Highways of

Canadian Literature

A Synoptic Introduction to the Literary

History of Canada (English)

from 1760 to 1924

By J. D. Logan

M.A. (Dalhousie), Ph.D. (Harvard), Hon. Litt. D. (Acadia).

Lecturer on Canadian Literature, Acadia University, Nova Scotia

and Donald G. French

Honorary President Canadian Literature Club of Toronto.

Author of The Appeal of Poetry; Editor

Standard Canadian Reciter, Etc.

Copyright, Canada, 1924

by McClelland and Stewart, Limited, Toronto

Printed in Canada

TO

COLONEL WILLIAM ERNEST THOMPSON, LL.B.

District Officer Commanding Military District

No. 6 During the World War,

A Governor of Dalhousie College,

for

The Gift of His Loyal and

Inexhaustible Friendship.

There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,

Save laughter and the love of friends.

—Hilaire Belloc.

Preface

Highways of Canadian Literature provides teachers and students in educational institutions and readers in general with a complete history of the Canadian literature extant in the English language. In very recent years Canadian universities and colleges have added to their curricula systematic study of the verse and prose of the chief writers born in or resident in the Dominion. Also, teachers in Canadian academies and high schools, as occasion affords opportunity, inform their pupils about the lives and work of Canadian authors. Further: as expressive of the new and increasing interest in Canadian Literature, Literary Clubs, Reading Clubs, and Reading Circles have been formed, and constantly are being formed, to promote ‘community’ study of the writings of Canadian men and women of letters.

Hitherto, however, those who wished to be informed on the literary history of Canada and the status of Canadian Literature, had to depend on Anthologies, summary annalistic Sketches, and biographical Compendia. The earlier anthologies comprise verse either chronologically or topically arranged, but some of them contain, in an Appendix, biographical notes on the authors represented in the volumes. The later anthologies, as, for instance, Garvin’s Canadian Poets, contain, besides the ‘selections,’ biographical and critical introductions. These anthologies, though comprehensive, informing and delightful ‘source-books,’ do not, by themselves, disclose the development of Canadian Literature. The annalistic sketches or compendia, on the other hand, are too sketchy, too annalistic. They do not tell the story of the development of Canadian Literature with any attempt at perspective or at disclosing its social and spiritual origins.

There was, therefore, pressing need for a comprehensive Synoptic History of Canadian Literature. Such a work would furnish the teacher, the student, and the general reader with a ‘method’ of reading Canadian Literature with philosophical insight or with historical and critical perspective. It would distinguish certain ‘epochs’ and ‘movements’ in the literary history of Canada, and make clear how Canadian poets and prose writers are related to one another and have influenced one another, and how, gradually, they expressed in literature the slowly emerging consciousness of a national spirit and a national destiny in the Dominion.

That is what Highways of Canadian Literature attempts to do. In scope it is a complete or comprehensive survey of literary ‘epochs’ and ‘movements’ in Canada, beginning with the Puritan Migration from the American Colonies in 1760 and closing at the end of the first quarter of the 20th century. In method it is both historical and critical. It orientates the ‘backgrounds’ of Canadian Literature, traces the social and spiritual origins of that literature, remarks special ‘influences,’ demarcates several ‘epochs’ and ‘movements,’ discusses the importance of outstanding Canadian authors, and supplies critical estimates of Canadian prose and poetry.

It is designed for the use of teachers and students in universities, colleges, academies, seminaries, and high schools, and of general readers. Together with suitable anthologies or selections it will furnish teachers and students with adequate equipment for a systematic study of Canadian Literature, and general readers and members of literary clubs equally adequate equipment for ‘home’ or ‘club’ study of the development of Canadian Literature.

The Chapters on Post-Confederation Fiction (Chapters XVI and XVII—Novelists and Short Story Writers of the First Renaissance and Chapter XXI—Fiction Writers of the Second Renaissance) were written, expressly at my solicitation, by Mr. Donald G. French, whose wide and intimate knowledge of the forms, technics, and history of Canadian fiction is recognized throughout Canada. For many years he has been assiduous, as an essayist and lecturer, in reviewing and promoting the study of Canadian imaginative prose fiction, and his experience of many years as reviewer, and later as literary editor for a book publishing house, has given him special opportunities to study the history and observe the evolution of Canadian imaginative prose. Moreover, since Mr. French is also well versed in the forms, history, and technics of Canadian poetry, and since he has a temperamental patience, which engenders in him the ‘wise passiveness’ essential to the just critic, I engaged for the book as a whole his taste and judgment, in regard to treatment and style, and his knowledge of facts of Canadian literary history. The text of the book is therefore enhanced in treatment and style, as well as in critical justice, by Mr. French’s contribution, and by his critical revision of the whole work.

I wish, here, specially to remark my ideal and aim in writing Highways of Canadian Literature. It is, I believe, the duty of the literary historian and critic to respect his subject and to present it under its most significant and engaging aspects in order that he may win others to equal respect for his subject. Canadian Literature is important at least to Canadians; and, whatever be its comparative aesthetic and artistic dignity, it is an integral part or branch of English Literature. This book will justify itself if it compels Canadians to recognize the importance of their own literature, and wins other peoples to a decent respect for a literature which, while still in its adolescence, shows evidences of attaining to independent and vigorous adult estate—in the event of which Canadian literary creation, taste, and judgment will be based, not on the work of British or of American masters of poetry and imaginative prose, but on that of Canadian masters. Meanwhile, this book aims to disclose to Canadians the social and spiritual importance of their own literature and to determine its place or distinction in English Literature—in short, to promote in Canada and abroad what may aptly be called ‘the higher study’ of Canadian Literature.

To Mr. Newton MacTavish, M.A., Editor of The Canadian Magazine, Mr. R. H. Hathaway, Mr. M. O. Hammond, Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott, Mr. John Murray Gibbon, Mr. S. Morgan-Powell, Literary Editor of The Montreal Star, Mr. John Garvin, B.A., Editor of Canadian Poets, Canadian Poems of the Great War, etc., Dr. Ray Palmer Baker, author of A History of English-Canadian Literature to the Confederation, and Mr. T. G. Marquis, author of English-Canadian Literature, I am indebted for advice, criticism, and much practical aid in preparing the text. To Miss Annie Donohoe, Librarian of the Nova Scotia Legislative Library and Mrs. Mary Kinley Ingraham, M.A., Librarian of Acadia University, I am indebted for assistance in research; and to Miss Laura P. Carten, Editor of The Children’s Page, Halifax Herald, for reading the ‘galley proofs’ of the text. To Colonel William Ernest Thompson, LL.B., Honorary Secretary of the Board of Governors of Dalhousie University, my indebtedness is great and is acknowledged in the Dedication to this book.

J. D. Logan.

Acadia University, Wolfville, N.S.

Contents

Preliminary Survey

To write properly a Synoptic History of Canadian Literature, the historian must first evaluate extant Canadian verse and prose from the point of view of the Whole. Secondly, he must treat Canadian Literature as a Whole in respect to its Genetic bases and relations. In presenting this synoptic history, Canadian Literature is considered not as a special, isolated, and chance product, but as the definitive outcome of racial, naturalistic, social, economic, and political conditions within the vast Dominion itself, and of other conditions brought into existence by racial affinities and social, political, economic, and spiritual relations with the people of the United States and the United Kingdom.

The general treatment proceeds on an a priori presumption and a critical principle. The a priori presumption is that in Canada where verse and prose which possess all degrees of worth have for more than a century and a half been produced in the English language and which had English poetry and prose for models, there must be a respectable residue of authentic literature written by native-born and resident émigré Canadian authors. In a phrase, the fact of a Canadian Literature is presumed. The critical principle employed in the treatment is this: that however insignificant, from the point of view of world literature, Canadian Literature may be, it is important to Canadians themselves. For however unimportant Canadian historical romances, Canadian humor, Canadian nature-poetry, Canadian poetic drama, Canadian realistic fiction, Canadian monodies may be when compared with the same genres in English Literature, they are the representatives of Canadian culture and of the Canadian creative spirit; if they were not extant there would be no Canadian Literature at all; and thus the Canadian people would be spiritually poorer and less significant not only to themselves but also to the world.

Some fair show of the fact of an authentic Canadian Literature may be evident from the following considerations. Let it be granted, as axiomatic, that verse and prose rise to the dignity of literature when they express and promote existence ideally—by delighting the aesthetic senses, by consoling the heart, by inspiring the moral imagination, by exalting or transporting the spirit. Judged by this four-fold test, the best Canadian poetry and imaginative prose will compare favorably with the admittedly authentic poetry and prose of many of the significant British and United States authors in the mid-Victorian era. In Canadian verse in English are genuine ‘gems’ of poetry, which, for vision, imagery, passion, lyrical eloquence, verbal music, and mastery of form and technique, are hardly, if at all, surpassed by the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne.

If this is doubted, in part or in whole, then apply this concrete pragmatic test:—For exquisite tenderness and simple pathos: with Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break, compare Charles G. D. Roberts’ sweetly sad lyric, Grey Rocks and Greyer Sea. For delicacy or for poignancy in expressing the passion and meaning of love: with Swinburne’s These Many Years, compare Roberts’ O Red Rose of Life, or with Browning’s Evelyn Hope, compare Roberts’ A Nocturne of Consecration. For power to visualize the ghostly and ghastly: with Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner compare the vivid, uncanny pictures of a spectral ship and crew in Bliss Carman’s Nancy’s Pride. For beauty of descriptive imagery, verbal music, and expressive correspondence of emotion with the mood of the season in nature-poetry: with Keats’ Ode to Autumn, compare Archibald Lampman’s lovely lyric of earth, September. For dignity of thought and mastery of technic: with the finest sonnets of Wordsworth, compare Roberts’ The Sower, or those noble sonnets by Lampman, beginning, ‘Not to be conquered by these headlong days,’ ‘Come with thine unveiled worlds, O truth of Night,’ and ‘There is a beauty at the goal of life.’ For dramatic power in sounding the depths of elemental passion and emotion: with Tennyson’s Rizpah, compare Campbell’s profound utterance of the heart of woman in The Mother, or with the more subtle of Browning’s dramatic monologues compare Campbell’s psychological revealments in Unabsolved, and in The Confession of Tama the Wise. For the dainty, piquant expression of all those experiences which delight and console us in our humaner moments of reflection and reverie, let these pure lyrics be a daily rosary:—F. G. Scott’s The Cripple, Van Risen, and A Reverie; Campbell’s The Hills and the Sea, Vapor and Blue, and Lake Huron; Lampman’s We, too, Shall Sleep, The Weaver and The Passing of Autumn; Carman’s Spring Song, commencing ‘Make me over, mother April,’ The Ships of St. John, and The Grave Tree; Roberts’ The Lone Wharf, Lake Aylesford, Afoot, Kinship, and Recessional; Duncan Campbell Scott’s The End of the Day, and A Lover to His Lass; and Pauline Johnson’s In the Shadows. Consider, too, that the satiric humor and comic characterization of Thomas Chandler Haliburton are not only in some respects unsurpassed by the art of Cervantes, Dickens, Daudet, and Mark Twain, and that Haliburton’s comic epigrams and moral maxims and certain of his comic characters have become part of the warp and woof of English literature. It is also indubitable that the two volumes of short stories of Duncan Campbell Scott—In the Village of Viger and The Witching of Elspie—are not excelled either in originality of conception or in technical artistry, and certainly not in spiritual beauty and pathos, by the short stories of Maupassant in France, of Stevenson or Hewlett in England, of Cable or Mary Wilkins Freeman in the United States.

In two other fields, the elegiac monody and poetic drama, Canadian poets have produced distinctive and impressive literature. It is admitted by British and United States critics that the threnodies of Campbell, Carman, Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, Marshall, and De Mille are distinctly noble in conception and imagery and artistically finished, and would be worthy of the genius even of Milton, Shelley, Keats, Arnold, and Emerson, and deserve to be placed in the company of the other fine threnodies written in the English language. It is also admitted by British and United States critics that the poetic dramas of Mair, Campbell, and Norwood, whether embodying Biblical, Arthurian, or Canadian legends and romantic characters, show authentic genius of dramatic conception and a notable distinction in technical structure and artistry while, to their credit, avoiding what Edmund Gosse has called the ‘violences and verbosities’ of the Elizabethan Tradition and of the Restoration and later poetic drama.

In England, at least as early as the ‘nineties’ of the last century, the fact of a respectable Canadian literature received a sort of spasmodic recognition. A genuine interest in it, or at least in Canadian poetry, was evoked in the United Kingdom by the visit of the late Pauline Johnson to London and her recitals there in 1894. As a matter of fact, Pauline Johnson’s first volume of verse The White Wampum was published originally in London in 1895. Again: with the permanent residence of Sir Gilbert Parker, and other Canadian men and women of letters, as, for instance, Miss Jean McIlwraith and Miss Lily Dougall, in England, the interest in Canadian Literature, on the part of the British people and critics, was very considerably intensified.

When the World War caused, first, an intenser sense of the unity of the Motherland and Canada, and, secondly, a plethora of verse and prose, especially verse, by Canadians in the field in France and in Flanders, and by Canadians at home, there arose in England a definite and systematic movement to promote in the United Kingdom the recognition and study of the literary history and literature of Canada, or at least Canadian literature written in the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth century. Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, who for some time during the late war was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, engaged in a serious and sympathetic study of the literature of Canada, and lectured on Canadian literature at the Colonial Institute, London, and elsewhere. Moreover, Sir Herbert Warren, then also President of the Poetry Society of London, had a by-law passed which stipulated that living Canadian authors should be recognized as non-resident members of the Poetry Society of London; and Canadian authors were invited to send copies of their published verse and prose to the Librarian of the Poetry Society, for cataloguing and exhibition in the reading room of the Society. Besides Sir Herbert Warren, two other British lecturers of established reputation—Miss Louise Bagley and Miss Julie Huntsman—devoted themselves to systematic lecturing on Canadian literature, verse and prose, in certain notable educational institutions in London and in provincial centres in England. Moreover, since the late war the works of Canadian authors have been in increasing numbers either published in England simultaneously with their publication in other countries, or have been first published in England and later republished in Canada, and in the United States.

In these facts, therefore, we have a kind of empirical proof or pragmatic test that in the United Kingdom there has existed for a considerable time a genuinely respectful recognition of the fact of a Canadian literature in the English language.

For the purposes of a Synoptic History of Canadian Literature in the English language a significant year is that of 1760. For that year marks both the Fall of Montreal (following the Fall of Quebec in 1759) and the Puritan Migration from New England to Maugerville, on the St. John River, and to the valleys of western Nova Scotia, in ‘Nova Scotia,’ which at the time embraced the mainland of what is now Nova Scotia, as well as New Brunswick, and part of Maine.

The significance of this date for a History of Canadian Literature in English will be realized by reflecting that from 1760 onwards until Confederation in 1867,—that is, a period of one hundred years—the two pioneer Provinces of the later Dominion, Quebec and the original Nova Scotia, and, in due time, Ontario, came under the influence of a specific British and a specific New England and Loyalist civilization and culture which essentially determined the political, social, and spiritual ideas and ideals of the English-speaking people in Canada. These specifically pioneer and pre-Confederation ideas and ideals form the social and spiritual bases of Canadian Literature in English, from 1760 to 1867.

More particularly, it is important to note that the struggle of the British North American Provinces to realize the ideals of Responsible Government, which the Puritan settlers brought with them and which were effected in 1848 in three of the Provinces later confederated, caused the first awakening of the literary spirit, and the actual creation of the first nativistic literature, in Canada. This struggle for Responsible Government and of other higher spiritual interests and ideals before 1848 and afterwards, including the later struggle for political union (Confederation) of the Provinces, not only incited Canadian poets and prose writers to literary expression during the period, but also largely determined the form, substance, and mood or temper of that literature.

A distinction must be drawn between (1) the literature written in or about Canada by British authors, visiting or sojourning in the Canadas and the Maritime Provinces, as, for instance, Tom Moore’s Canadian Boat Song (1804) and much other verse and prose down to Louis Hémon’s realistic romance of French-Canada, Maria Chapdelaine (1922), all of which will be noted but will be denominated the ‘Incidental’ Literature; and (2) the literature which was written by permanently resident émigrés and by native-born citizens in the separate (unconfederate) Provinces, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Canadas, up to the year of Confederation, which will be designated the ‘Nativistic’ Literature; and (3) the literature, after Confederation, written by native-born Canadians, which will be called the ‘Native and National’ Literature of Canada. These literary distinctions themselves are demanded by an important demarcation in the social groups which, from the Fall of Montreal in 1760 and the Puritan Migration from New England in the same year up to the last Loyalist Migration, in 1786, from New England and the other revolutionary States, formed the social and cultural units of the Anglo-Saxon civilization in what, after the acknowledgment of American Independence and up to the Confederation of the Canadian Provinces, was known definitively as British North America.

Following 1760 and the British Occupation of Montreal and Quebec City, the civilization and culture of the social groups in these centres and, later, in the Loyalist centres in Ontario, were on another and lower level than the culture and civilization in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Moreover, the literature written by the groups of English-speaking people, sojourning or permanently resident in the Canadas, neither sprang from the social and spiritual necessities which created the literature of the Maritime Provinces in their Puritan and Loyalist period, nor possessed the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of the literature produced in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the Puritan and Loyalist period of their history.

The Anglo-Saxon civilization and culture in Montreal and Quebec, after the British Occupation (1760), was highly military and practical; that is to say, materialistic. For the English-speaking people in Quebec were concerned wholly with the civil and military administration of Quebec City and Province, and the English-speaking people in Montreal were concerned chiefly with the development of trade, particularly the fur trade, under men who were adventurers much more than they were colonizers and civilizers. Naturally, therefore, Canadian Literature in English in the Province of Quebec chiefly consisted of chronicles, annals, and narratives (historical, or of adventure); and, secondly, whenever it happened to be pure literature, comprised verse and prose written by cultured visitors from the Motherland; and thus in all cases this ‘Incidental’ Pioneer Canadian Literature in English in the Province of Quebec was British in inspiration, form, and aim.

On the other hand, the Puritan and Loyalist migrations to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, particularly Nova Scotia, from 1760 to 1783 and later, comprised groups of English-speaking people who were intellectually cultured and spiritually-minded. The literature, verse and prose, which they produced was the urgent expression of political, social, and spiritual needs; and, being for the most part satiric, was modelled on the pre-revolutionary literature of their relatives in New England and the other Atlantic States, which, in its time, had been modelled on the satiric neo-classical verse and the polemic and satiric prose of the eighteenth century in England.

So that the genius of the literature written in the Province of Quebec from the British Occupation of Montreal to the triumph of Responsible Government in 1848, and somewhat later, was pragmatic rather than literary; whereas the genius of the literature produced in the same period in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, particularly in Nova Scotia, was definitively literary in spirit and form.

The civilization and culture of the Loyalist centres in Ontario, brought in by the Loyalist Migrations, 1783-1786, and later by the settlements of British-born émigrés, chiefly discharged soldiers, officials, and mechanics, after the close of the Napoleonic wars, 1815, were essentially practical and materialistic. On the whole the literature produced in Ontario, particularly up to the triumph of Responsible Government was, as in Quebec Province, a literature of annals and chronicles and narratives. However, during this period and onwards to Confederation, particularly after the war of 1812 and during the rebellion of 1837, there appeared in the Canadas some genuinely aesthetic verse and prose, written by British-born sojourners or permanent émigrés and by native authors.

There were, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, several other migrations of small groups of English-speaking people to Nova Scotia and the Canadas, notably a group of Scots. The English Migration in 1749, under Cornwallis, to Halifax was of no significance in the literary history of Canada; nor were the Swiss and German Migrations to Nova Scotia of literary significance. On the other hand, the Scots Migration to Pictou, Nova Scotia, 1773, had a most decided intellectual influence not only on Nova Scotia, but also on the whole of what is now known as Canada. It had, however, no influence on specific literary culture and literary creation, save Journalism, in Canada as a whole.

Meanwhile, it must be observed that in literary culture and the production of literature in the English language in Canada from 1760 to Confederation, taking these merely as convenient dates, Nova Scotia (including New Brunswick) during the Puritan and Loyalist period and up to the triumph of Responsible Government, and even still later, not only produced the most significant and authentic literature, but also Nova Scotia is to be regarded as the first home of an originally ‘Nativistic’ Literature produced in Canada.

Up to Confederation there could not be, as there was not, any innate and natural sentiment of Canadian nationality in the hearts of the people. The motive of Confederation was not based on sentiment but on practical political vision and expediency. The ideal of Confederation, before it was achieved, was wholly an intellectual concept. If, therefore, the Canadian Confederacy were to endure, it was imperative that the intellectual ideal, for the factual realization of it, should become powerful over the hearts and imagination of the Canadian people after the fact of Confederation in 1867—that there should develop, or be developed, in the souls of the Canadian people a definitive sentiment of nationality.

This meant that following the consummation of Confederation the people of Canada should find themselves pledged to and engaged in a distinctly new and novel political and social program. This program was chiefly one of political and social consolidation and of industrial and commercial expansion. It was most astutely and effectively, though slowly, carried out. With the ever-increasing political and social unification of the people and the intellectual and commercial expansion of the country, a genuine sentiment of Canadian nationality gradually developed, until by the time of the Great World War, 1914-1918, and largely in consequence of Canada’s part in that war, the sentiment of Canadian nationality suddenly acquired a pervasive intensity and evolved into a definite and profound sense of distinct nationhood.

Now, with this development in political and social consolidation, and territorial, industrial, and commercial expansion, and the evolution of a sentiment of nationality and, later, nationhood, it was inevitable that there should be not only a change in the literary ideals, inspiration, and aims of Canadian men and women of letters, but also that, with this change in aesthetic and artistic conscience, the literature produced in Canada, after Confederation, should be different in substance, form, and technical artistry or craftsmanship from the literature produced prior to Confederation. It was also inevitable that immediately upon Confederation, when, naturally, political and social consolidation and the sentiment of nationality were virtually at zero point or at least were inchoate, the literary ideals of Canadian men and women of letters should be, in substance and form, for a decade or so, traditional and derivative, not indigenous and originally Canadian. It was indeed so: for at least a decade there was hardly any independent or original native Canadian literature, or in it even a simmering of the sentiment of Canadian nationality, though there was a considerable quantity of ‘journalistic’ and imaginative poetry and prose which possessed distinctive and even engaging aesthetic and artistic qualities, written both by permanently resident émigrés and by native-born Canadians.

In 1868, for instance, Charles Mair, a native-born Canadian, published his Dreamland and Other Poems; and in 1870 John Reade, an Irishman long resident in Canada, published a volume of verse, The Prophecy of Merlin and Other Poems: but while Mair’s poems contained Canadian sentiment and color they were the sentiment and color of objective Nature in Canada; and while John Reade’s volume was written in Canada and though the poet really felt and was in sympathy with all the political, social, and spiritual aspirations of Canada, Reade’s poems themselves were based chiefly upon Arthurian legend and were written in a derivative English romantic manner of form, music, and color.

Mair and Reade and others were having an influence, however, in holding up the ideal of authentic literary creation in Canada while during that decade and the following decade a group of young native-born Canadians were growing into manhood, and were having engendered in their hearts and imagination a distinct innate sentiment of Canadian nationality and were to become the first native-born group of systematic poets and prose writers in Canada. Their work, in poetry and prose, may fairly be signalized as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

This group, for the purposes of literary history, we have denominated the Systematic School of Canadian poets and prose writers. For with the publication of Chas. G. D. Roberts’ Orion and Other Poems in 1880, a native-born leader for native-born men and women of letters appeared in Canada; and with the publication of Roberts’ In Divers Tones in 1887 in Canada (in U. S. 1886), there appeared at length the first ‘Voice’ of the Spirit of Canada, expressed in poetic literature, artistic in structure and noble in inspiration. The authentic beginning of strictly so-called Canadian Literature in English must, therefore, be dated from 1887. Roberts and his colleagues, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, D. C. Scott, F. G. Scott, Pauline Johnson, Gilbert Parker and Marshall Saunders are designated the Systematic School of Canadian poets and prose writers.

The First Renaissance in Canadian Native and National Literature may be said to close either with the publication of Pauline Johnson’s last volume of poems, Canadian Born, in 1903, or with the publication of Robert Service’s first volume of verse, Songs of a Sourdough (1907). By this is not meant that after twenty years of leadership and influence the first Systematic Group had not continued to hold up the ideal to the younger or later Canadian poets and prose writers or that there were no Canadian poets and prose writers who were continuing the older ideal and tradition. As a matter of fact, the creative and artistic ideals of the first group of systematic poets and prose writers had become engendered in the aesthetic and artistic conscience of the younger or later men and women of letters in Canada; and the poetry and prose produced by the younger or later Canadian men and women of letters were notably refined in sentiment, beautiful in structure and imagery, and noble in spiritual substance and appeal. They continued, and still continue, as do also Roberts, Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott and the other living members of the original Systematic Group, the tradition of aesthetic and artistic verse and prose.

But in 1907 another singing voice was heard; and there developed a group of poetasters and picaresque fictionists whose leader was Robert Service. Their special literary métier was verse, though Service and his literary confrères also essayed fiction. This group we call the Vaudeville School of Canadian Poetry. Its vogue lasted for an insignificant period of five years, or from 1908 up to the beginning of the Great World War.

In 1913 appeared a new group of younger Canadian poets and prose writers, who may be regarded as having begun the Second Renaissance in Canadian literature. They inaugurated, as it were, a Restoration Period in Canadian literature, inasmuch as, with some changes in ideals of form and craftsmanship, they essentially ‘restored’ the literary principles and aims of the First Renaissance Group. All these distinctions in nomenclature and dates are, of course, only used for expository or pedagogical purposes. Accordingly, it is convenient to mark the beginning of the Second Renaissance, or the Restoration Period, in Canadian Literature with the publication of Marjorie Pickthall’s first volume of verse, Drift of Pinions, in 1913.

This period in Canadian Literature in English is still in process. It is showing definitive originality in several ways, including original developments in modernity of theme and moral substance, in formal novelty, and in fresh expression of neglected or hitherto unessayed literary genres, such as, for instance, poetic and stage drama, and essays strictly in belles-lettres.

Contemporary with the poets of this period is a group of fictionists, who have produced and are producing novels, romances, and tales which are Canadian in theme, in social background, and in color. This group may be distinguished as the Realistic School of Canadian Fiction.

These distinctions thus determine the scope of the present work as a Synoptic History of Canadian Literature. The literature considered or treated comprises—(I) Pre-Confederation Literature (1760-1887); and (II) Post-Confederation Literature (1887——?). The Pre-Confederation Literature, which, for purposes of exposition or treatment, is viewed as running over into two decades beyond 1867, will be considered under three rubrics—(1) Incidental Pioneer Literature; (2) Emigré Literature and (3) Nativistic Literature. Post-Confederation Literature will be treated under a single rubric—Native and National Literature of Canada; and this indigenous Canadian literature will, for expository and pedagogical purposes, be considered under five Schools (or Periods)—(1) the Systematic School and Period (First Renaissance); (2) the Vaudeville School and Period (Decadent Interim); (3) the Restoration School and Period (Second Renaissance); (4) the Realistic School and Period of Fiction; and (5) the Rise of Realistic Native or National Drama. But these formal divisions cannot be kept mathematically rigid and there will necessarily be overlappings and special consideration of both imaginative and aesthetic Canadian literature, such as poetic drama, belles-lettres, hymnody and literary criticism, journalism, and the literature of travel, exploration, history, and biography.

The method of treatment and criticism employed in the present work is also Synoptic or Philosophical. The synoptic method adopts the point of view of Canadian literary history and literature as a spiritual Whole. It has distinct and desirable advantages over the other critical and pedagogical methods. For the synoptic method assists the imagination to view Canadian authors and their literature in an inclusive historical perspective, and thus to discover in Canadian Literature the evolution of a people’s social and spiritual ideals, their national and world conceptions, and how and what each individual poet or prose writer, or each group or school of poets and prose writers, has contributed to the vision of the people’s social and spiritual ideals and to the evolution of them in the people’s social conscience. Further: the synoptic method disengages and discriminates the essential excellences of the poetry and prose of particular individuals and groups, and enables the critic or historian rightly to estimate the social and spiritual significance and value of Canadian authors ideas on Nature, Society, human Existence, and Endeavor.

Part I

Pre-Confederation Literature
1760-1887.

CHAPTER I

Social and Spiritual Bases

THE SOCIAL AND SPIRITUAL BASES OF CANADIAN LITERATURE—THE PURITAN AND LOYALIST MIGRATIONS—THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCOTS MIGRATION—THE PRIMACY OF NOVA SCOTIA IN THE CREATIVE LITERATURE OF CANADA—LITERARY SPECIES IN ONTARIO AND QUEBEC.

Creative literature in the Provinces which now form the Dominion of Canada, really or most significantly began in Nova Scotia. The social bases of this Nova Scotian pioneer literature, its literary forms, and even its inspiration were of New England origin. It is highly important clearly to understand all this. In 1760, or two years after the proclamation of Governor Lawrence and the establishment of a Legislative Assembly in Nova Scotia, seven thousand Puritans emigrated from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut to Maugerville on the St. John River, and to the valleys of western Nova Scotia. The expulsion of the Acadians had left the fertile farms of western Nova Scotia deserted. These lands were naturally attractive to the people of New England, inasmuch as the soil was not only fertile, but the country itself was, at the time, part of British North America, as was New England itself. As soon as the Acadians had been expelled, the Governor of Nova Scotia set up military control and government. Moreover, the Anglican Church was the dominant creed. In New England civil and religious liberty were regarded as absolutely necessary to the life of the people. When, then, in 1758, Governor Lawrence brought about the formation of a Legislative Assembly and proclaimed civil and religious liberty for Nova Scotia, the New England Puritans felt free to come to Nova Scotia, which promised them an acceptable new home, both for the obtaining of material possessions and the free expression of their spiritual ideals.

