J.D. Logan
From
The Canadian Magazine XLV1II,
No. 1, Toronto, November,
1916
Editor’s Note—The
present essay and those to follow it will form the second series of historico-critical articles contributed to The
Canadian Magazine by Dr. Logan The essays are based on his
special series of lectures on the Literary History and the Literature of Canada,
delivered in December, 1915, at Acadia University, Wolfville, N.S.
The
lectures had the distinction of being the first of the kind
to be delivered at any university in the Dominion. They are in preparation for
publication in book form. In the meantime, the material selected from them for
publication in The Canadian Magazine
presents re-views, that is, new and revised views, of some unrecognized
salients in the literary history and the literature of Canada. The essays to
follow the present article are entitled: Canadian Fictionists and Other
Creative Prose Writers; The Second Renaissance of
Canadian Nativistic Poetry; Canadian Poets and Poetesses as Lyrists of Romantic
Love; and Canadian Poets as Verbal Colourists and Musicians. Either in theme,
point of view, or treatment, or all three, the essays are novel and original.
IN historico-critical reviews
or appreciations of literature, as distinguished from essays in belles-lettres,
what excites intellectual interest and engages the fancy is not so much the
persons and the times considered by a literary
historian or critic as the novelty in his point of view, originality in his
angle of vision in treating the poets and the prose-writers of a given country
and period or periods. Until the publication of Mr. T. G. Marquis’s illuminating
and genuinely constructive monograph,
“English-Canadian Literature”, (Toronto, 1913), no systematic critical
treatment of the origins, evolution, and æsthetic status of Canadian letters
had been attempted. To be sure, Sir John Bourinot and Dr. Archibald MacMurchy
had published excellent appreciative surveys of Canadian literature. But these
surveys, as also the many magazine essays on the same theme by other critics,
were annalistic, compendial, and quite without any philosophical, systematic,
or even distinctive method of treatment. Moreover, the principal Canadian
anthologists, Dr. Dewart, Mr. W. D. Lighthall, and Dr. Rand, have kept almost
wholly to the annalistic method of reviewing the salient persons and themes in
the poetic literature of the Dominion, as if these compilers and editors had
not critically observed an evolution in it from bad or indifferent to good,
from good to better, and from better to excellent and fine in imaginitive
conception and in technical artistry. The magazine essayists, on the other
hand, considered only individual Canadian men and women of letters, or discrete
groups of them, without having any regard to their æsthetic origins, evolution,
place and status in the corpus
of Canadian literature or of literature in general. What the essayists wrote
about the poets and prose writers of the Dominion was, for the most part,
uncritical knocks or boosts, based largely on the critics’ personal antipathies
or preferences. Until, then, the publication of Mr. Marquis’s monograph,
indigenous literary criticism of Canadian poetry and prose was unoriginal in point
of view, and unphilosophical and unsystematic in method. The present essay and
those to follow it have nothing specially to recommend them, save that their
point of view is original, their method philosophical and strictly critical,
and that, incidentally, they attempt to remove certain stubborn superstitions
which still persist, even in Mr. Marquis’s mind, regarding the literary
origins, genius, place, status and distinction of notable Canadian men and
women of letters.
