No More Learning

She was a singularly
unaffected writer, who knew her Irish atmosphere well, and who,
therefore, could give full effect to its sudden changes from bright-
ness to gloom, from storm to calm.
Emily Lawless, daughter of lord Cloncurry, was attracted
into the open-air life of Ireland by her taste for natural history
and, later, she was drawn by her sympathy with the country folk of
the west to study Irish history in its relation to them, with a result
shown most profoundly in her poems and works of prose fiction.
Ireland had been graven on her very soul. For, though there
is plenty of alternating Irish shower and sunshine in Hurrish
and Grania, and notes of exultation occasionally leap forth from
her With the Wild Geese, yet, no one can read through her first
two novels or, indeed, many pages of With Essex in Ireland,
without that painful perplexity which must haunt all who attempt
candidly to face the eternal riddle presented by that distressful
country to all students of its history.
>
a


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IX
]
Women Novelists
325
Finally, of recent women novelists, mention must be made of
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, for her Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore
and A Matrimonial Lottery, which achieved popularity by their
droll situations and exuberant fun; but her Aliens of the West
contained work of much finer quality. She takes us behind the
shutters of Irish country shop life in a most convincing manner,
and the characters drawn from her Toomevara are true to type.
The disillusionment of Molly Devine, 'The Voteen,' with her
commonplace, not to say vulgar, home surroundings, on her
return from the convent school, with its superior refinements;
her refusal to marry so-called eligible, but, to her, repulsive,
suitors, encouraged by her mother and stepfather, and her final
resolve to become a nun, in order to escape farther persecution
of the kind, is told with convincing poignancy, while a variant
of this theme is treated with even more power and pathos in
Tom Connolly's Daughter.
6
a
John D'Alton was a principal contributor to Hardiman's Irish
Minstrelsy, and, in 1814, published Dermid or Erin in the days of
Boroimha, a metrical romance in twelve cantos, written in smooth
verse and showing a real knowledge of the times described, for
he was an antiquary of note. In addition, he wrote a series of
historical works of value, including The Annals of Boyle and The
History of County Dublin.
John Mitchel is a very significant figure in Anglo-Irish litera-
ture. The son of a nonconformist minister who had been a United
Irishman in 1798, Mitchel had the rebel in his blood. He was
a student of Trinity college, Dublin, and, afterwards, more or less
of a constitutionalist as writer and contributor to The Nation (of
which, at a later date, he became editor); and he was especially
subdued in tone in his preface to the Life of Hugh O'Neill,
earl of Tyrone, a work included in Gavan Duffy's first Irish
Library. But he drew apart from the moderate section of
repealers headed by Daniel O'Connell, and started The United
Irishman with the avowed object of fanning into rebellion
what he described as 'the holy hatred of English Rule. ' His
utterances in this organ finally became so dangerously violent
that it was suppressed, and he was prosecuted and found guilty of
treason felony. He was sentenced to undergo fourteen years
transportation, but, five years afterwards, escaped from Tasmania,
and, after many adventures, graphically described in his Jail
Journal, reached California, and, later, settled in New York.


## p. 326 (#356) ############################################

326
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
During the American civil war, in which he espoused the cause of
the south, and gave the lives of his two sons to that cause, he con-
ducted The Richmond Examiner. In 1867, he started The Irish
Citizen in New York and, in 1875, he was elected member for
Tipperary. Mitchel was a writer who showed undoubted genius
when the fit was on him ; but much of his work, in his History of
Ireland, is slovenly and not a little even of the Jail Journal is
rhetorical and long drawn out.
William McCullagh Torrens, eldest son of James McCullagh,
assumed his maternal name for family reasons. A successful
practitioner at the Irish, then at the English, bar, he entered
parliament for Finsbury, and successfully promoted measures for
the amelioration of the lower classes. He wrote biographies of
Sheil, Sir James Graham and lord Melbourne, and several im-
portant works on political science. He had a distinct literary
gift, of which his interesting and brightly written Life of
Melbourne is a typical example.
John Francis Waller, a Trinity college, Dublin, man, and
long a contributor to, and afterwards editor of, The Dublin
University Magazine, was best known in his day by his poems,
appearing under the nom-de-plume Jonathan Freke Slingsby.
Not a few of these lyrics, such as The Song of the Glass, The
Spinning Wheel Song, Kitty Neil, have become popular by their
grace and sparkle, and, occasionally, he succeeds in more serious
verse. Waller also wrote many of the articles in The Imperial
Dictionary of Universal Biography, and, generally, superintended
the production of this work.
John Francis O'Donnell drifted from the south of Ireland to
London, where, for a while, he was editor of The Tablet, and his
verse contributions were welcomed by Dickens to his magazines.
Many of his poems were also published in Chambers's Journal.
He wrote in The Lamp a novel entitled Agents and Evictions.
He will, however, be best remembered by his lyrics and, more
especially, by A Spinning Song, which has found its way into most
recent anthologies of Irish verse.
Francis Davis, 'the Belfast man,' as he is called, was the son of
a soldier of Ballincollig, county Cork; but, to his mother, a woman
of good Scottish Highland family and fine intellectual and moral
gifts, he owed the influences which made him a man of mark at
the times of catholic emancipation, and later. He lost her,
however, when but a boy, and his father then consigned him to the
care of a rich but miserly relative, for whom he worked at the


