Phineas Taylor Barnum

I

PHINEAS TAYLOR BARNUM ! The very sound is compact of a large and common hilarity, —

Phineas Taylor Barnum! And his wife was Charity Barnum, and his sister, Minerva Barnum: all in a concatenation accordingly, as Tony Lumpkin and Sir Walter would have it. Barnum! The name itself is redolent of shows and showmen and humbug; and a showman he was, as his Autobiography abundantly makes manifest, almost from his boyhood in the eighteentwenties, till he died at eighty in 1891, the monarch of the Greatest Show on Earth. So far from feeling disgraced by his calling, he boasted of it on all possible occasions, appropriate and inappropriate: ‘I am “a showman” by profession, and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me. When a man is ashamed of his origin, or gets above his business, he is a poor devil, who merits the detestation of all who know him.’

Apart from his singular and absorbing pursuit, Barnum was a good average, you might say typical, American citizen. He was twice married, and had a family of daughters, and was an affectionate husband and father. He says so, and others agree with him. The appendix to his Autobiography, written by his second wife after his death, shows a genuine tenderness, which could have been inspired only by a kindly nature, and gives a most winning picture of the great showman in his home, with a group of grandchildren and greatgrandchildren about him.

He was eminently a social creature always, liked people of all sorts — to have them in his house, chat with them, laugh with them, frolic with them. His acquaintance was vast, included everybody. In Europe and America he fraternized with high and low. Samuel Rogers and the Bishop of London jested with him. Mark Twain and Matthew Arnold visited him. He would walk or talk or work or play with whoever happened to be his companion at the moment. ‘As a host he could not be surpassed,’ says one who visited him often. ‘He knew the sources of comfort — what to omit doing, as well as what to do for a guest. He had the supreme art of making you really free, as if you were in your own house.’

As in his human relations, so in his intellectual traits, Barnum was an average man. He was quick, shrewd, immensely keen to grasp the practical bearing of a problem. If he interested himself in any speculative matter, he would clarify it speedily, or let it alone, as not worth clarifying. He was an expert mathematician, at least as concerned dollars and cents. But he had little education and little real interest in abstract questions. It is curious to note that, although his business kept him in close contact with all sorts of animals, his Autobiography does not show the faintest trace of scientific curiosity. Neither does it indicate any affection for a single one of the numerous creatures who must have come more or less directly under his observation.

Matters of art did not take any more real hold of him than matters of intellect. It is true, he is careful to inform us that his own taste was much above the Museum. ‘I myself relished a higher grade of amusement, and I was a frequent attendant at the opera, firstclass concerts, lectures, and the like.’ His admiration for the beauties of nature shows itself in a delicious tirade against those who mar such beauties by advertising. ‘It is outrageous selfishness to destroy the pleasure of thousands for the sake of a chance of additional gain.’ But I do not find evidence that either the painting of Botticelli, or a quiet walk in the fields, afforded him any particular ecstasy.

Also, his religion was of a good, practical, working quality, rather than of mystical depth. It often appears in queer connections, and disappears in queerer. But, after all, in this muddled world, whose religion can be consistently counted on? Barnum’s was, I am sure, sincere and genuine at bottom. His little pamphlet on the principles of the Universalist faith shows some reading and a good deal of serious thinking; and he said shrewd and tender things about life and death, both. ‘ Of his own death he would not speak,’ says Mrs. Barnum; ‘of death in the abstract, he said: “It is a good thing, a beautiful thing, just as much so as life; and it is wrong to grieve about it, and to look on it as an evil.”’ As to life, and the beliefs back of it, he remarked with keen insight, ‘If the fact could be definitely determined, I think it would be discovered that in this “wide-awake” country there are more persons humbugged by believing too little than too much.’

