Initial Studies in American Letters Part 9

L. H. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford poetess, formerly known as "the Hemans of America," but now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival, of New Haven, a shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his simpler poems, still in circulation, such as _To Seneca Lake_ and the _Coral Grove_. Another Hartford poet, Brainard--already spoken of as an early friend of Whittier--died young, leaving a few pieces which show that his lyrical gift was spontaneous and genuine, but had received little cultivation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald G.

Mitch.e.l.l, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our literature, by virtue of his charmingly written _Reveries of a Bachelor_, 1850, and _Dream Life_, 1852, stories which sketch themselves out in a series of reminiscences and lightly connected scenes, and which always appeal freshly to young men because they have that dreamy outlook upon life which is characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most important contribution made by Connecticut in that generation to the literary stock of America was the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher had been an influential preacher and theologian, and a st.u.r.dy defender of orthodoxy against Boston Unitarianism. Of his numerous sons and daughters, all more or less noted for intellectual vigor and independence, the most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, the great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy a man to give more than his spare moments to general literature. His sermons, lectures, and addresses were reported for the daily papers and printed in part in book form; but these lose greatly when divorced from the large, warm, and benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up of articles in the _Independent_ and the _Ledger_, such as _Star Papers_, 1855, and _Eyes and Ears_, 1862, contain many delightful _morceaux_ upon country life and similar topics, though they are hardly wrought with sufficient closeness and care to take a permanent place in letters. Like Willis's _Ephemera_ they are excellent literary journalism, but hardly literature.

We may close our retrospect of American literature before 1861 with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the time--the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn in 1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little attention, but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramping a vehicle for his need of expression, he discarded them for a kind of rhythmic chant, of which the following is a fair specimen:

"Press close, bare-bosom'd night! Press close, magnetic, nouris.h.i.+ng night!

Night of south winds! night of the few large stars!

Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night!"

The invention was not altogether a new one. The English translation of the psalms of David and of some of the prophets, the _Poems of Ossian_, and some of Matthew Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the _Strayed Reveller_, have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the old Anglo-Saxon poems, like _Beowulf_, and the Scripture paraphrases attributed to Caedmon. But this species of _oratio soluta_, carried to the lengths to which Whitman carried it, had an air of novelty which was displeasing to some, while to others, weary of familiar measures and jingling rhymes, it was refres.h.i.+ng in its boldness and freedom.

There is no consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his so-called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety of prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination of affectation and indecency; and that the Whitman _culte_ is a pa.s.sing "fad" of a few literary men, and especially of a number of English critics like Rossetti, Swinburne, Buchanan, etc., who, being determined to have something unmistakably American--that is, different from any thing else--in writings from this side of the water, before they will acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into discovering in Whitman "the poet of democracy." Others maintain that he is the greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is "cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse elements which poetry has usually left out--the ugly, the earthy, and even the disgusting; the "under side of things," which he holds not to be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these elements in the conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole cla.s.ses of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, particularly that ent.i.tled _Children of Adam_, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing objects without selection. His single expressions arc often unsurpa.s.sed for descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of the prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept lines like these:

"And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and pa.s.sed north."

Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the people--mult.i.tudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar. "I loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly egotistic, simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same as any other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has great tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the Was.h.i.+ngton hospitals--an experience which he has related in the _Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a slouch hat and with a flannel s.h.i.+rt open at the throat. His decriers allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra civilization--like Th.o.r.eau, though in a different way. But with all his shortcomings in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to read him because he feels so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such a l.u.s.ty confidence in his own immortality and in the prospects of the human race. Stripped of verbiage and repet.i.tion, his ideas are not many. His indebtedness to Emerson--who wrote an introduction to the _Leaves of Gra.s.s_--is manifest. He sings of man and not men, and the individual differences of character, sentiment, and pa.s.sion, the _dramatic_ elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too early to say what will be his final position in literary history. But it is noteworthy that the democratic ma.s.ses have not accepted him yet as their poet. Whittier and Longfellow, the poets of conscience and feeling, are the darlings of the American people. The admiration, and even the knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the literary cla.s.s. It is also not without significance as to the ultimate reception of his innovations in verse that he has numerous parodists, but no imitators. The tendency among our younger poets is not toward the abandonment of rhyme and meter, but toward the introduction of new stanza forms and an increasing carefulness and finish in the _technique_ of their art. It is observable, too, that in his most inspired pa.s.sages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank verse, for example, in the _Man-of-War-Bird_:

"Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm, Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc.;

and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and pentameters:

"Earth of s.h.i.+ne and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . .

Far-swooping, elbowed earth! rich, apple-blossomed earth."

Indeed, Whitman's most popular poem, _My Captain_, written after the a.s.sa.s.sination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little in form from ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will show:

"My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; The s.h.i.+p is anch.o.r.ed safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; From fearful trip the victor s.h.i.+p comes in with object won.

Exult, O sh.o.r.es, and ring, O bells!

But I, with mournful tread, Walk the deck, my captain lies Fallen, cold and dead."

This is from _Drum Taps_, a volume of poems of the civil war. Whitman has also written prose having much the same quality as his poetry: _Democratic Vistas_, _Memoranda of the Civil War_, and, more recently, _Specimen Days_. His residence of late years has been at Camden, New Jersey, where a centennial edition of his writings was published in 1876.

1. William Cullen Bryant. _Thanatopsis_. _To a Water-fowl_. _Green River_. _Hymn to the North Star_. _A Forest Hymn_. "_O Fairest of the Rural Maids_." _June_. _The Death of the Flowers_. _The Evening Wind_. _The Battle-Field_. _The Planting of the Apple-tree_. _The Flood of Years_.

2. John Greenleaf Whittier. _Ca.s.sandra Southwick_. _The New Wife and the Old_. _The Virginia Slave Mother_. _Randolph of Roanoke_.

_Barclay of Ury_. _The Witch of Wenham_. _Skipper Ireson's Ride_.

_Marguerite_. _Maud Muller_. _Telling the Bees_. _My Playmate_.

_Barbara Frietchie_. _Ichabod_. _Laus Deo_. _Snow-Bound_.

3. Edgar Allan Poe. _The Raven_. _The Bells_. _Israfel_. _Ulalume_.

_To Helen_. _The City in the Sea_. _Annabel Lee_. _To One in Paradise_. _The Sleeper_. _The Valley of Unrest_. _The Fall of the House of Usher_. _Ligeia_. _William Wilson_. _The Cask of Amontillado_. _The a.s.signation_. _The Masque of the Red Death_.

_Narrative of A. Gordon Pym_.

4. N. P. Willis. _Select Prose Writings_. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886.

5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. _Oldtown Folks_.

6. W. G. Simms, _The Partisan_. _The Yema.s.see_.

7. Bayard Taylor. _A Bacchic Ode_. _Hylas_. _Kubleh_. _The Soldier and the Pard_. _Sicilian Wine_. _Taurus_. _Serapion_. _The Metempsychosis of the Pine_. _The Temptation of Ha.s.san Ben Khaled_.

_Bedouin Song_. _Euphorion_. _The Quaker Widow_. _John Reid_.

_Lars_. _Views Afoot_. _By-ways of Europe_. _The Story of Kennett_.

_The Echo Club_.

8. Walt Whitman. _My Captain_. "_When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloomed_." _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. _Pioneers, O Pioneers_. _The Mystic Trumpeter_. _A Woman at Auction_. _Sea-sh.o.r.e Memoirs_. _Pa.s.sage to India_. _Mannahatta_. _The Wound Dresser_.

_Longings for Some_.

9. _Poets of America_. By E. C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885.

CHAPTER VII.

LITERATURE SINCE 1861.

