Chronicles of Avonlea, a volume of short stories, contains some of her most finished work, showing that perfect art that conceals all art, and abounding in a strong vein of simple humour that is found in all her work.

The Story Girl and The Golden Road are written with even less attention to a central plot than the earlier ‘Anne’ books. They are somewhat loosely connected series of incidents in which the same characters take part. But the community type of fiction does not demand thrilling plots. Other writers can write plot stories, but most other writers do not hold before us the mirror of Canadian country life.

Kilmeny of the Orchard is in a sense but an expanded short story. It is a prose love idyll and does not, perhaps, bulk very large when compared with the other books. It is really one of the extended ‘chronicles’ of Avonlea.

The story of Anne Shirley continues through several volumes—Anne of the Island pictures her college days; Anne’s House of Dreams sees her established as mistress of her own home; while Rilla of Ingleside carries over the history into the second generation, Rilla being the daughter of Anne. There is no new development of method or treatment in these. In Emily of New Moon (1923) Miss Montgomery created a new child character, with a new environment, new conditions, and a new group of minor personages, yet in effect it is of the same type and in the same literary field as her previous novels. The chief difference to be observed is that she employs a more analytic psychological method in depicting her heroine—a method that tends to produce an adult’s story of youth. In a way it marks an advance in literary technique but is not as yet entirely divorced from that minute objective observation which makes equal appeal to the young in years and the young in heart.

The particular type of rural community which is the background of Marian Keith’s stories may be duplicated in many parts of Canada and is quite common in older Ontario—a community originally settled by Scottish Presbyterians and afterwards leavened with just enough English and Irish to throw into relief the chief characteristics of each nationality.

One cannot escape the fact of a marked similarity to the work of J. M. Barrie in his tales of Thrums. There is, however, this difference: Barrie is more restrained in his emotions, more abbreviated and less poetic in his descriptions, more pawky and less boisterous in his humor; in fine, Barrie is Scotch, Marian Keith is Scottish-Canadian.

As in most novels of the community type, the interest lies in incident and characterization. The noblest character of all her stories, the best drawn, is the grand old mystic Highlander, ‘Duncan Polite,’ the spiritual watchman of Glenoro. The incidents of this story are woven mainly around the path of the young minister, while the other Glenoro novels centre about the personages of chief interest in a rural community—Silver Maple, the school teacher; Treasure Valley, the young doctor. The End of the Rainbow and The Bells of St. Stephens are studies of town life. Lizbeth of the Dale and In Orchard Glen are character studies of a boy and a girl respectively. The same qualities prevail in all these. Little Miss Melody builds an engaging picture of the community of Cherry Hill around a fresh and original young girl character. The keynote of Marian Keith’s stories is ‘service.’ Her work as a whole gives a faithful picture of the social and religious life of a certain type of rural Canadian settlement, and Canadian town.

Mrs. McClung’s ‘community’ depicted in Sowing Seeds in Danny was a little western town, with certain elements of the usual population crossing its pages. The poor immigrant girl, the young English gentleman learning to farm, the doctor, the preacher, the would-be politician are faithfully portrayed. Most interesting of all is Mrs. Watson, the hard-working washerwoman and her family of nine children. The fortunes of Pearlie Watson are the theme of a sequel, The Second Chance, in which the setting in a rural settlement, while The Black Creek Stopping House is a collection of short stories. Later the career of Pearl Watson is continued in Purple Springs, but this novel shades into a sort of politico-propagandist treatise. Human interest and news quality with a ready-made style to correspond has caught the public interest in Mrs. McClung’s work rather than any conspicuous artistry of method.

2. The Institutional Novel.

From looking at the life of fixed communities or localities, the next step is to consider them in their relation to what we might call certain ‘institutions’ of our national life, growth, or conditions. We saw that R. E. Knowles in St. Cuthbert’s made the Scottish Presbyterian Church the dominating influence of that story. In this sense, the life of the railroad or construction camp is an ‘institutional’ rather than a local or community life. This has been excellently portrayed by Frank L. Packard in his collection of short stories, On the Iron at Big Cloud: Alan Sullivan’s The Passing of Oul-I-But contains some splendid stories of this type. Here also we would place the sea stories of Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.