## p. 327 (#357) ############################################

IX
:
]
Later Writers
327
loom, suffering much hard treatment at his hands. On his father's
death, he escaped from this drudgery to Belfast, where
As the weaver plied his shuttle,
Wove he, too, the mystio rhyme.
Here, he became the Ebenezer Elliott of the northern popular
movement About 1830, he travelled through England and
Scotland, earning his living by his trade, and writing poems all the
while, and, at the same time, studying French, Latin, Greek and
Gaelic. Later, he left the loom for the editorial chair of The
Belfastman's Journal, and then became a contributor to many
periodicals. There is a distinctly Scottish strain in Davis's poems,
probably due to his mother's blood and early influences upon
him. His political verse is pointed and spirited, but inferior to his
countryside songs, which are simple and picturesque and full of
unaffected feeling, though they often need the pruning hook.
Bartholomew Simmons, who held an appointment in the
London excise office till his death in 1850, was a popular con-
tributor to leading English magazines. Of his Napoleon's last
look, Maga's critic thus wrote:
Simmons, on the theme of Napoleon, excels all our great poets. Byron's
lines on that subject are bad; Scott's poor, Wordsworth's weak; Lockhart
and Simmons may be bracketted as equal; theirs are good, rich and
strong.
This tribute cannot be said to be undeserved, though Simmons's
verses just miss perfection by their somewhat unrestrained rhetoric,
and his fine ballad, The Flight to Cyprus, has too much of Irish
exultation about it.
Miss Casey (E. Owens Blackburne) became blind at eleven
years of age, and remained so for many years. After a hard struggle
,
to secure a literary position in London, she succeeded as a novelist
and writer of short stories. A collection of the latter under the
title A bunch of Shamrocks was published in 1879, and shows her
knowledge of Irish peasant life and speech.
Richard Dowling passed from a business into a literary career.
He was on the staff of The Nation, became editor of Zozimus,
the Dublin Punch, and, afterwards, was the mainstay of Ireland's
Eye, another Irish humorous periodical, and, yet again, started
Yorick, a London comic paper. But he did not find himself, from
the literary point of view, till he wrote and published The Mystery
of Killard, the central idea of which is the abnormal nature of a
deafmute, which leads him to hate his own child because that
child can hear and speak. ' The originality of this theme, and the


## p. 328 (#358) ############################################

328
[CH.
Anglo-Irish Literature
weird skill with which it was worked out, established his reputa-
tion as a novelist; but, perhaps, his best claim to literary reputation
is his volume of essays, On Babies and Ladders, which is full of
quaint fancies.
Lewis Wingfield, as actor, artist, surgeon, war-correspondent
and novelist had a curiously varied career, as may well be believed.
When the Franco-German war of 1870 broke out, he served as
surgeon on the German side, and was present at the battles of
Woerth and Wissembourg, but returned to Paris in time for the
first siege, and was then employed both as one of the surgeons
in the American hospital, and as correspondent of The Daily
Telegraph. Meanwhile, he was not idle with his brush, and one
of his pictures was bought by the French government. In
1876, he entered on his career of novel-writing. His first story
was Slippery Ground; his second, Lady Grizel, dealing with the
history of George III, attracted men's attention. His third effort,
My Lords of Strogue, describing Irish affairs at the time of the
union, was still more successful. Believing that books on prison
life published by ex-convicts are full of misrepresentations and
exaggerations, he obtained special facilities from the Home office
for studying the inside of prisons, and, as a result, published a
novel suggested by these experiences.
A group of friends, all of whom achieved success as writers on
antiquarian subjects, were the earl of Dunraven, James Henthorn
Todd, author of a Life of St Patrick, Sir John Gilbert, author of
The History of Dublin, William Stokes and his daughter Margaret
Stokes, authors respectively of The Life of George Petrie and
Early Christian Architecture in Ireland, bishops Graves and
Reeves, and, most noted and versatile of all, Patrick Weston Joyce.
Sixty-two years ago he contributed Irish folk-songs, and notes on
Irish dances to Petrie's Ancient Music of Ireland. In his spare
hours, when an active teacher, professor and training college
principal, he produced what have since become standard works
on Irish school method and Irish names of places. Turning his
attention to Irish history, he wrote several works on the subject;
the most important of which is his Social History of Ireland,
two volumes full of valuable learning, yet written with a direct
simplicity that at once engages the attention of the reader. His
old Celtic Romances, a series of free translations from old Irish
folk-tales, moreover, as has been said above, inspired Tennyson's
Voyage of Maeldune.
Archbishop McHale, next to O'Connell, exercised a more


