Part 11

When I saw Gene in London about November, or the end of October, 1889, his enthusiasm for life in highbrow Grubb Street was already on the wane. Funds were low, so were his spirits, and the hopes he had set on James Gordon Bennett’s enterprise had come to naught.

Mr. Bennett had been running the--or a--New York Herald in London for some time, kidding himself that London would accept a daily with so incongruous a title as a rival to the Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and so forth. And Eugene Field tried to persuade Bennett’s representative, that it could be done _provided_ that he had a column or a column and a half on the editorial page. His London Sharps and Flats were to be syndicated in America, the Chicago Daily News having the preference. And Gene hoped to get at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week out of the enterprise.

If he only had the money to go to Paris and stay there long enough to plead with James Gordon in person! But James Gordon, already a middle-aged man, continued to play the young buck and was seldom in his office for two consecutive days.

At one time, when Eugene had a hundred dollars laid aside for Paris, he received word, just in the nick of time, that the “Commodore” was off on his yacht for Monte Carlo, and would probably stay there--“until they kick him out,” snapped Eugene savagely. “I hope they do.”

And a week later he was much elated because they had done so. At the Eccentric Club he let the yarn loose before an audience dying with laughter.

“My unwilling Chief,” he began, “James Gordon, I mean, went to the Casino in Monte Carlo in a high state of intoxication, and raised Hades with all the trimmings imaginable, until thrown out. Then, still yelling for ‘the frog-eaters’’ blood and Monsieur Blanc’s in particular, he was carried to the yacht, relieved of his clothes, and treated to a cold bath, his usual medicine under like circumstances. After the bath he put on a kimona and airs and bawled for his secretary. That individual was yanked out of bed by the ears and Bennett dictated to him a proclamation in the style of a South American general starting a revolution.

“‘Monsieur Blanc and his associates,’ demanded the proclamation, ‘must send three of the directors to Mr. Bennett’s yacht, making abject apology for the insults heaped upon Mr. Bennett. And unless this apology is forthcoming without evasion or delay, the Commodore will be pleased to blow the Casino into smithereens--he has the guns, powder and shot.’

“At nine o’clock in the morning the directors were handed this ultimatum and they had to act by eleven or prepare to meet their maker, roulettes and all.

“Naturally the directors thought it a drunken joke, but at eleven sharp, Bennett began bombarding the Casino--with blank cartridges. Hence at eleven-ten, five directors instead of three raced to the Harbor in carriages, and tumbled head over heels into a white-flagged steam-pinnace.

“Well,” said Field, “Bennett kept them maneuvering around his yacht for a good fifteen minutes, while clearing decks and with much ostentation making ready for bombardment. When he finally _did_ admit the directors, he exacted even harder terms than he had first proposed, namely: A perpetual card of admission for James Gordon Bennett and friends and, for the present, a solemn invitation to Bennett to come to the Casino and do as he liked there.

“After this,” concluded Eugene, “I suppose these directors lent him their best grand piano for the uses he put Phil May’s mother’s piano to.”

The above was a good story, but unprintable at the time, and it was all Eugene ever got out of Bennett. So most other London enterprises, Gene tried to float, proved barren.

GENE, A “SUCCESS OF CURIOSITY”

The fact was, poor Eugene was no business man and, unlike Mrs. Clemens, pretty Mrs. Field, as far as I could make out, had no eye or head for business either. His London writings hardly ever appealed to a more international audience than Chicago and the West, willy-nilly, furnished. Syndicating was in its infancy and the papers printed nothing but news and again news. Even the New York Herald’s Sunday edition contained hardly a line unconnected with the news of the day. And Eugene said himself he was no newsmonger. Then London society, or near-society, tried to make him out a funny man. He was much in demand as a diner-out, and like an honest man, paid for his dinners and suppers in “his own coin,” stories and jokes.

These stories were all extravaganzas of the most extravagant kind. “I talked to the duchesses as I talk to my children when in pinafores,” he used to tell me, “and the harder I lie, the more natural my American yarns sound to them, for their ignorance of America is as profound as mine of Mars.”

Poor Gene, I am afraid, often accepted dinner invitations “to save grubbing at home,” for his finances were on the downgrade most of the time. In his talks with American friends he often regretted having left Chicago, “where one can always make a touch, if not at the office, then in the Clark Street Emporium” (meaning Mike McDonald’s saloon). And all the time his health severely suffered from the damp and wet, the sleet and raw winds, the river fogs and the smoke fogs.

