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THE NATIVISTIC LITERATURE OF CANADA—THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON—FIRST SYSTEMATIC HUMORIST OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEOPLES—CREATOR OF A NEW TYPE OF SATIRIC HUMOR AND COMIC CHARACTERIZATION.

It is the chief glory of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, born at Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1796, that he was the first systematic humorist and satirist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This distinction will appear as almost obvious once its meaning and scope are properly understood. From the founding of the American Colonies till the American Declaration of Independence there were no Anglo-Saxon peoples. Up to pre-revolutionary times the colonists in the Maritime Provinces, in Canada, and in the Atlantic Colonies thought of themselves as British people merely separated from the people in the Old Country by the main of the Atlantic. It was a separation only in geographical distribution. The British ‘family spirit’ was still intact, and the Old Country was still ‘over home.’ It might be thought that there were two British peoples on the American continent after the Fall of Montreal (1760). As a matter of fact, the British people in the Maritime Provinces and Canada had been, as it were, always ‘under the wing’ of the New England Colonies, at least in the sense of a military and naval protectorate. So that after the Fall of Montreal to the Declaration of Independence the whole of the vast areas occupied by the British in the New World was definitively British America.

With the American Declaration of Independence and the revolution, there resulted in sentiment and aim a political separation between the British people of one section in America and the people of the Old Country. For the first time the British ‘family spirit’ was disintegrated. In 1786, with the granting of the independence of the Atlantic Old Colonies, a real political separation of the British in North America was permanently established. There was effected a separate United States and a separate British North America (Maritime Provinces and Canada). Thus there were, politically viewed, two Anglo-Saxon peoples in America, and one in the United Kingdom. For the first time in history the phrase ‘the Anglo-Saxon peoples’ denoted a real distinction in political and social entities. The process of time, of course, only increased the sense of separation of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

Unless we think of this 18th century division of the Anglo-Saxons into three separate peoples, politically as well as sentimentally, we shall regard Jonathan Swift as the first systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This is impossible, however, for the reason that Swift’s satires—The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of The Books (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—were not only written prior to the revolution in America but also were addressed solely or specifically to the English people of the United Kingdom. Further, Swift was not a consciously systematic satirist. He simply wrote, as occasion demanded, satiric pièces-a-thèse. For the same reasons Laurence Sterne cannot be regarded as the first systematic humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) were published before there was a United States Republic and a British North America as separate political entities. When Charles Dickens published his Pickwick Papers (1836-37), the Anglo-Saxon peoples as such—in the United States, in British North America, and in the United Kingdom—had been a political fact for more than fifty years. Yet Dickens cannot be regarded as the first systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. He definitively addressed the English people in England. He was a benevolent humorist, aiming by comic characterization to create sympathy with our common humanity. He also aimed to bring about certain social reforms, but his method was that of the kindly humorist. The satirist aims to cause pain as a remedial measure. But, above all, Haliburton had anticipated Dickens both in time and in method. For The Clockmaker, with Sam Slick as the central comic character, was published serially in The Novascotian in 1835, or a year before the publication of the first of The Pickwick Papers, and was in method a combination of humor and satire, with a distinct political and social thesis, namely, to promote a zollverein of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Dickens aimed mostly to entertain his own people. Haliburton aimed to change the vision of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in the United States, British North America, and the United Kingdom, and thus, if possible, to effect a world-wide Anglo-Saxon union or unity. In short, Haliburton’s works in satiric humor were not conceived and written primarily as literature, but as social and political propaganda. The humor in them—the ‘soft sawder’—was introduced to relieve the pain of the satiric truth just as the comic episodes in Shakespeare’s tragedies relieve the emotional poignancy of the tragic strain.

To take this point of view about the aim and significance of Haliburton as a satiric humorist is the first step towards a proper approach to his humorous writings, and the only way rightly to estimate his importance in Canadian, American, English, and world literature. It is a simple matter to trace the origin of his genius and to show his place and influences on Canadian, American, and English Literature.

