Part I

Pre-Confederation Literature
1760-1887.

Social and Spiritual Bases

Creative literature in the Provinces which now form the Dominion of Canada, really or most significantly began in Nova Scotia. The social bases of this Nova Scotian pioneer literature, its literary forms, and even its inspiration were of New England origin. It is highly important clearly to understand all this. In 1760, or two years after the proclamation of Governor Lawrence and the establishment of a Legislative Assembly in Nova Scotia, seven thousand Puritans emigrated from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut to Maugerville on the St. John River, and to the valleys of western Nova Scotia. The expulsion of the Acadians had left the fertile farms of western Nova Scotia deserted. These lands were naturally attractive to the people of New England, inasmuch as the soil was not only fertile, but the country itself was, at the time, part of British North America, as was New England itself. As soon as the Acadians had been expelled, the Governor of Nova Scotia set up military control and government. Moreover, the Anglican Church was the dominant creed. In New England civil and religious liberty were regarded as absolutely necessary to the life of the people. When, then, in 1758, Governor Lawrence brought about the formation of a Legislative Assembly and proclaimed civil and religious liberty for Nova Scotia, the New England Puritans felt free to come to Nova Scotia, which promised them an acceptable new home, both for the obtaining of material possessions and the free expression of their spiritual ideals.

In 1763 other groups of New Englanders, with their characteristic ideals, came to Nova Scotia. In 1783, 1785 and 1786, following the War of American Independence, thirty thousand United Empire Loyalists emigrated from the Atlantic States and settled in Nova Scotia; ten thousand settled in Lower Canada (Quebec); and twenty thousand settled in the district which later became the Province of Ontario. So that, in a period of twenty-five years, about one hundred thousand émigrés from the United States coast had become permanent residents of the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas. That is to say, the bases of Canadian civilization and culture, following the Fall of Montreal and beginning with the first Puritan Migration, were definitively the social, political, intellectual, and literary ideals of New England.

In 1749 there was a migration of English from the Motherland to Halifax. They founded the City of Halifax. These English émigrés, however, found conditions of life at Halifax so forbidding by way of hardships and so socially unsettling that many of them removed to Boston and to New York. Subsequently their descendants came from New England and New York to Halifax. It was they, not their fathers, who really founded the City of Halifax and did most for the development of commerce and culture in that community. Later, when Halifax became a British Military and Naval Station, it took on an English ‘air.’ But essentially its culture and commerce were of New England Puritan origin.

In 1773 occurred the Scots migration to Pictou, on the North shore of Nova Scotia. These colonists were but a little band of two hundred; yet they brought with them two ideals which eventually pervaded the civilization and culture of Canada.

Viewed, then, synoptically, the civilization and culture of the Dominion of Canada, as we conceive and appreciate the significance of Canada to-day, had their origins in Puritanism and Calvinism—in the ideals brought into Nova Scotia and the Canadas by the New England and the Scots Migrations in the 18th century. Specifically, the New England colonists, especially the Loyalists, brought, with them the literary ideals which were to become the creative principles of the first native-born poets and prose writers of Nova Scotia and the Canadas. Specifically, the Scots colonists brought into Nova Scotia two ideals of spiritual import; namely, the ideal of the supreme worth of the individual human spirit and its salvation, and the ideal of sound intellectual education as the basis of the life of the spirit both for this world and the world to come.

To appreciate critically the results of the Loyalist ideals on the creative literary spirit in Nova Scotia, we must hark back to pre-Revolutionary times in New England and the other Atlantic Colonies and to the social conditions and spiritual problems of the people of Nova Scotia following the Loyalist Migrations. In pre-revolutionary days in the New England and the other Atlantic Colonies, the weapon used both by those who were for separation from England and those who were loyal to the British Crown was a literary weapon—prose and poetry. Naturally pre-revolutionary literature in the American Colonies was modelled on the mood and form of the satiric verse and pamphlets of the 18th century poets and prosemen of England. The American colonies became alive especially with poetic satirists. When, therefore, the Loyalists settled in Nova Scotia and the Canadas, and when, in due course, they themselves had to face the discussion and solution of new social and political problems, inevitably they adopted the 18th century forms of literary expression.

But what of the Puritan settlers in Nova Scotia? They were in the land for at least a decade before the coming of the Loyalists. They had social and religious problems for discussion and solution. Did not these problems of the Puritan émigrés issue in a literature? They did. But the Puritan literature in Nova Scotia was not in mood, aim, form, or result at all significant, or as genuinely creative as the Loyalist literature, and may be shortly noticed and dismissed. The Puritans were Congregationalists, and brought with them the old New England ideals of the ‘Town Meeting’—Responsible Civic Government and Religious Liberty. They were political and religious Democrats. But Church interests were paramount. Congregationalism, though essentially a democratic form of Church government, developed all the formalism, of an aristocratically conducted religion. The inevitable happened. There were ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘modernists’ in those days as in ours. Under Whitefield a schism occurred in Congregationalism. The leader of the schism in Nova Scotia was Rev. Henry Alline (1748-84). Under Whitefield in the American Colonies and Henry Alline, ‘the Whitefield of Province’ of Nova Scotia, the ‘New Lights’ (as they were called) triumphed over the Orthodox or Formalistic Congregationalists in America. But, oddly, this religious schism also resulted in a political schism. It resulted, in short, in a separation of the Puritans in Nova Scotia from the Puritans in the New England Colonies. So that the Puritan colony in Nova Scotia became a community apart, with a new and distinct sentiment of British connection. They retained, however, their New England ideals of responsible municipal government and absolute religious liberty. Nova Scotia thus became the home of a new experiment in Political and Religious Democracy.