A generation has nearly pa.s.sed since the outbreak of the civil war, and although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by tradition. It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared since its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was largely the work of writers who had already reached or pa.s.sed middle age. All of the more important authors described in the last three chapters survived the Rebellion except Poe, who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Th.o.r.eau and Hawthorne, who died in the second and fourth years of the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come. Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the Northern side, Horace Greeley's _American Conflict_, 1864-66; Vice-President Wilson's _Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America_, and J. W. Draper's _American Civil War_, 1868-70; on the Southern side Alexander H. Stephens's _Confederate States of America_, Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America_, and E. A. Pollard's _Lost Cause_.

These, with the exception of Dr. Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of being the work of actors in the political or military events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, therefore, partisan--in some instances pa.s.sionately partisan. A store-house of materials for the coming historian is also at hand in Frank Moore's great collection, the _Rebellion Record_; in numerous regimental histories of special armies, departments, and battles, like W.

Swinton's _Army of the Potomac_; in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders; in the "war papers," lately published in the _Century_ magazine, and in innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both sides.

The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark.

There were war-songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's Southern ballad, _Maryland, My Maryland_, sung to the old college air of _Lauriger Horatius_, and the grand martial chorus of _John Brown's Body_, an old Methodist hymn, to which the Northern armies beat time as they went "marching on." Randall's song, though spirited, was marred by its fire-eating absurdities about "vandals" and "minions" and "Northern sc.u.m," the cheap insults of the Southern newspaper press. To furnish the _John Brown_ chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her _Battle-Hymn of the Republic_, a n.o.ble poem, but rather too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers. Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and home-comings, of women waiting by desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who had gone to the war; or which celebrated individual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and heartbreaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were of too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. Among the best or the most popular of them were Kate Putnam Osgood's _Driving Home the Cows_, Mrs. Ethel Lynn Beers's _All Quiet Along the Potomac_; Forceythe Willson's _Old Sergeant_, and John James Piatt's _Riding to Vote_. Of the poets whom the war brought out, or developed, the most noteworthy were Henry Timrod, of South Carolina, and Henry Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the war Timrod was with the Confederate Army of the West, as correspondent for the _Charleston Mercury_, and in 1864 he became a.s.sistant editor of the _South Carolinian_, at Columbia.

Sherman's "march to the sea" broke up his business, and he returned to Charleston. A complete edition of his poems was published in 1873, six years after his death. The prettiest of all Timrod's poems is _Katie_, but more to our present purpose are _Charleston_--written in the time of blockade--and the _Unknown Dead_, which tells

"Of nameless graves on battle plains, Wash'd by a single winter's rains, Where, some beneath Virginian hills, And some by green Atlantic rills, Some by the waters of the West, A myriad unknown heroes rest."

When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. Finch, sang of these and of other graves in his beautiful Decoration Day lyric, _The Blue and the Gray_, which spoke the word of reconciliation and consecration for North and South alike.

Brownell, whose _Lyrics of a Day_ and _War Lyrics_ were published respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secretary to Farragut, on whose flag-s.h.i.+p, the _Hartford_, he was present at several great naval engagements, such as the "Pa.s.sage of the Forts" below New Orleans, and the action off Mobile, described in his poem, the _Bay Fight_. With some roughness and unevenness of execution Brownell's poetry had a fire which places him next to Whittier as the Korner of the civil war. In him, especially, as in Whittier, is that Puritan sense of the righteousness of his cause which made the battle for the Union a holy war to the crusaders against slavery:

"Full red the furnace fires must glow That melt the ore of mortal kind; The mills of G.o.d are grinding slow, But ah, how close they grind!

"To-day the Dahlgren and the drum Are dread apostles of his name; His kingdom here can only come By chrism of blood and flame."

One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore Winthrop, hardly known as a writer until the publication in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of his vivid sketches of _Was.h.i.+ngton as a Camp_, describing the march of his regiment, the famous New York Seventh, and its first quarters in the Capitol at Was.h.i.+ngton. A tragic interest was given to these papers by Winthrop's gallant death in the action of Big Bethel, June 10, 1861.

