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Title: Head-Waters of Canadian Literature
Author: MacMechan, Archibald McKellar (1862-1933)
Date of first publication: 1924
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1924
Date first posted: 2 March 2011
Date last updated: 2 March 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #737

This ebook was produced by
Iona Vaughan, Ross Cooling, Mark Akrigg
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  Head-Waters of Canadian Literature




  By the Same Author

  The Porter of Bagdad
  The Life of a Little College
  The Winning of Popular Government
  Old Province Tales (Nova Scotia)
  Nova Scotia Chap-Books.
  Sagas of the Sea

  Edited

  Sartor Resartus
  Heroes and Hero-Worship
  Tennyson: Select Poems
  Nova Scotia Archives, II., III.




  Head-Waters of Canadian Literature

  By
  Archibald MacMechan


  _ad maiorem patriae gloriam_


  McCLELLAND & STEWART
  Publishers   Toronto




  Copyright, Canada, 1924,
  by McClelland & Stewart, Limited, Toronto.


  Printed in Canada




  TO
  SIR ANDREW MACPHAIL.

_Dear Macphail_,

_No small part of the pleasure I had in writing this little book ad
maiorem patriae gloriam was in thinking I could set your name in the
dedication and sign myself_

  _your friend_.

  Archibald MacMechan.

Halifax, N.S.




  PREFACE


As a first sketch, or _Grundriss_ of Canadian Literature, this little
treatise differs in several respects from all previous attempts to
perform the same task.

Its chief singularity lies in treating together the Canadians who write
in French and the Canadians who write in English.

It avoids the dictionary type of literary history; it narrows the
definition of 'Canadian;' it suggests a new criterion for judging the
success of a 'Canadian' book; it tries to establish a relationship
between the growth of national, at first, provincial, self-consciousness
and the production of books; and it emphasises the importance of
Canadian periodicals in the different literary movements.

It lays no claim to being exhaustive and it makes no apology for
omitted names or works. It is emphatically a sketch, an outline, not a
complete history of Canadian Literature, but, the author offers it to
the judgment of his compatriots in the hope that his motive in
writing,--the greater glory of Canada--will atone for its faults and
imperfections. The margin of error has been reduced by my old friend
Professor John Squair, who was kind enough to read the proof.

  A. M. M.




  _Contents_


                                               PAGE

  Chapter   I.  Beside the Atlantic              11

  Chapter  II.  In Quebec                        51

  Chapter III.  The National Impulse             95

  Chapter  IV.  In Montreal                     143

  Chapter   V.  East and West                   187

  Epilogue                                      231




  1. Beside the Atlantic




  _Head-Waters of Canadian Literature_

  Chapter I

  BESIDE THE ATLANTIC


Like 'home' and 'gentleman,' 'literature' is a word not to be lightly
used, nor to be applied without nice discrimination. Unconscious of
their impiety, traders dare to call their advertising pamphlets;
politicians, their screaming campaign handbills; and professors, their
stupefying endless lists of books and articles by this high and sacred
name. The distinction drawn by De Quincey still holds good. All books
may be divided into the 'literature of knowledge' and 'the literature of
power.' Since the world began, it has been granted to some few scores or
hundreds of men to put together words that live; that may justly be
called literature, the literature of power. Of it, the two chief
ingredients are imagination and harmony. The literature of power is
creative; and, by universal consent, is held to be poetry in all its
branches. When the literature of a nation is mentioned, the first names
that come to mind are the names of great poets: Homer, Aeschylus,
Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe. These are the
glories of the nations which brought them forth.

Whether or not Canada has produced a literature in this sense is a
question which has been debated long and hotly. Some say 'No!' with
emphasis, and demand a Canadian Dickens, a Canadian Tennyson. Others say
'Yes,' and point to the hundreds of books which have been printed in the
country since Canada was a name on the map of the world. That the
question has been raised at all is a sign that the young nation has a
soul, which is striving to be articulate. It is a most important
question and it must receive a definite answer.

Canadians are in truth a prosaic people. A candid historian of the
American Revolution terms them a 'tamer, less inventive people' who have
never shown power of initiative like the colonists who made the United
States. An Australian observer, passing through, notes that Canadians
are sprung from the peasant class of Britain. There is truth in both
assertions. As a race, Canadians have always been dazzled by the rapid
growth of material prosperity in the Great Republic, and have been the
sincere imitators of its political, educational and religious
institutions. This is the result of the national youth and diffidence.
It is also true that Canadians generally are descended from the working
populations of the Old World, rather than from the gentry, though gentle
blood is to be found in the land. They are, in the main, a
forest-felling, railway-building, plowing, sowing, reaping,
butter-and-cheese making people, busied with mines and fisheries and
factories, intent on making their share of the world a place of human
habitation. They are a law-abiding, church-going, school-attending,
debt-paying people who, after a long hard struggle with material
conditions, are beginning to prosper. As befits its peasant origins, the
Dominion is half a continent staked out for a new experiment in
Democracy. For a long time, it seemed as if the experiment were doomed
to fail; but the earlier difficulties have been overcome and Canada is
becoming a nation.

On the surface though Canada be prosaic and commonplace, there is deep
down in the nation's heart a capacity for the ideal. It was for an ideal
that Canada poured out blood and treasure like water in the Great War.
When Canadians figure their country to themselves, they call up no
cypher of population, no symbol of territory, no statistic of trade, but
the image of a woman, young and fair, with the flush of sunrise on her
face. When they apply for admission to the great family of nations, they
do not present as credentials their wealth, their cities, their
harvests of a thousand million bushels, but a few printed books, some
songs, a tale or two. They say to the world in effect: 'We are a people,
not because we have cleared the land, built roads and cities, thriven in
trade; but because we have a voice. These printed pages tell how we
think and feel, what we remember and what we desire. These dead leaves
speak for the masses of us who otherwise were dumb.'

Literature, then, is the voice of a people. Through its literature, the
life, the soul of a people may be known. When that literature manifests
the strange quality of moving the imagination to body forth the forms of
things unknown and of stirring the human heart by which we live, then it
deserves to be called the literature of power. And though it is vain to
look for a Canadian Dickens, a Canadian Tennyson, work of this rare kind
has been written in Canada, of Canada, by birthright Canadians. It is a
question of degree, not of kind.

This may be merely a personal and private view of Canadian literature;
but even if Canada be denied a literature, she must be credited with a
certain amount of literary activity. That activity has been conditioned
by history and geography and is plainly manifest as five separate
movements identified with different parts of the country and with
different periods of its growth. The first, in order of time, centres at
Halifax, and the second at Quebec. The third movement has its home in
Ontario; the fourth is strictly local and confined to Montreal. The
fifth movement has no bounds but the frontiers of the Dominion. To trace
the course of these movements is the purpose of this book.

The primacy of Nova Scotia is due to the accident of early settlement.
Its new capital, Halifax, a fiat city, was built in a lull between two
wars, to counterpoise Louisbourg, the French stronghold in the island of
Cape Breton; and its creation was a most advantageous move in the
secular game of war between France and England. From its foundation in
the mid-eighteenth century, Halifax has been a city acquainted with
books and imbued with literary taste. When New France was in its last
agonies under its Bigots and Vaudreuils, or drained, after the Cession
but for its clergy, of its educated class, and when the rest of the
present Dominion was wilderness or virgin forest, Halifax had its books
and book sellers, its book-binders and even its book auctions, its own
newspapers and its own magazines. Thus Nova Scotia holds the position of
primacy in the intellectual development of Canada.

It is now generally admitted by American historians that the cruel
expulsion of the Loyalists from the United States after the Revolution,
deprived the new country of the educated and cultured class.
Confirmation of this view is found in the history of the Mayflower
Province. It is precisely during the period of Loyalist immigration into
Nova Scotia that the first provincial magazine flourished. In 1783,
Governor Parr wrote that there were 25,000 Loyalists in his government.
Of themselves they were able to found the city of Shelburne and the city
of St. John, soon destined to be the capital of a new province created
by fission from Nova Scotia. In July, 1789, the year of the Rights of
Man, there appeared in Halifax the first number of _The Nova Scotia
Magazine and Comprehensive Review of Literature, Politics and News._
This was a monthly magazine of eighty pages, and double columns, well
printed, if with rather small type. The editor was a Loyalist who had
been professor of classics in King's College, at New York; the printer
was a Loyalist from Boston, young John Howe, who was to beget a famous
son. The eighteenth century was the age of classical education, and the
title is decorated with two learned mottoes. The first, _Orientia
tempora notis Instruit exemplis_, declares the editor's purpose, while
the second, _Scribentem juvat ipse favor, minuitque laborem_, hints
delicately at consideration and support. The magazine is necessarily a
compilation, as editorial preface declares; but, even so, it leaves no
doubt as to the tastes of the constituency for which it caters.
Literature comes first in the sub-title and first in fact. The opening
article is historical, retrospective and appeals to a local patriotism,
which was even then evidently strong. It is a reprint of the life of Sir
William Alexander, court favorite of James I, the original grantee of
Nova Scotia, taken entire from the _Biographia Britannica_.[1] The
preface is confident that 'Everything that is connected with the history
of this Province must be interesting to the people who inhabit it.' One
feature is a long list of new books classified according to subject, and
taken with due acknowledgment from _The Analytical Review_. There are
extracts from du Paty and from Mr. Gibbon's new history of the Roman
Empire; Collins' _Ode on Highland Superstitions_ is printed in full.
Much space is given to the debates in the British House of Commons.
There are echoes of notable happenings in France and England; the appeal
of Philippe Egalit to representatives in his bailiwicks finds a place
beside the protest of Warren Hastings. Ten pages are devoted to foreign,
and perhaps, a column and a half to local, news. The list of subscribers
appears in the first number and contains names of families which have
been prominent in the life of the city from that day to this. In a note
to the second volume, the editor expresses the hope that the magazine
'may long continue an evidence of the literary taste of the Province,
and a record of its prosperity and happiness.' The evidence of taste is
beyond dispute; but the pious wish for length of days was not granted.
_The Nova Scotia Magazine_ came to an end in 1791, when the Loyalist
population ebbed.

For nearly a century, Nova Scotia had a new magazine for almost every
fresh decade. They were all ambitious and all short lived. Two call for
special remark.

_The Acadian Magazine or Literary Mirror, Consisting of Original and
Selected matter on Literary and Other Subjects_, appeared in 1826. This
was a large double-column monthly, apparently modelled on _Blackwood's_
and boldly venturing upon illustrations. 'Embellishments' appear to
lighten the letter-press, views of beautiful Windsor and the stately
Province House, portraits of Canning and the Duke of York. Local
patriotism has grown apace. This is no longer a compilation, but a
magazine in the modern sense. Contributors from all parts of the
province and beyond it send articles, sketches, letters, poems, signed
generally with pseudonyms or initials. A mathematical genius submits a
method of squaring the circle, with a convincing diagram, and a lively
discussion follows, Pictou and Musquodoboit joining merrily in the fray.
Between 1789 and 1826, when the _Acadian_ began its all too brief
career, a new generation had grown up, proud of their province and the
things that were theirs by right of birth. In the first volume, there is
a series of articles called 'Characteristics of Nova Scotia,' with
Scott's proud line for motto:

    This is my own, my native land.

The mental attitude dictating the articles may be further inferred from
a single sentence: 'We . . . . without assumed ostentation or empty
arrogance must declare that Nova Scotia possesses many legitimate
sources of pride.' The writer mentions with approval two poems which
seem to herald a nativist literary movement. The first is _The Rising
Village_, written by Oliver Goldsmith, grand-nephew of his great
name-sake. It tells how a local Edwin jilted his Angelina, and sketches
the growth of a backwoods settlement. The second, _Melville Island_ was
the first attempt of Joseph Howe to express his love for the natural
beauty of his province, in this case for the winding fiord called the
North West Arm, on the shores of which he was born. The _Acadian_ was
avowedly 'literary,' its title says so twice over, and soon dropped the
local news, because it was all anticipated by the regular journals. It
prints such rarities as a translation of one of Michael Angelo's
madrigals, evidently to gratify the taste of such readers as founded the
old Halifax Library and bought first editions of _Imaginary
Conversations_ to put in it.

To _The Acadian_ succeeded _The Halifax Monthly Magazine_ (1830-1832),
an interesting and lively periodical, invaluable as an index to the
literary preferences of by-gone Haligonians. The appeal is exclusively
to the educated and the refined. Choice bits from Praed, Scott,
Macaulay, D'Israeli (the elder) are reprinted. Notice is taken of the
great lights going out, _Lacon_ Colton, Bentham, Cuvier, Goethe. The
editor has an eye for local talent; he reviews Cooney's _History of New
Brunswick_, and criticises at length the annual exhibition of the
printing club. Great questions are discussed, such as a railway to
connect the various colonies of British North America.

Between 1789 and 1873 ten separate magazines ran their course in Nova
Scotia. That they failed is regrettable; but they served one purpose,
they proved the fact of local interest in literature, of an ever growing
local patriotism, an ever broadening culture. They tell of an atmosphere
in which letters would flourish.

The first book printed in Nova Scotia was a volume of provincial laws
compiled by John Duport, Esq., J.P., and printed by Robert Fletcher in
1766; but _Statutes At Large_ belongs to Elia's catalogue of books that
are no books. The first original work which merits recognition in the
'literature of knowledge' is Haliburton's _Nova Scotia_, which will be
discussed in its proper place with the rest of that author's output. Its
significance is not slight. As far back as 1789, the editor of the first
provincial magazine expressed the desire for a 'connected history of the
province' and alluded to a 'hand which is amply capable of such an
undertaking,' and was at that time actually engaged upon such a work.
The allusion is undoubtedly to the Reverend Andrew Brown, pastor of
historic St. Matthews and afterwards professor of Philosophy in
Edinburgh University. He collected the materials for an extensive work
but his manuscript, after its strange rescue from a destructive grocer,
lies still unpublished in the British Museum. Historical writing
proceeds from local, provincial, or national self-consciousness and
pride. That a 'connected history' of Nova Scotia should have been
demanded and projected so early and that it should have taken such an
ambitious form as Haliburton's is additional proof of the rapid growth
of a vigorous local patriotism. His work is also historically important
as being the first account of any Canadian province on anything like the
same scale. There again Nova Scotia holds the primacy over her sister
provinces. The chief significance of Haliburton, however, is that he
told the tale of the Acadians which found its _sacer vates_ in
Longfellow; and _Evangeline_ made Nova Scotia classic ground.

Since Haliburton, the study of local history has flourished greatly.
Beamish Murdoch digested the available MSS and printed materials into
three portly, indispensable volumes of annals. Campbell and Hannay drew
their connected histories from this source. When Howe came to power, he
had a Record Commission appointed to gather up the provincial muniments,
and secured a most suitable man for the task, Thomas Beamish Akins, an
enthusiast in his subject, and a charming gentleman of the old school
possessed of private means. He collected, arranged, classified, indexed
and catalogued the divers records of the province, supplementing the
original documents at hand with transcripts of others in London and
Paris. From these he drew his _Nova Scotia Archives_ published in 1869,
which Parkman used with due acknowledgments for his monumental work. The
Nova Scotia Historical Society, founded in 1878, has issued some twenty
volumes of its _Collections_. Thanks to Dr. Akins, every county has its
history, and almost every one its printed history. Yarmouth has two
histories. Patterson's history of Pictou county, Crowell's monograph on
Barrington township and the Calnek-Savary history of Annapolis contain
much valuable information. The various churches, Anglican, Baptist,
Methodist, have each their voluminous and painful chronicler. The
colleges; Acadia, Dalhousie, King's, have their historians. Nor has
biography, the history of individuals, been neglected. Hill wrote the
life of Sir Brenton Halliburton, and Patterson, the life of MacGregor,
the 'Seceder' missionary to Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century.
MacGregor was one of the fathers of the Presbyterian Church in Canada,
and his name is still a household word in the field of his apostolic
labors. One grandson became lieutenant-governor of the province, and
another, after a distinguished career at Dalhousie, filled the chair of
Physics at Edinburgh University. Patterson also wrote memoirs of the
missionaries Johnson and Matheson and of the martyred Gordons, who laid
down their lives for the Faith in the far-off islands of the sea. Of
Howe, the statesman, there are four separate 'lives,' Fenerty's
interesting sketch, Longley's fuller account as a 'maker of Canada,'
Principal Grant's sympathetic appreciation and his son, Professor W. L.
Grant's brief but authoritative 'Chronicle,' _The Tribune of Nova
Scotia_. Howe's _Letters and Speeches_ are at once an autobiography and
an authority of prime importance for the history of the province in a
most critical stage. Richey's life of the pioneer of Methodism in Nova
Scotia, 'Bishop' Black, one of Wesley's trusted lieutenants, is full of
interest. The _Journal_ of Alleyne, the fervid New Light evangelist is a
contribution to the literature of religious experience and was used by
Professor William James in his Gifford Lectures.

Nova Scotia has a history; Nova Scotians write history, and some of them
have made history.

The science of nature has not been neglected. Nova Scotians, being
ship-builders and sailors, have made contributions to the general
knowledge of the world. In the forties, Admiral Sir Edward Belcher,
R.N., grandson of the first Chief Justice of Nova Scotia, published his
narrative of H.M.S. _Sulphur's_ voyage round the world in 1836-42. The
most important book of Canadian travel, _Ocean to Ocean_ was written by
George Munro Grant, while minister of historic St. Matthew's in Halifax.
He was the scribe of Sir Sanford Fleming's party which crossed the
western wilderness of Canada in 1872, and revealed to Canadians the
undeveloped riches of their new domain. Nova Scotia is one great
plum-pudding of ores and minerals which were early studied in a
scientific way. The _Acadian Geology_ of Sir William Dawson is a classic
in its department, and is only one of a score of similar contributions
to an exact knowledge of Nature's part in making Nova Scotia. Long
before Dawson's day, in 1836, Abraham Gesner, a Granville man, had
written an able geology of the province, when the very science was in
its infancy. Gesner is the discoverer of coal oil and of Albertite. The
dons of the various little colleges have to their credit various learned
works in botany, metaphysics, mathematics, criticism, and so on, _biblia
a-biblia_, unread except by students. MacGregor of Dalhousie before his
promotion to Edinburgh produced some fifty scientific papers which
secured his admission to the Royal Society. The local scientific
movement has drawn to a head, like the historical movement, in an
organization, the Nova Scotia Institute of Science, founded in 1862,
which has its own library and its own series of publications. Much
literary activity must be dismissed in a single sentence such as volumes
of religious controversy, of sermons, of agricultural lore, educational
treatises, pamphlets without end, on all subjects.

Journalism is a subject by itself. The first newspaper published in what
is now the Dominion of Canada was _The Halifax Gazette_. The first
number issued on March 23, 1752, from a little office in Grafton Street,
which is marked in one of Short's engravings. The activity of Howe as a
journalist in The _Novascotian_ set a standard for Canada not yet
surpassed. One paper, _The Acadian Recorder_, has an uninterrupted life
of more than a hundred years, mainly under the management of one family.

Of minor, not to say minim poets, there is no dearth. Almost every
generation of Haligonians has had its singers, or satirists, or
occasional versers. From the first, there were those who strung Popian
couplets in the newspapers. They are always faint echoes of the
prevailing literary fashions: Pope, Scott, Byron, Moore, Mrs. Hemans.
There is also the workingman poet, a Scot, of course, who tries to walk
in the footsteps of Robert Burns. All this work tells the same tale as
the magazines, the tale of strong local feeling. A rather stout
anthology could be compiled of verse in praise of the provincial floral
emblem, the beautiful trailing arbutus (_epiga repens_), or Mayflower,
now happily under the aegis of the law. Nova Scotian verse has generally
two leading motives, edification and the celebration of places. A critic
might think it impossible to poetise on such harsh names as Stewiacke or
Musquodoboit, but only if he had been so unhappy as never to have seen
the happy valleys watered by those enchanted streams. New Brunswick can
boast of Roberts and Bliss Carman, but some of their best work draws
its color and life breath from the landscapes of Nova Scotia. They are
well fitted to set poets rhyming, being themselves poems. Roberts'
_Ave_, in the judgment of some, his finest poem, is rich in this special
and peculiar charm, while Carman's _Low Tide on Grand Pr_ is even
fuller of Acadia's gramarye. Rand's _At Minas Basin_ and Herbin's _The
Marshlands_ are distinguished by sincerity of feeling and often deft
interpretation of a scenery to be found nowhere else in the world. Mrs.
Lawson's _Frankincense and Myrrh_ and Hamilton's _Feast of Ste. Anne_
deserve mention. _Thistledown_, a posthumous volume of prose and verse
by A. R. Garvie, shows unusual cultivation, with his versions of Horace
and Heine and appreciation of Holman Hunt, when that great artist's name
was hardly known in England. Nova Scotia has also contributed to the
hymnology of the Christian church. _We love the place, O God_, is taken
from a _Christian Year_ by the Rev. W. Bullock published in Halifax in
1854; and Dr. Robert Murray is author of _From Ocean unto Ocean_, with
its reminiscence of the title of Grant's travels. The Reverend Silas
Rand, the missionary of the Micmacs and the translator of the Bible into
their tongue, published a volume of Latin hymns.

But Nova Scotia boasts more famous names than these. Thomas Chandler
Haliburton (1796-1865) was born in Windsor and educated at King's
College, the oldest university in the British Dominions overseas.
Williams of Kars, Inglis of Lucknow and he are the most distinguished
sons of that venerable institution. He practised law in Annapolis Royal
and afterwards in Halifax, where he was made a judge. He died a member
of the British House of Commons and a D.C.L. of Oxford. His literary
career began with the history of the province already mentioned, but his
first success was his _Recollections of Nova Scotia_ which ran in Howe's
newspaper from September 1835 until February 1836. The same year, 1836,
appeared in Halifax a small, neat volume entitled _The Clockmaker or The
Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville_. This is the editio
princeps and bears the imprint of Joseph Howe. The next year these
papers in an obscure, provincial journal were published in London as
_The Clockmaker_ and Sam Slick, the smart Yankee who wins his way by
'soft sawder' and his knowledge of 'human natur' became a figure in
literature. His creator, the colonial judge, became famous. Justin
McCarthy tells that the sayings of Sam Slick[2] were once as well known
as the sayings of Sam Weller. Professor Ray Palmer Baker has come upon
two hundred editions of Haliburton's works.

These sketches of life in Nova Scotia were not the first of their kind.
McCulloch, the first Principal of Dalhousie, had contributed _The
Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure_ to _The Acadian Recorder_ in 1823; but
the judge had a pungent humor, a command of dialect, and a story-telling
gift the divine could not approach. He was a shrewd observer. A Halifax
gentleman travelling with him in the Windsor stage-coach has told how a
fellow passenger, a buxom country-woman, was discoursing about a
temperance lecturer who was to speak at a given time and place; she said
'sugar off.' From his corner in the coach, Haliburton eyed her, took out
his notebook and jotted down the racy phrase. The anecdote illustrates
Haliburton's method and goes far to explain the popularity of his first
and most famous work. Being based on first-hand observation of actual
life in a British province, his 'Recollections' had a reality, a salt
and savor never attained by any of his other works. Local critics
sometimes try to belittle Haliburton's achievement by saying that he
collected stories and did not invent them. If this be true, it only
shows that like Molire he took his good things where he found them.

In creating Sam Slick, Haliburton uncovered the rich mine of American
humor. _The Clockmaker_ is the same kind of cute Yankee as the real
estate agent in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Lots in Eden, shoepeg oats, clocks
in Nova Scotia, all existed like the famous razors, to sell. _Caveat
emptor!_ Smartness, bragging, exaggeration, dialect are features of Sam
Slick. His sayings have wide currency. Many are embalmed in Bartlett as
'Americanisms;' and they were collected in a British province by a
lawyer of Scottish descent.

