SOURCE: MacDonald, R. D. “Thomas Chandler Haliburton's ‘Machine in the Garden’: Applying Leo Marx's Criticism of America to Haliburton's Clockmaker.” Canadian Review of American Studies 19, no. 2 (summer 1988): 165-80.

In a recent symposium, Robert L. McDougall has puzzled over T. C. Haliburton's being a reactionary tory and yet an advocate of technological progress: “How come … we find this [early nineteenth-century Nova Scotian writer] whose notion of utopia seems to be an agrarian economy, stable to the point of inertia and supported by an industrious yeomanry benevolently watched over by country squires—how come such a man takes such an interest in building railways and moving things around?”¹ McDougall believes that Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America may point the way to an answer: and so with Marx in mind, McDougall decides that Haliburton was “not more American but more North American than I had thought him to be,” for he takes Haliburton's preoccupation with “technology and communications” to be “American” or “North American.” Thus in Haliburton's opening sketch of The Season's Ticket (1860), McDougall sees an American's faith that technology, railways, shipping lanes and harbours can bind the Eastern and Western provinces of British North America together and further (shades of Whitman's “Passage to India”) can join them beyond to the East, “China, Japan, the Sandwich Islands, Australia and Hong Kong” (156). But McDougall also points beyond this to the “big” side of Haliburton's toryism: “The vision is of course suffused with Haliburton's imperial ardour: these will be British routes, made safe for commerce by a great navy” (156).

My only quarrel with McDougall is that he makes too much of American technology and not enough of Haliburton's being British North American. Certainly, Haliburton anticipates Stephen Leacock's early twentieth-century imperialist ardour, Leacock's loyalist dream of a larger Canadian citizenship within an enlarged and accommodating British Empire—and, incidentally, Haliburton also anticipates Marshall McLuhan's science-fiction prophecy of Canada (in the electronic/post-national age) plugged into a much larger Global Village. But, surely, in his own time, Haliburton was closer to the sober progressivism of his British contemporary William Wordsworth, the Wordsworth of “Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways” than he was to the intoxication of an Emerson—or to the later despair (or hangover?) of a Leo Marx. Wordsworth's sonnet concludes:

In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.

In this unifying myth of progress, Wordsworth imagines Nature “embrac[ing]” her own “lawful offspring” (or natural consequence) in Man's “art” (which includes the sense of “technology”) and Time taking up hope from man's limited triumph over Space. At the advent of the steam age, Wordsworth (and as shall be seen later, Haliburton) assign civilization a triumphant but still dependant part within the unfolding natural cosmos.

I find Leo Marx's 1960s view of technology more despairing, less complex—and more narrow—than that of Haliburton. Marx's Machine in the Garden poses a “metaphor of contradiction” in the American “pastoral fable,” i.e., the opposites of a raw wilderness and a decadent civilization.² While Marx's metaphor of a green garden might seem to promise a mediating image, some larger middle ground between nature and civilization, his garden finally becomes no more than an ironic measure of a failed and dying culture.

Thus Marx's “Epilogue: The Garden of Ashes” dwells upon Scott Fitzgerald's romantic disillusionment and concludes that America's “inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning,” that those hopes before “represented by the symbol of an ideal landscape have not, and probably cannot be embodied in our traditional institutions.” Thus Marx's typical American hero ends “alienated from society, alone and powerless, like the evicted shepherd of Virgil's ecologue” (364). This estranged “point of vision” typifies, however, not only the helpless drift of the American hero in modern fiction, but also the critic's own drift toward an irony of detached negation: for to Marx, the American pastoral reveals little more than a “root conflict [in American] culture,” achieves little more than a “clarif[ication of] our situation” of insufficiency in which “we” “require new symbols of possibility.” Indeed having traced the steam engine's sudden entrance into his nineteenth-century garden, this tender-minded Marx merely hands over the consequent moral issue, the truth-of-what-must-be-done to the politician; Marx sees “a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics”—how unlike the busy confidence and didacticism of Thomas Chandler Haliburton!

Perhaps because I am not an “American” (or hopelessly “devant-garde”) I do not subscribe to Leo Marx's assumptions that “our” traditional “symbols of order and beauty” are barren of meaning, that they have been exploded by technology and that “our” “problems” are to be “solved” or legislated only by tough-minded dealers in the “real”—politicians, businessmen or scientists. From Wordsworth I learn that technology, despite its “harsh features,” can be understood as part of man's art and that man and his artifacts inescapably remain part of nature's larger order. And from Haliburton I learn that we must see and use the powers of nature, especially water power and steam power, and fit those powers to man's basic needs. Surely Wordsworth and Haliburton welcome the advent of technology because they imagine the machine in its subservient place to be “natural” and “legitimate” and because they imagine natural history and human history to be an undivided, seamless whole.

The connection, then, that I would mark between Leo Marx and Haliburton is primarily one of difference. Haliburton is more detached than Marx as he sees through and around the explosive powers of an industrial civilization. He is much more sanguine than Marx as he draws together the cultural opposites of the contemplative British Squire and the active Yankee Clockmaker, celebrates the syncretic possibility of a British North American, and celebrates the undiminished natural backdrop, the idyllic order, the beauty and bounty of the Nova Scotian countryside.

