Charles G. D. Roberts
ROBERTS SPONSOR TO LAMPMAN—LITERARY FATHER OF BLISS CARMAN—MASTER OF VERSE TECHNIQUE—FORMS OF HIS VERSE, AND ITS QUALITIES.
Whether Charles G. D. Roberts had a genuine formative influence on Canadian literature, particularly Canadian poetry, or whether he should be regarded merely as ‘the eldest brother’ of the first systematic group of Canadian poets and prose writers may, possibly, be a moot question. Of a certainty he was the first native-born Canadian to take the leading role in making real and permanent, both by singular influences and by actual production in poetry and imaginative prose, a native and national literature in Canada.
First: Roberts was the literary sponsor of Archibald Lampman. In 1884, while editor of The Week, Roberts published in that periodical the very first poems which Lampman contributed to the public press (The Coming of Winter, and Three-Flower Petals). This is much more significant than appears on first view. It must be remembered that Roberts, though but twenty-four years old at the time of his editorship, had already published, in 1880, his Orion and Other Poems, which had been well received by the critical press in England and the United States. This distinction, abetted by his editorial connection with Goldwin Smith, the founder of The Week, gave him some of the glory of a new literary ‘star’ and made him an authority whose good opinion of another’s verse was very inspiring when it took the form of introducing a young unknown native poet to the Canadian public. In 1884 Lampman was a young man, human, sensitive, and shy. Roberts was the first to recognize Lampman’s authentic genius and the first to give him that practical encouragement which alone counts constructively—a first and right start, per aspera indeed, but, for Lampman, ad astra.
Roberts was also the ‘literary father’ of Bliss Carman. In 1885 Roberts was appointed Professor of Literature at King’s College, Windsor, Nova Scotia. It was Roberts who really trained Bliss Carman in the poetic perception of Nature and in poetic technique and who inspired him to begin a poetic career. It all happened in this way: To Roberts’ home, at Windsor, came Bliss Carman, a cousin of the elder poet. Here Carman spent several of his growing, most impressionable, and most receptive years, coming directly under the pervasive influences—the aesthetic culture and a tutorship in poetic technique—of the elder poet. Further: with Windsor as a centre, and Roberts as a companion and guide, Carman made excursions over the lovely and glamorous scenes and haunts of beauty near and beyond Roberts’ home. Carman, with Roberts, dwelt and communed with Nature intimately, visited the hiding places of earthly beauty, fed his senses with pure delight of stream, lake and marsh, woodland and sky, tuned his heart to hear, with peculiar meaning and joy, the cries of the denizens of the woodland, the murmurings, dronings, and shrillings of insects, and the dulcet lilting voices of birds. Also, in fancy and peaceful reverie, Carman lived over again all the rare moments and joys of sensation and spiritual ecstasy experienced by him in that lovely area of country conscribing Windsor, the land of Evangeline, the Gaspereau valley, the Basin of Minas, and the Tantramar marshes.
Thus the young Carman’s senses and imagination discovered the beauty, glamor, and glory of land and sea. Inevitably, at length, he was inspired to emulate the elder poet, Roberts, and to begin the systematic writing of the winning lyrism which, in the years that followed, has given Carman a name sui generis, not only amongst the poets of his homeland, Canada, but also amongst the poets of the English-speaking races.
Again: two years after taking up his residence at Windsor, Roberts published his really epoch-making volume of poetry, In Divers Tones (1887). This was his second volume of verse and, in it, his genius and art shone with greater glory, especially in the eyes of the critics and poets of the United States who were not likely to think, at any rate in that day, that anything could come out of Canada, particularly Nova Scotia, except pulpwood, coal, fish, and potatoes. Roberts and his poetic work disillusioned the young Canadian poet’s American cousins and taught them that Canada produced mind, and even poetic genius.
Roberts was related to Carman by blood and temperament and poetic tutorship. These facts of various relationship between Roberts and Carman became known in the United States; and the light of Roberts’ literary reputation was reflected on his cousin, Bliss Carman. It was, therefore, natural that the editor of The Atlantic Monthly should, as actually happened, publish in that magazine Carman’s first significant poem, Low Tide on Grand Pré (1887), which became the title poem of his first volume of verse, Low Tide on Grand Pré: a Book of Lyrics (New York, 1893). All this is more significant than it seems.
