Delphi complete works of.., p.623
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 623
BILLINGS ON THE MULE
THE MUEL is haf hoss, and haf Jackass, and then kums tu a full stop, natur diskovering her mistake. Tha weigh more, akordin tu their heft, than enny other kreeture, except a crowbar. Tha kant hear any quicker, nor further than the hoss, yet their ears are big enuff for snow shoes. You kan trust them with enny one whose life aint wirth enny more than the muels. The only wa tu keep them into a paster, is tu turn them into a medder jineing and let them jump out. Tha are reddy for use, just as soon as they will du tu abuse. Tha haint got enny friends, and will live on huckel berry brush, with an ockasional chanse at Kanada thissels. Tha are a modern invenshun, I don’t think the Bible deludes to them at tall. Tha sel for more money than enny other domestik animile. Yu kant tell their age by looking into their mouth, enny more than you kould a Mexican cannons. Tha never hav no disease that a good club wont heal.
If tha ever die tha must kum tu life agin, for I never heard nobody sa “Ded muel.” Tha are like some men, very korrupt at harte; I’ve known them tu be good muels for 6 months, just tu git a good chance to kick sumbody. I never owned one, nor never mean to, unless there is a United States law passed, requiring it. The only reason wha tha are pashunt, is bekause tha are ashamed ov themselfs. I have seen eddikated muels in a sirkus. Tha kould kick, and bite, tremenjis. I would not sa what I am forced tu sa agin the muel, if his birth want an outrage and man want tu blame for it. Enny man who is willing tu drive a muel ought to be exempt by law from running for the legislatur. Tha are the strongest creetures on earth, and heaviest, ackording tu their size; I herd tell ov one who fell oph the tow path, on the Eri Kanawl, and sunk as soon as he touched bottom, but he kept rite on towing the boat tu the nex stashun, breathing thru his ears, which stuck out ov the water about 2 feet 6 inches; I didn’t see this did, but an auctioneer told me ov it, and I never knew an auctioneer tu lie unless it was absolutely convenient.
BILLINGS ON THE HEN A HEN
A HEN is a darn phool, they was born so bi natur.
When natur undertakes tew make a phool, she hits the mark the fust time.
Most all the animile kritters hav instinkt, which is wuth more to them than reason would be, for instinkt don’t make enny blunders.
If the animiles had reason, they would akt just as ridikilus as we men folks do.
But a hen don’t seem tew hav even instinkt, and was made expressly for a phool.
I hav seen a hen fly out ov a good warm shelter, on the 15 th ov January, when the snow was 3 foot high, and lite on the top ov a stun wall, and coolly set thare, and freeze tew deth.
Noboddy but a darn phool would do this, unless it was tew save a bet.
I hav saw a human being do similar things, but they did it tew win a bet.
To save a bet, is self-preservashun, and self-preservashun, is the fust law ov natur, so sez Blakstone, and he is the best judge ov law now living.
If i couldn’t be Josh Billings, i would like, next in suit, tew be Blakstone, and compoze sum law.
JOSH REBUKES BILLINGS
The letter was printed by Josh as if it came to him from Mark Twain. He knew that Mark thought that Josh’s spelling spoilt the fun of his humor. It is reproduced from Mr. Cyril Clemens’ excellent volume Josh Billings.
DEAR JOSH: —
I think a very great deal of you, as a personal friend of long standing; I admire you as a philosopher; I actually revere you as almost the only specimen remaining with us, of a species that used to be common enough — I mean an honest man.
Therefore you can easily believe that if I don’t write the paragraphs you desire for your department of the paper, it is not because there is any lack in me of either the will or the willingness to do it.
No, it is only because my present literary contracts, and understandings debar me.
I am thus debarred for three years to come. But after that — however, you wouldn’t want to wait, perhaps.
I wish we could compromise; I wish it would answer for you to write one of these books, for me, while I write an almanac for you.
But this will not do, because I cannot abide your spelling.
It does seem to me that you spell worse every day.
Sometimes your orthography makes me frantic.
It is out of all reason that a man, seventy-five years of age, should spell as you do.
Why do you not attend a night school? You might at least get the hang of the easy words.
I am sending you a primer by this mail which I know will help you, if you will study it hard.
Now is the most favorable time that you have had for seventy years, now that you are just entering your second childhood.
It ought to come really easy to you.
Many believe that in the dominion of natural history you stand without a peer.
It is acknowledged on all sides that you have thrown new light on the mule, and also on other birds of the same family; you have notably augmented the world’s admiration of the splendid plumage of the Kangaroo — or possibly it might have been the cockatoo — but I knew it was one of those bivalves or the other; that you have uplifted the hornet, and given him his just place among the flora of our country; and that you have aroused an interest never felt before, in every fur bearing animal, from the occult rhinoceros clear down to the domestic cow of the present geologic period.
These researches ought not to die; but what can you expect?
Yale University desires to use them as text books in the natural history department of that institution, but they cannot stand the spelling.
