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.
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).
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).
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).
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,
At the foot of enchanted cliffs.
It is a question difficult of settlement whether Duncan
Campbell Scott is greater as a verbal colorist and nature-painter
than as a melodist. But there can be no doubt
that as a verbal colorist and nature-painter he has the eye
both of the naturalist and the impressionist. And it is
indubitable that as a colorist or impressionist he has put
more of the pageantry of Nature in Canada into his poetry
than has even Bliss Carman. All the Canadian seasons
are in it, and every phase of the light, color, and sound
of the Canadian year is in it—done by ready, flexible,
graphic stroke or exquisite touch, in rich or luminous and
translucent coloring, with romantic eye and fantasy, and
with singular ingenuity and power. It must be confessed
that there is a seeming display of musical theory and technics,
of musical learning, which almost savors of pedantry,
in those of Scott’s poems which contain musical thought
and imagery. This would be sophistication, were Scott
not sincere and did he not sincerely use it all to enhance
the poetic effect of his verse on the tonal sensibilities and
the imagination. But there is no sophistication, no mere
display of knowledge of pigments and the technic of
painting in his work as a verbal colorist. He is a word-painter,
a nature-colorist, an impressionist,—by innate
genius. As a matter of fact, too, almost all his verbal
melody is associated with color. So that, by genius rather
than by art, Duncan Campbell Scott may be regarded as
the supreme verbal colorist amongst Canadian poets. He
is this for three reasons—inclusiveness of the seasons and
phases of Nature in Canada, magic of pigmentation, and
novelty and imaginative power of coloring and description.
If the poems of Scott abound in arresting and compelling
phrases, lines, and stanzas of alliterative beauty,
the number of brilliant and luminous color phrases, lines,
and whole stanzas in his poems is astounding. The following
will serve in illustration:—
Bright as a sun spot in a globe of dew.
• • • •
The leaves dry up as pale as honeycomb.
• • • •
Or peacock tints on pools of amber gloom.
• • • •
Like the curve of a fragile ivory hand.
• • • •
the light slides there
Like minnows in a pool—slender and slow.
• • • •
Blown on a gold black flute.
• • • •
A miracle of foam and ivory.
• • • •
In loops of silver light.
• • • •
The gold moted wood-pools pellucid as her eyen.
• • • •
Snow peaks arise enrobed in rosy shadows.
• • • •
Tawny like pure honey.
• • • •
Fragile as frost pansies.
• • • •
Rubies, pale as dew ponds stained with slaughter.
How luminous, translucent, yet graphic and vivid, are all
those colorful lines. They are the ‘painting’ of a poet
who has, above all things, the eye of the naturalist and
also a fairy fantasy. If in those lines we find in Scott
a genius for exquisite and translucent verbal coloring,
corresponding to the art of Constable or Corot in imaginative
vision or fantasy, we discover the romantic pigmentation
of Rossetti (as a painter) and the rich luminous
impressionism of Monet, in the lines following the final
apostrophe to Beauty in Scott’s noble Ode for the Keats’
Centenary:—
For Beauty has taken refuge from our life
That grew too loud and wounding . . .
Beauty is gone, (Oh, where?)
To dwell within a precinct of pure air
Where moments turn to months of solitude;
To live on roots of fern and tips of fern,
On tender berries flushed with the earth’s blood.
Beauty shall stain her feet with moss
And dye her cheek with deep nut-juices
Laving her hands in the pure sluices
Where rainbows are dissolved.
Beauty shall view herself in pools of amber sheen
Dampened with peacock-tints from the green screen
That mingles liquid light with liquid shadow.
It is not necessary to illustrate the variety of Scott’s
pigmentation. That is as remarkable as its luminous
beauty. What is most compelling in his Nature-painting
is the unique ingenuity, power, and romantic beauty of his
color phrases, metaphors, and similes. The naturalistic
and imaginative intensity of them is a poetic phenomenon
by itself. Consider these phrases: ‘Sun, like a gold sword,’
‘A blade of gladiolus, like a sword,’ ‘A burning pool of
scent and heat,’ ‘Within the windless deeps of memory,’
‘Bent like a shield between the silver seas,’ ‘With gulfs of
blue and summits of rosy snow.’ Consider also these
lines:—
The west unrolled a feathery wind.
• • • •
The poignard lightning searched the air.
• • • •
Stars like wood daffodils grow golden in the night.
• • • •
and dawn
Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces;
and, finally, consider the compelling romantic fantasy of
color and simile in this stanza from The Piper of Arll:—
There were three pines above the cone
That, when the sun flared and went down,
Grew like three warriors reaving home
The plunder of a burning town.
It was said that there is more of Canada in the poetry
of Duncan Campbell Scott than in the verse of any other
Canadian poet. So far this appears to be true of Scott’s
painting of Nature in Canada. Scott, it must be observed,
is a Nature painter, never a Nature interpreter, as were
Lampman and Carman. Yet there is in Scott’s poetry a
decided interpretative or philosophical element. It is on
the side of his philosophical poetry that Scott’s verse contains
more of the Canadian spirit than does the verse of
any other Canadian poet. As a philosophical poet Scott
is, first, an interpreter of humanity and life in Canada—and
his interpretations possess highly novel distinction and
spiritual import. His philosophical poetry is contained in
three volumes, Labor and the Angel (1898), New World
Lyrics and Ballads (1905), and Via Borealis (1906).
In his New World Lyrics and Ballads, Scott aims to
reveal the kind of mind or thought which the strange
humanity of the Northwest in Canada—the Indian heart
in the wild North of Canada—contains. In the volume
Indian themes predominate, and the so called Ballads are
more aptly named Legends, because Scott’s Ballads are art
and the product of a reflective mind thinking into Indian
mind the thoughts of a civilized man, whereas the genuine
Ballad is a spontaneous story told in simple verse. Moreover,
Scott’s genius is lyrical; but in these so called Ballads
he attempts dramatic situation and emotion. It all lands
him in recondite psychological symbolism, as, for instance,
in The Mission of the Trees or in The Forsaken, which is
later attempted in The Half-Breed Girl (from Via Borealis),
a striking essay in Indian introspection. What we
get from these poems is Scott’s perception and revealment
of spiritual Beauty in loneliness—his half-mystical intuition
that the spirit in civilized man, in the Indian soul, and in
Nature everywhere is one and the same spirit, and that
civilization has only resulted in veiling the face of God
and in separating his creatures from one another and from
the Creator.
This vague mystical intuition of the mystery and yet
identity of spirit in man and Nature is beautifully, perhaps
too sensuously, envisaged in Scott’s Spring on Mattagami
(from Via Borealis). This poem is seductively musical
and highly impressionistic, but shows the influence of
Meredith (Love in a Wilderness) in its interpretation of
the conflict of Love and Law in the universe. What
counts and solaces, however, is the Vision or Light of a
higher Love and a deeper Law that lie behind the seemingly
meaningless conflict of the visible love and law. After
all, the poet, like the rest of mortals, can only ‘trust’ in
the supremacy of Good in the universe:—
Vaster than the world or life or death my trust is
Based in the unseen and towering far above.
Hold me, O Law, that deeper lies than Justice,
Guide me, O Light, that stronger burns than Love.
This abstract mystical symbolism is Old World, not
Canadian, not Scott’s own philosophy of the spirit for the
Canadian spirit. His own is found in his poem Labor and
the Angel. It is original and noble in conception; and,
consistently with its serious didactic purpose and ideas, or
symbolism, its diction is vernacular, its form and rhythm
are suited to plain narrative; and the whole is devoid of
Scott’s luxuriant color and sensuous melody. It is a dramatic
poem in the sense that it is designed to affect the
heart and the imagination with dramatic force and truth.
As a criticism of life in the Arnoldian sense, we see in the
poem the influence of Matthew Arnold. But its thought
and style show more notably the influence of Browning
and Meredith, especially in its syntactical ellipses, bald and
abrupt lines.
In its way, Labor and the Angel is as finely and as impressively
achieved as Tennyson’s Princess. It answers
a question which is particularly pertinent to Canada where
work—the gaining of material subsistence—necessarily is
paramount, because inevitable and pressing. As with
Browning, so with Scott, Woman is man’s life-star and
inspiration. In the poem Labor and the Angel, the Man
and the Girl are common humanity, but the Girl, who is
also the Angel of Labor, is the man’s companion and helpmate:—
Down on the sodden field
A blind man is gathering his roots,
Guided and led by a girl;
Her golden hair blows in the wind,
Her garments, with flutter and furl,
Leap like a flag in the sun;
And whenever he stoops, she stoops,
And they heap up the dark colored beets
In the barrow, row upon row.
Labor, the kind which is mere toil and drudgery, is
without meaning and unspiritual. But Woman was designed
by God as the power which shall inspire men to
spirituality in all things. As Man, every man would be
‘blind’ and purposeless and futile. But as Man, companioned
and inspired by Woman and idealizing labor for
the end of her companionship and love and the spiritual
fruits of that love, every man, who is obedient to the ideal,
transmutes the lowliest labor into spiritual purpose, meaning
and result:—
She offers no tantalus cup
To the shrunken, the desperate lips,
But she calms them with lethe and love
And deadens the throb and the pain.
For Labor is always blind,
Unless as the light of the deed
The Angel is smiling behind.
‘Effort and effort,’ she cries,
‘Up with the lark and the dew,
Still with the dew and the stars,
This is the heart beat of life,
Feel it athrob in the earth.’
Man and Labor, Woman and Love as the star and inspiration
of man in all his work—what nobler dignity
could any poet give to Woman, and what other consolation
of philosophy could he conceive and sing that would, as
it does, for men more surely
Make mortal flesh seem light and temporal!
Labor and the Angel is unique amongst poems by Canadians,
and its noble philosophy of the spirit challenges
poems of similar quality by Tennyson, Browning, Meredith,
and Emerson.
Duncan Campbell Scott—austere intellectualist, superb
verbal musician, luminous Nature-painter, and impeccable
technical virtuoso of verse amongst Canadian poets—it is
by him that we are also given in The Height of Land the
finest expression of the true spiritual mysticism, the immediate
perception of God—an intuition in which Life appears
As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:
A Something to be guided by ideals—
That in themselves are simple and serene
Of noble deed to foster noble thought,
And noble thought to image noble deed,
Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,
Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt
Whether the perfect beauty that escapes
Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing
Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:
Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest
The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,
And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.
Seek we in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott for
the choice and ineluctable goods of the spirit,—music, color,
high thought and serene philosophy—and we shall always
be rewarded with Beauty ‘golden and inappellable.’
The quotations in this chapter are chiefly from Beauty and Life, by Duncan
Campbell Scott, (McClelland & Stewart).
AS AN OBJECTIVE NATURE PAINTER—HUMANIZED SUBSTANCE
OF HIS VERSE—PATRIOTISM AND BROTHERHOOD—DRAMATIC
MONODY—POETICAL TRAGEDIES AND DRAMAS.
In the early nineties of the last century three young
Canadian poets, who were employed in the Civil Service
Departments at Ottawa, were closely associated in a
systematic way as men of letters. They were Wilfred
Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell
Scott. In the Toronto Globe they conducted a department
of literary criticism and ‘causerie’ under the caption ‘The
Mermaid Inn.’ Oddly, these three young Canadian men
of letters were singularly dissimilar in poetic temperament,
attitudes, vision, and ideals. As a poet Lampman was an
interpreter of the inner meaning of the beauty and moods
of Nature. He and Nature communed with each other
by reciprocal sympathy, and he cared greatly for style and
craftsmanship in poetry. Duncan Campbell Scott loved
beauty for its own sake as a spiritual delight or source of
ecstasy, but perfection of form, style, artistry—‘art for
art’s sake’—pre-empted all other considerations in poetry.
Wilfred Campbell occupied a middle ground. He was an
objective Nature-painter, with tendencies to be more interested
in Nature as a habitat or background of the human
spirit which had come from God and was going to God.
He was solicitous about form and imagery, color and
melody in poetry, but for him these were always a means
to an end, never a mere end in themselves. Or, harking
back to influences, we may say that Lampman wrote poetry
with the eye and the spirit of Keats and Wordsworth; Scott
with the eye of Matthew Arnold for naturalistic and moral
beauty and chaste artistry; and Campbell in the spirit of
Longfellow and Emerson, and, sometimes, of Tennyson.
With Campbell it was the substance or matter,—the
ideas, thought, and meanings for the spirit—not the formal
elements or manner of poetry, that counted for most. It
is the substance of poetry, its meanings for the spirit, that
counts always for most with the people. For this reason,
though Campbell is not the greatest of the poets of the first
Systematic School, he is, and will remain, as he has been
called, ‘the poet of the people’s choice.’
A distinct evolution—and advance in vision—from objective
nature-painting of the spirit can be observed in
the successive volumes of Campbell’s verse. Naturally,
until he had reflected on his aims as a poet, he did not announce
his poetic creed in his first volume of verse. He
did this in his fourth volume, Collected Poems (1905) in
his poem Higher Kinship:—
There is a time at middle summer, when,
In weariness of all this saddening world,
The simple nature aspects seem to me
As a close kindred, sweet and kind and true,
Giving me peace and comfort, and a joy
Not of the senses, but of the inward soul.
The restful day, the sunny leaf and wind,
The path of blue like windows shining down,
Do give to life a beauty and a calm
And a sweet sadness, that this mighty world
And all its myriad triumphs cannot give.
O let me live with Nature at her door,
And taste her home-brewed pleasures, simple, glad,—
The beauty of the day, the splendor of the night,—
Not in the great palace halls, great cloister domes,
The smoke of cities and the thronging din,
But out with air and woodlands, shining sun,—
These my companions, this my roof, my home!
‘Not of the senses’—Campbell is not a lover of impressionism
for its own sake, but he loves the simple,
colorful aspects of Nature for the joy, comfort and peace
which they give to ‘the inward soul.’ He has his equals as
an impressionistic colorist, but he is supreme when he paints
a phenomenon or aspect of Nature in monotone or in subdued
tones as in pastel, or when he etches a scene with a
Whistler-like feeling for atmosphere, shadow, and chiaroscuro,
and for line. In 1888, when he was in his twenty-seventh
year, Campbell published a booklet of twenty lyrics,
Snowflakes and Sunbeams. In these first lyrics he disclosed
the eye of monotonist and etcher for the beauty of
Nature. The verse in this rare little volume is marked,
too, by a grace and melody which enhance the pictures.
What but a ‘symphony in white’ is his Snow—
Folding the forest.
Folding the farms,
In a mantle of white,
And the river’s great arms,
Kissed by the chill night
From clamor to rest,
Lie all white and shrouded
Upon the world’s breast.
Thus, through several stanzas, he paints Nature in
white, seemingly for the joy of the senses but really for
‘the inward soul.’ For a moment he obtrudes the ‘message’
which the snow conveys to the moral imagination—
Falling so slowly
Down from above,
So white, hushed and holy,
Folding the city
Like the great pity
Of God in his love;
Sent down out of heaven,
On its sorrow and crime,
Blotting them, folding them
Under its rime.
Beautiful as an original image is the thought of the
snow descending hushed and holy, ‘like the great pity of
God in his love,’ but it is a sentimental obtrusion, out of
character with the snow-picture as such. We find Campbell
frequently creating the most engaging Nature pictures,
and here or there in a poem recalling the eye from the pure
visual delights to let the moral imagination reflect on
some suggestion, some similitude, for ‘the inward soul.’
What a pretty pastel, for instance, he paints with spare use
of mere tints, in the first two stanzas of In the Study:—
Out over my study,
All ashen and ruddy
Sinks the December sun,
And high up over
The chimney’s soot cover
The winter night has begun.
Here in the red embers
I dream old Decembers,
Until the low moan of the blast,
Like a voice out of Ghost-land,
Or memory’s lost-land,
Seems to conjure up wraiths from the past.
But Campbell does not continue the strict painting of the
objective picture. He introduces something ‘for the inward
soul,’ as he does, in the concluding stanza:—
Then into the room
Through the firelight and gloom,
Some one steals,—let the night wind grow bleak,
And ever so coldly,—
Two white arms enfold me,
And a sweet face is close to my cheek.
This is not a fault in Campbell’s poetry. It is an
essential part of his art. As in Longfellow, so in Campbell
the humanized substance of his verse is consciously designed
for the popular heart, and ensures popular acceptance.
Campbell would rather do this than to write always for
art’s sake, as in these sheer pictorial stanzas from A Winter’s
Night:—
Shadowy white,
Over the fields are the sleeping fences,
Silent and still in the fading light,
As the wintry night commences.
• • • •
Calm sleeping night
Whose jewelled couch reflects the million stars
That murmur silent music in their flight. . . .
Yet, he can employ delineative line with swift and sure
artistry just to make a picture for its own sake, disclosing
absolute mastery in economy of means, as in his
Rododactulos:—
The night blows outward in a mist,
And all the world the sun has kissed.
Along a golden rim of sky,
A thousand snow-piled vapors lie.
And by the wood and mist-clad stream,
The Maiden Morn stands still to dream.
That is an exquisite bit of naturalistic etching with a
poetic meaning intrinsically in the picture of the Maiden
Morn standing and dreaming in the mist. The picture
itself delights both the visual faculty and the imagination.
Campbell also possessed the faculty of painting vividly, as
with a single sweep of the brush, as in his Lake Huron (in
October) and its memorable lines:—
Miles and miles of lake and forest,
Miles and miles of sky and mist;
and these still more vivid lines:—
Miles and miles of crimson glories,
Autumn’s wondrous fires ablaze.
Campbell did not aim or strive to be a word-virtuoso.
But what he could achieve as an artist was to make at will
a dainty or a glorious picture, and so localize the picture
that one can immediately tell which section of the Canadian
land or waters is delineated. He surpassed all his contemporaries
in the gift of ‘flashing’ a vivid picture in a
single line, as, for instance:—
The stars came out in gleaming shoals
or this tremendous line:—
Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim.
The last line quoted also discloses in Campbell a power
which is not in any other Canadian poet—the Miltonic
power of conveying by description ideated sensations of
unending space and movement. Matching almost any
piece of sheer description of immensity by Milton is
Campbell’s compelling panorama of Lazarus in his flight
from Heaven to Hell and the sensations of illimitable
depths downward that it creates in the reader, as in these
stanzas from his poem Lazarus:—
Hellward he moved, like a radiant star shot out
From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even,
When Orion’s train and that mysterious seven
Move on in mystic range from heaven to heaven.
Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout.
The liquid floor of heaven bore him up
With unseen arms, as in his feathery flight
He floated down toward the infinite night;
But each way downward, on the left and right,
He saw each moon of heaven like a cup
Of liquid, misty fire that shone afar
From sentinel towers of heaven’s battlements;
But onward, winged by love’s desire intense,
He sank, space-swallowed, into the immense,
While with him ever widened heaven’s bar.
’Tis ages now long-gone since he went out,
Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls.
But hellward still he ever floats and falls,
And ever nearer come those anguished calls;
And far behind he hears a glorious shout.
Campbell had a gift, too, for vivid color epithets and
for vowel and alliterative word-melody. Indeed he was
a master of color and verbal melody. Some of his more
original and striking alliterative lines are:—
Flooding the silence in a silvern dream.
• • • •
Low flutes the lake along the lustrous sedge.
• • • •
But dawns and sunsets fell on mute dead faces.
• • • •
Belled with bees, a pollened bevy.
• • • •
Out of the murmurous moods of your multitudinous mind.
• • • •
Dim mists of darkness rise from marsh and mere.
• • • •
The waking world leaps to the day’s desire.
• • • •
The harmonies that float and melt afar.
• • • •
Deep-sounding and surgent, the armies of storm sweep by.
• • • •
None of Campbell’s contemporaries surpassed him in
painting a simple but vivid genre picture, and enhancing it
with verbal melody, as he does, for instance, in his Canadian
Folksong, beginning:—
The doors are shut, the windows fast;
Outside the gust is driving past,
Outside the shivering ivy clings,
While on the hob the kettle sings;
‘Margery, Margery, make the tea,’
Singeth the kettle merrily.
As a poet of humane patriotism, which has regard for
international or world relations, and which is not mere
‘drum and trumpet’ patriotism, Campbell stands in a class
by himself. He had a Keltic love of place or home. It
was a passion with him, but the passion embraced the
Anglo-Saxon peoples. So that his patriotic poetry contains
a large element of the ideal of Anglo-Saxon unity and of
the imperialistic destiny of the British peoples. Thus we
find him singing with equal warmth of Scotland, the homeland
of his ancestors (as in The World-Mother), of
England (as in his To England), of the United States (as
in his To the United States), and of Canada, his homeland
(as in Canada.)
A sincere and profound sense and love of brotherhood
is the key-note of his patriotic poetry. There is no magniloquent
bombast in it, whereas it must be admitted that
Roberts’ Canada and his Ode to the Confederacy have at
least an air of pomp of words which sound like mere magniloquence
or bombast. But there is in Campbell’s Canada
a sincere sense of history, of historical background and
heroic origins, as well as of a people whom the vastness of
their habitat should impel to a great and noble destiny.
Besides, Campbell sings of the homeland in simple octameter
couplets, the very simplicity of which impresses the
spirit with a deep sense of truth and reality. The poem,
with a slight change or two for choral singing would, if
set to dignified and sonorous music, be fitted to be an inspiring
and inspiriting National Hymn. It is a colorful,
lyrical poem, a Song, suffused with the qualities of the
Canadian spirit and the beauties of the Canadian habitat.
We quote a few excerpts:—
O land, by every gift of God
Brave home of freedom, let thy sod
Sacred with blood of hero sires,
Spurn from its breast ignobler fires.
Keep on these shores where beauty reigns,
And vastness folds from peak to plains,
With room for all from hills to sea,
No shackled, helot tyranny.
Spurn from thy breast the bigot lie,
The smallness not of earth or sky.
Breed all thy sons brave stalwart men,
To meet the world as one to ten.
Breed all thy daughters mothers true,
Magic of that glad joy of you,
Till liberties thy hills adorn
As wide as thy wide fields of corn.
• • • •
And round earth’s rim thine honor glows,
Unsullied as thy drifted snows.
Wilfred Campbell, then, appears as a lyrist of Nature
and poet of the Spirit, who is an adroit and vivid objective
colorist and etcher, but who, for the most part, tinges his
lyricism of Nature with meanings for the ‘inward soul.’
With equal dexterity and truth he painted an impressionistic
or a genre picture. But in doing this, he was unexcelled
by his contemporaries in Canada in economy of means for
expression. While, however, he was thus given to painting
or delineating Nature in Canada, he also appears as a poet
who ‘hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ He gave proof
of this in a singular way. Whatever other distinctions
belong to him, Campbell has never been equalled, by another
Canadian poet, in the Dramatic Monologue. Perhaps, in
view of the special meaning which Browning has given
to this species of poetry, it were better to use the formula
Dramatic Monody. For this phrase better describes
Campbell’s poignant, compelling Unabsolved, The Mother,
and Lazarus. But however categorized, these poems reveal
the fact that Campbell’s genius was essentially dramatic.
This dramatic instinct in him, Campbell developed
to a high degree until he essayed the five-act poetic drama.
It is as a Poetic Dramatist that Campbell achieved a distinct
and fixed place in Canadian creative poetry.
The first poet to attempt nativistic or native poetic
drama in Canada was Charles Mair, who published at Toronto,
in 1886. Tecumseh: A Drama. Many of its characters
are Canadian and much of its setting and color are
Canadian. Mair had created a work of real interest, of
excellent structure and dramatic development, and had used
impressively Canadian properties, character, and environment.
The verse is genuinely artistic and colorful and
dramatic, and the poem as a whole is worthy of critical
consideration; but only as the first example of Canadian
native poetic drama is Tecumseh to be regarded as significant
in the literary history of Canada.
Much superior to the dramatic poetry of Mair is that
of Wilfred Campbell. It is considerable in quantity, comprising
the following (as he called them) ‘poetical tragedies
and dramas:’ Mordred, Hildebrand, The Brockenfiend,
Robespierre, Daulac, Morning, Sanio, and The Admiral’s
Daughter. The quality of his poetical tragedies and dramas
distinguishes him as the first really important creator of
poetic drama in Canada.
The titles of his poetic tragedies and dramas clearly indicate
that, with one exception, his subjects were derivative
and his treatment traditional. With the exception of his
Daulac he took his subjects from Arthurian legend and
European romantic history. He was considerably under
the influence of Tennyson. Though he gave us an interesting
and arresting poetic drama with his Daulac, it is
specially notable as a drama which is Canadian in subject,
character, and setting. He was not so successful with it
as with his poetic drama based on Arthurian legend and
romantic history. The reason is that in a large degree he
possessed an ‘Old World,’ a Keltic imagination, and his
imagination was deeply impressed and moved by the romance
of mediaeval heroic exploits:—
Old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
The heroism of Daulac, his combats and other heroic
exploits were so near in time to the age of Campbell himself
that they could not affect the poet’s imagination so
pervasively and compellingly as do the older mediaeval
romances of heroic exploits. Campbell did not feel the
Daulac story as he had felt the Arthurian or romantic
legends of Europe. He, therefore, did not, because he
could not, put into his Daulac the same power of imagination
and dramatic characterization and reality that he put
into his other dramas. But Daulac, notwithstanding, is a
noble poetic drama; and since it is Canadian through and
through, in subject, in setting, and in authorship, we may
estimate it as the first native poetic drama of genuine art
and power in the creative literature of Canada.
The quotations from Wilfred Campbell’s work in this chapter are from
The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell (Hodder & Stoughton, Limited:
Toronto).
HER ANCESTRY AND ITS INFLUENCES—LITERARY AND
MUSICAL QUALITIES OF WORK—STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT IN
SPIRITUAL VISION—PICTURESQUE COLOR VERSE.
The name, life, and poetry of Pauline Johnson affect
the heart and imagination with the arresting pathos
which attaches to the imperishable memory of a belated and
beautiful spirit who came singing new and winning music
of earth, and man, and love. She was the most elementally
human of all Canadian poets. In some respects Pauline
Johnson was the most original and engaging singer in the
company of the Canadian lyrists who were born in 1860,
1861, and 1862—Roberts, Carman, Lampman, Campbell,
and Duncan Campbell Scott.
Pauline Johnson’s grandfather, who attained special
glory for his valorous deed of setting fire, with his own
hands, to the city of Buffalo in the War of 1812, was distinguished,
in times of peace, by his tribesmen with the honorable
and poetic sobriquet, ‘The Mohawk Warbler,’ not
because he could actually ‘warble’ like a present-day lyric
tenor, but because he possessed a ready flow of language
which he used with impassioned and dramatic eloquence.
The old warrior’s granddaughter, in her ballads and poems
of Indian wrongs and Indian heroic deeds, wrote with the
same dramatic intensity and the same gift for dramatic picture;
and in her songs of Nature and of love sang with a
lyrical lilt as natural, musical, free, and passionate as the
warblings of the thrush or lark or linnet.
The distinctive qualities of Pauline Johnson’s genius
and poetry are here noted summarily. In general: As a
story-telling balladist she must be ranked with the best
Canadian poets who have essayed the same genre, though
in some of her ballads there are lines which are rhetorical
and melodramatic. On the whole, however, her story-telling
ballads are unsurpassed by her Canadian confrères,
in emotional intensity, rapid movement, terse phrasing, and
dramatic pictorial vividness.
As a verbal musician, and as a nature-painter and etcher,
Pauline Johnson again must be given a very high place.
Some of her poems are marked by absolutely avian abandon;
others by haunting melody; and others by sweetly flowing
rhythm and winning cadences, and by sensuous vowel-harmonies
and faultless rhymes. Many of her poems
disclose the gift to paint in words a picture from Nature
with the impressionist’s mastery of sensation and color.
Some of them are low-keyed and full of shadows, suggested
sensations, and mystery. Others are dainty word-etchings,
picturesquely or subtly drawn and subdued in tone.
In particular: Pauline Johnson has yet, by other Canadian
poets, to be equalled as a lyrist of the passion and
pathos of romantic love, and as an inventor of picturesque,
veracious, vivid, beautiful, and compelling poetic figures
and images. Her love poems are full of the most poignant
passion and pathos. It would be easy to make a catalogue
of a half hundred or more poetic figures and images which
are unique in descriptive aptness or in emotional ‘tang.’
In short, the supreme spiritual and aesthetic qualities of
Pauline Johnson’s poetry are its real sincerity, its naiveté
of thought, its simplicity of structure, its lovely color images,
its winning music, its passion, pathos, and womanly
tenderness. But first place must be given to its dulcet and
insinuating music and to its original and arresting poetic
figures and images.
Pauline Johnson, taking the date engraved on the monument
to her memory at Vancouver, was born in 1861. She
died at Vancouver in 1912. She was the youngest child
of a family of four born to the late G. H. M. Johnson
(Onwononsyshon) of Brantford, Ontario, Head Chief of
the Six Nations Indians, and his wife, Emily S. Howells,
who was of English parentage and born at Brixton, England.
Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) was born on her
father’s estate, which is on the Reserve apportioned the
Mohawk Tribe by the Canadian government. It must,
therefore, pique the imagination to know that Pauline
Johnson was of pure Indian and pure English descent, but
that though she travelled from coast to coast in Canada
and the United States and twice to England, her freedom
of movement was ‘privileged’ and she was always, wherever
she went, a ‘ward’ of the Canadian government.
In Pauline Johnson’s case there are nice, though not
recondite, problems in literary psychology and interpretive
criticism. For instance: Was Pauline Johnson’s genius
Indian, or English? Was it inherited, or was she a ‘born’
poet, or how else may her gifts and tastes be explained?
The poet herself always insisted, with considerable pride,
on her Indian origin. Some critics, reasoning by quasi-inductions,
abetted her in this belief. Yet, so far as her
genius is concerned, the only one of her Indian ancestors
who had anything like literary gifts was her grandfather,
‘The Mohawk Warbler,’ and his gifts were those of the
‘tongue’ in compelling eloquence rather than aesthetic
sensibility and the power of expressing in words the beauty
and the music in Nature. On the other hand, Pauline
Johnson’s English ancestors were a family who possessed
distinct literary tendencies and habits. The most distinguished
member of the branches of that family was W. D.
Howells, the American novelist, poet, and essayist. It is
most probable that she inherited her literary gifts from her
English ancestors. For in Flint and Feather—her complete
poems—there is not one concept, or bit of color, or rhythm,
or anything else, that may be described as specifically Indian.
Rather it is all British or Universal. We do find
in her poems Indian themes, protests against British ruthlessness
in governmental treatment of the Indian, and the
celebration of Indian valor and love. But these are human
utterances. Moreover, of the ninety poems in Flint
and Feather, only eight concern the Indian, and these only
on the side of episodes which formed good material for
romantic story-telling in verse. In these fine ballads
Pauline Johnson became indeed the ‘Voice’ of her inarticulate
Indian fellows, but the voice itself was that of a
woman cultured in the forms and music of English poetry.
