Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

The Systematic School

THE FIRST RENAISSANCE IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL AND PERIOD—ROBERTS AND HIS COLLEAGUES.

The years 1860, 1861, and 1862 may be regarded as the most significant in the literary history of Canada. In the year 1860 were born Charles George Douglas Roberts and Charles William Gordon (pseud., Ralph Connor). In the year 1861 were born William Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, William Wilfred Campbell, E. Pauline Johnson (pseud., Tekahionwake), Margaret Marshall Saunders, and Frederick George Scott. In the year 1862 were born Duncan Campbell Scott and Gilbert (now Sir Gilbert) Parker. The most gifted and eminent of Canadian poets and imaginative or creative prose writers, these ten Canadians comprised a single group, and they began, under the influence of the awakening spirit of Canadian nationality, the first systematic writing of poetry and prose, inaugurating a period of original literary creation, which we shall term, for expository purposes, the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

These ten writers were born, bred and educated (intellectually and aesthetically) in the four Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec—which formed, on the proclamation of the British North America Act, 1867, or shortly after the birth of this group of writers, the Dominion of Canada. From the point of view of their nativity and education the members of the literary group born in 1860, 1861, and 1862, are the first strictly so-called Canadian poets and prose writers.

Again: they were the first native-born poets and prose writers to begin, under the Confederacy, a systematic literary career. The term ‘systematic’ defines their conspectus and aims. To this literary group the free and impassioned expression, in verse and prose, of beauty and truth, as beauty is in Nature in Canada and truth in Canadian thought, activities, and institutions, appeared as their own specific function and ideal life. They were thus the first Canadians consciously to undertake a literary career which should be, in its way and degree, commensurate with the growing spiritual, social, political, and commercial life of the Great Dominion, and to find their inspiration chiefly, if not wholly, in the natural beauty and sublimity of their homeland, and in the spiritual import of their country and of the lives of their compatriots. In short, their literary conspectus was thoroughly Canadian; and their inspiration and ideals, too, were Canadian. In fact, their inspiration and ideals were a moral necessity born of a loyal obedience to the same creative impulse that was active in other Canadians who also were bent on constructive achievement in other spheres of Canadian endeavor.

Moreover: the literary group born in 1860, 1861, 1862, may be distinguished as having been the first Canadian poets and prose writers who, by actual performance, showed the nations, largely the peoples of the Motherland and the United States, that the political and commercially lusty young Confederacy was, on its own account, decidedly active in letters. The truth is that, in the decade following 1887, which witnessed the publication of the first work in verse and in prose by the systematic group of Canadian men and women of letters, Canadian poetry and imaginative prose, though they were derivative in form and frequently derivative in theme, quite gained the decent regard, and, in some instances, the admiration, of distinguished men of letters in England and in the United States, and furnished a pledge of greater achievement in literature.

The Canadian poets and prose writers born in 1860, 1861, and 1862, distinguish themselves and the years in which they were born as the first systematically creative School and Period in the literary history of Canada. Their creative activities and their poetry and prose we have denominated as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

What is meant by the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature? In 1880 a young native-born Canadian, Charles G. D. Roberts, published a book of poems. The critics of England and the United States thought well of the verse. There was in it a quality that had not been in previous books of verse by native-born Canadians. The poems were marked by a certain noteworthy artistic finish in the craftsmanship.

This was significant. Hitherto native-born Canadian poets had not been adroit in technique; they had been very careless about it, and some of them had no respect or feeling for it at all. Poetry was poetry, they thought, whether it was well dressed or not. With the publication of his Orion, Roberts sounded the death knell of slovenly or indifferent technique in Canadian poetry. Working with him, and largely under the influence of his ideal of technical finish in verse, were Lampman, Carman, Campbell, Pauline Johnson, Duncan Campbell Scott, Frederick George Scott, and others. They all cared supremely for fine technique in poetry.

In the second decade after 1887 there arose in Canada a group of poets who were not solicitous about the technique of their verse. With them fine artistry in Canadian verse declined. This Decadent Interim lasted but a few years. A later band of poets arose who went back to the ‘technical’ ideals which were exemplified in the poetry of Roberts and his colleagues. This younger band of poets ‘restored’ the ideals of the first literary group and began the Restoration Period in Canadian poetry. Collaterally, a similar course of distinction, decadence, and restoration of technical ideals can be observed in Canadian imaginative and aesthetic prose.

In another sense the period which began with Roberts and his confrères may properly be denoted as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature. It happens that the best of the Pre-Confederation Literature, produced either by émigrés or by native sons of the Province, was the work of ‘old minds.’ Consider, for instance, the historical romances of Major John Richardson and the satiric humor of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the poetry of Oliver Goldsmith, 2nd, and of such émigrés as Charles Heavysege and John Reade, the romantic poetic dramas of John Hunter-Duvar and the prose tales of James De Mille. We observe that, despite certain engaging novelty in themes and treatment, it is all the work of old men; that is to say, of minds which were attempting to ‘transplant’ old traditional methods and the forms of a past literature in a soil which was naturally hostile to their growth and gave them a mean and dry exotic existence.

If we fancy that we discover in the best Pre-Confederation literature the fresh beauty and vitality of youth, we shall discover, if we look critically, that this vitality and beauty are the last hectic or pale flowering of an exotic English literature, and that, commingled with the beauty, are the wrinkles of sapless age. To be sure, there is the flame of creative fire in, for example, Richardson and Haliburton. Notwithstanding, it is the flame which flares up, with a startling brilliancy, just before it dies out.

In truth, then, Pre-Confederation Canadian Literature was essentially a transplanted Old World literature. Inevitably it was alien to the soil of Canadian life, genius, and ideals. It, therefore, lacks real vitality, vigor, and truth. Except in Nova Scotia, in the time of Haliburton and Howe, it was the outcome of personal, not necessary social expression.

But, after Confederation, expression of the spiritual and social needs of the Great Dominion became a national necessity. This expression, being born out of the spiritual and social needs of Canada, must be considered, however derivative the mere forms employed, as a genuine literary Renaissance. The period or movement begun by the systematic groups of poets and prose writers born in Canada in 1860, 1861, and 1862 may, then, properly be denoted as the First Renaissance in Canadian Literature.