V.

As I glance over my library shelves I find indeed that historical

literature has continued since the days of Garneau and Ferland, to

enlist the earnest and industrious study of Canadians with more or

less success. In English Canada, John Charles Dent produced a work on

the political development of Canada from the union of 1841 until the

confederation of 1867, which was written with fairness and ability,

but he was an Englishman by birth and education, though resident for

many years in the city of Toronto.[34] And here let me observe that

though such men as Dent, Heavysege, Faillon, Daniel Wilson, Hunt,

D'Arcy McGee and Goldwin Smith were not born or educated in Canada

like Haliburton, Logan, J. W. Dawson, Joseph Howe, Wilmot, Cartier,

Garneau, or Fréchette, but only came to this country in the maturity

of their mental powers, yet to men of their class the Dominion owes a

heavy debt of gratitude for the ability and earnestness with which they

have elevated the intellectual standard of the community where they

have laboured. Although all of us may not be prepared to accept the

conclusions of the historian, or approve the judgment of the political

critic; although we may regret that a man of such deep scholarship and

wide culture as Goldwin Smith has never yet been able to appreciate

the Canadian or growing national sentiment of this dependency, yet who

can doubt, laying aside all political or personal prejudice, that he,

like the others I have named, has stimulated intellectual development

in his adopted home, and so far has given us compensation for some

utterances which, so many Canadians honestly believe, mar an otherwise

useful and brilliant career. Such literary men have undoubtedly their

uses, since they seem specially intended by a wise dispensation of

affairs to cure us of too much self-complacency, and to prevent us from

falling into a condition of mental stagnation by giving us from time to

time abundant material for reflection. So much, by way of parenthesis,

is due to the able men who have adopted Canada as their home and have

been labouring in various vocations to stimulate the intellectual

growth of this Dominion. A most accurate historical record of the same

period of our history as that reviewed by Dent was made in French about

the same time by Louis Turcotte of Quebec.[35] Mr. Benjamin Sulte, a

member of this society, has also given us the results of many years of

conscientious research in his "Histoire des Canadiens," which is not

so well known as it ought to be, probably on account of its cumbrous

size and mode of publication.[36] The Abbé Casgrain, also a member

of the society and a most industrious author, has recently devoted

himself with true French Canadian fervour to the days of Montcalm

and Lévis, and by the aid of a large mass of original documents has

thrown much light on a very interesting and important epoch of the

history of America.[37] Dr. Kingsford with patience and industry has

continued his history of Canada, which is distinguished by accuracy

and research.[38] It is not my intention to enumerate all those names

which merit remark in this connection, for this is not a collection

of bibliographical notes,[39] but simply a review of the more salient

features of our intellectual development in the well-marked periods

of our history. Indeed it is gratifying to us to know that the Royal

Society comprises within its ranks nearly all the historical writers in

Canada, and it would seem too much like pure egotism were I to dilate

on their respective performances. Of poets since the days of Crémazie

we have had our full proportion, and it is encouraging to know that the

poems of Fréchette,--whose best work has been crowned by the French

Academy,--LeMay, Reade, Mair, Roberts, Bliss Carman, Wilfred Campbell

and Lampman have gained recognition from time to time in the world of

letters outside of Canada.[40][B] We have yet to produce in English

Canada a book of poems which can touch the sympathies and live on the

lips of the world like those of Whittier and Longfellow, but we need

not despair since even in the country which gave these birth they have

not their compeers. Some even declare that the only bard of promise who

appears in these days to touch that chord of nature which makes the

whole world kin is James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet, despite his

tendency to exaggerate provincial dialect and make his true poetic

genius too subordinate to what becomes at last an affectation and a

mere mannerism which wearies by its very repetition. Even in England

there is hesitation in choosing a poet laureate; there are Swinburne,

Morris and other poets, but not another Tennyson, and it has been even

suggested that the honour might pass to a master of poetic prose,

John Ruskin, whose brilliant genius has been ever devoted to a lofty

idealism which would make the world much happier and better. At the

present time Canadian poets obtain a place with regularity in the best

class of American magazines, and not infrequently their verse reaches

a higher level than the majority of poetic aspirants who appear in

the same field of poetry; but for one I am not an ardent admirer of

American magazine poems which appear too often mere machine work and

not the results of that true poetic inspiration which alone can achieve

permanent fame.

