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Title: On Canadian Poetry
Author: Brown, E. K. [Edward Killoran] (1905-1951)
Date of first publication: 25 September 1943
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Ryerson Press, 25 September 1943
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 31 July 2016
Date last updated: 31 July 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1344

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  E. K. BROWN

  _ON CANADIAN_
  Poetry



  The Ryerson Press * Toronto





  _Published September 25, 1943_



  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
  BY THE RYERSON PRESS, TORONTO




  _To
  Arthur
  who set me the task
  and to
  Peggy
  who held me to it_




{vii}

Preface

This is not an historical enquiry but a critical essay.  I have tried
to answer three questions important to the reader of modern Canadian
poetry, questions he must answer if his judgment is to have
perspective.  The first question is: What are the peculiar difficulties
which have weighed upon the Canadian writer?  In the first section
(parts of which are reprinted from _Poetry_, April, 1941, and from
_Canadian Literature Today_, University of Toronto Press, 1938) I have
described and estimated these difficulties as I see them.  The second
question is: What Canadian poetry remains alive and, in some degree at
least, formative?  In the second section I have given a brief history
of our poetry from the point of view set by this question.  The final
question is: How have the masters of our poetry achieved their success
and what are the kinds of success they have achieved?  In the third
section, writing of the three poets who seem to me pre-eminent, I have
tried to answer this, the most taxing of the questions.  I cannot hope
that all will agree with my conception of the difficulties or with my
choice of living poetry, or of pre-eminent masters; but I am convinced
that if the reading of contemporary poetry is to be illuminated by the
past course of Canadian poetry, as I am sure it can be, such attempts
at critical judgments are necessary.


It is with cordial pleasure that I acknowledge a number of obligations.
Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott and Professor E. J. Pratt have followed my
project with sympathetic interest, and have answered my questions with
kindness and insight.  Mr. and Mrs. T. R. Loftus MacInnes allowed me to
use the precious notebooks of Mrs. MacInnes's father, {viii} Archibald
Lampman.  Sir Charles Roberts wrote to me a valuable account of the
prospects for Canadian Literature as they appeared to him in 1880.  To
the staffs of the Parliamentary and municipal libraries at Ottawa I am
indebted for many courtesies and privileges.

E. K. B.

  _Goldwin Smith Hall,
  Ithaca, N. Y.
  June, 1943._




{ix}

Contents

CHAPTER

PREFACE

I. THE PROBLEM OF A CANADIAN LITERATURE

II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF POETRY IN CANADA

III. THE MASTERS

    1. Archibald Lampman

    2. Duncan Campbell Scott

    3. E. J. Pratt

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INDEX




{1}

ON CANADIAN POETRY


CHAPTER ONE

The Problem of a Canadian Literature


I

Towards the end of his life Matthew Arnold expressed his disapproval of
a tendency in the United States to speak of an American literature.
American authors should be conceived, he suggested, as making their
individual contributions to the huge treasury of literature in the
English language.  It was wrong to deal with the Americans who made
such contributions as if they formed a group apart, with a peculiar
unity of its own.  The reality of the unity among American writers is
now so obvious as to be accepted by everyone who is not a crank.  It
has been demonstrated in histories, anthologies and critical studies,
and not once but a hundred times, that to consider an American writer
or a group of American writers as American is one of the most
illuminating approaches one could make.  There are, it need scarcely be
said, other illuminating approaches: just as it would not be sufficient
for the student of Carlyle to consider him solely in relation to his
British predecessors, and contemporaries, so it would not be sufficient
for the student of Emerson to consider him solely in relation to other
Americans.  But the study of Emerson against his American background is
just as rewarding as the study of Carlyle against his British
background.  This is what is meant by saying that American literature
is a useful {2} concept, and the study of American literature an
illuminating study.  In expressing his disapproval of such a study
Arnold was satisfied that he had reduced the idea to absurdity by
pointing to an unbelievable future which would see histories of
Canadian and Australian literature.  "Imagine the face of Philip or
Alexander at hearing of a Primer of Macedonian Literature!  Are we to
have a Primer of Canadian Literature, too, and a Primer of Australian?"
I think the time has come when to doubt the value of the concept of a
Canadian literature, or an Australian, is to be a crank: a beginning
has been made towards demonstrating that among Canadian, and
Australian, writers, as among Americans, there is a peculiar unity, a
unity sufficiently important as to make  the approach to Canadian or
Australian writers as Canadians or Australians a sharply illuminating
approach.  As I said above, in speaking of American writers,--the
national approach is not adequate, it is not the only illuminating
approach, but it is valuable, and it throws into relief significant
aspects which would otherwise fail to attract the proper attention.

At the beginning of his _History of English Canadian Literature to
Confederation_ Professor R. P. Baker defines his scope when he says
that "it is wiser to consider only those authors of Canadian descent
who maintained their connection with their native country and those of
European birth and education who became identified with its
development."  In accepting this definition I should like to develop it
to a point where it will have greater precision.  By Canadian
literature I shall understand writing by those who having been born in
Canada passed a considerable number of their best creative years in
this country, and also writing by those who, wherever they may have
been born, once arrived in Canada did important creative work and led
much of their literary life among us.  Although this definition
continues to have an element of indefiniteness, it {3} will, I believe,
serve to cover every author who will come before us in the development
of Canadian poetry.  I should add that, like Professor Baker, I shall
include among Canadian writers those who wrote in any of the British
colonies which now form part of the Canadian confederation even if at
the time when they wrote their place of residence was outside what was
then described as Canada: the significance of this addition will be to
include all the Maritime authors whose lives, or literary lives, had
ended by the time that the Canadian Confederation came into existence.



II

There is a Canadian literature, often rising to effects of great
beauty, but it has stirred little interest outside Canada.  A few of
our authors, a very few, have made for themselves a large and even
enthusiastic audience in Britain or in the United States or in both.
Among these the first in time was Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Nova
Scotian judge, who would not have relished the claim that he was a
Canadian.  A curious blend of the provincial and the imperialist, he
ended his days in England, where long before he himself arrived his
humorous sketches were widely read, so widely that Justin McCarthy has
reported that for a time the sayings of his most ingenious creation,
Sam Slick, were as well known as those of the more durably amusing Sam
Weller.  Haliburton's papers were also popular in the United States,
and their dialectal humour and local colour have left a perceptible
stamp upon New England writing.  At the mid century, when Sam Slick was
already a big figure in English humour, _Saul_, a huge poetic drama by
a Montreal poet, Charles Heavysege, had a passing vogue in Britain and
in the United States, impressing Emerson and Hawthorne and inducing
Coventry Patmore to describe it as "indubitably one of the most {4}
remarkable English poems ever written out of Great Britain."  Its vogue
was lasting enough for W. D. Lighthall, a Montreal poet of a later
generation, to recall that "it became the fashion among tourists to
Montreal to buy a copy of _Saul_."  Today, along with Heavysege's other
works, his _Count Filippo_ and his _Jephthah's Daughter_, it is unknown
within Canada and without.  Even the songs and sonnets of Heavysege are
absent from recent Canadian anthologies.  At the turn of the century
the animal stories of C. G. D. Roberts extended the range of North
American writing in a direction it might naturally have been expected
to take with equal success somewhat sooner--the imaginative
presentation of the forms of wild life characteristic of this continent
in their relationship to the frontiers of settlement.  These tales,
simple and at times powerful, continue to hold a high place in the
rather isolated and minor kind of literature to which they belong; but
there is no doubt that in our time they are more talked of than opened
except by youthful readers.  There is little need for comment upon the
writings of a handful of Canadians who at about this same time began to
make their huge and ephemeral reputations as best-selling writers.
Gilbert Parker soon left Canada to establish himself in Britain, and it
is to English literature, to that group of British novelists who
followed in the wake of Stevenson's romantic fiction, that his work
belongs.  Preminent among the others, Ralph Connor, L. M. Montgomery
and Robert Service, continued to live in Canada, the first two until
they died, Service till middle age.  They were all more or less
aggressively unliterary; and their only significance for our inquiry is
the proof they offered that for the author who was satisfied to truckle
to mediocre taste, living in Canada and writing about Canadian
subjects, was perfectly compatible with making an abundant living by
one's pen.  The lesson they taught has not been forgotten: fortunately
it has not been widely effective.

{5}

More recently Canadian work of value comparable with that of
Haliburton's sketches and Roberts's animal tales has become known
outside the country.  There were the humorous papers of Stephen
Leacock, the best of which have delighted not only Americans and
Englishmen, and the peoples of other parts of the British Commonwealth,
but also some Europeans.  I can remember hearing M. Andr Maurois read
to a group of students at the Sorbonne the charming study called
"Boarding House Geometry"; and I never heard merrier laughter in Paris.
The endless Jalna chronicles of Miss Mazo de la Roche maintain a large
audience in Britain, and a sizable one in the United States; and in a
more restricted group in the latter country the short stories and, to a
less degree, the novels of Morley Callaghan are valued.  I think that I
have mentioned all the Canadians who have acquired considerable
popularity or reputation as imaginative authors, either in the United
States or in Great Britain.  To the reader outside Canada such works as
have been mentioned have not been important as reflections of phases in
a national culture; the interest in the work has not spread to become
an interest in the movements and the traditions in the national life
from which the work emerged.  Canadian books may occasionally have had
a mild impact outside Canada; Canadian literature has had none.



III

Even within the national borders the impact of Canadian books and of
Canadian literature has been relatively superficial.  The almost
feverish concern with its growth on the part of a small minority is no
substitute for eager general sympathy or excitement.  To one who takes
careful account of the difficulties which have steadily {6} beset its
growth its survival as something interesting and important seems a
miracle.

Some of these difficulties, those of an economic kind, may be easily
and briefly stated.  Economically the situation of our literature is,
and always has been, unsound.  No writer can live by the Canadian sales
of his books.  The president of one of our most active publishing
companies, the late Hugh Eayrs, estimated that over a period of many
years his profit on the sales of Canadian books was one per cent.; and
I should be surprised to learn that any other Canadian publisher could
tell a much more cheerful tale, unless, of course, the production of
text-books was the staple of his firm's business.  Text-books make
money in any country.  In general the Canadian market for books is a
thin one, for a variety of important reasons.  The Canadian population
is in the main a fringe along the American border: nine out of ten
Canadians live within two hundred miles of it, more than half within a
hundred miles.  The one important publishing centre is Toronto; and a
bookseller in Vancouver, Winnipeg or Halifax must feel reasonably sure
that a book will be bought before he orders a number of copies which
must be transported across thousands of miles.  Books like _Gone with
the Wind_ and _The White Cliffs_--to keep to recent successes--he will
order in quantity with confidence; but the distinguished work, the
experimental novel, the collection of austere verse, the volume of
strenuous criticism, is for him a luxury.  The population of Canada is
less than that of the State of New York; if our population were
confined within an area of the same size the problem of distributing
books would be soluble.  Even if our fewer than twelve million people
were confined within the huge triangle whose points are Montreal, North
Bay and Windsor--enclosing an area comparable with that of the region
of New England--the problem might be soluble.  But it is hard to see
how the cultivated minority is to be served when its centres are {7}
separated by hundreds and often thousands of miles in which not a
single creditable bookstore exists.

Of the less than twelve million Canadians who are strung along the
American border in a long thin fringe, almost a third are
French-speaking.  These read little if at all in any language except
French, apart from a small, highly conservative minority which studies
the classics and scholastic philosophy, and a rather larger minority
which keeps abreast of books in English that treat of political and
economic subjects.  In French Canada the sense of cultural nationality
is much stronger than in English Canada, but the nationality is French
Canadian, not Canadian _tout court_.  French Canada is almost without
curiosity about the literature and culture of English Canada; most
cultivated French Canadians do not know even the names of the
significant English Canadian creative writers, whether of the past or
of the present.  Occasionally an important Canadian book is translated
from the original into the other official language; but it is much more
likely that the work of a French Canadian will be translated into
English than that the work of an English Canadian will be translated
into French.  Louis Hmon was a _Franais de France_, but it was
because _Maria Chapdelaine_ dealt with French Canada that a
distinguished Ontario lawyer translated the novel into English, making
one of the most beautiful versions of our time.  W. H. Blake's
translation of Hmon's book is a masterpiece in its own right; no
French Canadian has as yet laboured with such loving skill to translate
any book that deals with English Canada.  A symbol of the fissure in
our cultural life is to be found in the definition of sections in The
Royal Society of Canada.  Three sections are assigned to the sciences,
one to mathematics, physics and chemistry, another to the biological
sciences, and the third to geology and allied subjects; in these
sections French and English fellows sit side by side.  But in the two
sections assigned to the humanities the {8} French and English fellows
are severely separate: in each the subjects run the impossible gamut
from the classics to anthropology.  It is not too much to say that the
maximum Canadian audience that an English Canadian imaginative author
can hope for is less than eight million people.

To write in the English language is to incur the competition of the
best authors of Britain and of the United States.  Every Canadian
publisher acts as agent for American and British houses; and it is as
an agent that he does the larger and by far the more lucrative part of
his business.  Every Canadian reviewer devotes a large part of his
sadly limited space to comment on British or American books.  Every
Canadian reader devotes a large part of the time and money that he can
allow for books to those which come from Britain and the United States.
Some angry critics have contrasted the plight of Canadian literature
with the eager interest that Norwegians take in the work of their own
authors.  It is obvious that the accident by which Canadians speak and
read one of the main literary languages of the world is a reason why
they are less likely to read native books than a Norwegian is, speaking
and reading a language peculiar to his own country.

Our great distances, the presence among us of a large minority which is
prevailingly indifferent to the currents of culture that run among the
majority, the accident of our common speech with Britain and the United
States--here are three facts with enormous economic importance for
literature.  The sum of their effect is the exceedingly thin market for
the author who depends on Canadian sales.  Unless an author gives all
or most of his time to writing for popular magazines he can make very
little indeed; and even the resort of the popular magazines is a
precarious solution.  There are few of these--they, too, are affected
by the factors that have been mentioned.  They are in almost ruinous
competition with American magazines, they cannot pay very much, they
print a good deal written outside {9} Canada, and they live so
dangerous an existence they commonly defer slavishly to the standards
of their average readers.

The serious Canadian writer has a choice among three modes of combining
the pursuit of literature with success in keeping alive and fed.  He
may emigrate: that was the solution of Bliss Carman, and many have
followed in his train.  He may earn his living by some non-literary
pursuit: that was the solution of Archibald Lampman, and it has been
widely followed.  He may while continuing to reside in Canada become,
economically at least, a member of another nation and civilization:
that is the solution of Mr. Morley Callaghan.  Each of these solutions
is open to danger and objection.

The author who emigrates becomes an almost complete loss to our
literature.  It is probable that in the end, like Henry James or Joseph
Conrad or Mr. T. S. Eliot, he will take out papers of citizenship in
the country where he has found his economic security and to which he
has transferred his spiritual allegiance.  If he goes to Britain, the
choice will not arise in this form, but he will be at best simply a
citizen of the Empire ceasing to be an authentic Canadian.  No one
thinks of Grant Allen as a Canadian author nor did he so consider
himself though he was born in Ontario.  How the creative powers of a
writer are affected by expatriation is much too vast a problem to
receive adequate consideration here.  Only this I should like to say:
the expatriate will find it more and more difficult to deal vigorously
and vividly with the life of the country he has left.  Joseph Conrad
did not write about Poland.  When towards the end of his career Henry
James read some of the early tales of Edith Wharton, before he had come
to know her, he urged that she should be tethered in her own New York
backyard.  His own experience persuaded him that exile disqualified one
from treating the life of one's own country without admitting one to
the centre of the life in {10} the country to which one had fled.  If
one compares the later novels of Edith Wharton, written after she had
lost contact with New York, with the earlier ones which rose out of
strong impacts that New York made upon her sensibilities, it is
immediately evident that the colours and shapes are less vivid and
definite, and that the works of her elder years are less significant.
I should argue that Bliss Carman, our most notable exile, suffered a
grave loss by passing his middle years in the United States, that he
did not become an American writer, but merely a _dracin_, a nomad in
his imaginary and not very rich kingdom of vagabondia.

People often ask why an author cannot satisfy himself with the solution
of Archibald Lampman.  Lampman, after graduating from Trinity College,
Toronto, entered the employ of the federal government as a clerk in the
Dominion Post Office at Ottawa.  Why, people inquire, cannot a writer
earn his living as a clerk, or a teacher, or a lighthouse keeper and
devote his leisure to literature?  The answer to this question must be
an appeal to experience.  One of our most gifted novelists, Mr. Philip
Child, once remarked to me that a writer must be the obsequious servant
of his demon, must rush to write when the demon stirs, and let other
things fall where they may.  If you fob off the demon with an excuse,
telling him to wait till you can leave the office, he will sulk, his
visits will become rarer and finally he will not return at all.
Temperaments differ; and some writers may, like Anthony Trollope, give
fixed hours to authorship and the rest of the day to business and
pleasure.  Even the Trollopes of this world would prefer to be free
from their unliterary employments, since it is not to manage a
post-office that a Trollope came into this world.  Temperaments less
phlegmatic than Trollope's find even the mild yoke of the post-office
too heavy for them.  Lampman did.  He had easy hours, from ten to
four-thirty, work which did not exhaust, and long holidays; but he was
irked {11} by his employment and made desperate and always unsuccessful
efforts to escape from it.  One has only to read his letters to realize
that he believed that his task-work was fatal to his full development,
and one has only to read his poems to believe that there was something
in Lampman that never did come to full fruition, something that would
have led to deeper and wiser poetry than he did write except in
snatches.  It appears to me so obvious as to require no argument that
whatever success a particular writer may have had in combining the
practice of his art with the business of earning a living by work which
is remote from letters, the notion that a whole literature can develop
out of the happy employment of the odd moments of rather busy men is an
unrealistic notion, and one that shows an alarming ignorance of the
process by which great works are normally written.  I suggest that the
richness of Canadian poetry in the lyric and its poverty in longer and
more complicated pieces, in epic, or dramatic composition, is related
to the need of Canadians to be something else than writers in most of
their time through their best creative years.  Some of them have, like
Matthew Arnold--also as a poet the victim of his unliterary
employment--left unfinished their main poetic attempt.

There remains a third solution, Mr. Callaghan's solution.  It is
possible to write primarily for an American or a British audience.
Most of Mr. Callaghan's novels and shorter tales are about the city in
which he lives, Toronto; but it seems to me, and I speak as one who was
born and brought up in that city, that Mr. Callaghan's Toronto is not
an individualized city but simply a representative one.  I mean that in
reading Mr. Callaghan one has the sense that Toronto is being used not
to bring out what will have the most original flavour, but what will
remind people who live in Cleveland, or Detroit, or Buffalo, or any
other city on the Great Lakes, of the general quality of their own
milieu.  If one compares Mr. Callaghan's Toronto with Mr. Farrell's
{12} Chicago, the point becomes very plain.  When I pass through Mr.
Farrell's Chicago, that part of the South Side which has been deserted
by the Irish to be seized by the Negroes, the memory of what he has
written of a life which has ceased to exist becomes very moving.  When
I walk through the parts of Toronto that Mr. Callaghan has primarily
dealt with, the poor areas towards the centre and a little to the
north-west of the centre, or the dingy respectability of the near east
end, it is only with an effort that I remember that he has written of
them at all.  It is a notable fact that never once in all his novels
does he use the city's name.  Just as Mr. Callaghan uses his Canadian
setting for its interest for a larger North American audience, so Miss
Mazo de la Roche sets her emphasis on those exceedingly rare aspects of
rural Ontario life which would remind an English reader of his own
countryside and the kind of life that goes on in it.  In the work of
both writers an alien audience has shaped the treatment of Canadian
life.  Whether this peculiarity has injured the novelist's art as art,
whether the characters and the setting are less alive and moving than
the characters and setting in, let us say, Mr. Farrell's novels or
Arnold Bennett's is not the immediate question; but there is not a
scrap of doubt that the methods of Mr. Callaghan and Miss de la Roche
have interfered with their presentation of Canadian life in the terms
most stimulating and informing to Canadian readers.  One of the forces
that can help a civilization to come of age is the presentation of its
surfaces and depths in works of imagination in such a fashion that the
reader says: "I now understand myself and my milieu with a fullness and
a clearness greater than before."  Many a Russian must have said so
after reading _Fathers and Sons_ or _War and Peace_.  It is difficult
to believe that a Canadian will say this or anything of the sort after
reading the work of Miss de la Roche or Mr. Callaghan.

I should like to turn for a moment to the question {13} momentarily put
aside, the question whether the solution adopted by such writers as Mr.
Callaghan and Miss de la Roche is injurious to their art, whether it
reduces the worth of their fiction for readers who are not Canadians,
and not interested in the problems peculiar to Canada as the ideal
Canadian reader must be.  A great opportunity has been refused by Mr.
Callaghan--the opportunity of drawing the peculiarities of Toronto in
full vividness and force.  This is a subject that no writer has yet
treated.  Most Canadians who are not born and bred in Toronto emphasize
that there is a quality in the life of that city which is to them
mysterious, and obnoxious.  To make plain what that quality is, perhaps
to satirize it as Mr. Marquand satirized something peculiar to Boston
in _The Late George Apley_, perhaps to give it a sympathetic
interpretation as Arnold Bennett interpreted the Five Towns in _The Old
Wives' Tale_--here was a great theme calling aloud for imaginative
treatment.  Had Mr. Callaghan not been essentially a part of American
civilization, it would have forced itself upon his perceptive and
completely realistic mind.  There is also something unique in the life
of rural Ontario, something that no novelist has succeeded in catching,
and Miss de la Roche has refused an opportunity perhaps no less golden
than Toronto offers.



IV

The difficulties that have so far appeared, unlike as they are, all
have economic roots.  It is time to turn to the psychological factors,
implied in much that has been said, against which the growth of a
Canadian literature must struggle.

Among these the most obvious, the most discussed, although _not_ the
most potent, is the colonial spirit.  Long {14} ago Harvard's President
Felton doubted that Canada would come to much since a colony was doomed
to be second-rate.  In a later generation an American who knew us much
better than Felton and who wished us well, William Dean Howells, used
almost the same language.  In _Their Wedding Journey_ he conducts his
couple from Niagara Falls by way of Kingston and Montreal to the east
coast, giving sharp little pictures of the Canadian towns; he concludes
that in comparison with the free nation to which they belong this
colony is second-rate in the very quality of its life.  Just a year or
so ago the Halifax novelist, Mr. Hugh MacLennan, gave to one of the
colonially minded characters in _Barometer Rising_ the same thought:
"I've wasted a whole lifetime in this hole of a town.  Everything in
this country is second-rate.  It always is in a colony."  These are
probably independent judgments.  What do they mean?  That a colony
lacks the spiritual energy to rise above routine, and that it lacks
this energy because it does not adequately believe in itself.  It
applies to what it has standards which are imported, and therefore
artificial and distorting.  It sets the great good place not in its
present, nor in its past nor in its future, but somewhere outside its
own borders, somewhere beyond its own possibilities.

The charge that English Canada is colonial in spirit is the most
serious of all the many charges that French Canada brings against us.
Speaking in the 1942 session of the Canadian House of Commons, Mr.
Louis Saint Laurent, the leading French member of the government,
illustrated what he meant by our colonialism when he cited an
interchange that is supposed to have occurred within the last few years
between the two living ex-prime ministers of Canada.  One said to the
other, on the eve of his departure to live in England: "I am glad to be
going _home_," and the other replied: "How I envy you!"  For these two
men--if the interchange did occur--Canada was {15} not the great good
place; and every French Canadian would regard their sentiments as
justifying his practice of referring to us not as _Canadiens Anglais_,
but merely as _Anglais_, or when his blood is up, as _maudits Anglais_!
Colonialism of this kind is natural to emigrants.  One can easily
forgive Sir Daniel Wilson, although he spent almost his entire active
career in Canada, for wishing to lie in Scottish earth; and yet for a
Canadian who knows what Scotland is like in November it is an
awe-inspiring thought that Sir Daniel on one of our autumn days, full
of the crashing scarlet glories of the Canadian forests or the benign
radiance of our Indian summers, wished to be amid the "sleety east
winds" of his native land.  What is odd, and unsatisfactory, is the
perpetuation of this kind of colonialism in the descendants of
emigrants even to the third and fourth generation.  It is clear that
those who are content with this attitude will seek the best in
literature, where they seek the best in jam and toffee, from beyond the
ocean.  That anything Canadian could be supremely good would never
enter their heads.

It is important to distinguish this attitude of pure colonialism from
another, which is steadily confused with it by all French Canadians,
and combined with it by a good number of English Canadians.  As the
nineteenth century drew on and the concept of empire in Britain herself
assumed a new colour, the Kipling colour, some Canadians spoke and
wrote of a Canada which would be a partner in the destinies of a great
undertaking in which Britain would not be the master, but simply the
senior partner.  Charles Mair, our first important political poet,
expressed the view I have in mind when he wrote, in 1888:

  First feel throughout the throbbing land
    A nation's pulse, a nation's pride--
  The independent life--then stand
    Erect, unbound, at Britain's side.

{16} Another poet, Wilfred Campbell, coined an impressive phrase for
Canada's destiny: Canada was to be a part of "Vaster Britain."
"Stronger even than the so-called Canadian spirit," he wrote, "is the
voice of Vaster Britain."  It is unjust to speak of this version of the
imperialist ideal as showing the "butler's mind": it contemplated not
serving Britain, but sharing Britain's glories.  The psychological
source of this intoxicating imperialism was not perhaps so much loyalty
to Britain, but rather discontent with the dimensions of the Canadian
scene.  Canada was at the close of the last century a poor country,
mainly concerned with material problems, and steadily losing many of
her people to the large, rich, exultant land to the south.  Imperialism
was a kind of beneficent magic which would cover our nakedness and feed
our starving spirits.  The imperialist dream still lingers, but it is
only a dream, for the mode in which the empire has evolved has been
centrifugal--away from the concept of imperial federation--and there is
nothing sufficiently rich and various to which the loyalty the dream
evokes can attach itself.  In practice the imperialist has drifted
unconsciously into a colonial attitude of mind.

As the idea of imperial federation receded--and it was an idea that we
may well judge impractical since French Canada could never have shared
it, nor the Dutch in South Africa, nor the Southern Irish--Canada
entered upon a period in which thinking was extremely confused.  I
cannot attempt to provide here any account of the extraordinary
political evolution of the Dominions within the past generation.  But
the confusion is obvious if one notes merely a few significant
political facts.  Canada has no distinct flag, and no single distinct
anthem although Mr. Mackenzie King paused on the very brink of
asserting the latter; the relations between Canadian Provinces and the
federal government are subject to review in London; and the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council, also in {17} London, is our highest
court.  But Canada has her own ministers in foreign countries, makes
treaties without reference to Britain, and declares, or refuses to
declare, war by the instrument of her own Parliament.  Is it any wonder
that Canadian thinking about Canada is confused, that one set of
clear-thinking men demand that we cease sending ministers and signing
treaties and declaring war for ourselves, and that another set of
clear-thinking men demand that we provide ourselves with a distinct
flag and anthem and end the ingestion of the British Parliament and the
British Privy Council in our affairs?  The average English Canadian
would still like to have it both ways and is irritated, or nonplussed,
by the demand that he make a resolute choice; at heart he does not know
whether Canada or the Empire is his supreme political value.

In the contemporary world autonomy is the most luxurious of privileges,
one which this anxious country cannot now afford and will not be able
to afford in any measurable future.  It is not an unmixed good.
Autonomy almost always breeds chauvinism, and usually brings as an
immediate consequence an unwholesome delight in the local second-rate.
Its advent opposes strong obstacles to international currents of art
and thought.  This is to be set firmly against the notion that out of
autonomy all good things soon issue.  Still it must be appreciated just
as clearly that dependence breeds a state of mind no less unwholesome,
a state of mind in which great art is most unlikely to emerge or to be
widely recognized if it did.  A great art is fostered by artists and
audience possessing in common a passionate and peculiar interest in the
kind of life that exists in the country where they live.  If this
interest exists in the artist he will try to give it adequate
expression; if it exists in the audience they will be alert for any
imaginative work which expresses it from a new angle and with a new
clearness.  From what was said a moment ago it will be obvious that in
a colonial or semi-colonial {18} community neither artist nor audience
will have the passionate and peculiar interest in their immediate
surroundings that is required.  Canada is a state in which such an
interest exists only among a few.  I have pointed out how Mr. Callaghan
and Miss de la Roche have written as they could not have written if
they had possessed such interest.  It is the same with Canadian
readers.  A novel which presents the farms of the prairie, or the
industrial towns of south-western Ontario, or the fishing villages in
the Maritime Provinces will arouse no more interest in the general
reader than a novel which is set in Surrey or in the suburbs of
Chicago.  Canadian undergraduates are much less likely than Americans
to write stories about their immediate environment: their fancies take
them to nightclubs in Vienna (rather than Montreal), islands in the
South Seas (rather than the St. Lawrence), foggy nights in London
(rather than Halifax).  It is almost impossible to persuade Canadians
that an imaginative representation of the group in which they live
could clarify for the reader his own nature and those of his
associates.  To the typical Canadian reader such a notion is arty
folly.  I give this as a fact; and I offer as a partial interpretation,
at least, that most Canadians continue to be culturally colonial, that
they set their great good place somewhere beyond their own borders.

