While, then, it is the challenging quality of Bliss Carman’s poetry, as

if he were directly of the strain of Chaucer, Burns, Wordsworth,

Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Masefield, and as if his verse, like

theirs, stood, as it does, upright on its own feet, that gives it its

first and most important general distinction, it possesses other

distinctions, one of which, namely, its special verbal music, of Keltic

origin and form, is unique in Canadian poetry and rare in modern English

poetry. It is these particular distinctions which stamp Bliss Carman as

an extraordinary creative poet and melodist, and as the one Canadian

poet who has a right to an indisputable place beside the finer and more

compelling poets of England and the United States. These claims may be

abundantly substantiated by a study of the texts of what may be called

the Popular Collected Poems of Bliss Carman, namely, _Ballads and

Lyrics_ and _Later Poems_ (with an appreciation by R. H. Hathaway), and

by a study of such interpretative commentaries as Odell Shepard’s _Bliss

Carman_ and H. D. C. Lee’s _Bliss Carman: A Study of Canadian Poetry_,

together with Hathaway’s ‘Appreciation’ in _Later Poems_ by Bliss

Carman. In this chapter Carman is considered and treated from the three

sides in which he is unique amongst Canadian poets: namely, as, in the

light of the history of English poetry, a singularly original and

inventive Vowel Melodist; as a Nature-Poet whose impressionism and

‘readings’ of earth differ from those of Roberts and Lampman; and as a

Philosophical or Mystical Poet who perceives in Beauty the only

manifestation of the union of the Real and the Ideal and regards it as

an intuitive proof of the Supremacy of Good in the universe.

However well-intentioned the attempts to divide the poetical activity of

Bliss Carman into _Periods_, on the whole they are not pedagogically

successful. Three Periods have been remarked—a so-called Romantic

Period, represented by _Low Tide on Grand Pré_ and the _Songs of

Vagabondia_ series; a Transcendental Period, represented by _Behind the

Arras_, subtitled ‘A Book of the Unseen,’ which indicates its mood, and

_The Green Book of the Bards_; and a Synthetic Period, in which his

appreciation of the beauty of earth is not contrasted with the

evanescence and the mystery of life, but in which there is a joyous

acceptance of both. This Synthetic Period is represented by _The Book of

the Myths_, _Sappho_, and _April Airs_. Yet in each volume, from _Low

Tide on Grand Pré_ (1893) to _April Airs_ (1916), there is in varying

degree the same ‘touch of manner,’ the same ‘hint of mood,’ the same

occupation _both_ with the beauty of earth and with the mystery and

meaning of existence and the universe. Really there is no development of

Carman’s genius and art—no periods of growth—after his first book,

_Low Tide on Grand Pré_, except an increase in ready mastery, not of

technic, but of _clear expression_ of thought and meaning. Some of his

finest verbal melody and some of his most compelling lines are in his

earlier volumes, and with them also embodiments of his essential thought

about life and the universe. But we do note, in each succeeding volume,

a gradual decrease in Carman’s _sense_ of world-pain (_weltschmerz_),

and an increase in _clearer expression_ of his thought about the mystery

of life. To use musical language: in his earlier books Carman heard

_discords_ in the universe. They were really not discords but

_dissonances_. As he grew older and reflected more philosophically, he

was able to resolve these dissonances; and as he gradually achieved

this, the more he combined, with clarity and surety, his fine natural

powers of lyrical utterance with, to use Meredith’s phrase, his ’reading

of earth,’ his intuitions of the ultimate supremacy of the Good.

Since he fully recovered from the illness which attacked him about 1919,

Carman has entered on what promises to be his greatest, most

constructive period, the keynote of which is his characteristic lyrical

utterance in the expressing of a confident synthesis of Sight and Faith,

of Beauty and Goodness. It is all the same verbal melody and the same

love of beautiful sound, color, and form as in _Low Tide on Grand Pré_,

but all the felt dissonances that existed for thought have been

resolved, and now existence is filled with an ineluctable joy and a

tender peace which are a pure gain for the spirit. The poems which

represent the _new_ Carman or the Carman of the _new_ and final period

exist, for the most part in manuscript, though a few have been published

fugitively. We quote one of these new fugitive poems, _Vestigia_ (1921),

in which the notable qualities, aside from verbal melody and color, are

a confident synthesis of Sight and Faith, Earth and God, and absolute

simplicity and clarity of the diction and images:—

I took a day to search for God

And found Him not. But as I trod

By rocky ledge, through woods untamed,

Just where one scarlet lily flamed,

I saw his footprints in the sod.

Then suddenly, all unaware,

Far off in the deep shadows where

A solitary hermit thrush

Sang through the holy twilight hush—

I heard his voice upon the air.

And even as I marvelled how

God gives us Heaven here and now,

In a stir of wind that hardly shook

The poplar leaves beside the brook—

His hand was light upon my brow.

At last with evening as I turned

Homeward, and thought what I had learned

And all that there was still to probe—

I caught the glory of His robe

Where the last flowers of sunset burned.

Back to the world with quickening start

I looked and longed for any part

In making saving Beauty be . . . .

And from that kindling ecstasy

I knew God dwelt within my heart.

Of the manuscript poems belonging to this fourth period, I may merely

mention the titles, as, for instance, _Wa-wa_, a mystical interpretation

of the wild-goose honk, _The Truce of the Manitou_, and, above all,

_Shamballah_, which is the perfection of Carman’s mystical

interpretations—a poem of

The City under the Star,

Where the Sons of the Fire-Mist gather,

And the keys of all mystery are.

Fugitive poems representing this final period are _The Mirage of the

Plain_, _The Rivers of Canada_, _Kaleedon Road_, and _Vancouver_, which

contain mystical interpretations ’suggested,’ as Carman has said, ‘by

the vast spaces of Canada.’ _Apropos_ of the mood, manner, and

interpretations of Nature in this period, Carman has observed: ‘All

Nature poems are more or less mystical.’

What we really observe, then, in Carman’s genius and poetry is not

genuine, clearly marked Periods, but rather _Periodicities_—waves of

poetical activity, in which the crest of the wave is either lyrical

ecstasy, the singing of the Beauty of Earth for its own sake and out of

love of beautiful sound and color, or mystical ‘readings’ of Earth,

transcendental interpretations of the meaning of the life of sentient

and spiritual creatures, but below the crest of the wave are poems of

transcendentalism if the crest is lyrical naturalism or poems of lyrical

naturalism if the crest is transcendental. Yet in these periodicities

there is a sure and well-demarcated development, not of technic, but of

clarity of thought and expression—from that earlier so-called mysticism

which was only mystification, to the genuine mysticism which is the

immediate intuition of God in the universe and especially the immediate

perception of the oneness of the spirit of Nature with that of Man and

of God. But all the while, as the development goes on, even to his final

period, Carman remains the superb melodist and colorist. So that Bliss

Carman must be regarded as at once both the most lyrical of Canadian

philosophical poets and the most philosophical of Canadian lyrical

poets.

Carman’s prototype in sheer singing quality is Chaucer—the first,

freest, and sweetest of the English poets, whom Tennyson apostrophized

in avian metaphor as a ‘warbler.’ So in the same way Carman sings with

the natural lilt, abandon, and melodiousness of the lark and linnet. He

is a ‘warbler.’ It is an irrelevant criticism to say, as has been said,

that Carman ‘sings on and on,’ frequently in his earlier poems, out of

his own ecstasy over hearing the beautiful verbal melody he is making,

whether a given poem makes sense in thought or not. He is not

ecstatically singing on and on from love of beautiful sound, but because

he cannot clearly express what he means in his thinking; and so we hear

the singing as if it were the accompaniment to the thought which we

cannot, any more than he, articulate. But how lovely, how melodious the

accompaniment!

As a matter of truth, however, we shall get at the secret of Carman’s

unique singing quality if we ask what is the _method_ of his warbling.

It is in his method that he differs from all modern English poets and

has made an original and distinct contribution to English lyrical

poetry. This is the fact: Bliss Carman is a belated troubadour or 16th

century English lutanist or Keltic harpist. Lutanists and harpists

created the text for their songs; and the prime end was melody or at

least melodiousness. The ultimate element or unit in verbal melody with

the lutanists or harpists was the _word_, and the core of the word, for

melodic purposes, was the vowel. Poets arose in England, but more

especially in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland, who aimed to

make the melody of unaccompanied poetry imitate the melody of the

lutanists’ and the harpists’ accompanied verses. The lutanists,

harpists, and melodic poets, who aimed to imitate music, passed, and new

generations of poets substituted metrical and stanzaic structure and

alliterative arrangement of consonants for the old vowel-melody. The

unit in English poetry, after the 16th century, became the _line_, not

the word or the vowel in the word.

It is the chief glory of Bliss Carman, as a creative poet, that he

brought back into English poetry the _word_ and the pure unimpeded

_singing vowel_, with the same intent as the Italian _bel canto_

composers, as the unit in verbal melody. Some critics have made

considerable point of the fact that Carman is a ‘great’ poet, _in spite_

of the fact that he employs chiefly the rhymed octosyllabic line or

measure, or iambic tetrameters and trimeters, with trochaic and

anapaestic substitutions and other metrical mechanics for variety. The

truth is that Carman wrote his poetry as a melodist, not as a technical

musician; that he aimed to _sing_, like the lark or linnet, not to

_compose_, like a musician. His measures were chosen, whenever he meant

to be lyrical, because they were _singing_ measures and his diction was

chosen for the melody inside the words, for the ‘vowel-chime’ in them.

In Carman’s lyrical poetry the word determines the line, or rather the

word alone counts, and the line is insignificant. Dulcet vowel-melody or

delicate vowel-harmony is Bliss Carman’s chief original contribution to

Canadian and English poetry. Examples are innumerable. Consider the

clarion tones in this line, which as a line by itself is perfect:—

The resonant far-listening morn.

There are no closed vowels in those words, and the word ’resonant’ is

precisely resonant in vowel-melody and harmony. It is the open vowels

that count melodically in this stanza:—

_But in the yule, O Yanna,_

Up from the round dim sea

_And reeling dungeons of the fog,_

I am come back to thee!

What a superb singing line is the first, and what booming sonorities are

in the eloquently descriptive third line, ‘the reeling dungeons of the

fog.’ Repeat it orally (for with Carman poetry is an _oral_ art) and all

the melody will be found in the vowels. And what bright vowel-melody

resides in the single words of this line:—

The glad indomitable sea!