Pauline Johnson’s loyalty to the Indian side of her ancestry,
and her pride in it, were admirable; but, if heredity is
to be accepted as a real cause of genius, her taste for
literature, and her bent towards literary expression, must
have come from her mother’s side. For her mother was
both a cultured and a romantically-minded woman. If,
however, we are to grant the poet any gift from her Indian
ancestry, we must remember her brilliant career as a reciter
or dramatic reader. If she inherited this dramatic
gift, then she got it from her eloquent grandfather, ‘The
Mohawk Warbler.’ Though she used it conspicuously in
her dramatic readings, the gift is also observable in the
vividly graphic qualities, and in the emotional intensity, of
her story-telling ballads.
Pauline Johnson was the first genuinely Canadian
‘daughter of the soil’ who indubitably was born a poet;
and her poetic development was one not in artistic craftsmanship,
but in vision. The first important fact in her
spiritual history is that at a very early age the future poet
evinced an original and intense taste for verse, expressing
this taste both by a fondness for memorizing verses read to
her and for composing childish jingles about familiar domestic
objects. A pretty illustration of Pauline Johnson’s
early predilection for poetry is furnished in the Biographical
Sketch to Flint and Feather, in which it is related
that when she was but four years old (1865) she was asked
by a friend who was going to a distant city what he should
bring her as a gift, and that the child-poet replied, ‘Verses,
please!’
The second important fact in Pauline Johnson’s spiritual
history is that from the time she could pen words intelligently
up to the close of her public-school days she
devoted much of her leisure to self-cultivation in the appreciation
and the writing of verse. Before she was twelve
years old (1873), Pauline Johnson had thoroughly read
Shakespeare and the British romantic poets, Scott and
Byron, and with their texts cultivated her native sense of
poetic diction and imagery, of verbal rhythm and music
(vowel-harmony, rhyme, consonance, assonance, alliteration),
and of color-epithets for brilliant and subtly impressionistic
word-painting.
Pauline Johnson, with rare good sense, did not publish
any of her verses till considerable time after she had completed
her formal schooling and her personally conducted
studies of versification, verbal music, and poetic imagery.
But as soon as she began to offer her verses to editors, she
seems to have found ready acceptances. The first periodical
to welcome her verse was a small New York magazine,
Gems of Poetry, published, presumably, in the early ’80’s of
the last century. This, however, can not be regarded as a
significant event. Really significant was the fact that The
Week (founded by Goldwin Smith) was the first Canadian
magazine to publish her verse. This fact assured her the
recognition and sponsorship of Goldwin Smith, himself an
eminent man-of-letters and a poet, and also, possibly, of
Charles G. D. Roberts, who was literary editor of The
Week in 1883-1884, and who was the first editor to stand
sponsor for Archibald Lampman. The imprimatur of The
Week, or the sponsorship of Goldwin Smith and Roberts,
automatically elected Pauline Johnson to the company of
the Systematic Group of Canadian poets born in 1860,
1861 and 1862, and introduced her to the English-speaking
world as a new and authentically gifted singer, in whose
music, though formally composed in the English manner
of versification, would, in due time, be heard the hitherto
unheard melancholy over-tones and wildwood notes of the
aboriginal Canadian spirit.
The next important date in Pauline Johnson’s history is
the year 1892, when a happy social and literary soirée
launched the Indian poet on a public career which, seemingly,
would not affect, save negatively, Pauline Johnson’s
function and art as a lyrist. From that date and for
sixteen years (1892-1908), Miss Johnson assiduously applied
her gifts as a reciter and dramatic reader in Canada,
the United States, and England, all the while publishing
intermittently in the periodical press her best verse.
In 1895, simultaneously at London, England, Boston,
and Toronto, appeared her first volume of poems, The White
Wampum. In 1903 her second volume of poems, Canadian
Born, was issued at Toronto. In 1912, also at Toronto,
there was published the definitive and inclusive edition of
her collected poems, Flint and Feather. All three, upon
their appearance, were highly praised in reviews by the
critics of England, the United States, and Canada.
It is important to appreciate the significance of Pauline
Johnson’s sixteen years of travelling over Canada, the
United States, and England, as a reciter and dramatic
reader. Possibly they reduced the amount of her poetic
output. But there are no evidences in Flint and Feather
that the experiences gained during these years diminished
or increased her powers of poetic vision or craftsmanship.
Pauline Johnson was self-deceived when, in a letter, she
expressed her belief that the fugitive verses published in
Flint and Feather, pages 135-156, surpass her poems in
The White Wampum and in Canadian Born. ‘My later
fugitive verse,’ she declared, ‘is, of course, my best work,
as it is more mature.’ There are only fifteen of these so-called
fugitive poems; but imaginative, musical, and tender
as they are, notably In Grey Days, Autumn’s Orchestra,
The Trail to Lillooet, The Lifting of the Mist, The King’s
Consort, and Day Dawn, they are all in the early manner
of the poet. They are lovely and winning poems, pervaded
with seductive music, tone-color pictures of nature
and of life, tinged with a tender pathos. But they show
no advance in technique, verbal music, imagery, or emotional
nuance—no lately acquired powers to express
rhythmic ecstasy with a newer and more musical lilt than
obtains in The Song My Paddle Sings (1892); or to paint
with more suggestive impressionism a nature picture full
of color, half-lights, or mystery, or more finely to etch a
verbal portrait than she has done in Erie Waters, Marshlands,
Shadow River, and Joe; or to catch and envisage
a mood or emotional nuance with subtler spirituality than
she accomplished in The Camper, Lady Lorgnette, Lullaby
of the Iroquois, Prairie Greyhounds, Lady Icicle, and The
Prodigal.
All these poems, whose titles have just been quoted, were
composed in the decade from 1892 to 1902, and belong to
Pauline Johnson’s first two volumes which together contained
sixty-seven poems of indubitable lyric and imaginative
quality. Of the poems composed by Pauline Johnson
in the decade from 1902 to 1912, only twenty-three
were deemed by the poet worthy to stand beside her poems
from The White Wampum and in Canadian Born which,
with the later twenty-three, form the contents of the
original edition of Flint and Feather. Five posthumously
published poems were added to the later editions.
If, then, in Flint and Feather we discover no advance
in the technique of Pauline Johnson’s art, wherein did her
new experiences gained by travel, by meeting men and
women of foreign lands and by learning the ways of the
world, work changes worth while? Solely in the poet’s
heart and imagination. Here was a development, not in
craftsmanship and art, but in spiritual vision. It was, too,
an evolution simple and natural in its stages, and is readily
traceable in the poems contained in Flint and Feather. Mr.
Melvin O. Hammond, an observant and judicious Canadian
critic, in a review of Flint and Feather (The Globe,
Toronto, Nov. 9th, 1912), was the first to disclose these
stages of Pauline Johnson’s development in spiritual vision.
They are four:—
First, Pauline Johnson appeared as the ‘voice’ of the
Indian people, who before her coming had been dumb or
inarticulate. Her point of view was, at this stage, Indian,
and she passionately protested against the abuses the Indians
of Canada have suffered (as in The Cattle Thief and
A Cry from An Indian Wife) or, as passionately, sang
of Indian valor and love (as in her Ojistoh).
Next, her point of view became Canadian. She turned
from lamenting the free and glorious past of her Indian
ancestors to paint in verse the land of her birth, ‘Canadian
life and scenery in the broad outdoors of the North and
West,’ not merely impressionistically picturing woods, skies,
plains, but also apostrophizing and humanizing both
natural creatures and objects, as if they were conscious of
their estate, function, and value to man, and had moods of
their own, as, for example, The Sleeping Giant (Thunder
Bay), and the dainty, fetching lyric The Homing Bee.
The third stage in Miss Johnson’s development in vision
was also Canadian. But, in this stage, her point of view
became broadened in scope. She turned to remark the
progress of the Canadian national spirit and the civilization
which binds the Dominion from ocean to ocean. This she
accomplished with extraordinary virility in rhythm, with apt
descriptive epithet, and with pictorial suggestiveness in her
Prairie Greyhounds—a song represented as sung by the
trans-continental trains in their passage from East to West,
and West to East. The poem gives the reader vivid ideated
sensations of the swish and roar and onward rush of the
trains, the sweep of the vast territory of the Dominion,
and the vision of the Greater Canada that is to be.
The final stage in Pauline Johnson’s increase in scope
of spiritual vision was marked by cosmopolitanism, pure
humanity, and by mysticism. She had lost the Indian and
the Canadian points of view when she composed Give
us Barrabas (commemorative of the exile of Dreyfus).
She was wholly a human being and sexless when she composed
her subtly sympathetic The City and the Sea, and
Fasting. She was genuinely mystical when she composed
her Penseroso wherein she sang persuasively:—
Soulless is all humanity to me
To-night. My keenest longing is to be
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.
To authenticate the claim that Pauline Johnson’s genius,
art, and poetry are highly original and sometimes unique,
it is only necessary to cite such of her poems as represent
the stages of her development and the special qualities of
her poetic vision and artistry.
Beginning with the first stage, we must observe that her
passionate protesting against the abuses which the Indians
of Canada had suffered as, for instance, in her poems The
Cattle Thief, and A Cry from an Indian Wife, is no proof
that the fierce intensity of her utterance is a recrudescence
of ancestral Indian fire of spirit or ferocity in herself. The
poems in which this so-called Indian emotional intensity
was expressed by her did, no doubt, spring out of imaginative
sympathy with her father’s race, but these poems
could have been written with the same show of emotional
intensity by any other poet who realized with equal imaginative
sympathy the wrongs that the Indians of Canada
had suffered and who had the gift of fiery expression.
Pauline Johnson is fundamentally Indian when she
is most pagan; that is, when, first, she realizes and expresses
poignantly her racial sense of haunting presences in the
natural world, and when, secondly, she expresses a melancholy
regret for the passing of her Indian race and a yearning
for free and pagan communion with the moods of
Nature, with the wild creatures of Nature, and with the
spiritual presences, which, to the imagination of the aboriginal
Indian, haunted the woods, the streams, the mists,
the clouds, and the sunsets before the hated British race
destroyed the Indian’s ancestral habitat and robbed him
both of his material and spiritual birthright. Moreover, in
the two or three poems in which she protested against the
wrongs which the Indians of Canada had suffered, Pauline
Johnson was really, if unconsciously, affecting to be the
‘voice’ of her Indian race. For she soon turned from such
affected poetic frenzy to expressing her admiration of the
British and her love of Canada as a free commonwealth
under British allegiance and protection, and to revealing in
colorful and musical verse the spirit and beauties of the
land of her birth.
Pauline Johnson, then, is essentially Indian, not when
frenzied, but only when she expresses in verse the inner
secrets of the joy and the pathos of her imaginative communion
with past and contemporary Nature in Canada,—when
she sings, with free and infectious lilt, outdoor life
in Canada or impressionistically paints Canadian woods,
skies, plains, snow, waters, or apostrophizes and humanizes
the creatures and objects of nature as if they had a psychology
of their own.
All the world knows Pauline Johnson’s lilting and infectious
lyric of Canadian outdoor life, The Song My
Paddle Sings. It is unsurpassed for suggested or ideated
sensations of wind and stream, of the spirit of motion, of
free life in the open, and wins one both by its vivid pictures
of outdoor life and by its simple but musical abandon. After
a two-stanza apostrophe to the West wind, closing with
Now fold in slumber your laggard wings
For soft is the song my paddle sings—
we hear the poet lilting the inspiriting song itself, opening
August is laughing across the sky,
Laughing while paddle, canoe and I,
Drift, drift,
Where the hills uplift
On either side of the current swift.
Specially to be noted in this poem is the descriptive and
musical realism which the poet effects by a sort of refrain
in the third line of each stanza, a monosyllabic accent which
precisely conveys to the sensibility the actual sensations experienced
in canoeing through slow-moving and rushing
or weltering waters—‘drift, drift,’ ‘dip, dip,’ ‘swirl, swirl,’
‘dash, dash,’ ‘reel, reel,’ ‘sway, sway,’ ‘swings, swings.’ This
is supreme in descriptive and imitative naturalism.
For examples of Pauline Johnson’s poetic power to
humanize objects and creatures in Nature The Sleeping
Giant and The Homing Bee may be cited. The latter is
also notably suffused with delicate color, moves with
a light, tripping music, and is dainty in structure, thus
exemplifying several of the other qualities of her art. The
opening lines indicate the ‘key’ in music and color:—
You are belted with gold, little brother of mine,
Yellow gold, like the sun
That spills in the west, as a chalice of wine
When feasting is done.
In the Canadian idyll, Pauline Johnson displayed a
delicate sense of color values, and sang as well of airy things
in Nature with an airy music, sometimes touched with a
reflective melancholy, as, for instance, in Shadow River.
The tones of melancholy, of sadness, observed sometimes
in Pauline Johnson’s poetry were not all born of a
mystical yearning for union with Nature. Sometimes they
were the expression of a poignant sense of the defeat of
romantic love. Hers was a simple, warm or passionate,
confiding, sensitive, but strong nature; and sensitive and
passionate but strong natures, if they belong to poets, tend
to express poignantly, rather than bitterly, any spiritual
cataclysm in their lives, and, for solace or support, to turn
to Nature or to religion. It was so with Pauline Johnson.
Charles Mair, author of Dreamland and Other Poems,
and Tecumseh: A Drama, is the authority for the belief
that Pauline Johnson went through an experience of romantic
love which, in its joy, gave wings of ecstasy and
a warm emotional coloring to her nature-poetry, but which,
when her love suffered a defeat that meant a spiritual
cataclysm for her, drew from her the most poignant expression
of yearning for union with Immortal Love. The
important truth is that whichever emotion she expresses,
she remains unequalled as a lyrist of the ecstasy and the
pathos of romantic love. But her poems of the ecstasy of
love are never merely the expression of subjective emotions.
They also have an idyllic or nature setting which so colors
her nature-poetry itself with the passion of love as to distinguish
it, both as nature-poetry and as love poetry, from
anything else of the kind in Canadian Literature. The
ecstasy is somewhat subdued in Idlers; but is passionate and
transporting, warmly colored with the light and tints of
Nature, and set to verbal music in perfect harmony with
the emotion and the nature-setting in Wave-won.
The fact of the defeat of love, in Pauline Johnson’s
case, may be observed in her Overlooked, a poem which
is notable for the invention on her part of a metaphor that,
for originality and beauty, is worthy of the Greek idyllists
or of Catullus, namely:—
O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise.
At length Pauline Johnson’s merely human passion of
yearning for union with the mortal companion is transmuted
into a spiritualized yearning—which, however, has
not in it the sad wistfulness of the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall—for
union with Immortal Love. Defeat of romantic
love in Pauline Johnson’s case passed, first, into renouncement,
and, at last, into resignation and the total giving of
self to Immortal Love, as in Brier—
Because, dear Christ, your tender, wounded arm
Bends back the brier that edges life’s long way,
That no hurt comes to heart, to soul no harm,
I do not feel the thorn so much to-day.
Because I never knew your care to tire,
Your hand to weary guiding me aright,
Because you walk before and crush the brier,
It does not pierce my feet so much to-night.
Because so often you have hearkened to
My selfish prayers, I ask but one thing now,
That these harsh hands of mine add not unto
The crown of thorns upon your bleeding brow.
Pauline Johnson possessed extraordinary, if not quite
unique, gifts as a story-telling balladist. Examples of her
art in this species are her compelling story of Indian love
and revenge, Ojistoh, her melodramatic Indian tale, The
Cattle Thief, and her Wolverine, a poem of Western
chevalerie, in which species, however, she does not rank with
Isabella Valancy Crawford.
Her poetry of the development of the Canadian national
spirit and civilization, by which she marks a broadening in
her own spiritual vision, is notably exemplified in two
poems, The Riders of the Plains and Prairie Greyhounds.
In the former, however, she is more British than Canadian.
But she is Canadian in her Prairie Greyhounds. In this
poem she achieves an extraordinary virility of rhythm,
employs apt and dramatic epithets and fills the picture with
a vivid suggestiveness of the vastness of Canada and the
vision of the greater autonomous and powerful Dominion
that is to be. Prairie Greyhounds, moreover, is a supreme
achievement in suggested or ideated sensations of motion.
The reader feels himself as if actually aboard the west-bound
and east-bound Canadian Pacific trains, experiencing,
as does a living passenger on a ‘fast express,’ the
swish, and roar, and onward rush of the trains.
As a verbal musician Pauline Johnson must be given
a very high place amongst Canadian poets. There is an
avian abandon and ecstasy, an avian lilt and warbling, in
The Birds’ Lullaby and in The Songster. There are flowing
rhythm and haunting melody of rhyme, vowel-harmony,
alliteration and cadences in The Trail to Lillooet:—
Song of fall, and song of forest, come you here on haunting quest,
Calling through the seas and silence, from God’s country of the west.
Where the mountain pass is narrow, and the torrent white and strong,
Down its rocky-throated canon, sings its golden-throated song.
You are singing there together through the God-begotten nights,
And the leaning stars are listening above the distant heights
That lift like points of opal in the crescent coronet
About whose golden setting sweeps the trail to Lillooet.
Pauline Johnson has also achieved what may be noted
in literary history as the first strictly Canadian ‘cradle-song’—Canadian
in music and in setting—her Lullaby of
the Iroquois.
As a nature-colorist and etcher Pauline Johnson again
must be given a very high place. For a genre etching of
the human figure against a background of nature her Joe,
which she herself sub-titles ‘An Etching,’ is as vividly presented
and as fetching as a genre drawing by Murillo. Her
Lady Lorgnette is as daintily graphic and colorful and
piquant and romantic as anything done by the brush of
Romney or Gainsborough or by the later modern ‘society’
miniaturists. She had the pictorial artist’s eye to spy out
a picture in Nature, as in At Husking Time. She had the
impressionist’s mastery of sensuous pigmentation, as in
Under Canvas. She could make a picture low-keyed, full
of shadows and suggested sensations and mystery, as in
Nocturne and in Moonset.
Finally: Pauline Johnson is certainly not surpassed,
if equalled, by any other Canadian lyrist as an inventor of
beautiful color epithets and of picturesque, vivid, and compelling
metaphors. They are to be found everywhere in
her poetry. Consider these as examples—‘Russet needles
as censers swing to an altar,’ ‘The sea-weeds cling with
flesh-like fingers,’ ‘Beaten gold that clung like coils of
kisses love inlaid,’ ‘The brownish hills with needles green
and gold,’ ‘O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise,’ ‘Swept
beneath a shore of shade, beneath a velvet moon,’ ‘Like
net work threads of fire,’ and this,
Purple her eyes as the mists that dream
At the edge of some laggard, sun-drowned stream
and many more as novel, colorful, musical, veracious and
compelling.
As a woman Pauline Johnson was a rare and beautiful
spirit. As a poet she was of all Canadian poets the most
pervasively true to her Canadian origin and habitat. She
is not to be given always the status of Lampman and Carman
and Duncan Campbell Scott, yet to her unquestionably
belongs a place beside these Canadian singers. Her poetry
had a magic of music and a color of leafy lawns and lovely
grey-eyed and tawny dusks and clear ecstatic morns, which
were all her own. She was indeed a ‘Mohawk Warbler,’
and her songs are
Free and artless as the avian lays
Heard in Canadian woods on April days.
The quotations in this chapter from Pauline Johnson’s poems are from Flint
and Feather, by E. Pauline Johnson, (Musson Book Co., Limited: Toronto).
PARKER AS A SONNETEER OF SPIRITUAL LOVE—ORIGIN AND
THEME OF A LOVER’S DIARY—MUSICAL AND COLORFUL
LYRICAL VERSE—SCOTT’S POETRY A REFLECTION OF HIS
PERSONALITY—DISTINGUISHED AS THE ‘POET OF THE SPIRIT’—CHIEF
QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY.
It was as a poet, not as a creator of historical romances,
that Sir Gilbert Parker first appeared as a man of letters
and first appealed to the literary public. As a poet he was
appreciated in Australia and in England, but not in Canada.
That as a poet he has been unknown and unappreciated
in his homeland, Canada, is due to the fact that he was
expatriate when he published his two volumes of poems,
the second of which was ‘privately printed,’ and that his
greater reputation as a novelist, particularly of old romantic
Canada, made him known in the Dominion exclusively
as a writer of fiction. Sir Gilbert Parker, however,
ranks high as a sonneteer of spiritual love, and as
lyrist in genre verse which has attained special reputation,
particularly as texts of songs for salon and recital repertory.
Sir Gilbert Parker was born in Ontario, in 1862. Never
robust, he left Canada in 1886 to seek recovery of health
in the warmer and more salubrious climate of Australia.
While in Australia he began publishing sonnets and lyrics
in magazines. The sonnets were collected and published
in a volume entitled A Lover’s Diary; first edition, 1894;
second edition, 1898. Before the publication of A Lover’s
Diary Parker had removed to London. While in England
he privately printed a volume of lyrics entitled Embers.
These two volumes, the first revised, and enlarged with
twenty-five sonnets, and the second, with the addition of
other lyrics, were collected and published as Volume 17 of
The Works of Gilbert Parker (1913). The volume containing
his collected poems is distinguished by a critical
Introduction by Sir Gilbert Parker himself.
In the Introduction Parker explains the origin and
theme of A Lover’s Diary. It is a sonnet-sequence, the
composition of which was begun when the poet was twenty-three
and still resident in Canada. The sequence is a
‘hopeless love, in form of temptation, but lifted away from
ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable
parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the
soul finished and the toil of the journey of understanding
paid.’ He adds: ‘The six sonnets . . . beginning with The
Bride, and ending with Annunciation, have nothing to do
with the story further than to show two phases of the
youth’s mind before it was shaken by speculation, plunged
into sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had
found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform
the character, and give a new impulse and direction to
personal forces and individual sense.’
As a poet of romantic love Parker is concerned with
the spiritual meaning of it. A Lover’s Diary is not concerned
with the mere emotions of romantic love but with
its spiritual thrall, and with it as a process of spiritual redemption
and exaltation. As an interpreter of spiritual
love, Parker contrasts with Robert Norwood whose sequence,
His Lady of the Sonnets (1915), though having
a spiritualizing intent, is highly sensuous and impressionistic
in diction and imagery. Parker breathes a less earthly air.
His sonnet-sequence is addressed more to the imaginative
reason than to the aesthetic imagination. It is much more
mystically conceived and much more chastely lovely with
the ‘white beauty’ of the spirit than is Norwood’s sequence.
Both sequences, however, are authentic and noble poetic
creations.
In pure beauty of conception, imagery, and artistry,
and in the spiritual exaltation of love, the following sonnet
from Parker’s A Lover’s Diary, is characteristic of the
whole sequence:—
It is enough that in this burdened time
The soul sees all its purposes aright.
The rest—what does it matter? Soon the night
Will come to whelm us, then the morning chime.
What does it matter, if but in the way
One hand clasps ours, one heart believes us true;
One understands the work we try to do,
And strives through Love to teach us what to say?
Between me and the chilly outer air
Which blows in from the world, there standeth one
Who draws Love’s curtains closely everywhere,
As God folds down the banners of the sun.
Warm is my place about me, and above,
Where was the raven, I behold the dove.
Parker’s lyrical verse, like his sonnet-sequence, is the
poetry of a young man who still possesses the enthusiasms
of youth for all the lovelier and happier things in existence,
and who rejoices in living. From the text of Parker’s
lyrics it is plain that he had the gifts of a lyrist in the
original Greek meaning, of one who wrote poems to be
sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. He was gifted
to turn a sentiment either seriously or playfully with simplicity
and directness of diction and with winning musical
lilt.
In truth, if he had turned to song composition, he was
more ideally equipped to write the texts of poems for songs
than was the greatest of American song composers, the
late Edward MacDowell, who, for lack of singable lyrical
texts, was compelled to compose his own poems as well
as their musical settings.
There is a spontaneity of lyrical lilt, lyrical verve, in
Parker’s lighter poems, which he composed both in literary
English and in ‘Irishy.’ As an example of the musical and
colorful qualities of his lyrics in literary English, the following
poem from Embers will aptly serve:—
I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still—
There was winter in my world and in my heart;
A breath came from the mesa, and a message stirred my will,
And my soul and I arose up to depart.
I heard the desert calling, and I knew that over there
In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
Was a woman of the sunrise with the star-shine in her hair
And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.
I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still—
There is summer in my world, and in my heart;
A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
Blinds my footsteps as I rise up to depart.
As an example of his musical quality and humor in
‘Irishy,’ the following lyric from Embers is apt and fetching:—
It was as fine a churchful as you ever clapt an eye on;
Oh, the bells was ringin’ gaily, and the sun was shinin’ free;
There was singers, there was clargy—‘Bless ye both,’ says Father Tryon—
They was weddin’ Mary Callaghan and me.
There was gatherin’ of women, there was hush upon the stairway,
There was whisperin’ and smilin’, but it was no place for me;
A little ship was comin’ into harbour through the fair-way—
It belongs to Mary Callaghan and me.
Shure, the longest day has endin’, and the wildest storm has fallin’—
There’s a young gossoon in yander, and he sits upon my knee;
There’s a churchful for the christenin’—do you hear the imp a-callin’?
He’s the pride of Mary Callaghan and me.
As a composer of song texts, Parker is rivalled only by
his Canadian compatriot, Arthur Stringer, whose poems in
‘Irishy’ have been most winningly and humorously set to
music by their compatriot, Gena Branscombe (Mrs. J. F.
Tenney). It is indeed as a poet, whose lyrics are inevitable
texts for songs which have literary charm and simple
humanity that Sir Gilbert Parker has been most admired
and appreciated.
For this view we have the authority of Sir Gilbert himself.
In the Introduction to the volume of his poetry in
his Collected Works, he says: ‘Mary Callaghan and Me has
been set to music by Mr. Max Muller, and has made many
friends, and The Crowning was the Coronation ode of The
People, which gave a prize, too ample I think, for the best
musical setting of the lines. Many of the other pieces in
Embers have been set to music by distinguished composers,
like Sir Edward Elgar, who has made a song-cycle of
several, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Mr. Arthur Foote, Mrs.
Amy Woodforde Finden, Robert Somerville, and others.
The first to have musical setting was You’ll Travel Far and
Wide, to which in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as
An Irish Folk Song. Like O Flower of All the World,
by Mrs. Amy Woolforde Finden, it has had a world of
admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to
make Mr. Foote’s music loved by thousands, and conferred
something more than an ephemeral acceptance of the
author’s words.’
Both, then, as a poet of mystical vision and sublimated
emotion, and of human sentiment and instincts which add
to the humanity and gaiety of life, Sir Gilbert Parker appears
as a poet who has authentic creative gifts and who
is a master craftsman in the ‘art’ of verse. In novelty and
variety his sonnets and lyrics have significantly enhanced
the quality of Canadian poetry, and have in their own degree
and way given the work of the poets of the Systematic
School and Period the character of a genuine ‘renaissance.’
Another poet who rightfully belongs to the Systematic
School and Period of Canadian Literature is Frederick
George Scott. In 1888, or in the year following the publication
of Roberts’ In Divers Tones (1887), Canon Scott
published his first book of verse, The Soul’s Quest and
Other Poems. This volume was succeeded by five other
volumes of verse, up to 1907, in which year he published
The Key of Life: A Mystery Play. In 1910 appeared his
Collected Poems. During the World War he published a
booklet of war verse, In the Battle Silences (1916).
The forms and qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry were
determined by his own moral personality and by his conception
of the ‘end’ of poetry. It is a fact that in no other
verse written by a Canadian is there such an absolute
identification of the man and the poet as in the poetry of
Canon Scott. The poetry reflects the whole personality of
the man. In the world, Canon Scott is a distinguished
example of the ‘Christian gentleman’—‘a man of liberal
culture and wide sympathies whose life has thrilled with
the larger life, political, social, and religious, a man of
strong courage born of reverent unquestioning faith.’ To
Canon Scott, therefore, the aim of poetry is not ‘art for
art’s sake,’ but the inspiration and consolation of the people
in their hour of doubt or darkness. His conception of the
‘end’ determined the forms and manner of Canon Scott’s
poetry. For if, like the ancient Hebraic poets, he was to
inspire and console his people, he must present his thoughts
in simple forms and in diction and imagery readily understood
by the people.
Canon Scott stands out from the rest of the members of
the Systematic School and Period as par excellence the
Poet of the Spirit; and his verse is distinguished from the
bulk of the verse of his colleagues in the Systematic School
as the Poetry of Faith and Consolation. There is nothing
original and distinctive in his forms: they are traditional
and simple. There is nothing original and distinctive
in his message: it, too, is traditional and simple—a
message of faith and courage and of joy in existence.
His distinction is in his ‘art,’ his power to convey
beautifully, sweetly—and above all, convincingly—to
the human soul noble or profound thoughts for its sustenance,
refreshment, and consolation. But while the
ethical and spiritual ‘notes’—which must be distinguished
from didacticism—are supreme in his poetry, Canon Scott
is also solicitous about the craftsmanship in his verse.
Though his verse forms are thoroughly socialized and
though he never aims to be a ‘word virtuoso,’ nevertheless
he is always the ‘artist’ in verse technique.
The chief qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry are piquant
phantasy rather than imagination, ingenious imagery, sympathy
with his kind, tenderness, wistfulness, simple or profound
thought expressed in simple diction and in simple
but dulcet verbal melody. Also in his verse is a two-fold
Canadianism. The self-reliant faith and courage in it is
Canadian, and the color and the naturalistic imagery are
derived from the woods, and fields, and streams, and hills
of his Canadian homeland, more particularly from Nature
in the Laurentian district. Indeed, Canon Scott has been
given the sobriquet of ‘the Poet of the Laurentians.’ But
while he impregnates and suffuses his verse with color and
naturalistic imagery from Nature in the Laurentians, he
always transmutes his naturalistic perceptions into spiritual
imagery and import. He does not do this with bald and
stark didacticism, but with exquisite artistry, and yet with
an intimacy, apt felicity, and naturalness that make it all
an achievement in winning a reader to see the beauty and
dignity of the familiar and commonplace in Nature. Canon
Scott’s poetry, in a phrase, is the acme of spiritual realism.
Of his diction, rhythm, and melody, and his Canadian
imagery in verse, Scott’s Dawn furnishes a short and impressive
example:—
The immortal spirit hath no bars
To circumscribe its dwelling-place;
My soul hath pastured with the stars
Upon the meadow-lands of space.
My mind and ear at times have caught
From realms beyond our mortal reach,
The utterance of Eternal Thought
Of which all nature is the speech.