But since, with the Puritans, Church or Spiritual interests were paramount, and since the separation between the Nova Scotia Puritans and the New England Puritans was merely sentimental and followed the religious schism, the Puritan literature of the period in Nova Scotia was wholly religious and theological. On the theological side, it took the form of controversial and polemical literature for the promotion of the ‘New Lights’ schism. On the religious and creative sides, it took the form of homilies, sermons, devotional works, prayers, and hymns.

The chief creative writer of the Puritan period was Henry Alline. During the conflict between the Orthodox Congregationalists and the ‘New Lights’ Henry Alline published a polemical pamphlet, The Anti-Traditionist, and five books of Hymns and Spiritual Songs. After his death his Life and Journal was published. It is interesting only to students of religious psychology and the varieties of religious experience.

But Alline’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs is a genuinely creative work. It contrasts admirably with the too often spiritually inept and doggerelized hymns and evangelical songs that have found a place in the hymnody of the Churches. Alline’s hymns and spiritual songs disclose on his part an authentic lyrical faculty, a sure sense of rhythm and of decent rhyme, and a respect for dignified diction and imagery. Though Alline’s work in prose and verse has no significance in the evolution of Canadian Literature, inasmuch as he did not even ‘influence’ Canadian hymnography, yet the literary historian must give him the distinction of being the first of the Pioneer Hymn Writers of Canada. The Puritan period in Nova Scotia had, however, no importance in the development of Canadian Literature.

The literature produced by the Loyalists in Nova Scotia, on the other hand, was fundamental in the evolution of Canadian Literature. For the most part, the Loyalists were members of the cultured Tory or aristocratic families of New England and the other Atlantic Colonies, and were highly cultured themselves. Many of them were teachers, clergymen, lawyers, jurists and officials—all graduates of Harvard, Yale, and other leading educational institutions in the lost colonies. The Loyalists brought with them their social and cultural ideals; and many of them were practised in literary expression, after the manner of the 18th century prose and verse. They were thus fitted by education and powers of literary expression to reconstruct, as they did, the civilization and culture of Nova Scotia, and to produce, as they did, the first Nativistic Literature of Canada. How they accomplished these creative results is an instructive study by itself.

During the American Revolution the Loyalists were aristocratic families with an ardent British sentiment. They wished to retain British connection and to promote their own institutions, with New World modifications, modelled upon British institutions. The persecutions they endured during the whole of the Revolutionary times and their forced exile to Nova Scotia did but intensify their sentiment for British connection in their new home in Nova Scotia. Yet the love for their old homeland remained, and became with them a rather poignant nostalgia. It was, however, the old homeland they loved; but for the people of the United States they had no sentiment save scorn and hate.

All the while, therefore, they retained in their minds and hearts the so-called ‘United Empire’ ideal. But at length this became a problem which took the form of an inner debate as to whether they should cast aside all thoughts of bringing about a re-union of British North America (that is, the Canadas and the Maritime Provinces) and the United States, or whether they should promote a new United Empire in the land over the border from the United States. It must be admitted, however, that on the side of ardency of sentiment the Loyalists in Nova Scotia really felt more a nostalgia for their old homeland than they felt a love for Great Britain and the establishment of a great British nation in the lands north of the United States.

It is this nostalgia which first finds expression in the Loyalist literature produced in Nova Scotia; and it finds its fullest expression in verse. Several names—Jacob Bailey, Jonathan Sewell, Joseph Stansbury, Jonathan O’Dell, Adam Allen, James Moody, Mather Byles, Walter Bates—are noted by literary historians as paramount in the early Loyalist literature. There is, however, nothing of genuine literary merit in their poetry, prose narratives, and diaries. Of these early Loyalist writers Jonathan O’Dell is somewhat significant. He introduced into Nova Scotia the verse forms and temper of the 18th century poetic satirists, Dryden and Pope.

Time, at length, wrought changes in the hearts of the Loyalists, and they began to look away from the United States and to take a pride in their new home; to look with affection upon Nova Scotia and to express a decent regard for England, the Motherland. As it were, the grapes in the United States had soured, and the Loyalists in Nova Scotia began to look on the Revolutionists as their inferiors in birth, culture and civilization. The true ideals, in their view, were in the aristocratic culture and the political system of the new Provinces and England. Once this spirit of contempt for United States culture and civilization became thoroughly engendered, the separation of the Loyalist community in Nova Scotia from all United States connection was complete. Whereupon the Loyalists felt that the only right course to pursue was for them to unite with the Puritan settlers who had preceded them to Nova Scotia, and to develop a civilization and culture all their own.

