American literature from the first has been rich in humor. The incongruities of the new world—the picturesque gathering of peoples like the Puritans, the Indians, the cavaliers, the Dutch, the negroes and the later immigrants; the makeshifts of the frontier, the vastness and the richness of the land, the leveling effects of democracy, the freedom of life, and the independence of spirit—all have tended to produce a laughing people. The first really American book, Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York, was a broadly humorous production. The mid period of the nineteenth century was remarkably rich in humor. One has only to mention Paulding and Holmes and Saxe and Lowell and Seba Smith and B. P. Shillaber. Yet despite these names and dozens of others almost equally deserving, it must be acknowledged that until the Civil War period opened there had been no school of distinctly American humorists, original and nation-wide. The production had been sporadic and provincial, and it had been read by small circles. The most of it could be traced to older prototypes: Hood, Thackeray, Lamb, Douglas Jerrold, Dickens. The humor of America, "new birth of our new soil," had been discovered, but as yet it had had no national recognition and no great representative.
As late as 1866, a reviewer of "Artemus Ward" in the North American Review, published then in Boston, complained that humor in America had been a local product and that it had been largely imitative. It was time, he declared, for a new school of humorists who should be original in their methods and national in their scope. "They must not aim at copying anything; they should take a new form.... Let them seek to embody the wit and humor of all parts of the country, not only of one city where their paper is published; let them force Portland to disgorge her Jack Downings and New York her Orpheus C. Kerrs, for the benefit of all. Let them form a nucleus which will draw to itself all the waggery and wit of America."[14] It was the call of the new national spirit, and as if in reply there arose the new school—uncolleged for the most part, untrained by books, fresh, joyous, extravagant in its bursting young life—the first voice of the new era.
The group was born during the thirties and early forties, that second seedtime of American literature. Their birth dates fall within a period of ten years:
| 1833. | David Ross Locke, "Petroleum V. Nasby." |
| 1834. | Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward." |
| 1834. | Charles Henry Webb, "John Paul." |
| 1835. | Samuel Langhorne Clemens, "Mark Twain." |
| 1836. | Robert Henry Newell, "Orpheus C. Kerr." |
| 1839. | Melvin DeLancy Landon, "Eli Perkins." |
| 1841. | Thomas Nast. |
| 1841. | Charles Heber Clark, "Max Adler." |
| 1841. | James Montgomery Bailey, "The Danbury News Man." |
| 1841. | Alexander Edwin Sweet. |
| 1842. | Charles Bertrand Lewis, "M. Quad." |
To the school also belonged several who were born outside of this magic ten years. There were Henry Wheeler Shaw, "Josh Billings," born in 1818; and Charles Henry Smith, "Bill Arp," born in 1823. At least three younger members must not be omitted: Robert Jones Burdette, 1844; Edgar Wilson Nye, "Bill Nye," 1850; and Opie Read, 1852.
In a broad way the school was a product of the Civil War. American humor had been an evolution of slow growth, and the war precipitated it. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the beginning. Here was a man of the new West who had worked on flatboats on the Ohio, who had served as a soldier in a backwoods troop, who had ridden for years on a Western circuit, and in rough and ready political campaigns had withstood the heckling of men who had fought barehanded with the frontier and had won. The saddest man in American history, he stands as one of the greatest of American humorists. His laughter rings through the whole period of the war, man of sorrows though he was, and it was the Western laughter heard until now only along the great rivers and the frontier and the gold coast of the Pacific. He had learned it from contact with elemental men, men who passed for precisely what they were, men who were measured solely by the iron rule of what they could do; self-reliant men, healthy, huge-bodied, deep-lunged men to whom life was a joy. The humor that he brought to the East was nothing new in America, but the significant thing is that for the first time it was placed in the limelight. A peculiar combination it was, half shrewd wisdom, "hoss sense," as "Josh Billings" called it, the rest characterization which exposed as with a knife-cut the inner life as well as the outer, whimsical overstatement and understatement, droll incongruities told with all seriousness, and an irreverence born of the all-leveling democracy of the frontier.
"It was Lincoln's opinion that the finest wit and humor, the best jokes and anecdotes, emanated from the lower orders of the country people,"[15] and in this judgment he pointed out the very heart of the new literature that was germinating about him. Such life is genuine; it rests upon the foundations of nature itself. Lincoln, like the man of the new West that he was, delighted not so much in books as in actual contact with life. "Riding the circuit for many years and stopping at country taverns where were gathered the lawyers, jurymen, witnesses, and clients, they would sit up all night narrating to each other their life adventures; and the things which happened to an original people, in a new country, surrounded by novel conditions, and told with the descriptive power and exaggeration which characterized such men, supplied him with an exhaustless fund of anecdotes which could be made applicable for enforcing or refuting an argument better than all the invented stories of the world."[16]
It was the new humor of the West for the first time shown to the whole world. Lincoln, the man of the West, had met the polished East in the person of Douglas and had triumphed through very genuineness, and now he stood in the limelight of the Presidency, transacting the nation's business with anecdotes from the frontier circuits, meeting hostile critics with shrewd border philosophy, and reading aloud with unction, while battles were raging or election returns were in doubt, from "Artemus Ward," or "Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby," or The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi—favorites of his because they too were genuine, excerpts not from books but from life itself.
Glimpses there already had been of the new humor of the West. George W. Harris (1814–1868), steamboat captain on the Tennessee River, had created that true child of the West, "Sut Lovengood"; Augustus B. Longstreet (1790–1870) in Georgia Scenes had drawn inimitable sketches of the rude life of his region; and Joseph G. Baldwin (1815–1864), like Lincoln, himself a lawyer who had learned much on his frontier circuit, in his Flush Times had traced the evolution of a country barrister in a manner that even now, despite its echoes of Dickens, makes the book a notable one.
But the greatest of them all, the real father of the new school of humorists, the man who gave the East the first glimpse of the California type of humor, was George Horatio Derby (1823–1861), whose sketches over the signature "John Phœnix" began to appear in the early fifties. Undoubtedly it would amaze Derby could he return and read of himself as the father of the later school of humor. With him literary comedy was simply a means now and then of relaxation from the burdens of a strenuous profession. He had been graduated from West Point in 1846, had fought in the Mexican War, and later as an engineer had been entrusted by the government with important surveys and explorations in the far West and later in Florida, where he died at the age of thirty-eight of sunstroke. He was burdened all his life with heavy responsibilities and exacting demands upon his energies. He had little time for books, and his writings, what few he produced, were the result wholly of his own observations upon the picturesque life that he found about him in the West.
