A somewhat different literary ideal inspired Charles G. D. Roberts to

undertake the pure romance of animal psychology and behavior. ‘It may be

that this arose as a natural development from Roberts’ early attempts to

depict a narrative from actual occurrences and experiences in the woods.

At any rate _Earth’s Enigmas_ (1896), followed by numerous other volumes

such as _The Kindred of the Wild_, _The Watchers of the Trails_, _The

Haunters of the Silences_, _Red Fox_, _The Feet of the Furtive_, _More

Animal Stories_ have established the place of Roberts as the supreme

artist in the field of animal romance.

Roberts’ treatment of animal psychology differs from that of Thompson

Seton or Marshall Saunders. He makes his wild animals either wholly

human or too human. They move in their world with a sort of super-animal

(or super-human) knowledge, and Roberts’ discloses a subconscious

motivation of conduct in the wild animals that outdoes the present clay

psycho-analyists in their revealments of human motivation. For this

reason they appeal not to the heart but to the analytic imagination and

the aesthetic sense. They awaken the interest of the intellect rather

than the sympathetic emotions. They lack humor and pathos, but in

imaginative sweep and artistic structure they are supreme creations. As

examples of a literary prose style they stand almost alone in their

particular field of fiction.

Not all Roberts’ animal stories are of this ‘intellectual’ type. Human

interest and humor is added by showing animals in relationships, more or

less accidental, to mankind, in such volumes as _The Backwoodsman_,

_Hoof and Claw_.

The peculiar _forte_ of Marshall Saunders is the romance of the

domesticated animal or animal pet. _Beautiful Joe: The Autobiography of

a Dog_, first published in 1894, is one of the literary phenomena of the

world. It has been translated into fourteen or more languages and has

sold over a million copies. With acute perceptive sympathy and engaging

artistry, Miss Saunders has commingled strangely but veraciously the

mind and life of the domestic animals. She envisages truthfully their

‘near humanity’ and reveals them as akin to man in feelings, passions,

desires, and the motivation of conduct, but keeps them on a level below

man. Her animals are not human, but they appeal more to the heart of the

humanity in us than those of Roberts, Thompson Seton, or W. A. Fraser;

particularly do they appeal more to the spirit and heart of youth. Her

_Golden Dicky_, the story of a canary and his friends; _Bonnie Prince

Fetlar_, the autobiography of a pony, and _Jimmy Goldcoast_, the story

of a monkey, have all the engaging qualities of her earlier work.

W. A. Eraser, in _Mooswa and Others of the Boundaries_ (1900), and in

_The Outcasts_ (1901) achieved a distinct success by working with much

the same material as Roberts and Thompson Seton and to some extent

combining the style and treatment of both. He is not so scientific as

Thompson Seton; nor is he so literary or so psychoanalytic as Roberts.

_The Sa’-Zada Tales_ (1905) in which the animals at the zoo are

represented as conversing with their keeper, Sahib Zada, and with one

another, exhibit the intimate knowledge of wild animal life gained, no

doubt, during the author’s residence in Asiatic countries, but they are

not as distinctively original in manner, nor as high in literary quality

as his other animal tales. Fraser, however, has a peculiar field in

which he excels—in his novel _Thoroughbreds_ (1902), and in his volume

of short stories _Brave Hearts_ (1904), he shows a sympathetic

understanding of the life of the race horse and he presents vividly and

with sometimes a rollicking humor, at others a tender pathos, many

incidents and expressions of the racing field. He is an apostle of clean

sport and a true lover of the racing horse and his enthusiasm gives to

these stories a directness and coherence not always found in some of his

later stories and novels with different subjects and settings.

_III. The Evangelical Romance._

The pioneer writer of the ‘evangelical romance’ in Canada was ‘Ralph

Connor’ (Reverend Charles W. Gordon). Back of all his books stands the

missionary spirit. Indeed it was that missionary spirit which led to the

finding of his literary gift. The story of that finding dates back to

1896. He had been attending a meeting of the Home Mission Committee of

the Presbyterian Church at Toronto, and afterwards tried to impress upon

the Rev. J. A. Macdonald, then editor of _The Westminster_, the duty of

the magazine to educate the committee and the people to a greater

liberality. The editor’s reply was: ‘Articles are no good if they have

only facts and statistics and exhortations. Give me a sketch, a story, a

thing of life rather than a report. . .’

The result of this advice was a series of sketches of missionary life in

the foothills of the Rockies, which were featured as _Tales of the

Selkirks_ in _The Westminster_ (1897) and appeared in book form the

following year as _Black Rock_.

When the first sketches were ready it was deemed advisable to conceal

the identity of the author. The editor telegraphed the query, ‘What

name?’ The reply came, ‘Sign sketch Cannor.’ ‘Can—Nor, that would

betray the face of a mask,’ says the editor. ‘Perhaps the operator made

a mistake. Likely it should be Connor.’ And running over the alphabet of

masculine names, he decided that ‘Ralph’ would just about fit with

‘Connor.’ Thus the christening of the missionary novelist.

Ralph Connor’s novels fall into several groups. _Black Rock_ and _The

Sky Pilot_ are tales of the Rocky Mountain foothills, both telling of

the wild life of the West and of the work of the missionary. _The Man

From Glengarry_ and _Glengarry School Days_ deal with the life of the

author’s boyhood in Eastern Ontario. _The Prospector_ and _The Doctor_

combine East and West, by following their leading characters through the

University of Toronto and transferring them to Western Canada. _The

Foreigner_ has a Manitoba setting and concerns itself with the problem

of the assimilation of the foreigner. _Corporal Cameron_ and _The Patrol

of the Sun Dance Trail_, carry a young Scot to Canada and through the

ranks of the Mounted Police. The Great War gave material for _The

Major_; labor troubles for _To Him That Hath_; while in _The Gaspards of

Pine Croft_, the author reverted to a setting not so far from that of

his first novel for a story more emotional and psychological in nature

than his others.

The circulation of Ralph Connor’s novels has been phenomenal and has

reached somewhere between two and a half and three millions, yet it

cannot be said that he has established a reputation as a literary

artist. His stories carry the reader because of action, incident, and

tense emotional situations. They always have an underlying ethical and

spiritual significance and they promulgate a belief in the presence of

some redeeming virtue in every human being, so that, despite adverse

critical opinion, they continue to touch the responsive chord in the

heart of a common humanity.

None of his later works has quite come up to the standard of _Black

Rock_ or _The Sky Pilot_ in consistency of characterization and in unity

of total effect. Indeed _The Sky Pilot_ is the most artistically

finished of all his works, because of the natural coherence of its parts

in their development of the central theme. Dramatic power he has to a

marked degree, so far as the presentation of individual scenes is

concerned, such as the fight in the lumber camp, the horse race, the

barn-raising, and many other thrilling episodes; but his grasp of

dramatic values is not broad enough to escape melodrama. The

constructive dramatic instinct which weaves each separate incident into

a chain of cause and effect dependent upon the character and motives of

the leading personages of the story is very little in evidence. Whole

chapters might be lifted bodily from some of these novels without

interfering with the main thread of the story.

His imagination is reproductive rather than creatively constructive. The

stories of the foothills are built upon his own missionary experiences

at Banff and elsewhere; the Glengarry tales deal with his schoolboy

experiences and his knowledge of the rough life of the lumber woods and

the drive; the stories of east and west are also drawn from his own

experiences in college and in the missionary field. As a result of this

his characters tend to become types and although fairly individual and

distinctive they are inclined to act mechanically and to operate without

sufficient inherent motivation.

The first novel of Robert E. Knowles, _St. Cuthbert’s_ although a

romance of a Presbyterian congregation, is not strictly an ‘evangelical

novel.’ It has more to do with showing the Presbyterian Church as an

institution which dominated the life of the Presbyterian community. The

doings of the Kirk session; the relations of the minister with the

various elements of his flock, the pious and the profligate, are

described with rare fidelity. The tender undercurrent covered by

Scottish reserve; the sympathetic understanding of human nature as the

greatest and most essential quality of ministry; the dry, pawky Scottish

humor; the distinctive and consistent characterization—these elements

make _St. Cuthbert’s_ a piece of genuine literature. _The Dawn at Shanty

Bay_ is in reality a short story. There is one underlying motive, and

only one, dominating the whole—it is the fight between parental love

and parental dignity. It should rank as one of the sweetest ‘Christmas

Carols’ in English literature. His remaining novels—_The Undertow_,

_The Web of Time_, _The Attic Guest_, and _The Singer of the Kootenay_

are of the evangelical type and are fashioned much to the same pattern,

showing inconsistencies in development and a lack of structural unity.

CHAPTER XVII

Short Story Writers

THE SHORT STORY FICTIONISTS OF THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL—E. W.

THOMSON—DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS—GILBERT

PARKER—ERNEST THOMPSON SETON—W. A. FRASER.

There is, on this continent, a literary tradition that Edgar Allan Poe

is the creator of the short story. The truth is that Poe applied a new

method to the short narrative or prose tale in that he gave the short

story a higher unity of effect towards an impressionistic climax. He did

not originate or create it; he simply improved its technique. But with

the school of Poe this method crystallized into a formula, and the

so-called American short story became an invention rather than an

imaginative creation. Thus it depends upon a cumulation of effects

rising to a climactic peak of emotional intensity, or upon a plot that

induces suspense by a clever interplay of incident. Its processes are

for the most part mechanical. The telling or the reading of a short

story of this type is far more a coldly-calculated intellectual exercise

than it is an appeal to warm-hearted human emotions. With aesthetic,

moral, or spiritual values it has little to do. Hence it has not that

permanency that makes for true literature. Based on incident and

accidental circumstance rather than character it engages the reader

temporarily by its cleverness, but it does not acquaint him with living

characters to whom he loves to return for an enlargement of that

acquaintanceship.

The Canadian species of short story is distinguished by a high artistic

unity of structure and effect and in that respect reflects the influence

of Poe upon all modern short story writing, but there is this

difference, that it achieves its unity of effect and its dramatic

interest not by mechanically constructed climaxes but by developments

arising out of the inherent traits and dispositions of the personages of

the story. Its basis is the solid rock of character. The Canadian short

story as a distinctive type does not present the excessively climactic

plot; nevertheless, it is more truly a real story than either the plot

story of the American and French writers or the fine psychological

situations of successful English story writers.

As we see it, this peculiar quality of the Canadian short story is

rooted in some quality of Canadian nationality. No Canadian writer can

be said to have originated the method. Each appears to evolve some

modification of it particularly adapted to his own field.

_Old Man Savarin and Other Tales_, by Edward William Thomson (1895)

contains a number of stories of Canadian life differing widely in

emotional interest. There is the near burlesque of _Old Man Savarin_,

with the incident of the fist fight which lasted for four hours,

although the two combatants never reached within striking distance of

each other all that time; _McGrath’s Bad Night_ portrays a pathetic

picture of a family on the verge of starvation, to which is added the

greater pathos of the breakdown of a man’s principles of honesty; _The

Privilege of the Limits_, wherein the author captures and presents

effectively the dry, pawky humor of the Scot; the sorrowful

dillusionment of youthful imagination in _The Shining Cross of Rigaud_;

superstitious terror overcome by plain common sense in _Red Headed

Windego_.

The stories with Eastern Ontario and Quebec for their setting show a

loving intimacy and understanding of the plain people—the habitant, the

river driver, the lumberman, the farmer; and the author is at his best

in his delineation of the Glengarry Scot or the Quebec habitant. Thomson

is scarcely a stylist. There is a freedom, even looseness, in his story

structure, and he employs sometimes the device of introducing a narrator

for his tale. But in his stories of the Canadian type and setting his

warm friendliness for his characters radiates a glow of enthusiasm that

captures and holds the reader. Not all Thomson’s stories, however, are

of this type—in _Petherick’s Peril_, there is an approach to the horror

tale of Poe; and in _The Swartz Diamond_ there is the trap-springing

device of the surprise ending, while _Boss of the World_ is an example

of the ‘tall story’ which produces its humor by the exaggeration of its

ideas—these stories we surmise to be the result of influences which

surrounded E. W. Thomson in his editorial offices in a Boston magazine

publishing firm.

