The little song I sing to you,
The father Sun has strayed afar–
As baby’s sire is straying, too,
And so the loving mother moon
Sings to the little star on high, And as she sings, her gentle tune
Is borne to me, and thus I croon
To thee, my sweet, that lullaby
Of hushaby, oh, hushaby.
There is a little one asleep
That does not hear his mother’s song, But angel-watchers as I weep
Surround his grave the night-tide long; And as I sing, my sweet, to you,
Oh, would the lullaby I sing–
The same sweet lullaby he knew
When slumbering on this bosom, too– Were borne to him on angel wing!
So hushaby, oh, hushaby._
The second of these songs bears the same title as one of Field’s favorite tales, and is inscribed, “To Jessie Bartlett Davis on the first anniversary of her little boy’s birth, October 6th, 1884”:
_THE SINGER MOTHER
A Singer sang a glorious song
So grandly clear and subtly sweet, That, with huzzas, the listening throng Cast down their tributes at her feet.
The Singer heard their shouts the while, But her serene and haughty face
Was lighted by no flattered smile
Provoked by homage in that place.
The Singer sang that night again
In mother tones, tender and deep, Not to the public ear, but when
She rocked her little one to sleep.
The song we bless through all the years As memory’s holiest, sweetest thing,
Instinct with pathos and with tears– The song that mothers always sing.
So tuneful was the lullaby
The mother sang, her little child Cooed, oh! so sweetly in reply,
Stretched forth its dimpled hands and smiled.
The Singer crooning there above
The cradle where her darling lay
Snatched to her breast her smiling love And sang his soul to dreams away.
Oh, mother-love, that knows no guile, That’s deaf to flatt’ry, blind to art, A dimpled hand hath wooed thy smile–
A baby’s cooing touched thy heart._
[Illustration: JESSIE BARTLETT DAVIS.]
Lest my readers should conclude from these early specimens of Field’s fondness for lilting lullabies that the gentler sex and “mother love” blinded him to the manly attractions and true worth of his own sex, let the following never-to-be-forgotten ode to the waistcoat of the papa of the hero of the two preceding songs bear witness. Mr. Davis has been a manager of first-class theatres and theatrical companies for a score of years, and there are thousands to testify that in the rhymes that follow Field has done no more than justice to the amazing “confections” in wearing apparel he affected in the days when we were boys together:
_Of waistcoats there are divers kinds, from those severely chaste To those with fiery colors dight or with fair figures traced: Those that high as liver-pads and chest-protectors serve, While others proudly sweep away in a substomachic curve, But the grandest thing in waistcoats in the streets in this great and wondrous west
Is that which folks are wont to call the Will J. Davis vest!
This paragon of comeliness is cut nor low nor high But just enough of both to show a bright imported tie: Bound neatly with the choicest silks its lappets wave-like roll, While a watch-chain dangles sprucely from the proper buttonhole And a certain sensuous languor is ineffably expressed In the contour and the mise en scene of the Will J. Davis vest.
Its texture is of softest silk: Its colors, ah, how vain The task to name the splendid hues that in that vest obtain! Go, view the rainbow and recount the glories of the sight And number all the radiances that in its glow unite, And then, when they are counted, with pride be it confessed They’re nil beside the splendor of the Will J. Davis vest.
Sometimes the gorgeous pattern is a sportive pumpkin vine, At other times the lily and the ivy intertwine: And then again the ground is white with purple polka dots Or else a dainty lavender with red congestive spots– In short, there is no color, hue, or shade you could suggest That doesn’t in due time occur in a Will J. Davis vest.
Now William is not handsome–he’s told he’s just like me. And in one respect I think he is, for he’s as good as good can be! Yet, while I find my chances with the girls are precious slim, The women-folks go wildly galivanting after him: And after serious study of the problem I have guessed That the secret of this frenzy is the Will J. Davis vest.
I’ve stood in Colorado and looked on peaks of snow While prisoned torrents made their moan two thousand feet below: The Simplon pass and prodigies Vesuvian have I done, And gazed in rock-bound Norway upon the midnight sun– Yet at no time such wonderment, such transports filled my breast As when I fixed my orbs upon a Will J. Davis vest.
All vainly have I hunted this worldly sphere around For a waistcoat like that waistcoat, but that waistcoat can’t be found! The Frenchman shrugs his shoulders and the German answers “nein,” When I try the haberdasheries on the Seine and on the Rhine, And the truckling British tradesman having trotted out his best Is forced to own he can’t compete with the Will J. Davis vest.
But better yet, Dear William, than this garb of which I sing Is a gift which God has given you, and that’s a priceless thing. What stuff we mortals spin and weave, though pleasing to the eye, Doth presently corrupt, to be forgotten by and by. One thing, and one alone, survives old time’s remorseless test– The valor of a heart like that which beats beneath that vest!_
Playgoers of these by-gone days will remember the name of Kate Claxton with varying degrees of pleasure. She was an actress of what was then known as the Union Square Theatre type–a type that preceded the Augustin Daly school and was strong in emotional roles. With the late Charles H. Thorne, Jr., at its head, it gave such plays as “The Banker’s Daughter,” “The Two Orphans,” “The Celebrated Case,” and “The Danicheffs,” their great popular vogue. Miss Claxton was what is known as the leading juvenile lady in the Union Square Company, and her Louise, the blind sister, to Miss Sara Jewett’s Henrietta in “The Two Orphans,” won for her a national reputation. She was endowed by nature with a superb shock of dark red hair, over which a Titian might have raved. This was very effective when flowing loose about the bare shoulders of the blind orphan, but afterward, when Miss Claxton went starring over the country and had the misfortune to have several narrow escapes from fire, the newspaper wits of the day could not resist the inclination to ascribe a certain incendiarism to her hair, and also to her art. And Field, who was on terms of personal friendship with Miss Claxton, led the cry with the following:
BIOGRAPHY OF KATE CLAXTON
This famous conflagration broke out on May 3d, 1846, and has been raging with more or less violence ever since. She comes of a famous family, being a lineal descendant of the furnace mentioned in scriptural history as having been heated seven times hotter than it could be heated, in honor of the tripartite alliance of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. One of her most illustrious ancestors performed in Rome on the occasion of the Emperor Nero’s famous violin obligato, and subsequently appeared in London when a large part of that large metropolis succumbed to the fiery element. This artist is known and respected in every community where there is a fire department, and the lurid flames of her genius, the burning eloquence of her elocution, and the calorific glow of her consummate art have acquired her fame, wherever the enterprising insurance agent has penetrated. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow vainly sought to rob her of much of her glory, but through the fiery ordeal of jealousy, envy, and persecution, has our heroine passed, till, from an incipient blaze, she has swelled into the most magnificent holocaust the world has ever known. And it is not alone in her profession that this gifted adustion has amazed and benefited an incinerated public: to her the world is indebted for the many fire-escapes, life-preservers, salamander safes, improved pompier ladders, play-house exits, standpipes, and Babcock extinguishers of modern times. In paying ardent homage, therefore, to this incandescent crematory this week, let us recognize her not only as the reigning queen of ignition, diathermancy, and transcalency, but also as the promoter of many of the ingenious and philanthropic boons the public now enjoys.
This was written in November, 1883, and is worthy of remark as an illustration of how in that day Field began deliberately to multiply words, each having a slight difference of meaning, as an exercise in the use of English–a practice that eventually gave him a vocabulary of almost unlimited range and marvellous accuracy.
