coy to draw the fire of the ever-watchful and hopeless
grammatical purist.

CHAPTER XVI

NATURE OF HIS DAILY WORK

In the last chapter I have told in general terms how Field employed
himself day by day, from which the reader may form the impression that
between eleven A.M. and midnight not over one-quarter of his time was
actually employed in work, the balance being frittered away in seeming
play. In one sense the reader would be right in such an inference.
Field worked harder and longer at his play than at what the world has
been pleased to accept as the work of a master workman, but out of
that play was born the best of all that he has left. His daily column
was a crystallization of the busy fancies that were running through
his head during all his hours of fooling and nights of light-hearted
pleasure. It reflected everything he read and heard and saw. It was a
"barren sea from which he made a dry haul"--a dreary and colorless
gathering that left him without material for his pen. He did not hunt
for this material with a brass band, but went for it with studied
persistence. Field never believed that he was sent into the world to
reform it. His aim was to amuse himself, and if in so doing he
entertained or gratified others, so much the better. "Reform away," he
was once reported as saying, "reform away, but as for me, the world is
good enough for me as it is. I am a thorough optimist. In temperament
I'm a little like old Horace--I want to get all the happiness out of
the world that's possible." And he got it, not intermittently and in
chunks, but day by day and every hour of the day.

His brother Roswell has said that the "curse of comedy was on Eugene,"
and "it was not until he threw off that yoke and gave expression to
the better and sweeter thoughts within him that, as with Bion, the
voice of song flowed freely from the heart."

I do not think it is quite fair to regard comedy as a curse or a yoke.
Certainly Eugene Field never suffered under the blight of the one nor
staggered under the burden of the other. If there is any curse in
comedy, unadulterated by lying, malice, or envy, he never knew it. He
knew--none better--that the author who would command the tears that
purify and sweeten life must move the laughter that lightens it. What
says our Shakespeare?--

_Jog on, jog, on the foot-path way,
And merrily hent the stile-a,
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a._