distinguish Haliburton as a man of letters. He was a first-rate satirist
or epigrammatist, narrative and descriptive writer, anecdotist or
raconteur, character-delineator, nature-painter, and, in one respect, he
was a prose stylist of first rank. Such versatility is unusual and even
exceptional, and seemingly marks Haliburton as a specially gifted
writer. But Haliburton’s versatility also exhibits certain
peculiarities. Oddly, though he is saliently the humorist or satirist or
aphorist or story-teller or descriptive writer or nature-painter or
character-limner in one or another of his works, he is, almost without
exception, all these in any work. More oddly, while a certain gift or
power predominates in a given work, all his works, taken successively,
disclose no development of powers either in invention or in literary
mechanics. There are differences in each successive work, but only of
sheer _variety_ in literary substance, not of greater and still greater
advance in novel conception and artistic handling of his matter.
Summarily: Haliburton’s gifts in humorous story-telling and aphoristic
wit and wisdom are salient in the first and second series of _The
Clockmaker_, _Wise Saws_, _Nature and Human Nature_, and _The Season
Ticket_. His gifts in narration and description are salient in _The
Clockmaker_, _The Attaché_, and _The Old Judge_. His gifts in
character-portraiture and naturalistic description are salient in _The
Old Judge_. But if any work contains all Haliburton’s best
qualities—ingenious and unfailing invention, novel and colorful
imagination, rare perception of the humorous and ludicrous, acute
insight into human nature, and extraordinary powers of vivid narration
and realistic description—that work is _The Old Judge; or, Life in a
Colony_.
As a satirist Haliburton employed two forms—realistic satire and
humorous exaggeration or mendacity (‘tall stories’ Haliburton called the
latter). A prime example of his realistic satire is his description of a
fashionable wedding in London; another of a ‘rube’ or bucolic wedding in
Slickville, both in _The Attaché_. In this sort of ‘take-off’ Haliburton
has never been surpassed by modern journalistic humorists. A first-rate
example of Haliburton’s gifts in humorous mendacity or burlesque is his
‘tall story’ of the sale of his horse Mandarin as related in _Nature and
Human Nature_. This is the prototype of Westcott’s horse deal burlesques
in his _David Harum_. More in the manner made familiar by Mark Twain is
the humorous mendacity of Haliburton’s tales of ‘The Gouging School’ and
‘The Black Stole,’ both in _The Attaché_. There are anticipations
a-plenty of the Mark Twain manner of ironic exaggeration and mordant
satire in the second series of _The Clockmaker_, _The Old Judge_, and
_The Season Ticket_.
As a Humorist Haliburton obtained his effects—and won his popularity
with all classes—by character typification, story-telling, aphorisms,
epigrams, and homely moral maxims, jests, waggish conceits, jocular
phrases, and puns, including _double entendres_. He employed two methods
of character typification; one being humorous definition; the other,
humorous classification. Almost all Haliburton’s characters have names
that are essentially what we mean by nick-names, to indicate distinctive
mental or moral qualities of the individuals. It is by this method,
rather than by character-drawing, that Haliburton succeeded in
individualizing each character. It is the method of individualization by
suggestion. The name Sam _Slick_, for instance, at once conveys the type
of individual or character, namely, the kind of person who ‘lives by his
wits,’ who gains profit by subtle or sharp practice. Such a person is
‘slick,’ an epithet derived by a vulgar pronounciation of the adjective
‘sleek.’ Other instances are The Honourable Lucifer _Wolfe_, The
Honourable Alden _Gobble_, General Conrad _Corncob_, Captain Ebeneezer
_Fathom_, Mr. _Pettifog_ the Justice, _Nabb_ the police constable,
Deacon _Flint_, Rev. Joshua _Hopewell_, Dr. _Query_, and Old _Blowhard_.
The moral connotations of these nick-names are obvious, but Haliburton
himself in the proper place always names the character and adds a
summary of moral qualities to show the aptness of the name and its
connotation. The Honourable Alden Gobble is satirically or humorously
thus named because he was ‘dyspeptic and suffered great oneasiness arter
[and from] eatin’.’ A signal example of Haliburton’s method of
typification by humorous classification is found in _The Clockmaker_,
(third series, chapter 13). There he classifies patriots into ‘rebel
patriots, mahogany patriots, spooney patriots, place patriots, and raal
genu_ine_ patriots.’
General popular character types which are familiar in American humor
indubitably had their prototypes in Haliburton’s characters. Sam Slick,
as a horse trader, is the prototype of David Harum; and, as an aphorist
and practical philosopher, is the prototype of Mr. Dooley. Mrs. Figg in
Haliburton’s _Letter-Bag_ is the prototype of Shillaber’s Mrs.
Partington. In the same work Haliburton has an ‘enfant terrible’ who is
the prototype of Peck’s ‘Bad Boy’ and of later examples of ‘awful
children,’ down to Tarkington’s Penrod.
Haliburton was an egregious punster, and he even indulged in _double
entendres_ which were coarse and sometimes obscene, but which may be
excused on account of their humorous point or satiric wit. As an
anecdotist, ‘spinner of yarns,’ ‘tall stories,’ ‘stretchers,’ with a
decided tendency to employ the coarse and irreverent, Haliburton
anticipated similar traits in Mark Twain, as in Twain’s _Roughing It_
and _Innocents Abroad_. Haliburton’s occasional coarseness and
irreverence are to be explained by his hatred of sham and insincerity,
of conventionalized prudery, of concealed indecency of thought, of the
real evil caused by men and women who are outwardly ‘whited sepulchres.’
It must, however, be admitted that, traceable to his Border Scots
ancestry, there was in him a love of plebeian or coarse fun for its own
sake. But it must also be said that his coarseness of wit was never
based on impurity of heart, and that he had the highest respect for the
moral beauty and dignity of womanhood. He did remark playfully the
engaging vanities and foibles of women, but for pure love and motherhood
and all the sweet charities of woman he had the finest and tenderest
respect. Unsurpassed in world literature is Haliburton’s tender and holy
sublimation of woman’s spiritual winsomeness and dignity, as in this
immortal metaphor:—
A woman has two smiles which an angel might envy; the smile that
accepts a lover before the words are uttered, and the smile that
lights on the first-born baby and assures him of a mother’s
love.
As to the original humor of Haliburton’s ingenious metaphors, similes,
outlandish coinage of expressive word morphology (such as
‘absquotulate,’ ‘spiflicate,’ ‘conflustigation,’ ‘conniption fit,’
reechoed in Artemus Ward and Josh Billings), and of his wealth of
aphoristic wit and wisdom, so much are they in the permanent warp and
woof of the popular literature of humor and of common speech that they
need not here be specially remarked and illustrated.
But there is one matter in which Haliburton has not been properly
appreciated, and which demands fresh treatment. He has been charged with
a lack of prose style. The truth is that Haliburton not only wrote with
a positive Theory of Style in mind, but also anticipated Matthew Arnold
and Herbert Spencer by actually publishing his theory or philosophy of
prose style. Those who criticized Haliburton as a stylist did so without
knowing that he had actually applied a definite theory of style to his
structure and color. From that point of view, the critics of Haliburton
as a stylist were irrelevant. But they also missed or ignored the fact
that he was, if infrequently, a master of descriptive prose style.
Haliburton formulates his theory of prose style in two works—in _The
Attaché_, and in _Wise Saws_ (chapter 19). The first work contains his
‘Apologia’ for his _utilitarian_ style; the second briefly explains the
_psychology_ of his style. The ‘Apologia’ justifies, as Matthew Arnold
would have justified, a certain promiscuity and rise and fall in his
style; the second work anticipates Spencer’s philosophy of the
conservation of mental energies as applied to particular styles.
Haliburton himself distinguishes between his conversational, colloquial,
humoristic—his consciously _utilitarian_—style, and his artificial or
literary—his _aesthetic_—style as in his descriptive prose.
In _The Attaché_ he points out, in what we have called his ‘Apologia,’
that his aims, which were utilitarian, did not call for either
architectonic skill or verbal artistry, but that his colloquial, loose,
prolix, promiscuous, repetitious, diffuse, and digressive style in _The
Clockmaker_ and _The Attaché_ was inevitable and was consciously adopted
as best fitted to the heterogeneous themes or matter of these works.
‘Prolixity,’ he adds, ‘was unavoidable from another cause. In order to
attain my [practical] objects, I found it expedient so to intermingle
humor with the several topics as to render subjects attractive that in
themselves are generally considered too deep and dry for general
reading.’
In particular, Haliburton justifies his sentential structure on
psychological grounds. In _Wise Saws_ he says that he purposely designed
the structure and rhythms of his sentences so that their length and
abrupt translations would spur the mind to attention, and that he
employed a conversational style and dialogue to create interest and keep
the attention alive. He wished his works, since they had a utilitarian
end, to be read by all classes. He resolved to adapt the style of his
works to assuring their popularity—‘in the parlor and the kitchen.’ His
themes were discursive and therefore he resolved that the stylistic
treatment should be discursive. So Haliburton consciously employed a
style which, by novelty of dress, by being written in natural language
and illustrated with droll humor, and which by colloquial sentential
structure would, like ‘oral chat,’ sustain interest or excite attention,
and inevitably be read in the parlor and the kitchen. ‘Why is it,’ asks
Sam Slick in the _Wise Saws_, ‘if you _read_ a book to a man you set him
asleep? Just because it is a book and the language ain’t common. Why is
it if you _talk_ to him he will sit up all night with you? Just because
it’s talk, the language of natur’.’
Haliburton’s humoristic or utilitarian prose style is justified, as he
himself justified it, by its successful adaption of means to end. In his
‘Apologia’ he noted the ‘unprecedented circulation’ of his works on
‘both sides of the Atlantic.’ He wrote _The Clockmaker_ in a people’s
style for people’s ends, and the style, in his own view, admirably
succeeded. We must therefore hold that academic criticism which scores
Haliburton’s humoristic style on the ground that it is loose, prolix,
repetitious, digressive, vulgar, colloquial, that it is not ‘_fine_
style,’ commits the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. In the writing of
humoristic, utilitarian, conversational style, precisely adapted to its
end, Haliburton was a master. But he was also, at least on occasion or
whenever he essayed fine style, as in his descriptive prose, especially
of Nature, an artist of first rank, worthy of a place beside Ruskin,
Stevenson, and Hardy.
As regards Haliburton’s aesthetic style we may instance as example of
graphic realism in ‘local color’ his description of the dress and
characteristics of an Acadian people (_Nature and Human Nature_) and of
a Low German people (_The Old Judge_). An example of his fine artistry
in painting social life is his idyllic picture of the home of Captain
Collingwood’s sister, Aunt Thankful (_Wise Saws_). As a picture of the
sweet and gracious social life in old colonial days, it is a
masterpiece. But for sheer pathos of ‘thoughts that lie too deep for
tears,’ Haliburton’s description of the Duke of Kent’s Lodge, against a
background of Nature (_The Clockmaker_, third series), is worthy of
Ruskin or Hardy.
But Haliburton’s _forte_ in descriptive prose was naturalistic
impressionism. In the technique of nature-painting Haliburton employed
the whole palette of pigmentation, but especially the color-tones of
carmines, yellows, greens, citrons, indigos, with white and black. His
description of a Silver Thaw in February in Nova Scotia (_The Old
Judge_) is unsurpassed in literature, and, if the authorship were
unknown, might be mistaken for a bit of aesthetic prose by Ruskin:—
This morning I accompanied the Judge and Miss Sandford in their
sleigh on an excursion into the country. The scene, though
rather painful to the eyes, was indescribably brilliant and
beautiful. There had been, during last night and part of
yesterday, a slight thaw, accompanied by a cold fine rain that
froze, the moment it fell, into ice of the purest crystal. Every
deciduous tree was covered with this glittering coating and
looked in the distance like an enormous though graceful bunch of
feathers; while, on nearer approach, it resembled, with its
limbs now bending under the heavy weight of the transparent
incrustation, a dazzling chandelier. The open fields, covered
with a rough but hardened surface of snow, glistened in the sun
as if thickly strewed with the largest diamonds; and every rail
of the wooden fences in this general profusion of ornaments was
decorated with a delicate fringe of pendent ice that radiated
like burnished silver. The heavy and sombre spruce, loaded with
snow, rejoiced in a green old age. Having its massy shape
relieved by strong and numerous lights, it gained in grace, what
it lost in strength, and stood erect among its drooping
neighbors, venerable but vigorous, the hoary forefather of the
wood. The tall and slender poplar and white birch . . . bent
their heads gracefully to the ground under the unusual burden,
and formed fanciful arches which the frost encircled with
numerous wreaths of pearls. . . . The boles of the different
trees and their limbs appeared through the transparent ice; and
the rays of the sun, as they fell on them, invested them with
all the hues of the prism. . . .
