Yea, verily we were in London. Presently Artemus Ward and “the show”
arrived in town. He took a lodging over an apothecary’s just across the
way from Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he was to lecture. We had
been the best of friends, were near of an age, and only
round-the-corner apart we became from the first inseparable. I
introduced him to the distinguished scientific set into which chance
had thrown me, and he introduced me to a very different set that made a
revel of life at the Savage Club.
I find by reference to some notes jotted down at the time that the last
I saw of him was the evening of the 21st of December, 1866. He had
dined with my wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur Sketchley,
who had dropped in after dinner, he bade us good-by and went for his
nightly grind, as he called it. We were booked to take our departure
the next morning. His condition was pitiable. He was too feeble to walk
alone, and was continually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon
had forbidden the use of wine or liquor of any sort. Instead he drank
quantities of water, eating little and taking no exercise at all.
Nevertheless, he stuck to his lecture and contrived to keep up
appearances before the crowds that flocked to hear him, and even in
London his critical state of health was not suspected.
Early in September, when I had parted from him to go to Paris, I left
him methodically and industriously arranging for his début. He had
brought some letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already
making progress toward what might be called the interior circles of the
press, which are so essential to the success of a newcomer in London.
Charles Reade and Andrew Haliday became zealous friends. It was to the
latter that he owed his introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon
made himself at home. His manners, even his voice, were half English,
albeit he possessed a most engaging disposition—a ready tact and keen
discernment, very un-English,—and these won him an efficient corps of
claquers and backers throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the
metropolis. Thus his success was assured from the first.
The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was
crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small,
from Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the
morning papers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts.
The Times was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the
wind blew, came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, each
evening proved a kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week in
advance. Up and down Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James
Street, carriages bearing the first arms in the kingdom were parked
night after night; and the evening of the 21st of December, six weeks
after, there was no falling off. The success was complete. As to an
American, London had never seen the like.
All this while the poor author of the sport was slowly dying. The
demands upon his animal spirits at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue
of “getting himself up to it,” the “damnable iteration” of the lecture
itself, wore him out. George, his valet, whom he had brought from
America, had finally to lift him about his bedroom like a child. His
quarters in Picadilly, as I have said, were just opposite the Hall, but
he could not go backward and forward without assistance. It was painful
in the extreme to see the man who was undergoing tortures behind the
curtain step lightly before the audience amid a burst of merriment, and
for more than an hour sustain the part of jester, tossing his cap and
jingling his bells, a painted death’s head, for he had to rouge his
face to hide the pallor.
His buoyancy forsook him. He was occasionally nervous and fretful. The
fog, he declared, felt like a winding sheet, enwrapping and strangling
him. At one of his entertainments he made a grim, serio-comic allusion
to this. “But,” cried he as he came off the stage, “that was not a hit,
was it? The English are scary about death. I’ll have to cut it out.”
He had become a contributor to Punch, a lucky rather than smart
business stroke, for it was not of his own initiation. He did not
continue his contributions after he began to appear before the public,
and the discontinuance was made the occasion of some ill-natured
remarks in certain American papers, which very much wounded him. They
were largely circulated and credited at the time, the charge being that
Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of the English charivari,
had broken with him because the English would not have him. The truth
is that their original proposal was made to him, not by him to them,
the price named being fifteen guineas a letter. He asked permission to
duplicate the arrangement with some New York periodical, so as to
secure an American copyright. This they refused. I read the
correspondence at the time. “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 advertisement 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 entrée 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, nobility 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.”
[Illustration: Artemus 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 hell.” 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. Dickens, though Mr. Andrew
Haliday, Dickens’ 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 illustrator and illustration. 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.