In his relation to the affairs of the community at large Barnum was always an active and a useful citizen. Here, again, he himself is liberal with information and commendation; but his testimony is amply supported by that of others. He was mayor of his own city, Bridgeport, and a member of the legislature of Connecticut; and as such, he fought abuses and advocated reforms, and was always a conspicuous and sometimes a significant figure. He was a candidate for Congress; but, according to his own account, party considerations defeated him. Perhaps the voters did not wholly relish being represented by a man whom the world at large could not be persuaded to take seriously.

General reforms attracted this zealous nature as well as political. Above all, for many years he preached — and practised — total abstinence. His story of his conversion and final adjuring of alcohol is most edifying. He lost no occasion of lecturing on the matter, with an abundant and fervid rhetoric. ‘In the course of my life,’ he says, ‘I have written much for newspapers, on various subjects, and always with earnestness; but in none of these have I felt so deep an interest as in that of the temperance reform.’ And again, in his later years: ‘At my stage of life I confess to a deeper interest in the noble cause of temperance than I ever had in the largest audience ever assembled under canvas.’

And he worked and gave, as well as talked. As his wealth grew, he dispensed it with broad and wise liberality, especially contributing to the development and improvement of the city in which he lived. If I cite his own evidence, instead of the abundant corroboration of his admirers, it is simply because of its delightful naïveté. ‘ I speak of these things, I trust,’ he says, ‘with becoming modesty, and yet with less reluctance than I should do, if my fellow citizens of Bridgeport had not generally and generously awarded me sometimes, perhaps, more than my meed of praise for my unremitting and earnest efforts to promote whatever would conduce to the growth and improvement of our charming city.’

But, though Barnum’s avocations and amusements may have been politics and philanthropy and reform, his real life was in his business. From his infancy his thoughts were devoted to making money, to getting a good bargain, to turning a penny shrewdly, even on a small scale. As a child, he was given pennies by his grandfather, ‘to buy raisins and candies, which he always instructed me to solicit from the storekeeper at the “ lowest cash price.” ’ The boy concentrated all his mental energy on the study of the qualities that would enable him to get and keep. He was born with a natural instinct in such matters: ‘I usually jump at conclusions, and almost invariably find that my first impressions are correct’; and he improved his natural instincts to a point that made him a phenomenon.

Note, however, that the driving force in all this was not the mere moneygreed itself. In this side of his nature Barnum was distinctively and thoroughly American. Foreigners are always accusing Americans of idolizing the dollar. They misunderstand. In reality, the American man of business cares nothing for the dollar. He has not the miser’s passion for accumulating, as such. He is just as ready to spend as he is to gain; to fling away the dollars for amusement or benevolence as fast, almost, as they come in, unless retaining them is clearly necessary, to get more. What he idolizes is not money, but success; and success in business, in money-making, is the crude, obvious form that appeals to a nation which has not yet wholly grasped the finer issues and interests of life. This was eminently true of Barnum. To call him avaricious or penurious would be absurd. To be sure, we have to discount a little when he says, ‘You are much mistaken in supposing that I am so ready or anxious to make money. On the contrary, there is but one thing in the world that I desire — that is, tranquillity.’ But it is certain that, after he had assured himself against want, what he sought, was to carry out his projects. Those projects happened to involve money-making, and he made it.

He did not even care greatly for the things that money gives. He could — and when it was necessary, he did — live with the utmost simplicity. When money came, he spent and, no doubt, enjoyed being eminently human. Besides, great, spending, even personal, was great advertising. But he did not need dollars for luxury any more than for the mere pleasure of possessing them.

I wish there were detailed evidence as to the most important of Barnum’s business qualities — that of dealing with men. His relations with them must have been vast and successful; but he himself throws little light upon the question. Now and then, however, there are glimpses of singular tact and aptitude; and I find one observation, from a man who knew him well, that is illuminating: ‘In the management of business he was both skillful and acute, but what surprised some was the fact that he habitually asked advice of you, whoever you were, on every matter he had in hand that could be disclosed. In this way he got all sorts of opinions, studied their value, and struck such a balance between them as his own judgment led him to think was the correct one.’ Such methods of procedure go a long way in accounting for a successful career.

