An American humorist, best known as “Artemus Ward.” He was born at Waterford, Maine, April 26, 1834. He began life as a printer in the office of the Skowhegan Clarion, and at fifteen was a compositor for a comic weekly journal in Boston, The Carpet Bag, to which he made occasional contributions. He then became reporter of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and conceiving the idea of writing in the character of a showman, be began a series of “Artemus Ward’s Sayings,” intentionally atrocious in spelling, but of humor that soon gained him notoriety. In 1860 he moved to New York, and joined the editorial staff of Vanity Fair. The first of his humorous lectures, “The Babes in the Wood,” was delivered in Brooklyn, and proved so successful that he abandoned journalism for the platform. In 1862 he visited California and Utah, gathering materials for a series of comic lectures on the Mormons, “whose religion is singular but their wives are plural.” These lectures, with a panoramic accompaniment, attained great popularity in America. Consumption attacked Browne in 1864, and for two years he withdrew from the public. In 1866, his health improving, he undertook a professional tour in England, where he lectured with very great success for three months, almost to the eve of his death, which occurred at Southampton, March 6, 1867. His lectures and humorous writings are collected as “Artemus Ward, His Book” (1865); “Artemus Ward, His Travels” (1865); “Artemus Ward in London” (1867). There is an edition of the “Works,” with a biographical sketch by Melville D. Landon (1875).

Personal

  Personally Charles Farrar Browne was one of the kindest and most affectionate of men, and history does not name a man who was so universally beloved by all who knew him. It was remarked, and truly, that the death of no literary character since Washington Irving caused such general and widespread regret. In stature he was tall and slender. His nose was prominent,—outlined like that of Sir Charles Napier, or Mr. Seward; his eyes brilliant, small, and close together; his mouth large, teeth white and pearly; fingers long and slender; hair soft, straight, and blonde; complexion florid; mustache large, and his voice soft and clear. In bearing, he moved like a natural-born gentleman. In his lectures he never smiled—not even while he was giving utterance to the most delicious absurdities; but all the while the jokes fell from his lips as if he was unconscious of their meaning. While writing his lectures, he would laugh and chuckle to himself continually. There was one peculiarity about Charles Browne—he never made an enemy.

  Browne’s personal appearance was anything but prepossessing, and he is remembered by Clevelanders as one of the most verdant-looking youths that ever set foot within the city. He wore a slouch hat, from beneath which protruded a mass of straight and unmanageable yellow hair. He had long limbs, and was lean and lank. His features were prominent, and set off by a nose that was decidedly Tennysonian, and was an oddity in itself. His clothes were seedy and ill-fitting. The ends of his coat-sleeves coquetted with his elbows, while his trowsers made vain endeavors to reach the tops of his shoes. His stockings lapped over and gave him a slovenly appearance. He walked with a loose, shambling gait, and a person unfamiliar with his appearance would naturally feel inclined to laugh at the spectacle. After he had been in the city some time he began to pay more attention to his toilet, and at last even became foppish. When he began lecturing he became more particular than ever, and his fondness for dress and display developed into a weakness. He even took with him a hair-dresser to curl his hair,—which nature intended should be worn uncurled,—and affected a large diamond pin and an immense diamond ring.

  In person he was tall, very thin, agile, with face of Norman type, a high aquiline nose, with sharp bent, and with quick, discerning eyes. He had the delicate, fair hand of woman—the most beautiful hand they ever saw, his friends say. He was slow and halting in speech, with soft, sweet voice, the tone often of gentle pleading and persuasion. When not directly engaged, he was inclined to abstraction. With all his play of wit, there was a tinge of melancholy, a suppressed expression of suffering or sorrow…. His manner of composing and writing, as described by Mr. George Hoyt and others of his associates in the Plain-Dealer office, was as peculiar as anything else about the man. He searched everywhere for funny things, and when he found them, or originated them, he seemed himself to enjoy them more than any one else. He had for his desk a rickety old table, and being an inveterate whittler, it was notched and gashed until it looked as though the lightning had gone through it. His chair was a fit companion thereto,—“a wabbling, unsteady affair, sometimes with four and sometimes with three legs.” When writing, one leg hung over the arm of the chair like a great hook, and when a funny idea came to him he would laugh “with a guffaw which seemed to shake him from his heels upward.” Sometimes he would “pound the table with his fists, slap the long, thin leg that hung over the arm of the chair, and explode with laughter.” Upon these occasions he would also call his associates, and read to them what he had written. He laughed nearly all the time he was writing.

