Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

CHAPTER XXVIII

Essayists and Color Writers

THE ESSAYISTS AND COLOR WRITERS OF CANADA—CARMAN—MACMECHAN—BLAKE—KATHERINE HALE—KING—DEACON—LEACOCK.

Canadian essays, familiar studies of life and manners, or essays in belles lettres, are too meagre in quantity and too ephemeral or slight in aesthetic substance as yet to be significant. Pure criticism of fine arts, including literature, is also slight in quantity and insignificant in form and substance. Both literary criticism and essays in belles-lettres are possible only under certain social and mental conditions. There must be a considerable degree of economic independence and leisure so as to permit writers to view Nature and existence with detachment. The writers themselves must be specially gifted with a light literary touch, a delicate sensibility to impressions from Nature and character, and a refined sense of the relative values of good and evil, tragedy and comedy, in the world, a whimsical or gracious humor and a faculty for gentle revery. In short, detachment, an eye for beauty in Nature and the human spirit and a genuine humor are necessary in writers who would achieve distinction in the field of the Familiar Essay and in Belletristic Literature. In Canada, however, where life is strenuous and where men and women must take pragmatic or moralistic attitudes to existence, detachment, humor, and a light touch are rarely possible. The result is that the belletristic literature of Canada is slight and as yet insignificant.

The most notable work of the kind appears to be the essays of Bliss Carman. He has published four volumes, considerable in quantity, on the philosophy of Nature and the Spirit, distinguished by a clear, well-knit, and readable prose style, and rich in poetic suggestiveness and spiritual power. These volumes are The Kinship of Nature, The Friendship of Art, The Poetry of Life, and The Making of Personality. Plato, the Greek Gnostics and Mystics, and the Transcendentalism of Emerson informed Carman’s heart and sublimated his imagination pantheistically and mystically. Carman applied his poetic imagination to a special philosophical interpretation and appreciation of Man’s kinship with Nature, and of the metaphysical meaning of the human personality or spirit in its relation to Nature and the universe. In truth, Carman’s prose and poetry are related as the converse and obverse sides of his inner being. Indeed the secret of the inner springs of his lyricism is to be discovered beautifully, lyrically, expressed in his prose essays.

But Carman’s essays are not prose poetry. He did not attempt, as Roberts attempted in his prose, to write impressionistic prose. Carman does not aim at mere color-writing for its own sake. What he attempts and achieves is a subtle analysis of the history of the spirit in its relations to man and to God and the whole universe. Because this was his aim, Carman was solicitous about his style—especially about clarity of diction and pure beauty of imagery, and about the simplicity and readableness of the structure of his sentences. In short, Carman’s prose style has the same simplicity and directness and chaste beauty of imagery and spiritual exaltation which we find in his lyrics. For this reason we may signalize Carman’s prose as ‘lyrical’ prose. But we are by no means to allow this epithet to connote anything like sensuous impressionism or vague imagination. It is all solid, if sublimated, thought about profound matters, addressed to the imaginative reason or the religious imagination, and addressed in a style so clear and direct and so emotionally pure that it affects the heart and the imagination lyrically.

An essayist in another style is Archibald MacMechan. Dr. MacMechan has published two volumes, The Porter of Bagdad (1901) and The Life of a Little College (1914); and he has published several booklets of essays in a series of ‘chap books.’ Dr. MacMechan is unsurpassed in Canada as a writer of the Light Essay. He differs of course from Carman in bent of genius as an essayist. Carman employs the religious or metaphysical imagination and appeals to our sensibilities. Dr. MacMechan employs the fancy. His essays are essentially, as he indicates in the title of The Porter of Bagdad, ‘fantasies’ or reveries. His style has a lightness of touch which is inviting and ingratiating, and he has a delicate and pleasant gift of humor. He is hardly Addisonian, but the substance of his essays, their diction, and the movement of his sentences engage the attention and delight the sense of form with the readiness and pleasant intrigue of the essays of Addison.

Not in so light a style and not with such playful fancy as Dr. MacMechan’s are the essays of W. H. Blake, widely known as the translator of Louis Hémon’s romantic idyll of French Canada, Maria Chapdelaine. Mr. Blake’s Brown Waters and Other Sketches, In a Fishing Country, and A Fisherman’s Luck indicate the scope and method of his essays. They are ‘sketches’ of objective experiences. They are not fantasies or reveries. The intellect, rather than the fancy, is the creative faculty most employed in them. Mr. Blake’s essays, therefore, have not the lightness and the limpidity of MacMechan’s but they contain happy revealments of Nature in Canada and of the human spirit against a background of Nature. At times, they contain patches of engaging ‘color-writing.’

In the field of systematic ‘color-writing’ Katherine Hale is an artist by herself. In aesthetic criticism Katherine Hale’s forte had always been a gift of causing the imagination and sensibilities to appreciate one art, say, music, in terms of another art, say, painting. Her musical criticism is not musical, but literary impressionism. Its effect all depends upon suggestion, particularly suggestion of color. When, therefore, Katherine Hale turned to employ her pictorial imagination in a field where the sense of color in Nature and of the ‘color of life’ would be absolutely free and directly at home, she produced work which is unique in its kind, as in her Canadian Cities of Romance (1922). The romance in this case is not the romance of sentiment and of wonder and of curiosity. It is the romance that exists for the eyes which perceive beauty in ancient by-ways, strange and eerie places, and in the dress, manners and habits of peculiar peoples in towns and cities which still retain a residue of an old and lost civilization and culture. Her Canadian Cities of Romance is a book by which to transport the pictorial imagination and to win the imaginative eye with aesthetic delights of ‘color’ in character, incident, and the dramatic movement of life. Her literary style is piquant, swift-moving, realistically faithful and yet suffused with tints from Nature’s palette and with imaginative light. Its analogue is found in the travel essays of E. V. Lucas.

In another form of the Essay, namely, the Practical, Reflective Essay, very little has been achieved, because rarely attempted, in Canada. Canadians do not seem to have the same desire as their cousins in the United States for homilies or practical preachments on the secret of ‘getting along’ in the world. An excellent, if singular, example of the Practical, Reflective Essay is The Secret of Heroism by the Rt. Hon. MacKenzie King, Premier of Canada. The Secret of Heroism is a biography of a human spirit, which, having served nobly on earth, passed, and in passing left the effluence of his life, which is still potent, to win men to the love of ‘otherworldliness.’ Aside from the matter, it is notable as an example of what is rare in Canadian prose, namely, ‘infused’ style, which requires that the matter and the form, the thought and the expression, be indivisible.