And high above the seas and lands,
On peaks just tipped with morning light,
My dauntless spirit mutely stands
With eagle wings outspread for flight.
How lowly, and yet how beautiful and compelling, are
these figures in the first stanza of that poem—‘pastured with
the stars,’ ‘meadow-lands of space.’ But both are derived
from Canon Scott’s boyhood days in his homeland. They
are Canadian.
There is a Wordsworthian humanity in his poem The
Cripple, a sympathy with his kind and a tender wistfulness
in his Van Elsen. There is nobility of thought in his
Samson, and in Thor, and a grandeur of vision in his
Hymn of Empire, which is a Canadian imperial and
patriotic poem in a kind by itself. But in one poem—a
sonnet—Canon Scott has achieved what is perhaps the most
ingenious imagery in Canadian poetry, and one of the
most extraordinary in English literature. This is his sonnet
Time:—
I saw Time in his workshop carving faces;
Scattered around his tools lay, blunting griefs,
Sharp cares that cut out deeply in reliefs
Of light and shade; sorrows that smooth the traces
Of what were smiles. Not yet without fresh graces
His handiwork, for oftimes rough were ground
And polished, oft the pinched made smooth and round;
The calm look, too, the impetuous fire replaces.
Long time I looked and watched; with hideous grin
He took each heedless face between his knees,
And graved and scarred and bleached with boiling tears.
I wondering turned to go, when lo, my skin
Feels crumpled, and in glass my own face sees
Itself all changed, scarred, careworn, white with years!
So far as derivative influences may in general be observed
in the poets of the Systematic School and Period
of Canadian Literature, Roberts, Lampman, and Carman
are Hellenistic and impressionistic in feeling and thought.
They were devoted to creating poetry that would delight
the aesthetic senses and sensibilities. But Frederick George
Scott is Hebraic in feeling and thought. He created
poetry to satisfy the heart and the religious imagination,
and to sustain and console the human spirit in its sojourn
on earth. He achieved these ends simply yet beautifully.
His poetry is pervaded with the most elemental and enduring
‘heart’ qualities. They give it such a direct and compelling
human appeal as to win a significant and distinctive
place for it in the authentic native and national poetry of
Canada.
The quotations in this chapter are from A Lover’s Diary and Embers, by
Sir Gilbert Parker, (Copp, Clark Co., Limited: Toronto); and from Poems, by
Frederick George Scott, (Constable & Co.: London).
THE TERM ‘MINOR’ DEFINED—ETHELWYN WETHERALD—JEAN
BLEWETT—FRANCIS SHERMAN—A. E. S. SMYTHE—S.
FRANCES HARRISON—ARTHUR STRINGER—PETER
MCARTHUR—ISABEL ECCLESTONE MACKAY.
It is proper to distinguish Roberts, Lampman, Carman,
Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, Frederick George
Scott, and Pauline Johnson as the ‘major’ poets of the First
Renaissance in Canadian Literature. Though of necessity
with them the writing of verse was in a sense an avocation,
in another sense it was a vocation. They were systematic
both in the writing and the quantitative publishing of it.
Contemporary with them, but, for the most part, later in
production and publishing, were other poets who wrote
with beauty and distinction in poetic style. They followed
the aesthetic and artistic ideals of the ‘major’ poets, but
they were not as systematic as Roberts and his confrères
in writing or in quantitative publishing. These are denoted
in this work the ‘minor’ poets of the Systematic School
or Period. But nothing invidious as to quality of verse
is intended by the distinction. For a few of these so-called
‘minor’ poets of the Systematic Period wrote some poetry
as fine in aesthetic substance and artistic finish as the poetry
of Roberts and his colleagues. The term ‘minor’ is meant
to distinguish these poets as being, first, later, for the most
part, than Roberts and his confrères, and as being, secondly,
less eminent than the early systematic group of Canadian
poets. The number of these so-called minor or later poets
is legion. They ‘flourished’ from 1887 to 1907, or from
the publication of Roberts’ In Divers Tones to the appearance
of Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough (the beginning
of the Decadent Interim). Detailed appreciation
of the minor poets of the Systematic Period would, therefore,
require a volume by itself. Here we may only recall
the salient names, and specially remark the verse, of some
of the minor poets whose lyrical poetry is particularly
representative or noteworthy, or has become genuinely
popular.
Worthy of a place beside the major poets of the Systematic
Period is Ethelwyn Wetherald. In 1895 she published
The House of the Trees and Other Poems; in 1902, Tangled
in the Stars; in 1904, The Radiant Road and in 1907,
an edition of her collected poems, The Last Robin; Lyrics
and Sonnets. Perhaps the outstanding aesthetic quality
of her poetry is a tender, subdued, melancholy, spiritual
grace, ‘a grey-eyed loveliness,’ which undoubtedly derives
from the characteristic pensiveness of her Quaker ancestry.
But in all her verse, which is authentic poetry, she discloses
pretty sentiment, reflective beauty, ingenious imagery, and
fine craftsmanship. The Hay Field, which is Canadian in
inspiration, setting, and color is an apt example of Ethelwyn
Wetherald’s art:—
With slender arms outstretching in the sun
The grass lies dead;
The wind walks tenderly and stirs not one
Frail, fallen head.
Of baby creepings through the April day
Where streamlets wend,
Of child-like dancing on the breeze of May,
This is the end.
No more these tiny forms are bathed in dew,
No more they reach
To hold with leaves that shade them from the blue
A whispered speech.
No more they part their arms and wreathe them close
Again, to shield
Some love-full little nest—a dainty house
Hid in a field.
For them no more the splendour of the storm,
The fair delights
Of moon and star-shine, glimmering faint and warm
On summer nights.
Their little lives they yield in summer death,
And frequently
Across the field bereaved their dying breath
Is brought to me.
A poet who has won a distinct and fixed place in the
popular heart and imagination of Canadians is Jean Blewett.
Her first volume, Heart Songs, appeared in 1897 and immediately
won a wide popularity. This was increased by
her next volume, The Cornflower and Other Poems
(1906). Her Collected Poems were published in 1922. Jean
Blewett is essentially a ‘woman’s poet.’ By this is meant
that she appeals to the domestic heart and the imagination,
that she sings of the joys of home, the ways of children,
the love of husband and wife. But Jean Blewett does this
in an extraordinary way. She treats homely subjects indeed,
but while she treats them in a homely or rather home-like
way she does it with a simple and ingratiating sincerity
and charm of sentiment and artistry which are quite her
own and in the employment of which she is alone in Canada.
If her poems deal with homely subjects, her artistry is by
no means bourgeois. She rises and falls with the inherent
dignity of her subject. But her human treatment of a
homely subject never issues in vulgarity, or vivid ‘vaudeville’
verse. As an example of her genuine artistry and
dignity of treatment in a high or serious subject we quote
her Quebec:—
Quebec, the gray old city on the hill,
Lives with a golden glory on her head,
Dreaming throughout this hour so fair, so still,
Of those days and her beloved dead.
The doves are nesting in the cannons grim,
The flowers bloom where once did run a tide
Of crimson when the moon rose pale and dim
Above a field of battle stretching wide.
Methinks within her wakes a mighty glow
Of pride in ancient times, her stirring past,
The strife, the valour of the long ago
Feels at her heart-strings. Strong and tall, and vast
She lies, touched with the sunset’s golden grace,
A wondrous softness on her gray old face.
When her subject gives her a chance for sweep of
imagination and for a pearly beauty of imagery, Jean
Blewett rises brilliantly to her theme, as in What Time the
Morning Stars Arise, a really splendid war poem commemorating
the heroic deed of Lieutenant Reginald Warneford,
aviator, who unassisted destroyed a German armed
Zeppelin, containing 28 men, on June 7th, 1915. We quote
the first and last stanzas:—
Above him spreads the purple sky,
Beneath him spreads the ether sea,
And everywhere about him lie
Dim ports of peace and mystery.
• • • •
He sees the white mists softly curl,
He sees the moon drift pale and wan,
Sees Venus climb the stars of pearl
To hold her court of Love at dawn.
Jean Blewett is chiefly loved by the people for her forte—her
sincere, simple singing of true love and faith, of
childhood, and the field flowers, and the joys of the Canadian
Spring and Winter. But, as a genre poet, she is
gifted with a whimsical humor which is quite unique in the
poetic literature of Canada. For He was Scotch and So
Was She is a fetching example of Jean Blewett’s humor
and humorous treatment of a simple or homely subject and
is to be found in many Canadian anthologies.
Francis Sherman, one of the truest and most individual
poets that Canada has produced, is a relative of Charles G.
D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. His literary output has been
meagre, comprising only one regularly published volume,
a small, thin booklet, Matins (1896), and three or four
privately printed pamphlets of verse. But the quality is
sufficient to fix his place in the company of the authentic
Canadian poets of the First Renaissance.
Sherman’s poetry shows a distinct tendency to mysticism.
He was, evidently, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite
School. But he had an independent individuality. He
possessed, as a poet, eyes and feelings of his own; and
could express what he saw and felt, with ready and confident
artistry. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on Francis
Sherman and his own natural gifts for individual expression
are disclosed in Between the Battles (from Matins):—
Let us bury him here
Where the maples are!
He is dead,
And he died thanking God that he fell with the fall of the leaf and the year.
Where the hillside is sheer,
Let it echo our tread
Whom he led;
Let us follow as gladly as ever we followed who never knew fear.
Ere he died, they had fled;
Yet they heard his last cheer
Ringing clear,—
When we lifted him up, he would fain have pursued, but grew dizzy instead.
Break his sword and his spear!
Let his last prayer be said
By the bed
We have made underneath the wet wind in the maple trees moaning so drear:
‘O Lord God, by the red
Sullen end of the year
That is here,
We beseech Thee to guide us and strengthen our swords till his slayers be dead!’
Many of Sherman’s poems have the ‘great out-of-doors’
world in Canada as their theme, and are marked by grave,
meditative beauty, disclosing, on his part, intimate communing
with and brooding on Nature’s moods. These
qualities of Francis Sherman’s mind and art are observed
in the following sonnet, quoted from his In Memorabilia
Mortis:—
I marked the slow withdrawal of the year,
Out on the hills the scarlet maple shone—
The glad, first herald of triumphal dawn.
A robin’s song fell through the silence—clear
As long ago it rang when June was here.
Then, suddenly, a few grey clouds were drawn
Across the sky; and all the song was gone,
And all the gold was quick to disappear.
That day the sun seemed loth to come again;
And all day long the low wind spoke of rain,
Far-off, beyond the hills; and moaned, like one
Wounded, among the pines; as though the Earth,
Knowing some giant grief had come to birth,
Had wearied of the Summer and the Sun.
A rare spirit and exquisite craftsman, as a poet, is
Albert Ernest Stafford Smythe. He was born in Ireland
in 1861. He is Keltic through and through; and because
he is Keltic in his reactions to the universe, in his perceptions
of spiritual meanings in all things, he divines God
in men and God in Nature, or God as man and God as
Nature—spiritual presences everywhere. In a word, Albert
E. S. Smythe exemplifies in his genius and art, as
notably and profoundly as Lampman in his, but in a different
way, what Wordsworth called natural piety. Smythe’s
spiritual perceptions of divinity everywhere rise to a refined
mysticism which he expresses with a ‘white beauty’
in exquisitely finished verse. As contrasted with other
Canadian mystical poets Smythe is the poet of the Cosmic
Spirit and Beauty.
In 1891 he published Poems; Grave and Gay, and in
1923, The Garden of the Sun. A sonnet (The Seasons of
the Gods) and a lyric (Anastasis) from the second volume
suffice to disclose his qualities in his role as the poet of the
Cosmic Spirit and Beauty. As a sonneteer, Smythe is not
surpassed by any of his older or younger contemporaries.
The Seasons of the Gods is lofty in conception, noble in
thought, rich in naturalistic imagery, dulcet in verbal
melody, and perfect in formal artistry. It is music of a
soul ‘in tune with the Infinite’:—
I sat with May upon a midnight hill
Wrapped in a dusk of unremembered years
And thought on buried April—on the tears
And shrouds of March, and Youth’s dead daffodil
All withered on a Mound of Spring. And still
The earth moved sweetly in her sleep, the Spheres
Wrought peace about her path, and for her ears
Climbed the high music of their blended will.
The God who dreamed the Earth, as I this frame
That makes me thrall to death and coward of birth—
Dreamed He not March below some vanished Moon—
Under an earlier Heaven’s auroral flame
The cosmic April flowering into mirth
Of May and joy of Universal June?
With what lyrical eloquence, subdued, yet direct and
compelling, Smythe calls the soul, in pure poetry, to achieve
its spiritual destiny, in this lyric, simple in diction and
structure, but sublimated, in thought:—
What shall it profit a man
To gain the world—if he can—
And lose his soul, as they say
In their uninstructed way?
The whole of the world in gain;
The whole of your soul! Too vain
You judge yourself in the cost.
’Tis you—not your soul—is lost.
Your soul! If you only knew—
You would reach to the Heaven’s blue,
To the heartmost centre sink,
Ere you severed the silver link,
To be lost in your petty lust
And scattered in cosmic dust.
For your soul is a Shining Star
Where the Throne and the Angels are.
And after a thousand years,
With the salve of his bottled tears,
Your soul shall gather again
From the dust of a world of pain
The frame of a slave set free—
The man that you ought to be,
The man you may be to-night
If you turn to the Valley of Light.
The number of women poets in the period under review
is noteworthy. Along with Ethelwyn Wetherald and Jean
Blewett must be mentioned appreciatively the names and
poetry of Virna Sheard, Helena Coleman, Elizabeth Roberts
MacDonald (sister of C. G. D. Roberts), Helen M.
Merrill, Annie Campbell Huestis, Agnes Maule Machar
(pseud. ‘Fidelis’), Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Alma Frances
McCollum, and S. Frances Harrison (pseud. ‘Seranus’).
Their outstanding contemporaries amongst the men were
Arthur Stringer and Peter McArthur. It is impossible to
review in detail the poetry of all these lyrists. They followed
the ideals of the older systematic group as regards
original inspiration and artistic craftsmanship. But the
work of some of them may briefly be remarked.
In 1891 S. Frances Harrison published Pine, Rose, and
Fleur de Lis, a volume of really poetical verse. She is,
however, more to be noted as the compiler of the first
noteworthy anthology of Canadian verse (A Canadian
Birthday Book, 1887), which is distinguished by the fact
that it contains a poem by the Indian Chief Tecumseh, the
first French-Canadian poem, and some of the earliest
poems of Bliss Carman (a series of quatrains). Arthur
Stringer is a lyrical poet and a poetic dramatist. His art
in the latter respect is appreciated in another chapter. In
1907 he published The Woman in the Rain and Other
Poems, and in 1911, Irish Poems. His lyrical poetry in
general is distinguished by a warm humanity and by careful
craftsmanship. But he achieved a special distinction
with his poems in ‘Irishy.’ Many of them have been set to
music, and, amongst Canadian-born poets, his only rival
in that field is Sir Gilbert Parker. By themselves Stringer’s
poems in ‘Irishy’ are a novel and real, if not important,
contribution to the genre and humorous poetry of Canada.
In 1907 Peter McArthur (‘The Sage of Ekfrid’)
published The Prodigal and Other Poems. He is never a
mere aesthete in form, but he is a rare Nature and humorous
poet—with the lightest and happiest touch in both
departments, as in his Corn-Planting and in To the Birds.
He humanizes Nature in a way altogether different from
other Canadian poets, perhaps whimsically but always with
an intimate, colloquial quality of diction, and a piquancy
which makes his Nature poetry spiritually refreshing, even
to formalists and dilettanti.
Properly Isabel Ecclestone Mackay belongs to the minor
poets of the Systematic Period. For in 1904 she published
her first volume of verse, Between the Lights. But with
that, she turned to writing fiction, and did not publish any
books of verse till the appearance of The Shining Ship and
Other Poems (1919) and Fires of Driftwood (1923). Her
first venture in verse was not better than passable or than
good journalistic verse. But in Fires of Driftwood she
disclosed a real mastery of form, color, and music, along
with a spiritual sentiment which is new in Canadian poetry.
She is occupied most with the vicissitudes and meaning of
life, but occasionally she paints objective Nature with winning
color and music. It is, however, in her poetry of
childhood (rather than for children), as in The Shining
Ship, that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay most displays original
genius and has achieved genuine distinction. The poems
in The Shining Ship are marked by the rarest of psychological
gifts in a poet—insight into the real heart and mind
and imagination of children, and by a diction and phrasing
which appeal to the child mind as immediately and as
winningly as do the child poems of Eugene Field and R.
L. Stevenson. In fact, as Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden
of Verse is to English Literature, so Isabel Ecclestone
Mackay’s A Shining Ship and Other Poems is to Canadian
Literature.
Sources of quotations in this chapter:
The Hayfield is found in The Last Robin, by Ethelwyn Wetherald (Ryerson
Press: Toronto).
Quotations from Jean Blewett’s work, in Jean Blewett’s Poems (McClelland
& Stewart: Toronto).
From Francis Sherman’s Matins (Copeland and Day: Boston).
From Albert E. S. Smythe’s Grave and Gay; and from The Garden of the
Sun (Macmillan Co.: Toronto).
THE ELEGIAC MONODISTS OF CANADA—CHARLES G. D.
ROBERTS—BLISS CARMAN—WILFRED CAMPBELL—DUNCAN
CAMPBELL SCOTT—WILLIAM MARSHALL—JAMES DE MILLE.
Canadian Literature is rich—not relatively but absolutely—in
Dirges, Epicedes, Elegies, Threnodies, and
Elegiac Monodies. That Canadian Elegiac Monodies, or
long ‘In Memoriam’ poems inspired by the death of a real,
not a mythical or imagined, person, have genuine distinction,
is indisputable. In number they equal the monodies
of English Literature; and in manner, in variety of form,
and in several qualitative excellences they surpass the
monodies of American Literature. Modern English literature
possesses five great threnodies or monodies; Milton’s
Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais, Tennyson’s In Memoriam,
Arnold’s Thyrsis, and Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale. American
Literature has to its credit two fine and noble monodies:
Emerson’s Threnody (for his son) and Whitman’s
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (for Lincoln).
Canadian Literature boasts of six threnodies or monodies,
which all enhance New World Literature and at least
two of which are a distinct contribution to the elegiac
poetry of English Literature. The Canadian monodies are
Roberts’ Ave! (to Shelley), Carman’s A Seamark (to
Stevenson), Campbell’s Bereavement of the Fields (to
Lampman), Duncan Campbell Scott’s Lines in Memory of
Edmund Morris (a Canadian painter), William E. Marshall’s
Brookfield (to R. R. MacLeod), and James De
Mille’s Behind the Veil (which is sort of Dantean ‘Vision’
of the Beloved in Heaven).
That Canadian poets should have essayed the Elegiac
Monody and have excelled in it is consistent with the
genuine, the essential mood, the spiritual attitudes of the
Canadian people. For while the literary traditions, forms,
and methods of Canadian poets are English, the bases of
Canadian culture and civilization are much more New
England and Scots than English, or, in short, Puritan and
Calvinistic. It was as natural for the 19th century native-born
Canadian, as it was for an 18th century New England
Puritan and Loyalist and a Scots Calvinist, to be preoccupied
with thoughts of ‘otherworldliness.’ The meaning
of life and death is almost a congenial subject of reflection
to the characteristic Canadian. Fortunately the
habitat of the Canadian mind, Nature in Canada, recalled
Canadian poets from exclusive occupation with spiritual
prosperities and great departures to thoughts of ‘the soul’s
inherent high magnificence’ in daily mundane life and to
the joys, consolations, spiritual transports, and peace which
Nature affords the distracted human spirit. Another factor
saved Canadian poets from moralistic preachments when
they were moved to express in verse their sorrow over
some great departure. They had the example of the form
and color of the English elegies, from Milton to Swinburne,
to save them from chill gravity and barren moralism. The
Canadian monodists, on their own account, also loved fine
technic in verse, and strove to achieve it according to their
capacity. It was therefore natural that Canadian poets not
only should essay the elegiac monody but also write that
species of poetry with genuine distinction.
The subjects of all Canadian elegiac monodies are either
presented against a background of Nature or are suffused
with ‘the color of life’ and the beauty of Nature. The
first, and in many ways the noblest, Canadian monody is
Charles G. D. Roberts’ Ave! (sub-titled An Ode for the
Centenary of Shelley’s Birth). It is a poem of thirty-one
ten-line stanzas, in decasyllabics, closing with a rimed
couplet, iambic pentameter. The poem is not so much, as
Roberts called it, an ‘ode’ as an elegiac monody, with the
subject presented against a pastoral background. That it
was written ostensibly to commemorate Shelley’s birth, not
his death, must not cause us to conceive the poem as other
than an elegy. The centenary of Shelley’s birth occurred in
1892, when Roberts was 32 years of age. Naturally he
seized the opportunity to memorialize in verse the spirit
of one of his masters, but he also laments the passing of
Shelley and his influence, after the manner of the true
elegiac monody. The poem divides not strophically but
symphonically. The first theme is a picture of the naturalistic
beauties of the Tantramar marshes and the tides that
rush in over it from the Bay of Fundy, and the influences
that Nature about Tantramar had on Roberts as a poet.
He develops this theme by marking how ‘strangely akin’
Tantramar’s marshes seem
to him whose birth
One hundred years ago
With fiery succor to the ranks of song
Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong;
and how, like these marshes, with the incoming and the
outgoing floods of Fundy’s tides, Shelley’s
compassionate breast,
Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace,
Was tortured with perpetual unrest.
Now loud with flood, now languid with release,
Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife
Of tides from the salt sea of human pain
That hiss along the perilous coasts of life
Beat in his eager brain;
But all about the tumult of his heart
Stretched the great calm of his celestial art.
A few stanzas are devoted, as they say in symphonic
music, to the ‘working out’ of this similitude in all its
aspects. Then in stanza XXII Roberts formally announces
the elegiac theme as such:—
Lament, Lerici, mourn the world’s loss!
Mourn that pure light of song extinct at noon!
Roberts develops the lyrical genius of Shelley in eight
stanzas, and in the final two stanzas returns to the original
theme of the Tantramar marshes where on the inner ear
of the Canadian poet
once more
Resounds the ebb with destiny in its roar.
It was remarked, in a preceding chapter, that we miss
the ethical note in Roberts’ genius and poetry. Here is
the exception. In his Ave! he became morally or religiously,
as well as imaginatively, sublimated. In that poem
he treats life and death with the moral beauty and significance
of his exemplars and models, Shelley’s Adonais,
Arnold’s Thyrsis, and Swinburne’s Ave atque Vale. In
form and substance Roberts’ Ave! is a true elegiac monody.
But is it a great poem? Fault has been found with it
on the side of structure or coherency. The poem appears
coherent when it is remembered that the structure is symphonic
rather than strophic. For though the poem begins
with a Canadian setting, which on the face of it is as far
away as possible from Shelley and Shelley’s England where
he was born and the Italy where he died, it is the thought
of the Canadian marshes and the floods and unrest of the
tides that suggests to Roberts the inner spirit and genius and
life and death of Shelley. So that naturally Roberts passes
from the Canadian setting and its suggestions to the subject
proper of his poem, namely, Shelley; then to memorializing
Shelley’s genius and lamenting his passing, and,
finally, back to the Canadian setting which suggested the
whole poem. Surely that is coherent logic, unity in variety
of structure!
Nor is there any real contradiction between the diction
and imagery of the poem and the high magnificence of
the soul which the poem commemorates. The ‘properties,’
of course, are not classical—heroes and nymphs, and all
the mythical personages of the Greek pastoral poets. There
is genuine spiritual dignity in the Canadian setting of the
Ave!—the atmosphere and color of the grassy Canadian
flatlands, and tides, and mists, and air, and life, and sky.
The poem, too, is in the grand manner and is marked by
a spiritual sweep and lyrical eloquence which convey to
the heart and the imagination of the reader the sense of
profound emotion and of sincerity on the part of the poet.
So that, in spite of alleged structural and dictional faults,
Roberts’ Ave! is distinguished by sensuous beauty and
splendor, by imaginative sweep, by emotional intensity and
moral and spiritual dignity. But above all it is, as a pastoral
elegy or monody, much more Canadian than English.
As such, it is a really fine and distinctive contribution to
Canadian creative literature. If it is not a great poem, it
is a magnificent, compelling, and noble achievement in
great poetry—a poem which surpasses any monody in
American Literature and which indubitably takes an important
status amongst the elegiac monodies of England.
In 1895 Bliss Carman published A Seamark[1] (sub-titled
A Threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson). It is a poem
of thirty-eight stanzas in rimed iambic tetrameter. It is
all in the inimitable lyric manner of Carman, and commemorates
Stevenson as ‘the master of the roving kind.’
Altiloquence is never a quality of Carman’s poetry, as it
is of Roberts.’ Subtlety in simplicity is the formula of
Carman’s genius. And he will color all his homely or
simple images with the most apt felicity of phrase and the
most insinuating verbal melody. For this reason, some
miss the high spiritual, mystical, and religious note in
poems which are even more sublimated, though less grandiloquent,
than Roberts’ verse. On the face of A Seamark,
it seems as if Carman, in commemorating the death of
Stevenson ‘as the master of the roving kind,’ composed a
colorful musical lyric, but not a highly spiritualized poem.
How simple or homely, and yet how felicitous and colorful,
are the images in Carman’s musical lines, announcing
the death of Stevenson on the island of Vailima:—
Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
And melted on the white sea-rim.
The hasty reader does not suspect or surmise the deeper
meaning that is to come. But Carman and Stevenson were
kin of mind and heart, and their kinship was a kinship of
the love of searching out the haunts and ways of the joy
and beauty that are on the face and in the heart of Nature.
So that these master rovers are not careless, irresponsible
vagabonds, but are spiritual nomads with a spiritual function
and bent on a divine errand. Thus does Carman
magnify their office:—
O all you hearts about the world
In whom the truant gypsy blood,
Under the frost of this pale time,
Sleeps like the daring sap and flood
That dream of April and reprieve!
You whom the haunted vision drives,
Incredulous of home and ease,
Perfection’s lovers all your lives!
What it was given to Carman to discern in the universe
was the eternal meaning of youth and to hear the ever-young
voice of earth singing in the heart of man and in
the earth, in everything, and to be himself the lyric voice
of the world. Stevenson was also such a lyric voice
of earth. Carman, then, does highly spiritualize his subject
when he first presents Stevenson in the manner of the outward
aspect by which he was commonly conceived, a restless
loved adventurer, who when he died was laid down,
as Carman puts it in novel and arresting paradox:—
Beyond the turmoil of renown,
and, next, discloses the inner meaning of the ‘wander-biddings’
that were in the soul of Stevenson who, even in
death, still kept
The journey-wonder on his face.
For when Stevenson died, men sorrowed and surmised not
why they grieved. But Carman in A Seamark reveals
why. Men thought a prince of joy had passed forever.
But Carman discloses the higher spiritual truth:—
He ‘was not born for age.’ Ah no,
For everlasting youth is his!
And part of the lyric of the earth
With spring and leaf and blade he is.
In form, and in musical, colorful, simple yet subtle,
spiritualization of the meaning and value of men in whom
the lyric spirit of earth is supreme and vocal, there is not
another elegiac monody in English like, or comparable to,
Carman’s A Seamark. It, too, like Roberts’ Ave! enhances
both the quality and quantity of the Canadian and the English
elegy.
Wilfred Campbell was a myriad-minded man and had
an inherited Keltic imagination which felt acutely the magic
and mystery of earth and existence. He conceived, most
beautifully and nobly, the passing of Archibald Lampman
not as a bereavement suffered by mere persons but rather
by the great and constant ‘companion’ of Lampman,
namely, Nature. With a peculiar and lovely sense of the
poetic significance of death, Campbell ennobled the spirit
of Lampman, and perpetuated the meaning of his poetry,
in an elegiac monody which bears the felicitous title
Bereavement of the Fields.
The poem is in a seven-lined pentameter stanza, and
is infused with Canadian Nature-color throughout. The
diction and the structure are simple, and there is no attempt
at sublimated imagination. The poem is rather in the subdued
and gentle manner of Lampman himself. That is to
say, there is a gentle melancholy running through the poem,
but the melancholy is relieved by a simple spiritual beauty
which conveys the rare essence of the spirit of Lampman,
who passed from earth:—
Leaving behind him, like a summer shower,
A fragrance of earth’s beauty, and the chime
Of gentle and imperishable rhyme.
If poetry can be accepted as literary criticism, then
Campbell has estimated better than the best prose critic the
significance and worth of Lampman as a poet and his place
in the company of the great:—
Outside this prison-house of all our tears,
Enfranchised from our sorrow and our wrong,
Beyond the failure of our days and years,
Beyond the burden of our saddest song,
He moves with those whose music filled his ears,
And claimed his gentle spirit from the throng,—
Wordsworth, Arnold, Keats, high masters of his song.
Campbell’s threnody is simple, sensuous, and impassioned,
without being impressionistic and rhetorical. It is
a sincere and noble affirmation of the supremacy of the
spirit of beauty in the world, wherein, as Lampman’s exemplar,
Keats, once said, imperishably:—
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.
Altogether in another form and with a fresh and novel
poetic conception and impressive artistry, Duncan Campbell
Scott wrote his Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris[2].
Scott’s art is singularly informed by a color and beauty
derived from his intimate and exquisite appreciation of the
fine arts, especially music and painting. More than any
other Canadian poet, Scott is the ‘artist in words.’ He is
concerned above all things to employ poetic diction and
imagery with the same love of refined expressiveness and
emotional nuance as inspired such musical composers or
tone-painters as Ravel, Debussy, and MacDowell, and such
painters as Constable, Watteau, and Monet. Or to borrow
from musical criticism, Scott loves his performance, his
executant artistry with words and imagery, more than he
loves his poetic ideas.
Edmund Morris was a Canadian painter and his spirit
perceived in Canadian Nature and in the Indian aborigines
in Canada something which no other painter had perceived
or attempted to envisage. Scott and Morris were companions
and kindred spirits—the one an artist in words;
and the other an artist in pigments. It was natural, then,
that Scott, on the tragic death of his friend, should commemorate
the loss which both the living friend and the
country suffered by the passing of Edmund Morris. But
it was impossible for Scott to write any conventionalized
elegiac monody. Under inner compulsion, he wrote of life
and death with all his original genius for conceiving, as he
phrases his mode of conception,
and with all his gifts in exquisite craftsmanship:—
Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.
