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Marse Henry (Vol. 1)

H >> Henry Watterson >> Marse Henry (Vol. 1)




Whatever Huxley's occupation, it turned out that he had at least one
book-publishing acquaintance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom he
introduced me next day, for I had brought with me a novel--the great
American romance--too good to be wasted on New York, Philadelphia or
Boston, but to appear simultaneously in England and the United States,
to be translated, of course, into French, Italian and German. This was
actually accepted. It was held for final revision.

We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, however, called me suddenly
home. Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and the
novel--it was entitled "One Story's Good Till Another Is Told"--was laid by
and quite forgotten. Some twenty years later, at a moment when I was being
lashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said:

"Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature." She had
preserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it.

"Fetch it," I said.

She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! The stuff it was! Not a
gleam, never a radiance. I had been teaching myself to write--I had been
writing for the English market--perpendicular! The Lord has surely been
good to me. If the "boys" had ever got a peep at that novel, I had been
lost indeed!



IV


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.




Chapter the Fifth

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



I


Mark Twain came down to the footlights long after Artemus Ward had passed
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 assortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of
amusement to us. Just after the successful production of his play, The
Gilded Age, and the uproarious hit 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' God," 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 nobody 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 noble
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 passed 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 titles, 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 documents--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.

"He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him," drawled Mark
to me, "and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up, whenever he's
around, with punctuality and regularity."

The "Earl" was indeed a terror, especially when he had been drinking. His
belief in his peerage was as absolute as Colonel Sellers' in his millions.
All he wanted was money enough "to get over there" and "state his case."
During the Tichborne trial Mark Twain and I were in London, and one day he
said to me:

"I have investigated this Durham business down at the Herald's office.
There's nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out of the Demesne of Durham a
hundred years ago. They had long before dissipated the estates. Whatever
the title, it lapsed. The present earldom is a new creation, not the same
family at all. But, I tell you what, if you'll put up five hundred dollars
I'll put up five hundred more, we'll fetch our chap across and set him in
as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy won't be a marker to
him!"

He was so pleased with his conceit that later along he wrote a novel and
called it The Claimant. It is the only one of his books, though I never
told him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, I happened to see
upon a hotel register in Rome these entries: "The Earl of Durham," and
in the same handwriting just below it, "Lady Anne Lambton" and "The Hon.
Reginald Lambton." So the Lambtons--they spelled it with a b instead of a
p--were yet in the peerage. A Lambton was Earl of Durham. The next time
I saw Mark I rated him on his deception. He did not defend himself, said
something about its being necessary to perfect the joke.

"Did you ever meet this present peer and possible usurper?" I asked.

"No," he answered, "I never did, but if he had called on me, I would have
had him come up."



III


His mind turned ever to the droll. Once in London I was living with my
family at 103 Mount Street. Between 103 and 102 there was the parochial
workhouse, quite a long and imposing edifice. One evening, upon coming in
from an outing, I found a letter he had written on the sitting-room table.
He had left it with his card. He spoke of the shock he had received upon
finding that next to 102--presumably 103--was the workhouse. He had loved
me, but had always feared that I would end by disgracing the family--being
hanged or something--but the "work'us," that was beyond him; he had not
thought it would come to that. And so on through pages of horseplay; his
relief on ascertaining the truth and learning his mistake, his regret at
not finding me at home, closing with a dinner invitation.

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