Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (Second Edition) Volume II 9781487589363

Table of contents :
Contents
PART IV. The Realization of a Tradition
1. The Writer and his Public 1920-1960
2. Canadian History and Social Sciences (1920-1960)
I. The Writing of Canadian History
II. Writing in the Social Sciences
3. Literary Scholarship to 1960
4. Religious and Theological Writings to 1960
5. Philosophical Literature 1910-1960
6. Travel Books on Canada 1920-1960
7. Essays and Autobiography
I. Essays 1920-I960
II. Autobiography
8. Children's Literature to 1960
9. Drama and Theatre
10. Fiction 1920-1940
11. Fiction 1940-1960
12. Poetry 1920-1935
13. Poetry 1935-1950
14. Poetry 1950-1960
Conclusion
Bibliography and Notes
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

LITERARY HISTORY OF CANADA VOLUME II Canadian Literature in English

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LITERARY HISTORY OF CANADA Canadian Literature in English Second Edition VOLUME II General Editor CARL F. KLINCK Editors

ALFRED G. BAILEY, CLAUDE BISSELL, ROY DANIELLS, NORTHROP FRYE, DESMOND PACEY

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS TORONTO AND BUFFALO

First Edition 1965 ©University of Toronto Press 1965 Toronto and Buffalo Second Edition 1976 ©University of Toronto Press 1976 Toronto and Buffalo ISBN 0-8020-2213-8 ISBN 0-8020-6277-6 LC 76-12353

This edition of the Literary History of Canada has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Ontario Arts Council.

Contents PART IV: THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION

1. The Writer and his Public (1920-1960)

DESMOND PACEY

3

2. Canadian History and Social Sciences (1920–1960) I. The Writing of Canadian History

WILLIAM KILBOURN

22

HENRY B. MAYO

43

MILLAR MACLURE

53

JOHN WEBSTER GRANT

75

5. Philosophical Literature (1910-1960)

THOMAS A. GOUDGE

95

6. Travel Books on Canada (1920-1960)

ELIZABETH WATERSTON

108

BRANDON CONRON

119

JAY MACPHERSON

126

SHEILA A. EGOFF

134

MICHAEL TAIT

143

10. Fiction (1920-1940)

DESMOND PACEY

168

11. Fiction (1940-1960)

HUGO MCPHERSON

205

12. Poetry (1920-1935)

MUNRO BEATTIE

234

13. Poetry (1935-1950)

MUNRO BEATTIE

254

14. Poetry (1950-1960)

MUNRO BEATTIE

297

NORTHROP FRYE

333

II. Writing in the Social Sciences 3. Literary Scholarship 4. Religious and Theological Writings (to 1960)

7. Essays and Autobiography I. Essays (1920-1960) II. Autobiography 8. Children's Literature (to 1960) 9. Drama and Theatre

CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES

365

THE CONTRIBUTORS

371

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

376

INDEX

379

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P A R T IV

The Realization of a Tradition

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1. The Writer and his Public 1920-1960 DESMOND PACEY

THE FIRST WORLD WAR effectually obliterated in Canada whatever traces of "high colonialism" had survived the boom of the first decade of the twentieth century and the bitter debates over Reciprocity with the United States and the Navy Bill for Empire defence. The War shattered the core of common beliefs and attitudes suggested by the adjective "high": the mood of Canada in 1918 and 1919 was angry, sceptical, and restless. And if Canadians were not yet sure what role they wished their country to play in the world, they were virtually all agreed that it should not be that of a colony. Change was everywhere. The Easter riots of 1918 in Quebec over conscription, the angry demonstrations of the United Farmers of Ontario in May 1918, the break of western labour with the Trades and Labour Congress and the formation of the radical One Big Union, the Winnipeg Strike in 1919, the victory of the United Farmers of Ontario in the provincial election of October 1919, the formation of the left-wing National Progressive party under Thomas A. Crerar in January 1920, the death of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the retirement of Sir Robert Borden: these events combined to transform the traditional image of Canadian society beyond recognition. The new Canada had new leaders—William Lyon Mackenzie King of the Liberals, Arthur Meighen of the Conservatives, T. A. Crerar and J. S. Woodsworth of the Progressives—and there was general hopefulness that they might find new solutions to the old problems. For the old problems did remain: the problems of the relations between French and English Canada, between the provinces and the federal government, between Canada and the British Empire. In spite of the new mood and the new leaders, progress in solving the first two of these problems was disappointingly slow. Mackenzie King, the Liberal prime minister who was to dominate the political life of Canada for almost thirty years, proved an adept at palliating the real or imagined grievances of French Canada, but he never really faced the full implications of the problem—with the unfortunate result that it was even more acute in the 1960's

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THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION

than it was in the 1920's. Not until 1937, with the appointment of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, was a determined effort made to solve the federal-provincial problem—with the unfortunate consequence that Canada had to meet the crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930's with divided and confused areas of jurisdiction. But the third problem, that of Canada's status within the British Empire, could be tackled more energetically because there was general agreement as to what that status must be. The war, for all the strains that it had put upon the Confederation, had had the very positive effect of proving Canada's strength both as a military and as an industrial power. A country which had made such a distinct contribution to the Allied war effort was no longer willing to be treated as a "child of nations"-—her limbs were altogether too giant-sized for that. Canada demanded and obtained a separate seat at the Peace Conference in 1919, became an independent member of the new League of Nations, balked when Great Britain seemed to take her complaisance for granted during the Chanak Incident of 1922, and in the series of Imperial Conferences held during the 1920's led the struggle for recognition of the British Dominions as equal and autonomous nations within the Commonwealth. The Statute of Westminster in 1931 was only formal recognition of Canada's national status; she had already begun to sign her own treaties and appoint her own ambassadors. The new spirit of self-confidence engendered by the war was confirmed by Canada's economic progress in the 1920's. It was a decade of unprecedented expansion. The new era of oil and electricity, mining and metallurgy, automobiles and aeroplanes was congenial to Canada's resources. In the age of high speed transportation, Canada's vast distances were no longer a serious obstacle to progress, and her remote districts—northern Ontario, northern Quebec, the Northwest Territories, the hinterland of British Columbia—proved to be rich in minerals, forest products, oil, and water systems suitable for producing hydro-electric power. These new sources of wealth, combined with such traditional Canadian commodities as the wheat of the prairies and the fruit, cattle, timber and fish of the eastern provinces, gave the Canadian economy in the 1920's a buoyancy it had never known before. It is sometimes difficult to establish direct relations between political and economic developments and literary and cultural ones, but in these years there is no doubt that the general air of change, excitement, and confidence did affect the development of Canadian literature. Just as in the decades immediately following Confederation there had been a conscious effort to create a literature worthy of the new confederacy, so now there was a conscious, at times a self-conscious, determination to create a literature commensurate with Canada's new status as an independent nation. As in the

THE WRITER AND HIS PUBLIC 1920-1960

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1870's, magazines were founded to serve as vehicles for the new literature, organizations were formed to protect and promote it, and anthologies and historical surveys were printed to publicize it at home and abroad. The four magazines which were founded immediately after the war clearly illustrate the main trends. These magazines were the Canadian Bookman (1919-39), the Canadian Forum (1920- ), the Canadian Historical Review (1920- ) and the Dalhousie Review (1921- ). The Canadian Bookman at once became the organ of the new spirit of uncritical self-confidence and "boosterism." To the editors of this magazine, a Canadian book was ipso facto a good book. The extremes to which it carried literary nationalism were almost incredible. Even such an austere person as D. C. Scott, when he reviewed L. Adams Beck's The Ninth Vibration for the Bookman, was capable of writing: "As if to emphasize the fact that the book is a product of Canada, the author has added to his signature . . . the word Canada. . . . We would commend this course to our writers as it nationalizes our production and puts the word Canada where it ought to be more frequently, on works of art and literature." But what really delighted the hearts of the editors of the Bookman was to be able to write such reports as this: "Dr. Silcox, principal of the Ottawa Normal School, in an address on Canadian Literature last month, comparing Canadian literature with that of the United States, said that much of our literature was superior to anything produced by any other country in any century of our era. He then gave a detailed description of the different classes of Canadian literature, along with brief sketches of some of our outstanding writers. Among others he spoke of Robert Norwood, L. M. Montgomery, Basil King, C. G. D. Roberts, Stephen Leacock, Gilbert Parker, Agnes Laut, Ralph Connor, Pauline Johnson, and L. Adams Beck." That report appeared in November 1926; a month later the Bookman proudly noted that "The Native Sons of Canada are sending speakers out to fill engagements in the smaller towns of the West dealing with the need for greater recognition of Canadian literature. The speakers trace the growth of prose and poetry from the earliest productions." This sort of thing was too much even for some of the contributors to the Bookman, and in June 1927, in an article entitled "What is Criticism?" Thomas O'Hagan wrote, "As regards Canadian literary criticism, it is woefully lacking in scholarship, poise and judicial discrimination. All our goslings are swans." This more critical spirit found consistent expression in the Canadian Forum. The Forum was as concerned for Canadian independence and cultural development as the Canadian Bookman, but it wanted the development to be of truly high standard and to be responsive to new ideas whether at home or abroad. Anyone who wants to see the new Canadian spirit at its best should read the whole of the Forum's first editorial (October 1920).

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THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION

Here are a few key sentences from it: "With interests as fresh and wide as her national responsibilities, Canada refuses instinctively to bind herself with formulae. Too often our convictions are borrowed from London, Paris, or New York. Real independence is not the product of tariff or treaties. It is a spiritual thing. No country has reached its full stature, which makes its goods at home, but not its faith and its philosophy. . . . The Canadian Forum had its origin in a desire to secure a freer and more informed discussion of public questions and, behind the strife of parties, to trace and value those developments of art and letters which are distinctly Canadian." The Forum proceeded to practise what it had preached: it printed the early poems of E. J. Pratt, Robert Finch, Dorothy Livesay, Raymond Knister, A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, and Leo Kennedy, the short stories of Raymond Knister, J. D. Robins, Mary Quayle Innis, Gilbert Norwood, C. F. Lloyd, and Jean Burton, articles on the developing little theatre movement in Canada and on the paintings of the Group of Seven, and balanced, intelligent reviews of all the best Canadian books. From the first it was critical of the boosting tendencies of the Canadian Bookman and the Canadian Authors' Association, and the climax came in December 1926 when it printed an article, "Making Literature Hum," by Douglas Bush. "It would seem incredible," Bush wrote, "that intelligent persons who were abreast of the contemporary movement could hold the opinions which most of our 'literati' exuberantly express about their own work and their friends. Every year one hopes to hear the last of our windy tributes to our Shakespeares and Miltons, and every year the Hallelujah Chorus seems to grow in volume and confidence. . . . Inflated rhetoric used to be left to the politicians, its rightful exponents, for use on the first of July; during the last few years it has become the language of literature, and one learns on all sides that Canada is taking its permanent seat in the literary league of nations." Bush went on to tell a few home truths about the books being boosted, and can scarcely have been surprised when his article provoked anguished replies in the succeeding few issues of the magazine. While the Canadian Forum was doing its best to stir up enlightened critical discussion of Canadian writing, the Canadian Historical Review was quietly promoting research into the source-material of Canadian history. The Review had its antecedent in the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada, which had been initiated at the University of Toronto in 1897 as part of the programme of that pioneer of Canadian historical scholarship, Professor George M. Wrong. The new Review provided a vehicle for the young historians to express their ideas about the Canadian past, and was in considerable measure responsible for the new erudition and critical insights which soon became apparent in the book-length, specialist studies which in this era replaced the more popular historical surveys of the

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previous period. Instead of being content with a recital of colourful events, the new historians sought for the deeper forces in Canadian historical development, and set out to define the exact nature of the Canadian constitution by subjecting it to close analysis and comparative study. The basis was being laid for a really informed sense of national identity to replace merely sentimental patriotism. An allied development may be associated with the foundation of the Dalhousie Review in 1921. It would be hard to over-estimate the influence of the university quarterlies upon Canadian cultural development. Lacking the weekly journals of opinion which have played such a part in English intellectual life,* Canada has relied upon the quarterlies to provide informed discussion of public affairs, reasoned reviews of current books, and general essays upon literature, art, and social movements. Queen's Quarterly had been founded as early as 1893, but remained substantially a magazine of alumni news until the 1920's; the University Magazine emanated from McGill between 1901 and 1920; the University of Toronto Quarterly was not to be established until 1931. Professor H. L. Stewart, the first editor of the Dalhousie Review, summed up the basic aim of all the university quarterlies in his "Salutation": "What we have in mind is the need of that public, concerned about the things of the intellect and spirit, which desires to be addressed on problems of general import and in a style that can be generally understood. . . . We shall always welcome papers that embody historical investigation into our country's records. Thus the outlook of the Review is primarily Canadian. . . . In this sense we avow a nationalism that is not prejudice and a provincialism that is not narrowness." The four magazines which we have just discussed were briefly augmented during the latter half of the 1920's by two little magazines in Montreal, the McGill Fortnightly Review (1925-27) and the Canadian Mercury (192829). Dominated by the young poets who were to be known as the Montreal Group—A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, and A. M. Klein—these magazines sought to introduce to Canada the new, modernist verse and prose of writers such as Eliot, Pound, Edith Sitwell, and James Joyce. The editors and contributors affected to be scornful of literary nationalism and preached the virtues of cosmopolitanism and of a contemporary sensibility. At every opportunity they ridiculed the boosterism of the Canadian Bookman and the Canadian Authors' Association. For all this, their activities can be claimed to form a part of the new literary nationalism. Some of their poems —A. J. M. Smith's "Lonely Land," for example—were deliberate efforts *A partial exception to this statement is Saturday Night (1887- ), which has at some times in its long history, and especially under the editorship of B. K. Sandwell from 1932 to 1951 and the recent editorships of Arnold Edinborough and Robert Fulford, provided responsible and informed comment on Canadian affairs.

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THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION

to match in verse the distinctively Canadian features of the paintings of the Group of Seven, and behind all their efforts lay a determination to create a Canadian literature worthy of comparison with the new literature emanating from abroad. Whereas the editors of the Bookman said, in effect, that Canadian writing was already as good as any in the world, the editors of the Fortnightly and the Mercury said that what we had was mediocre and we had better make haste to bring it up to world standards. The new nationalism which produced these magazines also led to the organization of the Canadian Authors' Association in 1921. At a founding dinner held in Montreal, Bliss Carman was hailed as Canada's unofficial poet laureate and symbolically crowned with laurel. The immediate objective of the association was to secure the passage of a Canadian Copyright Act which would give proper protection to the rights of Canadian authors, but it soon launched an ambitious programme of literary nationalism. In co-operation with the Canadian Bookman, which became the official organ of the association, it initiated a series of Canadian Book Weeks designed to publicize and sell the native literary product. Posters such as the following were designed and distributed to all Canadian bookstores:

700 Canadian Authors in our Wonderful Canada Have you read their books? As might have been expected, the Canadian Forum objected to such highpressure salesmanship—"shock tactics do not in the long run serve the best interests of literature. There may be immediate and tangible results during the week in question, but, the week after, the old condition will be back again and Canadian literature will stand just where it did two years before"— but the book weeks survived for over a quarter of a century. (Indeed the institution still survives in 1964 in a modified form: it is now called "Young Canada Book Week" and is confiined to books written, not necessarily by native authors, for juveniles.) Another activity of the Authors' Association was a series of summer schools of Canadian literature. The first such school was thus announced in the Bookman of June 1926: From July 5 to 11 the first Summer School of Canadian literature will be opened at Muskoka Assembly, the literary summer capital of Canada. Classes will be held out-of-doors, in the "Little Theatre in the Woods" at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., and will be conducted by three outstanding literary men: Charles G. D. Roberts, Wilson MacDonald and John W. Garvin. Dr. Roberts' subject will be "The Method and Technique of Prose and Poetry." Mr. MacDonald will deal with "The Development of Canadian Poetry—Early Canadian Poetry; the Group of the Early 60's;

THE WRITER AND HIS PUBLIC 1920-1960

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Canadian Women Poets; The Twentieth Century Group." Mr. Garvin's subject will be "Canadian Prose—-Travel and Adventures of the Explorers; Fiction: Richardson, Haliburton, DeMille; Fiction: Kirby, Parker, Lighthall, Duncan; Two Canadian Diaries: Paul Kane, George Monro Grant." During the remaining hours of this pleasure-plus-profit holiday, the "students" may make themselves at home in the delightful Epworth Inn, overlooking Lake Rosseau, or they may scatter themselves about in boats, or on the tennis courts and bowling green, or in the woods. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction: Leacock's satires never equal such a passage as this. The Bookman reported that between twenty and thirty students, six of them university graduates, attended that first summer school. Ways obviously had to be found to reach greater numbers. One way was to get Canadian literature accepted as a legitimate subject of study in the universities, as Canadian history had been accepted a generation earlier through the efforts of George M. Wrong. In 1923 the Bookman made a survey of the teaching of Canadian literature hi the universities, but found the results (as reported in the January 1924 issue) disappointing. The University of British Columbia reported no study at all of the subject, Manitoba one hour a week in the fourth year, U.N.B. had no course currently in operation but had had courses in the past, Toronto included a few Canadian poems in the text-book Representative Poetry, Western Ontario studied a little Canadian poetry in the fourth year. Only Acadia, which had a full-term course, Dalhousie, which reported a course on "Literary Movements in Canada," Ottawa, Laval, and McGill, which reported that it "has for the last twenty years given courses in Canadian literature, and is developing the department," gave the subject the attention which the Bookman felt it warranted. Indeed it was not until the 1940's and 1950's that Canadian literature became the focus of significant academic scrutiny in Canada. The boosterism of the Bookman and the Authors' Association offended the academic mind, and delayed rather than hastened the scholarly study of Canadian literature. Lecture tours by writers were another way of reaching large audiences, and proved easier to promote. Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Wilson MacDonald all made triumphant tours of Canada in the mid-twenties. In February 1927 the Bookman was able to report as follows: Not exactly like the troubadours of old, but with perhaps even more beneficial results in a community sense, several of Canada's poets are on tour east and west. Bliss Carman has been giving another series of addresses on poetry to university students in the west. The Roberts—Charles G.D. and Lloyd—have been filling engagements in far western cities, while from the Maritimes come reports of enthusiastic receptions to Wilson MacDonald on his tour of those provinces.

Lome Pierce was another lecturer who made extensive tours in the twenties, and even the austere Frederick Philip Grove was persuaded to engage in one

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THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION

such venture: he travelled across Canada in 1928 lecturing to members of the Canadian Clubs. The establishment of literary prizes, the award of which could be announced with a great fanfare of publicity, was another device favoured by the Bookman and the Authors' Association for "making literature hum." The Bookman triumphantly hailed the establishment in 1922 by the government of the Province of Quebec of a $5,000 annual fund for literary prizes for the best books in English and French, and the Authors' Association at once sought to have the Province of Ontario establish a similar fund. In May 1925 the Bookman wryly noted that the Ontario request "got short shrift at the hands of Premier Ferguson on the plea of economy, and the authors are trying to harmonize this with the substantial increases in the salaries of the ministers and in the sessional allowances of the members." The association had better luck a decade later, when it managed to persuade Lord Tweedsmuir to establish the annual Governor-General's Literary Awards. In the meantime, the proponent of literary awards could salute the initiation of the Lome Pierce Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Canada. This medal, donated by the energetic young editor of the Ryerson Press, was to be awarded not for a specific book, but for a distinguished and sustained contribution to Canadian letters: its first recipient, in 1926, was Charles G. D. Roberts. The relative paucity of domestic literary prizes in this decade was to some extent compensated by the award to Canadians of valuable foreign prizes. The boosters' claim that Canadians were now making contributions to the literature of the world seemed to receive confirmation from the award of the Dodd, Mead prize to Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese in 1925 and of the Atlantic Monthly Prize to Mazo de la Roche's Jalna in 1927. These awards, naturally, were announced triumphantly and at length in the pages of the Bookman and also, with a rare show of unanimity, in the pages of the Canadian Forum. Final proof of the spirit of literary nationalism and optimism characteristic of the 1920's was the proliferation of histories, anthologies, and "master works" of Canadian literature. No less than six histories of Canadian literature were published in the decade: R. P. Baker's A History of EnglishCanadian Literature to the Confederation (1920), J. D. Logan's and D. G. French's Highways of Canadian Literature (1924), Archibald MacMechan's Headwaters of Canadian Literature (1924), Lionel Stevenson's Appraisals of Canadian Literature (1926), Lorne Pierce's Outline of Canadian Literature (1927) and V. B. Rhodenizer's Handbook of Canadian Literature (1930). The anthologies of the decade included E. K. and E. H. Broadus's Book of Canadian Prose and Verse (1923), A. M. Stephen's The Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse (1928), and Raymond Knister's Canadian Short Stories

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(1928), in addition to revised editions of earlier anthologies by Wilfred Campbell and John W. Garvin. The spirit animating these anthologies was perhaps best expressed in Raymond Knister's introduction to his book of short stories. "Literature as a whole is changing," he wrote, "new fields are being broken, new crops are being raised in them, and the changes apparent in other countries show counterparts in our development. . . . Literature in the United States is only lately emerging from the imitative stage, and there are signs that it is doing the same thing here. . . . There is such a thing as a Canadian spirit, and perhaps in no other department of literature is it so vivid and indubitable." A similar conviction led Lome Pierce to launch in 1923 the ambitious Makers of Canadian Literature series, which was originally intended to include four introductory volumes of literary background, seven volumes in French, and twenty volumes in English. Each of these latter volumes was to be devoted to a single author, and to include a biography, critical assessment, and a sampling of the author's work. The series was too elaborate an undertaking, and petered out after half a dozen volumes, but its very conception indicates the temper of the period. A similarly ambitious series was Master Works of Canadian Authors, announced in 1925 by the Radisson Society as a deluxe twenty-five volume series priced at $100 per volume: it too, even more predictably, lapsed after two or three volumes had appeared. Many less ambitious reprints also appeared: new editions of almost all Canadian "classics" such as Richardson's Wacousta, Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, and Kirby's Golden Dog. Monographs on the leading Canadian writers were also published: V. L. O. Chittick's Thomas Chandler Haliburton in 1924, Odell Shepard's Bliss Carman in the same year, Carl Y. Connor's Archibald Lampman in 1929. All this buoyant optimism received a rude shock when the stock market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression began. In his budget speech of 1927, the Minister of Finance, J. A. Robb, had been able to report proudly that "The Dominion enters its Diamond Jubilee with a happy outlook. Our farmers have in general enjoyed a bountiful harvest, our industries are active and working well up to capacity. Many, indeed, are working overtime. Employment is on a high level. Our transportation companies report a large volume of business. The retail trade is brisk. Money is plentiful and a buoyant spirit prevails." Three years later Robb v/as out of office and the new Conservative prime minister, R. B. Bennett, had to call an emergency session of parliament to deal with the grave unemployment situation. The chief effects of the Depression on Canadian literature were to slow down its production and to turn the writers' attention towards problems of social and economic injustice. The Canadian publishing industry had scarcely existed before 1920—only 26 Canadian books were published in 1917, 43 in

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THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION

1918, and 70 in 1919—but during the 1920's it had grown with almost incredible rapidity. Now retrenchment was the order of the day. Several firms, and notably one of the most ambitious and experimental, Graphic Press of Ottawa, went bankrupt early in the 1930's; others cut back their lists and survived only by acting as agents for foreign houses. Even established Canadian writers such as Morley Callaghan and Frederick Philip Grove found it increasingly hard to get their books published, and new writers could scarcely get a hearing at all. For example, the young Montreal poets who had made their debuts in the magazines in the 1920's should have been publishing their first books in the 1930's, whereas in fact it was not until the 1940's that their first books appeared. Magazines were similarly hampered by the Depression. The only new literary magazines to appear in the decade were sponsored publications which did not have to make ends meet: the University of Toronto Quarterly, initiated by the University in 1931, and the Canadian Poetry Magazine, founded by the Canadian Authors' Association in 1936. One or two left-wing magazines made brief appearances—Masses (1932-34) and New Frontier (1936-37)—but in spite of their proletarian sympathies they could only survive for a few issues. Even the Canadian Forum encountered a series of financial crises, and at one point survived only by virtue of handing itself over to the sponsorship of the publishing house of J. M. Dent and Sons. The literary nationalism of the twenties began to evaporate in the dry atmosphere of the thirties. C. S. Ritchie, in a 1932 article in the Forum entitled "On Coming Home," noted the changes five years had wrought: "The tempo of Canadian life and thought has changed. . . . When I left Canada the country was flushed with prosperity. Today . . . the national mood is one of disillusionment . . . an increasing indifference to the old form of flag-waving nationalism." The disillusionment was particularly acute in relation to our literature. The social and economic crisis of the early thirties suddenly made people realize that our much-vaunted literature had virtually nothing to say on social and economic questions. Reviewing V. L. Parrington's Main Currents of American Thought in the July 1931 issue of the Forum, F. H. Underhill wrote: "The reading of a book such as this is a depressing experience for a Canadian. It makes him realize the awful intellectual and emotional poverty of our Canadian civilization. A country's literature should make it conscious of the social forces which determine its destiny. But our literature since 1867 displays only a Boeotian placidity. We shall never produce a Parrington because we have not produced the literature for him to interpret." The record of the thirties bore out Underhill's pessimistic prediction. No histories of Canadian literature were published in the decade, there were almost no reprints of Canadian classics, and the only monograph on a

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Canadian writer was James Cappon's Bliss Carman (1930), which was really a relic of the twenties. Only a few anthologies appeared to sustain the taste for Canadian writing: Nathaniel A. Benson's Modern Canadian Poetry (1930), Bliss Carman's and Lome Pierce's Our Canadian Literature (1935), New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (1936), Ethel Hume Bennett's New Harvesting (1938), and Alan Creighton's and Hilda M. Ridley's A New Canadian Anthology (1938). Perhaps the most significant of these anthologies was New Provinces: edited by F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith, it brought together for the first time the work of the best of the new Canadian poets, Pratt, Finch, Smith, Scott, and Klein. The publication of these anthologies, however, makes apparent the persistence of literary nationalism in spite of all the obstacles which now lay in its path. There were other indications that the trend might be slowed down but not halted. The best sustained piece of Canadian literary criticism to appear up to its time was W. E. Collin's brilliant group of essays on Canadian poetry, The White Savannahs (1936). In the same year the University of Toronto Quarterly began its series of annual reviews of Canadian literature, "Letters in Canada," providing for the first time a systematic, intelligent appraisal of Canadian books of all types. The introduction to the first issue of this survey noted that "there is no annual publication devoted to the cultural and literary life of the Dominion; no bibliography of books and articles on this subject, and no account done in Canada in a given year, in the different departments of writing, creative and critical. This twofold need the Quarterly seeks to supply." It then made a statement which marked an important breakthrough in the campaign to make Canadian literature academically respectable: "It will not be denied that letters in Canada is a legitimate and important subject of inquiry, and one in which many Canadian readers, and some outside Canada, are interested." The year 1936 also saw the institution of the Governor-General's Literary Awards, which provided medals for the best book each year in each of several categories. Another positive development was the establishment of a national broadcasting system in 1932: it was not long before the C.B.C. was sponsoring lectures on Canadian literature (Canadian Literature Today, edited by E. K. Brown, 1938) and broadcasting Canadian poems and short stories. Canadian literature, then, survived the Depression, if only on a modest scale in comparison with the lavish expansiveness of the twenties. But the Depression changed its direction as well as its scale. Poets and prose writers alike turned away from the technical experimentation of the twenties towards the exploration of social and economic themes. The consciousness of the need for new directions is clearly apparent in the apologetic preface to New Provinces: ". . .by the end of the last decade the modernist movement was

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frustrated for want of direction. In this, poetry was reflecting the aimlessness of its social environment. In confronting the world with the need to restore order out of social chaos, the economic depression has released human energies by giving them positive direction. . . . The poems in this collection were written for the most part when new techniques were on trial and when the need for a new direction was more apparent than what that direction would be." The bread lines, the work camps, the growing threat of a second world war—these things could be ignored by writers for the popular magazines, perhaps, but not by anyone of genuine sensibility. E. J. Pratt turned from his narratives of heroism at sea to the ironies of warfare in The Fable of the Goats (1937); F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, and even the relatively non-political A. J. M. Smith began to write poems attacking the injustices of the capitalist system and promoting socialist ideals; Dorothy Livesay deserted her early imagism for bitter portrayals of the plight of the workers; Anne Marriott, in The Wind Our Enemy (1939), depicted the sufferings of the prairie farmers whose economic troubles had been compounded by the dust storms of the mid-thirties. The novelists, strangely enough, were slower to react to the new conditions, but the economic conditions of the time figured prominently in Claudius Gregory's Forgotten Men (1933), Morley Callaghan's They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935), and Irene Baird's Waste Heritage (1939). The Second World War had much the same effect on Canada as had the First: it accelerated Canadian industrial development, produced a ferment of new ideas, and strengthened Canada's confidence in herself. The return of prosperity made possible the publication of many more books, and poets such as Klein, Smith, and Scott, and a large group of new poets and novelists, soon saw their work in print. There was a renewed sense of national purpose resulting from the virtual unanimity with which Canadians opposed Hitlerism and supported the joint efforts of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. The war quickened the process of social change: the Rowell-Sirois Report on Dominion-Provincial Relations, published in 1940, finally clarified the role of the federal authority in matters of social security; the Beveridge Report in Britain strengthened Canadian determination to establish the welfare state; there was much debate concerning the type of world organization which must follow the war and seek to preclude its repetition. There was a general shift to the left hi Canadian political thinking, an almost general acceptance of some form of collectivism. And once again the massive Canadian contribution to the Allied war effort made Canadians determined to play a strong and independent part in the peace. This time, however, the threat to Canada's independence came not from Britain, but from the United States. It was not a political but an economic and cultural dependence that was threatened, and the effort to escape this dependence was to be a major preoccupation of Canada throughout the forties, fifties and sixties.

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Again the general excitement fostered the development of new magazines, and the new magazines welcomed new writers. In far-off British Columbia, Alan Crawley in 1941 established the poetry magazine Contemporary Verse, thus initiating a trend which was soon to become significant: the decentralization of Canadian letters. Throughout the first three decades of the century, Toronto had remained the centre of literary activity in Canada, with Montreal as its only rival. In the forties and fifties, however, Toronto's dominance was challenged, in spite of the continued presence there of the Canadian Forum and most of the publishing houses. The most lively magazines of the war and post-war years were published in Montreal: Preview and First Statement, both of which were issued there between 1942 and 1945, and Northern Review, their joint successor, which was published there from 1946 to 1956. (Northern Review's, last few issues were published in Toronto, where its editor, John Sutherland, became a student at St. Michael's College.) To re-read Preview and First Statement is to recapture something of the excitement of those war years in Canadian literary circles. Preview began in March 1942 as a mimeographed bulletin issued by five writers who had "formed themselves into a group for the purpose of critical discussion and criticism": F. R. Scott, Margaret Day, Bruce Ruddick, Patrick Anderson, and Neufville Shaw. Militant engagement was the keynote of their opening editorial: "All anti-fascists, we feel that the existence of a war between democratic culture and the paralysing forces of dictatorship only intensifies the writer's obligation to work. Now, more than ever, creative and experimental writing must be kept alive and there must be no retreat from the intellectual frontier. . . . The poets among us look forward, perhaps optimistically, to a possible fusion between the lyric and didactic elements in modern verse, a combination of vivid, arresting imagery and the capacity to sing with social content and criticism." P. K. Page and A. M. Klein were soon added to the group, but the dominant influence from first to last was Patrick Anderson, whose arrival in Montreal in 1940 from England via New York was precisely the catalyst needed to revive the literary activity which had begun so promisingly in the twenties but gradually slowed down in the thirties. The new movement carried on the cosmopolitan interests of the original Montreal Group, but added a new element of socialist commitment. It was the cosmopolitanism of the Preview group which irked the founders of First Statement: John Sutherland, Irving Lay ton, and Louis Dudek. Sutherland, who was as dominant in this group as was Anderson in the other, argued that Preview's alleged cosmopolitanism was just another name for colonialism: "a poet preaching politics in the guise of Auden may be just as colonial as a member of the C.A.A. praising Britain in the metres of Tennyson." What Sutherland wanted was "a poetry that has stopped being a parasite on other literatures and has had the courage to decide its own problems in its own way." The poems and stories that Sutherland published

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THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION

in First Statement were less metaphysical and difficult in style than those selected by Anderson for Preview, were more direct reflections of the immediate Canadian scene, spoke a plainer and more colloquial language. The two groups temporarily merged to form the editorial board of Northern Review in 1945, but the alliance was short-lived. A bitter review of Robert Finch's poems by Sutherland led most of the Preview groups to resign. Sutherland carried his second magazine on for over a decade, but he gradually shifted its emphasis away from social realism towards Catholic apologetics. His own dogmatic but stimulating editorials, aggressively Marxist in the early years and aggressively Catholic in the later years, did more than anything else to make Northern Review the most provocative Canadian magazine of its period. There were other magazines, however, which played a significant part in these years. A group of poets and critics at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton sought to keep alive the literary tradition established there by Bliss Carman and Charles G. D. Roberts by founding The Fiddlehead in 1945. Like Preview and First Statement, it began as a mimeographed bulletin of the group, but gradually expanded its operations. The first step was to accept outside contributions; it then adopted a printed format; and eventually it began to print short stories and book reviews as well as poems. It has survived now for almost two decades, maintaining in its editorial policy the eclectic point of view with which it began. A much more ambitious but short-lived foundation was Here and Now, which was published in Toronto from 1947 to 1949. Its first editorial was another expression of Canadian literary nationalism: "For too long our artists and writers have been forced either to emigrate or to have their work produced elsewhere. Every country takes the greatest pains to prevent its money from going abroad, but too little care is taken in Canada to keep our brains and our writing at home." Here and Now appeared in a handsome format and was a fine example of layout and typography, but it had no clear editorial policy and, unlike the Montreal magazines and The Fiddlehead, was not the nucleus of a group of young writers. Its early demise, then, was not surprising. As in the twenties, there were also signs of literary awakening in the anthologies and literary histories that appeared in the forties. The two most influential books in these categories appeared almost simultaneously in 1943: A. J. M. Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry and E. K. Brown's On Canadian Poetry. The joint appearance of these books, produced by Canadians who were both to hold important chairs of English literature in the United States, was the final event in the long-drawn-out campaign to make Canadian literature academically respectable. They were distinct improvements over their analogues in the twenties: Smith's anthology was discriminat-

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ing in its selections and scholarly in its introductions and annotations, and Brown's critical history substituted something of Arnold's detachment for the perfervid patriotism of books such as Highways of Canadian Literature. And both Smith and Brown had a definite point of view which stimulated debate: Smith's obvious preference for metaphysical verse and for the cosmopolitan tradition provoked John Sutherland to edit Other Canadians (1947), and Irving Lay ton and Louis Dudek to produce Canadian Poems 1850-1952 (1952), while Brown's high estimate of Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott and virtual dismissal of Carman and Roberts initiated a whole series of critical re-appraisals of these poets of the Confederation group. Smith's anthology also had the effect of suggesting Desmond Pacey's Book of Canadian Stories (1947), in which he sought to do for Canadian short fiction what Smith had done for Canadian poetry. Other important anthologies of this period were Ralph Gustafson's Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Pelican 1942) and Canadian Accent (1944), a book of Canadian prose, and Ronald Hambleton's Unit of Five (1944), which provided the first substantial sampling of the poetry of P. K. Page, Louis Dudek, James Wreford, Raymond Souster, and Ronald Hambleton. The period also saw a revival of interest in monographs on Canadian writers: Carl F. Klinck's Wilfred Campbell appeared in 1942, Elsie Pomeroy's Sir Charles G. D. Roberts in 1943, Desmond Pacey's Frederick Philip Grove in 1945. This was also a period of intense activity in the writing of Canadian political and social history. Morden H. Long's History of the Canadian People appeared in 1943, Donald G. Creighton's Dominion of the North in 1944, and A. R. M. Lower's Colony to Nation in 1946, and these were only the three most striking books of the many that were published in the decade. The novel, as usual, lagged behind. Callaghan produced only one weak novel in the forties, Grove died in 1948., and Mazo de la Roche had settled down to the endless multiplication of the Jalna series. Hugh MacLennan was the only new novelist to produce a significant volume of work in the decade, and the nationalistic emphasis of his novels was the most interesting expression in fiction of the prevailing spirit of the period. First novels by Sinclair Ross, W. O. Mitchell, Hugh Garner, Earle Birney, Joyce Marshall, Henry Kreisel, Malcolm Lowry, and Ethel Wilson provided evidence, however, that even in fiction a new era of creativity was beginning. Canadian drama, which had shown a few stirrings of life in the twenties and then relapsed into inactivity, also showed renewed signs of life in the forties. Gwen Pharis Ringwood wrote her plays of prairie life, and a whole school of radio dramatists came into existence as the result of the challenge offered by Andrew Allan's C.B.C. Stage series. The C.B.C., indeed, was playing an increasingly important part in the cultural life of the nation. So too was another public enterprise, the National

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Film Board, established under the dynamic leadership of John Grierson in 1939. But the most ambitious and conscious effort to foster Canadian culture by a public agency was the establishment in 1949 of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. The establishment of this commission was the most tangible evidence of Canada's determination to resist the cultural domination of the United States and to develop an indigenous art and literature. The Order-in-Council stated: That it is desirable that the Canadian people should know as much as possible about their country, its history and traditions, and about their national life and common achievements; That it is in the national interest to give encouragement to institutions which express national feeling, promote common understanding and add to the variety and richness of Canadian life, rural as well as urban; That there exist already certain Federal agencies and activities which contribute to these ends . . . and That it is desirable that an examination be conducted into such agencies and activities, with a view to recommending their most effective conduct in the national interest. . . .

In most other countries of the Western world, such an Order-in-Council would have been commonplace; but in Canada, where, except for the Province of Quebec, an attitude of public laissez-faire in relation to the arts was long established, it was revolutionary in its implications. For the first time there was open, legal recognition of the necessity of a Canadian culture. For two years the Commission, under the able chairmanship of Vincent Massey, held hearings throughout Canada. Never before had the arts in Canada been the subject of such animated and sustained debate. And when the Report of the Commission appeared in 1951 it provided a testament of faith in Canada's independent cultural destiny: American influences on Canadian life to say the least are impressive. There should be no thought of interfering with the liberty of all Canadians to enjoy them. Cultural exchanges are excellent in themselves. . . . It cannot be denied, however, that a vast and disproportionate amount of material coming from a single alien source may stifle rather than stimulate our own creative effort; and, passively accepted without any standard of comparison, thus may weaken critical faculties. We are now spending millions to maintain a national independence which would be nothing but an empty shell without a vigorous and distinctive cultural life. . . . If we have properly understood what we have been told, the Canadian writer suffers from the fact that he is not sufficiently recognized in our national life, that his work is not considered necessary to the life of his country; and it is this isolation which prevents his making his full contribution. It seems, therefore, to be

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necessary to find some way of helping our Canadian writers to become an integral part of their environment and, at the same time, to give them a sense of their importance in this environment. . . . The work with which we have been entrusted is concerned with nothing less than the spiritual foundations of our national life. Canadian achievement in every field depends mainly on the quality of the Canadian mind and spirit. This quality is determined by what Canadians think, and think about; by the books they read, the pictures they see and the programmes they hear. These things, whether we call them arts and letters or use other words to describe them, we believe to lie at the roots of our life as a nation. . . . Our military defences must be made secure; but our cultural defences equally demand national attention; the two cannot be separated.

The Report went on to recommend the immediate establishment of a National Library and of "the Canada Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, Letters, Humanities and Social Sciences to stimulate and to help voluntary organizations within these fields, to foster Canada's cultural relations abroad, to perform the functions of a national commission for UNESCO, and to devise and administer a system of scholarships." The Report of the Massey Commission was in large measure the culmination of the cultural nationalism of the forties, but the fact that its recommendations were implemented well on in the fifties—the National Library was instituted in 1953, the Canada Council in 1957—reminds us that there was no sharp break between the two decades. If the renaissance of the forties had followed the pattern of the other two previous Canadian awakenings— those of the 1890's and the 1920's—it would have slowed down in the fifties. The encouraging thing was that it did not: new magazines, new writers, and new literary movements appeared as frequently in the new decade as in the old. The events of the fifties at home and abroad, however, did have something of the same chastening effect on Canadian enthusiasm as had the Depression and threat of war in the thirties. The outbreak of the Korean War, the continuation of the Cold War with Russia, the spread of McCarthy's witchhunt in the United States, the constant threat of annihilation in an atomic war, growing tension between the provincial and federal governments in Canada and between the English and French language groups: all these developments made Canadians uneasy and apprehensive throughout the decade. But beneath all the surface disturbances, the ground-swell of cultural nationalism continued to roll. Never before had there been so many outlets for Canadian writers. The Canadian Forum, the Fiddlehead, and the three great university quarterlies continued and indeed strengthened their positions; Contact was established in 1952 in Toronto, CIV/n in 1953 in Montreal, Tamarack Review in 1956

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in Toronto, Delta in 1957 in Montreal, Waterloo Review in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1958 and Prism in 1959 in Vancouver. Some of these magazines were short-lived, but as they died others sprang up to take their places. Alphabet began publication in London and Cataract in Montreal in 1960, Evidence in Toronto and Tish in Vancouver in 1961, Edge in Edmonton in 1963 and Catapult in Montreal in 1964. The existence of these magazines was often made possible by grants from the Canada Council; their subscription lists usually ran in the hundreds rather than the thousands; but they provided invaluable opportunities for young writers to try their wings. The new writers were not slow in appearing. Poets especially appeared in almost uncountable numbers: James Reaney and Jay Macpherson, Eli Mandel and Wilfred Watson, Daryl Hine and Leonard Cohen, Fred Cogswell, Elizabeth Brewster and Alden Nowlan, Margaret Avison and Anne Wilkinson, Alfred Purdy and Milton Acorn, Ronald Bates and D. G. Jones, Henry Moscovitch and George Ellenbogan, Phyllis Webb and Sylvia Bernard, George Bowering and Frank Davey. All of these poets, and a number of others who might be mentioned, published at least one volume of good or promising poetry in the decade, and when their books were added to those of the holdovers from the previous decades—E. J. Pratt, F. R. Scott, A. J. M. Smith, P. K. Page, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, Roy Daniells, Robert Finch, Dorothy Livesay, Earle Birney, and A. G. Bailey— the total volume of production was astonishingly large. The new novelists and short-story writers were less numerous, but there was a new sophistication both of style and subject-matter in the fiction of Ethel Wilson, Robertson Davies, David Walker, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, Ernest Buckler, Adele Wiseman, John Marlyn, Sheila Watson, Charles E. Israel, Norman Levine, Jack Ludwig, and Hugh Hood. History and biography also continued to flourish, such distinguished writers as Creighton and Lower being joined by W. L. Morton, R. M. Dawson, William Kilbourn, G. F. G. Stanley, C. P. Stacey, J. M. S. Careless, and F. H. Underbill. The academic study of Canadian literature also continued in the fifties and sixties. The establishment of the quarterly magazine, Canadian Literature, at the University of British Columbia in 1959 was proof of the vitality of this new academic discipline: sceptics who wondered how long such a venture could survive have been confounded by the succession of interesting issues which its editor, George Woodcock, produces year after year. A. J. M. Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry went into its third edition in 1957, and Pacey's Book of Canadian Stories into its fourth edition in 1961. Other successful anthologies in the decade were Earle Birney's Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry (1953), Malcolm Ross's Our Sense of Identity (1954) and C. F. Klinck's and R. E. Walters' Canadian Anthology (1955). Several books appeared which sought to appraise the developments of the arts in general or

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of literature in particular: Pacey's Creative Writing in Canada (1952) and Ten Canadian Poets (1958), Julian Park's The Culture of Contemporary Canada (1957), and Malcolm Ross's The Arts in Canada (1958). Had the struggle to create a national literature in Canada finally been won? Much had been accomplished in the forty years since 1920, but much still remained to do. On the positive side, a group of magazines had been established which for the first time offered the Canadian writer a wide choice of outlets for his wares; a reading public had finally been built up large enough to warrant the publication of a Canadian book for the domestic market; by the Report of the Massey Commission and the establishment of the Canada Council the federal government had formally recognized the importance of a national culture; a network of national associations and organizations—the National Library, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Film Board, the Canadian Library Association, to name but a few—had been flung across the provinces to bind them into a nation; Canadian literature had established itself as a respectable academic discipline; a body of critics had been assembled who were ready and able to appraise Canadian writing by responsible and informed standards; literary activity in all the major forms except drama was intense and of a worthy standard. Above all, there was no doubt that the nation now did have at least a dawning sense of identity: the inhabitant of Fredericton, New Brunswick, felt closer to the inhabitant of far-off Vancouver, British Columbia, than to the inhabitant of nearby Augusta, Maine. But all was not well. Just as in the political sphere Canadian problems of the twenties remained problems in the sixties—the problems of federalprovincial relations, French-English relations, and of Canada's dependence on an external power—so did the problems remain in the cultural sphere. Canada still had no writer of the first rank by world standards, was still unsure whether her writers should seek to be cosmopolitan or to develop an indigenous tradition, was still prone either to under-rate Canadian books because they were not reviewed hi the fashionable English or American periodicals or to over-rate them because they were our own, still alternated between truculent cultural self-assertion and whining cultural self-pity. The chapters which follow should do something to check this manic-depressive cycle, for they seek neither to boost nor to bust but merely and calmly to record and appraise. For, in the words of St. Augustine quoted as epigraph to the Massey Report, "a nation is an association of reasonable beings united in a peaceful sharing of the things they cherish; therefore, to determine the quality of a nation, you must consider what those things are."

2. Canadian History and Social Sciences (1920-1960)

I. The Writing of Canadian History WILLIAM KILBOURN Canadian historians have not been overly concerned with the art of history. In the period since 1920 they have been more interested in the content than in the form and expression of their work. The best of them have been more successful at analysis and synthesis than narrative, and in the study of determining forces and general trends than in the evocation of particular times and places and men. They have been primarily engaged in the enormous task of searching out and exploring vast reaches of source material, in order to make a usable map of Canadian history. In the universities their natural working partners and allies have been political scientists and economic historians and sociologists rather than students of language and literature. As a result, over the past two generations, an impressive body of periodical literature, monographs, and general histories has accumulated. In spite of the large areas still to be charted and the lack of many significant contributions outside the Canadian field, the work of Canadian historians has been comparable in professional competence with the best history written elsewhere. Like most contemporary history writing, however, it has left a good deal to be desired as literature. It has prompted one observer to comment that most Canadian histories are two or three drafts from completion, and another to remark that we have had too much accurate Canadian history and too little accurate Canadian imagination. There have been only a handful of historians, most notably Frank Underhill and Arthur Lower, whose incisive wit and trenchant powers of analysis have given their work a polish and readability that might justify their inclusion in a list of the best prose writers of their times. There has been only one Canadian historian, Donald Creighton, whose conscious literary craftsmanship, thorough scholarship, and passionate commitment to a few great themes, have produced work approaching the nobility and the grandeur of a Parkman or a Macaulay. Historians of the first rank, like Wagnerian tenors or concert cellists, are

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rare—rarer at any rate than great novelists or lyric poets. The technical requirements, the sheer quantity of fact to be surveyed and sifted, are apt to turn creative writers to other forms of art than history. Most history if it is to get done accurately at all is not in the twentieth century likely to be great literature. The scarcity of literary craftsmen among Canadian historians, however, must not obscure the central significance of their work for the literature of ideas. The contribution of historians to the understanding of modern Canada and the shaping of a Canadian consciousness is a major one. In the first place, their subject is perhaps the last of the amateur disciplines m the universities, and the only one whose practice is presided over by a muse. Most of their writing has been free of technical language, and accessible to the public in a way that the work of economists and scientists, philosophers and literary critics, has not. Canadian historians have always enjoyed a small but significant educated audience of public servants and leaders in the professional and business communities. It is no accident that many of Canada's diplomats have also been historians. Her first native governor-general and her only prime minister well known abroad began their careers teaching history at the University of Toronto. One historian, Frank Underbill, was a founding father of a national political party, and the concept of NATO emerged from the work of another, J. B. Brebner (1895-1957) North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain (1945). Since 1945 a minor boom in the publishing industry has brought forth a harvest of history books written for a wider public, as publishers competed to head their trade lists every year with several new items of Canadiana. Such has been the preoccupation with the question of Canada itself and with a search for a national identity in a nation where it does not exist in as palpable and obvious a way as in Europe and the United States that one is sometimes left with the odd sensation that Canada is nothing but a figment of the historical imagination, a concept nurtured in the minds of a small minority of Canadian leaders in each generation, aided and abetted by a few historians. In the years immediately after the First World War, Canada acquired the last major attributes of nationhood. She sent her first diplomatic representatives abroad. She gained control of her own foreign policy. As a result of Canadian initiative, dominion status was formally defined at the Imperial Conference of 1926 and confirmed in the Statute of Westminster in 1931. She had entered the war as a self-governing colony; she emerged, hi selfregard at least, a nation. Most of the historians who began their careers during the decade after the war were preoccupied with the development and meaning of Canada's new constitutional position. Unlike their more colonially minded predecessors,

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they were not content to see Canada's history as merely part of the expansion of England, the story of a frontier and the Empire's rivalry with the United States for the control of North America. But they were thoroughly British rather than American in their assumptions and approach. Their attitude was a little like Canada's position at Versailles, where she was present and voting both by herself and as part of the British Empire delegation. Notable members of this group of historians were the constitutional lawyer, W. P. M. Kennedy (1879-1963), the historian of Confederation Reginald Trotter (1888-1951), and O. D. Skelton (1878-1941), later to be Under Secretary of State for External Affairs and the biographer in 1921 of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the prime minister who had set Canada's course in the direction of dominion status. Their work was solid, useful, and uninspiring. Perhaps the books of greatest literary interest from among this group are Chester New's definitive biography of Lord Durham (1929) and the lively sketches by William Smith (1859-1932) of The Political Leaders of Upper Canada (1931). Another important historian of the same generation is W. Stewart Wallace. Librarian and editor, collector of Canadiana and author of a dictionary of Canadian biography, his writing on a wide variety of local and national subjects spans half a century. His article of 1920 in the first volume of the Canadian Historical Review, of which he was original editor, was a sign of a new nationalism in Canadian historiography. The most original of the political nationalists, however, as well as the most inspired and the most extreme, was Chester Martin (1882-1958), a scholar from Manitoba who moved east in 1929 to be head of the University of Toronto's History Department until his retirement over twenty years later. Although the synthesis of his life's work, The Foundations of Canadian Nationhood, did not appear until 1954, it was the expression of attitudes formed in the twenties, when he had already begun to publish the earliest of his articles and books about British North America. Martin wrote with an unsophisticated elegance that reminds one strongly of the acute but courtly country manner of his character and presence. His writing is suffused with the aroma of freshly harvested source material: he was in the habit of strewing his work with bits and pieces of old despatches and excerpts from letters and papers ("Shirley's Great Plan"; "the sheet anchor of my policy"; "the last best West"), some of which keep recurring with the frequency and insistency of leit-motivs. None of his work makes easy reading. But Martin's deep piety towards his subject-matter, grounded on intimate knowledge and strong conviction, ultimately compels the persevering reader to respect and fascination. From first to last Martin's over-arching vision was one of Empire. Through the history of British North America in the mid-eighteenth century down to the settlement of the Canadian West in the early twentieth, he pursued and marked out the origins of the process by which the world's greatest empire transformed itself into a community of self-governing nations. It was the most

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successful peaceful solution to the problem of local freedom and imperial authority that the world had seen, and in its achievement Canada played a leading role. As in the late Roman Empire, apotheosized splendidly in the silver poetry of Spanish Prudentius and Egyptian Claudian, it was often provincials who loved and understood the Empire best. A few British North American colonial leaders, guiding and working with a rare group of enlightened and concerned British governors and politicians from the age of Murray and Burke to that of Durham and Elgin and Grey, were the true prophets, the men who saw within the British parliamentry tradition the essential secret of what was to become the Commonwealth. Like his heroes Howe and Lafontaine, old Dr. Baldwin and his son Robert, with whose innermost political passions he identified so completely, Martin was impatient with Tories and Republicans alike, and hence with the majority of Britons and North Americans who disliked or did not understand British political traditions or care enough about them to apply them to the Empire. Martin's attack on the British Conservative historian Sir Reginald Coupland who had somewhat glibly described the Quebec Act as a great act of statesmanship, reminds one of a nineteenth century Canadian politician doggedly explaining to some unenlightened governor or colonial secretary the essence of parliamentary government and the need to practise it in Canada. But Martin's deepest aversion was from those who saw an answer in violence and revolution. He was dedicated to a position of moderation with the single-mindedness though not the unbalance of a fanatic. There is a stubborn and passionate pride in the opening assertion of his master work: "The political traditions culminating in Canadian nationhood are now the oldest in the American hemisphere— the only political traditions unbroken by a revolution or civil war." Martin, however, was not writing a chapter in some smoothly developing success story. He was not indulging in any smug Whiggish justification of the status quo. His work was very much an account of loss and defeat, the greatest at the beginning; it was a cry for what might have been. He was never quite reconciled to the loss of the thirteen colonies. He harked back with "a melancholy interest" and longing to the undivided North America of the mideighteenth century, when Benjamin Franklin called the British Empire the greatest political structure that human wisdom and freedom had ever yet erected, and dared to predict "that the foundations of [its] future grandeur and stability . . . lie rn America." When the men of moderation were defeated and the British and American extremists won the day, it was left to the small and far from brilliant northern provinces to perpetuate parliamentary traditions and evolve a new type of nationhood in America. Through the long struggle of the next century and a half there was for them no easy success and usually repeated failure. Canadian history . . . has been a tough and intractable business. Little of it falls into neat patterns against the background of the universe. Much of it has been a stolid

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and phlegmatic struggle against heavy odds. Denied the assurance of a "manifest destiny" . . . [Canadians] were almost invariably competing with superior resources. They dealt, as a rule, with forces beyond their control, in many cases the byproducts of other lands. "Courage in adversity," the motto of the old Nor'Westers, remained a stark national necessity for the Canadian brigades that shot the rapids and toiled across the portages of their stormy history. . . . Few of the makers of Canada lived to see what they had helped to make. . . . A "goodly company" of them, whatever their achievement for posterity, never emerged from the dust and heat of conflict. (P. 514)

As with the rest of his generation of historians, Martin's interests, even when he was writing of commerce or settlement, were overwhelmingly political. He was concerned with men's conscious purposes, with a bending of will and intellect to "prodigies of statesmanship" in the face of chance and circumstances, rather than with the determining forces that might shape both man and circumstance. In his last work he went so far as to dismiss economic factors such as "Western oil, Quebec iron, the St. Lawrence seaway, prolific industrial expansion," as "the more specious aspects of nationhood." Canada itself he saw less as a pattern of trade routes and communities and cultures than as "a giant's causeway of provinces" whose "organization" completed the basic structure of nationhood. Before Martin and the political nationalists had reached the peak of their influence between the two world wars, other historians appeared whose premises and interests were radically different. Without rejecting the nationalists' findings, which proved to be of permanent value so far as they went, these historians simply turned away from the study of the formal development of institutions and the achievement of self-government to other questions. That study had been inspired in part by optimistic Victorian beliefs about human nature in politics which the younger generation of historians did not accept. They were more impressed with Charles Beard's economic interpretation of the American Constitution than the political nationalists had been. They were sympathetic to the approach of such new disciplines as anthropology and the sociology of ideas. They were generally influenced more by American than by British scholars. They were impelled by the same concern to study the whole of the human past, the details of everyday life of all classes of men, which had led John Dewey's colleague, James Harvey Robinson, to proclaim the gospel of the new history which won such widespread allegiance in the American graduate schools. If any further influence was needed to move Canadian historiography towards an examination of the social and economic basis of politics and ideas, the great depression supplied it. The new historians in Canada have been called the Environmentalists. The name rightly suggests that the landscape played an even greater part hi their work, just as hi Canadian painting of the period, than it did in that of their American contemporaries. Since the 1930's, geographical determinants have been central to two prevailing interpretations of Canadian history.

