However, he went, and was
bewildered
by his own success.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
Her early death in 1877 at the age of twenty-one
was a loss both to her own and to our race, but her life and
literary achievements were an earnest of the more remarkable
results which were likely to ensue, and are ensuing, from the fusing
of western and eastern culture. The educational policy of the
government of India is destined, given continuity of development,
to react upon English literature in a manner realised even now by
but a few, and certainly undreamt of by those who entered upon
it. But, until its full results are made manifest, Anglo-Indian
literature will continue to be mainly what it has been, with few
exceptions, in the past—literature written by Englishmen and
Englishwomen who have devoted their lives to the service of India.
>
## p. 343 (#373) ############################################
CHAPTER XI
ENGLISH-CANADIAN LITERATURE
By the scheme of this History the writer is constrained to
confine his investigation to the ranks of the illustrious dead. Now,
whereas a moderately favourable case may be made out for our
current literature, our dead are neither numerous enough, nor
sufficiently illustrious to stimulate more than local enthusiasm,
and our few early writers of distinction inevitably suffer in a
discussion that fails to link them with their living descendants.
It is a reasonably safe surmise that the names of not more
than three of our deceased writers are known even to profes-
sional students of literature in Europe, and two of these names
belong to the present generation. Judge Haliburton (Sam Slick)
enjoys at least a modest measure of cosmopolitan reputation,
and the poetry of Drummond and of Lampman has received
recognition not alone upon its own intrinsic merits, but as being
characteristically and distinctively Canadian in its quality.
The mention of Drummond's name suggests a difficulty that
must be disposed of on the threshold of the discussion. To
what authors writing within or without her borders may
Canada justly lay claim ? Some arbitrary test must evidently
be employed. Drummond was born in Ireland and partly edu-
cated there, yet we include him inevitably among our Canadian
writers; Grant Allen was born in Canada, yet we exclude him
from the list; and Goldwin Smith, who lived in Toronto for forty
years, can only by an unjustifiable extension of the definition be
included in an account of Canadian literature. The criterion in
these doubtful cases must surely be an identification with the
interests of the country so complete that a Canadian character
is stamped upon the work, or, in default of that, a commanding
influence exercised by the author upon the development of the
country's literature. There is obviously nothing Canadian about
Grant Allen in motive or intention. A residence of forty years
## p. 344 (#374) ############################################
344 English-Canadian Literature
[CH.
would constitute an ordinary individual a Canadian; but Goldwin
Smith came among us with his babits of thought unyieldingly fixed,
and lived and died in our midst a philosophical radical of sixty
years ago. His interests in pure literature were never extensive,
and his influence upon our literature may be said to have been
negligible, or to have been confined to our newspapers, which,
doubtless, received some benefit from the purity and pungency
of his journalistic style.
It is not necessary to apologise for, but merely to explain, the
paucity of our literary performance. Canada has many advan-
tages; but it has the disadvantage, in the literary sense, of being
a young country, born in the old age of the world. All that
tradition counts for in the literature of a European country
we must forgo. Our literary past is the literary past of
England; we have not yet had time to strike root for ourselves.
Older countries have a progressive tradition and a harmonious
evolution little interrupted by artificial considerations; whereas,
with us, literature is compelled to be almost completely artifice.
England had her spontaneous ballad and epic beginnings, her
naive miracle plays that responded to an imperative need of the
time, her share in the exhilaration of the renascence, when even
imitation was an exercise of the original creative faculty; and,
upon these broad foundations, she built her great self-conscious
modern literature, each new generation of writers urged on by
impulses from the past, reinforcing its lessons here, violently
reacting from its opinions there and always excited by contact
with the vivifying ideas that the present hour engenders.
It may be said that this is too flattering a picture, that
England periodically goes to sleep, and that lethargy, rather than
excitement, characterises her normal condition. But the state-
ment was not made in flattery, and, if it does not always correspond
with the facts, it may serve, at least, to point a contrast with colonial
conditions. The raw material of literature we have here in
abundance; but this material does not seem to germinate. Our
activities are physical, and our mental needs do not require
to be supplied by our own exertions. When London began
to build her theatres, plays had to be created to employ them.
We build theatres freely; but why should we go to the exertion
of supplying the text or even the actors, when the United States
and England are within such lazy reach? And so with the novel,
and so, also, with poetry, but with this saving consideration that
poetry, being an affair of impulse, can live, if not flourish, without
>
## p. 345 (#375) ############################################
xi]
The Canadian Type
345
a public. It might be supposed that fiction has every oppor-
tunity to develop in a country where the conditions of life must,
necessarily, be novel and the types of character widely diversified
by emigration. But the story of our fiction is as brief, almost, and
inglorious as is the story of our national drama. Certain living
writers are using this new material to good purpose ; but it is still
necessary to account for the dearth of native novels in a novel-
reading country. In partial explanation, it may be urged that,
even if frivolous in intention, a novel is still a serious undertaking,
and is rarely entered upon by a sheer amateur. Now, by reason
of the conditions of life in Canada, and in view of the fierce
competition to which a Canadian novelist would be subjected, we
have not yet developed a professional literary class, and our great
novels still lie ahead of us. Hitherto, the little fiction that has
been produced has been principally historic in character, the
glamour of our early colonial period, with its picturesque con-
trast of races, naturally suggesting the type. Historic fiction is,
momentarily, out of fashion the world over, and our racial
peculiarities are, perhaps, not yet sufficiently consolidated to
afford suggestive material to the novelist whose commanding
interest is in human character. We have Anglo-Canadian types,
Irish-Canadian types, Scottish-Canadian types who are trans-
planted and scarcely altered Englishmen, Irishmen, or Scotsmen.
The genuine Canadian type probably exists somewhere—a fusion
of all these with a discreet touch of the Yankee—but he is so
shadowy in outline that no novelist has yet limned his features for
Efforts in this direction by distinguished outsiders have not
been convincing. Of our native-born writers, the desultory
humourist Haliburton alone possessed the shrewd insight into
character that might have given us our Canadian Tristram Shandy;
but he contented himself with giving us a Yankee Sam Slick,
whom certain distinguished New Englanders emphatically re-
pudiate as spurious and disreputable. It is a matter of regret
that Haliburton, with his unquestioned literary ability, never
consented to the discipline of even the most rambling plot, for,
what his humour precisely needed was the co-ordination and
direction that systematic fiction would have afforded. Though
he obviously does not range himself within any of the categories
under which it is proposed to treat Canadian literature—being
neither poet nor novelist, and only in a secondary degree an
historian-yet the permanence of his reputation among our
writers warrants and necessitates a special reference to his work.
us.
## p. 346 (#376) ############################################
346 English-Canadian Literature [ch.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born at Windsor, Nova
Scotia, on 17 December 1796, and, on his father's side, was
remotely connected with Sir Walter Scott. He was called to
the bar in 1820 and, in 1841, he was appointed to the supreme
court of the province. In 1856, he resigned his office and removed
to England, where he died in 1865.
Haliburton's literary work began with histories of Nova Scotia,
published in 1825 and 1829. His Sam Slick papers first appeared
in 1835 and 1836, as contributions in a newspaper edited by
Joseph Howe, called The Nova Scotian, and were published in
book form in Halifax and London in 1837. A second and third
series followed in 1838 and 1840, the three series being combined,
later, in one volume. A list of Haliburton's works will be found
in the bibliography.
Artemus Ward traces the humour of the United States to its
source in Sam Slick, and there is much to support the derivation.
The fun is rather frayed and old now, and the serious motives which
inspired it are out of date; but, taken in small instalments, the
books are still diverting, and, of course, historically important in
a minor way. Sam Slick has had his successors, but none of his
descendants is so prolific of anecdote, and so voluble at large,
as he. His shrewd remarks and illustrations are always apposite
to some trait in American character, or throw light on some
phase in American politics-and, in both connections, the
term American is used here to describe conditions on either
side of the border. In Haliburton, the old tory died hard, or,
rather, refused to die ; and, that he might give loose rein to
his political prejudices without the tedium which a heavy expo-
sition entails, he invented that strange compound of shrewd-
ness, wit, vulgarity and sheer dishonest cunning-Sam Slick
the Yankee clockmaker. Wordsworth uttered solemn truths
through the lips of a perambulating pedlar; it was an equally
ingenious conception to make a wandering clockseller the
purveyor of political wisdom. It is probable that the author
invented him in order to contrast his smartness and characteristic
Yankee enterprise with the inertia of his own 'blue-nose' com-
patriots of Nova Scotia. Since, however, it would have been too
incongruous to present, through Sam's irreverent lips, the whole
body of the old-fashioned tory doctrine dear to the author's heart,
a prosy New England parson, the Rev. Mr Hopewell, is introduced
in order to supply the deficiency. This trio, therefore, it is-Sam
Slick with anecdotes innumerable gathered in his ubiquitous
## p. 347 (#377) ############################################
XI
]
Judge Haliburton
347
wanderings, the parson with his prosy moralisings and the squire
with his interjected protests and leading questions—who, between
| them, compose the serious treatise on political science which
deservedly takes rank among the amusing books of the century.
Two purposes—one rather should say two passions-dominate
these books. Haliburton had a deep affection for his native
province and appreciated its possibilities of development, but he
found its people lethargic and improvident, and he sought per-
sistently to rouse them if not to a sense of shame at least to
a sense of responsibility. Many of the practical reforms and
developments suggested by him have been introduced, and it is
possible that his insistence may have accelerated the inevitable
march of events. The languor of his fellow-countrymen was a
perpetual source of irritation :
The folks to Halifax,' says Sam Slick, 'take it all out in talkin-they talk
of steam-boats, whalers, and railroads—but they all eend where they begin-
in talk. I don't think I'd be out in my latitude, if I was to say they beat the
women-kind at that. One feller says, I talk of goin to England-another
says I talk of goin to the country-while a third says, I talk of goin to sleep.
If we happen to speak of such things, we say “ I'm right off down East,” or
“ I'm away off South,” and away we go just like a streak of lightnin. . . . You've
seen a flock of partridge of a frosty mornin in the fall, a crowdin out of the
shade to a sunny spot, and huddlin up there in the warmth-well, the blue-
noses [i. e. the Nova Scotians] have nothin else to do half the time but sun
themselves. Whose fault is that? Why it is the fault of the legislatur; they
don't encourage internal improvement, nor the investment of capital in the
country, and the result is apathy, inaction, and poverty. '
So strongly does the author feel the force of Sam's remarks that
he italicises the conclusion of the homily, and casts the Yankee
idiom aside.
‘No,' said he (with an air of more seriousness than I had yet observed),
'how much it is to be regretted, that, laying aside personal attacks and petty
jealousies, they would not unite as one man, and with one mind and one heart
apply themselves sedulously to the internal improvement and developement
of this beautiful Province. Its value is utterly unknown, either to the general
or local Government, and the only persons who duly appreciate it are the
Yankees. '
Two points are to be noted, namely, that this extract is
introduced to represent not the humour but the purpose of the
volume, and that, when the author is imbued with the seriousness
of an argument, no artistic scruples forbid him to allow Sam Slick
to speak out of character.
Reference has been made to a second dominating purpose in
these books. Haliburton was passionately devoted to the cause
## p. 348 (#378) ############################################
348
English-Canadian Literature [CH.
of imperial unity at a time when Great Britain neglected her
colonies, and when the loosely organised provinces that now are
Canada were apparently drifting towards independence or an-
nexation. The two agencies that saved a dangerous situation
were responsible government and confederation. To the first,
Haliburton was obstinately opposed ; of the unifying possibilities
of the second, he was, like many of his contemporaries, pardonably
ignorant. The solution he offered was tory in the extreme: the
rising tide of democracy must be stemmed by a severe restriction
of the franchise; the executive councils must be consolidated in
power; the French must abandon their language and their law;
and the ambitions of intelligent colonists must be rewarded
by the most ample distribution of patronage from the mother
land. Canada was a stagnant pond that bred tadpoles and polly-
woggles ; a fresh stream of patronage would breed sizable fish.