It cannot be denied that the most conspicuous feature in Barnum’s business activity was the instinct of speculation, of venturesomeness, of taking a chance. Earning was well. Saving was well. But using your brains to make a big profit out of a small investment was far better. ‘My disposition,’ he says, ‘ is, and ever was, of a speculative character, and I am never content to engage in any business unless it is of such a nature that my profits may be greatly enhanced by an increase of energy, perseverance, attention to business, tact, and so forth.’ In his youth lotteries were much in fashion. They suited him exactly, and he loved to embark in the wild lotteries of others, and to invent wilder of his own. Even after he had left the lottery, the same gambling instinct clung to him. Only he himself used and enjoined upon others that combination of iron restraint with boldness which alone can bring speculation to success.

As to the moral element of such dubious ventures, Barnum’s career offers a most curious and interesting study. That he did not mean to delude and defraud is obvious enough. But his infinite delight in Yankee shrewdness often blinded him to the fact that such shrewdness is too apt to mean plain cheats and lies. He was brought up in an atmosphere of petty trickery, which he himself analyzes with the keenest insight; and his final comment on it is: ‘Such a school would “cut eye-teeth,” but if it did not cut conscience, morals, and integrity all up by the roots, it would be because the scholars quit before their education was completed.’ He wrote a huge and curious book on the Humbugs of the World, mixing and confusing all sorts of trifling deceptions, elaborate frauds, and political and religious delusions and hallucinations. His deduction from this study was that mankind liked to be humbugged and always would be; that some humbug was legitimate and delightful, and that precisely such was his.

Humbug or not, it must not be supposed that his success, or his wealth, was gained without bitter struggle. As he himself sums it up, with his luminous complacence: ‘A life with the wide contrasts of humble origin and high and honorable success; of most formidable obstacles overcome by courage and constancy; of affluence that had been patiently won, suddenly wrenched away, and triumphantly regained.’ To tell the story in more detail, he began poor, worked hard, though he hated work, wandered widely. He kept store, he ran nomadic shows, he dabbled in journalism, which landed him in jail, whence he emerged with a gorgeous ovation that tickled every fibre of his soul. By feeding men’s wonder with strange sights, he gathered a considerable property. Then he became involved, through what seems incredible carelessness, in an investment that practically ruined him. He took disaster with admirable equanimity, set to work with energy and independence to reëstablish himself, rejected offers of help, milked the world’s gullibility once more on an even vaster scale, paid his honest debts, and shone out in the end far more prosperous than when ruin overtook him.

You could not shake his confidence or his hope. His Museum was burned and burned again. He laughed, and rebuilt it. Competition beset him. The very nature of his business required extension and ever extension, and his closest followers were often alarmed and ready to draw back. Not he. He laughed, and told them that the desire for amusement was the one passion that was inexhaustible. You might tap it more and more deeply, and never find an end. At one time he t hought he had got enough and done enough. He would give up and rest, and let others do the work and get the profit. But nature was too strong, and back he went again, and kept at it till he died. His last words to his secretary were, ‘ What were the receipts yesterday? ’ and when told they were good, with the figures, he remarked that they were not up to the receipts of the Olympia in London.

II

It will not be disputed that the greatest element in Barnum’s success was advertising. The rapid development of journalism in the last half of the nineteenth century made it preëminently the age of publicity, and few human beings have ever lived who enjoyed publicity, or understood it, or profited by it, more than Barnum did. He recognized this, himself, at all times. In 1855 he wrote: ‘ Fully appreciating the powers of the press (to which more than to any other one cause I am indebted for my success in life), I did not fail to invoke the aid of printer’s ink.’ Twenty years later he declared, ‘Without printer’s ink, I should have been no bigger than Tom Thumb.’ By unfailing, unblushing proclamation of the merits of his goods, he drew the whole world about him; and so enormous was the force at his command, that even he did not. appreciate it fully. On one occasion he remarked, ‘I lost a large amount of money that day by not having sufficiently estimated the value of my own advertising.’

