THE HUMOR OF HENRY WARD BEECHER

Constance Rourke, in her Trumpets of Jubilee (1927), brackets Walt Whitman and Henry Ward Beecher as major and minor prophets of mid-nineteenth-century America and speaks of interests the two men shared. Beecher was sufficiently taken with Leaves of Grass to call on Whitman soon after its publication in 1855, but they could hardly have become close friends. Both, however, loved the full vibrant life of New York; they roamed through museums and art galleries, made friends of stage drivers, lingered on the waterfront, observed people at work in factories and emporiums, and often visited Fowler and Wells’ Phrenological Depot or Cabinet, Whitman because his book was on sale there, Beecher because of the interest in phrenology that he shared with Whitman and with tens of thousands of their contemporaries.¹

If Beecher bought a copy of Phrenology and Physiology by O. S. and L. N. Fowler, it is likely that he would have found the section on Mirthfulness fascinating, and even instructive. In the range the authors gave for this faculty, from Full down to Very Small, he might have pegged himself at Very Large, which was equated by the Fowlers with "an extraordinary disposition and capability to make fun" and also with a tendency to clownish behavior and to "undignified and perhaps low things to raise a laugh." He would have studied the authors’ sketch of a head meant to illustrate the Large category—full unshaven face with easy smile, smooth broad forehead, and long loose locks brushed back and hanging down over the shoulders; for in his glory days as the nation’s preeminent preacher he could well have served as model for this illustration.²

Phrenology apart, Beecher’s faculty for mirth was generally acknowledged, by both admirers and hostile critics, for he was famous, or notorious, for his habit of introducing amusing anecdotes and sly quips into his sermons; and he was quite willing to act the clown in order to induce laughter. Whitman could never have adopted such antics to win applause; his rating on the Fowler scale, I suspect, would have been only Moderate, a little below Average. I also suspect, as Constance Rourke has suggested, that Whitman sometimes heard Beecher preach, out of curiosity or, perhaps, in the hope of learning the art of effective public address; but such facility was not his to master, and it is unlikely that he ever said after one of his lectures, as Beecher often did after a sermon or speech, "I had great

liberty."³ That liberty, that sense of total freedom in the flow of serious and comic ideas, gave Beecher the momentary advantage; Whitman’s far greater reputation as American prophet developed only after his death.

Lewis Brastow, for his Representative Modern Preachers (1904), chose Beecher as his American representative. Few could electrify and sway an audience as he could, Brastow noted, or so easily move people to tears or to laughter. But he condemned Beecher’s sudden shifts in emotional mood: after depicting human miseries with moving pathos, "so that all were melted to tears, just then would come those jests and witticisms that are almost never lacking in his preaching," and, so Brastow thought, dispersing the impressions of sin and wrong. It was "this irrepressible humor, this lack of reverence in the treatment of sacred things, that [drew] many to Plymouth Church."⁴ He was probably right, but whether or not Beecher deserved censure of the sort Brastow elaborated, the liberal infusion of humor into sermons, Sunday after Sunday, warrants inclusion of Beecher in the ranks of native American humorists. By sophisticated modem standards his humor may seem thin, or heavy-handed, too obvious, or worst of all, not really amusing. But he was undeniably a man with a very large faculty of mirth and facility in making people laugh. "When he cracked his jokes," as one biographer tells us, "there were polite titters from the more costly pews and loud guffaws from the galleries."⁵

Not everyone was appreciative. His own wife, Eunice, old at forty, was not amused by what she viewed as pulpit horseplay and his "crude, sometimes almost vulgar, humor"; and reporters forced to attend his services were sometimes scathing in the accounts they wrote.⁶ It was left to biographers to search out the sources of his playfulness, and what they have found is revealing. When Henry Ward was a small boy in Litchfield, Connecticut, "boisterous humor was the fabric of the family life," but it had a rather strange purpose, that of exorcising, by horseplay and uproarious laughter, the stern and uncompromising Calvinism of his father, Lyman Beecher, who considered it his duty to punish any of his children severely for any lapse from grace. The punishment was corporal and so painful that Henry mentioned it sometimes in sermons as something he would like to be able to forget but could not. The memories had a role, no doubt, in his eventual rejection of all harsh punishment, whether in childhood or in the hereafter; the catch phrase here is that Beecher "disinvented hell." Having abandoned Calvinism, Beecher as a man no longer needed boisterous humor to compensate for its harshness,

but resort to it had become fixed habit, albeit redirected to quite a different purpose.⁷