Two other series of _The Clockmaker_ sketches followed the original
success. They are usually all combined in one volume. In _The Attach_
Haliburton attempted to do for England what Dickens had done for the
United States in _American Notes_. Sam Slick visits England with
satirical intent, having as much respect for the effete institutions of
the old country as Jefferson Brick. He had already found many faults and
failings among the Bluenoses to castigate and hold up to ridicule. In
contrast to the Americans, they were lazy, lacking in enterprise and
besotted with politics. The English also might naturally be expected to
fall short of Sam Slick's exalted standards.

It was not as a satirist, however, that Haliburton first came before the
public but as a serious historian. In 1829 there was published at
Halifax _An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, in Two
Volumes, Illustrated by a Map of the Province, and Several Engravings.
By Thomas C. Haliburton Esq., Barrister-at-Law and member of the House
of Assembly of Nova Scotia_. It is a handsome work of more than 800
pages with good paper and type, and, except for the proof-reading, well
printed. The motive is patriotic. On the title-page appears again
Scott's ringing line:

    This is my own, my native land.

For this patriotic work, Haliburton received the rare honor of the
Assembly's formal thanks and a grant of 500, but Howe, the publisher,
was almost ruined by it.

Haliburton's _Nova Scotia_, as it is commonly called, is a curious
production. Perhaps the most curious feature is the author's own
declaration revealing his nave conception of history, as dealing only
with matters remote and romantic. For him the history of the province
ends with the Peace of Paris in 1763. 'The uniform tranquility and
repose which Nova Scotia has since enjoyed, affords us no material for
an historical narrative,' he writes as a sort of colophon, and then adds
inconsistently 'A Chronological Table of events connected with and
illustrative of the History of Nova Scotia,' from 1763 to 1828, which
is as artless as the annals of a medieval chronicler.

When he wrote, his only models were the historians of the eighteenth
century. His account of the Seven Years' War is transferred bodily from
Smollett. On account of his father's illness, he was unable to read the
proof: hence there are many misprints in the first volume. The relation
of the second volume to the anonymous pamphlet, _An Historical and
Statistical Account of Nova Scotia_, has been long in doubt. The
similarity of title is noteworthy. Some hold that the pamphlet was
Haliburton's _ballon d'essai_; others that it was the work of Walter
Bromley, ex-paymaster of the 23rd Foot. But even a reading of the
preface should settle the question. There the anonymous author refers to
himself as having been fifteen years in the country and having made
several journeys into the interior. In Justin Winsor's _Critical
History_, Haliburton's work is discredited, but it contains a mass of
data not readily accessible elsewhere.

Still, _Haliburton's Nova Scotia_ deserves its fame. It is the first
history of a Canadian province; it is planned on an ambitious scale; and
it is an eloquent witness to the strength of provincial patriotism at
that early period. But its most remarkable feature is that for the first
time, it told the world the story of the Expulsion of the Acadians.
Inaccurate and generously _ex parte_ as his statements are, they had a
great influence. They inspired Catherine Williams' novel _The Neutral
French_, which in turn was used by Longfellow in the composition of
_Evangeline_. It was through an aunt of Haliburton's that the tale of
the separated lovers, the _ide mre_ of the famous poem, came to
Longfellow's knowledge. His criticism of contemporary Canadian politics,
_Bubbles of Canada_, shows him to be a crusted colonial Tory, who
reverted naturally and easily to life in England. With Papineau and
Mackenzie, and even with the moderate Reformers he had no sympathy
whatever. He was capable of believing that anarchy in the United States
was due to the lack of a state church. The _Old Judge_, or _Life in a
Colony_, has a greater value for Canadians than _Sam Slick_; for it
presents the manners and conditions of a Canadian province in its
pioneer stage. It stands head and shoulders above the few other books
which picture the origins of our people. Haliburton is fond of Rabelais'
easy chair; and he has some fine pages of description, such as the Duke
of Kent's Lodge and the desolation of Shelburne. His characteristic
humor and satire abound in his sketches of Halifax society, the Governor
and his little court, the climbers and the snobs.

The effigy of Joseph Howe stands in bronze on the sunny side of the
Province House, where he planted the oak on the tercentenary of
Shakespeare's birth. The inscription on the base styles him 'Poet,'
conferring a patent of nobility which some might be disposed to
question. Without dispute, however, he had the poet's temperament. Proof
of this in plenty will be found in his _Poems and Essays_ published at
Montreal in 1874. There you have the best of Howe; you see his heart
laid bare; you learn to know the great thoughts in whose society the man
lived. The themes of his verse are the loveliness of his native
province, loyalty to it and to the mother land, the primal sympathies of
the home. Whatever fault the critic may find with its form, or its
imitative or derivative character, the feeling it expresses is always
right and sincere. His prose is much stronger. Speeches do not, as a
rule, read well; but these are solid and bear close scrutiny. The
Shakespeare address is inspiring and ends with a fine tribute to Queen
Victoria. That on 'Eloquence' reveals the open secrets of his own
success as a speaker,--simplicity, earnestness, character. The speech at
the great family gathering of the Howes is a broad-minded, manly
eirenicon. A British subject, he addresses an American audience at a
time when their country was exacerbated with his country. He speaks
wisely, nobly, with true tact, without giving cause of offence, and yet
without lowering his flag for a moment. He has sentences like this: 'A
wise nation preserves its records, gathers up its muniments, decorates
the tombs of its illustrious dead, repairs its great public structures
and fosters national pride and love of country by perpetual references
to the sacrifices and glories of the past.' Howe's renown as an orator
and as a constructive statesman should not obscure his services to the
cause of Canadian letters. It seems impossible that he should have had
no part, in the two Halifax magazines which flourished in his youth.
Howe's _Letters to Lord John Russell_ reveal him as a deep political
thinker, teaching a British statesman the true principles of democracy.

James De Mille (his own modification of the Dutch patronymic Demill)
came of Loyalist blood on both sides of the house, and was born in the
Loyalist city of St. John; but his life-work was done in Nova Scotia.
From 1861 until 1864 he was Professor of Classics at Acadia. Migrating
to Dalhousie in the latter year, he became Professor of Rhetoric and
History until his death in 1880. He was only forty-seven years of age,
but he had more than a score of books to his credit, for he wielded a
fluent pen. His first publication was a story of the early Christians,
called _The Martyrs of the Catacombs_ (1865) followed in 1867 by
_Helena's Household_, a longer and better tale on the same theme. Like
Haliburton's, his first success was humorous, and dealt with American
character. This was _The Dodge Club_ which appeared as a serial in
_Harper's Monthly Magazine_ in 1868. It may have been suggested by his
own tour in Europe in 1850-51 with his elder brother. Here he struck the
vein of comic travels from the irreverent American point of view, which
Mark Twain worked to such profit in the contemporaneous _Innocents
Abroad_. Six of De Mille's novels were published by Harper's, one of
which, _The American Baron_, was translated into French by Louis Ulbach
and went through several editions in that form. Appleton's published
_An Open Question_, and _The Lady of the Ice_, which seems to have been
adapted for the stage. He also wrote nine books for boys, the B. O. W.
C. series. They are based in part on his schoolboy experiences at Horton
and they are the only books of his which owe anything to the province of
Nova Scotia.

No one could think more meanly of his books than their author; he called
them his 'trash,' his 'pot-boilers.' They are indeed facile imitations
of the prevailing literary fashions; but criticism may go too far in
condemnation, and, through ignorance or malice, some of De Mille's
critics have certainly gone too far. Only a gentleman and a scholar
possessing something like genius could have written these light, amusing
novels. There is fun, brisk succession of incident, and capital
situations in these despised 'pot-boilers.' Even in the lurid _Cord and
Creese_, which has enthralled many a boy, the description of the Greek
play, of Langhetti's music, and the scene of the lovers in the church
show what he was capable of. Among the books from his library presented
by the family to Dalhousie College are hymnologies of the Greek Church,
a beautiful set of Euripides, works in modern Greek, Sanskrit, and
Persian showing signs of use, as well as French, German and Italian
classics with pencilled marginalia, all attesting the breadth of his
intellectual interests. Since his death, his best book, _A Strange
Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder_ has been published by Harper's.
It anticipates such romances as _King Solomon's Mines_, being a tale of
wild adventures in an Antarctic Topsy-turveydom where lovers fly about
on tame pterodactyls, and utter unselfishness is the chief aim in life
of the highly civilised (but cannibal) inhabitants. His serious work was
an elaborate 'Rhetoric,' which is perhaps the best of its old-fashioned
kind, and a long religious poem, _Behind the Veil_, published since his
death. De Mille was a tall, handsome, dark man, an excellent teacher, a
good conversationalist, best in monologue, an amateur musician, an adept
at caricatures and comic verses; in short, a most unusual personality.

The literary impulse which was once so strong in Nova Scotia and
produced the first literary movement in Canada is by no means spent; but
those who feel it belong to a more modern period and were subject to
other than local influences. A modern instance of this impulse still at
work is in _The Book of the High Romance_, by Michael Williams, a
Haligonian born and bred. It is an Odyssey of the soul in search of
faith, and the quest ends in the Roman communion. The first section
sketches his childhood and youth in Halifax; and it contains most
beautiful vignettes of life in the old garrison town and sea-port.

[Footnote 1: On January 19, 1779, a Halifax merchant advertised for sale
the Biographia Britannica, 7 vols. fol. together with Colliers Body of
Divinity, Milton's Paradise Lost, elegantly bound, Laws of the Province
of Nova Scotia, Littleton's Latin and English Dictionary, Collier's
Moral Essays, Mrs. Glass's Cookery, Clerk's Sermons, 10 vols.;
Rousseau's Works, French, 8 vols.; Pascal's Letters on the Jesuits, 3
vols.; Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Florus, Justin, 'and sundry other
books too numerous to enumerate.']

[Footnote 2: After a Canadian force had executed a successful _ruse de
guerre_ against the Germans at the battle of Festubert a 'hyphenated'
voice cried out peevishly next evening: 'Say, Sam Slick, no dirty tricks
to-night.'--_Canada in Flanders_, 118.]




  2. In Quebec




  Chapter II

  IN QUEBEC


The history of Canada involves the destiny of two races. They speak
different languages; they practise, in the main, different religions.
They do not mingle, except for the purposes of commerce and politics.
They remain separate and distinct like the brown water of the Ottawa and
the blue water of the St. Lawrence when their floods meet and join above
the island of Montreal. Still, they are both affected by the genius of
the land they live in, and by the political institutions they have
framed. In spite of their unlikeness, they have also a certain likeness;
and any account of the beginnings of Canadian literature must reckon
with these facts. If the streams of creative impulse are different in
color, French and English, still they move in the same direction and
under the same conditions.

As in the case of the first literary movement, the second had its home
in the capital city of a province, and its origin in a newly aroused
local patriotism. Between the Cession and the mid-nineteenth century,
there was not a little literary activity in French Canada. Various
newspapers and magazines were founded, ran their course and expired.
This activity was not maintained by the native-born, by those whose
minds were formed in and through Canada, but by Frenchmen of France,
wanderers, who were denizens, not citizens, of the country. All that the
various Mesplets, Jautards, Quesnels accomplished may be swiftly passed
over. It is not characteristic; and is due solely to the accident of
their residence in New France. An exception must be made in the case of
Michel Bibaud (1782-1857), who was born at Cte des Neiges and educated
at what is now the Collge de Montreal. He has the honor always due to
the pioneer. As contributor to various magazines, as author of the first
volume of verse by a 'birth-right' Canadian, and as the first French
historian of Canada, his importance is not slight. His verse is largely
satiric, after seventeenth century models; and he describes himself
correctly as '_plus rimeur que pote_.' He satirised, in his
fellow-countrymen, the natural faults of a peasant population, its
avarice, envy, idleness, and ignorance. His history of Canada is not
popular, because it takes the side of the English as against the French
in the long constitutional struggle between the passage of the Quebec
Act and the Rebellion. Much is explained by his portrait, which is not
unlike Renan's. Bibaud had 'a broad, smooth mask, a supercilious air,
his long hair falling carelessly about his ears; his cold eyes looking
out with some disdain; his scornful lip displayed beneath a prominent
nose.' It is not an attractive face but not a weak one; it is the face,
one would say, of a man born to write satire and to espouse unpopular
causes.

Quebec in the decade between 1860 and 1870 is the true cradle of French
literature in Canada. As in the case of Halifax, historical interest and
study accompanied more purely literary activity; but the reaction of
history upon literature was more direct and very much stronger. The
first French school came into being through the _Histoire du Canada_ of
Franois Xavier Garneau. He was the son of a workingman and born in
Quebec in 1809. Without any education beyond what he could acquire in
the ordinary schools, he entered the office of a local notary at the age
of sixteen, and studied French and Latin classics out of hours. Being
twitted by the English clerks in the same office on the fact that the
French Canadians had no history, Garneau retorted 'Our history! Very
well--I will tell it. And you will see how our ancestors were
vanquished, and whether such a defeat was not as glorious as victory.'
He became a notary himself, saved enough money to go to England, where
he studied British institutions, a proceeding which argues distinct
originality of mind. After a visit to Paris, he became secretary to
'Beau' Viger, then diplomatic agent for the French-Canadians at London.
His stay abroad lasted two years, from 1831 to 1833, and proved to be a
most enlightening experience. On his return to Canada, he became an
accountant in a bank, and, finally, translator to the Legislative
Assembly of Lower Canada, an employment which afforded him the leisure
necessary for the useful but unremunerative labors of the historian. His
history appeared in three volumes, at intervals between 1845 and 1848.
It began with the discovery of America and ended with the granting of a
constitution to Canada in 1791. In 1852, Garneau published a second
edition, bringing the story down to 1840, the year of the union of the
Canadas, a political consummation hated and dreaded by the French, as
threatening the very life of their most cherished institutions. The
history has been translated into English by Andrew Bell, with notes and
interpolations intended to correct anti-British statements and views. A
very elaborate edition has been published by the historian's grandson.

Impartial history has yet to be written. Generally, a history is a
_roman  thse_. To expect impartiality in a history which began with an
affront, was studied during a time of civil excitement ending in
rebellion, and was written during a time of national humiliation is to
expect too much of human nature. Garneau holds a brief for his own
people, and he cannot be blamed for making the most of it. Clerical
critics do not find his philosophy 'always very safe;' he 'sometimes
allowed theories derived from French liberalism to find their way into
his work--for example the principle of the absolute freedom of
conscience.' Nor did he appreciate sufficiently the part played by the
clergy in the drama of Canadian history. Still its merits are very
great. Garneau's conception of history is far sounder than Haliburton's;
and his great work is a consistent whole, carefully studied and put
together, a contrast to the disconnected, fragmentary farrago of the
Nova Scotian. The Frenchman seems born with a sense of form and
proportion, and with a bent towards lucidity of expression. Garneau's
great service was in revealing their past to his countrymen, and in
rousing their national pride. For motto he might have taken the French
equivalent of Scott's line which decorated Haliburton's title-page:--

    This is my own, my native land.

Abb Camille Roy says: 'It produced the greatest enthusiasm in the
middle of the nineteenth century. The young especially were stirred as
they turned the pages in which they felt the soul of their country
throb. Garneau founded a school. Under his inspiration the historians
and poets of the ensuing years worked.'

In the year 1860, there was a little book-shop in the rue de la
Fabrique, Quebec, just opposite the old Jesuit barracks. It was kept by
three brothers, Jacques, Joseph and Octave Crmazie. The third brother,
Octave (1827-1879), was the genius of the family. Though a poet, he was
not at all poetic in appearance. A personal friend describes him as
'dumpy, broad-shouldered, with a big bald head, a round animated face
and a fringe of beard which ran from ear to ear. His eyes were little,
sunken and short-sighted; and he wore spectacles.' A Quebec lady adds
that he wore a brown wig, which gives the finishing touch to the little
oddity. The Paris portrait shows a much more personable man, bald, dark,
with the modish moustache and imperial of the time of Napolon le Petit.
This ugly little bookseller was a learned man. With equal ease he quoted
Sophocles and the Ramayana, Juvenal and the Arabian or Scandinavian
poets. He had even studied Sanskrit. Never was a more erudite bookseller
in Canada, with the exception possibly of James De Mille.

Crmazie's bookshop, its windows filled with the latest volumes from
Paris, was the rendezvous for the best minds in Quebec. There Garneau
the historian might be seen rubbing elbows with Etienne Parent the
thinker, baron Gauldre-Boilleau, consul-general for France, shaking
hands with Abb Ferland, while Chauveau turned over the leaves of
Pontmartin's _Samedis_. There Le May and Frchette came to read their
first essays; there Tach and Cauchon carried on endless arguments, and
Grin-Lajoie loitered after the closing of the legislative library. With
that French instinct for concerted action, so different from English
individualism, this _cnacle_ established a magazine, _Les Soires
Canadiennes_, the aim of which is sufficiently indicated by the motto
borrowed from Nodier, 'Let us hasten to relate the delightful tales of
the people before they have forgotten them.' French Canada has a
folk-lore of its own, tales of the _loup-garou_ and the
_chasse-galerie_. It also has folk-poetry and folk-music, a direct
inheritance from Old France, natural advantages for the French-Canadian
poet, which have not been exploited as they might be.

The coming of the French frigate _Capricieuse_ to Quebec during the
Crimean war was a great event for these writers. For the first time
since the Conquest, the French flag was shown in French Canada. It was
not the old flag of Catholic France, the golden lilies on the white
field, but the new tricolor of the republic which overthrew altar and
throne and worshipped the Goddess of Reason. None the less, it was the
flag of France, the visible symbol of the French race, their history,
their literature, and their art. The visit of the _Capricieuse_ is
frequently referred to; it inspired not a little verse; and it gave an
impetus to the cult of Napoleon in Canada. The genius of Crmazie was
awakened by it.

In 1862 Crmazie quitted Canada for ever. He had committed a commercial
irregularity, which a cold world could not distinguish from forgery; and
he fled to France, where he lived until 1879, under the name of Jules
Fontaine, supporting himself by casual employment and by remittances
from his brothers in Quebec. He sustained the horrors of the siege of
Paris in 1870. His journal kept at the time is full of interest. By a
strange irony of fate, the poet whose genius was awakened by the Crimean
war, who was captivated by the Napoleonic legend, and was roused to the
highest admiration by the spectacle of a mere conqueror trampling down
Europe, was an eye-witness of the second Napoleon's downfall, and
suffered in his own person the woes of the defeated.

Crmazie's prose is clear and forceful. His letters contain excellent
criticism of the contemporary literary movement; and they are
illuminated by flashes of wit distinctly French. Of a certain dabbler in
verse, he writes: 'A propos de la Toussaint, j'ai eu des vers
impossibles de M--. Pourquoi diable cet homme fait-il des vers? C'est si
facile de n'en pas faire.'

His verse is scanty, but high in quality. Great praise is usually
bestowed upon the macabre _Promenade de Trois Morts_. It is the first of
November, the feast of All Saints, that high-tide in the calendar of
Quebec, which recollects the dead. Under the mould, the Dead begin to
stir and take the road in a white and silent column; their flowing
graveclothes giving them the dignity of kings. Three seem to be the
'new-born of the dead.' One is an old man, whose head is blanched with
the snows of sixty winters: he was taken away from his only son, the son
of his old age. The second is a youth torn from his bride; the third is
a son snatched from his mother. A large part is borne by the Conqueror
Worm. The tone may be inferred from a single stanza.

  La femme a sa beaut; le printemps a ses roses,
  Qui tournent vers le ciel leurs lvres demi-closes;
  La foudre a son image o resplendit l'clair;
  Les grands bois ont leurs bruits mystrieux et vagues;
  La mer a les sanglots que lui jettent ses vagues;
  L'toile a ses rayons; mais la mort a son ver!...

And the dead man discourses with the worm, which tortures him. The poem
remains a torso.

What distinguishes Crmazie from the Mermets and Bibauds is his
enthusiastic love of the Canadian scene. Here is the new note sounded,
and herein is the typical Canadian poet. He has written perhaps the
finest poem on what is in truth one of the most beautiful parts of
Canada, the Thousand Islands. He has a theory of their origin. When the
angels carried the Garden of Eden away from earth to a higher sphere, a
trail of Eden flowers marked their flight. These fell upon the bosom of
the giant river, and brought forth '_les Mille Isles, le paradis du
Saint Laurent_.' The first part of the poem is an expansion of the
theme, 'Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! Then would I fly away.' He
wishes he were a swallow to avoid the cruel winter and visit the famous
regions of the South; he passes them in review--Spain and the golden
dome of Alcazar, Seville and the Giralda, the Escurial, the Alhambra,
Venice, Florence, Rome, even the Orient, Egypt, India, Delhi, Benares.
Each spot is given its brief suggestive description. In the second part,
he sums up. All these lovely places can never speak to the poet's heart
like the Thousand Islands; for this is his native land and this soil is
hallowed by the graves of his ancestors. The verse has surprising
energy.

  Ni l'orgueilleuse Andalousie,
  Ni les rivages de Cadix,
  Ni le royaume de Murcie,
  Etincelant comme un rubis,

       *     *     *     *     *

  Ni la terre des Pyramides,
  Ni tous les trsors de Memphis,
  Ni le Nil et ses flots rapides
  O vient se mirer Osiris,

  Ne sauraient jamais me redire
  Ce que me disent vos chos,
  Ce que soupire cette lyre
  Qui chante au milieu des roseaux.

The landscape has been illumined in the poet's eye by the Lamp of
Memory. It is the history of the land which makes it so precious and so
dear.

His greatest achievement is the making of a song which has come home to
the bosoms of his countrymen, _Le Drapeau de Carillon_. Garneau was an
honest man, but when he wrote, he had not access to the necessary
materials. Hence he created the pathetic figure of the Canadian habitant
cast off by France, and bitterly regretting the change. The facts are
all the other way. Canada was well rid of the Vaudreuils who misruled,
the Bigots who robbed, and the Vergors who betrayed her. Under the old
rgime the habitant had no privileges but fighting and paying taxes. If
the British were tyrants, the historian must explain the paradox of the
alien race fighting for their tyrants, instead of against them, within
sixteen years of the Conquest. Crmazie follows Garneau and creates the
old Canadian soldier, who, in the last days of the Seven Years' war,
journeys to France in order to rouse the king and court to the value of
the few 'arpents of snow' which they have lost. He fails in his mission,
returns with his golden-lilied flag to Carillon, the scene of
Montcalm's brilliant victory over Abercrombie, and there alone and
despairingly he dies.

  O Carillon, je te revois encore,
  Non plus, hlas! comme en ces jours bnis
  O dans tes murs la trompette sonore
  Pour te sauver nous avait runis.
  Je viens  toi, quand mon me succombe
  Et sent dj son courage faiblir.
  Oui prs de toi, venant chercher ma tombe,
  Pour mon drapeau je viens ici mourir.

The whole conception has been happily rendered in bronze by Hbert in
the monument to the poet in St. Louis square, Montreal, which the piety
of Frchette brought into being. The bust of Crmazie crowns a plinth
which is decorated with the laurel and the lyre. At the foot is the old
soldier dying with his flag clutched to his breast. _Carillon_ is a true
song and goes to a haunting, pathetic air; the words and the music mourn
together. It is the dirge of a lost cause. Fletcher of Saltoun was right
when he rated the making of ballads higher than the making of laws in
their influence upon the life of a nation. The English of Canada may
well envy the French in the possession of Crmazie and Grin-Lajoie.

