Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

Humorists

THE HUMORISTS OF CANADA: PRE-CONFEDERATION—HALIBURTON—HOWE— DE MILLE—DUVAR—POST-CONFED­ERATION—LANIGAN—COTES—DRUMMOND—HAM: NEW SCHOOL—LEACOCK—DONOVAN—DAVIS—MACTAVISH—McARTHUR—HODGINS.

The name and work of Thomas Chandler Haliburton as a satirist or humorist so over-shadowed the names and works of other Canadian humorists that it is a belief, both in foreign countries and in Canada itself, that the Canadian people have no genius for humor and that, outside of Haliburton’s satiric writings, there is no significant Canadian humorous literature. All this is superstition and has been perpetuated in two ways. No Canadian literary historian has remarked the existence of other Canadian humorists, save Haliburton, though Mark Twain in his Library of American Humor has included the work of Haliburton, De Mille, Lanigan; and, secondly, no Canadian anthologist, save Lawrence J. Burpee, has collected in a single volume examples of the work of Canadian humorists.

Pre-Confederation Canadian humor is represented by the work of Haliburton, Howe, and De Mille. Of these the work of Haliburton is the significant humor of the period. In general it is satiric, a criticism of society, aiming to bring about certain reforms. No other Canadian humorist since Haliburton, not even Leacock, had or has any gifts in comic characterization. Howe had no satiric purpose. His humor, which was chiefly in verse, was written ‘for the fun of the thing.’

A native-born Canadian man of letters who has not received his due is James De Mille, poet, novelist, short story fictionist and humorist. De Mille, at least in time, anticipated the new type of American humor which is associated with the name of Mark Twain. For some months before Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad was published (1869), De Mille’s The Dodge Club, or Italy in 1859 had appeared. This volume is not to be confused with De Mille’s Dodge Club Series published in 1871, 1872, 1877 which were humorous and healthful stories for the young. If, therefore, the humor of Stephen Leacock is essentially a recrudescence of the American humor which we see in Franklin and in Mark Twain, and if Leacock read De Mille and Twain, as presumably he did, then the first of the Leacockians in Canada, to use an anachronism, was De Mille, and he is ‘the father’ of the later or the 20th century Canadian humorists beginning with Leacock. For the genius of that genre of humor, as in De Mille and Twain, is essentially exaggerated nonsense or nonsense said with a face of seriousness. De Mille’s work does not lend itself to quotation, but stylistically De Mille’s humorous prose, aside from the humor itself, is distinctly engaging or readable by virtue of its simple or popular diction.

Away from the traditional humor of the American or Haliburton style, is the more delicate imaginative humor of John Hunter-Duvar and the whimsical humor of Grant Allen. Hunter-Duvar wrote considerable humor in light ephemeral form and his stories and verse are colored with many passages of genre humor and satire. The chief basis of his reputation as a humorist of a distinct and anomalous type is found in his extraordinarily conceived narrative poem, The Emigration of the Fairies. It deserves wide reading as an example of the pure humor of fancy. Grant Allen was a novelist and scientist. He published a volume of light verse, The Lower Slopes, in which he indulged his humorous gifts in a series of satiric and entertaining verses on scientific themes. It is all essentially the humor of persiflage.

After Haliburton the extraordinary name in Post-Confederation Canadian humor is George Thomas Lanigan. He was born in the Province of Quebec and has the distinction of having founded what is now the Daily Star, of Montreal. He was a brilliant journalist and possessed unusual versatility of invention and style in prose and verse. He had all the mental gifts, and some of the faults, native to the Keltic temperament. His ebullient spirits expressed themselves in restless activity and with as ready brilliancy in verse as in prose.

His prose humor, which was published serially in The World, New York, in the first decade after Confederation, was fresh and novel and arresting. The series was published in book form under the title Fables Out of the World (1878) and were to their time what the Fables in Slang by George Ade are to our time. So compellingly did Lanigan’s Fables strike the imagination of Mark Twain that he republished seven of them in his Library of Humor. For the most part, Lanigan’s Fables are satires on the half-truths which constitute popular moral maxims. They are all mere absurdities, and mere nonsense; but they contain a larger truth than the maxims they satirize. They are sure to awake a chuckle. We quote two examples:—

The Merchant of Venice.