For an example of just the kind of vowel-melody, dulcet and delicate,

which is of the lutanist or harpist order, all in the words _per se_,

not in the lines as lines, consider this stanza:—

A golden flute in the cedars,

A silver pipe in the swales,

And the slow large life of the forest

Wells back and prevails.

This is the music or melody which Pan must have piped and with which he

hushed to peace the wild-creatures of the ancient forests—it is

silvery, pastoral reed music, and in verbal reed melody Carman is a

modern Pan.

Carman can make beautiful line-melody, line-harmony when he wishes to do

so; and he is a master of alliteration, quite the peer of Tennyson or

Swinburne. For instance, these alliterative lines:—

The gold languorous lilies of the glade.

• • • •

Burying, brimming, the building billows.

• • • •

Silent with frost and floored with snow.

• • • •

And softer than sleep her hands first sweep

• • • •

And down the sluices of the dawn.

• • • •

And like green clouds in opal calms.

• • • •

Behind her banners burns the crimson sun.

• • • •

While down the soft blue-shadowed aisles of snow

Night, like a sacristan with silent step,

Passes to light the tapers of the stars.

Carman is as adept as Kipling in employing, for the sake of verbal music

and variety of rhythm, such devices as shifting of accent, slurring, and

elision, and, further, he invents beautiful measures, as, for instance,

the dimeter of _Ilicet_, or the six-line stanza of _The White Gull_

(Shelley):—

O captain of the rebel host,

Lead forth and far!

Thy toiling troopers of the night

Press on the unavailing fight;

The sombre field is not yet lost,

With thee for star.

Carman is also singularly adept in the use of what may be called musical

onomatopœia. In this quality his ear is specially sensitive to

_pianissimi_ in Nature, the soughing of the winds, the sighings and

whisperings of the zephyrs, the fifings and murmurings of the insects

(with Carman the crickets always ‘fife’ and the bees ‘murmur’), and, to

use his own phrase, all the ‘tiny multitudinous sound’ of rustling

leaves, dancing grasses, crooning brooks, tinkling rain, which make the

instrumentation of the Toy Symphony of Nature:—

Outside, a yellow maple tree,

Shifting upon the silvery blue

With tiny multitudinous sound,

Rustled to let the sunlight through.

It is, however, in the use of rhythmical onomatopœia that Carman is even

more inventively masterly than in mere sound imitation. An outstanding

example of the imitation of the ‘fife and drum’ marching rhythm, with an

exact imitation of the fife in the word ‘whistle’ and of the rattle-roll

of the drum in the word ‘rallied,’ is Carman’s lovely nature-lyric

_Daisies_, second stanza:—

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune

I saw the white daisies go down to the sea

• • • •

The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell,

The orioles whistled them out of the wood;

And all of their singing was, ‘Earth, it is well!’

And all of their dancing was, ‘Life, thou art good!’

Always, from his very first book, _Low Tide on Grand Pré_, to his

latest, _April Airs_, published almost a quarter of a century later,

Bliss Carman has been the master troubadour, the master melodist,

constructing his melody chiefly by an exquisite but subtle use of

vowel-tones, vowel-harmonies. But never has he aimed to be the

consciously meticulous technical musician, laboring at involved and

intricate metrical and stanzaic structure, assonance and alliteration.

His verbal melody is in the word and vowel as his ear naturally picked

these up from everyday speech, and is just as spontaneous and simple.

His melody did not come by ‘working at’ it in the study. We may often

note Roberts, and even Lampman, assiduously busied with constructing the

perfect musical line. Carman’s melody wells out of him in the ‘great

outdoors’—natural and spontaneous as the lark’s or linnet’s. By virtue,

then, of this spontaneous lyrical melodiousness of Carman’s poetry, a

melodiousness _newly based_ on the vowel-tones and harmonies in words,

simple words of actual humanized speech, and not on modern intricacies

of line or stanzaic structure and consonantal systems, Bliss Carman is

one of the master-melodists of English poetry.

Thus as a melodist in general. Canada, however, has produced no poet who

is Carman’s equal as a lyrist of the Sea and of Love. It is indubitable

that he has made a distinct and superb contribution to the authentic Sea

Poetry in the English language. His sea ‘speech’ is the native speech of

his soul, the expression of an innate personal sympathy with the moods,

powers, and deeds of the Sea, a sympathy which is, in Carman, an

_identity_ of the spirit in Nature with the spirit in the Man or Poet.

Melodiously he declares this personal sympathy and identity with the Sea

in his autobiographical poem, _A Son of the Sea_:—

I was born for deep-sea faring;

I was bred to put to sea;

Stories of my father’s daring

Filled me at my mother’s knee.

I was sired among the surges;

I was cubbed beside the foam;

_All my heart is in its verges,_

_And the sea-wind is my home_.

All my boyhood, far from vernal

Bourns of being, came to me

_Dream-like, plangent, and eternal_

_Memories of the plunging sea_.

No English poet of distinction so often even mentions the Sea or creates

such Homeric epithets for the Sea as does Bliss Carman. A catalogue of

Carman’s original epithets for the Sea, if complete, would be a poetic

phenomenon by itself. Some of the most apt and fetching may be

noted—‘the hollow sea,’ ‘the curving sea,’ ‘the old gray sea,’ ‘the

plunging sea,’ ‘the shambling sea,’ ‘the brightening sea,’ ‘the

troubling sea,’ ‘the lazy sea,’ ‘the open sea,’ ‘the heaving sea,’ ‘the

eternal sea,’ ‘the ruthless noisy sea,’ ‘the misty sea,’ ‘the ancient

ever-murmuring sea,’ and that supreme achievement in English poetry,

Carman’s inevitable, perfect line:—

The glad indomitable sea!

For lovers of sea poetry Carman’s _Ballads of Lost Haven: A Book of the

Sea_ (1897) is a genuinely unique anthology by itself—‘one hundred

pages,’ as a London critic has said, ‘of salt sea without a trace of

Kipling, and yet having a sea-flavor as unmistakable as his, and with a

finer touch—with less repetition, less of mere technicality, and a more

varied human interest.’ For Carman the Sea is a _human personality_. Its

moods and deeds embrace all the contradictory moods and deeds of human

beings. But whatever mood or deed of the Sea is expressed by Carman, he

does it with pure and perfect lyricism. Carman is said to have no gifts

for spiritual portraiture. Yet what English or American poet has matched

Carman’s portrait of the Sea as a shambling, fierce, grim, rollicking,

burly, cruel, crooked, old man, and at the same time created such a

brave and lilting song of the Sea, as in _The Gravedigger_, with its

inimitable burly refrain?—

Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,

He makes for the nearest shore;

And God, who sent him a thousand ship,

Will send him a thousand more;

But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,

And shoulder them in to shore,—

Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,

Shoulder them in to shore.

When a poet gives us such realistic portraiture and such inimitable

lyrical melody and rhythm as does Carman in _The Gravedigger_, it is a

futile criticism to find fault with his sea poems on the side of lack of

dramatic elements, and weakness in narrative, since the _strength_ of

the poems was meant by the poet to be their inherent passional intensity

and melody. Carman’s sea poems were not meant to be strictly dramatic

narrative tales of the sea, but to be ballads or songs of the _romance_

of the sea. We may remark, as a general observation, that as a balladist

of the Sea, Carman does not aim at dramatic narration, but at singing,

with the freedom and picturesque vernacular and technical slang of

sailors, as they would sing their chanteys, the romance, happy or grim,

of the sea. As songs, his so-called ballads of the Sea are a supreme

achievement in verbal melody, the glory of Canadian sea poetry, and one

of the glories of English poetry.

As the master melodist or musician of the Sea, Carman brilliantly

achieved, but he is equally the master melodist or musician of Romantic

and Spiritual Love. His Love Poetry is best represented in _Songs of the

Sea Children_ (1904) and in _Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics_ (1904). Earlier

he had written lightly, as it were flirtingly, about love. But in _Songs

of the Sea Children_, while he wrote as daintily or delicately as in his

earlier poems dealing with the passion, he has at last realized the

spiritual intent and meaning of pure devoted love, and has been moved

deeply and inspired by the passion. Though copyright restrictions forbid

full quotation, the spirit or mood or temper, and the pure melody, of

_Songs of the Sea Children_ may be gathered from this single stanza:—

O wind and stars, I am with you now;

And ports of day, Good-bye!

When my captain Love puts out to sea,

His mariner am I.

The rhymeless stanzas of the love poems in _Sappho_ are high-minded, but

are a poetical _genre_ by themselves. They are a _tour de force_ in

‘poetical restoration,’ and, perhaps for the first time, we actually

observe Carman at work in the study as the technical verbal artist and

musician. They have a technical perfection, and a quiet beauty of their

own, and though there is in them a large degree of spontaneity,

naturally they are not informed with the characteristic Carman lyrical

ecstasy and melody. They are, as love poems, perfect as the love poetry

of Sappho was fleckless with a Greek perfection of form and grace.

Bliss Carman is not properly called a nature-_interpreter_. To

understand his point of view we must contrast his with that of Lampman.

For Lampman Nature is one kind of being and Man is another—two

separated entities—and Man may only commune with Nature by ‘reciprocal

sympathy.’ So Lampman goes out to his Canadian maples and elms, fields

and streams, and _talks to_ them, _as if_ they were human, and can

sympathize with him. This is all simulated imaginative sympathy and

communion on the poet’s part. The maples and elms, fields and streams,

are really dumb, and the poet does but attribute to them what speech or

answer he wants back from them for the solace of his spirit. Always with

Lampman, Nature and Man are _two_. He does but humanize Nature for his

own purposes, by conscious, deliberate _objective symbolism_.

Carman, on the other hand, is a spiritual monist. Nature and Man are not

two. There is, in Carman’s poetical psychology and metaphysic, no mind

_and_ matter. The whole universe is spiritual through and through, and

the vital spirit which is in Nature is the same spirit which is in Man

and which is God. The universe is wholly spirit. We may call this ‘the

higher pantheism;’ but even in pantheistic doctrine, matter does exist

as alien to mind or spirit. Carman has no such attitude. He differs from

Lampman in conceiving himself as able, by spirit or will, to _identify

himself personally with Nature_. This power of personal identification

with Nature begets personal sympathy; and the communion which the poet

has with Nature is a ‘heart-to-heart talk,’ for spirit with spirit can

meet. This new philosophy of personal identity of the human spirit with

Nature is expressly declared by Carman:—

I blend with the soft shadows

Of the young maple trees,

And mingle in the rain-drops

That shine along the eaves . . .

No glory is too splendid

To house this soul of mine,

No tenement too lowly

To serve it for a shrine.

