Canadian literature

“ For the problem of Canadian literary criticism is not the question whether Canada has produced, intermittently and here and there, some original authors who have composed poetry and prose as aesthetically winning and as artistically beautiful or dignified as that of British and American writers, but whether the Dominion has produced a continuous body of poetry and prose, which, at its best, may justly be considered genuine literature, worthy to be regarded, as American literature is regarded, as a living branch of English Literature. ”

“ To observe that Canada has produced good poetry, near-great poetry, is not, as many Canadians seem to feel it is, to damn it with faint praise, but sensibly to evaluate it. Those native critics who ignore Canadian poetry because, as they think, it is not ‘great’ poetry and is, therefore, not ‘real’ poetry or not poetry worthy of the name of literature, are maladroit logicians. ”

“ For the chief aims of the Canadian constructive critics are these two: first, to make plain and indubitable to their compatriots and the world that Canada has a really respectable body of literature; secondly, to appraise new works of verse and prose by Canadians and to determine the status of their worth in the permanent literature of Canada. Canadian constructive critics have also a third aim. It is pedagogical: to teach the people a decent knowledge of the literary history of Canada and an aesthetic appreciation of Canadian poetry and prose. ”

“ We must, therefore, honor the earlier and later émigré poets and prose writers of Canada, not for the intrinsic merit of their work, but for the fact that they engendered in the native-born the ideal of expressing the consciousness of a Canadian homeland and spirit in literature which should possess originality in substance, and beauty in form and in technical artistry. ”

“ This book will justify itself if it compels Canadians to recognize the importance of their own literature, and wins other peoples to a decent respect for a literature which, while still in its adolescence, shows evidences of attaining to independent and vigorous adult estate—in the event of which Canadian literary creation, taste, and judgment will be based, not on the work of British or of American masters of poetry and imaginative prose, but on that of Canadian masters. ”

“ The contribution of romance and tradition is not an unimportant one in any nation. The French in Canada have never broken with their past, as the French in France have. There is a great charm about Quebec—its language, its social life, the military remains of the last century. It is a Protestant writer who speaks of the volume and wealth of the French Canadian literature as too little known to English-speaking Canada. And it is true that literary men have not realized the richness of the French material, nor the work accomplished by French writers in history, poetry, essays, and romances. ”

“ That a New Poetry will arise in Canada and that it will originate and flourish in the Canadian Far West, is highly probable, because the prairie-lands of the West, their endless fields of grain sheening in the sun and billowing in rhythmic swaying to the winds and the mighty vastnesses of land and sky awaken moods and appreciations of Nature similar to those stirred in men by the sea. It was, in Bliss Carman’s fine phrase, ‘the glad indomitable sea’ and the inland seas that inspired the Maritime and Lake poets who began the First Renaissance of Canadian Poetry. ”

“ Yet if this America of ours has a history only of yesterday, it, too, has its memories and associations to stimulate the genius of history, poetry and romance. Already in the first century of American literature have poets and historians and artists appeared to rival those of the older civilization of the world. The works of Parkman and Longfellow illustrate that there is, even in the early history and traditions of Canada, much to evoke the interest of the great world beyond us, when a writer brings to the task the genius of a true poet or the brilliancy of an accomplished historian. ”

“ This growth in it from crudity to decent literary form evolved according to the social and spiritual development of Canada in the Pioneer and the later Pre-Confederation periods. As existence in Canada became more and more settled, and education and culture became more and more distributed and appreciated, the literature produced in the country was written more and more to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities and the artistic conscience. ”

“ I wish, here, specially to remark my ideal and aim in writing Highways of Canadian Literature. It is, I believe, the duty of the literary historian and critic to respect his subject and to present it under its most significant and engaging aspects in order that he may win others to equal respect for his subject. Canadian Literature is important at least to Canadians ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Canada there is settling into shape a nation of two races; there is springing into existence, at the same time, a literature in two languages. In the matter of strength and stamina there is no overwhelming disparity between the two races. The two languages are admittedly those to which belong the supreme literary achievements of the modern world. In this dual character of the Canadian people and the Canadian literature there is afforded a series of problems which the future will be taxed to solve. ”

“ While the members of the Academic School take the strictly aesthetic attitude to Canadian Literature, and show little or no appreciation of the historic process in the evolution of Canadian culture, they differ even in aesthetic attitude from their predecessors. ”

“ THE ELEGIAC MONODISTS OF CANADA—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS—BLISS CARMAN—WILFRED CAMPBELL—DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT—WILLIAM MARSHALL—JAMES DE MILLE.
Canadian Literature is rich—not relatively but absolutely—in Dirges, Epicedes, Elegies, Threnodies, and Elegiac Monodies. That Canadian Elegiac Monodies, or long ‘In Memoriam’ poems inspired by the death of a real, not a mythical or imagined, person, have genuine distinction, is indisputable. In number they equal the monodies of English Literature ”

“ When the French Academy hailed our friend Fréchette as a brother poet, the act was not done because he was a Canadian, but because he was a poet, writing and speaking the French tongue. (Applause.) There is no such thing really as Canadian literature or American literature. It is all English literature, and we should all strive to add to the glory of that literature. We can do it, in our way, as well as Moore and Lover and Lever and Carleton and McGee did, when they added the splendid work of their genius to build up the renown and prestige of the parent stock. ”