## p. 329 (#359) ############################################

] IX
Russell and Synge
329
prolonged influence on the Roman catholic population of his
country than any Irishman of his time. Appointed professor of
dogmatic theology at Maynooth, he wrote a series of letters chiefly
concerned with controversial questions and catholic emancipation,
under the signature Hierophilus. His letters showed great vigour
of style and this, coupled with the energy of his character and
eloquence gained for him from O'Connell the title "The Lion of the
fold of Judah. ' Appointed archbishop of Tuam, he continued his
controversial letters and preached many sermons of note. He
was also a renowned Irish scholar, and not only translated sixty of
Moore's melodies into that language, but rendered into Gaelic six
books of the Iliad and several portions of the Bible.
Matthew Russell, S. J. , was the younger son of Arthur Russell
of Killowen, and brother of Charles, lord Russell of Killowen
and lord chief justice of England. A devoted Jesuit priest, father
Russell yet found time to gather round him at the office of his
Irish Monthly, which he conducted for more than a generation
with the utmost zeal and judgment, all the ablest of the young
Irish writers of his day. There, Oscar Wilde and Rosa Mulholland
and that charming but too short-lived poetess Rose Kavanagh and,
indeed, all the rising story-writers and poets and poetesses of
the Ireland of his day enjoyed his wise friendship and literary
advice. But the little periodical' as one of the women contri-
butors to it, now become famous, writes 'has real distinction
apart from the names, distinguished and to be distinguished
that are ever amongst its contributors. ' Much of this was due
to the work of its editor, who was a writer of both graceful and
moving verse and prose, touched with fine spirituality.
Descended, it is understood, from a court musician dubbed
'Synge' for his vocal talents by Henry VIII, John M. Synge
spent his early manhood in Paris amid art and literary influences
which attracted him to the elemental aspect of the Irish peasant
mind when he returned to his native Wicklow. He did not find
himself or rather he was not found by W. B. Yeats for the Irish
Literary theatre till he was approaching forty years of age and he
died almost as soon as he had become famous. By that time he had
written six remarkable plays, including the brilliant and much
criticised Playboy of the Western World, which, indeed, became a
storm centre of political and literary antagonism between those
who regarded it as an outrage on Irish character and those who
defended it as a justifiable treatment of certain phases of Irish
fundamental passions. Synge's medium of dramatic expression is


## p. 330 (#360) ############################################

330
[CH, IX
Anglo-Irish Literature
6
an artistic modification of the dialect used by those of the Irish
peasantry who carry Gaelic turns of thought and expression
into their current English speech.
This he uses with convincing skill not only in The Playboy,
the beautiful tragedy entitled The Riders to the Sea, the broad,
bitter, whimsical, wistful Well of the Saints and the brutally
humorous Tinker's Wedding, but, above all, in his single verse
drama, his lovely, fatalistic Deidre of the Sorrows, written when
he knew he was dying of an incurable disease. "Before verse can
*
be human again, it must learn to be brutal,' he wrote in the preface
to his slim volume of poems and translations. He tries to prove
this in such passages as the following from his lines In Kerry :
And this I asked beneath a lovely cloud
Of strange delight with one lark singing loud:
'What change you've wrought in graveyard, rock and sea,
This wild new Paradise to wake for me. . . . . .
Yet knew no more than knew these merry sins
Had built this stack of thigh-bones, jaws and shins!
These short poems, his own disjecta membra, are, indeed, much
of the nature of the grotesque relics of humanity, described by
him above. Not so his two volumes of descriptive prose The Aran
Islands and In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara. Here, his
sympathy with wild nature and curious interest in and brotherly
feeling for wild human kind make us realise the artist and the
man alike.
Finally, we agree with T. W. Rolleston that the plays of Synge
stand apart from the pessimistic pictures of 'disillusionment,
frustration and ignobility' characterising many of the plays of
the new Irish drama.
In his characters, in spite of all the outward barbarism and cynicism, I at
least feel conscious of a certain lift, an undulating force, like the swell from
an invisible ocean of life, which marks these people out as the destined
conquerors, not the victims of circumstances.
They may shock us, they have shocked a great many worthy people, but
they can never discourage or depress.
6


## p. 331 (#361) ############################################

CHAPTER X
ANGLO-INDIAN LITERATURE
On the analogy of the literature of the great British self-
governing dominions, Anglo-Indian literature should, logically, be
the territorial English literature of British India. But the degree
to which the ever-changing English community that guards and
administers India differs from the settled inhabitants of Canada
or Australia is, at the same time, an explanation of the main
peculiarities of that literature and, also, the measure of the
difficulty which confronts any attempt to define it. Anglo-Indian
literature, as regards the greater part of it, is the literature of a
comparatively small body of Englishmen who, during the working
part of their lives, become residents in a country so different in
every respect from their own that they seldom take root in its
soil. On the contrary, they strive to remain English in thought
and aspiration. By occasional periods of residence in England, they
keep themselves in intimate touch with English life and culture:
throughout the period of their life in India they are subject to the
influence of two civilisations, but they never lose their bias towards
that of England, which, in most cases, ultimately re-absorbs
them.
Anglo-Indian literature, therefore, is, for the most part, merely
English literature strongly marked by Indian local colour. It has
been published, to a great extent, in England, owing partly to lack
of facilities in India, and, partly, to the fact that the Anglo-Indian
writer must, as a rule, make his appeal mainly to the public in
England and only secondarily to the English community in India.
The actual writing has often been done in England during furlough
or after retirement, because that is precisely the time when the
Anglo-Indian has leisure for literary work. The years of retire-
ment are also specially fertile for another reason, since not until
1 The sense in which this term (now largely used in a different sense) is employed
in the present section is defined in the text.


