imagination with the arresting pathos which attaches to the imperishable
memory of a belated and beautiful spirit who came singing new and
winning music of earth, and man, and love. She was the most elementally
human of all Canadian poets. In some respects Pauline Johnson was the
most original and engaging singer in the company of the Canadian lyrists
who were born in 1860, 1861, and 1862—Roberts, Carman, Lampman,
Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott.
Pauline Johnson’s grandfather, who attained special glory for his
valorous deed of setting fire, with his own hands, to the city of
Buffalo in the War of 1812, was distinguished, in times of peace, by his
tribesmen with the honorable and poetic sobriquet, ‘The Mohawk Warbler,’
not because he could actually ‘warble’ like a present-day lyric tenor,
but because he possessed a ready flow of language which he used with
impassioned and dramatic eloquence. The old warrior’s granddaughter, in
her ballads and poems of Indian wrongs and Indian heroic deeds, wrote
with the same dramatic intensity and the same gift for dramatic picture;
and in her songs of Nature and of love sang with a lyrical lilt as
natural, musical, free, and passionate as the warblings of the thrush or
lark or linnet.
The distinctive qualities of Pauline Johnson’s genius and poetry are
here noted summarily. In general: As a story-telling balladist she must
be ranked with the best Canadian poets who have essayed the same
_genre_, though in some of her ballads there are lines which are
rhetorical and melodramatic. On the whole, however, her story-telling
ballads are unsurpassed by her Canadian _confrères_, in emotional
intensity, rapid movement, terse phrasing, and dramatic pictorial
vividness.
As a verbal musician, and as a nature-painter and etcher, Pauline
Johnson again must be given a very high place. Some of her poems are
marked by absolutely avian _abandon_; others by haunting melody; and
others by sweetly flowing rhythm and winning cadences, and by sensuous
vowel-harmonies and faultless rhymes. Many of her poems disclose the
gift to paint in words a picture from Nature with the impressionist’s
mastery of sensation and color. Some of them are low-keyed and full of
shadows, suggested sensations, and mystery. Others are dainty
word-etchings, picturesquely or subtly drawn and subdued in tone.
In particular: Pauline Johnson has yet, by other Canadian poets, to be
equalled as a lyrist of the passion and pathos of romantic love, and as
an inventor of picturesque, veracious, vivid, beautiful, and compelling
poetic figures and images. Her love poems are full of the most poignant
passion and pathos. It would be easy to make a catalogue of a half
hundred or more poetic figures and images which are unique in
descriptive aptness or in emotional ‘tang.’
In short, the supreme spiritual and aesthetic qualities of Pauline
Johnson’s poetry are its real sincerity, its naiveté of thought, its
simplicity of structure, its lovely color images, its winning music, its
passion, pathos, and womanly tenderness. But first place must be given
to its dulcet and insinuating music and to its original and arresting
poetic figures and images.
Pauline Johnson, taking the date engraved on the monument to her memory
at Vancouver, was born in 1861. She died at Vancouver in 1912. She was
the youngest child of a family of four born to the late G. H. M. Johnson
(Onwononsyshon) of Brantford, Ontario, Head Chief of the Six Nations
Indians, and his wife, Emily S. Howells, who was of English parentage
and born at Brixton, England. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) was born on
her father’s estate, which is on the Reserve apportioned the Mohawk
Tribe by the Canadian government. It must, therefore, pique the
imagination to know that Pauline Johnson was of pure Indian and pure
English descent, but that though she travelled from coast to coast in
Canada and the United States and twice to England, her freedom of
movement was ‘privileged’ and she was always, wherever she went, a
‘ward’ of the Canadian government.
In Pauline Johnson’s case there are nice, though not recondite, problems
in literary psychology and interpretive criticism. For instance: Was
Pauline Johnson’s genius Indian, or English? Was it inherited, or was
she a ‘born’ poet, or how else may her gifts and tastes be explained?
The poet herself always insisted, with considerable pride, on her Indian
origin. Some critics, reasoning by quasi-inductions, abetted her in this
belief. Yet, so far as her genius is concerned, the only one of her
Indian ancestors who had anything like literary gifts was her
grandfather, ‘The Mohawk Warbler,’ and his gifts were those of the
‘tongue’ in compelling eloquence rather than aesthetic sensibility and
the power of expressing in words the beauty and the music in Nature. On
the other hand, Pauline Johnson’s English ancestors were a family who
possessed distinct literary tendencies and habits. The most
distinguished member of the branches of that family was W. D. Howells,
the American novelist, poet, and essayist. It is most probable that she
inherited her literary gifts from her English ancestors. For in _Flint
and Feather_—her complete poems—there is not one concept, or bit of
color, or rhythm, or anything else, that may be described as
specifically Indian. Rather it is all British or Universal. We do find
in her poems Indian themes, protests against British ruthlessness in
governmental treatment of the Indian, and the celebration of Indian
valor and love. But these are human utterances. Moreover, of the ninety
poems in _Flint and Feather_, only eight concern the Indian, and these
only on the side of episodes which formed good material for romantic
story-telling in verse. In these fine ballads Pauline Johnson became
indeed the ‘Voice’ of her inarticulate Indian fellows, but the voice
itself was that of a woman cultured in the forms and music of English
poetry. Pauline Johnson’s loyalty to the Indian side of her ancestry,
and her pride in it, were admirable; but, if heredity is to be accepted
as a real cause of genius, her taste for literature, and her bent
towards literary expression, must have come from her mother’s side. For
her mother was both a cultured and a romantically-minded woman. If,
however, we are to grant the poet any gift from her Indian ancestry, we
must remember her brilliant career as a reciter or dramatic reader. If
she inherited this dramatic gift, then she got it from her eloquent
grandfather, ‘The Mohawk Warbler.’ Though she used it conspicuously in
her dramatic readings, the gift is also observable in the vividly
graphic qualities, and in the emotional intensity, of her story-telling
ballads.
Pauline Johnson was the first genuinely Canadian ‘daughter of the soil’
who indubitably was born a poet; and her poetic development was one not
in artistic craftsmanship, but in vision. The first important fact in
her spiritual history is that at a very early age the future poet
evinced an original and intense taste for verse, expressing this taste
both by a fondness for memorizing verses read to her and for composing
childish jingles about familiar domestic objects. A pretty illustration
of Pauline Johnson’s early predilection for poetry is furnished in the
Biographical Sketch to _Flint and Feather_, in which it is related that
when she was but four years old (1865) she was asked by a friend who was
going to a distant city what he should bring her as a gift, and that the
child-poet replied, ‘Verses, please!’
The second important fact in Pauline Johnson’s spiritual history is that
from the time she could pen words intelligently up to the close of her
public-school days she devoted much of her leisure to self-cultivation
in the appreciation and the writing of verse. Before she was twelve
years old (1873), Pauline Johnson had thoroughly read Shakespeare and
the British romantic poets, Scott and Byron, and with their texts
cultivated her native sense of poetic diction and imagery, of verbal
rhythm and music (vowel-harmony, rhyme, consonance, assonance,
alliteration), and of color-epithets for brilliant and subtly
impressionistic word-painting.
Pauline Johnson, with rare good sense, did not publish any of her verses
till considerable time after she had completed her formal schooling and
her personally conducted studies of versification, verbal music, and
poetic imagery. But as soon as she began to offer her verses to editors,
she seems to have found ready acceptances. The first periodical to
welcome her verse was a small New York magazine, _Gems of Poetry_,
published, presumably, in the early ’80’s of the last century. This,
however, can not be regarded as a significant event. Really significant
was the fact that _The Week_ (founded by Goldwin Smith) was the first
Canadian magazine to publish her verse. This fact assured her the
recognition and sponsorship of Goldwin Smith, himself an eminent
man-of-letters and a poet, and also, possibly, of Charles G. D. Roberts,
who was literary editor of _The Week_ in 1883-1884, and who was the
first editor to stand sponsor for Archibald Lampman. The imprimatur of
_The Week_, or the sponsorship of Goldwin Smith and Roberts,
automatically elected Pauline Johnson to the company of the Systematic
Group of Canadian poets born in 1860, 1861 and 1862, and introduced her
to the English-speaking world as a new and authentically gifted singer,
in whose music, though formally composed in the English manner of
versification, would, in due time, be heard the hitherto unheard
melancholy over-tones and wildwood notes of the aboriginal Canadian
spirit.
The next important date in Pauline Johnson’s history is the year 1892,
when a happy social and literary _soirée_ launched the Indian poet on a
public career which, seemingly, would not affect, save negatively,
Pauline Johnson’s function and art as a lyrist. From that date and for
sixteen years (1892-1908), Miss Johnson assiduously applied her gifts as
a reciter and dramatic reader in Canada, the United States, and England,
all the while publishing intermittently in the periodical press her best
verse.
In 1895, simultaneously at London, England, Boston, and Toronto,
appeared her first volume of poems, _The White Wampum_. In 1903 her
second volume of poems, _Canadian Born_, was issued at Toronto. In 1912,
also at Toronto, there was published the definitive and inclusive
edition of her collected poems, _Flint and Feather_. All three, upon
their appearance, were highly praised in reviews by the critics of
England, the United States, and Canada.
It is important to appreciate the significance of Pauline Johnson’s
sixteen years of travelling over Canada, the United States, and England,
as a reciter and dramatic reader. Possibly they reduced the amount of
her poetic output. But there are no evidences in _Flint and Feather_
that the experiences gained during these years diminished or increased
her powers of poetic vision or craftsmanship. Pauline Johnson was
self-deceived when, in a letter, she expressed her belief that the
fugitive verses published in _Flint and Feather_, pages 135-156, surpass
her poems in _The White Wampum_ and in _Canadian Born_. ‘My later
fugitive verse,’ she declared, ‘is, of course, my best work, as it is
more mature.’ There are only fifteen of these so-called fugitive poems;
but imaginative, musical, and tender as they are, notably _In Grey
Days_, _Autumn’s Orchestra_, _The Trail to Lillooet_, _The Lifting of
the Mist_, _The King’s Consort_, and _Day Dawn_, they are all in the
early manner of the poet. They are lovely and winning poems, pervaded
with seductive music, tone-color pictures of nature and of life, tinged
with a tender pathos. But they show no advance in technique, verbal
music, imagery, or emotional nuance—no lately acquired powers to
express rhythmic ecstasy with a newer and more musical lilt than obtains
in _The Song My Paddle Sings_ (1892); or to paint with more suggestive
impressionism a nature picture full of color, half-lights, or mystery,
or more finely to etch a verbal portrait than she has done in _Erie
Waters_, _Marshlands_, _Shadow River_, and _Joe_; or to catch and
envisage a mood or emotional nuance with subtler spirituality than she
accomplished in _The Camper_, _Lady Lorgnette_, _Lullaby of the
Iroquois_, _Prairie Greyhounds_, _Lady Icicle_, and _The Prodigal_.
All these poems, whose titles have just been quoted, were composed in
the decade from 1892 to 1902, and belong to Pauline Johnson’s first two
volumes which together contained sixty-seven poems of indubitable lyric
and imaginative quality. Of the poems composed by Pauline Johnson in the
decade from 1902 to 1912, only twenty-three were deemed by the poet
worthy to stand beside her poems from _The White Wampum_ and in
_Canadian Born_ which, with the later twenty-three, form the contents of
the original edition of _Flint and Feather_. Five posthumously published
poems were added to the later editions.