“ But while he thus was the first native-born writer to bring Canadian literature into a high and permanent place in English and world literature, he also was coadjutor with Howe in inaugurating the Epoch of the Independent Prose Literature of Canada. Considered from the sides of versatility of invention, variety of production in literary species, and of mastery of style, Thomas Chandler Haliburton remains to this day the Greatest Prose Writer of Canada. ”

“ Nature never was more lavish to any people in beautiful landscape from the quiet rural scenery of the maritime provinces, Quebec and Ontario, to the far-flung epic of the fenceless prairies and the Homeric grandeur of the mountains. Why are quiet rural beauty and illimitable freedom and lofty splendor not reflected in poem and novel and ballad and picture? The Canadian may answer—We go in more for athletics than aesthetics: we are living literature, not writing it. ”

“ What, then, is the status of Canadian poetry in the poetry of the Empire? Canadian nature-poetry, in variety of theme, substance, color, imagery and artistry, at its best, surpasses that of the other Dominions. Much of Overseas poetry is concerned with social life. In the past Canadians displayed an insistent sense of a call to work out their own destiny, and a profound pride in the resources and institutions of their country. In the verse of Canadian poets the ‘note’ in this regard is somewhat too insistent, almost strident. ”

“ But there can be no doubt that as a verbal colorist and nature-painter he has the eye both of the naturalist and the impressionist. And it is indubitable that as a colorist or impressionist he has put more of the pageantry of Nature in Canada into his poetry than has even Bliss Carman. All the Canadian seasons are in it, and every phase of the light, color, and sound of the Canadian year is in it—done by ready, flexible, graphic stroke or exquisite touch, in rich or luminous and translucent coloring, with romantic eye and fantasy, and with singular ingenuity and power. ”

“ The Canadian people are displaying an intellectual activity commensurate with the expansion of their territory and their accumulation of wealth. The scientific, historical and political contributions of three decades, make up a considerable library which shows the growth of what may be called Canadian literature, since it deals chiefly with subjects essentially of Canadian interest. ”

“ But to him, as some of our recently published historical and biographical works bear testimony, Canadian literature lies under a debt which it can never repay. Literature the man loves, and it is not an exaggeration to say that his life has been consecrated to it. How bitter have been the fortunes of letters in Canada, is a fact only too well known, but Mr. ”

“ In the imaginative power that she has brought to these semi-historical sagas, and in the liquid flow of her rhythmical prose, she has shown herself to be a literary worker of whom we may well be proud: she has made a most estimable contribution to purely Canadian literature. ”

“ Yet in Sunshine Sketches he has achieved an unmistakably true characterization of the average ‘little town’ of Canada—its life and its people—a life which shows the universal touch that makes the whole world akin, and at the same time has those narrow, provincial idiosyncrasies that make it distinctively local and impossible of portrayal except by one who has lived it. There is here revealed much of the usually uncovered side of human nature, lit up with a glow of amusement at the foibles of our fellow-man, but tempered, more than is usual with Leacock, with a good-natured sympathy. ”

“ But with the greater opportunities of leisure and culture necessarily opening up to us in the future, Canadians may yet have a literature, not merely imitative, as at present, but creative and original. ”

“ England had only Canada's population when a Shakespeare and a Milton rose like stars above the world. Scotland and Ireland both have a smaller population than Canada, and their ballads are sung all over the world. Canada has had a multitude of sweet singers pipe the joys of youth, but as life broadened and deepened their songs did not reach to the deeps and the heights. Something arrested development. They did not go on. Why? It may be that literature rises only as high as its fountain springs—the people ”

“ But it must be admitted that then, as now, the intellectual progress of Canada was very slow compared with that of the United States, where, during the times of which I am writing, literature was at last promising to be a profession, Cooper, Irving and Poe having already won no little celebrity at home and abroad. It was not till the Canadas were re-united and population and wealth poured into the country that culture began to be more general. ”

“ The members of the various Schools commingle aesthetic, academic, and pragmatic methods in the same essay, for the reason that in Canada criticism has been compelled, as it still is compelled, to be primarily a cultural agency, and could never aim to be literature, wholly delectable in itself. ”

“ Thus the second decade of this century saw the rise in Canada of the Realistic Romance. At its best this class of novel resembles the Community type but is speeded up with a more exciting and more complicated plot; at its worst it is lurid melodrama with realism interpreted as the portrayal of the sordid and seamy side of life. Very few of the realistic romances exhibit any distinction of manner and style. They are not concerned with the niceties of the art of telling a story but with the ability to keep the reader constantly keyed up to a high emotional tensity. ”

“ The a priori presumption is that in Canada where verse and prose which possess all degrees of worth have for more than a century and a half been produced in the English language and which had English poetry and prose for models, there must be a respectable residue of authentic literature written by native-born and resident émigré Canadian authors. ”

“ Until the ‘nineties’ the production of Canadian fiction had been spasmodic and scattered, but the success of Gilbert Parker, Marshall Saunders, and other Canadian writers who gained a hearing first in lands alien to their own, and whose work came back to Canada ‘with an alienated majesty,’ proved that Canada was rich in literary material. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a marked increase in fiction writing in Canada. The new writers were influenced not only by the example of their compatriots but by that of the fiction writers of Great Britain and the United States. ”