III
Greatly different from Riley, yet greatly like him in many ways, was Eugene Field, in whom the lawlessness of the West and the culture of the East met in strange confusion. Though of Western origin—he was born at St. Louis in 1850—he spent the formative years of his life between six and nineteen with his father's relatives at Amherst, Massachusetts. He completed a year at Williams College, then, called West by the death of his father, whose law practice at St. Louis had been distinctive, he was put by his guardian into Knox College. After a year he was transferred to the University of Missouri, but coming of age at the close of his junior year, and his share of his father's estate becoming available, he decided in the spring of 1872 to leave college and travel in Europe. Accordingly, to quote his own words, he spent "six months and [his] patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and England."
As a general rule one should quote the autobiographical statements of Eugene Field with extreme caution, but one can trust this bit of his "Auto-analysis":
In May, 1873, I became a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal. In October of that year I married Miss Julia Sutherland Comstock of St. Joseph, Mo., at that time a girl of sixteen. We have had eight children—three daughters and five sons.
My newspaper connections have been as follows: 1875-76, city editor of the St. Joseph (Mo.) Gazette; 1876-80, editorial writer on the St. Louis Journal and St. Louis Times-Journal; 1880-81, managing editor of the Kansas City Times; 1881-83, managing editor of the Denver Tribune. Since 1883 I have been a contributor to the Chicago Record (formerly Morning News).[143]
His success with the Denver Tribune, to which he contributed such widely copied work as that published in his first thin volume, The Tribune Primer (1882), attracted attention. He began to receive offers from Eastern papers, one at least from Dana, editor of the New York Sun, but it was not until Melville E. Stone offered him the humorous column of his paper, the Chicago News, that Field decided to turn eastward. He had begun to dream of a literary career and this dream, always a vague one, for he was chained by poverty to a tyrannical profession, seemed more possible in a less tense atmosphere than that of the Western mining center. Arriving at Chicago in 1883, he set out to make his new column a thing with distinction. Flats and Sharps was the name he gave it, and into it he poured a mélange of all things: poetry in every key, paragraphs on all subjects, parodies, hoaxes, mock reviews, pseudo news, personals, jokes—everything. He threw himself completely into the thing: it became his life work; "practically everything he ever wrote appeared at one time or another in that column."
But newspaper humor usually perishes with the flimsy leaves upon which it is recorded. Not until Field had written "Little Boy Blue" in 1887 did he become at all known to the reading public. The publication of the popular editions of A Little Book of Profitable Tales and A Little Book of Western Verse in 1890, only five years before his death, marks, perhaps, the time of his general acceptation as a writer. Hardly had the public learned to know him before they were called upon to mourn his early death. Indeed, the work by which he is now best known was done almost all of it in the last six or seven years of his life. It was only in this brief later period that he was a "bibliomaniac" or a lover of Horace or a student of the old English ballads.
One must classify Eugene Field first of all as a humorist, one of the leading figures in that nondescript school of newspaper comedians that has played such a part in the history of the period. To a personality as high spirited and as whimsical as Artemus Ward's he added the brilliancy of a Locker-Lampson and the improvidence of a Goldsmith as well as the kindly heart. Seriousness seemed foreign to his nature: his life was a perpetual series of hoaxes and practical jokes and hilarious sallies. No one has surpassed him in the making of parodies, of rollicking paraphrases and adaptations, in skilful blendings of modern and antique, in clever minglings of seriousness and humor. He was a maker of brilliant trifles and sparkling non sequiturs. His irreverence is really startling at times. He can make the Odes of Horace seem fit material for the funny column of a Chicago daily newspaper:
Boy, I detest the Persian pomp;
I hate those linden-bark devices;
And as for roses, holy Moses!
They can't be got at living prices!
Myrtle is good enough for us,—
For you, as bearer of my flagon;
For me, supine beneath this vine,
Doing my best to get a jag on!
He is boon companion of the old Sabine poet. He slaps him on the back and invites him to all kinds of costly revelry, assuring him that Mæcenas will pay the freight. And Horace by no means takes offense. He is a congenial soul.
I might discourse
Till I was hoarse
Upon the cruelties of Venus;
'T were waste of time
As well as rime,
For you've been there yourself, Mæcenas!
In the presence of such an incorrigible joker the reader feels always that he must be on his guard. One is never safe. Leafing the pages of the large collected edition of the poems, glancing over the Bret Harte echoes like "Casey's Table D'Hôte," smiling at such outrageous nonsense as "The Little Peach" and "The Onion Tart," one suddenly draws a sharp breath. At last the heart of Eugene Field:
Upon a mountain height, far from the sea,
I found a shell,
And to my listening ear the lonely thing
Ever a song of ocean seemed to sing,
Ever a tale of ocean seemed to tell.
* * * * *
Strange, was it not? Far from its native deep,
One song it sang,—
Sang of the awful mysteries of the tide,
Sang of the misty sea, profound and wide,—
Ever with echoes of the ocean rang.
And as the shell upon the mountain height
Sings of the sea,
So do I ever, leagues and leagues away,—
So do I ever, wandering where I may,—
Sing, O my home! sing, O my home! of thee.
A lyric worthy of any anthology. Yet one quickly finds that it is not Eugene Field at all. He wrote it deliberately as a hoax, a practical joke on Modjeska, who all the rest of her life was obliged to deny the authorship which Field had cunningly fastened upon her. The case is typical. Like Riley, the man is making copy. He uses pathos and sentiment and the most sacred things as literary capital. One wonders where one can draw the line. Was he really sincere in his child lyrics and his bibliomaniac writings or was he cleverly playing a part?
In criticizing Field one must remember the essential immaturity of the man. His frequent artificiality and his lack of sincerity came from his boyishness and his high spirits. He looked at life from the angle of mischievous boyhood. Moreover, he wrote always at the high tension of the newspaper office, for a thing that had no memory, a column that had but one demand—more! It bred in him what may be denominated, perhaps, the ephemeral habit. He was all his life a man preëminently and predominatingly of the present moment, and thus he stands a type of the literary creator that was to follow him.
For Field more than any other writer of the period illustrates the way the old type of literary scholar was to be modified and changed by the newspaper. Every scrap of Field's voluminous product was written for immediate newspaper consumption. He patronized not at all the literary magazines, he wrote his books not at all with book intent—he made them up from newspaper fragments. He wrote always a timely thing to the people, a thing growing out of the present moment for the people to read, making palatable for them even Horace and the severer classics. He was thus one of the leading forces in what may be called that democratizing of literature for which the period so largely stands.
He has been given a place far beyond his real deserts. The sentiment of "Little Boy Blue" and the other child lyrics, the whimsical fun and high spirits of his comic verse, endeared him to the public that enjoyed Riley. Then his whimsical, Goldsmith-like personality helped his fame, as did also his death, since it followed so quickly his late discovery by the reading public that it gave the impression he had been removed like Keats at the very opening of his career. He must be rated, however, not for what he wrote, though a few pieces, like his child lyrics and his bibliomaniac ballads, will continue long in the anthologies, but for the influence he exerted. He was a pioneer in a peculiar province: he stands for the journalization of literature, a process that, if carried to its logical extreme, will make of the man of letters a mere newspaper reporter.