ing farce." When he began to write, the contemplated short story swiftly expanded, and there developed unexpectedly under his hand serious characters and a tragic situation unrelated to the initiating impulse. After long study he extracted the "farce" by "Cæsarean operation," and appended it with amusing explanations to the "tragedy" which it had set in motion. Pudd'nhead Wilson, disfigured by vestiges of the farce in the incredible Italian twins, is, like The Gilded Age, a discordant medley with powerful character-drawing in Roxana and her half-breed son, and with a somewhat feebly indicated novelty in the philosophical detective Pudd'nhead.

The last certified claimant for a position in the front rank of the novels is Joan of Arc (1896), a romance containing as its core the ascertained facts concerning one of the most problematic figures in secular history, and as its important imaginative expansion Mark Twain's conception of her familiar charm and his pictures of the battles and scenes of state and trials through which she passed. As in the somewhat similar case of the supernatural powers of Jesus, of which he was certainly sceptical, he says nothing to raise a doubt of the Maid's divine assistance; he neither explained nor attempted to explain away Joan's mystery. Her character, her Voices, and her mission he presents throughout with an air of absolute reverence and indeed at times with almost breathless adoration. For the reader in whom illusion is not destroyed by constant involuntary attention to the line where fact meets fiction the total impression is doubtless both beautiful and deeply moving. In the last section, at least, which deals with the trial and martyrdom, the most impatient reader of historical romance can hardly escape the pang of actuality; he is too near the facts. Recognizing that the book was quite out of his customary vein, Mark Twain published it first anonymously; yet in 1908 he wrote: "I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; 12 years of preparation & 2 years of writing. The others needed no preparation, & got none." This much we must admit: we are glad to have Joan of Arc on the shelf beside A Connecticut Yankee to complete our conception of that versatile and representative American whom we call Mark Twain.

Without it, and its little companion-piece, In Defence of Harriet Shelley (1894), we should have a harder task to prove, against those that take him for a hard unsanctified philistine, his invincible chivalry and fineness in relation to womankind, feelings precious in a free society, and fostered, as we like to think, by a thoroughly established American tradition.

But if we value a book in proportion to its saturation with its author's most distinctive qualities and in proportion to its power, exerted or latent, to affect the general literary current, we shall hardly rate Joan of Arc among Mark Twain's most interesting or significant books. In its utterly reverent treatment of the traditional and the supernatural it impresses one as a counterpoise obviously unequal to the task of making a balance with the great burden of naturalistic and radically iconoclastic writing in the other scale.

Mark Twain counts as an influence because he is an innovator. The great notes of his innovation from Innocents Abroad to A Connecticut Yankee are: first, the disillusioned treatment of history; second, the fearless exploitation of "the natural man," or, the next thing to it, "the free-born American"; and, lastly, a certain strain of naturalistic pessimism. In the first class go the foreign-travel books, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee; and the impulse properly proceeding from them is imaginative satire. In the second class go Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, Adam's Diary, and Eve's Diary; and from such work has proceeded an observable impulse to the cultivation of the indigenous, the elemental, the primitive, and, perhaps, the brutal and the sensual. For the third class one can glean representative paragraphs only here and there among the writings published in Mark Twain's lifetime; but the posthumously published philosophical dialogue What is Man? (1905) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), a romance, and some of the letters are steeped in a naturalistic melancholy and tinged with a philosophical bitterness of which American literature before Mark Twain showed hardly a trace. That strain seems likely to be influential too, and, unfortunately, not always in connection with the fine bravado of his American faith, which occasionally required an antidote to its natural insolence.

CHAPTER IX

Minor Humorists

HE eccentric and racy touch of the Civil War humorists' vanished early in the seventies, and humour underwent

TH

a period of organization, levelling, and standardization. Its cruder manifestations disappeared; editors no longer burst upon their readers with the discovery of unsuspected females -Ann Tiquity, Ann Gelic, and Ann O'Dyne-in Webster's Unabridged; parodying became less inevitable; and "reverses such as P. T. Barnum's

Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel

lost their fascination for keen minds. The dialect of the immigrant replaced the twang of the crossroads. And at the same time the native flavour and homely philosophy of the older humour ceased to illuminate the work of the fun-makers.