This they proceeded to do by laying the foundations of Journalism in Nova Scotia. The first journalistic ventures in Nova Scotia happen also to be the first in Canada. The first newspaper had been founded at Halifax in 1752: that is, eight years before the Puritan Migration; but it was a government organ and not a real newspaper. But on March 17th, 1776, when the British troops evacuated Boston, John Howe, Loyalist and printer, also left Boston and with him went the press of the Boston News-Letter. Eventually it reached Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the News-Letter was amalgamated with the Halifax Gazette. In 1789 The Nova Scotia Magazine was founded, printed, and edited by John Howe. This was the first literary magazine published in British North America. Thus, under Loyalist auspices and literary traditions, journalism began in Nova Scotia, that is, in Canada.

Further: Loyalist newspapers and Loyalist magazines, founded at Halifax, and later at St. John, that is, Loyalist Journalism, laid the foundations of literary expression and literary creation in Canada. It is beside the point to animadvert upon the aesthetic values of the substance and form of the original prose and verse which appeared in the Loyalist newspapers and magazines. For, up till the time of Joseph Howe’s becoming sole owner and editor of The Novascotian, in 1828, all the literary work that had preceded was but a preparatory school of journalism and literature. When The Novascotian was founded by Joseph Howe, and when Thomas Chandler Haliburton, with Howe himself and others, began to contribute to it, journalism itself became literature, and the first Nativistic Literature of Canada was created.

The Loyalists, we must remember, though they came from a country in which the social and political ideals were democratic, were themselves aristocratic. When, therefore, they bethought themselves of founding a college, their ideal was that of a college which would preserve the curriculum of Colleges open only to those who were well to do. The University of King’s College was begun as an Academy at Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1787, was granted a Collegiate Charter in 1789, and was formally opened as a College in 1790. It was indeed open to all the Province—to all those who could afford to attend. But in 1802 this policy of seeming democratic inclusiveness was abrogated by an Imperial Government Act which limited the privilege of matriculation to members of the Church of England. Since seventy-five per cent. of the population of Nova Scotia were members of other communions, the great majority of possible students were shut out from King’s College. When, therefore, the Scots émigrés who settled at Pictou in 1773, found their children debarred from education at King’s College, they established in 1819 a new College. Education at Pictou Academy, as it has always been called, was open to students of all creeds, races, and color, as it is to this day. From that Academy went forth men and women who held up to the people of their own country and the rest of Canada the two ideals of the supreme worth of the individual human spirit and of sound elementary education as the basis of constructive good citizenship. From Pictou Academy went forth men and women who became leaders in thought and practical endeavor in Canada—superior teachers and presidents of Colleges, eloquent preachers, distinguished scientists, men of practical vision and achievement in the professions, in government and statesmanship, and in industry and commerce. Their influence, however, was intellectual and practical. Save in the field of journalism, they had no influence on literature and literary creation in Canada.

In Lower Canada and in the district that became Upper Canada, or Ontario, the earlier Loyalist Migrations brought with them a lower level of culture than that which was brought into the Maritime Provinces by the Loyalists who had migrated to Nova Scotia, which at the time included the territory that in 1784 became the Province of New Brunswick. This is not a matter of opinion or prejudice; it is a matter of fact. For the Loyalists who migrated to Nova Scotia were from the most cultured families in the Old Colonies, and even the men of the Loyalist Regiments were of a superior order of character and mind. So that the Loyalists who settled in Nova Scotia formed, as Dr. Baker phrases it, ‘an educated class seldom found in a pioneer community—a homogeneous community unique in origin, with a local pride not found in other sections.’

The so-called Overland Loyalists, on the other hand, who moved into the Niagara Peninsula and into Quebec were on the whole of humbler social status—agricultural workers, artisans, and a considerable number of irresponsible adventurers, who joined the Migrations in the hope of obtaining cheap lands and something for nothing. They were led, of course, by men of parts, but even these men had neither literary culture nor literary interests. Their interests were material, and they ‘headed’ a Loyalist motley so as to have the means and labor necessary to occupy the lands and clear them for their own materialistic ends. And so it happened that while in Quebec and in the settlements in the district which was to become Ontario there were literary activities, and even newspapers and magazines, the Overland Loyalists did not contribute constructively to the literary spirit and the creative literature of Canada.