In that passage, besides realistic impressionism or color-writing, we
find first rate _style_ in composition—artistic sentential structure
and rhythmical periods, along with pure and dignified diction. In all
Haliburton’s works we can find passages which show his firm grip on the
technique of prose style, and a special power of vivifying his
description and color-impressionism with psychological suggestion that
enhances the effect on the sensibilities and imagination. In all
literature the allurement of sylvan summer in Nova Scotia or Canada is
not more winningly or colorfully presented than in Haliburton’s
impressionistic idyll ‘A Day on the Lake’ (_Nature and Human Nature_).
In psychological suggestion the acme has been attained by Haliburton in
his descriptive sketches, ‘A Hot Day’ (_Wise Saws_) and ‘Inky Dell’
(_The Old Judge_).
Whoever charges that Haliburton lacks style errs either by irrelevancy
or by making the wrong accusation. It is not style that Haliburton
lacks; for he has two styles, each of which is right in the right
place—a conversational style for conveying unpopular practical ideas in
a popular way, and an aesthetic style for conveying ideas which are
delightful in themselves as beautiful pictures of Social Life and of
Nature. What Haliburton really lacked was architectonic skill—the power
of designing artistic structural unity and plot. This is best
illustrated by his character-delineation. His major characters have not
character-unity but characteristics or character-promiscuity. Sam Slick,
for instance, is never _one_ character as Micawber or Swiveller in
Dickens’ gallery is one character, unmistakably and always. Sam Slick is
a ‘mass of contradictions.’ Neither is the Rev. Joshua Hopewell a
unity—speaking and acting, that is, consistently with one character.
Yet they have a unity. How do they get it? It is not a moral but the
_functional_ unity of _Spokesmen_ of Haliburton’s ideas. The reason that
Slick and Hopewell have so much promiscuity of character is that
Haliburton, as he pleased and without any regard to consistency, made
Slick and Hopewell and any other of his major _dramatis personae_ the
Spokesmen of his various thoughts or ideas. He ‘picked on’ Slick for the
mouthpiece of this idea, and Hopewell for the mouthpiece of another
idea, without ever asking if the speech he put into the mouth of Slick
was consistent with Slick’s mental and moral character, or if the speech
he put into the mouth of Hopewell was consistent with Hopewell’s
intellectual and moral character. The result is that Slick, as we read
Haliburton, has ideas, makes speeches, and relates experiences that are
impossible in one of his culture and knowledge; and so with Hopewell and
others. In short, Haliburton’s major characters are _puppets_,
_marionettes_. Back of them is the Showman, Haliburton; and the speeches
we hear are not theirs but ‘their master’s voice.’
Oddly, Haliburton himself maintained in _The Old Judge_ that this was
not a defect in character-delineation or in artistry but was made
necessary by his practical aim and the content of his thought. The
promiscuous structure of his themes and composition or style and the
promiscuousness, or lack of unity, in his characters correspond to the
content and movement of his thought—which was swarming with ideas, full
of details of all sorts, loose, and diffuse, bent on expressing at all
hazards his ideas and opinions on matters of practical import, and not
on creating fine literature. The purpose of his writings, he declared,
was to inform and to amuse while informing. His humor was designed and
manufactured as the sugar-coating of his social and political ideas.
Consequently, the only unity his characters have is the thread that runs
through _his_ thought; their speeches, jests, anecdotes, aphorisms, and
moral maxims are but _his_ facts, ideas, opinions, strung on the various
_dramatis personae_. Thus inevitably, so Haliburton submitted, his works
and their style appear prolix, repetitious, diffuse, digressive, and
lack artistic unity. Still they each have their own unity of essential
thought; his characters have unity of function; his style, unity of
propriety—and the whole, unity of purpose, meaning, and achievement.
Haliburton consciously conceived a noble ideal. As a man of letters he
aimed to bring about an alliance or _zollverein_ of the Anglo-Saxon
peoples. To do this he employed an original method of satiric humor and
comic characterization. He was unmistakably a great satirist, and the
first and foremost systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon
peoples. This is his chief glory. But while he thus was the first
native-born writer to bring Canadian literature into a high and
permanent place in English and world literature, he also was coadjutor
with Howe in inaugurating the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature
of Canada. Considered from the sides of versatility of invention,
variety of production in literary species, and of mastery of style,
Thomas Chandler Haliburton remains to this day the Greatest Prose Writer
of Canada. Yet, at the same time, his achievements in creative satiric
comedy and comic characterization stamp his genius and work as not for a
single country or a specific age, but for all time and the world.
CHAPTER V
Romance _and_ Poetry
THE NATIVISTIC LITERATURE OF CANADA—THE HISTORICAL ROMANCERS—
JOHN RICHARDSON—ROSANNA MULLINS—AND OTHERS. THE POETS—GOLDSMITH
—SANGSTER—MAIR.
Nativistic romantic fiction in Canada begins with the historical novels
of Major John Richardson. In 1832 he published his _Wacousta; or, The
Prophecy_; and in 1840 its sequel, _The Canadian Brothers; or, The
Prophecy Fulfilled_. These are authentic novels of the romantic type,
having, as they do, respectably constructed plots, and being filled with
the romance of the passion of love, heightened with thrilling adventure
and incident, and colored with pictures of aboriginal character and life
against a background of Nature in the wild.
Richardson was born near Niagara Falls, in 1796 (in the same year as
Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and seven years after James Fenimore
Cooper). He spent his childhood and early adolescent days, till he was
sixteen years of age, that is, up to the outbreak of the War of 1812, in
the vicinity of the Falls and in Detroit. Then, although but a mere lad,
he enlisted in Brock’s army. Up to that time young Richardson, during
his most impressionable and receptive years, was entertained by his
grandparents and parents with tales of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit, and
with stories of the thrilling, romantic, and tragic events in the
history of the Niagara and Detroit districts—events which were surely
amongst the most enthralling and stirring in the vividly romantic
history of Canada and the United States. Those early days of
Richardson’s were thus replete with rare and unique formative
influences. They created in him the love of romance, of the heroic past
of his own country, and, later, when he came to write, furnished him
with the inspiration and the material for authentic Canadian historical
novels or romances.
Two other formative influences, besides those exercised over his heart
and imagination by his grandparents and parents, determined Richardson’s
genius, inspiration, and creative method. In the war of 1812 he had
fought side by side with the noble Indian warrior Tecumseh. Further:
Richardson, on his own confession, had, as he put it, ‘absolutely
devoured three times’ Cooper’s Indian romance, _The Last of the
Mohicans_. Some critics, therefore, hold that Richardson was a mere
imitator of Cooper; that, first, Richardson studied the mind, and
character, and ways of Indians at second-hand in the pages of Cooper’s
romance; and that, secondly, Richardson acquired from Cooper’s novel the
art or craft, the mechanics, of writing fiction.
For the view that Richardson got his knowledge of Indian mind and
character from Cooper, there is no ground in historical fact. The War of
1812, during which Richardson fought side by side with Tecumseh and his
Indians, began fourteen years before the publication of _The Last of the
Mohicans_ (1826), or long before Richardson could have read a page of
Cooper. Richardson’s imagination was romantically formed in his early
days when, during his association with Tecumseh, he came to know Indian
psychology and character at first-hand. That is indisputable fact. For
the view that Richardson acquired the technique of novel-writing from
reading Cooper, there is some justification. It is highly probable that
by his reading of _The Last of the Mohicans_, Richardson really got some
‘coaching’ in the mechanics of writing romance. But this concession
fails to prove that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper and not a
genuinely independent creator. Internal evidences point to independence.
For when we compare the diction, the sentential structure, the
descriptive epithets and imagery, and the general style of the two
romancers, Richardson appears, except as a plot-maker, the superior of
Cooper as a craftsman and stylist. It is proof presumptive that on the
whole the Canadian romancer developed independently his literary
technique. Moreover, in the fine art of character-drawing, Richardson is
more veracious and incisive—a better artist—than Cooper. When we
compare the American novelist’s Indian characters with those of the
Canadian, we discover that Cooper’s are more like ‘studies’ from books
than pictures from real life, whereas Richardson’s Indians are very near
to the real Indian, very lifelike. The heroic in them is heroic enough;
that is to say, human and natural. Richardson’s Indian characters, then,
are original creations—absolutely his own. Also his own are his other
characters (soldiers, fur-traders, French-Canadians, and the rest of the
motley), his plots, all the stirring incidents, and the ‘color’ of the
Canadian background from nature.
Of his romances, _Wacousta_, and _The Canadian Brothers_, the only
aesthetic criticisms worth while making are that not infrequently
Richardson forces the dramatic in them into the melodramatic, that he
puts into the mouths of his characters utterances which are unnatural or
not in keeping with the position and circumstances of the speakers, and
that he suits his historical facts to his own purposes. Sometimes, too,
construction and development are sacrificed to the ‘theatrical’ in
situation, to over-drawing of character, and to ‘color-writing.’ _The
Canadian Brothers_ has these defects in a larger degree than _Wacousta_.
Yet, on the whole, Richardson’s two chief romances are aesthetically
satisfying, and are clean, strong, wholesome, and engaging—quite
deserving of a place in permanent creative literature.
Summarily: since Richardson had his genius romantically formed, and had
engaged in the art of fiction, long before he had read Cooper, the only
possible influence Cooper could have had on Richardson was to incite him
to emulate the American romancer. Emulation incited by a contemporary
author does not imply imitation, and has no significance in original
literary creation. Taken, then, by and large, John Richardson had
first-rate powers of invention, and was a respectable literary
craftsman. He was not a great novelist, but he was sufficiently great as
a creator of historical romances to produce novels which have been read
during almost a century since publication, and are still read, along
with Kirby’s and Sir Gilbert Parker’s historical romances of life and
love and heroism in far-off days in Canada.
Moreover, if not in _Wacousta_, at least in _The Canadian Brothers_
Richardson embodied in romantic fiction, as Sangster and Mair did in
poetry, the first incipient expression of the spirit of Canadian
nationality. Both on account of the superior inherent qualities of
Richardson’s romances as creative fiction, and on account of their
containing the earliest expression of the embryonic spirit of Canadian
nationality, Richardson must be marked as of first-rate importance in
the literary history of Canada. He was indeed the creator of the
Canadian nativistic historical romance as Haliburton was the creator of
the nativistic fiction of satiric comedy and comic characterization. In
truth it may be said that if all Canadian imaginative prose were lost,
save the romances of Richardson and the satiric comedy of Haliburton,
Canada would still have a literature.
_The Literary Garland_ (1838-51) had considerable to do with promoting
letters in Canada, especially by encouraging native-born writers.
Amongst those who contributed to _The Literary Garland_ was a young
girl, Rosanna Eleanor Mullins, a native of Montreal, who, in time,
became the wife of J. L. Leprohon, also a native of Quebec. Rosanna
Mullins’ first novel, _Ida Beresford_, was written when the author was
but sixteen years of age, and was published serially in _The Literary
Garland_, in 1848. In 1859 she published _The Manor House of de
Villerai_, and in 1864, _Antoinette de Mirecourt_, and has several other
novels to her credit. Her characters, properties, and settings are
largely Canadian, and she evidently set out consciously to create a
nativistic literature by writing romances which should definitively
portray life and manners in the society of the Old French _Régime_ and
after the Fall of Quebec and Montreal.