Norman Duncan’s peculiar field is the ragged coasts and savage seas of Newfoundland and the hard, cruel, tempest-battered life of the Newfoundland fisherman. When The Way of the Sea was published (1904), Frank T. Bullen, himself a master-maker of sea stories, wrote in a foreword: ‘I am absolutely certain that with the exception of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling no writing about the sea has ever probed so deeply and so faithfully into its mysteries as his.’ Duncan’s fidelity to his subject appears not only in his truthful description of the life and way of the sea, but even more in his realization and presentation of the religious side of the Newfoundland fishermen—whose stern creed was born out of a never-ceasing struggle for existence.

Norman Duncan, although he produced several novels, of which Dr. Luke of the Labrador is the most artistically constructed, is essentially a writer of short stories. Indeed, some of his novels were made simply by piecing together, with connecting material, stories that had first appeared in magazine form. As a short story writer he exhibits the finest and most desirable qualities—substantial character foundation, economy of language, sufficiency of emotional causation, and a breadth of human sympathy. His Battles Royal Down North and Harbor Tales Down North are two collections of a high order of excellence. His power to portray action makes his juvenile books—such as Billy Topsail and Company—very acceptable to the youthful mind.

Frederick William Wallace writes chiefly of Nova Scotia sailors and deep sea fishermen. He is more objective in his treatment of themes than is Duncan. While Wallace’s gift may be said to lie in his skill in producing vivid visualizations of seamanship, Duncan’s lies in realizing seamen. Wallace observes and describes the life of the sailor and the fisherman; Duncan realizes and interprets the soul. Consequently in Blue Water (1920), The Shacklocker (a collection of short stories), and The Viking Blood, have much more plot and action to them than have Norman Duncan’s novels and short stories; but they are not so intimate and convincing in character analysis, neither are they so careful nor so finished in their technique—the two styles are quite in harmony with the differing methods of treatment.

Commercial life in its sociological relationships falls under our definition of an ‘institutional’ aspect of national life. Here must be placed Alan Sullivan’s The Inner Door which reveals inside conditions and labor problems in connection with the operation of a large rubber factory; also his story of the somewhat spectacular development of a chain of allied industries at a strategic point for power and for raw material—told in The Rapids.

There are, in this period, some notable examples of Incidental Literature. Louis Hémon, a native of France, lived but a short time in Canada, yet wrote, in Maria Chapdelaine, (English translations by W. H. Blake and by Sir Andrew Macphail), a chastely poetic novel of French Canadian life. Miss J. G. Sime in Our Little Life presents, if we view it from one angle, a meticulous study of the life of a Montreal seamstress, with her pathetically frustrate love story; but more than all that, Our Little Life is an observation of the life of the Canadian people by an English mind. The literary artistry of both these works is indisputable. Some criticism has been aimed at both on the score of inaccuracy of minor facts. Whether or not there are such minor inaccuracies, there still remains the grand result that the color, the atmosphere, the outward semblance, are portrayed as they have scarce ever been before; that the inmost soul of the characters is understandingly and consistently revealed.

Education in its institutional aspect appears in many novels only incidentally. As a dominant motive or a circumscribing setting its development is comparatively recent. Miriam of Queen’s, by Lilian Vaux Mackinnon (1921), shows the molding influence of university life; The Hickory Stick, by Nina Moore Jamieson (1921), emphasises the place and importance of the rural school in rural life and problems; the great school novels of English literature find a modified echo in the boarding school stories of Ethel Hume Bennett and Gordon Hill Grahame—Judy of York Hill (1922), by the former, in which dialogue, action and atmosphere contribute effectively in conveying a picture of a girls’ school; Larry, or the Avenging Terrors (1923), by the latter, a boys’ boarding school story of lively incident.

3. The Realistic Romance.

The rapid expansion of the far West and such spectacular events as the ‘Klondike rush,’ gave a sort of feverish color to a life that previously had appeared one of toil, hardship, and stony endurance. Viewed imaginatively, that life now presented its hectic side, and the far West and the high North were exploited as literary fields of thrill, adventure, and excitement. Thus the second decade of this century saw the rise in Canada of the Realistic Romance. At its best this class of novel resembles the Community type but is speeded up with a more exciting and more complicated plot; at its worst it is lurid melodrama with realism interpreted as the portrayal of the sordid and seamy side of life. Very few of the realistic romances exhibit any distinction of manner and style. They are not concerned with the niceties of the art of telling a story but with the ability to keep the reader constantly keyed up to a high emotional tensity.