In his Phœnixiana, published in 1855, we find nearly all of the elements that were to be used by the new school of humorists. First, there is the solemn protestation of truthfulness followed by the story that on the face of it is impossible. "If the son of the reader ... should look confidingly into his parent's face, and inquire—'Is that true, Papa?' reply, oh, reader, unhesitatingly—'My son, it is.'" To make the story still more plausible he quotes "Truthful James." He may then proceed with a story like this:
He glanced over the first column [of Phœnix's Pictorial] when he was observed to grow black in the face. A bystander hastened to seize him by the collar, but it was too late. Exploding with mirth, he was scattered into a thousand fragments, one of which striking him probably inflicting some fatal injury, as he immediately expired, having barely time to remove his hat, and say in a feeble voice, "Give this to Phoenix." A large black tooth lies on the table before us, driven through the side of the office with fearful violence at the time of the explosion. We have enclosed it to his widow with a letter of condolence.
"Truthful James"—we think of Bret Harte, and we think of him again after passages like this: "An old villain with a bald head and spectacles punched me in the abdomen; I lost my breath, closed my eyes, and remembered nothing further."
Derby was the first conspicuous writer to use grotesque exaggerations deliberately and freely as a provocative of laughter. Irving and many others had made use of it, but in Phœnixiana it amounts to a mannerism. He tells the most astonishing impossibilities and then naïvely adds: "It is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents." In true California style he makes use often of specific exaggeration. Two men trip over a rope in the dark "and then followed what, if published, would make two closely printed royal octavo pages of profanity." So popular was the Phœnix Herald that "we have now seven hundred and eighty-two Indians employed night and day in mixing adobe for the type molds."
The second characteristic of Derby's humor was its irreverence. To him nothing was sacred. The first practical joker, he averred, was Judas Iscariot: he sold his Master. Arcturus, he observed, was a star "which many years since a person named Job was asked if he could guide, and he acknowledged he couldn't do it." "David was a Jew—hence, the 'Harp of David' was a Jew's-harp."
He delights in the device of euphemistic statement used so freely by later humorists. The father of Joseph Bowers, he explains, was engaged in business as a malefactor in western New York, but was annoyed greatly by the prejudices of the bigoted settlers. He emigrated suddenly, however, with such precipitation in fact that "he took nothing with him of his large property but a single shirt, which he happened to have about him at the time he formed his resolution." Finally he "ended his career of usefulness by falling from a cart in which he had been standing, addressing a numerous audience, and in which fall he unfortunately broke his neck."
He abounds in true Yankee aphorisms—"when a man is going down, everybody lends him a kick," "Where impudence is wit, 'tis folly to reply." He uses unexpected comparisons and whimsical non sequiturs: he sails on "a Napa steam packet of four cat-power"; "the wind blew," he declared, "like well-watered roses." R. W. Emerson, he was informed, while traveling in upper Norway, "on the 21st of June, 1836, distinctly saw the sun in all its majesty shining at midnight!—in fact, all night. Emerson is not what you would call a superstitious man, by any means—but, he left."
It was Derby who wrote the first Pike County ballad. "Suddenly we hear approaching a train from Pike County, consisting of seven families, with forty-six wagons, each drawn by thirteen oxen." Elsewhere he has described the typical "Pike": "His hair is light, not a 'sable silvered,' but a yeller, gilded; you can see some of it sticking out of the top of his hat; his costume is the national costume of Arkansas, coat, waistcoat, and pantaloons of homespun cloth, dyed a brownish yellow, with a decoction of the bitter barked butternut—a pleasing alliteration; his countenance presents a determined, combined with a sanctimonious expression." "Now rises o'er the plains in mellifluous accents, the grand Pike County Chorus:
Not much was added to Western humor after Derby. Mark Twain's earliest manner had much in it that smacks of "Phœnix." The chapters entitled, "Phœnix Takes an Affectionate Leave of San Francisco," "Phœnix is on the Sea," and "Phœnix in San Diego" might have been taken from Roughing It. Just as truly the chapters, "Inauguration of the New Collector" and "Return of the Collector," "Thrilling and Frantic Excitement Among Office Seekers" might have been written by Orpheus C. Kerr. Yet despite such similarities, the later school did not necessarily filch from "Phœnix": they learned their art as he had learned it from contact with the new West. All drew from the same model.
For the new humor, which was to be the first product of the new period in American literature, was Western humor of the "John Phœnix" type. It came from three great seed places: the Mississippi and its rivers, the California coast, and, later, the camps of the Civil War. It was the humor of the gatherings of men under primitive conditions. It was often crude and coarse. It was elemental and boisterous and often profane. To the older school of poets and scholars in the East it seemed, as it began to fill all the papers and creep even into the standard magazines, like a veritable renaissance of vulgarity. "The worlds before and after the Deluge were not more different than our republics of letters before and after the war,"[17] wrote Stedman to William Winter in 1873, and the same year he wrote to Taylor in Europe, "The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic bathers [sic], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit."[18]
Many of the new humorists had been born in the East, but all of them had been drilled either in the rough school of the West or in the armies during the war. Shaw had been a deckhand on an Ohio River steamer; Browne had been a tramp printer both in the East and the West, and had lived for a time in California; Clemens had been tramp printer, pilot on the Mississippi, and for five years miner and newspaper man on the Western coast; Webb and Nye and Newell had seen life in California; Locke had edited country papers in northern Ohio, and C. H. Smith, Landon, Bailey, Sweet, Lewis, and Burdette had been soldiers in the Civil War. All of them had been thrown together with men under circumstances that had stripped them and the life about them of all the veneer of convention and class distinction.
One thing the group had in common: they were newspaper men; most of them had worked at the case; all of them at one time or another were connected with the press. The new humor was scattered by the newspapers that after the war spread themselves in incredible numbers over America. The exchange system, complained of by Stedman, became nation wide. The good things of one paper were seized upon by the others and sown broadcast. Humorous departments became more and more common, until staid old papers like the Boston Advertiser had yielded to the popular demand. The alarm voiced by Stedman in his letter to Taylor was taken up by the more conservative magazines. The humor of to-day is written for the multitude, complained the ponderous old North American Review, "that uncounted host which reads for its romance The Ledger and The Pirate of the Gulf. Common schools make us a nation of readers. But common schools, alas! do little to inculcate taste or discrimination in the choice of reading. The mass of the community has a coarse digestion.... It likes horse-laughs."[19] But it is useless to combat the spirit of the age.