Responsible government was the partisan cry of Papineau and
his rebel brood. Even the Yankee Slick is shocked at their
pretensions :
For that old party, clique, and compact were British in their language,
British in their feelings and British in their blood. Our party clique and
compact is not so narrow and restricted, for it is French in its language,
Yankee in its feelin', and Republican in its blood.
The Clockmaker was followed, in due order, by three further
Sam Slick volumes—The Attaché, Wise Saws and Nature and
Human Nature. They are full of rich humour, but suffer from
a forcing of the vein. The Attaché represents Sam Slick ‘at the
Court of St James's,' where, obviously, he is out of his element.
The book was intended as a burlesque rejoinder to Dickens's
American Notes; but there is a kindliness in the satire which
differentiates it from its prototype.
Taking all things into consideration, Haliburton's books merit
the commendation they have received. They are choppy and
unorganised, as the foregoing account of them will have made
clear; but, in spite of the designed disorder of his style, he has
produced work of permanent value. He is a raconteur of
exuberant fertility, a passionate politician and an irredeemable
and unforgivable punster.
Isabella Valancy Crawford is the first Canadian poet of dis-
tinction, and her work would challenge attention in the poetical
history of any country. She was born in Dublin in 1850, and
her family settled in Canada when she was a child of eight.
## p. 349 (#379) ############################################
XI]
Isabella Valancy Crawford
349
She spent her last years in Toronto, and her poems appeared,
for the most part, in the unregarded corners of the daily papers.
She died in 1886. Two years before her death, a meagre and
unassuming volume of her verse was published, bearing the title
Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and Other Poems. In 1905,
a reasonably full collection of her poems was published with
an introductory notice by a fellow poet, Ethelwyn Wetherald.
Valancy Crawford's lyrical verse is singularly intense and pure,
with the intensity and purity that we find in the work of Emily
Brontë, whose shy austerity and solitary brooding passion her
own suggests, without its tragic morbidity. Love's Forget Me Not
which stands first in the volume, has this peculiar Brontë quality.
Suggestions of resemblance to famous writers may be excused
in an account of an unknown poet. So, the following lyric may be
compared, for its daintily jewelled workmanship, with many a
similar lyric by Théophile Gautier, with whose very name Valancy
Crawford was probably not familiar :
O Love builds on the azure sea,
And Love builds on the golden sand,
And Love builds on the rose-winged cloud,
And sometimes Love builds on the land !
O if Love build on sparkling sea,
And if Love build on golden strand,
And if Love build on rosy cloud,
To Love these are the solid land!
O Love will build his lily walls,
And Love his pearly roof will rear
On cloud, or land, or mist, or sea-
Love's solid land is everywhere!
And a further resemblance which, again, is purely fortuitous,
suggests itself between The Helot and Meredith's tersely powerful
ballad Attila. There is the same compression, the same command-
ing vigour, and an approach, at least, to the imaginative breadth
of Meredith's great poem.
Isabella Valancy Crawford was no man's disciple, but she read
her poets to advantage. There is a quality in Malcolm's Katie
(not a wholly successful piece) which argues a familiarity with
Tennyson's narrative method, but the dependence is slight. Her
dialect poems, of which Old Spookses' Pass is the most vigorous
example, bring her into a comparison which is not wholly in her
disfavour with Bret Harte, Lowell and their progeny of Hoosier
and cowboy writers. How original her lyric gift is we realise by
## p. 350 (#380) ############################################
350
[Ch.
English-Canadian Literature
her fresh handling of an old theme. There is a whole literature of
the rose in English poetry. Valancy Crawford's version of the
theme has the freshness of a new discovery:
The Rose was given to man for this:
He, sudden seeing it in later years,
Should swift remember Love's first lingering kiss
And Grief's last lingering tears;
Or, being blind, should feel its yearning soul
Knit all its piercing perfume round his own,
Till he should see on memory's ample scroll
All roses he had known;
Or, being hard, perchance his finger-tips
Careless might touch the satin of its cup,
And he should feel a dead babe's budding lips
To his lips lifted up;
Or, being deaf and smitten with its star,
Should, on a sudden, almost hear a lark
Rush singing up-the nightingale afar
Sing thro' the dew-bright dark;
Or, sorrow-lost in paths that round and round
Circle old graves, its keen and vital breath
Should call to him within the yew's bleak bound
Of Life, and not of Death.
a
If we cannot designate any single writer as the founder of a
Canadian school of poetry, we can still point to Archibald
Lampman as the poet who, under the necessary conditions of
imitation, was as Canadian as circumstances would allow. With
Wordsworth, Keats and Arnold on one's shelves, one does not
draw inspiration from Sangster and Heavysege ; but what sets
Lampman in a different category from his predecessors is the fact
that the poets of the younger Canadian generation have frankly
admitted their debt to him. Lampman's work exhibits what a
carefully trained poetic sense can achieve in an environment
which he must himself have felt to be hostile to the free ex-
pansion of his talent, and his poetry is significant by what he
sought to do no less than by what he accomplished.
His friend and fellow-poet, D. C. Scott, has told the story of
his life in the brief memoir prefixed to his collected poems.
Archibald Lampman was born in 1861 at Morpeth, Ontario,
and was descended from a family of Pennsylvania Dutch loyalists,
who migrated to Canada at the time of the revolution. After
graduating at Trinity college, Toronto, he had a brief but severe
experience as a schoolmaster, from which he made his escape into
## p. 351 (#381) ############################################
xi]
Archibald Lampman
351
the civil service. The rest of his life, until his death in 1899, was
spent in the post office department at Ottawa.
Not much has been preserved from the work of his under-
graduate days. His first volume Among the Millet was the
product, chiefly, of the four years between 1884 and 1888. It
was, in part, a period of imitation and experimentation. The
Monk, a narrative poem, is diluted Keats, and the more ambitious
An Athenian Reverie is a skilful, if somewhat dull, literary exercise
into which he poured the results of his classical reading. Of
neither piece need any young poet have been ashamed; but,
obviously, there was no development possible in either of these
directions. His supreme passion was nature, and he was quick
to recognise that his best work was done in response to this
dominant impulse. His nature sympathies are readily explained.
Ottawa is beautifully situated between three rushing rivers whose
valleys tempted his feet when the day's routine was done, and it is
one of the advantages of the civil service that it does not monopolise
all the hours of daylight. His masters in poetry, too, fostered this
out-of-doors enthusiasm, for, though they owed much, indeed, to
other influences than nature, still, in Wordsworth, Keats and Arnold,
the descriptive vein was strong, and it was certainly the most
communicable part of their work. There is evidence, in later
years, that the general problems of society had begun to press in
upon Lampman's mind; but these problems he was able to
apprehend only through his imagination and his sympathies.
Nature was everywhere about him in her ample beauty and
variety; but the unaccented life of Ottawa afforded him no contact
with the disastrous extremes that are generated in the intenser
conditions of a large city.
Nature poetry is of many kinds and degrees. A rough summary
of its varieties may serve the purpose of testing the range of
Lampman's work in this direction. It should include the faithful
reproduction of a scene under the necessary conditions of artistic
selection and arrangement; the same, but with more particular
reference to the emotional and intellectual reaction from the
scene; an attempt to interpret the hidden significance of pheno-
mena; and, finally, the use of nature as a pictorial background
for human action, or as a setting for a mood.
The least interesting portion of Lampman's poetry lies in
the second of the above heads. One thinks of the powerful
philosophical reaction that Tintern Abbey gives us, or The
Prelude, of the impetuous personal recoil of the Ode to the
## p. 352 (#382) ############################################
352
[CH.
English-Canadian Literature
West Wind, or of the rich emotional reflex of the Ode to the
Nightingale; and, thinking of these superlative examples, one is
compelled to recognise the insipidity and monotony of Lampman's
reactions. Many of his poems that promise a fine result, such
as April, April in the Hills, The Meadow, Comfort of the Fields,
are carefully observed and exquisitely phrased, but are marred by
a trite conclusion. Ardent lover as he is, he can enumerate the
beauties of his mistress; but his tongue fails him to tell her more
than that he loves her dearly, and that he is glad to escape into her
presence from the dullness and vexations of his ordinary surround-
ings. Morning on the Lièvre is wholly free from this weakness,
and reproduces with vigour and cunningly contrived detail a
characteristic Canadian scene :
Far above us where a jay
Screams his matins to the day,
Capped with gold and amethyst,
Like a vapour from the forge
Of a giant somewhere hid,
Out of hearing of the clang
Of his hammer, skirts of mist
Slowly up the woody gorge
Lift and hang.
Softly as a cloud we go,
Sky above and sky below,
Down the river; and the dip
Of the paddles scarcely breaks,
With the little silvery drip
Of the water as it shakes
From the blades, the crystal deep
Of the silence of the morn,
Of the forest yet asleep;
And the river reaches borne
In a mirror, purple gray,
Sheer away
To the misty line of light,
Where the forest and the stream
In the shadow meet and plight,
Like a dream.
From amid a stretch of reeds,
Where the lazy river sucks
All the water as it bleeds
From a little curling creek,
And the musk rats peer and sneak
In around the sunken wrecks
Of a tree that swept the skies
Long ago,
On a sudden seven ducks
With a splashy rustle rise,
Stretching out their seven necks,
## p. 353 (#383) ############################################
XI]
Archibald Lampman
353
One before, and two behind,
And the others all arow,
And as steady as the wind
With a swivelling whistle go,
Through the purple shadow led,
Till we only hear their whir
In behind a rocky spur,
Just ahead.
The Frogs, Heat, Solitude, June, September, By an Autumn
Stream and Snow reveal Lampman's rare gift of observation,
selection and phrasing; and they, too, have a significant value that
transcends the mere terms of the description. By their repre-
sentative qualities, these poems are symbolic, and Lampman
attains this result not by the way of vagueness or mystical allusion,
but by the sure strokes of his poetic detail. Two stanzas from
Heat may serve to illustrate his skill in producing what we
vaguely designate as atmosphere :
From plains that reel to southward, dim,
The road runs by me white and bare;
Up the steep hill it seems to swim
Beyond, and melt into the glare.
Upward half-way, or it may be
Nearer the summit, slowly steals
A hay-cart, moving dustily
With idly clacking wheels.
By his cart's side the wagoner
Is slouching slowly at his ease,
Half-hidden in the windless blur
Of white dust puffing to his knees.
This wagon on the height above,
From sky to sky on either hand,
Is the sole thing that seems to move
In all the heat-held land.
Nature is not commonly employed by Lampman as a back-
ground of human action. There is little in him of the spirit of
romance if we make exception of his love for wild remote places.
One poem Between the Rapids, from his first volume, is, how-
ever, quite romantic in its conception and illustrates, with much
freshness, the ubi sunt theme that has tempted many poetic
experimenters.
The title of his second volume, Lyrics of Earth, betokens his
continued preoccupation with his favourite theme. He was pre-
paring Alcyone for the press during his last illness, but did not
live to see it published. It contains two poems, at least, that point
in a new direction and show the current of his social sympathies.
Of these one, The Land of Pallas, is ambitious but laboured ;
23
E, L. XIV.
CH. XI.
## p. 354 (#384) ############################################
354
[CH.
English-Canadian Literature
the other poem, The City of the End of Things, is Lampman's
highest imaginative achievement. It is a grim allegory of human
life largely conceived and forcibly wrought. There is nothing else
like it in his work.
The narrative pieces scattered through the volumes call for no
particular mention. Lampman's constructive and dramatic sense
was weak, and he had not the faculty of seizing upon some vivid
incident and developing its possibilities. He gives us life at mans
removes from actuality. In the sonnet, he was notably more
successful, and he felt himself that his best work was achieved in
that form. His sonnets are thoroughly well organised, and he
found them a convenient medium for conveying his philosophy of
life upon the purely human side. They go far, therefore, towards
saving his work from the monotony that otherwise would attach
to it. They contain many shrewd remarks upon life and give us
many fine records of imaginative moods.
