His imagination is reproductive rather than creatively constructive. The stories of the foothills are built upon his own missionary experiences at Banff and elsewhere; the Glengarry tales deal with his schoolboy experiences and his knowledge of the rough life of the lumber woods and the drive; the stories of east and west are also drawn from his own experiences in college and in the missionary field. As a result of this his characters tend to become types and although fairly individual and distinctive they are inclined to act mechanically and to operate without sufficient inherent motivation.

The first novel of Robert E. Knowles, St. Cuthbert’s although a romance of a Presbyterian congregation, is not strictly an ‘evangelical novel.’ It has more to do with showing the Presbyterian Church as an institution which dominated the life of the Presbyterian community. The doings of the Kirk session; the relations of the minister with the various elements of his flock, the pious and the profligate, are described with rare fidelity. The tender undercurrent covered by Scottish reserve; the sympathetic understanding of human nature as the greatest and most essential quality of ministry; the dry, pawky Scottish humor; the distinctive and consistent characterization—these elements make St. Cuthbert’s a piece of genuine literature. The Dawn at Shanty Bay is in reality a short story. There is one underlying motive, and only one, dominating the whole—it is the fight between parental love and parental dignity. It should rank as one of the sweetest ‘Christmas Carols’ in English literature. His remaining novels—The Undertow, The Web of Time, The Attic Guest, and The Singer of the Kootenay are of the evangelical type and are fashioned much to the same pattern, showing inconsistencies in development and a lack of structural unity.

Short Story Writers

There is, on this continent, a literary tradition that Edgar Allan Poe is the creator of the short story. The truth is that Poe applied a new method to the short narrative or prose tale in that he gave the short story a higher unity of effect towards an impressionistic climax. He did not originate or create it; he simply improved its technique. But with the school of Poe this method crystallized into a formula, and the so-called American short story became an invention rather than an imaginative creation. Thus it depends upon a cumulation of effects rising to a climactic peak of emotional intensity, or upon a plot that induces suspense by a clever interplay of incident. Its processes are for the most part mechanical. The telling or the reading of a short story of this type is far more a coldly-calculated intellectual exercise than it is an appeal to warm-hearted human emotions. With aesthetic, moral, or spiritual values it has little to do. Hence it has not that permanency that makes for true literature. Based on incident and accidental circumstance rather than character it engages the reader temporarily by its cleverness, but it does not acquaint him with living characters to whom he loves to return for an enlargement of that acquaintanceship.

The Canadian species of short story is distinguished by a high artistic unity of structure and effect and in that respect reflects the influence of Poe upon all modern short story writing, but there is this difference, that it achieves its unity of effect and its dramatic interest not by mechanically constructed climaxes but by developments arising out of the inherent traits and dispositions of the personages of the story. Its basis is the solid rock of character. The Canadian short story as a distinctive type does not present the excessively climactic plot; nevertheless, it is more truly a real story than either the plot story of the American and French writers or the fine psychological situations of successful English story writers.

As we see it, this peculiar quality of the Canadian short story is rooted in some quality of Canadian nationality. No Canadian writer can be said to have originated the method. Each appears to evolve some modification of it particularly adapted to his own field.

Old Man Savarin and Other Tales, by Edward William Thomson (1895) contains a number of stories of Canadian life differing widely in emotional interest. There is the near burlesque of Old Man Savarin, with the incident of the fist fight which lasted for four hours, although the two combatants never reached within striking distance of each other all that time; McGrath’s Bad Night portrays a pathetic picture of a family on the verge of starvation, to which is added the greater pathos of the breakdown of a man’s principles of honesty; The Privilege of the Limits, wherein the author captures and presents effectively the dry, pawky humor of the Scot; the sorrowful dillusionment of youthful imagination in The Shining Cross of Rigaud; superstitious terror overcome by plain common sense in Red Headed Windego.