If, then, in _Flint and Feather_ we discover no advance in the technique
of Pauline Johnson’s art, wherein did her new experiences gained by
travel, by meeting men and women of foreign lands and by learning the
ways of the world, work changes worth while? Solely in the poet’s heart
and imagination. Here was a development, not in craftsmanship and art,
but in spiritual vision. It was, too, an evolution simple and natural in
its stages, and is readily traceable in the poems contained in _Flint
and Feather_. Mr. Melvin O. Hammond, an observant and judicious Canadian
critic, in a review of _Flint and Feather_ (_The Globe_, Toronto, Nov.
9th, 1912), was the first to disclose these stages of Pauline Johnson’s
development in spiritual vision. They are four:—
First, Pauline Johnson appeared as the ‘voice’ of the Indian people, who
before her coming had been dumb or inarticulate. Her point of view was,
at this stage, Indian, and she passionately protested against the abuses
the Indians of Canada have suffered (as in _The Cattle Thief_ and _A Cry
from An Indian Wife_) or, as passionately, sang of Indian valor and love
(as in her _Ojistoh_).
Next, her point of view became Canadian. She turned from lamenting the
free and glorious past of her Indian ancestors to paint in verse the
land of her birth, ‘Canadian life and scenery in the broad outdoors of
the North and West,’ not merely impressionistically picturing woods,
skies, plains, but also apostrophizing and humanizing both natural
creatures and objects, as if they were conscious of their estate,
function, and value to man, and had moods of their own, as, for example,
_The Sleeping Giant_ (Thunder Bay), and the dainty, fetching lyric _The
Homing Bee_.
The third stage in Miss Johnson’s development in vision was also
Canadian. But, in this stage, her point of view became broadened in
scope. She turned to remark the progress of the Canadian national spirit
and the civilization which binds the Dominion from ocean to ocean. This
she accomplished with extraordinary virility in rhythm, with apt
descriptive epithet, and with pictorial suggestiveness in her _Prairie
Greyhounds_—a song represented as sung by the trans-continental trains
in their passage from East to West, and West to East. The poem gives the
reader vivid ideated sensations of the swish and roar and onward rush of
the trains, the sweep of the vast territory of the Dominion, and the
vision of the Greater Canada that is to be.
The final stage in Pauline Johnson’s increase in scope of spiritual
vision was marked by cosmopolitanism, pure humanity, and by mysticism.
She had lost the Indian and the Canadian points of view when she
composed _Give us Barrabas_ (commemorative of the exile of Dreyfus). She
was wholly a human being and sexless when she composed her subtly
sympathetic _The City and the Sea_, and _Fasting_. She was genuinely
mystical when she composed her _Penseroso_ wherein she sang
persuasively:—
Soulless is all humanity to me
To-night. My keenest longing is to be
Alone, alone with God’s grey earth that seems
Pulse of my pulse and consort of my dreams.
To authenticate the claim that Pauline Johnson’s genius, art, and poetry
are highly original and sometimes unique, it is only necessary to cite
such of her poems as represent the stages of her development and the
special qualities of her poetic vision and artistry.
Beginning with the first stage, we must observe that her passionate
protesting against the abuses which the Indians of Canada had suffered
as, for instance, in her poems _The Cattle Thief_, and _A Cry from an
Indian Wife_, is no proof that the fierce intensity of her utterance is
a recrudescence of ancestral Indian fire of spirit or ferocity in
herself. The poems in which this so-called Indian emotional intensity
was expressed by her did, no doubt, spring out of imaginative sympathy
with her father’s race, but these poems could have been written with the
same show of emotional intensity by any other poet who realized with
equal imaginative sympathy the wrongs that the Indians of Canada had
suffered and who had the gift of fiery expression.
Pauline Johnson is fundamentally Indian when she is most pagan; that is,
when, first, she realizes and expresses poignantly her racial sense of
haunting presences in the natural world, and when, secondly, she
expresses a melancholy regret for the passing of her Indian race and a
yearning for free and pagan communion with the moods of Nature, with the
wild creatures of Nature, and with the spiritual presences, which, to
the imagination of the aboriginal Indian, haunted the woods, the
streams, the mists, the clouds, and the sunsets before the hated British
race destroyed the Indian’s ancestral habitat and robbed him both of his
material and spiritual birthright. Moreover, in the two or three poems
in which she protested against the wrongs which the Indians of Canada
had suffered, Pauline Johnson was really, if unconsciously, _affecting_
to be the ‘voice’ of her Indian race. For she soon turned from such
affected poetic frenzy to expressing her admiration of the British and
her love of Canada as a free commonwealth under British allegiance and
protection, and to revealing in colorful and musical verse the spirit
and beauties of the land of her birth.
Pauline Johnson, then, is essentially Indian, not when frenzied, but
only when she expresses in verse the inner secrets of the joy and the
pathos of her imaginative communion with past and contemporary Nature in
Canada,—when she sings, with free and infectious lilt, outdoor life in
Canada or impressionistically paints Canadian woods, skies, plains,
snow, waters, or apostrophizes and humanizes the creatures and objects
of nature as if they had a psychology of their own.
All the world knows Pauline Johnson’s lilting and infectious lyric of
Canadian outdoor life, _The Song My Paddle Sings_. It is unsurpassed for
suggested or ideated sensations of wind and stream, of the spirit of
motion, of free life in the open, and wins one both by its vivid
pictures of outdoor life and by its simple but musical _abandon_. After
a two-stanza apostrophe to the West wind, closing with
Now fold in slumber your laggard wings
For soft is the song my paddle sings—
we hear the poet lilting the inspiriting song itself, opening
August is laughing across the sky,
Laughing while paddle, canoe and I,
Drift, drift,
Where the hills uplift
On either side of the current swift.
Specially to be noted in this poem is the descriptive and musical
realism which the poet effects by a sort of refrain in the third line of
each stanza, a monosyllabic accent which precisely conveys to the
sensibility the actual sensations experienced in canoeing through
slow-moving and rushing or weltering waters—‘drift, drift,’ ‘dip, dip,’
‘swirl, swirl,’ ‘dash, dash,’ ‘reel, reel,’ ‘sway, sway,’ ‘swings,
swings.’ This is supreme in descriptive and imitative naturalism.
For examples of Pauline Johnson’s poetic power to humanize objects and
creatures in Nature _The Sleeping Giant_ and _The Homing Bee_ may be
cited. The latter is also notably suffused with delicate color, moves
with a light, tripping music, and is dainty in structure, thus
exemplifying several of the other qualities of her art. The opening
lines indicate the ‘key’ in music and color:—
You are belted with gold, little brother of mine,
Yellow gold, like the sun
That spills in the west, as a chalice of wine
When feasting is done.
In the Canadian idyll, Pauline Johnson displayed a delicate sense of
color values, and sang as well of airy things in Nature with an airy
music, sometimes touched with a reflective melancholy, as, for instance,
in _Shadow River_.
The tones of melancholy, of sadness, observed sometimes in Pauline
Johnson’s poetry were not all born of a mystical yearning for union with
Nature. Sometimes they were the expression of a poignant sense of the
defeat of romantic love. Hers was a simple, warm or passionate,
confiding, sensitive, but strong nature; and sensitive and passionate
but strong natures, if they belong to poets, tend to express poignantly,
rather than bitterly, any spiritual cataclysm in their lives, and, for
solace or support, to turn to Nature or to religion. It was so with
Pauline Johnson.
Charles Mair, author of _Dreamland and Other Poems_, and _Tecumseh: A
Drama_, is the authority for the belief that Pauline Johnson went
through an experience of romantic love which, in its joy, gave wings of
ecstasy and a warm emotional coloring to her nature-poetry, but which,
when her love suffered a defeat that meant a spiritual cataclysm for
her, drew from her the most poignant expression of yearning for union
with Immortal Love. The important truth is that whichever emotion she
expresses, she remains unequalled as a lyrist of the ecstasy and the
pathos of romantic love. But her poems of the ecstasy of love are never
merely the expression of subjective emotions. They also have an idyllic
or nature setting which so colors her nature-poetry itself with the
passion of love as to distinguish it, both as nature-poetry and as love
poetry, from anything else of the kind in Canadian Literature. The
ecstasy is somewhat subdued in _Idlers_; but is passionate and
transporting, warmly colored with the light and tints of Nature, and set
to verbal music in perfect harmony with the emotion and the
nature-setting in _Wave-won_.
The fact of the defeat of love, in Pauline Johnson’s case, may be
observed in her _Overlooked_, a poem which is notable for the invention
on her part of a metaphor that, for originality and beauty, is worthy of
the Greek idyllists or of Catullus, namely:—
O Love, thou wanderer from Paradise.
At length Pauline Johnson’s merely human passion of yearning for union
with the mortal companion is transmuted into a spiritualized
yearning—which, however, has not in it the sad wistfulness of the
poetry of Marjorie Pickthall—for union with Immortal Love. Defeat of
romantic love in Pauline Johnson’s case passed, first, into
renouncement, and, at last, into resignation and the total giving of
self to Immortal Love, as in _Brier_—
Because, dear Christ, your tender, wounded arm
Bends back the brier that edges life’s long way,
That no hurt comes to heart, to soul no harm,
I do not feel the thorn so much to-day.
Because I never knew your care to tire,
Your hand to weary guiding me aright,
Because you walk before and crush the brier,
It does not pierce my feet so much to-night.
Because so often you have hearkened to
My selfish prayers, I ask but one thing now,
That these harsh hands of mine add not unto
The crown of thorns upon your bleeding brow.
Pauline Johnson possessed extraordinary, if not quite unique, gifts as a
story-telling balladist. Examples of her art in this species are her
compelling story of Indian love and revenge, _Ojistoh_, her melodramatic
Indian tale, _The Cattle Thief_, and her _Wolverine_, a poem of Western
_chevalerie_, in which species, however, she does not rank with Isabella
Valancy Crawford.
Her poetry of the development of the Canadian national spirit and
civilization, by which she marks a broadening in her own spiritual
vision, is notably exemplified in two poems, _The Riders of the Plains_
and _Prairie Greyhounds_. In the former, however, she is more British
than Canadian. But she is Canadian in her _Prairie Greyhounds_. In this
poem she achieves an extraordinary virility of rhythm, employs apt and
dramatic epithets and fills the picture with a vivid suggestiveness of
the vastness of Canada and the vision of the greater autonomous and
powerful Dominion that is to be. _Prairie Greyhounds_, moreover, is a
supreme achievement in suggested or ideated sensations of motion. The
reader feels himself as if actually aboard the west-bound and east-bound
Canadian Pacific trains, experiencing, as does a living passenger on a
‘fast express,’ the swish, and roar, and onward rush of the trains.
As a verbal musician Pauline Johnson must be given a very high place
amongst Canadian poets. There is an avian _abandon_ and ecstasy, an
avian lilt and warbling, in _The Birds’ Lullaby_ and in _The Songster_.
There are flowing rhythm and haunting melody of rhyme, vowel-harmony,
alliteration and cadences in _The Trail to Lillooet_:—
Song of fall, and song of forest, come you here on haunting quest,
Calling through the seas and silence, from God’s country of the west.
Where the mountain pass is narrow, and the torrent white and strong,
Down its rocky-throated canon, sings its golden-throated song.
You are singing there together through the God-begotten nights,
And the leaning stars are listening above the distant heights
That lift like points of opal in the crescent coronet
About whose golden setting sweeps the trail to Lillooet.
Pauline Johnson has also achieved what may be noted in literary history
as the first strictly Canadian ‘cradle-song’—Canadian in music and in
setting—her _Lullaby of the Iroquois_.