_In the Village of Viger_ (1896), by Duncan Campbell Scott is a little

volume of prose tales of French Canada, published in Boston by Copeland

and Day. These stories affect the heart and imagination with a reality

and sense of actuality as if one had dwelt in Viger and had daily come

face to face with Mademoiselle Viau, the little milliner; Madame

Laroque, gossip and reformer; Monsieur Cuerrier, kind-hearted

postmaster; brandy-tippling Paul Arbique and his wife; Hans Blumenthal,

the expatriate German watchmaker; Pierre, and the lovely but intriguing

Eloise of No. 68 rue Alfred de Musset; Jean Francois, the mysterious

blind peddler; Paul Farlotte who was always saving up to revisit France,

and gave up the project on the day he dreamed that his mother had

died—and all the rest in this gallery of lovable characters.

The reality and veracity of Dr. Scott’s character delineation produces

exquisite and infallible character-vignettes, or Rembrandtesque

word-etchings, lovely in ‘values’ and in spiritual _chiaroscuro_—depths

within depths of a single character as in Charles Desjardins in the

tragic story of _The Desjardins_. Yet in his handling of the tragic he

awakens, not a pity that produces fear or horror or disgust, but a

gentle pity that engenders sympathy. We appreciate the ‘little

milliner’s’ loyalty—begotten of pure love—to her rascal lover, a

common thief. The skilful sympathetic handling of the subject gives to

love a new dignity and to loyalty a new grandeur. The pathos moves to a

rise and fall, but never so overwhelms the emotions as to cause tears;

rather does it subdue the soul and leave in the heart of the reader a

gentle welling up of sympathy, a benignant sense of fellowship with

finite and erring humanity, and a tender peace. When a reader finishes

one of Dr. Scott’s stories of the pathetic episode—The _Little

Milliner_, _The Desjardins_, _Sedan_, _Paul Farlotte_—he experiences no

violent wrench of the heart-strings—sheds no tears—but is gently and

sweetly touched; feels with the unfortunate and afflicted; sees the veil

that obscures the hard workaday world lifted; and beholds life and the

world suffused with a ‘grey-eyed loveliness.’ This is all superb

artistry in emotional and spiritual love, by one who has had intimate

glimpses into the human heart and into the stern face of sublimity in

human character and in life.

So, too, his treatment of the comedy in human character and existence.

Human destiny and fate are too dear and pathetic to him to allow him to

engage his art in any raucous laughter. The smiles he evokes are based

on sympathetic fellow-feeling, on tenderness. We are amused, yet not

unsympathetic, at the rage of Madame Laroque, defeated in a

long-cherished love, and hope of ultimate marriage, by the elopement of

her ward, Cesarine, with the postmaster (_The Wooing of Monsieur

Cuerrier_); the futilities of old Paul Farlotte, who would see ‘la belle

France’ before he dies, envisage a comic character, but subdue our

laughter with the pathos of frustrated desire.

These themes, we see, are chosen from character and life in a typical

French-Canadian village, yet the sentiments, the ideals of human love

and character and conduct, and the natural and spiritual color, are

Canadian and even universal. They depend not upon mere accidents of

circumstance, but upon lasting and universal human emotions and human

relationships—permanent literary values. In these stories, Dr. Scott

achieves structural unity and harmony of emotional tone with an entire

absence of any striving for effect—with that finished art that conceals

the artifice of the craftsman.

Always a careful workman rather than a prolific writer, it was not until

1923 that Duncan Campbell Scott published another volume of short

stories, _The Witching of Elspie_. Some of these are French-Canadian in

their setting, but those most exquisitely wrought deal with the lonely

and heart-searching life of the Hudson Bay posts. Although Scott’s

method was fully formed in his first volume, there is here a very

evident advance in artistry, a greater economy in expression, but a

deeper intensity of effect. Here he shows a remarkable skill in the

almost imperceptible transition from explanation or description to the

inside of the mind of the varying personages of the story and back again

to description or explanation—one of the most artistic touches of the

work of a finished craftsman.

Charles G. D. Roberts developed, in the story of animal psychology, a

species of Canadian short story that depends not so much upon emotional

and artistic effects and a unity of impressionistic tone as upon

intellectual and stylistic effects and novelty of theme. Scott worked

with an artistry so exquisite that his stories possess the simplicity

and directness which conceal art. Roberts wrought his animal and

romantic short stories with an artistry so much in the manner of the

prose-poet that they reveal the stylist consciously aiming to impress

the intellect with niceties of structure, and the sensibility with

word-painting, always _couleur de rose_.

When Roberts is the psychologist he is also most the true structural

stylist. But for an example of more impressionistic color, of sheer

word-painting, of prose-poetry _couleur de rose_, the following

paragraphs from _The Watchers in the Swamp_ are convincing:—

Under the first pale lilac wash of evening, just where the slow

stream of the Lost-Water slipped placidly from the open meadows

into the osier-and-bulrush tangles of the swamp, a hermit

thrush, perched in the topmost spray of a young elm tree, was

fluting out his lonely and tranquil ecstasy to the last of the

sunset.

• • • •

It was high morning in the heart of the swamp. From a sky of

purest cobalt flecked sparsely with silver-white wisps of cloud,

the sun glowed down with tempered, fruitful warmth upon the

tender green of the half-grown rushes and already rank

water-grasses—the young leafage of the alder and willow

thickets—the wide pools and narrow, linking lanes of unruffled

water already mantling in spots with lily-pad and arrow-weed. A

few big red-and-black butterflies wavered aimlessly above the

reed-tops. Here and there, with a faint elfin clashing of

transparent wings, a dragon-fly, a gleam of emerald and amethyst

fire, flashed low over the water. From every thicket came a soft

chatter of the nesting red-shouldered blackbirds.

These stories are lyrical poems in prose; as an impressionistic stylist

in the medium of the animal short story Roberts is inimitable. We find

the same mellifluous prose (as Mr. T. G. Marquis discriminatingly terms

it) in his romantic short stories, _By the Marshes of Minas_, in which

themes, settings, and color are authentically Canadian (Acadian).

Gilbert Parker’s short stories exhibit many of the qualities of his

longer fiction. They are not always as artistically constructed as those

of Duncan Campbell Scott, nor are they as finely written as those of

Roberts, but in the main they are based on sufficient character

motivation and have a sustained dramatic power. Ernest Thompson Seton

and W. A. Fraser are engaging tellers of short tales abounding in

incident and humor, with a sound basis of characterization, yet of the

short story writers of the Systematic School, Duncan Campbell Scott has

produced the most uniformly excellent work.

CHAPTER XVIII

William Henry Drummond

THE NEW CANADIAN GENRE OF IDYLLIC POETRY—WILLIAM HENRY DRUMMOND,

INTERPRETER OF THE HABITANT—POET OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN CANADA.

The Canadian _voyageur_ and _habitant_, the lumberman, and peasant of

French Canada are ‘children of nature’—human, simple, shy,

warm-hearted, honest, and manly. They were not always thus

sympathetically conceived or regarded by most of their English-speaking

compatriots. They, therefore, needed a sympathetic interpreter who would

reveal their inward spirit and true character, mental and moral.

Strangely, but according to the inscrutable methods of Providence, the

man who was to be the friend and sympathetic interpreter of the

French-Canadian peasant, was born in Ireland in 1854. He was William

Henry Drummond.

Drummond emigrated to Canada when but a mere lad, before Old Country

education and culture had any chance to mould his mind and imagination

and moral attitudes. While, then, Drummond himself was an _émigré_, his

verse, like that of Isabella Valancy Crawford and for the same reasons

of formative influences in Canada, is Canadian. It is indeed regional,

but it is also indigenous poetry—in substance, in diction, in imagery,

and in craftsmanship.

William Henry Drummond, like the _dramatis personae_ of his poems, the

_voyageur_ and _habitant_, was a ‘child of nature.’ No other kind of

man, save this large-bodied, warm-hearted, open-minded lover of human

kin and of the creatures that live in the wild, who saw and felt the

common things of life, as the _habitant_ saw and felt them, could have

been a truthful interpreter of the _habitant_. The merely scholarly

poet, the poet of a hothouse refinement, the poet who went to work at

the craftsmanship of poetry as if he were carving arabesques in verse,

could not have the imaginative insight into the mind and heart of the

French-Canadian peasant and the sympathy with him that would make it

possible for such a poet, with kindly, playful humor, to express the

elemental feelings and thoughts—the real humanity—of the _habitant_.

Drummond was above all things a human poet. His sympathies were

inclusive. By intuition he could feel just as the _habitant_ felt about

good and evil in the universe. Drummond’s heart was warm and large and

religious, which meant that he could call nothing that was made in the

image of God common or outcast. Though he was well read in the modern

poets and was a student of literature, he was not a bookish man. He

distinguished between the literature which possessed only aesthetic and

artistic beauties and that which was the embodiment of the finer goods

of the spirit, the inalienable satisfactions of existence. He loved only

the literature that was human and beautiful—simple, pure, and true.

As, then, a ‘child of nature,’ with a large, sympathetic heart and a

Keltic vision of the ‘divinity’ which is in all men and also in the wild

creatures that are near to Nature, and with a gift of ready expression

in rhythmical verse, Drummond was uniquely fitted to be the interpreter

of his simple, kindly, reticent, but genuinely human and sincere,

fellow-being, the Canadian _habitant_. Thus singularly fitted to be, as

he has been called, ‘the Poet of the Habitant,’ Drummond, in his verse,

actually performed a social and a literary service for his country. On

the social side, to the English-speaking Canadian, who up to the last

decade of the 19th century considered the _habitant_ as little better

than a chattel, Drummond revealed the human, lovable, and admirable

virtues of the humble French-speaking compatriot, and also engendered in

the English-speaking Canadian a sincere respect and affection for his

French-speaking fellow countryman. On the literary side, Drummond

created a gallery of _genre_ pictures and spiritual portraits which

constitute a unique contribution, not only to Canadian poetic

Literature, but also to English Literature.

Under what inspiration or vision, hitherto not vouchsafed to any other

Canadian poet, did Drummond write, and what really novel and important

contributions did he make to Canadian poetry and to world literature?

He discovered and presented to the world, for the first time, the New

Romance in Canada, as Kirby and Sir Gilbert Parker had discovered and

presented the Old Romance. He created a new form of the Canadian Idyll.

He placed on the stage of the world a group of new Characters and,

through them, originated a new species or type of World Humor.

Pre-eminently Drummond is the Poet and Humorist of the New Social

Democracy in Canada.

Until the publication of Drummond’s first creative work, _The Habitant

and Other French-Canadian Poems_ (1897), the French-Canadian, in

general, was appreciated only according to the types seen in the towns

and cities. In particular, the French-Canadian _voyageur_ and _habitant_

were appreciated only as the merry hearts who had sung the old

_chansons_ on the rivers of Quebec Province—and, as their

English-speaking compatriots fancied, in the academic and eviscerated

English translations in which they heard these _chansons_. No one, up to

the time of Drummond’s first volume, had revealed the mind and heart of

the real, the living _habitant_, _voyageur_, lumberman, and peasant in

Old Quebec. No one before Drummond had sung their heart songs in the

patois that is theirs when attempting to express their thoughts and

emotions to their supercilious and not too respectful English-speaking

compatriots. But Drummond produced truthful, naturalistic pictures of

the real, the _living_ French-Canadian _habitant_, lumberman, and

peasant as they expressed their thoughts and emotions about life and

their fellows.

