writer who approaches the subject in a new way. The attitude was
apparent in the nature passages of _Gaff Linkum_ (1907) and became more
a quality of Archie McKishnie’s work as he continued to write short
stories and novels of animal life. We find it crystallized in _Openway_
(1923). Roberts is the intellectual animal psychologist; Thompson Seton,
the literary scientist; W. A. Fraser, the objective story teller; but
Archie McKishnie impresses us with the sense of his comradeship with the
creatures of the marsh, the wood, and the stream. He is their
interpreter but not as an outside observer. He lives with them, loves
them, protects them. Thus when he writes animal stories he rises to his
best literary style and achieves a beauty and smoothness that is not
always found in his other writing.
The detective story is represented by a series of ‘underground’ stories
by Arthur Stringer; a typical example is _The Wire Tappers_. The setting
is a large American city, and rapidity of action is the desired and
supplied element. More Canadian in setting and atmosphere are Victor
Lauriston’s _The Twenty-First Burr_ and Hopkins Moorhouse’s _The
Gauntlet of Alceste_, both well-constructed according to the
requirements of this type of fiction, concealing the mystery motive
skilfully up to a surprising climactic finish.
The religions and philosophies of the Orient find a slight reflection in
some Canadian poetry. In fiction, the stories and novels of L. Adams
Beck—_The Ninth Vibration_, _The Key of Dreams_, _The Perfume of the
Rainbow_, _The Treasure of Ho_—are chiefly Oriental in themes and
settings, and mark the author as an interpreter of the mysteries of the
East, with an unusual beauty and originality of style.
Arthur Stringer’s trilogy of the prairie—_The Prairie Wife_, _The
Prairie Mother_, _The Prairie Child_—is remarkable as a study in
feminine psychology and the reactions of problems of prairie life upon a
feminine mind in its domestic and personal associations. The first
volume in the trilogy is the most impressive because of its spontaneity,
its subtle touches of color and atmosphere. The modern double-triangle
element dominates and rather detracts from the originality and
individuality of the latter volumes, but the series is significant as an
advance from the realistic romance toward a newer realism.
7. _The New Realism._
It was but natural that a reaction should set in against the realistic
romance with its insufficiency of motivation and its lack of fidelity to
real life. Rather remarkably this arrives in another ten-year cycle and
a group of novels published in 1923 show a marked similarity of method
and treatment, with widely varied themes and settings. We distinguish
this fresh and original attitude as the ‘New Realism’ in Canadian
fiction. The strongest of these novels undoubtedly is _The Viking Heart_
by Laura Goodman Salverson. It might be called the epic of the Icelander
in Canada, describing as it does the arrival of a party of immigrants in
1870 and following their struggles, hardships, and gradual rise of
fortunes to the present day. There is no plot but such as grows out of
the record of the lives of the characters. There is no melodrama, but
there is the tense drama of the realities of life. The style is chaste,
simple, but forceful. Back of it all lies a big theme—‘the price of
country’—the realization of citizenship through toil, tears, blood, and
sacrifice.
The other novels in this group are: _Possession_, by Mazo de la Roche,
with its setting a Niagara fruit farm; _Lantern Marsh_, by Beaumont
Cornell, following a farm boy through his struggles for an education;
_Cattle_, by Onoto Watanna, an almost brutally realistic presentation of
a man whose sole aim in life was the acquirement of cattle—as a form of
wealth—whose whole outlook on life was measured in terms of cattle;
_The Child’s House_, by Marjory MacMurchy, which enters into the heart
and mind of a growing little girl.
The importance of this movement is that it has cast aside
superficialities, that these writers have somehow been able to ‘see
things as they are,’ to glimpse the realities of life from their real
beginnings—four of the five novels named are actually rooted in ‘the
soil’ as their setting and their underlying spiritual foundation. With
this foundation of actuality and truth, the writers have gained a
clearer and more finished expression. Some of these novels have
melodramatic spots; some have other weaknesses, but, on the whole, the
effect of this new movement has been to produce novels that have a
definite structural unity, that are largely free from irrelevant and
insignificant detail, that are written with an economy and aptness of
language, and that have more definiteness and depth to their basic
themes.
CHAPTER XXII
The Poetic Dramatists
THE POETIC DRAMATISTS OF THE SECOND RENAISSANCE—ARTHUR STRINGER—
ROBERT NORWOOD—MARJORIE PICKTHALL, AND OTHERS.
Arthur stringer, novelist and lyric poet, showed versatility and
considerable power in imaginative construction when, in 1903, he
published a volume of two dramatic poems or soliloquies and one poetic
drama, all on classical themes in blank verse; namely, _Hephaestus_,
_Persephone at Enna_, and _Sappho in Leucadia_. In these works, however,
Stringer was indulging an ‘avocation;’ for his genius is at its best in
lyrical verse and prose fiction. _Hephaestus_ and _Persephone_, even
though they are written in blank verse, have all the color, music, and
emotion which we associate with lyrical poetry. _Sappho in Leucadia_,
though dramatic in form, is undramatic in movement, and is lyrical in
spirit. For at the beginning Sappho, the ‘bird-throated child of
Lesbos,’ has resolved to destroy herself by leaping into the sea, and
Phaon’s only role is the attempt of a lover to dissuade her, but to no
avail. The so-called ‘drama’ is but a series of colloquies between
Sappho and Phaon. The only ‘movement’ is a psychological development in
three stages—first, the original intention on Sappho’s part to destroy
herself; then the arrested intention; and, finally, the intention
fulfilled, in spite of Phaon’s pleading, by Sappho leaping to her death.
What Stringer has really done in _Sappho in Leucadia_ is to take a Greek
legend and to tell the simple episode of Sappho’s death, in colorful,
musical, and artistic blank verse. There is no emotional poignancy in
it; nothing for the heart and the moral imagination. It is all for the
aesthetic sensibility, for the lover of sensuous imagery and melody.
Oddly its single lyrical interlude or ‘song’ is not in ‘Sapphics,’ but
is an octave in trimeters. The sensuous beauty of color and music in
this quasi-poetic drama is exemplified in the following speech by
Sappho:—
For like a god you seemed in those glad days
Of droning wings and languorous afternoons,
When close beside the murmuring sea we walked.
Then did the odorous summer ocean seem
A meadow green where foam one moment flowered
And then was gone, and ever came again,
A thousand bloom-burdened Springs in one!
—How like a god you seemed to me; and I
Was then most happy, and at little things
We lightly laughed, and oftentimes we plunged
Waist-deep and careless in the cool green waves,
As Tethys once and Oceanus played
Upon the golden ramparts of the world.
Then would we rest, and muse upon the sands, . . .
And on the dunes the thin green ripples lisped
Themselves to sleep and sails swung dreamily
Where azure islands floated on the air.
Then did your body seem a temple white. . . .
The bloom of youth was on your sunburnt cheek,
The streams of life sang thro’ your violet veins,
The midnight velvet of your tangled hair
Lured, as a twilight rill . . . . . . . . . . .
Stringer’s _Sappho in Leucadia_ is an engaging and even impressive
dramatic colloquy, but it is not an authentic poetic or closet drama. It
has sensuous beauty but no spiritual power. But it does increase
Stringer’s reputation as a verbal colorist and melodist.
In 1915 appeared an original poet of distinct spiritual power in lyrical
and dramatic forms. He was Robert Norwood. His first book was a
sonnet-sequence. But in 1916 he published a poetic drama, _The Witch of
Endor: A Tragedy_; and in 1919, another poetic drama, _The Man of
Kerioth_. In 1921 he published _Bill Boram_, which is a ‘dramatic tale.’
Robert Norwood has two natural gifts. More than any other Canadian poet
he has an innate genius for the philosophical or mystical interpretation
of good and evil in the universe. Also, he is gifted with acute insight
into the inner heart of man and woman, ancient and modern. These two
gifts fit him for the office of the kind of poet who by imaginative
sympathy perceives the ultimate harmony of the universe, the spiritual
meaning of the tragedy and comedy of existence. As a poetic dramatist,
then, Norwood is a Seer; and his voice is the voice of a Prophet. Power
over the heart and imagination of the people, not Beauty and Art for
art’s sake, is his aim. If he is the Poet of Beauty, as he is in all his
verse, lyrical and dramatic, he is more, or supremely, the Poet of
Spiritual Vision and Power in his poetic dramas.
In _The Witch of Endor_ Norwood returns to the Biblical theme which had
engaged Heavysege—the love romance and tragedy of King Saul. The
characters are never shadowy but always alive. The dramatic movement is
never held up by long or digressive moralizing speeches, as in
Heayysege’s _Saul_, but each character makes his speeches according to
the dramatic necessity, enough and no more, thus permitting at ‘the
psychological moment’ the natural entrance of another character and his
speech. The structure is logically developed to the tragic or spiritual
climax. But in the development there is no uniform level of emotion,
rather the emotion varies from gentle or pathetic to intense or tragic.
It is indeed in its profounder imaginative vision, its more varying and
rising degrees of emotional intensity, and its more logical structural
development to a climax that _The Witch of Endor_ has more incisive and
compelling power as poetic drama than Campbell’s Arthurian drama
_Mordred_. In short, _The Witch of Endor_ is a beautiful and spiritual
poetic drama—purging the emotions of pity and fear and transporting the
spirit to the Mount of Vision where it sees intuitively how the ways of
God to man are justified and how Love is greater than Faith and Hope.
In his next poetic drama _The Man of Kerioth_ (that is, Judas Iscariot)
Norwood made an advance in imaginative vision, construction, and power.
He achieves this by reducing the magniloquence of the speeches and by
modernly humanizing the characters of Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen,
Blind Bartimaeus, Philip, and Jesus the Carpenter. He even introduces
little children into the drama. The high and the vulgar and lowly,
saints and sinners, the motley of society in Jerusalem, commingle
intimately and humanly. There is a distinct advance in realistic truth
of characterization, and the whole drama is pervaded with a winning
naturalness and humanity which are not in any preceding poetic drama by
a Canadian, nor even in his own succeeding ultra-realistic ‘dramatic
tale of the sea,’ _Bill Boram_. So that in respect of creation
thoroughly humanized, noble, and clearly limned
character-portraiture—as, for instance, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen,
and Jesus—Norwood must be ranked as the supreme creator amongst
Canadian poetic dramatists. This is a matter of sheer artistry. But
Norwood also shows an advance in spiritual power. With profounder
mystical vision and greater truth he justifies the ways of God to man,
and exalts the spirit to the Temple pinnacle where we behold Immortal
Love in all its sweet beauty of humanity and in all its white radiance
of redeeming light. In _The Man of Kerioth_ he attains his acme in
spiritual beauty and power as a poetic dramatist.
So far Norwood had not created any poetic drama with a definitively
Canadian theme, setting, and characters. In his _Bill Boram_, which is a
‘dramatic tale’ told in the third person, the characters and the action
being ‘reported,’ Norwood made a fresh, novel, and impressive
contribution to original Canadian Literature. In doing so Norwood
dropped somewhat in imaginative truth and dramatic invention; but he
rose to greater heights of mystical perception and spiritual power. The
theme of _Bill Boram_ is the redemption of the human spirit by the love
of beauty in Nature. Ingenious as his conception is, Norwood committed
the error of conceiving the accident of a love of flowers, that is to
say, of sensuous beauty, as a possible redemptive force in human life.
He would have us believe that the love of sensuous beauty can transmute
itself or become transmuted into an altogether different kind of love,
namely, the love of spiritual beauty and thus regenerate a coarse and
brutal nature and remake it into a noble and refined spirit. Such
spiritual metabolism is impossible, and _Bill Boram_ so far forth lacks
imaginative truth and dramatic power.
