Re-Views of the Literary History of Canada

Re-Views of the Literary History of Canada

By J.D. Logan

From The Canadian Magazine, December 1916

Essay II – Canadian Fictionists and other Creative Prose Writers

It is unfortunate that hitherto Canadian verse has occupied the centre of the critical stage and has had the spotlight of sympathetic criticism fo­cused upon it. Hardly has Canadian fiction and imaginative prose in other genres had even the fringes of the limelight of appreciative criticism thrown upon its evolution and quali­ties. Mr. Marquis has devoted a con­siderable section of his monograph to a more or less sketchy, though con­structive, review of Canadian fiction. As a bird’s-eye view of the history of Canadian fiction, and as a succinct fresh estimate of its literary distinc­tion and value, his review is inform­ing and critically sane. But even Mr. Marquis hastens to state that “the chief glory of Canadian literature is its poetry”. The truth is that Cana­dian fiction, taken in the large to in­clude such imaginative genres as novels, romances, tales, prose idyls, animal stories, and creative comedy or humour, has a more distinctively nativistic origin and history, and a more distinctively national note, than has Canadian poetry. Here I may not wait to explain in this essay how the spotlight appreciative criticism and of consequent fame has been de­flected from Canadian fiction or ima­ginative prose to Canadian poetry. I need all the available space to pre­sent fresh constructive views of Cana­dian imaginative prose, and thus to signalize its real glory—which, let me add, only in fine craftsmanship and sustained inspiration is, at its best, less impressive, if less conspicuous, than the glory of Canadian poetry. Here, however, before passing, I may say that the critical neglect of Canadian imaginative prose has been due chiefly to two causes. Poetry is intrinsically a more in­viting and engaging literary species than is prose for critical treatment and appreciation. Aside from that, foreign, as well as native-born, critics of Canadian literature have had no really regardful eye for the historic process. They were concerned only with individuals and literary works, as if both were absolutely discrete entities that simply happened. Their criticisms were merely private appre­ciations or personal opinions. Who­ever, then, considers Canadian fiction and other imaginative prose genres strictly with his eye on the historic process in them, disclosing their be­ginnings and evolution, will do Cana­dian literature and literary criticism a genuine service. The present essay attempts such a service.

In the history of Canadian fiction and other imaginative prose genres I observe a Pioneer, Colonial, or Pre-Confederation period, and a strictly Canadian, or Post-Confederation period; and in the latter, at least so far as the novel and the romance are con­cerned, first, a tentative period, and, secondly, a constructive, systematic, or renaissance period. As a ready aid to recalling important persons and dates in a historico-critical review of the creative prose writers of Canada,

I note that Canadian nativistic fic­tion began virtually one hundred years after the first genuine work of English fiction had appeared, and that the original creators of fiction, both in England and in Canada, bore the same patronymic, or family name —Richardson. In 1740 Samuel Rich­ardson published his “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded”. It is the first specimen in English of the authentic novel; for though composed in the form of letters, there runs through the epistles a skilfully constructed and coherent plot; and plot is essential to the authentic novel. In 1832 Major John Richardson, born near Niagara Falls, published his “Wacousta; or, The Prophecy”, and, in 1840, its sequel, “The Canadian Brothers; or, The Prophecy Fulfilled”. They are authentic novels of the romantic type, having, as they do, respectably constructed plots, and being filled with the romance of the passion of love, heightened with thrilling adven­ture and incident, and coloured with pictures of aboriginal character and life against a background of nature in the wild. We may, then, put it down in our mental note-book that the first nativistic fiction, having the authentic Canadian note and having the right to be included by the liter­ary historian and critic in the corpus of Canadian literature as such, ap­peared considerably prior to Confed­eration.

