Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

Ernest Thompson Seton attracted the attention of the world by his romances of wild life in Canada because he combined in them the skilled observation of the scientist, the vision of the artist, the insight of the psychologist, the sympathy of the humane man; and, perhaps, more than all that, the spirit of youthful wonder at, and interest in, the ways and doings of the creatures of the field and wood.

He brought to his writings of animal life a new point of view—namely, that human beings and wild animals are kin; that animals are motivated with passions and desires and, to some extent, ideas, just as human beings are. Thus he wrote with sympathy and with creative imagination and revealed the new life and being of wild animals, and he hoped to achieve the practical result of quickening the sympathies of man toward animals and stopping the thoughtless extermination of many of our harmless wild creatures.

His books such as Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), The Trail of The Sand-Hill Stag, The Biography of a Grizzly, Lives of the Hunted, are studies of animal psychology and behavior. Lives of the Hunted, for example, contains life-histories of Krag, the mountain Ram; of Johnny Bear; of Coyotito, the Escaped Coyote. Krag’s whole history from birth to death is faithfully sketched and, incidentally, much is learned about the habits of the mountain-sheep. From these life-histories we gain, not merely knowledge and information but wisdom, since animal life and human life are akin.

Some of the earlier animal stories were written in dialogue—the animals being made to talk. But, very wisely, the author soon adopted the narrative style and removed his sketches from the character of fairy stories to that of real interpretations of animal life.

In Two Little Savages he gives the adventures of two boys who lived in the woods as Indians and learned much about Indian life and all kinds of wood-lore. Other stories of a similar type are employed for the teaching of different phases of woodcraft. Wood Myth and Fable advances a step further and from incidents in animal life, and other occurrences in nature, the writer points a definite moral lesson. This escapes preachiness by the adroit epigrammatic wit of the ‘moral.’

A somewhat different literary ideal inspired Charles G. D. Roberts to undertake the pure romance of animal psychology and behavior. ‘It may be that this arose as a natural development from Roberts’ early attempts to depict a narrative from actual occurrences and experiences in the woods. At any rate Earth’s Enigmas (1896), followed by numerous other volumes such as The Kindred of the Wild, The Watchers of the Trails, The Haunters of the Silences, Red Fox, The Feet of the Furtive, More Animal Stories have established the place of Roberts as the supreme artist in the field of animal romance.

Roberts’ treatment of animal psychology differs from that of Thompson Seton or Marshall Saunders. He makes his wild animals either wholly human or too human. They move in their world with a sort of super-animal (or super-human) knowledge, and Roberts’ discloses a subconscious motivation of conduct in the wild animals that outdoes the present clay psycho-analyists in their revealments of human motivation. For this reason they appeal not to the heart but to the analytic imagination and the aesthetic sense. They awaken the interest of the intellect rather than the sympathetic emotions. They lack humor and pathos, but in imaginative sweep and artistic structure they are supreme creations. As examples of a literary prose style they stand almost alone in their particular field of fiction.

Not all Roberts’ animal stories are of this ‘intellectual’ type. Human interest and humor is added by showing animals in relationships, more or less accidental, to mankind, in such volumes as The Backwoodsman, Hoof and Claw.

The peculiar forte of Marshall Saunders is the romance of the domesticated animal or animal pet. Beautiful Joe: The Autobiography of a Dog, first published in 1894, is one of the literary phenomena of the world. It has been translated into fourteen or more languages and has sold over a million copies. With acute perceptive sympathy and engaging artistry, Miss Saunders has commingled strangely but veraciously the mind and life of the domestic animals. She envisages truthfully their ‘near humanity’ and reveals them as akin to man in feelings, passions, desires, and the motivation of conduct, but keeps them on a level below man. Her animals are not human, but they appeal more to the heart of the humanity in us than those of Roberts, Thompson Seton, or W. A. Fraser; particularly do they appeal more to the spirit and heart of youth. Her Golden Dicky, the story of a canary and his friends; Bonnie Prince Fetlar, the autobiography of a pony, and Jimmy Goldcoast, the story of a monkey, have all the engaging qualities of her earlier work.

W. A. Eraser, in Mooswa and Others of the Boundaries (1900), and in The Outcasts (1901) achieved a distinct success by working with much the same material as Roberts and Thompson Seton and to some extent combining the style and treatment of both. He is not so scientific as Thompson Seton; nor is he so literary or so psychoanalytic as Roberts. The Sa’-Zada Tales (1905) in which the animals at the zoo are represented as conversing with their keeper, Sahib Zada, and with one another, exhibit the intimate knowledge of wild animal life gained, no doubt, during the author’s residence in Asiatic countries, but they are not as distinctively original in manner, nor as high in literary quality as his other animal tales. Fraser, however, has a peculiar field in which he excels—in his novel Thoroughbreds (1902), and in his volume of short stories Brave Hearts (1904), he shows a sympathetic understanding of the life of the race horse and he presents vividly and with sometimes a rollicking humor, at others a tender pathos, many incidents and expressions of the racing field. He is an apostle of clean sport and a true lover of the racing horse and his enthusiasm gives to these stories a directness and coherence not always found in some of his later stories and novels with different subjects and settings.