Scott’s Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris is in some
respects unique, but particularly in form, and its simple,
intimate, direct address to the spirit. It is not a pastoral
elegy in the third person but a dramatic monologue, or an
epistle in verse from one spirit to another. There is nothing
like it in all English Literature, not even in Browning. But
intimate, even familiar, and colloquial as it is, the poem
is radiant with a ‘white beauty’ of imagery and chaste
artistry. More notably still, it subdues the turbulence of
our souls in the presence of a great loss by death, transports
the imagination to the mount of spiritual vision, refines
faith, sustains hope, and fills the spirit with a serene peace.
It leaves upon us imperishably the inward sense that ‘it is
not death to die’:—
Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,
Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain,
Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart
And loses a gold kernel to the mould,
So the old world, hanging long in the sun,
And deep enriched with effort and with love,
Shall, in motions of maturity,
Wither and part, and the kernel of it all
Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to latitudes
Where the appearance, throated like a bird,
Winged with fire and bodied all with passion,
Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy.
All through this elegiac monody there is a singularly
sweet humanity and yet in it are heard the constant overtones
of ‘the soul’s inherent high magnificence,’ and the
whole is suffused or informed with the color of Canadian
Nature and character and life. So that the poem is a
novel and important contribution to the elegiac monody
in English.
In another style and with another but winning effect
upon the heart and the imagination, is William Edward
Marshall’s monody Brookfield. It is a poem of forty-five
stanzas in the Spenserian form. Structurally viewed, however,
his Brookfield is considerably an achievement in that
form. Its theme is the heart and mind of a simple man,
a friend of the poet, who taught the poet to love communion
with the simple creatures and the life of Nature, and to
observe in Nature, not the garment, but the very spiritual
presence of God. There is no metaphysic of Nature in
Brookfield. There is but the apprehension of divinity in
the little wild creatures and in the streams and hills, and in
the mists, and in all the varied life of the universal mother.
Marshall’s master was Keats, and while Brookfield cannot
critically be called an example of sensuous impressionism,
yet it is warmly colored with pigmentation from the palette
of Nature. But the loveliest strands running through the
warp and woof of the poem are those of love and the
heavenly vision. The sweet, gentle, even tender, Nature-quality
as well as the spiritual note in the poem, may be
apprehended from the following stanza:—
Ah, he was richly dowered of the earth!
The grain of sand, the daisy in the sod,
Awoke his heart; and early he went forth,
Through field and wood, with young eyes all abroad;
And saw the nesting birds and beck and nod
Of little creatures running wild and free,
(Which know not that they know, yet are of God)
And kept his youth, and grew in sympathy,
And loved his fellows more, and had love’s victory.
Literary critics in the United States, in reviewing Marshall’s
Brookfield signalized both its sensuous and spiritual
beauty as extraordinary, and in line with the quality of the
best English elegiac monodies. In Canada it received high
praise from Sir Andrew MacPhail, who sponsored it by
publishing it in The University Magazine, and from Dr.
Archibald MacMechan. ‘No such poem,’ said the latter,
‘has appeared in Canada since Roberts’ Ave! In dignity
and depth of feeling the Ave!, De Mille’s Behind the Veil,
and Brookfield stand together—a noble trio.’ Marshall’s
Brookfield is Canadian in subject and setting and is indeed
a beautiful and noble application of ideas to life—a genuinely
original contribution to the creative poetic literature
of Canada.
James De Mille’s Behind the Veil, published posthumously
in 1892, is a kind of elegiac monody. The poet
himself does not so sub-title it. He designates it simply as
‘A Poem.’ Whether the ‘Loved One’ who has been lost to
the poet was a real person or an imagined companion of
the spirit, it is impossible to surmise from the poem. But
the poem itself is concerned with life and death and yearning
for union with the Beloved in Heaven, and is thus a
spiritualized elegy. Essentially, however, it is a reflective
or philosophical poem. If it is reflective, it is also highly
melodramatic both in substance and in form. Part of its
melodramatic quality derives from its metrical structure
which suggests Poe’s Raven. It is written in stanzas of
five lines in trochaic tetrameter—a form totally unsuited
to its intended high spiritual dignity of theme. A taste of
its quality is afforded from the following stanzas:—
Through the darkness rose a vision,
Where beneath the night I kneeled,
Dazzling bright with hues Elysian—
Congregated motes of glory on an ebon field
And a form from out that glory to my spirit stood revealed.
‘Son of Light’—I murmured lowly—
‘All my heart is known to thee—
All my longing and my yearning for the Loved One lost to me—
May these eyes again behold her?’—and the Shape said, ‘Come and see.’
It is impossible to read one hundred and twenty-five
stanzas or 625 lines like the preceding, in which the feminine
endings make fixed caesural pauses that prevent enjambement
and thus inhibit rhythmical variety, without the
reader’s feeling himself in the realm of the musically melodramatic.
So that the high seriousness of the poem suffers
a loss in impressiveness because of the metre and rhythm
of the poem. It is plain that De Mille was not an adroit
verbal musician. The spiritual dignity and seriousness of
the poem can be commended, but on the whole, it is not
poetry, and is not a significant contribution to the Canadian
monody.
THE FICTIONISTS OF THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL—THE HISTORICAL
ROMANCERS—LIGHTHALL—SAUNDERS—PARKER—MARQUIS—MACLENNAN
AND McILWRAITH—AGNES C. LAUT—WILFRED
CAMPBELL—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS. THE ROMANCERS
OF ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY—THOMPSON SETON—ROBERTS—SAUNDERS—FRASER.
THE EVANGELICAL
ROMANCERS—RALPH CONNOR—R. E. KNOWLES.
When William Kirby published, in 1877, The Golden
Dog, he led the way in Canadian historical
romance. Major John Richardson had written historical
novels years before, but Richardson’s material was largely
first hand, from contact with a life and with a setting
similar to what he described. We might argue that Kirby
‘discovered’ to the fictionists who were to come after him
the wealth of material that lay in the unknown and almost
forgotten Canadian past, for he founded his work on Canadian
history and infused it with Canadian incident and
color; and although Mrs. Leprohon’s romances had a considerable
vogue both in English and in French, the circulation
of her novels was chiefly local and not anything like
so widespread as that of Kirby’s single masterpiece.
Yet it is problematic just how much the historical or
romantic fiction of the Post-Confederation period (beginning,
say, in 1888) owes to Kirby and how much it owes
to a stirring impulse of nationality. That impulse produced
tangible evidences in our literature because of a
conscious realization of national ideals and a sensing of
the spirit of a courageous and romantic past in a country
that, superficially viewed, had barely reached the stage of
‘growing pains.’
In 1888 William Douw Lighthall published The Young
Seigneur, a socio-political study of life and institutions in
Canada, which according to the author himself; ‘arose out
of my ideas as a young man concerning an ideal of Canadian
nationality to which I gave the color of this province
(Quebec) as I knew it in the old Seigneuries.’ Possibly
the ‘thesis’ overpowered the romantic or novel elements,
for this book is not regarded as equal in literary merit to
its successors. The False Chevalier (1898) was a historical
romance set partly in Canada and partly in France.
It is an attempt to depict an actual romance found in a
packet of documents at the house of the De Léry’s at
Boucherville near Montreal. It is rich in atmosphere and
color both of the old land and the new and is filled with
engaging incident, but lacks somewhat in effective novel
construction, and in convincing characterization. It is in
The Master of Life (1910) that Dr. Lighthall has produced
a unique and masterly piece of fiction. With
Hiawatha as its hero, it is purely aboriginal in setting and
color and exhibits the author’s wide knowledge of Indian
history and archaeology. It was the result of Dr. Lighthall’s
sympathies with the Iroquois Indians, derived originally
from the ancient family records of the Schuylers
(from whom the Lighthalls are descended). They, as
leading British officers and statesmen, had much to do with
keeping the Iroquois steadfast to the British Crown. Although
the impetus to its writing originated in this way,
The Master of Life, in its development is an example of
rare constructive imagination and is pervaded with a richly
poetic interpretation that apprehends nature as filled with
spiritual presences and nature’s beauty as the garment of
the Great Spirit.
The year 1889 saw the publication of a work of pure
romance in My Spanish Sailor by (Margaret) Marshall
Saunders. This was a love story of the sea in which a
Nova Scotian girl and a Spanish sea-captain are the leading
characters. Again in Rose à Charlitte (1898), afterwards
published as Rose of Acadie, Miss Saunders essays romance,
colored, it is true, by a seemingly historic atmosphere, but
yet rather a record than a history, for the Acadian habits
and customs which one might think of as belonging to a
past age were current among the people in the Bay of St.
Mary settlement when visited by Miss Saunders in the
summer of 1897. Here the descendants of the Acadians
had lived apart from the English and preserved their language,
traditions, customs, and their unique manner of
life. ‘The elements of strength and weakness of the people,
their patient devotion, their openness, simplicity and
generosity, their love of gossip and light-heartedness, with
the shadows of the tragic past brooding over them, are all
caught in a true perspective.’ Thus it is not until the year
1896 that we come upon a truly legitimate successor to The
Golden Dog. In that year appeared Gilbert Parker’s Seats
of the Mighty, which became one of the most popular of
his novels. The story has a strong and fairly unified and
coherent plot. It exhibits Parker’s powers of characterization
and presents to us a gallery of vividly limned historic
portraits—Robert Moray, Doltaire, Gabord, De la Darant,
Bigot, Vaudreuil, Montcalm, Wolfe—in the main true to
type, human, and universal. There is not, however, an
unerring accuracy in atmosphere and color and characterization.
The writer was not sufficiently saturated with his
subject and occasional touches of modernity and tinges
of contemporary color subtract from the excellence of
artistry.
But Parker’s fiction really began with his short stories
of ‘Pretty Pierre’ in 1890. It is related that upon coming
to London from Australia he brought to Archibald Forbes,
then noted as a war correspondent, a collection of stories.
Forbes’ comment was: ‘You have the best collection of
titles I ever saw.’ Parker took his manuscripts home and
promptly burned them. A day or so afterwards, while
passing a shop window filled with armor and other curios,
he noticed the leather coat and fur cap of a trapper. He
went at once to his room and began to write The Patrol of
the Cypress Hills, the first story in the series Pierre and
His People. These stories dealt with the life of early
Western Canada and were followed from time to time by
other volumes: A Romany of the Snows, published in England
under the title, An Adventurer of the North, picturing
French-Canadians in the woods and rural settlements;
The Lane That Had No Turning, stories of that Quebec
settlement which is the background of the novel When Valmond
Came to Pontiac; Cumner’s Son, sketches of life in
the South Seas and in Australia; Donovan Pasha, tales of
Egypt and the Soudan; Northern Lights, more modern
stories of Western Canada.
Parker became a prolific writer of novels and his settings
range from Canada and the South Seas to England,
Egypt, and South Africa. The treatment varies from an
almost immediate transcript of near present conditions as
in The Judgment House to the re-creation of the historic
past in The Battle of the Strong, from the delicate imaginative
romance in When Valmond Came to Pontiac, to a
pathological study in The Right of Way; he gives us a combination
of melodrama and mysticism in The Weavers,
the revealment of innate greatness of character in The
Translation of a Savage, while in You Never Know Your
Luck, he cleverly expands a tenuous short story thread to
the full proportions of a novel.
Besides The Seats of the Mighty, the novels of Gilbert
Parker that will be likely to command most attention because
of intrinsic worth are: The Right of Way, The Battle
of the Strong, When Valmond Came to Pontiac, The
Weavers, and The Judgment House. The Right of Way is
a compelling study in abnormal psychology. There may
be improbabilities in the development of the story of
Charley Steele, but there is a living force in his character
and he stands forth as one of the realities of fiction. The
Battle of the Strong depicts the Channel Islands in the
eighteenth century, and was written in a mood of defiance.
Parker was going to get away from a Canadian background.
He would write no more novels of Canada. But,
as Sherlock Holmes ‘returned,’ so Canada was too much a
part of Gilbert Parker’s life to remain out of his writings,
and he found, himself unable to get away from it for very
long. The Battle of the Strong, however, was based on a
thorough and sympathetic study of the country and people
of the Channel Islands and the characters and incidents are
colored with a simple, engaging humor. When Valmond
Came to Pontiac is a delightful excursion into romance in
which the Napoleonic tradition shows its influence in a little
out-of-the-way village of Quebec. It has much of the
charm of Booth Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire and is
structurally the nearest to artistic perfection of any of
Parker’s novels. The Weavers rises to a more Imperialistic
sweep, dealing as it does with internal and international
politics of Egypt, while The Judgment House, a novel of
London and South Africa, is his greatest literary conception;
in it his imaginative vision has apprehended big
interests, big business, big ideals, big expansion, Imperial
ends, conceived and carried out by big men, struggling
and striving and achieving in a big world. His more
recent novels, although some of them, as The Money Master,
show considerable skill in characterization, are largely
novels of incident and of accidental circumstance and have
not the broad grasp of men and events nor the innate emotional
depth and power of those just outlined.
The outstanding qualities of Parker’s work are:—
(1) The strong dramatic quality. It is no surprise to
us to learn that he was in his college days a most enthusiastic
Shakespeare student and an ‘elocutionist’ of some
reputation. The power to portray dramatic situations
is exhibited in his very earliest writings. One need but
open almost any of his novels and read the first paragraph
to find that one is projected into an imaginative
world of action, although the story may begin with a sentence
of pure narration or description.
(2) Skill in descriptive characterization. How effectively
action, explanation, and description are combined
to make his characters vivid, cannot be better exhibited
than in the introduction of Valmond in When Valmond
Came to Pontiac. Yet there is a tendency to cast some
of his characters in moulds, so that they become types
rather than individuals. ‘Donovan Pasha’ is but ‘Pretty
Pierre’ amid new conditions and circumstances. ‘Krool’
of The Judgment House recalls forcibly ‘Soolsby’ of The
Weavers.
(3) His versatility is apparent from the survey already
made of his works. And to the list of poems, short
stories, and novels, might be added his book on the Great
War—The World in the Crucible—and his articles on agricultural
questions and land settlement.
(4) His breadth of literary canvas. It may seem a
simple matter to place one part of a story in England and
another in Africa, or part in Canada and another part in
the South Seas, but it requires a very broad grasp of material
and a wide knowledge of people, and a keen sense of
atmosphere to do it effectually. He has been described as
the product of the British Empire, and there is little doubt
that the breadth of his experience is the basis of his breadth
of literary vision.
(5) A sense of the supernatural and touches of mysticism
are consequent to his strong dramatic powers and
show in many of his short stories, e.g. The Tall Master
and The Flood in Pierre and His People, and in some of
his novels, notably in The Weavers.
Summing up our impressions of Sir Gilbert Parker, we
find that he has a breadth of vision not excelled or even
equalled by any other Canadian writer. Comparing him
with Norman Duncan, we see that Duncan is a finer workman
but in a narrower range. Parker comes close to taking
a place with the front rank modern British novelists
and yet he does not quite do it. Why? Perhaps because
of the fact that a man’s excellences are very often the
cause of his defects. He is nothing if not dramatic. He
reaches always for the spectacular climax where nature is
often satisfied to take things quietly. He has just a little
too much of a tendency to play to the gallery. He verges
nearer to the melodramatic than do his contemporary British
novelists—in fact, he frequently falls to it. There is
not enough innate value in his incidents, there is more stage
play.
Yet on the whole, Parker’s work is fresher. There is
more of the clear air of the out-of-doors. There is not
the morbidity of tone, nor the feeling of helplessness that
is found in the fiction of Hardy, Meredith, Bennett, Galsworthy,
Philpotts, Trevena and other leaders of the modern
British novelists. We can forgive Parker many lapses because
at the end—the total effect is the feeling that the
good comes uppermost. Take even Pierre, half-breed
gambler, a sort of half-Ishmaelite, yet with a sense of
fair-play, a chivalry, a kindness that never leaves him.
And so nearly all his characters and most of his books
inspire us finally with divine lessons of hope and encouragement.
The historical romances of Charles G. D. Roberts—The
Forge in the Forest (1896), A Sister to Evangeline, The
Prisoner of Mademoiselle, The Raid From Beauséjour—while
they are Canadian in setting and color, do not show
the same imaginative reach and the same emotional power
as the romances of Parker. The themes and settings of
Roberts’ romances are rather narrow. They are concerned
chiefly with minor incidents of the early history of Acadia,
or we might say rather with a minor treatment of these
incidents, for the historical episodes about which these
stories are centered were, no doubt, of themselves important
enough to the early French colony. The difficulty is
that, despite the skill of Roberts in depicting local color
and reproducing atmosphere in exquisite smooth flowing
prose, he evinces little gift of characterization and the
personages of the story are more or less mechanical puppets
speaking by the will and with the words of the showman.
Somewhat unique in early romantic fiction is The Forest
of Bourg Marie, by S. Frances Harrison (‘Seranus’), first
published in 1898. The bygone civilization of the old
seigneuries casts its glamor over a newer and more
sophisticated Quebec, in its turn influenced by the hectic
glitter of great cities of ‘the States,’ to which were attracted
restless youth of French-Canada. Thus Mikel Caron,
forest-ranger for the county of Yamachiche, links to the
present the past grandeur of the Seigniory of Bourg Marie,
while Magloire le Caron (Mr. Murray Carson in the
States), villain of the piece, is the hybrid product of three
civilizations. The writer’s style alters itself to harmonize
with the varying spirit and mood of her story—stately and
poetic in its descriptions of departed greatness; nervous and
gauche in the passages where the turbulent current of a
fevered modernity breaks through.
In Marguerite de Roberval (1899), T. G. Marquis
turned back to the times of Jacques Cartier and applied
his constructive imagination as well as his industry in research
to building a story of Old France and the New
around a most romantic and dramatic love episode.
In the same year appeared The Span o’ Life written in
collaboration by William MacLennan and Jean N. MacIlwraith.
Its historical basis is found in the memoirs of a
Scottish Chevalier, who shared in the ill-starred rebellion
of Prince Charles and afterwards became a soldier of fortune
in the army of France, thus being present at the siege
of Louisbourg and afterwards escaping to Quebec and
joining the French forces there. The plot element of the
story is somewhat weak and it is of value chiefly for its
inside history of the siege conditions in the two greatest
forts of New France.
So far the concern of Canadian historical fiction, as we
have seen it, has been chiefly with New France and the conflicts
between the French and English in North America.
It remained for Agnes C. Laut to realize quite independently
the amazing wealth of romantic history that lay back
of the opening up and exploiting of the middle and far
West of Canada. While yet a schoolgirl and knowing only
the formal, conventional, and statistical outlines of Canadian
history as then taught, she came accidentally upon a
copy of Gunn’s History of Manitoba and sat up all night
thrilled with the story of the Selkirk settlers. Thus originated
the impulse, fulfilled later (1900), in The Lords of
the North and (1902) in Heralds of Empire, to reveal
what she felt, to show that Canada’s history was one page
of glory. It had never been told in a way that the youth
of the land would realize this, and she felt that, lacking
this realization, we lacked a truly national spirit.
Lords of the North presents a vivid picture of Canada’s
fur trade at the most flourishing period of that industry.
It follows the conflict between the rival fur companies—the
North-West and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Across
its pages flit the voyageur, the trader, Indians, missionaries,
settlers, buffalo hunters—all the romantic figures of
the Canadian West of the period of 1815 to 1821. Heralds
of Empire will be remembered for its characterization of
Pierre Radisson, the man of action—the man who dared
and who did—the man with the true pioneer spirit. Miss
Laut’s style is forcible and direct. Her sentences are brief
and crisp. The story runs on without effort. Description
never wearies because it is the natural and necessary setting,
painted with quick, bold vivid strokes. Of the larger matters
of plot structure—the architectonics of fiction, she can
hardly be said to have achieved mastery, but she writes
with such energy and enthusiasm for her subject that in a
measure this defect may be overlooked.
Wilfred Campbell also essayed the historical romance
but with indifferent success. His Ian of the Orcades with
its historical Scottish setting was more congenial to his
genius than A Beautiful Rebel. It has arresting incidents,
vigorously drawn characters, and considerable intensity of
emotions, but it wins us rather by Campbell’s power to suffuse
the text with what Matthew Arnold called ‘natural
magic.’ It is more in keeping with the ‘old world imagination’
of Campbell which has been defined in the study of
his poetry. A Beautiful Rebel, a story of Canada and
the United States in the war of 1812, is lacking in imaginative
color, is defective in structure, and the incident is
too slight for the significance of the theme. The comment
of the author has a way of appearing obtrusively as a
digression, or at times in the mouths of the characters.
What value A Beautiful Rebel has as historic fiction lies
chiefly in its representation of the part played in the war by
American sympathizers living as Canadian settlers.
In the field of romance of wild and of domestic animal
psychology, Canadian writers have shown a distinct and
unique inventive genius and a corresponding artistry.
Ernest Thompson Seton attracted the attention of the
world by his romances of wild life in Canada because he
combined in them the skilled observation of the scientist,
the vision of the artist, the insight of the psychologist, the
sympathy of the humane man; and, perhaps, more than all
that, the spirit of youthful wonder at, and interest in,
the ways and doings of the creatures of the field and wood.
He brought to his writings of animal life a new point
of view—namely, that human beings and wild animals are
kin; that animals are motivated with passions and desires
and, to some extent, ideas, just as human beings are. Thus
he wrote with sympathy and with creative imagination and
revealed the new life and being of wild animals, and he
hoped to achieve the practical result of quickening the
sympathies of man toward animals and stopping the
thoughtless extermination of many of our harmless wild
creatures.
His books such as Wild Animals I Have Known
(1898), The Trail of The Sand-Hill Stag, The Biography
of a Grizzly, Lives of the Hunted, are studies of animal
psychology and behavior. Lives of the Hunted, for example,
contains life-histories of Krag, the mountain Ram;
of Johnny Bear; of Coyotito, the Escaped Coyote. Krag’s
whole history from birth to death is faithfully sketched
and, incidentally, much is learned about the habits of the
mountain-sheep. From these life-histories we gain, not
merely knowledge and information but wisdom, since animal
life and human life are akin.
Some of the earlier animal stories were written in
dialogue—the animals being made to talk. But, very wisely,
the author soon adopted the narrative style and removed
his sketches from the character of fairy stories to that of
real interpretations of animal life.
In Two Little Savages he gives the adventures of two
boys who lived in the woods as Indians and learned much
about Indian life and all kinds of wood-lore. Other stories
of a similar type are employed for the teaching of different
phases of woodcraft. Wood Myth and Fable advances a
step further and from incidents in animal life, and other
occurrences in nature, the writer points a definite moral
lesson. This escapes preachiness by the adroit epigrammatic
wit of the ‘moral.’
A somewhat different literary ideal inspired Charles
G. D. Roberts to undertake the pure romance of animal
psychology and behavior. ‘It may be that this arose as
a natural development from Roberts’ early attempts to depict
a narrative from actual occurrences and experiences
in the woods. At any rate Earth’s Enigmas (1896), followed
by numerous other volumes such as The Kindred of
the Wild, The Watchers of the Trails, The Haunters of
the Silences, Red Fox, The Feet of the Furtive, More Animal
Stories have established the place of Roberts as the
supreme artist in the field of animal romance.
Roberts’ treatment of animal psychology differs from
that of Thompson Seton or Marshall Saunders. He makes
his wild animals either wholly human or too human. They
move in their world with a sort of super-animal (or super-human)
knowledge, and Roberts’ discloses a subconscious
motivation of conduct in the wild animals that outdoes the
present clay psycho-analyists in their revealments of human
motivation. For this reason they appeal not to the heart
but to the analytic imagination and the aesthetic sense.
They awaken the interest of the intellect rather than the
sympathetic emotions. They lack humor and pathos, but
in imaginative sweep and artistic structure they are supreme
creations. As examples of a literary prose style
they stand almost alone in their particular field of fiction.
Not all Roberts’ animal stories are of this ‘intellectual’
type. Human interest and humor is added by showing
animals in relationships, more or less accidental, to mankind,
in such volumes as The Backwoodsman, Hoof and
Claw.
The peculiar forte of Marshall Saunders is the romance
of the domesticated animal or animal pet. Beautiful Joe:
The Autobiography of a Dog, first published in 1894, is
one of the literary phenomena of the world. It has been
translated into fourteen or more languages and has sold
over a million copies. With acute perceptive sympathy and
engaging artistry, Miss Saunders has commingled strangely
but veraciously the mind and life of the domestic animals. She
envisages truthfully their ‘near humanity’ and
reveals them as akin to man in feelings, passions, desires,
and the motivation of conduct, but keeps them on a level
below man. Her animals are not human, but they appeal
more to the heart of the humanity in us than those of Roberts,
Thompson Seton, or W. A. Fraser; particularly do
they appeal more to the spirit and heart of youth. Her
Golden Dicky, the story of a canary and his friends; Bonnie
Prince Fetlar, the autobiography of a pony, and Jimmy
Goldcoast, the story of a monkey, have all the engaging
qualities of her earlier work.
W. A. Eraser, in Mooswa and Others of the Boundaries
(1900), and in The Outcasts (1901) achieved a distinct
success by working with much the same material as Roberts
and Thompson Seton and to some extent combining the
style and treatment of both. He is not so scientific as
Thompson Seton; nor is he so literary or so psychoanalytic
as Roberts. The Sa’-Zada Tales (1905) in which
the animals at the zoo are represented as conversing with
their keeper, Sahib Zada, and with one another, exhibit the
intimate knowledge of wild animal life gained, no doubt,
during the author’s residence in Asiatic countries, but they
are not as distinctively original in manner, nor as high in
literary quality as his other animal tales. Fraser, however,
has a peculiar field in which he excels—in his novel
Thoroughbreds (1902), and in his volume of short stories
Brave Hearts (1904), he shows a sympathetic understanding
of the life of the race horse and he presents vividly and
with sometimes a rollicking humor, at others a tender
pathos, many incidents and expressions of the racing field.
He is an apostle of clean sport and a true lover of the racing
horse and his enthusiasm gives to these stories a directness
and coherence not always found in some of his later
stories and novels with different subjects and settings.
The pioneer writer of the ‘evangelical romance’ in Canada
was ‘Ralph Connor’ (Reverend Charles W. Gordon).
Back of all his books stands the missionary spirit. Indeed
it was that missionary spirit which led to the finding of his
literary gift. The story of that finding dates back to 1896.
He had been attending a meeting of the Home Mission
Committee of the Presbyterian Church at Toronto, and
afterwards tried to impress upon the Rev. J. A. Macdonald,
then editor of The Westminster, the duty of the magazine
to educate the committee and the people to a greater liberality.
The editor’s reply was: ‘Articles are no good if
they have only facts and statistics and exhortations. Give
me a sketch, a story, a thing of life rather than a report. . .’
The result of this advice was a series of sketches of
missionary life in the foothills of the Rockies, which were
featured as Tales of the Selkirks in The Westminster
(1897) and appeared in book form the following year as
Black Rock.
When the first sketches were ready it was deemed advisable
to conceal the identity of the author. The editor
telegraphed the query, ‘What name?’ The reply came,
‘Sign sketch Cannor.’ ‘Can—Nor, that would betray the
face of a mask,’ says the editor. ‘Perhaps the operator
made a mistake. Likely it should be Connor.’ And running
over the alphabet of masculine names, he decided
that ‘Ralph’ would just about fit with ‘Connor.’ Thus the
christening of the missionary novelist.
Ralph Connor’s novels fall into several groups. Black
Rock and The Sky Pilot are tales of the Rocky Mountain
foothills, both telling of the wild life of the West and of
the work of the missionary. The Man From Glengarry
and Glengarry School Days deal with the life of the author’s
boyhood in Eastern Ontario. The Prospector and The
Doctor combine East and West, by following their leading
characters through the University of Toronto and transferring
them to Western Canada. The Foreigner has a
Manitoba setting and concerns itself with the problem of
the assimilation of the foreigner. Corporal Cameron and
The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail, carry a young Scot to
Canada and through the ranks of the Mounted Police.
The Great War gave material for The Major; labor troubles
for To Him That Hath; while in The Gaspards of Pine
Croft, the author reverted to a setting not so far from that
of his first novel for a story more emotional and psychological
in nature than his others.
The circulation of Ralph Connor’s novels has been
phenomenal and has reached somewhere between two and
a half and three millions, yet it cannot be said that he has
established a reputation as a literary artist. His stories
carry the reader because of action, incident, and tense emotional
situations. They always have an underlying ethical
and spiritual significance and they promulgate a belief in
the presence of some redeeming virtue in every human
being, so that, despite adverse critical opinion, they continue
to touch the responsive chord in the heart of a common
humanity.
None of his later works has quite come up to the standard
of Black Rock or The Sky Pilot in consistency of
characterization and in unity of total effect. Indeed The
Sky Pilot is the most artistically finished of all his works,
because of the natural coherence of its parts in their development
of the central theme. Dramatic power he has to a
marked degree, so far as the presentation of individual
scenes is concerned, such as the fight in the lumber camp,
the horse race, the barn-raising, and many other thrilling
episodes; but his grasp of dramatic values is not broad
enough to escape melodrama. The constructive dramatic
instinct which weaves each separate incident into a chain
of cause and effect dependent upon the character and
motives of the leading personages of the story is very little
in evidence. Whole chapters might be lifted bodily from
some of these novels without interfering with the main
thread of the story.
His imagination is reproductive rather than creatively
constructive. The stories of the foothills are built upon
his own missionary experiences at Banff and elsewhere;
the Glengarry tales deal with his schoolboy experiences and
his knowledge of the rough life of the lumber woods and
the drive; the stories of east and west are also drawn from
his own experiences in college and in the missionary field.
As a result of this his characters tend to become types and
although fairly individual and distinctive they are inclined
to act mechanically and to operate without sufficient inherent
motivation.
The first novel of Robert E. Knowles, St. Cuthbert’s although
a romance of a Presbyterian congregation, is not
strictly an ‘evangelical novel.’ It has more to do with
showing the Presbyterian Church as an institution which
dominated the life of the Presbyterian community. The
doings of the Kirk session; the relations of the minister
with the various elements of his flock, the pious and the
profligate, are described with rare fidelity. The tender
undercurrent covered by Scottish reserve; the sympathetic
understanding of human nature as the greatest and most
essential quality of ministry; the dry, pawky Scottish
humor; the distinctive and consistent characterization—these
elements make St. Cuthbert’s a piece of genuine literature.
The Dawn at Shanty Bay is in reality a short story.
There is one underlying motive, and only one, dominating
the whole—it is the fight between parental love and parental
dignity. It should rank as one of the sweetest ‘Christmas
Carols’ in English literature. His remaining novels—The
Undertow, The Web of Time, The Attic Guest, and
The Singer of the Kootenay are of the evangelical type
and are fashioned much to the same pattern, showing inconsistencies
in development and a lack of structural
unity.
THE SHORT STORY FICTIONISTS OF THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL—E.