The wave rolled on until it reached its height in the mid seventies. From journals with an incidental humorous column there had arisen the newspaper that was quoted everywhere and enormously subscribed for solely because of the funny man in charge. The Danbury News, the local paper of a small Connecticut city, swelled its subscription list to 40,000 because of its editor Bailey. The vogue of such a paper was not long. At different periods there arose and flourished and declined "Nasby's" Toledo Blade, "Lickshingle's" Oil City Derrick, Burdette's Burlington Hawkeye, "M. Quad's" Detroit Free Press, Peck's Sun, Sweet's Texas Siftings, Read's Arkansaw Traveller, and many others.
The greater part of this newspaper humor was as fleeting as the flying leaves upon which it was printed. It has disappeared never to be regathered. Even the small proportion of it that was put by its authors into book form has fared little better. From all the host of literary comedians that so shook the period with laughter not over four have taken anything even approaching a permanent place. These four are Browne, Locke, Nast, and Shaw.
Charles Farrar Browne, "Artemus Ward," the first of the group to gain recognition, was born of Puritan ancestry in Waterville, Maine, in 1834. Forced by the death of his father in 1847 to rely upon his own efforts for support, he became a typesetter on the Skowhegan Clarion, and later, after a wandering career from office to office, served for three years in Boston as a compositor for Snow and Wilder, the publishers of Mrs. Partington's Carpet Bag. His connection with Shillaber, the editor of this paper, turned his mind to humorous composition, but it was not until after his second wander period in the South and West that he discovered the real bent of his powers. His career as a humorist may be said to have begun in 1857, when, after two years at Toledo, Ohio, he was called to the local editorship of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and given freedom to inject into the dry news columns all the life and fun that he chose. He began now to write articles purporting to describe the struggles and experiences of one "Artemus Ward," an itinerant showman who was as full of homely wisdom and experience as he was lacking in book learning and refinement. The letters instantly struck a popular chord; they were copied widely. After serving three years on the Plain-Dealer their author was called to New York to become the editor of the brilliant but ill-starred comic magazine, Vanity Fair. The following year, 1861, he began to lecture, and in 1863 and 1864 he made a six-months' lecture tour of the Pacific Coast. The free, picturesque life of the new cities and the wild camps delighted him. In Virginia City he spent three marvelous weeks with Mark Twain, then a reporter on the local paper. Returning across the Plains, he visited the Mormons. The trip was the graduate course of the young humorist. Not until after his California training was he completely in command of his art. Then in 1866 at the height of his powers he went to London, where his success was instant and unprecedented. He was made an editor of Punch, he was discussed in all quarters, and his lectures night by night were attended by crowds. But the end was near. He died of quick consumption March 6, 1867.
The secret of Browne's success as a humorist lay, first of all, in the droll personality of the man. It was the opinion of Haweis, who heard him in London, that his "bursts of quaint humor could only live at all in that subtle atmosphere which Artemus Ward's presence created, and in which alone he was able to operate."[20] He made use of all the humorous devices of his favorite, John Phœnix, and to them he added what may be called the American manner of delivering humor: the setting forth with perfect gravity and even mournfulness his most telling jokes and then the assuming of a surprised or even a grieved expression when the audience laughed.
Furthermore, to Phœnix's devices he added cacography, the device of deliberate misspelling so much used by later humorists. He seems to have adopted it spontaneously as a matter of course. He was to take the character of an ignorant showman and naturally he must write as such a man would write. The misspelling of "Artemus Ward" has character in it. In his hands it becomes an art, and an art that helps make vivid the personality of the old showman. "Artemus Ward" is not a mere Dickens gargoyle: he is alive. Witness this:
If you say anything about my show say my snaiks is as harmliss as the new born Babe.
In the Brite Lexington of yooth, thar aint no sich word as fale.
"Too troo, too troo!" I answered; "it's a scanderlis fact."
He is not at all consistent in his spelling; he is as prodigal as nature and as careless. The mere uninspired cacographist misspells every word that it is possible to misspell, but Browne picks only key words. His art is displayed as much in the words he does not change as in those with which he makes free. He coins new words with telling effect. Of his wife he observes: "As a flap-jackist she has no equal. She wears the belt." And he makes free with older words in a way that is peculiarly his own: "Why this thusness."
The third element he added to the humor of Phœnix was a naïve drollery, a whimsical incongruity, that was peculiar to himself. He caught it from no one, and he imparted it to no one. It can be described only as "Artemus Ward." It lives even apart from his presence in much of the writing that he has left behind him. It is as useless to try to analyze it as it were to describe the odor of apples. One can only quote examples, as for instance this from his adventure "Among the Free Lovers":
The exsentric female then clutched me frantically by the arm and hollered:
"You air mine, O you air mine!"
"Scacely," I sed, endeverin to git loose from her. But she clung to me and sed:
"You air my Affinerty!"
"What upon arth is that?" I shouted.
"Dost thou not know?"
"No, I dostent!"
"Listin man & I'll tell ye!" sed the strange female; "for years I hav yearned for thee. I knowd thou wast in the world sumwhares, tho I didn't know whare. My hart sed he would cum and I took courage. He has cum—he's here—you air him—you air my Affinerty! O 'tis too mutch! too mutch!" and she sobbed agin.
"Yes," I anserd, "I think it is a darn sight too mutch!"
"Hast thou not yearned for me?" she yelled, ringin her hands like a female play acter.
"Not a yearn!" I bellerd at the top of my voice, throwin her away from me.
Whatever we may think of the quality of this, we must agree that it is original. If there is any trace of a prototype it is Dickens. The characters and the situation are heightened to grotesqueness, yet one must be abnormally keen in palate to detect any Dickens flavor in the style. It is "Artemus Ward" and only "Artemus Ward." All that he wrote he drew from life itself and from American life. It is as redolent of the new world as the bison or the Indian. He wrote only what had passed under his eye and he wrote only of persons. Unlike Mark Twain, he could cross the continent in the wild days of '64 and see nothing apparently but humanity.
