Eugene Field

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The general public will always remember Eugene Field as the author of Little Boy Blue, the many friends of Field, in addition to their memory of him as the charming poet of childhood, will always think of him as the irrepressible prince of merry-makers. To perpetrate a joke Field spared neither labor nor his friends. Many of his pranks were mere whimsicalities, innocent pleasantries that hurt no one. ”

“ No one who had spent any time in Colorado came East without bringing a fresh budget of tales of the pranks and pasquinades of Eugene Field, of the Denver Tribune. The clipping vogue of his Primer series had given him a newspaper reputation wide as the continent. He was far more quoted, however, for what he said and did than for anything he wrote. Had his career ended in 1883, before he came to Chicago, there would have been little or nothing left of literary value to keep his memory alive, beyond the regretful mention in the obituary columns of the western press. ”

“ With Eugene Field the man was always a bundle of delightful surprises, an ever unconventional personality of which only the merest suggestion is given in his works.
In the study I have made of the life of Eugene Field in the following pages I have received assistance from many sources, but none has been of so great value as that from his father's friend, Melvin L. Gray, in whose home Field found the counsel of a father and the loving sympathy of a mother. ”

“ Great credit for the remarkable success of Eugene is due to his Aunt Jones, Miss Mary French, and his guardian, Professor John Burgess, who were a continual and living influence about him until he arrived at maturity."
In 1868, at the age when his father was admitted to the bar of Vermont, Eugene Field, according to Mr. Tufts, was barely able to pass the examination for entrance at Williams "with some conditions." The only evidence preserved in the books of the college that he passed at all is the following entry:
Eugene Field, aged 18, September 5, 1868, son of R.M. Field, St. Louis. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This eventually led President Hopkins to inform Mr. Tufts privately that it might be well for his pupil, as certainly it would conduce to the orderly life of Williamstown, if he would run up from Monson and persuade Eugene to return home with him. There was no dismissal, rustication, or official reprimand of Eugene Field by the ever-honored President Hopkins. Field simply faded out of the annals and class of 1872, as if he had never been entered at Williams.
Memories of Eugene Field are not as thick at Williamstown as blackberries on the Pelham hills. ”

“ He was a student of the institution these three sessions only. His brother Eugene Field was a student of the junior class, session 1870-71, and never before or since.
I knew both of them well. Eugene was an inattentive, indifferent student, making poor progress in the studies of the course—a genial, sportive, song-singing, fun-making companion. Nevertheless he was bright, sparkling, entertaining and a leader among "the boys." In truth he was in intellect above his fellows and a genius along his favorite lines. He was prolific of harmless pranks and his school life was a big joke. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Francis Wilson, in his "The Eugene Field I Knew," preserves the following story of Eugene's further venture in search of a profession:
He organized a company of his own in conjunction with his friend, Marvin Eddy, who tells of a comedy Field wrote in which the heroines were impersonated by Field himself to the heroes of the only other acting member of the cast—Mr. Eddy. A Madame Saunders was the orchestra, or rather the pianist, and Monsieur Saunders painted the posters which announced the coming of the "great and only" entertainment. Rehearsals were held in the hotel dining-rooms. ”

“ Whether born on the anniversary of Cromwell's death or in the boiler-shop, no stories of the youthful precocity of Eugene Field survive to entertain us or to suggest that he gave early indication of the possession either of unusual talent or of that unique personality that were to distinguish him from the thousands born every day. ”

“ Louis as the birthplace of Eugene Field. Although Eugene himself went with the photographer and pointed out the house, his brother Roswell strenuously maintains that Eugene was born before the family moved to the Walsh row, so-called, and that to the boiler-shop belongs the honor of having heard the first lullabies that greeted the ears of their greatest master. ”

“ A pine table with two drawers was considered good enough for the most brilliant paragrapher in the United States, and, for all he cared, so it was. He had no special use for a desk, for at that time he carried his library in his head and wrote on his lap. I am happy in being able to present in corroboration of this a study of Eugene Field at work, drawn from life by his friend, J.L. Sclanders, then artist for the News, and also the copy of a blue print photograph, on the back of which Field wrote, "And they call this art!" ”