In fact, Rosanna Mullins, much more than Richardson, was inspired by a
desire to express the incipient national spirit of Canada. In _The
Canadian Brothers_ Richardson disclosed an _awakening_ consciousness in
himself of a sense of the spirit of nationality. Miss Mullins, on the
other hand, was the first Canadian novelist to have a _distinct_
consciousness of that spirit and to desire to express it for its own
sake. It is from this point of view, rather than from the point of view
of intrinsic literary merit, that Miss Mullins’ romances have a right to
a permanent place in the nativistic literature of Canada. Technically
she wrote with a finer pointed stylus than Richardson—with more grace
and a finer limning of character, and with a more engaging urbanity. In
fact, her style was informed by an Irish and French humaneness that made
her work as popular with the French-Canadians (for whom several of her
novels had been translated into French) as with the English-Canadian
people.
Rosanna Mullins is entitled to another distinction. On the side of
nationality she disputes with William Kirby the right of primacy in
calling the attention of the later Canadian romancers, especially Sir
Gilbert Parker, to the wealth of novelistic material that lay in the
life and manners and culture of society under the old French _Régime_
and the Occupation. For Kirby was foreign-born, whereas Rosanna Mullins
was native-born. As a matter of fact, however, it was Kirby’s romantic
fiction that opened the eyes of later Canadian novelists to the
abounding material for novelistic treatment that lay in the social and
political history of the Canadian past.
William Kirby was born in England, but came to Canada in 1832, the year
which saw the publication of Richardson’s _Wacousta_. He was then but
fifteen years of age and his mind unformed. He lived for the greater
part of his life at Niagara. So that from his fifteenth year onwards,
having taken a deep and special interest in Canadian history and
civilization, Kirby really formed his mind and imagination on Canadian
ideals and absorbed the Canadian nationalistic spirit.
His historical romance _The Golden Dog_, which was published in 1877, or
ten years after Confederation, really belongs to the _émigré_ literature
of Canada. But because of its constructive and inspirational influences
on certain members of the Systematic School of Canadian fictionists, in
particular on Sir Gilbert Parker, and because Kirby, though
foreign-born, was in spirit essentially a genuine Canadian man of
letters, we must regard _The Golden Dog_ as more important in the
_development_ of Canadian fiction than are Richardson’s and Rosanna
Mullins’ romances, and as worthy of a more significant status in
Canadian creative literature.
Summarily: _Wacousta_ and _The Golden Dog_ were the literary progenitors
of a series of romances which have a Canadian historical basis and which
are Canadian in incident and color. As to his creative and artistic
powers, Kirby was a finer artist than Richardson, in plot-making and
character-drawing. But, in view of certain faults—a somewhat too
theatrical grand manner in character-drawing and a too great indulgence
of his notable gifts in color-writing, Kirby and Richardson may be
classed as equal sinners.
_The Golden Dog_ is, aesthetically and artistically, that is, in
plot-making, character-drawing, and in sustaining interest, superior to
_Wacousta_ as an historical romance. Still _The Golden Dog_ is a
genuinely great novel—great inherently as an imaginative and artistic
creation, and great as the progenitor of the romantic fiction of Parker,
Roberts, Campbell, Saunders and other creators of the native and
national fiction of Canada.
James De Mille, who was born in New Brunswick, also must be considered
as a creator of Canadian Nativistic Literature. De Mille was a prolific
writer of mysterious, thrilling, extravagant, and sentimental fiction,
showing the influence of such masters in those genres as Poe and Wilkie
Collins. De Mille certainly possessed a creative imagination of his own,
was considerable of an artist in plot-making and in sustaining interest,
and had a distinct sense of dramatic values, which saves such an
extravagant tale of adventure as his _A Strange Manuscript found in a
Copper Cylinder_ from developing into the merely grotesque and
sensational. But because the settings of his novels and tales are not
Canadian, and because they in nowise express anything of the growing
sense of the Canadian national spirit, they are not, on that side,
significant in the literary history of Canada. They merely increase the
quantity of Canadian Nativistic Literature.
If we have regard for the historic process in all spiritual and social
achievements, and ask: What was it that, on the psychological or
spiritual side, brought about Responsible Government in the various
Provinces that came to form the original Dominion of Canada, and What
was it that brought about Confederation? we must answer that the people
in the British North American Provinces were gradually coming to see
themselves, their country, civilization, and institutions from the
_Canadian point of view_, and were gradually expressing, with more and
more of conscious fervor and power, in prose and poetry, their growing
interest in and love of Canada and the Canadian point of view. The
nativistic prose writers expressed the growing spirit of ‘Canada First,’
as in the writings of Haliburton and Howe, and also in the romances of
Richardson, Rosanna Mullins, and Kirby. We turn to observe how the
spirit of national ideals was gradually expressed in the work of the
nativistic poets.
Nativistic poetry in Canada did not take form till the last year of the
first quarter of the 19th century. In 1825 Oliver Goldsmith, a
great-nephew of the author of _The Deserted Village_, published his
idyll or descriptive poem, _The Rising Village_. Oliver Goldsmith was
born at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1781, and died at Liverpool,
England, in 1861, after a long official service in his native country.
_The Rising Village_, in substance or theme, aimed to describe the
habitat, sufferings, achievements, and prospects of the Loyalist
settlers. As regards its matter, therefore, the poem has the semblance
of a genuine Canadian poem. But the form, the metre, rhythm, and rhyme,
the diction and imagery, the characters and the settings, and even the
‘properties,’ are in slavish imitation of the elder Goldsmith’s idyll of
‘Sweet Auburn’ in Ireland. That is to say, the Nova Scotian’s Muse is
not the Nova Scotian or the Canadian but the British Muse transplanted.
Moreover, _The Rising Village_ is to be distinguished from Howe’s
_Acadia_ in that Howe, though imitating the form and manner of the elder
Goldsmith, expresses his love of his homeland, Nova Scotia, whereas the
younger Goldsmith, though a Nova Scotian, fills his poem with an
unpatriotic nostalgia. He loves the land where there is some ‘Sweet
Auburn,’ not his native land which he describes as ‘bleak and desert.’
The nostalgia is real and pervasive—so much so that he removes to
England and there dies. But since it is a poem of the habitat and
experiences of the Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia, and since it is
correct in versification and is musical and possesses naturalistic
truth, _The Rising Village_ may be regarded as a genuine poem of
_documentary_ value, and as the beginning of Canadian nativistic poetry.
The strictly Canadian ‘note’ in nativistic poetry is first clearly heard
in the verse of Charles Sangster. He was born near Kingston, Ontario, in
1822, and published _The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other
Poems_, in 1856, and _Hesperus and Other Poems_ in 1860. The title poem
of the first volume is in the Spenserian stanza as employed by Byron and
is also otherwise imitative. But it is distinctly Canadian in its
lyrical interludes, in which there is a poetic _abandon_, to the beauty
and magic of Nature in Canada, as, for instance, in Sangster’s _Lyric to
the Isles_, beginning:—
Here the spirit of Beauty keepeth
Jubilee for evermore;
Here the voice of Gladness leapeth,
Echoing from shore to shore
• • • •
Here the spirit of beauty dwelleth
In each palpitating tree,
In each amber wave that welleth
From its home beneath the sea;
In the moss upon the granite,
In each calm, secluded bay,
With the zephyr trains that fan it
With their sweet breath all the day.
On the waters, on the shore,
Beauty dwelleth evermore.
Faulty as Sangster’s first poems are in versification and derivative in
diction, we must mark his lyrical interludes, as in the foregoing
example, as expressing a _new_ note, _the_ Canadian note in Canadian
poetry. It is, however, a _nature_ note, not or hardly the _national_
note—clear and confident and strong. In Sangster’s second volume,
_Hesperus and Other Poems_, published just seven years before
Confederation, we hear the Canadian national note loudly vocal and
inspiring. We catch it unmistakably in Sangster’s _Brock_—a really
noble hymn to the memory of a national hero, who had ‘saved Canada’ for
the Canadians, but a hymn that much more expresses the deeply felt unity
of the Canadian people:—
One voice, one people, one in heart
And soul and feeling and desire.
Relight the smouldering martial fire
And sound the mute trumpet! Strike the lyre!
The hero dead cannot expire:
The dead still play their part.
Raise high the monumental stone,
A nation’s fealty is theirs,
And we the rejoicing heirs,
The honored sons of sires whose cares
We take upon us unawares
As freely as our own.
We observe for the first time in Canadian poetry, the consciously felt
sentiment of national unity—the first express utterance of the ideal of
Canada and its people as a political and spiritual entity apart—in
Sangster’s line, ‘A _nation’s_ fealty is theirs.’ Henceforth we shall
often hear this distinction—Canada and its people as a _nation_—in the
verse of Canadian poets. Sangster, then, is important as the poet who,
in aesthetically and artistically respectable verse, first uttered,
_consciously_ and clearly, in Canadian nativistic poetry the people’s
sense of a national spirit and destiny.
Again: Sangster, in _The Rapid_ and in _The Falls of Chaudière_, is the
first nativistic poet to express in verse that close or intimate kinship
with Nature which we discover much more profoundly expressed in the
poetry of Roberts, Lampman, and Carman. Sangster utters this new
naturalistic note in these authentically inspired lines from _The Falls
of Chaudière_:
I have laid my cheek to Nature’s, placed my puny hand in hers,
Felt a kindred spirit warming all the life-blood of my face.
_I have laid my cheek to Nature’s!_ We shall observe Lampman lay his
cheek to Nature’s with more intimacy, with a more profound sense of
spiritual companionship than Sangster. We shall note Carman ‘place his
puny hand’ in Nature’s—and have Nature as Mother April ‘make him
over’—with a far more intimate giving of self to the ‘heart of the
world’ than Sangster. Nevertheless, we must remark Sangster’s
priority—in spirit as well as in actual poetic production—in
expressing that special and singular kinship with Nature which must be
denoted as peculiarly Canadian. Still, in this respect, he is only the
first forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell,
and Duncan Campbell Scott.
A much more lyrically eloquent and influential forerunner is Charles
Mair. He was born at Lanark, Ontario, in 1838, and published, in 1868,
his _Dreamland and Other Poems_. Technically, Charles Mair is a much
finer craftsman than Sangster; for the latter was self-educated, whereas
Mair was a university graduate who was well read in the modern English
poets and had studied the forms of verse and the mechanics of
versification. What, however, really constitutes Mair as the authentic
forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman and Pauline Johnson as nature
poets, is not the fact that he was an artistic poet of Nature in Canada,
but that his _method of treating Nature_ was a _new_ method with
Canadian poets.
Two ‘features’ mark and distinguish the treatment of Nature in the
poetry of Charles Mair—impressionistic painting of the face of Nature
and the choice of the commonplace or the lowliest creatures in Nature as
the subjects of his poetry. The first may have been inspired by Keats,
and may be regarded as in the manner of Keats. But the second feature of
Mair’s lyrical poetry—his conscious attempt to give distinction to the
Commonplace in Nature in Canada;—that is original with Mair himself,
and appears for the first time in Canadian poetry in Mair’s work. It is
_Canadian_ in and by itself.
Wilfred Campbell has alleged that Mair influenced Roberts and Lampman as
Nature poets. All three were influenced by Keats, and certainly Roberts
and Lampman knew the poetry of Keats more intimately than that of Mair.
At least, Mair in a sense did but anticipate Roberts and Lampman in
actually treating Canadian Nature. But Mair’s treatment of the
commonplace was objective—being mostly a sort of philosophical or
religious reflection on the meaning of the commonplace, whereas
Lampman’s treatment of the same kind of subject was psychological. Mair
merely looked on and interrogated Nature, Lampman communed with his
lowly companions, such as the trees and the frogs, entered into their
hearts, and spoke out for them, expressing their moods, feelings, and
reflections.