The literary annalist, no doubt, would date the beginning of fiction in Canada with the appearance of “The History of Emily Montague” in 1769, a romance written and published by Mrs. Frances Brooke, wife of Rev. John Brooke, Chaplain of the British Forces at Quebec under the Carleton regime. Apart from its mat­ter, which is lively in movement and made sprightly with engaging characterization and with the colour of social life and of wild nature during the decade following the Fall of Que­bec, Mrs. Brooke’s novel is imitative, being written in the epistolary man­ner of Samuel Richardson. While, in­deed, it affords pleasurable reading, “The History of Emily Montague” is to be valued rather as a social and historical document, in as much as it faithfully depicts the customs and manners of the times in British North America after the conquest of the French. As literature and as history the book is strictly Colonial. There were other Colonial writers of ima­ginative prose. They are, however, to be accepted as quasi-fictionists; for they had no genius for invention, characterization, and realistic nature-painting in words. Including Mrs. Brooke, all the writers of fiction in Canada, preceding John Richardson, were, as Mr. Marquis phrases it, “birds of passage”, and have no right to be considered as producers of a Canadian nativistic fiction. As “birds of passage”, they have merely a right to have their existence and work noted in an inclusive Literary History of Canada.

Now, as Samuel Richardson was the creator of the English novel as such, that is, of fiction with plot, and as Sir Walter Scott was the creator of the English historical novel or ro­mance, so James Fenimore Cooper was the creator of the distinctively American historical romance, and John Richardson was the creator of the distinctively Canadian historical romance. Moreover, all four were equally original, independent, and in­dividual; Samuel Richardson’s novels were a pure invention in literary species; Scott's historical romances were also a pure invention in literary species; and as Scott had no influence on the inspiration and the methods of Cooper, so, as 1 shall show, con­trary to received opinion, Cooper had no influence on the inspiration and the methods of John Richardson. Un­less a constructive critic can show the originality and independence of John Richardson as a literary creator, the critic cannot mark a true beginning of Canadian nativistic fiction, trace an evolution in it, estimate its liter­ary value, fix its place in the corpus of English, as well as Canadian lit­erature, and thus disclose its relative distinction and glory when compared with British and American fiction, or when, on the other hand, compared with Canadian nativistic poetry. Let us, then, consider the formative in­fluences which shaped and inspired the genius of John Richardson, the first Canadian novelist as such, the creator of the Canadian nativistic his­torical romance.

Richardson was born near Niagara Palls in 1796 (seven years after Coop­er) and spent his childhood and early adolescent days till he was sixteen years of age, that is, up to the out­break of the War of 1812, in the vicin­ity of the Falls and of Detroit. On the outbreak of the war, he enlisted in Brock’s army. Up to that time, young Richardson, during his most impressionable and receptive years, was entertained by his grandparents and parents with tales of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit, and stories of the thrilling and romantic and tragic events in the history of the Niagara and Detroit districts—events which are surely amongst the most enthral­ling and stirring in the vividly ro­mantic history of Canada and the United States. These early days of Richardson’s were thus replete with rare and unique formative influences; they created in him the love of romance, of the heroic past of his own country, and later, when he came to write, afforded him the inspiration and the material really to write au­thentic Canadian historical novels or romances.

