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Title: New History for Old.
   Discussions on aims and methods
   in writing and teaching history.
Author: Pierce, Lorne Albert (1890-1961)
Date of first publication: 1931
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1931
   [J. Clarence Webster Lectureship in Canadian History,
   Mount Allison University, New Brunswick]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 16 March 2012
Date last updated: 16 March 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #925

This ebook was produced by Al Haines





[Illustration: Cover art]





New History for Old


  DISCUSSIONS ON AIMS AND METHODS
  IN WRITING AND TEACHING HISTORY


  _Delivered on the J. Clarence Webster Lectureship in Canadian History
  at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick_


BY

LORNE PIERCE, LL.D., F.R.S.C.



  _La pense dominante de ma vie a t
  d'harmoniser les diffrents lments
  dont se compose notre pays.  La pense
  est vraie et elle finira par triompher._
                --_Sir Wilfrid Laurier._




THE RYERSON PRESS

TORONTO :: :: CANADA




The Webster Lectureship in Canadian History

Mount Allison University


I. History and Present-Day Problems (1924)
      Senator John Stewart McLennan, D.C.L., F.R.S.C.


II. Behind the Scenes of Canadian War History (1925)
      Colonel William Wood, F.R.S.C.


III. The Discovery of Canada (1926)
      Lawrence J. Burpee, F.R.S.C.

IV. French Canadian Co-operation (1928)
      Professor Edouard Montpetit, Litt.D., LL.D.

V. New History for Old (1930)
      Lorne Pierce, LL.D., F.R.S.C.




 MON COLLGUE S LETTRES

MAURICE HBERT

PUBLICISTE DU GOUVERNEMENT

DE LA

PROVINCE DE QUBEC

EN TMOIGNAGE D'AMITI ET D'ESTIME




Copyright, Canada, 1931,

by

Mount Allison University




CONTENTS


FOREWORD

I. CONTRIBUTIONS TO NATIONAL SOLIDARITY
      1. Why Cherish Canadian Literature?
      2. The National Ideal: English and French Elements
      3. Gestures toward the Bonne Entente
      4. What Shall We Gain?
      5. The True Academy

II. NEW AIMS AND METHODS IN HISTORY.
      1. The Aims of Education
      2. History: The Record of Man's Quests
      3. The Theme Method in History
            i. World History
           ii. The History of Britain
          iii. The Story of Canada
      4. History as a Training for Citizenship

III. NEGLECTED SOURCES IN HISTORY
      1. Through History to Life
      2. Contributions of Canadian Literature:
            i. Fiction
                  (a) French
                  (b) English
           ii. Poetry:
                  (a) French
                  (b) English
          iii. Drama
           iv. Legend
            v. Settlement Sketches and Chroniques
      3. Contributions of Canadian Art
      4. Magnificent Obsessions
      5. Adventures in Local History:
            i. Amateur Antiquarians
           ii. History as Drama
          iii. History as Art
           iv. The Beloved Community
      6. The Magic of the Soil




FOREWORD

I wish to express my very high appreciation of the honour and privilege
tendered me by the President of Mt. Allison University, and by the
founder of the Lectureship.  To be numbered among those who have spoken
under these auspices is no ordinary distinction.  My chief pleasure,
however, is in being able to discuss in some detail, a few thoughts
which had their birth in Sackville several years ago.  The question
arose regarding the teaching of Canadian History and Literature.  Could
there be an alliance between the two in fostering and promoting a vivid
and intelligent national self consciousness?  Might not both be
vitalized and enriched by associating them with the local tradition?  I
was thinking of this Mount Allison, and of the literary and historical
traditions enshrined in the words Chignecto and Tantramar which it
inherited, and, in a sense, perpetuated.  These two queries suggested a
third: How can the aims and methods of teaching history and literature
during those strategic years, between grades VII and XII, be improved?

These problems I have already attempted to answer in several texts for
schools, offering a practical, though perhaps, tentative formula.  The
generous encouragement which they have received in departmental
authorisation, and in the gratifying results which they have achieved
in our schools, will in some way justify these talks.  Hitherto those
who have spoken on the Webster Foundation have been concerned with
episodes and problems in our history; my task is simply to show, as
best I can, how these characters and events and problems may take on
new significance in the building of our young Dominion.

L. P.

  Dominion Day,
  _Toronto_, 1930




I

CONTRIBUTIONS TO NATIONAL SOLIDARITY




It is so much easier to be prosperous than it is to be civilized...
Self-respect, self-confidence and self-support are as essential to a
nation as to an individual.  This is the starting point in
nation-building ... Fichte well understood the fundamental difference
between the Nation and the State, and his searching and moving appeal
was for the building of a German Nation on spiritual and intellectual
foundations so strong that they could not be moved.--Nicholas Murray
Butler, "Imponderables," an Address before the Reichstag, 1930.

A Canadian nationality ... not French-Canadian, nor British-Canadian,
nor Irish-Canadian: patriotism rejects the prefix--is, in my opinion,
what we should look forward to, that is what we ought to labour for,
that is what we ought to be prepared to defend to the death...  I see
in the not remote distance one great nationality, bound, like the
shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of the ocean.--Thomas D'Arcy McGee.

Such a union would at once decisively settle the question of races; it
would enable all the provinces to co-operate for all common purposes:
and above all, it would make for a great and powerful people ... I am,
in truth, so far from believing that the increased power and weight
that would be given these colonies by union would endanger their
connections with the Empire that I look to it as the only means of
fostering such a national feeling throughout them as would effectually
counterbalance whatever tendencies may now exist toward
separation.--Lord Durham.




I

CONTRIBUTIONS TO NATIONAL SOLIDARITY

Oscar Wilde, that "elegant leviathan," once spoke of literature as a
possible intercessor between rival nations.  He hoped the time would
come, when men became so satisfactorily civilized, that it would be the
most natural thing in the world to say: "We will not go to war with
France--because her prose is perfect."  George Meredith has remarked
that some flowers have roots as deep as oaks, and surely Wilde's _bon
mot_ is such a flower!  The root of the matter, at any rate, may be
found in the dedication of Zare.  Voltaire memorialized his English
visit in 1732, above all his friendship for A. M. Falkener, a London
merchant, in that remarkable dedication of his finest drama.  No doubt
Oscar Wilde had chanced upon these words: "Those who love the arts are
fellow citizens.  Honourable people have pretty much the same
principles, and form the selfsame republic."  William Hazlitt also had
the root of the matter in him when he declared: "We can scarcely hate
any one we know."

Sociologists are fond of speaking of the solidarity of mankind, as if
it were almost an established fact, rather than an ideal for long and
painful achievement.  The real and lasting cement of such concord
consists of sympathetic and intelligent understanding, and a sense of
mutual responsibility.  "Ignorance of his neighbours," observed Robert
Louis Stevenson, "is the characteristic of the typical John Bull....
the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance."  The
situation would be relatively simple if this ignorance were restricted
to one nation only.

The means by which amity may be established between peoples are
numerous, but surely the chief of them is an adequate knowledge and
appreciation of their history and literature.  That is especially true
in a nation where two races have agreed to live side by side, sharing
the common task and destiny.  It is for this reason, therefore, that we
shall consider the _bonne entente_ in Canada, pointing out how
literature and history have served the cause of national solidarity,
and how they may achieve a more perfect concord of mutual understanding
and of united national enterprise.


I  WHY CHERISH CANADIAN LITERATURE?

When John Henry Newman went up to Oxford, in 1816, he was expected, as
a scholar and a gentleman, to specialize in Latin and Greek.  No
English authors, and no modern foreign writers, were on the curriculum.
Fancy not knowing Greek, when it guaranteed social standing, or Latin,
when it was the password to preferment!  Young bucks rode to hounds
with Horace in their pockets.  Members of Parliament quoted Homer and
Virgil.  "The classics had sunk to the level of an accomplishment."
Later on English literature was accorded a place among the humanities,
being shortly followed by English history.

This reticence likewise prevailed in the United States, and has, until
recently, been the fashion in Canada.  Fortunately, Canadian history
has taken its place on the curricula of our colleges, but Canadian
literature, with few exceptions, is still among the unmentionables.
You may secure instruction in most of the literatures, living and dead,
and in any one of the fifty-seven varieties of practical courses, from
household science to embalming, but in the majority of our colleges,
you may not register for even a quarter-course in the literature of
this country.

Now, no intelligent and discriminating Canadian is under any delusion
regarding our literature.  Three swallows do not make a summer, neither
do three cheers make a classic.  Not all of our literature rises above
sea level.  Much of it lacks cadence, substance, good taste and honest
craftsmanship.  Not a little of it is utterly banal.  But some of it
does stand the test, and we ought to know it.  May one not speak of
Frchette and Lampman as did William Dean Howells; of Duncan Campbell
Scott as did William Archer and John Masefield; of Charles G. D.
Roberts and Bliss Carman as did Matthew Arnold and Richard LeGallienne;
of E. J. Pratt as did Laurence Binyon and George Gordon; and of Pauline
Johnson as did Whittier and Watts-Dunton; to mention only a few?  If
the Academy of France crowns a score of the great names of Quebec, if
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Royal Society of
Literature, elect our writers as Members and Fellows, can we not say
that they are deserving, in some respects at least?  We may surely
commend the best honestly as did such men, and discover the beauty they
prized, without either patronizing as do some, or, as some others, use
boastful phrases which would have to be modified even for Shakespeare
and Keats.  A decreasing number are rising in their places and
exclaiming, that all our literary works are vanity, and that there is
no good in them.  But the last enemy that shall be conquered is the
rhapsodist, the undiscriminating braggart who deals wholesale in
fleece-lined, caressive garments of praise.

A great literature presupposes an advanced organized and
well-integrated society--a mature body and a self-conscious soul.
Nationalism is a form of emotion, which seeks adequate expression, and
its most common and natural outlet is literature.  Therefore it becomes
one of the proudest and most potent symbols of separate national
existence and ambition.  Thus considered, a national spirit is the very
essence of a literature, whether it be Shakespeare's dramas, Dante's
_Divine Comedy_, Goethe's _Faust_, Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_,
or even Wordsworth's sonnets.  While our political status guarantees to
us the courtesies due a sovereign state, no similar gesture can confer
complete nationhood, and such we do not possess.  We have no
distinctive flag, no generally accepted national song, no saga, no
classic racy of the soil.  Our country sprawls between two remote seas,
and meanders northward among the hostile areas of the Arctic Circle.
The Fathers of Confederation conceived a nation in defiance of
geography.  Small communities, separated by immense distances, work out
their own destinies as best they can.  Undigested groups of foreign
peoples cling tenaciously to their speech and customs.  Yet, somehow, a
soul is taking shape.  Is a nation void of all worth because it is not
hoary with age, and gouty with conventionality and sophistication?
Does not our hope lie rather in the fact that we are not dilettante and
senile, that we possess a little primitivism and adolescence?  "There
is comfort in that," said Kinglake in _Eothen_, "health, comfort and
strength to one who is aching from very weariness of that poor, dear,
middle-aged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic and painstaking
governess, Europe."

Why, then, cherish our literature?

(1) In our anxiety to know the best of what has been thought and said
abroad, it will surely be an advantage to know what has been said and
thought at home.  It may lack many of the elements of greatness, and
the earmarks of supreme felicity, but if it is honest and sincere, and
has grown out of our emotional and social experience, it will have
value for us.  That is true of the literature of any country.  In the
poetry of Spenser and his associates met the strains of the new
learning and the Reformations, the first noticeable result of which was
a consolidating and quickening of the national self-consciousness.  The
seriousness born of the new-found classics, and the ardours of the
religious awakening, blossomed in a higher humanism and a more exalted
patriotism.  Much of that literature was coarse, fantastic and
extravagant, but it was always vigorous, honest and essentially sound
because its roots plucked the native soil of England.  A good deal of
nonsense has been current regarding Shakespeare as a man of the ages,
timeless and cosmic.  He was a man of his own day.  A product of the
double enlightenment of mind and heart in his own country, and always
and everywhere an Englishman.  Even his foreigners are Englishmen under
the accidents of customs, his continental landscapes are all English,
and the mythical navy of Bohemia the wooden walls of Britain.

(2) Our writers, as well as our artists and sculptors, are our best
interpreters.  They not only reveal what we are to ourselves as a
people, but they also explain us to others.  Would we know the soul of
Quebec?  Then let us turn to such spokesmen as Parent, Garneau,
Crmazie, Frchette, De Gasp, LeMay, Nelligan, Lozeau, Morin and Mgr.
Camille Roy.  Does Quebec desire to understand the rest of Canada?
Then let our French compatriots read Roberts, Carman, Lampman,
Campbell, Scott, Kirby and McArthur.  The Maritimes speak in
Haliburton, Howe, MacMechan, Roberts, L. M. Montgomery and Carman; east
and west in Parker, MacDonald, Marjorie Pickthall, Pauline Johnson,
Pratt, Ralph Connor, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Grove and many more.

(3) The real masterbuilders are not all in _Who's Who_, neither are our
greatest national assets listed in the _Almanac_.  You will find both
in the less than three-foot shelf of our best writers, a few square
yards of canvas, a little group of marbles and bronzes, and a few noble
buildings.

(4) We have frequently stressed the social, economic and constitutional
elements in Canadian history, when the real evolution of our country is
phrased in those pages which record the uneven yet earnest quest for
truth and beauty.  Our appreciation of art and literature abroad
depends upon the emotional atmosphere at home.  We can only build upon
the life we know.  It is obviously silly and unreasonable to decry our
adolescent awkwardness, as it is to fancy that we possess the ripeness,
grace and sophistication of the old world.  Some of our critics lean
their brows against the Wailing Wall, and cry out at the thought of our
literature: "It isn't quite good enough!"  Of course it is not, and may
it never satisfy us.  But is that apologetic mutter the only leadership
our mentors have to offer?  The confusion among our teachers and
reviewers reminds one of the old Christmas riddle of the Holly.

  _Highty-tighty, Paradighty,
  Clothed all in green.
  The King could not read it
  No more could the Queen.
  They sent for a Wise Man out of the East,
  Who said it had horns but was not a beast._


One need not rest satisfied and contented, but one ought surely to
search out the best and value it for what it is worth.  _Emily
Montague_, by Frances Brooke, is a poor enough imitation of _Pamela_,
but it contains some excellent vignettes of social life in Quebec
immediately subsequent to the Conquest.  The pictures of frontier
community life in DeGasp's _Les Anciens Canadiens_, Rivard's _Chez
Nous_, Bouchard's _Vieilles Choses, Vieilles Gens_, Kirby's _Canadian
Idylls_, Mrs. Moodie's _Roughing It in the Bush_, and others, are
excellent of their kind.  Consider Cappon, Blake, O'Hagan, Macphail,
Grove, Edgar, Dantin, Harvey, d'Arles and Mgr. Camille Roy in _belles
lettres_; some have borne away the Palmes Acadmiques, others have won
a name on the Continent.  And so on one might go.  The work of our
early writers, Sangster, Mair, Richardson and Haliburton, Garneau,
Crmazie, De Gasp and LeMay is uneven, yet it holds an honest mirror
up to our national life, and we would be the poorer without these
tentative efforts.  We demand that our young writers shall do better
than their forebears in the craft.  They must learn to perspire--in the
hand as well as in the head.  While their technique may surpass that of
their elders, they should aim to equal that sincerity and simplicity,
and that vivid love for the national homeland, which distinguish the
pages of our first writers.  "Avant tout je suis Canadien!" (Sir George
Etienne Cartier)

Our teachers of history and literature would do well to group the best
we have accomplished in these fields about their themes.  The romance
of our past has been superbly told.  The ancient quests of man for
adventure, fame, freedom, independence and the treasures of mind and
heart, are all there.  Later our youths will set out as self-conscious
Canadians, enriched by their native social inheritance, to explore the
records of dynasties, and the ages of enlightenment and progress
abroad.  Moreover, the landscape and seascape of Canada is the
atmosphere of home, and, fully understood and appreciated, will provide
an excellent stepping stone to the Lake District, Killingworth and the
Isle of Innisfree.