As a nature-colorist and etcher Pauline Johnson again must be given a
very high place. For a _genre_ etching of the human figure against a
background of nature her _Joe_, which she herself sub-titles ‘An
Etching,’ is as vividly presented and as fetching as a _genre_ drawing
by Murillo. Her _Lady Lorgnette_ is as daintily graphic and colorful and
piquant and romantic as anything done by the brush of Romney or
Gainsborough or by the later modern ‘society’ miniaturists. She had the
pictorial artist’s eye to spy out a picture in Nature, as in _At Husking
Time_. She had the impressionist’s mastery of sensuous pigmentation, as
in _Under Canvas_. She could make a picture low-keyed, full of shadows
and suggested sensations and mystery, as in _Nocturne_ and in _Moonset_.
Finally: Pauline Johnson is certainly not surpassed, if equalled, by any
other Canadian lyrist as an inventor of beautiful color epithets and of
picturesque, vivid, and compelling metaphors. They are to be found
everywhere in her poetry. Consider these as examples—‘Russet needles as
censers swing to an altar,’ ‘The sea-weeds cling with flesh-like
fingers,’ ‘Beaten gold that clung like coils of kisses love inlaid,’
‘The brownish hills with needles green and gold,’ ‘O Love, thou wanderer
from Paradise,’ ‘Swept beneath a shore of shade, beneath a velvet moon,’
‘Like net work threads of fire,’ and this,
Purple her eyes as the mists that dream
At the edge of some laggard, sun-drowned stream
and many more as novel, colorful, musical, veracious and compelling.
As a woman Pauline Johnson was a rare and beautiful spirit. As a poet
she was of all Canadian poets the most pervasively true to her Canadian
origin and habitat. She is not to be given always the status of Lampman
and Carman and Duncan Campbell Scott, yet to her unquestionably belongs
a place beside these Canadian singers. Her poetry had a magic of music
and a color of leafy lawns and lovely grey-eyed and tawny dusks and
clear ecstatic morns, which were all her own. She was indeed a ‘Mohawk
Warbler,’ and her songs are
Free and artless as the avian lays
Heard in Canadian woods on April days.
* * * * *
The quotations in this chapter from Pauline Johnson’s poems are from
_Flint and Feather_, by E. Pauline Johnson, (Musson Book Co., Limited:
Toronto).
CHAPTER XIII
Parker _and_ Scott (F. G.)
PARKER AS A SONNETEER OF SPIRITUAL LOVE—ORIGIN AND THEME OF A
LOVER’S DIARY—MUSICAL AND COLORFUL LYRICAL VERSE—SCOTT’S POETRY
A REFLECTION OF HIS PERSONALITY—DISTINGUISHED AS THE ‘POET OF THE
SPIRIT’—CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY.
It was as a poet, not as a creator of historical romances, that Sir
Gilbert Parker first appeared as a man of letters and first appealed to
the literary public. As a poet he was appreciated in Australia and in
England, but not in Canada. That as a poet he has been unknown and
unappreciated in his homeland, Canada, is due to the fact that he was
expatriate when he published his two volumes of poems, the second of
which was ‘privately printed,’ and that his greater reputation as a
novelist, particularly of old romantic Canada, made him known in the
Dominion exclusively as a writer of fiction. Sir Gilbert Parker,
however, ranks high as a sonneteer of spiritual love, and as lyrist in
_genre_ verse which has attained special reputation, particularly as
texts of songs for _salon_ and recital repertory.
Sir Gilbert Parker was born in Ontario, in 1862. Never robust, he left
Canada in 1886 to seek recovery of health in the warmer and more
salubrious climate of Australia. While in Australia he began publishing
sonnets and lyrics in magazines. The sonnets were collected and
published in a volume entitled _A Lover’s Diary_; first edition, 1894;
second edition, 1898. Before the publication of _A Lover’s Diary_ Parker
had removed to London. While in England he privately printed a volume of
lyrics entitled _Embers_. These two volumes, the first revised, and
enlarged with twenty-five sonnets, and the second, with the addition of
other lyrics, were collected and published as Volume 17 of _The Works of
Gilbert Parker_ (1913). The volume containing his collected poems is
distinguished by a critical Introduction by Sir Gilbert Parker himself.
In the Introduction Parker explains the origin and theme of _A Lover’s
Diary_. It is a sonnet-sequence, the composition of which was begun when
the poet was twenty-three and still resident in Canada. The sequence is
a ‘hopeless love, in form of temptation, but lifted away from ruinous
elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable parting,
poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished and the toil of the
journey of understanding paid.’ He adds: ‘The six sonnets . . .
beginning with _The Bride_, and ending with _Annunciation_, have nothing
to do with the story further than to show two phases of the youth’s mind
before it was shaken by speculation, plunged into sadness of doubt and
apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to
itself, transform the character, and give a new impulse and direction to
personal forces and individual sense.’
As a poet of romantic love Parker is concerned with the spiritual
_meaning_ of it. _A Lover’s Diary_ is not concerned with the mere
emotions of romantic love but with its spiritual thrall, and with it as
a process of spiritual redemption and exaltation. As an interpreter of
spiritual love, Parker contrasts with Robert Norwood whose sequence,
_His Lady of the Sonnets_ (1915), though having a spiritualizing intent,
is highly sensuous and impressionistic in diction and imagery. Parker
breathes a less earthly air. His sonnet-sequence is addressed more to
the imaginative reason than to the aesthetic imagination. It is much
more mystically conceived and much more chastely lovely with the ‘white
beauty’ of the spirit than is Norwood’s sequence. Both sequences,
however, are authentic and noble poetic creations.
In pure beauty of conception, imagery, and artistry, and in the
spiritual exaltation of love, the following sonnet from Parker’s _A
Lover’s Diary_, is characteristic of the whole sequence:—
It is enough that in this burdened time
The soul sees all its purposes aright.
The rest—what does it matter? Soon the night
Will come to whelm us, then the morning chime.
What does it matter, if but in the way
One hand clasps ours, one heart believes us true;
One understands the work we try to do,
And strives through Love to teach us what to say?
Between me and the chilly outer air
Which blows in from the world, there standeth one
Who draws Love’s curtains closely everywhere,
As God folds down the banners of the sun.
Warm is my place about me, and above,
Where was the raven, I behold the dove.
Parker’s lyrical verse, like his sonnet-sequence, is the poetry of a
young man who still possesses the enthusiasms of youth for all the
lovelier and happier things in existence, and who rejoices in living.
From the text of Parker’s lyrics it is plain that he had the gifts of a
lyrist in the original Greek meaning, of one who wrote poems to be
_sung_ to the accompaniment of the lyre. He was gifted to turn a
sentiment either seriously or playfully with simplicity and directness
of diction and with winning musical lilt.
In truth, if he had turned to song composition, he was more ideally
equipped to write the texts of poems for songs than was the greatest of
American song composers, the late Edward MacDowell, who, for lack of
singable lyrical texts, was compelled to compose his own poems as well
as their musical settings.
There is a spontaneity of lyrical lilt, lyrical verve, in Parker’s
lighter poems, which he composed both in literary English and in
‘Irishy.’ As an example of the musical and colorful qualities of his
lyrics in literary English, the following poem from _Embers_ will aptly
serve:—
I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still—
There was winter in my world and in my heart;
A breath came from the mesa, and a message stirred my will,
And my soul and I arose up to depart.
I heard the desert calling, and I knew that over there
In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
Was a woman of the sunrise with the star-shine in her hair
And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.
I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still—
There is summer in my world, and in my heart;
A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
Blinds my footsteps as I rise up to depart.
As an example of his musical quality and humor in ‘Irishy,’ the
following lyric from _Embers_ is apt and fetching:—
It was as fine a churchful as you ever clapt an eye on;
Oh, the bells was ringin’ gaily, and the sun was shinin’ free;
There was singers, there was clargy—‘Bless ye both,’ says Father
Tryon—
They was weddin’ Mary Callaghan and me.
There was gatherin’ of women, there was hush upon the stairway,
There was whisperin’ and smilin’, but it was no place for me;
A little ship was comin’ into harbour through the fair-way—
It belongs to Mary Callaghan and me.
Shure, the longest day has endin’, and the wildest storm has fallin’—
There’s a young gossoon in yander, and he sits upon my knee;
There’s a churchful for the christenin’—do you hear the imp a-callin’?
He’s the pride of Mary Callaghan and me.
As a composer of song texts, Parker is rivalled only by his Canadian
compatriot, Arthur Stringer, whose poems in ‘Irishy’ have been most
winningly and humorously set to music by their compatriot, Gena
Branscombe (Mrs. J. F. Tenney). It is indeed as a poet, whose lyrics are
inevitable texts for songs which have literary charm and simple humanity
that Sir Gilbert Parker has been most admired and appreciated.
For this view we have the authority of Sir Gilbert himself. In the
Introduction to the volume of his poetry in his Collected Works, he
says: ‘_Mary Callaghan and Me_ has been set to music by Mr. Max Muller,
and has made many friends, and _The Crowning_ was the Coronation ode of
_The People_, which gave a prize, too ample I think, for the best
musical setting of the lines. Many of the other pieces in _Embers_ have
been set to music by distinguished composers, like Sir Edward Elgar, who
has made a song-cycle of several, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Mr. Arthur
Foote, Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, Robert Somerville, and others. The
first to have musical setting was _You’ll Travel Far and Wide_, to which
in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as _An Irish Folk Song_. Like _O
Flower of All the World_, by Mrs. Amy Woolforde Finden, it has had a
world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr.
Foote’s music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an
ephemeral acceptance of the author’s words.’
Both, then, as a poet of mystical vision and sublimated emotion, and of
human sentiment and instincts which add to the humanity and gaiety of
life, Sir Gilbert Parker appears as a poet who has authentic creative
gifts and who is a master craftsman in the ‘art’ of verse. In novelty
and variety his sonnets and lyrics have significantly enhanced the
quality of Canadian poetry, and have in their own degree and way given
the work of the poets of the Systematic School and Period the character
of a genuine ‘renaissance.’
Another poet who rightfully belongs to the Systematic School and Period
of Canadian Literature is Frederick George Scott. In 1888, or in the
year following the publication of Roberts’ _In Divers Tones_ (1887),
Canon Scott published his first book of verse, _The Soul’s Quest and
Other Poems_. This volume was succeeded by five other volumes of verse,
up to 1907, in which year he published _The Key of Life: A Mystery
Play_. In 1910 appeared his _Collected Poems_. During the World War he
published a booklet of war verse, _In the Battle Silences_ (1916).
The forms and qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry were determined by his
own moral personality and by his conception of the ‘end’ of poetry. It
is a fact that in no other verse written by a Canadian is there such an
absolute identification of the man and the poet as in the poetry of
Canon Scott. The poetry reflects the whole personality of the man. In
the world, Canon Scott is a distinguished example of the ‘Christian
gentleman’—‘a man of liberal culture and wide sympathies whose life has
thrilled with the larger life, political, social, and religious, a man
of strong courage born of reverent unquestioning faith.’ To Canon Scott,
therefore, the aim of poetry is not ‘art for art’s sake,’ but the
inspiration and consolation of the people in their hour of doubt or
darkness. His conception of the ‘end’ determined the forms and manner of
Canon Scott’s poetry. For if, like the ancient Hebraic poets, he was to
inspire and console his people, he must present his thoughts in simple
forms and in diction and imagery readily understood by the people.
