WINDSOR AND “SAM SLICK”
How many towns are there which make one regret that
necessity which compels the visitor to approach them froml
their ugliest side. One can enter Oxford or Canterbury, to
mention two English instances, so as to offend one’s æsthetic
sense, and to impart an impression which it takes many hours
spent in contemplation of more favourable surroundings to
efface. So it is with the Nova Scotian town of Windsor.
It is all part of the tyranny of railways. It will not happen
in the coming day of the airship and air-skiff, when the
eager tourist can choose his own spot to alight, and give a
wide berth to the purlieus which depress, and the human
and architectural crudities which exasperate.
Windsor is one of the pleasantest towns in the Province,
the seat of King’s College and other institutions of learning,
and everlastingly associated with that rare spirit, Thomas
Chandler Haliburton. But one must banish its Main
Street, thronged with loafers, and its unspeakable Victoria
Hotel, where the proprietor sells cigars, presides over the
“register,” and carries ice-water to his guests in his shirtsleeves,
before one can appreciate that these are only
excrescences upon Windsor.
With a high tide in the beautiful Avon River, dotted
with sails, I should first descend in my aerial craft, not
amidst the pleasing ruins of Fort Edward, now a flourishing
golf club, but a mile further away, on a wooded hill at the
bottom of the wide shaded drive, facing the brown columned
porticoes of King’s College. Here, book or cricket-bat in
hand, I see eager-faced, alert young figures moving, fine
types of Canadian youth, who will presently go out to
furnish forth the pulpits and colleges, the bench and the
bar of Canada’s to-morrow. It is a great wooden building,
with Ionic portico, flanked by other buildings, the chapel,
and hall and library. All have an old-world look, especially
the spacious hall where many paintings adorn the walls.
The college was chartered by George III. in 1788, and
has in its time turned out many distinguished graduates.
Its library is particularly strong in theological works.
Talking with a King’s College professor, he said to me:
“I cannot help feeling a particular love for this place,
where my father and grandfather were before me educated.
I know all its walks and groves, and to me the country
round about is the most beautiful in the world. When
I think of the stream of graduates dear old King’s has
sent to all parts of Canada and the United States, I am
filled with pride. But there are many things we want to
make us a living force to-day. Too much of the educational
resources of this Province is frittered away. There are
too many small colleges. We want wider activities, and
for these we sadly need endowments. We recognise the
changing spirit of the age, but we at King’s will resist to the
death anything which will stultify our principles or destroy
the fabric so slowly built up, substituting gymnastics and
Esperanto for that real education which leads the mind
of the student along the paths of righteous conduct and
character.”[4]
[Footnote 4: Haliburton remarks that the “diffusion through the country
of a well-educated body of clergymen like those of the Establishment,
has had a strong tendency to raise the standard of qualification among
those who differ from them; while the habits, manners, and regular
conduct of so respectable a body of men naturally and unconsciously
modulate and influence those of their neighbours, who may not, perhaps,
attend their ministrations. It is, therefore, doubtless owing in a
great measure to the exertions and salutary example of the Church in
the colonies, that a higher tone of moral feeling exists in the British
provinces than in the neighbouring States.”]
From which statement I gather that there will be no
“hustling” spirit manifesting itself at King’s.
Hard by the old college is a flourishing collegiate school
for boys, and a little further on in our return to the town
of Windsor is the Edgehill Seminary, a largely attended
Church school for girls.
The superior culture and refinement of the people of Windsor is
exhibited in the streets and houses. In front of these latter stretch
beautifully kept lawns; that at the Anglican rectory, in its trim
terraces, being as fine as I have ever seen in England. A famous place
for prosperous-looking churches is Windsor—all denominations seem
to vie with one another, not only in erecting fine edifices, but in
keeping them in an order so irreproachable as to pulpit, chancel,
lectern, carpets, cushions, and appointments as would send a thrill of
envy through many a harassed English vicar’s bosom.
All the dwellings bespeak a degree of easy comfort and
considerable taste, built in a style inferior, it is true, to the
houses of the old Colonial period, but superior to the bald
and shapeless Noah’s Arks which have gone up in their
thousands and tens of thousands in the towns and villages
of Canada since Confederation.
Can there be, I have often speculated, any occult connection
between Canadian domestic architecture and
the political cohesion of the Provinces? Why, when the
Federal edifice was consummated, did the half million or
so little brick or timber edifices which housed the Canadian
population suddenly fall down as if at the blast of a trumpet,
and a half million colourless, clap-boarded, slant-roofed
structures—they are not houses or cottages—start up instead—making
home a derision? I have heard aged inhabitants
tell of, and have seen with my own eyes, pre-Confederation
houses which it would be a pleasure to dwell in—houses
built by the merchants and shipbuilders who grew rich
in the war of 1812—houses that were built by men who
built houses and not barns. But am I not making my
complaint too particular? Is it the case in rural England
as well? Compare the graceful, low-browed, hip-roofed
cottages of the past with the yellow brick or cement villas
of the present! How much better is a rude log-hut,
half-masked in glowing creeper, than such as these, with
their straitened entrys and stairways, and a dozen little
square chambers when four generously planned ones would
suffice!
