Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 16

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Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward," the first of the group to gain recognition, was born of Puritan ancestry in Waterville, Maine, in 1834. Forced by the death of his father in 1847 to rely upon his own efforts for support, he became a typesetter on the Skowhegan Clarion, and later, after a wandering career from office to office, served for three years in Boston as a compositor for Snow and Wilder, the publishers of Mrs. Partington's Carpet Bag. His connection with Shillaber, the editor of this paper, turned his mind to humorous composition, but it was not until after his second wander period in the South and West that he discovered the real bent of his powers. His career as a humorist may be said to have begun in 1857, when, after two years at Toledo, Ohio, he was called to the local editorship of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and given freedom to inject into the dry news columns all the life and fun that he chose. He began now to write articles purporting to describe the struggles and experiences of one "Artemus Ward," an itinerant showman who was as full of homely wisdom and experience as he was lacking in book learning and refinement. The letters instantly struck a popular chord; they were copied widely. After serving three years on the Plain-Dealer their author was called to New York to become the editor of the brilliant but ill-starred comic magazine, Vanity Fair. The following year, 1861, he began to lecture, and in 1863 and 1864 he made a six-months' lecture tour of the Pacific Coast. The free, picturesque life of the new cities and the wild camps delighted him. In Virginia City he spent three marvelous weeks with Mark Twain, then a reporter on the local paper. Returning across the Plains, he visited the Mormons. The trip was the graduate course of the young humorist. Not until after his California training was he completely in command of his art. Then in 1866 at the height of his powers he went to London, where his success was instant and unprecedented. He was made an editor of Punch, he was discussed in all quarters, and his lectures night by night were attended by crowds. But the end was near. He died of quick consumption March 6, 1867.

The secret of Browne's success as a humorist lay, first of all, in the droll personality of the man. It was the opinion of Haweis, who heard him in London, that his "bursts of quaint humor could only live at all in that subtle atmosphere which Artemus Ward's presence created, and in which alone he was able to operate."[20] He made use of all the humorous devices of his favorite, John Phœnix, and to them he added what may be called the American manner of delivering humor: the setting forth with perfect gravity and even mournfulness his most telling jokes and then the assuming of a surprised or even a grieved expression when the audience laughed.

Furthermore, to Phœnix's devices he added cacography, the device of deliberate misspelling so much used by later humorists. He seems to have adopted it spontaneously as a matter of course. He was to take the character of an ignorant showman and naturally he must write as such a man would write. The misspelling of "Artemus Ward" has character in it. In his hands it becomes an art, and an art that helps make vivid the personality of the old showman. "Artemus Ward" is not a mere Dickens gargoyle: he is alive. Witness this:

If you say anything about my show say my snaiks is as harmliss as the new born Babe.

In the Brite Lexington of yooth, thar aint no sich word as fale.

"Too troo, too troo!" I answered; "it's a scanderlis fact."

He is not at all consistent in his spelling; he is as prodigal as nature and as careless. The mere uninspired cacographist misspells every word that it is possible to misspell, but Browne picks only key words. His art is displayed as much in the words he does not change as in those with which he makes free. He coins new words with telling effect. Of his wife he observes: "As a flap-jackist she has no equal. She wears the belt." And he makes free with older words in a way that is peculiarly his own: "Why this thusness."

The third element he added to the humor of Phœnix was a naïve drollery, a whimsical incongruity, that was peculiar to himself. He caught it from no one, and he imparted it to no one. It can be described only as "Artemus Ward." It lives even apart from his presence in much of the writing that he has left behind him. It is as useless to try to analyze it as it were to describe the odor of apples. One can only quote examples, as for instance this from his adventure "Among the Free Lovers":

The exsentric female then clutched me frantically by the arm and hollered:

"You air mine, O you air mine!"

"Scacely," I sed, endeverin to git loose from her. But she clung to me and sed:

"You air my Affinerty!"

"What upon arth is that?" I shouted.

"Dost thou not know?"

"No, I dostent!"

"Listin man & I'll tell ye!" sed the strange female; "for years I hav yearned for thee. I knowd thou wast in the world sumwhares, tho I didn't know whare. My hart sed he would cum and I took courage. He has cum—he's here—you air him—you air my Affinerty! O 'tis too mutch! too mutch!" and she sobbed agin.

"Yes," I anserd, "I think it is a darn sight too mutch!"

"Hast thou not yearned for me?" she yelled, ringin her hands like a female play acter.

"Not a yearn!" I bellerd at the top of my voice, throwin her away from me.