A Venetian Merchant who was looking in the lap of luxury was accosted upon the Rialto by a friend who had not seen him for many months. ‘How is this?’ cried the latter. ‘When I last saw you your gaberdine was out at elbows, and now you sail in your own gondola.’ ‘True,’ replied the Merchant, ‘but since then I have met with serious losses, and been obliged to compound with my creditors for ten cents on the dollar.’

Moral.—Composition is the life of trade.

The Honest Newsboy.

A Newsboy was passing along the street, when he chanced to discover a purse of greenbacks. He was at first inclined to conceal it, but repelling the unworthy suggestion, he asked a Venerable Man if it was his’n. The Venerable Man looked at it hurriedly, said it was, patted him on the head, gave him a quarter, and said he would yet be president. The Venerable Man then hastened away, but was arrested for having counterfeit bills in his possession, while the honest Newsboy played penny-ante with his humble quarter and ran it up to $2.62.

Moral.—Honesty is sometimes the best policy.

Though Lanigan’s Fables in prose were at that time a new and brilliant type of humor, it is in his humorous ballads that he surpasses himself, and because of them he remains unique among Canadian humorists. Some of his humorous ballads have also been included in anthologies of American (!) humor, as, for instance, in Roscoe Johnson’s volume, Playday Poetry. The most famous of Lanigan’s humorous ballads is his egregious piece of persiflage, The Ahkoond of Swat. Really, however, much more humorous are Lanigan’s The Amateur Orlando and The Plumber’s Revenge. Their length prevents quotation here. On account of its notoriety and the absolute egregiousness of its comic irresponsibility we select for quotation Lanigan’s The Ahkoond of Swat. To give it color and setting we note briefly the origin of the verses. According to Mr. Burpee the facts are that ‘one evening, after learning the fact from the English mail just received, Lanigan announced that the Akhoond of Swat was dead and that he was writing a poem about him.’ The verses appeared in the next morning paper. Following is the text of the Ahkoond of Swat:—

What, what, what,

What’s the news from Swat?

Sad news,

Bad news,

Comes by the cable led

Through the Indian Ocean’s bed,

Through the Persian Gulf, the Red

Sea and the Med—

Iterranean—he’s dead;

The Akhoond is dead!

For the Akhoond I mourn,

Who wouldn’t?

He strove to disregard the message stern,

But he Ahkoodn’t.

Dead, dead, dead;

Sorrow Swats!

Swats wha’ hae wi’ Ahkoond bled,

Swats whom he had often led

Onward to a gory bed,

Or to victory,

As the case might be.

Sorrow Swats!

Tears shed,

Shed tears like water,

Your great Ahkoond is dead!

That Swat’s the matter!

Mourn, city of Swat!

Your great Ahkoond is not,

But lain ’mid worms to rot:

His mortal part alone, his soul was caught

(Because he was a good Ahkoond)

Up to the bosom of Mahound.

Though earthly walls his frame surround

(For ever hallowed be the ground!)

And sceptics mock the lowly mound

And say, ‘He’s now of no Ahkound!’

(His soul is in the skies!)

The azure skies that bend above his loved

Metropolis of Swat

He sees with larger, other eyes,

Athwart all earthly mysteries—

He knows what’s Swat.

Let Swat bury the great Ahkoond

With a noise of mourning and of lamentation!

Let Swat bury the great Ahkoond

With the noise of the mourning of the Swattish nation!

Fallen is at length

Its tower of strength,

Its sun had dimmed ere it had nooned:

Dead lies the great Ahkoond.

The great Ahkoond of Swat

Is not.

In passing we may note another Canadian humorous poem of the same type which has become famous, namely, Hoch de Kaiser, which was composed at a sitting by an émigré Canadian journalist who went sometimes by the name of Rose and sometimes by the name of Gordon.

We have elsewhere noted the fresh quality of the humor of Mrs. Everard Cotes (Sarah Jeanette Duncan) and a whole chapter has been devoted to the poetry of William Henry Drummond as the creator of a new species of Canadian humor. The great warm Irish heart of Drummond was not fitted to create satire or mere fun. His humor is based upon a tender sentiment or what is known as ‘the homely pathetic’ and on a special sense of the humor in genre characters, particularly the old and the adolescent habitant of Quebec.