However much, then, Haliburton may have been a British tory in his loyalties, he does not advocate a medieval squirearchy—though he does advocate the continuation, enlargement and adaptation of the British Empire. He does not advocate a static agrarian economy—though he does advocate a stable and progressive society. More to the point, Haliburton advocates an alert and thoughtful spirit of enterprise—forward-looking self-reliance within bounds; and like his East Coast contemporaries Thomas McCulloch of The Stepshure Letters (1822) and Henry David Thoreau of “Economy” in Walden (1854), Haliburton contends that social and political improvement is largely a matter of “home economics,” the homely ethic of simple wants finding simple expediencies. Thus the harnessing of water and steam power, the building of canals and railways and mills, is itself contained or harnessed within the larger view that prosperity is to be nurtured within the natural order of the Nova Scotian countryside, and within the protective and adaptive order of the British empire.

This vision of contained power is nicely realized in Haliburton's narrative style, his paired narrators, his joined opposites of the Squire and the Clockmaker. As J. D. Logan and Donald G. French have noted, Haliburton's genius does not show itself in his creation or invention of unified plots or even unified individual characters, but in his reworking of stock types. Sam Slick originates in the “stage peddler who made his appearance in dramatic literature as early as 1811, and who by 1830 was a stock character of the acted drama, having the same function as the stage Irishman of the late Victorian age.”³ But again while French and Logan appreciate Haliburton's liveliness in adapting this stock type, they emphasize Slick's representativeness:

Sam Slick is not a single person of many characteristics, not a type of character, but a composite creation, the epitome of so many distinct and contradictory traits that they could not reside in a single person but only in persons. Sam Slick, in short, was conceived and drawn to personify a people and his characteristics are an immanent criticism or satirizing of the virtues and vices of republican democracy.

(75)

What matters here is not a unity of character or plot, but the unity of Haliburton's thought: indeed, Sam Slick is a “‘mass of contradictions.’ Neither is the Rev. Joshua Hopewell a unity—speaking and acting, that is, consistently one character. Yet they have a unity. How do they get it? It is not a moral but the functional unity of Spokesman of Haliburton's idea” (87). Slick himself, however, becomes for them Haliburton's unifying centre and major accomplishment: in Slick, Haliburton “created a composite character, uncultured and socially inferior, to be the supreme critic of his social and intellectual betters and of American or republican culture, institutions and civilization. … [This] is an absolutely original achievement in creative satire and comic characterization. With a single stroke of genius Haliburton places himself beside Dean Swift as a satirist, and raises himself to the status of one of the world's perduring satirists and humorists” (77).

While the bringing of Slick's upstart perspicacity to centre stage is important, Logan and French fail to appreciate Haliburton's even larger accomplishment of joining the Clockmaker and the Squire. They do appreciate Haliburton's political intent—the first writer to address himself to the “anglo Saxon peoples,” the first after the American Revolution had disjoined Anglo-Saxondom to address himself with a new and distinctive viewpoint to rejoining the isolated peoples: “Dickens aimed mostly to entertain his own people. Haliburton aimed to change the vision of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in the United States, British North America, and the United Kingdom, and thus, if possible, to effect a world-wide Anglo-Saxon union or unity” (65). But they fail to appreciate how Haliburton overcomes these differences of outlook, how through the subtle joining of the Clockmaker and Squire, he exposes and draws together the differing edges of the American republic, the British North American colonies and the British nation/empire. I propose, then, to emphasize how Haliburton artfully contains the exuberant doings and sayings of Slick within the sober overview of the Squire and how he proposes a new technology still contained within the fixed order of nature.

To this end, I find Thomas Vincent's “Strategems of Satire in North American Literature Before Haliburton” useful. Vincent distinguishes two satiric traditions which Haliburton reworked to his own purposes: the one, rational and pragmatic, appeals to “Horse Sense” and opposes “failures of reason as manifested in human stupidity, vanity and pomposity”; the other, moral, makes its appeal to the traditional or established values of propriety, “based on a recognition of man's modest position in the scheme of things.”⁴ Joining the rational perspective of the Clockmaker and the moral perspective of the Squire, Haliburton created a dynamic relationship “grounded in the fundamental differences in personality and ideology between the two, differences which seem always to be threatening to break-up this ‘odd couple’” (61). In this complex relation, Vincent sees a sophisticated satire presupposing a sophisticated Nova Scotian readership which would recognize that the narrators, especially Slick, are at once the “instrument” and the object of the satire—and again a readership (as Vincent quotes Watters) which would recognize that “Haliburton uses the Squire ‘to help us see Sam more clearly.’ The attractiveness of Sam's rhetoric and the force of his personality require the occasional assertion of the antithetical perspective in order to temper the momentum and the mesmerizing influence of Sam's rhetoric and logic” (61). Indeed, Vincent not only warns that understanding Slick is “much like dealing with the character of Satan in Paradise Lost” (63), he asserts that the sophisticated Nova Scotian reader was disposed to understand what “Sam and his nation [were] lacking; political rebellion isolated [the Americans] intellectually and spiritually from the mainstream of human civility, and emotionally they continue to glory in that isolation” (64). Against this isolation Vincent flatters Haliburton's people—and perhaps (despite his ironically self-conscious parenthesis) Vincent himself falls victim to the kind of smug Canadianism that Sam Slick would have enjoyed lampooning: “… in the hearts and minds of the people of Maritime Canada, the warm light of civilization remains alive—in some more than in others” (64).