The world of Charles Farrar Browne was the child's world of wonder. He was a case, as it were, of arrested development, a fragment of the myth-making age brought into the nineteenth century. His "Artemus Ward" was a latter-day knight-errant traveling from adventure to adventure. The world to him, even as to a child, was full of strange, half mythical beings: Shakers, Spiritualists, Octoroons, Free Lovers, Mormons, Champions of Woman's Rights, Office Seekers, "Seseshers," Princes, and heirs to Empires. The hero is tempted, imposed upon, assaulted, but he always comes out first best and turns with copious advice which is always moral and sensible and appropriate. To the woman who had claimed him as her affinity he speaks thus:
I'm a lawabiding man, and bleeve in good, old-fashioned institutions. I am marrid & my orfsprings resemble me, if I am a showman! I think your Affinity bizniss is cussed noncents, besides bein outrajusly wicked. Why don't you behave desunt like other folks? Go to work and earn a honist livin and not stay round here in this lazy, shiftless way, pizenin the moral atmosphere with your pestifrous idees! You wimin folks go back to your lawful husbands, if you've got any, and take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful like other wimin. You men folks, cut orf them pirattercal wiskers, burn up them infurnel pamplits, put sum weskuts on, go to work choppin wood, splittin fence rales, or tillin the sile. I pored 4th. my indignashun in this way till I got out of breth, when I stopt.
This is not "Artemus Ward" talking; it is Charles Farrar Browne, and it is Browne who rebukes the Shakers, the Spiritualists, the Committee from the Woman's Rights Association, and the office-seekers about Lincoln, who gives advice to the Prince of Wales and Prince Napoleon, who stands by the flag when the mob destroys his show down among the "Seseshers," and who later addresses the draft rioters at Baldwinsville. Browne was indeed a moral showman. Every page of his work is free from profanity and vulgarity. He is never cheap, never tawdry, never unkind to anything save immorality and snobbishness. His New England ancestry and breeding may be felt in all he wrote. At heart he was a reformer. He once wrote: "Humorous writers have always done the most toward helping virtue on its pilgrimage, and the truth has found more aid from them than from all the grave polemists and solid writers that have ever spoken or written."
Beneath his kindly, whimsical exterior there was a spirit that could be blown into an indignation as fierce even as Mark Twain's. While he was local editor of the Plain-Dealer he burst out one day in this fiery editorial:
A writer in the Philadelphia Ledger has discovered that Edgar A. Poe was not a man of genius. We take it for granted that the writer has never read Poe. His lot in life was hard enough, God knows, and it is a pity the oyster-house critics, snobs, flunkeys, and literary nincompoops can't stop snarling over his grave. The biography of Poe by Griswold—which production for fiendish malignity is probably unequaled in the history of letters—should, it would seem, have sufficed. No stone marks the spot where poor Poe sleeps, and no friendly hand strews flowers upon his grave in summer-time, but countless thousands, all over the world, will read and admire his wildly beautiful pages until the end of time.[21]
This knightly spirit led him to warfare upon everything that was merely sentimental or insincere. He burlesqued the gushing love songs of the period, advertising in his program to render at appropriate intervals "Dearest, Whenest Thou Slumberest Dostest Thou Dreamest of Me?" and "Dear Mother, I've Come Home to Die by Request." He burlesqued the sensational novels of the day in Roberto, the Rover, and Moses, the Sassy. Only once did he ever read the Ledger, he avers, and that was after his first experience with New England rum:
On takin the secund glass I was seezed with a desire to break winders, & arter imbibin the third glass I knockt a small boy down, pickt his pocket of a New York Ledger, and wildly commenced readin Sylvanus Kobb's last Tail.
He is still read and still republished. There is a perennial charm about his work that raises it above the times that produced it, and that promises to make it permanent. His originality, his unfailing animal spirits which came of the abounding life of the new America, his quaint characterization which has added a new figure to the gallery of fiction, his Americanism, his vein of kindliness and pathos that underlies all that he wrote, his indignation at snobbery and all in the life of his day that was not genuine and pure, and finally the exquisite pathos of his later years, all combine to make him remembered.
Among the literary progeny of "Artemus Ward" the most noteworthy, perhaps, was "Petroleum V. Nasby," who became so familiar a figure during the war. The creator of this unique character was David Ross Locke, a native of the State of New York, and, like Browne, a wandering printer from early boyhood. When the "Artemus Ward" letters began to appear in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Locke was editor of the Bucyrus Journal, a few miles to the westward. Their success spurred him to imitation, but it was not until the firing upon Fort Sumter that he succeeded at all in attracting attention. Wingert's Corners, a small hamlet in Crawford County, Ohio, had petitioned the legislature to remove all negroes from the State. There was a humorous element in such a proposition from such a source. Why not give the bellicose little community an appropriate spokesman, a sort of "copperhead" "Artemus Ward," and have him declare it totally free and independent of the State? The result was a letter in the Findlay Jeffersonian, of which Locke was then the editor, dated "Wingert's Corners, March the 21, 1861," and signed "Petroleum V. Nasby." The "Nasby Letters" had begun. The little Ohio hamlet soon proved too small a field for the redoubtable Democrat, and to give free play to his love of slavery and untaxed whisky, his hatred of "niggers" and his self-seeking disloyalty, he was removed to "Confedrit X Roads (wich is in the Stait of Kentucky)," from which imaginary center letters continued to flow during the war and the reconstruction era that followed.
No humorist ever struck a more popular chord. The letters were republished week by week by the entire Northern press, and they were looked for by the reading public as eagerly as if they were reports of battles. The soldiers in the Federal armies read them with gusto, and Lincoln and Chase considered them a real source of strength to the Union cause.
Like most political satires, however, the letters do not wear well. They were too much colored by their times. To-day the atmosphere of prejudice in which they were written has vanished, and the most telling hits and timely jokes raise no smile. A generation has arisen which must have foot-notes if it is to read the letters. We wonder now what it was that could have so captivated the first readers.
"Nasby" has little of "Artemus Ward's" whimsical drollery; indeed, the old Democrat resembles the showman, his prototype, only in his rusticity, his ignorance of culture, and his defiance of the laws of spelling. One is Launcelot Gobbo, the other is Touchstone; one is a mere clown, the other a true humorist, as genuine as life itself is genuine. It is the duty of the clown to be a buffoon, to imitate and to come to grief. He essays all the parts of the acrobats only to roll ignominiously in the dust. Then to the amazement of the beholders he makes a leap that surpasses them all. "Nasby" at one time or another enters every sphere of the political life of his day and generally with small glory to himself. Through "influence" he becomes postmaster of "Confedrit X Roads," and through "influence" he loses his position.
