University of Virginia Library

THE REAL ARTEMUS WARD

THE above epitaph, written by the genial humorist's mother, one may read on a marble slab in the little cemetery at Waterford, Oxford County, Maine,— "Water-ford near Rum-ford," as he used to say, "the little village that nestled amongst the hills and never did anything but nestle." It is a charming spot where rest the remains of Charles Farrar Browne, looking out upon the little lake, and hard by the edge of a beech and maple wood,

in the days when I first knew the place. Born in the same year and in the same neighborhood as himself, and all the scenes of his early life being as dear and familiar to me as the songs of the birds or the crests of the bordering hills, it has seemed partly a duty, as well as a privilege and pleasure, to add my little contribution to the literature his career has called forth.

Even to those who knew him intimately throughout, his real life seems to have begun just where the great world first heard of him, upon his early pilgrimage westward. Major Armstrong tells how the green youth of twenty-three, in long linen duster, came to him in 1857 in the little city of Tiffin, Ohio, and wanted to set type on the only newspaper in town; how he took him into the hotel and gave him his first leisurely meal for many a day; how he "set locals out of his head" for four dollars a week till Riley put him on the local staff of the Toledo Commercial, and paid him the munificent stipend of a collar a day. Here his witticisms attracted the attention of Mr. Gray, the veteran editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and to that city the young journalist went, and soon found fame and the beginning of good fortune. In fact, Cleveland was always more a home to him than any other place, and he who goes thither to this day can learn from the lips of many warm and willing witnesses with what peculiar pride and affection his memory is cherished. The rickety chair and the old pine table he used in the Plain Dealer office are preserved with great care in the Western Reserve Historical Society.

The "show" had taken possession of him from his very boyhood, and showmen were always his admiration. "Artemus Ward," the showman he clothed with flesh and blood early in his Plain Dealer work, was a faithful development and no accident. The "3 moral bares" were born of the same idea that evolved the caravan of the boy of ten, in his little Oxford County home, in which his mother's cow, decked with fancy bed quilt, was the elephant.

Nearly three years were spent in Cleveland, when he went to New York to assist in the making of Vanity Fair. But in all this time his fragmentary newspaper work was only preparatory to entering upon a career that had been the dream of his life. It is curious to note that nearly all his newspaper friends tried to dissuade him from his purpose to attempt lecturing. Major Bone, the present managing editor of the Plain Dealer, having once gotten hold of a string of matter that appeared to have

been put together for use on the platform, made a personal appeal to Browne to give up the venture, as it would be sure to be a sorry failure. But he was persistent, even stubborn, (though always amiably so,) in his purpose, though in other things he had been vacillating and inconstant. He had heard his sayings retailed in minstrel halls and elsewhere, and if they were good, if they were merchandise, why should he not come to his own, since he was poor?

The public is tolerably familiar with his first ventures, "Ghosts," "Sixty Minutes in Africa," and the "Babes in the Wood." He was determined to lecture, and on a plan of his own, a plan it took some time and money to effect. It was the golden age of the platform, but there had never been a humorous lecture, in any broad sense. To entertain, with pure frolic, audiences thus educated, was indeed an audacious undertaking. But Artemus never seemed to have the slightest doubt of his success, which shows how completely he had mastered the subject. It was not, however, till his California trip and what came out of it that his full ideal was to be realized,—a lecture that should have a thread of narrative, or a series of pictures, or both, which he could use as the framework of his incomparable fun.

In more ways than one the California journey in the season of 1863-64 proved of great consequence. His reception all along the route was wonderfully cordial. In Virginia City the miners took charge of his lecture, refusing to have tickets sold, but invited in the crowd, and then a committee passed among the audience and collected sixteen hundred dollars! One hat broke through with its load of gold. Everybody wanted to see the tenderfoot who, on being requested to reply by wire what he would take for forty nights in California, instantly answered "Brandy and water." His wit was quicker than the lightning, and his kindliness and humor simply measureless.