He did not do this by a sort of reporting. He did it by letting them

talk for themselves in their own patois. Thus he gave to his pictures of

the French-Canadian _habitant_, lumberman, and peasant, a racy and

dramatic realism which distinguishes them as ‘characters’ apart in

Canadian, in English, and in world literature. This is the first reason

why William Henry Drummond must be regarded as an absolute creator of

literary species. He created a new form of romantic genre poetry, gave

it reality, veracity, and ideality. This is what Louis Fréchette meant

when in his Introduction to Drummond’s first volume, he hailed Drummond

as ‘the pathfinder of a new land of song.’

In what way did Drummond give true _ideality_ to the life and character

which he presented also with a convincing realism and veracity? There is

a species of romance which is the sheer invention of the fancy or

imagination. It presents a life and character that have never existed

and could not be possible anywhere on earth. That kind of romance is so

‘fantastic’ as to be absolutely unreal. There is another kind of romance

which is based on real imagination of supposed real life and real

personages. This sort of romance is typified by fairy tales, not the

fairy tales of all lands, but of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland.

The people actually believe in the real existence of fairies, and

imagine these invisible creatures in the forms of human beings. Romances

about them and their doings are, therefore, not fantastic, but are based

on a kind of reality. Again: there is a species of romance based upon

the imagining of real personages in impossible situations and doing

impossible things. It exists in Canadian Literature in those romances in

which the Indian conducts himself in ways that could only be possible

with men of civilized natures and civilized ideas. This kind of romance

is not unreal; it is _too ideal_.

In poetically conceiving and presenting the French-Canadian _habitant_,

lumberman, or peasant, Drummond might have drawn them as fantastic, or

fanciful, or absolutely ideal characters. Or, he might have drawn them,

as Service, for instance, has limned his characters of the trails and

mining camps, with an accentuated or rude realism. Drummond employed

none of these methods. He presented the French-Canadian _habitant_,

lumberman, and peasant as they really _appear_ on the outside, and as

they ideally _are_ on the inside, to the vision which sympathetically

divines their feelings, emotions, aspirations, sorrows, joys, and

consolations. Drummond’s poetic eye perceived the ideal spirit of the

French-Canadian _habitant_ as it shines through the outer, rude, homely,

simple, hesitant creature whom the English-speaking compatriot only too

often, till Drummond’s time, took to be of a lower and less spiritual

order than himself. By this combined realistic and idealistic treatment

of the character and life of the French-Canadian _habitant_, lumberman,

and peasant, Drummond created a new species of Canadian _genre_ poetry,

a new form of the Canadian Idyll.

As a creator, Drummond is entitled to another distinction. He originated

a new and distinct type of Humor. There were humorists before and since

Drummond. There was the prose humor of Haliburton’s _Sam Slick_. There

was the verse humor of Howe and of Lanigan. There was the prose humor of

De Mille and of Mrs. Cotes. There have been the prose humor of Leacock

and the verse humor of Service. But the only humor of all these that is

likely to perdure as world literature is that of Haliburton. Drummond

has created a humor which also is likely to live in permanent

literature. It is distinguished from all the other humor written in

Canada by the fact that it is never satiric or malicious or ungenial, or

mere humor for the sake of raising a laugh or to ridicule another. It is

humor with _pathos_. Just as Haliburton is unique as a satiric humorist,

so Drummond is unique as a sympathetic and interpretative humorist. He

is a Master of Humor and of Pathos.

His work is so well known throughout the world that it is hardly

necessary to quote examples of his humor. Mere excerpts will not

suffice. We may, however, recall, as outstanding examples, _The Wreck of

the Julie Plante_, _How Bateese Came Home_, _The Curé of Calumette_,

_Dominique_, _The Corduroy Road_, _Little Bateese_, _Johnnie Courteau_,

and _When Albani Sang_.

A few words on Drummond’s use of a patois or dialect and on his verse

technique will be sufficient. It is by his patois that he gives not only

naturalness but also veracity to the speech of his characters. His

dialect is pure and clean and is felt by the reader as natural and

genuine. As to technique, Drummond is a master of simple but flowing

rhythm and obtains his rhymes with an ease and naturalness that disclose

him as an original inventor of rhyme. He elected to be ‘The Poet of the

Habitant,’ and as such he is unique. Yet his poetry in this form, as

well as in other forms, clearly shows that if he had essayed the writing

of verse on traditional themes and in a traditional manner, he could

have been a poet of considerable distinction. It is best, however, to

leave him with his natural distinction and glory about him—the Poet of

the Habitant. As the discoverer of the New Romance in Canada, as the

Creator of the New Canadian Idyll, and as the Master of a unique species

of Canadian Humor and Pathos, William Henry Drummond made a signally

original contribution to the quantity and quality of the creative

literature of Canada.

CHAPTER XIX

_The_ Vaudeville School

THE DECADENT INTERIM IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—THE VAUDEVILLE SCHOOL

OF POETS—ROBERT W. SERVICE, ROBERT J. C. STEAD, AND OTHERS.

Not ineptly, though somewhat jocosely, we may group Canadian Poets in

the Post-Confederation period, from 1887 to 1907, into three Schools,

and label them with characteristic sobriquets. Already Archibald

Lampman, Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, with Pauline Johnson

and Frederick George Scott, have been called ‘The Great Lakes School.’

This is a dignified sobriquet, and derives its descriptive aptness from

the native environment, or from the themes, of these poets, or from

both. Again: Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman have been named ‘The

Birchbark School.’ This is a jocose, playful sobriquet, and was applied

to these poets because ‘they use the mottled scrolls of the Red Man’s

papyrus to build a canoe, or as a vehicle for verse, with equal

dexterity.’

By similar tokens, the throng of verse-makers whose vogue formed a

decadent interim in Canadian poetry, beginning with the publication of

Robert Service’s _Songs of a Sourdough_ (1907) and ending with the

publication of his _Rhymes of a Rolling Stone_ (1913), may be signalized

as ‘The Vaudeville School.’ On account of the themes of their verse, its

special and distinguishing technique, and its particular appeal to

popular or vulgar taste, this sobriquet, as applied to Robert Service,

Robert Stead, Paul Agar, George B. Field, Milton W. Yorke (_pseud._

Derby Bill), Robert T. Anderson, John Mortimer, James P. Haverson,

Charles W. MacCrossan, Hamilton Wigle, and others, is just, apt, and

veracious. It must be understood, however, to convey nothing of scorn or

contempt or derision, but to be only a pedagogical formula for

summarizing the qualities of the verse, the ideals, the methods, and the

craftsmanship of the great majority of the poets here named ‘The

Vaudeville School.’ They might have been dubbed ‘The Sourdough School,’

were it not that of them all only Service deals with those picturesque

and picaresque humans known in the slang of the Canadian gold-mining

camps as ‘Sourdoughs,’ and were it not that this name, used as

sobriquet, would be derisive rather than sincerely descriptive.

As used here, the term Vaudeville harks back to its original French

connotation. As applied to the verse of Service, Stead, Haverson, Field,

Yorke, and the others, it means, first, entertainment which appeals to

popular or vulgar or low taste in verse. It means, secondly, arresting

or violent methods in the technique of vividness. In fact, it is on the

side of the technique of vividness in verse-color and verse-rhythms

rather than on the side of the picturesque and often picaresque

matter—characters and situations—of the verse of this School that the

term Vaudeville is most apt and veracious, and that it is applied here

as a descriptive epithet in the ‘working’ vocabulary of literary

criticism.

_The sublimation of the technique of emotional vividness, to the

exclusion of all regard for the intrinsic and the aesthetic beauty and

moral dignity of poetry_—this is the essential formula of the verse of

the Vaudeville School of Canadian poets. Their aims or motives were

sincere and human. One motive was genuinely aesthetic: they wished to

write verse that would escape the emotional _deadness_ of the

traditional themes and manner of Canadian poetry. The other motive was

pragmatic: they wished to write rhythmic and rimed social documents in

verse which would have such novelty of theme and such dramatic or

theatrical or ‘sensational’ content as immediately to create a demand

for the ‘new poetry’ and make it readily marketable. Thus should ‘the

art of poetry’ become at once both pleasurable and profitable.

How were these ends to be achieved? ‘I am one who left off singing

Alleluias,’ said Dante, poet of the immortal ‘Vision’ of Hell,

Purgatory, and Paradise. Thus Dante, desiring to get away from the

conventional deadness of saying that he, as a poet, was a messenger from

Heaven to reveal spiritual beauty to his fellows, makes use of one of

the principles of the technique of vividness. He employs the unusual

phrase, the lively, arresting phrase that would be sure to strike and

vividly impress the average mind or imagination. In short, Dante invents

and uses picturesque slang: for ‘singing Alleluias’ is slang, but how

poetically suggestive it is, how vivid!

The Canadian Vaudeville verse-makers realized the poetic suggestiveness

and the vividness of the picaresque speech of the Far West and the High

North. They also knew how these sections of the country were rich in

picturesque and picaresque characters and in the ‘wild and woolly’ life

which produces strange and violent drama and melodrama, which is all the

more appealing to the imagination of men and women because it is real

and ‘stranger than fiction.’ It was a life full of moral (or immoral)

color of speech, and action—of compelling interest. Thus ready to hand

in Canada lay for immediate use the materials and the basal technical

principle—the recipe—for the ‘making,’ not the ‘creation,’ of

Vaudeville poetry. What was that recipe? Simply this. _Lilt in plangent

anapaestic metres or rhythms the picaresque melodrama of the mining

camps in the High North and the melodrama of the ‘chevalerie’ of the Far

West._

A single stanza from _The Shooting of Dan McGrew_ by Robert Service

(_Songs of a Sourdough_, 1907) affords ample proof and illustration of

the vaudeville qualities of this decadent verse:—

And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar

way;

In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him

sway;

Then his lips went in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was

calm;

And, ‘Boys,’ says he, ‘you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;

But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my poke

they’re true,

That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew.’

That is an impressive characteristic example of the technique of

vividness, by the Canadian master of them all. But let no one call it

poetry. Service’s astounding vogue for six years—it is now

vanished—was not due to the _poetry_ in his verse, but to the arresting

or violent _drama_ and _melodrama_ in it, made more arresting or

compelling by the infectious swing or lilt of the anapaestic rhythm.

This rhythm is his only _forte_ in verbal music, though he also employs

alliteration successfully. This _forte_ is seen to be a limitation and a

weakness, as it also was and is in his alleged artistic foster-father,

Rudyard Kipling. For as soon as Service attempts to employ another

rhythm better suited to higher thought than the picaresque matter of

strictly ‘Sourdough’ Songs, the results are disastrous. He fails to hold

the attention; and, inasmuch as there are no compensating rhythmic

values, all that is left is the strained and bizarre effect of cheap

melodrama. A singular example of this kind of weakness and failure in

Service is his _My Madonna_, in which he aims consciously and seriously

to achieve a _tour de force_ in religious sentiment, but falls into flat

_bathos_ of melodrama (_Songs of a Sourdough_).

If proof is wanted that the recipe for writing Vaudeville verse is

simply to lilt in anapaestic metre and rhythm the melodrama of the Far

West _chevalerie_, proof and illustration are furnished by a stanza from

_Sergeant Blue_ by Robert Stead (_Kitchener and Other Poems_, 1917):—

Sergeant Blue of the Mounted Police was a so-so kind of a guy;

He swore a bit, and he lied a bit, and he boozed a bit on the sly;

But he held the post at Snake Creek Bend for country and home and God,

And he cured the first and forgot the rest—which wasn’t the least bit

odd.

The amazing and pathetic fact about Robert Service is that he really

possessed authentic poetic genius, and sometimes did write pure poetry.

At his best Stead has written some satisfying _genre_ poetry and

story-telling ballads. But Stead could not rise beyond the

homely-pathetic and the melodramatic in Western _chevalerie_ into the

realm of pure poetry. He kept always to the level of his lowly subject.

