No More Learning

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.


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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


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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


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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


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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,


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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.
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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


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XI]
William Henry Drummond
355
the story in her biographical introduction to the posthumous
volume, The Great Fight:
It was during my convalescence that Le Vieux Temps was written, and its
first public reading was at a dinner of the Shakespeare Club of Montreal, of
which the doctor had once been a member. On this occasion, being asked to
reply to one of the toasts, he would have refused the invitation, declaring that
speech-making was not in his line; but finally a compromise was effected by
his diffident suggestion that perhaps he might read the new poem instead of
making a speech. When the night of the dinner arrived he was with difficulty
prevented from running off somewhere on the plea of professional duty.
However, he went, and was bewildered by his own success. 'It's the strangest
thing in the world,' he said, 'but do you know they simply went wild over that
poem! ' This was the beginning of a long series of triumphs of a like nature,
triumphs which owed little to elocutionary art, much to the natural gift of a
voice rare alike in strength, quality, and variety of tone, but most of all to the
fact that the characters he delineated were not mere creations of a vivid
imagination. They were portraits, tenderly drawn by the master hand of a
true artist, and one who knew and loved the originals.
It is a healthy sign that poetry should, occasionally, revert to
the primitive conditions from which it originated, and assume its
original public function as a binding social force.
How Drummond's circumstances gave him access to his material
may briefly be told. Born at Currawn, county Leitrim, Ireland, in
1854, he came to Canada with his parents at the age of eleven.
Soon afterwards, his father died, leaving his widow with very
narrow means. The boy studied telegraphy, and, in 1869, received
an appointment in the little village of Bord-à-Plouffe on the
beautiful Rivière des Prairies :
'Here it was,' to quote from Mrs Drummond's account, that he first came
in contact with the habitant and voyageur, and listened to their quaint tales of
backwoods life; here that he heard from Gédéon Plouffe the tragedy retold
as The Wreck of the Julie Plante, a poem of which he himself thought little,
and never cared to recite, but which had made its way through the length and
breadth of the American continent before ever his first book of poems was
published. It was the old lumberman's reiteration of the words,“ An'de win'
she blow, blow, blow! ” which rang so persistently in his ears that, at the dead
of night, unable to stand any longer the haunting refrain, he sprang from his
bed and penned the poem, which was to be the herald of his future fame. '
By the year 1876, when he was twenty-two, Drummond had
saved enough money to resume his interrupted education. From
the high school in Montreal, he passed to McGill university,
and, later, studied medicine at Bishop's college, Montreal, whence
he graduated in 1884. After a few years of country practice,
which familiarised him with the types represented in his Canadian
Country Doctor and Ole Doctor Fiset, he returned, in 1888, to
Montreal, continued his practice and, subsequently, lectured
on medical jurisprudence at Bishop's college.
23-2


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In 1905, Drummond became interested in some silver pro-
perties at Cobalt, which he and his brother successfully developed.
The possibilities of wealth did not dismay him. What he craved
was, in his own words, 'enough money to own a strip of salmon
water, and the best Irish terrier going, and to be able to help a
friend in need. ' Smallpox broke out in his camp in 1907. He
hurried there to cope with the disease, and, shortly after his
arrival, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Drummond's sympathy
with the habitant and his passion for wild life had been dominant
with him to the end. He perpetually refreshed himself in the
springs from which his poetry flowed.
Four volumes of verse stand to Drummond's credit: The
Habitant, Johnnie Courteau, The Voyageur and the posthu-
,
mously published The Great Fight. Another small book, Philo-
rum's Canoe, consists of two poems which reappear in Johnnie
Courteau,
Drummond's work is not characterised by the polished per-
fection of individual lines or stanzas. It is impossible, therefore,
to convey an adequate idea of his poetry by brief and dis-
connected quotation ; let this be said in no disparagement of the
result. It is honest, homely poetry, and Drummond broke new
ground.
The humours and the forgivable, even, as Drummond tells
them, the lovable, weaknesses of the habitant are traversed in
these poems. He sings his clumsily efficient courting, his worthy
pride in his abounding family of strapping sons and marriageable
girls, his love of the old homestead by the river, his anxiety to
return to it from his enforced wanderings and his reluctance to
leave it when his increased fortunes give him the dazzling prospect
of a 'tousand dollar' house. No poet ever derived his inspiration
from simpler themes, and the reader shares his enjoyment of the
good man's sublime self-content, his boastfulness, his love of a
horse-race and a dollar bet, his parochial outlook on politics and
the great world and his pardonable conviction that his own life,
his own wife and family, his own village and village curé, his
fields, his river and his weather are the best gifts that le bon
Dieu dispenses. That in all this there is never a hint of unkindly
caricature, the prefatory words of Louis Fréchette are sufficient
proof:
Dans son étude des Canadiens-français, M. Drummond a trouvé le moyen
d'éviter un écueil qui aurait semblé inévitable pour tout autre que pour lui.
Il est resté vrai, sans tomber dans la vulgarité, et piquant sans verser dans le


