Marse Henry Part 7

"Our aim," they said, "in making the engagement, had reference to our own circulation in the United States, which exceeds twenty-seven thousand weekly."

I suggested to Artemus that he enter his book, "Artemus Ward in London,"

in advance, and he did write to Oakey Hall, his New York lawyer, to that effect. Before he received an answer from Hall he got Carleton's advertis.e.m.e.nt announcing the book. Considering this a piratical design on the part of Carleton, he addressed that enterprising publisher a savage letter, but the matter was ultimately cleared up to his satisfaction, for he said just before we parted: "It was all a mistake about Carleton. I did him an injustice and mean to ask his pardon.

He has behaved very handsomely to me." Then the letters reappeared in Punch.

V

Whatever may be thought of them on this side of the Atlantic, their success in England was undeniable. They were more talked about than any current literary matter; never a club gathering or dinner party at which they were not discussed. There did seem something both audacious and grotesque in this ruthless Yankee poking in among the revered antiquities of Britain, so that the beef-eating British themselves could not restrain their laughter. They took his jokes in excellent part.

The letters on the Tower and Chawsir were palpable hits, and it was generally agreed that Punch had contained nothing better since the days of Yellow-plush. This opinion was not confined to the man in the street.

It was shared by the high-brows of the reviews and the appreciative of society, and gained Artemus the entree wherever he cared to go.

Invitations pursued him and he was even elected to two or three fashionable clubs. But he had a preference for those which were less conventional. His admission to the Garrick, which had been at first "laid over," affords an example of London club fastidiousness. The gentleman who proposed him used his pseudonym, Artemus Ward, instead of his own name, Charles F. Browne. I had the pleasure of introducing him to Mr. Alexander Macmillan, the famous book publisher of Oxford and Cambridge, a leading member of the Garrick. We dined together at the Garrick clubhouse, when the matter was brought up and explained. The result was that Charles F. Browne was elected at the next meeting, where Artemus Ward, had been made to stand aside.

Before Christmas, Artemus received invitations from distinguished people, n.o.bility and gentry as well as men of letters, to spend the week-end with them. But he declined them all. He needed his vacation, he said, for rest. He had neither the strength nor the spirit for the season.

Yet was he delighted with the English people and with English life. His was one of those receptive natures which enjoy whatever is wholesome and sunny. In spite of his bodily pain, he entertained a lively hope of coming out of it in the spring, and did not realize his true condition.

He merely said, "I have overworked myself, and must lay by or I shall break down altogether." He meant to remain in London as long as his welcome lasted, and when he perceived a falling off in his audience, would close his season and go to the continent. His receipts averaged about three hundred dollars a night, whilst his expenses were not fifty dollars. "This, mind you," he used to say, "is in very hard cash, an article altogether superior to that of my friend Charles Reade."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Artemas Ward]

His idea was to set aside out of his earnings enough to make him independent, and then to give up "this mountebank business," as he called it. He had a great respect for scholarly culture and personal respectability, and thought that if he could get time and health he might do something "in the genteel comedy line." He had a humorous novel in view, and a series of more aspiring comic essays than any he had attempted.

Often he alluded to the opening for an American magazine, "not quite so highfalutin as the Atlantic nor so popular as Harper's." His mind was beginning to soar above the showman and merrymaker. His manners had always been captivating. Except for the nervous worry of ill-health, he was the kind-hearted, unaffected Artemus of old, loving as a girl and liberal as a prince. He once showed me his daybook in which were noted down over five hundred dollars lent out in small sums to indigent Americans.

"Why," said I, "you will never get half of it back."

"Of course not," he said, "but do you think I can afford to have a lot of loose fellows black-guarding me at home because I wouldn't let them have a sovereign or so over here?"

There was no lack of independence, however, about him. The benefit which he gave Mrs. Jefferson Davis in New Orleans, which was denounced at the North as toadying to the Rebels, proceeded from a wholly different motive. He took a kindly interest in the case because it was represented to him as one of suffering, and knew very well at the time that his bounty would meet with detraction.

