Highways of Canadian Literature

by J. D. Logan; Donald G. French

To write properly a Synoptic History of Canadian Literature, the historian must first evaluate extant Canadian verse and prose from the point of view of the Whole. Secondly, he must treat Canadian Literature as a Whole in respect to its Genetic bases and relations. In presenting this synoptic history, Canadian Literature is considered not as a special, isolated, and chance product, but as the definitive outcome of racial, naturalistic, social, economic, and political conditions within the vast Dominion itself, and of other conditions brought into existence by racial affinities and social, political, economic, and spiritual relations with the people of the United States and the United Kingdom.

The general treatment proceeds on an a priori presumption and a critical principle. The a priori presumption is that in Canada where verse and prose which possess all degrees of worth have for more than a century and a half been produced in the English language and which had English poetry and prose for models, there must be a respectable residue of authentic literature written by native-born and resident émigré Canadian authors. In a phrase, the fact of a Canadian Literature is presumed. The critical principle employed in the treatment is this: that however insignificant, from the point of view of world literature, Canadian Literature may be, it is important to Canadians themselves. For however unimportant Canadian historical romances, Canadian humor, Canadian nature-poetry, Canadian poetic drama, Canadian realistic fiction, Canadian monodies may be when compared with the same genres in English Literature, they are the representatives of Canadian culture and of the Canadian creative spirit; if they were not extant there would be no Canadian Literature at all; and thus the Canadian people would be spiritually poorer and less significant not only to themselves but also to the world.

Some fair show of the fact of an authentic Canadian Literature may be evident from the following considerations. Let it be granted, as axiomatic, that verse and prose rise to the dignity of literature when they express and promote existence ideally—by delighting the aesthetic senses, by consoling the heart, by inspiring the moral imagination, by exalting or transporting the spirit. Judged by this four-fold test, the best Canadian poetry and imaginative prose will compare favorably with the admittedly authentic poetry and prose of many of the significant British and United States authors in the mid-Victorian era. In Canadian verse in English are genuine ‘gems’ of poetry, which, for vision, imagery, passion, lyrical eloquence, verbal music, and mastery of form and technique, are hardly, if at all, surpassed by the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne.

If this is doubted, in part or in whole, then apply this concrete pragmatic test:—For exquisite tenderness and simple pathos: with Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break, compare Charles G. D. Roberts’ sweetly sad lyric, Grey Rocks and Greyer Sea. For delicacy or for poignancy in expressing the passion and meaning of love: with Swinburne’s These Many Years, compare Roberts’ O Red Rose of Life, or with Browning’s Evelyn Hope, compare Roberts’ A Nocturne of Consecration. For power to visualize the ghostly and ghastly: with Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner compare the vivid, uncanny pictures of a spectral ship and crew in Bliss Carman’s Nancy’s Pride. For beauty of descriptive imagery, verbal music, and expressive correspondence of emotion with the mood of the season in nature-poetry: with Keats’ Ode to Autumn, compare Archibald Lampman’s lovely lyric of earth, September. For dignity of thought and mastery of technic: with the finest sonnets of Wordsworth, compare Roberts’ The Sower, or those noble sonnets by Lampman, beginning, ‘Not to be conquered by these headlong days,’ ‘Come with thine unveiled worlds, O truth of Night,’ and ‘There is a beauty at the goal of life.’ For dramatic power in sounding the depths of elemental passion and emotion: with Tennyson’s Rizpah, compare Campbell’s profound utterance of the heart of woman in The Mother, or with the more subtle of Browning’s dramatic monologues compare Campbell’s psychological revealments in Unabsolved, and in The Confession of Tama the Wise. For the dainty, piquant expression of all those experiences which delight and console us in our humaner moments of reflection and reverie, let these pure lyrics be a daily rosary:—F. G. Scott’s The Cripple, Van Risen, and A Reverie; Campbell’s The Hills and the Sea, Vapor and Blue, and Lake Huron; Lampman’s We, too, Shall Sleep, The Weaver and The Passing of Autumn; Carman’s Spring Song, commencing ‘Make me over, mother April,’ The Ships of St. John, and The Grave Tree; Roberts’ The Lone Wharf, Lake Aylesford, Afoot, Kinship, and Recessional; Duncan Campbell Scott’s The End of the Day, and A Lover to His Lass; and Pauline Johnson’s In the Shadows. Consider, too, that the satiric humor and comic characterization of Thomas Chandler Haliburton are not only in some respects unsurpassed by the art of Cervantes, Dickens, Daudet, and Mark Twain, and that Haliburton’s comic epigrams and moral maxims and certain of his comic characters have become part of the warp and woof of English literature. It is also indubitable that the two volumes of short stories of Duncan Campbell Scott—In the Village of Viger and The Witching of Elspie—are not excelled either in originality of conception or in technical artistry, and certainly not in spiritual beauty and pathos, by the short stories of Maupassant in France, of Stevenson or Hewlett in England, of Cable or Mary Wilkins Freeman in the United States.