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XI]
Lesser Poets
357
grotesque. . . que le récit soit plaisant ou pathétique, jamais la note ne sonne
faux, jamais la bizarrerie ne dégenère en puérilité burlesque.
The following poets deserve a note in any account of Canadian
literature.
Joseph Howe was distinguished in the political life of his
province of Nova Scotia. His poetry is rhetorical, and his literary
qualities are best exhibited in his eloquent prose. Evan MacColl
came to Canada in 1850. His best work is said to be in Gaelic.
Poems and Songs, which appeared in 1883, has not much merit.
Charles Heavysege showed, amidst much crudeness, occasional
flashes of power. He came to Montreal from England in 1853.
His reputation rests upon his sonnets and his dramatic poem
Saul, which was described by a North British reviewer as 'one of
the most remarkable poems ever written out of Great Britain. '
Alexander McLachlan came from Scotland in 1840. He aspired
to be the Burns of Canada. Charles Sangster, unlike the three
last-named writers, was born in Canada. Before the advent of the
younger generation, he was the representative poet of his native
land; but his work is markedly inferior to that of his successors.
What strength he possesses is exhibited to best advantage in his de-
scriptive verse, and this is of not more than average merit. Thomas
D'Arcy McGee was a man of brilliant talents, which overflowed by
mere exuberance into literature. A member of the Young
Ireland' group, he wrote in the feverish style that characterised
those fervid patriots. McGee, after an adventurous youth, settled
in Canada in 1857, and almost immediately became prominent in
the political life of his adopted country. He was assassinated in
Ottawa in April 1868. Sir James Edgar, whose chief activity, as
in the case of Howe and McGee, was centred in politics, shared
with them, also, a taste and talent for poetry. George Frederick
Cameron died before he had reached the full measure of his
powers. His early death, like that of T. B. Phillips Stewart and
of Arthur Weir, must be considered a distinct loss to Canadian
poetry. The more recent death of the Indian poetess, Pauline
Johnson, is, also, to be reckoned among our losses, though she had
lived long enough to show her capabilities. She had a genuine
lyric gift within a limited range. The verses called A Prodigal
have a note of true passion :
My heart forgot its God for love of you,
And you forgot me, other loves to learn;
Now through a wilderness of thorn and rue
į
Back to my God I turn.


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And just because my God forgets the past,
And in forgetting does not ask to know
Why I once left His arms for yours, at last
Back to my God I go.
A very enjoyable part of Canadian literature connects itself
with accounts of expeditions into distant regions of an un-
explored continent. A number of the best records of adventurous
journeys are written in French, of which many have been trans-
lated. The earliest of these explorers' volumes produced by an
Englishman was by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a high official in
the North-West company, who made trips through to the Arctic
and the Pacific, and, in 1801, published his Voyages from Montreal
through the Continent of North America. It makes fascinating
reading. George Heriot, the historian, wrote, in 1807, a curious
pioneer volume Travels through the Canadas which is much
more entertaining than his serious History of Canada. Alexander
Henry was an American by birth who spent many years as a fur-
trader in central Canada, and ended his days as a merchant in
Montreal. His book Travels and Adventures in Canada and the
Indian Territories was published in New York, in 1809, and
was edited as recently as 1901 by James Bain of Toronto. Anna
Brownell Jameson, who wrote on Shakespeare's women, spent a
part of 1836—7 in and near Toronto, and, in the following year,
published in three volumes Winter Studies and Summer Rambles
in Canada. Of a similar type were two books written by Susanna
Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush ; or Life in Canada (1852),
and Life in the Clearing versus the Bush (1853). These books
describe the conditions of life in the early settlements more
faithfully and, withal, more humorously than any other writer
has described them.
History is more successfully organised in Canada at the present
time than any other branch of literature. Our archives are being
systematically explored, and societies exist for the purpose of
editing old, and publishing new, material of a historical nature.
Our earliest historians, Heriot, Smith and Christie were of the
laboriously dull type that history frequently breeds. John Charles
Dent, an Englishman by birth, was much more entertaining ; but
his partisanship impairs the value of his work. This consists
of two readable histories, The Last Forty Years and The
Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion. The most complete and
painstaking of our histories, dull without being scientific, but
quite praiseworthy, is William Kingsford's History of Canada,
1