Strict orthodoxy, morality, and devotion to Canada mark the verse of
Pamphile Le May. He was born at Lotbinire in the year of the Rebellion,
one of a family of fourteen. His own sons and daughters amount to the
same number. For twenty-five years he was the legislative librarian: and
he was made official translator at the same time as Frchette. His first
volume, _Essais potiques_, appeared in 1865: in his laborious old age,
he composed little comedies which may some day see the light. In 1870 he
published his translation of Longfellow's _Evangeline_, perhaps his most
significant work. A national wrong is a fruitful source of poetry. The
expatriation of the Acadians from Nova Scotia offers perhaps the best
theme for poetry in the history of Canada. Though the unhappy event is a
century and a half old, it still provokes endless discussion, literary
and historical. The French in Canada must always labor under a sense of
grievance, just as the English would if the status of the two races were
reversed. That sense of grievance leads writers like Le May and
Frchette to emphasise and exploit whatever faults the English may be
guilty of in the long story of their rule. Being human, English rule is
not impeccable. Affection towards it, gratitude or anything more than
reluctant compliance on the part of an alien race subject to it, is not
to be expected. Therefore, in French-Canadian verse and prose
literature, there is always the tendency, natural enough and almost
laudable, to decry all things English and exalt all things French.
Crmazie, writing at the time of the Crimean war, hails the battle of
the Alma as symbolic of a new understanding between French and English;
but Frchette in his _Lgende d'un Peuple_ is distinctly anti-English,
while Le May's selection of _Evangeline_ for translation is dictated as
much by dislike for the English as sympathy for the Acadians. In life,
the exiled Acadians received little kindness from their French
compatriots. In the same vein is Abb Casgrain's _Plerinage au Pays
d'Evangeline_, in which Longfellow's poetic fancies are treated as
historical facts.

His clerical critics praise Le May's _Gouttelettes_, a collection of 175
sonnets on biblical and religious subjects. The more worldly minded,
like ab der Halden, are less impressed. Le May paints perhaps better
than any one the rustic life of French Canada, its homely employments,
threshing with the flail, the _'brayage'_ of linen, the shooting match,
the simple feasts of cakes and--not ale, but Jamaica rum. He wished to
be a poet of his own people, and he has succeeded. That is his chief
significance. Abb Camille Roy praises him as 'the most sympathetic poet
of the school of 1860.'

In the year 1884, the news that the poems of a French-Canadian writer
had been 'crowned' by the French Academy excited interest even among
those Canadians who do not read French or care for poetry. The country
had been paid a high compliment. Only such recognition from without
would convince Canadians that their own work could possess real merit.
The author who had been so honored was Louis Frchette (1839-1908). Born
at Levis, he was a student at Quebec when Cremazie's first poems
appeared, and, though never a member of the _cnacle_ in the rue de la
Fabrique, he belongs to the Quebec school in virtue of his admiration
for the chief poet in it. Frchette is the avowed disciple of Crmazie;
and, like his master, found his chief inspiration in the scenery and the
history of Canada.

In all the portraits of Frchette, there is the suggestion of explosive
force which his career does not belie. He began as a Liberal in politics
and an anti-clerical; and he made his way through the dust and heat of
many personal, literary, and political controversies, with those of his
own race and religion. His quarrel with William Chapman, an intensely
French poet, in spite of his English name, was particularly bitter.
Frchette was no effeminate dreamer; he was a born fighter, as capable
of defending himself with his pen as he once proved himself with his
sword, _La Voix d'un Exil_ (1871) is a satire upon the politicians of
Canada; and may be said to have opened his career. It certainly
attracted more attention than his first volume of poems. Like so many
other Canadians of the time, he found the means of a livelihood in the
United States which were denied him at home. In Chicago, he started a
paper, _L'Amrique_, which ran two years. In New Orleans, he fought his
duel with the Prussian during the excitement of the Franco-German war.
Except Howe, he is the only Canadian author put to such a test. The duel
was with swords; and after Frchette received a wound in the thigh,
honor was satisfied. Recalled to Quebec in 1871 by a friendly
appreciation of his talent, he practised law and took a keen interest in
politics. He was the member for his native town Levis during the brief
Liberal rgime of Mackenzie. Failing of re-election in 1878 and again
in 1882, he devoted himself thenceforth to literary work, except so far
as his duties as clerk to the Legislative Council permitted. He was
married to a sister of William Dean Howells, the American novelist and
critic. One of his strongest political opinions was that Canada should
form a political union with the United States. After the effervescence
of youth, he became reconciled with the Church, and his poetry is as
orthodox as Le May's.

In the richness, variety, and finish of his work Frchette stands first
among the Quebec school. He wrote poetry, drama, history, prose satire,
and a vast, unreckoned mass of journalistic journeyman work. He also
translated _A Chance Acquaintance_ and _Old Creole Days_ into French.
Six volumes of verse, five of prose, three plays are only part of his
total output.

His first volume of verse, _Mes Loisirs_, shows him the disciple of
Crmazie in his zeal for the scenery of the St. Lawrence, his
celebration of the ties of family, and his avoidance of the typical
young poet's favorite theme, the theme of passion. Indeed this singular
omission is a mark of all Canadian poets, French or English. All critics
notice it. Abb Roy remarks, 'The bearing of his muse never ceases to be
irreproachable.' The verse of _Mes Loisirs_ is more carefully wrought
and more artistic than any that had gone before.

In 1879 appeared _Fleurs Borales_, in the same vein. This was the
volume to which the French Academy awarded a Montyon prize. It was
highly complimented by the perpetual secretary, and gave Frchette his
reputation among his own people. In the same year he published _Oiseaux
de Neige_, a title which, like the former, speaks of Canada. Through
these works, Old France once more discovered New France: and Frchette's
literary success was followed by a personal success when he visited
Paris.

Frchette's chief work in verse is his _'Lgende d'un Peuple'_ (1887),
which owes its title and not a little of its inspiration to Victor
Hugo. It is a series of poems in different metres and various values
dealing with the story of the French in Canada. It begins with the
discovery of America and continues to the execution of Louis Riel, the
last of the martyrs. In it, Frchette aimed at being the Garneau of
poetry. He too holds a brief for his own people; and cool impartiality
is still less to be expected here than in the more sober pages of the
historian. Indeed some portions, such as the poem on Chnier, justify
the popular antithesis between truth and poetry. Frchette was no
historian and never submitted to the toilsome, patient discipline
without which the student of history cannot hope to become an authority.
He simply told the tale as he heard it in the bazaar, with an ample tide
of patriotic feeling to bear it along. Sometimes, like his model, his
verse becomes mere rhetoric; at other times it is simple, sensuous,
passionate, outlining and defining each incident with unmistakable
power. Like Crmazie he was inspired by the Crimean war and the union of
the two nations in a common cause; but, generally, the English are
represented as in the wrong and the French in the right. The book is a
study in snow and ink, as all such patriotic works must inevitably be:
for it is an apparent weakness of human nature that love of one's
country only comes into relief against dislike or hatred of another
country. The _Lgende_ is a favorite prize in the schools of French
Canada, which shows its place in popular esteem.

The great merit of the _Lgende_ is that it presents the epic grandeur
of the coming of the French as settlers and explorers of an unknown and
threatening wilderness. Like D'Arcy McGee, Frchette has celebrated the
sailing of Jacques Cartier from St. Malo, and he suggests skilfully the
explorers' awe of the untravelled and mysterious land.

  C'tait le Canada mystrieux et sombre
  Sol plein d'horreur tragique et de secrets sans nombre,
  Avec ses bois pais et ses rochers gants
  Emergeants tout  coup du lit des ocans.
  Quels tres inconnus, quels terribles fantmes
  De ces forts sans fin hantent les vastes dmes,
  Et peuplent de ces monts les repaires ombreux?

The pictures of the _Great_ and the _Little Ermine_ and the tiny
_Merlin_ confronted with the awful chasm of the Saguenay, of the first
mass, of the first harvest are all in Frchette's best style; and make
him worthy of his title of national poet.

His prose must not be passed over. In _Originaux et Dtraqus_, he
presents twelve types of oddities such as are fostered by a restricted
provincial existence: for example, the merchant who never enters a
church for fear of the roof falling on his head, the eminent lawyer who
is second to none in the courts and a shameless Bohemian outside, the
rich, staid, educated citizen who is engaged for sixty years, without
ever missing an evening walk with his betrothed, while the furniture for
their housekeeping remains stored in an attic. Mr. ab der Halden finds
great comic force in these sketches: Abb Roy is much more moderate in
tone. His other works are _Lettres  Basile_, _Histoire Critique des
Rois de France_, _Letters on Education_ and _Nol au Canada_.

His two plays _Montcalm_ and _Papineau_ treat of great names and great
events in the history of Canada. The latter drama had a certain success
on the Montreal stage, as has his pathetic play _Veronica_. Frchette's
dramatic essays have been criticised as having been modelled on inferior
originals.

The significance of Frchette is not slight. Perhaps his chief
significance is that, like Haliburton, he was the first provincial of
his blood to win the critical approval of the great literary centre,
whose _imprimatur_ is eagerly sought by all provincials. He is the first
Frenchman to reveal Canada to the French. He is, in the next place, the
national poet of the French community on the banks of the St. Lawrence,
because he has given unsurpassed expression to what he fittingly calls
the national legend. By virtue of its superior concentration, and its
superior appeal to the memory, verse carries further than prose.
Frchette's impassioned stanzas will always have a wider public than
Garneau's more solid periods. He is national also in finding his themes
at home, in the hills and woods and streams of his native province, not
seeking them at the ends of the earth, or in the realm of pure fantasy,
like the Montreal school. A decided asceticism marks all his work. The
work of Canadian poets both French and English has caused no little
surprise to such old-world critics as have given it their attention. _A
priori_, they have assumed that the verse of writers in a pioneer
community would correspond in rude strength, originality, even
coarseness. But this is not the case. The poets of New France inherit
the classical tradition, and they modelled their work on that of such
masters as were available, Delille, Lamartine, Hugo; and the mark of
their verse is not coarseness but over-refinement. They are derivative
and imitative. Another reason for the general ethical tone is that
Canada, Catholic and non-Catholic, still preserves the old moral
standards and both communities are Puritanic in their general outlook
upon life. No author has yet dared to fly in the face of Canadian
conventions: and those who have followed those conventions closest have
had the greatest popular success. In all these things, Frchette is
typically Canadian: he also shows himself typically French of the Quebec
school in his whole-hearted worship of Napoleon.

There are other names, each with its record of distinct achievement,
whose appropriate place is in a detailed literary history and not in a
first sketch such as this. There is Abb Ferland, the painstaking
historian of the old rgime in Canada; and Chapman of the _Feuilles
d'rable_, patriotic, religious, somewhat given to rhetoric and to
literary squabbles; and Abb Casgrain, whose _Plerinage au Pays
d'vangeline_ tells with sympathy and eloquence the story of the
Acadians. But two members of this _cnacle_ deserve more extended
notice, Grin-Lajoie and Aubert de Gasp.

Grin-Lajoie's imposing name is a most valuable asset to a poet.
According to Sulte, Grin is a family name derived from Grenoble, and
Lajoie is simply a sobriquet which he thought fit to adopt. The bearer
of it was born at Yamachiche in 1824 and died at Ottawa in 1882. He is
the author of _Jean Rivard_, a dull novel of pioneer life, and a history
of the difficult period of reconstruction which followed the Rebellion
and the union of the Canadas under Sydenham. What he will live by is his
truly national poem, a genuine lyric, _Un Canadien errant_. The French
Canadian is hard to uproot from the land he loves; but one effect of the
troubles of '37 was to drive many of the habitants across the border
into the United States. Political offenders were exiled to Bermuda and
Tasmania. It was a tragic time, and Grin-Lajoie has put the heart of
it into his wailing lines.

  Un Canadien errant,
  Banni de ses foyers,
  Parcourait, en pleurant,
  Des pays trangers.

As in the case of _Carillon_, the verses have been fitted with an
appropriate air. Wherever the French Canadian goes, this song goes with
him. It has been sung from the Rocky Mountains to the boulevards of
Paris. The poem is simple in expression; the feeling is unforced; and
the poet has struck the universal note. He sings the inexpugnable
homesickness, not of the Canadian alone, but of all exiles. How cold a
thing is a poem in a book which is taken down now and then from its
shelf compared with such a song living in the hearts and on the lips of
a whole people!

Philippe Aubert de Gasp had a great opportunity of which he did not
take full advantage. The son of an old-time seigneur, born at Quebec in
1786, he carried over into the nineteenth century the tradition of the
_Ancien Rgime_. When the Quebec school flourished, he was an old man, a
link with the past; but he came under its influence, and at the age of
seventy-four began his first romance, _Les Anciens Canadiens_. If he had
simply written down his reminiscences, or if he had been fortunate
enough to find a Boswell, the result might have been an invaluable
picture of bygone manners. Unfortunately he attempted to combine his
recollections with the framework of a conventional novel plot. Anyone
might have invented the story of _Les Anciens Canadiens_; but de Gasp
was the living depository of precious memories which none but he
possessed. Still, with all deductions made, this book is unique in
Canadian literature, as representing from first-hand knowledge the life
of seigneur and _censitaire_ in the good old days before the Conquest.
There is a precious residuum of fact and incident and point of view
which, but for this record, must have perished.

Any account of Canadian affairs must recognise the basal fact that the
country is inhabited by two races which are not in harmony with each
other. This antagonism is more or less pronounced, according to
circumstances of actual social contact, or of commercial rivalry, or of
political excitement. No good end is served by shutting one's eyes and
denying that this antagonism exists. It is only just to remark also that
this antagonism finds voice almost exclusively in the nativist French
literature. Apparently the sundering forces--race, speech,
religion--will never diminish in strength. Apparently the barriers to a
good understanding between the two peoples are insurmountable. Still
there has been an effort, an honest effort at reconciliation from one
side; and that is, naturally, the English side.

That effort is manifest in not a few magazine articles delineating the
French-Canadian with the utmost sympathy. Professor Shortt and W.
Maclennan have written ably on this subject. Mr. W. H. Blake in his
charming volume of essays _Brown Waters_ has made no secret of his
admiration for the many virtues of the habitant, his simplicity, his
high morality, his courtesy, his hospitality, his unworldliness. A still
more important service is his sympathetic translation of _Maria
Chapdelaine_, Hmon's idyll of French-Canadian life. It is a translation
which may take rank as an original work, being at once fruitful,
picturesque and penetrating; for Blake had a mastery of both languages.
Roberts has translated de Gasp, and Frchette's _Nol au Canada_, in
order to bring these important works to the notice of Canadians who do
not know French. A still more direct and earnest attempt at reconciling
the two races is Mr. Byron Nicholson's book, _The French-Canadian; A
Sketch of His More Prominent Characteristics_, which appeared first in
Toronto in 1902. It is the result of long residence among the French;
and its aim is stated frankly--'to correct misapprehensions and to
remove prejudices.' That the book has been a popular success, widely
read and widely influential, cannot be maintained; but it exists as
irrefutable evidence of an Anglo-Canadian's good will toward his French
compatriots. That the French appreciate his friendly intentions is shown
by the fact that it has achieved the rare distinction of being
translated into French. It remains to be seen if any French Canadian
will take his revenge by making a similar study of the Ontario farmer
for the enlightenment of his fellow-countrymen. If it takes two to make
a quarrel, it also takes two to form a friendship. The French are too
chivalrous by nature to accept compliments without essaying to return
them. And when were they worsted in an exchange of courtesies?

A far more potent force was the poetry of William Henry Drummond.
Although born at Currawn House, county Leitrim, in 1854, the son of an
officer in the Royal Irish Constabulary, he came to Canada as a child of
nine, and he was formed by Canadian institutions. The most
distinguished alumnus of Bishop's College, Lennoxville, he took his
medical degree in 1884; and, for twenty years, he practised his
profession in the city of Montreal. His untimely death at Cobalt in 1907
was felt as a national calamity. Of Drummond himself it is almost
impossible to write in moderate terms. Great-hearted, brotherly, frank,
with the physician's tolerance of human weakness, he was a man
universally beloved. His profession set him in the commercial metropolis
of Canada where French and English meet, but do not mingle, and where
they have clashed in bloody conflict. His love of sport took him afield
and brought him into close contact with the French cultivator of the
soil and all his primitive virtues. He became the first and best
interpreter of the French-Canadian. His first volume, _The Habitant_
(1897), was a rally of fugitive rhymes, some of which were already
widely known. It was published in New York; and leapt at once into
popularity. Drummond was the first Canadian poet to be widely read
outside of Canada or, for that matter, within Canada. Over one hundred
thousand copies of his works have been sold--an astonishing fact; and,
as in the case of Haliburton and Frchette, the acclaim of the critics
abroad gave the admirers of the poet at home confidence in their own
favorable judgment. Canadian criticism is apt to be both indiscriminate
and self-distrustful, and leans upon the decisions of London, Paris, or
New York.

Drummond's originality is not yet appreciated at its full value. By
virtue of his affectionate insight, he discovered an ancient classical
ideal living and real in the midst of a modern, tawdry, feverish
commercial civilisation. It is the ideal of the simple husbandman,
frugal, laborious, pious, unambitious, living content in his poverty
remote from the busy, troubled world. It was dear to the Roman
imagination. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Claudian have all expressed the
sentiments so admirably summed up in Pope's praise of the quiet life.

  Happy the man whose wish and care
  A few paternal acres bound,
  Content to breathe his native air
        In his own ground.

This poem paints feature by feature the typical habitant as represented
in the title poem of Drummond's first volume; but Drummond did not go to
Pope or the classics for his model; he found him on his paternal acres
throughout the length and breadth of Quebec. Equally original was the
poet in the medium of expression which he chose. French was barred;
literary English would be unnatural. He therefore selected a language
between the two, a _lingua franca_, which he employed with the greatest
tact. The French were suspicious of ridicule or caricature, to the very
end; even Frchette's skilful introduction did not entirely disarm them.
But Drummond's intent was so transparently honest that even those who
were most doubtful could not hold out against him. His own declaration
was manifestly sincere: 'Having lived, practically all my life, side by
side with the French-Canadian people, I have grown to admire and love
them.' He adds that he thought the best way to bring the habitant before
the English-speaking public was to let him tell his own story in his own
way, as he would to auditors not conversant with the French tongue. He
does allow his types to tell their stories in their own way; and that
constitutes the triumph of the artist. A dialect always carries the
suggestion of the comic in its very form, being a departure from the
literary language, and therefore a degradation: but Drummond succeeds to
a marvel in avoiding the least approach to ridicule or contempt of his
characters. He loves them and he makes them lovable. They live in the
sunshiny atmosphere of his kindly humor; and are neither sentimental nor
grotesque.

What marks Drummond off from the rest of Canadian writers of verse are
his human interest and his humor. Our poets sing of the landscape;
Drummond, of men and women. Nature-worship is a pure cult, but its
devotees are few. Mating, babyhood, old age, on the other hand, are
themes that touch the universal human heart. As Chesterton says: 'In
everyone there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death,
that likes sunlight.' That thing enjoys Drummond. The joy which the
advent of the first-born brings to the home is finely imagined in
_Dieudonn_. It is springtime and the country quiet broods over the
farmhouse. The curious robin comes

        peekin' t'roo de door
  For learn about de nice t'ing's come to us--

  An' w'en he see de baby lyin' dere upon de bed
    Lak leetle Son of Mary on de ole tam long ago--
  Wit' de sunshine an' de shadder makin' ring aroun' hees head,
    No wonder M'sieu Robin wissle low.

Babies bulk large in the doctor's philosophy; and form the kernel of
many of his poems. His gentle humor saves him from excess and from
sentimentality. Most of our poets distrust humor and rarely venture
upon it. They array themselves in their singing robes and set a garland
on their heads before they venture to sing. Drummond has a ready eye for
the unending incongruity of life. His laugh is never cynical or unkind.
The only poem known to the mass of Canadians, as _How We Beat the
Favorite_, is known to the mass of Australians, is _The Wreck of Julie
Plante_, which is mere burlesque.

  On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre
    De win' she blow, blow, blow,
  An' de crew of de wood scow _Julie Plante_
    Got scar't an' run below--
  For de win' she blow lak hurricane
    Bimeby she blow some more,
  An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre
    Wan arpent from de shore.

In all his poetic sketches, humor blends with sentiment. Perhaps the
best example of his power in this vein is _Johnnie Courteau_. The Orson
of the lumber-camps is tamed by marriage and the advent of the baby,
Drummond's chief heroine. Once the terror of the village, he creeps
into the house on tiptoe at the bidding of his little wife, for fear of
waking the baby.

Drummond's poetic activity comes long after the Quebec school in point
of time; but he is linked with it by his friendship with Frchette, as
well as by the French poet's cordial endorsation of the English poet's
effort 'to confirm the entente which is the psychical basis of
Confederation, to bridge with a tear, or a smile, or the two in one, the
slowly narrowing racial antitheses.'




  3. The National Impulse




  Chapter III

  THE NATIONAL IMPULSE


The central event in the history of Canada is Confederation. Before
1867, there was no Canada, only a chaos of provinces out of which a
country might be created. British North America was merely a
geographical expression. There was no common country to which Crmazie
and Haliburton owed allegiance except Great Britain. To the world, a
Canadian was a native Frenchman speaking broken English, as in the
stories of R. M. Ballantyne, a connotation only changed by the Great
War. A whole generation had to be born and grow up in the new conditions
before a national literature was possible. The new generation knew
nothing of separate provinces, but only Canada. To it the fierce
political struggles, which the union was to cure, were old, unhappy,
far-off things; and the new-built national fabric was made with the
mountains, and as imperishable. The scene shifts from the banks of the
St. Lawrence to the province of Ontario, that rich, heart-shaped
peninsula moated about by three freshwater seas, which even in the time
of the red man was a wealthy land. Recently settled and newly organised,
its origin was most romantic,--loyalty to a lost cause; for those men
and women who left the new Republic to live in the wilderness under the
old flag founded the province, and they builded better than they knew.
Ontario is a homogeneous English province side by side with a
homogeneous French province. Its rapid material development soon gave it
the leadership of the new Dominion; and it became the home, the centre,
the fertile breeding-ground of the new national sentiment. In the
provincial capital, one may see on the nation's birthday, a hundred
thousand people wearing the green maple leaf, the national emblem, in
spontaneous festival. In the organisation of the vast prairies beyond
the Great Lakes into separate states, the influence of Ontario has been
paramount. The settlers from the Banner Province carried with them their
institutions, and their ideals of law, education, political allegiance
and religion. On these ideals the Canadian West was based broad and
firm. The United Empire Loyalist leaven is leavening the whole lump.

Compared with New France and Nova Scotia which are among the first names
to find a place on the map of America, Ontario is very young. Its
beginnings were small; its spring was frost-bitten; it never began to
grow strong until the era of railway development in the mid-nineteenth
century. Reciprocity and war-prices helped to make it prosper.
Confederation marks the end of an old era and the beginning of a new in
matters political. The same is true of matters literary. Only after
Confederation are the writers of Ontario distinctively Canadian.

Its literary development shows a fair parallel to Quebec's. The first
books of history, travel, verse, prose fiction are written by immigrants
from the old world. Such books are 'Canadian' solely by accident of the
author's residence in the country. The same is true of the earliest
journalism in the country. Even when they write upon local themes, even
when their work takes color from the local life and local scenery, these
denizens cannot be classified as Canadian writers. Mrs. Moodie's is a
typical case. Her _Roughing It In The Bush_ is a classic; and yet the
author owes nothing to Canada but the hard experience of which she made
her book. As Quebec had her Mermets, Mesplets and Jautards, so Ontario
had her Heriots, McLachlans and D'Arcy McGees, writers of English,
Scottish and Irish provenance. Their education was complete before they
came to Canada; they were formed by alien influences; their first and
fondest natural allegiance is to their home land; and their hearts are
always turning fondly back to the cottage, the shieling, the cabin
beyond the sea. Their work, also, has exerted little or no influence
upon the thought or life of Canada. It is known chiefly to students and
collectors; and, in truth, with but few exceptions, it possesses only an
antiquarian interest. Whatever honor or value is attached to such work
cannot be credited to Canada. Heavysege's overrated _Saul_, for example,
might have been written anywhere; it is not nearly as 'Canadian,' as
Byron's _Beppo_, written in Italy, is Italian.