While this was still fresh in public recollection his ma.n.u.script novels were published, together with a collection of his stories and sketches reprinted from the magazines. His novels, though in parts crude and immature, have a dash and buoyancy--an out-door air about them--which give the reader a winning impression of Winthrop's personality. The best of them is, perhaps, _Cecil Dreeme_, a romance that reminds one a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is the New York University building on Was.h.i.+ngton Square, a locality that has been further celebrated in Henry James's novel of _Was.h.i.+ngton Square_.

Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz James...o...b..ien, an Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore in 1862 from the effects of a wound received in a cavalry skirmish, had contributed to the magazines a number of poems and of brilliant though fantastic tales, among which the _Diamond Lens_ and _What Was It?_ had something of Edgar A. Poe's quality. Another Irish-American, Charles G. Halpine, under the pen-name of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote a good many clever ballads of the war, partly serious and partly in comic brogue. Prose writers of note furnished the magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat of war, among papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. Holmes's _My Search for the Captain_, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and Colonel T. W.

Higginson's _Army Life in a Black Regiment_, collected into a volume in 1870.

Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is the ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war had brought the nation to its intellectual majority. In the stress of that terrible fight there was no room for buncombe and verbiage, such as the newspapers and stump-speakers used to dole out in _ante bellum_ days. Lincoln's speech is short--a few grave words which he turned aside for a moment to speak in the midst of his task of saving the country. The speech is simple, naked of figures, every sentence impressed with a sense of responsibility for the work yet to be done and with a stern determination to do it. "In a larger sense," it says, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so n.o.bly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under G.o.d, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Here was eloquence of a different sort from the sonorous perorations of Webster or the polished climaxes of Everett. As we read the plain, strong language of this brief cla.s.sic, with its solemnity, its restraint, its "brave old wisdom of sincerity," we seem to see the president's homely features irradiated with the light of coming martyrdom--

"The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American."

Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of American humor has reached its culmination. Every man of genius who is a humorist at all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is no lack of individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application they are not new in kind. Irving, as we have seen, was the literary descendant of Addison. The character-sketches in _Bracebridge Hall_ are of the same family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures of the Spectator Club. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, though purely American in its matter, is not distinctly American in its method, which is akin to the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of Swift in the _Voyage to Lilliput_. Irving's humor, like that of all the great English humorists, had its root in the perception of character--of the characteristic traits of men and cla.s.ses of men, as ground of amus.e.m.e.nt. It depended for its effect, therefore, upon its truthfulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did the humor of Shakespeare, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray. This perception of the characteristic, when pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and caricature, as in some of d.i.c.kens's inferior creations, which are little more than personified single tricks of manner, speech, feature, or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed from Irving's in temper but not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, to the English variety.

Dr. Holmes's more p.r.o.nouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically from the _facetiae_ of Thomas Hood, but his prominent trait is wit, which is the laughter of the head as humor is of the heart. The same is true, with qualifications, of Lowell, whose _Biglow Papers_, though humor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee character, are essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewdness of the hits in the _Biglow Papers_, their logical, that is, _witty_ character, as distinguished from their drollery, that arrests the attention. They are funny, but they are not so funny as they are smart. In all these writers humor was blent with more serious qualities, which gave fineness and literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of life was not exclusively comic. But there has been a cla.s.s of jesters, of professional humorists, in America, whose product is so indigenous, so different, if not in essence, yet at least in form and expression, from any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition to the comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to mult.i.tudes who have never read the _One Hoss-Shay_ or _The Courtin'_. And though it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny that there is an amount of flatness and coa.r.s.eness in many of their labored fooleries which puts large portions of their writings below the line where real literature begins, still it will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to predict that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that no literary fas.h.i.+on is more subject to change than the fas.h.i.+on of a jest, and that jokes that make one generation laugh seem insipid to the next. But there is something perennial in the fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called "the great jester of France," and though the puns of Shakespeare's clowns are detestable the clowns themselves have not lost their power to amuse.

