Novelists
THE FICTIONISTS OF THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL—THE HISTORICAL ROMANCERS—LIGHTHALL—SAUNDERS—PARKER—MARQUIS—MACLENNAN AND McILWRAITH—AGNES C. LAUT—WILFRED CAMPBELL—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS. THE ROMANCERS OF ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY—THOMPSON SETON—ROBERTS—SAUNDERS—FRASER. THE EVANGELICAL ROMANCERS—RALPH CONNOR—R. E. KNOWLES.
I. The Historical Romancers.
When William Kirby published, in 1877, The Golden Dog, he led the way in Canadian historical romance. Major John Richardson had written historical novels years before, but Richardson’s material was largely first hand, from contact with a life and with a setting similar to what he described. We might argue that Kirby ‘discovered’ to the fictionists who were to come after him the wealth of material that lay in the unknown and almost forgotten Canadian past, for he founded his work on Canadian history and infused it with Canadian incident and color; and although Mrs. Leprohon’s romances had a considerable vogue both in English and in French, the circulation of her novels was chiefly local and not anything like so widespread as that of Kirby’s single masterpiece. Yet it is problematic just how much the historical or romantic fiction of the Post-Confederation period (beginning, say, in 1888) owes to Kirby and how much it owes to a stirring impulse of nationality. That impulse produced tangible evidences in our literature because of a conscious realization of national ideals and a sensing of the spirit of a courageous and romantic past in a country that, superficially viewed, had barely reached the stage of ‘growing pains.’
In 1888 William Douw Lighthall published The Young Seigneur, a socio-political study of life and institutions in Canada, which according to the author himself; ‘arose out of my ideas as a young man concerning an ideal of Canadian nationality to which I gave the color of this province (Quebec) as I knew it in the old Seigneuries.’ Possibly the ‘thesis’ overpowered the romantic or novel elements, for this book is not regarded as equal in literary merit to its successors. The False Chevalier (1898) was a historical romance set partly in Canada and partly in France. It is an attempt to depict an actual romance found in a packet of documents at the house of the De Léry’s at Boucherville near Montreal. It is rich in atmosphere and color both of the old land and the new and is filled with engaging incident, but lacks somewhat in effective novel construction, and in convincing characterization. It is in The Master of Life (1910) that Dr. Lighthall has produced a unique and masterly piece of fiction. With Hiawatha as its hero, it is purely aboriginal in setting and color and exhibits the author’s wide knowledge of Indian history and archaeology. It was the result of Dr. Lighthall’s sympathies with the Iroquois Indians, derived originally from the ancient family records of the Schuylers (from whom the Lighthalls are descended). They, as leading British officers and statesmen, had much to do with keeping the Iroquois steadfast to the British Crown. Although the impetus to its writing originated in this way, The Master of Life, in its development is an example of rare constructive imagination and is pervaded with a richly poetic interpretation that apprehends nature as filled with spiritual presences and nature’s beauty as the garment of the Great Spirit.
The year 1889 saw the publication of a work of pure romance in My Spanish Sailor by (Margaret) Marshall Saunders. This was a love story of the sea in which a Nova Scotian girl and a Spanish sea-captain are the leading characters. Again in Rose à Charlitte (1898), afterwards published as Rose of Acadie, Miss Saunders essays romance, colored, it is true, by a seemingly historic atmosphere, but yet rather a record than a history, for the Acadian habits and customs which one might think of as belonging to a past age were current among the people in the Bay of St. Mary settlement when visited by Miss Saunders in the summer of 1897. Here the descendants of the Acadians had lived apart from the English and preserved their language, traditions, customs, and their unique manner of life. ‘The elements of strength and weakness of the people, their patient devotion, their openness, simplicity and generosity, their love of gossip and light-heartedness, with the shadows of the tragic past brooding over them, are all caught in a true perspective.’ Thus it is not until the year 1896 that we come upon a truly legitimate successor to The Golden Dog. In that year appeared Gilbert Parker’s Seats of the Mighty, which became one of the most popular of his novels. The story has a strong and fairly unified and coherent plot. It exhibits Parker’s powers of characterization and presents to us a gallery of vividly limned historic portraits—Robert Moray, Doltaire, Gabord, De la Darant, Bigot, Vaudreuil, Montcalm, Wolfe—in the main true to type, human, and universal. There is not, however, an unerring accuracy in atmosphere and color and characterization. The writer was not sufficiently saturated with his subject and occasional touches of modernity and tinges of contemporary color subtract from the excellence of artistry.
