THE HUMORISTS The National period of American literature, which began in the sixties, was marked by the appearance of a new type of humor,- one that had been evolved gradually from the national life. It was of western birth: it came from the settlement of the great mid-land region, from the steam-boats of the Mississippi, from the camps of the gold coast, and the bivouacs of the civil war. It is impossible to sample all the leading humorists of the period: one can only take a few typical figures. Five, perhaps, are enough to illustrate the various elements that went to make up the new product. Pioneer humorists there had been, like Longstreet and Harris and Baldwin, but the real father of the new school was an engineer, George Horatio Derby, who found relief at times from the perplexities of an exacting profession by writing his "John Phoenix " papers, in which he embodied the spirit of the early California where for a long time he was stationed. In his "Phoenixiana " we find the elements of exaggeration, irreverence, euphemistic statement, understatement, and Yankee aphorism. The second humorist in the school was Charles Farrar Browne, a Maine Yankee, who worked his way into the middle west, established one of the first of the newspaper funny columns, lectured extensively, at one time reaching the California coast, and finally went to London, the complete winning of which criticality made him universally famous. By the irony of fate, however, he was to die of consumption just at the moment of victory. His "Artemus Ward" papers are unique. They are redolent of a droll personality. He added cacography to the stock of American humorous devices, and he added also whimsical incongruity, the element of the grotesquely unexpected. Ever since the day of Franklin aphorism had been a prominent American product; it remained for Henry Wheeler Shaw to become the American comic Solomon. Shaw, or "Josh Billings," as he called himself, had had a varied career as college student, deck-hand on the Ohio River, farmer, and auctioneer in western towns, before he began to write. In 1859, when he was forty, he published an "Essay on the Mule" and from that time his writings became more and more familiar until his name was well-known in every American household, and deservedly so, for behind his grotesque spelling is real wisdom. From his quaint store of aphorisms one may construct the very soul of our Americanism. In the great number of political satirists called forth by the war the two leaders perhaps were David Ross Locke, on the Northern side, and Charles H. Smith on the Southern. The work of both of these men helped greatly in the troubled days in which they wrote. Satire, however, generally perishes with the period that calls it forth, and even now the writings of the two men are unintelligible unless accompanied by numerous foot-notes. 66 |