The stories with Eastern Ontario and Quebec for their setting show a loving intimacy and understanding of the plain people—the habitant, the river driver, the lumberman, the farmer; and the author is at his best in his delineation of the Glengarry Scot or the Quebec habitant. Thomson is scarcely a stylist. There is a freedom, even looseness, in his story structure, and he employs sometimes the device of introducing a narrator for his tale. But in his stories of the Canadian type and setting his warm friendliness for his characters radiates a glow of enthusiasm that captures and holds the reader. Not all Thomson’s stories, however, are of this type—in Petherick’s Peril, there is an approach to the horror tale of Poe; and in The Swartz Diamond there is the trap-springing device of the surprise ending, while Boss of the World is an example of the ‘tall story’ which produces its humor by the exaggeration of its ideas—these stories we surmise to be the result of influences which surrounded E. W. Thomson in his editorial offices in a Boston magazine publishing firm.

In the Village of Viger (1896), by Duncan Campbell Scott is a little volume of prose tales of French Canada, published in Boston by Copeland and Day. These stories affect the heart and imagination with a reality and sense of actuality as if one had dwelt in Viger and had daily come face to face with Mademoiselle Viau, the little milliner; Madame Laroque, gossip and reformer; Monsieur Cuerrier, kind-hearted postmaster; brandy-tippling Paul Arbique and his wife; Hans Blumenthal, the expatriate German watchmaker; Pierre, and the lovely but intriguing Eloise of No. 68 rue Alfred de Musset; Jean Francois, the mysterious blind peddler; Paul Farlotte who was always saving up to revisit France, and gave up the project on the day he dreamed that his mother had died—and all the rest in this gallery of lovable characters.

The reality and veracity of Dr. Scott’s character delineation produces exquisite and infallible character-vignettes, or Rembrandtesque word-etchings, lovely in ‘values’ and in spiritual chiaroscuro—depths within depths of a single character as in Charles Desjardins in the tragic story of The Desjardins. Yet in his handling of the tragic he awakens, not a pity that produces fear or horror or disgust, but a gentle pity that engenders sympathy. We appreciate the ‘little milliner’s’ loyalty—begotten of pure love—to her rascal lover, a common thief. The skilful sympathetic handling of the subject gives to love a new dignity and to loyalty a new grandeur. The pathos moves to a rise and fall, but never so overwhelms the emotions as to cause tears; rather does it subdue the soul and leave in the heart of the reader a gentle welling up of sympathy, a benignant sense of fellowship with finite and erring humanity, and a tender peace. When a reader finishes one of Dr. Scott’s stories of the pathetic episode—The Little Milliner, The Desjardins, Sedan, Paul Farlotte—he experiences no violent wrench of the heart-strings—sheds no tears—but is gently and sweetly touched; feels with the unfortunate and afflicted; sees the veil that obscures the hard workaday world lifted; and beholds life and the world suffused with a ‘grey-eyed loveliness.’ This is all superb artistry in emotional and spiritual love, by one who has had intimate glimpses into the human heart and into the stern face of sublimity in human character and in life.

So, too, his treatment of the comedy in human character and existence. Human destiny and fate are too dear and pathetic to him to allow him to engage his art in any raucous laughter. The smiles he evokes are based on sympathetic fellow-feeling, on tenderness. We are amused, yet not unsympathetic, at the rage of Madame Laroque, defeated in a long-cherished love, and hope of ultimate marriage, by the elopement of her ward, Cesarine, with the postmaster (The Wooing of Monsieur Cuerrier); the futilities of old Paul Farlotte, who would see ‘la belle France’ before he dies, envisage a comic character, but subdue our laughter with the pathos of frustrated desire.

These themes, we see, are chosen from character and life in a typical French-Canadian village, yet the sentiments, the ideals of human love and character and conduct, and the natural and spiritual color, are Canadian and even universal. They depend not upon mere accidents of circumstance, but upon lasting and universal human emotions and human relationships—permanent literary values. In these stories, Dr. Scott achieves structural unity and harmony of emotional tone with an entire absence of any striving for effect—with that finished art that conceals the artifice of the craftsman.

