Narrative Literature
NARRATIVE LITERATURE—HISTORY—BIOGRAPHY—EXPLORATION—TRAVELS—SPORT OR OPEN-AIR LIFE.
I. History.
Two general conditions have made the writing of ‘true history’ in Canada an impossibility. On the personal side, there were the lack of adequate culture, of a sense of the historic process and of history as the narrative of spiritual development, and of any genius, save curiosity, on the part of those who essayed the writing of history. Men with the historic imagination did not exist in Canada, and only ‘minor’ historians were active, up to the beginning of the 20th century. On the material or instrumental side, there were the heterogeneity of Canadian civilization, the want of political unity, the lack of access to documents and of facilities for historical research, and other untoward circumstances. Unimaginative minds and the heterogeneity of life and thought in Canada, before and after Confederation, limited history for the most part to annals, chronicles, period and sectional narratives.
The number of these uninspired, unimaginative ‘minor’ Canadian historians is legion. The more important were George Heriot, William Smith, Robert Christie, Alexander Begg, Beamish Murdock, Duncan Campbell, William Kingsford, James Hannay, and Egerton Ryerson. Oddly, the two first native-born historians to write with a show of imagination and a sense of true history were Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the humorist, and Major John Richardson, the romancer.
Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia was published by Joseph Howe in 1829. Though the two volumes are, in a degree, a compendium of facts, Haliburton was not interested in the facts so much as in the romantic or dramatic story of civilization and life in Nova Scotia. The way Haliburton imaginatively handled his material, the way he romantically told the story and made the whole a colorful and generally absorbing narrative, constitutes his work as ‘true history.’ It is Haliburton’s conception of history and his method of writing it that make him important—though he was not potent—in this department of Canadian Literature. His work is an outstanding native example of the romantic method of writing history as literature; and Haliburton himself appears as the first Canadian Historian to write history as if he were writing imaginative literature. But if he was not potent in his own country, that is, in British North America, he had, there is good ground to believe, considerable influence on Francis Parkman. For Parkman read Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, and not only had his imagination fired by such a romantic story as Haliburton tells of the Expulsion of the Acadians, but also adopted the romantic method of Haliburton in writing his own historical works.
The best account of the War of 1812 came from the pen of Major John Richardson, who had served in the conflict. It is the account of an eye-witness. It was written hurriedly for publication serially in his newspaper the New Era, and was reprinted in book form in 1842. As might be expected, Richardson presents vividly the drama or dramatic movement of his story, and makes it a colorful, gripping narrative. But though, like Haliburton, Richardson wrote graphically, romantically, he is superior to Haliburton in an important respect. The Nova Scotia historian and humorist did not have any gift for sharp character-drawing; his characters, like Dickens’ or Twain’s, stand out and hold us by what they say. But Richardson’s characters in his account of the War of 1812, especially Brock and Tecumseh, are vividly drawn by their action, and stand out sharply individualized. In Haliburton’s Historical Account of Nova Scotia we get only colorful romance. In Richardson’s War of 1812 we get colorful romance, dramatic movement, and memorable character portraiture. It, too, is ‘true history,’ and his work, like Haliburton’s, is an outstanding native example of the romantic method of writing history as literature.
After Haliburton and Richardson, all history of Canada, or the Provinces, by native-born or émigré writers was fragmentary in conception and dry-as-dust in matter and method. They all show inquisitiveness, diligence, though not careful research, and no imagination, and certainly no sense of history as the outward expression and movement of a people’s social and spiritual evolution. Yet the work of one man must be specially remarked. He was Alpheus Todd, who, in the department of Constitutional History, wrote a work which was long regarded as the greatest study of the English constitution written by any British subject. This really ‘monumental’ historical work was entitled Parliamentary Government in England; its Origin, Development, and Practical Operation. The first volume was published in 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation. But while Todd’s work is a ‘monument’ to his scholarship and industry, and while it has historic perspective, it is, like the work of preceding historians, without imagination and was written by one who had no conception of constitutional history as the expression of the social conscience gradually realizing, under changing conditions, the ideal of the rights of the spirit.