Aside from that, _Bill Boram_, on the whole, is a novel achievement in
dramatic narrative. The characters are vividly and veraciously drawn;
they have realistic truth. There is also an air of romance in the whole
tale, such an air of vital romance as obtains in the tales and novels of
the sea by Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.
Summarily; Norwood’s _Bill Boram_ is an amazing dramatic picture of rude
characters in a setting of romance colored by a strange and startling
commingling of coarse speech and brutalized deed and of beautiful
diction and exquisite imagery. It is at once a _tour de force_ in
dramatic conception and construction and in impressionistic
word-painting. Yet it is a powerful presentation of the idea of the
mystical union of the human spirit with the divine through the love of
pure beauty in Nature.
The Second Renaissance is noted also for the work of several other
poetic dramatists. Amongst them are Dr. James B. Dollard, author of
_Clontarf: An Irish National Drama_; Rev. Dean Llwyd, author of _The
Vestal Virgin_; John L. Carleton, author of _The Medieval Hun; A
Historical Drama_, and _The Crimson Wing_, which has the distinction of
having been the winner of the first prize for original dramatic
composition in the Canadian Prize Play Competition, 1918; Norah Holland,
author of _When Half Gods Go and Other Poems_ (1924), the title-poem of
which has been repeated as a Christmas play for several successive
seasons. These are all respectable poetic dramas and give distinction
both to the quantity and the quality of poetic drama in the Second
Renaissance.
But this work in poetic drama is, after all, not inspired impressing one
as a stint in creation, and is not at all comparable to the work of
Norwood in imaginative vision, artistic construction, and dramatic
power. Comparable, however, with Norwood’s and superior to it in
spiritual poignancy is the single poetic drama left by Marjorie
Pickthall. Though Norwood’s poetic dramas contain lyrical interludes,
and though his dramatic tale _Bill Boram_ is for the most part rhymed,
on the whole they are in blank verse. But Miss Pickthall’s single poetic
drama _The Wood Carver’s Wife_ is lyrical through and through, and is
properly to be denoted as ‘lyric drama.’ In form this lyric drama stands
midway between Stringer’s dramatic poems and Norwood’s poetic dramas. In
that respect Marjorie Pickthall made a novel contribution to Canadian
poetic literature.
_The Wood Carver’s Wife_ was first published in _The University
Magazine_ in 1920. It was reprinted, along with other fugitive poems, in
1922, the drama supplying the title poem of the volume. _The Wood
Carver’s Wife_ has four characters, one of whom is Shagonas, an Indian
lad who represents Nemesis. It is set in the time of the Intendant. The
theme is ‘the eternal triangle’—a girl-wife, with a husband still alive
and a secret lover. The mood of the drama is the tragedy which follows
the sin of disloyalty to the sacrament of marriage, even if the
disloyalty is only in the heart and never openly expressed in
clandestine meeting between the wife and the lover. The mood of the
dramatist, however, is not one of simply illustrating the law that the
‘soul that sinneth it shall die,’ but of wistfulness about the ways of
God to men and women when spiritual unmating is permitted by Heaven. The
dramatist _seems_ to put her own feeling about the matter into her
drama. She seems to feel that if the moral law is inexorable, it ought
not to be so in the case of a young girl who innocently, or without
knowing her own heart and what she was doing, married a man, who, after
all, did not want her as an end in herself, or her spirit for its own
sake, but to have her as a model for the statue of the Blessed Virgin he
was creating in wood, as a chattel in his studio. Humanly, Marjorie
Pickthall felt that the girl-wife was more sinned against than sinning
when she allowed herself to be conscious—merely conscious—of the
lover. But Marjorie Pickthall, with loyalty to the dramatic necessities,
though with a spiritual wistfulness all the while, constructed the
action and movement of _The Wood Carver’s Wife_ so that the tragic
ending was inevitable. For the husband knows that there is a secret
lover, and Shagonas knows, and at the tragic climax it is the arrow of
the Indian, representing the moral law, that sends the lover to his
death. The girl-wife knows what has happened, because she has heard the
twang of Shagonas’ bow-string. The tragedy is complete when she receives
from Shagonas, who is again Nemesis, the sword of her lover, and dies
with a mad speech on her lips, while at the same time the husband, also
mad, as he was from the beginning, has Shagonas pose the beautiful dead
body of the girl-wife that he may put the acme touches to his statue.
How easily the dramatist might have made certain shifts which would have
resulted in reconciliation and a happy ending! But with all her
spiritual wistfulness, Marjorie Pickthall loyally held to the dramatic
and the artistic ideals. The climax and tragic ending are tremendous and
wholly spiritualizing, purging the soul with pity for humanity through
the terror which the action and the denouement awake in the spirit.
There is in it all a spiritual poignancy which does not obtain in
Norwood’s love-tragedy of Saul in _The Witch of Endor_. It is suffused
with a lovely and winning beauty of diction, imagery, and verbal music;
and it contains one lyric ‘cry of a soul’ which for pathos is
unsurpassed in Canadian literature, namely, the Litany of Dorette, the
hapless girl-wife, to the Blessed Virgin Mother beginning,
If you have lain in the night
And felt the old tears run
In their channels worn in the heart,
Pity me, Mary.
Considered critically, then, the poetic dramas of Robert Norwood and the
lyric drama of Marjorie Pickthall are, from the universal point of view,
authentic works of art, originally conceived and beautifully
constructed, and, from the Canadian point of view, are the supreme
achievements in the poetic drama of Canada.
CHAPTER XXIII
Humorists
THE HUMORISTS OF CANADA: PRE-CONFEDERATION—HALIBURTON—HOWE— DE
MILLE—DUVAR—POST-CONFEDERATION—LANIGAN—COTES—DRUMMOND—HAM:
NEW SCHOOL—LEACOCK—DONOVAN—DAVIS—MACTAVISH—McARTHUR—HODGINS.
The name and work of Thomas Chandler Haliburton as a satirist or
humorist so over-shadowed the names and works of other Canadian
humorists that it is a belief, both in foreign countries and in Canada
itself, that the Canadian people have no genius for humor and that,
outside of Haliburton’s satiric writings, there is no significant
Canadian humorous literature. All this is superstition and has been
perpetuated in two ways. No Canadian literary historian has remarked the
existence of other Canadian humorists, save Haliburton, though Mark
Twain in his Library of American Humor has included the work of
Haliburton, De Mille, Lanigan; and, secondly, no Canadian anthologist,
save Lawrence J. Burpee, has collected in a single volume examples of
the work of Canadian humorists.
Pre-Confederation Canadian humor is represented by the work of
Haliburton, Howe, and De Mille. Of these the work of Haliburton is the
significant humor of the period. In general it is satiric, a criticism
of society, aiming to bring about certain reforms. No other Canadian
humorist since Haliburton, not even Leacock, had or has any gifts in
comic characterization. Howe had no satiric purpose. His humor, which
was chiefly in verse, was written ‘for the fun of the thing.’
A native-born Canadian man of letters who has not received his due is
James De Mille, poet, novelist, short story fictionist and humorist. De
Mille, at least in time, anticipated the new type of American humor
which is associated with the name of Mark Twain. For some months before
Mark Twain’s _The Innocents Abroad_ was published (1869), De Mille’s
_The Dodge Club_, or _Italy in 1859_ had appeared. This volume is not to
be confused with De Mille’s _Dodge Club Series_ published in 1871, 1872,
1877 which were humorous and healthful stories for the young. If,
therefore, the humor of Stephen Leacock is essentially a recrudescence
of the American humor which we see in Franklin and in Mark Twain, and if
Leacock read De Mille and Twain, as presumably he did, then the first of
the Leacockians in Canada, to use an anachronism, was De Mille, and he
is ‘the father’ of the later or the 20th century Canadian humorists
beginning with Leacock. For the genius of that _genre_ of humor, as in
De Mille and Twain, is essentially exaggerated nonsense or nonsense said
with a face of seriousness. De Mille’s work does not lend itself to
quotation, but stylistically De Mille’s humorous prose, aside from the
humor itself, is distinctly engaging or readable by virtue of its simple
or popular diction.
Away from the traditional humor of the American or Haliburton style, is
the more delicate imaginative humor of John Hunter-Duvar and the
whimsical humor of Grant Allen. Hunter-Duvar wrote considerable humor in
light ephemeral form and his stories and verse are colored with many
passages of _genre_ humor and satire. The chief basis of his reputation
as a humorist of a distinct and anomalous type is found in his
extraordinarily conceived narrative poem, _The Emigration of the
Fairies_. It deserves wide reading as an example of the pure humor of
fancy. Grant Allen was a novelist and scientist. He published a volume
of light verse, _The Lower Slopes_, in which he indulged his humorous
gifts in a series of satiric and entertaining verses on scientific
themes. It is all essentially the humor of persiflage.
After Haliburton the extraordinary name in Post-Confederation Canadian
humor is George Thomas Lanigan. He was born in the Province of Quebec
and has the distinction of having founded what is now the _Daily Star_,
of Montreal. He was a brilliant journalist and possessed unusual
versatility of invention and style in prose and verse. He had all the
mental gifts, and some of the faults, native to the Keltic temperament.
His ebullient spirits expressed themselves in restless activity and with
as ready brilliancy in verse as in prose.
His prose humor, which was published serially in _The World_, New York,
in the first decade after Confederation, was fresh and novel and
arresting. The series was published in book form under the title _Fables
Out of the World_ (1878) and were to their time what the _Fables in
Slang_ by George Ade are to our time. So compellingly did Lanigan’s
_Fables_ strike the imagination of Mark Twain that he republished seven
of them in his Library of Humor. For the most part, Lanigan’s _Fables_
are satires on the half-truths which constitute popular moral maxims.
They are all mere absurdities, and mere nonsense; but they contain a
larger truth than the maxims they satirize. They are sure to awake a
chuckle. We quote two examples:—
The Merchant of Venice.
A Venetian Merchant who was looking in the lap of luxury was
accosted upon the Rialto by a friend who had not seen him for
many months. ‘How is this?’ cried the latter. ‘When I last saw
you your gaberdine was out at elbows, and now you sail in your
own gondola.’ ‘True,’ replied the Merchant, ‘but since then I
have met with serious losses, and been obliged to compound with
my creditors for ten cents on the dollar.’
Moral.—Composition is the life of trade.
The Honest Newsboy.
A Newsboy was passing along the street, when he chanced to
discover a purse of greenbacks. He was at first inclined to
conceal it, but repelling the unworthy suggestion, he asked a
Venerable Man if it was his’n. The Venerable Man looked at it
hurriedly, said it was, patted him on the head, gave him a
quarter, and said he would yet be president. The Venerable Man
then hastened away, but was arrested for having counterfeit
bills in his possession, while the honest Newsboy played
penny-ante with his humble quarter and ran it up to $2.62.
Moral.—Honesty is sometimes the best policy.
Though Lanigan’s _Fables_ in prose were at that time a new and brilliant
type of humor, it is in his humorous ballads that he surpasses himself,
and because of them he remains unique among Canadian humorists. Some of
his humorous ballads have also been included in anthologies of
_American_ (!) humor, as, for instance, in Roscoe Johnson’s volume,
_Playday Poetry_. The most famous of Lanigan’s humorous ballads is his
egregious piece of persiflage, _The Ahkoond of Swat_. Really, however,
much more humorous are Lanigan’s _The Amateur Orlando_ and _The
Plumber’s Revenge_. Their length prevents quotation here. On account of
its notoriety and the absolute egregiousness of its comic
irresponsibility we select for quotation Lanigan’s _The Ahkoond of
Swat_. To give it color and setting we note briefly the origin of the
verses. According to Mr. Burpee the facts are that ‘one evening, after
learning the fact from the English mail just received, Lanigan announced
that the Akhoond of Swat was dead and that he was writing a poem about
him.’ The verses appeared in the next morning paper. Following is the
text of the _Ahkoond of Swat_:—
What, what, what,
What’s the news from Swat?