But Parker’s fiction really began with his short stories of ‘Pretty Pierre’ in 1890. It is related that upon coming to London from Australia he brought to Archibald Forbes, then noted as a war correspondent, a collection of stories. Forbes’ comment was: ‘You have the best collection of titles I ever saw.’ Parker took his manuscripts home and promptly burned them. A day or so afterwards, while passing a shop window filled with armor and other curios, he noticed the leather coat and fur cap of a trapper. He went at once to his room and began to write The Patrol of the Cypress Hills, the first story in the series Pierre and His People. These stories dealt with the life of early Western Canada and were followed from time to time by other volumes: A Romany of the Snows, published in England under the title, An Adventurer of the North, picturing French-Canadians in the woods and rural settlements; The Lane That Had No Turning, stories of that Quebec settlement which is the background of the novel When Valmond Came to Pontiac; Cumner’s Son, sketches of life in the South Seas and in Australia; Donovan Pasha, tales of Egypt and the Soudan; Northern Lights, more modern stories of Western Canada.
Parker became a prolific writer of novels and his settings range from Canada and the South Seas to England, Egypt, and South Africa. The treatment varies from an almost immediate transcript of near present conditions as in The Judgment House to the re-creation of the historic past in The Battle of the Strong, from the delicate imaginative romance in When Valmond Came to Pontiac, to a pathological study in The Right of Way; he gives us a combination of melodrama and mysticism in The Weavers, the revealment of innate greatness of character in The Translation of a Savage, while in You Never Know Your Luck, he cleverly expands a tenuous short story thread to the full proportions of a novel.
Besides The Seats of the Mighty, the novels of Gilbert Parker that will be likely to command most attention because of intrinsic worth are: The Right of Way, The Battle of the Strong, When Valmond Came to Pontiac, The Weavers, and The Judgment House. The Right of Way is a compelling study in abnormal psychology. There may be improbabilities in the development of the story of Charley Steele, but there is a living force in his character and he stands forth as one of the realities of fiction. The Battle of the Strong depicts the Channel Islands in the eighteenth century, and was written in a mood of defiance. Parker was going to get away from a Canadian background. He would write no more novels of Canada. But, as Sherlock Holmes ‘returned,’ so Canada was too much a part of Gilbert Parker’s life to remain out of his writings, and he found, himself unable to get away from it for very long. The Battle of the Strong, however, was based on a thorough and sympathetic study of the country and people of the Channel Islands and the characters and incidents are colored with a simple, engaging humor. When Valmond Came to Pontiac is a delightful excursion into romance in which the Napoleonic tradition shows its influence in a little out-of-the-way village of Quebec. It has much of the charm of Booth Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire and is structurally the nearest to artistic perfection of any of Parker’s novels. The Weavers rises to a more Imperialistic sweep, dealing as it does with internal and international politics of Egypt, while The Judgment House, a novel of London and South Africa, is his greatest literary conception; in it his imaginative vision has apprehended big interests, big business, big ideals, big expansion, Imperial ends, conceived and carried out by big men, struggling and striving and achieving in a big world. His more recent novels, although some of them, as The Money Master, show considerable skill in characterization, are largely novels of incident and of accidental circumstance and have not the broad grasp of men and events nor the innate emotional depth and power of those just outlined.
The outstanding qualities of Parker’s work are:—
(1) The strong dramatic quality. It is no surprise to us to learn that he was in his college days a most enthusiastic Shakespeare student and an ‘elocutionist’ of some reputation. The power to portray dramatic situations is exhibited in his very earliest writings. One need but open almost any of his novels and read the first paragraph to find that one is projected into an imaginative world of action, although the story may begin with a sentence of pure narration or description.
(2) Skill in descriptive characterization. How effectively action, explanation, and description are combined to make his characters vivid, cannot be better exhibited than in the introduction of Valmond in When Valmond Came to Pontiac. Yet there is a tendency to cast some of his characters in moulds, so that they become types rather than individuals. ‘Donovan Pasha’ is but ‘Pretty Pierre’ amid new conditions and circumstances. ‘Krool’ of The Judgment House recalls forcibly ‘Soolsby’ of The Weavers.