The first genuine Nativistic Literature of Canada was created in Nova Scotia—in the Satiric Comedy or Humor of Haliburton, in the Sketches, Essays, Legislative Reviews, Speeches and Public Letters and the Poetry of Joseph Howe, and in the Poetry of Oliver Goldsmith, 2nd, a great-nephew of the author of The Deserted Village. Still, this pre-eminence given to Nova Scotia is, in a way, based on a half-truth. It is true that, to put it colloquially, Nova Scotia had her creative literary ‘innings’ early in the game. It lasted from the publication of Joseph Howe’s Western Rambles, in 1828, or from the publication of Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, in 1829, to Haliburton’s last volume, The Season Ticket, published anonymously in 1859—that is, a period of thirty years.

Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were again to have an ‘innings’ when Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Marshall Saunders, of the Systematic School of native poets and prose writers, began publishing in the late ‘eighties’ of the 19th century. The Maritime Provinces, as a whole, by the addition of Lucy M. Montgomery to the native prose writers and William E. Marshall and Robert Norwood to the native poets, had a still further short ‘innings.’ But, it must be recalled, contemporaneously with Haliburton and Howe in Nova Scotia, certain writers in Ontario and Quebec, namely, first, John Richardson, Rosanna Mullins, and William Kirby, produced historical romances, or a ‘nativistic’ literature in prose, and, later, through the poetry of Sangster and Mair, Ontario produced Nativistic Literature in verse. Since the rise of the Systematic School, the centre of literary creation in Canada has shifted from Nova Scotia to Ontario and Western Canada.

Incidental Pioneer Literature

Broadly taken, the Incidental Pioneer Literature of Canada was produced by the wits and bon vivants amongst the officers of the British army and navy during or after the taking of Louisburg and Quebec, and by certain ‘birds of passage,’ British-born men and women, who were sojourning in the Canadas. It was considerable in quantity, embracing verse, narratives, social and nature studies and sketches, and even fiction. But it did not affect the life and ideals of the people. It was simply literature produced in the Canadas—incidentally.

From Louisburg to Quebec and Montreal the poets in the British navy and army exhibited a special preoccupation with a species of war poetry. In 1759, for instance, when the British frigate’s guns were breaching the walls of the French stronghold, Louisburg, Valentine Neville penned his poem The Reduction of Louisburgh. In 1760, George Cockings produced another war poem for the delight of London—The Conquest of Canada, or The Siege of Quebec: A Tragedy. In this species of literature, the most remarkable performance was Henry Murphy’s The Conquest of Quebec: An Epic Poem in Eight Books. It was published at Dublin in 1790 and runs to the amazing length of eight thousand lines. Quantity, not literary quality, was the only distinguishing mark of these early Canadian poems of heroism in war.

A really remarkable book, with genuine literary quality was the elder Alexander Henry’s narrative of his experience as a traveller and explorer, published in 1809 under the title Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories. In point of publication it was anticipated by narratives dating as early as 1736, when John Gyles wrote his memoirs of Odd Adventures, an account of his experience while exploring the region through which runs the St. John River. There were many volumes of narratives, but the most of them lacked literary style and are of interest chiefly to the antiquarian.

Two women, however, deserve special notice as contributors to the Incidental Literature of Canada. These were Mrs. Frances Brooke, who was the wife of a chaplain of the forces at Quebec in the last quarter of the 18th century; and Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson. While a resident of the Province of Quebec, Mrs. Brooke wrote what has been called ‘the first Canadian novel,’ The History of Emily Montague. Published in 1769, it ran into several editions. Mrs. Jameson possessed a rare pictorial sense of beauty in nature; and while visiting the Canadas she wrote Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Published in three volumes at London in 1838, this work remains to this day the finest example of ‘color writing’ in the whole range of Canadian Literature.

With the exception of Mrs. Brooke and Mrs. Jameson, the writers of the Incidental Pioneer Literature of Canada merely took a passing view of what had interested them and put it into literary form decent enough for publication. It was the substance of what they wrote, not the style or literary art in their books, that interested their public in the Canadas, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The only faculty these books satisfied or delighted was the faculty of curiosity; and the only delights they really gave readers were vicarious thrills of adventure and wonder.

The Incidental Literature of Canada, therefore, must be merely noted as fact. In nowise, whether it be literature or not, had it any real influence in developing a Canadian sentiment or in awakening a Canadian literary spirit. Mrs. Brooke wrote her novel, The History of Emily Montague, strictly in imitation of the first English novelist, Samuel Richardson. But Canadian fiction, in any real sense, did not begin with Mrs. Brooke. It began with a native-born Canadian, John Richardson, who wrote historical romance, notably Wacousta, after the manner of, though not in imitation of, Fenimore Cooper.

By the Emigré Literature of Canada we mean in general the poetry and prose written in Canada by permanent residents who were not born in any of the British North American Provinces. It is a moot question whether the literary historian should class the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford and of William Henry Drummond under the category of Emigré Canadian Literature. They were born outside of Canada; but they came to Canada at an age when their minds were young and unformed and readily susceptible to Canadian influences, naturalistic, social, and spiritual. Poets like Heavysege and John Reade came to Canada when their minds were mature and their attitudes to life were fixed. It is certain that Valancy Crawford and W. H. Drummond did write from the Canadian point of view and did influence Canadian literature, as well as contribute, somewhat uniquely, to its quantity and quality. It is equally certain that several of the maturely minded émigré writers influenced, by their presence and example, the development of Canadian Literature.