Every agency of direct, paid publicity was, of course, set constantly to work, with all its resources of flare and glitter. Once convinced that he had something worth public attention, he did not hesitate to arouse that attention by all that printing and painting could devise. In his homely way he says, ‘Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land — it largely increases the product.’

But direct methods were the smallest part of the matter. It was the cunning and subtle psychological suggestion of every sort and kind that counted most. Barnum speaks with delight of a sign he saw one day on which was written, ‘Don’t read the other side.’ Every human being did read the other side, and bought in consecjuence. It was the ingenuity of such things that charmed him, quite as much as their profit. Reporters? ‘Approachable, democratic in every way, and shrewd, he fairly melted to the interviewer, whom he frequently did not wait for, but sent for.’ Mystery? Infinite are the uses of mystery. Keep people guessing and you keep them interested. Crowds? They bring other crowds. Only make a man feel that his neighbor wants to enter your door, and he will jostle the world to get in himself. Elephants? Big, strange creatures, are n’t they? Good advertising anywhere. But if we buy a farm, in plain sight from a great railroad, and set elephants to ploughing it, what a stir we shall make! Pickpockets? You might think them a nuisance about a show. So they are. But if you catch one and shut him up, and tell everybody that a live pickpocket may be seen for a quarter, you will draw fools, and some who are not. Barnum did it. Religion? We have the greatest possible respect for religion. But if a minister attacks our show, and we can speak up for ourselves and tell his congregation that he is mistaken, and that we are one of the greatest moral influences of the age, well, religion will make as good advertising as anything else — and better.

On the dishonest, the fraudulent side of advertising, Barnum is inexhaustible and delightful. The ingenuity of his resource is equaled only by the sophistry of his defense. The fierce and solemn reprehension of the great English magazines as to the first edition of his Auto-biography should be read and enjoyed. But, after all, these attacks affected chiefly one or two conspicuous frauds, which Barnum himself in later years did not regard with much pride. Joice Heth, the one-hundred-and-sixty-yearold nurse of Washington, the Mermaid, and the Woolly Horse were not creditable adventures. Barnum confesses that he lied about the age of Tom Thumb, and in the earlier Autobiography (omitted in the later) insists that, so long as Tom was really a dwarf, it made no difference. Exaggerated statements, more or less deliberate misrepresentations, ingenious and far-fetched suggestion, had confused the great showman’s conscience to such an extent that, so long as the atmosphere of publicity was rosy, its haziness did not greatly disturb him. Yet when it came to actual business transactions, his substantial honesty seems beyond dispute. The whole history of his dealings with Jenny Lind, told from her side as well as from his, supports this. Moreover, he was firmly convinced of the great principle of advertising, which he never loses an occasion to emphasize: it only pays to advertise a good thing. Make the public feel that it has got its money’s worth, and you may tell it what you please.

As to the speculative aspect of publicity, the necessity of outlay and the uncertainty of return, Barnum is most interesting and instructive. No one had studied the intricacies of the subject more thoroughly than he. Yet he admits that, with all his experience, it is impossible to tell what will pay and what will not. ‘“The public” is a verystrange animal; and although a good knowledge of human nature will generally lead a caterer of amusements to hit the people, they are fickle, and ofttimes perverse.’ Nothing pleases him more than to combine advertising with practical utility. When he was conveying Tom Thumb through France, the railroad service proved inconvenient, and it was necessary to substitute other conveyances. The number of the attendants and the various accessories made a great display of vehicles indispensable. But Barnum consoled himself with the thought that it all helped to create interest. ‘ It was thus the best advertising we could have had, and was really, in many places, our cheapest and, in some places, our only mode of getting from point to point.’