Whatever the place or truth of this “light,” Vincent's essay enables one to see why Canadian literature cannot be ready-fitted to the categories of the American critic, Leo Marx, for through Haliburton, Vincent emphasizes that the ongoing connection of Britain and British North America was more than a political imperial/colonial arrangement. It was a moral connection: the British colonies remained consciously attached to the “warm light of [European] civilization”—or remained within, as George Grant might say, the ancient understanding that mankind inescapably plays a subordinate and modest part within the larger natural order.⁵ In this “light,” the American revolution becomes a wilful departure, a destructive and unstable separation from the good—and thereby a threat to the British colonies to the north.

However, because I am not as sure as Vincent that Haliburton's argument worked because it reflected back this “warm light,”—or that the American's lacked it—I must attend more closely to his writing itself, especially his fitting together of the Squire and the Clockmaker.

The Squire can all too easily be taken as little more than a technical device, a barely visible stage manager or straight man focussing attention upon his more colourful partner, providing cues as to when the spectator should laugh and how he should take the extravagant sayings and doings of Slick. But the Squire is more than a matter of technique: he embodies an ironic self-awareness, a philosophic recognition of his own limits and foibles, and a shrewd insight into the largely unselfconscious and bumptious Clockmaker. It is the fulness of the Squire's ironic sensibility, his judging disposition, that makes one take his change of heart toward Slick seriously: indeed, that such opposites should come together and come to agreement would surely startle even a Bluenoser out of his complacency and make him consider seriously Haliburton's “American” lessons of resourcefulness and self reliance—and consider new-fangled projects like railroads, canals, water mills and steam engines.

Initially, however, the difference between the Squire and Clockmaker may seem merely a convenient contrast of class (or national) stereotypes. The Squire looks askance at the stranger whose occupation he cannot place: “a want of staidness of look” disqualifies him as a lawyer—for lawyers can afford to be seen in old clothes. While the gaudiness of his brooch and “some superfluous seals and gold keys, which ornamented the outward man, looked New England like,” the Squire cannot decide whether Slick is merely a “Colchester beau” affecting the ways of a “Yankee fop.”⁶ This slow, cautious estimate, however, is more than just a strategy of raising our curiousity or fleshing-out our perception of Slick. As the Squire simultaneously discredits and credits himself, making himself the butt of his own joke and yet suavely crediting himself with self-knowledge, he shows himself to be all too much the gentleman. He shows both a modest sense of his own foibles and limitations and yet an overweening presumption: “I was always well mounted: I am fond of a horse and always piqued myself on having the fastest trotter in the Province. I have made no great progress in the world; I feel doubly, therefore, the pleasure of not being surpassed on the road” (4). But this quietly-aware man with his insight into general human folly—notice the easy assurance of his “therefore”—and with his ability to see through and around himself, fails to place Slick, fails to anticipate the efficacy of Slick's doings and sayings, and so in his triumphant moment of leaving behind his upstart fellow-traveller, he himself is left behind—so much so that Slick must rein in to carry on his conversation. Worse, the Squire now must endure the humiliation of hearing his own arrogant thoughts spoken aloud by the indelicate Clockmaker: “I don't like to ride in the dust after everyone I meet, and I allow no man to pass me but when I choose” (7). As the American declares and does what the other man only talks to himself of doing, the moralizing Squire is forced to moralize at his own expense: “Pride must have its fall: I confess mine was prostrate in the dust” (6). Thus the elegant pose of the self-possessed and self-deprecating gentleman has been left in tatters in the breezy wake of this “go-ahead” American cousin. And so when in the last lines of the book the Squire says, “I look forward with much pleasure to our meeting again. His manner and idiom were to me perfectly new, and very interesting. …” (164), Haliburton promises much more than the publication of new sketches. The final judgment upon Slick is to be taken seriously, because from the beginning the Squire himself has been given intellectual substance, himself enough “good sense and searching observation,” that he proves to be a match and occasionally (when he puts Slick in his place) more than a match for the extravagant Slick.

Surely, too, a large part of our amusement and edification arises from the discords and cacaphonies produced by these two differing voices. The opening and closing voice, the containing voice of the Squire, is that of a staid gentleman: the syntax is correct, balanced, measured and intricately discursive; the diction, bookish, elevated and often Latinate; the “spoken” paragraphs, models of linear and purposeful organization—reminiscent of an eighteenth-century Addison or a turn-of-the-century Washington Irving. On the other hand, Slick's syntax sings and swings to the verge of incoherence; his sentences vary from the extremes of quick stacatto to the lengthy and convoluted; his paragraphs, his metaphors and anecdotes move, it often seems, by a mode of free association. But almost always, through some powerful undercurrent of emotion or by some outrageous ruse of wit, Slick returns his digressions to the original point of his story.

As with Melville's Moby-Dick, a large part of the reader's pleasure arises from the recurring discovery that the most outlandish digressions lead, after all, to meaning. In both The Clockmaker and Moby-Dick, much of the meaning and pleasure is generated by the odd fit of the meditative onlooker and listener (Ishmael/Squire) and the bombastic, dangerous and hyperbolic man of action (Ahab/Slick). In Moby-Dick, however, Ishmael gives himself up at times to babbling and bombast; in The Clockmaker, the Squire never abandons his countervailing voice of quiet reason.