Somewhere beyond their borders--not necessarily beyond the seas.
Canada is colonial not only in its attitude towards Britain, but often
in its attitude toward the United States.  It is true that the imprint
of a London publisher, or of a British university press is a more
impressive guarantee of a book or an author than any Canadian
sponsorship, even a Governor-General's.  When the late Lord Tweedsmuir
remarked that a Canadian's first loyalty should be towards Canada
(rather than towards Britain or towards the empire) it was believed in
some circles, and these not the least cultivated, that he had been
guilty, as {19} one journalist phrased it in cynical fun, of
"disloyalty towards himself."  It was inevitable that a Scottish man of
letters should think in such terms, Scotland being almost wholly free
from the spirit of colonialism.  Pleas that we should seek to free
ourselves from our colonial feelings towards Britain are met with cries
of "ingrate!" or "traitor!"  There can, of course, be no question of
such open and violent objection against efforts to free us from a
colonial attitude towards the United States.  Our colonialism in
relation to the United States is unavowed, but it is deep.  The praise
of a couple of New York reviewers will outweigh the unanimous
enthusiasm of Canadian journals from coast to coast.  There is every
reason to suppose that as Canadian feeling becomes more and more
friendly towards the United States, as it has done during the past
quarter century, our cultural dependence on the Americans will grow.
If it does, our literature may be expected to become emphatically
regionalist; of the dangers of regionalism something will said a little
later.



V

A more powerful obstacle at present to the growth of a great literature
is the spirit of the frontier, or its afterglow.  Most Canadians live
at some distance from anything that could even in the loosest terms be
known as a material frontier; but the standards which the frontier-life
applied are still current, if disguised.  Books are a luxury on the
frontier; and writers are an anomaly.  On the frontier a man is mainly
judged by what he can do to bring his immediate environment quickly and
visibly under the control of society.  No nation is more practical than
ours; admiration is readily stirred, even more readily than south of
the border, by the man who can run a factory, or invent a {20} gadget
or save a life by surgical genius.  This kind of admiration is a
disguised form of the frontier's set of values.  No such admiration
goes out to any form of the aesthetic or contemplative life.  The
uneasiness in the presence of the contemplative or aesthetic is to be
ascribed to the frontier feeling that these are luxuries which should
not be sought at a time when there is a tacit contract that everyone
should be doing his share in the common effort to build the material
structure of a nation.  That a poem or a statue or a metaphysic could
contribute to the fabric of a nation is not believed.  In a gathering
of ruminative historians and economists, speaking their mind one
evening in Winnipeg years before the war was imminent, the unanimous
opinion was that a destroyer or two would do more than a whole corpus
of literature to establish a Canadian nationality.  The dissent of two
students of literature was heard in awkward silence.  If there were any
belief in the national value of art or pure thought, the strong desire
of the frontiersman that what is being built should eclipse all that
was ever built before would make a milieu for art and thought that
would at the root be propitious.

In a disguised form of frontier life what function can the arts hold?
They are at best recreative.  They may be alternatives to the hockey
match, or the whiskey bottle, or the frivolous sexual adventure as
means of clearing the mind from the worries of business and enabling it
to go back to business refreshed.  The arts' value as interpretation is
lost in the exclusive emphasis on their value as diversion, and even
their value as diversion is simplified to the lowest possible form--a
work of art must divert strongly and completely.  It must divert as a
thriller or a smashing jest diverts, not as an elaborate and subtle
romance or a complicated argument diverts.  In a word, Canada is a
nation where the best-seller is king, as it is on the frontier.

A third factor telling against the appreciation of art {21} is our
strong Puritanism.  Every foreign observer notes with amazement, both
in our French and in our English books, the avoidance of the themes
that irk the Puritan, or the language that now irks him more.  Canada
has never produced a major man of letters whose work gave a violent
shock to the sensibilities of Puritans.  There was some worry about
Carman, who had certain qualities of the _fin de sicle_ poet, but how
mildly he expressed his queer longings!  Mr. Callaghan has fallen foul
of the censors of morals in some of our more conservative cities, and
even among those of his own Roman Catholic faith a novel as _Such Is My
Beloved_ has had an uneasy path; but how cautious in the description of
sordor and how chastened in language he has always been!  Imagination
boggles at the vista of a Canadian Whitman, or Canadian Dos Passos.
The prevailing literary standards demand a high degree of moral and
social orthodoxy; and popular writers accept these standards without
even such a rueful complaint as Thackeray made in warning that he could
not draw his Pendennis as a full man, since no hero of an English novel
intended for the general public had been drawn in full since Fielding
went to his grave.

Even our Canadian Puritanism, however, has not been proof against the
international currents of moral relaxation which have coursed so
strongly during the past quarter century.  In the poetry of those who
are now approaching their fortieth year, there is a broad range of
emotion, which does not stop short of carnality, and an equally broad
range of speech for which nothing in the Canadian literary past gave a
precedent.  This poetry does not yet circulate at all widely, most of
it is still locked away in periodicals read by few, and it is not
possible to be sure whether it could even yet pass the moral test of
the general reading public.

If Puritanism operated simply to restrain the arts within the bonds of
moral orthodoxy, its effects, though regrettable, would be much less
grave than they now are.  {22} Puritanism goes beyond the demand for
severe morality: it disbelieves in the importance of art.  It allows to
the artist no function except watering down moral ideas of an orthodox
kind into a solution attractive to minds not keen enough to study the
ideas in more abstract presentations.  At its most liberal Puritanism
will tolerate, a little uneasily, the provision through the arts of an
innocent passing amusement which is expected to leave no deep trace on
character.  To popularize orthodox morality and to provide light, clean
fun--that is the very limit of what the arts can be allowed to do
without alarming the Puritan mind.  For the Puritan a life devoted to
one of the arts is a life misused: the aesthetic life is not a form of
the good life.  That profane art, both for artist and for audience, may
provide the contemplation of being, may offer an insight into the life
of things, is for the Puritan mist and moonshine.

Puritanism is a dwindling force, and the time is not far off when it
will no longer exercise its ruinous restraint upon the themes or
language of a Canadian writer who is addressing the general public.
Regionalism, another force which tells against the immediate growth of
a national literature, cannot be expected to dwindle so fast.  Canada
is not an integrated whole.  The Maritime Provinces recall the
days--only seventy-five years in the past--when they were separate
colonies; Nova Scotia, for instance, has re-established its colonial
flag, dating from the eighteenth century and flying now from the
Province House at Halifax; French Canada is a civilization apart;
Ontario unconsciously accepts itself as the norm of Canadian life; the
Prairie Provinces are steeped in their special vivid western past; and
British Columbia has a strong sense of its pre-confederation life and
of its continuing separate identity.  Geography confirms the influence
of history.  Ontario is separated from the Maritime Provinces by the
solid enclave of Quebec; between the populous southern part of Ontario
{23} and the prairies the Laurentian shield interposes another huge
barrier; and this barrier is no stronger, if broader, than the Rocky
Mountains create between the prairies and the coastal province of
British Columbia.  There is little doubt that the Fathers of
Confederation, or the majority of the leaders among them, expected and
planned for a much more unified whole than has so far come into being.
In time of war the tendency to self-aggrandizement on the part of the
Provinces is arrested, and even reversed; but there is ground for
fearing that the return to peace will start it into vigorous being once
more.  Among most Canadians there is little eagerness to explore the
varieties of Canadian life, little awareness how much variety exists,
or what a peril that variety is, in time of crisis, to national unity.
It may be that the next important stage of Canadian literature will be
strongly particularist and regionalist: one remembers what a force
regionalism was in American literature in the years after the Civil War.

Regionalist art may be expected to possess certain admirable virtues.
One of these is accuracy, not merely accuracy of fact, but accuracy of
tone; and throughout our literature there has been a disposition to
force the note, to make life appear nobler or gayer or more intense
than Canadian life really is in its typical expressions.  It would help
us towards cultural maturity if we had a set of novels, or sketches, or
memoirs that described the life of Canadian towns and cities as it
really is, works in which nothing would be presented that the author
had not encountered in his own experience.  It should also be
acknowledged that a warm emotion for one's _petit pays_ can lead to
very charming art, as in Stephen Leacock's humorous transposition of an
Ontario town in his _Sunshine Sketches_.  In the end, however,
regionalist art will fail because it stresses the superficial and the
peculiar at the expense, at least, if not to the exclusion, of the
fundamental and universal.  The advent {24} of regionalism may be
welcomed with reservations as a stage through which it may be well for
us to pass, as a discipline and a purgation.  But if we are to pass
through it, the coming of great books will be delayed beyond the
lifetime of anyone now living.



VI

What I have been attempting to suggest with as little heat or
bitterness as possible is that in this country the plight of literature
is a painful one.  People who dislike to face this truth--and most
Canadians do--have many easy answers.  One is that Canadians have been
so busy making a new world that it is harsh and unrealistic to expect
that they might have written a large number of important books, read
them with strong and general interest, and set a distinctive literary
tone for their civilization.  To this answer one may retort by pointing
to what had been achieved in the United States a century ago, calling
the roll of the names of those Americans who had written works of the
first order, of national and international importance, by
1843--Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne and
Emerson.  In certain other ways the American environment up to 1843 was
more hospitable to literature than ours has been up to the present
time; but there can, I think, be no doubt that Americans were in the
century and a half preceding 1843 just as busy building the material
structure of a nation as we have ever been.  Another easy answer is
often put in such terms as these: "If a Dickens begins to write in
Canada we shall greet him with a cheer, we shall buy his books by the
scores of thousands, get him appointed to the Senate of Canada, and
request the Crown to give him an O.M.  Meanwhile, don't bother us with
your complaints.  You can't point to a single man of {25} anything
approaching the calibre of Dickens who has written in this country.  We
have neglected no one of great importance.  Wait till our Dickens comes
along, and then we'll prove to you that we know how to honour a great
writer."  The line taken here depends on the belief that literature is
an autonomous thing, a succession of single great men, each arising
accidentally, each sufficient to himself.  On this view you will get
your great literature when you get your great men of letters, and
meanwhile there is no problem worth discussing.

Thinking of this sort ignores a fundamental fact: that literature
develops in close association with society.  I should not deny that a
single man of genius might emerge and express himself more or less
fully in a society which was inhospitable to literature; but I find it
significant that the most original of our poets, E. J. Pratt, has
maintained:


The lonely brooding spirit, generating his own steam in silence and
abstraction, is a rare spirit, if indeed he ever existed, and as far as
one may gather from scientific discussions on the point, there is no
biological analogy for this kind of incubation.  Rather, the mountains
come to birth out of the foothills, and the climbing lesser ranges.
The occasional instance cited in literary history, of personal
isolation ignores the context of spiritual companionship with books and
causes and movements.


The ways of genius cannot be fully predicted; but the "occasional
instance," the single man of genius, is not a literature and does not
bring a literature into being.  No doubt if a Browning or a Yeats were
to write in Canada and to make himself felt in Canada, the effect on
Canadian literature would be considerable.  But the stimulus such a
writer could give, great though it would be, and much as it may be
wished for by all who hope for the growth of a great literature in this
country, would be a passing stimulus, unless it were assisted by social
conditions friendly to creative composition.  A great literature is the
flowering {26} of a great society, a mature and adequate society.  Here
I must reluctantly take leave of the subject, for it is not in the
province of a student of letters to say how a society becomes mature
and adequate.

In the observations I have offered it will be thought by many Canadians
that the note of pessimism, or at least of rigour, is too strong.  On
the side of hope and faith it should be said that the future of Canada
is almost singularly incalculable: none of the factors that now tell so
strongly against the growth of our literature is necessarily eternal,
and many of them are likely to diminish in force.  Every reflective
Canadian must feel a mixture of disturbance and delight in our
inability to foresee even the main stresses of the Canada that will
exist a hundred years from now.




{27}

CHAPTER TWO

The Development of Poetry in Canada


I

Canadian literature in the English language began on the Atlantic coast
in the later years of the eighteenth century.  For a few decades before
the American Revolution Halifax had been the centre of a small colony,
drawn in large part from the New England communities.  One of the
by-products of the American Revolution was the emigration of those who
were resolved to remain British subjects and those whose loyalty to the
new nation was questioned by their fellows.  Many of these went to
England, others preferred the West Indies or the wild and almost
uninhabited lands to the north of the Great Lakes; a large number, over
thirty thousand, came to what is now the maritime group of Canadian
provinces, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.  Their
arrival gave a powerful and decisive impulse to the culture of these
colonies in which Halifax was the focal point: it was essentially the
culture of exiles, sometimes angry at their fate, sometimes hopeful
that they might return before they died to their American homes.  The
religious verse of Henry Alline, the author of a large collection of
hymns, might have come from Portland, or from some small town in the
back country of New England; some of the satires might have been
country cousins to the work of the Connecticut Wits if it were not for
their scorn of the republicanism which had cost their authors their
places in a settled society {28} and sent them on their journey to a
new, harsh and poor world; the little poem called "The Indian Names of
Acadia" might have been Longfellow's.  It is not too severe to say that
scarcely any of the verse written in the Maritime Provinces up to
Confederation has now more than historic interest.  Here and there
Alline, or Joseph Howe, or De Mille may achieve a line or even a stanza
that is impressive; the mastery never endures throughout a whole piece.
There is no Anne Bradstreet, no Edward Taylor, no Joel Barlow, no
Freneau among the early poets of Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.

For the first poetry of lasting value one must look farther west.
Kingston, on the shore of Lake Ontario, was also a loyalist town, the
centre of a community which was predominantly loyalist, and which had
built before the middle of the nineteenth century a social and economic
structure which was a smaller, cheaper replica of communities in the
eastern states from which its people had come.  In Montreal, although
there were loyalists, the English-speaking population was dominated by
middle-class Scotsmen and Englishmen, to whose mode of life the
loyalists partly conformed.  It was a hundred years ago, as it is now,
the financial capital of British North America: it was stamped with
wealth and the preoccupation with big business; the grip of Puritanism
was more relaxed than anywhere else in the British colonies; and
imagination had an outlet in the almost unknown west from which came
the furs which were the first base of Montreal's millions.  The two
chief figures in our pre-Confederation poetry are Charles Heavysege, a
Montreal cabinet maker and journalist who had come out from Liverpool
in middle age, and Charles Sangster, a Kingston journalist, born near
that city, and returning to die there after spending his later years as
a civil servant at Ottawa.

Sangster's life was perfectly representative of the {29} difficulties a
poet must face in a pioneer community.  It is clear that he never
succeeded in finding a niche that suited him.  As soon as he could he
found work on a newspaper; and it was while he was harassed by a kind
of activity that does not seem to have been compatible with his
temperament--though the best a pioneer area offered--that he managed to
bring out his two volumes of poetry, the first, _The St. Lawrence and
the Saguenay and Other Poems_, in 1856 when he was thirty-four, and the
second, _Hesperus and Other Poems and Lyrics_, four years later.
Kingston was then one of the principal centres in Canada: it would
probably be our capital city if it had not been so exposed to American
attack; it was for a time the home of two men who in Sangster's
lifetime were to be Prime Ministers of Canada, Alexander Mackenzie and
Sir John A. Macdonald; it was the seat of an important university, and
the source of much good journalism.  The social environment was as
propitious as an emphatically moral and bourgeois lyrist like Sangster
could have found in Canada; nor was he unappreciated.  In the year
following Confederation he was appointed to a place in the Post Office
in Ottawa, apparently as a recognition of his achievement in letters;
and long before he had been asked, on occasion, to write official
poetry.  When the monument to General Isaac Brock was raised at
Queenston in 1859, on the site where he was killed as his troops
triumphantly resisted American invasion, it was Sangster who was
charged with the memorial poem.  His _Brock_ is a fair sample of his
powers as a patriotic poet.  It begins:

  One voice, one people, one in heart,
    And soul, and feeling, and desire!
    Re-light the smouldering martial fire,
    Sound the mute trumpet, strike the lyre,
    The hero deed cannot expire,
      The dead still play their part.

{30}

  Raise high the monumental stone!
    A nation's fealty is theirs,
    And we are the rejoicing heirs,
    The honoured sons of sires whose cares
    We take upon us unawares,
      As freely as our own.

and in a more ambitious tone it ends:

  Some souls are the Hesperides
    Heaven sends to guard the golden age,
    Illuming the historic page
    With records of their pilgrimage;
    True Martyr, Hero, Poet, Sage:
      And he was one of these.

  Each in his lofty sphere sublime
    Sits crowned above the common throng,
    Wrestling with some Pythonic wrong,
    In prayer, in thunder, thought, or song;
    Briareus-limbed, they sweep along,
      The Typhons of the time.

This is Sangster when he has put on his formal singing robes: a little
awkward, bent on doing his very best, and coming out of the ordeal with
honour.  It is not to write poetry of this sort that he came into the
world.  His true note is much quieter.

It is the note of the best among the sonnets that he wrote in the woods
near Orillia on the edge of Muskoka in the summer of 1859, when he
found that:

  My soul is dark and restless as the breeze
  That leaps and dances over Couchiching.

or, in brighter moments:

  I've almost grown a portion of this place;
  I seem familiar with each mossy stone;
  Even the nimble chipmunk passes on,
  And looks but never scolds me.

{31} It is the note of the purer stanzas in his confession of
faith--and doubt--"My Prayer," stanzas such as

  We walk in blindness and dark night
    Through half our earthly way;
  Our clouds of weaknesses obscure
    The glory of the day.

It is the note of his love-poetry, of such pieces as "Good Night," with
its admirable beginning:

    We never say, "Good Night";
  For our eager lips are fleeter
  Than the tongue, and a kiss is sweeter
    Than parting words,
    That cut like swords;
  So we always kiss Good Night.

Sangster has been rather carefully compared with Longfellow by
Professor R. P. Baker, not with the cultivated Longfellow who was free
of the literature of all Europe, but with the simple poet of "The
Bridge" and "The Day is Done"; and the comparison is suggestive.
Sangster has not, however, the soft melancholy that is like a patina on
Longfellow's more famous lyrics, and lends to them a charm that is
moving if in the end a little cloying.  In all his better work there is
a firmness of temper that is more like Whittier's; and it is this
firmness that often enables him to treat sentimental subjects without
risking sentimentality.  Related to this firmness, and perhaps deriving
from it, is a reluctance--perhaps it was an incapacity--to express
strong emotion.  Sangster's guard is almost always up: writing among
and for a people whose reserve is almost stern, he has his audience in
view and records his experiences and aspirations with caution.  It is
here, rather than in his uncertain sense of language, that his chief
defect as a lyric poet lies, and it is a characteristic defect of art
in a community where art is a stranger.  It is easy to understand {32}
his silence for the almost forty years of life that remained to him
after the appearance of the _Hesperus_ volume, easy to understand how
he intended and planned a third collection and how he never came to
publish it.  In commenting on his first poems a reviewer remarked: "A
Canadian Poet, whose poems are far above mediocrity--whose songs are of
Canada--her mountains, maidens, manners, morals, lakes, rivers,
valleys, seasons, woods, forests, and aborigines, her faith and hope,
merits encouragement.  Will he get it?"  The answer is not a simple
one.  Sangster received a great deal of encouragement, it will be
clear; but he did not have around him that atmosphere of eager sympathy
with poetry that is the most precious kind of encouragement, without
which all other encouragement is a little artificial and in the end
insufficient.

Sangster wrote for his fellow-Canadians, and about them and with a
Canadian or, at the widest, a North American range of attitude.
Heavysege wrote for the world and for himself, of subjects entirely
unconnected with Canada or North America--even his natural imagery is
scarcely ever Canadian--and with a range of feeling that recalled the
Byronic afterglow that was alive in the England from which he emigrated.

He was born in Liverpool; in 1853, when he came to Canada, he was
thirty-seven, and already the author of a volume of poetry.  In
Montreal, supporting a large family, he at first followed his trade as
a cabinet-maker, and wrote, or it may be simply completed, his dramatic
trilogy, _Saul_.  The reception of this heartened him; it was admired
by Emerson and Longfellow, Hawthorne and Patmore; it was called the
greatest dramatic poem since the time of Shakespeare; it was called
perhaps the greatest poem in the English language composed outside of
Great Britain.  In middle age Heavysege left his bench to become a
reporter, and he was not a successful reporter.  He appears to have
{33} been arrogant and exacting; to have hated his environment; and to
have retired within himself.  There is no doubt that in his elder
years, at least, he was profoundly unhappy, all too conscious of the
gap between the language that was used about his poetry and the mean
way he earned his bread.  At least one more notable work came from him,
the dramatic poem, _Jephthah's Daughter_, which appeared in 1865.

It is a long time since Heavysege was even a name for the general
Canadian reader.  None of his pieces has even the slight popularity one
might claim for Sangster's "Brock"; of them all perhaps the most
familiar is the little poem:

  Open, my heart, thy ruddy valves;
    It is thy master calls,
  Let me go down, and curious trace
    Thy labyrinthine halls.
  Open, O heart, and let me view
    The secrets of thy den;
  Myself unto myself now show
    With introspective ken.
  Expose thyself, thou covered nest
    Of passions, and be seen;
  Stir up thy brood, that in unrest
    Are ever piping keen.
  Ah! what a motley multitude,
    Magnanimous and mean.

If one can pass quickly by the quaint and now absurd phrase that closes
the first line, the poem can be impressive.  It has a richer volume
than anything that Sangster ever wrote; it is organ music to Sangster's
little violin.  It evokes memories of Scott and Byron and Moore, and is
not unworthy to be set with their songs.  It has the intensity of the
popular romantics, an intensity that our poetry has all too often
lacked even in its finest expressions.  {34} Again and again Heavysege
strikes this deep note, for instance at the close of "Twilight":

                            the golden chime
    Of those great spheres that sound the years
    For the horologe of time;--
  Millenniums numberless they told,
  Millenniums a millionfold
    From the ancient hour of prime!

Here is a poet intoxicated with language, as his admired contemporary
Poe was intoxicated; and one could wish that he had set himself to
write with musical beauty of a fantastic world, as Poe wrote.

His preoccupation, however, was with drama, not with drama intended for
the stage, but with the cabinet-drama of the romantics.  _Saul_ is
cabinet-drama: it is closer to _Paradise Lost_ than to a stage-play; it
surprises one to learn that he prepared a text of _Saul_ for a New York
actress, a text which was never used and has long been lost.  But
recognition of the dramatic ineffectiveness of _Saul_ has led many of
Heavysege's modern detractors to deny him merits that he undoubtedly
possesses.  He has, for instance, considerable powers as a realist,
even as a bitter humorist.  It is impossible, I should think, for
anyone to read _Saul_ without being impressed by the dialogue he gives
to the devils who play a large part in the tragedy.  Line after line
has the sharp poetic realism of Malzah's comment on seeing the body of
Agag hacked in pieces:

                                A pie;
  But made, methinks, lass, when the cook was angry.

The soldiers and minor officers have a dialogue scarcely less vivid and
striking.  One may pause on this remark made by one of the soldiers who
is looking at the broken corpse of Agag:

{35}

  Agag is now a ghost, and would not know
  The carcass that three minutes ago contained him.
  So felled it is, so lopped, so strewn on th' ground,
  The bird, his soul, now would not know the tree
  That it for forty years has sat and sung in.
  He'll pipe no more.

The bird-image is plainly fanciful, in the manner of Scott and Moore;
but there is a vigorous temper in the lines, and, apart from this
image, poetic realism.  With the higher characters, Heavysege is not so
steadily successful: like the other nineteenth-century dramatists in
the Elizabethan tradition his approach to tragic character is
insufficiently realistic.  Saul and David, Abner and Samuel are far
from breathing human beings: they always stamp about with their buskins
in proud view.  Nor is his sense of tragic action sounder: Saul is the
prey of shifting passions, and if at first we are moved by his
impotence in their grip, when the same see-saw has been repeated
throughout the whole trilogy, it merely wearies.  A dramatic
imagination seizing on the tale might have graduated the crises, and
given us a feeling that Saul was in each act moving nearer to some
dread climax; Heavysege exploits the full resources of the situation in
the early acts of the first part.

_Jephthah's Daughter_ is, strictly speaking, a narrative; but it is
essentially a dramatic poem, a succession of long speeches tied
together by brief passages describing the settings.  Its dramatic value
is higher than _Saul's_: a single tragic situation works itself out
quickly and brings before us the inner natures of at least two
characters--Jephthah and his daughter--who are more real to us than any
of the major figures in _Saul_, though less real than even such
romantic personages as Tennyson's Lancelot or Arnold's Rustum.  What is
most attractive in _Jephthah's Daughter_ is the language, which has a
richness of beauty that is rare in _Saul_, a richness sometimes
Miltonic, but more often authentically nineteenth century.  It was not
till Carman {36} wrote "Low Tide on Grand Pr" that a Canadian would
again have the secret of such phrases as crowd from Heavysege's pen,
phrases like:

                      ... nor twilight dim,
  Sickening through shadows of mysterious eve,
  Die midst the starry watches of the night.

or

  The hill wolf howling on the neighbouring height,
  And bittern booming in the pool below.


Montreal was of all places in Canada the best for Heavysege, but it was
a meagre best.  He wrote to an American enthusiast in 1865: "Canada has
not a large cultivated class and what of such there is amongst us not
only misdoubts its own judgment, but has generally no literary faith in
sons of the soil, native or adopted."  The little community of
merchants and financiers that was English-speaking Montreal when he
began to publish his poems might take a certain pride in their
appearance: this was nevertheless not the kind of poetry that could
really matter to them--if any poetry could--and Heavysege had no
succession.  W. D. Lighthall evokes Heavysege as "a sombre shadow
towering in the background of the group--a man apart from the rest" of
the early Canadian poets.  He is a significant example of a poet gifted
in some ways almost to the level of genius, and yet leaving no mark on
the development of a literature and a civilization.



II

Our poetry has had two main flowerings.  The first began in 1880 with
the appearance of Charles G. D. Roberts's first collection, _Orion_,
and was already fading soon after the turn of the century.  Roberts was
one of four men born between 1860 and 1862 whose works were {37} the
great performances in our first distinguished period.  The others were
Bliss Carman, a cousin of Roberts who announced himself in 1893 with
_Low Tide on Grand Pr_; and Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell
Scott, civil servants in Ottawa and close friends, whose first
collections, _Among the Millet_ and _The Magic House_, appeared in 1888
and 1893 respectively.  Lampman died at the peak of his power in 1899;
Carman lived on to 1929 at odds with the poetic ideals that arose after
the war; Roberts and Scott, although they have passed eighty, now and
then publish a notable poem.

But before we turn to the new poets, it will be well to say what needs
to be said of two writers a little senior to them, although the
appearance of their works in book form belongs to the period following
the appearance of _Orion_.

George Frederick Cameron was a Nova Scotian by birth and upbringing.
In 1869 when he was fifteen, the family moved to Boston, as many a
Maritime family has done; and Cameron attended Boston College and
subsequently joined a Boston law-firm; if he had remained in the United
States his poetry would have no place in this survey; but for reasons
that are not clear he decided in 1882 to move to Kingston, Ontario,
where he attended Queen's University and was employed by a newspaper
until his sudden death in 1885.  His one collection, _Lyrics on
Freedom, Love and Death_, was issued in 1887 by his brother, who
promised that, if the book were well received, it would be followed by
others, since it contained only about a quarter of the surviving verse.
No later collection was undertaken, and nothing has been known of the
character of Cameron's unpublished work.

Since Cameron is quite unlike any other Canadian poet, the loss of so
much of his work is extremely unfortunate.  He is the nearest to a
citizen of the world among all our poets of the last century.  Of his
twenty-nine lyrics of freedom, thirteen have to do with Cuba, eight
with Russia, {38} three with France, three with the United States, and
one with Ireland.  Only one of his political poems, and this a weak
piece not grouped with the lyrics of freedom, has a Canadian theme.
The great political experiment of Canadian Confederation meant nothing
to him, to whom the American Civil War meant so much: his absence from
Canada in youth and early manhood does not account for such
indifference in one whose political preoccupation was so strong.  How
strong it was may be seen from his attacks on Russian absolutism,
attacks in which idea, feeling and form have the imprint of Swinburne,
as in these representative lines:

  Hath he shown a contempt of the wrong?
    Hath he shown a desire of the right?
  Hath he broken the strength of the strong,
      Or supported the weak with his might,
  That to meet him and greet him ye throng?

This, a complaint against Boston's enthusiastic reception of the Grand
Duke Alexis Romanoff, is very good Swinburne indeed.  In his Cuban
poems the note is more Byronic, as in this protest against Americans
who were opposed to Cuban efforts to achieve independence:

  Then gaze where Caribbean waves
    Loll calm on desecrated sands;
    Where Freedom cheers her weary bands:
  Where heroes dig heroic graves
    With their own hero-hands.

Whether he writes in Byron's manner or Swinburne's, Cameron is an
accomplished rhetorical poet.  Above rhetoric his political poetry
never rises: there is nothing in it like "The Isles of Greece," or
"Siena."

The rhetorical manner is almost everywhere in his poetry of love as
well, recalling Byron and Moore.  Note the orator's imagery in these
lines:

{39}

  Mine?  Ah, alas! the barricade
    That Mammon rears between us twain
  May not be overleaped, dear maid,
    Though high hearts break with parting pain.
  The phantom passion must be laid
    The harper taught another strain;
  The knee must seek another shrine,
    For thou art not--_thou art not mine!_

It is significant that his most stirring treatment of love, in the
longest of his poems, "Ysolte," is in the manner of "Maud," a
rhetorical manner, with an intensity that is nervous rather than
authentically passionate.  How close Cameron comes to Tennyson's manner
in "Maud" appears in these lines, breathing neurotic jealousy:

  The prowling fox has found his prey,--
    An easy prey, an easy prize:
  So easy that some people say
    It was a willing sacrifice.
  But I say neither yea nor nay,
    Not having other people's eyes.

Is there, one may ask, no manner of Cameron's own? no time when he is
free of Byron and Swinburne and Tennyson, and Shelley and Poe?