“ PEDIGREE
"Sir John Maundeville, Kt.," was his prototype, and Father Prout was his patron saint. The one introduced him to the study of British balladry, the other led him to the classic groves of Horace.
"I am a Yankee by pedigree and education," wrote Eugene Field to Alice Morse Earle, the author of "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," and other books of the same flavor, "but I was born in that ineffably uninteresting city, St. Louis." ”

“ Roswell Field says that his brother without instruction early acquired the habit of drawing amusing pictures of his playmates and his pets, and that later in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer. But Eugene's drawings at all periods were never more than grotesque or fanciful illustrations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting everything that came to his attention.
In after life Eugene Field gave frequent proof that he cherished contradictory sentiments toward Vermont and New England. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In December, 1895, Edmund Clarence Stedman contributed to the "Souvenir Book" of the New York Hebrew Fair a charmingly appreciative, yet justly critical, tribute to Eugene Field, whom he likened to Shakespeare's Yorick, whose "motley covered the sweetest nature and tenderest heart." Mr. Stedman there speaks of Field as a "complex American with the obstreperous bizarrerie of the frontier and the artistic delicacy of our oldest culture always at odds within him—but he was above all a child of nature, a frolic incarnate, and just as he would have been in any time or country." ”

“ Field’s children are known as “Googhy” and “Posy.”
Eugene Field was born in St. Louis, Missouri, September 2, 1850. Part of his early life was passed in Vermont and Massachusetts. He was educated in a university in Missouri. From 1873 to 1883 he was connected with various newspapers in Missouri and Colorado. He joined the staff of the Chicago “Daily News” in 1883 and removed to Chicago, where he continued to reside until his death, twelve years later. Of Mr. Field’s books, “The Denver Tribune Primer” was issued in 1882; “Culture Garden” (1887) ; “Little Book of Western Friends” (1889) ”

“ 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." ”

“ Louis. My mother taught her to read. She saw my name in a newspaper, and wrote me. We are now as thick as three in a bed. Her husband is a Mormon farmer. They have ten children, and are otherwise prosperous. We all unite in affectionate regards to Mrs. Gray and yourself, and we wish you the choicest of God's blessings.
As ever, sincerely yours,
EUGENE FIELD.
420 Fullerton Ave., Chicago.
Writing on June 28th, Field enclosed the dedication of the "Echoes from the Sabine Farm" to Mr. Gray, asking him to make any alterations therein which his taste or judgment might suggest. ”

“ It was in Denver that Eugene Field entered upon and completed the final stage of what may be called the hobble-de-hoy period in his life and literary career. He went to the capital of Colorado the most indefatigable merry-maker that ever turned night into day, a past-master in the art of mimicry, the most inveterate practical joker that ever violated the proprieties of friendship, time, and occasion to raise a laugh or puncture a fraud. As his friend of those days, E.D. Cowen, has written, "as a farceur and entertainer no professional could surpass him." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Londoner rightly says that an inert Eugene Field was an impossibility, and at that time he was only supremely happy when busily engaged in playing some practical joke on his ever-suspecting but never sufficiently wary friends. Of course Mr. Londoner himself was victimized, and more than once. During one campaign, as chairman of the Republican County Central Committee, Mr. Londoner was delegated to work up enthusiasm among the colored voters of Denver, and in an unguarded moment he took Field into his confidence and boasted of his flattering progress. ”

“ Julia, Ida, Posie, and I may drop in on you Saturday morning to spend Sunday. Would you like it? Would the child be too much for the peace and dignity of the household? Dear Mr. Gray, do be good to yourself. Don't let the rest of creation worry you one bit. You are about the only man I have to depend upon, for you know the good that is in me, as well as the folly. Our love to the Butterflyish Miss Eva, and more love to you—God bless you! Ever affectionately yours,
EUGENE FIELD.
1033 Evanston Ave., Station X, Chicago,
October 25th, 1894. ”

“ In that I find this remarkable anticipation of what befell his son, written of Roswell M. Field—who, be it remembered, started in life with a healthy and vigorous body, whereas uncertain health and a rebellious stomach were Eugene Field's portion all the days of his life. ”