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The first interpretation emphasized the vertical connections north and south between different Canadian regions and their American counterparts just across the border. This interpretation was applied and used more thoroughly during the 1930's than it was later. But it did establish once and for all that in the matter of class distinction and in much of the spirit and practice of political democracy, religion, and education, Canadian history has shown the development not of a British but of a North American society. This North American historical view tended to minimize the differences between Canada and the United States. Its proponents studied the migrations of people and customs and ideas back and forth across the unobstructed border. Their sympathies lay with the popular movements of social protest generated near the frontiers of settlement and directed against the remnants of imperial rule embodied in chateau clique, family compact, or mercantile aristocracy. They owed much to the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis that the vital elements of American society came from the forests and fields of the frontier. Turner's influence was reflected in two large sets of studies—one of Canadian frontiers of settlement and the other of Canadian-American relations —begun during the 1930's by scholars on both sides of the border with American foundation support. Canadian members of this North American school of interpretation have included A. S. Morton (1870-1945) and Fred Landon, and more recently the sociologist S. D. Clark. Gerald Craig's post-war work on early Upper Canada as an extension of the American frontier has shown how valid that approach can continue to be. Several leading historians who were attracted to the frontier approach during the 1930's, however, soon tempered or combined it with another interpretation of Canadian history. Without denying their frontier and democratic sympathies, Frank Underbill, Arthur Lower, and A. L. Burt explored in their work the power and influence of metropolitan centres in the development of Canada. The other Environmentalist view of Canadian history was intimately related but not limited to the idea of metropolitan influence. This view stems primarily from the work of Harold Innis (1894-1952), particularly his study of The Fur Trade in Canada published in 1930, and from Innis's younger colleague and biographer, Donald Creighton, whose first major work, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, was published in 1937. These two men, sometimes named Laurentians after the continental shield and the great river they celebrated in their writing, offered a distinctively Canadian interpretation of their nation's history. For them, the North American frontier approach left too much of Canada's peculiar development unexplained. It made of Canadian history a pale and laggardly imitation of American history. They believed that Canada was more than the artificial product of imperial policy and political circumstance. The acts of will and imagination which created and sustained the dominion were working with a transcontinental pattern inherent in the North American

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environment. Canada existed not in spite of geography but because of it. Canada was a creature of the early trade routes running east and west from the metropolitan centres of Europe and eastern Canada and along the great river systems of the St. Lawrence, the Saskatchewan, and the Mackenzie. After Confederation, the Canadian Pacific Railway recaptured through a new medium of transport the older Canadian economic unity of the fur trade. It was a unity which Canadians projected into the twentieth century by many new links of transport and communication, of which perhaps the most important was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. According to this interpretation, for the first three centuries and more Canada's history was largely the story of a hinterland exploited for a succession of staple products—fish, fur, timber, and wheat. In return, from the centres of cultivation in Europe and the few densely peopled river valleys of southern Canada came the ideas and the organizing power, the capital and the culture, that the hinterland needed in order to survive. Canada's extreme climate, difficult topography, and sparse settlement made her extraordinarily dependent on her own metropolitan centres and those of Europe for the necessities as well as the amenities of civilized life. This fact alone has made her radically different from the United States. It helps explain the conservatism and lack of a revolutionary tradition in Canada. In adopting the Laurentian view, historians have contrasted the American wild west with the Canadian frontiers that have been successfully planned and ordered by government and large private corporations in advance of settlement. Since the mid-nineteenth century Western Canada has been the domain of priest and mounted policeman, railway agent and branch bank manager, rather than that of sheriff's posse and desperado and lonely pioneer. From the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670 to that of the dozens of great crown corporations of twentieth-century Canada, the large-scale and carefully planned enterprise, dominating its field and aided by government regulation and support, has been typical of Canadian development. To the outlying regions, this domination by central Canada has often made Confederation seem an instrument of injustice. No historian has expressed that view more eloquently than William Morton, a Western conservative whose first book The Progressive Party in Canada (1950) was a sympathetic study of a protest movement. Even so, Morton in his own way accepted the Laurentian viewpoint, and has gone even further than Innis and Creighton in asserting the uniqueness of Canada as a northern land, and in demonstrating a particular kind of conservatism inherent in its traditions. In The Canadian Identity (1961) Morton has pointed out that Canada in contrast to the United States is a monarchy founded on the principle of allegiance rather than social contract and on the organic growth of tradition rather than by an explicit act of reason or assertion of revolutionary will. The British North America Act

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sets up the objectives of peace, order, and good government rather than those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. One of the most fundamental but least obvious differences between Canada and the United States is that for Canadians the fact and the principle of authority have been established prior to the fact and principle of freedom. In a country of "economic hazard, external dependence and plural culture," Morton concludes, government has needed to possess an objective life of its own (The Canadian Identity, p. 111). While not all Canadian historians would necessarily accept Morton's development of it in the 1960's, the Laurentian thesis was certainly dominant during the forties and fifties. No thoroughly worked out alternative to it emerged as a serious rival. A brilliant definitive article by J. M. S. Careless, "Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History" (Canadian Historical Review, March, 1954) clearly established that the idea of Canada as the creature of metropolitan planning and control, a society whose development was radically different from that of the United States, has been central to his generation's understanding of Canadian history. The climate of opinion in the country from 1940 to 1955 was peculiarly attuned to this point of view. Canada's early and heavy involvement in the Second World War and her renewed concern for transatlantic ties with Britain and Europe brought her out of her North American isolation of the inter-war period. Until the revival of the major European nations and the emergence of powerful nations in Asia during the 1950's, this country of sixteen million people was the world's fourth- or fifth-ranking power and even for a time after that she played a role in the United Nations out of keeping with her size. The great expansion of Canadian industrial capacity, the huge increase in the powers of the federal government, and the habit, at least among English-speaking Canadians, of thinking of their country as a single national entity, were all congenial to the transcontinental outlook of the Laurentian view of Canadian history. Further developments took place, however, which were not so easily accommodated to that point of view, and which for many Canadians appeared to call into question the very nature and future viability of the nation itself. It became clearer than ever during the 1950's that the major external metropolitan influence on Canada had become not London but Washington and New York. The Canadian economy and Canadian defence and foreign policy were being more closely integrated with those of the United States, and there was a growing similarity between the two affluent societies. The forces of regionalism and provincial autonomy and the old north-south sectional pull, which had always been a factor in Canadian history, were now balanced by no counterweight other than forces within the nation itself and a determination on the part of Canadians to remain the independent people that history had made of them. In spite of these developments, the historical writing of the 1940's and

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1950's, unprecedented in quantity and often high in quality, was not directed to the discovery or definition of any new theory of Canadian history or even to a major revision of the view expressed by Careless in his 1954 article. It was chiefly involved in two other tasks: first, the work of synthesis and re-presentation in narrative form of recent research, and, secondly, the exploration of topics either entirely untouched before or unreviewed for two or three generations. The first resulted in the appearance of many one-volume histories of Canada, an almost non-existent species during the previous generation. The liveliest and most provocative of these was probably Colony to Nation (1946) by a pioneer of economic and social history in Canada, Arthur Lower. Full of colourful detail, strong opinion, and a caustic wit, its most recurring theme was the confrontation in Canadian history between the predominantly static, catholic, and rural French-speaking community and the predominantly dynamic, Calvinist, and commercial English-speaking community. In contrast to the informality of Lower's prose were the Gibbonian cadences, abstract language, and scrupulous generalization of Canada: A Political and Social History (1947) by a historian of international relations, Edgar Mclnnis, the most complete and balanced of all the one-volume histories. Perhaps closer than either to being a recreation of the past by the art of narrative and the skilful use of source material was Donald Creighton's Dominion of the North (1944). All three of these very different works represented a substantial contribution to Canadian literature. Along with J. M. S. Careless's shorter history, they have been the best known of the one volume works, and in their original and revised versions they have sold widely in Canada and abroad ever since they were first published. Most historical writing of the fifties, however, consisted not of general histories but of the exploration of small specific themes in depth and with a new subtlety. While much of this exploration meant monographs of only marginal relevance to a literary history, the emphasis on small manageable segments of the past, the study of a particular event, place, person, or period of time did make it possible for the historian, if he chose, to re-discover his metier as an artist. It was possible to imitate the dramatist's attempt to realize one or all of the unities of time, place, and action, and each abstract thesis or general trend could be given a local habitation and a name. In no field was there a more obvious need for the practice of the art of history than in that of political biography. In 1948, before a decade of great change, Donald Creighton commented caustically on the state of Canadian writing in this field: Canadian biographies have a formal, official air, as if they had been written out of the materials of a newspaper morgue, or from the resources of a library largely

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composed of Blue Books and Sessional Papers. In all too many cases, the subject remains an important Public Personage . . . dwarfed by the circumstances of his "Times," which are portrayed in great chunks of descriptive material, pitilessly detailed, and among which he drags out an embarrassed and attenuated documentary existence like an insubstantial papier mdche figure made up of old dispatches and newspaper files. It seems difficult for us even to make our characters recognizably different; and as one reads through a small shelf-full of Canadian biographies, one is aware of a growing and uncomfortable sensation that one is reading about one and the same man. Is it possible that, even in Canada, people can actually be so indistinguishably alike? Is there really only one Canadian statesman, whose metamorphoses have merely involved a change of name? Or are all Canadian statesmen simply members of the same family, a spiritual family at any rate, with certain persistent and unchangeable family characteristics, and a distinguished hyphenated surname? Are there really biographies of [Robert] Baldwin, [Sir Francis] Hincks, and [Sir Wilfrid] Laurier, or are these merely lives of Robert ResponsibleGovernment and Francis Responsible-Government, and Wilfrid ResponsibleGovernment? ("Sir John A. Macdonald and Canadian Historians," Canadian Historical Review, xxix, 4.)

The most substantial response to such criticism was Creighton's own twovolume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald (The Young Politician (1952) and The Old Chieftain (1955)), which is discussed below. Although this work had no rival as a literary masterpiece it was accompanied and followed by a great number of historical biographies that changed the picture described in 1948 decisively for the better. Of these there was perhaps only one, J. M. S. Careless's two-volume portrait of George Brown, the great newspaper editor and Liberal politician, which equalled Creighton's work in weight and significance. The book not only illustrated Careless's views about the contribution of British ideas to Canadian liberalism and about the growing influence of Toronto over its metropolitan hinterlands, it also presented the best balanced and most complete study of mid-nineteenth century Canadian politics yet written. Although the political narrative is very detailed and densely structured it is enlivened by many finely drawn sketches of persons and places, by a sustaining though not intruding point of view throughout and by the easy goodnatured informality of Careless's prose style. Among other biographical studies of nineteenth-century Canadian politicians were those of two of the more important British governors: Donald Kerr's Sir Edmund Head (1954) and W. S. MacNutt's Days of Lome (1955); Elisabeth Wallace's study of the great publicist and intellectual, Goldwin Smith (1957); and William Kilbourn's The Firebrand: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada (1956). Two of the most interesting major biographies have been William Eccles' Frontenac: The Courtier Governor (1959), a cool and dispassionate piece of demythologizing of accepted scripture about one of the most colourful figures of the French regime, and A Prophet in Politics (1959), the life of the saintly founder of Canada's socialist party, J. S.

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Woodsworth, whose author, Kenneth McNaught, was passionately committed in the best sense and in the most illuminating way to his subject. With the exception of a few books by practising economic historians, such as Hugh Aitken's The Welland Canal Company (1954), and from an earlier period, Harold Innis's History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1923), most Canadian business histories must be judged for the intrinsic interest of the narrative itself and for the reflection of Canadian life and society found in them, rather than as contributions to the interpretation of Canadian economic history, which still awaits precise economic analysis of most major industries. Among the more entertaining company histories written during the 1950's were Merrill Denison's The Barley and the Stream (1955), which affords a colourful history of Montreal since the conquest as seen in the lives and work of the Molson family dynasty; Marjorie Campbell's The Northwest Company (1957) on the Canadian fur trade; and William Kilbourn's The Elements Combined (1960), which ranges from the history of iron and steel manufacturing in Canada since the eighteenth century to such topics as the era of the mergers, culminating in Beaverbrook's founding of the Steel Company of Canada in 1910, and the story of the great steel strike of 1945. Economic history as such is best discussed as part of the literature of the social sciences, but the appearance of the first important synthesis of the subject, Canadian Economic History (1956), by W. T. Easterbrook and Hugh Aitkea, should at least be recorded here. This work, like Easterbrook's thorough bibliographical essay "Recent Contributions to Economic History: Canada" (Journal of Economic History, vol. 19, no. 1, March, 1959), a useful companion piece to Careless's article mentioned above, tended to reinforce rather than revise Innis's staple theory and hence fitted well with the Laurentian view of Canadian history. The first comprehensive social history of Canada, Arthur Lower's Canadians in the Making, appeared in 1958, written in a style that is conversational in tone yet spare, well wrought, sometimes even epigrammatic. Lower's anecdotes and quotations help the book evoke the spirit of Canadian Me as well as any history ever written. While several guidelines are used throughout— religious, racial, and cultural division; the conflicts between urban and rural values, and between old and new Canadians—Lower adopts as his chief theme the evolution of a society through the stages of trading post to colony to province and, where it has happened, to the maturity of nationhood. The liveliest history of any of the visual arts in Canada to date, Alan Cowans' Looking at Architecture in Canada (1958), is also, in miniature, a revealing sketch of the development of Canadian society. For other significant contributions to Canadian social history one must look chiefly to the work of Canadian sociologists, particularly S. D. Clark, and the wide-ranging

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series of volumes on western Canada (with the slightly misleading title of Social Credit in Alberta) of which he was the editor. Clark's Church and Sect in Canada (1948) is also one of the few major contributions to the field of religious history in Canada. Other historians who have done useful work in this field recently include G. S. French, John Moir, T. R. Millman, and H. H. Walsh. The greatest single achievement remains, however, C. B. Sissons's definitive two-volume Life and Letters of Egerton Ryerson (1937, 1947). Ryerson's work as journalist, politician, educator, and Methodist minister made him chief guardian of the Ontario conscience and one of the most formidable figures in nineteenth-century Canada. The most important work of George W. Brown was also in the field of religious history, although his unique and invaluable contribution to Canadian historiography lay hi the great scope of his influence as an editor, of the Canadian Historical Review among other things and most recently of the projected multi-volume dictionary of Canadian biography whose foundations he laid before his death in 1963. The publication in 1963 of G. Ramsay Cook's The Politics of John W. Dafoe and the Free Press was a hopeful sign that that most neglected of all fields, Canadian intellectual history, might soon receive greater attention. Until now, however, the liveliest and most illuminating discussion of political ideas in Canada, that by Cook and by Frank Underbill, for example, has taken place in short occasional pieces, essays, and reviews, often published in nonacademic journals such as the Canadian Forum. Some of the best historical writing by Canadians has been regional or local in character. Among the interesting works of this sort have been the story of Halifax by the novelist Thomas Raddall, two histories of Montreal by J. I. Cooper and Stephen Leacock, W. S. MacNutt's history of pre-Confederation New Brunswick, Gordon Rothney's shorter studies in Newfoundland history, the work of L. H. Thomas and Morris Zaslow on the history of the Northwest Territories, Edwin Guillet's richly detailed descriptions of early Upper Canada, and the work of a group of writers in western Ontario, notably Fred Landon, W. Sherwood Fox, James Talman, F. C. Hamil, and Charles Johnston who have done much to keep alive the colour of their region. The two most successful provincial histories are British Columbia (1959), a large and beautifully written volume by Margaret Ormsby, and Manitoba (1957), the finest of William Morton's works. Perhaps more than any other major Canadian historian Morton has been consciously concerned to define and practise the art of history, just as he has aimed deliberately and precisely at working out an explicit interpretation of the Canadian experience. Always a highly disciplined writer of expository prose, he has not often achieved or tried for the lyric and dramatic qualities in his narrative writing which he admires in the

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greatest historians. However in the vivid accounts of his province's beginnings, of the life of the Metis and their buffalo hunt, in the stories of Selkirk and Kiel, Morton has written a moving tribute to "those who by endurance in loyalty to older values than prosperity, had learned to wrest a living from the prairie's brief summer and the harsh rocks and wild waters of the north." (P. 473.) The fields of imperial and military history have been better served than most in Canadian historical writing, which is fitting enough in a country whose history has until recently been part of a larger struggle for empire, and whose virtues seemed to be more evident in periods of war than in peace. The standard military history is Canada's Soldiers (1954) by G. F. G. Stanley and Harold Jackson. Charles Stacey, an exacting research historian with a crackling style and keen critical mind, was in charge of the official history of the Canadian Army during World War II (three volumes have appeared at time of writing). His most recent book Quebec, 1759 is an entertaining piece of detective work, at the expense of the reputation of General Wolfe, to celebrate the bicentenary of the capture of Quebec. Stacey's first book, Canada and the British Army 1846-71 (1938 reissued 1963), was a contribution to the study of British colonial policy, as was David Farr's The Colonial Office and Canada, 1867-87 (1955). Among many earlier works in the field of imperial history were those by A. L. Burt and Hilda Neatby on the old province of Quebec, and those of W. B. Kerr and J. B. Brebner on the Maritime provinces. Gerald Graham, a Canadian who became Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at the University of London, has written a series of works on empire and sea power in the struggle for North America. Like these, his general history of Canada was designed to approach the subject "from the outside rather than from within North America" and "to give as much weight to European as to indigenous influences," but even so he acknowledged that "the presence of the United States on the border of Canada was still the basic fact of Canadian history." The theme of Canadian-American relations was a central one in the history of Canada's foreign policy, a field well served by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in its continuing series of volumes on "Canada and World Affairs," and by historians of the calibre of F. H. Soward, George Glazebrook, Harold Nelson, Robert Spencer and Edgar Mclnnis, the Institute's President for some years and author of several books, including a sixvolume account of the Second World War and the general history discussed above. The most perceptive and elegant writer on Canada's external relations and defence policy, James Eayrs, did not publish any major work until after 1960, but his first book, Canada and World Affairs (1950-57), had already appeared in 1958. In recent writing on the evolution of Canadian government, as in the field

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of international relations, political scientists and historians have been doing essentially the same kind of work. This can be seen, for example, in the Canadian Government series, begun in 1946 and first edited by R. MacGregor Dawson (1895-1958), the father of Canadian political science. While the whole series sets a high standard, two books in particular, the political scientist J. E. Hodgetts' nineteenth-century administrative history, Pioneer Public Service (1955), and the historian J. T. Say well's The Office of LieutenantCovernor (1957), are examples of clear vigorous academic prose at its best. While the 1950's saw a great increase in the sheer quantity of Canadian history being published, the record of the sixties appeared likely to surpass them. In addition to many projected new works, two paperback series, published by the University of Toronto Press and by McClelland and Stewart in the Carleton Library, made readily available many standard works, some of which like George Glazebrook's History of Transportation in Canada and D. C. Masters's The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, had been long out of print. Essential source materials—collections of speeches, letters and debates; diaries and early narratives—introduced by an appropriate interpretative essay, have also been published in the Carleton Library and in Macmillan of Canada's Pioneer Books, two of which fittingly enough were edited by the Dominion Archivist, W. Kaye Lamb, whose vast knowledge, sound advice, and good planning underlay much of the post-war renaissance in Canadian historical study. There was, however, one Canadian historian who had accomplished that task, and without any sacrifice of the highest standards of scholarship or literary art. "The phrase 'literary historian' . . . does not mean a historian with a talent for turning an occasional pleasing trope to decorate the collected facts" but rather "the historian who saw the body of his subject while still it lay scattered in unorganized source materials; who re-created the body by reanimating the form it required." In these words, from The American Adam, R. W. B. Lewis might easily have been describing Donald Creighton. In his three most important works, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937), Dominion of the North (1944), and his two-volume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald (1952, 1955), Creighton's subject forms itself around the central image of the river-—-the river of Canada-—-and the hero who grasped its meaning and embarked upon the immense journey to possess and subdue the inland kingdom to which the river was the key. It was the one great river which led from the eastern shore into the heart of the continent. It possessed a geographical monopoly; and it shouted its uniqueness to adventurers. The river meant mobility and distance; it invited journeyings; it promised immense expanses, unfolding, flowing away into remote and changing horizons. The whole west, with all its riches, was the dominion of the river. To

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the unfettered and ambitious, it offered a pathway to the central mysteries of the continent . . . from the river there rose, like an exhalation, the dream of western commercial empire. . . . The dream . . . runs like an obsession through the whole of Canadian history; and men followed each other through life, planning and toiling to achieve it. The river was not only a great actuality: it was the central truth of a religion. Men lived by it, at once consoled and inspired by its promises, its whispered suggestions, and its shouted commands; and it was a force in history, not merely because of its accomplishments, but because of its shining, ever-receding possibilities. (The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence) Whether the hero's name was Cartier or Mackenzie, Champlain or Simon McTavish, some half-remembered merchant or nameless coureur de bois, whether his journey and his mastery were mainly one of stout limb and heart or one of the willing imagination, it mattered little; in the hero's act of penetration and possession of the land of the St. Lawrence there lay the central secret of Canadian history. The first Canadian statesman to be caught in the Laurentian spell was the great seventeenth-century Intendant of New France, Jean Talon. Talon began it. No doubt he had gone out to Canada with his head full of neat, orderly Colbertian asumptions about the future of New France. His first term was almost exemplary. He planned some model villages at Charlesbourg. He built a brewery. He was busy encouraging shipbuilding, hemp production, and manufacture. And yet, almost from the beginning, something began to happen to him. He started writing the oddest letters back to Colbert. He dilated upon the vast extent of the country. He urged the capture of New York. He assured the King that "nothing can prevent us from carrying the name and arms of his Majesty as far as Florida. . . ." These curious effusions, with their hints of suppressed excitement and their sudden vistas of gigantic empires, surprised and perplexed the minister at home. . . . Colbert made the prudent comment "Wait" on the margin of one of Talon's most intemperate suggestions. . . . Talon ought to have been impressed by it, but he was scarcely aware of the rebuke. He had suddenly become conscious of the river and of the enormous continent into which it led. He had yielded to that instinct for grandeur, that vertigo of ambition, that was part of the enchantment of the St. Lawrence. (Dominion of the North, pp. 68-9.) The St. Lawrence had a rival, however, and hi the end it did not bring its heroes the possession of the entire continent. "Something stood between the design and its fulfilment." "Two worlds lay over against each other in North America. . . . Of their essence, the St. Lawrence and the seaboard denied each other. Riverways against seaways, rock against farm land, trading posts against ports and towns and cities, habitants against farmers and fur traders against frontiersmen—they combined, geography and humanity, in one prime contradiction." Creighton's first book was the story of the frustration of the original grand design. By his choice of a beginning and end date for his subject (one of the few choices that the historian as artist possesses), Creighton managed to suggest the pattern of tragedy in the story of the empire of the

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St. Lawrence between the Conquest and the end of the Second British Empire in 1850. His Dominion of the North told in longer perspective of the three centuries of rivalry between the rich seaboard colonies, who rebelled and made a nation of the southern temperate zone of the continent, and the proud Judah of the north, which stubbornly held to its original Laurentian and imperial destiny. Creighton's masterpiece, the biography of Sir John A. Macdonald, celebrated the greatest but also the most practical of the Laurentian heroes, the statesman who gave to the northern kingdom the political frame which its nature and economy and history had so long demanded. Creighton's was a tale of vast dimensions, and he did not shrink from telling it in the grand manner. But rarely after his first book was there the least sign of rhetorical overwriting. He had the natural gifts of the story-teller. He could change the pace and mood of his narrative without losing any of its power. He deliberately prepared his climaxes, and he made it a rule never to cast ahead in analysing the aspects of a given moment in time and so lose both the suspense of the story and the feel of the actual historical moment. He had a poignant sense of the place and an ability to describe in loving sensual detail the homely pastoral landscape of picnic and country fair or the most formal of state occasions. Rarely, but with telling effect, would he break away from the quiet clear development of the details of a political story to illuminate it with some stark dramatic juxtaposition of natural to human catastrophe: "On a night in early September, 1883, a black and killing frost descended out of a still, autumnal sky on the wheat crop of the north-west . . . before the autumn was out, the depression, like a sinister grey familiar, returned to haunt the Dominion." (The Story of Canada, p. 173.) Creighton varied with great care the construction and length of sentences and paragraphs. He was particularly fond of the spare simple sentence at the beginning of a chapter ("In those days they came usually by boat." "It was his day if it was anybody's"), followed by a longer sentence describing, explaining, carrying forward the narrative. These openings always made some precise historical point, but, more important, they were his own unmistakable way of casting a spell, his manner of saying "Once upon a time." Creighton's brief history The Story of Canada (1959) is a fine example of his narrative style. Cartier's departure from St. Malo, Champlain's first encounter with the Iroquois, the capture of Quebec, the rebellions of Mackenzie and Kiel are all succinctly and dramatically recreated. The book is a gallery of character sketches, a commedia of persons captured in the description of a telling gesture or feature. One powerful sentence brings together two of the central actions of modern Canadian history, and evokes the whole struggle of a dominion linking two oceans and encompassing two cultures in its farflung diversity: On November 7th [1885], far out in the mountains, at a spot which Stephen

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determined must be called Craigellachie in memory of his clan's meeting-place and battle slogan, the bearded Donald Smith drove home the last spike in the railway's transcontinental line; and nine days later, on November 16th, while the autumnal sun rose late over plains which were white with hoar frost, the sprung trap in the Regina prison gave and Kiel dropped to his extinction. (P. 180.) In spite of his achievement, there is a sense in which Creighton has appeared somewhat isolated from his contemporaries and from the life of contemporary Canada. Even his narratives tend to grey and sadden a little as they approach the present. On occasions he has wrapped himself in the mantle of Don Quixote to go tilting at Americans, Establishment Liberals, and the Fabians he took for something far worse. In the face of a philistine world of journalist-historians, and the confident, successful, efficient professionals of the learned societies and graduate schools, he has sometimes responded with Eeyore's gloom and baleful eye. Yet if anyone has reshaped the tradition of Canadian historical writing it has been Donald Creighton. It is difficult to think of a narrative on a nineteenth-century subject by any of his younger contemporaries in the past decade whose style or structure does not owe him some debt. There are times when one could wish it otherwise. One tires of rather patronizing gestures of consideration for the general reader, of earnest and embarrassing attempts at poetic prose, and of clumsy, inappropriate insertions of little Creightonesque tableaux in the midst of dry recitals of facts. None of Creighton's followers, even at their best, quite show his ability to make use of a broad general culture in their writing. But it is a revealing measure of a writer's true stature if the only major fault to be found in him is that he has too many disciples. In a sense, it is difficult to conceive of a man whose thinking and writing, whose life style and very being, would stand in sharper contrast to Donald Creighton than Canada's other pre-eminent historian of the mid-twentieth century, Frank Underbill (1889-1971). Born thirteen years before Creighton, a Clear Grit from that North York farm country beyond the ridges which supplied the Mackenzie rebellion with its best recruits, he was for over forty years the chief gadfly of the Family Compact's spiritual descendants and of any and all Canadian Establishments, including that liberal-intellectual one which embraced but never quite smothered or tamed him with its honours and applause. Where Creighton was a scholar and an artist, the bardic singer celebrating and creating a nation by giving it a past, Underhill was an intellectual, a Socratic teacher, and a Shavian wit. Creighton's chief medium has been the prose narrative of epic dimensions, Underbill's the lecture and the informal essay or review; Underhill never wrote a book although his work has been collected in books. Creighton uses several different modes of expression, from that of the ruminative academic to the incantation and the

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lyric. Underbill's voice never strays far from that of conversation, of clear, simple, brilliant talk. Creighton's sympathies have been not so much conservative as with the living past itself, and with those great scholars like Harold Innis whom he admired for their refusal to be caught up in intellectual fashions of the day or to turn their history into present politics. Underbill on the other hand attacked the majority of his Canadian academic colleagues "who lived blameless intellectual lives, cultivated the golden mean and never stuck their necks out." His historical writing is alive with insights which might never have been gained but for his involvement in the present. Trained as a classicist at the University of Toronto, a Victorian liberal turned Fabian by three years of pre-war Oxford and the acquaintance of A. D. Lindsay and G. D. H. Cole, Underbill was caught up during the 1920's in the excitement of prairie politics in the halcyon days of the Progressive movement and of his two Canadian heroes, J. S. Woodsworth and John W. Dafoe. In 1933 he became the author of the founding manifesto of Canada's first social democratic party. By the 1950's, while still a sympathetic if pointed critic of the democratic left in Canada, he was "less interested in the fortunes of political parties as such and more concerned with the climate of opinion . . . which determines to a great extent what parties accomplish or try to accomplish." He became more and more sceptical of doctrinal political solutions. He wished, a little sadly, that he "could be as sure about anything as some people I know are about everything." He compared himself to Huckleberry Finn at the end of his adventures, someone with no political home to go to and needing to light out for the Territory. Certainly much of Underbill's great power as a teacher and a historian came from qualities of candour and humility, gentleness and human sympathy very like those of Huckleberry Finn. But he also had a little of Mark Twain's showman about him. Like George Bernard Shaw he sometimes could be too easily typecast and dismissed as a brilliant clown by the dominions and powers he made fun of. He once compared himself, not altogether inaccurately, to the man who applied to John Morley for a job on the Pall Mall Gazette but denied special knowledge of any of a dozen fields Morley named, and when pressed said "My specialty is general invective." A good deal of Underbill's important historical writing, along with some samples of his invective, has been collected in In Search of Canadian Liberalism (1960) to which is appended a representative list of some seventy of his other works, ranging from a book of lectures (The British Commonwealth, 1956) to several of his elegant brief book reviews. Among the pieces still uncollected are six articles on the career of the Liberal leader Edward Blake, and two long essays in intellectual history, "The Political Ideas of J. S. Ewart"

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(Canadian Historical Association Report, 1933) and "The Revival of Conservatism in North America" (Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 1958). A useful summary of Underbill's approach to his central theme, the history of party politics, is to be found in his pamphlet Canadian Political Parties (1957). Taking the American political tradition for his point of reference as he did so often, Underhill states that the main agent in the making of Confederation and in Canadian political history since has been a kind of Hamiltonian federalist party. This party has been a coalition of diverse sectional, racial, and religious interests whose chief dynamic has been supplied by the transcontinental drive for power and profit of the big business interests of Toronto and Montreal. For thirty years Macdonald's Conservative party played this role, until it was displaced after 1896 by Laurier's Liberals during the great period of western settlement. A third "governmental" party forged by Mackenzie King has held power with only two major interruptions from 1921 down to the present day, although in this period the business interests were more divided and more sophisticated than in the era of the Great Barbecue, and the party leadership was no longer so bold and exciting. Underhill recognized a kind of historical necessity in the existence of the first two parties, if the nation was to be built at all. For the last, however, King's party "of the extreme centre," which effectively dulled the edge of intelligent political debate that made American and British politics so lively, Underhill reserved some of his bitterest attacks. Nevertheless Mackenzie King's very skill in hanging on to power, and his ability to find policies to keep both French and English Canadians together in the same party, in the end won his grudging admiration. The essential task of Canadian statesmanship is to discover the terms on which as many as possible of the significant interest-groups of our country can be induced to work together in a common policy. . . . Mr. King has been the only political leader of the last generation who has understood [this]. . . . His statesmanship has been a more subtly accurate, a more flexibly adjustable Gallup poll of Canadian public opinion than statisticians will ever be able to devise. He has been the representative Canadian, the typical Canadian, the essential Canadian, the ideal Canadian, the Canadian as he exists in the mind of God. ... Mr. K i n g . . . was not the traditional kind of parliamentary leader that you read about in the textbooks. . . . He obviously disliked Parliament. The representative side of democracy he did not find congenial, and he worked out a much more direct but also much more indefinable relationship between himself and the Canadian people. . . . And without any of the apparatus of mass hypnosis and police coercion to which vulgar practitioners of the art like Hitler and Mussolini had to have recourse, he succeeded with hardly a mistake for twenty-five years in

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giving expression, by way of that curious cloudy rhetoric of his, to what lay in the Canadian sub-conscious mind. The commonest criticism of Mr. King was that he never gave a definite lead in any direction or committed himself in advance to anything concrete and tangible.... But there was one field in which he did .. . —external affairs. And it is in this field that we can now see most clearly that intuitive quality of Mr. King's mind. . .. He grasped what Canadians wanted better than they did themselves, and he was very clear-headed and persistent in moving towards a goal which he saw from the start. . . . He was primarily a North American. He resisted all attempts to make a political or economic or military unit out of the British Commonwealth. . . . Even in the emotional atmosphere of the war he declined all Churchillian invitations into an Imperial War Cabinet. Instead, he was vigorous both in peace and war in strengthening our American ties. . . . He never consulted parliament or people about these steps; he simply kept us informed. (Quotations are from the chapter "W. L. Mackenzie King," in In Search of Canadian Liberalism)

Like King, Underbill was "primarily a North American." Yet to develop and maintain the best of the North American democratic tradition in Canada has not been easy; liberalism and the political left have never flourished here. In Underbill's view the oldest and strongest of Canadian traditions from the "great refusal of 1776" to the Reciprocity issue of 1911 and to the Diefenbaker era, has been "our determination not to become Americans." "We were born saying 'No'" to the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, and for a century and a half we have regularly indulged in outbursts of antiAmerican feeling and rejected the best that American thought and society has had to offer us. "But if we allow ourselves to be obsessed by the danger of American cultural annexation, so that the thought preys on us day and night, we shall only become a slightly bigger Ulster. The idea that by taking thought, and with the help of some government subventions, we can become another England—which, one suspects, is Mr. [Vincent] Massey's ultimate idea—is purely fantastic." In his 1946 presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association, Underbill made a plea for two kinds of history little studied in Canada. He asked first for more Canadian intellectual history—political ideas, religion, and education—as a means of correcting and supplementing the Environmentalist emphasis on geographical determinants and abstract forces which often made Canadian history appear to be "a ghostly ballet of bloodless economic categories." Secondly, he noted with regret that Canadian historians concentrated so much on the writing of their own parochial national history and that Christianity and Classical Culture (1940) by C. N. Cochrane (18891945) was one of the few important books on world history written by a Canadian. He looked forward to the time when "we have asserted our full

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partnership in the civilization of our day by Canadian writing on the great subjects of permanent and universal interest." Since 1946 there has been very little writing of major importance that could be considered an adequate response to Underbill's first request. In the second area, however, a significant beginning has been made. It will be impossible to do justice here to the variety and scope of recent writing in a wide variety of fields by Canadian scholars, but some slight idea of its quality and extent may be given by naming a few of the historians who have published significant work. In ancient history these have included E. T. Salmon, Gilbert Bagnani, Mary White. Malcolm McGregor and F. M. Heichelheim; in medieval history, Bertie Wilkinson, Karl Helleiner, C. C. Bayley, T. J. Oleson (1912-1963), and M. R. Powicke; European history since the Renaissance, Wallace Ferguson, E. R. Adair, R. M. Saunders, Ralph Flenley (18861969), and John Cairns; in British and imperial history, W. S. Reid, Chester New (1882-1960), John Norris, D. J. McDougall, W. W. Piepenburg, A. P. Thornton, J. B. Conacher, and J. H. S. Reid (1909-1963); in American colonial history, R. A. Preston; in Japanese history, Herbert Norman (19091957); in the history of art, Peter Brieger, Jean Boggs, and Stephen Vickers; and in American business history, Richard Overton. Looking back to the 1920's, the most important of the founders of business history as a field of study was Norman S. B. Gras, a Canadian who occupied the first chair in the subject at Harvard University. Gras also developed the idea of studying the metropolis and the pattern of metropolitan growth as a general approach to the history of modern society, an approach used in such books as D. C. Masters' The Rise of Toronto (1947). However it has been the literary scholar, Marshall McLuhan, who, by developing an approach to the study of technology and communications first tentatively explored in the later work of Harold Innis, has made the most original Canadian contribution to the interpretation of the history of civilization. When some Canadian historians take McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) seriously enough to try to grapple with its explosive, joke-filled, nonlinear prose, and to let its insights or its errors act as a stimulus to the examination of their own canons of interpretation, their writing might well reach that level of maturity and excitement to which Frank Underhill looked forward a generation ago. As one of the most perceptive contemporary critics, Frank Kermode, has said of The Gutenberg Galaxy, "In a truly literate society this book would start a long debate."

The last best word on the subject of the historian and literature (and the sharpest comment on what Canadian historical writing most often neglects) is

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still that of the young Thomas Macaulay: "Our historians neglect the art of narration, the art of interesting the affections and presenting pictures to the imagination. . . . The perfect historian gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction. In his narrative a due subordination is observed: some transactions are prominent; others retire. But the scale on which he represents them is increased or diminished according to the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society and the nature of man. . . . A history which in every particular incident may be true, may, on the whole, be false." William Morton has shrewdly remarked that the first and perhaps the only major choice made by the historian as artist is the choice of his subject-matter, the act of seeing the whole form of his narrative, its beginning, its middle and its end. However, within the strict and difficult limits of what can be known about what actually happened, the historian does have a kind of freedom not easily achieved by the novelist. He need not strain for plausibility or limit his plot to what merely might have been. He need not use elaborate devices to establish the credibility of the narrative voice. He is free, by the very nature of his art, his discipline, and his subject, to explore and show forth in all its variety and complexity and strangeness the incredible truth.

II. Writing in the Social Sciences H E N R Y B. M A Y O In speaking of the literature of the social sciences in Canada, we use the word "literature" loosely, without any overtones of elegant style. The phrase simply means scholarly books, thus excluding on one side the mass of government publications and on the other the mass of journalism, monographs, and periodical articles. The affinities of social science scholarship are more with history, psychology, and geography than with literature in the narrow sense. This is not to assert that social science writings have no good literary qualities: in social science as in history, one occasionally finds books that are of some value as literature. For several reasons, we should expect the literature of the social sciences to be meagre. Until very recent times, Canada could be regarded as "underdeveloped." Its small and scattered population has been preoccupied with the economic tasks of settlement and building, and with political survival and expansion. The country is divided into two language groups, and both peoples have been able to borrow freely from abroad. The universities have been

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small—scarcely more than arts colleges with a few professional schools. It is from the universities, as they expanded and improved, that writing in the social sciences might be expected and has indeed largely come. All of which is to say that a certain maturity of economic development, a settled cultural environment, cities, a reading public, educated if not leisure classes—these and perhaps other conditions are prerequisites for the substantial growth of social sciences. The study of society requires the accumulation of data for descriptive accounts, it requires a curiosity as to how the social system works, it requires a certain detachment—or at any rate selfconsciousness. Only then can social analysis be undertaken, and an explanatory and theoretical set of social science disciplines be developed. There is also the point that the social sciences are in an intimate reciprocal relation to the society which they study. They reflect the society and yet they alter it, by the very fact of analysing, explaining, criticizing, publishing. In a very real sense one may say that a society which has been exposed to the social sciences is never the same again. No doubt literature also has great effects, yet it is the social sciences which document and validate the impressions and intuitions of a society as reflected in its literature. Before the First World War, social science writing in Canada was neither abundant nor for the most part of high quality. Nor was it possible to see in the better writing anything especially Canadian about either the men or their methods; both were imported. One thinks of the eccentric Robert Gourlay (1778-1863) and of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862), with their nineteenth-century studies of land settlement, as well as of John Rae, an original economic theorist who was (perhaps characteristically) not read in Canada although he became famous abroad (his important writings, along with a biography, will re-appear in 1964). One thinks, in a somewhat later period, of W. J. Ashley (1860-1927)—called the founder of the "Toronto School" of economic history—of John Davidson (1869-1905) and his work on labour economics, and of James Mavor (1854—1925), another economic historian. Adam Shortt (1859-1931), who set the long-lasting trend to applied Canadian economics at Queen's University, is the only Canadian who can compare with the immigrant scholars from Britain. After the First World War, the picture changed quickly. By the twenties and thirties social scientists, chiefly in the universities, began to be plainly noticeable, and it was possible to get over the feeling of surprise that good books on Canada should be written by Canadians. As Canadian society became more self-conscious, more of the prerequisites for social science were present. When the flow of books and other studies started, the preoccupation naturally enough was with the unique Canadian scene—with its economy, politics, and social structure—and above all with interpreting the history of Canada. The efforts of authors were directed much less to testing and modi-

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fying social theory than to practical ends, including in these the broad purpose of the preservation and expansion of a nation. Some of the best social science analysis has, in fact, been cast in historical form—alike in economics, politics, and sociology. Economics Of the social sciences proper, perhaps economics has developed furthest. From one point of view, economic analysis could be done only when the Canadian material—statistical and other—was available; at the same time part of the inquiry itself was to unearth the data. Economic studies could presumably be made either for theoretical or for practical policy purposes, but, on the whole, the main emphasis has been on the latter. Canada is a country where economic forces and political events have been closely intertwined—as in the nineteenth-century National Policies, the continuing Dominion-Provincial disputes within the federal system, and the development of resources. The political authorities have felt responsible for economic policy and development, so that determination by economic factors has seldom been pushed far in interpreting Canadian history. The economic history of Harold A. Innis (treated elsewhere in this book) concentrated on staple production, a method which gave his early work a unifying theme: the intimate connection of politics and economics. His Political Economy in the Modern State (1946), which dealt with contemporary problems, especially those arising from the combination of economic and political power, shows the theme somewhat played down. He came to emphasize technology more, and in his Empire and Communications (1950), to centre upon communication and its techniques, and how these might be causally related to empires and civilizations. The modern world was in danger, he believed, from the "monopoly" of communication—a theme which he pursued still further in The Bias of Communication (1951) and Changing Concepts of Time (1952). These books also reflected his increasing consciousness of the need for Canada to resist United States encroachment in many fields. Few, if any economists today have the broad historical sweep of Innis, and none has followed him in using historical studies of Canada as a take-off into wider speculative theory about the future of man. The historical approach to the study of the Canadian economy has, of course, continued. There are, for instance, the nine volumes of Canadian Frontiers of Settlement, edited by W. A. Mackintosh and W. L. G. Joerg in the 1930's and 1940's. The historical, combined with more economic theory, is typical of later works, for example of commercial and fiscal policy by O. J. McDiarmid and J. H. Perry, of banking by R. Craig Mclvor, of labour by Stuart Jamieson and of growth theory by O. J. Firestone. For the most part, applied economics has been the dominant strain, with

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the "Queen's School" of applied studies being the most outstanding representative. W. A. Mackintosh, whose first works were on the prairie economy, including Economic Problems of the Prairie Provinces (1935), moved on to the wider study The Economic Background of Dominion-Provincial Relations (1939). O. D. Skelton (1878-1941), W. C. Clark (1889-1952), C. A. Curtis, F. A. Knox and K. W. Taylor are the best known of this school which has always associated economics with government and public service. The impact of the Great Depression and the Second World War again concentrated much of the work of Canadian social scientists upon institutions and policy, while at the same time the Keynesian revolution in economic theory encouraged a more sophisticated economic analysis. Out of the depression came, for instance, the scholarly Report of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (1940) and the many special studies made for the Commission. These deal with a range of the social sciences—economics, political science, constitutional law, and sociology-—and with their subdivisions and interconnections so far as they relate to public policy. The Gordon Commission, Report of the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects (1957), although less historical and more limited in scope, also drew heavily upon university talent. Out of the hundreds of Royal Commissions it is fair to say that these, and a few others (on broadcasting, arts and letters, medical services, etc.) have been an important means of encouraging much first-rate scholarship in the social sciences: directly in so far as special studies have been commissioned; indirectly by the stimulus to research in general. The important factor is that some commissions contract for research, and are not content to hold hearings and collect opinions from interested parties. Governments have found social scientists useful, and have, in turn, provided the money for research. Specialized economic studies have been numerous. In agricultural economics there is G. E. Britnell (1903-1961), The Wheat Economy (1939), and V. C. Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (1957). Of more general scope is A. E. Safarian's The Canadian Economy in the Great Depression (1959); Irving Brecher has written a theoretical work on Canadian monetary policy (1953). Other studies, too numerous to mention, have been conducted on banking, corporation finance, farm credit, trade unionism, certain manufacturing and other industries, transportation, war economics, national income, welfare economics, foreign trade, capital formation, balance of payments, etc. At the risk of being invidious one might suggest that the chief writers have been D. A. MacGibbon, H. A. Logan, W. T. Easterbrook, V. W. Bladen, D. C. MacGregor, J. Douglas Gibson, A. F. W. Plumptre, and Stuart Jamieson. Apart from these, others have written on population and economic geography, among them Mabel Timlin, Griffith Taylor, and A. W. Currie. Still another field of distinguished work has been

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that of public finance, in which W. A. Mackintosh, John Deutsch, J. A. Maxwell, J. H. Perry, Eric Hanson and Robert M. Clark are prominent. It is in fact now possible to publish good anthologies of readings in Canadian economics, and there is moreover a market for them inside the country. With increasing industrialization and a more complex economy it is not possible, however, for authors to give the same kind of over-view, or integrated interpretation, that was provided by the "staples" or export commodities approach, taken in an earlier period. A few books have combined a treatment of general economic principles and Canadian data, for instance H. A. Logan's and M. K. Inman's A Social Approach to Economics (1939) and V. W. Bladen's An Introduction to Political Economy (1941). The former was succeeded by M. K. Inman's Economics in a Canadian Setting (1959). Later works of a similar kind have been produced by R. C. Bellan, and by Helen and Kenneth Buckley. Craufurd D. W. Goodwin has written an historical account of Canadian Economic Thought (1961). Economic theory of an advanced and systematic kind, not particularly linked to Canadian data, has been less well represented by original works, exceptions being D. B. Marsh on international trade theory, and B. S. Keirstead with The Theory of Economic Change (1948) and Capital, Interest and Profits (1959). Wm C. Hood has edited Studies in Econometric Method (1953), a field which E. F. Beach has also cultivated. No one can deny that the technical level of competence of economic analysis in Canada is now high especially among younger men such as Harry G. Johnson, H. Scott Gordon, Anthony Scott, Clarence Barber, and William Mackenzie. It remains true perhaps that only a few works may be said to have added to the international body of economic theory or "science." Political Science The study of politics and government in Canada has lagged behind the study of the economy. Political science, in any technical sense, was a late starter and even now economists vastly outnumber political scientists. The early writings on politics tended to be either historical or constitutional, a natural development given the larger number of historians and the fact that constitutional law and judicial interpretation have a whole profession devoted to them. When political science addressed itself to the realities of the political system a number of studies of institutions began to appear, including The Principle of Official Independence of R. MacG. Dawson (1895-1958) and R. A. MacKay's The Unreformed Senate of Canada (1926, new edition 1964). The institutional emphasis predominates even in Alexander Brady's Canada (1932), and the institutional and historical approaches are united in Daw-