In 1763 other groups of New Englanders, with their characteristic ideals, came to Nova Scotia. In 1783, 1785 and 1786, following the War of American Independence, thirty thousand United Empire Loyalists emigrated from the Atlantic States and settled in Nova Scotia; ten thousand settled in Lower Canada (Quebec); and twenty thousand settled in the district which later became the Province of Ontario. So that, in a period of twenty-five years, about one hundred thousand émigrés from the United States coast had become permanent residents of the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas. That is to say, the bases of Canadian civilization and culture, following the Fall of Montreal and beginning with the first Puritan Migration, were definitively the social, political, intellectual, and literary ideals of New England.

In 1749 there was a migration of English from the Motherland to Halifax. They founded the City of Halifax. These English émigrés, however, found conditions of life at Halifax so forbidding by way of hardships and so socially unsettling that many of them removed to Boston and to New York. Subsequently their descendants came from New England and New York to Halifax. It was they, not their fathers, who really founded the City of Halifax and did most for the development of commerce and culture in that community. Later, when Halifax became a British Military and Naval Station, it took on an English ‘air.’ But essentially its culture and commerce were of New England Puritan origin.

In 1773 occurred the Scots migration to Pictou, on the North shore of Nova Scotia. These colonists were but a little band of two hundred; yet they brought with them two ideals which eventually pervaded the civilization and culture of Canada.

Viewed, then, synoptically, the civilization and culture of the Dominion of Canada, as we conceive and appreciate the significance of Canada to-day, had their origins in Puritanism and Calvinism—in the ideals brought into Nova Scotia and the Canadas by the New England and the Scots Migrations in the 18th century. Specifically, the New England colonists, especially the Loyalists, brought, with them the literary ideals which were to become the creative principles of the first native-born poets and prose writers of Nova Scotia and the Canadas. Specifically, the Scots colonists brought into Nova Scotia two ideals of spiritual import; namely, the ideal of the supreme worth of the individual human spirit and its salvation, and the ideal of sound intellectual education as the basis of the life of the spirit both for this world and the world to come.

To appreciate critically the results of the Loyalist ideals on the creative literary spirit in Nova Scotia, we must hark back to pre-Revolutionary times in New England and the other Atlantic Colonies and to the social conditions and spiritual problems of the people of Nova Scotia following the Loyalist Migrations. In pre-revolutionary days in the New England and the other Atlantic Colonies, the weapon used both by those who were for separation from England and those who were loyal to the British Crown was a literary weapon—prose and poetry. Naturally pre-revolutionary literature in the American Colonies was modelled on the mood and form of the satiric verse and pamphlets of the 18th century poets and prosemen of England. The American colonies became alive especially with poetic satirists. When, therefore, the Loyalists settled in Nova Scotia and the Canadas, and when, in due course, they themselves had to face the discussion and solution of new social and political problems, inevitably they adopted the 18th century forms of literary expression.

But what of the Puritan settlers in Nova Scotia? They were in the land for at least a decade before the coming of the Loyalists. They had social and religious problems for discussion and solution. Did not these problems of the Puritan émigrés issue in a literature? They did. But the Puritan literature in Nova Scotia was not in mood, aim, form, or result at all significant, or as genuinely creative as the Loyalist literature, and may be shortly noticed and dismissed. The Puritans were Congregationalists, and brought with them the old New England ideals of the ‘Town Meeting’—Responsible Civic Government and Religious Liberty. They were political and religious Democrats. But Church interests were paramount. Congregationalism, though essentially a democratic form of Church government, developed all the formalism, of an aristocratically conducted religion. The inevitable happened. There were ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘modernists’ in those days as in ours. Under Whitefield a schism occurred in Congregationalism. The leader of the schism in Nova Scotia was Rev. Henry Alline (1748-84). Under Whitefield in the American Colonies and Henry Alline, ‘the Whitefield of Province’ of Nova Scotia, the ‘New Lights’ (as they were called) triumphed over the Orthodox or Formalistic Congregationalists in America. But, oddly, this religious schism also resulted in a political schism. It resulted, in short, in a separation of the Puritans in Nova Scotia from the Puritans in the New England Colonies. So that the Puritan colony in Nova Scotia became a community apart, with a new and distinct sentiment of British connection. They retained, however, their New England ideals of responsible municipal government and absolute religious liberty. Nova Scotia thus became the home of a new experiment in Political and Religious Democracy.

But since, with the Puritans, Church or Spiritual interests were paramount, and since the separation between the Nova Scotia Puritans and the New England Puritans was merely sentimental and followed the religious schism, the Puritan literature of the period in Nova Scotia was wholly religious and theological. On the theological side, it took the form of controversial and polemical literature for the promotion of the ‘New Lights’ schism. On the religious and creative sides, it took the form of homilies, sermons, devotional works, prayers, and hymns.

The chief creative writer of the Puritan period was Henry Alline. During the conflict between the Orthodox Congregationalists and the ‘New Lights’ Henry Alline published a polemical pamphlet, The Anti-Traditionist, and five books of Hymns and Spiritual Songs. After his death his Life and Journal was published. It is interesting only to students of religious psychology and the varieties of religious experience.

But Alline’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs is a genuinely creative work. It contrasts admirably with the too often spiritually inept and doggerelized hymns and evangelical songs that have found a place in the hymnody of the Churches. Alline’s hymns and spiritual songs disclose on his part an authentic lyrical faculty, a sure sense of rhythm and of decent rhyme, and a respect for dignified diction and imagery. Though Alline’s work in prose and verse has no significance in the evolution of Canadian Literature, inasmuch as he did not even ‘influence’ Canadian hymnography, yet the literary historian must give him the distinction of being the first of the Pioneer Hymn Writers of Canada. The Puritan period in Nova Scotia had, however, no importance in the development of Canadian Literature.

The literature produced by the Loyalists in Nova Scotia, on the other hand, was fundamental in the evolution of Canadian Literature. For the most part, the Loyalists were members of the cultured Tory or aristocratic families of New England and the other Atlantic Colonies, and were highly cultured themselves. Many of them were teachers, clergymen, lawyers, jurists and officials—all graduates of Harvard, Yale, and other leading educational institutions in the lost colonies. The Loyalists brought with them their social and cultural ideals; and many of them were practised in literary expression, after the manner of the 18th century prose and verse. They were thus fitted by education and powers of literary expression to reconstruct, as they did, the civilization and culture of Nova Scotia, and to produce, as they did, the first Nativistic Literature of Canada. How they accomplished these creative results is an instructive study by itself.

During the American Revolution the Loyalists were aristocratic families with an ardent British sentiment. They wished to retain British connection and to promote their own institutions, with New World modifications, modelled upon British institutions. The persecutions they endured during the whole of the Revolutionary times and their forced exile to Nova Scotia did but intensify their sentiment for British connection in their new home in Nova Scotia. Yet the love for their old homeland remained, and became with them a rather poignant nostalgia. It was, however, the old homeland they loved; but for the people of the United States they had no sentiment save scorn and hate.

All the while, therefore, they retained in their minds and hearts the so-called ‘United Empire’ ideal. But at length this became a problem which took the form of an inner debate as to whether they should cast aside all thoughts of bringing about a re-union of British North America (that is, the Canadas and the Maritime Provinces) and the United States, or whether they should promote a new United Empire in the land over the border from the United States. It must be admitted, however, that on the side of ardency of sentiment the Loyalists in Nova Scotia really felt more a nostalgia for their old homeland than they felt a love for Great Britain and the establishment of a great British nation in the lands north of the United States.

It is this nostalgia which first finds expression in the Loyalist literature produced in Nova Scotia; and it finds its fullest expression in verse. Several names—Jacob Bailey, Jonathan Sewell, Joseph Stansbury, Jonathan O’Dell, Adam Allen, James Moody, Mather Byles, Walter Bates—are noted by literary historians as paramount in the early Loyalist literature. There is, however, nothing of genuine literary merit in their poetry, prose narratives, and diaries. Of these early Loyalist writers Jonathan O’Dell is somewhat significant. He introduced into Nova Scotia the verse forms and temper of the 18th century poetic satirists, Dryden and Pope.

Time, at length, wrought changes in the hearts of the Loyalists, and they began to look away from the United States and to take a pride in their new home; to look with affection upon Nova Scotia and to express a decent regard for England, the Motherland. As it were, the grapes in the United States had soured, and the Loyalists in Nova Scotia began to look on the Revolutionists as their inferiors in birth, culture and civilization. The true ideals, in their view, were in the aristocratic culture and the political system of the new Provinces and England. Once this spirit of contempt for United States culture and civilization became thoroughly engendered, the separation of the Loyalist community in Nova Scotia from all United States connection was complete. Whereupon the Loyalists felt that the only right course to pursue was for them to unite with the Puritan settlers who had preceded them to Nova Scotia, and to develop a civilization and culture all their own.

This they proceeded to do by laying the foundations of Journalism in Nova Scotia. The first journalistic ventures in Nova Scotia happen also to be the first in Canada. The first newspaper had been founded at Halifax in 1752: that is, eight years before the Puritan Migration; but it was a government organ and not a real newspaper. But on March 17th, 1776, when the British troops evacuated Boston, John Howe, Loyalist and printer, also left Boston and with him went the press of the Boston News-Letter. Eventually it reached Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the News-Letter was amalgamated with the Halifax Gazette. In 1789 The Nova Scotia Magazine was founded, printed, and edited by John Howe. This was the first literary magazine published in British North America. Thus, under Loyalist auspices and literary traditions, journalism began in Nova Scotia, that is, in Canada.

Further: Loyalist newspapers and Loyalist magazines, founded at Halifax, and later at St. John, that is, Loyalist Journalism, laid the foundations of literary expression and literary creation in Canada. It is beside the point to animadvert upon the aesthetic values of the substance and form of the original prose and verse which appeared in the Loyalist newspapers and magazines. For, up till the time of Joseph Howe’s becoming sole owner and editor of The Novascotian, in 1828, all the literary work that had preceded was but a preparatory school of journalism and literature. When The Novascotian was founded by Joseph Howe, and when Thomas Chandler Haliburton, with Howe himself and others, began to contribute to it, journalism itself became literature, and the first Nativistic Literature of Canada was created.

The Loyalists, we must remember, though they came from a country in which the social and political ideals were democratic, were themselves aristocratic. When, therefore, they bethought themselves of founding a college, their ideal was that of a college which would preserve the curriculum of Colleges open only to those who were well to do. The University of King’s College was begun as an Academy at Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1787, was granted a Collegiate Charter in 1789, and was formally opened as a College in 1790. It was indeed open to all the Province—to all those who could afford to attend. But in 1802 this policy of seeming democratic inclusiveness was abrogated by an Imperial Government Act which limited the privilege of matriculation to members of the Church of England. Since seventy-five per cent. of the population of Nova Scotia were members of other communions, the great majority of possible students were shut out from King’s College. When, therefore, the Scots émigrés who settled at Pictou in 1773, found their children debarred from education at King’s College, they established in 1819 a new College. Education at Pictou Academy, as it has always been called, was open to students of all creeds, races, and color, as it is to this day. From that Academy went forth men and women who held up to the people of their own country and the rest of Canada the two ideals of the supreme worth of the individual human spirit and of sound elementary education as the basis of constructive good citizenship. From Pictou Academy went forth men and women who became leaders in thought and practical endeavor in Canada—superior teachers and presidents of Colleges, eloquent preachers, distinguished scientists, men of practical vision and achievement in the professions, in government and statesmanship, and in industry and commerce. Their influence, however, was intellectual and practical. Save in the field of journalism, they had no influence on literature and literary creation in Canada.

In Lower Canada and in the district that became Upper Canada, or Ontario, the earlier Loyalist Migrations brought with them a lower level of culture than that which was brought into the Maritime Provinces by the Loyalists who had migrated to Nova Scotia, which at the time included the territory that in 1784 became the Province of New Brunswick. This is not a matter of opinion or prejudice; it is a matter of fact. For the Loyalists who migrated to Nova Scotia were from the most cultured families in the Old Colonies, and even the men of the Loyalist Regiments were of a superior order of character and mind. So that the Loyalists who settled in Nova Scotia formed, as Dr. Baker phrases it, ‘an educated class seldom found in a pioneer community—a homogeneous community unique in origin, with a local pride not found in other sections.’

The so-called Overland Loyalists, on the other hand, who moved into the Niagara Peninsula and into Quebec were on the whole of humbler social status—agricultural workers, artisans, and a considerable number of irresponsible adventurers, who joined the Migrations in the hope of obtaining cheap lands and something for nothing. They were led, of course, by men of parts, but even these men had neither literary culture nor literary interests. Their interests were material, and they ‘headed’ a Loyalist motley so as to have the means and labor necessary to occupy the lands and clear them for their own materialistic ends. And so it happened that while in Quebec and in the settlements in the district which was to become Ontario there were literary activities, and even newspapers and magazines, the Overland Loyalists did not contribute constructively to the literary spirit and the creative literature of Canada.

The first genuine Nativistic Literature of Canada was created in Nova Scotia—in the Satiric Comedy or Humor of Haliburton, in the Sketches, Essays, Legislative Reviews, Speeches and Public Letters and the Poetry of Joseph Howe, and in the Poetry of Oliver Goldsmith, 2nd, a great-nephew of the author of The Deserted Village. Still, this pre-eminence given to Nova Scotia is, in a way, based on a half-truth. It is true that, to put it colloquially, Nova Scotia had her creative literary ‘innings’ early in the game. It lasted from the publication of Joseph Howe’s Western Rambles, in 1828, or from the publication of Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, in 1829, to Haliburton’s last volume, The Season Ticket, published anonymously in 1859—that is, a period of thirty years.

Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were again to have an ‘innings’ when Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Marshall Saunders, of the Systematic School of native poets and prose writers, began publishing in the late ‘eighties’ of the 19th century. The Maritime Provinces, as a whole, by the addition of Lucy M. Montgomery to the native prose writers and William E. Marshall and Robert Norwood to the native poets, had a still further short ‘innings.’ But, it must be recalled, contemporaneously with Haliburton and Howe in Nova Scotia, certain writers in Ontario and Quebec, namely, first, John Richardson, Rosanna Mullins, and William Kirby, produced historical romances, or a ‘nativistic’ literature in prose, and, later, through the poetry of Sangster and Mair, Ontario produced Nativistic Literature in verse. Since the rise of the Systematic School, the centre of literary creation in Canada has shifted from Nova Scotia to Ontario and Western Canada.

CHAPTER II

Incidental Pioneer Literature

THE INCIDENTAL PRE-CONFEDERATION LITERATURE OF CANADA—ALEXANDER HENRY’S TRAVELS—MRS. BROOKE’S NOVELS—MRS. JAMESON’S NATURE-STUDIES—THE ÉMIGRÉ PRE-CONFEDERATION LITERATURE OF CANADA—MRS. SUSANNA MOODIE—ADAM KIDD—JOHN READE—GEORGE MURRAY—ALEXANDER M^cLACHLAN—WILLIAM WYE SMITH—ISABELLA V. CRAWFORD.

Broadly taken, the Incidental Pioneer Literature of Canada was produced by the wits and bon vivants amongst the officers of the British army and navy during or after the taking of Louisburg and Quebec, and by certain ‘birds of passage,’ British-born men and women, who were sojourning in the Canadas. It was considerable in quantity, embracing verse, narratives, social and nature studies and sketches, and even fiction. But it did not affect the life and ideals of the people. It was simply literature produced in the Canadas—incidentally.

From Louisburg to Quebec and Montreal the poets in the British navy and army exhibited a special preoccupation with a species of war poetry. In 1759, for instance, when the British frigate’s guns were breaching the walls of the French stronghold, Louisburg, Valentine Neville penned his poem The Reduction of Louisburgh. In 1760, George Cockings produced another war poem for the delight of London—The Conquest of Canada, or The Siege of Quebec: A Tragedy. In this species of literature, the most remarkable performance was Henry Murphy’s The Conquest of Quebec: An Epic Poem in Eight Books. It was published at Dublin in 1790 and runs to the amazing length of eight thousand lines. Quantity, not literary quality, was the only distinguishing mark of these early Canadian poems of heroism in war.

A really remarkable book, with genuine literary quality was the elder Alexander Henry’s narrative of his experience as a traveller and explorer, published in 1809 under the title Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories. In point of publication it was anticipated by narratives dating as early as 1736, when John Gyles wrote his memoirs of Odd Adventures, an account of his experience while exploring the region through which runs the St. John River. There were many volumes of narratives, but the most of them lacked literary style and are of interest chiefly to the antiquarian.

Two women, however, deserve special notice as contributors to the Incidental Literature of Canada. These were Mrs. Frances Brooke, who was the wife of a chaplain of the forces at Quebec in the last quarter of the 18th century; and Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson. While a resident of the Province of Quebec, Mrs. Brooke wrote what has been called ‘the first Canadian novel,’ The History of Emily Montague. Published in 1769, it ran into several editions. Mrs. Jameson possessed a rare pictorial sense of beauty in nature; and while visiting the Canadas she wrote Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Published in three volumes at London in 1838, this work remains to this day the finest example of ‘color writing’ in the whole range of Canadian Literature.

With the exception of Mrs. Brooke and Mrs. Jameson, the writers of the Incidental Pioneer Literature of Canada merely took a passing view of what had interested them and put it into literary form decent enough for publication. It was the substance of what they wrote, not the style or literary art in their books, that interested their public in the Canadas, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The only faculty these books satisfied or delighted was the faculty of curiosity; and the only delights they really gave readers were vicarious thrills of adventure and wonder.

The Incidental Literature of Canada, therefore, must be merely noted as fact. In nowise, whether it be literature or not, had it any real influence in developing a Canadian sentiment or in awakening a Canadian literary spirit. Mrs. Brooke wrote her novel, The History of Emily Montague, strictly in imitation of the first English novelist, Samuel Richardson. But Canadian fiction, in any real sense, did not begin with Mrs. Brooke. It began with a native-born Canadian, John Richardson, who wrote historical romance, notably Wacousta, after the manner of, though not in imitation of, Fenimore Cooper.

By the Emigré Literature of Canada we mean in general the poetry and prose written in Canada by permanent residents who were not born in any of the British North American Provinces. It is a moot question whether the literary historian should class the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford and of William Henry Drummond under the category of Emigré Canadian Literature. They were born outside of Canada; but they came to Canada at an age when their minds were young and unformed and readily susceptible to Canadian influences, naturalistic, social, and spiritual. Poets like Heavysege and John Reade came to Canada when their minds were mature and their attitudes to life were fixed. It is certain that Valancy Crawford and W. H. Drummond did write from the Canadian point of view and did influence Canadian literature, as well as contribute, somewhat uniquely, to its quantity and quality. It is equally certain that several of the maturely minded émigré writers influenced, by their presence and example, the development of Canadian Literature.

From the point of view of influence, both of production and example, we include in the one category of Emigré Literature the poetry and prose of the permanent residents who came to Canada when mature in mind and of those who came in childhood. With the exception of the poetry of Miss Crawford and W. H. Drummond the Emigré Literature of Canada is derivative in form and substance. In Miss Crawford’s case we discover a considerable element of Canadian theme and a form of her own. In the case of Drummond we come upon what Louis Fréchette has called a ‘Pathfinder’—a poet with a new substance and a new form absolutely and uniquely indigenous to Canada.

Though Confederation in 1867 sounded the death knell of the Emigré Literature of Canada, actual production of it continued for a decade or two past Confederation. It may be said to have lasted for about a hundred years; or from the Fall of Montreal in 1760 till the publication of Charles G. D. Roberts’ In Divers Tones (1887) twenty years after Confederation.

In the first form, it was strictly pioneer literature, and naturally had the crudity of thought and structure which belong to literature composed under unsettled conditions. Gradually it came to have better aesthetic substance and artistic form. This growth in it from crudity to decent literary form evolved according to the social and spiritual development of Canada in the Pioneer and the later Pre-Confederation periods. As existence in Canada became more and more settled, and education and culture became more and more distributed and appreciated, the literature produced in the country was written more and more to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities and the artistic conscience. The reason for this is that when an émigré writer, such as Mrs. Susanna Moodie, undertook to write social and nature sketches, the substance counted for everything, and the form and movement were free, unhampered by traditional laws of expression. It was speech transcribed on paper. But the émigré poets were bound by English models according to which they must write, or not write at all. In émigré verse, therefore, rather than in émigré prose, we observe evidences of an evolution in substance and artistic structure.

John Fleming came to Montreal early in the 19th century. Suddenly his imagination grew poetic wings, and forthwith he produced An Ode of the Birthday of King George III. He made his poem as intellectualized and stilted with imitative poetic phrases as he possibly could. There was nothing Canadian about it. In 1830 Adam Kidd, who came to Canada from Ireland, produced a volume of poetry, The Huron Chief and Other Poems, which is definitively Canadian in theme and is remarkable for really engaging descriptions of Canadian scenery. It is in a traditional English form, but from the point of view of its substance it may be regarded as the first example of a genuinely Canadian poem by an émigré writer, as distinguished from a ‘nativistic’ writer, as, for instance, Oliver Goldsmith, 2nd, who was born in Nova Scotia and published The Rising Village in 1825.

The names and work of the émigré versifiers might be extended so as to include several significant poets, such as Charles D. Shanly, James McCarroll, Alexander McLachlan, William Wye Smith, Thomas D’Arcy McGee and others down to John Reade, who published The Prophecy of Merlin and Other Poems in 1870. In their verse we note a constantly increasing regard for aesthetic substance and artistic craftsmanship. The name and work, however, of one émigré poet deserves special notice, more particularly because he is constantly being classified as a Canadian poetic dramatist. This was Charles Heavysege.

Heavysege was thirty-seven years of age when he arrived in Canada. The accident of his having remained in Canada and of having published at Montreal his Saul, which, as a matter of fact, had been conceived in England, does not give him as much right, if any at all, to be considered a Canadian émigré poet as attaches to Kidd or Mrs. Moodie.

Saul was published in 1857. As a poetic drama there is no other poem which was written in Canada that is so much in the grand manner. Its theme is Biblical, and it is really treated with epic grandeur and romantic intensity. But with all its excellences, it had no influence, by way of example, on subsequent Canadian poetic dramatists, such as Charles Mair, Wilfred Campbell, or Robert Norwood. The first Canadian poetic dramatist, native-born, was Charles Mair. Though the theme of his Tecumseh is not so sublimated as Heavysege’s Saul, it is Canadian; and though its style is not so altiloquent as that of Saul, Mair’s Tecumseh is an original and notable contribution to the ‘nativistic’ literature of Canada.

It was really, however, the later émigré men of letters, particularly John Reade and George Murray, who by their own work in verse and in literary criticism held up the ideal of native production of worthy poetry in Canada. They were active in the first and second decade after Confederation. They did much to awaken the literary spirit in Canada and to correct the literary or artistic conscience of native-born writers. But when they had done this, their work for Canadian Literature was at an end.

Archibald McLachlan came to Canada in his twenties and he followed, in much of his writing, the themes, the dialect, and even the stanza-forms of Robert Burns. Both poets were intensely patriotic, both sang the gospel of the brotherhood of man. To both life was very much a mystery, a mystery tinged with pathos. The work of McLachlan which may be regarded as purely Canadian in tone and subject is found chiefly in the depiction of scenes of pioneer life, treated objectively: The Fire in the Woods, The Old Hoss, The Backwood’s Philosopher; and in The Emigrant he projected a pioneer epic, which opens with an apostrophe to Canada and traces the progress of the emigrant from the old land to his arrival and settlement in the new. The cutting of the first tree, the building of the log-cabin and the Indian battle are successive incidents of the poem. The style of the poem is rather formal, and recalls Scott’s Lady of the Lake, but is without so much life or color. The poet loved the spirit of freedom and independence which he found in the new land and voiced this love in some stirring patriotic lyrics, such as Hurrah for the New Dominion.

Although William Wye Smith left Scotland in his infancy and was for almost four score years a Canadian by adoption, almost all his writings show the influence of the language, the literature, the history, the religious and philosophic spirit of his homeland. A deep spiritual note is present in many of his lyrics. Yet he did on occasion enter fully into the Canadian spirit and show an appreciative understanding of Canadian conditions, the beauties of Canadian landscape, historic themes and national aspirations. Some of his best known poems are: The Second Concession of Deer, The Sheep-washing, Ridgeway, The Burial of Brock, Here’s to the Land!, Canadians on the Nile.

There was one émigré poet who deserves detailed appreciation as a creative interpreter of Western chevalerie and as a lyrist with an exquisite fancy and delicate artistry. This was Isabella Valancy Crawford. Born in Ireland in 1850, she came to Canada when but a child of eight years, her family settling in Ontario, and, later, moving to the Kawartha Lakes. Her father was a physician and it must be presumed that the daughter came under cultural influences in her home. More important is the fact she lived in Canadian districts which must have peculiarly affected her young, impressionable, and receptive mind. Undeniably she was born a poet; that is to say, she was born with a genius for seeing spiritual beauty and meaning in all common things, natural and human. Thus gifted and thus left free to be impressed by Canadian Nature and life around her, and also by Nature and life in the Western prairie regions, of which she had read, Valancy Crawford set about imaginatively to interpret and express in verse her appreciation of Nature and life in Canada.

Whether it was her sheer genius that created her sympathy with pioneer and cowboy life in Western Canada, or whether it was her imaginative sympathy with that life that fired her poetic faculty, is a question in literary psychology that does not here require discussion. The outstanding fact is that Miss Crawford’s most notable faculty was a profound sympathy with and a clear vision of the elemental dignity of the heart of men and women whose lot was cast in rude and unspiritualizing circumstances. It was out of this sympathy that she was able to handle her themes of Western chevalerie with a subtle, veracious, and genuinely human but not coarse humor. Miss Crawford saw, as no one in Canada before her or since has seen, the poetry and the poetic or religious significance of life and chevalerie in the early days in Western Canada. She took the rude material and sublimated it, not with rhetoric, but rather with verisimilitude of diction and phrase and imagery, to the dignity and beauty of authentic poetry.

We may summarize the qualities of her poetry of Western chevalerie, as in her Old Spookses’ Pass, under four distinctions. It is noted for dramatic (not melodramatic) force, rugged but characteristic humor, graphic character-drawing, and power of conveying to us the sense of the war of the elements which is felt by the wild creatures, such as cattle herds, who become the ‘playthings’ of those elements. The extraordinary fact is that, though all these qualities were, on her part, sheer imaginative invention, yet they are truer to the facts than if they had been written by an actual eye-witness. In short, Miss Crawford, as a poet of Western chevalerie, stands out as gifted with sheer and intense imaginative power and as an authentic imaginative creator.

Nevertheless, her art is all authentic realism, totally free from crass and hectic melodrama. Moreover, Miss Crawford achieved, not solely because she had imagination and a true sense of realistic values, but also because she saw that style in poetry was the only antiseptic for picaresque realism and hectic melodrama. She had genius, not merely a tale to tell.

Certainly Lowell, Bret Harte, John Hay, and others of their school, writing in dialect, did no better work than did Miss Crawford in Old Spookses’ Pass; and most certainly Robert Service did nothing so elementally human and so spiritualizing with his material from rude or picaresque life in Canada.

We shall not wait to detail the qualities of Miss Crawford’s art in other species of verse. We observe, however, that her long poem Malcolm’s Katie is specially remarkable for fine imagery, colorful descriptive passages, and for a glowing impressionism which is taken directly from Canadian Nature. Moreover, it is notable for its lyrical interludes, which as lyrics, are as dainty and as delicately constructed, as full of fancy and imagination in small form, as any one of the kind in English literature. Miss Crawford’s lyrical interlude, beginning ‘O, Love builds on the azure sea,’ is beyond criticism, and is ‘the gem’ of several Canadian anthologies. We quote the whole lyric:—

O, Love builds on the azure sea,

And Love builds on the golden sand;

And Love builds on the rose-winged cloud,

And sometimes Love builds on the land!

O, if Love build on sparkling sea,

And if Love build on golden strand,

And if Love build on rosy cloud,

To Love these are the solid land!

O, Love will build his lily walls,

And Love his pearly roof will rear

On cloud, or land, or mist, or sea—

Love’s solid land is everywhere!

As an outstanding example of Miss Crawford’s genius and art in lyrical impressionism, Canadian Literature contains nothing more colorful and musical than her ‘Lily-Song’ from Malcolm’s Katie:—

While, Lady of the silvered lakes—

Chaste goddess of the sweet, still shrine

The jocund river fitful makes

By sudden, deep gloomed brakes—

Close sheltered by close warp and woof of vine,

Spilling a shadow gloomy—rich as wine

Into the silver throne where thou dost sit,

Thy silken leaves all dusky round thee knit!

Mild Soul of the unsalted wave,

White bosom holding golden fire,

Deep as some ocean-hidden cave

Are fixed the roots of thy desire,

Thro’ limpid currents stealing up.

And rounding to the pearly cup.

Thou dost desire,

With all thy trembling heart of sinless fire,

But to be filled

With dew distilled

From clear, fond skies that in their gloom

Hold, floating high, thy sister moon,

Pale chalice of a sweet perfume,

Whiter-breasted than a dove,

To thee the dew is—love!

