A Breeze from the Woods, 2nd Ed.

Some good work has also been done in a scientific way. The geological survey of this State was arrested by the impatience of the people for immediate results. The topographical survey alone, than which nothing better has ever been done in this country, was more than an equivalent for the entire outlay. There will come a time when the practical value of such an enterprise will be better understood. The physical problems in a single State like California could not be solved in half a century. Was it well to ask a scientific commission to solve them, and publish the results in a few months?

The public journal, as a factor in education, is here, as elsewhere, the outgrowth of our civilization. It embodies the passions, caprices and enterprises of the community. In its best estate it gives the history of the world for one day. In its poorest estate it is content with a patent outside, the puffing of some mountebank, and the abuse of rivals. But at the close of this quarter century, the only complete history of the rise and progress of this commonwealth is that which the newspapers contain. I have seen an artist sketch an accurate likeness of his friend on his thumb-nail. But the modern newspaper every day sketches the likeness, the pulse, and the throbbing heart of the civilized world.

Just as the ideal state is something far in advance of the actual, so the ideal newspaper is something far better than exists on this side of the continent. Here, as elsewhere, it is largely the product of steamships, railroads and telegraphs. But the journal of the future will, after all, be very much what the community makes it. It is the child of civilization, going forward with the community to a better condition, or going backward with it to coarseness and barbarism. The best newspaper a hundred years ago was a poor affair. A hundred years hence, the journal of to-day will probably be viewed with as much interest for what it lacks, as for what it contains.

Our ideal newspaper will pander to no mean prejudices. It will be no generator of slang phrases. It will not murder honest English. It will have ripe and well-digested opinions. It will not truckle to base men. It will not sneer at religion. It will keep its editorial columns above all just suspicion of purchase. It will leave garbage in the gutter. It will assail no man unjustly, nor fear to defend any man or interest because he or it may be obscure or unpopular. No good citizen will fear the honest journal of the future, and no bad man will like it.

Observe how the outer bark of the madrono and eucalyptus, with the coming of every Summer, bursts, rolls up, and falls to the ground as so much rubbish. That is a sign of expanding life. A great deal of newspaper rubbish to-day is a sign of growth. The outer rind and husk of things fall to the ground by that vital force which is continually developing a larger and nobler life in the community. No man will hereafter go to the head of this profession without fair scholarship, a wide range of observation, a large capacity, to deal in a general way with human affairs, and that keen insight which catches the spirit and essence of this on-going life. Most difficult of all is a certain power of statement which no school can teach, and without which the highest plane of the journalist cannot be reached. Your long story will not be heard. The world is waiting for the man of condensation. Tell it in few words. If one can master this high eclecticism of thought and statement, I know of no more promising field for young men to-day than journalism. If one cannot, the potato field, in a season of blight, is quite as promising.

Without this broader culture for the journalist, there will be great danger that the exigencies of his work will make him a superficial man. The habit will grow upon him of touching merely the surface of things. He will come to think that, as his journal is only for the day, his errors are for the day also. The habit of careful investigation and exactness of thought and statement, will be discarded for random guesses and the temporary expedients of the hour. Nothing but the balancing influence of generous culture will arrest this lapsing tendency. It will be disclosed in platitudes and commonplaces; in writing against space, and in that dreadful amplitude which buries a thought under a mountain of verbiage.

One cannot fail to note that the newspaper has been gradually encroaching on the domain of literature. It has absorbed monthly magazines or forced publishers to resort to illustrations – to a sort of picture-book literature for grown-up children. It has driven the lumbering quarterlies into smaller fields and diminished their relative importance. The average citizen craves the news from a journal having the very dew of the morning and of the evening upon it. It must come to him damp and limp, bringing whatever is best at the smallest possible cost. The newspaper is the herald of the new era. Its errand must be swift, its statements compact, and its thought eclectic and comprehensive.

Three thousand years ago, one of the grand old prophets spoke mysteriously of the "living spirit in the wheels." Was it other than the modern newspaper thrown off by the pulsing of the great cylinder press? But observe that through yonder Golden Gate, which the sun and the stars and the lamps of men glorify day and night, the devil-fish comes sailing up, and is no whit concerned whether his accursed tentacula close around saint or sinner. Is it not the fittest symbol of a public journal conducted by ignorant and unscrupulous men? Rather would you not choose, as a more fitting symbol of the ideal journal, one of the small globules of quicksilver which you shall find on any of these encircling hills, so powerless to draw to it an atom of filth or rubbish, but ever attracting the smallest particle of incorruptible silver and gold?

It can hardly have escaped notice that California, during this quarter-century, has produced more humorists, and more of that literature which is essentially humorous, than all the rest of the country. It may be difficult to trace to any outward sources the inspiration of so much wit. Does it lie in the odd contrasts and strange situations which so often confront the observer here? Nor has this facetiousness depended at all for its development upon any degree of prosperity. In fact, the boldest and bravest challenge which has ever been given to adverse fortune here, has been by the gentle humorists who have suffered from her slings and arrows. It is said: "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." But these modern satirists made faces at bad fortune; they lampooned her and defied her to do her utmost. The more miserable they ought to have been, the happier they were. They found a grotesque and comic side to the most sober facts. They were facetious when there was small stock in the larder and smaller credit at the banker's. They smiled at the very grimness of evil fortune until she fled, and, in doing this, they half-unconsciously tickled the midriff of the world. A ripple of laughter ran over the surface of society. It sometimes made slow progress when it here and there met a mountain of obtuseness. But wit is wit; and what difference does it make if, failing to see the point, some people laugh next year instead of this? I will not be distressed because my friend does not, to this day, see how the immortal "Squibob" conquered his adversary at San Diego by falling underneath him and inserting his nose between his teeth. Nor does it greatly concern me that he does not assent to the proposition that John Ph[oe]nix, having made a national reputation by editing the San Diego Herald for one week, was the greatest journalist of modern times. If reputation is the measure of greatness, Ph[oe]nix is to this day without a peer. He made the very desert sparkle with his wit. He was a humorous comet, shooting across the dull horizon of pioneer life. Men looked up and wondered whence it came and whither it had gone.

