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: 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 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.