“The Clockmaker's Opinion of Halifax,” like “the Whale's Tail,” can be taken as a miniature of the whole book: it opens and closes with the Squire. While the Squire sees and generalizes “one of those uncommonly fine days that distinguish an American Autumn” (45), the Clockmaker in his more immediate and sensuous way tastes the “fineness” in terms of a “glass of mint julip, with a lump of ice in it; it tastes cool, and feels warm,” and he moves typically to breezy, chauvinistic superlatives: “It's generally allowed the finest weather in the world is in America; there ain't the beat of it to be found anywhere” (54). From here the Squire prods Slick to consider the “prospects of Halifax,” and at the close approves the sagacity of Slick's judgement; and in response to Slick's “most decided manner,” he concludes, “I am inclined to think he is right”: “He appears to be such a shrewd, observing and intelligent man, and so perfectly at home on these subjects that I confess I have more faith in this humble but eccentric Clockmaker, than in any other man in this Province. I therefore pronounce, ‘There will be a railroad’” (59). But between the Squire's neat opening and closing, Slick carries us down a most “untracklike” line, down an unpredictable and careening path like that of a Metaphysical conceit.

Without apparent forethought or logic, Slick extemporises—but in almost every instance, his anecdote or image leads to the discovery that what is nearest or underfoot, the natural resources of Nova Scotia, are at bottom best—if only they be recognized and taken. Thus Halifax is compared to the lower parts of a “Varginny gal”: Nova Scotia “will grow as fast as a Varginny gal; and they grow so amazin' fast, if you put your arm round one of their necks to kiss them, by the time you're done, they've grown up into women. It's a pretty Province I tell you, good above and better below. …” (54). The same directional metaphor holds true with the famous soup of the Tremont House: dip down into it, and one finds “fat pieces of turtle, and the thick rich soup, and a sight of little forced meat balls, of the size of sheep's dung” (56). But before Slick allows us to find these choice morsels, his story diverges to Major Bradford, who introduced him to the advantages of eating at the Tremont House—as Bradford says, “a grand place” for speculation (54). There Bradford sold a rich Carolina lawyer a horse that can supposedly “trot with the ball out of the small fed of a rifle, and never break into a gallop.” Bradford tries out a ＄200 horse and before buying it sells it to a lawyer for ＄400—an example of Yankee quickness and opportunism, if ever there were one. Again, as if in context to show the advantages of the Tremont and the eager opportunism of the Yankees: as they line up and rush for the food, Slick inadvertently grabs what he can to keep his balance and rips the dress off one of the women: “there she was, the pretty critter with all her upper riggin' standin' as far as her waist, and nothing left below but a short linen under-garment” and showing “a proper pretty leg” (56).

Against these pictures of the delights of what is near at hand and below, Slick contrasts the dismal lot of the Nova Scotians and Haligonians in their want of spirit and wakefulness—“they walk in their sleep, and talk in their sleep, and what they say one day they forget the next; they say they were dreaming” (56)—and the world around and below them is likened to a graveyard, the burial ground below the governor's mansion: “it's filled with large grave rats as big as kittens, and the springs of black water there go through the chinks in the rocks and flow into the wells, and fairly p'ison the folks: it's a dismal place, I tell you; I wonder the air from it don't turn all the brass and silver in the Governor's house of a brass colour—and folks say he has four loads of it—it's so ever lasting bad; it's near about as nosy as a slave ship of niggers. Well, you may go there and shake the folks to eternity, and you won't wake 'hem, I guess” (57). From here, as if to show his wakefulness, Slick digresses (and in effect, contrasts his own wakeful opportunism); he tells of turning on the spur of the moment to Warsaw after the Russian emperor had ordered all the Poles to cut off their queues: he is to “buy them all up, and ship them off to London for the wig makers. Human hair is scarce and risin'” (57). But this lesson of wakeful opportunism, of immediate “get up and go,” is once again brought home to the Nova Scotians: in his trip to Poland, Slick meets an armless Russian officer who unable to feed himself is fed by his neighbours—and hence his name, Spooney. Thus, too, the armless Halifax must starve or be fed by its neighbours—or must be given new “arms,” a railroad from the Atlantic to the Casno which would substitute for Halifax's lack of a river. Thus like the Varginny girl who would grow up instantly if you put you arm around her and kissed her, Halifax, Slick insists, is not too young to take upon herself the building of a railroad; like the Preacher's daughter who was thought by her father to be too young to get married, Halifax should realize that it is not she who is too young but the counsel of her elders that is too old and listless.

Through this series of disjointed, exuberant and often off-colour variations, Slick returns the Squire to the main point: indeed, at bottom, Halifax and Nova Scotia would become great if the Nova Scotians would but wake up and embrace her. Thus by means of Slick's anecdotal metaphor, itself like a spirited and unruly horse, Haliburton's meaning is carried forward rapidly, energetically, even licentiously; and yet from the start it is spurred and homed by the sober consciousness of the Squire.