The Trail of ’98, by Robert W. Service (1910), is a story of the Yukon, with the spectacular elements of gold-rush days fully emphasised. The qualities of Service’s poetry are accentuated in his fiction. In the same year H. A. Cody began his career as a novelist with another Yukon tale, The Frontiersman. It is a story of love, adventure, and missionary experience. Rod of the Lone Patrol followed in 1912, adding a new fictional element which has been much exploited—the doings of the North West Mounted Police. Cody produced a long series of adventure novels with a variety of settings.

Other writers of the Realistic Romance speedily developed different aspects of Western life or staged their romances in different regions of the Great West or the Far North. We have room only for brief mention of some of the best known writers in this class.

Robert Stead’s novels are chiefly of the prairie farm and ranch—The Bail Jumper (1914), The Homesteader, The Cowpuncher, Dennison Grant, Neighbors. He is effective in reproducing the atmosphere of the prairie, the details of farm and ranch life, and characteristic bits of scenery; his stories are stronger in incident and action than they are in characterization.

Robert Watson began fairly well with My Brave and Gallant Gentleman (1918), a romance of England and British Columbia, that had touches of Borrow and Stevenson, but his later efforts have tended to cast themselves into more stereotyped forms. Robert A. Hood produced two adventure-romances of British Columbia, The Chivalry of Keith Leicester and The Quest of Alistair. Douglas Durkin exploited Manitoba in The Lobstick Trail. ‘Luke Allan’ (Lacey Amy) wrote several stories of cowboy life of which Blue Pete: Half Breed was significant because of the originality and individuality of its leading character.

John Murray Gibbon’s earlier fiction—in Drums Afar and Hearts and Faces—was English in its setting and concerned with psychological problems and studies of Oxford life. In transferring to an American literary habitat, he entered the ranks of the Realistic Romancers. His novel, The Conquering Hero, was a lively, melodramatic story of the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia ranches; while in Pagan Love (1923), he combined a startling mystery with an element of satire on the modern philosophy of business success.

Theodore Goodridge Roberts, younger brother of Charles G. D. Roberts, is essentially a story teller and much of his fiction shows the influence of Weyman and the historical romanticists of the latter years of the nineteenth century. His Brothers in Peril (1905), A Captain of Raleigh’s (1911), and The Harbor Master (1914) are stories of romantic adventure of very early days in Newfoundland, while Jess of the River, Rayton and Forest Fugitives have a setting in rural New Brunswick.

4. Historical Fiction.

The influences that produced the Community Novel gave to the Historical Fiction of this period a closer up view. Instead of the far-off days of the French regime, the historical field of vision became that of but a century or so past and writers essayed to revivify the times and personages of the War of 1812 or the Rebellion of 1837. A noteworthy example is C. H. J. Snider’s stories of the naval engagements on the Great Lakes, In the Wake of the Eighteen-Twelvers. With fine recreative imagination he enables us to live through incidents of daring, gallantry, and romance of these stirring battles. ‘Anison North’ in The Forging of the Pikes gives a realistic picture of Toronto of ’37, of the battle of Montgomery’s Tavern, and a pen-portrait of the rebel leader, Mackenzie. She lets us see ‘both sides of the story’ of the conditions that were responsible for the Rebellion.

A minor species of the Historical Novel is found in the novel of pioneer life which seeks to put into a permanent record pioneer experiences and conditions of sometimes considerably less than a century ago. Adeline M. Teskey did this for the Niagara Peninsula and the building of the first Welland Canal with In Candlelight Days (1914). Archie McKishnie told of the conflict of the ‘bushwhacker,’ who delighted in the freedom of the woods and streams, with the incoming tide of settlement in Love of the Wild, drawing upon the historic figure of Colonel Talbot for some of his characterization. Anison North blends a colorful picture of the enjoyment of outdoor life with a pioneer line fence feud in her Carmichael. In Kinsmen Percival J. Cooney relates a strange story of Scottish feudalism—an example of the clan system with its autocratic laird—which actually existed in Canada.

Few Canadian writers have found leisure to follow the example of Gilbert Parker in writing Historical Fiction in Old World settings, but this has quite recently been done in a highly distinctive style in novels appearing over the signature—‘E. Barrington.’ The Ladies, semi-historical stories of the eighteenth century; The Chaste Diana, a story of Polly Peacham of ‘Beggar’s Opera’ fame; The Divine Lady (1924) tells the love-story of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton.