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son's Constitutional Issues in Canada, 1900-31 (1933), and The Development of Dominion Status, 1900-1936 (1937). With the expansion and changing nature of the universities, the stimulation of certain Royal Commissions, and the flow of research funds (chiefly from the United States), the number of institutional studies has immensely increased in the last two decades. The federal government, as might be expected, has been studied most. Some of the studies commissioned for the Rowell-Sirois Commission were highly competent political-cum-constitutional works, and there are also Eugene Forsey's The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth (1943),and Paul Gerin-Lajoie's Constitutional Amendment in Canada (1950). Norman Ward's works on the House of Commons (1950, 1962) are outstanding in their field, and are informed by a keen analysis of principles. Public administration, again mostly at the national level, is represented chiefly by R. MacG. Dawson's The Civil Service of Canada (1929), by J. E. Hodgetts' Pioneer Public Service (1955), by Taylor Cole's The Canadian Bureaucracy (1949), and by an anthology edited by J. E. Hodgetts and D. C. Corbett (1960). Provincial governments have been less studied, the chief impetus here having come from the Canadian Government series. An institution common to all provinces has been analysed in John T. Saywell's The Office of Lieutenant-Governor (1957). The provinces for which general accounts of their governments have appeared are Prince Edward Island (by Frank MacKinnon, 1951), Nova Scotia (by J. Murray Beck, 1957), New Brunswick (by Hugh G. Thorburn, 1961) and Manitoba (by Murray S. Donnelly, 1962). The municipal level of government has drawn even less attention, the chief works being the general surveys by Kenneth G. Crawford, Canadian Municipal Government (1954) and D. C. Rowat's Your Local Government (1955). There is, however, a ferment in local government today. As urbanization proceeds, the financial and other pressures upon the inherited framework and theory of local government continue to mount. Signs are apparent that this level of government will be the subject of vastly increasing research in the near future. Unfortunately, however, the number of men in Canada interested in and qualified to undertake such research is likely to be a severely limiting factor. The yield of studies in constitutional law and judicial interpretation is broad in scope and high in quality, the chief legal writers being W. P. M. Kennedy, F. R. Scott, Bora Laskin, V. C. McDonald, and Edward McWhinney. Political scientists—notably Eugene Forsey, J. R. Mallory, and Paul Gerin-Lajoie—have also made substantial contributions to constitutional studies. Systematic analyses of the Canadian political system as a whole could

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hardly appear until the spadework of initial particular studies had been done. These initial studies appeared not only in the works mentioned, but also as articles in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, founded in 1935. The first comprehensive work was that of H. McD. Clokie, Canadian Government and Politics (1944) followed by Dawson's The Government of Canada (1947). Somewhat more theoretically weighted were the comparative study by J. A. Corry, Democratic Government and Politics (1946) and Brady's Democracy in the Dominions (1947). It is now possible to see where the gaps lie in our knowledge of Canadian politics and government. These are most conspicuous for the political process, i.e., in the fields of parties, pressure groups, voting behaviour, electoral systems, public opinion, propaganda, etc. Nor is there any book on the Cabinet or the prime ministership. In spite of preliminary forays into these territories here and there since the 1940's, much is still unexplored and certainly under-cultivated. The gaps have been partly filled, to date, by political biographies, by monograph literature in the journals, and by studies of the minor political parties. On voting behaviour and electoral studies there is John Meisel's The Canadian General Election of 1957 (1962), and the statistical account by Howard A. Scarrow, Canada Votes (1962). On political parties, much of the work has been by American scholars— on the national C.C.F. party by Dean E. McHenry (1950) and on the C.C.F. in Saskatchewan, a sociologically oriented book by S. M. Lipset (1950), and on the Conservative party by J. R. Williams (1956). The latter book came from the Duke University series, which has sponsored some excellent books by Canadians about Canada, among them A. R. M. Lower, F. R. Scott, et al., Evolving Canadian Federalism (1958). The massive series on Social Credit in Alberta covers this Canadian phenomenon from the viewpoint of a number of disciplines. The political and constitutional aspects have received full-scale treatment by C. B. Macpherson, Democracy in Alberta (1953) and J. R. Mallory, Social Credit and the Federal Power in Canada (1954). The Progressive party in Canada, the Liberal party in Alberta, the Union Nationale in Quebec, have all been the subject of competent studies, historically oriented. The great national parties, Liberal and Conservative, still await both the historian and the political scientist. Meantime we make do with biographies, autobiographies, anthologies of articles from the periodicals, and journalism. It is a curious fact that we know much more about the smaller parties which have never held national office than about the parties which have actually governed. This is the sort of pattern that justifies a common criticism of the social sciences: what they study may not be important, but at least it will be well documented. Canadian scholars have not followed the American example in developing

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an empirical or non-normative general theory of the political process. Neither has there been much scholarly writing that could be called political philosophy. The nearest we come to it are the writings of party apologists (and this is not very near), the incidental ideological analysis found in books on parties, and a rare volume of essays like that of F. H. Underbill, In Search of Canadian Liberalism (1960) or the book by W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity (1961), or that edited by Michael Oliver, Social Purpose for Canada (1961). It may be possible to write a book of sorts on the history of Canadian political thought—though it has not yet been done—but it would be a bold man who dignified it with the title of Canadian political philosophy. As in economics, little political theory of a general nature, not tied to the Canadian scene, has appeared. Early exceptions to this generalization were Stephen Leacock's Elements of Political Science (1906) and R. M. Mclver's The Modern State (1926). In more recent years there are H. B. Mayo's Democracy and Marxism (1955) and Introduction to Democratic Theory (1960); C. B. Macpherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), and Terence H. Quaker, Propaganda and Psychological Warfare (1962). Canadian external relations have been studied by both the historians and the political scientists, though rather less by the latter. Historical works by G. P. de T. Glazebrook, W. A. Riddell (1881-1963), F. H. Soward, Gordon Skilling, H. A. Angus and others can only be mentioned here. The curious love-hate relationships with Britain and the Commonwealth on one side, and with the United States on the other, have frequently been prominent elements in political life, and hitherto the dominant themes in scholarship. The enormous set of volumes on "Canadian-American Relations" testifies to one part of this preoccupation. Foreign policy is of course played on a wider stage today, more particularly since the founding of the U.N., and being adrift in a more dangerous world, Canada and its scholars have tried to work out a suitable role for the country. Among the earlier works are Robert A. MacKay, Canada Looks Abroad (1938), and F. H. Soward and Edgar Mclnnis, Canada and the United Nations (1956). Representative of the recent literature are James Eayrs's The Art of the Possible: Government and Foreign Policy in Canada (1961), Peyton V. Lyon, The Policy Question (1963), and a series of volumes sponsored by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. At home, Canada is in the midst of re-defining the terms of its federal system. There may be subsidiary reasons for this, but the most obvious is that the French-speaking people of Quebec, aware of their changing society, are not only conducting a quiet revolution in their own house but are seeking a re-definition of their place in Canada. This exciting phenomenon is having a large impact on the political life of Canada—on parties, public finance, the

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constitution, etc.—and the present may be one of the nodal points in Canadian history. Already there has been a renaissance of studies inside Quebec, and one may expect this fertilizing stream of thought to lead to new political analyses and theoretical constructions outside that province, particularly in relation to federalism, the parliamentary system, and democracy itself. Sociology and Anthropology, etc. Political science is under-developed compared with economics; the other social sciences lag far in the rear. Many universities are even yet scarcely aware that there are such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, and criminology. In anthropology, some work has been done on the Eskimo, but far more on the native Indians. Most characteristic perhaps of the earlier work is that of Diamond Jenness and Marius Barbeau. The best contemporary work is that of T. F. Mcllwraith (1899-1964), The Bella Coola Indians (1948) and the volume by Harry B. Hawthorn, Cyril Belshaw, and Stuart Jamieson, The Indians of British Columbia (1958). Other ethnic groups, particularly in the Western provinces, have usually been studied by a broad, interdisciplinary approach, for example, The Doukhobors of British Columbia (1955), edited by Harry B. Hawthorn; F. E. LaViolette, The Canadian Japanese and World War II (1948); John Kosa, Land of Choice: The Hungarians in Canada (1957). General interpretations of Canada may perhaps be brought under the umbrella of sociology, however impressionistic and lacking in rigour some of them may be. One thinks of J. W. Dafoe, Canada, An American Nation (1935), Julian Park (ed.), The Culture of Contemporary Canada (1957), Miriam Chapin, Contemporary Canada (1959), and A. R. M. Lower, Canadians in the Making (1958). Of more technical sociological writings, usually on an historical basis, the best known are of S. D. Clark, Movements of Political Protest in Canada, 1640-1840 (1959), The Social Development of Canada (1942), which emphasized the frontier influence, Church and Sect in Canada (1948), and The Developing Canadian Community (1962). The emphasis has been rather more on economic history with C. A. Dawson's The Settlement of the Peace River Country (1934), though less so in his Group Settlement (1936). Several volumes in the Social Credit series also have social-psychological and sociological orientation, namely those by John A. Irving, The Social Credit Movement in Alberta (1959), by Jean Burnet, Next Year Country (1951), and W. E. Mann, Sect, Cult, and Church in Alberta (1955). The Impact of industrialization and urbanization is becoming of increasing interest. Everett C. Hughes's French Canada in Transition (1943) examines these forces in relation to Quebec's traditional culture, a theme of absorbing

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interest alike to both French- and English-speaking social scientists nowadays. It may well be true that the unique Canadian situation which arises from the French-English speaking symbiosis has so far been most perceptively treated by outsiders. This is certainly borne out by Andre Siegfried in Canada (1937) and by Mason Wade in The French Canadian Outlook (1946) and, as editor, Canadian Dualism (1960). On the impact of urbanism in general there is the composite work edited by S. D. Clark, Urbanism and the Changing Canadian Society (1961). Of special studies, the best known is J. R. Seeley, R. A. Sim, and Elizabeth Loosley, Crestwood Heights (1956), a study of a Toronto suburb. To judge only by the number of books mentioned in sociology and kindred disciplines would give a misleading underestimate of the actual scholarship. Professional attention has been directed, in depth, to an ever increasing range of social phenomena: to immigration, marriage and the family, religion, the professions, the military, delinquency, social stratification, the power elite, and so forth. A substantial anthology of recent work has already appeared, edited by R. B. Blishen, F. E. Jones, Kaspar Naegele, and John Porter, Canadian Society: Sociological Perspectives (1961). Canadian universities are experiencing a phenomenal rate of growth. It is safe to predict that, as the scholars increase rapidly in numbers, sociology, like all social sciences, will vastly expand its output of scholarly writing.

3. Literary Scholarship to 1960 MILLAR MACLURE

I LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP has no roots in this country; what has been written in this way, and it is very impressive—"the one kind of writing in which Canadians have won really wide recognition" (F. E. L. Priestley)—has been grafted onto the universities, those colonial plantations set in piety, expediency, or simply under pressure of population upon a landscape alien to the leisured disciplines. Of late years an indigenous scholarship, occasionally parochial and esoteric, but increasing in volume and significance, has grown upon "creative writing in Canada"; the "search for identity" is now in full swing, but it is still true that many of the valuable monuments have only a Canadian address. Scholarship has always been international in any case, from the neoplatonic glosses on Homer to a recent Japanese book on Milton, yet in deeper rooted cultures differences of emphasis appear; the footnote-draped Germanic disintegrators used to be opposed by the urbane English with their strong sense of unity of text and liberty of interpretation; now the American "new critics" have combined the meticulousness of the one with the "style" (sometimes very self-conscious) of the other to create a scholasticism which dominates, almost politically, the Western academy. George Woodcock, one of the very few free-wheeling men of letters working in this country (he has written books on Peter Kropotkin, Aphra Behn, Oscar Wilde, Proudhon, and Godwin, as well as books of travel and occasional pieces), once called for a Canadian criticism, but that remains "the shape yet undefined" (Roy Daniells' phrase), for this country is unhappily not an organism but an agglomeration. We are still in migration: we move like the Canada goose and the white-throated sparrow, and make as diverse sounds. *I am indebted for assistance and advice in the preparation of this survey to W. F. Blissett, G. W. Field, D. M. Hayne, C. D. Rouillard, F. W. Watt, and Mary E. White. H. Pietersma assisted me in preparing the basic file of authors from which I worked. All errors of omission and commission and all opinions expressed are my own. This survey, with some minor exceptions, comes down to 1960. For this revised edition of the Literary History of Canada I have made a number of verbal alterations, and certain corrections and additions, to take some account (perhaps ill-observed) of changes in perspective over a decade. My brief version of scholarship and criticism in Canadian literature in English now becomes section IV of the survey.

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Northrop Frye, whose name will inevitably appear in more than one context of this short view of part of the Canadian academy, in one of his animadversions upon the state of our intellectual life, has observed that there has been of late "a vast increase in the systematizing of scholarship," and has referred, not without some politic ambiguity, to the current "cult of productivity." The dilettante, or the man who, in the old Oxbridge tradition, simply was his subject, has been replaced by the "producing scholar," and the publication curve has shot up like a rocket at the right side of our time-graph. This is, of course, owing in part to simple increase of numbers, and F. E. L. Priestley, himself a prominent scholar-editor (and former adjutant of the academic brigade for the Humanities Research Council), once noted that "pressure to publish, to produce in God's name the infinitesimal product is (or has been) less heavy in most Canadian universities than it is popularly reputed to be south of the border." The qualifying parenthesis has, I think, considerable and increasing weight. It was not always so, and complaints of inadequate scholarly activity in the Canadian intellectual community are easy to collect, though naturally they multiply toward the end of our period. J. E. Wells (1836-1898), writing in the Canadian Monthly (1875), felt that Canada's intellectual growth was not keeping pace with her commercial progress, and that there were no pecuniary conditions for scholarship. In his retrospective address on the fiftieth anniversary of the Royal Society of Canada (1931), Sir Robert Falconer (18671943) recalled the situation in 1881: "The universities had no contact with one another. Most of them had been conceived, born, and nourished for sectarian purposes, and all were very poor. . . . Professors were badly paid, libraries were meagre." In 1893, and again in 1902, members of the Royal Society were reminded that the prospects for scholarship were very bad, and that organized research in the humanities did not exist in Canadian universities. The doyen of French studies in this country, A. F. B. Clark, in a thumping article in the Canadian Forum (1930), claimed that "as a recognized and organized force, literary scholarship simply does not exist in our universities," condemned the pedantry of the Ph.D. (as Frye does in the lecture referred to above), and spoke pretty sharply about academic laziness (golf and the summer cottage, etc.), an accusation repeated in considered terms by A. S. P. Woodhouse and Watson Kirkconnell in their survey The Humanities in Canada (1947). In 1943, Desmond Pacey, writing in Queen's Quarterly, found Canadian scholarly "output" in languages and literatures, as contrasted with history and the social sciences, "deplorably low." Woodhouse and Kirkconnell reminded their readers that "Canadian universities are primarily undergraduate teaching institutions," that facilities for scholarship (e.g., microfilm, travel grants, a national census of library holdings, etc.) were undeveloped or unenthusiastically employed, and that the Canadian scholarly

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community had suffered much from the long exodus of native sons to the United States: "It is doubtful if any other nation in history has lost so large a part of its most valuable human resources with such apparent unconcern." The "Massey Report" (1951)—an important landmark, for it recommended the formation of the Canada Council, which one young scholar has called "that warm featherbed for talent"—while it incidentally noted that there was "no vigorous intellectual life in Canada outside the universities." a remark retrospectively unfair to the CBC, the NFB, the theatre, and the magazines either experimental or traditional, still recorded that "apart from the work of a few brilliant persons, there is a general impression that Canadian scholarly work in the humanities and social sciences is slight in quantity and uneven in quality." I have assembled these sombre observations partly by way of contrast to the achievements noted below—though many of those achievements owe their successful completion to action initiated by these and other complaints—and partly to illustrate an activity which seems to me one of the few recognizably "Canadian" aspects of our culture: Canadians of an intellectual cast are given to constant stock-taking; even our poets and painters assemble frequently to see how things are going. Also we love to run ourselves down; urbane foreigners profess to find in this dour Northern habit a national characteristic of understatement. Apart from such qualities of industry, intelligence, and taste as he may possess or acquire, the "producing" scholar needs four conditions to flourish: a first-class library, or access by way of travel, film, photostat or facsimile to the holdings of other libraries; a learned community, or "institute," in which to associate with his fellows; recess from full-time undergraduate teaching; and means of publication. All these cost money. To trace how these facilities have been made more available to Canadian scholars, and how they have multiplied say since 1941, would be to write a chapter in the history of higher education in this country; here I only call attention to two or three significant developments. The strictures of J. B. Brebner (1895-1957) in 1943 upon the meetings and proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada ("drowsy gatherings . . . the transactions slumber undisturbed," etc.) may have been deserved, but it was on instruction from Section II that the Humanities Research Council was organized in 1943, and a study of its Reports is sufficient to indicate the variety of ways in which it has promoted literary scholarship in this country, by way of investigation, fund-raising and distribution of grants, aids to publication, and not least perhaps in creating an atmosphere of competition for its benefits. The theory of the Honours course is too deeply seated in Canadian universities to be abandoned in favour of a set of vulgar gymnasia with transferable credits for undergraduates, set apart from highly integrated schools or institutes for specialized study at the graduate level;* but institutes are essential, and the *This is no longer true, alas, in 1974.

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model for such development in Canada is of course the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, founded in 1929, on the suggestion of Etienne Gilson. E. J. McCorkell, in his brief history of the Institute (Varsity Graduate, July 1956), points out how from the beginning the advantages of association with the graduate school of the University were taken into account; here we have an example of how an institute international in its connections and highly specialized in its disciplines (the first class in Latin palaeography in Canada was started by J. T. Muckle in 1929), can at once add lustre to and derive part of its strength from association with a larger centre of learning. Other interdisciplinary institutes began their development during our period, e.g. the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University, established in 1957, directed by R. L. McDougall and productive of the interesting series Our Living Tradition. Departments of comparative literature belong after 1960, though monographs written by Canadian scholars in the European tradition, some of which will be mentioned below, come into this category, but the fact that English has in effect replaced Classics as the operative centre of the humanist disciplines (English literature being "foreign" to high-school graduates who no longer read the Bible and who have learned little or no classical mythology) helps to create the condition without the name, for the modern scholar-critic in English often takes all humanist knowledge as his province. (G. W. Field, a specialist in Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, finding in the Germanic Review for February 1960 what seemed to him a most illuminating article on Mann as the "last Wagnerite," wrote a note of congratulation to the author, c/o Department of German, University of Saskatchewan. The author is William Blissett, a professor of English with a long bibliography of articles on Renaissance subjects.) The local facilities for publication have also increased: the scholarly publication programme of the University of Toronto Press, the founding of the McGill-Queen's University Press, with the extension and inauguration of university "series," point in this direction.

II One of the most distinguished Canadian scholars of the older generation once said to the editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly that he was publishing too many footnotes. He did not mean it so, but he was pointing to a shift in form and intent, foreshadowed in what we might call the Johns Hopkins influence in Canadian scholarship (see Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada, Third Series, vol. XXIV, Section II, p. 33), which I can best summarize by giving another turn to what I wrote on this subject in 1957 (in The Culture of Contemporary Canada, p. 223): "The old imperial tradition, which 'colonized' the greater universities from Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Dublin . . . has been transformed into a wholesome exchange

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of talent and opinion. But the intimate association of Canadian scholars with their fellows in the United States, through the MLA, in the great research libraries, in the forum of the learned journals, and hi other less formal but equally productive relationships, while it has gained for many Canadian scholars a large following and influence in the world of American scholarship, has inevitably drawn Canadian scholarship firmly into the larger orbit of American scholarly and critical activity." One paradigm of this shift may be found in classical studies: from Gilbert Norwood (1880-1954) and E. T. Owen (1882-1948)—of whose The Story of the Iliad as Told in the Iliad (1946) Norwood observed that 'sweeping aside that notorious and manyheaded bogey, the Homeric Question, with a few politely devastating words... [he] lighted up the whole poem for every student"—to the emphasis among the present generation on what the editor of the Phoenix terms "professional scholarship," source-study, epigraphy, numismatics, archaeology, text-criticism. In a complementary context, Frye has noted that "the advance of critical techniques seems to be increasing the professionalizing of literary study, and thereby widening the gap between the critic and the plain reader." It is relevant to recall that the UTQ, in its first avatar (1895-96), was a collection of lectures before university and other societies, e.g. the Modern Language Club or the Philosophical Society, with the qualities and form incident to that kind of presentation. When we turn to some typical productions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we find well established the tradition of what one might call the "extension" lecture, and a recognition of what Mudie Macara, in "A Prize Essay, in the form of an Address to the Members of the Mercantile Library Association of Hamilton" (1855), referred to as "the advantages, intellectual and social, of associate institutions for literary objects." The genre may be illustrated by an address of the Rev. Henry Scadding (1813-1901) on Shakespeare the Seer, given to the St. George's Society of Toronto on April 23, 1864, a properly florid effort, considering the occasion; by S. E. Dawson (1833-1916) with A Study with Critical and Explanatory Notes of Lord Tennyson's Poem, The Princess (1884), which arose from a paper prepared for "a small semi-social, semi-literary society," which went to two editions, and for which the author received a letter of commendation from the Laureate himself; or by the Rev. John King (1829-1899) in his Critical Study of In Memoriam (1898), which had its origin in "a course of lectures delivered to ladies in Manitoba College." (This is, however, a more "scholarly" effort.) These excellent men anticipated a function which Woodhouse has attributed to much of the writing of Maurice Hutton (1856-1940), the founder of the Honours course in Toronto and author of The Greek Point of View (1925): he was "a missioner of culture to the Province." There were

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giants in the land in those days, but they were primarily great teachers; their bibliographies are short, but the memory of them is long. Such were W. J. Alexander (1855-1944) of Toronto, whose only important published work is An Introduction to the Poetry of Robert Browning (1889), Archibald MacMechan (1862-1933) of Dalhousie, and John Macnaughton (1858-1943) of Queen's, of whom W. D. Woodhead observed (in Queen's Quarterly, 1943) that he was "always somewhat indifferent to Research with a capital R," and that "he remained throughout his life a personality rather than a writer." There was a continuity, it appears, through the lecture to undergraduates, the "missionary" address, and the published essay. The loving exposition of familiar monuments, clear of technical clutter and informed by personality and prejudice: that is the form. From W. F. Osborne (1873-1950), Professor of English at Wesley College in Winnipeg, we have The Genius of Shakespeare and Other Essays (1908); the other essays are on In Memoriam and the Idylls of the King. (Here a certain crankiness appears: Shakespeare had "his full share of the pensiveness of the Teutonic race," which is superior to "the southern or Latin peoples.") A. W. Crawford (1866-1933), also of Manitoba, published, in 1916, Hamlet, an Ideal Prince. Such were the contents, too, of the University Magazine (1901-20)—it died as the Canadian Forum was being born—edited after 1907 by Sir Andrew Macphail (18641938), a journal of general culture; such is the tradition of Queen's Quarterly (begun 1893), early contributors to which included Macnaughton on the presentation of drama in ancient Greece, and T. R. Glover, who came to Queen's in 1896. The list of editors on the title-page of a forgotten student anthology, Great English Poets (1929), indicates a bridge between two worlds; the names are A. W. Crawford, Aaron J. Perry, and A. S. P. Woodhouse. Or one might cite the succession in the English department at University College, Toronto: Alexander, Malcolm Wallace, Woodhouse. I remember Wallace (18731960), the biographer of Sir Philip Sidney, himself a meticulous researcher with a strong ethical and political sense, saying to me, very kindly but firmly, after I had read a rather esoteric paper on Hamlet, that he thought I was off the main track of literary study. (Of Woodhouse I shall have more to say below.) Or, finally, there is the remark of G. S. Brett (1879-1944), in a paper read before the English Association of Toronto in 1918, and published in the University Magazine: he feared that a book on the "philosophy" of Conrad would appear sooner or later. But the kind of writing just characterized does not exhaust the scholarly production of the first era after the establishment of the Canadian universities. It is true that a run through Morgan's invaluable Bibliotheca Canadensis (1867) gives the impression that most of the intellectual energy of the provincials was expended in arguing the merits of infant baptism and of the prohibi-

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tion of alcoholic beverages, and in studying the geology of the country, and a nice essay could be written on the avocations of nineteenth-century clergymaneducators. Rev. William Cochrane (1745-1833), for example, Professor of Languages, Logic and Rhetoric in King's College, Windsor, N.S., a Trinity College Dublin man, published "A Fast Sermon," and kept a journal of the barometric readings at Windsor. Archdeacon W. T. Leach (1805-1886), Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy and Molson Professor of English Literature at McGill, has left us "A Discourse on the Nature and Duties of the Military Profession" (1840), "Observations on the Hypothesis of the former existence of a great Fresh Water Inland Sea within the Continent of America" (1845), On the Uses and Abuses of Phrenology (1846), An Advent Sermon (1851), and—a timeless touch—A Lecture on Education (1864). Two conspicuous figures, both classical scholars, dominate the field of more conventional and specialized scholarship. The first is John McCaul (1807-1886), President of University College, Toronto, also a TCD man, who published before he came to this country studies in Terence and Horace, but whose chief work was his Britanno-Roman Inscriptions (1863), of which an English reviewer observed: "It could scarcely have been expected in the old world, that in the remote capital of Western Canada, a scholar would devote his time to correcting by accurate knowledge and acute reasoning the errors of those who would seem to have much better means of examining the particulars . . . than himself." The second is Sir William Peterson (1856-1921), Principal of McGill from 1895-1919, who was an editor of Latin texts; see his M. Tulli Ciceronis Pro A. Cluentio Oratio (1899), etc.

in The categories, making for convenience if not for wisdom, so far employed in this survey, fail when we turn to the scholarly and critical writing which has been produced of late in this country in the disciplines of Classics and Modern Languages. Nor is a simple chronological approach useful, partly because of that explosion of publication which I have noted above, chiefly because of the prominence of certain individuals rather than of "schools"— and indeed of some individuals who deserve not a sentence but a chapter each. I take as examples two men who between them span two generations of Canadian scholarship, one a Cambridge man transplanted, the other a Canadian who studied at Harvard in the days of Babbitt and Kittredge: Gilbert Norwood and A. S. P. Woodhouse. Norwood was at home wherever there are scholars to disagree about Euripides (see his posthumously published Essays on Euripidean Drama [1954]), urbane, witty, the delight of many a common room. As he went on writing, he went deeper and deeper; there is a vast difference between the intent and style of his Greek Tragedy (first published 1920) and his elegant but by no

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means definitive Pindar (1945): both insist on the necessity of seeing the work in terms of its form, but in the second the interpretation less conventionally flowers out from the discovery of the symbolic centre of each ode. Norwood always kept his imagination fixed upon the immediate experience of literature, "appreciation" he would have called it; he was always the tutor, ready with the happy penetrating gloss—a centripetal man, who found it easy to live in the world on account of that centre. Woodhouse turned early to the history of ideas and to an almost reverent sense of their power to create patterns in both literature and life. His astonishing 100-page introduction to the Army Debates (Puritanism and Liberty (1938, 1950) remains the definitive analysis of the Puritan ethos; his occasional articles on Spenser and Milton (e.g., "Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene" ELH, 1949; "The Argument of Milton's Comus," UTQ, 1941) have become the periods from which following critics have commenced their highly documented sentences. A quarter-century of graduate students, bemused by end-of-term marathon seminar sessions, have often confused him with Milton, but in spite of his editorial and critical labours on Milton he was not just a Miltonist. He was a humanist, committed to power as well as knowledge (hence centrifugal), and a great deal of his intellectual energy was devoted influentially to advancing the cause of the humanities in Canada, and to shaping the careers of a generation of pro-consuls who have carried his principles through most Canadian, and some American universities. Neither a horizontal order (by type of scholarship) nor a vertical order (by "field") will do to describe the synthetic man, who lives and works on the diagonal, whether it be a man like G. G. Sedgewick (1882-1949), a teacher (at British Columbia) of legendary histrionics, whose Of Irony, Especially in Drama (1935, 1948) is as much the expression of a personality as the development of a theme; or F. M. Salter (1895-1962), whose authoritative—yet curiously sentimental—Medieval Drama in Chester (1955) exhibits his meticulousness and his pugnacity; or Watson Kirkconnell, whose extraordinary linguistic accomplishments, range and mass of publication (the Acadia Bulletin for January 1961 has published a "selective" list of 370 books, pamphlets and contributions to periodicals), and intransigence in opinion make him unique among Canadian scholars—only he could have produced The Celestial Cycle (1952), a collection of the major analogues to the Paradise Lost theme; or, again, Barker Fairley, whose Study of Goethe (1947), in which the stages on Goethe's way become acts in the drama of the creative spirit and a demonstration of the subtle relations between life and art, has an intention parallel to his experiments in portrait painting, while the enthusiastic humanism which informs his championshp of F. H. Varley against the Shield-to-abstraction movement in Canadian painting (Our Living Tradition,

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2nd & 3rd Series, 1959) directs him also to persuasive interpretations of such neglected or misunderstood writers as C. M. Doughty (1927) or Wilhelm Raabe(1961). Or Northrop Frye. Frye has written many things, besides those already noticed and others since: to say nothing of his early contributions to the Canadian Forum, he has written introductions to selections from Milton and Byron, to the Collected Poems of E. J. Pratt (2nd ed., 1958), and to The Tempest (Pelican Shakespeare); to the Hudson Review he has contributed the only short views which make sense of Wallace Stevens, C. J. Jung, and Samuel Beckett. But there is no journalistic diffusion in these enterprises—his world is architectonic. One characteristic mark of his style, otherwise proceeding, though witty in the seventeenth-century sense, en clair, the "natural" similes, in which giraffes and the Milky Way appear in the midst of abstract categories, is the sign of unity: he finds types in stones and forms in everything. Beginning with Blake—in the Moncton Public Library, of all places in the world—he developed (Fearful Symmetry, 1947) a critical grammar based on the traditional typological interpretation of the Bible and on a demonstration of the unity of myth; this he has since (Anatomy of Criticism, 1957) worked into a synthesis of critical theory, controversial, of immense influence (especially in the graduate schools of this continent), Spenglerian in its cyclical complications, overpowering in its range of reference, and depending polemically on such first principles as: "Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb"; "literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study"; "the study of literature can never be founded on value-judgments"; "the symbol neither is nor is not the reality which it manifests"; "the mathematical and the verbal universes are doubtless ways of conceiving the same universe." We are too close to Frye to assess his ultimate influence on the intellectual life of the Western academy; his work as scholar-administrator and lecturer-at-large in the cause of the humanities is spread very widely, and demonstrates one continuity in Canadian intellectual life, for it significantly recalls, with necessary differences, the careers of those missionaries of culture (noticed above) who created the constituencies of the Canadian universities. The "minister's study" (Frye, though many forget it, is a student of divinity too) is still a powerhouse. This "cabinet of characters" illustrates, among other things, the traditional non-specialist aspect of Canadian academic achievement. Other examples may be cited as well, beginning with Sir Daniel Wilson (1816-1892), who is perhaps best remembered—apart from his importance in the history of the University of Toronto—as the author of Caliban, the Missing Link (1873), a real period piece, but who also produced such diverse studies as a biography of Chatterton (1869) and sundry anthropological papers, including The Lost Atlantis (1892). G. H. Needier (1866-1961), soldier and grammarian,

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devoted his retirement to "a new career of research in his favorite English writers, always with some German or Canadian connection," e.g., Scott (Goethe and Scott, 1950). In the next generation we have Marshall McLuhan, who did his M.A. thesis on Meredith and his doctor's dissertation on Thomas Nashe, has written most ably on Tennyson and other literary subjects, and has become an internationally known expert and publicist in the field of "communications," beginning with The Mechanical Bride: Folklore oj Industrial Man (1951), a very comical and profound collage, and continuing in the journal Explorations (1953-57), in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and elsewhere; my favorite McLuhan title is "Sign, Sound and Fury" (in Mass Culture, Glencoe, 111., 1957). In this group we should notice first those at home hi most quarters of the English-speaking literatures, such as Pelham Edgar (1871-1948), the first Canadian Jamesian (Henry James, Man and Author [1927]), whose posthumously published sketches for an autobiography, Across My Path (1952) will provide the reader with a good deal of the human interest lacking in this survey; E. K. Brown, who, in addition to his essay on Canadian poetry, made influential contributions to the study of Matthew Arnold (Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict, 1948), of E. M. Forster (Rhythm in the Novel, 1950) and Willa Gather (Willa Gather: A Critical Biography (1953); or Malcolm Ross, whose contributions to Canadian letters are overshadowed, in the present writer's view, by his Milton's Royalism (1943), a study of conflict between symbol and idea in Milton's creative activity, and his Poetry and Dogma (1954), a Laudian antidote to the Grand Whiggery of scholarship in seventeenth-century poetry. Then there are those who have established themselves as mediators between disciplines, for example F. E. L. Priestley, between literature and science (e.g., "Science and the Poet," Dalhousie Review, 1958), or Reid MacCallum (1897-1949), between literary criticism and aesthetics by way of the philosophy and sacramental order of religion. His posthumously published Imitation and Design (ed. William Blissett, 1953), in appearance a collection of essays, is actually the vehicle for an austere and firmly outlined via media between those heretical dualisms of art and religion, the tyranny of the abstract and the tyranny of the concrete. The temper and intelligence of the work remind one, not altogether inappropriately, of Pascal. Here, before I turn to the specialists, is the place to notice Charles Cochrane (1889-1945) and his Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), which H. A. Innis called "the first major Canadian contribution to the intellectual history of the West." In Cochrane's choice of subject ("heroic" in the Miltonic sense) and in his understanding of the tension between classical naturalism and Augustinian eschatology, we can follow with elevated pleasure the transformation of scholarship into art, the end of art being, as Horace and Sidney said, to teach and delight.

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I have before me at this point a bibliography of studies in Classics, English and the Romance languages, produced by scholars working in Canadian universities since about 1920, which runs to roughly 150 items, in addition to those mentioned above—and it is highly selective and incomplete, even for books. Nor does this include, of course, publications in disciplines of ever growing importance and interest: in the Scandinavian languages and literatures, e.g., A. Anstensen's The Proverb In Ibsen (1936); or in Slavic studies, e.g., the numerous publications of G. Luckyj, the first editor of the Canadian Slavonic Papers; or in East Asiatic studies, e.g., W. A. C. H. Dobson's Late Archaic Chinese: A Grammatical Study (1959); or scholarship in the literatures, ancient and modern, of the Near East, e.g., the publications of G. M. Wickens on modern Persian literature, two of which have appeared in UTQ (Jan. 1959; Jan. 1960), or the ancient Near Eastern specialists, whose philological and archaeological studies move toward biblical theology, e.g., T. J. Meek, whose Hebrew Origins (1936, 1950, 1960) is one of the most meticulous and influential products of a strong school of Semitics at Toronto ("The book is fully documented with references, as I feel all books should be"), or the historians of the ancient Mediterranean world, e.g., E. T. Salmon, A History of the Roman World from 30 B.C. to AD. 138 (1944). But my list does Include publications which have an important place in the history of scholarship in their fields, and some contributions which testify to the range and power of the "establishment" in litterae humaniores. Apart from the invaluable bibliographical contributions to Canadian studies, by E. Goggio et al., R. Tanghe, R. Walters, etc., which are noticed elsewhere in this volume, the work of M. A. Buchanan (1878-1952), once termed "Canada's only Hispanist with an international reputation," in modern language methodology and Spanish literary chronology, the contributions of J. H. Parker to Spanish and Portuguese bibliography (in Bulletin of the Comediantes, SP, etc.), and J. R. MacGillivray's Bibliography and Reference Guide to Keats (1949), there is a not unsurprising dearth of bibliographical studies. There are some conspicuous contributions to philology, linguistics, and of late to lexicography. To begin with, one must mention R. A. Wilson's (1874-1949) The Miraculous Birth of Language (1937, four editions since), with its preface by Bernard Shaw, in which he noted that "provincial Canada had with this volume drawn easily ahead of Pasteurized Pavloffed Freudized Europe"; another monument, also sui generis, Andrew Bell's (1856-1932) The Latin Dual and Poetic Diction (1923), a work of specialized and rigorous opacity; W. L. Graff's Language and Languages (1932), "a general introduction to the science of language"; the guide to Canadian and United States spoken English, Pronunciation (1930), by Thorleif Larsen and F. C. Walker—Thorleif Larsen is better known as an authority on the dramatist George Peele, and his unpublished papers were used in preparing the new Yale edition of Peele. A more

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important contribution to Canadian linguistics was made during his years at Queen's by Henry Alexander, not only in his popular textbook The Story of Our Language (1940), but in his studies for the linguistic atlas for the United States and Canada and as one of the "founders" of The Canadian Dictionary (1962), a large co-operative project. Works in specialized lexicography include J. F. Madden and F. P. Magoun, A Grouped Frequency Word-List of AngloSaxon Poetry (1957), and J. B. Bessinger's Short Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1960), which "presents for the first time a complete glossary of OldEnglish poetry in normalized early West-Saxon orthography," and pioneers new fields in Old-English lexicography. This description is taken from a review by L. K. Shook, the President of the Pontifical Institute, who has published several important studies in the field, including interpretations of the Old English Riddles. This is the era of the editors. Almost every university of note seems to have a big project in hand and "teams" at work; Yale is of course conspicuous in this respect, with More, Milton, Boswell, etc., but nearer home we have an example in the University of Toronto Press's complete J. S. Mill (in progress) with J. M. Robson as present General Editor. Then we go down the scale from the original edition from MSS through the special-purpose editions of major authors to the "case-books" and anthologies required for mass teaching and in the universities. But even with all this going on, the reader may well share my initial surprise in finding how numerous, varied, and important have been the contributions of Canadian scholars to this department of learning. There is of course a tradition from the editing of classical texts: I have mentioned Sir William Peterson, and may now add a later example in W. H. Alexander (1878-1962), with numerous editorial publications in Seneca (e.g., Seneca's Dialogi, 3 vols., 1943-45). Besides the editing of specific texts, we have the findings of the epigraphers and numismatists, such as M. F. MacGregor, one of the authors of The Athenian Tribute Lists (1938-53), or W. P. Wallace, The Euboian League and its Coinage (1956), and other publications directed to the documentation of ancient history, as are the very numerous contributions of F. M. Heichelheim to the study of papyri and the economic history of the ancient world. From such achievements in the collation of and inference from jragmenta, we pass to the embarrassing riches of English literature. Here probably the most outstanding enterprise is Kathleen Coburn's edition of the Coleridge notebooks (1959- ). This is a prolonged and thorough resurrection of a "little world of man," travel, language and code, poem, criticism and philosophy, scandal and aside, metabolism and katabolism of the imagination—everything. Miss Coburn, also the general editor of the projected Complete Coleridge (in progress), is at once captain of academic industry and curious polymath; her earlier essays in Coleridgean editing include the Philosophical Lectures (1949) and the Letters of Sara Hutchinson

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(1954). The chief of her (Canadian) associates has been George Whalley, who has to his credit a highly Coleridgean work of speculative aesthetics (Poetic Process, 1953), and perhaps should have been included in my earlier collection of "non-specialists," since he has contributed to the CBEL Supplement, to Allan Wade's Yeats bibliography, to the Charles Lamb Society Bulletin, and to the legends of the Canadian North (in Tamarack Review, V); in this context we have Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems (1955). Earlier large editing enterprises include Burns Martin's edition of the Works of Allan Ramsay (1953) for the Scottish Text Society and Priestley's edition of Godwin's Political Justice (1946); before that, there were several editions in the Philology and Literature series of the University of Toronto; of the late Douglas Grant, during his productive and influential years at Toronto, brought out his Oxford edition of the Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (1956), with necessarily copious annotation, Ernest Sirluck has edited the second volume of the Yale edition of the Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1959), and G. M. Story, with Helen Gardner, has rescued the Sonnets of William Alabaster (1959) from obscurity; these are devotional exercises by one of the most unsettled in conscience of all Tudor and Stuart divines. The University of Western Ontario's series Studies in the Humanities was inaugurated competently by Herbert Berry with an edition of Sir John Suckling's Poems & Letters from Manuscript (1960), containing six poems and fourteen letters with full critical apparatus. Nor should we forget the right copious and happy industry of Joyce Hemlow among the huge masses of the Burney papers, in the New York Public Library, in the British Museum and elsewhere, the first-fruits of which are to be found in her pleasantly discursive History of Fanny Burney (1958). It is not a long step from Coleridge to Friedrich Schlegel, whose Literary Notebooks, 1797-1801 (1957) have been edited by Hans Eichner; something of what is said of him in the introduction to this intimately documented set of fragments might apply to STC as well: ". . . most of his countless projects never progressed beyond tentative beginnings . . . he was always teeming with ideas . . . the constant flux of his thought. . . . " A less tendentious connection with English literature is apparent hi Beatrice Corrigan's Curious Annals (1956), where the editor translates some newly discovered documents relating to the cause celebre which inspired Browning's The Ring and the Book; Miss Corrigan is an authority on Italian Renaissance drama (see Studies in the Renaissance, V, 1958 and her Catalogue of Italian Plays, 1500-1700, in the Library of the University of Toronto, 1961). In French studies, the most important editing, on the whole, has been done with medieval texts, beginning with A. J. Denomy's (1904-1957) Old French Lives of St. Agnes (1938)— Father Denomy is better known for his The Heresy of Courtly Love (1947), a much-cited treatment of the relation between amour courtois and the neo-

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Manicheanism of Provence—and C. M. Jones's edition of the Chronique du Pseudo-Turpin (1936), and continuing with Bernadine Bujila's La vie de sainte Marie I'Egyptienne (1949) and W. H. Trethewey's French Text of the Ancrene Riwle (1958). To these must be added a most elegant set of texts in Renaissance literature, the edition in six volumes in the Textes litteraires francais series of the works of Desportes, with the commentary of Malherbe, by Victor E. Graham. The range and quality of contemporary scholarship in Classics may be studied in Phoenix (from 1946), the journal of the Canadian Classical Association. The scholars of this generation, whose work is from time to time represented there (as elsewhere in their professional journals), are carrying on the various traditions of their field, literary criticism (e.g., D. J. Conacher on Euripides; W. J. N. Rudd on Horace and Juvenal), ancient history (e.g., S. E. Smethurst on Cicero and his times; C. W. J. Eliot on the demes of Attica), archaeology, influenced here by Homer Thompson (e.g., J. W. Graham on the Cretan palaces). Here one might mention especially, as extensions of the field, D. F. S. Thomson's studies in Renaissance Latin, and E. G. Berry's Emerson's Plutarch (1961), a book "really about Emerson" (H. L. Tracy), of which perhaps the most interesting part is the account of the idea of "Hellenism" in the Romantics and post-Romantics. (Here, as elsewhere in these necessarily abbreviated notices, I call attention to a few items either of special interest or obviously representative.) The immediate tradition behind these scholars may be indicated by reference to the productions of O. J. Todd (1884-1957), author of the Index Aristophaneus, translator of Xenophon's Banquet in the Loeb series; of W. Sherwood Fox, whose curious productions in Classics and Semitics include such items as "Lucian in the Grave-scene of Hamlet," and "The Origin of the Conical Cap of Cyprian Aphrodite Worship"; of W. D. Woodhead (18851957), Etymologizing in Greek Literature (1928)—hardly representative of his capacities; of Skuli Johnson (1888-1955), who was as at home among the Icelandic sagas as with his Horace (see his Selected Odes of Horace, 1952). The tradition has always had, however, its centre in knowledgeable piety before texts (see my reference to Norwood, above), and in this respect as in others G. M. A. Grube has been an influential figure. His earlier Drama of Euripides (1941), hi which a thorough discussion of the dramatic devices of the Greek stage precedes an analysis of each play seen in the context of its times, has been succeeded by Sophocles the Playwright (1957), of S. M. Adams (18911960) which has much the same attention to text in context of religious belief and dramatic convention; Grube's latest book, A Greek Critic: Demetrius on Style (1961), preceded by other investigations in Greek literary criticism

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(e.g., in AJP, 1957; Trans. RSC, 1956), displays another aspect of his interests: he gives a fresh translation of the document, so difficult to reproduce that there has to be a good deal of Greek in the footnotes, places it in the context of ancient writing on rhetoric, and argues at length for a date c. 270 B.C. This is technical and debatable, but the treatise itself is of interest to any student of rhetorical figures, and even the layman may amuse himself with the illustrations. His Plato's Thought (1935) is also of interest apart from its merits, still conspicuous among the constant re-interpretations of Plato, for it adumbrates another aspect of classical studies, exemplified by M. D. C. Tait (1896-1958) (e.g. "Plato's Use of Myth," UTQ, 1957) and L. E. Woodberry on Parmenides and other studies. Gilbert Bagnani's Arbiter of Elegance (1954), like its subject, Petronius, makes the best of two worlds, in this case the intricate problem of the date and authorship of the Satyricon, and the delightful if conjectural reconstruction of the life of its author. If E. T. Owen (see above) set aside the "Homeric question," L. A. MacKay in The Wrath of Homer (1948) approaches it by arguing that "Homer" used the story of the wrath of Achilles to organize two cycles, one dealing with Agamemnon's expedition, the other with the revenge of Achilles. I do not know how this stands with the experts, Denys Page et al, but it is a vivid scholarly demonstration. As I have implied above, A. S. P. Woodhouse has exerted a strong influence on English studies, whether specifically in the development of an approach to Milton—as in A. E. Barker's Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (1942), a standard work, which analyses Milton's thought in relation to the Puritan ideal of the "holy community," and follows its transformations through the alchemy of political controversy—more generally in his sympathy to such studies in the history of ideas as William Robbins' The Ethical Idealism of Matthew Arnold (1959), started under the direction of E. K. Brown; or in political and social history, e.g., my The Paul's Cross Sermons, 15341642 (1958); or in the adoption of his categories for seventeenth-century ethical and religious experience. H. S. Wilson (1904-1959), for example, turned Woodhouse's formulation of the nature-grace dichotomy to a study of Shakespeare's tragedies (On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy, 1957), not altogether persuasively, though the book remains valuable for its incidental insights and subtle analyses of dramatic action; and A. C. Hamilton, in his The Structure of Allegory in the Faerie Queene (1961), an asymmetrical but always interesting book, professes more debt to Woodhouse's discussion of the poem than he demonstrates. In Renaissance studies, the students of the Toronto "school" have also been deeply influenced by Wilson himself and by N. J. Endicott, the scope of whose researches in Sir Thomas Browne is suggested in UTQ, January 1961. I have mentioned William

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Blissett in another connection: he has also two important articles on Elizabethan "Caesarism" (SP, 1956; JHI, 1957); other contemporary representatives of these influences are H. N. Maclean (on Fulke Greville, in HLQ, 1953, 1958), and A. E. Malloch, who has written on Donne's paradoxes and their tradition (SP, 1956), and on the Renaissance casuists (SEL, 1962). Roy Daniells' contributions to scholarship in this period range from his edition of Traherne's Serious and Pathetic Contemplation (1941) to more recent studies in the Baroque. The most outstanding contributions to this field from outside this group have been made by John Peter, in his Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (1956), most valuable in its discussion of the rediscovery of Latin satire in the 1590's and its effects, and his A Critique of Paradise Lost (1960). Among contemporary Shakespeareans we should notice Marion B. Smith, who has also published on Marlowe's imagery (1940), and F. D. Hoeniger, a frequent contributor to the Shakespeare Quarterly and the editor of Pericles in the New Arden series. J. K. Johnstone's The Bloomsbury Group (1954) is an important contribution to twentiethcentury literary history. Some contributions to Old and Middle English scholarship have been noted above; to these should be added R. K. Gordon's translation Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1927) and his The Story of Troilus (1934), both of which, and especially the former, have been extraordinarily useful to literary students. A few monuments in scholarship and criticism of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury English literature must serve to conclude this section. W. O. Raymond's The Infinite Moment (1950 and expanded 1964), a collection of essays on Browning written over a considerable period, remains a useful part of any Browning library; W. L. MacDonald in Pope and His Critics (1951), investigates how far "personalities" entered into contemporary views of Pope, but the result is more an essay in biography than in the history of criticism. Clarence Tracy's biography of Richard Savage, The Artificial Bastard (1953), opens up accurately for the first time a fascinating chapter in the social and literary life of the eighteenth century, and R. M. Wiles, in his Serial Publication in England, before 1750 (1956), provides an account, among other things, of the early publication of abridged versions of Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and Joseph Andrews. Kenneth MacLean's John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1936) is a standard work on the influence of Locke's theories of mind on the eighteenth-century imagination, and is especially useful for Sterne; his Agrarian Age: A Background for Wordsworth (1950), a study of "agrarian sentiment" in the period, is touched by its author's sensitive, often eccentric (in the best sense) insights: e.g., "Wordsworth [in the French Revolutionary period] was the perfect young intellectual: his dress was rather loud. . . ." Another book of importance in this general category is The Valley of Vision (1961), a study of Blake's revolu-

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tionary dialectic in the context of the Age of Enlightenment, by Peter F. Fisher (1918-1958). Fisher, though he wrote articles on Beowulf, Scott, Milton, and Shakespeare, had primarily a philosophic mind, and this book demands much of its readers, who are rewarded by association with what Frye, editing this posthumous volume, calls "a critical mind of singular erudition and power." Surprisingly, not much has been done in the way of interpretations of American literature. It is a long step from Pelham Edgar's Henry James of 1927 to Peter Buitenhuis, who has edited Henry James, French Writers and American Women (1961), and contributed to a special group of James articles in UTQ, January 1962. Gordon Roper, whose "Mark Twain and his Canadian Publishers" (American Book Collector, 1960) is of more than bibliographical interest, has an edition of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1949), and Hugo McPherson has published a number of articles on Hawthorne (e.g., in American Literature, 1958; UTQ, 1959) and on other American authors. In Germanic scholarship and criticism the figures are more isolated, there is less question of influence or schools; there is an interesting concentration of late years upon modern German literature, not true generally of the publications of Heinrich Henel, which range indeed from an edition of Aelfric's De Temporibus Anni (1942) through articles on Goethe, Hebbel and a study of the nineteenth-century Swiss poet C. F. Mayer (1954); but H. Steinhauer, who has published anthologies of German novelle (1936) and drama (1938) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has written much on Hauptmann. The most recent work on Hauptmann is by Margaret Sinden, a study of his realistic prose plays (1957) which by extensive analysis introduces these dramas to English readers. Also in the modern field is W. L. Graff's Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet (1957), which is most convincing when it expounds the significance of certain recurring symbols in Rilke, "angels," "transformations." Hermann Boeschenstein, who succeded Barker Fairley at University College, Toronto, is representative of a different academic background and scholarly interests which coincide chiefly in the German novel—he has translated Fairley's Raabe. I am incompetent to assess his total contribution to studies of modern German culture, except to observe that the common reader may learn more about the German imagination and its implication for modern Europe from his Der Neue Mensch: Die Biographic im deutschen Nachkriegsroman (1958) or from such an unobtrusive but penetrating article as "The Germans Look at the Atomic Age" (UTQ, 1959), with its account of the intellectuals' distrust of the technology for which their compatriots are universally praised, than from any amount of popular interpretations of the German soul. His "report" (as he calls it) on German fiction during World War II, The German Novel 1939-1944 (1949), examines with tolerance and care the

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persistence of traditional themes in the genre, and the devices of indirection and irony which helped to preserve these themes and values under National Socialism. That gap in our scholarly concerns, the neglect of the American tradition, which I noted in the context of English studies, is not so glaring in the publications of the Italianists and Hispanists: E. Goggio, for example, from his Italians in Early American History (1930), through a whole series of publications on the relations of Irving, Longfellow, Cooper, and Emerson to Italian literature and culture, has domiciled comparative studies of this kind in Canada; another contributor to the study of Western hemisphere Hispanic literature is Kurt L. Levy, with a thoroughly documented book on Thomas Carrasquilla, a Toronto doctoral thesis, published in Spanish in Colombia (1958). Carrasquilla was "a pioneer of Spanish-American regionalism." In the European tradition, we have Ulrich Leo's Torquato Tasso (pub. Bern in German, 1951), a study of Tasso's tormented sensibility and its results for his style, and J. E. Shaw's (1876-1962) Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love (1948), an elucidation of the Canzone d'Amore; "the poem," said E. H. Wilkins, "has waited for 650 years to receive a duly satisfying interpretation, and it has found that interpretation not in its native Tuscany, but in Ontario." This whole matter of inter-cultural relations, in the context of comparative literature, is especially illuminated by a series of investigations by scholars in the field of French studies. Here are some representative titles: Harry Ashton, Du Bartas en Angleterre (1908); Margaret Cameron, L'influence des saisons de Thomson sur la poesie descriptive en France, 1759-1810 (1927); E. A. Joliat, Smollett et la France (1935); C. D. Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature, 1520-1660 (1940); E. J. H. Greene, T. S. Eliot et la France (1951). These adventures across linguistic boundaries make a good deal of Eng. Lit. thesis production look rather parochial, especially when, in the present political and cultural context, we add to these not only W. E. Collin's surveys of French-Canadian literature in "Letters in Canada," and D. M. Hayne's bibliographical studies in the French-Canadian novel, but such studies as M. B. Ellis's De Saint-Denys Garneau (1949) or G. A. Klinck's edition of the Memoires intimes of Louis Frechette (1961). In the main tradition of the major study of the major writer, there is A. F. B. Clark's Racine (1939), which sets the dramas conventionally in the context of the age, the biography, and the conventions of French classical tragedy. French studies at British Columbia in the twenties and thirties have left us besides Ashton's Madame de la Fayette (1922) and his Moliere (1930). In the eighteenth-century field, we have C. W. Hendel's two-volume Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist (1934), which traces the evolution of Rousseau's thought in terms of occasions and inward development, with

