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Title: Unexplored Fields of Canadian Literature
Author: Pierce, Lorne Albert (1890-1961)
Date of first publication: 1932
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1932
Date first posted: 2 February 2012
Date last updated: 2 February 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #911

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






UNEXPLORED FIELDS

OF CANADIAN

LITERATURE


BY

LORNE PIERCE




THE RYERSON PRESS

TORONTO - CANADA




COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1932, BY

THE RYERSON PRESS, TORONTO




  _Fate cannot harm me: I have had my say._
                                  --SIR SIDNEY SMITH.


The author of _Tom Jones_, in the Introduction to Book XIV, offers a
sprightly "essay to prove, that an author will write the better for
having some knowledge of the subject on which he writes."  That truth,
I believe, has never successfully been challenged.  Most editors bemoan
the fact that so much of the stuff submitted to them is innocent of any
skill in the craft of writing, or of an exact knowledge of the subject
chosen.  Not only do many writers fail to study the markets for their
wares, thereby inviting delay and disappointment, but they also neglect
to acquaint themselves in regard to the needs of the time and place.

This essay grew out of a request from the Toronto Branch of the
Canadian Authors' Association to provide some sort of dependable road
map for our young writers.  The title was the inspiration of the
executive.  My first impulse, based upon a rather lengthy experience as
editor of a publishing house, was to exclaim: "What have our writers
not explored!"  However, certain emotions, some of them colourful
enough, recollected in tranquillity, became suitable firstlies and
secondlies, and gave promise of a sort of a conclusion.  These are now
set down as the result of "an insistent demand."

I hesitate to associate my friend Pelham Edgar with anything so
trivial.  Indefatigable explorer, wise counsellor and true friend, he
deserves finer homage; yet, such as it is, I gladly offer this.

L.P.




Unexplored Fields of Canadian Literature




I

THE FIELD OF LITERARY CRITICISM

  _Pray tell me, on what particular ground
  A Poet should claim admiration?_
                                  --ARISTOPHANES (_Frogs_).


William Allen White burst upon the world, in 1896, asking: "What's the
matter with Kansas?"  Kansas, I take it, had something the matter with
it, but whether it was in need of a simple consultation or an autopsy
does not seem clear.  I have very great respect for the critics, those
scintillant beings who "from Heaven derive their light--these born to
judge."  They consult the Oracle of the Bottle in the Land of Lanterns,
not the Oracle of the Bottle in the Land of Lanterns that Rabelais
borrowed from Lucian, but one lowered directly from Heaven, unique and
immediate.  The resultant clairvoyancy is quite appalling.  Petronius,
that immortal wanton, amused himself by convincing his own soul that
the world was as bad as he.  Not so the modern critic; he holds a
spotless, and more or less level, mirror to the temper of poetry and
romance, hurling back stupidity, vanity and ineptitude into its
rightful face.

The most stubborn critic, however, is the public, the folk who buy
books, who know when they have had enough.  The hardy obstinacy of this
critic mocks that strange tribe, void of humour, who rent neat little
offices in skyscrapers, and go down every morning to wrestle with the
Oracle.  It is this critic, not the reviewer, who confers immortality
upon Dickens, Trollope and the rest, and, for weirdly uncritical
reasons, consigns countless incompetent scribblers to the endless
procession bound for oblivion headed by Anne Radcliff and Harold Bell
Wright.

Old writers, we are told, were free to "nap and amble and yawn and
look."  A good many of them, it happens, did it rather well.  New
writers find themselves in a less leisurely age; they must be tireless
in perfecting their craft.  Yet there is a perfection above all others,
and that is ripeness.

Canadian writers seem to be singularly impatient of discipline--the
long way home of relentless self-criticism.  The fundamental substance
of literature has changed scarcely at all since Homer; but styles
change, which is to say, aims and methods vary from age to age
according to altered tastes and needs.  A little meditation, one would
think, should disclose the fact that one's work has not grown out of
life, and that its cadences, contours and colours fall far short of
those of the master craftsmen.  But it is this meditation and
self-examination to which we are so frequently averse.

In a sense all writing is creative, all purposive writing at least.
Any enterprise is creative which entails struggling with the barriers
of art and overcoming.  Superficially it means the winnowing of words,
the wrestling with material; success or failure here is the difference
between the artist and the botch.  The main thing, however, and the
only excuse for writing, is to share one's vision with the world, to
reveal the essential character of a thing.  Robert Frost, you remember,
saw the essence of art in an axe-helve:

  He showed me that the lines of a good helve
  Were native to the grain before the knife
  Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
      put on it from without.

Walter Pater, no doubt, never carved an axe-handle, but he had the root
of the matter in him nevertheless.  He speaks wisely of that
"architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the
beginning, and never loses sight of it."  He goes on to point out, that
failure to do this results in an unconvincing, expressionless,
"round-hand" quality of art.

This all sounds very trite and commonplace.  Writers should know the
simple elements of their craft.  There are many good books from which
one may gain an insight into the various skills considered necessary.
_The Making of Literature, The Writer's Art, Tradition and Experiment,
The Discovery of Poetry, An Introduction to the Study of Literature_,
these are a few of the non-technical titles which come readily to mind.
Yet thousands of manuscripts come to the desk of every editor which are
innocent of any kind of skill.