And always, when he was anxious to inform the world, he believed in spending without limit, even if the gain was not directly visible. A man complained to him once that he had a good article and had advertised it, but could not sell it. ‘How did you advertise it?’ ’I put it in a weekly newspaper three times, and paid a dollar and a half for it.’ And Barnum’s comment was: ‘Sir, advertising is like learning — a little is a dangerous thing.’

If it was a question of getting himself and his wares before the public, Barnum was perfectly ready to appreciate the value of abuse as well as of commendation. Few men have been more scolded, more criticized, more lavishly and scurrilously ridiculed, than he. But his skin was thicker, apparently, than that of his own elephants; and so the world talked about him, he did not much care how it talked. He wrote his book to expose the humbugs of history, and he was quite willing that anybody who wished should expose him. A woman came and tried to make him buy up a pamphlet in which she had found fault with his procedure. My dear madam, he answered in substance, write what you please; ‘only have the kindness to say something about me, and then come to me and I will properly estimate the money value of your services to me as an advertising agent.’ — ‘It’s a great thing to be a humbug,’he quotes from a kindred spirit; ‘I’ve been called so, often. It means hitting the public, in reality. Anybody who can do so is sure to be called a humbug by somebody who can’t.’ Again and again he returns to this point: ‘The object was accomplished, and although some people cried out “humbug,” I had added to the notoriety which I so much wanted and I was satisfied.’ Finally, in one precious and perfect phrase, he sums up his whole attitude on the matter: ‘After all, it was a good advertisement for me, as well as for Higginson; and it would have been pretty difficult to serve me up about these times in printers’ ink in any form that I should have objected to.'

Nor was he satisfied with working through the newspapers, or through the tongues of others, or through a hundred subtle, indirect agencies of every kind. He was always ready to appear before the world in person; to tell it of the merits of his shows, and incidentally— and largely — of his own; to talk anywhere, inimitably. He assures us of his imperturbable coolness on the platform. You could not upset his equanimity or exhaust his patience. His golden, or brazen, abundance of words was unstinted, whether with tongue or pen. He could talk on any subject, telling stories, quoting authors, making points of all sorts, and always attracting the attention of wider and wider multitudes to the incomparable excellence of the Greatest Show on Earth.

And it cannot be denied that he made words serve his purpose with a deftness and facility calculated to increase the distrust of even one who regards those subtle agents with the extremest skepticism. He spoke and wrote well, with lucidity and energy, about politics, finance, temperance, general virtue, even religion. That he did not always live up to the high level of his eloquence is of less account, because a verbal standard so lofty would have been beyond the reach of any man. But, if you take the words by themselves, they do tell. The little pamphlet in which he, for a wonder concisely, expounds his Universalist beliefs, is a statement of singular vigor and directness. Do not sentences like these snap and sting? ‘The force of habit is indeed strong, but this argument overloads it tremendously. . . . if a man cannot will to obey, he cannot sin. He is not a responsible actor. If death does this, we are all alike unmanned. There can be neither heaven nor hell; we are not men, but things.'

And it is everywhere evident that the man was not going before the public simply for business motives: he loved it. The advertising instinct was bound up in his nature with an extraordinary childlike vanity. You can see it written all over him. A huge, benevolent, inimitable expansiveness radiates from every portrayal of his face and figure. He liked to talk of himself, had a large, clever gift of narrating all sorts of adventures in which he was the hero or the butt — at any rate the significant personage. He boasted of everything, even of his modesty. Of one of his earlier undertakings he says: it ’led me into still another field of enterprise which honorably opened to me that notoriety of which, in later life, I surely have had a surfeit.’ But if surfeit means enough, it does not appear that the point was ever really reached. With what joy does he record the arrival of the time when ‘visitors began to say that they would give more to see the proprietor of the Museum than to view the entire collection of curiosities ! ’