The patience of the reader forbids that I should attempt an enumeration of all Field’s friendships with stage folk, or of the unending flow of good-natured raillery and sympathetic comment that kept his favorites among them ever before the public eye. When it came Field’s time, all untimely, to pay the debt we all must pay, it was left for Sir Henry Irving, the dean of the English-speaking profession, to acknowledge in a brief telegram his own and its debt to the departed poet and paragrapher in these words:
The death of Eugene Field is a loss not only to his many friends, but to the world at large. He was distinctly a man of genius, and he was dowered with a nature whose sweetness endeared him to all who knew him. To me he was a loved and honored friend, and the world seems vastly the poorer without him.
Of what singular materials and contradictory natures was their friendship compact. From the day Henry Irving first landed in New York until Field’s pen was laid aside forever the actor’s physical peculiarities and vocal idiosyncrasies were the constant theme of diverting skits and life-like vocal mimicry. Field, however, always managed to mingle his references to Mr. Irving’s unmatched legs and eccentric elocution with some genuine and unexpected tribute to his personal character and histrionic genius. Nat Goodwin and Henry Dixey were the two comedians whose imitations of Mr. Irving’s peculiarities of voice and manner were most widely accepted as lifelike, while intensely amusing. But neither of them could approach Field in catching the subtile inflection of Henry Irving’s “Naw! Naw!” and “Ah-h! Ah-h!” with which the great actor prefixed so many of his lines. With a daring that would have been impertinent in another, Field gave imitations of Mr. Irving in Louis XI and Hamlet in his presence and to his intense enjoyment. It is a pity, however, that Sir Henry could not have been behind the screen some night at Billy Boyle’s to hear Field and Dixey in a rivalry of imitations of himself in his favorite roles. Dixey was the more amusing, because he did and said things in the Irvingesque manner which the original would not have dreamed of doing, whereas Field contented himself with mimicking his voice and gesture to life.
When Irving reached Chicago, Field and I, with the connivance of Mr. Stone, lured him into a newspaper controversy over his conception and impersonation of Hamlet, which ended in an exchange of midnight suppers and won for me the sobriquet of “Slaughter Thompson” from Mistress Ellen Terry, who enjoyed the splintering of lances where all acknowledged her the queen of the lists.
I have reserved for latest mention the one actor who throughout Field’s life was always dearest to his heart. Apart, they seemed singularly alike; together, the similarities of Eugene Field and Sol Smith Russell were overshadowed by their differences. There was a certain resemblance of outline in the general lines of their faces and figures. Both were clean-shaven men, with physiognomies that responded to the passing thought of each, with this difference–Field’s facial muscles seemed to act in obedience to his will, while Russell’s appeared to break into whimsical lines involuntarily. Russell has a smile that would win its way around the world. Field could contort his face into a thunder-cloud which could send children almost into convulsions of fear. There was one story which they both recited with invariable success, that gave their friends a great chance to compare their respective powers of facial expression. It was of a green New England farmer who visited Boston, and of course climbed up four flights of stairs to a skylight “studio” to have his “daguerotype took.” After the artist had succeeded in getting his subject in as stiff and uncomfortable position as possible, after cautioning him not to move, he disappeared into his ill-smelling cabinet to prepare the plate. When this was ready he stepped airily out to the camera and bade his victim “look pleasant.” Failing to get the impossible response the artist bade his sitter to smile. Then the old farmer with a wrathful and torture-riven contortion of his mouth ejaculated, “I am smiling!”
In rendering this, “I am smiling!” there was the misery of pent-up mental woe and physical agony in Russell’s voice and face. There was something ludicrously hopeless about the attempt, as Russell’s face mingled the lines of mirth and despair in a querulous grin that seemed to say, “For heaven’s sake, man, don’t you see that I am laughing myself to death?” Field’s “I am smiling!” was almost demoniacal in its mixture of wrath, vindictiveness, and impatience. There was the snarl of a big animal about the grin with which he exposed his teeth in the mockery of mirth. His whole countenance glowered at the invisible artist in lines of suppressed rage, that seemed to bid him cut short the exposure or forfeit his life.
All Field’s most successful bits of mimicry and stories were learned from Sol Smith Russell, and very many of the latter’s most successful recitations were written for him by Field. They talked them over together, compared their versions and methods, and stimulated each other to fresh feats of mimicry and eccentric character delineation. Many a night, and oft after midnight, in the rotunda of the Tremont House, when John A. Rice of bibliomaniac fame, was its lessee, I was the sole paying auditor of these seances, the balance of the audience consisting of the head night clerk, night watchman, and “scrub ladies.”
[Illustration: SOL SMITH RUSSELL.]
It may be recalled that Field’s “Our Two Opinions” written in imitation of James Whitcomb Riley’s most successful manner, was dedicated to Sol Smith Russell, and he for his part put into its recitation a subdued dramatic force and pathos that won from Henry Irving the comment that it was the greatest piece of American characterization he had ever witnessed.
Whenever Russell came to town Field spent all the time he could spare, when Russell was not acting or asleep, in his company. They exchanged all sorts of stories, but delighted chiefly in relating anecdotes of New England life and character. As Russell had for years travelled the circuit of small eastern towns, he had an exhaustless repertory of these, that smacked of salt codfish and chewing-gum, checkerberry lozenges, and that shrewd, dry Yankee wit that is equal to any situation. Between the two of them they perfected two stories that have been heard in every town in the Union where Russell has played or Field read, “The Teacher of Ettyket” and “The Old Deacon and the New Skule House.” These were originally Russell’s property, and he was inimitable in telling them. But having once caught Field’s fancy, he proceeded to elaborate them in a way to establish at least a joint ownership in them.
I wish I could remember the speech against the new school-house. It may be in print for ought I know, but I have never run across it. He opened with the declaration, “Fellow Citizens, I’m agin this yer new skule house.” Then he went on to say that “the little old red skule house was good enuff fur them as cum afore us, it was good enuff fur us, an’ I reckon its good enuff fur them as cum arter us.” Before proceeding he would take a generous mouthful of loose tobacco. Next he told how he had never been to school more than a few weeks “atween seasons, and yet I reckon I kin mow my swarth with the best of them that’s full of book-larnin an’ all them sort of jim-cracks.” Then he proceeded to illustrate the uselessness of “book-larnin” by referring to “Dan’l Webster, good likely a boy ez wus raised in these parts, what’s bekum ov him? Got his head full of redin, ritin, cifern, and book-larnin. What’s bekum of him, I say? Went off to Boston and I never hearn tell of him arterwards.”
Russell’s version of the story ended here with an emphatic declaration that the old deacon voted “No!” Field, on the contrary, when the laugh over Daniel Webster’s disappearance subsided, and, seemingly as an after-thought, before taking his seat mumbled out, “By the way, I did hear somebody tell Dan’l had written a dictionary on a bridge, huh!”
Field’s attentions to Russell did not end with their personal association. Week after week and month after month he sent apocryphal stories flying through the newspapers about wonderful things that never happened to Sol and his family. At one time he had Russell on the high road to a Presidential nomination on the Prohibition ticket. He solemnly recorded generous donations that Russell was (not) constantly making to philanthropic objects, with the result that the gentle comedian was pestered with applications for money for all sorts of institutions. In order to provide Russell with the means to bestow unlimited largess, Field endowed him with the touch of Midas. He would report that the matchless exponent of “Shabby Genteel” bought lead mines, to be disappointed by finding tons of virgin gold in the quartz. Like Bret Harte’s hero of Downs Flat, when Russell dug for water his luck was so contrary that he struck diamonds. When he ordered oysters each half shell had its bed of pearls. One specimen will do to illustrate the character of the gifts Field bestowed on Russell “as from an exhaustless urn”:
Sol Smith Russell’s luck is almost as great as his art. Last week his little son Bob was digging in the back yard of the family residence in Minneapolis, and he developed a vein of coal big enough to supply the whole state of Minnesota with fuel for the next ten years. Mr. Russell was away from home at the time, but his wife (who has plenty of what the Yankees call faculty) had presence of mind not to say anything about the “Find” until, through her attorney, she had secured an option on all the real estate in the locality.