The die is cast! The guilloteen hez fallen! I am no longer postmaster at Confedrit X Roads, wich is in the stait uv Kentucky. The place that knowd me wunst will know me no more forever; the paper wich Deekin Pogram takes will be handed out by a nigger; a nigger will hev the openin uv letters addressed to parties residin hereabouts containin remittances; a nigger will have the riflin uv letters adrest to lottery managers and extractin the sweets therfrom; a nigger will be—but I couldn't dwell upon the disgustin theme no longer.
This is mere clownishness, and yet no type of humor could have been more acceptable to the time that read it. The Revolutionary War had had its "McFingal," who loudly preached Toryism and as a reward was beaten about and even tarred and feathered. Periods of strife and prejudice always demand a clown, one who concentrates in a single personality the evils of the time. "Nasby" stands for blatant copperheadism, just as "McFingal" stands for Toryism, and as a result he delighted the multitude. His schemes and ideas and adventures were all exaggerated, and the persons he dealt with, like President Johnson and his circle, were heightened to the point of caricature. Magnified fifty diameters, the evil or the evil personage, like all things seen under the magnifying glass, becomes grotesque and startling. The people at first laugh and then they cry out, "Away with this thing; it is unendurable."
Refinement is not to be expected in political satires that came hot from a period of prejudice and war, but the coarseness of the "Nasby" letters goes beyond the bounds of toleration even in such writings. They smack of the coarseness of the armies of the period. They reek with whisky until one can almost smell it as one turns the pages. The uncouth spelling simply adds to the coarseness; it adds nothing to the reality of the characterization. There is an impression constantly that the writer is straining for comic effect. He who is capable of such diction as, "They can swear to each other's loyalty, which will reduce the cost of evidence to a mere nominal sum," would hardly be guilty of such spellings as "yeelded," "pekoolyer," and "vayloo," the last standing for "value."
The effect of the letters in forming sentiment in the North at critical periods was doubtless considerable, but such statements as the much-quoted one of George S. Boutwell at Cooper Union that the fall of the Confederacy was due to "three forces—the army, the navy, and the Nasby letters"—must be taken with caution as too much colored by the enthusiastic atmosphere in which it was spoken. Their enormous vogue, however, no one can question. East and West became one as they perused the remorseless logic of these patriotic satires. Strange as it may seem to-day, great numbers of the earlier readers had not a suspicion that "Nasby" of "Confedrit X Roads" was not as real a person even as "Jeff" Davis. According to Major Pond, "one meeting of the 'faithful' framed a resolution commending the fidelity to Democratic principles shown in the Nasby letters, but urging Mr. Nasby, for the sake of policy, not to be so outspoken."[22] In the presence of such testimony criticism must be silent. Realism can have no greater triumph than that.
Periods of prejudice and passion tend always to develop satirists. The Civil War produced a whole school of them. There was "Bill Arp," the "Nasby" of the South, philosopher and optimist, who did so much to relieve Southern gloom during the reconstruction era; there was "Orpheus C. Kerr," who made ludicrous the office-seeking mania of the times; and, greatest of them all, including even "Nasby," there was Thomas Nast, who worked not with pen but with pencil.
No sketch of American humor can ignore Nast. His art was constructive and compelling. It led the public; it created a new humorous atmosphere, one distinctively original and distinctively American. Nast was the father of American caricature. It was he who first made effective the topical cartoon for a leader; who first portrayed an individual by some single trait or peculiarity of apparel; and who first made use of symbolic animals in caricature, as the Tammany tiger, the Democratic jackass, and the Republican elephant—all three of them creations of Nast. His work is peculiarly significant. He created a new reading public. Even the illiterate could read the cartoons during the war period and the Tweed ring days, and it was their reading that put an end to the evils portrayed. General Grant when asked, "Who is the foremost figure in civil life developed by the Rebellion?" replied instantly, "I think Thomas Nast. He did as much as any one man to preserve the Union and bring the war to an end."[23]
In all the humorous writings of the period there was a deep undercurrent of wisdom. Ever since the days of Franklin, the typical American has been a maker of aphorisms quaintly expressed. The man who for years has wrestled with Nature on frontier or farm has evolved a philosophy of his own. American life has tended to produce unique individualities: "Sam Slicks," "Natty Bumppos," "Pudd'nhead Wilsons," "David Harums," and "Silas Laphams,"—men rich in self-gained wisdom, who talk in aphorisms like Lincoln's, "Don't swap horses when you are crossing a stream."
There has been evolved what may be called the American type of aphorism—the concentrated bit of wisdom, old it may be, but expressed in such a quaint and striking way as to bring surprise and laughter. The humor may come from the homeliness of the expression, or the unusual nature of the compared terms, or the ludicrous image brought suddenly to the mind. Examples are easily found: "Flattery is like kolone water, tew be smelt of, but not swallowed"; "It is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of paradise"; "The man who blows his own trumpet generally plays a solo"; and "A reasonable amount of fleas is good fer a dog—keeps him from broodin' over bein' a dog."
The leader of the latter-day proverbialists was Henry Wheeler Shaw, a native of Massachusetts, a student for a time at Hamilton College, and then for twenty years a deckhand, farmer, and auctioneer in Ohio. He was forty before he began to write. His "Essay on the Mule," 1859, found no favor. Rewritten the next year in phonetic spelling and submitted to a New York paper as "A Essa on the Muel, bi Josh Billings," it became quickly famous. The people of the early seventies wanted local color. the tang, as it were, of wild fruit,—life, fresh, genuine, and first-hand. They gave a languid approval to Holmes's Poet of the Breakfast Table, but bought enormous editions of Josh Billings' Farmers' Allmanax. The edition of 1870 sold 90,000 copies in three months; that of 1871 sold no fewer than 127,000.
The humor of "Josh Billings" is confined to his aphorisms. In his longer writings and indeed in his lectures, as we read them to-day, he is flat and insufferable. He has little of the high spirits and zest and lightness of "Phœnix" and "Ward": he began his humorous work too late in life for such effects; but he surpasses them all in seriousness and moral poise. That the times demanded misspelling and clownishness is to be deplored, for Shaw was a philosopher, broad and sane; how broad and sane one can see best in Uncle Esek's Wisdom, a column contributed for years to the Century Magazine, and, at the request of J. G. Holland, printed in ordinary spelling.
