Parker and Scott (F. G.)
PARKER AS A SONNETEER OF SPIRITUAL LOVE—ORIGIN AND THEME OF A LOVER’S DIARY—MUSICAL AND COLORFUL LYRICAL VERSE—SCOTT’S POETRY A REFLECTION OF HIS PERSONALITY—DISTINGUISHED AS THE ‘POET OF THE SPIRIT’—CHIEF QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY.
It was as a poet, not as a creator of historical romances, that Sir Gilbert Parker first appeared as a man of letters and first appealed to the literary public. As a poet he was appreciated in Australia and in England, but not in Canada. That as a poet he has been unknown and unappreciated in his homeland, Canada, is due to the fact that he was expatriate when he published his two volumes of poems, the second of which was ‘privately printed,’ and that his greater reputation as a novelist, particularly of old romantic Canada, made him known in the Dominion exclusively as a writer of fiction. Sir Gilbert Parker, however, ranks high as a sonneteer of spiritual love, and as lyrist in genre verse which has attained special reputation, particularly as texts of songs for salon and recital repertory.
Sir Gilbert Parker was born in Ontario, in 1862. Never robust, he left Canada in 1886 to seek recovery of health in the warmer and more salubrious climate of Australia. While in Australia he began publishing sonnets and lyrics in magazines. The sonnets were collected and published in a volume entitled A Lover’s Diary; first edition, 1894; second edition, 1898. Before the publication of A Lover’s Diary Parker had removed to London. While in England he privately printed a volume of lyrics entitled Embers. These two volumes, the first revised, and enlarged with twenty-five sonnets, and the second, with the addition of other lyrics, were collected and published as Volume 17 of The Works of Gilbert Parker (1913). The volume containing his collected poems is distinguished by a critical Introduction by Sir Gilbert Parker himself.
In the Introduction Parker explains the origin and theme of A Lover’s Diary. It is a sonnet-sequence, the composition of which was begun when the poet was twenty-three and still resident in Canada. The sequence is a ‘hopeless love, in form of temptation, but lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished and the toil of the journey of understanding paid.’ He adds: ‘The six sonnets . . . beginning with The Bride, and ending with Annunciation, have nothing to do with the story further than to show two phases of the youth’s mind before it was shaken by speculation, plunged into sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character, and give a new impulse and direction to personal forces and individual sense.’
As a poet of romantic love Parker is concerned with the spiritual meaning of it. A Lover’s Diary is not concerned with the mere emotions of romantic love but with its spiritual thrall, and with it as a process of spiritual redemption and exaltation. As an interpreter of spiritual love, Parker contrasts with Robert Norwood whose sequence, His Lady of the Sonnets (1915), though having a spiritualizing intent, is highly sensuous and impressionistic in diction and imagery. Parker breathes a less earthly air. His sonnet-sequence is addressed more to the imaginative reason than to the aesthetic imagination. It is much more mystically conceived and much more chastely lovely with the ‘white beauty’ of the spirit than is Norwood’s sequence. Both sequences, however, are authentic and noble poetic creations.
In pure beauty of conception, imagery, and artistry, and in the spiritual exaltation of love, the following sonnet from Parker’s A Lover’s Diary, is characteristic of the whole sequence:—
It is enough that in this burdened time
The soul sees all its purposes aright.
The rest—what does it matter? Soon the night
Will come to whelm us, then the morning chime.
What does it matter, if but in the way
One hand clasps ours, one heart believes us true;
One understands the work we try to do,
And strives through Love to teach us what to say?
Between me and the chilly outer air
Which blows in from the world, there standeth one
Who draws Love’s curtains closely everywhere,
As God folds down the banners of the sun.
Warm is my place about me, and above,
Where was the raven, I behold the dove.
Parker’s lyrical verse, like his sonnet-sequence, is the poetry of a young man who still possesses the enthusiasms of youth for all the lovelier and happier things in existence, and who rejoices in living. From the text of Parker’s lyrics it is plain that he had the gifts of a lyrist in the original Greek meaning, of one who wrote poems to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. He was gifted to turn a sentiment either seriously or playfully with simplicity and directness of diction and with winning musical lilt.
In truth, if he had turned to song composition, he was more ideally equipped to write the texts of poems for songs than was the greatest of American song composers, the late Edward MacDowell, who, for lack of singable lyrical texts, was compelled to compose his own poems as well as their musical settings.