W. THOMSON—DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT—CHARLES
G. D. ROBERTS—GILBERT PARKER—ERNEST THOMPSON
SETON—W. A. FRASER.
There is, on this continent, a literary tradition that
Edgar Allan Poe is the creator of the short story.
The truth is that Poe applied a new method to the short
narrative or prose tale in that he gave the short story a
higher unity of effect towards an impressionistic climax.
He did not originate or create it; he simply improved its
technique. But with the school of Poe this method crystallized
into a formula, and the so-called American short
story became an invention rather than an imaginative creation.
Thus it depends upon a cumulation of effects rising
to a climactic peak of emotional intensity, or upon a plot
that induces suspense by a clever interplay of incident. Its
processes are for the most part mechanical. The telling
or the reading of a short story of this type is far more a
coldly-calculated intellectual exercise than it is an appeal
to warm-hearted human emotions. With aesthetic, moral,
or spiritual values it has little to do. Hence it has not that
permanency that makes for true literature. Based on incident
and accidental circumstance rather than character
it engages the reader temporarily by its cleverness, but it
does not acquaint him with living characters to whom he
loves to return for an enlargement of that acquaintanceship.
The Canadian species of short story is distinguished by
a high artistic unity of structure and effect and in that
respect reflects the influence of Poe upon all modern short
story writing, but there is this difference, that it achieves
its unity of effect and its dramatic interest not by mechanically
constructed climaxes but by developments arising out
of the inherent traits and dispositions of the personages of
the story. Its basis is the solid rock of character. The
Canadian short story as a distinctive type does not present
the excessively climactic plot; nevertheless, it is more truly
a real story than either the plot story of the American and
French writers or the fine psychological situations of successful
English story writers.
As we see it, this peculiar quality of the Canadian short
story is rooted in some quality of Canadian nationality.
No Canadian writer can be said to have originated the
method. Each appears to evolve some modification of it
particularly adapted to his own field.
Old Man Savarin and Other Tales, by Edward William
Thomson (1895) contains a number of stories of Canadian
life differing widely in emotional interest. There is the near
burlesque of Old Man Savarin, with the incident of the
fist fight which lasted for four hours, although the two
combatants never reached within striking distance of each
other all that time; McGrath’s Bad Night portrays a
pathetic picture of a family on the verge of starvation,
to which is added the greater pathos of the breakdown of
a man’s principles of honesty; The Privilege of the Limits,
wherein the author captures and presents effectively the
dry, pawky humor of the Scot; the sorrowful dillusionment
of youthful imagination in The Shining Cross of
Rigaud; superstitious terror overcome by plain common
sense in Red Headed Windego.
The stories with Eastern Ontario and Quebec for their
setting show a loving intimacy and understanding of the
plain people—the habitant, the river driver, the lumberman,
the farmer; and the author is at his best in his
delineation of the Glengarry Scot or the Quebec habitant.
Thomson is scarcely a stylist. There is a freedom, even
looseness, in his story structure, and he employs sometimes
the device of introducing a narrator for his tale. But in
his stories of the Canadian type and setting his warm
friendliness for his characters radiates a glow of enthusiasm
that captures and holds the reader. Not all Thomson’s
stories, however, are of this type—in Petherick’s
Peril, there is an approach to the horror tale of Poe; and
in The Swartz Diamond there is the trap-springing device
of the surprise ending, while Boss of the World is an example
of the ‘tall story’ which produces its humor by the
exaggeration of its ideas—these stories we surmise to be
the result of influences which surrounded E. W. Thomson
in his editorial offices in a Boston magazine publishing
firm.
In the Village of Viger (1896), by Duncan Campbell
Scott is a little volume of prose tales of French Canada,
published in Boston by Copeland and Day. These stories
affect the heart and imagination with a reality and sense of
actuality as if one had dwelt in Viger and had daily come
face to face with Mademoiselle Viau, the little milliner;
Madame Laroque, gossip and reformer; Monsieur Cuerrier,
kind-hearted postmaster; brandy-tippling Paul Arbique
and his wife; Hans Blumenthal, the expatriate German
watchmaker; Pierre, and the lovely but intriguing
Eloise of No. 68 rue Alfred de Musset; Jean Francois,
the mysterious blind peddler; Paul Farlotte who was always
saving up to revisit France, and gave up the project
on the day he dreamed that his mother had died—and all
the rest in this gallery of lovable characters.
The reality and veracity of Dr. Scott’s character delineation
produces exquisite and infallible character-vignettes,
or Rembrandtesque word-etchings, lovely in
‘values’ and in spiritual chiaroscuro—depths within depths
of a single character as in Charles Desjardins in the tragic
story of The Desjardins. Yet in his handling of the
tragic he awakens, not a pity that produces fear or horror
or disgust, but a gentle pity that engenders sympathy. We
appreciate the ‘little milliner’s’ loyalty—begotten of pure
love—to her rascal lover, a common thief. The skilful
sympathetic handling of the subject gives to love a new
dignity and to loyalty a new grandeur. The pathos moves
to a rise and fall, but never so overwhelms the emotions
as to cause tears; rather does it subdue the soul and
leave in the heart of the reader a gentle welling up of
sympathy, a benignant sense of fellowship with finite and
erring humanity, and a tender peace. When a reader
finishes one of Dr. Scott’s stories of the pathetic episode—The
Little Milliner, The Desjardins, Sedan, Paul Farlotte—he
experiences no violent wrench of the heart-strings—sheds
no tears—but is gently and sweetly touched; feels
with the unfortunate and afflicted; sees the veil that obscures
the hard workaday world lifted; and beholds life
and the world suffused with a ‘grey-eyed loveliness.’ This
is all superb artistry in emotional and spiritual love, by one
who has had intimate glimpses into the human heart and
into the stern face of sublimity in human character and in
life.
So, too, his treatment of the comedy in human character
and existence. Human destiny and fate are too dear and
pathetic to him to allow him to engage his art in any
raucous laughter. The smiles he evokes are based on sympathetic
fellow-feeling, on tenderness. We are amused,
yet not unsympathetic, at the rage of Madame Laroque,
defeated in a long-cherished love, and hope of ultimate
marriage, by the elopement of her ward, Cesarine, with
the postmaster (The Wooing of Monsieur Cuerrier); the
futilities of old Paul Farlotte, who would see ‘la belle
France’ before he dies, envisage a comic character, but
subdue our laughter with the pathos of frustrated desire.
These themes, we see, are chosen from character and
life in a typical French-Canadian village, yet the sentiments,
the ideals of human love and character and conduct, and
the natural and spiritual color, are Canadian and even universal.
They depend not upon mere accidents of circumstance,
but upon lasting and universal human emotions and
human relationships—permanent literary values. In these
stories, Dr. Scott achieves structural unity and harmony of
emotional tone with an entire absence of any striving for
effect—with that finished art that conceals the artifice of
the craftsman.
Always a careful workman rather than a prolific
writer, it was not until 1923 that Duncan Campbell Scott
published another volume of short stories, The Witching of
Elspie. Some of these are French-Canadian in their setting,
but those most exquisitely wrought deal with the lonely
and heart-searching life of the Hudson Bay posts. Although
Scott’s method was fully formed in his first volume,
there is here a very evident advance in artistry, a greater
economy in expression, but a deeper intensity of effect.
Here he shows a remarkable skill in the almost imperceptible
transition from explanation or description to the
inside of the mind of the varying personages of the story
and back again to description or explanation—one of the
most artistic touches of the work of a finished craftsman.
Charles G. D. Roberts developed, in the story of animal
psychology, a species of Canadian short story that depends
not so much upon emotional and artistic effects and a unity
of impressionistic tone as upon intellectual and stylistic
effects and novelty of theme. Scott worked with an artistry
so exquisite that his stories possess the simplicity and
directness which conceal art. Roberts wrought his animal
and romantic short stories with an artistry so much in the
manner of the prose-poet that they reveal the stylist consciously
aiming to impress the intellect with niceties of
structure, and the sensibility with word-painting, always
couleur de rose.
When Roberts is the psychologist he is also most the
true structural stylist. But for an example of more impressionistic
color, of sheer word-painting, of prose-poetry
couleur de rose, the following paragraphs from The Watchers
in the Swamp are convincing:—
Under the first pale lilac wash of evening, just where the slow
stream of the Lost-Water slipped placidly from the open meadows
into the osier-and-bulrush tangles of the swamp, a hermit
thrush, perched in the topmost spray of a young elm tree, was
fluting out his lonely and tranquil ecstasy to the last of the
sunset.
• • • •
It was high morning in the heart of the swamp. From a sky of
purest cobalt flecked sparsely with silver-white wisps of
cloud, the sun glowed down with tempered, fruitful warmth
upon the tender green of the half-grown rushes and already
rank water-grasses—the young leafage of the alder and willow
thickets—the wide pools and narrow, linking lanes of unruffled
water already mantling in spots with lily-pad and arrow-weed.
A few big red-and-black butterflies wavered aimlessly above
the reed-tops. Here and there, with a faint elfin clashing of
transparent wings, a dragon-fly, a gleam of emerald and amethyst
fire, flashed low over the water. From every thicket came
a soft chatter of the nesting red-shouldered blackbirds.
These stories are lyrical poems in prose; as an impressionistic
stylist in the medium of the animal short story
Roberts is inimitable. We find the same mellifluous prose
(as Mr. T. G. Marquis discriminatingly terms it) in his
romantic short stories, By the Marshes of Minas, in which
themes, settings, and color are authentically Canadian
(Acadian).
Gilbert Parker’s short stories exhibit many of the qualities
of his longer fiction. They are not always as artistically
constructed as those of Duncan Campbell Scott, nor
are they as finely written as those of Roberts, but in the
main they are based on sufficient character motivation and
have a sustained dramatic power. Ernest Thompson Seton
and W. A. Fraser are engaging tellers of short tales abounding
in incident and humor, with a sound basis of characterization,
yet of the short story writers of the Systematic
School, Duncan Campbell Scott has produced the most
uniformly excellent work.
THE NEW CANADIAN GENRE OF IDYLLIC POETRY—WILLIAM
HENRY DRUMMOND, INTERPRETER OF THE HABITANT—POET
OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN CANADA.
The Canadian voyageur and habitant, the lumberman,
and peasant of French Canada are ‘children of nature’—human,
simple, shy, warm-hearted, honest, and manly.
They were not always thus sympathetically conceived or
regarded by most of their English-speaking compatriots.
They, therefore, needed a sympathetic interpreter who
would reveal their inward spirit and true character, mental
and moral. Strangely, but according to the inscrutable
methods of Providence, the man who was to be the friend
and sympathetic interpreter of the French-Canadian peasant,
was born in Ireland in 1854. He was William Henry
Drummond.
Drummond emigrated to Canada when but a mere lad,
before Old Country education and culture had any chance
to mould his mind and imagination and moral attitudes.
While, then, Drummond himself was an émigré, his verse,
like that of Isabella Valancy Crawford and for the same
reasons of formative influences in Canada, is Canadian.
It is indeed regional, but it is also indigenous poetry—in
substance, in diction, in imagery, and in craftsmanship.
William Henry Drummond, like the dramatis personae
of his poems, the voyageur and habitant, was a ‘child of
nature.’ No other kind of man, save this large-bodied,
warm-hearted, open-minded lover of human kin and of
the creatures that live in the wild, who saw and felt the
common things of life, as the habitant saw and felt them,
could have been a truthful interpreter of the habitant. The
merely scholarly poet, the poet of a hothouse refinement,
the poet who went to work at the craftsmanship of poetry
as if he were carving arabesques in verse, could not have
the imaginative insight into the mind and heart of the
French-Canadian peasant and the sympathy with him that
would make it possible for such a poet, with kindly, playful
humor, to express the elemental feelings and thoughts—the
real humanity—of the habitant.
Drummond was above all things a human poet.
His sympathies were inclusive. By intuition he could
feel just as the habitant felt about good and evil
in the universe. Drummond’s heart was warm and
large and religious, which meant that he could
call nothing that was made in the image of God common
or outcast. Though he was well read in the modern
poets and was a student of literature, he was not a bookish
man. He distinguished between the literature which possessed
only aesthetic and artistic beauties and that which
was the embodiment of the finer goods of the spirit, the
inalienable satisfactions of existence. He loved only the
literature that was human and beautiful—simple, pure,
and true.
As, then, a ‘child of nature,’ with a large, sympathetic
heart and a Keltic vision of the ‘divinity’ which is in all
men and also in the wild creatures that are near to Nature,
and with a gift of ready expression in rhythmical verse,
Drummond was uniquely fitted to be the interpreter of his
simple, kindly, reticent, but genuinely human and sincere,
fellow-being, the Canadian habitant. Thus singularly fitted
to be, as he has been called, ‘the Poet of the Habitant,’
Drummond, in his verse, actually performed a social and
a literary service for his country. On the social side, to
the English-speaking Canadian, who up to the last decade
of the 19th century considered the habitant as little better
than a chattel, Drummond revealed the human, lovable, and
admirable virtues of the humble French-speaking compatriot,
and also engendered in the English-speaking
Canadian a sincere respect and affection for his French-speaking
fellow countryman. On the literary side, Drummond
created a gallery of genre pictures and spiritual portraits
which constitute a unique contribution, not only to
Canadian poetic Literature, but also to English Literature.
Under what inspiration or vision, hitherto not vouchsafed
to any other Canadian poet, did Drummond write,
and what really novel and important contributions did he
make to Canadian poetry and to world literature?
He discovered and presented to the world, for the first
time, the New Romance in Canada, as Kirby and Sir
Gilbert Parker had discovered and presented the Old Romance.
He created a new form of the Canadian Idyll.
He placed on the stage of the world a group of new Characters
and, through them, originated a new species or type
of World Humor. Pre-eminently Drummond is the Poet
and Humorist of the New Social Democracy in Canada.
Until the publication of Drummond’s first creative work,
The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems (1897),
the French-Canadian, in general, was appreciated only according
to the types seen in the towns and cities. In particular,
the French-Canadian voyageur and habitant were
appreciated only as the merry hearts who had sung the
old chansons on the rivers of Quebec Province—and, as
their English-speaking compatriots fancied, in the academic
and eviscerated English translations in which they heard
these chansons. No one, up to the time of Drummond’s
first volume, had revealed the mind and heart of the real,
the living habitant, voyageur, lumberman, and peasant in
Old Quebec. No one before Drummond had sung their
heart songs in the patois that is theirs when attempting
to express their thoughts and emotions to their supercilious
and not too respectful English-speaking compatriots. But
Drummond produced truthful, naturalistic pictures of the
real, the living French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, and
peasant as they expressed their thoughts and emotions about
life and their fellows.
He did not do this by a sort of reporting. He did it
by letting them talk for themselves in their own patois.
Thus he gave to his pictures of the French-Canadian habitant,
lumberman, and peasant, a racy and dramatic realism
which distinguishes them as ‘characters’ apart in Canadian,
in English, and in world literature. This is the first reason
why William Henry Drummond must be regarded as an
absolute creator of literary species. He created a new
form of romantic genre poetry, gave it reality, veracity,
and ideality. This is what Louis Fréchette meant when
in his Introduction to Drummond’s first volume, he hailed
Drummond as ‘the pathfinder of a new land of song.’
In what way did Drummond give true ideality to the
life and character which he presented also with a convincing
realism and veracity? There is a species of romance which
is the sheer invention of the fancy or imagination. It presents
a life and character that have never existed and could
not be possible anywhere on earth. That kind of romance
is so ‘fantastic’ as to be absolutely unreal. There is another
kind of romance which is based on real imagination of
supposed real life and real personages. This sort of romance
is typified by fairy tales, not the fairy tales of all
lands, but of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. The
people actually believe in the real existence of fairies, and
imagine these invisible creatures in the forms of human
beings. Romances about them and their doings are, therefore,
not fantastic, but are based on a kind of reality.
Again: there is a species of romance based upon the imagining
of real personages in impossible situations and doing
impossible things. It exists in Canadian Literature in those
romances in which the Indian conducts himself in ways that
could only be possible with men of civilized natures and
civilized ideas. This kind of romance is not unreal; it is
too ideal.
In poetically conceiving and presenting the French-Canadian
habitant, lumberman, or peasant, Drummond
might have drawn them as fantastic, or fanciful, or absolutely
ideal characters. Or, he might have drawn them,
as Service, for instance, has limned his characters of the
trails and mining camps, with an accentuated or rude
realism. Drummond employed none of these methods. He
presented the French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, and
peasant as they really appear on the outside, and as they
ideally are on the inside, to the vision which sympathetically
divines their feelings, emotions, aspirations, sorrows, joys,
and consolations. Drummond’s poetic eye perceived the
ideal spirit of the French-Canadian habitant as it shines
through the outer, rude, homely, simple, hesitant creature
whom the English-speaking compatriot only too often, till
Drummond’s time, took to be of a lower and less spiritual
order than himself. By this combined realistic and idealistic
treatment of the character and life of the French-Canadian
habitant, lumberman, and peasant, Drummond
created a new species of Canadian genre poetry, a new form
of the Canadian Idyll.
As a creator, Drummond is entitled to another distinction.
He originated a new and distinct type of Humor.
There were humorists before and since Drummond. There
was the prose humor of Haliburton’s Sam Slick. There
was the verse humor of Howe and of Lanigan. There was
the prose humor of De Mille and of Mrs. Cotes. There
have been the prose humor of Leacock and the verse humor
of Service. But the only humor of all these that is likely
to perdure as world literature is that of Haliburton.
Drummond has created a humor which also is likely to
live in permanent literature. It is distinguished from all
the other humor written in Canada by the fact that it is
never satiric or malicious or ungenial, or mere humor for
the sake of raising a laugh or to ridicule another. It is
humor with pathos. Just as Haliburton is unique as a
satiric humorist, so Drummond is unique as a sympathetic
and interpretative humorist. He is a Master of Humor
and of Pathos.
His work is so well known throughout the world that
it is hardly necessary to quote examples of his humor. Mere
excerpts will not suffice. We may, however, recall, as
outstanding examples, The Wreck of the Julie Plante, How
Bateese Came Home, The Curé of Calumette, Dominique,
The Corduroy Road, Little Bateese, Johnnie Courteau, and
When Albani Sang.
A few words on Drummond’s use of a patois or dialect
and on his verse technique will be sufficient. It is by his
patois that he gives not only naturalness but also veracity
to the speech of his characters. His dialect is pure and
clean and is felt by the reader as natural and genuine. As
to technique, Drummond is a master of simple but flowing
rhythm and obtains his rhymes with an ease and naturalness
that disclose him as an original inventor of rhyme. He
elected to be ‘The Poet of the Habitant,’ and as such he is
unique. Yet his poetry in this form, as well as in other
forms, clearly shows that if he had essayed the writing
of verse on traditional themes and in a traditional manner,
he could have been a poet of considerable distinction. It
is best, however, to leave him with his natural distinction
and glory about him—the Poet of the Habitant. As the
discoverer of the New Romance in Canada, as the Creator
of the New Canadian Idyll, and as the Master of a unique
species of Canadian Humor and Pathos, William Henry
Drummond made a signally original contribution to the
quantity and quality of the creative literature of Canada.
THE DECADENT INTERIM IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—THE
VAUDEVILLE SCHOOL OF POETS—ROBERT W. SERVICE, ROBERT
J. C. STEAD, AND OTHERS.
Not ineptly, though somewhat jocosely, we may group
Canadian Poets in the Post-Confederation period,
from 1887 to 1907, into three Schools, and label them with
characteristic sobriquets. Already Archibald Lampman,
Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, with Pauline
Johnson and Frederick George Scott, have been called ‘The
Great Lakes School.’ This is a dignified sobriquet, and
derives its descriptive aptness from the native environment,
or from the themes, of these poets, or from both. Again:
Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman have been named
‘The Birchbark School.’ This is a jocose, playful sobriquet,
and was applied to these poets because ‘they use the
mottled scrolls of the Red Man’s papyrus to build a canoe,
or as a vehicle for verse, with equal dexterity.’
By similar tokens, the throng of verse-makers whose
vogue formed a decadent interim in Canadian poetry, beginning
with the publication of Robert Service’s Songs of
a Sourdough (1907) and ending with the publication of his
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1913), may be signalized as
‘The Vaudeville School.’ On account of the themes of
their verse, its special and distinguishing technique,
and its particular appeal to popular or vulgar taste, this
sobriquet, as applied to Robert Service, Robert Stead, Paul
Agar, George B. Field, Milton W. Yorke (pseud. Derby
Bill), Robert T. Anderson, John Mortimer, James P.
Haverson, Charles W. MacCrossan, Hamilton Wigle, and
others, is just, apt, and veracious. It must be understood,
however, to convey nothing of scorn or contempt or derision,
but to be only a pedagogical formula for summarizing the
qualities of the verse, the ideals, the methods, and the
craftsmanship of the great majority of the poets here
named ‘The Vaudeville School.’ They might have been
dubbed ‘The Sourdough School,’ were it not that of them
all only Service deals with those picturesque and picaresque
humans known in the slang of the Canadian gold-mining
camps as ‘Sourdoughs,’ and were it not that this name,
used as sobriquet, would be derisive rather than sincerely
descriptive.
As used here, the term Vaudeville harks back to its
original French connotation. As applied to the verse of
Service, Stead, Haverson, Field, Yorke, and the others,
it means, first, entertainment which appeals to popular or
vulgar or low taste in verse. It means, secondly, arresting
or violent methods in the technique of vividness. In fact,
it is on the side of the technique of vividness in verse-color
and verse-rhythms rather than on the side of the picturesque
and often picaresque matter—characters and situations—of
the verse of this School that the term Vaudeville is most
apt and veracious, and that it is applied here as a descriptive
epithet in the ‘working’ vocabulary of literary criticism.
The sublimation of the technique of emotional vividness,
to the exclusion of all regard for the intrinsic and the aesthetic
beauty and moral dignity of poetry—this is the
essential formula of the verse of the Vaudeville School
of Canadian poets. Their aims or motives were sincere
and human. One motive was genuinely aesthetic: they
wished to write verse that would escape the emotional
deadness of the traditional themes and manner of Canadian
poetry. The other motive was pragmatic: they wished
to write rhythmic and rimed social documents in verse
which would have such novelty of theme and such dramatic
or theatrical or ‘sensational’ content as immediately to create
a demand for the ‘new poetry’ and make it readily marketable.
Thus should ‘the art of poetry’ become at once both
pleasurable and profitable.
How were these ends to be achieved? ‘I am one who
left off singing Alleluias,’ said Dante, poet of the immortal
‘Vision’ of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Thus Dante,
desiring to get away from the conventional deadness of
saying that he, as a poet, was a messenger from Heaven
to reveal spiritual beauty to his fellows, makes use of one
of the principles of the technique of vividness. He employs
the unusual phrase, the lively, arresting phrase that
would be sure to strike and vividly impress the average
mind or imagination. In short, Dante invents and uses
picturesque slang: for ‘singing Alleluias’ is slang, but how
poetically suggestive it is, how vivid!
The Canadian Vaudeville verse-makers realized the
poetic suggestiveness and the vividness of the picaresque
speech of the Far West and the High North. They also
knew how these sections of the country were rich in picturesque
and picaresque characters and in the ‘wild and
woolly’ life which produces strange and violent drama and
melodrama, which is all the more appealing to the imagination
of men and women because it is real and ‘stranger
than fiction.’ It was a life full of moral (or immoral) color
of speech, and action—of compelling interest. Thus ready
to hand in Canada lay for immediate use the materials and
the basal technical principle—the recipe—for the ‘making,’
not the ‘creation,’ of Vaudeville poetry. What was that
recipe? Simply this. Lilt in plangent anapaestic metres
or rhythms the picaresque melodrama of the mining camps
in the High North and the melodrama of the ‘chevalerie’ of
the Far West.
A single stanza from The Shooting of Dan McGrew
by Robert Service (Songs of a Sourdough, 1907) affords
ample proof and illustration of the vaudeville qualities of
this decadent verse:—
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm;
And, ‘Boys,’ says he, ‘you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my poke they’re true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew.’
That is an impressive characteristic example of the
technique of vividness, by the Canadian master of them all.
But let no one call it poetry. Service’s astounding vogue
for six years—it is now vanished—was not due to the
poetry in his verse, but to the arresting or violent drama
and melodrama in it, made more arresting or compelling
by the infectious swing or lilt of the anapaestic rhythm.
This rhythm is his only forte in verbal music, though he
also employs alliteration successfully. This forte is seen
to be a limitation and a weakness, as it also was and is in
his alleged artistic foster-father, Rudyard Kipling. For
as soon as Service attempts to employ another rhythm better
suited to higher thought than the picaresque matter of
strictly ‘Sourdough’ Songs, the results are disastrous. He
fails to hold the attention; and, inasmuch as there are no
compensating rhythmic values, all that is left is the strained
and bizarre effect of cheap melodrama. A singular example
of this kind of weakness and failure in Service is
his My Madonna, in which he aims consciously and seriously
to achieve a tour de force in religious sentiment, but falls
into flat bathos of melodrama (Songs of a Sourdough).
If proof is wanted that the recipe for writing Vaudeville
verse is simply to lilt in anapaestic metre and rhythm the
melodrama of the Far West chevalerie, proof and illustration
are furnished by a stanza from Sergeant Blue by
Robert Stead (Kitchener and Other Poems, 1917):—
Sergeant Blue of the Mounted Police was a so-so kind of a guy;
He swore a bit, and he lied a bit, and he boozed a bit on the sly;
But he held the post at Snake Creek Bend for country and home and God,
And he cured the first and forgot the rest—which wasn’t the least bit odd.
The amazing and pathetic fact about Robert Service
is that he really possessed authentic poetic genius, and
sometimes did write pure poetry. At his best Stead has
written some satisfying genre poetry and story-telling
ballads. But Stead could not rise beyond the homely-pathetic
and the melodramatic in Western chevalerie into
the realm of pure poetry. He kept always to the level of
his lowly subject. Service, however, fell or rose to the
level of his subject. In short, while most of Service’s verse
is popular Vaudeville, considerable of it violent melodrama,
and much of it drama simply, some of his verse is genuinely
poetical, charged with pure beauty and poetic significance.
How nobly Service has conceived, how passionately
expressed in lovely color-images and pervasive vowel
and alliterative music, and how philosophically interpreted
Nature in his poem The Mountain and the Lake:—
I know a mountain thrilling to the stars,
Peerless and pure, and pinnacled with snow;
Glimpsing the golden dawn o’er coral bars,
Flaunting the vanished sunset’s garnet glow;
Proudly patrician, passionless, serene;
Soaring in silvered steeps where cloud-surfs break;
Virgin and vestal—oh, a very Queen!
And at her feet there dreams a quiet lake. . . .
In that poem Service has given us an arresting and
memorable picture of pure beauty in Nature. It is beautiful
and unforgettable because it has poetic Style. Stead
and the other members of the Vaudeville School, with the
exception at times of Service when at his best, lacked
genius for style in verse, without which verse, whether
its subject or theme be low or high, realistic or idealistic,
cannot rise to the dignity of poetry. Service, Stead, and
the rest are never authentic Realists. They could not avoid
the melodramatic in the matter of their verse and the
plangent and vivid in its technique. Always they deliberately
set out to assault the senses and the sensibilities.
Kipling could be realistic and by virtue of his style rise
to the dignity of poetry. But for the lack of style, the
hectic realism of Service and Stead never rises above the
crudely melodramatic or Vaudevillian. As picaresque
realists they are, to quote Mr. E. B. Osborn, ‘far behind
the Australian and compare very unfavorably with the
minor masters of Quebec.’
Many of the most effective pieces in Service’s first
volume (Songs of a Sourdough) were deliberate imitations
of Kipling. But later he gave some promise of developing
an independent manner of his own, the manner which is
disclosed in The Mountain and the Lake, and which indubitably
revealed in him innate original powers for painting
the beauty and sublimity of Nature in the Arctic.
Service did not hold to his own manner; and Stead and
the other Vaudevillians were innately incapable of any
manner of their own. At length the vogue of the Vaudeville
poets passed, having in no way affected the stream of
aesthetic and artistic poetry which began with the Systematic
School and which flowed on, pure and undefiled, if
placid and noiseless, through the poetry of the later generation
and into the Restoration Period or Second Renaissance
in Canadian Literature.
Fundamental to the point of view of the criticism which
follows is this proposition:—The poetry of the Vaudeville
School for the most part must be regarded, not strictly as
an aesthetic phenomenon, but rather as an envisagement of
certain phases of the civilization of Canada in that period—that
is, as a series of social documents. There is nothing
wrong in treating contemporary phases of civilization in
poetry with such vividness and veracity that they really
become social documents of the period which they envisage;
but they are of no aesthetic worth if they are not consecrated
to and by art. How a social document, when sublimated
by fine art, can become authentic poetry may be discovered
by turning to Pauline Johnson’s musical and swift-moving
lyric Prairie Greyhounds, descriptive of the transcontinental
trains and their service to Canadian civilization,
or to Mr. C. G. D. Roberts’ noble sonnet The Train Among
the Hills, or to his equally fine sonnet of the soil The
Sower.
It must be realized that the sources of poetic inspiration
in Canada have considerably shifted from the Atlantic,
the Land of Evangeline, the Great Lakes, and the Laurentians
to the Prairies, the Rockies, and the ice-clad wildernesses
of the High North. Now, it was inevitable that under
the inchoate and unsettled conditions of civilization in these
Far West and High North sections of the Dominion, the
mere inspiration to write verse should have been uppermost
and that considerations of form should have appeared
secondary or insignificant.
The themes treated in the Vaudeville verse were necessarily
new; and when the Western or Yukon poets published
their verses the newness of their themes and their
naïve disregard of technical niceties were mistaken in the
East for originality, vigor, freshness, and breeziness in art,
and were welcomed and read by all classes of Canadians
with avidity as ‘real,’ not ‘hothouse,’ poetry. There we
have the explanation of the astonishing vogue of the verses
of Service and Stead, and of their imitators. But their
verses, far from being examples of genuine originality in
invention of poetic themes and of really new art, exemplify
the total absence of art; and far from being ‘real’ poetry,
are totally devoid of the chaste speech, lovely imagery,
dulcet music, and exquisite emotion which constitute true
poetry.
It was a distinct moral fault on the part of Service that
he should have chosen to give us in verse what he had better
written in prose. The right form for social documents of
picaresque communities is prose. Further: it is a law of
aesthetics, a law exemplified most finely in Homer, that,
whenever possible, all the elements in a work of art should
each be intrinsically beautiful. Service deliberately chose
themes which disregarded that law. We could forgive
him for that if he had redeemed the vulgarity of the themes
by beautiful craftsmanship in versification. His poetry is
bad not because it is wicked or picaresque or risqué, but
because it is aesthetically bad through and through.
