Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

The Poetic Dramatists

THE POETIC DRAMATISTS OF THE SECOND RENAISSANCE—ARTHUR STRINGER—ROBERT NORWOOD—MARJORIE PICKTHALL, AND OTHERS.

Arthur stringer, novelist and lyric poet, showed versatility and considerable power in imaginative construction when, in 1903, he published a volume of two dramatic poems or soliloquies and one poetic drama, all on classical themes in blank verse; namely, Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia. In these works, however, Stringer was indulging an ‘avocation;’ for his genius is at its best in lyrical verse and prose fiction. Hephaestus and Persephone, even though they are written in blank verse, have all the color, music, and emotion which we associate with lyrical poetry. Sappho in Leucadia, though dramatic in form, is undramatic in movement, and is lyrical in spirit. For at the beginning Sappho, the ‘bird-throated child of Lesbos,’ has resolved to destroy herself by leaping into the sea, and Phaon’s only role is the attempt of a lover to dissuade her, but to no avail. The so-called ‘drama’ is but a series of colloquies between Sappho and Phaon. The only ‘movement’ is a psychological development in three stages—first, the original intention on Sappho’s part to destroy herself; then the arrested intention; and, finally, the intention fulfilled, in spite of Phaon’s pleading, by Sappho leaping to her death.

What Stringer has really done in Sappho in Leucadia is to take a Greek legend and to tell the simple episode of Sappho’s death, in colorful, musical, and artistic blank verse. There is no emotional poignancy in it; nothing for the heart and the moral imagination. It is all for the aesthetic sensibility, for the lover of sensuous imagery and melody. Oddly its single lyrical interlude or ‘song’ is not in ‘Sapphics,’ but is an octave in trimeters. The sensuous beauty of color and music in this quasi-poetic drama is exemplified in the following speech by Sappho:—

For like a god you seemed in those glad days

Of droning wings and languorous afternoons,

When close beside the murmuring sea we walked.

Then did the odorous summer ocean seem

A meadow green where foam one moment flowered

And then was gone, and ever came again,

A thousand bloom-burdened Springs in one!

—How like a god you seemed to me; and I

Was then most happy, and at little things

We lightly laughed, and oftentimes we plunged

Waist-deep and careless in the cool green waves,

As Tethys once and Oceanus played

Upon the golden ramparts of the world.

Then would we rest, and muse upon the sands, . . .

And on the dunes the thin green ripples lisped

Themselves to sleep and sails swung dreamily

Where azure islands floated on the air.

Then did your body seem a temple white. . . .

The bloom of youth was on your sunburnt cheek,

The streams of life sang thro’ your violet veins,

The midnight velvet of your tangled hair

Lured, as a twilight rill . . . . . . . . . . .

Stringer’s Sappho in Leucadia is an engaging and even impressive dramatic colloquy, but it is not an authentic poetic or closet drama. It has sensuous beauty but no spiritual power. But it does increase Stringer’s reputation as a verbal colorist and melodist.

In 1915 appeared an original poet of distinct spiritual power in lyrical and dramatic forms. He was Robert Norwood. His first book was a sonnet-sequence. But in 1916 he published a poetic drama, The Witch of Endor: A Tragedy; and in 1919, another poetic drama, The Man of Kerioth. In 1921 he published Bill Boram, which is a ‘dramatic tale.’

Robert Norwood has two natural gifts. More than any other Canadian poet he has an innate genius for the philosophical or mystical interpretation of good and evil in the universe. Also, he is gifted with acute insight into the inner heart of man and woman, ancient and modern. These two gifts fit him for the office of the kind of poet who by imaginative sympathy perceives the ultimate harmony of the universe, the spiritual meaning of the tragedy and comedy of existence. As a poetic dramatist, then, Norwood is a Seer; and his voice is the voice of a Prophet. Power over the heart and imagination of the people, not Beauty and Art for art’s sake, is his aim. If he is the Poet of Beauty, as he is in all his verse, lyrical and dramatic, he is more, or supremely, the Poet of Spiritual Vision and Power in his poetic dramas.