But specially to be noted is the fact that Carman does not stand apart

from Nature, from the woods, and flowers, and hills, and streams, and

become an _interpreter_ of Nature’s moods and emotions. Nay, the poet

enters into the tree or flower and becomes one with their soul or

spirit, their body becomes his body, and their voice, as heard in his

poetry, is but his voice articulating to the world what they are unable

to articulate. Nature, in Carman’s poetry, is become vocal; and the poet

himself is her very Voice. Metaphors in the nature-poetry of Carman are

not metaphors at all; they are direct experiences of spirit:—

Just where one scarlet lily flamed,

I saw His footprint in the sod.

• • • •

I caught the glory of His robe

Where the last fires of sunset burned.

This personal identity of the human spirit with the spirit in (or of)

Nature, this personal sympathy with the poet’s _kin_ in wild Nature, and

this taking on as a body the matter and form of a tree or flower or bird

or other creature of Nature, and becoming vocal for them, and thus

uttering _their_ thoughts, and feelings, and emotions, is new in Nature

poetry, and original with Bliss Carman. It is not Greek; it is not

English; but it is Canadian and unique. It is Carman’s most notable

contribution to world poetry.

This spiritual monism in Carman’s poetical attitude to Nature explains

the seemingly strange commingling of songs of pure delight in the beauty

and bounty of Nature and of joy in existence with poems which are the

expression of a poet who has ‘kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ It

explains such contradictions as the joyousness of some poems and the

metaphysical questings of others in Carman’s From the _Green Book of the

Bards_ (1903). It explains, in particular, why Carman, who, when he

wishes, can surpass Roberts as a nature-colorist and whose poetry is

actually rich in idyllic impressionism, never seems to set out, with

conscious intent, to be a nature-colorist or word-painter for the sake

of sheer impressionism. No other Canadian poet can make or has made such

a brilliant use of primary colors or such an exquisite use of delicate

tints and evanescent play of light on color as has Bliss Carman. In all

his nature description or impressionism, Carman’s aim has been

two-fold—first, ‘to better the world with beauty,’ and to compel

appreciation of Nature wherever her sweet or solacing spirit abides, to

reveal the haunt where Nature affords spiritual communion and

refreshment. His aim, in short, is to have men go out and meet Mother

Nature. To effect this, not to show how flashily she is dressed, Carman

paints her face and garb sometimes brilliantly, sometimes with a

grey-eyed loveliness. Carman’s poetry of Nature is only Nature herself

‘calling’ to each vagabond to rise and go out to meet her, ‘wherever the

way may lead.’ This two-fold aim of Carman’s nature-painting or poetic

impressionism is compellingly expressed in _A Vagabond Song_:—

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—

Touch of manner, hint of mood;

And my heart is like a rhyme,

With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry

Of bugles going by.

And my lonely spirit thrills

To see the frosty asters on the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;

We must rise and follow her,

When from every hill of flame

She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

The quiet or subdued call of Nature is winsomely uttered in _The

Deserted Pasture_ where

The old gray rocks so friendly seem,

So durable and brave . . .

There in the early springtime

The violets are blue,

And adder-tongues in coats of gold

Are garmented anew . . .

And there October passes

In gorgeous livery,—

In purple ash and crimson oak,

And golden tulip-tree.

Though the keynote of Carman’s poetry is Joy in the universe, he is no

mere hedonist. The beauty he loves is uranian, the Joy he aims to get

from Beauty and to share with the world through his poetry is

_spiritual_ joy. What he has always been sure of was that the

dissonances in the world and in existence were resolvable, but he

himself gradually had to resolve those dissonances, and win full and

complete joy in Nature, in Love, and in Religion. If we call him a

Philosophical Poet, we must do so only after we understand that his

belief in the supremacy of the Good or of God is intuitively derived.

Carman is not philosophical by virtue of having employed the faculty of

relational thinking for the attainment of his belief in the moral

meaning of life and the universe. He perceived Beauty in the world, and,

after much obfuscation of the immediate meaning of Beauty, Carman at

length perceived it as a symbol and pledge of the union of the Real and

the Ideal. Only in the sense that Beauty is a symbol of perfection does

Carman regard Nature as a symbol of God; and only in the sense that God,

like Beauty, can be directly or immediately perceived, is Carman a

mystical poet. If there is one thing of indubitable ill that science and

philosophy have accomplished, it is their dogmatizing that because

science and metaphysics with their categories cannot find out God as an

actuality, much less can the senses. The pseudo-mystics took science and

philosophy at their word, and said the only way to find God is by the

use of the religious imagination. Whereupon they so strained the

imaginative faculty to achieve what they called mystical union with God

that their mysticism only resulted in mystification. Science, with its

categories, only cast a veil over Truth, over the face of God.

Pseudo-mysticism only placed an opaque void between God and the Sons of

God called Men.

It is because Carman was in his early manhood caught on the wheels of

agnostic science, transcendental metaphysics and pseudo-mysticism that

in his earlier poems this lover of Beauty sings entrancingly of Beauty

and winsomely paints her dwelling-places, but while doing this he also

mystifies his readers with regard to the meaning of his poetry. The

music is all accompaniment to something that Carman himself does not in

his own soul clearly understand. Hence the wistfulness and melancholia

observable in many of Carman’s earlier poems; hence his sad engagement

with the problem of death, as in _Pulvis et Umbra_ and _The

Eavesdropper_.

Carman could not have written _Vestigia_ at that period. For that poem

is based on an immediate _sense_-intuition of God in Nature and in the

heart of Man. It was his gradual negation of the categories of science

and metaphysics and vacuous pseudo-mysticism, and an instinctive return

to an intuitive perception of the meaning of Beauty in Nature and Love

and Religion that cleared his vision, and gave him a sure and clear

understanding of the supremacy of the Good or God, and that thus won for

him triumphant spiritual Faith, Joy in existence, and Peace with God.

This is the true mysticism, the true union with God.

It is an interesting excursion in spiritual history to trace Carman’s

gradual escape from ‘mystical mystification’ into the triumphant faith

of true, earth-born, sense-perceived mysticism, as in _Behind the Arras_

(1895), _By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies_ (1898), _Last Songs

from Vagabondia_ (1901), _From the Book of Myths_ (1902), _From the Book

of Valentine_s (1905), and _Collected Poems_ (1904). It was a

‘mystified’ Carman who wrote _Pulvis et Umbra_. It was a truly mystical

Carman, possessed of a triumphant faith who a full twenty years

afterwards wrote _Te Deum_, the concluding verses of which follow:—

So I will pass through the lovely world, and partake of beauty to feed

my soul.

With earth my domain and growth my portion, how should I sue for a

further dole?

In the lift I feel of immortal rapture, in the flying glimpse I gain

of truth,

Released is the passion that sought perfection, assuaged the ardor of

dreamful youth.

The patience of time shall teach me courage, the strength of the sun

shall lend me poise.

I would give thanks for the autumn glory, for the teaching of earth

and all her joys.

Her fine fruition shall well suffice me; the air shall stir in my

veins like wine;

While the moment waits and the wonder deepens, my life shall merge

with the life divine.

The immediate sense-perception of God through Beauty and the acceptance

of Beauty as a factual proof of the union of the Soul with Nature, of

the Real with the Ideal, and thus a proof of the supremacy of Good in

the universe—this is the formula of Carman’s philosophical ‘reading’ of

Nature and Existence. Always a poet of fine and assured artistry and of

lyrical eloquence and spiritual power, Bliss Carman stands alone amongst

Canadian poets as a verbal melodist, as a lyrist of love and the sea,

and as a mystical interpreter of the moral and spiritual meaning of

nature and existence. As an original verbal melodist and poetic

impressionist and as an unexampled creator of songs of the sea, Bliss

Carman has added significantly to English and to world poetry and to

him, therefore, we may apply the distinction Great.

* * * * *

Quotations in this chapter, with the exception of a few lines, are from

_Later Poems_, and from _Ballads and Lyrics_, by Bliss Carman,

(McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).

CHAPTER X

Duncan Campbell Scott

INFLUENCES ON HIS WORK—OLD WORLD CULTURE—AUSTERE INTELLECTUALISM

—MUSIC AND PAINTING—ASSOCIATION WITH LAMPMAN—SCOTT, CARMAN, AND

LAMPMAN COMPARED—INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH POETS—TECHNICAL

EXCELLENCIES—REVELATION OF THE INDIAN HEART—MYSTICAL SYMBOLISM.

In the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott there is more and finer

expression of the pageantry of Nature in Canada and of the essential

Canadian spirit than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. But,

paradoxically, the genius and poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott are also

more informed with an Old World culture and art than are the genius and

verse of any other Canadian poet. Unless the reader and the critic of D.

C. Scott’s poetry first realize that the mind and art of the poet are a

product of Canada and of the Old World, a rare commingling of Canadian

and European cultures, they will fail to understand how he is at once

the least prolific and, to give him his outstanding distinction, the

most exquisite artist of Canadian poets, not excepting Lampman and Bliss

Carman. In his poem _Frost Magic_, Scott has written the formula of his

own exquisite artistry:—

Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.

That line, however, rather distinguishes the characteristic excellence

of his poetry on the technical side. It does not disengage the quality

which makes him unique amongst Canadian poets. His _differentia_—the

quality or power which distinguishes his poetic genius and craftsmanship

from the mind and the art of all other Canadian poets—is Style. Duncan

Campbell Scott is the one Canadian poet of whose verse it may be said

that, after the manner of the English tradition, it possesses _Style_.

Lampman’s and Carman’s, Pauline Johnson’s and Marjorie Pickthall’s,

poetry each possess a style. But in their cases the style is imitable;

it is a _manner_, original or ingenious no doubt, but not an essential

and inevitable expression, of their poets’ minds or personalities.

Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry has style, quite as individualistic as

the others’, but it is an essential expression of his personality and

character, and is therefore inimitable, or like the man himself, is in

‘the grand manner’—which is not at all a manner but just that subtle

spiritual quality which distinguishes individuals in species. The genius

and poetry or art of Duncan Campbell Scott, then, impose on us a special

and somewhat recondite study in literary psychology.

