Slason Thompson

“ How good it is to live in this beautiful world of ours; how varied and countless are the blessings bestowed upon us; how sweet is the beneficence of Nature; how dear is the companionship of humanity!
"The companionship of humanity!" Nothing could make up to him any narrowing of that. His friends became dearer to him than ever. He could send his copy down to the printer, but when his friends did not come out in sufficient numbers to Buena Park he made the long trip to town to meet them at luncheon or in the Saints' and Sinners' Corner at McClurg's. ”

“ In the rear, and facing the opening between the Court House and the Town Hall, stands the Congregational Church, where Eugene Field crunched caraway-seed biscuits when on a visit to his grandmother, and back of this stands another church, spotless in the white paint of Puritan New England meeting-houses, but deserted by its congregation of Baptists, which had dwindled to the vanishing point. In the centre of the village green is a grove of noble elms under whose grateful shade, on the day of my visit to Newfane, I saw a quartette of gray-headed attorneys, playing quoits with horse-shoes. ”

“ Miss Abbott is a lady for whom we have had for a number of years—ever since her debut as a public singer—the highest esteem. She is one of the most conscientious of women in her private walk, conscientious in every relationship and duty and practice that go to make the sum of her daily life. This conscientiousness, involving patience, humility, perseverance, and integrity, has been, we think, the real secret of her success. And no one who has watched her steady rise from poverty to affluence, and from obscurity to fame, will deny the proposition that the woman is genuinely successful ”

“ While her sisters were thinking how good it was of Field to take so much interest in a mere child, their long afternoon drives together down "Lovers' Lane, Saint Jo," had come to that happy turn that ignores all immaturities of age and lays the life of a man at the feet of the maid—albeit, the feet are still strangers to the French heels and have not yet known the witchery that goes with long dresses. Once sure of himself, Field lost no time in making his wishes known not only to Mistress Julia, but to her astonished family. ”

“ Field was as busy as a shuttle in a sewing-machine. He announced that Elder Melville E. Stone would "preside over the meetin' and line out the hymns," which Mr. Stone, though no singer, proceeded to do, calling on the mendacious Sinners for brief confessions of their manifold transgressions during the dying year. The tide of experiences was at its height when, on the first stroke of midnight, every light was doused. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Field prepared the menu with infinite care, and to the carnal eye it read like a dinner fit for the gods. But in reality it consisted of typical New England dishes, in honor of our New England guest, masquerading in the gay and frivolous lingo of the French capital. Codfish-balls, with huge rashers of bacon, boiled corned beef and cabbage, pork and beans, with slices of soggy Boston brown-bread, corn-bread and doughnuts, the whole topped off with apple-pie and cheese, were served with difficult gravity by the waiters to an appreciative company. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not love all children.
I have tried to analyze my feelings toward children, and I think I discover that I love them, in so far as I can make pets of them.
I believe that, if I live, I shall do my best literary work when I am a grandfather.
So cleverly are truth and fiction dove-tailed together in this "Auto-Analysis" that it would puzzle a jury of his intimate friends to say where Field was attempting to state facts and where he was laughing in his sleeve. ”

“ Into this civilization of the mining camp and smelter, just emerging into that of the railway, political, and financial centre of a vast and wealthy territory, came Eugene Field at the age of thirty-one, as free from care, warm-hearted, and open-handed as the most reckless adventurer in Colorado. Although a husband and a father, devoted as ever to his family, he threw himself into the bohemian life of Denver with the abandon of a youth of twenty. ”

“ He knew all that was to be known of the delightful art of the binder, but his most cherished specimen would always be one where a master had made some slip in tooling. For oddities and rarities in all the range of the collector's fever, from books and prints to pewter mugs and rag dolls, his mania was omnivorous and catholic. And strange as it may seem, with his mania was mingled a shrewd appreciation of the commercial side of it all. This is what Mr. Ralph means when he says Field was no ignoramus in his madness. ”

“ To his new home, which he christened "The Sabine Farm," were moved all the accumulated treasures of his mania for curiosities and antiques. "I do not think he thought much of art," wrote Edward Everett Hale in his introduction to "A Little Book of Profitable Tales"; and the motley, albeit fascinating, aggregation of rare and outlandish chattels in Eugene Field's house justified that conclusion. Of what the world calls art, whether the creation of the brush, the chisel, the loom, or the potter's oven, he had the most rudimentary conception. ”

“ Roswell M. Field never recognized the legality of any such ceremony or that Mary and Jeremiah had the lawful right to intermarry while the marriage at Putney remained in full force and effect. He had reason to be thankful for his escape from a union for life with a woman of such frivolous nature and easy indifference to the most sacred obligations of human and divine law. But he would not permit himself to become a silent copartner in what, to his strict notion of the inviolability of the marriage contract, was one of the most heinous crimes against society and morals. ”

“ More provident than his brother, Roswell lived comfortably on his share for nearly seven years, only in the end to envy the superior shrewdness of Eugene, who, putting his portion into cash, realized more from it, and spent it like a lord while it lasted. I must confess that I share Roswell's views, for the investment which Eugene Field made in the two years after coming of age in spending $20,000 on experience, returned to him many fold in the profession he was finally driven to adopt, not as a pastime, but to earn a livelihood for himself and his growing family. ”

“ With the joyousness of a boy about to play a prank, he chased down-stairs at the noon hour when he knew Miss Jeffries was at lunch with Mr. Barrett in the cafe of the Grunewald. Calling a waiter, he sent the huge envelope in to her table. She glanced at it a moment and then gradually drew the package from its envelope, while Field and I stood watching behind the entrance. It spread all over the table as she continued to unfold the enormous sheet, and its rustle attracted the attention of nearly every one in the room. ”