When, in 1884, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s unpretentious little volume of poems appeared, it won high praise from the critics of the London Athenaeum, The Spectator, The Graphic, and The Illustrated London News. They all noted that she had an excess of riches in fancy and in imagination, and a poetic style of her own which was distinguished both by beauty and exquisite artistry. In 1905 her poems were collected and edited by John W. Garvin, B.A., and published with a critical Introduction by Miss Ethelwyn Wetherald. This remains the definitive edition of the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford, whom Miss Wetherald describes as ‘a brilliant and fadeless figure in the annals of Canadian literary history.’

The Canadian Emigré writers in the Pre-Confederation period, are, then, to be appreciated by the literary historian as men and women who, first, drew attention to the fact that Canadian life and culture needed expression and, next, awoke in native-born sons and daughters of the Dominion the ambition to undertake this expression in verse and prose. We must, therefore, honor the earlier and later émigré poets and prose writers of Canada, not for the intrinsic merit of their work, but for the fact that they engendered in the native-born the ideal of expressing the consciousness of a Canadian homeland and spirit in literature which should possess originality in substance, and beauty in form and in technical artistry.

The quotations from Isabella Valancy Crawford’s work in this chapter are from The Collected Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford, edited by John W. Garvin, B.A., (Ryerson Press: Toronto).

CHAPTER III

Joseph Howe

THE NATIVISTIC LITERATURE OF CANADA—JOSEPH HOWE AS FOUNDER OF THE INDEPENDENT PROSE, CREATIVE JOURNALISM, POLITICAL LITERATURE, LITERARY AND FORENSIC ORATORY—AS PATRIOTIC, DESCRIPTIVE, AND HUMOROUS POET—AND AS THE DISCOVERER AND SPONSOR OF THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON.

The epithet nativistic as applied to Canadian Literature marks a two-fold contrast. On one side, it distinguishes the literature written by natives of any of the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas (Ontario and Quebec) from the earlier Incidental or Émigré Literature. On the other side, it distinguishes the literature written by native-born men and women before Confederation from the Native and National Literature written by native-born poets and prosemen after Confederation. Nativistic Literature is ‘native’ only in the sense of being the indigenous product of the Unconfederated Provinces; but it is neither ‘native’ nor ‘national’ in the sense of being the product of the Confederated Provinces which form the Dominion of Canada. But since this Nativistic Literature was written by native-born sons and daughters of the Provinces in a period when these Provinces were, so to put it, ‘on the way’ to political union, and since it has permanent significance, it is classified retroactively as part of the genuine literature of Canada. Thus Richardson’s romances (written and set in Ontario), Haliburton’s satiric comedy (written and set in Nova Scotia), Sangster’s and Mair’s poetry (written and set in Ontario) belong to the Nativistic Literature of Canada. But the poetry of Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, D. C. Scott, Sir Gilbert Parker, and Pauline Johnson, and the prose fiction of Miss Marshall Saunders, Roberts, Parker, and Scott, as well as the verse and prose of later native-born writers, belong to the Native and National Literature of Canada. Yet both the Nativistic and the Native and National Literature are equally Canadian, inasmuch as each expresses with beauty or truth the spirit and life of the people and the physiognomy and moods of Nature in her seasons in Canada.

The most significant writer, at least by versatility of genius and variety of achievement, in the history of the Nativistic Literature of Canada, was Joseph Howe, born at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1804. Solely as a man of letters, Howe must be regarded as having been, from the point of view of Nova Scotia and of Canada, a man of superior creative genius. He, along with Haliburton, inaugurated the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature of Canada. He laid the foundations of Canadian Creative Journalism and Canadian Political Literature. He was the ‘father’ of Canadian Literary and Forensic Oratory. He gave fresh life and novel humorous quality to the Familiar Sketch or Light Essay, after the manner but not in imitation of Addison and Goldsmith. He was the first writer in British North America to attempt the Short Story of Mystery, and with engaging success. He was a Poet of greater authentic genius than many other Canadian poets who have a wider reputation. For he wrote poetry of Nature and the Commonplace with the beauty and distinction of Goldsmith and Burns. He infused into the Patriotic Song a new music and what may be regarded as the first expression of the National spirit in verse of that species. He gave to the Convivial Song a fresh Western ‘tang’ of breeziness and genial humanity. He revitalized, with novel originality and piquancy, the Poetry of Humor, so originally indeed as to make his humorous poetry almost a species by itself. Finally, he discovered the genius of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, trained him, sponsored him, and introduced him to the world as the first systematic humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

In 1704, or just one hundred years before the birth of Joseph Howe, the Boston News-Letter, the first New England newspaper, was established. On March 17th, 1776, or seventy-two years after the founding of the News-Letter, the press of that journal departed from Boston for Halifax, via Newport, R.I., in the care of John Howe, father of Joseph Howe; and was set up in the office of the Halifax Gazette, founded in 1752, the first newspaper published in any of the Provinces which later became the Dominion of Canada. The News-Letter was amalgamated with The Gazette. The latter, however, was not a genuine newspaper; it was a governmental organ which published chiefly military and official intelligence. The News-Letter was, in our sense of the word, a genuine newspaper. On the face of the fact, the amalgamation of the New England and the Nova Scotia newspapers appears as a simple, unmeaningful business matter. Really, however, it was an important factor in the evolution of Canadian literature.

John Howe was a printer, and a cultured Loyalist. He brought to Nova Scotia two ideals. These were, first, the ideal of the free and democratic expression of the spirit in word and deed; and, secondly, the ideal of the expression of thought in strictly literary form. When, therefore, the Boston News-Letter was amalgamated with the Halifax Gazette, Loyalist culture and journalistic ideals and practice infected and enhanced Nova Scotian (that is, Canadian) journalism. The amalgamation changed the scope and quality of Canadian journalism. For in 1828 Joseph Howe became sole owner and editor of The Novascotian, and proceeded systematically, and with better effect, to put into practice the social, journalistic, and literary ideals of his father.

When Joseph Howe assumed absolute control of The Novascotian, in the same year (1828) he also brought together the band of Nova Scotia writers known as ‘The Club.’ In the twenty years from 1828, when Howe became active in creative journalism, to 1847, when the struggle for Responsible Government in Nova Scotia ended and Howe retired from The Novascotian, Howe raised journalism to the dignity of literature. He achieved this in two ways: first, by publishing in The Novascotian his own and Haliburton’s original ‘Club’ prose sketches, Haliburton’s first series of The Clockmaker, and the prose and verse of other contemporary Nova Scotia writers; and, secondly, by establishing, in his own narrative and descriptive sketches, essays, legislative reviews, reported legislative speeches, pamphlets, and public letters, a new standard of literary prose. Those twenty years—1828 to 1848—may be called the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature of Canada.

The epithet, ‘independent,’ as applied to the literature of that period in Nova Scotia means that Howe, along with Haliburton, set up standards of prose which in substance and style broke away from English traditions and models. Howe’s and Haliburton’s writings were not only an indigenous product of Nova Scotia, a native literature, but also a new literature, absolutely independent of other literatures—in matter, form, and style. Moreover, The Novascotian, in which were published the skits, sketches, essays, and letters of ‘The Club,’ the sketches and essays of Howe, the first of the Sam Slick humorous sketches, and, later, the texts of Howe’s literary and forensic orations and public letters, circulated not only in the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas but also in the United States and Great Britain. The Novascotian thus introduced Howe and Haliburton, as creative prose writers, to the literary world. We may, therefore, mark the twenty years from 1828 to 1848 as the Epoch of the First Nativistic Literature of Canada.

Howe’s own creative literary work by itself deserves particular notice, inasmuch as it was a distinct contribution to the genuine Nativistic Literature of Canada. In 1828 Howe himself began a series of narrative and descriptive writings, intimate, gossipy ‘genre’ and ‘color’ sketches, which he published in The Novascotian and which he named Western Rambles. In 1830 he followed these with a similar series which he named Eastern Rambles. In 1838 and in 1839, while he and Haliburton were in Europe, Howe published in The Novascotian two series of essay-like sketches, The Nova Scotian Afloat and The Nova Scotian in England, in which it appeared that Howe was developing for himself a new literary style. For though these sketches are somewhat in the manner of Goldsmith they have a merely outward essay-like formality, but are distinguished by an originality of their own, an inward spirit of fresh humor and a humanity, almost urbanity, which are wholly Howe’s own creation.

In another department Howe added creatively to the prose literature of Canada. He laid the foundations of a political literature, which was not journalism, but authentic literature. He did this, first, by his inimitable so-called Legislative Reviews, when, in 1830, he began what is admitted by all critics to be in literary form and style a brilliant series of discussions of public affairs. Again: Howe enhanced the political literature of Canada by his pamphlets, public letters and his speeches and addresses, which were all published in the press.

It is not, however, by his legislative reviews, pamphlets, essays, sketches and public letters that Howe must be given a unique status in Canadian creative prose literature. He wins his unique status by virtue of his Speeches and Orations. They are really ‘great’—noble in thought, beautiful in literary style and finish, extraordinarily fine examples of a Western reincarnation of the rhetorical and literary gifts of such consummate parliamentarians and statesmen as Edmund Burke, John Bright, and William Ewart Gladstone.

Finally: Howe contributed to the Nativistic creative literature of Canada considerable journalistic verse which, in virtue of its humanity, and sincerity, its imaginative beauties, pleasing conceits and sentiments, and flowing rhythms (though it lacks somewhat in original verbal music) is quite on the plane of the journalistic verse of the 18th century neo-classical school, especially the verse of Goldsmith, upon which most of the verse of Howe was modelled. Howe wrote inspiriting Imperial verse, as, for instance, his Flag of Old England, a really fine example of patriotic poetry. He wrote colorful and musical descriptive verse, as, for instance, his long unfinished poem Acadia (in the 18th century rhymed couplet). He wrote infectious humorous poetry, as, for instance, The Blue Nose, To Mary, A Toast (to Haliburton), which is as near poetry as that species of verse ever reaches.

If Johnson and Goldsmith raised journalistic verse to the plane of poetry, so did Joseph Howe. Or, concretely, if Goldsmith’s Deserted Village is authentic poetry, so is Howe’s Acadia. Consider this excerpt from Howe’s Acadia:—

Pearl of the West!—since first my soul awoke

And on my eyes thy sylvan beauties broke,

Since the warm current of my youthful blood

Flowed on, thy charms, of mountain, mead, and flood

Have been to me most dear. Each winning grace

E’en in my childish hours I loved to trace,

And, as in boyhood, o’er thy hills I strode,

Or on thy foaming billows proudly rode,

At ev’ry varied scene my heart would thrill,

For, storm or sunshine, ’twas my Country still,

And now, in riper years, as I behold

Each passing hour some fairer charm unfold,

In ev’ry thought, in ev’ry wish I own,

In ev’ry prayer I breathe to Heaven’s high throne,

My Country’s welfare blends—and could my hand

Bestow one floweret on my native land,

Could I but light one Beacon fire, to guide

The steps of those who yet may be her pride,

Could I but wake one never dying strain

Which Patriot hearts might echo back again,

I’d ask no meed—no wreath of glory crave—

If her approving smile my own Acadia gave!

Are those lines any less true, human, sincere, winning poetry than the opening apostrophe of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village?—

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain;

Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain,

Where smiling Spring its earliest visit paid,

And parting Summer’s lingering blooms delayed:

Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,

Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,

How often have I loitered o’er thy green,

Where humble happiness endeared each scene!

How often have I paused on every charm. . . .

and so on. ‘Pearl of the West!’—in just as short, apt, and felicitous poetic phrase as Goldsmith’s apostrophe ‘Sweet Auburn!’ Howe signalizes Nova Scotia, her natural beauty and magic, her ‘homeland’ thrall over the heart and imagination of her native sons, a thrall of mountain, mead, and wood, and flood, of kinship with nature and of pride in her resources on land and sea. His Acadia is all authentic poetry.

As a lyrist of the beauty and pathos of the Commonplace, after the manner of Burns, Howe ranks well, as in his lyrics of this species, To The Linnet, The Deserted Nest, and To the Mayflower (trailing arbutus). It is, however, as a Poet of Humor that Howe must be regarded as somewhat unique in the literary history of Canada. For in his humorous verse Howe does not indulge in the ludicrous or in sheer absurdity, as did George T. Lanigan. Rather Howe employs an unconventional method of dignifying the human spirit, as in his playful manner of signalizing the heart qualities of the Nova Scotian in his poem The Blue Nose and in A Toast (to Haliburton). Seldom did Howe use satire in humorous verse. But whenever he did so, he employed the manner of Burns, and in the form of epigram, as in To Ann and in this smart epigram, To a Lady (whose Eyes were Remarkably Small):—

Your little eyes, with which, fair maid,

Strict watch on me you’re keeping,

Were never made to look; I’m ’fraid

They’re only fit for peeping.

Joseph Howe was a ‘poet frustrate.’ Had he been able to devote himself wholly to verse, there is no doubt that he would have left a considerable body of authentic poetry. The bad in his verse is like the bad in the verse of his superiors, but the best of Howe’s verse is genuine poetry. Yet however high or low individual critics may estimate the aesthetic and artistic qualities of his verse, Joseph Howe has a right to a place in the history of Canadian poetry, and to a distinctive place in the history of Canadian humorous poetry.

As the inaugurator of the Epoch of the Independent Nativistic Prose Literature of Canada, as an authentic creator of Literary Journalism and Literary and Forensic Oratory, and as a significant, though frustrate Poet, Joseph Howe was, as Samuel Johnson said of Goldsmith,—‘a very great man.’

CHAPTER IV

Thomas Chandler Haliburton

THE NATIVISTIC LITERATURE OF CANADA—THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON—FIRST SYSTEMATIC HUMORIST OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEOPLES—CREATOR OF A NEW TYPE OF SATIRIC HUMOR AND COMIC CHARACTERIZATION.

It is the chief glory of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, born at Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1796, that he was the first systematic humorist and satirist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This distinction will appear as almost obvious once its meaning and scope are properly understood. From the founding of the American Colonies till the American Declaration of Independence there were no Anglo-Saxon peoples. Up to pre-revolutionary times the colonists in the Maritime Provinces, in Canada, and in the Atlantic Colonies thought of themselves as British people merely separated from the people in the Old Country by the main of the Atlantic. It was a separation only in geographical distribution. The British ‘family spirit’ was still intact, and the Old Country was still ‘over home.’ It might be thought that there were two British peoples on the American continent after the Fall of Montreal (1760). As a matter of fact, the British people in the Maritime Provinces and Canada had been, as it were, always ‘under the wing’ of the New England Colonies, at least in the sense of a military and naval protectorate. So that after the Fall of Montreal to the Declaration of Independence the whole of the vast areas occupied by the British in the New World was definitively British America.

With the American Declaration of Independence and the revolution, there resulted in sentiment and aim a political separation between the British people of one section in America and the people of the Old Country. For the first time the British ‘family spirit’ was disintegrated. In 1786, with the granting of the independence of the Atlantic Old Colonies, a real political separation of the British in North America was permanently established. There was effected a separate United States and a separate British North America (Maritime Provinces and Canada). Thus there were, politically viewed, two Anglo-Saxon peoples in America, and one in the United Kingdom. For the first time in history the phrase ‘the Anglo-Saxon peoples’ denoted a real distinction in political and social entities. The process of time, of course, only increased the sense of separation of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

Unless we think of this 18th century division of the Anglo-Saxons into three separate peoples, politically as well as sentimentally, we shall regard Jonathan Swift as the first systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This is impossible, however, for the reason that Swift’s satires—The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of The Books (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—were not only written prior to the revolution in America but also were addressed solely or specifically to the English people of the United Kingdom. Further, Swift was not a consciously systematic satirist. He simply wrote, as occasion demanded, satiric pièces-a-thèse. For the same reasons Laurence Sterne cannot be regarded as the first systematic humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) were published before there was a United States Republic and a British North America as separate political entities. When Charles Dickens published his Pickwick Papers (1836-37), the Anglo-Saxon peoples as such—in the United States, in British North America, and in the United Kingdom—had been a political fact for more than fifty years. Yet Dickens cannot be regarded as the first systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. He definitively addressed the English people in England. He was a benevolent humorist, aiming by comic characterization to create sympathy with our common humanity. He also aimed to bring about certain social reforms, but his method was that of the kindly humorist. The satirist aims to cause pain as a remedial measure. But, above all, Haliburton had anticipated Dickens both in time and in method. For The Clockmaker, with Sam Slick as the central comic character, was published serially in The Novascotian in 1835, or a year before the publication of the first of The Pickwick Papers, and was in method a combination of humor and satire, with a distinct political and social thesis, namely, to promote a zollverein of the Anglo-Saxon 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. In short, Haliburton’s works in satiric humor were not conceived and written primarily as literature, but as social and political propaganda. The humor in them—the ‘soft sawder’—was introduced to relieve the pain of the satiric truth just as the comic episodes in Shakespeare’s tragedies relieve the emotional poignancy of the tragic strain.

To take this point of view about the aim and significance of Haliburton as a satiric humorist is the first step towards a proper approach to his humorous writings, and the only way rightly to estimate his importance in Canadian, American, English, and world literature. It is a simple matter to trace the origin of his genius and to show his place and influences on Canadian, American, and English Literature.

Briefly, Haliburton’s satiric mood or temper was a recrudescence of the revolutionary Loyalist mood or temper. He also inherited the Loyalist love of British connection and an antipathy to republican institutions and civilization, as in the United States. Further, in his time the realistic revolt against the historical romance in fiction was under way. Born with an inherited satiric temper, and finding to hand a great problem, namely, the effecting of the Anglo-Saxon dream of Imperialistic unity amongst the peoples of British origin, Haliburton decided to be a satiric realist, and to have his satiric writings reach and move the hearts of his compatriots in the Maritime Provinces and Canada and of the people of the United States and in the United Kingdom. But as a satirist he saw all the facts with a humorous appreciation, and in presenting the facts of life, the psychology of society, the idiosyncrasies of peoples, political institutions and culture and civilization, as he saw them, Haliburton decided to write with realism and truth but without rancor.

He was the protégé of Joseph Howe; and when Howe founded ‘The Club,’ a coterie of Nova Scotia wits, Haliburton contributed his share of the skits in political and personal satire for which ‘The Club’ was famous. These skits were derivative in manner. But in 1835 Haliburton invented a method of his own and definitively set out on his career as a systematic humorist, presenting his thoughts, ‘as the sunny side of common sense,’ in a series of sketches entitled The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick of Slickville. These sketches were published in Joseph Howe’s newspaper The Novascotian (1835-36). There were twenty-three of them. These were augmented to thirty-three, and were published in book form by Joseph Howe, at Halifax, in 1837, and by Richard Bentley, at London, in the same year. Bentley published a second Series in 1838, and a third Series in 1840. Reprints appeared in the United States, and translations in France and Germany.

His reputation as a satiric humorist having been made by The Clockmaker, Haliburton became a thorough systematic creative humorist, publishing The Letter-Bag of the Great Western (1840), The Attaché; or Sam Slick in England (1843-44), The Old Judge; or Life in a Colony (1849), Sam Slick’s Wise Saws and Modern Instances (1853), Nature and Human Nature (1855), and The Season Ticket (1860). Besides these works in creative satire and humor, Haliburton applied himself to editing humorous works, and published Traits of American Humor by Native Authors (1852), and a sequel, The Americans at Home (1854). All his creative works and his compilations of humor were published on both sides of the Atlantic and ran into innumerable editions and pirated reprints, and The Clockmaker and some others were translated into French and German. So that, on the face of original production, Haliburton appears as the first and foremost systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

The core of all his works in creative humor is some problem of the larger politics—British Connection, Imperial Federation, Free Trade, the Independence of the British North American Colonies, their Annexation with the United States, Anglo-Saxon Alliance or Union, Responsible Government in the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas, Confederation of the Provinces, Voting by Ballot, Universal Suffrage. For instance, in The Clockmaker (second series) he presented the desirability of British connection, but in Nature and Human Nature declared for the independence of the British North American Colonies as against their annexation with the United States, because he fancied independence would be better for them and the motherland. In The Clockmaker (second series) he advocated Imperial Federation in the form of a union or alliance of the Anglo-Saxon peoples for reciprocal security and economic development. But in the same work and in The Attaché he opposed Responsible Government for the Colonies out of a fear of mobocracy, a fear that had been engendered in his heart by the Rebellion of 1837. An inherited prejudice against republican institutions and a dread of mobocracy caused him to oppose Confederation of the Provinces and Universal Suffrage. In every one of his works of humor or satire we find some special thesis, but chiefly satiric arguments for the union or unity of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to which he bends all his power of humor, satire, ridicule, and epigram.

Hitherto Haliburton’s originality and greatness have been based on two claims. He created one of the perduring or unique comic characters of humorous literature; and he is regarded as the ‘father’ of American humor. Neither of these distinctions constitutes his real originality and greatness as a satiric humorist and man of letters. He is really great on account of his distinct and definable influences on three literatures.

Beginning with Canadian Literature, we remark that Haliburton’s influence in Canada is popularly conceived, not as literary, but as political. It is true that Haliburton’s themes or theses were highly social and political. It is also true that, so far as his humor is concerned, he was unappreciated and even unread in Canada. It is true, still further, that he has had no successors as a humorist in Canada (for Stephen Leacock is not a successor, neither being a native son nor following the method of Haliburton). Nevertheless, Haliburton achieved two important results for Canadian Literature. Along with Joseph Howe, Haliburton ushered in the Epoch of the New or Independent Prose Literature of Canada. Again: he not only produced an original prose literature but also wrote it with such originality and novelty of matter and style that Haliburton’s prose, that is, Canadian prose, has a significant and permanent place in English and World Literature.

It may sound strange or startling to learn that Haliburton’s work in satiric humor and comic characterization actually displaced in England the vogue of such popular American prose writers as Irving and Cooper. The fact is important, but the reason is more important. Between 1820 and 1840 Irving, with The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall, and Cooper, with The Spy, The Pioneers, and his Leatherstocking Tales, won popular appreciation in England. By 1840 two Canadian authors, John Richardson, with his historical romance Wacousta, and Thomas Chandler Haliburton, with The Clockmaker series, also won popular appreciation. But Haliburton’s work was appreciated for an altogether different reason from that which caused the vogue of Irving, Cooper, and Richardson. The English were caught by the new matter in the work of Irving, Cooper and Richardson, but they felt that it was all in an old manner, the manner respectively of Goldsmith and Sir Walter Scott. They were reading, they felt, English Literature, done by two Americans and one Canadian. Save in mere matter and ‘properties’ there was nothing in the work of Irving, Cooper, and Richardson that might not have been done by a visiting Englishman who had gone to the United States or to the Canadas for new material and local color. It was English, not strictly original American, literature. And so it had a mere vogue.

When, however, the English people read Haliburton’s satiric comedy and comic characterization, they came, for the first time, upon an absolute or sheer literary novelty—literature that was not English, not English-American, not English-Canadian, but an original American species, absolutely new and unique. Here in Haliburton’s work was literature in the English language, but not English in matter, manner, or tone. Here were such novel satiric humor, such arresting and vitalized comic characterization, and such a strange medley of practical wisdom in moral maxims and epigrams, and all expressed in a unique lingo, that the like of it never was before in any literature which had come even from America.

At once a change took place in the minds of the English people in England. Hitherto America had looked across to England for fresh literature, and had based its own literature on English models. But when Haliburton produced a wholly original American literature, England looked, for the first time in history, across to America both for fresh and original literature, and for models which the English writers might follow. At least in one instance English humoristic literature actually modelled itself on Haliburton. There is no argument possible in the matter. For the fact is that Dickens did read The Clockmaker, which appeared serially a year earlier than Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and that Sam Weller is an English version of Haliburton’s Sam Slick (not conversely).

It is a literary phenomenon by itself that Haliburton’s work enjoyed an ‘unprecedented popularity’ in England but also displaced in popularity the work of Irving, Cooper and Richardson. The popularity of Haliburton’s work was not a mere vogue. It remains to this day. His Sam Slick has been admitted to the gallery of the chief comic characters, not only in English, but also in world, literature—to a place beside Sterne’s Uncle Toby, Dickens’ Pickwick and Micawber, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Daudet’s Tartarin, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It is also a fact that Haliburton’s epigrams and moral maxims have become part of the English colloquial speech and at least English popular literature.

Most remarkable were the influences of Haliburton and his works on American Literature. Rightly to appreciate these influences, it is necessary to understand what Haliburton was not. He was not, as has been alleged, ‘the father (or founder) of American humor.’ He was not ‘the creator of the American type in literature.’ He was not ‘the first American in literature.’ His Sam Slick is not ‘the typical American.’ These alleged distinctions are half-truths and are based on ambiguities.

There is considerable truth and point in calling Haliburton ‘the Apostle of American Humor.’ As to progenitorship, the fact is that Benjamin Franklin is the ‘father’ of indigenous American humor. In 1765 Franklin sent to a London newspaper what is the first example of that species of satiric burlesque, that preposterous or extravagant nonsense, said with a grave air of veracity, which is accepted as the characteristic matter and manner of American humor. Franklin was versatile in genius and so variously occupied in his long career that hardly can he be regarded as systematic in any calling. Yet he was as systematic as a humorist and satirist as he was in anything else. He began his literary career as a humorist when, in 1722, he contributed pseudonymously to The New England Courant the series of imitative Addisonian skits known as the ‘Silence Dogood Papers.’ Seven years later, he continued his humor in The Pennsylvania Gazette with the sprightly letters of ‘Busybody,’ ‘Anthony Afterwit,’ ‘Alice Addertongue,’ and ‘Bob Brief,’ and with satiric burlesques in A Meditation on a Quart Mug, A Witch Trial at Mount Holly, and other squibs. Quite systematic was the humor of Franklin’s Prefaces to Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-1758) and of some of the aphoristic wit and wisdom in the Almanacks when the epigrams or maxims were Franklin’s own invention, as, for instance, ‘Never take a wife till you have a house (and a fire) to put her in.’ Though most of the proverbial wisdom in Poor Richard was borrowed, the form and wit—the ‘Yankee smartness’—of it were Franklin’s creation, and he became the ‘father’ of all those New World humorists who wrote aphoristic wit and wisdom, down to Haliburton and from Haliburton down to Westcott (‘David Harum’). Masterpieces in mordant satire worthy of Dean Swift are Franklin’s Of the Meanes of disposing the Enemies of Peace (1760), An Edict by the King of Prussia (1773), Rules by which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One (1773), Speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim (an ironical justification for the enslaving of the Christians by Mohammedan Africans, 1790). Also to be mentioned are Franklin’s bagatelles (1778-80), written during his stay at Passy, France, of which the most famous are The Ephemera, The Story of the Whistle, The Morals of Chess, and The Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout.

The foregoing enumeration of Franklin’s humorous and satiric writings show that if collected in one or more volumes they would bulk large and prove that he was very considerable a systematic humorist. But only the Letter of 1765 to the London Press and the four masterpieces of irony or satiric burlesque written in 1760, 1773 and 1790 are in the manner which is recognized as the characteristic American humor—a commingling of extravagant nonsense and fact, uttered with such an air of veracity as to make the passage from fact to nonsense and conversely imperceptible and the detecting of it, on first reading, impossible. On the side of aphoristic wit and wisdom, the work of Franklin is indigenous, and, though in substance frequently derived, is original in form and style. So that while we must regard Franklin as the real ‘father’ of American humor, we must also see wherein Haliburton is even more original than Franklin and had an even more important a constructive influence on American humor than had Franklin.

What was meant by Artemus Ward and others who distinguished Haliburton as ‘the ‘father’ (or ‘founder’) of American humor,’ as the ‘creator of the American type in literature,’ as ‘the first American in literature,’ and Haliburton’s Sam Slick as ‘the typical American,’ was a three-fold distinction which these formulae do not truly express. First, Haliburton ‘naturalized’ in America a method of humor in dialect, so that it became the method of certain of his successors (Ward, Billings, Westcott, Dunne) and a method of exaggeration or humorous mendacity and comic characterization, so that it became the method of certain other successors (notably Mark Twain). Secondly, Haliburton ‘popularized’ his method of humor in dialect and his comic characterization, especially Sam Slick, so that they became accepted in England and Europe as peculiarly American—the one as the indigenously original American method of humor, and the other as the typical New Englander, whom the English cartoonists transmuted in caricature into ‘Uncle Sam,’ that is, into the embodiment of some typical American characteristics. Thirdly, though American (United States and British North America or Canadian) authors, Irving, Cooper, Richardson, who were contemporaries of Haliburton, had a vogue in England, Haliburton had produced satiric humor and comic characterization which were not only un-English in method and conception, but also so original as to be absolutely unlike any other humor and humorous characterization in the world. If any literature was, in substance and manner, strictly American, it was Haliburton’s humorous writings.

In short, the ‘naturalization’ of a method of humor in dialect—in America, and the ‘popularization’ of the chief phases of what became accepted throughout the world as American, though really New England, humor of thought, speech, and character—that is what is really meant by saying that Haliburton is the ‘father’ of American humor, and is also his great achievement so far as he constructively influenced American (United States) Literature. But it is not his greatest distinction from the point of view of creative originality.