5. Imaginative Fiction.

In one sense all fiction is imaginative. There is, however, a species in which pure imagination plays a much greater part than in the Community Novel, in Historical Fiction, or in the other types discussed in this chapter. Marjorie Pickthall’s work is the highest example of this. She wrote, not with the reproductive imagination nor with fancy, but with the faculty defined by Matthew Arnold as imaginative reason. Into the texture of her fiction she wove poetic imagination and poetic significance derived from her clear, absolute, and sympathetic understanding of the human heart and of the hidden springs and the meaning of existence, from her superior and inclusive sympathetic intelligence. Thus she was enabled to write stories of the most varied settings and of the most wildly differing characters with equal convincingness.

Little Hearts (1915), is an engaging tale of the days of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ with its conflict chiefly between loyalty to the Crown, and fidelity to the spirit of humanity. It pictures ‘little hearts,’ men of small fortunes, and small (as the world sees it) ambitions, in their pathetic existence, more pathetic because of finely brave in the midst of many both petty and heroic vicissitudes of fortune, of mean victory and noble defeat. The novel preaches no didactic moral but it silently teaches Christ’s philosophy of struggle and defeat—‘He that loseth his life shall find it.’ It impresses unforgettably how little after all are the greatest hearts, and how little we lose or gain in any defeat or triumph which is merely earthly defeat or triumph.

The Bridge (1922), has the same theme, with the pain and cruelty of love, of unfulfilled seeking, and the final triumph of a soul that saved itself by losing itself in inward self-knowledge and self-sacrifice. It is set against a background of the tremendous beauty of the Great Lakes, scenes of storm on land and water. Technically, it is farther from perfection than Little Hearts; it has less structural unity, less smoothness of style. At times the emotional situations seem overdrawn; nor are atmosphere and setting definitively localized.

The collection of short stories—Angel’s Shoes (1922)—embodies examples of Miss Pickthall’s perfect artistry as a short story writer. These stories are clear, vivid, colorful, and of almost the highest type of creative imagination. They may lack, occasionally, a warmth of humanity that is present in the work of other writers of poorer craftsmanship.

Less distinctive but belonging to the few Canadian novels of this class is The Window Gazer, by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, a romance of a man who ‘fell in love with his wife.’ Blended with the characteristics of the novel of pure imagination there are here slight touches of the Realistic Romance and the Community Novel. A somewhat curious literary phenomena is found in Mists of the Morning by this same writer, which began in the style of the Imaginative Novel and ended as a Realistic Romance.

6. Some Miscellaneous Types.

To the ranks of the Animal Romancers this period has added at least one writer who approaches the subject in a new way. The attitude was apparent in the nature passages of Gaff Linkum (1907) and became more a quality of Archie McKishnie’s work as he continued to write short stories and novels of animal life. We find it crystallized in Openway (1923). Roberts is the intellectual animal psychologist; Thompson Seton, the literary scientist; W. A. Fraser, the objective story teller; but Archie McKishnie impresses us with the sense of his comradeship with the creatures of the marsh, the wood, and the stream. He is their interpreter but not as an outside observer. He lives with them, loves them, protects them. Thus when he writes animal stories he rises to his best literary style and achieves a beauty and smoothness that is not always found in his other writing.

The detective story is represented by a series of ‘underground’ stories by Arthur Stringer; a typical example is The Wire Tappers. The setting is a large American city, and rapidity of action is the desired and supplied element. More Canadian in setting and atmosphere are Victor Lauriston’s The Twenty-First Burr and Hopkins Moorhouse’s The Gauntlet of Alceste, both well-constructed according to the requirements of this type of fiction, concealing the mystery motive skilfully up to a surprising climactic finish.

The religions and philosophies of the Orient find a slight reflection in some Canadian poetry. In fiction, the stories and novels of L. Adams Beck—The Ninth Vibration, The Key of Dreams, The Perfume of the Rainbow, The Treasure of Ho—are chiefly Oriental in themes and settings, and mark the author as an interpreter of the mysteries of the East, with an unusual beauty and originality of style.

