ARTEMUS WARD IN LONDON.

Press, Volume XI, Issue 1329, 9 February 1867, Page 3

ARTEMUS WARD IN LONDON.

[From the " Spectator."]

."kfenma Ward is, as a true humorist ■WjuM be, even better than his books. «bat his personal influence adds to Wβ humor of his stories is not of course always easy to analyze, but jamly vro think, this,—the impreshe contrives to produce that weconf ue i onß of thought and speech g all mentable on his own partj that J- mad drifts on helplessly from one tn ti grotesque ideas or expressions w the next, as the creature or victim e», bo that he is not even a party to ™teaneacfcicm though he has an ™*t and rather melancholy interest SttETS* , he first comes on 10 «» platform, witt hie long, hollow-

cheeked face, and his bright, sad, interrogative eyes, we should expect from him, if we know nothing about the matter, almost anything rat her than en use ibr laughing. Ho might be, were lie not a little too quiet and polished in manner, an eager philanthropist or religi mis preacher, who had one sole passion left burning in his brain, —to convince the rest of the world ot 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, ou the contrary, pleading and entreating, as if he wore above all things solicitous to get his thoughts really disentangled this time, when he is approaching one of his odd comparisons. When he iirst appears, for instance, he says, with the greatest simplicity and a pathetic kind of earnestness, that he does not himself think at all highly of his entertainment or expect much from it, that he only hopes to obtain iroin it a small sum of money sufficient to take him to New Zealand, ibr, he adds, " if] could only go to New Zealand, I should feel that I had not wholly lived in vain ;" and then, as the audience laugh at this very new recipe for avoiding a completely vain life, he adds, with eagerness and a child-like 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 humor. 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, behe could not bear the idea of the people carrying him about everywhere, making him common, and hugging him in plaster ot 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 nothing humorous 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 natural current of ideas where his audience see the most absurd combinations. In one of his " Punch Papers," Artemus Ward's best point was remarking quiet simply that the Tower is a "sweet boon," but the humor 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 humor, 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 candor, 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 humor from I his hesitating anxious way of appearing to show the analysis of his own embarrassed thoughts to the people he is addressing. The character he best likes to fill is that sort of intellectual Hans, —the model simpleton of the old German stories, —in the act of confiding himself to the public. In the German stories Hans only makes a practical fool of himself in all sorts of impossible ways. But Artemus Ward intellectualizes him, —shows the inner absurdity of his own thoughts with a Dathetic earnestness and candor. His mind seems to wander when he speaks of his own past with winning simplicity. With the sunny days of youth, he says, many sweet forms are associated, " especially Maria, — she married another, —you may notice they frequently do,"—and he brings out all such happy generalizations with a real heave of intellectual travail that convulses his hearers with good reason. ; Nothing is better than his eager, ardent way of propounding a truism. You cannot avoid the conviction for a moment that it has just struck him as a real truth. When he points to the summit of one of the range of mountains in Utah, and says, with an evident wish to be useful to his audience, " the highest part of this mountain is the top," or pointing to one of the horses on the prairie, " 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 humor simply by the engaging earnestness and naivete of his speech

Perhaps the most humorous part of Artemus "Ward's lecture, however, is the natural, unresisting way iv which he drifts about in search of words and 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-correctiug way, conscious he had gone wrong, " As a singster I was a failure. I am always saddest when I sine:, —and so are those who hear mc." The art with which he gives the impression that he is floundering along in his 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 " smgster" ho evidently Jelt that he was near the mark. ;i partial, but. not complete, satisfaction lit up his face, and yet he did not pronounce it with confidence, but with a- modest sort o( ditiidenee, as it' I ho phrase was as near as he could get. A gei.eral effect of having to grope for his language before he can express himself, always hovers about his manner. When he says, with some pride, that ho would not allow them " to sculp " him, and that " the clothes 1 now occupy produced a great seusatiou in America," there is no glimmer of a smile on his face, and a marked absence of emphasis on the grotesque words, which he slips out exactly as if he were rather anxious to divert attention from points on which he feels his ground somewhat uncertain, —just as an Englishman abroad hastily slurs over his doubtful grammar to get on to idioms of which he is more certain. Then occasionally he will fall in the most natural and "helpless way into a language-trap of his own setting, as where he says that in the hurry of embarking on board the steamer which took him from New York, some middle-aged ladies against whom he was hustled mistook his character wholly and said, " Base man, leave us, oh leave us !—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. antistrophe to the first. Jt 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 ! " He 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 explanation 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 aud embarrassment with which the juxtaposition 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 idiotic jingle of fascination. This is closely analogous to his curious habit of floating feebly down the chain 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 gate, he says, pointing to a very ridiculous and elongated feature in it, " Yonder lion, you will observe, has a tail. It will be continued/or a few evenings longer." The humor of all this is the humor of helplessness, the humor of letting your thoughts drift idly with the most absurd association that crosses them, and never rescuing yourself by any insurrection of common sense. Artemus Ward in all his best jokes, —of course, like other professional jokers, he has some poor ones, at which it is wrong to smile, — is, as we said before, an intellectualized form of the German village-simpleton Hans. He yields a literal obedience to every absurd suggestion of thought and language, just as Hans does to the verbal directions of his wife or mother, and gets into intellectual absurdity just as Hans gets into a practical absurdity. This, with the melancholy, earnest manner of a man completely unconscious that there is anything grotesque in what he says, conveys an effect of inimitable humour.