Essayists and Color Writers

Canadian essays, familiar studies of life and manners, or essays in belles lettres, are too meagre in quantity and too ephemeral or slight in aesthetic substance as yet to be significant. Pure criticism of fine arts, including literature, is also slight in quantity and insignificant in form and substance. Both literary criticism and essays in belles-lettres are possible only under certain social and mental conditions. There must be a considerable degree of economic independence and leisure so as to permit writers to view Nature and existence with detachment. The writers themselves must be specially gifted with a light literary touch, a delicate sensibility to impressions from Nature and character, and a refined sense of the relative values of good and evil, tragedy and comedy, in the world, a whimsical or gracious humor and a faculty for gentle revery. In short, detachment, an eye for beauty in Nature and the human spirit and a genuine humor are necessary in writers who would achieve distinction in the field of the Familiar Essay and in Belletristic Literature. In Canada, however, where life is strenuous and where men and women must take pragmatic or moralistic attitudes to existence, detachment, humor, and a light touch are rarely possible. The result is that the belletristic literature of Canada is slight and as yet insignificant.

The most notable work of the kind appears to be the essays of Bliss Carman. He has published four volumes, considerable in quantity, on the philosophy of Nature and the Spirit, distinguished by a clear, well-knit, and readable prose style, and rich in poetic suggestiveness and spiritual power. These volumes are The Kinship of Nature, The Friendship of Art, The Poetry of Life, and The Making of Personality. Plato, the Greek Gnostics and Mystics, and the Transcendentalism of Emerson informed Carman’s heart and sublimated his imagination pantheistically and mystically. Carman applied his poetic imagination to a special philosophical interpretation and appreciation of Man’s kinship with Nature, and of the metaphysical meaning of the human personality or spirit in its relation to Nature and the universe. In truth, Carman’s prose and poetry are related as the converse and obverse sides of his inner being. Indeed the secret of the inner springs of his lyricism is to be discovered beautifully, lyrically, expressed in his prose essays.

But Carman’s essays are not prose poetry. He did not attempt, as Roberts attempted in his prose, to write impressionistic prose. Carman does not aim at mere color-writing for its own sake. What he attempts and achieves is a subtle analysis of the history of the spirit in its relations to man and to God and the whole universe. Because this was his aim, Carman was solicitous about his style—especially about clarity of diction and pure beauty of imagery, and about the simplicity and readableness of the structure of his sentences. In short, Carman’s prose style has the same simplicity and directness and chaste beauty of imagery and spiritual exaltation which we find in his lyrics. For this reason we may signalize Carman’s prose as ‘lyrical’ prose. But we are by no means to allow this epithet to connote anything like sensuous impressionism or vague imagination. It is all solid, if sublimated, thought about profound matters, addressed to the imaginative reason or the religious imagination, and addressed in a style so clear and direct and so emotionally pure that it affects the heart and the imagination lyrically.

An essayist in another style is Archibald MacMechan. Dr. MacMechan has published two volumes, The Porter of Bagdad (1901) and The Life of a Little College (1914); and he has published several booklets of essays in a series of ‘chap books.’ Dr. MacMechan is unsurpassed in Canada as a writer of the Light Essay. He differs of course from Carman in bent of genius as an essayist. Carman employs the religious or metaphysical imagination and appeals to our sensibilities. Dr. MacMechan employs the fancy. His essays are essentially, as he indicates in the title of The Porter of Bagdad, ‘fantasies’ or reveries. His style has a lightness of touch which is inviting and ingratiating, and he has a delicate and pleasant gift of humor. He is hardly Addisonian, but the substance of his essays, their diction, and the movement of his sentences engage the attention and delight the sense of form with the readiness and pleasant intrigue of the essays of Addison.

Not in so light a style and not with such playful fancy as Dr. MacMechan’s are the essays of W. H. Blake, widely known as the translator of Louis Hémon’s romantic idyll of French Canada, Maria Chapdelaine. Mr. Blake’s Brown Waters and Other Sketches, In a Fishing Country, and A Fisherman’s Luck indicate the scope and method of his essays. They are ‘sketches’ of objective experiences. They are not fantasies or reveries. The intellect, rather than the fancy, is the creative faculty most employed in them. Mr. Blake’s essays, therefore, have not the lightness and the limpidity of MacMechan’s but they contain happy revealments of Nature in Canada and of the human spirit against a background of Nature. At times, they contain patches of engaging ‘color-writing.’

In the field of systematic ‘color-writing’ Katherine Hale is an artist by herself. In aesthetic criticism Katherine Hale’s forte had always been a gift of causing the imagination and sensibilities to appreciate one art, say, music, in terms of another art, say, painting. Her musical criticism is not musical, but literary impressionism. Its effect all depends upon suggestion, particularly suggestion of color. When, therefore, Katherine Hale turned to employ her pictorial imagination in a field where the sense of color in Nature and of the ‘color of life’ would be absolutely free and directly at home, she produced work which is unique in its kind, as in her Canadian Cities of Romance (1922). The romance in this case is not the romance of sentiment and of wonder and of curiosity. It is the romance that exists for the eyes which perceive beauty in ancient by-ways, strange and eerie places, and in the dress, manners and habits of peculiar peoples in towns and cities which still retain a residue of an old and lost civilization and culture. Her Canadian Cities of Romance is a book by which to transport the pictorial imagination and to win the imaginative eye with aesthetic delights of ‘color’ in character, incident, and the dramatic movement of life. Her literary style is piquant, swift-moving, realistically faithful and yet suffused with tints from Nature’s palette and with imaginative light. Its analogue is found in the travel essays of E. V. Lucas.