Arthur Stringer’s trilogy of the prairie—The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, The Prairie Child—is remarkable as a study in feminine psychology and the reactions of problems of prairie life upon a feminine mind in its domestic and personal associations. The first volume in the trilogy is the most impressive because of its spontaneity, its subtle touches of color and atmosphere. The modern double-triangle element dominates and rather detracts from the originality and individuality of the latter volumes, but the series is significant as an advance from the realistic romance toward a newer realism.

7. The New Realism.

It was but natural that a reaction should set in against the realistic romance with its insufficiency of motivation and its lack of fidelity to real life. Rather remarkably this arrives in another ten-year cycle and a group of novels published in 1923 show a marked similarity of method and treatment, with widely varied themes and settings. We distinguish this fresh and original attitude as the ‘New Realism’ in Canadian fiction. The strongest of these novels undoubtedly is The Viking Heart by Laura Goodman Salverson. It might be called the epic of the Icelander in Canada, describing as it does the arrival of a party of immigrants in 1870 and following their struggles, hardships, and gradual rise of fortunes to the present day. There is no plot but such as grows out of the record of the lives of the characters. There is no melodrama, but there is the tense drama of the realities of life. The style is chaste, simple, but forceful. Back of it all lies a big theme—‘the price of country’—the realization of citizenship through toil, tears, blood, and sacrifice.

The other novels in this group are: Possession, by Mazo de la Roche, with its setting a Niagara fruit farm; Lantern Marsh, by Beaumont Cornell, following a farm boy through his struggles for an education; Cattle, by Onoto Watanna, an almost brutally realistic presentation of a man whose sole aim in life was the acquirement of cattle—as a form of wealth—whose whole outlook on life was measured in terms of cattle; The Child’s House, by Marjory MacMurchy, which enters into the heart and mind of a growing little girl.

The importance of this movement is that it has cast aside superficialities, that these writers have somehow been able to ‘see things as they are,’ to glimpse the realities of life from their real beginnings—four of the five novels named are actually rooted in ‘the soil’ as their setting and their underlying spiritual foundation. With this foundation of actuality and truth, the writers have gained a clearer and more finished expression. Some of these novels have melodramatic spots; some have other weaknesses, but, on the whole, the effect of this new movement has been to produce novels that have a definite structural unity, that are largely free from irrelevant and insignificant detail, that are written with an economy and aptness of language, and that have more definiteness and depth to their basic themes.

The Poetic Dramatists

Arthur stringer, novelist and lyric poet, showed versatility and considerable power in imaginative construction when, in 1903, he published a volume of two dramatic poems or soliloquies and one poetic drama, all on classical themes in blank verse; namely, Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna, and Sappho in Leucadia. In these works, however, Stringer was indulging an ‘avocation;’ for his genius is at its best in lyrical verse and prose fiction. Hephaestus and Persephone, even though they are written in blank verse, have all the color, music, and emotion which we associate with lyrical poetry. Sappho in Leucadia, though dramatic in form, is undramatic in movement, and is lyrical in spirit. For at the beginning Sappho, the ‘bird-throated child of Lesbos,’ has resolved to destroy herself by leaping into the sea, and Phaon’s only role is the attempt of a lover to dissuade her, but to no avail. The so-called ‘drama’ is but a series of colloquies between Sappho and Phaon. The only ‘movement’ is a psychological development in three stages—first, the original intention on Sappho’s part to destroy herself; then the arrested intention; and, finally, the intention fulfilled, in spite of Phaon’s pleading, by Sappho leaping to her death.

What Stringer has really done in Sappho in Leucadia is to take a Greek legend and to tell the simple episode of Sappho’s death, in colorful, musical, and artistic blank verse. There is no emotional poignancy in it; nothing for the heart and the moral imagination. It is all for the aesthetic sensibility, for the lover of sensuous imagery and melody. Oddly its single lyrical interlude or ‘song’ is not in ‘Sapphics,’ but is an octave in trimeters. The sensuous beauty of color and music in this quasi-poetic drama is exemplified in the following speech by Sappho:—

Stringer’s Sappho in Leucadia is an engaging and even impressive dramatic colloquy, but it is not an authentic poetic or closet drama. It has sensuous beauty but no spiritual power. But it does increase Stringer’s reputation as a verbal colorist and melodist.

In 1915 appeared an original poet of distinct spiritual power in lyrical and dramatic forms. He was Robert Norwood. His first book was a sonnet-sequence. But in 1916 he published a poetic drama, The Witch of Endor: A Tragedy; and in 1919, another poetic drama, The Man of Kerioth. In 1921 he published Bill Boram, which is a ‘dramatic tale.’