Always a careful workman rather than a prolific writer, it was not until 1923 that Duncan Campbell Scott published another volume of short stories, The Witching of Elspie. Some of these are French-Canadian in their setting, but those most exquisitely wrought deal with the lonely and heart-searching life of the Hudson Bay posts. Although Scott’s method was fully formed in his first volume, there is here a very evident advance in artistry, a greater economy in expression, but a deeper intensity of effect. Here he shows a remarkable skill in the almost imperceptible transition from explanation or description to the inside of the mind of the varying personages of the story and back again to description or explanation—one of the most artistic touches of the work of a finished craftsman.

Charles G. D. Roberts developed, in the story of animal psychology, a species of Canadian short story that depends not so much upon emotional and artistic effects and a unity of impressionistic tone as upon intellectual and stylistic effects and novelty of theme. Scott worked with an artistry so exquisite that his stories possess the simplicity and directness which conceal art. Roberts wrought his animal and romantic short stories with an artistry so much in the manner of the prose-poet that they reveal the stylist consciously aiming to impress the intellect with niceties of structure, and the sensibility with word-painting, always couleur de rose.

When Roberts is the psychologist he is also most the true structural stylist. But for an example of more impressionistic color, of sheer word-painting, of prose-poetry couleur de rose, the following paragraphs from The Watchers in the Swamp are convincing:—

These stories are lyrical poems in prose; as an impressionistic stylist in the medium of the animal short story Roberts is inimitable. We find the same mellifluous prose (as Mr. T. G. Marquis discriminatingly terms it) in his romantic short stories, By the Marshes of Minas, in which themes, settings, and color are authentically Canadian (Acadian).

Gilbert Parker’s short stories exhibit many of the qualities of his longer fiction. They are not always as artistically constructed as those of Duncan Campbell Scott, nor are they as finely written as those of Roberts, but in the main they are based on sufficient character motivation and have a sustained dramatic power. Ernest Thompson Seton and W. A. Fraser are engaging tellers of short tales abounding in incident and humor, with a sound basis of characterization, yet of the short story writers of the Systematic School, Duncan Campbell Scott has produced the most uniformly excellent work.

William Henry Drummond

The Canadian voyageur and habitant, the lumberman, and peasant of French Canada are ‘children of nature’—human, simple, shy, warm-hearted, honest, and manly. They were not always thus sympathetically conceived or regarded by most of their English-speaking compatriots. They, therefore, needed a sympathetic interpreter who would reveal their inward spirit and true character, mental and moral. Strangely, but according to the inscrutable methods of Providence, the man who was to be the friend and sympathetic interpreter of the French-Canadian peasant, was born in Ireland in 1854. He was William Henry Drummond.

Drummond emigrated to Canada when but a mere lad, before Old Country education and culture had any chance to mould his mind and imagination and moral attitudes. While, then, Drummond himself was an émigré, his verse, like that of Isabella Valancy Crawford and for the same reasons of formative influences in Canada, is Canadian. It is indeed regional, but it is also indigenous poetry—in substance, in diction, in imagery, and in craftsmanship.

William Henry Drummond, like the dramatis personae of his poems, the voyageur and habitant, was a ‘child of nature.’ No other kind of man, save this large-bodied, warm-hearted, open-minded lover of human kin and of the creatures that live in the wild, who saw and felt the common things of life, as the habitant saw and felt them, could have been a truthful interpreter of the habitant. The merely scholarly poet, the poet of a hothouse refinement, the poet who went to work at the craftsmanship of poetry as if he were carving arabesques in verse, could not have the imaginative insight into the mind and heart of the French-Canadian peasant and the sympathy with him that would make it possible for such a poet, with kindly, playful humor, to express the elemental feelings and thoughts—the real humanity—of the habitant.

Drummond was above all things a human poet. His sympathies were inclusive. By intuition he could feel just as the habitant felt about good and evil in the universe. Drummond’s heart was warm and large and religious, which meant that he could call nothing that was made in the image of God common or outcast. Though he was well read in the modern poets and was a student of literature, he was not a bookish man. He distinguished between the literature which possessed only aesthetic and artistic beauties and that which was the embodiment of the finer goods of the spirit, the inalienable satisfactions of existence. He loved only the literature that was human and beautiful—simple, pure, and true.