  Poor Artemus! I shall not see his like again, as he appeared for a few short weeks before an English audience at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. Sometimes, as to looks, profoundly dejected, at others shy or reproachful; nervously anxious to please (apparently), yet with a certain twinkle at the back of his eye which convinced you of his perfect sang froid; and one thing always—full, unescapably full, of fun. The humour of Artemus was delicate, evanescent, and personal to an irritating degree. “I have bin troying,” said the impetuous Irishman, after hearing Macready, “for an hour to spake it out, loike that man, but, be-gohrra! I cannot at all—at all!” And no one ever yet succeeded in “spaking it out” like Artemus Ward…. Artemus Ward was a worthy and lovable man; he was sound, blameless, shrewd, sensitive, and affectionate.

  He was a shrewd, naïf, but at the same time modest and unassuming young man. He was a native of Maine, but familiar with the West. Quiet as he seemed, in three weeks he had found out everything in New York.

General

  Among the humorists who rose to eminence during the American War, Artemus Ward was the raciest. Among the satirists of the period he was the gentlest and the most genial.

  He, like Nasby, Billings, and company, hid under bad orthography and worse grammar the neatest nonsense and the broadest satire. While he had not so keen and critical a sense of the dialect or patois as Russell Lowell shows in the character of Hosea Bigelow—while he had not the pointed wit of Holmes or Saxe, whose verses are a fit frame for their exquisite artistic humor, yet Artemus, next to Mark Twain and Bret Harte, hit the very midriff of American humor.

  The writings of Artemus Ward are most expressive of the society of the United States. His genius is very national. Such a character as Artemus Ward could not have existed in any other than a democratic community. The freedom with which he approaches everybody and everything would be possible only to an American, or to some member of society as democratic as ours. In what he has to say about the leading persons of the day, he does not at all take into account the fact that he is an obscure and uneducated youth; that he has never been at college; that he is only a reporter for a county paper; that he was yesterday a typesetter or a farmer’s lad. No, he is an intellect, a judgment, which has arrived at a certain degree of power,—by what means it matters not,—and which looks about it with that freedom from corporeal modifications which might belong to an immaterial intelligence. Ward’s humour has many traits which are national…. Ward’s sketches, though caricatures, are extremely lively representations of American society. He draws a society strongly marked by alert selfishness and good nature. He describes admirably the civility which is half kindness and half policy, the prudence, and the humbug of such a society.

  Probably no writer in America—or out of it, for that matter—ever attained such universal notoriety, in such a brief space of time, as did that king of American humorists, Artemus Ward. His career was short but successful, and his fame will live as long as does the English language…. Despite his looks, Browne was a brilliant and ready writer. He became involved in numerous journalistic quarrels, and his cutting remarks and timely rebukes to his contemporaries soon made known the fact that he could not be mastered.

  He was the natural foe of bigotry, Pecksniffianism, and immorality of every kind. There are many hard hits at hypocrites, formalists, shams, and religious scoundrels; but throughout the whole of his works you will not find one sneer at virtue or religion, and in spite of a few broad jokes not quite in European taste, there is not one really loose or unguarded thought.

  We have no wish to detract from the literary merit, or to disparage the memory, of the amiable and generally-regretted “Artemus Ward,” the most celebrated of the lighter or broader school of western humorists. There was nothing in his genius of the tragic element that made almost pathetic the representations of the unapproachable actor Robson; but Mr. Browne is affectionately remembered as a man of wit and talent, whose refinement of manner conciliated the severest critics. His work is only the perfection of a spurious art; but he wins our regard by the good-humour that smiles alongside of the satire that scathes; disarms censure by laughing at himself, and eludes all suspicion of vulgarity, by never pretending to be other than he was—the son of an old New-England Jackson democrat of the middle-class, who saw through the braggadocio and corruption of either party, and did good service by exposing them in his vivid caricatures. We have no call to criticise minutely, or frequently to quote from, the often irresistible pages of this popular favourite. Who is not familiar with the showman, to whose show editors were “as welcome as flowers in May,” with his “wax-figgurs” running up and down the States; denounced as a “man of sin” by the Shaker Elder; imposed on by the Octoroon; listening to the Union orators and to Piccolomini; entertained by the Mormons; interviewing Albert Edward, President Lincoln, beset by “orfice seekers coming down the chimney,” and Prince Napoleon; confiscated by the “screaming eagle” of the Confederacy; escaping home to Betsey Jane; willing to surrender to his country “even his wife’s relations,” and ready with such good advice as, “Always live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so.”

  Artemus Ward anticipated Mark Twain as a representative of calm American irreverence, ready to ridicule every thing not in a high degree sacred or lovable; but, like Mark Twain’s, his lampoons were either made for the sake of fun alone, or for the ridicule of solemn pretence and hypocrisy.