Whatever we may think of the quality of this, we must agree that it is original. If there is any trace of a prototype it is Dickens. The characters and the situation are heightened to grotesqueness, yet one must be abnormally keen in palate to detect any Dickens flavor in the style. It is "Artemus Ward" and only "Artemus Ward." All that he wrote he drew from life itself and from American life. It is as redolent of the new world as the bison or the Indian. He wrote only what had passed under his eye and he wrote only of persons. Unlike Mark Twain, he could cross the continent in the wild days of '64 and see nothing apparently but humanity.

The world of Charles Farrar Browne was the child's world of wonder. He was a case, as it were, of arrested development, a fragment of the myth-making age brought into the nineteenth century. His "Artemus Ward" was a latter-day knight-errant traveling from adventure to adventure. The world to him, even as to a child, was full of strange, half mythical beings: Shakers, Spiritualists, Octoroons, Free Lovers, Mormons, Champions of Woman's Rights, Office Seekers, "Seseshers," Princes, and heirs to Empires. The hero is tempted, imposed upon, assaulted, but he always comes out first best and turns with copious advice which is always moral and sensible and appropriate. To the woman who had claimed him as her affinity he speaks thus:

I'm a lawabiding man, and bleeve in good, old-fashioned institutions. I am marrid & my orfsprings resemble me, if I am a showman! I think your Affinity bizniss is cussed noncents, besides bein outrajusly wicked. Why don't you behave desunt like other folks? Go to work and earn a honist livin and not stay round here in this lazy, shiftless way, pizenin the moral atmosphere with your pestifrous idees! You wimin folks go back to your lawful husbands, if you've got any, and take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful like other wimin. You men folks, cut orf them pirattercal wiskers, burn up them infurnel pamplits, put sum weskuts on, go to work choppin wood, splittin fence rales, or tillin the sile. I pored 4th. my indignashun in this way till I got out of breth, when I stopt.

This is not "Artemus Ward" talking; it is Charles Farrar Browne, and it is Browne who rebukes the Shakers, the Spiritualists, the Committee from the Woman's Rights Association, and the office-seekers about Lincoln, who gives advice to the Prince of Wales and Prince Napoleon, who stands by the flag when the mob destroys his show down among the "Seseshers," and who later addresses the draft rioters at Baldwinsville. Browne was indeed a moral showman. Every page of his work is free from profanity and vulgarity. He is never cheap, never tawdry, never unkind to anything save immorality and snobbishness. His New England ancestry and breeding may be felt in all he wrote. At heart he was a reformer. He once wrote: "Humorous writers have always done the most toward helping virtue on its pilgrimage, and the truth has found more aid from them than from all the grave polemists and solid writers that have ever spoken or written."

Beneath his kindly, whimsical exterior there was a spirit that could be blown into an indignation as fierce even as Mark Twain's. While he was local editor of the Plain-Dealer he burst out one day in this fiery editorial:

A writer in the Philadelphia Ledger has discovered that Edgar A. Poe was not a man of genius. We take it for granted that the writer has never read Poe. His lot in life was hard enough, God knows, and it is a pity the oyster-house critics, snobs, flunkeys, and literary nincompoops can't stop snarling over his grave. The biography of Poe by Griswold—which production for fiendish malignity is probably unequaled in the history of letters—should, it would seem, have sufficed. No stone marks the spot where poor Poe sleeps, and no friendly hand strews flowers upon his grave in summer-time, but countless thousands, all over the world, will read and admire his wildly beautiful pages until the end of time.[21]

This knightly spirit led him to warfare upon everything that was merely sentimental or insincere. He burlesqued the gushing love songs of the period, advertising in his program to render at appropriate intervals "Dearest, Whenest Thou Slumberest Dostest Thou Dreamest of Me?" and "Dear Mother, I've Come Home to Die by Request." He burlesqued the sensational novels of the day in Roberto, the Rover, and Moses, the Sassy. Only once did he ever read the Ledger, he avers, and that was after his first experience with New England rum:

On takin the secund glass I was seezed with a desire to break winders, & arter imbibin the third glass I knockt a small boy down, pickt his pocket of a New York Ledger, and wildly commenced readin Sylvanus Kobb's last Tail.

He is still read and still republished. There is a perennial charm about his work that raises it above the times that produced it, and that promises to make it permanent. His originality, his unfailing animal spirits which came of the abounding life of the new America, his quaint characterization which has added a new figure to the gallery of fiction, his Americanism, his vein of kindliness and pathos that underlies all that he wrote, his indignation at snobbery and all in the life of his day that was not genuine and pure, and finally the exquisite pathos of his later years, all combine to make him remembered.