(5) We need to study intently these interpreters and spokesmen of
Canada as an act of self-preservation.  The insistent pressure of old
and mighty civilizations tends to reduce so small and scattered a
people to spiritual and aesthetic vassalage.  Internationalism is a
fine sentiment, but our greatest contribution will come through the
development and expression of our own unique selves.


II THE NATIONAL IDEAL:

ENGLISH AND FRENCH ELEMENTS

The point has been stressed that we already have a national soul or
ego.  Politically we have desired to be a people, a nation by divine
right and in our own right.  That ideal we claim with all appropriate
tenacity and fierceness.  The expressions of our individuality are
numerous, and already people abroad recognize them.  They have seen: "A
spirit of self-direction and self-confidence; of independence and
initiative, a marvelous optimism or hopefulness in private and public
affairs; a great seriousness tinged with religion in English
communities and saturated with it in French areas; an interest in the
welfare of society a high degree of self-respect; a pride and
confidence in the present, and still more in the future of the nation;
an intense activity and a great desire for self-improvement; a truly
democratic spirit which regards all men as essentially or potentially
equal; and a complete intolerance of caste."

Examine that carefully and you will note certain features not
altogether ideal.  Some elements, you may have observed, are rather
vulgar--initiative for example, and the ability to think and act
quickly.  Anglo-Saxon forcefulness and efficiency, especially in a new
country, where one has to be forceful and tolerably efficient or sink,
are not always friendly to ideals.  Art and religion suffer in
consequence.  Carried to an extreme, and we shall be a pitiful folk.
The French are shrewd enough to see this, and from them we must learn
to be thoughtful of the amenities, and not be ashamed of religion, that
is, of our sublimer and deeper emotions.

It will have been observed, too, that wealth in the paradise to which
we are said to aspire.  Upon the high altar of avarice we sacrifice
friendship, home, honour and often plain decency.  At the same time
there is a noticeable increase in the population of gentlemen and
gentlewomen.  British self-respect and French taste have further
conquests still to make however.  The contribution of the French, will,
in this particular, be increasingly more obvious.  Big business would
prey upon the contentment and tractability of the French workman and
habitant, but the exponents of dividends-at-any-cost have yet to learn
that the ceaseless pre-occupation of those unassuming folk is a
wistful, tireless absorption in the altar, the hearth and the age-old
traditions of their race.  "L'Anglais met dans le travail des mains la
dlicatesse que le Franais met dans celui de l'esprit."  Thus truly
spake Chateaubriand.

Even education has not escaped the blight of success.  There are so
many honours paid to utility and efficiency that it is perhaps useless
to expect immunity for the schools.  The trend everywhere is from
production, through promotion to profits, whether it be chain stores,
movie syndicates or interlocking oil corporations.  It is true that the
directors seek to disguise this unpleasant fact through the subtle
poetry of their trade legends, and the lyrical promise of Service:
"Hats that Delay Baldness"; "Gifts that Last."  One would suppose, from
the evangelical earnestness of the street-car posters, that beauty,
health and urbanity, let alone social and economic success, depended
upon a certain brand of cigarette, mouth wash, or hair oil.  Ah well,
people know when they have had enough, and therein lies our hope.
Ultimately the Frenchman's genius for clear thinking, and the
Britisher's basic common sense, pull them up.

The backwoodsmen turned to the French quadrille; their stout matrons
envied the slender lines of mademoiselle, while their sons and
daughters aped the gallantries, wit and deportment of Gay Paree.  It
was useless for the frontier parson to admonish them, that French
culture stood for fickleness, glamorous manners for sensuousness, and
animation for unreliability and exaggerated etiquette!  Lord Bryce has
pointed out, in _The American Commonwealth_, that the bourgeoisie of
the pioneer settlements introduced certain elements of French culture.
It is difficult to see how this could have been avoided.  "Ce qui en
nous est proprement franais est inaltrable comme incommunicable."
Gustave Lauson spoke with some truth when he held that the spirit of
the French was unchanging, immutable, but surely they communicate it
lavishly every day!

We are committed to nationhood.  The barriers, so-called, of race,
religion, language, temperament, ideals and traditions, have proved to
be no insuperable obstacles to mutual understanding.  The
empire-dreaming Anglo-Saxon and the home-making, home-keeping French,
have together developed an outward and an inward look.  _La vitalit
franaise_, and the no less energetic virtues of Scot, Celt and Briton,
promise noble things.  "De toutes langues parles, il n'y a point eu,
en outre, de plus pntrante au coeur, de plus lumineuse  l'esprit que
la langue franaise."  Some English Albert Sorel might as truly and
passionately voice the excellence of the language Shakespeare spoke.
Of French or English, it is not the whole truth that Mistral gives: "la
langue d'un people est la clef qui dlivrera de ses chanes."  Our two
Canadian tongues will yet _weld_ chains, and they will be gold links
binding us one to another!

The tradition of the French missionary and soldier of fortune survived,
not only in place names, but also in story books, school texts, and in
the characters of the people.  The descendants of Cartier, who dreamed
of a French and Catholic America; the heirs of the Huguenots, who
desired a French and Protestant haven, to-day share honours and duties
alike.  In the _Mayflower_ there were French and Walloons, as well as
Britons, prophetic of a common destiny, and a free exchange of
spiritual commodities in Canada and also in the United States.  We are
not concerned with a type of Canadianizing which would iron out the
last wrinkle of national individuality.  The British are not all
materialists, neither are all the French idealists.  The literature and
history of Canada will fling up a highway east and west, and ultimately
all our people, let us hope, will find it.  "Contentement passe
richesse" deserves to be a common ideal, and "ces traditions, fleurs
exquises de notre temprament francais," so eloquently defined by Mgr.
Camille Roy, ought to become the common property of us all.

So it is that our national selfhood is in the process of becoming.
Many far-off springs feed the current of our national life.  We would
do well to study the conventions and enthusiasms of each other, for out
of them will come our finest art and literature.  We can learn from the
home-seekers who to-day enter our ports, each the representative of a
rich social inheritance.  We have much to learn from the French, and
they from us.  One thing we shall come to understand is, that learning
and morals must go hand in hand.  If the history of the last
twenty-five years means anything, it repudiates and condemns the pride
of knowledge without good taste, of scientific inquiry without
reverence, of theories about liberty without inhibitions of religious
faith, and of hungry ambition without public ethical standards and
private morals.

It is not to be supposed that our native French literature is an
effective prophylactic for every infection.  But one thing is certain,
if our teachers and preachers, artists and authors, our people
generally west of the Ottawa, and south of Gasp, can sympathetically
appreciate the amenities of the hearth, the traditions and customs of
the people, the passionate love of the altar, in short, the urbanity,
strength and charm of the French people, education, literature, art and
business will take on a new dignity throughout our land.

Be not afraid.  The elements which are being forged into a national
soul are not historically alien.  We are not founding an Empire out of
a handful of 100 per cent. Romans, and a multitude of barbarians and
slaves.  If we are not all identical, we are supplementary, and that is
a greater thing.  This work of confederation will not be accomplished
by fine figures of speech or sentimentalizing, but by knowing each
other's past, the social, political, aesthetic and religious elements
which have composed it, and by a fine sense of mutual sympathy and
mutual responsibility.  "This ideal comprehends a state of society so
unified by a sense of intelligent, sympathetic responsibility, that it
shall perform the functions of a nervous system; the interest or the
injury of any member of our society shall become the injury or the
interest of us all."--Jane Addams.


III GESTURES TOWARD THE BONNE ENTENTE

Looking backward through the years to the days of Champlain, founder of
New France, we realize that our national problems have been, and still
are, intellectual and spiritual, rather than economic.  Men are drawn
together by common ideals, spiritual affinities and ruling passions.
Therefore, it is not an accident that we have become a nation.  It is
not an abstract theory of government that keeps us such.  It is the
development of an inward life, the evolution of a collective spirit,
which has at last learned how to express itself in institutions and
customs, in a national community life, in foreign relationships, in art
and in literature.  Armed with this faith we are surely invincible,
for, in spite of external circumstances, we possess that inner worth
and vitality which no accident can touch or harm.  They have told us,
in Quebec, that in the event of an Anglo-American war, a Frenchman will
be found lining the last ditch.  We reply that an English-Canadian will
be found at the last barricade, also defending those treasures which
French and English have learned to cherish even in a nation so young as
ours.

While commerce and industry will continue to bring our provinces more
closely together, we must look to education, art, music, literature and
a common history to strengthen our inner continuity, and cement our
common life.  Historical romance, painstaking research, poets,
biographers, critics, journalists, and societies of writers, savants
and artists, have already accomplished much in perfecting the principle
of confederation.  It is well to remember that as a nation we were only
born yesterday.  One should bear in mind that the national literature
of Russia began, so late as 1832, with Pushkin's masterpiece _Eugene
Onyegin_.  The Irish Renaissance was heralded by Standish O'Grady's
_History of Ireland: Heroic Period_, in 1872.  Our own literature dates
from Howe's _Essays_, in 1828, and from Haliburton's _An Historical and
Statistical Account of Nova Scotia_ (1829), and his _Sayings and Doings
of Sam Slick_ (1836) (both from Howe's Press).  Oliver Goldsmith, the
first birthright Canadian poet published _The Rising Village_ at St.
John, in 1834.  Parent's slogan _Nos Institutions, Notre Langue, et Nos
Lois_, appeared in _Le Canadien_, in 1831, and a self-conscious French
literature in Canada shortly came into being.  The beginnings are not
far off, it is true, but they were significant.  Those who come after
us will be motivated by higher spiritual ideals, and governed by finer
laws of art.  But above all they will, if true to their avocations,
speak of those things which give to life deep inner support and
substance, and crown our common national enterprise with new value and
higher dignity.

We are sufficiently conscious of our prodigious wealth and power.  We
ought also to have a parallel sense of the necessity for larger and
more significant goals.  Dante held the sublime conviction that the
world, being a thought of God, is designed for unity.  We might add,
that the world is designed for undreamed of progress toward love,
beauty and truth.  What Sully-Prudhomme said of love and poetry applies
with equal force to the making of a nation.  "L'amour avec toutes les
passions dont il est le ressort, demeure le dernier occupant de
l'inspiration potique, comme il en a t le premier."


IV WHAT SHALL WE GAIN?

It is obvious that we have reached a stage where our national life has
sufficiently integrated to warrant our speaking of a national soul, a
selfhood, if you will.  Canadians have not only become self-conscious,
but they have also become articulate, and it is now useless to inquire
whether we have a literature or a history.  A growing sense of our
national importance and destiny has already revealed a fine enthusiasm
for a more organic union of our several parts, and possibly the most
significant sign of a finer spiritual confederation is the movement
toward _entente cordiale_ between the two elder races of the Dominion.
Our poetry, drama, fiction, history and eloquence are witnesses to the
reality of this cross-fertilization.  There is no place for the hyphen
in our life or art, for our loyalties go deep into the common soil, are
nurtured by it, and their roots mingle in the loam.  This is the pledge
of our lasting solidarity.  More and more in the days to come, whether
you cut through our national life this way or that, you will find it
all of a piece like a perfect tapestry.

What Shall We Gain?

(1) _We shall gain substance_.  The epic Parsifal was composed by a
poet who could neither read nor write, which is not the same thing as
saying that he was illiterate.  Henry James illustrates our meaning
when he declares that "no good novel will ever proceed from a
superficial mind."  We have reached the stage in our national
literature when we need to discover fresh sources of inspiration.  We
need bigger and better ideas.  There is a surfeit of verses on grain
fields, hepaticas and the aurora borealis.  There is a lack of reality,
experience and authentic emotion, in a word, content, in our work.  The
great masterpieces are concerned with the age-old quests of the mind
and heart.  They do not make the fatal American error of confusing love
with promiscuity, goodness with conventional morals (otherwise
etiquette), and truth with whatever happens to be in fashion.  There
lies the weakness of our native fiction and drama.  We can etch the
several freckles of a tulip, but we do not go down into the crypt and
abyss of a man's soul.  Readers desire meat, not alfalfa.  "You alarm
me!" said the King, "I feel faint.  Give me a ham sandwich."  "Another
sandwich!  There's nothing but hay left now," said the messenger,
peeping into the bag.  "Hay then!" murmured the King in a faint
whisper.  "There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint.  I did
not say there was nothing better--I said there was nothing like
it."--_Through the Looking Glass_.

(2) _We shall gain coherence_.  We have gusto, bounce, robustness and
sprightliness, but we lack the flavour of the oak vats, the bouquet
which can only come from long working in the dark.  We are cursed with
easy rhetoric.  To be dull is to be damned.  Therefore we startle
rather than persuade, and imagine that sharp contrast is argument.
Sprightliness is not artistry.  Some editors may say "To hell with the
plot!"  But they will demand, all the same, sequence, lucidity,
discipline and something of a pattern.  Whether it be poetry or prose,
the instrument must be played as it should be played, and not tortured
with ephemeral mutter and chatter.  _The Golden Dog, Wacousta, Les
Anciens Canadiens_ and _Jean Rivard_, like _Moby Dick_ and _The
Brothers Karamazov_, lack the artistic unity of Hamlet, but they are
great to this extent, namely, that they reveal "that final joyous
simplification which is the fruit of leisure and saturation."  That is
why they are significant, memorable and satisfying.  Incoherence is not
a local peculiarity.  It is found wherever there is no deep tap root of
sustained thought and profound experience, willing to submit to
discipline.  Given paltry ideas, slovenly habits, lack of standards of
taste, and you get chaos, either in Canada or Kamchatka.  And it is
useless to try and disguise the facts with vivacity and ingenuity.  The
old Quebec school may be challenged by the new Montreal group for it is
inevitable that new experiences should seek new forms, but that elder
fraternity touched nothing that was trivial or tawdry.  Their work may
frequently have lacked beginning, middle and end, that is the unities,
but they were never wanting in reality, neither did they fail to clothe
it with a certain austere beauty, or invest it with spiritual
significance related to the multiform pattern of life.