## p. 332 (#362) ############################################

332
[CH.
Anglo-Indian Literature
he leaves India has the official complete freedom from those bonds
of discipline which, in India, have always hampered the free
expression of opinion. Thus, Anglo-Indian literature is based in
origin, spirit and influences upon two separate countries at
one and the same time.
That this condition of affairs has prevailed in the past does
not necessarily imply that it must continue. The future of
the English language in India is a question of great moment
to English literature. As a collateral, though not by any means
inevitable, result of the establishment of the British Indian
empire, English has become the language of government and
a common medium of literary expression throughout a vast sub-
continent containing 300,000,000 inhabitants. At the time when
the empire was founded on the ruins of the Mogul dominion,
the Persian language performed that double task, and it might
have continued to do so had Englishmen preferred to orientalise
themselves rather than to anglicise those among whom they
lived. But, in addition to the natural disinclination of the English-
man to steep himself in orientalism, the introduction of English
law and English learning carried with it, as an almost necessary
corollary, the adoption of English as the language of universi-
ties and of the highest courts of justice. Hence, it followed that
English became a medium of literary expression for the educated
Indian. His writings in our language, together with those of the
domiciled community of European or mixed origin, constitute a
strictly territorial English literature, and may be regarded as that
part of Anglo-Indian literature which is most potential of develop-
ment in the future; but, in the past, they have, naturally,
attracted little notice in comparison with the writings of the
English immigrant population.
Father Thomas Stephens, who went to Goa in 1579, was the
first Englishman to settle in India, and Anglo-Indian literature
began with his letters, of no extrinsic value, to his father, which
have been preserved by Purchas. Master Ralph Fitch, merchant of
London, travelled in India and the east from 1583 to 1591, and his
lively description of his adventures, preserved by Hakluyt and
Purchas, was of the utmost value to those who sought to promote
an English East India company.
For a hundred years after the East India company received
its charter, Anglo-Indian literature consisted solely of books of
travel. Of the large number of writings of this class, a few may
find mention here. Sir Thomas Roe, the gallant Stewart diplomat


## p. 333 (#363) ############################################

x] The Governorship of Warren Hastings 333
ht:
a
who was the ambassador of James I at the court of the Great
Mogoar, King of the Orientall Indyes, of Condahy, of Chismer, and
of Corason,' wrote a very readable journal narrating his life at the
court of Jahangir. Edward Terry, his chaplain, wrote a Relation
of a Voyage to the Easterne India, full of interesting observation,
and including an account of his meeting with the 'Odcombian
legstretcher, Thomas Coryate', whom Roe also mentions. William
Bruton's Newes from the East Indies relates how the English
obtained their first footing in Orissa in 1632, and is a fine piece of
vigorous narrative English. William Methold, who was in India at
the same time, tells in his Relations of the Kingdome of Golconda,
preserved by Purchas, of his experiences in south India; while
John Fryer, who belongs to the latter half of the seventeenth
century, and had an interview with Aurangzib, throws a good deal
of light on the contemporary politics of western India in his New
Account of East India and Persia. These English writers of
travel tales are far less famous than their brilliant French con-
temporaries of the seventeenth century, Bernier and Tavernier;
but their naïveté, in the face of the many novel things they saw,
combined with the delightful seventeenth-century narrative style
in which they wrote, gives their writings a distinction which Anglo-
Indian literature of this kind has never recaptured.
The greater part of the eighteenth century, until near the close
of the governorship of Warren Hastings, was, in a literary sense,
all but uneventful. It was a period of anarchy and war in India.
The beginning of the century saw the English mere traders
struggling for a foothold in India; its closing decades saw them
sovereigns of vast territories. Alexander Hamilton, who was
in the east from 1688 to 1723, wrote A New Account of the
East Indies, but his book, though comprehensive, is rather
rambling and commonplace. Between his date and 1780 there
are only a few names which call for comment. Pre-eminent among
them was that of Robert Orme. Born in India in 1728, he returned
to the land of his birth as a writer' in 1743, and there, during the
course of a successful official career, in which he was closely con-
nected with many of the events afterwards discussed in his books,
he gathered the knowledge which enabled him to become one of
the greatest of Anglo-Indian historians? . His History of the
Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan is the
prose epic of the early military achievements of our race in India.
An indefatigable, rather than a brilliant, writer, Orme remains
1 See, ante, vol. iv, pp. 89 ff.
See, ante, vol. 2, pp. 293-4.