In another form of the Essay, namely, the Practical, Reflective Essay, very little has been achieved, because rarely attempted, in Canada. Canadians do not seem to have the same desire as their cousins in the United States for homilies or practical preachments on the secret of ‘getting along’ in the world. An excellent, if singular, example of the Practical, Reflective Essay is The Secret of Heroism by the Rt. Hon. MacKenzie King, Premier of Canada. The Secret of Heroism is a biography of a human spirit, which, having served nobly on earth, passed, and in passing left the effluence of his life, which is still potent, to win men to the love of ‘otherworldliness.’ Aside from the matter, it is notable as an example of what is rare in Canadian prose, namely, ‘infused’ style, which requires that the matter and the form, the thought and the expression, be indivisible.

A pragmatic people, as are the Canadians, have little or no taste for the Whimsical Essay. The matter of the whimsical essay counts for nothing. Its appeal is altogether by way of piquancy in what is said. Piquancy—not mordancy! For mordancy would only make what is said satiric, and cause pain. The whimsical essay must cause mere smiles and chuckles. It must be clever—and nothing more. Canadians are beginning to turn more and more to this form of Essay. Its character and manner are well exemplified in William A. Deacon’s Pens and Pirates (1923). The essays in this volume have novelty of theme, over which plays precisely the light of a ‘whimsical’ fancy and humor. They are informed, however, with the strictly literary color of allusion and quotation from the poets and prosemen of all ages to the present, but in such an incidental and light way that there is no show of pedantry. The allusion and quotation are natural to Mr. Deacon’s professional office as a reviewer of contemporary literature. His style is journalistic in the French sense—‘style coupe’—as regards sentence length. But he adds a piquancy to it which makes it somewhat ‘winged’ and which thus pleasantly engages the sensibility.

No Canadian as yet has appeared as a systematic writer of the Critical Essay. Such essays of this genre as were published have been ‘fugitive,’ and their aim and method have been pragmatic and pedagogical rather than literary. There is, however, much room and great need in Canada for systematic Essays in Criticism which shall have dignity of thought, imaginative light, and grace or power of style, and which in themselves shall be literature. Thomas O’Hagan’s Essays in Canadian Literature are too fragmentary and didactic to be literature, though they are literary. L. J. Burpee’s A Little Book of Canadian Essays contains brief but illuminating critical studies of seven Canadian writers. Stephen Leacock’s Essays and Literary Studies are too heterogeneous in theme and too variable (perhaps variegated) in style to be credited with the dignity of systematic Essays in Criticism. They are interesting but not weighty literary ‘Studies.’ The master critic has yet to appear in Canada.

Anthologies

Every anthology of national literature must be critically appreciated from the point of view of the aim of the author. Properly, according to the roots of the word anthology, care, and even fastidiousness, are implied on the part of the compiler. The world-famous collection of Greek verse known as The Greek Anthology is properly, that is both etymologically and aesthetically, an ‘anthology.’ For the poems in it were most carefully chosen before being collected together; and they were selected strictly according to ideals of beauty in thought and expression. So that the term anthology hardly if ever applies strictly to the so called anthologies of Canadian verse. As a matter of fact such collections of Canadian verse as have been compiled, actually do not bear the title anthology; they bear some such title as ‘A Treasury,’ or ‘A Wreath,’ or ‘Flowers,’ of Canadian Verse. Sometimes the collections have the plainest of practical titles, such as Canadian Poets or Canadian Singers and Their Songs, or The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse.

It is quite irrelevant and an elaboration of the obvious to dispraise, as some Canadian critics have done, the contents of certain anthologies of Canadian poetry, as of ‘unequal merit.’ They might as well say that the culture and the cultural institutions of Canada are of ‘unequal merit.’ Relatively to the poetry of old civilizations the poetry of Canada is poor or mediocre or indifferent or fine in aesthetic substance and artistic structure and form according to the culture and genius of the country’s poets. Secondly, all Canadian anthologies, whether the aim was to select the very best of the very best poetry or to select representative poems from each period or all periods, contain poetry which is not all on the same level of excellence.

The first anthology to engage public attention and to win critical appreciation was a book which now belongs to the rarissimae of collectors of ‘Canadiana,’ namely, The Canadian Birthday Book, by ‘Seranus’ (pseudonym of Mrs. S. Frances Harrison), published at Toronto in 1887. It was compiled, with exquisite taste, in both English and French; and it is notable for the fact that its selections date as far back as the year 1732, with a poem by Jean Taché who, as the compiler has said in her notes, is ‘probably the first French-Canadian poet to publish.’ It is notable also for the fact that it contains some verses by the Indian Chief Tecumseh, and is, likewise, one of the earliest volumes to contain the work of such poets as Bliss Carman, Wilfred Campbell, Pauline Johnson, and Archibald Lampman. In a real sense, that is, in the Greek sense of the term, the Canadian Birthday Book is the first Canadian anthology. The poems in it, are dainty in themselves and the artistry of the poems also is dainty—‘little flowers’ of pretty or beautiful Canadian verse, pioneer, émigré, nativistic, and native and national.