So greatly have poetic methods altered since Lampman's death
that already his poetry may seem to be old-fashioned. He has nothing
either of the characteristic modern realism or mysticism, and bis
technique, by newer standards, seems cramped and unduly studied.
He lacks subtlety and lyric fire, but he has merits that will survive
many fluctuations of taste, and, without being distinctively Canadian,
he is still our representative Canadian poet.
William Henry Drummond invented a mode of poetry that won
him great popularity from the appearance of the first volume
The Habitant in 1897. Dialect poems, exhibiting the humours
of humble or rustic folk, have been written in many tongues
Drummond's originality consists in conveying his theme through
the medium of a speech not native to the speakers. One has to
imagine a sympathetic English-speaking listener and an expansive
habitant farmer or voyageur, who, in a kind of fluid and most
un-Browninglike monologue, reveals himself and his surroundings
with mirth-provoking simplicity and charm. The full flavour of
these pieces cannot be gained by mere reading, nor is the
elocutionist's platform their proper setting. They should be
heard, as most Canadians are privileged to hear them, repeated
round a camp-fire by someone competent in French-Canadian English
patois, or recited at cigar-time after dinner, when subtle literary
qualities are prone to be neglected, and it suffices that a poem
should be humorous and human. Thus it was that Drummond
gained his first success and learned his power. His widow tells
## p. 355 (#385) ############################################
XI]
William Henry Drummond
355
the story in her biographical introduction to the posthumous
volume, The Great Fight:
It was during my convalescence that Le Vieux Temps was written, and its
first public reading was at a dinner of the Shakespeare Club of Montreal, of
which the doctor had once been a member. On this occasion, being asked to
reply to one of the toasts, he would have refused the invitation, declaring that
speech-making was not in his line; but finally a compromise was effected by
his diffident suggestion that perhaps he might read the new poem instead of
making a speech. When the night of the dinner arrived he was with difficulty
prevented from running off somewhere on the plea of professional duty.
However, he went, and was bewildered by his own success. 'It's the strangest
thing in the world,' he said, 'but do you know they simply went wild over that
poem! ' This was the beginning of a long series of triumphs of a like nature,
triumphs which owed little to elocutionary art, much to the natural gift of a
voice rare alike in strength, quality, and variety of tone, but most of all to the
fact that the characters he delineated were not mere creations of a vivid
imagination. They were portraits, tenderly drawn by the master hand of a
true artist, and one who knew and loved the originals.
It is a healthy sign that poetry should, occasionally, revert to
the primitive conditions from which it originated, and assume its
original public function as a binding social force.
How Drummond's circumstances gave him access to his material
may briefly be told. Born at Currawn, county Leitrim, Ireland, in
1854, he came to Canada with his parents at the age of eleven.
Soon afterwards, his father died, leaving his widow with very
narrow means. The boy studied telegraphy, and, in 1869, received
an appointment in the little village of Bord-à-Plouffe on the
beautiful Rivière des Prairies :
'Here it was,' to quote from Mrs Drummond's account, that he first came
in contact with the habitant and voyageur, and listened to their quaint tales of
backwoods life; here that he heard from Gédéon Plouffe the tragedy retold
as The Wreck of the Julie Plante, a poem of which he himself thought little,
and never cared to recite, but which had made its way through the length and
breadth of the American continent before ever his first book of poems was
published. It was the old lumberman's reiteration of the words,“ An'de win'
she blow, blow, blow! ” which rang so persistently in his ears that, at the dead
of night, unable to stand any longer the haunting refrain, he sprang from his
bed and penned the poem, which was to be the herald of his future fame. '
By the year 1876, when he was twenty-two, Drummond had
saved enough money to resume his interrupted education. From
the high school in Montreal, he passed to McGill university,
and, later, studied medicine at Bishop's college, Montreal, whence
he graduated in 1884. After a few years of country practice,
which familiarised him with the types represented in his Canadian
Country Doctor and Ole Doctor Fiset, he returned, in 1888, to
Montreal, continued his practice and, subsequently, lectured
on medical jurisprudence at Bishop's college.
23-2
## p. 356 (#386) ############################################
356
[CH.
English-Canadian Literature
In 1905, Drummond became interested in some silver pro-
perties at Cobalt, which he and his brother successfully developed.
The possibilities of wealth did not dismay him. What he craved
was, in his own words, 'enough money to own a strip of salmon
water, and the best Irish terrier going, and to be able to help a
friend in need. ' Smallpox broke out in his camp in 1907. He
hurried there to cope with the disease, and, shortly after his
arrival, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Drummond's sympathy
with the habitant and his passion for wild life had been dominant
with him to the end. He perpetually refreshed himself in the
springs from which his poetry flowed.
Four volumes of verse stand to Drummond's credit: The
Habitant, Johnnie Courteau, The Voyageur and the posthu-
,
mously published The Great Fight. Another small book, Philo-
rum's Canoe, consists of two poems which reappear in Johnnie
Courteau,
Drummond's work is not characterised by the polished per-
fection of individual lines or stanzas. It is impossible, therefore,
to convey an adequate idea of his poetry by brief and dis-
connected quotation ; let this be said in no disparagement of the
result. It is honest, homely poetry, and Drummond broke new
ground.
The humours and the forgivable, even, as Drummond tells
them, the lovable, weaknesses of the habitant are traversed in
these poems. He sings his clumsily efficient courting, his worthy
pride in his abounding family of strapping sons and marriageable
girls, his love of the old homestead by the river, his anxiety to
return to it from his enforced wanderings and his reluctance to
leave it when his increased fortunes give him the dazzling prospect
of a 'tousand dollar' house. No poet ever derived his inspiration
from simpler themes, and the reader shares his enjoyment of the
good man's sublime self-content, his boastfulness, his love of a
horse-race and a dollar bet, his parochial outlook on politics and
the great world and his pardonable conviction that his own life,
his own wife and family, his own village and village curé, his
fields, his river and his weather are the best gifts that le bon
Dieu dispenses. That in all this there is never a hint of unkindly
caricature, the prefatory words of Louis Fréchette are sufficient
proof:
Dans son étude des Canadiens-français, M. Drummond a trouvé le moyen
d'éviter un écueil qui aurait semblé inévitable pour tout autre que pour lui.
Il est resté vrai, sans tomber dans la vulgarité, et piquant sans verser dans le
## p. 357 (#387) ############################################
XI]
Lesser Poets
357
grotesque. . . que le récit soit plaisant ou pathétique, jamais la note ne sonne
faux, jamais la bizarrerie ne dégenère en puérilité burlesque.
The following poets deserve a note in any account of Canadian
literature.
Joseph Howe was distinguished in the political life of his
province of Nova Scotia. His poetry is rhetorical, and his literary
qualities are best exhibited in his eloquent prose. Evan MacColl
came to Canada in 1850. His best work is said to be in Gaelic.
Poems and Songs, which appeared in 1883, has not much merit.
Charles Heavysege showed, amidst much crudeness, occasional
flashes of power. He came to Montreal from England in 1853.
His reputation rests upon his sonnets and his dramatic poem
Saul, which was described by a North British reviewer as 'one of
the most remarkable poems ever written out of Great Britain. '
Alexander McLachlan came from Scotland in 1840. He aspired
to be the Burns of Canada. Charles Sangster, unlike the three
last-named writers, was born in Canada. Before the advent of the
younger generation, he was the representative poet of his native
land; but his work is markedly inferior to that of his successors.
What strength he possesses is exhibited to best advantage in his de-
scriptive verse, and this is of not more than average merit. Thomas
D'Arcy McGee was a man of brilliant talents, which overflowed by
mere exuberance into literature. A member of the Young
Ireland' group, he wrote in the feverish style that characterised
those fervid patriots. McGee, after an adventurous youth, settled
in Canada in 1857, and almost immediately became prominent in
the political life of his adopted country. He was assassinated in
Ottawa in April 1868. Sir James Edgar, whose chief activity, as
in the case of Howe and McGee, was centred in politics, shared
with them, also, a taste and talent for poetry. George Frederick
Cameron died before he had reached the full measure of his
powers. His early death, like that of T. B. Phillips Stewart and
of Arthur Weir, must be considered a distinct loss to Canadian
poetry. The more recent death of the Indian poetess, Pauline
Johnson, is, also, to be reckoned among our losses, though she had
lived long enough to show her capabilities. She had a genuine
lyric gift within a limited range. The verses called A Prodigal
have a note of true passion :
My heart forgot its God for love of you,
And you forgot me, other loves to learn;
Now through a wilderness of thorn and rue
į
Back to my God I turn.
## p. 358 (#388) ############################################
358
[CH.
English-Canadian Literature
And just because my God forgets the past,
And in forgetting does not ask to know
Why I once left His arms for yours, at last
Back to my God I go.
A very enjoyable part of Canadian literature connects itself
with accounts of expeditions into distant regions of an un-
explored continent. A number of the best records of adventurous
journeys are written in French, of which many have been trans-
lated. The earliest of these explorers' volumes produced by an
Englishman was by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a high official in
the North-West company, who made trips through to the Arctic
and the Pacific, and, in 1801, published his Voyages from Montreal
through the Continent of North America. It makes fascinating
reading. George Heriot, the historian, wrote, in 1807, a curious
pioneer volume Travels through the Canadas which is much
more entertaining than his serious History of Canada. Alexander
Henry was an American by birth who spent many years as a fur-
trader in central Canada, and ended his days as a merchant in
Montreal. His book Travels and Adventures in Canada and the
Indian Territories was published in New York, in 1809, and
was edited as recently as 1901 by James Bain of Toronto. Anna
Brownell Jameson, who wrote on Shakespeare's women, spent a
part of 1836—7 in and near Toronto, and, in the following year,
published in three volumes Winter Studies and Summer Rambles
in Canada. Of a similar type were two books written by Susanna
Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush ; or Life in Canada (1852),
and Life in the Clearing versus the Bush (1853). These books
describe the conditions of life in the early settlements more
faithfully and, withal, more humorously than any other writer
has described them.
History is more successfully organised in Canada at the present
time than any other branch of literature. Our archives are being
systematically explored, and societies exist for the purpose of
editing old, and publishing new, material of a historical nature.
Our earliest historians, Heriot, Smith and Christie were of the
laboriously dull type that history frequently breeds. John Charles
Dent, an Englishman by birth, was much more entertaining ; but
his partisanship impairs the value of his work. This consists
of two readable histories, The Last Forty Years and The
Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion. The most complete and
painstaking of our histories, dull without being scientific, but
quite praiseworthy, is William Kingsford's History of Canada,
1
## p. 359 (#389) ############################################
XI]
History and Fiction
359
which covers the period from the discovery of Canada to the
union of 1841. Ten volumes stand to Kingsford's credit, and he
began to write history at the age of sixty-five. Haliburton's
Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1829) is still
useful. Two other works by him-The Bubbles of Canada (1837)
and Rule and Misrule of the English in America (1851)
have a historical tinge.
The war of 1812 has been variously recorded. David Thompson
was imprisoned for debt as a result of his historic venture on
this theme. Major John Richardson's War of 1812, in its re-
edited form (1902), presents much valuable material. James
Hannay produced a History of Acadia and a War of 1812.
Lady Edgar, in her Ten Years of Peace and War in Upper
Canada, presents a most interesting account of the time, based
largely on the correspondence of the Ridout family to which she
belonged. Her Life of Brock in the Makers of Canada series is
clearly and entertainingly written. Lady Edgar also wrote a
history of Maryland in the eighteenth century under the title
A Colonial Governor in Maryland.
