Some
arbitrary
test must evidently
be employed.
be employed.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
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!
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.