Two other formative influences, besides those exercised over his heart and imagination by his grandparents and parents, have been noted by cer­tain critics as determining Richard­son’s genius, inspiration, and literary methods. In the War of 1812 he had fought side by side with the noble Indian warrior Tecumseh. Further, on his own confession, he had, as he puts it, “absolutely devoured three times” Cooper's Indian romance, “The Last of the Mohicans”. Some critics, therefore, hold that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper: that, first, he studied the mind and ways of In­dians at second-hand in the pages of Cooper’s romance, and that, secondly, he acquired the art of writing fiction from Cooper’s volume. There is not any real ground for such beliefs. Mr. Marquis rightly holds that as a his­torical romancer Richardson was orig­inal and independent. I hold the same belief, but I do so for reasons which differ from those that Mr. Marquis and others advance. On the first count, that Richardson got his know­ledge of Indians at second-hand from Coopers pages, I submit that such an opinion requires an absurd anachron­ism to make it possible and true. The War of 1812. during which Richard­son fought side by side with Tecum­seh, began fourteen years before the publication of “The Last of the Mo­hicans”, (1826), or long before Rich­ardson could have read a page of Cooper. Richardson’s genius was ro­mantically formed in his early days; and during his association with Te­cumseh he came to know Indian psychology and character at first­hand. That is indisputable. Again, on the second count, that Richardson acquired the art of novel-writing from Cooper, I submit that the Canadian romancer had learned the art of novel-writing, and had published novels some years before be published “Wacousta”. There was, for instance, his “Ecarte; or, The Salons of Paris”, published in 1828. Rut this is a sort of demi-monde novel, dealing with the evils of gambling, and, of course, far from the romantic passion, thrilling incident, and all the colour of life and nature that appear in Richardson’s “Wacousta” and “The Canadian Bro­thers”. Possibly Richardson may have got from his reading of Cooper some “coaching” in the mere mechanics of writing romance. Yet, when we com­pare the diction, sentential structure, descriptive epithets and imagery, and the general style of the two romancers, Richardson, if not a better plot-mak­er than Cooper, is the superior crafts­man and stylist, a fact which is proof presumptive that the Canadian romanancer developed independently his own mechanics of literary composi­tion. Finally, in the fine art of char­acter-drawing, Richardson is more veracious and incisive than Cooper. When we compare the American novelist’s characters with those of the Canadian, we find that Cooper’s are more like “studies” from books than pictures drawn from real life, where­as Richardson’s Indians are very near to the real Indian, very life-like: the heroic in them is heroic enough, that is to say, human and natural. Rich­ardson’s Indian characters, then, are original creations — absolutely his own. Also his own are the other char­acters (soldiers, fur-traders, French Canadians, etc.), the plots, all the stirring incidents and the colour of the Canadian background from na­ture. Of his romances, “Wacousta” and “The Canadian Brothers”, the only aesthetic criticisms worth while making are that not infrequently Richardson forces the dramatic in them into the melo-dramatic, that he puts into the mouths of his charac­ters utterances which are unnatural or not in keeping with the position and circumstances of the speakers, and that he suits his historical facts to his own purposes.

In sum, then, since Richardson had his genius romantically formed, and had engaged in the art of fiction, long before he had read Cooper, the only possible influence Cooper could have had on Richardson was to incite him to emulate the American romancer. Emulation, incited by a contempor­ary author, does not imply imitation, and has no significance in original literary creation. Taken by and large, John Richardson was the first creator of Canadian nativistic fiction as such. He had first-rate powers of invention, was a respectable craftsman, and pro­duced at least two original romances that are worthy to be included in the corpus of general English literature, and to have a distinctive niche in the corpus of Canadian nativistic litera­ture.

Contemporary with Richardson, a man of greater creative genius and versatility, who, in fact, became the foremost native-born writer of his time in British North America, gave to the world a species of the fiction of characterization and of the critic­ism of society and manners that for originality and enduring appeal to all classes is the most remarkable pro­duced by a Canadian man of letters, and amongst the most remarkable produced by any modern man of let­ters as such. This man was Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who, if he did not absolutely create a species of fic­tion without plot interest, at least gave it new form and potency, as he did, in those ingenious volumes which have Sam Slick as their chief inspirer and central character. Though born in Nova Scotia, Haliburton’s genius was indigenous, not so much to Nova Scotia or to Canada, as to the world; and the fiction he produced belongs, not so much to Canadian nativistic literature and to general English lit­erature, as to world literature.