The channels of humorous journalism were meanwhile clearly marked out. Casual newspaper paragraphers like J. M. Bailey of The Danbury [Connecticut] News, C. B. Lewis of The Detroit Free Press, and R. J. Burdette of The Burlington [Iowa] Hawkeye gave their otherwise obscure journals a nation-wide prominence, and demonstrated the commercial value of daily humour. Their books, compiled from newspaper clippings, have, however, long been covered by les neiges d'antan. Eugene Field set the measure of the humorist's output at one column a day "leaded agate, first line brevier." He aspired also to produce work of permanent literary quality. His standards in both respects are kept up at the present time by such experienced "colyumists" as Bert Leston Taylor ("B. L. T.") of 'See Book II, Chap. XIX.

The Chicago Tribune and in New York by Franklin P. Adams ("F. P. A.") of The Tribune and Don Marquis of The Evening Sun. The column that soothes tired business men on train, subway, or trolley has long been supplemented for family, club, and barber-shop consumption by the humorous weeklies: Puck, founded in 1877; Judge, 1881; and most notably Life, 1883. Taking their cue rather from the best of the college funny papers, such as The Harvard Lampoon, founded 1876, than from Punch, these weekly magazines have supplied the public with its best periodical humour. H. C. Bunner,' one time editor of Puck, and John Ames Mitchell and Edward S. Martin, founders of Life, should be mentioned among the writers who have given a high tone to comic journalism.

Besides its submission to the great American genius for commercialization, whatever national quality may be found in the humour of the last half century consists mainly in a tendency to regard fun-making as an end in itself rather than as an agent to criticism. Though no longer relying on the mechanical misspellings of Artemus Ward or Josh Billings, the next crop of humorists wrought effects in dialect rather than in character and preferred absurdities of their own invention to incongruities observed in the social scheme. Irony was alien to their minds, and satire, when they used it, took for its victims Mormons, mothers-in-law, undertakers, and other beings whose removal would in no way imperil the pillars of society. Jesters made it their function to tickle the sides of a nation content and prosperous, conscious of having made in the Civil War the great sacrifice of a generation, and confident after Grant's election that the fruits of victory would be apportioned among the truly deserving. There may be significance in the fact that the two comic writers who deserted journalism for other professions became one a popular preacher the other a successful manufacturer and conspicuous advocate of high tariff. At any rate, the words prefixed to one of the most widely circulated humorous books of the time might well have served as a motto for them all: "Fun is the most conservative element of society, and it ought to be cherished and encouraged by all lawful

Such being the case, the typical work of such humorists cannot stand high in comparison with the subtler manifestations of the Comic Spirit. That, at least, would be the conclusion if American humour were regarded as a mere stage in an inevitable progress from pioneer jocularity to urbane irony. But it is possible that the national preference for unreflective merriment is not thoughtless and immature, but deliberate, permanent, and full grown. While Americans can picture Lincoln deferring discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation to read aloud a chapter from Artemus Ward, the laughter of sheer full-throated relief may well seem to them more manly than the comedy that wakens thoughtful laughter. American humour, then, may claim to be of a different school from the comedy of the Old World, operating on human nature by the lenitives and tonics of mirth instead of by the scalpel of criticism.

One of the most decided believers in recreative humour was a man of many interests whose humorous writing was originally done merely for his own amusement. Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Princeton, after three years of student life at Heidelberg and Munich and three days as captain of a barricade in the Paris revolution of 1848, found the practice of law in the city of his birth a listless occupation. Turning journalist, he worked successively as managing editor under P. T. Barnum and R. W. Griswold. He gave early and able support to Lincoln's administration, besides seeing service in an emergency regiment during the Gettysburg campaign. The later years of his long life were spent in cultivating a wide circle of friends in America and Europe, in a disinterested and successful effort to establish industrial art as a branch of public education, and in the study of gipsy lore, tinkers' language, Indian legends, Italian witches, and all things exotic, mysterious, and occult. During this time he wrote with extreme fluency more than fifty books on the most varied subjects, not to mention uncounted contributions to periodicals. He would doubtless have wished to be remembered chiefly for his services to education.

His generation, however, persisted in thinking of him exclusively as the author of Hans Breitmann's Ballads, often to his annoyance identifying him with the hero of his lays. Indis