His prime originality lay neither in his dialect nor in the creation of his chief character, Sam Slick, but in something which is ultimate and unique in satiric genius, and which entitles him to a place beside Swift as a subtle creator of mordant satire. As regards the dialect and the conversational method of narrative of his chief character Sam Slick, the variations in morphology and phonetics, and the piquancy and liveliness of it all convince one that Haliburton independently developed the dialect or lingo of his humorous characters. But there are facts which prove that he developed it on a groundwork of a real New England diction. When we compare, on the one side, the ‘Down East’ dialect of Seba Smith’s Letters of Major Downing in the Portland Courier (1833-34), which were imitated by Charles Augustus Davis in the New York Daily Advertiser (1835), and on the other side, the New England diction in Lowell’s Biglow Papers (Boston Courier 1846-48; Atlantic Monthly 1862-67), with the diction which Haliburton puts into the mouth of Sam Slick, we find that Sam Slick’s dialect is more ‘outlandish’ in morphological and phonetic corruption than the ‘Down East’ diction in Smith’s and Davis’ Letters, but nearer to the New England dialect in Lowell’s Biglow Papers. Lowell, who was a scholar and linguist, and whose own appreciation of the New England diction is embodied in the learned disquisitions of Rev. J. Wilbur on dialectical morphology, certainly would not burlesque and degrade the speech of his fellow countrymen. The dialect of Lowell’s Biglow Papers must be accepted as a real, indigenous New England dialect. Haliburton had read Smith’s Letters, which had circulated throughout the Maritime Provinces, and a New England of ‘Down East’ dialect was familiar in Nova Scotia. Haliburton’s diction, then, in faithfulness to the real New England diction, falls midway between the diction in Lowell’s Biglow Papers and the first journalistic forms of that diction as represented in the Letters of Smith and Davis. Haliburton’s is his conception of that diction and his independent development of it into a novel humorous dialect.

As to the originality of Haliburton’s chief character, Sam Slick, the truth is that the humorist created, on a realistic basis, a transcript of the ‘composite’ order, the main outline being derived from a real peddler-clockmaker, named Seth, familiar in Nova Scotia, and from Haliburton’s own coachman, Lennie Geldert, and a friend Judge Peleg Wiswell, who were ‘smart’ in wit and who were first-rate raconteurs. Haliburton also had as material the stage peddler who had 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 comic function as the stage Irishman of the late Victorian age. Neither Sam Slick himself nor his conversational dialect were absolute inventions of Haliburton, but were based on a real and living dialect and character. He employed his creative faculties in giving the one a humorous piquancy and liveliness and the other the individuality and reality of a real person; so that Sam Slick remains as one of the immortal characters of fiction.

But the slightest reflection reveals the fact that 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.

What is Sam Slick? He is a disreputable plebeian creature—slangy, coarse, conceited, boastful, mendacious, irreverent, yet shrewd, wise, practical, acute in perception of social and political ideals, courageous, self-reliant, quick-witted, critical of standards and values, frank in speech, and direct in action. What does he represent? Haliburton’s conception of typical Americanism. What was he designed to achieve? Haliburton aimed to present in the character, sayings, and doings of Sam Slick, the reductio ad absurdum of republican culture, institutions and civilization in America.

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.

Did Haliburton really mis-represent? Did he really present only sectional and class culture and civilization in America? Was he justified in choosing an obscure, socially disreputable creature from a section of American society to be the critic of American institutions and civilization? Why did he not choose someone socially higher—an American gentleman—to represent typical Americanism? The truth is Haliburton actually did represent all phases of American culture and civilization. There is the interlocutor in The Clockmaker—the Squire, Rev. Mr. Hopewell, and Mr. Everett, who was a real person, a president of Harvard and a diplomat, and there are pictures of the finer social and intellectual life of Nova Scotia and the United States. Felton and Curtis missed all this. How did they happen to miss it? Because Haliburton’s lesser characters were just bits of genre humor, whereas Sam Slick was such an outstandingly clear and vivid—unique—creation in comic characterization that Felton and Curtis saw only Sam Slick and immediately conceived him as a mis-representation of the whole of American culture and civilization. That they did so is a tribute to the genius of Haliburton. For it contains the answer as to what is Haliburton’s real originality as a creative humorist. The answer is this: The fact that 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, is an absolutely original achievement in creative satire and comic characterisation. 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.

Finally: Haliburton influenced not only American humorous literature but also American fine literature. We note, first, the constructive influence of his editorial labors in compiling and distributing in the United States and other countries the best American humorous fiction, as in his Traits of American Humor, and The Americans at Home. Too much has been said of his influence on Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and other American humorists writing in dialect in prose. But his influence on American humor in dialect in verse has hardly, if at all, been rightly or fully appreciated. Lowell came under the influence of Haliburton in writing his humorous verse. In his Biglow Papers Lowell not only imitated, but also actually borrowed, ludicrous conceits and situations from The Clockmaker series. This fact is important, because in the last analysis Haliburton produced his humorous effects more by grotesque conceits and ludicrous situations than by dialect.

Haliburton had a potent influence also on American journalism of his time. The newspapers reprinted ‘Yankee Stories’ and ‘Yankee Yarns’ and ‘Letters,’ which were the titles of pirated editions of Haliburton’s The Americans at Home, and American newspaper staff humorists wrote imitations and burlesques in the manner of Sam Slick. This in turn influenced other American humorists, and they produced imitations of Sam Slick, commercializing them as ‘By the Author of Sam Slick,’ knowing that thus they guaranteed sure and large sales.

It may be granted that Haliburton’s influence on American romantic poetry was only accidental and pragmatic. But the fact is that Longfellow was actually inspired to versify the ‘story’ of the Acadian maiden Evangeline, not when he heard a mere incident of it from Hawthorne, or when he heard it more in detail from his own pastor, who got it from an aunt of Haliburton, but when he read in Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1829) the full pathetic tale of the Expulsion of the Acadians. More important is the fact that Francis Parkman derived from his reading of Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia his own romantic method of writing history. So that, as far as America is concerned, Haliburton may be called the ‘father’ of the romantic method of writing history.

Versatility of powers or genius and variety of literary creation distinguish Haliburton as a man of letters. He was a first-rate satirist or epigrammatist, narrative and descriptive writer, anecdotist or raconteur, character-delineator, nature-painter, and, in one respect, he was a prose stylist of first rank. Such versatility is unusual and even exceptional, and seemingly marks Haliburton as a specially gifted writer. But Haliburton’s versatility also exhibits certain peculiarities. Oddly, though he is saliently the humorist or satirist or aphorist or story-teller or descriptive writer or nature-painter or character-limner in one or another of his works, he is, almost without exception, all these in any work. More oddly, while a certain gift or power predominates in a given work, all his works, taken successively, disclose no development of powers either in invention or in literary mechanics. There are differences in each successive work, but only of sheer variety in literary substance, not of greater and still greater advance in novel conception and artistic handling of his matter. Summarily: Haliburton’s gifts in humorous story-telling and aphoristic wit and wisdom are salient in the first and second series of The Clockmaker, Wise Saws, Nature and Human Nature, and The Season Ticket. His gifts in narration and description are salient in The Clockmaker, The Attaché, and The Old Judge. His gifts in character-portraiture and naturalistic description are salient in The Old Judge. But if any work contains all Haliburton’s best qualities—ingenious and unfailing invention, novel and colorful imagination, rare perception of the humorous and ludicrous, acute insight into human nature, and extraordinary powers of vivid narration and realistic description—that work is The Old Judge; or, Life in a Colony.

As a satirist Haliburton employed two forms—realistic satire and humorous exaggeration or mendacity (‘tall stories’ Haliburton called the latter). A prime example of his realistic satire is his description of a fashionable wedding in London; another of a ‘rube’ or bucolic wedding in Slickville, both in The Attaché. In this sort of ‘take-off’ Haliburton has never been surpassed by modern journalistic humorists. A first-rate example of Haliburton’s gifts in humorous mendacity or burlesque is his ‘tall story’ of the sale of his horse Mandarin as related in Nature and Human Nature. This is the prototype of Westcott’s horse deal burlesques in his David Harum. More in the manner made familiar by Mark Twain is the humorous mendacity of Haliburton’s tales of ‘The Gouging School’ and ‘The Black Stole,’ both in The Attaché. There are anticipations a-plenty of the Mark Twain manner of ironic exaggeration and mordant satire in the second series of The Clockmaker, The Old Judge, and The Season Ticket.

As a Humorist Haliburton obtained his effects—and won his popularity with all classes—by character typification, story-telling, aphorisms, epigrams, and homely moral maxims, jests, waggish conceits, jocular phrases, and puns, including double entendres. He employed two methods of character typification; one being humorous definition; the other, humorous classification. Almost all Haliburton’s characters have names that are essentially what we mean by nick-names, to indicate distinctive mental or moral qualities of the individuals. It is by this method, rather than by character-drawing, that Haliburton succeeded in individualizing each character. It is the method of individualization by suggestion. The name Sam Slick, for instance, at once conveys the type of individual or character, namely, the kind of person who ‘lives by his wits,’ who gains profit by subtle or sharp practice. Such a person is ‘slick,’ an epithet derived by a vulgar pronounciation of the adjective ‘sleek.’ Other instances are The Honourable Lucifer Wolfe, The Honourable Alden Gobble, General Conrad Corncob, Captain Ebeneezer Fathom, Mr. Pettifog the Justice, Nabb the police constable, Deacon Flint, Rev. Joshua Hopewell, Dr. Query, and Old Blowhard. The moral connotations of these nick-names are obvious, but Haliburton himself in the proper place always names the character and adds a summary of moral qualities to show the aptness of the name and its connotation. The Honourable Alden Gobble is satirically or humorously thus named because he was ‘dyspeptic and suffered great oneasiness arter [and from] eatin’.’ A signal example of Haliburton’s method of typification by humorous classification is found in The Clockmaker, (third series, chapter 13). There he classifies patriots into ‘rebel patriots, mahogany patriots, spooney patriots, place patriots, and raal genuine patriots.’

General popular character types which are familiar in American humor indubitably had their prototypes in Haliburton’s characters. Sam Slick, as a horse trader, is the prototype of David Harum; and, as an aphorist and practical philosopher, is the prototype of Mr. Dooley. Mrs. Figg in Haliburton’s Letter-Bag is the prototype of Shillaber’s Mrs. Partington. In the same work Haliburton has an ‘enfant terrible’ who is the prototype of Peck’s ‘Bad Boy’ and of later examples of ‘awful children,’ down to Tarkington’s Penrod.

Haliburton was an egregious punster, and he even indulged in double entendres which were coarse and sometimes obscene, but which may be excused on account of their humorous point or satiric wit. As an anecdotist, ‘spinner of yarns,’ ‘tall stories,’ ‘stretchers,’ with a decided tendency to employ the coarse and irreverent, Haliburton anticipated similar traits in Mark Twain, as in Twain’s Roughing It and Innocents Abroad. Haliburton’s occasional coarseness and irreverence are to be explained by his hatred of sham and insincerity, of conventionalized prudery, of concealed indecency of thought, of the real evil caused by men and women who are outwardly ‘whited sepulchres.’ It must, however, be admitted that, traceable to his Border Scots ancestry, there was in him a love of plebeian or coarse fun for its own sake. But it must also be said that his coarseness of wit was never based on impurity of heart, and that he had the highest respect for the moral beauty and dignity of womanhood. He did remark playfully the engaging vanities and foibles of women, but for pure love and motherhood and all the sweet charities of woman he had the finest and tenderest respect. Unsurpassed in world literature is Haliburton’s tender and holy sublimation of woman’s spiritual winsomeness and dignity, as in this immortal metaphor:—

A woman has two smiles which an angel might envy; the smile that accepts a lover before the words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first-born baby and assures him of a mother’s love.

As to the original humor of Haliburton’s ingenious metaphors, similes, outlandish coinage of expressive word morphology (such as ‘absquotulate,’ ‘spiflicate,’ ‘conflustigation,’ ‘conniption fit,’ reechoed in Artemus Ward and Josh Billings), and of his wealth of aphoristic wit and wisdom, so much are they in the permanent warp and woof of the popular literature of humor and of common speech that they need not here be specially remarked and illustrated.

But there is one matter in which Haliburton has not been properly appreciated, and which demands fresh treatment. He has been charged with a lack of prose style. The truth is that Haliburton not only wrote with a positive Theory of Style in mind, but also anticipated Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer by actually publishing his theory or philosophy of prose style. Those who criticized Haliburton as a stylist did so without knowing that he had actually applied a definite theory of style to his structure and color. From that point of view, the critics of Haliburton as a stylist were irrelevant. But they also missed or ignored the fact that he was, if infrequently, a master of descriptive prose style.

Haliburton formulates his theory of prose style in two works—in The Attaché, and in Wise Saws (chapter 19). The first work contains his ‘Apologia’ for his utilitarian style; the second briefly explains the psychology of his style. The ‘Apologia’ justifies, as Matthew Arnold would have justified, a certain promiscuity and rise and fall in his style; the second work anticipates Spencer’s philosophy of the conservation of mental energies as applied to particular styles. Haliburton himself distinguishes between his conversational, colloquial, humoristic—his consciously utilitarian—style, and his artificial or literary—his aesthetic—style as in his descriptive prose.

In The Attaché he points out, in what we have called his ‘Apologia,’ that his aims, which were utilitarian, did not call for either architectonic skill or verbal artistry, but that his colloquial, loose, prolix, promiscuous, repetitious, diffuse, and digressive style in The Clockmaker and The Attaché was inevitable and was consciously adopted as best fitted to the heterogeneous themes or matter of these works. ‘Prolixity,’ he adds, ‘was unavoidable from another cause. In order to attain my [practical] objects, I found it expedient so to intermingle humor with the several topics as to render subjects attractive that in themselves are generally considered too deep and dry for general reading.’

In particular, Haliburton justifies his sentential structure on psychological grounds. In Wise Saws he says that he purposely designed the structure and rhythms of his sentences so that their length and abrupt translations would spur the mind to attention, and that he employed a conversational style and dialogue to create interest and keep the attention alive. He wished his works, since they had a utilitarian end, to be read by all classes. He resolved to adapt the style of his works to assuring their popularity—‘in the parlor and the kitchen.’ His themes were discursive and therefore he resolved that the stylistic treatment should be discursive. So Haliburton consciously employed a style which, by novelty of dress, by being written in natural language and illustrated with droll humor, and which by colloquial sentential structure would, like ‘oral chat,’ sustain interest or excite attention, and inevitably be read in the parlor and the kitchen. ‘Why is it,’ asks Sam Slick in the Wise Saws, ‘if you read a book to a man you set him asleep? Just because it is a book and the language ain’t common. Why is it if you talk to him he will sit up all night with you? Just because it’s talk, the language of natur’.’

Haliburton’s humoristic or utilitarian prose style is justified, as he himself justified it, by its successful adaption of means to end. In his ‘Apologia’ he noted the ‘unprecedented circulation’ of his works on ‘both sides of the Atlantic.’ He wrote The Clockmaker in a people’s style for people’s ends, and the style, in his own view, admirably succeeded. We must therefore hold that academic criticism which scores Haliburton’s humoristic style on the ground that it is loose, prolix, repetitious, digressive, vulgar, colloquial, that it is not ‘fine style,’ commits the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. In the writing of humoristic, utilitarian, conversational style, precisely adapted to its end, Haliburton was a master. But he was also, at least on occasion or whenever he essayed fine style, as in his descriptive prose, especially of Nature, an artist of first rank, worthy of a place beside Ruskin, Stevenson, and Hardy.

As regards Haliburton’s aesthetic style we may instance as example of graphic realism in ‘local color’ his description of the dress and characteristics of an Acadian people (Nature and Human Nature) and of a Low German people (The Old Judge). An example of his fine artistry in painting social life is his idyllic picture of the home of Captain Collingwood’s sister, Aunt Thankful (Wise Saws). As a picture of the sweet and gracious social life in old colonial days, it is a masterpiece. But for sheer pathos of ‘thoughts that lie too deep for tears,’ Haliburton’s description of the Duke of Kent’s Lodge, against a background of Nature (The Clockmaker, third series), is worthy of Ruskin or Hardy.

But Haliburton’s forte in descriptive prose was naturalistic impressionism. In the technique of nature-painting Haliburton employed the whole palette of pigmentation, but especially the color-tones of carmines, yellows, greens, citrons, indigos, with white and black. His description of a Silver Thaw in February in Nova Scotia (The Old Judge) is unsurpassed in literature, and, if the authorship were unknown, might be mistaken for a bit of aesthetic prose by Ruskin:—

This morning I accompanied the Judge and Miss Sandford in their sleigh on an excursion into the country. The scene, though rather painful to the eyes, was indescribably brilliant and beautiful. There had been, during last night and part of yesterday, a slight thaw, accompanied by a cold fine rain that froze, the moment it fell, into ice of the purest crystal. Every deciduous tree was covered with this glittering coating and looked in the distance like an enormous though graceful bunch of feathers; while, on nearer approach, it resembled, with its limbs now bending under the heavy weight of the transparent incrustation, a dazzling chandelier. The open fields, covered with a rough but hardened surface of snow, glistened in the sun as if thickly strewed with the largest diamonds; and every rail of the wooden fences in this general profusion of ornaments was decorated with a delicate fringe of pendent ice that radiated like burnished silver. The heavy and sombre spruce, loaded with snow, rejoiced in a green old age. Having its massy shape relieved by strong and numerous lights, it gained in grace, what it lost in strength, and stood erect among its drooping neighbors, venerable but vigorous, the hoary forefather of the wood. The tall and slender poplar and white birch . . . bent their heads gracefully to the ground under the unusual burden, and formed fanciful arches which the frost encircled with numerous wreaths of pearls. . . . The boles of the different trees and their limbs appeared through the transparent ice; and the rays of the sun, as they fell on them, invested them with all the hues of the prism. . . .

In that passage, besides realistic impressionism or color-writing, we find first rate style in composition—artistic sentential structure and rhythmical periods, along with pure and dignified diction. In all Haliburton’s works we can find passages which show his firm grip on the technique of prose style, and a special power of vivifying his description and color-impressionism with psychological suggestion that enhances the effect on the sensibilities and imagination. In all literature the allurement of sylvan summer in Nova Scotia or Canada is not more winningly or colorfully presented than in Haliburton’s impressionistic idyll ‘A Day on the Lake’ (Nature and Human Nature). In psychological suggestion the acme has been attained by Haliburton in his descriptive sketches, ‘A Hot Day’ (Wise Saws) and ‘Inky Dell’ (The Old Judge).

Whoever charges that Haliburton lacks style errs either by irrelevancy or by making the wrong accusation. It is not style that Haliburton lacks; for he has two styles, each of which is right in the right place—a conversational style for conveying unpopular practical ideas in a popular way, and an aesthetic style for conveying ideas which are delightful in themselves as beautiful pictures of Social Life and of Nature. What Haliburton really lacked was architectonic skill—the power of designing artistic structural unity and plot. This is best illustrated by his character-delineation. His major characters have not character-unity but characteristics or character-promiscuity. Sam Slick, for instance, is never one character as Micawber or Swiveller in Dickens’ gallery is one character, unmistakably and always. Sam Slick is a ‘mass of contradictions.’ Neither is the Rev. Joshua Hopewell a unity—speaking and acting, that is, consistently with one character. Yet they have a unity. How do they get it? It is not a moral but the functional unity of Spokesmen of Haliburton’s ideas. The reason that Slick and Hopewell have so much promiscuity of character is that Haliburton, as he pleased and without any regard to consistency, made Slick and Hopewell and any other of his major dramatis personae the Spokesmen of his various thoughts or ideas. He ‘picked on’ Slick for the mouthpiece of this idea, and Hopewell for the mouthpiece of another idea, without ever asking if the speech he put into the mouth of Slick was consistent with Slick’s mental and moral character, or if the speech he put into the mouth of Hopewell was consistent with Hopewell’s intellectual and moral character. The result is that Slick, as we read Haliburton, has ideas, makes speeches, and relates experiences that are impossible in one of his culture and knowledge; and so with Hopewell and others. In short, Haliburton’s major characters are puppets, marionettes. Back of them is the Showman, Haliburton; and the speeches we hear are not theirs but ‘their master’s voice.’

Oddly, Haliburton himself maintained in The Old Judge that this was not a defect in character-delineation or in artistry but was made necessary by his practical aim and the content of his thought. The promiscuous structure of his themes and composition or style and the promiscuousness, or lack of unity, in his characters correspond to the content and movement of his thought—which was swarming with ideas, full of details of all sorts, loose, and diffuse, bent on expressing at all hazards his ideas and opinions on matters of practical import, and not on creating fine literature. The purpose of his writings, he declared, was to inform and to amuse while informing. His humor was designed and manufactured as the sugar-coating of his social and political ideas. Consequently, the only unity his characters have is the thread that runs through his thought; their speeches, jests, anecdotes, aphorisms, and moral maxims are but his facts, ideas, opinions, strung on the various dramatis personae. Thus inevitably, so Haliburton submitted, his works and their style appear prolix, repetitious, diffuse, digressive, and lack artistic unity. Still they each have their own unity of essential thought; his characters have unity of function; his style, unity of propriety—and the whole, unity of purpose, meaning, and achievement.

Haliburton consciously conceived a noble ideal. As a man of letters he aimed to bring about an alliance or zollverein of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. To do this he employed an original method of satiric humor and comic characterization. He was unmistakably a great satirist, and the first and foremost systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This is his chief glory. But while he thus was the first native-born writer to bring Canadian literature into a high and permanent place in English and world literature, he also was coadjutor with Howe in inaugurating the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature of Canada. Considered from the sides of versatility of invention, variety of production in literary species, and of mastery of style, Thomas Chandler Haliburton remains to this day the Greatest Prose Writer of Canada. Yet, at the same time, his achievements in creative satiric comedy and comic characterization stamp his genius and work as not for a single country or a specific age, but for all time and the world.

CHAPTER V

Romance and Poetry

THE NATIVISTIC LITERATURE OF CANADA—THE HISTORICAL ROMANCERS—JOHN RICHARDSON—ROSANNA MULLINS—AND OTHERS. THE POETS—GOLDSMITH—SANGSTER—MAIR.

Nativistic romantic fiction in Canada begins with the historical novels of Major John Richardson. In 1832 he published his Wacousta; or, The Prophecy; and in 1840 its sequel, The Canadian Brothers; or, The Prophecy Fulfilled. These are authentic novels of the romantic type, having, as they do, respectably constructed plots, and being filled with the romance of the passion of love, heightened with thrilling adventure and incident, and colored with pictures of aboriginal character and life against a background of Nature in the wild.

Richardson was born near Niagara Falls, in 1796 (in the same year as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and seven years after James Fenimore Cooper). He spent his childhood and early adolescent days, till he was sixteen years of age, that is, up to the outbreak of the War of 1812, in the vicinity of the Falls and in Detroit. Then, although but a mere lad, he enlisted in Brock’s army. Up to that time young Richardson, during his most impressionable and receptive years, was entertained by his grandparents and parents with tales of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit, and with stories of the thrilling, romantic, and tragic events in the history of the Niagara and Detroit districts—events which were surely amongst the most enthralling and stirring in the vividly romantic history of Canada and the United States. Those early days of Richardson’s were thus replete with rare and unique formative influences. They created in him the love of romance, of the heroic past of his own country, and, later, when he came to write, furnished him with the inspiration and the material for authentic Canadian historical novels or romances.

Two other formative influences, besides those exercised over his heart and imagination by his grandparents and parents, determined Richardson’s genius, inspiration, and creative method. In the war of 1812 he had fought side by side with the noble Indian warrior Tecumseh. Further: Richardson, on his own confession, had, as he put it, ‘absolutely devoured three times’ Cooper’s Indian romance, The Last of the Mohicans. Some critics, therefore, hold that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper; that, first, Richardson studied the mind, and character, and ways of Indians at second-hand in the pages of Cooper’s romance; and that, secondly, Richardson acquired from Cooper’s novel the art or craft, the mechanics, of writing fiction.

For the view that Richardson got his knowledge of Indian mind and character from Cooper, there is no ground in historical fact. The War of 1812, during which Richardson fought side by side with Tecumseh and his Indians, began fourteen years before the publication of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), or long before Richardson could have read a page of Cooper. Richardson’s imagination was romantically formed in his early days when, during his association with Tecumseh, he came to know Indian psychology and character at first-hand. That is indisputable fact. For the view that Richardson acquired the technique of novel-writing from reading Cooper, there is some justification. It is highly probable that by his reading of The Last of the Mohicans, Richardson really got some ‘coaching’ in the mechanics of writing romance. But this concession fails to prove that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper and not a genuinely independent creator. Internal evidences point to independence. For when we compare the diction, the sentential structure, the descriptive epithets and imagery, and the general style of the two romancers, Richardson appears, except as a plot-maker, the superior of Cooper as a craftsman and stylist. It is proof presumptive that on the whole the Canadian romancer developed independently his literary technique. Moreover, in the fine art of character-drawing, Richardson is more veracious and incisive—a better artist—than Cooper. When we compare the American novelist’s Indian characters with those of the Canadian, we discover that Cooper’s are more like ‘studies’ from books than pictures from real life, whereas Richardson’s Indians are very near to the real Indian, very lifelike. The heroic in them is heroic enough; that is to say, human and natural. Richardson’s Indian characters, then, are original creations—absolutely his own. Also his own are his other characters (soldiers, fur-traders, French-Canadians, and the rest of the motley), his plots, all the stirring incidents, and the ‘color’ of the Canadian background from nature.

Of his romances, Wacousta, and The Canadian Brothers, the only aesthetic criticisms worth while making are that not infrequently Richardson forces the dramatic in them into the melodramatic, that he puts into the mouths of his characters utterances which are unnatural or not in keeping with the position and circumstances of the speakers, and that he suits his historical facts to his own purposes. Sometimes, too, construction and development are sacrificed to the ‘theatrical’ in situation, to over-drawing of character, and to ‘color-writing.’ The Canadian Brothers has these defects in a larger degree than Wacousta. Yet, on the whole, Richardson’s two chief romances are aesthetically satisfying, and are clean, strong, wholesome, and engaging—quite deserving of a place in permanent creative literature.

Summarily: since Richardson had his genius romantically formed, and had engaged in the art of fiction, long before he had read Cooper, the only possible influence Cooper could have had on Richardson was to incite him to emulate the American romancer. Emulation incited by a contemporary author does not imply imitation, and has no significance in original literary creation. Taken, then, by and large, John Richardson had first-rate powers of invention, and was a respectable literary craftsman. He was not a great novelist, but he was sufficiently great as a creator of historical romances to produce novels which have been read during almost a century since publication, and are still read, along with Kirby’s and Sir Gilbert Parker’s historical romances of life and love and heroism in far-off days in Canada.

Moreover, if not in Wacousta, at least in The Canadian Brothers Richardson embodied in romantic fiction, as Sangster and Mair did in poetry, the first incipient expression of the spirit of Canadian nationality. Both on account of the superior inherent qualities of Richardson’s romances as creative fiction, and on account of their containing the earliest expression of the embryonic spirit of Canadian nationality, Richardson must be marked as of first-rate importance in the literary history of Canada. He was indeed the creator of the Canadian nativistic historical romance as Haliburton was the creator of the nativistic fiction of satiric comedy and comic characterization. In truth it may be said that if all Canadian imaginative prose were lost, save the romances of Richardson and the satiric comedy of Haliburton, Canada would still have a literature.

The Literary Garland (1838-51) had considerable to do with promoting letters in Canada, especially by encouraging native-born writers. Amongst those who contributed to The Literary Garland was a young girl, Rosanna Eleanor Mullins, a native of Montreal, who, in time, became the wife of J. L. Leprohon, also a native of Quebec. Rosanna Mullins’ first novel, Ida Beresford, was written when the author was but sixteen years of age, and was published serially in The Literary Garland, in 1848. In 1859 she published The Manor House of de Villerai, and in 1864, Antoinette de Mirecourt, and has several other novels to her credit. Her characters, properties, and settings are largely Canadian, and she evidently set out consciously to create a nativistic literature by writing romances which should definitively portray life and manners in the society of the Old French Régime and after the Fall of Quebec and Montreal.

In fact, Rosanna Mullins, much more than Richardson, was inspired by a desire to express the incipient national spirit of Canada. In The Canadian Brothers Richardson disclosed an awakening consciousness in himself of a sense of the spirit of nationality. Miss Mullins, on the other hand, was the first Canadian novelist to have a distinct consciousness of that spirit and to desire to express it for its own sake. It is from this point of view, rather than from the point of view of intrinsic literary merit, that Miss Mullins’ romances have a right to a permanent place in the nativistic literature of Canada. Technically she wrote with a finer pointed stylus than Richardson—with more grace and a finer limning of character, and with a more engaging urbanity. In fact, her style was informed by an Irish and French humaneness that made her work as popular with the French-Canadians (for whom several of her novels had been translated into French) as with the English-Canadian people.

Rosanna Mullins is entitled to another distinction. On the side of nationality she disputes with William Kirby the right of primacy in calling the attention of the later Canadian romancers, especially Sir Gilbert Parker, to the wealth of novelistic material that lay in the life and manners and culture of society under the old French Régime and the Occupation. For Kirby was foreign-born, whereas Rosanna Mullins was native-born. As a matter of fact, however, it was Kirby’s romantic fiction that opened the eyes of later Canadian novelists to the abounding material for novelistic treatment that lay in the social and political history of the Canadian past.

William Kirby was born in England, but came to Canada in 1832, the year which saw the publication of Richardson’s Wacousta. He was then but fifteen years of age and his mind unformed. He lived for the greater part of his life at Niagara. So that from his fifteenth year onwards, having taken a deep and special interest in Canadian history and civilization, Kirby really formed his mind and imagination on Canadian ideals and absorbed the Canadian nationalistic spirit.

His historical romance The Golden Dog, which was published in 1877, or ten years after Confederation, really belongs to the émigré literature of Canada. But because of its constructive and inspirational influences on certain members of the Systematic School of Canadian fictionists, in particular on Sir Gilbert Parker, and because Kirby, though foreign-born, was in spirit essentially a genuine Canadian man of letters, we must regard The Golden Dog as more important in the development of Canadian fiction than are Richardson’s and Rosanna Mullins’ romances, and as worthy of a more significant status in Canadian creative literature.