Robert Norwood has two natural gifts. More than any other Canadian poet he has an innate genius for the philosophical or mystical interpretation of good and evil in the universe. Also, he is gifted with acute insight into the inner heart of man and woman, ancient and modern. These two gifts fit him for the office of the kind of poet who by imaginative sympathy perceives the ultimate harmony of the universe, the spiritual meaning of the tragedy and comedy of existence. As a poetic dramatist, then, Norwood is a Seer; and his voice is the voice of a Prophet. Power over the heart and imagination of the people, not Beauty and Art for art’s sake, is his aim. If he is the Poet of Beauty, as he is in all his verse, lyrical and dramatic, he is more, or supremely, the Poet of Spiritual Vision and Power in his poetic dramas.

In The Witch of Endor Norwood returns to the Biblical theme which had engaged Heavysege—the love romance and tragedy of King Saul. The characters are never shadowy but always alive. The dramatic movement is never held up by long or digressive moralizing speeches, as in Heayysege’s Saul, but each character makes his speeches according to the dramatic necessity, enough and no more, thus permitting at ‘the psychological moment’ the natural entrance of another character and his speech. The structure is logically developed to the tragic or spiritual climax. But in the development there is no uniform level of emotion, rather the emotion varies from gentle or pathetic to intense or tragic. It is indeed in its profounder imaginative vision, its more varying and rising degrees of emotional intensity, and its more logical structural development to a climax that The Witch of Endor has more incisive and compelling power as poetic drama than Campbell’s Arthurian drama Mordred. In short, The Witch of Endor is a beautiful and spiritual poetic drama—purging the emotions of pity and fear and transporting the spirit to the Mount of Vision where it sees intuitively how the ways of God to man are justified and how Love is greater than Faith and Hope.

In his next poetic drama The Man of Kerioth (that is, Judas Iscariot) Norwood made an advance in imaginative vision, construction, and power. He achieves this by reducing the magniloquence of the speeches and by modernly humanizing the characters of Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen, Blind Bartimaeus, Philip, and Jesus the Carpenter. He even introduces little children into the drama. The high and the vulgar and lowly, saints and sinners, the motley of society in Jerusalem, commingle intimately and humanly. There is a distinct advance in realistic truth of characterization, and the whole drama is pervaded with a winning naturalness and humanity which are not in any preceding poetic drama by a Canadian, nor even in his own succeeding ultra-realistic ‘dramatic tale of the sea,’ Bill Boram. So that in respect of creation thoroughly humanized, noble, and clearly limned character-portraiture—as, for instance, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalen, and Jesus—Norwood must be ranked as the supreme creator amongst Canadian poetic dramatists. This is a matter of sheer artistry. But Norwood also shows an advance in spiritual power. With profounder mystical vision and greater truth he justifies the ways of God to man, and exalts the spirit to the Temple pinnacle where we behold Immortal Love in all its sweet beauty of humanity and in all its white radiance of redeeming light. In The Man of Kerioth he attains his acme in spiritual beauty and power as a poetic dramatist.

So far Norwood had not created any poetic drama with a definitively Canadian theme, setting, and characters. In his Bill Boram, which is a ‘dramatic tale’ told in the third person, the characters and the action being ‘reported,’ Norwood made a fresh, novel, and impressive contribution to original Canadian Literature. In doing so Norwood dropped somewhat in imaginative truth and dramatic invention; but he rose to greater heights of mystical perception and spiritual power. The theme of Bill Boram is the redemption of the human spirit by the love of beauty in Nature. Ingenious as his conception is, Norwood committed the error of conceiving the accident of a love of flowers, that is to say, of sensuous beauty, as a possible redemptive force in human life. He would have us believe that the love of sensuous beauty can transmute itself or become transmuted into an altogether different kind of love, namely, the love of spiritual beauty and thus regenerate a coarse and brutal nature and remake it into a noble and refined spirit. Such spiritual metabolism is impossible, and Bill Boram so far forth lacks imaginative truth and dramatic power.

Aside from that, Bill Boram, on the whole, is a novel achievement in dramatic narrative. The characters are vividly and veraciously drawn; they have realistic truth. There is also an air of romance in the whole tale, such an air of vital romance as obtains in the tales and novels of the sea by Norman Duncan and Frederick William Wallace.