They never had any differences of opinion like “me ‘nd Jim.”
_So after all it’s soothin’ to know
That here Sol stays ‘nd yonder’s Jim– He havin’ his opinyin uv Sol,
‘Nd Sol havin’ his opinyin uv him._
CHAPTER XIV
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 Caesar,” “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 roles. 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 AEschylus 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 Ambrosianae” 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 Athenaeum, 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.
_MAECENAS
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 Beranger, 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. Beranger’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.” Beranger chose to sing for the people of France, Field for the children of the world. Field caught his fervor for Beranger 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 Beranger, 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, Tyrtaeus, Pindar, and the Teian 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 Beranger and found a fit recipient in his capacious and liberal mind.”
That Field caught the inspiration of Beranger 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:
BERANGER
_Viens, mon chien! Viens, ma pauvre bete! Mange, malgre, mon desespoir.
II me reste un gateau de fete–
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 Beranger 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, Maecenas 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.
CHAPTER XV
METHOD OF WORK
Although Eugene Field was the most unconventional of writers, there was a method in all his ways that made play of much of his work. No greater mistake was ever made than in attributing his physical break-down to exhaustion from his daily grind in a newspaper office. No man ever made less of a grind than he in preparing copy for the printer. He seldom arrived at the office before eleven o’clock and never settled down to work before three o’clock. The interim was spent in puttering over the exchanges, gossiping with visitors, of whom he had a constant stream, quizzing every other member of the staff, meddling here, chaffing there, and playing hob generally with the orderly routine of affairs. He was a persistent, insistent, irrepressible disturber of everything but the good-fellowship of the office, to which he was the chief contributor. No interruption from Field ever came or was taken amiss. From the hour he ambled laboriously up the steep and narrow stairs, anathematizing them at every step, in every tone of mockery and indignation, to the moment he sat down to his daily column of “leaded agate, first line brevier,” no man among us knew what piece of fooling he would be up to next.
Something was wrong, Field was out of town, or some old crony from Kansas City, St. Louis, or Denver was in Chicago, if about one o’clock I was not interrupted by a summons from him that the hour for luncheon had arrived. Although I was at work within sound of his voice, these came nearly always in the form of a note, delivered with an unvarying grin by the office-boy, who would drop any other errand, however pressing, to do Field’s antic bidding. These notes were generally flung into the waste-paper basket, much to my present regret, for of themselves they would have made a most remarkable exhibit. Sometimes the summons would be in the form of a bar of music like this which I preserved:
[Illustration: A BAR OF MUSIC.
_Written by Eugene Field._]
But more often it was a note in the old English manner, which for years was affected between us, like this one:
PUISSANT AND TRIUMPHANT LORD:
By my halidom it doth mind me to hold discourse with thee. Come thou privily to my castle beyond the moat, an’ thou wilt.
In all fealty, my liege,
Thy gentle vassal,
[Illustration: The mark of The Good Knight.]
Or, going down to the counting-room, he would summon a messenger to mount the stairs with a formal invitation like this:
SIR SLOSSON:
The Good but Impecunious Knight bides in the business office, and there soothly will he tarry till you come anon. So speed thee, bearing with thee ducats that in thy sweet company and by thy joyous courtesy the Good Knight may be regaled with great and sumptuous cheer withal.
THE GOOD KNIGHT.
Then out we would sally to the German restaurant around the corner, where the coffee was good, the sandwiches generous, and the pie execrable. If there was a German cook in Chicago who could make good pies we never had the good fortune to find him.
[Illustration: TWO GOOD KNIGHTS AT FEAST drawing and legend:
With great and sumptous cheer and with Joyous discourse, the good knight
Slosson regaleth the good knight
Eugene sans peur et sans monie.
_From a drawing by Eugene Field._]
Having regaled ourselves with this sumptuous cheer to “repletion,” we would walk three blocks to McClurg’s book-store and replenish our stock of English, sacred and profane, defiled and undefiled. I am writing now of the days before Field made the old-book department famous throughout the country as the browsing ground of the bibliomaniacs. After loitering there long enough to digest our lunches and to nibble a little literature, we would retrace our steps to the office, where Field resumed his predatory actions until he was ready to go to work. Then peace settled on the establishment for about three hours. If any noisy visitor or obstreperous reporter in the local room did anything to disturb the “literary atmosphere” that brooded around the office, Field would bang on the tin gong hanging over his desk until all other noises sank into dismayed silence. Then he would resume “sawing wood” for his “Sharps and Flats.”
If Field had not quite worked off his surplus stock of horse-play on his associates, he would vent it upon the compositor in some such apostrophe as the following:
_By my troth, I’ll now begin ter
Cut a literary caper
On this pretty tab of paper
For the horney-handed printer;
I expect to hear him swearing
That these inks are very wearing
On his oculary squinter._
Or this:
We desire to announce that Mademoiselle Rhea, the gifted Flanders maid, who has the finest wardrobe on the stage, will play a season of bad brogue and flash dresses in this city very soon. This announcement, however, will never see the dawn of November 13th, and we kiss it a fond farewell as we cheerfully submit it as a sop to Cerberus.
Field had a theory that Ballantyne, the managing editor, would not consider that he was earning his salary, and that Mr. Stone would not think that he was exercising the full authority of editorship, unless something in his column was sacrificed to the blue pencil of a watchful censorship. Coupled with this was the more or less cunning belief that it was good tactics to write one or two outrageously unprintable paragraphs to draw the fire, so to speak, of the blue pencil, and so to divert attention from something, about which there might be question, which he particularly wished to have printed. Ballantyne, as I have said, was a very much more exacting censor than Stone, for the reason that the humor of a story or paragraph often missed his Scotch literalness, while Stone never failed to let anything pass on that score.
By six o’clock Field’s writing for the day was done, and he generally went home for dinner. But that this was not always the case the following notes testify:
GOOD AND GENTLE KNIGHT:
If so be ye pine and so hanker after me this night I pray you come anon to the secret lair near the moat on the next floor, and there you will eke descry me. There we will discourse on love and other joyous matters, and until then I shall be, as I have ever been,
Your most courteous friend,
E. FIELD.
* * * * *
An’ it please the good and gentle knight, Sir Slosson Thompson, his friend in very sooth, the honest knight will arrive at his castle this day at the 8th hour, being minded to partake of Sir Slosson’s cheer and regale him with the wealth of his joyous discourse.
THE GOOD KNIGHT.
Five nights out of the week Field spent some part of the evening at one of the principal theatres of the town, of which at that time there were five. He was generally accompanied by Mrs. Field and her sister, Miss Comstock, who subsequently became Mrs. Ballantyne. When it was a family party, Ballantyne and I would join it about the last act, and there was invariably a late supper party, which broke up only in time for the last north-bound car. When Field was a self-invited guest with any of his intimates at dinner the party would adjourn for a round of the theatres, ending at that one where the star or leading actor was most likely to join in a symposium of steak and story at Billy Boyle’s English chop-house. This resort, on Calhoun Place, between Dearborn and Clark Streets, was for many years the most famous all-night eating-house in Chicago. For chops and steaks it had not its equal in America, possibly not in the world. Long after we had ceased to frequent Boyle’s, so long that our patronage could not have been charged with any share in the catastrophe, it went into the hands of the sheriff. This afforded Field an opportunity to write the following sympathetic and serio-whimsical reminiscence of a unique institution in Chicago life:
It is unpleasant and it is hard to think of Billy Boyle’s chop-house as a thing of the past, for that resort has become so closely identified with certain classes and with certain phases of life in Chicago that it seems it must necessarily keep right on forever in its delectable career. We much prefer to regard its troubles as temporary, and to believe that presently its hospitable doors will be thrown open again to the same hungry, appreciative patrons who for so many years have partaken of its cheer.
