I was on the steamboat, ready to start for Vancouver, when the great fire of 1910 broke out in the town. With a considerable wind blowing it seemed to me not improbable that the whole of Victoria would be burnt down that night, and I had sufficient of the journalistic instinct to leave my things to go on by the boat and to go back myself to watch the blaze. Luckily the wind dropped and the fire was kept to one quarter, and I rather regretted my haste when I found myself stranded in Victoria at three o'clock in the morning. Still, it was worth while to have been there, if only to observe the working of the Canadian mind in a crisis of this sort. In England you would have heard ejaculations of horror and much sympathy expressed with those who were bound to suffer by the fire. The Victorian crowd took it quite differently. 'This'll create more work,' said one man fervidly. 'Just what the town needed,' said another enthusiast. 'We'll be able to have a better-looking street there after this. Those shops weren't good enough.' I even heard some of the men who had rushed out of their burning offices talking keenly and proudly of the sort of buildings they'd have to start putting up next day—much better buildings. Presumably they were insured, but even so men in the old country would have been a little shocked and perturbed, and regretful of the old rooms they were accustomed to. I fell asleep, when I had found a hotel, almost oppressed by the optimism of Canada.
CHAPTER XXX
BACK THROUGH OTTAWA
It was just before sunrise that I first saw Ottawa. I was on my way back from Vancouver, and had spent four successive days in the train, getting out only for minutes at a time to stamp about platforms where the train waited long enough to permit of such exercise.
Such days, varied only by meals for which one is always looking, but never hungry, tend to become monotonous, even though one spends them mostly in the observation car. The fact is, observation pure and simple is one of the most difficult things possible to a member of the human tribe—as hard as doing compulsory jig-saws; and reading humorous American magazines, one after the other, is an alternative that also requires the strong mind. If I must travel long distances by train, I want to be the engine-driver.
The country, I thought, looked less attractive as I repassed it now than it looked before, and I put this down to the freeze-up, which had come unusually early, people kept saying, and gave to the land a black and ruffled look, like a sick bird's. Later it would be beautiful again in snow, and the life and work of the season of snow would begin. Meanwhile, people in the little northerly stations we passed had the appearance of having stopped work. You saw them standing about—always with their backs to buildings to get out of the shrivelling wind. I suppose in most of these places there is a between-time in which nobody can work.
Nothing much was doing in Ottawa when I got out there, but that of course was due to the earliness of the hour. It was so early that when I reached a hotel they told me breakfast was not to be had for some time yet, and so, since I was too wide-awake to go to sleep again, I thought I would spend the hour looking at the Dominion Parliament Buildings. Perhaps it was the too early hour, perhaps it was the coldness of the wind blowing round that bluff above the river on which the famous buildings stand—but I could feel none of that satisfaction, when I looked at them, which great architecture gives. The situation is fine, but not the buildings. Anthony Trollope has written of them:—'As regards purity of art and manliness of conception, the work is entitled to the very highest praise.... I know no modern Gothic purer of its kind or less sullied with fictitious ornamentation'—but I think he must have breakfasted handsomely first. Some one else, but I forget who, and it does not matter, has described the buildings as 'a noble pile,' which seems to hit the mark, if, as I fancy, that mid-Victorian expression suggests something on so large a scale, which has obviously cost such a lot of money, that vague admiration is the least of the emotions which should be produced by a sight of it. 'A noble pile,' then, let them remain, especially since, seen from some distance, with the beautiful river below and a spacious country stretched before them, they possess a certain imposing appearance. Closer up, one is less impressed. There is a long-backed unmeaning set to the buildings, as though the architects had found concentration a vexation, and had decided to extend instead. Still, they might have elaborated painfully, and they did not—except for those little turrets on the side-buildings, surmounted by railings which one associates chiefly with the London area. Area railings are meant, I suppose, to prevent errand-boys from falling into the areas, but there can be few errands to the roof of the Parliament Buildings. In passing, I did not like those hundreds of silly little windows that peep all round: one, as it were, for every official to peep from.
Reflection should serve to temper criticism, however. The year 1867, in which the Dominion Parliament required its Houses, was not one of brilliant achievement in the architectural world; and when it is remembered that Canada itself was also a new country, the wonder is that nothing worse was built. Only a few years before, we in England had been transfixed with admiration of the Crystal Palace; Royal Academicians were above criticism, and 'almost too great to live'; bright in the sun gleamed the Albert Memorial. We ruled the waves, but not the arts; and 'our daughter of the snows' took over our large ideas and our little taste in building.
Whether she took over our political ideas is another matter, upon which I pondered as I contemplated those Parliament Buildings. There stood the House in which Sir John Macdonald evolved that east-and-west policy which seemed such an empire-cementing thing; where Sir Wilfrid Laurier teaches the world how to lead a party; where not as yet had been ratified that Reciprocity Agreement with America which has been agitating our statesmen so much this year, though, even as I gazed, it must have been in course of construction. Would an Imperial Parliament sit there some day, I wondered, and direct the affairs of the British Empire from what would be, not so long hence, a far more central and important spot than Westminster? I could not quite imagine it. I could not even like the idea, as some Imperialists at any price can. Home Rule for England is one of the policies I shall always stand for, I believe; even when Canadians have that grasp of Imperial affairs which we in England impute to them—by comparison, we generally mean, with our own English political opponents—that grasp which, as a matter of fact, is much less common among them at present than it is among us, whether we be Liberals or Conservatives.