For a young poet, story-teller, or essayist to have his work published in The Atlantic Monthly is a literary distinction by itself. The imprimatur of The Atlantic Monthly is as a royal seal in the kingdom of letters on the American continent. Largely through the sponsorship of Roberts’ reputation, Carman was favorably known to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. When, therefore, the magazine published Carman’s first important poem, the poet was properly and most significantly introduced to the literary world. For The Atlantic Monthly enters only the homes of the most cultured readers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The placing of its imprimatur on the verse of Bliss Carman was a declaration to the world that Canada had produced another new and engaging poet.
Once more: at least in one matter Roberts had a considerable influence on several of the other members of the first systematic group of Canadian poets. He was the first native-born Canadian poet to be solicitous about poetic technique, and had thus won the notice and even commendation of critics and poets in England and the United States. In his Orion and in his In Divers Tones Roberts held up the ideal of finished technique in poetry. Roberts’ success from 1880 to 1887 became, therefore, an inspiration to other poets in the first systematic group, and inspired them to accomplish a body of verse excellent enough, at least in technique, for publication in volume form without danger of discrediting themselves and their country. So, in fact, it happened: Lampman and Scott (F. G.) published their first volume of verse in 1888; Campbell his first in 1889; Carman his first in 1893: Scott (D. C.) his first in 1893; Pauline Johnson her first in 1895.
Still further: it was Roberts’ two volumes of verse that first called the attention of the literary public in the United States and in England to the fact that systematic literary activity was going on in Canada, and that first awakened critical curiosity about the new Canadian poets and their verse whenever a volume by Roberts or any of his poetic compatriots was published. Roberts’ renown obtained for the others a ready and just ‘hearing.’ This achieved, the quality of their verse, especially of their nature-poetry, brought them, it is fair to say, very favorable appreciation from the critics and poets of the United States and England.
Finally: Roberts is related to the first systematic group of Canadian poets and prose writers, not only pragmatically as sponsor, inspirer, and leader: but also in a special way. He was the ‘Voice’ of the Canadian Confederacy. Seven years after the publication of his Orion, suddenly the Canadian people heard Roberts trumpeting a new song. In it there was nothing classical in theme, and nothing cold and correctly formal in artistic structure and finish. Roberts had changed from an Artist to a Prophet, from an Artificer in verse to a Voice—the Voice of one crying in the wilderness and trying to make straight the paths of the Canadian people. He was still a young man but he had been vouchsafed vision and he called magniloquently to his compatriots, thus:—
O Child of Nations, giant-limbed,
Who stand’st among the nations now
Unheeded, unadorned, unhymned,
With unanointed brow,—
How long the ignoble sloth, how long
The trust in greatness not thine own?
Surely the lion’s brood is strong
To front the world alone!
He repeated his trumpeting to the Canadian to awake to a national consciousness of destiny and to achieve that destiny—he repeated the ‘call’ in language even more magniloquent—in his Ode to the Canadian Confederacy.
Perhaps these were only ‘occasional’ poems, artificially inspired. At any rate Roberts’ Vision of Canadian nationality and his interest in expressing it forsook him. A few years after uttering the ‘Call’ he left his native Canadian habitat (in 1895) for New York. Yet in the fifteen years from 1880 to 1895 in the homeland, or till his removing to New York, by his own fine artistry and by the influence, at least of his example, on his contemporaries in Canada, Roberts was considerably, perhaps chiefly, potent in raising native Canadian poetry to a degree of technical finish that was never before reached or even attempted by native-born Canadian men and women of letters.
Summarily: as discoverer and sponsor of Lampman, as inspirer and sponsor of Carman, and as exemplar, at least in technical ideals, to the first native-born group of systematic poets of the Dominion, Charles G. D. Roberts wielded a constructive influence on Canadian native and national poetry. That without his influence there would still have been a Systematic School of Canadian Poets, of which Lampman, Carman, or D. C. Scott might have been the most conspicuous creator, is a high probability. But it is a theoretical probability. We cannot, however, gainsay the fact of Roberts’ constructive influence on his confrères in the Systematic School of Canadian Poets. On the grounds, therefore, of his triple role as sponsor, inspirer, and exemplar, and of his own creative poetic art, Charles G. D. Roberts is justly to be distinguished as the Inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.
Roberts’ own poetry may be critically appreciated (1) as a recrudescence of the English classical idyll; (2) as poetry of nature, with special reference to its distinction from the nature-poetry of Lampman; (3) as elegiac poetry; and (4) as poetry of modern eroticism.