Twenty years before the appearance of Seranus’ miniature anthology Rev. Edward Hartley Dewart published, under the plain title of Selections From Canadian Poetry, what may be called the first treasury of Canadian verse (1864). Dewart’s Selections was simply a ‘collection’ of poems for ‘good reading,’ or for pedagogical purposes in the Provinces of Canada. It was not intended to be received as literary anthology, but only as a volume of representative poems from the earlier periods of Canadian history up to the year of publication. Its audience was limited to Canada and it had only local or provincial appreciation.

The next anthology was W. D. Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889). It was informed with the Canadian outlook on life and national achievement within the twenty years after the formation of the Confederacy, and with the Canadian prevision of a national destiny which seemed implied in the genius of the Canadian people for autonomous government, in the vast resources of the Dominion, and in the relations which would inevitably develop between Canada and the United States and the other nations of the world. The aim of Dr. Lighthall was both literary and pragmatic. He desired to present to the English-speaking world the ideals and genius of Canada as these ideals and genius were embodied and expressed in the best poetry by émigré and by native-born Canadian poets.

Dr. Lighthall’s inclusive and pragmatic aim determines both the scope and the method of his aptly named Songs of the Great Dominion. In his Introduction he carefully explains the scope and method of his anthology. The order of this collection is in sections, treating of the Imperial Spirit, the New Nationality, the Indian, the Voyageur and Habitant, Settlement Life, Sports and Free Life, Historical Incidents, Places and Seasons. He says: They give merely, it should be understood, a sketch of the range of the subjects. Canadian history, for example, as any one acquainted with Parkman will know, perfectly teems with noble deeds and great events, of which only a small share have been sung, whereof there is only space here for a much smaller share. The Northwest and British Columbia, that Pacific clime of charm—the gold-diggings Province, land of salmon rivers, and of the Douglas firs which hide daylight at noonday—have been scarcely sung at all, owing to their newness. The poetry of the Winter Carnival, splendid scenic spectacle of gay Northern arts and delights, is only rudimentary also. Those who have been present at the thrilling spectacle of the nocturnal storming of the Ice Palace in Montreal, when the whole city, dressing itself in the picturesque snow-shoe costume and arraying its streets in lights and colors, rises as one man in a tumultuous enthusiasm, must feel that something of a future lies before the poetry of these strange and wonderful elements.’

What Lighthall in his Songs of the Great Dominion attempts to do is not to present us with a mere quantity of Canadian poetry which we may receive with delight or reject, but to invite us to the home of the Canadian National Spirit and to show us what the Canadian spirit, as it is envisaged and expressed in the poetry of the Dominion since Confederation, has achieved and means to achieve. One who reads Lighthall’s anthology cannot escape catching in it glimpses of the essential Canadian spirit. In the poems in Lighthall’s volume the Canadian spirit sings clearly its full gamut. We hear the ‘notes’ always of courage; of self-reliance; of hope; of exultation; and of good cheer and serenity; and these notes of courage and faith and exultation and indomitable will and heroism and good cheer and peace in the heart of man in Canada are but the antiphons to the voices of the land and the sea and the forest, the great waters and the sky and the maples, and elms in their strength and also in their gentler and peaceful humors.

The Canadian spirit, as evisaged and expressed in the Songs of the Great Dominion, is manly; and the supreme quality of the poetry in Lighthall’s anthology is the quality of manliness. But this is a moral quality. What of the aesthetic quality of the Songs of the Great Dominion? Agreeing that poets should rise and drop with their subjects, we note a high level of excellence in thought and in craftsmanship in the poems in Lighthall’s volume. Considering its scope and the variety of the subjects and styles of form in the volume, and considering also its expression of the full gamut of the notes of the Canadian spirit, Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion not only implies a kind of creative vision and imagination on the part of the compiler, but distinctly and unmistakably appeals to the same faculties in the reader. In other words, Lighthall’s volume delights the heart and the imagination by way of the intrinsic beauty and the moral substance of the poetry in it; but it delights more the constructive imagination of the reader by way of the illumination it sheds on the essential nature, will, and ideals of the Canadian spirit, of the Canadian people. It differs in this constructive way from all anthologies of Canadian verse that have preceded it and all that have followed it. In short, Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion, on the side of embodying and expressing spiritual essences, is unique amongst Canadian anthologies of native and national poetry.

Later Canadian Poems (1893), edited by J. E. Wetherell, is a much slighter volume than Lighthall’s but is significant as an expression of the new spirit in Canadian Literature, containing, as it does, the first publication of some of the work of Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Pauline Johnson.

