So after all it’s soothin’ to know
    That here Sol stays ’nd yonder’s Jim—­
  He havin’ his opinyin uv Sol,
    ‘Nd Sol havin’ his opinyin uv him.

CHAPTER XIV

BEGINNING OF HIS LITERARY EDUCATION

Before he came to Chicago, pretty much all that Eugene Field knew of literature and books had been taken in at the pores, as Joey Laddle would say, through association with lawyers, doctors, and actors.  His academic education, as we have seen, was of the most cursory and intermittent nature.  When he left the University of Missouri it was without a diploma, without studious habits, and without pretensions to scholarship.  His trip to Europe dissipated his fortune, and his early marriage rendered it imperative that he should stop study as well as play and go to work.  His father’s library was safely stored in St. Louis for the convenient season that was postponed from year to year, until a score were numbered ere the nails were drawn from the precious boxes.  Every cent of the salary that might have been squandered(?) in books was needed to feed and clothe the ravenous little brood that came faster than their parents “could afford,” as he has told us.  What time was not devoted to them and to the daily round of newspaper writing was spent in conversing with his fellows, studying life first hand, visiting theatres and enjoying himself in his own way generally.  All the advance that Field had made in journalism before the year 1883 was due to native aptitude, an unfailing fund of humor and an inherited turn for literary expression.  Without ever having read that author, he followed Pope’s axiom that “the proper study of mankind is man.”  This he construed to include women and children.  The latter he had every opportunity to study early and often in his own household, and most thoroughly did he avail himself thereof.  As for books, his acquaintance with them for literary pleasure and uses seemed to have begun and ended with the Bible and the New England Primer.  They furnished the coach that enabled his fancy “to take the air.”

His knowledge of Shakespeare, so far as I could judge, had been acquired through the theatre.  The unacted plays were not familiar to him.  Few people realize what a person of alert intelligence and retentive memory can learn of the best English literature through the theatre-going habit.  Measuring Field’s opportunity by my own, during the decade from 1873 to 1883, here is a list of Shakespearian plays he could have taken in through eyes and ears without touching a book:  “The Tempest,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” “Measure for Measure,” “The Comedy of Errors,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “As You Like It,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Twelfth Night,” “Richard II,” “Richard III,” “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” “Coriolanus,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Caesar,” “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Othello,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” and “Cymbeline.”