A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
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