The next illustration which we select of the Mirage of life is the man of Wit and Humor. Here at least it may be presumed that the search after happiness will be successful. It may be thought that they who promote mirth so much in others, and who treat life as if it were a jest, have themselves found out the true secret of enjoyment. Very different, however, is the result. There is a mirth in the midst of which the heart is sad and a laughter the end whereof is heaviness. Cervantes, at a time when all Spain was laughing at the humorous flights of his pen, was overwhelmed with a deep cloud of melancholy. Moliere, the first of French comic writers, carried into the domestic circle a sadness which the greatest worldly prosperity could never dispel. Samuel Foote, a noted wit of the eighteenth century, died of a broken heart. D'Israeli mentions that one morning meeting in a bookseller's shop a squalid and wretched-looking man, the very picture of misery, he was astonished to learn that he was a person who was amusing the metropolis by his humorous effusions. The anecdote is well known of the physician recommending a man who was pining under melancholy to attend, as a means of cure, the performances of a noted comic actor and of being informed that his patient was the actor in question—himself wretched, while amusing others. Captain Morris, a witty writer of considerable reputation at the commencement of the nineteenth century, when aged, deserted, and well-nigh impoverished, described in the following lines the little satisfaction which the retrospect of his life of folly could afford him:
“My friends of youth, manhood, and age
At length are all laid in the ground;
A unit I stand on life's stage,
With nothing but vacancy round.
I wander bewildered and lost,
Without impulse or interest in view;
And all hope of my heart is, at most,
Soon to bid this cold desert adieu.”
As one of the most striking examples in modern times of the unsatisfactory nature of a life of frivolity we select as our next illustration, THEODORE HOOK, or The Man of Wit and Humor.
He was the son of a musical composer of considerable eminence in his day. He was by death early deprived of the training of his mother, a circumstance to which much of the unhappiness of his future career may be attributed. His father, returning home one evening, was astonished at his son, then a mere child, producing two ballads, which with appropriate music he had himself composed: the one plaintive, the other humorous. The prognostics of future distinction thus afforded were verified by the event. At the age of sixteen, a time when other youths are just leaving school, he was, from his powers of dramatic composition, in the receipt of a considerable income and enjoying great popularity. His name was blazoned as a youthful genius in the newspapers; his portrait was taken, and he had free admission to the places of public amusement. Many a young man in the present day would have envied his position as containing all that was desirable! Life lay before him like a smooth ocean; and, intoxicated by success, he launched his bark fearlessly upon it. Youth stood at the prow, Mirth trimmed the sails, Folly took the helm, while the pennon which streamed in the air bore the words "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes.”
At this time a taste for coarse practical joking had seized young men. To pull off knockers and bell-handles, to carry away tradesmen's signs, and to overturn the boxes of sleeping watchmen were considered the marks of a generous and manly spirit. Hook plunged into these amusements and kept a private museum containing abstracted bells, knockers and signboards. We feel some scruple in making allusion to such disgraceful follies; but it is necessary for our illustration that the merry as well as the grave side of the picture should be shown. On one occasion Hook's friend pointed out to him, as an appropriate specimen of natural history for his museum, a new gilt eagle of large dimensions, which had been erected over a grocer's shop. A few weeks afterward, the same friend happening to be dining with Hook, the latter, towards the close of the entertainment, ordered "the game to be served up." Immediately, to the astonishment of the visitor, the servant entered the room, staggering under the burden of a dish of unusual size. On uncovering it there was produced the identical eagle which Hook as a practical joke had contrived to carry off. Such were the contemptible frivolities in which the man of humor wasted his youthful prime.
Among other accomplishments for which he was distinguished was a remarkable power of producing extempore poetry. At a dinner party he would without premeditation compose a verse on every person in the room, full of point and wit, and with true rhyme. Sheridan, the orator, who was present upon one of these occasions, declared that he could not have imagined such a talent possible had he not witnessed the exhibition of it.
So confident was Hook in his powers of humor, that, passing with a friend, a house in which a party was assembling for dinner, he undertook, although quite unacquainted with the owner of the house or any of the guests, to join them and instructed his friend to call for him at ten o'clock. Knocking at the door accordingly, he gave his hat confidently to the servant and was ushered upstairs. Entering the drawing-room, he affected to have for the first time discovered his mistake, and poured out such sallies of wit, that, as he had anticipated, the host, although ignorant even of his name, pressed him to stay to dinner. When his friend Mr. Terry called, ignorant whether he should find him there or in the neighboring watch-house, he was astonished, on being shown into the drawing-room, to see the man of humor seated at the pianoforte, delivering some extempore poetry, which, upon perceiving the entrance of his friend, he wound up with the following stanza:
“I'm very much pleased with your fare,
Your cellar's as good as your cook;
My friend's Mr. Terry, the player,
And I'm Mr. Theodore Hook.”