(3) His versatility is apparent from the survey already made of his works. And to the list of poems, short stories, and novels, might be added his book on the Great War—The World in the Crucible—and his articles on agricultural questions and land settlement.
(4) His breadth of literary canvas. It may seem a simple matter to place one part of a story in England and another in Africa, or part in Canada and another part in the South Seas, but it requires a very broad grasp of material and a wide knowledge of people, and a keen sense of atmosphere to do it effectually. He has been described as the product of the British Empire, and there is little doubt that the breadth of his experience is the basis of his breadth of literary vision.
(5) A sense of the supernatural and touches of mysticism are consequent to his strong dramatic powers and show in many of his short stories, e.g. The Tall Master and The Flood in Pierre and His People, and in some of his novels, notably in The Weavers.
Summing up our impressions of Sir Gilbert Parker, we find that he has a breadth of vision not excelled or even equalled by any other Canadian writer. Comparing him with Norman Duncan, we see that Duncan is a finer workman but in a narrower range. Parker comes close to taking a place with the front rank modern British novelists and yet he does not quite do it. Why? Perhaps because of the fact that a man’s excellences are very often the cause of his defects. He is nothing if not dramatic. He reaches always for the spectacular climax where nature is often satisfied to take things quietly. He has just a little too much of a tendency to play to the gallery. He verges nearer to the melodramatic than do his contemporary British novelists—in fact, he frequently falls to it. There is not enough innate value in his incidents, there is more stage play.
Yet on the whole, Parker’s work is fresher. There is more of the clear air of the out-of-doors. There is not the morbidity of tone, nor the feeling of helplessness that is found in the fiction of Hardy, Meredith, Bennett, Galsworthy, Philpotts, Trevena and other leaders of the modern British novelists. We can forgive Parker many lapses because at the end—the total effect is the feeling that the good comes uppermost. Take even Pierre, half-breed gambler, a sort of half-Ishmaelite, yet with a sense of fair-play, a chivalry, a kindness that never leaves him. And so nearly all his characters and most of his books inspire us finally with divine lessons of hope and encouragement.
The historical romances of Charles G. D. Roberts—The Forge in the Forest (1896), A Sister to Evangeline, The Prisoner of Mademoiselle, The Raid From Beauséjour—while they are Canadian in setting and color, do not show the same imaginative reach and the same emotional power as the romances of Parker. The themes and settings of Roberts’ romances are rather narrow. They are concerned chiefly with minor incidents of the early history of Acadia, or we might say rather with a minor treatment of these incidents, for the historical episodes about which these stories are centered were, no doubt, of themselves important enough to the early French colony. The difficulty is that, despite the skill of Roberts in depicting local color and reproducing atmosphere in exquisite smooth flowing prose, he evinces little gift of characterization and the personages of the story are more or less mechanical puppets speaking by the will and with the words of the showman.
Somewhat unique in early romantic fiction is The Forest of Bourg Marie, by S. Frances Harrison (‘Seranus’), first published in 1898. The bygone civilization of the old seigneuries casts its glamor over a newer and more sophisticated Quebec, in its turn influenced by the hectic glitter of great cities of ‘the States,’ to which were attracted restless youth of French-Canada. Thus Mikel Caron, forest-ranger for the county of Yamachiche, links to the present the past grandeur of the Seigniory of Bourg Marie, while Magloire le Caron (Mr. Murray Carson in the States), villain of the piece, is the hybrid product of three civilizations. The writer’s style alters itself to harmonize with the varying spirit and mood of her story—stately and poetic in its descriptions of departed greatness; nervous and gauche in the passages where the turbulent current of a fevered modernity breaks through.
In Marguerite de Roberval (1899), T. G. Marquis turned back to the times of Jacques Cartier and applied his constructive imagination as well as his industry in research to building a story of Old France and the New around a most romantic and dramatic love episode.
In the same year appeared The Span o’ Life written in collaboration by William MacLennan and Jean N. MacIlwraith. Its historical basis is found in the memoirs of a Scottish Chevalier, who shared in the ill-starred rebellion of Prince Charles and afterwards became a soldier of fortune in the army of France, thus being present at the siege of Louisbourg and afterwards escaping to Quebec and joining the French forces there. The plot element of the story is somewhat weak and it is of value chiefly for its inside history of the siege conditions in the two greatest forts of New France.