"With me everything must be put in two or three lines," he once declared, but his two or three lines are always as compressed as if written by Emerson. He deals for the most part with the moral side of life with a common sense as sane as Franklin's. So wide was the field of his work that one may find quotations from him on nearly every question that is concerned with conduct. His stamp is on all he wrote. One may quote from him at random and be sure of wisdom:
The best cure for rheumatism is to thank the Lord it ain't the gout.
Building air castles is a harmless business as long as you don't attempt to live in them.
Politeness haz won more viktorys than logick ever haz.
Jealousy is simply another name for self-love.
Faith was given to man to lengthen out his reason.
What the moral army needs just now is more rank and file and fewer brigadier generals.
The great tide of comic writings became fast and furious in the seventies. In 1872 no fewer than nine comic papers were established in New York alone: The Brickbat, The Cartoon, Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun, The Jolly Joker, Nick-nax, Merryman's Monthly, The Moon, The Phunny Fellow, The Thistle, and perhaps others. Some died after the first issue, some persisted longer. Every year saw its own crop of comics rise, flourish and die. In 1877 Puck was established, the first really successful comic paper in America; in 1881 appeared Judge; and in 1883 Life, the first to succeed without politics.
Very little of all this humorous product can be called literature; the greater part of it already has passed into oblivion; yet for all that the movement that produced it cannot be neglected by one who would study the period. The outburst of humor in the sixties and the seventies was indeed significant. Poor though the product may have been, it was American in background and spirit, and it was drawn from no models save life itself. For the first time America had a national literature in the broad sense of the word, original and colored by its own soil. The work of every one in the school was grounded in sincerity. The worker saw with his own eyes and he looked only for truth. He attacked sentimentality and gush and all that was affected and insincere. Born of the great moral awakening of the war, the humor had in it the Cervantes spirit. Nast, for instance, in his later years declared, "I have never allowed myself to attack anything I did not believe in my soul to be wrong and deserving of the worst fate that could befall it." The words are significant. The laughter of the period was not the mere crackling of thorns under a pot, not a mere fusillade of quips and puns; there was depth in it and purpose. It swept away weakness and wrongs. It purged America and brought sanity and health of soul. From the work of the humorists followed the second accomplishment of the period: those careful studies in prose and verse of real life in the various sections of America.
George Horatio Derby. (1823–1861.) Phœnixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John Phœnix, N. Y. 1855; The Squibob Papers, N. Y. 1859; Phœnixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John Phœnix. Introduction by John Kendrick Bangs. Illustrated by Kemble. N. Y. 1903.
Charles Farrar Browne. (1834–1867.) Artemus Ward, His Book. N. Y. 1862; Artemus Ward, His Travels. 1. Miscellaneous. 2. Among the Mormons, N. Y. 1865; Betsey Jane Ward. Hur Book of Goaks. N. Y. 1866; Artemus Ward in London and Other Papers. N. Y. 1867; Artemus Ward's Panorama as Exhibited in Egyptian Hall, London. Edited by his executors, T. W. Robertson and E. P. Hingston. N. Y. 1869; The Genial Showman, London, 1870; Artemus Ward, His Works Complete, with a biographical sketch by M. D. Landon. N. Y. 1875; The Complete Works of Artemus Ward. London. 1910.
David Ross Locke. (1833–1888.) Divers Views, Opinions, and Prophecies of Yours Trooly, Petroleum V. Nasby. 1865; Nasby Papers. With an Introduction by G. A. Sala. London. 1866; Swingin' Round the Cirkle. By Petroleum V. Nasby. His Ideas of Men, Politics, and Things, During 1866. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1867; Ekkoes from Kentucky. By Petroleum V. Nasby. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1868; The Struggles (Social, Financial, and Political) of Petroleum V. Nasby. With an Introduction by Charles Sumner. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Boston. 1872; Nasby in Exile. Toledo. 1882.
Thomas Nast. (1840–1902.) Thomas Nast. His Period and His Pictures. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 1904; Life and Letters of Thomas Nast, Albert Bigelow Paine, 1910.
Henry Wheeler Shaw. Josh Billings: His Sayings. New York. 1865; Josh Billings on Ice and Other Things. N. Y. 1868; Josh Billings' Farmers' Allmanax for the Year 1870. N. Y. 1870; Old Probabilities; Contained in One Volume. Farmers' Allmanax 1870–1880. N. Y. 1879; Josh Billings' Old Farmers' Allmanax, 1870–1879. N. Y. 1902; Complete Comic Writings of Josh Billings with biographical introduction. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. N. Y.; Life of Henry W. Shaw, by F. B. Smith. 1883.
With Mark Twain, American literature became for the first time really national. He was the first man of letters of any distinction to be born west of the Mississippi. He spent his boyhood and young manhood near the heart of the continent, along the great river during the vital era when it was the boundary line between known and unknown America, and when it resounded from end to end with the shouts and the confusion of the first great migration from the East; he lived for six thrilling years in the camps and the boom towns and the excited cities of Nevada and California; and then, at thirty-one, a raw product of the raw West, he turned his face to the Atlantic Coast, married a rare soul from one of the refined families of New York State, and settled down to a literary career in New England, with books and culture and trips abroad, until in his old age Oxford University could confer upon him—"Tom Sawyer," whose schooling in the ragged river town had ended before he was twelve—the degree that had come to America only as borne by two or three of the Brahmins of New England. Only America, and America at a certain period, could produce a paradox like that.
Mark Twain interpreted the West from the standpoint of a native. The group of humorists who had first brought to the East the Western spirit and the new laughter had all of them been reared in the older sections. John Phœnix and Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were born in New England, and Nasby and many of the others were natives of New York State. All of them in late boyhood had gone West as to a wonderland and had breathed the new atmosphere as something strange and exhilarating, but Mark Twain was native born. He was himself a part of the West; he removed from it so as to see it in true perspective, and so became its best interpreter. Hawthorne had once expressed a wish to see some part of America "where the damned shadow of Europe has never fallen." Mark Twain spent his life until he was thirty in such unshadowed places. When he wrote he wrote without a thought of other writings; it was as if the West itself was dictating its autobiography.
