"Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke
can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars.
By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become
godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous
to the sublime."
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON: Charles Dickens.



THE HUMORIST

Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines
of contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served
his apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism. Like
his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free
play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal
for the masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective
only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece
of his own invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native
flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more
sophisticated refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost
the ruddy glow of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end,
remained as it began--journalistic, untamed, primitive.

Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved