This necessarily brief review of the work of the Royal Society could
not well be left out of an address like this; and I can now pass on to
some reflections that occur to me on the general subject.
In the literature of biography, so susceptible of a treatment full of
human interests and sympathies--as chatty Boswell's "Life of Johnson,"
and Lockhart's "Life of Scott," notably illustrate--we have little to
show, except it be the enterprise of publishers and the zeal of too
enthusiastic friends. Nor is it necessary to dwell on the literature
of the law, which is becoming in a measure more of a technical and
less of a learned profession in the larger sense, unless, indeed,
our university schools of political science eventually elevate it
to a wider range of thought. Several excellent books of a purely
technical character have been compiled from year to year, but no Kent,
or Story, or Cooley has yet appeared to instruct us by a luminous
exposition of principle, or breadth of knowledge. Those who know
anything of Dr. Edward Blake's great intellectual power, of his wealth
of legal learning, of his insight into the operations of political
constitutions, cannot deny that he at least could produce a work which
might equal in many respects those of the great Americans here named;
but it looks very much at present as if he, and others I could mention,
will give up their best years to the absorbing and uncertain struggles
of politics, rather than to the literature of that profession to which
they might, under different conditions, raise imperishable memorials.
From the pulpit many of us hear from time to time eloquent and well
reasoned efforts which tell us how much even the class, necessarily
most conservative in its traditions, and confined in its teachings,
has been forced by modern tendencies to enlarge its human sympathies
and widen its intellectual horizon; but the published sermons are
relatively few in number; and while, now and then, at intervals, after
a public celebration, an important anniversary or ceremonial, or as a
sequence of a controversy on the merits or demerits of creed or dogma,
we see a pile of pamphlets on the counter of a bookstore, we do not
hear of any printed book of sermons that appears to have entered of
recent years into the domain of human thought and discussion in the
great world beyond our territorial limits.
I shall not attempt to dwell at any length on the intellectual standard
of our legislative bodies, but shall confine myself to a few general
observations that naturally suggest themselves to an observer of our
political conditions. Now, as in all times of our history, political
life claims many strong, keen and cultured intellects, although it is
doubtful whether the tendency of our democratic institutions is to
encourage the most highly educated organizations to venture, or remain,
should once they venture, in the agitated and unsafe sea of political
passion and controversy. The first parliament of the Dominion, and the
first legislatures of the provinces, which met after the federal union
of 1867, when the system of dual representation was permissible--a
system whose advantages are more obvious now--brought into public
life the most brilliant and astute intellects of Canada, and it will
probably be a long time before we shall again see assemblages so
distinguished for oratory, humour and intellectual power. A federal
system was, doubtless, the only one feasible under the racial and
natural conditions that met the Quebec Conference of 1864; but, while
admitting its political necessity, we cannot conceal from ourselves
the fact that the great drain its numerous legislative bodies and
governments make upon the mental resources of a limited population--a
drain increased by the abolition of dual representation--is calculated
to weaken our intellectual strength in our legislative halls, when
a legislative union would in the nature of things concentrate that
strength in one powerful current of activity and thought. A population
of five millions of people has to provide not only between six and
seven hundred representatives, who must devote a large amount of
time to the public service for inadequate compensation, but also
lieutenant-governors, judges and high officials, holding positions
requiring intellectual qualifications as well as business capacity if
they are properly filled. Apart from these considerations, it must
be remembered that the opportunities of acquiring wealth and success
in business or professional vocations have naturally increased with
the material development of the Dominion, and that men of brains
have consequently even less inducement than formerly to enter on the
uncertain and too often ungrateful pursuit of politics. We have also
the danger before us that it will be with us, as it is in the United
States and even in England under the new conditions that are rapidly
developing there; the professional politician, who is too often the
creation of factions and cliques, and the lower influences of political
intrigue and party management, will be found, as time passes, more
common in our legislative halls, to the detriment of those higher
ideals that should be the animating principles of public life in
this young country, whose future happiness and greatness depend so
much on the present methods of party government. Be all this as it
may be, one may still fairly claim for our legislative bodies that
their intellectual standard can compare favourably with that of the
Congress at Washington or the state legislatures of Massachusetts and
New England generally. After all, it is not for brilliant intellectual
pyrotechnics we should now so much look to the legislative bodies of
Canada, but rather for honesty of purpose, keen comprehension of the
public interests, and a business capacity which can grasp the actual
material wants and necessities of a country which has to face the
competition, and even opposition, of a great people full of industrial
as well as intellectual energy.
Nowhere in this review have I claimed for this country any very
striking results in the course of the half century since which we have
shown so much political and material activity. I cannot boast that we
have produced a great poem or a great history which has attracted the
attention of the world beyond us, and assuredly we find no noteworthy
attempt in the direction of a novel of our modern life; but what I do
claim is, looking at the results generally, the work we have done has
been sometimes above the average in those fields of literature--and
here I include, necessarily, science--in which Canadians have worked.