If in his pulpit heyday his wife and some critics objected to the coarseness and the approach to vulgarity in Beecher’s humor, we have a problem. His sermons were printed in a ten-cent weekly titled Plymouth Pulpit,⁸ but as printed they reveal nothing that would come close to offending anybody today. Did the editor prudently delete or tone down the humor? Or have standards of decency changed radically since a century ago? Just what was there in his preaching that would draw loud guffaws from the back rows of Plymouth Church? The closest Beecher came to offending good taste, in examples I have seen, was not in a sermon but in a speech he delivered in Liverpool, wherein he compared some difficult chore to "driving a team of runaway horses and making love to a lady at the same time."⁹ I somehow doubt, however, that this suggested to his audience the same lurid picture that flashed across my unregenerate mind. Nor would people in the late nineteenth century, reading one particular sermon, have been likely to wonder, as I did, whether Beecher paused dramatically before the final word in this example: "There is one place where a man can bear a boil, and that is on his neighbor."¹⁰ But virtually every other example of Beecher’s humor in print is so mild and gentle that it is hard to understand why anyone objected, except to its being out of place in a sermon.

Beecher must have known that some people did object to humor in the pulpit—people whose faculty of mirth the phrenologists would grade as Very Small. Because most auditors seemed to like it, he had no real reason for defending the practice; but sometimes he did. "Some people," he once said, "are so dry that you might soak them in a joke for a month, and it would not wet through their skin."¹¹ He also wrote out what could serve as his creed about humor; here’s a part of it:

Life is full of amusement to an amusing man. Happy is he who has this faculty. It is more blessed than a garment in cold weather. There is nothing that so covers the nerves, there is nothing that so tempers anger and passion, there is nothing that is such a natural cure for discontent, there is nothing that brings men to such a companionable level, and creates such fellowship, as the divine sense of mirth.¹²

It was a creed he could be faithful to, almost without trying. Whatever the text or theme of a sermon, he could lighten it with a joke or a humorous application. Although never entirely at ease with the theory of evolution, he could soften objection with humor: "I am

perfectly willing that it should be true, that, millions of years ago, my ancestors sprang from monkeys. I would as lief spring from a monkey as from some men I know of."¹³

There’s always a risk in quoting out of context, but some of

Beecher’s one-liners can stand by themselves:

There is only one thing I can think of that is not dangerous, and that is dying.¹⁴

If you want to get dyspepsia, follow down every mouthful, to know where it is going; you will speedily find out.¹⁵

Men mean to go to heaven, but they do not mean that it shall cost them any more virtue than they can possibly help.¹⁶

I have never seen anybody that didn’t make mistakes, except babies, and they always died early.¹⁷

We all say, "Blessed are the poor,"; and yet if there be one blessing which we would prefer not to have more than another, it is that of poverty.¹⁸

If you send a villain to Albany or Washington to represent you, he does represent you!¹⁹

In some of these the religious context is implicit, as it more obviously is in an extended passage from a sermon titled "Prayer":

When men begin their prayers with, "O thou omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all-seeing, ever-living, blessed Potentate, Lord God Jehovah!" I should think they would take breath. Think of a man in his family, hurried for his breakfast, praying in such a strain! He has a note coming due, and it is going to be paid today, and he feels buoyant; and he goes down on his knees like a cricket on the hearth, and piles up these majestically moving phrases about God. Then he goes on to say that he is a sinner; he is proud to say that he is a sinner. Then he asks for his daily bread. He has it; and he can always ask for it when he has it. Then he jumps up, and goes over to the city. He comes back at night, and goes through a similar wordy form of "evening prayers"; and he is called a "praying man." A praying man? I might as well call myself an ornithologist because I eat a chicken once in a while for my dinner.²⁰

Out of the pulpit as in it, Beecher displayed his impulsive playfulness, sometimes even in situations where humor would hardly have been expected or tolerated. At his trial for adultery in 1875, which dragged on for about six months and is all that some people know about him, just after the jury was directed to retire he called out, "There has been no collection taken up!"²¹ At other times his humor was for the private entertainment of friends sitting nearby, as I have reported elsewhere:

Since [Edward] Eggleston was acquainted with the principal

figures of the trial, he was not surprised at being subpoenaed as a witness. For several afternoons in May he sat among Beecher’s lawyers and friends, waiting to testify. Far from showing strain after four months in a courtroom, Beecher was in excellent spirits; he could even relieve the tedium by an unseemly levity. He had previously twitted Eggleston about the abundance of his hair; once he had called out at the close of a prayer meeting, "You shaggy man, come up here." Now at the trial he scribbled three notes and passed them along the row of witnesses. The first was addressed to a man named Halliday: "You are sitting near a dangerous man—He is an Armenian—a rank one as you can see by the luxuriance of his hair. It is evident that a soil that produces much crops must be over rich—malarial index—Beware." The second note chaffed Halliday on his baldness, and the third chided both Halliday and Eggleston for laughing out loud in court.²²

The trial ended in a hung jury, and it in no way lessened Beecher’s popularity, for he continued to pack Plymouth Church for the rest of his life, and he continued to be in demand as a public speaker. In the presidential campaign of 1884, he took to the stump in support of Grover Cleveland and laced his oratory, as usual, with humor. Republicans could not have been expected to be amused: the New York Tribune editorially charged that "Such humor as he displayed was envenomed with spite, and sometimes degenerated into coarse buffoonery."²³ If this seems damning, we would do well to remember that a more exalted humorist, Mark Twain, when speaking at a Republican rally in the 1876 campaign, drew similar partisan fire: the Boston Transcript editorialized that "somebody should have led him from the platform by the ear."²⁴

Beecher had no taste for the pastoral duties commonly expected of clergymen, but so affluent a church as his could afford to hire assistant pastors for that chore. What this meant was ample time for the writing that was in the blood of all the Beechers. Sister Harriet had set a standard of success almost beyond emulation, but Henry Ward was not daunted and came reasonably close with his novel Norwood, a best-seller in 1867, though not a runaway. Beecher was good-natured about it, and in later years had frequent opportunity for a quip: "People used to accuse me of having written Uncle Tom’s Cabin—until they read Norwood."²⁵

William McLoughlin, in his 1970 book The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher, assigns importance to Norwood as Beecher’s first and only effort to "put down in a systematic way his over-all view of life and its meaning."²⁶ Even more recently, Henry Nash Smith

chose Norwood as the one book deserving a chapter to itself in his Democracy and the Novel. He called it "A Textbook of the Genteel Tradition" and placed it, for contrast, just after close studies of Hawthorne and Melville, whose books of the 1850s, "masterpieces of highbrow psychological romance," had been "emphatically rejected both by critics and by the public."²⁷ I would suggest yet another approach, somewhat synthesizing those of McLoughlin, who dwells on Beecher’s exposition of Gilded Age theology in Norwood, and Smith, who views the book as a prime exhibit of middle-brow literary standards in the same period. Whatever its shortcomings, as half-baked theology or superficial fiction, Norwood was, and remains, a classic of popular culture, and its humor is what middle-class readers could appreciate in the early years of emergent Realism. Characters such as Deacon Marble and the sexton-undertaker Mr. Turfmould are presented by caricature close to that favored by Eggleston in The Hoosier School-Master and its immediate successors. Incidents and relationships are also treated humorously, and there is even humor to which readers could respond in the description of Dr. Buell’s rocking chair and other inanimate objects. The sheer length of a novel, as compared to even the longest-winded sermon, gave Beecher greater freedom to infuse his habitual humor, but for the same purpose, to sugar-coat his theology.

Of the numerous other titles that comprise the Beecher corpus, two are collections of essays and similar pieces that he wrote over an extended period: Star Papers (1855),²⁸ so titled because he used a star or asterisk to sign many of the pieces, and Eyes and Ears (1862).²⁹ Miscellaneous in their subject matter, they differ from the sermons and Norwood in an important way: the humor is commonly not to illustrate some serious concept but for the sake of humor itself; and accordingly they may be the best available basis for judging Beecher as a humorist. "Sleeping in the Cars," for example, is an amusing account of how difficult it was to sleep on a train trip before the advent of the Pullman sleeper.³⁰ "Climbing" may seem dated, for not many of us today climb trees, and make ourselves ridiculous in the process, in quest of a stick for any conceivable purpose.³¹

Beecher begins one essay, "Embodied Jokes," with a series of questions. "Has not nature an element of the ludicrous in it? Are there no creatures which may be regarded as mere quizzical oddities? What else can you make of the world-renowned Jack? Can any man look into his face without an irresponsible temptation to laughter?" (Here we may be reminded of Josh Billings’ "Essa on the

Muel," with its atrocious misspellings intended to heighten the comic effect—a device Beecher would never have used.) He goes on to cite the grotesqueness of the toad, the squeaking voice of the bat with its mouth "a burlesque upon humanity," the monkey as "an organized sarcasm upon humanity," and the crab and lobster as beings that strike us as comical. As humor, however, this piece is somewhat compromised by a didactic conclusion: mankind needs to laugh and should be grateful for odd creatures in nature to laugh at.³²

One amusing essay is on mosquitoes, and even better is one on wasps. It is too long to quote in full, so I have chosen one excerpt and will close this paper with it:

    The wasp is always well dressed, and ready for company. A nimble creature, exquisite in every particular—trig, polished, burnished, elegant in form;—what single thing can be alleged against him except for that little stiletto which he carries in a terminal sheath? Yet he is not to be blamed. He did not put it there. . . .