The passage from the objective treatment of Nature to the subjective
interpretation of the commonplace in Nature by Canadian poets, has its
_termini_ marked by Mair at the one end and Lampman at the other. Mair
merely interrogates and wonders what the answer ought to be to his
questions. Lampman communes with his lowly and animate companions in
Nature, and, by imaginative sympathy, answers for them.
These distinctions between Mair as an impressionistic Nature-_painter_
and an objective _interrogator_, and Lampman as a subjective interpreter
of Nature, are nicely illustrated in Mair’s exquisitely beautiful and
sensuously lovely poem, _The Fire-Flies_:—
I see them glimmer where the waters lag
By winding bays, and to the swallows sing;
And, far away, where stands the forest dim,
Huge-built of old, their tremulous lights are seen.
High overhead they gleam like trailing stars,
Then sink adown, until their emerald sheen
Dies in the darkness like an evening hymn,—
Anon to float again in glorious bars
Of streaming rapture, such as man may hear
When the soul casts its slough of mortal fear.
And now they make rich spangles in the grass,
Gilding the night-dews on the tender blade;
Then hover o’er the meadow-pools, to gaze
At their bright forms shrined in the dreamy glass
Which earth, and air, and bounteous rain have made.
One moment, and the thicket is ablaze
With twinkling lamps, which swing from bough to bough;
Another, and like sylphids they descend
To cheer the brook-side where the bell-flow’rs grow,
Near, and more near, they softly come, until
Their little life is busy at my feet;
They glow around me, and my fancies blend
Capriciously with their delight, and fill
My wakeful bosom with unwonted heat.
One lights upon my hand, and there I clutch
With an alarming finger its quick wing;
Erstwhile so free, it pants, the tender thing!
And dreads its captor and his handsel touch.
Where is thy home? On what strange food dost feed,
Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night?
From what far nectar’d fount, or flow’ry mead,
Glean’st thou, by witching spells, thy sluicy light?
Is not that poem _Canadian_ definitively and through and through—and is
it not also authentic poetry, far in advance, aesthetically and
artistically, of any poetry previously written in Canada? They who, with
master artistry, write delineative poetry, shall hardly achieve, in
short and single phrase, so apt and clear and vivid a picture of the
Canadian firefly as Mair’s incisively realistic and genuinely poetical
line:—
Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night.
That is masterly, and yet how it fails before such a tremendously
pregnant crystallization of the subjective treatment of Nature as Bliss
Carman’s pervasive thrall of the senses and the imagination in his
imperishable line:—
The resonant far-listening morn.
The glory that is Carman’s in pure poetry, is not Mair’s, and the glory
that is Lampman’s in the sympathetic interpretation of the moods and
thoughts of lowly animate Nature, is not Mair’s. Yet unquestionably Mair
is the authentic forerunner of those perfervid Nature-worshippers,
Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell
Scott, the creative Poets of the Systematic School, who wrote the first
native and national literature of the Dominion of Canada, and wrote it
so that the world heard and has acclaimed them Master Poets and their
poetry authentic Literature!
* * * * *
_The Fireflies_ is quoted from _Dreamland and Other Poems_ by Charles
Mair.
Part II.
Post Confederation Literature
(1887-1924)
CHAPTER VI
_The_ Systematic School
THE FIRST RENAISSANCE IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—THE SYSTEMATIC
SCHOOL AND PERIOD—ROBERTS AND HIS COLLEAGUES.
The years 1860, 1861, and 1862 may be regarded as the most significant
in the literary history of Canada. In the year 1860 were born Charles
George Douglas Roberts and Charles William Gordon (_pseud._, Ralph
Connor). In the year 1861 were born William Bliss Carman, Archibald
Lampman, William Wilfred Campbell, E. Pauline Johnson (_pseud._,
Tekahionwake), Margaret Marshall Saunders, and Frederick George Scott.
In the year 1862 were born Duncan Campbell Scott and Gilbert (now Sir
Gilbert) Parker. The most gifted and eminent of Canadian poets and
imaginative or creative prose writers, these ten Canadians comprised a
single group, and they began, under the influence of the awakening
spirit of Canadian nationality, the first systematic writing of poetry
and prose, inaugurating a period of original literary creation, which we
shall term, for expository purposes, the First Renaissance in Canadian
Literature.
These ten writers were born, bred and educated (intellectually and
aesthetically) in the four Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,
Ontario, and Quebec—which formed, on the proclamation of the British
North America Act, 1867, or shortly after the birth of this group of
writers, the Dominion of Canada. From the point of view of their
nativity and education the members of the literary group born in 1860,
1861, and 1862, are the first strictly so-called _Canadian_ poets and
prose writers.
Again: they were the first native-born poets and prose writers to begin,
under the Confederacy, a systematic literary career. The term
‘systematic’ defines their conspectus and aims. To this literary group
the free and impassioned expression, in verse and prose, of beauty and
truth, as beauty is in Nature in Canada and truth in Canadian thought,
activities, and institutions, appeared as their own specific function
and ideal life. They were thus the first Canadians consciously to
undertake a literary career which should be, in its way and degree,
commensurate with the growing spiritual, social, political, and
commercial life of the Great Dominion, and to find their inspiration
chiefly, if not wholly, in the natural beauty and sublimity of their
homeland, and in the spiritual import of their country and of the lives
of their compatriots. In short, their literary conspectus was thoroughly
Canadian; and their inspiration and ideals, too, were Canadian. In fact,
their inspiration and ideals were a moral necessity born of a loyal
obedience to the same creative impulse that was active in other
Canadians who also were bent on constructive achievement in other
spheres of Canadian endeavor.
Moreover: the literary group born in 1860, 1861, 1862, may be
distinguished as having been the first Canadian poets and prose writers
who, by actual performance, showed the nations, largely the peoples of
the Motherland and the United States, that the political and
commercially lusty young Confederacy was, on its own account, decidedly
active in letters. The truth is that, in the decade following 1887,
which witnessed the publication of the first work in verse and in prose
by the systematic group of Canadian men and women of letters, Canadian
poetry and imaginative prose, though they were derivative in form and
frequently derivative in theme, quite gained the decent regard, and, in
some instances, the admiration, of distinguished men of letters in
England and in the United States, and furnished a pledge of greater
achievement in literature.
The Canadian poets and prose writers born in 1860, 1861, and 1862,
distinguish themselves and the years in which they were born as the
first systematically creative School and Period in the literary history
of Canada. Their creative activities and their poetry and prose we have
denominated as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.
What is meant by the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature? In 1880 a
young native-born Canadian, Charles G. D. Roberts, published a book of
poems. The critics of England and the United States thought well of the
verse. There was in it a quality that had not been in previous books of
verse by native-born Canadians. The poems were marked by a certain
noteworthy _artistic finish_ in the craftsmanship.
This was significant. Hitherto native-born Canadian poets had not been
adroit in technique; they had been very careless about it, and some of
them had no respect or feeling for it at all. Poetry was poetry, they
thought, whether it was well dressed or not. With the publication of his
_Orion_, Roberts sounded the death knell of slovenly or indifferent
technique in Canadian poetry. Working with him, and largely under the
influence of his ideal of technical finish in verse, were Lampman,
Carman, Campbell, Pauline Johnson, Duncan Campbell Scott, Frederick
George Scott, and others. They all cared supremely for fine technique in
poetry.
In the second decade after 1887 there arose in Canada a group of poets
who were not solicitous about the technique of their verse. With them
fine artistry in Canadian verse declined. This Decadent Interim lasted
but a few years. A later band of poets arose who went back to the
‘technical’ ideals which were exemplified in the poetry of Roberts and
his colleagues. This younger band of poets ‘restored’ the ideals of the
first literary group and began the Restoration Period in Canadian
poetry. Collaterally, a similar course of distinction, decadence, and
restoration of technical ideals can be observed in Canadian imaginative
and aesthetic prose.
In another sense the period which began with Roberts and his _confrères_
may properly be denoted as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.
It happens that the best of the Pre-Confederation Literature, produced
either by _émigrés_ or by native sons of the Province, was the work of
‘old minds.’ Consider, for instance, the historical romances of Major
John Richardson and the satiric humor of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the
poetry of Oliver Goldsmith, 2nd, and of such _émigrés_ as Charles
Heavysege and John Reade, the romantic poetic dramas of John
Hunter-Duvar and the prose tales of James De Mille. We observe that,
despite certain engaging novelty in themes and treatment, it is all the
work of old men; that is to say, of minds which were attempting to
‘transplant’ old traditional methods and the forms of a past literature
in a soil which was naturally hostile to their growth and gave them a
mean and dry exotic existence.
If we fancy that we discover in the best Pre-Confederation literature
the fresh beauty and vitality of youth, we shall discover, if we look
critically, that this vitality and beauty are the last hectic or pale
flowering of an exotic English literature, and that, commingled with the
beauty, are the wrinkles of sapless age. To be sure, there is the flame
of creative fire in, for example, Richardson and Haliburton.
Notwithstanding, it is the flame which flares up, with a startling
brilliancy, just before it dies out.
In truth, then, Pre-Confederation Canadian Literature was essentially a
transplanted Old World literature. Inevitably it was alien to the soil
of Canadian life, genius, and ideals. It, therefore, lacks real
vitality, vigor, and truth. Except in Nova Scotia, in the time of
Haliburton and Howe, it was the outcome of personal, not necessary
social expression.
But, after Confederation, expression of the spiritual and social needs
of the Great Dominion became a national necessity. This expression,
being born out of the spiritual and social needs of Canada, must be
considered, however derivative the mere forms employed, as a genuine
literary Renaissance. The period or movement begun by the systematic
groups of poets and prose writers born in Canada in 1860, 1861, and 1862
may, then, properly be denoted as the First Renaissance in Canadian
Literature.
CHAPTER VII
Charles G. D. Roberts
ROBERTS SPONSOR TO LAMPMAN—LITERARY FATHER OF BLISS CARMAN—
MASTER OF VERSE TECHNIQUE—FORMS OF HIS VERSE, AND ITS QUALITIES.
Whether Charles G. D. Roberts had a genuine formative influence on
Canadian literature, particularly Canadian poetry, or whether he should
be regarded merely as ‘the eldest brother’ of the first systematic group
of Canadian poets and prose writers may, possibly, be a moot question.
Of a certainty he was the first native-born Canadian to take the leading
role in making real and permanent, both by singular influences and by
actual production in poetry and imaginative prose, a native and national
literature in Canada.
First: Roberts was the literary _sponsor_ of Archibald Lampman. In 1884,
while editor of _The Week_, Roberts published in that periodical the
very first poems which Lampman contributed to the public press (_The
Coming of Winter_, and _Three-Flower Petals_). This is much more
significant than appears on first view. It must be remembered that
Roberts, though but twenty-four years old at the time of his editorship,
had already published, in 1880, his _Orion and Other Poems_, which had
been well received by the critical press in England and the United
States. This distinction, abetted by his editorial connection with
Goldwin Smith, the founder of _The Week_, gave him some of the glory of
a new literary ‘star’ and made him an authority whose good opinion of
another’s verse was very inspiring when it took the form of introducing
a young unknown native poet to the Canadian public. In 1884 Lampman was
a young man, human, sensitive, and shy. Roberts was the first to
recognize Lampman’s authentic genius and the first to give him that
practical encouragement which alone counts constructively—a first and
right start, _per aspera_ indeed, but, for Lampman, _ad astra_.
