Eugene Field and His Work

THAT a man should produce a substantial body of literary work and achieve a considerable literary reputation in the last six or seven years of a life spent in newspaper work, with its continual emphasis upon the ephemeral and its distracting scramble after the popular, is unusual. The sight, therefore, of the ten sumptuous volumes of the works of Eugene Field ¹ is, to say the least, surprising. In number they are divided equally between prose and verse. Of the prose volumes, three — A Little Book of Profitable Tales, The Holy Cross, and the Second Book of Tales — are made up of short pieces. These consist chiefly of simple dialect sketches ; of fables, allegories, and fairytales, usually in pseudo-archaic diction, and little pastels of home life, especially those aspects of home life which take their color and meaning from the love of children. Of the two other volumes, one, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, is a rambling discourse, in a thin dramatic disguise, on the delights of reading and book-owning; the other, The House, is the narrative of a familiar domestic episode, humorous and ostensibly dramatic in tone, but with an easily detected autobiographic subtexture. The poetry consists of A Little Book of Western Verse, supplemented by a second and a third volume of the same tone and intention, Poems of Childhood, and a series of riotous “ translations “ from Horace, Echoes from the Sabine Farm. This surely is no mean array.

Perhaps the most surprising characteristic of the short tales and sketches, to those who knew of Field only as a Western newspaper wit, is the old fashion of their sentiment and form. The story of the Holy Cross, which recounts the meeting of some Spanish soldiers from the army of Cortes with the Wandering Jew, and the subsequent pardon and release from bis torments of that hackneyed personage, is exactly in the tone of outworn romanticism of the early decades of the century. It recalls Chateaubriand, but without his ardency, or at least without the breath of adventure that permeates the first attempts in a given literary mode. Such pieces as The Oak-Tree and the Ivy, of which there are a great number in the three volumes, with their wooden appurtenances of Ice-King, South Wind, and the like, are so much akin to the profitable tales which one remembers from sleepy Sunday afternoons over the godless imitators of Hans Andersen that one feels a humorous desire to charge the author with plagiarizing his own nursery books. Tale after tale, again, is written in a sort of sham-archaic diction which Field invented for himself, and which, used as it is for the most divergent purposes without a corresponding change of key, ends by giving a distressingly artificial effect. Answering to this lack of modernity in form is a still more curious persistence of old-fashioned sentiment. It is of course none the worse for being old-fashioned, but there is something odd, even a little pathetic, in the way in which this daily fun-maker for the most headlong and modern of cities kept turning hack to trite and homely motives ; putting one side, as if he did not know them, the questioning, the daring, the mysticism, and the cynicism of modern life, choosing as a medium of expression this or that much-fingered. instrument, full of wheezy memories of tunes.

It is only fair to add that sometimes this homeliness of sentiment, so far from being insipid, acts as a tremendous reinforcement. In such a sketch as The Little Yaller Baby, for example, the elements of pathos, though as familiar as maternity, are as poignant as the presence of death. If Field had written a dozen things like that one, he would deserve a place among those who, having known the eternal secrets of the heart, stand outside time, and of whom it is impertinent to inquire whether their work is old or new. But this intense entering into a human situation is very rare with him. Pathos his tales often have, but it is the pathos of reminiscence, the pathos of the popular song which depends upon the manipulation of a few chords warranted by long service to produce a melting effect; sincerity they have, but it is the sincerity of a mind not thoroughly awake, of an imagination not quite vitally quickened.