Once again, the literary movement is preceded and accompanied by
magazines with more or less ambitious aims. Brief life was here their
portion. As a rule they did not pay for contributions, relying upon the
struggling author's pride at seeing himself in print, to fill their
pages; but the pleasure soon palled. The old sets of these magazines
show occasional contributions of ability, but also much flatness and
many borrowings. Their titles, _The Canadian Magazine_, (1823-24), _The
Canadian Review_ (1824-26), _The Canadian Monthly_ (1872-1882), _The New
Dominion Monthly_, bear witness of their patriotic intention and of the
intellectual life struggling to assert itself amidst pioneer conditions.
Of all these publications, the most ambitious and the most remarkable
was _The Week_, founded in Toronto by Goldwin Smith in 1883, upon the
model of _The Saturday Review_ and similar weeklies. The founder was the
most distinguished denizen of Canada who ever followed the profession of
letters in it. Formed by Eton and unreformed Oxford, and by the
comfortable life of the wealthy English middle class, he was a Liberal
in politics, an admirer of Peel, Bright and Cobden. In _My Windows On
The Street Of The World_, his friend Professor Mavor shows how many and
how serious were his limitations. Lampooned by Disraeli in _Lothair_, he
retorted in an open letter, in which he called the Hebrew novelist's
references to himself 'the stingless insults of a coward.' He had been
Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford before Stubbs and Freeman:
and he had been a contributor to _The Saturday Review_ in the days when
it was nicknamed _The Saturday Reviler_. Family reasons led him to
settle in Toronto, a move which he himself regarded as unfortunate. 'My
Oxford dreams of literary achievement never were or could be fulfilled
in Canada,' he wrote sadly; and Matthew Arnold, a fellow Oxonian has
recorded his sympathy with a man of genius compelled to dwell in such a
stronghold of Philistia as Toronto. Goldwin Smith was the master of a
keen, incisive, pointed style, which he applied powerfully to the
criticism of Canadian politics and politicians. His sympathies with his
fellow citizens were strangely imperfect, while towards the people and
institutions of the United States he always seemed much more favorable.
His favorite idea was the political reunion of the English race upon the
American continent, an idea which set the majority of the Canadian
people in irreconcilable opposition to him. This idea he held to the
last, as his _Reminiscences_ prove, _vox clamantis in deserto_. How he
would have regarded Canada's lavish outpouring of blood and treasure in
the Great War for the defence of Liberal principles it is impossible to
imagine; for he never wrote upon the Canadian Question without
lacerating Canadian susceptibilities. None the less Canadians did ample
justice to his great ability and literary gifts. He was universally
regarded as a tower of strength, the one great man of letters in Canada.
His founding of a literary journal of the first class in Toronto was an
event, which might have exerted a great influence upon a nativist
literature. After a few years it failed; and its files remain as record
of a unique experiment in Canadian journalism.

For editor, _The Week_ secured a young New Brunswicker, fresh from
college, Charles G. D. Roberts. He had published a slender volume of
verse, _Orion and other Poems_, which gave evidence of classical taste
and a Keatsian love of beauty. The conjunction of the two personalities
in the management of this journal is highly significant, as a blending
of English and Canadian influences. Roberts was of United Empire
Loyalist stock and was brought up in the beautiful little capital of the
Loyalist province, distinguished by its cathedral and its university.
Fredericton has its memories of Imperial garrisons and Mrs. Ewing, the
author of _Jackanapes_. Besides Roberts, it has bred two other writers
of true poetry, Bliss Carman and Frank Sherman, the author of _Matins_.
This kindly nurse of Canadian poets has been pictured with rare skill
and sympathy by Lloyd Roberts in _The Book of Roberts_.

The full story of _The Week_ with the reasons for its rise and progress,
its decline and fall has not been written; but it holds an important
place in the third movement of Canadian literature. New names attached
to unremarked contributions crept into its columns. One of the earliest
was that of Archibald Lampman signed to a most characteristic short poem
called _A Monition_. Bliss Carman and many other Canadian _littrateurs_
made their first appearance in _The Week_. It was the first Canadian
critical journal; its standard was of the centre, as Matthew Arnold
might say; and to win its approval was certainly a worthy object of
ambition.

A little later, a second _Canadian Magazine_ was launched at Toronto,
which enjoys the reputation of being the most successful of its kind.
Founded on the model of the popular American monthlies with
illustrations and a judicious mingling of prose fiction and brief
articles of a more 'solid' nature sandwiched between pieces of verse, it
has been so carefully nursed and tended that it has survived for more
than a quarter of a century. It paid moderately for contributions; and
was therefore enabled to pick and choose. In fiction it was never
strong, the rates not being high enough to divert the best short stories
from the American market. Its strongest point has always been the
contributions to Canadian history.

Another enterprise which manifests clearly the new national impulse is
the huge picture-book in two sumptuous volumes, called _Picturesque
Canada_. Drafted on the lines of Bartlett's _British North America_, it
was more comprehensive in plan, because there was a greater country to
describe and to depict. The provinces are recognised not as rivals or
foes but only as component parts of the new Dominion. It was edited by
one of the most ardent and broad-minded Canadians, George Munro Grant,
who was born in Nova Scotia and educated at Glasgow; and the drawings
for the illustrations were made by Canadian artists such as Sandham and
O'Brien. The book was made before the era of the process picture; and
the artists' sketches were reproduced by the last of the engravers on
wood. _The Week_ bestowed its impressive benison, 'For magnitude of
design and unrivalled execution it stands easily first among Canadian
publications,' was the reviewer's verdict. Read or allowed to gather
dust on the shelves, _Picturesque Canada_ is yearly increasing in value
as the scenes depicted in it change inevitably with time; and it will
always remain as a monument of self-conscious national pride.

How the intellectual life was stirring in the half-developed province is
proved by a multitude of slim volumes of verse. They form an obscure,
pathetic chapter in the story of our nativist literature. Published at
the author's expense, they have no sale; but are distributed among the
journals and the author's friends: and that is the end of them. They
are, as a rule, derivative and imitative; and also, as a rule, weak in
technique. One enthusiastic amateur of Canadian letters is credited with
a collection of four hundred such volumes. Indeed the writing of verse
ranks almost as a national amusement like snowshoeing or toboganning:
and each volume is to be regarded as a letter of recommendation for the
writer; for, whatever his success, his aim has been high, and his
ambition worthy. Towards all this feeble work, the attitude of the local
critics was uniformly benevolent. The accepted phrase of approval was,
'a notable contribution to Canadian literature,' and it was repeated
until it almost became slang. Local criticism carried no weight with the
Canadian people.

Such a 'contribution' was _Among the Millet_, published at Ottawa in
1888. The author was a young member of the Civil Service, born and
brought up in Ontario, a product of our public school system and a
graduate of Trinity College. The book received the usual compliments and
the usual neglect, until Mr. W. D. Howells 'discovered' it in _Harper's
Monthly_ for April, 1889. The _doyen_ of American letters found in these
poems 'intimate friendship with Nature:' the Canadian poet has always
'the right word on his lips.' One sonnet, _The Truth_, is characterised
as 'very wise and noble.' Of the book as a whole, he wrote: 'Every page
of it has some charm of phrase, some exquisite divination of beauty,
some happily suggested truth.' This was Lampman's Montyon prize. Such
praise from such a quarter persuaded Canadians of the fact that at least
one native-born Canadian possessed poetical talent. Lampman wrote more
verse; but he never surpassed his first essay. One of his sonnets, a
thoroughly Canadian picture of a stinging winter evening, caught the eye
and won the praise of Tusitala in far-off Honolulu. His poetry was even
criticised in Germany. The man and his work made up one harmony. He died
in 1899, too soon; for there were many who loved him and many who still
hold his memory dear.

_Among the Millet_ impressed Mr. Howells as original. 'It is mainly
descriptive,' he wrote, 'but descriptive in a new fashion, most
delicately pictorial and subtly thoughtful, with a high courage for the
unhackneyed features and aspects of the great life around us.' What
Lampman describes in this new fashion is simply the unhackneyed features
and aspects of the great life visible in his native province. He takes
for theme the march of the seasons, singing only what he knows,--the
glory of the swift-footed Canadian spring, the gray river ice with the
patches of blue water showing between, the welcome heat of mid-summer in
which one bathes, while the brain stirs and clarifies, the mellow
miraculous autumn, the oncoming of winter, the quiet endless falling of
the snow till the landscape is blotted out,--and singing all without a
single false note. No Canadian poet is more atmospheric than Lampman. In
_Heat_, which Howells singled out for praise, he expresses the true
Canadian's enjoyment of the glowing summer; and, in _Winter Hues
Recalled_, his equal relish of the crisp, keen frost and of sunsets seen
across leagues of white country. His attitude towards Nature is
Wordsworthian. Nature is the mighty mother who never will deceive the
heart that loves her. She offers the counter-charm to sorrow and care
'barricadoed ever more within the walls of cities.' But his method has
more of the picturesqueness of Keats.

Lampman sang what he knew. Anyone who knows Ottawa, the stately capital
of the Dominion, which has chosen the better part,--of Beauty, will
recognise this picture.

  Oh, the hum and toil of the river;
      The ridge of the rapid sprays and skips
      Loud and low by the water's lips,
      Tearing the wet pines into strips,
  The saw-mill is moaning ever.
      The little grey sparrow skips and calls
      On the rocks in the rain of the waterfalls,
  And the logs are adrift in the river.

Like most Canadians, he knows the delight of life in the open; he had
camped out; he had canoed; he had noted the inexhaustible beauty of the
early summer morning, incense-breathing, far from the stain of
civilisation.

  Softly as a cloud we go,
  Sky above and sky below,
  Down the river; and the dip
  Of the paddles scarcely breaks
  With the little silvery drip
  Of the water as it shakes
  From the blades, the crystal deep
  Of the silence of the morn,
  Of the forest yet asleep;
  And the river reaches borne
  In a mirror, purple gray,
  Sheer away
  To the misty line of light
  Where the forest and the stream
  In a shadow meet and plight,
  Like a dream.

He was a true lover of Nature, studying every expression of her face and
perceiving what less affectionate observation would never note. There is
a mood of our Canadian climate in autumn's end, when the whole land
seems to pause and wait for winter's approach. Lampman was sensitive to
the mood and expressed it in those three stanzas he first called _A
Monition_ in _The Week_, and later renamed _The Coming of Winter_. The
last quatrain is the most direct and also the most subtle.

  Black grows the river, blacker drifts the eddy:
      The sky is gray; the woods are cold below:
  Oh make thy bosom, and thy sad lips ready
      For the cold kisses of the folding snow.

The 'high courage for the unhackneyed,' which Howells praised, is seen
in Lampman's sonnets, _The Frogs_. A characteristic of the Canadian
night in early spring is the clear high piping of the frogs in their
ponds; but, on account of the common and grotesque nature of the
creatures making it, this mating song had no interpreter. Lampman thinks
of these as favorites of Pan and their upraised voices as the only
modern echo of the pipes of the goatfoot god. He recognises the
quaintness, the melody and the eerie suggestion of the mysterious
chorus, where the ordinary person is only conscious of ludicrous
incongruity.

      Then like high flutes in silvery interchange
      Ye piped with voices still and sweet and strange,
  And ever as ye piped, on every tree
  The great buds swelled; among the pensive woods
      The spirits of first flowers awoke and flung
  From buried faces the close fitting hoods
      And listened to your piping till they fell,
      The frail spring beauty with her perfumed bell.
  The wind-flower and the spotted adder-tongue.

It is no common talent which can transmute something like a national
joke into pure poetry. The poet has few higher functions than awakening
the dull intellect to the strange loveliness of the actual, seemingly
commonplace, world which it inhabits.

Part of Lampman's charm lies undoubtedly in his ethic. Though Keatsian,
he was no mere hedonist. Sincere, tender, unworldly, contemplative are
the terms which describe his character; he lived in and for the ideal.
His attitude is well represented in the sonnet entitled _Outlook_.

  Not to be conquered by these headlong days,
      But to stand free: to keep the mind at brood
      On life's deep meaning,--nature's altitude
  Of loveliness, and time's mysterious ways.
  At every thought and deed to clear the haze
      Out of our eyes, considering only this
      What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,
  This is to live, and win the final praise.

The ethical quality of his work excited Howells' admiration, especially
in the sonnet _The Truth_, which contains these lines:

      He that sees clear is gentlest of his words
  And that's not truth that has the heart to kill.

What is essentially Canadian in Lampman's verse? It is his subtle
interpretation of the land he lived in, deriving from the closest,
life-long intimacy. From the first poet of a rude, raw democracy such as
Canada seems to some critics, one might expect the 'barbaric yawp;' but
the note of Lampman is almost ultra refinement. For the history of his
country and the politics, which are present history, he had little or no
interest. The human interest is also slight. Like most Canadian poets,
he eschews erotic themes. To point out the influence of Wordsworth upon
his thought, or of Keats upon his style is easy and unprofitable: as it
is to show that certain lines and stanzas would not have been written
but for exemplars in Tennyson and Swinburne. Lampman is not popular; but
his verse must always be reckoned in any account of the nation's
intellectual riches. He is the pathfinder of a new region of song.
Before him, no author so purely Canadian had written verse so deeply
imbued with the very spirit of Canada.

       *     *     *     *     *

Charles G. D. Roberts was born at Fredericton, N.B. in 1860, the son of
a clergyman and the eldest of a talented family. He was formed by
Canadian influences, the public school, the provincial university, the
scenery about his birthplace. At the university he carried away many
prizes. His subsequent career was varied. After teaching school in his
native province, he became editor of _The Week_ for about a year. Later,
he was professor at King's College, Windsor, where some of his best work
was done. Then he filled various positions in New York and latterly he
has lived abroad on the continent and in London. When the Great War
broke out, he joined the King's Liverpool Regiment, and saw service
during the Sinn Fein revolt in Dublin. He was a man of extraordinary
vitality and muscular strength disguised by a moderate physique. In
temperament he was the eternal youth.

The literary activity of Roberts has hardly been surpassed by any of his
Canadian contemporaries. It began with the publication of _Orion_ in
1880, and has continued for more than forty-five years. A long list of
volumes in prose and verse stands to his credit; and his poetry has been
criticised in a monograph by Professor Cappon of Queen's, perhaps the
most masculine judgment in Canada. Roberts is the name most often
mentioned whenever Canadian literature is discussed; his place is
conspicuous and sure among the pioneers of Canadian verse.

His first volume of verse was classic in the mode of Keats, as became a
young collegian who had carried off prizes in Latin and Greek. _Marsyas_
is most successful in rendering the clear unmoving atmosphere that
haunts the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_. Canadian verse shows its
amateurishness in defective technique, the forced rhyme, the padded
line, the otiose epithet, the cloudy syntax, the lack of rule and
proportion, the inability to handle a chosen metre consistently. But
Roberts had followed good models, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson: and his
verse was not merely free from the usual distressing flaws in
workmanship, but possessed genuine melody. As Cappon notes, he had the
singing gift. The year 1880 must always be an important date in the
literary annals of Canada: it saw the issue of a book of true poetry by
a truly Canadian writer.

_In Divers Tones_ (1886) registers a distinct advance on his first
volume, especially in the range of themes. Unlike Lampman, Roberts took
an interest in the young, growing nation. It was Roberts, the New
Brunswicker who wrote the _Collect for Dominion Day_, and uttered the
sentiment

  Surely the lion's brood is strong
    To front the world alone.

It was Roberts who was to write, what is, in spite of its inaccuracies,
the best single volume history of Canada, and to make various
excursions, not altogether happy, into the region of historical romance,
for which he found material in the early days of Acadie. About his work,
from first to last, there is nothing provincial except that the Nature
he celebrates wears the face of the landscape he knows best, the
landscape of the Atlantic seaboard.

       *     *     *     *     *

_Songs of the Common Day_ (1893) marks a bold departure from the themes
which pleased him first. Turning from the classic, he elects the homely.
Side by side with the contest between the sun-god and Marsyas in some
dim Arcady are ranged distinctly Canadian cow-pastures and
potato-fields. His purpose is revealed in his invocation to Night, the
'grave Mysteriarch'

  Make thou my vision sane and clear,
    That I might see what beauty clings
  In common forms, and find the soul
    Of unregarded things.

Here the influence of Wordsworth is unmistakable. The sonnet sequence
forms a complete cycle, a sort of poet-farmer's calendar. It begins with
the first furrow in the spring plowing and follows the course of the
seasons round to the spring again. Picture comes before thought, which
is rather a denial of the sonnet nature; but the pictures remain in the
memory by virtue of the truthful observation which has made them. Every
Canadian will recognise the

  Barn by many seasons beaten grey,--

the burnt lands peopled by

  Giant trunks, bleak shapes that once were trees,--

the raw clearing, all

  Stumps and harsh rocks, and prostrate trunks all charred
  And gnarled roots naked to the sun and rain.

More graceful is the picture of the pea-fields;

  These are the fields of light, and laughing air,
    And yellow butterflies and foraging bees,
    And whitish wayward blossoms winged as these.

Even the prosaic pumpkins between the long lines of tent-like piles of
cornstalks in the cold autumn morning make a French impressionist
picture.

  Purple the narrowing alleys stretched between
  The spectral shooks, a purple harsh and cold
  But spotted, where the gadding pumpkins run,
  With bursts of blaze that startle the serene,
  Like sudden voices, globes of orange bold,--

These are characteristic features of the Canadian scene, east and west,
and the poet has not only himself succeeded in seeing the beauty of
common things but he is able to make the reader who is no poet, see them
also.

The same volume contains _Ave_, printed separately the year before, a
commemoration ode on Shelley, for the hundredth anniversary of his
birth. This is Roberts' best poem and probably the best poem _de longue
haleine_ ever written by a Canadian. It is frankly modelled on Arnold's
_Thyrsis_, with certain alterations in the verse-scheme of the sonorous
ten-line stanza. There is an intimate relation between the scenery
about Oxford and Clough; but there is no apparent connection between the
marshes of a tidal river in Nova Scotia--

  River of hubbub, raucous Tantramar

--and Shelley. None the less, Roberts bridges the gap rather skilfully,
and makes a harmonious synthesis, as is the poet's right. Very
significant is the large part taken by the new world landscape; it
serves as introduction, spacious, dignified and self-contained, to the
main purpose, the celebration of the poet who never saw it--

            --grassy Tantramar
  Wide marshes ever washed in clearest air,

The characterisation of Shelley and his work has been much admired. All
that is best of him is brought together in a single stanza, in a series
of graceful allusions.

  Thyself the lark melodious in mid-heaven;
    Thyself the Protean shape of chainless cloud,
  Pregnant with elemental fire, and driven
    Through deeps of quivering light, and darkness loud
  With tempest, yet beneficent as prayer:
    Thyself the wild west wind, relentless strewing
  The withered leaves of custom on the air
    And through the wreck pursuing
  O'er lovelier Arnos, more imperial Romes
  Thy radiant visions to their viewless homes.

_Ave_ is the most sincere of Roberts' poems: he had a genuine feeling
for the landscape and a real reverence for Shelley. According to Cappon,
it is 'a splendid rhetorical effort, a bold but somewhat irregular
flight of fancy through the empyrean.' After Roberts left Canada for the
United States, his verse changed in quality. His _New York Nocturnes_
are largely erotic, or sentimental. Few careful readers of his work will
be inclined to dissent from Cappon's summing up: 'He has the true
singing quality.' But he 'needs a sterner literary conscience . . . His
work belongs too much to the region of artistic experiment. His constant
transformations too, and the ethical heterogeneity of his work take away
something of the impression of sincerity and depth, which the poetry
ought to give.'

Roberts has also written a great deal of prose. His _History of Canada_
has its faults, but it enjoys the rare distinction of being eminently
readable. It is well proportioned and clearly ordered; and, as it
represents throughout the Canadian point of view, it is a good book to
put into the hand of the foreigner who wishes to understand the country
and the people. His novels, _A Sister to Evangeline_, and so on are
rather feeble performances and reveal the mawkish strain which affects
some of his verse unpleasantly. Where Roberts really found himself was
in his short stories of animal life. For this task he was specially
qualified; for he knew the woods and streams and wild creatures of his
native province intimately. His apprenticeship to teaching had made him
critical and had reacted favorably upon his own prose. It is probable
that his reputation will rest ultimately upon _Earth's Enigmas_, and the
many volumes of similar studies of wild life. Roberts was judged by the
late W. H. Hudson as supreme in this _genre_.

With Roberts must always be associated his cousin Bliss Carman, who was
born at Fredericton in 1861, and educated under Parkin at the local
academy. Like so many other youths of the time, he found it impossible
to live by the pen in Canada and sought his opportunity in the United
States. There he filled various positions upon the staffs of various
journals and magazines; and there he acquired his greatest reputation.
It was a joy to the critics to discover that his poetic-looking name was
not a _nom de guerre_, but lawfully his own. When one of his lyrics was
included in the _Oxford Book of Verse_, this recognition by a critic of
the 'centre' first convinced the poet's countrymen that his work had
merit. Carman's output is so considerable that it has attained the
unique honor among Canadian poets, of forming the subject of a doctor's
dissertation, accepted by the university of Rennes.

Carman's first volume, _Low Tide on Grand Pr_, was published in New
York in 1893 and almost immediately went into a second edition. Though
he wrote much after his removal from Canada, he never regained 'the
first fine careless rapture' of this thoroughly Canadian book of lyrics.
Across the border, he fell under other influences--of Boston plus
Browning in the weird days of Browning societies--and of a certain
calculated Bohemianism which led him into a strange region yclept
Vagabondia. Frankly, his later work became vague and affected. His
tendency to be formless became confirmed; and much of his later verse
seems purely experimental. He is generally adopted by the Americans in
their genial fashion as an 'American' poet, a claim, which, perhaps, he
has not been unwilling to admit.

The sub-title of _Low Tide on Grand Pr_ was _A Book of Lyrics_, and it
is accurately descriptive. Here for the first time in the story of
Canadian letters appears the true lyric, 'simple, sensuous, passionate.'
Though there are echoes of other poets here and there, Tennyson,
Browning, Swinburne, Carman has a distinctive manner of his own. Such
modes as these are undiluted music.

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

  And all her heart
  Is a woven part
  Of the flurry and drift
      Of whirling snow;
  For the sake of two
  Sad eyes and true
  And the old, old love
      So long ago.

  Still the Guelder roses bloom
  And the sunlight fills the room,

  Where love's shadow at the door
  Falls upon the dusty floor.

These were all undeniable successes; but without doubt, the strongest
form is the simple ballad quatrain which Heine used so well. The true
lyrist does not follow after eccentricity. He takes the tune
consecrated by ages of use, the verse form that comes easiest to the
lips of the common people; and to both he gives new content and the
imprint of his own hand. Carman has many stanzas like this,

  She knows the morning ways whereon
      The windflower and the wind confer;
  Behold there is not any fear
      Upon the farthest trail with her.

and like this, with a trochaic movement

  For man walks the world with mourning
      Down to death, and leaves no trace,
  With the dust upon his forehead,
      And the shadow in his face.

Such consummate mastery of the instrument was unique in Canada and rare
anywhere. Apart from the thought, or the suggestion of pictorial beauty,
such verse is a charm, to croon over to oneself for pure joy in lightly
tripping procession of well ordered words. They meet the final test of
the lyric; they will not out of the memory. To read them once is to be
haunted henceforth by shapes of grace and echoes of elfin sweetness.

The general mood is pensive, as the title suggests. Grand Pr is classic
ground as the scene of _Evangeline_. The great wind-swept reaches of
meadow and marsh-land beside the blue waters of Minas Basin, the old
French willows about the well of the vanished village are imbued with
the sense of tears. Low tide suggests the ebb of life, and love, and all
good things. Over all these poems broods the deep but not unwelcome
melancholy of youth. Some are a lover's half confidences of
love--longing and loss, and, like Wordsworth's, intended for a lover's
ear alone; but often the personal note, at no time insistent or
plaintive, is merged in deeper, fuller strains. These may be called
hymns to Cybele, Magna Mater. The relation between

            --the great Mother of us all,
  Whose moulded dust and dew we are
    With the blown flower by the wall.

and her poet-son is one of perfect understanding, of grave tenderness
without a shadow of gloom. Since Wordsworth, there is nothing new in
regarding Nature as the Consoler, but Carman treats the well-worn theme
with an air of distinction, entirely his own.