It might have been expected that The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), inasmuch as it was seemingly compiled by Wilfred Campbell, one of the more important poets of Canada, would be on the level of the ideal required by the Oxford Press and superior to other anthologies of Canadian verse. As a matter of fact The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, as originally compiled by Wilfred Campbell, was not according to the standard of the Oxford Press. The necessary re-compilation was made by two hands, Mr. S. B. Gundy, Canadian Representative of the Oxford Press at Toronto, and J. D. Logan who selected and added fifty poems (Nos. 211 to the end, inclusive) from the work of the younger Canadian poets. Campbell’s Oxford Press anthology has been frequently appreciated as the best of the treasuries of Canadian poetry. But how a volume of such fortuitous origin and construction can be the best of the Canadian anthologies, passes understanding. As an anthology The Oxford Book is more than any of the other anthologies of Canadian verse a volume of poetry ‘of unequal merit.’ But the defect most conspicuous in the book is psychological rather than artistic, spiritual rather than aesthetic. It contains 251 poems by 100 poets. It is the slightest of the three great anthologies, and the most classical. Its contents have dignity, taste, correctness.

Of the other two chief anthologies—Theodore Harding Rand’s A Treasury of Canadian Verse (1900) and John W. Garvin’s Canadian Poets (1916)—the Rand anthology was compiled from the point of view of the history, rather than the aesthetics, of Canadian poetry, whereas the Garvin anthology was compiled from the point of view of modernity in the aesthetic substance and artistic construction of Canadian poetry. Garvin’s volume contains the work of only fifty-two poets, whereas Rand’s and Lighthall’s contain the work of more than twice that number of poets. Garvin’s volume is better suited to its century than is any of the others. It is not only a repository of modern Canadian poetry but also a critical vade mecum to 20th Century Canadian poetry. For in addition to the poems in the volume, each poet’s work is prefaced by a biographical sketch and by critical appreciation or comment by others than the compiler. The latter fact relieves the critical apparatus itself of the charge of personal bias on the part of the compiler. The Garvin anthology, again, is distinguished by a peculiarity of singular spiritual import. It contains nothing that is not typical of the Canadian national spirit and Canadian civilization and culture. Lighthall’s volume, despite its good sense and genuinely aesthetic quality, had such variety and diversity of ‘notes’ of the spirit in it that it is hard to distinguish which is the essential note, the typical voice, and which the ‘overtones’ of the Canadian spirit. The Oxford Book, again, is untypical of the Canadian spirit by way of too many poems that are ‘poet’s poems’—too much of art for art’s sake. But Garvin’s Canadian Poets contains the work of such poets, both of the older and the younger generation, as expresses the typical work of each of the singers and the typical spirit of the Canadian people. It is a companionable volume; and it has the distinct advantage of biographical and critical comment, which fit it, according to its scope, for private reading and enjoyment and for critical study of the history of Canadian poetry. In those regards Garvin’s Canadian Poets is an anthology which is at once aesthetically satisfying and pragmatically the most serviceable in the field that it covers. Mr. Garvin is also the compiler of the only anthology of the Canadian poetry of the Great War.

Several other anthologies of Canadian poetry require no more notice here than to mention their names and scope. L. J. Burpee’s Flowers From a Canadian Garden is a genuine anthology in the Greek meaning of the term. It is a bijou anthology containing seventy-five fastidiously selected short lyrics, lovely ‘little flowers’ of Canadian poetry. The selections in Mr. Burpee’s A Century of Canadian Sonnets are also most carefully chosen. E. S. Caswell’s Canadian Singers and Their Songs is a unique volume of selected poems in fac-similes of the authors’ holograph manuscripts; and is illustrated with portraits of the authors of the poems. It is essentially a literary curiosity, and meets the express design of the compiler, namely, to produce a book of ‘personalia’ which would be appreciated as a gift book. Mrs. C. M. Whyte Edgar’s A Wreath of Canadian Song (1910) is too fragmentary in the poetry which chiefly forms its substance to be considered a genuine anthology. Moreover, it is limited to the verse of Canadian poets who have died. Aesthetically viewed it is a work of no significance; but it contains historical and bibliographical data that is curious and useful for critical purposes. Our Canadian Literature (1923) is a collection of Canadian poetry and prose by Dr. Lorne Pierce and Dr. A. D. Watson. It is much more valuable as a reading course or class room textbook than as a treasury of aesthetic poetry and prose. A Book of Canadian Verse and Prose (1923) is the compilation of Professor E. K. Broadus and Mrs. Broadus. It is a collection of Canadian poetry and prose in English and French.

A number of compilations of Canadian poetry and prose have been made from time to time for school use. Among these are Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises, by G. W. Ross; Selections from Canadian Poets and Selections from Canadian Prose, both by E. A. Hardy; The Standard Canadian Reciter, by Donald G. French; The Canadian Poetry Book, by D. J. Dickie.

Canadian Journalism

The question: Are Newspapers and Magazines literature? has various answers, negative and affirmative. There cannot be any doubt that Newspapers and Magazines can be literature, because they have been literature; or that Newspapers and Magazines promote literature, because they have done this. The fact is that the first journalism in English was at the very outset literature. The Tatter and The Spectator were founded in the years 1709 and 1711, respectively. The Rambler was founded later. These periodicals, whose pages were the popular reading of the times, and whose pages were made ‘living epistles’ by the pens of Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith—four of the greatest prose writers of the 18th century—were the predecessors of the modern Newspaper. Their pages, especially those of The Spectator, combined the functions of a newspaper, a literary miscellany and a review of society, life, and world happenings. In particular, Joseph Addison was ‘the father’ of the modern newspaper ‘leader’ and ‘editorial’ and of the special article in theatrical and art criticism. Samuel Johnson was the inventor of the modern ‘society page’ and ‘woman’s page’ as we know them in our day. In short, Steele, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, Defoe and others of considerable literary reputation in the 18th century were the creators of England’s first ‘people’s literature’—a journalistic literature.

