An American poet and humorous journalist; born at St. Louis, Mo., Sept. 2, 1850; died Nov. 4, 1895. His latter years were spent in Chicago. By his poems and tales in the press he won a high reputation in the West, which before his death had become national. His poems for children are admirable in their simplicity and in their sympathetic insight into the child’s world of thought and feeling. His complete works comprise: “Love Songs of Childhood;” “A Little Book of Western Verse;” “A Second Book of Verse;” “The Holy Cross, and Other Tales;” “The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.” He made, in collaboration with his brother Roswell Martin Field, some good translations from Horace—“Echoes from the Sabine Farm.”

Personal

  A tall, thin-haired man with a New England face of the Scotch type, rugged, smoothly shaven, and generally very solemn—suspiciously solemn in expression. His infrequent smile curled his wide, expressive mouth in fantastic grimaces which seemed not to affect the steady gravity of the blue-gray eyes…. His voice was deep but rather dry in quality.

  Clever, witty, and beautiful as were the poems and stories of Eugene Field, he was himself far more lovable than them all. My own acquaintance with Mr. Field was confined to one meeting, but I shall never forget that, or rather I shall never forget him. He came into the room, a long, lank, loose-jointed figure, looking far more like a man of business than a creator of fancies. At first his thin, cadaverous face seemed to me as one of the ugliest I had ever seen; a few moments later, when he had begun to talk freely, I thought it was one of the most attractive. He had been visiting in the afternoon one of the big book-stores of New York, and he spoke with enthusiasm of the rare volumes he had seen there and had longed to possess, but was too poor to buy. Then when his work was mentioned he spoke of that with a freedom from affectation, an absolute unconsciousness, that was most charming. On this occasion I had the good fortune to hear him recite, and I can say in all sincerity that I have never heard any one else recite so well. He possessed the qualities of the greatest of all actors, the actor who knows how to appeal to the heart by simple, direct, and wholly natural methods.

  Of recent years Mr. Field rarely went to the office of the Chicago News, the paper for which during the last ten years he had written a daily column under the title of “Sharps and Flats,” but did most of his work at his home in Buena Park, which he called the Sabine Farm. Here he began his day about nine o’clock, by having breakfast served to him in bed, after which he glanced through the papers, and then settled himself to his writing, with feet high on the table, and his pages before him laid neatly on a piece of plate glass. He wrote with a fine-pointed pen, and had by him several different colored inks, with which he would illuminate his capitals and embellish his manuscript. The first thing he did was his “Sharps and Flats” column, which occupied three or four hours, the task being usually finished by one o’clock. His other work he did in the afternoons and evenings, writing at odd hours, sometimes in the garden if the weather was pleasant. He was much interrupted by friends dropping in to see him; but, however busy, he welcomed whoever came, and would turn aside good-naturedly from his manuscript to entertain a visitor or to hear a story of misfortune. After dinner he retired to his “den” to read; for he read constantly, what ever the distractions about him, and was much given to reading in bed. Of all his visitors the most constant and appreciative were children. These he never sent away without some bright word, and he rarely sent them away at all.

  The determination to found a story or a series of sketches on the delights, adventures, and misadventures connected with bibliomania did not come impulsively to my brother. For many years, in short during the greater part of nearly a quarter of a century of journalistic work, he had celebrated in prose and verse, and always in his happiest and most delightful vein, the pleasures of book-hunting. Himself an indefatigable collector of books, the possessor of a library containing volumes obtained only at the cost of a great personal sacrifice, he was in the most active sympathy with the disease called bibliomania, and knew, as few comparatively poor men have known, the half-pathetic, half-humorous side of that incurable mental infirmity.

  There were many Eugene Fields. Like the Apostle, he was all things to all men and much to many…. He was a terror to politicians, a Homer to the children, and different to, as well as from, everybody. He bore unique relations to each of his friends and acquaintances, as many of them have eloquently and affectionately testified…. Possessed of a sonorous bass voice, an unconventional manner, and much magnetism, he easily made himself the centre of any group in which he chanced to mingle. He constantly attracted people who were as far removed as possible, seemingly, from any interest in the work in which he was engaged; then his missionary labors began; and in a few weeks, under the stimulating guidance of their poetic friend, his new acquaintances would be collecting books and rapidly developing into gentle bibliomaniacs. In this conversion of an indifferent soul into an enthusiastic worshipper at the shrine of literature, Eugene Field rejoiced. His devotion to his friends was beautiful…. Except at those infrequent times when he permitted his face to take a serious cast, the Eugene Field whom I knew had little or nothing morose about him, little or nothing that was not of the brightest, sunniest character. He had a wonderfully keen appreciation of the humorous and the ridiculous, and a facility for turning a proposition from grave to gay and from gay to grave as unusual as it was diverting.

  With his wonderful brain and all his charm of manner, it was, after all, his great-heartedness that won for him the love of the world. He loved humanity and drank in the sunshine and beauties of nature until there blossomed therefrom the beautiful flower of his verse, and his scarcely less poetic prose. The parent stalk is dead, but the scattered leaves forever shall shed abroad their sweet perfume; and the children for all time to come will bless the sweet spirit that gave them so much joy.