Turning now to my theme
in this essay, The Significance of Nova Scotia in the Literary History of
Canada, I remark that Nova Scotia has always taken a leading—in some respects,
the leading—part
in promoting and developing the spiritual, including the literary, culture of
the people of the Dominion. Somewhat from priority of colonization and
propinquity to Great Britain and the United States, but more from the moral
energy of her immigrant population and the loyalty of their descendants to the
intellectual interests and traditions of their forebears, especially the Highland
Scots and Irish, though the descendants of the English settlers and of the
immigrants from New England, New York and Pennsylvania who came to the Province
in the latter half of the eighteenth century also played their important role,
Nova Scotia was the first of the English speaking Provinces which were eventually
confederated into the Dominion of Canada to initiate and advance popular and
university education. Also, in religious education, and in conceiving and
carrying out big constructive movements in church organization and missionary
enterprise, Nova Scotia took the initiative and has always been in the van of
progress. Again, to her enduring glory, Nova Scotia has the distinction of
being the home and inspiration of the first strictly nativistic
literature produced in any of the four English-speaking Provinces that at
Confederation formed the original Dominion of Canada; of being, secondly, the æsthetic,
habitat and the inspiration of the leader of the First Renaissance of Canadian
nativistic and national literature,
chiefly poetry; and of being, finally, the homeland, if not always also the
inspiration of the initiators, or the most gifted and conspicuous leaders, of
the Second Renaissance of Canadian nativistic and national poetry—a
literary movement, however, that has
engaged at the same time the
genius of the younger men and women of letters in all the
English-speaking Provinces of the Dominion.
It will be observed that
I have applied the
epithets “nativistic” and “national” to different
periods and phases of the
literary history of Canada.
I have employed this distinction
for good reasons.
In the pioneer and the colonial periods, in all stages up
to, and even for a decade or more subsequent
to, Confederation, there were
in Canada many
verse-makers and prose writers who
were not born in any of the Provinces of
what is now the Dominion of Canada,
though some of them were bred and
educated in one or other of
these Provinces. Their poetry and prose,
whether inspired by Canadian life and scenes or
not, are rightly
to be distinguished as colonial
or British rather than as Canadian. On the
other hand, while, prior to Confederation and for a decade or more after that
event, there were writers who were born and bred in
Upper Canada and the Maritime Provinces, and who now solely
by virtue of historic retrospect
in which the Canada that was once merely possible is
seen made actual in the Canada of
to-day, may be denoted Canadians, these
writers got their literary themes
and inspiration almost wholly
from experience or phenomenon
other than that which was (provincially)
Canadian. So that to-day it is at least
inept to categorize such poetry and
prose as were produced in the
Provinces of Canada, prior to Confederation,
as Canadian in the authentic
connotation of the term; and it is certainly absurd to apply to them, or to
even post-Confederation Canadian literature, until the
rise of the Robertsian group of poets and prose writers in
the Dominion, the epithet national.
This literature, produced in the nineteenth century from 1830 to 1887 (the year
of the publication of Roberts’s “In Divers Tones”) by writers
born and bred and schooled in the
Provinces is strictly to be denoted as only nativistic
provincial literature of Canada. It is nativistic, but not national, because
the writers were natives of the as yet unconfederated Provinces, because either
their subjects or themes, or their
inspiration, or both, were chiefly indigenous to the writers’ respective
homelands, and because what they wrote was really literature. On
the other hand, the poetry and prose produced by the
Robertsian group of native-born authors from 1887 to 1903, and from 1903 to
the present, are both nativistic and national literature, and are to be
categorized as strictly and genuinely Canadian in the inclusive connotation
of the term.
Now, take a pen and on
the geographical map of Nova Scotia draw an ellipse, beginning at Windsor,
passing the line through Grand Pré and Wolfville, then across the western end
of the Basin of Minas, next up to the Tantramar marshes, and back again to
Windsor. That elliptical line and that ellipse of country embracing idyllic
town, romantic village, valley-land, storied bluff and mount, haunted waters,
misty marsh, and glamorous fields and skies, is the original Literary Map of
Nova Scotia, and, by implication, of Canada. It
all conscribes the pristine home, scenes, and inspiration of
the first nativistic literature of Nova Scotia and the first
national literature of the
Dominion of Canada.
The first native Nova
Scotian author of consequence and the first to make the beginnings of what, had
he but inspired others or had followers, would have become an original and
genuine nativistic literature in Nova Scotia, and thus in
Canada, was Thomas Chandler
Haliburton, born at Windsor, N.S., 1796. Now
in that year, it happens,
in the Niagara district there was born
another creative man of letters whose writings are
included in the corpus of
Canadian literature, namely, Major John Richardson.