A man quite by himself as a humorist is George Henry Ham, who has not unfittingly been called ‘the laughing philosopher’ of Canada. Ham’s humor is essentially the humor of the ‘after-dinner’ or ‘the occasional’ speaker, and is for the most part anecdotal. During a long life he had acquired an inexhaustible fund of the most humorous anecdotes about Canadian characters or celebrated men. These were collected and published in his Reminiscences of a Raconteur.

Essentially Ham’s humor is not creative; it is the reproductive humor of the raconteur; but Ham has added to it by a color and settings of his own. It is the humor itself and not the style that counts. But while it is humor and for the most part sheer fun or entertainment, it comes from a man who has seen many vicissitudes in Canadian life and history and institutions and who, in his great age, as human life goes, invites us in his Reminiscences of a Raconteur to look upon life and its vicissitudes of good and ill fortune with courage, serenity, faith and hope—and not to fear death. Ham’s humor is distinguished as pleasant medicine for the soul in the hurly-burly of life and in the contemplation of having some time to depart from a world that is full of dear companions and pleasant places.

The next Canadian systematic humorist, though not Canadian-born, is Stephen Leacock. Haliburton was a creator; he really invented, his method of satiric humor, or if he did not invent the method, he at least originally created his comic characters. Leacock, who is ‘a graft on the Canadian literary tree,’ models his humor considerably after the American manner. It is satiric burlesque deliberately constructing around serious character or events extravagant nonsense which is a sort of criticism of manners and morals of society, but which tends to engage us more as burlesque than as criticism. Mr. Leacock’s first book was entitled Literary Lapses, published at Montreal in 1910. It was, as the author’s Preface states, for the most part a collection of sketches which had before that date appeared in print in various magazines. Two of the sketches gained the distinction of being reprinted in Punch and The Lancet, London. These were respectively Leacock’s Boarding House Geometry and The New Pathology, the latter of which had the further distinction of being reprinted in translations in various German periodicals. His Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town approaches more closely to the unity of a regular novel than any of his other books and is the highest example of his art. His style here is personal and familiar almost to undue flippancy; it is witty and sparkling even to brilliancy; it is less literary than the material of the Mariposa Newspacket; it is surrounded with an exuberant atmosphere of burlesque. Yet in Sunshine Sketches he has achieved an unmistakably true characterization of the average ‘little town’ of Canada—its life and its people—a life which shows the universal touch that makes the whole world akin, and at the same time has those narrow, provincial idiosyncrasies that make it distinctively local and impossible of portrayal except by one who has lived it. There is here revealed much of the usually uncovered side of human nature, lit up with a glow of amusement at the foibles of our fellow-man, but tempered, more than is usual with Leacock, with a good-natured sympathy.

From 1910 onwards to 1922, when Leacock’s My Discovery of England was published, the humorist produced a dozen volumes of his special species of humor and attained a vogue which places him first amongst Canadian humorists of the 20th century. He works at it brilliantly, sometimes in the extreme burlesque manner of Mark Twain and sometimes in the quiet, humble and drier manner of the characteristic English humor which appears in Punch in its department of ‘Charivaria.’ Unlike Haliburton, Leacock rather makes the reader behold the humorist himself figuring away bravely and sometimes futilely, to divert and amuse or entertain. That is to say, unlike Haliburton’s humor, which had an easy method of attack and drew attention to itself, Leacock’s humor gives the reader an impression of its being strained, an effort on the humorist’s part deliberately to make people smile or laugh, whether they will or not. It is ‘smart,’ as the word is used in Yankee slang, rather than human and profound. It ‘tickles’ the fancy and sensibility rather than illuminates the imagination and informs the moral reason. It is clever; but like all things that are merely clever it is ephemerally engaging or pleasing, and it is all a case of the half being greater than the whole. In short, Leacock’s humor is for a day, whereas Haliburton’s humor is for all time.