The Americans are not a gay people, but they are fond of a joke.

Lincoln's "little stories" were characteristically Western, and it is doubtful whether he was more endeared to the ma.s.ses by his solid virtues than by the humorous perception which made him one of them.

The humor of which we are speaking now is a strictly popular and national possession. Though America has never, or not until lately, had a comic paper ranking with _Punch_ or _Charivari_ or the _Fliegende Blatter_, every newspaper has had its funny column. Our humorists have been graduated from the journalist's desk and sometimes from the printing-press, and now and then a local or country newspaper has risen into sudden prosperity from the possession of a new humorist, as in the case of G. D. Prentice's _Courier Journal_, or more recently of the _Cleveland Plaindealer_, the _Danbury News_, the _Burlington Hawkeye_, the _Arkansaw Traveller_, the _Texas Siftings_, and numerous others.

Nowadays there are even syndicates of humorists, who co-operate to supply fun for certain groups of periodicals. Of course, the great majority of these manufacturers of jests for newspapers and comic almanacs are doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain that the best of the cla.s.s, like Clemens and Browne, will not long continue to be read as ill.u.s.trative of one side of the American mind, or that their best things will not survive as long as the _mots_ of Sydney Smith, which are still as current as ever. One of the earliest of them was Seba Smith, who, under the name of "Major Jack Downing," did his best to make Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P. s.h.i.+llaber's "Mrs. Partington"--a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop--enjoyed great vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind were the _Phoenixiana_, 1855, and _Squibob Papers_, 1856, of Lieutenant George H. Derby, "John Phoenix," one of the pioneers of literature on the Pacific coast at the time of the California gold fever of '49. Derby's proposal for _A New System of English Grammar_, his satirical account of the topographical survey of the two miles of road between San Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery made out of the conventional houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, runaway Negroes, and other designs which used to figure in the advertising columns of the newspapers, were all very ingenious and clever. But all these pale before Artemus Ward--"Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade called him--who first secured for this peculiarly American type of humor a hearing and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of Hosea Biglow, an imaginary personage of some sort, under cover of whom the author might conceal his own ident.i.ty, has seemed a necessity to our humorists. Artemus Ward was a traveling showman who went about the country exhibiting a collection of wax "figgers" and whose experiences and reflections were reported in grammar and spelling of a most ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor was Charles F. Browne, originally of Maine, a printer by trade and afterward a newspaper writer and editor at Boston, Toledo, and Cleveland, where his comicalities in the _Plaindealer_ first began to attract notice. In 1860 he came to New York and joined the staff of _Vanity Fair_, a comic weekly of much brightness, which ran a short career and perished for want of capital. When Browne began to appear as a public lecturer, people who had formed an idea of him from his impersonation of the shrewd and vulgar old showman were surprised to find him a gentlemanly-looking young man, who came upon the platform in correct evening dress, and "spoke his piece" in a quiet and somewhat mournful manner, stopping in apparent surprise when any one in the audience laughed at any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where he delivered his _Lecture on the Mormons_, in 1806, the gravity of his bearing at first imposed upon his hearers, who had come to the hall in search of instructive information and were disappointed at the inadequate nature of the panorama which Browne had had made to ill.u.s.trate his lecture. Occasionally some hitch would occur in the machinery of this and the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few moments to "work the moon" that shone upon the Great Salt Lake, apologizing on his return on the ground, that he was "a man short" and offering "to pay a good salary to any respectable boy of good parentage and education who is a good moonist." When it gradually dawned upon the British intellect that these and similar devices of the lecturer--such as the soft music which he had the pianist play at pathetic pa.s.sages--nay, that the panorama and even the lecture itself were of a humorous intention, the joke began to take, and Artemus's success in England became a.s.sured. He was employed as one of the editors of _Punch_, but died at Southampton in the year following.