I am urging just now that Canadian writers pay greater heed to the
simple elementals, that they turn historians and critics of their
craft, in order that they may discover the great traditions governing
their chosen field, and, if so may be, wade resolutely out of the
morass of ineptitude.  "'Can you do simple addition?' the White Queen
asked.  'What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and
one and one and one?'"  It is not as simple as that, yet a writer must
submit to the drudgery with as much diligence as the painter and
sculptor, or else, in spite of commendable candour and an equally
laudable urge to express his reactions to life, find no justification
for wasting other people's time.

Dr. Johnson has assured us that the purpose of a writer is to be read.
If he is a scientist he will do his best to prove his hypothesis.  The
orator's business is to persuade.  The writer will endeavour, perhaps,
to be truthful and persuasive, but above all he is an artist.  People
buy his books not because of his thesis, and certainly not for his
rhetoric, but simply because his aim is to show "Life _looks_ like
that!"  By means of many devices, the impeccable word, lights and
shades as well as the colours, balance and proportion as well as the
rhythm, the architecture of the conception as well as the shining
metaphor, the senses yield to the bewitchment, the illusion becomes
complete, memorable and satisfying.

I am anxious that our writers should preserve good traditions, but I am
even more concerned that they should establish worthy traditions in
their turn.  Wordsworth told Coleridge to be careful of rant, and I
fear this expostulation may sound terribly like something of that sort.
Since, however, this business of criticism is the basis of all that I
have to say, I must run the risk.  Geniuses will defy rules and ignore
hoary tradition; with these celestial beings we have nothing to do.
Others will cast off restraint, and dedicate their talents to
experiment, only to find that they lack the skill to direct their
energies toward an architectural end--a comprehended ideal.  Charles
Lamb shrank from such dismal studies as the genesis of masterpieces.
He always regretted having seen the manuscript of "Lycidas" corrected
and interlined.  I admit that I rather enjoy the vision of Keats
fumbling over the first line of "Endymion" and, above all, striking out
a line here and adding a line there to his "Ode to the Nightingale."
If the critic should be conscious of himself as an artist, there is the
same necessity for an artist to be conscious of himself as a critic.
"He should be aware of the responsibilities imposed by his art; he
should respect the technique of his craft."  (_J. Middleton Murry._)

  O the little more, and how much it is;
  And the little less, and what worlds away.
                                  --ROBERT BROWNING.




II

THE FIELD OF BIOGRAPHY

  _Not being able to give her the finer gift
  of the spirit, he loaded her with jewels._
                                  --ELLEN GLASGOW.


Portraits of great Canadians are too few, and most of them are
incompetent.  We have made our bow to conventionalized portraiture, yet
we still appear to believe that it is our duty to go on nodding
approvingly like porcelain mandarins.  I do not mean to suggest that we
should imitate the sprightly example of Lytton Strachey, or mimic the
easy formul of Emil Ludwig.  Nothing is so easy as to be "modern" in
this sense, to pounce upon a man, devise a smug formula (eros _versus_
ethos; narcissus _versus_ ethos; theos _versus_ diabolus) and squeeze
his "life and letters" into a whimsical pattern mould.  Nothing is so
easy, and nothing can be more remote from truth.

I do not think Lockhart's _Scott_ can be surpassed in its class.  At
the same time, we need in Canada the two types.  We require more
painstaking, authoritative lives and letters, and we also should have
more popular sketches of the lives of great national characters.

It is the custom to smile at the restless self-sufficiency of our
frontier life.  The answer to that is: a certain amount of
self-sufficiency and alertness are necessary to survive at all.  There
is not absent a good deal of amiable banter in regard to our adolescent
hurrah.  We are sometimes regarded as a sort of sorority,
leather-lunged and whooping it up for the dear old alma mater, its
leaders and achievements.  But this preoccupation with one's history is
not unique.  England has arrived at her present state of national
solidarity and integration through one thousand years of sagas,
ballads, chronicles, legends, romances and historical dramas.  The same
is true of every other nation which has achieved unity and ripeness.
The turning point in the Irish nationalist movement was Standish
O'Grady's _History of Ireland: Heroic Period_.  The rest is written in
the art, letters and politics of the new nation.

Our first families were frontier-minded men and women--explorers,
discoverers, pathfinders, colonizers.  Above all else they were men and
women of lofty character--heroic to the point of daring, sublimely
imaginative and of exalted nobility.  No other nation is richer in this
element.  In the history of those three centuries of what is now Canada
this is the human type that overwhelmingly predominates.  Surely no
field offers more alluring inducements than these names, our real
nobility.

Human interest is always saleable.  It is surely something to be able
to recall a certain night at Tibur, when the Falernian stung the palate
of Horace and his friend Thaliarchus, or to share the pang of Dante's
heart when the living vision of Beatrice Portinari shattered the poet's
rest.  At the same time, is it not legitimate to write persuasively of
those splendid days at old Port Royal, when poetry and drama were born
on the North American continent, and Champlain and Lescarbot wrote
their names into the annals of the new world.  The soil we tread has
measured the shadows of heroic men.  One would rarely suspect it, so
dull and commonplace are the lives we have written about them.  We
should live with the classics in order that we may discover their
secret.  Often we must repudiate them in the hope of becoming like
them--and so make our world new and magic and inexpressibly our own.

  Et si je danse sur les tombes
  C'est pour que la beaut du monde
  Soit neuve en moi tous les matins!