From the point of view of influence, both of production and example, we include in the one category of Emigré Literature the poetry and prose of the permanent residents who came to Canada when mature in mind and of those who came in childhood. With the exception of the poetry of Miss Crawford and W. H. Drummond the Emigré Literature of Canada is derivative in form and substance. In Miss Crawford’s case we discover a considerable element of Canadian theme and a form of her own. In the case of Drummond we come upon what Louis Fréchette has called a ‘Pathfinder’—a poet with a new substance and a new form absolutely and uniquely indigenous to Canada.

Though Confederation in 1867 sounded the death knell of the Emigré Literature of Canada, actual production of it continued for a decade or two past Confederation. It may be said to have lasted for about a hundred years; or from the Fall of Montreal in 1760 till the publication of Charles G. D. Roberts’ In Divers Tones (1887) twenty years after Confederation.

In the first form, it was strictly pioneer literature, and naturally had the crudity of thought and structure which belong to literature composed under unsettled conditions. Gradually it came to have better aesthetic substance and artistic form. This growth in it from crudity to decent literary form evolved according to the social and spiritual development of Canada in the Pioneer and the later Pre-Confederation periods. As existence in Canada became more and more settled, and education and culture became more and more distributed and appreciated, the literature produced in the country was written more and more to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities and the artistic conscience. The reason for this is that when an émigré writer, such as Mrs. Susanna Moodie, undertook to write social and nature sketches, the substance counted for everything, and the form and movement were free, unhampered by traditional laws of expression. It was speech transcribed on paper. But the émigré poets were bound by English models according to which they must write, or not write at all. In émigré verse, therefore, rather than in émigré prose, we observe evidences of an evolution in substance and artistic structure.

John Fleming came to Montreal early in the 19th century. Suddenly his imagination grew poetic wings, and forthwith he produced An Ode of the Birthday of King George III. He made his poem as intellectualized and stilted with imitative poetic phrases as he possibly could. There was nothing Canadian about it. In 1830 Adam Kidd, who came to Canada from Ireland, produced a volume of poetry, The Huron Chief and Other Poems, which is definitively Canadian in theme and is remarkable for really engaging descriptions of Canadian scenery. It is in a traditional English form, but from the point of view of its substance it may be regarded as the first example of a genuinely Canadian poem by an émigré writer, as distinguished from a ‘nativistic’ writer, as, for instance, Oliver Goldsmith, 2nd, who was born in Nova Scotia and published The Rising Village in 1825.

The names and work of the émigré versifiers might be extended so as to include several significant poets, such as Charles D. Shanly, James McCarroll, Alexander McLachlan, William Wye Smith, Thomas D’Arcy McGee and others down to John Reade, who published The Prophecy of Merlin and Other Poems in 1870. In their verse we note a constantly increasing regard for aesthetic substance and artistic craftsmanship. The name and work, however, of one émigré poet deserves special notice, more particularly because he is constantly being classified as a Canadian poetic dramatist. This was Charles Heavysege.

Heavysege was thirty-seven years of age when he arrived in Canada. The accident of his having remained in Canada and of having published at Montreal his Saul, which, as a matter of fact, had been conceived in England, does not give him as much right, if any at all, to be considered a Canadian émigré poet as attaches to Kidd or Mrs. Moodie.

Saul was published in 1857. As a poetic drama there is no other poem which was written in Canada that is so much in the grand manner. Its theme is Biblical, and it is really treated with epic grandeur and romantic intensity. But with all its excellences, it had no influence, by way of example, on subsequent Canadian poetic dramatists, such as Charles Mair, Wilfred Campbell, or Robert Norwood. The first Canadian poetic dramatist, native-born, was Charles Mair. Though the theme of his Tecumseh is not so sublimated as Heavysege’s Saul, it is Canadian; and though its style is not so altiloquent as that of Saul, Mair’s Tecumseh is an original and notable contribution to the ‘nativistic’ literature of Canada.

It was really, however, the later émigré men of letters, particularly John Reade and George Murray, who by their own work in verse and in literary criticism held up the ideal of native production of worthy poetry in Canada. They were active in the first and second decade after Confederation. They did much to awaken the literary spirit in Canada and to correct the literary or artistic conscience of native-born writers. But when they had done this, their work for Canadian Literature was at an end.

