Wilfred Campbell
AS AN OBJECTIVE NATURE PAINTER—HUMANIZED SUBSTANCE OF HIS VERSE—PATRIOTISM AND BROTHERHOOD—DRAMATIC MONODY—POETICAL TRAGEDIES AND DRAMAS.
In the early nineties of the last century three young Canadian poets, who were employed in the Civil Service Departments at Ottawa, were closely associated in a systematic way as men of letters. They were Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. In the Toronto Globe they conducted a department of literary criticism and ‘causerie’ under the caption ‘The Mermaid Inn.’ Oddly, these three young Canadian men of letters were singularly dissimilar in poetic temperament, attitudes, vision, and ideals. As a poet Lampman was an interpreter of the inner meaning of the beauty and moods of Nature. He and Nature communed with each other by reciprocal sympathy, and he cared greatly for style and craftsmanship in poetry. Duncan Campbell Scott loved beauty for its own sake as a spiritual delight or source of ecstasy, but perfection of form, style, artistry—‘art for art’s sake’—pre-empted all other considerations in poetry. Wilfred Campbell occupied a middle ground. He was an objective Nature-painter, with tendencies to be more interested in Nature as a habitat or background of the human spirit which had come from God and was going to God. He was solicitous about form and imagery, color and melody in poetry, but for him these were always a means to an end, never a mere end in themselves. Or, harking back to influences, we may say that Lampman wrote poetry with the eye and the spirit of Keats and Wordsworth; Scott with the eye of Matthew Arnold for naturalistic and moral beauty and chaste artistry; and Campbell in the spirit of Longfellow and Emerson, and, sometimes, of Tennyson.
With Campbell it was the substance or matter,—the ideas, thought, and meanings for the spirit—not the formal elements or manner of poetry, that counted for most. It is the substance of poetry, its meanings for the spirit, that counts always for most with the people. For this reason, though Campbell is not the greatest of the poets of the first Systematic School, he is, and will remain, as he has been called, ‘the poet of the people’s choice.’
A distinct evolution—and advance in vision—from objective nature-painting of the spirit can be observed in the successive volumes of Campbell’s verse. Naturally, until he had reflected on his aims as a poet, he did not announce his poetic creed in his first volume of verse. He did this in his fourth volume, Collected Poems (1905) in his poem Higher Kinship:—
There is a time at middle summer, when,
In weariness of all this saddening world,
The simple nature aspects seem to me
As a close kindred, sweet and kind and true,
Giving me peace and comfort, and a joy
Not of the senses, but of the inward soul.
The restful day, the sunny leaf and wind,
The path of blue like windows shining down,
Do give to life a beauty and a calm
And a sweet sadness, that this mighty world
And all its myriad triumphs cannot give.
O let me live with Nature at her door,
And taste her home-brewed pleasures, simple, glad,—
The beauty of the day, the splendor of the night,—
Not in the great palace halls, great cloister domes,
The smoke of cities and the thronging din,
But out with air and woodlands, shining sun,—
These my companions, this my roof, my home!
‘Not of the senses’—Campbell is not a lover of impressionism for its own sake, but he loves the simple, colorful aspects of Nature for the joy, comfort and peace which they give to ‘the inward soul.’ He has his equals as an impressionistic colorist, but he is supreme when he paints a phenomenon or aspect of Nature in monotone or in subdued tones as in pastel, or when he etches a scene with a Whistler-like feeling for atmosphere, shadow, and chiaroscuro, and for line. In 1888, when he was in his twenty-seventh year, Campbell published a booklet of twenty lyrics, Snowflakes and Sunbeams. In these first lyrics he disclosed the eye of monotonist and etcher for the beauty of Nature. The verse in this rare little volume is marked, too, by a grace and melody which enhance the pictures. What but a ‘symphony in white’ is his Snow—
Folding the forest.
Folding the farms,
In a mantle of white,
And the river’s great arms,
Kissed by the chill night
From clamor to rest,
Lie all white and shrouded
Upon the world’s breast.
Thus, through several stanzas, he paints Nature in white, seemingly for the joy of the senses but really for ‘the inward soul.’ For a moment he obtrudes the ‘message’ which the snow conveys to the moral imagination—
Falling so slowly
Down from above,
So white, hushed and holy,
Folding the city
Like the great pity
Of God in his love;
Sent down out of heaven,
On its sorrow and crime,
Blotting them, folding them
Under its rime.
Beautiful as an original image is the thought of the snow descending hushed and holy, ‘like the great pity of God in his love,’ but it is a sentimental obtrusion, out of character with the snow-picture as such. We find Campbell frequently creating the most engaging Nature pictures, and here or there in a poem recalling the eye from the pure visual delights to let the moral imagination reflect on some suggestion, some similitude, for ‘the inward soul.’ What a pretty pastel, for instance, he paints with spare use of mere tints, in the first two stanzas of In the Study:—
Out over my study,
All ashen and ruddy
Sinks the December sun,
And high up over
The chimney’s soot cover
The winter night has begun.