When the sheriff asked Billy Boyle the other day where the key to the door was, Billy seemed to feel hurt. What did Billy know about a key, and what use had he ever found for one in that hospitable spot, whither famished folk of every class gravitated naturally for the flying succor of Billy’s larder?
“The door never had a key,” said Billy. “Only once in all the time I have been here has the place been closed, and then it was but four hours.”
Down in New Orleans there is a famous old saloon called the Sazeraz. For fifty-four years it stood open to the thirsty public. Then the City Council passed a Sunday-closing ordinance, and with the enforcement of this law came the discovery that through innocuous desuetude the hinges of the doors to the Sazeraz had rusted off, while the doors themselves had become so worm-eaten that they had to be replaced by new ones. The sheriff who pounced down on Billy Boyle’s in his official capacity must have fancied he had struck a second Sazeraz, for the lock upon the door was so rusty and rheumatic through disuse that it absolutely refused to respond to the persuasion of the keys produced for the performance of its functions. We cannot help applauding the steadfastness with which this lock resented the indignity which the official visit of the sheriff implied.
If we were to attempt to make a roster of the names of those who have made the old chop-house their Mecca in seasons of hunger and thirst, we could easily fill a page. So, although you may have never visited the place yourself, it is easy for you to understand that many are the associations and reminiscences which attached to it. There was never any attempt at style there; the rooms were unattractive, save for the savory odors which hung about them; the floors were bare, and the furniture was severe to the degree of rudeness. There was no china in use upon the premises; crockery was good enough; men came there to feed their stomachs, not their eyes.
Boyle’s was a resort for politicians, journalists, artists, actors, musicians, merchants, gamblers, professional men generally, and sporting men specially. Boyle himself has always been a lover of the horse and a patron of the turf; naturally, therefore, his restaurant became the rendezvous of horsemen, so called. Upon the walls there were colored prints, which confirmed any suspicion which a stranger might have of the general character of the place, and the _mise en scene_ differed in no essential feature from that presented in the typical chop-house one meets in the narrow streets and by-ways of “dear ol’ Lunnon!”
It is likely that Boyle’s has played in its quiet way a more important part in the history of the town than you might suppose. It was here that the lawyers consulted with their clients during the noon luncheon hour; politicians came thither to confer one another and to devise those schemes by which parties were to be humbugged. It was here that the painter and the actor discussed their respective arts; here, too, in the small hours of morning, the newspaper editor and reporters gathered together to dismiss professional cares and jealousies for the nonce, and to feed in the most amicable spirit from the same trough. Jobs were put up, _coups_ planned, reconciliations effected, schemes devised, combinations suggested, news exploited and scandals disseminated, friendships strengthened, acquaintances made–all this at Billy Boyle’s–so you see it would have been hard to find a better field in which to study human nature, for hither came people of every class and kind with their ambitions, hopes, purposes, and eccentricities.
The glory of the house of Boyle was the quality of viands served there, and nowhere else in the world was it possible to find finer steaks and chops. These substantials were served with a liberality that would surely have astounded those who did not understand that the patrons of Billy Boyle’s were men blest with long appetites and robust digestions. Spanish stew was one of the specialties; so were baked potatoes, and so were Spanish roasted onions. It was the custom to sit and smoke after the meal had been disposed of, and the quality of the cigars sold in the place was the best; at night particularly–say after the newspaper clans began to gather–Boyle’s wore the aspect of a smoke-talk in full blast. Harmony invariably prevailed. If, perchance, any discordant note was sounded it was speedily hushed. Charlie, the man behind the bar, had a way of his own of preserving the peace. He was a gentleman of a few words, slow to anger, but sure of wrath. Experience had taught him that the best persuasive to respectful and reverential order was a spoke of a wagon-wheel. One of these weapons lay within reach, and it never failed to restore tranquillity when produced and wielded at the proper moment by Charlie. The consequence was that Charlie inspired all good men with respect and all evil men with terror, and the result was harmony of the most enjoyable character. Perhaps if Charlie had been on watch when that horrid sheriff arrived on his meddlesome errand, Billy Boyle’s might still be open to the rich and the poor who now meet together in that historic alley and bemoan the passing of their old point of rendezvous. Perhaps–but why indulge in surmises? It is pleasanter to regard this whole disagreeable sheriff business as an episode that is soon to pass away and to be forgotten, if not forgiven.
Surely the clouds will roll by; surely you, Septimius, and you, Tuliarchus mine, will presently gather with others of the old cronies around the hospitable board of that genial host to renew once more the delights of days and nights endeared to us in memory!
Billy Boyle’s succumbed to his love for the race-track and the abuse of his credit-check system. Field has mentioned gamblers as among the patrons of the place. After midnight they were his most liberal customers. Winning or losing, their appetites were always on edge and their tastes epicurean. Nothing the house could afford was too good for them, and, while Charlie was on deck, what the house could afford was good enough for them, whether they thought so or not. During the ’80s Chicago was a gamblers’ paradise. Everything was run “wide open,” as the saying is, under police regulation and protection, and Billy Boyle’s was in the very centre of the gambling district. If Billy had been paid cash, and could have been kept away from the race-tracks, he would have grown rich beyond the terrors of the sheriff. While the gamblers were winning they supped like princes and paid like goldsmiths. When they were losing their losses whetted their appetites, they ate to keep their spirits up, and Billy’s spindles were not long enough to hold their waiters’ checks. In flush times a goodly percentage of these checks were redeemed, but the reckoning of the bad ones at the bottom grew longer and dirtier and more hopeless, until it brought the sheriff.
We of the Morning News–Field, Stone, Ballantyne, Reilly, and I–frequented Boyle’s until the war which the paper waged unceasingly upon the league between the city administration and the gamblers brought about a stricter surveillance of gaming, and we came to be regarded by our fellow-guests as interlopers, if not spies, upon their goings in and out. Neither Boyle nor the ever faithful Charlie ever by word or sign intimated that we were _personae non gratae_, but the atmosphere of the place became too chilly for the enjoyment of late suppers.
I have devoted so much space to Billy Boyle’s because for several years Field found there the best opportunity of his life “to study human nature” and observe the “ambitions, hopes, purposes, and eccentricities” of his fellow-man.
After the “pernicious activity” of our newspaper work had “put the shutters up” against us in Calhoun Place, we transferred our midnight custom to the Boston Oyster House, on the corner of Clark and Madison streets, which Field selected because of the suggestion of baked beans, brown bread, and codfish in its name. Here we were assigned a special table in the corner near the grill range, and here we were welcomed along about twelve o’clock by the cheerful chirping of a cricket in the chimney, which Field had a superstition was intended solely for him. The Boston Oyster House had the advantage over Billy Boyle’s that here we could bring “our women folks” after the theatre or concert. It was through a piece of doggerel, composed and recited by Field with great gusto on one of these occasions, that we first learned of the serious attentions of our managing editor to Mrs. Field’s youngest sister. One of these stanzas ran thus:
_A quart taken out of the ice-box,
A dozen broiled over the fire,
Then home from the show
With her long-legged beau,
What more can our sister desire?_
But the ladies were never invited to invade the cricket’s corner, where we were permitted to beguile the hours in gossip, song, and story until the scrub-women had cleaned the rest of the big basement and “the first low swash” of the suds and brush threatened the legs of our chairs. Then, with a parting anathema on the business of slaves that toiled when honest folk should be abed, we would ascend the stairs and betake ourselves to our several homes. It was at the Boston that Field varied his diet of pie and coffee with what he was pleased to describe as “the staying qualities as well as the pleasing aspect of a Welsh rabbit.”