Sir John George Bourinot is the author of a popular history
called The Story of Canada. He was a diligent and useful writer
upon Canadian affairs, and his position as clerk of the Canadian
house of commons gave him peculiar opportunities for the study
of constitutional problems. The leading Canadian writer, however,
on constitutional procedure was Alpheus Todd, whose works will be
found in the bibliography. Two men, Joseph Howe and George
Morris Grant, exercised by their voice and pen a powerful in-
fluence on the political thought of Canada. Their literary output
was slender and does not give the full measure of their ability
or influence.
There are some novels that have honestly died, and some that
have never lived. Canada's fiction may, with few exceptions, be
classed in one or other of these categories. The Bibliography
of Canadian Fiction gives the titles of nearly one hundred and
fifty novels written by authors deceased.
Mrs Brook has the distinction of producing, in 1769, the first
novel, Emily Montague, which essayed a description of Canadian
conditions at that interesting and remote time. Canadian fiction
proper is supposed to date from the year 1832, when John
Richardson published Wacousta. It is a curious book. To
a certain point midway in the narrative, it holds the reader's
## p. 360 (#390) ############################################
360
[CH. XI
English-Canadian Literature
attention, and then breaks down into a series of wildly impossible
situations without one redeeming human touch to save them from
utter absurdity. The Canadian Brothers is a still weaker effort.
Mrs Leprohon was a constant contributor in prose and verse to
The Literary Garland, a periodical of some repute in the middle
of the last century. Her novels are gracefully written, with some
idea of construction, and no little discernment of character and
motive. Antoinette de Mirecourt is the best of her eight books.
Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie were sisters who
diligently devoted themselves to writing. Mrs Traill, whose chief
distinction was gained in natural history, wrote also several novels,
of which Lost in the Backwoods, published in London in 1852,
under the title The Canadian Crusoes, is the best. Her sister
Mrs Moodie has been referred to for her interesting descriptions
of pioneer life. James de Mille was prolific and popular in his
day. His novels were extravagantly romantic.
William Kirby wrote the best Canadian novel, Le Chien d'Or,
or The Golden Dog, published in 1877. It is an ambitious book,
cast in a large historic mould. The scene is laid in the middle of
the eighteenth century, and the actors of the drama are the nota-
bilities of Quebec, with such subsidiary characters as are necessary
to drive the plot along. Signs of an unpractised hand abound in
the book, but its merits are very considerable.
William McLennan wrote two novels, a book of short stories and
a useful volume of verse, Songs of Old Canada, translated from
the French. Spanish John, his only independent novel, possesses
much literary merit which, until recent years, has not been a
conspicuous virtue among Canadian writers. The Span o' Life,
written in collaboration, is a stirring tale of the days of prince
Charlie. McLennan's collection of short stories In Old France and
New is described in its title. His habitant tales are an interest-
ing prose counterpart of the work of Drummond.
## p. 361 (#391) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
THE LITERATURE OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND
THE British settlement in Australia began only in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century; and, in the intervening years,
an increasing but still small population has been chiefly engaged
in agriculture and commerce. The class of settler needed for the
development of the country was not one, who, as in the settlement
of the American colonies, could carry with him to a new land the
traditions and civilisation of the old. The labour of laying the
material bases of prosperity was, for long, too severe to leave
time for intellectual cultivation; and the country has enjoyed
but little of the leisure which is favourable to the practice of
literature. Nevertheless, both the quantity and quality of English
literature produced in Australia give evidence of the vigour which
is characteristic of the Australian. If Australian life and thought
has no background of inherited romance and legend, it has its own
tales of heroism, its own strong colour and other incentives to
literary expression. Nature, here magnificently beautiful and
there desolate and terrible; the exploration of vast deserts; the
conflict with drought and storm; the turbulent period of the
gold-diggings; the free life in sparsely populated country; the
prevalence of horses; the neighbourhood of the sea and, in recent
years, the passionate assertion of democratic liberty-all these
have furnished material for literature, and, especially, for poetry,
with distinctive characteristics. Australian poetry shows a pre-
valence of swinging metres, which suggest the movement of horses,
or the roll of great waves. It consists largely of narrative and
character-sketch. Much of it is genially humorous; together with
a warm appreciation of heroism and devotion, it shows a delight
in the odd types of character (and rascality) fostered by the con-
ditions of life in a young country. Where it is serious, it frequently
expresses a gloomy view of life, induced, perhaps, by the hardships
and the uncertainty that attended the days of settlers, explorers
and gold-diggers.
The earliest Australian poetry was rather an inheritance from
Great Britain than a native growth. In 1819, Charles Lamb's
## p. 362 (#392) ############################################
362
[CH.
Australia and New Zealand
friend, Barron Field, who, in 1816, became judge of the supreme
court of New South Wales, and remained in Australia till 1824,
published in Sydney, for private circulation, First Fruits of
Australian Poetry. In 1823, a born Australian, William Charles
Wentworth, wrote in competition for the chancellor's medal at the
university of Cambridge a poem entitled Australasia, which was
printed in London and shortly afterwards appeared in the first
Australian newspaper, The Sydney Gazette. In 1826, another
Australian, Charles Tompson, junior, published in Sydney bis
poems, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel. The
names of Australian fauna and flora and references to the aboriginal
races are found creeping further into English verse in the poems
of John Dunmore Lang, a presbyterian divine, who arrived in
New South Wales in 1823 and took a prominent part in Australian
politics. His Aurora Australis, published in Sydney in 1826, is
Australian at least in so far as it applies inherited modes of
expression to the beauties and characteristics of his adopted
country. Lang was not afraid to write : :
At length an occupant was given
To traverse each untrodden wild,
The rudest mortal under Heaven,
Stern Nature's long-forgotten child !
Compatriot of the tall emu,
The wombat and the kangaroo!
The decade 1840–1850, preceding the rush to the gold-diggings,
was an important period in the history of Australian poetry. The
development of New South Wales brought about an increase in
the number of newspapers, and the newspapers gave opportunities
for the publication of verse. Encouragement came, also, from
Sir Henry Parkes, who, having emigrated to Australia in 1839 at
the age of twenty-four, was enabled by his eminent position in the
political life of New South Wales to foster the production of poetry.
Parkes was, himself, a poet of some merit. Of the five volumes
of verse which he published in Sydney, the earliest was issued
in 1842; the best is probably the second, Murmurs of the Stream,
which came out in 1857; but poetry was to him the recreation
of a busy life, and his power of lyrical expression was not culti-
vated as it deserved. Other poets of the period were Daniel
Henry Deniehy, a graceful singer; Richard P. L. Rowe, a journalist
whose miscellaneous writings under the pseudonym 'Peter
Possum' were very popular with Australian readers, and whose
best poems show a subtle imagination and a delicate ear; Henry
Halloran, a fluent and straightforward versifier, and J. Sheridan
## p. 363 (#393) ############################################
X11]
Charles Harpur
363
Moore, who sang in easy style of Australian scenes. The same
decade, moreover, saw the publication of his first volume of poetry
by one whose work deserves more particular attention.
Charles Harpur may be considered the first distinctively
Australian poet. He was a student of Wordsworth and of Shelley,
and more than one of his lyric poems (for instance, that entitled
Words) suggest that he had read the lyric poems of Blake. In
this first volume, Thoughts : a Series of Sonnets, published in
Sydney in 1845, there is little that might not have been written
by one who had never seen Australia. The sonnets are well
performed exercises in poetry, not devoid of the commonplaces of
poetical diction, and, in spite of some fervour and fine imagination,
seldom rising above a moderate level of merit. As time went on,
Harpur, who was Australian born and spent much of his life in the
bush, came to trust more, for subject and for inspiration, to what
he himself felt and saw in his own life and surroundings. He was
the first Australian poet to give a worthy imaginative representa-
tion of Australian scenery and nature. The largeness of his vision
and the simplicity of his emotion suggest life in an undeveloped
and sparsely populated country; and, while he practised many
forms of lyrical poetry, he found his most suitable medium in
blank verse narrative and description. The Creek of the Four
Graves is the poem on which his fame is most firmly established,
and it is essentially Australian. His play, The Bushrangers,
published in 1853, is not a good play; but the volume in which
it appeared and the volume called The Power of the Dream,
published in 1865, contain some thoughtful and learned verse.
The rush for gold, which began just after the middle of the last
century, brought to Australia a great quantity of new life and
enterprise, which attracted thither a few men of intellectual
attainments. Among these was Richard Henry Horne (who, while
in Australia changed his second name to Hengist), the author
of Orion”, whose poetical works bear some traces of his seventeen
years' residence in Australia. Horne's chief influence on Australian
poetry, however, lay in the advice and encouragement which he
gave to younger poets. The same is true of James Lionel Michael,
who, soon after his arrival in Sydney, gave up the idea of gold-
digging and began to practise his own profession of solicitor.
Michael, a friend of John Everett Millais and a supporter of the
pre-Raphaelite movement in English painting, was a man of fine
intellect, and himself a ready and musical poet. His long narrative
and partly autobiographical poem John Cumberland, which was
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap. v.
## p. 364 (#394) ############################################
364 Australia and New Zealand [CH.
published in Sydney in 1860, flows easily along in varied metres,
and, though an eccentric jumble of matter and manner, has
qualities of grace and refinement; but poetry, and Australian
poetry in particular, is less indebted to him for his own writings
than for his fostering care of one of the two greatest Australian
poets, Henry Clarence Kendall.
Kendall, born in Australia of English and Irish descent, was
employed by Michael in boyhood as clerk and amanuensis, and
to Michael is due the credit of having early discerned the boy's
poetical promise. His poems were sent to Parkes, who published
them in The Empire. Kendall was twenty-one years old when
he published in Sydney, in 1862, his first volume, Poems and
Songs. The book contained a good deal that was immature, and
Kendall later tried to suppress it. But the promise in it is
unmistakable; and so, in certain instances, is the achievement
One of the poems told in impressive fashion the story of the
explorers Burke and Wills, who had recently perished. In spite
of the opportunities granted by the newspapers, however, Australia
was not in those days a good field for poetry. Mistrusting their
own judgment, the Australian critics and reading public were
inclined to condemn any literature that had not won the approval
of the mother-country. Kendall, whose faith in his own powers
was not yet shaken by his inherited weakness of character and his
consequent unhappiness, boldly sent specimens of his work to
The Athenaeum, which, on 27 September 1862, printed some of
them with favourable comments, and on several later occasions
gave space and praise to Kendall's work. This was the first
recognition of Australian poetry by an English critical journal,
and Kendall was greatly encouraged. He continued contributing
poems to the newspapers and, seven years later, collected them,
with a few from his Poems and Songs, in a volume entitled
Leaves from an Australian Forest. Here he shows himself a
true poet, and a truly Australian poet. Though he had spent
some years in city life, which he disliked, his heart was always in
the country; and he stands in his generation for the poet of the
quieter side of Australian country life, and of the beauty of
Australian forests, streams and mountains. His third notable
volume was Songs from the Mountains, published in 1880. The
intervening years had been clouded. In the later poems there
are many touches of regret and remorse: on the other hand,
some of the poetry of Kendall's last years reaches a strength and
dignity unknown in his earlier work.
The best of his poetry is to be found in the three volumes
## p. 365 (#395) ############################################
XII]
Adam Lindsay Gordon
365
mentioned, for his efforts in satire and comic writing are negligible.
Kendall was not a keen student of the great English poets of the
past. His fancy was all for the writers of the nineteenth century;
and some of his poetical weakness may be due to ignorance of the
greatest models. At times, he seems to be merely an imitator,
now of Poe, now of Longfellow, now of Moore. He is not strong
in narrative, nor profound in perception of character. But there
is grandeur in such poems as his blank verse address to a
Mountain, and a fine lyrical quality in his poems of nature and
of domestic joy or grief. A gentle, sensitive dreamer, he shows
poetry at home in Australia, drawing beauty and sweetness from
the poet's surroundings, without defiant or subservient glances at
other lands.