  Reserved in some ways, yet reckless, with the buoyancy of temperament which comes from a keen sense of humor, he was, at the same time, a man of judgment and keen perception, though not among the pence-getters. I presume Tom Hood was somewhat like him. He was watchful, though, in the midst of his buoyancy, and shrewd and careful and energetic in working for his friends or for what he considered right. There were tossing whitecaps on the river and ten thousand laughing ripples, but, underneath, the current was strong and swift and its course was well defined. One of the greatest among American writers was Eugene Field, but he was not greater in what he wrote than he was in his own personality—something exquisite and noble.

  Eugene Field’s study of the pleasure of others was something he never allowed to show on the surface of his words or acts. Whenever he made one of a group in conversation he seemed to do just so much of the talking as suited his caprice and no more; yet by and by you would notice that he never monopolized the conversation and that it was mainly through his impulse that it kept passing around the circle. He did not send out his heart to persons or things; he took them into it as wholly without effort or show of goodness as the clover takes the bee…. Of course, this mere memorandum is no portrait. It is but the vehicle for a few impressions of one who knew Eugene Field not nearly so long or so well as did many others, but amply long and well enough to testify to the sweetness and strength of a character and life comparatively unfettered by that mechanical order which to persons of less native sweetness or strength—to the most of us, indeed—is as indispensable as rails and couplings to a moving train. It took but a short while and no special generosity of mind for anyone to see that traits which would have set radically wrong the clock-work lives of commoner men were but the shadows and shadow-play of the gifts that made him a boon to the world; and that it was to their own and the world’s advantage that his most familiar friends took him as fortune gave him and wore him close to their hearts as something that did infinitely better things than keep time.

  “In wit a man, in simplicity a child,” nothing gloomy, narrow, or pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, “his finances, alas! were always miserably low.” This followed from his learning how to spend money freely before he was forced to earn it laboriously. He scattered his patrimony gaily and then when the last inherited cent was gone, turned with equal gayety to earning, not only enough to support himself, but the wife and family that, with the royal reckless prodigality of genius, he provided himself with at the very outset of his career…. With Eugene Field the man was always a bundle of delightful surprises, an ever unconventional personality of which only the merest suggestion is given in his works.

General

  The humanity of Mr. Field has brought him safely through waters where many another vessel has gone to pieces. The dialect story or poem, if it be more than mere curiosity or a scientific disclosure of an out-of-the-way phase of life, must reveal some trait that touches the universal heart. Mr. Field has fairly done this in his best efforts of the kind, although he would doubtless have agreed with the critic who classed the dialect effusions among writings of his that he estimated at the lowest rate…. The poetry of Eugene Field contains his truest contribution to the thought and art of his day; whether we consider his disclosures of the pleasures and weaknesses of the bibliophile, in which he was so immersed and which he knew so well, or whether we read his renderings of Horace into a modernity at times perhaps somewhat too insistent, we touch the truest chord of the poet’s nature; and when we come to his songs of the intimate life of home and childhood, we are aware of a gift unique and tender. Whatever technical deficiencies we may find, or however a false note in some of the best known of these verses may offend our ear, we are quick to overlook it in the simplicity and genuineness of the feeling.

  He [James Whitcomb Riley] is a sympathetic singer of childhood, although he falls short here of Eugene Field. This sweet-souled lyrist, a native of St. Louis and in his later life a resident of Chicago, left in the ten volumes of his collected works nothing so dear to West and East as the simple stanza of “Little Boy Blue.”

  It is in my own schoolroom and among my own pupils that the most genuine realization of Eugene Field’s genius has come to me. The child, when left to his own inner leadings, his opinions not constrained, speaks out with great courage; his criticism has the delicacy of the downy bloom of his own cheek. His velvet voice lingers over the lines most exquisite in finish, like his own feelings, and “from these presents” I know that the child, the perfection of creation, has found his own poet, his own interpreter. A roguish brownie of eight years, as full of play as the day is long, finds leisure in some way, to learn “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” and begs to recite it, and all the other brownies listen with eyes sparkling. A more serious child presents “The Wanderer” or “Christmas Treasures” or “Pitty-Pat and Tippy-Toes” and every rosy face becomes thoughtful. What a world of little people was left unrepresented in the realms of poetry until Eugene Field came in!

  Everything Field wrote in prose or verse reflects his contempt for earth’s mighty and his sympathy for earth’s million mites. His art, like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was “to magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a two-penny post communication.” Sense of earthly grandeur he had little or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life—those minor sympathies that are common to all and finally swell into the major song of life—of this sense he was compact. It was the meat and marrow of his life and mind, of his song and story. With unerring instinct Field, in his study of humanity, went to the one school where the emotions, wishes, and passions of mankind are to be seen unobscured by the veil of consciousness. He was forever scanning whatever lies hidden within the folds of the heart of childhood. He knew children through and through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He associated with them on terms of the most intimate comradeship and wormed his way into their confidence with assiduous sympathy. Thus he became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.

  Eccentric, prodigal, uneven in quality to the last degree, the work of Field, in prose and verse, bears the unmistakable stamp of his unique and powerful genius. Especially, whether in dialect, mock archaic, or straightforward English, Field utters the very heart’s secrets of boyhood as not even Riley or Louis Stevenson can do. “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” became long ago a kindergarten classic. His echoes of Horace are not mere irreverent travesties, but seize the very essence of the thought, and render it in the most startlingly up-to-date English, spiced both with current slang and with Field’s own invented idioms. He was really a learned man in many lines rarely, if ever, united before. He was not a cynic, though he never lost the opportunity for mockery, banter, and jest.