A JEWISH HIIMOURIST.
THOUGH humour is hardly a prominent quality of the Jews, and many are possibly of Carlyle's opinion, that they have no real sense of the humorous, there is a good deal more drollery in the sayings and doings of those reared in the Synagogue than outsiders generally suppose. Be that, however, as it may, the Jewish race can claim to have produced in the person of Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, an Austrian journalist but little known in this country, the foremost wit and humourist of the German-speaking people. As ready in retort as Jerrold, as brilliant a conversationalist and raconteur as Sheridan, he was as graceful and effective a punster as the immortal Tom Hood. The right of his co-religionist, Heine, to rank among hamourists is often questioned in German literary coteries ; but Saphir's pre-eminence is admitted even by the ponder- ous writers of the " Brockhans-Lexicon." The son of a poor pedlar in Hungary, he was born and reared in the Pressburg Ghetto at a time when to be a Jew was to be debarred from well-nigh every form of modern culture; and yet before his nine-and-twentieth year he was the most con- spicuous journalist in Germany, ae much hated as admired, and had become the founder of that lighter school of journalistic criticism that makes the ephemeral literature of the Fatherland tolerable. He came to Berlin in 1825, or thereabouts, and started the Courier, the wit and audacity of which took the capital by storm. But the Prussian censors did not appre- ciate a writer who, instead of grumbling at them, made them the butt of his irreverent jokes, and actually poked fun at them. Six weeks' imprisonment for an acrostic on Madame Sontag, the singer, and amonth for calling a would-be dramatist named Cosmar a " creature " that writes plays, convinced Saphir that his peculiar form of humour was not likely to have fair play where Count Granow wielded the censor's pencil. So he removed to Munich, where, in 1828-29, he published the Bazaar. He was also converted to Protestantism, and was made Hof-Theater-Intendant. But he soon got into trouble again, and this time with a more important personage than a Press- censor. King Ludwig was addicted to writing bad verse and making bad jokes, and Saphir did not hesitate to express very freely his opinion as to the quality of both. It would not do to punish the critic for this, but his sine were laid up against him ; and when he ventured subsequently to make some remarks about the notorious Lola Mentes, he received a peremptory order to quit the Bavarian capital within four-and-twenty hours. The Court Chamberlain, commissioned by the King, waited on him, and asked if he could manage to get away in so short a time. " Yes," replied the unabashed journalist ; "and if my own legs can't take me quickly enough, I'll borrow some of the superfluous feet in his Majesty's last volume of verse." He never forgot this expulsion from Munich. When, one day, some one congratulated him on his erect carriage and walk, he remarked he had had a good master of deportment ; "Ring Ludwig had taught him to step out." He went to Vienna in 1835, and after becoming a Catholic, started the Humorist, the chief organ of its kind in Germany, with which he was connected until his death in 1850. Saphir was a voluminous writer, and his " Damme Briefe " and " Album fiir Witz and Humor" are never•failing sources upon which his imitators to this day draw. His works are not much read by the general public, despite their undoubted brilliancy
and humour, and the extraordinary " word-play " in which they abound. He was deficient in depth, and lacked the creative gadfly of true genius that stings to the highest form of literary expression ; and it is for the good things he said and the odd things he did, that he is chiefly remembered by his countrymen and his sometime co-religionists.
Innumerable are the anecdotes told of him. A few called from the collections of " Saphiriana," published in Germany, are characteristic, and well illustrate the readiness of his wit and the peculiar form of humour for which he was noted. Jerrman, his colleague on the Humorist, often asked him to dinner ; but as Madame Jerrman was reputed to be one of the meanest women in the capital, the hamourist generally managed to excuse himself. At last, though, he was trapped into an acceptance. The dinner consisted, as he anticipated, of more table-cloth than meat, and Saphir, who was a big man with a proportionate appetite, rose from table as hungry as he had sat down. As he was taking his leave, the hostess came up to him, and playfully tapping him on the shoulder with her fan, said, —" And now, Herr Saphir, when will you dine with me again P" "At once, Madame Jerrman, at once !" responded the hungry wit in his deepest bass. The old Rothschild, at an evening gathering, requested Saphir to write something in his antograph-book, but it was to be something characteristic. In two minutes the financier received the volume back with the following entry :—" Oblige me, Dear Baron, with the loan of 10,000 golden ; and Forget, For ever after, your obedient servant, M. G. Serum" The man of money saw the point of the joke, and paid generously for the humourist's signature. Equally brief was the retort he made to some one against whom he accidentally knocked when turning the corner of a street in Munich. " Beast," cried the offended person, without waiting for an apology. "Thank you," said the journalist, "and mine is Saphir." Colmar, a relative of the bookseller, was an amateur author who thought a good deal more of himself than the public could be persuaded to think. Meeting Saphir in a mixed company, he made the silly remark that Saphir " was a Jew who wrote for money, while he wrote for fame." " Quite so," remarked the wit ; "we each write for what we lack and need." His friend Jerrman was always warning him about getting into debt, for he was extremely careless in money- matters, and explaining the advantages to be derived from paying cash for everything. Once he wound up his usual caution with the remark that " making debts ruins many a man." " Oh, no !" responded Saphir ; " it's paying them that dose the mischief." When introduced for the first time to the prompter of the Leipziger Stadt-Theatre, a pompons personage too much in evidence nt times, Saphir remarked,—"I heard a good deal of you, Herr A— "—the prompter bowed his acknowledgments of the expected compli- ment, while the wit added—" in the course of a performance last evening."