(3) _We shall gain subtlety_.  Sincerity and simplicity we demand as a
first necessity, and later, as we are able, we shall acquire subtlety.
Subtlety is the difference between a Greek vase and a flower-pot
contrived out of putty and oddments from the ash barrel.  It is born of
leisure and urbanity.  While the first duty of an author is to say what
he means, and to be certain that what he means makes sense, he will
desire, if he is an artist, the outward forms of an inward and
invisible grace.  One cannot define style.  Buffon's oft-quoted dictum
was that it is the man.  We might add, that it is man when he is an
artist.  A recent work, _Ananias, or the False Artist_, defines a false
artist as "a man who knows the unique significance of the work on which
he has entered, and yet cannot give himself to it whole-heartedly."
Later on the author supplements this by saying, that most of the sons
of Ananias are "blindly unaware of their villainous inadequacy."  There
lies our difficulty.  We are not only impatient of helpful criticism,
and the long way home of honest drudgery, but we are also, and perhaps
it is because of that, frequently ephemeral and superficial.  We bolt
our pre-digested cereal and leap headlong into the garish day.
Subtlety is not acquired with a fluency in the Gallic idiom, or the
graceful gymnastics of a French dancing master, any more than good
taste can be purchased with books on etiquette, or ripeness sponged
from an encyclopaedia of questions.  The American girls on the banks of
the Delaware, away back in 1800, blushed at their own awkwardness when
they beheld the swimming air and nonchalance of Mademoiselle de
Florian, daughter of the lodging-house keeper.  But the culture of
Boston and Philadelphia did not depend upon those charming externals,
any more than ours does upon the meaty ingredients of Elbert Hubbard's
_Scrap Book_, or the mysteries of Pelmanism.  There is a profound
difference between manners and good taste, between fluency and a style
that charms and bewitches.  We also mistake petition for subtlety:
"Four out of Five Now Lose"; "Labour Produces All Wealth."  Subtlety
has nothing to do with tricks of style or rules of etiquette, but
everything to do with ripe thinking, refined emotions and noble
character, in short, the golden fruits of education.  The classical
tradition began with schoolmasters, the Greek philosophers and
dramatists, who taught "free men the essentials of the good life."  And
they made those noble sentiments immortal, because of the profound
feeling, the luminous fancy and the clairvoyant imagination with which
they exalted them.


V THE TRUE ACADEMY

Matthew Arnold attributed the provinciality of English letters, as
compared with France, to the fact that there was in England no Academy.
"The less a literature has felt the influence of a supposed centre of
correct information, correct judgment, correct taste, the more we shall
find in it this note of provinciality."  Lacking this in Canada we
shall have to depend upon our schoolmasters.  In the warfare between
science and religion, the dilemmas of radical democracy, the increase
of insolent wealth and futile use of leisure, the depressing weight of
material things, and the general noise, bluster and vulgarity, the
little red school house is still our best defence against shallow
sentiment, flabby ideas and bad taste.  We are not so much in need of
literary creeds as we are of a native culture, broad, rich and
tolerant.  This can be the only lasting basis of a real _bonne entente_.

A finer understanding of our history and literature will also help.
Here again the teacher leads in the work of properly integrating all
elements of our national life, French and English, Nordic and Everyman,
relating them to the social and personal experiences of the public and
high school grades.  A fervent and intelligent national sentiment
should be created in the public schools, and it will not be achieved
through dissertations on wars, treaties and constitutional problems.
Our literature abounds in excellent material for this purpose, from the
community and frontier sketches of our early writers to the vivid
narratives and descriptions of our best novelists and poets.

Literature is for life, not only to inspire new standards of value and
taste, but to convey pleasure as well.  We are coming more and more to
understand that our courses in literature and history, in both public
and high schools, must be radically changed.  No longer can the old
button-bag, bric-a-brac collection of snippet readings serve our
purpose.  Psychology has added its blessing to what we had already
discovered through actual experience: there are certain permanent
interests and ideals alive in the minds of children.  Around these
dreams and enthusiasms we must build our texts on literature, history
and science.  Any further course, to commend itself, must proceed thus,
and those who build these books will find a bonanza of material ready
to hand in our poetical, romantic and historical writings.  In this
way, the best of all that we have produced may be related, at the
proper time and in the right manner, and find its beautiful flowering
in a higher national citizenship.

Of course, we must criticize our writers intelligently, and not be
silly about it.  But surely our art and literature can bear the truth,
and be judged sincerely for whatever of truth or beauty it contains.
Does it reflect a unique individual and social experience, with
fidelity, with persuasiveness, and with some degree of magic?  If so,
we have, for the present, all that we deserve or can expect.  To-morrow
we shall perhaps do better.

The brown loam rich with the odour of life, emblem of immortality,
cannot imprison the almond beyond its appointed April blossoming.  And
so, when the time is fulfilled, the great Canadian epic, novel or drama
will break into the light.  Classics do not appear nearly so often as
publishers' blurbs would lead one to expect.  Still, there is no reason
why we should wear sackcloth, and sift ashes upon our heads when we sit
down to speak of Canadian literature and history.  Masterpieces are not
as common as daisies in the meadows, and that is true of every country.
In all history there is but a small handful of real classics, and happy
is that culture, ages old, wise and ripe, which has dropped one such
lovely fruit!  In the meantime we write of life as we understand it,
having an ear for cadence, an eye for colour, a hand for contour,
adding magic to metaphor, and the result is memorable and useful for
our people for a time, even though it be not immortal.  It is well that
we have a few who can speak for to-day and to-morrow, even though their
voices may not carry down the centuries.

You may say that the times are out of joint; that puritanism and
industrialism choke artistic expression; that philistinism is too thin
a soil in which to raise these heavenly beauties; that our social
environment is unfriendly to the sensitive plants we call poets.
Therefore we will write pot-boilers, and escape from uplifters in
irreverent protest and heart-easing mirth, folfol-rol-de-lee-ro.  But
have the times ever been more auspicious?  What of the days when the
Hebrews sang their melancholy sweet songs in a strange land?  What of
the days, brutal and licentious, when the virgin queen reigned, and a
runaway deer-stalker climbed over the footlights up the stairway of the
stars?  What of the days when the epileptic Dostoevsky, loosed from a
Siberian dungeon, hung in the Russian heavens his stupendous creations,
Myshkin and Karamazov?  This day is as auspicious as any that has ever
dawned.

For the rank and file, we have something to do about it.  Joseph Howe
sponsored Thomas Chandler Haliburton.  The success of Haliburton
encouraged Richardson, born in the same year.  LeMoine, De Gasp and
Sulte fed the fires of William Kirby's genius.  Charles G. D. Roberts
kindled his student, Robert Norwood, gave strength to the reticence of
his cousin Bliss Carman, and, when _Orion_ appeared, young Lampman wept
for joy, that one might sing new songs of the Dominion with the grace
our elder poets had.  Lampman stimulated his fellow civil servant
Duncan Campbell Scott.  Scott's "The Piper of Aril," appearing in a
journal edited by Peter McArthur, fell into the hands of an employee in
an East Side New York saloon and John Masefield dreamed his songs of
the sea.  Parent's burning challenge, "Our Language, Our Literature,
Our Laws," roused the young law student Garneau.  Garneau's _Histoire
du Canada_ became an epic in the hands of Crmazie, impassioned lyrics
with Frchette, and inspired every other writer of the Quebec School
from De Gasp to Ferland, Chapais, LeMay and Camille Roy.  Life comes
out of life.  The author draws a circle around some Sussex, and there
plants the seed of his tree of life.  As for the rest, we can create an
atmosphere so sensitive to beauty, so sympathetic in its understanding,
that, when the master artist musician or builder with words at last may
appear, his creations may flourish.  It is important that we should
know how to choose the good, that we should shun and discourage the
mediocre, and this may be done while at the same time preserving honest
feelings of expectancy and hospitality.  And so it happens, that the
materials are already to hand for a _bonne entente_.  Proper
discrimination, sympathetic understanding and intelligent direction on
the part of critics, teachers and readers, can lay the foundation for a
mighty structure.  But the spirit of tolerance and good will shall be
the lily work upon the top of the pillars of the _bonne entente_.




II

NEW AIMS AND METHODS IN HISTORY




What is history?  It is the attempt of man to fix in his memory those
things in the past that really matter.  Out of the infinite multitude
of events that are every minute happening and being forgotten, history
selects a few, writes down an account of them, studies how they came
about, and teaches them to after generations.

But how does history select the things that matter?  To begin with, no
doubt, it is the instinctive human memory that remembers some things
and not others, or partly remembers and partly invents.  Then the
careful historian comes and compares the different stories and verifies
the alleged facts; but he still, for the most past, accepts the
selection made for him.

And what a dreadful selection it mostly is!  If you read most national
histories you get a feeling of horror at the incessant crimes,
miseries, and all-pervading selfishness; you wonder if the human race
is really as base as all that.  The fact is that the conventional
history selects its material on just the same principles as the
sensational newspaper.  A crime is news; a fight is news, an accident,
a scandal, a "horror" or "tragedy" of any kind is news; good effective
human life is not news at all.  Again, conventional history, like the
sensational newspaper, is interested in the people who happen to be
before the public at the time--an emperor, a film star, a murderer; it
is not interested in either things or people because they are really
interesting or really important.  Most of the important creative work
going on in the world, most of the really interesting thoughts and
lives, are entirely ignored by newspapers and by history.

Hitherto, speaking roughly, the thing to which history has given most
attention is war.  War used to be, in the eyes of history, the supreme
test of a nation's worth; the defeated nation, the unsuccessful
general, were written down as inferior things.  The conqueror was a
hero and had a statue.  War was the way to freedom.  It was the great
method for removing injustices.  It was the climax of human effort.
And now the whole civilized world has realised that war is both an evil
and an avoidable evil, and all the great nations have solemnly
renounced it.

Clearly, history must change her scheme of values.  She must try to
discover what things are really important; what are really interesting;
what things, if war is gone, are able to stir the heart as war did, and
inspire men with the same devotion and self-sacrifice.  One cannot yet
see the answer to that question, but one can see the region in which it
will be found: in the help of man by man, of nation by nation, in the
binding together of human minds and wills to make possible greater
heights of human achievement.--Gilbert Murray.  The New Era, London,
England, April, 1930.




II

NEW AIMS AND METHODS IN HISTORY

We have seen that the study of Canadian history and Canadian literature
is a binding necessity if we would seriously desire to become a nation.
It is important that we should count one, when the roll call of the
nations is taken, but it is even more desirable that we should
cultivate our national soul, and work out our own special contribution
to the intellectual and spiritual life of the world.  History and
literature are the cement which bind us as a people one to another.
Significant works of history and literature are, moreover, our
spokesmen, revealing us to ourselves, and declaring what we are to
others.

In this lecture we shall consider how history should be taught and
read, stressing the story of our own nation.  History is a _story_, in
which dramatic and romantic elements are stressed, built upon the
interests and told in the language, of pupils in the various grades.
It will be discovered that much of the old formal material must be
rejected, periods, movements and personalities that have no interest
for boys and girls.  And further, the material chosen must be built
round the chief interests, or quests, of the child in topical form.
These topics will consist of biographies and romances bearing on a
single theme in such a manner as to reveal the streams of history, that
is, the stories will be more or less continuous narratives of human
progress along various lines, and within the experience of the student
and focused upon his interests and problems.  Certain themes, or
streams of history, will be reserved for later years, building upon the
expanding experiences of the pupil.  This guarantees that there shall
be no snippets requiring memorization, but rather lesson-units of
sufficient length to interest the student and leave a memorable
picture.  As the pupil sees the main streams of history he arrives at
an idea of his own place in the epic of man's progress.  He will wish
to share intelligently in it, and enrich the narrative as best he can.
This allows for pleasure reading in related fields; the making of
history books of his own, built round those themes in which he is
specially interested, choosing facts, stories and illustrational
material he considers valuable; dramatizing interesting episodes;
making charts and maps and other devices to explain the events more
adequately; and, through such projects as class debates, discussion
groups, programs, school museums, and local history crusades, making
the story and its meaning more real for him.  In all of which the pupil
discovers that there is life in history, and that it may be his own
life written large.


I THE AIMS OF EDUCATION

There are many difficulties of education; for our present purpose it
will be sufficient to say, that it aims "to assist the student in
arriving at reasonable conclusions regarding the meaning of life, and
in relating the manifold elements of experience in a purposeful program
of his own."  In other words, education, by strengthening the
character, training the mind, disciplining the emotions, broadening the
sympathies and kindling new ideals, enables the student to find his
right work in the world and to be useful and happy in it.  This is the
aim of life, and life is an art which one never wholly masters.
Through observation and experience one gains skill, and through the
reading of history and literature one may check up one's personal
conclusions and practices with those of the race.

It will be recognized at once that government, law, commerce, society,
freedom, democracy, truth, beauty and so on are concepts built up out
of materials, simple and concrete, which have come within the range of
the experience of the student, and therefore have reality and
significance for him.  Take the idea of democracy, for example.  We
meet the very young child upon his own ground, in the simple social
experiences of the home, school and playground, the common delights of
the everyday world around him.  Ultimately we trace the social
structure outward through the community, the township, to the nation
and the world.  Thus it is that out of three sounds we make not a
fourth sound but a star, a principle, a law of life, something to
direct, kindle, quicken and motivate.  The young boy will discover in
the society of Athens, in the Golden Age of Greece, only what he knows
of beauty and truth in his own home environment, or in Charlemagne only
what he recognizes as civic nobility in the town fathers of his native
community.

Therefore, we are at school, and as "friends educating each other."

We have seen that the end of education is life, and that education is
life.  Shall we ever reach a time when the quest for the meaning of
life has been ended?  It is no easy task, as you may have discovered
for yourselves, because life is not only increasingly more complex, but
the enemies of rational living more insidious,--vulgarity, standardized
thinking, emotional chaos, blatant irreverence.  Life indeed is in
flux, as Heraclitus said, but, beneath the surface, one discovers that
the stream is warm and vital, and that the channel along which it flows
was not cut by caprice.  And above the ebb and flow of life there
shines the polar star, a little fitfully at times, but steadily
nevertheless.  We can not define poetry or beauty, let alone truth,
life and God, but it does shine above us (and within us) and holds us
imperiously to the high road of destiny.

Our knowledge is experimental, whether it be the making of a
ploughshare, or the appreciation of the good and the beautiful.  There
are born within us certain incentives, and experience likewise suggests
others.  As we have just seen, the minds and hearts of men are engaged
in great unchanging and unending quests.  "Learning is ever in the
freshness of its youth, even for the old."  Aeschylus was right.  The
necessities of an industrialized and specialized existence tend to
reduce us to "fractional personalities," to specialists and Gradgrinds.
But there is an increasing number of young men and women who rebel at
the over-fed, super-dressed, ill-mannered prototypes of modern success,
who refuse to stand cowed, bewildered and cynical, when the historic
quests of mankind have proved the value and dignity of their own souls.
There is a growing multitude of young people who choose not to become
professionalized, and so lose the fruits of balanced development.
College training has about reached the limits of vocational training,
training for industry, for unlimited specialization, the breeding of
"particularists."  Education will ultimately swing about, aiming at a
high average, and offer opportunities by which one may "become aware of
significant experience".  We desire "new meanings for life, new reasons
for living."

Matthew Arnold was right when he diagnosed--

  ....this strange disease of modern life,
  With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
  Its heads o'er taxed, its palsied hearts.

  What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
  What leisure to grow wise?....

  Too fast we live, too much are tried,
  Too harass'd, to attain
  Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide
  And luminous view to gain.