But this terribly trying trip in "the little den on wheels," as he called the stage, brought on a serious illness upon his return by way of Utah; and yet, as has been hinted, it all turned out to be one of the greatest bits of good fortune. His enforced stay among the Mormons gave him an opportunity to study the inside history and working of their institution, and thus furnish him what he had so long desired,—the subject of an illustrated lecture, which in those days meant a panorama or other series of actual pictures, instead of the modern stereopticon. On his reaching New York, in the spring of '64, he at once set about his ideal plan, and was soon "on the road" with the most unique entertainment ever offered to the public.

I shall never forget my meeting him in Baltimore the following winter, the last year of the war, when he was giving his new Mormon lecture in the quaint old "Maryland Institute." I had not seen him for three years, and his first greeting was to thrust into my hand the program of his lecture, and a ticket inscribed, "Admit the bearer and one wife." This ticket, the program, and autograph on an invitation to admit all my acquaintances, together with woodcuts of the lecturer, and other curious mementoes of my old friend, gathered later, I keep among my treasures.

From this time until the date of his leaving for England in the summer of 1866, I had great opportunities to observe and study him. There was something very fascinating in his presence. Never was a man more misunderstood. He had not one trace of coarseness or real awkwardness. Though far from handsome, he had a fine, lithe figure, with smooth, light hair, teeth white and delicate, and the most beautiful hands. His voice was peculiarly soft, and his whole demeanor was that of a finely bred, sensitive, and modest gentleman. Even his most intimate friends could hardly understand why nothing of the

clown ever cropped out in facial or bodily contortion, when he was saying his odd things; but surely it never did, and this self poise and grave mien on all these occasions no one who knew him can ever for a moment forget. It is not strange that the great public always thought of him beforehand as a bumptious and rather uncouth specimen of the traveling showman, and it was their disappointment on seeing him that added greatly to the amusement of his entertainment. A London reporter relates that when he made his appearance in the evening on the stage, a large part of the audience that had never seen him supposed that he was the genteel manager who had come out to make some preliminary announcement. But the real fact is that Artemus Ward was not even affected by local coloring or prejudice, nor was his speech marked by a single provincialism. He was a cosmopolitan gentleman in every relation of life. And this is what was the beginning of the power he had over his audiences, that they at once saw he was not to attempt to amuse them by antics, but by quietly saying things worth saying. And half the fun of the entertainment lay in the successive, or rather cumulative bursts of laughter that followed his best points. The bright few were ready to laugh on the instant; then a slower section of the audience would "catch on," and finally all would be tumult for minutes together.

The program of this Mormon lecture, precisely the same in England as here, was a wonderful creation; and the very music in it showed the genius of the artist. It was at a time when the community was gorged with sentimental songs, and these were imitated and paraphrased by him, one of the pieces being entitled, "Dearest, When Thou Sleepest, Dostest Dreamest of Me?" And yet Artemus was not a frivolous person. He had a deep and appreciative sentiment. More than this, he had reverence, and it was because of these that he detested shallow and unworthy persons and cheats. It was because he had real sentiment that he ridiculed gush. He was up to the intellectual standard of his audiences. It is a mistake to suppose he was in any way an inferior man. He knew men and he knew public affairs most correctly and thoroughly. One of his English critics has said of him that he knew as much about England as most Englishmen knew; and "To him the Tower of London was the history of England in stone and mortar."

I saw him the last time on the eve of his departure for London, where he was to face a critical and expectant public in the metropolis of England. He never seemed to doubt the entire safety of this venture, and was gleeful as a child over the prospect. Exactly as he had planned it, he delivered his opening lecture November 13th, 1866, in Egyptian Hall, which had been made famous by many literary talkers. The notables among artists, actors, the club men, in fact, the representatives of all social and literary London, were there,—all by invitation, the paying public not being admitted. On this first night, as I have said, it was the lecture on the Mormons. There was "the little picture shop, with its central curtain of green baize, the piano hidden from view, some pictures to be unrolled, a few good, but mostly very bad; while the music was what the lecturer's whim might suggest.

