University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION.
BY T. W. ROBERTSON.

FEW tasks are more difficult or delicate than to write
on the subject of the works or character of a departed
friend. The pen falters as the familiar face looks out of
the paper. The mind is diverted from the thought of death
as the memory recalls some happy epigram. It seems so
strange that the hand that traced the jokes should be
cold, that the tongue that trolled out the good things should
be silent—that the jokes and the good things should remain,
and the man who made them should be gone for ever.

The works of Charles Farrer Browne—who was known
to the world as “Artemus Ward”—have run through
so many editions, have met with such universal popularity,
and have been so widely criticised, that it is needless
to mention them here. So many biographies have been,

written of the gentleman who wrote in the character of the
'cute Yankee Showman, that it is unnecessary that I should
touch upon his life, belongings, or adventures. Of “Artemus
Ward” I know just as much as the rest of the world. I
prefer, therefore, to speak of Charles Farrer Browne, as
I knew him, and, in doing so, I can promise those friends
who also knew him and esteemed him, that as I consider
no “public” man so public, that some portion of his work,
pleasures, occupations, and habits may not be considered
private I shall only mention how kind and noble-minded
was the man of whom I write, without dragging forward
special and particular acts in proof of my words, as if the
goodness of his mind and character needed the certificate of
facts.

I first saw Charles Browne at a literary club; he had only
been a few hours in London, and he seemed highly pleased and
excited at finding himself in the old city to which his thoughts
had so often wandered. Browne was an intensely sympathetic
man. His brain and feelings were as a “lens,” and he

received impressions immediately. No man could see him
without liking him at once. His manner was straightforward
and genial, and had in it the dignity of a gentleman,
tempered, as it were, by the fun of the humorist. When
you heard him talk you wanted to make much of him,
not because he was “Artemus Ward,” but because he
was himself, for no one less resembled “Artemus Ward”
than his author and creator, Charles Farrer Browne. But
a few weeks ago it was remarked to me that authors were
a disappointing race to know, and I agreed with the remark,
and I remember a lady once said to me that the personal
appearance of poets seldom “came up” to their works. To
this I rephed that, after all, poets were but men, and that it
was as unreasonable to expect that the late Sir Walter Scott
could at all resemble a Gathering of the Clans as that the
late Lord Macaulay should appear anything like the Committal
of the Seven Bishops to the Tower. I told the lady
that she was unfair to eminent men if she hoped that celebrated
engineers would look like tubular bridges, or that Sir
Edwin Landseer would remind her of a “Midsummer Night's
Dream.” I mention this because, of all men in the world, my
friend Charles Browne was the least like a showman of any
man I ever encountered. I can remember the odd half-disappointed
look of some of the visitors to the Egyptian
Hall when “Artemus” stepped upon the platform. At first
they thought that he was a gentleman who appeared to
apologise for the absence of the showman. They had pictured
to themselves a coarse old man with a damp eye and
a puckered mouth, one eyebrow elevated an inch above
the other to express shrewdness and knowledge of the
world—a man clad in velveteen and braid, with a heavy
watch-chain, large rings, and horny hands, the touter
to a wax-work show, with a hoarse voice, and over
familiar manner. The slim gentlemen in evening dress,
polished manners, and gentle voice, with the tone of good
breeding that hovered between deference and jocosity; the
owner of those thin—those much too thin—white hands
could not be the man who spelt joke with a “g.” Folks
who came to laugh, began to fear that they should remain
to be instructed, until the gentlemanly disappointer began
to speak, then they recovered their real “Artemus,”
Betsey Jane, wax-figgers, and all. Will patriotic Americans
forgive me if I say that Charles Browne loved England
dearly? He had been in London but a few days when he
paid a visit to the Tower. He knew English history better
than most Englishmen; and the Tower of London was to
him the history of England embalmed in stone and mortar.
No man had more reverence in his nature; and at the
Tower he saw that what he had read was real. There
were the beef-eaters; there had been Queen Elizabeth
and Sir Walter Raleigh, and Lady Jane Grey, and
Shakspere's murdered princes, and their brave, cruel uncle.
There was the block and the axe, and the armour and
the jewels. “St. George for merrie England!” had been
shouted in the Holy Land, and men of the same blood as
himself had been led against the infidel by men of the same
brain and muscle as George Washington. Robin Hood was
a reality, and not a schoolboy's myth like Ali Baba and
Valentine and Orson.