During the first years of his connection with the Morning News, Field worked without intermission six days of the week, without a vacation and, except when he transferred his scene of operations to the capitol at Springfield, without leaving Chicago–with two noteworthy exceptions. For some reason Field had taken what the Scotch call a scunner to ex-President Hayes, whom he regarded as a political Pecksniff. The refusal of Mr. Hayes while President to serve wine in the White House Field regarded as a cheap affectation, and so when, through his numerous sources of information, he learned that Mr. Hayes derived a part of his income from saloon property in Omaha, nothing would do Field but, accompanied by the staff artist, he must go to Omaha and investigate himself the story for the News.
He went, found the facts were as represented, and returned with the proofs and a photograph of himself sitting on a beer-keg in a saloon owned by Rutherford B. Hayes. He also bought the keg, and out of its staves had a frame made for the picture, which he presented to Mr. Ballantyne.
His other notable absence from Chicago in those days was also connected with ex-President Hayes. This time it involved a visit to the latter’s home at Fremont, O. In all his frequent references to Mr. Hayes, Field had always spoken of Mrs. Hayes with sincere admiration for her womanly qualities and convictions. So long as these were confined to the ordering of her personal household he deemed them as sacred as they were admirable. Nor did he blame her for attempting to extend them to rule the actions of her husband in his public relations. But it was for permitting this that Mr. Hayes earned the scorn of Field. When President Hayes retired from the White House to Fremont, instead of becoming another Cincinnatus at the plough he was overshadowed by the stories of Mrs. Hayes’s devotion to her chicken-farm, and the incongruity of the occupation appealed so strongly to Field’s sense of the ridiculous that he prevailed on Mr. Stone to let him go down to Fremont to take in its full absurdity with his own eyes.
Before going to Omaha, Field had taken the precaution to write enough “Sharps and Flats” to fill his column until he returned–a precaution he omitted when he started for Fremont, on the understanding that his associates on the editorial page would do his work for him. This was our opportunity, and gladly we availed ourselves of it. The habit had grown on Field of introducing his paragraphic skits with such “country journalisms” as:
“We opine,”
“Anent the story,”
“We are free to admit,”
“We violate no confidence,”
“It is stated, though not authoritatively,”
“Our versatile friend,”
“We learn from a responsible source,” and
“Our distinguished fellow-townsman.”
This he accompanied with a lavish bestowal of titles that would have done credit to the most courtly days of southern chivalry.
So when Field was safely off for Fremont we started to produce a column that would be a travesty on his favorite expressions at the expense of his titled friends. We opined and violated all the confidences of which we were possessed in regard to Colonel Phocion Howard, of the Batavia frog-farm, Major Moses P. Handy, the flaming sword of the Philadelphia Press, Senator G. Frisbie Hoar, Major Charles Hasbrook, Colonel William E. Curtis, Colonel John A. Joyce, Colonel Fred W. Nye, Major E. Clarence Stedman, and Colonels Dana, Watterson, and Halstead, and we exhausted the flowers of Field’s vocabulary in daring encomiums on Madame Modjeska, Lotta, Minnie Maddern, and Marie Jansen. If any of Field’s particular friends were omitted from “favorable mention” in that column, it was because we forgot or Mr. Stone’s blue pencil came to the rescue of his absent friend. Ballantyne was party to the conspiracy, because he had often remonstrated against the rut of expression into which Field was in danger of falling.
When Field returned that one column had driven all thoughts of Mrs. Hayes’s hens from his thoughts. There was a cold glitter in his pale blue eyes and a hollow mock in the forced “ha, ha” with which he greeted some of our “alleged efforts at wit.” He said little, but a few days later relieved his pent-up feelings by printing the following:
_MAY THE 26th, 1885
As when the bright, the ever-glorious sun In eastern slopes lifts up his flaming head, And sees the harm the envious night has done While he, the solar orb, has been abed– Sees here a yawl wrecked on the slushy sea, Or there a chestnut from its roost blown down, Or last year’s birds’ nests scattered on the lea, Or some stale scandal rampant in the town– Sees everywhere the petty work of night, Of sneaking winds and cunning, coward rats, Of hooting owls, of bugaboo and sprite, Of roaches, wolves, and serenading cats–
Beholds and smiles that bagatelles so small Should seek to devastate the slumbering earth– Then smiling still he pours on one and all The warmth and sunshine of his grateful mirth; So he who rules in humor’s vast domain, Borne far away by some Ohio train,
Returns again, like some recurring sun, And shining, God-like, on the furrowed plain Repairs the ills that envious hands have done._
But the daring violation of Field’s confidence effected its purpose. Never again did he employ the type-worn expressions of country journalism, except with set prepense and self-evident satire. He shunned them as he did an English solecism, which he never committed, save as a decoy to draw the fire of the ever-watchful and hopeless grammatical purist.
CHAPTER XVI
NATURE OF HIS DAILY WORK
In the last chapter I have told in general terms how Field employed himself day by day, from which the reader may form the impression that between eleven A.M. and midnight not over one-quarter of his time was actually employed in work, the balance being frittered away in seeming play. In one sense the reader would be right in such an inference. Field worked harder and longer at his play than at what the world has been pleased to accept as the work of a master workman, but out of that play was born the best of all that he has left. His daily column was a crystallization of the busy fancies that were running through his head during all his hours of fooling and nights of light-hearted pleasure. It reflected everything he read and heard and saw. It was a “barren sea from which he made a dry haul”–a dreary and colorless gathering that left him without material for his pen. He did not hunt for this material with a brass band, but went for it with studied persistence. Field never believed that he was sent into the world to reform it. His aim was to amuse himself, and if in so doing he entertained or gratified others, so much the better. “Reform away,” he was once reported as saying, “reform away, but as for me, the world is good enough for me as it is. I am a thorough optimist. In temperament I’m a little like old Horace–I want to get all the happiness out of the world that’s possible.” And he got it, not intermittently and in chunks, but day by day and every hour of the day.
His brother Roswell has said that the “curse of comedy was on Eugene,” and “it was not until he threw off that yoke and gave expression to the better and sweeter thoughts within him that, as with Bion, the voice of song flowed freely from the heart.”
I do not think it is quite fair to regard comedy as a curse or a yoke. Certainly Eugene Field never suffered under the blight of the one nor staggered under the burden of the other. If there is any curse in comedy, unadulterated by lying, malice, or envy, he never knew it. He knew–none better–that the author who would command the tears that purify and sweeten life must move the laughter that lightens it. What says our Shakespeare?–
_Jog on, jog, on the foot-path way,
And merrily hent the stile-a,
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a._
Eugene Field trod the footpath way to popularity and fame with a buoyant and merry heart. If there was any abatement of his joyous spirits I never knew it, and I do not think that his writings disclose any sweeter strain, as his brother suggests, in the days when ill-health checked the ardor of his boyish exuberance, but could not dim the unextinguishable flame of his comedy. The two books that contain what to the last he considered his choicest work–a judgment confirmed by their continued popularity and sale, “A Little Book of Western Verse” and “A Little Book of Profitable Tales”–were compiled from the writings (1878-1887) that flowed from his pen when he worshipped most assiduously at the shrine of the goddess of comedy and social intercourse.