Sad news,
Bad news,
Comes by the cable led
Through the Indian Ocean’s bed,
Through the Persian Gulf, the Red
Sea and the Med—
Iterranean—he’s dead;
The Akhoond is dead!
For the Akhoond I mourn,
Who wouldn’t?
He strove to disregard the message stern,
But he Ahkoodn’t.
Dead, dead, dead;
Sorrow Swats!
Swats wha’ hae wi’ Ahkoond bled,
Swats whom he had often led
Onward to a gory bed,
Or to victory,
As the case might be.
Sorrow Swats!
Tears shed,
Shed tears like water,
Your great Ahkoond is dead!
That Swat’s the matter!
Mourn, city of Swat!
Your great Ahkoond is not,
But lain ’mid worms to rot:
His mortal part alone, his soul was caught
(Because he was a good Ahkoond)
Up to the bosom of Mahound.
Though earthly walls his frame surround
(For ever hallowed be the ground!)
And sceptics mock the lowly mound
And say, ‘He’s now of no Ahkound!’
(His soul is in the skies!)
The azure skies that bend above his loved
Metropolis of Swat
He sees with larger, other eyes,
Athwart all earthly mysteries—
He knows what’s Swat.
Let Swat bury the great Ahkoond
With a noise of mourning and of lamentation!
Let Swat bury the great Ahkoond
With the noise of the mourning of the Swattish nation!
Fallen is at length
Its tower of strength,
Its sun had dimmed ere it had nooned:
Dead lies the great Ahkoond.
The great Ahkoond of Swat
Is not.
In passing we may note another Canadian humorous poem of the same type
which has become famous, namely, _Hoch de Kaiser_, which was composed at
a sitting by an _émigré_ Canadian journalist who went sometimes by the
name of Rose and sometimes by the name of Gordon.
We have elsewhere noted the fresh quality of the humor of Mrs. Everard
Cotes (Sarah Jeanette Duncan) and a whole chapter has been devoted to
the poetry of William Henry Drummond as the creator of a new species of
Canadian humor. The great warm Irish heart of Drummond was not fitted to
create satire or mere fun. His humor is based upon a tender sentiment or
what is known as ‘the homely pathetic’ and on a special sense of the
humor in _genre_ characters, particularly the old and the adolescent
_habitant_ of Quebec.
A man quite by himself as a humorist is George Henry Ham, who has not
unfittingly been called ‘the laughing philosopher’ of Canada. Ham’s
humor is essentially the humor of the ‘after-dinner’ or ‘the occasional’
speaker, and is for the most part anecdotal. During a long life he had
acquired an inexhaustible fund of the most humorous anecdotes about
Canadian characters or celebrated men. These were collected and
published in his _Reminiscences of a Raconteur_.
Essentially Ham’s humor is not creative; it is the reproductive humor of
the raconteur; but Ham has added to it by a color and settings of his
own. It is the humor itself and not the style that counts. But while it
is humor and for the most part sheer fun or entertainment, it comes from
a man who has seen many vicissitudes in Canadian life and history and
institutions and who, in his great age, as human life goes, invites us
in his _Reminiscences of a Raconteur_ to look upon life and its
vicissitudes of good and ill fortune with courage, serenity, faith and
hope—and not to fear death. Ham’s humor is distinguished as pleasant
medicine for the soul in the hurly-burly of life and in the
contemplation of having some time to depart from a world that is full of
dear companions and pleasant places.
The next Canadian systematic humorist, though not Canadian-born, is
Stephen Leacock. Haliburton was a creator; he really invented, his
method of satiric humor, or if he did not invent the method, he at least
originally created his comic characters. Leacock, who is ‘a graft on the
Canadian literary tree,’ models his humor considerably after the
American manner. It is satiric burlesque deliberately constructing
around serious character or events extravagant nonsense which is a sort
of criticism of manners and morals of society, but which tends to engage
us more as burlesque than as criticism. Mr. Leacock’s first book was
entitled _Literary Lapses_, published at Montreal in 1910. It was, as
the author’s Preface states, for the most part a collection of sketches
which had before that date appeared in print in various magazines. Two
of the sketches gained the distinction of being reprinted in _Punch_ and
_The Lancet_, London. These were respectively Leacock’s _Boarding House
Geometry_ and _The New Pathology_, the latter of which had the further
distinction of being reprinted in translations in various German
periodicals. His _Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town_ approaches more
closely to the unity of a regular novel than any of his other books and
is the highest example of his art. His style here is personal and
familiar almost to undue flippancy; it is witty and sparkling even to
brilliancy; it is less literary than the material of the _Mariposa
Newspacket_; it is surrounded with an exuberant atmosphere of burlesque.
Yet in _Sunshine Sketches_ he has achieved an unmistakably true
characterization of the average ‘little town’ of Canada—its life and
its people—a life which shows the universal touch that makes the whole
world akin, and at the same time has those narrow, provincial
idiosyncrasies that make it distinctively local and impossible of
portrayal except by one who has lived it. There is here revealed much of
the usually uncovered side of human nature, lit up with a glow of
amusement at the foibles of our fellow-man, but tempered, more than is
usual with Leacock, with a good-natured sympathy.
From 1910 onwards to 1922, when Leacock’s _My Discovery of England_ was
published, the humorist produced a dozen volumes of his special species
of humor and attained a vogue which places him first amongst Canadian
humorists of the 20th century. He works at it brilliantly, sometimes in
the extreme burlesque manner of Mark Twain and sometimes in the quiet,
humble and drier manner of the characteristic English humor which
appears in _Punch_ in its department of ‘Charivaria.’ Unlike Haliburton,
Leacock rather makes the reader behold the humorist himself figuring
away bravely and sometimes futilely, to divert and amuse or entertain.
That is to say, unlike Haliburton’s humor, which had an easy method of
attack and drew attention to itself, Leacock’s humor gives the reader an
impression of its being _strained_, an effort on the humorist’s part
deliberately to make people smile or laugh, whether they will or not. It
is ‘smart,’ as the word is used in Yankee slang, rather than human and
profound. It ‘tickles’ the fancy and sensibility rather than illuminates
the imagination and informs the moral reason. It is clever; but like all
things that are merely clever it is ephemerally engaging or pleasing,
and it is all a case of the half being greater than the whole. In short,
Leacock’s humor is for a day, whereas Haliburton’s humor is for all
time.
Peter Donovan is a promising later humorist. His first book was
_Imperfectly Proper_. After a short residence in England since the war,
he published _Over ‘Ere and Back Home_ (1922). Mr. Donovan is a critic
of society. He is not, however, a critic of constructive social thought
but of conventional thinking and conventional manners. The arrows of his
humor, which are neither sharp-pointed nor poisonous, are directed
against what Matthew Arnold used to call ‘Philistines’—the ‘nice’
people who outwardly conform to all the conventionalities of the law of
the land and of the church but who inwardly—when no one is
looking—break these laws. Donovan directs his humor against shams in
society—not the great shams but those shams which have become acquired
habits, or against all that is the ‘fashion’ or the ‘rage’ of the year
or day. What he really achieves, from the point of view of vision, is to
make us see ourselves as others see us, and to cause us to ‘chuckle’
over his polite—for he is never rude or coarse—revealments. Norris
Hodgins works much within the same range as Donovan—_Why Don’t You Get
Married?_ (1923)—and is not often quite so hilariously funny, but he
comes closer to the daily experiences of every man and every woman, and
there is just a bit more solidity to his underlying structure of
everyday philosophy.
In another vein is the humor of Peter McArthur, who has been sometimes
called ‘The Sage of Ekfrid.’ McArthur writes as one who, living a
pastoral and serious life, actually looks around upon his neighbors in
other spheres of life and on their striving after wealth and material
goods, and who freshly reflects the thought, as old as the ancient
hills, that a serious and contented mind, satisfied with the gifts of
nature and of God, with pure friendships and sufficient sustenance for
body, possesses the only permanent satisfactions of life. He presents
this view, not with any originality in thought, but with a manner or
style that is pleasant reading and causes us to fall in love with life
and laughter and simple joys and to look with charity upon our fellows,
and to promote peace.
A new type of Canadian humor, with a new quality of style, is the humor
of Newton MacTavish, Editor of _The Canadian Magazine_, in which
periodical Mr. MacTavish first gave to the public his fresh and piquant
humor, under the title _Thrown In_. The sketches were collected in a
volume and published with the same title in 1923. The aim of MacTavish’s
humor is definitively social—to disclose the hidden humanity of
commonplace souls and their essential unity with their more magnificent
fellows. When his humor is amusing or entertaining, it achieves this
quality not so much by depicting grotesque or ludicrous situations as by
revealing the natural attitudes of pioneer people towards the common
things of life, and the elementally human idiosyncrasies of the
so-called common people. When it is wit rather than mere humor,
MacTavish turns the light of truth upon human psychology and character,
by way of situation and character-drawing, in terms of commonplace
humanity expressed and colored by homely speech and anecdote. So that
the effect of his humor is two-fold. For while the reader is being
entertained his mind is also receiving new insight into our common
heritage, our genuine humanity, whatever be our culture or social
status. In short, MacTavish’s humor is philosophical.
In Roy Davis’ long satiric poem, _Flying Rumors_, published in booklet
form at Boston, 1922, we discover a recrudescence of the satiric spirit
of Haliburton. Davis was born in Nova Scotia, and was educated at
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Harvard University. He is
Professor of English in the School of Business Administration, Boston
University, of which he is also Assistant Dean.
With the same intent as Haliburton, namely, to correct certain
centrifugal tendencies in society, Davis employs satire, not, as did
Haliburton, in prose, but in verse, which was the traditional medium of
the satire of Haliburton’s and Davis’ Loyalist ancestors in
Pre-Revolutionary days in the Old Colonies. The form of Davis’ ‘essay on
man and society’ in verse adds, on the side of novelty, a fresh
contribution to the satiric literature of Canada. The poet has avoided
going back to the traditional rhymed couplet of the Loyalist satirists
in Nova Scotia, but has used an octavo stanzaic form in which the first
six lines are rhymed alternately, and the last two are rhymed as a
couplet. This effects a pleasant sense of finality and rest. Besides,
Davis has invented a considerable number of lines which are musical, and
arresting or startling in novelty of imagery, as, for instance, this
ingenious and daring couplet:—
A goose-step strutting Kaiser, kissing Mars,
Has missed the humor of the midnight stars!
When, therefore, we survey the history of Canadian humor from Haliburton
to Leacock, and from Leacock to MacTavish and Davis, the humorists who
have remained salient and popular, and whose work seems to have the
inherent qualities which make for permanent appeal, are Haliburton and
Lanigan. And when we survey and note the variety and distinction of
Canadian humor—that it is, in many ways, a humor quite by itself, and
that it is of considerable quantity—we may reply to certain literary
historians and critics that Canadians are not, as they are
superstitiously believed to be, a humorless people and quite without a
literature of humor. For Canada has produced several notable humorists,
an admirable literature of humor; and the work of one of Canada’s
humorists, Haliburton, has long possessed international renown—a place
in permanent world literature.
CHAPTER XXIV
National Stage Drama
THE RISE OF NATIVE AND NATIONAL REALISTIC STAGE DRAMA IN CANADA:
THE LITTLE THEATRE AND THE WORK OF CARROLL AIKINS AND MERRILL
DENISON.
Although Canada is relatively rich in Poetic Drama, there is no evidence
of a developed Stage Drama. Part of the literary future of the country
lies in the development of native and national stage drama. A
significant beginning in native production of the acted drama was
inaugurated by Mr. Carroll Aikins who established in the Okanagan
Valley, at a centre named Naramata, a ‘Little Theatre,’ which he named
The Home Theatre. It was formally opened in November 1920 by the Rt.