Canon Scott stands out from the rest of the members of the Systematic
School and Period as _par excellence_ the Poet of the Spirit; and his
verse is distinguished from the bulk of the verse of his colleagues in
the Systematic School as the Poetry of Faith and Consolation. There is
nothing original and distinctive in his forms: they are traditional and
simple. There is nothing original and distinctive in his message: it,
too, is traditional and simple—a message of faith and courage and of
joy in existence. His distinction is in his ‘art,’ his power to convey
beautifully, sweetly—and above all, convincingly—to the human soul
noble or profound thoughts for its sustenance, refreshment, and
consolation. But while the ethical and spiritual ‘notes’—which must be
distinguished from didacticism—are supreme in his poetry, Canon Scott
is also solicitous about the craftsmanship in his verse. Though his
verse forms are thoroughly socialized and though he never aims to be a
‘word virtuoso,’ nevertheless he is always the ‘artist’ in verse
technique.
The chief qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry are piquant phantasy rather
than imagination, ingenious imagery, sympathy with his kind, tenderness,
wistfulness, simple or profound thought expressed in simple diction and
in simple but dulcet verbal melody. Also in his verse is a two-fold
_Canadianism_. The self-reliant faith and courage in it is Canadian, and
the color and the naturalistic imagery are derived from the woods, and
fields, and streams, and hills of his Canadian homeland, more
particularly from Nature in the Laurentian district. Indeed, Canon Scott
has been given the sobriquet of ‘the Poet of the Laurentians.’ But while
he impregnates and suffuses his verse with color and naturalistic
imagery from Nature in the Laurentians, he always transmutes his
naturalistic perceptions into spiritual imagery and import. He does not
do this with bald and stark didacticism, but with exquisite artistry,
and yet with an intimacy, apt felicity, and naturalness that make it all
an achievement in winning a reader to see the beauty and dignity of the
familiar and commonplace in Nature. Canon Scott’s poetry, in a phrase,
is the acme of _spiritual realism_.
Of his diction, rhythm, and melody, and his Canadian imagery in verse,
Scott’s _Dawn_ furnishes a short and impressive example:—
The immortal spirit hath no bars
To circumscribe its dwelling-place;
My soul hath pastured with the stars
Upon the meadow-lands of space.
My mind and ear at times have caught
From realms beyond our mortal reach,
The utterance of Eternal Thought
Of which all nature is the speech.
And high above the seas and lands,
On peaks just tipped with morning light,
My dauntless spirit mutely stands
With eagle wings outspread for flight.
How lowly, and yet how beautiful and compelling, are these figures in
the first stanza of that poem—‘pastured with the stars,’ ‘meadow-lands
of space.’ But both are derived from Canon Scott’s boyhood days in his
homeland. They are Canadian.
There is a Wordsworthian humanity in his poem _The Cripple_, a sympathy
with his kind and a tender wistfulness in his _Van Elsen_. There is
nobility of thought in his _Samson_, and in _Thor_, and a grandeur of
vision in his _Hymn of Empire_, which is a Canadian imperial and
patriotic poem in a kind by itself. But in one poem—a sonnet—Canon
Scott has achieved what is perhaps the most ingenious imagery in
Canadian poetry, and one of the most extraordinary in English
literature. This is his sonnet _Time_:—
I saw Time in his workshop carving faces;
Scattered around his tools lay, blunting griefs,
Sharp cares that cut out deeply in reliefs
Of light and shade; sorrows that smooth the traces
Of what were smiles. Not yet without fresh graces
His handiwork, for oftimes rough were ground
And polished, oft the pinched made smooth and round;
The calm look, too, the impetuous fire replaces.
Long time I looked and watched; with hideous grin
He took each heedless face between his knees,
And graved and scarred and bleached with boiling tears.
I wondering turned to go, when lo, my skin
Feels crumpled, and in glass my own face sees
Itself all changed, scarred, careworn, white with years!
So far as derivative influences may in general be observed in the poets
of the Systematic School and Period of Canadian Literature, Roberts,
Lampman, and Carman are Hellenistic and impressionistic in feeling and
thought. They were devoted to creating poetry that would delight the
aesthetic senses and sensibilities. But Frederick George Scott is
Hebraic in feeling and thought. He created poetry to satisfy the heart
and the religious imagination, and to sustain and console the human
spirit in its sojourn on earth. He achieved these ends simply yet
beautifully. His poetry is pervaded with the most elemental and enduring
‘heart’ qualities. They give it such a direct and compelling human
appeal as to win a significant and distinctive place for it in the
authentic native and national poetry of Canada.
* * * * *
The quotations in this chapter are from _A Lover’s Diary_ and _Embers_,
by Sir Gilbert Parker, (Copp, Clark Co., Limited: Toronto); and from
_Poems_, by Frederick George Scott, (Constable & Co.: London).
CHAPTER XIV
Minor Poets
THE TERM ‘MINOR’ DEFINED—ETHELWYN WETHERALD—JEAN BLEWETT—
FRANCIS SHERMAN—A. E. S. SMYTHE—S. FRANCES HARRISON—ARTHUR
STRINGER—PETER MCARTHUR—ISABEL ECCLESTONE MACKAY.
It is proper to distinguish Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, Duncan
Campbell Scott, Frederick George Scott, and Pauline Johnson as the
‘major’ poets of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. Though of
necessity with them the writing of verse was in a sense an avocation, in
another sense it was a vocation. They were systematic both in the
writing and the quantitative publishing of it. Contemporary with them,
but, for the most part, later in production and publishing, were other
poets who wrote with beauty and distinction in poetic style. They
followed the aesthetic and artistic ideals of the ‘major’ poets, but
they were not as systematic as Roberts and his _confrères_ in writing or
in quantitative publishing. These are denoted in this work the ‘minor’
poets of the Systematic School or Period. But nothing invidious as to
quality of verse is intended by the distinction. For a few of these
so-called ‘minor’ poets of the Systematic Period wrote some poetry as
fine in aesthetic substance and artistic finish as the poetry of Roberts
and his colleagues. The term ‘minor’ is meant to distinguish these poets
as being, first, _later_, for the most part, than Roberts and his
_confrères_, and as being, secondly, _less eminent_ than the early
systematic group of Canadian poets. The number of these so-called minor
or later poets is legion. They ‘flourished’ from 1887 to 1907, or from
the publication of Roberts’ _In Divers Tones_ to the appearance of
Robert Service’s _Songs of a Sourdough_ (the beginning of the Decadent
Interim). Detailed appreciation of the minor poets of the Systematic
Period would, therefore, require a volume by itself. Here we may only
recall the salient names, and specially remark the verse, of some of the
minor poets whose lyrical poetry is particularly representative or
noteworthy, or has become genuinely popular.
Worthy of a place beside the major poets of the Systematic Period is
Ethelwyn Wetherald. In 1895 she published _The House of the Trees and
Other Poems_; in 1902, _Tangled in the Stars_; in 1904, _The Radiant
Road_ and in 1907, an edition of her collected poems, _The Last Robin_;
_Lyrics and Sonnets_. Perhaps the outstanding aesthetic quality of her
poetry is a tender, subdued, melancholy, spiritual grace, ‘a grey-eyed
loveliness,’ which undoubtedly derives from the characteristic
pensiveness of her Quaker ancestry. But in all her verse, which is
authentic poetry, she discloses pretty sentiment, reflective beauty,
ingenious imagery, and fine craftsmanship. _The Hay Field_, which is
Canadian in inspiration, setting, and color is an apt example of
Ethelwyn Wetherald’s art:—
With slender arms outstretching in the sun
The grass lies dead;
The wind walks tenderly and stirs not one
Frail, fallen head.
Of baby creepings through the April day
Where streamlets wend,
Of child-like dancing on the breeze of May,
This is the end.
No more these tiny forms are bathed in dew,
No more they reach
To hold with leaves that shade them from the blue
A whispered speech.
No more they part their arms and wreathe them close
Again, to shield
Some love-full little nest—a dainty house
Hid in a field.
For them no more the splendour of the storm,
The fair delights
Of moon and star-shine, glimmering faint and warm
On summer nights.
Their little lives they yield in summer death,
And frequently
Across the field bereaved their dying breath
Is brought to me.
A poet who has won a distinct and fixed place in the popular heart and
imagination of Canadians is Jean Blewett. Her first volume, _Heart
Songs_, appeared in 1897 and immediately won a wide popularity. This was
increased by her next volume, _The Cornflower and Other Poems_ (1906).
Her Collected Poems were published in 1922. Jean Blewett is essentially
a ‘woman’s poet.’ By this is meant that she appeals to the domestic
heart and the imagination, that she sings of the joys of home, the ways
of children, the love of husband and wife. But Jean Blewett does this in
an extraordinary way. She treats homely subjects indeed, but while she
treats them in a homely or rather home-like way she does it with a
simple and ingratiating sincerity and charm of sentiment and artistry
which are quite her own and in the employment of which she is alone in
Canada. If her poems deal with homely subjects, her artistry is by no
means bourgeois. She rises and falls with the inherent dignity of her
subject. But her human treatment of a homely subject never issues in
vulgarity, or vivid ‘vaudeville’ verse. As an example of her genuine
artistry and dignity of treatment in a high or serious subject we quote
her _Quebec_:—
Quebec, the gray old city on the hill,
Lives with a golden glory on her head,
Dreaming throughout this hour so fair, so still,
Of those days and her beloved dead.
The doves are nesting in the cannons grim,
The flowers bloom where once did run a tide
Of crimson when the moon rose pale and dim
Above a field of battle stretching wide.
Methinks within her wakes a mighty glow
Of pride in ancient times, her stirring past,
The strife, the valour of the long ago
Feels at her heart-strings. Strong and tall, and vast
She lies, touched with the sunset’s golden grace,
A wondrous softness on her gray old face.
When her subject gives her a chance for sweep of imagination and for a
pearly beauty of imagery, Jean Blewett rises brilliantly to her theme,
as in _What Time the Morning Stars Arise_, a really splendid war poem
commemorating the heroic deed of Lieutenant Reginald Warneford, aviator,
who unassisted destroyed a German armed Zeppelin, containing 28 men, on
June 7th, 1915. We quote the first and last stanzas:—
Above him spreads the purple sky,
Beneath him spreads the ether sea,
And everywhere about him lie
Dim ports of peace and mystery.
• • • •
He sees the white mists softly curl,
He sees the moon drift pale and wan,
Sees Venus climb the stars of pearl
To hold her court of Love at dawn.
Jean Blewett is chiefly loved by the people for her _forte_—her
sincere, simple singing of true love and faith, of childhood, and the
field flowers, and the joys of the Canadian Spring and Winter. But, as a
_genre_ poet, she is gifted with a whimsical humor which is quite unique
in the poetic literature of Canada. _For He was Scotch and So Was She_
is a fetching example of Jean Blewett’s humor and humorous treatment of
a simple or homely subject and is to be found in many Canadian
anthologies.
Francis Sherman, one of the truest and most individual poets that Canada
has produced, is a relative of Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman.
His literary output has been meagre, comprising only one regularly
published volume, a small, thin booklet, _Matins_ (1896), and three or
four privately printed pamphlets of verse. But the quality is sufficient
to fix his place in the company of the authentic Canadian poets of the
First Renaissance.
Sherman’s poetry shows a distinct tendency to mysticism. He was,
evidently, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite School. But he had an
independent individuality. He possessed, as a poet, eyes and feelings of
his own; and could express what he saw and felt, with ready and
confident artistry. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on Francis Sherman and
his own natural gifts for individual expression are disclosed in
_Between the Battles_ (from _Matins_):—
Let us bury him here
Where the maples are!
