From the Spectator. grateful for the freak of hot-blooded inso- highly of his entertainment or expect much fence which has helped us to understand from it, that he only hopes to obtain from clearly the horror of entrusting the most it a small sum of money sufficient to take responsible of judicial functions to a youth him to New Zealand, for, he adds, "if I whose small intellectual faculties are still could only go to New Zealand, I should feel apparently in that noble phase when they that I had not wholly lived in vain ;" and seek their exercise in pinning dishcloths be- then, as the audience laugh at this very new hind the backs of comrades, and inducing recipe for avoiding a completely vain life, friends to sit down unawares in tubs of wa- he adds, with eagerness and a child-like ter, or on empty space. sort of effusion to his audience, “I don't want to live wholly in vain," at which, of course, the laughter deepens into a hearty roar. That is a type of the whole character of his humour. He gets hold of two inconsistent and absurdly arbitrary ideas, connects them with a sort of simple fervour in his own mind, and presses them on his hearers with an air of plaintive good faith that is quite irresistible. So, a few sentences afterwards, when he mentions that he would not allow a bust of himself to be taken because he could not bear the idea of the people carrying him about everywhere, making him common, and hugging him in plaster of Paris, and his audience (rather prematurely) laugh, he assumes the laugh to be sceptical, and says with a sharp, half snappish air of innocent, argumentative irritation, "Yes, they would," and then those who saw noting humourous before are fully carried away now, and join in the universal chorus. All his best points are made by producing this impression,- that his mind is floating inevitably along a natu ARTEMUS WARD IN LONDON. ARTEMUS WARD is, as a true humourist should be, even better than his books. What his personal influence adds to the humour of his stories is not of course always easy to analyze, but mainly, we think, this, the impression which he contrives to produce that his confusions of thought and speech are all inevitable on his own part, that his mind drifts on helplessly from one of these grotesque ideas or expressions to the next, as the creature or victim of some overruling power, which chooses his thought and language for him, so that he is not even a party to the transaction, though he has an earnest and rather melancholy interest in the result. When he first comes on to the plat-ral current of ideas where his audience see form, with his long, hollow-cheeked face, and his bright, sad, interrogative eyes, we should expect from him, if we knew nothing about the matter, almost anything rather than cause for laughter. He might be, were he not a little too quiet and polished in manner, an eager philanthropist or religious preacher, who had one sole passion left burning in his brain, ― to convince the rest of the world of the duty of joining in some great crusade. Yet he has the face of a humourist nevertheless, the light in the eyes, the twitch about the mouth which show, as soon as we know what he really is, that the most opposite currents of association constantly cross each other and pull simultaneously at the most widely separated chords of his mind. He never smiles, but looks, on the contrary, pleading and entreating, as if he were above all things solicitous to get his thoughts really disentangled this time, when he is approaching one of his odd comparisons. When he first appears, for instance, he says, with the greatest simplicity and a pathetic kind of earnestness, that he does not himself think at all the most absurd combinations. In one of his Punch Papers, Artemus Ward's best point was remarking quite simply that the Tower is a "sweet boon," but the humour of this criticism would have been immensely enhanced by his manner. He would have said it with such accidental pathos, as if the words were the only possible ones that could have risen to his lips to describe the Tower that the humour, real enough in the printed letter, would have convulsed his audience. All he says seems to be thought aloud, as if it were just bubbling up new within him. And when he hits on a deep thought, and says, for instance, with a sort of hesitating, perplexed candour, as though he were getting a little beyond his own depth and his audience's too, Time passed on. You may have noticed that it usually does, that that is a sort of way Time has about it, it generally passes on," a joke of no absolute merit takes a very great humour from his hesitating anxious way of appearing to show the analysis of his own embarrassed thoughts to the people he is addressing. The charac[ter he best likes to fill is that of a sort of in 66 tellectual Hans, - the model simpleton of not complete, satisfaction lit up his face, and the old German stories, in the act of con- yet he did not pronounce it with confidence, fiding himself to the public. In the German but with a modest sort of diffidence, as if stories Hans only makes a practical fool of the phrase was as near as he could get. A. himself in all sorts of impossible ways. But general effect of having to grope for his lanArtemus Ward intellectualizes him, shows guage before he can express himself, always the inner absurdity of his own thoughts hovers about his manner. When he says, with a pathetic earnestness and candour. with some pride, that he would not allow His mind seems to wander when he speaks them "to sculp" him, and that "the clothes of his own past with winning simplicity. With I now occupy produced a great sensation in the sunny days of youth, he says, many America," there is no glimmer of a smile on sweet forms are associated," especially Ma- his face, and a marked absence of emphasis ria, she married another, you may no- on the grotesque words, which he slips out tice they frequently do," and he brings exactly as if