1886.]

CHAPTER VII

IN THE SAINTS’ AND SINNERS’ CORNER

To those of us who were closely associated with Eugene Field personally or in his work, it was evident during the years from 1887 until after his return from Europe that a radical change was taking place in his methods of life and thought.  His friend Cowen has ascribed this change to settling down “in the must and rust of bibliomania”; but I fancy that that settling down was more than half the result of the failing health which warned him that he must conserve his powers.  He felt the shadows creeping up the mountain, and realized he had much to do while yet it was day.

In Eugene Field’s case it would be difficult to distinguish the line where his bibliomania, that was an inherited infatuation for collecting, ended, and the carefully cultivated affectation of the craze for literary uses began.  He was unquestionably a victim of the disease about which he wrote so roguishly and withal so charmingly.  But though it was in his blood, it never blinded his sense of literary values or restrained his sallies at the expense of his demented fellows.  He had too keen a sense of the ridiculous to go clean daft on the subject.  He yielded to the fascinating pursuit of rare and curious editions, of old prints of celebrities, and of personal belongings of distinguished individuals; but how far these impulses were irresistible and how much he was mad only in craft, like Hamlet, it is impossible to say.  The bibliomaniacs claim him for their scribe and poet, the defender of their faith, the high-priest of their craft.  The scoffers find a grimace in everything he ever wrote upon the subject, from “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer,” with its palpable reflection of Watts and its ill-concealed raillery, down to the gentle, yet none the less discernible, mockery of the “Love Affairs.”  It would be a bootless task to follow the gradual evolution from the frequent authorship of such quatrains as—­

  In Cupid’s artful toils I roll
    And thrice ten thousand pangs I feel,
  For Susie’s eyes have ground my soul
    Beneath their iron heel.

And: 

  O thou, who at the age of three
    Grew faint and weak and ill,
    O’ertaken by the bitter pill
  Of cold adversity!

which frolic through his column as late as June, 1888; to such bits as this: 

  Oh, for a booke and a shady nooke
    Eyther in doore or out,
  With the greene leaves whispering overhead,
    Or the streete cryes all about;
  Where I maie read all at my ease
    Both of the newe and old,
  For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke
    Is better to me than golde!