The Vaudeville School
THE DECADENT INTERIM IN CANADIAN LITERATURE—THE VAUDEVILLE SCHOOL OF POETS—ROBERT W. SERVICE, ROBERT J. C. STEAD, AND OTHERS.
Not ineptly, though somewhat jocosely, we may group Canadian Poets in the Post-Confederation period, from 1887 to 1907, into three Schools, and label them with characteristic sobriquets. Already Archibald Lampman, Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, with Pauline Johnson and Frederick George Scott, have been called ‘The Great Lakes School.’ This is a dignified sobriquet, and derives its descriptive aptness from the native environment, or from the themes, of these poets, or from both. Again: Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman have been named ‘The Birchbark School.’ This is a jocose, playful sobriquet, and was applied to these poets because ‘they use the mottled scrolls of the Red Man’s papyrus to build a canoe, or as a vehicle for verse, with equal dexterity.’
By similar tokens, the throng of verse-makers whose vogue formed a decadent interim in Canadian poetry, beginning with the publication of Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough (1907) and ending with the publication of his Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1913), may be signalized as ‘The Vaudeville School.’ On account of the themes of their verse, its special and distinguishing technique, and its particular appeal to popular or vulgar taste, this sobriquet, as applied to Robert Service, Robert Stead, Paul Agar, George B. Field, Milton W. Yorke (pseud. Derby Bill), Robert T. Anderson, John Mortimer, James P. Haverson, Charles W. MacCrossan, Hamilton Wigle, and others, is just, apt, and veracious. It must be understood, however, to convey nothing of scorn or contempt or derision, but to be only a pedagogical formula for summarizing the qualities of the verse, the ideals, the methods, and the craftsmanship of the great majority of the poets here named ‘The Vaudeville School.’ They might have been dubbed ‘The Sourdough School,’ were it not that of them all only Service deals with those picturesque and picaresque humans known in the slang of the Canadian gold-mining camps as ‘Sourdoughs,’ and were it not that this name, used as sobriquet, would be derisive rather than sincerely descriptive.
As used here, the term Vaudeville harks back to its original French connotation. As applied to the verse of Service, Stead, Haverson, Field, Yorke, and the others, it means, first, entertainment which appeals to popular or vulgar or low taste in verse. It means, secondly, arresting or violent methods in the technique of vividness. In fact, it is on the side of the technique of vividness in verse-color and verse-rhythms rather than on the side of the picturesque and often picaresque matter—characters and situations—of the verse of this School that the term Vaudeville is most apt and veracious, and that it is applied here as a descriptive epithet in the ‘working’ vocabulary of literary criticism.
The sublimation of the technique of emotional vividness, to the exclusion of all regard for the intrinsic and the aesthetic beauty and moral dignity of poetry—this is the essential formula of the verse of the Vaudeville School of Canadian poets. Their aims or motives were sincere and human. One motive was genuinely aesthetic: they wished to write verse that would escape the emotional deadness of the traditional themes and manner of Canadian poetry. The other motive was pragmatic: they wished to write rhythmic and rimed social documents in verse which would have such novelty of theme and such dramatic or theatrical or ‘sensational’ content as immediately to create a demand for the ‘new poetry’ and make it readily marketable. Thus should ‘the art of poetry’ become at once both pleasurable and profitable.
How were these ends to be achieved? ‘I am one who left off singing Alleluias,’ said Dante, poet of the immortal ‘Vision’ of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Thus Dante, desiring to get away from the conventional deadness of saying that he, as a poet, was a messenger from Heaven to reveal spiritual beauty to his fellows, makes use of one of the principles of the technique of vividness. He employs the unusual phrase, the lively, arresting phrase that would be sure to strike and vividly impress the average mind or imagination. In short, Dante invents and uses picturesque slang: for ‘singing Alleluias’ is slang, but how poetically suggestive it is, how vivid!
The Canadian Vaudeville verse-makers realized the poetic suggestiveness and the vividness of the picaresque speech of the Far West and the High North. They also knew how these sections of the country were rich in picturesque and picaresque characters and in the ‘wild and woolly’ life which produces strange and violent drama and melodrama, which is all the more appealing to the imagination of men and women because it is real and ‘stranger than fiction.’ It was a life full of moral (or immoral) color of speech, and action—of compelling interest. Thus ready to hand in Canada lay for immediate use the materials and the basal technical principle—the recipe—for the ‘making,’ not the ‘creation,’ of Vaudeville poetry. What was that recipe? Simply this. Lilt in plangent anapaestic metres or rhythms the picaresque melodrama of the mining camps in the High North and the melodrama of the ‘chevalerie’ of the Far West.
