Part 15

Mrs. Booth is the ablest woman orator in America. Her cause is one of the most worthy. She has something to say and knows how to say it. She is also one of the most loved women in the land, as well as the most attractive of all our public speakers--as great intellectually as she is simple and devoted spiritually.

Possessing fire and magnetism, with oratorical gifts of the highest order, deep convictions, high purpose, and burning earnestness, she has all the essentials for the highest of success. It has been difficult to induce her to enter upon the lecturer’s work, for she feels, as all know, so high a devotion to those labors of religion and philanthropy that her name is associated with as to dread the fascination of a work that might divert her energies in ever so slight a degree. But, realizing also possibilities in the winning of new channels of influence and the earning of means that may largely help her own work forward, Mrs. Booth has taken up the task with all her powers, and she fascinates and wins on all occasions.

Miss Mary Proctor, in her excursions to the heavens, comes of a line of astronomical ancestry. Richard A. Proctor, the great English astronomer, gave his first lectures in America in the early seventies. His coming was widely heralded by the newspapers and no scientific lecturer ever met with a more hearty welcome from the best public. I remember I went from Leavenworth, Kansas, where I then lived, to Chicago, on purpose to see and hear him, and paid three dollars for a ticket.

That was before the stereopticon had been invented, and his illustrations, consisting of maps and charts drawn on canvas, were at that time counted as marvels, though they would attract no attention in these modern days. The scholarly attainments of the man and his simple, eloquent descriptions were an additional revelation to the audiences, which were composed of the most select and intelligent of the general public.

It was a great season for Professor Proctor, and as fruitful to the public as it was lucrative to the lecturer, for it created a general interest in astronomy, which to-day is almost as universally studied as Brigham Young’s three R’s--“readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic”--which, he insisted, was all the education any person needed who had fair common sense.

I know I date my first interest in astronomy to Professor Proctor’s lectures, and I know, too, that the interest in the subject became so widespread that it was then a common theme in the family, at public assemblies and on the cars.

Two prosperous seasons and the professor returned to England, but not to remain there long. He had met with such hearty appreciation over here, and had made so many friends, that he decided to return and make his home in America. He selected St. Joseph, Mo., one of the richest and, as seemed to him, one of the many Western cities that must have a great future. There he moved with his family, consisting of two daughters and three sons.

After a tour in the South, Professor Proctor returned to New York, put up at the Westminster Hotel, and was taken ill there with yellow fever, which he had contracted in Florida. He died after a very brief illness on September 12, 1888, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, where a monument was erected over his grave by the late George W. Childs.

During the World’s Fair, in Chicago, at kindergarten meetings for teachers and children, a young lady gave a lecture on “Astronomy for Children” before representatives of the kindergarten schools all over the country. Her audience was fairly electrified by the simplicity, eloquence, and marvellous knowledge displayed in this address.

After the lecture, many came forward to congratulate the fair speaker, and to ascertain who she was and whence she came. It proved that she was Miss Mary Proctor, of St. Joseph, Mo., where she had a kindergarten school, and that she was the daughter of the late Richard A. Proctor, the famous English astronomer.

Representatives of newspapers from all parts of the country happened to be present. They telegraphed to their home papers accounts of this young woman’s wonderful address, and she awoke the next morning to find herself famous.

I at once proposed that she enter the lecture-field, but it was with great hesitancy that she could think of leaving her work with the children, whom she loved so dearly, at her home in St. Joseph. She was interviewed by reporters, and asked to write on astronomy for the leading magazines and the great Sunday newspapers. She also prepared lectures on astronomy, with elaborate illustrations, and was invited to lecture before the literary societies and clubs, colleges and public schools. She has held the very first place as a woman in the profession up to the present time. She has written a book on astronomy entitled “Stories of Starland,” for children, and her name has become a household word. Her great ambition is to be known as “The Children’s Astronomer.”

She looks young to stand before an audience and deal with such weighty topics, but she does so in a manner that holds the attention and interest of every hearer, young or old.