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XI]
History and Fiction
359
which covers the period from the discovery of Canada to the
union of 1841. Ten volumes stand to Kingsford's credit, and he
began to write history at the age of sixty-five. Haliburton's
Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1829) is still
useful. Two other works by him-The Bubbles of Canada (1837)
and Rule and Misrule of the English in America (1851)
have a historical tinge.
The war of 1812 has been variously recorded. David Thompson
was imprisoned for debt as a result of his historic venture on
this theme. Major John Richardson's War of 1812, in its re-
edited form (1902), presents much valuable material. James
Hannay produced a History of Acadia and a War of 1812.
Lady Edgar, in her Ten Years of Peace and War in Upper
Canada, presents a most interesting account of the time, based
largely on the correspondence of the Ridout family to which she
belonged. Her Life of Brock in the Makers of Canada series is
clearly and entertainingly written. Lady Edgar also wrote a
history of Maryland in the eighteenth century under the title
A Colonial Governor in Maryland.
Sir John George Bourinot is the author of a popular history
called The Story of Canada. He was a diligent and useful writer
upon Canadian affairs, and his position as clerk of the Canadian
house of commons gave him peculiar opportunities for the study
of constitutional problems. The leading Canadian writer, however,
on constitutional procedure was Alpheus Todd, whose works will be
found in the bibliography. Two men, Joseph Howe and George
Morris Grant, exercised by their voice and pen a powerful in-
fluence on the political thought of Canada. Their literary output
was slender and does not give the full measure of their ability
or influence.
There are some novels that have honestly died, and some that
have never lived. Canada's fiction may, with few exceptions, be
classed in one or other of these categories. The Bibliography
of Canadian Fiction gives the titles of nearly one hundred and
fifty novels written by authors deceased.
Mrs Brook has the distinction of producing, in 1769, the first
novel, Emily Montague, which essayed a description of Canadian
conditions at that interesting and remote time. Canadian fiction
proper is supposed to date from the year 1832, when John
Richardson published Wacousta. It is a curious book. To
a certain point midway in the narrative, it holds the reader's


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[CH. XI
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attention, and then breaks down into a series of wildly impossible
situations without one redeeming human touch to save them from
utter absurdity. The Canadian Brothers is a still weaker effort.
Mrs Leprohon was a constant contributor in prose and verse to
The Literary Garland, a periodical of some repute in the middle
of the last century. Her novels are gracefully written, with some
idea of construction, and no little discernment of character and
motive. Antoinette de Mirecourt is the best of her eight books.
Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie were sisters who
diligently devoted themselves to writing. Mrs Traill, whose chief
distinction was gained in natural history, wrote also several novels,
of which Lost in the Backwoods, published in London in 1852,
under the title The Canadian Crusoes, is the best. Her sister
Mrs Moodie has been referred to for her interesting descriptions
of pioneer life. James de Mille was prolific and popular in his
day. His novels were extravagantly romantic.
William Kirby wrote the best Canadian novel, Le Chien d'Or,
or The Golden Dog, published in 1877. It is an ambitious book,
cast in a large historic mould. The scene is laid in the middle of
the eighteenth century, and the actors of the drama are the nota-
bilities of Quebec, with such subsidiary characters as are necessary
to drive the plot along. Signs of an unpractised hand abound in
the book, but its merits are very considerable.
William McLennan wrote two novels, a book of short stories and
a useful volume of verse, Songs of Old Canada, translated from
the French. Spanish John, his only independent novel, possesses
much literary merit which, until recent years, has not been a
conspicuous virtue among Canadian writers. The Span o' Life,
written in collaboration, is a stirring tale of the days of prince
Charlie. McLennan's collection of short stories In Old France and
New is described in its title. His habitant tales are an interest-
ing prose counterpart of the work of Drummond.