Hon. Mr. Meighen, then Prime Minister. Mr. Aikins’ aims were to produce
a national drama, staged according to artistic conceptions of simplicity
and beauty, and to teach the people to appreciate good plays produced
with simple and beautiful properties, stage sets, and lighting.
In order to realize these ideals it was necessary to choose good plays
that had already been standardized and to train his actors directly in
the Home Theatre. Mr. Aikins’ belief was that by developing in the
people a love of good plays produced in a Canadian theatre under
Canadian direction, the people sooner or later would demand the
production of Canadian plays and that this demand would lead to the
creation of plays on Canadian subjects by Canadian playwrights. That is
to say, Mr. Aikins believed that the movement he started in the Home
Theatre would at length result in the creating of Canadian Native and
National Stage Drama.
In 1921 Mr. Aikins produced on the stage of the Home Theatre an acted
version of _The Trojan Women_ by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides.
In 1922 he produced his own Passion Play, _Victory in Defeat_, a
beautifully staged pantomime of moving pictures against a sky of
changing light, interpreted with the aid of a reader and expressive
music—the first experiment of its kind attempted in Canada.
The ‘Little Theatre’ movement has also achieved something for the
appreciation of good Canadian plays in the cities of Winnipeg, Montreal,
Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. At Hart House in Toronto, there has been
considerable activity concerned with the production of Canadian plays.
In April, 1921, Merrill Denison’s _Brothers in Arms_ was produced at
that theatre; and in April 1922 another of his plays, _From Their Own
Place_, was produced. These, with two others, were published in book
form in 1923 under the title _The Unheroic North_.
Denison’s plays are Canadian by virtue of the author’s parentage and
family traditions (his mother being the late Flora McD. Denison), and by
the plays themselves being on Canadian themes, with Canadian characters
moving in Canadian surroundings. They are realistic satiric dramas of
life and thought in Canadian ‘backwoods’ and rural settlements. The
dramatist presents the life and speech and conduct of these characters
with such broad realism that the plays themselves are a mordant satire
on existence and society in isolated Canadian communities. But Denison’s
plays are also a satire _within_ a satire. It is not life in certain
Canadian communities that he is really satirizing, but an attitude of
the Canadian people themselves.
The people of Canada dearly love ‘high’ romance and spurious
sentimentality. They find this spurious sentimentality in some Canadian
fiction, and the romance in the poetic dramas of Mair, Mrs. Curzon,
Wilfred Campbell, Dr. Dollard, Robert Norwood, and others. Boldly,
therefore, and with evident sincerity, Merrill Denison conceived the
idea of satirizing the lovers of spurious sentimentality by presenting
them with plays which would be the antithesis of ‘high’ romance and
affected sentimentality—with life so broadly or coarsely realistic that
the people of Canada would _not_ like the life or the plays.
Two of the plays—_Brothers in Arms_ and the _Weather Breeder_—portray
life in the Canadian backwoods districts as Mr. Denison has observed
that life. Two of the plays—_From Their Own Place_ and _Marsh
Hay_—portray, according to Mr. Denison, life in the poorer or more
sordid farming districts of Canada. The dramatist has explained his
motive and aim. He says: ‘These plays have their origin in the needs of
a theatre—not _the_ theatre. _Brothers in Arms_ was written because a
Canadian comedy was needed to fill a bill and none could be found. In
writing it as an innovation, I wrote of a part of Canada I knew, and
introduced as characters actual Canadians. The result was new, but, as
might have been expected, Canadian. It must be remembered that these
plays were written for a Canadian theatre, not Broadway, and that any
literature of the theatre in Canada must follow the same course—be
written for Canadian production.’
It may be regretted that Denison went to sordid and vulgar society in
Canada for his dramatic subjects or material. But he had just cause to
satire Canadian life by means of realistic Canadian plays. For the
intellectual dishonesty, and the ‘immoral moral psychology,’ which
creates the spurious or hectic sentimentality in certain Canadian
fiction would compel a sane-minded man to show the other side of the
picture, and to show it with pervasive and vivid realism. Denison
perceived and felt the profound untruth or falsity of certain forms of
20th century Canadian fiction. In his view, it was all too ‘nice’ and
saccharine as art; it had neither truth nor strength. Denison felt that
no such men and women as appear in many of the novels of the Realistic
Romances exist in Canada. In his opinion, the substance of these novels
is puerile and vain invention. He, therefore, decided to present to the
Canadian public real men and women as they really live, move and have
their being in Canada—even if they are, as indeed they are, sordid and
vulgarized men and women. Denison’s plays, then, are a Protest; they are
also a Satire. What the dramatist is protesting against is not the life
that he presents in his plays. What he is satirizing is not Canadian
life as such. He is protesting against intellectual dishonesty and
spurious sentimentality in Canadian fiction. He is satirizing the life
and characters which these Canadian fictionists have presented in their
romances.
Denison presents his material in three one-act plays with four to six
characters, and in one four-act play with fourteen characters. It is the
business of the dramatic critic to estimate Denison’s success in
dramaturgy, to determine whether they are well-constructed and actable
plays. On the strictly literary side, his plays in _The Unheroic North_,
despite their sordid or vulgarized characters, and despite the sections
of society and life presented in them, intrigue the attention and make
interesting and diverting reading. As satires on the methods and ideals
of certain Canadian romantic fictionists, on the social life at least of
certain Canadian communities Denison’s realistic dramas are a
significant beginning of creative Stage Drama in Canada.
Part III.
Special and Miscellaneous
Literature
(1760-1924)
CHAPTER XXV
_The_ War Poetry _of_ Canada
MRS. MOODIE—ANNIE ROTHWELL CHRISTIE—ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD—
JOHN MCCRAE—CANADIAN POEMS OF THE GREAT WAR.
I. THE POETRY OF THE CIVIL REBELLION
AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
It is a literary phenomenon by itself that the best or most popular of
the inspirational and the commemorative war verse by permanently
resident _émigrés_ or native-born Canadians was the work of the
country’s women poets. No samples of martial verse inspired by the War
of 1812-14 seem to be extant. The records of martial verse produced in
Canada begin with the Civil War of 1837-38 and the inspirational war
lyrics of Mrs. Susanna Moodie.
Fifteen years after the war opened, Mrs. Moodie’s martial lyrics were
published in her _Roughing It In The Bush_ (1852, two vols.). In ‘The
Advertisement’ (which is a sort of publisher’s Preface) to this work,
the publisher recounts the origin and effect of Mrs. Moodie’s
inspirational war verse. ‘During the rebellion,’ he says, ‘her loyal
lyrics, prompted by strong affection for her native country [England],
were circulated and sung throughout the colony [Ontario], and produced a
great effect in rousing an enthusiastic feeling in favor of public
order.’ But Mrs. Moodie herself modestly remarks (_op. cit. sup._, Vol.
2):—
I must own that my British spirit was fairly aroused, and as I
could not aid in subduing the enemies of my beloved country with
my arm, I did what little I could to serve the good cause with
my pen. It may probably amuse my readers, to give them a few
specimens of these loyal staves, which were widely circulated
through the colony at the time.
It will suffice to quote the first and last stanzas of her _Address to
the Freemen of Canada_ (_op. cit. sup._, p. 191) in order to show that
Mrs. Moodie wrote no mediocre martial verse of the inspirational type:—
Canadians, will you see the flag
Beneath whose folds your fathers bled,
Supplanted by the vilest rag
That ever host to rapine led?
Thou emblem of a tyrant’s sway,
Thy triple hues are dyed in gore;
Like his, thy power has passed away,
Like his, thy short-lived triumph’s o’er.
In a footnote Mrs. Moodie explains that ‘the vilest rag’ is the
tri-colored flag assumed by the rebels. The use of the phrase has, of
course, both psychological and aesthetic warrant. The thought of the
tri-colored flag, of its earlier bloody history in the French
Revolution, revolted her sense of nobility and righteousness, and, like
Homer’s, her diction and imagery sank in correspondence with the fall in
the spiritual dignity of her subject. Aesthetically viewed, she was
quite justified in sinking and rising with the emotional dignity of her
subject. She sinks in the third stanza, but rises magniloquently in the
fifth (final) stanza. Thus:—
By all the blood for Britain shed
On many a glorious battlefield,
To the free winds her standard spread,
Nor to these base insurgents yield.
With loyal bosoms beating high,
In your good cause securely trust;
‘God and Victoria’ be your cry,
And crush the traitors to the dust.
Compared with standard martial songs, such as Burns’ _Scots Wha’ Hae wi’
Wallace Bled_, or _The March of the Men of Harlech_, the first three
lines of the foregoing stanza are really excellent. The vocables are
mouth filling, the rhythm moves rapidly and carries one with it, and
though the third line might be improved by the use of the word ‘fling’
for the word ‘spread’ in the text, still ‘To the free winds her standard
spread’ increases respiration, and stimulates ideated sensations of free
movement and expanding personality. Altogether, it is a vigorous—a
‘breezy’ line. No Canadian need feel ashamed of it. And what magnificent
energy is in the last two lines of the stanza! The reader no sooner
reaches ‘God and Victoria’ than he shifts back the accent to the word
‘God,’ emphasizes it with a full burst of breath and with a change in
pitch, and then impulsively spurts out the utterance of the remaining
syllables in the same changed pitch until he attacks the word ‘cry,’
which is both oxytoned and emphasized. Thus the line becomes a veritable
battle-shout and inspiriting slogan. After this ringing, rousing,
energizing oxytone line comes the barytone cadence, ‘And crush the
traitors to the dust.’ The reader braces himself for action—takes in a
full breath, fronts his eyes, sets his jaws, and all his muscles, and
lunges forward to the fray. Both are brave lines; both are energizing,
impelling; and the whole stanza is a magnificent sample of inspiriting
martial verse. No Canadian need feel ashamed to recite it before the
admirers of Robert Burns or William Duthie.
Mrs. Moodie’s modest estimate of her martial lyrics is not just to the
poet. They are better than mere ‘loyal staves,’ fitted solely to ‘amuse’
casual readers. That they were widely circulated and sung throughout
Canada at the time when they were needed, is proof that they possessed
lyrical eloquence and the inspirational power to stir the heart and
impel the will to honorable action. They are good singing verse, but
they are not genuine poetry. All that is required in an inspirational
war lyric is that it come warm from the heart and hand; that it be
human, manly, direct in thought; that it be ringing in lilt and swinging
in rhythm; and that it be respectable technically as verse. To write
martial verse that fulfils all these requirements and to write it
immediately on demand is no easy task. Judged by these standards Mrs.
Moodie excelled in inspirational war lyricism. It is true that Harriet
A. Wilkins, Mrs. Curzon, Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie, Valancy Crawford,
and Agnes Machar surpassed her in poetic war lyricism. But this was due
to the fact that their best martial verse was commemorative, and was
written _after_ the deeds or events celebrated by them, and at a time
when they could compose in peace and at leisure.
Of these later Canadian women poets of martial verse the supreme artist
was Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie. The verse of the others, even Isabella
Valancy Crawford’s novel _The Rose of a Nation’s Thanks_, and Agnes
Maule Machar’s swinging _Our Lads to the Front_, though choicer in
diction and imagery than Mrs. Moodie’s, hardly rise above the quality of
good verse. Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie’s commemorative martial verse
on the other hand, attains to the dignity and beauty of pure poetry. We
do not need the statement of the English poet Sir Edwin Arnold, that
‘the best war songs of the Half-breed Rebellion were written by Annie
Rothwell-Christie.’ Dignity, beauty, melody and compelling pathos are in
every line she wrote. These qualities can be observed in the lines we
quote from her _After the Battle_ and _Welcome Home_, selecting, first,
two stanzas from _After the Battle_:—
Ay, lay them to rest on the prairie, on the spot where for honor they
fell,
The shout of the savage their requiem, the hiss of the rifle their
knell.