  Still the old secret shifts and waits
        The last interpreter--

This interpreter is worthy of his great charge; he has found new meaning
in the old text. _Wayfaring_ is a very musical expression of his vague
pantheism.

  And all the world is but a scheme
    Of busy children in the street,
  A play they follow and forget
    On summer evenings, pale with heat.

         *     *     *     *     *

  But waiting in the fields for them
      I see the ancient Mother stand,
  With the old courage of her smile,
      The patience of her sunbrown hand.

  They heed her not, until there comes
      A breath of sleep upon their eyes,
  A drift of dust upon their face
      Then in the closing dusk they rise,

  And turn them to the empty doors;

This is the old antithesis of Wordsworth and Arnold between our
feverish, futile human life and the calm deep majesty of this world's
beauty; but seldom has the antithesis been drawn with more grace.

Carman has none of Roberts' feeling for Canada as a nation; but this
first volume is thoroughly Canadian in scene and atmosphere. His
backgrounds so delicately limned are taken from the beautiful region
about Windsor. Ardise is a real name, from _ardoise_ because of the
slate quarries: so also with 'mining Rawdon' and 'Pereau.' In _A
Northern Vigil_ and elsewhere, he uses these place names most aptly.

  Come, for the night is cold,
    The ghostly moonlight fills
  Hollow and rift and fold
    Of the eerie Ardise hills!

  The windows of my room
    Are dark with bitter frost--

That picture of Canadian winter applies to the whole country. This
'impression' is specially Acadian, where no point of the province is
more than thirty miles from the sea

  Harvest with her low red planets
    Wheeling over Arrochar;
  And the lonely hopeless calling
    Of the bell-buoy on the bar.

Carman's great gifts are music and the power of inducing glamor.

       *     *     *     *     *

W. W. Campbell is an Ontario man, born in 1860 and educated in the
public schools of the province. For some time he was a clergyman, with a
small cure in New England. In 1891, he gave up the church and entered
the Canadian Civil Service at Ottawa. His appointment was the very last
made by Sir John A. Macdonald. His first volume _Lake Lyrics and Other
Poems_ was published at St. John, N.B., in 1889. Campbell has written a
great deal. His collected poems, published in 1905 is a book of three
hundred and fifty pages. He has essayed drama and prose fiction.
Canadian scenery has been his inspiration, especially the region of the
Great Lakes from which his first volume takes its name. His work is
serious and thoughtful; but singularly lacking in technique. Nor did he
show any inclination to listen to his critics and profit by their
counsel. He seemed to hold that thought and emotion will redeem all
faults in the construction of a poem. But no one has rendered some
phases of Canadian Nature with truer inspiration. His lyric _Indian
Summer_, for example, is perfect.

  Along the line of smoky hills
    The crimson forest stands,
  And all the day the blue-jay calls
    Throughout the autumn lands.

  Now by the brook the maple leans
    With all his glory spread,
  And all the sumachs on the hills
    Have turned their green to red.

  Now by great marshes wrapt in mist,
    Or past some river's mouth,
  Throughout the long, still autumn day
    Wild birds are flying south.

Another precious whiff of song straight from the open fields and the
spaces of the sky embodies a mood of Nature which every Nature-lover
knows--the curious pause which follows the stir of awaking life in the
hour of sunrise, before the day grows hot and busy.

  The night blows outward in a mist,
  And all the world the sun has kissed.
  Along the golden rim of sky
  A thousand snow-piled vapors lie.

  And by the wood and mist clad stream,
  The maiden morn stands still to dream.

Nothing is lacking,--inspiration, delicacy of touch, truth of
observation, finish. Had Campbell written often thus, it had been vain
to blame, and useless to praise him.

In prose fiction, the second sphere of the creative imagination,
Canadians had never shown the ability so manifest in their poetry.
Before Confederation, the so-called Canadian novelists were either
denizens who happened to choose Canadian themes, generally historical,
or else Canadians by birth whose work had absolutely nothing to do with
Canada, like De Mille's facile exercises in the prevailing literary
fashions, such as the mystery tale of Wilkie Collins. In the eighties of
the last century, when Canadians were asked to name a Canadian novel,
they could only cite _The Golden Dog_ of William Kirby, (1817-1906). He
was an Englishman by birth, who came to Montreal as a boy and spent the
greater part of his life at Niagara, where he was editor of _The Mail_
for twenty-five years. _The Golden Dog_ is an ambitious historical novel
on a large scale dealing with the death agony of New France. It has
undoubted power; but it also has its _longueurs_. The French of Quebec
find the picture of their past acceptable. It has been translated by
Frchette and Le May. Even if the merits friendly critics find in this
story be admitted, still one swallow does not make a summer, nor one
good novel a nation's literary reputation. But a great change was
coming.

The fruitful decade between 1880 and 1890 saw the beginning of that
change. _Place aux dames!_ Sara Jeannette Duncan was a genuine product
of the new Canada. Born and brought up in the typical Ontario town of
Brantford, with its memories of a great Indian chieftain and the
inventor of the telephone, Miss Duncan served her apprenticeship to
literature in the exacting school of journalism. For years she
conducted the woman's page of _The Globe_ (Toronto) under the name of
Garth Grafton. In 1890, her first book appeared, _A Social Departure; or
How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves_. It is the
wittiest book of travels ever written by a Canadian; it was a success;
and, naturally _The Illustrated London News_ called the author an
'American.' All the qualities of Miss Duncan's best work are to be found
in this charming volume, the light, bright, easy style which never
becomes slovenly, the quiet, all-pervading wit which is nearer the
French _esprit_, and the keen powers of observation. That sense of
international values, the subtle shades of difference between the
English, the Canadians and Americans is shown here in the difference
between herself and Orthodocia, a typical British spinster of the
Victorian era. This is one quality which makes such novels as _Those
Delightful Americans_ so much more agreeable reading to a Canadian than
to either his American, or his English, cousins. Miss Duncan is a
social satirist of the Jane Austen type: and her wit is that peculiarly
feminine kind which conveys a sting in the mere statement of the fact.
The deserved success of this first volume, and of the long series of
novels and stories which followed it is proof positive that Canadian
conditions unaided can form a writer of outstanding ability.

Miss Duncan married Mr. Everett Cotes, a journalist in Calcutta, and
went to live in India. There she found ample material for fiction. _The
Simple Adventures of a Mem-Sahib_ is in her own original vein.
Unfortunately, think some of her admirers, she forsook her own methods
for those of Henry James. _The Path of a Star_, for example, is in her
later manner. She has written only one story which deals with Canadian
life, _The Imperialist_ (1904), which first ran in _The Globe_ as a
serial; but that story stands out from the vast desert of
well-intentioned mediocrity known as Canadian fiction. Its distinction
lies in its choice of theme and its truth of observation. It does not
deal with the romantic periods of our history, nor of the Acadian
French, nor of the adventurous west, but of plain, _bourgeois_,
money-getting Ontario and the humdrum activities of a little town which
grows slowly in wealth and population, and in which the greatest
excitements are a tea-meeting or a Dominion election. The characters are
all carefully drawn. The Murchisons are a typical 'common Canadian'
family. Hesketh, the patronising 'Englishman in Canada' is not a
caricature. In the English-speaking parts of Canada there is a real
homogeneity, no matter how widely they are scattered; and the types of
_The Imperialist_ are to be found both east and west. True as this novel
is, it was not a popular success. The appearance in _The Globe_ of a
tale preaching that salvation for the Empire could only come by Joseph
Chamberlain was something of a joke; and perhaps Mrs. Cotes had been too
long out of Canada. Perhaps the book was too true.

About the time that Lampman was winning recognition in New York another
Canadian writer began to make head in an entirely different quarter. In
that part of _The Illustrated London News_ where such masterpieces as
_The Beach of Fales_ had appeared, a series of short stories began
called _Parables of a Province_. This was the work of Mr. Gilbert
Parker, and his fellow Canadians rejoiced in this success as a tribute
to Canada. He was born in Camden East, Ontario, in 1862 and is therefore
exactly the age of Roberts and W. W. Campbell. He was educated in the
usual Ontario manner and studied arts and theology at Trinity College,
Toronto. He took deacon's orders, and, for a time, was curate at
Trenton. In 1885, he went to Australia, and worked on the staff of the
_Morning Herald_, of Sydney. Parker has gone far. He made a wealthy
marriage and settled in London, entered Parliament, became a knight, a
baronet, a privy councillor. He is the first conspicuous example of a
Canadian literary man 'succeeding,' in the popular sense of the term.

Parker has written many tales; and several are ostensibly Canadian in
scene. They deal either with the remote Northwest, as _The Chief Factor_
and _Pretty Pierre_, or with French Canada, as _When Valmond Came to
Pontiac_. It cannot be denied that they have attained to popularity; and
therewith the distinguished author ought to rest content. They have
never pleased the critical, though they have been praised in terms which
could not be applied without modification to the romances of Scott or
Hugo. The truth is that the vast majority of novels are born but to die.
They are the veriest ephemer. In this struggle for existence only those
rare works which combine deep knowledge of life, dramatic power to
represent it and style, have a chance to survive. Parker's Canada seems
to the Canadian utterly unreal, a sort of _La Scribie_, where labelled
puppets are pulled about by very obvious strings and mop and mow in a
ghastly affectation of life. His Pretty Pierre stories seem a poor
imitation of Bret Harte: his pictures of French-Canadian life are not
recognisable in Quebec. Indeed, the chief significance of Parker in this
third literary movement is that he was formed by Canada, that he was the
first popular success and that his success was based on fiction treating
Canadian subjects and knowing no east and no west.

The whole movement is clearly defined in time and place. Ontario is the
home of it; with Toronto and Ottawa as strong centres of attraction. The
writers in it are all children at the time of Confederation, they are
formed by the institutions then created, they all begin to produce and
to emerge into notice in the same decade. The national impress is upon
them all; and all win recognition and even popularity outside their own
country. The stream of production was destined to widen immensely as
were also the bounds of success. In the meantime, a second French school
of peculiar interest, came into being in Montreal.




  4. In Montreal




  Chapter IV

  IN MONTREAL


Revolt, self-conscious and organised, is the mark of the fourth literary
movement in Canada. As the first school of French-Canadian literature
had its home in Quebec, it was not unfitting that the second should have
its home in Montreal; for the two schools are distinct and even opposed
in their aims and ideals. They have in common, however, the French
instinct for forming a _cnacle_, or clique, for the deliberate
cultivation of literature. The English tendency is for each man to go
his own way; the French is social, to benefit by intercourse,
discussion, criticism, the light and warmth struck out by the impact of
mind on mind.

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, a number of young
Frenchmen in Montreal with literary ambitions did so organise themselves
into such a school or society. The movement first becomes defined by the
publication of _Le Glaneur_ and _L'Echo des Jeunes_ in 1892. These were
literary journals in which the new tendencies were to find expression.
The first number of the _Echo des Jeunes_ contained a declaration of war
upon the old crumbling idols which had been feared so long and which
were the enemies of progress. They were therefore of necessity the
enemies of _Les Jeunes_. The Montreal school was, in fact, a school of
romantic revolt against the old classical school of Quebec. In the
manifesto of these youths appeared the usual watchwords, 'liberty,'
'emancipation of thought,' 'enemies of progress;' and in their journal
they reprinted poems from the most advanced, not to say decadent,
reviews of France. Their audacious challenge provoked immediate
criticism. They drew the fire of the veteran journalist, Arthur Buies.
Though he had fought for Garibaldi, when the Papal Zouaves were fighting
against the Italian patriot, and though he had edited the witty,
anti-clerical _Lanterne_, Buies had sunk back into the natural
conservatism of age, and the instinctive opposition to everything new.
He finds a school without masters an absurdity; it can be nothing but a
mutual admiration society. If these boys must form a school, let them
take men with solid reputations for their instructors; and the
instructors were even named. He gave them the advice old men always give
the young,

    Choose honour'd guide and practised road.

Happily the advice was disregarded; unless young men forsook the old
guides and the beaten track, progress were a dream.

Although these ephemeral journals published nothing of real importance,
they showed what tendencies were at work; and they prepared the way for
what has been called 'the most original effort of intellectual Canada
to organise itself and find a way out of the amateurishness in which the
national poets struggled and wallowed at this end of the nineteenth
century.' Towards the end of 1895, when _L'Echo des Jeunes_ was on its
death-bed, a remarkable announcement appeared in _La Presse_ and various
other Montreal papers. It was to the effect that a group of young men in
that city had decided to form themselves into a school of literature. A
constitution had been drafted, a programme of studies had been marked
out, and a managing committee had been formed. This committee undertook
to revise the works of literary aspirants, and had power to accept or
reject candidates for admission to the society. The mention of a
programme of studies and the promise to revise manuscripts would
indicate that _Les Jeunes_ had laid to heart the advice to include
masters as well as pupils in their 'school.' The members were young
university graduates, who have since become, for the most part, lawyers
or journalists. First and last, they numbered about forty, the figure of
the Immortals of the French Academy.

Thus organised, the new school set to work, with enthusiasm, to produce
literature, and, for three years, it wrought hard and in silence at this
noble task. It met on Friday evenings in the historic Chteau de
Ramezay, once the residence of royal governors, now the museum of
Montreal. The account Charles Gill gives of these sessions of sweet
thought is most engaging, and resembles Abb Casgrain's ideal picture of
the gatherings in Crmazie's back-shop, thirty years before.

'If some inquisitive person had ventured on a Friday evening into this
historic dwelling which was usually shut at this hour of the day, after
having passed through a dark hall decorated with old portraits,
arrow-heads and tomahawks, he would enter a little room, where he would
see four lawyers, two newspaper men, a doctor, a bookseller, five
students, a notary and a painter assembled round a table covered with a
green cloth, which was strewn with manuscripts. It was the School of
Literature to which the historic building offered sanctuary for that
night. . . .

'It was a school without masters. No one had the right to raise his
voice above his neighbor's. And as there was no honor to court beyond
the plaudits of his friends, when a lucky rhyme pierced the clouds of
cigarette smoke, or some well expressed passage made us hold our breath,
jealousy had not cast its black shadow over our enthusiasm. The
infrequent compliments, like the criticisms were sincere. Everyone was
eager to offer his latest masterpiece for consideration and bring to the
board what had chiefly interested him during the week. One member would
appear with the latest best seller; another, with the first book of a
new author, while a third would bring his copy of Leconte de Lisle for
the purpose of quoting his divinity in an argument with a friend who
knew his Lamartine by heart. After the consideration of the manuscripts
came an hour of good talk when paradox had free course, plans jostled
plans, fancy suggested fancy and fallacy was swallowed up in
fallacy. . . .'

It is a pleasing idyll, thus presented.

While the manifold activities of Canada's commercial metropolis are in
full flood all about them, a knot of young idealists withdraw and devote
themselves to the things of the intellect and the imagination; they find
an appropriate home in a building which links them with their country's
past; and they vie with one another in their efforts to increase their
country's true glory by making contributions to the literature of power.
The school prospered, and became so important that Frchette consented
to become its honorary president. Then, after this long period of
incubation, _Les Jeunes_ offered their works for public approval. During
the years 1898-1900, they held four public meetings, three in the
Chteau de Ramezay and one in the Monument National. The general idea
of these feasts of reason was to serve a very solid central dish amid
light garnishings, sweet and savory, of the youthful authors' own
confection. At the first meeting, Frchette read his five-act drama,
_Vronica_; at the second, Senator David gave a lecture on Baldwin and
La Fontaine; at the third, Mr. Jean Charbonneau discoursed on Symbolism,
a theme germane to the school's activities; and at the fourth, the
President, Larose, reproduced the counsels of Philistia as delivered to
the students of Eastman College, Poughkeepsie, by the lips of the
American oracle, Chauncey M. Depew! This must have been a staggering
blow to any school of literature; but worse was to follow. When the
_Soires du Chteau de Ramezay_, an anthology of the works of _Les
Jeunes_, was published in 1900, it was found that this same president
Larose had filled more than a fourth of its four hundred pages with his
own work, a proceeding which would seem to argue an imperfect sense of
proportion. The school, in consequence, came to an untimely end and,
though there was a suggestion of reviving it in 1907, it has passed,
like the Quebec school, into the domain of history.

The difference between these two schools is very strongly marked. They
differ first in choice of theme. The Quebec poets found inspiration
almost exclusively in Canada and the Church. It was distinctly patriotic
and religious in tone. With exceptions which hardly count, the Montreal
poets avoid these fruitful themes. None of 'Les Jeunes' writes a second
_Lgende d'un Peuple_; and if he chooses a distinctly religious subject,
such as the Nativity, his treatment is rather philosophical and fanciful
than devout. The second point of difference is in the French authors
admired and imitated. For the Quebec school, the masters were Victor
Hugo and Lamartine; the originality of the Montreal school consisted in
taking Hrdia the complete sonneteer and Leconte de Lisle for their
models. Like their predecessors, 'Les Jeunes' excel particularly in
descriptive poetry. They have incurred one critic's blame for attempting
to describe what they have not seen,--in a word, the exotic. Like their
predecessors, and also like their English contemporaries, they hardly
venture to approach the universal theme of youthful poets,--love and the
revel of the senses. Here indeed is a huge _lacuna_ in Canadian
literature, waiting to be filled. Some poems of Lozeau speak feelingly
of love; but they stand almost alone. As the old school showed the
influence of the great romantic poets of France, the new school showed
the influence of the late Parnassians. The young enthusiasts of Montreal
were, in fact, modern; and, although the movement never came to its full
strength, and, although the work published in the _Soires de Ramezay_
is often crude and faulty, it was more than justified in that it brought
forward two young men of more than average talent. These were mile
Nelligan and Albert Lozeau.

In 1903 there was published in Montreal a small volume of verse entitled
_mile Nelligan et son Oeuvre_, with a biographical introduction by
Louis Dantin. The frontispiece is a portrait of the author. It is in
every way a remarkable face--the smooth face of a boy and Irish in every
feature, in thorough accord with his Irish name and Irish parentage. The
strong nose and chin, the broad mouth, the full lips drooping at the
corners, the strongly marked eyebrows, the clear eyes, the thick
handsome mop of dark hair are all as Irish as they can be. The
expression is dreamy and sad, but there is alertness and vigor in the
poise of the head. Change the dress slightly, or cover it, and you would
see a typical Irish girl of the peasant class. It is an attractive and a
pathetic face, which prepares the reader for the tragedy of Nelligan's
life, and the strange quality of his verse.

It is not a long story. The son of an Irish father and a French mother,
Nelligan was born in Montreal in 1882. His home life was unhappy. His
education at the College of Montreal and at the Jesuit College was
imperfect, owing to his idle habits and dislike of discipline, maladies
most incident to genius. Conformably to the tradition of young poets at
school, he followed his own bent in reading rather than the
prescriptions of the curriculum, but explorations in Voltaire are not
encouraged in the Jesuit College. A post as bookkeeper was found for
him, but Pegasus went ill in harness. His one desire was literary
fame,--to see his poems published--and he tried to put into practice the
alluring theory that the world owes its poets a living. He was a citizen
of Bohemia, or the Latin Quarter, rather than of Montreal, but his
Bohemianism seems never to have gone further than such pardonable
affectations as his overcoat flying open, his hair on end and his
fingers consistently inked. The Celtic melancholy that is plain to read
in his face as in his verse, at last overwhelmed him. His mind gave way
and, though he still lives, it is as a hopeless patient in a retreat
for the insane.

Through the pious care of his friends who took part in the Friday
evening meetings at the Chteau de Ramezay, the desire of the boy has
been fulfilled. This little book contains a selection from his
voluminous manuscripts, all that has been judged worthy to live and to
perpetuate his memory. Charles ab der Halden says of it: '_Ce n'est que
par la brivet de son souffle et l'ingalit de son inspiration qu'on
devine l'colier et l'enfant. Mais cet enfant avait du gnie._

_C'est la seule fois, on voudra bien le remarquer, que nous avons
employ ce mot en parlant d'un crivain canadien._'

The first impression of his verse is how little it has to do with
Canada. For him Canadian history, Canadian landscape do not exist. No
wreath of maple leaves entwines his page. Except for their spiritual
purity--the constant mark of all Canadian poetry--it would be hard to
determine from internal evidence the place of their origin. Nor does he
write of France; he avoids the common affectation of idolising the
mother country; he has not a word on the Napoleon legend. In fact, this
poet has hardly eyes for the external world; he looks into his heart and
writes. He is subjective, even egotistic, if you will; his own
experience, his own inner life is his supreme interest. He is
unaffectedly sad, a pessimist whilst yet a boy, with the black shadow of
madness hanging over him. Some of his work is faulty and unequal; but it
must be remembered that his career ended at nineteen. Then the black
shadow descended and has never lifted since. All deductions made, his
achievement is unique in the history of Canadian literature.

Strangeness is the 'note' of Nelligan. His world is like Poe's, his own
creation of exotic fancies, out of space, out of time. How remote from
the usual and the conventional are the bold images of _Le Vaisseau
d'Or_:--

'It was a mighty Ship carved out of solid gold. Her masts touched the
blue sky, on undiscovered seas. At the prow flaunted the Cyprian queen
of love, with flying hair and naked flesh, in overplus of sun.

'But one night the Ship struck on a vast reef in the treacherous main,
where the Siren sang; and the dreadful wreck sank her keel into the
depths of the Abyss, an everlasting tomb.

'It was a Ship of gold: her transparent sides held treasures over which
the unholy mariners, Disgust, Hatred, and Madness quarrelled among
themselves.

'What is left of it in the sudden storm? What has become of my heart,
that abandoned ship? Alas! it foundered in the Abyss of Dreams.'

Fantastical as this poem may seem, the image is clear: the '_grand
vaisseau taill dans l'or massif_' swims into our ken, her masts raking
the blue above fairy seas forlorn. '"There was a ship," quoth he.' Ab
der Halden questions if any Canadian poet before Nelligan had really
created a poetic image.

Nelligan abounds in strange, quickcoming fancies. He has visions of a
red, spectral ox with sea-green horns which goes lowing in the
sunset,--of a noble Viennese lady in violet gauze, seated in her carven
chair, turning with ivory fingers the well-worn vellum of an old
missal,--of a negro servitor bearing in to the banquet the truffled
turkey on a broad silver platter. The feminine quality in Nelligan
reveals itself in his love of quaint luxurious interiors, such as he
conjures up in _Pastels et Porcelaines_. The old-world _salon_ with
tarnished lace, where still glitters the brocade of sofas from Japan, is
used as a background more than once. Sometimes the poet sees a dance of
the dead there, or fancies that the old fan is stirred by the fingers of
some bygone beauty. He has also a half feminine, half artistic feeling
for rich decoration and articles of luxury. On his window-panes the
frost has chiselled fine fantastic vases, jewels of goldsmith's work,
the pride of Cellini; Gretchen's dear fingers bear constellations of
curious rings; in Emmeline's deserted boudoir, camelias are languishing
in a glass bowl; her jewels scattered on the onyx table mingle their
reflections in sides of silver boxes. This esthetic delight in dainty
and beautiful things for their own sake puts Nelligan in a class by
himself.

One technical peculiarity of Nelligan's verse is very grateful to
English ears, accustomed as they are to the strongly marked cadences of
their native poetry, and that is their sonority. As a rule, French verse
lacks body; it is not satisfactory to read aloud. But Nelligan has lines
like these:

  Je rve de marcher comme un conquistador,
  Haussant mon labarum triomphal de victoire,
  Plein de fiert farouche et de valeur notoire,
  Vers des assauts de ville aux tours de bronze et d'or.

They fill the mouth and the ear almost like a stanza by Macaulay or
Swinburne. According to his most judicious critic, Nelligan's poetry is
_symboliste_ in idea, and _parnassien_ in structure. He loves the
curious word and the far-fetched epithet; and yet the strange vocables
denoting strange ideas blend readily with the less recondite terms.
Along with true inspiration he had the true artist's passion for
perfection, the capacity for taking pains, and the rare faculty of
self-criticism. Wherever it is possible to compare earlier and later
versions of the same poem, the advantage is always with the revision.