That is true, but one is not compelled to live in the garish day, and
frolic about in a three-ring circus.  Montaigne suggested that everyone
might possess an _arrire boutique_, some little back shop where one
might set up one's liberty.  Now I do not desire to over-stress the
obvious, but I wish to point out that in the hectic times into which we
are born, we must discover those fixed stars in the heavens.  All that
I shall have to say depends upon getting this clear.  I want you to
see, that at the centre of art, religion, philosophy, government and
the rest, there stands a man, someone who passionately desired beauty,
loved only loving kindness, cared for nothing but truth, sought nothing
save freedom and justice--a man who, day and night, rain or shine,
through thick and thin, kept his immortal soul on top!  And seeing
this, I want you to see further, that all history is the life story of
that man written large,--"those individuals who were free (because they
knew) their powers and capacities, as well as their limitations; who
sought a way of life which utilized their total personalities; who
aimed to alter their conduct in relation to a changing environment in
which they were conscious of being active agents."[1]  Education,
therefore, looks out upon life as a series of great quests.  If history
is rewritten along these lines it will be infinitely more purposive and
creative.


II HISTORY: THE RECORD OF MAN'S QUESTS:

And so we come to the main point.  We desire to know how we may read
history and literature, delve into the accumulated experiences of our
forebears, and return from these vicarious experiences, kindled,
balanced and newly directed.  "The civilization of power aims at the
_exploitation of the world_.... that of culture aims at the
_development of man_."  (L. P. Jacks).  I desire to possess ideas of
worth, of value, to be able to say Yes and No in a way that is quite my
own.  Animal training, propaganda and organized fear will always,
perhaps, be popular in some schools and sects, but so long as the
majority know how to stand erect we are safe.  "A man is known by the
dilemmas he keeps," says Walter Lippman.  He will never escape doubt,
but he must stand forth a free spirit.

The chief thing is to remember, that "citizenship is the power to
contribute one's instructed judgment to the public good....  A nation
of men, which has not known this intellectual heritage, cannot enter
into possession of its kingdom."  (Harold J. Laski.)

Before we proceed to a few illustrations I wish to say a word or two
about these quests.  I want first to remind you of Goethe's dictum: "In
general we learn from what we love."  You will remember that Goethe
went further and said: "You don't learn anything when you read, but you
become something."  Suppose you are interested in art, in the
cultivation of taste and artistic standards.  The acquirement of this
skill can never be a formal process subject to pedantic rules of art
criticism, or the "elements" of literary criticism.  The success of
your quest is based upon enjoyment.  Your enjoyment, and the enjoyment
of Keats, for instance, on first looking into _Chapman's Homer_, are
common experiences, perhaps, only in certain superficial agreements.
But do not fear that, fear rather to look through the magic casements,
and not report exactly what you yourself saw and felt.  Fear derivative
ideas, snobbish and useless standards, second-hand emotions.  We become
artistic when we acquire a sense of order, rhythm and beauty in our
lives.  This can never be an external accomplishment, but must always
be associated with a participating enthusiasm and the activity of
fellowship.  That is what John Dewey understands by "enjoyed meanings",
something immediate, intimate, enthusiastic, something into which we
enter blithely and zestfully.

Emanuel Kant had a small library of but three hundred books, and half
of these were on travel.  It is said that he never got farther than his
two-by-four back garden.  He remarked to a visitor, that, while the
garden was not long or wide, it was very high.  I find that I am taking
you back again to the idea of quests and stars.


III THE THEME METHOD IN HISTORY

Since we have spent considerable time in discussing this idea of
history and literature as the record of man's quests, let us illustrate
our meaning.

I suppose you have been accustomed to read history chronologically,
coming grandly down from the dawn of history along a bewildering trail
that branches off every little while.  In the end you have a feeling
something akin to William James' description of the baby's world, "a
big, blooming, buzzing universe."  You took everything as it came, the
Golden Age of Greece, the Hundred Year's War, The American Revolution,
The British North America Act, and so on.  No doubt you found it
difficult, when you had ploughed through endless snippets on
Sennacherib and the Assyrians, the Gracchi and the Gauls, to thread
your way back, and say in so many words what it was all about.  I
defied a Premier not long ago to take a certain world history, and,
even with his social and political experience, get interested in
congeries of dates, notes and nothings, and make 75% as he expected his
pupils to do.  Our courses in history and literature frequently
resemble nothing so much as button bags, little unrelated things,
useful in their way, but lacking coherence or any integrating
principle.  "Ever since the world began," says John Drinkwater, "the
greatest purpose of man's life on it has been to grow from a confusion
that cannot be understood into clear shapes that can be understood."

Now the old method of writing history lacked method, unity, coherence.
The threads of the narrative are constantly being broken by incursions
into other fields.  Instead of seeing the steady progress of the idea
of beauty through all ages, or the romance of man's quest for freedom,
you become lost in a congeries of dates, dynasties, treaties,
meaningless wars and so on.  Your perspective is distorted, your
judgment confused.  Instead of seeing Magna Charta, Lord Durham's
Report, or the Declaration of Independence as parts of a movement, you
see them separately as revolts, agitations, ungratefulness, ignorance,
or what you will.

What alternative have we to offer?  Simply this, that we will proceed
to the study of history as a series of sublime quests.  The teaching of
history should deal with great movements, and ideas evolving through
long periods of time in broad outline.  Primary and secondary education
should aim "to convey a sense of human progress, to show that the
manners, the ideas, and the institutions of each epoch are evolved from
what has gone before," rather than to concentrate on the intensive
study of a limited field.  Instead of chaotic by-paths we shall have a
highway, well defined and obvious, along which man comes struggling
toward the Moated Grange.  We will divide our world history into these
great quests, and then follow these chains of sequence, noting step by
step the logical development, getting a sense of perspective, of
context, of evolution.  The background of the canvas soon emerges, and
over against it the big things look big, and the small things appear
insignificant.  Cause and effect, too, need no underlining; conclusions
become inevitable.

You remember the old Saxon Chronicle.  Sometimes a scribe took a hand
at it, and added a touch of poetry that made the annals live, but how
often you run into something like this:

_Year_ 189 In this year Severus succeeded to the Empire, and
           reigned seventeen winters.  He begirt Britain
           with a dike from sea to sea.

_Year_ 190

_Year_ 199

_Year_ 200 In this year was found the Holy Rood.

If that is all there was to this chronological record we should not
have missed it greatly.  It was the poetry in it, and the vivid prose
narrative now and then, which redeemed the old Saxon Chronicle, and
kept English poetry and prose, in other words, the English soul, alive
through hundreds of years, through war, conquest and disappointment.


I World History

Suppose we draw up a tentative outline of world history to demonstrate
our meaning, taking as our main themes the great historic quests of
mankind, the quest for happiness and adventure; the quest for power as
seen in the story of science in its conquest over the material world
and in government in the rule of the people; the quest for freedom; the
joy of work and play; the quest for truth in the story of education;
the quest for beauty in the story of literature and the arts; the quest
for the fulness of life in the story of the world's religious prophets.
We develop these themes progressively and cumulatively, relating them
to current events, and associating them with their present and future
applications.  In Bolingbroke's words, one is able to catch the meaning
of history by understanding its "philosophy of action."

You will have noticed that this theme method is poles removed from the
old dynastic and constitutional history to which we have always been
accustomed.  It is also different from that political and social
history so much in vogue just now.  History is not that alone; it is
government and society, plus the strivings of man's indomitable spirit
for beauty and happiness and the endless privileges of the spirit.
Scientist and priest, the explorer and artist, ruler and teacher, the
man with a hoe and the woman with her hearth-song, all take their
proper place in the progressive evolution of "_the main thing_."  At
times the story will be the romance of a great movement, at other times
the stream of the narrative will broaden into strangely agitated or
quickened lakes, the biographies of great men and women who have
changed the political and intellectual boundaries of the world, lives
through which the currents of the time flow and are coloured and
changed.  The end of it all is, that the student shall understand
clearly as never before the great highroads along which humanity has
moved, that he shall participate in the world movements, and return
enriched as a citizen.  It is more important that we should see the
broad sweep of the currents of time, than that we should memorize
endless snippets about this and that.  Some things will have to be
foregone.

One world history has at least 700 separate headings, about one fifth
of which are of any possible interest or value to a pupil of that
grade.  The remaining snatches are too bald, lifeless and unrelated, to
be of any use to anyone.  Is it not more important, that the interests
of the blossoming citizen should be isolated and studied as a sequence,
than that he should return from "taking history", confused, impotent
and cold?  If less space is devoted to the expeditions of Caesar, the
Wars of the Roses, or the War of 1812, it is because more space is
given to those things which come within the social, intellectual and
spiritual range of the students themselves.  In the end we desire a
sense of increasing awareness, wider horizons, fresh contacts with
life, new enthusiasms, finer hospitality and quickened sympathy,--in a
word, fulness of life.


II The History of Britain

Over against such a background of world history we may now place the
history of Great Britain and of Canada.  It will not be necessary to
duplicate strictly the theme method of world history, but by a union of
the theme or topical method and the chronological method usually
employed, we arrive at a sensible scheme which amplifies and
illustrates the world story.

From this you will see that the dynastic method must disappear, and
that key topics should be stressed.  These first things are given first
place, and in their natural chronological order.  We come at them in
various ways, by stories of incident, dramatic portraits of outstanding
men and women, suitable extracts from the legends, chronicles,
literature and oratory of the time, and by utilising reproductions of
contemporary art which throw light on social, industrial and
intellectual conditions.  In this manner the legacy of each period
comes out into bold relief.  Certain definite conclusions of a
political, social or spiritual nature are achieved, and upon these the
next period builds.  The same age-old quests of men are operative, and
illustrate similar enterprises in every other land where men live and
aspire.

A recent interview with Mr. H. G. Wells reports him as giving
expression to a similar ideal.[2]

"History is essentially a study for the adult mind.  Concerned as it is
with human experience it can only be understood as it becomes related
to human experience, experience which the child does not as yet
possess.  It deals with ideas which are beyond the comprehension of
children, or at any rate can only be dimly comprehended by them.  Its
simplest terms are only partially understandable to them.

"For, why do we teach history to our children?  To take them out of
themselves, to place them in a conscious relationship to the world in
which they live, to make them realise themselves as actors and authors
in a great drama which began before they were born and which opens out
to issues far transcending any personal ends in their interest and
importance....  Unfortunately the teaching of history in schools has
followed the movement of the student of history and not the needs of
the common citizen toward ampler views, because there has never yet
been a proper recognition of the difference in aim between study for
knowledge, the historical study of the elect, on the one hand, and
teaching, the general education of the citizen for the good, not only
of the citizen but of the community, on the other."


III The Story of Canada

This method will also redeem the teaching of Canadian history in our
schools.  It is nothing short of a tragedy, that such a large
percentage of our boys and girls heartily dislike the story of their
own country as it is now largely written.  Of course nothing can ever
take the place of the well equipped teacher, who brings to his task not
only knowledge, but swift and luminous insight and a sense of dramatic
and spiritual values as well.  Fortunately the task is being made
easier.

The story of Canada is interesting, and it can, at the same time, be
comprehensive.  It is obvious, that many of the vital issues in our
history, the evolution of constitutional government, the cause and
conduct of wars or rebellions with their treaties, the struggle for
democratic principles in church and state, these and other questions
are beyond the range of 'teen age boys and girls.  Therefore one might
as well recognise the fact, that historical unity is a fiction.  It
ought to be equally obvious that there is no such thing as a true
chronological history.  A strictly chronological biography even, say of
the Mayor of this town, would fill the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  There
are, however, spiritual unities, which are not fiction.

It is impossible that an alert and intelligent national self
consciousness can be built upon the old elaborated note-book style of
history text.  What we desire is that the story of our Dominion should
be told, and that it should be related in simple, vivid and dramatic
style, emphasing at all times the romance of incident and character.
Many can write who know little history, a good many know their history
but are innocent of an attractive and persuasive style, but the two
desiderata can be found in one person if we look hard enough.

Then let the story of Canada be divided into its natural divisions,
those key themes which represent the main currents of our national
life.  About these topics the lessons will be built, not snatches of
notes, but a lesson theme, long enough to tell something, and
interesting enough to whet the appetite for more.  There will be
several lesson themes about one main topic, coming at the key idea in
many ways so that it may be obvious even to the most backward.  These
lessons will radiate from the centre like the spokes from the hub of a
wheel.  The result will be a closely knit, living and colourful picture.

It is taken for granted that the results of psychological research must
be applied with increasing fidelity to the teaching of history.  No
educational subject can be of the slightest use which does not build
upon the mental, emotional and social experiences of the pupil.
Therefore, what is the use of cluttering up the story with princelings,
little busybodies, inept office holders, wars, bills, acts and the
cross word puzzle of constitutional development?  Why fill two pages
with the Aroostook War, the Ashburton Treaty, Oregon and the San Juan
Dispute, when the only thing that kindles a boy is the story of the
Oregon trail and Captain Cook's voyage?  The boy wants adventure, and
he should have it for we have plenty of the best sort.  Out of it will
be born a contagious love for his country at a time when permanent
enthusiasms are being aroused.  By challenging an interest in the noble
men and women of our country's history, in the thrilling quests which
have marked every page of our story, we shall make better men and
women, and for that matter better historians to boot.  Such a topical
program calls for fewer class readings than the curriculum requires.
This is designed so that the pupil may avail himself of those
interesting supplementary readers which are now so lavishly provided
for him.  Certain characters and events will intrigue him about which
he will desire to know more.  Our writers, artists and other heroes of
peace are introduced in the text, and many will want to know more about
them, also.  We shall see a remarkable development in supplementary
source material designed for the various grades.  It is of more than
passing interest to know, that Mr. C. W. Jefferys, R.C.A., who has
spent many years recording the story of Canada in a long series of
historical drawings, will shortly make them available with his own
interesting comments for our home and school libraries.


IV HISTORY AS A TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP

We have stressed the fact, that through history, properly taught, the
pupil arrives at an understanding of the great enterprises and
master-motives which have distinguished the evolution of human society,
and that, by this means, he discovers his own value to, and work in,
the world.  Let me close what I have to say in this connection by two
short quotations.

"The object of public education is to train the mind and character of
the growing citizen so that he or she may be enabled to think and act
with independence and responsibility.  One of the disciplines employed
to this end is the study of history.  To pervert history to a lesser
purpose is to debase both the teacher and the subject.  No doubt it
will be urged that this ideal is too austere--that countless teachers
to-day are in fact, willingly or unwillingly, engaged in propaganda,
and that the friends of peace are therefore compelled to set a
counter-propaganda in motion.

"That some propaganda exists in the schools of most countries, and a
great deal of propaganda in the schools of some, may be readily
admitted.  But the best remedy against propaganda is not more
propaganda.  It is disinterested thinking.  Propagandist schools are
not good schools.  They do not turn out intelligent students--still
less, competent historians.  Left to themselves, they will sooner or
later retrace their steps.  Every true educator knows that the healthy
mind reacts against excess, and that propaganda therefore breeds its
own antidote.

"But if one remedy lies in independent action by historians,
independence on the part of teachers of history is another line of
advance.  No two teachers teach alike or have exactly the same
interests.  Every teacher who is a real teacher ought therefore to have
a voice in the choice of the textbook to be used in his class.  Here
one comes up against many obstacles, customary, bureaucratic and
administrative, and it is difficult to lay down a counsel of
perfection.  But, whatever the tyranny of ministers, inspectors,
headmasters, examination syllabuses and even parents, the principle
that the history teacher should remain master in his own class remains
valid....