Summarily; Norwood’s Bill Boram is an amazing dramatic picture of rude characters in a setting of romance colored by a strange and startling commingling of coarse speech and brutalized deed and of beautiful diction and exquisite imagery. It is at once a tour de force in dramatic conception and construction and in impressionistic word-painting. Yet it is a powerful presentation of the idea of the mystical union of the human spirit with the divine through the love of pure beauty in Nature.

The Second Renaissance is noted also for the work of several other poetic dramatists. Amongst them are Dr. James B. Dollard, author of Clontarf: An Irish National Drama; Rev. Dean Llwyd, author of The Vestal Virgin; John L. Carleton, author of The Medieval Hun; A Historical Drama, and The Crimson Wing, which has the distinction of having been the winner of the first prize for original dramatic composition in the Canadian Prize Play Competition, 1918; Norah Holland, author of When Half Gods Go and Other Poems (1924), the title-poem of which has been repeated as a Christmas play for several successive seasons. These are all respectable poetic dramas and give distinction both to the quantity and the quality of poetic drama in the Second Renaissance.

But this work in poetic drama is, after all, not inspired impressing one as a stint in creation, and is not at all comparable to the work of Norwood in imaginative vision, artistic construction, and dramatic power. Comparable, however, with Norwood’s and superior to it in spiritual poignancy is the single poetic drama left by Marjorie Pickthall. Though Norwood’s poetic dramas contain lyrical interludes, and though his dramatic tale Bill Boram is for the most part rhymed, on the whole they are in blank verse. But Miss Pickthall’s single poetic drama The Wood Carver’s Wife is lyrical through and through, and is properly to be denoted as ‘lyric drama.’ In form this lyric drama stands midway between Stringer’s dramatic poems and Norwood’s poetic dramas. In that respect Marjorie Pickthall made a novel contribution to Canadian poetic literature.

The Wood Carver’s Wife was first published in The University Magazine in 1920. It was reprinted, along with other fugitive poems, in 1922, the drama supplying the title poem of the volume. The Wood Carver’s Wife has four characters, one of whom is Shagonas, an Indian lad who represents Nemesis. It is set in the time of the Intendant. The theme is ‘the eternal triangle’—a girl-wife, with a husband still alive and a secret lover. The mood of the drama is the tragedy which follows the sin of disloyalty to the sacrament of marriage, even if the disloyalty is only in the heart and never openly expressed in clandestine meeting between the wife and the lover. The mood of the dramatist, however, is not one of simply illustrating the law that the ‘soul that sinneth it shall die,’ but of wistfulness about the ways of God to men and women when spiritual unmating is permitted by Heaven. The dramatist seems to put her own feeling about the matter into her drama. She seems to feel that if the moral law is inexorable, it ought not to be so in the case of a young girl who innocently, or without knowing her own heart and what she was doing, married a man, who, after all, did not want her as an end in herself, or her spirit for its own sake, but to have her as a model for the statue of the Blessed Virgin he was creating in wood, as a chattel in his studio. Humanly, Marjorie Pickthall felt that the girl-wife was more sinned against than sinning when she allowed herself to be conscious—merely conscious—of the lover. But Marjorie Pickthall, with loyalty to the dramatic necessities, though with a spiritual wistfulness all the while, constructed the action and movement of The Wood Carver’s Wife so that the tragic ending was inevitable. For the husband knows that there is a secret lover, and Shagonas knows, and at the tragic climax it is the arrow of the Indian, representing the moral law, that sends the lover to his death. The girl-wife knows what has happened, because she has heard the twang of Shagonas’ bow-string. The tragedy is complete when she receives from Shagonas, who is again Nemesis, the sword of her lover, and dies with a mad speech on her lips, while at the same time the husband, also mad, as he was from the beginning, has Shagonas pose the beautiful dead body of the girl-wife that he may put the acme touches to his statue.

How easily the dramatist might have made certain shifts which would have resulted in reconciliation and a happy ending! But with all her spiritual wistfulness, Marjorie Pickthall loyally held to the dramatic and the artistic ideals. The climax and tragic ending are tremendous and wholly spiritualizing, purging the soul with pity for humanity through the terror which the action and the denouement awake in the spirit. There is in it all a spiritual poignancy which does not obtain in Norwood’s love-tragedy of Saul in The Witch of Endor. It is suffused with a lovely and winning beauty of diction, imagery, and verbal music; and it contains one lyric ‘cry of a soul’ which for pathos is unsurpassed in Canadian literature, namely, the Litany of Dorette, the hapless girl-wife, to the Blessed Virgin Mother beginning,

Considered critically, then, the poetic dramas of Robert Norwood and the lyric drama of Marjorie Pickthall are, from the universal point of view, authentic works of art, originally conceived and beautifully constructed, and, from the Canadian point of view, are the supreme achievements in the poetic drama of Canada.