From the beginning of the 20th century, Canadian historians based their work on documentary research and wrote history with a lively sense of imaginative or romantic values which corresponded to the method and manner of Haliburton and Richardson. This change in the method of writing ‘true history’ is notably exemplified in Quebec Under Two Flags and in The Cradle of New France by A. G. Doughty; in The Fight for Canada, by William Wood; and, later, in The Conquest of the Great North-West, Pathfinders of the West, and Vikings of the Pacific, by Agnes Laut. Doughty was a poet before he became an historian, and in writing history let his imagination play over the facts, thus transmuting the documentary material into literature. William Wood also applied the romanticist’s imagination to the facts, and, besides, wrote history with a fine feeling for style and characterization somewhat in the manner of Parkman. Miss Laut, basing her matter on thorough research, humanized it with a sympathetic appreciation of the struggles of the pioneers of the Canadian West and with a picturesque literary style.
Sectional and local histories of Canada abound. There are also race histories and several so-called School Histories. But these are all of popular quality and have no distinction in literary style, although the narratives of W. J. Rattray, George Stewart, H. Scadding, J. Ross Robertson, John Murray Gibbon, Sir John Bourinot and Charles G. D. Roberts show a considerable solicitude for style and actually achieve good literary style.
II. Biography.
As with general history, so with personal or spiritual history. Biographical writing in Canada is sparse in quantity and, on the whole, insignificant in literary quality. Often the subject of a biographical narrative was great enough to compel imaginative and artistic creation on the part of the writer. Seldom, however, does any biographer of a Canadian man of distinction rise to his subject either in conception or in style. But of those who did rise to their subject, one was Charles Lindsey, who wrote The Life and Times of William Lyon MacKenzie. Lindsey handled his material so as to present the proper values in the political and social problems in the time of the famous leader of the Rebellion of 1837. Another of those who rose to his subject and who wrote with a sense of the really significant events in the life of his subject, presenting the salients with decent respect for truth, with adequate detail, and yet with readable style, was Sir Joseph Pope, who gave the literary world a compelling and vigorously moving biographical volume, Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John Alexander Macdonald. It is a vigorous narrative, but rather inflexible in style. Sir John Stephen Willison’s Sir Wilfrid Laurier and The Liberal Party is an outstanding biography. Like Lindsey, Sir John Willison was a thoroughly trained journalist before he attempted biographical writing. Along with the journalist’s vigor and vivacity of style, Sir John Willison wrote with feeling for dignified and elegant diction. His Wilfrid Laurier is notable chiefly for its refinement in prose style.
George Monro Grant’s Joseph Howe is a tour de force in brilliant word painting and hero worship. It misses the significance of Howe as an original and constructive mind. Longley’s Joseph Howe is a popular narrative, careless of logic and literary style.
Several other individual biographies of Canadians by Canadians have been published. The best of them are Duncan Campbell Scott’s John Graves Simcoe, Adam Shortt’s Lord Sydenham, George M. Wrong’s Life of Lord Elgin, Arnold Haultain’s Goldwin Smith: His Life and Opinions, Grant and Hamilton’s George Monro Grant, and Edith J. Archibald’s Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald. But a genuinely great biography of a great man remains to be written in Canada.
Deserving of mention are three short popular biographies—Owen McGillicuddy’s sketch of the life and achievements of Rt. Hon. MacKenzie King, Premier of Canada, which appears under the title The Making of a Premier (1922); John W. Dafoe’s Laurier (1922) and Peter McArthur’s Laurier (1922). These biographies are by practical journalists, and are journalistic in style. Dafoe’s Laurier is the most acute and weighty.
A genuine literary achievement in biographical writing is M. O. Hammond’s Confederation and Its Leaders (1917). It is based on thorough research, and, as a series of intimate political biographies in the form of narrative sketches, is packed with human interest, and is marked by a straightforward, commonsense style. It has a high seriousness, and in this respect contrasts with the lighter, more piquant but less persuasive style of Augustus Bridle’s Sons of Canada—a work which is essentially a series of familiar portraits, done as jeux d’esprit.