Saphir mortally offended the Munich citizens by speaking of them as being "beer-barrels in the morning, and barrels of beer in the evening." One of the most charming girls in that capital, a girl who enjoyed some reputation as an artist, married a young man of the "long and lanky" type, and very wooden- headed into the bargain. Some friends were discussing the match, and one lady happened to say,—" I wonder what Fraillein Wahrmann will do with him." " Oh !" exclaimed Saphir, who was listening ; " she is fond of painting, and may find him useful as a mahl-stick." He was crossing the market. place with a friend, when a member of the comedy troupe of the Court Theatre stopped and exchanged a few words with him. " Who was that P" said Saphir's companion, when the player had gone. " Oh ! that is Waldeck, the actor." "He does not look much like an actor off the stage," said the other. "Still less when he's on the stage," retorted Saphir. Of another " poor " player, a low comedian, he once remarked that, "jesting apart, he was not a bad actor." There was some difficulty owing to the nature of the soil, in digging the foundation for a statue to be erected in honour of an important Grand Duke, famous for nothing in particular. The humourist and a friend passed the men at work. " What are they doing P" asked the latter. " Oh 1 they are trying to find ground for raising a monument to the Gross-Herzog," was the reply. Driving out in the suburbs of Vienna one day, his coachman, a peppery Miefli-kutecher, got into an alterca• tion with a rival Jehu. Words soon led to oaths, and oaths to blows, and the pair set-to in good earnest to
decide which was the better man. Popping his head out of the fiacre-window,. Saphir mildly implored the pair to oblige him, and drab each other as quickly as they could, for he had "engaged the carriage by the hour." But Saphir could be extremely rode, and was not unfrequently as coarse as Swift, of whom, by-the-way, he was a diligent student, for he was a master of English. At a ball, a young lady, heated with dancing, and one who should have known better, remarked that she " felt as though she were stewing." " But still quite raw," observed the wit, in a stage aside. Another young person once asked him which was the greatest miracle in the Bible, and then, without waiting for an answer, added, " that Elijah did not burn in the fiery chariot that appeared and took him to heaven." "No," said Saphir, "it was Balaam's ass : the ass that made answer before it was questioned." A great bore, seated next to him at dinner, was excusing his evident loudness for the bottle. " Good wine," said the personage, "makes us forget trouble and vexation, and enables us to bear up against the thousands of disagresables we en- counter and have to submit to. Don't you, Herr Saphir, think it excusable in a man to drink sometimes ?" "Oh, yes!" replied the wit ; "quite excusable, if be happen to sit next to yon at dinner." A wealthy relative, of whom he wished to borrow a little money, reproached him with his incapacity for business. " Why, you cannot even add !" exclaimed the Jewish money-bags, summing up the writer's delinquencies. "No," retorted the other ; " but I can subtract, and if one were to sub- tract your money from you, there would be only a nothing left."
Saphir was no respecter of persons, and nothing could abash him. King Ludwig of Bavaria, the verse-maker to whom he owed his expulsion from Munich, walked up to him one day, and tapping the felt hat he wore uttered the single word, "File." Now, File, which means "felt" is also a most opprobious epithet, and the King's conduct was grossly insulting. In reply, Saphir merely touched the overcoat he -wore, with the remark, " Wasser-dichter,"—that is to say, waterproof." But as Bidder also means a "poet," the term signified " water-poet," a Germanism applied to one who is no poet at all. He could be as rude in an amiable fashion too. A young couple, newly engaged, were favoured with a letter of intro- duction to him, which they duly presented. Now, the gentleman was notorious for his effeminate habits and ways, and his -appearance at once struck the eye of the observant journalist, who had heard about him. He said nothing, received the pair with empressement, insisted upon their being seated in his most comfortable easy-chairs, assured them how pleased he was to 'hear of their engagement, and wound np with,—"Now, pray, you must, you really must, tell me which of you is the bride." Travelling in a second-class carriage between Hamburg and Berlin, he had a little misunderstanding with a lady, the only occupant of the compartment beside himself, in reference to the opening of a window. "Yon don't appear to know the difference, Mein Herr, between the second and third class," said the lady, cuttingly. "Oh, Madame !" replied Saphir, "I am an old railway traveller ; I know all the class distinctions. In the first class, the passengers behave rudely to the guard ; in the third, the guards behave rudely to the passengers ; in the second (with a bow to his fellow-traveller), the passengers behave rudely to each other." Some of his briefer sayings are extremely droll. He once described a theatre as being so full that people were obliged to laugh perpendicularly, there was no room to do so horizontally. Of a dull townlet he visited, he remarked it was so quiet that but for an occasional death there would really be no life in the place. He was a big man, and when a little poet once threatened to run him through for an adverse criticism, lie merely observed that he would thenceforth have to pull his boots up higher when he went abroad. His Jewishness was not often apparent in what he said or did. On one occasion, though, lie showed that he was not unmindful of his origin. Dining at Bothschild's, some fine lachryma Christi was placed on the table. " Whence," asked the financier, "does the wine get so strange a name ?" "I suppose," answered Saphir, "it is because good Christians must weep to think that a Jew should be able to treat his friends to such a superb beverage." It must be admitted, though, that, like Heine, whom he bitterly hated, he had little sympathy with those of his own race.
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