The best account of the War of 1812 came from the pen of Major John Richardson, who had served in the conflict. It is the account of an eye-witness. It was written hurriedly for publication serially in his newspaper the New Era, and was reprinted in book form in 1842. As might be expected, Richardson presents vividly the drama or dramatic movement of his story, and makes it a colorful, gripping narrative. But though, like Haliburton, Richardson wrote graphically, romantically, he is superior to Haliburton in an important respect. The Nova Scotia historian and humorist did not have any gift for sharp character-drawing; his characters, like Dickens’ or Twain’s, stand out and hold us by what they say. But Richardson’s characters in his account of the War of 1812, especially Brock and Tecumseh, are vividly drawn by their action, and stand out sharply individualized. In Haliburton’s Historical Account of Nova Scotia we get only colorful romance. In Richardson’s War of 1812 we get colorful romance, dramatic movement, and memorable character portraiture. It, too, is ‘true history,’ and his work, like Haliburton’s, is an outstanding native example of the romantic method of writing history as literature.
After Haliburton and Richardson, all history of Canada, or the Provinces, by native-born or émigré writers was fragmentary in conception and dry-as-dust in matter and method. They all show inquisitiveness, diligence, though not careful research, and no imagination, and certainly no sense of history as the outward expression and movement of a people’s social and spiritual evolution. Yet the work of one man must be specially remarked. He was Alpheus Todd, who, in the department of Constitutional History, wrote a work which was long regarded as the greatest study of the English constitution written by any British subject. This really ‘monumental’ historical work was entitled Parliamentary Government in England; its Origin, Development, and Practical Operation. The first volume was published in 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation. But while Todd’s work is a ‘monument’ to his scholarship and industry, and while it has historic perspective, it is, like the work of preceding historians, without imagination and was written by one who had no conception of constitutional history as the expression of the social conscience gradually realizing, under changing conditions, the ideal of the rights of the spirit.
From the beginning of the 20th century, Canadian historians based their work on documentary research and wrote history with a lively sense of imaginative or romantic values which corresponded to the method and manner of Haliburton and Richardson. This change in the method of writing ‘true history’ is notably exemplified in Quebec Under Two Flags and in The Cradle of New France by A. G. Doughty; in The Fight for Canada, by William Wood; and, later, in The Conquest of the Great North-West, Pathfinders of the West, and Vikings of the Pacific, by Agnes Laut. Doughty was a poet before he became an historian, and in writing history let his imagination play over the facts, thus transmuting the documentary material into literature. William Wood also applied the romanticist’s imagination to the facts, and, besides, wrote history with a fine feeling for style and characterization somewhat in the manner of Parkman. Miss Laut, basing her matter on thorough research, humanized it with a sympathetic appreciation of the struggles of the pioneers of the Canadian West and with a picturesque literary style.
Sectional and local histories of Canada abound. There are also race histories and several so-called School Histories. But these are all of popular quality and have no distinction in literary style, although the narratives of W. J. Rattray, George Stewart, H. Scadding, J. Ross Robertson, John Murray Gibbon, Sir John Bourinot and Charles G. D. Roberts show a considerable solicitude for style and actually achieve good literary style.
II. Biography.
As with general history, so with personal or spiritual history. Biographical writing in Canada is sparse in quantity and, on the whole, insignificant in literary quality. Often the subject of a biographical narrative was great enough to compel imaginative and artistic creation on the part of the writer. Seldom, however, does any biographer of a Canadian man of distinction rise to his subject either in conception or in style. But of those who did rise to their subject, one was Charles Lindsey, who wrote The Life and Times of William Lyon MacKenzie. Lindsey handled his material so as to present the proper values in the political and social problems in the time of the famous leader of the Rebellion of 1837. Another of those who rose to his subject and who wrote with a sense of the really significant events in the life of his subject, presenting the salients with decent respect for truth, with adequate detail, and yet with readable style, was Sir Joseph Pope, who gave the literary world a compelling and vigorously moving biographical volume, Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John Alexander Macdonald. It is a vigorous narrative, but rather inflexible in style. Sir John Stephen Willison’s Sir Wilfrid Laurier and The Liberal Party is an outstanding biography. Like Lindsey, Sir John Willison was a thoroughly trained journalist before he attempted biographical writing. Along with the journalist’s vigor and vivacity of style, Sir John Willison wrote with feeling for dignified and elegant diction. His Wilfrid Laurier is notable chiefly for its refinement in prose style.
George Monro Grant’s Joseph Howe is a tour de force in brilliant word painting and hero worship. It misses the significance of Howe as an original and constructive mind. Longley’s Joseph Howe is a popular narrative, careless of logic and literary style.
Several other individual biographies of Canadians by Canadians have been published. The best of them are Duncan Campbell Scott’s John Graves Simcoe, Adam Shortt’s Lord Sydenham, George M. Wrong’s Life of Lord Elgin, Arnold Haultain’s Goldwin Smith: His Life and Opinions, Grant and Hamilton’s George Monro Grant, and Edith J. Archibald’s Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald. But a genuinely great biography of a great man remains to be written in Canada.
Deserving of mention are three short popular biographies—Owen McGillicuddy’s sketch of the life and achievements of Rt. Hon. MacKenzie King, Premier of Canada, which appears under the title The Making of a Premier (1922); John W. Dafoe’s Laurier (1922) and Peter McArthur’s Laurier (1922). These biographies are by practical journalists, and are journalistic in style. Dafoe’s Laurier is the most acute and weighty.
A genuine literary achievement in biographical writing is M. O. Hammond’s Confederation and Its Leaders (1917). It is based on thorough research, and, as a series of intimate political biographies in the form of narrative sketches, is packed with human interest, and is marked by a straightforward, commonsense style. It has a high seriousness, and in this respect contrasts with the lighter, more piquant but less persuasive style of Augustus Bridle’s Sons of Canada—a work which is essentially a series of familiar portraits, done as jeux d’esprit.