In The Witch of Endor Norwood returns to the Biblical theme which had engaged Heavysege—the love romance and tragedy of King Saul. The characters are never shadowy but always alive. The dramatic movement is never held up by long or digressive moralizing speeches, as in Heayysege’s Saul, but each character makes his speeches according to the dramatic necessity, enough and no more, thus permitting at ‘the psychological moment’ the natural entrance of another character and his speech. The structure is logically developed to the tragic or spiritual climax. But in the development there is no uniform level of emotion, rather the emotion varies from gentle or pathetic to intense or tragic. It is indeed in its profounder imaginative vision, its more varying and rising degrees of emotional intensity, and its more logical structural development to a climax that The Witch of Endor has more incisive and compelling power as poetic drama than Campbell’s Arthurian drama Mordred. In short, The Witch of Endor is a beautiful and spiritual poetic drama—purging the emotions of pity and fear and transporting the spirit to the Mount of Vision where it sees intuitively how the ways of God to man are justified and how Love is greater than Faith and Hope.

In his next poetic drama The Man of Kerioth (that is, Judas Iscariot) Norwood made an advance in imaginative vision, construction, and power. He achieves this by reducing the magniloquence of the speeches and by modernly humanizing the characters of Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen, Blind Bartimaeus, Philip, and Jesus the Carpenter. He even introduces little children into the drama. The high and the vulgar and lowly, saints and sinners, the motley of society in Jerusalem, commingle intimately and humanly. There is a distinct advance in realistic truth of characterization, and the whole drama is pervaded with a winning naturalness and humanity which are not in any preceding poetic drama by a Canadian, nor even in his own succeeding ultra-realistic ‘dramatic tale of the sea,’ Bill Boram. So that in respect of creation thoroughly humanized, noble, and clearly limned character-portraiture—as, for instance, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen, and Jesus—Norwood must be ranked as the supreme creator amongst Canadian poetic dramatists. This is a matter of sheer artistry. But Norwood also shows an advance in spiritual power. With profounder mystical vision and greater truth he justifies the ways of God to man, and exalts the spirit to the Temple pinnacle where we behold Immortal Love in all its sweet beauty of humanity and in all its white radiance of redeeming light. In The Man of Kerioth he attains his acme in spiritual beauty and power as a poetic dramatist.

So far Norwood had not created any poetic drama with a definitively Canadian theme, setting, and characters. In his Bill Boram, which is a ‘dramatic tale’ told in the third person, the characters and the action being ‘reported,’ Norwood made a fresh, novel, and impressive contribution to original Canadian Literature. In doing so Norwood dropped somewhat in imaginative truth and dramatic invention; but he rose to greater heights of mystical perception and spiritual power. The theme of Bill Boram is the redemption of the human spirit by the love of beauty in Nature. Ingenious as his conception is, Norwood committed the error of conceiving the accident of a love of flowers, that is to say, of sensuous beauty, as a possible redemptive force in human life. He would have us believe that the love of sensuous beauty can transmute itself or become transmuted into an altogether different kind of love, namely, the love of spiritual beauty and thus regenerate a coarse and brutal nature and remake it into a noble and refined spirit. Such spiritual metabolism is impossible, and Bill Boram so far forth lacks imaginative truth and dramatic power.

Aside from that, Bill Boram, on the whole, is a novel achievement in dramatic narrative. The characters are vividly and veraciously drawn; they have realistic truth. There is also an air of romance in the whole tale, such an air of vital romance as obtains in the tales and novels of the sea by Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.

Summarily; Norwood’s Bill Boram is an amazing dramatic picture of rude characters in a setting of romance colored by a strange and startling commingling of coarse speech and brutalized deed and of beautiful diction and exquisite imagery. It is at once a tour de force in dramatic conception and construction and in impressionistic word-painting. Yet it is a powerful presentation of the idea of the mystical union of the human spirit with the divine through the love of pure beauty in Nature.

The Second Renaissance is noted also for the work of several other poetic dramatists. Amongst them are Dr. James B. Dollard, author of Clontarf: An Irish National Drama; Rev. Dean Llwyd, author of The Vestal Virgin; John L. Carleton, author of The Medieval Hun; A Historical Drama, and The Crimson Wing, which has the distinction of having been the winner of the first prize for original dramatic composition in the Canadian Prize Play Competition, 1918; Norah Holland, author of When Half Gods Go and Other Poems (1924), the title-poem of which has been repeated as a Christmas play for several successive seasons. These are all respectable poetic dramas and give distinction both to the quantity and the quality of poetic drama in the Second Renaissance.