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much massive exposition of texts and little epigrammatic force. M. B. Ellis's Julie; or, La Nouvelle Heloise (1949) demonstrates the consistency between the moral philosophy of the work and the moral theory in Rousseau's earlier writings. These volumes are representative of the history of ideas; the various publications of D. O. Evans on the drama and novel in the Romantic period, and his Social Romanticism in France, 1830-1848 (1951), are concerned with literature in its social relations—see the pages on Hugo in the industrial hell of Lille, in this book, which contains a bibliography of French socialism from Saint-Simon to Proudhon.

rv The beginnings, development, and flowering of studies in Canadian literature fall, for the most part, into the obvious pattern I have already employed: complaint leading to accomplishment and systematization; belles-lettres and general surveys supplanted by specialization and the search for the mythos of Canadian culture. We may begin with a perceptive remark by Wilfred Campbell, whom Carl Klinck has studied in his proper context as a "provincial Victorian" (1942): "The grave weakness of our literary life is the same as that at the bottom of our national existence. Sad to say, we are less a people with one aim and sympathy than we are a bundle of cliques, each determined to get what it calls its rights and caring little for matters outside its own interests" (Toronto Globe, Dec. 10, 1892). True then and true now. In the Dalhousie Review article referred to above, George Woodcock condensed the pseudoproblem which has haunted the literary life of this country in recent times: "Of criticism which, in the full sense, seeks to evaluate Canadian writings in a creative manner and to relate it, not only to creative experience, but also to a universal criterion, there is almost none. Reviewers exist in plenty, making ad hoc judgments . . . which are rarely more than superficial." (For the moment he had forgotten UTQ's "Letters in Canada," which since 1936 has provided, in the words of its first editor, "material for a conspectus, not merely of literature in the narrow sense, but of that culture of which it forms a part.") Woodcock goes on to desiderate a journal devoted to such criticism; this hope has been realized in Canadian Literature (begun 1959), the beautifully produced magazine he edits at Vancouver. More practical, less pontifical, is Desmond Pacey's plea (in the Royal Society's Stadia Varia, 1957): "There has been some improvement in the quantity and quality of Canadian criticism, especially since about 1925 when the first handbooks began to appear, but much remains to be done. Really informed and intelligent criticism, such as that of the late E. K. Brown . . . of W. E. Collin . . . or of ... "Letters in Canada," is precisely what a nascent literature such as ours most requires." (Note the assumption in the last sentence: that our literature, in 1957, is still

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"nascent.") Pacey goes on to note the wholesome influence in this respect of The Week (1883-96)—studied by Claude Bissell in the Canadian Historical Review (Sept. 1950)—the Canadian Forum, and Northern Review (194656), the only Canadian literary magazine which has achieved, by the virtue, intelligence, and evil fortune of one man, a tragic moment, when John Sutherland (1919-1956), from his Stryker frame, finished his testament, a significant study of E. J. Pratt, The Poetry of E. J. Pratt (1956). Pacey's view of criticism, it appears, is progressive, industrial; he believes in symposia, in periodic assessment of "the progress of Canadian letters." In this he carries on, with some sophistication, the pious and patriotic intentions of his predecessors, the anthologists, the writers of handbooks, and the contributors to the Makers of Canadian Literature series, from the Rev. E. H. Dewart (1828-1903) Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), through Archibald MacMurchy (1832-1912) Handbook of Canadian Literature (1906), J. W. Garvin (1859-1935) Canadian Poets (1916, 1926), R. P. Baker's History of English-Canadian Literature to the Confederation (1920), a work not superseded until the present volume, Our Canadian Literature (1922), edited by A. D. Watson (1859-1926) and Lome Pierce (18901963), whose services to Canadian literature as publisher (Ryerson), editor, bibliographer, and publicist are outstanding, Highways of Canadian Literature (1924), by J. D. Logan (1869-1929) and D. G. French (1873-1945), to Lionel Stevenson's Appraisals of Canadian Literature (1926). Compare Logan and French with Stevenson, and you will find a significant change in critical method. Logan (according to Garvin, he delivered the first series of lectures on Canadian literature in a Canadian university, at Acadia in 191516), a victim, says Pacey, of "classifying mania," collects on four astonishing pages the critics of Canadian letters up to his time, leader-writers, dilettantes, professors—there are twenty potential M.A. dissertations in Can. Lit. in those pages, and, for all I know, most of them have since been written— and classifies them in three "schools": the Pioneer or Traditional, the Academic or Dilettante, the Pragmatic or Pedagogic. Stevenson, on the other hand, anticipates Frye in his perceptive observations on the Canadian literary scene —and this, we should remember, was before the best of Pratt. "Canadian poetry," he writes, "is equally [with painting] concerned with the apocalyptic. . . . In Canada the modern mind is placed in circumstances approximately those of the primitive myth-makers. . . . The Canadian poet is instinctively a romantic." Frye has, in his series of "Letters in Canada" reviews, in his "Preface to an Uncollected Anthology" (Studia Varia, 1957), in his review of A. J. M. Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry in the Forum (1943), and elsewhere, "re-written the history of Canadian poetry, adjusting it to the focus of his mythopoetic lens" (Eli Mandel), which is a-historical, and invites us to

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take our ancestors on our own terms. He has been followed by James Reaney in his attempt to "find out painfully what symbolic language expresses the feelings [the poet] has about living in this country" through meditations on Isabella Valancy Crawford (who was edited by Garvin) and E. J. Pratt; (see also his "The Canadian Poet's Predicament," UTQ, April, 1957). But the traditional approach continues, in Pacey's standard work, Creative Writing in Canada (1952, 1961), with its indispensable bibliography, and its rather tiring succession of writers who either fulfil or do not fulfil (usually not) their "early promise," and, in another way, in such enterprises as the New Canadian Library, general editor Malcolm Ross, an admirable series of reprints introduced by a variety of editors, which illustrate generally the high degree of organization in Can. Lit., the occasional superiority of the critic to his material, and in one case at least, a curious lapse of judgment, when The Stepsure Letters, the lucubrations of that tedious old pharisee Thomas McCulloch (1777-1843), first President of Dalhousie, were exhumed by an elaborate apparatus from their decent grave in The Acadian Recorder. "It is not a nation but an environment that makes an impact on poets," Frye observes. James Cappon (1854-1939), whose studies of Roberts (Roberts and the Influences of His Time, 1905) and Carman (Bliss Carman and the Literary Currents and Influences of His Time, 1930), are classics of Canadian literary history, would have subscribed to this; the study of Carman especially conveys his fine sense of a poet's context—Carman had some very odd contexts. But Cappon is, of course, by current critical standards as dated as the "conservative and correct" Archibald MacMechan (1862-1933) in his Headwaters of Canadian Literature (1924); a student contribution to The Rebel noted in a report of Cappon's address to the Toronto English Association (1917), that "the test which Professor Cappon applies to poetry as a working criterion is 'Has it a rationalized concept?' Yeats he found lacking hi clarity of thought." And he was capable of attributing to Carman, Roberts, and Whitman alike something that he called "the cosmic touch." Looking through the admirable books on Canadian poetry published since 1930, from W. E. Collin's over-written but influential The White Savannahs to R. E. Rashley's Poetry in Canada: The First Three Stages (1958), one finds parochial hyperbole giving way to thoughtful analysis, supported more and more by scholarly revaluation of minor figures. To this task E. K. Brown (19051951) in his On Canadian Poetry (1943) brought a patient and open-minded lucidity, and A. J. M. Smith the resources of a born anthologist, a taste at once catholic and refined, and a nice sense of historical development. The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943, 1948) has been for long our guide, and the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse will continue to be our breviary. The ground, then, has been mapped, theories, inventories, and assessments

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have flowered in the winter sun of Canadian nationalist sentiment, and now there is less danger than a half-century ago of mistaking archaeology for criticism; perhaps there is more in mistaking the contrivances of myth for the realities of scholarship. V

There, then, are the pigeonholes, and from each peeps the spine of a book or the curling edge of an offprint, bent with its freight of footnotes. The various "genres" of literary scholarship are all there and all represented. What does this kind of summary prove? It proves the vitality of research and teaching—for many of these works started in classroom notes—in the humanities in Canada, or one branch of the humanities, and provides a happy ending to the dark surveys and forecasts with which I decorated the first pages of this essay. It proves that the antiquary is as creative as the astronomer, and his enterprise as much a challenge to the active intellect. The spaces between dates—and between words—are psychologically as great as the spaces between stars, and have the same masterful Irrelevance to natural resources and political programmes. So far as the Canadian ethos is concerned, it proves very little. For many of the persons noted above, a Canadian university was or is a pause in passage and no continuing city; for most of them, too, inclusion in a survey like this is accidental, for each belongs with his fellows in his "field" (a good word, field, you use a hoe in a field, not a placard), and only there is the real association. Such a generalization is not altogether right for those whose achievements have made them prestigious symbols for their universities, or those who have helped to create the conditions under which literary research has flourished and by their teaching and example have raised the standards of the profession. To them I have tried to give the prominence they deserve. But all these writers have in common an adherence to the disinterested use of words; this is the dominant element in an otherwise complex tradition, and they maintain it in the age of the electronically disseminated corruption of the word. There is an academic jargon too, but at least its aim is usually definition, not sedation. And this is very valuable, especially in a country with four languages (French, English, TV, and "joual"), but essential at all times and in all places to the creation of civility.

4. Religious and Theological Writings to 1960 JOHN WEBSTER GRANT

"THERE is NOTHING more pleasant and comfortable, more animating and enlivening, more ravishing and soul-contenting, to a true Christian, than the frequent reading [of] the Experiences of dying Saints." Thus wrote Lawrence Coughlan in introducing An Account of the Work of God, in Newfoundland, North America (1776), the first religious publication in English that can plausibly be connected with present-day Canada. Coughlan, a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel who dedicated his narrative of remarkable conversions and triumphant deaths to the evangelical Countess of Huntingdon, had compromised his claim to priority, however, by returning to England before publishing his book. No such ambiguity attaches to Henry Alline (1748-1784), who both lived and published in Nova Scotia. Converted in 1776 without much acknowledged assistance from others, he undertook a travelling ministry that disrupted the Congregational churches of the Maritimes and replaced them with New-Light congregations that would for the most part eventually adopt Baptist principles. His Two Mites on . . . Divinity (1781) and A Court for the Trial of AntiTraditionalist (1783), the first religious books to appear in British North America, were highly original contributions to theology. Drawing on the mystical piety of William Law, and through Law on that of Jacob Boehme, Alline argued that the world is a fallen portion of a universe emanating from God and that salvation is free to all who will escape the taint of sin by overcoming bodily desires. Jonathan Scott (1744-1819), a Congregational minister whose flock had been disrupted by Alline's preaching, put the case for the traditional Calvinistic orthodoxy capably although not very imaginatively in A Brief View of the Religious Tenets and Sentiments . . . in . . . Two Mites (1784). These beginnings might have been expected to inaugurate a religious literature based on the novelties of the frontier experience. Beyond inspiring a spate of pious narratives analogous to that of Coughlan, however, the frontier spirit made little lasting impression on Canadian religious writing. David

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Willson (17787-1866) founded a community near Toronto known as the Children of Peace and personally supervised the building of their Sharon Temple. Manifesting in The Impressions of the Mind (1835) and other writings a religious inventiveness reminiscent of such other natives of upstate New York as Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes, he claimed a mission to restore not only the Christian but the Jewish dispensation. For the most part, however, early religious writings faithfully reflected the European backgrounds of settlers and missionaries. Their authors, typically, were pastors or theological teachers who wished to keep their people firm in the faith and loyal to the particular traditions they represented. Since a number of denominations shared the ground and competed for members, polemic was practically the norm of religious writing. Best remembered today is the vigorous exchange between John Strachan (1778-1867) and Egerton Ryerson (1803-1882) over the clergy reserves and related issues. Stung by Strachan's charge that the province was being inundated by "numbers of uneducated itinerant Preachers" whose religious motives and political loyalties were both suspect, Ryerson compared his fellow-Methodists favourably with the Anglican clergy in Claims of the Churchmen and Dissenters of Upper Canada (1828). Strachan's fullest statement on the relations of church and state was in A Letter to the Right Honorable Thomas Franklin Lewis, M.P. (1830). Both men would return to the theme on numerous occasions. Controversy raging most often over the basic principles that distinguished churches from one another, however, reflected the dangers and opportunities of a period when denominational attachments were still fluid. Infant baptism was a popular theme, especially in the Maritime provinces where the Baptists were a large and aggressive body. William Elder (1784-1848), a Baptist minister who turned Congregationalist, justified his change of allegiance in Infant Baptism (1823). E. A. Crawley (1789-1885) of Acadia University, himself a convert from the Church of England and widely regarded as the Baptists' prize trophy, replied belatedly in A Treatise on Baptism (1835). James Robertson (18017-1878), an Anglican clergyman in the heart of the Baptist country, had A Treatise on Infant Baptism published in the following year. Disputes about the authority of bishops were most commonly aired in pamphlets and church newspapers, but they also helped to inspire the publication of The Foundation and Constitution of the Christian Ministry (1826) by Bishop G. J. Mountain (1789-1863) and of An Historical View of the Church of England (1830) by Daniel Falloon (d. 1862). Other books recall issues now largely forgotten but current in the early nineteenth century. Universalism was a favourite target of Methodists, who saw in it a threat to the urgency of their appeal for conversion; A. W. McLeod, a Maritime editor, was one of the earliest with Universalism in Its Modern and Ancient Form (1837). Arminianism, a mark not only of

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Methodists but of revivalists in the Alline tradition, was deplored by Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), first president of Dalhousie University, in his posthumous Calvinism, the Doctrine of the Scriptures (1849). Millerism, which induced a continent-wide expectation of the immediate return of Christ, was dissected by the Congregationalist John Roaf (1801-1862) in his Lectures on the Millennium (1844). The most dependable source of polemic, however, was the gulf of misunderstanding that separated Roman Catholics from all others. As early as 1804 a Letter of Instruction to the Roman Catholic Missionaries of Nova Scotia and Its Dependencies by Bishop Edmund Burke (1753-1820), which branded as insulting the oath of allegiance required of Roman Catholic priests, led to a brisk exchange of correspondence between the Bishop and two local Anglican clergymen. Thomas McCulloch, who would later be a vigorous foe of the Anglican establishment, seized the occasion to publish anonymously a fullscale treatise entitled Popery Condemned by Scripture and the Fathers (1808). This was followed quickly by Burke's Remarks on a Pamphlet entitled Popery Condemned by Scripture and the Fathers (1809) and by McCulloch's inevitable Popery Again Condemned (1810), both of exhausting length. Almost all theologians of rank felt themselves compelled at one time or another to express themselves on this topic. The genre was eventually discredited, however, by its most successful practitioner. Charles Chiniquy (1809-1899), a former priest turned Presbyterian, obtained a massive readership by laying sensational charges of immorality against the Roman Catholic clergy. The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional (1874) and Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (1885), in particular, went through scores of editions and are probably popular in some quarters even yet. Controversialists of the early nineteenth century documented their arguments with quotations from Scripture, from the church fathers, and from numerous modern writers both Protestant and Roman Catholic. Thek works, although of almost no interest today, reflected a measure of scholarship that could not have been achieved easily in the midst of the busy lives they led. On the other hand, one searches in vain for traces of intellectual curiosity. The object was to score debating points, not to discover truth. Conspicuously, too, there was no thought of understanding the adversary, of discovering common ground with him, or of learning from him. Each tradition was complete, intact, and closed. Debate of this kind was possible, however, only because all parties shared a considerable amount of common ground. In 1810 Edmund Burke published A Treatise on the First Principles of Christianity. In 1859 James Bovell (18171880) of Trinity College, Toronto, issued his Outlines of Natural Theology for the Use of the Canadian Student. Burke's presuppositions were scholastic, whereas Bovell belonged to the eighteenth-century tradition that found the

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literal truth of the Bible confirmed by the observation of countless natural phenomena. Yet the two had enough in common to justify Burke's confidence that his book would give no offence to Christians of any description. Both writers emphasized the fulfilment of prophecy, the confirmation of scriptural truth by miraculous signs, and the conformity of divine revelation with the best human thinking. Confident that this foundation was well laid, the denominations could get on with their quarreling. In a period when churches were being planted, few of those involved had leisure or interest to record the manner of the planning. Those who undertook special surveys for churches or societies constituted an exception, for they were under obligation to write reports. Some of these reports were little more than compilations of raw data, but others had some literary style. Joshua Marsden (1777-1837) was perhaps too self-consciously literary in his Narrative of a Mission to Nova Scotia (1816). John West (17757-1845) in The Substance of a Journal (\ 824), G. J. Mountain in his Journal (1845), and John Ryerson (1800-1878) in Hudson's Bay (1855) found their powers of observation enhanced by unfamiliar western surroundings. In all of these accounts simple but acute descriptions are overlaid with pious sentiment and with censorious judgments on both Indians and traders. Experiences of a different kind were recorded in the Life (1849) of the escaped slave Josiah Henson (1789-1883), which had a wide circulation and was long believed to be the model for Uncle Tom's Cabin. Although ghost-written, the book was obviously based on the recollections of an intelligent and sensitive man. In time the denominations would see a need for more coherent accounts of their history. Early attempts ranged in style from epic narrative to dry-as-dust listing of clerical appointments, the two often being combined within the same volume. The Rise and Progress of the Church of England in the British North American Provinces (1849) by T. B. Akins (1809-1891) was one of the sketchiest; Case and His Cotemporaries (1867-77), a five-volume compendium of miscellaneous information about the Methodists by John Carroll (1809-1884), the most ambitious. William Gregg (1817-1909) began well with his History of the Presbyterian Church in the Dominion of Canada (1885), but was unable to bring the story up to date in the same detail. Fifty Years with the Baptist Ministers and Churches of the Maritime Provinces of Canada (1880) by I. E. Bill (1805-1891) was largely biographical in presentation. Greatly as they varied in other respects, these books all had as their dominant theme the successful planting and growth toward maturity of a particular tradition on Canadian soil. By the later decades of the nineteenth century the familiar denominational polemics were beginning to seem somewhat anachronistic, and readiness to explore new questions was replacing the old cocksureness about received traditions. In part this change of theological climate reflected the conviction of

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the major communions that they now had an assured place in Canada, and also their preoccupation with the national responsibilities that had been thrust upon them by Confederation. In part it was a response to new ideas from Europe that threatened to destroy the foundations on which all of their systems had been built. The ideas that would deflect the course of religious controversy came chiefly from three sources. German scholars had been applying to the biblical text since late in the eighteenth century the methods of literary analysis that had long since suggested the composite authorship of Homer; and by the time of Confederation some Canadians were becoming aware of their conclusion that large proportions of the Old Testament in particular had not been written by the authors to whom they had hitherto been attributed. The research of physical and biological scientists was casting doubt on the chronology of creation suggested by a literal reading of Genesis, and the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 made this doubt a matter of common knowledge. A brilliant succession of philosophers and theologians in Germany, represented most notably by Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, had meanwhile driven from the field the common-sense philosophy which most early Canadian theological writers had taken for granted. As early as 1859 Edwin Hatch (1835-1889), later a noted Oxford scholar, was introducing students of Trinity College to the newer critical approach as a colleague of James Bovell. It was becoming widely known, in any case, through books and journals. The first serious grappling with the new ideas took place not in theological colleges but in universities where church influence was waning and where faculties were being augmented chiefly from the British Isles. Several outstanding teachers helped to pilot Canadian students through the religious difficulties of the era. John A. Irving has called attention (in Volume I, Chapter 23) to the importance of George Paxton Young (1819-1889) of University College, Toronto, John Watson (1847-1939) of Queen's, and J. Clark Murray (18361917) of McGill. These men, all imports from Scotland and all convinced Christians, saw their task as that of mediating the new critical and scientific ideas in a way that would not be subversive of Christian faith. They sought to accomplish it by drawing on German idealist philosophy to provide the basis for a new understanding of Christianity that would be compatible with biblical criticism and evolution and hence less vulnerable than conventional theology to materialist and agnostic attacks. Their approach emphasized the ethical aspects of religion rather than the dogmatic, asserted the continuity of the natural with the supernatural, and derived the authority of Christianity from its intrinsic appeal to the human heart and mind rather than from the authority of an infallible book or the evidence of miraculous divine interventions. The critical approach to Scripture was inevitably controversial, not only

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because it denied convictions that had long been held but because it threatened an apologetic method, largely developed in controversy with eighteenth-century deists, that placed a great deal of weight on the evidential value of biblically attested miracles and of messianic prophecies fulfilled by Christ. When George C. Workman (1848-1936) argued in a public lecture shortly after his return from theological study in Germany that Old Testament prophecies were not to be understood as conscious predictions of the coming of Christ, the resulting outcry led to his eventual departure from Victoria University. His most persistent opponent was E. H. Dewart (1828-1903), editor of the Methodist Christian Guardian, whose Jesus the Messiah in Prophecy and Fulfilment (1891) was frankly based on the evidential value of fulfilled predictions. The publication of Workman's Messianic Prophecy Vindicated (1899) was the signal for another salvo of attacks, of which Dewart's The Bible under Higher Criticism (1900) was the most serious. The most formidable Canadian opponent of biblical criticism was Sir J. William Dawson (1820-1899), principal of McGill University and a geologist of considerable note, who with indefatigable industry set forth in a long succession of books the unvarying thesis that the scientific evidence as established by geologists and archeologists harmonizes unfailingly with the biblical record. His presentation of the case, first set forth in Archaia (1860), was successively developed and expanded in Nature and the Bible (1875) and The Origin of the World (1877). Dawson's position differed in some important respects from that of typical opponents of the critics. He conceded the probability of a much longer span of creation than a literal reading of Genesis would imply, admitted a flood of less than world-wide proportions, and regularly provided natural explanations for supposed miracles, insisting only that the Bible correctly understood is compatible at all points with an enlightened science. In spirit, however, his work belonged to the early nineteenth century with its predilection for prearranged harmonies. The shaking of old convictions gave rise not only to conservative reactions but to bold speculations that could not be contained even within the categories of liberal theologians. Richard Maurice Bucke (1837-1902), for many years superintendent of a mental hospital at London, Ontario, was led by the influence and friendship of Walt Whitman and by a personal experience of "illumination" to the view that a higher intuitive consciousness of "the life and order of the universe" has been possessed by a few outstanding individuals and will shortly be the common possession of humanity. His Cosmic Consciousness (1901), although seldom found in theological libraries, has been avidly read by a circle of devotees ever since its publication. Its influence has been by no means negligible in Canada itself, where the intellectual generation represented in painting by the Group of Seven was strongly tinged with theosophical ideas. Others embraced spiritualism. One of these was B. F. Austin (1850-

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1932), who turned from such conventional Methodist themes as denunciations of drink and the Jesuit order to publish his Glimpses of the Unseen in 1898. A. Durrant Watson (1859-1926), who combined Methodist churchmanship with psychic research and theosophical speculation, collaborated with Margaret Lawrence in Mediums and Mystics (1923) to record his disillusionment with "spiritism" but also to declare his conviction that we are surrounded by a "sea of Universal Consciousness." Despite the opposition of conservatives and the danger of being overtaken by radicals, established scholars found the critical approach both too convincing and too useful to let go. Religious leaders of the time were highly sensitive to widespread claims that science and literary analysis had shown the Bible to be fraudulent and the claims of the Christian faith therefore untenable. Workman's Messianic Prophecy Vindicated was actually a reply to Goldwin Smith, who in Guesses at the Riddle of Existence (1897) had suggested that the unmasking of the Old Testament would eventually lead to the surrender of the central doctrines of Christianity. Interpreted in the light of idealistic philosophy, however, criticism could be made the basis of a new defence that fitted both the secular optimism of the period and the traditional moralism of the Canadian churches. The result was a spate of books not only defending the "higher criticism" but assuring Canadians that the foundations of their faith had never been firmer. J. E. McFadyen (1870-1933) of Knox offered such assurance in Old Testament Criticism and the Christian Church (1903), R. A. (later Sir Robert) Falconer (1867-1943) of the Presbyterian College, Halifax, in The Truth of the Apostolic Gospel (1904), W. G. Jordan (18521939) of Queen's in Biblical Criticism and Modern Thought (1909). Viewed tentatively at first in theological colleges, the new approach made its way in such periodicals as the Knox College Monthly and was soon shaping their curricula. Theological faculties of the time were largely dominated by scholars of British origin, who naturally continued to participate in the scholarly debates of their homeland. Posts in Canadian colleges even came to be recognized as suitable stepping stones for British theologians on the make, with the result that Canada can lay claim to segments of the careers of such eminent scholars as McFadyen, A. R. Gordon (1877-1930), and George Jackson (1861-1945) in Old Testament; E. F. Scott (1868-1954) and William Manson (1882-1958) in New Testament; and John Baillie (18811963) in systematic theology. In turn a number of Canadians, benefitting from their exposure to European scholarship but finding few opportunities at home, went on to carve out careers in the United States. Cultural nationalism was not totally lacking, however. The publishing firm of Hodder and Stoughton, backed by an impressive Canadian editorial committee, proposed in 1913 a series of books in various fields to be called The Canadian Library of Religious Literature. Three volumes only of a long projected list appeared after the

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First World War, perhaps a creditable proportion for a series whose subject matter seems to have been selected with little regard for the special interests of Canadians. Old Testament scholars were largely absorbed, during the earlier years of this century, with the application and explanation of the techniques of literary criticism. J. E. McFadyen's Introduction to the Old Testament (1905) was directed not to specialists but to those "who desire to understand the modern attitude to the Old Testament," and George Jackson's Studies in the Old Testament (1909) had the same readership in mind. More ambitious was A. R. Gordon's thorough although long outdated examination of The Early Traditions of Genesis (1907). A different approach was represented by J. F. McCurdy (1847-1935) of the University of Toronto. In three thick volumes entitled History, Prophecy and the Monuments (1896-1911) he sought to interpret the Old Testament evidence in conjunction with archeological discoveries and with the historical records of surrounding nations, abandoning conservative presuppositions noticeably as he proceeded from volume to volume. This infusion of cultural interests into Old Testament studies led by the 1930's to the publication of several outstanding studies. Theophile J. Meek (1881—1966) of Toronto, building on foundations laid by McCurdy, published an authoritative book on Hebrew Origins (1936). W. C. Graham (18871955), who returned to Winnipeg after some years at Chicago, collaborated with H. C. May on Culture and Conscience (1936), a book that put archeology to uses that would have scandalized Sir William Dawson. W. A. Irwin (18841963), a Toronto graduate who spent most of his career at Chicago, represented the same general tradition in The Problem of Ezekiel (1943) and later in The Old Testament: Keystone of Human Culture (1952). With controversy focused on Genesis and the significance of Old Testament prophecy, New Testament studies were at first less affected by the critical approach. William Patrick (1852-1911) argued in James the Lord's Brother (1906) that James had written the epistle bearing his name. Robert Law (1860-1919), commenting on 1 John in The Rule of Life (1909), maintained that the apostle had written not only this epistle but the gospel. Even in 1937 Sir Robert Falconer would argue for greater Pauline content in The Pastoral Epistles than would be acknowledged generally today. E. F. Scott was bolder in his Canadian years, applying Albert Schweitzer's apocalyptic emphasis to Christian origins in The Kingdom and the Messiah (1911) and The Beginnings of the Church (1914). Ecumenical interest was already affecting the study of Christian origins, leading to more eirenic attitudes although seldom to the resolution of historic differences. In From Apostle to Priest (1900) J. W. Falconer (1869-1956), later of the Presbyterian College, Halifax, restated the Protestant case against "sacerdotalism." Harold Hamilton (1876-1919) combined in The People of God (1912) a standard Anglo-

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Catholic view of episcopacy with a conception of the unity and uniqueness of the biblical revelation that might have awakened a more positive response in the next generation than it did in his own. Although the critical approach to the Bible is compatible with many philosophies, we have already seen that in Canada it was mediated and interpreted almost exclusively in terms of nineteenth-century German idealism. John Watson was recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on Kant, accepting in the main T. H. Green's modifications of Kant's philosophy. In Christianity and Idealism (1897) and The Philosophical Basis of Idealism (1907) he set forth persuasively the view that Christianity and idealism must support and complement each other. This was likewise the opinion of G. J. Blewett (18731912) of Victoria University, who in The Study of Nature and the Vision of God (1907) sought to take into account the contribution of mysticism as well but ultimately rejected it as an option for modern man. J. Clark Murray applied substantially the same criteria to ethics in A Handbook of Christian Ethics (1908). Systematic theology was somewhat under a cloud, but Chancellor Nathanael Burwash (1839-1918) of Victoria University sought to place the discipline on a new basis in his Manual of Christian Theology on the Inductive Method (1900). J. M. Shaw (1879-1972), a Scot who taught for many years at Pine Hill Divinity Hall and Queen's Theological College, attempted in The Resurrection of Christ (1920) and other books to anchor liberal Christianity on historical fact. His Christian Doctrine (1953) became one of the most widely used textbooks on the subject. A similar combination of Scottish reverence and liberal breadth was evident in John Baillie's The Interpretation of Religion (1928) and The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (1929), books published during his brief tenure at Emmanuel College, Toronto. Encouraged by the liberal spirit, scholars began to explore new or hitherto neglected fields of study. G. B. Cutten (1874-1962), president of Acadia University, contributed to the study of the psychology of religion in a series of books from The Psychological Phenomena of Christianity (1908) to Instincts and Religion (1940). R. E. Welsh (1857-1935) included writings of various religions in his Classics of the Soul's Quest (1922), while insisting finally on the distinctiveness and superiority of Christian experience. L. H. Jordan (1855-1923), a Dalhousie graduate who never secured a chair in Canada although he lectured by invitation at the University of Chicago and at a session of the World's Parliament of Religions, was determined to avoid a partisan approach to religion. Employing rigorously the comparative method, he devoted his life and a series of books beginning with Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (1905) to "the preparation of a new science." Books interpreting the life and teaching of Jesus and applying them to personal and social life were naturally popular in an era that preferred ethics to

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dogma. Several outstandingly successful popularizers had connections with Canada at one time or another. T. R. Glover (1869-1943), author of The Jesus of History (1919), taught for some time at Queen's. Lloyd C. Douglas (1877-1951), who made best-seller lists regularly with such favourites as Magnificent Obsession (1929), The Robe, and The Big Fisherman, was from 1929 to 1933 minister of St. James' United Church, Montreal. John Paterson Smyth (1852-1932), who had already made a reputation with a series of books seeking to ease anxieties over biblical criticism, continued his writing career as rector of St. George's Church, Montreal. His People's Life of Christ (1920) was not so much an imaginative reconstruction as a simplified presentation of the gospel accounts. C. W. Gordon (1860-1937) attempted something similar in He Dwelt among Us (1936), but a style that suited tales of the Canadian frontier was not so well adapted to ancient Galilee. Lily Dougall (1858-1923), a member of a prominent Montreal family who spent much of her life at Oxford, had a charismatic personality that attracted to her circle a remarkable group of intellectuals. In Pro Christo et Ecclesia (1900) and other books she sought to distinguish Christianity from the crusading moralism of which her family had long been outstanding Canadian representatives. Richard Roberts (1874-1945), a Toronto minister who represented in Canada the poetic temperament of Welsh nonconformity, wrote with authority on a surprising range of subjects. Robert Norwood (1874-1932) used the forms of poetry and drama for his message. In all of these writers one notes a desire to extend the range of preaching through the use of other literary media, in some a concern to break down barriers between the churches and the realm of arts and letters. The temper of the Protestantism of the era was epitomized in the Canadian Journal of Religious Thought, founded in 1924 to provide a forum for an increasingly articulate body of Canadian religious writers. Liberal in general outlook, it kept Canadians well informed of developments in biblical studies and devoted even more attention to changing philosophical concepts of religion. Practical application had its place, and topics of the day were fully discussed. Although the founding of the Journal presumably reflected a growing Canadian self-consciousness, its predominant tone was international. British and American writers furnished many of its articles, and reflection on the Canadian experience found little place. Publication ceased in 1932, shortly after the onset of the depression. Within the Roman Catholic church there was scarcely a trace throughout this period of the modernism that attracted so much attention elsewhere. Bishop Alexander MacDonald (1858-1941), who wrote voluminously on many theological subjects, devoted his energies largely to the defence of what would now be called an "integralist" conception of the faith. In The Symbol of the Apostles (1893), later expanded as The Apostles' Creed, he main-

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tained that the creed in its original form was composed by the apostles in Jerusalem. In The Sacrifice of the Mass (1905) he insisted on the identity of the sacrifice of the Mass with the sacrifice offered in the last supper and on the cross. In subtlety of argument and respect for his opponents he far surpassed controversialists of earlier years. Thus in Questions of the Day (1905), written mainly to defend the inerrancy of the Bible, he left questions of authorship to one side and conceded that the truth of various passages is not necessarily of the same order. There is no sign, however, of the mood of searching so conspicuous among Protestants of the period. The period during which the churches were called upon to cope with disturbing ideas from abroad was also that in which Canada was developing as a nation from sea to sea. While professors were wrestling with theological problems, church leaders were more concerned with those of national growth. Meanwhile Canada was becoming an important base of overseas missionary activity, which called for the formulation of a rationale and a strategy. The approach of the churches to practical problems was shaped, in the main, by the missionary thrust of the nineteenth century and by their own inherited moralism. It also had to find room for the liberal ideas that were winning wide acceptance. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, and indeed on a reduced scale until the present, accounts of adventurous pioneering figured largely in the winning of popular support for missionary effort. Firsthand narratives always had a special appeal, and among these the straightforward but graphic writings of the Methodist missionary John McDougall (1842-1917) rank high. In such travelogues as Saddle, Sled and Snowshoe (1896) we are carried along irresistibly through the adventures of the narrator and seldom made overly conscious of the propagandist purpose. Most accounts published under church sponsorship were serviceable study books without literary pretensions, but H. A. Cody (1872—1946) made a wide readership aware of the remarkable exploits of Bishop Bompas in Apostle of the North (1908), while George Bryce (1844-1931) gave Presbyterians a warm understanding of the trials and achievements of their pioneer minister of the west in John Black, the Apostle of the Red River (1898). John Maclean (1851-1928) performed the same service for Methodists in a series of books, and W. R. Harris (1847-1923) covered many aspects of Roman Catholic endeavour both in Canada and elsewhere. The promotion of Christian missionary effort included from the start an insistence on its social benefits, and Robert Murray (1832-1910) of the Presbyterian Witness consistently held forth in editorials and occasional hymns the vision of a Canada thoroughly christianized not only hi personal but in corporate life. By the early years of the twentieth century a liberal and humanitarian note was becoming common. Ralph Connor's Sky Pilot (1899) pro-

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vided a model of the effective Canadian home missionary, aggressive but concerned for the total well-being of his people. Sir Wilfred Grenfell (18651940) was perhaps the most impressive example of this muscular Christianity, apparently enjoying every moment of his service on the bleak Labrador coast. His integrity and his optimism are equally prominent in his autobiographical Forty Years in Labrador (1934). As the coming of immigrants and the rise of industrial cities began to erode the familiar Victorian values, the need for sober analysis was also seen. J. S. Woodsworth (1874-1942), then superintendent of All Peoples' Mission in Winnipeg, combined Anglo-Saxon prejudice with Methodist compassion in Strangers within Our Gates (1909) and My Neighbor (1911). Some recognition of the necessity of making a place for newcomers on their own terms was beginning to emerge in His Dominion (1917) by W. T. Gunn (1867-1930) and in Building the Nation (1922) by W. G. Smith (1872-1943). Harmonizing the interests of various ethnic groups was one of the major issues discussed by G. T. Daly, cssr (1872-1956) in Catholic Problems in Western Canada (1921). A substantial literature on overseas missions reflected a similar change of outlook. The earliest publication on this subject in British North America was a sermon entitled The Universal Difference of the Everlasting Gospel (1846) by John Geddie (1815-1872), himself a pioneer Presbyterian missionary to the New Hebrides. To his fellow-Maritimer George Patterson (1824-1897), author of The Heathen World (1884), the contrast between Christianity and other religions was one of absolute light and darkness, and George Monro Grant (1823-1902) of Queen's was as definite although more charitable in The Religions of the World (1894). C. S. Eby (1845-1925), still relying for support on the older view of science, put the same case eloquently and tactfully to Japanese students in Christianity and Humanity (1883). The atmosphere of intercultural contact had changed remarkably by the 1920's. J. L. Stewart (1872-1946) devoted most of Chinese Culture and Christianity (1926) to a sympathetic survey of Chinese culture, closing with a brief appeal for Christian workers to serve China. Partnership in mission with rising indigenous churches was emphasized by J .H. Arnup (1881-1965) in A New Church Faces a New World (1937). A desire for church union sprang in part from a sense of the needs of Canada and of the total world mission of the church, in part from revulsion against the narrow sectarianism of earlier years. In 1899 Herbert Symonds (1860-1921), a broad church Anglican, argued in Christian Unity for a federation of churches based on mutual recognition of ministers but retaining episcopal ordination for the future. Later, when a definite proposal for the union of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists had been made, opinions became increasingly polarized. The most impressive position statements were those of A. S. Morton (1870-1945) and Robert Campbell (1835-1921), both composed

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before the controversy became embittered. In The Way to Union (1912), Morton put the unionist case in terms both of scriptural warrant and of Canada's growing sense of unity. Campbell, who detected Darwinian presuppositions behind the union, argued in Relations of the Churches (1913) for an obligation to maintain pure types. C. E. Silcox (1888-1961) offered a sociological analysis of the union in Church Union in Canada (1933), but no comparable theological critique has yet been made. Probably the most unusual publication inspired by the movement was Looking Forward (1913), a novel in which Hugh Pedley (1852-1923) brought a twentieth-century Rip van Winkle into a Canada in which union had already taken place. The appearance of new structures and approaches reflected, in considerable measure, the vision of a christianized society that came to be known as the "social gospel." Salem Bland (1859-1950), a Methodist minister who attracted controversy throughout his career, was its most articulate exponent. In The New Christianity (1920), he predicted the emergence of a new socially oriented Christianity that would fulfil and thus supersede both Catholicism and Protestantism. During the depression, after a period of eclipse, the social gospel became more specifically political in its orientation. Towards the Christian Revolution (1936), edited by R. B. Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos, was intended as a manifesto for Christian socialism. Roman Catholics looked with more hope to the co-operative movement, of which M. M. Coady (18821959) of St. Francis Xavier University was a most persuasive spokesman. His major speeches and writings have been collected into a volume entitled The Man from Mar garee (1971). A generation so hopeful of the immediate future was not hospitable to reflection on the past experience of the churches in Canada. E. H. Oliver (1882-1935), reminded by the setting of his Saskatoon college of the continual thrust of the church into new areas, made in The Winning of the Frontier (1930) the first serious attempt to find coherence in Canadian church history. For the rest, historians followed the familiar pattern of recording denominational achievements. A. G. Morice (1859-1938) wrote a lively although partisan two-volume History of the Catholic Church in Western Canada (1910), John T. McNeill a comprehensive if somewhat official account of The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875-1925 (1925), Canon C. W. Vernon (18711934) a competent survey of Anglicanism in The New Church in the Old Dominion (1925). E. R. Fitch (1878-1935) filled a serious vacuum rather sketchily in The Baptists of Canada (1911). As the Second World War approached, the theological climate began to change perceptibly. Old-time liberals were shocked to discover that supernatural and even dogmatic concepts of religion were regaining currency, especially in academic circles where they were assumed to have been long since discredited. Remembering old battles over evolution and higher criticism, they

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sensed a betrayal of freedoms that had been dearly bought. It was not the critical approach that was now being questioned, however, but the alliance of Christianity with philosophical idealism that had once enabled the churches to come to terms with criticism. The new supernaturalism was yet another import from Europe, where it had arisen in protest against an excessive accommodation to secular values. As liberal optimism gave way to existential despair, the times seemed to call for a release from bondage to philosophical systems, national ways of life, and the civilizing mission of the west. Protestant neoorthodoxy and Roman Catholic neo-Thomism suddenly became important in Canada, and after the war a general atmosphere of "return to religion" affected many writers who admitted no great sympathy with either movement. Karl Earth and others who came to be designated popularly as "neo-orthodox" insisted against the immanentism of the prevailing liberalism that God does not so much validate human aspirations as stand over against them in judgment and mercy. To them the Bible was neither the collection of divine oracles taken for granted by the older orthodoxy nor the treasury of religious experience valued by liberals, but rather the record of God's saving activity in history. The theology of Karl Earth secured its first foothold in Canada through the energetic advocacy of W. W. Bryden (1883-1952) of Knox College, Toronto, who in The Christian's Knowledge of God (1940) roundly berated liberal theologians for blindness to the Word of God. Since Bryden had been a strong opponent of church union, many Canadians regarded Earth's theology at first as a special hobby of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Old-time colleagues in the social gospel were thunderstruck, therefore, when John Line (1885-1970), of the United Church's Emmanuel College, became a convert to neo-orthodoxy. Theologians raised in the Presbyterian Church have, however, continued to be prominent in Barthian studies. A. C. Cochrane's study, The Church's Confession under Hitler (1962), dedicated to Earth and the two Niemoellers, substantially equates effective Christian resistance to Nazism with unequivocal confession of the Christian faith. James D. Smart, now minister of Rosedale Presbyterian Church, has written two monographs on Earth's relations with other theologians. William Hordern, formerly a United Churchman but now a Lutheran professor in Saskatoon, contributed The Case for a New Reformation Theology (1959) to a trilogy designed to acquaint Protestants with current theological options. Gordon Harland, now of the University of Manitoba, wrote what is generally regarded as the authoritative work on The Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (1960). Perhaps representing a trend, the last three writers have all returned to Canada after productive years in the United States. "Neo-Thomists" sought to rescue the study of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas from those who used them as bulwarks of stability in the church. His principles, they insisted, could become the basis of an intellectually open and

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socially just society. Emphasizing reason rather than authority, neo-Thomism had few obvious resemblances to Protestant neo-orthodoxy. Yet it too represented an effort to break free from compromising cultural attachments, in this case between the Roman Catholic church and ultra-conservative political regimes and parties. Neo-Thomism was introduced to English-speaking Canadians chiefly through the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto, founded in 1929 and granted its pontifical charter in 1939. In the latter year its organ, Mediaeval Studies, also commenced publication. The institute has always regarded itself as primarily a centre for advanced research into various aspects of medieval life. Its publications have been designed for the specialist, and most of them have been in categories other than the specifically religious. Its basis has been distinctly Roman Catholic, however, and its significance in shaping Catholic thought in Canada has been enormous. A notable feature has been the active participation of Etienne Gilson, who has been a professor from the beginning, and of Jacques Maritain, whose association extended over many years. These outstanding Frenchmen can scarcely be denied the status of landed scholars, if not of landed immigrants. Among publications that are all scholastically impeccable but for the most part beyond the competence of ordinary reviewers to judge, it is necessarily invidious to select any for particular mention. For a worthy sample of the painstaking and patient theological scholarship of institute members, however, one might turn to a series of volumes on The Theology of the Hypostatic Union in the Early Thirteenth Century begun by Walter H. Principe, csb, in 1963. The Canadian author who probably did most to affect the religious thinking of the period was neither a seminary teacher nor a member of an ecclesiastical institute but a professor at the provincial University of Toronto. C. N. Cochrane (1889-1945) traced the transition from paganism to Christian faith in Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), covering much the same ground as Gibbon's Decline and Fall but offering a radically different interpretation. The church fathers emerge in Cochrane's account not as spoilers of classical rationalism but as serious thinkers grappling with problems that classicism had failed to solve. St. Augustine in particular is credited with constructing on the basis of trinitarian doctrine a coherent approach to knowledge from which the residues of luck and fate that had stultified classical science had been successfully banished. Although not intended as a work of Christian apologetics, Christianity and Classical Culture was warmly welcomed by theologians. Many theological liberals had accused St. Augustine of encouraging a low view of human possibilities. Cochrane confirmed the more favourable view of the neoorthodox and gave additional reasons for it. More significantly still, his conclusions suggested that Christians may serve society better by maintaining their faith with integrity than by seeking to harmonize it with the values of the surrounding culture.

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Religious writers, no longer preoccupied with justifying their beliefs in terms of the assumptions of secular society, began to raise searching questions about these assumptions. As early as 1939 Elias Andrews of Pine Hill Divinity Hall was announcing a Christian counterattack on proponents of human self-sufficiency in Modern Humanism and Christian Theism. The positivistic assumptions of many scientists and camp-followers of science were more explicitly singled out for criticism by D. R. G. Owen of Trinity College in Scientism, Man and Religion (1952) and by Charles De Koninck of Laval in his Whidden Lectures entitled The Hollow Universe (1960). Reassertion of the autonomy of spiritual values was not the concern of theologians alone. The argument of Malcolm Ross in Poetry and Dogma (1954) that Protestant revision of eucharistic doctrine had led to a separation between the "pseudo-sacred" of romanticism and the "real profane" of rationalism was symptomatic of a renewed interest in theology in various university departments. Because of this very interest, indeed, there was need not only for confrontation but dialogue between religion and culture. The United Church appointed a commission on culture after the war. Its report became the basis of a symposium edited by R. C. Chalmers, The Heritage of Western Culture (1952), and the inspiration for several further volumes on the relation of Christianity to various aspects of culture edited by Chalmers and John A. Irving. As Protestant theologians sought renewed grounding in the record of God's redemptive action, biblical studies tended to become more theological in tone. Self-conscious efforts to interpret the Bible to the modern mind gave way to unambiguous affirmations of its status as a vehicle of divine revelation, a shift symbolized in the choice of J. S. Thomson (1892-1972) of the title The Word of God (1959) for a book introducing the Bible to lay readers. Among Canadian writers the change was most marked in New Testament studies. Christology was represented by Elias Andrews' The Meaning of Christ for Paul (1949). The origins of the church were examined theologically by George Johnston of Emmanuel College in The Doctrine of the Church in the New Testament (1943) and by George B. Caird, an English Congregationalist who taught for several years in Canada, in The Apostolic Age (1957). A liturgical emphasis that also characterized the period was exemplified by Archbishop Philip Carrington of Quebec in The Primitive Christian Calendar (1952), a bold reinterpretation of St. Mark's gospel as essentially a series of lections over the Christian year. Canadian Old Testament writers were less affected by the neo-orthodox current. R. B. Y. Scott's The Relevance of the Prophets (1947), while clearly marked by its time, reflected for the most part the interests of the social gospel of the 1930's. F. V. Winnett's The Mosaic Tradition (1949) was a technical exercise in textual criticism that called into question the longaccepted Graf-Wellhausen theory identifying documentary strands in the Pentateuch. In The Spiritual History of Israel (1961), on the other hand, Jacob

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Jocz of Wycliffe College attempted a theological synthesis of Old Testament history, although from a perspective that owed more to the English evangelical tradition than to contemporary German theology. Growing collaboration betwen theologians and biblical scholars did not dislodge a well-established tradition of careful critical scholarship. Some practitioners of the critical method complained that concern for theological content encouraged timidity or carelessness in technical scholarship. On the whole, however, neo-orthodoxy encouraged a combination of theological affirmation with radical criticism, for with its emphasis on the Christ of faith it had less incentive even than classical liberalism to insist on the historical inerrancy of Scripture. This combination, exemplified in the popularity of form-criticism, was especially conspicuous in the work of F. W. Beare of Trinity College, whose commentary on The First Epistle of Peter (1945) was followed by numerous other works on St. Paul and the gospels. The same juxtaposition of critical scholarship and theological reintegration was a marked feature of the Interpreters' Bible (1951-1957), a commentary to which a number of Canadians contributed. The concern for strengthening the foundations of belief that attracted some writers to biblical themes led others to re-examine the development of religious traditions. Archbishop Carrington turned in his two-volume Early Christian Church (1957) to the second century, a period during which a somewhat inchoate Christianity began to assume a more definite shape. His approach, conservative in its use of sources but highly imaginative in its reconstruction of church life, was suggestive if not always convincing to fellow scholars. Canadians teaching in the United States contributed significantly to the writing of church history during the period. J. T. McNeill wrote authoritatively on a wide range of subjects, perhaps most notably in The History and Character of Calvinism (1954). G. R. Cragg made the transition from seventeenth-century Puritanism to eighteenth-century rationalism his special field, tracing the nuances of this complex period in a succession of books of which The Church and the Age of Reason (1960) has probably been most widely read. The search for roots in history was not confined to Christian writers. Jews, keenly aware of Nazi persecution and its tragic culmination, began to explore their tradition with renewed urgency. Rabbis M. N. Eisendrath of Toronto and H. J. Stern of Montreal both published mainly collections of miscellaneous essays, with titles that indicated the increasing sombreness of the period: Eisendrath moving from The Never-failing Stream (1939) to Can Faith Survive? (1964), Stern from The Jewish Spirit Triumphant (1944) to Martyrdom and Miracle (1950). Not all writers were positive in their appraisal of tradition. W. A. Gifford (1877-1960), v/ith unabashed liberalism, lamented, in The Story of the Faith (1946) and The Seekers (1954), that the career of the church had been largely a descent into superstition.

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Position statements expounding the beliefs and practices of particular communities or traditions constituted a favourite genre of the period. For the United Church of Canada, which had entered a stage when self-definition seemed urgent, John Dow (1885-1964) wrote This is Our Faith (1943) as a companion piece to a new semi-official statement of faith. R. C. Chalmers' See the Christ Stand (1945), by contrast, was an exposition of the doctrinal statement of the original Basis of Union. John McNab and F. Scott MacKenzie performed a similar service for the Presbyterians, who also had an identity to discover, in Our Heritage and Our Faith (1950). Protestantism as a whole was the theme of R. C. Chalmers' The Protestant Spirit (1955) and Kenneth Hamilton's The Protestant Way (1956), Christianity itself of G. B. Caird's The Truth of the Gospel (1951) and of J. S. Thomson's The Hope of the Gospel (1951) and The Divine Mission (1958). A People and Its Faith (1959), edited by Albert Rose under the auspices of Holy Blossom Synagogue, Toronto, was, despite its particular local interest, the first systematic attempt to assess the place of Judaism in Canadian society. The revival of confessional interest did not preclude participation in ecumenical discussion but rather fostered it, for interest in particular traditions stimulated a desire to reconstitute the overarching tradition of which they were seen as particular manifestations. As yet this dialogue was almost entirely limited to Christian communions, and even they still found it difficult to go beyond the point of defining their disagreements more precisely. E. R. Fairweather and R. F. Hettlinger presented varying Anglican views in Episcopacy and Reunion (1952), while Fairweather collaborated with E. R. Hardy in The Voice of the Church (1962) to examine the history of the conciliar process. John Line's Doctrine of the Christian Ministry (1959) was a United Church contribution to the same discussion. A most significant straw in the ecumenical wind was the appearance in 1956, some years before the Second Vatican Council, of Irenee Beaubien's eirenic Towards Christian Unity in Canada: A Catholic Approach. The temper of the time, which took particularities of time and place with unaccustomed seriousness, was favourable to reflection on the Canadian religious experience. A resurgence of interest in particular traditions led to a rash of denominational histories, few of great literary or scholarly merit. Carrington's The Anglican Church in Canada (1963) was, on the whole, the least unsatisfactory. C. R. Cronmiller helped to fill a serious gap with his History of the Lutheran Church in Canada (volume I only, 1961). The narrative and largely Montreal-oriented History of the Jews in Canada (volume I, 1945) by Benjamin G. Sack (1889-1967) held its particular field until the publication in 1970 and 1971 of Stuart E. Rosenberg's two-volume The Jewish Community in Canada. During the same period several important regional histories of denominations appeared.