Roberts was also the ‘literary father’ of Bliss Carman. In 1885 Roberts
was appointed Professor of Literature at King’s College, Windsor, Nova
Scotia. It was Roberts who really trained Bliss Carman in the poetic
perception of Nature and in poetic technique and who inspired him to
begin a poetic career. It all happened in this way: To Roberts’ home, at
Windsor, came Bliss Carman, a cousin of the elder poet. Here Carman
spent several of his growing, most impressionable, and most receptive
years, coming directly under the pervasive influences—the aesthetic
culture and a tutorship in poetic technique—of the elder poet. Further:
with Windsor as a centre, and Roberts as a companion and guide, Carman
made excursions over the lovely and glamorous scenes and haunts of
beauty near and beyond Roberts’ home. Carman, with Roberts, dwelt and
communed with Nature intimately, visited the hiding places of earthly
beauty, fed his senses with pure delight of stream, lake and marsh,
woodland and sky, tuned his heart to hear, with peculiar meaning and
joy, the cries of the denizens of the woodland, the murmurings,
dronings, and shrillings of insects, and the dulcet lilting voices of
birds. Also, in fancy and peaceful reverie, Carman lived over again all
the rare moments and joys of sensation and spiritual ecstasy experienced
by him in that lovely area of country conscribing Windsor, the land of
Evangeline, the Gaspereau valley, the Basin of Minas, and the Tantramar
marshes.
Thus the young Carman’s senses and imagination discovered the beauty,
glamor, and glory of land and sea. Inevitably, at length, he was
inspired to emulate the elder poet, Roberts, and to begin the systematic
writing of the winning lyrism which, in the years that followed, has
given Carman a name _sui generis_, not only amongst the poets of his
homeland, Canada, but also amongst the poets of the English-speaking
races.
Again: two years after taking up his residence at Windsor, Roberts
published his really epoch-making volume of poetry, _In Divers Tones_
(1887). This was his second volume of verse and, in it, his genius and
art shone with greater glory, especially in the eyes of the critics and
poets of the United States who were not likely to think, at any rate in
that day, that anything could come out of Canada, particularly Nova
Scotia, except pulpwood, coal, fish, and potatoes. Roberts and his
poetic work disillusioned the young Canadian poet’s American cousins and
taught them that Canada produced mind, and even poetic genius.
Roberts was related to Carman by blood and temperament and poetic
tutorship. These facts of various relationship between Roberts and
Carman became known in the United States; and the light of Roberts’
literary reputation was reflected on his cousin, Bliss Carman. It was,
therefore, natural that the editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_ should, as
actually happened, publish in that magazine Carman’s first significant
poem, _Low Tide on Grand Pré_ (1887), which became the title poem of his
first volume of verse, _Low Tide on Grand Pré: a Book of Lyrics_ (New
York, 1893). All this is more significant than it seems.
For a young poet, story-teller, or essayist to have his work published
in _The Atlantic Monthly_ is a literary distinction by itself. The
imprimatur of _The Atlantic Monthly_ is as a royal seal in the kingdom
of letters on the American continent. Largely through the sponsorship of
Roberts’ reputation, Carman was favorably known to the editor of _The
Atlantic Monthly_. When, therefore, the magazine published Carman’s
first important poem, the poet was properly and most significantly
introduced to the literary world. For _The Atlantic Monthly_ enters only
the homes of the most cultured readers in the United States, Canada, and
the United Kingdom. The placing of its imprimatur on the verse of Bliss
Carman was a declaration to the world that Canada had produced another
new and engaging poet.
Once more: at least in one matter Roberts had a considerable influence
on several of the other members of the first systematic group of
Canadian poets. He was the first native-born Canadian poet to be
solicitous about poetic technique, and had thus won the notice and even
commendation of critics and poets in England and the United States. In
his _Orion_ and in his _In Divers Tones_ Roberts held up the ideal of
finished technique in poetry. Roberts’ success from 1880 to 1887 became,
therefore, an inspiration to other poets in the first systematic group,
and inspired them to accomplish a body of verse excellent enough, at
least in technique, for publication in volume form without danger of
discrediting themselves and their country. So, in fact, it happened:
Lampman and Scott (F. G.) published their first volume of verse in 1888;
Campbell his first in 1889; Carman his first in 1893: Scott (D. C.) his
first in 1893; Pauline Johnson her first in 1895.
Still further: it was Roberts’ two volumes of verse that first called
the attention of the literary public in the United States and in England
to the fact that _systematic_ literary activity was going on in Canada,
and that first awakened critical curiosity about the new Canadian poets
and their verse whenever a volume by Roberts or any of his poetic
compatriots was published. Roberts’ renown obtained for the others a
ready and just ‘hearing.’ This achieved, the quality of their verse,
especially of their nature-poetry, brought them, it is fair to say, very
favorable appreciation from the critics and poets of the United States
and England.
Finally: Roberts is related to the first systematic group of Canadian
poets and prose writers, not only pragmatically as sponsor, inspirer,
and leader: but also in a special way. He was the ‘Voice’ of the
Canadian Confederacy. Seven years after the publication of his _Orion_,
suddenly the Canadian people heard Roberts trumpeting a new song. In it
there was nothing classical in theme, and nothing cold and correctly
formal in artistic structure and finish. Roberts had changed from an
Artist to a Prophet, from an Artificer in verse to a Voice—the Voice of
one crying in the wilderness and trying to make straight the paths of
the Canadian people. He was still a young man but he had been vouchsafed
vision and he called magniloquently to his compatriots, thus:—
O Child of Nations, giant-limbed,
Who stand’st among the nations now
Unheeded, unadorned, unhymned,
With unanointed brow,—
How long the ignoble sloth, how long
The trust in greatness not thine own?
Surely the lion’s brood is strong
To front the world alone!
He repeated his trumpeting to the Canadian to awake to a national
consciousness of destiny and to achieve that destiny—he repeated the
‘call’ in language even more magniloquent—in his _Ode to the Canadian
Confederacy_.
Perhaps these were only ‘occasional’ poems, artificially inspired. At
any rate Roberts’ Vision of Canadian nationality and his interest in
expressing it forsook him. A few years after uttering the ‘Call’ he left
his native Canadian habitat (in 1895) for New York. Yet in the fifteen
years from 1880 to 1895 in the homeland, or till his removing to New
York, by his own fine artistry and by the influence, at least of his
example, on his contemporaries in Canada, Roberts was considerably,
perhaps chiefly, potent in raising native Canadian poetry to a degree of
technical finish that was never before reached or even attempted by
native-born Canadian men and women of letters.
Summarily: as discoverer and sponsor of Lampman, as inspirer and sponsor
of Carman, and as exemplar, at least in technical ideals, to the first
native-born group of systematic poets of the Dominion, Charles G. D.
Roberts wielded a constructive influence on Canadian native and national
poetry. That without his influence there would still have been a
Systematic School of Canadian Poets, of which Lampman, Carman, or D. C.
Scott might have been the most conspicuous creator, is a high
probability. But it is a theoretical probability. We cannot, however,
gainsay the fact of Roberts’ constructive influence on his _confrères_
in the Systematic School of Canadian Poets. On the grounds, therefore,
of his triple role as sponsor, inspirer, and exemplar, and of his own
creative poetic art, Charles G. D. Roberts is justly to be distinguished
as the Inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.
Roberts’ own poetry may be critically appreciated (1) as a recrudescence
of the English classical idyll; (2) as poetry of nature, with special
reference to its distinction from the nature-poetry of Lampman; (3) as
elegiac poetry; and (4) as poetry of modern eroticism.
At the outset it is important to emphasize two singular facts. First,
with the single notable exception of Roberts’ spasmodic ‘Call’ to the
Canadian people to achieve a national destiny, and with the further
exception of a national or Canadian setting and color in some of his
nature-poetry, Roberts’ verse is anything but Canadian. Secondly,
Roberts’ poetry is signally an example of poetry which is not, to use
Mathew Arnold’s formula, ‘a profound and beautiful application of ideas
to life.’ It is characteristic of the essential Canadian genius that its
attitudes to the universe and to existence are moral and religious, that
it values the fine arts, including literature, as a means for the ideal
enhancement of life, and loves the Beautiful in the fine arts as the
only visible instance of the union of the real and of the ideal, which
is, philosophically viewed, our only pledge of the ultimate supremacy of
the Good. The only really deadly criticism, therefore, that can be
applied against the poetry of Roberts is that he has missed in his own
verse the supreme ethical note or ideal which is in the poetry of one of
his masters, Keats:—
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
and that he did not engage himself to write poetry, with the intent
which was really the aim of Keats, as well as of Arnold, namely, as a
profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. Aware now of the
unethical intent and quality of Robert’s poetry, we can the better and
more justly appreciate his development as a poet and his achievements in
poetic substance and technique.
It was natural and inevitable that an undergraduate introduced, at
College, into the world of letters through the poetry of the Greek and
Latin classics and the highly lyrical and sensuous poetry of Shelley,
Keats, and Tennyson, should, when he himself felt impelled to write,
produce poetry which, in substance and style, was based on classical
themes, and colored with sensuous images, and that, when critically
estimated, this poetry should be valued as a sincere but finished
academic exercise in verse. Roberts’ first volume, _Orion and Other
Poems_, was just such an academic exercise in verse. Yet it was an
exercise by a lad just out of college who not only informed his verse
with a respectable showing of classical scholarship and with an engaging
Arcadian setting and color but also wrote with so careful a technique
that when his verse was compared with that of earlier Canadian poets, it
was found to be unprovincial in scope and appeal, and more finished in
technique than any previous Canadian verse. It was indeed derivative,
literary, academic. It was vitiated with youthful crudities in thought
and manner and certain borrowings. But, on the whole, it was as
excellent a first book of verse as might be issued by any young Oxford
or Cambridge undergraduate or, conceivably, by Shelley, Tennyson, or
Swinburne in their undergraduate days. Indeed, critics and poets in
England and in the United States, in reviewing _Orion and Other Poems_,
noted the volume as a respectable performance in verse and a fair
promise of excellent future poetry from the Dominion.
Roberts’ first volume _Orion and Other Poems_ is a significant
disclosure, both positively and negatively, of his essential genius and
art. Positively, the bias or bend of his genius was towards English
neo-classical idyllism and sensuous impressionism. Negatively, his
genius lacked, and has continued to lack, original imagination or
imaginative power. In his first volume, his ‘properties,’ to use a term
borrowed from the stage and employed by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate,
are the same ‘properties’ as appear in the Keatsian idyll. In Roberts’
earliest verse masquerade mythical Greek deities and heroes, sylvan
demi-gods and demi-goddesses, Arcadian denizens and shepherds, painted
with rich sensuous color against a background of pastoral or idyllic
landscape, to the accompaniment of impressionistic verbal music;
alliteration, consonance, assonance, and vowel-harmony. All this is a
recrudescence, unmistakably, of the same qualities in Keats, Tennyson,
and Swinburne. In short, Roberts appears as an unoriginal or
unimaginative nature-and-figure-painter and verbal melodist. A single
example from _Orion_ will suffice:—
For there the deep-eyed night
Looked down on me; unflagging voices called
From unpent waters falling; tireless wings
From long winds bear me tongueless messages
From star-consulting, silent pinnacles;
And breadth, and depth, and stillness
Fathered me.
In that passage criticism at once notes that Roberts, as a very young
poet, begins his professional career as a clever ‘word virtuoso.’ That
passage certainly suggests, as no doubt it imitates, the sensuous
impressionism of the Choric Song in Tennyson’s _Lotus Eaters_. Its
verbal music carries the same kind of vague impressionism which we hear
in the gossamer tone-painting of Debussy’s orchestral prelude
_L’Après-midi d’un Faune_. No one will doubt the sincere ambition of
Roberts to be a poet, and the sincerity of his choice of themes and
properties, diction, and poetic style. Yet, while noting the
artificiality of it all, one does wonder that a tyro poet could, in a
first volume of undergraduate verse, so consummately simulate, as
Roberts did, the art of the supreme masters of English neo-classical
idyllism and impressionism.