It is as a systematic creative humourist, embracing, as it were, in one genius the gifts of Benjamin Frank­lin, Charles Dickens, Artemas Ward, Josh Billings, and Mark Twain, that Haliburton has won a unique and permanent place in Canadian, Eng­lish, and world literature. This is the only angle from which it is worth while for genuine criticism to view and estimate the genius and creative prose of Haliburton. Those who deal in literary dominoes, and who call such diversion criticism, may pother with the fact that Longfellow, by his own confession, actually did read Haliburton’s account of the expulsion of the Acadians, or with the possi­bility that Parkman may have read the whole of Haliburton’s "Historical anti Statistical Account of Nova Sco­tia”. Longfellow and Parkman mere­ly turned to Haliburton, just as Shakespeare, Scott, and Tennyson turned to Plutarch, the Chroniclers, and the “Morte d’Arthur”, as “sources” of material for plays, ro­mances. and idyls; and the “influence” of Haliburton on the creative genius and invention of the American poet and historian was as insignificant as that of the author of the “Morte d’Arthur” on the poetic invention of Tennyson. But it is very highly sig­nificant that Haliburton was the author of a distinct—and alas! ex­tinct—type of creative comedy or humour, that he was the foremost sys­tematic humourist of his time on the North American continent, that he was in his day the supreme aphorist and epigrammatist of the English­speaking peoples, and that his wit and wisdom remain part of the warp and woof of modern world literature. In comic character-drawing Haliburton takes a place beside Cervantes, Dic­kens, Daudet, and Mark Twain. His Sam Slick, and even his minor char­acters, are amongst the best imagina­tive creations of modern fiction, Sam Slick himself being as unique—in­dividual, real, human, and fascinating —as Don Quixote, Pickwick, Tartaran or Huckleberry Finn, while being distinguishable from these others by aphoristic speech that in form is bril­liant wit and humour, but that in substance is enduring wisdom.

Now, it is this abiding philosophical quality of Haliburton’s wit and hu­mour, as we get it chiefly in the ut­terances of Sam Slick, that construc­tive criticism seizes on to remove the superstition which Artemns Ward first created by declaring that Haliburton was “the founder of the Am­erican school of humour”, and which so acute and well-informed a Cana­dian critic as Mr. Marquis has gone to pains to perpetuate by submitting that “American humour received its first impulse from ‘Sam Slick’; and Haliburton was, moreover, the first writer to use the American dialect in literature. Artemas Ward, Josh Bill­ing and Mark Twain are, in a way, mere imitators of Haliburton, and he is their superior”. There is not a single grain of truth in any of these claims, except possibly that Ward, Billings and Twain imitated or adopt­ed Haliburton’s so-called American dialect, if a manufactured potpourri of Yankee localisms and slang and mis-spelled diction can justly be call­ed “the American dialect”. Haliburton created the shrewd Yankee pedlar and humourist, Sam Slick, and then put him as a “character”, and his wit and humour, uttered in a dialect which virtually existed in New Eng­land, into literature. That is all Hali­burton ever had to do with American humour. He certainly was not the founder or the father of the Ameri­can school of humour. The real “father” of American humour—that is, the humour of sheer exaggerated nonsense, having on the face of it seriousness and veracity—was Ben­jamin Franklin who in 1765, or thirty years before Haliburton was born, produced the first example of what is popularly meant by American hu­mour. The example is to be found in a letter by Franklin to one of the eighteenth century London news­papers to offset the idiotic views which Englishmen then held about the British colonies, including Can­ada, in America. I quote from the letter in part:

“I beg to say that all the articles of news that seem improbable are not mere inventions. The very tails of the Ameri­can sheep are so laden with wool that each has a little car or wagon on four little wheels to support and keep it from trailing on the ground. Would they caulk their ships, would they even litter their horses with wool, if it were not both plenty and cheap. . . . Their engaging three hundred silk throwsters here in one week for New York was treated as a fable, because, forsooth, they have ‘no silk there to throw’. Those who make this objection, perhaps do not know that at the same time the agents from the King of Spain were at Quebec to contract for one thousand pieces of cannon to be made there for the fortification of Mexico. . . . And yet all this is as certainly true, as the account said to be from Quebec, in all the papers last week, that the inhabitants of Canada are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery ‘this summer in the Upper Lakes'. Ignorant people may object that the Upper Lakes are fresh, and that cod and whales are salt water fish; but let them know, sir, that cod, like other fish when attacked by their enemies, fly into any water where they can be safest; that whales when they have a mind to eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; and that the grand leap of the whale in the chase up the Falls of Niagara is esteemed by all who have seen it as one of the finest spectacles in nature.”

