Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions — Volume 1

by Slason Thompson

'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 Cæsar," "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 rôles. 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!