There is a spontaneity of lyrical lilt, lyrical verve, in Parker’s lighter poems, which he composed both in literary English and in ‘Irishy.’ As an example of the musical and colorful qualities of his lyrics in literary English, the following poem from Embers will aptly serve:—
I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still—
There was winter in my world and in my heart;
A breath came from the mesa, and a message stirred my will,
And my soul and I arose up to depart.
I heard the desert calling, and I knew that over there
In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
Was a woman of the sunrise with the star-shine in her hair
And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.
I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still—
There is summer in my world, and in my heart;
A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
Blinds my footsteps as I rise up to depart.
As an example of his musical quality and humor in ‘Irishy,’ the following lyric from Embers is apt and fetching:—
It was as fine a churchful as you ever clapt an eye on;
Oh, the bells was ringin’ gaily, and the sun was shinin’ free;
There was singers, there was clargy—‘Bless ye both,’ says Father Tryon—
They was weddin’ Mary Callaghan and me.
There was gatherin’ of women, there was hush upon the stairway,
There was whisperin’ and smilin’, but it was no place for me;
A little ship was comin’ into harbour through the fair-way—
It belongs to Mary Callaghan and me.
Shure, the longest day has endin’, and the wildest storm has fallin’—
There’s a young gossoon in yander, and he sits upon my knee;
There’s a churchful for the christenin’—do you hear the imp a-callin’?
He’s the pride of Mary Callaghan and me.
As a composer of song texts, Parker is rivalled only by his Canadian compatriot, Arthur Stringer, whose poems in ‘Irishy’ have been most winningly and humorously set to music by their compatriot, Gena Branscombe (Mrs. J. F. Tenney). It is indeed as a poet, whose lyrics are inevitable texts for songs which have literary charm and simple humanity that Sir Gilbert Parker has been most admired and appreciated.
For this view we have the authority of Sir Gilbert himself. In the Introduction to the volume of his poetry in his Collected Works, he says: ‘Mary Callaghan and Me has been set to music by Mr. Max Muller, and has made many friends, and The Crowning was the Coronation ode of The People, which gave a prize, too ample I think, for the best musical setting of the lines. Many of the other pieces in Embers have been set to music by distinguished composers, like Sir Edward Elgar, who has made a song-cycle of several, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Mr. Arthur Foote, Mrs. Amy Woodforde Finden, Robert Somerville, and others. The first to have musical setting was You’ll Travel Far and Wide, to which in 1895 Mr. Arthur Foote gave fame as An Irish Folk Song. Like O Flower of All the World, by Mrs. Amy Woolforde Finden, it has had a world of admirers, and such singers as Mrs. Henschel helped to make Mr. Foote’s music loved by thousands, and conferred something more than an ephemeral acceptance of the author’s words.’
Both, then, as a poet of mystical vision and sublimated emotion, and of human sentiment and instincts which add to the humanity and gaiety of life, Sir Gilbert Parker appears as a poet who has authentic creative gifts and who is a master craftsman in the ‘art’ of verse. In novelty and variety his sonnets and lyrics have significantly enhanced the quality of Canadian poetry, and have in their own degree and way given the work of the poets of the Systematic School and Period the character of a genuine ‘renaissance.’
Another poet who rightfully belongs to the Systematic School and Period of Canadian Literature is Frederick George Scott. In 1888, or in the year following the publication of Roberts’ In Divers Tones (1887), Canon Scott published his first book of verse, The Soul’s Quest and Other Poems. This volume was succeeded by five other volumes of verse, up to 1907, in which year he published The Key of Life: A Mystery Play. In 1910 appeared his Collected Poems. During the World War he published a booklet of war verse, In the Battle Silences (1916).
The forms and qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry were determined by his own moral personality and by his conception of the ‘end’ of poetry. It is a fact that in no other verse written by a Canadian is there such an absolute identification of the man and the poet as in the poetry of Canon Scott. The poetry reflects the whole personality of the man. In the world, Canon Scott is a distinguished example of the ‘Christian gentleman’—‘a man of liberal culture and wide sympathies whose life has thrilled with the larger life, political, social, and religious, a man of strong courage born of reverent unquestioning faith.’ To Canon Scott, therefore, the aim of poetry is not ‘art for art’s sake,’ but the inspiration and consolation of the people in their hour of doubt or darkness. His conception of the ‘end’ determined the forms and manner of Canon Scott’s poetry. For if, like the ancient Hebraic poets, he was to inspire and console his people, he must present his thoughts in simple forms and in diction and imagery readily understood by the people.