During the Vaudeville Period Roberts, Campbell, Carman,
Duncan Campbell Scott, Canon Scott, Pauline
Johnson, Arthur Stringer, Albert E. S. Smythe, Ethelwyn
Wetherald, Jean Blewett, Helena Coleman, Virna Sheard,
the late Marjorie Pickthall, Katherine Hale, Jean Graham,
Peter McArthur, Richard Scrace, Lucy M. Montgomery
and a host of others published aesthetically satisfying
poetry. For their spirit was of the spirit which inaugurated
the First Renaissance in Canadian poetry. But the spirit
of Service and the lesser poets of the Vaudeville School was
identical with that which animated the early Canadian
verse-makers before the times of Breakenridge, Sangster,
Mair, and John Reade. In spirit and in craftsmanship
the poetry of the Vaudeville School was essentially a recrudescence
of the poetry that made glad the hearts of the
‘Bush’ and ‘Clearing’ settlers of Canada in the first and
second quarters of the last century.
That a New Poetry will arise in Canada and that it will
originate and flourish in the Canadian Far West, is highly
probable, because the prairie-lands of the West, their endless
fields of grain sheening in the sun and billowing in rhythmic
swaying to the winds and the mighty vastnesses of land
and sky awaken moods and appreciations of Nature similar
to those stirred in men by the sea. It was, in Bliss Carman’s
fine phrase, ‘the glad indomitable sea’ and the inland
seas that inspired the Maritime and Lake poets who began
the First Renaissance of Canadian Poetry.
But if any of the future Canadian poet, Western or
Eastern, should prefer or incline to turn back to the ways
of Service and Stead, let him reflect that since beauty is
our clearest manifestation of the union of the real and the
ideal, that is, of perfection, not to love and promote beauty
in poetry is so far forth to refuse to love and promote the
Godlike in the hearts of mankind, for perfection is the essence
of the Godhead. To become a poet may not be a
moral duty. But if one elects the office of poet, then to
perfect oneself, as far as possible, in poetic artistry for the
sake of beautifully or compellingly embodying in verse
whatsoever is lovely in Nature or noble in ideas, is to attain
to high moral dignity in one’s own soul as a poet and to
impress on the world the high spiritual function of poetry.
Sources of quotations in this chapter:
Poems of Robert W. Service—The Songs of a Sourdough (Ryerson Press:
Toronto); The Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, (Ryerson Press: Toronto).
Poems of Robert Stead—Kitchener and Other Poems—or in The Empire
Builders (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).
THE RESTORATION OR SECOND RENAISSANCE PERIOD IN
CANADIAN LITERATURE—NEW FORMS, THEMES, AND SOCIAL
IDEALS—THE POETS—MARJORIE PICKTHALL—ROBERT
NORWOOD—KATHERINE HALE—AND OTHERS.
We call the period beginning with the publication of
Marjorie Pickthall’s first volume of verse, Drift of
Pinions (1913), and on to the present, the Restoration or
Second Renaissance Period in Canadian Literature. It is
a ‘restoration’ period because it marks a return, after the
Decadent Interim of the Vaudeville School (1907-1912),
to the aesthetic and artistic ideals of the first systematic
group of native-born Canadian writers. It is a ‘renaissance’
because the writers of the period undertook the systematic
production of original authentic literature, and because they
wrote under the inspiration of new themes, ideals, and
forms.
By 1913 when the Canadian public had tired of the
picaresque themes and the plashing anapaests of Robert
Service, and the vogue of the Vaudeville School had passed,
there was a demand for clean and sweet sustenance of the
soul and refreshing new verbal music for the spirit. It
was a demand for pure Beauty—
of fragrance made,
Woven and rhymed of light.
Marjorie Pickthall was the first to give the Canadian
public sweet draughts of a new poetic wine of life. She
engaged the attention of the Canadian public with the same
immediacy and delight as the early lyrics of Tennyson and
Swinburne captivated the English lovers of poetry. Set for
the most part to a new or, so far as Canada was concerned,
a strange music of trochaic, anapaestic, and syncopated
metres and rhythms, rich in vowel-harmonies and the tone-color
of consonance, assonance, and exquisite alliteration,
her songs changed the world about her into an earthly
paradise. At first Marjorie Pickthall arrested attention as
a young unknown poet singing shyly from a corner in a
daily newspaper or magazine, but singing with a rare beauty
of imagery and of color from Nature, and with a fresh
and dulcet verbal melody, heard as overtones above the
more plashing, plangent rhythms of Service and his colleagues.
It seemed as if Pan had come again to earth, so
idyllic was the Nature-beauty and so simple and dulcet was
the melody of her poetry, as in, for instance, The Little
Fauns to Proserpine, daintily suggestive of their shadowy
figures:—
Browner than the hazel-husk, swifter than the wind,
Though you turn from heath and hill, we are hard behind,
Singing, ‘Ere the sorrows rise, ere the gates unclose,
Bind above your wistful eyes the memory of the rose.’
Now the vintage feast is done, now the melons glow
Gold along the raftered thatch beneath a thread of snow.
Dian’s bugle bids the dawn sweep the upland clear,
Where we snared the silken fawn, where we ran the deer.
Through the dark reeds wet with rain, past the singing foam
Went the light-foot Mysian maids, calling Hylas home.
Syrinx felt the silver sprite fold her at her need.
Hear, ere yet you say farewell, the wind along the reed.
There was no appeal on the part of Service and the
other Vaudevillians to the spirit, to the religious imagination.
It was inevitable, then, that the Canadian public—and
the world—should be arrested by the spiritual beauty,
tenderness, wistfulness, and the engaging music of such a
poem as Marjorie Pickthall’s Mary Shepherdess, the following
three stanzas of which illustrate how the thought
is ‘woven and rhymed of light’:—
When the heron’s in the high wood and the last long furrow’s sown,
With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown,
Comes Mary, Mary Shepherdess, a-seeking for her own.
Saint James he calls the righteous fold, Saint John he calls the kind,
Saint Peter seeks the valiant men all to loose or bind,
But Mary seeks the little souls that are so hard to find,
All the little sighing souls born of dust’s despair,
They who fed on bitter bread when the world was bare,
Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair.
One will seek far in English poetry for a picture of the
human figure limned as graphically as it is in Marjorie
Pickthall’s line:—
With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown;
and one will seek far in English poetry to find a line musically
so in harmony with the spiritual picture of ‘all the little
sighing souls’ eyeing, wistful and afraid, the wonder of the
shining spectacle of Heaven, as her line:—
Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair.
Not once, or even for a moment, could the earthward
vision of the Vaudevillian poets conceive, and much less
could they write, such a poem of the pure in heart who
shall see God as Marjorie Pickthall’s The Lamp of Poor
Souls, and its subdued, sacramental music, ending thus:—
Shine, little lamp, fed with sweet oil of prayers.
Shine, little lamp, as God’s own eyes may shine,
When He treads softly down His starry stairs
And whispers, ‘Thou art Mine!’
Shine, little lamp, for love hath fed thy gleam.
Sleep, little soul, by God’s own hands set free.
Cling to His arms and sleep, and sleeping, dream,
And dreaming, look for me.
Francis Thompson or Alice Meynell could have written
the whole poem possibly with a more immaculate artistry,
but not with any finer appeal to the religious or mystical
imagination, and not with a melody a whit more winning
as an end in itself.
Having thus tasted the chief engagements of Marjorie
Pickthall’s poetry, we must in a more detailed way disclose
her genius and art as they appear in her lyrical poems in
The Drift of Pinions (1913), The Lamp of Poor Souls
(1916), and the posthumous volume The Wood Carver’s
Wife (1922)—the last of which contains a lyric drama
(the title-poem of the volume) and several lyrics. It is
as an adroit and exquisite craftswoman (or ‘artist’), rather
than for originality of imaginative conception, that, from
her first printed essays in verse to the last, Marjorie Pickthall
appeals as a specially gifted poet in Canada, and must
be accorded an honorable, possibly high, place in Canadian
poetic literature.
Technically, her poetry is distinguished by an extraordinarily
successful use of color epithets and verbal melody,
especially alliteration. The defects of her poetry are
not, on the whole, technical, but are defects, or rather limitations,
of genius. Broadly viewed, her poetry lacks breadth
of range and eloquence of style. By ‘style’ is not meant
Matthew Arnold’s conception or formula of what he called
‘the grand style.’ Marjorie Pickthall’s verse is free, flowing,
airy, graceful, tripping, musical; in a word, feminine.
But by thus much does it lack originality and seriousness
in the substance of its style, the qualities which give us the
sense of having met with beauty which is not a mere finely
distilled essence of loveliness, but which has strength, and
dignity, and power over the heart and the imagination.
The key to the defects or limitations in Marjorie Pickthall’s
poetry was not her imagination but her ‘heart.’ She
loved and had sympathy only or specially with all little
creatures and things, with tender, frail, and helpless creatures
and things; and she felt profoundly a sort of injustice
in their fate, which begot in her a wistful wondering about
the justice of the ways of God. She therefore inevitably
impressed on her poetry her own feminine feeling for the
little and helpless creatures of earth, her own sympathy with
the evanescence of all the animate ‘little things’—children,
flowers, moths, birds, and ‘the little stars of Duna’—that
for her made existence tolerable or happy. Everywhere in
her verse appears her preoccupancy with the very word or
with suggestions of the word ‘little.’ It is this ‘heart’
limitation that causes her to show what would seem at
first sight to be a mannerism, namely, her predilection for
certain substantives and epithets, as, for instance, ‘moth,’
‘dove,’ ‘stars,’ ‘silver,’ ‘golden.’ It is not really a mannerism;
but a necessity of her heart and mind. For the creatures
and things her heart most loved, inevitably filled
her consciousness and excluded other creatures and things.
But while Marjorie Pickthall, by limitation of genius,
failed to attain to the sheer reaches in style and poetic
substance which mark the work of Lampman, Carman, and
D. C. Scott, and while she did not possess the ecstatic lilt
of Carman, still she must be ranked as a supreme lyrist
of the lovely, evanescent little things in the world. She
must be ranked high also as a technical artist. If her poetry
does not disclose her as able to achieve the finer strength
and beauties of technique in poetic style, that distinguish
the poetry of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, she is
less often at fault technically than the older poets. Her
technical artistry was not an acquired accomplishment; it
was a gift of Nature. For while the older poets won their
way, by hard striving, to their perfection in technique,
Marjorie Pickthall, as early as her sixteenth year of age,
displayed a precocious virtuosity, which was almost an
instinct, in adroit and ingenious verbal coloring and melody.
In the invention of winsome and vivid color epithets
and images and in her power for alliterative music in verse,
Marjorie Pickthall was, perhaps, surpassed by Pauline
Johnson. But Miss Pickthall was the more ingenious of
the two poets. The following examples are impressive:—‘Dark
with the green silence under the gold weather,’ ‘And
close the cowslips’ cups of honeyed gold,’ ‘Yellow for the
ripened rye, white for ladies’ wearing,’ ‘Where cling the
moths that are the longings of men,’ ‘Thy lips are bright
as the edge of the sword,’ ‘On the great green lawns o’
heaven,’ ‘He saw the moonlit rafters of the world,’ ‘Clear-footed
from the frontiers of the world,’ ‘And hear new
stars come singing from God’s hand,’ ‘To the wind that
cried last night like a soul in sin.’
Nature was Marjorie Pickthall’s chief mistress. In the
pictorial treatment of Nature the poet displayed special
gifts. It is not true to say that she had the Greek ‘feeling’
for Nature, or that the Nature in her verse was that of the
ancient Greeks. It was impossible for Marjorie Pickthall,
an Anglo-Canadian, to have a Greek imagination; and they
who claim that she had the ancient Greek feeling for
Nature, might as rightfully claim that she had the ancient
Gaelic or Keltic feeling for Nature, or the ancient Semitic
feeling for the presence of God, or the medieval Breton
feeling for Nature and the mystery of religious faith, which
some have remarked as ‘mysticism’ in Marjorie Pickthall’s
poetry.
The truth is that, first, Marjorie Pickthall had a mind
and imagination which were naturally pagan, and that,
secondly, Nature was to her but the material for her fanciful
and pretty treatment in verse. But to the Greeks,
Nature, as perceived and embodied in their mythology and
poetry, was their vision of the real face and heart of Nature.
They actually believed in gods, goddesses, heroes,
muses, naiads, mermaids, satyrs, fauns, as being Nature
herself. This is what we mean by saying that the Greeks
were pagans. But Marjorie Pickthall had, by native gift,
only the sensibility and imagination that were naturally
pagan in a love of and preference for thus visualizing
Nature. She had saturated her mind, by reading, with the
mythology of the Greeks; and her naturally pagan sensibility
and imagination re-colored and re-expressed this
material in a delightful pagan—not Greek—way in verse.
Marjorie Pickthall had no such lively sense of the reality
of divinity in Nature as had the Greeks. But she did have
a lively pagan, if Anglo-Canadian, imagination. And so,
with imaginative ‘make-believe’ she peopled Nature with
spirits, mermaids, pixies, fauns, elfs, playing with the Old
Nurse Nature, or with themselves, and rejoicing in the
sights, sounds, and the shy forest creatures, which they see
and hear amongst the woodlands, streams, hills. She thus
paganly poetizes Nature, beautifully, winningly; but it is
all a tour de force of the senses and imagination, achieved
in her ‘closet,’ where she was temporarily shut off from the
roar and turmoil of great cities.
Had she steeped herself as thoroughly in ancient Gaelic
lore, myths and legends, she would have written as engagingly
of the Nature of the Kelts. In her single poetic
essay in Gaelic ‘feeling’ for Nature—the Gael’s innate love
of Nature and the Homeland, his nostalgia—she failed in
a double way; first, by infelicitously giving her poem a
German title, Wanderlied, and, secondly, by a dull and commonplace
imitation, if not a parody, of Ethna Carbery,
Nora Hopper, Moira O’Neil, Katharine Tynan. When she
was sincerely and naturally pagan, as in most of her verse,
she succeeded admirably. But when she attempted to write
a ‘literary’ poem in the pagan spirit, as in Wanderlied, she
failed.
More of her imagery is derived from actual Nature in
Canada than from mythological Nature in ancient Greece.
The coloring from Canadian woods in Spring, Autumn,
and Winter is in her verse, also visualizations of Canadian
fields and flowers, and the subtle handwork of ‘the Frost
King,’ and even Canadian domestic felicities made possible
by Nature, such as the winter arabesque on the windowpanes
in contrast with the inviting glow of burning logs
on the hearth:—
Here where the bee slept and the orchis lifted
Her honeying pipes of pearl, her velvet lip,
Only the swart leaves of the oak lie drifted
In sombre fellowship.
Here where the flame-weed set the lands alight,
Lies the bleak upland, webbed and crowned with white.
Build high the logs, O love, and in thine eyes
Let me believe the summer lingers late.
We shall not miss her passive pageantries,
We are not desolate,
When on the sill, across the window bars,
Kind winter flings her flowers and her stars.
And what but Canadian is this compelling line from The
Young Baptist?—
Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world!
In short, if we were making a formula for Marjorie
Pickthall’s Nature poetry, we would employ this sub-title—‘Lyrics
in the Greek and the Canadian Modes of Pictorializing
Nature.’ Thus we should, by a single phrase, escape
absurdly alleging that an Anglo-Canadian mind possessed
Greek imagination and feeling for a mythological Nature;
and thus also make clear the fact that Marjorie Pickthall,
an Anglo-Canadian poet, was gifted not only with a lively
pagan sense of the beauty of a vanished world, but also with
a responsive sensibility to the beauty of a real and present
world of Nature in Canada.
In two respects, then, Marjorie Pickthall may be regarded
as having made original contributions to Canadian
literature. First, she winsomely pictorialized, not, as with
Lampman, spiritually interpreted, the face and pageantry
of Nature. Secondly, she subtilized verse technique in
verbal coloring and melody. She had a light and tender
fancy, and, certainly for Canada, a rare artistry. She
brought Titania and Ariel to earth again; and suffused existence
with magical illusion, rhymed of light. The monument
she herself raised to her genius and memory is not
large and imposing; but it is, like her own spirit, chaste,
exquisite, beautiful—and enduring.
Another significant creative poet of the Second Renaissance
Period is Robert Norwood. Miss Pickthall was an
objective poet. Whenever her imagination concerned itself
with the spiritual realm it was to interpret only her own
private experience, strictly from a personal point of view.
Norwood is an interpreter of the Spirit to the Spirit—universalizing
his imaginative experiences. He is, to be
sure, a colorist and a musician in verse; but he is these
secondarily in aim, whereas primarily he is the singer and
interpreter of the meaning of Spiritual Love. In this field
he has made a really original contribution to native Canadian
poetry. In another field, however, he has made a still
greater contribution to Canadian poetry.
The faculty of love, which is the deepest function of
man’s spiritual nature, is the imagination, the idealizing
faculty. The greatest and most spiritualizing power in
the world is love because its ultimate object is the heart of
the universe; that is, Immortal Love, which is God, for God
is Love. The greatest and most spiritualizing earthly object
of love is Woman, because it is the idealization, the
love, of Woman that most inspires men to achievement
in this life and to the deserving of union and companionship
on earth and in the life to come. That is to say, the
spiritual love of Woman is the chief inspiration of human
creative ideals and activities—of material achievement, of
creation in the fine arts, and of religion. Thus did Goethe
apostrophize this divine function of woman:—
Das Ewig Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan
—the eternal woman-soul draws us forever upwards and
on; and thus has Robert Norwood also declared Woman’s
spiritualizing function:—
Much have I learned of woman and the part
She plays in shaking from the laden bough
Life’s blossoms; all that has been, and is now,
And ever shall be: Science, music and art,
Religion, these, as from a fountain start
The river, have been hers—man to endow.
It is Norwood’s mastery of verbal color and music and
his power of spiritual vision and exaltation—his interpretation
and treatment of Ideal Love—that constitute his
novel quality of fresh excellence in the poetry of the Second
Renaissance. Certainly in his sonnet-sequence His Lady
of the Sonnets (1915), he has enhanced the quality of Canadian
poetry. Uppermost in his heart and imagination is
the refining redemptive, transmuting power of Love, an absolute
joy in the thought of the spiritual union and companionship
of the Lover and the Beloved. To him Love
is a holy ideal; and Loving is the fusion of soul and soul,
of spirit and spirit, until the Lover and the Beloved become
one soul, one spirit, enamored of holiness in thought,
speech, and deed.
As an example of Norwood’s sensuously colorful and
musical envisagement of the Ideal Love we quote the following
sonnet:—
I meet you in the mystery of the night,
A dear Dream Goddess on a crescent moon;
An opalescent splendour like a noon
Of lilies; and I wonder that the height
Should darken for the depth to give me light—
Light of your face, so lovely that I swoon
With gazing, and then wake to find how soon
Joy of the world fades when you fade from sight.
Beholding you I am Endymion,
Lost and immortal in Latmian dreams;
With Dian bending down to look upon
Her shepherd, whose aeonian slumber seems
A moment, twinkling like a starry gem
Among the jewels of her diadem.
As an example of his power for spiritualizing Love, the
following sonnet from the same sequence will suffice:—
Last night I crossed the spaces to your side,
As you lay sleeping in the sacred room
Of our great moment. Like a lily’s bloom,
Fragile and white were you, my spirit-bride,
For pain and loneliness with you abide,
And Death had thought to touch you with his doom,
Until Love stood angelic at the tomb,
Drew sword, smote him and Life’s door opened wide.
I looked on you and breathed upon your hair—
Your hair of such soft, brown, translucent gold!
Nor did you know that I knelt down in prayer,
Clasped hands, and worshipped you for the untold
Magnificence of womanhood divine—
God’s miracle of Water turned to Wine!
In his exquisitely wrought, sensuously colored, yet
spiritually elevating verse surely we discover something
that has never before been in Canadian poetry. It is a
fresh achievement in Canadian poetry, even though it is
not always impeccable in rhythm and rhyme. It is, too,
authentic poetry, as if Dante or Keats or Tennyson or
Swinburne had returned to earth and their genius were
reincarnated, in a notable degree, in the genius of Robert
Norwood.
Katherine Hale (Mrs. John Garvin) is a poet by herself.
For she was a poet of considerable distinction for a decade
before she published the volume which revealed her as
having found her métier in creative poetry, as in her Morning
in the West (1923). The eye and the ear are supreme
in her processes of perception. Music and pictorial art
were her first aesthetic loves, and had most to do with
determining her attitudes and appreciations of the spiritual
world. So that, at length, the inner eye and the inner ear
became the faculties by which she perceived beauty in the
external world as well as in the heart of mankind. All her
reactions to what she saw and heard in the external world
were in terms of color beauty and tonal beauty, perhaps
more in terms of color than of tone. She became a musical
critic of distinction, and one of our foremost ‘color-writers.’
When, therefore, Katherine Hale felt the ‘urge’ to
create poetry, her reactions to the spiritual world also were
in terms of color and music. It is found that her development
in poetic writing follows the same order as her development
in prose writing. She began as a critic of music
and reviewer of literature, but capped all her prose with a
finished and arresting work in ‘color-writing,’ Canadian
Cities of Romance (1922). She began her poetic creation
with the musical or lyrical qualities of her verse much more
accentuated than the color qualities, and her themes and
forms much more earth-born and conventional than romantic
and spiritualized in meaning. But always in her
first three books of verse there was the feeling for pictorial
or color values and for subtle emotional and spiritual
nuances.
At length, as in Morning in the West, her latest volume,
she found her true mode, and poetry became for her the
beautiful sketching and etching and painting of the romance
of the Canadian spirit. This poetry of the spirit she suffused
with all the subtle variations of imaginative ‘color,’
half-lights, shadows, and chiaroscuro of Nature and social
life in Canada from the days of the Scots factor and Western
chevalerie to the era of the transcontinental railways.
Her first two books of verse, Grey Knitting (1914) and
The White Comrade (1916), by their very titles suggest the
color ‘note.’ But the gift or power of embodying spiritual
beauty in lyrical music is always uppermost, as for instance
in The Ultimate Hour or In Noonday containing the unforgettable
alliterative and musical line:—
With dear indefinite delight;
or in this stanza from The Answer:—
Unaltered aisles that wait and wait forever,
O woods that gleam and stir in liquid gold,
What of your little lover who departed
Before the year grew old?
In addition to the winsome color and musical qualities of
her earlier lyrical verse, we discover a refined spiritual
quality in such a sonnet as The First Christmas, and a noble
spiritualization of romantic love in her sonnet At Noon,
beginning:—
Thou art my Tower in the sun at noon.
Katherine Hale’s long poem The White Comrade
(1916) discloses notable gifts in blank verse and the power
to make a dramatic picture that enthralls the mystical or
religious imagination. Her rare gifts of delicate fancy,
elfin enchantment from Nature and simple Orphean music,
reminding us of Bliss Carman’s light lyrism, is finely exemplified
in her spiritualized lyric I Used to Wear a Gown
of Green, in which beauty and pathos are tenderly commingled:—
I used to wear a gown of green
And sing a song to May,
When apple blossoms starred the stream
And Spring came up the way.
I used to run along with Love
By lanes the world forgets,
To find in an enchanted wood
The first frail violets.
And ever ’mid the fairy blooms
And murmur of the stream,
We used to hear the pipes of Pan
Call softly through our dream.
But now, in outcry vast, that tune
Fades like some little star
Lost in an anguished judgment day
And scarlet flames of war.
What can it mean that Spring returns
And purple violets bloom,
Save that some gypsy flower may stray
Beside his nameless tomb!
To pagan Earth her gown of green,
Her elfin song to May—
With all my soul I must go on
Into the scarlet day.
All these—the poetry of her first three books, Grey
Knitting, The White Comrade, and The New Joan—were
but her short flights preparatory to making her eagle flight,
by which she should discover the meaning of Canadian
history and civilization in which is envisaged the Canadian
national spirit. In Morning in the West Katharine Hale
is no longer the individual lyrist fluting in the band of
other Canadian lyrists. In that volume she sounds the
diapason of Canadian nationality. She invents new forms
of lyrism, and her themes are colored with new tones and
lights of an impressionism which is the acme of realism and
yet is finely spiritualized, as in the series of verbal color-sketches
Going North and A Study of Shadows. But always
we are being taken by the poet through Canada, and
made to see what has been for us the most invisible, or, if
visible, the most elusive of all things, namely, the forms
and variation of the Canadian spirit and habitat.
The new forms of her lyrism may be exemplified in this
example, Enchantment:—
I never see a blue jay
But I think of her;
Never hear that hoarse ‘dear—dear’
From a tree-top stir,
And the answering call
Far, far away,
And the flash of azure—
Oh, she would stay
Listening in the forest,
Loitering through the silence,
Hearing calls and singing
All the livelong day!
Her new themes and new vision and spiritual import in
them—the envisagement of the qualities of the Canadian
spirit—are notably presented in Cun-ne-wa-bum, Buffalo
Meat, and most poignantly in An Old Lady, which is an
incisively graphic and dramatic picture of the whole history
of Canadian civilization from the early days of the Hudson’s
Bay Company to the 20th century social life in Ottawa
in these days of automobiles and bridge parties. Yet
it is no mere picture, but possesses a simple pathos, tenderness,
and wistfulness which spiritualize the realism in the
poem, and raise it to the plane of literature. This, then,
is Katherine Hale’s novel contribution to the poetic literature
of Canada:—Canadian nature and civilization envisaged
with a spiritual realism which has national perspective
and native color and atmosphere. It is a new and
distinct achievement in creative poetry in Canada.
Another significant poet of the Second Renaissance
period, whose verse deserves special mention, is Lloyd
Roberts. Early in 1914 he published a volume of verse
entitled, England Over Seas. Lloyd Roberts is the son of
Charles G. D. Roberts. No doubt, he inherited his poetic
gifts from his father, and, no doubt, learned the principles
of technical artistry from him. But, as a matter of fact,
in his own published verse, Lloyd Roberts shows qualities—love
of Nature and the gift of a singularly lyrical lilt—that
are nearer the verse of his father’s cousin, the inimitable
lyrist of the seasons, the vagrom heart, and the open road,
Bliss Carman.
In England Over Seas, the younger Roberts is an enchanting
lover of Nature, a vivid colorist, and a melodious
verbal musician. Nature is, in his own phrase, ‘the star’—always
the theme and in the foreground. Of his qualities
as a nature-painter and a verbal melodist, the following is
an excellent example:—
Crimson and gold in the paling sky;
The rampikes black where they tower on high—
And we follow the trails in the early dawn
Through the glades where the white frosts lie.
Down where the flaming maples meet;
Where the leaves are blood before our feet
We follow the lure of the twisting paths
While the air tastes thin and sweet.
Leggings and jackets are drenched with dew;
The long thin barrels are cold and blue;
But the glow of the Autumn burns in our veins,
And the eyes and hands are true.
Where the sun drifts down from overhead
(Tangled gleams in the scarlet bed),
Rush of wings through the forest aisle—
And the leaves are a brighter red.
Loud drum the cocks in the thickets nigh;
Gray is the smoke where the ruffed grouse die.
There’s blackened shell in the trampled fern
When the white moon swims the sky.
The number of the poets of the Second Renaissance is
legion. Amongst them are Arthur S. Bourinot, Gertrude
Bartlett, Bernard F. Trotter (deceased), Arthur L. Phelps,
Lucy M. Montgomery-MacDonald, Grace Blackburn,
Beatrice Redpath, Laura E. McCully, Louise Morey Bowman,
Florence Randal Livesay, Norah Holland, Amy
Pennington, Carroll C. Aikins, Wm. A. Creelman, Andrew
D. Merkel, Alexander Louis Fraser, Peter MacLaren
MacDonald, Clare Giffen, Erica Selfridge, Charles T.
Bruce, Marian Osborne, H. J. Maclean. It were worth
while to review in detail the work of Arthur S. Bourinot
as represented in his Laurentian Lyrics (1915), and
Lyrics From the Hills (1923), and Arthur L. Phelps as
represented in his Poems (1921) and A Bobcaygeon Chapbook
(1923). Bourinot attracted attention by his noble
and moving sonnet To The Memory of Rupert Brooke and
his tender and musical war lyric beginning:—
They are not dead, the soldier and the sailor.
But he is also an artist in colorful lyrism of Nature in
Canada, especially of the Laurentian district. Phelps is
a refined, perhaps it were better to say, dainty lyrist; but
he has also attempted new forms, and has been successful
with realistic ‘free verse.’ The others, with a few exceptions,
are systematic poets, but are not notable for
spiritual vision or for originality in forms or substance.
It is, however, from the point of view of a fresh vision
of earth and life and of originality in forms and substance
that the work of Florence Randal Livesay, Grace Blackburn,
Beatrice Redpath, Louise Morey Bowman, and Wilson
MacDonald must be specially remarked. For their
work displays a distinct advance in modernism over the
work of Marjorie Pickthall, Robert Norwood, and Katherine
Hale (earlier manner). In fact, there is in their work
fresh origination in themes, structures, music, and social
ideals. Florence Randal Livesay won distinction by her
Songs of Ukraina (1916). Though formally called translations,
they have such original elements of form and
matter that they are no more translations in the ordinary
meaning than is Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Mrs. Livesay’s work in the Songs of Ukraina, like that of
Fitzgerald, has a turning of phrase and of imagery and a
grace and music which are all her own and entitle the Songs
to the distinction of creative verse. In 1923 she published
Shepherd’s Purse. Here her genius flowered independently
in what is essentially spiritual realism. But it is not a
heavy spiritual realism. It exhibits a rare and light fancy
for elusive emotional nuances; and all the poems have a
piquancy, daintiness, and exquisite humanity which win one
to the love of the evanescent beauty that is in all things
human. The poems too have an air of the qualities which
are in the vers de société and the ‘Blue China’ poetry of
Andrew Lang and Austin Dobson. Mrs. Livesay has made
a genuinely novel contribution to Canadian poetry.
Outstanding in other ways is the verse of Grace Blackburn,
Beatrice Redpath, Louise Morey Bowman, and Wilson
MacDonald. There is more strength and spiritual
perceptiveness in the poetry of Grace Blackburn and
Beatrice Redpath than in that of Louise Morey Bowman.
All show equal originality and finish in the technical treatment
of their themes, but Louise Morey Bowman shows at
times an airy fancy which is almost so ethereal as to be
altogether abstract and unearthly. On the whole, exquisite
technique is their chief distinction; they are artists.
Wilson MacDonald in his Songs of the Prairie Land
(1918) and The Miracle Songs of Jesus (1921) discloses
an absorption in mystical psychology and psychoanalysis
which, by its daring and his method of suffusing the matter
with ingenious and subtilized novelty or beauty of diction
and imagery, adumbrates Goethe of the Faust tradition.
