Beverly Street, though it lies in the heart of the city, is one of the most fashionable quarters of Toronto. About the middle of its eastern side a whole block is walled off from curious eyes by a high, blank fence, behind which rises what seems a bit of primeval forest. The trees are chiefly fir-trees, mossed with age, and sombre; and in the midst of their effectual privacy, with sunny tennis-lawns spread out before its windows, is The Grange. The entrance to the grounds is in another street, Grange Road, where the fir-trees stand wide apart, and the lawns stretch down to the great gates standing always hospitably open. The house itself is an old-fashioned, wide-winged mansion of red brick, low, and ample in the eaves, its warm color toned down by the frosts of many Canadian winters to an exquisite harmony with the varying greens which surround it. The quaint, undemonstrative doorway, the heavy, dark-painted hall-door, the shining, massy knocker, and the prim side-windows,—all savor delightfully of United Empire Loyalist days. Just such fit and satisfactory architecture this as we have fair chance of finding wherever the makers of Canada came to a rest from their flight out of the angry, new-born republic. As the door opens one enters a dim, roomy hall, full of soft brown tints and suggestion of quiet, the polished floor made noiseless with Persian rugs. On the right hand open the parlors, terminated by an octagonal conservatory. The wing opposite is occupied by the dining-room and a spacious library.
The dining-room has a general tone of crimson and brown, and its walls are covered with portraits in oil of the heroes of the Commonwealth. Milton, Cromwell, Hampden, Pym, Vane, et al.—they are all there, gazing down severely upon the well-covered board. The abstemious host serenely dines beneath that Puritan scrutiny; but to me it has always seemed that a collection of the great cavaliers would look on with a sympathy more exhilarating. From here a short passage leads to the ante-room of the library, which, like the library itself, is lined to the ceiling with books. At the further end of the library is the fireplace, under a heavy mantel of oak, and near it stands a massive writing-desk, of some light colored wood. A smaller desk, close by, is devoted to the use of the gentleman who acts as librarian and secretary. The ample windows are all on one side, facing the lawn; and the centre of the room is held by a billiard-table, which, for the most part, is piled with the latest reviews and periodicals. The master of The Grange is by no means an assiduous player, though he handles the cue with fair skill. In such a home as this, Mr. Goldwin Smith may be considered to have struck deep root into Canadian soil; and as his wife, whose bright hospitality gives The Grange its highest charm, is a Canadian woman, he has every right to regard himself as identified with Canada. In person, Mr. Smith is very tall, straight, spare; his face keen, grave, almost severe; his iron-gray hair cut close; his eyes restless, alert, piercing, but capable at times of an unexpected gentleness and sweetness; his smile so agreeable that one must the more lament its rarity. The countenance and manner are preëminently those of the critic, the investigator, the tester. As he concerns himself earnestly in all our most important public affairs, his general appearance, through the medium of the Toronto Grip, our Canadian Punch, has come to be by no means unfamiliar to the people of Canada.
In becoming a Canadian, Goldwin Smith has not ceased to be an Englishman; he has also desired to become an American, by the way. He holds his English audience through the pages of The Contemporary and The Nineteenth Century, and he addresses Americans for some weeks every year from a chair in Cornell University. In Canada he chooses to speak from behind an extremely diaphanous veil—the nom de plume of “A Bystander”; and under this name he for some time issued a small monthly (changed to a quarterly before its discontinuance), which was written entirely by himself, and treated of current events and the thought of the hour. That periodical has now been succeeded by The Week, to which the Bystander has been a contributor since the paper was founded. It were out of place to speak here of Goldwin Smith’s career and work in England; it would be telling, too, what is pretty widely known. In Canada his influence has been far deeper than is generally imagined, or than, to a surface-glance, would appear. On his first coming here he was unfairly and relentlessly attacked by what was at the time the most powerful journal in Canada, the Toronto Globe; and he has not lacked sharp but irregular antagonism ever since. Somewhat relentless himself, as evinced by his attitude toward the Irish and the Jews, and having always one organ or another in his control, he has long ago wiped out his score against the Globe, and inspired a good many of his adversaries with discretion. He devotes all his energy and time, at least so far as the world knows, to work of a more or less ephemeral nature; and when urged to the creation of something permanent, something commensurate with his genius, he is wont to reply that he regards himself rather as a journalist than an author. He would live not by books, but by his mark stamped on men’s minds. It does, indeed, at first sight, surprise one to observe the meagreness of his enduring literary work, as compared with his vast reputation. There is little bearing his name save the volume of collected lectures and essays—chief among them the perhaps matchless historical study entitled “The Great Duel of the Seventeenth Century,”—and the keen but cold monograph on Cowper contributed to the English Men-of-Letters. His visible achievement is soon measured, but it would be hard to measure the wide-reaching effects of his influence. Now, while