## p. 334 (#364) ############################################

334
[CH.
Anglo-Indian Literature
a mine in which all subsequent historians must quarry. In his
Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes and
of the English concerns in Indostan from the year 1659, the con-
scientious and unwearied narrator of contemporary events became
the industrious investigator of past history, though it is by his first
book that Orme's name chiefly lives. Alexander Dow, who died at
Bhagalpur in 1779, not only translated histories from the Persian,
but wrote two tragedies, Zingis and Sethona, which were produced
at Drury lane. His authorship of these plays, which were oriental
in setting, was challenged by Baker in his Biographia Dramatica,
‘for he is said by those who know him well to be utterly un-
qualified for the production of learning or of fancy, either in prose
or verse. ' Others who may be mentioned are John Zephaniah
Holwell, a survivor of the Black Hole, who wrote on historical and
other subjects after his retirement in 1760, including a Narrative
of the deplorable deaths of the English gentlemen who were
suffocated in the Black Hole, which was included in his India
Tracts. Charles Hamilton, who wrote a history of those Rohilla
Afghans whose expulsion from Rohilcand brought much odium upon
Warren Hastings; James Rennell, the father of Indian geography,
who wrote after his retirement in 1777; and William Bolts and
Henry Verelst, whose quarrels in India resulted in the production
of polemical history by them both.
The closing years of Warren Hastings's Indian career saw the
real birth of English literature and literary studies in India.
Hicky's Bengal Gazette, the first newspaper of modern India, was
founded at Calcutta by James Augustus Hicky in 1780. It was a
scurrilous production, but a sign of life. James Forbes left India
in 1784, carrying with him the collected materials which he after-
wards published as his Oriental Memoirs. The appointment, in 1783,
of Sir William Jones as judge of the supreme court was an event of
high importance in the history of the relations between east and
west, as was also his foundation of the Asiatic society of Bengal. He
is remembered primarily as the earliest English Sanskrit scholar;
but, in the domain of Anglo-Indian letters, he takes rank not only
by his translation of Kalidasa's Sakuntala, but, also, as the first
Anglo-Indian poet. He had written verse before he came to India;
while in India, he addressed the gods of Indian mythology in
a series of hymns which, if not of the highest order of poetry, are
yet aflame with enthusiasm and knowledge. Inferior to Jones as
an orientalist, but superior as a poet, was John Leyden, that ‘lamp
too early quenched,' as Sir Walter Scott put it. He lived in the
a


## p. 335 (#365) ############################################

x] The Early Years of the XIXth Century 335
east from 1803 to 1811, and, though he, too, is remembered chiefly
as an orientalist, he is to be noted as the first of that long line of
writers who expressed in verse the common feelings of Englishmen
in the land of regrets. ' His poetry is a simple expression of the
emotions which all Anglo-Indians experience at some time-pride
in the military achievements of our race, loathing at the darker
aspects of Indian superstition and the exile's longing for home.
His Ode to an Indian Gold Coin deserves a place in every Anglo-
Indian anthology of verse as an expression of this last emotion.
The closing years of the eighteenth century, and the first
two decades of the nineteenth, were marked by other signs of
literary advance. Hugh Boyd, who, by some, was alleged to be
Junius, was in India from 1781 to 1794, and made some attempt, in
essays on literary and moral subjects in local journals which he
conducted, to keep alive the flame of English literary culture in his
adopted country. In 1789, the quaint translation into English of
Ghulam Hussein Khan's Siyar-ul-Muta'akhkhirin by the Franco-
Turk Raymond, alias Haji Mustapha, was published in Calcutta.
The intrinsic interest of this contemporary history of India, com-
bined with the oriental phraseology and the Gallicisms with which
the translation abounds, renders Raymond's book one of the most
curious pieces of literature among Anglo-Indian writings. Mean-
while, Henry Thomas Colebrooke made a name for himself as the
leading Sanskrit scholar of the day; James Tod was carrying on those
researches in Rajputana which he ultimately gave to the world in
the classic Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, a work fuller of
romance than most epics; Mark Wilks, in the south of India, was
both helping to make history and amassing the materials for writing
it, which he eventually published as his impartially and critically
written Historical Sketches of the Southof India. Sir John Malcolm,
who, also, took part in many of the events which he described,
followed with his Political History of India in 1811, and, sub-
sequently, with his History of Persia, his Central India and other
works, including a volume of poems; while Francis Buchanan-
Hamilton wrote on scientific and historical subjects, including An
Account of the Kingdom of Nipal. As belonging to this period,
too, may be mentioned Eliza Fay's Original Letters from Calcutta,
descriptive of her travels from England to Calcutta, and the anony-
mous Hartly House, described as a novel, though, in form, a series of
letters written by a lady and descriptive of life in Calcutta towards
the close of the eighteenth century. Finally, Mary Martha Sher-
wood, the children's writer, was in India during this period and