It is at once realistic and ultra-spiritualistic. His technique
is just as original and individualized as the matter of his
poems. If any Canadian has the right to the distinction of
possessing sheer creative genius, that right belongs to Wilson
MacDonald as a Seer and as an Artist working in a
field of spiritual vision which he has pre-empted.
Sources of quotations in this chapter:
Marjorie Pickthall—The Wood Carver’s Wife and Other Poems (McClelland
& Stewart: Toronto).
Robert Norwood—His Lady of the Sonnets (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
Katherine Hale—The White Comrade (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto);
Morning in the West (Ryerson Press: Toronto).
Lloyd Roberts—England Overseas (Elkin Mathews: London).
THE COMMUNITY NOVEL—MONTGOMERY—KEITH—MCCLUNG—LE
ROSSIGNOL. INSTITUTIONAL FICTION—PACKARD—SULLIVAN—DUNCAN—WALLACE
AND OTHERS. REALISTIC
ROMANCE—SERVICE—CODY—STEAD, ETC. HISTORICAL FICTION—SNIDER—ANISON
NORTH—TESKEY—MCKISHNIE—COONEY.
IMAGINATIVE FICTION—PICKTHALL—MACKAY.
MISCELLANEOUS TYPES—MCKISHNIE—SULLIVAN—HÉMON—SIME.
THE NEW REALISM—SALVERSON—DE LA ROCHE—CORNELL,
ETC.
Until the ‘nineties’ the production of Canadian fiction
had been spasmodic and scattered, but the success of
Gilbert Parker, Marshall Saunders, and other Canadian
writers who gained a hearing first in lands alien to their
own, and whose work came back to Canada ‘with an alienated
majesty,’ proved that Canada was rich in literary
material. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a
marked increase in fiction writing in Canada. The new
writers were influenced not only by the example of their
compatriots but by that of the fiction writers of Great
Britain and the United States. They began to realize that
life around them was as interesting as Barrie’s Thrums or
Bret Harte’s California. There was, too, a growing reading
public ready to appreciate stories that presented the
adventure, the humor, and the pathos of the daily life of
themselves, their neighbors, or their fellow-Canadians in
other parts of the country and sometimes of other racial
origins.
Hence arose the Community Novel or type of story. One
of the earlier examples is Adeline M. Teskey’s Where the
Sugar Maple Grows (1901). In telling of the origin of
this book, Miss Teskey wrote that when reading Ian MacLaren’s
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush she said within herself,
‘I know just as interesting people in Canada.’ Her
sketches of village characters, depicted with a homely but
effective simplicity of style, showed that she was right. A
delightfully humorous novel of Cranfordian flavor, The
Specimen Spinster, by Kate Westlake Yeigh, (1906), essayed
a larger canvas instead of the smaller etchings and
gave an insight into the social relationships of the rural
village.
The year 1908 may be said to mark the real beginning of
the Second Renaissance in Canadian fiction, for in that
year there were published three novels of the Community
type—Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery;
Duncan Polite, by Marian Keith; Sowing Seeds in Danny,
by Nellie L. McClung. There appeared also a charming
collection of short tales, Little Stories of Quebec, by James
Le Rossignol. This date is still further significant as the
year in which Marjorie Pickthall published her first important
short story, La Tristesse, in The Atlantic Monthly,
although her work differs greatly in setting and artistic
method from the fiction of the Community type.
L. M. Montgomery was born at Clifton, Prince Edward
Island, and spent her childhood in Cavendish, a seashore
farming settlement which figures as ‘Avonlea’ in her stories.
That her life has been spent chiefly within the limits of the
little island province and the bounds of an Ontario country
parish does not narrow her outlook although she confines
herself to themes bounded by rural experiences, for her
forte is the portrayal of what she has seen and knows. She
has imaginative and creative gifts, but she uses these in
enabling us to see the beauty, the humour, and the pathos
that lies about our daily paths.
Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, has an interesting
history. Upon being asked for a short serial story for
a Sunday School weekly, she cast about for a plot idea. A
faded note book entry suggested: ‘Elderly couple apply to
orphan asylum for a boy; a girl is sent to them.’ The
writing of a serial was started, but time did not allow the
author to complete it for the purpose intended. As she
brooded over the theme it began to expand and the result
was a book which may be confidently labelled a ‘Canadian
classic.’
In Anne we have an entirely new character in fiction,
a high-spirited, sensitive girl, with a wonderfully vivid
imagination; wise beyond her years, outspoken and daring:
not always good but always lovable. Her longing for a
real home, and an interest in her very quaintness, ends in
her being established as a member of the Green Gables
family. It is Anne who dominates the whole story. There
are other characters, quaint too, and well-drawn, but the
introduction of Anne into the community—Anne, so unconventional
so imaginative, and so altogether different
from the staid, prosaic, general attitude of the neighbourhood—proves
to be the invasion of a peculiar ferment, and
the incidents which discover the process of fermentation
are most delightfully odd and mirth-provoking.
Anne of Avonlea follows the career of the orphan heroine
and deals with two eventful years of school teaching.
Miss Montgomery understands children thoroughly and
makes her child characters of all types perfectly natural and
lifelike. The same creative faculty which gave us in
Anne an entirely new shadow-child shows itself in the portrayal
of the mischievous but lovable Davy Keith, his
demure twin sister Dora, the imaginative Paul Irving, and
the many individualities of the pupils of Avonlea School.
Plot interest is not a strong feature of this or of any of
L. M. Montgomery’s novels. There are, nevertheless,
several threads of action which bind together the series of
incidents and secure continuity and unity. The nature
descriptions reveal at once the author’s intimacy with
nature and her poetic attitude of mind.
Here is a typical passage:—
A September day on Prince Edward Island hills; a crisp wind blowing
up over the sand dunes from the sea; a long, red road, winding
through fields and woods, now looping itself about a corner of thick
set spruce, now threading a plantation of young maples with great
feathery sheets of ferns beneath them, now dipping down into a hollow
where a brook flashed out of the woods and into them again, now
basking in the open sunshine between ribbons of goldenrod and of
myriads of crickets.
Chronicles of Avonlea, a volume of short stories, contains
some of her most finished work, showing that perfect
art that conceals all art, and abounding in a strong vein of
simple humour that is found in all her work.
The Story Girl and The Golden Road are written with
even less attention to a central plot than the earlier ‘Anne’
books. They are somewhat loosely connected series of incidents
in which the same characters take part. But the
community type of fiction does not demand thrilling plots.
Other writers can write plot stories, but most other writers
do not hold before us the mirror of Canadian country life.
Kilmeny of the Orchard is in a sense but an expanded
short story. It is a prose love idyll and does not, perhaps,
bulk very large when compared with the other books. It
is really one of the extended ‘chronicles’ of Avonlea.
The story of Anne Shirley continues through several
volumes—Anne of the Island pictures her college days;
Anne’s House of Dreams sees her established as mistress
of her own home; while Rilla of Ingleside carries over the
history into the second generation, Rilla being the daughter
of Anne. There is no new development of method or treatment
in these. In Emily of New Moon (1923) Miss
Montgomery created a new child character, with a new
environment, new conditions, and a new group of minor
personages, yet in effect it is of the same type and in the
same literary field as her previous novels. The chief difference
to be observed is that she employs a more analytic
psychological method in depicting her heroine—a method
that tends to produce an adult’s story of youth. In a way
it marks an advance in literary technique but is not as yet
entirely divorced from that minute objective observation
which makes equal appeal to the young in years and the
young in heart.
The particular type of rural community which is the
background of Marian Keith’s stories may be duplicated in
many parts of Canada and is quite common in older Ontario—a
community originally settled by Scottish Presbyterians
and afterwards leavened with just enough English
and Irish to throw into relief the chief characteristics of
each nationality.
One cannot escape the fact of a marked similarity to
the work of J. M. Barrie in his tales of Thrums. There
is, however, this difference: Barrie is more restrained in
his emotions, more abbreviated and less poetic in his
descriptions, more pawky and less boisterous in his humor;
in fine, Barrie is Scotch, Marian Keith is Scottish-Canadian.
As in most novels of the community type, the interest
lies in incident and characterization. The noblest character
of all her stories, the best drawn, is the grand old mystic
Highlander, ‘Duncan Polite,’ the spiritual watchman of
Glenoro. The incidents of this story are woven mainly
around the path of the young minister, while the other
Glenoro novels centre about the personages of chief interest
in a rural community—Silver Maple, the school teacher;
Treasure Valley, the young doctor. The End of the Rainbow
and The Bells of St. Stephens are studies of town life.
Lizbeth of the Dale and In Orchard Glen are character
studies of a boy and a girl respectively. The same qualities
prevail in all these. Little Miss Melody builds an engaging
picture of the community of Cherry Hill around a fresh
and original young girl character. The keynote of Marian
Keith’s stories is ‘service.’ Her work as a whole gives a
faithful picture of the social and religious life of a certain
type of rural Canadian settlement, and Canadian town.
Mrs. McClung’s ‘community’ depicted in Sowing Seeds
in Danny was a little western town, with certain elements
of the usual population crossing its pages. The poor immigrant
girl, the young English gentleman learning to
farm, the doctor, the preacher, the would-be politician are
faithfully portrayed. Most interesting of all is Mrs. Watson,
the hard-working washerwoman and her family of
nine children. The fortunes of Pearlie Watson are the
theme of a sequel, The Second Chance, in which the setting
in a rural settlement, while The Black Creek Stopping
House is a collection of short stories. Later the career of
Pearl Watson is continued in Purple Springs, but this novel
shades into a sort of politico-propagandist treatise. Human
interest and news quality with a ready-made style to correspond
has caught the public interest in Mrs. McClung’s
work rather than any conspicuous artistry of method.
From looking at the life of fixed communities or localities,
the next step is to consider them in their relation to
what we might call certain ‘institutions’ of our national
life, growth, or conditions. We saw that R. E. Knowles
in St. Cuthbert’s made the Scottish Presbyterian Church
the dominating influence of that story. In this sense, the
life of the railroad or construction camp is an ‘institutional’
rather than a local or community life. This has been excellently
portrayed by Frank L. Packard in his collection
of short stories, On the Iron at Big Cloud: Alan Sullivan’s
The Passing of Oul-I-But contains some splendid stories
of this type. Here also we would place the sea stories of
Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.
Norman Duncan’s peculiar field is the ragged coasts
and savage seas of Newfoundland and the hard, cruel,
tempest-battered life of the Newfoundland fisherman.
When The Way of the Sea was published (1904), Frank
T. Bullen, himself a master-maker of sea stories, wrote in a
foreword: ‘I am absolutely certain that with the exception of
Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling no writing about the
sea has ever probed so deeply and so faithfully into its
mysteries as his.’ Duncan’s fidelity to his subject appears
not only in his truthful description of the life and way of
the sea, but even more in his realization and presentation
of the religious side of the Newfoundland fishermen—whose
stern creed was born out of a never-ceasing struggle
for existence.
Norman Duncan, although he produced several novels,
of which Dr. Luke of the Labrador is the most artistically
constructed, is essentially a writer of short stories. Indeed,
some of his novels were made simply by piecing together,
with connecting material, stories that had first appeared in
magazine form. As a short story writer he exhibits the
finest and most desirable qualities—substantial character
foundation, economy of language, sufficiency of emotional
causation, and a breadth of human sympathy. His Battles
Royal Down North and Harbor Tales Down North are two
collections of a high order of excellence. His power to
portray action makes his juvenile books—such as Billy
Topsail and Company—very acceptable to the youthful
mind.
Frederick William Wallace writes chiefly of Nova Scotia
sailors and deep sea fishermen. He is more objective in his
treatment of themes than is Duncan. While Wallace’s gift
may be said to lie in his skill in producing vivid visualizations
of seamanship, Duncan’s lies in realizing seamen.
Wallace observes and describes the life of the sailor and
the fisherman; Duncan realizes and interprets the soul.
Consequently in Blue Water (1920), The Shacklocker (a
collection of short stories), and The Viking Blood, have
much more plot and action to them than have Norman Duncan’s
novels and short stories; but they are not so intimate
and convincing in character analysis, neither are they so
careful nor so finished in their technique—the two styles are
quite in harmony with the differing methods of treatment.
Commercial life in its sociological relationships falls under
our definition of an ‘institutional’ aspect of national
life. Here must be placed Alan Sullivan’s The Inner Door
which reveals inside conditions and labor problems in connection
with the operation of a large rubber factory; also
his story of the somewhat spectacular development of a
chain of allied industries at a strategic point for power and
for raw material—told in The Rapids.
There are, in this period, some notable examples of Incidental
Literature. Louis Hémon, a native of France,
lived but a short time in Canada, yet wrote, in Maria Chapdelaine,
(English translations by W. H. Blake and by Sir
Andrew Macphail), a chastely poetic novel of French
Canadian life. Miss J. G. Sime in Our Little Life presents,
if we view it from one angle, a meticulous study of
the life of a Montreal seamstress, with her pathetically frustrate
love story; but more than all that, Our Little Life
is an observation of the life of the Canadian people by an
English mind. The literary artistry of both these works
is indisputable. Some criticism has been aimed at both on
the score of inaccuracy of minor facts. Whether or not
there are such minor inaccuracies, there still remains the
grand result that the color, the atmosphere, the outward
semblance, are portrayed as they have scarce ever been
before; that the inmost soul of the characters is understandingly
and consistently revealed.
Education in its institutional aspect appears in many
novels only incidentally. As a dominant motive or a circumscribing
setting its development is comparatively recent.
Miriam of Queen’s, by Lilian Vaux Mackinnon (1921),
shows the molding influence of university life; The Hickory
Stick, by Nina Moore Jamieson (1921), emphasises
the place and importance of the rural school in rural life
and problems; the great school novels of English literature
find a modified echo in the boarding school stories of Ethel
Hume Bennett and Gordon Hill Grahame—Judy of York
Hill (1922), by the former, in which dialogue, action and
atmosphere contribute effectively in conveying a picture of
a girls’ school; Larry, or the Avenging Terrors (1923),
by the latter, a boys’ boarding school story of lively
incident.
The rapid expansion of the far West and such spectacular
events as the ‘Klondike rush,’ gave a sort of feverish
color to a life that previously had appeared one of toil,
hardship, and stony endurance. Viewed imaginatively,
that life now presented its hectic side, and the far West
and the high North were exploited as literary fields of thrill,
adventure, and excitement. Thus the second decade of
this century saw the rise in Canada of the Realistic Romance.
At its best this class of novel resembles the Community
type but is speeded up with a more exciting and
more complicated plot; at its worst it is lurid melodrama
with realism interpreted as the portrayal of the sordid and
seamy side of life. Very few of the realistic romances
exhibit any distinction of manner and style. They are not
concerned with the niceties of the art of telling a story but
with the ability to keep the reader constantly keyed up to a
high emotional tensity.
The Trail of ’98, by Robert W. Service (1910), is a
story of the Yukon, with the spectacular elements of gold-rush
days fully emphasised. The qualities of Service’s
poetry are accentuated in his fiction. In the same year H.
A. Cody began his career as a novelist with another Yukon
tale, The Frontiersman. It is a story of love, adventure,
and missionary experience. Rod of the Lone Patrol followed
in 1912, adding a new fictional element which has
been much exploited—the doings of the North West
Mounted Police. Cody produced a long series of adventure
novels with a variety of settings.
Other writers of the Realistic Romance speedily developed
different aspects of Western life or staged their
romances in different regions of the Great West or the Far
North. We have room only for brief mention of some of
the best known writers in this class.
Robert Stead’s novels are chiefly of the prairie farm
and ranch—The Bail Jumper (1914), The Homesteader,
The Cowpuncher, Dennison Grant, Neighbors. He is effective
in reproducing the atmosphere of the prairie, the
details of farm and ranch life, and characteristic bits of
scenery; his stories are stronger in incident and action than
they are in characterization.
Robert Watson began fairly well with My Brave and
Gallant Gentleman (1918), a romance of England and
British Columbia, that had touches of Borrow and Stevenson,
but his later efforts have tended to cast themselves into
more stereotyped forms. Robert A. Hood produced two
adventure-romances of British Columbia, The Chivalry of
Keith Leicester and The Quest of Alistair. Douglas Durkin
exploited Manitoba in The Lobstick Trail. ‘Luke
Allan’ (Lacey Amy) wrote several stories of cowboy life of
which Blue Pete: Half Breed was significant because of the
originality and individuality of its leading character.
John Murray Gibbon’s earlier fiction—in Drums Afar
and Hearts and Faces—was English in its setting and concerned
with psychological problems and studies of Oxford
life. In transferring to an American literary habitat, he
entered the ranks of the Realistic Romancers. His novel,
The Conquering Hero, was a lively, melodramatic story of
the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia ranches; while
in Pagan Love (1923), he combined a startling mystery
with an element of satire on the modern philosophy of
business success.
Theodore Goodridge Roberts, younger brother of
Charles G. D. Roberts, is essentially a story teller and much
of his fiction shows the influence of Weyman and the historical
romanticists of the latter years of the nineteenth
century. His Brothers in Peril (1905), A Captain of
Raleigh’s (1911), and The Harbor Master (1914) are
stories of romantic adventure of very early days in Newfoundland,
while Jess of the River, Rayton and Forest
Fugitives have a setting in rural New Brunswick.
The influences that produced the Community Novel
gave to the Historical Fiction of this period a closer up
view. Instead of the far-off days of the French regime,
the historical field of vision became that of but a century
or so past and writers essayed to revivify the times and
personages of the War of 1812 or the Rebellion of 1837.
A noteworthy example is C. H. J. Snider’s stories of the
naval engagements on the Great Lakes, In the Wake of the
Eighteen-Twelvers. With fine recreative imagination he
enables us to live through incidents of daring, gallantry,
and romance of these stirring battles. ‘Anison North’ in
The Forging of the Pikes gives a realistic picture of Toronto
of ’37, of the battle of Montgomery’s Tavern, and a
pen-portrait of the rebel leader, Mackenzie. She lets us
see ‘both sides of the story’ of the conditions that were responsible
for the Rebellion.
A minor species of the Historical Novel is found in
the novel of pioneer life which seeks to put into a permanent
record pioneer experiences and conditions of sometimes
considerably less than a century ago. Adeline M.
Teskey did this for the Niagara Peninsula and the building
of the first Welland Canal with In Candlelight Days
(1914). Archie McKishnie told of the conflict of the
‘bushwhacker,’ who delighted in the freedom of the woods
and streams, with the incoming tide of settlement in Love
of the Wild, drawing upon the historic figure of Colonel
Talbot for some of his characterization. Anison North
blends a colorful picture of the enjoyment of outdoor life
with a pioneer line fence feud in her Carmichael. In Kinsmen
Percival J. Cooney relates a strange story of Scottish
feudalism—an example of the clan system with its autocratic
laird—which actually existed in Canada.
Few Canadian writers have found leisure to follow the
example of Gilbert Parker in writing Historical Fiction in
Old World settings, but this has quite recently been done
in a highly distinctive style in novels appearing over the
signature—‘E. Barrington.’ The Ladies, semi-historical
stories of the eighteenth century; The Chaste Diana, a story
of Polly Peacham of ‘Beggar’s Opera’ fame; The Divine
Lady (1924) tells the love-story of Lord Nelson and Emma
Hamilton.
In one sense all fiction is imaginative. There is, however,
a species in which pure imagination plays a much
greater part than in the Community Novel, in Historical
Fiction, or in the other types discussed in this chapter.
Marjorie Pickthall’s work is the highest example of this.
She wrote, not with the reproductive imagination
nor with fancy, but with the faculty defined by
Matthew Arnold as imaginative reason. Into the texture
of her fiction she wove poetic imagination and poetic significance
derived from her clear, absolute, and sympathetic
understanding of the human heart and of the hidden
springs and the meaning of existence, from her superior
and inclusive sympathetic intelligence. Thus she was enabled
to write stories of the most varied settings and of the
most wildly differing characters with equal convincingness.
Little Hearts (1915), is an engaging tale of the days
of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ with its conflict chiefly between
loyalty to the Crown, and fidelity to the spirit of humanity.
It pictures ‘little hearts,’ men of small fortunes, and small
(as the world sees it) ambitions, in their pathetic existence,
more pathetic because of finely brave in the midst of many
both petty and heroic vicissitudes of fortune, of mean victory
and noble defeat. The novel preaches no didactic
moral but it silently teaches Christ’s philosophy of struggle
and defeat—‘He that loseth his life shall find it.’ It impresses
unforgettably how little after all are the greatest
hearts, and how little we lose or gain in any defeat or
triumph which is merely earthly defeat or triumph.
The Bridge (1922), has the same theme, with the pain
and cruelty of love, of unfulfilled seeking, and the final
triumph of a soul that saved itself by losing itself in inward
self-knowledge and self-sacrifice. It is set against
a background of the tremendous beauty of the Great Lakes,
scenes of storm on land and water. Technically, it is
farther from perfection than Little Hearts; it has less
structural unity, less smoothness of style. At times the
emotional situations seem overdrawn; nor are atmosphere
and setting definitively localized.
The collection of short stories—Angel’s Shoes (1922)—embodies
examples of Miss Pickthall’s perfect artistry
as a short story writer. These stories are clear, vivid,
colorful, and of almost the highest type of creative
imagination. They may lack, occasionally, a warmth of
humanity that is present in the work of other writers of
poorer craftsmanship.
Less distinctive but belonging to the few Canadian
novels of this class is The Window Gazer, by Isabel Ecclestone
Mackay, a romance of a man who ‘fell in love with
his wife.’ Blended with the characteristics of the novel of
pure imagination there are here slight touches of the
Realistic Romance and the Community Novel. A somewhat
curious literary phenomena is found in Mists of the
Morning by this same writer, which began in the style of
the Imaginative Novel and ended as a Realistic Romance.
To the ranks of the Animal Romancers this period has
added at least one writer who approaches the subject in a
new way. The attitude was apparent in the nature passages
of Gaff Linkum (1907) and became more a quality
of Archie McKishnie’s work as he continued to write short
stories and novels of animal life. We find it crystallized
in Openway (1923). Roberts is the intellectual animal
psychologist; Thompson Seton, the literary scientist; W.
A. Fraser, the objective story teller; but Archie McKishnie
impresses us with the sense of his comradeship with the
creatures of the marsh, the wood, and the stream. He is their
interpreter but not as an outside observer. He lives with
them, loves them, protects them. Thus when he writes
animal stories he rises to his best literary style and achieves
a beauty and smoothness that is not always found in his
other writing.
The detective story is represented by a series of ‘underground’
stories by Arthur Stringer; a typical example is
The Wire Tappers. The setting is a large American city,
and rapidity of action is the desired and supplied element.
More Canadian in setting and atmosphere are Victor
Lauriston’s The Twenty-First Burr and Hopkins Moorhouse’s
The Gauntlet of Alceste, both well-constructed according
to the requirements of this type of fiction, concealing
the mystery motive skilfully up to a surprising climactic
finish.
The religions and philosophies of the Orient find a
slight reflection in some Canadian poetry. In fiction, the
stories and novels of L. Adams Beck—The Ninth Vibration,
The Key of Dreams, The Perfume of the Rainbow,
The Treasure of Ho—are chiefly Oriental in themes and
settings, and mark the author as an interpreter of the mysteries
of the East, with an unusual beauty and originality
of style.
Arthur Stringer’s trilogy of the prairie—The Prairie
Wife, The Prairie Mother, The Prairie Child—is remarkable
as a study in feminine psychology and the reactions of
problems of prairie life upon a feminine mind in its domestic
and personal associations. The first volume in the trilogy
is the most impressive because of its spontaneity, its
subtle touches of color and atmosphere. The modern
double-triangle element dominates and rather detracts from
the originality and individuality of the latter volumes, but
the series is significant as an advance from the realistic
romance toward a newer realism.
It was but natural that a reaction should set in against
the realistic romance with its insufficiency of motivation
and its lack of fidelity to real life. Rather remarkably
this arrives in another ten-year cycle and a group of novels
published in 1923 show a marked similarity of method and
treatment, with widely varied themes and settings. We
distinguish this fresh and original attitude as the ‘New
Realism’ in Canadian fiction. The strongest of these novels
undoubtedly is The Viking Heart by Laura Goodman Salverson.
It might be called the epic of the Icelander in
Canada, describing as it does the arrival of a party of immigrants
in 1870 and following their struggles, hardships,
and gradual rise of fortunes to the present day. There is
no plot but such as grows out of the record of the lives of
the characters. There is no melodrama, but there is the
tense drama of the realities of life. The style is chaste,
simple, but forceful. Back of it all lies a big theme—‘the
price of country’—the realization of citizenship through
toil, tears, blood, and sacrifice.
The other novels in this group are: Possession, by Mazo
de la Roche, with its setting a Niagara fruit farm; Lantern
Marsh, by Beaumont Cornell, following a farm boy
through his struggles for an education; Cattle, by Onoto
Watanna, an almost brutally realistic presentation of a man
whose sole aim in life was the acquirement of cattle—as a
form of wealth—whose whole outlook on life was measured
in terms of cattle; The Child’s House, by Marjory MacMurchy,
which enters into the heart and mind of a growing
little girl.
The importance of this movement is that it has cast
aside superficialities, that these writers have somehow been
able to ‘see things as they are,’ to glimpse the realities of
life from their real beginnings—four of the five novels
named are actually rooted in ‘the soil’ as their setting and
their underlying spiritual foundation. With this foundation
of actuality and truth, the writers have gained a clearer
and more finished expression. Some of these novels have
melodramatic spots; some have other weaknesses, but, on
the whole, the effect of this new movement has been to produce
novels that have a definite structural unity, that are
largely free from irrelevant and insignificant detail, that
are written with an economy and aptness of language, and
that have more definiteness and depth to their basic themes.
THE POETIC DRAMATISTS OF THE SECOND RENAISSANCE—ARTHUR
STRINGER—ROBERT NORWOOD—MARJORIE
PICKTHALL, AND OTHERS.
Arthur stringer, novelist and lyric poet, showed
versatility and considerable power in imaginative
construction when, in 1903, he published a volume of two
dramatic poems or soliloquies and one poetic drama, all on
classical themes in blank verse; namely, Hephaestus, Persephone
at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia. In these works,
however, Stringer was indulging an ‘avocation;’ for his
genius is at its best in lyrical verse and prose fiction.
Hephaestus and Persephone, even though they are written
in blank verse, have all the color, music, and emotion which
we associate with lyrical poetry. Sappho in Leucadia,
though dramatic in form, is undramatic in movement, and
is lyrical in spirit. For at the beginning Sappho, the ‘bird-throated
child of Lesbos,’ has resolved to destroy herself
by leaping into the sea, and Phaon’s only role is the attempt
of a lover to dissuade her, but to no avail. The so-called
‘drama’ is but a series of colloquies between Sappho and
Phaon. The only ‘movement’ is a psychological development
in three stages—first, the original intention on
Sappho’s part to destroy herself; then the arrested intention;
and, finally, the intention fulfilled, in spite of Phaon’s
pleading, by Sappho leaping to her death.
What Stringer has really done in Sappho in Leucadia
is to take a Greek legend and to tell the simple episode of
Sappho’s death, in colorful, musical, and artistic blank
verse. There is no emotional poignancy in it; nothing for
the heart and the moral imagination. It is all for the
aesthetic sensibility, for the lover of sensuous imagery and
melody. Oddly its single lyrical interlude or ‘song’ is not
in ‘Sapphics,’ but is an octave in trimeters. The sensuous
beauty of color and music in this quasi-poetic drama is
exemplified in the following speech by Sappho:—
For like a god you seemed in those glad days
Of droning wings and languorous afternoons,
When close beside the murmuring sea we walked.
Then did the odorous summer ocean seem
A meadow green where foam one moment flowered
And then was gone, and ever came again,
A thousand bloom-burdened Springs in one!
—How like a god you seemed to me; and I
Was then most happy, and at little things
We lightly laughed, and oftentimes we plunged
Waist-deep and careless in the cool green waves,
As Tethys once and Oceanus played
Upon the golden ramparts of the world.
Then would we rest, and muse upon the sands, . . .
And on the dunes the thin green ripples lisped
Themselves to sleep and sails swung dreamily
Where azure islands floated on the air.
Then did your body seem a temple white. . . .
The bloom of youth was on your sunburnt cheek,
The streams of life sang thro’ your violet veins,
The midnight velvet of your tangled hair
Lured, as a twilight rill . . . . . . . . . . .
Stringer’s Sappho in Leucadia is an engaging and even
impressive dramatic colloquy, but it is not an authentic
poetic or closet drama. It has sensuous beauty but no
spiritual power. But it does increase Stringer’s reputation
as a verbal colorist and melodist.
In 1915 appeared an original poet of distinct spiritual
power in lyrical and dramatic forms. He was Robert
Norwood. His first book was a sonnet-sequence. But in
1916 he published a poetic drama, The Witch of Endor: A
Tragedy; and in 1919, another poetic drama, The Man of
Kerioth. In 1921 he published Bill Boram, which is a
‘dramatic tale.’
Robert Norwood has two natural gifts. More than
any other Canadian poet he has an innate genius for the
philosophical or mystical interpretation of good and evil
in the universe. Also, he is gifted with acute insight into
the inner heart of man and woman, ancient and modern.
These two gifts fit him for the office of the kind of poet
who by imaginative sympathy perceives the ultimate harmony
of the universe, the spiritual meaning of the tragedy
and comedy of existence. As a poetic dramatist, then,
Norwood is a Seer; and his voice is the voice of a Prophet.
Power over the heart and imagination of the people, not
Beauty and Art for art’s sake, is his aim. If he is the Poet
of Beauty, as he is in all his verse, lyrical and dramatic,
he is more, or supremely, the Poet of Spiritual Vision and
Power in his poetic dramas.
In The Witch of Endor Norwood returns to the Biblical
theme which had engaged Heavysege—the love romance
and tragedy of King Saul. The characters are never
shadowy but always alive. The dramatic movement is
never held up by long or digressive moralizing speeches,
as in Heayysege’s Saul, but each character makes his
speeches according to the dramatic necessity, enough and
no more, thus permitting at ‘the psychological moment’ the
natural entrance of another character and his speech. The
structure is logically developed to the tragic or spiritual
climax. But in the development there is no uniform level
of emotion, rather the emotion varies from gentle or
pathetic to intense or tragic. It is indeed in its profounder
imaginative vision, its more varying and rising degrees of
emotional intensity, and its more logical structural development
to a climax that The Witch of Endor has more
incisive and compelling power as poetic drama than Campbell’s
Arthurian drama Mordred. In short, The Witch of
Endor is a beautiful and spiritual poetic drama—purging
the emotions of pity and fear and transporting the spirit to
the Mount of Vision where it sees intuitively how the ways
of God to man are justified and how Love is greater than
Faith and Hope.