Here in the red embers
I dream old Decembers,
Until the low moan of the blast,
Like a voice out of Ghost-land,
Or memory’s lost-land,
Seems to conjure up wraiths from the past.
But Campbell does not continue the strict painting of the objective picture. He introduces something ‘for the inward soul,’ as he does, in the concluding stanza:—
Then into the room
Through the firelight and gloom,
Some one steals,—let the night wind grow bleak,
And ever so coldly,—
Two white arms enfold me,
And a sweet face is close to my cheek.
This is not a fault in Campbell’s poetry. It is an essential part of his art. As in Longfellow, so in Campbell the humanized substance of his verse is consciously designed for the popular heart, and ensures popular acceptance. Campbell would rather do this than to write always for art’s sake, as in these sheer pictorial stanzas from A Winter’s Night:—
Shadowy white,
Over the fields are the sleeping fences,
Silent and still in the fading light,
As the wintry night commences.
• • • •
Calm sleeping night
Whose jewelled couch reflects the million stars
That murmur silent music in their flight. . . .
Yet, he can employ delineative line with swift and sure artistry just to make a picture for its own sake, disclosing absolute mastery in economy of means, as in his Rododactulos:—
The night blows outward in a mist,
And all the world the sun has kissed.
Along a golden rim of sky,
A thousand snow-piled vapors lie.
And by the wood and mist-clad stream,
The Maiden Morn stands still to dream.
That is an exquisite bit of naturalistic etching with a poetic meaning intrinsically in the picture of the Maiden Morn standing and dreaming in the mist. The picture itself delights both the visual faculty and the imagination. Campbell also possessed the faculty of painting vividly, as with a single sweep of the brush, as in his Lake Huron (in October) and its memorable lines:—
Miles and miles of lake and forest,
Miles and miles of sky and mist;
and these still more vivid lines:—
Miles and miles of crimson glories,
Autumn’s wondrous fires ablaze.
Campbell did not aim or strive to be a word-virtuoso. But what he could achieve as an artist was to make at will a dainty or a glorious picture, and so localize the picture that one can immediately tell which section of the Canadian land or waters is delineated. He surpassed all his contemporaries in the gift of ‘flashing’ a vivid picture in a single line, as, for instance:—
The stars came out in gleaming shoals
or this tremendous line:—
Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim.
The last line quoted also discloses in Campbell a power which is not in any other Canadian poet—the Miltonic power of conveying by description ideated sensations of unending space and movement. Matching almost any piece of sheer description of immensity by Milton is Campbell’s compelling panorama of Lazarus in his flight from Heaven to Hell and the sensations of illimitable depths downward that it creates in the reader, as in these stanzas from his poem Lazarus:—
Hellward he moved, like a radiant star shot out
From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even,
When Orion’s train and that mysterious seven
Move on in mystic range from heaven to heaven.
Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout.
The liquid floor of heaven bore him up
With unseen arms, as in his feathery flight
He floated down toward the infinite night;
But each way downward, on the left and right,
He saw each moon of heaven like a cup
Of liquid, misty fire that shone afar
From sentinel towers of heaven’s battlements;
But onward, winged by love’s desire intense,
He sank, space-swallowed, into the immense,
While with him ever widened heaven’s bar.
’Tis ages now long-gone since he went out,
Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls.
But hellward still he ever floats and falls,
And ever nearer come those anguished calls;
And far behind he hears a glorious shout.
Campbell had a gift, too, for vivid color epithets and for vowel and alliterative word-melody. Indeed he was a master of color and verbal melody. Some of his more original and striking alliterative lines are:—
Flooding the silence in a silvern dream.
• • • •
Low flutes the lake along the lustrous sedge.
• • • •
But dawns and sunsets fell on mute dead faces.
• • • •
Belled with bees, a pollened bevy.
• • • •
Out of the murmurous moods of your multitudinous mind.
• • • •
Dim mists of darkness rise from marsh and mere.
• • • •
The waking world leaps to the day’s desire.
• • • •
The harmonies that float and melt afar.
• • • •
Deep-sounding and surgent, the armies of storm sweep by.
• • • •
None of Campbell’s contemporaries surpassed him in painting a simple but vivid genre picture, and enhancing it with verbal melody, as he does, for instance, in his Canadian Folksong, beginning:—
The doors are shut, the windows fast;
Outside the gust is driving past,
Outside the shivering ivy clings,
While on the hob the kettle sings;
‘Margery, Margery, make the tea,’
Singeth the kettle merrily.
As a poet of humane patriotism, which has regard for international or world relations, and which is not mere ‘drum and trumpet’ patriotism, Campbell stands in a class by himself. He had a Keltic love of place or home. It was a passion with him, but the passion embraced the Anglo-Saxon peoples. So that his patriotic poetry contains a large element of the ideal of Anglo-Saxon unity and of the imperialistic destiny of the British peoples. Thus we find him singing with equal warmth of Scotland, the homeland of his ancestors (as in The World-Mother), of England (as in his To England), of the United States (as in his To the United States), and of Canada, his homeland (as in Canada.)