## p. 336 (#366) ############################################

336
[CH.
Anglo-Indian Literature
her Little Henry and his Bearer was the gift which she gave to
Anglo-Indian children in memory of the child she had lost.
The thirty or forty years which preceded the mutiny were full
of events of the greatest moment for the future of the English
language in India. Macaulay was in India from 1834 to 1838, and
his minute on education resulted in the definite adoption by
lord Bentinck's government of the English language as the basis
of all higher education in India Ram Mohan Roy, the Bengali
reformer, had advocated in English writing this and other reforms,
the style of which Jeremy Bentham compared favourably with that
of James Mill. David Hare, a Calcutta watchmaker, gave him
strong support, and eventually in 1816 the Hindu college was
founded at Calcutta for the instruction of Indians in English; and
the decision of the government of India, in 1835, that its educational
subsidies should promote mainly the study of European literature
and science, found its natural sequel in the foundation, in 1857,
during the very crisis of the mutiny, of universities in which English
was to be the medium of instruction at Calcutta, Madras and
Bombay. The government of India had set out to give its
subjects, so far as might be, an English mind.
As a result of this policy, there is, in modern British India,
a steady and increasing output of English literature written by
Indians. But, as is only natural, so drastic an innovation as the
complete changing of a people's literary language could not bear im-
mediate results of value, and not only has the bulk of Anglo-Indian
literature continued to be written by Englishmen, but, for a very
long time, it remained doubtful whether Indians could so com-
pletely become Englishmen in mind and thought as to add, except
in the rarest and most exceptional cases, anything of lasting value
to the roll of English literature.
While this remarkable change was beginning in India, Anglo-
Indian writers were not idle. Heber, bishop of Calcutta, claims
attention here rather by his Narrative of a Journey from Calcutta
to Bombay than by his few Anglo-Indian poems; Henry Louis Vivian
Derozio, most famous of those of our Indian fellow-men who are
neither exclusively European nor Indian but share the blood of both,
put all the pathos and passion of his own sensitive nature into his
metrical tale The Fakeer of Jungheera; Henry Meredith Parker
is remembered not only as an actor and musician but as a poet,
essayist and story-teller. Among his productions was an Indian
mythological narrative poem called The Draught of Immortality
and two clever volumes of miscellaneous prose and verse entitled


## p. 337 (#367) ############################################

x]
Historians
337
Bole Ponjis (The Punch bowl). Major David Lester Richardson,
of the Bengal army, abandoned military life and devoted himself to
education and literature. He takes rank among Anglo-Indian
writers mainly as a literary critic, though he also wrote poetry and
history. The titles of his books, such as Literary Leaves, Literary
Chit-Chat, Literary Recreations, are an index of the general
trend of his mind, and suggest that he was probably happier in his
work at the Hindu college, to which, by Macaulay's influence, he
was appointed in 1836 as professor of English literature, than he
had been in his previous career. Henry Whitelock Torrens, who was
secretary of the Asiatic society from 1840 to 1846, was a clever
essayist as well as a journalist and scholar, and his scattered papers
were deservedly collected and published at Calcutta in 1854.
Sir Richard Francis Burton was in India during this period, but
his fame cannot be said to be specially Anglo-Indian.
Of the historians during the period, James Grant Duff and
Mountstuart Elphinstone are pre-eminent. Grant Duff's History
of the Mahrattas (1826) and Elphinstone's History of India (1841)
are two of the classics of Indian history. The romantic interest of
the former book, the accurate though uninspiring conciseness of the
second, and the pioneering ability shown by both in the untilled
regions which they surveyed, gave these books a standing which they
still hold, despite the advance of knowledge since they appeared.
Other historians were Horace Hayman Wilson, the Sanskrit scholar,
who continued and edited James Mill's History of British India;
John Briggs, the translator of Ferishta's Muhammedan Power in
India; Sir Henry Miers Elliot, the unwearied student of the
history of Mussulman India, whose History of India as told by its
own Historians was edited after his death by John Dowson; and
Sir John Kaye, prominent in the history of Anglo-Indian letters
as the founder, in 1844, of The Calcutta Review, to which he
frequently contributed. He also, long after his departure from
India, wrote Indian history voluminously, his History of the Sepoy
War in India being his best known work.
During this period, fiction established itself as one of the most
vigorous branches of Anglo-Indian literature. William Browne
Hockley made use of his undoubted genius for story-telling in
producing tales based on his intimate knowledge of Indian life.
Pandurang Hari, or Memoirs of a Hindoo, a lifelike picture of
Maratha character with excessive emphasis on its darker side,
appeared in 1826. Tales of the Zenana, or a Nawab's Leisure
.
Hours was Hockley's best book. It is a sort of Anglo-Indian
22
E, L. XIV.
CH. X.