While much of The Clockmaker is a repeated attack upon the lethargy of the Nova Scotians, their failure to wake up and take what is theirs (and thus an attack upon their unnecessary poverty), two chapters attack the customary order itself (or, once again, a lethargic, uncritical acceptance of old ways). In “Justice Pettifog,” Haliburton employs the indignation of the outsider, Slick, to show established law working against natural justice: Pettifog refuses to unsuit Dennis O'Brien when his accuser, William Hare, is unprepared to bring evidence to support his charge that O'Brien owes him three pounds for a month's lodging; then when O'Brien makes the counterclaim that Hare owes him four pounds, ten shillings for teaching Hare's children, the judge declares that his court is not qualified to settle claims larger than three pounds—but offers to represent him in the higher court. Before this egregious turn of events, Slick has already called for lynch law: in the States they would “make a carpenter's plumb bob of [the judge], and hang him from the church steeple, to try if it were perpendicular” (18). The Squire agrees; but in more temperate terms, he laments the patronage that accounts for Pettifog's appointment: “Disgusted at the gross partiality of the Justice, I also quitted the court, fully concurring in the opinion, though not in the language, that Dennis was giving utterance to in the bar-room. Pettifog owed his elevation to his interest at an election. It is to be hoped that his subsequent merits will be as promptly rewarded, by his dismissal from a bench which he disgraces and defiles by his presence” (20).

Elsewhere, Haliburton warns even more directly against an uncritical acceptance of law and custom. Again, this truth seems to arise incidentally from the differences between the Squire and Slick: bragging of his horse Clay, Slick likens its “action and soundness” to that of a “free and enlightened” American citizen; objecting to this appropriation of the word “free” exclusively to Americans, the Squire points to the hypocrisy of slavery in the so-called land of the free. In turn, Slick points to the greater evil of Nova Scotians auctioning off the poor to “them that will keep them for the lowest sum” (132-133). In this anecdote, Slick shames the typically apathetic (and henpecked) Nova Scotian, John Porter, into admitting, “I never seed it in that 'ere light afore, for its our custom, and custom you know will reconcile one to 'most anything. I must say, it does appear, as you lay it out, an unfeelin' way of providin' for the poor. …” (134). Thus the American racist heaps scorn on the Nova Scotians because they deal in poor whites while the Americans “deal only in blacks.” This is one of those unusual spots where Haliburton turns his penetrating irony not only upon the rebel Americans and the apathetic Nova Scotians but upon the dangers of established custom or tradition itself.

Haliburton turns this same active and critical eye upon the future. Nova Scotians must wake up and become more self-reliant; they must take on the new technology of water mills and canals, steam-engined boats and railroads—but must also beware of the dangerous consequences of the new technology and thinking. This progressive conservatism and its accompanying style can be understood in part through Leo Marx's explanation of how the nineteenth-century machine and idea of progress affected the thought and prose of the period. Marx attributes to Carlyle the recognition that the machine is more than an objective fact—it becomes a metaphor of a whole culture. Indeed, then, the new technology represents “a change in our whole way of life”—for as Carlyle is quoted, “‘the same habit regulates not our modes of thought alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand’” (174). And so the impetuous rush of progress, the striving and restlessness, is reflected in the exuberant prose of the age: thus the machine itself is used not only “to figure” an “unprecedented release of human energy in science, politics, and everyday life” (191), it is also the source of an “overblown, exclamatory tone [which] arises from the intoxicated feeling of unlimited possibility. History has a meaning, a purpose, a goal: it is nothing less than man's acquisition of absolute truth” (198). This exuberance, expressing “a generous delight at the promise of so much energy so soon to be released” (206-7), arises [as Mill observed] from a subconscious level below ideas: “… a buoyant feeling generated without words or thought. The same may be said of the rhetoric. It rises like froth on a tide of exuberant self regard, sweeping over all misgivings, problems and contradictions” (207). Certainly in the vernacular speech of Sam Slick, Haliburton carries this kind of exuberance, but Haliburton works misgivings and apocalyptic second thoughts into Slick's thought and into the countervailing voice of the Squire, the vestigial voice of the age of reason. Yet even this measured and measuring voice approves the steamboat promise of a larger unified world.

To sort the drift in this exuberant and anecdotal froth, I shall trace Haliburton's motif of the machine, having already drawn attention to the rush of Slick's voice and the speedy motion of his horses. It is appropriate that, as Slick relates his adventures of oneupmanship, his horse catches his infectious spirit of motion, this barely controlled force which verges upon the violent and the destructive. In “Go Ahead,” Slick is so carried away with the “go-ahead” virtues of American ciphering, the quick calculation and taking of profits, the reading of nature as “the other book,” and so carried away with his attack upon traditional book learning, the classical learning of Greek and Latin, so caught up with Halifax and its natural advantages and its needing only to be “wound up into motion” like a clock—the key being a railroad that would “beget a spirit of enterprise” and “nullify space and time”—so caught up by this vision of motion and progress that his horse, feeling “the animation of his master … set[s] off at a most prodigious rate” leaving the Squire behind once again to meditate upon the lesson: that a railroad is “the substitution of mechanical for human labour … and makes a child a giant” (26-27). But Slick's gusto, his revelling in motion and power and oneupsmanship, increasingly takes on a sinister edge. Thus his anecdote of the American Quaker besting the lawyer Daniel Webster unintentionally suggests that in competitive America even the peacable Friends are sharp and quick dealers: in response to the Quaker's complaint against his high legal fee, Webster agrees (thinking Quakers are the least disputatious people) to “plead the other cases” that the Quaker would bring forward. Then when the Quaker in effect hires him out and Webster balks, the Quaker smartly declares “If thou wilt not stand up to thy agreement, neither will stand to I mine” (16). Indeed, in such a world of sharp dealers, Nova Scotians like the lazy Pat Flanagan should think twice before emigrating to the States: it is a world, to employ Slick's canal image, in which “one must either draw or be dragged to death” (17). And, indeed, Slick's many stories of besting his opponents at fighting, talking, horse racing and dealing, pretending to be less than he is and then cutting his opponents down to size, increasingly indicate a domineering and warlike disposition. Thus his delight in catching the notorious Jim Munro outside his sister's window in a rabbit snare, stretching his one foot longer than the other and forcing him by means of this humiliation to marry Sister Sal; yet again, his sharp delight in setting a “Yankee Handle on a Halifax Blade,” forcing the proud Haligonian to recognize that Halifax is backward because the people are asleep, cannot cipher and lack enterprise; his delight in the preacher who, refusing to accept the boxer's challenge to fight, merely chucks him over the fence—proving once again the virtue of quickness and the moral that religious controvertionalists waste their breath. To overstate the matter in Slick's manner: what matters is doing, not saying or thinking.