A sincere and profound sense and love of brotherhood is the key-note of his patriotic poetry. There is no magniloquent bombast in it, whereas it must be admitted that Roberts’ Canada and his Ode to the Confederacy have at least an air of pomp of words which sound like mere magniloquence or bombast. But there is in Campbell’s Canada a sincere sense of history, of historical background and heroic origins, as well as of a people whom the vastness of their habitat should impel to a great and noble destiny. Besides, Campbell sings of the homeland in simple octameter couplets, the very simplicity of which impresses the spirit with a deep sense of truth and reality. The poem, with a slight change or two for choral singing would, if set to dignified and sonorous music, be fitted to be an inspiring and inspiriting National Hymn. It is a colorful, lyrical poem, a Song, suffused with the qualities of the Canadian spirit and the beauties of the Canadian habitat. We quote a few excerpts:—
O land, by every gift of God
Brave home of freedom, let thy sod
Sacred with blood of hero sires,
Spurn from its breast ignobler fires.
Keep on these shores where beauty reigns,
And vastness folds from peak to plains,
With room for all from hills to sea,
No shackled, helot tyranny.
Spurn from thy breast the bigot lie,
The smallness not of earth or sky.
Breed all thy sons brave stalwart men,
To meet the world as one to ten.
Breed all thy daughters mothers true,
Magic of that glad joy of you,
Till liberties thy hills adorn
As wide as thy wide fields of corn.
• • • •
And round earth’s rim thine honor glows,
Unsullied as thy drifted snows.
Wilfred Campbell, then, appears as a lyrist of Nature and poet of the Spirit, who is an adroit and vivid objective colorist and etcher, but who, for the most part, tinges his lyricism of Nature with meanings for the ‘inward soul.’ With equal dexterity and truth he painted an impressionistic or a genre picture. But in doing this, he was unexcelled by his contemporaries in Canada in economy of means for expression. While, however, he was thus given to painting or delineating Nature in Canada, he also appears as a poet who ‘hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.’ He gave proof of this in a singular way. Whatever other distinctions belong to him, Campbell has never been equalled, by another Canadian poet, in the Dramatic Monologue. Perhaps, in view of the special meaning which Browning has given to this species of poetry, it were better to use the formula Dramatic Monody. For this phrase better describes Campbell’s poignant, compelling Unabsolved, The Mother, and Lazarus. But however categorized, these poems reveal the fact that Campbell’s genius was essentially dramatic. This dramatic instinct in him, Campbell developed to a high degree until he essayed the five-act poetic drama. It is as a Poetic Dramatist that Campbell achieved a distinct and fixed place in Canadian creative poetry.
The first poet to attempt nativistic or native poetic drama in Canada was Charles Mair, who published at Toronto, in 1886. Tecumseh: A Drama. Many of its characters are Canadian and much of its setting and color are Canadian. Mair had created a work of real interest, of excellent structure and dramatic development, and had used impressively Canadian properties, character, and environment. The verse is genuinely artistic and colorful and dramatic, and the poem as a whole is worthy of critical consideration; but only as the first example of Canadian native poetic drama is Tecumseh to be regarded as significant in the literary history of Canada.
Much superior to the dramatic poetry of Mair is that of Wilfred Campbell. It is considerable in quantity, comprising the following (as he called them) ‘poetical tragedies and dramas:’ Mordred, Hildebrand, The Brockenfiend, Robespierre, Daulac, Morning, Sanio, and The Admiral’s Daughter. The quality of his poetical tragedies and dramas distinguishes him as the first really important creator of poetic drama in Canada.
The titles of his poetic tragedies and dramas clearly indicate that, with one exception, his subjects were derivative and his treatment traditional. With the exception of his Daulac he took his subjects from Arthurian legend and European romantic history. He was considerably under the influence of Tennyson. Though he gave us an interesting and arresting poetic drama with his Daulac, it is specially notable as a drama which is Canadian in subject, character, and setting. He was not so successful with it as with his poetic drama based on Arthurian legend and romantic history. The reason is that in a large degree he possessed an ‘Old World,’ a Keltic imagination, and his imagination was deeply impressed and moved by the romance of mediaeval heroic exploits:—
Old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
The heroism of Daulac, his combats and other heroic exploits were so near in time to the age of Campbell himself that they could not affect the poet’s imagination so pervasively and compellingly as do the older mediaeval romances of heroic exploits. Campbell did not feel the Daulac story as he had felt the Arthurian or romantic legends of Europe. He, therefore, did not, because he could not, put into his Daulac the same power of imagination and dramatic characterization and reality that he put into his other dramas. But Daulac, notwithstanding, is a noble poetic drama; and since it is Canadian through and through, in subject, in setting, and in authorship, we may estimate it as the first native poetic drama of genuine art and power in the creative literature of Canada.
The quotations from Wilfred Campbell’s work in this chapter are from The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell (Hodder & Stoughton, Limited: Toronto).