    Now, for a gentleman at leisure walking up and down, soliloquizing good will to all creation, it is a very awkward thing to have a wasp crawling up between his boot and pantaloons, and be ignorant of the fact!

    The poor insect is unconscious of any impropriety. He has no suspicion of the scenes which you will soon enact. It is not until he has ascended above your knees that some motion constraining the cloth presses him close to your warm flesh. The contact is a terror to him. . . . Like a hero, he will die fighting. He thrusts out his sword in a manner that dispels every poetic dream, and brings you to the realities of life with such a clutch at the spot as no man can give except one who has once had a wasp between raiment and body. You have got him! To do it you have taken a large grasp, that he may be encompassed with thicknesses of cloth impervious to the longest sting. But the act and attitude are not favorable to grace. You rush to the house or barn careless of pace or dignity, and eager only for deliverance. Now, unless one has been drilled, it is difficult to disrobe while you are bent half double, and with only a left hand at liberty for use and an enemy in the rear. As the cautious work goes on, some luckless fold loosens, and the enemy is at you again, and in good earnest. Strange that so small an instrument can put a brave man into such ecstatic haste! But there is many a man who could firmly face a cannon, who could not stand for a moment with a wasp inside his garment. . . .

    I consider one wasp under [one’s clothing] as more terrible than nine hundred and ninety-nine in a fair fight in the open field!³³

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Were this a trial of Henry Ward Beecher not for alleged adultery but on charges of being a humorist, now would be the time for the prosecution to rest its case.

UNIVERSITY OF MAINE

NOTES

    ¹Constance Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (New York, 1927), p. 174.
   ²O. S. and L. N. Fowler, Phrenology and Physiology (New York, 1852), pp. 102–104.
   ³Rourke, p. 175.
   ⁴Lewis Brastow, Representative Modern Preachers (New York, 1904), chapter on Beecher, pp. 98–139.
   ⁵Paxton Hibben, Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 1927), p. 189.
   ⁶Ibid., p. 121.
   ^{7 7}Ibid., p. 15.
   ⁸Issued by J. B. Ford & Co. in 1868.
   ⁹Eleanor Maria Easterbrook [Eleanor Ames], comp., Beecher as a Humorist (Boston, 1887), p. 27; Miss Easterbrook was one of Beecher’s parishioners.
   ¹⁰Ibid., p. 101.
   ¹¹Ibid., p. 1.
   ¹²Ibid., p. vii.
   ¹³Ibid., p. 11.
   ¹⁴Ibid., p. 22.
   ¹⁵Ibid., p. 3.
   ¹⁶Ibid., p. 57.
   ¹⁷Ibid., p. 20.
   ¹⁸Ibid., p. 2i.
   ¹⁹Ibid., p. 4.
   ²⁰Ibid., pp. 144–45.
   ²¹Hibben, p. 279.
   ²²William Peirce Randel, Edward Eggleston (New York, 1945), p. 146.
   ²³Hibben, p. 279.
   ²⁴William Peirce Randel, Centennial: American Life in 1876 (Philadelphia, 1969), pp. 225–26.
   ²⁵Dan McCall ,Beecher (New York, 1979), p. 148.
   ²⁶William McLaughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 1970), pp. xi–xii.
   ²⁷Henry Nash Smith, Democracy and the Novel (New York, 1978), pp. 56–74. Norwood; or, Village Life in New England was serialized in the New York Ledger in 1867 and was issued as a book in 1868.
   ²⁸Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers; or, Experiences of Art and Nature (New York, 1855, with numerous reissues); collected from the Independent.
   ²⁹Henry Ward Beecher, Eyes and Ears (Boston, i862); collected from the New York Ledger, with a few pieces from the Independent.
   ³⁰Easterbrook, pp. 151–52.
   ³¹Ibid.. pp. 153–54.
   ³²Ibid., pp. 185–87.
   ³³"Wasps." Ibid., pp. 137–39.

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