Part 15

Years ago when I was on the lecture platform I used to have some cloudy hours, in spite of my efforts to be sunny, for, unlike theatrical people, lecturers are usually their own only traveling companions, the railway runs are long, the engagements are what the dramatic agents call “one night stands,” so the stops are so short that the lecturer has no chance to adapt his digestive apparatus to the surprises that unknown chefs of unknown hotels delight in springing upon him. Years ago—as I said a moment ago, I was thinking of all these miseries, as I left a train at Utica on a snowy, stormy afternoon of the Christmas holidays, when I specially longed to be with some friends in New York. I had four blank hours before me, for I was not to appear on the platform until evening, and it was one of the days when I was too tired to study or read and too shaken up to sleep. Suddenly a negro porter in drawing-room car uniform accosted me with:

“Mr. Wilder, Mr. Jefferson would like to see you.”

He pointed to the right, and there in the window of a parlor car, sidetracked for the day only, stood “Joe” Jefferson. When I got into the car and looked about me I saw the great “all-star” cast of “The Rivals”—dear Mme. Ponisi, Mr. John Drew, Viola Allen, W. J. Florence, Otis Skinner, Frederic Paulding, Frank Bangs, George Dunham, Elsie C. Lombard (now Mrs. John T. Brush), and Mr. Jefferson’s sons, Tom, Charlie, Joe, Jr., and Willie.

These good people were all seated around the dining-table of the special car that I entered, and the cordial greeting I received, combined with the contrast with “all-outdoors” and all else that had been depressing me, made me the happiest man on the continent. I remained there two or three hours, partly because, when manners suggested I should go, I was forcibly detained. I told stories whenever I could, but I was more entertained than entertaining. The time came when I was really obliged to go and I said:

“Mr. Jefferson, I am booked here to-night at a church, and I must begin my hour-long entertainment at seven o’clock.”

“Well, Marshall,” was the reply, “that will give you a chance to see our performance, so we’ll reserve a box for you.”

I thanked him, seized my bag, hurried to a hotel and prepared for my work. The church in which I appeared was crowded—packed, in fact; I afterward learned that, although I was well and properly paid, there had been no charge for admission. When I reached the theatre the house was only half full, but the performance of “The Rivals” was of full size. After the curtain fell I went to my hotel, packed my bag and hurried to the station; I had almost two hours to spare, but there are times when the station is more interesting than the hotel. Soon Charlie Jefferson stumbled over me and took me back to the company’s car, where I had supper with the entire cast.

My train was due about an hour after midnight and as I rose to make my adieux, Mr. Jefferson looked kindly down on me, took me by the ear and said, in his own inimitable plaintive manner,

“Friends, I want you to look at this little scoundrel. He comes up here from New York; we entertain him; we dine him for three hours, he queers our house, yet gets a big fee for his own work. We again entertain him for hours by giving a “Rival” show, and yet he is not satisfied without taking my life”—with this he handed me a beautifully bound book, “Memoirs of Joseph Jefferson,” with the inscription in the fly-leaf, “Presented to my little friend, Marshall P. Wilder.”

Everybody tells stories of Jefferson’s absent-mindedness, and he sometimes tells them himself. I can venture to repeat two which he himself has told. A friend of young Joe was making a long visit at Mr. Jefferson’s house, so the comedian saw him at the table every day for a fortnight. One evening young Joe took his friend to the Player’s Club, in New York. The elder Jefferson was there, and on being reminded of the young man’s presence he said cordially,

“My boy, I’m very glad to meet you. Why don’t you come up and see us? Do come and make me a visit.”

But here is Jefferson’s star story against himself.

“I was in a down-town office building in New York, a few years ago, and when I entered the elevator a short stout gentleman with a cigar in his fingers spoke to me, saying,

“‘How do you do, Mr. Jefferson?’

“‘I am very glad to see you,’ I replied. He continued,

“‘You don’t know me, do you, Mr. Jefferson?’