III

THE FIELD OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  _Hamlet: Do you see nothing there?_
  _Gertrude: Nothing at all; yet all that is, I see._
                                  --SHAKESPEARE.


I can think of no better cure for the easy nonchalance of our writers,
and the shallow flippancy of our critics, than a brief trial of
self-analysis and portraiture.  There may be a good deal of private
work being done along these lines, although one can scarcely imagine
it.  Certainly the spring and autumn book lists do not expose such.  In
all our literature there are but two autobiographies worthy the name,
and it is not strange that they should have been offered as romances.
To have christened them autobiographies would have impaired their
commercial success, let alone thrust them into a bleak and uninhabited
world.

If we put aside the journals, prayers and hymns of Handley Chipman
(1717-1799) and the Life and Journal of Henry Alline (1748-1784) of the
Maritime pre-revolutionary period, as well as the Journal of Jacob
Bailey, a Maritime Loyalist, all of which are not accessible, we
discover but two, _The High Romance_, by Michael Williams, and _A
Search for America_, by Frederick Philip Grove.  These are Macmillan
books, and I congratulate my friend Hugh Eayrs, President of the
Company.  Both books record the quest for the spirit's Moated Grange.
Williams found peace in the Roman Catholic Church; Grove never found
peace, but he discovered Canada, the Prairies, and new life for old.
Williams writes a sort of idyll; Grove, fearlessly and candidly,
unfolds a stark drama.  They are both brave, searching and memorable.

The journals hitherto published in Canada have been too superficial,
timid and objective.  Of these the three to survive are by women, Anna
Jameson, Susanna Moodie and Mrs. Simcoe.  They belong to the travel
type of memoir, vignettes of the countryside, rather than chronicles of
the kingdom within.  We have done this sort of thing without end, and
it is not without value.  On the other hand, I do not wish to have the
electorate suddenly take to exposing their whole souls.  It would be
quite embarrassing, so much heart-searching and public unrobing.  We
shall leave it to those wise and ripe, who, in the dervish dance of
life, have succeeded in keeping their souls on top.




IV

THE FIELD OF DRAMA

  _Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but
  for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is
  no place like home._
                                  --GEORGE SANTAYANA.


The literary dramas of Charles Heavysege, John Hunter-Duvar, William
Wilfred Campbell and Charles Mair, not to mention the comedies of
Joseph Quesnel, and the dramas of F. A. Marchand, Pamphile LeMay, Louis
Frchette and Frre Marie-Victorin, have left little or no impression
upon the Canadian stage.  Anything approaching significance is to be
found in the short plays of Duncan Campbell Scott, Marjorie Pickthall's
"The Wood-Carver's Wife," and miscellaneous one-act plays by Mazo De La
Roche, Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, Carroll Aikens, Marian Osborne, Fred
Jacob and one or two others.

Merrill Denison, more than any other, has laid the foundations for a
native Canadian drama.  The _Unheroic North_ (1923) has recently been
followed by _Henry Hudson and Other Plays_.  The first collection was
designed for The Little Theatre, and the latter for the radio; both
will be found under the corner-stone of a new national drama.

As I have already pointed out, there is endless poetry, romance and
drama in the Canadian scene.  One does not need to go to the barren
lands for native atmosphere, as is usually supposed.  We are a prey to
adolescence, are caught up in the breathless drama of nation building,
and so fail to find leisure for that detachment, reflection and probing
necessary to significant work.  The essence of drama is character, and
Merrill Denison has shown that the annals of Canada teem with it.

The whole future is before us in this field, but we must go down deep
into the crypt and abyss of a man's soul, and report what we find
there.  Until we can learn this art, submit to this discipline, learn
to recognize nobility of mind and spirit when we see it, and then
achieve lifelikeness, compelling and significant, we shall stand still.
Our failure may be due in part to the lack of a National Theatre and a
sympathetic atmosphere on the part of the public, but the roots of the
matter go far deeper than that.  The majority of our play-makers are
unspeakably shallow, and the result is pawky characterization and an
infinite amount of ephemeral mutter.




V

THE FIELD OF BELLES LETTRES

  _We must never attempt to separate prose
  from poetry too dogmatically._
                                  --BLISS CARMAN.


The field of the essay is more crowded, or, perhaps one should say,
what currently passes for the essay.  The true essay is the perfect
fruit of ripeness, taste and urbanity.  There is a closer kinship
between the good letter-writer and the good essayist than between any
others.  The easy inconsequence, grace, charm, sophistication and
personal intimacy of the letter are all found in the essay, which may
be defined as an epistle to the world of kindred spirits at large.

The successful essay is a touchstone of urbanity, and only comes after
long standing in the oak.  Good talk sparkles and has a rich bouquet;
the essay is that.  Judged by these standards little of what we have
accomplished in Canada along this line approaches the true essay.  The
style is self-conscious, bookish, lacks charm, in other words our
essayists do not move easily and naturally in the native element.  On
the other hand the purpose of the essay has been often misjudged.  We
confuse it with appraisals of literature and art, and load it with far
too much preaching, expostulation and tub-thumping.  The essay should
be compact of worldly wisdom carried lightly.  We try to load it with
knowledge of some sort, and mistake sprightliness for lightness.