Archibald McLachlan came to Canada in his twenties and he followed, in much of his writing, the themes, the dialect, and even the stanza-forms of Robert Burns. Both poets were intensely patriotic, both sang the gospel of the brotherhood of man. To both life was very much a mystery, a mystery tinged with pathos. The work of McLachlan which may be regarded as purely Canadian in tone and subject is found chiefly in the depiction of scenes of pioneer life, treated objectively: The Fire in the Woods, The Old Hoss, The Backwood’s Philosopher; and in The Emigrant he projected a pioneer epic, which opens with an apostrophe to Canada and traces the progress of the emigrant from the old land to his arrival and settlement in the new. The cutting of the first tree, the building of the log-cabin and the Indian battle are successive incidents of the poem. The style of the poem is rather formal, and recalls Scott’s Lady of the Lake, but is without so much life or color. The poet loved the spirit of freedom and independence which he found in the new land and voiced this love in some stirring patriotic lyrics, such as Hurrah for the New Dominion.

Although William Wye Smith left Scotland in his infancy and was for almost four score years a Canadian by adoption, almost all his writings show the influence of the language, the literature, the history, the religious and philosophic spirit of his homeland. A deep spiritual note is present in many of his lyrics. Yet he did on occasion enter fully into the Canadian spirit and show an appreciative understanding of Canadian conditions, the beauties of Canadian landscape, historic themes and national aspirations. Some of his best known poems are: The Second Concession of Deer, The Sheep-washing, Ridgeway, The Burial of Brock, Here’s to the Land!, Canadians on the Nile.

There was one émigré poet who deserves detailed appreciation as a creative interpreter of Western chevalerie and as a lyrist with an exquisite fancy and delicate artistry. This was Isabella Valancy Crawford. Born in Ireland in 1850, she came to Canada when but a child of eight years, her family settling in Ontario, and, later, moving to the Kawartha Lakes. Her father was a physician and it must be presumed that the daughter came under cultural influences in her home. More important is the fact she lived in Canadian districts which must have peculiarly affected her young, impressionable, and receptive mind. Undeniably she was born a poet; that is to say, she was born with a genius for seeing spiritual beauty and meaning in all common things, natural and human. Thus gifted and thus left free to be impressed by Canadian Nature and life around her, and also by Nature and life in the Western prairie regions, of which she had read, Valancy Crawford set about imaginatively to interpret and express in verse her appreciation of Nature and life in Canada.

Whether it was her sheer genius that created her sympathy with pioneer and cowboy life in Western Canada, or whether it was her imaginative sympathy with that life that fired her poetic faculty, is a question in literary psychology that does not here require discussion. The outstanding fact is that Miss Crawford’s most notable faculty was a profound sympathy with and a clear vision of the elemental dignity of the heart of men and women whose lot was cast in rude and unspiritualizing circumstances. It was out of this sympathy that she was able to handle her themes of Western chevalerie with a subtle, veracious, and genuinely human but not coarse humor. Miss Crawford saw, as no one in Canada before her or since has seen, the poetry and the poetic or religious significance of life and chevalerie in the early days in Western Canada. She took the rude material and sublimated it, not with rhetoric, but rather with verisimilitude of diction and phrase and imagery, to the dignity and beauty of authentic poetry.

We may summarize the qualities of her poetry of Western chevalerie, as in her Old Spookses’ Pass, under four distinctions. It is noted for dramatic (not melodramatic) force, rugged but characteristic humor, graphic character-drawing, and power of conveying to us the sense of the war of the elements which is felt by the wild creatures, such as cattle herds, who become the ‘playthings’ of those elements. The extraordinary fact is that, though all these qualities were, on her part, sheer imaginative invention, yet they are truer to the facts than if they had been written by an actual eye-witness. In short, Miss Crawford, as a poet of Western chevalerie, stands out as gifted with sheer and intense imaginative power and as an authentic imaginative creator.

Nevertheless, her art is all authentic realism, totally free from crass and hectic melodrama. Moreover, Miss Crawford achieved, not solely because she had imagination and a true sense of realistic values, but also because she saw that style in poetry was the only antiseptic for picaresque realism and hectic melodrama. She had genius, not merely a tale to tell.

Certainly Lowell, Bret Harte, John Hay, and others of their school, writing in dialect, did no better work than did Miss Crawford in Old Spookses’ Pass; and most certainly Robert Service did nothing so elementally human and so spiritualizing with his material from rude or picaresque life in Canada.

We shall not wait to detail the qualities of Miss Crawford’s art in other species of verse. We observe, however, that her long poem Malcolm’s Katie is specially remarkable for fine imagery, colorful descriptive passages, and for a glowing impressionism which is taken directly from Canadian Nature. Moreover, it is notable for its lyrical interludes, which as lyrics, are as dainty and as delicately constructed, as full of fancy and imagination in small form, as any one of the kind in English literature. Miss Crawford’s lyrical interlude, beginning ‘O, Love builds on the azure sea,’ is beyond criticism, and is ‘the gem’ of several Canadian anthologies. We quote the whole lyric:—

As an outstanding example of Miss Crawford’s genius and art in lyrical impressionism, Canadian Literature contains nothing more colorful and musical than her ‘Lily-Song’ from Malcolm’s Katie:—

When, in 1884, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s unpretentious little volume of poems appeared, it won high praise from the critics of the London Athenaeum, The Spectator, The Graphic, and The Illustrated London News. They all noted that she had an excess of riches in fancy and in imagination, and a poetic style of her own which was distinguished both by beauty and exquisite artistry. In 1905 her poems were collected and edited by John W. Garvin, B.A., and published with a critical Introduction by Miss Ethelwyn Wetherald. This remains the definitive edition of the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford, whom Miss Wetherald describes as ‘a brilliant and fadeless figure in the annals of Canadian literary history.’