“‘Well, really, you must pardon me, but your face is quite familiar but your name has escaped my memory.’

“‘My name is Grant,’ he said quietly, with a twinkle in his eye. I got out at the next floor; I was so afraid I might ask him if he had been in the war.”

But there is no accounting for absent-mindedness. Charles Wyndham, the English comedian, tells of an enthusiastic hunter, a man who thought of nothing else. One morning his wife saw him leaving the house and asked:

“Where are you going?”

“Hunting,” was the reply.

“But where is your gun?”

“Bless me! I was sure I had left something behind.”

Regarding sunny-hearted actors, it is well to remember that they too have troubles peculiarly their own, and one of the worst is to have an impulse where only solemnity is in order. Nat Goodwin who has been making audiences laugh for the last thirty years and I “took” a certain degree of masonry together, and as all masons know, the proceedings were quite as solemn as a church ceremony. Taking the degree with us was a worthy German, whose hold on the English language was both weak and spasmodic, as was manifested when it became our duty to repeat certain obligations, sentence or sentences after an officer of the lodge. Both Goodwin and I were fully impressed by the gravity of the occasion, yet we could not help hearing that German; he had a dialectic utterance that would have driven a Philadelphia vaudeville audience wild with delight and although he caught the sense of all the responses required of us, he unconsciously repeated many of them backward according to the constructive forms of the German language.

Goodwin and I knew it would be an unpardonable breach of decorum, as bad as laughing aloud in church in prayer time, if we gave way to our feelings. I bit my lips till they bled. Nat, less conventional, tried to stow his entire handkerchief in one side of his mouth, while he voiced the responses from the other. We had almost got full control of ourselves; the beautiful and impressive service was almost over, but when the oath was required, that engaging German repeated it backward. I yelled; Goodwin had a spasm—almost a fit.

To square ourselves, required a dinner for the entire lodge, and Goodwin and I were the hosts.

This was not the only scrape I was in with Nat Goodwin. During the bicycle craze of a few years ago, when wheels were as numerous at any good road-house as free-ticket beggars at a theatre, Nat and I met at the Casino, in McGowan’s Pass, Central Park, and he asked me to wait for him, so that we might ride home together. We found many acquaintances about the tables, remained till after dark and then started homeward on bicycles without lamps. We had not expected to be out after sunset. At that time the law was very stringent and rightly so, about lights on bicycles, so I urged haste. Luckily I had many friends among the Park Police; they knew I was not a “scorcher” and that I had proper respect for my own life, so they kindly looked aside as we passed. But Nat—well they probably had seen him on the stage again and again and been the better for it, but actors don’t wear their stage clothes and wigs and paint when they go bicycling, so none of the officers recognized him. At a turn of the road we came upon a policeman who didn’t know me either, and he shouted—“Here you fellows—stop!” I don’t believe I am a slippery chap, but I slipped past that officer before he could touch my wheel, but alas for poor Nat! he didn’t. I did not remain to hear the conversation, for I knew I could not make any useful addition to it. Goodwin was to play the next night in Boston, so I expected to see a “scare head” story in the morning paper about his arrest. But fortunately while he was reasoning with the policeman, a friend came along in a carriage and succeeded in rescuing Nat and his bicycle from the clutches of the law.

I wish the carriage had been mine for Nat Goodwin has come to my rescue more than once. I recall one of the (London) Green-room Club’s annual dinners, which Nat and I attended. It was given at the Crystal Palace; Mr. Bancroft—“Squire” Bancroft, “Squire” being his name and not a title—Mr. Bancroft was in the chair. About the middle of the evening a four cornered discussion between Sir Augustus Harris, Henry Arthur Jones, Henry Pettit and Comyns-Carr, all good fellows, became so heated that something had to be done to restore quiet, so Chairman Bancroft in a suave, diplomatic manner of which he has a mastery, arose and said,

“Gentlemen, we’re here to-night for a good time. Let’s quarrel to-morrow. I take great pleasure in calling upon our American friend, Mr. Marshall P. Wilder.”