The fame of the man of wit reached even royalty itself. The Prince Regent was so fascinated with him that he appointed him treasurer to the island of Mauritius with a salary of £2,000 a year. He here gave himself up to every enjoyment. "This island," he wrote home to his friends, "is fairyland. The mildness of the air, the clearness of the atmosphere, the liveliness of the place itself—all combine to render it fascination. Every hour seems happier than the last." Here, then, was Hook at the pinnacle of his glory. Rich, popular, witty and full of friends, he had surely found the secret of happiness! No; he had only followed the mirage.
Business and pleasure, in the worldly sense of the latter term, are rarely compatible. A deficiency of £12,000, arising not from fraud but from gross carelessness, was found in the treasury. He was suddenly arrested in a ballroom and sent home a prisoner for debt to England, and penniless, stripped of all his honor. Happy would it have been for him had this blow awakened him from his dream of folly; but, alas! as one delusion was dissipated, another took its place. By his pen he soon achieved literary eminence and an income of £4,000 a year. Seated at the tables of the great, he became again, from his wit and humor, the life of every party. His versatile genius sparkled more brilliantly than ever, and he was the admired of all admirers. In the midst of his gaiety, however, he had an aching heart. From the brilliant saloon he would retire to his lonely apartment, and there, with jaded spirits, sit down to write for his bread some work of humor, racking, as has been well observed, his imagination for mirth with anguish at his heart.
“We may venture," says one who appears to have known him intimately, "we may venture to supply by way of specimen a sketch, by no means overcharged, of one of those restless life-exhausting days in which the seemingly iron energies of Hook were prematurely consumed.
His breakfast was called for late, his spirits were jaded by the exertions of yesterday, and he was farther depressed by some pecuniary difficulty. Large arrears of literary oil are to be made up, the meal is sent away un-tasted, and every power of his mind is forced and strained for the next four or five hours upon the subject that happens to be in hand. Then he takes a rapid drive to town, visits first one club where he becomes the center of an admiring circle, and his intellectual faculties are again upon the stretch and again aroused and sustained by artificial means.
The same thing is repeated at a second club, he attends a third for a general meeting where he eats once more as well as drinks a tumbler of brandy-and-water or two, and we fear the catalog would not always close here. Off next to take his place at some lordly banquet where the fire of his wit is to be stirred into a blaze and fed by fresh supplies of potent stimulants....
Lady A. has never heard one of his delightful extempores, and since the pianoforte is at hand, fresh and more vigorous efforts of fancy, memory, and application are called for. All the wondrous machinery of the brain are taxed and strained to the very most. Smiles and applause reward the exertion, and perhaps one more song is craved as a special favor....He retires at last; but not to rest—not to home. Half an hour at Crockford's is proposed by some merry companion as they quit together. We need not continue the picture. The half-hour is quadrupled, and the excitement of the preceding part of the evening is as nothing to that which now ensues. By the time he reaches home the reaction is complete; and in a state of utter prostration, bodily and mentally, he seeks his pillow to run perhaps precisely a similar course on the morrow.
Such was the daily life of the man of wit and humor! Hook has left behind him a journal, some extracts from which appeared in the Quarterly Review. It is a harrowing description of splendid misery— of the life of one who, while in the world's opinion full of enjoyment, was in truth thoroughly wretched. Let a few brief extracts suffice: "Today I am forcing myself, against my inclination, to write. The old sickness and faintness of heart came over me, and I could not go out. No; it is only to the grave that I must be carried. If my poor children were safe, I would not care....Another year opens upon me with a vast load of debt, and many encumbrances. I am suffering under a constant depression of spirits which no one who sees me in society ever dreams of.”
The close was, however, approaching. One day, at a dinner party, all were struck with his ghastly paleness. Turning round to a mirror, he himself exclaimed, "Ah! I see how it is. I look just as I am—done up in mind, in body and purse." Returning home, he took to his bed. A friend calling on him found him in an undress. "Here you see me," he said. "All my buckling, and padding, and washing dropped forever, and I a gray-headed old man." A few days afterward he died.
Such was the end of the man of wit and humor. His noble powers had all been wasted in the service of the world. He had followed mirth and folly as his grand object in life. Oh, how emphatically had they proved to him—only the mirage.