The poems of the well known American authors, Aldrich, Gilder and

Stedman, have certainly an easy rhythmical flow and an artistic finish

which the majority of Canadian poetic aspirants should study with

far more closeness. At the same time it may be said that even these

artists do not often surpass in poetic thought the best productions of

the Canadians to whom I have referred as probably illustrating most

perfectly the highest development so far among us of this department

of _belles-lettres_. It is not often that one comes across more

exquisitely conceived poems than some of those written by Mr. John

Reade, whom the laborious occupation of journalism and probably the

past indifference of a Canadian public to Canadian poetry have for a

long while diverted from a literary field where it would seem he should

have won a wider fame. Among the verses which one can read time and

again are those of which the first lines are

"In my heart are many chambers through which I wander free,

Some are furnished, some are empty, some are sombre, some are

light;

Some are open to all comers, and of some I keep the key,

And I enter in the stillness of the night."[41][C]

It would be interesting as well as instructive if some competent

critic, with the analytical faculty and the poetic instinct of Matthew

Arnold or Sainte-Beuve, were to study the English and French Canadian

poets and show whether they are mere imitators of the best models of

French and English literature, or whether their work contains within

itself those germs which give promise of original fruition in the

future. It will be remembered that the French critic, though a poet

of merit himself, has spoken of what he calls "the radical inadequacy

of French poetry." In his opinion, whatever talent the French poets

have for strophe and line, their work, as a rule is "too slight, too

soon read, too poor in ideas, to influence a serious mind for any

length of time." No doubt many others think that, in comparison with

the best conceptions of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Browning

and Tennyson, French poetry is, generally speaking, inadequate for the

expression of the most sublime thoughts, of the strongest passion, or

of the most powerful imagination, and though it must always please

us by its easy rhythm and lucidity of style, it fails to make that

vivid impression on the mind and senses which is the best test of that

true poetic genius which influences generations and ever lives in the

hearts of the people. It represents in some respects the lightness

and vivacity of the French intellectual temperament under ordinary

conditions, and not the strength of the national character, whose

depths are only revealed at some crisis which evokes a deep sentiment

of patriotism. "Partant pour la Syrie," so often heard in the days of

the last Bonaparte regime, probably illustrated this lighter tendency

of the French mind just as the "Marseillaise," the noblest and most

impressive of popular poetic outbursts, illustrated national passion

evoked by abnormal conditions. French Canadian poetry has been often

purely imitative of French models, like Musset and Gauthier, both in

style and sentiment, and consequently lacked strength and originality.

It might be thought that in this new country poets would be inspired

by original conceptions--that the intellectual fruition would be fresh

and vigorous like some natural products that grow so luxuriantly

on the virginal soil of the new Dominion, and not like those which

grow on land which is renewed and enriched by artificial means after

centuries of growth. Perhaps the literature of a colonial dependency,

or a relatively new country, must necessarily in its first stages be

imitative, and it is only now and then an original mind bursts the

fetters of intellectual subordination. In the United States Emerson

and Hawthorne probably best represent the original thought and

imagination of that comparatively new country, just as Aldrich and

Howells represent in the first case English culture in poetry, and in

the other the sublimated essence of reportorial realism. The two former

are original thinkers, the two others pure imitators. Walt Whitman's

poems certainly show at times much power and originality of conception,

but after all they are simply the creations of an eccentric genius

and illustrate a phase of that Realism towards which fiction even in

America has been tending of late, and which has been already degraded

in France to a Naturalism which is positively offensive. He has not

influenced to any perceptible extent the intellect of his generation or

elevated the thoughts of his countrymen like the two great minds I have

just named. Yet even Whitman's success, relatively small as it was in

his own country, arose chiefly from the fact that he attempted to be an

_American_ poet, representing the pristine vigour and natural freedom

of a new land. It is when French Canadian poets become thoroughly

Canadian by the very force of the inspiration of some Canadian subject

they have chosen, that we can see them at their best. Fréchette has all

the finish of the French poets, and while it cannot be said that he

has yet originated great thoughts which are likely to live among even

the people whom he has so often instructed and delighted, yet he has

given us poems like that on the discovery of the Mississippi,[D] which

proves that he is capable of even better things if he would always

seek inspiration from the sources of the deeply interesting history

of his own country, or enter into the inner mysteries and social

relations of his own people, rather than dwell on the lighter shades

and incidents of their lives. Perhaps in some respects Crémazie had

greater capabilities for the poems of deep passion or vivid imagination

than any of his successors in literature; the few national poems

he left behind are a promise of what he could have produced had the

circumstances of his later life been happier.[E] After all, the poetry

that lives is the poetry of human life and human sympathy, of joy and

sorrow, rather than verses on mountains, rivers and lakes, or sweetly

worded sonnets to Madame B. or Mademoiselle C. When we compare the

English with the French Canadian poets we can see what an influence the

more picturesque and interesting history of French Canada exercises on

the imagination of its writers. The poets that claim Ontario for their

home give us rhythmical and pleasing descriptions of the lake and river

scenery of which the varied aspects and moods might well captivate the

eye of the poet as well as of the painter. It is very much painting

in both cases; the poet should be an artist by temperament equally

with the painter who puts his thoughts on canvas and not in words.