"The way to international understanding is through better education.
Better education means better teachers, and better conditions for the
exercise of the teachers' art.  Once secure these and the rest will
follow...."[3]

The next quotation is from "History as a Training for Citizenship," by
G. P. Gooch, M.A., D.Litt., a lecture delivered on January 6, 1930,
before the Conference of Educational Associations, University College,
London.

"It is an axiom that democracy makes a larger demand on the individual
citizen than any other form of Government.  In terms of social ethics
it means government by discussion, the sharing of responsibility, the
methods of compromise and accommodation.  We are members of a society
dedicated to the bracing principle of self-determination, in which each
one of us is at once a subject and a sovereign; and it is the dream of
our hearts to share in training the citizens of the future for their
duties and destiny....

"In putting forward such a resonant claim for history as a factor in
the making of citizens, I must be allowed to define it in my own way;
for our estimate of its value must obviously depend on our conception
of its nature.  History as I learned it at school, over forty years
ago, was barren of intellectual stimulus and civic inspiration; for it
was presented as a string of more or less unrelated occurrences.
Today, thanks to the devoted labours of a generation of writers and
teachers, we realise that it is the record and interpretation of the
life of humanity; that it is concerned with man's ideas and deals no
less than with his physical needs, with the pilgrimage of the spirit no
less than the strength of his hand.  _Historicus sum: nihil humani
alienum puto_.  And today we proceed from the whole to the part, not
from the part to the whole.  Now that we know the story of mankind in
all its length and breadth, it is easier to visualise and understand;
for the vast structure is held together by the simple conception of
growth from savagery to civilisation, and every chapter falls into its
place as a stage and a stepping-stone in the Great Adventure.  Today is
not only the child of yesterday, but the heir of all the ages.

"Assuming, therefore, that history is broadly conceived and
intelligently taught, let us discuss its function in the training of
our citizens.  Its first task assuredly is to enable us to understand
the world into which we are born and the stage on which we are called
to play our part.  Our birthplace gives a direction and a definition to
our thought from which few of us ever escape.  But this inevitable
limitation has its advantages; for it simplifies the task of the
teacher and enables the budding citizen to adapt his lungs to the
atmosphere he is fated to breathe.  Moreover, with the aid of knowledge
and imagination we can eliminate the crudest forms of local bias, and
do justice to other varieties of human experience.  The first and
greatest lesson that the citizen has to learn is that the human family
is greater than any of its constituent parts; that civilisation is a
co-operative achievement, a common heritage and a joint responsibility;
that every national unit is connected with the larger life of mankind
by a thousand channels and contacts, visible and invisible.  Only if
the growing mind is flooded with the conception of the unity of
civilization, the essential oneness of the human race, which came in
with Christianity and the jurists of Imperial Rome, can it see the
world of the twentieth century in proper perspective, and understand
the practical tasks which it presents.

"To me, at any rate, the League of Nations is the logical and natural
consummation of the whole process of human development.  For the
instinct of association is as old and as enduring as the instinct of
strife.  Patriotism is not enough,[4] either in scholarship or in
citizenship.  A factor of incalculable significance has come into our
lives, and it is our plain duty to show not only what it is and what it
does, but why and how it came into existence.  Civilisation is
organisation, and the League is the latest and most hopeful of human
experiments.  The Middle Ages invented the noble conception of the
Respublica Christiana--the interdependence of different communities
paying homage to the same fundamental principles of conduct and belief.
We cannot restore that ideal, and we would not if we could.  The world
has enlarged its boundaries since the sixteenth century, and a common
religious faith can no longer serve as a cement.  But we must revive
the kernel of the mediaeval conception, and found it on the basis of
our common humanity.

"If this doctrine seems to some of us to overlook the fact that moral
ideas, like every other expression of the human spirit, are subject to
evolution, we may at any rate find in the study and teaching of history
a source of priceless moral stimulus and discipline.  She is the healer
of past quarrels, the enemy of rancorous hate.  Without history there
can be no perspective, and without perspective there can be no insight.
At her best she is a judge, wiser than any one man, without passion or
fear, swayed neither by religion nor race, party nor class, a corrector
of injustice, an avenger of innocence.  She encourages her votaries to
ask for evidence, to allow for bias, to seek and to tell the truth and
nothing but the truth.  By bidding us apply not less exacting standards
to the conduct of our own country than to that of other men, she
disciplines and purifies our patriotism.  The study of other epochs,
races, nations, religions, institutions and customs leads us to
wide-hearted appreciation of the higher values; to respectful
toleration of differences; and to a conception of civilisation as
orchestral, the fruit of effort working along many lines.  In the study
of history, in a word, we find precisely the synthesis of intellectual
enlightenment and moral stimulus which citizenship requires and
demands.[5]



[1] Adult Education.  By E. C. Lindeman, New York, 1926.  p. 78.

[2] The New Era, April, 1930.

[3] "The League of Nations and the Teaching of History," by Alfred
Zimmern.  The New Era, op. cit, p. 72.

[4] Spoken by Nurse Edith Cavell before her execution.

[5] The New Era, London, England, April, 1930.  pp. 67-70.




III

NEGLECTED SOURCES IN HISTORY




As we contemplate these stupendous movements across the pages of
history we are witnessing once more the power of ideas.  The hearts and
the minds of men were gripped and moved by the eloquent appeals of
these orators and philosophers, and human happenings were shaped
precisely as these philosophers and orators had predicted and urged.
The power of oratory and of statesmanship is an intangible.

Given a nation, conscious of itself, proud of its past, rich in power
of every kind, abundant in contribution to letters, to the fine arts,
to music, to philosophy and to education, eager in the advancement of
scientific inquiry, quick in harnessing new scientific truth, new
scientific discovery, to the practical needs of men, what shall be its
mode of life, what its measures for the greatest satisfaction and
happiness of its people, what its relations with its neighbors and with
all the world?  We have learned to speak of races as the Teutonic, the
Latin, the Slavic, the Mongolian and others.  We see mankind separated
into groups, some of them of immense size, by differences of language
and these groups again divided, regardless of their size or place, by
differences of religious faith and worship.  Where is to be found the
guide to unity and peace through this labyrinth of diversity and
conflict?  Shall these diversities and conflicts be permitted to go
their way unguided, unhampered, to a cataclysm that would mark
civilization's end, and leave the planet Earth to the still cold death
of a body that has played its part in the heavenly system and could no
longer do more than revolve about its central point as a mere
makeweight among the stars?  Or, on the other hand, shall there be
found a path to unity, to companionship, to confidence, to constant
consultation, to association in high endeavor, to the end that the
supreme human unity which underlies and conditions all human
diversities may find its just and beneficent expression?--Nicholas
Murray Butler, from "Imponderables."




III

NEGLECTED SOURCES IN HISTORY


I THROUGH HISTORY TO LIFE

The study of history is coming to have an increasingly more important
part in the curricula of our schools, and in the self-training of
adults.  Some of the more obvious advantages are these: (I) It provides
an adequate background to our thinking.  Over against this we place our
new ideas and experiences, whereupon the small things look trivial, and
the big things appear significant.  We need this every day.  The air is
thick with voices of insistent isms and the din of movements born with
every sunrise.  He who has explored among the experiences of the race
as recorded in history greets these last cries and fresh panaceas with
intelligent interest.  He does not fear them, because he knows their
antecedents.  He does not discount them for he understands their
context.  He can not be stampeded by propaganda since he sees them in
their right perspective over against the historical background.  (II)
Not only do we gain perspective, but we also acquire
historical-mindedness, that is, we are able to stand in the shoes of
the best men of the best ages.  We contemplate their world vividly and
entirely.  We recognize it as a part of a continuous process.  We
observe laws at work, tendencies evolving, conclusions being reached,
eras growing ripe with legacies.  And when the time is fulfilled we
detect nations, rousing as strong men from their sleep, ready to press
forward to the inaccessible homeland of their dreams.  (III) Looking
backward we look forward.  Having ascertained certain dominant
tendencies in society we get an inkling of the purpose latent in
history.  Thus it is the we become seers, and are able to discover the
significant goals of men.  These goals are their quests, the eternal
moated granges toward which the minds and hearts of the best among men
aspire.  (IV) What is true of history in general is equally true of
Canadian history in particular.  We are a part of all that we have met,
and can only be known as we are considered a part of the general
evolution of the race.  At the same time, we must know ourselves,
understand our resources, develop an intelligent pride in our spiritual
tributaries, and build up a fine, sympathetic cohesion among all our
component parts.  No nation ever yet made a contribution of any worth
that did not feel itself a united, self-conscious, and independent
people.  In a people so young we expect confidence and
self-assertiveness, but we hope that a finer enthusiasm for our arts
and letters will promote urbanity and the fruits of the spirit.  After
all, ripeness is everything.



II CONTRIBUTIONS OF CANADIAN LITERATURE

What is Canadian literature?  Charles G. D. Roberts has defined it
thus: "A body of work in prose and verse, produced by writers who are
either (a) Canadians by birth and breeding (and therefore inescapably a
product of the soil) or; (b) Canadians whose adoption is so complete
that their subconscious impulses tend to make them _think_ and _feel_
as Canadians."  I have tried to show that a national literature
presupposes a well organized and well integrated society.  The
literature, therefore, of a people is the natural voice of the people's
spirit.  Since history is the record of a nation's quest, the
literature of the country will have an important part in portraying and
interpreting the most important features of that progressive record.
Literature is for delight, for entertainment, but not chiefly.
Literature opens up a way of escape, but it is not entirely an exit.
Literature kindles the mind and awakens the heart, but it is not
exclusively this.  It is all of these, because it is life--the life of
a people, and its roots go down deep into the loam of national life.
It conducts us to ever widening horizons of experience.  It enlarges
our contacts with power, and puts us in possession of wealth which no
catastrophe can spoil or any other advantage embarrass.  It is the
final touchstone which estimates the real worth and significance of a
people, that central spirit which constitutes the only imperishable
commodity of exchange in the give and take of nations.

It has long been an open secret that literature gives significance to
the story of a nation's life.  The contributions of our writers,
introduced in the proper place in the record, make the chronicle alive,
expectant, vital.  Marjorie Pickthall's "Pre Lalement" belongs to the
narrative of the Jesuit missionaries as truly as the _Relations_.
Verses from the poems of Carman and Roberts will quicken any tale of
high deeds performed in the Grand Pr country or storied Chignecto.
And so on one might go.

"Literature makes us feel about more things, and it also makes us feel
more about them."  "It reveals the significance of one object after
another; and with every new significance thus revealed to us we are
larger men--men of more penetration, more sympathy, and more
reverence.... we find that we cannot look upon any object without,
consciously or unconsciously, piercing our vision right through it to
thoughts, implications, references, relations, that, a year ago, or two

before, we should never have glimpsed behind such a dull object.
Dull--that's the point!  It would have been dull before literature gave
us this eager awareness; it is thrilling now.  It would have been a
solid, opaque thing in those old days; it is rarefied and diaphanous
now.  We, too, have become poets and interpreters."  (Ernest Raymond.)

Well, literature is full of these things, full of the voice of those
who have beheld the landscapes and seascapes of their native countries,
looked on the pageant of life, and uttered their pain, their ecstasy,
their memorable thoughts about the tragedy and comedy about them.

The teaching of Canadian history would be greatly enriched had we an
adequate source book available.  The time has come for such a work.
Teachers of Canadian history might well engage themselves in this task,
and call to their aid the students in their university classes.
Already we have available selected documents in economic history which
throw fascinating light upon social and industrial conditions.  _Four
Centuries of Medical History in Canada_, (2 Vols.), by Dr. John J.
Haggerty contains chapters on the effect of contagious diseases in the
early life of the colony.  Histories of Canadian literature and
Canadian art place the aesthetic development of the Dominion within
reach of the writers of our future histories.  All of these contain
human documents of the highest importance, which will illuminate and
illustrate many a dull page.

We shall speak of the place of art in history later on; for the present
I wish to show the wealth of material available for those who will
rewrite our history along more competent and human lines.  About all we
can attempt here is a check list with brief comments on the titles.  A
full discussion of the contents of these books would make a book in
itself.  The books which we shall mention ought to be in our school
libraries, and parts of them should be read in connection with the
themes taught.  We shall roughly classify them under fiction, poetry,
drama, humour, oratory and stories of settlement and adventure.


i Fiction

A. _French_:

There was no native press in French Canada prior to the conquest.
Colonial self-consciousness had not arisen, and such books as were
written in New France and printed in Paris were journals of the
discoverers and explorers, as well as narratives of the missionaries.
After the conquest, however, matters changed.  The isolated French
community was proud of its traditions, and tenacious of its
inheritance, and after half a century began to make these vocal.

We can date the beginning.  On May 7, 1831, Etienne Parent printed in
bold type across the front page of his journal, _Le Canadien: Nos
Institutions, Notre Langue et Nos Lois!_  That legend became the
rallying cry of succeeding generations of French writers in Canada.

Lord Durham had said in his Report (1839) that the French in Canada
were a people without a history.  That seemed to be true, if one
overlooked the books by missionaries, adventurers and generals
published in Old France.  William Smith's _History_ (1826) belittled
the record of the French in America, while Michel Bibaud, (1782-1857),
the first native born French Canadian historian and poet, and the first
French writer to have his works published in Canada, was frankly
cynical of his compatriots.  Smarting under this neglect and ridicule
Franois Xavier Garneau (1809-1866) accepted the challenge of his
fellow law students and undertook a history of his people.  Garneau's
_Histoire du Canada_, in three volumes (1845, 1846, 1848) was the
answer.  Philippe Aubert De Gasp (1786-1871) expressed the gratitude
of his people when _Les Anciens Canadiens_ appeared in 1863: "Long have
you been ignored, my Canadian brothers of old!  Shamefully have you
been slandered!  Honour to those who have redeemed your memory.
Honour, a hundred times honour, to our compatriot M. Garneau, who has
rent the veil that hid your exploits!" (Cap. xii)  Garneau's reward was
also in the epic poems of Crmazie, the lyrics of Frchette, the
pastorals of LeMay, indeed in the very fibre of all subsequent French
Canadian literature.

_Les Anciens Canadiens_[1] (1863): Philippe Aubert De Gasp
(1786-1871).  This so-called romance is almost void of plot or
characterization.  De Gasp states his purpose in these words: "To
preserve a few episodes of the good old days, a few memories of a
youth, alas! now long past--that is my sole ambition." Faithfully
recording the tales which he had heard at his mother's knee, and the
stories told him by his grandfather who had led his troops at
Ticonderoga, De Gasp has preserved in this "chanson de geste in prose"
the customs, traditions, chansons, the life that gathered around the
hearth and altar in the French seignories along the St. Lawrence.
There you will observe how they dressed, hear what they said, and enter
into the spirit of their gaiety, piety and hospitality.

_Jean Rivard: Le Dfricheur_ (vol. I. 1874): _Jean Rivard: Economiste_
(vol. II, 1876): Antoine Grin-Lajoie (1824-1882).  This author is also
concerned with French Canadian life and manners.  Urging his
compatriots to love the soil won from the forests by their forefathers,
to refrain from emigrating, he sets out to show the advantages of the
agricultural avocation, and the possibilities open to the industrious
and successful.  His pages abound with faithful pictures of customs and
manners.