When at the last moment, a spare figure in full evening dress, holding in his delicate handsome hand the dainty little riding whip to point out the details of his pictures, appeared upon the stage in front of the curtain, there was a depressed and disappointed feeling all through the audience that somehow there was a mistake,—nearly everybody having the impression that, though well meant, it must be a dismal failure. But Artemus soon ended all that. In that quiet, quaint way that no man has

ever equaled, and no man can half represent, hesitating, and even apparently stammering and blushing just a little, in his effort to say the exact and conscientious thing, seemingly so diffident that he would apparently get wholly confused and incapable of getting back to what he had marked out to say, he began: "I hope my little picture shop will please you. The pictures are by some of the oldest masters I could find. I am not an artist myself, but I have always been more or less mixed up with art. Once a sculpist wanted to make a burst of me, but I was too modest to let him do it. I knew everybody would want one, and it would get very trying to be constantly meeting everywhere the educated classes taking bursts of me to their families." And then he told them a roundabout story of something that happened to him once when he had undertaken to be a manager; how he had engaged a celebrated living skeleton in New York to exhibit in Australia. "He was a splendid skeleton, one of the most reliable skeletons I had ever met. But do you know that very soon after getting to sea that unprincipled creature began to eat dreadfully? Between meals he would wander around amongst the freight, and eat everything he could get his hands on. He said he thought the salt air agreed with him! When we arrived at Melbourne that dreadful, that perfidious skeleton weighed seventy-three pounds more than I did!" And then he would apologize for introducing the incident, and thus keep the audience waiting by something like this, though never twice the same. "I know that this story has nothing to do with my entertainment, but one of the principal features of my entertainment is that it contains so many things that don't have anything to do with it." By this time the audience would be all alive to try and catch what he meant by it all. The very next thing would be apparently the most childlike statement about his show. "I always try to get the best without much regard to expense. I pay my orchestra five pounds a week, and do his washing!" Think of the audacity of a man who could look into the face of John Bright and the Honorable Robert Lowe, who, as a London paper of the next day said, sat in one of the front rows of seats, and say such things!

A considerable portion of this lecture was a really creditable and worthy piece of description, and some of the illustrations from the panorama were excellent. But it was all only a background for the fun of the showman, and he was supreme master of it. However much the audience might laugh, even to a tumult of merriment that would often last a minute or two, or perhaps longer, Artemus stood with the gravest mien and unmoved face. He could not help laughing while writing or planning a good thing, but no necromancer was ever more selfpoised when he stood before his audience.

The lecture showed much shrewd observation of the Mormons, who were then at the height of their power. He knew Brigham Young personally, as well as Heber C. Kimball, and always spoke of the latter's wives as the queens of Heber. But the greatest fun of the whole was the manipulation of the panorama itself. Things would go wrong every now and then, and the audience would fairly scream with laughter, supposing it was a mistake; while as a matter of fact Artemus was always at the bottom of it all. For instance, the prairie fire would go down at the wrong time, and then break out again when the scene it was to illustrate had wholly passed, the lecturer meantime apparently nearly overcome with vexation and despair, that made the whole effect irresistibly ludicrous. Then the wrong music would be played, and the house would break out into roars of laughter, as when he touched upon one really pathetic recital the piano ground out "Poor Mary Ann."

In the midst of a most instructive talk on the complications of the Mormon question, or an impressive description of the mountain scenery in Salt Lake City, he would call attention to an animal in the foreground of one of the pictures, and remark that it was a horse, as he had that very morning learned from his artist; and he thought no man had a right to keep such a fact from the public. In another moment he would become seemingly lost to everything about him as he related some startling and absorbing incident, turning it to ridicule in the next breath by incidentally remarking, "I did not see this myself, but I had it from a man-that-is-just-as-relible-as-I-am!"

Of a piece with this was his reference to a very touching speech he once made, ending by exclaiming, "If Cicero were alive—" and then, as if suddenly stricken with a sharp sense of a recent personal bereavement, he would add, "but he is not; he is dead,—he is gone from us." It usually took two or three minutes for the audience to straighten itself out after this scene, but all the while the lecturer stood as if deprecating the whole thing as an unexpected interruption.