As, then, a ‘child of nature,’ with a large, sympathetic heart and a Keltic vision of the ‘divinity’ which is in all men and also in the wild creatures that are near to Nature, and with a gift of ready expression in rhythmical verse, Drummond was uniquely fitted to be the interpreter of his simple, kindly, reticent, but genuinely human and sincere, fellow-being, the Canadian habitant. Thus singularly fitted to be, as he has been called, ‘the Poet of the Habitant,’ Drummond, in his verse, actually performed a social and a literary service for his country. On the social side, to the English-speaking Canadian, who up to the last decade of the 19th century considered the habitant as little better than a chattel, Drummond revealed the human, lovable, and admirable virtues of the humble French-speaking compatriot, and also engendered in the English-speaking Canadian a sincere respect and affection for his French-speaking fellow countryman. On the literary side, Drummond created a gallery of genre pictures and spiritual portraits which constitute a unique contribution, not only to Canadian poetic Literature, but also to English Literature.

Under what inspiration or vision, hitherto not vouchsafed to any other Canadian poet, did Drummond write, and what really novel and important contributions did he make to Canadian poetry and to world literature?

He discovered and presented to the world, for the first time, the New Romance in Canada, as Kirby and Sir Gilbert Parker had discovered and presented the Old Romance. He created a new form of the Canadian Idyll. He placed on the stage of the world a group of new Characters and, through them, originated a new species or type of World Humor. Pre-eminently Drummond is the Poet and Humorist of the New Social Democracy in Canada.

Until the publication of Drummond’s first creative work, The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems (1897), the French-Canadian, in general, was appreciated only according to the types seen in the towns and cities. In particular, the French-Canadian voyageur and habitant were appreciated only as the merry hearts who had sung the old chansons on the rivers of Quebec Province—and, as their English-speaking compatriots fancied, in the academic and eviscerated English translations in which they heard these chansons. No one, up to the time of Drummond’s first volume, had revealed the mind and heart of the real, the living habitant, voyageur, lumberman, and peasant in Old Quebec. No one before Drummond had sung their heart songs in the patois that is theirs when attempting to express their thoughts and emotions to their supercilious and not too respectful English-speaking compatriots. But Drummond produced truthful, naturalistic pictures of the real, the living French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, and peasant as they expressed their thoughts and emotions about life and their fellows.

He did not do this by a sort of reporting. He did it by letting them talk for themselves in their own patois. Thus he gave to his pictures of the French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, and peasant, a racy and dramatic realism which distinguishes them as ‘characters’ apart in Canadian, in English, and in world literature. This is the first reason why William Henry Drummond must be regarded as an absolute creator of literary species. He created a new form of romantic genre poetry, gave it reality, veracity, and ideality. This is what Louis Fréchette meant when in his Introduction to Drummond’s first volume, he hailed Drummond as ‘the pathfinder of a new land of song.’

In what way did Drummond give true ideality to the life and character which he presented also with a convincing realism and veracity? There is a species of romance which is the sheer invention of the fancy or imagination. It presents a life and character that have never existed and could not be possible anywhere on earth. That kind of romance is so ‘fantastic’ as to be absolutely unreal. There is another kind of romance which is based on real imagination of supposed real life and real personages. This sort of romance is typified by fairy tales, not the fairy tales of all lands, but of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. The people actually believe in the real existence of fairies, and imagine these invisible creatures in the forms of human beings. Romances about them and their doings are, therefore, not fantastic, but are based on a kind of reality. Again: there is a species of romance based upon the imagining of real personages in impossible situations and doing impossible things. It exists in Canadian Literature in those romances in which the Indian conducts himself in ways that could only be possible with men of civilized natures and civilized ideas. This kind of romance is not unreal; it is too ideal.