Service, however, fell or rose to the level of his subject. In short,

while most of Service’s verse is popular Vaudeville, considerable of it

violent melodrama, and much of it drama simply, some of his verse is

genuinely poetical, charged with pure beauty and poetic significance.

How nobly Service has conceived, how passionately expressed in lovely

color-images and pervasive vowel and alliterative music, and how

philosophically interpreted Nature in his poem _The Mountain and the

Lake_:—

I know a mountain thrilling to the stars,

Peerless and pure, and pinnacled with snow;

Glimpsing the golden dawn o’er coral bars,

Flaunting the vanished sunset’s garnet glow;

Proudly patrician, passionless, serene;

Soaring in silvered steeps where cloud-surfs break;

Virgin and vestal—oh, a very Queen!

And at her feet there dreams a quiet lake. . . .

In that poem Service has given us an arresting and memorable picture of

pure beauty in Nature. It is beautiful and unforgettable because it has

poetic _Style_. Stead and the other members of the Vaudeville School,

with the exception at times of Service when at his best, lacked genius

for style in verse, without which verse, whether its subject or theme be

low or high, realistic or idealistic, cannot rise to the dignity of

poetry. Service, Stead, and the rest are never authentic Realists. They

could not avoid the melodramatic in the matter of their verse and the

plangent and vivid in its technique. Always they deliberately set out to

assault the senses and the sensibilities. Kipling could be realistic and

by virtue of his style rise to the dignity of poetry. But for the lack

of style, the hectic realism of Service and Stead never rises above the

crudely melodramatic or Vaudevillian. As picaresque realists they are,

to quote Mr. E. B. Osborn, ‘far behind the Australian and compare very

unfavorably with the minor masters of Quebec.’

Many of the most effective pieces in Service’s first volume (_Songs of a

Sourdough_) were deliberate imitations of Kipling. But later he gave

some promise of developing an independent manner of his own, the manner

which is disclosed in _The Mountain and the Lake_, and which indubitably

revealed in him innate original powers for painting the beauty and

sublimity of Nature in the Arctic.

Service did not hold to his own manner; and Stead and the other

Vaudevillians were innately incapable of any manner of their own. At

length the vogue of the Vaudeville poets passed, having in no way

affected the stream of aesthetic and artistic poetry which began with

the Systematic School and which flowed on, pure and undefiled, if placid

and noiseless, through the poetry of the later generation and into the

Restoration Period or Second Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

Fundamental to the point of view of the criticism which follows is this

proposition:—The poetry of the Vaudeville School for the most part must

be regarded, not strictly as an aesthetic phenomenon, but rather as an

envisagement of certain phases of the civilization of Canada in that

period—that is, as a series of _social documents_. There is nothing

wrong in treating contemporary phases of civilization in poetry with

such vividness and veracity that they really become social documents of

the period which they envisage; but they are of no aesthetic worth if

they are not consecrated to and by art. How a social document, when

sublimated by fine art, can become authentic poetry may be discovered by

turning to Pauline Johnson’s musical and swift-moving lyric _Prairie

Greyhounds_, descriptive of the transcontinental trains and their

service to Canadian civilization, or to Mr. C. G. D. Roberts’ noble

sonnet _The Train Among the Hills_, or to his equally fine sonnet of the

soil _The Sower_.

It must be realized that the sources of poetic inspiration in Canada

have considerably shifted from the Atlantic, the Land of Evangeline, the

Great Lakes, and the Laurentians to the Prairies, the Rockies, and the

ice-clad wildernesses of the High North. Now, it was inevitable that

under the inchoate and unsettled conditions of civilization in these Far

West and High North sections of the Dominion, the mere inspiration to

write verse should have been uppermost and that considerations of form

should have appeared secondary or insignificant.

The themes treated in the Vaudeville verse were necessarily new; and

when the Western or Yukon poets published their verses the newness of

their themes and their naïve disregard of technical niceties were

mistaken in the East for originality, vigor, freshness, and breeziness

in art, and were welcomed and read by all classes of Canadians with

avidity as ‘real,’ not ‘hothouse,’ poetry. There we have the explanation

of the astonishing vogue of the verses of Service and Stead, and of

their imitators. But their verses, far from being examples of genuine

originality in invention of poetic themes and of really new art,

exemplify the total absence of art; and far from being ‘real’ poetry,

are totally devoid of the chaste speech, lovely imagery, dulcet music,

and exquisite emotion which constitute true poetry.

It was a distinct moral fault on the part of Service that he should have

chosen to give us in verse what he had better written in prose. The

right form for social documents of picaresque communities is prose.

Further: it is a law of aesthetics, a law exemplified most finely in

Homer, that, whenever possible, all the elements in a work of art should

each be intrinsically beautiful. Service deliberately chose themes which

disregarded that law. We could forgive him for that if he had redeemed

the vulgarity of the themes by beautiful craftsmanship in versification.

His poetry is bad not because it is wicked or picaresque or risqué, but

because it is aesthetically bad through and through.

During the Vaudeville Period Roberts, Campbell, Carman, Duncan Campbell

Scott, Canon Scott, Pauline Johnson, Arthur Stringer, Albert E. S.

Smythe, Ethelwyn Wetherald, Jean Blewett, Helena Coleman, Virna Sheard,

the late Marjorie Pickthall, Katherine Hale, Jean Graham, Peter

McArthur, Richard Scrace, Lucy M. Montgomery and a host of others

published aesthetically satisfying poetry. For their spirit was of the

spirit which inaugurated the First Renaissance in Canadian poetry. But

the spirit of Service and the lesser poets of the Vaudeville School was

identical with that which animated the early Canadian verse-makers

before the times of Breakenridge, Sangster, Mair, and John Reade. In

spirit and in craftsmanship the poetry of the Vaudeville School was

essentially a recrudescence of the poetry that made glad the hearts of

the ‘Bush’ and ‘Clearing’ settlers of Canada in the first and second

quarters of the last century.

That a New Poetry will arise in Canada and that it will originate and

flourish in the Canadian Far West, is highly probable, because the

prairie-lands of the West, their endless fields of grain sheening in the

sun and billowing in rhythmic swaying to the winds and the mighty

vastnesses of land and sky awaken moods and appreciations of Nature

similar to those stirred in men by the sea. It was, in Bliss Carman’s

fine phrase, ‘the glad indomitable sea’ and the inland seas that

inspired the Maritime and Lake poets who began the First Renaissance of

Canadian Poetry.

But if any of the future Canadian poet, Western or Eastern, should

prefer or incline to turn back to the ways of Service and Stead, let him

reflect that since beauty is our clearest manifestation of the union of

the real and the ideal, that is, of perfection, not to love and promote

beauty in poetry is so far forth to refuse to love and promote the

Godlike in the hearts of mankind, for perfection is the essence of the

Godhead. To become a poet may not be a moral duty. But if one elects the

office of poet, then to perfect oneself, as far as possible, in poetic

artistry for the sake of beautifully or compellingly embodying in verse

whatsoever is lovely in Nature or noble in ideas, is to attain to high

moral dignity in one’s own soul as a poet and to impress on the world

the high spiritual function of poetry.

* * * * *

Sources of quotations in this chapter:

Poems of Robert W. Service—_The Songs of a Sourdough_ (Ryerson Press:

Toronto); _The Rhymes of a Rolling Stone_, (Ryerson Press: Toronto).

Poems of Robert Stead—_Kitchener and Other Poems_—or in _The Empire

Builders_ (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).

CHAPTER XX

_The_ Restoration Period

THE RESTORATION OR SECOND RENAISSANCE PERIOD IN CANADIAN

LITERATURE—NEW FORMS, THEMES, AND SOCIAL IDEALS—THE POETS—

MARJORIE PICKTHALL—ROBERT NORWOOD—KATHERINE HALE—AND OTHERS.

We call the period beginning with the publication of Marjorie

Pickthall’s first volume of verse, _Drift of Pinions_ (1913), and on to

the present, the Restoration or Second Renaissance Period in Canadian

Literature. It is a ‘restoration’ period because it marks a return,

after the Decadent Interim of the Vaudeville School (1907-1912), to the

aesthetic and artistic ideals of the first systematic group of

native-born Canadian writers. It is a ‘renaissance’ because the writers

of the period undertook the systematic production of original authentic

literature, and because they wrote under the inspiration of new themes,

ideals, and forms.

By 1913 when the Canadian public had tired of the picaresque themes and

the plashing anapaests of Robert Service, and the vogue of the

Vaudeville School had passed, there was a demand for clean and sweet

sustenance of the soul and refreshing new verbal music for the spirit.

It was a demand for pure Beauty—

of fragrance made,

Woven and rhymed of light.

Marjorie Pickthall was the first to give the Canadian public sweet

draughts of a new poetic wine of life. She engaged the attention of the

Canadian public with the same immediacy and delight as the early lyrics

of Tennyson and Swinburne captivated the English lovers of poetry. Set

for the most part to a new or, so far as Canada was concerned, a strange

music of trochaic, anapaestic, and syncopated metres and rhythms, rich

in vowel-harmonies and the tone-color of consonance, assonance, and

exquisite alliteration, her songs changed the world about her into an

earthly paradise. At first Marjorie Pickthall arrested attention as a

young unknown poet singing shyly from a corner in a daily newspaper or

magazine, but singing with a rare beauty of imagery and of color from

Nature, and with a fresh and dulcet verbal melody, heard as overtones

above the more plashing, plangent rhythms of Service and his colleagues.

It seemed as if Pan had come again to earth, so idyllic was the

Nature-beauty and so simple and dulcet was the melody of her poetry, as

in, for instance, _The Little Fauns to Proserpine_, daintily suggestive

of their shadowy figures:—

Browner than the hazel-husk, swifter than the wind,

Though you turn from heath and hill, we are hard behind,

Singing, ‘Ere the sorrows rise, ere the gates unclose,

Bind above your wistful eyes the memory of the rose.’

• • • •

Now the vintage feast is done, now the melons glow

Gold along the raftered thatch beneath a thread of snow.

Dian’s bugle bids the dawn sweep the upland clear,

Where we snared the silken fawn, where we ran the deer.

Through the dark reeds wet with rain, past the singing foam

Went the light-foot Mysian maids, calling Hylas home.

Syrinx felt the silver sprite fold her at her need.

Hear, ere yet you say farewell, the wind along the reed.

There was no appeal on the part of Service and the other Vaudevillians

to the spirit, to the religious imagination. It was inevitable, then,

that the Canadian public—and the world—should be arrested by the

spiritual beauty, tenderness, wistfulness, and the engaging music of

such a poem as Marjorie Pickthall’s _Mary Shepherdess_, the following

three stanzas of which illustrate how the thought is ‘woven and rhymed

of light’:—

When the heron’s in the high wood and the last long furrow’s sown,

With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown,

Comes Mary, Mary Shepherdess, a-seeking for her own.

Saint James he calls the righteous fold, Saint John he calls the kind,

Saint Peter seeks the valiant men all to loose or bind,

But Mary seeks the little souls that are so hard to find,

All the little sighing souls born of dust’s despair,

They who fed on bitter bread when the world was bare,

Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair.

One will seek far in English poetry for a picture of the human figure

limned as graphically as it is in Marjorie Pickthall’s line:—

With the herded cloud before her and her sea-sweet raiment blown;

and one will seek far in English poetry to find a line musically so in

harmony with the spiritual picture of ‘all the little sighing souls’

eyeing, wistful and afraid, the wonder of the shining spectacle of

Heaven, as her line:—

Frighted of the glory gates and the starry stair.

Not once, or even for a moment, could the earthward vision of the

Vaudevillian poets conceive, and much less could they write, such a poem

of the pure in heart who shall see God as Marjorie Pickthall’s _The Lamp

of Poor Souls_, and its subdued, sacramental music, ending thus:—

Shine, little lamp, fed with sweet oil of prayers.