At the outset it is important to emphasize two singular facts. First, with the single notable exception of Roberts’ spasmodic ‘Call’ to the Canadian people to achieve a national destiny, and with the further exception of a national or Canadian setting and color in some of his nature-poetry, Roberts’ verse is anything but Canadian. Secondly, Roberts’ poetry is signally an example of poetry which is not, to use Mathew Arnold’s formula, ‘a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life.’ It is characteristic of the essential Canadian genius that its attitudes to the universe and to existence are moral and religious, that it values the fine arts, including literature, as a means for the ideal enhancement of life, and loves the Beautiful in the fine arts as the only visible instance of the union of the real and of the ideal, which is, philosophically viewed, our only pledge of the ultimate supremacy of the Good. The only really deadly criticism, therefore, that can be applied against the poetry of Roberts is that he has missed in his own verse the supreme ethical note or ideal which is in the poetry of one of his masters, Keats:—
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
and that he did not engage himself to write poetry, with the intent which was really the aim of Keats, as well as of Arnold, namely, as a profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. Aware now of the unethical intent and quality of Robert’s poetry, we can the better and more justly appreciate his development as a poet and his achievements in poetic substance and technique.
It was natural and inevitable that an undergraduate introduced, at College, into the world of letters through the poetry of the Greek and Latin classics and the highly lyrical and sensuous poetry of Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, should, when he himself felt impelled to write, produce poetry which, in substance and style, was based on classical themes, and colored with sensuous images, and that, when critically estimated, this poetry should be valued as a sincere but finished academic exercise in verse. Roberts’ first volume, Orion and Other Poems, was just such an academic exercise in verse. Yet it was an exercise by a lad just out of college who not only informed his verse with a respectable showing of classical scholarship and with an engaging Arcadian setting and color but also wrote with so careful a technique that when his verse was compared with that of earlier Canadian poets, it was found to be unprovincial in scope and appeal, and more finished in technique than any previous Canadian verse. It was indeed derivative, literary, academic. It was vitiated with youthful crudities in thought and manner and certain borrowings. But, on the whole, it was as excellent a first book of verse as might be issued by any young Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate or, conceivably, by Shelley, Tennyson, or Swinburne in their undergraduate days. Indeed, critics and poets in England and in the United States, in reviewing Orion and Other Poems, noted the volume as a respectable performance in verse and a fair promise of excellent future poetry from the Dominion.
Roberts’ first volume Orion and Other Poems is a significant disclosure, both positively and negatively, of his essential genius and art. Positively, the bias or bend of his genius was towards English neo-classical idyllism and sensuous impressionism. Negatively, his genius lacked, and has continued to lack, original imagination or imaginative power. In his first volume, his ‘properties,’ to use a term borrowed from the stage and employed by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate, are the same ‘properties’ as appear in the Keatsian idyll. In Roberts’ earliest verse masquerade mythical Greek deities and heroes, sylvan demi-gods and demi-goddesses, Arcadian denizens and shepherds, painted with rich sensuous color against a background of pastoral or idyllic landscape, to the accompaniment of impressionistic verbal music; alliteration, consonance, assonance, and vowel-harmony. All this is a recrudescence, unmistakably, of the same qualities in Keats, Tennyson, and Swinburne. In short, Roberts appears as an unoriginal or unimaginative nature-and-figure-painter and verbal melodist. A single example from Orion will suffice:—
For there the deep-eyed night
Looked down on me; unflagging voices called
From unpent waters falling; tireless wings
From long winds bear me tongueless messages
From star-consulting, silent pinnacles;
And breadth, and depth, and stillness
Fathered me.
In that passage criticism at once notes that Roberts, as a very young poet, begins his professional career as a clever ‘word virtuoso.’ That passage certainly suggests, as no doubt it imitates, the sensuous impressionism of the Choric Song in Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters. Its verbal music carries the same kind of vague impressionism which we hear in the gossamer tone-painting of Debussy’s orchestral prelude L’Après-midi d’un Faune. No one will doubt the sincere ambition of Roberts to be a poet, and the sincerity of his choice of themes and properties, diction, and poetic style. Yet, while noting the artificiality of it all, one does wonder that a tyro poet could, in a first volume of undergraduate verse, so consummately simulate, as Roberts did, the art of the supreme masters of English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism.