In poetically conceiving and presenting the French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, or peasant, Drummond might have drawn them as fantastic, or fanciful, or absolutely ideal characters. Or, he might have drawn them, as Service, for instance, has limned his characters of the trails and mining camps, with an accentuated or rude realism. Drummond employed none of these methods. He presented the French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, and peasant as they really appear on the outside, and as they ideally are on the inside, to the vision which sympathetically divines their feelings, emotions, aspirations, sorrows, joys, and consolations. Drummond’s poetic eye perceived the ideal spirit of the French-Canadian habitant as it shines through the outer, rude, homely, simple, hesitant creature whom the English-speaking compatriot only too often, till Drummond’s time, took to be of a lower and less spiritual order than himself. By this combined realistic and idealistic treatment of the character and life of the French-Canadian habitant, lumberman, and peasant, Drummond created a new species of Canadian genre poetry, a new form of the Canadian Idyll.

As a creator, Drummond is entitled to another distinction. He originated a new and distinct type of Humor. There were humorists before and since Drummond. There was the prose humor of Haliburton’s Sam Slick. There was the verse humor of Howe and of Lanigan. There was the prose humor of De Mille and of Mrs. Cotes. There have been the prose humor of Leacock and the verse humor of Service. But the only humor of all these that is likely to perdure as world literature is that of Haliburton. Drummond has created a humor which also is likely to live in permanent literature. It is distinguished from all the other humor written in Canada by the fact that it is never satiric or malicious or ungenial, or mere humor for the sake of raising a laugh or to ridicule another. It is humor with pathos. Just as Haliburton is unique as a satiric humorist, so Drummond is unique as a sympathetic and interpretative humorist. He is a Master of Humor and of Pathos.

His work is so well known throughout the world that it is hardly necessary to quote examples of his humor. Mere excerpts will not suffice. We may, however, recall, as outstanding examples, The Wreck of the Julie Plante, How Bateese Came Home, The Curé of Calumette, Dominique, The Corduroy Road, Little Bateese, Johnnie Courteau, and When Albani Sang.

A few words on Drummond’s use of a patois or dialect and on his verse technique will be sufficient. It is by his patois that he gives not only naturalness but also veracity to the speech of his characters. His dialect is pure and clean and is felt by the reader as natural and genuine. As to technique, Drummond is a master of simple but flowing rhythm and obtains his rhymes with an ease and naturalness that disclose him as an original inventor of rhyme. He elected to be ‘The Poet of the Habitant,’ and as such he is unique. Yet his poetry in this form, as well as in other forms, clearly shows that if he had essayed the writing of verse on traditional themes and in a traditional manner, he could have been a poet of considerable distinction. It is best, however, to leave him with his natural distinction and glory about him—the Poet of the Habitant. As the discoverer of the New Romance in Canada, as the Creator of the New Canadian Idyll, and as the Master of a unique species of Canadian Humor and Pathos, William Henry Drummond made a signally original contribution to the quantity and quality of the creative literature of Canada.

The Vaudeville School

Not ineptly, though somewhat jocosely, we may group Canadian Poets in the Post-Confederation period, from 1887 to 1907, into three Schools, and label them with characteristic sobriquets. Already Archibald Lampman, Wilfred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, with Pauline Johnson and Frederick George Scott, have been called ‘The Great Lakes School.’ This is a dignified sobriquet, and derives its descriptive aptness from the native environment, or from the themes, of these poets, or from both. Again: Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman have been named ‘The Birchbark School.’ This is a jocose, playful sobriquet, and was applied to these poets because ‘they use the mottled scrolls of the Red Man’s papyrus to build a canoe, or as a vehicle for verse, with equal dexterity.’