You will take kindly what I am saying; I only wish to make you understand that even the profoundest science must perish and be lost to the world, when it is couched in such inhuman orthography as yours.
Even the very first word of your annual is an atrocity: Allminax is no way to build that word.
I can spell better than that with my left hand.
In answer to your other inquiry, I say “No” decidedly.
You can’t lecture on “Light” with any success.
Tyndall has used up that subject.
And I think you ought not to lecture on “Nitro-Glycer- me, with Experiments.” The cost of keeping a coroner under salary would eat up all the profits.
Try “Readings.” They are all the rage now. Yet how can you read acceptably when you cannot even spell correctly.
An ignorance so shining and conspicuous as yours —
Now I have it — go on a jury.
That is your place.
Your friend, MARK TWAIN.
Chapter Seven . ARTEMUS WARD: HIS LIFE, HIS BOOK, HIS DEATH
THE CIVIL WAR turned all the funny men into camp followers — either with the army or behind it, or at a desk. The Papers of Orpheus C. Kerr — his name was Newell, but his pseudonym recalled the scramble of the “office-seeker” — reached a nation-wide audience, with Abraham Lincoln in a front seat. The Letters of Petroleum V. Nasely (David Locke, an Ohio local editor) were “as eagerly expected,” so a historian tells us, “as the news of battles and universally read by the federal soldiers.”
But one reputation of the period eclipses all others. Around the memory of Artemus Ward a loving world has twined a garland of affection as for a lost child. In his case it is not possible to separate his work from his personality. The two go together. In much of art, in most of the best, the artist is a thing apart, of no consequence, quite unnecessary for the purpose of interpretation or appreciation. Not so with Artemus Ward. His fame, that now is mere history and memory, and no longer carries a present enjoyment of his work, rested upon his queer personality, the appealing innocence of his so-called lectures, the naïveté of his outlook on the world. His work, or the little fragments dignified by that name, should be presented in immediate connection with his life. Take first the most momentous episode in his story.
It is the morning of Monday, September 22, 1862. Abraham Lincoln has called his Cabinet together at the White House. He wishes to announce to them what is undoubtedly the most important decision of his life. He is to read to them the Proclamation, which he has written the day before, setting free the slaves in the rebel states and destined to end American slavery forever.
But first Lincoln informs the Cabinet that Artemus Ward has sent him his new book and that he would like to read them a chapter of it, with which, he reads to them as follows:
HIGH-HANDED OUTRAGE AT UTICA
In the Faul of 1856,I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.
The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.
I day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual Howry stile what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.
“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.
Sez he, “What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?” & he hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.
Sez I, “You egrejus ass, that air’s a wax figger — a representashun of the false’Postle.”
Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a dam site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to I of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.
It appears that the Cabinet listened to the reading with mixed feelings. The dignified Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, heard it with dry disapproval. “The President,” he tells us in his diary, “seemed to enjoy it very much.” The rest of the Cabinet apparently laughed at it, except Stanton, who wouldn’t. Yet Stanton had a certain claim as a man of humor, being quite famous for his power to quote from Dickens. No doubt he scorned to laugh over poor Artemus, not yet approved by London.
Yet there are no two names more fitted to recall to us at once the mingled tragedy and laughter of life than those of Lincoln and Artemus Ward — both marked by fate, the one for martyrdom, the other for a tragic, premature death. For both of them life’s tears and laughter, life’s joys and sorrows, ran easily together. To both of them was shown that higher vision, that larger and kindlier wisdom to which humor and pathos became one.
* * * *
The Artemus Ward of 1862 was already something of a national figure — his own name long since forgotten or never known. He had been born in 1834 and baptised as Charles Farrar Browne. His people lived in the village of Waterford in Maine and he enjoyed that rural and penurious upbringing that has been the privilege of so many great men on this continent. When he had finished school he learned how to set type and so became a journeyman printer wandering round from town to town. The printer of those days was a sort of troubadour, carrying his composing stick as the troubadour carried his guitar, or Scott’s Last Minstrel his harp. Easily enough they changed from printers to composers, from artisans to artists.
Browne wandered into Cleveland and then he settled down as a local reporter on the Plain Dealer. His business was to write up anything that happened, or if it didn’t, to write up something else. Journalism was a sort of roving commission, but most of all it was commissioned to rove round in the surrounding locality and “get in a good one” on a rival town, or a rival political party. So after a while young Browne invented the idea of “Artemus Ward” — supposed to be a traveling showman and writing in to the paper to give information and to ask for it. These letters were the first of Browne’s work that can perhaps be called “literary” as apart from mere news and personal items. Presently they transformed him into Artemus Ward.