Briefly, Haliburton’s satiric mood or temper was a recrudescence of the revolutionary Loyalist mood or temper. He also inherited the Loyalist love of British connection and an antipathy to republican institutions and civilization, as in the United States. Further, in his time the realistic revolt against the historical romance in fiction was under way. Born with an inherited satiric temper, and finding to hand a great problem, namely, the effecting of the Anglo-Saxon dream of Imperialistic unity amongst the peoples of British origin, Haliburton decided to be a satiric realist, and to have his satiric writings reach and move the hearts of his compatriots in the Maritime Provinces and Canada and of the people of the United States and in the United Kingdom. But as a satirist he saw all the facts with a humorous appreciation, and in presenting the facts of life, the psychology of society, the idiosyncrasies of peoples, political institutions and culture and civilization, as he saw them, Haliburton decided to write with realism and truth but without rancor.

He was the protégé of Joseph Howe; and when Howe founded ‘The Club,’ a coterie of Nova Scotia wits, Haliburton contributed his share of the skits in political and personal satire for which ‘The Club’ was famous. These skits were derivative in manner. But in 1835 Haliburton invented a method of his own and definitively set out on his career as a systematic humorist, presenting his thoughts, ‘as the sunny side of common sense,’ in a series of sketches entitled The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick of Slickville. These sketches were published in Joseph Howe’s newspaper The Novascotian (1835-36). There were twenty-three of them. These were augmented to thirty-three, and were published in book form by Joseph Howe, at Halifax, in 1837, and by Richard Bentley, at London, in the same year. Bentley published a second Series in 1838, and a third Series in 1840. Reprints appeared in the United States, and translations in France and Germany.

His reputation as a satiric humorist having been made by The Clockmaker, Haliburton became a thorough systematic creative humorist, publishing The Letter-Bag of the Great Western (1840), The Attaché; or Sam Slick in England (1843-44), The Old Judge; or Life in a Colony (1849), Sam Slick’s Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1853), Nature and Human Nature (1855), and The Season Ticket (1860). Besides these works in creative satire and humor, Haliburton applied himself to editing humorous works, and published Traits of American Humor by Native Authors (1852), and a sequel, The Americans at Home (1854). All his creative works and his compilations of humor were published on both sides of the Atlantic and ran into innumerable editions and pirated reprints, and The Clockmaker and some others were translated into French and German. So that, on the face of original production, Haliburton appears as the first and foremost systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

The core of all his works in creative humor is some problem of the larger politics—British Connection, Imperial Federation, Free Trade, the Independence of the British North American Colonies, their Annexation with the United States, Anglo-Saxon Alliance or Union, Responsible Government in the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas, Confederation of the Provinces, Voting by Ballot, Universal Suffrage. For instance, in The Clockmaker (second series) he presented the desirability of British connection, but in Nature and Human Nature declared for the independence of the British North American Colonies as against their annexation with the United States, because he fancied independence would be better for them and the motherland. In The Clockmaker (second series) he advocated Imperial Federation in the form of a union or alliance of the Anglo-Saxon peoples for reciprocal security and economic development. But in the same work and in The Attaché he opposed Responsible Government for the Colonies out of a fear of mobocracy, a fear that had been engendered in his heart by the Rebellion of 1837. An inherited prejudice against republican institutions and a dread of mobocracy caused him to oppose Confederation of the Provinces and Universal Suffrage. In every one of his works of humor or satire we find some special thesis, but chiefly satiric arguments for the union or unity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to which he bends all his power of humor, satire, ridicule, and epigram.

Hitherto Haliburton’s originality and greatness have been based on two claims. He created one of the perduring or unique comic characters of humorous literature; and he is regarded as the ‘father’ of American humor. Neither of these distinctions constitutes his real originality and greatness as a satiric humorist and man of letters. He is really great on account of his distinct and definable influences on three literatures.

Beginning with Canadian Literature, we remark that Haliburton’s influence in Canada is popularly conceived, not as literary, but as political. It is true that Haliburton’s themes or theses were highly social and political. It is also true that, so far as his humor is concerned, he was unappreciated and even unread in Canada. It is true, still further, that he has had no successors as a humorist in Canada (for Stephen Leacock is not a successor, neither being a native son nor following the method of Haliburton). Nevertheless, Haliburton achieved two important results for Canadian Literature. Along with Joseph Howe, Haliburton ushered in the Epoch of the New or Independent Prose Literature of Canada. Again: he not only produced an original prose literature but also wrote it with such originality and novelty of matter and style that Haliburton’s prose, that is, Canadian prose, has a significant and permanent place in English and World Literature.