Canadian literature is too serious.  Surely there is a place for books
of trifles, _inter alia_, relaxation and escape.  We need more
resounding laughter, perhaps, but certainly more subtle humour and even
satire.  Still we go on writing sermonettes, trying to prove something
or convert somebody.  Blake, MacMechan and Macphail come nearest to the
real essay.  Bliss Carman nearly always had a thesis to expound.
McArthur's best prose pieces were sketches not essays.  As for the rest
they write criticism, an art, it is true, but not the kind of art that
makes the essay.  The successful Canadian essayist will resemble
Bunyan's hero, whose solemn moral burden dropped from his stooped
shoulders at sight of the Celestial City--in this case the Celestial
City of Urbanity.

"Of all the arts, let me here observe, poetry is the nearest to prose.
That is a very obvious reflection; so obvious that our thinking
sometimes misses it, and rarely, I fancy, attends to its implications.
For is not this a very serious situation for poetry--to be so near
prose, to hold its station always on the edge of that precipice, to
have this hair-breadth remove from the very negation of itself?  I
cannot think that poetry stands thus near to prose for nothing.  It
runs this daily danger of being prose just because it exists, not for
its own sake (as perhaps some other arts do), but for ours, to serve
essentially human needs.  It is near to prose for the opportunities of
discourse, for the communication of experience.  It has deliberately
elected to say things; and having made that election, is it not going
to say the things that most matter?" (_Prose and Poetry_, H. W. Garrod).

If poetry runs this constant danger of breaking into prose, the essay
shows that prose can be but a hair-breadth removed from poetry.
Hazlitt is still the shining example of this truth, though you may
prefer to reflect upon Montaigne, and his bewitchment for Shakespeare.
"_C'est icy un livre de bon foy, lecteur!_"  As for serving essentially
human needs, that also is true, providing we do not fall into the
customary Canadian error and confuse these with moral reform, literary
uplift and miscellaneous information.  Nothing so perfectly illustrates
"the sheer incompetence of prose" as this death-in-life moral
atmosphere, heavy with the breath of necessity and wanting the light of
the imagination.




VI

THE FIELD OF THE FIRST CANADIAN

_For the essence of humanism is that belief ... that nothing which has
ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no
language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed
their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human
minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended
time and zeal._
                                  --WALTER PATER ("Picodella Mirandola").


How do you account for the fact, that the life of the North American
Indian has been so little exploited in our literature?  Among the
adventurers John Jewitt and Daniel Harmon have left the most faithful
pictures of tribal life and custom.  Catlin and Kane are chiefly
valuable for their artistic records.  Holgate among the modern artists
seems to be the only Canadian to have discovered them.  McKelvie's
_Huldowget_, and Barbeau's _Indian Days in the Canadian Rockies_, and
_The Downfall of Temlaham_, if you exempt the various anglicized
retellings of their legends, are the only two who have joined hands
with David Higgins, author of _The Mystic Spring_.

How long the native races ruled the wilderness we do not know; some say
25,000 years.  Down through those millenniums they persisted and
flourished.  To have done so they must have had something which was
socially, sthetically and spiritually satisfying.  In other words,
they must have had satisfactory equivalents for what we mean by
government, social etiquette, art, poetry and religion.  Had it not
been for Marius Barbeau and other indefatigable anthropologists every
vestige of their life would have disappeared.  Their songs, folk tales,
fugitive fragments of their art, these are stored in the archives of a
Federal Department--that is, so much of them as remains.

There is a place for Indian folk tales, providing they are not
anglicized; but surely there is a more important place for good novels.
As for Indian art it has had no effect upon our native art; only on the
ceiling of a grill room and the top of a skyscraper could one find any
hint of Canadian prehistoric art, and now the grill room has mercifully
disappeared, metamorphosed into a Dutch tea room!  Barbeau and McKelvie
have begun right.  They throw Indian life and manners into bold relief
by placing it over against civilization.  They show how, in spite of
apparent Christianization, in the hour of tribal stress the whole
weight of centuries of custom bear down and prove too much for the
modern veneer.  It has always been thus.  The conquered race is not an
assortment of corpses; there is a spark of life left, and it strikes
back.  This is so well illustrated in the story of the conquest of
Christianity, and its successive accretions of pagan elements thinly
disguised.  Our pioneer novelists in this genre will be followed by
many, let us hope.  We are nourished by the same soil that sustained
the native red man, and we are, in a very real sense, his heirs.




VII

THE FIELD OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH

  _But oh, a scrap of orange peel,
  Or stump of a cigar,
  Once trodden by a princely heel
  How beautiful they are!_
                                  --ANON.


Much of what passes for history in Canada is a congeries of bald dates,
petty wars, private feuds, coalitions, constitutional acts and
amendments, treaties and statistics.  These are repeated _ad
nauseam_--the same heresies, the same quotations, the identical
snippets on social and industrial backgrounds.

The treasures of our Federal and Provincial Archives are not known,
except to a mere handful of research men.  These men, if given time,
will change our interpretation of Canadian history.  Current versions
of events are often far astray.  Outstanding characters are either
wrongly apotheosized or stupidly defamed.  There are many notable
figures upon which we have nothing.  We prattle endlessly about the
Loyalists, the Family Compact, the headwaters of Canadian Literature
and so on, when we do not take the trouble to examine what has been
painstakingly assembled and catalogued for our benefit.  We need more
gold in our histories, yet there are bulging treasure-rooms of it
already about which we are apparently content to remain ignorant.

