A Study in Heredity and Contradictions - Slason Thompson

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girls

      With myrtle braid their lustrous curls.

      I have followed the original copy Field sent to Mr. Gray, which has several variations in punctuation from the version as printed in "The Sabine Farm," where the eighth line reads:

      Bind myrtle in their lustrous curls,

      which the reader can compare with the original as printed above. In that same dedication Field referred to Mr. Gray as one

      Who lov'st us for our father's sake.

      In announcing to Mr. Gray by letter, June 28th, 1891, his intention to make this dedication, Field wrote:

      It will interest, and we [Roswell was a joint contributor to "The Sabine Farm"] are hoping that it will please you to know that we shall dedicate this volume to you, as a slight, though none the less sincere, token of our regard and affection to you, as the friend of our father and as the friend to us. Were our father living, it would please him, we think, to see his sons collaborating as versifiers of the pagan lyrist whose songs he admired; it would please him, too, we are equally certain, to see us dedicating a result of our enthusiastic toil to so good a man and to so good a friend as you.

      These quotations are interesting as indicating the character of the surroundings of Eugene Field's early life in St. Louis.

      It was the hope of their father that one, if not both, of his sons would adopt the profession of the law, in which he and his brother Charles and their father before them had attained both distinction and something more than a competence. But neither Eugene nor his brother Roswell had the slightest predilection for the law. By nature and by a certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the simplest forms of justice.

      The stage, on the other hand, possessed a fascination for Eugene. He was a mimic by inheritance, a comedian by instinct and unrestrained habit. Everything appealed to his sense of the queer, the fanciful, and the utterly ridiculous. He was a student of the whimsicalities of character and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or pen. Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte. He had inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy. His early love for reciting passages from "Spartacus," referred to by the Rev. Mr. Tufts, showed the bent of his mind, and when he became master of his own affairs he sought out Edwin Forrest and confided to him his ambition to go on the boards. Would that I could reproduce Field's version of that interview! He approached the great tragedian with a sinking heart, for Forrest had a reputation for brusque roughness never exceeded on or off the stage. But Eugene managed to prefer his request for advice and an opening in Forrest's company. The dark-browed Othello looked his visitor over from head to foot, and, in a voice that rolled through the flies of the stage where this little scene was enacted, exclaimed:

      "Boy, return to your friends and bid them apprentice you to a wood-sawyer, rather than waste your life on a precarious profession whose successes are few and whose rewards are bankruptcy and ingratitude. Go! study and learn of Coriolanus."

      This I repeat from memory, preserving the sense and the three words "boy," "wood-sawyer," and "Coriolanus," which always recurred in Field's various versions of "Why I did not go on the stage." Eugene returned to St. Louis and quietly disposed of the costumes he had prepared for such characters as Hamlet, Lear, and Spartacus.

      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. While a darky carried a placard of announcement, the result of Saunders's artistic handiwork, the local band, specially engaged, played in front of the principal places in town. Mr. Eddy recalls that Field had a sweet bass voice which he used with much effect both in songs and recitations.

      The season, confined to such towns in Missouri as Carrollton, Richmond, etc., lasted about two weeks and was what the papers would call a succès d'estime.

      Which, being interpreted into the vernacular of the author of "Sharps and Flats," spelled a popular "frost" and a financial failure. And thus Missouri closed the door of comedy against Field, as Forrest had shut the gates of tragedy in his pale and intellectual face.

      There was still one profession open to him in which he had made a few halting and tentative steps—that of journalism, with its broad entrance and narrowing perspective into the fair field of letters. While a sophomore at Knox he had exercised his irrepressible inclination "to shoot folly as it flies" by contributions to the local paper of Galesburg, which had the piquant flavor of personal comment. His youthful dash at the door of the stage had brought him into the comradeship of Stanley Waterloo and several other young journalists in St. Louis, and he was easily persuaded to try his 'prentice hand as a reporter, under the tutelage of Stanley Huntley, of the "Spoopendyke Papers" fame.

      But Eugene Field was yet without the stern incentive of necessity that is the seed of journalism. Circumstances, however, were ripening that would soon leave him no excuse on that score for not buckling down to "sawing wood," as for twenty-three years he was wont to consider his daily work. When he reached his majority he was entitled to his share in the first distribution of his father's estate. Before this could be made, Mr. Gray had to dispose of a part of the land which he held as executor of Roswell M. Field. It was accordingly offered for sale at auction, and enough to realize $20,000 was sold. Under the will, Eugene's share of this was $8,000, and he immediately placed himself in the way of investing it where it would be the least incumbrance to him. While at Columbia he had met Edgar V. Comstock, the brother of his future wife, through whom it was that he made her acquaintance. Upon the first touch of the cash payment on his share of the executor's sale, Eugene at once proposed to young Comstock that they visit Europe in company, he bearing the expenses of the expedition. His friend did not need much persuasion to embark on what promised to be such a lark. And so, in the fall of 1872, the two, against the prudent counsels of Mr. Gray, set out to see the world, and they saw it just as far as Eugene's cash and the balance of that $8,000 would go.

      In his "Auto-Analysis," Field says: "In 1872 I visited Europe, spending six months and my patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and England." This is as near the sober truth as anything Field ever wrote about himself. The youthful spendthrift and his companion landed in Ireland, and by slow, but extravagant, stages reached Italy, taking the principal cities and sights of England and France en route. About the only letters that reached America from Field during this European trip (always excepting those that went by every mail-steamer to a young lady in St. Jo) were those addressed with business-like brevity to Mr. Gray, calling for more and still more funds to carry the travellers onward. Before they had reached Italy the mails were too slow to convey Field's importunity, and he had recourse to the cable to impress Mr. Gray with the dire immediateness of his impecuniosity. In order to relieve this Mr. Gray was forced to discount the notes for the deferred payments on the sale of the Field land, and when Eugene and his brother-in-law-to-be reached Naples their soulful appeals for more currency with which to continue their golden girdle of the earth were met with the chilling notice "No funds available." Happily, in their meteoric transit across Europe, they had invested in many articles of vertu and convertible souvenirs of the places they had visited. By the sale, or sometimes by the pledge, of these accumulated impedimenta of travel, Eugene made good his retreat to America, where he landed with empty pockets and an inexhaustible fund of mirthful stories and invaluable experience.

      On arriving in New York, Field had to

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