Haliburton and Richardson were active in creative letters (prose-fiction)
during the same period. Richardson published his romance, “Wacousta; or The
Prophecy”, in 1832, and its sequel, “The Canadian Brothers; or The Prophecy
Fulfilled”, in 1840. He is, therefore, to be regarded as “the father” of
nativistic romantic fiction in Canada. On the other hand, Haliburton published
his chief and most popular work of fiction, “the Clockmaker; or The Sayings and
Doings of Sam Slick of Slickville”, serially in 1835-36, and in book form at
Halifax and London in 1837, 1838, and 1840. Haliburton is, therefore, to be
regarded as “the father” of the nativistic fiction of characterization and the
criticism of society and manners, and also of nativistic humour in Canada. As
Alfred Russell and Charles Darwin, working independently and apart,
simultaneously formulated the law or principle of organic evolution, so
Haliburton and Richardson, writing independently and a thousand miles apart,
created at the same time the first nativistic fiction produced in Canada, but
with this difference that Haliburton is the first and only creator of a unique
and distinct species of fictional characterization and speech or humour.
To those who would,
therefore, regard Richardson as entitled to the distinction of being, as it
were, the contemporaneous co-creator of nativistic fiction in Canada, and to
an equal place beside Haliburton, I must submit two counts that give
Haliburton the chief position of honour in producing the first nativistic
literature in Canada. Without question Haliburton was the more versatile and
original genius. But aside from that fact, there is another important truth,
the significance of which Canadian literary historians and critics seem to
have missed, or not to have divined. Though synchronously, as noted, Haliburton
and Richardson created, so far as Canada is concerned, two distinct species of
fictional prose, Haliburton takes precedence over Richardson in time and in
literary origination, by being the first systematic writer born in any of the
old unfederated Provinces of Canada to see, with poetic vision, the romance in
Nova Scotian ,that is, Canadian, history, and to tell, with the interest,
colour and emotional appeal almost of a work of pure fiction, the pathetic
story of the expulsion of the Acadians, as he did, in his “Historical and
Statistical Account of Nova Scotia”, published in 1829, or three years before
Richardson’s “Wacousta”. At once real history and winning romance, though, of
course, not an historical romance of fiction, this work by Haliburton was the
essential beginning of what, had he had imitators and followers, might have
proved to be a permanent and genuine
nativistic literature of romantic history in Canada. As it is, it is the beginning
of nativistic creative literature in Canada.
How abortive in laying
the foundations of a nativistic creative literature—a
literature in the three species of history, fiction and humour—Haliburton’s
genius and writings proved to be is one of the “curiosities” of the literary
history of Canada, and a phenomenon by itself in general literary history.
Haliburton was one born out of his time, or born too soon, to have his gifts
perpetuated by influencing creatively other Nova Scotian, or, later, Canadian
men of letters. So far as creative literature in Canada is concerned,
Haliburton simply happened.
It has been held,
however, that by a trick of fate which has created a most astounding literary anomaly,
Haliburton had considerable influence on American letters. He has been called
“the founder of the American school of humour”, “the father of American
humour”. That is a very uncritical belief and a superstition. For the present
let the belief stand as sound. Now, if it be true, as some allege, that
Longfellow and Parkman read Haliburton’s
“Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia”, and that their reading of
the work inspired the one to write in immortal verse the story of the winsome
Acadian maid, Evangeline, and furnished the other with his singularly engaging
method of writing history, then Haliburton may be called also “the father” of
American romantic poetry and of American romantic history. Has any scholarly
and reputable critic yet been found who has maintained such a thesis as that
Haliburton influenced the creative genius and the methods of Longfellow and
Packman? I can discover no such critic. Moreover, if Haliburton had really in
anywise influenced American men of letters, poets, historians or humourists,
we surely should expect to see the fact published in Professor Barrett
Wendell’s supposedly inclusive and accurate “Literary History of America”. So
interesting and significant a fact, if there were such a literary fact, would
not have escaped the notice and acknowledgment of Professor Wendell. Yet not
only does he not record any influence of Haliburton on American letters, but
also he does not even mention the name of the Nova Scotian historian and
humourist. But on this whole question, and particularly on the superstition
that Haliburton is “the father of American humour”, I shall write more fully
and critically in my later essay on “Canadian Fictionists and Other Creative
Prose Writers”.