III. Travels, Exploration, Sport.
Canada has a considerable quantity of the literature of travels, explorations and sport but the literary interest of the most of it is far from obvious. A really remarkable book in this genre is the elder Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures in Canada and The Indian Territories, published in New York in 1809. Henry was a man of acute observation, and also possessed a graphic pen for character limning. His Travels and Adventures engages both the intellect and the imagination, the scientist and the literary artist. For it contains the most interesting observations on the flora and fauna of the countries he visited, and really graphic and colorful pictures of the peoples and the characters he met and observed. Henry had also a gift like that of Thucydides—the gift and skill of dramatically reporting a speech as, for instance, the speech of the Ojibwa Chief Minavavana. The book really forms an entrancing and instructive volume of Travel and Adventure.
The same may be said of Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages From Montreal Through the Continent of North America, 1789-1793. This work was published at London in 1801. Mackenzie came from a people—the Gaels of the Island of Lewis—who have a racial gift of colorful imagination and of felicity of language in nature description. Mackenzie, moreover, was, like Henry, a keen observer. His Voyages, therefore, as might be expected, are marked by colorful style and the imaginative presentation of the scenes he visited and of the inspiring or sublime phenomena he observed. John Howison’s Sketches of Upper Canada conforms only to the ideal of fact. It is, as the title suggests, merely a series of ‘sketches,’ written in a vigorous style with only a touch here and there of finer literary style.
With the work of Anna Brownell Jameson we meet with the first ‘color-writing’ in and about Canada. Her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, published in London in 1838, has not yet been excelled by a native Canadian ‘color writer.’ At the time, Canada was a wilderness for the most part, with a few settlements, but Mrs. Jameson, with the eye of an artist, saw everywhere in Nature in Canada and in Canadian life and character much to delight the eye and the sensibilities and much to satisfy the pictorial and dramatic imagination. Her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, in three volumes, are a library of winsome Nature sketches and critical appreciations of human personality—a work of art, and a permanent contribution to the Incidental Pioneer Literature of Canada.
The aesthetic sense and the artistic conscience were uppermost in Paul Kane’s Wanderings of An Artist Among The Indian Tribes of North America. Kane was a celebrated Canadian painter; and, having the gift of style, he wrote, with the eye of the pictorial artist, about his ‘wanderings’ among the western tribes. It is an informing volume and makes genuinely interesting and satisfying reading.
George M. Grant was a man of splendid force of character and strength of will tempered with a singular gift of humor and pathos. He travelled across Canada in the last five years of the first decade following Confederation, he met all peoples, dwelt in camps, visited trading posts, and stopped at the hotels of the larger centres. On his journey he was impressed by the life, energy, and the striving of the Canadian people for a self-reliant and worthy history and destiny. And so Grant’s volume of travel, Ocean to Ocean, is noted for its acute observation, for its colorful and vitalizing descriptions of Nature in Canada, and for its seriousness, at all times relieved by an unusual quality of humor and of pathos. In ‘color-writing’ too, the volume is, at times, incomparable.
J. W. Tyrrell’s Across the Sub-Arctics of Canada and his The St. Lawrence Basin and Its Border-Lands, Lawrence J. Burpee’s The Search for The Western Sea, Vilhjalmur Stefannson’s The Friendly Arctic and his Hunters of the Great North, Arthur Heming’s Drama of the Forests, are all noted for their literary style and for the dramatic pictures they make of Nature scenes and of human characters.
Two really notable books under the head of Sport, as a form of travel and adventure, are Arthur Silver’s Farm, Cottage, Camp and Canoe In Maritime Canada (1884) and Phil. H. Moore’s With Gun and Rod in Canada (1922). Silver’s volume makes pleasant reading, but the style is much more pedestrian than Moore’s work, which is heightened and colored by picturesque diction and images and by considerable characteristic humor. Midway between the greater books of Travel and Adventure and these books of Sport come Wilfred Grenfell’s volumes descriptive of Labrador and the late C. Gordon Hewitt’s Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada. The latter, though scientific in aim and method, is full of aesthetic and literary charm and is written in an interesting literary style.