As in most novels of the community type, the interest lies in incident and characterization. The noblest character of all her stories, the best drawn, is the grand old mystic Highlander, ‘Duncan Polite,’ the spiritual watchman of Glenoro. The incidents of this story are woven mainly around the path of the young minister, while the other Glenoro novels centre about the personages of chief interest in a rural community—Silver Maple, the school teacher; Treasure Valley, the young doctor. The End of the Rainbow and The Bells of St. Stephens are studies of town life. Lizbeth of the Dale and In Orchard Glen are character studies of a boy and a girl respectively. The same qualities prevail in all these. Little Miss Melody builds an engaging picture of the community of Cherry Hill around a fresh and original young girl character. The keynote of Marian Keith’s stories is ‘service.’ Her work as a whole gives a faithful picture of the social and religious life of a certain type of rural Canadian settlement, and Canadian town.
Mrs. McClung’s ‘community’ depicted in Sowing Seeds in Danny was a little western town, with certain elements of the usual population crossing its pages. The poor immigrant girl, the young English gentleman learning to farm, the doctor, the preacher, the would-be politician are faithfully portrayed. Most interesting of all is Mrs. Watson, the hard-working washerwoman and her family of nine children. The fortunes of Pearlie Watson are the theme of a sequel, The Second Chance, in which the setting in a rural settlement, while The Black Creek Stopping House is a collection of short stories. Later the career of Pearl Watson is continued in Purple Springs, but this novel shades into a sort of politico-propagandist treatise. Human interest and news quality with a ready-made style to correspond has caught the public interest in Mrs. McClung’s work rather than any conspicuous artistry of method.
2. The Institutional Novel.
From looking at the life of fixed communities or localities, the next step is to consider them in their relation to what we might call certain ‘institutions’ of our national life, growth, or conditions. We saw that R. E. Knowles in St. Cuthbert’s made the Scottish Presbyterian Church the dominating influence of that story. In this sense, the life of the railroad or construction camp is an ‘institutional’ rather than a local or community life. This has been excellently portrayed by Frank L. Packard in his collection of short stories, On the Iron at Big Cloud: Alan Sullivan’s The Passing of Oul-I-But contains some splendid stories of this type. Here also we would place the sea stories of Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.
Norman Duncan’s peculiar field is the ragged coasts and savage seas of Newfoundland and the hard, cruel, tempest-battered life of the Newfoundland fisherman. When The Way of the Sea was published (1904), Frank T. Bullen, himself a master-maker of sea stories, wrote in a foreword: ‘I am absolutely certain that with the exception of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling no writing about the sea has ever probed so deeply and so faithfully into its mysteries as his.’ Duncan’s fidelity to his subject appears not only in his truthful description of the life and way of the sea, but even more in his realization and presentation of the religious side of the Newfoundland fishermen—whose stern creed was born out of a never-ceasing struggle for existence.
Norman Duncan, although he produced several novels, of which Dr. Luke of the Labrador is the most artistically constructed, is essentially a writer of short stories. Indeed, some of his novels were made simply by piecing together, with connecting material, stories that had first appeared in magazine form. As a short story writer he exhibits the finest and most desirable qualities—substantial character foundation, economy of language, sufficiency of emotional causation, and a breadth of human sympathy. His Battles Royal Down North and Harbor Tales Down North are two collections of a high order of excellence. His power to portray action makes his juvenile books—such as Billy Topsail and Company—very acceptable to the youthful mind.
Frederick William Wallace writes chiefly of Nova Scotia sailors and deep sea fishermen. He is more objective in his treatment of themes than is Duncan. While Wallace’s gift may be said to lie in his skill in producing vivid visualizations of seamanship, Duncan’s lies in realizing seamen. Wallace observes and describes the life of the sailor and the fisherman; Duncan realizes and interprets the soul. Consequently in Blue Water (1920), The Shacklocker (a collection of short stories), and The Viking Blood, have much more plot and action to them than have Norman Duncan’s novels and short stories; but they are not so intimate and convincing in character analysis, neither are they so careful nor so finished in their technique—the two styles are quite in harmony with the differing methods of treatment.
Commercial life in its sociological relationships falls under our definition of an ‘institutional’ aspect of national life. Here must be placed Alan Sullivan’s The Inner Door which reveals inside conditions and labor problems in connection with the operation of a large rubber factory; also his story of the somewhat spectacular development of a chain of allied industries at a strategic point for power and for raw material—told in The Rapids.
There are, in this period, some notable examples of Incidental Literature. Louis Hémon, a native of France, lived but a short time in Canada, yet wrote, in Maria Chapdelaine, (English translations by W. H. Blake and by Sir Andrew Macphail), a chastely poetic novel of French Canadian life. Miss J. G. Sime in Our Little Life presents, if we view it from one angle, a meticulous study of the life of a Montreal seamstress, with her pathetically frustrate love story; but more than all that, Our Little Life is an observation of the life of the Canadian people by an English mind. The literary artistry of both these works is indisputable. Some criticism has been aimed at both on the score of inaccuracy of minor facts. Whether or not there are such minor inaccuracies, there still remains the grand result that the color, the atmosphere, the outward semblance, are portrayed as they have scarce ever been before; that the inmost soul of the characters is understandingly and consistently revealed.
Education in its institutional aspect appears in many novels only incidentally. As a dominant motive or a circumscribing setting its development is comparatively recent. Miriam of Queen’s, by Lilian Vaux Mackinnon (1921), shows the molding influence of university life; The Hickory Stick, by Nina Moore Jamieson (1921), emphasises the place and importance of the rural school in rural life and problems; the great school novels of English literature find a modified echo in the boarding school stories of Ethel Hume Bennett and Gordon Hill Grahame—Judy of York Hill (1922), by the former, in which dialogue, action and atmosphere contribute effectively in conveying a picture of a girls’ school; Larry, or the Avenging Terrors (1923), by the latter, a boys’ boarding school story of lively incident.