Journalism and Magazine writing in Canada began with the same ideals of scope and literary dignity as obtained in the days of Addison and Johnson in England. The first newspaper to be established in any of the Provinces which later became confederated in the Canadian Union was The Halifax Gazette which was established at Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1752; that is, 43 years after the founding of The Tatler. The first magazine to be established in Canada was published at Halifax in 1789 and was named The Nova Scotia Magazine. As a newspaper, however, The Halifax Gazette was devoted chiefly to the publication of military and governmental intelligence. It was not till Joseph Howe purchased The Novascotian, at Halifax, in 1828, that journalism in Canada harked back to the ideals of The Tatler and The Spectator. Joseph Howe must be regarded as the first and foremost literary, as well as practical, journalist in the history of Canada.

It is sufficient here to remark Howe’s strict literary ideals, even as a journalist, and to observe not only that in his own journalistic writing he strove after literary form and color, but also that in the writings of his contributors he saw to it that there was a very considerable literary flavor. His ideals were emulated by other Canadian journalists, as for instance Etienne Parent, in Quebec, and George Brown of the Toronto Globe and Charles Lindsey, in Ontario, and by later journalists in Canada. Yet we must here emphasize, for our own times, the inclusiveness of the ideals which inspired Howe and which resulted in his producing newspapers whose influence abides to this day.

By some sort of intuition, Howe knew, as Addison and Steele before him knew, that the secrets of successful journalism are two: Variety of interests in reading matter, and Readableness or the power to hold the attention by the manner or style of what is written. Howe also had aesthetic and moral ideals. He aimed to produce journalism that would entertain and at the same time improve literary taste and educate the sensibilities and moral imagination. Howe saw that the unpardonable sins of all newspapers are the lack of humanized matter, and dullness in style; and that, therefore, no matter how high and worthy the moral aims of journalism may be, unless a newspaper possesses variety and readableness, it is doomed to fail both as a newspaper that otherwise might have endured and as a newspaper that might have been perennially the voice and the educator of the spirit. In other words, Joseph Howe saw that the supreme virtues of first rate journalism, the virtues which raise journalism to the dignity of literature, are two: Humanity and Urbanity.

Five years after the fall of Quebec, that is, in 1764, when Quebec city had acquired a considerable English-speaking population, the second of the pioneer Canadian newspapers was established. This was the Quebec Gazette. For seventy-eight years this newspaper was printed in two languages—English and French. From 1848 till 1880 it was printed wholly in English. With the coming of the Loyalists, while New Brunswick was still part of Nova Scotia, there appeared at St. John, in 1783, the Royal St. John Gazette and Nova Scotia Intelligencer. In the following year, when New Brunswick had become a separate Province, this newspaper changed its name to the Royal Gazette & New Brunswick Advertiser. In 1785 the Gazette was established at Montreal. In 1791 and in 1793 newspapers were established at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and Niagara, Ontario. In 1806 and in 1810 newspapers were established at Fredericton, N.B. and Kingston, Ont. Up to 1810 the newspapers of Canada, with the notable exception of the Quebec Gazette, were not at all in the spirit of constructive journalism, but with the founding of The Herald at Montreal in 1811, The Acadian Recorder at Halifax in 1813, the Colonial Advocate at Queenston in 1824, and The Novascotian at Halifax in 1824 (purchased by Joseph Howe in 1828), journalism in Canada took on the scope and complexion of literary and constructive journalism.

The Pioneer Newspapers, as contrasted with the Pioneer and later Canadian Magazines, served very considerably as ‘the people’s’ reading and as the popular educator. They were instrumental in creating a desire for intelligence about Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The demand was chiefly for commercial and social, and political news. And so with the desire for news came into existence an ardent desire for an education in the so-called ‘three R’s.’ As to the style of the reading matter in the Pioneer Newspapers, it conformed, with notable exceptions, to the conditions, social and political, of the times. As a matter of fact, politics were paramount in pioneer days and up to the triumph of Responsible Government, or to the middle of the 19th Century. Naturally, therefore, the newspapers contained considerable satiric writing and letters on practical matters, including reforms in Government. Accordingly the general style of the newspapers was straightforward, often overpointed in vigorous vernacular, with no care for purity of diction and coherency of sentential structure. The thing to be said, the matter, must be said at all hazards—plainly, bluntly, vigorously, and unmistakably. In all these regards, which were not according to the English style of journalism under Addison and Steele, the better newspapers, such as The Montreal Gazette, and The Novascotian, were notable exceptions to the general run of the Pioneer Newspapers. Howe, for example, did see to it, with considerable solicitude, that his newspapers, especially The Novascotian, should contain genuine literary matter and that the style of the general reading matter which appeared in his newspapers should be in decent readable English.

On the whole, therefore, the Pioneer Newspapers of Canada and those which appeared up to Responsible Government and Confederation, and later, conformed to the two ideals of purveyors of intelligence and disseminators of popular culture. Except in rare instances, however, they did not foster the creative literary spirit. That function was left to the Canadian Magazines.