Historical research is not the business of the "scientific historian,"
whatever that may mean.  Any man is a scientist who wants to know and
tries to find out.  A little more of this sort of passion would have
saved endless novels from utter banality, the historical romance type
which seems to flourish here and cover the earth like a banyan tree.  I
can think of no term strong enough to use in connection with the
shoddy, hurried, absurd trash that is sent by the truckload to editors
every year in the name of Canadian historical romance, and Canadian
social romance.  The writing is as slovenly as the thinking, and
practically all of it is without any atom of verisimilitude.

This is not the place to catalogue the names of those themes upon which
we require intensive research.  Each subject requires rigid
specialization.  One cannot well embrace an era.  A good beginning is
to draw a circle round some theme, step inside, and remain there until
its resources are apparently exhausted.  I recommend this to writers of
fiction; it is an admirable discipline.  I know an artist, C. W.
Jefferys, who will spend months in verifying a musket-lock, a uniform,
the outline of a palisade.  Our novelists are less finicky.  What does
it matter if side-arms are carried by field officers?  What does
anything matter so long as we get away with it?

I do not suppose Hardy's lifelong study of archology and folk-lore
detracted in any way from the romantic value of his Wessex novels.
Some day, let us hope, a Canadian writer will give us a few novels
built round the life of the Hudson's Bay Company forts.  There is no
end of material ready at hand for this timely undertaking, but it needs
to be dug out, and digging is hard work.

Many are the uses of historical research, and significant will be the
work of the artist who loads the rifts of his creations with the
precious ore.




VIII

FIELDS FOR THE AMATEUR HISTORIAN

  _We rose from Homer's halting flight
  To Cicero; we also rose
  To what the real people write
  To-day--we also rose in prose._
                                  --HILLAIRE BELLOC.


The amateur historian is frequently confused with that cheerful
imbecile who synthesizes and vulgarizes the research of others.  How
often has the inspired research of Francis Parkman reappeared in the
easy rhetoric of John Smith, Regular Member of the Canadian Authors'
Association, Swayback Centre!  The amateur historian is a _bona fide_
historian, but whereas the specialist selects a single object for his
devotion, the amateur is rather more fickle, having more loves and
loving them none the less.

I sing the virtues of this anonymous hero.  He has no ambition to break
into print, and to rise in prose.  Parish Registers unfold for him the
humble annals of his folk.  Local traditions, legends, ballads, even
genealogies, are the stuff that feed his hunger.  I have seen his
harvested treasures, bulging scrap-books, notebooks, letters and
diaries.  I have watched him tunnel into old cupboards, burrow in musty
attics, part the weeds in a country cemetery to copy an inscription or
verify a date.  The fame of this local Herodotus was not even local.
Yet, out of his splendid hobby grew a collection of books, prints and
papers which one day made the town museum justly notable.

This is no place to discourse on the amenities of book collecting--if
indeed there can ever be a place where one may fittingly invite others
to sin!  However, there is no sin in this gentle lover of old things.
Under his brooding solicitude the _genius loci_ took form, some Sussex,
some Barsetshire, or Tantramar.  Writers for the papers, feature
journalists, local colourists, even the lordly novelist, will sow his
gold with a lavish hand.  It matters not.  In heaven the angels all
know that John Smith put Hainsville on the map.


In the world of letters there is a quality, rare and indefinable, by
which certain real places take on a new nature and acquire through
books an added magic.  In Barsetshire the imaginary is made real and
Barchester cloisters, echoing Mr. Harding's footsteps, are more to us
than most cathedral precincts...

There are yet other ways in which literature may be transfigured.  To
read an epitaph by Pope or Dr. Johnson on the grave for which it was
written turns it from mere elegiac verse into the lament of friend for
friend.  So, too, a name long dear in literature may glorify the tomb
of some forgotten ancestor.  To read in Eastwick Church the epitaph of
"John Plumer of Blaxware, Esqre., who died on the 27th Day of December,
1709, leaving five of his children living, viz. Walter, William,
Richard, Ann and Katherine," is to realize that this son Walter was
that sprightly bachelor-uncle who had visited much in Italy and was the
reputed author of fine, facetious rattle-headed Plumer of the South Sea
House.  But for Charles Lamb, what were the Plumers even of the true
descent save country squires?  It was their housekeeper's grandchild
who gave them immortality and glorified for ever that mansion which
another Mrs. Plumer "had lately pulled down."

The spirit of man desires to go on pilgrimage.  What that pilgrimage
will be depends upon his nature and his training.  To some the
restoration of St. David's or St. Mary's, Walsingham, with their new
fellowship of worship, may be all-important; to others, as the young
American Louise Imogen Guiney felt, the yearly service at the
Confessor's tomb in Westminster is a new baptism of the spirit; others,
again, will find in Dr. Johnson's epitaph on Catherine Chambers, with
whom he prayed upon her deathbed, and to whom parting with him was the
greatest grief she ever felt, that which makes one little Lichfield
church and one small tablet there more sacred than the great cathedral
and all the sculpture it contains.