It may sound strange or startling to learn that Haliburton’s work in satiric humor and comic characterization actually displaced in England the vogue of such popular American prose writers as Irving and Cooper. The fact is important, but the reason is more important. Between 1820 and 1840 Irving, with The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall, and Cooper, with The Spy, The Pioneers, and his Leatherstocking Tales, won popular appreciation in England. By 1840 two Canadian authors, John Richardson, with his historical romance Wacousta, and Thomas Chandler Haliburton, with The Clockmaker series, also won popular appreciation. But Haliburton’s work was appreciated for an altogether different reason from that which caused the vogue of Irving, Cooper, and Richardson. The English were caught by the new matter in the work of Irving, Cooper and Richardson, but they felt that it was all in an old manner, the manner respectively of Goldsmith and Sir Walter Scott. They were reading, they felt, English Literature, done by two Americans and one Canadian. Save in mere matter and ‘properties’ there was nothing in the work of Irving, Cooper, and Richardson that might not have been done by a visiting Englishman who had gone to the United States or to the Canadas for new material and local color. It was English, not strictly original American, literature. And so it had a mere vogue.

When, however, the English people read Haliburton’s satiric comedy and comic characterization, they came, for the first time, upon an absolute or sheer literary novelty—literature that was not English, not English-American, not English-Canadian, but an original American species, absolutely new and unique. Here in Haliburton’s work was literature in the English language, but not English in matter, manner, or tone. Here were such novel satiric humor, such arresting and vitalized comic characterization, and such a strange medley of practical wisdom in moral maxims and epigrams, and all expressed in a unique lingo, that the like of it never was before in any literature which had come even from America.

At once a change took place in the minds of the English people in England. Hitherto America had looked across to England for fresh literature, and had based its own literature on English models. But when Haliburton produced a wholly original American literature, England looked, for the first time in history, across to America both for fresh and original literature, and for models which the English writers might follow. At least in one instance English humoristic literature actually modelled itself on Haliburton. There is no argument possible in the matter. For the fact is that Dickens did read The Clockmaker, which appeared serially a year earlier than Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and that Sam Weller is an English version of Haliburton’s Sam Slick (not conversely).

It is a literary phenomenon by itself that Haliburton’s work enjoyed an ‘unprecedented popularity’ in England but also displaced in popularity the work of Irving, Cooper and Richardson. The popularity of Haliburton’s work was not a mere vogue. It remains to this day. His Sam Slick has been admitted to the gallery of the chief comic characters, not only in English, but also in world, literature—to a place beside Sterne’s Uncle Toby, Dickens’ Pickwick and Micawber, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Daudet’s Tartarin, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It is also a fact that Haliburton’s epigrams and moral maxims have become part of the English colloquial speech and at least English popular literature.

Most remarkable were the influences of Haliburton and his works on American Literature. Rightly to appreciate these influences, it is necessary to understand what Haliburton was not. He was not, as has been alleged, ‘the father (or founder) of American humor.’ He was not ‘the creator of the American type in literature.’ He was not ‘the first American in literature.’ His Sam Slick is not ‘the typical American.’ These alleged distinctions are half-truths and are based on ambiguities.

There is considerable truth and point in calling Haliburton ‘the Apostle of American Humor.’ As to progenitorship, the fact is that Benjamin Franklin is the ‘father’ of indigenous American humor. In 1765 Franklin sent to a London newspaper what is the first example of that species of satiric burlesque, that preposterous or extravagant nonsense, said with a grave air of veracity, which is accepted as the characteristic matter and manner of American humor. Franklin was versatile in genius and so variously occupied in his long career that hardly can he be regarded as systematic in any calling. Yet he was as systematic as a humorist and satirist as he was in anything else. He began his literary career as a humorist when, in 1722, he contributed pseudonymously to The New England Courant the series of imitative Addisonian skits known as the ‘Silence Dogood Papers.’ Seven years later, he continued his humor in The Pennsylvania Gazette with the sprightly letters of ‘Busybody,’ ‘Anthony Afterwit,’ ‘Alice Addertongue,’ and ‘Bob Brief,’ and with satiric burlesques in A Meditation on a Quart Mug, A Witch Trial at Mount Holly, and other squibs. Quite systematic was the humor of Franklin’s Prefaces to Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-1758) and of some of the aphoristic wit and wisdom in the Almanacks when the epigrams or maxims were Franklin’s own invention, as, for instance, ‘Never take a wife till you have a house (and a fire) to put her in.’ Though most of the proverbial wisdom in Poor Richard was borrowed, the form and wit—the ‘Yankee smartness’—of it were Franklin’s creation, and he became the ‘father’ of all those New World humorists who wrote aphoristic wit and wisdom, down to Haliburton and from Haliburton down to Westcott (‘David Harum’). Masterpieces in mordant satire worthy of Dean Swift are Franklin’s Of the Meanes of disposing the Enemies of Peace (1760), An Edict by the King of Prussia (1773), Rules by which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One (1773), Speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim (an ironical justification for the enslaving of the Christians by Mohammedan Africans, 1790). Also to be mentioned are Franklin’s bagatelles (1778-80), written during his stay at Passy, France, of which the most famous are The Ephemera, The Story of the Whistle, The Morals of Chess, and The Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout.