As, in the case of daily journalism, Nova Scotia had priority in establishing newspapers, so, in the case of Canadian magazines, Nova Scotia also was first in enterprise. The first magazine to be published in any of the Provinces of Canada was the Nova Scotia Magazine, which appeared at Halifax in 1789, and ceased publication in 1792. The second Canadian magazine to be published was the Quebec Magazine, which appeared at Quebec in 1791 (2). It also went out of existence in two or three years. The difficulty then was the same as in the present day. The Canadian editor and publisher of native magazines could not compete with the British and the United States magazines, because the foreign periodicals were more readable and cheaper. The matter, however, of the earlier Canadian magazines was, for the most part, genuinely literary and fostered culture.

The first magazine in Canada to spread culture and at the same time to foster amongst native-born or resident émigré writers the creative literary spirit, and to publish contributions in the form of essays, Nature sketches, and poems by native-born and permanently resident writers, was the Literary Garland. It flourished from 1838 to 1851, and numbered amongst its contributors such men and women of parts as William Dunlop, who may be regarded as the first émigré Canadian humorist in distinction from Haliburton, the first native-born humorist, Charles Sangster, who was the first native-born Canadian poet of significant power in original creation, Susanna Moodie who was a versatile writer of colorful prose, and the first singer of Canadian Martial Verse, and her sister Catharine Parr Traill, whose Nature studies and sketches are still eminently worth reading.

In the year which saw the consummation of the Confederacy George Stewart, a man of fine critical taste, established Stewart’s Quarterly at St. John, N.B. His ideal was that of the English Quarterlies; and the articles which appeared in his magazine were notably solid in substance and distinguished in literary style. Stewart’s Quarterly did much to promote culture and to encourage creative writing on the part of native-born Canadian writers. Several other magazines which conformed more to the matter and style of the Literary Garland were established in the first 25 years following Confederation. They all eventually went out of existence. The first magazine to endure as a cultural agency and genuine fosterer of the literary spirit was the Canadian Magazine, founded in 1893 by J. Gordon Mowat. Under his editorship it grew and further progressed under the editorship of John A. Cooper. In 1907 the Canadian Magazine came under the editorship of Mr. Newton MacTavish.

From 1907, when Mr. MacTavish became editor, there was a distinct and continually progressive change in the editorial policy of the Canadian Magazine. Patriotically he set out to foster the appreciation and production of fine arts and literature by native-born Canadians. To do this he reproduced in the magazine paintings and drawings by Canadian artists, along with special articles, critically appraising Canadian artists and their art. He also published essays, criticism, fiction, and poetry, by native-born Canadian writers. In fact, it was considerably due to the sympathetic and respectful encouragement which Mr. MacTavish gave to native-writers, that Canadian poets and prose writers achieved as splendidly as they have done in the first quarter of the 20th century, and that constructive literary criticism and literary history significantly developed in Canada.

With the Canadian Magazine should be mentioned two others, the Queen’s Quarterly and the University Magazine. The latter was edited by Sir Andrew Macphail, and did much to foster letters and criticism in Canada. Amongst other distinctions, the University Magazine published not only the best verse but also the first book of poems by Marjorie Pickthall, Drift of Pinions (1913). It ceased publication in 1921. The Queen’s Quarterly, always well edited, is still potent in fostering letters and criticism in Canada. The Dalhousie Review, founded in 1921, essayed some of the ideals of the University Magazine. But it is given too much to critical writing by foreign literati to be potent in fostering letters and criticism in Canada.

Narrative Literature

I. History.

Two general conditions have made the writing of ‘true history’ in Canada an impossibility. On the personal side, there were the lack of adequate culture, of a sense of the historic process and of history as the narrative of spiritual development, and of any genius, save curiosity, on the part of those who essayed the writing of history. Men with the historic imagination did not exist in Canada, and only ‘minor’ historians were active, up to the beginning of the 20th century. On the material or instrumental side, there were the heterogeneity of Canadian civilization, the want of political unity, the lack of access to documents and of facilities for historical research, and other untoward circumstances. Unimaginative minds and the heterogeneity of life and thought in Canada, before and after Confederation, limited history for the most part to annals, chronicles, period and sectional narratives.

The number of these uninspired, unimaginative ‘minor’ Canadian historians is legion. The more important were George Heriot, William Smith, Robert Christie, Alexander Begg, Beamish Murdock, Duncan Campbell, William Kingsford, James Hannay, and Egerton Ryerson. Oddly, the two first native-born historians to write with a show of imagination and a sense of true history were Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the humorist, and Major John Richardson, the romancer.

Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia was published by Joseph Howe in 1829. Though the two volumes are, in a degree, a compendium of facts, Haliburton was not interested in the facts so much as in the romantic or dramatic story of civilization and life in Nova Scotia. The way Haliburton imaginatively handled his material, the way he romantically told the story and made the whole a colorful and generally absorbing narrative, constitutes his work as ‘true history.’ It is Haliburton’s conception of history and his method of writing it that make him important—though he was not potent—in this department of Canadian Literature. His work is an outstanding native example of the romantic method of writing history as literature; and Haliburton himself appears as the first Canadian Historian to write history as if he were writing imaginative literature. But if he was not potent in his own country, that is, in British North America, he had, there is good ground to believe, considerable influence on Francis Parkman. For Parkman read Haliburton’s Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, and not only had his imagination fired by such a romantic story as Haliburton tells of the Expulsion of the Acadians, but also adopted the romantic method of Haliburton in writing his own historical works.