Contemporary with Kendall, though some eight years older,
was the most famous of all Australian poets, Adam Lindsay
Gordon.
was a loss both to her own and to our race, but her life and
literary achievements were an earnest of the more remarkable
results which were likely to ensue, and are ensuing, from the fusing
of western and eastern culture. The educational policy of the
government of India is destined, given continuity of development,
to react upon English literature in a manner realised even now by
but a few, and certainly undreamt of by those who entered upon
it. But, until its full results are made manifest, Anglo-Indian
literature will continue to be mainly what it has been, with few
exceptions, in the past—literature written by Englishmen and
Englishwomen who have devoted their lives to the service of India.
>
## p. 343 (#373) ############################################
CHAPTER XI
ENGLISH-CANADIAN LITERATURE
By the scheme of this History the writer is constrained to
confine his investigation to the ranks of the illustrious dead. Now,
whereas a moderately favourable case may be made out for our
current literature, our dead are neither numerous enough, nor
sufficiently illustrious to stimulate more than local enthusiasm,
and our few early writers of distinction inevitably suffer in a
discussion that fails to link them with their living descendants.
It is a reasonably safe surmise that the names of not more
than three of our deceased writers are known even to profes-
sional students of literature in Europe, and two of these names
belong to the present generation. Judge Haliburton (Sam Slick)
enjoys at least a modest measure of cosmopolitan reputation,
and the poetry of Drummond and of Lampman has received
recognition not alone upon its own intrinsic merits, but as being
characteristically and distinctively Canadian in its quality.
The mention of Drummond's name suggests a difficulty that
must be disposed of on the threshold of the discussion. To
what authors writing within or without her borders may
Canada justly lay claim ? Some arbitrary test must evidently
be employed. Drummond was born in Ireland and partly edu-
cated there, yet we include him inevitably among our Canadian
writers; Grant Allen was born in Canada, yet we exclude him
from the list; and Goldwin Smith, who lived in Toronto for forty
years, can only by an unjustifiable extension of the definition be
included in an account of Canadian literature. The criterion in
these doubtful cases must surely be an identification with the
interests of the country so complete that a Canadian character
is stamped upon the work, or, in default of that, a commanding
influence exercised by the author upon the development of the
country's literature. There is obviously nothing Canadian about
Grant Allen in motive or intention. A residence of forty years
## p. 344 (#374) ############################################
344 English-Canadian Literature
[CH.
would constitute an ordinary individual a Canadian; but Goldwin
Smith came among us with his babits of thought unyieldingly fixed,
and lived and died in our midst a philosophical radical of sixty
years ago. His interests in pure literature were never extensive,
and his influence upon our literature may be said to have been
negligible, or to have been confined to our newspapers, which,
doubtless, received some benefit from the purity and pungency
of his journalistic style.
It is not necessary to apologise for, but merely to explain, the
paucity of our literary performance. Canada has many advan-
tages; but it has the disadvantage, in the literary sense, of being
a young country, born in the old age of the world. All that
tradition counts for in the literature of a European country
we must forgo. Our literary past is the literary past of
England; we have not yet had time to strike root for ourselves.
Older countries have a progressive tradition and a harmonious
evolution little interrupted by artificial considerations; whereas,
with us, literature is compelled to be almost completely artifice.
England had her spontaneous ballad and epic beginnings, her
naive miracle plays that responded to an imperative need of the
time, her share in the exhilaration of the renascence, when even
imitation was an exercise of the original creative faculty; and,
upon these broad foundations, she built her great self-conscious
modern literature, each new generation of writers urged on by
impulses from the past, reinforcing its lessons here, violently
reacting from its opinions there and always excited by contact
with the vivifying ideas that the present hour engenders.
It may be said that this is too flattering a picture, that
England periodically goes to sleep, and that lethargy, rather than
excitement, characterises her normal condition. But the state-
ment was not made in flattery, and, if it does not always correspond
with the facts, it may serve, at least, to point a contrast with colonial
conditions. The raw material of literature we have here in
abundance; but this material does not seem to germinate. Our
activities are physical, and our mental needs do not require
to be supplied by our own exertions. When London began
to build her theatres, plays had to be created to employ them.
We build theatres freely; but why should we go to the exertion
of supplying the text or even the actors, when the United States
and England are within such lazy reach? And so with the novel,
and so, also, with poetry, but with this saving consideration that
poetry, being an affair of impulse, can live, if not flourish, without
>
## p. 345 (#375) ############################################
xi]
The Canadian Type
345
a public. It might be supposed that fiction has every oppor-
tunity to develop in a country where the conditions of life must,
necessarily, be novel and the types of character widely diversified
by emigration. But the story of our fiction is as brief, almost, and
inglorious as is the story of our national drama. Certain living
writers are using this new material to good purpose ; but it is still
necessary to account for the dearth of native novels in a novel-
reading country. In partial explanation, it may be urged that,
even if frivolous in intention, a novel is still a serious undertaking,
and is rarely entered upon by a sheer amateur. Now, by reason
of the conditions of life in Canada, and in view of the fierce
competition to which a Canadian novelist would be subjected, we
have not yet developed a professional literary class, and our great
novels still lie ahead of us. Hitherto, the little fiction that has
been produced has been principally historic in character, the
glamour of our early colonial period, with its picturesque con-
trast of races, naturally suggesting the type. Historic fiction is,
momentarily, out of fashion the world over, and our racial
peculiarities are, perhaps, not yet sufficiently consolidated to
afford suggestive material to the novelist whose commanding
interest is in human character. We have Anglo-Canadian types,
Irish-Canadian types, Scottish-Canadian types who are trans-
planted and scarcely altered Englishmen, Irishmen, or Scotsmen.
The genuine Canadian type probably exists somewhere—a fusion
of all these with a discreet touch of the Yankee—but he is so
shadowy in outline that no novelist has yet limned his features for
Efforts in this direction by distinguished outsiders have not
been convincing. Of our native-born writers, the desultory
humourist Haliburton alone possessed the shrewd insight into
character that might have given us our Canadian Tristram Shandy;
but he contented himself with giving us a Yankee Sam Slick,
whom certain distinguished New Englanders emphatically re-
pudiate as spurious and disreputable. It is a matter of regret
that Haliburton, with his unquestioned literary ability, never
consented to the discipline of even the most rambling plot, for,
what his humour precisely needed was the co-ordination and
direction that systematic fiction would have afforded. Though
he obviously does not range himself within any of the categories
under which it is proposed to treat Canadian literature—being
neither poet nor novelist, and only in a secondary degree an
historian-yet the permanence of his reputation among our
writers warrants and necessitates a special reference to his work.
us.
## p. 346 (#376) ############################################
346 English-Canadian Literature [ch.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born at Windsor, Nova
Scotia, on 17 December 1796, and, on his father's side, was
remotely connected with Sir Walter Scott. He was called to
the bar in 1820 and, in 1841, he was appointed to the supreme
court of the province. In 1856, he resigned his office and removed
to England, where he died in 1865.
Haliburton's literary work began with histories of Nova Scotia,
published in 1825 and 1829. His Sam Slick papers first appeared
in 1835 and 1836, as contributions in a newspaper edited by
Joseph Howe, called The Nova Scotian, and were published in
book form in Halifax and London in 1837. A second and third
series followed in 1838 and 1840, the three series being combined,
later, in one volume. A list of Haliburton's works will be found
in the bibliography.
Artemus Ward traces the humour of the United States to its
source in Sam Slick, and there is much to support the derivation.
The fun is rather frayed and old now, and the serious motives which
inspired it are out of date; but, taken in small instalments, the
books are still diverting, and, of course, historically important in
a minor way. Sam Slick has had his successors, but none of his
descendants is so prolific of anecdote, and so voluble at large,
as he. His shrewd remarks and illustrations are always apposite
to some trait in American character, or throw light on some
phase in American politics-and, in both connections, the
term American is used here to describe conditions on either
side of the border. In Haliburton, the old tory died hard, or,
rather, refused to die ; and, that he might give loose rein to
his political prejudices without the tedium which a heavy expo-
sition entails, he invented that strange compound of shrewd-
ness, wit, vulgarity and sheer dishonest cunning-Sam Slick
the Yankee clockmaker. Wordsworth uttered solemn truths
through the lips of a perambulating pedlar; it was an equally
ingenious conception to make a wandering clockseller the
purveyor of political wisdom. It is probable that the author
invented him in order to contrast his smartness and characteristic
Yankee enterprise with the inertia of his own 'blue-nose' com-
patriots of Nova Scotia. Since, however, it would have been too
incongruous to present, through Sam's irreverent lips, the whole
body of the old-fashioned tory doctrine dear to the author's heart,
a prosy New England parson, the Rev. Mr Hopewell, is introduced
in order to supply the deficiency. This trio, therefore, it is-Sam
Slick with anecdotes innumerable gathered in his ubiquitous
## p. 347 (#377) ############################################
XI
]
Judge Haliburton
347
wanderings, the parson with his prosy moralisings and the squire
with his interjected protests and leading questions—who, between
| them, compose the serious treatise on political science which
deservedly takes rank among the amusing books of the century.
Two purposes—one rather should say two passions-dominate
these books. Haliburton had a deep affection for his native
province and appreciated its possibilities of development, but he
found its people lethargic and improvident, and he sought per-
sistently to rouse them if not to a sense of shame at least to
a sense of responsibility. Many of the practical reforms and
developments suggested by him have been introduced, and it is
possible that his insistence may have accelerated the inevitable
march of events. The languor of his fellow-countrymen was a
perpetual source of irritation :
The folks to Halifax,' says Sam Slick, 'take it all out in talkin-they talk
of steam-boats, whalers, and railroads—but they all eend where they begin-
in talk. I don't think I'd be out in my latitude, if I was to say they beat the
women-kind at that. One feller says, I talk of goin to England-another
says I talk of goin to the country-while a third says, I talk of goin to sleep.
If we happen to speak of such things, we say “ I'm right off down East,” or
“ I'm away off South,” and away we go just like a streak of lightnin. . . . You've
seen a flock of partridge of a frosty mornin in the fall, a crowdin out of the
shade to a sunny spot, and huddlin up there in the warmth-well, the blue-
noses [i. e. the Nova Scotians] have nothin else to do half the time but sun
themselves. Whose fault is that? Why it is the fault of the legislatur; they
don't encourage internal improvement, nor the investment of capital in the
country, and the result is apathy, inaction, and poverty. '
So strongly does the author feel the force of Sam's remarks that
he italicises the conclusion of the homily, and casts the Yankee
idiom aside.
‘No,' said he (with an air of more seriousness than I had yet observed),
'how much it is to be regretted, that, laying aside personal attacks and petty
jealousies, they would not unite as one man, and with one mind and one heart
apply themselves sedulously to the internal improvement and developement
of this beautiful Province. Its value is utterly unknown, either to the general
or local Government, and the only persons who duly appreciate it are the
Yankees. '
Two points are to be noted, namely, that this extract is
introduced to represent not the humour but the purpose of the
volume, and that, when the author is imbued with the seriousness
of an argument, no artistic scruples forbid him to allow Sam Slick
to speak out of character.
Reference has been made to a second dominating purpose in
these books. Haliburton was passionately devoted to the cause
## p. 348 (#378) ############################################
348
English-Canadian Literature [CH.
of imperial unity at a time when Great Britain neglected her
colonies, and when the loosely organised provinces that now are
Canada were apparently drifting towards independence or an-
nexation. The two agencies that saved a dangerous situation
were responsible government and confederation. To the first,
Haliburton was obstinately opposed ; of the unifying possibilities
of the second, he was, like many of his contemporaries, pardonably
ignorant. The solution he offered was tory in the extreme: the
rising tide of democracy must be stemmed by a severe restriction
of the franchise; the executive councils must be consolidated in
power; the French must abandon their language and their law;
and the ambitions of intelligent colonists must be rewarded
by the most ample distribution of patronage from the mother
land. Canada was a stagnant pond that bred tadpoles and polly-
woggles ; a fresh stream of patronage would breed sizable fish.
