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.

Like Artemus Ward, later still, editor of a

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. he was a printer, later a reporter, and 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

emerges into literary quality, if at all, only in the form of a reckless humour whose history shows something like development. This humour is always extravagant, generally deficient in taste, and mostly ephemeral; but its underlying trait seems like that of the humour which has enlivened our standard literature. Our American temper has a shrewd sense of fact. Its instinctive conception of fun seems to lie in a preposterous confusion of hard fact with wild nonsense, complicated and freshly confused by a superficially grave manner. Its jumps from serious things to things which no human being could take seriously, and back again, are incalculably sudden. What looks like a vital trait in all this is the tendency among the "funny men" of our newspapers to deal with fact in growingly mature spirit. Artemus Ward came nearer life than John Phoenix, Nasby than Artemus Ward; and, on the whole, the more recent of our newspaper humourists seem rather more firmly poised than Nasby. So far, this phase of American literature has produced nothing which can reasonably be expected to last. From this broadly popular origin, however, may perhaps come in future some lasting development. At least, if a man should appear in America with such gifts as now and again have made the humourists of other countries immortal, that man would find ready a vehicle of expression and a public which might help him to produce works of humour at once permanent and characteristically national.

Though newspapers are incalculably the most popular vehicles of modern American expression, there are other such vehicles generally familiar to our educated classes. The principal of these are the illustrated monthly magazines published in New York. These, which circulate by hundreds of thousands, and go from one end of the country to the other, provide the ordinary American citizen of to-day with his nearest approach to literature. A glance through any volume of any of them will show that the literary form which most luxuriantly flourishes in their pages is the short story. This de

ner.

velopment of short stories is partly a question of business. Short stories have usually been more profitable to writers and more convenient to editors than long novels; and at this moment poetry seems not to appeal to any considerable public taste. Partly, however, this prevalence of short stories seems nationally characteristic of American as distinguished from English men of letters. Of late, no doubt, England has produced one or two writers who do this kind of work extraordinarily well; there is no living American, for example, whose stories equal those of Mr. Kipling; but Mr. Kipling, a remarkable master of this difficult literary form, is a comparatively new phenomenon in English literature. From the days of Washington Irving, on the other hand, Americans have shown themselves able to write short stories rather better than anything else. The older short stories of America - Irving's and Poe's and even Hawthorne's were generally romantic in both impulse and manAccordingly, however local their sentiment may have been, and however local in certain cases their descriptive passages, they were not precisely documents from which local conditions might be inferred. The short stories of modern Americans differ from these by being generally realistic in impulse and local in detail. We have stories of decaying New England, stories of the Middle West, stories of the Ohio region and Chicago stories, stories of the Southwest, stories of the Rocky Mountains and of California, of Virginia and of Georgia. In plot these generally seem conventionally insignificant. Their characters, too, have hardly reached such development as to become recognised national types. These characters, however, are often typical of the regions which have suggested them; and the description of these regions is frequently rendered in elaborate detail with workmanlike effectiveness. On the whole, like all the literature of the moment, in England and in America alike, these short stories lack distinction. The people who write them, one is apt to feel, are not Olympian in temper, but Bohemian. Our Amer