"Professor" Roberts he is still called by his old friends in New
Brunswick, and, so far as we know, "Old Man" he is still called by his
literary companions. "The 'Old Man,'" said Richard Hovey a few years
ago, "he is fondly called by the poets who are his companions, not
that he is so much the elder of the group, but perhaps because he had
already achieved a certain measure of reputation and was a full-fledged
man of letters when the others were just beginning their callow
boy-bows to the Muse. And the name, given at the outset in a comic,
mock-filial mood, has stuck to him as a term of endearment."
Hovey--may he rest in peace!--loved and admired Roberts. He said so
in writing; he said so o' nights in the company of his old friends
in Boston. Hovey had a manner that would remind one of the rivers
branching off Roberts's familiar Bay of Fundy. At first, a stranger,
you found it empty; in a few moments, if he offered you the right hand
of fellowship, it was flooding with a warm tide.
We could readily go on for a page or two speaking of the lamented
singer, and of what it meant to know him as a friend--to share his
hospitality and his sympathy. But it occurs to us that some reader may
be inquiring why the professor from New Brunswick has been brought into
a book on American authors. We might answer, with a smile, to incite
him to become as loyal an American as General Wallace or Mark Twain.
Or we might repeat as an answer a statement made to us not long ago by
an observant inhabitant of this part of the literary world--"Professor
Roberts is quite as good an American as Henry James." But, using
American in its fullest sense, Roberts easily comes in under that head.
The shadow of the Stars and Stripes falls near his birthplace. His
public is largely a purely American public. His residence for the last
four years has been New York City. He is perhaps the most gifted author
reared in late decades by our lovely neighbor, the Dominion of Canada,
his alma mater--
O child of nations, giant-limbed,
Who stand'st among the nations now
Unheeded, unadored, unhymned,
With unanointed brow!
Speaking of Roberts in _The Writer_ once, his friend Hovey said: "All
his excursions include a return ticket to the Maritime Provinces, and
'Up and Away in the Morning' is always for the sake of 'Home, Home in
the Evening.'" This statement has been contradicted by Roberts's life
during the last few years. He is to be found in New York winter and
summer.
At the same time we should be stultifying ourselves to deny his loyalty
to his native land. It lives in many of his pages; it is kept aflame
by ties of family and of friendship. The beautiful part of the world
northeast of New England has been to him nursery, academy and studio.
Indeed, one who knew him well has said: "He is neither Briton nor
American, but assertively Canadian; and, if history ever make his dream
a reality, his own poems will not have been an entirely negligible
factor in bringing it to pass."
Charles George Douglass Roberts, M.A., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.L., was born
in Douglas, at the mouth of the Keswick River, near Fredericton, New
Brunswick, on January 10, 1860. His father, the Rev. G. Goodridge
Roberts, M.A., the son of Professor George Roberts, Ph.D., is the
rector of the English church in Fredericton, and also the canon of
Christ Church Cathedral. His mother, Emma Wetmore Bliss Roberts,
comes of what used to be known as United Empire Loyalist stock--the
same stock, by the way, that Emerson's mother came of. Her ancestors
left the colonies for the provinces at the outbreak of the American
Revolution. There were many influential families among the Loyalists,
and, on the whole, their headstrong flight has been beneficial to the
land 'way down East. The novelist's mother, it should be said, is a
sister of Bliss Carman's mother, which makes the two young writers,
Roberts and Carman, cousins by blood as well as brothers by profession.
A strong intellectual ancestry has Roberts, it will be seen, an
ancestry that fully accounts for the circumstance that his sister and
his two younger brothers are skillful at versification.
The first fourteen years of Roberts's life were spent in Woodstock,
of which parish his father was then the rector, and up to the end of
these fourteen years Charles's education had been personally supervised
by his father. Fortunate conditions!--as they who have missed such
supervision can most eloquently testify. Ideal conditions, if we are to
accept the well-digested opinion of scholastic as well as of medical
experts.