While indeed
Haliburton’s genius, as expressed in “The Clockmaker”, was fitted to originate
in Canada a nativistic literature of humour, the odd fact is that, virtually,
there is no such literary species in the Dominion, that is, no published works
of humour by native-born Canadian authors which have the quality of genuine literature.
George T. Lanigan, had he lived, might have created a Canadian humour as such.
Mr. Stephen Leacock is brilliantly striving—and for his part is succeeding in
his endeavours—to create a Canadian literature of humour, but he is not
Canadian-born, or is only, as Mr. Marquis puts it, “a graft on the Canadian
literary tree”; and, besides, Mr. Leacock writes his humour considerably after
the American manner—satiric burlesque,
deliberate commingling of serious conduct and character with extravagant
nonsense.
All, then, that can be
said to give Haliburton his rightful place and distinction in the literary
history of Canada is that, had the times and the culture of his homeland,
Nova Scotia, been ripe to receive and to be inspired by his genius and literary
works, he would have been “the father” or founder of a nativistie literature in
the three species of romantic history, character fiction, and humour in Canada;
and that, secondly, in spite of fate’s refusal to give his literary genius,
labours, and vogue this glory, he has the greater glory of having been a
creative writer sui generis—the
first native son of any of the Provinces which now form the Dominion of Canada
to produce original literary works that have enduring quality and a unique
place not only in the corpus of
Canadian literature, but also in that of English literature.
The first native-born
Canadian constructively to make real and permanent a nativistie and national
literature strictly as such was Charles G. D.
Roberts. If, as a matter of fact, he was born in New
Brunswick seven years before Confederation, and educated at the provincial
university, it is much more, or altogether, significant that Roberts was
spiritually reborn, æsthetically re-educated, and became imaginatively
creative at Windsor. Nova Scotia. For ten years, beginning in 1885, or two
years before the publication of his epoch-making volume of verse, “In
Divers Tones”, while
professor of literature at King’s College,
he dwelt and
communed with nature intimately, visited the haunts of earthly beauty, fed his
senses with the pure delights of field and stream, lake
and marsh, woodland
and sky, tuned his heart to hear, with
peculiar meaning and joy, the cries of the
denizens of the wild-land, the
murmurings, dronings, and shrillings of insects, and the
myriad sweet songs of the birds, and lived
over again in fancy and peaceful revery all the rare moments of choice
sensation and spiritual ecstasy experienced in the gardens of happy existence.
From and in Nova Scotia, then—from
that lovely area of country conscribing Windsor, the Land of Evangeline, the
Gaspereau Valley, the Basin of Minas, the Tantramar marshes, and the district
round again to Windsor, Roberts produced the first and considerable of the
best of his nativistic and national poetry, and began the systematic
fluctuation of his genius in lyrism,
romantic tale-telling, novel writing, and animal fiction which have given him
international fame and vogue, and which
have established for
him a world-wide reputation as
the most original, versatile and artistic—the
very foremost—of living Canadian men of letters.
Besides being the first and
most eminent of the systematic “makers”
of a genuine Canadian nativistic literature,
with national “notes” in it, Roberts is,
in several other
ways, to be regarded as “the father”
of the post-Confederation, that is, the strictly Canadian,
literature of the Dominion. As in Roberts’s own case,
so, wholly through Roberts, Nova Scotia became
the inspiration of Bliss Carman, the second most
versatile and artistic of
living Canadian men of letters. This happened because at the Roberts home in
Windsor, Carman spent several
of his growing, most impressionable, and most receptive years, coming directly
under the pervasive influence—the
aesthetic culture and the tutorship in poetic technique of the elder poet, and
in company with him making from Windsor as a centre excursions over the lovely
and glamorous scenes and haunts of beauty near and beyond the Roberts home.