That was written by Franklin in the eighteenth century, and it is writ­ten in the newspaper style of Addi­son. Yet any well-read student of the history of literature who did not recognize the authorship would likely credit it to Mark Twain. But Haliburton, Ward and Billings wrote their humour in a specious or perverted dialect. How, then, can it be said, with any plausibility, that Haliburton “fathered” or “gave impulse” to American humour? Moreover, Frank­lin began early the publication of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” a quasi-literary periodical which gave vogue in America to that sort of aphoristic or humorous wisdom which is also uttered by Haliburton’s chief char­acter, Sam Slick. It is more than probable that Haliburton had read “Poor Richard”. Are we to conclude that Franklin is the literary “father” of Haliburton as a humourist and aphorist, and that Sam Slick’s epi­grams are an imitation of “Poor Rich­ard’s” bits of practical wisdom? There is, in fact, no plausibility in either view that Haliburton is the “father” of American humour or that Franklin is the “father” of Haliburtonian; that is, Canadian humour. Possibly Haliburton got some “coach­ing” in the methods of humour from Franklin.

Still, Haliburton created Canadian nativistic humour—and has left no successors. He was the first systema­tic humourist of the Provinces that have become the Dominion of Can­ada—original in time and original in inventing the humorous character, Sam Slick, and in being the first to use the so-called American dialect as speech for wit and humour, and to employ wit, wisdom and kindly sa­tire—not, note, exaggerated nonsense after the American manner—as hu­mour. And so Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a native son of Nova Scotia, appears as the foremost man of letters of the Colonial Canadian period who had first-rate creative genius and who has won a unique and permanent place, not only in Canadian and in English literature, but also in world literature. He is the only native-born Canadian writer to whom we can justly apply the epi­thet “great”. As Mr. Marquis puts it: “Of him we can say, as Ben John­son said of Shakespeare—‘He is not of an age, but for all time’ ”.

After Richardson and Haliburton there were no Colonial or Pre-Confed­eration fictionists of any constructive significance in Canadian nativistic letters. The first stage of the new constructive period in Canadian fic­tion began with William Kirby’s his­torical romance, “The Golden Dog” (“Le Chien d’Or”), published in 1877, that is, ten years after Confed­eration, or twenty years before the publication of Roberts’s “In Divers Tones”, which inaugurated the First Renaissance in Canadian nativistic and national poetry. It may be ob­jected that because Kirby was born in England, he is not rightfully to be regarded as a Canadian. He came, however, to Canada when he was but fifteen years of age, was resident in Canada for forty-five years before he produced and published “The Golden Dog”, and chose the theme, setting, and colour of his romance from Cana­dian history and social life. Essen­tially, therefore, Kirby was a genuine Canadian man of letters. But it is not aesthetically or as a work of artis­tic fiction that Kirby’s romance “The Golden Dog” is important, but in its constructive and inspirational influ­ence on other Canadian fictionists. In that regard it is more important than Richardson’s “Wacousta”, and better entitled than Richardson’s romance to a permanent place in the corpus of Canadian literature. In “The Golden Dog” Kirby went back for his in­spiration to the romantic and heroic past of Canada, and thus brought to the notice of future fictionists the wealth of novelistic material that lay in the unknown or the forgotten Can­adian past. In short., Kirby and “The Golden Dog” were the literary pro­genitors of a series of romances that have a Canadian historical basis and Canadian incident and colour. While his own historical romance was a ten­tative production, that is, not succeed­ed by other romances on Kirby’s part, “The Golden Dog” was, as it were, the harbinger of the spring and summer that were to be in Canadian nativistic and national fiction.