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CHAPTER XII
THE LITERATURE OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND
THE British settlement in Australia began only in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century; and, in the intervening years,
an increasing but still small population has been chiefly engaged
in agriculture and commerce. The class of settler needed for the
development of the country was not one, who, as in the settlement
of the American colonies, could carry with him to a new land the
traditions and civilisation of the old. The labour of laying the
material bases of prosperity was, for long, too severe to leave
time for intellectual cultivation; and the country has enjoyed
but little of the leisure which is favourable to the practice of
literature. Nevertheless, both the quantity and quality of English
literature produced in Australia give evidence of the vigour which
is characteristic of the Australian. If Australian life and thought
has no background of inherited romance and legend, it has its own
tales of heroism, its own strong colour and other incentives to
literary expression. Nature, here magnificently beautiful and
there desolate and terrible; the exploration of vast deserts; the
conflict with drought and storm; the turbulent period of the
gold-diggings; the free life in sparsely populated country; the
prevalence of horses; the neighbourhood of the sea and, in recent
years, the passionate assertion of democratic liberty-all these
have furnished material for literature, and, especially, for poetry,
with distinctive characteristics. Australian poetry shows a pre-
valence of swinging metres, which suggest the movement of horses,
or the roll of great waves. It consists largely of narrative and
character-sketch. Much of it is genially humorous; together with
a warm appreciation of heroism and devotion, it shows a delight
in the odd types of character (and rascality) fostered by the con-
ditions of life in a young country. Where it is serious, it frequently
expresses a gloomy view of life, induced, perhaps, by the hardships
and the uncertainty that attended the days of settlers, explorers
and gold-diggers.
The earliest Australian poetry was rather an inheritance from
Great Britain than a native growth. In 1819, Charles Lamb's


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362
[CH.
Australia and New Zealand
friend, Barron Field, who, in 1816, became judge of the supreme
court of New South Wales, and remained in Australia till 1824,
published in Sydney, for private circulation, First Fruits of
Australian Poetry. In 1823, a born Australian, William Charles
Wentworth, wrote in competition for the chancellor's medal at the
university of Cambridge a poem entitled Australasia, which was
printed in London and shortly afterwards appeared in the first
Australian newspaper, The Sydney Gazette. In 1826, another
Australian, Charles Tompson, junior, published in Sydney bis
poems, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel. The
names of Australian fauna and flora and references to the aboriginal
races are found creeping further into English verse in the poems
of John Dunmore Lang, a presbyterian divine, who arrived in
New South Wales in 1823 and took a prominent part in Australian
politics. His Aurora Australis, published in Sydney in 1826, is
Australian at least in so far as it applies inherited modes of
expression to the beauties and characteristics of his adopted
country. Lang was not afraid to write : :
At length an occupant was given
To traverse each untrodden wild,
The rudest mortal under Heaven,
Stern Nature's long-forgotten child !
Compatriot of the tall emu,
The wombat and the kangaroo!
The decade 1840–1850, preceding the rush to the gold-diggings,
was an important period in the history of Australian poetry. The
development of New South Wales brought about an increase in
the number of newspapers, and the newspapers gave opportunities
for the publication of verse. Encouragement came, also, from
Sir Henry Parkes, who, having emigrated to Australia in 1839 at
the age of twenty-four, was enabled by his eminent position in the
political life of New South Wales to foster the production of poetry.
Parkes was, himself, a poet of some merit. Of the five volumes
of verse which he published in Sydney, the earliest was issued
in 1842; the best is probably the second, Murmurs of the Stream,
which came out in 1857; but poetry was to him the recreation
of a busy life, and his power of lyrical expression was not culti-
vated as it deserved. Other poets of the period were Daniel
Henry Deniehy, a graceful singer; Richard P. L. Rowe, a journalist
whose miscellaneous writings under the pseudonym 'Peter
Possum' were very popular with Australian readers, and whose
best poems show a subtle imagination and a delicate ear; Henry
Halloran, a fluent and straightforward versifier, and J. Sheridan