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More significant for the future of Canadian religious history than this resurgence of denominational self-awareness was the discovery of religion as a neglected area of research by students of Canadian society. In 1948 there appeared two important works on the typology of Canadian religious movements. S. D. Clark, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, signalled an influential new approach in his Church and Sect in Canada; The Great Awakening in Nova Scotia, by Maurice W. Armstrong, another church historian teaching in the United States, has not received the attention it deserved. Controversy over the place of religion in Canadian school systems was ably treated from a Protestant standpoint by C. B. Sissons (1879-1965), of Victoria University, in Church and State in Canadian Education (1959), and from a Roman Catholic one by Franklin A. Walker in Catholic Education and Politics in UpperCanada (1955) and Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario (1964). A more general treatment of issues of church and state was John S. Moir's Church and State in Canada West (1959). The appearance of both denominational and topical studies helped to make possible the publication by H. H. Walsh (1899-1969) of the first comprehensive treatment of Canadian church history, The Christian Church in Canada (1956). As J. S. Thomson has pointed out, the mental climate of the post-war years was reflected in the Canadian Journal of Theology, founded in 1955, as that of the liberal era had been in the Canadian Journal of Religious Thought. A glance through the files of the Canadian Journal of Theology leaves the impression of a Christian orientation, an ecumenical intent, an awareness of Canadian identity, a greater interest in the formulation of ideas than in the promotion of technical scholarship, and a firm base of support in the faculties of theological seminaries. Nothing could have revealed with greater clarity the change in mood that had taken place since the 1920's than the unabashed reference in its title to theology, the pariah among religious disciplines during the heyday of liberalism. To note that Canadian religious literature has been dominated in turn by the assertion, reinterpretation, reformulation, and questioning of inherited traditions is to tell its story as a chapter in the intellectual history of the nation. Such an approach, while probably best adapted to the intentions of most religious writers, inevitably takes little account of the literary quality of the books discussed. Patently, however, religion has required for its expression not only intellectual content but literary form. Religion is most consciously literary in its liturgies, where care is taken to find appropriate and expressive words. Canadians have drawn widely on an international heritage for their materials of worship, and the anonymity of prayer and service books masks what Canadian content there is. Canadian hymn writers have achieved some recognition in their own country, although few have established reputations elsewhere; the most widely known Canadian

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hymn—"What a Friend We Have in Jesus," by Joseph Scriven (1820-1886)— is unfortunately not universally admired. Personal experience was the usual theme of early Canadian hymns, those of Henry Alline and David Willson being at once the most original and the most memorable. More recent hymn writers, from Robert Murray in the late nineteenth century to R. B. Y. Scott, Herbert O'Driscoll, and Walter Farquharson in the late twentieth, have been more aware of social concerns. The translation of Scripture is another area in which Canadians have been involved, T. J. Meek's versions of the Song of Songs and Lamentations in The Complete Bible: An American Translation (1939) deserving special mention. Especially in communities of Scottish background, however, the favourite literary embodiment of religious ideas has been the sermon. Sermons in the early nineteenth century were usually expository, systematic, and long: Two Sermons on Family Prayer (1814) by C. J. Stewart (1775-1837) ran to 394 pages. By the early twentieth century, when the Canadian pulpit reached the peak of its influence, they were more often topical and laced with literary allusions. Preachers of the order of George C. Pidgeon (1872-1971), W. A. Cameron (1882-1956) and R. J. Renison (18751957) were not only deeply spiritual Christians but conscientious craftsmen with words. Religion has also been a persistent theme in general literature. Sometimes literary forms have deliberately been appropriated as vehicles of religious or moral teaching: there is a long Canadian tradition of such use from Thomas McCulloch's Stepsure Letters (1821-1822) and Joshua Marsden's Poems on Methodism (1848) to the plays of Robert Norwood and the novels of Ralph Connor and Nellie McClung. More often, and usually to better literary effect, writers have drawn naturally on their own religious impressions or on the religious motifs embedded in their heritage. The influence of theosophy is as patent, if not so explicit, in the Confederation poets as in R. M. Bucke. The Jesuit martyrs of Huronia have been celebrated more effectively in Pratt's Brebeuf and His Brethren than in many pious biographies and learned articles. Those who would comprehend the texture of twentieth-century Canadian religion must turn not only to church historians but to the novels of Morley Callaghan and Hugh MacLennan, and they will not find even yet among the historians of religion the insights into the immigrant experience that may be obtained from Jewish poets or from such novelists as Rudy Wiebe. Poets, dramatists, and novelists fall within the provinces of other contributors, and detailed consideration of the religious aspects of their work would be inappropriate here. It is sufficient to enter a claim upon a much larger body of literature than can legitimately be included in this chapter.

5. Philosophical Literature 1910-1960* THOMAS A. GOUDGE

THE HISTORY OF philosophical literature in English-speaking Canada during the twentieth century illustrates how philosophy itself has evolved in this period. During the nineteenth century there were only a few professional philosophers and a small number of publications. The publications were chiefly the work of two men: John Watson of Queen's and John Clark Murray of McGill, spokesmen respectively for the traditions of Absolute Idealism and the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense. Since 1910, and particularly since 1950, the number of philosophers in the country has greatly increased. A corresponding increase has occurred in the number of publications. Furthermore, the character of the publications has changed. They have become more specialized, concentrated, and technically proficient than works of the preceding century. The religious orientation that used to dominate the subject and the involvement with large-scale systems of metaphysics have been replaced by a broadly secular, empirical, and analytic approach. The main stages of this evolution can be shown by discussing books that appeared in three periods: 1910-1950; 1950-1960; and after 1960. In the present chapter I shall deal only with the first two periods. 7970-7950 New developments in the early decades of the century are linked with the names of four men: George Sidney Brett (Toronto; 1879-1944), Herbert Leslie Stewart (Dalhousie; 1882-1953), Rupert Clendon Lodge (Manitoba; 1886-1961), and Etienne Gilson (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto; 1884). They brought fresh influences into the Canadian *This chapter replaces both subdivisions of Chapter 30 of the first edition, written by the late John A. Irving and by A. H. Johnson, who was unable to assist in a revision because of previous commitments. I have used much of their material, and I am therefore greatly indebted to them. Since my interpretations of this material often differ from theirs, interested readers may wish to compare the two versions. I have, of course, added the material for the period after 1963. Cf. Literary History of Canada (1965), pp. 576-597.

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academic scene. Brett, Stewart, and Lodge were graduates of Oxford, and Gilson a graduate of the University of Paris. Some of the traditions of both universities thus took their place alongside the traditions of Edinburgh and Glasgow. As a result of their teaching and publications these men stimulated many students to undertake the study of philosophy. The prevailing emphasis of the time was on the historical treatment of the subject. Books were broadly concerned with textual and expository discussions of past philosophers or with phases of intellectual history, including the history of scientific ideas. There was almost no interest in examining problems analytically or in seeking to produce original answers to them. This development of historical studies supplanted the Philosophy of Common Sense and Absolute Idealism, both of which were on the wane in the English-speaking world, although Stewart and Lodge did have a mild allegiance to an idealist metaphysics. The first of the men to arrive on the scene was Brett, who came to Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1908. He had been Professor of Philosophy at the government college, Lahore, for four years, and his first book, The Philosophy of Gassendi, had just been published.* He was not, however, committed to any one of the traditional systems. His account of the atomist Gassendi is clear and objective, displaying a mastery of the Greek ideas that Gassendi utilized. While at Oxford, Brett studied Aristotle intensively, and Aristotelianism undoubtedly remained a strong influence in his thinking. But he also studied thoroughly Leibniz, Lotze, James, Bergson, and the Oxford idealists, Green, Bradley and Bosanquet. Hence he kept himself free to make use of contributions from many quarters instead of subscribing to the tenets of a particular school. He thus provides a salutary example of a philosopher on whom it is hard to pin a standard label. At a time when "realists" and "idealists" were attacking each other, and "pragmatists" were attacking (and being attacked by) both, he remained detached from these warring factions, believing that the philosopher's job has little to do with polemics, and much to do with the investigation of particular problems in their historical contexts. In adopting this approach, Brett helped to move English-Canadian philosophy towards maturity. But this was not the only respect in which he did so. From the start of his career, Brett espoused the classical view that philosophy should aim at scope and comprehensiveness in its investigations. The point is clearly stated in the preface of his first book: This comprehensiveness makes for greatness; through it a man may be the spectator of all times and places. But he must not hope to gain this comprehensive outlook by occupying one solitary peak: he must not flatter himself that there is an essence of *For details of Brett's career, an account of the influences on his thought, and a full bibliography, see John A. Irving, "The Achievement of George Sidney Brett," University of Toronto Quarterly, XIV (July 1945), pp. 329-365.

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all essences, that he can condense all life and thought into one magic drop. On the contrary he must keep the original wealth of material undiminished if he would have a world in which "life's garden blows"; if he abstracts and simplifies, the product is an "essence," a drop of scent in place of the living flower. (The Philosophy of Gassendi, 1908, vi-vii)

The same point is made in the body of the work where he says approvingly of Gassendi: "He has tried to unite the results, not only of philosophy in the narrower sense, but of all previous and contemporary thought, into one whole, as consistent as he thought it could be." Thus like the idealists, Brett regarded comprehensiveness as something a philosopher has to seek. Unlike the idealists, he sought this comprehensiveness not in some ultimate metaphysical synthesis, but in a synoptic view of the history of philosophy and science. A number of strands of that history are traced in Brett's magnum opus, the three-volume History of Psychology (1912-1921). It is, as Irving remarked, "his most outstanding and permanent contribution to scholarship." The work's title is likely to be misleading unless it is recognized that what is treated is the history of philosophical psychology, i.e., the history of the concepts, assumptions, hypotheses, and explanation-schemes devised by Western man in the attempt to understand himself and his modes of behaviour. The investigation thus encompasses many issues of classical epistemology and metaphysics. It also relates the history of philosophical psychology to the history of medicine, the natural sciences, and, to a lesser extent, religion. The treatment has a general orientation which Brett states at the beginning of Volume II (6-7): A history of science is a unique species of history. For the content of the science the student may go to the latest textbook where he may learn the established truths without any reference to their genesis or to the men who established them. For those who require no more, a history is superfluous; it can add nothing to that knowledge. . . . But there is another and a different object for which it has a specific function. If the student is not to be left with the idea that knowledge is a fixed quantity of indisputable facts, if on the contrary, he is to acquire a real understanding of the process by which knowledge is continually made and remade, he must learn to look at the movement of ideas, without prejudice, as a separate fact with its own significance and its own meaning for humanity. To despise forgotten theories because they no longer hold good, and refuse on that account to look backward, is in the end to forget that man's highest ambition is to make progress possible, to make the truth of to-day into the error of yesterday—in short, to make history.

It can be truly said that Brett's History is just such a comprehensive, detailed "look at the movement of ideas, without prejudice," in the domain with which it deals. The work's general orientation epitomizes a number of themes quite different from those found in the idealists of the preceding century. Where they tended to envisage philosophy as separate from and superior to the sciences, Brett made no such contrast. Where they regarded philosophy as yielding knowledge

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about ultimate reality, and science as yielding knowledge merely of appearances, Brett considered philosophy and science to be interacting parts of a single cognitive enterprise—man's continuous exploration of his world and of himself. Where the idealists purported to find only one set of universal categories, Brett recognized alternative, historically changing sets appropriate to different disciplines. Indeed, metaphysics was for him not classical ontology, but the science of categories that lie at the roots of first-order inquiries, and which are reformed in "the process by which knowledge is continually made and remade." Two facets of Brett's publications, less influential than the History, call for brief comment. One of these is his discussion of ethics and politics in the introductory work, The Government of Man (1913). Like his other books, it takes a predominantly historical approach to the subject matter, and again, a salient feature is breadth of outlook. Brett holds that to understand adequately the ethical and political ideas of an era one needs to study their interactions with the economic, social, and religious factors of the era. Accordingly, the book outlines in broad strokes the evolution of these interacting factors in Western civilization from the Greeks to the nineteenth century. As always, the treatment is lucid, balanced, urbane, and enlivened by occasional touches of wit. The book is not, however, and does not purport to be, a technical contribution to the subject. The other facet of Brett's publications is his occasional discussion of the inter-relations between philosophy and literature. He did not write at length about this matter, but in several essays he makes plain his view that the insights of poetry, drama, and fiction provide important material for the philosopher, just as the various sciences do. Here he shared common ground with his colleague H. L. Stewart at Dalhousie. Both men held that philosophy cannot be solidly based if, like Narcissus, it contemplates only its own image. It must reflect widely and deeply upon the knowledge which comes from outside itself. Brett seemed to have believed, indeed, that literature and philosophy, particularly in the Greco-Roman period, could be treated as a single, comprehensive whole. His lectures as well as his publications made frequent and illuminating use of examples drawn from literature to reinforce philosophical points. In 1913, five years after Brett came to Canada, H. L. Stewart was appointed George Munro Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University. From then until retirement thirty-four years later, he was a prominent academic figure—-a stimulating teacher, a productive scholar, and a well-known commentator on the national radio system. While a student at Oxford, he was influenced by Bernard Bosanquet, whose conciliatory form of absolute idealism he found congenial. Like Brett, Stewart impressed on students the importance of firsthand study of philosophical texts, particularly those of the Greeks and the

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British empiricists. In logic, epistemology, and metaphysics his views were the conventional ones of the idealistic tradition, adequately stated, he seemed to think (at least for undergraduates), in A. E. Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics. But his own philosophical interests lay elsewhere. As his publications show, these interests were in philosophical aspects of literature (of which his knowledge was prodigious), in philosophy of religion, and in public affairs, domestic and international. The one book which discusses issues outside the above areas, Questions of the Day in Philosophy and Psychology (1912), is in several senses a "first book." It shows competence in dealing with such questions as the associationistic theory of mind, the challenge of pragmatism, utilitarian ethics, etc., but does not advance distinctive conclusions about any of them. His two most notable works are Anatole France, the Parisian (1927) and A Century of Anglo-Catholicism (1929). Both are written in polished, forceful prose. The former work illustrates Stewart's gift for extracting from the writings of an eminent man of letters ideas about human nature, moral values, knowledge, and the universe at large—in short, the writer's implicit philosophical outlook. It likewise illustrates how he was fascinated by minds of a sceptical, satirical, and pessimistic cast (witness his interest in Carlyle, Hardy, G. B. Shaw, etc.), even though such attitudes were wholly alien to his own. He delighted in ideas that were expressed in witty, piquant phrases. These he could quote endlessly in private conversation and in his lectures. At quite another level he found the history of theological controversies absorbing, especially when viewed in their social setting. One of these controversies, with all its intricate manoeuvring, the Anglo-Catholic movement which so stirred the Established Church in nineteenth-century England, he explored fully, never losing sight of the metaphysical currents flowing beneath it. A sequel to this work, Modernism Past and Present (1932), follows another strand of controversy extending beyond the boundaries of Anglicanism. The enterprise of restating Christianity with the deliberate omission or denial of tenets that the church of the past thought indispensable, is traced from the age of Erasmus and the Protestant reformers to Catholic modernism and the doctrines of Karl Earth. Canadian philosophical literature began to reflect the influence of Platonism as a result of the writings of R. C. Lodge at the University of Manitoba. Four of his books deal with this subject: Plato's Theory of Ethics (1928), Plato's Theory of Education (1947), Plato's Theory of Art (1953), and The Philosophy of Plato (1956). Lodge's primary concern in these books is to expound fully the various aspects of the Platonic philosophy. A supplementary concern is to remove sundry misconceptions of it and to compare other doctrines with it, generally to Plato's advantage. Two features of this philosophy seem especially to have recommended it to Lodge. One feature was its advocacy

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of ontological idealism, a tradition in which he felt very much at home. The other feature was Plato's methodology which, according to Lodge, took up each problem open-mindedly, reviewed judiciously what others had to say about it, and weighed arguments carefully before arriving at any conclusion. Here is a true Platonic ideal for the philosopher, showing him how to approach problems "without any one-sided dogmatism of acceptance or rejection, but with a whole-hearted faith in the gradual evolution of philosophic truth." In other publications such as The Questioning Mind (1937, 1947) and Applied Philosophy (1950), Lodge embarked on what is nowadays called "meta-philosophy," i.e., a systematic discussion of philosophical inquiry itself. As has already been mentioned, the early years of the twentieth century were marked by the rise of two "schools" which opposed the dominant but declining idealism, viz., Anglo-American realism and American pragmatism. Lodge proposed that these schools be taken as three mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive ways of doing philosophy. Every thinker, then, past or present, will be classifiable as an idealist, or a realist, or a pragmatist. Each of the positions has its own basic principles, concepts, and methods. Each of them will therefore arrive at typically different solutions to problems in all the major areas of the subject. Using this tripartite scheme, Lodge seeks to throw light on phases of the history of philosophy as well as on the question of "why philosophers disagree." The fourth person to be influential in Canadian philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century, Etienne Gilson, came to Toronto from France in 1928. He helped to found the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and was its first Director of Studies. In 1939 the Institute became the separate Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. At the time of his arrival Gilson was already a scholar of international reputation. His presence and his publications gave a great impetus to the study of scholastic thought on the part of both colleagues and students. Hence although his voluminous writings do not, strictly speaking, form part of Canadian philosophical literature—for he returned each year to his native France and did much of his research there—the impact of such powerful works as The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (1936), The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937), The Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure (1938), and The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (1956) was certainly felt here as it was elsewhere. For a non-specialist the book that best displays Gilson's originality and insight as an interpreter of mediaeval thought is his History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955). It is, as Professor Johnson noted, "a masterly guide to the vast amount of philosophical material that the Middle Ages provides, much of which has not been properly edited and is still available only in manuscript form." Throughout Gilson's publications three themes of substance recur. The

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first theme is that the enduring principles of philosophy have their source in Aristotle and were given their canonical formulation by Thomas Aquinas. The task of all philosophers in the Roman Catholic tradition at least is to learn these principles, and to teach, interpret, and apply them to the contemporary world. Furthermore, the proper understanding of Thomistic philosophy recognizes that it is closely linked to Thomistic theology. This second theme is clearly put by Gilson in The Spirit of Thomism (1964 ): True enough, Thomas introduced a clear-cut distinction between reason and faith, philosophy and theology. But far from inferring from this distinction that they should be kept apart, Thomas always thought that the best thing for them was to live in a sort of symbiosis in which each profited from its association with the other. I know that many philosophers refuse to have anything to do with religion . . . but I also know that from the point of view of Thomism they are certainly wrong. The full significance of this contention can be seen by relating it to a third theme, introduced by Gilson in his Gifford Lectures of 1931-1932, subsequently published as The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy. Here he seeks to establish the existence of a distinctively Christian philosophy. The central point he makes is that revelation provides a Christian philosopher with "a principle of discernment and selection which allows him to restore rational truth to itself by purging away the errors that encumber it." Once these errors are removed, reason can deal with philosophical questions quite independently of faith, and may even produce different answers to a particular question. Thus Thomism does not aspire to be a "system" of thought such as the Absolute Idealists believed they could construct. "Philosophy," Gilson declares, "simply is not the kind of conceptual poetry they call a philosophical 'system.' Philosophy is wisdom, and wisdom is not poetry." It was Thomas who formulated the eternal first principles of wisdom, and thereby brought philosophy into harmony with Christian faith. As the fourth decade of the century arrived, books by philosophers born and trained in Canada began to appear alongside those of academics who had been trained elsewhere. The subject matter of the books was much the same as before. That is to say, they tended to be either studies of individual thinkers of the past, or of phases of intellectual history, or of the doctrines of neoscholasticism. The volume of literature was not yet large but it was growing. A native Canadian who published in this period was Fulton H. Anderson (1895-1968), a pupil of Stewart and later of Brett. Towards the end of the 1920's he became Brett's colleague and eventually succeeded him as Head of the Department of Philosophy at Toronto. Anderson's scholarly work focussed on Plato, Francis Bacon, and John Locke. His first book, The Argument of Plato (1934), is an introductory study which depicts Plato not as an abstract reasoner propounding a set of fixed conclusions, but as a unique combination

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of thinker and artist. The Platonic "argument" is a union of dialectical and dramatic elements in which all the major dimensions of human existence are explored. The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1948) gives a full exposition of the thought of that somewhat neglected figure. Anderson develops the point that the famous Baconian method rests on a metaphysical base, and that the base is close to being a form of materialism. Metaphysics is thus for Bacon generalized physics—a position sharply contrasted with Aristotelianism, as one might expect. In Francis Bacon, His Career and Thought (1962) a picture is drawn of a true Renaissance man who was at the same time a major philosopher. Even the well-known incident of bribe-taking which ended Bacon's career on the Bench is set in perspective and shown to be much less than the depravity depicted by Puritan commentators. The extensive researches on Locke which occupied Anderson for many years remained incomplete at his death. A native Canadian who was with Gilson one of the founders of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Fr. Gerald B. Phelan (1892-1965), was long a major influence there. His chief publication is a work entitled St. Thomas and Analogy (1941). It is an investigation of the metaphysical concept of analogy, one of the most subtle and difficult concepts in Thomistic philosophy. The investigation is partly carried out by comparing the Thomistic concept with the concept of analogy in mathematics and with analogy in the thought of Aristotle. The argument is directed to establishing the difference between Thomas' concept and the other two, and to demonstrating that it is essential for an adequate metaphysics of being. In addition to this work, Phelan published Jacques Maritain (1937), an exposition of the doctrines of the French Roman Catholic advocate of "integral humanism," who was for a period associated with the Institute, although not so closely as his fellow-countryman, Gilson. Another long-time member of the Institute is Anton C. Pegis, whose writings, although focussed on Thomism, have ranged widely over the whole of scholastic thought. His St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Century (1934) deals with a crucial issue in rational psychology as it is treated by St. Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and St. Thomas. The issue is a mirror within which the contrary currents of Platonism and Aristotelianism, both flowing strongly in the thirteenth century, are reflected. At the centre is the problem of conceiving the soul as a kind of spiritual being and of establishing its indestructible and immortal character. Pegis investigates such matters thoroughly. Some years later, his St. Thomas and the Greeks (1939) followed a number of thirteenth-century themes back to their classical origins. This is an aspect of the history of philosophy to which Pegis devotes special attention in his writings. A quite different aspect of the history of philosophy, hitherto unexplored in the literature, was presented when Charles W. Hendel, then MacDonald Professor of Moral Philosophy at McGill University, published his compre-

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hensive two-volume work, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist (1934). As its title indicates the work is concerned with Rousseau's ethical ideas in their bearing on individual conduct and on the organization of society. Hendel treats the ideas primarily as philosophical claims for which some arguments are given by Rousseau. Yet he also takes cognizance of their close connection with Rousseau's complex, romantic temperament by discussing the details of his life. Here personal letters are a prime source of evidence, and Hendel edited a collection of them in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Citizen of Geneva (1937). From 1910 to the end of World War II Canadian philosophy became a fully autonomous discipline having high standards of historical scholarship, as the contributions to the literature just reviewed illustrate. Yet the discipline was still limited and conservative in scope. Dedicated to the study of the thought of the past, it tended to disregard (and even to be mildly contemptuous of) contemporary philosophy. One exception was Brett, who did maintain acquaintance with current trends. But even he often gave the impression that he considered them rather thin gruel. Meanwhile in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States the trends were altering philosophy, posing new problems, and proposing new techniques for dealing with old problems. Canadian philosophy was soon to feel the effects of these trends, and so to evolve with increasing rapidity during the next few decades. 7950-7960 The books of this period are of two main sorts. There are those that continue the tradition of scholarly study of the thought of individuals, but often deal with late nineteenth-century or twentieth-century thinkers, and hence with current issues. These books also tend to undertake critical assessments of doctrines at greater length than formerly. The other sort of books deal with problems, rather than individuals, in particular areas of philosophy, such as ethics, theory of value, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history. An example of the first group is Thomas A. Goudge's The Thought of C. S. Peirce (1950), a detailed examination of the ideas of America's most original philosophic mind. It is contended that Peirce's complex thought, which is radically incomplete, harbours two opposed tendencies, one of them naturalistic and the other transcendental. The ideas which constitute these tendencies are explored so as to cover the whole range of Peirce's work, in logic, scientific method, phenomenology, theory of signs, probability-theory, evolutionary metaphysics, etc., all of them mid-twentieth-century topics. Like Anderson, Goudge was a pupil of Stewart and of Brett. Another of Brett's pupils, A. H. Johnson, published extensively on the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. In Whitehead's Theory of Reality (1952) he discusses in depth the central categories of Whitehead's novel and difficult

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system of metaphysics. Johnson is a sympathetic interpreter who seeks to elaborate the meaning of those categories—individuality, creativity, process, organic inter-relation, permanence, value—and to remove misunderstandings of them. He also seeks to show that they are adequate for interpreting the main forms of human experience. In Whitehead's Philosophy of Civilization (1958) an account is given of the view of history contained in Whitehead's mature philosophy which began with Science and the Modern World. The challenge posed by the advance of the sciences, and especially the claim sometimes advocated that they can in principle answer all questions ("scientism"), was countered by Derwyn R. G. Owen in Scientism, Man and Religion (1952) and by Reid MacCallum (1897-1949) in a group of essays edited after his death by William Blissett and published under the title Imitation and Design (1953). Owen argues that those who defend scientism fail to grasp "the heights and depths of human nature" in their endlessly diverse manifestations. By using a relatively small number of abstract concepts, scientific thinking aims at simplicity. But where man and his religions are concerned this too readily leads to over-simplification. MacCallum seeks to defend the phenomena of art, myth, and religion, as well as the autonomy of philosophy, from the inroads of scientism. He argues that many different approaches are needed to understand the different dimensions of man's world. Scientific method is one of these approaches with its own sphere of application. But to try to make it apply to all dimensions of the human scene produces a distortion that amounts to falsification. The strength of the Canadian tradition of Greek studies is well displayed in Joseph Owens' The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (1951). This influential work, based on a careful examination of original texts, presents an analysis of the fine structure of Aristotle's doctrine. The views of other commentators come under scrutiny in the course of the analysis. One consequence of the investigation is to underline the originality of the Aristotelian doctrine and its points of difference from the doctrine of being in Thomas Aquinas. In two subsequent works, St. Thomas and the Future of Metaphysics (1957) and A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (1959), other facets of the above theme are discussed. Greek philosophical studies in Canada have been carried on not only by philosophers but also by professional classicists. A well-known, early example of this is George M. A. Grube's Plato's Thought (1935), which discusses in an introductory manner all the main aspects of its subject. Two other examples that fall within the period being reviewed are Norman W. DeWitt's (18761958) Epicurus and His Philosophy (1954) and St. Paul and Epicurus (1954). The first of these combines an exposition of the Epicurean epistemology, physics, and ethics, with some rather novel interpretations of

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doctrine. In opposition to the usual view that Epicurus was an empiricist, an egoistic hedonist, and a foe of religion, DeWitt advances the claim that he accepted a doctrine of "innate ideas," advocated altruism as an important virtue, and took a position on religion not far removed from that of St. Paul! In the second book, St. Paul and Epicurus, the debt of the Pauline Epistles to Epicureanism is argued for. Another book which departs from standard interpretations of certain doctrines of the past is Alastair R. C. Duncan's Practical Reason and Morality (1957). This book is a study of one of Kant's famous treatises, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which has usually been construed as a presentation of the doctrine of the moral law. Duncan contends, however, that a close analysis of Kant's compact, difficult text shows that it is primarily a critique of practical reason. Viewing it in this way allows a number of traditional difficulties in Kant's exposition of his argument to be mitigated or removed. These various examples of philosophical scholarship indicate an increasing sense of assurance and a willingness to strike out on independent lines of interpretation on the part of Canadian academics. This trend was a natural corollary of the attaining by philosophy of autonomous status as a result of the developments of the preceding period. The situation was therefore ripe for the appearance of books which would make a frontal attack on problems with the aid of new philosophical techniques that were being used elsewhere. One of the techniques was that of logical and linguistic analysis developed at Oxford. A book that tackles a specific problem from this vantage point is William H. Dray's Laws and Explanation in History (1957). The problem is to determine what sorts of explanation historians use, i.e., it is a problem in the philosophy of history. There has been a long-standing opposition between those who say that historians do not explain events at all but only describe, narrate, or tell stories about them, and those who say that historians explain or attempt to explain events in just the way natural scientists do. Dray remarks that both parties accept a common assumption, viz., that an explanation is a logical schema which subsumes what is to be explained under a general law. He refers to this logical schema as "the covering law model" of explanation. Positivistically-oriented philosophers of history, by adopting various strategies, try to make historical writings exemplify the model, but Dray argues that their endeavours fail and are bound to fail. Yet it does not follow that historians only describe or tell stories about the past. They also offer explanations, at least two kinds of which are uniquely historical and do not involve bringing an event under a general law as the covering law model demands. Dray's book is a good example of a new genre in English-Canadian philosophy. It is a carefully argued examination of a few issues lying at the centre of a larger issue, and it has precipitated vigorous discussion among philosophers interested in methodology.

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Francis E. Sparshott applies a similar technique to the field of ethics in An Enquiry into Goodness and Related Concepts (1958). He employs linguistic analysis, very much in the Oxford manner, to explicate the meaning of normative terms clustered about the term "good." The nuclear meaning of the term used as a predicate in the judgment "x is good," is that x satisfies the wants or needs of some person or group of persons. Hence value judgments in ethics at least are, under certain conditions, judgments of fact. They are, therefore, amenable to empirical confirmation. Sparshott pursues his discussion into the domain of culture and compares the extent to which value-schemes of different cultures succeed in satisfying the needs of their members. This work is the fullest consideration of ethical ideas to appear in the literature of the 1950's. The general contention that values can be best investigated by empirical science is put forward by Albert L. Milliard in The Forms of Value (1950) and by John A. Irving (1903-1965) in his collection of essays, Science and Values (1952). Hilliard starts with the hypothesis that value is whatever yields satisfaction or pleasure. He then follows the consequences of the hypothesis for the claim that both ethical and aesthetic values are amenable to scientific inquiry. Irving surveys in a preliminary way, and with an eye to practical policies, some problems connected with the treatment of value judgments by the social sciences. These two approaches reflect the influence on Canadian philosophy of twentieth-century empiricism. It is a measure of how far the climate of thought had altered that approaches to value which would have been anathema to the men of John Watson's time should now be seriously discussed. Two other influences from outside Canada which appeared in the literature of the decade both stemmed from the work of the logical positivist, Carnap. His analysis of the structure of scientific method is utilized by Henryk Mehlberg in The Reach of Science (1958) to investigate the range and limits of the sciences. Among the many conceptions Mehlberg discusses is the well-known principle of verifiability, which he takes to be not a criterion of meaning but a criterion for ascertaining the material truth and falsity of statements. By some intricate argument he seeks to show that the principle of verifiability can be proved. It is not just an analytic statement, a postulate, or a definition. On the main issue of the book, he concludes that if a problem is solvable, it can be solved by science. This is not to say that science can solve all problems or that only science can solve problems. Hence the position that emerges is not properly called "scientism." The formal study of language with the aid of mathematical logic, which owes much to Carnap, is undertaken in Neil L. Wilson's The Concept of Language (1959). This book seeks to specify conditions that enable a formal and perfectly general definition of a language to be given. To spell out the conditions a number of technical points in logical syntax and semantics have to be

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taken up. Wilson pursues exactness in his discussion, as Carnap did, but he does not share Carnap's antipathy to metaphysics. It is unavoidable that a work of this kind should be abstract and technical, requiring expertise in a specialized field. These qualities are another index of how Canadian philosophy was changing with the times.

6. Travel Books on Canada 1920-1960 ELIZABETH

WATERSTON

"TRAVELS are day-dreams translated into action." In the years after the Great War, the world's dream of Canada was summarized: "a lone figure on the sky-line . . . golden miles of grain fields . . . the Mountie in his scarlet regalia . . . the quaint habitant by his log cabin." Item by item, the dream symbolized individualism, fertility, law, tradition—ideals achingly desired in the faceless, formless, lawless world between wars. Travel books of these times are tense with the recognition that Canadian actuality differed from the dream. The series starts in gay vein, deepens into disillusionment, bafflement, cynicism. A post-war restlessness may account for the great popularity of travel books in the 1920's. Certainly the Canadians themselves were ready to move around the country and to record their moves. About one-third of the travel books of this decade were by Canadians. A larger group, however, came from English visitors, including a number of women. The number of Americans, Scots, and Irishmen reporting on Canada decreased noticeably—a trend that continued in the thirties. The twenties began with "the jolliest Royal Tour on record." W. D. Newton in Westward with the Prince of Wales (1920) trailed the popular young prince through a ragtime trip, in high good spirits, noting (for instance) the banners at Cobalt that shouted to H.R.H. "Glad U Come! The town is yours. Paint it Red or any old Colour you like!" Other "tours" produced quieter reports: A. F. Barker, Professor of Textile Industries at the University of Leeds, described A Summer Tour through the Textile Districts of Canada and the United States (1920); A. H. Godwin and F. B. Low edited Teachers' Trails in Canada (1925), "an illustrated review of the tour of the British Educationists' party"; A Joyous Adventure (1928) recounted the experiences of the choirs of Westminster Abbey. All visitors in the twenties—especially the choir boys—reacted vigorously to the "luscious colour in the store windows," the sky signs, the white clean

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lunch-rooms, of post-war Canada. Most marvelled at a world of material "comforts": telephones, gramophones, motor-cars, "splendid" picture palaces. Hostility to Englishmen had lessened in war years. Being an Englishman was now a comic disadvantage, not an insurmountable barrier to friendship. Shared "war yarns" made casual conversation easy. Canadians seemed honest, efficient ("fine staff work" was remembered of the Canadian Expeditionary Force under Sir Arthur Currie). Men had no legendary quality—the "wild and woolly West" was laughingly remembered, while Mounties "rode" for the visitors in their "famed" show. If one were lucky he might see "a cowboy (the real thing)" from the train window. Once-controversial ethnic groups now roused little interest. Indians seemed comic; we are told of "an old squaw waddling under a wide-brimmed hat. . . built somewhat on the plan of a sea-lion." French Canadians were dismissed with laughing tales about their evasion of conscription. The new Canadians out West, generally lumped together as "Galicians," with their ungrudging, undespairing work, appeared to show "just those qualities which are desirable" on the prairies. For "older Canadians," "clubland" flourished, and most travellers became conscious of the Canadian Club and its many rivals. Toronto and Edmonton shared the centre of interest. The new terminus in Toronto replaced the domes and fortresses of older views. But even the new cities caught less attention than the hinterland, the immense, sleepy, murmuring prairie, the "lonely land," the backwoods, the new North (not quite yet a major focus in travel accounts). Nature exhilarated; spring brought "champagne-like air," and winter seemed "one of the jolliest seasons." The culture of the country was modest (one visitor noted that portraits of King George and Queen Mary had been "executed" by local artists out West). But the young people seemed hopeful and energetic. "There is a stretching out in this country." In this "real democracy," university students worked as waiters, farmhands, or street excavators. It was a world different from "Home"; but rigid standards had eased, and differences were usually met with interest or even admiration, rather than with the pre-war arrogant amusement. The post-war book may be a delayed report on an earlier visit, or an account of a tour "planned in 1912, delayed till 1922." It may be an attempt to jump a band-wagon of "travel-books," to add a new item to a successful series. J. T. Paris adds Seeing Canada (1924) to his Seeing the Middle West, Seeing the Sunny South, etc. Vernon Quinn adds Beautiful Canada (1925) to his Beautiful America, Beautiful Mexico, etc. J. E. Ray adds Things Seen in Canada (1927) to Things Seen in Constantinople. M. I. Newbigin's Canada, the Great River, the Lands and the Men (1927) and H. A. Kennedy's The Book of the West (1925) are also the work of old hands at the travel-book business. Percy Gomery's lively A Motor Scamper 'Cross Canada (1922) marks the substitution of a new mode of travel for the old railroading

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ways, and is one of a series of "car-centred" books. Most of these works follow a sedate path from east to west, with the still-inevitable lunge off the track to Niagara Falls. The point of view in many is that of the bright, openminded woman of the post-war decade, adventurous, rather inclined to rosy vision, but bringing neither the gentility of the ladies of the nineties nor the militant energy of the pre-war suffragettes. Yvonne Fitzroy in A Canadian Panorama (1929) and Katherine Hale (1878-1956) in Canadian Cities of Romance (1928) represent English and Canadian versions of the viewpoint of the new woman. Victoria Hay ward's Romantic Canada (1922) heralded by its publisher as "the first important book in this category" is indeed the most readable. Different in tone, as in ordering and intention, are the reports of wanderers in hungry search of work. The titles are suggestive: Adventures and Misadventures (1922) by "Lofty"; Ups and Downs in Canada (1922) by V.H.Ricci; Life is a Jest (1924) by C. W. Thompson (F.R.C.S.). "I challenged Fate and got my whack in reply" is "Lofty's" condensed version of these travel tales. Here is the first sounding of themes dominant in the thirties and forties. One answer to this despair appears in Across the Prairie (1922), Miss Hasell's account of the rewarding life on the Sunday School caravans. L. M. Guest's Canada as a Career (1927) also represents Western life in a bracing vein, as does J. Peat Young's A Newcomer in Canada (1924). All these meander from one topic to another in the random pattern of their restlessness. Less uneven is the work of the professional journalists who came to report on "Canadian facts." The Imperial Press Conference brought numbers of newsmen to Canada in 1920 and their reports dutifully appeared. P. Donald's is the official account; J. C. Glendinning (representative of the Irish Newspaper Society) in Oh! Canada (1921), and E. W. Watt (a Scottish newsman) in A Canadian Tour (1921) present livelier personal versions. Later Eldred Walker, West of England journalist, in Canadian Trails Revisited (1926) commented on changes in farming and social life since 1914. Canada still "baint Zummerset," as another West-Country journalist agreed—F. J. Cox in A Holiday in Canada (1924). An odd and interesting associated report comes from T. E. Naylor, a delegate to the Imperial Press Conference representing the mechanical side of newspaper production. A Compositor in Canada (1921) probes into union meetings, into labour halls loaded with unhappy memories of the Winnipeg riots of 1919, into workers' homes, into a socialist open-air rally, which approved the Labour Irish policy and condemned British intervention in Russia. It is a sociological reminder that several "Canadas" were emerging, and that a traveller would be hard put to see them all. Besides the clear representatives of the travel-book genre, books of the

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period include many related publications: memoirs, publicists' brochures, hand-books, guide-books, historical accounts, some including descriptive and travel passages such as enliven D. H. McCormick's Lloydminster, or 5000 Miles with the Barr Colonists (1929). Finally, analysis, description, and travel story blend in two unusual books: Sarah MacNaughton's My Canadian Memories (1920), disorganized perhaps because of its posthumous publication but particularly interesting on Canadian people, groups and individuals; and Peggy Webling's Peggy (1924), a back-stage version of the life of a touring group, with sharp-biting accounts of the hotels, the concert halls, the louts, the pianos, the foods, and the enthusiasm that greeted this energetic actress. Peggy and "Lofty" produce the youngest, jauntiest, and therefore the most representative travel books of the decade. Their perspective is always cheerful, even if their prospect is not. But no really interesting example of a handling of the travel book as genre emerges from the twenties. If the twenties brought a high point in camaraderie between travellers and their Canadian hosts, the thirties witnessed a reverse into disdain, resentment, or hostility. The number of travel books increased, to a level just below the neverequalled eighties, but the tone is radically different from the confidence of those earlier times. Now depression days brought emigrants to the disillusionment of a "Land of Bull and Bale-Wire"—anglice, of boasting and "making do." Travellers met compatriots who were bitter, homesick, "bushed." Hirepurchases kept up appearances, for Canada was slow to admit she was hard up. But the soldier-settlement scheme now appeared "a disastrous failure." A new land had its tyrannies, its hardships for body and spirit. Droughts, wire screens, storm windows, over-heating, snow-boots, chewing-gum, radio talk about laxatives, soft drinks, "Ritz-Carlton red hots," all-day suckers: the minutiae irritated visitors as much as Canadian egotism, chauvinism, philistinism ("Young Canadians think that literature and art constitute the realm of women and of teachers"—"merchant venturers are their heroes"). Work was a fetish, and in dull rural areas the second generation walked with the "tread of an Indian, tread of a bear." A yearning to be together trapped all. A craze for education, mostly "on the practical side," made hardship for families (though most university students still paid their own way). Oddities in the educational scene—the school train, the fraternity house, the Junior Red Cross concert, the oral language teaching—caught the traveller's attention. So of course did bootlegging. There was promise of growth in art. One heard of Tom Thomson, of "old masters" in Montreal, of the Little Theatre movement, of theatre at Hart

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House, in Winnipeg, in Vancouver. "The whole country's tired of American films."

Indeed the "American Invasion" of "souse-hunting" Yankees, the closed American border of 1924 which had dumped labour into Canada, the shift of American tourists from Canada to Europe, all brought sour comment from Canadians. Englishmen were regarded with no greater affection. British capital was popular because of the collapse of the dollar, but a public school voice or an Oxford accent still posed a problem. Canadians assumed the Englishman incompetent. "He may be able to preach a sermon or write a book or give a lecture, but is not expected to be able to stoke a furnace, cook a chop, wield an axe, or hammer a nail straight into a piece of wood." Visitors returned the scorn: Canadian society seemed selfish in its security, filled with "the sound of many dollars." The French Canadian now came back into the spotlight. Much discussed in the thirties were his character, his traditions, his religion, his gaiety or graciousness, the barrier he raised against Americanization. Indians also regained their pathos. "How little interest the average Canadian takes in the only really romantic people in their midst!" The facts of immigration forced also a focus on the new Canadians, no longer quietly assimilating, but "tough-looking," ever present in the West—"Bohunks," Poles, 'Slovaks, Ukrainians, Germans, Finns, Hutterites, Mormons, "Douks," and "Dagoes" in Toronto road work —not pleasant in themselves and all increasing the danger of secession to the United States. Out on the coast was talk of "J.C.," the new province— "Japanese Columbia." It is people who fill the pages of the travel books of the thirties, easing out both descriptions of cities and rhapsodies over nature. "High and clear the call of the North": but except for that call, Canada's voice is the voice of the Bohunk and the hobo; the housewife "slamming the door" on a salesman; the minister urging all to sing together "action songs of the nursery" or "Alouette"; the demagogues—Houde and Aberhart, Tim Buck. (Hepburn and Bennett and Mackenzie King, Miss Hasell and Cora Hind get passing mention too.) In that distressed epoch, the most interesting travel accounts are written by tension-ridden travellers, themselves under stress. The complacent, valueassured observer found nothing in Canada to stir him or satisfy him. But someone like Kathryn Trevelyan, the nervous and arrogant daughter of the British Minister of Education, flinging aside her debutante dilettante life in London to hitch-hike across Canada, found here new pressures and new values, even though most of the trip rubbed sensibilities raw. Her Unharboured Heaths (1930), like the best books of the twenties, is more rewarding to the psychologist or sociologist than to the literary critic. More polished in presentation, but still provocative in content is England's French Dominion

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(1932) written by a young politician, William Teeling, in an interval between "nursing his constituency." We find, of course, a few trailing survivors of the old-style travel book, the east-to-west, day-by-day account of a holiday trip or a business tour. Only one is memorable, and that mostly for its title: Hell! I'm British (1938) by affable A. C. Elliott. There is the old familiar baggage of special interests, as in Canadian Journey (1939) by H. P. Thompson, editorial secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Going Places (1939) by Colin Hood, a Glasgow businessman; Lodging for a Night (1939) by gourmet Duncan Mines. One group of regional studies adds to the old emphasis on the West: M. Harrison's Go West—-Go Wise! (1930), Stephen Leacock's My Discovery of the West (1937), Frederick Niven's Canada West (1930), A. Kriztjansson's In the West (1935). Another, larger, group focuses on the new North: E. A. Powell's Marches of the North (1931); and the strong series of Greenland sketches by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962). Memoirs consolidate the image of the old wilderness places. Most interesting, and including most of traditional travel material—trip out, etc., is Roger Vardon's English Bloods (1930). A much more important group in the thirties return to the "bitter land" theme. Bleaker aspects of travel, hobo style, saddening views of farm land and city, appear in G. H. Westbury's Misadventure of a Working Hobo in Canada (1930), J. H. Hooker's The Heart of an Immigrant; or, "Just Life" in Canada (1931), E. F. G. Fripp's The Outcasts of Canada: Why Settlements Fail (1932), J. H. Walker's A Scotsman in Canada (1935), Harold Baldwin's A Farm for Two Pounds (1935), James Kinniburgh's Sidelights on Canada (1936), W. G. Carr's High and Dry (1938). Tales of hard times, of depression, of strikes, of harvesting abuses, of the narrow life in rural areas, laziness, intolerance, snobbery—these sourly realistic books are of great importance for their reversal of the old image of peace and plenty, happiness, freedom and prosperity. In form Fripp is most interesting, for he copes with the bulk of his experiences by dividing the book in two, the first half a unified narrative of the struggles of a soldier-settler and his "plucky" English wife to "make land" in the West; the second half is a series of tales of his own troubles hi Canadian cities, trying to "make a go" of selling vacuum cleaners, brushes— anything the depression-weary Canadian housewife might be charmed into buying by the once-despised "English accent." For pleasant fare, but always with a wry recognition of depression realities, we might turn to The First Winter (1935) by H. Herklots, canon of St. John's Cathedral in Winnipeg, and professor at St. John's College there. This little book, "published to save fellow Englishmen from having to write letters

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home," ranks among the most attractive of all visitors' accounts. Other amiable descriptions appear in books for children, publicists' work (like that of Murray Gibbon) and hand-book writers. Canadian writers skim regional life for local colour. The "search for identity" has hardly affected this kind of writing as yet; deeper probing must wait till the forties. Meantime, the thirties brought the inevitable "Royal Tour" books. Boorman's Merry America (1939), and C. K. Carnegie's And the People Cheered (1940) are standard reports. There is another of those car-centred efforts; this one is M. L. O'Hara's Coast to Coast in a Puddle-Jumper (1930). (Sample this to see how awful a travel book can be!) Probably the last of the "lady travellers" was Lady Kitty Vincent (Ritson) whose Two on a Trip (1930) gaily chit-chats about discomfort and fun in the backwoods. A less pretentious lady, also the last of a long line, is Miss Hilda S. Primrose. North American Summer (1939) is one of those gentle genteel holiday accounts devoted to a tour of the United States plus a brief swing over the border (53 pages out of 355). Her one claim to fame among her peers is that she "left Niagara unvisited." In the 1940's, "missing Niagara" symbolizes the fashion. The old high spots are by-passed now, in favour of by-ways. He d'Orleans, not Quebec City; Prescott, not Toronto; Saanich, not Victoria—the substitutions are Bruce Hutchison's, but they are typical. For the first time, Americans equal British travellers in number of books published. More significant still, both are outnumbered (also for the first time) by Canadian reporters. The total number of travel books is down, largely because of the war, but partly also because the complexity of the country now awed most "holiday-trippers." This is a heavier time. Instead of glimpses of farm life we hear abstractly of "forces of agrarian unrest." The geographers see the land in terms of vast "wedges," "bolts," "channels." Probably the air age produced this new perspective, just as it produced for most travellers a new route and a new time sense and a modified reaction to those two old horrors, the winter and the vastness. Mode of travel has always provided the dynamic in travel books, the base line of their composition. A new mode brings fresh vigour in organization. The Canadian character emerged in a better light as always in wartime: arrogance justified by effort, "making-do" justified by world necessity. Canada's resentment of world ignorance of her strength was acceptable now to most tourists, impressed by her war effort. The big gray shapes of warships haunting the coastline made national limits seem clearer to both English and American visitors. A British lecturer, after a wartime lecture tour in the States, revived in Vancouver before "a 100 percent friendly audience." Sta-

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tions of the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme, toured by most "official" visitors, stirred with the paradox of Canada's integration with the far-away war effort. American visitors might acknowledge their ignorance, their anticipation of seeing "the Canadian shore lined with Mounted Police, little Dionnes, or French Habitants," but they were ready for romantic, half-rueful admiration of the war-time seriousness of their northern neighbours. French Canadians were again a focus of conversation for both American and British visitors. Now in uneasy urgency one heard of their "exploitation by the Axis," their political corruptions, their religious separatism. Louisa M. Peat, in Canada: New World Power (1945) marks the changing focus on Canada, with her emphasis on racial animosities, the "Zombies," the air force, and her anecdotes of wartime life, "the Drama of the Doukhobor," old and new Canadians, and so on. This book is an interesting distance-marker of the times, over-wrought in style, chaotic in order, but sounding the themes of the amazing period. Most visitors were anxious—over-anxious—to "understand" Canada, rather than to describe her; but Canada was becoming too mobile, too closed and secret in her complexities, too confusing for clear impact. The number of visitors bold enough to attempt a coast-to-coast report dwindled. Larry Nixon in See Canada Next (1940), follow-up to See America First! presents a vision of a luxurious vacation land, "where you get $21 change from a $20 bill." Mary Bosanquet in Saddlebags for Suitcases (1942), reprinted in England as Canada Ride (1944), recounts an "economy holiday" across the country with two spunky little horses. William R. Watson adds And All Your Beauty (1948) to the heap of method-of-travel books, this one featuring a trailer. Most of the travel books of the forties are selective, the specialist's affair. Canada: A Study of Cool Continental Environments (1947) by Griffith Taylor (1880-1963) illustrates the limit of specialized description. J. H. Stembridge, geographer of the Oxford University Press, humanizes the "geographic angle" in a humorous account of a brief wartime tour, A Portrait of Canada (1943). Basil Newman's American Journey (1943) tucks five chapters on Canada into a sound report on wartime moods, from a broadcaster's point of view. Regional studies continue, particularly of the barren lands, and there are books for children: Lilian H. Strack's Crossing Canada (1940) (with John and Judy) and Frances Carpenter's Canada and her Northern Neighbors (1946) (with "our friend the pilot" and "Miss Bobby, the airline hostess"). Lady Tweedsmuir's Canada (1941) is a sadly thin entry in the list of vice-regal accounts. Two American women contribute animated studies: Frances Arleen Ross, The Land and People of Canada (1947) and Dorothy Duncan, Here's to Canada! (1941). The latter is a moving account of the author's "conversion to Canada." When this gifted writer faced the formal problems of the travel

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book, however, she was obviously baffled. Her chapters, strung along the old east-to-west line, are anecdotal, deftly handled. But they are interlarded with guidebook statistics, set in italics, and they end with summaries of "What to Buy," "Approaches by Road," etc. Uncertainty regarding the functions of the travel book—aesthetic or practical—reaches its sad climax here. The uncertainty is firmly solved by Bruce Hutchison. In The Unknown Country (1942) he evolves a new form. On a surface order of east-to-west he builds a surface pattern of essays of regional analysis handled through anecdotes of travel and of talk by the way. He adds poetic inter-chapters, blending memory, drifts of phrase and of legend, with his present perspective as Westerner, married man, journalist—all the personal attitudes which furnish a point of reference. Thus a cross-cut hi time is achieved, and a unity built of refrain and the recurrence of the personal perspective. It is a technical tour de force. Precious? Perhaps. Certainly there is no concealed art here. The elaborated technique seems finally to corrupt the vision: cliches appear, effectively worded and dextrously placed, but still cliches—ideas about French Canadians, for instance, which can be maintained if one looks closely at the lie d'Orleans and one's own memories, not if one looks objectively at Montreal. All is coloured by Hutchison's impassioned "Canadianism" (according to his own definition). After Hutchison's careful subtleties, would any traveller dare revert to the old thinness of "We embarked . . . French Canada is ... Niagara next . . . and then the prairies . . . and so, homeward bound?" Would any outside observers, skimming the surface, dare report their findings, after all this probing in by-ways of time and place? Yes, indeed they would, and did in the fifties, in the same old ways. The 1950's produced many regional studies such as Clifford Wilson's North of 55 Degrees (1954) and Pierre Berton's The Mysterious North (1956). Some are theses rather than descriptions: LeBourdais' Canada's Century (1951), Leslie Roberts' Canada, the Golden Hinge (1952), E. Westropp's Canada, Land of Opportunities (1959). There were also glossy pictorial works with a tiny text; B. K. Sandwell's Cities of Canada, in paintings (1951), and Wilfrid Eggleston's Image of Canada (1953). There are slick books angled at tourists, like M. Chapin's Contemporary Canada (1959) and brochures like S. S. Ericsson's Are Canadians Really? (published by a committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1954). The children's books continue and there is a trickle of old-style "holiday tour" accounts, including Australian Frank Clune's Hands across the Pacific (1951), Ray Dorien (author of Venturing to New Zealand, Venturing to Australia), Venturing (what else?) to Canada (1955) and Nicholas Monsarrat's Canada, Coast to Coast (1955), disappointingly thin. The decade ends with Gordon and Elspeth Winter's Our-

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selves in Canada (1960), regional (mostly in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa), limited to treatment of daily life in the suburbs, "the Canadian way of life as lived by ordinary people." The modest hey-day of the travel book on Canada is over. Never a year without its "Summer Tour" but never a year with the bumper crops of those good old years, 1885, 1911, 1930. In many of the books of the fifties, Newfoundland receives heavy emphasis, because of its recent entry into Confederation, and because of a continuing emphasis on raw resources and on the places that produce them. Ungava, Noranda, Rouyn, Chicoutimi, Kapuskasing, Churchill, Norman Wells, Port Nelson, Kitimat, Prince Rupert: this is the new roll-call of names mingling with the old list of city centres. (One nice variation on an old theme—"Victoria plays Lady Nelson to Vancouver's Lady Hamilton.") The old sights still pulled: the Rockies, Quebec City; and Niagara wielded its old sledgehammer effect on prose. "Gosh, I had to turn away, couldn't bear it so suddenly. Stupendous!" (Then a cryptic postscript—"Oh well. . .") The sense of distances and of rawness was restored by the new routes of air travel, and the new emphasis on the North revived the old themes of cold and snow and frozen emptiness. In society the women seemed "formidable beyond measure"; the homes, kitchens, gardens, shops, and clothes burdened the country with post-war efficiency and utilitarianism. But here European culture could regenerate itself in a country opening still, among Canadians, more cautious than the Americans, but intelligent and without illusions. At the end of the period 1920-1960, two books appeared, in fantastic opposition. One is Bruce Hutchison's vision, Canada, Tomorrow's Giant (1957). It repeats the pattern of inter-chapters set in italics, repeats the eastwest progression, repeats the emphasis on side-roads and casual chat, repeats the optimism and the stress on personal perspective. Beside this, place Norman Levine's Canada Made Me (1958). Canada, says this bitter revenant, is "a dream, an experiment that could not come off." Remembering his share of the dream and the experiment as a child in Ottawa, a youth at McGill, a young man out West, he returns to the present reality. In Halifax, after a fantastic trip out, he meets a burlesque reception: rudeness in customs, official boredom and petty corruption, and a hearty reception only from a Kelloggvs representative, passing out boxes of Corn Flakes "from the Canadian wheat field . . . and cheap too." "I am a Zero," he concludes, and perhaps his native land, "recognized" (as his epigraph from Camus suggests) "at the moment of losing it," is a Zero too. Certainly the Canada he travels is vulgar and careless, a shoddy world of dingy restaurants filled with blank-eyed girls and leather-jacketed youths. Blobs of chewing-gum stuck underneath the table signal the return to Canadian life. In Levine's treatment of Ottawa and Montreal, his receptivity plays against

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the remembered resentments to create a curious tension. His technical power in anecdote usually controls the obsessed quality, but the total effect of the book is that of a nightmare, where brilliant particles of realistic reporting whirl into a grotesque reprise. Canada Made Me is a memorable book. Like the best of the travel books on Canada, it reflects the shock, stimulus, elation, and despair roused in a sensitive observer by this nation. In the best travel accounts, Canada is preconceived as having unity, is perceived in sharp and fresh detail, and is presented through the personal fusion of dextrous composition and style in a tone uncorrupted by the temptations of the travel genre.