As yet, then, Roberts’ poetry discloses only talent in him, nothing of
genius, or originality, or imagination. His poetry is, after all, a
cleverly sublimated academic exercise. Literary psychologists cannot
escape the feeling that Roberts deliberately ‘manufactured’ his first
volume of verse—cannot help picturing the young poet diligently
figuring away in his student’s cloister at the properties, forms and
metres of his imitative idyllism and impressionism. It is all Artifice;
all artificial. As yet in Roberts’ verse there is no ‘note’ of
inspiration awakened by the magic and mystery of the great Dominion—no
New World ‘note’ caught from Canadian Nature, or from Canadian romantic
life and contemporary civilization.
In his second volume of poems, _In Divers Tones_, there is an advance in
variety of inspiration, in his forms and metres, and in finish of
technique. Still, on the whole, the themes and properties, rhythms,
metres, and color are those of English neo-classical idyllism and
impressionism. There is, however, some suggestion of a change away from
his former too imitative adherence to the subject, manner, and style of
the English idyllists. There is, for instance, a suggestion of a
structural, but not ethical, influence from Browning. There is, in this
regard, a Browningesque coinage of unconventional or awkward diction, an
adoption of a Browningesque metre and an introduction of ‘medley’ as
when he inserts, after the Browning manner, a lyrical interlude,
unexpectedly and with no logical justification, into the text of a
broader, more serious movement and more ethically informed subject. His
second volume of poetry, _In Divers Tones_, shows that Roberts has
talent, but is still unimaginative and artificial. Yet his second volume
is much more significant than his first, not by its being more various
in its themes and forms, but by its exhibiting new tendencies in the
bent of the poet’s mind and imagination. There is a tendency towards
ethical influences and to get away from his early preoccupation with
English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism. There is also the
merest show of a tendency to occupy his imagination with ideas of the
Canadian ‘spirit’ and the beauty and wonder of Nature in Canada. There
is, however, no distinctive embodiment of inspirational ideas or moods
awakened by the Great Dominion or the New World.
Notwithstanding, in his second volume Roberts is taking his first step
on the way to the expression of the essential form and manner of his
creative genius as a poet. He was born to lilt, in simple lyrical and
descriptive verse, the aesthetic sensations and the emotional nuances of
Canadian life and external nature. In short, Roberts was born to become,
as he did become, the most engaging and artistic, though not the first,
native-born Canadian idyllist. _In Divers Tones_ he first appears as a
really significant creative Canadian poet. But whenever, in his later
literary career, Roberts forsakes his light or simple idyllic and
impressionistic treatment of Canadian life and external nature, as he
forsakes it in the monody, in his poetry of city life, and in his poetry
of modern eroticism, he may be engaging or arresting or impressive, but
in nowise is he creatively significant.
In the same volume, _In Divers Tones_, Roberts exhibits two manners. In
some poems in the volume he clings to his old manner of English
Classical Impressionism. In other poems in the same volume he essays his
new manner of Canadian Impressionism. The first is distinguished by
overweighted sensuousness, by over-burdened luxurious color of
descriptive epithet and verbal music. An impressive example is _Off
Pelorus_, the sensuous quality of which may be suggested by the
following single stanza:—
Idly took we thought, for still our eyes betray us,
Lo, the white-limbed maids, with love-soft eyes aglow,
Gleaming bosoms bare, loosed hair, sweet hands to slay us,
Warm lips wild with song, and softer throat than snow!
Roberts’ strictly Canadian Impressionism is colorful and musical, but
the structure of the verse is simple, as, for instance, _On the Creek_,
an idyllic lyric, full of Canadian color, and highly alliterative,
beginning:—
Dear heart, the noisy strife,
And bitter harpings cease.
Here is the lamp of life,
Here are the lips of peace.
Roberts developed other ‘manners’ or styles. But, unquestionably, this
Canadian idyllic impressionism, simple in thought and form, yet colorful
and musical, is his natural _forte_—his _natural, characteristic
manner_. It is exemplified, in the same volume, by other Canadian idylls
in the simple style of _On the Creek_, as, for instance, _In The
Afternoon_, _Salt_, _Winter Geraniums_, _Birch and Paddle_; by distinct
and deliberate suffusions of Canadian Nature in dactylic hexameters, as
in _The Tantramar Revisited_, and in the sonnet-form (somewhat
anticipating the nature-poetry of Lampman), as in Roberts’ genuinely
noble sonnets _The Sower_, and _The Potato Harvest_.
We may turn now to a general consideration of Roberts’ poetic treatment
of Nature. In Roberts’ first volume, in his strictly Arcadian poetry,
there is nothing of Canadian Nature, nothing of Canadian scenery, nor
the color and sentiment of Canadian life in the habitat of the
distinctive Canadian spirit. In the second volume, _In Divers Tones_,
there is a definitive engagement, on his part, with Canadian Nature, or
with Canadian life and sentiment pictured against Canadian backgrounds;
and also a change in the form and style of Roberts’ poetic composition.
The natural forms of Roberts’ art are light, simple, lyrical, and
descriptive verse, which he treats with charming naturalness, almost
_naiveté_, with simple tunefulness of ballad or folk rhythms, and which
sometimes he delicately suffuses with a contemplative revery, a gentle
melancholy, or a subdued sentimental reflection on the magic and mystery
of Nature and life, somewhat in the manner of Herrick and Tennyson, and
Longfellow. But Roberts’ lyrical idyllism or nature-description is not
always wholly soft or sentimental, pretty, or gentle, or charming, nor
is his new manner always in folk rhythm in form. At times, even when
simple, his verse is picturesque, even brusque, vigorous, and
overweighted with descriptive details as if, in the last matter, he must
‘paint in’ all the features and properties of Canadian Nature and leave
nothing of its physiognomy to be added by the imagination of the reader.
Roberts, however, has one singular limitation, an innate defect of his
genius. He cannot limn the human person or figure as one of the
properties of his poetry of Canadian woodlands or pastoral scenery and
life. In the matter of human portraiture against a background of Nature
Roberts, as poet, is abstract and faltering in drawing, lifeless,
unveracious, ineffective. Otherwise in the Canadian idyll or in
nature-description he is concrete, veracious, simple but graphic, nearly
always winningly musical and on the whole satisfying. In short, Roberts
discloses in his new manner, in the Canadian idyll and his Acadian
nature-poetry, the sure possession of the secrets of color, movement and
music, and of real Canadian national sentiment, in the presence of life
and nature. He is an adroit nature-colorist and verbal melodist.
Absent, however, from his genius and art are all gifts in spiritual
portraiture and the fine and noble interpretation of Nature which
Lampman discloses in his nature-poetry and his interpretation of the
essential Canadian spirit from the embodiment of that spirit, as Lampman
discerns it, in Nature in Canada.
Roberts’ treatment of Nature may be illustrated by examples taken from
his second volume, _In Divers Tones_ (1887), and from _The Book of the
Native_ (1896), in the latter of which are some poems that really
belong, in form, and spirit, to the time when he was changing his
abstract _Arcadian_ manner to his concrete _Acadian_ manner as in his
_In Divers Tones_. Illustrative of Roberts’ change to a Canadian theme
and to the modern simple method of treating Nature, in the
pseudo-classical style, an apt example is _The Tantramar Revisited_,
composed in the dactylic hexameter, a form, suggested, no doubt, by
Longfellow’s pretty story of Evangeline. In this poem Roberts treats
Canadian Nature with an impressive originality in properties, color, and
sentiment, and certainly with a pervasive directness and veracity which
prove his sincerity and which convince the reader that the poet was
moved by the beauty and pathos of his Acadian subject:—
Ah, the old-time stir, how once it stung me with rapture,—
Old-time sweetness, the winds freighted with honey and salt!
Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland,—
Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see,—
Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion,
Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change.
What a change in Roberts—this change from the abstract, artificial,
academic, over-sensuous treatment of Nature in Arcadia to his direct,
simple, concrete treatment of real nature in Acadia, with his poet’s
eyes directly ‘on the object.’ There we have the real, the genuine
Roberts, the original authentic poet of Canadian Nature and life and
nationality.
For an example of his colored realism or idyllic naturalism tinged with
a sort of Wordsworthian plainness or austerity of style and ethical
revery, consider his sonnet _The Sower_. It has been called Roberts’
‘popular masterpiece.’ As a sonnet, it is perfect in artistic structure,
and is as faithful to Canadian Nature and sentiment as, say, Millet’s
paintings, _The Reapers_ and _The Angelus_, are true to French pastoral
life and religious sentiment.
But this sonnet is a good example of Roberts’ ineffectiveness in human
or spiritual portraiture. How effectively it pictures for us the land,
the sky, the birds, the human properties of the Acadian landscape in
Nova Scotia. The poem visualizes vividly for us all the features and
elements of external Nature; yet it fails to visualize the Sower
_himself_, to limn him effectively, graphically, impressively against
the background of Nature as, on the other hand, Millet has graphically
limned the human figures in his paintings against the French landscape.
Finally: a poem which is a really fine example of Roberts’
characteristic genius and art in the authentic Canadian idyll and in
nature-description, and which, perhaps, contains his nearest approach to
graphic figure-poetry, namely, his lyric _The Solitary Woodsman_, is
specially noteworthy. Though published in _The Book of the Native_, it
really belongs to the period of _In Divers Tones_ when Roberts was
changing over to his natural and characteristic manner of Canadian
idyllic impressionism. For it is a gentle, natural, and simple lyrical
idyll of Canadian Nature and life, tinged with a delicate mood of
contemplation and pathos. A touch more of ‘personal detail,’ of moral
characterization, would have made _The Solitary Woodsman_ as universal
and popular a portrait as the genre picture of the hardy, happy village
blacksmith in Longfellow’s poem with that subject. Nevertheless, the
poem has vigor, action, life-likeness; it is veracious and picturesque.
In it Roberts is at his best in the Canadian lyrical idyll and in
figure-portraiture.
Strict analysis of Roberts’ nature-poetry reveals both the positive
qualities and the defects of his genius and art. As a poet of Nature in
Acadia he hardly more than effects _glimpses_ of Canadian scenery and
pastoral life, colorful, no doubt, and tinged with a homely or even
tender naturalistic sentiment. His pictures of Canadian scenery and
pastoral life are indeterminate _pastels_ of the general features of
Nature in Canada rather than rich, broad paintings done with the
forthright, broad brush-work of a master artist. It is all pretty, or
charming, and faithful to Nature in Acadia. But it is all based on
superficial observation and is devoid of poetic, that is to say,
profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. It is not to be
expected that the Canadian people will treasure these pastels of
Canadian scenery and pastoral life. For though they be beautiful,
simple, and realistic, the ethical element in them is always a
reflection, a moral platitude, from the poet’s own moralizing, or a
recrudescence of some older poets’ moralizings.
The public is quick to detect insincerity in a poet. While it would not
be just to accuse Roberts of insincerity whenever he attempts to
moralize in his nature-poetry, or to give it a moral or religious
significance, it is still true that Roberts’ nature-poetry is too
superficial, too obviously ‘an effort’ to make pretty or charming
pastels of Canadian scenery and pastoral life, too lacking in thoroughly
humanized treatment of Nature, to be popular or cherished for its own
sake by the Canadian people.
His pure lyrical pastels, as for instance, _On the Creek_, and _The
Solitary Woodsman_, are more likely to remain permanently popular than
are his Nature poems in other forms, as, for example, the genuinely
important sonnet-sequence in his _Songs of the Common Day_ (1893). In
these sonnets, however, he shows no increase of descriptive power but
only the variety of his word-painter’s palette. Moreover, in these
sonnets there is a felt insincerity of aim. Though fine in structure,
faithful to Canadian Nature, variously treating the aspects of Canadian
Nature, and often sentimental and moralistic, they impress the reader as
having been designed and written deliberately to show forth the poet’s
powers in realistic or naturalistic impressionism, in the philosophical
interpretation of Nature, and in technical artistry. Notwithstanding, it
must be admitted that in these sonnets Roberts, as an impressionistic
painter of Canadian Nature, is a master, and has his analogues, in the
pictorial painting of Nature, in Corot and Millet, and in the tonal
painting of Nature, in MacDowell and Debussy. These sonnets were
consciously designed to be ‘works of art,’ and to impress the
philosophically minded poets and critics of poetic form. Fine and
masterful as they are in technical artistry, and impressive, too, with a
resurgence of moral ideas, nevertheless they appeal neither to the
popular heart nor to the philosophical imagination. For they create in
the heart of the reader the sense only of a splendid achievement in
poetic artistry, but never any sense of the poet’s own enrichment of
life from his interpretation of beauty in Canadian Nature, civilization,
and life.