“I thought if I got away from coffee and Chicago pies, my stomach would act decently again,” he moaned sometimes; “but the eternal tea of Britain is as bad as our coffee, and its meat pies are even more alluring and digestion-disturbing. I will never get well until I can pay a cook a hundred dollars a week and a doctor fifty to tell me what to avoid.”

There was a tendency in London then, among literary people and others, to treat American men of letters not with scant courtesy exactly, but as successes of curiosity. Eugene felt that after a while and it made him sore on London and made him long still more for the fleshpots of Chicago. Of course he returned a broader-minded and a better informed man, but consider the cost to him! The English climate, so healthful to Londoners as to make the town’s death rate the lowest in Europe, wrecked what was left of Eugene’s frail health. But for London he might have lived ten or more years longer. Yet he never could forgive Bennett for turning him down, though I often explained to him that his application may have never reached Bennett’s own desk.

In a measure, too, Eugene Field was responsible for many of his discomforts in London, for he allowed a friend to select most dismal quarters for him and stuck to them instead of getting out and moving to one of the suburbs. “Richmond would be the place for you,” we often told him.

“I am the Duke of Bedford’s tenant,” he joked, “and his Grace is pleased to have my name on his rent roll, so what can I do?” And then he would go into the Bedford family history and count up its fortunes, its land, and estates, in London and out. “Ah,” he would say, “it stands to reason that among Bedford’s ancestors were no penny-a-liners or blue stockings.”

DIRE CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN HORSEPLAY

At the time when Eugene Field was in London, Oscar Wilde and Henry Irving were undoubtedly leaders of the intellectual circles, and with both of these men Gene had quarreled. No open rupture, but he had played practical jokes on them--during their American tours--something an Englishman never forgives. And if he wanted to, his friends and compatriots wouldn’t let him.

It may be true or not that Henry Irving laughed at Gene’s caricatures of himself, done before his very eyes, as well as behind his back in Chicago, but that doesn’t argue that Irving did not resent Gene’s merrymaking. Irving had many eccentricities in person and speech, but still more dignity. And the dignity of his profession was very dear to his heart. Hence there was no companionship between the Chicago writer and the great English actor-manager while Gene was trying to establish himself in London. If he had come to London under an engagement as critic or editorial writer, it would have been different, but Gene was only a struggling literary man like so many others. So the Henry Irving literary circles were closed against the Chicago newspaper man as a matter of course.

But that didn’t sour Gene’s judgment of Irving’s art. I remember a Macbeth night at the Lyceum Theatre. As a production, Irving’s Macbeth was the last word in stage effects. I reminded Gene of the sensation caused in Chicago by the red velvet draw curtain which Irving had brought from London. Up to that time Chicago had only known paper or canvas curtains, variously painted.

“Look at the scenery,” Gene kept on saying at the Lyceum. “It’s all solid, vast, monumental. Chicago would go crazy about that set piece.”

In the lobby we met several critics, among them the critic of the Standard. The Standard man repeated his published charge, namely, that Irving was sinning against tradition, that Macready and Kemble alone had understood how to present Macbeth. Irving, this critic insisted, ought to know “that his Macbeth was unacceptable to the best judgment.”

“Best judgment--fiddlesticks! You merely state your personal opinion. We all do so. For my part I like Irving’s reading with its poetry and romanticism,” said Field hotly. “The King of Scots was full of irresolution, but was often dejected in spirits--Irving’s portrait of a shrinking, faltering King is what it ought to be, since it holds the mirror up to history. As to tradition--that be damned--it is largely in the critic’s mind and nowhere else, except perhaps with some dotard, gabbing about old times.”

That was Gene all over. If the cause was just he would as lief fight the battles of a man like Irving, who ignored him, as of his best friend.

Here is another illustration of that golden rule--by contrary.

He liked Ellen Terry, liked her immensely, but he did not fail to criticise her severely. You may remember Macbeth’s line:

“What if we fail?”

Lady Macbeth answers:

“We fail--”

Now Terry pronounced these two words as if she meant to indicate--well if we fail there’s an end to it.

“All wrong,” said Gene. “She ought to pronounce it:

“_We_ fail!”

“It ought to sound like: ‘Failure is a thing not to be thought of.’”

“I will tell Terry about it when I see her,” he said. Whether he carried out that intention or not I don’t know. He always spoke about Ellen Terry as the wonderful woman on the stage. “Think what she makes her body do, how she makes it respond to the demands of every role. Her eyes are pale, her nose is too long, her mouth is only ordinary, yet she makes these faulty features tell on the stage, and the audience never knows how deficient she is as to mouth, eyes and nose. And her complexion isn’t good--naturally that doesn’t matter so much. Her hair is an indecent tow color. And how she makes that lean and bony figure of hers cut ice is wonderful. I forgot about her feet. But her hands are too large for a woman. Indeed they are masculine, yet her audience is never allowed to see that. She gets you, and she entrances you by her innate grace--such grace as graces the world only once in a hundred years.”

