strel shows, now tending to vanish in performances like those of London music halls. In these shows a number of men would daub their faces with burnt cork, would dress themselves in preposterous burlesque of the florid taste still characteristic of negroes, and sitting in a row would sing songs and tell stories. The songs were sometimes sentimental, the stories almost always extravagantly comic; but underlying one and all was an assumption that everybody who heard what the performers said was familiar with everything they knew, not only with local allusions and human nature, but also with the very names and personal oddities of the individuals they mentioned. To phrase the thing colloquially, the whole performance assumed that we were all in the crowd. You will find a touch of this temper in Falstaff, plenty of it in Sancho Panza; you will find it, too, in the conventional personages of the old European stage, -Policinello or Sganarelle; you will find it in the mountebanks who have plied their trade throughout human history. This temper is obviously akin to that broadly human feeling which underlies all great works of lasting art. The more we can assume that everybody is human, the more human our literary work will be.

Some such trait as this pervades the "funny" columns of American newspapers, particularly in the West; and it is mostly from these columns that American humour has emerged into what approach it has made to literary form. Generally, of course, this humour, like other recent phases of American expression, has come from men still living, and so is beyond our range; but at least three familiar humorous figures who are no longer with us typify the kind of literary impulse now in mind. The first was George Horatio Derby, an army officer, born of a good Massachusetts family in 1823, who spent a good deal of his life in the West, particularly in California. Here, under the name of John Phoenix, he took to writing whimsical letters for the newspapers, two volumes of which had been collected and published before his death in

1861. In their day, “Phœnixiana" and the "Squibob Papers," which grotesquely satirise life in California during the early days of American control there, were popular all over the country. To-day one feels their extravagance more than their fun; the whole thing seems overdone. John Phoenix, however, was undoubtedly among the earliest humourists of a school which has tended to produce better and better work.

About ten years after his time there came into notice a man whose name is still remembered both at home and in England. This was Charles Farrar Browne, born at Waterford, Maine, in 1834. At first a printer, then a newspaper man, he drifted to Ohio, where about 1858 he became a reporter on the Cleveland "Plain Dealer." For this he began to write, over the signature of Artemus Ward, humorous articles which carried both the "Plain Dealer" and his pseudonym all over the country. Just before the Civil War he took charge of a comic weekly newspaper in New York. The war brought this venture to an end; for the rest of his life he was a "funny" lecturer; he died in England on a lecturing tour in 1867. Like the humour of John Phoenix, that of Artemus Ward now seems tediously extravagant; but the essence of it lies in his inextricable confusion of fact and nonsense. He often assumes the character of a travelling showman, remotely resembling the late Mr. Barnum, in which character he has interviews not only with typical individuals of various classes, but with all sorts of notable persons, from Brigham Young to Queen Victoria. With all these he is on the most intimate terms; the fun lies chiefly in the grotesque incongruity between the persons concerned and what they say. Like Lowell in the " Biglow Papers," he emphasised his jests with mad misspelling and the like; but all his vagaries cannot conceal the sober confusion of fact and nonsense which groups his temper with that of Lowell and Irving and the other humourists of our standard literature. Essentially, however, as we have seen, Lowell and Irving and Holmes and the rest were

gentlemen and men of taste; poor Artemus Ward was neither. Personally he is said to have been so far from reputable that even in his palmy days as a Cleveland reporter the better sort of people in that Ohio city let him severely alone; and throughout the volumes in which his newspaper articles were from time to time collected, although you find no indecency, you will find no vestige of taste. The extreme extravagance of Artemus Ward, however, peculiarly commended him to many readers in England, who found his work so different from what they were used to, that they welcomed him as characteristically American.

In the history of American newspaper humour the grotesque extravagance of Artemus Ward stands midway between that of John Phoenix and that of the writers who are still at work. The personal career of the man, no longer living, who may be taken to represent this later stage of development resembled that of Artemus Ward. David Ross Locke was born in a country village of New York in 1833. Like Artemus Ward, he was a printer, later a reporter, and later still, editor of a local newspaper in Ohio. At the beginning of the Civil War he began to write political satires over the signature of Petroleum V. Nasby. The preposterousness of this pseudonym typifies the absurdity of his misspelt and otherwise eccentric style. His satire, however, which was widely circulated at a moment of national crisis, dealt with matters of significance. He had come intimately to know the border regions between the North and the South. He was a strong Union man; and with all the grotesque mannerisms of a newspaper humourist he satirised Southern character and those phases of Northern character which sympathised with the constitutional contentions of the Confederacy. Nasby's work, then, had in its day political importance; it really helped solidify and strengthen Union sentiment. In 1865, Mr. Locke became editor of the "Toledo Blade;" and he survived at Toledo, Ohio, until 1888. His work as a humourist, however,

belongs to the Civil War and to the disturbed ensuing administration of President Johnson, against whom some of his most pitiless satire was directed. The Nasby letters purport to come from a place called "Confederate X-Roads," and to be written by a good-for-nothing Southern politician with no redeeming trait except a Falstaffian presumption that everybody will agree with him. Addressing himself directly to the every-day readers of an Ohio newspaper, and popular throughout the Northern States, Nasby was at once a characteristic newspaper humourist and a satirist of considerable power. His work, then, has considerable interest for students of American political history.

Though, in general, American newspaper humour is not so significant, it has retained from Nasby's day the sort of contagious vitality found throughout his writings; and in one or two cases of men still living it has emerged into something more notable. In one case, indeed, it has resulted in literary work so characteristically American, and so widely varied, that while happily the author in question is not yet a posthumous subject for such study as ours, it is impossible not to mention his name. If there be any contemporary work at once thoroughly American, and, for all its errors of taste, full of indications that the writer's power would have been exceptional anywhere, it is that of Mr. Clemens, more widely known as Mark Twain.

On the whole, however, we may say of our great confused West, that just as surely as New England has made its mark in the literary history of America, so as yet this West has not. Its general literary condition resembles that of the South, and of New York in the days which have followed the Knickerbocker School. Its varied, swiftly changing life has not yet ripened into an experience which can possibly find lasting expression.

V

THE PRESENT TIME

So at last we come to the question of what America is doing in literature to-day. At this, of course, we must glance very generally. Living men, we decided long ago, are not within the scope of our study; we may properly inquire only what literary symptoms we discern in our new nation, which almost within our own time has tamed and settled the American continent from sea to sea.

Old New York, we saw, expressed itself in our first school of renascent writing, which withered away with the "Knickerbocker Magazine;" and modern New York seems doing little more than contemplate the forces from which by and by some newer and deeper literature may emerge. New England ripened into renascent expression; but its Renaissance is now a thing of the past, and in many aspects the New England of to-day seems otherwise past its prime. In the older South, literature was never highly developed; and the Civil War is hardly yet so remote as to allow the new South to have declared its final character. The West, too, has not yet reached maturity. The America of the future, however, seems likely to be a country in which the forces which have gathered separately may finally fuse into a centralised nationality more conscious and more powerful than we have yet known. It becomes interesting, then, to inquire what literary symptoms, if any, are common to our whole country, what kind of expression is now familiar throughout it.

The newspaper we have seen, for one thing, crude, sensational, and mostly addressed to the unthinking classes. It