Responsible government was the partisan cry of Papineau and
his rebel brood. Even the Yankee Slick is shocked at their
pretensions :
For that old party, clique, and compact were British in their language,
British in their feelings and British in their blood. Our party clique and
compact is not so narrow and restricted, for it is French in its language,
Yankee in its feelin', and Republican in its blood.
The Clockmaker was followed, in due order, by three further
Sam Slick volumes—The Attaché, Wise Saws and Nature and
Human Nature. They are full of rich humour, but suffer from
a forcing of the vein. The Attaché represents Sam Slick ‘at the
Court of St James's,' where, obviously, he is out of his element.
The book was intended as a burlesque rejoinder to Dickens's
American Notes; but there is a kindliness in the satire which
differentiates it from its prototype.
Taking all things into consideration, Haliburton's books merit
the commendation they have received. They are choppy and
unorganised, as the foregoing account of them will have made
clear; but, in spite of the designed disorder of his style, he has
produced work of permanent value. He is a raconteur of
exuberant fertility, a passionate politician and an irredeemable
and unforgivable punster.
Isabella Valancy Crawford is the first Canadian poet of dis-
tinction, and her work would challenge attention in the poetical
history of any country. She was born in Dublin in 1850, and
her family settled in Canada when she was a child of eight.
## p. 349 (#379) ############################################
XI]
Isabella Valancy Crawford
349
She spent her last years in Toronto, and her poems appeared,
for the most part, in the unregarded corners of the daily papers.
She died in 1886. Two years before her death, a meagre and
unassuming volume of her verse was published, bearing the title
Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and Other Poems. In 1905,
a reasonably full collection of her poems was published with
an introductory notice by a fellow poet, Ethelwyn Wetherald.
Valancy Crawford's lyrical verse is singularly intense and pure,
with the intensity and purity that we find in the work of Emily
Brontë, whose shy austerity and solitary brooding passion her
own suggests, without its tragic morbidity. Love's Forget Me Not
which stands first in the volume, has this peculiar Brontë quality.
Suggestions of resemblance to famous writers may be excused
in an account of an unknown poet. So, the following lyric may be
compared, for its daintily jewelled workmanship, with many a
similar lyric by Théophile Gautier, with whose very name Valancy
Crawford was probably not familiar :
O Love builds on the azure sea,
And Love builds on the golden sand,
And Love builds on the rose-winged cloud,
And sometimes Love builds on the land !
O if Love build on sparkling sea,
And if Love build on golden strand,
And if Love build on rosy cloud,
To Love these are the solid land!
O Love will build his lily walls,
And Love his pearly roof will rear
On cloud, or land, or mist, or sea-
Love's solid land is everywhere!
And a further resemblance which, again, is purely fortuitous,
suggests itself between The Helot and Meredith's tersely powerful
ballad Attila. There is the same compression, the same command-
ing vigour, and an approach, at least, to the imaginative breadth
of Meredith's great poem.
Isabella Valancy Crawford was no man's disciple, but she read
her poets to advantage. There is a quality in Malcolm's Katie
(not a wholly successful piece) which argues a familiarity with
Tennyson's narrative method, but the dependence is slight. Her
dialect poems, of which Old Spookses' Pass is the most vigorous
example, bring her into a comparison which is not wholly in her
disfavour with Bret Harte, Lowell and their progeny of Hoosier
and cowboy writers. How original her lyric gift is we realise by
## p. 350 (#380) ############################################
350
[Ch.
English-Canadian Literature
her fresh handling of an old theme. There is a whole literature of
the rose in English poetry. Valancy Crawford's version of the
theme has the freshness of a new discovery:
The Rose was given to man for this:
He, sudden seeing it in later years,
Should swift remember Love's first lingering kiss
And Grief's last lingering tears;
Or, being blind, should feel its yearning soul
Knit all its piercing perfume round his own,
Till he should see on memory's ample scroll
All roses he had known;
Or, being hard, perchance his finger-tips
Careless might touch the satin of its cup,
And he should feel a dead babe's budding lips
To his lips lifted up;
Or, being deaf and smitten with its star,
Should, on a sudden, almost hear a lark
Rush singing up-the nightingale afar
Sing thro' the dew-bright dark;
Or, sorrow-lost in paths that round and round
Circle old graves, its keen and vital breath
Should call to him within the yew's bleak bound
Of Life, and not of Death.
a
If we cannot designate any single writer as the founder of a
Canadian school of poetry, we can still point to Archibald
Lampman as the poet who, under the necessary conditions of
imitation, was as Canadian as circumstances would allow. With
Wordsworth, Keats and Arnold on one's shelves, one does not
draw inspiration from Sangster and Heavysege ; but what sets
Lampman in a different category from his predecessors is the fact
that the poets of the younger Canadian generation have frankly
admitted their debt to him. Lampman's work exhibits what a
carefully trained poetic sense can achieve in an environment
which he must himself have felt to be hostile to the free ex-
pansion of his talent, and his poetry is significant by what he
sought to do no less than by what he accomplished.
His friend and fellow-poet, D. C. Scott, has told the story of
his life in the brief memoir prefixed to his collected poems.
Archibald Lampman was born in 1861 at Morpeth, Ontario,
and was descended from a family of Pennsylvania Dutch loyalists,
who migrated to Canada at the time of the revolution. After
graduating at Trinity college, Toronto, he had a brief but severe
experience as a schoolmaster, from which he made his escape into
## p. 351 (#381) ############################################
xi]
Archibald Lampman
351
the civil service. The rest of his life, until his death in 1899, was
spent in the post office department at Ottawa.
Not much has been preserved from the work of his under-
graduate days. His first volume Among the Millet was the
product, chiefly, of the four years between 1884 and 1888. It
was, in part, a period of imitation and experimentation. The
Monk, a narrative poem, is diluted Keats, and the more ambitious
An Athenian Reverie is a skilful, if somewhat dull, literary exercise
into which he poured the results of his classical reading. Of
neither piece need any young poet have been ashamed; but,
obviously, there was no development possible in either of these
directions. His supreme passion was nature, and he was quick
to recognise that his best work was done in response to this
dominant impulse. His nature sympathies are readily explained.
Ottawa is beautifully situated between three rushing rivers whose
valleys tempted his feet when the day's routine was done, and it is
one of the advantages of the civil service that it does not monopolise
all the hours of daylight. His masters in poetry, too, fostered this
out-of-doors enthusiasm, for, though they owed much, indeed, to
other influences than nature, still, in Wordsworth, Keats and Arnold,
the descriptive vein was strong, and it was certainly the most
communicable part of their work. There is evidence, in later
years, that the general problems of society had begun to press in
upon Lampman's mind; but these problems he was able to
apprehend only through his imagination and his sympathies.
Nature was everywhere about him in her ample beauty and
variety; but the unaccented life of Ottawa afforded him no contact
with the disastrous extremes that are generated in the intenser
conditions of a large city.
Nature poetry is of many kinds and degrees. A rough summary
of its varieties may serve the purpose of testing the range of
Lampman's work in this direction. It should include the faithful
reproduction of a scene under the necessary conditions of artistic
selection and arrangement; the same, but with more particular
reference to the emotional and intellectual reaction from the
scene; an attempt to interpret the hidden significance of pheno-
mena; and, finally, the use of nature as a pictorial background
for human action, or as a setting for a mood.
The least interesting portion of Lampman's poetry lies in
the second of the above heads. One thinks of the powerful
philosophical reaction that Tintern Abbey gives us, or The
Prelude, of the impetuous personal recoil of the Ode to the
## p. 352 (#382) ############################################
352
[CH.
English-Canadian Literature
West Wind, or of the rich emotional reflex of the Ode to the
Nightingale; and, thinking of these superlative examples, one is
compelled to recognise the insipidity and monotony of Lampman's
reactions. Many of his poems that promise a fine result, such
as April, April in the Hills, The Meadow, Comfort of the Fields,
are carefully observed and exquisitely phrased, but are marred by
a trite conclusion. Ardent lover as he is, he can enumerate the
beauties of his mistress; but his tongue fails him to tell her more
than that he loves her dearly, and that he is glad to escape into her
presence from the dullness and vexations of his ordinary surround-
ings. Morning on the Lièvre is wholly free from this weakness,
and reproduces with vigour and cunningly contrived detail a
characteristic Canadian scene :
Far above us where a jay
Screams his matins to the day,
Capped with gold and amethyst,
Like a vapour from the forge
Of a giant somewhere hid,
Out of hearing of the clang
Of his hammer, skirts of mist
Slowly up the woody gorge
Lift and hang.
Softly as a cloud we go,
Sky above and sky below,
Down the river; and the dip
Of the paddles scarcely breaks,
With the little silvery drip
Of the water as it shakes
From the blades, the crystal deep
Of the silence of the morn,
Of the forest yet asleep;
And the river reaches borne
In a mirror, purple gray,
Sheer away
To the misty line of light,
Where the forest and the stream
In the shadow meet and plight,
Like a dream.
From amid a stretch of reeds,
Where the lazy river sucks
All the water as it bleeds
From a little curling creek,
And the musk rats peer and sneak
In around the sunken wrecks
Of a tree that swept the skies
Long ago,
On a sudden seven ducks
With a splashy rustle rise,
Stretching out their seven necks,
## p. 353 (#383) ############################################
XI]
Archibald Lampman
353
One before, and two behind,
And the others all arow,
And as steady as the wind
With a swivelling whistle go,
Through the purple shadow led,
Till we only hear their whir
In behind a rocky spur,
Just ahead.
The Frogs, Heat, Solitude, June, September, By an Autumn
Stream and Snow reveal Lampman's rare gift of observation,
selection and phrasing; and they, too, have a significant value that
transcends the mere terms of the description. By their repre-
sentative qualities, these poems are symbolic, and Lampman
attains this result not by the way of vagueness or mystical allusion,
but by the sure strokes of his poetic detail. Two stanzas from
Heat may serve to illustrate his skill in producing what we
vaguely designate as atmosphere :
From plains that reel to southward, dim,
The road runs by me white and bare;
Up the steep hill it seems to swim
Beyond, and melt into the glare.
Upward half-way, or it may be
Nearer the summit, slowly steals
A hay-cart, moving dustily
With idly clacking wheels.
By his cart's side the wagoner
Is slouching slowly at his ease,
Half-hidden in the windless blur
Of white dust puffing to his knees.
This wagon on the height above,
From sky to sky on either hand,
Is the sole thing that seems to move
In all the heat-held land.
Nature is not commonly employed by Lampman as a back-
ground of human action. There is little in him of the spirit of
romance if we make exception of his love for wild remote places.
One poem Between the Rapids, from his first volume, is, how-
ever, quite romantic in its conception and illustrates, with much
freshness, the ubi sunt theme that has tempted many poetic
experimenters.
The title of his second volume, Lyrics of Earth, betokens his
continued preoccupation with his favourite theme. He was pre-
paring Alcyone for the press during his last illness, but did not
live to see it published. It contains two poems, at least, that point
in a new direction and show the current of his social sympathies.
Of these one, The Land of Pallas, is ambitious but laboured ;
23
E, L. XIV.
CH. XI.
## p. 354 (#384) ############################################
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[CH.
English-Canadian Literature
the other poem, The City of the End of Things, is Lampman's
highest imaginative achievement. It is a grim allegory of human
life largely conceived and forcibly wrought. There is nothing else
like it in his work.
The narrative pieces scattered through the volumes call for no
particular mention. Lampman's constructive and dramatic sense
was weak, and he had not the faculty of seizing upon some vivid
incident and developing its possibilities. He gives us life at mans
removes from actuality. In the sonnet, he was notably more
successful, and he felt himself that his best work was achieved in
that form. His sonnets are thoroughly well organised, and he
found them a convenient medium for conveying his philosophy of
life upon the purely human side. They go far, therefore, towards
saving his work from the monotony that otherwise would attach
to it. They contain many shrewd remarks upon life and give us
many fine records of imaginative moods.