And all the vanity, all the love of popular applause, or even abuse, is poured out in the immense, singular document called Struggles and Triumphs, the bulky Autobiography which sets forth so many things that happened and that did not happen, and makes the wide world revolve around that jovial heap of kindly egotism. To be sure, the power of self-observation is not quite equal to the infantile candor. Yet what a book! What a collection of books! For it was revised over and over, and printed and reprinted in half a dozen different forms, all ingeniously adapted to entice dollars from purses fat and lean and ragged and gorgeous. How he did love it, how he thought over it and worked over it, the precious record of his abounding and world-agitating self! Not Henry James could have given more care to the revision of his earlier writings to suit his later glory, than did this busy and, in a sense, illiterate showman. The crude anecdotes, the crowding vulgarisms, of 1855, are chastened, to use his own favorite word, in the editions of the seventies, so that they may not profane the transformation from thousands to millions. Heaven knows there are still enough left. Up to his death he added a yearly chapter, that not one precious act might be unnoted; and he enjoined upon his disconsolate widow the melancholy completion, which unhappily he could not set down himself.

So, from the cradle to the grave, his impulse was to keep always before the people. In Mr. Conklin’s excellent book about the circus, there is a vivid picture of Barnum, showing how he reveled in the opportunity of exhibiting himself to applauding crowds. ‘Soon after the show began, he arrived, in an open carriage drawn by two horses, with a coachman and a footman in full livery on the box. The whole performance came to a stop while he was driven slowly around the hippodrome track. At intervals he would have the carriage stop, and would stand up in it, calling out in his squeaky voice, “ I suppose you came to see Barnum, did n’t you? Wa-al, I’m Mr. Barnum.’” For fifty years he had been proclaiming through a megaphone to the admiring universe,‘I’m Mr. Barnum.’

III

The palliation for all this immense and undeniably vulgar egotism, the excuse which made the world tolerate it and makes those who read about it tolerate it still, was, first, the man’s benefaction to humanity in public entertainment. Here, again, no one can state his own merits more emphatically than he does. ‘ Every man’s occupation should be beneficial to his fellow man as well as profitable to himself. All else is vanity and folly.’—‘Men, women, and children, who cannot live on gravity alone, need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours; and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the Author of our nature’; which is certainly putting the circus under respectable patronage. But that Barnum did labor to amuse mankind, as well as to enrich himself, cannot he disputed.

As to the quality of the amusement, there may be some question. Critics of what, if he had lived fifty years later, he would have called a ‘ high-brow ’ order. are unsparing in their condemnation. If he did not degrade and deprave public taste, he at least appealed to much that was degraded and depraved in it. If he was careful to avoid conflict, with the more obvious principles of morality, he at least fed the idly and vulgarly curious with entertainment that tended to crowd all that was fine and noble out of their lives. I should not undertake to determine the truth of this complicated charge, merely pointing out that some of the reprehensible features of Barnum’s shows gradually gave way to what was more wholesome, and that, since his time, diversions have evolved to a stage that makes anything he could conceive innocuous. The interesting thing is his own complete self-complacency in the matter. To his mind all that he furnished the public was beneficial and improving in the highest degree, and every shade of the harmful was carefully eliminated. I do not know how this can be urged with more force than in the concluding words of the 1880 edition of his Autobiography: ‘ When it is evident that the public, old and young, are not made wiser, better, and happier by the recreation which I provide for them, my efforts in that, direction will cease.’

As to the quantity of amusement furnished, there will be less question than as to the quality. ‘ Taken altogether, I think I can, without egotism, say, that I have amused and instructed more persons than any other manager who ever lived.’ So writes this creature of infinite self-content. And he proceeds to give figures to prove that, in all, he had exhibited to over eighty-two million persons. This, of course, as he is careful to point out, may include the same visitor many times. But, even so, it is a vast total of human delight. And while the majority must consist of the youthful and the uneducated, we know that young and old, high and low, man and woman, the millionaire, the scholar, the preacher, all alike meet at the circus and the menagerie. The child is the pretext, but the immortal child in all of us is the explanation. Who has been such a benefactor to children as Barnum, and who like him has teased the child out of the weary and fretted and forgetful man?