This lack of tenseness in Field’s prose work shows itself in two striking ways, significant enough of the conditions under which he labored to deserve mention. The first is his poverty, or at least his unwarrantable repetition, of motive. The note which he struck so tenderly and resonantly in the poem by which almost alone his name is widely known, Little Boy Blue, the tragedy of childhood led away from its toys and its prattle by the shadowy hand of death, reappears again and again, in less and less persuasive adumbrations, until one’s sense of delicacy is outraged, and one is forced to cry out against what has come to seem little better than cant. This is, alas, only one instance out of many ; almost every striking tale or poem in the ten volumes is flanked by two, three, or half a dozen weak replicas. The second way in which Field’s lack of selfcriticism and of artistic strenuousness shows itself is in his wanton marring of carefully prepared effects for the sake of introducing some bit of irrelevant humor which has struck his predatory journalistic eye. Tn the volume called The House, for instance, we have come almost to believe in Reuben Baker, the mild, garrulous astronomer, who watches m helpless dignity his shifty little wife Alice buy and fit up the coveted home, when we are plunged into a series of “grinds" upon public characters and institutions of Chicago, from which we emerge with complete repudiation upon our lips for the flimsy figure. He is no longer a portrait, a humorous transcript of real character, but a jester’s marionette. In the same way, the Bibliomaniac bids fair for a few chapters to be an individual. A really delicate perfume of personality begins to disengage itself from the pages ; the fragile, detached old enthusiast begins to take on the winning hues of life. Then, without warning and as if petulantly tired of the effort, the author flattens him into pasteboard and uses him to hang “copy” on, — and rather cheap and incoherent copy at that. All this, along with a great deal else that is deplorable in the body of writing which Field left, is undoubtedly due, in large measure at least, to his newspaper training. One who sees the work of his pen perishing with the day that gives it birth is not apt to be scrupulous about repetition of motive; one who assists in the great daily handybandying of the choir of heaven and furniture of earth is not apt to keep a conscience virginal toward the demands of a little imaginary gentleman in a white choker, who is timidly eager to maintain himself as a genuine creation in the world of art.

It is pleasant to turn from the prose to the verse, for here we come upon bits of well-nigh flawless workmanship, and upon something that approaches supreme perception. The verse divides itself loosely under five heads : rollicking jingles, the aim of which is to raise a laugh at any cost; serious or semi-serious poems of a reflective sort: translations, both serious and flippant ; dramatic poems, usually in dialect; and the inimitable “ poems of childhood.” The jingles are supreme in their irresponsible and delightful class. Such delectable titles as The Schnellest Zug, Plaint of the Missouri ’Coon, and The Two Little Skeezucks only faintly suggest the joy that is in them. The author has thrown himself into these happy-go-lucky trifles with a whimsical gusto which takes criticism captive. At callous moments we can find fault with them: we can see that they are too long, that their nonsense is not always so weirdly inspired as we had thought it. But for the most part we submit ourselves to their tyranny, and are left with only a titilliation of fun in the roots of our hair and an unspeakable gratitude in the region of the visibles.

The reflective poems, including the more serious of the translations, are much less successful. There are, to be sure, a few pieces which command respect for their sincerity and tenderness, such for example as the famous Little Boy Blue and Contentment, which latter has a note of quiet nobility thoroughly fine. Usually, however, Field had not the power to speak of old things with a new voice. Here, even more than in his prose, the lack of magnetic correspondence between substance and style is apparent. The thought does not indue itself with expression by any inner willfulness. There is a sameness of style which in the end amounts to a drone. His lack of subtlety in the perception of style is especially noteworthy in the translations. The five volumes contain a great number of these, covering a range from Bion and Horace to Bérangev and Dr. Watts. I can recall scarcely a half dozen where the peculiar aroma of the style has been even faintly caught. The poignant concreteness of Heine, the sweep and volume of Goethe, the golden mist of the Sicilian lyrists, the sanctified diffuseness of the evangelical doctor, are all melted down into a common mould, respectable but featureless.

Closely connected with this latency of the stylistic sense is the tendency to introduce types, and not individuals, which makes the dramatic verse of Field so essentially undramatic. The pieces which deal with the life of the Western miningcamp, Red Hoss Mountain, as well as many others written in the same goodnatured thumping seven-foot lines, come beyond all chance of question from the same mouth. This is not to say that they are therefore failures. By no means. The figures that gathered about Casey’s immortal “ tabble dote, and took part with such admired decorum in the “ conversazzhvony at the Gosh-all-Hemlock mine, move in a world of humor that pours a redeeming light over their aitistic shortcomings. It is only to say that the magical touch which could lift these bundles of quizzical humors into imaginative reality, as some of the miners of Bret Harte and some of the human odds and ends of James Whitcomb Riley have been lifted, is hopelessly to seek.