So greatly have poetic methods altered since Lampman's death
that already his poetry may seem to be old-fashioned. He has nothing
either of the characteristic modern realism or mysticism, and bis
technique, by newer standards, seems cramped and unduly studied.
He lacks subtlety and lyric fire, but he has merits that will survive
many fluctuations of taste, and, without being distinctively Canadian,
he is still our representative Canadian poet.
William Henry Drummond invented a mode of poetry that won
him great popularity from the appearance of the first volume
The Habitant in 1897. Dialect poems, exhibiting the humours
of humble or rustic folk, have been written in many tongues
Drummond's originality consists in conveying his theme through
the medium of a speech not native to the speakers. One has to
imagine a sympathetic English-speaking listener and an expansive
habitant farmer or voyageur, who, in a kind of fluid and most
un-Browninglike monologue, reveals himself and his surroundings
with mirth-provoking simplicity and charm. The full flavour of
these pieces cannot be gained by mere reading, nor is the
elocutionist's platform their proper setting. They should be
heard, as most Canadians are privileged to hear them, repeated
round a camp-fire by someone competent in French-Canadian English
patois, or recited at cigar-time after dinner, when subtle literary
qualities are prone to be neglected, and it suffices that a poem
should be humorous and human. Thus it was that Drummond
gained his first success and learned his power. His widow tells
## p. 355 (#385) ############################################
XI]
William Henry Drummond
355
the story in her biographical introduction to the posthumous
volume, The Great Fight:
It was during my convalescence that Le Vieux Temps was written, and its
first public reading was at a dinner of the Shakespeare Club of Montreal, of
which the doctor had once been a member. On this occasion, being asked to
reply to one of the toasts, he would have refused the invitation, declaring that
speech-making was not in his line; but finally a compromise was effected by
his diffident suggestion that perhaps he might read the new poem instead of
making a speech. When the night of the dinner arrived he was with difficulty
prevented from running off somewhere on the plea of professional duty.
However, he went, and was bewildered by his own success. 'It's the strangest
thing in the world,' he said, 'but do you know they simply went wild over that
poem! ' This was the beginning of a long series of triumphs of a like nature,
triumphs which owed little to elocutionary art, much to the natural gift of a
voice rare alike in strength, quality, and variety of tone, but most of all to the
fact that the characters he delineated were not mere creations of a vivid
imagination. They were portraits, tenderly drawn by the master hand of a
true artist, and one who knew and loved the originals.
It is a healthy sign that poetry should, occasionally, revert to
the primitive conditions from which it originated, and assume its
original public function as a binding social force.
How Drummond's circumstances gave him access to his material
may briefly be told. Born at Currawn, county Leitrim, Ireland, in
1854, he came to Canada with his parents at the age of eleven.
Soon afterwards, his father died, leaving his widow with very
narrow means. The boy studied telegraphy, and, in 1869, received
an appointment in the little village of Bord-à-Plouffe on the
beautiful Rivière des Prairies :
'Here it was,' to quote from Mrs Drummond's account, that he first came
in contact with the habitant and voyageur, and listened to their quaint tales of
backwoods life; here that he heard from Gédéon Plouffe the tragedy retold
as The Wreck of the Julie Plante, a poem of which he himself thought little,
and never cared to recite, but which had made its way through the length and
breadth of the American continent before ever his first book of poems was
published. It was the old lumberman's reiteration of the words,“ An'de win'
she blow, blow, blow! ” which rang so persistently in his ears that, at the dead
of night, unable to stand any longer the haunting refrain, he sprang from his
bed and penned the poem, which was to be the herald of his future fame. '
By the year 1876, when he was twenty-two, Drummond had
saved enough money to resume his interrupted education. From
the high school in Montreal, he passed to McGill university,
and, later, studied medicine at Bishop's college, Montreal, whence
he graduated in 1884. After a few years of country practice,
which familiarised him with the types represented in his Canadian
Country Doctor and Ole Doctor Fiset, he returned, in 1888, to
Montreal, continued his practice and, subsequently, lectured
on medical jurisprudence at Bishop's college.
23-2
## p. 356 (#386) ############################################
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[CH.
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In 1905, Drummond became interested in some silver pro-
perties at Cobalt, which he and his brother successfully developed.
The possibilities of wealth did not dismay him. What he craved
was, in his own words, 'enough money to own a strip of salmon
water, and the best Irish terrier going, and to be able to help a
friend in need. ' Smallpox broke out in his camp in 1907. He
hurried there to cope with the disease, and, shortly after his
arrival, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Drummond's sympathy
with the habitant and his passion for wild life had been dominant
with him to the end. He perpetually refreshed himself in the
springs from which his poetry flowed.
Four volumes of verse stand to Drummond's credit: The
Habitant, Johnnie Courteau, The Voyageur and the posthu-
,
mously published The Great Fight. Another small book, Philo-
rum's Canoe, consists of two poems which reappear in Johnnie
Courteau,
Drummond's work is not characterised by the polished per-
fection of individual lines or stanzas. It is impossible, therefore,
to convey an adequate idea of his poetry by brief and dis-
connected quotation ; let this be said in no disparagement of the
result. It is honest, homely poetry, and Drummond broke new
ground.
The humours and the forgivable, even, as Drummond tells
them, the lovable, weaknesses of the habitant are traversed in
these poems. He sings his clumsily efficient courting, his worthy
pride in his abounding family of strapping sons and marriageable
girls, his love of the old homestead by the river, his anxiety to
return to it from his enforced wanderings and his reluctance to
leave it when his increased fortunes give him the dazzling prospect
of a 'tousand dollar' house. No poet ever derived his inspiration
from simpler themes, and the reader shares his enjoyment of the
good man's sublime self-content, his boastfulness, his love of a
horse-race and a dollar bet, his parochial outlook on politics and
the great world and his pardonable conviction that his own life,
his own wife and family, his own village and village curé, his
fields, his river and his weather are the best gifts that le bon
Dieu dispenses. That in all this there is never a hint of unkindly
caricature, the prefatory words of Louis Fréchette are sufficient
proof:
Dans son étude des Canadiens-français, M. Drummond a trouvé le moyen
d'éviter un écueil qui aurait semblé inévitable pour tout autre que pour lui.
Il est resté vrai, sans tomber dans la vulgarité, et piquant sans verser dans le
## p. 357 (#387) ############################################
XI]
Lesser Poets
357
grotesque. . . que le récit soit plaisant ou pathétique, jamais la note ne sonne
faux, jamais la bizarrerie ne dégenère en puérilité burlesque.
The following poets deserve a note in any account of Canadian
literature.
Joseph Howe was distinguished in the political life of his
province of Nova Scotia. His poetry is rhetorical, and his literary
qualities are best exhibited in his eloquent prose. Evan MacColl
came to Canada in 1850. His best work is said to be in Gaelic.
Poems and Songs, which appeared in 1883, has not much merit.
Charles Heavysege showed, amidst much crudeness, occasional
flashes of power. He came to Montreal from England in 1853.
His reputation rests upon his sonnets and his dramatic poem
Saul, which was described by a North British reviewer as 'one of
the most remarkable poems ever written out of Great Britain. '
Alexander McLachlan came from Scotland in 1840. He aspired
to be the Burns of Canada. Charles Sangster, unlike the three
last-named writers, was born in Canada. Before the advent of the
younger generation, he was the representative poet of his native
land; but his work is markedly inferior to that of his successors.
What strength he possesses is exhibited to best advantage in his de-
scriptive verse, and this is of not more than average merit. Thomas
D'Arcy McGee was a man of brilliant talents, which overflowed by
mere exuberance into literature. A member of the Young
Ireland' group, he wrote in the feverish style that characterised
those fervid patriots. McGee, after an adventurous youth, settled
in Canada in 1857, and almost immediately became prominent in
the political life of his adopted country. He was assassinated in
Ottawa in April 1868. Sir James Edgar, whose chief activity, as
in the case of Howe and McGee, was centred in politics, shared
with them, also, a taste and talent for poetry. George Frederick
Cameron died before he had reached the full measure of his
powers. His early death, like that of T. B. Phillips Stewart and
of Arthur Weir, must be considered a distinct loss to Canadian
poetry. The more recent death of the Indian poetess, Pauline
Johnson, is, also, to be reckoned among our losses, though she had
lived long enough to show her capabilities. She had a genuine
lyric gift within a limited range. The verses called A Prodigal
have a note of true passion :
My heart forgot its God for love of you,
And you forgot me, other loves to learn;
Now through a wilderness of thorn and rue
į
Back to my God I turn.
## p. 358 (#388) ############################################
358
[CH.
English-Canadian Literature
And just because my God forgets the past,
And in forgetting does not ask to know
Why I once left His arms for yours, at last
Back to my God I go.
A very enjoyable part of Canadian literature connects itself
with accounts of expeditions into distant regions of an un-
explored continent. A number of the best records of adventurous
journeys are written in French, of which many have been trans-
lated. The earliest of these explorers' volumes produced by an
Englishman was by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a high official in
the North-West company, who made trips through to the Arctic
and the Pacific, and, in 1801, published his Voyages from Montreal
through the Continent of North America. It makes fascinating
reading. George Heriot, the historian, wrote, in 1807, a curious
pioneer volume Travels through the Canadas which is much
more entertaining than his serious History of Canada. Alexander
Henry was an American by birth who spent many years as a fur-
trader in central Canada, and ended his days as a merchant in
Montreal. His book Travels and Adventures in Canada and the
Indian Territories was published in New York, in 1809, and
was edited as recently as 1901 by James Bain of Toronto. Anna
Brownell Jameson, who wrote on Shakespeare's women, spent a
part of 1836—7 in and near Toronto, and, in the following year,
published in three volumes Winter Studies and Summer Rambles
in Canada. Of a similar type were two books written by Susanna
Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush ; or Life in Canada (1852),
and Life in the Clearing versus the Bush (1853). These books
describe the conditions of life in the early settlements more
faithfully and, withal, more humorously than any other writer
has described them.
History is more successfully organised in Canada at the present
time than any other branch of literature. Our archives are being
systematically explored, and societies exist for the purpose of
editing old, and publishing new, material of a historical nature.
Our earliest historians, Heriot, Smith and Christie were of the
laboriously dull type that history frequently breeds. John Charles
Dent, an Englishman by birth, was much more entertaining ; but
his partisanship impairs the value of his work. This consists
of two readable histories, The Last Forty Years and The
Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion. The most complete and
painstaking of our histories, dull without being scientific, but
quite praiseworthy, is William Kingsford's History of Canada,
1
## p. 359 (#389) ############################################
XI]
History and Fiction
359
which covers the period from the discovery of Canada to the
union of 1841. Ten volumes stand to Kingsford's credit, and he
began to write history at the age of sixty-five. Haliburton's
Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1829) is still
useful. Two other works by him-The Bubbles of Canada (1837)
and Rule and Misrule of the English in America (1851)
have a historical tinge.
The war of 1812 has been variously recorded. David Thompson
was imprisoned for debt as a result of his historic venture on
this theme. Major John Richardson's War of 1812, in its re-
edited form (1902), presents much valuable material. James
Hannay produced a History of Acadia and a War of 1812.
Lady Edgar, in her Ten Years of Peace and War in Upper
Canada, presents a most interesting account of the time, based
largely on the correspondence of the Ridout family to which she
belonged. Her Life of Brock in the Makers of Canada series is
clearly and entertainingly written. Lady Edgar also wrote a
history of Maryland in the eighteenth century under the title
A Colonial Governor in Maryland.
