I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles Johnston on the essence of American humor in which he applies to the conditions of American life one familiar distinction between humor and wit. Wit, he asserts, scores off the other man, humor does not. Wit frequently turns upon tribal differences, upon tribal vanity. The mordant wit of the Jew, for example, from the literature of the Old Testament down to the raillery of Heine, has turned largely upon the sense of racial superiority, of intellectual and moral differences. But true humor, Mr. Johnston goes on to argue, has always a binding, a uniting quality. Thus Huckleberry Finn and Jim Hawkins, white man and black man, are afloat together on the Mississippi River raft and they are made brethren by the fraternal quality of Mark Twain's humor. Thus the levelling quality of Bret Harte's humor bridges social and moral chasms. It creates an atmosphere of charity and sympathy. In fact, the typical American humor, according to the opinion of Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and humane side of our common nature. It reveals the common soul. It possesses a surplusage of power, of buoyancy and of conquest over circumstances. It means at its best a humanizing of our hearts. Some people will think that all this is too optimistic, but if you are not optimistic enough you cannot 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.