Her voice is clear, forcible, pleasant and well modulated; her delivery, graceful and easy. She never refers to notes of any kind while on the platform. Her talks are full of simple example and metaphor, and free from all technical terms. She has inherited her father’s gift of popularizing the most abstruse subjects and illustrating their vastness by comparisons associated with daily life.

Her lectures for children, “Giant Sun and His Family” and “Legends of the Stars,” and her more advanced lectures on “Other Worlds than Ours,” “Wonders of the Star Depths,” and “Mars, the Planet of Romance,” are all beautifully illustrated by stereopticon views that are quite as wonderful for this day as her father’s cruder pictures were thirty years ago.

Miss Mary Proctor is one of the rare examples of the heredity of genius.

Outshining her charms as a lecturer are the charms of her private life, where, of course, very few are privileged to know her. She is the attraction of the household. Children as well as grown up folks love her, and she is queen of the situation wherever she happens to be.

It has been our privilege to entertain her in our home several times. Her theme was usually the skies and the heavens. The stories she tells about the stars when conversing with little children on these topics fix in their young minds a knowledge of the geography of the heavens as long terms of study from books could never do.

And yet this little lady whom the children love so much, when surrounded by great scientists and scholars, is perfectly at her ease. It is a charming intellectual display and a wonderful lesson and privilege to see Miss Mary Proctor under any of these conditions.

HUMORISTS Josh Billings was a popular humorous lecturer for several years, but not a repeater. There is hardly a village of five thousand people and over within a radius of five hundred miles of New York where he has not given his lecture on “Milk,” the only lecture which he ever had. He insisted that a tumbler of milk should always be on the table in front of him, to which he never alluded in any way whatever. He always sat down while he lectured. I don’t remember of ever seeing him stand a moment on the platform. He immediately walked to his chair, sat down and commenced his talk.

His lecture was a shower of “Josh Billings’s” epigrams, sparkling as they tumbled over each other in falling from his lips, reflected from his bright eyes over his spectacles.

“Ladies and gentlemen:

“I hope you are all well.”

“There’s lots of folks who eat well and drink well, and yet are sick all the time. These are the folks who always ‘enjoy poor health.’”

“People who agree with you never bore you.”

“The shortest way to a woman’s heart is to praise her baby and her bonnet.”

“A man is a bore when he talks so much about himself that you kant talk about yourself.”

“Still I go on talking.”

“Comik lecturing is an uncommon pesky thing to do.”

“There ain’t but phew good judges of humor and they all differ about it.”

“If a lecturer trys to be phunny he iz like a hoss trying to trot backwards, pretty apt to trod on himself.”

“Humor must fall out uv a man’s mouth like musik out uv a bobolink, or like a young bird out uv its nest, when it iz feathered enuff to fly.”

“In delivering a comic lecture it iz a good general rule to stop sudden; sometimes before you git through.”

“This brings me to the mule--the pashunt mule. The mule is pashunt because he is ashamed of hisself. The mule is haf hass and half jackass, and then kums to a full stop, natur discovering her mistake. They weigh more according to their heft than enny other creeter except a crowbar. They kant heer enny quicker nor further than the hoss, yet their ears are big enuff for snow shoes. You kan trust them with enny one whose life ain’t worth more than the mules. The only way to keep them into a paster is tu turn them into a medder jining and let them jump out. Tha are reddy for use just as soon as tha will do to abuse. Tha are a modern invention. Tha never have a disease that a good club wont heal.”

“There is but one other animal that kan do more kicking than a mule, and that is a quire singer. A quire singer giggles during the sermon and kicks the rest ov the week.”

“This brings me to suggest the bumble-bee.”

“The bumble-bee iz more artistic than the mule, and as busy as a quire singer.”

“The hornet is an inflammable buzzer, sudden in his impreshions and hasty in his conclusion, or end.”

“Kindness iz an instinckt, politeness only an art.”

“Remember the poor--it costs nothing,” and so it goes on between the intervals of laughter until the hour is up and laughter won’t come any more because it is completely laughed out.

“I lecture for nothing, with $100 thrown in,” he said.

We never had the slightest difficulty in filling all the time that he could give us. He was a delightful man to know personally--kind, gentle, sincere and very sympathetic, with an intense fondness for children. A child riding in the same car with him could hardly escape his patronage and attention, and what was especially peculiar about him, as with Mr. Beecher, he always attracted children to him.

When “Josh” passed away, I know that I lost a very dear friend, and that all who had known and heard him felt the same way. His was a noble spirit.

I find but two of “Josh Billings’s” (Henry W. Shaw) letters among my collection, as most of his correspondence was with the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, and were filed away with the mass of other correspondence. I find one, directed to me personally, in reply to an invitation to witness the exposé of spiritualism by Harry Kellar, at Horticultural Hall in Boston, and it is as follows:

* * * * *

“NEW YORK, January 16, 1878.

“MAJOR MI DEER: I regret, (i may say that, i fairly mourn,) that i kant be present to witness yure friend Kellar’s expozure ov spiritualism in Horticultural Hall in Boston, the hub ov the univers. Altho not present in the flesh (mi actual weight iz 186 pounds), in spirit i shall be thare (mi spirit on this partiklar matter ways 642 pounds), the whole ov which yu are welkum to. Thare are a fu spiritualists whom i pity; these are the phools,--thare are a greater number whom i dispize; theze are the frauds, and ded beats ov the profeshion.

“Enny man who kan bring a kounterfitter to justiss, enny man who kan beat a thimble rigger at his own game, enny man who kan probe a _Three Kard Monte_ wretch, and dispoil him ov hiz little joker, i look upon az a child ov genius, at work in the vinyard ov truth and morality. The only spiritualizm that haz suckceeded yet iz the kind that haz got the most fraud in it. Tell Harry i pray that suckess may crown hiz noble efforts.

“Good-by Major “Yours unto deth-- “‘JOSH BILLINGS’ “(Henry W. Shaw).”

* * * * *

Thomas Nast--up to his time, caricature had been a minor branch of art. He made it one of the most potent agencies for creating and influencing public opinion.

No editor, no orator, no division commander in our army, no captain in our navy, did more to put down the rebellion with pen, tongue, or sword than did Mr. Nast with his pencil.

It was said of Luther that his words were half battles. With equal truth Nast’s war pictures were military assaults. They stirred the patriotic blood in the North, and sent battalions of youth to rally round the flag.

Like many famous artists, Mr. Nast was personally shy, and would sooner go on a forlorn hope than face an audience. After trying to induce him to join the army of lecturers, and getting reply after reply declining even to consider the subject, my predecessor, Mr. Redpath, adopted a course that showed enterprise, and was successful in inducing Mr. Nast to enter the lecture field.

Finding that Mr. Nast had quarrelled with the Harpers, and was going to Europe, Mr. Redpath took passage on the same steamer, and introduced himself to Mr. Nast. Mr. Nast laughed and said:

“Well, you have got me where I cannot run away; but it’s no use--I won’t lecture.”

Mr. Redpath, nevertheless, got his chance to set forth the advantages of lecturing, went with Nast to London, and before coming away got his consent, if Mrs. Nast would agree to it. Returning to New York, he secured Mrs. Nast’s approval, and the next fall Thomas Nast made his début as a lecturer. His lectures were illustrated--that is, he drew on large sheets of paper crayon pictures and pictures in oil in presence of his audiences. The crayons were both plain and colored, and he drew with such amazing rapidity that the people were delighted.

On one occasion, in Philadelphia, he went to his blackboard and began the outlining of a building. When the sketch was finished, he turned and said with apparent simplicity, “I can draw a house.” As the theatre was packed, the double meaning conveyed “brought down the house” at once.

He had a long list of engagements, six nights a week, with a certainty of from $200 to $500 a lecture. He earned $40,000 that season, and, as he got homesick, cancelled about $5,000 worth toward the close. Nevertheless, it is an illustration of the thorough honesty of the man that he insisted that the bureau should receive its full commission on the fees of the cancelled lectures.