Summarily: Wacousta and The Golden Dog were the literary progenitors of a series of romances which have a Canadian historical basis and which are Canadian in incident and color. As to his creative and artistic powers, Kirby was a finer artist than Richardson, in plot-making and character-drawing. But, in view of certain faults—a somewhat too theatrical grand manner in character-drawing and a too great indulgence of his notable gifts in color-writing, Kirby and Richardson may be classed as equal sinners.

The Golden Dog is, aesthetically and artistically, that is, in plot-making, character-drawing, and in sustaining interest, superior to Wacousta as an historical romance. Still The Golden Dog is a genuinely great novel—great inherently as an imaginative and artistic creation, and great as the progenitor of the romantic fiction of Parker, Roberts, Campbell, Saunders and other creators of the native and national fiction of Canada.

James De Mille, who was born in New Brunswick, also must be considered as a creator of Canadian Nativistic Literature. De Mille was a prolific writer of mysterious, thrilling, extravagant, and sentimental fiction, showing the influence of such masters in those genres as Poe and Wilkie Collins. De Mille certainly possessed a creative imagination of his own, was considerable of an artist in plot-making and in sustaining interest, and had a distinct sense of dramatic values, which saves such an extravagant tale of adventure as his A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder from developing into the merely grotesque and sensational. But because the settings of his novels and tales are not Canadian, and because they in nowise express anything of the growing sense of the Canadian national spirit, they are not, on that side, significant in the literary history of Canada. They merely increase the quantity of Canadian Nativistic Literature.

If we have regard for the historic process in all spiritual and social achievements, and ask: What was it that, on the psychological or spiritual side, brought about Responsible Government in the various Provinces that came to form the original Dominion of Canada, and What was it that brought about Confederation? we must answer that the people in the British North American Provinces were gradually coming to see themselves, their country, civilization, and institutions from the Canadian point of view, and were gradually expressing, with more and more of conscious fervor and power, in prose and poetry, their growing interest in and love of Canada and the Canadian point of view. The nativistic prose writers expressed the growing spirit of ‘Canada First,’ as in the writings of Haliburton and Howe, and also in the romances of Richardson, Rosanna Mullins, and Kirby. We turn to observe how the spirit of national ideals was gradually expressed in the work of the nativistic poets.

Nativistic poetry in Canada did not take form till the last year of the first quarter of the 19th century. In 1825 Oliver Goldsmith, a great-nephew of the author of The Deserted Village, published his idyll or descriptive poem, The Rising Village. Oliver Goldsmith was born at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1781, and died at Liverpool, England, in 1861, after a long official service in his native country. The Rising Village, in substance or theme, aimed to describe the habitat, sufferings, achievements, and prospects of the Loyalist settlers. As regards its matter, therefore, the poem has the semblance of a genuine Canadian poem. But the form, the metre, rhythm, and rhyme, the diction and imagery, the characters and the settings, and even the ‘properties,’ are in slavish imitation of the elder Goldsmith’s idyll of ‘Sweet Auburn’ in Ireland. That is to say, the Nova Scotian’s Muse is not the Nova Scotian or the Canadian but the British Muse transplanted. Moreover, The Rising Village is to be distinguished from Howe’s Acadia in that Howe, though imitating the form and manner of the elder Goldsmith, expresses his love of his homeland, Nova Scotia, whereas the younger Goldsmith, though a Nova Scotian, fills his poem with an unpatriotic nostalgia. He loves the land where there is some ‘Sweet Auburn,’ not his native land which he describes as ‘bleak and desert.’ The nostalgia is real and pervasive—so much so that he removes to England and there dies. But since it is a poem of the habitat and experiences of the Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia, and since it is correct in versification and is musical and possesses naturalistic truth, The Rising Village may be regarded as a genuine poem of documentary value, and as the beginning of Canadian nativistic poetry.

The strictly Canadian ‘note’ in nativistic poetry is first clearly heard in the verse of Charles Sangster. He was born near Kingston, Ontario, in 1822, and published The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems, in 1856, and Hesperus and Other Poems in 1860. The title poem of the first volume is in the Spenserian stanza as employed by Byron and is also otherwise imitative. But it is distinctly Canadian in its lyrical interludes, in which there is a poetic abandon, to the beauty and magic of Nature in Canada, as, for instance, in Sangster’s Lyric to the Isles, beginning:—

Here the spirit of Beauty keepeth

Jubilee for evermore;

Here the voice of Gladness leapeth,

Echoing from shore to shore

• • • •

Here the spirit of beauty dwelleth

In each palpitating tree,

In each amber wave that welleth

From its home beneath the sea;

In the moss upon the granite,

In each calm, secluded bay,

With the zephyr trains that fan it

With their sweet breath all the day.

On the waters, on the shore,

Beauty dwelleth evermore.

Faulty as Sangster’s first poems are in versification and derivative in diction, we must mark his lyrical interludes, as in the foregoing example, as expressing a new note, the Canadian note in Canadian poetry. It is, however, a nature note, not or hardly the national note—clear and confident and strong. In Sangster’s second volume, Hesperus and Other Poems, published just seven years before Confederation, we hear the Canadian national note loudly vocal and inspiring. We catch it unmistakably in Sangster’s Brock—a really noble hymn to the memory of a national hero, who had ‘saved Canada’ for the Canadians, but a hymn that much more expresses the deeply felt unity of the Canadian people:—

One voice, one people, one in heart

And soul and feeling and desire.

Relight the smouldering martial fire

And sound the mute trumpet! Strike the lyre!

The hero dead cannot expire:

The dead still play their part.

Raise high the monumental stone,

A nation’s fealty is theirs,

And we the rejoicing heirs,

The honored sons of sires whose cares

We take upon us unawares

As freely as our own.

We observe for the first time in Canadian poetry, the consciously felt sentiment of national unity—the first express utterance of the ideal of Canada and its people as a political and spiritual entity apart—in Sangster’s line, ‘A nation’s fealty is theirs.’ Henceforth we shall often hear this distinction—Canada and its people as a nation—in the verse of Canadian poets. Sangster, then, is important as the poet who, in aesthetically and artistically respectable verse, first uttered, consciously and clearly, in Canadian nativistic poetry the people’s sense of a national spirit and destiny.

Again: Sangster, in The Rapid and in The Falls of Chaudière, is the first nativistic poet to express in verse that close or intimate kinship with Nature which we discover much more profoundly expressed in the poetry of Roberts, Lampman, and Carman. Sangster utters this new naturalistic note in these authentically inspired lines from The Falls of Chaudière:

I have laid my cheek to Nature’s, placed my puny hand in hers,

Felt a kindred spirit warming all the life-blood of my face.

I have laid my cheek to Nature’s! We shall observe Lampman lay his cheek to Nature’s with more intimacy, with a more profound sense of spiritual companionship than Sangster. We shall note Carman ‘place his puny hand’ in Nature’s—and have Nature as Mother April ‘make him over’—with a far more intimate giving of self to the ‘heart of the world’ than Sangster. Nevertheless, we must remark Sangster’s priority—in spirit as well as in actual poetic production—in expressing that special and singular kinship with Nature which must be denoted as peculiarly Canadian. Still, in this respect, he is only the first forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott.

A much more lyrically eloquent and influential forerunner is Charles Mair. He was born at Lanark, Ontario, in 1838, and published, in 1868, his Dreamland and Other Poems. Technically, Charles Mair is a much finer craftsman than Sangster; for the latter was self-educated, whereas Mair was a university graduate who was well read in the modern English poets and had studied the forms of verse and the mechanics of versification. What, however, really constitutes Mair as the authentic forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman and Pauline Johnson as nature poets, is not the fact that he was an artistic poet of Nature in Canada, but that his method of treating Nature was a new method with Canadian poets.

Two ‘features’ mark and distinguish the treatment of Nature in the poetry of Charles Mair—impressionistic painting of the face of Nature and the choice of the commonplace or the lowliest creatures in Nature as the subjects of his poetry. The first may have been inspired by Keats, and may be regarded as in the manner of Keats. But the second feature of Mair’s lyrical poetry—his conscious attempt to give distinction to the Commonplace in Nature in Canada;—that is original with Mair himself, and appears for the first time in Canadian poetry in Mair’s work. It is Canadian in and by itself.

Wilfred Campbell has alleged that Mair influenced Roberts and Lampman as Nature poets. All three were influenced by Keats, and certainly Roberts and Lampman knew the poetry of Keats more intimately than that of Mair. At least, Mair in a sense did but anticipate Roberts and Lampman in actually treating Canadian Nature. But Mair’s treatment of the commonplace was objective—being mostly a sort of philosophical or religious reflection on the meaning of the commonplace, whereas Lampman’s treatment of the same kind of subject was psychological. Mair merely looked on and interrogated Nature, Lampman communed with his lowly companions, such as the trees and the frogs, entered into their hearts, and spoke out for them, expressing their moods, feelings, and reflections.

The passage from the objective treatment of Nature to the subjective interpretation of the commonplace in Nature by Canadian poets, has its termini marked by Mair at the one end and Lampman at the other. Mair merely interrogates and wonders what the answer ought to be to his questions. Lampman communes with his lowly and animate companions in Nature, and, by imaginative sympathy, answers for them.

These distinctions between Mair as an impressionistic Nature-painter and an objective interrogator, and Lampman as a subjective interpreter of Nature, are nicely illustrated in Mair’s exquisitely beautiful and sensuously lovely poem, The Fire-Flies:—

I see them glimmer where the waters lag

By winding bays, and to the swallows sing;

And, far away, where stands the forest dim,

Huge-built of old, their tremulous lights are seen.

High overhead they gleam like trailing stars,

Then sink adown, until their emerald sheen

Dies in the darkness like an evening hymn,—

Anon to float again in glorious bars

Of streaming rapture, such as man may hear

When the soul casts its slough of mortal fear.

And now they make rich spangles in the grass,

Gilding the night-dews on the tender blade;

Then hover o’er the meadow-pools, to gaze

At their bright forms shrined in the dreamy glass

Which earth, and air, and bounteous rain have made.

One moment, and the thicket is ablaze

With twinkling lamps, which swing from bough to bough;

Another, and like sylphids they descend

To cheer the brook-side where the bell-flow’rs grow,

Near, and more near, they softly come, until

Their little life is busy at my feet;

They glow around me, and my fancies blend

Capriciously with their delight, and fill

My wakeful bosom with unwonted heat.

One lights upon my hand, and there I clutch

With an alarming finger its quick wing;

Erstwhile so free, it pants, the tender thing!

And dreads its captor and his handsel touch.

Where is thy home? On what strange food dost feed,

Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night?

From what far nectar’d fount, or flow’ry mead,

Glean’st thou, by witching spells, thy sluicy light?

Is not that poem Canadian definitively and through and through—and is it not also authentic poetry, far in advance, aesthetically and artistically, of any poetry previously written in Canada? They who, with master artistry, write delineative poetry, shall hardly achieve, in short and single phrase, so apt and clear and vivid a picture of the Canadian firefly as Mair’s incisively realistic and genuinely poetical line:—

Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night.

That is masterly, and yet how it fails before such a tremendously pregnant crystallization of the subjective treatment of Nature as Bliss Carman’s pervasive thrall of the senses and the imagination in his imperishable line:—

The resonant far-listening morn.

The glory that is Carman’s in pure poetry, is not Mair’s, and the glory that is Lampman’s in the sympathetic interpretation of the moods and thoughts of lowly animate Nature, is not Mair’s. Yet unquestionably Mair is the authentic forerunner of those perfervid Nature-worshippers, Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott, the creative Poets of the Systematic School, who wrote the first native and national literature of the Dominion of Canada, and wrote it so that the world heard and has acclaimed them Master Poets and their poetry authentic Literature!

The Fireflies is quoted from Dreamland and Other Poems by Charles Mair.

Part II.

Post Confederation Literature
(1887-1924)

CHAPTER VI

The Systematic School

THE FIRST RENAISSANCE IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL AND PERIOD—ROBERTS AND HIS COLLEAGUES.

The years 1860, 1861, and 1862 may be regarded as the most significant in the literary history of Canada. In the year 1860 were born Charles George Douglas Roberts and Charles William Gordon (pseud., Ralph Connor). In the year 1861 were born William Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, William Wilfred Campbell, E. Pauline Johnson (pseud., Tekahionwake), Margaret Marshall Saunders, and Frederick George Scott. In the year 1862 were born Duncan Campbell Scott and Gilbert (now Sir Gilbert) Parker. The most gifted and eminent of Canadian poets and imaginative or creative prose writers, these ten Canadians comprised a single group, and they began, under the influence of the awakening spirit of Canadian nationality, the first systematic writing of poetry and prose, inaugurating a period of original literary creation, which we shall term, for expository purposes, the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

These ten writers were born, bred and educated (intellectually and aesthetically) in the four Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec—which formed, on the proclamation of the British North America Act, 1867, or shortly after the birth of this group of writers, the Dominion of Canada. From the point of view of their nativity and education the members of the literary group born in 1860, 1861, and 1862, are the first strictly so-called Canadian poets and prose writers.

Again: they were the first native-born poets and prose writers to begin, under the Confederacy, a systematic literary career. The term ‘systematic’ defines their conspectus and aims. To this literary group the free and impassioned expression, in verse and prose, of beauty and truth, as beauty is in Nature in Canada and truth in Canadian thought, activities, and institutions, appeared as their own specific function and ideal life. They were thus the first Canadians consciously to undertake a literary career which should be, in its way and degree, commensurate with the growing spiritual, social, political, and commercial life of the Great Dominion, and to find their inspiration chiefly, if not wholly, in the natural beauty and sublimity of their homeland, and in the spiritual import of their country and of the lives of their compatriots. In short, their literary conspectus was thoroughly Canadian; and their inspiration and ideals, too, were Canadian. In fact, their inspiration and ideals were a moral necessity born of a loyal obedience to the same creative impulse that was active in other Canadians who also were bent on constructive achievement in other spheres of Canadian endeavor.

Moreover: the literary group born in 1860, 1861, 1862, may be distinguished as having been the first Canadian poets and prose writers who, by actual performance, showed the nations, largely the peoples of the Motherland and the United States, that the political and commercially lusty young Confederacy was, on its own account, decidedly active in letters. The truth is that, in the decade following 1887, which witnessed the publication of the first work in verse and in prose by the systematic group of Canadian men and women of letters, Canadian poetry and imaginative prose, though they were derivative in form and frequently derivative in theme, quite gained the decent regard, and, in some instances, the admiration, of distinguished men of letters in England and in the United States, and furnished a pledge of greater achievement in literature.

The Canadian poets and prose writers born in 1860, 1861, and 1862, distinguish themselves and the years in which they were born as the first systematically creative School and Period in the literary history of Canada. Their creative activities and their poetry and prose we have denominated as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

What is meant by the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature? In 1880 a young native-born Canadian, Charles G. D. Roberts, published a book of poems. The critics of England and the United States thought well of the verse. There was in it a quality that had not been in previous books of verse by native-born Canadians. The poems were marked by a certain noteworthy artistic finish in the craftsmanship.

This was significant. Hitherto native-born Canadian poets had not been adroit in technique; they had been very careless about it, and some of them had no respect or feeling for it at all. Poetry was poetry, they thought, whether it was well dressed or not. With the publication of his Orion, Roberts sounded the death knell of slovenly or indifferent technique in Canadian poetry. Working with him, and largely under the influence of his ideal of technical finish in verse, were Lampman, Carman, Campbell, Pauline Johnson, Duncan Campbell Scott, Frederick George Scott, and others. They all cared supremely for fine technique in poetry.

In the second decade after 1887 there arose in Canada a group of poets who were not solicitous about the technique of their verse. With them fine artistry in Canadian verse declined. This Decadent Interim lasted but a few years. A later band of poets arose who went back to the ‘technical’ ideals which were exemplified in the poetry of Roberts and his colleagues. This younger band of poets ‘restored’ the ideals of the first literary group and began the Restoration Period in Canadian poetry. Collaterally, a similar course of distinction, decadence, and restoration of technical ideals can be observed in Canadian imaginative and aesthetic prose.

In another sense the period which began with Roberts and his confrères may properly be denoted as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. It happens that the best of the Pre-Confederation Literature, produced either by émigrés or by native sons of the Province, was the work of ‘old minds.’ Consider, for instance, the historical romances of Major John Richardson and the satiric humor of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the poetry of Oliver Goldsmith, 2nd, and of such émigrés as Charles Heavysege and John Reade, the romantic poetic dramas of John Hunter-Duvar and the prose tales of James De Mille. We observe that, despite certain engaging novelty in themes and treatment, it is all the work of old men; that is to say, of minds which were attempting to ‘transplant’ old traditional methods and the forms of a past literature in a soil which was naturally hostile to their growth and gave them a mean and dry exotic existence.

If we fancy that we discover in the best Pre-Confederation literature the fresh beauty and vitality of youth, we shall discover, if we look critically, that this vitality and beauty are the last hectic or pale flowering of an exotic English literature, and that, commingled with the beauty, are the wrinkles of sapless age. To be sure, there is the flame of creative fire in, for example, Richardson and Haliburton. Notwithstanding, it is the flame which flares up, with a startling brilliancy, just before it dies out.

In truth, then, Pre-Confederation Canadian Literature was essentially a transplanted Old World literature. Inevitably it was alien to the soil of Canadian life, genius, and ideals. It, therefore, lacks real vitality, vigor, and truth. Except in Nova Scotia, in the time of Haliburton and Howe, it was the outcome of personal, not necessary social expression.

But, after Confederation, expression of the spiritual and social needs of the Great Dominion became a national necessity. This expression, being born out of the spiritual and social needs of Canada, must be considered, however derivative the mere forms employed, as a genuine literary Renaissance. The period or movement begun by the systematic groups of poets and prose writers born in Canada in 1860, 1861, and 1862 may, then, properly be denoted as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

CHAPTER VII

Charles G. D. Roberts

ROBERTS SPONSOR TO LAMPMAN—LITERARY FATHER OF BLISS CARMAN—MASTER OF VERSE TECHNIQUE—FORMS OF HIS VERSE, AND ITS QUALITIES.

Whether Charles G. D. Roberts had a genuine formative influence on Canadian literature, particularly Canadian poetry, or whether he should be regarded merely as ‘the eldest brother’ of the first systematic group of Canadian poets and prose writers may, possibly, be a moot question. Of a certainty he was the first native-born Canadian to take the leading role in making real and permanent, both by singular influences and by actual production in poetry and imaginative prose, a native and national literature in Canada.

First: Roberts was the literary sponsor of Archibald Lampman. In 1884, while editor of The Week, Roberts published in that periodical the very first poems which Lampman contributed to the public press (The Coming of Winter, and Three-Flower Petals). This is much more significant than appears on first view. It must be remembered that Roberts, though but twenty-four years old at the time of his editorship, had already published, in 1880, his Orion and Other Poems, which had been well received by the critical press in England and the United States. This distinction, abetted by his editorial connection with Goldwin Smith, the founder of The Week, gave him some of the glory of a new literary ‘star’ and made him an authority whose good opinion of another’s verse was very inspiring when it took the form of introducing a young unknown native poet to the Canadian public. In 1884 Lampman was a young man, human, sensitive, and shy. Roberts was the first to recognize Lampman’s authentic genius and the first to give him that practical encouragement which alone counts constructively—a first and right start, per aspera indeed, but, for Lampman, ad astra.

Roberts was also the ‘literary father’ of Bliss Carman. In 1885 Roberts was appointed Professor of Literature at King’s College, Windsor, Nova Scotia. It was Roberts who really trained Bliss Carman in the poetic perception of Nature and in poetic technique and who inspired him to begin a poetic career. It all happened in this way: To Roberts’ home, at Windsor, came Bliss Carman, a cousin of the elder poet. Here Carman spent several of his growing, most impressionable, and most receptive years, coming directly under the pervasive influences—the aesthetic culture and a tutorship in poetic technique—of the elder poet. Further: with Windsor as a centre, and Roberts as a companion and guide, Carman made excursions over the lovely and glamorous scenes and haunts of beauty near and beyond Roberts’ home. Carman, with Roberts, dwelt and communed with Nature intimately, visited the hiding places of earthly beauty, fed his senses with pure delight of stream, lake and marsh, woodland and sky, tuned his heart to hear, with peculiar meaning and joy, the cries of the denizens of the woodland, the murmurings, dronings, and shrillings of insects, and the dulcet lilting voices of birds. Also, in fancy and peaceful reverie, Carman lived over again all the rare moments and joys of sensation and spiritual ecstasy experienced by him in that lovely area of country conscribing Windsor, the land of Evangeline, the Gaspereau valley, the Basin of Minas, and the Tantramar marshes.

Thus the young Carman’s senses and imagination discovered the beauty, glamor, and glory of land and sea. Inevitably, at length, he was inspired to emulate the elder poet, Roberts, and to begin the systematic writing of the winning lyrism which, in the years that followed, has given Carman a name sui generis, not only amongst the poets of his homeland, Canada, but also amongst the poets of the English-speaking races.

Again: two years after taking up his residence at Windsor, Roberts published his really epoch-making volume of poetry, In Divers Tones (1887). This was his second volume of verse and, in it, his genius and art shone with greater glory, especially in the eyes of the critics and poets of the United States who were not likely to think, at any rate in that day, that anything could come out of Canada, particularly Nova Scotia, except pulpwood, coal, fish, and potatoes. Roberts and his poetic work disillusioned the young Canadian poet’s American cousins and taught them that Canada produced mind, and even poetic genius.

Roberts was related to Carman by blood and temperament and poetic tutorship. These facts of various relationship between Roberts and Carman became known in the United States; and the light of Roberts’ literary reputation was reflected on his cousin, Bliss Carman. It was, therefore, natural that the editor of The Atlantic Monthly should, as actually happened, publish in that magazine Carman’s first significant poem, Low Tide on Grand Pré (1887), which became the title poem of his first volume of verse, Low Tide on Grand Pré: a Book of Lyrics (New York, 1893). All this is more significant than it seems.

For a young poet, story-teller, or essayist to have his work published in The Atlantic Monthly is a literary distinction by itself. The imprimatur of The Atlantic Monthly is as a royal seal in the kingdom of letters on the American continent. Largely through the sponsorship of Roberts’ reputation, Carman was favorably known to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. When, therefore, the magazine published Carman’s first important poem, the poet was properly and most significantly introduced to the literary world. For The Atlantic Monthly enters only the homes of the most cultured readers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The placing of its imprimatur on the verse of Bliss Carman was a declaration to the world that Canada had produced another new and engaging poet.

Once more: at least in one matter Roberts had a considerable influence on several of the other members of the first systematic group of Canadian poets. He was the first native-born Canadian poet to be solicitous about poetic technique, and had thus won the notice and even commendation of critics and poets in England and the United States. In his Orion and in his In Divers Tones Roberts held up the ideal of finished technique in poetry. Roberts’ success from 1880 to 1887 became, therefore, an inspiration to other poets in the first systematic group, and inspired them to accomplish a body of verse excellent enough, at least in technique, for publication in volume form without danger of discrediting themselves and their country. So, in fact, it happened: Lampman and Scott (F. G.) published their first volume of verse in 1888; Campbell his first in 1889; Carman his first in 1893: Scott (D. C.) his first in 1893; Pauline Johnson her first in 1895.

Still further: it was Roberts’ two volumes of verse that first called the attention of the literary public in the United States and in England to the fact that systematic literary activity was going on in Canada, and that first awakened critical curiosity about the new Canadian poets and their verse whenever a volume by Roberts or any of his poetic compatriots was published. Roberts’ renown obtained for the others a ready and just ‘hearing.’ This achieved, the quality of their verse, especially of their nature-poetry, brought them, it is fair to say, very favorable appreciation from the critics and poets of the United States and England.

Finally: Roberts is related to the first systematic group of Canadian poets and prose writers, not only pragmatically as sponsor, inspirer, and leader: but also in a special way. He was the ‘Voice’ of the Canadian Confederacy. Seven years after the publication of his Orion, suddenly the Canadian people heard Roberts trumpeting a new song. In it there was nothing classical in theme, and nothing cold and correctly formal in artistic structure and finish. Roberts had changed from an Artist to a Prophet, from an Artificer in verse to a Voice—the Voice of one crying in the wilderness and trying to make straight the paths of the Canadian people. He was still a young man but he had been vouchsafed vision and he called magniloquently to his compatriots, thus:—

O Child of Nations, giant-limbed,

Who stand’st among the nations now

Unheeded, unadorned, unhymned,

With unanointed brow,—

How long the ignoble sloth, how long

The trust in greatness not thine own?

Surely the lion’s brood is strong

To front the world alone!

He repeated his trumpeting to the Canadian to awake to a national consciousness of destiny and to achieve that destiny—he repeated the ‘call’ in language even more magniloquent—in his Ode to the Canadian Confederacy.

Perhaps these were only ‘occasional’ poems, artificially inspired. At any rate Roberts’ Vision of Canadian nationality and his interest in expressing it forsook him. A few years after uttering the ‘Call’ he left his native Canadian habitat (in 1895) for New York. Yet in the fifteen years from 1880 to 1895 in the homeland, or till his removing to New York, by his own fine artistry and by the influence, at least of his example, on his contemporaries in Canada, Roberts was considerably, perhaps chiefly, potent in raising native Canadian poetry to a degree of technical finish that was never before reached or even attempted by native-born Canadian men and women of letters.

Summarily: as discoverer and sponsor of Lampman, as inspirer and sponsor of Carman, and as exemplar, at least in technical ideals, to the first native-born group of systematic poets of the Dominion, Charles G. D. Roberts wielded a constructive influence on Canadian native and national poetry. That without his influence there would still have been a Systematic School of Canadian Poets, of which Lampman, Carman, or D. C. Scott might have been the most conspicuous creator, is a high probability. But it is a theoretical probability. We cannot, however, gainsay the fact of Roberts’ constructive influence on his confrères in the Systematic School of Canadian Poets. On the grounds, therefore, of his triple role as sponsor, inspirer, and exemplar, and of his own creative poetic art, Charles G. D. Roberts is justly to be distinguished as the Inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

Roberts’ own poetry may be critically appreciated (1) as a recrudescence of the English classical idyll; (2) as poetry of nature, with special reference to its distinction from the nature-poetry of Lampman; (3) as elegiac poetry; and (4) as poetry of modern eroticism.

At the outset it is important to emphasize two singular facts. First, with the single notable exception of Roberts’ spasmodic ‘Call’ to the Canadian people to achieve a national destiny, and with the further exception of a national or Canadian setting and color in some of his nature-poetry, Roberts’ verse is anything but Canadian. Secondly, Roberts’ poetry is signally an example of poetry which is not, to use Mathew Arnold’s formula, ‘a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life.’ It is characteristic of the essential Canadian genius that its attitudes to the universe and to existence are moral and religious, that it values the fine arts, including literature, as a means for the ideal enhancement of life, and loves the Beautiful in the fine arts as the only visible instance of the union of the real and of the ideal, which is, philosophically viewed, our only pledge of the ultimate supremacy of the Good. The only really deadly criticism, therefore, that can be applied against the poetry of Roberts is that he has missed in his own verse the supreme ethical note or ideal which is in the poetry of one of his masters, Keats:—

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,

and that he did not engage himself to write poetry, with the intent which was really the aim of Keats, as well as of Arnold, namely, as a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. Aware now of the unethical intent and quality of Robert’s poetry, we can the better and more justly appreciate his development as a poet and his achievements in poetic substance and technique.

It was natural and inevitable that an undergraduate introduced, at College, into the world of letters through the poetry of the Greek and Latin classics and the highly lyrical and sensuous poetry of Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, should, when he himself felt impelled to write, produce poetry which, in substance and style, was based on classical themes, and colored with sensuous images, and that, when critically estimated, this poetry should be valued as a sincere but finished academic exercise in verse. Roberts’ first volume, Orion and Other Poems, was just such an academic exercise in verse. Yet it was an exercise by a lad just out of college who not only informed his verse with a respectable showing of classical scholarship and with an engaging Arcadian setting and color but also wrote with so careful a technique that when his verse was compared with that of earlier Canadian poets, it was found to be unprovincial in scope and appeal, and more finished in technique than any previous Canadian verse. It was indeed derivative, literary, academic. It was vitiated with youthful crudities in thought and manner and certain borrowings. But, on the whole, it was as excellent a first book of verse as might be issued by any young Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate or, conceivably, by Shelley, Tennyson, or Swinburne in their undergraduate days. Indeed, critics and poets in England and in the United States, in reviewing Orion and Other Poems, noted the volume as a respectable performance in verse and a fair promise of excellent future poetry from the Dominion.

Roberts’ first volume Orion and Other Poems is a significant disclosure, both positively and negatively, of his essential genius and art. Positively, the bias or bend of his genius was towards English neo-classical idyllism and sensuous impressionism. Negatively, his genius lacked, and has continued to lack, original imagination or imaginative power. In his first volume, his ‘properties,’ to use a term borrowed from the stage and employed by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate, are the same ‘properties’ as appear in the Keatsian idyll. In Roberts’ earliest verse masquerade mythical Greek deities and heroes, sylvan demi-gods and demi-goddesses, Arcadian denizens and shepherds, painted with rich sensuous color against a background of pastoral or idyllic landscape, to the accompaniment of impressionistic verbal music; alliteration, consonance, assonance, and vowel-harmony. All this is a recrudescence, unmistakably, of the same qualities in Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne. In short, Roberts appears as an unoriginal or unimaginative nature-and-figure-painter and verbal melodist. A single example from Orion will suffice:—

For there the deep-eyed night

Looked down on me; unflagging voices called

From unpent waters falling; tireless wings

From long winds bear me tongueless messages

From star-consulting, silent pinnacles;

And breadth, and depth, and stillness

Fathered me.

