Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/521

 THE LITERARY INTERESTS OF CHICAGO SS

countersign "A pure literature." And the Public said: "All right, and all hail," As "an organ of all that is good and true, and an enemy of all that is bad and false in this age and country," the Owl was devoted chiefly to new books. The essays by Dr. Poole were a feature in which he carried out his policy of impressing on the community high standards, and at the same time a belief in popular fiction reading, an influence from him which was recently acknowledged by the Dial.

There were many manifestations of the striving toward metropolitan breadth of view-point in Chicago literary periodical ventures during the later seventies. This was so, notwithstand- ing the fact that in population Chicago was not yet the metropolis of the Mississippi valley. St Louis, with 310,864 inhabitants, outranked Chicago, the fifth in the list of cities, with 298,977 at the census of 1870. The Inland Monthly Magazine, 1872-77, advertised as "the only magazine of the West and South devoted to literature, science, art, humor, sketches, etc.," had its main office at St. Louis, and merely a branch in Chicago.

By 1873 Chicago had reached such a stage of metropolitan sophistication as to have its first periodical devoted exclusively to humor. "Carl Pretzel" was the nom de plume of C. H. Harris, the editor. He began with Carl Pretzel's Magazine P o ok, in which the sketches, like all his works, were written in the style of Leland's Hans Breitmann. This Pook was a weekly folio, filled with good fun on local topics, phrased in a pseudo- German-English lingo. In this form of expression is to be seen one influence of Chicago's large and important German popula- tion. Many anglicized German expressions and many ger- manized English phrases have made fun in the ordinary conversation of Chicago people. Hence "Carl Pretzel's" form of humorous expression met with a specially ready welcome. In attitude his humor was of the comic variety, which, as is seen in the current work of Ade, McCutcheon, and Dunne, is the characteristic Chicago humor the comic as against the cynic of more sophisticated New York. Mr. Francis F. Browne, Mr. John McGovern, and Mr. John R. Walsh, from their varying points of view, agree in recollections that "Carl Pretzel's"