By similar tokens, the throng of verse-makers whose vogue formed a decadent interim in Canadian poetry, beginning with the publication of Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough (1907) and ending with the publication of his Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1913), may be signalized as ‘The Vaudeville School.’ On account of the themes of their verse, its special and distinguishing technique, and its particular appeal to popular or vulgar taste, this sobriquet, as applied to Robert Service, Robert Stead, Paul Agar, George B. Field, Milton W. Yorke (pseud. Derby Bill), Robert T. Anderson, John Mortimer, James P. Haverson, Charles W. MacCrossan, Hamilton Wigle, and others, is just, apt, and veracious. It must be understood, however, to convey nothing of scorn or contempt or derision, but to be only a pedagogical formula for summarizing the qualities of the verse, the ideals, the methods, and the craftsmanship of the great majority of the poets here named ‘The Vaudeville School.’ They might have been dubbed ‘The Sourdough School,’ were it not that of them all only Service deals with those picturesque and picaresque humans known in the slang of the Canadian gold-mining camps as ‘Sourdoughs,’ and were it not that this name, used as sobriquet, would be derisive rather than sincerely descriptive.

As used here, the term Vaudeville harks back to its original French connotation. As applied to the verse of Service, Stead, Haverson, Field, Yorke, and the others, it means, first, entertainment which appeals to popular or vulgar or low taste in verse. It means, secondly, arresting or violent methods in the technique of vividness. In fact, it is on the side of the technique of vividness in verse-color and verse-rhythms rather than on the side of the picturesque and often picaresque matter—characters and situations—of the verse of this School that the term Vaudeville is most apt and veracious, and that it is applied here as a descriptive epithet in the ‘working’ vocabulary of literary criticism.

The sublimation of the technique of emotional vividness, to the exclusion of all regard for the intrinsic and the aesthetic beauty and moral dignity of poetry—this is the essential formula of the verse of the Vaudeville School of Canadian poets. Their aims or motives were sincere and human. One motive was genuinely aesthetic: they wished to write verse that would escape the emotional deadness of the traditional themes and manner of Canadian poetry. The other motive was pragmatic: they wished to write rhythmic and rimed social documents in verse which would have such novelty of theme and such dramatic or theatrical or ‘sensational’ content as immediately to create a demand for the ‘new poetry’ and make it readily marketable. Thus should ‘the art of poetry’ become at once both pleasurable and profitable.

How were these ends to be achieved? ‘I am one who left off singing Alleluias,’ said Dante, poet of the immortal ‘Vision’ of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Thus Dante, desiring to get away from the conventional deadness of saying that he, as a poet, was a messenger from Heaven to reveal spiritual beauty to his fellows, makes use of one of the principles of the technique of vividness. He employs the unusual phrase, the lively, arresting phrase that would be sure to strike and vividly impress the average mind or imagination. In short, Dante invents and uses picturesque slang: for ‘singing Alleluias’ is slang, but how poetically suggestive it is, how vivid!

The Canadian Vaudeville verse-makers realized the poetic suggestiveness and the vividness of the picaresque speech of the Far West and the High North. They also knew how these sections of the country were rich in picturesque and picaresque characters and in the ‘wild and woolly’ life which produces strange and violent drama and melodrama, which is all the more appealing to the imagination of men and women because it is real and ‘stranger than fiction.’ It was a life full of moral (or immoral) color of speech, and action—of compelling interest. Thus ready to hand in Canada lay for immediate use the materials and the basal technical principle—the recipe—for the ‘making,’ not the ‘creation,’ of Vaudeville poetry. What was that recipe? Simply this. Lilt in plangent anapaestic metres or rhythms the picaresque melodrama of the mining camps in the High North and the melodrama of the ‘chevalerie’ of the Far West.

A single stanza from The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert Service (Songs of a Sourdough, 1907) affords ample proof and illustration of the vaudeville qualities of this decadent verse:—

That is an impressive characteristic example of the technique of vividness, by the Canadian master of them all. But let no one call it poetry. Service’s astounding vogue for six years—it is now vanished—was not due to the poetry in his verse, but to the arresting or violent drama and melodrama in it, made more arresting or compelling by the infectious swing or lilt of the anapaestic rhythm. This rhythm is his only forte in verbal music, though he also employs alliteration successfully. This forte is seen to be a limitation and a weakness, as it also was and is in his alleged artistic foster-father, Rudyard Kipling. For as soon as Service attempts to employ another rhythm better suited to higher thought than the picaresque matter of strictly ‘Sourdough’ Songs, the results are disastrous. He fails to hold the attention; and, inasmuch as there are no compensating rhythmic values, all that is left is the strained and bizarre effect of cheap melodrama. A singular example of this kind of weakness and failure in Service is his My Madonna, in which he aims consciously and seriously to achieve a tour de force in religious sentiment, but falls into flat bathos of melodrama (Songs of a Sourdough).