Shine, little lamp, as God’s own eyes may shine,

When He treads softly down His starry stairs

And whispers, ‘Thou art Mine!’

Shine, little lamp, for love hath fed thy gleam.

Sleep, little soul, by God’s own hands set free.

Cling to His arms and sleep, and sleeping, dream,

And dreaming, look for me.

Francis Thompson or Alice Meynell could have written the whole poem

possibly with a more immaculate artistry, but not with any finer appeal

to the religious or mystical imagination, and not with a melody a whit

more winning as an end in itself.

Having thus tasted the chief engagements of Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry,

we must in a more detailed way disclose her genius and art as they

appear in her lyrical poems in _The Drift of Pinions_ (1913), _The Lamp

of Poor Souls_ (1916), and the posthumous volume _The Wood Carver’s

Wife_ (1922)—the last of which contains a lyric drama (the title-poem

of the volume) and several lyrics. It is as an adroit and exquisite

craftswoman (or ‘artist’), rather than for originality of imaginative

conception, that, from her first printed essays in verse to the last,

Marjorie Pickthall appeals as a specially gifted poet in Canada, and

must be accorded an honorable, possibly high, place in Canadian poetic

literature.

Technically, her poetry is distinguished by an extraordinarily

successful use of color epithets and verbal melody, especially

alliteration. The defects of her poetry are not, on the whole,

technical, but are defects, or rather limitations, of genius. Broadly

viewed, her poetry lacks breadth of range and eloquence of style. By

‘style’ is not meant Matthew Arnold’s conception or formula of what he

called ‘the grand style.’ Marjorie Pickthall’s verse is free, flowing,

airy, graceful, tripping, musical; in a word, feminine. But by thus much

does it lack originality and seriousness in the substance of its style,

the qualities which give us the sense of having met with beauty which is

not a mere finely distilled essence of loveliness, but which has

strength, and dignity, and power over the heart and the imagination.

The key to the defects or limitations in Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry was

not her imagination but her ‘heart.’ She loved and had sympathy only or

specially with all little creatures and things, with tender, frail, and

helpless creatures and things; and she felt profoundly a sort of

injustice in their fate, which begot in her a wistful wondering about

the justice of the ways of God. She therefore inevitably impressed on

her poetry her own feminine feeling for the little and helpless

creatures of earth, her own sympathy with the evanescence of all the

animate ‘little things’—children, flowers, moths, birds, and ‘the

little stars of Duna’—that _for her_ made existence tolerable or happy.

Everywhere in her verse appears her preoccupancy with the very word or

with suggestions of the word ‘little.’ It is this ‘heart’ limitation

that causes her to show what would seem at first sight to be a

mannerism, namely, her predilection for certain substantives and

epithets, as, for instance, ‘moth,’ ‘dove,’ ‘stars,’ ‘silver,’ ‘golden.’

It is not really a mannerism; but a necessity of her heart and mind. For

the creatures and things her heart most loved, inevitably filled her

consciousness and excluded other creatures and things.

But while Marjorie Pickthall, by limitation of genius, failed to attain

to the sheer reaches in style and poetic substance which mark the work

of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott, and while she did not possess the

ecstatic lilt of Carman, still she must be ranked as a supreme lyrist of

the lovely, evanescent little things in the world. She must be ranked

high also as a technical artist. If her poetry does not disclose her as

able to achieve the finer strength and beauties of technique in poetic

style, that distinguish the poetry of Lampman, Carman, and D. C. Scott,

she is less often at fault technically than the older poets. Her

technical artistry was not an acquired accomplishment; it was a gift of

Nature. For while the older poets won their way, by hard striving, to

their perfection in technique, Marjorie Pickthall, as early as her

sixteenth year of age, displayed a precocious virtuosity, which was

almost an instinct, in adroit and ingenious verbal coloring and melody.

In the invention of winsome and vivid color epithets and images and in

her power for alliterative music in verse, Marjorie Pickthall was,

perhaps, surpassed by Pauline Johnson. But Miss Pickthall was the more

ingenious of the two poets. The following examples are

impressive:—‘Dark with the green silence under the gold weather,’ ‘And

close the cowslips’ cups of honeyed gold,’ ‘Yellow for the ripened rye,

white for ladies’ wearing,’ ‘Where cling the moths that are the longings

of men,’ ‘Thy lips are bright as the edge of the sword,’ ‘On the great

green lawns o’ heaven,’ ‘He saw the moonlit rafters of the world,’

‘Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world,’ ‘And hear new stars come

singing from God’s hand,’ ‘To the wind that cried last night like a soul

in sin.’

Nature was Marjorie Pickthall’s chief mistress. In the pictorial

treatment of Nature the poet displayed special gifts. It is not true to

say that she had the Greek ‘feeling’ for Nature, or that the Nature in

her verse was that of the ancient Greeks. It was impossible for Marjorie

Pickthall, an Anglo-Canadian, to have a Greek imagination; and they who

claim that she had the ancient Greek feeling for Nature, might as

rightfully claim that she had the ancient Gaelic or Keltic feeling for

Nature, or the ancient Semitic feeling for the presence of God, or the

medieval Breton feeling for Nature and the mystery of religious faith,

which some have remarked as ‘mysticism’ in Marjorie Pickthall’s poetry.

The truth is that, first, Marjorie Pickthall had a mind and imagination

which were naturally pagan, and that, secondly, Nature was to her but

the material for her fanciful and pretty treatment in verse. But to the

Greeks, Nature, as perceived and embodied in their mythology and poetry,

was their vision of the real face and heart of Nature. They actually

_believed_ in gods, goddesses, heroes, muses, naiads, mermaids, satyrs,

fauns, as being Nature herself. This is what we mean by saying that the

Greeks were pagans. But Marjorie Pickthall had, by native gift, only the

sensibility and imagination that were naturally pagan in a love of and

preference for thus _visualizing_ Nature. She had saturated her mind, by

reading, with the mythology of the Greeks; and her naturally pagan

sensibility and imagination re-colored and re-expressed this material in

a delightful pagan—not Greek—way in verse. Marjorie Pickthall had no

such lively sense of the _reality_ of divinity in Nature as had the

Greeks. But she did have a lively pagan, if Anglo-Canadian, imagination.

And so, with imaginative ‘_make-believe_’ she peopled Nature with

spirits, mermaids, pixies, fauns, elfs, playing with the Old Nurse

Nature, or with themselves, and rejoicing in the sights, sounds, and the

shy forest creatures, which they see and hear amongst the woodlands,

streams, hills. She thus paganly _poetizes_ Nature, beautifully,

winningly; but it is all a _tour de force_ of the senses and

imagination, achieved in her ‘closet,’ where she was temporarily shut

off from the roar and turmoil of great cities.

Had she steeped herself as thoroughly in ancient Gaelic lore, myths and

legends, she would have written as engagingly of the Nature of the

Kelts. In her single poetic essay in Gaelic ‘feeling’ for Nature—the

Gael’s innate love of Nature and the Homeland, his nostalgia—she failed

in a double way; first, by infelicitously giving her poem a German

title, _Wanderlied_, and, secondly, by a dull and commonplace imitation,

if not a parody, of Ethna Carbery, Nora Hopper, Moira O’Neil, Katharine

Tynan. When she was sincerely and naturally pagan, as in most of her

verse, she succeeded admirably. But when she attempted to write a

‘literary’ poem in the pagan spirit, as in _Wanderlied_, she failed.

More of her imagery is derived from _actual Nature in Canada_ than from

mythological Nature in ancient Greece. The coloring from Canadian woods

in Spring, Autumn, and Winter is in her verse, also visualizations of

Canadian fields and flowers, and the subtle handwork of ‘the Frost

King,’ and even Canadian domestic felicities made possible by Nature,

such as the winter arabesque on the windowpanes in contrast with the

inviting glow of burning logs on the hearth:—

Here where the bee slept and the orchis lifted

Her honeying pipes of pearl, her velvet lip,

Only the swart leaves of the oak lie drifted

In sombre fellowship.

Here where the flame-weed set the lands alight,

Lies the bleak upland, webbed and crowned with white.

Build high the logs, O love, and in thine eyes

Let me believe the summer lingers late.

We shall not miss her passive pageantries,

We are not desolate,

When on the sill, across the window bars,

Kind winter flings her flowers and her stars.

And what but Canadian is this compelling line from _The Young

Baptist_?—

Clear-footed from the frontiers of the world!

In short, if we were making a formula for Marjorie Pickthall’s Nature

poetry, we would employ this sub-title—‘Lyrics in the Greek and the

Canadian Modes of Pictorializing Nature.’ Thus we should, by a single

phrase, escape absurdly alleging that an Anglo-Canadian mind possessed

Greek imagination and feeling for a mythological Nature; and thus also

make clear the fact that Marjorie Pickthall, an Anglo-Canadian poet, was

gifted not only with a lively pagan sense of the beauty of a vanished

world, but also with a responsive sensibility to the beauty of a real

and present world of Nature in Canada.

In two respects, then, Marjorie Pickthall may be regarded as having made

original contributions to Canadian literature. First, she winsomely

_pictorialized_, not, as with Lampman, spiritually interpreted, the face

and pageantry of Nature. Secondly, she subtilized verse technique in

verbal coloring and melody. She had a light and tender fancy, and,

certainly for Canada, a rare artistry. She brought Titania and Ariel to

earth again; and suffused existence with magical illusion, rhymed of

light. The monument she herself raised to her genius and memory is not

large and imposing; but it is, like her own spirit, chaste, exquisite,

beautiful—and enduring.

Another significant creative poet of the Second Renaissance Period is

Robert Norwood. Miss Pickthall was an objective poet. Whenever her

imagination concerned itself with the spiritual realm it was to

interpret only her own _private_ experience, strictly from a personal

point of view. Norwood is an interpreter of the Spirit to the

Spirit—universalizing his imaginative experiences. He is, to be sure, a

colorist and a musician in verse; but he is these secondarily in aim,

whereas primarily he is the singer and interpreter of the meaning of

Spiritual Love. In this field he has made a really original contribution

to native Canadian poetry. In another field, however, he has made a

still greater contribution to Canadian poetry.

The faculty of love, which is the deepest function of man’s spiritual

nature, is the imagination, the idealizing faculty. The greatest and

most spiritualizing power in the world is love because its ultimate

object is the heart of the universe; that is, Immortal Love, which is

God, for God is Love. The greatest and most spiritualizing earthly

object of love is Woman, because it is the idealization, the love, of

Woman that most inspires men to achievement in this life and to the

deserving of union and companionship on earth and in the life to come.

That is to say, the spiritual love of Woman is the chief inspiration of

human creative ideals and activities—of material achievement, of

creation in the fine arts, and of religion. Thus did Goethe apostrophize

this divine function of woman:—

Das Ewig Weibliche

Zieht uns hinan

—the eternal woman-soul draws us forever upwards and on; and thus has

Robert Norwood also declared Woman’s spiritualizing function:—

Much have I learned of woman and the part

She plays in shaking from the laden bough

Life’s blossoms; all that has been, and is now,

And ever shall be: Science, music and art,

Religion, these, as from a fountain start

The river, have been hers—man to endow.

It is Norwood’s mastery of verbal color and music and his power of

spiritual vision and exaltation—his interpretation and treatment of

Ideal Love—that constitute his novel quality of fresh excellence in the

poetry of the Second Renaissance. Certainly in his sonnet-sequence _His

Lady of the Sonnets_ (1915), he has enhanced the quality of Canadian

poetry. Uppermost in his heart and imagination is the refining

redemptive, transmuting power of Love, an absolute joy in the thought of

the spiritual union and companionship of the Lover and the Beloved. To

him Love is a holy ideal; and Loving is the fusion of soul and soul, of

spirit and spirit, until the Lover and the Beloved become one soul, one

spirit, enamored of holiness in thought, speech, and deed.