I arose, but the excitement had got all around the tables; my job was too big for me, and I could not raise a laugh.

As I dropped into my chair, the chairman called upon Mr. Goodwin. Nat got up; he began gently to spray oil on the troubled waters; then he drizzled it; showered it and finally poured it on by the tub full until he got the entire assemblage laughing and saved the day. I mean the night.

Some actors produce sunshine, that is, laughter, by direct means, others indirectly and by inversion. George Leslie and Wilton Lackaye are to the point, for Leslie is an optimist and “jollier,” while Lackaye is sarcastic. One day Lackaye said to Leslie: “The only difference between you and me is that you bless people and things and I damn them—and neither of us is on the level.”

At a dinner at the Lambs’ Club, Lackaye bet Burr McIntosh that Burr would “make a break” nine times out of ten in whatever he did, and he added, “McIntosh, I’ll let you select the times.” It was amusing to hear Lackaye say, at the beginning of every dinner,—“Burr, that bet still goes.” I believe it has not yet been decided.

But Lackaye is best when telling a joke against himself. While he was a member of the Daly Company, he said:

“Miss Ada Rehan is a charming lady, and I’ve always considered her a great comedienne—a creative one. At rehearsal one day we were standing aside and chatting, the scene not being ours and I asked off-hand,

“‘Are you a quick study?’

“‘Oh, yes, very,’ she replied. I looked at her doubtingly and asked,

“‘How long do you think it would take you to like me?’

“‘Present?—or absent?’ she asked. That floored me.”

XXIV

SUNSHINE IS IN DEMAND

Laughter Wanted Everywhere.—Dismal Efforts at Fun.—English Humor.—The Difference Between Humor and Wit.— Composite Merriment.—Carefully Studied “Impromptus.”—National Types of Humor.—Some Queer Substitutes for the Real Article.—Humor is Sometimes “Knocked Out,” Yet Mirth is Medicine and Laughter Lengthens Life.

Perhaps the reason that the true jester is always sunny of heart and manner is that his output is always in demand. Busy though his wits and tongue may be, the demand always exceeds the supply. Laughter, like gold, is never a drug on the market, and, as is true regarding gold, people will endure some frightful substitutes rather than go without it. In countries that have no real fun in them—and there are such countries, the people insist on having laughter provided for them, even if they must depend on the public executioner to do it. It is said that in some Asiatic countries the people become wildly mirthful at the contortions of a criminal’s body from which the head has just been severed; as to that, there are solemn Americans—men who would think it sinful to smile at a comedy, who almost split their sides with laughter over the floppings of a beheaded chicken.

As to that, I assert on my honor that I have seen Englishmen laugh over the pages of _Punch_ and Frenchmen roused gleefully by a copy of _Le Petit Journal Pour Rire_, though both papers seem as dismal, to the average American, as an old-fashioned German on the doom of the finally impenitent. According to competent judges the best thing that ever appeared in _Punch_ was a poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln, which was not exactly a laughing matter. Yet the English are a good-natured people, and full of laughter. Sometimes it takes them a lot of time to get off a laugh, but, when the climax is really reached, the sound resembles an Indian war-whoop tangled up in a thunder-storm. They don’t take their pleasure sadly, for there are no more cheery-faced people in the world, but their joke-makers are not successful when at work on serious subjects. _Punch_ was never more popular than during the recent war in South Africa, when the greatest and best nation in Europe was being humiliated in plain sight of all the world by a few thousand Boers, not one in ten of whom ever fired a shot. It made me almost wish I could be an Englishman, just to see where the fun came in, for it was plain to see that it came.