a sort of conservatism is creeping over his utterances with years, doctrines contrary to those he used so strenuously to urge seem much in the ascendant in England. But in Canada he has found a more plastic material into which, almost without either our knowledge or consent, his lines have sunk deeper. His direct teachings, perhaps, have not greatly prevailed with us. He has not called into being anything like a Bystander party, for instance, to wage war against party government, and other great or little objects of his attack. For this his genius is not synthetic enough—it is too disintegrating. But his influence pervades all parties, and has proved a mighty shatterer of fetters amongst us—a swift solvent of many cast-iron prejudices. He has opened, liberalized, to some extent deprovincialized, our thought, and has convinced us that some of our most revered fetishes were but feathers and a rattle after all. But he sees too many sides of a question to give unmixed satisfaction to anybody. The Canadian Nationalists, with whom he is believed to be in sympathy, owe him both gratitude and a grudge. He has made plain to us our right to our doctrines, and the rightness of our doctrines; he has made ridiculous those who would cry “Treason” after us. But we could wish that he would suffer us to indulge a little youthful enthusiasm, as would become a people unquestionably young; and also that he would refrain from showing us quite so vividly and persistently all the lions in our path. We think we can deal with each as it comes against us. His words go far to weaken our faith in the ultimate consolidation of Canada; he tends to retard our perfect fusion, and is inclined to unduly exalt Ontario at the expense of her sister Provinces. All these things trouble us, as increasing the possibility of success for a movement just now being actively stirred in England, and toward which Goldwin Smith’s attitude has ever been one of uncompromising antagonism—that is, the movement toward imperial federation.
Speaking of Mr. Smith and Canadian Nationalism, as the Nationalist movement is now too big to fear laughter, I may mention the sad fate of the first efforts to institute such a movement. A number of years ago, certain able and patriotic young men in Toronto established a “Canada First” party, and threw themselves with zeal into the work of propagandizing. Mr. Smith’s cooperation was joyfully accepted, and he joined the movement. But it soon transpired that it was the movement which had joined him. In very fact, he swallowed the “Canada First” party; and growing tired of propagandizing when he thought the time was not ripe for it, and finding something else to do just then than assist at the possibly premature birth of a nation, he let the busy little movement fall to pieces. The vital germ, however, existed in every one of the separate pieces, and has sprung up from border to border of the land, till now it has a thousand centers, is clothed in a thousand shapes, and is altogether incapable of being swallowed.
As I am writing for an American audience, it may not be irrelevant to say, before concluding, that while Goldwin Smith is an ardent believer in, and friend of, the American people, he has at the same time but a tepid esteem for the chief part of American literature. He rather decries all but the great humorists, for whom, indeed, his admiration is unbounded. He has a full and generous appreciation for the genius of Poe. But he misses entirely the greatness of Emerson, allows to Lowell no eminence save as a satirist, and is continually asking, privately, that America shall produce a book. As he has not, however, made this exorbitant demand as yet in printer’s ink, and over his sign and seal, perhaps we may be permitted to regard it as no more than a mild British joke.
Charles G. D. Roberts.
Fredericton, N. B.
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
EDMUND C. STEDMAN
IN NEW YORK AND AT “KELP ROCK”
New York is an ugly city, with only here and there a picturesque feature. Still the picturesque exists, if it be sought for in remote corners. When about to choose a permanent home, Mr. Stedman did not exile himself to the distance at which alone such advantages are to be obtained. For he may be said to be the typical literary man of his day, in that he is the man of his epoch, of his moment—of the very latest moment. There is that in his personality which gives him the air of constantly pressing the electric button which puts him in relation with the civilized activities of the world. He was born man of the world as well as poet, with a sensitive response to his age and surroundings which has enabled him to touch the life of the day at many divergent points of contact. He owes to an equally rare endowment, to his talent for leading two entirely separate lives, his success in maintaining his social life free from the influences of his career as an active business man. The broker is a separate and distinct person from the writer and poet. The two, it is true, meet as one, on friendly terms, on the street or at the club. But the man of Wall Street is entertained with scant courtesy within the four walls of the poet’s house.
Once within these, Mr. Stedman’s true life begins. It is an ardent, productive, intellectual life, only to be intruded upon with impunity by the insistent demands of his social instincts. Mr. Stedman has the genius of good-fellowship. His delight in men is only second to his delight in books. How he has found time for the dispensing of his numerous duties as host and friend is a matter of calculation which makes the arithmetic of other people’s lives seem curiously at fault. He has always possessed this talent for forcing time to give him twice its measure. That expensive mode of illumination known as burning the candle at both ends would probably be found to be the true explanation.