Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

In the year which saw the consummation of the Confederacy George Stewart, a man of fine critical taste, established Stewart’s Quarterly at St. John, N.B. His ideal was that of the English Quarterlies; and the articles which appeared in his magazine were notably solid in substance and distinguished in literary style. Stewart’s Quarterly did much to promote culture and to encourage creative writing on the part of native-born Canadian writers. Several other magazines which conformed more to the matter and style of the Literary Garland were established in the first 25 years following Confederation. They all eventually went out of existence. The first magazine to endure as a cultural agency and genuine fosterer of the literary spirit was the Canadian Magazine, founded in 1893 by J. Gordon Mowat. Under his editorship it grew and further progressed under the editorship of John A. Cooper. In 1907 the Canadian Magazine came under the editorship of Mr. Newton MacTavish.

From 1907, when Mr. MacTavish became editor, there was a distinct and continually progressive change in the editorial policy of the Canadian Magazine. Patriotically he set out to foster the appreciation and production of fine arts and literature by native-born Canadians. To do this he reproduced in the magazine paintings and drawings by Canadian artists, along with special articles, critically appraising Canadian artists and their art. He also published essays, criticism, fiction, and poetry, by native-born Canadian writers. In fact, it was considerably due to the sympathetic and respectful encouragement which Mr. MacTavish gave to native-writers, that Canadian poets and prose writers achieved as splendidly as they have done in the first quarter of the 20th century, and that constructive literary criticism and literary history significantly developed in Canada.

With the Canadian Magazine should be mentioned two others, the Queen’s Quarterly and the University Magazine. The latter was edited by Sir Andrew Macphail, and did much to foster letters and criticism in Canada. Amongst other distinctions, the University Magazine published not only the best verse but also the first book of poems by Marjorie Pickthall, Drift of Pinions (1913). It ceased publication in 1921. The Queen’s Quarterly, always well edited, is still potent in fostering letters and criticism in Canada. The Dalhousie Review, founded in 1921, essayed some of the ideals of the University Magazine. But it is given too much to critical writing by foreign literati to be potent in fostering letters and criticism in Canada.

CHAPTER XXXI

Narrative Literature

NARRATIVE LITERATURE—HISTORY—BIOGRAPHY—EXPLORATION—TRAVELS—SPORT OR OPEN-AIR LIFE.

I. History.

Two general conditions have made the writing of ‘true history’ in Canada an impossibility. On the personal side, there were the lack of adequate culture, of a sense of the historic process and of history as the narrative of spiritual development, and of any genius, save curiosity, on the part of those who essayed the writing of history. Men with the historic imagination did not exist in Canada, and only ‘minor’ historians were active, up to the beginning of the 20th century. On the material or instrumental side, there were the heterogeneity of Canadian civilization, the want of political unity, the lack of access to documents and of facilities for historical research, and other untoward circumstances. Unimaginative minds and the heterogeneity of life and thought in Canada, before and after Confederation, limited history for the most part to annals, chronicles, period and sectional narratives.

The number of these uninspired, unimaginative ‘minor’ Canadian historians is legion. The more important were George Heriot, William Smith, Robert Christie, Alexander Begg, Beamish Murdock, Duncan Campbell, William Kingsford, James Hannay, and Egerton Ryerson. Oddly, the two first native-born historians to write with a show of imagination and a sense of true history were Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the humorist, and Major John Richardson, the romancer.

Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia was published by Joseph Howe in 1829. Though the two volumes are, in a degree, a compendium of facts, Haliburton was not interested in the facts so much as in the romantic or dramatic story of civilization and life in Nova Scotia. The way Haliburton imaginatively handled his material, the way he romantically told the story and made the whole a colorful and generally absorbing narrative, constitutes his work as ‘true history.’ It is Haliburton’s conception of history and his method of writing it that make him important—though he was not potent—in this department of Canadian Literature. His work is an outstanding native example of the romantic method of writing history as literature; and Haliburton himself appears as the first Canadian Historian to write history as if he were writing imaginative literature. But if he was not potent in his own country, that is, in British North America, he had, there is good ground to believe, considerable influence on Francis Parkman. For Parkman read Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, and not only had his imagination fired by such a romantic story as Haliburton tells of the Expulsion of the Acadians, but also adopted the romantic method of Haliburton in writing his own historical works.