His troubles in America with Oscar Wilde closed another set of literary salons in Eugene’s face while in London. For it must be remembered that Oscar’s disgrace took place years later, in 1895, and that until his quarrel with Lord Queensbury, he was a figure to be reckoned with in London society. He was at least as important in certain social circles as Lillie Langtry, and was a Mason-brother of the Prince of Wales.

“What a fool I was, estranging Oscar,” Gene confessed. “At the time I thought it exquisitely funny, but the British can’t see through our American horseplay. They think it undignified and that’s enough to kill even the loudest laugh.”

“What did you do to Oscar?” I asked.

“The day before his arrival in Denver, where I was doing the Tribune Primer, I impersonated Oscar in the mask of Bunthorne of Patience, driving through Denver in an elegant landau and pair, and creating a riot of mirth. Oscar thought it a good advertisement for his lecture, and as a matter of fact it was, but as to the humor of the thing, he hadn’t the slightest notion, and treated me, who had made hundreds for him, with studied coldness.”

“Yet,” continued Gene, “for all I know he may be living on the proceeds of my joke even now, for they say he earns next to nothing and depends on the money he saved in the United States, from the proceeds of his tour. But give the devil his due, Oscar does the Prince-chap business in great style. His game is to impress ordinary folks, the grocer and the glovemaker, that a litterateur is not necessarily a Bohemian living in a garret, sporting frayed collars, having no money for cigarettes in the morning and no dinner money in the evening. And to demonstrate, he dines at the swellest hotels and restaurants and tries to cut a big swath everywhere.”

On another occasion, Gene told a few things about Oscar that he had heard at the Herald office. “Our fine American girl, Mary Anderson, has given that fop Oscar a commission, duly signed, to write a drama for her. It’s going to be called ‘The Duchess of Padua.’ Oscar may make five or ten thousand dollars out of it. If I wasn’t by nature so much inclined to humor, I might get an honorable commission like that. But people think I am only fit for cracking jokes and writing jocular and sentimental poetry.”

“Well,” I said, “Gene, everybody to his groove. While Oscar does the highfalutin’, you make people laugh. If you really want to make money you ought to go on the stage. There your gift of mimicry and imitation ought to get you big returns, for you could hold your own with Goodwin and Henry Dixey.”

“I have been told that before,” said Gene; “they drummed it into my head in Denver and in Chicago, but somehow or other I prefer the writing game to any other, even if it keeps one on a level with proletarians.”

Though not mixing with Oscar Wilde’s crowd, Gene heard a lot of gossip concerning the author of “Salome,” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” Likewise some stories about Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, a most eccentric woman, whose motto was said to be: “Only shopkeepers are respectable.”

“Why, in his own mother’s house, Oscar started a ‘Society for the Suppression of Virtue,’” vowed Gene.

Then there was the famous yarn about original sin that we heard right off the griddle. It ran this way:

Said a Famous Beauty, friend of the Prince of Wales, to Wilde:

“Is it not a fact that original sin began with Adam and came down direct to you, Oscar?”

Oscar, shielding his mouth with his hand, for he had bad teeth, responded:

“No, my dear, sin commenced with Eve, Cleopatra carried it on and with our dear Lillie the future of sin may be safely left, being in expert hands.”

FIELD’S LIBRARY OF HUMOR

While in Germany, Gene had read up on ideas of humor, and entertained the notion that a “History of Humor” would prove a good seller. The book was to start with “The Smile,” such chapters to follow as: “Feeling Good;” “Pleasant Thoughts;” “Why We Laugh Over the Ridiculous;” “Whims;” “Practical Jokes;” “Fixed Ideas;” “_Naiveté_;” “Blue-stockings;” “Old Maids,” and so forth.

He jotted these chapters down on the marble top of our table in the Cafe Royal, and I copied the list. I think the above is pretty complete.

THOSE GERMAN PROFESSORS

When Gene Field returned from Hanover, where he had placed his children in school, he was full of the German professors he had met.

I reminded him that Lord Palmerston had called Germany “that damned land of Professors.”

“I know the woods are full of them. I have seen them in droves, good, bad and indifferent, but I put my kids with the human kind of professor, and, besides, those youngsters can take care of themselves. I am told of a private tutor who, on applying for a job at a country house, thought his future paymaster as big a brute as himself. Accordingly, while the rich man was drawing up a contract, this tutor fell upon the boys, his future charges, as he thought, and began to thrash them without any cause whatever in the most cruel and barbarous fashion.

