Nature and Human Nature

by Thomas Chandler Haliburton

He didn’t pursue the subject.

That’s what I call brag for brag. We never allow any created critter, male or female, to go a-head of us in anything. I heard a lady say to embassador’s wife once, in answer to her question, “how she was?”

“Oh, I am in such rude health, I have grown quite indecently stout.”

Embassadress never heard them slang words before (for even high life has its slang), but she wouldn’t be beat.

“Oh,” said she, “all that will yield to exercise. Before I was married I was the rudest and most indecent gall in all Connecticut.”

Well, an Irishman, with his elbow through his coat, and his shirt, if he has one, playing diggy-diggy-doubt from his trowsers, flourishes his shillalah over his head, and brags of the “Imirald Isle,” and the most splindid pisantry in the world; a Scotchman boasts, that next to the devil and the royal owner of Etna, he is the richest proprietor of sulphur that ever was heard of; while a Frenchman, whose vanity exceeds both, has the modesty to call the English a nation of shopkeepers, the Yankees, canaille, and all the rest of the world beasts. Even John Chinaman swaggers about with his three tails, and calls foreigners “Barbarians.” If we go a-head and speak out, do you do so, too. You have a right to do so. Hold the mirror to them, and your countrymen, too. It won’t lie, that’s a fact. They require it, I assure you. The way the just expectations of provincials have been disappointed, the loyal portion depressed, the turbulent petted, and the manner the feelings of all disregarded, the contempt that has accompanied concessions, the neglect that has followed devotion and self-sacrifice, and the extraordinary manner the just claims of the meritorious postponed to parliamentary support, has worked a change in the feelings of the people that the Downing Street officials cannot understand, or surely they would pursue a different course. They want to have the mirror held up to them.

I know they feel sore here about the picture my mirror gives them, and it’s natural they should, especially comin’ from a Yankee; and they call me a great bragger. But that’s nothin’ new; doctors do the same when a feller cures a poor wretch they have squeezed like a sponge, ruinated, and given up as past hope. They sing out Quack. But I don’t care; I have a right to brag nationally and individually, and I’d be no good if I didn’t take my own part. Now, though I say it that shouldn’t say it, for I ain’t afraid to speak out, the sketches I send you are from life; I paint things as you will find them and know them to be. I’ll take a bet of a hundred dollars, ten people out of twelve in this country will recognise Jerry Boudrot’s house who have never entered it, but who have seen others exactly like it, and will say, “I know who is meant by Jerry and his daughter and wife; I have often been there; it is at Clare or Arichat or Pumnico, or some such place or another.”

Is that braggin’? Not a bit; it’s only the naked fact. To my mind there is no vally in a sketch if it ain’t true to nature. We needn’t go searching about for strange people or strange things; life is full of them. There is queerer things happening every day than an author can imagine for the life of him. It takes a great many odd people to make a world, that’s a fact. Now, if I describe a house that has an old hat in one window, and a pair of trousers in another, I don’t stop to turn glazier, take ’em out and put whole glass in, nor make a garden where there is none, and put a large tree in the foreground for effect; but I take it as I find it, and I take people in the dress I find ’em in, and if I set ’em a talkin’ I take their very words down. Nothing gives you a right idea of a country and its people like that.

There is always some interest in natur, where truly depicted. Minister used to say that some author (I think he said it was old Dictionary Johnson) remarked, that the life of any man, if wrote truly, would be interesting. I think so too; for every man has a story of his own, adventures of his own, and some things have happened to him that never happened to anybody else. People here abuse me for all this, they say, after all my boastin’ I don’t do ’em justice. But after you and I are dead and gone, and things have been changed, as it is to be hoped they will some day or another for the better, unless they are like their Acadian French neighbours, and intend to remain just as they are for two hundred and fifty years, then these sketches will be curious; and, as they are as true to life as a Dutch picture, it will be interestin’ to see what sort of folks were here in 1854, how they lived, and how they employed themselves, and so on.

Now it’s more than a hundred years ago since Smollett wrote, but his men and women were taken from real life, his sailors from the navy, his attorneys from the jails and criminal courts, and his fops and fine ladies from the herd of such cattle that he daily met with. Well, they are read now; I have ’em to home, and laugh till I cry over them. Why? Because natur is the same always. Although we didn’t live a hundred years ago, we can see how the folks of that age did; and, although society is altered, and there are no Admiral Benbows, nor Hawser Trunnions, and folks don’t travel in vans with canvas covers, or wear swords, and frequent taverns, and all that as they used to did to England; still it’s a pictur of the times, and instructin’ as well as amusin’. I have learned more how folks dressed, talked, and lived, and thought, and what sort of critters they were, and what the state of society, high and low, was then, from his books and Fielding’s than any I know of. They are true to life, and as long as natur remains the same, which it always will, they will be read. That’s my idea at least.