The Canadian Emigré writers in the Pre-Confederation period, are, then, to be appreciated by the literary historian as men and women who, first, drew attention to the fact that Canadian life and culture needed expression and, next, awoke in native-born sons and daughters of the Dominion the ambition to undertake this expression in verse and prose. We must, therefore, honor the earlier and later émigré poets and prose writers of Canada, not for the intrinsic merit of their work, but for the fact that they engendered in the native-born the ideal of expressing the consciousness of a Canadian homeland and spirit in literature which should possess originality in substance, and beauty in form and in technical artistry.

The quotations from Isabella Valancy Crawford’s work in this chapter are from The Collected Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford, edited by John W. Garvin, B.A., (Ryerson Press: Toronto).

Joseph Howe

The epithet nativistic as applied to Canadian Literature marks a two-fold contrast. On one side, it distinguishes the literature written by natives of any of the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas (Ontario and Quebec) from the earlier Incidental or Émigré Literature. On the other side, it distinguishes the literature written by native-born men and women before Confederation from the Native and National Literature written by native-born poets and prosemen after Confederation. Nativistic Literature is ‘native’ only in the sense of being the indigenous product of the Unconfederated Provinces; but it is neither ‘native’ nor ‘national’ in the sense of being the product of the Confederated Provinces which form the Dominion of Canada. But since this Nativistic Literature was written by native-born sons and daughters of the Provinces in a period when these Provinces were, so to put it, ‘on the way’ to political union, and since it has permanent significance, it is classified retroactively as part of the genuine literature of Canada. Thus Richardson’s romances (written and set in Ontario), Haliburton’s satiric comedy (written and set in Nova Scotia), Sangster’s and Mair’s poetry (written and set in Ontario) belong to the Nativistic Literature of Canada. But the poetry of Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Campbell, D. C. Scott, Sir Gilbert Parker, and Pauline Johnson, and the prose fiction of Miss Marshall Saunders, Roberts, Parker, and Scott, as well as the verse and prose of later native-born writers, belong to the Native and National Literature of Canada. Yet both the Nativistic and the Native and National Literature are equally Canadian, inasmuch as each expresses with beauty or truth the spirit and life of the people and the physiognomy and moods of Nature in her seasons in Canada.

The most significant writer, at least by versatility of genius and variety of achievement, in the history of the Nativistic Literature of Canada, was Joseph Howe, born at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1804. Solely as a man of letters, Howe must be regarded as having been, from the point of view of Nova Scotia and of Canada, a man of superior creative genius. He, along with Haliburton, inaugurated the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature of Canada. He laid the foundations of Canadian Creative Journalism and Canadian Political Literature. He was the ‘father’ of Canadian Literary and Forensic Oratory. He gave fresh life and novel humorous quality to the Familiar Sketch or Light Essay, after the manner but not in imitation of Addison and Goldsmith. He was the first writer in British North America to attempt the Short Story of Mystery, and with engaging success. He was a Poet of greater authentic genius than many other Canadian poets who have a wider reputation. For he wrote poetry of Nature and the Commonplace with the beauty and distinction of Goldsmith and Burns. He infused into the Patriotic Song a new music and what may be regarded as the first expression of the National spirit in verse of that species. He gave to the Convivial Song a fresh Western ‘tang’ of breeziness and genial humanity. He revitalized, with novel originality and piquancy, the Poetry of Humor, so originally indeed as to make his humorous poetry almost a species by itself. Finally, he discovered the genius of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, trained him, sponsored him, and introduced him to the world as the first systematic humorist of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

In 1704, or just one hundred years before the birth of Joseph Howe, the Boston News-Letter, the first New England newspaper, was established. On March 17th, 1776, or seventy-two years after the founding of the News-Letter, the press of that journal departed from Boston for Halifax, via Newport, R.I., in the care of John Howe, father of Joseph Howe; and was set up in the office of the Halifax Gazette, founded in 1752, the first newspaper published in any of the Provinces which later became the Dominion of Canada. The News-Letter was amalgamated with The Gazette. The latter, however, was not a genuine newspaper; it was a governmental organ which published chiefly military and official intelligence. The News-Letter was, in our sense of the word, a genuine newspaper. On the face of the fact, the amalgamation of the New England and the Nova Scotia newspapers appears as a simple, unmeaningful business matter. Really, however, it was an important factor in the evolution of Canadian literature.