7. Essays and Autobiography I. Essays 1920-I960 BRANDON CONRON* THE JOURNALISTIC SLANT of the Canadian essay became more pronounced after 1920. Essays were still being published in scholarly periodicals such as the Queen's Quarterly and the Dalhousie Review, but it was the critical spirit of the new journals such as Canadian Forum and Canadian Mercury that did most in directing the genre towards the "preaching, expostulation and tubthumping" that Lome Pierce deplored in 1932. What appeared to be exhortation was really a restless questioning of the Canadian way of life, for few writers had a platform, and the editors of the Forum itself failed to agree on a political and social philosophy. Most eloquent among the new voices in the Forum was Douglas Bush, whose scholarly training in English literature produced a genial irreverence for the introspective and moral seriousness of both Canadian literature and the Canadian character. W. D. Woodhead (1885-1957) had much in common with Bush, but made more use of humour. The essay on Prohibition ("If Winter Comes"), in which Woodhead joked about "the unnatural dryness of the moral atmosphere," belongs with Bush's "Plea for Original Sin" and Pratt's Witches' Brew. Other contributors to the Forum were too opinionated to be skilful essayists. John Macnaughton (1858-1943) was often belligerent in defence of the humanities. A. J. M. Smith's plea for Canadian criticism was taken up by Frederick Philip Grove (1871-1948) and expanded into a survey of the needs of Canadian art (// Needs to be Said, 1929). In other issues, E. K. Broadus (1876-1936) attacked contemporary poetry, and B. K. Sandwell (1876-1954) contributed a discussion on education. In his incisive and critical scrutiny of Canada and her political relationships, Frank Underbill gave a broad and highly personal interpretation of his subject. Even such whimsically humorous pieces as "Exposed the Golfic Mysteries" of John D. Robins (1884-1952) did not avoid the thrust of satire. Underlying the restlessness of the twenties and thirties was the attempt to define Canadianism. Many of those who contributed to the Forum had an academic background, and stood therefore in a tradition of free inquiry, a •Assisted by Donald Hair.

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tradition which enjoined a sympathetic consideration of all points of view. And while these writers strove for a specific ideology, it was their heritage, the critical spirit itself, that came to be identified with Canadianism. As the uncertainty of the twenties and thirties gave way to the struggle of the forties and the optimism of the fifties, this spirit grew. Its adolescent intensity still permeated the radio scripts of John Fisher, an impassioned critic of those who apologized for, or refused to support, things Canadian. Mature expression came with the speeches and articles of Vincent Massey, whose quiet prudence seemed to be the essence of Canada. The Canadian character has been, and probably will be, a perennial theme for the essayist. It is significant that when Malcolm Ross set about making an anthology of Canadian essays, he produced a book called Our Sense of Identity (1954). For the essayist, who needs some degree of detachment and quiet contemplation, the critical temper of the twenties was not always a congenial one. To attack, to criticize, involved venturing from the tower to the marketplace, and, once there, the temptation to stay was strong. The forays of William Arthur Deacon were typical in that they led him away from the essay entirely. Unpredictable, often belligerent, rarely dull, Deacon characterized himself as a "literary adventurer," a pirate, one of "those irresponsible but picturesque seamen of old who went on erratic journeys to bring back treasure. . . ." Deacon's earliest journeys were the most successful, partly because of the vigour of his approach, partly because he thought of himself as an essayist and therefore tried for a clear muscular prose style. The treasure of Pens and Pirates (1923) is typically diversified, ranging as it does from barbering to the "national character," from whimsy to stern humour. The pace is so brisk that the reader often forgets the erratic organization. Much smoother in rhythm is Poteen (1926), "A Pot-Pourri of Canadian Essays." Deacon's real interest lay in defying "the conservatism of the Canadian Mind." In 1931 he was joint editor of Open House, a collection of articles representing "a free flow of frank and fearless opinion on many subjects." With My Vision of Canada (1933) the critical temper took over completely, and Deacon disregarded the demands of form and style in the passionate hope that he might thereby speak more openly and frankly about Canada's needs. While many of their academic colleagues found much to attack and little to defend, a group of classics professors at the University of Toronto was quietly fostering traditional humanist ideals. The scholarly essays of Maurice Hutton (1856-1940) are largely revised public lectures on people, books, and ideas. Hutton's approach is thoughtful and leisurely, and combines the best of the two great classical cultures. The spontaneity of the Greek spirit appears in his robust sense of humour, the conservatism of the Roman mind in his intelligent consideration of ancient virtues. The lucidity and balance of Hutton's style are reflected in the polished phrases of one of his students, John Charles

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Robertson (1864-1956). Like his master, Robertson treats "various matters of perennial interest in which the ancient and the modern world throw light each upon the other." Gilbert Norwood (1880-1954) stands apart from his colleagues, partly because a good deal of his professional life was spent in England, partly because he is lively and outspoken while Hutton and Robertson are restrained and poised. The essay in Canada has always had some of the timeliness usually associated with journalism. Newspaper articles, on the other hand, sometimes approach the timelessness that traditionally characterizes the essay. Hence we must consider a number of books containing collections of newspaper columns, published by their authors with the not entirely misplaced hope that they had some literary value. A columnist like Pierre Berton, whose interest lies in people, events, and issues, or a journalist like H. W. Charlesworth (18721945), who chronicles the social and political currents of his time, does not make contributions to literature. "The best columns," Pierre Berton has said, are the "most topical, written in the heat of the moment and in prose that is something less than imperishable." Once the columnist begins avoiding the "heat of the moment," however, he approaches the essay. His style, it is true, may betray the effects of an imminent deadline, but his methods and materials are similar to those of the essayist. Description, anecdote, reminiscence, and humour form his stock-in-trade. His appeal lies in an entertaining display of his personality and tastes. One of the best of these peripheral literary figures was T. B. Roberton (1879-1936), whose articles in the Winnipeg Free Press were sufficiently polished to warrant two posthumous collections. From the Winnipeg Tribune came C. B. Pyper's One Thing after Another (1948) and This For Remembrance (1949), by W. T. Allison (1874-1941). Bruce West's A Change of Pace (1956), reprinted from the Toronto Globe and Mail, has little literary value. More skilful is Jack Scott's From Our Town (1959), a selection of articles from the Vancouver Sun, Of all the columnists, the humorists were most widely read and best loved. Peter Donovan's Imperfectly Proper (1920), a collection of his sketches from the Toronto Saturday Night, set the pace. Newton McTavish (1877-1941), editor of the Canadian Magazine, followed with Thrown in (1923), reminiscences of a rural childhood. Gregory Clark collected his humorous anecdotes in several volumes. His finest pieces appeared in the Weekend Magazine, and were gathered together in The Best of Gregory Clark (1959). Like the other humorists, Eric Nicol relied on anecdotes of personal experiences. His social satire, however, was often distinctive and refreshing. The bogey of every journalist is the "average reader." This mythical but all-powerful creature not only dictates what he likes to read, but how he likes it written. The humorists (with the possible exception of Nicol) managed to please because each cultivated an "average man" attitude and an idiomatic

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style. Donovan was perhaps typical. His pieces, the "random impressions of an Earnest Soul," were dedicated to "Constant Reader" and "Old Subscriber." He liked the good old days, sports (usually fishing), and "getting away from it all"; he disliked silly women, affectation, and social teas. Common sense, tolerance, and amusement marked his approach to life. Though the "average reader" was no obstacle to the humorists, he posed a real dilemma for the serious essayist. Most essays in Canada are published in journals and magazines commanding a fairly wide audience. Few readers are interested in literary value. As Gregory Clark wrote bluntly in the preface to Which We Did (1936), "nobody but invalids and retired clergymen read essays any more." In spite of this bleak situation, most essayists found a solution. Some, like Hugh MacLennan, contributed principally to sophisticated journals like the Montrealer. Others, like B. K. Sandwell, editor of Saturday Night, tried to correct the "average reader." Robertson Davies ignored him: "I do not believe in wasting good talk on people who are plainly unable to appreciate it." The essays of Hugh MacLennan will probably always take second place to his fiction, especially since many of the pieces are used to formulate definitions and to work out ideas later incorporated into the novels. Yet these pieces are by no means alien to the essay tradition in Canada. In the preface to Thirty and Three (1954) MacLennan sounds the note of virtually every Canadian essayist after 1920. Discarding the traditional concept of the essayist as a "man who lives a life of quiet but surprisingly cheerful desperation, reconciled to the facts of existence," MacLennan writes: "I am still unreconciled to the kind of world I live in and I view many things with alarm besides myself, including most politicians and a good many voters." He speaks of the period in which he lives as "transitional," and his search after definitions is largely an attempt to understand the nature of the transition. The Canadian character is the principal subject of Cross Country (1949), while Scotchman's Return (I960) ranges more widely. MacLennan tends to make his definitions statements of general truths (a practice which may irritate the reader who does not share his opinions), when they are in fact themes, "a mood or a cluster of ideas which somehow has emerged," MacLennan himself says, from the writer as an individual. This tendency is only partially offset by his practice of so loading the essays with reminiscences and personal revelations that they might almost be chapters in an autobiography. Personal likes and dislikes provide the basis on which MacLennan works out his definitions, but when he goes astray and comes to the wrong conclusions, he fails to charm as the essayist should. This failure is mitigated in part by a style in which his craftsmanship is never obtrusive, and even when the content falters its touch is strong and sure. As editor of a weekly journal, Bernard Keble Sandwell (1876-1954)

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shared in the prevailing critical spirit, but his temper was highly individual. "I am not a leader of society. I am a follower of it. I follow it at a respectful distance, near enough to permit me to study its many interesting qualities, but far enough away to make it clear that I do not belong to it." The Swiftian overtones of this statement are strengthened by the title of the volume from which it is taken, The Privatity Agent and Other Modest Proposals (1928). Irony is the mark of many of the essays, but while Swift's irony is often savage, Sandwell's is mocking and witty, or, to use his own word, "skittish." A polished style, characterized by short thrusting phrases, gives this irony a cutting edge that resembles that of satire. The parallel is intentional, for Sandwell's purpose was to improve the Canadian social and political world. His norm was the "good old days," his own role that of laudator temporis acti. Sandwell's ideal is not to be found in any one era, however; it is rather that Utopia where reason, common sense, and justice prevail. It is an ideal implied rather than described, and it lurks behind his every incisive criticism of twentieth century life. Typical of his provocative wit is the following statement from "The Hispano-Suiza Aristocracy": "I have, I must say, a great deal of sympathy with superior persons. Their path in life, in this age of the triumph of the inferior, is terribly hard. It is becoming so difficult for them to convince the inferior persons of their inferiority." With such material, readers both common and uncommon may be shocked into that one activity that Sandwell desires, but most shun: "thinking solemnly about solemn things." The "average reader," that creature of "Drabbery and Squirtdom," is completely ignored by Robertson Davies, in spite of the fact that this versatile writer was literary editor of Saturday Night, and subsequently editor of the Peterborough Examiner. For his audience he looks to the "clerisy," those few "who read for pleasure and with some pretension to taste." One of the most prominent members of this clerisy is his dyspeptic Samuel Marchbanks, whose Diary (1947) and Table Talk (1949) make use of forms which, like the letter, are traditionally related to the essay. A compound of shrewd observation, razor-edge comments, playful sallies, evaporations of wit, and exuberant humour, these pieces make up an anatomy of the tastes and opinions of a fictional character whose ultimate purpose is the frank and often critical illumination of the Canadian way of life. The "national passion for dowdy utility," the prevalence of "boobs, yahoos and ninnies," is more than offset by Marchbanks himself who, like Dr. Johnson, "loved tea, conversation and pretty women, and had not much patience with fools." Davies admires intelligence, not the dull pedantic kind, but that lively appreciation of life that is the natural concomitant of the well-stocked cultivated mind. Just as angling was for W. H. Blake the central activity of the good life, so reading is for Davies the principal pursuit of the intelligent individual. "Reading is my theme," he announces at the beginning of A Voice from the Attic (1960),

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"and reading is a private, interpretative art." "Private" is a key word. Like Sandwell, Davies places his hope for the future on the capacities of the individual: "Only individuals think; gangs merely throb." The gangs of "average readers" not infrequently so alienated a journalist that he fled from the city and sought out a country home. One of the unusual and perhaps most significant themes arising out of the journalistic world was this return to nature, in part a retreat, in part a resurgence of the pioneering spirit. The pattern was set in an academic fashion by E. K. Broadus (18761936), whose Saturday and Sunday (1935) records impressions of an odyssey from Harvard to Edmonton to set up the University of Alberta. But while Broadus was an educational pioneer, the journalists had more in common with Thoreau. Frederick Philip Grove summed up their purposes when in commenting on Friendship (1943) he said of its author, H. L. Symons: "What he wanted was a piece of land which would help him to grow, to live himself into the soil and to come out of it a completer man." Both Symons and John D. Robins (1884-1952) often vitiate their theme with humorous cliches. Kenneth McNeill Wells is more successful. A long series of articles in the Toronto Telegram, later gathered together in four books, chronicled life at the Owl Pen, the author's farm "up Medonte way." Like Peter McArthur, Wells was a world-weary writer who turned to "that which is eternally and datelessly of the farmstead and concession line, that which is evergreen." A much more careful writer than McArthur, Wells was accurate but not lyrical in his descriptions. His penchant was to story-telling, not to humour, and he was particularly skilful in transcribing the idiom of the Ontario farmer. Nature remained an important topic for the Canadian essayist. Some writers, like Ernest Fewster (1868-1947) and W. S. Johnson, attempted unsuccessfully to reproduce the descriptive fantasies of Archibald MacMechan. Sunlight and Shadow (1928) by Cecil Francis Lloyd (1884-1938) has some value, however, principally because Lloyd has a flair for finding the right descriptive word. His Malvern Essays (1930) are modelled on Montaigne, and, like his master, he derives "a mild and chequered enjoyment from being alive." His attitude is ambivalent, recognizing as it does the permanent and the fleeting, the beautiful and the homely, life and death. As he tells us in "The Burden of Existence," he takes life as it is, but his acceptance is wistful and weary. Lloyd's style has individual faults, but in general it is easy and graceful, and faithfully portrays a sensitive, rather sad personality. Far different from the approach of Archibald MacMechan is that of Frederick Philip Grove (1871-1948), who described nature in a detailed, almost scientific fashion. When the reader is informed that a cloud "covers the sky in the northwest to an angular height of thirty degrees," he may wonder if the description is literary at all, but he soon discovers that such details fit together in an infinitely suggestive whole. Grove himself wrote: "While I am

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trying to set down facts, I am also trying to render moods and images begot by them. . . . " It is, in fact, only such careful accuracy that enables him to describe in Over Prairie Trails (1922) seven trips over the same Manitoba road, and to differentiate the mood and emotion of each journey. More important, such detail somehow brings the reader closer to the mystery of existence. "I wanted the simpler, the more elemental things," writes Grove, "things cosmic in their associations, nearer to the beginning or end of creation." In spite of Grove's personal love for such forbidding country, these cosmic associations keep obtruding. The Turn of the Year (1923), a description of the passing of the seasons on the prairie, has a certain harsh largeness of vision not quite suited to the personal scope of the essay. In the introduction to the original edition, Arthur Phelps spoke of the "epic comment" which seemed to characterize the book. The sketches of the settlers, of the Sower and the Reaper, are dwarfed by the total design. The documentary of the passing seasons seems as determined and inexorable as nature herself. The strong forward stride of Grove's prose rhythms complements the descriptions of nature's power. While Grove described nature with cosmic implications, Roderick Langmere Haig-Brown dwells upon its value for the individual. The difference is one of tradition. Grove was a novelist whose realism did not always avoid the determinism of the naturalist school. Haig-Brown, on the other hand, is a fisherman in the Waltonian tradition, a tradition naturalized in Canada by W. H. Blake. Consequently, fishing is never a utilitarian skill, but an "art, ephemeral, graceful, complicated, full of tradition yet never static." HaigBrown is often as technical and scientific as Grove, but the technicalities subserve his primary purpose of entertaining, "in its highest sense of providing sustenance for the mind." Fishing is not, as some of Haig-Brown's critics have suggested, his way of life; rather, it is both an adjunct to, and a symbol of, life as Haig-Brown believes it should be—the pleasurable experience of an intelligent individual. This thought, expressed in A River Never Sleeps (1946), is one of Haig-Brown's earliest answers to the question "Why Fish?" In Measure of the Year (1950) his pleasure in fishing is extended to all the experiences of life in the country. From Fisherman's Spring (1951), Fisherman's Winter (1954) and Fisherman's Summer (1959) emerges, for the writer, a pattern of civilized life, for the reader, "thoughts and ideas that might otherwise have remained idle and forgotten in the back of the mind." Haig-Brown's style is as quiet and thoughtful as his approach to life. Rarely lyrical or humorous, sometimes fiat and heavy, it is regularly polished and eloquent. The essays of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) stand somewhat apart from the development traced in this section. The pieces that make up Adventures in Error (1936) are complex structures where irony and sly humour lurk under an approach that seems as orderly and systematic as a

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philosophical treatise. Even the title is ironical, for Stefansson is in search of truth. Stefansson's approach would lead one to believe that truth lies in empirical fact, and error in man's wilful disregard of such facts. But the "errors" of the human imagination are empirical facts and, in that sense, true. Human desires, moreover, are significant even when self-deceptive. The reader is soon forced to acknowledge that man's mental processes have a validity of their own, and that the "standardization of error" is desirable. Logical organization and a clear impersonal style aid Stefansson's multiple irony. Speeches were relatively unimportant in the development of the essay during the period from 1920 to 1960, principally because writers no longer looked to oratorical eloquence as a stylistic model. Orators themselves were using a simpler, more direct style. The addresses of Sir Robert Falconer (1867-1943), published as Idealism in National Character (1920), are vigorous, idiomatic, and forceful. Vincent Massey's speeches are unobtrusively eloquent. Journalism was primarily responsible for the general change in style which marked the development of the essay from 1880 to 1960. Utilitarian clarity and conciseness are the marks of journalistic prose, and lend themselves well to the kind of writing where content is more important than style. To the critical temper of the 1920's, a merely ornamental style was anathema. In contrast, the essay writer usually prides himself on a distinctive style which not only reflects his character and tastes, but is largely responsible for communicating the mood or emotion of his chosen subject. For the essayist, style is never purely ornamental. Some of the contributors to The Week scorned attention to style, but most were as careful in cultivating an individual mode of writing as were the essayists who followed them. With the advent of the 1920's, however, prose became a vehicle for attack and criticism. Form and content became distinguishable as they never had been before. Later essayists adapted the directness and force of the journalistic tradition into their own styles, and found that the vigour of the modem idiom was by no means alien to the carefully integrated and unobtrusively artful style of the essay.

II. Autobiography JAY MACPHERSON CANADIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES generally offer more of historical or social than of literary interest. With many, title or sub-title offers a fair idea of the content: Arctic Bride, Artist at War, Memoirs of a Canadian Merchant, Soldiering in Canada, We Keep a Light, When the Steel Went Through. With others

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the author's name suffices: Mrs. George Black, C. T. Currelly, Lady Eaton, Madge Macbeth, Egerton Ryerson, Goldwin Smith, A Staff Surgeon (Walter Henry). The interest of such extroverted books is mainly in a locality or a subject-matter. This chapter will discuss, not a cross-section of these, but a selection of the autobiographies of writers and painters, which, while they display much variety of outward circumstance, may be expected to dwell more on the inner life. However, while the artist appears in Goldsmith as government official, in Major John Richardson as defender of calumniated honour, hi others as crusader, adventurer, journalist, invalid, and in Norman Levine as parasite, only in a few autobiographies is the artist as such very conspicuously present. John Gait (1779-1839) published his two-volume Autobiography six years before his death. In an uncommon phrase he describes his state at the time of writing: "Infirm and ailing as I am, deprecating death with art." Art is less in evidence than the effort to direct belated attention to his earlier works and to justify his conduct on certain past occasions. Nearly a third of the book concerns the founding and operations of the Canada Company, as whose agent Gait spent three years in Upper Canada, returning home ruined in fortune and reputation. One of the few happy moments described is the founding of Guelph: yet "from the day that I announced the founding of this metropolis to the directors of the Canada Company, my troubles and vexations began, and were accumulated on my unsheltered head till they could be no longer endured." His account is detailed and involved, and his legal training causes him to bring forward numerous documents in his defence against misunderstandings and false imputations. After his return he devotes himself full time to his old avocation of literature, having earlier produced plays, poems, and works of travel and biography: now come his two novels of Scottish settler life in Canada, Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet. The Autobiography deals with Gait's public rather than with his domestic life: he says of his marriage only that it took place on a Tuesday, and we know that he had three sons-—who all later settled in Canada—because he mentions his arrest for failure to pay their school fees. Oliver Goldsmith (1794-1861) spent his life as a conscientious official of the army commissariat, occupying posts in Halifax, Saint John, Hong Kong, St. John's, and Corfu, from which last 01 health forced him to retire in 1855. Settled with a sister in Liverpool, where he was to spend his remaining years, Goldsmith outlined his life in a notebook, "with the view of recording circumstances with their dates when they occurred, before time may have erased them altogether from my Memory." It was interest in the author of The Rising Village that caused publication of the Autobiography in 1943, but Goldsmith himself took his literary career very lightly. Looking back after thirty years, he says: "It was very fortunate for me that [the poem] was the

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occupation of leisure Hours. My living did not depend on my poetical talent, lucky fellow, and in this respect I had the advantage of the immortal Poet. After this essay, I abandoned the Muses, and I have not had the pleasure of any further intercourse with the lovely ladies." In the manner of the day, Goldsmith ornaments his rather plain prose with literary allusions: however, to him writing, like reading, is one among the diversions of a modest and accomplished bachelor. Others include playing Tony Lumpkin in amateur theatricals, participating in Masonic and Mechanics' Institute activities, gardening—"my Strawberries and Celery were superior"—and undertaking a pious journey to Lissoy in Ireland, the Goldsmith family home. Here his pride in "the immortal Poet," his great-uncle, lends glory to the scene. Perhaps it is evident too in a Saint John reminiscence of him skating, quoted in the editor's notes: "The skill with which, by sweeping clean-cut curves upon the hard glassy ice, he used to write, in large yet elegant letters, the words 'Oliver Goldsmith,' it was worth going a long way to see." The autobiographical works of Susanna Moodie (1803-1885) were written mainly to earn money, and also intended to instruct. Roughing It in the Bush (1852) is a personal narrative in which she is deliberately using the history of her family's struggles in the deep woods near Peterborough as an objectlesson to prospective settlers. This is one of the best known, and among the most impressive, of Canadian books. In Life in the Clearings (1853), a leisurely account of reasonably civilized life in Belleville, a well-bred reserve replaces the earlier self-revelation. That during these years a fire destroyed house and possessions, a son was drowned, and Mrs. Moodie became seriously ill, we are told only because she wants to record the kindness of a Catholic priest, the force of Belleville's river Moira, and the occasion for her undertaking the trip to Niagara that is the book's main event. Humour and a balanced outlook are among her assets as a writer. John Gait sent his servant to report on Niagara Falls, a hundred yards away: for Mrs. Moodie the sight of them is one of life's great climaxes, but she nevertheless includes in her book, as part of an excellent anonymous sketch, the lines: My thoughts are strange, magnificent, and deep, When I look down on thee; Oh, what a glorious place for washing sheep Niagara would be!

She shows more lightness in Life in the Clearings than earlier, because her personal battle with Canada is over; but her concerns never become trivial. While carefully and objectively describing natural detail and social customs, notably camp-meeting and mourning ones, like Gait she has a visionary enthusiasm for the future that Canada will build up on the labour of those to whom she offers dignity and independence. Comparable narratives of pioneer

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life were written by Mrs. Moodie's brother Samuel Strickland and her sister Catharine Parr Traill. Mrs. Moodie thinks of literature largely as an instrument of social improvement, citing Oliver Twist and "The Song of the Shirt": so do the Manitoba novelists Rev. Charles W. Gordon (1860-1937, "Ralph Connor"), who wrote at first to win support for Presbyterian missionary work in the West, and Nellie McClung (1873-1951), inspired in youth by Dickens. Both were personally engaged, sometimes together, in the same causes, fights against the liquor interests and for women's suffrage and better factory conditions. Both, visiting the League of Nations at Geneva, see a kind of culmination of their own labours, though Mrs. McClung goes on to record its failure. Gordon's Postscript to Adventure (1938), lively and far from solemn, is full of youthful muscle-building, heroic men and women, dramatic confrontations, and its author's innocently prideful view of himself as a small but honest cog that has turned some big wheels: " 'Excellent! What was Sir Wilfrid's reply?' asked [Mr Asquith] eagerly." Mrs. McClung's Clearing in the West (1935) and The Stream Runs Fast (1945) convey a practical intelligence, warm feeling, and an unerring inaccuracy about books: "I knew every word of In Tune with the Indefinite." Also unerring is her eye for characters and anecdotes (a Brandon landlady: "I like to charge my boarders plenty and then I won't be begrudgin' them"); her use of a notebook for such observations gives life and thickness to her novels. "The people of this neighbourhood drew a sharp line between summer and winter drinkers." Drinking in harvest-time is like eating one's seed-corn, an act of despair. From Mrs. Moodie to Stephen Leacock we are shown that, in the former's words, "Drinking is the curse of Canada." Many staples of Connor and McClung fiction—the picnic spoiled by whisky, the drunken husband who fails to bring the doctor, the petted girl unfit to be a settler's wife—have their originals in their authors' life-stories, though one searches in vain for the reformed saloon-keeper. On the whole these autobiographies record more convincingly than the novels the unsocial setting in which the W.C.T.U. was a liberal movement of its time and it was no longer mainly the Indians for whom the churches needed missionaries. R. W. Service (1874-1958) has two autobiographical books: Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory (1945) describes his early life in Scotland and his North American wanderings, while Harper of Heaven: A Record of Radiant Living (1948) covers his later life in France and California. His contact with persons and places seems callously superficial, while his treatment of experience is sensational and highly coloured. Service's literary career grew out of a talent for public declamation and a knack of producing verse to formula: "attack, build-up and pay-off"; "What about the old triangle. . . ? Sure fire stuff. . . . Give it a setting in a Yukon saloon and make the two guys shoot it out. . . . " However, he fancies the role of inspired

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poet, and gives us hints of creative frenzies, with comments like, "I have ever been a minion of the moon. . . ." The original Endymion went through life with his eyes shut; and the titles of Service's books do not begin to convey his jaunty, vulgar style, his preening, and his contempt for literature. Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) shares with Service a fuzzy natural religion, a cult of wholesome living, and a sense that the true America is California. Trail of an Artist-Naturalist (1940) is best in its depiction of the perilous excitements of a backwoods farm and the acquisition, mainly in Ontario and Manitoba, of Thompson Seton's unsurpassed knowledge of wild life. A third Scotsman, Frederick Niven (1878-1944), published Coloured Spectacles in 1938. The art of this book is so self-effacing, and the impact of reality so direct, that the title slightly misleads. "Memory winnows," he says, impressionistically recreating with lights and colours and smells a boyhood oriented geographically between Valparaiso and Glasgow, and imaginatively between Andrew Lang and Deadwood Dick. The chapters were at first essays separately published, but are drawn together by our recognition of a real person's modesty and skill and the sustained search for unity in diversity, the contemplative threads that connect the here and there, the then and now. Whatever he talks about he gives us the feel of, developing, for example, a Canadian wilderness scene out of the thin smoke of a campfire. His theme is perhaps the search for home, or the way memory makes identity. His thoughtfulness continually orders and relates, rather than dwelling like Service on petty irony and contrast. He makes an unusual conquest of distance: such a mind carries its treasures with it, and he not only finds Scotland in Canada, but sees how Scotland has prepared him for Canada. Sitting with an Indian friend on the prairie, he thinks "of the days . . . when as a small boy I visited the camps of the Blackfeet—invisible to all but me—in Scotland, and smoked the pipe of peace with a viewless, imagined Crowfoot. The sound of the Bow River below us, flowing shallow through the Blackfoot Reservation in Alberta was, for a few minutes, the sound of Gryffe, in Renfrewshire, rippling over its stones." Unexpected versions of such identity also occur: an Indian devoted to the ways of his people, learning that his interviewer is a Scotsman, returns "Me too!"; and a fanatical Scot encountered in Nelson, B.C., at last declares, " 'Leave Scotland, is't? Never been in Scotland! I come frae Glengarry County, Ontario.' He repeated it with sonorous articulation like that of Alan Breck announcing that he bore a king's name: 'Glengarry County, Ontario.' " The technique of the book is subjective without egotism: the impression of human and literary maturity comes in part from Niven's not finding it necessary to arrange his record around social movements or even crucial events in his own life, but rather letting his casually gathered material take its life from him, in the imaginative force with which memory has endowed it: hence the book strikes us as a real creation and its author as an adult.

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The most deliberate effort to portray the artist as such is made by Frederick Philip Grove (1872-1948) in In Search of Myself (1946). The dominating intention causes him to mingle fact and (apparently) fiction, realism and symbolism, to make his hero carry out the fate foreshadowed in the highly selfconscious epigraph, £a vous amuse, la vie? From the beginning this hero is one set apart for a special destiny, even foredoomed. He plays out for us Grove's favourite drama, that of the strong man with a wound that will take his whole lifetime to kill him. Peculiar ironies surround him; and as fate bludgeons him with them, so he bludgeons the reader, most severely in the Prologue. His romantic Titanism is at once both imposing and absurd: "like the face of Europe my memory is a palimpsest. . . ." "The ultimate working out of what was in me: a sort of reaction to the universe in which man was trapped, defending himself on all fronts against a cosmic attack," is perhaps most completely achieved in his life rather than in his work, whose failure as a totality is what In Search of Myself sets out to explain. A comparison he suggests between Siberia and the intellectual life of western Canada is not meant to be ironic, but the inherent reality is so: the wilderness is to Grove both nourishing and destroying, and this is true also of solitude and conversely of human ties. The strength which he phenomenally displays can in other lights look like wilfulness and weakness: in his writing it is hard to distinguish between bang and whimper. This book seems less admirable than A Search for America in that it presents a thinner and more confined reality: social milieu is perfunctorily given and other people appear as objects, even ultimately as obstacles. Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) in The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946) shows a reticence like Gait's about his personal life. In these rambling pieces he feels safest with topics of mild general interest, but enough of his circumstances becomes clear to enlighten the reader about the attitudes he displays elsewhere. His father was a spineless English gentleman packed off by his family to a bush farm near Lake Simcoe, where he took to drink and at length wandered off altogether. Looking back, while still humorously nostalgic about his British origins, Leacock seems glad to have left behind a land where some people were "born to be poor" for one where the family servant "in whose old-fashioned Yorkshire mind wages due from the aristocracy were like shares in the National Debt" is an anachronism. Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (1939), by Laura Goodman Salverson, is one of the most rounded, intelligent, and attractive of Canadian life-stories. Her Icelandic family and its community provide some wonderful characters—Aunt Haldora the midwife, Great Uncle Jonathan with tales of his seafaring youth, Great Aunt Steinun who dragged her injured husband in winter from Gimli to Winnipeg on a wood-sledge, Indians inscrutable but good-hearted—and illuminate the qualities of independence and imagination developing in the sickly little girl. Many of the events are common to several

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of the writers' backgrounds: the westward migration in search of fortune, the struggles with poverty and illness, the yearly arrival of babies too feeble to live but whose lives must still be fought for, the effort while still very young to become a teacher, which was Mrs. Salverson's great but hopeless desire. For Mrs. Salverson the determination to be a writer comes with the first visit to a library, where the world of books opens before her. We might compare, for its characteristic difference, Norman Levine's account in Canada Made Me (1958) of first entering a library and being handed a book by the librarian: "I wanted to do things to her, but I was too young": clearly, life is what you make it. Humour, sympathy, and a sense of proportion carry Mrs. Salverson through grim experiences as a working girl in Duluth on starvation wages, and the book concludes in the happier days that followed her marriage. A Painter's Country (1958) by A. Y. Jackson and the autobiographical books of Emily Carr (1871-1945), while written late in life by painters who respect each other's work, have nothing else in common. Dr. Jackson's is a very external account, generally impersonal, in which he is anxious carefully to outline the constitution and history of the Group of Seven of which he was so important a member, and to do exact justice both to it and to its detractors. For his own work he leaves the excellent reproductions to speak. Emily Carr, who on the whole liked animals better than people, writes of her battle to be herself and do her own work, from the first without family support or communication with other Canadian artists, and always subject to periodic physical collapses: when these at length put an end to her painting, she began seriously to write. Klee Wyck (1941) describes her painting trips to Indian villages on the northern British Columbia coast, The Book of Small (1942) her Victoria childhood, The House of All Sorts (1944) her career as a Victoria dog-breeder and landlady, Pause (1953) her stay in an English sanatorium, and Heart of a Peacock (1953) some animal friends. Growing Pains (1946) is her autobiography, presented characteristically in a series of quick sketches. She tells her story with force, often with malicious comedy, but this book unlike the others offers as much embarrassment as pleasure. She arranges her scenes much as Dr. Gordon does his, if less crudely: both have a natural arrogance that must snatch the last word, even when unspoken. Her diction, though expressive, teeters between innocence and affectation, at worst developing a squirming coyness that fits ill with either the forthrightness of her painting or the brooding and sibylline Miss Carr of a late photograph. Nevertheless, it is a heroic record. Canadian autobiographies notably reflect a practical grasp of outward reality rather than any inward illumination: the bulk of those not discussed here are naively external narratives, shaped at the least by mere chronology, at the most by the fortunes of some cause, movement, or institution with which the writer identifies his own. As a group the women autobiographers

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perhaps present themselves better than the men: whether by nature or by training, they seem less self-absorbed and more actively interested in the people around them, and so able to give a fuller sense of life. Besides the hard physical struggle to keep going, Mrs. McClung, Mrs. Salverson and Emily Carr had in addition to cope with the gradual and difficult realization of what society expected of women, and none of them was content with the role laid down for her. Clearly, they often caused grief to those closest to them, and they did well if they escaped becoming unduly vulnerable or defensive. Most of the books on this list are less vivid in their later parts, whether because the child's point of view embraces a more manageable cosmos, or because as they go on the writers lose the sense that it rests with them to show us a vanished way of life, and therefore in the later, more familiar settings allow their accounts to become fragmentary. In the Canadian scene, where literature presses less heavily on experience than in Europe, we can note some curious effects of the working of literary convention on life. Mrs. Moodie includes in Life in the Clearings the stories of "Michael Macbride" and "Jeanie Burns," both declared to be absolutely true, and both obviously either modelled on or influenced by sentimental domestic romance of the most standard kind: they stick out from the rest of the book in much the same way as Mrs. Moodie's verse does from her prose. Similarly extraneous in Clearing in the West are the stories of Bertha and Mrs. Thorne: the youthful mind into which these items fell must have been well schooled in temperance tracts before it turned them out again as exempla. At an opposite extreme is the all but obsessively conscious case of Grove. In the first chapter of Walden, a book which Grove apparently admired and knew well long before settling in Canada, Thoreau says: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." Grove's entire career as related in In Search of Myself is an illustration of this saying, which he restates at the end of his book as his discovery. Has he ordered the pattern of his life so as to demonstrate an already accepted truth? Or, making like a Grove hero a choice both necessary and fatal, did he choose the life that would prove it? Where the artless writer gives his own history as a somewhat random record but shapes extra matters like conventional fiction, the overconscious writer, aware of nothing but himself, shapes such a pattern of fatality as to make us feel we have read one more of his novels. The soundest ground is the middle area occupied by writers who, whether solid like Mrs. Salverson or slight like Niven, are just artistic enough to give their record of life both its pattern and its freedom.

8. Children's Literature to 1960 SHEILA A. EGOFF

CANADIAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE has had a long history but only a brief existence. Although some of its wellsprings in the oral tradition antedate Canada itself, as a body of writing distinguishable by features more or less peculiar to itself it is less than a hundred years old. Even so, its achievements are substantial; and in both its successes and its problems Canadian children's literature represents a significant chapter in Canadian literary history. The Beginnings By the middle of the eighteenth century both France and England had a flourishing publishing industry in children's books. In Canada, printing presses were established at an early date (Halifax 1751, Quebec 1764, and Montreal 1778), but they were certainly too busy with government and commercial interests to print books for children, if indeed any such literature existed. The only publications for children that can be traced are little catechisms. This emphasis on religion was quite in keeping with trends in other countries, since all children's books of the time had highly religious, moral, and didactic overtones. Yet it is also worth noting that a new land and a new set of circumstances did not change the old rules. If one excepts the catechisms as being little more than a kind of job printing, the first "real" children's books that could be called "Canadian" did not appear until the nineteenth century. Even so, their "Canadianness" is debatable, since they were published abroad and were written by visitors and by a few writers who had not even set foot in Canada. Only the settings were Canadian. Naturally enough the authors tended to focus on the exotic elements of the Canadian scene as being most likely to command interest. One of our early examples of absentee writing (perhaps our earliest) was A Peep at the Esquimaux; or, Scenes on the Ice. To which is annexed, A Polar Pastoral (1825) by an anonymous English "Lady." Considering the amount of misinformation about other lands abounding in English children's books of the period, this is a remarkably accurate picture of the Eskimos of the eastern Arctic (it was based on the journal of George Francis Lyon). It had, even more remarkably, a much less condescending tone towards the "natives" than most other books of the day. Catharine Parr Traill (1802-99), one of the

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famous Strickland sisters, also wrote a book about Canada before she emigrated here in 1832. This was The Young Emigrants; or, Pictures of Canada. Calculated to Amuse and Instruct the Minds of Youth (1826). The story was told in the guise of a series of letters, the epistolary novel then being greatly in vogue for instructing adults as well as children. Although the didacticism is overdone, the book has a ring of truth as actual letters received from Canada were used as source material. Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) and R. M. Ballantyne (1825-94) exemplify the visitors' contributions to our early children's literature. Marryat served with the Loyalist forces during the Rebellion of 1837 in Lower Canada and Ballantyne, entering the service of the Hudson's Bay Company at the age of sixteen, spent six years here. Judging by their books, Ballantyne certainly had a greater affinity for Canada than did Marryat. In Marryat's one book with a Canadian setting, Settlers in Canada (1844), the family of English immigrants, fallen fortunes restored, hastens back to English warmth and security, leaving their youngest child (inarticulate and uneducated) to stay with his woodsman friend. Ballantyne wrote numerous books with Canadian settings, his best known being Snowflakes and Sunbeams; or, The Young Fur Traders (1856), later published as The Young Fur Traders. To a modern reader much of Ballantyne appears heavy-handed, moralistic, and even precious. But he had a lively pen and a good eye; his stories always move at a brisk pace and the descriptions of life in the wild, the fur-trading posts, and the early settlements are full of striking details. It is likely that Ballantyne was of considerable influence on his successors. Other writers drew upon the factual "lore" that he provided and certainly there was a "Ballantyne style" running through most of the boys' books that came later, particularly in the work of James De Mille. There is some question about when one is to date the beginning of a "native" literature for children, depending on whether one counts as literature the instructional material given a veneer of fiction. In any case, when the contributions of the early settlers came, they were both meagre and predictable. Philip Henry Gosse (1810-88), who spent some years in Newfoundland and then farmed in lower Canada, wrote The Canadian Naturalist: A Series of Conversations on the Natural History of Lower Canada (1840). The use of dialogue between adult and child for imparting information was a strong literary convention of the time: Father: But here our well-known nimble little friend, the Red Squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius), has crossed the road . . . Charles: Oh! the rogue! see, he has come direct from the barn . . . It was reprinted in 1971—more, one presumes, for its lore than its language. Survival, like the didactic, another dominant theme of the early writings and in fact often used to convey the moral, first emerged with Catharine Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1852). Her book was re-

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printed until 1923 and its tenacious publishing record was well deserved, even though the scarcity of Canadian children's books probably accounted for some of its staying power. Mrs. Traill, of course, used Defoe's theme (as well as part of his title), but in adding to it what she knew of the unpopulated wilderness north of Cobourg, Ontario, she made the landscape the centrepiece of the story. Instead of an adult Crusoe, two teen-age boys and a twelve-year-old girl live for three years in the wilderness. But if the theme is Defoe's, the style, unfortunately, is not and the flowery nineteenth-century language spoils an otherwise readable story. Even so, as a piece of Canadiana it retains elements of interest. Our first important home-grown writer, James De Mille (1833-80), gave children a chance to see something more than the forest and pioneer life of Upper and Lower Canada. He drew upon his own youthful adventures around the Bay of Fundy and the more sophisticated atmosphere of a boy's school for his B.O.W.C. (Brethren of the White Cross), which was published in 1869 and gave rise to a short series. Although most of the characters are mere stereotypes, the boys themselves emerge with a gaiety and insouciance and a "boyishness" that was hardly to be found again for another hundred years. De Mille was a prolific writer; so were many of the other early authors. De Mille turned out some thirty books, eleven of them for boys. James Macdonald Oxley (1855-1907) of Halifax wrote more than twenty boys' adventure stories; Egerton Ryerson Young (1840-1904), a former missionary, wrote over twenty novels after 1888 that were read by children even if they were not necessarily intended for them; and Marshall Saunders (1861-1947) wrote twenty-six books, most of which were animal stories. This contrast with today, when so many writers for children appear to be one-book authors, is striking and not easily explained. Of De Mille's contemporaries and immediate successors, Oxley wrote chiefly historical fiction; Fife and Drum at Louisbourg (1899) is a typical example. Young, in such stories as Three Boys in the Wild North Land (1896), described the life of the trappers, Hudson's Bay factors, and Indians with honest realism accompanied by his own brand of evangelicalism. Marshall Saunders' settings were more urban and domestic and her aim was openly humanitarian—to prevent cruelty to animals. This combination gave us our most sentimental books of the period and culminated in Beautiful Joe (1894), which was directly inspired by Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877) and is often confused with it. Like its famous English model, Beautiful Joe was a great commercial success, going through numerous editions and being translated into several languages. Although the sentimentality now seems unbearably maudlin, Beautiful Joe moved two generations of readers and the title even yet invokes response. It is still probably one of the half-dozen or so best-known Canadian children's books. 7900-7925 With the turn of the century, Canada moved a long step closer to the establish-

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ment of a children's literature of independent character. Indeed Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943) and Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) between them created a whole new genre—the animal biography—and in so doing revolutionized the animal story around the world. They did not write specifically for children, but since their time the realistic animal story, and the Canadian animal story in particular, has belonged alike to adults and children. In Seton's Wild Animals I Have Known (1898) and Roberts' The Kindred of the Wild (1902) the animals were allowed to express themselves through their natural actions which were realistically described, although Roberts' stories have been criticized more than those of Seton for endowing animals with human feelings. The themes of both books are timeless—and timely: that we must respect and ultimately love nature for what it is, and that we must see nature for what it is in order to understand man's place in the scheme of things. Wishing to spare us emotionalism and sentimentalism, both writers managed to keep the reader at one remove from the tragedies of the wilderness; they established a precedent of sorts by placing an aesthetic distance between their readers and their animal characters. We know their animals but we do not identify ourselves with them. Seton knew that "the life of a wild animal always has a tragic end" and to Roberts "death stalks joy forever among the kindred of the wild." The two writers were far more individualistic than this joint appraisal shows. In general Roberts had a lyrical, often mystical approach to animals and so has faced stronger charges of anthropomorphism than Seton. The effects of the Roberts school can still be felt in such accurate but emotional presentations as Fred Bodsworth's The Last of the Curlews (1955) and Cameron Langford's The Winter of the Fisher (1972). Seton's disciples are represented in the documentary approach of Roderick L. Haig-Brown's Ki-Yu: A Story of Panthers (1934) and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf (1963). Seton's Two Little Savages (1903) is in many ways the apotheosis of Canadian children's literature. His two boy heroes, Sam and Yan (Seton himself), are archetypal Canadian boys as they play at being Indians. But the play is serious, as all children's play is serious although not solemn. The book's theme is man's necessarily close relationship with nature and wild life; its message is survival. Its setting is the bushland country around Lindsay, Ontario, in the early twentieth century. The boys display the comradely attitudes of men, putting their knowledge to good use in helping one another—the book is really a teaching vehicle. Seton was an idealistic man who loved to learn things and to impart his knowledge to others. The didactic approach was integral to his writings—whether subtle (as in his animals stories) or outright (as in Two Little Savages). His messages anticipated the modern-day warnings of such naturalists and conservationists as Roderick Haig-Brown and Farley Mowat. While Roberts and Seton were presenting animals with realism, their contemporaries—Ralph Connor (Charles W. Gordon; 1860-1937), Nellie L. McClung (1873-1951), and L(ucy) M(aude) Montgomery (1874-1942)—

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were working the even richer lode of sentimentality. Their books were read by many thousands, in the case of Connor and Montgomery more likely by many millions. If their success was more commercial than artistic, these writers are none the less important for their part in establishing an image of the Canadian that still persists: close to nature, vigorous, and wholesome. Connor and McClung did not write particularly for children, but their books—particularly Glengarry Schooldays (1902) and Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908)—were read by them, as much because they created an assortment of youthful characters as because of the general scarcity of Canadian children's books. Sowing Seeds in Danny has an omniscient child heroine and Glengarry Schooldays, as the title suggests, features children among the central characters and offers some memorable school scenes. Both writers were arrant proselytizers—Connor for his evangelical beliefs and McClung for the Women's Christian Temperance Movement and women's rights. They were truly Canadian in that the environment was given a central place: the small town and farms of Manitoba and the lumber camps of Glengarry County are brought sharply into focus and remain memorable when the characters are forgotten. These books also present insights into the adult world, which is seldom more than shadowy in the average children's book. L. M. Montgomery's lush Prince Edward Island setting and her sharp portrayals of eccentric adults are equally her greatest strengths, even though the mind may linger fondly on our first (and almost our last) light-hearted and spirited heroine, the central character of Anne of Green Gables (1908). This book quickly became a bestseller at home and abroad and has never really lost its popularity. As is so often the case with children's books, its success occasioned a number of sequels, but the appealing qualities of the first book are unquestionably dissipated in the succeeding series, as L. M. Montgomery herself admitted. The period 1900 to 1925 does not appear to be one of high productivity; but the records are incomplete and it is difficult to tell by titles alone whether books are for children or adults. Some clues can be found in the Toronto Public Library's Canadian Catalogues, which show that only ten children's novels were published between 1921 and 1923. Most of them were boys' outdoor adventure stories, as exemplified at both ends of the period by John Hampden Burnham's Jack Ralston; or, The Outbreak of the Nauscopees: A Tale of Life in the Far North-East of Canada (1903) and George Frederick Clarke's Chris in Canada (1925). The best and most enduring book of this period was The Adventures of Billy Topsail (1906) by Norman Duncan (1871-1916). Although Duncan was born and brought up in Ontario, he lived for a while in the Newfoundland outports, which is the setting for the story. Excerpts from Billy Topsail were reprinted in Canadian readers for many years and so generations of Canadian school children grew up knowing about giant squid and how Billy's life was saved by his Newfoundland dog. It is at once a book of its time—"people know

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their place" in life—and a book of the present, since the essential qualities by which men face and wrest a living from the sea have not changed. Much the same theme dominates the other notable publication of the period, Kak the Copper Eskimo (1924) by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) and Violet Irwin. This should have been an outstanding book, for Stefansson was a man of great talent with an undeniable knowledge of and admiration for the way of life of the Eskimos, especially their love for their children. Unfortunately the purely narrative elements are hopelessly marred by the banal and mushy writing—of Violet Irwin, presumably. In spite of its failings, the Stefansson book represents one of the first and very few attempts at a serious portrayal of Canada's native peoples. Indeed there are to this day few books centred in Eskimo life. Indian settings were standard features of outdoor stories but only as scenic effects; and although Indian characters have been plentiful, rarely did the authors attempt to make them important or to give in mood, tone, and outlook an authentic picture of Indian life. Yet all along there has been a rich store of incident, legend, and poetry drawn from the Indian oral tradition. The first noteworthy rendering of Indian mythic material was made by Emily Pauline Johnson (1862-1913), herself of Indian descent. Rather strangely her Legends of Vancouver (1911) is not about her own Indian culture at all. Although she was a Mohawk, these are Squamish tales told to her by a west coast Indian chief. She recasts them in a highly personal and romantic style; there is a memorable note of sadness in the lament of the "old tyee" who speaks of a time when "Indian law ruled the land." An equally romantic and, indeed, European approach to Indian legends, is noticeable in Cyrus Macmillan's (1882-1953) Canadian Wonder Tales (1918) and Canadian Fairy Tales (1922). His strongest stories were about the Micmac trickster-hero, Glooskap, and these were brought together and reprinted in 1955 as Glooskap's Country and Other Indian Tales. Perhaps it is an indication of the increased interest in Indian legends in the 1970's that the two original Macmillan volumes were brought together in 1974 by an English publisher under the title Canadian Wonder Tales with headpieces by the noted Canadian illustrator, Elizabeth Cleaver. Also reprinted in 1973 was Margaret Bemister's Thirty Indian Legends of Canada, first published in 1917. The difference in content and style between the two volumes is perhaps indicative of the constant difficulties faced by a re-teller of the oral tradition when that oral tradition is still alive and not already frozen on the printed page. What might be termed the authentic but rather dull approach of the Bemister retelling is strongly contrasted with the highly readable traditional European folk and fairy tale approach of the Macmillan volume. 7925-7950 In some respects the second quarter of the century represents a low point in

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the development of Canadian children's literature. Coming after the era of Saunders, Montgomery, Roberts, and Seton, who had won an international audience for Canadian children's books, it is disappointing to see the publishing output reduced to a purely national market and to a rather small one at that. For example, the official bibliographical records indicate that no children's books at all were issued in 1935, and until 1950 only a handful of titles appeared each year. The best books of this period are by Roderick L. Haig-Brown (b. 1908). Born and educated in Britain but long identified with British Columbia, HaigBrown brought the Canadian outdoor story to full maturity. His nature tales, Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon (1931) and Ki-Yu: A Story of Panthers (1934), are as different in tone as they are similar in revealing Haig-Brown's knowledge of animal life. Silver has a personal, intimate style, while Ki-Yu has a stark realism that makes for coldness but also for a compelling authenticity. Turning later to the novel, he began in Starbuck Valley Winter (1943) with a conventional enough theme—a seventeen-year-old boy running his own trapline in the interior of British Columbia. But it was written with consummate skill and gave us our first book with a real insight into a boy's character. Like our earlier writers, Haig-Brown has a feeling for the land that is genuine and deep, but he has learned how to shape his feelings rather than just express them; he knows, too, that even in a children's story a character remains vivid long after the most ingenious contrivances of plot have been forgotten. Starbuck Valley Winter is not strongly plotted; neither is its sequel Saltwater Summer (1948). But their treatment of natural hazards and of the inherent violence of outdoor life gives both books great impact. Our best children's books have been written by naturalists and conservationists, and our warmest, most emotional story comes from the most unusual nature writer of them all, Archibald Stansfeld Belaney (1888-1938), an Englishman living in Canada who preferred to be known by his adopted name, Grey Owl, and was long thought to be a full-blooded Indian. His one children's book, The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People (1935), is an account of a little Indian girl's love for two beaver kittens and is one of our few animal stories that show a mystic link between animals and children. Perhaps it is because the story is played out in an Indian setting, with the two beavers finally returning to their own habitat, that the characteristic themes of survival and alienation are brought into complete harmony with the natural surroundings. 1950-1960 More children's books were published in this period than in any other. The figures remained steady at fifty or sixty a year and so it is not surprising that we had some Canadian "firsts." We had our first serious fantasy with the writing

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of Catherine Anthony Clark; our first folktales (other than Indian legends) with Marius Barbeau's and Michael Hornyansky's The Golden Phoenix and Other French-Canadian Fairy Tales (1958) and James McNeill's The Sunken City and Other Tales from Around the World (1959); and the first genuinely creative biography for children, Richard S. Lambert's Franklin of the Arctic (1949). In 1953 came the first volume of the Great Stories of Canada series, which now numbers thirty-three. Although many of them were overly fictionalized and in general lacked maps, indexes, notes, and bibliographies, they were on the whole a successful attempt to make aspects of history and biography interesting to children. Such well-known and reputable authors as Marjorie Wilkins Campbell, Roderick L. Haig-Brown, Thomas H. Raddall, and Joseph Schull ranged in subject matter as diverse as the fur trade and the Canadian Navy in the Second World War. One of the most popular books in the series is Pierre Berton's The Golden Trail: The Story of the Klondike Rush (1954). It is regrettable but true that no great book has emerged from this series, indeed from any series of Canadian children's books. The editorial hand in series publications seems too strong; contrivance deters creativity. The virtues of the individualistic approach can be seen in William Toye's distinctive history, The St. Lawrence (1959). Having a completely free hand (in this case he was editor and designer as well as author), Toye escapes the dullness and predictability imposed by the series format. Without the embellishment of "made-up" conversation, but quoting extensively from journals and documents, he imparted an intimate, story-like quality to history, while retaining an admirable degree of accuracy and authentic description. Generally speaking, in spite of the rising numbers, the themes of our books remained constant: a stream of historical fiction exemplified by the books of John Hayes; stories of Indian life such as John Craig's The Long Return (1959); and a variety of outdoor adventures, most of which have since passed wholly from view. The conventionality of theme and incident serves to heighten the contribution, in invention and originality as well as in sheer talent, made by the two leading writers of the period, Catherine Anthony Clark (b. 1892) and Farley Mowat (b. 1921). Wholly different in mood and approach, Clark and Mowat are alike in daring to aim at a world audience rather than a purely national one while retaining a distinctively Canadian coloration. Fantasy had been conspicuously lacking in our literature until the publication of Mrs. Clark's The Golden Pine Cone (1950). First-rate fantasy requires superior writing ability. Apart from the fact that superior talent is scarce in any country at any time, Canada lacked most of the requisites that would provide a hospitable context for the writing of fantasy. For one thing there was no tradition of "faerie" comparable to the oral literature of the older countries. Canadian writers in general had hardly sniffed at the fumes of fancy or the nonsensical. Where in our adult literature is there any counterpart to J. R. R.