Summarily: as an original Poet, Roberts’ _forte_ is the treatment of
Canadian Nature and pastoral life in impressionistic pastels, to an
accompaniment of verbal music in folk rhythms or simple lyric forms.
Thus accepted and appreciated he is a satisfying nature-colorist and
melodist. But, impressive and magnificent, as he is, in more formal or
larger poetic genres, as for instance, the sonnet and monody, he fails
to give us in both a vital application of ideas to life.
Consideration of Roberts’ poetry of modern eroticism reveals only what
has been called a variety of Roberts’ ‘ethical heterogeneity.’ This,
however, is a defect in the man rather than in the poet, and only
negatively affects Roberts’ significance in the literary history of
Canada. Roberts’ work as a threnodist, romantic novelist, and inventor
of a species of animal psychology in the romance is considered
elsewhere. It is, however, as the inaugurator of the First Renaissance
in Canadian Literature, both poetry and prose, rather than as a poet of
Canadian Nationality and Nature, that Roberts has a right to a supremely
significant status in the literary history of Canada.
* * * * *
The quotations from Charles G. D. Roberts’ works are found in the
individual volumes mentioned in the text. There is also issued a
collection entitled, _Poems_ by Charles G. D. Roberts—New complete
edition—(Copp, Clark Co., Toronto, 1907).
CHAPTER VIII
Archibald Lampman
AN INTERPRETER OF THE ESSENTIAL SPIRIT OF CANADA—STUDY OF
LAMPMAN’S ‘SAPPHICS’—POWER OF HUMANIZING NATURE—EXCELLENCE OF
HIS SONNETS—CONSUMMATE ARTIST OF NATURAL BEAUTY.
In 1887 Charles G. D. Roberts had, with his poem beginning ‘O Child of
Nations’ and again with his magniloquent _Ode to the Canadian
Confederacy_, issued a ‘call’ to the Canadian people to realize a
national consciousness and to achieve a national destiny. He appeared as
the ‘Voice’ of Canada. But he was a mere ‘Voice.’ For aside from simply
uttering the ‘call’ he did nothing else to awaken in the Canadian people
a consciousness of their own native or national spirit and a love of
country, except to publish some impressionistic word pictures of
Canadian scenery and pastoral life.
Meanwhile Swinburne had told the world that out of Canada or Australia
would come a great New Voice of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. In 1889, or two
years after Roberts had trumpeted his ‘call’ to Canadians, Theodore
Watts-Dunton, poet, novelist, and the most far-visioned of British
critics then living, in an article on Canadian poetry made the same
prophecy as had Swinburne. ‘Canada,’ he said, ‘had excellent poets, and
with the development of a national consciousness of the history,
resources and wealth of the country, would produce great poets.’ In
1918, or practically thirty years after the prophecies of Swinburne and
Watts-Dunton and the ‘call’ of Roberts, Sir Herbert Warren, President of
Magdalen College, Oxford, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, in an
address on ‘Overseas Poetry,’ as he called it, before the Royal Colonial
Institute, London, also confessed to a vision of great poets arising in
Canada and said that, in his view, so far Canada had produced only ‘some
_good_ poets.’ It is probable that the prophecies of Swinburne and
Watts-Dunton were merely generous pleasantries or, possibly, ‘guesses at
the truth.’ In any case what they were really concerned about was the
appearance of a great _Imperial_ poet in Canada or some other one of the
British Overseas Dominions.
What Canadians themselves should be concerned about is not whether
Canada has produced a significant Imperial poet but whether the Dominion
has produced a signally excellent poet who, if not the prophetic Voice
of the Dominion, is the true _Interpreter_ of the essential Canadian
spirit.
When Sir Herbert Warren declared that Canada had produced only some good
poets, he had in mind Roberts, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Valancy
Crawford, W. H. Drummond, and Robert Service. But the greatest poet that
Canada has produced, greatest as a nature-poet, and as an interpreter of
the essential mind and heart of the Canadian people and country, is
Archibald Lampman. If Lampman is not great in the sense that Shelley or
Keats or Wordsworth or Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne is great, at
least he is more than a good poet. He is a consummate artist. But more
important, he is a subtle interpreter of the Canadian national spirit by
way of a new and philosophical interpretation of Nature in Canada. He is
_par excellence_ the poet of Canadian Nature and Nationality.
For inductive proof of ‘nationality’ in literature, consider critically,
and at some length, from Lampman’s poetry, an impressive example of
wholly indigenous expression of the Canadian genius and the Canadian
view of Nature and of Life. Justly it may be held that this example of
interpretative nature-poetry by Lampman, which goes under the name of
_Sapphics_, is, for faultless technic, for spiritual vision of Nature
and for the beautiful application of noble ideas to life, an indubitable
contribution to poetic art, and is peculiarly Canadian. This is not too
high praise; for the poem itself, with analyses of its form and beauty,
together with a commentary on its spiritual meaning, will furnish
sufficient evidence that it must be given a unique place in Canadian
Literature. For easy expository purposes the poem may be divided into
three parts, which contain its three themes and their inspiration:—
I
Clothed in splendor, beautifully sad and silent,
Comes the autumn over the woods and highlands,
Golden, rose-red, full of divine remembrance,
Full of foreboding.
Soon the maples, soon will the glowing birches,
Stripped of all that summer and love had dowered them,
Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure
Ruthlessly scattered:
Yet they quail not; Winter, with wind and iron,
Comes and finds them silent and uncomplaining,
Finds them tameless, beautiful still and gracious,
Gravely enduring.
II
Me, too, changes, bitter and full of evil,
Dream by dream have plundered and left me naked,
Gray with sorrow. Even the days before me
Fade into twilight,
Mute and barren. Yet will I keep my spirit
Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble
Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless,
Grandly ungrieving.
III
Brief the span is, counting the years of mortals,
Strange and sad; it passes and then the bright earth,
Careless mother, gleaming with gold and azure,
Lovely with blossoms—
Shining white anemones, mixed with roses,
Daisies mild-eyed, grasses and honeyed clover—
You and me, and all of us, met and equal,
Softly shall cover.
The pure beauty of that poem, of its spiritual imagery, of its rhythmic
flow and cadences, _andante tranquillo_, and the noble mood and emotion
it induces—how it all affects the heart and imagination like music
heard in dim cathedral aisles, or recalls us from the vulgar
distractions of life to sequestered retreats in the Canadian wildwood,
there to contemplate existence with a subdued joy and tender peace! Nay
more, we rise from communing with the poet, as he did from his communion
with Nature, anointed with a new spiritual grace and with a new strength
to achieve, amidst ten thousand vicissitudes of fortune, a right worthy
destiny—‘grandly ungrieving.’
Each of the three parts of the poem has its own theme and inspiration.
The first section gives us the poet’s vision of Nature and of Nature’s
own (as well as the poet’s) autumnal mood. This is an important
distinction. It distinguishes a peculiar Canadian pictorializing and
humanizing vision of Nature. Who can mistake in what land comes that
autumn, ‘clothed in a splendor,’ and ‘beautifully sad and silent,’ in
what land flourish those woods, ‘golden, rose-red,’ and in what land
rise those hills, ‘full of divine remembrance’? Those are indisputably,
unmistakably, Canadian woods and hills, in their precise autumnal garb
and mood.
Some would contend that this way of pictorializing Nature is Grecian or
even English. Rather is it peculiarly Canadian. It is so for this
reason: The Greeks, as it were, ‘decked out’ Nature solely for the
sensuous enjoyment of a world made lovely to look upon or pleasant to
dwell in. The external beauty of Nature was with them, as with Keats and
Wordsworth, when these two did not assume the moralizing attitude, the
sufficient reason for their impressionistic word-painting. With Lampman,
as with the Kelts (and Lampman was a Gael on his mother’s side), the
physical loveliness of the face and garb of Nature is an essential,
living aspect of earth. For does not Nature herself, as if conscious and
reflective, change her aspect and garb becomingly with her seasons and
moods? Lampman’s attitude to Nature is not the attitude of an
impressionistic landscape painter, but of one for whom physical
loveliness is supremely a spiritual revealment. This, however, might be
wholly Keltic, and not Canadian. But it is Canadian, and not Keltic,
because the interior revealment expresses a special view of Nature and a
special mode of intimate communion between the Canadian heart and the
spirit of Nature in Canadian woods and streams and hills.
Part second of the poem gives us an altogether novel and original
spiritual interpretation of Nature’s mood and temper. It is a mood or
temper, be it remarked, not expressed by Nature in any land save Canada,
and not to be divined, and sympathized with, by any other racial genius
save by the mind and heart indigenous to Canada, sensitive emotionally
to the varying aspects and manner of Nature in Canada, as children to
the meaning of changes in the facial expression and manner of a mother.
The uncritical, having in mind that inveterate sermonizer Wordsworth,
may think that Lampman in this poem does but ‘moralize’ Nature. Far from
it, Lampman ‘humanizes’ Nature in a peculiar way, namely, by reciprocal
sympathy. We must mark that—‘reciprocal sympathy’—as an original
Canadian contribution to the poetic interpretation, the spiritual
revealment, of Nature. Lampman, as he says himself, is ‘brother’ to
Nature. Her reflections on her own vicissitudes are as his own on his
fortunes of life. The Poet and Nature, though two physically, are one by
mutual bonds of sympathy. The poet sympathizes with Nature as he himself
feels that she sympathizes with him. Thus does he humanize, not
sentimentally, but nobly, the Canadian maples and birches, which, as he
says:—
Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure
Ruthlessly scattered:
Yet they quail not . . . .
‘Yet they quail not’—there we have envisaged the mood and temper of
Canadian Nature! The Gael, visioning the maples and birches, with his
racial melancholy sentiment for glories departed, might say of them that
they ‘dream, sad-limbed.’ But only a Canadian, or a Canadian Gael,
apprehending, through sympathy, their inmost mood, could say of them,
nobly, inimitably: ‘Yet they quail not.’ And so Lampman, divining, with
a more than Keltic subtlety of vision, the spirit of the Canadian woods
in autumn, sympathetically responds to their mood, and is heartened to
endure, as they do, ‘silent and uncomplaining.’
Yet I will keep my spirit
Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble
Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless,
Grandly ungrieving.
‘Yet I will keep my spirit clear and valiant!’—Mark that as the
authentic _spiritual_ note of the Canadian genius. It is not Canadian,
however, merely because it is the expression of indomitable courage and
serenity, but because the idea, the inspiration, of a self-controlled
destiny, achieved with clearness of vision and valiant heart, first
comes to the mind and heart and moral imagination of the Canadian poet
_as a gift from Canadian woods_. He, for his part, conveys that gift to
his compatriots, by his poetic envisagement of the ‘brotherhood’ of Man
and Nature in this land of glowing birches, noble elms and maples. That
‘note’ of clear-visioned faith and courage and serenity is in Canadian
poetry of earlier days, long before the Confederacy, as well as in these
days of social and commercial progress. It was in the poetry of Sangster
and Mair in Ontario, and in the Gaelic verses of James MacGregor in Nova
Scotia. But it is most articulate and vocal in the poetry of Archibald
Lampman.
Considering now the first two parts of Lampman’s poem as a whole, we
become aware that the first distinctively ‘national’ note in the
literature of the Canadian Confederacy is a unique humanizing of Nature,
singularly apparent in the Nature-poetry of Lampman—a sympathetic
identity of mood and temper, a reciprocal sense of brotherhood, between
Man and Nature. This is a psychological phenomenon by itself, belonging
solely to the Canadian genius and expressing itself, with fine art,
solely in Canadian poetry.