The foregoing enumeration of Franklin’s humorous and satiric writings show that if collected in one or more volumes they would bulk large and prove that he was very considerable a systematic humorist. But only the Letter of 1765 to the London Press and the four masterpieces of irony or satiric burlesque written in 1760, 1773 and 1790 are in the manner which is recognized as the characteristic American humor—a commingling of extravagant nonsense and fact, uttered with such an air of veracity as to make the passage from fact to nonsense and conversely imperceptible and the detecting of it, on first reading, impossible. On the side of aphoristic wit and wisdom, the work of Franklin is indigenous, and, though in substance frequently derived, is original in form and style. So that while we must regard Franklin as the real ‘father’ of American humor, we must also see wherein Haliburton is even more original than Franklin and had an even more important a constructive influence on American humor than had Franklin.

What was meant by Artemus Ward and others who distinguished Haliburton as ‘the ‘father’ (or ‘founder’) of American humor,’ as the ‘creator of the American type in literature,’ as ‘the first American in literature,’ and Haliburton’s Sam Slick as ‘the typical American,’ was a three-fold distinction which these formulae do not truly express. First, Haliburton ‘naturalized’ in America a method of humor in dialect, so that it became the method of certain of his successors (Ward, Billings, Westcott, Dunne) and a method of exaggeration or humorous mendacity and comic characterization, so that it became the method of certain other successors (notably Mark Twain). Secondly, Haliburton ‘popularized’ his method of humor in dialect and his comic characterization, especially Sam Slick, so that they became accepted in England and Europe as peculiarly American—the one as the indigenously original American method of humor, and the other as the typical New Englander, whom the English cartoonists transmuted in caricature into ‘Uncle Sam,’ that is, into the embodiment of some typical American characteristics. Thirdly, though American (United States and British North America or Canadian) authors, Irving, Cooper, Richardson, who were contemporaries of Haliburton, had a vogue in England, Haliburton had produced satiric humor and comic characterization which were not only un-English in method and conception, but also so original as to be absolutely unlike any other humor and humorous characterization in the world. If any literature was, in substance and manner, strictly American, it was Haliburton’s humorous writings.

In short, the ‘naturalization’ of a method of humor in dialect—in America, and the ‘popularization’ of the chief phases of what became accepted throughout the world as American, though really New England, humor of thought, speech, and character—that is what is really meant by saying that Haliburton is the ‘father’ of American humor, and is also his great achievement so far as he constructively influenced American (United States) Literature. But it is not his greatest distinction from the point of view of creative originality.

His prime originality lay neither in his dialect nor in the creation of his chief character, Sam Slick, but in something which is ultimate and unique in satiric genius, and which entitles him to a place beside Swift as a subtle creator of mordant satire. As regards the dialect and the conversational method of narrative of his chief character Sam Slick, the variations in morphology and phonetics, and the piquancy and liveliness of it all convince one that Haliburton independently developed the dialect or lingo of his humorous characters. But there are facts which prove that he developed it on a groundwork of a real New England diction. When we compare, on the one side, the ‘Down East’ dialect of Seba Smith’s Letters of Major Downing in the Portland Courier (1833-34), which were imitated by Charles Augustus Davis in the New York Daily Advertiser (1835), and on the other side, the New England diction in Lowell’s Biglow Papers (Boston Courier 1846-48; Atlantic Monthly 1862-67), with the diction which Haliburton puts into the mouth of Sam Slick, we find that Sam Slick’s dialect is more ‘outlandish’ in morphological and phonetic corruption than the ‘Down East’ diction in Smith’s and Davis’ Letters, but nearer to the New England dialect in Lowell’s Biglow Papers. Lowell, who was a scholar and linguist, and whose own appreciation of the New England diction is embodied in the learned disquisitions of Rev. J. Wilbur on dialectical morphology, certainly would not burlesque and degrade the speech of his fellow countrymen. The dialect of Lowell’s Biglow Papers must be accepted as a real, indigenous New England dialect. Haliburton had read Smith’s Letters, which had circulated throughout the Maritime Provinces, and a New England of ‘Down East’ dialect was familiar in Nova Scotia. Haliburton’s diction, then, in faithfulness to the real New England diction, falls midway between the diction in Lowell’s Biglow Papers and the first journalistic forms of that diction as represented in the Letters of Smith and Davis. Haliburton’s is his conception of that diction and his independent development of it into a novel humorous dialect.