They have shown in many productions a conscientious spirit of research,
patient industry, and not a little literary skill in the management
of their material. I think, on the whole, there have been enough
good poems, histories and essays written and published in Canada for
the last four or five decades to prove that there has been a steady
intellectual growth on the part of our people, and that it has kept
pace at all events with the mental growth in the pulpit, or in the
legislative halls, where, of late years, a keen practical debating
style has taken the place of the more rhetorical and studied oratory
of old times. I believe the intellectual faculties of Canadians only
require larger opportunities for their exercise to bring forth a
rich fruition. I believe the progress in the years to come will be
far greater than that we have yet shown, and that necessarily so,
with the wider distribution of wealth, the dissemination of a higher
culture, and a greater confidence in our own mental strength, and in
the resources that this country offers to pen and pencil. The time
will come when that great river, associated with memories of Cartier,
Champlain, La Salle, Frontenac, Wolfe and Montcalm,--that river already
immortalized in history by the pen of Parkman--will be as noted in song
and story as the Rhine, and will have its Irving to make it as famous
as the lovely Hudson.
Of course there are many obstacles in the way of successful literary
pursuits in Canada. Our population is still small, and separated into
two distinct nationalities, who for the most part necessarily read
books printed in their own tongue. A book published in Canada then has
a relatively limited _clientèle_ in the country itself, and cannot
meet much encouragement from publishers in England or in the United
States who have advantages for placing their own publications which no
Canadian can have under existing conditions. Consequently an author
of ambition and merit should perforce look for publishers outside his
own country if he is to expect anything like just appreciation, or to
have a fair chance of reaching that literary world which alone gives
fame in the true sense. It must be admitted too that so much inferior
work has at times found its way from Canada to other countries that
publishers are apt to look askance at a book when it is offered to
them from the colonies. Still, while this may at times operate against
making what is a fairly good bargain with the publisher--and many
authors, of course, believe with reason that a publisher, as a rule,
never makes a good bargain with an author, and certainly not with a new
one--a good book will sooner or later assert itself whenever Canadians
write such a book. Let Canadians then persevere conscientiously and
confidently in their efforts to break through the indifference which at
present tends to cramp their efforts and dampen their energy. It is a
fashion with some colonial writers to believe that there is a settled
determination on the part of English critics to ignore their best
work, when, perhaps, in the majority of cases it is the lack of good
work that is at fault. Such a conclusion sometimes finds an argument
in the fact that, when so able a Canadian as Edward Blake enters the
legislative halls of England, some ill-natured critic, who represents
a spirit of insular English snobbery, has only a sneer for "this
Canadian lawyer" who had better "stay at home," and not presume to
think that he, a mere colonist, could have anything to say in matters
affecting the good government of the British Empire. But the time has
long since passed for sneers at colonial self-government or colonial
intellect, and we are more likely hereafter to have a Canadian House of
Commons held up as a model of decorum for so-called English gentlemen.
Such able and impartial critical journals as _The Athenæum_ are more
ready to welcome than ignore a good book in these days of second-rate
literature in England itself. If we produce such a good book as Mrs.
Campbell Praed's "Australian Life," or Tasma's "Uncle Piper of Piper's
Hill," we may be sure the English papers will do us justice. Let me
frankly insist that we have far too much hasty and slovenly literary
work done in Canada. The literary canon which every ambitious writer
should have ever in his mind has been stated by no less an authority
than Sainte-Beuve: "Devoted to my profession as a critic, I have tried
to be more and more a good and if possible an able workman." A good
style means artistic workmanship. It is too soon for us in this country
to look for a Matthew Arnold or a Sainte-Beuve--such great critics are
generally the results, and not the forerunners, of a great literature;
but at least if we could have in the present state of our intellectual
development, a criticism in the press which would be truthful and
just, the essential characteristics of the two authors I have named,
the effect would be probably in the direction of encouraging promising
writers, and weeding out some literary dabblers. "What I have wished,"
said the French critic, "is to say not a word more than I thought, to
stop even a little short of what I believed in certain cases, in order
that my words might acquire more weight as historical testimony." Truth
tempered by consideration for literary genius is the essence of sound
criticism.
We all know that the literary temperament is naturally sensitive to
anything like indifference and is too apt, perhaps, to exaggerate
the importance of its calling in the prosaic world in which it is
exercised. The pecuniary rewards are so few, relatively, in this
country, that the man of imaginative mind--the purely literary
worker--naturally thinks that he can, at least, ask for generous
appreciation. No doubt he thinks, to quote a passage from a clever
Australian novel--"The Australian Girl"--"Genius has never been truly
acclimatized by the world. The Philistines always long to put out
the eyes of poets and make them grind corn in Gaza." But it is well
always to remember that a great deal of rough work has to be done in a
country like Canada before its Augustan age can come. No doubt literary
stimulus must be more or less wanting in a colony where there is latent
at times in some quarters a want of self-confidence in ourselves and in
our institutions, arising from that sense of dependency and habit of
imitation and borrowing from others that is a necessity of a colonial
condition. The tendency of the absence of sufficient self-assertion is
to cramp intellectual exertion, and make us believe that success in
literature can only be achieved in the old countries of Europe. That
spirit of all-surrounding materialism to which Lowell has referred
must also always exercise a certain sinister influence in this way--an
influence largely exerted in Ontario--but despite all this we see
that even among our neighbours it has not prevented the growth of a
literary class famous for its intellectual successes in varied fields
of literature. It is for Canadian writers to have always before them a
high ideal, and remember that literature does best its duty--to quote
the eloquent words of Ruskin--"in raising our fancy to the height of
what may be noble, honest and felicitous in actual life; in giving
us, though we may be ourselves poor and unknown, the companionship
of the wisest spirits of every age and country, and in aiding the
communication of clear thoughts and faithful purposes among distant
nations, which will at last breathe calm upon the sea of lawless
passion and change into such halcyon days the winter of the world, that
the birds of the air may have their nests in peace and the Son of Man
where to lay his head."