There young Carman’s senses and imagination began to discover the beauty and
glory of land and sea; and eventually he was inspired to emulate the elder
poet, and thus to begin the
writing of the winning lyrism
for which Carman has become noted
as a poet sui generis.
Roberts, then, is the literary father of Bliss Carman.
Further, having been
the first Canadian of
consequence to recognize,
in a practical way,
the poetic genius of Lampman,
by publishing in The Week,
Toronto, the shy, young poet” first respectable verses,
Roberts is to be distinguished as
the literary sponsor of Lampman, and as having made the
latter’s career in letters possible, just as he had, in another way, made
Carman’s literary career possible. Finally, if Roberts had no formative
influence on the genius of the other members of the post-Confederatian group of
Canadian poets and prose writers whom I denote as the Robertsian group, he at
least caused Wilfred Campbell, Frederick George Scott, Duncan Campbell Scott,
and, possibly, Pauline Johnson and Miss Marshall Saunders, to care exceedingly,
as he did himself, for fine craftsmanship, exquisite technical artistry, in
what they wrote, whether poetry or imaginative prose. By his own fine artistry
and by the influence of his example on his contemporaries, Roberts raised
nativistic poetry and prose to a degree of technical finish that was never
before reached, nor even attempted, by native-born Canadian men and women of
letters.
Through Charles G. D.
Roberts, then, and those of his contemporaries or confreres
to whom, in one way or another, he was “the master”, a strictly Canadian
literature—nativistic and national—began
systematically to be developed in quantity and in aesthetic and artistic
quality, until at length authoritative critics in England (Matthew Arnold, for
instance) and in the United States (Clarence Stedman, for instance) were
compelled to acknowledge that Canada possessed a really worthy
corpus of original poetry and
imaginative prose, beautiful or noble in spiritual substance and finely or
exquisitely wrought in technique and form. As the inspirer, sponsor and leader
of the first native-born group of systematic poets and prose writers of the Dominion,
Roberts inaugurated the First Renaissance of Canadian letters, and is
indubitably “the father” of Canadian nativistic and national literature
strictly as such.
To Nova Scotia,
therefore, directly through Charles G. D. Roberts and his poetry and imaginative
prose, into much of which he has put the natural beauty and the romance of
Acadian land, wild-life, legend, history and society, and indirectly through
his formative and constructive influences on his contemporaries, belongs the
unique distinction of being the original home and the inspiration of the First
Renaissance of Canadian poetry and prose, and of the first genuine corpus
of authentic Canadian literature. nativistic in origin and national in note.
To Nova Scotia, as I
shall show in a subsequent essay, also belongs the distinction of having
inaugurated the Second Renaissance of Canadian poetry. For a decade or more a
school, or at least a group, of poets, unconscionable in moral and aesthetic
taste and inartistic in technique, whom I have elsewhere called “The
Vaudeville School of Canadian Poetry”, has had astonishing vogue in the
Dominion. Their day has at length passed, and a renaissance, in the spirit of
the elder Robertsian group, is now active and in the ascendant. The initiators
and the most noteworthy leaders of the Second Renaissance of Canadian poetry
are natives of Nova Scotia. Here, however, I may merely remark the fact,
postponing the treatment of their work to a subsequent essay.
Meanwhile, to conclude:
The significance of Nova Scotia in the Literary history of Canada may be signalized
in a single sentence. Nova Scotia is the home and the inspiration of the first
attempts to found a nativistic provincial literature in English-speaking
Canada, and also of two movements which will leave to the Dominion the
inestimable legacy of a genuine nativistic and national literature,
aesthetically winning, artistically fine, and spiritually satisfying and
elevating.
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