He is dead,
And he died thanking God that he fell with the fall of the leaf and
the year.
Where the hillside is sheer,
Let it echo our tread
Whom he led;
Let us follow as gladly as ever we followed who never knew fear.
Ere he died, they had fled;
Yet they heard his last cheer
Ringing clear,—
When we lifted him up, he would fain have pursued, but grew dizzy
instead.
Break his sword and his spear!
Let his last prayer be said
By the bed
We have made underneath the wet wind in the maple trees moaning so
drear:
‘O Lord God, by the red
Sullen end of the year
That is here,
We beseech Thee to guide us and strengthen our swords till his slayers
be dead!’
Many of Sherman’s poems have the ‘great out-of-doors’ world in Canada as
their theme, and are marked by grave, meditative beauty, disclosing, on
his part, intimate communing with and brooding on Nature’s moods. These
qualities of Francis Sherman’s mind and art are observed in the
following sonnet, quoted from his _In Memorabilia Mortis_:—
I marked the slow withdrawal of the year,
Out on the hills the scarlet maple shone—
The glad, first herald of triumphal dawn.
A robin’s song fell through the silence—clear
As long ago it rang when June was here.
Then, suddenly, a few grey clouds were drawn
Across the sky; and all the song was gone,
And all the gold was quick to disappear.
That day the sun seemed loth to come again;
And all day long the low wind spoke of rain,
Far-off, beyond the hills; and moaned, like one
Wounded, among the pines; as though the Earth,
Knowing some giant grief had come to birth,
Had wearied of the Summer and the Sun.
A rare spirit and exquisite craftsman, as a poet, is Albert Ernest
Stafford Smythe. He was born in Ireland in 1861. He is Keltic through
and through; and because he is Keltic in his reactions to the universe,
in his perceptions of spiritual meanings in all things, he divines God
in men and God in Nature, or God _as_ man and God as Nature—spiritual
presences everywhere. In a word, Albert E. S. Smythe exemplifies in his
genius and art, as notably and profoundly as Lampman in his, but in a
different way, what Wordsworth called _natural piety_. Smythe’s
spiritual perceptions of divinity everywhere rise to a refined mysticism
which he expresses with a ‘white beauty’ in exquisitely finished verse.
As contrasted with other Canadian mystical poets Smythe is the poet of
the _Cosmic_ Spirit and Beauty.
In 1891 he published _Poems; Grave and Gay_, and in 1923, _The Garden of
the Sun_. A sonnet (_The Seasons of the Gods_) and a lyric (_Anastasis_)
from the second volume suffice to disclose his qualities in his role as
the poet of the Cosmic Spirit and Beauty. As a sonneteer, Smythe is not
surpassed by any of his older or younger contemporaries. _The Seasons of
the Gods_ is lofty in conception, noble in thought, rich in naturalistic
imagery, dulcet in verbal melody, and perfect in formal artistry. It is
music of a soul ‘in tune with the Infinite’:—
I sat with May upon a midnight hill
Wrapped in a dusk of unremembered years
And thought on buried April—on the tears
And shrouds of March, and Youth’s dead daffodil
All withered on a Mound of Spring. And still
The earth moved sweetly in her sleep, the Spheres
Wrought peace about her path, and for her ears
Climbed the high music of their blended will.
The God who dreamed the Earth, as I this frame
That makes me thrall to death and coward of birth—
Dreamed He not March below some vanished Moon—
Under an earlier Heaven’s auroral flame
The cosmic April flowering into mirth
Of May and joy of Universal June?
With what lyrical eloquence, subdued, yet direct and compelling, Smythe
calls the soul, in pure poetry, to achieve its spiritual destiny, in
this lyric, simple in diction and structure, but sublimated, in
thought:—
What shall it profit a man
To gain the world—if he can—
And lose his soul, as they say
In their uninstructed way?
The whole of the world in gain;
The whole of your soul! Too vain
You judge yourself in the cost.
’Tis you—not your soul—is lost.
Your soul! If you only knew—
You would reach to the Heaven’s blue,
To the heartmost centre sink,
Ere you severed the silver link,
To be lost in your petty lust
And scattered in cosmic dust.
For your soul is a Shining Star
Where the Throne and the Angels are.
And after a thousand years,
With the salve of his bottled tears,
Your soul shall gather again
From the dust of a world of pain
The frame of a slave set free—
The man that you ought to be,
The man you may be to-night
If you turn to the Valley of Light.
The number of women poets in the period under review is noteworthy.
Along with Ethelwyn Wetherald and Jean Blewett must be mentioned
appreciatively the names and poetry of Virna Sheard, Helena Coleman,
Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald (sister of C. G. D. Roberts), Helen M.
Merrill, Annie Campbell Huestis, Agnes Maule Machar (_pseud._
‘Fidelis’), Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Alma Frances McCollum, and S.
Frances Harrison (_pseud._ ‘Seranus’). Their outstanding contemporaries
amongst the men were Arthur Stringer and Peter McArthur. It is
impossible to review in detail the poetry of all these lyrists. They
followed the ideals of the older systematic group as regards original
inspiration and artistic craftsmanship. But the work of some of them may
briefly be remarked.
In 1891 S. Frances Harrison published _Pine, Rose, and Fleur de Lis_, a
volume of really poetical verse. She is, however, more to be noted as
the compiler of the first noteworthy anthology of Canadian verse (_A
Canadian Birthday Book_, 1887), which is distinguished by the fact that
it contains a poem by the Indian Chief Tecumseh, the first
French-Canadian poem, and some of the earliest poems of Bliss Carman (a
series of quatrains). Arthur Stringer is a lyrical poet and a poetic
dramatist. His art in the latter respect is appreciated in another
chapter. In 1907 he published _The Woman in the Rain and Other Poems_,
and in 1911, _Irish Poems_. His lyrical poetry in general is
distinguished by a warm humanity and by careful craftsmanship. But he
achieved a special distinction with his poems in ‘Irishy.’ Many of them
have been set to music, and, amongst Canadian-born poets, his only rival
in that field is Sir Gilbert Parker. By themselves Stringer’s poems in
‘Irishy’ are a novel and real, if not important, contribution to the
_genre_ and humorous poetry of Canada. In 1907 Peter McArthur (‘The Sage
of Ekfrid’) published _The Prodigal and Other Poems_. He is never a mere
aesthete in form, but he is a rare Nature and humorous poet—with the
lightest and happiest touch in both departments, as in his
_Corn-Planting_ and in _To the Birds_. He humanizes Nature in a way
altogether different from other Canadian poets, perhaps whimsically but
always with an intimate, colloquial quality of diction, and a piquancy
which makes his Nature poetry spiritually refreshing, even to formalists
and dilettanti.
Properly Isabel Ecclestone Mackay belongs to the minor poets of the
Systematic Period. For in 1904 she published her first volume of verse,
_Between the Lights_. But with that, she turned to writing fiction, and
did not publish any books of verse till the appearance of _The Shining
Ship and Other Poems_ (1919) and _Fires of Driftwood_ (1923). Her first
venture in verse was not better than passable or than good journalistic
verse. But in _Fires of Driftwood_ she disclosed a real mastery of form,
color, and music, along with a spiritual sentiment which is new in
Canadian poetry. She is occupied most with the vicissitudes and meaning
of life, but occasionally she paints objective Nature with winning color
and music. It is, however, in her poetry _of_ childhood (rather than
_for_ children), as in _The Shining Ship_, that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
most displays original genius and has achieved genuine distinction. The
poems in _The Shining Ship_ are marked by the rarest of psychological
gifts in a poet—insight into the real heart and mind and imagination of
children, and by a diction and phrasing which appeal to the child mind
as immediately and as winningly as do the child poems of Eugene Field
and R. L. Stevenson. In fact, as Stevenson’s _A Child’s Garden of Verse_
is to English Literature, so Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s _A Shining Ship
and Other Poems_ is to Canadian Literature.
* * * * *
Sources of quotations in this chapter:
_The Hayfield_ is found in _The Last Robin_, by Ethelwyn Wetherald
(Ryerson Press: Toronto).
Quotations from Jean Blewett’s work, in _Jean Blewett’s Poems_
(McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
From Francis Sherman’s _Matins_ (Copeland and Day: Boston).
From Albert E. S. Smythe’s _Grave and Gay_; and from _The Garden of the
Sun_ (Macmillan Co.: Toronto).
CHAPTER XV
Elegiac Monodists
THE ELEGIAC MONODISTS OF CANADA—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS—BLISS
CARMAN—WILFRED CAMPBELL—DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT—WILLIAM MARSHALL
—JAMES DE MILLE.
Canadian Literature is rich—not relatively but absolutely—in Dirges,
Epicedes, Elegies, Threnodies, and Elegiac Monodies. That Canadian
Elegiac Monodies, or long ‘In Memoriam’ poems inspired by the death of a
real, not a mythical or imagined, person, have genuine distinction, is
indisputable. In number they equal the monodies of English Literature;
and in manner, in variety of form, and in several qualitative
excellences they surpass the monodies of American Literature. Modern
English literature possesses five great threnodies or monodies; Milton’s
_Lycidas_, Shelley’s _Adonais_, Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_, Arnold’s
_Thyrsis_, and Swinburne’s _Ave atque Vale_. American Literature has to
its credit two fine and noble monodies: Emerson’s _Threnody_ (for his
son) and Whitman’s _When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d_ (for
Lincoln). Canadian Literature boasts of six threnodies or monodies,
which all enhance New World Literature and at least two of which are a
distinct contribution to the elegiac poetry of English Literature. The
Canadian monodies are Roberts’ _Ave!_ (to Shelley), Carman’s _A Seamark_
(to Stevenson), Campbell’s _Bereavement of the Fields_ (to Lampman),
Duncan Campbell Scott’s _Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris_ (a Canadian
painter), William E. Marshall’s _Brookfield_ (to R. R. MacLeod), and
James De Mille’s _Behind the Veil_ (which is sort of Dantean ‘Vision’ of
the Beloved in Heaven).
That Canadian poets should have essayed the Elegiac Monody and have
excelled in it is consistent with the genuine, the essential mood, the
spiritual attitudes of the Canadian people. For while the literary
traditions, forms, and methods of Canadian poets are English, the bases
of Canadian culture and civilization are much more New England and Scots
than English, or, in short, Puritan and Calvinistic. It was as natural
for the 19th century native-born Canadian, as it was for an 18th century
New England Puritan and Loyalist and a Scots Calvinist, to be
preoccupied with thoughts of ‘otherworldliness.’ The meaning of life and
death is almost a _congenial_ subject of reflection to the
characteristic Canadian. Fortunately the _habitat_ of the Canadian mind,
Nature in Canada, recalled Canadian poets from exclusive occupation with
spiritual prosperities and great departures to thoughts of ‘the soul’s
inherent high magnificence’ in daily mundane life and to the joys,
consolations, spiritual transports, and peace which Nature affords the
distracted human spirit. Another factor saved Canadian poets from
moralistic preachments when they were moved to express in verse their
sorrow over some great departure. They had the example of the form and
color of the English elegies, from Milton to Swinburne, to save them
from chill gravity and barren moralism. The Canadian monodists, on their
own account, also loved fine technic in verse, and strove to achieve it
according to their capacity. It was therefore natural that Canadian
poets not only should essay the elegiac monody but also write that
species of poetry with genuine distinction.