But, to get back to my subject, every healthy man likes to laugh; therefore he likes whoever will make him laugh. Ella Wheeler Wilcox voiced a great truth when she wrote “Laugh, and the world laughs with you.” Men are so fond of laughing that they will endure nine wormy chestnuts, badly served, if the tenth effort produces the genuine thing. Much of the best fun comes by accident; that is, from incongruity. Two of the few immortal figures of humorous literature—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, owe their existence to this double motif; in the knight, by idealized chivalry being put down among pigs and kitchen wenches; while the persistent coarseness and vulgarity of his squire are thrown into juxtaposition with the chivalry and splendor of lords and ladies.

Every soul, man and woman, as well as many who are not, tries to provoke smiles, but not one in a thousand succeeds; as for those who actually create new humor, their name may be called on the fingers of two hands. Almost all humorists, whether amateur or professional, get no further than to evolve variations of old forms and climaxes, but what does it matter so long as they compel a laugh? At this sort of thing Americans beat the world. A cook who can serve a dozen different soups from one kettle is a bungler when compared with the American joker.

Mark Twain says there are only seven original jokes in existence and he ought to know, yet out of them has come an output that is incomparable, in proportion, except to the evolution of the entire English language, by varying the changes on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

The demand for laugh-making gives employment to many who might otherwise be in far worse business. These men are the founts of inspiration for the newspapers and the stage. The press and the footlights are ever clamoring for new fun and numberless are the attempts to supply the demand and incidentally utilize it in the form of cold cash. This stimulus has produced the humorist pure and simple, the paragrapher, the comic versifier, the compounder of burlesque and the maker of witty dialogue to spice the works of serious playwrights. There is also the humorous artist; when there isn’t, there can always be found half a dozen tipsters who can’t draw a line unless they have a yardstick to help them but who have enough funny concepts on tap (and for sale) to make fame and money for all the artists in the land.

The clever impromptu you hear in a vaudeville sketch, the delicious eight line dialogue you chuckle over in the morning paper, the flashing contest of wit you enjoy in a society drama often represent the labor, not of one but of a half dozen intellects trained to the elaboration of humorous conceits.

If all the humor which appears daily in print and on the stage could be clipped and put into scrap-books, it would fill forty large volumes in a year, yet nine-tenths of it—yes nine hundred and ninety-nine one thousandth would consist of variations of old facts, personalities, situations and plays upon words.

Besides all these clever fellows and their works, there are specialists in many other lines. Even a language serious enough in itself, may be so twisted as to make people laugh, especially if the twist can be nicknamed “dialect”; so we have the purveyor of German humor (so called) the manufacturer of Irish “bulls,” the sedlac of French jokes, the broker in Italian bon-mots, and a few days ago I heard of a cosmopolitan individual with a high sounding Celt-Iberian name, who offered to supply a prominent comedian with the latest humor of Portugal and Brazil. I don’t doubt that before long some enterprising Mongolian will be trotting around among vaudeville managers with a stock of the latest _jeux d’esprit_ of Chinatown, Canton, and Hong-kong, or that some one will put them in good enough shape to make people laugh. Good luck to them, for after all, the laugh is the thing. No one joke will be equally amusing to everybody, for each person has his own ideas of fun. For instance on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the country, a lot of good healthy minded folks will munch red winter apples and gather round the piano and sing “Happy Day,” and other Sunday-school songs, and look as full of fun as any comedian’s audience. And the grab-bag at the church fair! Around it there is more fun visible in human faces, than some great men get out of the cleverest jokes ever cracked. There is no end to fun, no more than there is to the melodies that keep rising, like birds from the eight keyed home of song, that octave that reaches from “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” to “Tannhäuser.”

And there is no need of it all, for “mirth is medicine and laughter lengthens life.” That is what my good friend Colonel Robert Ingersoll wrote under his picture which adorns my wall. The Colonel was one of us entertainers, though not professionally. Our merry champion he! The spirit of his tender epigram seems to haunt the dim twilight ways of men, looking with cheery solicitude for those who are weary, to take them by the hand and tell them tales full of dawn and breaking day, and rush of rosy life in rising sun. It stands on the side of light and love along the paths where flowers bloom and birds are glad in song. And it is needed, for from the start, there has been a fight between merriment and misery and the latter has its stout advocates. The gloomster and the jester have ever been sparring for paints and sometimes the jester has gone down under swinging right-handers; then, something that its enemies call Puritanism, probably because it hates all purity not of its own peculiar brand, has clapped its hands, all smeared with brimstone, until you could see the blue flames of the place that Ingersoll said didn’t exist.