The influence of the Church in Quebec is hard to escape; and, in spite
of his Bohemianism, Nelligan owes more to Rome than does Lozeau, for
example. The poetry of her ritual, the eye-striking splendor of her
accessories appealed strongly to the artist in him. Like so many other
poets, like Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse, he is at once attracted and
repelled by the life of renunciation. Attraction and repulsion are both
visible in _Le Clotre noir_:--

    'To the muffled chant of their sandals, they pass along, heads
    bent, and fingering their heavy rosaries, bead by bead.

    'The evening, as it wanes, reddens the funereal splendor of the
    flag-stones with reflections as of blood.

    'Suddenly they are blotted out at the end of the corridors
    filled with relays of purple, as in labyrinths of shadow, where
    great angels emblazoned on the panes deny all ingress to earthly
    offences.

    'Their faces are mournful; and in their tranquil eyes, as in the
    wide horizons at sea, flames the austerity of passionless
    habitudes.

    'Light divine fills their ample spirits, for triumphant hope
    built the solitudes of these mute spectres of Jesus Christ.'

It is significant that Nelligan should work over a first version into
this far superior form; and also that by some apish fantasy he should
provide variants for the final lines, which turn them into blasphemy.
One section of the book, _Petite Chapelle_, is devoted to poems owing
their inspiration to the externals of Catholicism, and is by no means
the least impressive part of it.

The melancholy of Nelligan is deep and unaffected. As a youth he looks
back upon and regrets his lost childhood. The oldest and truest friends
are gone; he yearns for sympathy and a spiritual love, but he finds
himself alone in a black, hateful, lying world. Images of death haunt
him--a hearse in the autumn fog and rain; the coffin-maker and his
secrets; the monk dead in his cell; the artist lifeless on his pallet.
Nelligan had a passionate love of music, but he heard only funeral
marches. Even in his lighter moments, as in _Five O'clock_, he catches
only the eternal note of sadness in the compositions of Mendelssohn and
Liszt. His sadness has the direct and poignant appeal of real emotion.
That sadness together with the strangeness of his imagery and the rich
music of his verse set him in a niche apart from all his fellows. His
tragic end will also serve to consecrate his memory.

  Un aigle royal en plein ciel foudroy.

Regarding Albert Lozeau, the second outstanding talent of the Montreal
school, the most important biographical fact is that he belongs to the
class which religious people call 'shut-in.' In his boyhood he was
stricken with a disease which confined him to his room and his bed. He
was long an invalid; and though by skilful surgery, his condition was
improved, he died in 1924. One thinks of Heine who lay so long on his
_matrazengruft_ in Paris, equalled with him in fate. Of himself, Lozeau
writes: 'For nine years I lay with my heels as high as my head: that
taught me humility. I rhymed to kill time, which was killing me. . . .
It is because I had not taken my classical course, that I know no Latin,
which is indispensable for writing well in French. I had finished a
commercial course when sickness laid me on my back. I knew absolutely
nothing of French literature; and I was bed-ridden and very ill when I
learned of the existence of Chnier, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Gautier,
Leconte de Lisle, and the other great masters. Lacking all preparation,
I could only enjoy them imperfectly. It was through the old books my
friends handed on to me that I learned about them and that the rhyming
plague affected me. I say rhyming plague, but for me it was a godsend. I
firmly believe it snatched me from despair and death.' A more truthful
or more appealing autobiographical fragment would be hard to find.

In consequence of his malady he could not actually take part in the
'evenings' at the Chteau de Ramezay; but he is naturally in close
alliance with 'Les Jeunes.' Perhaps his isolation did him little harm,
for it led him less into imitation of the modern masters acknowledged by
the Montreal school and more to the intensive cultivation of his own
true and delicate talent. He has an appreciative sonnet, a form he
prefers, on Baudelaire and another on Nelligan, whom he calls 'an eagle
lightning-smitten in mid heaven.' He has published two volumes of verse
_L'Ame Solitaire_ and _Le Miroir des Jours_; his most important work is
contained in the first.

Such a bedfast prisoner as Lozeau might be forgiven some morbidity, some
inclination towards pessimism, some tendency to dwell mournfully upon
his own limitations; but such is not the spirit of the poet. Even in his
cell the world of books is open to him, and nature, and music. Though
nailed to his couch, he is free to wander through each one; and Love the
pilgrim comes his way, even if he be his guest but for a night. In a
sick-room, the patient has two things to watch, the door and the window.
At any moment there may be footsteps on the stair, and the door may open
and show a friendly face. Thus the poet waits, expectant. His heart is
an open door flung wide for the coming of the Beloved. He dreams of her
graciousness, her faith, her purity, her tender care, her white,
musician hands, the kisses of her mouth, the sweet, intimate silences
when they shall be together. And at length she comes as he had dreamed.
Love poetry is a rare product of the Canadian muse. Desire--the natural
longing of a man for a maid--has seldom found its voice in these
northern latitudes; but in lines like these is heard the authentic
yearning note.

  Vos yeux . . . Je baiserai vos yeux sans achever;
  Fort d'un si grand amour, on ose tout braver.
  Vos mains . . . Je presserai vos mains musiciennes,
  Et vous ne pourrez pas les retirer des miennes.
  Vos lvres . . .  mon got j'en boirai le bon vin,
  Et votre effort  les dtourner sera vain.
  Vous me privez souvent du doux plaisir que j'aime:
  Ah! vous me l'offrirez maintenant de vous-mme!
  Tout ce que je voudrai, dsormais je l'aurai.
  Ce n'est pas moi toujours qui vous obirai.
  Vous souriez . . . Laissez, mon amour, que j'achve:
  Dites, que pouvez-vous faire contre mon rve?

The light playful touch which is characteristic of Lozeau does not
really detract from the earnestness of feeling. He seems to have little
time for self pity, or regret for his lot. He can be almost caustic, or
cynical on occasion, in the unexpected turn he gives to the main idea of
a poem. In _Silence_, for example, he deplores the inadequacy of speech,
and vaunts the superiority of the lover's unspoken language. He longs to
do without words,

                     . . . infidles, petits,
  Qu'on dsavoue,  peine aussitt qu'ils sont dits--
  Comme ceux-l qu'ici, pour vous, je viens d'crire!

The suggestion of 'treason' in the poet's own avowal comes as a
surprise.

This Gallic lightness, the old traditional French gaiety, crops out
again and again. _Causerie Fminine_ is an amusing little bit of social
satire. Young girls are talking rather shrilly in the drawing-room,--of
wonderful trinkets,--of other young people whom they criticise with
scant charity. They compliment one another upon their clothes and plan
new purchases. They confide secrets which the confidante repeats an hour
later. They raise their voices; it sounds as if they were coming to
blows. There must be fourteen or fifteen of them talking. . . . There
are four! The poet can even bid sad-hued autumn welcome and draw cheer
from a rainy October day. True, it is pouring, but it is pouring verses
for poets with jostling golden rhymes. Poets need only to hold out their
hearts,--_sursum corda!_--to catch them as they fall. In autumn, too,
the poet knows how to waste a sullen day, as Milton proposed, with Attic
feast and wine.

  Pendant qu'il pleut, buvons, buvons le vin joyeux,
  Le vin magicien qui fait comme les dieux
  Les jours gris rayonnants et les nuits tristes belles!

The ballade of little poets has also the ring of mirth in it, while many
of his out-o'-doors pieces pulsate with delight in the manifold shifting
beauty of Nature's pageant.

Nature-worship is the 'note' of Canadian poetry, French as well as
English. Poets of other nations find beauty, love, the soul their first
concern; but our native bards seem to turn instinctively to the
external world. Perhaps it is because the Canadian climate, with its
fierce extremes of heat and cold, forces them to fix their eyes upon the
procession of the seasons or because in their desire for beauty they
find it first at their own door, not in the handiwork of man, but in the
handiwork of God. The fact remains that, one and all, they sing the
praise of Nature. The Mighty Mother is the theme of Lozeau, bed-ridden
in a city room, no less than of Roberts, the untiring ranger of woods
and streams. Like Roberts, he has made for himself a poet's calendar,
which he calls _La Chanson des Mois_. His year begins with March, like
the Christian year. The days are still wintry, but they are blue and
sunny with the promise of spring in the air. The lovely weather draws
the poet from his book and his devotion. He follows the course of the
months round to winter again with keen enjoyment, as the epilogue,
_Quand Mme_, testifies.

  Alors que le dernier chant vibre
  D'un accent plaintif et moins libre,
  Aux jours des automnes rleurs,
  Mon coeur entonne un chant aux fleurs.

  Lorsque siffle et brle la bise,
  Qu'il fait triste comme en glise,
  Aux jours des hivers assombris,
  Quand mme, sentant qu'il se grise
  Mon coeur exulte, jusqu'aux cris!

That exultant heart is a priceless treasure.

The poet's calendar abounds in fine observation and just feeling. It
could have been written only by a Canadian, of the Canadian year.
Naturally, there is a great deal of snow in it, for the northern winter
is not easily ignored. The lines on the behavior of a snowflake, on
girls snow-shoeing, on the snow melting from the eaves appeal directly
to Canadian experience. One mark of the native-born Canadian is his
equal delight in the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Lampman has
sung both themes, and here Lozeau celebrates the prodigality of June,
the ardors of the _Bel Et_, and also the frost upon the pane and the
whirling flurry and fall of the snow. Lampman and Lozeau resemble each
other also in their natural refinement, a refinement with an edge.

  Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art,

runs Landor's poetic summation of his life. The art that appeals most
strongly to Lozeau is music. He has hardly an image from painting, or
sculpture, or architecture, but one entire section of _L'Ame Solitaire_
is devoted to poems on music. That he has written eloquently on both
love and music is the distinction of Lozeau. He longs, as an artist, for
the musician's power of expression, which is not fettered by the sad
limitations of words. He thrills in response to all varieties of music.

  Langue d'argent vieilli des anciennes chansons;
  Langue de bronze et d'or; carillon de baptme;
  Langue d'airain par qui la rvolte blasphme,
  Te Deum, Marseillaise. . . .

Music intoxicates him like wine, and brings heaven into his very marrow.
He seems more responsive to instruments of music, the harp, the
mandolin, the guitar, the piano, than to the human voice. Above all, he
praises the '_belles mains musiciennes_,' the '_mains savantes_,' which
can evoke the spells of the keyboard. He can write of the Italian and
his street piano in a vein of gay humor, so catholic is his love of
music.

The final section of _L'Ame Solitaire_ is devoted to reflective poetry.
There are references to Goethe, Hugo, Shakespeare, but the names that
receive most attention are out of the beaten track--Ronsard, du Bellay,
Villon, and Baudelaire. That a French-Canadian poet should have a good
word for the author of _Fleurs du Mal_, shows how the world has moved,
even in the province of Quebec. He understands the thesis of
materialism, as in _La Voix Brutale_, and the demands of the soul, as in
_La Voile_. If his final view has a shade of pessimism and seems to
contradict his songs of courage and delight, he has plenty of good
company, from Solomon to Swinburne, to reinforce his counsel

  N'espre rien de bon de la vie: elle est vaine!

Perhaps the poem, _Inconsquence_, expresses as well as any his simple
philosophy of life. A rough English version may give the course of
thought, if not the felicity of phrase.

  Why were eyes given except to weep with care?
      And hearts except to love, until they ache?
      Flesh but to bleed and rot? Childhood to take
  The pains of age? And hope to breed despair?

  And most of all, wherefore the Lie of Dreams,
      When in the Prison of the Real we groan,
      But, after years dream-riddn, this alone,--
  To learn how vain the Vision also seems?

  What seems Good, tried, betrays us evermore.
      Illusion smiles,--whereby we agonise.
      If we mount up, the Abyss beneath us lies,
  Which flight for ever deepens as we soar.

  And we fall ever, as a drunkard falls,
      Despairing aye, but proud to rise again:
      For we do rise, and till the end we gain,
  We curse our life, rejoiced that life enthrals.

Lozeau's second volume, _Le Miroir des Jours_, appeared in 1912. It has
all the qualities of the first, playful humor, love of nature and of
music. It contains, like the first, poems to a woman and reflective
poems. While it perhaps maintains the general level of the earlier work,
it certainly does not surpass it. The first volumes of Canadian poets
are apt to be their best.

What makes Lozeau's work significant is that his culture is exclusively
Canadian. He has submitted to no alien influences. He has not travelled,
even in his own country. He has escaped the deadening effects of
ordinary school and college training. His long illness has forced him
back upon himself, has driven his thoughts inward and has given him
leisure for meditation. Books, music, friends,--universal implements of
culture,--are to be found everywhere. The face of Nature is not hidden
even in the brick and mortar wilderness of the modern city. Her child,
the poet, may catch glimpses of her loveliness,--cloud, and star, and
moon, and sky, and sun,--through his narrow loophole of retreat. As
Stevenson says beautifully,

  To make this earth, our heritage,
  A cheerful and a changeful page,
  God's bright and intricate device
  Of days and seasons doth suffice.

These aspects of the Mighty Mother have had no slight or trivial
influence upon Lozeau. The great Church which claims him as her son has
given him a central point for his universe. Together, they have aided in
making him what he is, the gentle dreamer of pure and tender dreams.

A foreign critic ventures on prophecy and declares that some day
Lozeau's talent, which is already full grown, will compel the applause
of all who love poetry.

The School of Literature rested from its labors, but French letters were
still cultivated in Montreal. Volumes of verse still appeared from time
to time, all more or less 'modern' in tone and tendency, and therefore
to be classified as belonging to this fourth literary movement. Prose
fiction and the drama were not produced; the favorite form was poetry.
Much was meritorious; and some distinguished or refined in thought or
expression; but there was no work strikingly different from the general
run. In 1911, however, there appeared in Paris a book by a young French
Canadian, which differed widely from all that had gone before, _Le Paon
d'mail_, by Paul Morin.

The author was born in Montreal in 1889, and had benefited by an
education of more than usual breadth and thoroughness. From Laval he
received three degrees, in Arts, Science, and Law; and from the
University of Paris the doctorate for a thesis on the sources of
Longfellow's poetry, which required a knowledge of practically every
language and literature in Europe. In addition, he had made the classic
tour of Europe and had seen with his own eyes the sunburnt lands about
the Mediterranean, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, and Algiers. Such an
equipment of scholarship and experience is rare; among Canadian men of
letters, it is, one may fairly say, unique. No Canadian writer had
completed such a training at the age of twenty-two.

In 1911 Morin produced his first book, _Le Paon d'mail_; and every page
bears evidence of scholarship, travel, and cultivated taste. The title
indicates the deliberate selection of an artistic _motif_ which runs
through the whole volume. The peacock, Juno's bird, is found in the
illuminations of the ancestral missal of the famous family de Noailles:
and to the Countess de Noailles, for whose poetry he has a profound
admiration, Morin has dedicated this first heir of his invention. In his
poem on the St. Jerome of Antonello da Messina, he says that the beauty
of the peacock has always fascinated him, as well it might; for he has a
painter's eye, having inherited from his mother artistic tendencies, and
having himself cultivated art with success; and he would perceive the
decorative possibilities of the gorgeous creature with all the eyes of
Argus in his plumes. The peacock brings light and color to many a page.
He plunges his crested, serpent-like head into the rose-bushes, or
parades before an illuminated letter in an old missal, or marches
across the lawns of the Villa d'Este in the October sunshine. Under the
escort of the peacock, the poet sees himself gathering the heavy velvet
Persian roses in Ispahan; and in the dying peacock of the Tuileries, he
perceives, quite needlessly, the symbol of his own poetry rent by a
monster of a critic. He notes the gardener's fancy of calling the
carnation the royal peacock, and he devotes a poem to the daring of
Cicero in offering his friend a dinner without a peacock.

Morin is, in fact, a _Parnassien_, of the school of Leconte de Lisle.
One mark of that school is perfection of form and the other, its
fondness for the exotic. In _Le Paon d'mail_, the labor of the file has
not been stinted; technical defects are absent; and although the
unaccustomed reader is halted now and then by the rare and far-fet word,
he has no feeling that content has been sacrificed to form. In subject
matter, this volume, it is almost needless to repeat, offers a complete
contrast to the works of the Quebec school. Canada and the Church are
not the sources of Morin's inspiration; nor does he fall under ab der
Halden's playful condemnation of Canadian poets that they are fondest of
describing what they have never seen. Morin has poems dedicated to his
contemporaries, Lozeau and Delahaye; and, in his envoy, he promises in
some future day to wed Canadian words to the rhythms of France, and to
intertwine the maple leaves with the laurel: but, apart from these
references, there is little to prove that these poems were not written
by some young Parisian. Italy, Turkey, China, Japan, Belgium, Brittany,
Persia, Spain, Greece,--in other words, the strange, the foreignly
picturesque, not the scenery or legends of the St. Lawrence, have
prompted him to write.

In contrast to Lozeau, the shut-in, and to Lampman, who was never out of
Canada, Morin is the traveller; he has seen the world; and he was
dowered with the rare temperament which really benefits by travel.
Happy is the artist who sees the world in his impressionable youth.
Therefore, Morin, with his keen eye for form and color, his familiarity
with books, and his trained historic feeling, is happiest in his efforts
to seize the spirit of places. His _Adieux  Venise_ conjures up, with
fresh, intimate touches, the sea Cybele to her countless lovers.

  Voici la Dogana. La gondola fantasque
  maille sur l'eau d'or une ombre de tarasque.

Simple! but the couplet calls up the palace where the doges ruled, and
the single gondola floating before that wonderful faade, with its
fantastic shadow in the golden tide. Equally atmospheric is the cry,

  Coupoles de Ziem, palais du Titien,
  O bleu mol et mourant du ciel vnitien!

And everyone who has known the tender skies of Venice will echo the
lament.

  D'autres que moi boiront votre air dor, moir.
  Je ne reverrai plus San Giorgio Maggiore. . . .

  Et par ce long canal d'azur et de topaze
  Faut-il quitter, ce soir, la Ville d'extase?

Such verse does not lend itself to translation; the sense is too closely
wedded to the words, their very form and sound; for Morin uses words as
a jeweller uses precious stones in a gold setting. To displace,
interchange, or to substitute is to mar. Like Nelligan's, his verse has
to English ears a grateful sonority, which may be due to his Longfellow
studies. The research for the exact word produces this pleasure for the
reader.

One French verse form which is apt to please English readers is that
employed by Lamartine in his famous poem, _Le Lac_. Its effect is almost
the same as the quatrain of _A Dream of Fair Women_, with its truncated
fourth line. It is used by Morin in his _Trianon_. The haunts of Marie
Antoinette set the poet dreaming; he peoples Versailles with beautiful
and tragic figures--Polignac, Lamballe, the hapless Dauphin, the Queen
herself.

  Mon coeur franais et moi nous vmes ce matin
  Le plaisible hameau parfum de fougre
  O Marie-Antoinette en paniers de satin
              Rva d'tre bergre;

He does not moralise: he simply pictures the tragedy of 'the Austrian's'
downfall, allowing the reader to make his own reflections. He does not
disguise the fact of the Queen's folly, but he ponders on the grief with
which she uttered the word, Trianon, when she left for ever the temple
where Love hid arrows in his quiver under the roses.

With some justice Morin has been criticised because his poems contain
'more color than ideas.' In a young poet, this is a pardonable fault,
which may be left to time to cure. Verbal felicity and formal perfection
going hand in hand with spontaneous delight in the external world--

  The beauty and the wonder and the power,
  The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,
  Changes, surprises--

represent no slight achievement in a poet of twenty-two. Learned,
travelled, eager to excel, seeing life with the artist's eye, endowed
with true poetic power, Morin has written the best volume of French
verse which can be credited to Canada. His second volume, _Pomes de
Cendre et d'Or_ displays the same qualities of style as the first; but
it does not possess the same artistic unity. To this volume the
government of Quebec adjudged a prize of $2,000 in 1923. Whether Morin
will advance in power of thought, while retaining his love of beauty,
cannot be predicted; but he has already done enough to give him a secure
place in the literature of Canada and warrant high hopes for his future.

The fourth literary movement is curiously remote from national and
historical influence. Its members are of Canadian birth and training;
but they owe very little to the land of their birth. They might have
cultivated French poetry, one feels, almost as well at Cayenne or
Nouma. Their 'note' is attention to artistic form; they are more
learned and more critical than the Quebec school; and their success is
undoubtedly greater. The poetry of Nelligan, Lozeau, and Morin is a
greater glory to Montreal than her fifty millionaires.




  5. East and West




  Chapter V

  EAST AND WEST


Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Great
War, Canada knew for the second time in her history a period of
undoubted prosperity. Canadians who had been accustomed, all their
lives, to think of Canada as a poor country had to readjust their
thinking to fit the concept of Canada as a rich country. During the long
lean years, there was a constant emigration of young men from the
Dominion to the United States at the beckoning of opportunity, and the
men of letters joined the stream of exiles. It was a commonplace that no
literary man could hope for a career in Canada; there was no market for
his wares; and a Canadian novelist, one of the expatriated, has recorded
his opinion that his countrymen cared more for whiskey than for
literature, as they spent far more money on drink than on books. The
same might be said of every other country in the world, but the gibe
rankled. The time was coming when the reproach should lose something of
its sting. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the fifth literary
movement in Canada, is that Canadian writers shared in the general
prosperity. They were no longer compelled to exile themselves in Boston
or New York; they remained at home, and were still able to market their
wares outside of Canada to great advantage. For the first time, Canada
saw the works of Canadian authors selling by the hundred thousand
copies; and the swollen cheques for royalties impressed the popular
imagination. It was no longer necessary for a poor writer to pay a
Barabbas of a publisher for the privilege of seeing his immortal work in
print. The rising tide of national prosperity was lapping on the attic
stairs of Grub Street. The fifth literary movement is the era of 'best
sellers.'

The second feature of this period is the absence of any fixed literary
centre. In all the other movements, groups of writers are found working
with more or less cohesion in a city, Halifax, Quebec, Montreal,
Toronto, Ottawa. Now the movement was as wide as the continent; it knew
no east and no west. A girl in a quiet hamlet in Prince Edward Island, a
parson in Winnipeg, a bank clerk in Vancouver could produce a child's
story, a religious novel, or a book of verse, and thereby win immediate
popularity, at home and abroad. The national impulse which began with
the birth of the Dominion, and which was so strongly fecund and
operative in Ontario has been felt from ocean to ocean. In spite of the
chasm of the French-speaking province, it has reached out to the old
colonies on the Atlantic seaboard; and, in spite of the clash of
agrarian with manufacturing interests, it has taken possession of the
prairie hinterland and crossed the barrier mountains to the Pacific.
Throughout the country, Quebec always excepted, there is a certain
sameness in thought and feeling, the basis, think some, of nationhood.

A third mark of this fifth movement was the production of prose fiction.
The novel was everywhere the favorite form of expression all through the
nineteenth century, and kept its place in the first decades of the
twentieth against the competition of the new drama. Canada lagged
behind, not only the United States and the rest of the world, in
producing the novel, but behind her sister Dominions overseas. No story
had been written so distinctly Canadian, as _Robbery Under Arms_ is
distinctly Australian, and no story 'made in Canada' attained the fame
of _The Story of an African Farm_. For two generations, historians of
Canadian literature were sore pressed to fill the department of nativist
fiction. _The Golden Dog_ was almost the single entry under this rubric,
or else recourse was had to the historical romances of Major Richardson.
Now there was an effort to depict life not in the past but in the
present, especially as it manifested itself in the newer parts of
Canada. Along with this cultivation of the prose fiction, there was a
corresponding decline in the production of verse; for a successful
novelist can live by his trade, while a poet is like Virtue and receives
the wages of going on. If there was no falling off in the actual
quantity of verse written, the quality suffered, with one brilliant and
delightful exception to be noted later. A very great change had taken
place since Lampman. The tender idealism of the eighties seemed to have
fled from earth, and the most popular versifier of this period built his
reputation upon brutality of theme and violence of language. None the
less the spectacle of so many men and women working according to their
divers gifts at the profession of letters throughout the land and
attaining the success they desired was one to cheer the considerate
patriot. Canadians in greater numbers than ever before were devoting
themselves to the art of arts. The young Dominion was finding its
voice; and the old reproach, 'the least literary of the colonies,' could
no longer be justly flung at it.