One of the best built houses I ever saw in my life is
in Pictou, walls a foot and a half thick, fine fat timbers,
plenty of honest freestone, heaps of cupboard room, and
a great dry cellar. A right good, tight good house, built
by an old Scotsman in New Scotland nearly a hundred years
ago, and as sturdy to-day as the day he built it, although
alas, to-day untenanted. There are plenty of other houses,
too, pleasant old-fashioned ones, with wood panelled walls
within instead of paper. That is the best place for wood in
a house—inside—inside on the walls, and a great log of it
blazing on the hearth. I never can understand why the
New Scotlanders go on building wooden houses, when stone
is so plentiful and lasts for ever.
“I’ll tell you why,” said a native Nova Scotian to
me. “One reason is, we haven’t any stone-masons to show
us how, and the other reason is we’re in too much of a
hurry. In ten years—in five, perhaps in less time, we
are prepared to move—to sell our house and go into another
one. We never look ahead more than ten years. After
that, it is posterity; and Canadians don’t worry much
about posterity.”
In many places I was struck by the haste with which
houses and shops arose and churches were run up. The
Roman Catholics of Annapolis Royal wanted of a sudden
a new church. The moment their mind was made up they
rushed off to a builder and got an estimate for the construction
of a two-aisled church in pine-wood. I wish
you could have seen, as I saw daily, that skeleton of naked
timbers arise. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars
would be spent by these pious communicants on a wilderness
of scantling poles, covered with thin planks, roofed in with
tin, painted a sepulchral white, hung within by the portraits
of saints, illuminated by candles, and reverberating
with American-organic harmony. To the eye all is well.
Appearances are kept up, and the worshipper may, if he is
a man of strong imagination, hug the illusion that he is
worshipping God in a temple altogether adequate to the
Almighty. In the capital I saw a cathedral built, as to
its interior, of cement, moulded and embossed to simulate
stone. Great slabs of a dough-like mixture were scored
across longitudinally in order to counterfeit the seams
filled with mortar. A few months of labour, and a cheap
and colourable imitation of Wells Cathedral resulted. Now
all this sort of architectural hypocrisy and makeshift is
very well for a Shepherd’s Bush Exhibition, in its nature
ephemeral, but how will it appear to the eyes of the twenty-first
century, not to mention the thirtieth or the fortieth?
Would the old builders, who aforetime reared such stately
and beautiful fabrics, who were far poorer than we, and
lived in smaller towns and even villages, would they have
worked this way and in this spirit? Rather were they
content to add a single stone a day, seven stones a week,
three hundred and sixty-five stones a year; until slowly
and surely a holy building arose, to defy time and the
elements, and to be a blessed sanctuary for ages yet unborn.
What, gentlemen, and O ye pious ladies (whom I suspect
of knowing as much about architecture as a Hottentot
knows of an Elzevir) what is your hurry? Do you think
the Christian religion and the practice of public worship
will not outlast your time, that you are in such haste to
quit the old church, chapel, or meeting-house, and run up
a showy successor (generally mortgaged), which may deceive
a tourist at forty rods, an architect at half a mile, but will
never deceive God Almighty or the lawyer who holds a
mortgage for it in his pocket, and can only foster a spirit
of hypocrisy in the congregation? Better far worship in
the open fields than be surrounded by such pitiful architectural
mockery. And in the same way, I conjure you,
better live in comfortable log cabins, than build an apology
for a house, with all “modern conveniences,” that you
will afterwards come to be ashamed of—or if you don’t
you ought to be.
[Illustration: VICTORIA PARK, WINDSOR, N.S.]
[Illustration: NEAR LOCHABER LAKE.]
All the foregoing train of reflection has been started by a
contemplation of a sweet and gentle and unpretentious
cottage at Windsor. It is at the end of a short wide avenue
of elms. It is low and spacious within. It is the kind of
house a poet should live in, and it is now fast going to
decay; nothing is spent by its absentee owner to preserve
it, and it is occupied at present by a couple of poor Irish
families. This is the house built by, and where once dwelt,
Haliburton, Nova Scotia’s sole literary celebrity of international
renown. When his book, “The Clockmaker, or the
Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville” appeared,
the whole literary world was taken by surprise, and
Christopher North could not praise it enough in the pages
of Blackwood.