The father of Mark Twain, John Clemens, a dreamer and an idealist, had left Virginia with his young wife early in the twenties to join the restless tide that even then was setting strongly westward. Their first settlement was at Gainsborough, Tennessee, where was born their first son, Orion, but they remained there not long. Indeed, like all emigrants of their type, they remained nowhere long. During the next ten or eleven years five other children were born to them at four different stations along the line of their westward progress. When the fifth child arrived, to be christened Samuel Langhorne, they were living at Florida, Missouri, a squalid little hamlet fifty miles west of the Mississippi. That was November 30, 1835. Four years later they made what proved to be their last move, settling at Hannibal, Missouri, a small river town about a hundred miles above St. Louis. Here it was that the future Mark Twain spent the next fourteen years, those formative years between four and eighteen that determine so greatly the bent of the later life.
The Hannibal of the forties and the fifties was hardly a town one would pick deliberately for the education of a great man of letters. It lay just a few miles above the northern line of Pike County—that Pike County, Missouri, that gave name to the shiftless, hand-to-mouth, ague-shaken type of humanity later to be celebrated so widely as the Pike. Hannibal was not a Pike community, but it was typically southwestern in its somnolent, slave-holding, care-free atmosphere. The one thing that forever rescued it from the commonplace was the River, the tremendous Mississippi, source of endless dreams and romance. Mark Twain has given us a picture, perfect as an etching, of this river and the little town that nestled beside it:
After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breast, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in water-melon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered around the "levee"; a pile of "skids" on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the "point" above the town, and the "point" below, bounding the river glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of these remote "points"; instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, "S-t-e-a-m boat a-comin'!" and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time.... The furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gage-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight, and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.[25]
It was the romance of this river, the vastness and the mystery of it, the great unknown world which lay beyond those "points" where all things disappeared, that made of the boy a restless soul, a dreamer and an idealist—that made of him indeed the Mark Twain of the later years. His books nowhere rise into the pure serene of literature unless touched at some point by this magic stream that flowed so marvelously through his boyhood. The two discoverers of the Mississippi were De Soto and Mark Twain.
The first crisis in the boy's life came in his twelfth year, when the death of his father sent him as an apprentice to a country newspaper office, that most practical and most exacting of all training schools for youth. Two years on the Missouri Courier, four years on the Hannibal Journal, then the restlessness of his clan sent him wandering into the East even as it had sent Artemus Ward and Nasby into the West. For fifteen months he served as compositor in New York City and Philadelphia, then a great homesickness for the river came upon him. From boyhood it had been his dream to be the pilot of a Mississippi steamboat; all other professions seemed flat and lifeless compared with that satisfying and boundless field of action; and it is not strange that in April, 1857, we find him installed as Horace Bixby's "cub" at the beginning of a new career.
During the next four years he gave himself heart and soul to the almost superhuman task of committing to memory every sandbar and point and landmark in twelve hundred miles of a shifting, treacherous river. The difficulties he has explained fully in his book. It was a college course of four years, and no man ever had a better one. To quote his own words:
In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.[26]
It taught him far more than this. The pilot of a great Mississippi boat was a man with peculiar responsibilities. The lives of the passengers and the safety of the cargo were absolutely in his hands. His authority was above even the captain's. Only picked men of courage and judgment with a self-reliance that never wavered in any crisis were fit material for pilots. To quote Horace Bixby, the most noted of them all:
There were no signal lights along the shore in those days, and no searchlights on the vessels; everything was blind, and on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting sand-bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be founded on absolute certainty.[27]
Under such conditions men were valued only for what they actually could do. There was no entrance into the inner circle of masters of the river save through genuineness and real efficiency. Sentimentalizing and boasting and sham died instantly in that stern atmosphere. To live for four years in daily contact with such men taught one coarseness of speech and an appalling fluency in the use of profanity, but it taught one at the same time to look with supreme contempt upon inefficiency and pretense.
The "cub" became at length a pilot, to be entrusted after a time with some of the finest boats on the river. He became very efficient in his hard-learned profession so conspicuously so that he won the commendation even of Bixby, who could say in later years, "Sam Clemens never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once when he got aground for a few hours in the bagasse (cane) smoke, with no damage to any one."[28] But the war put a sudden end to the piloting. The river was closed, and in April, 1861, he went reluctantly back to Hannibal. "I loved the profession far better than any I have ever followed since," he declared in his later years, "and I took a measureless pride in it." It is very possible that but for the war and the change which it wrought upon the river, Mark Twain might have passed his whole life as a Mississippi pilot.
After a few weeks in a self-recruited troop that fell to pieces before it could join the Confederate army, the late pilot, now twenty-six years old, started by stage coach across the Plains with his brother Orion, who had just been appointed secretary to the new Governor of Nevada. It was Mark Twain's entry upon what, in college terms, may be called his graduate course. It was six years long and it covered one of the most picturesque eras in the history of Western America.
For a few restive months he remained at Carson City as his brother's assistant, then in characteristic fashion he broke away to join the excited tide of gold seekers that was surging through all the mountains of Nevada. During the next year he lived in mining camps with prospectors and eager claim-holders. Luck, however, seemed against him; at least it promised him little as a miner, and when the Virginia City Enterprise, to which he had contributed letters, offered him a position on its staff of reporters, he jumped at the opportunity.
Now for two years he lived at the very heart of the mining regions of the West, in Virginia City, the home of the Comstock lode, then at its highest boom. Everything about him—the newness and rawness of things, the peculiar social conditions, the atmosphere of recklessness and excitement, the money that flowed everywhere in fabulous quantities—everything was unique. Even the situation of the city was remarkable. Hingston, who visited it with Artemus Ward while Mark Twain was still a member of the Enterprise staff, speaks of it as "perched up on the side of Mt. Davidson some five or six thousand feet above sea level, with a magnificent view before us of the desert.... Nothing but arid rocks and sandy plains sprinkled with sage brush. No village for full two hundred miles, and any number of the worst type of Indians—the Goshoots—agreeably besprinkling the path."[29] Artemus Ward estimated its population at twelve thousand. He was impressed by its wildness, "its splendid streets paved with silver ore," "its unadulterated cussedness," its vigilance committee "which hangs the more vicious of the pestiferous crowd," and its fabulous output of silver which is "melted down into bricks the size of common house bricks, then loaded into huge wagons, each drawn by eight and twelve mules, and sent off to San Francisco."[30]
It was indeed a strange area of life that passed before the young Mississippi pilot. For two winters he was sent down to report the new legislature of the just-organized territory, and it was while engaged in this picturesque gala task that he sent back his letters signed for the first time Mark Twain. That was the winter of 1863. It was time now for him to seek a wider field. Accordingly, the following May he went down to San Francisco, where at length he found employment on the Morning Call.