Canon Scott stands out from the rest of the members of the Systematic School and Period as par excellence the Poet of the Spirit; and his verse is distinguished from the bulk of the verse of his colleagues in the Systematic School as the Poetry of Faith and Consolation. There is nothing original and distinctive in his forms: they are traditional and simple. There is nothing original and distinctive in his message: it, too, is traditional and simple—a message of faith and courage and of joy in existence. His distinction is in his ‘art,’ his power to convey beautifully, sweetly—and above all, convincingly—to the human soul noble or profound thoughts for its sustenance, refreshment, and consolation. But while the ethical and spiritual ‘notes’—which must be distinguished from didacticism—are supreme in his poetry, Canon Scott is also solicitous about the craftsmanship in his verse. Though his verse forms are thoroughly socialized and though he never aims to be a ‘word virtuoso,’ nevertheless he is always the ‘artist’ in verse technique.
The chief qualities of Canon Scott’s poetry are piquant phantasy rather than imagination, ingenious imagery, sympathy with his kind, tenderness, wistfulness, simple or profound thought expressed in simple diction and in simple but dulcet verbal melody. Also in his verse is a two-fold Canadianism. The self-reliant faith and courage in it is Canadian, and the color and the naturalistic imagery are derived from the woods, and fields, and streams, and hills of his Canadian homeland, more particularly from Nature in the Laurentian district. Indeed, Canon Scott has been given the sobriquet of ‘the Poet of the Laurentians.’ But while he impregnates and suffuses his verse with color and naturalistic imagery from Nature in the Laurentians, he always transmutes his naturalistic perceptions into spiritual imagery and import. He does not do this with bald and stark didacticism, but with exquisite artistry, and yet with an intimacy, apt felicity, and naturalness that make it all an achievement in winning a reader to see the beauty and dignity of the familiar and commonplace in Nature. Canon Scott’s poetry, in a phrase, is the acme of spiritual realism.
Of his diction, rhythm, and melody, and his Canadian imagery in verse, Scott’s Dawn furnishes a short and impressive example:—
The immortal spirit hath no bars
To circumscribe its dwelling-place;
My soul hath pastured with the stars
Upon the meadow-lands of space.
My mind and ear at times have caught
From realms beyond our mortal reach,
The utterance of Eternal Thought
Of which all nature is the speech.
And high above the seas and lands,
On peaks just tipped with morning light,
My dauntless spirit mutely stands
With eagle wings outspread for flight.
How lowly, and yet how beautiful and compelling, are these figures in the first stanza of that poem—‘pastured with the stars,’ ‘meadow-lands of space.’ But both are derived from Canon Scott’s boyhood days in his homeland. They are Canadian.
There is a Wordsworthian humanity in his poem The Cripple, a sympathy with his kind and a tender wistfulness in his Van Elsen. There is nobility of thought in his Samson, and in Thor, and a grandeur of vision in his Hymn of Empire, which is a Canadian imperial and patriotic poem in a kind by itself. But in one poem—a sonnet—Canon Scott has achieved what is perhaps the most ingenious imagery in Canadian poetry, and one of the most extraordinary in English literature. This is his sonnet Time:—
I saw Time in his workshop carving faces;
Scattered around his tools lay, blunting griefs,
Sharp cares that cut out deeply in reliefs
Of light and shade; sorrows that smooth the traces
Of what were smiles. Not yet without fresh graces
His handiwork, for oftimes rough were ground
And polished, oft the pinched made smooth and round;
The calm look, too, the impetuous fire replaces.
Long time I looked and watched; with hideous grin
He took each heedless face between his knees,
And graved and scarred and bleached with boiling tears.
I wondering turned to go, when lo, my skin
Feels crumpled, and in glass my own face sees
Itself all changed, scarred, careworn, white with years!
So far as derivative influences may in general be observed in the poets of the Systematic School and Period of Canadian Literature, Roberts, Lampman, and Carman are Hellenistic and impressionistic in feeling and thought. They were devoted to creating poetry that would delight the aesthetic senses and sensibilities. But Frederick George Scott is Hebraic in feeling and thought. He created poetry to satisfy the heart and the religious imagination, and to sustain and console the human spirit in its sojourn on earth. He achieved these ends simply yet beautifully. His poetry is pervaded with the most elemental and enduring ‘heart’ qualities. They give it such a direct and compelling human appeal as to win a significant and distinctive place for it in the authentic native and national poetry of Canada.
The quotations in this chapter are from A Lover’s Diary and Embers, by Sir Gilbert Parker, (Copp, Clark Co., Limited: Toronto); and from Poems, by Frederick George Scott, (Constable & Co.: London).