THE LAUGHTER OF THE WEST
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.
I
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.
II
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 Phoenix" 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 _Phoenixiana_, 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 Phoenix'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 _Phoenixiana_ it amounts to
a mannerism. He tells the most astonishing impossibilities and then
naively 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 Phoenix _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:
Oh, we'll soon be thar
In the land of gold,
Through the forest old,
O'er the mounting cold,
With spirits bold--
Oh, we come, we come,
And we'll soon be thar.
Gee up, Bolly! whoo, up, whoo haw!"
Not much was added to Western humor after Derby. Mark Twain's earliest
manner had much in it that smacks of "Phoenix." The chapters entitled,
"Phoenix Takes an Affectionate Leave of San Francisco," "Phoenix is
on the Sea," and "Phoenix 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 "Phoenix": they learned their art as he had
learned it from contact with the new West. All drew from the same model.
III
For the new humor, which was to be the first product of the new period
in American literature, was Western humor of the "John Phoenix" 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.
IV
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 Phoenix, 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 Phoenix'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 Phoenix was a naive
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.
V
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.
VI
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]
VII
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 "Phoenix" 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.
VIII
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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY[24]
GEORGE HORATIO DERBY. (1823-1861.) _Phoenixiana, or Sketches and
Burlesques by John Phoenix_, N. Y. 1855; _The Squibob Papers_,
N. Y. 1859; _Phoenixiana, or Sketches and Burlesques by John
Phoenix_. 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.