The subjects of all Canadian elegiac monodies are either presented
against a background of Nature or are suffused with ‘the color of life’
and the beauty of Nature. The first, and in many ways the noblest,
Canadian monody is Charles G. D. Roberts’ _Ave!_ (sub-titled _An Ode for
the Centenary of Shelley’s Birth_). It is a poem of thirty-one ten-line
stanzas, in decasyllabics, closing with a rimed couplet, iambic
pentameter. The poem is not so much, as Roberts called it, an ‘ode’ as
an elegiac monody, with the subject presented against a pastoral
background. That it was written ostensibly to commemorate Shelley’s
birth, not his death, must not cause us to conceive the poem as other
than an elegy. The centenary of Shelley’s birth occurred in 1892, when
Roberts was 32 years of age. Naturally he seized the opportunity to
memorialize in verse the spirit of one of his masters, but he also
laments the passing of Shelley and his influence, after the manner of
the true elegiac monody. The poem divides not strophically but
symphonically. The first theme is a picture of the naturalistic beauties
of the Tantramar marshes and the tides that rush in over it from the Bay
of Fundy, and the influences that Nature about Tantramar had on Roberts
as a poet. He develops this theme by marking how ‘strangely akin’
Tantramar’s marshes seem
to him whose birth
One hundred years ago
With fiery succor to the ranks of song
Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong;
and how, like these marshes, with the incoming and the outgoing floods
of Fundy’s tides, Shelley’s
compassionate breast,
Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace,
Was tortured with perpetual unrest.
Now loud with flood, now languid with release,
Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife
Of tides from the salt sea of human pain
That hiss along the perilous coasts of life
Beat in his eager brain;
But all about the tumult of his heart
Stretched the great calm of his celestial art.
A few stanzas are devoted, as they say in symphonic music, to the
‘working out’ of this similitude in all its aspects. Then in stanza XXII
Roberts formally announces the elegiac theme as such:—
Lament, Lerici, mourn the world’s loss!
Mourn that pure light of song extinct at noon!
Roberts develops the lyrical genius of Shelley in eight stanzas, and in
the final two stanzas returns to the original theme of the Tantramar
marshes where on the inner ear of the Canadian poet
once more
Resounds the ebb with destiny in its roar.
It was remarked, in a preceding chapter, that we miss the ethical note
in Roberts’ genius and poetry. Here is the exception. In his _Ave!_ he
became morally or religiously, as well as imaginatively, sublimated. In
that poem he treats life and death with the moral beauty and
significance of his exemplars and models, Shelley’s _Adonais_, Arnold’s
_Thyrsis_, and Swinburne’s _Ave atque Vale_. In form and substance
Roberts’ _Ave!_ is a true elegiac monody.
But is it a great poem? Fault has been found with it on the side of
structure or coherency. The poem appears coherent when it is remembered
that the structure is symphonic rather than strophic. For though the
poem begins with a Canadian setting, which on the face of it is as far
away as possible from Shelley and Shelley’s England where he was born
and the Italy where he died, it is the thought of the Canadian marshes
and the floods and unrest of the tides that suggests to Roberts the
inner spirit and genius and life and death of Shelley. So that naturally
Roberts passes from the Canadian setting and its suggestions to the
subject proper of his poem, namely, Shelley; then to memorializing
Shelley’s genius and lamenting his passing, and, finally, back to the
Canadian setting which suggested the whole poem. Surely that is coherent
logic, unity in variety of structure!
Nor is there any real contradiction between the diction and imagery of
the poem and the high magnificence of the soul which the poem
commemorates. The ‘properties,’ of course, are not classical—heroes and
nymphs, and all the mythical personages of the Greek pastoral poets.
There is genuine spiritual dignity in the Canadian setting of the
_Ave!_—the atmosphere and color of the grassy Canadian flatlands, and
tides, and mists, and air, and life, and sky. The poem, too, is in the
grand manner and is marked by a spiritual sweep and lyrical eloquence
which convey to the heart and the imagination of the reader the sense of
profound emotion and of sincerity on the part of the poet. So that, in
spite of alleged structural and dictional faults, Roberts’ _Ave!_ is
distinguished by sensuous beauty and splendor, by imaginative sweep, by
emotional intensity and moral and spiritual dignity. But above all it
is, as a pastoral elegy or monody, much more Canadian than English. As
such, it is a really fine and distinctive contribution to Canadian
creative literature. If it is not a great poem, it is a magnificent,
compelling, and noble achievement in great poetry—a poem which
surpasses any monody in American Literature and which indubitably takes
an important status amongst the elegiac monodies of England.
In 1895 Bliss Carman published _A Seamark_[1] (sub-titled _A Threnody
for Robert Louis Stevenson_). It is a poem of thirty-eight stanzas in
rimed iambic tetrameter. It is all in the inimitable lyric manner of
Carman, and commemorates Stevenson as ‘the master of the roving kind.’
Altiloquence is never a quality of Carman’s poetry, as it is of
Roberts.’ Subtlety in simplicity is the formula of Carman’s genius. And
he will color all his homely or simple images with the most apt felicity
of phrase and the most insinuating verbal melody. For this reason, some
miss the high spiritual, mystical, and religious note in poems which are
even more sublimated, though less grandiloquent, than Roberts’ verse. On
the face of _A Seamark_, it seems as if Carman, in commemorating the
death of Stevenson ‘as the master of the roving kind,’ composed a
colorful musical lyric, but not a highly spiritualized poem. How simple
or homely, and yet how felicitous and colorful, are the images in
Carman’s musical lines, announcing the death of Stevenson on the island
of Vailima:—
Our restless loved adventurer,
On secret orders come to him,
Has slipped his cable, cleared the reef,
And melted on the white sea-rim.
The hasty reader does not suspect or surmise the deeper meaning that is
to come. But Carman and Stevenson were kin of mind and heart, and their
kinship was a kinship of the love of searching out the haunts and ways
of the joy and beauty that are on the face and in the heart of Nature.
So that these master rovers are not careless, irresponsible vagabonds,
but are spiritual nomads with a spiritual function and bent on a divine
errand. Thus does Carman magnify their office:—
O all you hearts about the world
In whom the truant gypsy blood,
Under the frost of this pale time,
Sleeps like the daring sap and flood
That dream of April and reprieve!
You whom the haunted vision drives,
Incredulous of home and ease,
_Perfection’s lovers_ all your lives!
What it was given to Carman to discern in the universe was the eternal
meaning of youth and to hear the ever-young voice of earth singing in
the heart of man and in the earth, in everything, and to be himself the
lyric voice of the world. Stevenson was also such a lyric voice of
earth. Carman, then, does highly spiritualize his subject when he first
presents Stevenson in the manner of the outward aspect by which he was
commonly conceived, a restless loved adventurer, who when he died was
laid down, as Carman puts it in novel and arresting paradox:—
Beyond the turmoil of renown,
and, next, discloses the inner meaning of the ‘wander-biddings’ that
were in the soul of Stevenson who, even in death, still kept
The journey-wonder on his face.
For when Stevenson died, men sorrowed and surmised not why they grieved.
But Carman in _A Seamark_ reveals why. Men thought a prince of joy had
passed forever. But Carman discloses the higher spiritual truth:—
He ‘was not born for age.’ Ah no,
For everlasting youth is his!
And part of the lyric of the earth
With spring and leaf and blade he is.
In form, and in musical, colorful, simple yet subtle, spiritualization
of the meaning and value of men in whom the lyric spirit of earth is
supreme and vocal, there is not another elegiac monody in English like,
or comparable to, Carman’s _A Seamark_. It, too, like Roberts’ _Ave!_
enhances both the quality and quantity of the Canadian and the English
elegy.
Wilfred Campbell was a myriad-minded man and had an inherited Keltic
imagination which felt acutely the magic and mystery of earth and
existence. He conceived, most beautifully and nobly, the passing of
Archibald Lampman not as a bereavement suffered by mere persons but
rather by the great and constant ‘companion’ of Lampman, namely, Nature.
With a peculiar and lovely sense of the poetic significance of death,
Campbell ennobled the spirit of Lampman, and perpetuated the meaning of
his poetry, in an elegiac monody which bears the felicitous title
_Bereavement of the Fields_.
The poem is in a seven-lined pentameter stanza, and is infused with
Canadian Nature-color throughout. The diction and the structure are
simple, and there is no attempt at sublimated imagination. The poem is
rather in the subdued and gentle manner of Lampman himself. That is to
say, there is a gentle melancholy running through the poem, but the
melancholy is relieved by a simple spiritual beauty which conveys the
rare essence of the spirit of Lampman, who passed from earth:—
Leaving behind him, like a summer shower,
A fragrance of earth’s beauty, and the chime
Of gentle and imperishable rhyme.
If poetry can be accepted as literary criticism, then Campbell has
estimated better than the best prose critic the significance and worth
of Lampman as a poet and his place in the company of the great:—
Outside this prison-house of all our tears,
Enfranchised from our sorrow and our wrong,
Beyond the failure of our days and years,
Beyond the burden of our saddest song,
He moves with those whose music filled his ears,
And claimed his gentle spirit from the throng,—
Wordsworth, Arnold, Keats, high masters of his song.
Campbell’s threnody is simple, sensuous, and impassioned, without being
impressionistic and rhetorical. It is a sincere and noble affirmation of
the supremacy of the spirit of beauty in the world, wherein, as
Lampman’s exemplar, Keats, once said, imperishably:—
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.
Altogether in another form and with a fresh and novel poetic conception
and impressive artistry, Duncan Campbell Scott wrote his _Lines in
Memory of Edmund Morris_[2]. Scott’s art is singularly informed by a
color and beauty derived from his intimate and exquisite appreciation of
the fine arts, especially music and painting. More than any other
Canadian poet, Scott is the ‘artist in words.’ He is concerned above all
things to employ poetic diction and imagery with the same love of
refined expressiveness and emotional nuance as inspired such musical
composers or tone-painters as Ravel, Debussy, and MacDowell, and such
painters as Constable, Watteau, and Monet. Or to borrow from musical
criticism, Scott loves his performance, his executant artistry with
words and imagery, more than he loves his poetic ideas.
Edmund Morris was a Canadian painter and his spirit perceived in
Canadian Nature and in the Indian aborigines in Canada something which
no other painter had perceived or attempted to envisage. Scott and
Morris were companions and kindred spirits—the one an artist in words;
and the other an artist in pigments. It was natural, then, that Scott,
on the tragic death of his friend, should commemorate the loss which
both the living friend and the country suffered by the passing of Edmund
Morris. But it was impossible for Scott to write any conventionalized
elegiac monody. Under inner compulsion, he wrote of life and death with
all his original genius for conceiving, as he phrases his mode of
conception,
Meanings hid in mist;
and with all his gifts in exquisite craftsmanship:—
Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.
Scott’s _Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris_ is in some respects unique,
but particularly in form, and its simple, intimate, direct address to
the spirit. It is not a pastoral elegy in the third person but a
dramatic monologue, or an epistle in verse from one spirit to another.
There is nothing like it in all English Literature, not even in
Browning. But intimate, even familiar, and colloquial as it is, the poem
is radiant with a ‘white beauty’ of imagery and chaste artistry. More
notably still, it subdues the turbulence of our souls in the presence of
a great loss by death, transports the imagination to the mount of
spiritual vision, refines faith, sustains hope, and fills the spirit
with a serene peace. It leaves upon us imperishably the inward sense
that ‘it is not death to die’:—
Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,
Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain,
Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart
And loses a gold kernel to the mould,
So the old world, hanging long in the sun,
And deep enriched with effort and with love,
Shall, in motions of maturity,
Wither and part, and the kernel of it all
Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to latitudes
Where the appearance, throated like a bird,
Winged with fire and bodied all with passion,
Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy.