As to the originality of Haliburton’s chief character, Sam Slick, the truth is that the humorist created, on a realistic basis, a transcript of the ‘composite’ order, the main outline being derived from a real peddler-clockmaker, named Seth, familiar in Nova Scotia, and from Haliburton’s own coachman, Lennie Geldert, and a friend Judge Peleg Wiswell, who were ‘smart’ in wit and who were first-rate raconteurs. Haliburton also had as material the stage peddler who had made his appearance in dramatic literature as early as 1811, and who by 1830 was a stock character of the acted drama, having the same comic function as the stage Irishman of the late Victorian age. Neither Sam Slick himself nor his conversational dialect were absolute inventions of Haliburton, but were based on a real and living dialect and character. He employed his creative faculties in giving the one a humorous piquancy and liveliness and the other the individuality and reality of a real person; so that Sam Slick remains as one of the immortal characters of fiction.

But the slightest reflection reveals the fact that Sam Slick is not a single person of many characteristics, not a type of character, but a composite creation, the epitome of so many distinct and contradictory traits that they could not reside in a single person but only in persons. Sam Slick, in short, was conceived and drawn to personify a people, and his characteristics are an immanent criticism or satirizing of the virtues and vices of republican democracy.

What is Sam Slick? He is a disreputable plebeian creature—slangy, coarse, conceited, boastful, mendacious, irreverent, yet shrewd, wise, practical, acute in perception of social and political ideals, courageous, self-reliant, quick-witted, critical of standards and values, frank in speech, and direct in action. What does he represent? Haliburton’s conception of typical Americanism. What was he designed to achieve? Haliburton aimed to present in the character, sayings, and doings of Sam Slick, the reductio ad absurdum of republican culture, institutions and civilization in America.

President Felton, of Harvard University, in 1842, writing in The North American Review, and George William Curtis, writing later in Harper’s Magazine, were only partially right in attacking Haliburton for having burlesqued and caricatured in The Clockmaker, and, particularly in the character of Sam Slick, American culture and civilization. It was mis-representation by sectional and class typification; the illogic of a part for the whole. But they were wrong in their fundamental presumption, namely, that the English people would accept Sam Slick and his sayings and doings as typical Americanism. Cultivated English people no more accepted Sam Slick as the typical American than cultivated American people accepted the London Cockney, Sam Weller, as the typical Englishman. What really happened was a two-fold result in literary appreciation. That such an uncultured and socially inferior creature as Sam Slick should appear as the social and political critic of Anglo-Saxon institutions and civilization struck the imagination of the English people as a most novel and daring creation in satiric comedy, and Sam Slick himself as the most egregiously comic figure in modern literature. The second result was that since the English people accepted Sam Slick and his sayings and doings as a novelty in creative comedy and the American people took it all as a caricature of their culture and civilization, Haliburton’s satiric humor enjoyed, as it does to this day, an ‘unprecedented popularity’ in England but had less popularity in the United States. Haliburton’s unprecedented popularity in England had also the effect of causing the English people for the first time to look across the Atlantic to America for novel literary creation and entertainment.