In that passage criticism at once notes that Roberts, as a very young poet, begins his professional career as a clever ‘word virtuoso.’ That passage certainly suggests, as no doubt it imitates, the sensuous impressionism of the Choric Song in Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters. Its verbal music carries the same kind of vague impressionism which we hear in the gossamer tone-painting of Debussy’s orchestral prelude L’Après-midi d’un Faune. No one will doubt the sincere ambition of Roberts to be a poet, and the sincerity of his choice of themes and properties, diction, and poetic style. Yet, while noting the artificiality of it all, one does wonder that a tyro poet could, in a first volume of undergraduate verse, so consummately simulate, as Roberts did, the art of the supreme masters of English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism.

As yet, then, Roberts’ poetry discloses only talent in him, nothing of genius, or originality, or imagination. His poetry is, after all, a cleverly sublimated academic exercise. Literary psychologists cannot escape the feeling that Roberts deliberately ‘manufactured’ his first volume of verse—cannot help picturing the young poet diligently figuring away in his student’s cloister at the properties, forms and metres of his imitative idyllism and impressionism. It is all Artifice; all artificial. As yet in Roberts’ verse there is no ‘note’ of inspiration awakened by the magic and mystery of the great Dominion—no New World ‘note’ caught from Canadian Nature, or from Canadian romantic life and contemporary civilization.

In his second volume of poems, In Divers Tones, there is an advance in variety of inspiration, in his forms and metres, and in finish of technique. Still, on the whole, the themes and properties, rhythms, metres, and color are those of English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism. There is, however, some suggestion of a change away from his former too imitative adherence to the subject, manner, and style of the English idyllists. There is, for instance, a suggestion of a structural, but not ethical, influence from Browning. There is, in this regard, a Browningesque coinage of unconventional or awkward diction, an adoption of a Browningesque metre and an introduction of ‘medley’ as when he inserts, after the Browning manner, a lyrical interlude, unexpectedly and with no logical justification, into the text of a broader, more serious movement and more ethically informed subject. His second volume of poetry, In Divers Tones, shows that Roberts has talent, but is still unimaginative and artificial. Yet his second volume is much more significant than his first, not by its being more various in its themes and forms, but by its exhibiting new tendencies in the bent of the poet’s mind and imagination. There is a tendency towards ethical influences and to get away from his early preoccupation with English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism. There is also the merest show of a tendency to occupy his imagination with ideas of the Canadian ‘spirit’ and the beauty and wonder of Nature in Canada. There is, however, no distinctive embodiment of inspirational ideas or moods awakened by the Great Dominion or the New World.

Notwithstanding, in his second volume Roberts is taking his first step on the way to the expression of the essential form and manner of his creative genius as a poet. He was born to lilt, in simple lyrical and descriptive verse, the aesthetic sensations and the emotional nuances of Canadian life and external nature. In short, Roberts was born to become, as he did become, the most engaging and artistic, though not the first, native-born Canadian idyllist. In Divers Tones he first appears as a really significant creative Canadian poet. But whenever, in his later literary career, Roberts forsakes his light or simple idyllic and impressionistic treatment of Canadian life and external nature, as he forsakes it in the monody, in his poetry of city life, and in his poetry of modern eroticism, he may be engaging or arresting or impressive, but in nowise is he creatively significant.

In the same volume, In Divers Tones, Roberts exhibits two manners. In some poems in the volume he clings to his old manner of English Classical Impressionism. In other poems in the same volume he essays his new manner of Canadian Impressionism. The first is distinguished by overweighted sensuousness, by over-burdened luxurious color of descriptive epithet and verbal music. An impressive example is Off Pelorus, the sensuous quality of which may be suggested by the following single stanza:—

Idly took we thought, for still our eyes betray us,

Lo, the white-limbed maids, with love-soft eyes aglow,

Gleaming bosoms bare, loosed hair, sweet hands to slay us,

Warm lips wild with song, and softer throat than snow!

Roberts’ strictly Canadian Impressionism is colorful and musical, but the structure of the verse is simple, as, for instance, On the Creek, an idyllic lyric, full of Canadian color, and highly alliterative, beginning:—

Dear heart, the noisy strife,

And bitter harpings cease.

Here is the lamp of life,

Here are the lips of peace.

Roberts developed other ‘manners’ or styles. But, unquestionably, this Canadian idyllic impressionism, simple in thought and form, yet colorful and musical, is his natural forte—his natural, characteristic manner. It is exemplified, in the same volume, by other Canadian idylls in the simple style of On the Creek, as, for instance, In The Afternoon, Salt, Winter Geraniums, Birch and Paddle; by distinct and deliberate suffusions of Canadian Nature in dactylic hexameters, as in The Tantramar Revisited, and in the sonnet-form (somewhat anticipating the nature-poetry of Lampman), as in Roberts’ genuinely noble sonnets The Sower, and The Potato Harvest.

We may turn now to a general consideration of Roberts’ poetic treatment of Nature. In Roberts’ first volume, in his strictly Arcadian poetry, there is nothing of Canadian Nature, nothing of Canadian scenery, nor the color and sentiment of Canadian life in the habitat of the distinctive Canadian spirit. In the second volume, In Divers Tones, there is a definitive engagement, on his part, with Canadian Nature, or with Canadian life and sentiment pictured against Canadian backgrounds; and also a change in the form and style of Roberts’ poetic composition.

The natural forms of Roberts’ art are light, simple, lyrical, and descriptive verse, which he treats with charming naturalness, almost naiveté, with simple tunefulness of ballad or folk rhythms, and which sometimes he delicately suffuses with a contemplative revery, a gentle melancholy, or a subdued sentimental reflection on the magic and mystery of Nature and life, somewhat in the manner of Herrick and Tennyson, and Longfellow. But Roberts’ lyrical idyllism or nature-description is not always wholly soft or sentimental, pretty, or gentle, or charming, nor is his new manner always in folk rhythm in form. At times, even when simple, his verse is picturesque, even brusque, vigorous, and overweighted with descriptive details as if, in the last matter, he must ‘paint in’ all the features and properties of Canadian Nature and leave nothing of its physiognomy to be added by the imagination of the reader.

Roberts, however, has one singular limitation, an innate defect of his genius. He cannot limn the human person or figure as one of the properties of his poetry of Canadian woodlands or pastoral scenery and life. In the matter of human portraiture against a background of Nature Roberts, as poet, is abstract and faltering in drawing, lifeless, unveracious, ineffective. Otherwise in the Canadian idyll or in nature-description he is concrete, veracious, simple but graphic, nearly always winningly musical and on the whole satisfying. In short, Roberts discloses in his new manner, in the Canadian idyll and his Acadian nature-poetry, the sure possession of the secrets of color, movement and music, and of real Canadian national sentiment, in the presence of life and nature. He is an adroit nature-colorist and verbal melodist.

Absent, however, from his genius and art are all gifts in spiritual portraiture and the fine and noble interpretation of Nature which Lampman discloses in his nature-poetry and his interpretation of the essential Canadian spirit from the embodiment of that spirit, as Lampman discerns it, in Nature in Canada.

Roberts’ treatment of Nature may be illustrated by examples taken from his second volume, In Divers Tones (1887), and from The Book of the Native (1896), in the latter of which are some poems that really belong, in form, and spirit, to the time when he was changing his abstract Arcadian manner to his concrete Acadian manner as in his In Divers Tones. Illustrative of Roberts’ change to a Canadian theme and to the modern simple method of treating Nature, in the pseudo-classical style, an apt example is The Tantramar Revisited, composed in the dactylic hexameter, a form, suggested, no doubt, by Longfellow’s pretty story of Evangeline. In this poem Roberts treats Canadian Nature with an impressive originality in properties, color, and sentiment, and certainly with a pervasive directness and veracity which prove his sincerity and which convince the reader that the poet was moved by the beauty and pathos of his Acadian subject:—

Ah, the old-time stir, how once it stung me with rapture,—

Old-time sweetness, the winds freighted with honey and salt!

Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland,—

Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see,—

Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion,

Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change.

What a change in Roberts—this change from the abstract, artificial, academic, over-sensuous treatment of Nature in Arcadia to his direct, simple, concrete treatment of real nature in Acadia, with his poet’s eyes directly ‘on the object.’ There we have the real, the genuine Roberts, the original authentic poet of Canadian Nature and life and nationality.

For an example of his colored realism or idyllic naturalism tinged with a sort of Wordsworthian plainness or austerity of style and ethical revery, consider his sonnet The Sower. It has been called Roberts’ ‘popular masterpiece.’ As a sonnet, it is perfect in artistic structure, and is as faithful to Canadian Nature and sentiment as, say, Millet’s paintings, The Reapers and The Angelus, are true to French pastoral life and religious sentiment.

But this sonnet is a good example of Roberts’ ineffectiveness in human or spiritual portraiture. How effectively it pictures for us the land, the sky, the birds, the human properties of the Acadian landscape in Nova Scotia. The poem visualizes vividly for us all the features and elements of external Nature; yet it fails to visualize the Sower himself, to limn him effectively, graphically, impressively against the background of Nature as, on the other hand, Millet has graphically limned the human figures in his paintings against the French landscape.

Finally: a poem which is a really fine example of Roberts’ characteristic genius and art in the authentic Canadian idyll and in nature-description, and which, perhaps, contains his nearest approach to graphic figure-poetry, namely, his lyric The Solitary Woodsman, is specially noteworthy. Though published in The Book of the Native, it really belongs to the period of In Divers Tones when Roberts was changing over to his natural and characteristic manner of Canadian idyllic impressionism. For it is a gentle, natural, and simple lyrical idyll of Canadian Nature and life, tinged with a delicate mood of contemplation and pathos. A touch more of ‘personal detail,’ of moral characterization, would have made The Solitary Woodsman as universal and popular a portrait as the genre picture of the hardy, happy village blacksmith in Longfellow’s poem with that subject. Nevertheless, the poem has vigor, action, life-likeness; it is veracious and picturesque. In it Roberts is at his best in the Canadian lyrical idyll and in figure-portraiture.

Strict analysis of Roberts’ nature-poetry reveals both the positive qualities and the defects of his genius and art. As a poet of Nature in Acadia he hardly more than effects glimpses of Canadian scenery and pastoral life, colorful, no doubt, and tinged with a homely or even tender naturalistic sentiment. His pictures of Canadian scenery and pastoral life are indeterminate pastels of the general features of Nature in Canada rather than rich, broad paintings done with the forthright, broad brush-work of a master artist. It is all pretty, or charming, and faithful to Nature in Acadia. But it is all based on superficial observation and is devoid of poetic, that is to say, profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. It is not to be expected that the Canadian people will treasure these pastels of Canadian scenery and pastoral life. For though they be beautiful, simple, and realistic, the ethical element in them is always a reflection, a moral platitude, from the poet’s own moralizing, or a recrudescence of some older poets’ moralizings.

The public is quick to detect insincerity in a poet. While it would not be just to accuse Roberts of insincerity whenever he attempts to moralize in his nature-poetry, or to give it a moral or religious significance, it is still true that Roberts’ nature-poetry is too superficial, too obviously ‘an effort’ to make pretty or charming pastels of Canadian scenery and pastoral life, too lacking in thoroughly humanized treatment of Nature, to be popular or cherished for its own sake by the Canadian people.

His pure lyrical pastels, as for instance, On the Creek, and The Solitary Woodsman, are more likely to remain permanently popular than are his Nature poems in other forms, as, for example, the genuinely important sonnet-sequence in his Songs of the Common Day (1893). In these sonnets, however, he shows no increase of descriptive power but only the variety of his word-painter’s palette. Moreover, in these sonnets there is a felt insincerity of aim. Though fine in structure, faithful to Canadian Nature, variously treating the aspects of Canadian Nature, and often sentimental and moralistic, they impress the reader as having been designed and written deliberately to show forth the poet’s powers in realistic or naturalistic impressionism, in the philosophical interpretation of Nature, and in technical artistry. Notwithstanding, it must be admitted that in these sonnets Roberts, as an impressionistic painter of Canadian Nature, is a master, and has his analogues, in the pictorial painting of Nature, in Corot and Millet, and in the tonal painting of Nature, in MacDowell and Debussy. These sonnets were consciously designed to be ‘works of art,’ and to impress the philosophically minded poets and critics of poetic form. Fine and masterful as they are in technical artistry, and impressive, too, with a resurgence of moral ideas, nevertheless they appeal neither to the popular heart nor to the philosophical imagination. For they create in the heart of the reader the sense only of a splendid achievement in poetic artistry, but never any sense of the poet’s own enrichment of life from his interpretation of beauty in Canadian Nature, civilization, and life.

Summarily: as an original Poet, Roberts’ forte is the treatment of Canadian Nature and pastoral life in impressionistic pastels, to an accompaniment of verbal music in folk rhythms or simple lyric forms. Thus accepted and appreciated he is a satisfying nature-colorist and melodist. But, impressive and magnificent, as he is, in more formal or larger poetic genres, as for instance, the sonnet and monody, he fails to give us in both a vital application of ideas to life.

Consideration of Roberts’ poetry of modern eroticism reveals only what has been called a variety of Roberts’ ‘ethical heterogeneity.’ This, however, is a defect in the man rather than in the poet, and only negatively affects Roberts’ significance in the literary history of Canada. Roberts’ work as a threnodist, romantic novelist, and inventor of a species of animal psychology in the romance is considered elsewhere. It is, however, as the inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature, both poetry and prose, rather than as a poet of Canadian Nationality and Nature, that Roberts has a right to a supremely significant status in the literary history of Canada.

The quotations from Charles G. D. Roberts’ works are found in the individual volumes mentioned in the text. There is also issued a collection entitled, Poems by Charles G. D. Roberts—New complete edition—(Copp, Clark Co., Toronto, 1907).

CHAPTER VIII

Archibald Lampman

AN INTERPRETER OF THE ESSENTIAL SPIRIT OF CANADA—STUDY OF LAMPMAN’S ‘SAPPHICS’—POWER OF HUMANIZING NATURE—EXCELLENCE OF HIS SONNETS—CONSUMMATE ARTIST OF NATURAL BEAUTY.

In 1887 Charles G. D. Roberts had, with his poem beginning ‘O Child of Nations’ and again with his magniloquent Ode to the Canadian Confederacy, issued a ‘call’ to the Canadian people to realize a national consciousness and to achieve a national destiny. He appeared as the ‘Voice’ of Canada. But he was a mere ‘Voice.’ For aside from simply uttering the ‘call’ he did nothing else to awaken in the Canadian people a consciousness of their own native or national spirit and a love of country, except to publish some impressionistic word pictures of Canadian scenery and pastoral life.

Meanwhile Swinburne had told the world that out of Canada or Australia would come a great New Voice of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. In 1889, or two years after Roberts had trumpeted his ‘call’ to Canadians, Theodore Watts-Dunton, poet, novelist, and the most far-visioned of British critics then living, in an article on Canadian poetry made the same prophecy as had Swinburne. ‘Canada,’ he said, ‘had excellent poets, and with the development of a national consciousness of the history, resources and wealth of the country, would produce great poets.’ In 1918, or practically thirty years after the prophecies of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and the ‘call’ of Roberts, Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, in an address on ‘Overseas Poetry,’ as he called it, before the Royal Colonial Institute, London, also confessed to a vision of great poets arising in Canada and said that, in his view, so far Canada had produced only ‘some good poets.’ It is probable that the prophecies of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton were merely generous pleasantries or, possibly, ‘guesses at the truth.’ In any case what they were really concerned about was the appearance of a great Imperial poet in Canada or some other one of the British Overseas Dominions.

What Canadians themselves should be concerned about is not whether Canada has produced a significant Imperial poet but whether the Dominion has produced a signally excellent poet who, if not the prophetic Voice of the Dominion, is the true Interpreter of the essential Canadian spirit.

When Sir Herbert Warren declared that Canada had produced only some good poets, he had in mind Roberts, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Valancy Crawford, W. H. Drummond, and Robert Service. But the greatest poet that Canada has produced, greatest as a nature-poet, and as an interpreter of the essential mind and heart of the Canadian people and country, is Archibald Lampman. If Lampman is not great in the sense that Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne is great, at least he is more than a good poet. He is a consummate artist. But more important, he is a subtle interpreter of the Canadian national spirit by way of a new and philosophical interpretation of Nature in Canada. He is par excellence the poet of Canadian Nature and Nationality.

For inductive proof of ‘nationality’ in literature, consider critically, and at some length, from Lampman’s poetry, an impressive example of wholly indigenous expression of the Canadian genius and the Canadian view of Nature and of Life. Justly it may be held that this example of interpretative nature-poetry by Lampman, which goes under the name of Sapphics, is, for faultless technic, for spiritual vision of Nature and for the beautiful application of noble ideas to life, an indubitable contribution to poetic art, and is peculiarly Canadian. This is not too high praise; for the poem itself, with analyses of its form and beauty, together with a commentary on its spiritual meaning, will furnish sufficient evidence that it must be given a unique place in Canadian Literature. For easy expository purposes the poem may be divided into three parts, which contain its three themes and their inspiration:—

I

Clothed in splendor, beautifully sad and silent,

Comes the autumn over the woods and highlands,

Golden, rose-red, full of divine remembrance,

Full of foreboding.

Soon the maples, soon will the glowing birches,

Stripped of all that summer and love had dowered them,

Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure

Ruthlessly scattered:

Yet they quail not; Winter, with wind and iron,

Comes and finds them silent and uncomplaining,

Finds them tameless, beautiful still and gracious,

Gravely enduring.

II

Me, too, changes, bitter and full of evil,

Dream by dream have plundered and left me naked,

Gray with sorrow. Even the days before me

Fade into twilight,

Mute and barren. Yet will I keep my spirit

Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble

Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless,

Grandly ungrieving.

III

Brief the span is, counting the years of mortals,

Strange and sad; it passes and then the bright earth,

Careless mother, gleaming with gold and azure,

Lovely with blossoms—

Shining white anemones, mixed with roses,

Daisies mild-eyed, grasses and honeyed clover—

You and me, and all of us, met and equal,

Softly shall cover.

The pure beauty of that poem, of its spiritual imagery, of its rhythmic flow and cadences, andante tranquillo, and the noble mood and emotion it induces—how it all affects the heart and imagination like music heard in dim cathedral aisles, or recalls us from the vulgar distractions of life to sequestered retreats in the Canadian wildwood, there to contemplate existence with a subdued joy and tender peace! Nay more, we rise from communing with the poet, as he did from his communion with Nature, anointed with a new spiritual grace and with a new strength to achieve, amidst ten thousand vicissitudes of fortune, a right worthy destiny—‘grandly ungrieving.’

Each of the three parts of the poem has its own theme and inspiration. The first section gives us the poet’s vision of Nature and of Nature’s own (as well as the poet’s) autumnal mood. This is an important distinction. It distinguishes a peculiar Canadian pictorializing and humanizing vision of Nature. Who can mistake in what land comes that autumn, ‘clothed in a splendor,’ and ‘beautifully sad and silent,’ in what land flourish those woods, ‘golden, rose-red,’ and in what land rise those hills, ‘full of divine remembrance’? Those are indisputably, unmistakably, Canadian woods and hills, in their precise autumnal garb and mood.

Some would contend that this way of pictorializing Nature is Grecian or even English. Rather is it peculiarly Canadian. It is so for this reason: The Greeks, as it were, ‘decked out’ Nature solely for the sensuous enjoyment of a world made lovely to look upon or pleasant to dwell in. The external beauty of Nature was with them, as with Keats and Wordsworth, when these two did not assume the moralizing attitude, the sufficient reason for their impressionistic word-painting. With Lampman, as with the Kelts (and Lampman was a Gael on his mother’s side), the physical loveliness of the face and garb of Nature is an essential, living aspect of earth. For does not Nature herself, as if conscious and reflective, change her aspect and garb becomingly with her seasons and moods? Lampman’s attitude to Nature is not the attitude of an impressionistic landscape painter, but of one for whom physical loveliness is supremely a spiritual revealment. This, however, might be wholly Keltic, and not Canadian. But it is Canadian, and not Keltic, because the interior revealment expresses a special view of Nature and a special mode of intimate communion between the Canadian heart and the spirit of Nature in Canadian woods and streams and hills.

Part second of the poem gives us an altogether novel and original spiritual interpretation of Nature’s mood and temper. It is a mood or temper, be it remarked, not expressed by Nature in any land save Canada, and not to be divined, and sympathized with, by any other racial genius save by the mind and heart indigenous to Canada, sensitive emotionally to the varying aspects and manner of Nature in Canada, as children to the meaning of changes in the facial expression and manner of a mother.

The uncritical, having in mind that inveterate sermonizer Wordsworth, may think that Lampman in this poem does but ‘moralize’ Nature. Far from it, Lampman ‘humanizes’ Nature in a peculiar way, namely, by reciprocal sympathy. We must mark that—‘reciprocal sympathy’—as an original Canadian contribution to the poetic interpretation, the spiritual revealment, of Nature. Lampman, as he says himself, is ‘brother’ to Nature. Her reflections on her own vicissitudes are as his own on his fortunes of life. The Poet and Nature, though two physically, are one by mutual bonds of sympathy. The poet sympathizes with Nature as he himself feels that she sympathizes with him. Thus does he humanize, not sentimentally, but nobly, the Canadian maples and birches, which, as he says:—

Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure

Ruthlessly scattered:

Yet they quail not . . . .

‘Yet they quail not’—there we have envisaged the mood and temper of Canadian Nature! The Gael, visioning the maples and birches, with his racial melancholy sentiment for glories departed, might say of them that they ‘dream, sad-limbed.’ But only a Canadian, or a Canadian Gael, apprehending, through sympathy, their inmost mood, could say of them, nobly, inimitably: ‘Yet they quail not.’ And so Lampman, divining, with a more than Keltic subtlety of vision, the spirit of the Canadian woods in autumn, sympathetically responds to their mood, and is heartened to endure, as they do, ‘silent and uncomplaining.’

Yet I will keep my spirit

Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble

Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless,

Grandly ungrieving.

‘Yet I will keep my spirit clear and valiant!’—Mark that as the authentic spiritual note of the Canadian genius. It is not Canadian, however, merely because it is the expression of indomitable courage and serenity, but because the idea, the inspiration, of a self-controlled destiny, achieved with clearness of vision and valiant heart, first comes to the mind and heart and moral imagination of the Canadian poet as a gift from Canadian woods. He, for his part, conveys that gift to his compatriots, by his poetic envisagement of the ‘brotherhood’ of Man and Nature in this land of glowing birches, noble elms and maples. That ‘note’ of clear-visioned faith and courage and serenity is in Canadian poetry of earlier days, long before the Confederacy, as well as in these days of social and commercial progress. It was in the poetry of Sangster and Mair in Ontario, and in the Gaelic verses of James MacGregor in Nova Scotia. But it is most articulate and vocal in the poetry of Archibald Lampman.

Considering now the first two parts of Lampman’s poem as a whole, we become aware that the first distinctively ‘national’ note in the literature of the Canadian Confederacy is a unique humanizing of Nature, singularly apparent in the Nature-poetry of Lampman—a sympathetic identity of mood and temper, a reciprocal sense of brotherhood, between Man and Nature. This is a psychological phenomenon by itself, belonging solely to the Canadian genius and expressing itself, with fine art, solely in Canadian poetry.

Like other poets, British and American, Canadian poets have notable pictorializing gifts, and can visualize a scene so vividly as to give a reader of their verse the intimate view of an eye-witness of the reality. They can, as aptly as Wordsworth, also moralize Nature and convey a noble preachment. But of them all Lampman stands alone in this—the power to humanize Nature into personality, and sympathetically identify her spirit with his own, in mood and will.

Lampman also stands alone in this—in his love of local beauty and his power to individualize and vitalize it. This, too, is a ‘national’ note and a psychological phenomenon by itself. His is not a love of Nature’s beauty abstracted from a particular time and place, but of those very scenes and haunts where first he beheld Nature in all her physical loveliness and many moods and became her intimate companion and lover. Lampman so individualizes and vitalizes his fields and woods, as Campbell his lakes, Roberts his woods and marshes, and Carman his tide and mists and April morns, that the reader can localize the region, and ‘time’ the season, of their inspiration with the nicest perception. So singularly is this quality present, most notably in poetry of Lampman, though also in the poetry of Roberts, Carman, Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott and Pauline Johnson, that a reader can, with absolute surety, say not only, ‘This is Canadian nature-beauty,’ but also, ‘This is Canadian nature-beauty in Nova Scotia, in New Brunswick, in Ontario.’ Surely, then, this peculiar imaginative interpretation of Canadian Nature whereby Lampman and his confrères, first, localize Nature, and, next, humanize her noblest mood and temper into an identity with their own is a supreme expression of the national spirit and raises Post-Confederation poetry to the dignity of authentic literature.

Canadians are, in the eyes of the older nations, a notably sane and happy people. They are so because they keep their souls, in the phrase of Lampman, always ‘clear and valiant,’ having, as Lampman, and even as Roberts and the other poets of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature, a sure vision of the greatness of their country’s destiny and of the means to it. The peculiar moral qualities of the Canadian people are an inviolable faith in themselves, an indomitable courage, and an imperturbable serenity. The ground and inspiration of these qualities are in Canadian woods and hills and waters, and Archibald Lampman, in his nature-poetry, interprets these qualities of the Canadian people and country with sweet reasonableness and genuine nobility.

In two of his finest sonnets, rich both in aesthetic and in spiritual beauty, and worthy both of Keats and Wordsworth, possibly suggesting the spirit of their finest sonnets, Lampman has summarized his poetic and philosophical creed. So beautiful in structure and imagery, so noble in their expression of the courage and serenity and faith which obtain in his Sapphics, and yet so wistful of the heavenly beauty and so infused with the pathos of life are these sonnets, that they move the soul and subdue the spirit with ‘thoughts too deep for tears.’ If there is any genuine meaning to Arnold’s conception of the moral dignity and spiritual function of poetry as ‘the profound and powerful application of ideas of life,’ these two sonnets by Lampman quite match the finest sonnets of the same degree of poetic vision by Keats, Wordsworth, and Arnold:—

I

Not to be conquered by these headlong days,

But to stand free; to keep the mind at brood

On life’s deep meaning, nature’s altitude

Or loveliness, and time’s mysterious ways;

At every thought and deed to clear the haze

Out of our eyes, considering only this,

What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,

This is to live, and win the final praise.

Though strife, ill fortune, and harsh human need

Beat down the soul, at moments blind and dumb,

With agony; yet, patience—there shall come

Many great voices from life’s outer sea,

Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed,

Murmurs and glimpses of eternity.

II

There is a beauty at the goal of life,

A beauty growing since the world began,

Through every age and race, through lapse and strife,

Till the great human soul complete her span:

Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn,

The currents of blind passion that appal,

To listen and keep watch till we discern

The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all;

So to address our Spirits to the height,

And so to attune them to the valiant whole,

That the great light be clearer for our light,

And the great soul the stronger for our soul:

To have done this is to have lived, though fame

Remembers us with no familiar name.

Certainly these sonnets breath a higher spiritual air than do the finest sonnets of Roberts, as, for instance, The Sower and The Potato Harvest. As certainly, in sustained serenity and moral import, as well as in profound spiritual beauty, Lampman’s sonnet-sequence The Frogs surpasses Roberts’ sonnet-sequence in his Songs of the Common Day,—not only technically and in nature-color and music but also in transporting the spirit with inevitable ‘murmurs and glimpses of eternity’:—

And slowly as we heard you, day by day,

The stillness of enchanted reveries

Bound brain and spirit with half-closèd eyes,

In some divine sweet wonder-dream astray;

To us no sorrow or upreared dismay

Nor any discord come, but evermore

The voices of mankind, the outer roar,

Grew strange and murmurous, faint and far away.

Morning and noon and midnight exquisitely,

Rapt with your voices, this alone we knew,

Cities might change and fall, and men might die,

Secure were we, content to dream with you

That change and air are shadows faint and fleet,

And dreams are real, and life is only sweet.

There we have, not talent cleverly performing an academic exercise, but serene and noble genius profoundly and finely interpreting and appreciating Beauty and Good in the universe and in existence. Indubitably Lampman is a master of the sonnet, a master whom those greatest masters of the sonnet, Keats and Wordsworth, would welcome to their company, and of whose company, as a nature-poet working in the sonnet or the lyric forms, he really is.

But Lampman is more than a philosophical interpreter of the mystery and wonder of Nature and Life. He is also a consummate artist in revealing to others his vision of the natural magic and beauty of Nature in Canada. He is even a finer colorist and melodist than is Roberts. He is such because he has finer powers of observation, and notes not merely the general superficial beauty of the face of Nature but also the minutest details of Nature’s physiognomy and garb, and the gentler, more gracious of Nature’s moods.

Unlike Roberts, Lampman is not a mere sensuous impressionist. He is an artist with the same gifts as those of Thomas Gray for discerning, appreciating, and envisaging in lyric verse the subtler and lovelier beauties of fields and woods and hills and streams and sky, and for interpreting to the spirit the meaning of pastoral beauty and life in Canadian woods. Roberts paints charmingly indeed at times the mere face of Nature. Lampman not only paints exquisitely and daintily the physical loveliness and garb of Nature but also conveys her most winsome moods and her daintiest messages for the refreshment and sustenance of the spirit. Moreover, Lampman has Gray’s gift in limning the human figure, of adding, with graphic nicety, a humanistic touch to his spiritual portraits. As a poet who paints and interprets Nature with the intimate vision and delicate brush of the artist, not with mere impressionism but with minute and lovely truth and realism, and also as a poet who humanizes Nature with graphic portraits and interprets Nature subtly and intimately to the spirit, Lampman is a master by himself.