Peter Donovan is a promising later humorist. His first book was Imperfectly Proper. After a short residence in England since the war, he published Over ‘Ere and Back Home (1922). Mr. Donovan is a critic of society. He is not, however, a critic of constructive social thought but of conventional thinking and conventional manners. The arrows of his humor, which are neither sharp-pointed nor poisonous, are directed against what Matthew Arnold used to call ‘Philistines’—the ‘nice’ people who outwardly conform to all the conventionalities of the law of the land and of the church but who inwardly—when no one is looking—break these laws. Donovan directs his humor against shams in society—not the great shams but those shams which have become acquired habits, or against all that is the ‘fashion’ or the ‘rage’ of the year or day. What he really achieves, from the point of view of vision, is to make us see ourselves as others see us, and to cause us to ‘chuckle’ over his polite—for he is never rude or coarse—revealments. Norris Hodgins works much within the same range as Donovan—Why Don’t You Get Married? (1923)—and is not often quite so hilariously funny, but he comes closer to the daily experiences of every man and every woman, and there is just a bit more solidity to his underlying structure of everyday philosophy.

In another vein is the humor of Peter McArthur, who has been sometimes called ‘The Sage of Ekfrid.’ McArthur writes as one who, living a pastoral and serious life, actually looks around upon his neighbors in other spheres of life and on their striving after wealth and material goods, and who freshly reflects the thought, as old as the ancient hills, that a serious and contented mind, satisfied with the gifts of nature and of God, with pure friendships and sufficient sustenance for body, possesses the only permanent satisfactions of life. He presents this view, not with any originality in thought, but with a manner or style that is pleasant reading and causes us to fall in love with life and laughter and simple joys and to look with charity upon our fellows, and to promote peace.

A new type of Canadian humor, with a new quality of style, is the humor of Newton MacTavish, Editor of The Canadian Magazine, in which periodical Mr. MacTavish first gave to the public his fresh and piquant humor, under the title Thrown In. The sketches were collected in a volume and published with the same title in 1923. The aim of MacTavish’s humor is definitively social—to disclose the hidden humanity of commonplace souls and their essential unity with their more magnificent fellows. When his humor is amusing or entertaining, it achieves this quality not so much by depicting grotesque or ludicrous situations as by revealing the natural attitudes of pioneer people towards the common things of life, and the elementally human idiosyncrasies of the so-called common people. When it is wit rather than mere humor, MacTavish turns the light of truth upon human psychology and character, by way of situation and character-drawing, in terms of commonplace humanity expressed and colored by homely speech and anecdote. So that the effect of his humor is two-fold. For while the reader is being entertained his mind is also receiving new insight into our common heritage, our genuine humanity, whatever be our culture or social status. In short, MacTavish’s humor is philosophical.

In Roy Davis’ long satiric poem, Flying Rumors, published in booklet form at Boston, 1922, we discover a recrudescence of the satiric spirit of Haliburton. Davis was born in Nova Scotia, and was educated at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Harvard University. He is Professor of English in the School of Business Administration, Boston University, of which he is also Assistant Dean.

With the same intent as Haliburton, namely, to correct certain centrifugal tendencies in society, Davis employs satire, not, as did Haliburton, in prose, but in verse, which was the traditional medium of the satire of Haliburton’s and Davis’ Loyalist ancestors in Pre-Revolutionary days in the Old Colonies. The form of Davis’ ‘essay on man and society’ in verse adds, on the side of novelty, a fresh contribution to the satiric literature of Canada. The poet has avoided going back to the traditional rhymed couplet of the Loyalist satirists in Nova Scotia, but has used an octavo stanzaic form in which the first six lines are rhymed alternately, and the last two are rhymed as a couplet. This effects a pleasant sense of finality and rest. Besides, Davis has invented a considerable number of lines which are musical, and arresting or startling in novelty of imagery, as, for instance, this ingenious and daring couplet:—

A goose-step strutting Kaiser, kissing Mars,

Has missed the humor of the midnight stars!

When, therefore, we survey the history of Canadian humor from Haliburton to Leacock, and from Leacock to MacTavish and Davis, the humorists who have remained salient and popular, and whose work seems to have the inherent qualities which make for permanent appeal, are Haliburton and Lanigan. And when we survey and note the variety and distinction of Canadian humor—that it is, in many ways, a humor quite by itself, and that it is of considerable quantity—we may reply to certain literary historians and critics that Canadians are not, as they are superstitiously believed to be, a humorless people and quite without a literature of humor. For Canada has produced several notable humorists, an admirable literature of humor; and the work of one of Canada’s humorists, Haliburton, has long possessed international renown—a place in permanent world literature.