White, soft, long, slender, and really handsome, they were more like the hands of a high-born lady than those of a Western editor.He attended to them with careful pride, and never alluded to them as a subject for his jokes, until, in his last illness, they had become unnaturally fair, translucent, and attenuated.Then it was that a friend calling upon him at his apartments in Piccadilly, endeavoured to cheer him at a time of great mental depression, and pleasantly reminded him of a ride they had long ago projected through the South-Western States of the Union."We must do that ride yet, Artemus.Short stages at first, and longer ones as we go on." Poor Artemus lifted up his pale, slender hands, and letting the light shine through them, said jocosely, "Do you think these would do to hold a rein with? Why, the horse would laugh at them."Having collected a sufficient number of quaint thoughts, whimsical fancies, bizarre notions, and ludicrous anecdotes, the difficulty which then, according to his own confession, occurred to Artemus Ward was, what should be the title of his lecture.The subject was no difficulty at all, for the simple reason that there was not to be any.The idea of instructing or informing his audience never once entered into his plans.His intention was merely to amuse; if possible, keep the house in continuous laughter for an hour and a half, or rather an hour and twenty minutes, for that was the precise time, in his belief, which people could sit to listen and to laugh without becoming bored; and, if possible, send his audience home well pleased with the lecturer and with themselves, without their having any clear idea of that which they had been listening to, and not one jot the wiser than when they came.No one better understood than Artemus the wants of a miscellaneous audience who paid their dollar or half-dollar each to be amused.No one could gauge better than he the capacity of the crowd to feed on pure fun, and no one could discriminate more clearly than he the fitness, temper, and mental appetite of the constituents of his evening assemblies.The prosiness of an ordinary Mechanics' Institute lecture was to him simply abhorrent; the learned platitudes of a professed lecturer were to him, to use one of his own phrases, "worse than poison." To make people laugh was to be his primary endeavour.If in so making them laugh he could also cause them to see through a sham, be ashamed of some silly national prejudice, or suspicious of the value of some current piece of political bunkum, so much the better.He believed in laughter as thoroughly wholesome; he had the firmest conviction that fun is healthy, and sportiveness the truest sign of sanity.Like Talleyrand, he was of opinion that "Qui vit sans jolie n'est pas si sage qu'il croit."Artemus Ward's first lecture was entitled "The Babes in the Wood."I asked him why he chose that title, because there was nothing whatever in the lecture relevant to the subject of the child-book legend.He replied, "It seemed to sound the best.I once thought of calling the lecture 'My Seven Grandmothers.' Don't you think that would have been good?" It would at any rate have been just as pertinent.
Incongruity as an element of fun was always an idea uppermost in the mind of the Western humorist.I am not aware that the notes of any of his lectures, except those of his Mormon experience, have been preserved, and I have some doubts if any one of his lectures, except the Mormon one, was ever fairly written out."The Babes in the Wood," as a lecture, was a pure and unmitigated "sell." It was merely joke after joke, and drollery succeeding to drollery, without any connecting thread whatever.It was an exhibition of fireworks, owing half its brilliancy and more than half its effect to the skill of the man who grouped the fireworks together and let them off.In the hands of any other pyrotechnist the squibs would have failed to light, the rockets would have refused to ascend, and the "nine-bangers" would have exploded but once or twice only, instead of nine times.The artist of the display being no more, and the fireworks themselves having gone out, it is perhaps not to be regretted that the cases of the squibs and the tubes of the rockets have not been carefully kept.Most of the good things introduced by Artemus Ward in his first lecture were afterwards incorporated by him in subsequent writings, or used over again in his later entertainment.Many of them had reference to the events of the day, the circumstances of the American War and the politics of the Great Rebellion.These, of course, have lost their interest with the passing away of the times which gave them birth.The points of many of the jokes have corroded, and the barbed head of many an arrow of Artemus's wit has rusted into bluntness with the decay of the bow from which it was propelled.