All through this elegiac monody there is a singularly sweet humanity and
yet in it are heard the constant overtones of ‘the soul’s inherent high
magnificence,’ and the whole is suffused or informed with the color of
Canadian Nature and character and life. So that the poem is a novel and
important contribution to the elegiac monody in English.
In another style and with another but winning effect upon the heart and
the imagination, is William Edward Marshall’s monody _Brookfield_. It is
a poem of forty-five stanzas in the Spenserian form. Structurally
viewed, however, his _Brookfield_ is considerably an achievement in that
form. Its theme is the heart and mind of a simple man, a friend of the
poet, who taught the poet to love communion with the simple creatures
and the life of Nature, and to observe in Nature, not the garment, but
the very spiritual presence of God. There is no metaphysic of Nature in
_Brookfield_. There is but the apprehension of divinity in the little
wild creatures and in the streams and hills, and in the mists, and in
all the varied life of the universal mother. Marshall’s master was
Keats, and while _Brookfield_ cannot critically be called an example of
sensuous impressionism, yet it is warmly colored with pigmentation from
the palette of Nature. But the loveliest strands running through the
warp and woof of the poem are those of love and the heavenly vision. The
sweet, gentle, even tender, Nature-quality as well as the spiritual note
in the poem, may be apprehended from the following stanza:—
Ah, he was richly dowered of the earth!
The grain of sand, the daisy in the sod,
Awoke his heart; and early he went forth,
Through field and wood, with young eyes all abroad;
And saw the nesting birds and beck and nod
Of little creatures running wild and free,
(Which know not that they know, yet are of God)
And kept his youth, and grew in sympathy,
And loved his fellows more, and had love’s victory.
Literary critics in the United States, in reviewing Marshall’s
_Brookfield_ signalized both its sensuous and spiritual beauty as
extraordinary, and in line with the quality of the best English elegiac
monodies. In Canada it received high praise from Sir Andrew MacPhail,
who sponsored it by publishing it in _The University Magazine_, and from
Dr. Archibald MacMechan. ‘No such poem,’ said the latter, ‘has appeared
in Canada since Roberts’ _Ave!_ In dignity and depth of feeling the
_Ave!_, De Mille’s _Behind the Veil_, and _Brookfield_ stand together—a
noble trio.’ Marshall’s _Brookfield_ is Canadian in subject and setting
and is indeed a beautiful and noble application of ideas to life—a
genuinely original contribution to the creative poetic literature of
Canada.
James De Mille’s _Behind the Veil_, published posthumously in 1892, is a
kind of elegiac monody. The poet himself does not so sub-title it. He
designates it simply as ‘A Poem.’ Whether the ‘Loved One’ who has been
lost to the poet was a real person or an imagined companion of the
spirit, it is impossible to surmise from the poem. But the poem itself
is concerned with life and death and yearning for union with the Beloved
in Heaven, and is thus a spiritualized elegy. Essentially, however, it
is a reflective or philosophical poem. If it is reflective, it is also
highly melodramatic both in substance and in form. Part of its
melodramatic quality derives from its metrical structure which suggests
Poe’s _Raven_. It is written in stanzas of five lines in trochaic
tetrameter—a form totally unsuited to its intended high spiritual
dignity of theme. A taste of its quality is afforded from the following
stanzas:—
Through the darkness rose a vision,
Where beneath the night I kneeled,
Dazzling bright with hues Elysian—
Congregated motes of glory on an ebon field
And a form from out that glory to my spirit stood revealed.
‘Son of Light’—I murmured lowly—
‘All my heart is known to thee—
All my longing and my yearning for the Loved One lost to me—
May these eyes again behold her?’—and the Shape said, ‘Come and see.’
It is impossible to read one hundred and twenty-five stanzas or 625
lines like the preceding, in which the feminine endings make fixed
caesural pauses that prevent enjambement and thus inhibit rhythmical
variety, without the reader’s feeling himself in the realm of the
musically melodramatic. So that the high seriousness of the poem suffers
a loss in impressiveness because of the metre and rhythm of the poem. It
is plain that De Mille was not an adroit verbal musician. The spiritual
dignity and seriousness of the poem can be commended, but on the whole,
it is not poetry, and is not a significant contribution to the Canadian
monody.
-----
[1] _A Seamark_ is found in the collection _Ballads and Lyrics_, by
Bliss Carman (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
[2] _Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris_ is from _Lundy’s Lane and Other
Poems_ (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).
CHAPTER XVI
Novelists
THE FICTIONISTS OF THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL—THE HISTORICAL ROMANCERS
—LIGHTHALL—SAUNDERS—PARKER—MARQUIS—MACLENNAN AND McILWRAITH—
AGNES C. LAUT—WILFRED CAMPBELL—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS. THE
ROMANCERS OF ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY—THOMPSON SETON—ROBERTS—SAUNDERS
—FRASER. THE EVANGELICAL ROMANCERS—RALPH CONNOR—R. E. KNOWLES.
_I. The Historical Romancers._
When William Kirby published, in 1877, _The Golden Dog_, he led the way
in Canadian historical romance. Major John Richardson had written
historical novels years before, but Richardson’s material was largely
first hand, from contact with a life and with a setting similar to what
he described. We might argue that Kirby ‘discovered’ to the fictionists
who were to come after him the wealth of material that lay in the
unknown and almost forgotten Canadian past, for he founded his work on
Canadian history and infused it with Canadian incident and color; and
although Mrs. Leprohon’s romances had a considerable vogue both in
English and in French, the circulation of her novels was chiefly local
and not anything like so widespread as that of Kirby’s single
masterpiece. Yet it is problematic just how much the historical or
romantic fiction of the Post-Confederation period (beginning, say, in
1888) owes to Kirby and how much it owes to a stirring impulse of
nationality. That impulse produced tangible evidences in our literature
because of a conscious realization of national ideals and a sensing of
the spirit of a courageous and romantic past in a country that,
superficially viewed, had barely reached the stage of ‘growing pains.’
In 1888 William Douw Lighthall published _The Young Seigneur_, a
socio-political study of life and institutions in Canada, which
according to the author himself; ‘arose out of my ideas as a young man
concerning an ideal of Canadian nationality to which I gave the color of
this province (Quebec) as I knew it in the old Seigneuries.’ Possibly
the ‘thesis’ overpowered the romantic or novel elements, for this book
is not regarded as equal in literary merit to its successors. _The False
Chevalier_ (1898) was a historical romance set partly in Canada and
partly in France. It is an attempt to depict an actual romance found in
a packet of documents at the house of the De Léry’s at Boucherville near
Montreal. It is rich in atmosphere and color both of the old land and
the new and is filled with engaging incident, but lacks somewhat in
effective novel construction, and in convincing characterization. It is
in _The Master of Life_ (1910) that Dr. Lighthall has produced a unique
and masterly piece of fiction. With Hiawatha as its hero, it is purely
aboriginal in setting and color and exhibits the author’s wide knowledge
of Indian history and archaeology. It was the result of Dr. Lighthall’s
sympathies with the Iroquois Indians, derived originally from the
ancient family records of the Schuylers (from whom the Lighthalls are
descended). They, as leading British officers and statesmen, had much to
do with keeping the Iroquois steadfast to the British Crown. Although
the impetus to its writing originated in this way, _The Master of Life_,
in its development is an example of rare constructive imagination and is
pervaded with a richly poetic interpretation that apprehends nature as
filled with spiritual presences and nature’s beauty as the garment of
the Great Spirit.
The year 1889 saw the publication of a work of pure romance in _My
Spanish Sailor_ by (Margaret) Marshall Saunders. This was a love story
of the sea in which a Nova Scotian girl and a Spanish sea-captain are
the leading characters. Again in _Rose à Charlitte_ (1898), afterwards
published as _Rose of Acadie_, Miss Saunders essays romance, colored, it
is true, by a seemingly historic atmosphere, but yet rather a record
than a history, for the Acadian habits and customs which one might think
of as belonging to a past age were current among the people in the Bay
of St. Mary settlement when visited by Miss Saunders in the summer of
1897. Here the descendants of the Acadians had lived apart from the
English and preserved their language, traditions, customs, and their
unique manner of life. ‘The elements of strength and weakness of the
people, their patient devotion, their openness, simplicity and
generosity, their love of gossip and light-heartedness, with the shadows
of the tragic past brooding over them, are all caught in a true
perspective.’ Thus it is not until the year 1896 that we come upon a
truly legitimate successor to _The Golden Dog_. In that year appeared
Gilbert Parker’s _Seats of the Mighty_, which became one of the most
popular of his novels. The story has a strong and fairly unified and
coherent plot. It exhibits Parker’s powers of characterization and
presents to us a gallery of vividly limned historic portraits—Robert
Moray, Doltaire, Gabord, De la Darant, Bigot, Vaudreuil, Montcalm,
Wolfe—in the main true to type, human, and universal. There is not,
however, an unerring accuracy in atmosphere and color and
characterization. The writer was not sufficiently saturated with his
subject and occasional touches of modernity and tinges of contemporary
color subtract from the excellence of artistry.
But Parker’s fiction really began with his short stories of ‘Pretty
Pierre’ in 1890. It is related that upon coming to London from Australia
he brought to Archibald Forbes, then noted as a war correspondent, a
collection of stories. Forbes’ comment was: ‘You have the best
collection of titles I ever saw.’ Parker took his manuscripts home and
promptly burned them. A day or so afterwards, while passing a shop
window filled with armor and other curios, he noticed the leather coat
and fur cap of a trapper. He went at once to his room and began to write
_The Patrol of the Cypress Hills_, the first story in the series _Pierre
and His People_. These stories dealt with the life of early Western
Canada and were followed from time to time by other volumes: _A Romany
of the Snows_, published in England under the title, _An Adventurer of
the North_, picturing French-Canadians in the woods and rural
settlements; _The Lane That Had No Turning_, stories of that Quebec
settlement which is the background of the novel _When Valmond Came to
Pontiac_; _Cumner’s Son_, sketches of life in the South Seas and in
Australia; _Donovan Pasha_, tales of Egypt and the Soudan; _Northern
Lights_, more modern stories of Western Canada.
Parker became a prolific writer of novels and his settings range from
Canada and the South Seas to England, Egypt, and South Africa. The
treatment varies from an almost immediate transcript of near present
conditions as in _The Judgment House_ to the re-creation of the historic
past in _The Battle of the Strong_, from the delicate imaginative
romance in _When Valmond Came to Pontiac_, to a pathological study in
_The Right of Way_; he gives us a combination of melodrama and mysticism
in _The Weavers_, the revealment of innate greatness of character in
_The Translation of a Savage_, while in _You Never Know Your Luck_, he
cleverly expands a tenuous short story thread to the full proportions of
a novel.