The systematic Renaissance in the scope, themes and technic of Cana­dian fiction and other imaginative prose began about a decade after the Renaissance in Canadian poetry, and resulted in an impressive body of Canadian nativistic fiction in all of the chief genres—novels, romances, tales, prose idyls, animal stories and social satire and humour. Here I may merely mention the most significant names in the Renaissance period of Canadian fiction. I lead off with Miss Marshall Saunders, who in 1889 pub­lished her “My Spanish Sailor”, whereas Mr. Marquis gives preference to Sir Gilbert Parker and his “Pierre and His People”, published in 1890. Parker is indubitably the most emin­ent of Canadian fictionists, but in scope he tends to be Imperial, rather than Canadian, even in those novels which have a Canadian historical basis, setting and colour, as, for in­stance, in his “The Seats of the Mighty” (1896). Miss Saunders is pervasively Canadian, quite as inven­tive as Parker, and technically a bet­ter craftsman than he. I might have led off with Mr. W. D. Lighthall’s “The Young Seigneur”, published in 1888, were it not that this work is a socio-political study and not a genu­ine novel. In romantic fiction of the Renaissance period, the salient names, then, are Miss Saunders, Sir Gilbert Parker, Charles G. D. Roberts, Wil­fred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, Charles W. Gordon (Ralph Connor), Edward W. Thomson, J. Macdonald Oxley, W. A. Fraser, Mrs. Grace Dean MacLeod Rogers, Miss Alice Jones, Mrs. Carleton Jones, Norman Duncan, and Arthur String­er; and beginning again with Lucy M. Montgomery (Mrs. Ewan Mac­Donald), the still later generation of Canadian fictionists, as, for instance, Alan Sullivan, Peter MacFarlanc, Mrs. Isabel Ecclestone MacKay, Mrs. Virna Sheard, the really creative art­ist amongst them all being the author of “Anne of Green Gables”. In an­other genre of fiction, namely, social satire and humour, Sara Jeanette Duncan (Mrs. Cotes), stands by her­self as the foremost Canadian woman of letters in her special field, just as Miss Saunders stands by herself in the fiction of the humanitarian ani­mal story, as Ernest Thompson-Seton and C. G. D. Roberts remain sui gen­eris in the fiction of the psychological animal story, and as Stephen Leacock remains alone in creative literary comedy or humour and wit. All the foregoing Canadian fictionists, save “Ralph Connor”, whatever be the genre they have essayed, have been moved to write by artistic inspiration and aims, and, on the whole, have suc­ceeded admirably. Some of them have won world-wide reputation for first-rate invention, enlivening incident and colourization, and incisive char­acterization; others have achieved international reputation; and others are on the way to appreciation wider than what they receive in their own coun­try. Taken all in all, they have creat­ed a very respectable body of fiction and imaginative prose, quite worthy, if it does not shine with equal glory, to have an honourable place beside the body of Canadian creative poetry.

In this essay I have applied the historico-critical method to the appreciation and evaluation of Canadian nativistic and national fiction or imaginative prose, signalizing only constructive authors and movements. From Richardson and Haliburton to Kirby, and from Kirby to Miss Saun­ders and Sir Gilbert Parker, and then onwards to Lucy M. Montgomery and her confreres or contemporaries we have noted a genuine evolution in lit­erary species and eventually the sys­tematic production of a body of prose that has aesthetic beauty or dignity, artistic structure, and imaginative and spiritual appeal. Some of it will have a permanent place only in Cana­dian literature; some of it is worthy to be included, as it is, in the general corpus of English literature; and all the best of it, despite the contempt of those myopic critics who find lit­erature only in antique tomes and lit­erary beauties only in the supreme masters, is genuine literature. I hold to that—unswervingly.

Literary History of Nova Scotia

Re-Views of the Literary History of Canada

Part I.—The Significance of Nova Scotia

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.