As an example of Norwood’s sensuously colorful and musical envisagement

of the Ideal Love we quote the following sonnet:—

I meet you in the mystery of the night,

A dear Dream Goddess on a crescent moon;

An opalescent splendour like a noon

Of lilies; and I wonder that the height

Should darken for the depth to give me light—

Light of your face, so lovely that I swoon

With gazing, and then wake to find how soon

Joy of the world fades when you fade from sight.

Beholding you I am Endymion,

Lost and immortal in Latmian dreams;

With Dian bending down to look upon

Her shepherd, whose aeonian slumber seems

A moment, twinkling like a starry gem

Among the jewels of her diadem.

As an example of his power for spiritualizing Love, the following sonnet

from the same sequence will suffice:—

Last night I crossed the spaces to your side,

As you lay sleeping in the sacred room

Of our great moment. Like a lily’s bloom,

Fragile and white were you, my spirit-bride,

For pain and loneliness with you abide,

And Death had thought to touch you with his doom,

Until Love stood angelic at the tomb,

Drew sword, smote him and Life’s door opened wide.

I looked on you and breathed upon your hair—

Your hair of such soft, brown, translucent gold!

Nor did you know that I knelt down in prayer,

Clasped hands, and worshipped you for the untold

Magnificence of womanhood divine—

God’s miracle of Water turned to Wine!

In his exquisitely wrought, sensuously colored, yet spiritually

elevating verse surely we discover something that has never before been

in Canadian poetry. It is a fresh achievement in Canadian poetry, even

though it is not always impeccable in rhythm and rhyme. It is, too,

authentic poetry, as if Dante or Keats or Tennyson or Swinburne had

returned to earth and their genius were reincarnated, in a notable

degree, in the genius of Robert Norwood.

Katherine Hale (Mrs. John Garvin) is a poet by herself. For she was a

poet of considerable distinction for a decade before she published the

volume which revealed her as having found her métier in creative poetry,

as in her _Morning in the West_ (1923). The eye and the ear are supreme

in her processes of perception. Music and pictorial art were her first

aesthetic loves, and had most to do with determining her attitudes and

appreciations of the spiritual world. So that, at length, the inner eye

and the inner ear became the faculties by which she perceived beauty in

the external world as well as in the heart of mankind. All her reactions

to what she saw and heard in the external world were in terms of color

beauty and tonal beauty, perhaps more in terms of color than of tone.

She became a musical critic of distinction, and one of our foremost

‘color-writers.’

When, therefore, Katherine Hale felt the ‘urge’ to create poetry, her

reactions to the spiritual world also were in terms of color and music.

It is found that her development in poetic writing follows the same

order as her development in prose writing. She began as a critic of

music and reviewer of literature, but capped all her prose with a

finished and arresting work in ‘color-writing,’ _Canadian Cities of

Romance_ (1922). She began her poetic creation with the musical or

lyrical qualities of her verse much more accentuated than the color

qualities, and her themes and forms much more earth-born and

conventional than romantic and spiritualized in meaning. But always in

her first three books of verse there was the feeling for pictorial or

color values and for subtle emotional and spiritual nuances.

At length, as in _Morning in the West_, her latest volume, she found her

true mode, and poetry became for her the beautiful sketching and etching

and painting of the romance of the Canadian spirit. This poetry of the

spirit she suffused with all the subtle variations of imaginative

‘color,’ half-lights, shadows, and chiaroscuro of Nature and social life

in Canada from the days of the Scots factor and Western _chevalerie_ to

the era of the transcontinental railways.

Her first two books of verse, _Grey Knitting_ (1914) and _The White

Comrade_ (1916), by their very titles suggest the color ‘note.’ But the

gift or power of embodying spiritual beauty in lyrical music is always

uppermost, as for instance in _The Ultimate Hour_ or _In Noonday_

containing the unforgettable alliterative and musical line:—

With dear indefinite delight;

or in this stanza from _The Answer_:—

Unaltered aisles that wait and wait forever,

O woods that gleam and stir in liquid gold,

What of your little lover who departed

Before the year grew old?

In addition to the winsome color and musical qualities of her earlier

lyrical verse, we discover a refined spiritual quality in such a sonnet

as _The First Christmas_, and a noble spiritualization of romantic love

in her sonnet _At Noon_, beginning:—

Thou art my Tower in the sun at noon.

Katherine Hale’s long poem _The White Comrade_ (1916) discloses notable

gifts in blank verse and the power to make a dramatic picture that

enthralls the mystical or religious imagination. Her rare gifts of

delicate fancy, elfin enchantment from Nature and simple Orphean music,

reminding us of Bliss Carman’s light lyrism, is finely exemplified in

her spiritualized lyric _I Used to Wear a Gown of Green_, in which

beauty and pathos are tenderly commingled:—

I used to wear a gown of green

And sing a song to May,

When apple blossoms starred the stream

And Spring came up the way.

I used to run along with Love

By lanes the world forgets,

To find in an enchanted wood

The first frail violets.

And ever ’mid the fairy blooms

And murmur of the stream,

We used to hear the pipes of Pan

Call softly through our dream.

But now, in outcry vast, that tune

Fades like some little star

Lost in an anguished judgment day

And scarlet flames of war.

What can it mean that Spring returns

And purple violets bloom,

Save that some gypsy flower may stray

Beside his nameless tomb!

To pagan Earth her gown of green,

Her elfin song to May—

With all my soul I must go on

Into the scarlet day.

All these—the poetry of her first three books, _Grey Knitting_, _The

White Comrade_, and _The New Joan_—were but her short flights

preparatory to making her eagle flight, by which she should discover the

meaning of Canadian history and civilization in which is envisaged the

Canadian national spirit. In _Morning in the West_ Katharine Hale is no

longer the individual lyrist fluting in the band of other Canadian

lyrists. In that volume she sounds the diapason of Canadian nationality.

She invents new forms of lyrism, and her themes are colored with new

tones and lights of an impressionism which is the acme of realism and

yet is finely spiritualized, as in the series of verbal color-sketches

_Going North_ and _A Study of Shadows_. But always we are being taken by

the poet through Canada, and made to see what has been for us the most

invisible, or, if visible, the most elusive of all things, namely, the

forms and variation of the Canadian spirit and habitat.

The new forms of her lyrism may be exemplified in this example,

_Enchantment_:—

I never see a blue jay

But I think of her;

Never hear that hoarse ‘dear—dear’

From a tree-top stir,

And the answering call

Far, far away,

And the flash of azure—

Oh, she would stay

Listening in the forest,

Loitering through the silence,

Hearing calls and singing

All the livelong day!

Her new themes and new vision and spiritual import in them—the

envisagement of the qualities of the Canadian spirit—are notably

presented in _Cun-ne-wa-bum_, _Buffalo Meat_, and most poignantly in _An

Old Lady_, which is an incisively graphic and dramatic _picture_ of the

whole history of Canadian civilization from the early days of the

Hudson’s Bay Company to the 20th century social life in Ottawa in these

days of automobiles and bridge parties. Yet it is no mere picture, but

possesses a simple pathos, tenderness, and wistfulness which

spiritualize the realism in the poem, and raise it to the plane of

literature. This, then, is Katherine Hale’s novel contribution to the

poetic literature of Canada:—Canadian nature and civilization envisaged

with a spiritual realism which has national perspective and native color

and atmosphere. It is a new and distinct achievement in creative poetry

in Canada.

Another significant poet of the Second Renaissance period, whose verse

deserves special mention, is Lloyd Roberts. Early in 1914 he published a

volume of verse entitled, _England Over Seas_. Lloyd Roberts is the son

of Charles G. D. Roberts. No doubt, he inherited his poetic gifts from

his father, and, no doubt, learned the principles of technical artistry

from him. But, as a matter of fact, in his own published verse, Lloyd

Roberts shows qualities—love of Nature and the gift of a singularly

lyrical lilt—that are nearer the verse of his father’s cousin, the

inimitable lyrist of the seasons, the vagrom heart, and the open road,

Bliss Carman.

In _England Over Seas_, the younger Roberts is an enchanting lover of

Nature, a vivid colorist, and a melodious verbal musician. Nature is, in

his own phrase, ‘the star’—always the theme and in the foreground. Of

his qualities as a nature-painter and a verbal melodist, the following

is an excellent example:—

Crimson and gold in the paling sky;

The rampikes black where they tower on high—

And we follow the trails in the early dawn

Through the glades where the white frosts lie.

Down where the flaming maples meet;

Where the leaves are blood before our feet

We follow the lure of the twisting paths

While the air tastes thin and sweet.

Leggings and jackets are drenched with dew;

The long thin barrels are cold and blue;

But the glow of the Autumn burns in our veins,

And the eyes and hands are true.

Where the sun drifts down from overhead

(Tangled gleams in the scarlet bed),

Rush of wings through the forest aisle—

And the leaves are a brighter red.

Loud drum the cocks in the thickets nigh;

Gray is the smoke where the ruffed grouse die.

There’s blackened shell in the trampled fern

When the white moon swims the sky.

The number of the poets of the Second Renaissance is legion. Amongst

them are Arthur S. Bourinot, Gertrude Bartlett, Bernard F. Trotter

(deceased), Arthur L. Phelps, Lucy M. Montgomery-MacDonald, Grace

Blackburn, Beatrice Redpath, Laura E. McCully, Louise Morey Bowman,

Florence Randal Livesay, Norah Holland, Amy Pennington, Carroll C.

Aikins, Wm. A. Creelman, Andrew D. Merkel, Alexander Louis Fraser, Peter

MacLaren MacDonald, Clare Giffen, Erica Selfridge, Charles T. Bruce,

Marian Osborne, H. J. Maclean. It were worth while to review in detail

the work of Arthur S. Bourinot as represented in his _Laurentian Lyrics_

(1915), and _Lyrics From the Hills_ (1923), and Arthur L. Phelps as

represented in his _Poems_ (1921) and _A Bobcaygeon Chapbook_ (1923).

Bourinot attracted attention by his noble and moving sonnet _To The

Memory of Rupert Brooke_ and his tender and musical war lyric

beginning:—

They are not dead, the soldier and the sailor.

But he is also an artist in colorful lyrism of Nature in Canada,

especially of the Laurentian district. Phelps is a refined, perhaps it

were better to say, dainty lyrist; but he has also attempted new forms,

and has been successful with realistic ‘free verse.’ The others, with a

few exceptions, are systematic poets, but are not notable for spiritual

vision or for originality in forms or substance.

It is, however, from the point of view of a fresh vision of earth and

life and of originality in forms and substance that the work of Florence

Randal Livesay, Grace Blackburn, Beatrice Redpath, Louise Morey Bowman,

and Wilson MacDonald must be specially remarked. For their work displays

a distinct advance in modernism over the work of Marjorie Pickthall,

Robert Norwood, and Katherine Hale (earlier manner). In fact, there is

in their work fresh origination in themes, structures, music, and social

ideals. Florence Randal Livesay won distinction by her _Songs of

Ukraina_ (1916). Though formally called translations, they have such

original elements of form and matter that they are no more translations

in the ordinary meaning than is Fitzgerald’s _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_.

Mrs. Livesay’s work in the _Songs of Ukraina_, like that of Fitzgerald,

has a turning of phrase and of imagery and a grace and music which are

all her own and entitle the _Songs_ to the distinction of creative

verse. In 1923 she published _Shepherd’s Purse_. Here her genius

flowered independently in what is essentially spiritual realism. But it

is not a heavy spiritual realism. It exhibits a rare and light fancy for

elusive emotional nuances; and all the poems have a piquancy,

daintiness, and exquisite humanity which win one to the love of the

evanescent beauty that is in all things human. The poems too have an air

of the qualities which are in the _vers de société_ and the ‘Blue China’

poetry of Andrew Lang and Austin Dobson. Mrs. Livesay has made a

genuinely novel contribution to Canadian poetry.