The key to Duncan Campbell Scott’s genius and poetry is this singular,

if not anomalous, spiritual fact that his Art always, corresponds with,

and never contradicts, his Thought and Life. In this ‘tri-unity’ of

complete ‘correspondence’ of Thought, Life, and Art, Scott’s analogue is

Matthew Arnold. The English poet was, above all things, the austere

intellectualist. So, too, Duncan Campbell Scott is the austere

intellectualist. But, unlike Arnold, Scott’s ‘austerities and

rejections’ are not those of the substance of poetry but of its temper

and technic. While it is true that Scott is the remorseless idealist as

man and active citizen, and while the light that chiefly plays on his

poetry is the ‘dry light’ of the intellect or imaginative reason, it is

equally true that in his heart there is the warm fire of love of

humanity and Nature and all the humanizing arts, and that the dry

intellectual light which most notably illumines his poetry is colored,

at times delicately or subtly, at times brilliantly, at other times

magically, with the substance and color of Nature in Canada and of

modern music and painting. As in the man and citizen, as in his Thought

and Life, there is a high plane of refined and serene vision, feeling,

and deed, so in his poetic Art and Style the outstanding qualities are

serene Dignity and exquisite Beauty. It is always a manly and refined

art; and its sensuous Beauty is made spiritual by sincerity, delicacy or

nobility of thought and by imaginative truth. Never in it is there

sentimentality, or vulgarity, but always _humane_ beauty and dignity

which derive from delicacy of spiritual vision and sincerity, and from

restraint in technical artistry. As an example of these excellences in

Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry—of its dignity and beauty, refinement

and restraint—we quote this surpassing compliment to woman’s spiritual

loveliness and charm, _Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Gagnon_ (from Scott’s

_Beauty and Life_):—

Beauty is ambushed in the coils of her

Gold hair—honey from the silver comb

Drips and the clustered under-tone is warm

As beech leaves in November—the light slides there

Like minnows in a pool—slender and slow.

A glow is ever in her tangled eyes,

Surprise is settling in them, never to be caught;

Thought lies there lucent but unsolvable,

Her curved mouth is tremulous yet still,

Her will holds it in check; were it to sleep

One moment—that white guardian will of hers—

Words would brim over in a wild betrayal,

Fall sweet and tell the secret of her charm,

Harm would befall the world, Beauty would fly

Into the shy recesses of the wood—

Be seen no more of mortals, be a myth

Remembered by a few who might recall

A nerveless gesture, a frail color, a faint stress,

Some vestige of a vanished loveliness.

This ‘strong and delicate art’ of Scott’s was itself the outcome of

years of training in delicate perception or visioning of Nature and the

human Spirit and in the practice of spiritual refinement and restraint

in art or technical craftsmanship; and also of assiduous cultivation in

the technical appreciation of modern music and painting. Born in 1862,

Duncan Campbell Scott did not publish verse till he was some years past

his majority, and did not publish his first book of poems till he was

thirty-one years of age (_The Magic House and Other Poems_, 1893). For

more than forty years he has been in the Civil Service of Canada, and

for some years has been Deputy Superintendent General (a title and

function equivalent to Deputy Minister) of the Department of Indian

Affairs of the Dominion. Archibald Lampman was a contemporary and a

close friend of Scott. Lampman was a student of the poetry of Keats and

much influenced by the verse of the English poet. In 1894 Scott married

an accomplished lady, who was a violin virtuoso. He had published

fugitive poems in magazines before 1893. (His poetry was later the

subject of a very complimentary critical appreciation by William Archer

in _Poets of the Younger Generation_). He had finished his academic

studies at the public schools and at Stanstead College by his

seventeenth year, and had then entered the Civil Service of Canada. So

that the three influences on his mind and art are, first, that which

began with his friendship with Lampman; secondly, his marriage with a

cultured musician, and, thirdly, his long tenure of office in the

Department of Indian Affairs of the Dominion of Canada. To his

association with Lampman, rather than to his teachers at school and

college, must be attributed his reading of the English poets and the

cultivation of poetic technics. It is not until after his marriage and

after his long association with certain Canadian painters that we find

in his poetry any ‘color’ from music and painting. His connection with

the Department of Indian Affairs resulted in those lyrics and legends

which have for themes the Indian, the French-Canadian, and the Beauty of

Nature. Lampman as co-student of the English poets, especially Keats or

the idyllic impressionists, and as a co-worker in creative poetry,

especially the poetry of Nature, was the most potent or subtle influence

on Scott. This, however, was an influence _ab extra_. The most important

_inner_ influence on Scott was his own intellectual rigorism and austere

respect for chaste or faultless craftsmanship. But for this rare virtue,

which was innate in him, Scott would or might have been a more prolific

poet, and might have been a close imitator of the English impressionists

or Lampman himself as a nature-poet, or of Bliss Carman as a lyrist of

Nature and of Love.

There is no denying that Lampman had considerable influence, negative

and positive, on Scott, and that the negative influence was the more

important. At any rate, by choice Scott decided to be a poet who, while

caring as much for Nature as did Lampman and Carman, would care

supremely for refined perfection of technical artistry in his verse. It

is easy to observe the general differences between Lampman and Carman

and Scott in attitudes, and in methods of poetic conception. Lampman is

the more subjective, the more interested in his own emotions; Scott is

the more objective, disclosing a delight in the object for its own sake

or a philosophical interest in humanity and life. Lampman is the more

passionate; Scott the more restrained or austere (without being

ascetic). Lampman is the more sensuously luscious (though not always);

Scott the more lucid and luminously colorful. Carman is the more

naturalistically sensuous, and his pigmentation is limited to the

pageant of Spring and Autumn; Scott is the more imaginatively sensuous,

and paints every phase of the pageantry of Nature in the cycle of the

seasons of the whole year. Carman is more a melodist, basing his melody

on vowel-chime in words; Scott is more the musician, the technical

virtuoso—or, in other words, Carman _sings_ or _lilts_, like the lark;

Scott _performs_, like the violin or flute virtuoso, though each in his

way is as entrancingly lyrical. Carman is the more vernacular in

diction, employing considerably the actual speech of everyday life;

Scott is the more recondite, and therefore the more meaningful, in

diction—‘a word virtuoso.’ But it is not true to say, as has been said,

that Scott is a ‘poet’s poet.’ He is, when he aims to be, just as

lyrical, musical, colorful, and simple in diction as Lampman or Carman,

but he is also more delicate or chaste, more fanciful or imaginative,

more lucid or luminous, and always more subtle in diction and exquisite

craftsmanship. So that whenever Scott envisages or interprets Nature in

Canada and the essential spirit of Canada, more than any other

native-born poet he puts more of Canada in it and does it with a

singular and surpassing beauty of diction, imagery, music, color, and

general technical artistry.

Thus, in outline, as regards the Canadian influences on Scott’s genius

and poetry. It is necessary also to note the influence of Old World

culture on his genius and art. For, like Bliss Carman’s, there is a

challenging quality in Scott’s poetry which compels favorable comparison

of it with the verse of English and United States poets of distinction.

But while influences of certain English poets are remarked, this does

not mean that Scott is derivative in inspiration or method of treatment,

but that the influence was either on his ideals of what poetry is or on

his meticulous practice of technical artistry in verse; or, in a phrase,

their influences have been those of inspiring him to distinction in

Style and Technic. In Scott’s noble monody in memory of his father, _In

the Country Churchyard_, the formal structure and the elegiac elevation

of thought fill the heart with a serene beauty which discloses the

influence of Gray. There is a distinct Wordsworthian spirit and flavor

to _Above St. Irénée_. A haunting beauty, which is of the quality of

Tennyson, pervades Scott’s title poem of his first volume, _The Magic

House_. Unmistakable is the influence of Rossetti on the form and

tone-color of Scott’s sonnet sequence, _In the House of Dreams_, but

there is enough of Scott’s own originality and ingenuity in inventing

Western-world metaphors and in vowel-melody and alliteration to

distinguish it as Scott’s or as Canadian or Western. The sonnet form is

Rossettian, the mediaeval atmosphere and setting are Pre-Raphaelite, as

are also the personages:—

The Lady Lillian knelt upon the sward,

Between the arbor and the almond leaves;

Beyond the barley gathered into sheaves;

A blade of gladiolus, like a sword,

Flamed fierce against the gold; and down toward

The limpid west, a pallid poplar wove

A spell of shadow; through the meadow drove

A deep unbroken brook without a ford.

The first line of the octave is, of course, Rossettian, but the fourth

line (‘A blade of gladiolus, like a sword’) is not only Western but the

phrase ‘like a sword’ is a common simile with Scott. In the sestet,

quite Western is the picture in the second and third lines:—

On the soft grass a frosted serpent lay,

With oval spots of opal over all.

The extraordinary ingenuity of the tone-unisons (not harmonies) in the

third line (‘With oval spots of opal over all’) must have struck the

fancy of the poet himself, because he repeats the very same vowel

unisons, thus turning art into artifice, in _Spring on Mattagami_ (from

_Via Borealis_, 1906, reprinted in _Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems_,

1916):—

While like spray from the iridescent fountain,

Opal fires weave over all the oval of the lake.

Quite Rossettian, at least in word-painting of fabrics and jewelry, is

Scott’s picture of the drowned lady in his poem _After a Night of Storm_

(from _Beauty and Life_, 1921). It is here quoted, not only to show the

Rossettian influence, but also to furnish an example of how Scott works

as lovingly and as painstakingly as a lapidary at his technic:—

After a night of storm,

They found her lovely form

They said she was a wondrous thing to see,

All dazzling in her bridal dress,

A miracle of foam and ivory.

Her satin gown was smoothened by the wave,

Her rippled ribbons, all her wandering laces

Set in their places.

Her hands were loosely clasped without a gem,

But clad with mitts of silken net.

Diamonds in the buckles of her shoon

All fairly set,

And one great brooch the color of the moon

Held her lace shawl.

A snood had slipped back from her hair,

Her face was piteous, so fair, so fair,

And gleaming small

Upon her breast there seemed to float

A wedding ring,

Threaded upon a crimson and green string

Around her throat.

Surely there is the art of a poet who has lingered long in the studios

and ateliers, watching painters, lapidaries, and designers at work on

pigments, precious stones, and delicate fabrics! Again, whose influence

do we find or feel in certain parts of _Spring on Mattagami_ and _The

Anatomy of Melancholy_?—is it the influence of Keats or of Swinburne?

It might be either in these lines from _Spring on Mattagami_:—

She would let me steal,—not consenting or denying—

One strong arm beneath her dusky hair,

She would let me bare, not resisting or complying,

One sweet breast so sweet and firm and fair;

Then with the quick sob of passion’s shy endeavor

She would gather close and shudder and swoon away . . .

But there is no mistaking the Swinburnian manner of imaginative color

and of alliterative and sensuous music in these lines from _The Anatomy

of Melancholy_ (from _Beauty and Life_):—

Lifted the dragon-guarded lid—and lo!