I have been tempted into this digression in order that the reader may not be at a loss to reconcile the apparent frivolity of Field’s life and the mass of his writings at this period with the winnowed product as it appeared in the two volumes just mentioned. Out of the comedy of his nature came the sweetness of his work, and out of his association with all conditions of his fellow-men came that insight into the springs of human passion and action that leavens all that he wrote, from “The Robin and the Violet” (1884) down to “The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac” (1895).
The general character of Eugene Field’s life and writing went through a gradual process of evolution from the time of his arrival in Chicago to the final chapters of “The Love Affairs,” which were his last work. But it can be safely divided into two periods of six years each, with the turning point at the publication of his little books of verse and tales in the year 1889. Nearly all that he wrote previous to that year was marked by his association with his kind; that which he wrote subsequently was saturated with his closer association with books. About all the preparation he needed for his daily “wood-sawing” was a hurried glance through the local papers and his favorite exchanges, among which the New York Sun held first place, with the others unplaced. He insisted that the exchange editor should send to his desk daily a dozen or more small country sheets from the most out of the way places–papers that recorded the painting of John Doe’s front fence or that Seth Smith laid an egg on the editor’s table with a breezy “come again, Seth, the Lord loveth a cheerful liar.” When Field had accumulated enough of these items to suit his humor, he would paraphrase them, and, substituting the names of local or national celebrities, as the incongruity tickled his fancy, he would print them in his column under the heading of local, social, literary, or industrial notes, as the case might be. He seldom changed the form of these borrowed paragraphs materially, for he held most shrewdly that no humorist could improve upon the unconscious humor of the truly rural scribe. Field never outgrew the enjoyment and employment of this distinctively American appreciation of humor. As late as October 29th, 1895, “The Love Affairs” had to wait while he regaled the readers of the Chicago Record with his own brand of “Crop Reports from East Minonk,” of which the following will serve as specimens:
All are working to get in the corn crop as if they never expected to raise another crop. The schools are almost deserted, and even the schoolm’ams may yet be drafted in as huskers. As the season advances the farmers begin to realize the immensity of the crop, and the dangers and difficulties of handling it. Owing to its cumbersomeness the old-fashioned way of handling it becomes obsolete, and new methods will have to be adopted and hydraulic machinery procured. Many new uses can be made of the corn-stalks, such as flag-poles for school-houses, telegraph poles and sewer-pipes. By hollowing out a corn-stalk it will make the very best of windmill towers, as the plunger-rod can be placed inside, thus protecting it from the weather, and if desired, an excellent fountain can be obtained by perforating the joints with an awl.
A freight train on the Santa Fe railroad was delayed four hours last Saturday by a corn-stalk in Jake Schlosser’s field, which had been undermined by hogs, falling across the track. It was removed with a crane and considerable difficulty by the wrecking crew.
The town of Hegler, on the Kankakee, Minonk and Western railroad, is invisible in a forest of corn. A search party under the direction of the road commissioners are looking for it.
These solemnly exaggerated crop notes were strung out to the extent of over half a column. Some will question the wit of such fantastic extravagance, but Field had early learned the truth of Puck’s exclamation: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” He knew that there was absolutely no bounds to the gullibility of mankind, and he felt it a part of his mission to cater to it to the top of its bent. One of his most successful impositions was international in its scope. On September 13th, 1886, the following paragraph, based on the current European news of the day, appeared in his column:
We do not see that Prince Alexander, the deposed Bulgarian monarch, is going to have very much difficulty in keeping the wolf away from the door. In addition to the income from a $2,000,000 legacy, he has a number of profitable investments in America which he can realize upon at any time. He owns considerable real estate in Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, and Omaha, and he is a part owner of one of the largest ranches in New Mexico. His American property is held in the name of Alexander Marie Wilhelm Ludwig Maraschkoff, and his interests in this country are looked after by Colonel J.S. Norton, the well-known attorney of this city. Colonel Norton tells us that he would not be surprised if Prince Alexander were to come to this country to live. In a letter to Colonel Norton last June the Prince said: “If ever it is in divine pleasure to release us from the harassing responsibilities which now rest upon us, it will be our choice to find a home in that great country beyond the Atlantic, where, removed from the intrigues of court and state, we may enjoy that quiet employment and peaceful meditation for which we have always yearned.”
Now it must be confessed that this bears a sufficient air of verisimilitude to deceive the casual reader. It is as perfect a specimen of the pure invention which Field delighted to deck out in the form of truth with facts and the names of real personages as he ever wrote. In that year not only Englishmen, but other foreigners, were investing in American real estate. James S. Norton was indeed a well-known attorney of Chicago, as he deserved to be for his wit and professional ability. He was on such friendly terms with Field that the latter thought nothing of taking any liberty he pleased with his name whenever it served to lend credibility to an otherwise unconvincing narrative. In subsequent paragraphs Field answered fictitious inquiries as to Mr. Norton’s reality by giving his actual address, with the result that Mr. Norton was pestered with correspondence from all over the union offering opportunities to invest Prince Alexander’s funds.
But the success of this hoax was not confined to the American side of the Atlantic, as the following paragraph from London Truth shortly after proves:
I gave some particulars a few weeks ago of the large amount of property which had been extracted from Bulgaria by Prince Alexander, who arrived at Sofia penniless, except for a sum of money which was advanced to him by the late Emperor of Russia. It is now asserted by the American papers that Prince Alexander has made considerable purchases under an assumed name (Alexander Marie Wilhelm Ludwig Maraschkoff) of real estate in Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, and Omaha, and that he is part owner of one of the largest sheep ranches in New Mexico. The Prince’s property in America is under the charge of Colonel Norton, a well-known attorney of Chicago. Prince Alexander must be possessed of a true Yankee cuteness if he managed to squeeze the “pile” for these investments out of Bulgaria in addition to the L70,000 to which I referred recently. The Russian papers have accused him of dabbling in stock exchange speculations, and if disposed for such business, his position must have given him some excellent opportunities of making highly profitable bargains.
Thus was Prince Alexander convicted of having burglarized Bulgaria upon an invention which should not have deceived Mr. Labouchere. How that ostentatiously manufactured alias ever imposed on Truth passes comprehension. Is it any wonder that at one of our numerous mid-day lunches “Colonel” Norton fired the following rhyming retort at Field?–
_TO EUGENE FIELD
Forgive, dear youth, the forwardness Of her who blushing sends you this,
Because she must her love confess, Alas! Alas! A lass she is.
Long, long, so long, her timid heart Has held its joy in secrecy,
Being by nature’s cunning art
So made, so made, so maidenly.
She knew you once, but as a pen
In humor dipt in wisdom’s pool,
And gladly gave her homage then
To one, to one, too wonderful;
But having seen your face, so mild,
So pale, so full of animus,
She can but cry in accents wild,
Eugene! Eugene! You genius!_
The deep and abiding interest Field felt in the fortunes of Prince Alexander may be inferred from his exclamation, “When Stofsky meets Etrovitch, then comes the tug of Servo-Bulgarian war!”
He took no end of pleasure in starting discussions over the authorship of verses and sayings by wilfully attributing them to persons whose mere name in such connection conveyed the sense of humorous impossibility, and he thoroughly enjoyed such suggestions being taken seriously. Once having started the ball of doubt rolling he never let it stop for want of some neat strokes of his cunning pen. Several noteworthy instances of this form of literary diversion or perversion occur to me. There never was any occasion to doubt the authorship of “The Lost Sheep,” which won for Sally Pratt McLean wide popular recognition a decade and a half ago. Its first stanza will recall it to the memory of all:
_De massa of de sheep fol’
Dat guard de sheep fol’ bin,
Look out in de gloomerin’ meadows
Whar de long night rain begin–
So he call to de hirelin’ shepa’d, “Is my sheep, is dey all come in?”