Possibly, there is something favorable to the play of humor in a greater freedom from conventional limitations. If one grows into this larger liberty, or is translated into it, a flavor of freshness comes to pervade all the intellectual life. A certain spontaneity of expression, a spring, a rioting song of gladness, are some of the signs of this more abounding life. In homely phrase, we say there is a flavor of the soil about it. It might, therefore, have been necessary that Mark Twain should sleep on this soil, and should have a wide range of pioneer experiences, before he could become the prince of grotesque humorists. He got up suddenly from the very soil which in its secret laboratory colors the olive and the orange, and began to make the world laugh. With a keen sense of the symmetry and harmony of things, he had a keener perception of all the shams and ridiculous aspects of life. His pungent gospel of humor is as sanitary as a gentle trade-wind. He knew a better secret than the old alchemists. Every time he made the world laugh he put a thousand ducats into his pocket. But never until he had slept in his blankets, had been robbed on the "Divide," and had learned the delicate cookery of a miner's cabin, could he do these things. But now he cannot even weep at the tomb of his ancestor, Adam, without moving the risibles of half the world. He has also a finer touch and flavor, not of the rankest soil, but of that which gives the aroma and delicate bouquet to the rarest mountain-side vintage. When this man had tried his wit on a Californian audience and had won an approving nod, he had an endorsement that was good in any part of the English-speaking world.

Of a more subtile wit and a finer grain was Harte, who did his best work as a humorist in California. All his earlier triumphs were won here. His subsequent indorsement in a wider field was only an affirmation of this earlier public judgment.

Sometimes in the thicket one may come upon a wild mocking bird which is running up the gamut of its riotous burlesque upon the song of every other bird, and the sound of every living thing in the forest. But when all this is done, that mocking bird will sometimes give out a song which none other can match with its melody. As much as this, and more, lay within the range of this poet-satirist. His mocking had, however, a deep and salient meaning in it. When Truthful James rises to explain in what respect Ah Sin is peculiar, he has a higher purpose than merely to show the overreaching cunning of this bronzed heathen,

"With a smile that was child-like and bland."

So long as Ah Sin and his race could be plucked and despoiled at will, he provoked no antagonisms. But when he overmatched the sharpness of his spoilers, we have this tale, with its moral:

"Then I looked up at Nye;
And he gazed upon me;
And he rose with a sigh,
And said, 'Can this be?
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!'
And he went for that heathen Chinee."

Every demagogue in the State, who had rung the changes on the evils of cheap labor, felt the thrust; and it is doubtful if one of them has forgiven Harte to this day.

The dogmatism and intolerant assumption which sometimes become rampant in scientific societies, is thus punctured by Truthful James, in his description of "The Society upon the Stanislaus:"

"But first I would remark that it is not a proper plan
For any scientific gent to whale his fellow-man,
And if a member don't agree with his peculiar whim,
To lay for that same member for to 'put a head' on him."

When Jones undertook to prove that certain fossil bones were from one of his lost mules, then the trouble began:

"Now I hold it is not decent for any scientific gent
To say another is an ass – at least to all intent;
Nor should the individual who happens to be meant,
Reply by heaving rocks at him, to any great extent.

"Then Abner Dean of Angel's raised a point of order, when
A chunck of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen,
And he smiled a sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.

"For in less time than I write it every member did engage
In a warfare with the remnants of the paleozoic age;
And the way they heaved those fossils in their anger was a sin,
Till the skull of an old mammoth caved the head of Thompson in."

When the supposed pliocene skull, found in Calaveras County, had developed a good deal of scientific quackery, Harte, in his "Geological Address," makes the skull declare that it belonged to Joe Bowers, of Missouri, who had fallen down a shaft. For six months thereafter no theorist was able to discuss the character of that fossil with a sober countenance. No Damascus blade ever cut with keener stroke than did the blade of this satirist, even when it was hidden in a madrigal or concealed in some polished sentence of prose.

As a humorist, he appreciated humor in others. When Dickens died, not another man in all the length and breadth of the land contributed so tender and beautiful a tribute to his memory as did Harte in his poem of "Dickens in Camp." The rude miners around the camp-fire drop their cards as one of them draws forth a book:

"And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,
And as the fire-light fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the master
Had writ of 'Little Nell.'

"Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy – for the reader
Was youngest of them all —
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall.

"The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp with 'Nell' on English meadows
Wandered and lost their way.

* * * * *

"Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire,
And he who wrought that spell —
Ah! towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!

"Lost is that camp, but let its fragrant story
Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop-vines' incense all the pensive glory,
That fills the Kentish hills.

"And on that grave where English oak, and holly,
And laurel wreaths entwine,
Deem it not all a too-presumptuous folly —
This spray of western pine?"

It was left to this shy man, who came forth from the very wastes of this far-off wilderness, to lay upon the bier of the dead humorist as fragrant an offering as any mortal fellowship could suggest. It was a song in a different key – as if one having entered into the very life of the great novelist, had also for a moment entered into his death.

The wit and the poetry which ripen here are under the same sun which ripens the pomegranate and the citron. The grain and texture have always been better than that suggested by the coarser materialism without. It is little to him who is cutting his marble to the divinest form, that the whole city reeks with grime and smoke, and all its outlines are misshapen and ugly. It is little to poet or painter that sometimes the earth has only a single tint of gray, since he may also see in contrast, what a transfigured glory there may be on mountain and on sea.