I. The Historical Romancers.
When William Kirby published, in 1877, The Golden Dog, he led the way in Canadian historical romance. Major John Richardson had written historical novels years before, but Richardson’s material was largely first hand, from contact with a life and with a setting similar to what he described. We might argue that Kirby ‘discovered’ to the fictionists who were to come after him the wealth of material that lay in the unknown and almost forgotten Canadian past, for he founded his work on Canadian history and infused it with Canadian incident and color; and although Mrs. Leprohon’s romances had a considerable vogue both in English and in French, the circulation of her novels was chiefly local and not anything like so widespread as that of Kirby’s single masterpiece. Yet it is problematic just how much the historical or romantic fiction of the Post-Confederation period (beginning, say, in 1888) owes to Kirby and how much it owes to a stirring impulse of nationality. That impulse produced tangible evidences in our literature because of a conscious realization of national ideals and a sensing of the spirit of a courageous and romantic past in a country that, superficially viewed, had barely reached the stage of ‘growing pains.’
In 1888 William Douw Lighthall published The Young Seigneur, a socio-political study of life and institutions in Canada, which according to the author himself; ‘arose out of my ideas as a young man concerning an ideal of Canadian nationality to which I gave the color of this province (Quebec) as I knew it in the old Seigneuries.’ Possibly the ‘thesis’ overpowered the romantic or novel elements, for this book is not regarded as equal in literary merit to its successors. The False Chevalier (1898) was a historical romance set partly in Canada and partly in France. It is an attempt to depict an actual romance found in a packet of documents at the house of the De Léry’s at Boucherville near Montreal. It is rich in atmosphere and color both of the old land and the new and is filled with engaging incident, but lacks somewhat in effective novel construction, and in convincing characterization. It is in The Master of Life (1910) that Dr. Lighthall has produced a unique and masterly piece of fiction. With Hiawatha as its hero, it is purely aboriginal in setting and color and exhibits the author’s wide knowledge of Indian history and archaeology. It was the result of Dr. Lighthall’s sympathies with the Iroquois Indians, derived originally from the ancient family records of the Schuylers (from whom the Lighthalls are descended). They, as leading British officers and statesmen, had much to do with keeping the Iroquois steadfast to the British Crown. Although the impetus to its writing originated in this way, The Master of Life, in its development is an example of rare constructive imagination and is pervaded with a richly poetic interpretation that apprehends nature as filled with spiritual presences and nature’s beauty as the garment of the Great Spirit.
The year 1889 saw the publication of a work of pure romance in My Spanish Sailor by (Margaret) Marshall Saunders. This was a love story of the sea in which a Nova Scotian girl and a Spanish sea-captain are the leading characters. Again in Rose à Charlitte (1898), afterwards published as Rose of Acadie, Miss Saunders essays romance, colored, it is true, by a seemingly historic atmosphere, but yet rather a record than a history, for the Acadian habits and customs which one might think of as belonging to a past age were current among the people in the Bay of St. Mary settlement when visited by Miss Saunders in the summer of 1897. Here the descendants of the Acadians had lived apart from the English and preserved their language, traditions, customs, and their unique manner of life. ‘The elements of strength and weakness of the people, their patient devotion, their openness, simplicity and generosity, their love of gossip and light-heartedness, with the shadows of the tragic past brooding over them, are all caught in a true perspective.’ Thus it is not until the year 1896 that we come upon a truly legitimate successor to The Golden Dog. In that year appeared Gilbert Parker’s Seats of the Mighty, which became one of the most popular of his novels. The story has a strong and fairly unified and coherent plot. It exhibits Parker’s powers of characterization and presents to us a gallery of vividly limned historic portraits—Robert Moray, Doltaire, Gabord, De la Darant, Bigot, Vaudreuil, Montcalm, Wolfe—in the main true to type, human, and universal. There is not, however, an unerring accuracy in atmosphere and color and characterization. The writer was not sufficiently saturated with his subject and occasional touches of modernity and tinges of contemporary color subtract from the excellence of artistry.
But Parker’s fiction really began with his short stories of ‘Pretty Pierre’ in 1890. It is related that upon coming to London from Australia he brought to Archibald Forbes, then noted as a war correspondent, a collection of stories. Forbes’ comment was: ‘You have the best collection of titles I ever saw.’ Parker took his manuscripts home and promptly burned them. A day or so afterwards, while passing a shop window filled with armor and other curios, he noticed the leather coat and fur cap of a trapper. He went at once to his room and began to write The Patrol of the Cypress Hills, the first story in the series Pierre and His People. These stories dealt with the life of early Western Canada and were followed from time to time by other volumes: A Romany of the Snows, published in England under the title, An Adventurer of the North, picturing French-Canadians in the woods and rural settlements; The Lane That Had No Turning, stories of that Quebec settlement which is the background of the novel When Valmond Came to Pontiac; Cumner’s Son, sketches of life in the South Seas and in Australia; Donovan Pasha, tales of Egypt and the Soudan; Northern Lights, more modern stories of Western Canada.
Parker became a prolific writer of novels and his settings range from Canada and the South Seas to England, Egypt, and South Africa. The treatment varies from an almost immediate transcript of near present conditions as in The Judgment House to the re-creation of the historic past in The Battle of the Strong, from the delicate imaginative romance in When Valmond Came to Pontiac, to a pathological study in The Right of Way; he gives us a combination of melodrama and mysticism in The Weavers, the revealment of innate greatness of character in The Translation of a Savage, while in You Never Know Your Luck, he cleverly expands a tenuous short story thread to the full proportions of a novel.
Besides The Seats of the Mighty, the novels of Gilbert Parker that will be likely to command most attention because of intrinsic worth are: The Right of Way, The Battle of the Strong, When Valmond Came to Pontiac, The Weavers, and The Judgment House. The Right of Way is a compelling study in abnormal psychology. There may be improbabilities in the development of the story of Charley Steele, but there is a living force in his character and he stands forth as one of the realities of fiction. The Battle of the Strong depicts the Channel Islands in the eighteenth century, and was written in a mood of defiance. Parker was going to get away from a Canadian background. He would write no more novels of Canada. But, as Sherlock Holmes ‘returned,’ so Canada was too much a part of Gilbert Parker’s life to remain out of his writings, and he found, himself unable to get away from it for very long. The Battle of the Strong, however, was based on a thorough and sympathetic study of the country and people of the Channel Islands and the characters and incidents are colored with a simple, engaging humor. When Valmond Came to Pontiac is a delightful excursion into romance in which the Napoleonic tradition shows its influence in a little out-of-the-way village of Quebec. It has much of the charm of Booth Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire and is structurally the nearest to artistic perfection of any of Parker’s novels. The Weavers rises to a more Imperialistic sweep, dealing as it does with internal and international politics of Egypt, while The Judgment House, a novel of London and South Africa, is his greatest literary conception; in it his imaginative vision has apprehended big interests, big business, big ideals, big expansion, Imperial ends, conceived and carried out by big men, struggling and striving and achieving in a big world. His more recent novels, although some of them, as The Money Master, show considerable skill in characterization, are largely novels of incident and of accidental circumstance and have not the broad grasp of men and events nor the innate emotional depth and power of those just outlined.
The outstanding qualities of Parker’s work are:—
(1) The strong dramatic quality. It is no surprise to us to learn that he was in his college days a most enthusiastic Shakespeare student and an ‘elocutionist’ of some reputation. The power to portray dramatic situations is exhibited in his very earliest writings. One need but open almost any of his novels and read the first paragraph to find that one is projected into an imaginative world of action, although the story may begin with a sentence of pure narration or description.