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X11]
Charles Harpur
363
Moore, who sang in easy style of Australian scenes. The same
decade, moreover, saw the publication of his first volume of poetry
by one whose work deserves more particular attention.
Charles Harpur may be considered the first distinctively
Australian poet. He was a student of Wordsworth and of Shelley,
and more than one of his lyric poems (for instance, that entitled
Words) suggest that he had read the lyric poems of Blake. In
this first volume, Thoughts : a Series of Sonnets, published in
Sydney in 1845, there is little that might not have been written
by one who had never seen Australia. The sonnets are well
performed exercises in poetry, not devoid of the commonplaces of
poetical diction, and, in spite of some fervour and fine imagination,
seldom rising above a moderate level of merit. As time went on,
Harpur, who was Australian born and spent much of his life in the
bush, came to trust more, for subject and for inspiration, to what
he himself felt and saw in his own life and surroundings. He was
the first Australian poet to give a worthy imaginative representa-
tion of Australian scenery and nature. The largeness of his vision
and the simplicity of his emotion suggest life in an undeveloped
and sparsely populated country; and, while he practised many
forms of lyrical poetry, he found his most suitable medium in
blank verse narrative and description. The Creek of the Four
Graves is the poem on which his fame is most firmly established,
and it is essentially Australian. His play, The Bushrangers,
published in 1853, is not a good play; but the volume in which
it appeared and the volume called The Power of the Dream,
published in 1865, contain some thoughtful and learned verse.
The rush for gold, which began just after the middle of the last
century, brought to Australia a great quantity of new life and
enterprise, which attracted thither a few men of intellectual
attainments. Among these was Richard Henry Horne (who, while
in Australia changed his second name to Hengist), the author
of Orion”, whose poetical works bear some traces of his seventeen
years' residence in Australia. Horne's chief influence on Australian
poetry, however, lay in the advice and encouragement which he
gave to younger poets. The same is true of James Lionel Michael,
who, soon after his arrival in Sydney, gave up the idea of gold-
digging and began to practise his own profession of solicitor.
Michael, a friend of John Everett Millais and a supporter of the
pre-Raphaelite movement in English painting, was a man of fine
intellect, and himself a ready and musical poet. His long narrative
and partly autobiographical poem John Cumberland, which was
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap. v.


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364 Australia and New Zealand [CH.
published in Sydney in 1860, flows easily along in varied metres,
and, though an eccentric jumble of matter and manner, has
qualities of grace and refinement; but poetry, and Australian
poetry in particular, is less indebted to him for his own writings
than for his fostering care of one of the two greatest Australian
poets, Henry Clarence Kendall.
Kendall, born in Australia of English and Irish descent, was
employed by Michael in boyhood as clerk and amanuensis, and
to Michael is due the credit of having early discerned the boy's
poetical promise. His poems were sent to Parkes, who published
them in The Empire. Kendall was twenty-one years old when
he published in Sydney, in 1862, his first volume, Poems and
Songs. The book contained a good deal that was immature, and
Kendall later tried to suppress it. But the promise in it is
unmistakable; and so, in certain instances, is the achievement
One of the poems told in impressive fashion the story of the
explorers Burke and Wills, who had recently perished. In spite
of the opportunities granted by the newspapers, however, Australia
was not in those days a good field for poetry. Mistrusting their
own judgment, the Australian critics and reading public were
inclined to condemn any literature that had not won the approval
of the mother-country. Kendall, whose faith in his own powers
was not yet shaken by his inherited weakness of character and his
consequent unhappiness, boldly sent specimens of his work to
The Athenaeum, which, on 27 September 1862, printed some of
them with favourable comments, and on several later occasions
gave space and praise to Kendall's work. This was the first
recognition of Australian poetry by an English critical journal,
and Kendall was greatly encouraged. He continued contributing
poems to the newspapers and, seven years later, collected them,
with a few from his Poems and Songs, in a volume entitled
Leaves from an Australian Forest. Here he shows himself a
true poet, and a truly Australian poet. Though he had spent
some years in city life, which he disliked, his heart was always in
the country; and he stands in his generation for the poet of the
quieter side of Australian country life, and of the beauty of
Australian forests, streams and mountains. His third notable
volume was Songs from the Mountains, published in 1880. The
intervening years had been clouded. In the later poems there
are many touches of regret and remorse: on the other hand,
some of the poetry of Kendall's last years reaches a strength and
dignity unknown in his earlier work.
The best of his poetry is to be found in the three volumes