In his next poetic drama The Man of Kerioth (that is,
Judas Iscariot) Norwood made an advance in imaginative
vision, construction, and power. He achieves this by reducing
the magniloquence of the speeches and by modernly
humanizing the characters of Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen,
Blind Bartimaeus, Philip, and Jesus the Carpenter.
He even introduces little children into the drama. The
high and the vulgar and lowly, saints and sinners, the motley
of society in Jerusalem, commingle intimately and
humanly. There is a distinct advance in realistic truth
of characterization, and the whole drama is pervaded with
a winning naturalness and humanity which are not in any
preceding poetic drama by a Canadian, nor even in his
own succeeding ultra-realistic ‘dramatic tale of the sea,’
Bill Boram. So that in respect of creation thoroughly
humanized, noble, and clearly limned character-portraiture—as,
for instance, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen, and
Jesus—Norwood must be ranked as the supreme creator
amongst Canadian poetic dramatists. This is a matter
of sheer artistry. But Norwood also shows an advance
in spiritual power. With profounder mystical vision and
greater truth he justifies the ways of God to man, and
exalts the spirit to the Temple pinnacle where we behold
Immortal Love in all its sweet beauty of humanity and in
all its white radiance of redeeming light. In The Man of
Kerioth he attains his acme in spiritual beauty and power
as a poetic dramatist.
So far Norwood had not created any poetic drama with
a definitively Canadian theme, setting, and characters. In
his Bill Boram, which is a ‘dramatic tale’ told in the third
person, the characters and the action being ‘reported,’ Norwood
made a fresh, novel, and impressive contribution to
original Canadian Literature. In doing so Norwood
dropped somewhat in imaginative truth and dramatic invention;
but he rose to greater heights of mystical perception
and spiritual power. The theme of Bill Boram is the
redemption of the human spirit by the love of beauty in
Nature. Ingenious as his conception is, Norwood committed
the error of conceiving the accident of a love of
flowers, that is to say, of sensuous beauty, as a possible
redemptive force in human life. He would have us believe
that the love of sensuous beauty can transmute itself or
become transmuted into an altogether different kind of
love, namely, the love of spiritual beauty and thus regenerate
a coarse and brutal nature and remake it into a noble
and refined spirit. Such spiritual metabolism is impossible,
and Bill Boram so far forth lacks imaginative truth and
dramatic power.
Aside from that, Bill Boram, on the whole, is a novel
achievement in dramatic narrative. The characters are
vividly and veraciously drawn; they have realistic truth.
There is also an air of romance in the whole tale, such an
air of vital romance as obtains in the tales and novels of
the sea by Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.
Summarily; Norwood’s Bill Boram is an amazing dramatic
picture of rude characters in a setting of romance
colored by a strange and startling commingling of coarse
speech and brutalized deed and of beautiful diction and
exquisite imagery. It is at once a tour de force in dramatic
conception and construction and in impressionistic word-painting.
Yet it is a powerful presentation of the idea of
the mystical union of the human spirit with the divine
through the love of pure beauty in Nature.
The Second Renaissance is noted also for the work of
several other poetic dramatists. Amongst them are Dr.
James B. Dollard, author of Clontarf: An Irish National
Drama; Rev. Dean Llwyd, author of The Vestal Virgin;
John L. Carleton, author of The Medieval Hun; A
Historical Drama, and The Crimson Wing, which has
the distinction of having been the winner of the first prize
for original dramatic composition in the Canadian Prize
Play Competition, 1918; Norah Holland, author of When
Half Gods Go and Other Poems (1924), the title-poem of
which has been repeated as a Christmas play for several
successive seasons. These are all respectable poetic dramas
and give distinction both to the quantity and the quality of
poetic drama in the Second Renaissance.
But this work in poetic drama is, after all, not inspired
impressing one as a stint in creation, and is not at all
comparable to the work of Norwood in imaginative vision,
artistic construction, and dramatic power. Comparable,
however, with Norwood’s and superior to it in spiritual
poignancy is the single poetic drama left by Marjorie
Pickthall. Though Norwood’s poetic dramas contain
lyrical interludes, and though his dramatic tale Bill Boram
is for the most part rhymed, on the whole they are in blank
verse. But Miss Pickthall’s single poetic drama The Wood
Carver’s Wife is lyrical through and through, and is
properly to be denoted as ‘lyric drama.’ In form this lyric
drama stands midway between Stringer’s dramatic poems
and Norwood’s poetic dramas. In that respect Marjorie
Pickthall made a novel contribution to Canadian poetic
literature.
The Wood Carver’s Wife was first published in The
University Magazine in 1920. It was reprinted, along
with other fugitive poems, in 1922, the drama supplying
the title poem of the volume. The Wood Carver’s Wife
has four characters, one of whom is Shagonas, an Indian
lad who represents Nemesis. It is set in the time of the
Intendant. The theme is ‘the eternal triangle’—a girl-wife,
with a husband still alive and a secret lover. The mood
of the drama is the tragedy which follows the sin of disloyalty
to the sacrament of marriage, even if the disloyalty
is only in the heart and never openly expressed in clandestine
meeting between the wife and the lover. The mood
of the dramatist, however, is not one of simply illustrating
the law that the ‘soul that sinneth it shall die,’ but of wistfulness
about the ways of God to men and women when
spiritual unmating is permitted by Heaven. The dramatist
seems to put her own feeling about the matter into her
drama. She seems to feel that if the moral law is inexorable,
it ought not to be so in the case of a young girl
who innocently, or without knowing her own heart and
what she was doing, married a man, who, after all, did not
want her as an end in herself, or her spirit for its own
sake, but to have her as a model for the statue of the Blessed
Virgin he was creating in wood, as a chattel in his studio.
Humanly, Marjorie Pickthall felt that the girl-wife was
more sinned against than sinning when she allowed herself
to be conscious—merely conscious—of the lover. But
Marjorie Pickthall, with loyalty to the dramatic necessities,
though with a spiritual wistfulness all the while, constructed
the action and movement of The Wood Carver’s Wife so
that the tragic ending was inevitable. For the husband
knows that there is a secret lover, and Shagonas knows,
and at the tragic climax it is the arrow of the Indian, representing
the moral law, that sends the lover to his death.
The girl-wife knows what has happened, because she has
heard the twang of Shagonas’ bow-string. The tragedy
is complete when she receives from Shagonas, who is again
Nemesis, the sword of her lover, and dies with a mad speech
on her lips, while at the same time the husband, also mad,
as he was from the beginning, has Shagonas pose the beautiful
dead body of the girl-wife that he may put the acme
touches to his statue.
How easily the dramatist might have made certain
shifts which would have resulted in reconciliation and a
happy ending! But with all her spiritual wistfulness,
Marjorie Pickthall loyally held to the dramatic and the
artistic ideals. The climax and tragic ending are tremendous
and wholly spiritualizing, purging the soul with pity
for humanity through the terror which the action and the
denouement awake in the spirit. There is in it all a spiritual
poignancy which does not obtain in Norwood’s love-tragedy
of Saul in The Witch of Endor. It is suffused
with a lovely and winning beauty of diction, imagery, and
verbal music; and it contains one lyric ‘cry of a soul’ which
for pathos is unsurpassed in Canadian literature, namely,
the Litany of Dorette, the hapless girl-wife, to the Blessed
Virgin Mother beginning,
If you have lain in the night
And felt the old tears run
In their channels worn in the heart,
Pity me, Mary.
Considered critically, then, the poetic dramas of Robert
Norwood and the lyric drama of Marjorie Pickthall are,
from the universal point of view, authentic works of art,
originally conceived and beautifully constructed, and, from
the Canadian point of view, are the supreme achievements
in the poetic drama of Canada.
THE HUMORISTS OF CANADA: PRE-CONFEDERATION—HALIBURTON—HOWE—
DE MILLE—DUVAR—POST-CONFEDERATION—LANIGAN—COTES—DRUMMOND—HAM:
NEW SCHOOL—LEACOCK—DONOVAN—DAVIS—MACTAVISH—McARTHUR—HODGINS.
The name and work of Thomas Chandler Haliburton
as a satirist or humorist so over-shadowed the names
and works of other Canadian humorists that it is a belief,
both in foreign countries and in Canada itself, that the
Canadian people have no genius for humor and that, outside
of Haliburton’s satiric writings, there is no significant
Canadian humorous literature. All this is superstition and
has been perpetuated in two ways. No Canadian literary
historian has remarked the existence of other Canadian
humorists, save Haliburton, though Mark Twain in his
Library of American Humor has included the work of
Haliburton, De Mille, Lanigan; and, secondly, no Canadian
anthologist, save Lawrence J. Burpee, has collected in a
single volume examples of the work of Canadian humorists.
Pre-Confederation Canadian humor is represented by
the work of Haliburton, Howe, and De Mille. Of these the
work of Haliburton is the significant humor of the period.
In general it is satiric, a criticism of society, aiming to
bring about certain reforms. No other Canadian humorist
since Haliburton, not even Leacock, had or has any gifts
in comic characterization. Howe had no satiric purpose.
His humor, which was chiefly in verse, was written ‘for
the fun of the thing.’
A native-born Canadian man of letters who has not received
his due is James De Mille, poet, novelist, short story
fictionist and humorist. De Mille, at least in time,
anticipated the new type of American humor which is
associated with the name of Mark Twain. For some
months before Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad was
published (1869), De Mille’s The Dodge Club, or Italy in
1859 had appeared. This volume is not to be confused
with De Mille’s Dodge Club Series published in 1871, 1872,
1877 which were humorous and healthful stories for the
young. If, therefore, the humor of Stephen Leacock is
essentially a recrudescence of the American humor which
we see in Franklin and in Mark Twain, and if Leacock
read De Mille and Twain, as presumably he did, then
the first of the Leacockians in Canada, to use an anachronism,
was De Mille, and he is ‘the father’ of the later or
the 20th century Canadian humorists beginning with Leacock.
For the genius of that genre of humor, as in De
Mille and Twain, is essentially exaggerated nonsense or
nonsense said with a face of seriousness. De Mille’s work
does not lend itself to quotation, but stylistically De Mille’s
humorous prose, aside from the humor itself, is distinctly
engaging or readable by virtue of its simple or popular
diction.
Away from the traditional humor of the American
or Haliburton style, is the more delicate imaginative humor
of John Hunter-Duvar and the whimsical humor of Grant
Allen. Hunter-Duvar wrote considerable humor in light
ephemeral form and his stories and verse are colored with
many passages of genre humor and satire. The chief
basis of his reputation as a humorist of a distinct and anomalous
type is found in his extraordinarily conceived narrative
poem, The Emigration of the Fairies. It deserves
wide reading as an example of the pure humor of fancy.
Grant Allen was a novelist and scientist. He published
a volume of light verse, The Lower Slopes, in which he
indulged his humorous gifts in a series of satiric and
entertaining verses on scientific themes. It is all essentially
the humor of persiflage.
After Haliburton the extraordinary name in Post-Confederation
Canadian humor is George Thomas Lanigan.
He was born in the Province of Quebec and has the distinction
of having founded what is now the Daily Star, of
Montreal. He was a brilliant journalist and possessed unusual
versatility of invention and style in prose and verse.
He had all the mental gifts, and some of the faults, native
to the Keltic temperament. His ebullient spirits expressed
themselves in restless activity and with as ready brilliancy
in verse as in prose.
His prose humor, which was published serially in The
World, New York, in the first decade after Confederation,
was fresh and novel and arresting. The series was published
in book form under the title Fables Out of the World
(1878) and were to their time what the Fables in Slang
by George Ade are to our time. So compellingly did Lanigan’s
Fables strike the imagination of Mark Twain that
he republished seven of them in his Library of Humor.
For the most part, Lanigan’s Fables are satires on the
half-truths which constitute popular moral maxims. They
are all mere absurdities, and mere nonsense; but they contain
a larger truth than the maxims they satirize. They
are sure to awake a chuckle. We quote two examples:—
The Merchant of Venice.
A Venetian Merchant who was looking in the lap of luxury
was accosted upon the Rialto by a friend who had not seen him
for many months. ‘How is this?’ cried the latter. ‘When I
last saw you your gaberdine was out at elbows, and now you
sail in your own gondola.’ ‘True,’ replied the Merchant, ‘but
since then I have met with serious losses, and been obliged to
compound with my creditors for ten cents on the dollar.’
Moral.—Composition is the life of trade.
The Honest Newsboy.
A Newsboy was passing along the street, when he chanced
to discover a purse of greenbacks. He was at first inclined to
conceal it, but repelling the unworthy suggestion, he asked a
Venerable Man if it was his’n. The Venerable Man looked at
it hurriedly, said it was, patted him on the head, gave him a
quarter, and said he would yet be president. The Venerable
Man then hastened away, but was arrested for having counterfeit
bills in his possession, while the honest Newsboy played
penny-ante with his humble quarter and ran it up to $2.62.
Moral.—Honesty is sometimes the best policy.
Though Lanigan’s Fables in prose were at that time a
new and brilliant type of humor, it is in his humorous ballads
that he surpasses himself, and because of them he remains
unique among Canadian humorists. Some of his
humorous ballads have also been included in anthologies of
American (!) humor, as, for instance, in Roscoe Johnson’s
volume, Playday Poetry. The most famous of Lanigan’s
humorous ballads is his egregious piece of persiflage, The
Ahkoond of Swat. Really, however, much more humorous
are Lanigan’s The Amateur Orlando and The Plumber’s
Revenge. Their length prevents quotation here. On account
of its notoriety and the absolute egregiousness of its
comic irresponsibility we select for quotation Lanigan’s
The Ahkoond of Swat. To give it color and setting we
note briefly the origin of the verses. According to Mr.
Burpee the facts are that ‘one evening, after learning the
fact from the English mail just received, Lanigan announced
that the Akhoond of Swat was dead and that he
was writing a poem about him.’ The verses appeared in
the next morning paper. Following is the text of the
Ahkoond of Swat:—
What, what, what,
What’s the news from Swat?
Sad news,
Bad news,
Comes by the cable led
Through the Indian Ocean’s bed,
Through the Persian Gulf, the Red
Sea and the Med—
Iterranean—he’s dead;
The Akhoond is dead!
For the Akhoond I mourn,
Who wouldn’t?
He strove to disregard the message stern,
But he Ahkoodn’t.
Dead, dead, dead;
Sorrow Swats!
Swats wha’ hae wi’ Ahkoond bled,
Swats whom he had often led
Onward to a gory bed,
Or to victory,
As the case might be.
Sorrow Swats!
Tears shed,
Shed tears like water,
Your great Ahkoond is dead!
That Swat’s the matter!
Mourn, city of Swat!
Your great Ahkoond is not,
But lain ’mid worms to rot:
His mortal part alone, his soul was caught
(Because he was a good Ahkoond)
Up to the bosom of Mahound.
Though earthly walls his frame surround
(For ever hallowed be the ground!)
And sceptics mock the lowly mound
And say, ‘He’s now of no Ahkound!’
(His soul is in the skies!)
The azure skies that bend above his loved
Metropolis of Swat
He sees with larger, other eyes,
Athwart all earthly mysteries—
He knows what’s Swat.
Let Swat bury the great Ahkoond
With a noise of mourning and of lamentation!
Let Swat bury the great Ahkoond
With the noise of the mourning of the Swattish nation!
Fallen is at length
Its tower of strength,
Its sun had dimmed ere it had nooned:
Dead lies the great Ahkoond.
The great Ahkoond of Swat
Is not.
In passing we may note another Canadian humorous
poem of the same type which has become famous, namely,
Hoch de Kaiser, which was composed at a sitting by an
émigré Canadian journalist who went sometimes by the
name of Rose and sometimes by the name of Gordon.
We have elsewhere noted the fresh quality of the humor
of Mrs. Everard Cotes (Sarah Jeanette Duncan) and a
whole chapter has been devoted to the poetry of William
Henry Drummond as the creator of a new species of
Canadian humor. The great warm Irish heart of Drummond
was not fitted to create satire or mere fun. His
humor is based upon a tender sentiment or what is known
as ‘the homely pathetic’ and on a special sense of the
humor in genre characters, particularly the old and the
adolescent habitant of Quebec.
A man quite by himself as a humorist is George Henry
Ham, who has not unfittingly been called ‘the laughing
philosopher’ of Canada. Ham’s humor is essentially the
humor of the ‘after-dinner’ or ‘the occasional’ speaker, and
is for the most part anecdotal. During a long life he
had acquired an inexhaustible fund of the most humorous
anecdotes about Canadian characters or celebrated men.
These were collected and published in his Reminiscences
of a Raconteur.
Essentially Ham’s humor is not creative; it is the reproductive
humor of the raconteur; but Ham has added to
it by a color and settings of his own. It is the humor
itself and not the style that counts. But while it is humor
and for the most part sheer fun or entertainment, it comes
from a man who has seen many vicissitudes in Canadian
life and history and institutions and who, in his great age,
as human life goes, invites us in his Reminiscences of a
Raconteur to look upon life and its vicissitudes of good
and ill fortune with courage, serenity, faith and hope—and
not to fear death. Ham’s humor is distinguished as
pleasant medicine for the soul in the hurly-burly of life
and in the contemplation of having some time to depart
from a world that is full of dear companions and pleasant
places.
The next Canadian systematic humorist, though not
Canadian-born, is Stephen Leacock. Haliburton was a
creator; he really invented, his method of satiric humor,
or if he did not invent the method, he at least originally
created his comic characters. Leacock, who is ‘a graft
on the Canadian literary tree,’ models his humor considerably
after the American manner. It is satiric burlesque
deliberately constructing around serious character or
events extravagant nonsense which is a sort of criticism
of manners and morals of society, but which tends to engage
us more as burlesque than as criticism. Mr. Leacock’s
first book was entitled Literary Lapses, published
at Montreal in 1910. It was, as the author’s Preface states,
for the most part a collection of sketches which had before
that date appeared in print in various magazines. Two
of the sketches gained the distinction of being reprinted in
Punch and The Lancet, London. These were respectively
Leacock’s Boarding House Geometry and The New Pathology,
the latter of which had the further distinction of
being reprinted in translations in various German periodicals.
His Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town approaches
more closely to the unity of a regular novel than any
of his other books and is the highest example of his art.
His style here is personal and familiar almost to undue
flippancy; it is witty and sparkling even to brilliancy; it is
less literary than the material of the Mariposa Newspacket;
it is surrounded with an exuberant atmosphere of
burlesque. Yet in Sunshine Sketches he has achieved an
unmistakably true characterization of the average ‘little
town’ of Canada—its life and its people—a life which
shows the universal touch that makes the whole world
akin, and at the same time has those narrow, provincial
idiosyncrasies that make it distinctively local and impossible
of portrayal except by one who has lived it. There
is here revealed much of the usually uncovered side of
human nature, lit up with a glow of amusement at the
foibles of our fellow-man, but tempered, more than is
usual with Leacock, with a good-natured sympathy.
From 1910 onwards to 1922, when Leacock’s My Discovery
of England was published, the humorist produced
a dozen volumes of his special species of humor and attained
a vogue which places him first amongst Canadian
humorists of the 20th century. He works at it brilliantly,
sometimes in the extreme burlesque manner of Mark
Twain and sometimes in the quiet, humble and drier manner
of the characteristic English humor which appears in
Punch in its department of ‘Charivaria.’ Unlike Haliburton,
Leacock rather makes the reader behold the humorist
himself figuring away bravely and sometimes futilely,
to divert and amuse or entertain. That is to say, unlike
Haliburton’s humor, which had an easy method of attack
and drew attention to itself, Leacock’s humor gives the
reader an impression of its being strained, an effort on the
humorist’s part deliberately to make people smile or laugh,
whether they will or not. It is ‘smart,’ as the word is
used in Yankee slang, rather than human and profound.
It ‘tickles’ the fancy and sensibility rather than illuminates
the imagination and informs the moral reason. It is
clever; but like all things that are merely clever it is
ephemerally engaging or pleasing, and it is all a case of
the half being greater than the whole. In short, Leacock’s
humor is for a day, whereas Haliburton’s humor
is for all time.
Peter Donovan is a promising later humorist. His
first book was Imperfectly Proper. After a short residence
in England since the war, he published Over ‘Ere
and Back Home (1922). Mr. Donovan is a critic of
society. He is not, however, a critic of constructive social
thought but of conventional thinking and conventional
manners. The arrows of his humor, which are neither
sharp-pointed nor poisonous, are directed against what
Matthew Arnold used to call ‘Philistines’—the ‘nice’ people
who outwardly conform to all the conventionalities
of the law of the land and of the church but who inwardly—when
no one is looking—break these laws. Donovan
directs his humor against shams in society—not the great
shams but those shams which have become acquired habits,
or against all that is the ‘fashion’ or the ‘rage’ of the year
or day. What he really achieves, from the point of view
of vision, is to make us see ourselves as others see us, and
to cause us to ‘chuckle’ over his polite—for he is never
rude or coarse—revealments. Norris Hodgins works
much within the same range as Donovan—Why Don’t You
Get Married? (1923)—and is not often quite so hilariously
funny, but he comes closer to the daily experiences of
every man and every woman, and there is just a bit more
solidity to his underlying structure of everyday philosophy.
In another vein is the humor of Peter McArthur, who
has been sometimes called ‘The Sage of Ekfrid.’ McArthur
writes as one who, living a pastoral and serious
life, actually looks around upon his neighbors in other
spheres of life and on their striving after wealth and
material goods, and who freshly reflects the thought, as
old as the ancient hills, that a serious and contented mind,
satisfied with the gifts of nature and of God, with pure
friendships and sufficient sustenance for body, possesses
the only permanent satisfactions of life. He presents this
view, not with any originality in thought, but with a manner
or style that is pleasant reading and causes us to fall
in love with life and laughter and simple joys and to look
with charity upon our fellows, and to promote peace.
A new type of Canadian humor, with a new quality of
style, is the humor of Newton MacTavish, Editor of The
Canadian Magazine, in which periodical Mr. MacTavish
first gave to the public his fresh and piquant humor, under
the title Thrown In. The sketches were collected in
a volume and published with the same title in 1923. The
aim of MacTavish’s humor is definitively social—to disclose
the hidden humanity of commonplace souls and their essential
unity with their more magnificent fellows. When
his humor is amusing or entertaining, it achieves this quality
not so much by depicting grotesque or ludicrous situations
as by revealing the natural attitudes of pioneer people
towards the common things of life, and the elementally
human idiosyncrasies of the so-called common people.
When it is wit rather than mere humor, MacTavish turns
the light of truth upon human psychology and character,
by way of situation and character-drawing, in terms of
commonplace humanity expressed and colored by homely
speech and anecdote. So that the effect of his humor is
two-fold. For while the reader is being entertained his
mind is also receiving new insight into our common heritage,
our genuine humanity, whatever be our culture or
social status. In short, MacTavish’s humor is philosophical.
In Roy Davis’ long satiric poem, Flying Rumors, published
in booklet form at Boston, 1922, we discover a recrudescence
of the satiric spirit of Haliburton. Davis was
born in Nova Scotia, and was educated at Dalhousie University,
Nova Scotia, and Harvard University. He is
Professor of English in the School of Business Administration,
Boston University, of which he is also Assistant Dean.
With the same intent as Haliburton, namely, to correct
certain centrifugal tendencies in society, Davis employs
satire, not, as did Haliburton, in prose, but in verse, which
was the traditional medium of the satire of Haliburton’s
and Davis’ Loyalist ancestors in Pre-Revolutionary days
in the Old Colonies. The form of Davis’ ‘essay on man
and society’ in verse adds, on the side of novelty, a fresh
contribution to the satiric literature of Canada. The
poet has avoided going back to the traditional rhymed
couplet of the Loyalist satirists in Nova Scotia, but has
used an octavo stanzaic form in which the first six lines
are rhymed alternately, and the last two are rhymed as a
couplet. This effects a pleasant sense of finality and rest.
Besides, Davis has invented a considerable number of lines
which are musical, and arresting or startling in novelty of
imagery, as, for instance, this ingenious and daring couplet:—
A goose-step strutting Kaiser, kissing Mars,
Has missed the humor of the midnight stars!
When, therefore, we survey the history of Canadian
humor from Haliburton to Leacock, and from Leacock to
MacTavish and Davis, the humorists who have remained
salient and popular, and whose work seems to have the
inherent qualities which make for permanent appeal, are
Haliburton and Lanigan. And when we survey and note
the variety and distinction of Canadian humor—that it is,
in many ways, a humor quite by itself, and that it is of
considerable quantity—we may reply to certain literary
historians and critics that Canadians are not, as they are
superstitiously believed to be, a humorless people and
quite without a literature of humor. For Canada has produced
several notable humorists, an admirable literature
of humor; and the work of one of Canada’s humorists,
Haliburton, has long possessed international renown—a
place in permanent world literature.
THE RISE OF NATIVE AND NATIONAL REALISTIC STAGE DRAMA
IN CANADA: THE LITTLE THEATRE AND THE WORK OF
CARROLL AIKINS AND MERRILL DENISON.
Although Canada is relatively rich in Poetic Drama,
there is no evidence of a developed Stage Drama. Part
of the literary future of the country lies in the development
of native and national stage drama. A significant beginning
in native production of the acted drama was inaugurated
by Mr. Carroll Aikins who established in the Okanagan
Valley, at a centre named Naramata, a ‘Little Theatre,’
which he named The Home Theatre. It was formally
opened in November 1920 by the Rt. Hon. Mr. Meighen,
then Prime Minister. Mr. Aikins’ aims were to produce
a national drama, staged according to artistic conceptions
of simplicity and beauty, and to teach the people to appreciate
good plays produced with simple and beautiful
properties, stage sets, and lighting.
In order to realize these ideals it was necessary to choose
good plays that had already been standardized and to train
his actors directly in the Home Theatre. Mr. Aikins’ belief
was that by developing in the people a love of good
plays produced in a Canadian theatre under Canadian
direction, the people sooner or later would demand the production
of Canadian plays and that this demand would lead
to the creation of plays on Canadian subjects by Canadian
playwrights. That is to say, Mr. Aikins believed that the
movement he started in the Home Theatre would at length
result in the creating of Canadian Native and National
Stage Drama.
In 1921 Mr. Aikins produced on the stage of the Home
Theatre an acted version of The Trojan Women by the
ancient Greek dramatist Euripides. In 1922 he produced
his own Passion Play, Victory in Defeat, a beautifully
staged pantomime of moving pictures against a sky of
changing light, interpreted with the aid of a reader and
expressive music—the first experiment of its kind attempted
in Canada.
The ‘Little Theatre’ movement has also achieved something
for the appreciation of good Canadian plays in the
cities of Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver.
At Hart House in Toronto, there has been considerable
activity concerned with the production of Canadian
plays. In April, 1921, Merrill Denison’s Brothers in
Arms was produced at that theatre; and in April 1922
another of his plays, From Their Own Place, was produced.
These, with two others, were published in book form in
1923 under the title The Unheroic North.
Denison’s plays are Canadian by virtue of the author’s
parentage and family traditions (his mother being the late
Flora McD. Denison), and by the plays themselves being
on Canadian themes, with Canadian characters moving in
Canadian surroundings. They are realistic satiric dramas
of life and thought in Canadian ‘backwoods’ and rural settlements.
The dramatist presents the life and speech and
conduct of these characters with such broad realism that
the plays themselves are a mordant satire on existence and
society in isolated Canadian communities. But Denison’s
plays are also a satire within a satire. It is not life in certain
Canadian communities that he is really satirizing, but
an attitude of the Canadian people themselves.
The people of Canada dearly love ‘high’ romance and
spurious sentimentality. They find this spurious sentimentality
in some Canadian fiction, and the romance in the
poetic dramas of Mair, Mrs. Curzon, Wilfred Campbell,
Dr. Dollard, Robert Norwood, and others. Boldly, therefore,
and with evident sincerity, Merrill Denison conceived
the idea of satirizing the lovers of spurious sentimentality
by presenting them with plays which would be the antithesis
of ‘high’ romance and affected sentimentality—with
life so broadly or coarsely realistic that the people of Canada
would not like the life or the plays.
Two of the plays—Brothers in Arms and the Weather
Breeder—portray life in the Canadian backwoods districts
as Mr. Denison has observed that life. Two of the plays—From
Their Own Place and Marsh Hay—portray, according
to Mr. Denison, life in the poorer or more sordid farming
districts of Canada. The dramatist has explained his
motive and aim. He says: ‘These plays have their origin
in the needs of a theatre—not the theatre. Brothers in
Arms was written because a Canadian comedy was needed
to fill a bill and none could be found. In writing it as an
innovation, I wrote of a part of Canada I knew, and introduced
as characters actual Canadians. The result was
new, but, as might have been expected, Canadian. It must
be remembered that these plays were written for a Canadian
theatre, not Broadway, and that any literature of the theatre
in Canada must follow the same course—be written
for Canadian production.’
It may be regretted that Denison went to sordid and
vulgar society in Canada for his dramatic subjects or
material. But he had just cause to satire Canadian life by
means of realistic Canadian plays. For the intellectual dishonesty,
and the ‘immoral moral psychology,’ which creates
the spurious or hectic sentimentality in certain Canadian
fiction would compel a sane-minded man to show the other
side of the picture, and to show it with pervasive and vivid
realism. Denison perceived and felt the profound untruth
or falsity of certain forms of 20th century Canadian fiction.
In his view, it was all too ‘nice’ and saccharine as art; it
had neither truth nor strength. Denison felt that no such
men and women as appear in many of the novels of the
Realistic Romances exist in Canada. In his opinion, the
substance of these novels is puerile and vain invention.
He, therefore, decided to present to the Canadian public
real men and women as they really live, move and have
their being in Canada—even if they are, as indeed they
are, sordid and vulgarized men and women. Denison’s
plays, then, are a Protest; they are also a Satire. What
the dramatist is protesting against is not the life that he
presents in his plays. What he is satirizing is not Canadian
life as such. He is protesting against intellectual dishonesty
and spurious sentimentality in Canadian fiction. He
is satirizing the life and characters which these Canadian
fictionists have presented in their romances.
Denison presents his material in three one-act plays
with four to six characters, and in one four-act play with
fourteen characters. It is the business of the dramatic critic
to estimate Denison’s success in dramaturgy, to determine
whether they are well-constructed and actable plays. On
the strictly literary side, his plays in The Unheroic North,
despite their sordid or vulgarized characters, and despite
the sections of society and life presented in them, intrigue
the attention and make interesting and diverting reading.
As satires on the methods and ideals of certain Canadian
romantic fictionists, on the social life at least of certain
Canadian communities Denison’s realistic dramas are a significant
beginning of creative Stage Drama in Canada.