It is very difficult for any reader of today to find much fun in these early sketches in the Plain Dealer, or to find them interesting in any but a biographical and historical sense. They belong to another world, another day and another setting. In those earlier and restricted days journalism turned much on local jokes and local “cracks,” especially as from one town to another. This form of humor is of course as old and as enduring as humanity. Egypt made jokes about Rameses building the Pyramids; Aristophanes of Athens took a rise out of Corinth; Chaucer took a crack at Stratford atte Bowe. In Ward’s own boyhood, young Charles Dickens, at dinners in America, made his most colossal hit as a humorist — it was at Richmond, Va., — by “getting in a crack” at the new Richmond and Frederichsburg Railway.
So with the young Browne of the Plain Dealer. He invents the notion that there is a “showman” traveling round and sending in pieces of news to the paper. He finds just the name for him as “Artemus Ward” — the sound of it, on an old law document, had lingered from Charles Browne’s childhood. He makes out that the showman is just about to arrive! he’s in Cincinnati, he’s in Tiffin, he’s in Toledo, and, wherever he writes from, it means a crack on that town. He tells his readers that in “Tiffin was pasted his wax figure, Judas Iscariot” and said that “Judas Iscariot couldn’t show himself with impunity in Tiffin!” That was a big joke. It still is. Let a New Yorker read it that Judas Iscariot had better not show up in Yonkers! — or for a Boston reader warn him off Chelsea — or for a Montreal man to keep him out of Verdun — and the joke retains all its original glory.... This particular joke Artemus Ward thought so good that he used it again and again: it is in the Lincoln episode above; he hated to let it go; all humorists will sympathize. The form of the humor of these early sketches, apart from the local hits, depends very largely upon bad spelling, or at least combines bad spelling with whatever other basis it may have. For the world today this practically rules it out of court. To us bad spelling isn’t funny.
People might well ask why it ever was, but the explanation is not so very far to seek. We have to remember that although art is everlasting its form changes from time to time. Thus the art of the moving picture, with its huge shadowed figures, all lines and wrinkles, figures of people often twenty feet high (if you measure them out at full length), with its “fade outs” and “close ups,”
“retrospects” and “cut ins,” represent a mass of conventions which it has taken us twenty-five years to learn. We go and see something from which Leonardo da Vinci would have sun away frightened, and we call it a “sweet, simple story.”
Now spelling in the days of Abraham Lincoln and Artemus Ward was a very solemn thing. It was the great art and mystery, learned at school and at times brought to a high pitch of excellence by “scholars” who could spell ten hard words correctly one after the other. The “spelling bee” was a part of rural life. A good speller, like Lincoln, was already an eminent person. Hence the very eminence of spelling rendered it all the better mark for artful degradation. Bad spelling had in it something of the supreme fun of irreverence, without the evil conscience. So it came about that Ward and his predecessors, and even those after him, revelled in bad spelling. Mark Twain had the sense to break away from it and use it only in and through his characters for phonetic effect. He realized that the expansion of education had left spelling to the primary school; grown-up people, for good or ill, were done with it.
At times, of course, the bad spelling of Artemus Ward and of Josh Billings was so ingenious as to be funny on that account — the misfit of ingenuity, fitting where it ought not to. A supreme example is the word “wife,” spelt by Josh as “yph.” So in Artemus’ sketches, as when he designates a boa constrictor snake as a “boy constructor.”
But on the whole the bad spelling exercises for us a repellent effect and makes the written humor of Artemus Ward a purely historical product. But so too, for those candid enough to admit it, are the works of Homer and the Chanson de Roland, and dare we say Milton — and does someone murmur Shakespeare. Ward is in good company.
* * * * *
Artemus presently (1860) became a contributor to Vanity Fair of New York and in 1861 accepted a post on that journal. Ward worked on this paper in his own lazy and intermittent fashion. Some of his best sketches appeared in it in the years 1860 to 1862. Among these were his famous interview with President Lincoln, which he never had, and his various Civil War sketches which delighted Lincoln, who never saw him.
Whatever we may think of these “pieces” now, there is no doubt that they made a great hit and brought him a wide reputation. Artemus Ward, indeed, has often been called the first “national” humorist of America, though his celebrity and his achievement was soon to be far surpassed by that of Mark Twain, whose star rose just at the sunset of Artemus’s brief day.
But Artemus Ward’s growing fame was soon to rest not only on his written work but on his success as a platform humorist. He had always had an odd turn for public appearance — as a nigger minstrel or as a comedian — as a sort of entertainer at large. Unlike most good “lecturers,” he liked lecturing, and he liked the wandering life that went with it. He began professional lecturing in 1861 and visited a number of Eastern centers. This led him in 1863 to take ship via Panama for the new world opening up on the Pacific side of America. There he “lectured” in mining towns and camps with vast success; “blew” into Virginia City in Nevada, where he met and fraternized with Samuel Clemens, just turning into Mark Twain.
There is no doubt that as a platform lecturer Artemus Ward achieved a success equal, or almost equal, to anything in his day. The colossal and sustained achievement of Charles Dickens — whose performance seems to have contained a sort of mesmeric power — had set in England a high standard for others to aim at; and Mark Twain was already beginning that unique career upon the public platform which was to extend over thirty years.