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XII]
Adam Lindsay Gordon
365
mentioned, for his efforts in satire and comic writing are negligible.
Kendall was not a keen student of the great English poets of the
past. His fancy was all for the writers of the nineteenth century;
and some of his poetical weakness may be due to ignorance of the
greatest models. At times, he seems to be merely an imitator,
now of Poe, now of Longfellow, now of Moore. He is not strong
in narrative, nor profound in perception of character. But there
is grandeur in such poems as his blank verse address to a
Mountain, and a fine lyrical quality in his poems of nature and
of domestic joy or grief. A gentle, sensitive dreamer, he shows
poetry at home in Australia, drawing beauty and sweetness from
the poet's surroundings, without defiant or subservient glances at
other lands.
Contemporary with Kendall, though some eight years older,
was the most famous of all Australian poets, Adam Lindsay
Gordon. Like Horne and Michael, Gordon, who arrived in
Adelaide in 1853 at the age of twenty, brought to Australia a
classical education and the traditions of a cultivated home.
Through most of his varied, difficult and unhappy life, he was an
eager reader of the great poets, from Homer to Swinburne. His
poetry, however, was a more direct and personal expression of
its author's own thoughts and feelings even than that of Kendall;
and his thoughts and feelings were, far more than Kendall's, those
of the majority of the Australians of his time.
The influence of old ballads, of Macaulay, of Browning, of
Swinburne and others is patent in Gordon's metres and diction;
it could scarcely be otherwise in the case of a poet with whom to
read once attentively was to know by heart. But his poetry
remains so personal in manner, and springs so directly out of his
own mind and experience, that Kendall's poetry seems by com-
parison the fruit of culture. Opinion is divided as to whether
Gordon is a distinctively Australian poet. One good Australian
authority says : 'Beyond dispute Gordon is the national poet of
Australia? '; another says : 'Gordon's work cannot be considered
as peculiarly Australian in character? ' Unless the two state-
ments are compatible, the popularity of Gordon's poetry in
Australia, and the number of quotations from his work which
are current in Australian speech would seem to imply that the
former expresses the truth. As mounted trooper, as horse-breaker,
as steeple-chase rider, as livery-stable keeper, Gordon spent most
1 Humphris, E. and Sladen, D. , Adam Lindsay Gordon, p. 254.
Stevens, B. , The Golden Treasury of Australian Verse, p. XXV.
2


