(L. J. B.)

2. French-Canadian Literature at the opening of the 20th century might be described as entirely the work of two generations, and it was separated from the old régime by three more generations whose racial sentiment only found expression in the traditional songs and tales which their forefathers of the 17th century had brought over from the mère patrie. Folk-lore has always been the most essentially French of all imaginative influences in Canadian life; and the songs are the quintessence of the lore. Not that the folk-songs have no local variants. Indian words, like moccasin and toboggan, are often introduced. French forms are freely turned into pure Canadianisms, like cageux, raftsman, boucane, brushwood smoke, portage, &c. New characters, which appeal more directly to the local audience, sometimes supplant old ones, like the quatre vieux sauvages who have ousted the time-honoured quatre-z-officiers from the Canadian version of Malbrouk. There are even a few entire songs of transatlantic origin. But all these variants together are mere stray curios among the crowding souvenirs of the old home over sea. No other bridge can rival le Pont d’Avignon. “Ici” in C’est le ban vin qui danse ici can be nowhere else but in old France—le ban vin alone proves this. And the Canadian folk-singer, though in a land of myriad springs, still goes à la claire fontaine of his ancestral fancy; while the lullabies his mother sang him, like the love-songs with which he serenades his blonde, were nearly all sung throughout the Normandy of le Grand Monarque. The habitant was separated from old-world changes two centuries ago by difference of place and circumstances, while he has hitherto been safeguarded from many new-world changes by the segregative influences of race, religion, language and custom; and so his folk-lore still remains the intimate alter et idem of what it was in the days of the great pioneers. It is no longer a living spirit among the people at large; but in secluded villages and “back concessions” one can still hear some charming melodies as old and pure as the verses to which they are sung, and even a few quaint survivals of Gregorian tunes. The best collection, more particularly from the musical point of view, is Les Chansons populaires du Canada, started by Ernest Gagnon (1st ed. 1865).

Race-patriotism is the distinguishing characteristic of French-Canadian literature, which is so deeply rooted in national politics that L.J. Papineau, the most insistent demagogue of 1837, must certainly be named among the founders, for the sake of speeches which came before written works both in point of time and popular esteem. Only 360 volumes had been published during 80 years, when, in 1845, the first famous book appeared—François Xavier Garneau’s (1809-1866) Histoire du Canada. It had immense success in Canada, was favourably noticed in France, and has influenced all succeeding men of letters. Unfortunately, the imperfect data on which it is based, and the too exclusively patriotic spirit in which it is written, prevent it from being an authoritative history: the author himself declares “Vous verrez si la défaite de nos ancêtres ne vaut pas toutes las victoires.” But it is of far-reaching importance as the first great literary stimulus to racial self-respect. “Le Canada français avait perdu ses Ictlres de noblesse; Garneau les lui a rendues.” F.X. Garneau is also remembered for his poems, and he was followed by his son Alfred Garneau (1836-1904).

A. Gérin-Lajoie was a mere lad when the exile of some compatriots inspired Le Canadien errant, which immediately became a universal folk-song. Many years later he wrote discriminatingly about those Dix ans au Canada (1888) that saw the establishment of responsible government. But his fame rests on Jean Rivard (1874), the prose bucolic of the habitant. The hero, left at the head of a fatherless family of twelve when nearly through college, turns from the glut of graduates swarming round the prospects of professional city-bred careers, steadfastly wrests a home from the wilderness, helps his brothers and sisters, marries a habitante fit for the wife of a pioneer, brings up a large family, and founds a settlement which grows into several parishes and finally becomes the centre of the electoral district of “Rivardville,” which returns him to parliament. These simple and earnest Scènes de la vie réelle are an appealing revelation of that eternal secret of the soil which every people wishing to have a country of its own must early lay to heart; and Jean Rivard, le défricheur, will always remain the eponym of the new colons of the 19th century.