Humor must have fact, and very familiar fact, as a basis of interpretation by grotesque and incongruous comparisons. The fact and the whimsical statement about it must have a very close relation. The whole fun of the pun or the answer to the conundrum lies in its being so very easy; so that he who keeps nearest to the truth, even in fun, is most effective. Nobody understood this better than Artemus, who rarely made a mistake. It is true, he led up to the joke by the most elaborate art,—but it was always a surprise when it came, and never an unwholesome one. Sometimes there would be a most effective and needed hit at the foibles of the times in his little byplays. As for instance, when he pointed out how people who had settled a certain Western town had prospered; "I know," said he, "a young man who was the son of poor parents, who had hardly any education, who went there and started in business without a cent of capital, and at the end of two years he left the place, owing over two hundred thousand dollars!" In cold type there is nothing very funny about this, which must be said of many things that have amused us; but this man had the power, at any moment, to take hold of the average audience at any given point, and play with them till they shrieked with laughter,—a thing I never saw done before, and never expect to see again.

I have spoken of this particular entertainment thus somewhat at length, and both as I have seen it many times, and as it has been described in its London presentation by some personal friends and in the public press. The marvel of it seems to be that it was such a success with the audiences at Egyptian Hall, before a matter-of-fact people, who have never been supposed capable of great interest in our most pronounced types of American humor. But the praise of it was very great, even from the most cautious authorities. I subjoin the notice of it in the London Times, on the morning after the first presentation:-

Before a large audience, comprising an extraordinary number of literary celebrities, Mr. Artemus Ward, the noted American humorist, made his first appearance here as a public lecturer Tuesday evening. His very first sentences and the way they were received amply sufficed to prove that his success was certain. His dialect bears a less evident mark of the Western world than that of many American actors; but his jokes are of that true transatlantic type to which no nation beyond the limits of the States can offer any parallel. These jokes he lets fall with an air of profound unconsciousness,—we may almost say melancholy,—which is irresistibly droll. And he has found an audience by whom his caustic humor is thoroughly appreciated. Not one of the odd pleasantries, slipped out with such imperturbable gravity, misses its mark, and scarcely a minute elapses at the end of which the sedate Artemus is not forced to pause till the roar of mirth has subsided; which shows that the Englishman, puzzled by Yankee politics, is capable of relishing Yankee jokes, though they are not in the least like his own.

After making several excellent points

of criticism, all in words of genuine appreciation, the article ends thus:-

We can therefore state that the lecture is entertaining to such a degree that, to those who seek amusement, its brevity is its only fault; that it is wholly free from offence, though the opportunities for offence given by the subject of Mormonism are obviously many; and that it is interspersed not only with irresistible jokes, but with shrewd remarks, proving that Artemus Ward is a man of reflection as well as a consummate humorist.

But the curtain fell for the last time before his little "picture shop," on the night of January 23d, 1867, the lecture of that evening being abruptly broken off by the sudden illness of the lecturer, the fitful flame of whose life had long been flickering. Exactly one month later he made his will, a copy of which lies before me as I write, and in another week came the end. Never a man had such friends. They took him to the Isle of Jersey, with the hope that the sea breezes might strengthen him, but it was too late. They started to take him back to London, but he could not bear the journey farther than Southampton, where he died on Wednesday, March 6th, at the age of thirty-three, with the regret upon his lips that he could not look into his mother's eyes once more. To the very last his new friends were around him, one London club by agreement detailing two of its members at a time to keep him company and minister to him, although he never knew the arrangement, so delicately was it managed; and when it was all over they buried him in Kensal Green. Afterwards his remains were brought back to his Oxford County home, and laid to rest beside his father and brother; and only a little while ago, his mother, too, joined them in the village cemetery, and over her grave, when I saw it, the blades of new grass were quivering in the June sun.