Faint and uncertain,

_Frail rose-ghosts of rose-gardens all in blow_

Haunted the room,

_The spangled dew, the shell-tints and the moonlight_

Lived in the fume. . . .

All the English poets mentioned were, however, not formative influences.

At best what seems imitations of the manner of Gray, Tennyson, Rossetti,

Keats, Swinburne are but recrudescences, quite unconscious and original,

in Scott’s poetry. Scott is a nature-colorist, or impressionist, verbal

musician and metrist, romanticist, and philosophical interpreter of

Nature and Life on his own account. The real formative influences in

Scott’s genius and art were the climate, atmosphere, seasons, and the

color and drama of varied Nature and Humanity, of Canada; his compatriot

poet of Nature, Lampman, and perhaps Carman, and these three English

poets, Browning, Arnold and Meredith; and, finally, his appreciation and

knowledge of the technic of music and painting.

Considering his qualities as a verbal musician and metrist, we may note

that while Scott employs all the technical artifices of other Canadian

and English poets, such as vowel-melody and harmony, alliteration and

consonantal changes, beautiful measures and rhythms, he differs from his

compatriot poets by informing, as did Browning, the substance of his

poetry with an intimate use of the technical language of music,

allusions to musical literature, and the aesthetic values of music. The

texts of his poems show that he is acquainted technically with the music

of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Grieg, such romantic moderns as Raff and

MacDowell and such ultra-moderns as Debussy and Ravel. To anyone who has

heard Beethoven’s Fifth (C-minor) Symphony, how arresting and

emotionally impressive is the allusion to the principal motive of that

great work, in these lines from Scott’s _The Fragment of a Letter_!—

Then quick upon the dark, like knocks of fate,

There fell three axe-strokes, and then clear, elate

Came back the echoes true to tune and time,

Three axe-strokes—rhythmed and matched in rhyme.

Again: it is not poetical pedantry on Scott’s part when, in his elegiac

monody _On the Death of Claude Debussy_, he rhapsodizes the forms,

content, properties, color, and musical structure—‘the mood

pictures’—of Debussy’s opera _Pellèas et Mélisande_, his orchestral

prelude _L’Après-midi d’un Faune_, and his orchestral sketches _La Mer_.

No musical journalist or critic, writing in prose, has done this so

summarily and with such vividness and veracity as Scott has accomplished

it in twenty-five lines of trimeter and tetrameter unrhymed iambics and

trochaics. It is for the sake of illumination and the substance of true

poetry that Scott thus finely incorporates his knowledge of music into

the text of his poetry. And, as Browning made compelling use of the

technical language and meanings of musical structure, notably in his

_Abt Vogler_, so, in the Debussy monody, Scott twice finely affects the

spirit and illuminates the substance of his poem with such recondite

musical technology as:—

And under all, the _pedal-point_

Of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean,

Hidden under the mists,

Chanting, infinitely remote,

At the foot of enchanted cliffs.

Then with a turn of illumination,

An _enharmonic_ change of vision,

Death and Debussy

Become France and her heroes,

As if all her sacred heroes

Were in that one form,

Clasped in the bosom of France,

Enfolded with her ideals and aspirations.

The felicity of the phrase ‘the pedal-point of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean’

is apparent to anyone who is musically trained and who immediately hears

the sustained stationary bass of the sea reverberating while mingling

with its thunder are chords and progressions of wave plashings and wind

harmonies, all combining to make the sublime Symphony of the Sea. Still

more remarkable and illuminating is Scott’s use of the phrase ‘an

enharmonic change . . . . Death and Debussy.’ In music an enharmonic

change is but a change in notation of intervals and chords, the sound of

them remaining the same. And so how felicitous Scott’s use of ‘an

enharmonic change of vision!’—Death, Debussy (who died in the last year

of the late war), France, and her war heroes. These terms are all

synonymous of ‘one form,’ the spirit of France; there is only an

enharmonic change in notation or name.

All this is, on Scott’s part, a brilliant and—as far as Canadian poetry

is concerned—a unique achievement in incorporating musical ideas and

essences and technics to color, illuminate, and enhance poetic meanings.

But Scott surpasses himself in this matter, creating something really

unique in poetic literature, in his _Variations on a Seventeenth Century

Theme_. It is the most ingeniously conceived poem, if not in English

poetry, at least in continental American poetry; and it is a signal

illustration of that Old World culture which was remarked as part of the

challenging quality in Scott’s poetry. The poem is ‘programmatic’ in

scheme, comprising ten sections which are ‘free variations’ on a Nature

theme (the yellow of the primrose), inspired by two lines from Henry

Vaughan (17th century):—

It was high spring, and all the way

Primrosed, and hung with shade.

The ten sections or ‘variations’ or ‘movements’ of the poem are such

niceties in imitation of the forms of music that they should be properly

indicated with form or tempi nomenclature, inasmuch as the poet has not

done this at the head of each section or ‘variation.’ Variation I is a

Prelude (in the old style), the diction of which is Chaucerian or early

15th century English. Variation II is a triple-time Vivace movement (old

form of the Scherzo)—a fetching bit of lively ballad-song. Variation

III is a Largo movement, noble and impressive. A short Nocturne follows

in Variation IV, which is succeeded by a movement that may be styled

Dramatico, a short poignant ‘play within a play,’ dealing with the

tragedy of romantic love. Variation VI is an Intermezzo, a contrasting

change on ‘Youth is a blossom yellow at the edge.’ Variation VII is a

Funeral March for fairies, and is fairy-like in imagery and music. By

itself it is as pretty and winning a poem for children as any in our

language:—

For dead fairies go nowhere,

Leaving nothing in the air.

Their clear bodies are all through

Made of shadow, mixed with dew.

When they change their fairy state,

They, like dew, evaporate.

But we fairies that remain,

The dead fairy’s funeral feign,

Place within a shepherd’s purse

Primrose pollen; for a hearse

Lady-birds we harness up

To an empty acorn cup.

This we bury, deep in moss:—

Then we mourn our grievous loss,

Mourn with music, piercing thin,

Cricket with his mandolin,

Many a hautboy, many a flute,

Played by them you fancy mute . . . .

Variation VIII is a very human Burlesca—a ‘_genre_ picture’ of the

comedy of life in Old London, with the ‘motive’ of a socially outcast

old woman looking at pots of primroses, labelled ‘Only a quarter,’ and

fingering a coin, trying to decide whether to buy primroses or spend it

on beer for herself and ‘dear old Jerry.’ The pathos of its realism is

relieved by the piquancy of the spiritual portrait of the outcast old

woman, in whose soul there is still a fine redeeming loyalty to a real

heart-love. Variation IX is a Folk Song in the manner of Burns. It is

followed by a Finale, which returns to the Vaughan theme, and closes

with its couplet. The Finale is ennobled with tender reflections or

philosophical interpretations of the drama of earth and existence, in

which Scott beautifully maintains and expresses Serene Faith in the

permanence of Beauty and Love. From this magnificent and genuinely

unique poem, we quote Variation IX, as an example of Scott’s gifts as a

song-writer. If it is in the manner of Burns or an imitation of one of

his best-known songs, it is as informed also with the spirit of Herrick,

but it is melodious, by vowel-music, alliteration, and rhythm, in a way

which was not in the power of Herrick or Burns:—

My Love is like the primrose light

That springs up with the morn,

My Love is like the early night

Before the stars are born.

My Love is like the shine and shade

That ripple on the wood,

(The shadow is her dark green plaid,

The light her silver snood).

They never meet with eager lips,

And mingle in their mirth,

They only touch their finger-tips,

And circle round the earth.

My Love’s so pure, so winsome-sweet,

So dancing with delight,

That I shall love her till they meet,

And all the world is night.

In that song-lyric we find Scott’s characteristic dignity and beauty.

But fine and beautiful as it all is, the music of it is not the

_natural_ melodiousness of Herrick or Burns, of the lark or linnet, but

the music of the adroit technical musician who is a ready master of all

the resources of modern versification and metrics.

As regards these technical resources of verbal melody and

music—vowel—‘tone-color’ and harmonies, alliteration, assonance,

rhythm of line and stanza and other metrical structure, and even what is

called in music as such ’suspension’—Scott challenges the art of Keats,

Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold, and the Laureate, Sir Robert Bridges. In

one instance, Scott has made the most happy and ingenious use of what

musicians call ‘chord suspension’—that is, the retaining in any chord

some notes (or tones) of the preceding chord. Scott achieves it finely

in this cadence:—

With the thrushes fluting _deep, deep_,

_Deep_ on the pine-wood hill.

This effect of ‘suspension’ in verbal music is not new in poetry, but it

is infrequent in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon people. A melodious

example is the opening stanza from Collins’ _Ode to Evening_:—

If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,

Like thy own solemn _springs_,

_Thy springs_, and dying gales.

With Collins the ‘suspension’ is an artifice rather than an inspiration.

With Scott, it is, in the example instanced, an inspiration. No other

modern poet, certainly no other Canadian or American poet, has Scott’s

gift of verbally phrasing, with the utmost concreteness, imitative

realism, and charm the ‘notes’ of bird songs and their meaning. In the

cadence quoted, the effect of the ‘suspension’—‘deep, deep, deep’—is a

happy realistic imitation of the tone-color of the thrush’s flute-like

notes, and the triple reiteration affects the imagination with that

charm which we distinguish as ‘haunting.’ Carman has not this gift of

concreting bird-songs. Carman uses only the general epithet. One bird

simply ‘whistles;’ another ‘flutes.’ Carman would have written the lines

quoted from Scott not only without ‘suspension’ but also without any

concrete, realistic imitation of the thrush’s notes and suspensions,

thus:—

With the thrush’s fluting

On the pine-wood hill.

Scott not only makes a masterly and felicitous use of concrete

tone-color epithets in phrasing the songs of birds, but he also knows

how important and eloquent in music as such, as well as in the songs of

birds, are pauses or silences, and uses this appreciation of silences

exquisitely. Scott’s artistry in both these respects is finely shown in

these lines:—

Hidden above there, half asleep, a thrush

Spoke a few _silver words upon the hush_—

_Then paused self-charmed to silence_.

Scott, in truth, on the side of exquisite realistic concretion of the

notes and cadences of bird-songs, has the ear of a _naturalist_—and a

better ear than Thoreau or Burroughs. Scott is the ‘bird-musician’ _par

excellence_. Witness the naturalist’s exquisite ear for concrete realism

in these lines:—

She would hear the partridge drumming in the distance,

Rolling out his _mimic thunder_ in the sultry noons;

Hear beyond the silver reach in _ringing wild persistence_

Reel remote the _ululating laughter_ of the loons.

