Thus, at the outset of a career from which much was to be expected, a man, possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure. There was then no Mark Twain or Bret Harte. His rivals were such humorists as Orpheus C. Kerr, Nasby, Asa Hartz, The Fat Contributor, John Happy, Mrs. Partington, Bill Arp and the like, who are now mostly forgotten.
Artemus Ward wrote little, but he made good and left his mark. Along with the queer John Phoenix his writings survived the deluge that followed them. He poured out the wine of life in a limpid stream. It may be fairly said that he did much to give permanency and respectability to the style of literature of which he was at once a brilliant illustrator and illustration. His was a short life indeed, though a merry one, and a sad death. In a strange land, yet surrounded by admiring friends, about to reach the coveted independence he had looked forward to so long, he sank to rest, his dust mingling with that of the great Thomas Hood, alongside of whom he was laid in Kensal Green.
Chapter the Fifth
Mark Twain--The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers--The "Earl of Durham"--Some Noctes Ambrosianæ--A Joke on Murat Halstead
I
Mark Twain came down to the footlights long after Artemus Ward had passed from the scene; but as an American humorist with whom during half a century I was closely intimate and round whom many of my London experiences revolve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after his elder. There was not lacking a certain likeness between them.
Samuel L. Clemens and I were connected by a domestic tie, though before either of us were born the two families on the maternal side had been neighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an aunt of mine--the children of this marriage cousins in common to us--albeit, this apart, we were life-time cronies. He always contended that we were "bloodkin."
Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain appeared east of the Alleghanies and north of the Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the west, the bizarre alike of the pilot house and the mining camp very much in evidence, he came of decent people on both sides of the house. The Clemens and the Lamptons were of good old English stock. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century three younger scions of the Manor of Durham migrated from the County of Durham to Virginia and thence branched out into Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.
His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a drawl that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her famous son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen. The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived upon the scene.
These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceedingly large, varied and picturesque assortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of amusement to us. Just after the successful production of his play, The Gilded Age, and the uproarious hit of the comedian, Raymond, in the leading role, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had made in Colonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen and thought he had drawn him to the life. "But for the love o' God," he said, "don't whisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me, if he did not thrash me on sight."