Haliburton was a Nova Scotian judge who, with wide
reading and a capital literary style, added to a native fund
of humour, knew his native Province as none has done
before or since. Sam Slick, as a pure literary creation,
vies with any of the characters of Dickens. He may be
described as a compound of Sam Weller, Alfred Jingle, and
Jefferson Brick, and the whole book, or series of books,
penned by Haliburton, profess chiefly to give this vulgar,
loquacious, astute Yankee pedlar’s opinions on American,
British, and Nova Scotian men, manners, and institutions.
For the biting satire contained in these productions Haliburton
was widely blamed; and in reply to the charge
of holding the Yankee up to ridicule, he thus condescended
to explain his object:
“In the Canadas,” he wrote in 1838, “there is a party
advocating republican institutions and hostility to everything
British. In doing so they exaggerate all the advantages
of such a form of government, and depreciate the
blessings of a limited monarchy. In England this party
unfortunately finds too many supporters, either from a
misapprehension of the true state of the case, or from a
participation in their treasonable views. The sketches
continued in the present and preceding series of the Clockmaker,
it is hoped, will throw some light on the topics of
the day, as connected with the design of the anti-English
party. The object is purely patriotic.”
In exposing the faults and the follies of the Nova
Scotians, Haliburton claimed that he had “done a good deal
of good. It has made more people hear of Nova Scotia than
ever heard tell of it afore by a long chalk; it has given it
a character in the world it never had afore, and raised the
valley of real property there considerable.”
At all events, Sam Slick soon became a household word,
and so high was he held in the esteem of the Yankees that,
long after Haliburton had left the Province, long indeed
after his death, thousands of Americans came to pay a
visit to his dwelling here in Windsor, long known as the
“Sam Slick house.” Many to-day know of Sam Slick who
do not know of Haliburton. His writings present an
admirable picture of the Province seventy or eighty years
ago; and much of what he described then is true to-day.
It cannot be said that he was a neglected author, or that he
lacked a due appreciation of his own merit. In one of his
own chapters he boldly recommends himself to preferment
at the hands of the British Government, as a clever Colonial
author who is worth being taken notice of.
“The natives,” he makes his hero say, “are considerable
proud of him, and if you want to make an impartial deal
to tie the Nova Scotians to you forever to make your own
name descend to posterity with honour, and to prevent
the inhabitants from ever thinking of Yankee connexion
(mind that hint, say a good deal about that, for it’s a tender
point that, adjoining of our union, and fear is plaguy sight
stronger than love any time) you’ll jist sarve him as you
sarved Earl Mulgrave (though his writins ain’t to be compared
to the Clockmaker, no more than chalk is to cheese),
you give him the governorship of Jamaica and arterwards
of Ireland. John Russell’s writins got him the berth of
leader in the House of Commons. Well, Francis Head,
for his writins you made him Governor of Canada, and
Walter Scott you made a baronet of, and Bulwer you did
for too, and a great many others you have got the other
side of the water you sarved the same way. Now, minister,
fair play is a jewel, says you: if you can reward your writers
to home with governorships and baronetcies and all sorts o’
snug things, let’s have a taste o’ the good things this side o’
the water too. You needn’t be afraid o’ bein too often
troubled that way by authors from this country (it will make
him larf that, and there’s many a true word said in joke),
but we’ve got a sweet tooth here as well as you have. Poor
pickins in this country, and colonists are as hungry as hawks.
The Yankees made Washington Irvin a minister plenipo, to
honour him; and Blackwood, last November, in his magazine,
says that are Yankee’s books ain’t fit to be named in
the same day with the Clockmaker—that they’re nothin
but Jeremiads. So, minister, says you, jist tip a stave to
the Governor of Nova Scotia, order him to inquire out
the Author, and to tell that man, that distinguished man,
that Her Majesty delights to reward merit and honour
talent, and that if he will come home, she’ll make a man
of him for ever, for the sake of her royal father, who lived
so long among the Blue-noses, who can’t forget him very
soon.”
Haliburton duly went to England, was elected member of
Parliament for Launceston, and, had he lived long enough,
would have seen his son, who died the other day, Under-Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs, and Lord Haliburton.
Sam Slick’s author himself died in 1865 in his
seventieth year.
But we must take leave of Windsor, which was formerly
the prosperous Acadian village of Pisiquid (“Junction of
the Waters”) long before the expulsion of 1755. Fort
Edward here played a prominent part in all the internecine
struggles of the period.
I have alluded above to the existing remains of Fort
Edward. Standing on the disused battlements one’s
glance sweeps across the waters it commands to Avonport
on the opposite shore. But I write “waters”—can I now
speak of the waters of the Avon? For, lo! the tide has
fallen and there is now but a mighty waste of red, red mud
“an ugly rent in the land,” where but two hours or so ago
a teeming river flowed a spectacle to remind us that we are
now in the land of the “fluvial bore,” and are watching
the action of the far-famed double tides of the Bay of
Fundy.