John Howe was a printer, and a cultured Loyalist. He brought to Nova Scotia two ideals. These were, first, the ideal of the free and democratic expression of the spirit in word and deed; and, secondly, the ideal of the expression of thought in strictly literary form. When, therefore, the Boston News-Letter was amalgamated with the Halifax Gazette, Loyalist culture and journalistic ideals and practice infected and enhanced Nova Scotian (that is, Canadian) journalism. The amalgamation changed the scope and quality of Canadian journalism. For in 1828 Joseph Howe became sole owner and editor of The Novascotian, and proceeded systematically, and with better effect, to put into practice the social, journalistic, and literary ideals of his father.

When Joseph Howe assumed absolute control of The Novascotian, in the same year (1828) he also brought together the band of Nova Scotia writers known as ‘The Club.’ In the twenty years from 1828, when Howe became active in creative journalism, to 1847, when the struggle for Responsible Government in Nova Scotia ended and Howe retired from The Novascotian, Howe raised journalism to the dignity of literature. He achieved this in two ways: first, by publishing in The Novascotian his own and Haliburton’s original ‘Club’ prose sketches, Haliburton’s first series of The Clockmaker, and the prose and verse of other contemporary Nova Scotia writers; and, secondly, by establishing, in his own narrative and descriptive sketches, essays, legislative reviews, reported legislative speeches, pamphlets, and public letters, a new standard of literary prose. Those twenty years—1828 to 1848—may be called the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature of Canada.

The epithet, ‘independent,’ as applied to the literature of that period in Nova Scotia means that Howe, along with Haliburton, set up standards of prose which in substance and style broke away from English traditions and models. Howe’s and Haliburton’s writings were not only an indigenous product of Nova Scotia, a native literature, but also a new literature, absolutely independent of other literatures—in matter, form, and style. Moreover, The Novascotian, in which were published the skits, sketches, essays, and letters of ‘The Club,’ the sketches and essays of Howe, the first of the Sam Slick humorous sketches, and, later, the texts of Howe’s literary and forensic orations and public letters, circulated not only in the Maritime Provinces and the Canadas but also in the United States and Great Britain. The Novascotian thus introduced Howe and Haliburton, as creative prose writers, to the literary world. We may, therefore, mark the twenty years from 1828 to 1848 as the Epoch of the First Nativistic Literature of Canada.

Howe’s own creative literary work by itself deserves particular notice, inasmuch as it was a distinct contribution to the genuine Nativistic Literature of Canada. In 1828 Howe himself began a series of narrative and descriptive writings, intimate, gossipy ‘genre’ and ‘color’ sketches, which he published in The Novascotian and which he named Western Rambles. In 1830 he followed these with a similar series which he named Eastern Rambles. In 1838 and in 1839, while he and Haliburton were in Europe, Howe published in The Novascotian two series of essay-like sketches, The Nova Scotian Afloat and The Nova Scotian in England, in which it appeared that Howe was developing for himself a new literary style. For though these sketches are somewhat in the manner of Goldsmith they have a merely outward essay-like formality, but are distinguished by an originality of their own, an inward spirit of fresh humor and a humanity, almost urbanity, which are wholly Howe’s own creation.

In another department Howe added creatively to the prose literature of Canada. He laid the foundations of a political literature, which was not journalism, but authentic literature. He did this, first, by his inimitable so-called Legislative Reviews, when, in 1830, he began what is admitted by all critics to be in literary form and style a brilliant series of discussions of public affairs. Again: Howe enhanced the political literature of Canada by his pamphlets, public letters and his speeches and addresses, which were all published in the press.

It is not, however, by his legislative reviews, pamphlets, essays, sketches and public letters that Howe must be given a unique status in Canadian creative prose literature. He wins his unique status by virtue of his Speeches and Orations. They are really ‘great’—noble in thought, beautiful in literary style and finish, extraordinarily fine examples of a Western reincarnation of the rhetorical and literary gifts of such consummate parliamentarians and statesmen as Edmund Burke, John Bright, and William Ewart Gladstone.

Finally: Howe contributed to the Nativistic creative literature of Canada considerable journalistic verse which, in virtue of its humanity, and sincerity, its imaginative beauties, pleasing conceits and sentiments, and flowing rhythms (though it lacks somewhat in original verbal music) is quite on the plane of the journalistic verse of the 18th century neo-classical school, especially the verse of Goldsmith, upon which most of the verse of Howe was modelled. Howe wrote inspiriting Imperial verse, as, for instance, his Flag of Old England, a really fine example of patriotic poetry. He wrote colorful and musical descriptive verse, as, for instance, his long unfinished poem Acadia (in the 18th century rhymed couplet). He wrote infectious humorous poetry, as, for instance, The Blue Nose, To Mary, A Toast (to Haliburton), which is as near poetry as that species of verse ever reaches.

If Johnson and Goldsmith raised journalistic verse to the plane of poetry, so did Joseph Howe. Or, concretely, if Goldsmith’s Deserted Village is authentic poetry, so is Howe’s Acadia. Consider this excerpt from Howe’s Acadia:—