Whatever influences Keats may have had on Lampman’s art, it must be observed that fundamentally, as an artist and as an interpreter of Nature, with the power to add here and there graphic bits of human portraiture, Lampman is nearer to Gray than to Keats or even to Wordsworth. All these qualities are incisively exemplified in Lampman’s lyric Heat. In this poem Nature and pastoral life in Canada, on a day of sultry summer heat, are painted with the nicest realistic detail; and in it the bit of human portraiture, the wagoner ‘slowly slouching at his ease,’ is as graphic and as true to life as Gray’s bit of human portraiture, the plowman homeward plodding his weary way, is graphic and true to English pastoral and natural life.

If any Canadian poet ever entered the sanctuaries of Nature and revealed the intimate observation and consummate artistry which marks the art of all the exquisite poets of Nature—that Canadian poet is Archibald Lampman. He is, however, a greater poet than he is an artist. As a poet he is the superior of Roberts. As an artist he has no superior save Duncan Campbell Scott. But as a poet of Nature, interpreting from Nature the essence of the Canadian spirit, Lampman is superb, supreme—unmatched, and even unrivalled by any other poet that Canada has yet produced.

The quotations from Archibald Lampman’s work in this chapter are from The Collected Poems of Archibald Lampman, edited, with a memoir by Duncan Campbell Scott—new edition, 1923 (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).

CHAPTER IX

Bliss Carman

AS A WORLD-POET—CREATIVE MELODIST—PERIODS OF HIS POETRY—SINGING QUALITY AND ITS METHOD—LYRIST OF THE SEA AND OF LOVE—TREATMENT OF NATURE.

Bliss carman is the only Canadian-born poet who reasonably and inevitably challenges comparison with English and United States poets of admitted distinction. He is, in the continental sense of the term, more American than he is Canadian; more English than American; and more a world-poet than Canadian, or American, or English, in the sense that famous poets writing in the English language, from Chaucer to Masefield, are world-poets. His genius and poetry, as do the genius and poetry of no other Canadian poet, challenge criticism to define the qualities of his mind and art. Unless, therefore, those who have written con amore about Carman and have denoted him as the greatest Canadian poet distinguish in what respect or respects he is so to be designated, the distinction is unmeaning. Carman is not the greatest Canadian poet in versatility of genius, variety of themes and forms, and perfection of technic or craftsmanship. He is surpassed by Roberts in versatility of genius and variety of forms. He is not the greatest Canadian nature-colorist or impressionistic word-painter in verse. There again Roberts surpasses him. Carman is not the greatest Canadian poetic interpreter of nature in Canada and of the Canadian spirit. Lampman is his equal, and, in one respect, his superior. Nor is Carman the greatest Canadian artist in narrative verse. Pauline Johnson and Edward W. Thomson surpass him. Further, Carman is not, save in a special sense, the greatest Canadian melodist. Pauline Johnson and Marjorie Pickthall have a more dulcet singing lilt and sensuous music. Finally, Carman is not the greatest, that is, the nearest to perfection, in technical artistry, of Canadian poets. Duncan Campbell Scott is his unrivalled master in that respect.

Yet indubitably Bliss Carman is the very foremost of Canadian-born poets. In Carman’s genius and poetry there are an originality and power and beauty and distinction that, first, make him unique amongst Canadian poets and that, secondly, compel the critical world to admit that he is the only Canadian-born poet who, whenever he is the supreme lyrist and the inspired technician in verse that he can be, has made a distinct, singular, and enduring contribution of his own to English or world poetry, and, on that account, is in the direct line of the Chaucerian succession. Whenever, that is, Carman excels in sheer genius, and as a nature-painter, nature-interpreter, story-teller in verse, melodist and technician, he surpasses each and all his Canadian compatriot poets at their best in their specialty. They each excel in one or two powers. Carman excels in all their combined powers, to the maximal degree. Moreover, none of his Canadian compatriot poets is his equal or even rival in originality and power of imagination, in sheer vision of the metaphysical meanings of nature and existence, in intensity of passion, in romantic atmosphere, in satiric humor, in free and potent diction and inevitable imagery, and in light or ecstatic lyricism. So great is Carman as a poet of the Sea that he has made a distinct contribution in this genre to English poetry. As a lyric poet of romantic and Spiritual Love, he has no superior, if even an equal, in Canada or America, and few in any other country. His Elegies are lovely lyric memorials of the Spirit. His poems of sheer joy of living or of satiric humor have no prototypes. His symbolistic or so-called mystical poetry, as an interpretation of the universe and as a means of solace and serenity in the midst of seeming Satanic triumphs, are as noble and grateful to the spirit and as sustaining as the breath of life from his own Maritime sea-winds and woodsy zephyrs. But when he sings most freely and liltingly, then is Bliss Carman the supreme melodist, and Chaucer is heard again in the land, and the troubadours, and all those upon whom Nature bestowed the gift of verbal bel canto.

While, then, it is the challenging quality of Bliss Carman’s poetry, as if he were directly of the strain of Chaucer, Burns, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Masefield, and as if his verse, like theirs, stood, as it does, upright on its own feet, that gives it its first and most important general distinction, it possesses other distinctions, one of which, namely, its special verbal music, of Keltic origin and form, is unique in Canadian poetry and rare in modern English poetry. It is these particular distinctions which stamp Bliss Carman as an extraordinary creative poet and melodist, and as the one Canadian poet who has a right to an indisputable place beside the finer and more compelling poets of England and the United States. These claims may be abundantly substantiated by a study of the texts of what may be called the Popular Collected Poems of Bliss Carman, namely, Ballads and Lyrics and Later Poems (with an appreciation by R. H. Hathaway), and by a study of such interpretative commentaries as Odell Shepard’s Bliss Carman and H. D. C. Lee’s Bliss Carman: A Study of Canadian Poetry, together with Hathaway’s ‘Appreciation’ in Later Poems by Bliss Carman. In this chapter Carman is considered and treated from the three sides in which he is unique amongst Canadian poets: namely, as, in the light of the history of English poetry, a singularly original and inventive Vowel Melodist; as a Nature-Poet whose impressionism and ‘readings’ of earth differ from those of Roberts and Lampman; and as a Philosophical or Mystical Poet who perceives in Beauty the only manifestation of the union of the Real and the Ideal and regards it as an intuitive proof of the Supremacy of Good in the universe.

However well-intentioned the attempts to divide the poetical activity of Bliss Carman into Periods, on the whole they are not pedagogically successful. Three Periods have been remarked—a so-called Romantic Period, represented by Low Tide on Grand Pré and the Songs of Vagabondia series; a Transcendental Period, represented by Behind the Arras, subtitled ‘A Book of the Unseen,’ which indicates its mood, and The Green Book of the Bards; and a Synthetic Period, in which his appreciation of the beauty of earth is not contrasted with the evanescence and the mystery of life, but in which there is a joyous acceptance of both. This Synthetic Period is represented by The Book of the Myths, Sappho, and April Airs. Yet in each volume, from Low Tide on Grand Pré (1893) to April Airs (1916), there is in varying degree the same ‘touch of manner,’ the same ‘hint of mood,’ the same occupation both with the beauty of earth and with the mystery and meaning of existence and the universe. Really there is no development of Carman’s genius and art—no periods of growth—after his first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré, except an increase in ready mastery, not of technic, but of clear expression of thought and meaning. Some of his finest verbal melody and some of his most compelling lines are in his earlier volumes, and with them also embodiments of his essential thought about life and the universe. But we do note, in each succeeding volume, a gradual decrease in Carman’s sense of world-pain (weltschmerz), and an increase in clearer expression of his thought about the mystery of life. To use musical language: in his earlier books Carman heard discords in the universe. They were really not discords but dissonances. As he grew older and reflected more philosophically, he was able to resolve these dissonances; and as he gradually achieved this, the more he combined, with clarity and surety, his fine natural powers of lyrical utterance with, to use Meredith’s phrase, his ’reading of earth,’ his intuitions of the ultimate supremacy of the Good.

Since he fully recovered from the illness which attacked him about 1919, Carman has entered on what promises to be his greatest, most constructive period, the keynote of which is his characteristic lyrical utterance in the expressing of a confident synthesis of Sight and Faith, of Beauty and Goodness. It is all the same verbal melody and the same love of beautiful sound, color, and form as in Low Tide on Grand Pré, but all the felt dissonances that existed for thought have been resolved, and now existence is filled with an ineluctable joy and a tender peace which are a pure gain for the spirit. The poems which represent the new Carman or the Carman of the new and final period exist, for the most part in manuscript, though a few have been published fugitively. We quote one of these new fugitive poems, Vestigia (1921), in which the notable qualities, aside from verbal melody and color, are a confident synthesis of Sight and Faith, Earth and God, and absolute simplicity and clarity of the diction and images:—

I took a day to search for God

And found Him not. But as I trod

By rocky ledge, through woods untamed,

Just where one scarlet lily flamed,

I saw his footprints in the sod.

Then suddenly, all unaware,

Far off in the deep shadows where

A solitary hermit thrush

Sang through the holy twilight hush—

I heard his voice upon the air.

And even as I marvelled how

God gives us Heaven here and now,

In a stir of wind that hardly shook

The poplar leaves beside the brook—

His hand was light upon my brow.

At last with evening as I turned

Homeward, and thought what I had learned

And all that there was still to probe—

I caught the glory of His robe

Where the last flowers of sunset burned.

Back to the world with quickening start

I looked and longed for any part

In making saving Beauty be . . . .

And from that kindling ecstasy

I knew God dwelt within my heart.

Of the manuscript poems belonging to this fourth period, I may merely mention the titles, as, for instance, Wa-wa, a mystical interpretation of the wild-goose honk, The Truce of the Manitou, and, above all, Shamballah, which is the perfection of Carman’s mystical interpretations—a poem of

The City under the Star,

Where the Sons of the Fire-Mist gather,

And the keys of all mystery are.

Fugitive poems representing this final period are The Mirage of the Plain, The Rivers of Canada, Kaleedon Road, and Vancouver, which contain mystical interpretations ’suggested,’ as Carman has said, ‘by the vast spaces of Canada.’ Apropos of the mood, manner, and interpretations of Nature in this period, Carman has observed: ‘All Nature poems are more or less mystical.’

What we really observe, then, in Carman’s genius and poetry is not genuine, clearly marked Periods, but rather Periodicities—waves of poetical activity, in which the crest of the wave is either lyrical ecstasy, the singing of the Beauty of Earth for its own sake and out of love of beautiful sound and color, or mystical ‘readings’ of Earth, transcendental interpretations of the meaning of the life of sentient and spiritual creatures, but below the crest of the wave are poems of transcendentalism if the crest is lyrical naturalism or poems of lyrical naturalism if the crest is transcendental. Yet in these periodicities there is a sure and well-demarcated development, not of technic, but of clarity of thought and expression—from that earlier so-called mysticism which was only mystification, to the genuine mysticism which is the immediate intuition of God in the universe and especially the immediate perception of the oneness of the spirit of Nature with that of Man and of God. But all the while, as the development goes on, even to his final period, Carman remains the superb melodist and colorist. So that Bliss Carman must be regarded as at once both the most lyrical of Canadian philosophical poets and the most philosophical of Canadian lyrical poets.

Carman’s prototype in sheer singing quality is Chaucer—the first, freest, and sweetest of the English poets, whom Tennyson apostrophized in avian metaphor as a ‘warbler.’ So in the same way Carman sings with the natural lilt, abandon, and melodiousness of the lark and linnet. He is a ‘warbler.’ It is an irrelevant criticism to say, as has been said, that Carman ‘sings on and on,’ frequently in his earlier poems, out of his own ecstasy over hearing the beautiful verbal melody he is making, whether a given poem makes sense in thought or not. He is not ecstatically singing on and on from love of beautiful sound, but because he cannot clearly express what he means in his thinking; and so we hear the singing as if it were the accompaniment to the thought which we cannot, any more than he, articulate. But how lovely, how melodious the accompaniment!

As a matter of truth, however, we shall get at the secret of Carman’s unique singing quality if we ask what is the method of his warbling. It is in his method that he differs from all modern English poets and has made an original and distinct contribution to English lyrical poetry. This is the fact: Bliss Carman is a belated troubadour or 16th century English lutanist or Keltic harpist. Lutanists and harpists created the text for their songs; and the prime end was melody or at least melodiousness. The ultimate element or unit in verbal melody with the lutanists or harpists was the word, and the core of the word, for melodic purposes, was the vowel. Poets arose in England, but more especially in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland, who aimed to make the melody of unaccompanied poetry imitate the melody of the lutanists’ and the harpists’ accompanied verses. The lutanists, harpists, and melodic poets, who aimed to imitate music, passed, and new generations of poets substituted metrical and stanzaic structure and alliterative arrangement of consonants for the old vowel-melody. The unit in English poetry, after the 16th century, became the line, not the word or the vowel in the word.

It is the chief glory of Bliss Carman, as a creative poet, that he brought back into English poetry the word and the pure unimpeded singing vowel, with the same intent as the Italian bel canto composers, as the unit in verbal melody. Some critics have made considerable point of the fact that Carman is a ‘great’ poet, in spite of the fact that he employs chiefly the rhymed octosyllabic line or measure, or iambic tetrameters and trimeters, with trochaic and anapaestic substitutions and other metrical mechanics for variety. The truth is that Carman wrote his poetry as a melodist, not as a technical musician; that he aimed to sing, like the lark or linnet, not to compose, like a musician. His measures were chosen, whenever he meant to be lyrical, because they were singing measures and his diction was chosen for the melody inside the words, for the ‘vowel-chime’ in them. In Carman’s lyrical poetry the word determines the line, or rather the word alone counts, and the line is insignificant. Dulcet vowel-melody or delicate vowel-harmony is Bliss Carman’s chief original contribution to Canadian and English poetry. Examples are innumerable. Consider the clarion tones in this line, which as a line by itself is perfect:—

The resonant far-listening morn.

There are no closed vowels in those words, and the word ’resonant’ is precisely resonant in vowel-melody and harmony. It is the open vowels that count melodically in this stanza:—

But in the yule, O Yanna,

Up from the round dim sea

And reeling dungeons of the fog,

I am come back to thee!

What a superb singing line is the first, and what booming sonorities are in the eloquently descriptive third line, ‘the reeling dungeons of the fog.’ Repeat it orally (for with Carman poetry is an oral art) and all the melody will be found in the vowels. And what bright vowel-melody resides in the single words of this line:—

The glad indomitable sea!

For an example of just the kind of vowel-melody, dulcet and delicate, which is of the lutanist or harpist order, all in the words per se, not in the lines as lines, consider this stanza:—

A golden flute in the cedars,

A silver pipe in the swales,

And the slow large life of the forest

Wells back and prevails.

This is the music or melody which Pan must have piped and with which he hushed to peace the wild-creatures of the ancient forests—it is silvery, pastoral reed music, and in verbal reed melody Carman is a modern Pan.

Carman can make beautiful line-melody, line-harmony when he wishes to do so; and he is a master of alliteration, quite the peer of Tennyson or Swinburne. For instance, these alliterative lines:—

The gold languorous lilies of the glade.

• • • •

Burying, brimming, the building billows.

• • • •

Silent with frost and floored with snow.

• • • •

And softer than sleep her hands first sweep

• • • •

And down the sluices of the dawn.

• • • •

And like green clouds in opal calms.

• • • •

Behind her banners burns the crimson sun.

• • • •

While down the soft blue-shadowed aisles of snow

Night, like a sacristan with silent step,

Passes to light the tapers of the stars.

Carman is as adept as Kipling in employing, for the sake of verbal music and variety of rhythm, such devices as shifting of accent, slurring, and elision, and, further, he invents beautiful measures, as, for instance, the dimeter of Ilicet, or the six-line stanza of The White Gull (Shelley):—

O captain of the rebel host,

Lead forth and far!

Thy toiling troopers of the night

Press on the unavailing fight;

The sombre field is not yet lost,

With thee for star.

Carman is also singularly adept in the use of what may be called musical onomatopœia. In this quality his ear is specially sensitive to pianissimi in Nature, the soughing of the winds, the sighings and whisperings of the zephyrs, the fifings and murmurings of the insects (with Carman the crickets always ‘fife’ and the bees ‘murmur’), and, to use his own phrase, all the ‘tiny multitudinous sound’ of rustling leaves, dancing grasses, crooning brooks, tinkling rain, which make the instrumentation of the Toy Symphony of Nature:—

Outside, a yellow maple tree,

Shifting upon the silvery blue

With tiny multitudinous sound,

Rustled to let the sunlight through.

It is, however, in the use of rhythmical onomatopœia that Carman is even more inventively masterly than in mere sound imitation. An outstanding example of the imitation of the ‘fife and drum’ marching rhythm, with an exact imitation of the fife in the word ‘whistle’ and of the rattle-roll of the drum in the word ‘rallied,’ is Carman’s lovely nature-lyric Daisies, second stanza:—

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune

I saw the white daisies go down to the sea

• • • •

The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell,

The orioles whistled them out of the wood;

And all of their singing was, ‘Earth, it is well!’

And all of their dancing was, ‘Life, thou art good!’

Always, from his very first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré, to his latest, April Airs, published almost a quarter of a century later, Bliss Carman has been the master troubadour, the master melodist, constructing his melody chiefly by an exquisite but subtle use of vowel-tones, vowel-harmonies. But never has he aimed to be the consciously meticulous technical musician, laboring at involved and intricate metrical and stanzaic structure, assonance and alliteration. His verbal melody is in the word and vowel as his ear naturally picked these up from everyday speech, and is just as spontaneous and simple. His melody did not come by ‘working at’ it in the study. We may often note Roberts, and even Lampman, assiduously busied with constructing the perfect musical line. Carman’s melody wells out of him in the ‘great outdoors’—natural and spontaneous as the lark’s or linnet’s. By virtue, then, of this spontaneous lyrical melodiousness of Carman’s poetry, a melodiousness newly based on the vowel-tones and harmonies in words, simple words of actual humanized speech, and not on modern intricacies of line or stanzaic structure and consonantal systems, Bliss Carman is one of the master-melodists of English poetry.

Thus as a melodist in general. Canada, however, has produced no poet who is Carman’s equal as a lyrist of the Sea and of Love. It is indubitable that he has made a distinct and superb contribution to the authentic Sea Poetry in the English language. His sea ‘speech’ is the native speech of his soul, the expression of an innate personal sympathy with the moods, powers, and deeds of the Sea, a sympathy which is, in Carman, an identity of the spirit in Nature with the spirit in the Man or Poet. Melodiously he declares this personal sympathy and identity with the Sea in his autobiographical poem, A Son of the Sea:—

I was born for deep-sea faring;

I was bred to put to sea;

Stories of my father’s daring

Filled me at my mother’s knee.

I was sired among the surges;

I was cubbed beside the foam;

All my heart is in its verges,

And the sea-wind is my home.

All my boyhood, far from vernal

Bourns of being, came to me

Dream-like, plangent, and eternal

Memories of the plunging sea.

No English poet of distinction so often even mentions the Sea or creates such Homeric epithets for the Sea as does Bliss Carman. A catalogue of Carman’s original epithets for the Sea, if complete, would be a poetic phenomenon by itself. Some of the most apt and fetching may be noted—‘the hollow sea,’ ‘the curving sea,’ ‘the old gray sea,’ ‘the plunging sea,’ ‘the shambling sea,’ ‘the brightening sea,’ ‘the troubling sea,’ ‘the lazy sea,’ ‘the open sea,’ ‘the heaving sea,’ ‘the eternal sea,’ ‘the ruthless noisy sea,’ ‘the misty sea,’ ‘the ancient ever-murmuring sea,’ and that supreme achievement in English poetry, Carman’s inevitable, perfect line:—

The glad indomitable sea!

For lovers of sea poetry Carman’s Ballads of Lost Haven: A Book of the Sea (1897) is a genuinely unique anthology by itself—‘one hundred pages,’ as a London critic has said, ‘of salt sea without a trace of Kipling, and yet having a sea-flavor as unmistakable as his, and with a finer touch—with less repetition, less of mere technicality, and a more varied human interest.’ For Carman the Sea is a human personality. Its moods and deeds embrace all the contradictory moods and deeds of human beings. But whatever mood or deed of the Sea is expressed by Carman, he does it with pure and perfect lyricism. Carman is said to have no gifts for spiritual portraiture. Yet what English or American poet has matched Carman’s portrait of the Sea as a shambling, fierce, grim, rollicking, burly, cruel, crooked, old man, and at the same time created such a brave and lilting song of the Sea, as in The Gravedigger, with its inimitable burly refrain?—

Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,

He makes for the nearest shore;

And God, who sent him a thousand ship,

Will send him a thousand more;

But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,

And shoulder them in to shore,—

Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,

Shoulder them in to shore.

When a poet gives us such realistic portraiture and such inimitable lyrical melody and rhythm as does Carman in The Gravedigger, it is a futile criticism to find fault with his sea poems on the side of lack of dramatic elements, and weakness in narrative, since the strength of the poems was meant by the poet to be their inherent passional intensity and melody. Carman’s sea poems were not meant to be strictly dramatic narrative tales of the sea, but to be ballads or songs of the romance of the sea. We may remark, as a general observation, that as a balladist of the Sea, Carman does not aim at dramatic narration, but at singing, with the freedom and picturesque vernacular and technical slang of sailors, as they would sing their chanteys, the romance, happy or grim, of the sea. As songs, his so-called ballads of the Sea are a supreme achievement in verbal melody, the glory of Canadian sea poetry, and one of the glories of English poetry.

As the master melodist or musician of the Sea, Carman brilliantly achieved, but he is equally the master melodist or musician of Romantic and Spiritual Love. His Love Poetry is best represented in Songs of the Sea Children (1904) and in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1904). Earlier he had written lightly, as it were flirtingly, about love. But in Songs of the Sea Children, while he wrote as daintily or delicately as in his earlier poems dealing with the passion, he has at last realized the spiritual intent and meaning of pure devoted love, and has been moved deeply and inspired by the passion. Though copyright restrictions forbid full quotation, the spirit or mood or temper, and the pure melody, of Songs of the Sea Children may be gathered from this single stanza:—

O wind and stars, I am with you now;

And ports of day, Good-bye!

When my captain Love puts out to sea,

His mariner am I.

The rhymeless stanzas of the love poems in Sappho are high-minded, but are a poetical genre by themselves. They are a tour de force in ‘poetical restoration,’ and, perhaps for the first time, we actually observe Carman at work in the study as the technical verbal artist and musician. They have a technical perfection, and a quiet beauty of their own, and though there is in them a large degree of spontaneity, naturally they are not informed with the characteristic Carman lyrical ecstasy and melody. They are, as love poems, perfect as the love poetry of Sappho was fleckless with a Greek perfection of form and grace.

Bliss Carman is not properly called a nature-interpreter. To understand his point of view we must contrast his with that of Lampman. For Lampman Nature is one kind of being and Man is another—two separated entities—and Man may only commune with Nature by ‘reciprocal sympathy.’ So Lampman goes out to his Canadian maples and elms, fields and streams, and talks to them, as if they were human, and can sympathize with him. This is all simulated imaginative sympathy and communion on the poet’s part. The maples and elms, fields and streams, are really dumb, and the poet does but attribute to them what speech or answer he wants back from them for the solace of his spirit. Always with Lampman, Nature and Man are two. He does but humanize Nature for his own purposes, by conscious, deliberate objective symbolism.

Carman, on the other hand, is a spiritual monist. Nature and Man are not two. There is, in Carman’s poetical psychology and metaphysic, no mind and matter. The whole universe is spiritual through and through, and the vital spirit which is in Nature is the same spirit which is in Man and which is God. The universe is wholly spirit. We may call this ‘the higher pantheism;’ but even in pantheistic doctrine, matter does exist as alien to mind or spirit. Carman has no such attitude. He differs from Lampman in conceiving himself as able, by spirit or will, to identify himself personally with Nature. This power of personal identification with Nature begets personal sympathy; and the communion which the poet has with Nature is a ‘heart-to-heart talk,’ for spirit with spirit can meet. This new philosophy of personal identity of the human spirit with Nature is expressly declared by Carman:—

I blend with the soft shadows

Of the young maple trees,

And mingle in the rain-drops

That shine along the eaves . . .

No glory is too splendid

To house this soul of mine,

No tenement too lowly

To serve it for a shrine.

But specially to be noted is the fact that Carman does not stand apart from Nature, from the woods, and flowers, and hills, and streams, and become an interpreter of Nature’s moods and emotions. Nay, the poet enters into the tree or flower and becomes one with their soul or spirit, their body becomes his body, and their voice, as heard in his poetry, is but his voice articulating to the world what they are unable to articulate. Nature, in Carman’s poetry, is become vocal; and the poet himself is her very Voice. Metaphors in the nature-poetry of Carman are not metaphors at all; they are direct experiences of spirit:—

Just where one scarlet lily flamed,

I saw His footprint in the sod.

• • • •

I caught the glory of His robe

Where the last fires of sunset burned.

This personal identity of the human spirit with the spirit in (or of) Nature, this personal sympathy with the poet’s kin in wild Nature, and this taking on as a body the matter and form of a tree or flower or bird or other creature of Nature, and becoming vocal for them, and thus uttering their thoughts, and feelings, and emotions, is new in Nature poetry, and original with Bliss Carman. It is not Greek; it is not English; but it is Canadian and unique. It is Carman’s most notable contribution to world poetry.

This spiritual monism in Carman’s poetical attitude to Nature explains the seemingly strange commingling of songs of pure delight in the beauty and bounty of Nature and of joy in existence with poems which are the expression of a poet who has ‘kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ It explains such contradictions as the joyousness of some poems and the metaphysical questings of others in Carman’s From the Green Book of the Bards (1903). It explains, in particular, why Carman, who, when he wishes, can surpass Roberts as a nature-colorist and whose poetry is actually rich in idyllic impressionism, never seems to set out, with conscious intent, to be a nature-colorist or word-painter for the sake of sheer impressionism. No other Canadian poet can make or has made such a brilliant use of primary colors or such an exquisite use of delicate tints and evanescent play of light on color as has Bliss Carman. In all his nature description or impressionism, Carman’s aim has been two-fold—first, ‘to better the world with beauty,’ and to compel appreciation of Nature wherever her sweet or solacing spirit abides, to reveal the haunt where Nature affords spiritual communion and refreshment. His aim, in short, is to have men go out and meet Mother Nature. To effect this, not to show how flashily she is dressed, Carman paints her face and garb sometimes brilliantly, sometimes with a grey-eyed loveliness. Carman’s poetry of Nature is only Nature herself ‘calling’ to each vagabond to rise and go out to meet her, ‘wherever the way may lead.’ This two-fold aim of Carman’s nature-painting or poetic impressionism is compellingly expressed in A Vagabond Song:—

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—

Touch of manner, hint of mood;

And my heart is like a rhyme,

With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry

Of bugles going by.

And my lonely spirit thrills

To see the frosty asters on the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;

We must rise and follow her,

When from every hill of flame

She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

The quiet or subdued call of Nature is winsomely uttered in The Deserted Pasture where

The old gray rocks so friendly seem,

So durable and brave . . .

There in the early springtime

The violets are blue,

And adder-tongues in coats of gold

Are garmented anew . . .

And there October passes

In gorgeous livery,—

In purple ash and crimson oak,

And golden tulip-tree.

Though the keynote of Carman’s poetry is Joy in the universe, he is no mere hedonist. The beauty he loves is uranian, the Joy he aims to get from Beauty and to share with the world through his poetry is spiritual joy. What he has always been sure of was that the dissonances in the world and in existence were resolvable, but he himself gradually had to resolve those dissonances, and win full and complete joy in Nature, in Love, and in Religion. If we call him a Philosophical Poet, we must do so only after we understand that his belief in the supremacy of the Good or of God is intuitively derived. Carman is not philosophical by virtue of having employed the faculty of relational thinking for the attainment of his belief in the moral meaning of life and the universe. He perceived Beauty in the world, and, after much obfuscation of the immediate meaning of Beauty, Carman at length perceived it as a symbol and pledge of the union of the Real and the Ideal. Only in the sense that Beauty is a symbol of perfection does Carman regard Nature as a symbol of God; and only in the sense that God, like Beauty, can be directly or immediately perceived, is Carman a mystical poet. If there is one thing of indubitable ill that science and philosophy have accomplished, it is their dogmatizing that because science and metaphysics with their categories cannot find out God as an actuality, much less can the senses. The pseudo-mystics took science and philosophy at their word, and said the only way to find God is by the use of the religious imagination. Whereupon they so strained the imaginative faculty to achieve what they called mystical union with God that their mysticism only resulted in mystification. Science, with its categories, only cast a veil over Truth, over the face of God. Pseudo-mysticism only placed an opaque void between God and the Sons of God called Men.

It is because Carman was in his early manhood caught on the wheels of agnostic science, transcendental metaphysics and pseudo-mysticism that in his earlier poems this lover of Beauty sings entrancingly of Beauty and winsomely paints her dwelling-places, but while doing this he also mystifies his readers with regard to the meaning of his poetry. The music is all accompaniment to something that Carman himself does not in his own soul clearly understand. Hence the wistfulness and melancholia observable in many of Carman’s earlier poems; hence his sad engagement with the problem of death, as in Pulvis et Umbra and The Eavesdropper.