Slick's subordination of reason to action and appetite is implicit in his excuse that he does not cheat his customers; they (in their greed to get something for nothing) supposedly cheat themselves. Slick's violent chauvinism shows in his indignation against the British doctor who insults the American ambassador “Gobble” by claiming that his dyspepsia is caused by his “bolting his food like a boa constrictor.” Slick rages, “I'd a headed him … and pinned him up against the wall, and make him bolt his words ag'in, as quick as he throw'd them up, for I never see'd an Englishman that didn't cut his words as short as he does his horse's tail, close up to the stump” (34); and in reflex he turns as usual in his anger “to indemnify himself” by ridiculing the Nova Scotians. His dangerous gusto, his revelling in his own power, is even more apparent in his defeat of the bully, Jim Bradley. Refusing to fight, apparently running away, Slick suddenly drops to his knees and upends the pursuing Bradley and then unleashes his best—and indeed his racy language seems at one with his violent action: “‘That riled him up properly; I meant that it should; so he ups and at me awful spiteful, like a bull; then I lets him have it, right, left, right, jist three corkers, beginning with the right hand, shifting to the left, and then with the right ag'in. This way I did it’, said the Clockmaker (and he showed me the manner in which it was done); ‘it's a beautiful way of hitting and always does the business—a blow for each eye and one for the mouth.’” From here Slick moves to a rollicking celebration of his horse Clay, “spry as a colt yet, clear grit, ginger to the backbone; I can't help thinkin' sometimes the breed must have come from old Kentuck, half horse, half alligator, with a cross of the airthquake” (90).

The sheer violent exuberance of this frontier braggadocio draws comic attention to itself. Elsewhere Haliburton uses the Squire to the same end: when Slick (observing the beautiful stars in the Nova Scotian night) brags of the stars in the American flag and the emblem of the American eagle “on its perch, balancing itself for a start on the broad expanse of blue sky, afeared of nothin' of its kind, and president of all it surveys,” the Squire angrily retorts, “The emblem is more appropriate than you are aware of: boasting of what you cannot perform, grasping at what you cannot attain; an emblem of arrogance and weakness; of ill-directed ambition and vulgar pretension” (48). Predictably, Slick in return declaims against the apathy of the Nova Scotians: “An Owl should be his emblem and the motto, ‘He sleeps all the days of his life’” (49).

In at least two oddly evocative passages, Haliburton makes one think twice upon the enormous capacity of Americans for work—ultimately it is silent and static, without purpose or end or meaning. (I am reminded here of Leo Marx's reference to Henry Adams' awe at the mystery of the silent but powerful dynamo going round and round in an unending circle.) Slick in his praise of work boasts of a similar miracle, the unnatural phenomenon of the “Silent Girls” at work in a Lowell mill:

Now with us it's all work and no talk; in our shipyards, our factories, our mills, and even in our vessels, there's no talk; a man can't work and talk too. I guess if you were at the factories at Lowell we'd show you a wonder—five hundred gals at work together all in a silence. I don't think our great country has such a real natural curiosity as that. … for a woman's tongue goes so slick of itself, without water power or steam, and moves so easy on its hinges, that it's no easy matter to put a spring stop on it. …

(14)

Again as Slick contrasts the ever-working New Englander to the detriment of the lazy Blue Noser (with all his excuses that the maritime climate is not suitable to farming), Slick overstates his case and again unwittingly creates a sinister and absurd picture of work:

There was no ‘blowin' time’ there, you may depend. We ploughed all the fall for dear life; in winter we thrashed, made and mended tools, went to the market and mill, and got out our firewood and rails. As soon as frost was gone, came sowin' and plantin' and weedin' and hoein', then harvest and spreadin' compost; then gatherin' manure, fencin' and ditchin'; and then turn tu and fall ploughin' ag'in. It all went round like a wheel without stoppin' and so fast, I guess you couldn't see the spokes, just one everlastin' stroke from July to etarnity, without time to look back on the tracks. Instead of racin' over the country like a young doctor, to show how busy a man is that has nothin' to do, as Bluenose does, and then take a ‘blowin' time,’ we kept a rale travellin' gait, an eight-mile-an-hour pace, the whole year round.

(110)

More will be made of this later when Slick explains why such work is not necesesary in Nova Scotia.

