The detective story is represented by a series of ‘underground’ stories by Arthur Stringer; a typical example is The Wire Tappers. The setting is a large American city, and rapidity of action is the desired and supplied element. More Canadian in setting and atmosphere are Victor Lauriston’s The Twenty-First Burr and Hopkins Moorhouse’s The Gauntlet of Alceste, both well-constructed according to the requirements of this type of fiction, concealing the mystery motive skilfully up to a surprising climactic finish.
The religions and philosophies of the Orient find a slight reflection in some Canadian poetry. In fiction, the stories and novels of L. Adams Beck—The Ninth Vibration, The Key of Dreams, The Perfume of the Rainbow, The Treasure of Ho—are chiefly Oriental in themes and settings, and mark the author as an interpreter of the mysteries of the East, with an unusual beauty and originality of style.
Arthur Stringer’s trilogy of the prairie—The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, The Prairie Child—is remarkable as a study in feminine psychology and the reactions of problems of prairie life upon a feminine mind in its domestic and personal associations. The first volume in the trilogy is the most impressive because of its spontaneity, its subtle touches of color and atmosphere. The modern double-triangle element dominates and rather detracts from the originality and individuality of the latter volumes, but the series is significant as an advance from the realistic romance toward a newer realism.
7. The New Realism.
It was but natural that a reaction should set in against the realistic romance with its insufficiency of motivation and its lack of fidelity to real life. Rather remarkably this arrives in another ten-year cycle and a group of novels published in 1923 show a marked similarity of method and treatment, with widely varied themes and settings. We distinguish this fresh and original attitude as the ‘New Realism’ in Canadian fiction. The strongest of these novels undoubtedly is The Viking Heart by Laura Goodman Salverson. It might be called the epic of the Icelander in Canada, describing as it does the arrival of a party of immigrants in 1870 and following their struggles, hardships, and gradual rise of fortunes to the present day. There is no plot but such as grows out of the record of the lives of the characters. There is no melodrama, but there is the tense drama of the realities of life. The style is chaste, simple, but forceful. Back of it all lies a big theme—‘the price of country’—the realization of citizenship through toil, tears, blood, and sacrifice.
The other novels in this group are: Possession, by Mazo de la Roche, with its setting a Niagara fruit farm; Lantern Marsh, by Beaumont Cornell, following a farm boy through his struggles for an education; Cattle, by Onoto Watanna, an almost brutally realistic presentation of a man whose sole aim in life was the acquirement of cattle—as a form of wealth—whose whole outlook on life was measured in terms of cattle; The Child’s House, by Marjory MacMurchy, which enters into the heart and mind of a growing little girl.
The importance of this movement is that it has cast aside superficialities, that these writers have somehow been able to ‘see things as they are,’ to glimpse the realities of life from their real beginnings—four of the five novels named are actually rooted in ‘the soil’ as their setting and their underlying spiritual foundation. With this foundation of actuality and truth, the writers have gained a clearer and more finished expression. Some of these novels have melodramatic spots; some have other weaknesses, but, on the whole, the effect of this new movement has been to produce novels that have a definite structural unity, that are largely free from irrelevant and insignificant detail, that are written with an economy and aptness of language, and that have more definiteness and depth to their basic themes.
CHAPTER XXII
The Poetic Dramatists
THE POETIC DRAMATISTS OF THE SECOND RENAISSANCE—ARTHUR STRINGER—ROBERT NORWOOD—MARJORIE PICKTHALL, AND OTHERS.