Philippe de Gaspé’s historical novel, Les Anciens Canadiens (1863), is the complement of Garneau and Gérin-Lajoie. Everything about the author’s life helped him to write this book. Born in 1784, and brought up among reminiscent eye-witnesses of the old régime, he was an eager listener, with a wonderful memory and whole-hearted pride in the glories of his race and family, a kindly seigneur, who loved and was loved by all his censitaires, a keen observer of many changing systems, down to the final Confederation of 1867, and a man who had felt both extremes of fortune (Mémoires, 1866). The story rambles rather far from its well-worn plot. But these very digressions give the book its intimate and abiding charm; for they keep the reader in close personal touch with every side of Canadian life, with songs and tales and homely forms of speech, with the best features of seigniorial times and the strong guidance of an ardent church, with voyageurs, coureurs de bois, Indians, soldiers, sailors and all the strenuous adventurers of a wild, new, giant world. The poet of this little band of authors was Octave Crémazie, a Quebec bookseller, who failed in business and spent his last years as a penniless exile in France. He is usually rather too derivative, he lacks the saving grace of style, and even his best Canadian poems hardly rise above fervent occasional verse. Yet he became a national poet, because he was the first to celebrate occasions of deeply felt popular emotion in acceptable rhyme, and he will always remain one because each occasion touched some lasting aspiration of his race. He sings what Garneau recounts—the love of mother country, mother church and Canada. The Guerre de Crimée, Guerre d’ltalie, even Castel-fidardo, are duly chronicled. An ode on Mgr. de Montmorency-Laval, first bishop of Quebec, brings him nearer to his proper themes, which are found in full perfection in the Chant du vieux soldat canadien, composed in 1856 to honour the first French man-of-war that visited British Quebec, and Le Drapeau de Carillon (1858), a centennial paean for Montcalm’s Canadians at Ticonderoga. Much of the mature work of this first generation, and of the juvenilia of the second, appeared in Les Soirées canadiennes and Le Foyer canadien, founded in 1862 and 1863 respectively. The abbé Ferland was an enthusiastic editor and historian, and Etienne Parent should be remembered as the first Canadian philosopher.

At Confederation many eager followers began to take up the work which the founders were laying down. The abbé Casgrain devoted a life-time to making the French-Canadians appear as the chosen people of new-world history; but, though an able advocate, he spoilt a really good case by trying to prove too much. His Pèlerinage au pays d’Evangéline (1888) is a splendid defence of the unfortunate Acadians; and all his books attract the reader by their charm of style and personality. But his Montcalm et Lévis (1891) and other works on the conquest, are all warped by a strong bias against both Wolfe and Montcalm, and in favour of Vandreuil, the Canadian-born governor; while they show an inadequate grasp of military problems, and practically ignore the vast determining factor of sea-power altogether. Benjamin Sulte’s comprehensive Histoire des Canadiens-français (1882) is a well-written, many-sided work. Thomas Chapais’ monographs are as firmly grounded as they are finely expressed; his Jean Talon (1904) is of prime importance; and his Montcalm (1901) is the generous amende honorable paid by French-Canadian literature to a much misrepresented, but admirably wrought, career. A. Gérin-Lajoie’s cry of “back to the land” was successfully adapted to modern developments in Le Saguenay (1896) and L’Outaouais supérieur (1889) by Arthur Buies, who showed what immense inland breadths of country lay open to suitable “Jean Rivards” from the older settlements along the St Lawrence. In oratory, which most French-Canadians admire beyond all other forms of verbal art, Sir Wilfrid Laurier has greatly surpassed L.J. Papineau, by dealing with more complex questions, taking a higher point of view, and expressing himself with a much apter flexibility of style.

Among later poets may be mentioned Pierre Chauveau (1820-1890), Louis Fiset, (b. 1827), and Adolphe Poisson (b. 1849). Louis Fréchette (1830-1908) has, however, long been the only poet with a reputation outside of Canada. In 1879 Les Fleurs boréales won the Prix Monthyon from the French Academy. In 1887 La Légende d’un peuple became the acknowledged epic of a race. He occasionally nods; is rather strident in the patriotic vein; and too often answers the untoward call of rhetoric when his subject is about to soar into the heights of poetry. But a rich vocabulary, a mastery of verse-forms quite beyond the range of Crémazie, real originality of conception, individual distinction of style, deep insight into the soul of his people, and, still more, the glow of warm-blooded life pulsing through the whole poem, all combine to give him the greatest place at home and an important one in the world at large. Les Vengeances (1875), by Leon Pamphile Le May, and Les Aspirations (1904), by W. Chapman, worthily represent the older and younger contemporaries. Dr Nérée Beauchemin keeps within somewhat narrow limits in Les Floraisons matutinales (1897); but within them he shows true poetic genius, a fine sense of rhythm, rhyme and verbal melody, a curiosa felicitas of epithet and phrase, and so sure an eye for local colour that a stranger could choose no better guide to the imaginative life of Canada.

A Canadian drama hardly exists; among its best works are the pleasantly epigrammatic plays of F.G. Marchand. Novels are not yet much in vogue; though Madame Conan’s L’Oublié (1902) has been crowned by the Academy; while Dr Choquette’s Les Ribaud (1898) is a good dramatic story, and his Claude Paysan (1899) is an admirably simple idyllic tale of the hopeless love of a soil-bound habitant, told with intense natural feeling and fine artistic reserve. Chief-Justice Routhier, a most accomplished occasional writer, is very French-Canadian when arraigning Les Grands Drames of the classics (1889) before his ecclesiastical court and finding them guilty of Paganism.

The best bibliographies are Philéas Gagnon’s Essai de bibliographie canadienne (1895), and Dr N.E. Dionne’s list of publications from the earliest times in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada for 1905.

(W. Wo.)