AN AMERICAN GENIUS.*
PEOPLE are very busy nowadays putting 0. Henry in the shade ; but if any part of him still protrudes into the sun, this biography of Phineas Taylor Barnum should apply the final shove. A man who made and lost two " fortunes " by the time he was fifteen, at eighteen dealt in hardware, lottery- tickets, and porter ; at twenty-one founded and ran an influential weekly and was put in gaol for libelling a deacon ; started life as a showman with George Washington's negro nurse (aged 161 years) ; reappeared, when that had blown over, with a stuffed mermaid ; made a considerable sum by producing religious plays in a museum bought on tick ; made himself and his museum the sensation of New York ; found the famous Tom Thumb in a back street in Bridgeport, Conn., and took him over to sec Queen Victoria (who was charmed) ; tired of dog-faced boys and suchlike banalities and hired Jenny Lind to tour the States (and she was the first European star to do so) in consequence ; indulged in politics as an occasional holiday and temperance reform as a duty and an advertisement ; founded the biggest circus on this and probably any other earth ; and died worth four millions— surely that man not only eclipses any humbug in fiction, but has a right to his self-framed title of the Prince of Humbugs !
But Barman's great contribution to modern civilization lay in none of these things. He is the man who taught America how to advertise. Other charlatans there have been whose ingenuity was equally worthy of success ; other men who have risen to great wealth from a state of nil ; other members of State Legislature and other Temperance Reformers ; but such another advertiser there has not been since Adam first cut his name in the bark of the Forbidden Tree ; nor, with all the greater resources now at its command, has America yet shown any likelihood of beating him. There was nothing he could not turn into an advertisement, from a riot in a baby- show to an elephant's determination to lie on its tummy in the middle of the Zoo. He kept the editors of his time in a state of headache by the variety of the false news he contrived to have forwarded to them from the most reliable sources. The man who came near Barnum and did not wish to serve as an advertisement had no more hope than a fly in a web. If you did what Barnum wished he scored ; if you did not, he scored. There was no escape. And, moreover, he had that power so necessary to really great advertising : he could not • P. T. Barnum. By M B. Werner. London: Jonathan Cape. ads. uct,I
only rouse expectations, he could—even with the most meagre means—satisfy them. Many men find the very excitement their advance agent has aroused their worst enemy. Not so Barnum. The crowd was in his hand at the beginning, and the middle, and the end. They, too, hadn't a chance.
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