How easily the dramatist might have made certain shifts which would have resulted in reconciliation and a happy ending! But with all her spiritual wistfulness, Marjorie Pickthall loyally held to the dramatic and the artistic ideals. The climax and tragic ending are tremendous and wholly spiritualizing, purging the soul with pity for humanity through the terror which the action and the denouement awake in the spirit. There is in it all a spiritual poignancy which does not obtain in Norwood’s love-tragedy of Saul in _The Witch of Endor_. It is suffused with a lovely and winning beauty of diction, imagery, and verbal music; and it contains one lyric ‘cry of a soul’ which for pathos is unsurpassed in Canadian literature, namely, the Litany of Dorette, the hapless girl-wife, to the Blessed Virgin Mother beginning, If you have lain in the night And felt the old tears run In their channels worn in the heart, Pity me, Mary. Considered critically, then, the poetic dramas of Robert Norwood and the lyric drama of Marjorie Pickthall are, from the universal point of view, authentic works of art, originally conceived and beautifully constructed, and, from the Canadian point of view, are the supreme achievements in the poetic drama of Canada. CHAPTER XXIII Humorists THE HUMORISTS OF CANADA: PRE-CONFEDERATION—HALIBURTON—HOWE— DE MILLE—DUVAR—POST-CONFEDERATION—LANIGAN—COTES—DRUMMOND—HAM: NEW SCHOOL—LEACOCK—DONOVAN—DAVIS—MACTAVISH—McARTHUR—HODGINS. The name and work of Thomas Chandler Haliburton as a satirist or humorist so over-shadowed the names and works of other Canadian humorists that it is a belief, both in foreign countries and in Canada itself, that the Canadian people have no genius for humor and that, outside of Haliburton’s satiric writings, there is no significant Canadian humorous literature. All this is superstition and has been perpetuated in two ways. No Canadian literary historian has remarked the existence of other Canadian humorists, save Haliburton, though Mark Twain in his Library of American Humor has included the work of Haliburton, De Mille, Lanigan; and, secondly, no Canadian anthologist, save Lawrence J. Burpee, has collected in a single volume examples of the work of Canadian humorists. Pre-Confederation Canadian humor is represented by the work of Haliburton, Howe, and De Mille. Of these the work of Haliburton is the significant humor of the period. In general it is satiric, a criticism of society, aiming to bring about certain reforms. No other Canadian humorist since Haliburton, not even Leacock, had or has any gifts in comic characterization. Howe had no satiric purpose. His humor, which was chiefly in verse, was written ‘for the fun of the thing.’