Outstanding in other ways is the verse of Grace Blackburn, Beatrice

Redpath, Louise Morey Bowman, and Wilson MacDonald. There is more

strength and spiritual perceptiveness in the poetry of Grace Blackburn

and Beatrice Redpath than in that of Louise Morey Bowman. All show equal

originality and finish in the technical treatment of their themes, but

Louise Morey Bowman shows at times an airy fancy which is almost so

ethereal as to be altogether abstract and unearthly. On the whole,

exquisite technique is their chief distinction; they are artists.

Wilson MacDonald in his _Songs of the Prairie Land_ (1918) and _The

Miracle Songs of Jesus_ (1921) discloses an absorption in mystical

psychology and psychoanalysis which, by its daring and his method of

suffusing the matter with ingenious and subtilized novelty or beauty of

diction and imagery, adumbrates Goethe of the _Faust_ tradition. It is

at once realistic and ultra-spiritualistic. His technique is just as

original and individualized as the matter of his poems. If any Canadian

has the right to the distinction of possessing _sheer_ creative genius,

that right belongs to Wilson MacDonald as a Seer and as an Artist

working in a field of spiritual vision which he has pre-empted.

* * * * *

Sources of quotations in this chapter:

Marjorie Pickthall—_The Wood Carver’s Wife and Other Poems_ (McClelland

& Stewart: Toronto).

Robert Norwood—_His Lady of the Sonnets_ (McClelland & Stewart:

Toronto).

Katherine Hale—_The White Comrade_ (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto);

_Morning in the West_ (Ryerson Press: Toronto).

Lloyd Roberts—_England Overseas_ (Elkin Mathews: London).

CHAPTER XXI

Fiction Writers

THE COMMUNITY NOVEL—MONTGOMERY—KEITH—MCCLUNG—LE ROSSIGNOL.

INSTITUTIONAL FICTION—PACKARD—SULLIVAN—DUNCAN—WALLACE AND

OTHERS. REALISTIC ROMANCE—SERVICE—CODY—STEAD, ETC. HISTORICAL

FICTION—SNIDER—ANISON NORTH—TESKEY—MCKISHNIE—COONEY.

IMAGINATIVE FICTION—PICKTHALL—MACKAY. MISCELLANEOUS TYPES—

MCKISHNIE—SULLIVAN—HÉMON—SIME. THE NEW REALISM—SALVERSON—DE

LA ROCHE—CORNELL, ETC.

1. _The Community Novel._

Until the ‘nineties’ the production of Canadian fiction had been

spasmodic and scattered, but the success of Gilbert Parker, Marshall

Saunders, and other Canadian writers who gained a hearing first in lands

alien to their own, and whose work came back to Canada ‘with an

alienated majesty,’ proved that Canada was rich in literary material.

The first decade of the twentieth century saw a marked increase in

fiction writing in Canada. The new writers were influenced not only by

the example of their compatriots but by that of the fiction writers of

Great Britain and the United States. They began to realize that life

around them was as interesting as Barrie’s Thrums or Bret Harte’s

California. There was, too, a growing reading public ready to appreciate

stories that presented the adventure, the humor, and the pathos of the

daily life of themselves, their neighbors, or their fellow-Canadians in

other parts of the country and sometimes of other racial origins.

Hence arose the Community Novel or type of story. One of the earlier

examples is Adeline M. Teskey’s _Where the Sugar Maple Grows_ (1901). In

telling of the origin of this book, Miss Teskey wrote that when reading

Ian MacLaren’s _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_ she said within herself,

‘I know just as interesting people in Canada.’ Her sketches of village

characters, depicted with a homely but effective simplicity of style,

showed that she was right. A delightfully humorous novel of Cranfordian

flavor, _The Specimen Spinster_, by Kate Westlake Yeigh, (1906), essayed

a larger canvas instead of the smaller etchings and gave an insight into

the social relationships of the rural village.

The year 1908 may be said to mark the real beginning of the Second

Renaissance in Canadian fiction, for in that year there were published

three novels of the Community type—_Anne of Green Gables_, by L. M.

Montgomery; _Duncan Polite_, by Marian Keith; _Sowing Seeds in Danny_,

by Nellie L. McClung. There appeared also a charming collection of short

tales, _Little Stories of Quebec_, by James Le Rossignol. This date is

still further significant as the year in which Marjorie Pickthall

published her first important short story, _La Tristesse_, in _The

Atlantic Monthly_, although her work differs greatly in setting and

artistic method from the fiction of the Community type.

L. M. Montgomery was born at Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and spent

her childhood in Cavendish, a seashore farming settlement which figures

as ‘Avonlea’ in her stories. That her life has been spent chiefly within

the limits of the little island province and the bounds of an Ontario

country parish does not narrow her outlook although she confines herself

to themes bounded by rural experiences, for her forte is the portrayal

of what she has seen and knows. She has imaginative and creative gifts,

but she uses these in enabling us to see the beauty, the humour, and the

pathos that lies about our daily paths.

_Anne of Green Gables_, her first novel, has an interesting history.

Upon being asked for a short serial story for a Sunday School weekly,

she cast about for a plot idea. A faded note book entry suggested:

‘Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy; a girl is sent to

them.’ The writing of a serial was started, but time did not allow the

author to complete it for the purpose intended. As she brooded over the

theme it began to expand and the result was a book which may be

confidently labelled a ‘Canadian classic.’

In Anne we have an entirely new character in fiction, a high-spirited,

sensitive girl, with a wonderfully vivid imagination; wise beyond her

years, outspoken and daring: not always good but always lovable. Her

longing for a real home, and an interest in her very quaintness, ends in

her being established as a member of the Green Gables family. It is Anne

who dominates the whole story. There are other characters, quaint too,

and well-drawn, but the introduction of Anne into the community—Anne,

so unconventional so imaginative, and so altogether different from the

staid, prosaic, general attitude of the neighbourhood—proves to be the

invasion of a peculiar ferment, and the incidents which discover the

process of fermentation are most delightfully odd and mirth-provoking.

_Anne of Avonlea_ follows the career of the orphan heroine and deals

with two eventful years of school teaching. Miss Montgomery understands

children thoroughly and makes her child characters of all types

perfectly natural and lifelike. The same creative faculty which gave us

in Anne an entirely new shadow-child shows itself in the portrayal of

the mischievous but lovable Davy Keith, his demure twin sister Dora, the

imaginative Paul Irving, and the many individualities of the pupils of

Avonlea School.

Plot interest is not a strong feature of this or of any of L. M.

Montgomery’s novels. There are, nevertheless, several threads of action

which bind together the series of incidents and secure continuity and

unity. The nature descriptions reveal at once the author’s intimacy with

nature and her poetic attitude of mind.

Here is a typical passage:—

A September day on Prince Edward Island hills; a crisp wind

blowing up over the sand dunes from the sea; a long, red road,

winding through fields and woods, now looping itself about a

corner of thick set spruce, now threading a plantation of young

maples with great feathery sheets of ferns beneath them, now

dipping down into a hollow where a brook flashed out of the

woods and into them again, now basking in the open sunshine

between ribbons of goldenrod and of myriads of crickets.

_Chronicles of Avonlea_, a volume of short stories, contains some of her

most finished work, showing that perfect art that conceals all art, and

abounding in a strong vein of simple humour that is found in all her

work.

_The Story Girl_ and _The Golden Road_ are written with even less

attention to a central plot than the earlier ‘Anne’ books. They are

somewhat loosely connected series of incidents in which the same

characters take part. But the community type of fiction does not demand

thrilling plots. Other writers can write plot stories, but most other

writers do not hold before us the mirror of Canadian country life.

_Kilmeny of the Orchard_ is in a sense but an expanded short story. It

is a prose love idyll and does not, perhaps, bulk very large when

compared with the other books. It is really one of the extended

‘chronicles’ of Avonlea.

The story of Anne Shirley continues through several volumes—_Anne of

the Island_ pictures her college days; _Anne’s House of Dreams_ sees her

established as mistress of her own home; while _Rilla of Ingleside_

carries over the history into the second generation, Rilla being the

daughter of Anne. There is no new development of method or treatment in

these. In _Emily of New Moon_ (1923) Miss Montgomery created a new child

character, with a new environment, new conditions, and a new group of

minor personages, yet in effect it is of the same type and in the same

literary field as her previous novels. The chief difference to be

observed is that she employs a more analytic psychological method in

depicting her heroine—a method that tends to produce an adult’s story

of youth. In a way it marks an advance in literary technique but is not

as yet entirely divorced from that minute objective observation which

makes equal appeal to the young in years and the young in heart.

The particular type of rural community which is the background of Marian

Keith’s stories may be duplicated in many parts of Canada and is quite

common in older Ontario—a community originally settled by Scottish

Presbyterians and afterwards leavened with just enough English and Irish

to throw into relief the chief characteristics of each nationality.

One cannot escape the fact of a marked similarity to the work of J. M.

Barrie in his tales of Thrums. There is, however, this difference:

Barrie is more restrained in his emotions, more abbreviated and less

poetic in his descriptions, more pawky and less boisterous in his humor;

in fine, Barrie is Scotch, Marian Keith is Scottish-Canadian.

As in most novels of the community type, the interest lies in incident

and characterization. The noblest character of all her stories, the best

drawn, is the grand old mystic Highlander, ‘Duncan Polite,’ the

spiritual watchman of Glenoro. The incidents of this story are woven

mainly around the path of the young minister, while the other Glenoro

novels centre about the personages of chief interest in a rural

community—_Silver Maple_, the school teacher; _Treasure Valley_, the

young doctor. _The End of the Rainbow_ and _The Bells of St. Stephens_

are studies of town life. _Lizbeth of the Dale_ and _In Orchard Glen_

are character studies of a boy and a girl respectively. The same

qualities prevail in all these. _Little Miss Melody_ builds an engaging

picture of the community of Cherry Hill around a fresh and original

young girl character. The keynote of Marian Keith’s stories is

‘service.’ Her work as a whole gives a faithful picture of the social

and religious life of a certain type of rural Canadian settlement, and

Canadian town.

Mrs. McClung’s ‘community’ depicted in _Sowing Seeds in Danny_ was a

little western town, with certain elements of the usual population

crossing its pages. The poor immigrant girl, the young English gentleman

learning to farm, the doctor, the preacher, the would-be politician are

faithfully portrayed. Most interesting of all is Mrs. Watson, the

hard-working washerwoman and her family of nine children. The fortunes

of Pearlie Watson are the theme of a sequel, _The Second Chance_, in

which the setting in a rural settlement, while _The Black Creek Stopping

House_ is a collection of short stories. Later the career of Pearl

Watson is continued in _Purple Springs_, but this novel shades into a

sort of politico-propagandist treatise. Human interest and news quality

with a ready-made style to correspond has caught the public interest in

Mrs. McClung’s work rather than any conspicuous artistry of method.

2. _The Institutional Novel._

From looking at the life of fixed communities or localities, the next

step is to consider them in their relation to what we might call certain

‘institutions’ of our national life, growth, or conditions. We saw that

R. E. Knowles in _St. Cuthbert’s_ made the Scottish Presbyterian Church

the dominating influence of that story. In this sense, the life of the

railroad or construction camp is an ‘institutional’ rather than a local

or community life. This has been excellently portrayed by Frank L.

Packard in his collection of short stories, _On the Iron at Big Cloud_:

Alan Sullivan’s _The Passing of Oul-I-But_ contains some splendid

stories of this type. Here also we would place the sea stories of Norman

Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.