## p. 366 (#396) ############################################

366
[CH.
Australia and New Zealand
of his Australian life among horses. He composed many of his
poems while on horseback in the bush, and the rhythm of horse-
hoofs seems to beat in most of his metres. Not letters but horses
were his trade; and he sings not the dreams of a remote spirit,
but the joys and sorrows, the hope and despair, the energy and
the weariness of the man of action, concerned in the common life
of his place and period. To English readers Adam Lindsay
Gordon's poetry seems the very voice of Australia.
The reason of this is not any great prevalence of local colour
in his writings. Most of his narrative and descriptive poems,
such as The Sick Stockrider and Wolf and Hound, were written
in the last year of his life, when his fame was achieved in Australia
and rapidly growing in England. Apparently, his short sight
prevented him from seeing many of the details of nature which
give particularity to the descriptions of Kendall and other
Australian poets. He was the poet of Australia because he was
the poet of the sportsman and the adventurer. The youth whose
wildness had unfitted him for English life found in the new country
the proper field for his daring and high spirit. Partly owing to
his own recklessness and extravagance and partly to a hereditary
taint of melancholy, his life was unhappy, and he ended it by his
own hand; but, in the saddle and out of it, he was adventurous,
brave, 'a thorough sportsman. ' His poetry is the voice of men
who lead adventurous lives, who fight gallantly against long odds,
and take defeat almost as a matter of course. It is melancholy in
so far as it despairs of success or reward; but it is joyous in its
love of the fight for its own sake.
Gordon was a poet from his youth. On leaving England, in
1853, he wrote a poem of farewell to home which already showed
his characteristic pride and defiance. Some years, however, were
to pass before he published anything of importance. In 1865, he
contributed to Bell's Life in Victoria what purported to be
merely one of the riming tips for horse-races that were not
infrequent in that journal, but was, in fact, a fine poem, in which
his passion for horses, for the sea and for life alike found ex-
pression. More of these racing poems followed; contemporary
racing in Australia and memories of hunting and steeple-chasing
in his youth at home supplied him with subjects during the
remaining five years of his life. With the possible exception of
Whyte Melville, whom he greatly admired and to whom he
dedicated, in a beautiful poem, his volume Bush Ballads, Gordon
is the only poet who has used sport as the medium for the


## p. 367 (#397) ############################################

XII] Adam Lindsay Gordon 367
expression of his views on life. All his gallant, despairing
philosophy finds voice in these poems; and, where other poets
have turned to tales of ancient heroism at sea or on the battle-
field, Gordon turned to a race-meeting. On these sporting poems,
rather than on his reflective poems or his dramatic narratives,
Gordon's popularity rests, not only in Australia but among
English readers in all countries. And that popularity is deserved.
The best of them have not only an irresistible fire and pace:
Gordon, seeing sport as the best thing in life, could give dignity
to its treatment, while his knowledge of poetry and his natural
gifts made him a secure, if not an original, metrist.
Poems in Bell's Life in Victoria and in The Australasian
came frequently from his pen; and, in 1867, he collected some of
them into a volume, Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. The same year
saw the issue of a long poem, Ashtaroth, partly founded on
Goethe's Faust, which contains much that is characteristic of
Gordon with very little that was of his best. In 1868, Marcus
Clarke persuaded him to contribute poems to The Colonial
Monthly, and he began with the mournful poem Doubtful
Dreams. In 1869, full of trouble, he found refuge for a time
at a friend's house, where he wrote his best dramatic lyrics,
The Sick Stockrider, The Ride from the Wreck, Wolf and Hound
and his most famous racing poem, How we beat the Favourite.
In 1870, he published his volume Bush Ballads and Galloping
Rhymes and, a few months later, died by his own hand.
Gordon occasionally handled old themes, and some of his ballads
are stirring. Among his autobiographical poems, Whisperinge
in Wattle-Boughs, in which he looks back to his wild youth, is
full of music and pathos. Many of his reflective poems finely
express his ardent joy in activity and effort and his profound
melancholy, although in these his metrical debt to Swinburne
or another is more insistently noticeable than in his narratives
or poems of sport. If Gordon is not a poet of the first rank,
he is one in whom both the learned and the unlearned can take
pleasure. His spirit of daring, of joy in the fight for the fight's
sake, would appear to be alive yet in Australia; and there is much
of Gordon, though there is no imitation of Gordon, in the frank
feeling and defiant gladness of the recently published Book of
Anzac, over which the Australasian soldiers in Gallipoli have made
English readers laugh and weep.
To the same period as Gordon's poetry belong the comparatively
few poetical works of Marcus Clarke, journalist, dramatist and