So far the concern of Canadian historical fiction, as we have seen it, has been chiefly with New France and the conflicts between the French and English in North America. It remained for Agnes C. Laut to realize quite independently the amazing wealth of romantic history that lay back of the opening up and exploiting of the middle and far West of Canada. While yet a schoolgirl and knowing only the formal, conventional, and statistical outlines of Canadian history as then taught, she came accidentally upon a copy of Gunn’s History of Manitoba and sat up all night thrilled with the story of the Selkirk settlers. Thus originated the impulse, fulfilled later (1900), in The Lords of the North and (1902) in Heralds of Empire, to reveal what she felt, to show that Canada’s history was one page of glory. It had never been told in a way that the youth of the land would realize this, and she felt that, lacking this realization, we lacked a truly national spirit.
Lords of the North presents a vivid picture of Canada’s fur trade at the most flourishing period of that industry. It follows the conflict between the rival fur companies—the North-West and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Across its pages flit the voyageur, the trader, Indians, missionaries, settlers, buffalo hunters—all the romantic figures of the Canadian West of the period of 1815 to 1821. Heralds of Empire will be remembered for its characterization of Pierre Radisson, the man of action—the man who dared and who did—the man with the true pioneer spirit. Miss Laut’s style is forcible and direct. Her sentences are brief and crisp. The story runs on without effort. Description never wearies because it is the natural and necessary setting, painted with quick, bold vivid strokes. Of the larger matters of plot structure—the architectonics of fiction, she can hardly be said to have achieved mastery, but she writes with such energy and enthusiasm for her subject that in a measure this defect may be overlooked.
Wilfred Campbell also essayed the historical romance but with indifferent success. His Ian of the Orcades with its historical Scottish setting was more congenial to his genius than A Beautiful Rebel. It has arresting incidents, vigorously drawn characters, and considerable intensity of emotions, but it wins us rather by Campbell’s power to suffuse the text with what Matthew Arnold called ‘natural magic.’ It is more in keeping with the ‘old world imagination’ of Campbell which has been defined in the study of his poetry. A Beautiful Rebel, a story of Canada and the United States in the war of 1812, is lacking in imaginative color, is defective in structure, and the incident is too slight for the significance of the theme. The comment of the author has a way of appearing obtrusively as a digression, or at times in the mouths of the characters. What value A Beautiful Rebel has as historic fiction lies chiefly in its representation of the part played in the war by American sympathizers living as Canadian settlers.
II. The Romancers of Animal Psychology.
In the field of romance of wild and of domestic animal psychology, Canadian writers have shown a distinct and unique inventive genius and a corresponding artistry.
Ernest Thompson Seton attracted the attention of the world by his romances of wild life in Canada because he combined in them the skilled observation of the scientist, the vision of the artist, the insight of the psychologist, the sympathy of the humane man; and, perhaps, more than all that, the spirit of youthful wonder at, and interest in, the ways and doings of the creatures of the field and wood.
He brought to his writings of animal life a new point of view—namely, that human beings and wild animals are kin; that animals are motivated with passions and desires and, to some extent, ideas, just as human beings are. Thus he wrote with sympathy and with creative imagination and revealed the new life and being of wild animals, and he hoped to achieve the practical result of quickening the sympathies of man toward animals and stopping the thoughtless extermination of many of our harmless wild creatures.
His books such as Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), The Trail of The Sand-Hill Stag, The Biography of a Grizzly, Lives of the Hunted, are studies of animal psychology and behavior. Lives of the Hunted, for example, contains life-histories of Krag, the mountain Ram; of Johnny Bear; of Coyotito, the Escaped Coyote. Krag’s whole history from birth to death is faithfully sketched and, incidentally, much is learned about the habits of the mountain-sheep. From these life-histories we gain, not merely knowledge and information but wisdom, since animal life and human life are akin.
Some of the earlier animal stories were written in dialogue—the animals being made to talk. But, very wisely, the author soon adopted the narrative style and removed his sketches from the character of fairy stories to that of real interpretations of animal life.