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Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings or T. H. White's The Once and Future Kingl Fantasy, of all forms of children's literature, depends least on purely local interest or on the props of history and geography, accuracy and pedagogy. When fantasy did come with The Golden Pine Cone, it came stepping lightly. With typical Canadian restraint Mrs. Clark held firmly to the mountainous land of British Columbia, weaving in Indian myths and symbols, keeping the children with one foot firmly rooted in the real world, and allowing them to drink only sparingly of the magic potion. They are exposed to events that seem only somewhat larger than real life and to a land that remains familiar to them. Her great strength is in her settings and in her ability to people the snowy peaks, the forests, the lonely paths by the lakes with a peculiarly Canadian kind of spirit folk—the Rock Puck, the Ice Folk, the Head Canada Goose, the Lake Snake, and prospectors who live on the borderline between the real world and the fantasy world. Her second book The Sun Horse was published in 1951, The One-Winged Dragon in 1955, The Silver Man in 1958, The Diamond Feather in 1962, and The Hunter and the Medicine Man in 1966. All are remarkably similar in plot and setting and remarkably effective. Farley Mowat is the "Mr. Canada" of children's books—it is hard to believe there exists a child in this country who has not read one of his books, a speculation that could not be ventured about any other writer. Mowat is a natural writer for children. He uses his own experience in a direct, simple, and lively style, which makes many of his books for adults, such as Never Cry Wolf (1963) and The Boat Who Wouldn't Float (1969), accessible to children as well. His first children's book, Lost in the Barrens (1956), is a conventional Canadian novel for children in theme and setting and its success abroad no doubt reinforces the image of Canada as a snow-covered barren land. Two boys—one Indian, one white—face the North and everything it can impose upon them; they survive and somehow grow up in the process. But they do not undergo the subtle internal change of the young hero in Haig-Brown's Starbuck Valley Winter. Mowat's boys develop as they adapt to the violent exterior conditions they face and the plot has a "piled-on" quality. His larger-than-life approach is also seen in the stories of his super-canine Mutt in The Dog Who Wouldn't Be (1957) and his eccentric owls in Owls in the Family (1961). But Mowat is too good a writer to put a great strain on credibility; his own wry view of life comes through and all is backed up with realistic details—dogs are still dogs, owls are owls, and certainly boys are boys. His steady hand on the world of reality is best seen in his modern pirate story, The Black Joke (1962). Its combination of breathless suspense, gusto, and toughness makes it one of the most exciting books in Canadian children's literature.

9. Drama and Theatre M I C H A E L TAIT

i. DRAMA, 1920-1960 MANY REASONS have been advanced to explain the lack in Canada of a dramatic literature of any real distinction. In this area of the arts more than in any other, critics protest, this country has been in the disadvantageous position of a cultural colony. Canada has so much in common with both America and England that their playwrights easily provide immediately entertaining fare for Canadian audiences. When the distinctive qualities of one group of dramatists begins to pall, a second is available. There is also, the argument continues, the thorny problem of geography. How is it possible to conceive of a national drama in a country comprised of two main races and so many regions separated by such great distances? What has a play about commercial Toronto to say to a rancher in Alberta or one about the strength of English traditions in Victoria to a habitant in Quebec? This difficulty exists of course for the poet and the novelist as well, but not in so acute a form. Either may reach a widely dispersed, if select, audience with comparative ease. Theatre depends upon concentrated support in each community and to be truly national, drama must be meaningful to a cross-section of the total population. Moreover, it is often claimed that theatre can only flourish at the centre of a society, at a focal point where social cross-currents meet and clash, in an atmosphere of intense feeling and lively intellectual debate. Although the cultural climate of certain cities, Toronto and Montreal in particular, is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, no such centre exists as yet in Canada. The comparative feebleness of Canada's dramatic output has been attributed to a variety of other interrelated factors. The amorphous nature of Canadian society, its lack of distinctive features which may be readily exploited on the stage, have added to the playwright's difficulties. In addition, the traditionally conventional, somewhat staid habits of mind that characterize Anglo-Saxon Canada are not easily converted into exciting theatre. In so far as such capacious generalizations are possible, English Canadians with their high regard for reticence and propriety have perhaps little national affinity for

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the theatre, that most extravagantly exhibitionistic of the arts. Certainly their inhibited modes of speech make them awkward propositions on stage. However, some assert, it is not simply a matter of manners but also of morals. The twofold Puritan heritage of Scotland and New England has perpetuated a view of the theatre as an expendable commodity to be tolerated perhaps so long as it never presumes to explore themes offensive to respectable persons. Merrill Denison, writing in the Year Book for the Arts in Canada (1929), stated pessimistically: "The two or three indubitably Canadian plays that might be written would never find a welcome in a Canadian theatre, even if there was one" (p. 55). This supports the view put forward by Professor Arthur Phelps that Canadians have an innate distaste for the kind of spiritual self-discovery serious drama affords. The rise of the cinema before a native drama could take hold has consolidated this general indifference towards the stage and hence the work of Canadian playwrights. But in the absence of audiences and governmental subsidy there has been no money to build throughout the country the playhouses and to develop the sort of companies which enable the young playwright to acquaint himself with the potentialities and limitations of his medium. At the same time, the dearth of proper facilities has been a further reason for the public's refusal to support the theatre. One particularly damaging consequence of the lack of large and knowledgeable audiences has been the absence of severe critical standards which compel the playwright to aim high or risk ridicule. Of course no one of these factors or all of them together necessarily preclude the appearance of a major dramatist. For such a figure adverse circumstances would simply be grist to the mill. Continual developments in the Canadian theatrical world would make such an advent, if by no means inevitable, at least a possibility. It should be noted before we begin to record actual accomplishments that in a survey of this kind the emphasis necessarily falls upon published material. It should also be noticed, however, that the publication of plays in this country is a very haphazard process. Merit is not by any means always the criterion. Lister Sinclair, Len Peterson, Joseph Schull, Ted Allan, Harry Boyle, Morley Callaghan, Stanley Mann, Andrew Allan, Mavor Moore, Patricia Joudry, Donald Jack, John Gray, and Jack Winter among others have written plays of considerable interest which have received performance but have not found a publisher. The first Canadian playwright of any stature whatever is Merrill Denison, whose appearance coincided with the quickening of the Little Theatre movement in this country. He was closely associated with Hart House Theatre in the active years immediately following its foundation in 1919. Although early in his career he departed for lucrative opportunities in the United States, he left behind him several slight but interesting plays. These include Balm, which

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appears in volume I of Plays from Hart House Theatre (1926), The Prizewinner (1928), and a volume entitled The Unheroic North containing four pieces, Brothers in Arms, From Their Own Place, The Weather Breeder, and Marsh Hay. In every respect these little plays offer a vivid contrast with the sort of thing which had preceded them: Marjorie Pickthall's The Woodcarver's Wife (1922) or the interminable poetic closet dramas of the nineteenth century. They are short (most of them one act), realistic in manner, display a nice command of dialogue, and are eminently suitable for performance. Their content is in the main satirical; their mood is in harmony with the critical temper of the twenties. Denison's technique is to strike out in as many directions as possible, debunking whatever seems to him pretentious or absurd in Canadian attitudes of mind. The title, The Unheroic North, gives the clue to one such attitude. This is the notion (common among Canadian writers of the last century but entertained perhaps by many city dwellers before and since) of the Northland as an environment conducive to moral uplift, inhabited by figures ten feet tall who live a life of virtuous simplicity as a result of their close contact with the soil. In The Unheroic North we are rapidly disabused of this view. For example, in Brothers in Arms Dorothea, seeking "romance in the land of Robert Service and Ralph Connor," is confronted by the backwoodsman Syd, who is transfigured in her eyes but is in fact lazy, obtuse, and probably dishonest like his counterparts in From Their Own Place. But Denison's satire has many dimensions. The figure of Syd is played off against the third character, a pompous business man, and before the play is done, the army, patriotism, social standing, and such ideals as thrift and industry, the shibboleths of the city in effect, have been held up to derision. The characters of course are blatant types, and as in all of Denison there is a hint of the wrong kind of artificiality here and there. Brothers in Arms is nevertheless an enjoyable play. The Weather Breeder, From Their Own Place, and The Prizewinner also illustrate with a variety of comic flourishes the benighted quality of life in the Ontario backwoods. (Balm stands a little apart, being set in the city. This entertaining trifle concerns a frigid social worker who scotches an attempt by two old maids to adopt a child. Its theme, the conflict between the repressive forces of society and the creative, often feckless exuberance of the individual, is one which is treated repeatedly by Canadian playwrights.) Mr. Denison has carefully observed the community he depicts and his portrayal suggests an understanding of its dark as well as its comic aspects. At moments in certain of these satirical farces one has the sense that the laughter proceeds partially from a recognition by author and audience of a submerged level of violence and terror. (This alarming facet of rural life provides the basis for The Killdeer by the contemporary poet James Reaney, a play set in a land equally unheroic and distinctly macabre.) For example, in The Prizewinner one member of a dubious road show on tour in

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the backwoods advises the impresario not to arouse the critical wrath of the community and remarks, "Back here they can't even write. . . . Say it with canthooks is their motto." An exaggeration no doubt, but comic in part because of an unnerving truth somewhere offstage. It is not strange, then, that Denison's most ambitious and interesting play is not a comedy. In Marsh Hay, his only full-length published drama, he delineates directly the sombre, often desperate existence of a northern family. The underlying theme is a strong one, the crippling effect morally, intellectually, and emotionally, of the backwoods environment, particularly on those who must attempt to wring a living from the worthless land. By and large Denison avoids passing judgment. The squalor and the attempts to escape through sexual promiscuity, the bigoted and perverse mores of the little community, the utter breakdown of human relations in the family, these are circumstances for which no one in particular is to blame, and for which no solution is offered. The play has a number of flaws: one or two episodes are naive and improbable, certain themes such as the indifference of governments to the plight of the region are not sufficiently integrated into the action, the dialogue is somewhat repetitive, the ending strikes one as rather too remorselessly pat. Nevertheless Marsh Hay is a creditable achievement that almost stands comparison, in its intensity of mood at least, with O'Neill's Desire under the Elms. It is without question the best Canadian play of the decade. But while Brothers in Arms has been performed many times there is no record to date of a production of Marsh Hay. Denison also produced a volume of six radio plays based on the exploits of figures in Canadian history. They are competently done, but the author does not seem altogether at ease, either with the medium or the limitations imposed by his subject-matter. Apart from Merrill Denison, no playwright of proven merit emerged during the 1920's. However, the rise of the little theatre prompted the composition of numerous plays. Optimism and confidence were in the air. On every hand there were hopes for and predictions of a Canadian dramatic renaissance reminiscent perhaps of developments in Ireland. Quite suddenly the need for theatrical expression seemed urgent. Would-be dramatists throughout the country essayed a wide variety of genres—fantasy, farce, melodrama, grand guignol, plays exploiting the romance of Canadian, British, or Ancient Egyptian history, plays based on Indian themes, or depicting Ontario's rural society, or England's high society, plays incorporating expressionistic devices, and so forth. Regrettably, the great mass of this writing is quite without merit. Everywhere originality, intensity, technique are lacking. However a few collections and single plays may be noted. Two volumes of Plays from Hart House Theatre appeared successively in 1926 and 1927, introduced by Vincent Massey. Volume I, besides three pieces by Denison, and a few negligible items, contains Pierre by Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947) and Britton

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Cook's The Translation of John Snaith. Pierre is a domestic tragedy set in rural Quebec. Its plot is over-familiar, the return after many years of the ne'er-do-well son, and the dialogue is written in the specious idiom English Canadians always seem to attribute to the French. The play, however, has dignity and there is genuine pathos in the last scene as Madame Durocher, the universal mother, speaks of the happy future in store for her son, unaware that Pierre has departed again having stolen the meagre savings of the family. The Translation of John Snaith is a more complex and interesting work. It is set in a northern Ontario town during World War I and presents us with a number of themes: the spiritual sterility of the region, the hunger of its inhabitants for some intimation of beauty and joy, the attitude of certain Englishmen who view Canada as incorrigibly barren, fit only for commercial exploitation, the destruction of a vital Indian culture by the barbaric white man who can replace it with nothing, and finally the urgent need for local heroes or myths that will serve to unify and inspire the life of the community. As is so often the case with Canadian .plays, the ideas are stronger than their dramatic realization. The characterization is unsubtle, and the melodramatic ending fails to convince. But in the early death of Britton Cook Canada lost a playwright of promise. Volume II of Plays from Hart House Theatre contains three full-length pieces. Leslie Reid's Trespassers has nothing to recommend it. The Freedom of Jean Guicket by L. A. MacKay displays a certain originality but is defeated by its incongruous mixture of farce and melodrama. God of Gods, by Carroll Aikins, first produced by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1919, sets forth in an Indian setting the conflict between the vital individual vision of the poet and the tyrannical and superstitious prejudices of the tribe. There are a few theatrically effective moments here and some acceptable comedy. Mr. Aikins's main problem, and that of all who attempt to put the Canadian Indian on stage, is one of diction. Anything but the most rudimentary language rings somehow false, but then how is one to make a play out of monosyllables? The choice (a dilemma which confronts many modern playwrights, unconcerned with Indians, who accept the restrictions of realism) seems to be between an inexpressive verisimilitude and fraudulent eloquence. Mr. Aikins chooses the latter, a precarious poetical prose which is prone to alarming descents into bathos. (AMBURI harshly: "Since when has the God's Priestess had a mate?".) Another volume to appear during the twenties was One Third of a Bill, six one-act plays by Fred Jacob (1882-1926). Most of these are mildly amusing and depict, when they reflect the Canadian scene at all, the foibles of an Ontario urban bourgeoisie. Mr. Jacob by and large derives his plots from the battle of the sexes, or, once again, from the triumph of the energetic individual in his encounter with a conformist society. These little plays are

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competently put together but somewhat pale. Only one of them, The Basket, promises greater distinction. Its setting is rural Ontario in the 1880's and its theme, the plight of a Mediterranean man in an alien northern culture, has possibilities. Unfortunately these are dissipated and confused amid melodramatic hocus-pocus. Another collection of some interest is Six Canadian Plays edited by Herman Voaden and published in 1930. This volume is the result of a competition in which the contestants were enjoined to attempt explicitly nationalistic drama set in a northern landscape and capturing, if possible, the mood of the painters in the Group of Seven. It is indicative of the rearguard position occupied by the drama in this country that at a time when the revolt of the twenties was no longer in the least revolutionary and the leading poets were increasingly occupying themselves with urban subjects, Canadian dramatists should be seeking inspiration in the great outdoors. The plays themselves, though disappointing, illustrate the earnest search for dramatically viable Canadian themes. The Bone Spoon by Betti Sandiford is an attempt, as the editor puts it, "to work over the rich materials of our adventurous past." The figure of Prudence, who clearly has the author's unaffected sympathy, speaks of "these glorious old rocks" and of her desire "to write something great and romantic and brave like the country." Prudence we have seen before from a somewhat different perspective in the satires of Merrill Denison. Mother Lode by Archibald Key concerns an idealistic prospector and his search for the good life close to nature, a life threatened by the expansion of a corrupt civilization. This too, of course, is a common motif in nineteenthcentury Canadian literature. The influence of expressionism is apparent in T. M. Morrow's Manitou Portage which in atmosphere, plot, and stage effects suggests O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. Lake Dore by J. E. Middleton (18721960), incorporating Franz Johnston's picture "The Deserted Cabin" as a backdrop, offers little. C. E. Carruthers' God Forsaken is a sardonic comment in the style of Denison on back-country mores and Winds of Life by Dora Smith Conover written around the auspicious theme of an Englishman's inability to cope with a harsh Canadian environment is nullified by absurdly sententious dialogue. In general this volume illustrates the danger of trying to produce a Canadian drama through self-conscious determination. One further collection remains. One Act Plays by Canadian Authors is a book compiled in 1926 by the drama group of the Canadian Authors' Association. These short plays were selected primarily "for productions by Little Theatres, Community Players, amateur dramatic societies." Almost all are very bad indeed. T. M. Morrow's The Blue Pitcher with its cluttered interior, wan farm woman, and distraught atmosphere is a paradigm for the many inferior imitations of Marsh Hay which comprise the Canadian stove-pipe school. One charming little play in this primitive anthology is The Death

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of Pierrot by H. Green. There is delicately mordant satire in Mrs. Solomon Grundy's indignation that Pierrot and Columbine should live together "in a decent city." She immediately phis a black skirt on Columbine. "Oh hideous hideous," grieves Pierrot. "It can't be hideous," conies the retort, "it's the fashion." The volume also contains two plays Low Life and Come True by Mazo de la Roche (1885-1961). Although the action in both cases is trivial, the dialogue is deft. Another of her one-act plays (not in this collection), The Return of the Immigrant, generates a complex mood but is flawed by its stage Irish idiom. The prolific Miss de la Roche is also the author of a threeact play Whiteoaks that enjoyed an extremely long run in London's West End, and of which Bernard Shaw was heard to remark: "Amazing! There has been nothing like it in London since Henry Irving in The Bells." In the early years of the thirties, Canadian plays continued to appear in profusion, although as the depression wore on their numbers diminished. The Dominion Drama Festival, organized in 1932, included among its awards the Sir Barry Jackson Trophy for the best performance of a native play. Samuel French Limited instituted a Canadian Playwright Series for the purpose of publishing whatever Canadian drama seemed to have merit and promise profit. Various associations and little theatres continued to encourage writers through competitions and prizes. Martha Allan, L. Bullock-Webster, Raymond Card, Mary Farquharson, Elsie Park Gowan, Madge Macbeth, Isabel MacKay, Janet McPhee, George Palmer, Marjorie Price, W. S. Milne, Lois Reynolds, Lillian Thomas are a few of the authors who grappled with the medium. One figure who stands somewhat apart is Gwen Pharis Ringwood. Unquestionably she is the most capable playwright of this period. Miss Pharis wrote about ten plays in all, a number of them hi connection with the Alberta Folk Lore project. Stampede, for example, has to do with the break-up of the old West and increasing commercialism of the annual festivities at Calgary. Only three, Still Stands the House, The Courting of Marie Jenvrin and Dark Harvest, are readily available. The action of Still Stands the House takes place in a farm house in southern Alberta, a region that Miss Pharis knows intimately, during the droughts of the depression. The farm is unproductive and a buyer has offered a good price for it. The conflict arises with inevitability out of the relation of the three main characters: the man torn between a desire to appease his wife and to hold on to the barren soil, the gentle city-born wife who finds the place intolerable, and a crazed lovestarved sister (rather overdrawn) for whom the dead father's farmhouse is a sacred thing. Gwen Pharis creates the atmosphere of despair very well indeed and Bruce Warren's anguished identification with his bitter Alberta prairie lingers in the mind as a symbol for all human attachments of this kind. The dialogue is entirely natural without seeming flat. Miss Pharis's

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infrequent images ("Wheat like gold on the hills," "hair—black as a furrow turned in spring") are always in context and lend an unobtrusive expressiveness to the speech of her characters. The main defect of this, as of so many short plays in English, is a surfeit of well-made plot which tries to go too far, too fast. The Courting of Marie Jenvrin tells of a French-Canadian girl and her suitors in the Northwest Territories. It is an unremarkable but wellexecuted comedy. In Dark Harvest, an ambitious three-act drama, Miss Pharis explores again the evil consequence of her protagonist's fanatical devotion to the land. In spite of serious flaws—a gratuitously sensational ending and a style which lacks the necessary vigour to prevent the tragic mood from degenerating into dreariness—the play is powerfully conceived. Further west, A. M. D. Fairbairn is the author of four Plays from the Pacific Coast (1935). All are concerned with the unhappy relations between the white man and the Haida Indians of British Columbia. Ebb Tide and A Pacific Coast Tragedy depict the insidious influence of the wretched remnant of the tribe upon those who live too long with it, whereas The Tragedy of Tanoo and The Wardrums of the Skedans are concerned with the moral damage done to the Indians by the whites. The red man is a notoriously opaque and difficult subject for any drama but his own; consequently the first two plays of this list are the more successful. Ebb Tide evokes something of the squalor of certain remote Indian communities. Once again it is an unlikely plot and unpalatable characterization (the heroine Ann, whatever the author's intentions, sounds like a race supremicist) that negate the play. The most absorbing piece is A Pacific Coast Tragedy. It portrays an English missionary who had come to the area twenty-five years before zealously determined to cure the diseased bodies and superstitious souls of the native inhabitants. In his desire to reach these people he had married an Indian wife. When the play begins a visitor from England finds him completely stalemated by the environment. He has made no impact whatever on the community, his wife is a vast, repellent squaw, and his son a criminal. In the course of the play Hopwood, the protagonist, discovers that his youngest daughter is to have an illegitimate child and his son has been arrested, charged with murder. At the end he takes his life, leaving an impression halfway between that of Job and the protagonist of Somerset Maugham's Rain. In spite of stiff dialogue and a dramatically incredible accumulation of disasters, the play has its effective moments: Hopwood's introduction of his squaw, for example, to the fastidious advocate from London, or a local Indian lad's description of how he is in the habit of sawing up his tribe's ancient totems for firewood. A more accomplished dramatist of the thirties (one who is still actively engaged in his craft) is John Coulter. His plays include Oblomov, a dramatization of Goncharov's novel, The Drums are Out, an Irish Civil War piece,

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a libretto for an opera Deirdre of the Sorrows, The House in the Quiet Glen, The Family Portrait, Sleep My Pretty One, Holy Manhattan, and Kiel. Several of Mr. Coulter's plays are set in his native Ireland and show clearly the influence of Ireland's celebrated group of dramatists, Lady Gregory in particular, Synge less often. Coulter understands the value of economy in dialogue and his best plays—The House in the Quiet Glen is an example— reveal both inner vitality and careful construction. Too often in Canadian drama the one or the other is absent. To those detractors who might deny the value of writing Irish plays in Canada, Mr. Coulter in a preface to his libretto for Deirdre has this to say: "The art of a Canadian remains with but little differentiation the art of the country of his forebears and the old world heritage of myth and legend remain his heritage to be used for suitable ends though the desk on which he writes be Canadian." A considerable number of dramas which appeared during the thirties and for which there are no counterparts before or since were inspired by the Great Depression. They have for the most part sociological interest only, but the pity and just anger they reflect, rare emotions in Canadian drama, are often curiously impressive. M. E. Bicknell's Relief is an earnest portrayal of the effects of drought on a Saskatchewan homestead. Twenty-Five Cents by Eric Harris is concerned with the calamities, material and psychological, which befall a family when the father who is a skilled machinist loses his job. Such Harmony by the same author depicts, to quote the preface, "The possible beginnings of authoritative control of freedom of speech, the vague influences which if given free play might usher in Fascism even in a country like Canada." The chief drawback of almost all these depression plays is a confusion in their authors' minds between the impact of emotion recollected in excitement and the effects of art. The Second World War interrupted many of the country's dramatic activities and after it far fewer plays appear, in published form at least. It is as if the first optimistic experiments have been tried and it is now discouragingly clear to all that play-making is a craft long to learn, especially for Canadians. In addition, developments in the field of radio had the effect of diverting the energies of potential playwrights towards this remunerative and, at the time, exciting medium. However, during the forties, Canada's most prolific dramatist to date made his appearance. Robertson Davies has written a good deal for the stage. He has produced, besides "King Phoenix" and "Hunting Stuart," two unpublished works, a volume of one-act plays, Eros at Breakfast (1949), Fortune My Foe (1949), At My Heart's Core (1950), A Masque of Aesop (1952), and A Jig for the Gypsy (1954). These pieces display a large measure of theatrical inventiveness, satiric flair, and refreshingly literate dialogue. Certain familiar themes reappear: the widespread philistinism, narrowness, and prudery of life in

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Canada, the collision between the many who would confine the human spirit and the few who would liberate it, the fate of the creative imagination in an inhospitable climate which is home and hence inescapable. What distinguishes Davies from his predecessors is the greater insight, force, and variety with which he explores his subject. Eros at Breakfast, the title play of its volume, is described by the author as a "psychosomatic interlude." It is a clever fantasy in which each character represents one of the internal organs of a Canadian youth whose regimen has been disturbed by the onset of romantic impulses. None of the characters, of course, can agree on the proper attitude towards this development, thus opening the way for satiric thrusts at Canadian manners and a common human predicament. The Voice of the People is a more conventionally conducted attack on the fatuous complacence of the common man. The banning of Moliere's Tartuffe in Quebec in 1693 provides the basis for Hope Deferred. This play touches on a number of the author's deepest concerns: the low estate of theatre in Canada, the wholesale departure of artists to more civilized countries, and the alarming power of unenlightened virtue. The effect of this bitter little comedy is heightened by particularly trenchant dialogue. At the Gates of the Righteous is weak, but Overlaid is perhaps the most entertaining short play ever written in this country. The setting is Merrill Denison's rural wasteland, and although the plot which hinges on a financial windfall is commonplace, the characters are intensely alive. The surrender of Pop, with his immortal longings for the high life, to his daughter Ethel whose dream is a granite headstone for the family plot, is both hilarious and poignant. But there is subtlety in the portrait of Ethel, who is obscurely sympathetic and in Pop's defeat which is not unqualified. This is the only play about the backwoods to contain so great a measure of exuberance and truth. Fortune My Foe, Mr. Davies' first three-act drama, is less satisfactory. The author's dialogue is, as always, lively and precise; his themes, the purblind philistinism of the Canadian public and the improvidence of a society which continually loses its talented citizens through its indifference to them, lend an angry energy to many scenes. However the crucial distance between the author and his work seems unstable. One feels that the dramatist's emphatic opinions periodically overcome him and disturb the play's equilibrium. The result is that the central characters, though animated, lack genuine vitality. The good ones, those who subscribe to a creed of sweetness and light, tend to be sentimentalized while the bad ones who oppose or misunderstand them emerge as creatures of spleen rather than imagination. At My Heart's Core, Mr. Davies' next full-length play, is a stronger work. Once again the theme he chooses is the fate of the civilized minority in a culturally barren Canadian environment. In this instance, however, the dramatist has greater control of his material. By setting the action of the play in Upper

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Canada in 1837, he more easily presents the issues which concern him with the necessary degree of detachment. The period setting, too, enables the author (who is not entirely at ease with the amorphous idiom of modern urban speech) to exploit without incongruous effects his gift for precise rhetoric. The main plot of At My Heart's Core concerns the attempt by Cantwell, a mysterious and baleful figure, to undermine the composure of three women: the two Strickland sisters and one Mrs. Stewart, a lady of aristocratic antecedents, whose husbands have gone to York to fight the rebels. Cantwell's strategy is to persuade each in turn that the development of her particular talents or qualities is totally thwarted by the social and domestic wasteland that surrounds her. All three repudiate him, cleave to their husbands, and remain in Canada. The ending, however, like that of Fortune My Foe, is ambiguous. In both plays Davies seems at the same time to assert that faith hi Canada's cultural future is an admirable thing, and to question whether such faith is worth the sacrifice of the rich possibilities life offers elsewhere. A Masque of Aesop which was originally written for a cast of boy actors is Davies' most successful work for the stage. Like At My Heart's Core, it is not a direct portrayal of the contemporary scene and again one has the sense that the highly conventional masque form has provided the dramatist with a maximum of freedom for his satiric sallies against bigotry, complacence, and insensitivity, enduring qualities in human nature generally, but which for Davies inform so distressingly the Canadian scene in particular. In A Masque of Aesop there is none of the unassimilated residue of rancour that mars Fortune My Foe. The satire has both charm and bite; wit, gravity, and absurdity combine to make each point with maximum effect. Mr. Davies' last published play to date is A Jig for the Gypsy. The action is set in Wales in 1885 at the time of a national election and revolves around the attempt by a group of Radical politicians to enlist the aid of Benoni Richards, a gypsy with mysterious powers of divination. When she permits herself to be drawn into the political hurly-burly, the results are disastrous. Both the Radical and Conservative factions eventually turn upon her and in anger she returns to her traditional way of life outside the framework of ordinary society. The play in essence illustrates the conflict of two worlds. Benoni's richly imaginative and intuitive style of life is contrasted with the doctrinaire rationalism of Jebson, the Radical candidate, who is dedicated to a vulgar ideal of public success. Davies, like Matthew Arnold's Oxford scholar, seems to regard the gypsies as possessors of an ancient, esoteric power and wisdom which modern society ignores or ridicules, but which in its deprived condition it can ill afford to do without. The play's conclusion, a ritual dance in which Benoni is joined by Conjuror Jones, a fellow magician, communicates a mood of optimism missing from Fortune My Foe or At My

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Heart's Core. Benoni's jig seems to affirm the essential invulnerability of the life of the imagination, even in the most unpropitious circumstances, even, one is left to deduce, in Canada. Norman Williams is one of the most promising playwrights to appear in the fifties. He has published one volume of six short plays Worlds Apart (1956) and has written a full-length work "To Ride a Tiger" which was performed in 1957 but is not as yet available in print. Mr. Williams's range in his choice of subjects and forms is considerable. Although not given to radical experiment, in A Battle of Wits and Protest he manipulates the non-illusionistic devices of the Chinese theatre with ease and originality. Elsewhere, in Dreams for example, he does not hesitate to disturb the conventions of realism to make his point. Even such modest departures from the realistic mode are rare in Canadian drama and lend particular interest to Mr. Williams's work. His themes are diverse. The most persistent is the conflict between inherited conventions or loyalties and private impulse, the refusal of the individual to accommodate himself to traditional values and attitudes. This conflict is present hi some form in The King Decides and the two Chinese plays of Worlds Apart, where Mr. Williams demonstrates both the comedy and the pathos which proceed from it. But this volume also contains plays which centre around the plight of a negro mother, the death of a movie star, and the assassination of Philip of Macedonia. Although the political and moral ideas in The King Decides or The Mountain lack incisiveness, Williams's dialogue is always both neat and fluent and (with the possible exception of The Mountain) all his plays build to excellent climaxes. Certain other pieces published in recent years deserve some comment. One work that has attracted attention and a degree of commercial success is Patricia Joudry's Teach Me How to Cry (1955). It received its first performance in Toronto and was subsequently produced in both New York and London. In Miss Joudry's words the play "concerns the manner in which human beings shape one another, and tells the story of a troubled teen-age girl who is steered away from a hazardous life of escapism by the love of a boy who has himself learned to face reality." The prevailing mood of delicate pathos is reminiscent of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams which in perhaps too many respects this play resembles. However it is written with sincerity and considerable technical skill. Miss Joudry plots each crisis with careful economy and achieves a good balance between her characters, all of whom are conceived in terms of the central theme: the perils of illusion, the salvation in an acceptance of reality. The play is designed for a multiple set that facilitates a quick succession of short scenes. This arrangement best

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serves the action of the piece which, as the author observes, "is essentially emotional rather than physical." It is unfortunate that the real merits of Teach Me How to Cry are largely nullified by its shortcomings. In the first place, the appeal of the two young people at the centre of the play is too calculated. Their value as protagonists is radically reduced by the lack of any suggestion of pimples, of the grotesquerie of adolescence, of the crassness of immaturity. They emerge inevitably as bloodless imitations of their counterparts in life. A comparable pallor afflicts most of the other characters who are sketched with the same kind of life-destroying compassion. The play as a result lacks verve and excitement, qualities that no degree of gentle, rueful perception can replace. Similarly, the poetical "atmosphere" of the drama cannot compensate for the poverty of the dialogue. Teach Me How to Cry illustrates the dangers and difficulties which confront the Canadian playwright who attempts to treat a popular theme in an established idiom. The tribulation of the sensitive small-town adolescent who struggles to realize himself in the face of an inadequate older generation is, of course, a commonplace of the contemporary American stage. The theme, though overworked, is valid enough, but if the Canadian dramatist chooses to deal with it he must find his own voice and style. A more imposing work is Lister Sinclair's Socrates (1957) which was first performed in 1952 at the Museum theatre in Toronto. As the title suggests it is an ambitious play. Sinclair undertakes to present the issues which culminated in the arrest of Socrates, the trial itself, and in the last scene, the philosopher's celebrated death. The author exploits dramatic licence to the full in assembling and deploying a large cast drawn hi the main from Plato's dialogues. At the same time he contrives to adapt and incorporate into his play some of the most notable passages from the Symposium, the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo. However, in spite of a nicely calculated structure, precise characterization, and an easy command of dialogue which ranges from colloquial prose to a stately verse measure, the play lacks power. At the root of the difficulty is the playwright's attitude toward the central figure. Sinclair has been unable to resist his admiration for his hero. Socrates is portrayed as an immaculate idealist destroyed by a purblind or corrupt gang of worldly sceptics. This is certainly the popular view but it is too simple-minded a conception to build a satisfactory play upon. One looks in vain for an astringent touch of Ibsenesque ambivalence. To the extent that Socrates is sentimentalized, his stature is diminished and the impact of the play as a whole is weakened. This central flaw has unfortunate ramifications. The trial scene, for example, fails because Socrates' opponents are characterized almost without exception as

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fools or knaves. There is a strong case, if not an ultimately convincing one, to be made against Socrates. His accusers are not permitted to make it. (Unhappily this scene invites comparison with the trial in Saint Joan which gains so much from Shaw's scrupulous portrait of Cauchon and the Inquisitor.) Moreover, in his anxiety to recommend his hero to the spectator, Sinclair has been careful to sidestep all the aspects of Socrates' life and thought, as Plato transmits them, which might disturb a modern audience: the banishment of the poet from the ideal state; the profoundly undemocratic view of human nature; the homosexual love which is the unspoken assumption of the Symposium; the disdain for political democracy. This is not to suggest that the inclusion of any of these issues might necessarily have improved the play. It is simply that the removal of any serious challenge to the hero of the piece precludes the possibility of significant conflict and vitiates this attempt to dramatize an exceptionally dramatic historical episode. A Beach of Strangers: An Excursion (1961) by John Reeves which won an international award in 1959 has been widely translated and performed. Although it was written in the first place as a radio drama, it has been successfully staged. In this respect as in others the work recalls its prototype, Under Milk Wood. The action of the play takes place within an explicitly allegorical framework. On a holiday beach by the sea a variety of figures frolic, despair, love, and are estranged from one another. The characters represent a cross-section of mankind, and the sea, "man's first womb," laps on a beach emblematic of the context of all human life. The play's three-part structure is determined by the actions and fantasies of three sets of interrelated characters during the single day which is the fictional time span of the drama. A Beach of Strangers is in essence a set of variations upon the theme of human solitude and the poignancy of the precarious reprieve from isolation which love in its several forms accomplishes. Like most good themes this one is entirely familiar, but in the play's best scenes it is handled with the authority of fresh insight. The strength of the theme, however, is somewhat undermined by stylistic uncertainties. Although Reeves writes with energy and invention his idiom is disconcertingly eclectic. Auden, Eliot, and others are discernible behind the verse interludes, while Dylan Thomas is overwhelmingly present in the sections of prose dialogue. Reeves has not yet assimilated these disparate influences to the point where they serve a style of his own. One evidence of this is an occasional incongruity between matter and manner. For example, the surface of certain ruminative passages in verse is altogether too oblique and complicated for the substance of the author's thought. Another kind of problem is posed by the method of characterization. The audience's response to the people in the drama is rigorously controlled by

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means of ironic commentary. This commentary is delivered not only by a detached narrator but in many instances by a character who himself reflects in the third person upon his own nature. The device is theatrically successful but it tends ultimately to produce the effect of caricature. The characters too often appear deprived of the possibilities of freedom and hence of their human stature. In so far as they are reduced to the level of determined objects, they seem simply ludicrous or pitiful. Nevertheless in its technical assurance and its often moving treatment of a large theme, A Beach of Strangers is a considerable achievement. Important episodes from Canadian history have always appealed to native playwrights concerned to promote directly a sense of cultural identity. Mr. Coulter's Riel (1962) is the most recent instance of this kind of drama. (Charles Mair's Tecumseh is a notable early example.) Coulter's play is in two parts which trace the major phases of the Northwest Rebellion. The protagonist's trial and execution constitute the play's climactic concluding scenes. There is much in Riel to praise. The play is designed for production on a bare stage with a minimum of properties. This allows the dramatist maximum freedom for presenting events which historically are separated widely in space and time. Moreover in the absence of any fixed set, one brief scene follows another with a rapidity which generates excitement and holds one's interest. Although the panoramic technique entails in some instances a certain sacrifice of character to external action, Coulter's portrait of Riel himself is complex and powerful. He emerges as an enigmatic but entirely convincing blend of simplicity, ruthlessness, piety, fanaticism, and nobility; in short, as a theatrically fascinating figure. The play has weaknesses. Too many of the Englishmen, particularly the officers and men of the British army, are caricatured hi the standard, tedious manner. Moreover, it is doubtful whether the scenes which require crowds and spectacle could be made quite credible in any medium except film. More serious is the playwright's failure to suggest successfully the wider implications of the action. Much of the excitement of Riel results from a skilful dramatization of historical events which, in outline at least, are familiar to any informed audience. What is lacking is a sense that these events have been sufficiently disciplined and exploited to serve some insight into Canadian society or some more general view of human experience. To an extent, especially in the trial scene, this transfiguration of an historical record into a significant dramatic fiction has taken place. Unfortunately, a good deal of the play gives the impression that the author has capitulated too readily to his somewhat intransigent source material. When all criticisms have been made, however, Riel remains much the best play of its type to be written in Canada since Confederation.

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Without much question, the most arrestingly individual voice among contemporary Canadian playwrights belongs to James Reaney whose The Killdeer and Other Plays appeared in 1962. This volume contains, in addition to the title work, a brief masque for one performer, the libretto of an opera, Night Blooming Cereus (for which John Beckwith has composed music), and one other play, The Sun and the Moon. Another early piece, The Easter Egg, is not included in this collection. Reaney's genre is pastoral comedy but his buoyant, wayward drama eludes categories. The geographical context, like that of much of Reaney's best verse, is small town Ontario, but in these plays both landscape and character are strangely transfigured. As one might expect, there are obvious stylistic and thematic parallels between Reaney's lyric poetry and his works for the stage. Predictably also, both the strengths and the limitations of the plays proceed from the fact that he is in the first place an eloquent and original poet, still, as yet, experimenting with dramatic modes. It is unrewarding and somewhat inappropriate therefore to dissect these plays too precisely into the traditional components of plot, character, theme, and so forth. The force of much of Reaney's best drama springs from patterns of imagery and the moods these generate. This is particularly true of The Killdeer, Reaney's most ambitious play, in which themes are projected and conflicting characters define themselves through sets of images expressive of such large antitheses as innocence and experience, eternity and time, fertility and death. The tangled wealth of character and incident in The Killdeer defies summary. In so far as it is legitimate to isolate a single theme, the action concerns the quest for maturity, or more exactly the movement from a vulnerable and imperfect innocence to experiential wisdom, first by Harry, the mother-ridden adolescent, and then by Eli, a youth who has retreated to infantilism under the impact of traumatic shock. A corollary theme, the initiation of the tender consciousness into the repellent mysteries of the fallen world (a central motif in The Red Heart, Reaney's first book of verse), appears in The Easter Egg and, less prominently, in The Sun and the Moon. James Reaney's qualities as a poet are rare; his faults as a dramatist commonplace. The necessity for a tolerably unified action sometimes escapes him. In the exuberance of his invention, for example, two or three separate plays jostle and compete within the loose structural confines of The Killdeer. He has not, moreover, mastered the technique of artful exposition and too frequently he dissipates the effect of potentially powerful scenes in superfluous or unstageworthy dialogue. More seriously, the various levels, symbolic, fantastic, naturalistic, on which certain of his characters are conceived (Madame Fay in The Killdeer, or Kenneth in The Easter Egg) fail to coincide, and as a result their effectiveness on any level diminishes. Finally, although Reaney is adept at farce and scenes of poignant charm, he has shown little capacity to project

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strong emotion. This would not necessarily be a matter for criticism except that such plays as The Kllldeer and The Easter Egg, in spite of their comic framework, revolve about acts of great violence and horror. The imaginative perspective, however, from which these pieces are written tends to deny the reality of these acts and hence to nullify the sympathetic response of the audience towards the characters who are menaced by them. Nevertheless, amid (for the most part) the grey wastes of Canadian drama, Reaney's plays shine with a peculiar brilliance. Not the least of his achievements is to have made, in a variety of dramatic forms, imaginative sense out of one geographical area of Ontario. At present, it is hard to discern any significant continuity or developing pattern in the course of Canadian drama since 1920. There are, it is true, tenuous points of contact between such figures as Denison and Davies, and certain themes appear and reappear in the drama of this period. For example, as we have noticed, many of the plays set in a rural context have at their centre the struggle of the protagonists with an intimidating natural environment, while several of those set in the city present in some form the struggle between the exuberant, creative individual and a censorious life-denying society. In both cases, it is the precise quality of the conflict which gives these plays, the better ones at least, their "distinctively Canadian" character. However, the overriding impression one receives from the last four decades of drama in Canada is of a group of playwrights, some with considerable gifts, separated primarily not by space and time but by the absence of a common dramatic tradition, a tradition that may be accepted or challenged, but within which action produces reaction. In an important sense, the playwright in this country has hardly anything either to follow or to repudiate. He must begin each time to build from the bottom and in such circumstances it takes a dramatist of formidable energy and skill to build very high. This problem is related to a wider and more profound one. Francis Fergusson has pointed out in his Idea of a Theater that what characterizes modern drama in general is the bewildering variety of partial perspectives on the human situation it affords. The modern theatre, unlike that of Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Racine, for a great number of complex reasons can no longer provide a comprehensive and coherent image of the age. Because Canada shares as deeply as any nation in the break-up of the kind of metaphysical, moral, and social order which formed the matrix for these older modes of theatre, the demand for a dramatist whose work will present a total and decisive revelation of life in this country will not readily be satisfied. Any final evaluation of the significance and stature of Canadian drama will necessarily depend on the criteria one chooses to employ. Judged by national standards the accomplishment of Canadian playwrights is not inconsiderable. Canadian novelists taken as a group have done better; Canadian poets much

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better; but it may be argued that the dramatists constitute a respectable third. Certainly drama in Canada compares favourably with that of other Commonwealth nations. Judged however by an undiluted, international standard—a level of dramatic excellence set and intermittently sustained by countries with a flourishing national theatre and secure dramatic tradition, the achievement of Canadian playwrights is distinctly unimpressive. Some explanations have been offered in the foregoing account. Behind all these reasons is simply a perplexing failure of the imagination; a failure to capture in the art of the theatre the complicated intensities of human experience as it is subtly or strikingly coloured in the context of this dominion. Dr. Claude Bissell has observed that by and large Canadian novelists have had difficulty in seeing Canada as a human society. A comparable incapacity in even greater measure has afflicted the dramatists. In the absence of this vision, our drama (with isolated exceptions), assessed against the highest standard, has been imitative and curiously irrelevant. It is in the theatre therefore that the long deferred promise of cultural maturity is awaited with keenest anxiety and expectation. The future of the theatre will of course be influenced by developments in the mass media. C.B.C. radio has had a distinguished record in the field of drama. Andrew Allan's Stage series, for instance, maintained a consistently high standard and did much to foster public interest hi good plays. The theatre may continue to benefit from scripts written in the first place for radio (Len Peterson's Burlap Bags is an example) which are then revised for stage production. It is not yet clear whether television will have equally desirable repercussions. There are some, no doubt, who would concur with Paddy Chayevsky's remarkable opinion that television will emerge as the basic theatre of the twentieth century. However, such volumes as Arthur Hailey's Close Up: On Writing for Television only prove that Canadian playwrights have yet to investigate the potentialities of the new medium. But it is impossible to predict the ultimate quality and influence of television drama. If dramatists emerge who prove capable of meeting the challenge it presents, changes may occur. The vast audience reached today only by television may in such circumstances have its collective taste shaped and sharpened to the point where it will seek once again the experience of theatre in its traditional form. II. THEATRE, 1920-1960

The Background: Commercial Theatre from Abroad In one sense Canadian theatre, that most insecure of the arts hi this country, flourished with greatest vigour during the later nineteenth century and in the years prior to World War I. This was the era of the celebrated stars, American and British, who toured the extent of Canada supported either by their own companies or else relying on local talent in each town or city to

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provide a supporting cast. Edmund Kean, Charles Macready, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Sara Bernhardt, James O'Neill, Ellen Terry, Johnston ForbesRobertson, Robert B. Mantell, Cyril Maude, John Martin-Harvey, George Arliss, Minnie Fiske, Seymour Hicks, John Barrymore, and other illustrious performers of the period visited Canada, some many times. It was during these years, moreover, that theatres sprang up all over the country to accomodate the touring groups. Only the larger centres like Toronto, Montreal, or Winnipeg could afford to build elaborate opera houses, but every community of any size whatever had some sort of structure, almost invariably grand in name if not design. These theatres dispensed an extraordinarily democratic sort of entertainment. The appeal was to every age group, economic bracket, and social level, and there was a generous disregard by public and often by actor of the distinction between varieties of amusement. For example, Sir John Martin-Harvey relates without comment how in Vancouver he played Hamlet and A Cigarette Maker's Romance (a romantic melodrama adapted from a novel by Marion Crawford) on successive nights, both to overflowing houses. From roughly 1870 to 1914 then, theatre in Canada was in a way more robust and much more an integral part of social life than at any subsequent period. From another standpoint, of course, these years are of negligible significance. Apart from the physical fact of the playhouses, there was virtually no theatrical activity which bore any organic relation to the Canadian environment. Almost all plays and actors were foreign imports. The few local troupes devoted themselves in the main to a kind of rootless slapstick, although the Marx Brothers also presented melodramas and the wartime Dumbells on occasion included some topical satire in their act. No doubt the example of the visiting stars did something to encourage native Canadians who later gained fame on the stage, but with success such performers as Mary Pickford, Margaret Anglin, Walter Huston, and Raymond Massey left Canada permanently to become citizens of New York or London. Because of lack of opportunity at home, until quite recently this departure of the talented and ambitious has been the rule. The absence, moreover, in many regions of any native company of even modest pretentions made the aspiring playwright's job next to impossible. There was no way he could learn the vital practical aspects of his craft by working in the theatre and seeing his plays performed. Although the considerable upsurge of nationalistic sentiment generated first by Confederation and then World War I resulted in a number of dramas, most were written only for the study, and none was really adequate for the stage. The years following World War I marked the breakdown of the touring system. Vastly increased travelling expenses and the advent of the talking pictures which offered the mass audience greater sensationalism at less cost, are two important causes among many which led to the collapse of "the

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Road." During the twenties when visits from stars and touring companies were becoming less and less frequent, an attempt was made by certain repertory companies, mainly English, to supply the market. They too eventually fell on evil days but for a while they endeavoured to give the public the best of those modern plays which had proved successful in New York or London. Of these companies Vaughan Glaser's established itself most firmly, playing six years in Toronto, from 1921 to 1926. Other resident repertory groups that achieved some measure of success included Cameron Matthews English Players, Charles Hampden's British Players, the English Repertory Company, and the New Empire Company. (These were reassuring names to those Canadian theatre-goers who welcomed the invasion of the commercial British theatre as protection from what they regarded as the less palatable vulgarities of the American.) However, by the late 1920's the prospects for the professional stage in Canada were very unpromising indeed. The films had changed decisively the entertainment routine of the nation which, lacking a native theatre, had no secure tradition of theatre attendance. Many of the old playhouses were converted into cinemas and the new managers were naturally reluctant to rent their premises to competition. Others were torn down to provide space for offices and car parks or were destroyed by fire or time. Only the Royal Alexandra in Toronto and Her Majesty's in Montreal survive to this day, fulfilling by and large their original function as touring houses. Amateur Theatre: The Dominion Drama Festival Simultaneous with the decline in the number of companies from abroad was the quickening of an unpretentious native theatre. Amateur play acting has a long history in Canada dating back to the Garrick Club of Hamilton founded in 1862, to theatricals put on by garrison officers of the British Army posted in Halifax, and even further to a performance of a play by Marc Lescarbot presented in 1606 in honour of Sieur de Poutrincourt. Three hundred years later in 1907 the Governor-General instituted the Earl Grey Music and Dramatic Trophy Competition "for the encouragement of dramatic arts throughout the dominion." This competition persisted for five years until the departure of Earl Grey. After 1918, the Little Theatre movement, as it came to be called, gained great momentum. The reasons are not far to seek. The nationalistic impulses reinforced by Canada's role in the Great War intensified the desire for some form of national self-expression in this as in the other arts. Moreover, to concerned minorities everywhere it was becoming apparent that if they were to have any legitimate theatre at all, they must fend for themselves. The movement in Canada, too, was influenced by the growth of the Little Theatre in America and expressed the same protest against the stultifying impact of routine films and the chronic surrender of art to commerce on Broadway.