One of the chief powers in the poetry of Lampman and his associates is
their power in the handling of nature.  Before Cameron is left behind
it will be well to note how nature appears in his verse.  His treatment
is well represented by these lines which form part of a poem sent back
to his sister Louise in Nova Scotia long after he had left the colony
and at a time when he yearned to revisit it,

  And pluck the flowers full-freighted with perfumes--
  With dew-drops sparkling, and by south winds fanned,--
  The flowers that gem the fields of our beloved land.

{40} It is the nature of the English late-eighteenth century, of Gray
and Goldsmith, conventional, generalized, supplying no picture,
affording no surprise.  In Cameron a bird is a "silver-throated
singer"; a fountain is "fringed with laurel"; the "placid wave" carries
its calm foambell.  It is a rhetorician's nature, the nature of one
whose mind has been on other things.  It is highly significant that the
one nature-poem that his first season in Kingston suggested is a
complaint against cold weather.  The new world about him gave no
stimulus to his imagination; he was not curious to note and use its
phenomena; he just felt that it was cold:

  What wonder we long for a breeze from the islands
    The beautiful islands and blest of the sea?--
  Vine-lands or pine-lands, lowlands or highlands,
    So they be summer lands nought care we!

Even the nature he dreams of is not particularized: anything will do,
provided there is warmth.  It should be said that this poem was
written, not in mid-February but in--November.

Interesting as Cameron's verse is, it must, I think, be admitted that
nowhere does he fully satisfy, nowhere is he fully himself.  Set among
the Canadian poets, he at first appears original because he is unlike
the others in most respects; but when he is set among English and
American poets of the age and of the age before, more particularly of
the age before, he shows himself to be more like these than Lampman is,
or Roberts.  The real originality, then, is not in Cameron but in his
junior contemporaries.  We can now answer the question which was
allowed to dangle some time past: has Cameron anywhere a manner of his
own, is he anywhere notably and fully himself?  No.  Perhaps had he
lived--and it is to be remembered that he was only thirty-one when he
died--such a manner might have developed.  Lampman, however, had his
manner long {41} before his development was complete, had it well
before his thirtieth year.

Three years before Cameron's collection appeared at Kingston, a Toronto
press produced _Old Spookses Pass_, _Malcolm's Katie and Other Poems_,
the work of a young woman who had been brought out from Ireland as a
child when her parents emigrated to a village in Upper Canada, and who
like Cameron was to die in her thirties.  Isabella Valancy Crawford is
the only Canadian woman poet of real importance in the last century;
and her "Malcolm's Katie," a long narrative of backwoods life in
primitive Ontario, is the best image a poet has given us of Canadian
living in the years following Confederation.  Malcolm Graem is a stern,
silent, Scottish Canadian farmer, who has made his fields from the
wilderness and every time he surveys them feels a rugged pride in
property and accomplishment.  His daughter Katie has the graces and the
softer virtues that belong to a time of consolidation rather than
back-breaking pioneer effort; but her love goes out to Max, a
lumberman, who is a representative of a Canada more primitive than
Katie's father's, a Canada where adventure is a deeper satisfaction
than achievement, though achievement is not scorned.  Clearly, in her
way of presenting these personages, as in her style, Miss Crawford
follows Tennyson, the Tennyson of the modern idylls; but in the style
there is a density, at times a confused richness, which express a
nature more nervous and ardent than Tennyson's.

Nowhere does her style appear to better advantage than in the
description of nature, in such passages as these:

  At morn the sharp breath of the night arose
  From the wide prairies, in deep-struggling seas,
  In rolling breakers, bursting to the sky;
  In tumbling surfs, all yellow'd faintly thro'
  With the low sun; in mad conflicting crests,
  Voic'd with low thunder from the hairy throats
  Of the mist-buried herds....

{42}

and

  In this shrill Moon the scouts of winter ran
  From the ice-belted north, and whistling shafts
  Struck maple and struck sumach, and a blaze
  Ran swift from leaf to leaf, from bough to bough;
  Till round the forest flashed a belt of flame,
  And inward lick'd its tongues of red and gold
  To the deep tranced inmost heart of all.

Both these passages come from the opening of the second part of
"Malcolm's Katie," in which with more impressive result than anywhere
else in her poetry Miss Crawford sought to convey the teeming vitality
of nature.  The density and confused richness in her manner, sometimes
a fatal flaw, are here wholly appropriate: they do aid her in making
the reader feel that nature is enormously and even terrifyingly alive.
Not until Duncan Campbell Scott wrote his major nature poems was any
other Canadian poet to rival Miss Crawford's adequacy in handling wild
nature.

The passages that have been quoted suggest another of her powers, the
power of fantastic imagination: indeed it is only because her
imagination is wildly fantastic that those passages were written, that
nature in her poetry is such a wild and exciting thing.  In very
trifling pieces this imagination appears to arrest the attention, in
such comparisons as that of a girl's mobile eyes with "a woodbird's
restless wing," a light laugh with "a zigzag butterfly," the flash of a
jewel with the "silent song of sun and fire."  The multitude of such
images makes it unsafe to neglect even her most careless and
unsatisfactory poems--and very much of her work is careless and
unsatisfactory.

Often her poetry is unsatisfactory simply because it is carelessly
conventional.  She is very likely in her more relaxed passages to use a
diction like Cameron's, in which fields are "gemmed" with flowers, a
canoe has "polished sides" like a queen's, a mother's hair is "the holy
silver of {43} her noble head."  There is a great deal of this sort of
language in her poetry, and even in the middle of some of her intensely
worked-up passages it comes to mar the fine effect.  In the second part
of "Malcolm's Katie," where she is at her very best, she can speak of a
tree as

  The mossy king of all the woody tribes

or of careless health as denoted by

  The rose of Plenty in the cheeks.

This carelessness, the sign of flagging energy and dubious taste, is
perhaps, all in all, not so grievous a disappointment as some of the
tricks played Miss Crawford by what is so often her strength--that very
fantastic imagination some of whose flights have been recorded.  Of
these tricks I shall give but one example, a passage which has by some
been highly admired:

  For love, once set within a lover's breast,
  Has its own sun, its own peculiar sky,
  _All one great daffodil_, on which do lie
  The sun, the moon, the stars all seen at once.

The utter lawless wildness of such a comparison is the penalty paid for
the fantastic successes; and there is a great deal of such wildness,
most of it far less acceptable than the lines quoted.

Some time ago it was said that in "Malcolm's Katie" Miss Crawford had
given us the one poetic account of real Canadian living in the years
following Confederation.  She was able to do so because, despite her
fantastic vein, she lived in the real Upper Canadian world of her time.
She tells, for instance, of how into the edges of settlement came the
business men:

  ... smooth-coated men, with eager eyes,
  And talk'd of steamers on the cliff-bound lakes,
  And iron tracks across the prairie lands,
{44}
  And mills to crush the quartz of wealthy hills,
  And mills to saw the great wide-armed trees,
  And mills to grind the singing stream of grain....

And over against this picture of the coming of a business
civilization--how much there is in that one epithet,
"smooth-coated"--in her best-known lyric, "The Song of the Axe," she
celebrates the pioneer glory.  She frames the song admirably, placing
just before it the line:

  While the Great Worker brooded o'er His work

and after it this claim of Max's:

  My axe and I--we do immortal tasks--
  We build up nations--this my axe and I.

In the framework and in the tone of the song itself Miss Crawford comes
nearer to Whitman than any of her contemporaries.  The song itself is
moving:

  Bite deep and wide, O Axe, the tree,
  What doth thy bold voice promise me?

  I promise thee all joyous things,
  That furnish forth the lives of kings!

  For ev'ry silver ringing blow
  Cities and palaces shall grow!

  Bite deep and wide, O Axe, the tree,
  Tell wider prophecies to me.

  When rust hath gnawed me deep and red,
  A nation strong shall lift his head!

  His crown the very Heav'ns shall smite,
  ons shall build him in his might.

  Bite deep and wide, O Axe, the tree;
  Bright Seer, help on thy prophecy!

{45} The old clothes are still there, but the new spirit is strong
enough to shine through them, and to animate, as little of Sangster or
Cameron can.  Miss Crawford's vision was not strictly national, nor was
Lampman's to be; but it was often fixed, as his was, on the real
significance of the life immediately around her.

Something of the change brought to the style and feeling of our poetry
by Lampman and the other poets born in the early 'sixties has been
caught by James Cappon, who remarked in his monograph on Roberts:


You can see the difference at once in the descriptive manner of the new
poets, in the sensuous or mystical intensity of the verb and in the
impressionistic delicacy of the epithet.  The dawn no longer chills, it
"bites"; it does not rise, it "leaps"; it is nothing so common as rosy,
but has some elusive epithet attached to it, such as "inviolate" or
"incommunicable."  Darkness and night "reel"; the sea, the wind, the
rain, the trees, all "sob"; the stillness of the woods is "expectant";
terms like "elemental," "largess," "lure," "sinister," slipped from
their older and narrower usage into a wider power of suggestion.  It
was an evolution of a new poetic diction which reflected the more
intimate sense of the mystery of life and nature which was arising in
the new generation.  A new and mystic form of romanticism was coming
into vogue.


The new richness, subtlety and mystery first found expression, although
incompletely, in _Orion_.  Roberts was only twenty when the book
appeared, and many of the poems where written when he was in his middle
teens.  His subjects are Greek, and Greece is seen through the eyes of
Keats and Tennyson.  Roberts had received an excellent classical
education of the old sort at the Fredericton Collegiate School and at
the University of New Brunswick, from which he had graduated a year
before he brought out the book.  His father and the headmaster of the
school, George R. Parkin, cared deeply for poetry, and the boy {46} had
read widely, perceptively, formatively in the musical and pictorial
poetry of nineteenth-century England as well as in the best books of
the ancient world.  _Orion_ is exactly the kind of poem that a boy of
Roberts's temper and training might be expected to write, with its
gentle, sensuous pictures of women and nature, and its soft Tennysonian
music.  In his next collection, _In Divers Tones_, the qualities of
_Orion_ are more impressively developed.  Here are the vaguely
beautiful pictures of women

  Perfectly fair like day, and crowned with hair
  The colour of nipt beech-leaves ...
  Its soft thick coils about my throat and arms;
  Its colour like nipt beech-leaves, tawny brown,
  But in the sun a fountain of live gold

the vaguely beautiful idyllic landscape

        the grey-green dripping glens all bare,
  The drenched slopes open sunward

and the vaguely beautiful despair

  I have lived long and watched out many days,
  Yet have not learned that aught is sweet save life,
  Nor learned that life hath other end than death.

To the earlier Canadian poetry these first collections of Roberts's owe
nothing at all: with them Canadian poetry begins anew.

What is important and lasting in the new beginning is not the classical
substance--Roberts himself was to abandon this--but the quiet, sensuous
manner, a manner caught from the milder passages in Keats and Swinburne
and the early Tennyson.  This was the manner not only of Roberts but of
Carman and Lampman in much of their best work.  Among the earliest of
Lampman's notable {47} pieces, his "April," written in the spring of
1884, is pure Keats:

  Pale season, watcher in unvexed suspense,
  Still priestess of the patient middle day,
  Betwixt mild March's humoured petulance
  And the warm wooing of green kirtled May,
  Maid month of sunny peace and sober gray,
  Weaver of flowers in sunward glades that ring
  With murmur of libation to the spring.

The mood of the "Ode to Autumn" is there as it is in so many of the
good pieces in Lampman's first collection.  Set these lines of his
youth or any typical passage of the early Carman, for instance,

                when athwart
    The dark a meteor's gloom unbars
    God's lyric of the April stars
  Above the autumn hills of dream

beside the poetry of Sangster or Heavysege and it leaps to view that a
subtler, more sensuous, more mystery-haunted generation has come into
being, a generation, too, that as Cappon says, had the language its
preoccupations required.

A group of poets devoted to Keats and the early Tennyson, delighting in
the subtleties of the senses and of words, full of a consciousness of
the mystery in things, might turn to either of two subjects--nature or
woman.  The Canadian poets turned to nature.  It was the central theme
of all the poets of the generation coming into view in the eighties and
nineties.  They were concerned both with the surface of nature and with
its central meaning.

Roberts is at his best when he deals with the surface.  Nowhere in the
whole range of his poetry is he better than in his pictures of rural
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Where so much is of even goodness it is
hard to know what to quote.  In his purely realistic manner he has
never gone {48} beyond some of the lines in "The Potato Harvest," lines
like

  A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
    Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
    Washing the ridge; a clamour of crows that fly
  In from the wide flats ...

Roberts's sense for the word is not unerring, and usually in such
purely simple verse as this he will sooner or later introduce
unnecessary decoration in the desire to heighten his tone.  More
typical of his good nature verse is a more elaborate and suggestive
passage, such as this:

  Out of the frost-white wood comes winnowing through
    No wing; no homely call or cry is heard.
    Even the hope of life seems far deferred.
  The hard hills ache beneath their spectral hue.
  A dove-grey cloud, tender as tears or dew,
    From one lone hearth exhaling, hangs unstirred,
    Like the poised ghost of some unnamed great bird
  In the ineffable pallor of the blue.

Here he can be suggestive and mysterious while at the same time
supplying a picture: the touch is harder and sharper than Lampman's or
Carman's, but at a glance the passage is seen to be their kind of verse.

It would not be rewarding to linger over Roberts's interpretations of
the inner meaning of nature.  Never a poet of philosophical ideas, he
was not intimately affected by the intellectual anxieties that _The
Origin of Species_ and _The Descent of Man_ had brought to the nature
poets of Europe.  God is in nature; and nature is good.  Man is a part
of nature; and has no quarrel with it.  These simple, supremely
optimistic notions, characteristic of Wordsworth's generation, and
continuing on in the poetry of the American transcendentalists, are all
that Roberts requires.  It is typical of his temper and mind that these
ideas are set {49} forth obscurely, in a fashion which indeed prevents
the rapid reader from deriving anything beyond a vague notion that all
is mysteriously well.  The heart of the universe, for instance, is
described as

    the wisdom and the stillness
  Where thy consummations are.


His love poetry offers a special problem.  Towards the end of the
century Roberts left Canada, which was not again to be his home until
after the First World War.  In the atmosphere of New York City, in the
company of _fin de sicle_ spirits, he began to write a kind of poetry
new to Canadians, but familiar enough to his new milieu, a poetry of
passion in which natural emotions are veiled by exotic settings and
obscure allusions.  This poetry abounds in such language as "our heaven
of dream," "the mystical perfection of her kiss," and "the dark rose."
It is represented, not unfairly, by such lines as these from "The Rose
of My Desire":

  O wild dark flower of woman,
  Deep rose of my desire,
  An eastern wizard made you
  Of earth and stars and fire.

  When the orange moon swung low
  Over the camphor-trees,
  By the silver shaft of the fountain
  He wrought his mysteries.

In the sultry atmosphere of his love poems nothing is quite what it
seems.  To Canadian critics of the time such poetry seemed disquieting
and even unwholesome; it is now sufficient to say that it was very much
of its time and has nothing whatever in common with the great love
poems of that or any other period in literature.  Little of it appears
in the selection Roberts recently made from his work.  It {50} does not
form a significant exception to the general truth that Canadian poets
have not dealt movingly or naturally with human relationships.

More permanently interesting is Roberts's political poetry.  There is,
I think, no doubt that his political poetry is the best we have had.
In approaching it it is wise to recall that Roberts was for some years
a professor of political economy, a chair which he combined with that
in English literature at one of the small Maritime colleges; and that
he wrote a vigorous popular history of Canada, as well as some romantic
historical fiction.  For a time at least his attention was given to
political facts far more eagerly and constantly than that of any other
of our major poets.  In his early "Ode for the Canadian Confederacy" he
found an accent more fervent than any of his predecessors or
contemporaries: he calls upon the new nation to attain consciousness of
its latent powers:

    This North whose heart of fire
    Yet knows not its desire
  Clearly, but dreams, and murmurs in the dream.
  The hour of dreams is done.  Lo, on the hills the gleam!

  Awake, my country, the hour of dreams is done!
    Doubt not nor dread the greatness of thy fate.

It appeared that a national poet had arisen.  If he was not specific in
his exhortations, at least he pled for:

    ... a patriot people, heart and hand
  Loyal to our native earth, our own Canadian land.

If Roberts is without the clear programme that marks some of the
political verse of Charles Mair, an active associate in political
movements, it must be said that his note of intensity in urging pride
in the nation's character and future was a more poetic service to
Canada than the most carefully articulated programme could have been.
Stuart Sherman {51} has said of _Leaves of Grass_ that the incomparable
contribution of Whitman was that he had gone about all over America,
picking up one thing after another and insisting how beautiful it was.
Roberts is not a Whitman: no Canadian poet has yet rendered to Canada
the service that _Leaves of Grass_ rendered to the United States.
Roberts, however, does look at Canada as a whole and does say that what
he is looking at is of the very first order: and to say that, meaning,
as it does, that Canada is no mere colony, no offshoot or tributary, is
to take the first big step towards making a Canadian _Leaves of Grass_
possible.  The service that Roberts does us is comparable with the
service rendered to the United States by the political verse of Lowell
or Emerson.  As Roberts grew older England and the Empire took a larger
place in his thought; and though even in 1927 he continued to set
Canada first, the note of intense pride and absolute devotion that
sounds in the "Ode for the Canadian Confederacy" is not recaptured in
any of his late political verse.

It is wrong to say of Roberts, as Cappon does, that in him the man
outlived the poet.  Much of his most accomplished verse belongs to his
later years; and after he had passed seventy he could write of
nature--the surface of nature--with almost as much power as when he was
young.  Nevertheless, the study of his later poems is disappointing,
for a number of reasons.  Inadequacy of thought is more painful in the
kind of poetry an older man writes; versatility of mood is less
satisfying when the poet has lost the suggestive power of his youth and
offers statements instead of evocations; and, finally, it is sad to
find a poet of such promise, a poet who was once a founder, a breaker
of trails, in the very rear of the modern movement.  The conservatism
of Roberts was a factor in his rendering of what has been his chief
service in the twenty years since he returned to Canada.  He has become
more and more the spokesman {52} for literature in English Canada.  His
prestige as the beginner of the richest movement our literature has
ever known, his record in prose of the animal life of the land, his
national verse, and the vigour and colour of his character were
powerful reasons why he should have been accorded his present role.

One of Roberts's earliest poems, written when he was only eighteen, was
his "Epistle to Bliss Carman."  Carman, his cousin, passed through the
same high school and the same university, a couple of years behind
Roberts.  He, too, read widely in ancient literature and in the English
poets of the nineteenth century; he, too, began to write as a poet of
the senses in love with music and imagery; and he, too, was in love
with the nature immediately about him.  However, even the earliest
poetry of Carman is easily distinguishable from _Orion_ and the
following collection.  The note of "Low Tide on Grand Pr," which
Carman sought to maintain throughout the entire volume to which it gave
a name, is indeed a unique note, and not only in Canadian poetry.  No
one else has ever written quite in the manner of:

  The sun goes down, and over all
    These barren reaches by the tide
  Such unelusive glories fall,
    I almost dream they yet will bide
  Until the coming of the tide....

  Was it a year or lives ago
    We took the grasses in our hands,
  And caught the summer flying low
  Over the waving meadow lands,
  And held it there between our hands?

In its quiet delight in nature, its idyllic imagery and dreamy music,
its perfect relaxation and unbroken gentleness of tone, this is all of
a piece, and the piece is perfect.  Perfection is not what Roberts
offers.

{53}

Of all Carman's merits the beauty of his music is the most remarkable:
his first collection is one of the most musical volumes of verse in the
entire century.  Again and again the ear is excited by such magical
phrases as "Golden Rowan of Menalowan" or "The Trail Among the Ardise
Hills."  Sometimes, more often in the work of his youth, entire poems
have a musical perfection.  Once heard, the stanzas I am about to quote
are unforgettable:

  Now the lengthening twilights hold
  Tints of lavender and gold,
  And the marshy places ring
  With the pipers of the spring.

  Now the solitary star
  Lays a path on meadow-streams,
  And I know it is not far
  To the open door of dreams.

  Lord of April, in my hour
  May the dogwood be in flower,
  And my angel through the dome
  Of spring twilight lead me home.

The soft, rich music of these lines will dissatisfy only those whose
doctrines or sensibilities recoil from this kind of music: of its sort
it is perfect.  Carman often falls short of attaining this effect, for
which he so generally strives.  Of all our major poets, he had the
least capacity for self-criticism, the strongest tendency to "run on."
In his other musical vein, a familiar, rather shrill vein, he is seldom
altogether happy.  None of his poems is better known than one that
illustrates this vein and Carman's failure with it, the "Spring Song"
in _Songs from Vagabondia_, with its celebrated beginning:

  Make me over, mother April
  When the sap begins to stir!

{54} Those lines do not exemplify either the music, or the diction, of
the piece; more typical is such a stanza as this:

  Only make me over, April,
  When the sap begins to stir!
  Make me man or make me woman,
  Make me oaf or ape or human,
  Cup of flower or cone of fir;
  Make me anything but neuter
  When the sap begins to stir.

The word for that movement and manner is jaunty; and it is scarcely
possible to be poetic and jaunty.  The jaunty manner is an impure
manner.  It will be more evident perhaps that this is so if we pause on
another aspect of Carman's jauntiness, his jauntiness in diction.
"Neuter" is jaunty, and so is "oaf": these are words that can be used
in serious verse (as distinguished from light-hearted satire such as
Burns could write so masterly) only when the intention is bitter.  Pope
could have used them, or Browning, but in their hands the terms would
have had a searing force.  Carman uses them playfully, just as he uses
his jaunty poetic manner playfully.  The worst about them is not merely
that they are unpoetic--which is arguable endlessly--but that they are
cloying.

This word brings us to the central weakness of Carman.  His poetry as a
whole is cloying.  The truth of this complaint has occurred even to so
worshipping an admirer as Odell Shepard.  Mr. Shepard regrets Carman's
notion of each of his volumes as a perfect unity:


Twenty variations upon one tune with very minute and gradual
modulations from key to key, leave a final impression less sharply
defined than the original theme might have given if left to stand
alone.  As one reads a volume of verse put together on this principle
he is likely to feel that the poet is suffering from some mild
obsession or monomania...  Because of the lack of {55} contrast in mood
and material the reader comes to forget and ignore the poet's subject
and to surrender himself to the intoxication of rhythm and the wavering
phantasmagoria of poetic images.


In mitigation Mr. Shepard pleads that the tone of one collection
differs enormously from that of another, and that in consequence if
Carman is read as a whole he will satisfy us of the variety of his
poetry and appear as "a poet of very extraordinary range and as one who
has done memorable work in each of the many kinds of poetry he has
written."  This claim cannot, I think, be wholly accepted.  What is
true is that Carman is reasonably versatile in his choice of subjects,
no more so, however, than Roberts, and much less so than Mr. Shepard's
praise would suggest; but it is also true that when one turns from one
of his nature lyrics to one of his elegies and then to one of his
dreamy meditations, what strikes one is not the change in subject but
the sameness in manner.  He is always trying to cast almost exactly the
same spell; and before long we become uneasy and the spell ceases to
take effect.  The monotony that Mr. Shepard admits as a trait in the
several collections is a trait of the work as a whole.

It is worth inquiring into the causes of this monotony.  In the first
place Carman lacks the mastery of pictorial detail that marks all his
chief Canadian contemporaries.  In his poetry it is seldom that a scene
is clearly and sharply drawn, all his autumns are the one hazy autumn,
all his sunrises the one golden sunrise.  More fatal still is his
incapacity for restraint: what would have been charming and, to use Mr.
Shepard's word, memorable, loses its effectiveness because, instead of
being said firmly and finally, it is played with through stanza upon
stanza until the reader has only two feelings, that the music is
charming but soporific, and that there is no reason why it should ever
cease.  The thought is almost always exceedingly {56} tenuous: a vague
transcendentalism similar to Roberts's.  It is true that out of
transcendentalism great poetry can come; but only when
transcendentalism is very strongly felt by the poet.  If the idea that
all is one, and the idea that nature corresponds with spirit, and the
idea that man is an element in the world soul strike the poet with a
shock of immense surprise, making him feel that his eyes have been
suddenly unsealed, then great poetry may emerge.  But Carman takes
transcendentalism lightly: to him it is all so obvious.  And from
transcendentalism taken lightly no poetry can come, except an
occasional verse or at most a brief lyric.  And it is Carman's briefest
lyrics that in the main make his best work.

The two most powerful and satisfying poets of the period, Lampman and
Scott, I am reserving for treatment at greater length in special
chapters.  If Canadian poetry has any masters, Lampman and Scott are of
the company.



III

Though Lampman's fame was growing after his untimely death, though
Carman and Roberts were moving along new paths, though Scott was
reaching the height of his power, the early years of the new century
were dominated by a poetry quite different from theirs, a poetry which
set little value on the refinements of pure art, and showed little
interest in nature, but fastened upon the simplest intensities of human
feeling and action.  Greatly as they differed one from another, W. H.
Drummond, Robert W. Service and Tom MacInnes all sought to make man the
theme of their work and to show man in the raw.  They failed to give to
our poetry a permanent new direction; but they did acquire for poetry a
largely expanded audience.  Drummond and Service were more popular than
any Canadian poets before or since.

{57}

Drummond was an Irish-born doctor who settled in Quebec Province and
came to know the intimate life of French Canadians on the farm and in
the village as no English Canadian but a physician could.  He became
aware how new to other English-speaking persons was the kind of
material he was amassing in the course of his professional and social
visits; and little by little he began to give it an artistic form.  "It
seemed to me," he says, "that I could best attain the object in view by
having my friends tell their own tales in their own way, as they would
relate them to English-speaking auditors not familiar with the French
tongue."  What this means is best made clear by an example:

  Mos' ev'ry day raf it is pass on de rapide
    De voyageurs singin' some ole chanson
  Bout girl down de reever--too bad dey mus' leave her
    But comin' back soon wit' beaucoup d' argent.

There are more French words here than in most passages of this length;
but the general mixture of French words, English words pronounced with
a French twist, an occasional French construction, is representative of
Drummond's verse as a whole.  In 1897, when he had found by giving
informal recitations that there was an audience for what he had
written, he gathered together a sample of his work and had it published
in New York under the title, _The Habitant and Other French Canadian
Poems_.  To make sure of a sympathetic reception from French Canada, he
invited a preface from Louis Frchette, the leading French Canadian
poet of the day.  Frchette seized Drummond's artistic problem with
real insight, and commented upon the novelty and difficulty of
undertaking to present a group of characters who cannot even read their
own idiom and who use a language which is not their own and which they
have learned by hearing it spoken.  He was concerned to point out that
Drummond had no thought of ridiculing his {58} subjects but was instead
bent upon commending them to the respect and affection of English
Canada.

It was wise of Drummond to obtain this preface; but it did not suffice.
Many French Canadians have never forgiven him for putting a patois on
the lips of his habitants, and insist--mistakenly--that the vulgar
error in English Canada that French Canadians do not generally speak
good French has its origin in Drummond's poems.  The political
shortcoming of his work--it was certainly no part of his intention to
produce such an effect--is not so grave as its literary weakness.  A
stanza such as I have quoted aims at rigorous realism of diction; and
this consorts well with the sly humour expressed.  But when Drummond
aims at pathos or tragedy--as he does not often do in his first
collection--there is an inescapable incongruity between the medium and
the substance.

For younger readers, despite his four volumes, Drummond is now scarcely
a name, certainly no more; but almost every Canadian knows, usually
without recalling who wrote it, the stirring ballad called "The Wreck
of the _Julie Plante_."  Lines like:

  De cook she's name was Rosie,
    She come from Montreal,
  Was chambermaid on lumber-barge
   On de Grande Lachine Canal,

or

  De win' can blow lak' hurricane
    An' s'pose she blow some more,
  You can't get drown' on Lac St. Pierre
    So long you stay on shore.

have become parts of the meagre treasure of our popular song.  Their
author will not always be as neglected as he has been during the last
generation.

Service is a marginal figure: his Canadian years were relatively few;
and if it were not for the Canadian themes {59} of so many among the
most effective of his pieces, there would be no tendency to regard him
as a part of Canadian literature.  He caught a noisy, highly coloured
moment in our history--the Yukon gold-rush--in his noisy, highly
coloured verse.  Kipling is obviously his master--the Kipling of the
early ballads--and he is not much below that Kipling except in the
refinements of technique.  Like Drummond, he was able, by the vigorous
humanity of his subjects and the simplicity of his form, to attract
many thousands who would not open books of lyric verse.  He has held
his audience better than Drummond, but recent Canadian poetry owes
nothing to what he did.  The narratives of E. J. Pratt or of Watson
Kirkconnell do not bear his stamp.

Never so broadly popular as Drummond or Service, Tom MacInnes shares
with them a delight in the natural man, whom he conceives not as
idyllic, with Drummond, or heroic, with Service, but as bohemian.  His
best work is not in his narratives, which in language and movement
smack of Kipling, Service and Masefield, and show little power in the
handling of a tale or the setting of a scene, but rather in his poems
of comment.  In these he usually employs elaborate forms: very often
the ballade, in which his note is almost always serio-comic; or the
villanelle, where he is softer and graver; or, now and then, some form
of his own devising and naming, such as the _mirelle_ or the _cantel_.
It amused MacInnes when an academic critic reproved him for his
"Mirelle of Found Money," saying that the subject matter was unsuitable
to such a form, which, like other of the ancient French forms, called
for elegant phrasing and courtly themes.  "I made up the name and form
of MIRELLE for myself in Montreal, because it sounded that way," he
retorted.  The mirelle is in five five-lined stanzas, the first stanza
rhyming _abaab_, the second _bcbbc_, and so on, till in the final
stanza the _a_ rhyme recurs in the second and last lines.  The cantel
is in {60} three four-lined stanzas, the first and last rhyming _aaba_,
and the second _bbab_.  In general MacInnes uses the mirelle for the
same kind of theme and tone as the ballade, and the cantel for the same
kind of theme and tone as the villanelle.  His gayer manner comes out
in such a passage as this stanza from the "Ballade of Detachment":

  Oh damnable palavering
    Of pedagogues too regular!
  I'd rather be a tramp, or sing
    For my living at a bar,
    Or peddle peanuts, far by far,
  Than lose my reasonable ease
  In tow of rule and calendar--
    Among the inequalities.