As yet, then, Roberts’ poetry discloses only talent in him, nothing of genius, or originality, or imagination. His poetry is, after all, a cleverly sublimated academic exercise. Literary psychologists cannot escape the feeling that Roberts deliberately ‘manufactured’ his first volume of verse—cannot help picturing the young poet diligently figuring away in his student’s cloister at the properties, forms and metres of his imitative idyllism and impressionism. It is all Artifice; all artificial. As yet in Roberts’ verse there is no ‘note’ of inspiration awakened by the magic and mystery of the great Dominion—no New World ‘note’ caught from Canadian Nature, or from Canadian romantic life and contemporary civilization.
In his second volume of poems, In Divers Tones, there is an advance in variety of inspiration, in his forms and metres, and in finish of technique. Still, on the whole, the themes and properties, rhythms, metres, and color are those of English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism. There is, however, some suggestion of a change away from his former too imitative adherence to the subject, manner, and style of the English idyllists. There is, for instance, a suggestion of a structural, but not ethical, influence from Browning. There is, in this regard, a Browningesque coinage of unconventional or awkward diction, an adoption of a Browningesque metre and an introduction of ‘medley’ as when he inserts, after the Browning manner, a lyrical interlude, unexpectedly and with no logical justification, into the text of a broader, more serious movement and more ethically informed subject. His second volume of poetry, In Divers Tones, shows that Roberts has talent, but is still unimaginative and artificial. Yet his second volume is much more significant than his first, not by its being more various in its themes and forms, but by its exhibiting new tendencies in the bent of the poet’s mind and imagination. There is a tendency towards ethical influences and to get away from his early preoccupation with English neo-classical idyllism and impressionism. There is also the merest show of a tendency to occupy his imagination with ideas of the Canadian ‘spirit’ and the beauty and wonder of Nature in Canada. There is, however, no distinctive embodiment of inspirational ideas or moods awakened by the Great Dominion or the New World.
Notwithstanding, in his second volume Roberts is taking his first step on the way to the expression of the essential form and manner of his creative genius as a poet. He was born to lilt, in simple lyrical and descriptive verse, the aesthetic sensations and the emotional nuances of Canadian life and external nature. In short, Roberts was born to become, as he did become, the most engaging and artistic, though not the first, native-born Canadian idyllist. In Divers Tones he first appears as a really significant creative Canadian poet. But whenever, in his later literary career, Roberts forsakes his light or simple idyllic and impressionistic treatment of Canadian life and external nature, as he forsakes it in the monody, in his poetry of city life, and in his poetry of modern eroticism, he may be engaging or arresting or impressive, but in nowise is he creatively significant.
In the same volume, In Divers Tones, Roberts exhibits two manners. In some poems in the volume he clings to his old manner of English Classical Impressionism. In other poems in the same volume he essays his new manner of Canadian Impressionism. The first is distinguished by overweighted sensuousness, by over-burdened luxurious color of descriptive epithet and verbal music. An impressive example is Off Pelorus, the sensuous quality of which may be suggested by the following single stanza:—
Idly took we thought, for still our eyes betray us,
Lo, the white-limbed maids, with love-soft eyes aglow,
Gleaming bosoms bare, loosed hair, sweet hands to slay us,
Warm lips wild with song, and softer throat than snow!
Roberts’ strictly Canadian Impressionism is colorful and musical, but the structure of the verse is simple, as, for instance, On the Creek, an idyllic lyric, full of Canadian color, and highly alliterative, beginning:—
Dear heart, the noisy strife,
And bitter harpings cease.
Here is the lamp of life,
Here are the lips of peace.
Roberts developed other ‘manners’ or styles. But, unquestionably, this Canadian idyllic impressionism, simple in thought and form, yet colorful and musical, is his natural forte—his natural, characteristic manner. It is exemplified, in the same volume, by other Canadian idylls in the simple style of On the Creek, as, for instance, In The Afternoon, Salt, Winter Geraniums, Birch and Paddle; by distinct and deliberate suffusions of Canadian Nature in dactylic hexameters, as in The Tantramar Revisited, and in the sonnet-form (somewhat anticipating the nature-poetry of Lampman), as in Roberts’ genuinely noble sonnets The Sower, and The Potato Harvest.
We may turn now to a general consideration of Roberts’ poetic treatment of Nature. In Roberts’ first volume, in his strictly Arcadian poetry, there is nothing of Canadian Nature, nothing of Canadian scenery, nor the color and sentiment of Canadian life in the habitat of the distinctive Canadian spirit. In the second volume, In Divers Tones, there is a definitive engagement, on his part, with Canadian Nature, or with Canadian life and sentiment pictured against Canadian backgrounds; and also a change in the form and style of Roberts’ poetic composition.
