III. The Evangelical Romance.
The pioneer writer of the ‘evangelical romance’ in Canada was ‘Ralph Connor’ (Reverend Charles W. Gordon). Back of all his books stands the missionary spirit. Indeed it was that missionary spirit which led to the finding of his literary gift. The story of that finding dates back to 1896. He had been attending a meeting of the Home Mission Committee of the Presbyterian Church at Toronto, and afterwards tried to impress upon the Rev. J. A. Macdonald, then editor of The Westminster, the duty of the magazine to educate the committee and the people to a greater liberality. The editor’s reply was: ‘Articles are no good if they have only facts and statistics and exhortations. Give me a sketch, a story, a thing of life rather than a report. . .’
The result of this advice was a series of sketches of missionary life in the foothills of the Rockies, which were featured as Tales of the Selkirks in The Westminster (1897) and appeared in book form the following year as Black Rock.
When the first sketches were ready it was deemed advisable to conceal the identity of the author. The editor telegraphed the query, ‘What name?’ The reply came, ‘Sign sketch Cannor.’ ‘Can—Nor, that would betray the face of a mask,’ says the editor. ‘Perhaps the operator made a mistake. Likely it should be Connor.’ And running over the alphabet of masculine names, he decided that ‘Ralph’ would just about fit with ‘Connor.’ Thus the christening of the missionary novelist.
Ralph Connor’s novels fall into several groups. Black Rock and The Sky Pilot are tales of the Rocky Mountain foothills, both telling of the wild life of the West and of the work of the missionary. The Man From Glengarry and Glengarry School Days deal with the life of the author’s boyhood in Eastern Ontario. The Prospector and The Doctor combine East and West, by following their leading characters through the University of Toronto and transferring them to Western Canada. The Foreigner has a Manitoba setting and concerns itself with the problem of the assimilation of the foreigner. Corporal Cameron and The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail, carry a young Scot to Canada and through the ranks of the Mounted Police. The Great War gave material for The Major; labor troubles for To Him That Hath; while in The Gaspards of Pine Croft, the author reverted to a setting not so far from that of his first novel for a story more emotional and psychological in nature than his others.
The circulation of Ralph Connor’s novels has been phenomenal and has reached somewhere between two and a half and three millions, yet it cannot be said that he has established a reputation as a literary artist. His stories carry the reader because of action, incident, and tense emotional situations. They always have an underlying ethical and spiritual significance and they promulgate a belief in the presence of some redeeming virtue in every human being, so that, despite adverse critical opinion, they continue to touch the responsive chord in the heart of a common humanity.
None of his later works has quite come up to the standard of Black Rock or The Sky Pilot in consistency of characterization and in unity of total effect. Indeed The Sky Pilot is the most artistically finished of all his works, because of the natural coherence of its parts in their development of the central theme. Dramatic power he has to a marked degree, so far as the presentation of individual scenes is concerned, such as the fight in the lumber camp, the horse race, the barn-raising, and many other thrilling episodes; but his grasp of dramatic values is not broad enough to escape melodrama. The constructive dramatic instinct which weaves each separate incident into a chain of cause and effect dependent upon the character and motives of the leading personages of the story is very little in evidence. Whole chapters might be lifted bodily from some of these novels without interfering with the main thread of the story.
His imagination is reproductive rather than creatively constructive. The stories of the foothills are built upon his own missionary experiences at Banff and elsewhere; the Glengarry tales deal with his schoolboy experiences and his knowledge of the rough life of the lumber woods and the drive; the stories of east and west are also drawn from his own experiences in college and in the missionary field. As a result of this his characters tend to become types and although fairly individual and distinctive they are inclined to act mechanically and to operate without sufficient inherent motivation.
The first novel of Robert E. Knowles, St. Cuthbert’s although a romance of a Presbyterian congregation, is not strictly an ‘evangelical novel.’ It has more to do with showing the Presbyterian Church as an institution which dominated the life of the Presbyterian community. The doings of the Kirk session; the relations of the minister with the various elements of his flock, the pious and the profligate, are described with rare fidelity. The tender undercurrent covered by Scottish reserve; the sympathetic understanding of human nature as the greatest and most essential quality of ministry; the dry, pawky Scottish humor; the distinctive and consistent characterization—these elements make St. Cuthbert’s a piece of genuine literature. The Dawn at Shanty Bay is in reality a short story. There is one underlying motive, and only one, dominating the whole—it is the fight between parental love and parental dignity. It should rank as one of the sweetest ‘Christmas Carols’ in English literature. His remaining novels—The Undertow, The Web of Time, The Attic Guest, and The Singer of the Kootenay are of the evangelical type and are fashioned much to the same pattern, showing inconsistencies in development and a lack of structural unity.