Carman would have stopped with the general word ‘drumming’ in the phrase

‘hear the partridge drumming’—not so Scott; he must realistically

concrete the reverberance of the drumming in the phrase ‘rolling out his

mimic thunder.’ And what realistic concretion is in the phrases ‘in

ringing wild persistence,’ and ‘ululating laughter!’ Carman half hears.

Scott hears with the ear of the naturalist _and_ the musician.

Again, only the ear of the naturalist and the musician in Scott could

have so exquisitely, veraciously, concreted the ‘note’ of the

white-throat sparrow and the lovely cadences of the vireo as in these

lines:—

While the white-throat never-resting,

Even in the deepest night _rings his crystal bell_.

And:—

A vireo turns his _slow_

_Cadence_, as if he gloated

Over the last phrase he floated;

Each one he moulds and mellows

_Matching it with his fellows_:

So have you noted

How the oboe croons,

The canary-throated,

In the gloom of the violoncellos

And bassoons.

Scott knows the ‘voices’ of instruments as intimately as those of birds

and other feathered wild creatures. How finely he combines a concrete

use of his two-fold musical knowledge in this respect in the following

ingenious and original bit of verbal instrumentation:—

And in the two-fold dark I hear the owl

_Puff at his velvet horn_.

The reader must be a naturalist and, as well, have been a bandsman or

orchestral instrumentalist to feel the felicitous realism and

descriptive exactitude of Scott’s art, or rather inspiration, in

inventing that figure of the owl as a musician. The humor of it also is

exquisite.

Scott surpasses all other Canadian poets in a genius for inventing

single and double terminal rhymes, and he excels in this gift, without

ever dropping to impossible or bizarre rhymes, except when the comedy of

life in a subject naturally requires the use of a vulgarism as in this

couplet from the Burlesca movement (VIII) of _Variations on a

Seventeenth Century Theme_:—

But I keeps my quarter,

Though—perhaps I’d orter.

As ready and expert as Carman with such other musical resources as

vowel-melody and harmony, assonance, consonantal tone-color and

alliteration, Scott is more lyrically melodious than even Carman.

Melodiousness—dulcet melody of combined vowel and consonant and

rhythm—is the supreme musical quality of Scott’s poetry. Not Tennyson

nor Swinburne have surpassed the melodiousness of this stanza from

Scott’s _The Lover to His Lass_:—

Crown her with stars, this angel of our planet,

Cover her with morning, this thing of pure delight,

Mantle her with midnight till a mortal cannot

See her for the garments of the light and the night.

Matching the melodiousness of Scott’s poetry is its inimitable

‘color-music,’ a combination of sensuous color and alliteration, which

quite rivals Swinburne. Scott’s poetry indeed abounds in the most

ingenious and sensuously musical alliterative lines in Canadian verse.

Outstanding examples are these:—

One sweet breast so sweet and firm and fair.

• • • •

Dark with sordid passion, pale with wringing pain.

• • • •

Shall find amid the ferns the perfect flower.

• • • •

With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.

• • • •

The still, translucent, turquoise-hearted tarns.

• • • •

Rubies, pale as dew-ponds stained with slaughter.

• • • •

See Aldebaran like a red rose clamber.

• • • •

The long, ripe rippling of the grain.

• • • •

Flush and form, honey and hue.

• • • •

Still pools of sunlight shimmering in the sea.

• • • •

Languorously floating by the lotus leaves.

• • • •

Frail rose-ghosts of rose-gardens all in blow.

Such magical melody and color are not artifice or even art with Scott.

It is all an inspiration, clear spontaneity of genius. If it were

artifice or art it would be confined to mere phrases or lines; but Scott

as readily and as magically fills stanzas with the same magical melody

and color as in _The Voice and The Dusk_:—

The slender moon and one pale star,

A rose-leaf and a silver bee

From some fool’s garden blown afar,

Go down the gold deep tranquilly.

There is a sylvan _earthly_ music in the poetry of Carman, Pauline

Johnson, and Marjorie Pickthall. But the music of Duncan Campbell

Scott’s poetry is the melody of a fairy fantasy, an _unearthly_ lyrical

melody suffused with color which is imaginative rather than earth-born.

Yet its vowel and alliterative melody, rhythmical refinement, and

translucent or sensuous color are never unreal but only serve to

etherealize real experience, to transport us with exquisite sensation of

ineffable, unimagined beauty. To figure him under the title of one of

his own most melodious and romantically imaginative poems, Duncan

Campbell Scott is _The Piper of Arll_—and, like Debussy, regales us

with:—

The complaint of the wind

In the plane-trees,

The far away pulse of a horn,

Ripples of fairy color,

Rhythms of Spain,

The overtones of cymbals,

The sobs of tormented souls,

Cries of delight and their echoes . . . .

Fauns’ eyes in the vapor,

Flutes of Dionysus,

Haunting his ruined fane,

Veils of rain, quenching the tulip gardens,

Sea-light at the roots of islands . . . .

And under all, the pedal-point

Of the deep based ocean,

Hidden under mists,

Chanting, infinitely remote,

At the foot of enchanted cliffs.

It is a question difficult of settlement whether Duncan Campbell Scott

is greater as a verbal colorist and nature-painter than as a melodist.

But there can be no doubt that as a verbal colorist and nature-painter

he has the eye both of the naturalist _and_ the impressionist. And it is

indubitable that as a colorist or impressionist he has put more of the

pageantry of Nature in Canada into his poetry than has even Bliss

Carman. All the Canadian seasons are in it, and every phase of the

light, color, and sound of the Canadian year is in it—done by ready,

flexible, graphic stroke or exquisite touch, in rich or luminous and

translucent coloring, with romantic eye and fantasy, and with singular

ingenuity and power. It must be confessed that there is a seeming

display of musical theory and technics, of musical learning, which

almost savors of pedantry, in those of Scott’s poems which contain

musical thought and imagery. This would be sophistication, were Scott

not sincere and did he not sincerely use it all to enhance the poetic

effect of his verse on the tonal sensibilities and the imagination. But

there is no sophistication, no mere display of knowledge of pigments and

the technic of painting in his work as a verbal colorist. He is a

word-painter, a nature-colorist, an impressionist,—by innate genius. As

a matter of fact, too, almost all his verbal melody is associated with

color. So that, by genius rather than by art, Duncan Campbell Scott may

be regarded as the supreme verbal colorist amongst Canadian poets. He is

this for three reasons—inclusiveness of the seasons and phases of

Nature in Canada, magic of pigmentation, and novelty and imaginative

power of coloring and description.

If the poems of Scott abound in arresting and compelling phrases, lines,

and stanzas of alliterative beauty, the number of brilliant and luminous

color phrases, lines, and whole stanzas in his poems is astounding. The

following will serve in illustration:—

Bright as a sun spot in a globe of dew.

• • • •

The leaves dry up as pale as honeycomb.

• • • •

Or peacock tints on pools of amber gloom.

• • • •

Like the curve of a fragile ivory hand.

• • • •

the light slides there

Like minnows in a pool—slender and slow.

• • • •

Blown on a gold black flute.

• • • •

A miracle of foam and ivory.

• • • •

In loops of silver light.

• • • •

The gold moted wood-pools pellucid as her eyen.

• • • •

Snow peaks arise enrobed in rosy shadows.

• • • •

Tawny like pure honey.

• • • •

Fragile as frost pansies.

• • • •

Rubies, pale as dew ponds stained with slaughter.

How luminous, translucent, yet graphic and vivid, are all those colorful

lines. They are the ‘painting’ of a poet who has, above all things, the

eye of the naturalist and also a fairy fantasy. If in those lines we

find in Scott a genius for exquisite and translucent verbal coloring,

corresponding to the art of Constable or Corot in imaginative vision or

fantasy, we discover the romantic pigmentation of Rossetti (as a

painter) and the rich luminous impressionism of Monet, in the lines

following the final apostrophe to Beauty in Scott’s noble _Ode for the

Keats’ Centenary_:—

For Beauty has taken refuge from our life

That grew too loud and wounding . . .

Beauty is gone, (Oh, where?)

To dwell within a precinct of pure air

Where moments turn to months of solitude;

To live on roots of fern and tips of fern,

On tender berries flushed with the earth’s blood.

Beauty shall stain her feet with moss

And dye her cheek with deep nut-juices

Laving her hands in the pure sluices

Where rainbows are dissolved.

Beauty shall view herself in pools of amber sheen

Dampened with peacock-tints from the green screen

That mingles liquid light with liquid shadow.

It is not necessary to illustrate the variety of Scott’s pigmentation.

That is as remarkable as its luminous beauty. What is most compelling in

his Nature-painting is the unique ingenuity, power, and romantic beauty

of his color phrases, metaphors, and similes. The naturalistic and

imaginative intensity of them is a poetic phenomenon by itself. Consider

these phrases: ‘Sun, like a gold sword,’ ‘A blade of gladiolus, like a

sword,’ ‘A burning pool of scent and heat,’ ‘Within the windless deeps

of memory,’ ‘Bent like a shield between the silver seas,’ ‘With gulfs of

blue and summits of rosy snow.’ Consider also these lines:—

The west unrolled a feathery wind.

• • • •

The poignard lightning searched the air.

• • • •

Stars like wood daffodils grow golden in the night.

• • • •

and dawn

Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces;

and, finally, consider the compelling romantic fantasy of color and

simile in this stanza from _The Piper of Arll_:—

There were three pines above the cone

That, when the sun flared and went down,

_Grew like three warriors reaving home_

_The plunder of a burning town_.

It was said that there is more of Canada in the poetry of Duncan

Campbell Scott than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. So far this

appears to be true of Scott’s painting of Nature in Canada. Scott, it

must be observed, is a Nature _painter_, never a Nature _interpreter_,

as were Lampman and Carman. Yet there is in Scott’s poetry a decided

interpretative or philosophical element. It is on the side of his

philosophical poetry that Scott’s verse contains more of the Canadian

_spirit_ than does the verse of any other Canadian poet. As a

philosophical poet Scott is, first, an interpreter of humanity and life

in Canada—and his interpretations possess highly novel distinction and

spiritual import. His philosophical poetry is contained in three

volumes, _Labor and the Angel_ (1898), _New World Lyrics and Ballads_

(1905), and _Via Borealis_ (1906).