“The children’s howls brought the father to the scene, who seized the scoundrel by the neck and demanded what he meant by assaulting his boys.

“‘Well,’ answered the tutor, ‘I meant to show them right away that I am master.’

“‘And I will show you who is master here,’ shouted the father, and gave that tutor the licking of his life. Then he kicked him out of doors, and said: ‘Now run, for in five minutes I will loose my dogs, and if they catch you, God have mercy upon your soul.’”

EUGENE FIELD AND NORTHERN LORE

While in London Eugene Field was always talking about the Orkney Islands, the dreariest, foggiest, most uninteresting patches of land in the wet you want to see. He had discovered somehow that Queen Mary of Scots had created that brute Bothwell, duke of Orkney, a title reserved for members of the reigning family. Hence her bestowal of the title helped to emphasize still more the hatred of the nobles against her husband. He chewed the matter over for a month, then one rainy afternoon, at the Cafe Royal, he got it off his chest.

“I want to go to the Orkney Islands to find traces of Bothwell and perhaps get a new angle on that fearless lass--as fearless as she was vindictive--Mary. When the Queen was taken prisoner, Bothwell made for the Orkneys and chose one of the smaller islands to assemble a piratical navy. Instead of stealing queens, he meant to steal goods and chattels of merchantmen passing the Northern Seas and the Channel. He had been a pirate before Mary took him up and was a robber baron by birth. Wonder if his remains rest in the Orkneys or at the bottom of the sea.”

“He was buried in some small Danish seaboard town and in a church at that.”

“Perhaps he died in the odor of sanctity,” laughed Gene; “that would make it only the more interesting. Anyhow from the Orkneys I can easily get to Denmark and from there I can almost swim over to Sweden. I want to dig deep into Northern lore--there are unexplored tons of it, full of the most sublime poetry, and when I return to America and have time to look over my notes, there will be something doing, I promise you, my boy.”

Returning to Bothwell, Field asked:

“By the way, I read somewhere that Mary was divorced from Bothwell while in English captivity.”

“If you can get hold of the Vatican records about that divorce,” I answered, “the fortune of your book amongst scholars is made. What do you suppose was the cause of the divorce granted by the Roman Court?”

“Why, the murder of Mary’s second husband, the Earl of Darnley, at which she and Bothwell had connived.”

“Wrong.”

“Or the fact that Bothwell was a Protestant, a heretic.”

“Wrong again.”

“Then because Bothwell was still the husband of Ann Thorssen when he married the Queen.”

“Wrong the third time. The divorce was granted on evidence that Bothwell had intercourse with Mary before marriage.”

One of these Northern lore stories Field wrote for a little book of Christmas tales, but having been unable to carry out his intention as above set forth, the yarn was of small account. It lacked local color and the naturalness that made most of his stories so delightful.

LITTLE BOY BLUE

It has been forgotten by this time that Gene lost a son while the boy was at school in Hanover--the most promising of his boys, it was said. But at the time when the grieving father brought the body of his boy home, a great many lovers of his poetry associated the child’s death with the famous “Little Boy Blue.”

As a matter of fact, however, “Little Boy Blue” was not the echo of a fond parent’s sorrow, but was written when all his children were flourishing. At the time Gene was simply in a sentimental mood. Maybe, too, some newspaper story he read was responsible. At any rate, “Little Boy Blue” was published and admired and beloved a year or two, or longer, before Gene went to Europe, and while all his children enjoyed good health.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation has been standardized. Spelling has been retained as in the original except for the following:

Page xi: “Think of Her Sorrow” “Think of Her Sorrows” Page xi: “Blücher in Oxford” “Blucher in Oxford” Page 33: “of Catherine of Russia” “of Catharine of Russia” Page 141: “Indeed, most of th” “Indeed, most of the” Page 159: “Duke's mediicine chest” “Duke's medicine chest” Page 162: “MARK TWAIN AND THE ENGLISH” “MARK AND THE ENGLISH” Page 179: “Troquemada and the rest” “Torquemada and the rest” Page 183: “MARK TWAIN EXPLAINS DEAN” “MARK EXPLAINS DEAN” Page 189: “to _Mont de Piétè_” “to _Mont de Piété_” Page 204: “great Catherine played” “great Catharine played” Page 233: “an Englishmen never” “an Englishman never” Page 238: “Lady Windemere's Fan” “Lady Windermere's Fan”