Moreover, we forgive much, not only to his faculty of entertaining others, but to his own exuberant delight in what he was doing. Some entertainers are anxious and worried, like the rest of us. They make amusement a business like another, dry and shrink up in a back office, while the huge, mad riot of the world is going on about them. Not so Barnum. It was his riot and his world, and he savored every thrill of its enjoyment as if it were his own. He could himself perform, if necessary, could do sleight-of-hand tricks, or black up and sing coon songs — anything to divert the waiting multitude, if occasion called for it. He could plunge into strange antics, for the mere zest, as when he visited the South of France in time of vintage. ‘While I was there, desiring a new experience, I myself trod out a half-barrel or so with my own naked feet, dancing the while to the sound of a fiddle.’ But most of all he reveled in the glory of exhibiting glory. He knew it was second-hand, knew it was mere reflection. With a pretty mock-modesty he sometimes tries to shrink into the background. But why? It was Barnum who pulled the wires, Barnum who set these puppets dancing and doing their clever tricks, and all the world knew it, and he was Barnum. Why not enjoy it?

The truth was, he enjoyed everything. Life was a huge joke, and jokes were the spice that seasoned his whole existence. From the first page of his Autobiography to the last there is a succession of jokes, some clever, some vulgar, some monstrous, but all side-splitting — or so he found them. The taste was inborn, he says; and from his cradle, his grandfather and all his family made him the butt of a jest about an inherited mud-patch called Ivy Island. The germ caught in his system, and for seventy years he played jokes on all about him, and expected them to be played upon him. His splendid health, his ever-abounding spirits, all conspired to keep him daily and nightly in the mood of this perpetual frolic.

Note that there is no particular wit or element of intelligence about this fun of Barnum’s. Now and then he strikes a happy retort; as when the Bishop of London expressed the assurance, at parting, that they would meet in Heaven, and Barnum said, ’If your Lordship is there.’ But in the main it is the unfailing outflow of a vigorous temperament, taking the form of socalled practical jokes, rich with the suggestion of a large, luscious, animal felicity, but not especially diverting in the record, and quite often degenerating into dullness.

Also, there were worse elements than dullness. The practical joke, as everyone knows, runs too easily into cruelty, and Barnum’s were not exempt from this feature. Mr. Benton insists that ’his audacious performances and jokes were always good-natured.’ So they were in intention, no doubt; but Barnum himself says of the town where he passed much of his youth, ‘A joke was never given up in Bethel until the very end of it was unraveled’; and we all know what that means. It was immensely humorous to send forged dispatches at Christmas to all his employees; but the man who was informed that his native village was in ashes and his own homestead burned could not have passed a pleasant hour. It was a rollicking jest to tell a ticket-taker that an angry student had challenged him to a duel. But ‘as he expected to be shot, he suffered the greatest mental agony. About midnight, however, after he had been sufficiently scared, I brought him the gratifying intelligence that I had succeeded in settling the dispute.’ Read in cool quiet, these things do not altogether amuse. And I feel still more the callousness they suggest, in Barnum’s apparent complete indifference to the semi-humanity or subhumanity’ of the horrible creatures that he often exhibited. One would think that a nature with a shred of sensitiveness would have recoiled from the public display of these monstrosities and the sickening, morbid curiosity" they fostered. Sensitiveness of this kind Barnum had not.