The growth of historic consciousness and the production of historical
works have already been remarked as notable features of all literary
movements in Canada but one. In Halifax, in Quebec, in Ontario, they
accompanied and reinforced the creative impulse. Far from losing its
force by diffusion, the historic consciousness of Canada intensified and
kept pace with the material expansion of the country. Evidence on this
point is overwhelming. First comes the series of political biographies
known as _The Makers of Canada_. The series was patriotically conceived,
even if the individual works are of unequal value. Some are critical in
method, original in use of materials, and well, even admirably written;
such as Shortt's _Sydenham_, Le Sueur's _Frontenac_, Miss McIlwraith's
_Haldimand_, and D. C. Scott's _Simcoe_. In format, paper, print,
illustrations, and binding, the note of luxury was struck, and the
authors were paid a living wage; but the Canadian public was ready and
willing to meet the total cost. Large as this scheme was, it was to be
outdone by one still more grandiose and even better executed. This was
nothing less than a cooperative history of the whole country upon the
familiar principle of assigning to a different specialist the part of
the subject with which he was most competent to deal. Under the able
leadership of Professor Shortt, and Dr. Arthur Doughty, the Dominion
Archivist, a corps of a hundred associated writers was formed, which in
five years produced the truly monumental work known as _Canada and its
Provinces_. It ran to twenty-two 'sumptuous' volumes and the set cost
nearly four hundred dollars; but the market absorbed it at once. Every
department of our history, every form of national activity has been
treated in detail. It is not only a history, but an encyclopedia of
Canada, an indispensable storehouse of information regarding the
country. How it is to be superseded, or how Canadian history is to be
written along other lines, is difficult to understand. It was planned by
Canadians; it was written by, and for, Canadians; it was made possible
by the enthusiasm and acumen of a Canadian publisher; and it will long
remain a conspicuous monument of Canadian pride in Canada. Running side
by side with this huge publication was a series of popular little
histories known as _Chronicles of Canada_, in thirty-two volumes. It was
a charming series in all externals; it emphasised the picturesque in our
history, and it appealed first to the intelligent young Canadian in his
teens. It was even a greater success than the parent enterprise. A
striking feature was the spirited frontispieces in color by the Canadian
artist C. W. Jefferys, while the rest of the illustrative
material--maps, plans, portraits--though not lavish, was carefully
selected and always an aid to the understanding. Throughout, the quality
of the writing is on a high level, the various authors apparently
taking up the task of making books for the young with a certain youthful
freshness and vigor. All based their work on special studies; and all
had served their apprenticeship to the craft of letters. Leacock and
Colonel William Wood are the largest contributors to the series, and
their monographs are not surpassed in every essential of good
story-telling.

Equally significant is the existence of the Champlain Society. It was a
limited club founded for the purpose of reprinting for members rare and
valuable documents relating to the history of Canada. Originating in
Toronto, it holds out the hand of friendship to the French province. The
society is named from the founder of Quebec and the first books to be
printed are the works of French explorers and historians. Sixteen
volumes have appeared which are, in all externals, triumphs of the
book-maker's art. They have been edited with Benedictine care. Notable
among these scholarly works are the editions of Le Clercq and Denys by
Professor Ganong, an expatriated New Brunswicker, who brought to his
task a most minute knowledge of the topography of his native province.
Another scholarly publication of a most comprehensive character is the
_Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada_, founded by
Professor G. M. Wrong and published by the University of Toronto. The
title explains the scope of this review. From the first, it was noted
for its high standard of excellence and for the fearlessness of its
criticism. It constitutes an annotated bibliography of Canadian history,
which must be indispensable to the specialist in that subject. While
losing nothing of its breadth of scope, it has been turned into a
regular quarterly review.

All these belong to the literature of knowledge; but they all owe their
existence to the strong sense of nationhood, which is felt first by the
keenest minds, by the intellectual leaders, the makers of opinion and by
them communicated to the mass. It is also noteworthy that they all have
their origin in the centre, and that they reach out east and west to the
farthest bounds of the Dominion. They are all national, not provincial
in their scope and plan. Many other histories and biographies must, of
necessity, be passed over without even reference in so slight a sketch
as this; but the total mass of current historical writing augurs well
for the growth of the nation in true patriotism. A people that is
unmindful of its past can have no future.

Not only the development of historic feeling, but the development of
journalism has accompanied and reinforced the impulse to creative
literature in Canada. Sam Slick, the typical 'smart Yankee,' made his
first appearance in a contribution to a provincial newspaper. Journalism
is the humble Cinderella sister to Literature, and, though often
unacknowledged by her proud elder, most friendly and helpful. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, the old personal journalism in the
larger centres has passed away and given place to the journalism of the
joint-stock company and the capitalist. The management was learning to
pay for contributions, not generously, but still enough to enforce the
truth that what costs nothing is commonly worth nothing. It was now
possible for a number of Canadian writers to make a modest addition to
their incomes by occasional contributions to the press. The _causerie_
has not been developed in Canada except in French journals, but almost
every important newspaper has its 'magazine features,' and its
department of literary criticism. Of this last the most noteworthy
examples were the 'Notes and Queries' page conducted by George Murray in
the _Star_, and 'At Dodsley's' conducted by Dr. Martin Griffin in the
_Gazette_. The growing wealth of the country was enabling newspaper
proprietors to employ qualified and scholarly contributors.

The book review and 'literary page' was a concession of the frankly
commercial newspaper to the educated portion of the democracy. It was
only fitting that the professed nurseries of the mind, the universities,
should do their share in fostering the intellectual life of the country
through the higher journalism. Nor have they come short of such a lawful
expectation. A group of Queen's men founded in 1892 the able review
known as _Queen's Quarterly_. It has contained many articles of merit,
and it is distinguished for its incisive and well informed criticism of
foreign and domestic politics. Unfortunately it is not endowed, and does
not pay for contributions. Its constituency is therefore limited, and
also its usefulness. A labor of love, and an intellectual beacon, it is
a striking proof of the strong independence of spirit and the local
patriotism which have always characterised Queen's University. A more
ambitious journal, established decisively not on the voluntary
principle, but on the truth that the laborer is worthy of his hire, was
_The University Magazine_, which first saw the light in 1907. It really
was the child of McGill, but Toronto and Dalhousie stood sponsor. That
was a red-letter day in the literary annals of Canada, when Andrew
Macphail, physician, essayist, professor, and amateur farmer, declared
before the Canadian Society of Authors, at their session in Toronto, 'I
would not have anything to do with a magazine that depended on charity.
If a magazine cannot pay its contributors, it is simply prolonging a
useless existence.' Upon this impregnable rock, the new Canadian
quarterly review was founded. At once it took its place among the very
best of its kind. Macphail proved himself a heaven-sent editor. Thanks
to his native courtesy and tact, to his unstinted, unpaid labors, and,
in no small measure, to his own articles in it, the _University_ became
at once a power in the life of the country. His revolutionary policy of
paying a living wage enabled the editor to rally the best brains of the
country to its support, and also, what was even more important, to pick
and choose, to accept and to reject, without fear or favor. Its chief
preoccupation was Canadian and Imperial politics, but it offered an open
forum for the discussion of all problems in literature, art, philosophy.
The encouragement it gave to Canadian writers was most grateful; it
revealed unexpected strength; and it had the honor of introducing Miss
Pickthall's poetry to an audience fit to appreciate it. It was a
distinct commercial success, ran a brilliant course until Macphail went
to the Great War as captain in No. 6 Field Ambulance, and finally ceased
publication in April 1920. The only critical journal comparable to it in
power was _The Week_; but its strength was a single extraordinarily keen
and well-furnished mind. The strength of the _University Magazine_ was
in its corps of writers recruited all over Canada. _The Week_ was
undoubtedly able in its criticism of Canadian affairs, but it was
unsympathetic, and soon drew the fire of so typical a Canadian as Grant
of Queen's. The criticism of the _University Magazine_ managed to be
quite as searching, but without offence. Its successful career supplies
one more index of the growth of national sentiment in sanity and
strength.

The Canadian novel was tardy in its development. Not till about the end
of the nineteenth century did this most popular form of writing come to
its own in Canada; and once more journalism proved to be a most useful
handmaid to literature. In 1897 _The Westminster_, a monthly magazine
directed by a board of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, published as a
serial, a story, _Black Rock_. When this tale appeared in book form, it
was received enthusiastically not only in Canada but throughout the
United States. The author was the Rev. C. W. Gordon, who adopted in a
rather haphazard fashion the _nom de guerre_ of 'Ralph Connor,' Gordon
is a thoroughly Canadian product. Having passed through the regular mill
of Ontario government schools, he took his degree in Arts at the
University of Toronto, and, in Divinity, at Knox College. After
theological courses in Edinburgh and some travel on the Continent, he
returned to Canada to work in the mission fields of the Northwest,
before the coming of the land-sharks and the fabulous prices of
townlots. He saw the raw, hard life of the frontier from the
missionary's point of view. It was a wonderful chance to gather material
and Gordon used it to the best of his ability; but the literary artist
in him was always overshadowed by the earnest preacher of the gospel.

_Black Rock_ is a tale of the unending struggle between the powers of
light and darkness. Into a typical mining town in the Canadian Selkirks
comes Craig, a typical Canadian missionary of the eighties, like Angus
McLeod or Donald Martin, virile, earnest, fearless. He sets himself to
reclaim the miners from drink, gambling and debauchery; and after
various fortunes of war, he wins the victory. It would not be fair to
describe such a book as a sugar-coated tract. The work is too sincere;
and concessions are made to ordinary human nature by admitting
descriptions of fights, horse-races, and by a certain moderate vein of
humor, which reveals itself in imitation of French-Canadian and Scottish
dialects, tolerant amusement at religious vagaries, etc. It succeeds
also in a measure in conveying the atmosphere of the prairie and the
mountains. _The Sky Pilot_ is built on much the same lines. In this the
forces of evil are a company of aristocratic ranchers, Englishmen of
good family who meet periodically for a good time. Moore, the
missionary, takes the part of Craig, but he dies in the hour of victory
when the church at Swan Creek is opened. _The Man From Glengarry_ and
_Glengarry Schooldays_ deal with conditions in the lumbering regions of
Ontario about the middle of the last century. Doubtless there is much
personal reminiscence in them. _The Prospector_ is also a tale of
missionary life in the West and lifts the veil from the hardships
endured by pioneers. In _The Doctor_, Gordon introduces that admirable
church statesman, Robertson, the Superintendent, whose biography he
wrote later. One realistic chapter betrays his artistic limitations. His
latest work, _The Foreigner_, opens up the problem of miscellaneous
European immigration into Canada. The problem is sufficiently serious,
and cannot be too carefully studied by all patriots.

Gordon's popularity is very pronounced. A Canadian lecturing on Canadian
literature in San Francisco was interrupted by a burst of cheering at
the mere mention of Ralph Connor's name. A Dalhousie professor kept a
record of what his freshmen had read before entering college for several
years, and found that practically every one was acquainted with Gordon's
work. The English publishers of _Corporal Cameron_ announced the first
printing of 200,000 volumes. The fortunate author has made his fortune
by his books; probably the first Canadian to do so. This wide-spread
popularity admits of certain conclusions. All Gordon's novels are novels
with a purpose, and that purpose is ethical and religious: the mass of
mankind, not the critical remnant, still retains a lively interest in
ethics and religion, and will always read a story which treats ethical
and religious problems. The mass of readers holds firmly by the great
Decency Principle and ranks itself decisively on the side of the angels.
Gordon's success in his native country is explained by the fact that
Canada is the last refuge of the Puritan spirit. A Scottish visitor in
the Canadian West has recorded her surprise that young men attended
church without any visible compulsion. To the eternal honor of the
Canadian churches, they made a gallant effort to follow the settlers
into the wilderness and provide them with the ordinances of religion.
There was no lapsed Canadian West. Gordon is the historian of that
movement for his own church, and his novels contain the record. That is
their chief significance. With his native modesty and with the
standards of literary excellence furnished by his university training,
he would be the last to claim for his facile fiction any greater
permanent value.

Gordon produced his novels at the geographical centre of the country, in
his leisure from his ministerial duties. Miss Lucy M. Montgomery
achieved her success from the far east, while pursuing her work as a
school-teacher in the quiet hamlet of Cavendish in Prince Edward Island.
Her education had been practically all received in her native province,
except for a year at Dalhousie College, where she is gratefully
remembered for a clever article on the education of women contributed to
a 'Dalhousie number' of a local paper. In _Anne of the Island_ she has
described Halifax with affection under the name of Kingsport. Unlike
Gordon, who had to be goaded into composition, Miss Montgomery had
strong literary ambitions, and worked long and hard with little or no
recognition before she was rewarded with an immense popular success.
This was _Anne of Green Gables_ (1908). More than three hundred
thousand copies were sold within eight years. Mark Twain wrote to a
friend: 'In Anne Shirley you will find the dearest and most moving and
delightful child of fiction since the immortal Alice.' The heroine so
praised is a little waif adopted by a childless couple in 'The Island.'
Unlike the central figure of the usual child's story, she is not
pathetic, or misunderstood, or neglected; nor does she immediately
blossom into a genius, with love affairs. She is a good-natured,
affectionate, garrulous, imaginative tomboy, who, with the best will in
the world, is always getting into innocent scrapes, and ruing the
consequences. One striking physical feature is her red hair, an
unappreciated beauty, indeed a source of mortification, which aroused
the sympathy of 'every red-haired girl in the world.' Anne would be at
home in the household of _Little Women_; Jo March would have understood
and appreciated her; but the mention of that classic is rather
dangerous. The Canadian book just misses the kind of success which
convinces the critic while it captivates the unreflecting general
reader. The story is pervaded with a sense of reality; the pitfalls of
the sentimental are deftly avoided; Anne and her friends are healthy
human beings; their pranks are engaging; but the 'little more' in truth
of representation, or deftness of touch, is lacking; and that makes the
difference between a clever book and a masterpiece. Mr. Clemens'
superlatives express the popular verdict. Canadian authors are in the
habit of looking across the border for appreciation. They value American
approval because home-grown critics are either cold, or so uniform and
undiscriminating in their praise that it loses all savor.

_Anne of Avonlea_ (1909) is a sequel to _Anne of Green Gables_, with the
usual qualities of sequels. An author naturally desires to repeat a
success as soon as possible; and the public created by one pleasing book
just as naturally prefers a repetition of the same ideas and sensations
to the fatigue of having to readjust its mental machinery to new
requirements. The author's name becomes a trade-mark, guaranteeing
uniform quality in the ware supplied. Miss Montgomery has created her
public and she supplies it with what it wants. The conclusion to be
drawn from Miss Montgomery's achievement is that the great reading
public on this continent and in the British Isles has a great tenderness
for children, for decent, and amusing stories, and a great indifference
towards the rulings of the critics. Besides, _Anne of Green Gables_ and
its fellows meet more nearly the common and reasonable requirement of
'being true to life' than the Canadian stories of either Gordon or
Parker.

A special significance of Gordon's fiction and of Miss Montgomery's is
their Scottish atmosphere. Both writers are of Scottish descent. Gordon
is a minister, and Miss Montgomery married a minister. In all they write
the influence of the minister is either actual or implied. This means
that Scottish religious and social ideals have been brought to this
country by the immigrants from Scotland; and they have had no small or
trivial influence in the up-building of the new country.

The other Canadian novelists of the fifth movement are difficult to
classify and to characterise. Some are Canadian by birth and training,
but they are expatriates, and find both inspiration and marketable
themes in the busier and more various life of the American republic,
rather than at home. The Rev. William King, who writes under the doublet
name of 'Basil King' is a native of Prince Edward Island, a graduate of
King's College, Windsor, and he was, for several years, rector of St.
Luke's Cathedral at Halifax. After going to a charge in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, he married an American lady; and his very successful
stories deal exclusively with American problems and types. Arthur J.
Stringer and Norman Duncan are also birthright Canadians who made their
home in the United States and treated non-Canadian themes in their
books. That Canada has a right to claim them as her own is more than
doubtful. The same criticism must apply to Miss Lily Dougall, who had
long resided in England, to Storer Clouston, and to W. Albert Hickman,
author of a Pictou county story, _The Sacrifice of the Shannon_. E. W.
Thomson and J. Macdonald Oxley have written many acceptable stories for
boys and deal with recognisable Canadian life. The Rev. Robert Knowles,
a Presbyterian minister of Galt, Ontario, had a certain success with
novels of the 'Ralph Connor' school--Canadian stories with a purpose.
Among the prominent women writers must be mentioned Miss Marshall
Saunders and Miss Alice Jones, both Haligonians. Miss Saunders' animal
story _Beautiful Joe_ belongs to the same class as _Black Beauty_. Its
aim is to win sympathy for our four-footed friends. This book has also
sold by hundreds of thousands of copies. Miss Jones, the daughter of the
late lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, has written five stories, two
under pseudonyms, which touch the life and legends of her native
province. _Gabriel Praed's Castle_ is considered her strongest work.

Regarded as a whole, Canadian fiction is tame. It bears everywhere the
stamp of the amateur. Nowhere can be traced that fiery conviction which
alone brings forth a masterpiece. Modern problems are as yet untouched,
unapproached. Direct, honest realism is also sadly to seek, though
subjects are crying aloud for treatment on every side. If the truth were
told about life in the west as Miss Sarah Macnaughten told it, or about
Canadian farms, or about French Canada, the world would be astonished
and enlightened. So far Canadian fiction is conventional, decent,
unambitious, _bourgeois_. It has nowhere risen to the heights or plumbed
the depths of life in Canada.

In a young country, it is only natural that imaginative writing should
take precedence over reflective. The essay is almost a virgin field, and
the Canadian essayists can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Amongst his other manifold activities, Dr. Andrew Macphail has produced
three remarkable volumes, _Essays In Puritanism_ (1905), and _Essays In
Politics_ (1909) and _Essays In Fallacy_ (1910). The _Essays In
Puritanism_ are penetrating studies of Jonathan Edwards, John Winthrop,
Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and John Wesley. A literary and artistic
circle in Montreal was so fortunate as to hear these subtle and
brilliant essays by word of mouth. _Essays In Politics_ consists of
reprinted articles from _The University Magazine_ chiefly treating the
relations between Canada and Great Britain. _The Essays In Fallacy_ deal
with the American woman, the suffragette, and various holes in the coats
of the teacher and the divine. These volumes stand alone for originality
of thought, and for strength and subtlety of style. Mr. W. H. Blake
published in 1915 a collection of his articles which had appeared in
_The University Magazine_, under the title _Brown Waters_. In them he
reveals a happy blending of the tastes of the sportsman and the
bookman. Perhaps the most valuable portions are the appreciations of
what is best in French-Canadian character as seen in the remoter parts
of Quebec. In his _Canadian Essays_ and _Addresses_ (1915) Sir William
Peterson discusses various problems of the Empire and of McGill
University. His arguments are distinguished by their lucidity. _The Life
of a Little College_ (1914), by Archibald MacMechan, is a collection of
essays on literary themes ranging from Virgil to Herman Melville. The
title essay is a eulogy of Dalhousie College, where the writer was
Professor of English. His introductions to _Sartor Resartus_ and _Heroes
and Hero-worship_ are more ambitious critical studies of Carlyle. Arnold
Haultain was born in India, but was educated in Toronto. For many years
he was secretary to Goldwin Smith, and acted as his literary executor.
Besides the _Reminiscences_, or table-talk of the famous Oxford
professor, Haultain has written a classic on the game of golf, the
wittiest and at the same time the most practical book on the subject,
_The Mystery of Golf_. Stephen Leacock is, like Haultain, English by
birth, but educated in Canada. He holds the chair of Political Economy
in McGill University; but his real function is contributing to the
gaiety of nations and adding to the stock of harmless mirth. His
_Literary Lapses_ (1910) signalled him as a humorist of the American
school; and, as a consequence, a satirist, shooting folly as it flies.
His humorous works enjoy, and deserve, a wide reputation. His _Essays
and Literary Studies_ (1916) treat themes as diverse as the character of
Charles II. and the genius of O. Henry. They are all brilliantly witty
and refreshingly original; and some, like _The Devil and The Deep Sea_,
bring the light of a clear intellect to bear on one of humanity's most
mournful problems. Leacock's work grows stronger with age. This
completes the list of Canadian essayists, a scant half-dozen. Short as
the list is, it is still too long for the public patience. In Canada,
essays are tolerated but not read.

Parallel to the great popular success of Gordon and Miss Montgomery in
prose, is the popular success of Robert Service in verse. His first
volume, _Songs of a Sourdough_ (1907) ran through edition after edition,
and it was reported that his first cheque for royalties amounted to five
thousand dollars. The book was published in Canada by a Canadian
publisher and was bought by the Canadian public. It reads like a fairy
tale, a page from the _Arabian Nights_. Mr. Service is not a Canadian,
but a Scot; and he found his material in the wild life of the Yukon,
among the gamblers, the miners, the fancy women who swarm wherever gold
is found. Bret Harte dealt with similar material in a way that should
daunt competition, but apparently Mr. Service did not fear comparison
with that master. His themes are instinct with the quality which the
French call _brutalit_. The sordid, the gross, the bestial may
sometimes be redeemed by the touch of genius, which reveals the soul of
goodness in things evil; but that Promethean touch is not in Mr.
Service. In manner, he is frankly imitative of Kipling's barrack-room
balladry; and imitation is an admission of inferiority. 'Sourdough' is
Yukon slang for the provident 'old-timer,' who bakes his own bread while
'baching it,' and keeps some dough over from one baking to leaven the
next. It is a convenient term for this wilfully violent kind of verse
without the power to redeem the squalid themes it treats. _The Ballads
of a Cheechako_ is a second instalment of sourdoughs, while his novel
_The Trail of '98_ is simply sourdough prose. A man in convulsions is
not strong (though six men cannot hold him). In the Great War, Mr.
Service was as good as his name at the front, in a field ambulance, and
his _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_ are a distinct advance on his previous
volumes. He has come into actual touch with the grimmest of realities;
and, while his radical faults have not been cured, his rude lines drive
home the truth that he has seen.

If the critic were to judge the taste of the Canadian public solely by
the prairie fire success of the sourdough verse, he might rashly
conclude that the tender idealism, the Keats-like love of beauty which
distinguish the dawn of Canadian national poetry had fled from the land
for ever. But he would have to correct his judgment by taking into
account success of another kind. In the autumn of 1913, there appeared,
through the good offices of Andrew Macphail, a slim little dove-colored
volume of less than a hundred pages, called _The Drift of Pinions_, by
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall. An impression of a thousand copies was
absorbed almost at once by the discerning; and this must also be
reckoned as a popular success. Though born in England, Miss Pickthall
came to Canada as a child, was educated and spent her formative years in
this country; but environment has exerted little influence upon the
character of her verse. She lived in Toronto until after the death of
her mother, when she returned to England; but Canada cannot be denied
the honor of having given her a home and being the first to acclaim her
authentic gift of song.

The common complaint of the critic was that Canadian poets proffered
their music to the world before they had mastered their instrument. They
were apt to produce involuntary discords; but here was a singer who from
her first prelude was incapable of uttering a false note. Open her
little book at random, and harmony comes forth. It may be a dulcet
Swinburnian melody. The little fauns sing to Prosperine departing

  Now the vintage feast is done, now the melons glow,
  Gold along the raftered thatch beneath a thread of snow.
  Dian's bugle bids the dawn sweep the upland clear,
  Where we snared the silken fawn, where we ran the deer.

It may be a strain of Tennysonian blank verse.

                          She rode beside the duke
  In velvet, colored as a pansy is,
  And threaded round with gold. Her mantle strained
  On the warm wind behind her, golden too,
  Gold as the spires of lilies, and her hair,
  And her dark eyes were danced across with gold.