Oh, den says de hirelin’ shepa’d,
“Dey’s some, dey’s black and thin, And some, dey’s po’ol’ wedda’s,
But de res’ dey’s all brung in–
But de res’ dey’s all brung in.”_
The very notoriety of the authorship of these lines merely served as an incentive for Field to print the following paragraph calling it in question:
Miss Sally McLean, author of “Cape Cod Folks,” claims to have written the dialect poem, “Massa of de Sheep Fold,” which the New York Sun pronounces a poetic masterpiece. We dislike to contradict Miss McLean, but candor compels us to say that we have reason to believe that she is not the author of the stanzas in question. According to the best of our recollection, this poem was dashed off in the wine-room of the Gault House, at Louisville, Ky., by Colonel John A. Joyce, from ten to twenty years ago. Joyce was in the midst of a party of convivial friends. After several cases of champagne had been tossed down, a member of the party said to Colonel Joyce, “Come, old fellow, give us an extempore poem.” As Colonel Joyce had not utilized his muse for at least twenty minutes, he cordially assented to the proposition, and while the waiter was bringing a fresh supply of wine Colonel Joyce dashed off the dialect poem so highly praised by the New York Sun. We are amazed that he has laid no claim to its authorship since its revival. Unfortunately, all the gentlemen who were present at the time he dashed off the poem are dead, or there would be no trouble in substantiating his claims to its authorship. We distinctly remember he wrote it the same evening he dashed off the pretty poem so violently claimed by, and so generally accredited to, Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
This was written in February, 1885, and though it failed of its ostensible aim of discrediting Miss McLean’s authorship of “The Lost Sheep,” it succeeded in rekindling throughout the exchanges the smouldering fires of the dispute Field had himself started over that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “Solitude,” the relevant verse of which runs:
_Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone,
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has troubles enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air,
The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care._
From the day “Solitude” appeared in Miss Wheeler’s “Poems of Passion” in 1883, and so long as Field lived, he never ceased to fan this controversy into renewed life, more often than not by assuming a tone of indignation that there should be any question over it, as in the following recurrence to the subject in July, 1885:
It is reported that Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox is anxious to institute against Colonel John A. Joyce such legal proceedings as will determine beyond all doubt that she, and not Colonel Joyce, was the author of the poem entitled “Love and Laughter,” and beginning:
_”Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.”_
Mrs. Wilcox is perhaps the most touchy person in American literature at the present time. For a number of years she has been contributing to the newspaper press of the country, and her verses have been subjected to the harshest sort of criticism. The paragraphists of the press have bastinadoed and gibbeted her in the most cruel manner; her poems have been burlesqued, parodied, and travestied heartlessly–in short, every variety of criticism has been heaped upon her work, which, even the most prejudiced will admit, has evinced remarkable boldness and an amazing facility of expression. Now we would suppose that all this shower of criticism had tanned the fair author’s hide–we speak metaphorically–until it was impervious to every unkindly influence. But so far from being bomb-proof, Mrs. Wilcox is even more sensitive than when she bestrode her Pegasus for the first time and soared into that dreamy realm where the lyric muse abides. There is not a quip nor a quillet from the slangy pen of the daily newspaper writers that she does not brood over and worry about as heartily as if it were an overdue mortgage on her pianoforte. We presume to say that the protests which she has made within the last two years against the utterances of the press would fill a tome. Now this Joyce affair is simply preposterous; we do not imagine that there is in America at the present time an ordinarily intelligent person who has ever believed for one moment that Colonel Joyce wrote the poem in question–the poem entitled “Love and Laughter.” Colonel Joyce is an incorrigible practical joker, and his humor has been marvellously tickled by the prodigious worry his jest has cost the Wisconsin bard. The public understands the situation; there is no good reason why Mrs. Wilcox should fume and fret and scurry around, all on account of that poem, like a fidgety hen with one chicken. Her claim is universally conceded; there is no shadow of doubt that she wrote the poem in question, and by becoming involved in any further complication on this subject she will simply make a laughing-stock of herself; we would be sorry to see her do that.
And yet whenever his stock of subjects for comment or raillery ran low he would write a letter to himself, asking the address of Colonel John A. Joyce, the author of “Love and Laughter,” and manage in his answer to open up the whole controversy afresh. I suppose that to this day there are thousands of good people in the United States whose innocence has been abused by Field’s superserviceable defence of Mrs. Wilcox’s title to “Laugh and the World Laughs with You.” It was delicious fooling to him and to those of us who were on the inside, but I question if Mrs. Wilcox ever appreciated its humorous aspect.
Speaking of his practice of getting public attention for his own compositions through a letter of his own “To the Editor,” the following affords a good example of his ingenious method, with his reply:
EVANSTON, ILL., Aug. 15, 1888.
_To the Editor_:
Several of us are very anxious to learn the authorship of the following poem, which is to be found in so many scrap-books, and which ever and anon appears as a newspaper waif:
_RESIGNATION
I have a dear canary bird,
That every morning sings
The sweetest songs I ever heard,
And flaps his yellow wings.
I love to sit the whole day long
Beside the window-sill,
And listen to the joyous song
That warbler loves to trill.
My mother says that in a year
The bird that I’ve adored
Will maybe, lay some eggs and rear A callow, cooing horde.
But father says it’s quite absurd
To think that bird can lay,
For though it is a wondrous bird, It isn’t built that way.
Now whether mother tells me true
Or father, bothers me;
There’s nothing else for me to do But just to wait and see.
Whate’er befalls this bird of mine, I am resolved ’twill please–
Far be it from me to repine
At what the Lord decrees._
Mr. Slason Thompson, compiler of “The Humbler Poets,” could decide this matter for us if he were here now, but unhappily he is out of town just at present. We have a suspicion that the poem was originally written by Isaac Watts, but that suspicion is impaired somewhat by another suspicion that there were no such things as canary birds in Isaac Watts’s time.
Yours truly,
MELISSA MAYFIELD.
We have shown this letter to Evanston’s most distinguished citizen, the Hon. Andrew Shuman, and that sapient poet-critic tells us that as nearly as he can recollect the poem was written, not by Dr. Watts, but by an American girl. But whether that girl was Lucretia Davidson or Miss Ada C. Sweet he cannot recall.
Mr. Francis F. Browne, of The Dial, thinks it is one of Miss Wheeler’s earlier poems, since it is imbued with that sweet innocence, that childish simplicity, and that meek piety which have ever characterized the work of the famous Wisconsin lyrist. But as we can learn nothing positive as to the authorship of the poem, we shall have to call upon the public at large to help us out.
It is needless to say that the public at large could throw no light on the composition of this imitation of Dr. Watts with which Field was not already possessed, since both poem and “Melissa Mayfield” were creations of Field’s fancy.
One of the most characteristic examples of the pains he would take to palm off a composition of his own upon some innocent and unsuspecting public man appeared in the Morning News on January 22d, 1887. It was nothing short of an attempt to father upon the late Judge Thomas M. Cooley the authorship of half a dozen bits of verse of varying styles and degrees of excellence. He professed to have received from Jasper Eastman, a prominent citizen of Adrian, Mich., twenty-eight poems written by Judge Cooley, “the venerable and learned jurist, recently appointed receiver of the Wabash Railroad.” These were said to have appeared in the Ann Arbor Daily News when it was conducted by the judge’s most intimate friend, between the years 1853 and 1861. Field anticipated public incredulity by saying that “people who knew him to be a severe moralist and a profound scholar will laugh you to scorn if you try to make them believe Cooley ever condescended to express his fancies in verse.” Then he went on to describe the judge, at the time of writing the verse, as “a long, awkward boy, with big features, moony eyes, a shock of coarse hair, and the merest shadow of a mustache,” in proof of which description he presented a picture of the young man, declared to be from a daguerrotype in the possession of Mr. Eastman. The first “specimen gem” was said to be a paraphrase from Theocritus, entitled “Mortality”:
_O Nicias, not for us alone
Was laughing Eros born,
Nor shines for us alone the moon,
Nor burns the ruddy morn.