He used to relate with gusto an interview he once had with Murat Halstead, who had printed a tart paragraph about him. He went into the office of the Cincinnati editor, and began in his usual jocose way to ask for the needful correction. Halstead resented the proffered familiarity, when Artemus told him flatly, suddenly changing front, that he "didn't care a d--n for the Commercial, and the whole establishment might go to h.e.l.l." Next day the paper appeared with a handsome amende, and the two became excellent friends. "I have no doubt," said Artemus, "that if I had whined or begged, I should have disgusted Halstead, and he would have put it to me tighter. As it was, he concluded that I was not a sneak, and treated me like a gentleman."

Artemus received many tempting offers from book publishers in London.

Several of the Annuals for 1866-67 contain sketches, some of them anonymous, written by him, for all of which he was well paid. He wrote for Fun--the editor of which, Mr. Tom Hood, son of the great humorist, was an intimate friend--as well as for Punch; his contributions to the former being printed without his signature. If he had been permitted to remain until the close of his season, he would have earned enough, with what he had already, to attain the independence which was his aim and hope. His best friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, Tom Robertson, the dramatist, Charles Mathews, the comedian, Tom Taylor and Arthur Sketchley. He did not meet Mr. d.i.c.kens, though Mr. Andrew Haliday, d.i.c.kens' familiar, was also his intimate. He was much persecuted by lion hunters, and therefore had to keep his lodgings something of a mystery.

So little is known of Artemus Ward that some biographic particulars may not in this connection be out of place or lacking in interest.

Charles F. Browne was born at Waterford, Maine, the 15th of July, 1833.

His father was a state senator, a probate judge, and at one time a wealthy citizen; but at his death, when his famous son was yet a lad, left his family little or no property. Charles apprenticed himself to a printer, and served out his time, first in Springfield and then in Boston. In the latter city he made the acquaintance of Shilaber, Ben Perley Poore, Halpine, and others, and tried his hand as a "sketchist"

for a volume edited by Mrs. Partington. His early effusions bore the signature of "Chub." From the Hub he emigrated to the West. At Toledo, Ohio, he worked as a "typo" and later as a "local" on a Toledo newspaper. Then he went to Cleveland, where as city editor of the Plain Dealer he began the peculiar vein from which still later he worked so successfully.

The soubriquet "Artemus Ward," was not taken from the Revolutionary general. It was suggested by an actual personality. In an adjoining town to Cleveland there was a snake charmer who called himself Artemus Ward, an ignorant witling or half-wit, the laughing stock of the countryside.

Browne's first communication over the signature of Artemus Ward purported to emanate from this person, and it succeeded so well that he kept it up. He widened the conception as he progressed. It was not long before his sketches began to be copied and he became a newspaper favorite. He remained in Cleveland from 1857 to 1860, when he was called to New York to take the editorship of a venture called Vanity Fair. This died soon after. But he did not die with it. A year later, in the fall of 1861, he made his appearance as a lecturer at New London, and met with encouragement. Then he set out _en tour_, returned to the metropolis, hired a hall and opened with "the show." Thence onward all went well.

The first money he made was applied to the purchase of the old family homestead in Maine, which he presented to his mother. The payments on this being completed, he bought himself a little nest on the Hudson, meaning, as he said, to settle down and perhaps to marry. But his dreams were not destined to be fulfilled.

Thus, at the outset of a career from which much was to be expected, a man, possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure. There was then no Mark Twain or Bret Harte. His rivals were such humorists as Orpheus C. Kerr, Nasby, Asa Hartz, The Fat Contributor, John Happy, Mrs. Partington, Bill Arp and the like, who are now mostly forgotten.

Artemus Ward wrote little, but he made good and left his mark. Along with the queer John Phoenix his writings survived the deluge that followed them. He poured out the wine of life in a limpid stream. It may be fairly said that he did much to give permanency and respectability to the style of literature of which he was at once a brilliant ill.u.s.trator and ill.u.s.tration. His was a short life indeed, though a merry one, and a sad death. In a strange land, yet surrounded by admiring friends, about to reach the coveted independence he had looked forward to so long, he sank to rest, his dust mingling with that of the great Thomas Hood, alongside of whom he was laid in Kensal Green.

