Stories of Authors, British and American Part 24

The hero was not unworthy of the praises which his peers at the Lotus dinner were glad to lavish. Said St. Clair McKelway:

"He has enough excess and versatility to be a genius. He has enough quality and quant.i.ty of virtues to be a saint. But he has honorably trans.m.u.ted his genius into work, whereby it has been brought into relations with literature and with life. And he has preferred warm fellows.h.i.+p to cool perfection, so that sinners love him and saints are content to wait for him."

LXIX

HAMLIN GARLAND'S LITERARY BEGINNING

Hamlin Garland is one of the writers whose name suggests the great Northwest. He was born in Wisconsin in 1860, went to Iowa and later to Dakota, striving at an early age to wrest a living from the soil. At ten years of age he plowed seventy acres of land. His vivid descriptions of Western farm-life are not the results of reading and casual observation, supplemented by a vivid imagination; they are the products of actual experiences.

In a personal interview with Mr. Garland, Frank G. Carpenter gives us the following interesting particulars:

"The conversation here turned to Mr. Garland's literary work, and he told me how he was first led to write by reading Hawthorne's _Mosses from an Old Manse_. This book so delighted him that he wanted to write essays like it for a living, and he practised at this during the intervals of his school-teaching and studying for years. It was not until he was older that he attempted fiction or poetry. The story of his first published article is a curious one. Said he:

"'My first literary success was a poem which I wrote for _Harper's Weekly_, ent.i.tled 'Lost in the Norther.' It was a poem describing a blizzard and the feelings of a man lost in it. I received twenty-five dollars for it.'

"'That must have been a good deal of money to you then, Mr. Garland?'

"'It was,' was the reply. 'It was my first money in literature, and I spent it upon my father and mother. I paid five dollars for a copy of Grant's _Memoirs_, which I sent father, and with the remaining twenty dollars I bought a silk dress for my mother. It was the first silk dress she had ever had.'

"'When did you write your first fiction?'

"'My mother got half of the money I received for that,' replied Mr.

Garland, 'as it was due to her that I wrote it. I had been studying in Boston for several years, when I went out to Dakota to visit my parents. The night after I arrived I was talking with mother about old times and old friends. She told me how one family had gone back to New York for a visit, and had returned very happy, in getting back to their Western home. As she told the story, the pathos of it struck me.

I went into another room and began to write. The story was one of the best chapters of my book _Main-Traveled Roads_. I read it to mother, and she liked it, and upon telling her that I thought it was worth at least seventy-five dollars, she replied: "Well, if that is so, I think you ought to _divvy_ with me, for I gave you the story." "I will,"

said I, and so, when I got my seventy-five dollars, I sent her a check for thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents. I got many other good suggestions during that trip to Dakota. I wrote poems and stories.

Some of the stories were published in _The Century_, and I remember that I received six hundred dollars within two weeks from its editors.

It was perhaps a year later before I published my first book. It had a good sale, and I have been writing from that day to this.'

"Hamlin Garland spends a part of every year in the West. He has bought the old home place where he was born in Wisconsin, and he has there a little farm of four acres, upon which he raises asparagus, strawberries, onions, and bushels of other things. His mother lives with him. During my talk with him the other night he said: 'I like the West and the Western people. I have been brought up with them, and I expect to devote my life to writing about them. I spend a portion of each summer on the Rocky Mountains, camping out. I like to go where I can sleep in the open air and have elbow-room away from the crowded city.'"

LXX

STEPHEN CRANE: A "WONDERFUL BOY"

In 1900, Stephen Crane, while yet barely thirty, died. His early pa.s.sing away was widely regarded as a loss to American literature. In England he was especially admired as a vigorous writer. His _The Red Badge of Courage_ won him wide recognition as a keen a.n.a.lyst. Old soldiers who read the story could not believe that it was written by a boy who was born after the war had ended. By many critics his stories of boyhood are considered the writings that shall be longest remembered. Shortly before his death Mr. Crane wrote the following letter to the editor of a Rochester daily:

"My father was a Methodist minister, author of numerous works of theology, and an editor of various periodicals of the church. He was a graduate of Princeton, and he was a great, fine, simple mind. As for myself, I went to Lafayette College, but did not graduate. I found mining-engineering not at all to my taste. I preferred base-ball.

