“By his life he made bright the lives of all who knew him and by his books he cheered the thoughts of thousands who didn’t know him.”
Substitute “millions” for thousands and you have Mark Twain the Man and Mark Twain the Writer.
***
One afternoon, having laughed our fill with the “Belle of New York” and rejoiced in the London success of the piece (Mark, who while alive enjoyed scant luck as a playwright, yet loved to see others “win out”), our friend and the present writer happened to cross Bedford Square. Seeing the name at a street corner, Mark pulled out his notebook. “Eugene Field lived somewhere around here in 1889,” he said. I showed him the house, No. 20 Alfred Street.
“A dark and dismal hole,” said Mark, ruefully shaking his head; “no wonder he couldn’t find his ‘righteous stomach’ there, even in the absence of Chicago pies.”
“And coffee,” I interpolated. “Yours truly, too, would have died of dyspepsia if he had stayed in Chicago and continued at Henrici’s coffee and pie counter, as Gene did.”
Mark remained silent for a block or two. “I’ve got it,” he said at last, “God gave Gene a good enough stomach, and English hospitality completely paralyzed what was left of his digestive powers after the Cook County coffee and pie diet. Did you see much of Gene while he was in London?”
I told Mark all I knew about Field’s social and literary doings. “Bennett was right when he refused him a job on the London Herald,” said Clemens. “For one thing, the Herald didn’t last long, and the English climate would have cut poor Gene’s life still shorter by two or three winters and falls.”
Just the same, the desire for a London success, then common among American writers and artists, killed Eugene Field, the genial and lovable poet of childhood and man-about-literature’s-highways-and-byways.
HENRY W. FISHER.