he were rather anxious to divert out all such happy generalizations with a attention from points on which he feels his real heare of intellectual travail that con- ground somewhat uncertain,-just as an Engvulses his hearers with good reason. Noth-lishman abroad hastily slurs over his doubtful is better than his eager, ardent way of pro-grammar to get on to idioms of which he is pounding a truism. You cannot avoid the more certain. Then occasionally he will fall conviction for a moment that it has just in the most natural and helpless way into struck him as a real truth. When he points a language-trap of his own setting, as where to the summit of one of the range of moun- he says that in the hurry of embarking on tains in Utah, and says, with an evident board the steamer which took him from New wish to be useful to his audience," the high- York, some middle-aged ladies against whom est part of this mountain is the top," or he was hustled mistook his character wholly pointing to one of the horses on the prairie and said, "Base man, leave us, oh leave us! "that beautiful and interesting animal is a horse, it was a long time before I discovered it," in spite of the exceeding simplicity and obviousness of the joke, which any clown in a pantomime might have made as well, he reaches the sense of humour simply by the engaging earnestness and naïvele of his speech. 66 Perhaps the most humorous part of Artemus Ward's lecture, however, is the natural, unresisting way in which he drifts about in search of words und phrases, often conveying a sense of difficulty and of conscious error, and then correcting himself by the use of a phrase still more ludicrous, and on which yet he seems to have been landed by an imperious necessity. Thus, when he says that he used to sing, but not well, he stumbles in the most natural way, and is a prey to melancholy that he can't hit on the proper phrase, as a songer," he said, "I was not successful;" and then, in a depressed and self-correcting way, conscious he had gone wrong, "As a singster I was a failure. I am always saddest when I sing, and so are those who hear me." The art with which he gives the impression that he is floundering along in his choice of words, the victim of the first verbal association which strikes his memory, and yet just familiar enough with language to feel uncertain as to his ground and to wish to get hold of some clearer term, is beyond praise. When he lighted upon singster" he evidently felt that he was near the mark, a partial, but 66 - 66 and I left them, oh! I left them!" where he appears quite unable to help throwing the second half of the sentence into the form of an apostrophe to the first. It impresses one as a sheer inability to get out of the wake of the first half of the sentence, not as any wish to be amusing, that makes him interpolate the second oh!" seems like a man who, having taken a good run, cannot stop himself at the right point, but must run beyond it; the rhythm of the elderly ladies' exhortation mastered him; he helplessly succumbs to it in explaining how he obeyed it. It is the fatalism of grammatical construction. So, again, when he finds the seventeen young Mormon widows weeping, and asks them, Why is this thus?" he falls a victim to the perplexity and embarrassment with which the juxtapo sition of this and thus has overpowered his weak brain; and goes on helplessly, "what is the cause of thisthusness?". He cannot evidently help developing at length those subtle suggestions of verbal confusion which so often strike everybody's ear with an idictic jingle of fascination. This is closely analogous to his curious habit of floating feebly down the chrain of intellectual association, however grotesque. When he tells us that the picture of the Nevada mountains is by "the ancient masters," the mere idea of the ancient masters of course suggests at once that they are dead; so he goes on, "this was the last picture they painted, and then they died." So when he points out the lion on Brigham Young's smile, - is, as we said before, an intellectugate, he says, pointing to a very ridiculous alized form of the German village-simpleand elongated feature in it, "Yonder lion, ton Hans. He yields a literal obedience to you will observe, has a tail. It will be con- every absurd suggestion of thought and lantinued for a few evenings longer." The hu- guage, just as Hans does to the verbal dimour of all this is the humour of helpless- rections of his wife or mother, and gets into ness, the humour of letting your thoughts intellectual absurdity just as Hans gets into drift idly with the most absurd association a practical absurdity. This, with the melthat crosses them, and never rescuing your- ancholy, earnest manner of a man comself by any insurrection of common sense. pletely unconscious that there is anything Artemas Ward in all his best jokes, of grotesque in what he says, conveys an effect course, like other professional jokers, he has of inimitable humour. some poor ones, at which it is wrong to No. 1178. Fourth Series, No. 39. 29 December, 1866. Should any of you have any difficulty in getting your numbers for next year through your booksellers we beg leave to repeat our former assurance that we shall be glad to supply you directly from this office free of postage - · upon your remittance of eight dollars to us. Your orders will receive prompt attention NEW BOOKS. MADONNA MARY, by MRS. OLIPHANT. 50 cents. SIR BROOK FOSSBROOKE, by Charles Lever. 50 cents. MISS MARJORIBANKS, by Mrs. Oliphant. 75 cents. Published by Littell, Son & Co., Boston. Wholesale dealers supplied on liberal terms. CHINCAPIN CHARLIE, by Nellie Eyster. Philadelphia, Duffield Ashmead. THE BAPTIST QUARTERLY, No. 1. Philadelphia. American Baptist Publication Society. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year; nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Second " The Complete work 20 "" 50 46 Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. |