In Two Little Savages he gives the adventures of two boys who lived in the woods as Indians and learned much about Indian life and all kinds of wood-lore. Other stories of a similar type are employed for the teaching of different phases of woodcraft. Wood Myth and Fable advances a step further and from incidents in animal life, and other occurrences in nature, the writer points a definite moral lesson. This escapes preachiness by the adroit epigrammatic wit of the ‘moral.’
A somewhat different literary ideal inspired Charles G. D. Roberts to undertake the pure romance of animal psychology and behavior. ‘It may be that this arose as a natural development from Roberts’ early attempts to depict a narrative from actual occurrences and experiences in the woods. At any rate Earth’s Enigmas (1896), followed by numerous other volumes such as The Kindred of the Wild, The Watchers of the Trails, The Haunters of the Silences, Red Fox, The Feet of the Furtive, More Animal Stories have established the place of Roberts as the supreme artist in the field of animal romance.
Roberts’ treatment of animal psychology differs from that of Thompson Seton or Marshall Saunders. He makes his wild animals either wholly human or too human. They move in their world with a sort of super-animal (or super-human) knowledge, and Roberts’ discloses a subconscious motivation of conduct in the wild animals that outdoes the present clay psycho-analyists in their revealments of human motivation. For this reason they appeal not to the heart but to the analytic imagination and the aesthetic sense. They awaken the interest of the intellect rather than the sympathetic emotions. They lack humor and pathos, but in imaginative sweep and artistic structure they are supreme creations. As examples of a literary prose style they stand almost alone in their particular field of fiction.
Not all Roberts’ animal stories are of this ‘intellectual’ type. Human interest and humor is added by showing animals in relationships, more or less accidental, to mankind, in such volumes as The Backwoodsman, Hoof and Claw.
The peculiar forte of Marshall Saunders is the romance of the domesticated animal or animal pet. Beautiful Joe: The Autobiography of a Dog, first published in 1894, is one of the literary phenomena of the world. It has been translated into fourteen or more languages and has sold over a million copies. With acute perceptive sympathy and engaging artistry, Miss Saunders has commingled strangely but veraciously the mind and life of the domestic animals. She envisages truthfully their ‘near humanity’ and reveals them as akin to man in feelings, passions, desires, and the motivation of conduct, but keeps them on a level below man. Her animals are not human, but they appeal more to the heart of the humanity in us than those of Roberts, Thompson Seton, or W. A. Fraser; particularly do they appeal more to the spirit and heart of youth. Her Golden Dicky, the story of a canary and his friends; Bonnie Prince Fetlar, the autobiography of a pony, and Jimmy Goldcoast, the story of a monkey, have all the engaging qualities of her earlier work.
W. A. Eraser, in Mooswa and Others of the Boundaries (1900), and in The Outcasts (1901) achieved a distinct success by working with much the same material as Roberts and Thompson Seton and to some extent combining the style and treatment of both. He is not so scientific as Thompson Seton; nor is he so literary or so psychoanalytic as Roberts. The Sa’-Zada Tales (1905) in which the animals at the zoo are represented as conversing with their keeper, Sahib Zada, and with one another, exhibit the intimate knowledge of wild animal life gained, no doubt, during the author’s residence in Asiatic countries, but they are not as distinctively original in manner, nor as high in literary quality as his other animal tales. Fraser, however, has a peculiar field in which he excels—in his novel Thoroughbreds (1902), and in his volume of short stories Brave Hearts (1904), he shows a sympathetic understanding of the life of the race horse and he presents vividly and with sometimes a rollicking humor, at others a tender pathos, many incidents and expressions of the racing field. He is an apostle of clean sport and a true lover of the racing horse and his enthusiasm gives to these stories a directness and coherence not always found in some of his later stories and novels with different subjects and settings.
III. The Evangelical Romance.
The pioneer writer of the ‘evangelical romance’ in Canada was ‘Ralph Connor’ (Reverend Charles W. Gordon). Back of all his books stands the missionary spirit. Indeed it was that missionary spirit which led to the finding of his literary gift. The story of that finding dates back to 1896. He had been attending a meeting of the Home Mission Committee of the Presbyterian Church at Toronto, and afterwards tried to impress upon the Rev. J. A. Macdonald, then editor of The Westminster, the duty of the magazine to educate the committee and the people to a greater liberality. The editor’s reply was: ‘Articles are no good if they have only facts and statistics and exhortations. Give me a sketch, a story, a thing of life rather than a report. . .’