With the same pleasure that one turns from Field’s prose to his verse one turns again to that best portion of his verse which deals with child life ; for here the most guarded critic can forget his qualms, and yield himself whole-heartedly to a new and naïve fascination. The reputation which some of the more serious of these child poems have achieved is not, to my thinking, wholly deserved. There is in them just a hint of stock sentiment, at the minimum in such direct and concrete things as Little Boy Blue, at the maximum in such self-conscious ones as The Dead Babe. It is in the lighter, more fanciful and rollicking of the verses that the author strikes a vein thoroughly fresh and charming. One has to go to Schumann’s Kinderscenen for a parallel rendering of the silver-gray phantasmagoria, half dream, half waking gleams and splinterings of fancy, that Field has given us in The Fly-Away Horse, and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Always excepting Stevenson’s Child s Garden of Verse, I know of no work, save perhaps that of Field’s own friend Riley, which gives us the atmosphere of the young mind as faithfully as the delightful boyish solilocpiy called Seein’ Things at Night. The humorous paternity of The Ride to Bumpville wins us at the first line with the stealing tenderness and well-being of the fireside, and even the somewhat gurgling paternity of The Bottle Tree and Googly-Goo leaves us with a smile that is wholly engaged. Strangely enough, too, in the handling of these sympathetic little subjects, many of the technical limitations of the poet’s gift which we have noticed are refined quite away. Elsewhere his sense of style is dull or non-existent; here the diction springs new as a flower out of rich deposits of nursery tradition, and the tune, starting with the swing of the cradle or the toand-fro of a grand dame’s rockerless chair, leaps and lingers and bickers and swirls like the spirit of water. If Mother Goose, wandering into the semicircle of light where Dante found the limbo of the good poets, should sit at the feet of Shelley and learn the magic of his lyre.

I fancy that her wizened, beatified old throat would break out sooner or later into much such a carol as The Rock-a-By Lady from Hushaby Street or The Song of Luddy-Dud. It is no small thing to voice the joys and woes of one whole stage of the earthly journey, however short, especially when that stage is full of the most enormous little psychic adventures. This Field has done. He has written the Canterbury Pilgrimage of infancy. The great book of human interpretation is the poorer that the tale had to be left half told.

But Field did not pretend to be an artist; one can imagine the droll repudiation he would have made of the title. Yet at rare moments and in dealing with a few subjects he had the artist’s touch. Moreover, it is not difficult to see that in the last years of his life his sense of the beauty and value of creative art rapidly deepened. He seems to have been conquered by the Muse almost before he knew it, as one who should stop by an Athenian door-sill to chat with a lazy citizen, and go thence knowing Socrates and questioning the ultimate. Yet it this rare touch had never come to him, he would still have been, from many points of view, an engaging and suggestive figure. He was one of those unusual men who contrive to be profoundly typical of their time and environment at the same time that they retain the raciest of individualities. His irrepressible gayety his obstreperous plunging through bush and brier after the will-o’-the-wisp of fun, his jaunty plucking of laughter from dullness, represent a trait of the nascent but already recognizable national temper which bids fair to mark us off most saliently from our native English stock. The imperturbable impudence with which, in the Echoes from the Sabine Farm, he slaps Horace on the back and drags him off for a lark and a supper, is more extravagantly American than it has entered into the heart of the most inspired of our foreign parodists to conceive. It may be said parenthetically that we feel a pleased assurance that Horace does not in the least resent the familiarity, but goes boon and meek to “ polish up the city,” confident in the assurance of his brother bard that Mæcenas will “ pay the freight.”

Recalling the intimate charm of Field’s friendship, of which there is abundant evidence in the introductions to the various volumes, and those inimitable drolleries of daily walk and conversation which distinguished him racily among his contemporaries, we must look at him rather as a personality which only tardily and incompletely arrived at expression, than as an artist with whom expression was the first concern. The elements of this personality were singularly rich. He joined an almost Gothic grotesqueness and exuberance of fancy with an absorption in homely affections and a forthright crude sanity which usually go with imaginative limitations. He found an equal relish in the uproarious humors of Bohemianism and the delicate elusive atmosphere of the minds of children. But for the most part this unusual range of endowment obtained only fortuitous and lax expression, and it is a matter for regret that, in the definitive edition of his writings, piety should have intervened to prevent a thorough winnowing of that which has a chance to live from that which is predoomed to die. A man engaged in the pursuit of an exacting profession cannot, in the leisure moments of six or eight years, produce ten volumes of imaginative writing which shall even begin to approach, as a whole, the level of his best. As it stands, the bulk of his writing is unwieldy, and much that is lovely and sound is in danger of being swamped by much more that is tawdry and mistaken.