It is all very _fin de sicle_, London and New York were full of poets
who practised this manner, and Carman in his New York days could do
this kind of thing as smoothly, if with less vigorous conviction.  The
graver manner appears in one of the villanelles, "The Tiger of Desire,"
more completely perhaps than any other of MacInnes's pieces:

  Starving, savage, I aspire
    To the red meat of all the World:
  I am the Tiger of Desire!

  With teeth bared, and claws uncurled,
    By leave o' God I creep to slay
  The innocent of all the World.

  Out of the yellow, glaring day,
    When I glut my appetite,
  To my lair I slink away.

  But in the black, returning night
    I leap resistless on my prey,
  Mad with agony and fright.

{61}

  The quick flesh I tear away,
    Writhing till the blood is hurled
  On leaf and flower and sodden clay.

  My teeth are bare, my claws uncurled--
    Of the red meat I never tire;
  In the black jungle of the World
    I am the Tiger of Desire!

That is not MacInnes's most characteristic note; but it is his deepest,
and his most original.  The melodramatic imagination of the 'nineties
is there; but something deeper and truer gives it a special force and
the reader a special _frisson_.  We are for once out of the world of
bars and tramps and easy loves and quaint humours, out of MacInnes's
other world of voluptuous dreams and sensuous longings.  The elaborate
antique form holds within firm restraint a feeling which is at once
dangerously fierce and dangerously vague.  Completely satisfying poetry
is not written after this fashion, but there is nothing in Drummond or
Service that equals this piece, or one or two others among MacInnes's
shorter poems.

The work of our romantic naturists was to have a final phase of great
refinement in the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall.  Twenty years their
junior, she was brought out from England as a child; and in 1913, when
she was thirty, published her first collection.  Canadian critics had
long before seized on her poems and stories as works of distinction; a
long absence from Canada did not break her ties with the country in
which her imagination had sprouted, and she returned to spend her last
years in painful and abortive effort to realize her full powers.  More
than any other Canadian poet of this century she was the object of a
cult: the kind of comment she evoked is exemplified in Professor
Broadus's claim: "The untimely death of Marjorie Pickthall (April 19,
1922) deprived Canadian literature of its purest poet.  The two slender
volumes, _A Drift of Pinions_ {62} and _The Lamp of Poor Souls_,
contain nothing that will place her among 'the few, the immortal
names,' but they do reveal a singing voice and a delicate perception of
beauty unparalleled in contemporary Canadian poetry."  Unacademic
critics boldly placed her among the few, the immortal names.  It is now
clear that the praise she received was exuberant.  Her perception of
beauty has not the clarity which is so constant a trait of Lampman and
its range is slighter than Roberts's or Duncan Campbell Scott's.  It is
almost purely Celtic, and indeed the essential influence pervading her
work, as Mr. Collin has shown abundantly, is that of the Irish poetry
of the 'nineties.  She likes to write of:

  The cloud-white thorn and the white cloud blowing together

or

    a wild swan calling
  From the marshes broad and dim

Of her, as of Cameron, it must be conceded that where there is
deviation from the main stream of Canadian poetry, it is not because of
originality, but because of closer contact with movements in other
countries.  Still, Canada was, as I have said, the country of her
imagination, the setting which now and then does enable her to make her
pictures clear and her feelings sharp and strong.

It is not an accident that the work which is most remembered, the
poetic play called _The Wood-Carver's Wife_, has a Canadian setting.
More moving than this play, which is shot through with misty Celtic
symbolism weakening to its dramatic force and pictorial sharpness, are
a few pieces in which Miss Pickthall deals more simply and forcefully
with Canadian history and legend.  There is, for example, "On Lac
Sainte Irne," where despite a softish beginning,

  On Lac Sainte Irne the morn
  Lay rimmed with pine and roped with mist

{63} the theme of an Indian fleeing from justice is handled with
intensity, the picture of nature and the very rhythm co-operating to
strengthen the effect, as in such a stanza as this:

  On Lac Sainte Irne the moose
  Broke from his balsams, breathing hot.
  The bittern and the great wild goose
  Fled south before the sudden shot.
  One fled with them like a hunted soul,
  And followed ever
  By ford and river
  The little canoe of the lake patrol.

The virtue of that last line, which may seem a little pat, and even
melodramatic, can be appreciated when the poem is read as a whole: with
slight variation it ends each stanza.  Or there is the dramatic
monologue in which she presents one of the Jesuit martyrs, Gabriel
Lalement.  She has caught the priest stepping aside from his Indian
band during a portage near one of the upper lakes and dreaming
nostalgically of the centres of Canadian civilization during the
seventeenth century:

  Do the French lilies reign
  Over Mont Royal and Stadacona still?
  Up the St. Lawrence comes the spring again,
  Crowning each southward hill
  And blossoming pool with beauty

and then projecting himself rather wearily into his grim future:

  My hour of rest is done;
  On the smooth ripple lifts the long canoe;
  The hemlocks murmur sadly as the sun
  Slants his dim arrows through.
  Whither I go I know not, nor the way,
{64}
  Dark with strange passions, vexed with heathen charms,
  Holding I know not what of life or death;
  Only be Thou beside me day by day,
  Thy rod my guide and comfort, underneath
  Thy everlasting arms.

The lines twist and quiver with restrained feeling; the language is apt
for the record of the quite simple but quite intense state of mind she
is mirroring; and the biblical note, which often sounds a little false
in her work, rings true and clear.

After the Celtic influence, the biblical is next in strength.  She is
bewitched by the biblical parallelisms, and by the biblical imagery
melting into music.  Biblical themes attract her again and again; and
she treats them with a rich orientalism and a never-failing delight in
what is very much of the past.  All her poetry, except a few brief
lyrics, is poetry of the past: the immediate present she was quite
helpless to apprehend in its poetic significance.  Even when the war
forced itself upon her consciousness and she wrote a once famous
sonnet, "Canada to England," she began by hailing

  Great names of thy great captains gone before

and ended by evoking

                    the invulnerable ghosts
  Of all past greatnesses.

When she thought of what the war was fought to preserve she symbolized
what she valued by a daffodil.  When she thought of what soldiers in
German prisons were deprived of, she gathered together images of birds
and squirrels, stars and the new moon, trees, the aroma of burning
leaves and of the rich earth, and the play of the sun on English
beeches.  When she was faced with the need to sum up civilization, she
summed up nature; for her there was {65} nothing else.  And the nature
she loved was nature in her exquisite little details.

Naturism could go no farther.  Marjorie Pickthall had worked the last
and smallest lode.  It was time for a change.



IV

The poetry of Drummond, Service and MacInnes was swept aside after the
First Great War.  It has not counted as an influence since 1918.  The
war brought a brief stimulus to poetry in Canada as in England; elder
poets such as C. G. D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott were stirred
to exquisite laments; a few younger writers wrote lyrics with some
quiet and lofty beauties; nothing good was achieved in the harsher
manners; the one masterpiece was Colonel McCrae's "in Flanders Fields,"
where careful art, studied moderation in tone, and intense as well as
perfectly representative emotion fused to produce a moment's
perfection.  The poetry of the war was also swept aside; and when the
new movements began they were in rivalry with Miss Pickthall and with
the nature-verse of Lampman and Scott, Carman and Roberts.  It should
be remembered that of these five only Lampman was dead--all the others
were still writing poetry similar in tone and virtue to their highest
achievements.

Against the elder poets the sad young men rose in angry revolt; they
were punctually insulted in the radical journals as the "maple tree
school."  The bitter vengefulness with which they were harried by the
generation of their grandchildren is at first exceedingly difficult to
understand.  In the perspective of time it is clear that the elder
poets had all a high concern with craftsmanship, a preoccupation with
genuineness of feeling, and a belief, not shared when they began to
write by the majority of their English-speaking compatriots, that the
development of a distinctive {66} Canadian nationality was under way.
In them the younger poets and critics chiefly disliked two things.  The
elder poets had dealt rather flaccidly with individual character.
Surprisingly little of their work was dramatic or psychological.  When
they abandoned nature it was usually to meditate dreamily on life in
general or to exhort.  In none of them can one find anything in the
manner of Frost's "Death of the Hired Man" or Robinson's "Tasker
Norcross."  What the younger men did not sufficiently remember was that
even in fiction and in biography Canadians had failed to deal firmly
and vividly with character.  The second objection was against the form
of the elder poets.  To read what was said about it in the 'twenties
one would suppose that the elders had held primly aloof from any
measure more modern than the Spenserian stanza or the rhyme royal.  The
truth is more complex.  All the elder writers, and notably Scott and
Carman, were experimental; but they had all come under the influence of
the rich music of Swinburne and Verlaine and accordingly retreated from
any roughness of texture.  Moreover, their long-established prestige
did make it painfully hard for younger poets, penetrated by the alien
method and tone of Eliot, Hopkins and the Metaphysicals, to get a
respectful hearing.

The renewal of our poetry after the war had two independent sources:
one man in Toronto and a coherent group in Montreal.  E. J. Pratt is
the pre-eminent figure in Canadian poetry between the wars: his first
important volume, _A Book of Newfoundland Verse_, belongs to 1923, the
first in which his originality and power were mature, _Titans_, belongs
to 1926; since the latter date his place has been uncontested.  His
work is reserved for extended consideration in a special chapter.  In
Montreal, in the early and middle 'twenties, an original group of
undergraduates conducted literary magazines far out of the common run;
notable among them was _The McGill Fortnightly_, {67} the most
interesting literary magazine English Canadian students have ever
developed.  In its pages appeared most of the early verses of Abraham
Klein, Frank Scott, A. J. M. Smith, and Leo Kennedy who from outside
McGill joined in their quest of strictly contemporary themes and forms.
They were all experimenters, eager to naturalize in Canada the kind of
poetry then being written by Eliot and Pound, all zealots for the
metaphysical verse of the seventeenth century, then being reinterpreted
in Eliot's criticism, and for Emily Dickinson.  Out of their fellowship
there was to come long afterwards the little anthology, _New Provinces,
Poems by Several Authors_, in which Pratt and another Toronto poet,
Robert Finch, also appeared.  Two of the Montreal group have brought
out collections of their verse, Leo Kennedy _The Shrouding_ in 1933,
and Abraham Klein _Hath Not a Jew..._ in 1940.  A book of A. J. M.
Smith's work is long overdue and with a collected edition of E. J.
Pratt is the principal desideratum in Canadian poetry today.  Poetry of
the same sort as theirs is to be found in Dorothy Livesay's _Sign Post_
(1932) and in Anne Marriott's _The Wind Our Enemy_ (1939).  The poetry
of the Montreal group and of their disciples and associates is the core
of Canadian verse during the past twenty years.  Pratt, it must always
be remembered, is a man apart: his poetry has invigorated and liberated
others, but its influence is and must be an impalpable one.

Of the Montreal group, Leo Kennedy is much the simplest.  His range is
narrow.  His best poetry has to do with three themes--the ecstasy of
sexual love, the horror of death, the mystery of resurrection.  When he
thinks of love he usually thinks of death and resurrection; and when he
thinks of death he thinks of resurrection; the three themes are really
phases of one great theme--the cycle of life.  There is a similar
narrowness in the range of form in which he is at his best: but
whatever his stanza may be, and there {68} is considerable variety in
stanza, his movement is rapid, confident, almost ebullient.  When he
attempts a grave or emphatic movement the vitality and charm
evaporates.  Vitality and charm he has, at his best, in a remarkable
intensity in such lines as

  Now that leaves shudder from the hazel limb,
  And poppies pod, and maples whirl their seed,
  And the squirrels dart from private stores to slim
  The oak of acorns with excessive greed

or

  Hawthorns bloom whitely, laburnums shudder
  Profusion from dim boughs--slight daffodils
  Defy the pale predominance of colour.
  April is rather a month for subtle spells.

The lines abound in massed consonants; still they summon one to
pronounce them quickly; and the result is that the lines resound with
an extraordinary intensity, and seem tremendously alive.  Kennedy
himself has a swift, nervous habit of speech and he has found a
movement that exactly fits his own temperament.  Born a little earlier,
he would doubtless have been an almost pure romantic; but his
associations with Frank Scott and Arthur Smith led him to explore Sir
James Frazer and T. S. Eliot, and, seen through Eliot's eyes, the
tragedies and lyrics of the early seventeenth century.  He was thus
enabled to escape from purely lyric verse into more general statements
about love, death and resurrection, and to do so when he was still very
young.  The perfect expression of the young Kennedy under the
influences I have described is in his "Words for a Resurrection":

  Each pale Christ stirring underground
  Splits the brown casket of its root,
  Wherefrom the rousing soil upthrusts
  A narrow, pointed shoot,

{69}

  And bones long quiet under frost
  Rejoice as bells precipitate
  The loud ecstatic sundering,
  The hour inviolate.

  This Man of April walks again--
  Such marvel does the time allow--
  With laughter in His blessed bones,
  And lilies on His brow.

The stamp of Eliot is clear on almost every line, sometimes in a word,
sometimes in an image, sometimes in a movement, but there is a
straining eagerness in that last stanza which is Kennedy's own, and
which is essential to the emotion the poem produces.  That eagerness
comes from the rich romanticism of Kennedy's own self, which no study
could remove.

It is not at all easy to be sure just what Kennedy means by the
resurrection he here celebrates so joyously; but consideration of his
other resurrection pieces leads one to suppose that what he exults in
is simply the endless continuance of material being, a concept which
softens, although it does not abolish the horror he finds in the
processes that go on in the tomb.  The section of _The Shrouding_ in
which "Words for a Resurrection" comes is significantly entitled
"Weapons Against Death."

Much of the work in _The Shrouding_ is somewhat careless.  Kennedy is
an impetuous poet, and one is sure that, like Byron, he resembles the
tiger who, if his first spring is not successful, must return to his
lair and start all over again.  In his more recent poems he has turned
away from Eliot and the seventeenth century.  In 1937, moved by the
Spanish War, he called upon the poets to realize:

  You are part of the turmoil, Eagles, knit to its glory.
  There is work for your strong beaks and the thundering wings,
  For the clean flight of the mind and the sharp perception:
  _There is only a glacial death on the lonely crags_.

{70} Obedient to his own advice, he has written simply, ardently and
sympathetically, with just an occasional phrase whose intricacy and
polish suggest his earlier masters.

Whatever kind of poetry Abraham Klein may write, he always writes as a
Jew.  Like the other members of the Montreal group, he underwent the
influence of Eliot; but usually in the moments when he is nearest to
Eliot, he is also richly and vigorously Jewish.  His early work was
never better than in the "Soire of Velvel Kleinberger," where the
likeness to the Eliot of "Prufrock" and the "Portrait of a Lady" is
obvious.  The first few lines are pure early Eliot:

  In back-room dens of delicatessen stores,
  In curtained parlours of garrulous barber-shops,
  While the rest of the world most comfortably snores
  On mattresses or on more fleshly props

but it is not long before we are restored to a Jewish world, of

                      ... teachers
  With dirty beards and hungry features

of factories with operatives

      having trickled sweat, according to a scale of wages,
  Sewing buttons to warm the navels of your business sages,

and of social revolutionary dreams.  The poem's thread is a card-game
and as the end approaches the significance of the game is steadily
expanded, until Klein makes his mature and profound comment in an
adaptation of a nursery rhyme:

  Hum a hymn of sixpence,
  A tableful of cards
  Fingers slowly shuffling
  Ambiguous rewards.

{71}

  When the deck is opened
  The pauper once more gave
  His foes the kings and aces
  And took himself the knave.

Juxtaposed with this whimsically expressed wisdom is Velvet's foolish
reverie:

  Once more he cuts the cards, and dreams his dream:
  A Rolls-Royce hums within his brain;
  Before it stands a chauffeur tipping his hat,
  'You say that it will rain, Sir; it will rain!'
  Upon his fingers diamonds gleam,
  His wife wears gowns of ultra-Paris fashion,
  And she boasts jewels as large as wondrous eyes,
  The eyes of Og, the giant-king of Bashan.

That last touch is the perfect example of how Klein can use whatever
the early Eliot can teach, and yet remain the Jew, and by remaining the
Jew, as Ludwig Lewisohn has said, contribute something quite new to
English poetry.  In substance and form there is so much that is
imitative; and yet the authentic indestructible Jewishness of Klein has
enabled him to convert much of what he borrowed to his own, already
peculiar ends.  Here and there in the early poems there is verbal and
rhythmic imitation; but as he grew older this was to disappear.

If one is not Jewish, Klein's decision to turn away from the subject
and method of the "Soire" in the direction of Jewish history and
legend must be a sharp disappointment.  In _New Provinces_, along with
the "Soire," he chose to represent himself by a sequence of lyrics on
Spinoza, named "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens," and in some
of these he is indicating the kind of poetry he will in future write.
It is the poetry of a Jew who turns in discontent from the cosmopolitan
world around him, exemplified in the first piece in _Hath Not a Jew..._
by the {72} circle of the Mermaid Tavern, to the world of his own
people, exemplified in the great rabbis.  The Christians he presents
are cruel oppressors, from Polish barons who think nothing of ordering
the slaughter of Jews, to Montreal bourgeois who can never forget that
their Jewish friends are Jews.  Over against the Christians who are
seen always from the outside he sets a Jew-world which is full of charm
and kindness.  A learned man himself, Klein is specially eager to show
that the great rabbis were no dried-out killjoys but men in whom life
and gaiety were abundant: the Baal Shem Tov, who found more piety in a
child's song under the open sky than in a prayer chanted by ten men in
a synagogue, and seeing a child crying bore him to school on his back
and quieted his grief by crossing a stream upon his handkerchief; the
rabbi Elijah who wished to whoop the moon down from the skies so that
he could roll it like a hoop, and the stars so that he could juggle
them like marbles; Reb Paupa

          whose belly so did wax
  It sheltered a camel, hump, and load of flax

or he whose complacent ardour in teaching was such

          I think that in Paradise
  Reb Simcha, with his twinkling eyes,
  Interprets, in some song-spared nook,
  To God the meaning of His book.

The picture is charming and familiar: we are at home where we before
felt strange; and this is so because Klein has reached down to find
something that is universal under the oddities he heaps up.  How true
this is will appear by contrast if one looks at the poems in which
Klein presents the ceremonies of his religion: here there is a surface
richness which may charm for a moment, but there is no power to
universalize the seemingly odd and strange.  Very much of the
collection is given to poetry of this kind.  More {73} goes to nursery
verse, in which affection lends some vitality to a texture which is
without Klein's usual distinction and force.  As Leon Edel has pointed
out, there is much negligence in the simpler poems and simpler passages
in _Hath Not a Jew..._, so much indeed that in general the volume may
be said to fall short of what "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens"
had promised.

As an achievement that poem does not wholly satisfy; some of its
sections are without adequate development of theme and the thread of
the poem's development from beginning to end is broken more than once.
But in it are some of the best passages in our poetry between the wars,
passages such as this from the psalm which composes section VIII:


The wind through the almond-trees spreads the fragrance of thy robes;
the turtle-dove twittering utters diminutives of thy love; at the
rising of the sun I behold thy countenance.

Yea and in the crescent moon, thy little finger's fingernail....

Wherefore I said to the wicked, Go to the ant, thou sluggard, seek thou
an audience with God.

On the swift wings of a star, even on the numb legs of a snail, thou
dost move, O lord.

A babe in swaddling clothes laughs at the sunbeams on the door's
lintel; the sucklings play with thee; with thee Kopernik holds
communion through a lens.


or this from section IV, where Klein is close to the Gautier stanza
Eliot has so often used:

  Soul of Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza bids you,
  Forsake the god suspended in mid-air
  Seek you that other Law, and let Jehovah
  Play his game of celestial solitaire.

Klein has already passed out of the phases which _Hath Not a Jew..._
records, and it is reasonable to hope that in {74} later works the full
promise of his beginnings will be realized.  That promise was as high
as any Canadian poet has ever given.

Frank Scott, now professor of Constitutional Law in McGill University
and one of the leading humanitarian idealists in Canada, began with
delicate lyrics of exquisite imagery and muted sound; he has since
filled his verse with a warm and angry concern for social injustice and
social reform.  Sometimes, wishing to appeal to a large and relatively
uneducated audience, he has striven for a simplicity which is almost
unpatterned; again he has contrived to find for his social ideas forms
at once simple and beautifully designed.

Recognized from the outset as the central figure in the group, A. J. M.
Smith proceeded from McGill to Edinburgh where he undertook graduate
studies in the poetry of the seventeenth century with the counsel of
Sir Herbert Grierson.  A professor of English at Michigan State
College, he has shown the strongest critical interest of all our poets;
and in an article contributed to what is perhaps our main critical
journal, _The University of Toronto Quarterly_, he sets forth the
tenets of the younger poets with vigorous simplicity:


Set higher standards for yourself than the organized mediocrity of the
authors' associations dares to impose.  Be traditional catholic and
alive.  Study the great masters of clarity and intensity....  Study the
poets of to-day whose language is living, and whose line is sure....
Read the French and German poets whose sensibility is most intensely
that of the modern world....  Read, if you can, the Roman satirists....

And remember lastly that poetry does not permit the rejection of every
aspect of the personality except intuition and sensibility.  It must be
written by the whole man.  It is an intelligent activity, and it ought
to compel the respect of the generality of intelligent men.  If it is a
good, it is a good in itself.


{75} This pronouncement, with which his article concludes, would, I
believe, satisfy almost all the younger poets, those in the Montreal
group and most of those younger still.  The principles he sets forth
are embodied in Mr. Smith's own verse.  Much of this is acutely
religious, sometimes in the metaphysical manner, sometimes more in the
tone of Hopkins.  Some of it is coldly satirical, some politically
intense, some politically disillusioned.  Little of it has to do with
nature, although Mr. Smith has an eye not far inferior to Lampman's for
natural detail.  Whatever the theme, the execution is beautifully
deliberate, and the feeling or thought fully mature and intense.

Loosely attachable to the Montreal group are Ralph Gustafson and Robert
Finch.  A professor of French literature, a delicate and deliberate
painter, an enthusiast for modern music, Mr. Finch's preoccupations
have been rather different from those of his Montreal contemporaries.
His verse is full of suggestions of French poets from Mallarm down,
and his range and use of imagery has unusual originality and purity.
No Canadian poet in our time has had in greater degree the love of the
word or of design as an autonomous value.  His poetry, always
solicitous of musical effect, has steadily moved towards spareness and
simplicity.  Mr. Gustafson's art is less delicate but more brilliant.
The impress of Gerard Hopkins' passionate, contorted work is upon many
of his pieces; fascinating as the Hopkins techniques are in his use of
them, one doubts, at times, whether the substance inevitably required
so intense and so elaborate a treatment.  Whatever question his poetry
inspires, Mr. Gustafson is always notable as a curious and striking
craftsman.

A younger writer, coming too late to feel the full impact of
metaphysical verse or of Eliot's earlier manner, Anne Marriott
immediately acquired a solid reputation with her first work, _The Wind
Our Enemy_, which came out as a chap-book in 1939.  In this poem of
about two {76} hundred and fifty lines is the first striking
presentation in verse of the great droughts of the decade.  After a
spirited prelude in which the themes are suggested, Miss Marriott
paints the wheatfields in their productive glory; she then reveals the
successive effects on the farmers of year upon year of drought--a wry
courage, then a grudging acceptance of relief, pathetic efforts at
communal amusement, decay of fibre, and yet persisting through all the
phases a residue of indestructible will; the psychological drama is
firmly set against a vivid background of caked earth, shrivelled grain
and gaunt farm-animals.  It is a great subject, one of the greatest our
poets have approached.  The manner is not quite equal to it; the scraps
of conversation in a singularly impoverished language will not bear the
emotional weight assigned to them when they come to interrupt the
passages of high poetry.  More serious is the imperfect success in
welding the varied elements of the poem into a totality.  It remains
true that none of our recent poets has had a more interesting
beginning; and if her second work, a radio-play with choruses in verse,
_Calling Adventurers_, fell short of her first, it fell short in ways
that show that Miss Marriott was moving towards a greater command of
the large variety of elements she uses.  In a third chapbook, _Salt
Marsh_, most of the best qualities in _The Wind Our Enemy_ reappear;
but Miss Marriott has still to take any important step beyond her first
achievement.

The newest of new voices is Mr. Earle Birney's in his _David and Other
Poems_.  "David" is a narrative of a kind new to our poetry,
matter-of-fact in manner and, until the crisis is reached,
matter-of-fact in substance also.  It is a tale of two young men
climbing mountains along the British Columbian coast, David an
experienced mountaineer, Bobbie a novice.  The early sections of the
poem--it comes just short of two hundred lines--are rich in pictures
and impressions, in passages such as

{77}

                              Then the darkening firs
  And the sudden whirring of waters that knifed down a fern-hidden
  Cliff and splashed unseen into mist in the shadows

and

          Coming down we picked in our hats the bright
  And sunhot raspberries, eating them under a mighty
  Spruce, while a marten moving like quicksilver scouted us

passages which for all their detail are full of vitality and
suggestion, urging the reader to participate fully in the experience of
the characters.  These early sections carry also a load of learning,
the mountaineer's learning of rocks and fossils, a load perhaps heavier
than the prevailing note of simplicity requires.  The two characters
are securely realized, the relation between them is warm without
ceasing to be simple and clear.  The tragedy comes quietly; Bobbie's
foothold gives way and David instinctively turns in a trice to steady
him; the added strain is enough to make David slide, and at once he is
gone.  It is all over in an instant, the quickness an essential part of
the effect Mr. Birney is trying to produce.  The central scene is yet
to come: it is the dialogue between the two when Bobbie has made his
way to where David lies partly paralyzed.  Mr. Birney has found simple
words, brief phrases, which bear the weight of David's plea to be
pushed from the ledge on which he is caught and die in a
six-hundred-foot drop, and of Bobbie's plea that he wait till help can
be brought.  Bobbie yields, staggers back to camp, and

  I said that he fell straight to the ice where they found him,
  And none but the sun and the incurious clouds have lingered
  Around the marks of that day on the ledge of the Finger,
  That day, the last of my youth, on the last of our mountains.

It is impossible to over-praise that close: magic has entered in with
the last line, giving an unpredictable extension of {78} meaning, and
at one stroke raising the experience of the poem to another level where
pain and constraint and self-reproach are no longer matter-of-fact but
full of tranquillizing imaginative suggestion.  "David" does not stand
alone.  The little collection--twenty-one poems in all--shows
repeatedly that in Mr. Birney's work there is authentic originality; he
owes nothing at all to earlier Canadian writing and scarcely
anything--when he is fully himself--to recent verse anywhere else.  He
has a harsh and intense sensibility which makes his pictures and
rhythms fresh and living, and his technical accomplishment is
brilliant, at times bewildering.

More conservative strains have been abundantly represented in the
poetry of the past twenty years: a glance through the best anthology of
recent Canadian verse, Mrs. Ethel Hume Bennett's _New Harvesting_
(1938), will show that the majority of competent verse-writers in
Canada have been little affected by the movement which began with the
_McGill Fortnightly_.  Some of the conservative writers have struck
notes of power, if not of originality: Mrs. Louise Morey Bowman has
written imagist poetry of real distinction; in "Laodamia" and some
shorter pieces Miss Audrey Alexandra Brown has brought a new richness
in colour and sound to romantic narrative and song; Dr. George Herbert
Clarke, notably in his odes, has demonstrated repeatedly a mastery of
technique and a feeling for the grand style; Mr. A. S. Bourinot and Mr.
Kenneth Leslie have written sonnets of musical sweetness and, often, of
intense and finely controlled feeling; Mr. L. A. MacKay--as well as
being our most angry and clever satirist--has written rich, descriptive
pieces recalling Heredia and the middle manner of William Morris; many
members of the Roberts family have written nature verse accurate,
musical and striking, if never approaching the excellence of their
chieftain; perhaps the richest natural endowment of any of the poets in
this group is that of the most prolific among them {79} by far, Mr.
Wilson Macdonald.  He resembles Carman in many ways, in his delight in
vague and subtle music, in his quest of vagabondia, in his
preoccupation with his states of mind; in none of these is his
resemblance to Carman closer than in his lack of self-criticism.
Between the range of his average performance and that of his few fine
lyrics the gap is astonishing; but when he is at his best he is
admirable indeed, intense in feeling, sensitive in imagery, uncannily
musical.




{80}

CHAPTER THREE

The Masters

1.  ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN

I

In the United States and in England the most widely known and admired
of our poets has been Bliss Carman.  In Canada Lampman is the nearest
approach to a national classic in verse, and the passing of decades has
confirmed his status if it has not very much widened the circle of his
readers.  Lampman contributed steadily to the literary magazines in the
United States; his reputation at home was given its impetus by William
Dean Howells's review of his first volume in _Harper's_; and his second
collection was brought out by a Boston publisher; it remains true,
however, that American interest in him was slight and temporary, and
has for long been quite dead.  His case has a special significance for
the student of Canadian poetry, who must inquire whether the praise he
has had at home is supported by the intrinsic merit of his work, and
whether there are special reasons why this poet should be neglected
abroad--for the English, too, make no mention of him now--reasons which
need not perhaps prevent us from claiming that his poetry deserves to
be read everywhere that people care for what is authentic in literature.