The best account of the War of 1812 came from the pen of Major John Richardson, who had served in the conflict. It is the account of an eye-witness. It was written hurriedly for publication serially in his newspaper the New Era, and was reprinted in book form in 1842. As might be expected, Richardson presents vividly the drama or dramatic movement of his story, and makes it a colorful, gripping narrative. But though, like Haliburton, Richardson wrote graphically, romantically, he is superior to Haliburton in an important respect. The Nova Scotia historian and humorist did not have any gift for sharp character-drawing; his characters, like Dickens’ or Twain’s, stand out and hold us by what they say. But Richardson’s characters in his account of the War of 1812, especially Brock and Tecumseh, are vividly drawn by their action, and stand out sharply individualized. In Haliburton’s Historical Account of Nova Scotia we get only colorful romance. In Richardson’s War of 1812 we get colorful romance, dramatic movement, and memorable character portraiture. It, too, is ‘true history,’ and his work, like Haliburton’s, is an outstanding native example of the romantic method of writing history as literature.

After Haliburton and Richardson, all history of Canada, or the Provinces, by native-born or émigré writers was fragmentary in conception and dry-as-dust in matter and method. They all show inquisitiveness, diligence, though not careful research, and no imagination, and certainly no sense of history as the outward expression and movement of a people’s social and spiritual evolution. Yet the work of one man must be specially remarked. He was Alpheus Todd, who, in the department of Constitutional History, wrote a work which was long regarded as the greatest study of the English constitution written by any British subject. This really ‘monumental’ historical work was entitled Parliamentary Government in England; its Origin, Development, and Practical Operation. The first volume was published in 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation. But while Todd’s work is a ‘monument’ to his scholarship and industry, and while it has historic perspective, it is, like the work of preceding historians, without imagination and was written by one who had no conception of constitutional history as the expression of the social conscience gradually realizing, under changing conditions, the ideal of the rights of the spirit.

From the beginning of the 20th century, Canadian historians based their work on documentary research and wrote history with a lively sense of imaginative or romantic values which corresponded to the method and manner of Haliburton and Richardson. This change in the method of writing ‘true history’ is notably exemplified in Quebec Under Two Flags and in The Cradle of New France by A. G. Doughty; in The Fight for Canada, by William Wood; and, later, in The Conquest of the Great North-West, Pathfinders of the West, and Vikings of the Pacific, by Agnes Laut. Doughty was a poet before he became an historian, and in writing history let his imagination play over the facts, thus transmuting the documentary material into literature. William Wood also applied the romanticist’s imagination to the facts, and, besides, wrote history with a fine feeling for style and characterization somewhat in the manner of Parkman. Miss Laut, basing her matter on thorough research, humanized it with a sympathetic appreciation of the struggles of the pioneers of the Canadian West and with a picturesque literary style.

Sectional and local histories of Canada abound. There are also race histories and several so-called School Histories. But these are all of popular quality and have no distinction in literary style, although the narratives of W. J. Rattray, George Stewart, H. Scadding, J. Ross Robertson, John Murray Gibbon, Sir John Bourinot and Charles G. D. Roberts show a considerable solicitude for style and actually achieve good literary style.

II. Biography.

As with general history, so with personal or spiritual history. Biographical writing in Canada is sparse in quantity and, on the whole, insignificant in literary quality. Often the subject of a biographical narrative was great enough to compel imaginative and artistic creation on the part of the writer. Seldom, however, does any biographer of a Canadian man of distinction rise to his subject either in conception or in style. But of those who did rise to their subject, one was Charles Lindsey, who wrote The Life and Times of William Lyon MacKenzie. Lindsey handled his material so as to present the proper values in the political and social problems in the time of the famous leader of the Rebellion of 1837. Another of those who rose to his subject and who wrote with a sense of the really significant events in the life of his subject, presenting the salients with decent respect for truth, with adequate detail, and yet with readable style, was Sir Joseph Pope, who gave the literary world a compelling and vigorously moving biographical volume, Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John Alexander Macdonald. It is a vigorous narrative, but rather inflexible in style. Sir John Stephen Willison’s Sir Wilfrid Laurier and The Liberal Party is an outstanding biography. Like Lindsey, Sir John Willison was a thoroughly trained journalist before he attempted biographical writing. Along with the journalist’s vigor and vivacity of style, Sir John Willison wrote with feeling for dignified and elegant diction. His Wilfrid Laurier is notable chiefly for its refinement in prose style.

George Monro Grant’s Joseph Howe is a tour de force in brilliant word painting and hero worship. It misses the significance of Howe as an original and constructive mind. Longley’s Joseph Howe is a popular narrative, careless of logic and literary style.

Several other individual biographies of Canadians by Canadians have been published. The best of them are Duncan Campbell Scott’s John Graves Simcoe, Adam Shortt’s Lord Sydenham, George M. Wrong’s Life of Lord Elgin, Arnold Haultain’s Goldwin Smith: His Life and Opinions, Grant and Hamilton’s George Monro Grant, and Edith J. Archibald’s Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald. But a genuinely great biography of a great man remains to be written in Canada.

