputy in the Health Office.
Administrations may come and go. Would that he could sip the elixir of
life, that he might go on forever!
[Illustration: DR. FRANK W. REILLY.]
On his occasional visits to Chicago, before he came up here for good,
Dr. Reilly had become a welcome guest and sometimes host in our
midnight round-ups at the Boston Oyster House, and when he made his
home here he was taken into regular fellowship. The regulars then were
Field, Ballantyne, Reilly, and I--with Mr. Stone, Willis Hawkins, a
special writer on the News, Morgan Bates, Paul Hull, a sketch writer
who fancied he looked like Lincoln and told stories that would have
made Lincoln blush to own a faint resemblance, and Cowen when in town,
to say nothing of "visiting statesmen" and play-actors as occasional
visitors and contributors to the score. Some insight into the
characters of the four regulars may be gained from the statement that
Field invariably ordered coffee and apple pie, Ballantyne tea and
toast with oysters, Dr. Reilly oysters and claret, and I steak and
Bass's ale.
It was during these meetings that Field caught from Dr. Reilly's
frequent unctuous quotations his first real taste for Horace. To two
works the doctor was impartially devoted, the "Noetes Ambrosianæ" and
"The Reliques of Father Prout."
He never wearied of communion with the classical father or of literary
companionship with Christopher North, Timothy Tickler, and the Ettrick
Shepherd. We never sat down to pie or oysters that his imagination did
not transform that Chicago oyster house into Ambrose's Tavern, the
scene of the feasts and festivities of table and conversation of the
immortal trio. But though the doctor enjoyed association with Kit
North and the voluble Shepherd, it was for the garrulous Father Prout,
steeped in the gossip and learning of the ancients, that he reserved
his warmest love and veneration. So saturated and infatuated was the
doctor with this fascinating creation of Francis Mahony's, that he
inoculated Field with his devotion, and before we knew it the author
of the Denver Tribune Primer stories was suffering from a literary
disease, to the intoxicating pleasure of which he yielded himself
without reservation.
To those who wish to understand the effect of this inspiration upon
the life and writings of Eugene Field, but who have not enjoyed
familiar acquaintance with the celebrated Prout papers, some
description of this work of Francis Mahony may not be amiss. He was a
Roman Catholic priest, educated at a Jesuit college at Amiens, who had
lived and held positions in France, Switzerland, and Ireland. It was
while officiating at the chapel of the Bavarian Legation in London
that he began contributing the Prout papers to Fraser's Magazine.
These consisted of fanciful narratives, each serving as a vehicle for
the display of his wonderful polyglot learning, and containing
translations of well-known English songs into Latin, Greek, French,
and Italian verse, which later he seriously represented as the true
originals from which the English authors had boldly plagiarized. He
also introduced into his stories the songs of France and Italy and
felicitous translations, none of which were better than those from
Horace. His command of the various languages into which he rendered
English verse was extraordinary, and his translations were so free and
spirited in thought and diction as to excite the admiration of the
best scholars. When it is said that his translations of French and
Latin odes preserved their poetical expression and sentiments with the
freedom of original composition almost unequalled in English
translations, the exceptional character of Father Prout's work will be
appreciated. Accompanying these English versions there was a running
commentary of semi-grave, but always humorous, criticism. Of Francis
Mahony's acknowledged poems, the "Bells of Shandon" is the best known.
In the Prout papers, while his genius finds its chief expression in
fantastic invention and sarcastic and cynical wit, it is everywhere
sweetened by gentle sentiments and an unfailing fund of human nature
and kindly humor.
"Prout's translations from Horace are too free and easy," solemnly
said the London Athenæum, reviewing them as they came out more than
sixty years ago. And no wonder, for Prout invented Horatian odes that
he might translate them into such rollicking stanzas as Burns's "Green
Grow the Rashes, O!"
That Field, at the time of which I am writing (1885), had quite an
idea of following in the wake of Father Prout may be indicated by the
following Latin jingle written in honor of his friend, Morgan Bates,
who, with Elwin Barren, had written a play of western life entitled
"The Mountain Pink." It was described as a "moral crime," and had been
successfully staged in Chicago.