• • • •
As the blood of the martyr enfruitens his creed, so the hero sows
peace
And the reaping of war’s deadly harvest is the earnest his havoc shall
cease.
The extraordinary imagery of the last line of the first stanza
(couplet)—‘the shout of the savage their requiem, the hiss of the rifle
their knell’ and the novel beauty of the similitude in the first line of
the second stanza are enough to raise these verses to the dignity of
pure poetry. Besides, there is a spiritual militancy in the rhythm that
soothes or solaces, while its cadences solemnize the soul, begetting
resignation to the Will of the Universe. Or listen to the triumphant,
sonorous verbal music of these lines from _Welcome Home_:—
War-worn, sun-scorched, strained with the dust of toil,
And battle-scarred they come—victorious.
Exultantly we greet them—cleave the sky
With cheers, and fling our banners to the winds;
We raise triumphant songs, and strew their path
To do them homage—bid them ‘Welcome Home!’
We hear drum beats, bugle calls, and the tramp of armed men on the march
in those first two spondaic phrases—‘war-worn, sun-scorched.’ A new
emotional experience comes to us with the quicker moving syllables in
the next two lines; the rhythm is fitted to exultation. Also we are
treated to a new but brilliant alliterative metaphor—‘cleave the sky
with cheers.’ We are in the realm of poetry. But fine as are the
preceding examples of Mrs. Annie Rothwell-Christie’s commemorative
martial verse, the pathos of the following, from _The Woman’s Part_, is
overwhelmingly human and moving and ennobling. The inspiration is
derived from reflecting whether to those who, fired by love of adventure
or country, have gone to war, and fallen, the mothers, sisters, and
sweethearts shall give regrets, prayers, or tears. The poet disparages
all these, and turns to solace the mother or wife, whose son or husband
had died on the battlefield:—
O, woman-heart be strong,
Too full for words—too humble for a prayer—
Too faithful to be fearful—offer here
Your sacrifice of patience. Not for long
The darkness. When the dawn of peace breaks bright,
Blessed she who welcomes whom her God shall save,
But honored in her God’s and country’s sight
She who lifts empty arms to cry, ‘_I Gave_!’
After reading that noble poem of love and pathos, and being moved to
emotion too deep for tears, one knows that all distinctions for sex are
man-made and ephemeral and abortive—that only ‘soul,’ whatever be its
form of earthly tenement, is real. For Annie Rothwell-Christie who wrote
that poem was altogether soul—superman, superwoman—gifted with the
speech of angels. Her martial verse is absolutely unique, and a distinct
contribution to perduring war poetry.
II. THE POETRY OF THE WORLD WAR
The Canadian Poetry of the World War is, as was previous martial verse
by Canadian poets, both inspirational and commemorative. What is
significant for literary history, is, first, that there is a distinct
advance in the excellence both of the ideas and of the artistic form of
the Canadian poetry of the world war; and, secondly, that both the
activity in poetic composition occasioned by the late war and the
quality of the poetry became an inspiration to other poets whose genius
was dormant and unawakened, and caused a genuine Renascence of the
Poetic Spirit and of Poetry in Canada.
In what respect may the Canadian Poetry of the world war be said to be
excellent, or even unexcelled by the martial poetry of the United
States, if excelled by that of England and France? It is relatively
great in noble ideas. In it we see clearly and vividly what Canadian men
and women, at home and in the field of war, really thought and felt
about war and death, love and home and country, self-sacrifice, and the
good green earth, and peace.
_Truth, beauty and splendor of ideas_—these are the three supreme
excellences of the Canadian poetry written by the soldier-poets in
active service on the fighting field, and by the professional or amateur
non-combatant poets at home, during the war.
As to the artistic form of this poetry, considering all the conditions
of distraction and perturbance under which it was written, the wonder is
that it has any formal finish at all. As a matter of fact, however, the
Canadian poetry inspired by the world war cannot be depreciated as
‘twinkling trivialities’ either in substance or in form. All the best of
it is good poetry—originally conceived, winningly suffused with beauty
of sentiment, rich in noble ideas and spiritual imagery, engaging in
verbal music, and technically well-wrought. If the formal finish of
Canadian Poetry of the world war is not always quite the equal of the
British and American poetry similarly occasioned, still the altogether
most famous and most popular poem of the war and most likely to perdure
in the popular memory, is neither the sonnet of the English
soldier-poet, Rupert Brooke, _The Soldier_, nor the poem of the American
soldier-poet, Alan Seeger, _I Have a Rendezvous with Death_, but the
lyric of the Canadian soldier-poet, John McCrae, _In Flanders Fields_.
Further, special circumstances, special sentiments, and special color
and form went to making the poem by McCrae the supreme lyric of the
world war, and the popularity of _In Flanders Fields_ affected the
appreciation of other Canadian poetry of the late war to such a degree
as to cause the popular imagination, as well as the critical sense of
the cultured, to estimate all other Canadian poetry of the world war as
so far below McCrae’s exquisite lyric as to be second-rate in substance
and form. This is not so. Save that they do not embody a special form
and are not as musically insinuating as McCrae’s, the best of other
Canadian poems of the world war are as nobly conceived, as spiritually
subduing or exalting, and as technically finished as _In Flanders
Fields_.
During the world war, as in previous wars, the women poets of Canada
were to the fore in writing inspirational and commemorative martial
verse. In Garvin’s _Canadian Poems of the Great War_ about one third
(26) of the total number (73) of poets represented are women, and their
war verse, especially the verse of Katherine Hale (whose poetry has been
already dealt with), Helena Coleman, Frances Harrison, Isabel Graham,
Agnes Maule Machar, Gertrude Bartlett, Grace Blackburn, Jean Blewett,
Minnie Hallowell Bowen, Louise Morey Bowman, Isabelle Ecclestone Mackay,
Lilian Leveridge, Lucy Montgomery, Beatrice Redpath, Sheila Rand,
Florence Randal Livesay, Richard Scrace (Mrs. J. B. Williamson), Virna
Sheard, Eloise Street, Ruth Strong, is not a whit below the level of the
war verse by Canadian men and in some instances surpasses the latter’s.
Dr. O’Hagan’s _Songs of Heroic Days_ (1916) is a popular volume, in
which, for the most part, the poet recrudesces, in good newspaper verse,
the traditional war spirit of bloodshed, retaliation and revenge. The
poems, however, are made engaging by a ready humor and an Irish _jeu
d’esprit_ in the thought of ‘squaring things’ with an enemy guilty of
‘dhirty thricks’ in war. Several other volumes of war verse appeared
during and shortly after the close of the war—_The Fighting Men of
Canada_ by Douglas Durkin; _Over the Hills of Home and Other Poems_ by
Lilian Leveridge; _Sea Dogs and Men at Arms_ by Jesse Edgar Middleton;
_A Canadian Twilight and Other Poems_ (posthumous) by Lieutenant Bernard
Freeman Trotter; _Laurentian Lyrics and Other Poems_ (1915) by
Lieutenant Arthur S. Bourinot; _Insulters of Death_ and _The New
Apocalyse_ by Sergeant J. D. Logan, and several other volumes by
returned men. The only comprehensive anthology of verse of the Great
War, written by Canadians, is J. W. Garvin’s _Canadian Poems of the
Great War_ (1918). This volume furnishes adequate proof that, as foreign
critics have said, ‘the war poetry written by Canadian civilians and
Canadian poets on active service is as excellent as that written by the
poets of the older Allied Nations.’
For the purpose of just appreciation we remark the fine, spirited, and
imaginatively impressive qualities, as well as the artistic finish, of
selected Canadian war poems that are really worthy to stand beside the
best verse of English and American poets who were inspired by the late
war. Aside from McCrae’s _In Flanders Fields_ the most celebrated
commemorative war poem by a Canadian is Dr. J. B. Dollard’s sonnet to
the memory of Rupert Brooke—a sonnet in which, as English and American
critics observed, Dr. Dollard made beautiful use of the supposed cause
of Brooke’s death (sunstroke, ‘arrows of Apollo’) and the place of
burial in the Aegean. Brooke’s grave is on the island of Scyros, not
Lemnos. But the error in fact only enhances the beauty of the poem:—
Slain by the arrows of Apollo, lo!
The well-belovèd of the Muses lies
On Lemnos’ Isle ’neath blue and classic skies,
And hears th’ Aegean waters ebb and flow!
How strange his beauteous soul should choose to go
Out from his body in this hallowed place,
Where Poetry and Art’s undying grace
Still breathe, and Pipes of Pan melodious blow!
Here shall he rest untroubled, knowing well
That faithful hearts shall hold his memory dear,
Moved to affection weak words cannot tell
By his short, splendid life that knew no fear;
Beloved of the gods, the gods have ta’en
Their Ganymede, by bright Apollo slain!
Almost as celebrated as Dr. Dollard’s sonnet to Brooke is Lieutenant
Arthur Bourinot’s sonnet to the dead poet-soldier. For the sake of
variety in forms we quote _Immortality_—a most winsome, tender lyric;
simple, sincere, and convincing—from Lieutenant Bourinot’s _Laurentian
Lyrics_ (1915):—
They are not dead, the soldier and the sailor,
Fallen for Freedom’s sake;
They merely sleep with faces that are paler
Until they wake.
They will not weep, the mothers, in the years
The future will decree;
For they have died that the battles and the tears
Should cease to be.
They will not die, the victorious and the slain,
Sleeping in foreign soil,
They gave their lives, but to the world is the gain
Of their sad toil.
They are not dead, the soldier and the sailor,
Fallen for Freedom’s sake;
They merely sleep with faces that are paler
Until they wake.
The most lilting example of Canadian inspirational war verse is Douglas
Durkin’s _The Fighting Men of Canada_. It is spirited and inspiriting.
The colloquial diction of the refrains charges it with veracity,
vividness, and with ‘the punch’ which the London critic, Mr. E. B.
Osborn, desiderates in the content of what are, in his view, the only
‘true war poems,’ namely, ‘song-pictures of the campaigns and of
soldiers’ life’:—
Call it lust, or call it honor. Call it glory in a name!
We’re a handful, more or less, of what we were,
But we praise the grim Almighty that we stuck and played the game,
Till we chased them at the double to their lair.
For the word came, ‘Up and over!’
And our answer was a yell
As we scrambled out of cover—
And we dealt the dastards hell!
Mr. Durkin’s ballad is a human, veracious war-poem in the traditional
spirit of Campbell’s _Battle of the Baltic_, Tennyson’s _Ballad of the
Revenge_, Newbolt’s _Drake’s Drum_. It is designedly inspirational after
the manner, and with the substance, of the old heroic ‘fighting spirit.’
It is, therefore, a recrudescence of a war spirit and an ideal of poetic
inspiration, aim, and content which were not the real and authentic
spirit, motive, and ideal of the best Canadian, British, French, or
American poetry of the world war. In short, Mr. Durkin’s poem, _The
Fighting Men of Canada_, lilting, spirited, and inspiriting as it is,
must critically be estimated as an obsolete form of ‘recruiting’ ballad
rather than as a true inspirational poem conceived and written according
to the characteristic genius of the poetry of the world war. As a
reversion to the old type of martial poem, it deserves mention. Possibly
it may be instanced as the nearest approach to a Canadian war-song,
though the extraordinary fact is that not a single war-song, of the
popular or of the marching species, was written by a Canadian civilian
or soldier-poet.
In the war verse of another poet we find the kind of poetry that fired
the imagination and moved the will of the men of Canada who went to the
world war. To Lloyd Roberts, son of Charles G. D. Roberts, the war
poetry of the British Empire, as well as Canada, is indebted for two of
the most striking and impressive short poems in the new spirit of
inspirational verse inspired by the world war. His _Come Quietly,
England_, simple and direct in thought, free in form, colloquial in
diction, but positive, candid, sincere, is one of the most arresting and
convincing poems that have for a theme ‘the call to arms’—not for King,
or Country, nor for fear or anything else undivine:—
But for the sake of simple goodness
And His laws,
We shall sacrifice our all
For The Cause!