A single stanza from The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert Service (Songs of a Sourdough, 1907) affords ample proof and illustration of the vaudeville qualities of this decadent verse:—
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm;
And, ‘Boys,’ says he, ‘you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my poke they’re true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew.’
That is an impressive characteristic example of the technique of vividness, by the Canadian master of them all. But let no one call it poetry. Service’s astounding vogue for six years—it is now vanished—was not due to the poetry in his verse, but to the arresting or violent drama and melodrama in it, made more arresting or compelling by the infectious swing or lilt of the anapaestic rhythm. This rhythm is his only forte in verbal music, though he also employs alliteration successfully. This forte is seen to be a limitation and a weakness, as it also was and is in his alleged artistic foster-father, Rudyard Kipling. For as soon as Service attempts to employ another rhythm better suited to higher thought than the picaresque matter of strictly ‘Sourdough’ Songs, the results are disastrous. He fails to hold the attention; and, inasmuch as there are no compensating rhythmic values, all that is left is the strained and bizarre effect of cheap melodrama. A singular example of this kind of weakness and failure in Service is his My Madonna, in which he aims consciously and seriously to achieve a tour de force in religious sentiment, but falls into flat bathos of melodrama (Songs of a Sourdough).
If proof is wanted that the recipe for writing Vaudeville verse is simply to lilt in anapaestic metre and rhythm the melodrama of the Far West chevalerie, proof and illustration are furnished by a stanza from Sergeant Blue by Robert Stead (Kitchener and Other Poems, 1917):—
Sergeant Blue of the Mounted Police was a so-so kind of a guy;
He swore a bit, and he lied a bit, and he boozed a bit on the sly;
But he held the post at Snake Creek Bend for country and home and God,
And he cured the first and forgot the rest—which wasn’t the least bit odd.
The amazing and pathetic fact about Robert Service is that he really possessed authentic poetic genius, and sometimes did write pure poetry. At his best Stead has written some satisfying genre poetry and story-telling ballads. But Stead could not rise beyond the homely-pathetic and the melodramatic in Western chevalerie into the realm of pure poetry. He kept always to the level of his lowly subject. Service, however, fell or rose to the level of his subject. In short, while most of Service’s verse is popular Vaudeville, considerable of it violent melodrama, and much of it drama simply, some of his verse is genuinely poetical, charged with pure beauty and poetic significance. How nobly Service has conceived, how passionately expressed in lovely color-images and pervasive vowel and alliterative music, and how philosophically interpreted Nature in his poem The Mountain and the Lake:—
I know a mountain thrilling to the stars,
Peerless and pure, and pinnacled with snow;
Glimpsing the golden dawn o’er coral bars,
Flaunting the vanished sunset’s garnet glow;
Proudly patrician, passionless, serene;
Soaring in silvered steeps where cloud-surfs break;
Virgin and vestal—oh, a very Queen!
And at her feet there dreams a quiet lake. . . .
In that poem Service has given us an arresting and memorable picture of pure beauty in Nature. It is beautiful and unforgettable because it has poetic Style. Stead and the other members of the Vaudeville School, with the exception at times of Service when at his best, lacked genius for style in verse, without which verse, whether its subject or theme be low or high, realistic or idealistic, cannot rise to the dignity of poetry. Service, Stead, and the rest are never authentic Realists. They could not avoid the melodramatic in the matter of their verse and the plangent and vivid in its technique. Always they deliberately set out to assault the senses and the sensibilities. Kipling could be realistic and by virtue of his style rise to the dignity of poetry. But for the lack of style, the hectic realism of Service and Stead never rises above the crudely melodramatic or Vaudevillian. As picaresque realists they are, to quote Mr. E. B. Osborn, ‘far behind the Australian and compare very unfavorably with the minor masters of Quebec.’
Many of the most effective pieces in Service’s first volume (Songs of a Sourdough) were deliberate imitations of Kipling. But later he gave some promise of developing an independent manner of his own, the manner which is disclosed in The Mountain and the Lake, and which indubitably revealed in him innate original powers for painting the beauty and sublimity of Nature in the Arctic.
Service did not hold to his own manner; and Stead and the other Vaudevillians were innately incapable of any manner of their own. At length the vogue of the Vaudeville poets passed, having in no way affected the stream of aesthetic and artistic poetry which began with the Systematic School and which flowed on, pure and undefiled, if placid and noiseless, through the poetry of the later generation and into the Restoration Period or Second Renaissance in Canadian Literature.
