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
comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving
the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic
apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his
journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That
trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened
verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the
new journalism.
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