All those who think at all have their own Iona, their own Marathon;
that man is little to be envied who does not find somewhere or in
something a source of reverence and inspiration, a raising of the
spirit to a power not himself that to him makes for righteousness.  It
may be Nature, as with Wordsworth; it may be the haunting memories of
youth, as with Charles Lamb; it may be art or history or literature, or
the shrines where men have worshipped.  It is the highest gift of
genius to create places of refreshment for the soul, to explore some
unknown Delectable Mountains from which new visions of Eternity can be
discerned.--["Genius Loci," _London Times Literary Supplement_.  Dec.
25, 1930.]




IX

THE FIELD OF SCHOOL TEXTS

  _And five times to the child I said:
  "Why, Edward, tell me, why?"_
                                  --WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.


One of the most neglected fields this is, as well as one of the most
inviting.  "The neglected fields of fact--history, biography, travel,
industry, art and natural science--all need development; not a crude
rehearsal of ill-selected facts, but skilful composition incorporating
salient interest-provoking elements.  There are a few such books to-day
within the reading ability of primary children, but there need to be
many more, to open doors into many fields and attract the developing
intelligence to pursue paths which lead on to widening interests and
worthier thoughts."  (F. W. Dunn).

In a nation-wide experimentation, conducted by a publishing house in
the United States, it was found that many of the old classics were of
far less interest than educationists generally suppose.  On the other
hand it was proved, that boys and girls found greater pleasure in such
moderns as Ernest Thompson-Seton, Albert Payson Terhune, Howard Pyle
and others.  In addition to this the fact was emphasized, that children
are eager to know the hows and whats and whys in regard to every-day
things.

There is a danger that, by overstressing this informational material,
the standards of taste may suffer.  However, the pressure is squeezing
out such absurd things as "Boadica" to make way for Roberts' "They Who
Seek Their Meat From God" and other reading materials, which are more
interesting and better literature to boot.  The tendency south of the
line is to go too far, and lug in all sorts of commonplace factual
readings.  Someone will come along who can explain the technique of
fighting a fire, riding in an elevator or fishing through a hole in the
ice, and do so with a high degree of style.  There is a great and
immediate need for this sort of thing, new literary material, suitable
for classes in English, and the social sciences generally.  It should
bear the earmarks of that literary excellence which characterized most
of the old, but deal with contemporary life, and our near past.  Books
most desirable for children from nine to twelve years of age are one of
the greatest problems of Canadian publishers.  At present most of our
story materials are presented in an utterly banal style.  Take the
stories of our pioneers, of the Loyalists, or the early days on the
frontier, what could be more insipid and killing?  The stories are not
selected on a basis of intelligent interest to the children themselves.
On the other hand, factual material is presented with the dull
precision of an encyclopdia.  Children like reality.  They are quick
to detect a hoax, either in the narrative or in the illustrations.
They will not tolerate the writer who approaches them in a
now-my-dear-children manner.  Publishers will welcome books for this
class of reader.

There is no course offered in this fine art, and only a very rough idea
can be given as to the essentials.  In the first place, the story must
come within the range of the child's social and sthetic experience.
It must also be graded properly, both in style and vocabulary.  Given
so much, the writer for this public will endeavour to maintain the
element of surprise; pay heed to the child's love of liveliness and
animalness and good talk; construct his plot with as much care as if
writing for an adult group; and never fail to preserve a sense of
humour.

The subjects for those fitted to write children's books are many and
varied.  Fairy tales and fables, legends and folk-lore have been fairly
well covered, and it will be hard to surpass the best that has been
done.  The same is even more true of light lyrics and narratives in
verse upon these related topics.  One field remains practically
unoccupied.  There is a golden opportunity for the poet who can turn
the great characters and episodes of Canadian history into fine
swinging ballads.  We have a surfeit of lyrics upon hepatics, but not a
single first-rate ballad to commemorate the past of our country.

Historical narrative, substantial information in regard to present-day
life--the doctor, policeman, fireman and the rest--biographies, travel,
community life at home and abroad, stories of science and invention,
industry, trade and commerce, narratives stressing moods and
characteristics--fun, courage, good sense, fair play, sympathy--these
are a few of the needs.  But let there be no moralizing, irrelevance,
or silly conversation.  Simpleness is not simplicity.  And let there be
musical meaning to your words, and fitting colour patterns, and a
well-knit style.  Even a boy of ten knows a sloppy style when he sees
it, will detect the vagaries of your paragraphing and lay an accusing
finger on your conceits.




X

THE FIELD OF BONNE ENTENTE

  _La pense dominante de ma vie a
  t d'harmoniser les diffrents
  lments dont se compose notre pays.
  La pense est vraie et elle finira
  par triompher._
                                  --SIR WILFRID LAURIER.


The writer is spokesman and interpreter of his country, and as such has
a national, as well as an international, duty to perform.  In a more
special sense he is the chosen ambassador of good understanding between
all races and creeds within our boundaries.  Tolstoy closed his essay
on "Art" in these words: "The task for Christian art is to establish
brotherly union among men."  Bliss Carman's comment upon that was: "Has
any one any better aim to propose for the art of the future?"

In 1877 William Kirby opened up a rich vein when he published his
romance upon the French rgime.  The mine has been worked thoroughly in
that particular manner.  It is more essential that we now endeavour to
understand the mind of Quebec.  Too long have we prided ourselves upon
our provincialism.  It is not necessary that we melt into one another,
lose every last token of individuality; but it is imperative that we
know and respect each other's traditions and ideals.