In his _New World Lyrics and Ballads_, Scott aims to reveal the kind of

mind or thought which the strange humanity of the Northwest in

Canada—the Indian heart in the wild North of Canada—contains. In the

volume Indian themes predominate, and the so called Ballads are more

aptly named Legends, because Scott’s Ballads are art and the product of

a reflective mind _thinking into_ Indian mind the thoughts of a

civilized man, whereas the genuine Ballad is a spontaneous story told in

simple verse. Moreover, Scott’s genius is lyrical; but in these so

called Ballads he attempts dramatic situation and emotion. It all lands

him in recondite psychological symbolism, as, for instance, in _The

Mission of the Trees_ or in _The Forsaken_, which is later attempted in

_The Half-Breed Girl_ (from _Via Borealis_), a striking essay in Indian

introspection. What we get from these poems is Scott’s perception and

revealment of spiritual Beauty in loneliness—his half-mystical

intuition that the spirit in civilized man, in the Indian soul, and in

Nature everywhere is one and the same spirit, and that civilization has

only resulted in veiling the face of God and in separating his creatures

from one another and from the Creator.

This vague mystical intuition of the mystery and yet identity of spirit

in man and Nature is beautifully, perhaps too sensuously, envisaged in

Scott’s _Spring on Mattagami_ (from _Via Borealis_). This poem is

seductively musical and highly impressionistic, but shows the influence

of Meredith (_Love in a Wilderness_) in its interpretation of the

conflict of Love and Law in the universe. What counts and solaces,

however, is the Vision or Light of a higher Love and a deeper Law that

lie behind the seemingly meaningless conflict of the visible love and

law. After all, the poet, like the rest of mortals, can only ‘trust’ in

the supremacy of Good in the universe:—

Vaster than the world or life or death my _trust_ is

Based in the unseen and towering far above.

Hold me, O Law, that deeper lies than Justice,

Guide me, O Light, that stronger burns than Love.

This abstract mystical symbolism is Old World, not Canadian, not Scott’s

own philosophy of the spirit for the Canadian spirit. His own is found

in his poem _Labor and the Angel_. It is original and noble in

conception; and, consistently with its serious didactic purpose and

ideas, or symbolism, its diction is vernacular, its form and rhythm are

suited to plain narrative; and the whole is devoid of Scott’s luxuriant

color and sensuous melody. It is a dramatic poem in the sense that it is

designed to affect the heart and the imagination with dramatic force and

truth. As a criticism of life in the Arnoldian sense, we see in the poem

the influence of Matthew Arnold. But its thought and style show more

notably the influence of Browning and Meredith, especially in its

syntactical ellipses, bald and abrupt lines.

In its way, _Labor and the Angel_ is as finely and as impressively

achieved as Tennyson’s _Princess_. It answers a question which is

particularly pertinent to Canada where work—the gaining of material

subsistence—necessarily is paramount, because inevitable and pressing.

As with Browning, so with Scott, Woman is man’s life-star and

inspiration. In the poem _Labor and the Angel_, the Man and the Girl are

common humanity, but the Girl, who is also the Angel of Labor, is the

man’s companion and helpmate:—

Down on the sodden field

A blind man is gathering his roots,

Guided and led by a girl;

Her golden hair blows in the wind,

Her garments, with flutter and furl,

Leap like a flag in the sun;

And whenever he stoops, she stoops,

And they heap up the dark colored beets

In the barrow, row upon row.

Labor, the kind which is mere toil and drudgery, is without meaning and

unspiritual. But Woman was designed by God as the power which shall

inspire men to spirituality in all things. As Man, every man would be

‘blind’ and purposeless and futile. But as Man, companioned and inspired

by Woman and idealizing labor for the end of her companionship and love

and the spiritual fruits of that love, every man, who is obedient to the

ideal, transmutes the lowliest labor into spiritual purpose, meaning and

result:—

She offers no tantalus cup

To the shrunken, the desperate lips,

But she calms them with lethe and love

And deadens the throb and the pain.

For Labor is always blind,

Unless as the light of the deed

The Angel is smiling behind.

‘Effort and effort,’ she cries,

‘Up with the lark and the dew,

Still with the dew and the stars,

This is the heart beat of life,

Feel it athrob in the earth.’

Man and Labor, Woman and Love as the star and inspiration of man in all

his work—what nobler dignity could any poet give to Woman, and what

other consolation of philosophy could he conceive and sing that would,

as it does, for men more surely

Make mortal flesh seem light and temporal!

_Labor and the Angel_ is unique amongst poems by Canadians, and its

noble philosophy of the spirit challenges poems of similar quality by

Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, and Emerson.

Duncan Campbell Scott—austere intellectualist, superb verbal musician,

luminous Nature-painter, and impeccable technical virtuoso of verse

amongst Canadian poets—it is by him that we are also given in _The

Height of Land_ the finest expression of the true spiritual mysticism,

the immediate perception of God—an intuition in which Life appears

As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:

A Something to be guided by ideals—

That in themselves are simple and serene

Of noble deed to foster noble thought,

And noble thought to image noble deed,

Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,

Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt

Whether the perfect beauty that escapes

Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing

Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:

Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest

The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,

And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.

Seek we in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott for the choice and

ineluctable goods of the spirit,—music, color, high thought and serene

philosophy—and we shall always be rewarded with Beauty ‘golden and

inappellable.’

* * * * *

The quotations in this chapter are chiefly from _Beauty and Life_, by

Duncan Campbell Scott, (McClelland & Stewart).

CHAPTER XI

Wilfred Campbell

AS AN OBJECTIVE NATURE PAINTER—HUMANIZED SUBSTANCE OF HIS VERSE—

PATRIOTISM AND BROTHERHOOD—DRAMATIC MONODY—POETICAL TRAGEDIES

AND DRAMAS.

In the early nineties of the last century three young Canadian poets,

who were employed in the Civil Service Departments at Ottawa, were

closely associated in a systematic way as men of letters. They were

Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. In the

Toronto _Globe_ they conducted a department of literary criticism and

‘causerie’ under the caption ‘The Mermaid Inn.’ Oddly, these three young

Canadian men of letters were singularly dissimilar in poetic

temperament, attitudes, vision, and ideals. As a poet Lampman was an

interpreter of the inner meaning of the beauty and moods of Nature. He

and Nature communed with each other by reciprocal sympathy, and he cared

greatly for style and craftsmanship in poetry. Duncan Campbell Scott

loved beauty for its own sake as a spiritual delight or source of

ecstasy, but perfection of form, style, artistry—‘art for art’s

sake’—pre-empted all other considerations in poetry. Wilfred Campbell

occupied a middle ground. He was an objective Nature-painter, with

tendencies to be more interested in Nature as a habitat or background of

the human spirit which had come from God and was going to God. He was

solicitous about form and imagery, color and melody in poetry, but for

him these were always a means to an end, never a mere end in themselves.

Or, harking back to influences, we may say that Lampman wrote poetry

with the eye and the spirit of Keats and Wordsworth; Scott with the eye

of Matthew Arnold for naturalistic and moral beauty and chaste artistry;

and Campbell in the spirit of Longfellow and Emerson, and, sometimes, of

Tennyson.

With Campbell it was the substance or matter,—the ideas, thought, and

meanings for the spirit—not the formal elements or manner of poetry,

that counted for most. It is the substance of poetry, its meanings for

the spirit, that counts always for most with the people. For this

reason, though Campbell is not the greatest of the poets of the first

Systematic School, he is, and will remain, as he has been called, ‘the

poet of the people’s choice.’

A distinct evolution—and advance in vision—from objective

nature-painting of the spirit can be observed in the successive volumes

of Campbell’s verse. Naturally, until he had reflected on his aims as a

poet, he did not announce his poetic creed in his first volume of verse.

He did this in his fourth volume, _Collected Poems_ (1905) in his poem

_Higher Kinship_:—

There is a time at middle summer, when,

In weariness of all this saddening world,

_The simple nature aspects seem to me_

_As a close kindred_, sweet and kind and true,

_Giving me peace and comfort, and a joy_

_Not of the senses, but of the inward soul_.

The restful day, the sunny leaf and wind,

The path of blue like windows shining down,

_Do give to life a beauty and a calm_

_And a sweet sadness, that this mighty world_

_And all its myriad triumphs cannot give_.

O let me live with Nature at her door,

And taste her home-brewed pleasures, simple, glad,—

The beauty of the day, the splendor of the night,—

Not in the great palace halls, great cloister domes,

The smoke of cities and the thronging din,

But out with air and woodlands, shining sun,—

These my companions, this my roof, my home!

‘Not of the senses’—Campbell is not a lover of impressionism for its

own sake, but he loves the simple, colorful aspects of Nature for the

joy, comfort and peace which they give to ‘_the inward soul_.’ He has

his equals as an impressionistic colorist, but he is supreme when he

paints a phenomenon or aspect of Nature in monotone or in subdued tones

as in pastel, or when he etches a scene with a Whistler-like feeling for

atmosphere, shadow, and chiaroscuro, and for line. In 1888, when he was

in his twenty-seventh year, Campbell published a booklet of twenty

lyrics, _Snowflakes and Sunbeams_. In these first lyrics he disclosed

the eye of monotonist and etcher for the beauty of Nature. The verse in

this rare little volume is marked, too, by a grace and melody which

enhance the pictures. What but a ‘symphony in white’ is his _Snow_—

Folding the forest.

Folding the farms,

In a mantle of white,

And the river’s great arms,

Kissed by the chill night

From clamor to rest,

Lie all white and shrouded

Upon the world’s breast.

Thus, through several stanzas, he paints Nature in white, seemingly for

the joy of the senses but really for ‘the inward soul.’ For a moment he

obtrudes the ‘message’ which the snow conveys to the moral imagination—

Falling so slowly

Down from above,

So white, hushed and holy,

Folding the city

Like the great pity

Of God in his love;

Sent down out of heaven,

On its sorrow and crime,

Blotting them, folding them

Under its rime.

Beautiful as an original image is the thought of the snow descending

hushed and holy, ‘like the great pity of God in his love,’ but it is a

sentimental obtrusion, out of character with the snow-picture as such.

We find Campbell frequently creating the most engaging Nature pictures,

and here or there in a poem recalling the eye from the pure visual

delights to let the moral imagination reflect on some suggestion, some

similitude, for ‘the inward soul.’ What a pretty pastel, for instance,

he paints with spare use of mere tints, in the first two stanzas of _In

the Study_:—

Out over my study,

All ashen and ruddy

Sinks the December sun,

And high up over

The chimney’s soot cover

The winter night has begun.