Although he met with great success, Mr. Nast had such a distaste for the work that he could not be induced to try another season. At first he had stage fright in the worst form. When he was to make his first appearance in a country town in Massachusetts--Peabody, I believe--he asked Mr. Redpath to go with him, and, when he arrived at the hall, said: “Now, Redpath, you got me into this scrape and you will have to go on the platform with me.” Mr. Redpath, who never had that sort of fever, readily enough consented, and sat on a chair close behind the artist. He said that Mr. Nast was so nervous that he dug his nails into the reading desk. A few months afterward, Mr. Nast faced a New York audience in Steinway Hall as jauntily as if he had been a veteran comedian.

At the time that Horace Greeley became a candidate for President of the United States, it was said that Mr. Nast’s cartoons killed the great editor. Be that as it may, we remember in that campaign Mr. Nast’s cartoons attracted universal attention--Horace in the old white coat with the Gratz Brown card appended to his coat-tails; and this was the way that card came there.

Mr. Nast had prepared a cartoon of a number of the candidates on the ticket, with Greeley at the head. It had been sent into the engraver’s room, when somebody remarked to Nast that he had omitted the name of the Vice-President.

“Oh,” he said, “is somebody a candidate for Vice-President? Oh, yes; Brown of Missouri.”

He simply wrote the name and tacked it to the coat-tail of Greeley, and that went through the papers.

Brown of St. Louis was a delightful man. He signed the pledge after he was nominated for Vice-President, but during the campaign tour in the East it was reported that Brown drank too much at a banquet in New Haven, and the Good Templars’ Society telegraphed to some persons in New Haven to ask whether the report were true. Word came back that they did not know whether he were drunk or not, but he ate butter on his watermelon. One of the cartoons had Brown as Bacchus a-straddle of a big watermelon, in the act of buttering a slice.

Another and possibly even a more telling one was the cartoon which depicted Mr. Greeley as consuming his own broth--that is, feeding himself from a bowl filled with the denunciations and criticisms he had, during his long career as the leading Whig and Republican editor of the United States, fulminated against the Democratic party and its policies. As he was that party’s nominee the point was obvious.

The way that the cartoon came to be was something like this: Once Ben: Perley Poor, the famous correspondent of the Boston _Journal_, and Richard J. Hinton, a Washington journalist, were both active and earnest on the side of the Republican ticket. Hinton was the press secretary of the Congressional and National committees of his party, and is fond nowadays of asserting that the “campaign of education,” then carried on under his direction, was the active cause of the destruction of the franking privilege that followed during the first session of Congress in Grant’s second term. Between these two keen-witted “Knights of the Quill,” it was decided to prepare and publish a campaign document containing choice extracts from all the various denunciations of the Democracy which had appeared in the columns Mr. Greeley edited. Major Poor was clerk of the Printing Records Committee of Congress; he knew where the files were. A score of searchers and copyists were employed, and in a few days a huge document of nearly two hundred pages was put into type. A bundle of revises was sent to Nast by the press secretary with a request for a cartoon. They were returned at once with the famous picture of Mr. Greeley with the bowl and the long handled _Tribune_ spoon, from which he was, politically speaking, thus made to sup sorrow of his own making.

Petroleum V. Nasby’s letters--to these, next to the cartoons of Thomas Nast, will the historian undoubtedly give credit in their influence in inspiring people with enthusiasm for the cause of the Union. Indeed, a member of Mr. Lincoln’s cabinet, the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Boutwell, said in a public speech shortly after the war:

“The rebellion was put down by three forces: the army and the navy of the United States, and the letters of Petroleum V. Nasby.”

Petroleum V. Nasby was the _nom de plume_ of David R. Locke of Ohio. At the beginning of the Civil War he was a young and obscure man, editing a little country paper in the interior of Ohio. It occurred to him that it would be a good idea to write a series of letters, one a week, exposing and ridiculing the Democratic party. These letters pretended to be written in earnest by a Confederate War office-seeker. They succeeded in deceiving even the County Democrats for a time.