The natural forms of Roberts’ art are light, simple, lyrical, and descriptive verse, which he treats with charming naturalness, almost naiveté, with simple tunefulness of ballad or folk rhythms, and which sometimes he delicately suffuses with a contemplative revery, a gentle melancholy, or a subdued sentimental reflection on the magic and mystery of Nature and life, somewhat in the manner of Herrick and Tennyson, and Longfellow. But Roberts’ lyrical idyllism or nature-description is not always wholly soft or sentimental, pretty, or gentle, or charming, nor is his new manner always in folk rhythm in form. At times, even when simple, his verse is picturesque, even brusque, vigorous, and overweighted with descriptive details as if, in the last matter, he must ‘paint in’ all the features and properties of Canadian Nature and leave nothing of its physiognomy to be added by the imagination of the reader.
Roberts, however, has one singular limitation, an innate defect of his genius. He cannot limn the human person or figure as one of the properties of his poetry of Canadian woodlands or pastoral scenery and life. In the matter of human portraiture against a background of Nature Roberts, as poet, is abstract and faltering in drawing, lifeless, unveracious, ineffective. Otherwise in the Canadian idyll or in nature-description he is concrete, veracious, simple but graphic, nearly always winningly musical and on the whole satisfying. In short, Roberts discloses in his new manner, in the Canadian idyll and his Acadian nature-poetry, the sure possession of the secrets of color, movement and music, and of real Canadian national sentiment, in the presence of life and nature. He is an adroit nature-colorist and verbal melodist.
Absent, however, from his genius and art are all gifts in spiritual portraiture and the fine and noble interpretation of Nature which Lampman discloses in his nature-poetry and his interpretation of the essential Canadian spirit from the embodiment of that spirit, as Lampman discerns it, in Nature in Canada.
Roberts’ treatment of Nature may be illustrated by examples taken from his second volume, In Divers Tones (1887), and from The Book of the Native (1896), in the latter of which are some poems that really belong, in form, and spirit, to the time when he was changing his abstract Arcadian manner to his concrete Acadian manner as in his In Divers Tones. Illustrative of Roberts’ change to a Canadian theme and to the modern simple method of treating Nature, in the pseudo-classical style, an apt example is The Tantramar Revisited, composed in the dactylic hexameter, a form, suggested, no doubt, by Longfellow’s pretty story of Evangeline. In this poem Roberts treats Canadian Nature with an impressive originality in properties, color, and sentiment, and certainly with a pervasive directness and veracity which prove his sincerity and which convince the reader that the poet was moved by the beauty and pathos of his Acadian subject:—
Ah, the old-time stir, how once it stung me with rapture,—
Old-time sweetness, the winds freighted with honey and salt!
Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland,—
Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see,—
Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion,
Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change.
What a change in Roberts—this change from the abstract, artificial, academic, over-sensuous treatment of Nature in Arcadia to his direct, simple, concrete treatment of real nature in Acadia, with his poet’s eyes directly ‘on the object.’ There we have the real, the genuine Roberts, the original authentic poet of Canadian Nature and life and nationality.
For an example of his colored realism or idyllic naturalism tinged with a sort of Wordsworthian plainness or austerity of style and ethical revery, consider his sonnet The Sower. It has been called Roberts’ ‘popular masterpiece.’ As a sonnet, it is perfect in artistic structure, and is as faithful to Canadian Nature and sentiment as, say, Millet’s paintings, The Reapers and The Angelus, are true to French pastoral life and religious sentiment.
But this sonnet is a good example of Roberts’ ineffectiveness in human or spiritual portraiture. How effectively it pictures for us the land, the sky, the birds, the human properties of the Acadian landscape in Nova Scotia. The poem visualizes vividly for us all the features and elements of external Nature; yet it fails to visualize the Sower himself, to limn him effectively, graphically, impressively against the background of Nature as, on the other hand, Millet has graphically limned the human figures in his paintings against the French landscape.