## p. 338 (#368) ############################################

338
Anglo-Indian Literature [CH.
Arabian Nights, filled with wit and liveliness. Hockley un-
doubtedly possessed narrative genius. He was unrivalled in the
sphere of Anglo-Indian fiction, until Philip Meadows Taylor,
novelist and historian, began his literary career in 1839 with The
Confessions of a Thug, a gruesome presentation of those facts
which Sir William Henry Sleeman embodied in official reports.
His next production was Tippoo Sultan, a tale of the Mysore war,
in 1840. Taylor's reputation, however, rests mainly on stories
which he wrote after he retired in 1860, especially the trilogy
Tara, a Maratta Tale, Ralph Darnell and Seeta. The three
tales were connected by a curious link: the year 1657 was that of
the triumph of the Maratha chieftain Sivagi over the Bijapur
army, which laid the foundation of his people's power in India;
the year 1757 saw a greater power than that of the Marathas
arise at Plassey; 1857 was the year of the mutiny. These three
events, occurring at intervals of one hundred years, supplied the
central themes of the three tales. Taylor contrasts with Hockley
as one who idealised, rather than delineated, his types.
The tendency of Anglo-Indian fiction, however, to turn away
from the portrayal of Indian life and focus itself chiefly upon the
life of the English in India, was well illustrated by Oakfield: or
Fellowship in the East, by William Delafield Arnold, brother of
Matthew Arnold. It was a book with a purpose; throughout its
a
pages there breathed stern moral protest against the dissipation of
the Anglo-Indian community and its disregard, as he conceived it,
of the interests of the children of the soil. England has given to
India few minds of more refined and sensitive texture than that of
W. D. Arnold.
After the mutiny, Anglo-Indians continued to produce work of
permanent value in most branches of literature. George Bruce
Malleson, James Talboys Wheeler, John Clark Marshman and Sir
William Hunter devoted themselves to the discovery of new know-
ledge in Indian history as well as to the popularisation of that
already existing. John Watson McCrindle threw light on the
history of ancient India; Charles Robert Wilson on that of modern
Bengal; Henry George Keene took medieval and modern India
as his subject; while Sir William Muir wrote The Life of Mahomet
and other books on Islamic history. Of less important writers of
history and kindred literature, the names are too numerous to
recite, though Henry Elmsley Busteed's carefully written and
attractive Echoes from Old Calcutta deserves mention as having
secured a standard position among Anglo-Indian writings. These


## p. 339 (#369) ############################################

x]
Sir William Hunter
339
historians were marked in the main by assiduous ability rather
than by genius. Malleson, possessed as he was of a vigorous
narrative style, was eminently suited to write the history of the
Indian mutiny, had he not been so strong a partisan, a fault which
revealed itself also in his History of the French in India. Wheeler
and Marshman, without being distinguished by their style, came
nearer to impartiality through their close Indian sympathies.
McCrindle, Wilson, Keene and Muir alike produced work of lasting
historical value; but, as a historian and man of letters, Sir William
Hunter stands out as the most brilliant Anglo-Indian of the last
generation. His style was picturesque and striking, his im-
partiality rare, his grasp of world-history wide and penetrating,
and his industry enormous. Alike in his more technical work,
such as The Imperial Gazetteer, his historical work, such as The
Annals of Rural Bengal and his History of British India, his
biographies and his lighter literary work, such as The Thackerays
in India and The Old Missionary, he gave evidence of broad
culture and of a rare power of accurate and vigorous literary
expression. Hunter's death at a time when he had completed but
one hundred years of his History of British India was the severest
blow ever sustained by Indian historical studies.
In fiction, John Lang, who wrote novels both before and after
the mutiny, is the earliest name with which we meet in this period.
In his work, we notice a difference of attitude from that of Oak-
field, since Lang cynically satirised Anglo-Indian failings over which
Arnold's deeper nature grieved. Alexander Allardyce painted a
very attractive picture of indigenous Indian life in his City of Sun-
shine, a study of Indian psychology. Henry Curwen, editor of The
Times of India, used thin plots as a peg on which to hang a vast
amount of clever talk, speculation and satire. Sir George Chesney,
who created a sensation in 1871 by his Battle of Dorking, lives
in Anglo-Indian literature mainly by The Dilemma, a powerful
mutiny romance. Jessie Ellen Cadell, who was an oriental
scholar of some merit, wrote two novels, of which the first, Ida
Craven, described frontier life.
Among the poets, William Waterfield, Mary Leslie, Henry George
Keene and Charles Kelly may be mentioned, in passing, among a
host of minor writers. Waterfield derived the theme of his ballads
from Indian mythology; Mary Leslie from Indian history and
Indian nature; Keene, historian, essayist and poet, one of the
early supporters of The Calcutta Review, and for some years
before his death in 1915 the doyen of Anglo-Indian literary men,
22-2