Like other poets, British and American, Canadian poets have notable
pictorializing gifts, and can visualize a scene so vividly as to give a
reader of their verse the intimate view of an eye-witness of the
reality. They can, as aptly as Wordsworth, also moralize Nature and
convey a noble preachment. But of them all Lampman stands alone in
this—_the power to humanize Nature into personality, and
sympathetically identify her spirit with his own, in mood and will_.
Lampman also stands alone in this—_in his love of local beauty and his
power to individualize and vitalize it_. This, too, is a ‘national’ note
and a psychological phenomenon by itself. His is not a love of Nature’s
beauty abstracted from a particular time and place, but of those very
scenes and haunts where first he beheld Nature in all her physical
loveliness and many moods and became her intimate companion and lover.
Lampman so individualizes and vitalizes his fields and woods, as
Campbell his lakes, Roberts his woods and marshes, and Carman his tide
and mists and April morns, that the reader can localize the region, and
‘time’ the season, of their inspiration with the nicest perception. So
singularly is this quality present, most notably in poetry of Lampman,
though also in the poetry of Roberts, Carman, Campbell, Duncan Campbell
Scott and Pauline Johnson, that a reader can, with absolute surety, say
not only, ‘This is Canadian nature-beauty,’ but also, ‘This is Canadian
nature-beauty in Nova Scotia, in New Brunswick, in Ontario.’ Surely,
then, this peculiar imaginative interpretation of Canadian Nature
whereby Lampman and his _confrères_, first, localize Nature, and, next,
humanize her noblest mood and temper into an identity with their own is
a supreme expression of the national spirit and raises
Post-Confederation poetry to the dignity of authentic literature.
Canadians are, in the eyes of the older nations, a notably sane and
happy people. They are so because they keep their souls, in the phrase
of Lampman, always ‘clear and valiant,’ having, as Lampman, and even as
Roberts and the other poets of the First Renaissance in Canadian
Literature, a sure vision of the greatness of their country’s destiny
and of the means to it. The peculiar moral qualities of the Canadian
people are an inviolable faith in themselves, an indomitable courage,
and an imperturbable serenity. The ground and inspiration of these
qualities are in Canadian woods and hills and waters, and Archibald
Lampman, in his nature-poetry, interprets these qualities of the
Canadian people and country with sweet reasonableness and genuine
nobility.
In two of his finest sonnets, rich both in aesthetic and in spiritual
beauty, and worthy both of Keats and Wordsworth, possibly suggesting the
spirit of their finest sonnets, Lampman has summarized his poetic and
philosophical creed. So beautiful in structure and imagery, so noble in
their expression of the courage and serenity and faith which obtain in
his _Sapphics_, and yet so wistful of the heavenly beauty and so infused
with the pathos of life are these sonnets, that they move the soul and
subdue the spirit with ‘thoughts too deep for tears.’ If there is any
genuine meaning to Arnold’s conception of the moral dignity and
spiritual function of poetry as ‘the profound and powerful application
of ideas of life,’ these two sonnets by Lampman quite match the finest
sonnets of the same degree of poetic vision by Keats, Wordsworth, and
Arnold:—
I
Not to be conquered by these headlong days,
But to stand free; to keep the mind at brood
On life’s deep meaning, nature’s altitude
Or loveliness, and time’s mysterious ways;
At every thought and deed to clear the haze
Out of our eyes, considering only this,
What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,
This is to live, and win the final praise.
Though strife, ill fortune, and harsh human need
Beat down the soul, at moments blind and dumb,
With agony; yet, patience—there shall come
Many great voices from life’s outer sea,
Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed,
Murmurs and glimpses of eternity.
II
There is a beauty at the goal of life,
A beauty growing since the world began,
Through every age and race, through lapse and strife,
Till the great human soul complete her span:
Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn,
The currents of blind passion that appal,
To listen and keep watch till we discern
The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all;
So to address our Spirits to the height,
And so to attune them to the valiant whole,
That the great light be clearer for our light,
And the great soul the stronger for our soul:
To have done this is to have lived, though fame
Remembers us with no familiar name.
Certainly these sonnets breath a higher spiritual air than do the finest
sonnets of Roberts, as, for instance, _The Sower_ and _The Potato
Harvest_. As certainly, in sustained serenity and moral import, as well
as in profound spiritual beauty, Lampman’s sonnet-sequence _The Frogs_
surpasses Roberts’ sonnet-sequence in his _Songs of the Common
Day_,—not only technically and in nature-color and music but also in
transporting the spirit with inevitable ‘murmurs and glimpses of
eternity’:—
And slowly as we heard you, day by day,
The stillness of enchanted reveries
Bound brain and spirit with half-closèd eyes,
In some divine sweet wonder-dream astray;
To us no sorrow or upreared dismay
Nor any discord come, but evermore
The voices of mankind, the outer roar,
Grew strange and murmurous, faint and far away.
Morning and noon and midnight exquisitely,
Rapt with your voices, this alone we knew,
Cities might change and fall, and men might die,
Secure were we, content to dream with you
That change and air are shadows faint and fleet,
And dreams are real, and life is only sweet.
There we have, not talent cleverly performing an academic exercise, but
serene and noble genius profoundly and finely interpreting and
appreciating Beauty and Good in the universe and in existence.
Indubitably Lampman is a master of the sonnet, a master whom those
greatest masters of the sonnet, Keats and Wordsworth, would welcome to
their company, and of whose company, as a nature-poet working in the
sonnet or the lyric forms, he really is.
But Lampman is more than a philosophical interpreter of the mystery and
wonder of Nature and Life. He is also a consummate artist in revealing
to others his vision of the natural magic and beauty of Nature in
Canada. He is even a finer colorist and melodist than is Roberts. He is
such because he has finer powers of observation, and notes not merely
the general superficial beauty of the face of Nature but also the
minutest details of Nature’s physiognomy and garb, and the gentler, more
gracious of Nature’s moods.
Unlike Roberts, Lampman is not a mere sensuous impressionist. He is an
artist with the same gifts as those of Thomas Gray for discerning,
appreciating, and envisaging in lyric verse the subtler and lovelier
beauties of fields and woods and hills and streams and sky, and for
interpreting to the spirit the meaning of pastoral beauty and life in
Canadian woods. Roberts paints charmingly indeed at times the mere face
of Nature. Lampman not only paints exquisitely and daintily the physical
loveliness and garb of Nature but also conveys her most winsome moods
and her daintiest messages for the refreshment and sustenance of the
spirit. Moreover, Lampman has Gray’s gift in limning the human figure,
of adding, with graphic nicety, a humanistic touch to his spiritual
portraits. As a poet who paints and interprets Nature with the intimate
vision and delicate brush of the artist, not with mere impressionism but
with minute and lovely truth and realism, and also as a poet who
humanizes Nature with graphic portraits and interprets Nature subtly and
intimately to the spirit, Lampman is a master by himself.
Whatever influences Keats may have had on Lampman’s art, it must be
observed that fundamentally, as an artist and as an interpreter of
Nature, with the power to add here and there graphic bits of human
portraiture, Lampman is nearer to Gray than to Keats or even to
Wordsworth. All these qualities are incisively exemplified in Lampman’s
lyric _Heat_. In this poem Nature and pastoral life in Canada, on a day
of sultry summer heat, are painted with the nicest realistic detail; and
in it the bit of human portraiture, the wagoner ‘slowly slouching at his
ease,’ is as graphic and as true to life as Gray’s bit of human
portraiture, the plowman homeward plodding his weary way, is graphic and
true to English pastoral and natural life.
If any Canadian poet ever entered the sanctuaries of Nature and revealed
the intimate observation and consummate artistry which marks the art of
all the exquisite poets of Nature—that Canadian poet is Archibald
Lampman. He is, however, a greater poet than he is an artist. As a poet
he is the superior of Roberts. As an artist he has no superior save
Duncan Campbell Scott. But as a poet of Nature, interpreting from Nature
the essence of the Canadian spirit, Lampman is superb,
supreme—unmatched, and even unrivalled by any other poet that Canada
has yet produced.
* * * * *
The quotations from Archibald Lampman’s work in this chapter are from
_The Collected Poems of Archibald Lampman_, edited, with a memoir by
Duncan Campbell Scott—new edition, 1923 (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).
CHAPTER IX
Bliss Carman
AS A WORLD-POET—CREATIVE MELODIST—PERIODS OF HIS POETRY—SINGING
QUALITY AND ITS METHOD—LYRIST OF THE SEA AND OF LOVE—TREATMENT
OF NATURE.
Bliss carman is the only Canadian-born poet who reasonably and
inevitably challenges comparison with English and United States poets of
admitted distinction. He is, in the continental sense of the term, more
American than he is Canadian; more English than American; and more a
world-poet than Canadian, or American, or English, in the sense that
famous poets writing in the English language, from Chaucer to Masefield,
are world-poets. His genius and poetry, as do the genius and poetry of
no other Canadian poet, challenge criticism to define the qualities of
his mind and art. Unless, therefore, those who have written _con amore_
about Carman and have denoted him as the greatest Canadian poet
distinguish in what respect or respects he is so to be designated, the
distinction is unmeaning. Carman is not the greatest Canadian poet in
versatility of genius, variety of themes and forms, and perfection of
technic or craftsmanship. He is surpassed by Roberts in versatility of
genius and variety of forms. He is not the greatest Canadian
nature-colorist or impressionistic word-painter in verse. There again
Roberts surpasses him. Carman is not the greatest Canadian poetic
interpreter of nature in Canada and of the Canadian spirit. Lampman is
his equal, and, in one respect, his superior. Nor is Carman the greatest
Canadian artist in narrative verse. Pauline Johnson and Edward W.
Thomson surpass him. Further, Carman is not, save in a special sense,
the greatest Canadian melodist. Pauline Johnson and Marjorie Pickthall
have a more dulcet singing lilt and sensuous music. Finally, Carman is
not the greatest, that is, the nearest to perfection, in technical
artistry, of Canadian poets. Duncan Campbell Scott is his unrivalled
master in that respect.
Yet indubitably Bliss Carman is the very foremost of Canadian-born
poets. In Carman’s genius and poetry there are an originality and power
and beauty and distinction that, first, make him unique amongst Canadian
poets and that, secondly, compel the critical world to admit that he is
the only Canadian-born poet who, whenever he is the supreme lyrist and
the inspired technician in verse that he can be, has made a distinct,
singular, and enduring contribution of his own to English or world
poetry, and, on that account, is in the direct line of the Chaucerian
succession. Whenever, that is, Carman excels in sheer genius, and as a
nature-painter, nature-interpreter, story-teller in verse, melodist and
technician, he surpasses each and all his Canadian compatriot poets at
their best in their specialty. They each excel in one or two powers.
Carman excels in all their combined powers, to the maximal degree.
Moreover, none of his Canadian compatriot poets is his equal or even
rival in originality and power of imagination, in sheer vision of the
metaphysical meanings of nature and existence, in intensity of passion,
in romantic atmosphere, in satiric humor, in free and potent diction and
inevitable imagery, and in light or ecstatic lyricism. So great is
Carman as a poet of the Sea that he has made a distinct contribution in
this _genre_ to English poetry. As a lyric poet of romantic and
Spiritual Love, he has no superior, if even an equal, in Canada or
America, and few in any other country. His Elegies are lovely lyric
memorials of the Spirit. His poems of sheer joy of living or of satiric
humor have no prototypes. His symbolistic or so-called mystical poetry,
as an interpretation of the universe and as a means of solace and
serenity in the midst of seeming Satanic triumphs, are as noble and
grateful to the spirit and as sustaining as the breath of life from his
own Maritime sea-winds and woodsy zephyrs. But when he sings most freely
and liltingly, then is Bliss Carman the supreme melodist, and Chaucer is
heard again in the land, and the troubadours, and all those upon whom
Nature bestowed the gift of verbal _bel canto_.