_The Literary Digest_ remarked Lloyd Roberts’ _Come Quietly, England_ as
‘one of the most striking statements of what may be called the
philosophy of the war from the English [British] point of view because
it puts so candidly into words the thoughts that are in the minds of the
author’s fellow-countrymen.’ The other poem by Roberts, also in his new
simple, colloquial, direct style, is entitled _If I Must_. It is the
most remarkably original ‘anti-pacifist’ poem written by an
English-speaking poet. It takes the form of a quasi-dramatic monologue,
and concludes with a stanza which has, in journalistic slang, ‘punch’ in
it. We quote the whole poem:—
God knows there’s plenty of earth for all of us;
Then why must we sweat for it, deny for it,
Pray for it, cry for it,
Kill, maim and lie for it,
Struggle and suffer and die for it—
We who are gentle and sane?
Let us respect one another, wherever we are,
Fly your flag, O my brother;
I like its bright color, whether red, green, or yellow;
Your language is queer, but I’ll learn it in time;
And you’re a dear fellow,
If your laws are not quite so clean as our own;
But then ours need pruning, and thistles have grown.
So I won’t spill your blood, for that’s not the way
To assist in law-making, whatever some say,
I’ll try by example to lead you aright
Out of the shadows and into the light—
If you’ll do as much for me.
What! You don’t understand?
You refuse my right hand?
You say might is right,
And to live we must fight?
Are we still in such plight?
Poor, blind, stupid fool, so deep in the dust—
Well, hand me the gun—
If I must—if I must!
It is, perhaps, in the best Canadian commemorative, elegiac, or
reflective poems of the Great War that the three supreme excellences,
Truth, Beauty, and Splendor of Ideas, in the war poetry of Canada are
most conspicuously present. The distinctive presence of these qualities
not only marks a clear advance beyond the older Canadian martial verse
but also establishes a high place for Canadian commemorative, elegiac
and reflective war verse in the body of war poetry written by poets of
the Allied Nations. Truth, Beauty, or Splendor of Ideas are in Gertrude
Bartlett’s _The Blessed Dead_, Grace Blackburn’s _Christ in Flanders_,
Lillie Brooks’ _Bereaved_, Helena Coleman’s _Oh, Not When April Wakes
the Daffodils_, Jean Blewett’s _The Lover Lads of Devon_, Lilian
Leveridge’s _Over the Hills of Home_, Florence Randal Livesay’s _A
Daffodil from Vimy Ridge_, Agnes Maule Machar’s _De Profundis_, Louise
Morey Bowman’s _The White Garden_, Virna Sheard’s _The Young Knight_,
Frederick George Scott’s _The Silent Toast_, Arthur Stringer’s
_Christmas Bells in War Time_, Archibald Sullivan’s _The Plaint of the
Children_, Beatrice Redpath’s _The Men of Canada_, Isabel Ecclestone
Mackay’s _The Mother Gives_, John Stuart Thomson’s _His Darkest Hour_,
A. E. S. Smythe’s noble sonnet _The Champions_, S. Morgan-Powell’s
magniloquent _Kitchener’s Work_, and W. D. Lighthall’s magnificent and
exalting poem _The Galahads_.
One of the finest commemorative poems of the world war written by a
Canadian is Duncan Campbell Scott’s sonnet _To a Canadian Lad Killed in
the War_. It is fine in conception, novel in terminal endings and
elevating in emotional appeal. But fine as it is, it pales in aesthetic
and artistic dignity with the only Canadian war poem that has achieved
sublimity—the same poet’s unforgettably noble elegiacs _To a Canadian
Aviator (Who Died for His Country in France)_:—
Tossed like a falcon from the hunter’s wrist
A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise,
And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist,
The elastic stairway to the rising sun.
Peril below thee and above, peril
Within thy car; but peril cannot daunt
Thy peerless heart; gathering wing and poise,
Thy plane transfigured, and thy motor-chant
Subdued to a whisper—then a silence,—
And thou art but a disembodied venture
In the void.
But Death, who has learned to fly,
Still matchless when his work is to be done,
Met thee between the armies and the sun;
Thy speck of shadow faltered in the sky;
Then thy dead engine and thy broken wings
Drooped through the arc and passed in fire,
A wreath of smoke—a breathless exhalation.
But ere that came, a vision sealed thine eyes,
Lulling thy senses with oblivion;
And from its sliding station in the skies
Thy dauntless soul upward in circles soared
To the sublime and purest radiance whence it sprang.
In all their eyries eagles shall mourn thy fate,
And leaving on the lonely crags and scaurs
Their unprotected young, shall congregate
High in the tenuous heaven and anger the sun
With screams, and with a wild audacity
Dare all the battle danger of thy flight;
Till weary with combat one shall desert the light,
Fall like a bolt of thunder and check his fall
On the high ledge, smoky with mist and cloud,
Where his neglected eaglets shriek aloud,
And drawing the film across his sovereign sight
Shall dream of thy swift soul immortal
Mounting in circles, faithful beyond death.
In that poem we perceive, unmistakably, how even war verse may rise to
the spiritual dignity of absolute poetry, and by its ideal substance and
spiritual grandeur achieve the highest moral and religious function—the
function, namely, of dignifying or glorifying the human spirit with
Christlikeness in self-slaying love for the perfection and happiness of
humanity. Only a too fastidious and perverted criticism will deny to the
best of the Canadian poetry of the World War a distinction in truth,
beauty, and splendor of ideas and in technical artistry that gives it
the right to an equal place beside the significant war verse of the
British and United States poets. Certainly in technique it is quite as
finished as the American war poetry, and in ideas of ‘uncompelled and
undiluted chivalry,’ it is as noble and eloquent as the war poetry of
the British singers.
CHAPTER XXVI
Hymn Writers
THE HYMN WRITERS OF CANADA—ALLINE—CLEVELAND—SCRIVEN— MURRAY—
SCOTT—RAND—DEWART—WALKER—AND OTHERS.
A hymn is a form of sacred lyrical literature. It must be popular
literature, but not necessarily pure poetry or permanent literature. A
hymn is properly defined not by what it _is_ in literary qualities but
by what it _does_ for the human spirit—for the heart and the religious
imagination. It aims lyrically to express dependence on divine
providence, to praise the divine perfections, to give thanks for divine
mercies and benefits, and to supplicate divine aid in doubt and weakness
and divine consolation in tribulation and defeat. A hymn, in short, is
the spontaneous lyrical expression of a paternal and filial relationship
between Man and God.
The structural qualities which constitute a true hymn are few and
readily understood. Since a hymn must above all things be potent over
the hearts and imagination of _all_ the people, its diction must be
vernacular—simple words of one and two syllables. Since a hymn must be
singable by _all_ the people in concert, its metrical flow must be short
and rhythmical. In aesthetic qualities a hymn should be simple but
beautiful in thought, sentiment and imagery. In moral qualities a hymn
should be suggestive of human but holy relations between Man and Divine
Providence. These are the prime qualities that constitute the popularity
of a hymn and give it a place either in permanent poetry or in permanent
hymnody.
Several Canadians, _émigrés_ or native-born, have written hymns which
have a rightful and permanent place in church hymnody. The history of
Canadian hymnography dates back to the year 1786. In that year Henry
Alline, leader of the ‘New Lights’ schism in Nova Scotia, published his
_Hymns and Spiritual Songs_. He was as prolific a hymn writer as Charles
Wesley, having five books of hymns to his credit. His diction is not
always true to the demands of a hymn; sometimes it is stilted and too
literary. But his imagery is simple and the movement of his thought is
direct. The chief merit of his hymns is their genuine lyrical quality;
they have rhythmical flow. One or two of them have held a permanent
place in church hymnody, as, for instance, the hymn beginning with this
homely image expressed in vernacular English:—
Amazing sight! the Saviour stands
And knocks at every door—
Of the Cleveland family in the Old Colonies two members emigrated to
Nova Scotia—Aaron Cleveland, who became minister of Mather’s (now St.
Matthew’s) church, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Benjamin Cleveland who
joined in with the ‘New Lights,’ and emulated Alline as a hymn writer.
One of his hymns still finds a place in church hymnody in Canada, the
familiar hymn beginning
Oh, could I find from day to day
A nearness to my God.
None of the hymns of Alline or Cleveland, however, attained a world-wide
popularity. The first Canadian to write a hymn that has become not only
world-famous but also has been translated into several ‘heathen tongues’
as well as civilized languages was Joseph Scriven, author of the simple
spiritual song, _What a Friend We Have in Jesus_. The man and the hymn
have a remarkable history, which is recounted by Rev. James Clelland in
his biographical sketch in a tiny thirty-page booklet entitled: _What a
Friend We Have in Jesus, and Other Hymns by Joseph Scriven_. It was
published at Port Hope, Ontario, in 1895.
For many years the hymn had been attributed, without authentication, to
Dr. Horatius Bonar. But in 1893 a letter appeared in the _New York
Observer_, in which it was stated that the hymn had been found amongst
some papers belonging to Joseph Scriven, who had ended his life by
suicide. Scriven was a local preacher but he was a graduate of Trinity
College, Dublin, and was, therefore, a man of respectable culture. Like
Cowper, Scriven suffered from melancholia; and it is natural to suppose
that he had written the hymn after recovery from one of his fits of
melancholia. He was a shy man, and after writing the hymn gave a copy of
it to his mother, from whom he extracted a promise that she would not
reveal its existence or show it to anyone else. But whether the mother’s
pride in her son’s accomplishment overcame her, or whether due to some
sort of accident, the hymn reached a certain Mr. Converse, a musician,
and he at once set it to music of the more popular kind. Soon the hymn
attained a popular vogue in the United States and from there gained
equally popular vogue in Canada. Some are inclined to believe that it
was not the hymn itself but the musical setting that created its
popularity. No doubt the musical setting to Lyte’s _Abide With Me_, or
to Newman’s _Lead Kindly Light_, has considerable to do with the appeal
of those hymns. Newman expressly attributes the popularity of his hymn
to the musical setting and not to the spiritual beauty of the text. But
the musical setting to Scriven’s _What a Friend We Have In Jesus_ is so
poor in melodic invention and so lacking in cantante quality and
rhythmic flow that as a tune or melody it is not singable or infectious
and could not be a compelling ‘sacred folksong.’ We must, therefore,
charge its popularity to the appeal of the text of the hymn to some
elemental want or need of humble human hearts.
But whatever the cause of the popularity of this hymn, whether the words
or the musical setting or both, the fact remains that it is the most
widely known hymn in Christian hymnology. It has been translated into
many of the civilized and the barbaric languages of the world, and more
than a hundred million impressions of the hymn have been printed.
Searching for a psychological explanation of its appeal to the universal
human heart, we know that as a matter of fact it has solaced, as one
writer puts it, ‘millions and millions of souls, from the criminal on
his way to the scaffold to the ocean traveller in his last moment aboard
a sinking ship; from the negro in his wretched plantation cabin to the
highest dignitary of the evangelical churches; from the unclad heathen
denizen of the cannibalistic South Sea Islands or in wildest Africa to
the most learned savant of the most civilized land.’ The obvious
explanation of its appeal is that Scriven’s hymn expresses, both for the
humble and for the highest, the elemental and inevitable sense of
_dependence_ for life and happiness on some spiritual power that is
mighty to comfort, solace, sustain, and save. When that sense of
dependence comes over any human being, and when such a human being feels
that there is an ever-ready invisible hand to sustain or succor, in that
moment the sense of dependence and of ever-ready aid, and of joy or
comfort or hope thus awakened, are expressed in emotionalized rhythm,
which is religious song.