_Jacques et Marie_ (1866): Napoleon Bourassa (1827-1916).  Longfellow
had a remarkable following in Quebec.  The pretty Evangeline myth has
been worked over, translated and imitated many times.  Bourassa follows
Longfellow closely in his story of the Acadians and the unfortunate
exile.

_Angline de Montbrun_ (1884): Laure Conan (1854-1924).  Mlle Felicit
Angers read Kirby's _The Golden Dog_ for the French Canadian publisher
before it was translated by Pamphile LeMay, to insure no unnecessary
aspersions being cast upon the religious and social sympathies of the
French.  Her first novel is a story of the Jesuit missionaries.  Two
subsequent romances, _A l'Oeuvre et a l'Epreuve_, and _L'Oublie_ deal
with the French rgime, and the founding of Montreal by Maisonneuve.

_Pour La Patrie_ (1895): Jules Paul Tardivel (1851-1905).  This story
also relates to the religious and patriotic life of Quebec.  The two
notes, patriotism and piety are insistent in practically all French
Canadian writers, and while patriotism everywhere tends toward the
strident, never has the altar been celebrated with more beauty and
charm.

_Nol au Canada_ (1900): Louis Frchette (1839-1908).  Having set the
deeds of his compatriots to impassioned lyric verse, the Poet Laureate
of Quebec turned to prose, and chronicled their patriotic and religious
enthusiasms.  _Christmas in French Canada_ is, unfortunately, out of
print.

Among the modern novelists Ernest Choquette's _Les Ribaud_ (1898), and
Robert LaRoque de Roquebrun's _Les Habits Rouges_ (1923), deal with the
Rebellion in Lower Canada.  In each case the hero of the piece is the
revolution.  The latter, in _D'Un Ocan a l'Autre_ (1924), took for his
theme the Riel rebellions of 1870 and 1885.

_Maria Chapdelaine_ (1916): Louis Hmon (1880-1913).  His classic of
frontier life in Quebec is well known.  It has been translated by both
W. H. Blake and Sir Andrew Macphail.  A Breton, of the same race as
Cartier and Chateaubriand, and possessing something of the spirit of
one and the piety of the other, he startled the world when his Quebec
idyll appeared as a _feuilleton_ in _Le Temps_ (1913).

Such are a few of the romances valued in Quebec for the manner in which
they enshrine the religious, social and national ideals and customs of
the people.  They have all been published during the past sixty-four
years, but their roots go back into the soil claimed by Cartier, and
colonized by Champlain for the Church and the King of France.  "L'me
Canadienne-Francaise est reste foncirement religieuse et chrtienne."
(Mgr. Roy) You must turn to these novels for the illustrations of the
manner in which French piety and patriotism have gone hand in hand.


B. _English_:

English Canadian romance dealing with the French rgime is voluminous.
It begins with _The History of Emily Montague_ (1769) by Frances Brooke
(1724-1789).  The friend of Dr. Johnson and David Garrick, she
accompanied her husband to Quebec where he was stationed as garrison
chaplain shortly after the conquest.  In her novel, patterned after
Richardson's _Pamela_, this queen of the Quebec blue stockings, or, as
she was sometimes called Little Red Riding Hood, retailed the gossip
from the capital of the new world to the capital of England.  It makes
sprightly reading, and is important for the light it throws upon social
life in and around Quebec in those days.  For this reason it is an
important historical document.

_The Golden Dog_ (1877): William Kirby (1817-1906).  This, the greatest
of our novels, instituted a vogue for the stirring history of the last
conflict.  There are errors of historical fact, but it is a faithful
and compelling narrative of the people and the times.  Parkman praised
it, which is enough.  Many a page could be cited as a model of prose
narrative style, and also used to lend verisimilitude to the history of
the time.

Following Kirby the deluge.  Mrs. Leprohon's _Antoinette de Mirecourt_,
John Lesperance's _The Bastonnais_, W. D. Lighthall's _The False
Chevalier_ and _The Young Seigneur_, T. G. Marquis' _Marguerite de
Roberval_, S. F. Harrison's _The Forest of Bourg-Marie_, James
LeRossignol's _Jean Baptiste_ and his book of legends _The Flying
Canoe_, P. A. W. Wallace's selection of legends _Jean Baptiste_, E. W.
Thomson's habitant stories, _Old Man Savarin_, and Duncan Campbell
Scott's delightful collection of short stories _In the Village of
Viger_, these are some of the better known.  Charles G. D. Roberts was
fascinated by the French period in the Maritimes, and has given us _The
Forge in the Forest, A Sister to Evangeline, The Young Acadian_, and
_The Heart that Knows_.

_The Seats of the Mighty_ (1896): Gilbert Parker (1859--).  This was
the only historical romance on this period to threaten Kirby, but the
Nestor of Niagara has held first place.  Parker followed this
successful story with others, _When Valmond Came to Pontiac_ (1895),
and _The Power and the Glory_ (1926), a story of LaSalle.

English Canadian fiction dealing with other parts of the Dominion has
been prolific, but not all of it rises above the level.  We can
indicate but a few of the more successful, and therefore more useful
for our purpose.  An interesting and useful source-book in Canadian
history could be compiled from selected reading in this field.

_Wacousta_ (1832): Major John Richardson (1796-1852).  Young Richardson
took part in the War of 1812, and has given many first hand accounts of
the affair.  His story is highly coloured, but even so that part of the
narrative dealing with Pontiac is very worth while.

_The Clockmaker, or The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick_ (1836): Thomas
Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865).  Few possess the first editions of all
of Haliburton's humorous works, and even those who do are not likely to
read them through.  For this reason _The Best of Sam Slick_, by P. A.
W. Wallace, or _Sam Slick_, by Ray Palmer Baker, short selections from
the best of this nimble-witted colonial judge, will serve admirably.
While Haliburton's Tory politics and his antipathy to Durham and the
Reformers, are now sadly out of date, his racy descriptions of Nova
Scotia social life are in their way immortal.

Coming to the moderns we cover a wide field, and we can but mention a
few of the titles.  _Anne of Green Gables_, by L. M. Montgomery gives
one a memorable picture of simple home life on the north east coast of
Prince Edward Island.  _Blue Water_, by Frederick William Wallace, is a
robust tale of deep sea fishermen off Nova Scotia.  _The Man From
Glengarry, Black Rock_ and other novels by Ralph Connor contain
forceful narratives about people and localities from Glengarry on the
St. Lawrence to the Rockies.  Mabel B. Dunham in _The Trail of the
Conestoga_, and _Toward Sodom_, tells the story of the Mennonite
settlement in Southern Ontario.  Marian Keith's _Duncan Polite_, and J.
H. McCulloch's _The Men of Kildonan_ record the romance of Scottish
settlement in Ontario and on the Red River.  Frederick Philip Grove
gives a tragic picture of the prairie in _Settlers of the Marsh_.
Grove's autobiographical romance _A Search for America_, perhaps our
best recent novel, provides a memorable picture of the New Canadian
making himself at home among us.  Alan Sullivan's _Under Northern
Lights_ carries us to the great north land, and _The Rapids_ pictures
life on the rivers beyond Ft. William.  A. M. Chisholm's _When Stewart
came to Sitkum_, and _The Downfall of Tremlaham_ by Marius Berbeau,
reflect life and Indian traditions on the coast and along the wild
rivers of British Columbia Laura Goodman Salverson, an Albertan of
Icelandic forbears, has written two books dealing with her people--_The
Viking Heart_ a story of Icelandic settlement on the Prairies, and
_Lord of the Silver Dragon_ a romance of Leif Ericson.  Norman Duncan's
_Dr. Luke of the Labrador_ and kindred tales associated with that bleak
coast are well known.


ii Poetry

_A French_:

When we come to poetry we are in a field which few historians seem able
to appreciate as material for their craft.  They are willing to use
myths and statistics, party songs and caricatures, but poetry, rarely.
Yet, if one wishes to give breath to French Canadian history, one will
find many a fine swinging line in the works of Octave Crmazie
(1827-1879) such as "_Chant du vieux Soldat canadien_", "_Carillon_"
and "_Chant des Voyageurs_." Louis Frchette's _Lgende d'un Peuple_
(1887) also can not well be overlooked.  It makes patriotism lyrical.
Poetry about the flag is always nearly banal, but his "Le Drapeau
fantme--

  Le vieux drapeau francais qui flotte dans le vent!

can be matched by lyrics of beauty and power.  Pamphile LeMay's _Les
Gouttelettes_ (1904), although a long sonnet sequence of unequal
felicity, breathes the spirit of the national social and religious life
of his people.  Blanche Lamontagne has made the spirit of her people
vocal in _Par nos Champs et nos Rives_ (1912).  Over against the charm
of LeMay's pious confidences, and the pastoral simplicity of Blanche
Lamontagne, there stands William Chapman (1850-1917) expressing
patriotic and religious inspirations with the passionate fervor of an
orator in such collections as _Quebcquoises_ (1876), _Les Feuilles
d'Erable_ (1890), and _Rayons du Nord_ (1910).  The younger poets of
Quebec, Albert Lozeau, Emile Nelligan, Ren Chopin, Paul Morin and
others, are chiefly concerned with lyrical protests, and longings after
an elusive beauty.  Alfred Des Rochers is the poet supreme of French
Canadian fields and woods.  The very essence of the Provinces is in his
epic lines.  These reflect more clearly than any social study a new
trend in the thought and life of today in Quebec.  It will be a long
time before the impulse of the Epic School of Quebec exhausts itself,
and in this noble bequest of the lyric heart of New France the
historian, yes, even the scientific historian, may refresh himself as
well as his readers.


_B. English_:

What has been said of French Canada is equally true of the rest of the
Dominion.  From the days when Oliver Goldsmith (1787-1861) the first
native born Canadian poet, a grand nephew of the English poet,
published _The Rising Village_ (1825-1834), down to E. J. Pratt's
_Verses of the Sea_ (1930) there have appeared men and women whose
verse belongs to the record of their times as truly as hansard.  The
first self-conscious note in Canadian imaginative literature was sung
by a poor civil servant, Charles Sangster (1822-1893) in _The St.
Lawrence and the Saguenay_ (1856).  This enchantment with the Canadian
scene was caught up by Charles Mair (1838-1927) in _Dreamland and Other
Poems_ (1869), by that timid and beautiful spirit Isabella Valancy
Crawford (1850-1887) in _Old Spookse's Pass and Malcom's Katie_ (1884)
and by a whole choir, known as the Group of the Sixties, Charles G. D.
Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Wilfred Campbell and Duncan
Campbell Scott.  If Tom Maclnnes' Vancouver Chinatown, Robert Service's
Yukon Days, William Henry Drummond's habitants, Pauline Johnson's
Indian wives and chieftains and voyageurs, if these are memorable
figures in our national life and literature, then you must place along
side _Flint and Feather_, _Songs of a Sourdough_ and the rest, Isabella
Valancy Crawford's vivid pastoral epic "Malcolm's Katie," Roberts'
_Songs of the Common Day_ (1893), Lampman's _Lyrics of Earth_
(definitive edition 1925), Campbell's (1905) and Scott's (1927)
_Collected Poems_, Carman's _Low Tide on Grand Pr_ (1893) and two
later collections, MacDonald's _The Song of the Prairie Land_ (1918)
and _Out of the Wilderness_ (1926), Pratt's _Newfoundland Verse_ (1923)
and Marjorie Pickthall's _Poems_ (1927).  These standard collections
surely ought to be in our school libraries.  The task of making an
anthology could be undertaken by a class, separate authors being
assigned to each student.  There is abundant material available for
French classes in our High Schools, while English poetry covers a wide
range suitable for both Primary and Secondary Grades.

An Anthology of Canadian verse built around the great characters and
events in our history, the pageantry of our seasons, incidents of work
and play, frontier life, and our kindred of the wild, would
appropriately betroth literature to life, and exalt many a page in the
chronicles of our nation.


iii Drama

Canadian drama began with Charles Mair's _Tecumseh_ (1896).  It was not
meant to be acted, and for our purpose has little value.  We can
discover more about Brock and Tecumseh elsewhere, while little that
Mair says illuminates either character in any special sense.  Wilfred
Campbell's _Daulac_ (des ormeaux) (1908) is better, and not a few
passages will be found which can be used with effect.  Duncan Campbell
Scott's _Pierre_, is in the idyllic vein of his short stories in _The
Village of Viger_.  _The Unheroic North_ by Merrill Denison (1923)
attempts to portray in four plays the vigorous and mostly unattractive
life of northern Ontario.  Denison's _Henry Hudson and Other Historical
Plays_ (1931) offers six dramas on as many great characters and
episodes in our history.  This volume lays the foundation of a new
historical drama in Canada.  Although _Canadian Plays from Hart House_
(2 vols.) and similar collections are interesting exhibits in the
history of Canadian Drama, the historian will find little of value for
his purpose.  Much might also be said of Marjorie Pickthall's _The Wood
Carver's Wife_ (1922) perhaps the best one act play we have produced,
as well as plays by Robert Norwood, Mazo de la Roche and others.
Marjorie Pickthall's play centres about Lorette and offers an
unforgettable picture of a half-breed wood carver's passion.

French Canadian drama is not without a history, indeed Lescarbot's
_Histoire de la Nouvelle France_ (1609) records the production of a
play at Port Royal, Champlain being a spectator.  However from Joseph
Quesnel's two comedies and F. A. Marchand's plays to Frre Marie
Victorin's _Charles LeMoyne_ (1925), and _Peuple sans Histoire_ (1925),
we find practically nothing of real significance--at least not for the
historian.


iv Legend

The French Canadian has stood alone in his preoccupation with the
legends of his people.  Perhaps this sort of thing thrives better in
Quebec than elsewhere in Canada.  Be that as it may the body of legend
is great, and of first rate importance to the historian.  We have seen
how it has entered into the historical novels of many English
Canadians, and how Wallace and LeRossignol have worked them up into
delightful literary offerings.  With the French, however, the study and
preservation of these relics of the past is a science.  Among the older
writers we have such works as the following: _Lgendes_ (1860) by Abb
H. R. Casgrain; _Trois Legendes de Mon Pays_ (1876) and _Forestiers et
Voyageurs_ (1884) by Joseph Charles Tach; _Souvenirs et Legendes_
(1877) by P. J. O. Chauveau, and _Contes Vrais_ (1899) by Pamphille
LeMay.  If you add to these Ernest Gagnon's _Chansons Populaires du
Canada, Folk Songs of French Canada_, by Marius Barbeau and Edward
Sapir, and _French Canadian Folk Songs_, by J. Murray Gibbon, you have
an imposing list of first class source material for the historian who
cares to read it.

