Читать книгу Highways of Canadian Literature онлайн

77 страница из 84

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.