Lampman's early verse is a delicate record of the surface of nature.
Sometimes his manner of recording it reflects his close study of
Wordsworth, as in the early "Winter Hues Recalled," which abounds in
such notations as this:

{81}

                        Ere yet I turned
  With long stride homeward, being heated
  With the loose swinging motion, weary too,
  Nor uninclined to rest, a buried fence,
  Whose topmost log just shouldered from the snow,
  Made me a seat....

Everything in the manner of this is imitative of "The Prelude,"
slavishly imitative, if you will; what is significant is that taking so
much from Wordsworth as he does, the young poet applies it so surely
and so sharply to scenes and situations in his own immediate world, in
this instance a wintry field surrounded by a snake-fence and a
snow-shoer making his way across, something as Canadian as pea-soup and
maple-sugar.  It was the same with his borrowings from Keats, the
strongest and most lasting influence upon his style and upon his
handling of nature.  In the first of the poems in the manuscript book
from which he made up his first collection occurs the line:

  Mute maker of a soft pale-petalled rhyme

and that Keatsian accent marks more than half of Lampman's early
manuscripts.  Again, however, he brings his study of Keats to bear upon
his immediate world.  He did not believe that the piece from which this
line comes was worthy of being published; and he also laid aside the
poem from which I shall now take an excerpt, a poem in which he is
trying to catch the quality of a late August day through which autumn
is beginning to make itself felt:

    All day cool shadows o'er drowsy kine
  The wide elms in the windless pasture flung;
  The tufted branches of the sun-soaked pine
    Grey-silvery in the burning noon-tide hung;
  The light winds clattered in the poplar leaves
  The squirrels robbed among the golden sheaves.

{82} That sun-soaked pine, those clattering poplar leaves, are
presented with Keats's sensibility; they and the squirrels and the elms
are taken straight from the Ontario landscape.  The desire for sharp
accuracy and the nervous sensibility--these were the great qualities
the young Lampman had within himself; he sought from the English
romantics, and later from Arnold and Tennyson, instruction not in what
to see or how to feel, but in how to express what he saw and how he
felt.  It would be fatuous to expect that a novice could find within
himself the secret of adequate expression: he went to Keats and
Wordsworth as Tennyson did, and as Keats went to Spenser and
Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to Milton.  What is remarkable is that like
them he found within himself the secret of vision and emotion.  What
one will wish to know is whether as he became more practised in
expression he could emerge from the tutelage of Wordsworth and Keats
and speak to us directly, sensitively, powerfully, in a personal idiom
mirroring an interesting and original personality.



II

Before we approach the poems in which Lampman's record of nature is at
its best, the external factors in his development should be made clear.
He came from an extremely conservative environment; indeed it could
have been more conservative, more typical of the ascendant party in
Upper Canada only by being opulent.  On both sides of his family he was
descended from Loyalists, and on his mother's side, at least, his
ancestors had been men of substance in the American colonies.
Lampman's father, a Church of England rector who delighted in the
literature of Queen Anne's time, spent his life in small, conservative,
southern Ontario towns and villages.  The boy was sent to {83} a
private school kept by a man who at one time had been headmaster of the
principal Tory academy in the province; from this Lampman passed to
Trinity College School, which prepared boys for entrance into Trinity
University, the Church of England college in Toronto; and in due time
Lampman went up to Toronto, not to the provincial university but to
Trinity, where he was in company which was prevailingly Tory and
Anglican, and under the influence of teachers who were clerics of
English birth and education.  Every element in his early environment
told against the development of Canadianism in Lampman, but Canadianism
did develop very early.

One of the most charming pages in our literary history is that in which
Lampman tells of his overpowering emotion when, a youth of twenty, he
came on the newly published work of another Canadian youth of twenty,
the _Orion_ of Charles G. D. Roberts:


"Like most of the young fellows about me, I had been under the
depressing conviction that we were situated hopelessly on the outskirts
of civilization, where no art and no literature could be, and that it
was useless to expect that anything great could be done by any of our
companions, still more useless to expect that we could do it ourselves.
I sat up most of the night reading and re-reading _Orion_ in a state of
the wildest excitement and when I went to bed I could not sleep.  It
seemed to me a wonderful thing that such work could be done by a
Canadian, by a young man, one of ourselves.  It was like a voice from
some new paradise of art, calling to us to be up and doing.  A little
after sunrise I got up and went out into the college grounds.  The air,
I remember, was full of the odour and cool sunshine of the spring
morning.  The dew was thick upon the grass, all the birds of our
Maytime seemed to be singing in the oaks, and there were even a few
adder tongues and trilliums still blooming on the slope of the little
ravine.  But everything was transfigured for me beyond description,
bathed in an old world radiance of beauty, the magic of the lines was
sounding in my ears, those divine {84} verses as they seemed to me,
with their Tennyson-like richness and strange earth-loving Greekish
flavour.  I have never forgotten that morning, and its influence has
always remained with me."


Could a nation's poetic history begin with a more charming freshness?
It is delightful to look back across the years to that bright spring
morning in the semi-wild meadows about the old Trinity building, to
evoke the delicate, young Ontario poet destined to die long before he
had grown to his full power, reading from the slim booklet of the young
man from New Brunswick who is now, after the passing of more than sixty
years, shaping verses in the very city where so long ago Lampman caught
from him the assurance that a Canadian literature was waiting to be
born.  The delight he felt in that first volume of Roberts was a
delight springing from his need to feel that Canadians were not, to use
the phrase of Henry James, among the disinherited of art, to feel that
great things of a special sort might be done here and now.  It must, I
think, be assumed that Lampman's Canadianism was of the rarest and most
precious kind, that it was instinctive.

It was destined to grow in circumstances not much more hospitable than
those of his home and education.  A few months after leaving college,
Lampman entered the service of the federal Post Office at Ottawa, and
he was to remain a humble, ill-paid clerk in this department for the
rest of his life.  In 1883, when he came to Ottawa, Sir John A.
Macdonald was Prime Minister; a boom was on; the Canadian Pacific
Railway was the nexus of political activity; the sixteen-year-old
Confederation was a business civilization.  It was impossible for
Lampman to interest himself in the typical expressions of Canadian
life.  A civil servant in a sub-Arctic lumber village converted into a
political cock-pit--this was Goldwin Smith's account of Lampman's
Ottawa--he saw the seamy side of politics at close range.  How complete
his disgust was many a line {85} makes plain.  As he saw member upon
member and minister upon minister play his part in the pit, he
concluded that they were indifferent and even defiant towards truth and
principle and that for them the administration of a country was a
shabby but lucrative game.  I am told that he was accustomed to
describe the man who was his own minister in the last years of his life
as Moloch.  Nowhere in his published verse is his contempt for the
politician so fierce as in this epigram which he kept to himself and
his friends:

  From the seer with his snow-white crown
    Through every sort and condition
  Of bipeds, all the way down
    To the pimp and the politician.

Nor did he judge the money-makers more mildly.  Again an unpublished
piece supplies the strongest evidence, the harsh "Epitaph on a Rich
Man":

  He made himself a great name in his day,
  A glittering fellow on the world's hard way;
  He tilled and seeded and reaped plentifully
  From the black soil of human misery.
  He won great riches, and they buried him
  With splendour that the people's want makes grim;
  But some day he shall not be called to mind
  Save as the curse and pestilence of his kind.

Political trickery and financial exploitation seemed to him to be the
permanent staples of the city: it bears the curse of gold, the curse of
harassed, mindless toil, the curse of shallow, aimless speed.  Through
the darkness of midnight Lampman hears the mill-wheels turning on the
river, and the trains roaring inland out of the station.  Nor does he
expect that the future will be nobler: in his apocalyptic piece, "The
City of the End of Things," originally entitled "The City of
Machinery," he projects a Butlerian {86} nightmare of man as victim of
mechanical civilization.  "The issue of the things that are," as he
calls it in a sub-title, is a pandemonium of noise, where

  The beat, the thunder and the hiss
  Cease not, and change not, night nor day.

Man will not be able to sustain life in its mephitic atmosphere: he
will be superseded by machines; a carved idol of an idiot will preside
over its clangor; and the final state of the city shall be one in which
all is destroyed except the huge, idiotic face.

It should now be clear why Lampman retreated from the city.  Urban life
was in principle defective.  As he moved about in Ottawa year after
year, as one political administration gave way to another, and one
piece of skulduggery surpassed another, only one quality of the city
continued to please him: the beauty of buildings.  He liked to take his
stand on the river-bank or on the hills on the Quebec side, especially
at sunrise or sunset, and look back at the great group of buildings
which stood even then on Parliament Hill; man-made though they were, he
found them congruent with the grandeur and vigour of the landscape into
which they melted, adding a new charm.  It was the same with St.
Catharines, that small city on the Niagara Peninsula which he praises
in a sonnet significantly entitled "A Niagara Landscape."  Viewing the
rich plains and orchards, dotted with towers and dim villages, he finds
the scene crowned:

    Far to westward, where yon pointed towers
  Rise faint and ruddy from the vaporous blue,
    Saint Catharines, city of the host of flowers.


Nature drew Lampman not only because it was great and beautiful in
itself; but just as much because it was a {87} refuge from the society
he had found to be neither.  Again and again he sounds the note of
nature the refuge; for instance, in his Swinburnian piece, "Freedom,"
entitled in the manuscript "Out of Prison," he is seeking escape

  Out of the heart of the city begotten
    Of the labour of men and their manifold hands,
  Whose souls, that were sprung from the earth in her morning,
  No longer regard or remember her warning,
    Whose hearts in the furnace of care have forgotten
      For ever the scent and hue of her lands.

If Lampman was a good Canadian, he was so in his own fashion.  Whatever
might be said of Canadian politics and Canadian society and Canadian
character, the Canadian landscape was grand and beautiful--no one could
wish for anything grander or more beautiful.  For the time at least, he
believed, the Canadian poet should make himself its sensitive recorder
and thus reflect the nation without tarnishing his poetry.  The
Canadian poet, he has said, must depend on nature and on himself, and
on these alone.



III

It is now easier to consider the question raised some time
past--whether Lampman in his approach to nature could free himself from
imitation and find an utterance which would carry adequately what he
saw and how he felt.  Even in his first collection, published when he
was twenty-seven, there are passages and a few whole poems in which
Lampman is master of his emotion and vision, and speaks for himself.
When I first read him the poem which convinced me that he was a poet of
authentic distinction {88} was "Heat," written as early as 1883, a
piece to which I shall return.  The quality of "Heat" is to be found in
some of the early sonnets, for instance, "Late November":

  The far-off leafless forests slowly yield*
    To the thick-driving snow.  A little while
    And night shall darken down.  In shouting file
  The woodmen's carts go by me homeward-wheeled
  Past the thin fading stubbles, half-concealed,
    Now golden-gray, sowed softly through with snow,
    Where the last ploughman follows still his row,
  Turning black furrows through the whitening field.
  Far off the village lamps begin to gleam,
    Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way;
      The hills grow wintry white, and bleak winds moan
      About the naked uplands.  I alone,
    Am neither sad, nor shelterless, nor gray,
  Wrapped round with thought, content to watch and dream.

*Superior I think to the reading in the printed text:
    The hills and leafless forests slowly yield.


Lampman's method as landscapist has been carefully studied by Mr. W. E.
Collin, who comments on the precision of the details, on "an intangible
quietness and repose and warmth" that "linger over the lines and
colours," on the selection of words for "their aura of high
visibility."  To keep to terms used in the sonnet that has been quoted,
Lampman _watches_, with an eye sharper than any other Canadian poet's,
an eye which appreciates not only the contours and colours of
particular objects but just as sharply the relations between objects,
and Lampman _dreams_, he does not merely record but also feels the
essence of the scene in which he finds himself, the essence here of
helpless bleakness with a strange, moving beauty of its own.  It
appears to me that the sensibility this sonnet reveals is a highly
personal one, that what Lampman is {89} telling us is something that no
one else has quite told us; and it appears to me, also, that he has
told us what he had to tell in his own way, that he has escaped from
his early masters.  "Late November" is great nature poetry.

How much of Lampman's nature poetry is comparable with this sonnet?
Keeping still to the first collection, I should say that few of the
longer pieces have anything so excellent and that none but "Heat"
maintains it throughout.  Perhaps the most remarkable work in the
volume is a sequence of five sonnets entitled "The Frogs," which
expresses the permanent core of Lampman's nature philosophy.  These are
not the ordinary bull-frogs but those shy creatures whose thin, sweet
voices rise in chorus in the early summer from many a pool and swamp in
Ontario and Quebec.  "Quaint uncouth dreamers, voices high and strange"
Lampman calls them; and as he listens to them, in that dreamy mood
already noted, he comes to believe that they are the organ by which
nature seeks to communicate to us her inmost meaning.  Morning, noon,
and night they sing to us, as nature tells her simple, deep
significance over and over, so that we may be sure to catch it; as we
listen we are made to dream, taken out of our ordinary personalities,
washed clean of all our preoccupations.  Nothing else conserves its
reality,

  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 pain are shadows faint and fleet,
  And dreams are real, and life is only sweet.

There, for the young Lampman, is the whole meaning of nature; there for
him is the truth of life.  His sequence abounds in phrases of the
richest suggestiveness, touched {90} with Keats and Matthew Arnold, but
his own, phrases such as

  The wonder of the ever-healing night

  Still with soft throats unaltered in your dream.

All of them in the tone that the theme requires, these are of his own
coinage.



IV

One other escape from the routine and meanness that he detected in his
environment was available to Lampman.  For a long time critics have
complained of Lampman's failure to treat of love.  MacMechan spoke
mildly of the lack, and Mr. Collin more emphatically insists that "the
love-passion, so conspicuously absent in his poetry, may have been
dried up under the austere respectability of Ontario and the polite
humanism of Matthew Arnold," an author Mr. Collin pursues with stubborn
scorn.  To a young man with Keatsian sensibility, indifferent to the
social and economic currents about him, love and the poetry of love
might well be a preoccupation.  To Lampman they were, as his
manuscripts disclose.  Two unpublished narratives, "Arnulph" and "White
Margaret," are packed with love.  "Arnulph," the richer of the two, the
story of a vassal's love for his maiden lady, recalls again and again
"The Eve of St. Agnes," in lines such as these:

  I must die, or with my whole soul drink;
  Unless between my hungering arms I fold
  Her whole dear loveliness to have and hold
  Forever, I can no more rest or bear
  This broken life or breathe the sunless air.

Stronger evidence and greater power appear here and there in a sequence
of eight sonnets, written in 1884-1885, and {91} reflecting his love
for Emma Playter, whom he was to marry.  A pair of curtal sonnets of
the same period and quality, demonstrably addressed to the same person,
are entitled in the manuscript "Praise and Prayer."  Where so much is
notable for intensity and so little for accomplished art, it is hard to
know what should be quoted: probably none of the sonnets is all in all
so remarkable as the second in the "Praise and Prayer" set:

  Ah, God were very good to me, I said,
  If this, this only, he would grant for alms,
  That one day I might hold her yellow head,
  With all its locks between my worshipping palms,
  And bend and kiss the innocent lips upheld;
  And the fair cheeks caress from youth to eld.
  Ah me; I would have toiled, as no man did
  Ever on earth, or with a strength divine
  Have braved the whole hard world, if she did bid;
  Only to touch her glorious lips and twine
  Thrice blessed her two yielded hands in mine,
  And tell her all that in my heart lay hid.

For such poetry I should not think of claiming the praise that is due
to the early nature verse.  Lampman's visual powers always desert him
when he turns from nature to woman; his sensibility remains acute but
his gift of language is sometimes withdrawn from him as it was from
Keats.  But there is no question, either in this poem or in his love
poetry as a whole, that his passion was intense: and his own awareness
of the intensity is shown by his having pinned the pages on which these
sonnets were written in his manuscript book and requested his friends
not to remove the pins when they were going through the collection.
That is even more revealing than his decision that only one of the
sonnets should be published.  The chief interest of this group of poems
is psychological: it is important for us to know that love was an early
theme of Lampman's, a {92} theme to which from 1884 on he returned
again and again.  It was to be a long time before another Canadian poet
wrote of passionate love with such fire and force.



V

_Among the Millet_ had appeared in 1888; five years later Lampman
brought out a second and slighter collection, _Lyrics of Earth_.  It is
disappointing that so few of the notes he now strikes are different
from those in the earlier book.  It is disappointing but I do not think
that it is surprising.  I have mentioned Lampman's claim that a
Canadian poet was dependent solely on nature and on himself.  After
making that observation, he went on to say:


He is almost without the exhilaration of lively and frequent literary
intercourse--that force and variety of stimulus which counts for so
much in the fructification of ideas.  The human mind is like a plant,
it blossoms in order to be fertilised, and to bear seed must come into
actual contact with the mental dispersion of others.  Of this natural
assistance the Canadian writer gets the least possible.


There is no doubt that Lampman is here describing his own case.  Duncan
Campbell Scott, looking back on his friend's career a quarter century
after his death, has told us that Lampman was unusually dependent on
the society about him and that if in Ottawa he had found a more
stimulating society his achievement would have been greater by far.  It
is indicative that Lampman clung so long to the associations that he
formed in college, as if failing to discover an adequate milieu in the
capital.  Mr. Scott's picture of Lampman's life in Ottawa is depressing:


He felt the oppression of the dullness of the life about us more keenly
than I did; for he had fewer channels of escape {93} [Lampman was not a
deep or wide reader, nor was he a musician] and his responsibilities
were heavier; he had little if any enjoyment in the task-round of every
day, and however much we miss the sense of tedium in his best work,
most assuredly it was with him present in the days of his week and the
weeks of his year.  He had real capacity for gaiety and for the width
and atmosphere of a varied and complex life, not as an actor in it
perhaps, but as a keen observer and as a drifter upon its surface, one
in whom the colour and movement of life would have created many
beautiful and enchanting forms.  But he was compelled to work without
that stimulus, in a dull environment....


Nature and himself--those were all he had, except for a few friends,
notably Mr. Scott and Wilfred Campbell, with whom, for a year or so, he
made a trio to conduct a literary department in a Toronto daily, and a
small group who were interested in socialist ideals.  Nature he appears
to have felt by 1888 as strongly as he would ever feel her; the very
title of the second collection establishes that it, too, is primarily
nature verse; and the nature pieces that predominate in it are largely
interchangeable with those in _Among the Millet_.  By 1893 Lampman had
a firmer mastery of what he had learned from Keats: one has but to
compare the "June" of the second volume with the "April" or "Among the
Timothy" of the first to appreciate the advance.  In the later pieces
the language is more uniformly admirable, and the rhythms a little
freer.  But all in all the treatment of nature is almost the same, the
idea of nature is exactly the same.  What of the poet's self?
Lampman's favoured vehicle for disclosing what was going on within
himself was the sonnet; in the first collection there are thirty
sonnets, in the second, none.  _Lyrics of Earth_ [1893] is a very
unreflective book.  The best clue to the poet's mind that it furnishes
comes in the long poem, "Winter-Store," written at the close of 1889,
where he sets side by side, as he had so often done, the world of
nature and the world of man.  In winter pent in the city, he {94} would
have his spirit subsist on the sense impressions garnered in the other
seasons of the year; as it strives to do so, suddenly the still, sad
music of humanity breaks in:

  Yet across the windy night
  Comes upon its wings a cry;
  Fashioned forms and modes take flight,
  And a vision sad and high
  Of the labouring world down there
  Where the lights burn red and warm
  Pricks my soul with sudden stare.

And no fragrant memory of April or June quite suffices to divert his
attention from social evil and perversion.  There is no doubt that the
longer he lived in Ottawa, and the more he winced at his bondage of
clerical taskwork, the surer he became that our constitution of society
was incompatible with the good life for man in general.

What the good life was and what it supposed, we shall presently see in
some of his later poems.  When _Lyrics of Earth_ appeared Lampman had
only six years to live; and no further collection of his appeared
during his lifetime.  He did, however, plan a volume to be named
_Alcyone and Other Poems_ and had even read the final proofs.  The
pieces it was to consist of have been grouped in the collected edition
which by the zeal of Duncan Campbell Scott came out the year after the
poet died.  As evidence of how Lampman desired to approach his readers
in his third trial they deserve corporate consideration, and we shall
see that the _Alcyone_ volume has much to say about the good life and
its opposite.

At first glance it seems very similar to _Among the Millet_, another
mixture of sonnets that are chiefly pictorial and atmospheric, rich
nature verse, a few lyrical cries and a miscellany of meditative verse.
Closer study will disclose that there are notable differences,
technical and intellectual.  {95} Except in a handful of sonnets, the
_Alcyone_ collection has not much pure or nearly pure nature poetry: to
describe the surface of nature, to catch the tone of a natural scene,
to record his own responses to the procession of the seasons and the
comings and goings of the birds, is no longer enough.  Scott's
observation that "the only existence he coveted was that of a bushman,
to be constantly hidden in the heart of the woods" has been taken too
literally by Mr. Collin.  At the end as at the beginning, Lampman was
happiest when he was melting into the landscape; but at the end he was
no longer dependably at peace when he was so lost in nature: the
embrace was now a drug and often he both feared and foresaw the
awakening.  The note predominant in _Among the Millet_ was that of
tranquil happiness; in _Alcyone and Other Poems_, it is that of
intellectual and spiritual struggle.



VI

In tracing Lampman through his last years the sonnets whose first
appearance, at least in book form, was in the collected edition are a
valuable supplement to the _Alcyone_ pieces.  They are astonishingly
varied in theme, ranging from delicate nature vignettes, through harsh
and powerful insights into nature's grander aspects, to reflections,
sometimes very forceful, on moral ideas and human oddities.  Lampman
can still strike the note of Keatsian richness, as in the vivid close
of "Across the Pea-Fields:

  Across these blackening rails into the light
    I lean and listen, lolling drowsily;
  On the fence-corner, yonder to the right,
    A red squirrel whisks and chatters; nearer by
    A little old brown woman on her knees
    Searches the deep hot grass for strawberries

{96} Little of such rich work as that last line belongs to the last
years.  Lampman was then more likely to pierce through the surface to
some significance in nature which bore upon man's fate, as in the end
of "A Summer Evening":

  Peaceful the world, and peaceful grows my heart.
  The gossip cricket from the friendly grass
  Talks of old joys and takes the dreamer's part.
  Then night, the healer, with unnoticed breath,
  And sleep, dark sleep, so near, so like to death.

This utterance, seven years later than "Across the Pea-Fields," may
tell of peace and claim peace, but how uneasy it is, how deeply stirred
with gloom in comparison with the earlier poem!  Uneasiness runs
through many of the moral sonnets such as "Xenophanes" (1892) or
"Chaucer" (1894) or "Passion" (1896) or "To the Ottawa River" (1898).
Still the uneasiness in the sonnets is restrained by the purity of the
form and for the sharpest and fullest expressions of Lampman's
anxieties we must turn to the major poems in the _Alcyone_ volume.
"The City of the End of Things" has already been mentioned; it is
perhaps the strongest expression of Lampman's social pessimism.  It is
not, however, intellectually so impressive as "The Land of Pallas," a
long Utopian piece where Lampman sets forth his social ideal only to
concede that it is unattainable.

The land he dreams of is one where voices are sweet, with the essential
sweetness of fine feelings; where houses and gardens are quiet and
beautiful; where work goes on in the open air and is followed by kindly
festival; where everyone has enough and no one has great wealth or
great power; where there is no army, no judiciary, no caste, no
marriage, no king; where honour is reserved to the masters of language
and wisdom; where one man understands his neighbour as an affinity and
is understood in return.  As in Erewhon machinery has been scrapped and
stored in {97} museums to remind the malcontent of an era of horror.
This is the land of Pallas--it is almost Morris's "Nowhere": we could
attain it, Lampman says, if we wished; but its advocate is repressed by
the rulers of our society as an anarch and by the masses avoided as a
madman.  Originally this poem, written in 1892, ended on the note of
pure despair:

  Then I returned upon my footsteps madly guessing,
    And many a day thereafter with feet sad and sore
  I sought to win me back into that land of blessing,
    But I had lost my way, nor could I find it more.

Subsequently Lampman dropped this stanza and struck a note of resolute
if limited cheer:

  And still I preached, and wrought, and still I bore my message,
    For well I knew that on and upward without cease
  The spirit works for ever, and by Faith and Presage
    That somehow yet the end of human life is peace

Lampman's despair went deep but never so deep as to destroy or even
disturb his intuition that the core of the universe is sound.  Society
can corrupt man and does: Ottawa had sought to corrupt Lampman.  Man
can resist corruption by maintaining close and passionate contact with
nature: this Lampman did summer and winter, in fact and in imagination.
If, as he says in "The Poet's Song," the fountain should run dry, one
has but to hasten to the wilds and the life of the spirit will be
renewed.  Renewal and resistance to corruption may also flow from that
rare accomplishment, reciprocal understanding between two human spirits,

  When ardour cleaves to ardour, truth to truth.

Lampman's pessimism is purely social.



{98}

VII

It should now be evident that in his later years Lampman's conception
of life was much more comprehensive than his readers and interpreters
have generally supposed.  "It is idle to conjecture what the course of
his development might have been," Scott declared, unveiling the
memorial cairn at Morpeth, "but one can hazard that it would broadly
have tended towards the drama of life and away from the picture of
nature."  It may perhaps be objected that his widening range of
interest was not deeply significant for his poetry, that his best work
at the end as at the beginning of his life was in his record of the
surface of nature and of his responses to it.  Undoubtedly the poetic
beauty of "The Land of Pallas"--excluded by Duncan Campbell Scott from
the selected edition of 1925--is far inferior to the poetic beauty of,
let us say, "Heat" or "The Frogs."  Is there any poem composed in his
last years that can be set beside these nature pieces without suffering
by the comparison, a poem reflecting the widening of his interest?  I
think that nowhere has he gone beyond the poetic beauty of a poem
celebrating Daulac and his companions at the Long Sault, a poem on
which he was working a few months before his death.  He had a great
theme--against the background of the Ottawa and the forests, in the
spring of 1660, Daulac and his little band of French Canadians held a
dilapidated fort for about ten days against an overwhelming number of
Iroquois, continuing to fight till all had been grievously wounded and
all but four were dead.  Their resistance ended an Iroquois project of
descending the river to sack the little settlement at Montreal.  The
issue was epic in significance; the background was grand; the incident
superbly heroic in quality.  The subject might well have been treated
in a long narrative {99} but Lampman preferred to concentrate tightly
upon the climactic action and to despatch the whole in just short of a
hundred lines.  The entire poem--it is just about to appear in
print---cannot be given here: two extracts will, however, serve to show
Lampman's powers in presenting men and their fate with dramatic
intensity and ripe understanding.  The first is his elaborate
comparison of the individual hero with a desperately enduring moose:

  Silent, white-faced, again and again,
  Charged and hemmed round by furious hands
  Each for a moment faces them all and stands
  In his little desperate ring; like a tired bull-moose
  Whom scores of sleepless wolves, a ravening pack,
  Have chased all night, all day
  Through the snow-laden woods, like famine let loose;
  And he turns at last in his track
  Against a wall of rock and stands at bay;
  Round him with terrible sinews and teeth of steel
  They charge and recharge; but with many a furious plunge and wheel,
  Hither and thither over the trampled snow
  He tosses them bleeding and torn;
  Till, driven, and ever to and fro
  Harried, wounded and weary grown,
  His mighty strength gives way
  And all together they fasten upon him and drag him down.

In passing it is worth noting that Lampman's nature poetry has been of
fields and woods and streams, of birds and insects: here for the first
time he deals with one of the great creatures of the wilds.  And
throughout the extended image persistently, almost continuously, the
reader is invited to emotion and thought about man, about the valour,
the endurance, the tragic failure and heroic stature of man.  Nature is
a background for man, as it is throughout the {100} poem.  The other
extract is the lyric with which "At the Long Sault" closes:

  All night by the foot of the mountain
    The little town lieth at rest;
  The sentries are peacefully pacing;
    And neither from East nor from West

  Is there rumour of death or of danger;
    None dreameth tonight in his bed
  That ruin was near and the heroes
    That met it and stemmed it are dead.

  But afar in the ring of the forest
    Where the air is so tender with May
  And the waters are wild in the moonlight,
    They lie in their silence of clay.

  The numberless stars out of heaven
    Look down with a pitiful glance;
  And the lilies asleep in the forest
    Are closed like the lilies of France.

After the firm, deep sound of the preceding lines, telling of the
heroes' end, the swift, gentle fall of the anapaests soothes the
spirit, and persuades one to believe that the dark and terrible
conflict by the river was no mere explosion of primitive force, that it
was a reassuring act, preserving serenity and safety for Montreal--for
Canada--and encouraging us to share that serenity and safety.  But lest
we hold the sacrifice too cheap, the epigrammatic close is there to
remind us of death--but also to suggest resurgence.  It is a great
elegy to be set with Duncan Campbell Scott's "The Closed Door"; and no
one will question that here at least Lampman shows his power as a poet
of human feeling and action.

"At the Long Sault" gives a measure of the power Lampman had at the end
of his career in dealing with human themes.  It is not notable in
narrative; but the {101} great virtues of moral poetry are here--the
wisdom, the intensity, the beauty, which all depend in part upon the
awareness that the particular situation, the selected personalities,
are parts of a great whole.