Marius Barbeau has been indefatigable in collecting French and Indian
folk songs and folk tales.  So vast is the amount of material harvested
that it will require years to put it in shape.  A hint as to the scope
of these researches may be had by a glance at the reports of the
Ethnological Department of the Dominion Government.  Of a more popular
nature are such collections as _Legends of Vancouver_, by Pauline
Johnson, and _Indian Days in the Rockies_ by Marius Barbeau.  There is
the stuff of fiction and history here, as may be seen in B. A.
McKelvie's _The Huldowget_ and Barbeau's _The Downfall of Temlaham_.
It has been a constant source of wonder to me that our writers in their
quest for themes do not utilize this amazing repository of legend, and
folk lore.


v Settlement Sketches and Chroniques

I trust that I have made it sufficiently clear that the historian has
many allies which can enhance the reality and interest of his work.
More might be said regarding the contribution made by our essayists,
our humorists, and the many volumes of published eloquence.  Archibald
MacMechan has shown what an historian may do when wedding the dry
details of documents to the imaginative arts.  _Ultima Thule, Sagas of
the Sea, Old Province Tales, There Go the Ships_ are all collections of
essays, brief but by no means inconsequential.  They possess all the
historical value of scrupulously documented treaties, but they are also
documents humane, full of the breath of life, and instinct with poetry
and the amenities of a superb style.  MacMechan's papers belong to the
group of settlement sketches, that class of book which includes _Winter
Studies and Summer Rambles_, by Anna Jameson, _Roughing it in the
Bush_, by Susanna Moodie, _The Backwoods of Canada_, by Catharine Parr
Traill and such like.  They have to do with the humble annals of simple
but brave men and women.

In a sense De Gasp's _Les Anciens Canadiens_ belongs to this class,
since the love story is negligible and the accounts of other days and
other ways the things which he desires to preserve.  Benjamin Sulte
(1841-1923) was an indefatigable antiquarian, as was his contemporary
Sir James LeMoine.  The complete works of the former are being
published in a great many volumes.  A bibliography of LeMoine would
fill much space.  Charles Mair said of him to William Kirby, "LeMoine
is a Mine".  To him Kirby was indebted for the kernel of his novel _The
Golden Dog_, Parker for the core of _Seats of the Mighty_, Mair himself
for the character of Lefroy in _Tecumseh_, and a host of others for
more or less.  Indeed the French are supreme in frontier chronicles,
from the _Lgends Canadiennes_ (1860) of Abb Henri Raymond Casgrain,
Joseph Charles Tach's _Forestiers et Voyageurs_ (1863), P. J. O.
Chauveau's _Souvenirs et Lgends_ (1877), to the many publications of
Hubert La Rue (1831-1881), Henri Edmond Faucher de Saint-Maurice
(1844-1897), Arthur Buies (1840-1901), and Sir Adolphe Routhier
(1839-1929).  Nols, chroniques and rcits of great value abound in
their work.  Later writers concern themselves with more recent
settlement life.  Frre Marie Victorin's _The Chopping Bee and other
Laurentian Stories_, Adjutor Rivard's _Chez-Nous_ (translated by W. H.
Blake as _Round Home_) Georges Bouchard's _Vieilles Choses, Vieilles
Temps_ (translated as _Other Days, Other Ways_), Mgr. Camille Roy's
_Propos Rustiques_, these and others are gold for the historian.



III CONTRIBUTIONS OF CANADIAN ART

The history of Canadian Art parallels in many ways the history of
Canadian literature.  Both may be taken as commentaries on the
evolution of the Dominion from the colonial status into full
nationhood.  In this section I do not propose to suggest that I am a
critic, much less a connoisseur of Canadian art.  I wish merely to do
one thing; to show as clearly as I can the contribution which an
indigenous art in Canada may make to the new history in which we are
all interested.

Until the superb drawings of C. W. Jefferys, R.C.A. appeared we were at
the mercy of the photoengraver.  Our school histories were surfeited
with grubby daubs of portraits, and other wretched fillers.  But
Jefferys was a true historian as well as an artist of rare insight and
technical skill.  Working long over French and English documents,
verifying his creations to the last button and musket lock, he
constructed the great scenes of our history, from Cartier to the
present, and from Atlantic to Pacific.  He was not content merely with
faithful portraits; what he sought to do was to place his characters in
the proper context of their most significant achievements, Joseph Howe
being carried in triumph from the Old Province building on the
shoulders of his friends, or Alexander MacKenzie in company with his
fellow adventurers gazing upon the waters of the Pacific, or Sieur de
la Verendrye with his companions looking westward to the shining
mountains.  One has only to look into _The Story of Canada_, by Wrong,
Martin and Sage to realize what a revolution he has made.  So great has
been his industry that we hope before long to have a complete pictorial
history of Canada by him.  A hint as to the completeness of his work
may be had by reference to The Ryerson Canadian History Readers, in
which scores of his creations appear.

The work of C. W. Jefferys has inspired the thought which underlies
this section.  It is briefly this.  When our writers have been shown to
offer material for the enrichment of almost every period of our history
in imaginative prose and in verse, why can we not reach out for the
works of our artists, who are able to illuminate the Canadian scene,
its glorious landscape and seascape, and the various features of
community, frontier and industrial life?  I shall endeavour to show
that this material is ready to hand.

You are all familiar with the topographical scenes drawn by English
military men.  They avoided figure work, but what they did is useful as
documents are.  The sketches by the explorers, such as Champlain,
Hennepin, LaHontan, LaPoterie and others belong to the same class.
Richard Short, who visited Canada in 1759-1760, has left a number of
excellent engravings which are too well known to require comment.  They
were a long step forward in historical illustration.  The next
significant date is 1842, when _Canadian Scenery_ (2 vols.) appeared
with the excellent plates by W. H. Bartlett.  Forty years later this
idea was developed in _Picturesque Canada_, edited by George Munro
Grant, and illustrated by such artists as Lucius O'Brien, F. M.
Bell-Smith, Robert Harris and others.  It has always been a mystery to
me why these plates by Short, Bartlett and the artists in _Picturesque
Canada_ have not been more frequently used in our school histories.  If
the aim of history is to acquaint the student with the country of his
birth or adoption, surely such illustrations as these have their place.

As in literature so in art, the European tradition was strong at the
beginning.  Most of the artists were born abroad, studied there, and
took their cues from the Paris salons.  In spite of that numbers of
them were fascinated by the Canadian scene.  Paul Kane (1810-1871) was
the first.  Born in Ireland he settled in York with his parents, in
1819.  His great contribution was made in _Wanderings of an Artist
among the Indians of North America_ (1843).  These paintings are
authentic documents, and we should be the poorer without A Blackfoot
Chief, The Buffalo Pound, and many more.  A monograph on this artist is
badly needed, together with reproductions in colour of his chief
canvases.

Kane was followed by Cornelius Krieghoff (1812-1872).  From his
birthplace in Dusseldorf he went to Montreal, and has left many fine
things.  He was the pioneer painter, as Charles Sangster was the
pioneer poet, of Canadian landscape.  His beautiful paintings of Quebec
landscapes and the habitant are a part of the record of that time, and
might supplant giddy looking sketches of storming parties and
blockhouses.

Fully to sketch the artists who belong in a vital way to Canadian
history would require more knowledge than I possess.  It may not be
impertinent, however, to mention a few names with which I am familiar.
The name James Wilson Morrice (1869-1924) suggests itself, with his
fine interpretations of the Canadian scene, particularly of Quebec
village life.  Horatio Walker has made the Ile d'Orleans his own.
There you will find Habitant life--all of it.  Few get any farther than
his "Oxen Drinking."  Other Quebec names come to mind.  Maurice G.
Cullen, a Newfoundlander, who was selected for the Canadian War
Memorial Commission, has given us many good things beside "In Lower
Town, Quebec," and "Ice Harvest."  Clarence Gagnon's "Quebec Village",
"Wayside Cross", "The Races on the River" and others are human
documents of real value for our purpose.  Edwin Holgate has done fine
work in perpetuating the totems and human types of the Coast Indians,
while his wood cuts for Other Days and Other Ways are truly remarkable.
Robert Pilot's sketches of Quebec town and country life, Suzor-Cote's
sculpture work of Maria Chapdelaine, and Indian Women of Caughnawaga,
his paintings "The Breviary", "Street in Arthabasca" and his explorers
and coureurs-de-bois are all grist for our mill.  Louis Philippe
Hrbert's statues, Bishop Laval, Georges Etienne Cartier, Maisonneuve
and Evangeline are deservedly popular, although sculpture does not lend
itself to book illustration.

In Ontario the work of A. Y. Jackson "A Winter Road", "Entrance to
Halifax Harbor", "November, Lake Superior" and his line drawings made
on an arctic trip, are vigorous, and belong to the native Canadian
school both as to spirit and technique.  J. E. H. MacDonald, a member
of the Group of Seven, can not be ignored.  His "Solemn Land", and
"Nova Scotia Coast" are samples of several vivid pieces.  Jeffery's
water colours of the prairies, John Innes, paintings and ink drawing of
British Columbia historical episodes, these are but hints of what the
historian may find if he looks ever so casually.

Caricature has a place in historical illustration.  We have no Max
Beerbohm and no Spy, but this sort of thing should be encouraged.  The

humorist and the caricaturist both have their place in the record.
John W. Bengough's work in _Grip_ is perhaps the most familiar artistic
satire we possess, but the names of Sam Hunter, of the _Globe_, and A.
C. Racey of the _Montreal Star_ are worth keeping in mind.  It would be
an interesting pastime for some student of Canadian history to go
through our newspapers, and make a list of the best of Canadian
caricature.



IV MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS

You will remember a remark made by the old book collector in _The Crime
of Sylvestre Bonard_: "There is no reading more easy, more fascinating,
and more delightful than that of a catalogue."  If you have not
experienced that pleasure you ought to read _The Amenities of Book
Collecting_ by A. Edward Newton, and _Books and Bidders_, by Dr.
Rosenbach.  Personally I can think of no hobby which offers such rare
enjoyment as that of book collecting.  This is what I mean by the
magnificent obsession.

A medieval book seller has left us this choice morsel:

  Still am I busy bookes assemblynge,
  For to have plentie is a pleasant thynge,
  In my conceyt, and to have them ay in hande,
  But what they mene do I not understande.

No doubt there is good fun in that, although it too much resembles a
war-time millionaire lining the walls of his library with sets of the
classics in de luxe bindings.  Incunabula is a fine field for the
collector, but if he can not read the old books what is the use?  I
have in mind an obsession for books which one not only can understand,
but which one may also love.

We are incurably acquisitive.  Some collect stamps, engravings,
porcelains and autographs.  Others are satisfied only with Rembrandts,
gems or trophies of the hunt.  Indians were addicted to scalps, the
gentlemen of Borneo wanted whole heads.  Henry Ford has a taste for
dilapidated saw mills and old inns.  The things which men horde are as
variable as men themselves, running the gamut from wives in India to
walking sticks in Sackville.

It is interesting to recall that such great national libraries as the
British Museum, the Bodleian, the Sorbonne, the Smithsonian, the
Vatican, the Congressional and the Dominion Archives, have owed many of
their proudest collections to humble men who have carried on their
hobby in inconspicuous places.  There are homes, some of them castles
of grandees others of less exalted men, which have enshrined libraries
that are the boast of their nations.  Succeeding generations of heirs
have added to the treasure room with industry and taste, and today
their value is past computing.  The breaking up of many of these
ancestral houses has provided a rich hunting ground for millionaire
book collectors in the United States, as the Huntington Library in
California, the Clements Library in Michigan, the Morgan Library in New
York, and many more attest.

There have always been splendid buccaneers in the book collecting
business, from the days when Richelieu carried off an entire library
down to Dr. Rosenbach, to whom $100,000 for a book means little.  To
these lords of the industry a Shakespeare First Folio, a Caxton's _Le
Morte d'Arthur_ or a _Kilmarnock_ Burns are mere trifles.  In making a
plea for more book collectors in Canada I do not mean to suggest that
you should aim to annex a _Titus Andronicus_, or a _Boccacio_, a
_Tamerlaine_ or an _Endymion_, presentation copies, and of course
perfect "with all points."  These are excellent in their way, but that
is not what I am urging now.  I am thinking of the student of Canadian
history and Canadian literature, a person with good judgment but small
resources and little leisure, who chooses wisely and well, whose
imagination foresees the tremendous value such trifles as broadsheets,
letters, MSS and contemporary first editions will have fifty or a
hundred years hence.

I hope many of you will collect Canadiana.  There are but two
requirements necessary.  First you should know what you like, travel,
poetry, maps or illustrations, and of these know what is authentic and
potentially valuable.  Then you must study the fine art of patience,
and be willing to wait years for the missing items to turn up.  J. P.
Morgan or Henry Huntington can call in the best book agents on the five
continents, taking the beauties at their will no matter what they cost.
Others must watch and wait.  Don Vincente the Spanish monk coveted a
rare _Lamberto Palmart_ (Valencia, 1482) and when the owner would not
part with it he burned the house down and his enemy with it, but he got
the book!  Today our methods are more subtle, but scarcely less
persistent.  We do not plunder chateaux and abbeys for Gutenberg Bibles
and such like, but we are unforgetting and unrelenting none the less.
The remorseless hunt goes on in old houses, dilapidated book shops, and
dusty bargain bins, ever hoping that the treasure we seek will be in
the hands of an unwary dealer or an innocent owner!

There is a third requirement.  One can not buy up the universe, so one
must draw a circle round that field or that author which one decides to
collect.  One must know all about the writer or the period to collect
wisely, and one must aim to make it perfect.  A little bit of
everything will not do.  Far better to have a complete Cook,
Haliburton, or Frchette than to possess ragged ends of a score or
more.  Early works of travel, old journals, historical paintings,
engravings and holograph letters are for the few.  Harry Widener left
to Harvard University, his alma mater, that fatal day when he went down
on the Titanic with a rare copy of Bacon's _Essays_ in his pocket, one
of the most remarkable libraries ever assembled.  He was only
twenty-seven but he had wealth, leisure and an encyclopaedic knowledge
of the field.  What Harry Widener did, you in your own way may do.  Up
and down the land, in old homes, in out of the way places, on book
stalls there are awaiting you precious things which will give your
library distinction, and should you some day offer it to your college,
you will make it a mecca.  Few will be able to have agents bid for them
at Sotheby's in London, or at the Anderson-American Art Galleries in
New York; let the archives attend to that.  All of you may repeat the
thrilling experience of those who have come upon forgotten cupboards
and dusty store-rooms in Canada, and have brought to light priceless
documents from the early days of the Colony.

We should have an art centre in all our country towns.  A canvas added
each year will mean a great deal in fifty years.  The taste of our
people generally is unspeakable.  The prints which adorn the walls of
our schools are ghastly.  If we can not afford a proper art gallery,
let us not wait, but use the reception halls of our schools or public
buildings.

We should have archives in every county town, and if possible a museum
attached.  Our county town libraries are frequently pathetic.  The
walls are lined with fiction from the ends of the earth, but few of
them have a decent representative collection of Canadiana.  Possibly
not more than a score of them make any attempt to gather in historical
data relating to the parishes and townships within their borders.
Governments and councils have funds for highways and drains, but it
requires a major operation to secure a grant for a rare book.
Everything should not go to Ottawa.  Every county should be proud of
local and national history and literature, and should fill a treasure
room.  Here is where you come in.  The archivist or the librarian can
not be everywhere, but he may have the hundred sleepless eyes of Argus
and the hundred untiring arms of Briareus, through your co-operation.

We should have many more local historical and literary societies.  A
great deal yet needs to be done in the study of local history and
tradition, place names, genealogies and so on.  Parish registers,
commonplace books, diaries, scrap books, correspondence, family records
and such like are the stuff out of which history and even literature
are made.