_MÆCENAS
Mons! aliusque cum nobis,
Illicet tibi feratum,
Quid, ejusmodi hoec vobis,
Hunc aliquando erratum
Esse futurus fuisse,
Melior optimus vates?
Quamquam amo amavisse--
Bonum ad Barron et Bates!
Gloria, Mons! sempiturnus,
Jupiter, Pluvius, Juno,
Itur ad astra diurnus,
Omnes et ceteras uno!
Fratres! cum bibite vino,
Moralis, criminis fates,
Montem hic vita damfino--
Hic vita ad Barron et Bates._
A very slight knowledge of Latin verse is needed to detect that this
has no pretence to Latin composition such as Father Mahony's
scholarship caracoled in, but is merely English masquerading in
classical garb.
Father Prout also introduced Field to fellowship with Béranger, the
national song writer of France, to whom, next to the early English
balladists and Horace, he owes so much of that clear, simple,
sparkling style that has given his writings enduring value. Béranger's
description of himself might, with some modifications, be fitted to
Field: "I am a good little bit of a poet, clever in the craft, and a
conscientious worker, to whom old airs have brought some success."
Béranger chose to sing for the people of France, Field for the
children of the world. Field caught his fervor for Béranger from the
enthusiasm of Prout.
"I cannot for a moment longer," wrote he, "repress my enthusiastic
admiration for one who has arisen in our days to strike in France with
a master hand the lyre of the troubadour and to fling into the shade
all the triumphs of bygone minstrelsy. Need I designate Béranger, who
has created for himself a style of transcendent vigor and originality,
and who has sung of _war, love, and wine_, in strains far
excelling those of Blondel, Tyrtæus, Pindar, and the Teïan bard. He is
now the genuine representative of Gallic poesy in her convivial, her
amatory, her warlike and her philosophic mood; and the plenitude of
the inspiration that dwelt successively in the souls of all the
songsters of ancient France seems to have transmigrated into Béranger
and found a fit recipient in his capacious and liberal mind."
That Field caught the inspiration of Béranger more truly than Father
Prout, those who question can judge for themselves by a comparison of
their respective versions of "Le Violon Brise"--the broken fiddle. A
stanza by each must suffice to show the difference:
BÉRANGER
_Viens, mon chien! Viens, ma pauvre bête!
Mange, malgré, mon désespoir.
II me reste un gâteau de fête--
Demain nous aurons du pain noir!_
PROUT
_My poor dog! here! of yesterday's festival-cake
Eat the poor remains in sorrow;
For when next a repast you and I shall make,
It must be on brown bread, which, for charity's sake,
Your master must beg or borrow._
FIELD
_There, there, poor dog, my faithful friend,
Pay you no heed unto my sorrow:
But feast to-day while yet we may,--
Who knows but we shall starve to-morrow!_
The credit for verbal literalness of translation is with Prout, but
the spirit of the fiddler of Béranger glows through the free rendition
of Field.
[Illustration: "FATHER PROUT."
_Francis Mahony._]
The reader of Eugene Field's works will find scant acknowledgment of
his indebtedness to Father Francis Mahony, but there are many
expressions of his love and admiration for the friend who introduced
him to the scholar, wit, and philosopher, by whose ways of life and
work his own were to be so shaped and tinged. Among these my
scrap-books afford three bits of verse which indicate in different
degrees the esteem in which "the genial dock" of our comradeship was
held by his associates as well as by Field. The first was written in
honor of the doctor's silver wedding:
_TO DR. FRANK W. REILLY
If I were rich enough to buy
A case of wine (though I abhor it!)
I'd send a case of extra dry,
And willingly get trusted for it.
But, lack a day! you know that I'm
As poor as Job's historic turkey--
In lieu of Mumm, accept this rhyme,
An honest gift, though somewhat jerky.
This is your silver-wedding day--
You didn't mean to let me know it!
