nnot keep up with the facts. Certain it is
that the pioneers of American national humor, the creators of what we
may call the "all-American" type of humor, have possessed precisely the
qualities which Mr. Johnston has pointed out. They are apparent in the
productions of Artemus Ward. The present generation vaguely remembers
Artemus Ward as the man who was willing to send all his wife's
relatives to the war and who, standing by the tomb of Shakespeare,
thought it "a success." But no one who turns to the almost forgotten
pages of that kindly jester can fail to be impressed by his sunny
quality, by the atmosphere of fraternal affection which glorifies his
queer spelling and his somewhat threadbare witticisms. Mark Twain, who
is universally recognized by Europeans as a representative of typical
American humor, had precisely those qualities of pioneer curiosity,
swift versatility, absolute democracy, which are characteristic of the
national temper. His lively accounts of frontier experiences in
_Roughing It_, his comments upon the old world in _Innocents Abroad_
and _A Tramp Abroad_, his hatred of pretence and injustice, his scorn
at sentimentality coupled with his insistence upon the rights of
sentiment, in a word his persistent idealism, make Mark Twain one of
the most representative of American writers. Largeness, freedom, human
sympathy, are revealed upon every page.

It is true that the dangers of American humor are no less in evidence
there. There is the danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's
earlier writings was carried to lengths of absurdity. There is the old
danger of the professional humorist of fearing to fail to score his
point, and so of underscoring it with painful reiteration. Mark Twain
is frequently grotesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imperfect
taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is actual vulgarity. In his
earlier books particularly there is revealed that lack of discipline
which has been such a constant accompaniment of American writing. Yet a
native of Hannibal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and in a
country printing-office and in mining-camps, can scarcely be expected
to exhibit the finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Arnold.
Mark Twain was often accused in the first years of his international
reputation of a characteristically American lack of reverence. He is
often irreverent. But here again the boundaries of his irreverence are
precisely those which the national inst