Scriven lacked lyrical or rhythmical sensibility, and his famous hymn
possesses no aesthetic or artistic appeal. But in times of need,
aesthetics are the poorest support and solace. In spite, then, of the
lyrical and aesthetic defects of Scriven’s simple hymn, it has remained,
by virtue of its elemental appeal to people of all estates and by its
solacing and sustaining power, one of the world’s perduring sacred
songs.
From a strictly Canadian point of view and with reference to aesthetic
qualities which give a hymn a dignity of poetry, the most notable and
significant hymn composed by a native-born Canadian is Robert Murray’s
_From Ocean Unto Ocean_. The author was born and educated in Nova
Scotia. From early childhood he disclosed a Keltic gift of imagination
and fondness for expressing his emotions in verse. Dr. Murray was a
religious journalist, and, as editor of _The Presbyterian Witness_, did
much to raise ordinary journalism to the dignity of literature.
It was his custom to write hymns and to publish them anonymously in the
religious press. Those who had an eye for the revision of church hymnals
were struck by the aesthetic beauty and dignity as well as religious
fervor of Dr. Murray’s hymns. They are indeed extraordinary, and the
substance of them is so universalized that they fit the hymnals or Books
of Praise of any Christian communion, Protestant or Catholic. His hymns
are included in the _Book of Praise_ of the Presbyterian Church of
Canada; in the _Book of Common Praise_ of the Church of England in
Canada; and in _The Hymnary_ of the Scottish Churches. Rev. A. W. Mahon
observes in his readable brochure, _Canadian Hymns and Hymn Writers_
(1908): ‘Thirteen Canadians contribute to the New Church of England Book
of Common Praise, including Canon Welsh of Toronto and the late Dean
Partridge of Fredericton, but Dr. Murray’s contributions exceed all
other in number and in intrinsic merit.’
To appreciate Murray’s _From Ocean Unto Ocean_—its intrinsic merits, as
well as its special qualities and fervor which embody and express the
Canadian national spirit—the whole poem must be read and felt both as a
hymn for devotional and for national occasions. Following is the full
text of Dr. Murray’s hymn:—
From ocean unto ocean
Our land shall own Thee Lord,
And, filled with true devotion
Obey Thy sovereign word.
Our prairies and our mountains,
Forest and fertile field,
Our rivers, lakes, and fountains,
To Thee shall tribute yield.
O Christ, for Thine own glory,
And for our country’s weal,
We humbly plead before Thee,
Thyself in us reveal;
And may we know, Lord Jesus,
The touch of Thy dear hand;
And, healed of our diseases,
The tempter’s power withstand.
Where error smites with blindness,
Enslaves and leads astray,
Do Thou in lovingkindness
Proclaim Thy gospel day;
Till all the tribes and races
That dwell in this fair land,
Adorned with Christian graces,
Within Thy courts shall stand.
Our Saviour King, defend us,
And guide where we should go;
Forth with Thy message send us;
Thy love and light to show;
Till, fired with true devotion
Enkindled by Thy word,
From ocean unto ocean
Our land shall own Thee Lord.
The diction of this hymn is simple, vernacular; of 160 words in the text
only ten are of Latin origin, and even these are as short and familiar
as our Anglo-Saxon diction. The rhythmic flow is thoroughly lyrical. But
though simple in diction and lyrical structure, there is a universality
of reach or sweep in its imagery that, at least relatively to most other
hymns, raises Murray’s hymn to the dignity of poetry. There is no
provincialism in it. There is no denominationalism in it. There is no
narrow or bigoted ethics in it. It is thoroughly human and humane. It
possesses universality and spiritual dignity. It is all that a true hymn
should be.
Murray’s hymn, moreover, in humanity and spiritual dignity, contrasts
winningly with the original form of the British, which is also the
Canadian, National Anthem. This so-called anthem has been revised so as
to remove from it certain inane thoughts and sentiments and imagery that
were not consistent with Christian charity and the ideal of human
brotherhood. Canada has, too, its own indigenous National Song or Hymn
which is the text to a sonorous organ-toned musical setting by Calixa
Lavallée. The original text of the Canadian National Hymn is by
Routhier. It is patriotic in the old exclusive sense, containing that
kind of patriotism which is solicitous about the mere material success
and aggrandizement of Canada. But Murray’s _From Ocean Unto Ocean_ is so
human and so humane, so unracial, so unprovincial, so unsectarian, and
by its imagery so informed with the free and all-embracing spirit of the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, bounding the vast Canadian prairies and
mountains and forests, that its spiritual sweep takes in the whole of
Canada without respect to race or region or religion, or high degree or
low degree of person, and is fitted to be, if not the National Anthem,
at any rate the National Hymn, of Canada. It is at once both Christian
and Universal—a distinctive and authentic hymn, and an original
contribution to permanent Canadian hymnody.
Murray was not a creative poet in the sense of being a systematic poet.
But Canon Frederick George Scott, who is a member of the Systematic
School of Canadian poets, has written hymns. They are strictly
evangelical, rather than universal in thought and scope, and are in the
traditional hymn form. They have a sweet simplicity and a spiritual
dignity but, beyond their lyrical or rhythmic expressiveness, have no
especial aesthetic and artistic qualities that call for particular
critical consideration. The same appreciation suits a critical estimate
of the hymns by Silas T. Rand, Edward Hartley Dewart, Charles Innis
Cameron, Louisa Walker and other accepted Hymn Writers of Canada.
Rand’s Latin Hymns are interesting as translations and are literary
phenomena by themselves. Cameron was a poet and his hymns have an
excellence of structure, imagery, and color that give them quite the
quality of poetry, though again, it must be observed, they are
evangelical, rather than universal, in scope and sweep. Anna Louisa
Walker is famous as the author of the hymn _Work, For The Night Is
Coming_. This is really a ‘sacred folk-song.’ It has indeed a wide
popularity, but by no means as wide as Scriven’s world-famous hymn.
Albert Durrant Watson and Alexander Louis Fraser are hymn writers of
distinction. Summarily: Canadian Hymn Writers have contributed
substantially to the hymnody of the Evangelical Church in Canada, and,
at least in two instances, to permanent hymnody. But no Canadian hymn
has the structural beauty and spiritual sublimation which belong to such
hymns as Newman’s _Lead, Kindly Light_, or Baring-Gould’s _Onward,
Christian Soldiers_, or Lyte’s _Abide With Me_, and which lift these
hymns into the realm of authentic poetry.
CHAPTER XXVII
Literary Criticism
LITERARY CRITICISM IN CANADA—SCHOOLS, AIMS, METHODS, AND DEFECTS
—NEW SYNOPTIC METHOD APPLIED TO POETRY OF OVERSEAS DOMINIONS.
_I. Schools of Literary Criticism._
In an old country, like England, which long has had established
standards of taste and refined artistry, literary criticism is a fine
art. The essays in criticism by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Pater,
Arthur Symons, Gilbert Chesterton, Mackail, Ker, and others are polite,
disinterested, humane, and delightful in themselves. They have an
intrinsic charm of thought and style. They are literature. In a young
country, like Canada, when, in pioneer days, the people were necessarily
preoccupied wholly with practical living and material civilization, and
few were cultured and none had leisure for cultivating taste, literary
criticism, if it existed, was exotic and traditional. Later, when the
people are still primarily occupied with material civilization but
decent culture is distributed and there is leisure for cultivating
taste, literary criticism becomes imitative but academic, and,
sometimes, is in the manner of the dilettante. Finally, when the people
of a young country become conscious that they have a native literature
and indigenous standards of taste but are in doubt about the status of
their literature and the aesthetic dignity of their literary taste,
literary criticism becomes pragmatic or pedagogical or philosophical.
In its first stage literary criticism in a young country attempts to
_appraise_, by exotic, traditional standards, foreign literature. Such
criticism has no communal value. It is not disinterested but personal.
It only exhibits, as it was intended to do, the fine taste and style of
the critics. In its pragmatic stage literary criticism in a young
country attempts to _praise_ native literature, so as to win for this
literature the appreciation of the people in the land in which it was
produced and, secondarily, the decent regard of foreign men of letters.
The matter of such pragmatic criticism always counts most, or for more
than the manner or style. It aims to be constructive. But because it is
self-conscious, self-reliant, and ardent, its praise tends to be too
high and its condemnation too severe. In the final stage literary
criticism becomes less self-conscious, less ardent, and more detached
and philosophical towards native literature. It takes a synoptic view of
the whole civilization and culture which the native literature of a
young country embodies and interprets. It looks first to this literature
as an entity by itself and next regards it from the point of view of
absolute or long established standards. It judges the native poetry and
prose of a young country by their relative importance to the people of
that country itself, and by its dignity as a contribution to
world-literature.
These are the stages in evolution of Literary Criticism in Canada.
Progressively there arose four Schools of Criticism—the Traditional,
the Academic or Dilettante, the Pragmatic or Pedagogical, and the
Synoptic or Philosophical. But the fourth is not so much a new School as
it is the Pragmatic School with a broader and more philosophical
application of its aims and methods. All these distinctions, however,
are themselves pedagogical. The members of the various Schools commingle
aesthetic, academic, and pragmatic methods in the same essay, for the
reason that in Canada criticism has been compelled, as it still is
compelled, to be primarily a cultural agency, and could never aim to be
literature, wholly delectable in itself.
The Traditional School has passed but it was represented by such
deceased critics as George Stewart, John Reade, George Murray, and
Martin Griffin. The Academic or Dilettante School is represented by
Professors James Cappon, W. J. Alexander, Pelham Edgar, and Archibald
MacMechan, and by Sir Andrew Macphail, and Arnold Haultain; and the
Pragmatic School, by T. G. Marquis, Miss Jean Graham, Miss Marjory
MacMurchy, Katherine Hale (Mrs. John Garvin), Donald G. French, Melvin
O. Hammond, R. H. Hathaway, J. D. Logan, and Bernard Muddiman. The
Synoptic School, which, too, is pragmatic but also philosophical, is
represented by Ray Palmer Baker, author of _A History of
English-Canadian Literature to Confederation_ and by the author of the
present work.
As to the aims and methods of the members of the Traditional and the
Academic Schools:—In general, Reade and Griffin wrote critically, to
illuminate universal literature (poetry, fiction, drama, social life,
and history). The members of the Academic or Dilettante School have, on
the whole, the same aim, but sometimes they write critical essays as a
fine art in the department of _belles-lettres_. Reade and Griffin wrote
on literature and life in brief but scholarly journalistic essays.
Professors Cappon, Alexander, Edgar, and MacMechan wrote or write
monographs (as, for instance, Cappon’s fine study of the poetry of C. G.
D. Roberts) or critical introductions and prefatory essays to selected
English men of letters (as, for instance, Alexander’s admirable
_Introduction to Browning_ or MacMechan’s scholarly Introductions to his
_Selections from Tennyson_ and Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_). Dr.
Macphail and Mr. Haultain delight in the critical essay for its own
sake, and are more solicitous about beauty or dignity of style than
about substance or thought. Their essays belong to the department of
_belles-lettres_—not always and not essentially, but in tendency, form,
and aesthetic dignity or style.