One meeting of the faithful framed a resolution commending the fidelity to Democratic principles shown in the Nasby letters, but urging Mr. Nasby, for the sake of policy, not to be so outspoken. The sarcasm was so broad that it is difficult, if one reads them to-day for the first time, to understand how the most illiterate partisans could mistake them. But at a time when men’s passions were red hot, and their prejudices volcanic, they were universally applauded by the upholders of the Union.

The circulation of Locke’s paper rose rapidly, and he became one of the most famous men in America in less than a year. He soon bought an interest in the Toledo _Blade_, then in a dying state. He moved to Toledo, supervised the paper, and its circulation increased until it rivalled the most popular journals of the continent both in its sale and its influence. When he died, in 1888, the _Blade_ for several years had had a circulation of over one hundred thousand.

From being a poor country editor Locke had become one of the wealthiest men in the West, and died a millionaire.

Of course, as soon as he had won a national reputation, he was invited to lecture. He used to boast that he made, during his first lecture season, the longest and most lucrative lecture tour recorded in the annals of the lyceum.

He lectured every secular night for nine or ten months, and made over $30,000 by the tour. His lectures until some time after the war were very popular; but he had none of the graces of the orator, and as the war fever abated, he gradually lost his hold, and retired from the field.

One day Nasby came into our office in Boston just as Gough was passing out. Nasby said to me:

“I suppose Gough’s mad at me. I was in St. Paul, at the Merchants’ Hotel, and hard up for a letter. I saw Gough was registered there, and I ordered two whiskey cocktails sent to his room. Then I wrote my letter on what I saw.”

Nothing that was said could make “Nasby” see at the time the outrage he had perpetrated. It is probable, however, that when his own habits changed, some years later, he realized the offence committed and the wrong done to a man of honorable life and pure purposes.

His intense Republicanism made him hate the Irish and Irish-Americans, and as he afterward said:

“If I ever missed a chance to get a dig at the Irish for twenty years before I went to Ireland, I can’t remember it.”

He used to sneer at the Irish for clamoring for freedom at home, and supporting the pro-slavery party when they came to America. A few years before his death he made a tour of Europe, and in coming back reached Belfast and got among the Orangemen of the North. These men intensified his prejudices, and when he reached Dublin he had made up his mind to write a series of Nasby letters ridiculing Parnell and the Irish movement for home rule. Mr. Redpath happened to meet him there, but found it impossible to convince him that the Irish were wholly in the right in their struggle for home rule. Finally, finding that he could not make Nasby understand the tyranny of the Irish landlords, he offered to make a bet to convert him. And a curious bet it was. Redpath said:

“Take a map of Ireland and pitch a sixpence on any part of the West, and whether I have been there or not, if you and Bob (his son) will go there with me, I will convince you by what I shall show you that I am right and the Irish are right, and I will pay your expenses if you don’t come back a worse Irishman than I am, but you will pay mine if you are converted.”

The offer was accepted, and Nasby fixed on the Killarney Lake region. In going there from Cork the party stopped over at the Galter Mountains, and Nasby was so shocked at the horrible poverty he saw there, and at the stories he heard from the people, that in coming back he offered to send the best Winchester rifle in America to the jaunting-car driver if he would promise to shoot a landlord.

“Which landlord, your honor?” asked the driver.

“Oh, any one, I don’t care,” replied Nasby, “so long as he is an Irish landlord.”

On returning to America Locke astonished his old friends by becoming a more radical champion of Irish rights than even his friend Redpath, whom the Irish-Americans had already christened “the adopted Irishman.”

President Lincoln telegraphed to Toledo: “For the genius to write like Nasby I would gladly give up my office.” Of all publications during the Civil War none had such a charm for him. It was a delight to see him surrender himself completely to their fascination.

Of his letters Charles Sumner says, in the preface to Nasby’s book, “it is impossible to measure their value.”