Here in the red embers

I dream old Decembers,

Until the low moan of the blast,

Like a voice out of Ghost-land,

Or memory’s lost-land,

Seems to conjure up wraiths from the past.

But Campbell does not continue the strict painting of the objective

picture. He introduces something ‘for the inward soul,’ as he does, in

the concluding stanza:—

Then into the room

Through the firelight and gloom,

Some one steals,—let the night wind grow bleak,

And ever so coldly,—

Two white arms enfold me,

And a sweet face is close to my cheek.

This is not a fault in Campbell’s poetry. It is an essential part of his

art. As in Longfellow, so in Campbell the _humanized substance_ of his

verse is consciously designed for the popular heart, and ensures popular

acceptance. Campbell would rather do this than to write always for art’s

sake, as in these sheer pictorial stanzas from _A Winter’s Night_:—

Shadowy white,

Over the fields are the sleeping fences,

Silent and still in the fading light,

As the wintry night commences.

• • • •

_Calm sleeping night_

_Whose jewelled couch reflects the million stars_

That murmur silent music in their flight. . . .

Yet, he can employ delineative line with swift and sure artistry just to

make a picture for its own sake, disclosing absolute mastery in economy

of means, as in his _Rododactulos_:—

The night blows outward in a mist,

And all the world the sun has kissed.

Along a golden rim of sky,

A thousand snow-piled vapors lie.

And by the wood and mist-clad stream,

_The Maiden Morn stands still to dream_.

That is an exquisite bit of naturalistic etching with a poetic meaning

intrinsically in the picture of the Maiden Morn standing and dreaming in

the mist. The picture itself delights both the visual faculty and the

imagination. Campbell also possessed the faculty of painting vividly, as

with a single sweep of the brush, as in his _Lake Huron_ (in October)

and its memorable lines:—

Miles and miles of lake and forest,

Miles and miles of sky and mist;

and these still more vivid lines:—

Miles and miles of crimson glories,

Autumn’s wondrous fires ablaze.

Campbell did not aim or strive to be a word-virtuoso. But what he could

achieve as an artist was to make at will a dainty or a glorious

_picture_, and so _localize_ the picture that one can immediately tell

which section of the Canadian land or waters is delineated. He surpassed

all his contemporaries in the gift of ‘flashing’ a vivid picture in a

single line, as, for instance:—

The stars came out in _gleaming shoals_

or this tremendous line:—

Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim.

The last line quoted also discloses in Campbell a power which is not in

any other Canadian poet—the Miltonic power of conveying by description

ideated sensations of unending space and movement. Matching almost any

piece of sheer description of immensity by Milton is Campbell’s

compelling panorama of Lazarus in his flight from Heaven to Hell and the

sensations of illimitable depths downward that it creates in the reader,

as in these stanzas from his poem _Lazarus_:—

Hellward he moved, like a radiant star shot out

From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even,

When Orion’s train and that mysterious seven

Move on in mystic range from heaven to heaven.

Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout.

The liquid floor of heaven bore him up

With unseen arms, as in his feathery flight

He floated down toward the infinite night;

But each way downward, on the left and right,

He saw each moon of heaven like a cup

Of liquid, misty fire that shone afar

From sentinel towers of heaven’s battlements;

But onward, winged by love’s desire intense,

He sank, space-swallowed, into the immense,

While with him ever widened heaven’s bar.

’Tis ages now long-gone since he went out,

Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls.

But hellward still he ever floats and falls,

And ever nearer come those anguished calls;

And far behind he hears a glorious shout.

Campbell had a gift, too, for vivid color epithets and for vowel and

alliterative word-melody. Indeed he was a master of color and verbal

melody. Some of his more original and striking alliterative lines are:—

Flooding the silence in a silvern dream.

• • • •

Low flutes the lake along the lustrous sedge.

• • • •

But dawns and sunsets fell on mute dead faces.

• • • •

Belled with bees, a pollened bevy.

• • • •

Out of the murmurous moods of your multitudinous mind.

• • • •

Dim mists of darkness rise from marsh and mere.

• • • •

The waking world leaps to the day’s desire.

• • • •

The harmonies that float and melt afar.

• • • •

Deep-sounding and surgent, the armies of storm sweep by.

• • • •

None of Campbell’s contemporaries surpassed him in painting a simple but

vivid _genre_ picture, and enhancing it with verbal melody, as he does,

for instance, in his _Canadian Folksong_, beginning:—

The doors are shut, the windows fast;

Outside the gust is driving past,

Outside the shivering ivy clings,

While on the hob the kettle sings;

‘Margery, Margery, make the tea,’

Singeth the kettle merrily.

As a poet of humane patriotism, which has regard for international or

world relations, and which is not mere ‘drum and trumpet’ patriotism,

Campbell stands in a class by himself. He had a Keltic love of place or

home. It was a passion with him, but the passion embraced the

Anglo-Saxon peoples. So that his patriotic poetry contains a large

element of the ideal of Anglo-Saxon unity and of the imperialistic

destiny of the British peoples. Thus we find him singing with equal

warmth of Scotland, the homeland of his ancestors (as in _The

World-Mother_), of England (as in his _To England_), of the United

States (as in his _To the United States_), and of Canada, his homeland

(as in _Canada_.)

A sincere and profound sense and love of brotherhood is the key-note of

his patriotic poetry. There is no magniloquent bombast in it, whereas it

must be admitted that Roberts’ _Canada_ and his _Ode to the Confederacy_

have at least an air of pomp of words which sound like mere

magniloquence or bombast. But there is in Campbell’s _Canada_ a sincere

sense of history, of historical background and heroic origins, as well

as of a people whom the vastness of their habitat should impel to a

great and noble destiny. Besides, Campbell sings of the homeland in

simple octameter couplets, the very simplicity of which impresses the

spirit with a deep sense of truth and reality. The poem, with a slight

change or two for choral singing would, if set to dignified and sonorous

music, be fitted to be an inspiring and inspiriting National Hymn. It is

a colorful, lyrical poem, a Song, suffused with the qualities of the

Canadian spirit and the beauties of the Canadian habitat. We quote a few

excerpts:—

O land, by every gift of God

Brave home of freedom, let thy sod

Sacred with blood of hero sires,

Spurn from its breast ignobler fires.

Keep on these shores where beauty reigns,

And vastness folds from peak to plains,

With room for all from hills to sea,

No shackled, helot tyranny.

Spurn from thy breast the bigot lie,

The smallness not of earth or sky.

Breed all thy sons brave stalwart men,

To meet the world as one to ten.

Breed all thy daughters mothers true,

Magic of that glad joy of you,

Till liberties thy hills adorn

As wide as thy wide fields of corn.

• • • •

And round earth’s rim thine honor glows,

Unsullied as thy drifted snows.

Wilfred Campbell, then, appears as a lyrist of Nature and poet of the

Spirit, who is an adroit and vivid objective colorist and etcher, but

who, for the most part, tinges his lyricism of Nature with meanings for

the ‘inward soul.’ With equal dexterity and truth he painted an

impressionistic or a _genre_ picture. But in doing this, he was

unexcelled by his contemporaries in Canada in economy of means for

expression. While, however, he was thus given to painting or delineating

Nature in Canada, he also appears as a poet who ‘hath kept watch o’er

man’s mortality.’ He gave proof of this in a singular way. Whatever

other distinctions belong to him, Campbell has never been equalled, by

another Canadian poet, in the Dramatic Monologue. Perhaps, in view of

the special meaning which Browning has given to this species of poetry,

it were better to use the formula Dramatic Monody. For this phrase

better describes Campbell’s poignant, compelling _Unabsolved_, _The

Mother_, and _Lazarus_. But however categorized, these poems reveal the

fact that Campbell’s genius was essentially dramatic. This dramatic

instinct in him, Campbell developed to a high degree until he essayed

the five-act poetic drama. It is as a Poetic Dramatist that Campbell

achieved a distinct and fixed place in Canadian creative poetry.

The first poet to attempt nativistic or native poetic drama in Canada

was Charles Mair, who published at Toronto, in 1886. _Tecumseh: A

Drama_. Many of its characters are Canadian and much of its setting and

color are Canadian. Mair had created a work of real interest, of

excellent structure and dramatic development, and had used impressively

Canadian properties, character, and environment. The verse is genuinely

artistic and colorful and dramatic, and the poem as a whole is worthy of

critical consideration; but only as the first example of Canadian native

poetic drama is _Tecumseh_ to be regarded as significant in the literary

history of Canada.

Much superior to the dramatic poetry of Mair is that of Wilfred

Campbell. It is considerable in quantity, comprising the following (as

he called them) ‘poetical tragedies and dramas:’ _Mordred_,

_Hildebrand_, _The Brockenfiend_, _Robespierre_, _Daulac_, _Morning_,

_Sanio_, and _The Admiral’s Daughter_. The quality of his poetical

tragedies and dramas distinguishes him as the first really important

creator of poetic drama in Canada.

The titles of his poetic tragedies and dramas clearly indicate that,

with one exception, his subjects were derivative and his treatment

traditional. With the exception of his _Daulac_ he took his subjects

from Arthurian legend and European romantic history. He was considerably

under the influence of Tennyson. Though he gave us an interesting and

arresting poetic drama with his _Daulac_, it is specially notable as a

drama which is Canadian in subject, character, and setting. He was not

so successful with it as with his poetic drama based on Arthurian legend

and romantic history. The reason is that in a large degree he possessed

an ‘Old World,’ a Keltic imagination, and his imagination was deeply

impressed and moved by the romance of mediaeval heroic exploits:—

Old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago.

The heroism of Daulac, his combats and other heroic exploits were so

near in time to the age of Campbell himself that they could not affect

the poet’s imagination so pervasively and compellingly as do the older

mediaeval romances of heroic exploits. Campbell did not feel the

_Daulac_ story as he had felt the Arthurian or romantic legends of

Europe. He, therefore, did not, because he could not, put into his

_Daulac_ the same power of imagination and dramatic characterization and

reality that he put into his other dramas. But _Daulac_,

notwithstanding, is a noble poetic drama; and since it is Canadian

through and through, in subject, in setting, and in authorship, we may

estimate it as the first native poetic drama of genuine art and power in

the creative literature of Canada.

* * * * *

The quotations from Wilfred Campbell’s work in this chapter are from

_The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell_ (Hodder & Stoughton, Limited:

Toronto).

CHAPTER XII

Pauline Johnson

HER ANCESTRY AND ITS INFLUENCES—LITERARY AND MUSICAL QUALITIES OF

WORK—STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT IN SPIRITUAL VISION—PICTURESQUE COLOR

VERSE.