There is not one of you who might not become distinguished in some
branch of Canadiana.  Such collections as those of Dr. J. C. Webster of
Shediac, Dr. Victor Morin of Montreal, Mr Justice Riddell of Toronto,
The Honourable Dr Rutherford of Edmonton, Dr James Maclean of Winnipeg,
and Judge F. W. Howay of New Westminster all began with one book.  The
finest collection of Maritime poets in Canada is owned by a railway
official in Toronto, R. H. Hathaway, who for thirty years has gathered
in one book or pamphlet or broadsheet at a game.  If I offer any advice
to you it would be this: (I) Single out one writer and learn all you
can about him.  You will discover the lacunae and will desire to fill
these in.  Gather first editions, in perfect condition.  Keep scrap
books, note books and picture albums about him.  Out of such simple
material William Kirby wrought his _Golden Dog_, and every other book
he wrote.  Major John Richardson used his note books for his novels and
histories.  Phillipe Aubert De Gasp built _Les Anciens Canadiens_ out
of his notes and reminiscences in which he had shepherded the
traditions of his people.  Why name others?  (II) Find out those who
have made a study of your specialty, and profit by their mistakes and
successes.  It will save you time and money.  (III) Keep a card index
of your collection, entering on it title, author, publisher, date and
place, interesting points about the book, binding, etc.  (IV) If there
is no check list of the author or subject you intend to make your hobby
enlist the assistance of the archives and leading librarians.  Never go
it blind.  Someday we shall have a bibliographical society in Canada
which will make the work easier for all of us.  (V) A complete
collection of Haliburton or Carman is probably impossible today, and at
the best you will have to wait a considerable time between purchases.
In such cases it would be well to have a running mate less difficult,
say a Lampman, Pickthall, Garneau or Kirby.  (VI) And finally, be sure
to keep a scrap book for your writers, and another for locals.  Keep a
note book for these also, and another in which you can jot down
conversations with old people, notes on rare books in your community,
monument inscriptions, parish registers, folk songs and folk tales,
copy important letters and other documents, and make sketches of
historic places.  Had it not been for a few such passing notes by a few
acquaintances we should know nothing about Shakespeare the man.  The
Gospels, indeed, grew out of scattered reminiscences, and a few records
of the sayings of Jesus.  There is nothing trivial to the historian.



V ADVENTURES IN LOCAL HISTORY


i Amateur Antiquarians

In addition to what I have said regarding the necessity for building up
a library of source material in poetry, fiction, community chronicles
and so on, the importance of Canadian art in searching the history of
our country, and the educational value to be derived from the thrilling
book collecting game, or the acquisitive game in general, there are
other useful and interesting activities, which should commend
themselves to the average school.

Any little red school house can have a museum of local interest, and
value.  "Local history, if used properly, brings general history within
the limits of the child's experience and so makes it more real."[2]
While no set time should be given for a "class" in local history it
ought to be vividly present in every course of history and literature.
Local records, legends, and myths are the foundation of history.
Community chronicles might be "built" round central themes insuring
definiteness.  Old letters, speeches, maps, interesting events in the
lives of local folk, illustrations, photographs, documents or copies of
them of many sorts, parish minutes and extracts from parish registers,
transcriptions of monuments and drawings of ruins and landmarks,
military records, place names, genealogies and short notes on local
settlement, races, religious denominations, customs and the like.

This practice generally followed, and the results carefully preserved,
would not only assist historians but make historians as well.  It
combines the best features of the source method and the problem method.
[3]By this the student learns how to be critical and thoughtful, to
verify the subject, and is stimulated to further reading and research
without compulsion, through the kindling of his constructive
imagination.

"Happy is that boy who, having so 'grown up with' the story of his
country, can people the fields and lanes of his home with the figures
of the past; can hear the clatter of Rupert's horsemen down the village
street, and can picture the good monks catching baskets full of trout
in the stream, (there were more trout in it before the Reformation)
wherein he is failing to get a rise."[4]


ii History as Drama

The historical pageant has a useful function in teaching as you well
know.  I am not thinking of the pageant which is already written and
only requires rehearsal, some more or less elaborate presentation of an
historic episode quite unrelated to the story of our nation.  I have in
mind something quite different.  There are interesting events in the
three hundred years of our history which lend themselves to
reproduction.  If possible they should be given out of doors, on the
bank of some river or lake.  Historical drawings provide ample data
regarding costumes, weapons, implements and such like, which can all be
made at home.  The main thing is to capture the spirit of the episode,
whether it be the Order of Good Cheer, or a frontier Husking Bee, the
landing of Cartier or an old time political hustings.  Not every
community will believe that it has a local history sufficiently
interesting to work up into a pageant, but L. M. Montgomery had simple
material for _Anne of Green Gables_ and Mabel Dunham for the _Trail of
the Conestoga_.  The chief thing is to reconstruct and interpret the
past, making it vivid and meaningful.  We require more opportunities
for the exercise of latent dramatic talent.  The teaching of history
and literature both stand to gain hereby, but the boy and girl will
gain most in character, understanding, and enjoyment.  The Drama in
Canada will find the soil thereby enriched, promoting a growth in
power, subtlety and persuasiveness, which it has hitherto not enjoyed.


iii History as Art

Other activities may be undertaken in the local community which will
build upon the pleasure instinct of the student, (and of his parents as
well) and contribute directly to good scholarship and good citizenship
to boot.  We have seen how history and literature both gain through
hobbies, the play habit and in other ways.  As we acquire new skills
and develop old ones, we grow in confidence, in ripeness, in subtlety,
and thus it is that the Arts touch hands.  The drawing lesson can
contribute new by-products also.  The student may link up his study of
design composition, draftsmanship, with those features of literature
and history in which he found great enjoyment.  He may make real models
of buildings or architects' plans of them, sketch panoramas, draw the
tools, implements and weapons of the period, show by drawings the
evolution of the home exterior, of costumes, chairs and conveyances,
illustrate man's conquest of the world by reproducing charts and maps
of several ages, or indicate the changing ideas in pottery making or
statuary, by drawings of representative pieces.  The range is wide and
need only be indicated.  Both Art and History will take on new interest
and significance.  Should the class undertake to "build a book" the
illustrations are ready to hand.  The camera club will provide others.
The chief thing is to enter artistically into the study of man's story,
more particularly of Canada's story, and the story of the home
community, just as I suggested a moment ago, that we should likewise
enter into all of it dramatically.


iv The Beloved Community

The other suggestion is that inter-community gatherings of school
children should be encouraged.  This idea has been worked out on the
continent, at Chteau de Bierville (near Etampes), at Freiburg, and at
Bedales School, England.

The New Canadians within our gates come together with us in their
native costume, tell about their own national inheritance, relate the
stirring deeds of their homeland, exhibit illustrations of their native
industries, homes, public buildings, landscapes, and works of art.
Native born Canadians will endeavor to match these with similar
narratives and exhibits.  They will all learn that citizenship in a new
country as well as citizenship in the world demands a fine sense of
mutual sympathy, of interdependence, of solidarity.  Differences are
chiefly superficial, and the similarities profound,--the imponderables.
Life takes on new meaning as a quest all make together, and Canadian
citizenship a free and glad exchange of the best each has to offer.
This inter-community gathering of school children in Canada, if
encouraged between French and English boys and girls each learning to
speak the Mother-tongue of the other, would achieve a lasting _bonne
entente_.  What I wish very much to stress is this, we must teach
history better in order that we shall make better history to teach.  By
every possible means let us encourage "a sense of history as the common
adventure of all mankind," for this, as Mr. H. G. Wells declares, "is
as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations."



VI THE MAGIC OF THE SOIL

Throughout these lectures I have tried to show that whatever of
literature or art possesses life must send down its roots deep into the
native soil.  In the rich loam of our national experience they will
find character and nourishment.  There is a virtue, a vitality, in
being wedded to the soil which the air plants of art and literature can
never know.  I have also tried to show how the best of these
achievements in the realm of imaginative experience may, and must, be
incorporated in the writing of our new Canadian histories.

A remarkable book has recently come to my attention; it is John Dewey's
_Impressions of Soviet Russia_. (N. Y. 1929)  He has an illuminating
chapter on Education which illustrates a theory which I have been
working out for some time.  Dr. Dewey shows that the Russian schools
are the "ideaological arm of the revolution."  Their method has been
based partly on Tolstoy's version of Rousseau's doctrine of freedom and
partly on the methods for the formation of social attitudes borrowed
from University Settlements in the United States.  They have also
borrowed from America the theory of the value of productive labour.  In
other words, they recognise that the aims and methods of education are
affected by varying economic, political and social conditions.

The Russian educationists have set out to study the actual conditions
in which the children live at home.  They aim at interpreting their
acts in the light of these environing conditions just as a physician
would.  Having studied the social causations in the various areas, they
were next compelled to consider history, geography, language and
literature in the light of them.  Upon these discoveries they based
their projects, that is, "the conscious control of every educational
procedure by reference to a single and comprehensive social purpose."
(p. 76)

Of course the theory has been carried to rather weird extremes.  It
would seem to promise the dissolution of the family life, the
destruction of collective worship and many more.  Lenin foresaw all
this and said: "The school, apart from life, apart from politics, is a
lie, a hypocrisy."  He might have said, that his theory of the ends of
education was no worse than the malicious principle of
industrialization in America, whereby the pupil was trained for
individualism and personal competition.  Be that as it may, we are not
here debating the question.  It is enough to say that their ideal is,
whatever the actual conditions may be, "the union of general culture
with efficiency of labour, and power to share in public life.... the
development of the population in the spirit of communism."

This is not vocational training, as we understand it.  While they aim
to discover individual capacities, so that students may become
"socially useful", vocational training and technical instruction are
postponed until "a general technological and scientific-social
foundation has been laid." (p. 89)

Uniformity in education ends with this initial foundation course in
communistic ethics.  "Each province has its own experimental school,
that supplements the work of the central or federal experimental
station, by studying local resources, materials and problems with a
view to adapting school work to them." (p. 95) Each local school
district becomes an educational laboratory, in which the pupils take an
intelligent part.  They not only are conducted on exploratory trips and
taught to observe for themselves, but they also collect for the school
museum such flora, fauna, minerals and other data as they select on
their individual and collective excursions.

Textbooks are also adapted to the local environment.  There is no such
thing as a provincial authorization.  Each book is designed to meet the
social and industrial needs of the particular area.  They hope that in
this way cultural independence may be achieved, at the same time
avoiding superiority complexes and racial prejudices through the
knowledge of similar experiments being conducted in a great number of
experimental schools.  This may sound complex, but it is really not so
in practice.  In building up the curricula they avoid splitting up the
studies into a confusing array of compulsory and elective courses.  The
official statement of the central committee says: "The study of human
work and its organization" shall be the integrating centre of all
school classes.  Teachers shall have "recourse to the experience of
humanity--so that the local phenomena may be connected with national
and international industrial life."

To achieve this the teachers themselves must be students.  Teachers in
the West relate their subjects to a variety of purposes, but in Russia
there is but one objective.  So it is that the student-teacher and his
classes pursue nature study, inquire into local customs and traditions,
inspect sanitation, observe horticultural and agricultural methods,
visit art galleries and criticize everything from methods in hygiene to
madness in political history, and all this with "socially useful work"
as the acid test.  Krupshaia, Lenin's widow, now in the federal
department of education, has this to say regarding education in the
present rgime: "Its purpose is to enable every human being to obtain
personal cultivation.... (and) to share to the full in all the things
that give value to human life."

There is much in this that should commend itself to us.  The time will
never come perhaps when education will be entirely divorced from
propaganda of any sort, that is propaganda in its best sense.  Whether
the aim be political, social, industrial, aesthetic or moral, whether
it is any or all of these, we would do well to remember the Russian
experiment, and relate them to the local environment and to local
needs, having at all times "recourse to the experience of humanity."

This would be especially fruitful in the teaching of history and
literature.  I can fancy few experiments more pregnant with interest
and good results than that of putting these subjects in closer contact
with what I call the magic of the soil.  There are many areas in our
country where the soil is fertile in romance and warm with the
throbbing life of the spirit.  From Annapolis Royal, and the Tantramar,
to the shores mapped by Cook, three hundred years have left their rich
deposit.  Surely we would do well to plant our teaching of history and
literature in these, sure in the confidence that our boys and girls
will kindle at the remembrance of those high deeds and sweet songs, and
keep alive the fires upon the altars of remembrance.  It is a privilege
to have been born within sight of Beausejour and the "journeying tides
of Fundy", to know that near here stood Westcock Parsonage, the cradle


of a self conscious Canadian literature.  No youth should go out of
these schools without high pride in these men and these traditions.
Life comes out of life, and if ever we are to achieve better things we
will of necessity have to graft the new branches to these study trees
of an elder day.  We have spoken at length of the sources of national
solidarity, of the aims and methods of education as applied to history,
of the contributions of the spirit to the enrichment of our national
epic, but it all simmers down to this.  The effectiveness with which we
teach the story of our country, and inspire a lively and intelligent
pride in it, will depend upon our success in building the community,
its needs, its achievements, its spirit, into the fabric of the whole
nation.  Each parish and school district will then become a local
experimental station, self conscious and self directed, and like the
mythical warrior, its strength doubled with each contact with the soil.

A moment ago I said that we must teach history better in order that we
shall make better history.  It is an enterprise in which the whole
community becomes student, discoverer and adventurer, among the great
legacies of the past, in order that some new legacy may be bequeathed
to the future.  This affects us as citizens of Canada.  Loving the
fruitful soil, ravished by the beauty of landscape and seascape,
stirred by the deeds of three centuries of master builders and home
makers, kindled by artists and writers who have drunk deep the wine of
our life, participating in the humble tasks of nation building, this
Dominion, my country, becomes mine in so many ways that no one can ever
take it from me.

Absorbed in its story I have become in turn, explorer, husbandman,
artist, poet, dramatist, craftsman and neighbour.  My ideas have
significance because they have taken root in this soil.  My hunger for
beauty and desires of the spirit were born here, and must ever find
their satisfaction here.

"There is no more precious element in our national heritage than the
sturdy individualism which bids defiance alike to subjection and
standardization.  The visualization of this great inheritance of
traditions and deeds guarantees the continuity and significance of our
national life, and commands individual and collective responsibility."

_Thou hast inherited Sparta: Adorn her!_



[1] Translated (Canadians of Old) by Georgiana M. Penne, Desbarants,
Quebec, 1864.  (Seigneur D'Haberville, Musson, Toronto, 1929.) Also by
Charles G. D. Roberts (Cameron of Lochiel) L. C. Page, Boston, 1905.

[2] The Teaching of History.  By C. H. Jarvis, Oxford, 1917.  p. 46.

[3] The Teaching of History in Junior and Senior High Schools.  By R.
M. Tryon.  Ginn and Go., 1921.  Vide Chap. IV.  Modern Elementary
School Practice.  By G. E. Freeland.  MacMillan, 1919.  Vide Chaps. II,
III.

Supervised Study in American History.  By M. E. Simpson.  MacMillan,
1919.

[4] Introductory History of England.  By C. R. L. Fletcher, (Preface.)




Transcriber's note:

The word "franais" and its variants sometimes have c-cedilla,
sometimes not (franais vs. francais).  We have not attempted
to standardize these spellings.




[End of New History for Old, by Lorne Pierce]
