Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

William Henry Drummond

THE NEW CANADIAN GENRE OF IDYLLIC POETRY—WILLIAM HENRY DRUMMOND, INTERPRETER OF THE HABITANT—POET OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IN CANADA.

The Canadian voyageur and habitant, the lumberman, and peasant of French Canada are ‘children of nature’—human, simple, shy, warm-hearted, honest, and manly. They were not always thus sympathetically conceived or regarded by most of their English-speaking compatriots. They, therefore, needed a sympathetic interpreter who would reveal their inward spirit and true character, mental and moral. Strangely, but according to the inscrutable methods of Providence, the man who was to be the friend and sympathetic interpreter of the French-Canadian peasant, was born in Ireland in 1854. He was William Henry Drummond.

Drummond emigrated to Canada when but a mere lad, before Old Country education and culture had any chance to mould his mind and imagination and moral attitudes. While, then, Drummond himself was an émigré, his verse, like that of Isabella Valancy Crawford and for the same reasons of formative influences in Canada, is Canadian. It is indeed regional, but it is also indigenous poetry—in substance, in diction, in imagery, and in craftsmanship.

William Henry Drummond, like the dramatis personae of his poems, the voyageur and habitant, was a ‘child of nature.’ No other kind of man, save this large-bodied, warm-hearted, open-minded lover of human kin and of the creatures that live in the wild, who saw and felt the common things of life, as the habitant saw and felt them, could have been a truthful interpreter of the habitant. The merely scholarly poet, the poet of a hothouse refinement, the poet who went to work at the craftsmanship of poetry as if he were carving arabesques in verse, could not have the imaginative insight into the mind and heart of the French-Canadian peasant and the sympathy with him that would make it possible for such a poet, with kindly, playful humor, to express the elemental feelings and thoughts—the real humanity—of the habitant.

Drummond was above all things a human poet. His sympathies were inclusive. By intuition he could feel just as the habitant felt about good and evil in the universe. Drummond’s heart was warm and large and religious, which meant that he could call nothing that was made in the image of God common or outcast. Though he was well read in the modern poets and was a student of literature, he was not a bookish man. He distinguished between the literature which possessed only aesthetic and artistic beauties and that which was the embodiment of the finer goods of the spirit, the inalienable satisfactions of existence. He loved only the literature that was human and beautiful—simple, pure, and true.

As, then, a ‘child of nature,’ with a large, sympathetic heart and a Keltic vision of the ‘divinity’ which is in all men and also in the wild creatures that are near to Nature, and with a gift of ready expression in rhythmical verse, Drummond was uniquely fitted to be the interpreter of his simple, kindly, reticent, but genuinely human and sincere, fellow-being, the Canadian habitant. Thus singularly fitted to be, as he has been called, ‘the Poet of the Habitant,’ Drummond, in his verse, actually performed a social and a literary service for his country. On the social side, to the English-speaking Canadian, who up to the last decade of the 19th century considered the habitant as little better than a chattel, Drummond revealed the human, lovable, and admirable virtues of the humble French-speaking compatriot, and also engendered in the English-speaking Canadian a sincere respect and affection for his French-speaking fellow countryman. On the literary side, Drummond created a gallery of genre pictures and spiritual portraits which constitute a unique contribution, not only to Canadian poetic Literature, but also to English Literature.

Under what inspiration or vision, hitherto not vouchsafed to any other Canadian poet, did Drummond write, and what really novel and important contributions did he make to Canadian poetry and to world literature?

He discovered and presented to the world, for the first time, the New Romance in Canada, as Kirby and Sir Gilbert Parker had discovered and presented the Old Romance. He created a new form of the Canadian Idyll. He placed on the stage of the world a group of new Characters and, through them, originated a new species or type of World Humor. Pre-eminently Drummond is the Poet and Humorist of the New Social Democracy in Canada.

Until the publication of Drummond’s first creative work, The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems (1897), the French-Canadian, in general, was appreciated only according to the types seen in the towns and cities. In particular, the French-Canadian voyageur and habitant were appreciated only as the merry hearts who had sung the old chansons on the rivers of Quebec Province—and, as their English-speaking compatriots fancied, in the academic and eviscerated English translations in which they heard these chansons. No one, up to the time of Drummond’s first volume, had revealed the mind and heart of the real, the living habitant, voyageur, lumberman, and peasant in Old Quebec. No one before Drummond had sung their heart songs in the patois that is theirs when attempting to express their thoughts and emotions to their supercilious and not too respectful English-speaking compatriots. But Drummond produced truthful, naturalistic pictures of the real, the living French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, and peasant as they expressed their thoughts and emotions about life and their fellows.