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368
[CH.
Australia and New Zealand
novelist, who wrote some pretty lyrics and clever parodies, and
the earlier work of two poets of considerable merit, Thomas
Bracken and Arthur Patchett Martin. Martin's lyrical poems are
thoughtful and musical, tinged with the sadness of one who, in his
youth, had high faith in freedom, but lost it as time went on.
Bracken was a facile and rather sentimental poet, whose lyrics
have more sweetness than strength. One of them, Not Understood,
is widely known. Bracken was by birth a New Zealander, and not
a few of his poems are based on Maori legends or history. The
poet of the Maoris, however, is Alfred Domett, the friend of
Robert Browning, who went to New Zealand in 1842 and lived
there for nearly thirty years. Before leaving England, Domett
had published poems, among them a long lyric on Venice (1839).
His longest work, Ranolf and Amohia, he put forth after his
return home in 1872. In a great variety of lyrical metres it
describes the scenery of New Zealand and narrates a story of
Maori life. Had these been Domett's only objects in writing the
poem, he would probably have left a better memorial of his
undeniable poetic gift. His descriptions of the romantic scenery
of the islands and the mythology and customs of the Maoris are
often very beautiful and interesting. In the prefatory poem he
says:
Well, but what if there gleamed in an Age cold as this,
The divinest of Poets' ideals of bliss ?
Yea, an Eden could lurk in this Empire of ours,
With the loneliest love in the loveliest bowers.
The answer he gives is convincing: but he had a further object
which interfered with the success of his work. He wanted to talk
about theism and positivism; and, though his philosophising is
very interesting in itself, his disquisitions break the flow of his
poem. Domett's last volume, Flotsam and Jetsam, published in
1877, contains many beautiful descriptions of places which he had
visited in his European travels, and some glowing expressions of
his opinions and hopes.
To the period of Kendall and Gordon belongs also the earlier
work of the Queensland poet, James Brunton Stephens, a Scot
who went to Australia in 1866. The popularity of Stephens rests
chiefly on his humorous poems, such as To a Black Gin and
Universally Respected; and these vigorous and hearty sketches
make him the Bret Harte of Australia. They do not, however,
show his talent at its best. Stephens is a poet of great strength
and fine imagination. His first poem, Convict Once, is a tale of


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X11]
Fiction
369
remarkable power and gloom; and among his lyrics are several
which, for their music and their passion, are much to be prized.
Technically, Stephens is noteworthy for his strong handling of
dactylic metres. Another good Queensland poet, George Essex
Evans, belongs to a later date, since his first volume was not
published till 1891. Evans shared Stephens's lofty belief in the
destinies of Australia. His Australian Symphony and his
patriotic poems are full of passion for his country and of a more
manful and ambitious love of it than Kendall or any other
Australian poet had expressed. His long narrative poem, The
Repentance of Magdalene Despar, is strong and tragic, and in his
lyric poems he shows a command of original metres and cadences
and a choice fancy.
In the decade 1880—90, there began a new era in Australian
poetry, possibly due, in some measure, to the new pride and
confidence which was the natural result of the increased interest
in Australia after the International Exhibition at Melbourne in
1880—1 and the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in
1886. At any rate, it is the poetry of a civilised country, with
leisured and cultivated inhabitants. The poems of Philip Joseph
Holdsworth, of Francis Adams, of James Lister Cuthbertson, of
Robert Richardson, of William Gay, of Grace Jennings Carmichael,
of Barcroft Henry Boake and of Victor James Daley show poetry
firmly established in Australia, well received by a public that can
judge for itself, and flowering with a peculiar vigour. It is the
poetry of refined and cultivated minds; but it is free from wilful
strangeness and from any native or imported taints of morbidity.
Meanwhile, John Farrell had set the vogue for racy, free-and-easy
poetry of common life, which his successors are practising with
greater skill and verisimilitude than himself. In origin it doubt-
less owes something to Bret Harte: but it is enriching the English
language with vigorous colloquial expressions, and providing
readers with excitement and amusement.
The best literary genius of Australia turns to poetry; but good
work has been done in fiction. Henry Kingsley's Geoffrey Hamlyn,
though a story of Australia, founded on the author's experiences
during his brief stay in the colony, can scarcely be considered
a novel of Australian origin; and William Howitt's A Boy's
Adventures in the Wilds of Australia stands in the same
category. Perhaps the earliest properly Australian novels were
Clara Morison and others by Catherine Helen Spence, who was
better known as a political writer; and Charles Rowcroft's colonial
24
E. L. XIV.
CH. XII.


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370 Australia and New Zealand [CH.
6
stories showed that Australian fiction was struggling into
being. With the fiction of Marcus Clarke a further stage is
reached. His novel Heavy Odds is now negligible; but his
chief work, His Natural Life, is not only a vivid and carefully
substantiated tale of a penal settlement, but a powerful work
of fiction.