Later I attended Syracuse University, where I attempted to study literature, but found base-ball again much more to my taste. My first work in fiction was for the New York _Tribune_, when I was eighteen years old. During this time, one story of the series went into the _Cosmopolitan_. At the age of twenty I wrote my first novel--_Maggie_.

It never really got on the market, but it made for me the friends.h.i.+p of William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, and since that time I have never been conscious for an instant that those friends.h.i.+ps have at all diminished. After completing _Maggie_, I wrote mainly for the New York _Press_ and for _The Arena_. In the latter part of my twenty-first year I began _The Red Badge of Courage_, and completed it early in my twenty-second year. The year following I wrote the poems contained in the volume known as _The Black Riders_. On the first day of last November I was precisely twenty-nine years old and had finished my fifth novel, _Active Service_. I have only one pride, and that is that the English edition of _The Red Badge of Courage_ has been received with great praise by the English reviewers. I am proud of this simply because the remoter people would seem more just and harder to win."

In another letter to the same editor he writes about his literary sincerity:

"The one thing that deeply pleases me is the fact that men of sense invariably believe me to be sincere. I know that my work does not amount to a string of dried beans--I always calmly admit it--but I also know that I do the best that is in me without regard to praise or blame. When I was the mark for every humorist in the country, I went ahead; and now when I am the mark for only fifty per cent of the humorists of the country, I go ahead; for I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision--he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition."

LXXI

EUGENE FIELD

The general public will always remember Eugene Field as the author of _Little Boy Blue_, the many friends of Field, in addition to their memory of him as the charming poet of childhood, will always think of him as the irrepressible prince of merry-makers. To perpetrate a joke Field spared neither labor nor his friends. Many of his pranks were mere whimsicalities, innocent pleasantries that hurt no one. He would spend three hours in ill.u.s.trating a letter to a friend, filling the letter with gossipy trivialities and using six different kinds of ink to make it look grotesque.

During the last years of Field's too brief life he was importuned so frequently for the facts concerning his career that he printed a brief biography or _Auto-a.n.a.lysis_, as he called it. This contains a generous portion of fiction mingled with some fact. He begins his autobiography with:

"I was born in St. Louis, Mo., September 3, 1850.... Upon the death of my mother (1856), I was put in the care of my (paternal) cousin, Miss Mary Field French, at Amherst, Ma.s.s.

"In 1865 I entered the private school of Rev. James Tufts, Monson, Ma.s.s., and there fitted for Williams College, which inst.i.tution I entered as a freshman in 1868. Upon my father's death, in 1869, I entered the soph.o.m.ore cla.s.s of Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., my guardian, John W. Burgess, now of Columbia College, being then a professor in that inst.i.tution. But in 1870 I went to Columbia, Mo., and entered the State University there, and completed my junior year with my brother. In 1872 I visited Europe, spending six months and my patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and Italy. In May, 1873, I became a reporter on the St. Louis _Evening Journal_. In October of that year I married Miss Julia Sutherland Comstock (born in Chenango Co., N.Y.), of St. Joseph, Mo., at that time a girl of sixteen. We have had eight children--three daughters and five sons."

This is not all of the autobiography. There are about a thousand words more. The reason Field attended three collegiate inst.i.tutions is that his mischievous pranks made him _persona non grata_ to the college authorities. In after years the old historian of Knox College wrote: "He was prolific of harmless pranks and his school life was a big joke."