The Robertses moved from Woodstock to Fredericton in 1874. At
Fredericton, Charles attended the Collegiate School. Chief among
those who fitted the boy for college was Dr. George R. Parkin, who,
although now the head of Upper Canada College, Toronto, has perhaps
been most prominent as an Imperial Federationist advocate. In 1876
young Roberts was matriculated at the University of New Brunswick.
As for his progress there, no more need be said than that he won the
Douglas silver medal for Latin and Greek, the alumni gold medal for the
Latin essay, and a classical scholarship. In 1879 he was graduated with
honors in ethics, metaphysics and political economy. That same year he
was appointed head master of the Chatham (N. B.) Grammar School. The
next year, 1880, chronicled two notable events--his marriage, and the
publication of his first book, "Orion and Other Poems."
In 1881, at the University of New Brunswick, he took his degree of
Master of Arts for Greek and higher mathematics. During the next two
years he taught school in Fredericton.
Then there came a brief excursion which may have illustrated his
doubts about a career. He left off teaching and went to Toronto.
There, with the assistance of Goldwin Smith, he established _The
Week_, the most important of the Canadian literary periodicals.
He relinquished this work the following year to take the chair of
English and French literature in King's College, Windsor, Nova Scotia.
In 1887 he abandoned the French department for the department of
Economics and International Law. At Windsor he lived in a house in the
balmy woods--"Kingscroft," he called it--and there he planned three
books--"The Forge in the Forest," his first Acadian romance; "The Book
of the Native," and "A History of Canada."
These plans compelled the abandonment of teaching, so, in 1895,
Roberts left King's College and returned to Fredericton. At the age
of thirty-five, therefore, he formally adopted the profession of
literature.
Early in 1897 he moved to New York, where for eight months he was
associate editor of _The Illustrated American_. Since then he has
directed his efforts wholly to authorship.
And with the utmost justification. In narrative and in descriptive
power he shines brilliantly among his contemporaries. Hovey would
not answer the question: "Who is the greatest poet born on Canadian
soil?"--"but," he writes, "when I say that Roberts is _par excellence_
the 'Poet of Canada,' I have little fear that anyone will contradict
me." There is his noble hymn, "Canada," there is "Autochthon," there
is "Kinship," there is "Origins"--poems of faultless grace and
deep-founded sentiment and what one critic has termed "chiselled,
Parnassian calm." For example:
The mount, the star, the germ, the deep,
They all shall wake, they all shall sleep.
Time, like a flurry of wild rain,
Shall drift across the darkened pane.
Space, in the dim predestined hour,
Shall crumble like a ruined tower.
I only, with unfaltering eye,
Shall watch the dreams of Gods go by.
Hovey, whom we may accept as an accomplished judge of symbolist
literature, put "Do Seek their Meat from God" and "The Young Ravens
that call upon Him," two sketches in "Earth's Enigmas," and "Savory
Meats," a story published in the _Chap-Book_, together, and said that
they "form an altogether unique and extraordinary triptych. I am
inclined to think these three pieces," he says, "Roberts's most notable
contribution to literature. The problem of the struggle for existence,
of the preying of life on life, is treated with an inexorable fidelity
to the fact, a catholic sympathy, a sense of universality and mystery,
and a calm acceptance, that reaches the level of 'pathos' in the
highest Greek usage of the word. There is a finality in these three
prose poems that is known only to the greatest art."
As for Robert's novels, they are full of the perfumed freshness, the
vigorous life and the romantic wealth which constituted, and to a small
extent still constitute, the salient characteristics of the lands in
which he spent his youth. We have noted his narrative and descriptive
power. Let us take from "A Sister to Evangeline" one of Paul Grande's
visions of Yvonne de Lamourie.
"In one of these I saw her as she stood a certain morning in the
orchard, prying with insistent little finger-tips into the heart of a
young apple-flower, while I watched and said nothing. I know not to
this day whether she were thinking of the apple-flower or wondering
at the dumbness of her cavalier; but she feigned, at least, to concern
herself with only the blossom's heart. Her wide white lids downcast
over her great eyes, her long lashes almost sweeping the rondure of
her cheek, she looked a Madonna. The broad, low forehead; the finely
chiselled nose, not too small for strength of purpose; the full, firm
chin--all added to this sweet dignity, which was of a kind to compel a
lover's worship. There was enough breadth to the gracious curve below
the ear to make me feel that this girl would be a strong man's mate.