Carman could not have written Vestigia at that period. For that poem is based on an immediate sense-intuition of God in Nature and in the heart of Man. It was his gradual negation of the categories of science and metaphysics and vacuous pseudo-mysticism, and an instinctive return to an intuitive perception of the meaning of Beauty in Nature and Love and Religion that cleared his vision, and gave him a sure and clear understanding of the supremacy of the Good or God, and that thus won for him triumphant spiritual Faith, Joy in existence, and Peace with God. This is the true mysticism, the true union with God.

It is an interesting excursion in spiritual history to trace Carman’s gradual escape from ‘mystical mystification’ into the triumphant faith of true, earth-born, sense-perceived mysticism, as in Behind the Arras (1895), By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies (1898), Last Songs from Vagabondia (1901), From the Book of Myths (1902), From the Book of Valentines (1905), and Collected Poems (1904). It was a ‘mystified’ Carman who wrote Pulvis et Umbra. It was a truly mystical Carman, possessed of a triumphant faith who a full twenty years afterwards wrote Te Deum, the concluding verses of which follow:—

So I will pass through the lovely world, and partake of beauty to feed my soul.

With earth my domain and growth my portion, how should I sue for a further dole?

In the lift I feel of immortal rapture, in the flying glimpse I gain of truth,

Released is the passion that sought perfection, assuaged the ardor of dreamful youth.

The patience of time shall teach me courage, the strength of the sun shall lend me poise.

I would give thanks for the autumn glory, for the teaching of earth and all her joys.

Her fine fruition shall well suffice me; the air shall stir in my veins like wine;

While the moment waits and the wonder deepens, my life shall merge with the life divine.

The immediate sense-perception of God through Beauty and the acceptance of Beauty as a factual proof of the union of the Soul with Nature, of the Real with the Ideal, and thus a proof of the supremacy of Good in the universe—this is the formula of Carman’s philosophical ‘reading’ of Nature and Existence. Always a poet of fine and assured artistry and of lyrical eloquence and spiritual power, Bliss Carman stands alone amongst Canadian poets as a verbal melodist, as a lyrist of love and the sea, and as a mystical interpreter of the moral and spiritual meaning of nature and existence. As an original verbal melodist and poetic impressionist and as an unexampled creator of songs of the sea, Bliss Carman has added significantly to English and to world poetry and to him, therefore, we may apply the distinction Great.

Quotations in this chapter, with the exception of a few lines, are from Later Poems, and from Ballads and Lyrics, by Bliss Carman, (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).

CHAPTER X

Duncan Campbell Scott

INFLUENCES ON HIS WORK—OLD WORLD CULTURE—AUSTERE INTELLECTUALISM—MUSIC AND PAINTING—ASSOCIATION WITH LAMPMAN—SCOTT, CARMAN, AND LAMPMAN COMPARED—INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH POETS—TECHNICAL EXCELLENCIES—REVELATION OF THE INDIAN HEART—MYSTICAL SYMBOLISM.

In the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott there is more and finer expression of the pageantry of Nature in Canada and of the essential Canadian spirit than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. But, paradoxically, the genius and poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott are also more informed with an Old World culture and art than are the genius and verse of any other Canadian poet. Unless the reader and the critic of D. C. Scott’s poetry first realize that the mind and art of the poet are a product of Canada and of the Old World, a rare commingling of Canadian and European cultures, they will fail to understand how he is at once the least prolific and, to give him his outstanding distinction, the most exquisite artist of Canadian poets, not excepting Lampman and Bliss Carman. In his poem Frost Magic, Scott has written the formula of his own exquisite artistry:—

Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.

That line, however, rather distinguishes the characteristic excellence of his poetry on the technical side. It does not disengage the quality which makes him unique amongst Canadian poets. His differentia—the quality or power which distinguishes his poetic genius and craftsmanship from the mind and the art of all other Canadian poets—is Style. Duncan Campbell Scott is the one Canadian poet of whose verse it may be said that, after the manner of the English tradition, it possesses Style. Lampman’s and Carman’s, Pauline Johnson’s and Marjorie Pickthall’s, poetry each possess a style. But in their cases the style is imitable; it is a manner, original or ingenious no doubt, but not an essential and inevitable expression, of their poets’ minds or personalities. Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry has style, quite as individualistic as the others’, but it is an essential expression of his personality and character, and is therefore inimitable, or like the man himself, is in ‘the grand manner’—which is not at all a manner but just that subtle spiritual quality which distinguishes individuals in species. The genius and poetry or art of Duncan Campbell Scott, then, impose on us a special and somewhat recondite study in literary psychology.

The key to Duncan Campbell Scott’s genius and poetry is this singular, if not anomalous, spiritual fact that his Art always, corresponds with, and never contradicts, his Thought and Life. In this ‘tri-unity’ of complete ‘correspondence’ of Thought, Life, and Art, Scott’s analogue is Matthew Arnold. The English poet was, above all things, the austere intellectualist. So, too, Duncan Campbell Scott is the austere intellectualist. But, unlike Arnold, Scott’s ‘austerities and rejections’ are not those of the substance of poetry but of its temper and technic. While it is true that Scott is the remorseless idealist as man and active citizen, and while the light that chiefly plays on his poetry is the ‘dry light’ of the intellect or imaginative reason, it is equally true that in his heart there is the warm fire of love of humanity and Nature and all the humanizing arts, and that the dry intellectual light which most notably illumines his poetry is colored, at times delicately or subtly, at times brilliantly, at other times magically, with the substance and color of Nature in Canada and of modern music and painting. As in the man and citizen, as in his Thought and Life, there is a high plane of refined and serene vision, feeling, and deed, so in his poetic Art and Style the outstanding qualities are serene Dignity and exquisite Beauty. It is always a manly and refined art; and its sensuous Beauty is made spiritual by sincerity, delicacy or nobility of thought and by imaginative truth. Never in it is there sentimentality, or vulgarity, but always humane beauty and dignity which derive from delicacy of spiritual vision and sincerity, and from restraint in technical artistry. As an example of these excellences in Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry—of its dignity and beauty, refinement and restraint—we quote this surpassing compliment to woman’s spiritual loveliness and charm, Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Gagnon (from Scott’s Beauty and Life):—

Beauty is ambushed in the coils of her

Gold hair—honey from the silver comb

Drips and the clustered under-tone is warm

As beech leaves in November—the light slides there

Like minnows in a pool—slender and slow.

A glow is ever in her tangled eyes,

Surprise is settling in them, never to be caught;

Thought lies there lucent but unsolvable,

Her curved mouth is tremulous yet still,

Her will holds it in check; were it to sleep

One moment—that white guardian will of hers—

Words would brim over in a wild betrayal,

Fall sweet and tell the secret of her charm,

Harm would befall the world, Beauty would fly

Into the shy recesses of the wood—

Be seen no more of mortals, be a myth

Remembered by a few who might recall

A nerveless gesture, a frail color, a faint stress,

Some vestige of a vanished loveliness.

This ‘strong and delicate art’ of Scott’s was itself the outcome of years of training in delicate perception or visioning of Nature and the human Spirit and in the practice of spiritual refinement and restraint in art or technical craftsmanship; and also of assiduous cultivation in the technical appreciation of modern music and painting. Born in 1862, Duncan Campbell Scott did not publish verse till he was some years past his majority, and did not publish his first book of poems till he was thirty-one years of age (The Magic House and Other Poems, 1893). For more than forty years he has been in the Civil Service of Canada, and for some years has been Deputy Superintendent General (a title and function equivalent to Deputy Minister) of the Department of Indian Affairs of the Dominion. Archibald Lampman was a contemporary and a close friend of Scott. Lampman was a student of the poetry of Keats and much influenced by the verse of the English poet. In 1894 Scott married an accomplished lady, who was a violin virtuoso. He had published fugitive poems in magazines before 1893. (His poetry was later the subject of a very complimentary critical appreciation by William Archer in Poets of the Younger Generation). He had finished his academic studies at the public schools and at Stanstead College by his seventeenth year, and had then entered the Civil Service of Canada. So that the three influences on his mind and art are, first, that which began with his friendship with Lampman; secondly, his marriage with a cultured musician, and, thirdly, his long tenure of office in the Department of Indian Affairs of the Dominion of Canada. To his association with Lampman, rather than to his teachers at school and college, must be attributed his reading of the English poets and the cultivation of poetic technics. It is not until after his marriage and after his long association with certain Canadian painters that we find in his poetry any ‘color’ from music and painting. His connection with the Department of Indian Affairs resulted in those lyrics and legends which have for themes the Indian, the French-Canadian, and the Beauty of Nature. Lampman as co-student of the English poets, especially Keats or the idyllic impressionists, and as a co-worker in creative poetry, especially the poetry of Nature, was the most potent or subtle influence on Scott. This, however, was an influence ab extra. The most important inner influence on Scott was his own intellectual rigorism and austere respect for chaste or faultless craftsmanship. But for this rare virtue, which was innate in him, Scott would or might have been a more prolific poet, and might have been a close imitator of the English impressionists or Lampman himself as a nature-poet, or of Bliss Carman as a lyrist of Nature and of Love.

There is no denying that Lampman had considerable influence, negative and positive, on Scott, and that the negative influence was the more important. At any rate, by choice Scott decided to be a poet who, while caring as much for Nature as did Lampman and Carman, would care supremely for refined perfection of technical artistry in his verse. It is easy to observe the general differences between Lampman and Carman and Scott in attitudes, and in methods of poetic conception. Lampman is the more subjective, the more interested in his own emotions; Scott is the more objective, disclosing a delight in the object for its own sake or a philosophical interest in humanity and life. Lampman is the more passionate; Scott the more restrained or austere (without being ascetic). Lampman is the more sensuously luscious (though not always); Scott the more lucid and luminously colorful. Carman is the more naturalistically sensuous, and his pigmentation is limited to the pageant of Spring and Autumn; Scott is the more imaginatively sensuous, and paints every phase of the pageantry of Nature in the cycle of the seasons of the whole year. Carman is more a melodist, basing his melody on vowel-chime in words; Scott is more the musician, the technical virtuoso—or, in other words, Carman sings or lilts, like the lark; Scott performs, like the violin or flute virtuoso, though each in his way is as entrancingly lyrical. Carman is the more vernacular in diction, employing considerably the actual speech of everyday life; Scott is the more recondite, and therefore the more meaningful, in diction—‘a word virtuoso.’ But it is not true to say, as has been said, that Scott is a ‘poet’s poet.’ He is, when he aims to be, just as lyrical, musical, colorful, and simple in diction as Lampman or Carman, but he is also more delicate or chaste, more fanciful or imaginative, more lucid or luminous, and always more subtle in diction and exquisite craftsmanship. So that whenever Scott envisages or interprets Nature in Canada and the essential spirit of Canada, more than any other native-born poet he puts more of Canada in it and does it with a singular and surpassing beauty of diction, imagery, music, color, and general technical artistry.

Thus, in outline, as regards the Canadian influences on Scott’s genius and poetry. It is necessary also to note the influence of Old World culture on his genius and art. For, like Bliss Carman’s, there is a challenging quality in Scott’s poetry which compels favorable comparison of it with the verse of English and United States poets of distinction. But while influences of certain English poets are remarked, this does not mean that Scott is derivative in inspiration or method of treatment, but that the influence was either on his ideals of what poetry is or on his meticulous practice of technical artistry in verse; or, in a phrase, their influences have been those of inspiring him to distinction in Style and Technic. In Scott’s noble monody in memory of his father, In the Country Churchyard, the formal structure and the elegiac elevation of thought fill the heart with a serene beauty which discloses the influence of Gray. There is a distinct Wordsworthian spirit and flavor to Above St. Irénée. A haunting beauty, which is of the quality of Tennyson, pervades Scott’s title poem of his first volume, The Magic House. Unmistakable is the influence of Rossetti on the form and tone-color of Scott’s sonnet sequence, In the House of Dreams, but there is enough of Scott’s own originality and ingenuity in inventing Western-world metaphors and in vowel-melody and alliteration to distinguish it as Scott’s or as Canadian or Western. The sonnet form is Rossettian, the mediaeval atmosphere and setting are Pre-Raphaelite, as are also the personages:—

The Lady Lillian knelt upon the sward,

Between the arbor and the almond leaves;

Beyond the barley gathered into sheaves;

A blade of gladiolus, like a sword,

Flamed fierce against the gold; and down toward

The limpid west, a pallid poplar wove

A spell of shadow; through the meadow drove

A deep unbroken brook without a ford.

The first line of the octave is, of course, Rossettian, but the fourth line (‘A blade of gladiolus, like a sword’) is not only Western but the phrase ‘like a sword’ is a common simile with Scott. In the sestet, quite Western is the picture in the second and third lines:—

On the soft grass a frosted serpent lay,

With oval spots of opal over all.

The extraordinary ingenuity of the tone-unisons (not harmonies) in the third line (‘With oval spots of opal over all’) must have struck the fancy of the poet himself, because he repeats the very same vowel unisons, thus turning art into artifice, in Spring on Mattagami (from Via Borealis, 1906, reprinted in Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems, 1916):—

While like spray from the iridescent fountain,

Opal fires weave over all the oval of the lake.

Quite Rossettian, at least in word-painting of fabrics and jewelry, is Scott’s picture of the drowned lady in his poem After a Night of Storm (from Beauty and Life, 1921). It is here quoted, not only to show the Rossettian influence, but also to furnish an example of how Scott works as lovingly and as painstakingly as a lapidary at his technic:—

After a night of storm,

They found her lovely form

They said she was a wondrous thing to see,

All dazzling in her bridal dress,

A miracle of foam and ivory.

Her satin gown was smoothened by the wave,

Her rippled ribbons, all her wandering laces

Set in their places.

Her hands were loosely clasped without a gem,

But clad with mitts of silken net.

Diamonds in the buckles of her shoon

All fairly set,

And one great brooch the color of the moon

Held her lace shawl.

A snood had slipped back from her hair,

Her face was piteous, so fair, so fair,

And gleaming small

Upon her breast there seemed to float

A wedding ring,

Threaded upon a crimson and green string

Around her throat.

Surely there is the art of a poet who has lingered long in the studios and ateliers, watching painters, lapidaries, and designers at work on pigments, precious stones, and delicate fabrics! Again, whose influence do we find or feel in certain parts of Spring on Mattagami and The Anatomy of Melancholy?—is it the influence of Keats or of Swinburne? It might be either in these lines from Spring on Mattagami:—

She would let me steal,—not consenting or denying—

One strong arm beneath her dusky hair,

She would let me bare, not resisting or complying,

One sweet breast so sweet and firm and fair;

Then with the quick sob of passion’s shy endeavor

She would gather close and shudder and swoon away . . .

But there is no mistaking the Swinburnian manner of imaginative color and of alliterative and sensuous music in these lines from The Anatomy of Melancholy (from Beauty and Life):—

Lifted the dragon-guarded lid—and lo!

Faint and uncertain,

Frail rose-ghosts of rose-gardens all in blow

Haunted the room,

The spangled dew, the shell-tints and the moonlight

Lived in the fume. . . .

All the English poets mentioned were, however, not formative influences. At best what seems imitations of the manner of Gray, Tennyson, Rossetti, Keats, Swinburne are but recrudescences, quite unconscious and original, in Scott’s poetry. Scott is a nature-colorist, or impressionist, verbal musician and metrist, romanticist, and philosophical interpreter of Nature and Life on his own account. The real formative influences in Scott’s genius and art were the climate, atmosphere, seasons, and the color and drama of varied Nature and Humanity, of Canada; his compatriot poet of Nature, Lampman, and perhaps Carman, and these three English poets, Browning, Arnold and Meredith; and, finally, his appreciation and knowledge of the technic of music and painting.

Considering his qualities as a verbal musician and metrist, we may note that while Scott employs all the technical artifices of other Canadian and English poets, such as vowel-melody and harmony, alliteration and consonantal changes, beautiful measures and rhythms, he differs from his compatriot poets by informing, as did Browning, the substance of his poetry with an intimate use of the technical language of music, allusions to musical literature, and the aesthetic values of music. The texts of his poems show that he is acquainted technically with the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Grieg, such romantic moderns as Raff and MacDowell and such ultra-moderns as Debussy and Ravel. To anyone who has heard Beethoven’s Fifth (C-minor) Symphony, how arresting and emotionally impressive is the allusion to the principal motive of that great work, in these lines from Scott’s The Fragment of a Letter!—

Then quick upon the dark, like knocks of fate,

There fell three axe-strokes, and then clear, elate

Came back the echoes true to tune and time,

Three axe-strokes—rhythmed and matched in rhyme.

Again: it is not poetical pedantry on Scott’s part when, in his elegiac monody On the Death of Claude Debussy, he rhapsodizes the forms, content, properties, color, and musical structure—‘the mood pictures’—of Debussy’s opera Pellèas et Mélisande, his orchestral prelude L’Après-midi d’un Faune, and his orchestral sketches La Mer. No musical journalist or critic, writing in prose, has done this so summarily and with such vividness and veracity as Scott has accomplished it in twenty-five lines of trimeter and tetrameter unrhymed iambics and trochaics. It is for the sake of illumination and the substance of true poetry that Scott thus finely incorporates his knowledge of music into the text of his poetry. And, as Browning made compelling use of the technical language and meanings of musical structure, notably in his Abt Vogler, so, in the Debussy monody, Scott twice finely affects the spirit and illuminates the substance of his poem with such recondite musical technology as:—

And under all, the pedal-point

Of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean,

Hidden under the mists,

Chanting, infinitely remote,

At the foot of enchanted cliffs.

Then with a turn of illumination,

An enharmonic change of vision,

Death and Debussy

Become France and her heroes,

As if all her sacred heroes

Were in that one form,

Clasped in the bosom of France,

Enfolded with her ideals and aspirations.

The felicity of the phrase ‘the pedal-point of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean’ is apparent to anyone who is musically trained and who immediately hears the sustained stationary bass of the sea reverberating while mingling with its thunder are chords and progressions of wave plashings and wind harmonies, all combining to make the sublime Symphony of the Sea. Still more remarkable and illuminating is Scott’s use of the phrase ‘an enharmonic change . . . . Death and Debussy.’ In music an enharmonic change is but a change in notation of intervals and chords, the sound of them remaining the same. And so how felicitous Scott’s use of ‘an enharmonic change of vision!’—Death, Debussy (who died in the last year of the late war), France, and her war heroes. These terms are all synonymous of ‘one form,’ the spirit of France; there is only an enharmonic change in notation or name.

All this is, on Scott’s part, a brilliant and—as far as Canadian poetry is concerned—a unique achievement in incorporating musical ideas and essences and technics to color, illuminate, and enhance poetic meanings. But Scott surpasses himself in this matter, creating something really unique in poetic literature, in his Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme. It is the most ingeniously conceived poem, if not in English poetry, at least in continental American poetry; and it is a signal illustration of that Old World culture which was remarked as part of the challenging quality in Scott’s poetry. The poem is ‘programmatic’ in scheme, comprising ten sections which are ‘free variations’ on a Nature theme (the yellow of the primrose), inspired by two lines from Henry Vaughan (17th century):—

It was high spring, and all the way

Primrosed, and hung with shade.

The ten sections or ‘variations’ or ‘movements’ of the poem are such niceties in imitation of the forms of music that they should be properly indicated with form or tempi nomenclature, inasmuch as the poet has not done this at the head of each section or ‘variation.’ Variation I is a Prelude (in the old style), the diction of which is Chaucerian or early 15th century English. Variation II is a triple-time Vivace movement (old form of the Scherzo)—a fetching bit of lively ballad-song. Variation III is a Largo movement, noble and impressive. A short Nocturne follows in Variation IV, which is succeeded by a movement that may be styled Dramatico, a short poignant ‘play within a play,’ dealing with the tragedy of romantic love. Variation VI is an Intermezzo, a contrasting change on ‘Youth is a blossom yellow at the edge.’ Variation VII is a Funeral March for fairies, and is fairy-like in imagery and music. By itself it is as pretty and winning a poem for children as any in our language:—

For dead fairies go nowhere,

Leaving nothing in the air.

Their clear bodies are all through

Made of shadow, mixed with dew.

When they change their fairy state,

They, like dew, evaporate.

But we fairies that remain,

The dead fairy’s funeral feign,

Place within a shepherd’s purse

Primrose pollen; for a hearse

Lady-birds we harness up

To an empty acorn cup.

This we bury, deep in moss:—

Then we mourn our grievous loss,

Mourn with music, piercing thin,

Cricket with his mandolin,

Many a hautboy, many a flute,

Played by them you fancy mute . . . .

Variation VIII is a very human Burlesca—a ‘genre picture’ of the comedy of life in Old London, with the ‘motive’ of a socially outcast old woman looking at pots of primroses, labelled ‘Only a quarter,’ and fingering a coin, trying to decide whether to buy primroses or spend it on beer for herself and ‘dear old Jerry.’ The pathos of its realism is relieved by the piquancy of the spiritual portrait of the outcast old woman, in whose soul there is still a fine redeeming loyalty to a real heart-love. Variation IX is a Folk Song in the manner of Burns. It is followed by a Finale, which returns to the Vaughan theme, and closes with its couplet. The Finale is ennobled with tender reflections or philosophical interpretations of the drama of earth and existence, in which Scott beautifully maintains and expresses Serene Faith in the permanence of Beauty and Love. From this magnificent and genuinely unique poem, we quote Variation IX, as an example of Scott’s gifts as a song-writer. If it is in the manner of Burns or an imitation of one of his best-known songs, it is as informed also with the spirit of Herrick, but it is melodious, by vowel-music, alliteration, and rhythm, in a way which was not in the power of Herrick or Burns:—

My Love is like the primrose light

That springs up with the morn,

My Love is like the early night

Before the stars are born.

My Love is like the shine and shade

That ripple on the wood,

(The shadow is her dark green plaid,

The light her silver snood).

They never meet with eager lips,

And mingle in their mirth,

They only touch their finger-tips,

And circle round the earth.

My Love’s so pure, so winsome-sweet,

So dancing with delight,

That I shall love her till they meet,

And all the world is night.

In that song-lyric we find Scott’s characteristic dignity and beauty. But fine and beautiful as it all is, the music of it is not the natural melodiousness of Herrick or Burns, of the lark or linnet, but the music of the adroit technical musician who is a ready master of all the resources of modern versification and metrics.

As regards these technical resources of verbal melody and music—vowel—‘tone-color’ and harmonies, alliteration, assonance, rhythm of line and stanza and other metrical structure, and even what is called in music as such ’suspension’—Scott challenges the art of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold, and the Laureate, Sir Robert Bridges. In one instance, Scott has made the most happy and ingenious use of what musicians call ‘chord suspension’—that is, the retaining in any chord some notes (or tones) of the preceding chord. Scott achieves it finely in this cadence:—

With the thrushes fluting deep, deep,

Deep on the pine-wood hill.

This effect of ‘suspension’ in verbal music is not new in poetry, but it is infrequent in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon people. A melodious example is the opening stanza from Collins’ Ode to Evening:—

If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,

Like thy own solemn springs,

Thy springs, and dying gales.

With Collins the ‘suspension’ is an artifice rather than an inspiration. With Scott, it is, in the example instanced, an inspiration. No other modern poet, certainly no other Canadian or American poet, has Scott’s gift of verbally phrasing, with the utmost concreteness, imitative realism, and charm the ‘notes’ of bird songs and their meaning. In the cadence quoted, the effect of the ‘suspension’—‘deep, deep, deep’—is a happy realistic imitation of the tone-color of the thrush’s flute-like notes, and the triple reiteration affects the imagination with that charm which we distinguish as ‘haunting.’ Carman has not this gift of concreting bird-songs. Carman uses only the general epithet. One bird simply ‘whistles;’ another ‘flutes.’ Carman would have written the lines quoted from Scott not only without ‘suspension’ but also without any concrete, realistic imitation of the thrush’s notes and suspensions, thus:—

With the thrush’s fluting

On the pine-wood hill.

Scott not only makes a masterly and felicitous use of concrete tone-color epithets in phrasing the songs of birds, but he also knows how important and eloquent in music as such, as well as in the songs of birds, are pauses or silences, and uses this appreciation of silences exquisitely. Scott’s artistry in both these respects is finely shown in these lines:—

Hidden above there, half asleep, a thrush

Spoke a few silver words upon the hush—

Then paused self-charmed to silence.

Scott, in truth, on the side of exquisite realistic concretion of the notes and cadences of bird-songs, has the ear of a naturalist—and a better ear than Thoreau or Burroughs. Scott is the ‘bird-musician’ par excellence. Witness the naturalist’s exquisite ear for concrete realism in these lines:—

She would hear the partridge drumming in the distance,

Rolling out his mimic thunder in the sultry noons;

Hear beyond the silver reach in ringing wild persistence

Reel remote the ululating laughter of the loons.

Carman would have stopped with the general word ‘drumming’ in the phrase ‘hear the partridge drumming’—not so Scott; he must realistically concrete the reverberance of the drumming in the phrase ‘rolling out his mimic thunder.’ And what realistic concretion is in the phrases ‘in ringing wild persistence,’ and ‘ululating laughter!’ Carman half hears. Scott hears with the ear of the naturalist and the musician.

Again, only the ear of the naturalist and the musician in Scott could have so exquisitely, veraciously, concreted the ‘note’ of the white-throat sparrow and the lovely cadences of the vireo as in these lines:—

While the white-throat never-resting,

Even in the deepest night rings his crystal bell.

And:—

A vireo turns his slow

Cadence, as if he gloated

Over the last phrase he floated;

Each one he moulds and mellows

Matching it with his fellows:

So have you noted

How the oboe croons,

The canary-throated,

In the gloom of the violoncellos

And bassoons.

Scott knows the ‘voices’ of instruments as intimately as those of birds and other feathered wild creatures. How finely he combines a concrete use of his two-fold musical knowledge in this respect in the following ingenious and original bit of verbal instrumentation:—

And in the two-fold dark I hear the owl

Puff at his velvet horn.

The reader must be a naturalist and, as well, have been a bandsman or orchestral instrumentalist to feel the felicitous realism and descriptive exactitude of Scott’s art, or rather inspiration, in inventing that figure of the owl as a musician. The humor of it also is exquisite.

Scott surpasses all other Canadian poets in a genius for inventing single and double terminal rhymes, and he excels in this gift, without ever dropping to impossible or bizarre rhymes, except when the comedy of life in a subject naturally requires the use of a vulgarism as in this couplet from the Burlesca movement (VIII) of Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme:—

But I keeps my quarter,

Though—perhaps I’d orter.

As ready and expert as Carman with such other musical resources as vowel-melody and harmony, assonance, consonantal tone-color and alliteration, Scott is more lyrically melodious than even Carman. Melodiousness—dulcet melody of combined vowel and consonant and rhythm—is the supreme musical quality of Scott’s poetry. Not Tennyson nor Swinburne have surpassed the melodiousness of this stanza from Scott’s The Lover to His Lass:—

Crown her with stars, this angel of our planet,

Cover her with morning, this thing of pure delight,

Mantle her with midnight till a mortal cannot

See her for the garments of the light and the night.

Matching the melodiousness of Scott’s poetry is its inimitable ‘color-music,’ a combination of sensuous color and alliteration, which quite rivals Swinburne. Scott’s poetry indeed abounds in the most ingenious and sensuously musical alliterative lines in Canadian verse. Outstanding examples are these:—

One sweet breast so sweet and firm and fair.

• • • •

Dark with sordid passion, pale with wringing pain.

• • • •

Shall find amid the ferns the perfect flower.

• • • •

With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.

• • • •

The still, translucent, turquoise-hearted tarns.

• • • •

Rubies, pale as dew-ponds stained with slaughter.

• • • •

See Aldebaran like a red rose clamber.

• • • •

The long, ripe rippling of the grain.

• • • •

Flush and form, honey and hue.

• • • •

Still pools of sunlight shimmering in the sea.

• • • •

Languorously floating by the lotus leaves.

• • • •

Frail rose-ghosts of rose-gardens all in blow.

Such magical melody and color are not artifice or even art with Scott. It is all an inspiration, clear spontaneity of genius. If it were artifice or art it would be confined to mere phrases or lines; but Scott as readily and as magically fills stanzas with the same magical melody and color as in The Voice and The Dusk:—

The slender moon and one pale star,

A rose-leaf and a silver bee

From some fool’s garden blown afar,

Go down the gold deep tranquilly.

There is a sylvan earthly music in the poetry of Carman, Pauline Johnson, and Marjorie Pickthall. But the music of Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry is the melody of a fairy fantasy, an unearthly lyrical melody suffused with color which is imaginative rather than earth-born. Yet its vowel and alliterative melody, rhythmical refinement, and translucent or sensuous color are never unreal but only serve to etherealize real experience, to transport us with exquisite sensation of ineffable, unimagined beauty. To figure him under the title of one of his own most melodious and romantically imaginative poems, Duncan Campbell Scott is The Piper of Arll—and, like Debussy, regales us with:—

The complaint of the wind

In the plane-trees,

The far away pulse of a horn,

Ripples of fairy color,

Rhythms of Spain,

The overtones of cymbals,

The sobs of tormented souls,

Cries of delight and their echoes . . . .

Fauns’ eyes in the vapor,

Flutes of Dionysus,

Haunting his ruined fane,

Veils of rain, quenching the tulip gardens,

Sea-light at the roots of islands . . . .

And under all, the pedal-point

Of the deep based ocean,

Hidden under mists,

Chanting, infinitely remote,