XXV

“BILL” NYE

A Humorist of the Best Sort.—Not True to His Own Description of Himself.—Everybody’s Friend.—His Dog “Entomologist” and the Dog’s Companions.—A Man With the Right Word for Every Occasion.—His Pen-Name was His Own.—Often Mistaken for a Distinguished Clergyman.—Killed by a Published Falsehood.

In one respect entertainers closely resemble preachers;—they greatly enjoy listening to the greater members of their own profession. Consequently, I never lost a chance to listen to Bill Nye, and I worship the memory of him as he was—a gentle yet sturdy and persistent humorist of so good a sort, that he never could help being humorous, no matter how uncongenial the surroundings. Although he saw hundreds and thousands of chances of hitting other men so hard that the hurt would last forever, he dropped every one of them and trampled them so hard that they never dared show their faces again. He was an apostle of the Golden Rule, which he exemplified in himself, so there never was a sting in his jokes; gentle raillery was the sweetest thing he ever attempted, and even this he did with so genial a smile and so merry an eye, that a word of his friendly chaffing was worth more than a cart-load of formal praise.

I speak what I do know, for he and I were close friends for many years before his untimely death, and he was so solicitous for my welfare and comfort, that after he had played father and mother to me successfully, he couldn’t help going on till he had become my grandfather and grandmother, as well as a number of sisters and cousins and aunts.

I don’t believe he ever had an enemy but himself, and he injured himself only by his peculiarities of self-description. Any one reading his humorous articles would imagine him an undersized scrawny backwoods invalid with an irritable disposition and an unquenchable thirst for something else than water. In reality he was a tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, healthy, genial chap so in love with the mere fact of living, that he took scrupulous care of himself in every way. He was as abstemious as any clergyman who is not a total abstainer, and he never lost his temper except when some deliberate scoundrelism was inflicted upon him. He would go out of his way—a whole day’s journey out of his way, with all the railway fares and other discomforts in such cases made and provided,—to help a friend out of a sick bed or other trouble, and he endured all the torments of a busy entertainer’s season on the road as cheerfully, as if he were perpetual holder of the record for patience.

People often wondered how he could go on year after year digging the same kind of fun out the same old vein, but the secret was that he lived right in the centre of that vein and was merely digging his way out of it. He had a full assortment of polite commonplaces, and carried them as gracefully as he did his full-dress clothes, but as soon as he got well acquainted with a man—and it didn’t take him long to get inside of any decent fellow’s waistcoat—he would talk in his characteristic droll manner all day and seven days a week, and as much longer as they two traveled together.

As seriously as if he were talking of audiences or hotel tables or railway nuisances, he told me a story of a dog he had owned. It was a Dachshund, and Nye described him as two and a-half dogs long by one dog high. He had named the animal “Entomologist,” because it was a collector of insects. In fact, the dog lived up to his name so strenuously that something had to be done. A friend suggested soaking the dog in kerosene, saying,

“If it doesn’t rid the dog of fleas, it will rid you of the dog.”

So kerosene was tried and the dog passed away. After all was over Bill felt so bad that he went out for a walk, which did him no good. Returning home with dejected spirits and a sorrowing soul, he was smitten afresh with remorse when he realized that there would be no little dog awaiting him. But yes, surely there was something on the steps. Looking closer he saw seven hundred fleas sitting there, and they all looked up into his face as if to say,

“When are you going to get us another dog?”

Few of the great world’s great dispatches contained so much wisdom in so few words as Nye’s historic wire from Washington—

“My friends and money gave out at 3 A. M.”