And yet your smiles and raiment gay
Beyond all peradventure show it!
By all you say and do it's clear
A birdling in your breast is singing,
And everywhere you go you hear
The old-time bridal bells a-ringing.
All, well, God grant that these dear chimes
May mind you of the sweetness only
Of those far-distant callow times
When you were bachelor and lonely--
And when an angel blessed your lot--
For angel is your helpmate, truly--
And when to share the joy she brought,
Came other little angels duly.
So here's a health to you and wife:
Long may you mock the reaper's warning,
And may the evening of your life
In rising Sons renew the morning;
May happiness and peace and love
Come with each morrow to caress ye;
And when you've done with earth, above--
God bless ye, dear old friend--God bless ye!_
The second is of a very different flavor and shows Field indulging in
that play of personal persiflage, in which he took a never-flagging
pleasure. It has no title and was written in pencil on two sheets of
rough brown paper:
_The Dock he is a genial friend,
He frequently has cash to lend;
He writes for Rauch, and on the pay
He sets 'em up three times a day.
Oh, how serenely I would mock
My creditors, if I were Dock.
The Cowen is a lusty lad
For whom the women-folks go mad;
He has a girl in every block--
Herein, methinks, he beats the Dock--
Yes, if the choice were left to me
A lusty Cowen I would be.
Yet were I Cowen, where, oh, where
Would be my Julia, plump and fair?
And where would be those children four
Which now I smilingly adore?
The thought induces such a shock,
I'd not be Cowen--I'd be Dock!
But were I Dock, with stores of gold,
How would I pine at being old--
How grieve to see in Cowen's eyes
That amorous fire which age denies--
Oh, no, I'd not be Dock forsooth,
I'd rather be the lusty youth.
Nor Dock, nor Cowen would I be,
But such as God hath fashioned me;
For I may now with maidens fair
Assume I'm Cowen debonnair,
Or, splurging on a borrowed stock,
I can imagine I'm the Dock._
The last tribute which I quote from Field to his school-master,
literary guide, and friend is credited to the "Wit of the Silurian
Age," and is accompanied by a drawing by the poet, who took a cut from
some weekly of the day and touched it up with black, red, and green ink
to represent the genial "Dock" seated in an arm-chair before a cheery
fire, with the inevitable claret bottle on a stand within easy reach
and a glass poised in his hand ready for the sip of a connoisseur,
while the devotee of Kit North and Father Prout beamed graciously at
you through his glasses:
_Said Field to Dr. Reilly, "You
Are like the moon, for you get brighter
When you get full, and it is true
Your heavy woes thereby grow lighter."
"And you" the Doctor answer made,
"Are like, the moon because you borrow
The capital on which you trade--
As I'm acquainted, to my sorrow!"
"'Tis true I'm like the moon, I know,"
Replied the poor but honest wight,
"For, journeying through this vale of woe,
I borrow oft, but always light!"_
But Field's acknowledgments of an ever-increasing debt of gratitude to
Dr. Reilly were not confined to privately circulated tokens of
affection and friendship, as the following stanzas, printed in his
column in the News, in February, 1889, testify:
_TO F.W.R. AT 6 P.M.
My friend, Mæcenas and physician,
Is in so grumpy a condition
I really more than half suspicion
He nears his end;
Who then would lie on earth to shave me,
To feed me, coach me, and to save me
From tedious cares that would enslave me--
Without this friend?
Nay, fate forfend such wild disaster!
May I play Pollux to his Castor
Thro' years that bind our hearts the faster
With golden tether;
And every morbid fear releasing,
May our affection bide unceasing--
every salary raise increasing--
Then die together!_
Finally, Dr. Reilly is the Dr. O'Rell of "The Love Affairs of a
Bibliomaniac," whom Field playfully credits with prescribing one or the
other--the Noctes or the Reliques--to his patients, no matter what
disease they might be afflicted with. He prescribed them to both of us,
and Field took to his bed with the Reliques and did not get up until he
had "comprehended" the greater part of its five hundred and odd pages
of perennial literary stimulant.