The Quebec of the romancer is not the land of _les anciens Canadiens_.
It bears little resemblance to the Province of Garneau's _Histoire_, of
Frchette's _La Legende d'un Peuple_, of Crmazie's epic verse, of De
Gasp's and Grin-Lajoie's community novels.  One would suspect that
the story of Quebec was told in the tinkling of glasses, the ring of
swords, and the witty talk and fervent love-making of seigneurs and
soldiers of fortune.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The
life of Quebec has changed little; still remain the ancient
devotions--the altar, the hearth and the deathless loves of the race.
That is true whether you tap the School of Quebec, or the newer groups
of Montreal and Sherbrooke.  The bottles are new, but the wine is old
wine.

The same is true of other parts of the Dominion.  It is not enough that
we know the folk-lore, dances and idioms of our several elements.  We
must translate their masterpieces, read them in our homes and schools,
and arrive at a finer sense of mutual sympathy and mutual
responsibility.

The French-Canadian is ambidextrous.  He knows English, can procure our
works and read them for himself.  The Anglo-Saxon is a slow-witted
beast.  He learns another language painfully.  I suspect it is that,
although the real agony may not be in the exertion, but rather in the
supposed necessity that he should make a gesture to understand anybody.
He has things to sell; let men speak to him in his bargaining tongue.

Well, here is an attractive field.  There is a surprising number of men
and women at work in it already, interpreting us to ourselves, delving
into our histories, translating our ablest work.  Perhaps our chief
need is for a few competent poets who can snare the music and the fancy
of the French poets in Canada, and give the English-speaking public,
who do not read French, an inkling of what our compatriots are
accomplishing.  A goodly number of them have been crowned by the French
Academy.  How many of our poets are laureated in London?

This work is perhaps least conspicuous of all.  The returns are small,
very small, when measured in terms of monetary reward or public
approval.  But I can think of no finer literary service than this.  Our
national future depends upon it.  The reward will be a nation of good
companions.

  "Thou hast inherited Sparta.
    Adorn her!"




XI

THE FIELD OF CHARACTER

"A hill can't be a valley, you know," said Alice.  "That would be
nonsense."  The Red Queen shook her head.  "You may call it 'nonsense'
if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which
that would be as sensible as a dictionary."
                                  --LEWIS CARROLL.


Plato was the first writer in Europe to assume that man is a spiritual
being, and that all valuations which matter are spiritual valuations.
We fail to remember that spiritual preparation is necessary to discover
that which can only be spiritually discerned.  I do not see why we
should be bashful about this, why one should not talk naturally about
spiritual values.  To me one of the delightful features about
French-Canadian poetry, fiction and _belles lettres_ is the easy,
matter-of-fact way in which they introduce spiritual subjects.

Bliss Carman, speaking of Matthew Arnold, called him a "great friend
and aider of those who would live in the spirit."  One of Arnold's
well-known dicta was, that poetry is "a criticism of life ... mainly on
the side of morality."  The prophet of sweetness and light did not have
social uplift in mind when speaking of morality, or any cant about
conventional ethics.  He simply wished to stress the fact, that
literary values are human values, and that the summit of literary
expression is the presentation of things spiritual.

"Frankly," says H. W. Garrod, "frankly, I do not know what it is that
we are all so frightened of.  Moral ideas are not going to bite us,
that, when we meet them here, or in some other poetry, we should bury
our heads in the bedclothes, seeking safety in form and expression,
until the ethical terror be overpast.  I sometimes wonder whether what
we are afraid of is not, in fact, poetry itself." (_Poetry and Life_.)

Longinus, "On the Sublime," defines sublimity as "an echo of
magnificence of mind."  Perhaps that is as near to an exact definition
as we can come.  Certainly it is based upon an exalted spiritual
foundation which can always be easily recognized.

I have stressed at some length the two outstanding needs in our
literature--the necessity for painstaking discipline in the matter of
style, and the want of significant content.  In so far as content is
concerned the principal element is character, not simply individuality,
but the individual.  It has been observed that our history is rich in
this.  The very landscape reflects our national character.  So, whether
your gaze be outward or inward, you are bound to see, if you have eyes
at all, those spiritual qualities which distinguish us as a people.

Pastoral simplicity is in retreat.  The tempo of life has immeasurably
quickened, while civilization has grown more and more complex.  It is
not enough that the poet should come out of his retreat and count for
us the several freckles of the tulip.  The nature lyric turned out in
such unbelievable quantities is pale and anmic and has no remote
contact with life.  The writers of our novels are too busy to glimpse
the quests of humanity about them.  Their work is thin, has little
bottom, substance or reality, with a corresponding lack of finish,
unity, aim and method.  That is why we accept nudity for truth, confuse
morbid realism with reality, mistake etiquette for good manners.

I think it was Coleridge who stressed the necessity for a deeper
sensibility to character, to human life, and a profounder attention to
it.  He urged that we present our whole awareness to character.  The
serious artist idealizes character; the lesser craftsman exults in
defects, fiddles sentimentally with exalted themes and twiddles
suggestively with viscous things.  The fault is that we have little
spiritual sense.  What Chateaubriand called "the exact science of
character" requires the inclination, as well as the talent, for
spiritual observation.  George Santayana held the same view.  "No one
can be a great artist or a sound artist whose experience is not
coloured, organized, purified and intensified by his awareness of the
difference between good and evil."

