Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

Oddly, Haliburton himself maintained in The Old Judge that this was not a defect in character-delineation or in artistry but was made necessary by his practical aim and the content of his thought. The promiscuous structure of his themes and composition or style and the promiscuousness, or lack of unity, in his characters correspond to the content and movement of his thought—which was swarming with ideas, full of details of all sorts, loose, and diffuse, bent on expressing at all hazards his ideas and opinions on matters of practical import, and not on creating fine literature. The purpose of his writings, he declared, was to inform and to amuse while informing. His humor was designed and manufactured as the sugar-coating of his social and political ideas. Consequently, the only unity his characters have is the thread that runs through his thought; their speeches, jests, anecdotes, aphorisms, and moral maxims are but his facts, ideas, opinions, strung on the various dramatis personae. Thus inevitably, so Haliburton submitted, his works and their style appear prolix, repetitious, diffuse, digressive, and lack artistic unity. Still they each have their own unity of essential thought; his characters have unity of function; his style, unity of propriety—and the whole, unity of purpose, meaning, and achievement.

Haliburton consciously conceived a noble ideal. As a man of letters he aimed to bring about an alliance or zollverein of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. To do this he employed an original method of satiric humor and comic characterization. He was unmistakably a great satirist, and the first and foremost systematic satiric humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. This is his chief glory. But while he thus was the first native-born writer to bring Canadian literature into a high and permanent place in English and world literature, he also was coadjutor with Howe in inaugurating the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature of Canada. Considered from the sides of versatility of invention, variety of production in literary species, and of mastery of style, Thomas Chandler Haliburton remains to this day the Greatest Prose Writer of Canada. Yet, at the same time, his achievements in creative satiric comedy and comic characterization stamp his genius and work as not for a single country or a specific age, but for all time and the world.

CHAPTER V

Romance and Poetry

THE NATIVISTIC LITERATURE OF CANADA—THE HISTORICAL ROMANCERS—JOHN RICHARDSON—ROSANNA MULLINS—AND OTHERS. THE POETS—GOLDSMITH—SANGSTER—MAIR.

Nativistic romantic fiction in Canada begins with the historical novels of Major John Richardson. In 1832 he published his Wacousta; or, The Prophecy; and in 1840 its sequel, The Canadian Brothers; or, The Prophecy Fulfilled. These are authentic novels of the romantic type, having, as they do, respectably constructed plots, and being filled with the romance of the passion of love, heightened with thrilling adventure and incident, and colored with pictures of aboriginal character and life against a background of Nature in the wild.

Richardson was born near Niagara Falls, in 1796 (in the same year as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and seven years after James Fenimore Cooper). He spent his childhood and early adolescent days, till he was sixteen years of age, that is, up to the outbreak of the War of 1812, in the vicinity of the Falls and in Detroit. Then, although but a mere lad, he enlisted in Brock’s army. Up to that time young Richardson, during his most impressionable and receptive years, was entertained by his grandparents and parents with tales of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit, and with stories of the thrilling, romantic, and tragic events in the history of the Niagara and Detroit districts—events which were surely amongst the most enthralling and stirring in the vividly romantic history of Canada and the United States. Those early days of Richardson’s were thus replete with rare and unique formative influences. They created in him the love of romance, of the heroic past of his own country, and, later, when he came to write, furnished him with the inspiration and the material for authentic Canadian historical novels or romances.

Two other formative influences, besides those exercised over his heart and imagination by his grandparents and parents, determined Richardson’s genius, inspiration, and creative method. In the war of 1812 he had fought side by side with the noble Indian warrior Tecumseh. Further: Richardson, on his own confession, had, as he put it, ‘absolutely devoured three times’ Cooper’s Indian romance, The Last of the Mohicans. Some critics, therefore, hold that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper; that, first, Richardson studied the mind, and character, and ways of Indians at second-hand in the pages of Cooper’s romance; and that, secondly, Richardson acquired from Cooper’s novel the art or craft, the mechanics, of writing fiction.

For the view that Richardson got his knowledge of Indian mind and character from Cooper, there is no ground in historical fact. The War of 1812, during which Richardson fought side by side with Tecumseh and his Indians, began fourteen years before the publication of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), or long before Richardson could have read a page of Cooper. Richardson’s imagination was romantically formed in his early days when, during his association with Tecumseh, he came to know Indian psychology and character at first-hand. That is indisputable fact. For the view that Richardson acquired the technique of novel-writing from reading Cooper, there is some justification. It is highly probable that by his reading of The Last of the Mohicans, Richardson really got some ‘coaching’ in the mechanics of writing romance. But this concession fails to prove that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper and not a genuinely independent creator. Internal evidences point to independence. For when we compare the diction, the sentential structure, the descriptive epithets and imagery, and the general style of the two romancers, Richardson appears, except as a plot-maker, the superior of Cooper as a craftsman and stylist. It is proof presumptive that on the whole the Canadian romancer developed independently his literary technique. Moreover, in the fine art of character-drawing, Richardson is more veracious and incisive—a better artist—than Cooper. When we compare the American novelist’s Indian characters with those of the Canadian, we discover that Cooper’s are more like ‘studies’ from books than pictures from real life, whereas Richardson’s Indians are very near to the real Indian, very lifelike. The heroic in them is heroic enough; that is to say, human and natural. Richardson’s Indian characters, then, are original creations—absolutely his own. Also his own are his other characters (soldiers, fur-traders, French-Canadians, and the rest of the motley), his plots, all the stirring incidents, and the ‘color’ of the Canadian background from nature.

Of his romances, Wacousta, and The Canadian Brothers, the only aesthetic criticisms worth while making are that not infrequently Richardson forces the dramatic in them into the melodramatic, that he puts into the mouths of his characters utterances which are unnatural or not in keeping with the position and circumstances of the speakers, and that he suits his historical facts to his own purposes. Sometimes, too, construction and development are sacrificed to the ‘theatrical’ in situation, to over-drawing of character, and to ‘color-writing.’ The Canadian Brothers has these defects in a larger degree than Wacousta. Yet, on the whole, Richardson’s two chief romances are aesthetically satisfying, and are clean, strong, wholesome, and engaging—quite deserving of a place in permanent creative literature.