If proof is wanted that the recipe for writing Vaudeville verse is simply to lilt in anapaestic metre and rhythm the melodrama of the Far West chevalerie, proof and illustration are furnished by a stanza from Sergeant Blue by Robert Stead (Kitchener and Other Poems, 1917):—

The amazing and pathetic fact about Robert Service is that he really possessed authentic poetic genius, and sometimes did write pure poetry. At his best Stead has written some satisfying genre poetry and story-telling ballads. But Stead could not rise beyond the homely-pathetic and the melodramatic in Western chevalerie into the realm of pure poetry. He kept always to the level of his lowly subject. Service, however, fell or rose to the level of his subject. In short, while most of Service’s verse is popular Vaudeville, considerable of it violent melodrama, and much of it drama simply, some of his verse is genuinely poetical, charged with pure beauty and poetic significance. How nobly Service has conceived, how passionately expressed in lovely color-images and pervasive vowel and alliterative music, and how philosophically interpreted Nature in his poem The Mountain and the Lake:—

In that poem Service has given us an arresting and memorable picture of pure beauty in Nature. It is beautiful and unforgettable because it has poetic Style. Stead and the other members of the Vaudeville School, with the exception at times of Service when at his best, lacked genius for style in verse, without which verse, whether its subject or theme be low or high, realistic or idealistic, cannot rise to the dignity of poetry. Service, Stead, and the rest are never authentic Realists. They could not avoid the melodramatic in the matter of their verse and the plangent and vivid in its technique. Always they deliberately set out to assault the senses and the sensibilities. Kipling could be realistic and by virtue of his style rise to the dignity of poetry. But for the lack of style, the hectic realism of Service and Stead never rises above the crudely melodramatic or Vaudevillian. As picaresque realists they are, to quote Mr. E. B. Osborn, ‘far behind the Australian and compare very unfavorably with the minor masters of Quebec.’

Many of the most effective pieces in Service’s first volume (Songs of a Sourdough) were deliberate imitations of Kipling. But later he gave some promise of developing an independent manner of his own, the manner which is disclosed in The Mountain and the Lake, and which indubitably revealed in him innate original powers for painting the beauty and sublimity of Nature in the Arctic.

Service did not hold to his own manner; and Stead and the other Vaudevillians were innately incapable of any manner of their own. At length the vogue of the Vaudeville poets passed, having in no way affected the stream of aesthetic and artistic poetry which began with the Systematic School and which flowed on, pure and undefiled, if placid and noiseless, through the poetry of the later generation and into the Restoration Period or Second Renaissance in Canadian Literature.

Fundamental to the point of view of the criticism which follows is this proposition:—The poetry of the Vaudeville School for the most part must be regarded, not strictly as an aesthetic phenomenon, but rather as an envisagement of certain phases of the civilization of Canada in that period—that is, as a series of social documents. There is nothing wrong in treating contemporary phases of civilization in poetry with such vividness and veracity that they really become social documents of the period which they envisage; but they are of no aesthetic worth if they are not consecrated to and by art. How a social document, when sublimated by fine art, can become authentic poetry may be discovered by turning to Pauline Johnson’s musical and swift-moving lyric Prairie Greyhounds, descriptive of the transcontinental trains and their service to Canadian civilization, or to Mr. C. G. D. Roberts’ noble sonnet The Train Among the Hills, or to his equally fine sonnet of the soil The Sower.