Sir John George Bourinot is the author of a popular history
called The Story of Canada. He was a diligent and useful writer
upon Canadian affairs, and his position as clerk of the Canadian
house of commons gave him peculiar opportunities for the study
of constitutional problems. The leading Canadian writer, however,
on constitutional procedure was Alpheus Todd, whose works will be
found in the bibliography. Two men, Joseph Howe and George
Morris Grant, exercised by their voice and pen a powerful in-
fluence on the political thought of Canada. Their literary output
was slender and does not give the full measure of their ability
or influence.
There are some novels that have honestly died, and some that
have never lived. Canada's fiction may, with few exceptions, be
classed in one or other of these categories. The Bibliography
of Canadian Fiction gives the titles of nearly one hundred and
fifty novels written by authors deceased.
Mrs Brook has the distinction of producing, in 1769, the first
novel, Emily Montague, which essayed a description of Canadian
conditions at that interesting and remote time. Canadian fiction
proper is supposed to date from the year 1832, when John
Richardson published Wacousta. It is a curious book. To
a certain point midway in the narrative, it holds the reader's
## p. 360 (#390) ############################################
360
[CH. XI
English-Canadian Literature
attention, and then breaks down into a series of wildly impossible
situations without one redeeming human touch to save them from
utter absurdity. The Canadian Brothers is a still weaker effort.
Mrs Leprohon was a constant contributor in prose and verse to
The Literary Garland, a periodical of some repute in the middle
of the last century. Her novels are gracefully written, with some
idea of construction, and no little discernment of character and
motive. Antoinette de Mirecourt is the best of her eight books.
Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie were sisters who
diligently devoted themselves to writing. Mrs Traill, whose chief
distinction was gained in natural history, wrote also several novels,
of which Lost in the Backwoods, published in London in 1852,
under the title The Canadian Crusoes, is the best. Her sister
Mrs Moodie has been referred to for her interesting descriptions
of pioneer life. James de Mille was prolific and popular in his
day. His novels were extravagantly romantic.
William Kirby wrote the best Canadian novel, Le Chien d'Or,
or The Golden Dog, published in 1877. It is an ambitious book,
cast in a large historic mould. The scene is laid in the middle of
the eighteenth century, and the actors of the drama are the nota-
bilities of Quebec, with such subsidiary characters as are necessary
to drive the plot along. Signs of an unpractised hand abound in
the book, but its merits are very considerable.
William McLennan wrote two novels, a book of short stories and
a useful volume of verse, Songs of Old Canada, translated from
the French. Spanish John, his only independent novel, possesses
much literary merit which, until recent years, has not been a
conspicuous virtue among Canadian writers. The Span o' Life,
written in collaboration, is a stirring tale of the days of prince
Charlie. McLennan's collection of short stories In Old France and
New is described in its title. His habitant tales are an interest-
ing prose counterpart of the work of Drummond.
## p. 361 (#391) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
THE LITERATURE OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND
THE British settlement in Australia began only in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century; and, in the intervening years,
an increasing but still small population has been chiefly engaged
in agriculture and commerce. The class of settler needed for the
development of the country was not one, who, as in the settlement
of the American colonies, could carry with him to a new land the
traditions and civilisation of the old. The labour of laying the
material bases of prosperity was, for long, too severe to leave
time for intellectual cultivation; and the country has enjoyed
but little of the leisure which is favourable to the practice of
literature. Nevertheless, both the quantity and quality of English
literature produced in Australia give evidence of the vigour which
is characteristic of the Australian. If Australian life and thought
has no background of inherited romance and legend, it has its own
tales of heroism, its own strong colour and other incentives to
literary expression. Nature, here magnificently beautiful and
there desolate and terrible; the exploration of vast deserts; the
conflict with drought and storm; the turbulent period of the
gold-diggings; the free life in sparsely populated country; the
prevalence of horses; the neighbourhood of the sea and, in recent
years, the passionate assertion of democratic liberty-all these
have furnished material for literature, and, especially, for poetry,
with distinctive characteristics. Australian poetry shows a pre-
valence of swinging metres, which suggest the movement of horses,
or the roll of great waves. It consists largely of narrative and
character-sketch. Much of it is genially humorous; together with
a warm appreciation of heroism and devotion, it shows a delight
in the odd types of character (and rascality) fostered by the con-
ditions of life in a young country. Where it is serious, it frequently
expresses a gloomy view of life, induced, perhaps, by the hardships
and the uncertainty that attended the days of settlers, explorers
and gold-diggers.
The earliest Australian poetry was rather an inheritance from
Great Britain than a native growth. In 1819, Charles Lamb's
## p. 362 (#392) ############################################
362
[CH.
Australia and New Zealand
friend, Barron Field, who, in 1816, became judge of the supreme
court of New South Wales, and remained in Australia till 1824,
published in Sydney, for private circulation, First Fruits of
Australian Poetry. In 1823, a born Australian, William Charles
Wentworth, wrote in competition for the chancellor's medal at the
university of Cambridge a poem entitled Australasia, which was
printed in London and shortly afterwards appeared in the first
Australian newspaper, The Sydney Gazette. In 1826, another
Australian, Charles Tompson, junior, published in Sydney bis
poems, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel. The
names of Australian fauna and flora and references to the aboriginal
races are found creeping further into English verse in the poems
of John Dunmore Lang, a presbyterian divine, who arrived in
New South Wales in 1823 and took a prominent part in Australian
politics. His Aurora Australis, published in Sydney in 1826, is
Australian at least in so far as it applies inherited modes of
expression to the beauties and characteristics of his adopted
country. Lang was not afraid to write : :
At length an occupant was given
To traverse each untrodden wild,
The rudest mortal under Heaven,
Stern Nature's long-forgotten child !
Compatriot of the tall emu,
The wombat and the kangaroo!
The decade 1840–1850, preceding the rush to the gold-diggings,
was an important period in the history of Australian poetry. The
development of New South Wales brought about an increase in
the number of newspapers, and the newspapers gave opportunities
for the publication of verse. Encouragement came, also, from
Sir Henry Parkes, who, having emigrated to Australia in 1839 at
the age of twenty-four, was enabled by his eminent position in the
political life of New South Wales to foster the production of poetry.
Parkes was, himself, a poet of some merit. Of the five volumes
of verse which he published in Sydney, the earliest was issued
in 1842; the best is probably the second, Murmurs of the Stream,
which came out in 1857; but poetry was to him the recreation
of a busy life, and his power of lyrical expression was not culti-
vated as it deserved. Other poets of the period were Daniel
Henry Deniehy, a graceful singer; Richard P. L. Rowe, a journalist
whose miscellaneous writings under the pseudonym 'Peter
Possum' were very popular with Australian readers, and whose
best poems show a subtle imagination and a delicate ear; Henry
Halloran, a fluent and straightforward versifier, and J. Sheridan
## p. 363 (#393) ############################################
X11]
Charles Harpur
363
Moore, who sang in easy style of Australian scenes. The same
decade, moreover, saw the publication of his first volume of poetry
by one whose work deserves more particular attention.
Charles Harpur may be considered the first distinctively
Australian poet. He was a student of Wordsworth and of Shelley,
and more than one of his lyric poems (for instance, that entitled
Words) suggest that he had read the lyric poems of Blake. In
this first volume, Thoughts : a Series of Sonnets, published in
Sydney in 1845, there is little that might not have been written
by one who had never seen Australia. The sonnets are well
performed exercises in poetry, not devoid of the commonplaces of
poetical diction, and, in spite of some fervour and fine imagination,
seldom rising above a moderate level of merit. As time went on,
Harpur, who was Australian born and spent much of his life in the
bush, came to trust more, for subject and for inspiration, to what
he himself felt and saw in his own life and surroundings. He was
the first Australian poet to give a worthy imaginative representa-
tion of Australian scenery and nature. The largeness of his vision
and the simplicity of his emotion suggest life in an undeveloped
and sparsely populated country; and, while he practised many
forms of lyrical poetry, he found his most suitable medium in
blank verse narrative and description. The Creek of the Four
Graves is the poem on which his fame is most firmly established,
and it is essentially Australian. His play, The Bushrangers,
published in 1853, is not a good play; but the volume in which
it appeared and the volume called The Power of the Dream,
published in 1865, contain some thoughtful and learned verse.
The rush for gold, which began just after the middle of the last
century, brought to Australia a great quantity of new life and
enterprise, which attracted thither a few men of intellectual
attainments. Among these was Richard Henry Horne (who, while
in Australia changed his second name to Hengist), the author
of Orion”, whose poetical works bear some traces of his seventeen
years' residence in Australia. Horne's chief influence on Australian
poetry, however, lay in the advice and encouragement which he
gave to younger poets. The same is true of James Lionel Michael,
who, soon after his arrival in Sydney, gave up the idea of gold-
digging and began to practise his own profession of solicitor.
Michael, a friend of John Everett Millais and a supporter of the
pre-Raphaelite movement in English painting, was a man of fine
intellect, and himself a ready and musical poet. His long narrative
and partly autobiographical poem John Cumberland, which was
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap. v.
## p. 364 (#394) ############################################
364 Australia and New Zealand [CH.
published in Sydney in 1860, flows easily along in varied metres,
and, though an eccentric jumble of matter and manner, has
qualities of grace and refinement; but poetry, and Australian
poetry in particular, is less indebted to him for his own writings
than for his fostering care of one of the two greatest Australian
poets, Henry Clarence Kendall.
Kendall, born in Australia of English and Irish descent, was
employed by Michael in boyhood as clerk and amanuensis, and
to Michael is due the credit of having early discerned the boy's
poetical promise. His poems were sent to Parkes, who published
them in The Empire. Kendall was twenty-one years old when
he published in Sydney, in 1862, his first volume, Poems and
Songs. The book contained a good deal that was immature, and
Kendall later tried to suppress it. But the promise in it is
unmistakable; and so, in certain instances, is the achievement
One of the poems told in impressive fashion the story of the
explorers Burke and Wills, who had recently perished. In spite
of the opportunities granted by the newspapers, however, Australia
was not in those days a good field for poetry. Mistrusting their
own judgment, the Australian critics and reading public were
inclined to condemn any literature that had not won the approval
of the mother-country. Kendall, whose faith in his own powers
was not yet shaken by his inherited weakness of character and his
consequent unhappiness, boldly sent specimens of his work to
The Athenaeum, which, on 27 September 1862, printed some of
them with favourable comments, and on several later occasions
gave space and praise to Kendall's work. This was the first
recognition of Australian poetry by an English critical journal,
and Kendall was greatly encouraged. He continued contributing
poems to the newspapers and, seven years later, collected them,
with a few from his Poems and Songs, in a volume entitled
Leaves from an Australian Forest. Here he shows himself a
true poet, and a truly Australian poet. Though he had spent
some years in city life, which he disliked, his heart was always in
the country; and he stands in his generation for the poet of the
quieter side of Australian country life, and of the beauty of
Australian forests, streams and mountains. His third notable
volume was Songs from the Mountains, published in 1880. The
intervening years had been clouded. In the later poems there
are many touches of regret and remorse: on the other hand,
some of the poetry of Kendall's last years reaches a strength and
dignity unknown in his earlier work.
The best of his poetry is to be found in the three volumes
## p. 365 (#395) ############################################
XII]
Adam Lindsay Gordon
365
mentioned, for his efforts in satire and comic writing are negligible.
Kendall was not a keen student of the great English poets of the
past. His fancy was all for the writers of the nineteenth century;
and some of his poetical weakness may be due to ignorance of the
greatest models. At times, he seems to be merely an imitator,
now of Poe, now of Longfellow, now of Moore. He is not strong
in narrative, nor profound in perception of character. But there
is grandeur in such poems as his blank verse address to a
Mountain, and a fine lyrical quality in his poems of nature and
of domestic joy or grief. A gentle, sensitive dreamer, he shows
poetry at home in Australia, drawing beauty and sweetness from
the poet's surroundings, without defiant or subservient glances at
other lands.
Contemporary with Kendall, though some eight years older,
was the most famous of all Australian poets, Adam Lindsay
Gordon.