Friar Salimbene in his chronicle sets forth fifteen reasons why a
brother ought not to have spoken so improperly.  The most plausible
was, that the offender and his hearers were all Florentines together,
and that no joke, however indecent, could shock a Florentine, "_cum
sint homines solatiosi et maximi trufatores_."

The definite, personal and direct impression of life, which Henry James
conceived to constitute the value of a novel, "is greater or less
according to the intensity of the impression."  That is partly true.
It is true to the extent that it will keep one in the middle of the
highway of life, and prevent one from dropping into the ditch of
eccentricity, sensationalism and baseness.  But the heights of art are
reached by the clarity of spiritual perception.  Only in this way will
brutality and vulgarity, if they must come within the limits of our
vision and our art, be securely retained within the borders of true
life.

The demand of young writers for the whole of life is silly.  It was
beyond Shakespeare.  All Homer could attempt in the _Odyssey_ was a
presentation of what was relevant and representative, or as much of it
as he could divine and set down in a number of self-contained
situations.  The artist is not concerned with all of life; he is
concerned with character.  Character, rightly understood and motivated,
means noble expression, "an echo of magnificence of mind."  Failure
here results in Pater's "round hand," the expressionless, insipid style
which no amount of correspondence school work can ever disguise.  G. K.
Chesterton, discussing the formlessness of the modern novel, compared
it to a sack stuffed with anything the novelist happens to have about
him.  There is no substitute for character.  It means nobility of style
and exalted significance.

I spoke a moment ago of our reticence in regard to spiritual things.  I
think it accounts for our adolescent attitude toward life in general,
and toward art in particular.  "If character is subject matter,"
remarks Galsworthy, "moral attributes cannot be irrelevant."  And yet
it is still the custom for a certain type of reviewer to scoff at the
use of the word "wholesome" in connection with a literary work.  On
more than one occasion I have heard the reviewer inquire flippantly as
to the meaning of the word.  I will tell him.  A work is wholesome when
the artist has the right tags on things, and when, whether he paints
black or gold, there is the magnificence of a great spirit brooding
over it and restraining it within the bounds of true life.  A work is
wholesome when its import is revealed, not in moral teaching, but in
the significance of its approach to life.  A work is wholesome when the
author, like Marius, "willed to live with scrupulous thoroughness the
artist's life."  Exalted beauty, spiritual significance, good taste and
noble utterance are wholesome qualities, and have nothing in common
with that easy ecstasy which flutters the hearts of anmic housemaids,
or the facile amorousness designed to transport the tired business man.
The best illustration that I can recall of what wholesomeness means is
to be found in the _Iliad_ (Book XVIII).  Homer is describing the
shield which Hephstus, at the request of Thetis, made for Achilles:
"And behind the plough the earth went black and looked like ploughed
ground, though it was made of gold; that was the miracle of his craft."

And so I come back to character, and I say with Homer, let us have
life, all of it that is art.  It is not necessary to remind you of
Lessing's _Laocoon_, his justification of the sculptor for not leaving
the strangled father's mouth open in a shriek.  You will recall his
mention of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, and how he commended the
artist's sympathetic strategy.  The horror of the bystanders was shown,
but not the despair of the father--it was too awful.

"Style is the man."  Rather, style is the man when that man is artist.
Beauty deals with externals; the sublime goes to the heights and depths
of character, hinting at magnificence of spirit.  I find that I have
come back to Longinus.  Then let me quote him once again.

"It was no mean or low-born creature which Nature chose when she
brought man into the Universe, and ordained us to be spectators of the
cosmic show and most eager competitors; from the first she poured into
our souls a deathless longing for all that is great and diviner than
ourselves."

Mankind is in quest of this Moated Grange.  That is why Hardy's
mercilessly bludgeoned heroes, and Dostoevsky's middle-class Russians,
oppressed with a passion for the refining culture of suffering, move
out of the isolation of the community of their birth and possess the
world.  In Jude the beaten artist everywhere goes down to defeat; in
Raskolnikov the wanton rabble of the earth find the way to atonement.
One day a character comes upon the artist which summons up all his
wealth of experience, and he cries, as did Faust when he beheld
Margaret:

  "Ah, still delay, thou art so fair!"

She does delay.  That is the magic of the artist.  And there she
stands!  Faust's Margaret and our Margaret.  Like the figures on Keat's
Grecian urn she will abide, lovely for ever.  The artist cries to the
character of his ideal: "Ah, still delay, thou art so fair!"  A
disciplined hand, obedient to the swift spiritual insight of the artist
sweeps the brush unerringly upon the canvas.  Then we cry in our turn:
"Ah, that is she!  Life is like that!"




Transcriber's note:

The edition used as base for this book contained the
following errors, which have been corrected:

Chapter II (quotation at start):
ELLEN GLASCOW
=> ELLEN GLASGOW

Chapter VI:
McKelvey's Huldowget
=> McKelvie's Huldowget
[It is possible that Pierce intended McKelvey, but
we have used the standard spelling of the name of
Bruce Alistair McKelvie (1889-1960), the author
of the 1926 novel Huldowget: A Story of the North
Pacific Coast]

Chapter XI:
Lessings' Laocoon
=> Lessing's Laocoon




[End of Unexplored Fields of Canadian Literature, by Lorne Pierce]