Deserving of mention are three short popular biographies—Owen McGillicuddy’s sketch of the life and achievements of Rt. Hon. MacKenzie King, Premier of Canada, which appears under the title The Making of a Premier (1922); John W. Dafoe’s Laurier (1922) and Peter McArthur’s Laurier (1922). These biographies are by practical journalists, and are journalistic in style. Dafoe’s Laurier is the most acute and weighty.

A genuine literary achievement in biographical writing is M. O. Hammond’s Confederation and Its Leaders (1917). It is based on thorough research, and, as a series of intimate political biographies in the form of narrative sketches, is packed with human interest, and is marked by a straightforward, commonsense style. It has a high seriousness, and in this respect contrasts with the lighter, more piquant but less persuasive style of Augustus Bridle’s Sons of Canada—a work which is essentially a series of familiar portraits, done as jeux d’esprit.

III. Travels, Exploration, Sport.

Canada has a considerable quantity of the literature of travels, explorations and sport but the literary interest of the most of it is far from obvious. A really remarkable book in this genre is the elder Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures in Canada and The Indian Territories, published in New York in 1809. Henry was a man of acute observation, and also possessed a graphic pen for character limning. His Travels and Adventures engages both the intellect and the imagination, the scientist and the literary artist. For it contains the most interesting observations on the flora and fauna of the countries he visited, and really graphic and colorful pictures of the peoples and the characters he met and observed. Henry had also a gift like that of Thucydides—the gift and skill of dramatically reporting a speech as, for instance, the speech of the Ojibwa Chief Minavavana. The book really forms an entrancing and instructive volume of Travel and Adventure.

The same may be said of Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages From Montreal Through the Continent of North America, 1789-1793. This work was published at London in 1801. Mackenzie came from a people—the Gaels of the Island of Lewis—who have a racial gift of colorful imagination and of felicity of language in nature description. Mackenzie, moreover, was, like Henry, a keen observer. His Voyages, therefore, as might be expected, are marked by colorful style and the imaginative presentation of the scenes he visited and of the inspiring or sublime phenomena he observed. John Howison’s Sketches of Upper Canada conforms only to the ideal of fact. It is, as the title suggests, merely a series of ‘sketches,’ written in a vigorous style with only a touch here and there of finer literary style.

With the work of Anna Brownell Jameson we meet with the first ‘color-writing’ in and about Canada. Her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, published in London in 1838, has not yet been excelled by a native Canadian ‘color writer.’ At the time, Canada was a wilderness for the most part, with a few settlements, but Mrs. Jameson, with the eye of an artist, saw everywhere in Nature in Canada and in Canadian life and character much to delight the eye and the sensibilities and much to satisfy the pictorial and dramatic imagination. Her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, in three volumes, are a library of winsome Nature sketches and critical appreciations of human personality—a work of art, and a permanent contribution to the Incidental Pioneer Literature of Canada.

The aesthetic sense and the artistic conscience were uppermost in Paul Kane’s Wanderings of An Artist Among The Indian Tribes of North America. Kane was a celebrated Canadian painter; and, having the gift of style, he wrote, with the eye of the pictorial artist, about his ‘wanderings’ among the western tribes. It is an informing volume and makes genuinely interesting and satisfying reading.

George M. Grant was a man of splendid force of character and strength of will tempered with a singular gift of humor and pathos. He travelled across Canada in the last five years of the first decade following Confederation, he met all peoples, dwelt in camps, visited trading posts, and stopped at the hotels of the larger centres. On his journey he was impressed by the life, energy, and the striving of the Canadian people for a self-reliant and worthy history and destiny. And so Grant’s volume of travel, Ocean to Ocean, is noted for its acute observation, for its colorful and vitalizing descriptions of Nature in Canada, and for its seriousness, at all times relieved by an unusual quality of humor and of pathos. In ‘color-writing’ too, the volume is, at times, incomparable.

J. W. Tyrrell’s Across the Sub-Arctics of Canada and his The St. Lawrence Basin and Its Border-Lands, Lawrence J. Burpee’s The Search for The Western Sea, Vilhjalmur Stefannson’s The Friendly Arctic and his Hunters of the Great North, Arthur Heming’s Drama of the Forests, are all noted for their literary style and for the dramatic pictures they make of Nature scenes and of human characters.

Two really notable books under the head of Sport, as a form of travel and adventure, are Arthur Silver’s Farm, Cottage, Camp and Canoe In Maritime Canada (1884) and Phil. H. Moore’s With Gun and Rod in Canada (1922). Silver’s volume makes pleasant reading, but the style is much more pedestrian than Moore’s work, which is heightened and colored by picturesque diction and images and by considerable characteristic humor. Midway between the greater books of Travel and Adventure and these books of Sport come Wilfred Grenfell’s volumes descriptive of Labrador and the late C. Gordon Hewitt’s Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada. The latter, though scientific in aim and method, is full of aesthetic and literary charm and is written in an interesting literary style.

Index

This index covers the names of Canadian writers, Canadian books, journals, individual poems, or stories referred to in the text. Names of authors are in roman type; all titles of books, journals, poems, stories, etc., are in italic.