Norman Duncan’s peculiar field is the ragged coasts and savage seas of

Newfoundland and the hard, cruel, tempest-battered life of the

Newfoundland fisherman. When _The Way of the Sea_ was published (1904),

Frank T. Bullen, himself a master-maker of sea stories, wrote in a

foreword: ‘I am absolutely certain that with the exception of Joseph

Conrad and Rudyard Kipling no writing about the sea has ever probed so

deeply and so faithfully into its mysteries as his.’ Duncan’s fidelity

to his subject appears not only in his truthful description of the life

and way of the sea, but even more in his realization and presentation of

the religious side of the Newfoundland fishermen—whose stern creed was

born out of a never-ceasing struggle for existence.

Norman Duncan, although he produced several novels, of which _Dr. Luke

of the Labrador_ is the most artistically constructed, is essentially a

writer of short stories. Indeed, some of his novels were made simply by

piecing together, with connecting material, stories that had first

appeared in magazine form. As a short story writer he exhibits the

finest and most desirable qualities—substantial character foundation,

economy of language, sufficiency of emotional causation, and a breadth

of human sympathy. His _Battles Royal Down North_ and _Harbor Tales Down

North_ are two collections of a high order of excellence. His power to

portray action makes his juvenile books—such as _Billy Topsail and

Company_—very acceptable to the youthful mind.

Frederick William Wallace writes chiefly of Nova Scotia sailors and deep

sea fishermen. He is more objective in his treatment of themes than is

Duncan. While Wallace’s gift may be said to lie in his skill in

producing vivid visualizations of seamanship, Duncan’s lies in realizing

seamen. Wallace observes and describes the life of the sailor and the

fisherman; Duncan realizes and interprets the soul. Consequently in

_Blue Water_ (1920), _The Shacklocker_ (a collection of short stories),

and _The Viking Blood_, have much more plot and action to them than have

Norman Duncan’s novels and short stories; but they are not so intimate

and convincing in character analysis, neither are they so careful nor so

finished in their technique—the two styles are quite in harmony with

the differing methods of treatment.

Commercial life in its sociological relationships falls under our

definition of an ‘institutional’ aspect of national life. Here must be

placed Alan Sullivan’s _The Inner Door_ which reveals inside conditions

and labor problems in connection with the operation of a large rubber

factory; also his story of the somewhat spectacular development of a

chain of allied industries at a strategic point for power and for raw

material—told in _The Rapids_.

There are, in this period, some notable examples of Incidental

Literature. Louis Hémon, a native of France, lived but a short time in

Canada, yet wrote, in _Maria Chapdelaine_, (English translations by W.

H. Blake and by Sir Andrew Macphail), a chastely poetic novel of French

Canadian life. Miss J. G. Sime in _Our Little Life_ presents, if we view

it from one angle, a meticulous study of the life of a Montreal

seamstress, with her pathetically frustrate love story; but more than

all that, _Our Little Life_ is an observation of the life of the

Canadian people by an English mind. The literary artistry of both these

works is indisputable. Some criticism has been aimed at both on the

score of inaccuracy of minor facts. Whether or not there are such minor

inaccuracies, there still remains the grand result that the color, the

atmosphere, the outward semblance, are portrayed as they have scarce

ever been before; that the inmost soul of the characters is

understandingly and consistently revealed.

Education in its institutional aspect appears in many novels only

incidentally. As a dominant motive or a circumscribing setting its

development is comparatively recent. _Miriam of Queen’s_, by Lilian Vaux

Mackinnon (1921), shows the molding influence of university life; _The

Hickory Stick_, by Nina Moore Jamieson (1921), emphasises the place and

importance of the rural school in rural life and problems; the great

school novels of English literature find a modified echo in the boarding

school stories of Ethel Hume Bennett and Gordon Hill Grahame—_Judy of

York Hill_ (1922), by the former, in which dialogue, action and

atmosphere contribute effectively in conveying a picture of a girls’

school; _Larry, or the Avenging Terrors_ (1923), by the latter, a boys’

boarding school story of lively incident.

3. _The Realistic Romance._

The rapid expansion of the far West and such spectacular events as the

‘Klondike rush,’ gave a sort of feverish color to a life that previously

had appeared one of toil, hardship, and stony endurance. Viewed

imaginatively, that life now presented its hectic side, and the far West

and the high North were exploited as literary fields of thrill,

adventure, and excitement. Thus the second decade of this century saw

the rise in Canada of the Realistic Romance. At its best this class of

novel resembles the Community type but is speeded up with a more

exciting and more complicated plot; at its worst it is lurid melodrama

with realism interpreted as the portrayal of the sordid and seamy side

of life. Very few of the realistic romances exhibit any distinction of

manner and style. They are not concerned with the niceties of the art of

telling a story but with the ability to keep the reader constantly keyed

up to a high emotional tensity.

_The Trail of ’98_, by Robert W. Service (1910), is a story of the

Yukon, with the spectacular elements of gold-rush days fully emphasised.

The qualities of Service’s poetry are accentuated in his fiction. In the

same year H. A. Cody began his career as a novelist with another Yukon

tale, _The Frontiersman_. It is a story of love, adventure, and

missionary experience. _Rod of the Lone Patrol_ followed in 1912, adding

a new fictional element which has been much exploited—the doings of the

North West Mounted Police. Cody produced a long series of adventure

novels with a variety of settings.

Other writers of the Realistic Romance speedily developed different

aspects of Western life or staged their romances in different regions of

the Great West or the Far North. We have room only for brief mention of

some of the best known writers in this class.

Robert Stead’s novels are chiefly of the prairie farm and ranch—_The

Bail Jumper_ (1914), _The Homesteader_, _The Cowpuncher_, _Dennison

Grant_, _Neighbors_. He is effective in reproducing the atmosphere of

the prairie, the details of farm and ranch life, and characteristic bits

of scenery; his stories are stronger in incident and action than they

are in characterization.

Robert Watson began fairly well with _My Brave and Gallant Gentleman_

(1918), a romance of England and British Columbia, that had touches of

Borrow and Stevenson, but his later efforts have tended to cast

themselves into more stereotyped forms. Robert A. Hood produced two

adventure-romances of British Columbia, _The Chivalry of Keith

Leicester_ and _The Quest of Alistair_. Douglas Durkin exploited

Manitoba in _The Lobstick Trail_. ‘Luke Allan’ (Lacey Amy) wrote several

stories of cowboy life of which _Blue Pete: Half Breed_ was significant

because of the originality and individuality of its leading character.

John Murray Gibbon’s earlier fiction—in _Drums Afar_ and _Hearts and

Faces_—was English in its setting and concerned with psychological

problems and studies of Oxford life. In transferring to an American

literary habitat, he entered the ranks of the Realistic Romancers. His

novel, _The Conquering Hero_, was a lively, melodramatic story of the

Rocky Mountains and British Columbia ranches; while in _Pagan Love_

(1923), he combined a startling mystery with an element of satire on the

modern philosophy of business success.

Theodore Goodridge Roberts, younger brother of Charles G. D. Roberts, is

essentially a story teller and much of his fiction shows the influence

of Weyman and the historical romanticists of the latter years of the

nineteenth century. His _Brothers in Peril_ (1905), _A Captain of

Raleigh’s_ (1911), and _The Harbor Master_ (1914) are stories of

romantic adventure of very early days in Newfoundland, while _Jess of

the River_, _Rayton_ and _Forest Fugitives_ have a setting in rural New

Brunswick.

4. _Historical Fiction._

The influences that produced the Community Novel gave to the Historical

Fiction of this period a closer up view. Instead of the far-off days of

the French regime, the historical field of vision became that of but a

century or so past and writers essayed to revivify the times and

personages of the War of 1812 or the Rebellion of 1837. A noteworthy

example is C. H. J. Snider’s stories of the naval engagements on the

Great Lakes, _In the Wake of the Eighteen-Twelvers_. With fine

recreative imagination he enables us to live through incidents of

daring, gallantry, and romance of these stirring battles. ‘Anison North’

in _The Forging of the Pikes_ gives a realistic picture of Toronto of

’37, of the battle of Montgomery’s Tavern, and a pen-portrait of the

rebel leader, Mackenzie. She lets us see ‘both sides of the story’ of

the conditions that were responsible for the Rebellion.

A minor species of the Historical Novel is found in the novel of pioneer

life which seeks to put into a permanent record pioneer experiences and

conditions of sometimes considerably less than a century ago. Adeline M.

Teskey did this for the Niagara Peninsula and the building of the first

Welland Canal with _In Candlelight Days_ (1914). Archie McKishnie told

of the conflict of the ‘bushwhacker,’ who delighted in the freedom of

the woods and streams, with the incoming tide of settlement in _Love of

the Wild_, drawing upon the historic figure of Colonel Talbot for some

of his characterization. Anison North blends a colorful picture of the

enjoyment of outdoor life with a pioneer line fence feud in her

_Carmichael_. In _Kinsmen_ Percival J. Cooney relates a strange story of

Scottish feudalism—an example of the clan system with its autocratic

laird—which actually existed in Canada.

Few Canadian writers have found leisure to follow the example of Gilbert

Parker in writing Historical Fiction in Old World settings, but this has

quite recently been done in a highly distinctive style in novels

appearing over the signature—‘E. Barrington.’ _The Ladies_,

semi-historical stories of the eighteenth century; _The Chaste Diana_, a

story of Polly Peacham of ‘Beggar’s Opera’ fame; _The Divine Lady_

(1924) tells the love-story of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton.

5. _Imaginative Fiction._

In one sense all fiction is imaginative. There is, however, a species in

which pure imagination plays a much greater part than in the Community

Novel, in Historical Fiction, or in the other types discussed in this

chapter. Marjorie Pickthall’s work is the highest example of this. She

wrote, not with the reproductive imagination nor with fancy, but with

the faculty defined by Matthew Arnold as imaginative reason. Into the

texture of her fiction she wove poetic imagination and poetic

significance derived from her clear, absolute, and sympathetic

understanding of the human heart and of the hidden springs and the

meaning of existence, from her superior and inclusive sympathetic

intelligence. Thus she was enabled to write stories of the most varied

settings and of the most wildly differing characters with equal

convincingness.

_Little Hearts_ (1915), is an engaging tale of the days of ‘Bonnie

Prince Charlie’ with its conflict chiefly between loyalty to the Crown,

and fidelity to the spirit of humanity. It pictures ‘little hearts,’ men

of small fortunes, and small (as the world sees it) ambitions, in their

pathetic existence, more pathetic because of finely brave in the midst

of many both petty and heroic vicissitudes of fortune, of mean victory

and noble defeat. The novel preaches no didactic moral but it silently

teaches Christ’s philosophy of struggle and defeat—‘He that loseth his

life shall find it.’ It impresses unforgettably how little after all are

the greatest hearts, and how little we lose or gain in any defeat or

triumph which is merely earthly defeat or triumph.

_The Bridge_ (1922), has the same theme, with the pain and cruelty of

love, of unfulfilled seeking, and the final triumph of a soul that saved

itself by losing itself in inward self-knowledge and self-sacrifice. It

is set against a background of the tremendous beauty of the Great Lakes,

scenes of storm on land and water. Technically, it is farther from

perfection than _Little Hearts_; it has less structural unity, less

smoothness of style. At times the emotional situations seem overdrawn;

nor are atmosphere and setting definitively localized.

The collection of short stories—_Angel’s Shoes_ (1922)—embodies

examples of Miss Pickthall’s perfect artistry as a short story writer.

These stories are clear, vivid, colorful, and of almost the highest type

of creative imagination. They may lack, occasionally, a warmth of

humanity that is present in the work of other writers of poorer

craftsmanship.

Less distinctive but belonging to the few Canadian novels of this class

is _The Window Gazer_, by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, a romance of a man

who ‘fell in love with his wife.’ Blended with the characteristics of

the novel of pure imagination there are here slight touches of the

Realistic Romance and the Community Novel. A somewhat curious literary

phenomena is found in _Mists of the Morning_ by this same writer, which

began in the style of the Imaginative Novel and ended as a Realistic

Romance.

6. _Some Miscellaneous Types._