But the mouth, a bow of tenderness, with a wilful dimple at either
delectable corner always lurking, spoke her all woman, too laughing and
loving to spend her days in sainthood. Her hair--very thick and of a
purply-bronze, near to black--lay in careless fullness over her little
ears. On her head, though in all else she affected the dress of Grand
Pré maids, she wore, not the Acadian linen cap, but a fine shawl of
black Spanish lace, which became her mightily. Her bodice was of linen
homespun, coarse, but bleached to a creamy whiteness; and her skirt,
of the same simple stuff, was short after the Acadian fashion, so that
I could see her slim ankles, and feet of that exceeding smallness and
daintiness which may somehow tread heavily upon a man's heart."
And there is a strong resemblance to Thomas Hardy in at least one of
the paragraphs narrating Paul Grande's race with death toward the
Anderson farm--the paragraph dealing with the idle things that then
incongruously concerned the hero:
"Things idle as these: I see a dew-wet fir-top catch the moonlight
for an instant and flash to whiteness, an up-thrust lance of silver;
I see the shadow of a dead, gnarled branch cast upon a mossy open in
startling semblance to a crucifix--so clear, I cannot but stoop and
touch it reverently as I pass; I see, at the edge of a grassy glade, a
company of tall buttercups, their stems invisible, their petals seeming
to float toward me, a squadron of small, light wings; I hear the smooth
swish of branches thrust apart; I hear the protesting, unresonant
creak of the green underbrush as we tread it down, and the sharp
crackle of dry twigs as we thread the aisles of older forest; I hear,
from the face of a moonlit bluff upon our left, the long, mournful
_Whóo-hu-hu--Hóo-oo_ of the brown owl. I smell the savour of juniper,
of bruised snakeroot, and of old, slow-rotting wood; with once a fairy
breath of unseen _linoea_; and once at the fringed brink of a rivulet,
the pungent fragrance of wild mint. I feel the frequent wet slappings
of branches on my face; I feel the strong prickles of the fir, the
cool, flat frondage of the spruce and hemlock, the unresisting,
feathery spines of the young hackmatack trees; I feel, once, a gluey
web upon my face, and the abhorrence with which I dash off the fat
spider that clings to my chin; I feel the noisome slump of my foot as I
tread upon a humped and swollen gathering of toad-stools."
More than one judicious critic has remarked that few men of his years
have achieved--and deservedly!--the literary renown which Professor
Roberts's published works warrant. These works are as follows: "Orion
and Other Poems" (1880), "In Divers Tones" (1887), "The Canadians of
Old" (a translation from the French of de Gaspé, 1889), Appleton's
"Canadian Guide Book" (1890), "Ave, An Ode for the Shelley Centenary"
(1892), "Songs of the Common Day" (1893), "The Raid of Beauséjour"
(1894), "Reub Dare's Shad Boat" (1895), "Around the Camp Fire" (1896),
"Earth's Enigmas" (1896), "A History of Canada" (1897), "The Forge
in the Forest" (1897), "The Book of the Native" (1897), "New York
Nocturnes" (1898), "A Sister to Evangeline" (1898), "By the Marshes of
Minas" (1900), "The Heart of the Ancient Wood" (1900).
However, notwithstanding this long and excellent literary record, we
are assured that Roberts "has a keen fondness for athletics. He is an
enthusiastic football and tennis player, canoeist and fisherman, and is
equally as skilled in these as he is in the pursuits of literature."
Another novel from his pen, "Barbara Ladd," appears this fall. "I
consider it," he writes, "a sort of cross between 'The Heart of the
Ancient Wood' and a historical-psychological romance." As for the
future, he says: "Next will probably appear a collection of poems, and
a collection of animal stories. Then another romance, planned but not
yet named; and then, if the Fates are very good to me, I'll take time
for a long lyrical drama on which I have been engaged off and on for
some years."
[Illustration: Photo by Strauss.