Or it may be the simple ballad metre enriched and sweetened.

  Dark is the iris meadow,
  Dark is the ivory tower,
  And lightly the young moth's shadow
  Sleeps on the passion flower.

  Gone are the day's red roses,
  So lovely and lost and few;
  But the first star discloses
  A silver bud in the blue.

  Night and a flame in the embers
  Where the seal of the years was set.--
  When the almond-bough remembers
  How shall my heart forget?

Besides these, she has her own musical variations upon well accepted
themes. In the words of the bridegroom of Cana to the bride, passion
speaks as in the more ethereal portions of _The Song of Songs_.

  Hear how my harp on a single string
  Murmurs of love.
  Down in the fields the thrushes sing
  And the lark is lost in the light above,
  Lost in the infinite glowing whole,
  As I in thy soul,
  As I in thy soul.

  Love I am fain for thy glowing grace
  As the pool for the star, as the rain for the rill.
  Turn to me, trust to me, mirror me
  As the star in the pool, as the cloud in the sea.
  Love, I looked awhile in His face
  And was still.

If technical perfection were all, _The Drift of Pinions_ would stand
alone in Canadian literature beside _Low Tide on Grand Pr_, but the
verbal music is only the accompaniment of inner harmonies which these
true poems release. Miss Pickthall is a singer of spiritual songs, a
dreamer of such dreams as haunted St. Agnes. The title is significantly
drawn from Francis Thompson's lines,

  The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
  Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

Her consciousness of the unseen is the heart of all her poetry. Perhaps
the most significant of all her poems is _St. Yves Poor_. It is a
mediaeval theophany, the scene being laid in Brittany; the very name is
mystical. The good almoner is distributing the accustomed dole of
loaves and fishes among the poor, when a ragged unknown suppliant
appears begging; and the saint leaves the last loaf in his palm that
shows 'a red wound like a star.' The climax is capable of moving to
tears by its intense but quiet beauty.

  And I once more, My son I know thee not,
  But the bleak wind blows bitter from the sea,
  And even the gorse is perished. Rest thou here.
  And he again, My rest is in thy heart.
  I take from thee as I have given to thee.
  Dost thou not know Me, Breton?

                              I,--My Lord!--
  A scent of lilies on the cold sea-wind,
  A thin white blaze of wings, a face of flame
  Over the gateway, and the vision passed,
  And there were only Matthieu and brown Bran,
  And the young girl, the foam-white Jannedik,
  Wondering to see their father rapt from them,
  And Jeffik weeping o'er her withered hand.

Christina Rossetti and Blake would have felt their spiritual kinship
with the author of this poem. Narrative is the exception. Her poems are
essentially songs, the purest form of poetry, 'purest' meaning 'freest
from admixture of anything else.' These lyrics are not of the earth;
their element is air; they never touch the ground, but wheel like
swallows in an enchanted crystal-clear ether of their own. For this
poetess, the jar and fret of this present evil world, the tempest of
human sorrow, the clamor of social war, the tumult of discontent, the
roaring wheels of industry and commerce are as if they had never been.
Apart and aloof from it all, she sits and weaves her spells, admitting
within the magic circle of her verse nothing harsh, nothing ugly,
nothing common or unclean. Creeds, opinions, philosophies which unite or
divide men cast no shadow here. Most poetry is human sadness, human
emotion and brooding charged with the sense of tears, but these fairy
roundels are full of quiet joy, such as an innocent child might feel in
a world that had never known sin.

Though _The Drift of Pinions_ is not 'a contribution to Canadian
literature,' Canada has brought her own subtle contribution to its
making. Maple leaves are entwined in a song of the Nativity;
choke-cherries and milk-weed are decorations borrowed from Canadian
fields; the heart of Lalemant, the Jesuit martyr, is laid bare in one
poignant soliloquy; and the cruelty of Charnisay in another. Such a
lyric as _Frost Song_ is an intimate interpretation of the norland
winter, and fit tribute to Our Lady of the Snows--a little love by the
blazing fire with the frost barricading the doors against all intruders.

  Here where the bee slept and the orchid lifted
  Her honeying pipes of pearl, her velvet lip,
  Only the swart leaves of the oak lie drifted
  In sombre fellowship.
  Here where the flame-weed set the lands alight,
  Lies the bleak upland, webbed and crowned with white.

  Build high the logs, O love, and in thine eyes
  Let me believe the summer lingers late:
  We shall not miss her passive pageantries,
  We are not desolate,
  When on the sill, across the window bars,
  Kind winter flings her flowers and her stars.

It may not perhaps be mere fancy to suggest that clear Canadian skies
and hopeful air may have had some influence on the serene tone of all
Miss Pickthall's poetry.

Prose has also engaged her pen. Since returning to England, she has
produced a novel, _Little Hearts_ (1915) of much promise. The scene is
laid in eighteenth-century England, the coarse, shallow, self-complacent
world of Horace Walpole. But Miss Pickthall is incapable of representing
that world as it really was. Over all she casts the opalescent mists of
her own temperament, softening, irradiating, etherealising the harsh
features of that prosaic time. Her novel has the same qualities as her
poetry, a refined and flawless style, with its centre in the things of
the spirit. _Little Hearts_ is not a costume novel, nor a Stevensonian
story of adventure. It deals with problems which cannot vary from age to
age--love for a woman, friendship for a man, loyalty to a trust,
speaking truth or living a lie--and it handles these problems with rare
and delicate skill. In the technique of the story-teller's art, Miss
Pickthall has little to learn; the characters are pastels, the narrative
moves freely, suspense is well maintained, the climax is a complete
surprise, deep and touching. A certain patrician distinction attends
all Miss Pickthall's work. Her prose is gentle, unforced, clear,
penetrating; sentence following sentence 'with the moon's beauty and the
moon's soft pace.' The patriotic critic is wistfully conscious that
Canada has neither part nor lot in this achievement, and he wishes his
country could lay claim to it.

Miss Pickthall could not remain in England after the war. She declared
herself 'Canada sick,' and returned home, to produce, one more novel,
_The Bridge_, and to die, untimely. In spite of excellent passages, _The
Bridge_ cannot be considered a successful novel. The Canadian setting
seemed to make the tale unreal: and it is doubtful if she would have
ever succeeded as a novelist. Her legacy to Canada is a tiny sheaf of
true poems.




  Epilogue




  EPILOGUE


A survey of the various literary movements in what is now the Dominion
of Canada reveals very interesting tendencies. From the first number of
_The Nova Scotia Magazine_ to _The Drift of Pinions_, a period of a
century and a quarter, the tiny rill which had its source in Loyalist
Halifax has broadened into a richly various stream of literary
production as wide as the continent. From the first, history has played
a large part. Provincial at the outset, the historical consciousness of
Canada has more than kept pace with the material expansion of the
country. Now it knows no east and no west. Its reaction upon the Quebec
school of writers is most marked; but it only reached its growth after
the difficult and hazardous experiment of national unity commonly known
as Confederation. To no department of the literature of knowledge have
Canadian writers made richer contributions than to the department of
Canadian history. The very latest achievements are the most impressive
and the most solid. In this tendency, which is far from spent, may be
clearly seen a potent force working silently for national unity.

In the literature of power, Canada has repeated the history of all
primitive peoples. Poetry has come first; prose is a late development.
The only nativist prose fiction worth considering is that of the very
latest period. Most of it shows the weakness of the amateur. The
novelists do not speak for Canada as the poets do. Frchette has voiced
the aspirations of his province; Roberts, the aspirations of Canada. The
absolute achievement of our true poets, Crmazie, Lampman, Carman,
Morin, Pickthall, is far higher than the best work of our novelists. No
prose work from a Canadian pen can be set beside _Low Tide on Grand
Pr_, _Le Paon d'Email_, _The Drift of Pinions_ for sheer imaginative
power, harmony, and beauty. The Canadian novel is yet to come. The
period under review comes to the colophon with cheering signs for the
future,--the finished artistry of Paul Morin, and the clear, penetrating
appeal to the spirit, of Marjorie Pickthall.

A third remarkable feature is the popularity of Canadian authors in
their own country. Being interpreted, this phenomenon means that the
Canadian public is interested in itself, and is able and willing to buy
home-grown books. It also implies a rapid and wide-spread literary
cultivation and genuine interest in the world of letters. A Canadian
public has been formed which is ready to welcome the work of Canadians
and is becoming more and more competent to judge that work. Canadian
writers need no longer exile themselves abroad, or look first for a
market south the border. Nor does a sweeping popular success mean that
Canada cannot appreciate a pure and high idealism in literature. Though
progress in literary production is largely illusory, for creative
periods may be followed by dead wastes of commonplace, the outlook is
full of hope.

There is one exception. The Canadian literature in the French tongue has
many qualities of distinction; a regard for form, which is inseparable
from French genius, strong historic feeling, and the capacity for
genuine emotion. The difficulty which French-Canadian writers must
always encounter is lack of that public appreciation which will make
their exertions worth while. In other words, the lack of a market can
hardly fail to discourage French-Canadian writers. Quebec is a
speech-island in an English-speaking continent. Popular success is out
of the question. A French Ralph Connor is hardly thinkable though there
is the success of _Maria Chapdelaine_ to be taken into account. The most
that a Quebecquois novelist or poet can hope for is a _succs d'estime_,
either at home, or in France. At the highest, he may hope to become a
Canadian Hrdia. Another difficulty is the tendency manifested by the
younger school to cut themselves off from the springs of
French-Canadian national life. There is gain in artistry and in
cosmopolitan breadth, but also loss of touch with the creative,
life-giving, native soil.

All critical judgments are sadly liable to error, and always subject to
revision. The test which no critic can apply, the final test, is the
test of time. The old fellow with the scythe and the hour-glass is the
supreme judge of literary fame. From his decision there is no appeal.
How much of the work produced in Canada during the last century is
destined to live? How much will be read or remembered at the end of the
twentieth century? The answer must be--very little. The bulk of it is
ephemeral; it smells of mortality. If Tennyson heard sullen Lethe
rolling doom on his great compositions, what should be the reflections
of our poetlings regarding theirs? I venture to think that two French
lyrics will endure,--Grin-Lajoie's pathetic _Canadien Errant_, and
Crmazie's noble _Drapeau de Carillon_,--at least as long as the French
have hearts to sing. Humorous work has perhaps the best chances of
living. The best pages of Haliburton, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Drummond,
and Leacock may be saved from the wreck. Fragments of the most quotable
work of Lampman, Roberts, Carman, Pickthall, Frchette, Morin will be
salvaged into histories of literature, school-readers, and national
anthologies along with McCrae's perfect rondeau. Over how much of the
rest will oblivion scatter her poppy!




  Index




  INDEX


  A

  _Acadian Geology_, 32.

  _Acadian Magazine, The_, 23.

  _Acadian Recorder, The_, 32.

  _Adieux  Venise_, 182.

  Akins, Thomas Beamish, 28.

  _American Baron, The_, 47.

  _Among the Millet_, 109.

  _Anciens Canadiens, Les_, 84.

  _Anne of Avonlea_, 211.

  _Anne of Green Gables_, 209-10.

  _Anne of the Island_, 209.

  _At Minas Basin_, 35.

  _Attach, The_, 39.

  _Ave_, 122, 124.


  B

  _Ballads of a Cheechako_, 220.

  _Beautiful Joe_, 214.

  _Behind the Veil_, 49.

  Belcher, Admiral Sir Edward, 31.

  _Bel Et_, 172.

  Bell, Andrew, 57.

  Bibaud, Michel, 54.

  _Black Rock_, 204.

  Blake, W. H., 86, 216-17.

  _Book of High Romance, The_, 50.

  _Book of Roberts, The_, 105.

  _B.O.W.C. series_, 47.

  _Bridge, The_, 229.

  Brown, Rev. Andrew, 27.

  _Brown Waters_, 86, 216-17.

  _Bubbles of Canada_, 43.

  Bullock, Rev. W., 35.


  C

  _Calnek-Savary History_, 29.

  Campbell, 28.

  Campbell, W. Wilfred, 133-135.

  _Canada and Its Provinces_, 195.

  _Canadian Essays and Addresses_, 217.

  _Canadian Magazine, The_, 102, 106.

  _Canadian Monthly, The_, 102.

  _Canadian Review, The_, 102.

  _Canadien errant, un_, 82 237.

  Carman, Bliss, 35, 105, 126-133, 238.

  Casgrain, Abb, 71.

  _Causerie Fminine_, 169.

  Chapman, William, 72, 81.

  _Chief Factor, The_, 141.

  _Chronicles of Canada_, 196.

  _Clockmaker (The), or the Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick of
    Slickville_, 37, 39.

  Clouston, Storer, 214.

  _Collect for Dominion Day_, 119.

  _Collections (N.S. Historical Society)_, 29.

  _Coming of Winter, The_, 117.

  'Connor, Ralph,' 204-209, 236.

  _Cord and Creese_, 47.

  _Corporal Cameron_, 207.

  Crmazie, Octave, 60-69, 237.

  Crowell, 29.


  D

  Dawson, Sir William, 32.

  de Gasp, Philippe Aubert, 83.

  De Mille, James, 46-50.

  _Devil and the Deep Sea, The_, 218.

  _Dieudonn_, 92.

  _Doctor, The_, 207.

  _Dodge Club, The_, 47.

  Dougall, Lily, 214.

  Doughty, Dr. Arthur, 195.

  _Drapeau de Carillon, Le_, 67, 237.

  _Drift of Pinions, The_, 221, 224, 233, 234.

  Drummond, William Henry, 87-94, 238.

  Duncan, Norman, 213.

  Duncan, Sara Jeannette, 136-139, 238.

  Duport, John, 26.


  E

  _Earth's Enigmas_, 125.

  _Emile Nelligan et son oeuvre_, 155.

  _Essais Potiques (Le May)_, 69.

  _Essays and Literary Studies_, 218.

  _Essays in Fallacy_, 216.

  _Essays in Politics_, 216.

  _Essays in Puritanism_, 216.

  Ewing, Mrs., 105.


  F

  _Feast of Ste. Anne_, 35.

  Fenerty, 30.

  Ferland, Abb, 81.

  _Feuilles d'Erable_, 81.

  _Five O'clock_, 164.

  _Fleurs Borales_, 75.

  _Fleurs du Mal_, 174.

  _Foreigner, The_, 207.

  _Frankincense and Myrrh_, 35.

  Frchette, Louis, 70, 72-81, 238.

  _French-Canadian, The_, 86.

  _Frogs, The_, 114.

  _From Ocean Unto Ocean_, 36.

  _Frontenac_, 194.

  _Frost Song_, 227.


  G

  _Gabriel Praed's Castle_, 215.

  Ganong, Professor, 198.

  Garneau, Francois Xavier, 56-59.

  Garvie, A. R., 35.

  _Gazette, The (Montreal)_, 200.

  Gerin-Lajoie, 82-83.

  Gesner, Abraham, 32.

  _Glaneur, Le_, 146.

  _Glengarry School Days_, 206.

  _Golden Dog, The_, 135-136.

  Goldsmith, Oliver, 24.

  Gordon, Rev. Charles W. ('Ralph Connor'), 204-209.

  _Gouttelettes_, 71.

  Grant, Principal (George Munro), 30, 31, 107.

  Grant, W. L., 30.

  _Great Ermine_, 78.

  Griffin, Martin, 200.


  H

  _Habitant, The_, 88.

  _Haldimand_, 194.

  Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 27, 36-44, 238.

  _Halifax Gazette, The_, 33.

  _Halifax Monthly Magazine, The_, 25.

  Hamilton, 35.

  Hannay, 28.

  Haultain, Arnold, 217.

  _Heat_, 111.

  Heavysege, Charles, 101.

  _Helena's Household_, 47.

  Hmon, Louis, 86.

  Herbin, J. F, 35.

  Hickman, W. Albert, 214.

  _Histoire Critique des Rois de France_, 79.

  _Histoire du Canada_, 56.

  _Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, An_, 40-43.

  _History of Canada_, 125.

  Howe, Joseph, 25, 44-46.

  _Howe's Letters and Speeches_, 30.


  I

  _Imperialist, The_, 138.

  _Inconsquence_, 175.

  _Indian Summer_, 134.

  _In Divers Tones_, 119.


  J

  _Jackanapes_, 105.

  _Jean Rivard_, 82.

  Jefferys, C. W., 196.

  _Johnnie Courteau_, 93.

  Jones, Alice, 214.

  _Journal of Alleyne_, 31.


  K

  King, Rev. William ('Basil'), 213.

  Kirby, William, 135-136.

  Knowles, Rev. Robert, 214.


  L

  _La Chanson des Mois_, 171.

  _Lady of the Ice, The_, 48.

  _Lake Lyrics_, 133.

  _L'Amerique_, 73.

  _L'Ame Solitaire_, 166, 173-4.

  Lampman, Archibald, 106, 109-117, 238.

  _La Presse_, 148.

  _La Voile_, 174.

  _La Voix Brutale_, 174.

  _La Voix d'un Exil_, 73.

  Lawson, Mrs., 35.

  Leacock, Stephen, 197, 218, 238.

  _L'Echo des Jeunes_, 146.

  Le Clercq and Denys, 198.

  _Le Clotre Noir_, 162.

  _Lgende d'un Peuple_, 70, 75-78, 153.

  _Le Lac_, 183.

  Le May, Pamphile, 69.

  _Le Miroir des Jours_, 166, 175-6.

  _Le Paon d'mail_, 178-184, 234.

  Le Sueur, 194.

  _Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure, The_, 38.

  _Letters on Education_, 79.

  _Letters to Lord John Russell_, 46.

  _Lettres  Basile_, 79.

  _Le Vaisseau d'Or_, 158.

  _Life of a Little College, The_, 217.

  _Life of 'Bishop' Black_, 31.

  _Life of MacGregor_, 30.

  _Life of Sir Brenton Halliburton_, 30.

  _Literary Lapses_, 218.

  _Little Ermine_, 78.

  _Little Hearts_, 228.

  _Low Tide on Grand Pr_, 35, 127, 224, 233, 234.

  Lozeau, Albert, 164-177.


  M

  MacGregor (of Dalhousie), 32.

  MacMechan, Archibald, 217.

  Macphail, Andrew, 202-3, 216.

  _Makers of Canada, The_, 194.

  _Man from Glengarry, The_, 206.

  _Maria Chapdelaine_, 86, 236.

  _Marshlands, The_, 35.

  _Marsyas_, 118.

  _Martyr of the Catacombs_, 47.

  _Matins_, 105.

  Mavor, Professor, 102.

  McCrae, Col. John, 238.

  McCulloch (Principal), 38.

  McIlwraith, Jean N., 194.

  _Melville Island_, 25.

  _Merlin_, 78.

  _Mes Loisirs_, 74.

  _Milles Isles, Les_, 65.

  _Monition, A_, 106.

  _Montcalm (play)_, 79.

  Montgomery, L. M., 209-213.

  Moodie, Susanna, 100.

  Morin, Paul, 178-185, 235, 238.

  Murdoch, Beamish, 28.

  Murray, George, 200.

  Murray, Rev. Robert, 36.

  _Mystery of Golf, The_, 218.

  _My Windows on the Street of the World_, 102.


  N

  _Nelligan, Emile_, 155-164.

  _New Dominion Monthly, The_, 102.

  _New York Nocturnes_, 124.

  Nicholson, Byron, 86.

  _Nol au Canada_, 79.

  _Northern Vigil, A_, 132.

  _Nova Scotia Archives_, 29.

  _Nova Scotia Magazine, The_, 20, 233.

  _Novascotian, The_, 32.


  O

  _Ocean to Ocean_, 31.

  _Oiseaux de Neige_, 75.

  _Old Judge, The: or, Life in a Colony_, 44.

  _Open Question, An_, 47.

  _Originaux and Dtraqus_, 78.

  _Orion and Other Poems_, 104, 118.

  Oxley, J. Macdonald, 214.


  P

  _Papineau (play)_, 79.

  _Parables of a Province_, 140.

  Parker, Gilbert, 140-142.

  _Pastels et porcelaines_, 160.

  _Path of a Star, The_, 138.

  Patterson, 29.

  _Plerinage au Pays d'Evangeline_, 71, 81.

  Peterson, Sir William, 217.

  _Petite Chapelle_, 163.

  Pickthall, Marjorie L. C., 221-229, 235, 238.

  _Picturesque Canada_, 107.

  _Pomes de Cendre et d'Or_, 185.

  _Poems and Essays, (Howe)_, 44.

  _Pretty Pierre_, 141.

  _Promenade de Trois Morts_, 64.

  _Prospector, The_, 206.


  Q

  _Quand Mme_, 171.

  _Queen's Quarterly_, 201.


  R

  Rand, Rev. Silas.

  _Recollections of Nova Scotia_, 36.

  _Reminiscences (Goldwin Smith)_, 104, 217.

  _Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada_, 198.

  _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_, 220.

  Richey, 31.

  _Rising Village, The_, 24.

  Roberts, Charles G. D., 34, 35, 104, 117-126, 238.

  Roberts, Lloyd, 105.

  _Roughing It in the Bush_, 100.


  S

  _Sacrifice of the Shannon, The_, 214.

  _Saul_, 101.

  Saunders, Marshall, 214.

  Scott, D. C., 194.

  Service, Robert, 219.

  Sherman, Frank, 105.

  Shortt, 194.

  _Silence_, 169.

  _Simcoe_, 194.

  _Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, The_, 138.

  _Sister to Evangeline, A_, 125.

  _Sky Pilot, The_, 206.

  Smith, Goldwin, 102.

  _Social Departure, A_, 137.

  _Soires Canadiennes, Les_, 61.

  _Soires du Chteau de Ramezay_, 152.

  _Song of Songs, The_, 223.

  _Songs of a Sourdough_, 219.

  _Songs of the Common Day_, 120.

  _Star, The (Montreal)_, 200.

  _Statutes at Large_, 26.

  _Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, A_, 49.

  Stringer, Arthur J., 213.

  _St. Yves Poor_, 224.

  _Sydenham_, 194.


  T

  _Thistledown_, 35.

  Thomson, E. W., 214.

  _Those Delightful Americans_, 137.

  _Trail of '98, The_, 220.

  _Trianon_, 183.

  _Tribune of Nova Scotia, The_, 30.

  _Truth, The_, 109, 116.


  U

  _University Magazine, The_, 201.


  V

  _Veronica (play)_, 79, 152.

  _Voyage of H.M.S. Sulphur_, 31.


  W

  _Wayfaring_, 131.

  _Week, The_, 102.

  _We love the place, O God_, 35.

  _Westminster, The_, 204.

  _When Valmond Came to Pontiac_, 141.

  Williams, Michael, 50.

  _Winter Hues Recalled_, 111.

  Wood, Col. William, 197.

  _Wreck of the Julie Plante, The_, 93.

  Wrong, Professor G. M., 198.


  =Transcriber's Notes:=
   hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in
    the original
  Page 71, 'brayage ==> 'brayage'
  Page 88, untimley ==> untimely
  Page 198, New Bruswicker ==> New Brunswicker
  Page 207, mention of 'Ralph" ==> mention of Ralph
  Page 216, Puritaism ==> Puritanism
  Page 227, Frost Song in an ==> Frost Song is an
  Page 235, wiling ==> willing
  Page 236, themselvs ==> themselves
  Page 238, Sarah Jeanette Duncan ==> Sara Jeannette Duncan
  Page 238, along with Mc Crae's ==> along with McCrae's
  Index, Aikins, Thomas Beamish ==> Akins, Thomas Beamish
  Index, Duncan, Sara Jeanette ==> Duncan, Sara Jeannette
  Index, Heaveysege, Charles ==> Heavysege, Charles
  Index, Jeffreys, C. W. ==> Jefferys, C. W.
  Index, Le Clerq and Denys ==> Le Clercq and Denys
  Index, Murdock, Beamish ==> Murdoch, Beamish




[End of Head-Waters of Canadian Literature, by Archibald MacMechan]