And thus I have tried to sketch, with the help of notes by Mr. Hingston and others, in a way that befits truthfulness, and a sincere friendship as well, the career of a young man who was known to the world less than ten years, and to the platform only six, and yet who made for himself a world-wide fame, by very force of his genius; for while other men have been wits and humorists in a provincial and restricted sense, and in special and peculiar modes and directions, and have had skill and art, this man had nothing less than genius; and best of all, it was able to interpret and illumine the tenderest and most lovable side of human life.

I have purposely avoided any attempt herein to write a mere biographical sketch. I have not even desired to tell a new anecdote of the man, though there are many which I could relate, that, so far as I know, have never been recorded. But I have felt that not everything which has been said and thought of him has been appreciative or just; and so I have written this, my contribution to the history of the humorous literature of the country, of which he was unquestionably the best exponent. He was greater than all the rest in most ways, and especially in this: He was a natural interpreter and exponent of the truest type of distinctively American humor, and yet it never even tended to coarseness, indirectly or remotely. He led a merry, and somewhat whimsical life, but his humor had such a phase and such a setting that it at once enlarged and illuminated the tender human side. He himself was broader and manlier for it all. It did not mar or narrow him. It was not strained or unduly cultivated; and so it ministered naturally and inevitably to his own happiness. He made a business of humorous lecturing for these few years, and yet he was always something more—at least to his friends—than a professional funny man. So far from there being any abnormal or even undue development of this phase of fun, his whole make-up was sound and symmetrical. He was not one man on the stage and another off. He was the same everywhere and always, for his fun was healthy and legitimate. He

laughed over his first squibs in the Plain Dealer office in Cleveland; he laughed over the good things he had read or "thought up" in his boyhood; and he laughed with his friends and the world from first to last, because the world was all beautiful and healthful to him. He never did a cheap thing. He never made a contortion or a grimace in his life. His fun was never intermittent. It was a fountain that never had to be forced but always bubbled. "You should go to the pantomime. You should be made to laugh. You should see Harlequin," cheerily said old Doctor Abernethy, who had just come from the play, to the dejected looking patient who stood before him.—"See Harlequin! My God, Doctor, I am Harlequin, and I am dying from melancholy!"—Not so with Artemus Ward. The more he could make others laugh the blither was he, the very gravity of his face at times being the curtain for his incomparable fun.

How many times, since I determined to write this little sketch, has the picture of the old town where Artemus was born come up before me. My own early home was close by, and I knew it as a schoolboy knows the picture in the book he daily studies. I knew all its people, young and old, for I dwelt among them, and taught the children in the schools. There was the overhanging mountain in the west, that was at once a bulwark and a shade for the one little street of the village, whose row of square white houses looked out upon the lake that washed the very edges of their gardens. There was the quaint little church with the fan windows, where Parson Douglass preached for more than fifty years, and is buried in its shadow. There was the great white house of the 'Squire, with the long L, and stable with green doors, the heavy gate-posts in front, and arched portal through which many a lover has walked with the 'Squire's daughters as they came in from their long strolls beneath the winter stars. There was the little white office of the village Lawyer on the edge of the green, with only a single room, whose floor was of soft, pale brick, and with the great flaring fireplace, where more than one statesman had begun his professional and political career and laid the foundation of his future fortune. There was the old Doctor's office, precisely like the other only that it was painted yellow and had a rough flagstone step, with the skull upon the mantel over the fireplace, and the skeleton in the closet by the woodbox, where as a student one of the most celebrated surgeons of his time came daily from his old home three miles away, and burned the old-fashioned whale-oil lamp till into the morning hours. All these and many more familiar pictures come up to me like the faces of old friends.

But in the midst of it all, most potent and pathetic is the memory of Charles F. Browne, the gentlest and most loyal of friends, with a tenderness surpassing the love of woman, whose gifts were the very essence and form of genius, who has touched every note of pathos and humor in the gamut of the human passions, and who never by deed or word knowingly brought a feather's weight of sorrow to any human heart.

Enoch Knight.