Derby was the first conspicuous writer to use grotesque exaggerations deliberately and freely as a provocative of laughter. Irving and many others had made use of it, but in Phœnixiana it amounts to a mannerism. He tells the most astonishing impossibilities and then naïvely adds: "It is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents." In true California style he makes use often of specific exaggeration. Two men trip over a rope in the dark "and then followed what, if published, would make two closely printed royal octavo pages of profanity." So popular was the Phœnix Herald that "we have now seven hundred and eighty-two Indians employed night and day in mixing adobe for the type molds."
The second characteristic of Derby's humor was its irreverence. To him nothing was sacred. The first practical joker, he averred, was Judas Iscariot: he sold his Master. Arcturus, he observed, was a star "which many years since a person named Job was asked if he could guide, and he acknowledged he couldn't do it." "David was a Jew—hence, the 'Harp of David' was a Jew's-harp."
He delights in the device of euphemistic statement used so freely by later humorists. The father of Joseph Bowers, he explains, was engaged in business as a malefactor in western New York, but was annoyed greatly by the prejudices of the bigoted settlers. He emigrated suddenly, however, with such precipitation in fact that "he took nothing with him of his large property but a single shirt, which he happened to have about him at the time he formed his resolution." Finally he "ended his career of usefulness by falling from a cart in which he had been standing, addressing a numerous audience, and in which fall he unfortunately broke his neck."
He abounds in true Yankee aphorisms—"when a man is going down, everybody lends him a kick," "Where impudence is wit, 'tis folly to reply." He uses unexpected comparisons and whimsical non sequiturs: he sails on "a Napa steam packet of four cat-power"; "the wind blew," he declared, "like well-watered roses." R. W. Emerson, he was informed, while traveling in upper Norway, "on the 21st of June, 1836, distinctly saw the sun in all its majesty shining at midnight!—in fact, all night. Emerson is not what you would call a superstitious man, by any means—but, he left."
It was Derby who wrote the first Pike County ballad. "Suddenly we hear approaching a train from Pike County, consisting of seven families, with forty-six wagons, each drawn by thirteen oxen." Elsewhere he has described the typical "Pike": "His hair is light, not a 'sable silvered,' but a yeller, gilded; you can see some of it sticking out of the top of his hat; his costume is the national costume of Arkansas, coat, waistcoat, and pantaloons of homespun cloth, dyed a brownish yellow, with a decoction of the bitter barked butternut—a pleasing alliteration; his countenance presents a determined, combined with a sanctimonious expression." "Now rises o'er the plains in mellifluous accents, the grand Pike County Chorus:
Oh, we'll soon be thar
In the land of gold,
Through the forest old,
O'er the mounting cold,
With spirits bold—
Oh, we come, we come,
And we'll soon be thar.
Gee up, Bolly! whoo, up, whoo haw!"
Not much was added to Western humor after Derby. Mark Twain's earliest manner had much in it that smacks of "Phœnix." The chapters entitled, "Phœnix Takes an Affectionate Leave of San Francisco," "Phœnix is on the Sea," and "Phœnix in San Diego" might have been taken from Roughing It. Just as truly the chapters, "Inauguration of the New Collector" and "Return of the Collector," "Thrilling and Frantic Excitement Among Office Seekers" might have been written by Orpheus C. Kerr. Yet despite such similarities, the later school did not necessarily filch from "Phœnix": they learned their art as he had learned it from contact with the new West. All drew from the same model.
III
For the new humor, which was to be the first product of the new period in American literature, was Western humor of the "John Phœnix" type. It came from three great seed places: the Mississippi and its rivers, the California coast, and, later, the camps of the Civil War. It was the humor of the gatherings of men under primitive conditions. It was often crude and coarse. It was elemental and boisterous and often profane. To the older school of poets and scholars in the East it seemed, as it began to fill all the papers and creep even into the standard magazines, like a veritable renaissance of vulgarity. "The worlds before and after the Deluge were not more different than our republics of letters before and after the war,"[17] wrote Stedman to William Winter in 1873, and the same year he wrote to Taylor in Europe, "The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic bathers [sic], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit."[18]