But this work in poetic drama is, after all, not inspired impressing one as a stint in creation, and is not at all comparable to the work of Norwood in imaginative vision, artistic construction, and dramatic power. Comparable, however, with Norwood’s and superior to it in spiritual poignancy is the single poetic drama left by Marjorie Pickthall. Though Norwood’s poetic dramas contain lyrical interludes, and though his dramatic tale Bill Boram is for the most part rhymed, on the whole they are in blank verse. But Miss Pickthall’s single poetic drama The Wood Carver’s Wife is lyrical through and through, and is properly to be denoted as ‘lyric drama.’ In form this lyric drama stands midway between Stringer’s dramatic poems and Norwood’s poetic dramas. In that respect Marjorie Pickthall made a novel contribution to Canadian poetic literature.

The Wood Carver’s Wife was first published in The University Magazine in 1920. It was reprinted, along with other fugitive poems, in 1922, the drama supplying the title poem of the volume. The Wood Carver’s Wife has four characters, one of whom is Shagonas, an Indian lad who represents Nemesis. It is set in the time of the Intendant. The theme is ‘the eternal triangle’—a girl-wife, with a husband still alive and a secret lover. The mood of the drama is the tragedy which follows the sin of disloyalty to the sacrament of marriage, even if the disloyalty is only in the heart and never openly expressed in clandestine meeting between the wife and the lover. The mood of the dramatist, however, is not one of simply illustrating the law that the ‘soul that sinneth it shall die,’ but of wistfulness about the ways of God to men and women when spiritual unmating is permitted by Heaven. The dramatist seems to put her own feeling about the matter into her drama. She seems to feel that if the moral law is inexorable, it ought not to be so in the case of a young girl who innocently, or without knowing her own heart and what she was doing, married a man, who, after all, did not want her as an end in herself, or her spirit for its own sake, but to have her as a model for the statue of the Blessed Virgin he was creating in wood, as a chattel in his studio. Humanly, Marjorie Pickthall felt that the girl-wife was more sinned against than sinning when she allowed herself to be conscious—merely conscious—of the lover. But Marjorie Pickthall, with loyalty to the dramatic necessities, though with a spiritual wistfulness all the while, constructed the action and movement of The Wood Carver’s Wife so that the tragic ending was inevitable. For the husband knows that there is a secret lover, and Shagonas knows, and at the tragic climax it is the arrow of the Indian, representing the moral law, that sends the lover to his death. The girl-wife knows what has happened, because she has heard the twang of Shagonas’ bow-string. The tragedy is complete when she receives from Shagonas, who is again Nemesis, the sword of her lover, and dies with a mad speech on her lips, while at the same time the husband, also mad, as he was from the beginning, has Shagonas pose the beautiful dead body of the girl-wife that he may put the acme touches to his statue.

How easily the dramatist might have made certain shifts which would have resulted in reconciliation and a happy ending! But with all her spiritual wistfulness, Marjorie Pickthall loyally held to the dramatic and the artistic ideals. The climax and tragic ending are tremendous and wholly spiritualizing, purging the soul with pity for humanity through the terror which the action and the denouement awake in the spirit. There is in it all a spiritual poignancy which does not obtain in Norwood’s love-tragedy of Saul in The Witch of Endor. It is suffused with a lovely and winning beauty of diction, imagery, and verbal music; and it contains one lyric ‘cry of a soul’ which for pathos is unsurpassed in Canadian literature, namely, the Litany of Dorette, the hapless girl-wife, to the Blessed Virgin Mother beginning,

If you have lain in the night

And felt the old tears run

In their channels worn in the heart,

Pity me, Mary.

Considered critically, then, the poetic dramas of Robert Norwood and the lyric drama of Marjorie Pickthall are, from the universal point of view, authentic works of art, originally conceived and beautifully constructed, and, from the Canadian point of view, are the supreme achievements in the poetic drama of Canada.