“Romantic Canada” aims to give, and from the hands of two women singularly fitted to give it, the story of Canada in the romance of its simple industries simply accomplished. It gives the story, in word and in picture, of all sorts and conditions of folk, as they are to be found in the faraway and little-visited territories of the Dominion. Author and artist have left the beaten track, for it is in the highways and by-ways that this particular Canada, which is passing as we grow in population, and as steel links territory to territory the more easily and the more quickly, is to be found. The photographs and discussion of this hinterland of Canada are quite unique in the history of Canadian literature and photographic art.
The author and artist have gone from Canadian coast to Canadian coast. They have thought it not unwise also to include matter descriptive of their travels in Labrador and Newfoundland.
The author and artist and ourselves desire to say “Thank you” to all those who have helped to make this book what it is. Specifically we are indebted to “Asia, the Magazine of the Asiatic Society”, for permission to reproduce the photographs bearing the captions “Domesticity” and “Pulling Flax”; to the “Century Magazine” in the same regard as to “Hearty at Eighty”, “Island Woman of St. Pierre et Miquelon”, and “The Figure on the Bow”; to “Town and Country”, as to “Fort Mississauga”, and “View from His Britannic Majesty George III’s Chapel to the Mohawks, near Brantford”; to the “Canadian Home Journal” as to “Early Home of Alexander Graham Bell”, and “Drawing Water from the Columbia”; and to the Toronto “Saturday Night” as to “An Old Ontario Homestead”.
We are also vastly indebted to the editor and proprietors of “The Canadian Magazine”.
INTRODUCTION.
By Edward J. O’Brien.
It is a happy comradeship which has made this interesting volume possible. Those who know and love the by-ways of Canada have frequently encountered Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in the pursuit of a self-imposed task. Hardly a task we should call it, but a delight, to record with the camera and the pen those unique and beautiful racial traditions which have survived in Canada and flourished, while the passion for conformity to a provincial process of standardization has crushed them in the United States. In Canada, the Scottish Highlander, the Acadian, and the Doukhobor, for example, have not been compelled to abandon their memories. The life of their forefathers has flourished when transplanted to a new soil. That wise tolerance and appreciative catholicity which is not always found in a new land has preserved old loveliness here, and the magic of Miss Watson’s camera has arrested this beauty at many significant moments.
I have more than once had occasion to allude to the invaluable labours of Mr. C. M. Barbeau in harvesting the folksongs and tales of Quebec and Ontario. Although the general public may not realize it, he is conferring a new literature upon Canada and adding rich chapters to her imaginative history. Well, these pictures with their fine sense of composition and warm human values provide this literature with its just setting, and the social record they afford is of permanent significance. The quality of life changes even in a generation, and those who may turn over the leaves of this book a century from now will know, as they could not otherwise have known, what beautiful life has flourished in hidden places.
The Magdalen Islands, for example, are an unknown land to Canadian city dwellers. The service of Miss Watson and Miss Hayward in introducing them alone to those who have never visited them is one for which any happy traveller should be very grateful.
Cambridge, England.