Did Haliburton really mis-represent? Did he really present only sectional and class culture and civilization in America? Was he justified in choosing an obscure, socially disreputable creature from a section of American society to be the critic of American institutions and civilization? Why did he not choose someone socially higher—an American gentleman—to represent typical Americanism? The truth is Haliburton actually did represent all phases of American culture and civilization. There is the interlocutor in The Clockmaker—the Squire, Rev. Mr. Hopewell, and Mr. Everett, who was a real person, a president of Harvard and a diplomat, and there are pictures of the finer social and intellectual life of Nova Scotia and the United States. Felton and Curtis missed all this. How did they happen to miss it? Because Haliburton’s lesser characters were just bits of genre humor, whereas Sam Slick was such an outstandingly clear and vivid—unique—creation in comic characterization that Felton and Curtis saw only Sam Slick and immediately conceived him as a mis-representation of the whole of American culture and civilization. That they did so is a tribute to the genius of Haliburton. For it contains the answer as to what is Haliburton’s real originality as a creative humorist. The answer is this: The fact that Haliburton created a composite character, uncultured and socially inferior, to be the supreme critic of his social and intellectual betters and of American or republican culture, institutions, and civilization, is an absolutely original achievement in creative satire and comic characterisation. With a single stroke of genius Haliburton places himself beside Dean Swift as a satirist, and raises himself to the status of one of the world’s perduring satirists and humorists.

Finally: Haliburton influenced not only American humorous literature but also American fine literature. We note, first, the constructive influence of his editorial labors in compiling and distributing in the United States and other countries the best American humorous fiction, as in his Traits of American Humor, and The Americans at Home. Too much has been said of his influence on Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and other American humorists writing in dialect in prose. But his influence on American humor in dialect in verse has hardly, if at all, been rightly or fully appreciated. Lowell came under the influence of Haliburton in writing his humorous verse. In his Biglow Papers Lowell not only imitated, but also actually borrowed, ludicrous conceits and situations from The Clockmaker series. This fact is important, because in the last analysis Haliburton produced his humorous effects more by grotesque conceits and ludicrous situations than by dialect.

Haliburton had a potent influence also on American journalism of his time. The newspapers reprinted ‘Yankee Stories’ and ‘Yankee Yarns’ and ‘Letters,’ which were the titles of pirated editions of Haliburton’s The Americans at Home, and American newspaper staff humorists wrote imitations and burlesques in the manner of Sam Slick. This in turn influenced other American humorists, and they produced imitations of Sam Slick, commercializing them as ‘By the Author of Sam Slick,’ knowing that thus they guaranteed sure and large sales.

It may be granted that Haliburton’s influence on American romantic poetry was only accidental and pragmatic. But the fact is that Longfellow was actually inspired to versify the ‘story’ of the Acadian maiden Evangeline, not when he heard a mere incident of it from Hawthorne, or when he heard it more in detail from his own pastor, who got it from an aunt of Haliburton, but when he read in Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1829) the full pathetic tale of the Expulsion of the Acadians. More important is the fact that Francis Parkman derived from his reading of Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia his own romantic method of writing history. So that, as far as America is concerned, Haliburton may be called the ‘father’ of the romantic method of writing history.

Versatility of powers or genius and variety of literary creation distinguish Haliburton as a man of letters. He was a first-rate satirist or epigrammatist, narrative and descriptive writer, anecdotist or raconteur, character-delineator, nature-painter, and, in one respect, he was a prose stylist of first rank. Such versatility is unusual and even exceptional, and seemingly marks Haliburton as a specially gifted writer. But Haliburton’s versatility also exhibits certain peculiarities. Oddly, though he is saliently the humorist or satirist or aphorist or story-teller or descriptive writer or nature-painter or character-limner in one or another of his works, he is, almost without exception, all these in any work. More oddly, while a certain gift or power predominates in a given work, all his works, taken successively, disclose no development of powers either in invention or in literary mechanics. There are differences in each successive work, but only of sheer variety in literary substance, not of greater and still greater advance in novel conception and artistic handling of his matter. Summarily: Haliburton’s gifts in humorous story-telling and aphoristic wit and wisdom are salient in the first and second series of The Clockmaker, Wise Saws, Nature and Human Nature, and The Season Ticket. His gifts in narration and description are salient in The Clockmaker, The Attaché, and The Old Judge. His gifts in character-portraiture and naturalistic description are salient in The Old Judge. But if any work contains all Haliburton’s best qualities—ingenious and unfailing invention, novel and colorful imagination, rare perception of the humorous and ludicrous, acute insight into human nature, and extraordinary powers of vivid narration and realistic description—that work is The Old Judge; or, Life in a Colony.

