Considered critically, then, the poetic dramas of Robert Norwood and the lyric drama of Marjorie Pickthall are, from the universal point of view, authentic works of art, originally conceived and beautifully constructed, and, from the Canadian point of view, are the supreme achievements in the poetic drama of Canada.
CHAPTER XXIII
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:—