In particular, whenever the members of the first two schools have
written about any phase of the literary history and the literature of
Canada, or about any author who has figured notably in that history and
literature, they have been rigorously aesthetic and critical. But the
writers of the Traditional School differ from those of the Academic or
Dilettante School in critical attitude to Canadian literature and
literary history. Reade and Griffin wrote sympathetically, and with
sincere admiration, about phases of Canadian Literature; but they showed
little or no understanding of the historic process in the evolution of
Canadian culture, of the continuity of Canadian literary history. How,
then, could they have been more than merely aesthetic—how could they
have been genuinely critical—if they had not the philosophic eye, did
not look before and after, and thus did not treat the phases of Canadian
Literature from the point of view of its implied relations to the whole
of Canadian life and of English literature, of which Canadian verse and
prose form a part? Sympathetically, politely, and charmingly as Reade
wrote about the phases of Canadian Literature, his criticism, to employ
a phrase of M. Jules Lemaitre, was ‘not criticism, but entertaining
conversation.’ Virtually it denied that Canada possessed a literature, a
body of poetry and prose which should be regarded as a real integer,
having unity of inspiration and a continuous growth from crude thought
and form to respectable aesthetic and artistic dignity. It implied only
that in the literature of Canada there are no ‘highways,’ but only
pleasant ‘by-ways’ which invite the essayist to write of them with
aesthetic appreciation. This is not philosophical, not genuine,
criticism; it is polite, entertaining conversation. For the problem of
Canadian literary criticism is not the question whether Canada has
produced, intermittently and here and there, some original authors who
have composed poetry and prose as aesthetically winning and as
artistically beautiful or dignified as that of British and American
writers, but whether the Dominion has produced a continuous body of
poetry and prose, which, at its best, may justly be considered genuine
literature, worthy to be regarded, as American literature is regarded,
as a living branch of English Literature.
While the members of the Academic School take the strictly aesthetic
attitude to Canadian Literature, and show little or no appreciation of
the historic process in the evolution of Canadian culture, they differ
even in aesthetic attitude from their predecessors. They are rather
dogmatic and patronizing towards Canadian prose and poetry.
As to the aims and methods of the Pragmatic School:—The members of this
school have for their central principle or chief article of faith the
proposition that Canada has a worthy body of authentic literature, which
is being perennially enhanced in quantity and in quality. For their
second principle they hold to the proposition that Canadian literary
critics must more or less intimately know the history—the social and
spiritual origins, ideals, and evolution—of Canadian Literature. For
their third principle they have the proposition that the independent,
sincere, honest, and really serviceable literary critic to-day must be
constructive and pedagogic in method. They do not write literary
criticism which is meant to be literature itself, intrinsically
aesthetic, or pleasantly engaging reading on its own account. They call
their essays, whether a journalistic review or editorial, or a magazine
article, constructive criticism. Their critical writings are, in the
Greek sense, pragmatic. For the chief aims of the Canadian constructive
critics are these two: first, to make plain and indubitable to their
compatriots and the world that Canada has a really respectable body of
literature; secondly, to appraise new works of verse and prose by
Canadians and to determine the status of their worth in the permanent
literature of Canada. Canadian constructive critics have also a third
aim. It is pedagogical: to teach the people a decent knowledge of the
literary history of Canada and an aesthetic appreciation of Canadian
poetry and prose. The members of the Pragmatic School all write with
knowledge of their subject, with literary dignity, thoughtfully, and, on
the whole, convincingly and effectively. Their systematic and ardent
championing of the cause of Canadian Literature has had a three-fold
result. It has led to establishment of regular courses in the study of
Canadian Literature in the universities and colleges of the Dominion and
in some universities of the United States, to a wider study and
appreciation of Canadian Literature on the part of the people, and to
finer critical and creative writing by Canadian men and women of
letters.
_II. The Synoptic Method._
Literary criticism in Canada has had two faults. It was _vicarious_—an
echo of foreign criticism which was patronizing and insincere, and,
therefore, untrue and harmful. It was too _inclusive_ in conspectus and
standards, for Canadian poetry and prose were critically compared with
classical English Literature. This was to write criticism without
perspective and without respect to a hierarchy of values. It was
supererogatory and therefore futile. Even the Pragmatic School of
Canadian literary critics did not wholly escape this second fault. It
will result better for the advancement of Canadian Criticism if the
literatures of the British Overseas Dominions—Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Tasmania, South Africa—are compared amongst themselves; and if
thus the status of each relatively in the literature of the Empire is
critically determined.
By this method of comparing child with child, and not the child with the
parent, the literary historian shows how worthily Canadian poetry and
prose compare with other Overseas poetry and prose, and what right
Canadian and other Overseas literature have to be considered respectable
branches of the literature of the Empire. A comparative appreciation of
the Poetry of Canada and the other Overseas Dominions will suffice.
If Canadians have not written ‘great’ poetry, they have written poetry
in which, as Mr. E. B. Osborn, of the London _Morning Post_, says, ‘the
most exacting critic can find something to admire.’ The problem of
literary criticism in Canada to-day is not whether Canada has produced
or is producing ‘great poetry,’ but whether it has produced or is
producing good poetry, consistently with its grade of culture,
civilization and national inspirations and aspirations—poetry that can
genuinely be admired and that deserves to be preserved. To observe that
Canada has produced good poetry, near-great poetry, is not, as many
Canadians seem to feel it is, to damn it with faint praise, but sensibly
to evaluate it. Those native critics who ignore Canadian poetry because,
as they think, it is not ‘great’ poetry and is, therefore, not ‘real’
poetry or not poetry worthy of the name of literature, are maladroit
logicians. Those other native critics who discover Coleridge
reincarnated in Bliss Carman, Tennyson in Roberts, Keats in Lampman,
Matthew Arnold in Duncan Campbell Scott, Kipling in Service are damning
Canadian poetry with superobese praise. The truth is that Canada has
produced systematic poets who have written much poetry that is good,
some that is super-excellent, and some rare examples that are near the
perfection which entitles them, in their kind, to be ranked as really
great.
Canadian poetry, in variety of theme or species, and in technical
finish, naturally might be presumed to be superior to that of Australia,
New Zealand, or South Africa. In a literary way, Canada is not much, if
at all, older than Australia. Both countries depend on England for their
literary standards and poetic forms. But in changes of seasons and their
effects on the beauty and call of objective Nature, Canada has greater
variety, and Nature makes a deeper impress on the soul, than is possible
by climatic changes and Nature’s varying face and garb in Australia.
Moreover, Canada has a unique background of romantic history which
affords Canadian poets special opportunities to incorporate romantic and
heroic material in their poetry, or to suffuse it with the glamor of
romance. Australia has not this romantic history, and Australian poets,
therefore, have less opportunity to make their descriptive and narrative
poetry interesting or entrancing by way of romantic glamor. Again:
Canada has had several internal or national crises which have had a
distinct effect on the conscience of the Canadian people—creating in
them a sense of solidarity, evoking a national consciousness, and
filling them with national aspirations and an intense desire to work out
their own destiny. Australia has not had any such internal crises; and,
it is, therefore, not to be expected that Australian poetry will be
noted for peculiar, intense, or profound expressions of the sense of
nationality and of destiny.
But while in Canada the literature most in popular demand is imaginative
prose, and while the majority of readers are virtually perusers of prose
fiction, in Australia the readers and writers of poetry are legion or,
as one critic has put it, ‘poetry out there is a national habit.’ Mr.
Arthur Adams, an Australian editor, has stated that while he was always
certain of getting good verse from contributors, he was never certain of
getting a good story. It has been quite the other way in Canada—an
editor is practically certain of getting a good piece of prose or a good
story, and never sure of getting a technically worthy poem, or even
verse which might by courtesy be called poetry. In Canada, with the
exception of the enormous sales of Service’s volumes and W. H.
Drummond’s _habitant_ verse, Canadian poets have had to be content with
very small editions, and even some of these had many left-over copies,
absolutely unsaleable. In Australia the sale of poetry—of large
successive editions of the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson,
Will H. Ogilvie, A. B. Patterson, C. J. Dennis, the latter’s running
beyond 100,000 copies in 1917—is a literary phenomenon by itself; and
goes to prove that in Australia the reading and the writing of poetry
are virtually national habits.
On the sides, then, of romantic historical backgrounds, practical or
social crises, and variety, beauty, and sublimity of Nature, Canada was
naturally fitted to produce a larger and more impressive body of poetry
than was Australia. But as a matter of fact, in at least two respects,
Australian poetry rather surpasses Canadian. Canadian poets never had a
waiting and avid body of readers. Australian poets had precisely such a
_clientèle_. This means that in Canada poetry would not be written with
the consciousness of a critical public in mind—a public that would as
readily reject or condemn poetry which was not satisfactory as it would
accept and praise poetry which satisfied, whereas in Australia poetry
would be written consciously aiming at pleasing and satisfying a
critical public of readers. In other words, while Canadian poets had
only foreign or English standards, and practically no domestic standards
or _clientèle_, Australian poets had both foreign and domestic standards
and a very large and responsive domestic public of readers.
The result was that while in Canada the general run of poetry was
technically indifferent, at least until the rise of the Systematic
School, in Australia the run of poetry, irrespective of the themes, was
technically better finished than the Canadian. The Canadians did not
seem to write with a consciousness of English standards and criticism.
Their poetry was only for home consumption—and the substance counted
more than the form or style. The Australians, as poets, on the whole
were more cultured than the Canadians and wrote their verse as if
distinctly conscious that it would be seen and read in England, and
judged according to rigorous English standards, because regarded as
written by _absentee_ Englishmen. Australian verse was written more for
English readers than for home readers. But the home readers also read
with English standards in view—even though the themes were Australian,
horse-racing and other picaresque life or the more dignified themes of
Nature’s loveliness, Nature’s immensities, or tragic death in the
wilderness. Hence, on the whole, Australian poetry actually shows a
better _technical_ finish than does Canadian poetry.
Canadian and Australian poets naturally produced verse which is marked
by fervid nature-painting and by realistic pictures of pioneer and wild
romantic social life. But in fine nature-painting the Canadians surpass
the Australians. Both in color from Nature (Canadian poets have the
larger, more varied palette) and in technical artistry Australia has not
produced a poet of the quality of Lampman, Wilfred Campbell, or Duncan
Campbell Scott. Nor when it comes to envisaging the _moods_ of Nature
and the open-road, has Australia produced a poet of the lyrical quality
of Bliss Carman. Canada’s Nature-painters are superb _artists_.
But the Australian poets have their _forte_. In realistic pictures of
rough or pioneer social life, they surpass the Canadian poets. The
Canadian poet Drummond, of course, stands in a class by himself,
inasmuch as his poetry of the _habitant_ and _voyageur_ was a field
pre-empted by him and inasmuch as his poetry in this field is devoted to
picturesque revealment of the _humanity_—the pathos and humor—of the
thought, speech and simple life—of a peculiar but morally worthy
people. There is nothing melodramatic in Drummond’s poetry. It is
genuinely humanized verse about a genuinely human people. Service’s
Western and Northern Canadian verse, on the contrary, is the poetry of
picaresque melodrama. The best ballads of the Australian poets of rough
or pioneer life, A. L. Gordon, A. B. Patterson, Henry Lawson, C. J.
Dennis, are authentic poetry. In remarking the distinction between the
Australian and the Canadian poets of rude or picaresque life, Mr. E. B.
Osborn truthfully says: ‘Some of the poems in his [Service’s] last
volume are a _near approach_ to the Australian realism, which avoids the
melodramatic and the splashing of anapests as far as possible and makes
use of the quiet-curtain. So far the manly adventurous poets of Canada
[Service, Stead, McInnes, Fraser, _et al._] have not progressed far
beyond the Adam Lindsay Gordon convention. As yet none of the Western
Canadian poets see that _style_ is the only antiseptic and, as artists,
they are far behind the Australians and compare unfavorably with the
minor masters of Quebec.’
What has been said regarding the technical finish of Australian verse
applies also to the verse of New Zealand and of South Africa, and to the
latter with even more truth. For all the South African poets happened to
be men and women of culture. Thomas Pringle was a man of rare and
refined culture. So are Arthur Cripps, R. C. Russell, John Runcie, Mrs.
Beatrice Bromley, W. C. Scully, and a score of others.