Besides _The Seats of the Mighty_, the novels of Gilbert Parker that
will be likely to command most attention because of intrinsic worth are:
_The Right of Way_, _The Battle of the Strong_, _When Valmond Came to
Pontiac_, _The Weavers_, and _The Judgment House_. _The Right of Way_ is
a compelling study in abnormal psychology. There may be improbabilities
in the development of the story of Charley Steele, but there is a living
force in his character and he stands forth as one of the realities of
fiction. _The Battle of the Strong_ depicts the Channel Islands in the
eighteenth century, and was written in a mood of defiance. Parker was
going to get away from a Canadian background. He would write no more
novels of Canada. But, as Sherlock Holmes ‘returned,’ so Canada was too
much a part of Gilbert Parker’s life to remain out of his writings, and
he found, himself unable to get away from it for very long. _The Battle
of the Strong_, however, was based on a thorough and sympathetic study
of the country and people of the Channel Islands and the characters and
incidents are colored with a simple, engaging humor. _When Valmond Came
to Pontiac_ is a delightful excursion into romance in which the
Napoleonic tradition shows its influence in a little out-of-the-way
village of Quebec. It has much of the charm of Booth Tarkington’s
_Monsieur Beaucaire_ and is structurally the nearest to artistic
perfection of any of Parker’s novels. _The Weavers_ rises to a more
Imperialistic sweep, dealing as it does with internal and international
politics of Egypt, while _The Judgment House_, a novel of London and
South Africa, is his greatest literary conception; in it his imaginative
vision has apprehended big interests, big business, big ideals, big
expansion, Imperial ends, conceived and carried out by big men,
struggling and striving and achieving in a big world. His more recent
novels, although some of them, as _The Money Master_, show considerable
skill in characterization, are largely novels of incident and of
accidental circumstance and have not the broad grasp of men and events
nor the innate emotional depth and power of those just outlined.
The outstanding qualities of Parker’s work are:—
(1) The strong dramatic quality. It is no surprise to us to learn that
he was in his college days a most enthusiastic Shakespeare student and
an ‘elocutionist’ of some reputation. The power to portray dramatic
situations is exhibited in his very earliest writings. One need but open
almost any of his novels and read the first paragraph to find that one
is projected into an imaginative world of action, although the story may
begin with a sentence of pure narration or description.
(2) Skill in descriptive characterization. How effectively action,
explanation, and description are combined to make his characters vivid,
cannot be better exhibited than in the introduction of Valmond in _When
Valmond Came to Pontiac_. Yet there is a tendency to cast some of his
characters in moulds, so that they become types rather than individuals.
‘Donovan Pasha’ is but ‘Pretty Pierre’ amid new conditions and
circumstances. ‘Krool’ of _The Judgment House_ recalls forcibly
‘Soolsby’ of _The Weavers_.
(3) His versatility is apparent from the survey already made of his
works. And to the list of poems, short stories, and novels, might be
added his book on the Great War—_The World in the Crucible_—and his
articles on agricultural questions and land settlement.
(4) His breadth of literary canvas. It may seem a simple matter to place
one part of a story in England and another in Africa, or part in Canada
and another part in the South Seas, but it requires a very broad grasp
of material and a wide knowledge of people, and a keen sense of
atmosphere to do it effectually. He has been described as the product of
the British Empire, and there is little doubt that the breadth of his
experience is the basis of his breadth of literary vision.
(5) A sense of the supernatural and touches of mysticism are consequent
to his strong dramatic powers and show in many of his short stories,
e.g. _The Tall Master_ and _The Flood_ in _Pierre and His People_, and
in some of his novels, notably in _The Weavers_.
Summing up our impressions of Sir Gilbert Parker, we find that he has a
breadth of vision not excelled or even equalled by any other Canadian
writer. Comparing him with Norman Duncan, we see that Duncan is a finer
workman but in a narrower range. Parker comes close to taking a place
with the front rank modern British novelists and yet he does not quite
do it. Why? Perhaps because of the fact that a man’s excellences are
very often the cause of his defects. He is nothing if not dramatic. He
reaches always for the spectacular climax where nature is often
satisfied to take things quietly. He has just a little too much of a
tendency to play to the gallery. He verges nearer to the melodramatic
than do his contemporary British novelists—in fact, he frequently falls
to it. There is not enough innate value in his incidents, there is more
stage play.
Yet on the whole, Parker’s work is fresher. There is more of the clear
air of the out-of-doors. There is not the morbidity of tone, nor the
feeling of helplessness that is found in the fiction of Hardy, Meredith,
Bennett, Galsworthy, Philpotts, Trevena and other leaders of the modern
British novelists. We can forgive Parker many lapses because at the
end—the total effect is the feeling that the good comes uppermost. Take
even Pierre, half-breed gambler, a sort of half-Ishmaelite, yet with a
sense of fair-play, a chivalry, a kindness that never leaves him. And so
nearly all his characters and most of his books inspire us finally with
divine lessons of hope and encouragement.
The historical romances of Charles G. D. Roberts—_The Forge in the
Forest_ (1896), _A Sister to Evangeline_, _The Prisoner of
Mademoiselle_, _The Raid From Beauséjour_—while they are Canadian in
setting and color, do not show the same imaginative reach and the same
emotional power as the romances of Parker. The themes and settings of
Roberts’ romances are rather narrow. They are concerned chiefly with
minor incidents of the early history of Acadia, or we might say rather
with a minor treatment of these incidents, for the historical episodes
about which these stories are centered were, no doubt, of themselves
important enough to the early French colony. The difficulty is that,
despite the skill of Roberts in depicting local color and reproducing
atmosphere in exquisite smooth flowing prose, he evinces little gift of
characterization and the personages of the story are more or less
mechanical puppets speaking by the will and with the words of the
showman.
Somewhat unique in early romantic fiction is _The Forest of Bourg
Marie_, by S. Frances Harrison (‘Seranus’), first published in 1898. The
bygone civilization of the old seigneuries casts its glamor over a newer
and more sophisticated Quebec, in its turn influenced by the hectic
glitter of great cities of ‘the States,’ to which were attracted
restless youth of French-Canada. Thus Mikel Caron, forest-ranger for the
county of Yamachiche, links to the present the past grandeur of the
Seigniory of Bourg Marie, while Magloire le Caron (Mr. Murray Carson in
the States), villain of the piece, is the hybrid product of three
civilizations. The writer’s style alters itself to harmonize with the
varying spirit and mood of her story—stately and poetic in its
descriptions of departed greatness; nervous and gauche in the passages
where the turbulent current of a fevered modernity breaks through.
In _Marguerite de Roberval_ (1899), T. G. Marquis turned back to the
times of Jacques Cartier and applied his constructive imagination as
well as his industry in research to building a story of Old France and
the New around a most romantic and dramatic love episode.
In the same year appeared _The Span o’ Life_ written in collaboration by
William MacLennan and Jean N. MacIlwraith. Its historical basis is found
in the memoirs of a Scottish Chevalier, who shared in the ill-starred
rebellion of Prince Charles and afterwards became a soldier of fortune
in the army of France, thus being present at the siege of Louisbourg and
afterwards escaping to Quebec and joining the French forces there. The
plot element of the story is somewhat weak and it is of value chiefly
for its inside history of the siege conditions in the two greatest forts
of New France.
So far the concern of Canadian historical fiction, as we have seen it,
has been chiefly with New France and the conflicts between the French
and English in North America. It remained for Agnes C. Laut to realize
quite independently the amazing wealth of romantic history that lay back
of the opening up and exploiting of the middle and far West of Canada.
While yet a schoolgirl and knowing only the formal, conventional, and
statistical outlines of Canadian history as then taught, she came
accidentally upon a copy of Gunn’s _History of Manitoba_ and sat up all
night thrilled with the story of the Selkirk settlers. Thus originated
the impulse, fulfilled later (1900), in _The Lords of the North_ and
(1902) in _Heralds of Empire_, to reveal what she felt, to show that
Canada’s history was one page of glory. It had never been told in a way
that the youth of the land would realize this, and she felt that,
lacking this realization, we lacked a truly national spirit.
_Lords of the North_ presents a vivid picture of Canada’s fur trade at
the most flourishing period of that industry. It follows the conflict
between the rival fur companies—the North-West and the Hudson’s Bay
Company. Across its pages flit the voyageur, the trader, Indians,
missionaries, settlers, buffalo hunters—all the romantic figures of the
Canadian West of the period of 1815 to 1821. _Heralds of Empire_ will be
remembered for its characterization of Pierre Radisson, the man of
action—the man who dared and who did—the man with the true pioneer
spirit. Miss Laut’s style is forcible and direct. Her sentences are
brief and crisp. The story runs on without effort. Description never
wearies because it is the natural and necessary setting, painted with
quick, bold vivid strokes. Of the larger matters of plot structure—the
architectonics of fiction, she can hardly be said to have achieved
mastery, but she writes with such energy and enthusiasm for her subject
that in a measure this defect may be overlooked.
Wilfred Campbell also essayed the historical romance but with
indifferent success. His _Ian of the Orcades_ with its historical
Scottish setting was more congenial to his genius than _A Beautiful
Rebel_. It has arresting incidents, vigorously drawn characters, and
considerable intensity of emotions, but it wins us rather by Campbell’s
power to suffuse the text with what Matthew Arnold called ‘natural
magic.’ It is more in keeping with the ‘old world imagination’ of
Campbell which has been defined in the study of his poetry. _A Beautiful
Rebel_, a story of Canada and the United States in the war of 1812, is
lacking in imaginative color, is defective in structure, and the
incident is too slight for the significance of the theme. The comment of
the author has a way of appearing obtrusively as a digression, or at
times in the mouths of the characters. What value _A Beautiful Rebel_
has as historic fiction lies chiefly in its representation of the part
played in the war by American sympathizers living as Canadian settlers.
_II. The Romancers of Animal Psychology._
In the field of romance of wild and of domestic animal psychology,
Canadian writers have shown a distinct and unique inventive genius and a
corresponding artistry.
Ernest Thompson Seton attracted the attention of the world by his
romances of wild life in Canada because he combined in them the skilled
observation of the scientist, the vision of the artist, the insight of
the psychologist, the sympathy of the humane man; and, perhaps, more
than all that, the spirit of youthful wonder at, and interest in, the
ways and doings of the creatures of the field and wood.
He brought to his writings of animal life a new point of view—namely,
that human beings and wild animals are kin; that animals are motivated
with passions and desires and, to some extent, ideas, just as human
beings are. Thus he wrote with sympathy and with creative imagination
and revealed the new life and being of wild animals, and he hoped to
achieve the practical result of quickening the sympathies of man toward
animals and stopping the thoughtless extermination of many of our
harmless wild creatures.
His books such as _Wild Animals I Have Known_ (1898), _The Trail of The
Sand-Hill Stag_, _The Biography of a Grizzly_, _Lives of the Hunted_,
are studies of animal psychology and behavior. _Lives of the Hunted_,
for example, contains life-histories of Krag, the mountain Ram; of
Johnny Bear; of Coyotito, the Escaped Coyote. Krag’s whole history from
birth to death is faithfully sketched and, incidentally, much is learned
about the habits of the mountain-sheep. From these life-histories we
gain, not merely knowledge and information but wisdom, since animal life
and human life are akin.
Some of the earlier animal stories were written in dialogue—the animals
being made to talk. But, very wisely, the author soon adopted the
narrative style and removed his sketches from the character of fairy
stories to that of real interpretations of animal life.
In _Two Little Savages_ he gives the adventures of two boys who lived in
the woods as Indians and learned much about Indian life and all kinds of
wood-lore. Other stories of a similar type are employed for the teaching
of different phases of woodcraft. _Wood Myth and Fable_ advances a step
further and from incidents in animal life, and other occurrences in
nature, the writer points a definite moral lesson. This escapes
preachiness by the adroit epigrammatic wit of the ‘moral.’