inct itself has drawn. The joke
stops short of certain topics which the American mind holds sacred. We
all have our favorite pages in the writings of this versatile and
richly endowed humorist, but I think no one can read his description of
the coyote in _Roughing It_, and Huckleberry Finn's account of his
first visit to the circus, without realizing that in this fresh
revelation of immemorial human curiosity, this vivid perception of
incongruity and surprise, this series of lightning-like flashes from
one pole of experience to the other, we have not only masterpieces of
world humor, but a revelation of a distinctly American reaction to the
facts presented by universal experience.

The picturesque personality and the extraordinarily successful career
of Mark Twain kept him, during the last twenty-five years of his life,
in the focus of public attention. But no one can read the pages of the
older American humorists,--or try to recall to mind the names of
paragraphers who used to write comic matter for this or that
newspaper,--without realizing how swiftly the dust of oblivion settles
upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is enough, perhaps, that they
caused a smile for the moment. Even those humorists who mark epochs in
the history of American provincial and political satire, like Seba
Smith with his _Major Jack Downing_, Newell with his _Papers of Orpheus
C. Kerr_, "Petroleum V. Nasby's" _Letters from the Confedrit X Roads_,
Shillaber's _Mrs. Partington_--all these have disappeared round the
turn of the long road.

"Hans Breitman gife a barty--
Vhere ish dot barty now?"

It seems as if the conscious humorists, the professional funny writers,
had the shortest lease of literary life. They play their little comic
parts before a well-disposed but restless audience which is already
impatiently waiting for some other "turn." One of them makes a hit with
a song or story, just as a draughtsman for a Sunday colored supplement
makes a hit with his "Mutt and Jeff." For a few months everybody
smiles and then comes the long oblivion. The more permanent American
humor has commonly been written by persons who were almost unconscious,
not indeed of the fact that they were creating humorous characters, but
unconscious of the effort to provoke a laugh. The smile lasts longer
than the laugh. Perhaps that is the secret. One smiles as one reads the
delicate sketches of Miss Jewett. One smiles over the stories of Owen
Wister and