It must be realized that the sources of poetic inspiration in Canada have considerably shifted from the Atlantic, the Land of Evangeline, the Great Lakes, and the Laurentians to the Prairies, the Rockies, and the ice-clad wildernesses of the High North. Now, it was inevitable that under the inchoate and unsettled conditions of civilization in these Far West and High North sections of the Dominion, the mere inspiration to write verse should have been uppermost and that considerations of form should have appeared secondary or insignificant.

The themes treated in the Vaudeville verse were necessarily new; and when the Western or Yukon poets published their verses the newness of their themes and their naïve disregard of technical niceties were mistaken in the East for originality, vigor, freshness, and breeziness in art, and were welcomed and read by all classes of Canadians with avidity as ‘real,’ not ‘hothouse,’ poetry. There we have the explanation of the astonishing vogue of the verses of Service and Stead, and of their imitators. But their verses, far from being examples of genuine originality in invention of poetic themes and of really new art, exemplify the total absence of art; and far from being ‘real’ poetry, are totally devoid of the chaste speech, lovely imagery, dulcet music, and exquisite emotion which constitute true poetry.

It was a distinct moral fault on the part of Service that he should have chosen to give us in verse what he had better written in prose. The right form for social documents of picaresque communities is prose. Further: it is a law of aesthetics, a law exemplified most finely in Homer, that, whenever possible, all the elements in a work of art should each be intrinsically beautiful. Service deliberately chose themes which disregarded that law. We could forgive him for that if he had redeemed the vulgarity of the themes by beautiful craftsmanship in versification. His poetry is bad not because it is wicked or picaresque or risqué, but because it is aesthetically bad through and through.

During the Vaudeville Period Roberts, Campbell, Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, Canon Scott, Pauline Johnson, Arthur Stringer, Albert E. S. Smythe, Ethelwyn Wetherald, Jean Blewett, Helena Coleman, Virna Sheard, the late Marjorie Pickthall, Katherine Hale, Jean Graham, Peter McArthur, Richard Scrace, Lucy M. Montgomery and a host of others published aesthetically satisfying poetry. For their spirit was of the spirit which inaugurated the First Renaissance in Canadian poetry. But the spirit of Service and the lesser poets of the Vaudeville School was identical with that which animated the early Canadian verse-makers before the times of Breakenridge, Sangster, Mair, and John Reade. In spirit and in craftsmanship the poetry of the Vaudeville School was essentially a recrudescence of the poetry that made glad the hearts of the ‘Bush’ and ‘Clearing’ settlers of Canada in the first and second quarters of the last century.

That a New Poetry will arise in Canada and that it will originate and flourish in the Canadian Far West, is highly probable, because the prairie-lands of the West, their endless fields of grain sheening in the sun and billowing in rhythmic swaying to the winds and the mighty vastnesses of land and sky awaken moods and appreciations of Nature similar to those stirred in men by the sea. It was, in Bliss Carman’s fine phrase, ‘the glad indomitable sea’ and the inland seas that inspired the Maritime and Lake poets who began the First Renaissance of Canadian Poetry.

But if any of the future Canadian poet, Western or Eastern, should prefer or incline to turn back to the ways of Service and Stead, let him reflect that since beauty is our clearest manifestation of the union of the real and the ideal, that is, of perfection, not to love and promote beauty in poetry is so far forth to refuse to love and promote the Godlike in the hearts of mankind, for perfection is the essence of the Godhead. To become a poet may not be a moral duty. But if one elects the office of poet, then to perfect oneself, as far as possible, in poetic artistry for the sake of beautifully or compellingly embodying in verse whatsoever is lovely in Nature or noble in ideas, is to attain to high moral dignity in one’s own soul as a poet and to impress on the world the high spiritual function of poetry.

Sources of quotations in this chapter:

Poems of Robert W. Service—The Songs of a Sourdough (Ryerson Press: Toronto); The Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, (Ryerson Press: Toronto).

Poems of Robert Stead—Kitchener and Other Poems—or in The Empire Builders (Musson Book Co.: Toronto).

The Restoration Period