VIII

The effect produced by "At the Long Sault" depends in large measure on
the formal resources on which the poet here draws so happily.  To read
it convinces us how sound was Scott's lament that his friend's career
"was cut short just as he was beginning to develop new and freer forms
of expression."  We may now look back over his poetry to inquire where
in general its formal beauty lies, and what formal resources Lampman
most often uses.  He is undoubtedly the most pictorial of Canadian
poets: again and again the nature of the Ottawa Valley is seized with
absolute fidelity and with something superior to fidelity--the
painter's insight into the essence of a scene.  "Heat" is a perfect
instance of this achievement.  Nothing could be more patiently faithful
than:

  On the brook yonder not a breath
    Disturbs the spider or the midge.
  The water-bugs draw close beneath
    The cool gloom of the bridge.

The picture is so clear that anyone who has at midsummer leaned over a
bridge spanning a quiet stream has a reminiscence of recreative
vividness, leading him to recall all the essential circumstances and
renewing for him in great intensity all the main sensations and
emotions he experienced and indeed the very "feel" of the remembered
moment, almost in full vigour.  Or take the opening lines of "Winter
Evening":

  Tonight the very horses springing by
  Toss gold from whitened nostrils....

{102} for fidelity in a city scene, fidelity irradiated by verbal
magic; and the following lines for picture melting into suggestion,
another of Lampman's chief resources, present in less degree in the
passages already cited:

                              In a dream
  The streets that narrow to the westward gleam
  Like rows of golden palaces; and high
  From all the crowded chimneys tower and die
  A thousand aureoles.

In the picture and suggestion of nature---or of the city's charm--lies
Lampman's chief formal beauty.  Sometimes, as in the lines from "Heat,"
his manner is bare, sometimes, as in the "Winter Evening," it is
luxuriant.

Luxuriant or bare, his manner was always carefully studied.  His
manuscripts show how laboriously he sought for the exact word or
phrase.  From thousands of examples I take but three, the first of
which will represent his quest of the ideal single word.  In the sonnet
"At Dusk," he first wrote of

                                the night wind
  Wandering in breaths from off the darkening hill

and _breaths_ gave way to _waves_, then, unfortunately, to _strata_,
then to _snatches_, and, finally and happily, to _puffs_.  Often the
alternatives heap up along the margin and sometimes in inextricable
disorder above and below the inadequate word.  Note, too, how he
reshapes an entire line:

  Where the soft sunshine one long moment more

in "A Sunset at Les Eboulements," becoming more pictorially--

  Where the long light across the lit sea-floor

and then, with something more of Lampman's magical kind of fidelity,

  The sun's last shaft beyond the gray sea-floor,

{103} Sometimes, but by no means so frequently, a longer passage is
fully reconsidered, as in the opening lines of a late sonnet, "The
Passing of Spring," which originally ran:

  All, all are gone, the first strange flowers; the glow
    Of birthroot in the forest depths away,
    The waxen bloodroot in her suit of grey,
  The bridal song of many a bird we know.

Looking critically at this, we can imagine Lampman pausing over the
first line as too crowded, over the repetition in _birthroot_ and
_bloodroot_, and the unsatisfactory contrast between the mention of
specific flowers and the general allusion to birds.  We can understand
his wish to make an entirely fresh start, drafting the opening thus:

  Petal by petal all the flowers that blow
    Loosen and fall and vanish from our ken,
    Till the long-changing year returns again
  With other hopes and griefs we do not know.

This is musical; none of the aesthetic problems in the first draft
remains; but all pictorial quality has gone, and from the outset spring
is little more than a psychological state.  Lampman makes another and a
final try:

  No longer in the meadow coigns shall blow
    The creamy blood-root in her suit of gray,
    But all the first strange flowers have passed away,
  Gone with the childlike dreams that touched us so.

The second line comes from the first version, with one admirable
modification, _waxen_ becoming _creamy_; the rapid reference to
_strange flowers_ is happily expanded; the new first line, keeping the
movement and the rhyming word of the opening of the second version,
supplies a setting for the bloodroot; and instead of the allusions to
the future in that version there is a pathetically powerful reference
to the past, {104} to the psychological spring.  Music, image and
feeling are all fused, as in neither of the earlier versions.

Intense concern for the word and the phrase is the outstanding feature
of Lampman's corrections in manuscript.  He seldom modifies his main
idea; a little more often he substitutes one image for another, as in
some of the examples that have been given; most of the time he is in
quest of a word or a phrase that is more pictorial or more musical.
His verbal sensitiveness recalls that of the English poets whom at his
best he most resembles, Keats and Tennyson.

As metrist Lampman is not strikingly inventive.  Until his last years
all his favoured forms were among those which the experience of others
had tried and approved--the sonnet, the rhyming quatrain, the stanzaic
forms of Keats's major odes, and a six-line stanza consisting of a
quatrain followed by a couplet.  In the mid-'nineties he became more
experimental, and it is probable that the more unusual stanza forms he
then began to use, alternatively with his former preferences, reflect
the emotional struggles he was undergoing.

Of these struggles Duncan Campbell Scott has told a little in the
preface to the selections from Lampman published in 1925.  Scott speaks
of "evidences in the poems and the letters of spiritual adventures and
perturbations that were not apparent even to the closest companion,"
and after quoting a few sentences from letters concludes by saying
these will "prove the existence but not the plot of an intense personal
drama."  The period of struggle runs almost from the beginning of the
'nineties to the end of Lampman's life, in 1899; its greatest acuteness
may be fixed at about the middle of the period.  It was then that he
wrote to his friend and fellow-poet, E. W. Thomson, that "I have gone
through so much inward trouble that it has somewhat broken me, and I do
not take wing, so to speak, very readily"; and again that "to tell
{105} the truth I have been under such a heavy strain of feeling during
the last year or two that I have come to look on the matter of
publishing and fame, etc., as of very little importance at all."  What
the "plot" of the "intensely personal drama" was I cannot say; but it
is evident that what occurred was more than a crisis of social
pessimism, that the deepest and most secret elements of Lampman's
nature were involved.

That such developments should also affect his poetic forms is natural.
The very first poem in the _Alcyone_ collection, the title piece, is
impressively different in form from anything that Lampman had
previously done.  Its first strophe is sufficient to show the newness
of the form:

  In the silent depth of space
  Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,
  Glittering with a silver flame
  Through eternity,
  Rolls a great and burning star,
  With a noble name,
  Alcyone!

The blend of rhyming and unrhyming lines, long lines and short lines,
in an irregular pattern is one of Lampman's experiments.  Another is
the choice of stanza for the "Ode to the Hills," but here the
experiment is in greater elaborateness.  Still another is the
long-lined couplet he uses in the narrative called "The Woodcutter's
Hut."  None of these experiments is as striking as what Lampman
attempted in "At the Long Sault" where, as in "Alcyone," he is
undergoing some influence from Duncan Campbell Scott, who had moved
much more quickly towards flexibility of form.  The formal experiments
are too diverse to enable one to predict the sort of verse Lampman
would have written had he lived into the new century: their
significance is in reflecting the tumult of his spirit.

It may be useful to say something of Lampman's {106} conduct of the
sonnet, the form in which he wrote most often and felt that he was at
his happiest.  He has no constant or usual sonnet-form: sometimes he
uses octave and sestet, sometimes he prefers quatrains and couplet; in
his octaves he usually has three rhymes (abba acca), although in some
of his finest sonnets he restricts himself to the statutory two; he
likes to set his couplet between the second and third quatrain, rather
than at the close of the poem, but this liking is not consistent.
Since he also likes to introduce his sestet with a couplet, the close
reader grows to expect that the ninth and tenth lines of a Lampman
sonnet--whether in quatrains and couplet or in octave and sestet--will
form a rhyming interlude.  How successful he is in this little device
may be seen in "A Sunset at Les Eboulements," a loosely Italian sonnet:

  Broad shadows fall.  On all the mountain side
  The scythe-swept fields are silent.  Slowly home
  By the long beach the high-piled hay-carts come,
  Splashing the pale salt shallows.  Over wide
  Fawn-coloured wastes of mud the slipping tide,
  Round the dun rocks and wattled fisheries,
  Creeps murmuring in.  And now by twos and threes,
  O'er the slow spreading pools with clamorous chide,
  _Belated crows from strip to strip take flight
  Soon will the first star shine; yet ere the night_
  Reach onward to the pale green distances,
  The sun's last shaft beyond the gray sea-floor
  Still dreams upon the Kamouraska shore,
  And the long line of golden villages.

The effect in a sonnet consisting of quatrains and couplet can be seen
in the admirable "On Lake Temiscamingue":

  A single dreamy elm, that stands between
    The sombre forest and the wan-lit lake,
  Halves with its slim grey stem and pendent green
    The shadowed point.  Beyond it without break
{107}
  Bold brows of pine-topped granite bend away,
    Far to the southward, fading off in grand
  Soft folds of looming purple.  Cool and gray,
    The point runs out, a blade of thinnest sand.
  _Two rivers meet beyond it: wild and clear,
    The deepening thunder breaks upon the ear--_
  The one descending from its forest home
    By many an eddied pool and murmuring fall--
  The other cloven through the mountain wall,
    A race of tumbled rocks, a roar of foam.

With these illustrations of one little refinement in the oldest of the
forms he was accustomed to use, we may take leave of Lampman's art, the
most careful that any Canadian has yet exhibited in verse--or in prose.



IX

It remains to inquire whether Lampman's reputation at home or abroad is
in keeping with his deserts.  At home, as I have said, his is the first
place.  At Morpeth, in south-western Ontario, a cairn commemorates his
birth: it was unveiled with impressive ceremony in which men of
letters, educators and plain citizens confirmed the praise so
eloquently expressed by Duncan Campbell Scott.  In the capital, where
he lived, the municipal library long ago installed a window in which
Lampman's head appears beside those of the major poets of England.  The
selected edition of 1925 remains in print; and the collected works as
well as the volumes that appeared in his lifetime are sought by
bibliophiles and patriots.  No poems from our nineteenth century are so
widely known and quoted, often by quite unliterary people, as some of
his sonnets.  The man is admired for the gentle firmness of his
character.  Much, very much, of Lampman's reputation has come from the
admirable fashion in which his friend Scott conceived and {108} carried
out the duties of literary executor, never missing an appropriate
occasion to impress upon his countrymen the quality of the man and his
work.  Forty-four years have passed since Lampman wrote his last sonnet
and set below it a single line from the _Odyssey_, which may be
translated: "For men age quickly in evil fortune"; his posthumous
reputation has been slow to grow, not quick, but in the end his
literary fate in his own country has been good, not evil, for he has
the rare fortune to be acceptable to a new impatient generation.
Abroad he is today unknown.  The charm and fidelity of his nature
poetry must always be more intimately moving to those who know the
Canadian seasons, the beauty of sunlight upon the pure, deep snow and
the even greater beauty of sunrise and sunset, the quick greenness of
the Canadian spring, the northern lakes a cold blue at the height of
summer, the violent colours of the fall.  But this poetry, and the
finest of his lyrical cries, the wisest of his sonnets, the unpublished
"At the Long Sault," have only to be known to be valued.  Lampman's
voice is too genuine to be ignored for ever in any country where the
language he used with such patient and suggestive fidelity is the
language men speak.




2.  DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT


I

In 1924 Archibald MacMechan, who was then nearing the end of a long
career as professor of English literature at Dalhousie University,
brought out his _Headwaters of Canadian Literature_.  The fruit of a
course given for many years, this is the most distinguished and
sensible book about the national literature yet written by an
English-speaking Canadian.  "It is," he says in his preface,
"emphatically {109} a sketch"; and on the first page of the copy I
possess the warning not to expect too much is repeated in MacMechan's
elegant Victorian hand.  What he meant was that he preferred to keep
his two hundred and thirty small pages for the major figures, to speak
of the lesser worthies only when their work had shaped the development
of letters or culture.  Still, MacMechan's standards are not rigorous;
space is found to refer to more than forty poets and to study with care
some dozen of these.  Duncan Campbell Scott is not of the dozen; he is
not even of the forty.  The only allusion to him is the mention in
passing that he had written the life of a governor of the ancient
Province of Upper Canada.  When MacMechan wrote, Scott's first
collection had been before the public for more than thirty years; half
a dozen others had followed it; and Scott's productive career was
indeed approaching its end.

How is such an omission to be explained?  It was assuredly not the
result of any personal spite--it simply reflects the long failure of
the Canadian public and Canadian critics to do anything like justice to
Scott's powers.  For justice he has had to wait much longer than any of
the other poets of his generation.  Carman and Roberts and even minor
figures such as Wilfred Campbell and Tom MacInnes were legends in their
prime; in varying ways they embodied what the public expected a lyrical
poet to be.  On whatever they did, wherever they went--and they all
wandered and turned their hands to many things--they printed the mark
of a peculiar personality, self-centred and striking.  On the surface
Scott has lived the life of a devoted and successful civil servant; he
has been little known outside Ottawa except among professional
associates; even where he has been known, the shyness and austerity
which have marked his relations with all but his intimates have left a
colourless impression; if those he met casually were aware that he
wrote verses, such a relaxation seemed to them somewhat {110} out of
character.  Lampman, no less shy and no less bound to a narrow circle,
had no substantial fame till his early death made of him what he has
remained--our Canadian symbol of the fragile artist worn down by the
rigours of our climate and our social and economic structure.  The
effect of personal impressions does not, however, suffice to explain
the disparity between the earlier reputation of Scott and that of his
contemporaries.  There are other reasons why Canadians say in one
breath--and even today: "Lampman, Carman and Roberts," and only after a
marked pause: "Oh, and Duncan Campbell Scott, too."  It is to be
remembered that Roberts gave the lead to the group, and that his mellow
classical pieces mingling myth and landscape, and his homely local
pictures, fixed for the time what the range of Canadian poetry was to
be.  "When I was beginning to write," he remarked in a recent letter,
"I was not aware of any such thing as Canadian literature....  But I
did dream of _starting_ a _Canadian_ literature; and I joyously hailed
the first efforts of Lampman and Carman, as the beginnings of it."  The
reminiscence is exceedingly revealing.  Roberts set the course and
warmly welcomed those who rivalled him, recognizing especially the
values in Lampman and Carman.  Lampman appreciated his debt to Roberts
at its full size: in the chapter on his poetry I have quoted his
enthusiastic response to the first of Roberts's collections.  His
awareness of obligation was matched by Carman's.  The three of them,
whatever their differences in temperament, were drawn to many of the
same kinds of subjects and to forms if not the same at least closely
akin.  Where one was known and approved, the others needed only to be
known to be approved also.  Scott was never to be wholly at home in
their world, no matter how he might try to write in their fashion, no
matter how well he might come to know them--and he was to become one of
Lampman's closest intimates.  In a word, it is Scott's originality
which explains the long time he had {111} to wait before readers in any
considerable numbers began to appreciate that he was one of the chief
masters of Canadian literature.



II

Scott was Ottawa-born and if he was not Ottawa-bred he returned to the
city when he was sixteen, and it has since been his home.  He grew to
maturity in the shadow of Parliament, and his imagination was early
caught by the capital.  "The city of the end of things," Lampman was to
call it in one of those moments when he ceased to dream of its towers
and hills and sunsets; for Scott it has always been the "maiden queen
of all the towered towns."  As a small child he was taken to hear
Joseph Howe speak in the Commons; he was appointed to the civil service
after an interview with Sir John A. Macdonald; into his idea of Ottawa
and of Canada there has always entered that stamp of greatness that the
Fathers of Confederation could give, and none of them so imaginatively
and vividly as the Nova Scotian man of letters who was our most
cultivated statesman and the Ontario strategist and dreamer who was our
most far-sighted founder.  Instead of a provincial town where the
currents of world thought, art and action arrived with extreme
slowness--this was how Lampman judged it--Scott saw in Ottawa something
to stimulate the imagination and thrill the spirit.  As he wrote in one
of his earliest poems:

                    Fair as a shrine that makes
  The wonder of a dream, imperious towers
  Pierce and possess the sky, guarding the halls
  Where our young strength is welded strenuously;
  While in the East the star of morning dowers
  The land with a large tremulous light, that falls
  A pledge and presage of our destiny.

It was natural that he should decide on a career in the civil service;
and at eighteen, without going to college, he entered {112} the
Department of Indian Affairs.  He was not then conscious of any poetic
impulse: his aesthetic expression was then in music.  Only after
Lampman had come to Ottawa in 1883, and become a friend, did Scott
think of writing verse.  That splendid May morning two years before
when Lampman had read Roberts in the meadow at Trinity College was the
beginning not of one but of two poetic careers.  Scott wrote slowly and
critically; but before the 'eighties ended his verses in magazines were
attracting notice, and when in 1889 W. D. Lighthall published his
important anthology, _Songs of the Great Dominion_, Scott's verse was
represented.



III

In 1893, just after he had passed his thirtieth year, he brought out
his first collection, _The Magic House and Other Poems_.  In that same
year Carman's first collection appeared, with its famous title piece,
_Low Tide on Grand Pr_.  Carman, as has been suggested, began his
career with subjects and tones which strongly recalled Lampman and
Roberts, both of whom had established themselves with the Canadian
readers of verses some years earlier.  Before four months had passed,
Carman's book was in its second edition; Scott, more original, was not
to be so fortunate.

In his work, it is so even in this first collection, there is a mixture
of restraint and intensity which grasps at one and will not let one go.
As one reads the collection through today, it is to be struck by the
predominance of the dark and the powerful--night, storm, the
wilderness, the angry sea.  The nature he depicts and evokes is a harsh
and violent nature:

  ... a land that man has not sullied with his intrusion
  When the aboriginal shy dwellers in the broad solitudes
  Are asleep in their innumerable dens and night haunts
  Amid the dry ferns.

{113}

His strongest pictures of this Nature come from later collections--the
lines that have been quoted belong to a poem that appeared as late as
1916--and it is when these are reached that an attempt may best be made
to define Scott's view of the external world.  Here it need only be
said that Lampman, Carman and Roberts have in the main presented the
more or less cultivated parts of Canada, or those marginal to
settlement, Scott, above all those that are untouched or scarcely
touched by the hand of man, for example, "the lonely loon-haunted
Nipigon reaches" and "the enormous targe of Hudson Bay."  By his choice
of the wilds he has won an immense advantage over his contemporaries.
They usually write of Canada--and this appears in their images and
rhythms as well as in their substance--as if it were a large English
county, and it is hard for them to convey in their nature-verse any
feeling which has not been more powerfully presented by one or another
of the English poets.  Imitation almost imposes itself upon them.  The
path to originality is wide before Scott.  His problem is to find a
form suitable and adequate for his novel matter.  It will not be
supposed that he succeeded in finding that form at the very outset of
his career.

Indeed, the nature-pieces in his first collection are not as satisfying
as the dream-pieces.  These are definitely _fin de sicle_.  They
introduce one to a nightmarish world, in which not only are logical
relations suspended as they are in symbolist verse, in much of Carman's
early work, to take a Canadian example, but the relation even between
images is extremely loose, exactly as in vivid dreams.  The quality of
Scott's dream-pieces has been perfectly caught in John Masefield's
tribute to one of them, "The Piper of Aril," which in 1895 quickened
his interest in poetry when he was a factory-hand at Yonkers:


This was the first poem by a living writer to touch me to the quick.
It was narrative; it was delicate phantasy; it was {114} about the sea
and singing and a romantic end.  I did not know it at the time but it
was a choice example of the work of the romantic poets of that decade.
Its longing, its wistfulness, and the perfection of some of its images
made deep impressions upon me....  Years later I came upon the writing
of a critic [William Archer] who mentions it as a poem "the symbolism
of which escapes me."  Well, let it escape.  The romantic mood and the
dream may be of deep personal significance and joy, even if the
author's thought eludes us.


In general, even in "The Piper of Aril," the thought does not elude,
but is a mass of suggestions which do indeed lack definiteness.  The
two sonnets which are grouped under the caption "In the House of
Dreams" might have come from _The Yellow Book_: in them we find a lady,
a blade of gladiolus, a fountain, a serpent, a crow and finally a
"little naked lad."  Even a casual reading conveys the general sense of
love as a source of pain coming into a bower of beauty in which some
ugly elements have been awaiting its advent in order to coalesce.  A
careful reading does not do much more to clarify the sense: but we are
not eluded, we are merely held in an atmosphere heavy with suggestion.
The title-piece is similar in effect, harking back to the
Pre-Raphaelite mood as much _fin de sicle_ poetry did: the woman in
the magic house is a sister of the Blessed Damozel and of the Lady of
Shalott.  The movement has the hushed and halting quality that is found
in much of the early work of William Morris.  Where outside Morris has
his movement been so perfectly achieved as in such a stanza as this:

  But no thing shall habit there,
    There no human foot shall fall,
  No sweet word the silence stir,
    Naught her name shall call,
  Nothing come to comfort her.

There is possibly a brusqueness in the fourth line which is not
Morris's, and which, recurring throughout the poem, {115} gives a
strangely powerful effect as it punctually comes to break the
dream-movement.  Original, too, but quite in Morris's manner is the
internal rhyme in the fifth line, another designed and repeated effect.
What is more significant from the present point of view is the absence
of perspective: everything is on the same level, the size of things and
their demands upon our attention do not vary.  Nothing can better
achieve the effect of dream than this primitively unorganized
succession of imagery.  At the end of the piece, although it is evident
that the woman passed through a variety of states, one does not know
where the turning point, or turning points, lay.  Just what these
states were does not greatly matter; nor does it greatly matter how she
passed from one to another; what does matter is a diffused sense of
agonies undergone in silence.  The reader feels dimly oppressed--an
effect of restrained intensity.

Restrained intensity is also sought in a very simple narrative, one of
Scott's very earliest compositions, called "At the Cedars," something
miles removed from the kind of verse that has just been considered.  It
tells of a log-jam on the Ottawa, in which a man is caught and killed
in the presence of his girl, who set out for the jam in a canoe only to
be caught and killed as quickly and brutally as her lover.  What I mean
by an attempt at restrained intensity of manner will be evident from so
brief a passage as this, especially from its laconic close:

  He went up like a block
  With the shock,
  And when he was there
  In the air,
  Kissed his hand
  To the land;
  When he dropped
  My heart stopped,
{116}
  For the first logs had caught him
  And crushed him;
  When he rose in his place
  There was blood on his face.

It is significant that in such a subject, new to Scott and treated in
such a bald and simple fashion, the same fundamental quality is
evident.  It is significant because it appears to point to something
permanent and instinctive in his practice, permanent and instinctive in
himself.  We shall see that the appearance is not deceptive.



IV

A search for the adequate theme and the adequate form in which
restrained intensity may express itself--here is the emotional centre
of Scott's work.  In the two collections that followed his first,
_Labour and the Angel_ (1898) and _New World Lyrics and Ballads_
(1905), there are many failures and a larger number of approaches to
success.  Most of the failures are similar in theme and form to poems
that were being written by the general run of Scott's contemporaries in
Canada and in the United States.  It was an age in which only bold
experimenters and original temperaments went beyond the gentle feeling,
the gentle word, the gentle landscape.  In exasperation Edwin Arlington
Robinson was pleading:

  Oh for a poet--for a beacon bright
  To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray;
  To spirit back the Muses, long astray,
  And flush Parnassus with a newer light;
  To put these little sonnet-men to flight
  Who fashion in a shrewd mechanic way,
  Songs without souls that flicker for a day,
  To vanish in irrevocable night.

{117} In Canada there was less of the shrewd mechanic, less of the
sonneteering, but just as much of the dead gray.  Scott took the
infection.  When he wrote in the gentle manner he was not as winning,
because not as genuine, as Lampman or Carman: it was not his manner and
he wrote in it only because he was not yet in sure possession of a
manner of his own, and highly sensitive to the winds of taste.

It will be more interesting to consider the approaches to success, in
which there is something more original.  Sometimes he hits upon a theme
which is proper to him, but is impeded by his choice of form.  A
striking instance is his "Mission of the Trees," a narrative of two
Indians, father and son, the only Christians in their settlement; the
son, about to die, pleads with his father to take him to the Christian
mission; setting out in midwinter, the father collapses and dies,
beside the corpse of the son, frozen in the drifts.  All the intensity
Scott might desire is in this theme: intensity of effort, intensity of
conflict between man and nature?  But Scot wished not only to be
intense, but also to establish restraint--he was determined not to
overdo his effect.  The result was too quiet a note.  Set side by side
with the primitive and violent materials that have been mentioned, such
images as these:

                          Never
    Bell-note sounded so forlorn,
  Like a plover in the clearing
    When the frost is on the corn

or

  Then the cloud was spent at midnight
    And the world so gleamed with snow,
  That the frosty moon looked downward
    On a moon that glowed below

delicately Tennysonian, and with a liquidity and regularity of rhythm
that has nothing whatever in common with the {118} bitterness of the
experiences to which they relate.  How can one explain the amazing
discrepancy between form and substance?  The substance was to give the
intensity, the form the restraint.  Scott was here satisfied with a
balance that is mechanical, a balance that was achieved by setting two
entities side by side and making sure that they had the same weight.
For the greatest effects the balance must be organic: the intensity and
the restraint must fuse.  This they do not often do in Scott's early or
intermediate volumes.

When they do his poetry is not to be equalled, I think, by any of the
Canadian poets of his generation.  "The Forsaken," another Indian
narrative, is an admirable example of his success.  In this piece he
presents two pictures.  The first gives us a young squaw with her
papoose, caught in a snowstorm on a frozen northern lake; to save her
child from death she breaks a hole in the ice and tries to hook a fish;
she is without success till she baits the hook with her own flesh;
strengthened by food, she is able to give milk and keep her baby living
till she can rejoin her people.  In the second picture an Indian
family, in which this same squaw is now the withered grandmother,
reaches, as winter approaches, the same spot where she had so long ago
baited her hook; the rest of the group sneak off across the lake,
leaving the old woman behind.  The poem is impressive in many ways, but
what now concerns us is its fundamental quality, its perfect fusion of
intensity and restraint.

Let us look back for a moment to that earlier narrative, "At the
Cedars," which presents the death of two lovers in a log jam.  "At the
Cedars" is an undoubted success; indeed, I think it is the best
narrative Scott wrote before "The Forsaken."  It is not usually fair to
estimate the quality of a narrative poem by that of a few lines,
however good; the effect of narrative poetry, even more than that {119}
of other kinds of poetry, is a total effect.  When a short passage of
narrative is abstracted from its context it will often seem rough and
even commonplace, as well as false in tone.  With this in mind to
preserve us from making too harsh a judgment, let us look at the lines
from "At the Cedars" which have already been quoted.  Do not such lines
as:

  When he dropped
  My heart stopped

fall short of the tragic note such a poem should sustain, fall short
because they are a little over-sharp, and over-tense?  The reading of
the whole poem would confirm such a criticism.  Here and there it
verges on melodrama, intensity without restraint.  The first of the
pictures in "The Forsaken" is given in short lines, but it leaves an
effect not of sharpness but of lucidity and firmness.  This is partly
because the lines are unrhymed, but the absence of rhyme is not really
a cause but merely a concurrent effect of a difference in mood.  What
this mood is becomes more evident in the second picture, where the
lines lengthen and the note deepens.  Set beside the description of the
crisis in "At the Cedars," this account of the state of mind of the old
woman as she appreciates that she has been forsaken:

  Then, without a sigh,
  Valiant, unshaken,
  She smoothed her dark locks under her kerchief,
  Composed her shawl in state,
  Then folded her hands ridged with sinews and corded with veins,
  Folded them across her breasts spent with the nourishing of children
  Gazed at the sky past the tops of the cedars....

Here at last is the magical union towards which Scott had so long been
moving.



{120}

V

Not a few of the poems in which he achieves this peculiar kind of
perfection have to do with the Indians.  Of all Canadian poets, indeed
of all Canadian imaginative writers, he has best succeeded in making
great literature out of such distinctively Canadian material as our
aborigines supply.  This is wholly fitting.  The entire professional
career of Duncan Campbell Scott was passed in the federal Department of
Indian Affairs in which he rose, while still young, to be Deputy
Superintendent General, a post which he held for about twenty years.
During that period, and indeed for some time before his formal
accession to the post, he was the chief moulder of departmental policy,
an administrator of rare imaginative sympathy and almost perfect
wisdom.  He was never the _rond de cuir_: he was always eager to see
his charges, and especially in his later years in the department when
he had greater freedom of movement was much among them, both on the
reservations and in the wild and remote areas where the Indians
continue to lead a life which preserves much of the nomadic and
picturesque quality of the past.  He was led to the conclusion,
significant not only for his policies but for his poetry, that Indians
are primarily to be understood as men and women, not as creatures of a
different race and colour from ours.  His poetry presents them not as
noble savages, whose emotions run in courses unknown to us, surprising
us by their strangeness, but as complex yet intelligible persons.  What
is the real theme of "The Forsaken"?  It is nothing less than a
universal tragedy, the tragedy of Lear and Goriot, the ruinous
intrusion into filial relationships of egoism and economic realism.
Those who once were strong become weak; their value dwindles and those
whom they reared from helpless weakness to strength discard them as
costly superfluities.

{121}

The same universality marks another of the Indian poems of his middle
period, that sonnet of rare beauty, "The Onondaga Madonna."  Here the
theme is the tragic confusion of the _mtis_, and nowhere in his work
does Scott show a more delicate imaginative sympathy than in his
dealings with those of mixed blood.  The sonnet ends:

  And closer in the shawl about her breast,
  The latest promise of her nation's doom,
  Paler than she her baby clings and lies,
  The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes;
  He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom,
  He draws his heavy brows and will not rest.

