It may be set down here as well as elsewhere, and still quoting Mr. Stone, that not only did Field write nearly every line that ever appeared in the "Sharps and Flats" column, but that practically everything that he ever wrote, after 1883, appeared at one time or another in that column.
To which it may be added that it has been the custom of those writing of Eugene Field to surround and endow him throughout his career with the acquirement of scholarship, and pecuniary independence, which he never possessed before the last six years of his life.
Practically all Field's scholarship and mental equipment, so far as they were obtained from books, were acquired after he came to Chicago, and he was never lifted above the ragged edge of impecuniosity until he began to receive royalties from the popular edition of "A Little Book of Western Verse" and "A Little Book of Profitable Tales." His domestic life was spent in flats or rented houses until less than five months before his death. The photographs taken a few months before his death of Eugene Field's home and the beautiful library in which he wrote are ghastly travesties on the nomadic character of his domestic arrangements for many years before June, 1895—dreams for which he longed, but only lived to realize for four brief months. All the best Field wrote previous to 1890—and it includes the best he ever wrote, except "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac"—was written in a room to which many a box stall is palatial, and his sole library was a dilapidated edition of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Cruden's "Concordance of the Bible," and a well-thumbed copy of the King James version of the Bible. He detested the revised version. The genius of this man at this time did not depend on scholarship or surroundings, but on the companionship of his fellows and the unconventionality of his home life.
CHAPTER XII
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
It was in the month of September, after Field's coming to the Morning News, that a managerial convulsion in the office of the Chicago Herald threw the majority of its editorial corps and special writers across Fifth Avenue into the employ of Messrs. Lawson & Stone. They were at first distributed between the morning and evening editions of the News, my first work being for the latter, to which I contributed editorial paragraphs for one week, when Mr. Stone concluded to make me his chief editorial writer on the Morning News. This brought me into immediate personal and professional relations with Field. Our rooms adjoined, being separated by a board partition that did not reach to the ceiling and over which for four years I was constantly bombarded with missives and missiles from my ever-restless neighbor. Among the other recruits from the Herald at that time was John F. Ballantyne, who, from being the managing editor of that paper, was transferred to the position of chief executive of the Morning News under Mr. Stone. One of the first duties of his position was to read Field's copy very closely, to guard against the publication of such bitter innuendoes and scandalous personalities as had kept the Denver Tribune in constant hot water between warlike descents upon the editor and costly appeals to the courts. Mr. Stone wanted all the racy wit that had distinguished Field's contributions to the Tribune without the attendant crop of libel suits, and he relied on Ballantyne's Scotch caution to put a query mark against every paragraph that squinted at a breach of propriety or a breach of the peace, or that invited a libel suit. There was no power of final rejection in Ballantyne's blue pencil. That was left for Mr. Stone's own decision. It was well that it was so, for Mr. Ballantyne's appreciation of humor was so rigid that, had it been the arbiter as to which of Field's paragraphs should be printed, I greatly fear me there would often have been a dearth of gayety in the "Sharps and Flats." The relations in which Ballantyne and I found ourselves to Field can best be told in the language of Mr. Cowen, whose own intimate relations with Field antedated ours and continued to the end:
"Coming immediately under the influence of John Ballantyne and Slason Thompson, respectively managing editor and chief editorial writer of the News—the one possessed of Scotch gravity and the other of fine literary taste and discrimination—the character of Field's work quickly modified, and his free and easy, irregular habits succumbed to studious application and methodical labors. Ballantyne used the blue pencil tenderly, first attacking Field's trick fabrications and suppressing the levity which found vent in preceding years in such pictures of domestic felicity as:
Baby and I the weary night
Are taking a walk for his delight,