There were two sets of feelings in Charles Browne at the

Tower. He could appreciate the sublimity of history, but,
as the “Show” part of the exhibition was described to
him, the humorist, the wit, and the iconoclast from the
other side of the Atlantic must have smiled at the “descriptions.”
The “Tower” was a “show,” like his own—
Artemus Ward's. A price was paid for admission, and the
“figgers” were “orated.” Real jewellery is very like
sham jewellery after all, and the “Artemus” vein in
Charles Browne's mental constitution—the vein of humour,
whose source was a strong contempt of all things false,
mean, shabby, pretentious, and only external—of bunkum
and Barnumisation—must have seen a gigantic speculation
realising ship loads of dollars if the Tower could have been
taken over to the States, and exhibited from town to town—
the Star and Stripes flying over it—with a four-horse
lecture to describe the barbarity of the ancient British
Barons and the cuss of chivalry.

Artemus Ward's Lecture on the Mormons at the
Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, was a great success. His humour

was so entirely fresh, new, and unconventional, it took his
hearers by surprise, and charmed them. His failing health
compelled him to abandon the lecture after about eight or ten
weeks. Indeed, during that brief period he was once or twice
compelled to dismiss his audience. I have myself seen him
sink into a chair and nearly faint after the exertion of dressing.
He exhibited the greatest anxiety to be at his post at the
appointed time, and scrupulously exerted himself to the
utmost to entertain his auditors. It was not because he
was sick that the public was to be disappointed, or that
their enjoyment was to be diminished. During the last few
weeks of his lecture-giving, he steadily abstained from
accepting any of the numerous invitations be received. Had
he lived through the following London fashionable season,
there is little doubt that the room at the Egyptian Hall
would have been thronged nightly. Our aristocracy have a
fine delicate sense of humour, and the success, artistic and
pecuniary, of “Artemus Ward” would have rivalled that
of the famous “Lord Dundreary.” There were many stupid
people who did not understand the “fun” of Artem
Ward's books. In their vernacular “they didn't see it.”
There were many stupid people who did not understand the
fun of Artemus Ward's lecture on the Mormons. They
could not see it. Highly respectable people—the pride of
their parish, whon they heard of a lecture “upon the
Mormons”—expected to see a solemn person, full of old
saws and new statistics, who would denounce the sin of
polygamy—and bray against polygamists with four-and-twenty
boiling-water Baptist power of denunciation. These
uncomfortable Christians do not like humour. They dread
it as a certain personage is said to dread holy water, and for
the same reason that thieves fear policemen—it finds them
out. When these good idiots heard Artemus offer, if they did
not like the lecture in Piccadilly, to give them free tickets
for the same lecture in California, when he next visited that
country, they turned to each other indignantly, and said
“What use are tickets for California to us? We are not
going to California. No! we are too good—too respectable
to go so far from home. The man is a fool!” One
of these ornaments of the vestry complained to the door
keepers, and denounced the lecture as an imposition—
“and,” said the wealthy parishioner, “as for the panorama,
it's the worst painted thing I ever saw in all my life!”

But the Entertainment, original, humorous, and racy
though it was, was drawing to a close! In the fight between
youth and death, death was to conquer. By medical
advice Charles Browne went for a short time to Jersey—
but the breezes of Jersey were powerless. He wrote to
London to his nearest and dearest friends—the members of
a literary club of which he was a member—to complain
that his “loneliness weighed on him.” He was brought
back, but could not sustain the journey farther than Southampton.
There the members of the beforementioned club
travelled from London to see him—two at a time—that he
might be less lonely—and for the unwearying solicitude of
his friend and agent, Mr. Hingston, and to the kindly sympathy
of the United States Consul at Southampton, Charles
Browne's best and nearest friends had cause to be grateful.
I cannot close these lines without mention of “Artemus

Ward's” last joke. He had read in the newspapers that a
wealthy American had offered to present the Prince of
Wales with a splendid yacht, American built.

“It seems,” said the invalid “a fashion now-a-days for
everybody to present the Prince of Wales with something.
I think I shall leave him—my Panorama!”

Charles Browne died beloved and regretted by all who
knew him, and by many who had known him but a few
weeks; and when he drew his last breath there passed away
the spirit of a true gentleman.

T. W. ROBERTSON.

London,

August 11, 1868.