## p. 340 (#370) ############################################

340 Anglo-Indian Literature [CH.
>
published tasteful verse on Indian and other topics throughout a
long literary life of over fifty years. Kelly, like many other
Anglo-Indian writers, was inspired by the mutiny. But, pre-
eminent among the poets of the last generation were Sir Edwin
Arnold and Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall. Arnold was employed in
India in educational work from 1856 to 1861, and then returned
to England. As a poet, journalist and man of letters, he belongs
mainly to the history of English literature proper, and he wrote
all his best work long after his departure from India ; but his
whole subsequent life, and almost the whole of his subse-
quent work, bore predominant impress of his Indian experience.
As an unwearied and tasteful translator of Indian poetry into
English verse, Arnold is unrivalled and possesses an assured place
in English literature; while, as regards his most original work,
The Light of Asia, India may justly claim to have inspired some
of its noblest passages, though, perhaps, she is responsible for its
exotic and sometimes cloying sweetness. Sir Alfred Lyall, whose
Asiatic Studies and Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion
in India proved him to be one of the foremost Anglo-Indian thinkers
and writers, combined thought and form most happily in the
reflections on Indian politics and religion which he put into
the form of Verses written in India. Never since Leyden's Ode
to an Indian Gold Coin had the exile's longing been expressed
so well as in The Land of Regrets, while Siva: or Mors Janua
Vitae is one of the finest products of Anglo-Indian literature.
Among the many writers of humorous verse-a species of
literature always popular in India—Walter Yeldham, who wrote
under the name Aliph Cheem, deserves mention. His Lays
of Ind made him the Anglo-Indian Hood, and revealed to his
delighted generation the humour latent in Anglo-Indian life. By
its side, Thomas Francis Bignold's Leviora : being the Rhymes of
a Successful Competitor deserves mention.
Among miscellaneous prose writings of the period two famous
satires claim notice. The Chronicles of Budgepore, by Itudus
Prichard, attempted 'to show the quaint results which an indis-
criminate and often injudicious engrafting of habits and ideas of
western civilisation upon oriental stock is calculated to produce. '
Prichard had equal command of the bitterest irony and the most
whimsical humour, and was the most powerful satirist whom Anglo-
India has known. Twenty-one Days in India, being the Tour of
Sir Ali Baba, which appeared in Vanity Fair in 1878–9, was
satire of a lighter kind. It was the work of George Robert


## p. 341 (#371) ############################################

x] The Influence of English Literature 341
Aberigh-Mackay, and the frank, humorous and deliberately cynical
way in which it laughed at the personnel of the government of
India, from the viceroy down to the humblest menial and the
infinite tenderness of its pathos, secured to it a celebrity which
it still commands.
Philip Stewart Robinson and Edward Hamilton Aitken may be
treated together. They both took the familiar Indian sights, the
birds, the trees, 'the syce's children . . . the mynas, crows, green
parrots, squirrels, and the beetles that get into the mustard and
the soup,' and wrote about them in pleasant prose. Robinson's In
my Indian Garden and Aitken's Behind the Bungalow have few
rivals in this class of writing, the predominant feature of which is
a gay and lighthearted attitude towards the ordinary things, even
the ordinary annoyances, of Indian rural life.
Despite the spread of the knowledge of English among
the educated classes of India, Indians wrote comparatively
little that can be regarded as permanent additions to English
literature. The adoption of English as the language of the
universities had the altogether unexpected, though in every
way desirable, result of revivifying the vernaculars. Stimu-
lated by English literature and English knowledge, Bankim
Chandra Chatterji, the first graduate of Calcutta university,
created Bengali fiction. Under the influence of the works of
Scott, he wrote successful historical novels, and followed these
with novels of Indian social life. Bankim, undoubtedly, was the
first creative genius who sprang from the Indian renascence
brought about in the nineteenth century by the introduction of
English education. But he deliberately turned his face away
from all attempts to gain a reputation as an English writer. His
younger rival, Romesh Chunder Dutt, sought fame in Bengali as
a novelist, and, in English, as a historian, economist, novelist and
poet. His Lays of Ancient India and his novels show him to
have had a complete mastery of the technique of our language,
and considerable imaginative power; but his history and his
economics were sometimes too polemical for impartiality, and
Romesh will live in literary history mainly as one who helped to
create modern Bengali.
Ram Mohan Roy, as a pioneer of English education in India,
Keshab Chandra Sen, as a religious propagandist, Kashinath
Trimback Telang the Maratha, as a judge, scholar and translator,
Bahramji Malabari the Parsi, as a social reformer, and hundreds of
other Indians used our language for their own purposes almost as


## p. 342 (#372) ############################################

342 Anglo-Indian Literature [CH, X
if it had been their mother tongue; but, of those who attempted
imaginative literature in English, very few succeeded in writing
anything of permanent interest. Michael Madhu Sadan Dutt lives
by his Bengali poems rather than by his Captive Ladie, an attempt,
so early as 1849, to tell in English verse the story of Prithwi Raj,
king of Delhi. Malabari, besides ardently advocating social
reforms through the medium of English writings, wrote The
Indian Muse in English garb, with, however, indifferent success.
Lal Behari Day's Govinda Samanta : or The History of a Bengal
Ráiyat and his Folk Tales of Bengal were pieces of work well
worth doing and competently carried out, though exhibiting ability
rather than genius. In Torulata Dutt, however, we meet a different
order of intellect. The daughter of Govind Chandra Dutt, who
himself wrote tasteful English verse, and related to Sasi Chandra of
the same family, a voluminous writer of English, she was in close
contact with English or continental culture throughout most
of her short life. She wrote a novel in French, which was pub-
lished posthumously in Paris. Her English poetry displayed real
creative and imaginative power and almost faultless technical
skill. In her English translations (A Sheaf gleaned in French
Fields), and in her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan,
she so nearly achieved a striking success as to make one regret
that our language is essentially unsuited to the riot of imagery
and ornament which form part of the natural texture of the
oriental mind. 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!