“ It is not, however, for his learning and accomplishments of mind and person that we are interested in Roswell Martin Field, but for the strange incident in his life that uprooted him from the congenial environments of New England and the career opening so temptingly before him, to transplant him to Missouri, there to become the father of a youth, who, by all laws of heredity and by the peculiar tang of his genius, should have been born and nurtured amid the stern scenes and fixed customs of Puritan New England. ”

“ Well, Chicago beat St. Louis to-day and, the gods be glorified! Kansas City beat Detroit! as for New York, Boston whipped her day before yesterday and Washington shut her out to-day! now if Detroit will only lose a game or two to St. Louis! I more than half suspect that your home folk will think that you and I are base-ball mad. ”

“ He knew children through and through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He associated with them on terms of the most intimate comradeship and wormed his way into their confidence with assiduous sympathy. Thus he became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.
"In wit a man, in simplicity a child," nothing gloomy, narrow, or pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, "his finances, alas! were always miserably low." ”

“ Field announced that he preferred to be enrolled as a Democrat, and to accept his share in all the obloquy which he laid at the Democratic door rather than affiliate with the Mugwump bolters. He said that he would rather be classed as a thoroughbred donkey than be feared as a mule without pride of pedigree or hope of posterity, whose only virtue lay in its heels. Then he swathed himself in a shroud of newspapers and laid himself out in the centre of the floor in the rôle of a martyred Republican. He bade the rest of us form a procession and walk over him, taking care not to step on the corpse. ”

“ The every-day practical joker and entertaining mimic of Denver recoiled in Chicago from the reputation of a Merry Andrew, the prospect of gaining which he disrelished and feared. He preferred to invent paragraphic pleasantries for the world at large and indulge his personal humor in the office, at home, or with personal friends. Gayety was his element. He lived, loved, inspired, and translated it, in the doing which latter he wrote, without strain or embarrassment, reams of prose satire, contes risqués, and Hudibrastic verse. ”

“ I never knew another bowler so quick to discover the tricks and peculiarities of an alley or so crafty to master and profit by them. Whenever the hour was ripe for a game Field would send the boy with some such taunt or challenge as is shown in the accompanying fac-simile.
I shall never forget, nor would an elaborately colored score by Field permit me, if I would, his chagrin over the result of one of these matches. He and Willis Hawkins had challenged Cowen and me to a tourney, as he called it, of five strings. ”

“ Neither a sinner nor a saint was the man who went into an old book-store in Chicago and bewildered the matter-of-fact dealer in old editions with the inquiry, "Have you an unexpurgated copy of Hannah More's 'Letters to a Village Maiden'?"
Everything Field wrote in prose or verse reflects his contempt for earth's mighty and his sympathy for earth's million mites. His art, like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was "to magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a two-penny post communication." ”

“ Nature smiles once more; the lawns are green, the trees are reviving; the roadsides are beautiful with the grasses, the ferns, and the wild flowers, among which insectivorous life makes cheery music. The rain has arrayed old Mother Earth in a bright new garb.
The month of September is close at hand; the conditions of its coming are favorable. There is fun ahead for all us sentimental people. A beautiful moon is waiting rather impatiently for the clouds to roll by; the moon is always at her best in the full summer-time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I think Field cherished a genuine admiration for Abraham Lincoln, whose whole life, nature, personal appearance, unaffected greatness, manner of speech, and fate appealed to his idea of what "the first American" should be. But strike the names of Newman, Horace, old man Poggio, Walter Scott, and Hans Andersen from the list of his favorites that follow the name of Lincoln, and it gains in truth as it shrinks in length.
Upon the question of extending the right to vote to women, Field wasted no more thought than he did on "Politics," whether so called or not. ”

“ All the politics, railway, and mining interests of the newly created state centred in Denver. The city was alive with the throbbing energy of strife and speculation over mines, railway grants, and political power. Life was rapid, boisterous, and rough. Nothing had settled into the conventional grooves of habit. The whole community was fearless in its gayety. It had not learned to affect the sobriety and demureness of stupidity lest its frivolity should be likened to the crackling of thorns under a pot. ”

“ Throughout "Culture's Garland" Field is the unsparing satirist of contemporary humbug and pretence—social, political, and literary—and that perhaps accounts for its failure to achieve an immediate popular success. I, for one, am glad that so late as December, 1893, and after he had tasted the sweets of popular applause, with its attendant royalties, he had the courage to write of it to a friend in Boston, "I am not ashamed of this little book, but, like the boy with the measles, I am sorry for it in spots."
"Culture's Garland" really cleared the way for Field's subsequent literary success. ”

“ ANECDOTES OF LIFE IN DENVER
No story of Eugene Field's life would be true, no study of his personality complete, if it ignored or even glossed over "the mad wild ways of his youthful days" in Denver. He never wearied of telling of the constant succession of harum-scarum pranks that made the Tribune office the storm-centre for all the fun-loving characters in Colorado. Not that Field ever neglected his work or his domestic duties for play, but it was a dull day for Denver when his pen or his restless spirit for mischief did not provide some fresh cause for local amazement or merriment. ”

“ All men, and especially literary men, seem to consider themselves on dress parade in their correspondence, and pose accordingly. Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred are more self-conscious in writing than they are in talking. Even the least conscious seem to imagine that what they put down in black and white is to pass under some censorious eye. The professional writer, whether his reputation be international, like that of a Lowell or a Stevenson, or confined to the circle of his village associates, never appears to pen a line without some affectation. ”

“ 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." ”