Even worse than the mixture of joke with cruelty is the mixture with dishonesty, because the combination is more easily effected and more insidious. Barnum’s preoccupation with this side of the matter is always evident. When, as a boy, he was a clerk in a store, and tricked his customers, he remarks that some of them ‘were vexed, but most of them laughed at the joke.’ When he has advanced much further in experience and success, he comforts himself for various odd procedures with the reflection that ‘the public appears to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived,’

The earlier chapters of his elaborate study of ‘Humbug’ are largely occupied with a specious apology for his own career. With extreme and farreaching ingenuity, he argues that humbug and swindling are very different matters. With all respect for his cleverness, however, I think the average honest man will hold that humbug in everything even remotely connected with money does mean swindling, and nothing else. The peculiarity of humbug is that it is swindling with a sense of humor, of practical joke, in it. This is what makes it tolerable to the American public, and this is just what fascinated Barnum — profitable practical joking. But it may be questioned whether either the precept or the example was of advantage to American youth.

Yet, in spite of all the callousness and all the trickery inherent in the joking habit, there was at the bottom of the jokes, in Barnum’s case, a vast and jovial good-nature, which you cannot help admiring and liking and enjoying. Tried by the final test of the joker, that of being willing to take a joke on himself, he comes out with an unfailing cheerfulness and a hearty sense of reciprocity which always command respect. He tells innumerable pranks that were played upon him, in full detail and with huge impersonal relish. To be sure, he usually contrives a sequel by which the rash jester is amply repaid. But it must be admitted that he does not hesitate a moment to show himself in a ridiculous light, even when he has been placed there by his own folly. And this is only part of the general, winning candor of self-confession by which, so far as he sees, which perhaps is not to the very bottom, he places his whole heart before the reader of his pages. At times, as is apt to be the case with such candor, he reaches a point of joking self-depreciation that is misleading, and might easily tempt the critic to judge him more severely than he deserves. Thus it was that, in his later years, after a life of farextended beneficence, he could say publicly, ‘Mine is usually a profitable philanthropy. I have no desire to be considered much of a philanthropist in any other sense.'

When it is finally analyzed, a good deal of philanthropy brings its profit in one way or another. But few people have had the kindly instinct of spreading and promoting joy more fully than Barnum. He believed that the Americans, ‘with the most universal diffusion of the means of happiness ever known among any people,’ were unhappy, and he wanted to make them cheerful. He believed in laughter, wanted to make people laugh; and ‘men who had not laughed for twenty years, or maybe never, held aching sides when it was their good fortune to meet P. T. Barnum in a merry mood.’ He loved children, above all things loved to make them happy, and did it; and, next to becoming like a little child, — and Barnum was not unlike one, — is there any surer passport, to the Kingdom of Heaven? He turned his whole circus parade out of its route to amuse a sick boy who had dreamed for days of seeing it. To be sure, these things sooner or later found their way into the papers, and made famous advertising, and the philanthropy was profitable. But the philanthropy was there, just the same; and some men like the profit without it.

So he lived and died, the great showman of the world; turning the world into a show, making a show of everything in it, and all the time himself furnishing the greatest show of all. And he knew it, reveled in it, was as ready to turn himself into laughter as anything else. The glorification of laughter has its weak points, the weakest perhaps being that those who laugh easily are inclined to laugh too much and quite out of place. But in the world as it is, a good many of us might laugh, or smile, a little more; and Barnum at least did his part toward diffusing the habit.

It is true that at moments he tried to pull a long face and emphasize the solemn trumpet tone of the Koran sentence: ‘The heavens and the earth, think ye that we have created them to be a jest?’ With his inimitable verbal facility he could reproduce this tone, as he could many others: ‘The endless ages of immortal life are not given to sit on a flower-bed and sing and play harps, but for the endless development of immortal souls.’ But this was not his natural vein, was not in the essential temper of his spirit. If he lingers in history at all, or in the memory of his American fellow countrymen, whom he amused so vastly, it will be as a trifling bubble of riotous and somewhat vulgar laughter on the stream of the Infinite Illusion.