Here what shines out from the quiet lines is not the specific tragedy
of a European-Indian mixture, but the general tragedy of all
blood-mixture.  It is the same with the longer, no less powerful and
scarcely less finished "The Half Breed Girl."  The degree to which
Scott universalizes his Indian characters may be suggested, perhaps by
an error into which I was led by the poem "Night Burial in the Forest"
and by his comment upon the error.  Here he tells of a sordid love set
against the awful background of the untouched wilderness.  One man
kills another because of a fancy for a cheap girl, and the murderer
rushes off to vanish into the north.  The evocation of the dark forests
on the river bank, and the flare of torches in the little camp at the
water's edge, led me to imagine that the poem had to do with Indians.
Scott has told me that I was wrong, and that he had in mind an
expedition of lumberjacks along the Nipigon, but he added that the slip
was "unimportant": to him lumberjack and Indian are of the same stuff.

Throughout almost all of the Indian poems the fusion of intensity and
restraint is notable.  It comes to its perfection in a piece longer
than any that have been mentioned, {122} "Powassan's Drum."  To the end
of a poem almost one hundred and fifty lines in length, Scott maintains
his spell.  There is no monotony of effect.  The poem begins quietly.
At a safe psychological distance, as vagrant tourists, we watch the old
medicine man, Powassan, beating his drum with a fierce steadiness; he
impresses us with just the idle curiosity that any anachronism might
provoke.  Slowly the drum begins to drown all other impressions; from
our safe distance we have been pulled within the range where the beat
seems to be nothing short of the "pulse of Being"; we cannot remember a
time when the beat did not dominate our world or conceive a time when
it will not.  Everything has been poisoned: air, earth and water repeat
the appalling sound.  Our senses play us false, and Scott suggests our
corrupted state by a weird and fully suitable image:

  Then from the reeds stealing,
  A shadow noiseless,
  A canoe moves noiseless as sleep,
  Noiseless as the trance of deep sleep
  And an Indian still as a statue,
  Molded out of deep sleep,
  Headless, still as a headless statue
  Molded out of deep sleep,
  Sits modelled in full power,
  Haughty in manful power,
  Headless and impotent in power.
  The canoe stealthy as death
  Drifts to the throbbing of Powassan's Drum.

Here by his rhythm, Scott has lulled the critical powers and we easily
make the final step in the long process which began as we stood in
curiosity outside Powassan's tent and which ends with our immersion in
a world of being that normally would have no meaning for us, but now
takes on a huge and sinister suggestion.  The outlines become clearer,
and the rhythms less incantatory as the passage continues:

{123}

  The Indian fixed like bronze
  Trails his severed head
  Through the dead water
  Holding it by the hair,
  By the plaits of hair,
  Wound with sweet grass and tags of silver.
  The face looks through the water
  Up to its throne on the shoulders of power,
  Unquenched eyes burning in the water,
  Piercing beyond the shoulders of power
  Up to the fingers of the storm cloud.

The threatening beat is sharply broken at the close of the poem: a
storm breaks upon the world, and at its climax seems like the
prolongation of the beat of Powassan's drum.

The height of Scott's power in dealing with Indian material is reached
in this poem and in a much quieter piece, a poem within a poem, the
lines on the death of Akoose which form a brief passage in the "Lines
in Memory of Edmund Morris."  Something of the power in the Akoose
passage derives from its very carefully established relation with its
setting.  Morris, a painter who was an intimate of Scott's, died
suddenly at a time when the poet was intending to reply to his last
letter; even though his friend is dead Scott finds himself eager to
answer, and at the beginning of the piece presents himself as pondering
over the characteristic illegibilities in Morris's letter:

  I gather from the writing,
  The coin that you had flipt,
  Turned tails; and so you compel me
  To meet you at Touchwood Hills:
  Or, mayhap, you are trying to tell me
  The sum of a painter's ills:
  Is that Phimister Proctor
  Or something about a doctor?
  Well, nobody knows, but Eddie,
  Whatever it is, I'm ready.

{124} In this jaunty quasi-doggerel, Scott sets out on his composition.
As he recalls their expeditions into the wilds the note becomes graver
and some quiet, suggestive nature verse follows; from the wilds Scott
passes smoothly and in an easier vein to their human equivalents, the
Indians.  Picture follows picture, accurate and evocative, many of them
presented in language as easy as the opening of the poem:

  And well I recall the weirdness
  Of that evening at Qu'Appelle,
  In the wigwam with old Sakimay,
  The keen, acrid smell
  As the kinnikinick was burning;
  The planets outside were turning,
  And the little splints of poplar
  Flared with a thin, gold flame.

The verses lengthen and deepen as Scott turns to meditation, slowly
convincing himself that human life records more good than ill, that the
victories of man, indecisive as they are, are yet more substantial than
his defeats.  Persistence, he concludes,

  Persistence is the master of this life;
  The master of these little lives of ours;
  To the end--effort--even beyond the end.

There is the bare statement, lent a mild glory by the cadence of the
verse.  Akoose shall serve as its illustration: forty lines, just
preceding the end of the poem, which exceeds two hundred and fifty,
demonstrate that for Scott the poetic mode of thought is more congenial
than the rhetorical, that after the statement, fine as it is, must come
the suggestion, the persuasive individual case.

The opening lines are strong and heavy:

{125}

  Think of the death of Akoose, fleet of foot,
  Who, in his prime, a herd of antelope
  From sunrise, without rest, a hundred miles
  Drove through rank prairie, loping like a wolf,
  Tired them and slew them, ere the sun went down.

With this picture is contrasted, as in "The Forsaken," the humiliating
and shameful weakness of old age:

  Akoose, in his old age, blind from the smoke
  Of tepees and the sharp snow light, alone
  With his great-grandchildren, withered and spent,
  Crept in the warm sun along a rope
  Stretched for his guidance.

But the death of Akoose is to be a prouder one than that of the old
squaw in "The Forsaken": all she could do was to oppose to the
cruelties of nature and of her family an uncomplaining pensive
firmness, which, if it had a dignity of its own, was at least as
pathetic as it was heroic.  Akoose will act; he seizes a pony that
wanders within range and makes off northward to slip down at sunset and
lie waiting for death, passive as befits age, but in conditions he has
chosen--at the scene of his most brilliant exploit.  Persistence!
_Ewig, ewig, usque ad finem!_ as Stein's formula runs in _Lord Jim_;
the relation of the incident to the idea is not laboured, but it is
clear.

Note how Scott's verse, so varied in this poem, swells and grows richer
as he approaches the conclusion:

  There Akoose lay, silent amid the bracken,
  Gathered at last with the Algonquin Chieftains.
  Then the tenebrous sunset was blown out,
  And all the smoky gold turned into cloud wrack.
  Akoose slept forever amid the poplars,
  Swathed by the wind from the far-off Red Deer
  Where dinosaurs sleep, clamped in their rocky tombs.

{126} Even without that last line the death of Akoose has been lifted
high above pathos; the old man who crept along the rope to sun himself
had given way to the essential form of Akoose, the idea, the fleet and
bold chief.  All discord had been resolved: the close was adequate to
record the death of a hero when that death was a quiet one.  The last
line adds another effect, congruent with this but surpassing it: Akoose
enters into the process of the centuries and his life and death fall
into place as parts of a great and ultimately satisfying panorama,
which is suddenly given a focus.  The incident here reveals its full
illustrative value on a high level.  Five lines follow to dwell on this
and to enforce it:

  Who shall count the time that lies between
  The sleep of Akoose and the dinosaurs?
  Innumerable time, that yet is like the breath
  Of the long wind that creeps upon the prairie
  And dies away with the shadows at sundown.

It remains for Scott to return to his main theme and relate the death
of Akoose to the death of Edmund Morris; as he does so he retains the
slow, heavy cadence of those last lines.



VI

The perfection of his best Indian pieces is matched in his best
nature-verse, and seldom anywhere else in his work.  It is in the
collections of his middle years that Scott's nature-verse is most fully
successful.  Many of the poems in _Via Borealis_ relate to a canoe-trip
which Scott took, in 1906, with his lifelong friend, the eminent
critic, Pelham Edgar.  In the rocky wilderness of northern Ontario
Scott responds to nature, not to the quiet, quasi-maternal being that
Lampman sought in his wanderings on the outskirts of Ottawa, but to
"quintessential passion."  Where so many {127} more commonplace minds,
poets or painters, have felt the nature of our Laurentian shield as
silence and repose Scott has found in a multitude of its explicit or
suggested activities an enormous intensity--in the loud beat of
partridge wings, the wild laughter of loons, the violent colours of
sunrise and sunset and their scarcely less violent reflection in the
lakes, the exciting maze of fireflies whose trajectories cross and
recross, and, most vivid, perhaps, of all his pictures:

                              the fatal shore
  Where a bush fire, smouldering, with sudden roar
  Leaped on a cedar and smothered it with light
  And terror.  It had left the portage height
  A tangle of slanted spruces burned to the roots,
  Covered still with patches of bright fire.

Scott does not seem to reach to the very heart of the Laurentian
intensity as two or three of our painters, notably Tom Thomson, have
done.  For him it is only the mass of surface aspects that is violent.
But how violent the surface is!  So violent that in "Spring on
Mattagami"--a poem for which he himself does not much care--with
perfect appropriateness the response to nature is fused with an
intensity of sexual feeling not elsewhere to be found in his work.  It
seems wholly in keeping that he should pass from stanzas which smoulder
with the colours and scents of the landscape to stanzas which flame
with his longing for some one in Ottawa, whom he pictures in the midst
of wild nature, drawing from it a liberation from her hesitations so
that she yields to his passion.

Scott's nature-verse was never superior to the effects he produces in
some parts of this poem or in the more philosophic "Height of Land," a
somewhat later poem from which the image of the bush-fire comes.  To
some it may appear that "Spring on Mattagami," like some of Scott's
first nature-poems, is a juxtaposition rather than a fusion of
intensity and restraint.  The poem is elaborate {128} and it is slow,
but the lines have a fluidity which to my feeling produces fusion: it
offers a steady current of emotion with sudden bursts of passion and
gradual returns to the more usual pace.  It is important to recognize
that though the bursts are sudden the returns are graduated, and thus
there is no effect of sharp recoil produced by these.  Fine as Scott's
presentation of nature as passion may be, he would not be a part of the
Canadian tradition if he were not more at ease in the presentation he
offers in "The Height of Land," where nature is less primitive and more
complex.  Here, again, he goes beyond the conception of nature as a
quasi-maternal being, but his advance is in another direction.  In
"Spring on Mattagami" he did not appear aware of calm as an aspect of
nature: he excluded it.  In "The Height of Land" he includes it in a
broader conception.  "Here," he says, "is peace"; but he goes on to say:

  That Something comes by flashes
  Deeper than peace,--a spell
  Golden and inappellable
  That gives the inarticulate part
  Of our strange being one moment of release
  That seems more native than the touch of time,
  And we must answer in chime;
  Though yet no man may tell
  The secret of that spell
  Golden and inappellable.

The voice in the earlier lines of the passage is the voice of
Wordsworth, but the mind that it expresses is more modern, more
sceptical: it is the mind of Arnold, whom the later lines suggest in
diction and movement as well as idea.  Even Arnold was not so dubious
as Scott here shows himself in his formulation of the Being that lies
within nature and lends to it its deepest meaning.  This Something is
neither calm nor violence.  As the poem proceeds Scott finds difficulty
in maintaining in fusion elements of calm and elements of something
else which is more intense.  He {129} descends to a historical
interpretation, in which he is concerned not with defining the
substance of the Something but with recording the visions of it that
men may have.  He suggests that in our time, the ending period of the
"Christ age," the inmost principle of the universe is defined as love,
a love presented rather sketchily as serene and also passionate; and he
conceives a coming age in which the interpretive power of man will have
been extended--there is no rejection of the idea of the Christ-age but,
as before, an inclusion of one set of ideas in another which is more
comprehensive and more profound.  In the coming age that Something will
receive clearer definition.  But in a final note of complexity Scott
suggests that perhaps there will never be deeper wisdom, never fuller
understanding of the Something than appears in the summary intuition
described in the passage quoted.  It is one of Scott's greatest
accomplishments to have remained sensitive to all his intellectual
scruples, to have continued a modern man, and yet to have written, in
this poem, with an intensity and depth of emotion which is normally the
privilege of assured faith.



VII

The dialectical habit of thought which added a note of distinction to
"The Height of Land" is a characteristic in many of Scott's later
poems.  A curious and powerful instance of dialectical thinking which
is also highly poetical is the "Variations on a Seventeenth Century
Theme," in the collection of 1921.  The theme comes from Henry Vaughan:

  It was high spring, and all the way
  Primrosed, and hung with shade.

Scott's imagination was stimulated by the odd coupling of the primrose
and shadow, the symbol of spring and gaiety and love set beside the
symbol of death and gloom.  Where {130} Milton had written two
contrasted poems, each fully working out one-half of the substance here
combined, Scott weaves the two halves through a sequence of ten lyrics
and meditations.  In one Eve takes the primrose with her into outer
darkness; in another the path of gaiety and love shifts into the
primrose path to the everlasting bonfire; in another, as pure a song as
Scott has written, the permanency of a love is presented in terms of a
beginning in the primrose light of dawn and an ending only with the
final fall of night.  The term "variations" suggests very clearly how
it is that Scott has turned a method of thought into a poetic approach
to life: the analogy with music is evident.  As he opens the last of
the sequence, he confesses:

  A few chords now for a brimming close,
  No climax, but a fading away
  Into something either grave or gay
  As the line wanders and falters.

But the confession is not to be taken literally; in this final poem the
architecture is very careful---it comes to crown the whole.  The
"Variations" put us in touch with a mind with a rich sense of the
diversity of experience and with a power to sort it into emotionally
significant categories.

In the outstanding Indian poem of his last collection, the piece called
"A Scene at Lake Manitou," the dialectical method is used without
musical function.  An old squaw carries out all the observances of
Christian piety as her son lies dying; when they fail to propitiate she
reverts to her tribal gods and, as a sacrifice, begins to hurl into the
lake all her treasures.  Following his death her thoughts, after sharp
oscillations, come to rest slowly in a perfect balance:

  He had gone to his father
  To hunt in the Spirit Land
  And to be with Jesus and Mary.

The effect of this method, whether it is a conspicuous feature of
poetic structure as in the "Variations," or simply an {131} approach to
experience as here and in "The Height of Land," is to communicate a
breadth and depth to the poetry.  It is to be admitted, however, that
in the dialectical pieces and passages there is less of the restrained
intensity than in such a poem as "Powassan's Drum."  It is not easy, if
it is possible at all, to be at once dialectical and intense, since one
cannot be dialectical and simple.

As a purely simple poet Scott has notable powers, powers that have not
appeared adequately in this study.  One has only to think of his elegy
for his daughter, "The Closed Door," with its magic opening:

  The dew falls and the stars fall,
  The sun falls in the west

and after a dozen rich, slow lines reaching its magical close:

  While the sun falls in the west,
  The dew falls and the stars fall.

In its almost perfect simplicity--there is but one dissonant note, a
single word, "caressed"--it is one of the best fusions of restraint and
intensity in Scott's work.  Beside it may be set, without fear, the
hymn he wrote during the first world war, the hymn that begins:

  Those we have loved the dearest,
    The bravest and the best....

At least I believe this may be set beside the more personal elegy, but
it is inseparable in my memory from an evening I spent with Scott.

It was one of the many evenings in the summer of 1942 when I talked
with him in the huge, high-ceilinged room at the back of his rambling
house.  Along the walls were low bookcases filled, for the most part,
with first editions and the collected works of modern poets; on top of
them were varied mementoes of his contacts with the Indians; and above
were the brilliant landscapes of Milne, Emily Carr and the "Seven," one
of the most distinguished small {132} collections of Canadian painting.
Scott took down battered old volumes of early Canadian poets, of
Heavysege, Sangster and Cameron; he spoke of his arduous canoe trips
long ago up the Nipigon and along Achigan, and of his memories of
London and Florence; he evoked for me the long sessions in the
'eighties and 'nineties when he and Lampman, "poor Archie," were
forging their poetics; he told of the welcome he gave to the early work
of Marjorie Pickthall, and of Rupert Brooke's visit to him just before
the last war; he sought to make clear the change in the fibre of human
nature that has occurred in the past half century; he gave to me the
manuscript of one of Lampman's lyrics and allowed himself to be led on
to read a few of his own briefer pieces, among them the hymn I have
quoted from, which interested him by its resemblance to something he
was just then composing.  It was only a week before his eightieth
birthday; the grave, gentle voice was that of an old man, but what he
had to say reflected not old age but exquisite maturity.  Here, I
thought, as Pater presents Marius thinking of Fronto, was "the one
instance" I had seen "of a perfectly tolerable, perfectly beautiful old
age--an old age in which there seemed ... nothing to be regretted,
nothing really lost in what the years had taken away.  The wise old man
... would seem to have replaced carefully and consciously each natural
trait of youth, as it departed from him, by an equivalent trait of
culture."




3.  E. J. PRATT

Originality has been rare in Canadian literature, and what originality
there has been is narrowly limited.  In the early generations with whom
imaginative writing began, there was a tendency, natural enough in
transplanted Englishmen and Americans, to depend on English and {133}
American authors for tragedy and comedy, general history and general
criticism, philosophical reflection whether in prose or verse, in
short, for the presentation of all general problems of human
experience.  Canadians were impelled to write descriptions either of
the landscape round about them or of the peculiar circumstances in
which they lived: these they must describe for themselves since the
material was unknown to anyone else.  Preoccupation with landscape and
with local history has been strong up to the present time: the mark of
regionalism is upon almost all our best writing.  Our poetry has been
above all a poetry of landscape, in which the most successful
performances have usually been those that presented an exact picture,
or else suggested, by musical effect, an emotion experienced in the
presence of a particular scene.  In poetry and prose, but more clearly
in the latter, there has been a continuing attempt to describe the
surface of local life with heavy stress on material environment and, in
the best instances, an account of the impact of this environment on the
state of mind of the pioneer or, in recent times, the resident in rural
areas.  Canadian writing has been in the main a supplementary kind of
writing, in which the substance of most great literature was not
employed.  The tradition that has grown up, governing in a considerable
degree even the modes and tones of expression, has not caught much that
was deep in human character or very striking in thought.  The few
writers who have essayed something big, something central, have usually
failed; and their failure has strengthened the tradition.

The tradition of Canadian poetry at the end of the First Great War was
what the above account would suggest.  Beginning around 1880, a
movement to write about Canadian nature had been developing with a
notable measure of success; one skilful craftsman had followed another,
faithful to the limitations described, sharp in picture or suggestive
in music, but usually weak in the {134} passages of attempted
reflection, and often in the rendering of strong emotions; this
movement had passed its height by 1905, and in the following years the
old themes and the old moods were reiterated to the point of becoming
irksome.  If a tradition had come into being, with the genuine value
that a tradition always proceeds to acquire, it was a somewhat thin and
narrow tradition: there was general agreement that Canadian poetry was
charming and graceful, but most readers felt that it was something that
could rightly be ignored in favour of other writing, English or
American, that had greater interest, intensity and significance.
Canadian poetry was not, it need scarcely be said, a self-contained
development: romanticism and transcendentalism had marked it strongly;
the milder aspects of symbolism had affected it before 1900; and later
there was a superficial contact with imagism.  The main forces that
were stirring in English and American poetry after 1900 had, however,
but little effect in Canada: nothing of the sharpness and firmness of
Robinson and Frost had crossed the border; nothing of the sophisticated
simplicity of the Georgians had come over from England; Pound was
someone to sneer at, Sandburg someone to laugh about.

Bursting out of this tight little tradition emerged the poetry of Edwin
John Pratt.  Pratt was born in a Newfoundland fishing village in 1883,
the son of a Methodist clergyman.  From his earliest years up to the
time he was in his twenties he was in close and natural contact with
the sea; and the influence of the sea was almost equalled by that of
the books he found in his father's library and in the small schools to
which he went in that old and poverty-stricken colony.  After some
years of student preaching and elementary teaching, notably in the
whaling village of Moreton Harbour, Pratt came inland to the University
of Toronto in 1907.  As an undergraduate he interested himself in
philosophy and psychology, then almost inextricably related at Toronto,
and soon after his graduation he was appointed {135} to lecture in the
department of psychology, in which he remained for six years.  He had
been ordained; and in his choice of a theme for his doctoral
dissertation his theological interest is evident--in 1917 he presented
as his thesis _Studies in Pauline Eschatology_.  A rather large edition
of this pedestrian argument was printed by a local publisher; and Pratt
enjoys telling how for many years whenever he wanted to start a fire he
would toss in a copy or two of the thesis, which he refuses to list
among his publications since it was "done to a formula."  Even today in
the second-hand bookshops of Toronto one comes on this sturdy, ugly
volume side by side with the slim volumes of Pratt's verse.

In the same year appeared another book which he is just as averse to
remembering.  At the urging of friends he had privately printed a
Newfoundland narrative, _Rachel_, in the manner of Wordsworth's
_Michael_: although in the decision to write narrative verse he was
departing from the main Canadian tradition, both in the conventionality
of the language and the weakness in the presentation of character the
poem was stamped as imitative and ordinary.  Although he was to reprint
the conclusion, he now considers the whole performance unworthy.  The
printing of _Rachel_ was, however, the natural result of his growing
preoccupation with poetry.  During the years that he was a member of
the department of psychology, he was composing a good deal of verse.
Soon after the appearance of _Rachel_ Pratt finished a long lyrical
drama, _Clay_, in which he presented a variety of philosophical
systems, and towards the close introduced, to crown the whole, some
ideas more or less of his own devising.  One typescript of this work
has survived to be the object of his own derision, and, on occasion, of
the kindly amusement of his friends.  He has recently described this
second poetic venture as "full of theories and reflections of theories
about life, ethical maxims, philosophical truisms, bald, very bald
{136} generalizations--practically the whole cargo of the department of
Philosophy as it existed twenty years ago in the University of
Toronto."  The failure of _Clay_ disenchanted Pratt with the approach
to human experience by way of philosophy and psychology: it led him to
seek the concrete, the individual, the emotional approach, it led him
towards literature.

The most important opportunity of his life came in 1919 when he was
invited to join the department of English in the Methodist college of
the Toronto federation.  The invitation to Pratt is immensely to the
credit of Victoria College.  He had had no advanced training in English
language or literature: he was appointed because of his creative
powers, or rather because of his creative potentialities--for he had as
yet published no verse of distinction beyond a few short pieces in
local magazines.  The college gambled on Pratt's future; and it did so
because the head of the English department, Pelham Edgar, could discern
in Pratt's first and groping compositions the promise of what was to
come.  In Pelham Edgar's small department, dominated by his fine and
liberal taste, Pratt expanded at astonishing speed.  Pelham Edgar, who
has done more to foster Canadian literature than any other academic
figure, watched his experiment with a tirelessly benignant eye.  He set
Pratt to lecture in the courses where he thought the material would be
most valuable to Pratt's poetry.  There is no doubt that the impact of
Shakespeare, of Hakluyt, and of the Renaissance generally, was profound.

In 1923, four years after his appointment, Pratt brought out his first
collection of poems, _A Book of Newfoundland Verse_.  Many of the
poems, there are about forty, reflected the local tradition; and the
general effect that the book produces when read today is, that in
essentials it belonged to the Canadian school then in possession.
Nature is the chief theme; the predominant mood is late romantic; the
experiments in verse-structure, although {137} interesting, are never
radical; there is no single strong personality shaping the whole,
instead Pratt assumes a variety of points of view without much relation
between any of them.  Most of the pieces in the collection would be not
unfairly represented by this little stanza:

  With grey upon the sea,
  And driftwood on the reef,
  With winter in the tree,
  And death within the leaf.

That is pure and right and charming; but at least four of the elder
poets then alive might have written it.  The collection contains a few
narratives, or fragments of narrative; but these are far from being the
best things in it, slow in pace, and rather ponderous in diction.  The
one poem that really pointed towards Pratt's future was a little trifle
called "The Epigrapher," in which he used the tetrameter, exulted in
polysyllables, achieved the asperity of sound that has been one of the
marks of his most characteristic verse, and bathed the whole in genial
humour.  _Newfoundland Verse_ is the work of a poet who has not yet
come to grips with himself, although Pratt was forty years old when it
came out: it is the work of an experimenter who is continuing to clutch
at a tradition although that tradition is actually stifling him.

Only three years later appeared a book to which these remarks have no
application whatever.  _Titans_ is the work of a poet who has defined
his personality and determined his form.  Some of Pratt's admirers
still set it above everything he has done since; and indeed it is not
easy to name any poem written in Canada at any time that is more
satisfying than "The Cachalot," the short epic with which the book
begins.  Here for the first time what is peculiar to Pratt appeared in
its full splendour; and it is pleasant to recall that when we first
read "The Cachalot," many of us felt immediately the rare distinction
of what was before us.  {138} The other narrative which rounds out the
book, "The Great Feud," confirms the impression produced by "The
Cachalot."  A narrative of the amphibian _tyrannosaurus rex_, who was
born ages late and dominated a conflict between the creatures of the
earth and the creatures of the sea, less dramatic than "The Cachalot,"
less beautifully proportioned, it is no less satisfying in texture.

What is the originality of these poems, and especially of "The
Cachalot"?  It is, as the deepest aesthetic originality commonly is,
the full, happy, exciting expression of an original temperament.
Pratt's choice of subject arose from his revolt against the abstract
themes suggested to him by his philosophic formation; in this revolt he
went back to the non-academic aspects of his experience, especially to
what he had known in Newfoundland before he came to Toronto.  When he
was teaching school, about 1903, he would see at Moreton's Harbour "the
whaling steamers ... tow the whales into the harbour and moor them
belly up until they were taken to the factories."  He used to row out
and circle about the whales, and then come back to shore and talk with
the whalers.  Much of the emotion in "The Cachalot" is, in the best
sense, juvenile; but the juvenile emotion combines with others to make
a rich whole.

The poem immediately makes the reader think of _Moby Dick_.  When he
wrote it, Pratt had not read Melville's prose epic, which he was later
to edit in a series for use in the schools of Ontario.  The whale, for
Melville an incarnation of the evil in the universe, is for Pratt an
incarnation of its strength, enviable, admirable.  In the crushing of
the ship by the whale, what Pratt sees is nature imposing her strength
to rend the complex contrivances of artificial society, the primitive
overpowering the intellectual.  The angle from which the subject is
here approached is fairly constant with Pratt: he occupied it again a
decade later when he wrote _The Titanic_.  For all his admiration of
the energy and gallantry of passengers and crew, his spirit was {139}
then more fully satisfied by the spectacle of the great marine machine,
supposed invulnerable, destroyed by the effortless, unconscious power
of the ice-berg.  The climax of _The Titanic_--it was also the passage
first written, although it comes at the very end--celebrates the
strength of the ice-berg:

  Silent, composed, ringed by its icy broods,
  The gray shape with the palaeolithic face
  Was still the master of the longitudes.

The originality of "The Cachalot," as of _The Titanic_, lies first,
then, in the exaltation that Pratt experiences in the mere existence
before his imagination of supreme strength.  It is this that critics
are trying to express when they call him "epic" or "heroic."

Along with his delight in strength, a violent and even a harsh quality,
goes Pratt's abounding humour.  The combination, or at his best the
fusion, of humour and heroic strength allows him, as he has said, "to
bring in with the more severe elemental qualities the human
idiosyncrasies" which bulk large in his understanding of life.  In the
presence of strength Pratt feels pleasure as well as awe; there is very
little terror in Pratt's world, and the reader never feels small in it;
his pictures of strength release one from the petty round and make one
feel the ally, not the victim--as with Jeffers, whom he warmly
admires--of universal power.  Pratt's humour removes tension, and
promotes an effect of heroic ease.  Simple and primitive as this humour
is, it is usually expressed in terms far from epic simplicity, terms
sometimes extremely erudite.  He is artful in twisting the big word
into a humorous effect, while caressing it at the same time for its
resonant beauty.  He turns even his speedy pace into something with a
comic overtone: one can feel towards the end of one of the galloping
passages that Pratt is getting a little out of breath and is smiling at
his _tour de force_.

{140}

These and many other forms of humour are obvious in "The Cachalot."
There, for the adequate projection of his strength and humour, Pratt
made use of a form which has remained a favourite with him.  Most of
his readers speak loosely of his "tetrameter couplets," but Pratt,
appreciating the danger of monotony, departs from the succession of
couplets, using a fair number of quatrains, and sometimes allowing as
many as ten lines to pass before a rhyme is completed.  Notable
versatility in the distribution of stresses further counteracts the
tetrameter's penchant toward over-resonant monotony.  The result of
Pratt's metrical resourcefulness is admirable: "The Cachalot" abounds
in energy and clamour, but it is never tiresomely reiterative.  Nowhere
else is Pratt's verse so conspicuously original in texture as in "The
Cachalot" and its companion piece.  Even in these few lines, with which
"The Cachalot" opens, it is evident, I think, that Pratt has that
exceedingly rare quality, absolute originality of texture:

  A thousand years now had his breed
  Established the mammalian lead;
  The founder (in cetacean lore)
  Had followed Leif to Labrador;
  The eldest-born tracked all the way
  Marco Polo to Cathay;
  A third had hounded one whole week
  The great Columbus to Bahama;
  A fourth outstripped to Mozambique
  The flying squadron of de Gama....
  And when his time had come to hasten
  Forth from his deep sub-mammary basin
  Out on the ocean tracts, his mama
  Had, in a North Saghalien gale,
  Launched him, a five-ton healthy male,
  Between Hong Kong and Yokohama.