Humorists

The name and work of Thomas Chandler Haliburton as a satirist or humorist so over-shadowed the names and works of other Canadian humorists that it is a belief, both in foreign countries and in Canada itself, that the Canadian people have no genius for humor and that, outside of Haliburton’s satiric writings, there is no significant Canadian humorous literature. All this is superstition and has been perpetuated in two ways. No Canadian literary historian has remarked the existence of other Canadian humorists, save Haliburton, though Mark Twain in his Library of American Humor has included the work of Haliburton, De Mille, Lanigan; and, secondly, no Canadian anthologist, save Lawrence J. Burpee, has collected in a single volume examples of the work of Canadian humorists.

Pre-Confederation Canadian humor is represented by the work of Haliburton, Howe, and De Mille. Of these the work of Haliburton is the significant humor of the period. In general it is satiric, a criticism of society, aiming to bring about certain reforms. No other Canadian humorist since Haliburton, not even Leacock, had or has any gifts in comic characterization. Howe had no satiric purpose. His humor, which was chiefly in verse, was written ‘for the fun of the thing.’

A native-born Canadian man of letters who has not received his due is James De Mille, poet, novelist, short story fictionist and humorist. De Mille, at least in time, anticipated the new type of American humor which is associated with the name of Mark Twain. For some months before Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad was published (1869), De Mille’s The Dodge Club, or Italy in 1859 had appeared. This volume is not to be confused with De Mille’s Dodge Club Series published in 1871, 1872, 1877 which were humorous and healthful stories for the young. If, therefore, the humor of Stephen Leacock is essentially a recrudescence of the American humor which we see in Franklin and in Mark Twain, and if Leacock read De Mille and Twain, as presumably he did, then the first of the Leacockians in Canada, to use an anachronism, was De Mille, and he is ‘the father’ of the later or the 20th century Canadian humorists beginning with Leacock. For the genius of that genre of humor, as in De Mille and Twain, is essentially exaggerated nonsense or nonsense said with a face of seriousness. De Mille’s work does not lend itself to quotation, but stylistically De Mille’s humorous prose, aside from the humor itself, is distinctly engaging or readable by virtue of its simple or popular diction.

Away from the traditional humor of the American or Haliburton style, is the more delicate imaginative humor of John Hunter-Duvar and the whimsical humor of Grant Allen. Hunter-Duvar wrote considerable humor in light ephemeral form and his stories and verse are colored with many passages of genre humor and satire. The chief basis of his reputation as a humorist of a distinct and anomalous type is found in his extraordinarily conceived narrative poem, The Emigration of the Fairies. It deserves wide reading as an example of the pure humor of fancy. Grant Allen was a novelist and scientist. He published a volume of light verse, The Lower Slopes, in which he indulged his humorous gifts in a series of satiric and entertaining verses on scientific themes. It is all essentially the humor of persiflage.

After Haliburton the extraordinary name in Post-Confederation Canadian humor is George Thomas Lanigan. He was born in the Province of Quebec and has the distinction of having founded what is now the Daily Star, of Montreal. He was a brilliant journalist and possessed unusual versatility of invention and style in prose and verse. He had all the mental gifts, and some of the faults, native to the Keltic temperament. His ebullient spirits expressed themselves in restless activity and with as ready brilliancy in verse as in prose.

His prose humor, which was published serially in The World, New York, in the first decade after Confederation, was fresh and novel and arresting. The series was published in book form under the title Fables Out of the World (1878) and were to their time what the Fables in Slang by George Ade are to our time. So compellingly did Lanigan’s Fables strike the imagination of Mark Twain that he republished seven of them in his Library of Humor. For the most part, Lanigan’s Fables are satires on the half-truths which constitute popular moral maxims. They are all mere absurdities, and mere nonsense; but they contain a larger truth than the maxims they satirize. They are sure to awake a chuckle. We quote two examples:—