Descriptions of our meadows, prairies and forests, with their wealth

of herbage and foliage, or artistic sketches of pretty bits of lake

scenery have their limitations as respects their influence on a people.

Great thoughts or deeds are not bred by scenery. The American poem

that has captured the world is not any one of Bryant's delightful

sketches of the varied landscape of his native land, but Longfellow's

Evangeline, which is a story of the "affection that hopes, and endures

and is patient." Dollard, and the Lady of Fort La Tour are themes which

we do not find in prosaic Ontario, whose history is only a century

old--a history of stern materialism as a rule, rarely picturesque or

romantic, and hardly ever heroic except in some episodes of the war

of 1812-15, in which Canadians, women as well as men, did their duty

faithfully to king and country, though their deeds have never yet been

adequately told in poem or prose. The story of Laura Secord's toilsome

journey on a June day eighty years ago[41_a_] seems as susceptible of

strong poetic treatment as Paul Revere's Ride, told in matchless verse

by Longfellow.

I think if we compare the best Canadian poems with the same class

of literature in Australia the former do not at all lose by the

comparison. Thanks to the thoughtfulness of a friend in South Australia

I have had many opportunities of late of studying the best work of

Australian writers, chiefly poets and novelists,[42] and have come

to the conclusion that at least the poets of both hemispheres--for

to fiction we cannot make even a pretense--reflect credit on each

country. In one respect indeed Canadians can claim a superiority over

their fellow-citizens of the British Empire in that far off Australian

land, and that is, in the fact that we have poets, and historians, and

essayists, who write the languages of France and England with purity

and even elegance; that the grace and precision of the French tongue

have their place in this country alongside the vigorous and copious

expression of the English language. More than that, the Canadians have

behind them a history which is well calculated to stimulate writers to

give utterance to national sentiment. I mean national in the sense of

being thoroughly imbued with a love for the country, its scenery, its

history and its aspirations. The people of that great island continent

possess great natural beauties and riches--flowers and fruits of every

kind flourish there in rare profusion, and gold and gems are among

the treasures of the soil, but its scenery is far less varied and

picturesque than ours and its history is but of yesterday compared with

that of Canada. Australians cannot point to such historic ground as is

found from Louisbourg to Quebec, or from Montreal to Champlain, the

battle ground of nations whose descendants now live under one flag,

animated by feelings of a common interest and a common aspiration for

the future!

Perhaps if I were at any time inclined to be depressed as to the future

of Canada, I should find some relief in those poems by Canadian authors

which take frequently an elevated and patriotic range of thought and

vision, and give expression to aspirations worthy of men born and

living in this country. When some men doubt the future and would see

us march into the ranks of other states, with heads bowed down in

confession of our failure to hold our own on this continent and build

up a new nation always in the closest connection with England, I ask

them to turn to the poems of Joseph Howe and read that inspiring

poetic tribute to the mother country, "All hail to the day when the

Britons came over"--

"Every flash of her genius our pathway enlightens,

Every field she explores we are beckoned to tread,

Each laurel she gathers, our future day brightens--

We joy with her living and mourn with her dead."[43]

Or read that tribute which the French Canadian laureate, Fréchette, has

been fain to pay to the English flag under whose folds his country has

enjoyed so much freedom and protection for its institutions:

"Regarde me disait mon père

Ce drapeau vaillamment porté;

Il a fait ton pays prospère

Et respecte ta liberté.

"C'est le drapeau de l'Angleterre;

Sans tache, sur le firmament,

Presque à tous les points de la terre

Il flotte glorieusement."

Or take up a volume by Roberts and read that frequently quoted poem of

which these are the closing lines:

"Shall not our love this rough sweet land make sure?

Her bounds preserve inviolate, though we die.

O strong hearts of the North,

Let flame your loyalty forth,

And put the craven and base to an open shame,

Till earth shall know the Child of Nations by her name."

Even Mr. Edgar has forgotten the astute lawyer and the politician in

his national song, "This Canada of Ours," and has given expression to

the deep sentiment that lies as I have said in the heart of every true

Canadian and forces him at times to words like these:

"Strong arms shall guard our cherished homes

When darkest danger lowers,

And with our life-blood we'll defend

This Canada of ours,

Fair Canada,

Dear Canada,

This Canada of ours."

Such poems are worth a good many political speeches even in parliament

so far as their effect upon the hearts and sympathies is concerned. We

all remember a famous man once said, "Let me make all the ballads, and

I care not who makes the laws of a people."

[Footnote B: A list of Canadian poems which have been printed in books

(from 1867-1893) appears in the Bibliographical Notes (40).]

[Footnote C: Given in full in Appendix.]

[Footnote D: See Appendix to this work, note 40, for an extract from

this fine poem.]

[Footnote E: See Appendix to this work, note 40, for an extract from

one of his national poems.]