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:—
A woman has two smiles which an angel might envy; the smile that accepts a lover before the words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first-born baby and assures him of a mother’s love.
As to the original humor of Haliburton’s ingenious metaphors, similes, outlandish coinage of expressive word morphology (such as ‘absquotulate,’ ‘spiflicate,’ ‘conflustigation,’ ‘conniption fit,’ reechoed in Artemus Ward and Josh Billings), and of his wealth of aphoristic wit and wisdom, so much are they in the permanent warp and woof of the popular literature of humor and of common speech that they need not here be specially remarked and illustrated.