Now for the first time the young reporter found himself in a literary atmosphere. Poets and sketch-writers and humorists were everywhere. There was at least one flourishing literary journal, the Golden Era, and its luxuriously appointed office was the literary center of the Pacific Coast. "Joaquin Miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him then, having seen Adah Isaacs Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr, Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore, W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock assembled there at one time."[31] Charles Henry Webb was just starting a literary weekly, the Californian, and when, a year later, Bret Harte was made its editor, Mark Twain was added to the contributing staff. It was the real beginning of his literary career. He received now helpful criticism. In a letter written in after years to Thomas Bailey Aldrich he says:
Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.[32]
To the Californian and the Era he now contributed that series of sketches which later was drawn upon for material for his first published book. But the old restlessness was upon him again. He struck out into the Tuolumne Hills with Jim Gillis as a pocket miner and for months lived as he could in shacks and camps, panning between drenching showers worthless gravel, expecting every moment to find gold. He found no gold, but he found what was infinitely richer. In later years in a letter to Gillis he wrote:
It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days. Still it shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming good fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's Camp—I mean that day we sat around the tavern and heard that chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot. And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over it out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up. I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since.[33]
The publication in New York, May 1, 1867, of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches and the delivery a week later by the author of The Jumping Frog of a lecture on the Sandwich Islands marks the end of the period of preparation in Mark Twain's life. A new American author had arrived.
Send this Mississippi pilot, printer, adventurer, miner in rough camps of the Sierras, to Paris, Italy, Constantinople, and the Holy Land, and what will be his impressions? For an answer we must read The Innocents Abroad. It will be no Outre Mer, we are certain of that, and no Pencillings by the Way. Before a line of it was written an atmosphere had been created unique in American literature, for where, save in the California of 1867, was there ever optimism, nay, romanticism, that could reply instantly to the young reporter who asked to be sent on a Don Quixote pilgrimage to Europe and the Orient, "Go. Twelve hundred and fifty dollars will be paid for you before the vessel sails, and your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the Alta California"?
It was not to be a tour of Europe, as Longfellow and Willis and Taylor had made it, the pilgrimage of a devotee to holy shrines; it was to be a great picnic with sixty-seven in the picnic party. Moreover, the recorder of it was bound by his instructions to report it in the style that had won him California fame. It was to be a Western book, written by a Westerner from the Western standpoint, but this does not imply that his Western readers expected an illiterate production full of coarseness and rude wit. California had produced a school of poets and romancers; she had serious literary journals, and she was proud of them. The letters, if California was to set her stamp of approval upon them, must have literary charm; they must have, moreover, freshness and originality; and they must sparkle with that spirit of humor which already had begun to be recognized as a native product.
We open the book and linger a moment over the preface:
Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretence of showing any one how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea—other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.
I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me—for I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not.
Let us read the book straight through. We are impressed with the fact that, despite the supposition of its first readers, it is not primarily a humorous work. It is a genuine book of travels. It is first of all an honest record, even as its author averred. In the second place it is the book of a young man, a young man on a lark and full of the highest spirits. The world is good—it is a good show, though it is full of absurdities and of humbugs that should be exposed. The old stock jokes of the grand tour—the lack of soap, the charge for candles, the meeting of supposed foreigners who break unexpectedly into the best of English, and all the well-known others—were new to the public then and they came with freshness. Then it is the book of one who saw, even as he claimed, with his own eyes. This genuine American, with his training on the river and the wild frontier where men and things are what they are, no more and no less, will be impressed only with genuineness. He will describe things precisely as he sees them. Gibraltar "is pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive of a 'gob' of mud on the end of a shingle"; of the Coliseum: "everybody recognizes at once that 'looped and windowed' bandbox with a side bitten out"; and of a famous river: "It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very passable river if they would pump some water into it." That was not written for a joke: it was the way the Arno honestly impressed the former Mississippi pilot.
He is not always critical. Genuineness and real worth never fail to impress him. Often he stands before a landscape, a city, a cathedral, as enthusiastic as any of the older school of travelers. The book is full of vivid descriptions, some of them almost poetic in their spirit and diction. But things must be what they pretend to be, or they will disgust him. Everywhere there is scorn for the mere echoer of the enthusiasm of others. He will not gush over an unworthy thing even if he knows the whole world has gushed over it. Da Vinci's "Last Supper," painted on a dilapidated wall and stained and scarred and dimmed, may once have been beautiful, he admits, but it is not so now. The pilgrims who stand before it "able to speak only in catchy ejaculations of rapture" fill him with wrath. "How can they see what is not visible?" The work of the old masters fills him always with indignation. They painted not Hebrews in their scriptural pieces, but Italians. "Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons was more prominent to me and claimed my attention more than the charms of color." "Raphael pictured such infernal villains as Catherine and Marie de Medicis seated in heaven conversing familiarly with the Virgin Mary and the angels (to say nothing of higher personages), and yet my friends abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old masters."
Here we have a note that was to become more and more emphatic in Mark Twain's work with every year he lived: his indignation at oppression and insincerity. The cathedrals of Italy lost their beauty for him when he saw the misery of the population. He stood before the Grand Duomo of Florence. "Like all other men I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said 'O sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?' Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that cathedral."
Everywhere he strikes out at sentimentality. When he learns how Abelard deliberately sacrificed Héloïse to his own selfish ideals, he bursts out: "The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my ignorance! I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled to any tearful attentions or not." He is eager to see a French "grissette," but having seen one, bursts out in true Artemus Ward fashion: "Aroint thee, wench! I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him. Thus topples to the earth another idol of my infancy." The story of Petrarch's love for Laura only fills him with pity for the outrageously treated "Mr. Laura," the unknown husband of the heroine, who bore the burden but got none of the glory, and when they tell the thrilling legend of the old medieval castle, he makes only the comment, "Splendid legend—splendid lie—drive on!"