But to return to the motif of exuberant and ultimately pruposeless motion: it is not only the unthinking and silent drive and doing of the Yankee that frightens one; it is the tendency of such work and machines to uncontrolled violence. America itself becomes a giant centripetal and centrifugal force pulling everything into its field and threatening at the same time to blow apart. America becomes a “road of needcessity” inexorably doing whatever is necessary to guarantee prosperity. American access to the fisheries will make a canal through the Casno Straight mandatory; in Slick's extravagant rhetoric, they will “stick a torpedo in the bottom of the province and blow it up or pull it out to sea” (30). Indeed, like Benjamin Franklin, who believed that Providence would make for the extirpation of the North American Indians, Slick believes that the apathetic Nova Scotians “must recede before our free and enlightened citizens, like the Indians: our folks will buy them out, and they must give place to a more intelligent and active people” (51).

To Slick, activity and intelligence means the ability to convert any circumstance into money; thus the Americans so improve upon or exceed themselves and Creation, “they are actilly equal to cash” (71). Such a people (who can cipher directly from nature and can see immediately through cant by asking of themselves and everyone else “what's that to me”) would seem in their individualism and opportunism to be free from traditional restraints. And indeed Haliburton suggests that the driving dynamo of unimpeded self-interest threatens to pull America apart or to bring it to a “spontaneous combustion.” The divisiveness, the tendency to individualism, schism, separatism, racial, religious, regional and class warfare is powerfully realized by Slick himself as he envisages in the opposition of Blacks and Whites, Protestants and Catholics, “general” and “state” government, an “Etna lava” or “the three steamboat options”—“to be blown sky-high or to be scalded to death, or drowned” (45). The force is both a vortex pulling all into its destructive centre and a steamboat explosion. The source of this immense and destructive force, however, is not merely economic greed or technology.

To Slick's father, who repeatedly glories in the War of Independence, the War is, after all, a nightmarish act of murder, an act of unnecessary separation, born out of a spirit of schism and disloyalty—an unfixed or uncommitted spirit which threatens to drive America yet again to civil war. Thus Pa Slick (like Lady Macbeth) cannot wash out the irremediable “stain of that 'ere blood from my hands” as he recognizes that the British had already made concessions and that reconciliation had been possible; he concludes that “our Revolution has made us grow faster and grow richer, but, Sam, when we were younger and poorer, we were more pious and more happy. We have nothin' fixed either in religion or politics.” Indeed, the dissenting spirit of Protestantism, the refusal to “go whole hog” in any belief, has led Pa Slick and the Rev. Hopewell to see a world darkened by “infidelity,” a cynicism which falls away from all belief; and so (in the 1830s) they anticipate the horrors of the Civil War, “the blood we shed in our Revolution will be atoned for in the blood and suffering of our fellow citizens” (147-148).

It is significant that while Slick continually makes invidious comparisons between dull inaction and joyful motion—Nova Scotia as a becalmed sailing ship, “an everlasting flappin' of the sails and a creaking of the booms” and the Yankees as a sudden sweet motion of a “steamboat a-clippin' by”—he also repeatedly warns against steam engines exploding, against acceleration leading to disintegration. It is difficult to know whether the Nova Scotian of Haliburton's own day could make sense out of these contraries, but the contraries surely enabled Haliburton simultaneously to raise Nova Scotian fears against the dynamic Americans and yet to raise Nova Scotian hopes of improving upon the Americans before it was too late. He employs a rhetoric of anxiety familiar to later American leaders in their post-Sputnik rivalry with the Russians. But Haliburton surely does not propose the sacrifice of the old ways for the new ways of the Americans. In “A Body Without a Head,” for example, the American Hopewell insists that even in a republic citizens must revere their leaders and traditions, that a society without leaders and without respect for its leaders is a society moving to anarchy. Thus “every man's vote [in a corporation] is regilated by his share and proportion of stock”; thus nature decreed a head to every family, and an overseer to “niggers” on a plantation—the traditional political message here, contained in the crude stereotypes, is that the lesser must be subordinated to the greater. In Nova Scotia, however, Slick argues that less attention should be paid to politics, less should be expected of politicians, less blame should be assigned to the wealthy elite: and the lesser members of society should spend more time at home minding fences or minding their own business:

‘You are like the machinery on one of our boats—good enough, and strong enough, but of no airthly use until you get the steam up; you want to be set in motion, and then you'll go ahead like anything, you may depend. Give up politicis. It's a barren field and wellwatched too; where one critter jumps a fence into a good field and gets fat, more nor twenty are chased round and round, by a whole pack of yelping curs, till they are fairly beaten out and end by being half starved, and you at the liftin' at last. Look to your farms, your water power and your fisheries, and factories. In short' says I puttin' on my hat and startin', ‘look to yourselves and don't look to others.’

(102)

Indeed, staying at home, minding one's own business, looking to “home” economics rather than to politics, is as much the message as the subordination of the lesser to the greater. But the Jacksonian Hopewell goes even further as he argues that a true democratic republic can only arise from the virtues of a traditional agrarian society. Otherwise, it tends to atheism and anarchy: “A republic is only calculated for an enlightened and vartuous people, and folks chiefly in the farmin' line. That is an innocent and happy vocation. Agriculture was ordained by him as made us, for our chief occupation” (126). Slick (who sees the shortage of land on the New England seaboard and the exodus of pioneers for the Ohio interior) drives home the lesson that the varied and yet ordered agrarian countryside of Nova Scotia, with its sea air, healthful climate and fertile abundance, is superior to the thirty-bushel land of the interior—for the extremes of the inland climate transform the more delicate sex into grotesques: “Poor critters, when they get away back there, they grow as thin as sawd lathe; their little peepers are as dull as a boiled codfish; their skin looks like yaller fever, and they seem all mouth like a crocodile. … And that's not all, for the temper is plaguey apt to change with the cheek too” (162-163).