  He flashed like a brilliant meteor across the sky of American literature—emerging from obscurity, having a brief and brilliant career, and then vanishing, amid universal exclamations of regret…. Wit, such as his—so thoroughly spontaneous, so entirely sui generis—can scarcely be said to have had a model. And yet he himself has said that Seba Smith’s writings served to some extent as patterns for him. And it is almost beyond a doubt that his long connection with Messrs. Saxe and Halpine, on the staff of the Carpet Bag, greatly influenced him, and perhaps contributed to form the characteristics of his style. But granting all this is only to admit that the same things which influence us, and go to make us what we are, affected Charles Browne also. This does not alter the fact that though the manner might be an unconscious partial imitation of the style of a contemporary, yet the matter was unique, spontaneous, and as true an outflow of genius as it was possible to be. The unexpected way in which misspelt words confront one in his writings constitute in no small degree an element of their humor…. Artemus Ward was something more than a sparkling humorist. He was a man of character and principle. He was neither an adventurer nor a speculator. Throughout the whole of his works there will not be found one sneer at virtue or religion, and no profanity whatever. He says himself, and this is one of the times when Charles Browne, not Artemus Ward, speaks; “I rarely stain my pages even with mild profanity. It is wicked in the first place, and not funny in the second.” There may be an occasional joke not quite in good taste; but in judging this we must consider the difference between the canons of good taste in England and in America.

  Was a man whose mind was as quaintly put together as were those of Shakespeare’s clowns. He was an involuntary—though by no means an unconscious—fun-maker: his conceits were in his marrow, and were not more the result of intellectual effort than his breathing was. To his eye, the universe was not a universe, but a great incoherency. Wherever he looked, he beheld a manifest absurdity. Standards of behavior, habits of thought, modes of life, appeared to him inverted, arbitrary, illusive: he was impelled to reverse all precedent and order, and to make the planet roll from east to west. Had his mind stopped here, he would simply have been insane; but, in fact, he was a duplex phenomenon; few men had so clear a perception as he himself had of his own perversity. Hence he was a born humorist, and—if such a thing be predicable of fun-making—a born genius…. This showman—Artemus—by the way, is one of the solidest figures in the gallery of American fiction. To the public, for whom Browne wrote, he is still a much more real person than is Charles Farrar Browne himself. Certainly there could not be a contrast greater than that between the blatant, vulgar, impudent old buffoon of the book, and the quiet, delicate, pensive, sensitive-looking young gentleman of the lecture-platform. And yet, before he had been speaking five minutes, you could understand how and why the creator of “Artemus” was his creator.

  It is vain to attempt to analyze the fun of Artemus Ward. Why did he make some people laugh till they cried, while others were all untouched? His secret probably was almost entirely one of manner, a trick of almost idiotic naïveté, like that of Lord Dundreary, covering real shrewdness. He had his rustic chaff, his Puritan profanity; his manner was the essence of his mirth. It was one of the ultimate constituents of the ludicrous, beyond which it is useless to inquire.

  May be regarded as typical of the entire class of humorous journalists and speakers who have followed him. Certainly he has not been denied the homage of imitation, and certainly the writings he has left behind him are enough more than mere “comic copy” to give him his place as a representative figure…. It may be thought that an inordinate space has been devoted to a person who stood related to literature as bouffe to grand opera. Yet Artemus Ward represented conspicuously a class of writers which must not be overlooked in any general survey of American letters. Indeed, it would not be unprofitable to scrutinise the career and work of other men who stood less upon the dignity than the drollery of their productions; for if their appeal has not always been to the most fastidious, they have often meant more to “the great body of the plain people” than graver bookmen who escape the humourist’s penalty of writing, as a rule, for one generation or decade.

  When we remember that a large part of Browne’s mature life was taken up in learning the printer’s trade, in which he became a master, we must decide that he had only entered on his career as humorous writer. Much of what he wrote is simply amusing, with little depth or power of suggestion; it is comic, not humorous. He was gaining the ear of the public and training his powers of expression. What he has left consists of a few collections of sketches written for a daily paper…. He was more than a joker, as under the cap and bells of the fool in Lear we catch a glimpse of the face of a tender-hearted and philosophic friend. Browne’s nature was so kindly and sympathetic, so pure and manly, that after he had achieved a reputation and was relieved from immediate pecuniary pressure, he would have felt an ambition to do some worthy work and take time to bring out the best that was in him. As it is, he had only tried his ’prentice hand.

  As much of Browne’s success depended on his personality, he is practically in the position of many a by-gone orator whose fame is kept up by tradition, not by his published works. The men and women who heard Browne are alone competent to judge him, yet when one has read what his admirers have written about him, and has avoided underrating the true wit and the fantastic humor of his writings, one is tempted to play the judge one’s self and to declare that, as a whimsical genius, not as a broad, hearty humorist, he has had no equal in America.