Finally: a poem which is a really fine example of Roberts’ characteristic genius and art in the authentic Canadian idyll and in nature-description, and which, perhaps, contains his nearest approach to graphic figure-poetry, namely, his lyric The Solitary Woodsman, is specially noteworthy. Though published in The Book of the Native, it really belongs to the period of In Divers Tones when Roberts was changing over to his natural and characteristic manner of Canadian idyllic impressionism. For it is a gentle, natural, and simple lyrical idyll of Canadian Nature and life, tinged with a delicate mood of contemplation and pathos. A touch more of ‘personal detail,’ of moral characterization, would have made The Solitary Woodsman as universal and popular a portrait as the genre picture of the hardy, happy village blacksmith in Longfellow’s poem with that subject. Nevertheless, the poem has vigor, action, life-likeness; it is veracious and picturesque. In it Roberts is at his best in the Canadian lyrical idyll and in figure-portraiture.
Strict analysis of Roberts’ nature-poetry reveals both the positive qualities and the defects of his genius and art. As a poet of Nature in Acadia he hardly more than effects glimpses of Canadian scenery and pastoral life, colorful, no doubt, and tinged with a homely or even tender naturalistic sentiment. His pictures of Canadian scenery and pastoral life are indeterminate pastels of the general features of Nature in Canada rather than rich, broad paintings done with the forthright, broad brush-work of a master artist. It is all pretty, or charming, and faithful to Nature in Acadia. But it is all based on superficial observation and is devoid of poetic, that is to say, profound and beautiful application of ideas to life. It is not to be expected that the Canadian people will treasure these pastels of Canadian scenery and pastoral life. For though they be beautiful, simple, and realistic, the ethical element in them is always a reflection, a moral platitude, from the poet’s own moralizing, or a recrudescence of some older poets’ moralizings.
The public is quick to detect insincerity in a poet. While it would not be just to accuse Roberts of insincerity whenever he attempts to moralize in his nature-poetry, or to give it a moral or religious significance, it is still true that Roberts’ nature-poetry is too superficial, too obviously ‘an effort’ to make pretty or charming pastels of Canadian scenery and pastoral life, too lacking in thoroughly humanized treatment of Nature, to be popular or cherished for its own sake by the Canadian people.
His pure lyrical pastels, as for instance, On the Creek, and The Solitary Woodsman, are more likely to remain permanently popular than are his Nature poems in other forms, as, for example, the genuinely important sonnet-sequence in his Songs of the Common Day (1893). In these sonnets, however, he shows no increase of descriptive power but only the variety of his word-painter’s palette. Moreover, in these sonnets there is a felt insincerity of aim. Though fine in structure, faithful to Canadian Nature, variously treating the aspects of Canadian Nature, and often sentimental and moralistic, they impress the reader as having been designed and written deliberately to show forth the poet’s powers in realistic or naturalistic impressionism, in the philosophical interpretation of Nature, and in technical artistry. Notwithstanding, it must be admitted that in these sonnets Roberts, as an impressionistic painter of Canadian Nature, is a master, and has his analogues, in the pictorial painting of Nature, in Corot and Millet, and in the tonal painting of Nature, in MacDowell and Debussy. These sonnets were consciously designed to be ‘works of art,’ and to impress the philosophically minded poets and critics of poetic form. Fine and masterful as they are in technical artistry, and impressive, too, with a resurgence of moral ideas, nevertheless they appeal neither to the popular heart nor to the philosophical imagination. For they create in the heart of the reader the sense only of a splendid achievement in poetic artistry, but never any sense of the poet’s own enrichment of life from his interpretation of beauty in Canadian Nature, civilization, and life.
Summarily: as an original Poet, Roberts’ forte is the treatment of Canadian Nature and pastoral life in impressionistic pastels, to an accompaniment of verbal music in folk rhythms or simple lyric forms. Thus accepted and appreciated he is a satisfying nature-colorist and melodist. But, impressive and magnificent, as he is, in more formal or larger poetic genres, as for instance, the sonnet and monody, he fails to give us in both a vital application of ideas to life.
Consideration of Roberts’ poetry of modern eroticism reveals only what has been called a variety of Roberts’ ‘ethical heterogeneity.’ This, however, is a defect in the man rather than in the poet, and only negatively affects Roberts’ significance in the literary history of Canada. Roberts’ work as a threnodist, romantic novelist, and inventor of a species of animal psychology in the romance is considered elsewhere. It is, however, as the inaugurator of the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature, both poetry and prose, rather than as a poet of Canadian Nationality and Nature, that Roberts has a right to a supremely significant status in the literary history of Canada.
The quotations from Charles G. D. Roberts’ works are found in the individual volumes mentioned in the text. There is also issued a collection entitled, Poems by Charles G. D. Roberts—New complete edition—(Copp, Clark Co., Toronto, 1907).