Fundamental to the point of view of the criticism which follows is this proposition:—The poetry of the Vaudeville School for the most part must be regarded, not strictly as an aesthetic phenomenon, but rather as an envisagement of certain phases of the civilization of Canada in that period—that is, as a series of social documents. There is nothing wrong in treating contemporary phases of civilization in poetry with such vividness and veracity that they really become social documents of the period which they envisage; but they are of no aesthetic worth if they are not consecrated to and by art. How a social document, when sublimated by fine art, can become authentic poetry may be discovered by turning to Pauline Johnson’s musical and swift-moving lyric Prairie Greyhounds, descriptive of the transcontinental trains and their service to Canadian civilization, or to Mr. C. G. D. Roberts’ noble sonnet The Train Among the Hills, or to his equally fine sonnet of the soil The Sower.
It must be realized that the sources of poetic inspiration in Canada have considerably shifted from the Atlantic, the Land of Evangeline, the Great Lakes, and the Laurentians to the Prairies, the Rockies, and the ice-clad wildernesses of the High North. Now, it was inevitable that under the inchoate and unsettled conditions of civilization in these Far West and High North sections of the Dominion, the mere inspiration to write verse should have been uppermost and that considerations of form should have appeared secondary or insignificant.
The themes treated in the Vaudeville verse were necessarily new; and when the Western or Yukon poets published their verses the newness of their themes and their naïve disregard of technical niceties were mistaken in the East for originality, vigor, freshness, and breeziness in art, and were welcomed and read by all classes of Canadians with avidity as ‘real,’ not ‘hothouse,’ poetry. There we have the explanation of the astonishing vogue of the verses of Service and Stead, and of their imitators. But their verses, far from being examples of genuine originality in invention of poetic themes and of really new art, exemplify the total absence of art; and far from being ‘real’ poetry, are totally devoid of the chaste speech, lovely imagery, dulcet music, and exquisite emotion which constitute true poetry.
It was a distinct moral fault on the part of Service that he should have chosen to give us in verse what he had better written in prose. The right form for social documents of picaresque communities is prose. Further: it is a law of aesthetics, a law exemplified most finely in Homer, that, whenever possible, all the elements in a work of art should each be intrinsically beautiful. Service deliberately chose themes which disregarded that law. We could forgive him for that if he had redeemed the vulgarity of the themes by beautiful craftsmanship in versification. His poetry is bad not because it is wicked or picaresque or risqué, but because it is aesthetically bad through and through.
During the Vaudeville Period Roberts, Campbell, Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, Canon Scott, Pauline Johnson, Arthur Stringer, Albert E. S. Smythe, Ethelwyn Wetherald, Jean Blewett, Helena Coleman, Virna Sheard, the late Marjorie Pickthall, Katherine Hale, Jean Graham, Peter McArthur, Richard Scrace, Lucy M. Montgomery and a host of others published aesthetically satisfying poetry. For their spirit was of the spirit which inaugurated the First Renaissance in Canadian poetry. But the spirit of Service and the lesser poets of the Vaudeville School was identical with that which animated the early Canadian verse-makers before the times of Breakenridge, Sangster, Mair, and John Reade. In spirit and in craftsmanship the poetry of the Vaudeville School was essentially a recrudescence of the poetry that made glad the hearts of the ‘Bush’ and ‘Clearing’ settlers of Canada in the first and second quarters of the last century.
That a New Poetry will arise in Canada and that it will originate and flourish in the Canadian Far West, is highly probable, because the prairie-lands of the West, their endless fields of grain sheening in the sun and billowing in rhythmic swaying to the winds and the mighty vastnesses of land and sky awaken moods and appreciations of Nature similar to those stirred in men by the sea. It was, in Bliss Carman’s fine phrase, ‘the glad indomitable sea’ and the inland seas that inspired the Maritime and Lake poets who began the First Renaissance of Canadian Poetry.
But if any of the future Canadian poet, Western or Eastern, should prefer or incline to turn back to the ways of Service and Stead, let him reflect that since beauty is our clearest manifestation of the union of the real and the ideal, that is, of perfection, not to love and promote beauty in poetry is so far forth to refuse to love and promote the Godlike in the hearts of mankind, for perfection is the essence of the Godhead. To become a poet may not be a moral duty. But if one elects the office of poet, then to perfect oneself, as far as possible, in poetic artistry for the sake of beautifully or compellingly embodying in verse whatsoever is lovely in Nature or noble in ideas, is to attain to high moral dignity in one’s own soul as a poet and to impress on the world the high spiritual function of poetry.
Sources of quotations in this chapter:
Poems of Robert W. Service—The Songs of a Sourdough (Ryerson Press: Toronto); The Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, (Ryerson Press: Toronto).
Poems of Robert Stead—Kitchener and Other Poems—or in The Empire Builders (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).