Thus, while the book ends neatly with the familiar refrain that “Industry, Enterprise and Economy” are lacking in Nova Scotia and while the Squire concurs one last time with Slick's good sense, Haliburton also plays with a darker and more disturbing possibility: land-hungry Americans will make something of the beautiful and abundant Nova Scotian countryside if Blue Nosers do not. By this time, Haliburton has firmly set in place his opposed images of extreme lethargy and unchecked vitality: on the one hand, the Nova Scotian as an ever-skinny and half-grown colt, as an old preacher lacking vigour, as an under-nourished Grahamite refusing to eat meat and again lacking vigour; on the other hand, the voracious Alden Gobble, the sharp and vital Slick, crocodile-mouthed women, and land-hungry pioneers displacing the Indians. Between these grotesque extremes, Haliburton surely implies the possibility of moderation.

While Leo Marx (since he sees a society with no traditional guidelines) gives over America to the politician, as a world whose old ways have been exploded by technology, Haliburton embraces the possibility that the new technology can sustain the old order. Is Haliburton's dream plausible or naïve? George Grant has argued that the United States is the most dynamic of the modern societies, that it is the spearhead of modern progress, the sign of Canada's inevitable future, and that the old and new ways cannot be meshed. Grant presents Americans as a pragmatic and liberal people who cannot abide any limits except those temporary and conditional limits of their own making. In Lament for a Nation, he argues that America, if it has not already done so, will swallow, homogenize or absorb those ancient traditions that had taken their peculiar root in the Northern part of the continent. Yet Grant's satiric lament offers little hope that the new and the old, the active and meditative, can sustain each other.

Against Grant's satiric despair and Marx's tired cynicism of the later twentieth century, I contend that Haliburton still plausibly joins together the “perfectly new,” the critical and searching observations of the Yankee Clockmaker, and the slower and more careful judgement of the Squire. Moreover, while undoubtedly one could argue that Haliburton makes Sam Slick, the Rev. Hopewell and Pa Slick speak truths that are implausibly self-aware, skeptical and self-doubting—and therefore un-American—Slick himself is brought close to a recognition that his experience, his reading of the book of nature, his proverbs, are after all the distillations of many generations' experience—their collective experience of nature. Slick loves his proverbs primarily because they represent the “distilled facts steamed down to an essence … a portable soup … an amazin' deal of matter in a small compass.” But this experience comes to mean more than just his own “hearin', seein' and tryin'”—indeed to him, the truth and beauty of proverbs seems to reside in the efficient simplicity of time's testing: “the beauty of old proverbs [is that they] … are as true as a plumb line, and as short and sweet as sugar candy” (155). At once fresh and familiar, his proverbs themselves indicate that the old knowing, the tried and true experience of generations, can be freshly applied to the new: the old and the new can and should continually be brought together. Finally then, in its trust in old proverbs like “too many irons in the fire” and “the black knob,” Slick's outlook is revealed at the ending to be close to that of his conservative fellow-traveller, the Squire. It is not just the Squire, then, who has a favorable change of mind at the close about the upstart Slick. Slick himself now looks at the present and future through the eyes of the past, through the wisdom of old proverbs.

Through this continuum of time past, present and future, and through his surprisingly close dovetailing of the New World clockmaker and Old World squire, Haliburton sheds a hopeful light both upon the United States of America and British North America—a light which remains timely. Thus, while McDougall would have us understand Haliburton through Leo Marx's 1960s criticism of America, the destructive intrusion of the machine into the garden, I would have us understand the limitations of Marx's critical perspective by pointing to Haliburton's creative joining of the Clockmaker and Squire. Haliburton reminds us that weary disillusionment (of Marx's or Grant's kind) is not necessary—indeed, as seen through the early Squire, such disillusionment is perhaps no more than the self-indulgent pose of the gentleman or the literati. What Haliburton calls for is the active joining together of nature, technology and tradition into a balanced and dynamic whole. On the one side, Haliburton ridicules apathy and disillusionment; on the other, he ridicules the uncontrolled activism of America. Unlike Leo Marx, he does not blame the erosion of traditional values upon the “machine” (or upon the technological or pragmatic attitude) but upon America's earlier rebellion against its European past. What Haliburton calls for, then, is not (as McDougall argues) a new North American reality, but the simple fact of a “British North America,” the achieved reunion and combined good sense of the British Squire and the Yankee Clockmaker.

Notes

1. Robert L. McDougall, “The Achievement of Thomas Chandler Haliburton: An Assessment Panel,” The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium, ed. and intr. Frank M. Tierney (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 1985), 156.

2. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: [1964] Galaxy, 1967), 36.

3. Donald G. French and J. D. Logan, Highways of Canadian Literature: A Synoptic Introduction to the Literary History of Canada (English) from 1760 to 1924 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1924), 75.

4. Thomas Vincent, “Strategems of Satire in North American Literature Before Haliburton: A Background Paper,” The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium, 60.

5. See George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965) and “In Defense of America,” Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi, 1969).

6. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, The Clockmaker or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slicksville (Toronto: [1836] McClelland and Stewart, 1958).