Alas! to-morrow lies not in the ken Of us who are, O Nicias, mortal men._
Next followed a bit, “in lighter vein, from the Simonides of Amorgas,” entitled “A Fickle Woman”:
_Her nature is the sea’s, that smiles to-night A radiant maiden in the moon’s soft light; The unsuspecting seaman sets his sails, Forgetful of the fury of her gales;
To-morrow, mad with storms, the ocean roars, And o’er his hapless wreck her flood she pours._
Field then went on to describe Judge Cooley as equally felicitous in Latin verse, presenting in proof thereof the following, “sung at the junior class supper at Ann Arbor, May 14th, 1854”:
_Nicyllam bellis oculis–
(Videre est amare),
Carminibus et poculis,
Tra la la, tra la la,
Me placet propinare:
Tra la la, tra la la,–
Me placet propinare!_
Beside such grotesque literary horse-play as this, with a gravity startling in its unexpected daring, Field proceeded to attribute to the venerable jurist one of the simplest and purest lullabies that ever came from his own pen, opening with:
_I hear Thy voice, dear Lord;
I hear it by the stormy sea
When winter nights are bleak and wild, And when, affright, I call to Thee;
It calms my fears and whispers me, “Sleep well, my child.”_
Then follows “The Vision of the Holy Grail,” one of those exercises in archaic English in which Field took infinite pains as well as delight, and to which, as a production of Judge Cooley’s, he paid the passing tribute of saying that it was “a graceful imitation of old English.” As an example of the judge’s humorous vein Field printed the conclusion of his lines “To a Blue Jay”:
_When I had shooed the bird away
And plucked the plums–a quart or more– I noted that the saucy jay,
Albeit he had naught to say,
Appeared much bluer than before._
After crediting the judge with a purposely awful parody on “Dixie,” in which “banner” is made to rhyme with “Savannah,” and “holy” with “Pensacola,” Field concluded the whimsical fabrication with the serious comment: “It seems a pity that such poetic talent as Judge Cooley evinced was not suffered to develop. His increasing professional duties and his political employments put a quietus to those finer intellectual indulgences with which his earlier years were fruitful.”
Having launched this piece of literary drollery, over which he had studied and we had talked for a week or more, Field proceeded to clinch the verse-making on Judge Cooley by a series of letters to himself, one or two of which will indicate the fertile cleverness and humor he employed to cram his bald fabrication down the public gullet. The first appeared on January 24th, in the following letter “to the Editor”:
I have read Judge Cooley’s poems with a good deal of interest. I am somewhat of a poet myself, having written sonnets and things now and then for the last twenty years. My opinion is that Judge Cooley’s translations, paraphrases, and imitations, are much worthier than his original work. I hold that no poet can be a true poet unless he is at the same time somewhat of a naturalist. If Judge Cooley had been anything of a naturalist he would never have made such a serious blunder as he has made in his poem entitled “Lines to a Blue Jay.” The idea of putting a blue jay into a plum-tree is simply shocking! I don’t know when I’ve had anything grate so harshly upon my feelings as did this mistake when I discovered it this morning. It is as awful as the blunder made by one of the modern British poets (I forget his name) in referring to the alligators paddling about in Lake Erie. The blue jay _(Cyanurus cristatus)_ does not eat plums, and therefore does not infest plum-trees.
Yours truly,
CADMON E. BATES.
Upon which Field, in his editorial plurality, commented:
To Professor Bates’s criticism we shall venture no reply. We think, however, that allowance should be made for the youth of the poet when he committed the offence which so grievously torments our correspondent. It might be argued, too, that the jay of which the poet treats is no ordinary bird, but is one of those omnivorous creatures which greedily pounce upon everything coming within their predatory reach.
And two days later he made bold to crush the judge’s critics with letters from the same versatile pen that never failed to aid in the furtherance of its master’s hoaxes:
To the Editor: Prof. Bates may be a good taxidermist, but he knows little of ornithology. Never before he spoke was it denied that the _Cyanurus cristatus_ (blue jay) fed upon plums. All the insect-eating birds also eat of the small fruits. It is plain that the poet knew this, even though the taxidermist didn’t.
Yours truly,
L.R. COWPERTHWAITE.
To the Editor: Isn’t Prof. Bates too severe in his claim that genius like that of the poetic Judge Cooley should be bound down by the prosaic facts of ornithology? Milton scorned fidelity to nature, especially when it came to ornithological details, and poets, as a class, have been singularly wayward in this respect. My impression is that Judge Cooley has simply made use of a poetic license which any fair-minded person should be willing to concede the votaries of the muse.
Yours truly,
J.G.K.
The echoes of Judge Cooley’s youthful verse were never permitted to die wholly out of Field’s column, but were frequently given renewed life by casual references. Even the publication of “The Divine Lullaby” in his “Little Book of Western Verse” did not prevent Field from speaking of Judge Cooley’s poetical diversions.
On another occasion he spent his odd time for weeks in preparing a humorous hoax upon the critics of Chicago. It consisted of a number of close imitations of the typical verses of Dr. Watts, in which he was a master. The fruits of his congenial labor on this occasion are preserved in his collected works. But the purpose for which they were prepared adds to their interest. They were incorporated in a prose article which gave a plausible account of how they had been exhumed from the correspondence of a sentimental friend of Watts. When the last strokes had been put upon the story, whose tone of genuineness was calculated to deceive the elect, it was mailed to Charles A. Dana, who was thoroughly in sympathy with Field in all such enterprises, and on the following Sunday it appeared in the New York Sun as an extract from a London paper. As soon as the publication reached Chicago a number of the cleverest reporters on the News staff were sent out to interview the local literary authorities. They were all carefully coached by Field what questions to ask and what points to avoid, and their reports were all turned over to him to prepare for publication. Next morning the better part of a page of the News was surrendered to quotations from the fictitious article, with learned dissertations on the value of the discovery, coupled with careful comparisons of the style and sentiments of the verse with the acknowledged work of Watts. In the whole city only one of those interviewed was saved, by a sceptical analysis, from falling into the pit so adroitly prepared by Field.
Loyal to Chicago, to a degree incomprehensible by those who judged his sentiments by his unsparing comments on its crudities in social and literary ways, he never ceased to get pleasure out of serio-comic confounding of its business activities and artistic aspirations. Its business men and enterprises were constantly referred to in his column as equally strenuous in the pursuit of the almighty dollar and of the higher intellectual life. In his view “Culture’s Garland,” from the Chicago stand-point, was, indeed, a string of sausages. Of this spirit the following, printed in December, 1890, is a good example:
A DANGER THAT THREATENS
The rivalry between the trade and the literary interests in Chicago has been wondrously keen this year.
Prof. Potwins, the most eminent of our statisticians, figures that we now have in the midst of us either a poet or an author to every square yard within the corporate limits, and he estimates that in ten years’ time we shall have a literary output large enough to keep all the rest of the world reading all the time.
Our trade has been increasing, too. Last September 382,098 cattle were received, against 330,994 in September of 1889. So far this year the increase over 1889 in the receipts of hogs is 2,000,000.