What dash!  What trumpet notes!  What power of personality!  This was
startlingly new to our poetry, and in no {141} other poetry is its like
to be found.  The nearest resemblance is with the Australian, Bernard
O'Dowd, but it is distant indeed.  The passage I have quoted is
descriptive.  But the same originality of texture is everywhere in "The
Cachalot": it marks the narrative and the dialogue no less than the
descriptions.  What Pratt's narrative is like appears with sufficient
clearness in these few lines which present a squid expecting and then
enduring a grapple with the cachalot:

  Nor was there given him more than time
  From that first instinct of alarm,
  To ground himself in deeper slime,
  And raise up each enormous arm
  Above him, when, unmeasured, full
  On the revolving ramparts, broke
  The hideous rupture of a stroke
  From the forehead of the bull.
  And when they interlocked, that night--
  Cetacean and cephalopod--
  No Titan with Olympian god
  Had ever waged a fiercer fight;
  Tail and skull and teeth and maw
  Met sinew, cartilage and claw....

And the dialogue is all very much like this brief interchange:

  "Two hundred barrels to a quart,"
  Gamaliel whispered to Old Wart.

  "A bull, by gad the biggest one
  I've ever seen," said Wart, "I'll bet'ee,
  He'll measure up a hundred ton
  And a thousand gallons of spermaceti."

  "Clew up your gab!"
            "Let go that mast! ..."

{142} The rush and bound of the rhythm is always there, though it is
not always the same kind of rush and bound.  For the entire length of
the poem the reader is whirled at a pace which dizzies and exhilarates
him; and when the poem ends one feels that he has made a unique
adventure, a journey into a realm of the imagination to which no other
poet could admit him.  It is notable that employing a range of diction
which so often in other poets has produced effects which may be
described as portentous or bombinating, Pratt, throughout "The
Cachalot," maintains a nervous vigour and a fullness of meaning.  Think
what such words as "cetacean," "cephalopod," "revolving ramparts" do in
the sort of poetry where they most often occur, what a dead weight they
make and then observe, as one may in an instant, what they add to the
movement and texture of "The Cachalot."

What happened within Pratt in the years just before he wrote "The
Cachalot"?  It was shortly before he wrote this poem that I first met
him, but my acquaintance was wholly superficial until much later.
However, I find the dedication to this volume of 1926 significant for
anyone who has known Pratt at any time in his mature life.  He
addresses the book to "the boys of the stag-parties."  These
stag-parties of Pratt's are for many Canadians among the best things in
their lives.  They undoubtedly answer to a deep need in Pratt's nature;
and they had got under way some little time before "The Cachalot" was
written.  As I try to sum up the leading elements in Pratt I stop first
at his conviviality.  In his relations with others he is never so
himself as when he sits at the head of his table with half a dozen men
around him, a great fowl before him, and vigorous, easy conversation in
the air.  The conversation need not be wholly or even mainly literary,
but there must be a literary temper in the language; the men need not
be intimate friends, but they must warm and soften as the dinner goes
on, so that for the moment at least they are {143} raised to the plane
of careless friendship.  It was the host at these parties who wrote
"The Cachalot," as a year or two before he had written for a wedding
anniversary that high-spirited, brilliant, kaleidoscopic fantasia, _The
Witches' Brew_; but in "The Cachalot" there was another Pratt, a very
secretive being who has contrived to lead an impenetrable life behind
the front of the most expansive of Canadian poets.  As a young critic
wrote a few years ago:

  Pratt preferred internal planes
  Building a world so roughly grand
  He gave triumphantly the slip
  To all that ev'n Toronto planned.

A little of his secret will be seen at a later point.

For about a decade the works that followed "The Cachalot" brought no
significant change, if one excepts a piece of occasional poetry, the
sombre and eloquent ode on his mother's death, called _The Iron Door_.
_The Titanic_ has been mentioned; it was less popular and less talked
of than _The Roosevelt and the Antinoe_ (pronounced as if there were no
terminal _e_), which tells of a rescue in mid-ocean, and is stirring
and admirably managed.  Still, this poem is less deeply satisfying than
_The Titanic_: in it the foreground of heroism blots out the forces of
the sea which are the cause of all that occurs in it.  I do not think
that Pratt intended to blot them out; I think that the drama of rescue
had so many and such complicated steps that, contrary to the ideal
development of the piece, Pratt concentrated upon these, and left the
powerful sources of the incident to form an indeterminate back-drop.
In this tale of a rescue he comes closer to Masefield than anywhere
else; and it has become the custom with some critics to think of Pratt
as a local Masefield.  I do not find the comparison illuminating, and
in some respects it seems to me to be dangerously misleading.
Masefield's is essentially a tender nature, lacking in humour; and when
he exalts strength, as he often does, there {144} is something
_maladif_ in his tone as there is in Henley's or Swinburne's.
Tenderness is almost absent from Pratt's poetry: his approach to
strength is much more masculine than Masefield's, and in this
difference lies one of the great fundamental distinctions between the
poetry of the two.

The other has to do with their treatment of character.  Nothing is so
difficult for a Canadian as to give a living presentment of a natural
human individual.  Canadian biographies never put before the reader a
man in his habit as he walked and talked; they are the equivalent of
marble busts.  Canadian novels are full of characters who are simply
the _porte-parole_ of their writers, or conventionally humorous
nondescripts, or pale idealizations.  Only in a few short stories and
novelettes, notably in those of Mr. Morley Callaghan, do real breathing
individuals exist.  In none of the poems mentioned up to this point
could one say that Pratt made an individual live for us as Dauber
lives, or Saul Kane.  Pratt participates in the weaknesses of the
tradition in which he grew to poetic maturity.

The closest that Pratt has ever come to animating a character with
genuine life is in the latest of his major works, _Brbeuf and His
Brethren_.  Here he has left the sea for the Canadian past, for the
most picturesque and heroic achievement in our national history--the
deeds of the Jesuits who came out from France in the seventeenth
century and after exploits of unbelievable brilliance, and endurance as
great as the type of hero-saint has ever shown, ended as martyrs.  The
poem centres in the figure of Jean Brbeuf; and he is as lifelike a
figure as there has been in our poetry.  Ten years earlier Pratt could
not have drawn such a figure.  He has come very slowly to believe that
human beings radiate such excitement as he long found only in
ice-bergs, whales, prehistoric giants and ocean storms.  It will not, I
hope, be mistaken for easy humour if I say that in the mould where
Pratt cast his figure of the Jesuit priest something of the prehistoric
giant, something of the whale, and even {145} a little of the ice-berg
remained.  Brbeuf is much larger than life.  A good deal is made of
his physical size: he was so huge that Indians hesitated to let him
into their canoes.  He is always the hero: no discouragement weighs him
down; no doubt divides; no horror appals; the last extremity of
Iroquois torture cannot make him blench.  What is fundamental to
Pratt's interest in the story is suggested by his remark that he began
the composition of the piece with a quest for "a simile for the Cross
which would express alike shame and glory, something strongly
vernacular set over against cultivated imagery and language.  Two slabs
of board--nails--Jewish hill, and so forth, contrasted with lilies,
robes and so forth."  That is not the way in which a story is begun
when the chief interest is the portrayal of character: it is the way of
the poet for whom character is a symbol, rather than a dramatic
complex.  And Brbeuf is a symbol: there is nothing complicated in him.
He belongs in epic poetry, but he is not the kind of epic hero that
Homer drew, or, to keep to more modest and modern names, that Morris
gave us in _Sigurd the Volsung_.

In this poem the great thing is, as always with Pratt, the expression
of a temperament.  The temperament reflected here is quieter and graver
than that which lent such fire and force to "The Cachalot."  I have
quoted all too little of Pratt's verse: he has never surpassed the tone
and feeling that marks the conclusion of _Brbeuf and His Brethren_:

  Three hundred years have passed, and the winds of God
  Which blew over France are blowing once more through the pines
  That bulwark the shores of the great Fresh Water Sea.
  Over the wastes abandoned by human tread,
  Where only the bittern's cry was heard at dusk;
  Over the lakes where the wild ducks built their nests
  The skies that had banked their fires are shining again
  With the stars that guided the feet of Jogues and Brbeuf.
{146}
  The years as they turned have ripened the martyrs' seed,
  And the ashes of St. Ignace are glowing afresh.
  The trails, having frayed the threads of the cassocks, sank
  Under the mould of the centuries, under fern
  And brier and fungus--there in due time to blossom
  Into the highways that lead to the crest of the hill
  Which havened both shepherd and flock in the days of their trial.
  For out of the torch of Ragueneau's ruins the candles
  Are burning today in the chancel of Sainte Marie.
  The Mission sites have returned to the fold of the Order.
  Near to the ground where the cross broke under the hatchet,
  And went with it into the soil to come back at the turn
  Of the spade with the carbon and the calcium char of the bodies,
  The shrines and altars are built anew; the _Aves_
  And prayers ascend, and the Holy Bread is broken.

In these lines all the clamour of "The Cachalot" is stilled: Pratt has
found for himself a grave, slow-moving, blank verse.  He will not
forget this new accent.  To observe the quiet and restrained manner in
which he read these lines to a great audience in Toronto a year or so
ago was to appreciate what a change has come over him of late.

The long depression which enveloped Canada in 1929 and never really
lifted until it was replaced by the worse disaster of war was sobering
to Pratt.  During the 'thirties, as a result of his growing reputation,
he was giving recitals and lectures across the country; he taught in
summer schools from Halifax to Vancouver; everywhere he went--he is
always gregarious--he saw and heard the painful facts.  Although
Pratt's is not at all a political or sociological mind, although his
temperament is very unlike those of our tender leftist poets, he was
agitated by the spectacle of a society in which scores of thousands of
people had fallen into an abyss where life was grey and numb.
Disturbance in the face of our social order runs through his little
collection of 1937, _The Fable of the Goats and Other Poems_.  He
speaks of

  The deep _malaise_ in the communal heart of the world

{147} and sees no solution for general misery.  The tension in
international relations impressed him profoundly as the 'thirties drew
on.  In the same collection his mind can be seen following other
unaccustomed paths.  He foresees war.  In the title-piece he attempts
an allegory in a prehistoric setting, and presents his hopeful proposal
for an ideal Europe.  What he suggests is, in a word, that a nation
should disarm its enemy by a conspicuous gesture of non-resistance.
This is not one of his strongest works--Pratt's poetry is not
hospitable to pure ideas, for he is still in revolt against his
philosophic formation.  The poem is, however, striking evidence of the
change going on within him: one has only to compare it with the kindred
"Great Feud" of a decade earlier to be sure of this.  Elsewhere in the
collection of 1937 he protests in the manner of the time against the
inadequacies of brain in the leaders, whose shortcomings must be made
good by the fatal courage of young heroes.

The outbreak of the war weighed heavily upon his spirit.  He went back
to the national past not simply, if at all, as an escape, but rather to
be reassured as to the qualities of Canadian life.  He wished to be
sure that we could bear the strains of war.  To a Canadian the lines
quoted from Brbeuf and that poem as a whole must have a special
appeal.  Brbeuf and his fellow-martyrs are the Canadian types of
sanctity--they are the only Canadians canonized at Rome.  Theirs was a
great role, perhaps the supreme role, in our heroic age--_ton histoire
est une pope_, a national anthem tells us, though we do not always
believe it; nowhere are we closer to the epic level of Canadian life
than when we stand on the rocky shore of the Georgian Bay where the
Jesuits have built what is known as The Martyrs' Shrine on the supposed
site of Brbeuf's principal mission at Sainte Marie.  Pratt has often
stood there: he has been "over every square foot of the ground."
_Brbeuf and His Brethren_ must mean more to his own people than it can
to others.  Consequently it is extremely difficult {148} for a
Canadian, especially so soon after the poem's appearance and before
readers in other countries have recorded their responses, to suggest
what degree of universal interest and significance the poem has.  But I
do not know what authentic poetry may be, I shall confess, if these
lines, to which a comment of Pratt already quoted refers, are not
authentic:

  Nor in the symbol of Richelieu's robes or the seals
  Of Mazarin's charters, nor in the stir of the lilies
  Upon the Imperial folds; nor yet in the words
  Loyola wrote on a table of lava-stone
  In the cave of Manresa--not in these the source--
  But in the sound of invisible trumpets blowing
  Around two slabs of board, right-angled, hammered
  By Roman nails and hung on a Jewish hill.


I have spoken almost exclusively of the narrative poet.  It is not to
be forgotten that from _Newfoundland Verse_ down to the immediate
present Pratt has been steadily writing lyrical poetry as well.  If
some of his lyrics are admirable, his range in this kind of poetry is
extraordinarily limited.  Love and passion play an almost negligible
part in Pratt's poetry.  It is astonishing that in the robust elemental
world of his narratives, where his heroes and his monstrous animals are
for ever fighting and drinking and eating, sexual desire does not
exist.  When Pratt does, now and then, speak of love in his lyrics, the
note is very gentle and the effect is weak.  He takes his place with
the other masters of Canadian poetry in shying away from the expression
of passion, and he is not in temperament adapted, as Sangster was, or
Carman, to express the pale delicacy of immaterial love.  Nor is Pratt
a nature lyrist.  Here and there, in his epic pieces, there are highly
imaginative renderings of nature, passages in which nature comes alive
for a moment.  But nature is never more than the setting for action, a
background for heroes: Pratt is cordially {149} appreciative of Lampman
and his company but the microscopic is not congenial to his space- and
size-loving nature.  Nor does Pratt often attempt the meditative lyric.
The best among the meditative lyrics are, I think, "Silences," which
belongs to the collection of 1937, and "Come Away Death," which
appeared in the Canadian issue of _Poetry_, in 1941.

The first section of "Silences" is specially impressive and highly
characteristic of the texture of Pratt's poetry:

  There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the
        silence under the sea;
  No cries announcing birth,
  No sounds declaring death.
  There is silence when the milt is laid on the spawn in the weeds
        and fungus of the rock-clefts;
  And silence in the growth and struggle for life.
  The bonitoes pounce upon the mackerel,
  And are themselves caught by the barracudas,
  The sharks kill the barracudas
  And the great molluscs rend the sharks
  And all noiselessly--
  Though swift be the action and final the conflict,
  The drama is silent.

  There is no fury upon the earth like the fury under the sea.
  For growl and cough and snarl are the tokens of spendthrifts who
        know not the ultimate economy of rage.
  Moreover, the pace of the blood is too fast.
  But under the waves the blood is sluggard and has the same
        temperature as that of the sea.

  There is something pre-reptilian about a silent kill.

In these lines, so like the long, grave, intense verses of Jeffers,
Pratt achieves something of the quality that marks the meditative
passages in _Brbeuf_.  "Silences" might well have been an extended
comment in that poem: it is not {150} a song, it is an intense
reflection, conducted in concrete terms.  Although the form of "Come
Away Death" is nearer to that of song, it, too, is essentially a piece
of intense reflection.  The final stanzas will suggest this, as they
also suggest the power Pratt has in this special kind of lyric:

  The poplars straightened to attention
  As the winds stopped to listen
  To the sound of a motor drone--
  And then the drone was still.
  We heard the tick-tock on the shelf,
  And the leak of valves in our hearts.
  A calm condensed and lidded
  As at the core of a cyclone ended breathing.
  This was the monologue of Silence
  Grave and unequivocal.

  What followed was a bolt
  Outside the range and target of the thunder
  And human speech curved back upon itself
  Through Druid runways and the Piltdown scarps,
  Beyond the stammers of the Java caves,
  To find its origins in hieroglyphs
  On mouths and eyes and cheeks
  Etched by a foreign stylus never used
  On the outmoded page of the Apocalypse.

Here is Pratt's lyrical power at its most impressive; and that power is
obviously not that of a singing poet.

It is not necessary to pass in review the other kinds of lyric that
Pratt writes--the humorous lyric, the compliment, the familiar letter.
None of these exhibits the remarkable force that animates the
narratives and shines with a subdued glow in the best of the meditative
poems.  It is the author of "The Cachalot," _Brbeuf_ and _The Titanic_
who rightly preoccupies us, and who has won for Pratt the central place
among Canadian poets in these years.

{151}

In contemporary Canadian letters Pratt's place is unique.  Some years
ago I suggested that he was our only valid link between the elder and
the younger poets.  I did not mean that he derived from the old and
produced the new.  He resembles the old in some respects and the new in
others and with reservations appreciates both, giving a lead to poets
and critics alike to profess a generous but not spineless eclecticism.
Pratt's natural generosity of taste has been strengthened by his
academic studies: unlike most poets of his generation and that which
followed, in Canada and elsewhere, Pratt sees great beauty in many
traditions and most experiments.  Whitman was not lost to him when he
came to admire Eliot: Auden, from whom he has learned, has not come
between him and Shelley.  The breadth of Pratt's taste, along with a
modest sense of his duties as a master of Canadian letters, has led him
to be an active member of literary societies, a devoted Fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada, and the editor of the _Canadian Poetry
Magazine_ from its foundation.  Traditionalists and experimenters trust
his judgment and work together under his high-spirited chairmanship.
Pratt is also a link between the creative writers and the universities.
Among writers he is always pleading for the importance of accuracy and
fullness of information, of which his _Brbeuf_ is a notable instance.
In the universities he inveighs against the conception of a literary
education which esteems a detailed knowledge of minor writers in the
past more pertinent than acquaintance with the best that is written
today.  Nor does his mediatorial power stop there: the general public,
stupidly indifferent to poetry and distrustful of poets, is slowly
coming to know of Pratt.  His most recent work, a short epic on
Dunkirk, has been more widely read than any other Canadian poem of
merit in the past thirty years.  Pratt's work, and Pratt's personality,
help to make poetry and poets less alien to the people of this
materialized civilization.  It is perhaps too easy for those who talk
with {152} Pratt to forget that this man of unconsidered speech and
homespun exuberant manner is a distinguished poet: to the unreflecting
he may too often seem just one of the boys; but the reflecting know
that only the outer rings of the man are penetrable, and that at the
core is a secret life, the life of one who is not lonely only because
he is self-sufficient.




{153}

Bibliographical Note

There is no wholly satisfactory history of Canadian literature or of
Canadian poetry: those that are sufficiently comprehensive lack
critical insight, and those with such insight are too restricted in
scope.  The best introductory book either for literature in general or
for poetry is Archibald MacMechan's _Headwaters of Canadian Literature_
(1924) which, up to 1900 at least, is admirable in perspective.  The
earlier period has been carefully studied by Ray Palmer Baker in his
_History of English-Canadian Literature to Confederation_ (1920), but
readers of this excellent book need to be warned against its extreme
bias toward the culture of the Maritime Provinces and away from that of
Upper Canada, the modern Ontario.  There is no study of comparable
thoroughness on the period since Confederation; but for poetry at least
the defect is partly made good in W. E. Collin's _The White Savannahs_
(1936), which has chapters on Lampman, Pickthall, Pratt, Kennedy,
Klein, F. R. Scott, A. J. M. Smith, and D. Livesay.  Pre-Confederation
poets are generously represented in most of the principal anthologies,
among which W. D. Lighthall's _Songs of the Great Dominion_ (1889) and
J. W. Garvin's _Canadian Poets_ (second edition, revised and enlarged,
1926) are notable.  A more comprehensive anthology with special stress
on Pre-Confederation poetry is in preparation by A. J. M. Smith.
Collected or selected editions of most of the Post-Confederation poets
are kept in print, but Pratt is a regrettable exception.  His poems
must be read in the original volumes, many of which are no longer
easily available.  The best anthology of recent poetry is Mrs. E. H.
Bennett's _New Harvesting_ (1938); it requires to be supplemented by
_New Provinces: Poems by Several Authors_ (1936), which contains poems
by Finch, Kennedy, Klein, Pratt, Scott and Smith.  A useful
introductory anthology is Ralph Gustafson's small collection, _An
Anthology of Canadian Poetry_ (_English_) in the Pelican Library (1942).

On Lampman the best material is in the prefaces by Duncan Campbell
Scott to the complete _Poems_ (1900) and to the selected _Lyrics of
Earth, Poems and Ballads_ (1925).  There is a useful critical
biography, _Archibald Lampman, Canadian Poet of Nature_ (1929), by Carl
Connor.  Miss E. M. Pomeroy has written an exhaustive work, entitled
_Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, A Biography_ {154} (1943).  James Cappon
did an admirable study of Roberts for the Makers of Canadian Literature
series (1925), and a less judicial book on Carman, _Bliss Carman_
(1929); more satisfactory than this is Odell Shepard's _Bliss Carman_
(1923).  Carl F. Klinck's _Wilfred Campbell, A Study in Late Provincial
Victorianism_ (1942) is valuable for its fully documented account of a
minor poet belonging to the group born in the 1860's.  There is no book
on D. C. Scott; an important article is Pelham Edgar's "Duncan Campbell
Scott" in the Dalhousie Review (1926).  Nor is there a book on Pratt or
any of the important poets more recent than Carman and Roberts, except
for J. F. Macdonald's study of Drummond in the Makers of Canadian
Literature and Lorne Pierce's _Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of
Remembrance_ (1925), which supplies the essential information about
Miss Pickthall.  On the movement since 1935 the reader may find it
helpful to consult the annual surveys of Canadian Poetry contributed by
the present writer to _Letters in Canada_, a supplement to the April
issues of the _University of Toronto Quarterly_.

D. C. Scott's "Poetry and Progress" in _Transactions of the Royal
Society of Canada_ (1922), Pratt's article, "Canadian Poetry Past and
Present," in the _University of Toronto Quarterly_ (1938), and A. J. M.
Smith's rejoinder, "Canadian Poetry a Minority Report," in the same
review (1939), are fundamental to an understanding of what these poets,
and others, have sought to accomplish.




{155}

INDEX


  "Across the Pea-Fields," 95-96.
  "Alcyone," 105.
  _Alcyone and Other Poems_, 94-95.
  Allen, Grant, 9.
  Alline, Henry, 27.
  _Among the Millet_, 37, 92, 93, 95.
  "Among the Timothy," 93.
  "April," 47, 93.
  Arnold Matthew, 1-2.
  "Arnulph," 90.
  "At Dusk," 102.
  "At the Cedars," 115-116.
  "At the Long Sault," 98-101.


  B

  Baker, R. P., 2-3, 31.
  "Ballade of Detachment," 60.
  Bennett, Ethel Hume, 78, 153.
  Birney, Earle, 76-78.
  Blake, W. H., 7.
  _Book of Newfoundland Verse, A_, 66, 136-137, 148.
  Bourinot, Arthur S., 78.
  Bowman, Louise Morey, 78.
  _Brbeuf and His Brethren_, 144-146, 147-148, 151.
  Broadus, E. K., 61.
  "Brock," 29-30, 33.
  Brooke, Rupert, 132.
  Brown, Audrey Alexandra, 78.


  C

  _Cachalot, The_, 137-143, 145.
  Callaghan, Morley, 5, 11-13, 21.
  _Calling Adventurers_, 76.
  Cameron, George Frederick, 37-41.
  Campbell, Wilfred, 16, 109.
  Cappon, James, 45, 51.
  Carman, Bliss, 21, 37, 46-47, 52-56, 66, 109, 110, 112.
  Child, Philip, 10.
  "City of the End of Things, The," 85-86, 96-97.
  Clarke, George Herbert, 78.
  _Clay_, 135-136.
  "Closed Door, The," 100, 131.
  Collin, W. E., 62, 88, 90, 95, 153.
  "Come Away Death," 149-150.
  Conrad, Joseph, 9.
  _Count Filippo_, 4.
  Crawford, Isabella Valancy, 41-45.


  D

  "David," 76-77.
  _David and Other Poems_, 76-78.
  De la Roche, Mazo, 5, 12-13.
  _Drift of Pinions, A_, 61.
  Drummond, W. H., 56, 57-58.


  E

  Edel, Leon, 73.
  Edgar, Pelham, 126, 136, 154.
  "Epigrapher, The," 137.
  "Epistle to Bliss Carman," 51-52.
  "Epitaph on a Rich Man," 85.


  F

  _Fable of the Goats and Other Poems, The_, 146-147.
  Finch, Robert D. C., 67, 75.
  "Forsaken, The," 118-119, 120.
  Frchette, Louis, 57-58.
  "Freedom," 87.
  "Frogs, The," 89-90, 98.


  G

  Garvin, John, 153.
  "Good Night," 31.
  "Great Feud, The," 138, 147.
  Gustafson, Ralph, 75.


  H

  _Habitant and Other French Canadian Poems, The_, 57-58.
  "Half Breed Girl, The," 121.
  Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 3.
  _Harper's Magazine_, 80.
  _Hath Not a Jew..._, 67, 71-75.
  "Heat," 88, 98, 101.
  Heavysege, Charles, 3-4, 28, 32-36.
  "Height of Land, The," 127-129, 131.
  Hmon, Louis, 7.
  _Hesperus and Other Poems and Lyrics_, 29, 32.
  Howells, William Dean, 14, 80.


  I

  "Indian Names of Acadia, The," 28.
  _In Divers Tones_, 46, 52.
  "In Flanders Fields," 65.
  "In the House of Dreams," 114.


  J

  Jephthah's Daughter, 4, 33, 35-36.
  "June," 93.


  K

  Kennedy, Leo, 67-70.
  King, W. L. Mackenzie, 16.
  Klein, Abraham, 67, 70-74.


  L

  _Labour and the Angel_, 116.
  Lampman, Archibald, 10-11, 37, 40, 46-47, 80-108,
      109, 110, 111, 112, 132.
  _Lamp of Poor Souls, The_, 62.
  "Land of Pallas, The," 96, 98.
  "Laodamia," 78.
  "Late November," 88-89.
  Leacock, Stephen, 5, 23.
  Leslie, Kenneth, 78.
  Lewisohn, Ludwig, 71.
  "Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris," 123-126.
  Livesay, Dorothy, 67.
  "Low Tide on Grand Pr," 36, 52.
  _Low Tide on Grand Pr and Other Poems_, 37, 52.
  _Lyrics of Earth_, 92-94.
  _Lyrics on Freedom, Love and Death_, 37-41.


  M

  Macdonald, Wilson, 79.
  MacInnes, Tom, 56, 59-61, 109.
  MacKay, L. A., 78.
  MacLennan, Hugh, 14.
  MacMechan, Archibald, 90, 108-109, 153.
  "Magic House, The," 114-115.
  _Magic House and Other Poems, The_, 37, 112-115.
  Mair, Charles, 15, 50.
  "Malcolm's Katie," 41-45.
  Marriott, Anne, 67, 75-76.
  Masefield, John, 113.
  Maurois, Andr, 5.
  McCarthy, Justin, 3.
  McCrae, John, 65.
  _McGill Fortnightly, The_, 67, 78.
  Melville, Herman, 138.
  "Mirelle of Found Money," 59.
  "Mission of the Trees, The," 117-118.
  "My Prayer," 31.


  N

  _New Harvesting_, 78.
  _New Provinces_, 67.
  _New World Lyrics and Ballads_, 116.
  "Niagara Landscape, A," 86.
  "Night Burial in the Forest," 121.


  O

  "Ode for the Canadian Confederacy," 50-51.
  "Ode to the Hills," 105.
  _Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie and Other Poems_, 41-45.
  "On Lac Sainte Irne," 62-63.
  "On Lake Temiscamingue," 106-107.
  "Onondaga Madonna, The," 121.
  _Orion and Other Poems_, 36, 37, 43-46, 52, 83-84.
  "Ottawa," 112.
  "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens," 71, 73-74.


  P

  Parker, Sir Gilbert, 4.
  "Passing of Spring, The," 103-104.
  "Passion," 76.
  "Pre Lalement," 63-64.
  Pickthall, Marjorie, 61-65, 132.
  "Piper of Aril, The," 113-114.
  "Poet's Song, The," 97.
  "Potato Harvest, The," 48.
  "Powassan's Drum," 122-123.
  "Praise and Prayer," 91-92.
  Pratt, E. J., 25, 66, 67, 132-152.


  R

  _Rachel_, 135.
  Roberts, Sir Charles G. D., 4, 36-37, 45-52, 65, 83-84, 109, 110.
  Robinson, E. A., 116.
  _Roosevelt and the Antinoe, The_, 143-144.
  "Rose of My Desire, The," 49.


  S

  Saint Laurent, Louis, 14.
  _St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and Other Poems, The_, 29.
  _Salt Marsh_, 76.
  Sangster, Charles, 28-32.
  _Saul_, 3, 32, 34-35.
  Scott, Duncan Campbell, 37, 42, 65, 66, 92-93, 94,
        100, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108-132.
  Scott, F. R., 67, 74.
  Service, Robert, 4, 56, 58-59.
  _Shrouding, The_, 67-69.
  _Sign Post_, 67.
  "Silences," 149.
  "Soire of Velvel Kleinberger," 70-71.
  Smith, A. J. M., 67, 74-75.
  _Songs of the Great Dominion_, 112.
  _Songs from Vagabondia_, 53-54.
  "Spring on Mattagami," 127.
  "Spring Song," 53-54.
  _Studies in Pauline Eschatology_, 135.
  "Summer Evening, A," 96.
  "Sunset at Les Eboulements, A," 102, 106.


  T

  Thomson, E. W., 104.
  Thomson, Tom, 127.
  "Tiger of Desire, The," 60, 61.
  _Titanic, The_, 138-139, 143.
  _Titans_, 66, 137-143.
  Tweedsmuir, Lord (John Buchan), 18-19.
  "Twilight," 34.


  U

  _University of Toronto Quarterly, The_, 74.


  V

  "Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme," 129-130.
  _Via Borealis_, 126.


  W

  Wharton, Edith, 9-10.
  "White Margaret," 90.
  Wilson, Sir Daniel, 15.
  _Wind Our Enemy, The_, 67, 75-76.
  "Winter Evening," 101-102.
  "Winter Hues Recalled," 80-81.
  "Winter-Store," 93-94.
  _Witches' Brew, The_, 143.
  _Wood Carver's Wife, The_, 62.
  "Woodcutter's Hut, The," 105.
  "Words for a Resurrection," 68-69.
  "Wreck of the _Julie Plante_, The," 58.


  Y

  "Ysolte," 39.






[End of On Canadian Poetry, by E. K. Brown]