Chapter the Fifth

Mark Twain--The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers--The "Earl of Durham"--Some Noctes Ambrosianae--A Joke on Murat Halstead

I

Mark Twain came down to the footlights long after Artemus Ward had pa.s.sed from the scene; but as an American humorist with whom during half a century I was closely intimate and round whom many of my London experiences revolve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after his elder. There was not lacking a certain likeness between them.

Samuel L. Clemens and I were connected by a domestic tie, though before either of us were born the two families on the maternal side had been neighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an aunt of mine--the children of this marriage cousins in common to us--albeit, this apart, we were life-time cronies. He always contended that we were "bloodkin."

Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain appeared east of the Alleghanies and north of the Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the west, the bizarre alike of the pilot house and the mining camp very much in evidence, he came of decent people on both sides of the house. The Clemens and the Lamptons were of good old English stock. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century three younger scions of the Manor of Durham migrated from the County of Durham to Virginia and thence branched out into Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.

His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a drawl that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her famous son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen. The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived upon the scene.

These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceedingly large, varied and picturesque a.s.sortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of amus.e.m.e.nt to us. Just after the successful production of his play, The Gilded Age, and the uproarious. .h.i.t of the comedian, Raymond, in the leading role, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had made in Colonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen and thought he had drawn him to the life. "But for the love o' G.o.d," he said, "don't whisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me, if he did not thrash me on sight."

The pathos of the part, and not its comic aspects, had most impressed him. He designed and wrote it for Edwin Booth. From the first and always he was disgusted by the Raymond portrayal. Except for its popularity and money-making, he would have withdrawn it from the stage as, in a fit of pique, Raymond himself did while it was still packing the theaters.

The original Sellers had partly brought him up and had been very good to him. A second Don Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of La Mancha in character, it would have been safe for n.o.body to laugh at James Lampton, or by the slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat him with inconsideration, or any proposal of his, however preposterous, with levity.

He once came to visit me upon a public occasion and during a function.

I knew that I must introduce him, and with all possible ceremony, to my colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black, swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black crepe to conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his linen as spotless as new-fallen snow. I had my fears. Happily the company, quite dazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity, and the kind old gentleman, pleased with himself and proud of his "distinguished young kinsman," went away highly gratified.

Not long after this one of his daughters--pretty girls they were, too, and in charm altogether worthy of their Cousin Sam Clemens--was to be married, and Sellers wrote me a stately summons, all-embracing, though stiff and formal, such as a baron of the Middle Ages might have indited to his n.o.ble relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good lady and his retinue and abide within the castle until the festivities were ended, though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage scarcely big enough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the bombastic but hospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond, who chanced to be playing in Louisville when it reached me. He read it through with care and reread it.

"Do you know," said he, "it makes me want to cry. That is not the man I am trying to impersonate at all."

Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual being of Mark Twain's Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a lion and as upright as Sam Clemens himself.

When a very young man, living in a woodland cabin down in the Pennyrile region of Kentucky, with a wife he adored and two or three small children, he was so carried away by an unexpected windfall that he lingered overlong in the nearby village, dispensing a royal hospitality; in point of fact, he "got on a spree." Two or three days pa.s.sed before he regained possession of himself. When at last he reached home, he found his wife ill in bed and the children nearly starved for lack of food. He said never a word, but walked out of the cabin, tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhipping himself when the cries of the frightened family summoned the neighbors and he was brought to reason.

He never touched an intoxicating drop from that day to his death.

II

Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was the "Earl of Durham."

I ought to say that Mark Twain and I grew up on old wives' tales of estates and t.i.tles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of humor in both of us, we treated with shocking irreverence. It happened some fifty years ago that there turned up, first upon the plains and afterward in New York and Washington, a lineal descendant of the oldest of the Virginia Lamptons--he had somehow gotten hold of or had fabricated a bundle of doc.u.ments--who was what a certain famous American would have called a "corker." He wore a sombrero with a rattlesnake for a band, and a belt with a couple of six-shooters, and described himself and claimed to be the Earl of Durham.