As a satirist Haliburton employed two forms—realistic satire and humorous exaggeration or mendacity (‘tall stories’ Haliburton called the latter). A prime example of his realistic satire is his description of a fashionable wedding in London; another of a ‘rube’ or bucolic wedding in Slickville, both in The Attaché. In this sort of ‘take-off’ Haliburton has never been surpassed by modern journalistic humorists. A first-rate example of Haliburton’s gifts in humorous mendacity or burlesque is his ‘tall story’ of the sale of his horse Mandarin as related in Nature and Human Nature. This is the prototype of Westcott’s horse deal burlesques in his David Harum. More in the manner made familiar by Mark Twain is the humorous mendacity of Haliburton’s tales of ‘The Gouging School’ and ‘The Black Stole,’ both in The Attaché. There are anticipations a-plenty of the Mark Twain manner of ironic exaggeration and mordant satire in the second series of The Clockmaker, The Old Judge, and The Season Ticket.

As a Humorist Haliburton obtained his effects—and won his popularity with all classes—by character typification, story-telling, aphorisms, epigrams, and homely moral maxims, jests, waggish conceits, jocular phrases, and puns, including double entendres. He employed two methods of character typification; one being humorous definition; the other, humorous classification. Almost all Haliburton’s characters have names that are essentially what we mean by nick-names, to indicate distinctive mental or moral qualities of the individuals. It is by this method, rather than by character-drawing, that Haliburton succeeded in individualizing each character. It is the method of individualization by suggestion. The name Sam Slick, for instance, at once conveys the type of individual or character, namely, the kind of person who ‘lives by his wits,’ who gains profit by subtle or sharp practice. Such a person is ‘slick,’ an epithet derived by a vulgar pronounciation of the adjective ‘sleek.’ Other instances are The Honourable Lucifer Wolfe, The Honourable Alden Gobble, General Conrad Corncob, Captain Ebeneezer Fathom, Mr. Pettifog the Justice, Nabb the police constable, Deacon Flint, Rev. Joshua Hopewell, Dr. Query, and Old Blowhard. The moral connotations of these nick-names are obvious, but Haliburton himself in the proper place always names the character and adds a summary of moral qualities to show the aptness of the name and its connotation. The Honourable Alden Gobble is satirically or humorously thus named because he was ‘dyspeptic and suffered great oneasiness arter [and from] eatin’.’ A signal example of Haliburton’s method of typification by humorous classification is found in The Clockmaker, (third series, chapter 13). There he classifies patriots into ‘rebel patriots, mahogany patriots, spooney patriots, place patriots, and raal genuine patriots.’

General popular character types which are familiar in American humor indubitably had their prototypes in Haliburton’s characters. Sam Slick, as a horse trader, is the prototype of David Harum; and, as an aphorist and practical philosopher, is the prototype of Mr. Dooley. Mrs. Figg in Haliburton’s Letter-Bag is the prototype of Shillaber’s Mrs. Partington. In the same work Haliburton has an ‘enfant terrible’ who is the prototype of Peck’s ‘Bad Boy’ and of later examples of ‘awful children,’ down to Tarkington’s Penrod.

Haliburton was an egregious punster, and he even indulged in double entendres which were coarse and sometimes obscene, but which may be excused on account of their humorous point or satiric wit. As an anecdotist, ‘spinner of yarns,’ ‘tall stories,’ ‘stretchers,’ with a decided tendency to employ the coarse and irreverent, Haliburton anticipated similar traits in Mark Twain, as in Twain’s Roughing It and Innocents Abroad. Haliburton’s occasional coarseness and irreverence are to be explained by his hatred of sham and insincerity, of conventionalized prudery, of concealed indecency of thought, of the real evil caused by men and women who are outwardly ‘whited sepulchres.’ It must, however, be admitted that, traceable to his Border Scots ancestry, there was in him a love of plebeian or coarse fun for its own sake. But it must also be said that his coarseness of wit was never based on impurity of heart, and that he had the highest respect for the moral beauty and dignity of womanhood. He did remark playfully the engaging vanities and foibles of women, but for pure love and motherhood and all the sweet charities of woman he had the finest and tenderest respect. Unsurpassed in world literature is Haliburton’s tender and holy sublimation of woman’s spiritual winsomeness and dignity, as in this immortal metaphor:—