The result of this advice was a series of sketches of missionary life in the foothills of the Rockies, which were featured as Tales of the Selkirks in The Westminster (1897) and appeared in book form the following year as Black Rock.
When the first sketches were ready it was deemed advisable to conceal the identity of the author. The editor telegraphed the query, ‘What name?’ The reply came, ‘Sign sketch Cannor.’ ‘Can—Nor, that would betray the face of a mask,’ says the editor. ‘Perhaps the operator made a mistake. Likely it should be Connor.’ And running over the alphabet of masculine names, he decided that ‘Ralph’ would just about fit with ‘Connor.’ Thus the christening of the missionary novelist.
Ralph Connor’s novels fall into several groups. Black Rock and The Sky Pilot are tales of the Rocky Mountain foothills, both telling of the wild life of the West and of the work of the missionary. The Man From Glengarry and Glengarry School Days deal with the life of the author’s boyhood in Eastern Ontario. The Prospector and The Doctor combine East and West, by following their leading characters through the University of Toronto and transferring them to Western Canada. The Foreigner has a Manitoba setting and concerns itself with the problem of the assimilation of the foreigner. Corporal Cameron and The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail, carry a young Scot to Canada and through the ranks of the Mounted Police. The Great War gave material for The Major; labor troubles for To Him That Hath; while in The Gaspards of Pine Croft, the author reverted to a setting not so far from that of his first novel for a story more emotional and psychological in nature than his others.
The circulation of Ralph Connor’s novels has been phenomenal and has reached somewhere between two and a half and three millions, yet it cannot be said that he has established a reputation as a literary artist. His stories carry the reader because of action, incident, and tense emotional situations. They always have an underlying ethical and spiritual significance and they promulgate a belief in the presence of some redeeming virtue in every human being, so that, despite adverse critical opinion, they continue to touch the responsive chord in the heart of a common humanity.
None of his later works has quite come up to the standard of Black Rock or The Sky Pilot in consistency of characterization and in unity of total effect. Indeed The Sky Pilot is the most artistically finished of all his works, because of the natural coherence of its parts in their development of the central theme. Dramatic power he has to a marked degree, so far as the presentation of individual scenes is concerned, such as the fight in the lumber camp, the horse race, the barn-raising, and many other thrilling episodes; but his grasp of dramatic values is not broad enough to escape melodrama. The constructive dramatic instinct which weaves each separate incident into a chain of cause and effect dependent upon the character and motives of the leading personages of the story is very little in evidence. Whole chapters might be lifted bodily from some of these novels without interfering with the main thread of the story.
His imagination is reproductive rather than creatively constructive. The stories of the foothills are built upon his own missionary experiences at Banff and elsewhere; the Glengarry tales deal with his schoolboy experiences and his knowledge of the rough life of the lumber woods and the drive; the stories of east and west are also drawn from his own experiences in college and in the missionary field. As a result of this his characters tend to become types and although fairly individual and distinctive they are inclined to act mechanically and to operate without sufficient inherent motivation.
The first novel of Robert E. Knowles, St. Cuthbert’s although a romance of a Presbyterian congregation, is not strictly an ‘evangelical novel.’ It has more to do with showing the Presbyterian Church as an institution which dominated the life of the Presbyterian community. The doings of the Kirk session; the relations of the minister with the various elements of his flock, the pious and the profligate, are described with rare fidelity. The tender undercurrent covered by Scottish reserve; the sympathetic understanding of human nature as the greatest and most essential quality of ministry; the dry, pawky Scottish humor; the distinctive and consistent characterization—these elements make St. Cuthbert’s a piece of genuine literature. The Dawn at Shanty Bay is in reality a short story. There is one underlying motive, and only one, dominating the whole—it is the fight between parental love and parental dignity. It should rank as one of the sweetest ‘Christmas Carols’ in English literature. His remaining novels—The Undertow, The Web of Time, The Attic Guest, and The Singer of the Kootenay are of the evangelical type and are fashioned much to the same pattern, showing inconsistencies in development and a lack of structural unity.