In two other fields, the elegiac monody and poetic drama, Canadian poets have produced distinctive and impressive literature. It is admitted by British and United States critics that the threnodies of Campbell, Carman, Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, Marshall, and De Mille are distinctly noble in conception and imagery and artistically finished, and would be worthy of the genius even of Milton, Shelley, Keats, Arnold, and Emerson, and deserve to be placed in the company of the other fine threnodies written in the English language. It is also admitted by British and United States critics that the poetic dramas of Mair, Campbell, and Norwood, whether embodying Biblical, Arthurian, or Canadian legends and romantic characters, show authentic genius of dramatic conception and a notable distinction in technical structure and artistry while, to their credit, avoiding what Edmund Gosse has called the ‘violences and verbosities’ of the Elizabethan Tradition and of the Restoration and later poetic drama.

In England, at least as early as the ‘nineties’ of the last century, the fact of a respectable Canadian literature received a sort of spasmodic recognition. A genuine interest in it, or at least in Canadian poetry, was evoked in the United Kingdom by the visit of the late Pauline Johnson to London and her recitals there in 1894. As a matter of fact, Pauline Johnson’s first volume of verse The White Wampum was published originally in London in 1895. Again: with the permanent residence of Sir Gilbert Parker, and other Canadian men and women of letters, as, for instance, Miss Jean McIlwraith and Miss Lily Dougall, in England, the interest in Canadian Literature, on the part of the British people and critics, was very considerably intensified.

When the World War caused, first, an intenser sense of the unity of the Motherland and Canada, and, secondly, a plethora of verse and prose, especially verse, by Canadians in the field in France and in Flanders, and by Canadians at home, there arose in England a definite and systematic movement to promote in the United Kingdom the recognition and study of the literary history and literature of Canada, or at least Canadian literature written in the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth century. Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, who for some time during the late war was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, engaged in a serious and sympathetic study of the literature of Canada, and lectured on Canadian literature at the Colonial Institute, London, and elsewhere. Moreover, Sir Herbert Warren, then also President of the Poetry Society of London, had a by-law passed which stipulated that living Canadian authors should be recognized as non-resident members of the Poetry Society of London; and Canadian authors were invited to send copies of their published verse and prose to the Librarian of the Poetry Society, for cataloguing and exhibition in the reading room of the Society. Besides Sir Herbert Warren, two other British lecturers of established reputation—Miss Louise Bagley and Miss Julie Huntsman—devoted themselves to systematic lecturing on Canadian literature, verse and prose, in certain notable educational institutions in London and in provincial centres in England. Moreover, since the late war the works of Canadian authors have been in increasing numbers either published in England simultaneously with their publication in other countries, or have been first published in England and later republished in Canada, and in the United States.

In these facts, therefore, we have a kind of empirical proof or pragmatic test that in the United Kingdom there has existed for a considerable time a genuinely respectful recognition of the fact of a Canadian literature in the English language.

For the purposes of a Synoptic History of Canadian Literature in the English language a significant year is that of 1760. For that year marks both the Fall of Montreal (following the Fall of Quebec in 1759) and the Puritan Migration from New England to Maugerville, on the St. John River, and to the valleys of western Nova Scotia, in ‘Nova Scotia,’ which at the time embraced the mainland of what is now Nova Scotia, as well as New Brunswick, and part of Maine.

The significance of this date for a History of Canadian Literature in English will be realized by reflecting that from 1760 onwards until Confederation in 1867,—that is, a period of one hundred years—the two pioneer Provinces of the later Dominion, Quebec and the original Nova Scotia, and, in due time, Ontario, came under the influence of a specific British and a specific New England and Loyalist civilization and culture which essentially determined the political, social, and spiritual ideas and ideals of the English-speaking people in Canada. These specifically pioneer and pre-Confederation ideas and ideals form the social and spiritual bases of Canadian Literature in English, from 1760 to 1867.