The gay irresponsibility of Field is early ill.u.s.trated in the reckless manner in which he spent "six months and his patrimony" in Europe. In 1872 Field received $8,000, the first portion of his patrimony. He proposed to a young friend, Comstock, the brother of Julia, whom he later married, that they go to Europe. Field offered to bear all the expenses of the trip. They went and for six months they had a glorious time. Soon the money was gone; he telegraphed for more; was obliged to sell the odd curios he had gathered to pay his way home. This expenditure of his money in a trip abroad is not so unprofitable a venture as it appears. The elder Field had left a fortune valued at $60,000; Eugene's share was to be about $25,000. In two years he spent about $20,000. His brother Roswell, more prudent, lived for several years on his share but finally, owing to the depreciation of real estate values, saw his fortune dwindle away. He is said to have envied the shrewdness of Eugene in spending his money when he had it.

Field had the highest respect for womankind. In his _Auto-a.n.a.lysis_ he writes: "I am fond of companions.h.i.+p of women, and I have no unconquerable prejudice against feminine beauty. I recall with pride that in twenty-two years of active journalism I have always written in reverential praise of womankind." This respect for womankind, however, did not prevent him from playing pranks upon his wife. On their wedding journey he delighted to tease his young Julia by ordering at Delmonico's "boiled pig's feet a la St. Jo." A few years later a quartet was accustomed to meet at Eugene's home. Field did not sing with the quartet but as a fifth member acted as reader or reciter in their little entertainments. Eugene delighted to tease his wife by walking into the parlor when the quartet was practicing at his home and saying: "Well, boys, let us take off our coats and take it easy; it's too hot." When this was done, Eugene would blaze forth in the brilliancy of a red flannel unders.h.i.+rt, with white cuffs and collar pinned to his s.h.i.+rt.

When Carl Schurz was making his senatorial campaign in Missouri, Field was sent with the party to report the meetings. Field, although greatly admiring Schurz, took great delight in misreporting Schurz, whose only comment would be: "Field, why will you lie so outrageously?" One evening when a group of German serenaders had a.s.sembled in front of the hotel to do honor to Schurz, Field rushed out and pretending to be Schurz, addressed them in broken English. At another time, at a political meeting, Field suddenly stepped out to the front and began:

"Ladies and Shentlemen: I haf such a pad colt dot et vas not bossible for me to make you a speedg to-night, but I haf die bleasure to introduce to you my brilliant chournalistic friendt Euchene Fielt, who will spoke you in my blace."

While in Denver Field worked upon the _Tribune_. Over his desk hung,--"This is my busy day," and on the wall,--"G.o.d bless our proofreader, He can't call for him too soon." In his office he kept an old bottomless black-walnut chair. Across its yawning chasm he would carelessly thrown old newspapers. As it was the only unoccupied chair in the room, the casual visitor would drop unsuspectingly into the trap. The angry subscriber who had come to wreak vengeance upon the writer of irritating personalities could not withstand the apparently sincere apologies which Field lavished upon his victim. It was so humiliating to a man of Field's sensibilities to be obliged to receive such important visitors in an office whose very furniture indicated the poverty of the newspaper.

In 1883 Field moved to Chicago, where the rest of his life was pa.s.sed. Mr. Stone, one of the proprietors of _The News_, had gone to Denver to have a personal interview with Field, whose work had attracted attention in the newspaper world. Field stipulated that he was to have a column a day for his own use. The Chicago public soon was attracted by the brilliant versatility of the writer of "Sharps and Flats," the t.i.tle of the column written by Field.

Some months after Field had moved to Chicago he concluded that the general public ought to know that he had arrived. It was a cold morning in December. "So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, b.u.t.toned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the pa.s.sers-by. When he reached the entrance to the _Daily News_ office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke."

Field had execrable taste in dress and he knew it. Consequently he enjoyed presenting neckties to his friends. His biographer, Slason Thompson, who worked in the same newspaper office, separated only by a low thin part.i.tion, relates that in the afternoon about two o'clock Field would stick his head above the part.i.tion and say,--"Come along, Nompy, and I'll buy you a new necktie," and when Thompson would decline the offer, Field would mildly respond, "Very well, if you won't let me buy you a necktie, you must buy me a lunch," and off to the coffee-house they would march, where the bill would be paid by Thompson, for Field was indeed through life the gay knight he styled himself, _sans peur and sans monnaie_.