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Drama groups proliferated everywhere. The Ottawa Drama League was formed in 1913 and had seventeen hundred members by 1928. The Arts and Letters Players Club of Toronto, which had been active since 1905, provided some of the impetus which led to the founding of Hart House Theatre in 1919 under the aegis of Vincent Massey. This admirably equipped stage on the campus of the University of Toronto immediately became a focal point for the creative energies of such figures as Roy Mitchell, its first director, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, and Merrill Denison. Their work was continued under a series of able directors including Bertram Forsythe, Carroll Aikins, Edgar Stone, and Nancy Pyper. Carroll Aikins himself had previously established the Home Theatre on his farm in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley and was the first to organize a group of actors called the Canadian Players which toured the neighbouring villages. Other community theatres appeared in rapid succession. By 1930 the Montreal Repertory Theatre was active under the exceptionally able direction of Martha Allan, and Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and many smaller centres had flourishing drama societies. One of the most notable was formed in London in 1934 when four separate groups amalgamated and later acquired the Grand Theatre, a playhouse built in the hey-day of the touring companies. In recent times a number of foreign stars, including John Gielgud and Michael Redgrave, have chosen this theatre as a starting point for their tours of North America. Inevitably the kind of plays produced, the seriousness of purpose, and the standard of achievement varied, and continues to vary, greatly from group to group. But quite often in the best little theatres dedication and talent had rewarding results. Moreover, because the people involved were in it for the love of the thing, the plays presented covered a much wider range than was common or possible on the professional stage. A list of representative productions during the 1920's includes such authors as Pirandello, Schnitzler, Capek, Claudel, Moliere, Ben Jonson, Goethe, Maeterlinck, Rice, Yeats, and Synge, with Shaw, Ibsen and Shakespeare as hardy perennials. For the first time, too, the Canadian playwright had an opportunity to see his work performed and was encouraged by competitions sponsored by such organizations as the Canadian Authors' Association and the I.O.D.E., as well as the little theatres themselves. For example, it was the policy of Hart House Theatre to stage at least one Canadian play each year. During the thirties in spite of the depression which gave the coup de grace to the touring professionals, amateur theatre continued to thrive. If anything it grew for a few years in richness and variety. In Toronto, for instance, the Playwrights' Studio Group devoted itself to the development of native dramatists, Herman Voaden's Theatre Studio Group experimented with techniques of expressionism, while a plea for an ideologically committed drama came

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from the Theatre of Action, whose spokesmen, vehement Marxists all, denounced the existing Little Theatre as an enfeebled expression of a moribund society. In 1932 this diverse theatrical activity was further stimulated and to an extent co-ordinated through the establishment of a kind of national theatre. Local and provincial competitions had been in effect for some time, but in the autumn of 1932 the Earl of Bessborough called a meeting of representatives from drama groups across the land and the Dominion Drama Festival was launched. The country was divided into regions and in each of these preliminary competitions were held in the spring. The first finals took place at Ottawa in May 1933. Except for an interruption during the war, the Festival has been an annual event ever since, expanding and consolidating itself through the years, and has served a number of important purposes. It has created a kind of tenuous theatrical tradition in a country extremely poor in this respect. It has helped to stimulate all aspects of Canadian theatre and maintain standards of performance most notably during the long period when the professional stage was almost non-existent. To some extent, difficult to calculate, it has served as a unifying cultural force enabling widely different groups to meet each year in a common endeavour. It has provided, moreover, a valuable opportunity to young designers, actors, and directors, amateur and professional, to gain knowledge and experience. The Festival, however, has had to contend with certain disadvantages. The level of production, although high as a rule, has inevitably been influenced by the fact that the majority of participants are amateurs, dedicated perhaps, but unable to devote full time and energy to the arts of the theatre. Also as the site of the Festival changes each year every group but the local one must accommodate its production to an unfamiliar, sometimes unsuitable, stage with a minimum of rehearsal time. Most seriously perhaps the personnel of the competing groups is in continual flux from year to year, an unavoidable circumstance that has militated against the type of ideal performance only approached by an able company working together over a long period. Nevertheless, the D.D.F. with its verve and atmosphere of excitement has been a significant phenomenon. It has offered in the past incentive to amateur groups everywhere, and has provided in part a groundwork for the development of professional theatre. Professional Theatre Except for the extraordinary phenomenon of Stratford, indigenous professional theatre has had an uncertain and somewhat dispiriting history. Although such companies as the John Holden Players (now defunct) and the Brae Manor Theatre at Knowlton, Quebec, which closed in 1956 were active as early as the mid-thirties, professional theatre emerged in the main after the Second World War. Its growth offers a parallel to the rise of the Little

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Theatre after the First. The centres of professionalism have been chiefly the larger cities—Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. However, the failure record of the various enterprises is a melancholy index of the indifference with which the mass of Canadians regard the legitimate stage. In British Columbia Sidney Risk's Everyman Theatre, founded in 1946 with the intention of building up a repertory of Canadian plays, is no longer operating. The Totem Theatre hi Vancouver lasted two seasons. The most permanent venture in the West has been Theatre under the Stars which is subsidized by the city of Vancouver. At Ottawa, the Canadian Repertory Theatre, an outgrowth of the Stage Society, collapsed in 1956 after five years. Toronto, the most active centre of English-speaking theatre, has had the highest mortality rate. The Earle Grey Players (whose annual Shakespearean Festival pre-dated Stratford by five years) have now departed. The Avenue, the Lansdowne, and, most recently, the Civic Square are some of the theatres which have been compelled to close. However, there have been real achievements. Of particular interest was the founding of the New Play Society in Toronto in 1947 by Dora Mavor Moore and her son Mavor. Their purpose was to develop "a living Canadian Theatre on a permanent but non-profit basis" and for a few years the N.P.S. was very active indeed. It used as a nucleus C.B.C. radio actors, supplementing this group with amateurs from Hart House Theatre and elsewhere. The facilities available to the N.P.S.—the little Museum theatre—were very inadequate, but its productions displayed singular energy and conviction. One especially admirable feature of the N.P.S. was its willingness to gamble on Canadian plays. Morley Callaghan's "Going Home," Harry Boyle's "The Inheritance," John Coulter's Kiel, Mavor Moore's "Who's Who," "Narrow Passage" by Andrew Allan and later Donald Harron's adaptation of Earle Birney's novel Turvey all received their first (and in most cases their last) performance by the N.P.S. The Society's audience, though loyal, was never large and in latter years its activities have been restricted to a drama school and an annual review, Spring Thaw, which has regularly proven enormously popular and profitable. Spring Thaw continues now independently under the direction of Mavor Moore. At first glance it is perhaps surprising that audiences which by and large shy away from the conventional traffic of the stage should find the satirical revue, a relatively sophisticated kind of theatre, so suited to their taste. Much of the reason is the refreshing irreverence of satire in a nation which has tended to solemnity. These revues, moreover, have provided an astringent commentary on Canadian life which is not to be found in imported theatrical fare. The years after the war saw the appearance of numerous summer stock companies across the country: the Kingston International Players (who first produced Robertson Davies' Fortune My Foe), the Mountain Playhouse in

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Montreal, the Red Barn at Lake Simcoe, several in the Niagara peninsula, one at Peterborough, and others in the Maritimes and the West. While providing an excellent training ground for actors they too have had a precarious existence and many have either changed hands repeatedly or disappeared altogether. One of the most durable has been the Straw Hat Players, formed in 1948 by the Davis brothers. In 1953, with the aim of making their venture a year-long project, the Davises took over a Toronto movie house and established the Crest Theatre. In spite of a good percentage of fine productions it too has had great difficulty in finding consistent audiences. So much so that the Davises have found it necessary to transform it into a non-profit foundation, thus making it eligible for Canada Council support. Another promising development in Toronto has been the emergence of George Luscombe's Theatre Workshop founded on the principles of group theatre associated with Joan Littlewood. In the prairie provinces the most successful professional venture has been the Manitoba Theatre Centre under the direction of John Hirsch. One of the factors that has assisted the professional theatre in Canada, particularly the actor, has been the C.B.C. Any competition the C.B.C. may have offered the legitimate stage has been outweighed by the opportunities it has provided, especially through television. It has enabled an increasing number of actors to earn a living, meagre for most, abundant for a few, at their profession the year around. Thus they have been free to accept less lucrative engagements in the theatre proper. Moreover television, penetrating into houses everywhere, has exposed a number of actors consistently enough that a few have something of the status of national stars, and the public will more readily turn out when these figures appear on the stage. Work, money, and a measure of prestige: these three essentials the C.B.C. is capable of affording the Canadian actor. There are, of course, certain drawbacks. Television, which most of the time demands a muted, casual, ultra-realistic acting style is of only limited value to the actor primarily interested in the stage. Stratford Undoubtedly, the most spectacular and significant event in the history of Canadian professional theatre was the launching of the Festival at Stratford, Ontario, in July 1953. The danger, of course, was that such a festival would emerge as a pale imitation of the famous English original. That it has not done so is owing in particular to the highly independent talents of Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Miss Tanya Moiseiwitsch who together designed the superb stage, and in general to the feeling of all concerned that imitation was as impossible as it was pointless. Although the policy has been to import one or two widely acclaimed actors from abroad each season, the bulk of the company has been Canadian and something like a native Shakespearian style is in

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the process of developing. The verse is spoken with a conversational vitality which at its most successful avoids both the operatic excesses of English delivery and the harshness of American. The nature of the stage, too, has tested the ingenuity of the directors and prompted them to experiment in deploying their actors. There are, naturally, criticisms to be made. Sir Tyrone's presence has been of incomparable value, but some of his more flamboyant mannerisms have tended to haunt subsequent productions. The subtler values of the text have too often been sacrificed to speed and spectacle. However these are faults which may well be corrected as the Festival matures artistically. Certainly Stratford at its best is very good indeed. Such productions as All's Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night have worked a unique magic, enriching incalculably the Canadian cultural scene. From the first it has been recognized that if Stratford is to approximate a national theatre it must be more than just an elegant stage devoted to Shakespeare. Clearly other playwrights, including whenever possible Canadians, must be represented. A move towards widening the scope of the Festival was made in 1955 with an impressive presentation of Oedipus Rex which was taken the following year to the Edinburgh Festival. On this occasion Oedipus was accompanied by a production of Henry V starring Christopher Plummer, probably the first unambiguously Canadian actor of international repute. Another offshoot of Stratford was the Canadian Players, a two-unit company which tours America and Canada in the winter months bringing theatre, necessarily in a somewhat austere form, to outlying communities across the country. One of the motives behind the formation of the Canadian company was the desire to offset in some small way the cultural isolation of the various regions of this country. Stratford, too, is a product in part of an increasingly vigorous nationalism in the arts. In the past America, England, and Europe have too frequently been accepted by Canadians as the exclusive sources for standards of dramatic excellence. Behind the foundation of the Festival Theatre is the impulse to establish such standards within the borders of Canada. Stratford has its imperfections and it certainly will not alter overnight the unsatisfactory character of the total theatrical situation. It is however an auspicious development which has materially hastened the day when drama and the theatre will be at least on a par with the other arts in Canada. Most important, the prestige attendant upon the production of an original play at Stratford, particularly if it meets the challenge of the Festival's arena stage, may stimulate native dramatists to new endeavour, which may in turn do something to rectify perhaps the most depressing feature of theatre in Canada: the lack of any vital and continuing relation between theatrical activity and the work of the Canadian playwright.

10. Fiction 1920-1940 D E S M O N D PACEY

LOOKING BACK from the vantage point of the mid-century, we are apt to see Canadian fiction of the twenty years between the two World Wars as a barren area peopled only by Frederick Philip Grove, Morley Callaghan, and Mazo de la Roche, with perhaps a few small figures of historical romancers such as Frederick Niven and Laura Goodman Salverson grouped around them. A more detailed scrutiny, however, now for the first time made feasible by the publication of R. E. Walters' Check List of Canadian Literature (1959). reveals that the novels and novelists were surprisingly numerous. In these twenty years, some seven hundred novels were published by Canadians, and to the readers of that time many of them appeared as important as, if not more important than, the few novelists whose reputations have survived. In spite of this great bulk of fiction, however, it is still true to say that Grove, Callaghan, and to a lesser extent Mazo de la Roche were the most significant writers, and that their joint achievement is almost equivalent to the total achievement of the period. One reads on and on through the hundreds of novels, hoping against hope that some forgotten masterpiece will reveal itself. The revelation never comes. A few forgotten novels have virtues that lilt them above the level of mediocrity, and elicit their meed of praise, but even the best of them fall short of the level of Grove and Callaghan. What was the achievement of the fiction of this period? It was certainly not to leave behind a legacy of imperishable work, novels which caught forever the very note and trick of Canadian life in the period. In view of the virtual monopoly of romanticism in Canadian fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this would have been to expect too much. All that the best novelists of this period were able to do was to begin the process of turning the eyes of readers and fellow-writers from a fabled past or a romanticized present towards the actual conditions of Canadian life. If this period deserves remembering at all, it is as the time when a few novelists first seriously tried to come to terms with their Canadian environment, and to find a suitable style in which to seal the bargain.

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By far the great majority of the novelists of these twenty years, however, made no such effort. Most of them conceived the novel and the short story merely as media of light entertainment, and contented themselves with providing some form of romantic escape. There were many forms of this escapism. Some of them had no connection with Canada, but were merely re-tracings of escape routes that had been well mapped by writers elsewhere. Novels about the mysterious Orient, for example, were produced in quantity. The prolific Lily Adams Beck (d. 1931) wrote a number of novels with Oriental settings (The Key of Dreams, 1922; The Treasure of Ho, 1924; The Garden of Vision, 1929; etc.), as did James Livingstone Stewart (The Laughing Buddha, 1925, etc.), Harold Kingsley (Kong, 1927), and Florence Ayscough (A Chinese Mirror, 1925, etc.). Another standard escape route, that into the realm of crime, detection, and mystery, was also followed assiduously by Canadian writers of this time. "Luke Allan" (William Lacey Amy) was perhaps the most prolific Canadian producer in this genre, publishing well over a score of novels with such titles as The Ghost Murder and Black Opal. Other mystery writers with long lists were Frank L. Packard (1877-1942) (The Devil's Mantle, 1927; Shanghai Jim, 1928; etc.), Guy E. Morton (1884-1948) (Black Gold, 1924; Ashes of Murder, 1935; etc.), Hopkins Moorhouse (The Golden Scarab, 1926; etc.), Maurice B. Dix (b. 1889) (The Dartmoor Mystery, 1935; etc.), Pearl Foley (d. 1953) (The Grome Mine Mystery, 1933; etc.), and Hulburt Footner (Antennae, 1926; etc.). Rather similar to these novels of crime and detection were those dealing with amorous intrigue and high adventure. Novels of this sort, the staples of the lending library trade, were written in quantity by Elizabeth Sprigge (Faint Amorist, 1927; Castle in Andalusia, 1935; etc.), John Murray Gibbon (1875-1952) (Pagan Love, 1922; Eyes of a Gipsy, 1926; etc.), Percy Gomery (1881-1960) (Curve, Go Slow: A Romance of the Pacific Coast, 1927; etc.), F. W. Wallace (1886-1958) (Captain Salvation, 1925; etc.), Grace Murray Atkin (That Which is Passed, 1923; etc.), Virna Sheard (d. 1943) (Fortune Turns Her Wheel, 1929; etc.), Robert Watson (1882-1948) (The Spoilers of the Valley, 1921; etc.), Madge Macbeth (The Patterson Limit, 1923; etc.), Douglas Leader Durkin (The Lobstick Trail, 1921; etc.), and Robert Allison Hood (The Quest of Alistair, 1921; etc.). More specifically Canadian in inspiration were the escape novels of another variety: those treating of life in the Far North, and especially of the lives of the Eskimos. Here indeed was an opportunity to deal realistically with a way of life unfamiliar to writers of other countries, and something really compelling might have been made out of the strange terrain, the long dark winters and short vivid summers, the small tenacious inhabitants of the North. In fact, however, with the partial exception of some of the short stories of Alan

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Sullivan (1868-1947), the opportunity was completely missed. Frank J. Tate (Red Wilderness, 1938), Robert Watson (1882-1948) (High Hazard, 1928), Kenneth Conibear (Northland Footprints, 1936), and Samuel Alexander White (Ambush, 1920; Code of the Northwest, 1940; etc.) saw only material for melodrama in the life of this region. Even Alan Sullivan packed most of his many novels with melodramatic incidents, but in some of the short stories in The Passing of Oul-I-But (1913) and Under the Northern Lights (1926) he did capture something of the authentic atmosphere and spirit of the North. Closely allied to novels of the North, and indeed sometimes overlapping with them, were romantic novels of the West, usually known as "westerns." Although the Canadian West was never "wild" in the sense that many parts of the western United States were, this did not deter a few writers from trying to invest it with glamour and excitement. "Luke Allan," whom we have already encountered as a writer of mysteries, also wrote such "westerns" as Blue Pete: Half Breed (1921), and A. M. Chisholm (1872-1960) made a career of doing so, producing between 1911 and 1929 a dozen novels including The Boss of Wind River (1911), Prospectin' Fools (1927), and Red Bill (1929). As we might expect, the Mounted Police were the focus for many of these Canadian "westerns." Harwood Steele (Spirit of Iron, 1923; The Ninth Circle, 1928; etc.) specialized in stories of the Mounties, and there were many Canadian novels with such titles as The Case of Constable Shields, The Luck of the Mounted, and Campbell of the Mounties. By far the most popular types of escape literature, however, were the two that have become traditional in Canadian fiction: the historical romance, and the regional idyll. Historical Romances Historical romances dealing with almost every phase of human history were produced in Canada during these decades. British, French, biblical, Scottish, and Roman history all found their exponents. The most popular Canadian historical subjects were the French regime in Quebec, and the early history of the West. The history of Ontario and the Maritimes was not entirely overlooked, but it was given relatively little attention. The most prolific purveyor of historical romances during the period was "E. Barrington," whom we have met as a writer about the Orient under her real name of Lily Adams Beck. Mrs. Beck, indeed, had two pseudonyms: not only was she "E. Barrington," she was also, in her novels dealing with the Mediterranean area, "Louise Moresby." Her total output of novels, under her three names, was in the vicinity of thirty. A resident of Victoria, B.C., she first won fame under the name of "E. Barrington" with her historical romance The Divine Lady (1924). She was obviously a woman of wide geographical

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and historical knowledge, for she wrote novels with equal success about England and Egypt, France and China, Anne Boleyn and Lord Byron, Mary Queen of Scots and the Empress Josephine. But her work, so apparently disparate, had one unifying thread: the bright thread of love. The Divine Lady has as its theme the love of Lord Nelson for Lady Hamilton; Glorious Apollo (1925) deals with the love life of Lord Byron; The Exquisite Perdita (1926) chronicles the loves of the notorious Perdita Robinson; The Thunderer (1927) lays bare the love life of Napoleon and Josephine; The Empress of Hearts (1928) provides intimate glimpses of the affairs of Marie Antoinette; and the whole series reached its inevitable climax in The Laughing Queen (1929), a record of the delightful amours of that queen of lovers, Cleopatra of Egypt! It may seem absurd to give so much space to the forgotten author of amorous pot-boilers. Her career, however, might legitimately be claimed to be part of the literary history of Canada as an example of how readily the Canadian literary public of the twenties could mistake grandiosity for greatness. For the astonishing fact is that "E. Barrington" was taken seriously by her contemporaries. Duncan Campbell Scott, then President of the Royal Society of Canada, reviewed her 1922 collection of Oriental tales, The Ninth Vibration, and praised it highly: "We know it to be a competent and beautiful book and we are neither glad nor sorry that there is nothing specially Canadian about it. We know that it is a real addition to our literature and that is all we are concerned with." The Canadian Bookman declared of The Divine Lady: "At last a Canadian . . . has written a novel of distinction destined for a high place among those which endure." The Canadian Annual Review of 1924-25 called the same novel "the book of the year from every point of view." The Byron novel, Glorious Apollo, was given for review to Frederick Philip Grove, and even he, while expressing scepticism about historical novels generally and urging Mrs. Beck to write about the present, opined that "this book has great merits." In March 1927 the editors of the Canadian Bookman were able to report proudly that "Mrs. L. Adams Beck, who has been spending some time in London, is receiving great recognition. She is the centre of attraction in the literary world there." It was left for the Canadian Forum, in March 1930, to prick this bubble of over-estimation and reduce Mrs. L. Adams Beck, alias E. Barrington, alias Louise Moresby, to her proper size. Reviewing The Laughing Queen, the Forum said sensibly, "It is primarily a popular novel. . . . The style is smooth and easy, and on the whole it is a readable, amusing and interesting book with enough in it to hold one's interest for a few hours." Other historical romancers of this period who dealt with extra-Canadian subjects included H. J. O. Bedford-Jones (1887-1949), whose specialty was French history (D'Artagnan, 1928; Rodomont: A Romance of Mont St.

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Michel in the Days of Louis XIV, 1926; etc.), W. G. Hardy, a professor of classics and ancient history who chose either classical or biblical themes, and Isabel M. Paterson, who in The Singing Season (1924) and other novels dealt with the history of Old Spain. The only one of these who deserves somewhat more extended notice is W. G. Hardy. His first novel, Father Abraham (1935), is the story of Abraham's life from boyhood to old age, and stresses especially his love for Sarai and Hagar and his search for the true God, Yahweh. The latter purports to be the main theme, but the major emphasis actually falls on Abraham's amorous adventures. The novel is replete with lively action and vigorous characters, but there is little depth of thought and scarcely any grace of style. In his foreword, Hardy says, "Time makes characters and events legendary. Under its alchemy Sarai and Abraham have become figures of such heroic proportions and of such far-off majesty that they have lost their reality. We have forgotten that they were people like ourselves. But they, too, must have known hunger and simple joys and satisfactions and all the thousand and one monotonies and trivialities of which the sum total is everyday life. . . ." The trouble is that Hardy makes them all too human. It is hard to believe that such a legend of spiritual greatness would have sprung up around as ordinarily sensual a figure as Abraham appears here. For his second novel, Turn Back the River (1938), Hardy chose ancient Rome in the days of Catiline and Clodia. Here his preoccupation with physical love continued, and led one critic to describe him as "the bold champion of a fleshly school of Canadian fiction." The novel attempts to defend Catiline, to uphold him as an intelligent aristocrat dedicated to defending the republican ideal, and to vilify Cicero as the spokesman of tyrannical reaction and economic royalism. This more serious theme, however, is greatly obscured by the vast amount of amorous intrigue and dalliance. Hardy seemed unable to decide whether he was writing a serious historical novel or a pot-boiler for the drug store trade. This dichotomy of intention has continued to weaken Hardy's later novels, All the Trumpets Sounded (1942), which deals with the life and loves of Moses, The Unfulfilled (1952), his only venture into the study of contemporary Canadian life, and City of Libertines (1958), another attempt to portray Roman civilization in its decadence. It is in his short stories that Hardy's more restrained and sensitive responses find expression; his novels have vigour and crude energy, but they are too often coarse and flamboyant. The great bulk of Canadian historical fiction, in this and indeed in all periods, dealt not with ancient Rome but with New France. Why the French regime in Canada has continued to cast such a spell over Canadian writers and readers is a most interesting question. From the days of Mrs. Leprohon in the mid-nineteenth century, through Gilbert Parker in the late nineteenth century, and up to the present, it has remained the favourite hunting-ground

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for seekers after romance. Perhaps English-Canadians are haunted by a sense of guilt over the Conquest; perhaps they are conscious of the relative drabness of English-Canadian society and yearn for the colour and gaiety which they can imagine to have characterized I'ancien regime; perhaps this quest for the French past is an indirect protest against the materialism and money-grubbing of the Anglo-Saxon present. Whatever the reason, the fact remains. Novelists who produced historical romances of the French regime between the wars included Leslie Gordon Barnard (1890-1961), who was perhaps best known for the sensitive short stories contained in One Generation Away (1931) and So Near is Grandeur (1945) but whose novel Jancis (1935) is a romantic study of life in old Quebec; Philip Child, author of The Village of Souls (1933) and of several later novels on contemporary themes; Joseph P. Choquet, author of Under Canadian Skies (1922), sub-titled A FrenchCanadian Historical Romance; the prolific Louis Arthur Cunningham (19001954), who wrote romances of many times and places but whose The King's Fool (1931) is set in the Quebec of Louis XV; Annie Ermatinger Fraser (d. 1930), author of The Drum of Lanoraye (1932); Gordon Hill Graham, author of The Bond Triumphant (1923); L. C. Servos, author of Fronfenac and the Maid of the Mist (1927); Alan Sullivan, who in 1941 deserted his Northland specialty to write the very popular French-Canadian romance, Three Came to Ville Marie, and Franklin Davey McDowell, who published The Champlain Road in 1939. None of these novels deserves separate, detailed treatment. Two or three of them—The Village of Souls, Three Came to Ville Marie, and The Champlain Road—are more memorable than the others, but they all had their reward in contemporary popularity and few of them are likely to be of permanent interest. It is a mark of the improvement that has subsequently taken place in the quality of Canadian fiction that in the early years of World War II The Champlain Road and Three Came to Ville Marie were adjudged worthy of the Governor-General's Award, as the best Canadian novels of their respective years. Rather strangely, in view of their relative youth, the runners-up to French Canada as the most popular venue for historical romances were the Canadian prairies. The Red River settlement, near what is now the city of Winnipeg, was especially popular with novelists. John Herries McCulloch, who was later to write quite a realistic novel entitled Dark Acres (1935), began his career in fiction with two such historical romances: The Men of Kildonan (1926) and The Splendid Renegade (1928). James McGillivray, in The Frontier Riders (1925), and B. A. McKelvie (1889-1960) in Huldowget (1926), The Black Canyon (1927), and Pelts and Powder (1929), dealt with the romantic period of early exploration and settlement of the West. Alexander Maitland Stephen (1882-1942), in The Kingdom of the Sun (1927), spun a very romantic tale of the early days in British Columbia. But the three writers

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who were regarded as the leading exponents of this kind of western historical romance were Frederick Niven (1878-1944), "Jane Rolyat" (E. Jean McDougall) and Laura Goodman Salverson (b. 1890). Many of Frederick Niven's almost two score novels were published prior to 1920 and belong to an earlier section of this history; several of his novels of this inter-war period are set in Scotland and do not belong in the present context; but he does belong here by virtue of his trilogy of novels tracing the historical development of the Canadian prairies: The Flying Years (1935), Mine Inheritance (1940), and The Transplanted (1944). Based on a great amount of detailed historical research, these three novels are attempts to show the processes by which the inhabitants of the West developed from the primitive nomadic life of the Indians to the civilized and settled society of the early twentieth century. They are thus a most ambitious undertaking, and although they fail fully to realize their author's somewhat grandiose intentions they are probably the best historical novels yet produced of and in this area. Their strengths are their documentary accuracy, their liveliness, and their descriptive power: Niven has studied the sources, knows how to tell an anecdote, and has great skill in capturing the appearance and atmosphere of the prairie landscape. But Niven's thematic and documentary approach often gets in the way of his characterization: the characters frequently serve merely as pegs on which historical or thematic material is hung. And his novels are too loosely episodic: he is so anxious to work in all the incidents that his historical research has uncovered that he ignores the novelist's task of selection, arrangement, and development. For all this, his work stands well above the average level of Canadian historical romance: there is in his books a serious attempt to deal with things as they actually were and are, and some sense of style and form. Frederick Niven's name is still remembered, but that of "Jane Rolyat" (E. Jean McDougall) seems to have been completely forgotten. It is a legitimate piece of Canadian literary history, however, to record that in the early 1930's she was regarded as the chief hope of Canadian fiction. Her first novel, The Lily of Fort Garry (1930), was advertised by J. M. Dent and Sons as The Canadian Novel in the September 1930 issue of the Canadian Forum, and the London reader's enthusiastic assessment of the manuscript was printed in full. The concluding paragraph of the assessment ran as follows: "The book has genuine beauty and charm. . . . Miss Rolyat may easily develop into an accomplished writer of English prose. There is every possibility that she may become the first Canadian novelist of importance." The October issue of the Forum quoted S. Morgan Powell of the Montreal Daily Star as saying of the novel: "It would be difficult to pick out any emphatic indication that this is a first novel. Its literary quality rather stamps it as a work of one who is at any rate mistress of the art of writing. Its poetic qualities are an integral part of

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its appeal, and the sheer lyric beauty of much of the writing in no wise detracts from its power as a study of a historic period, as well as of the emotional reactions characteristic of that period." In June of 1933, Dent took a full-page advertisement in the Forum to announce Miss Rolyat's second novel, Wilderness Walls (1933). Wilderness Walls was announced as the first of a trilogy, in which Miss Rolyat had captured "the stillness and beauty of our own north country"; and excerpts were quoted from enthusiastic reviews in English newspapers. Canadian reviewers of this book were a little more cautious, but it had been given such a build-up that they did not dare to dismiss it outright. E. C. K(yte?) in Queen's Quarterly wrote that "The great Canadian novel is yet to be written. Until it arrives we can be glad if there are published no worse tales than Wilderness Walls. . . . As a contribution to Canadian fiction the book is noteworthy." Burns Martin, writing in the Dalhousie Review, found fault with the style of the novel but concluded warily that "if Miss Rolyat is a good critic of her own work, and is not afraid of labour, the next two volumes may be significant in Canadian fiction." L. A. MacKay, in the Forum, had much the same approach: "It is too much to ask that this book be re-written in a less flashy, inaccurate and fatiguing idiom; but one may hope in the remaining books of the trilogy to find a purer style that will give her real qualities freer play." The remaining books of the trilogy, incidentally, seem never to have appeared. The contemporary reader who, in the light of these assessments, goes back to The Lily of Fort Garry and Wilderness Walls hoping to discover forgotten masterpieces will be gravely disappointed. The first is not without merit. An historical romance of the Red River Settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, its basic stuff is a reasonably convincing account of the day-to-day life of the settlers. But this basic material is overlaid with two very romantic plots. The heroine, Margaret Moore, called the lily of Fort Garry because of her blonde beauty, has a father who is forever disappearing on mysterious journeys, and it transpires that he is looking for a long-lost brother who is reputed to have acquired great wealth; and the heroine falls in love with a handsome and arrogant half-breed, Roger MacLachlin, with whom she eventually goes off to live in the wilds. The novel does have some documentary value, and some passages of good description, but it fails to fuse realism and romance in its matter, and it fails to be consistent in its style. Miss Rolyat is far too prone to lapse into flowery phrases such as "a wild vanity palpitated through her." The overly romantic elements present to some degree in The Lily of Fort Garry are much more prominent in Wilderness Walls. This novel deals with the life of a Hudson's Bay Company post on the shores of Lake Huron in the 1860's. The hero, Vincent Reid, comes out from Montreal as a young apprentice-clerk, to discover that the chief factor is half-mad from grief for his dead wife and that his own predecessor as junior clerk, one Mclvor, has given

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up his job because he is reputed to have inherited great wealth. Out in the nearby woods one day Reid confronts and is attacked by a wild man dressed in Indian fashion, and he eventually finds that this supposed savage is Mclvor, who has murdered the child he has fathered by a local Indian girl and "gone native." This is the romantic overlay: underneath, it is only fair to say, there is a fairly solid account of Reid's routine work as a clerk, credible conversations and arguments about the future of Canada, and some exact description of the wilderness scenery. Again the failures are glaring inconsistencies in both matter and style. The astonishing thing about these books, as about those by Lily Adams Beck, is that reputable Canadian critics once took them seriously. Canadians in the twenties and thirties were so anxious to discover the great Canadian novel that they saw it in books which had no claim whatever to genuine literary distinction. At the same time they came very close to ignoring the few books, such as the novels of Grove and Callaghan, that did at least come within striking distance of greatness. The third historical novelist of the West worthy of separate mention, Laura Goodman Salverson, has specialized on one aspect of that area: its settlement by pioneers of Scandinavian, and especially Icelandic, stock. Her first novel, The Viking Heart (1923), should perhaps not be described as historical, since its action ends in World War I, shortly before the novel was written. There is a sense in which The Viking Heart might be considered as a realistic study of western life, and be grouped with the novels of Stead, Ostenso, and Grove. It deals in a realistic way with the hardships of the Icelandic pioneers; but, as Professor E. A. McCourt has convincingly argued, it is basically romantic in tone and outlook. Whereas in the novels of Grove there is a pervasive sense of doom, there is in Mrs. Salverson's novel, as McCourt puts it, "the comfortable assurance that everything is going to turn out all right in the end." McCourt's summary is a just one: "Although The Viking Heart is not, as has so often been claimed, a serious realistic treatment of Icelandic settlement in Manitoba, it is a fine romantic tale, written with much sympathy and tenderness and understanding." Mrs. Salverson's later novels did not live up to the promise of The Viking Heart. When Sparrows Fall (1925) is on a similar theme of pioneer hardships, set in the northern United States, but has little of the charm of its predecessor. In Lord of the Silver Dragon (1927) she went back to the days of Leif Ericson in an effort "to interpret the little known and greatly misunderstood character of the Norsemen," but the book is little more than an historical costume melodrama. Johann Lind (1928) is a third attempt to depict the lives of Scandinavian settlers, this time in the province of Saskatchewan, but it lacks clarity and unity. The Dove (1933) is an historical romance based on a seventeenth-century Icelandic saga which tells of a raid of Barbary corsairs on the south coast of the island, and of the captivity of the Icelanders in

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Algiers. The central character is a beautiful woman known as the dove because of her charity; she acts as a ministering angel to her fellow-slaves, but is so beautiful that a prince falls in love with her. The novel, in short, is a romance of the type beloved by the women's magazines. The Dark Weaver (1937) reverts to her favourite theme of Scandinavian settlement of the West and is on a much higher level of achievement, but Mrs. Salverson attempts to deal with too many characters and too many episodes, and the result is rather confusing. Black Lace (1938) is a mere pot-boiler about Louis XIV, his mistress and some pirates, but Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (1939), Mrs. Salverson's autobiography, is an authentic record of her own development and perhaps her finest single achievement apart from The Viking Heart. Historical romances dealing with areas of Canada other than Quebec and the prairies are rare, and not usually of much significance. Louis Arthur Cunningham wrote a few novels, including his first, Yvon Tremblay (1927), about the Acadian period of the Maritime provinces; John M. Elson's The Scarlet Sash (1925) is a romance of the old Niagara frontier district; and Miss C. H. MacGillivray (d. 1949) wrote inThe Shadow of Tradition (1927) a story of early days in Ontario's Glengarry County. The only writers in this group worthy of slightly more extensive notice are Mabel Dunham (18811957) and Else Porter Reed. Miss Dunham chose to write of the early nineteenth-century emigrations of the Dutch Mennonites from Pennsylvania to Waterloo County in Ontario. Her four novels, beginning with The Trail of the Conestoga in 1924 and including Towards Sodom (1927), The Trail of the King's Men (1931), and Kristli's Trees (1948), are based on extensive research and thus have some documentary value, but they are deficient in plot, form, and style. When Miss Dunham deserts historical fact for imaginative fiction, she frequently lapses into sentimentality. Mrs. Reed wrote only one novel, A Man Forbid (1935), but it is a quite powerful study of the effects on a small Nova Scotian community in the mid-nineteenth century of the arrival there of a mysterious negro sailor. Regional Idylls In quantity, though certainly not in quality, historical romances continued to dominate Canadian fiction during this twenty-year period; their nearest rivals in popularity were regional idylls, or novels of local colour and sentiment. I think that the term regional idyll is the most fitting phrase to apply to these novels, for they aim at portraying the life of a small area of Canada, usually of a rural or semi-rural area, in a way which stresses its beauty, its peculiar customs, its traditions and its aspirations. The emphasis is always on domesticity, the little events of everyday life, and the tone is predominantly optimistic. Trials and hardships are not completely ignored, but they are overcome or circumvented, and we are asked to believe that the world is

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essentially a good place in which such qualities as thrift, industry, and integrity will always, in the long run, triumph. The regional idyll had established itself in Canada well before World War I, and it steadily declined in importance during the period at present under review. A few of its survivors are, however, worthy of brief notice, and one of them, Mazo de la Roche, brought the form to its climax of popular fame and made her romantic version of life in rural Ontario current throughout much of the world. Between them, these regional idyllists covered most of Canada. Edith J. Archibald (1854-1934), in The Token (1930), sought to capture the quality of Cape Breton life in the late nineteenth century, stressing its Scottish customs and its religious devotion; Frank Parker Day (1881-1950), in Rockbound (1928) and John Paul's Rock (1932), produced two vigorous stories, the first of the harsh lives of fishermen off the Nova Scotia coast, and the second of an Indian banished by a crime to a remote rock in the interior of the province, where he ekes out a living from the wilderness and communes with his tribal gods; J. F. Herbin (1860-1923), in Jen of the Marshes (1921), attempted to portray the farm life and scenery of the Grand Pre district of Nova Scotia; and John Freeman, in This My Son (1923), and George Frederick Clarke in Chris in Canada (1925), The Magic Road (1925), and The Best One Thing (1926), gave us idealized pictures of life in rural New Brunswick. Rural Quebec provided the setting for Maurice B. Caron's The Cure of St. Michel (1925), Angus A. Graham's Napoleon Tremblay (1939), Vivian Parsons's Lucien (1938) and "V. V. Vinton'"s (Mrs. R. J. Dale's) To the Greater Glory (1939). The middle and far West of Canada, probably because of their recent settlement, received little attention from the writers of regional idylls. Ethel Chapman attempted a romance of Saskatchewan in The Homesteaders (1936), and Frank Parker Day produced a somewhat more realistic story of life in northern Manitoba in his River of Strangers (1926)—but it is worth noting that neither of these authors was a resident of the West. The only western native to produce novels of this type was Ethel Kirk Grayson, author of Willow Smoke (1928), a romance set in a small Saskatchewan town, Apples of the Moon (1933), a university story, and Fires in the Vine (1942), a family novel set in Ontario. The typical product of the Western imagination was either something much more adventurous than the idyll, or something much more sombrely realistic. The largest group of regional idylls came, as we might expect, from the populous province of Ontario. Apart from the novels of Mazo de la Roche, there were in this period Clara Rothwell Anderson's John Matheson (1923), Jessie L. Beattie's Hill Top (1935) and Three Measures (1938), Ethel Chapman's God's Green Country (1922) and With Flame of Freedom

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(1938), Fred Jacob's The Day before Yesterday (1925), Alexander Knox's Bride of Quietness (1933); also Savour of Salt (1927) by Florence Randal Livesay (1874-1953), and The Yellow Briar (1933) and Robert Harding (1938) by "Patrick Slater" (John Mitchell, 1882-1951). This group is not only the largest, it is probably also the best of the regional genre. Jessie L. Beattie's stories are honest, unpretentious, and accurate evocations of Ontario farm life; Fred Jacob (1882-1926) works into his study of an Ontario small town in the late years of the nineteenth century a good deal of the wit and satke which was to enliven his later Peevee (1928); Alexander Knox's novel has some excellent passages descriptive of the hills and streams of the upper Ottawa valley and a refreshingly simple and delicate love story. Perhaps best of all is Slater's Yellow Briar, a delightfully informal, semi-documentary and autobibgraphical story of Toronto and rural Ontario from roughly 1836 to 1865. It is a book replete with Irish humour and sentiment, accounts of pioneer social gatherings, and descriptions of the Ontario landscape: a rustic idyll without pretensions of any sort and thoroughly delightful. But the novelist of rural Ontario who by both the quality and the quantity of her production deserves pride of place is Mazo de la Roche (1879-1961). Some critics might question the wisdom of including her in this category, since there are elements in her work which suggest that she had a more ambitious intention than that of writing romantic idylls of rural life. But to attempt to discuss Mazo de la Roche as in any sense a social realist is to misconceive the whole temper of her work. Judged as a realist, she is almost pitifully vulnerable: of course rural Ontario life is not typically as she describes it in the Jalna series, nor in the early novels which preceded Jalna (1927). Miss de la Roche was from the outset a romantic writer who set out to communicate an imaginary world of her own creation, and who had the skill and patience to make the real world share her vision. This limits her achievement certainly, but it also defines it, as that of one of the leading popular novelists of her time. The romantic bent of Miss de la Roche's imagination was apparent from the very beginning of her career. One of her early stories, published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1915, was entitled "Buried Treasure" and is an amusing tale of three boys and an eccentric archaeologist who pretends to be a pirate and as such leads the boys to buried treasure in their own backyard. One of the old man's speeches might serve as the motto for almost all of Mazo de la Roche's writing: "We do what we can to keep a little glamour and gaiety in the world. Some folk would like to discipline it all away." Her first book, Explorers of the Dawn (1922), was a highly imaginative recreation of the lives of three children, whom she saw as living in a perpetual state of innocent wonder and freedom. Thus early was established her ruling idea: that of the superiority of the primitive and the instinctive over the civilized and

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conventional. Her heroes, whether they be children, adolescents, or old men and women, are those who have managed to retain a fresh, instinctive, passionate response towards life. The romantic emphasis was continued in Miss de la Roche's early novels, Possession (1923) and Delight (1926). Possession is the story of Derek Vale's passionate involvement with an Indian girl in the fruit belt of Ontario, and it romanticizes sex as a force which is irresistible and transforms the rather prosaic southern Ontario landscape into a kind of primitive paradise. Delight has as its theme the impingement of instinctive freedom and sensuousness upon a conventional society. The heroine, Delight Mainprize, is described as "a creature of instincts, emotions, not much more developed intellectually than the soft-eyed Jersey in the byre, nor the wood-pigeon that called upon the cedars." And it is this creature of instinct whom her creator allows to triumph, after the grim moral matrons of the small Ontario town have done their best to destroy her. Delight, in fact, illustrates most of the qualities, good and bad, that were to mark all of Mazo de la Roche's work as a novelist. It is packed with varied, interesting, and passionate characters, characters who are a little larger than life and are the products of romantic exaggeration rather than realistic observation. It is a succession of exciting, unexpected episodes which seem to follow one another haphazardly but actually are grouped around three major crises to form a pattern of development. The novel is given additional continuity by the employment of thematic symbols, the chief of which are the crows, symbolizing the free life and mockery of conventional values which Delight herself stands for. Birds, and other wild creatures, play a large part in this novel: Miss de la Roche takes pleasure in describing them, and almost all her similes and metaphors relate to them. But Delight, for all its liveliness, has many deficiencies: it has little psychological depth; its philosophy of primitivism is not deeply considered; it has no claim to social realism; its style is frequently coy and artificial. It is, in short, a romantic tale whose chief value is as entertainment for an idle afternoon. But to provide entertainment for millions, as Miss de la Roche has done, is no mean achievement. One of the most dramatic events in the literary history of Canada between the wars was the 1927 award of the Atlantic Monthly's $10,000 prize to Miss de la Roche's Jalna as the best novel submitted for its contest. Toronto, which has always yearned, to be the literary centre of Canada, for once had some basis for the claim, and proceeded to make the most of it. The following account of the civic celebrations, taken entire from the Canadian Bookman of May 1927, is offered as a document in Canadian literary history: On the occasion of the complimentary banquet presentation to Mazo de la Roche, Toronto, in the civic sense, justified itself besides honoring a clever

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daughter, for the city demonstrated that laurels won in the mental arena were deemed not less worthy of recognition than those concerned with physical prowess. There have been a series of events in which Toronto organizations have paid tribute to the talented author upon her winning of the "Atlantic Monthly's" $10,000 prize with her novel "Jalna," the latest being the dinner at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto on May 14th, but the most significant and most elaborate was at the Queen's Hotel, Toronto, on Saturday, May 7th, under the auspices of the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Authors Association. In proposing the toast, "Our Guest of Honor," Dr. Charles G. D. Roberts spoke of the honor which the gifted young author had brought not only to her native city but to all Canadian writers. Miss de la Roche's simple response delighted everyone. She recalled that it was at the Queen's Hotel that she had eaten her first hotel dinner at the tender age of six. On that occasion she had been so awed and charmed by the splendid gentleman in evening dress, who pulled out her chair and showered attentions upon her throughout the meal, that, when leaving, she had seized him by the hand and thanked him. Miss de la Roche said she found that winning a prize was a very wonderful experience, but one that required perfect mental balance. When his Worship, Mayor Thomas Foster, had presented her with a handsome silver tea service, Miss de la Roche's words were few because, she said, her heart was very full. In proposing the toast to "The Arts in Education," Sir Robert Falconer, President of the University of Toronto, said that he had been struck by the simplicity and sincerity of Miss de la Roche's words on this occasion, and that he had noticed these same qualities in the first instalment of "Jalna"; they were the two essential qualities of all great art. The speaker drew attention to Canada's geographical position in the very centre of the civilized world, and pointed out that this author's achievement was all the more impressive because she had been measured with the best of other countries. Speaking of universities, he said that these institutions were not only producing a creative class but another very necessary class of appreciative readers and critics. In his reply, Premier Ferguson outlined what had been done to raise the general standard of school pupils in Ontario. He also appealed to Canadian authors to contribute stories woven around Canada and things Canadian in this Jubilee year. Professor Pelham Edgar, proposing a toast to "Canadian Authors," expressed the opinion that Canada was on the verge of great intellectual prosperity. Mrs. John Garvin (Katherine Hale), Miss Marshall Saunders and Hon. Mr. Justice W. R. Riddell replied. Mrs. Garvin recalled her schoolgirl friendship with Mazo de la Roche and the latter's early literary successes, while Miss Saunders made witty remarks about many of those present. Hon. Mr. Justice Riddell warmly congratulated Miss de la Roche and concluded by saying that as 1837 had laid the foundation of the present "Commonwealth of Nations," it was up to the Canadian authors to lay the foundation for the greater development of a literature Canadian in subject and sentiment. In addition to the tea service from the City, Miss de la Roche received a beautiful basket of flowers from the Canadian Literature Club of Toronto. During the evening music was provided by Cassar George Finn, pianist, and Mrs. Fenton Box, soloist, accompanied by Mr. D'Alton McLaughlin. Among the distinguished guests was Bliss Carman, who, when his presence was made known, received a flattering welcome.

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Jalna is by now so well known that it would be redundant to attempt a fullscale analysis of it. It is far from being a great novel, in the strict sense of that phrase, but it is still a very entertaining one. What impresses us most about it is its liveliness, especially the liveliness of its characters. Miss de la Roche had learnt from Dickens how to fix a character in our minds by attaching to it a few strong identifying gestures, mannerisms, or habits of speech. Almost equally impressive is the way in which the old house which gives the book its name, and the luxuriant gardens and fields and woods which surround the house, are made so real a presence. The plot is ingenious and continuously exciting, and the style, if a little too precious for our austere modern taste, is fresh and beguiling. Miss de la Roche is prodigal with metaphors: a bird fills the air with its rich throaty notes, "tossing them on to the bright sunshine like ringing coins"; and young trees stand in snowy rows "like expectant young girls awaiting their first communion." Writing of this sort is apt to sound offensive to contemporary ears, but if the style of Jalna has tarnished, its chief glory—the character of Grandmother Whiteoak-— remains. Blunt, coarse, greedy, rude, extravagant, sensual and selfish, she dominates the family and earns the reader's grudging affection by her immense vitality, her insatiable appetite for experience. Jalna, of course, was so popular that its author had no choice but to write its sequel: The Whiteoaks of Jalna (1929). And having written one successful sequel, more and still more were demanded of her, until there were eventually sixteen novels in the series. But the indefatigable Mazo de la Roche found tune to write a dozen books outside the series: her love of animals found expression in Portrait of a Dog (1930) and in the short stories collected in The Sacred Bullock (1939); her fondness for children led her to write the juveniles Lark Ascending (1932), Beside a Norman Tower (1934), The Very House (1937), and The Story of Lambert (1955); and in Growth of a Man (1938), The Two Saplings (1942) and A Boy in the House (1952) she produced novels of Ontario rural life outside the Jalna setting. She also wrote some one-act plays, some historical studies, and her autobiography, Ringing the Changes (1957). All in all, it was a remarkably productive career, and marked the apogee in the history of the regional idyll in Canadian fiction. Some Minor Forms Before turning from romance to the beginnings of realistic Canadian fiction in this inter-war period, we should glance at the development of three minor categories of fiction: stories for younger readers, humorous novels, and the short story. Juvenile literature in Canada had had a great deal of success in the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially in the work of Ralph Connor,

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L. M. Montgomery, and Marshall Saunders. The period 1920 to 1940, however, was relatively barren in this respect. The Reverend Frank Baird (18701951) wrote two quite good adventure stories for boys: Rob McNabb (1923) and Parson John of the Labrador (1924). Similar tales of outdoor adventure were written by Cameron Blake (Set Stormy, 1931, and Only Men on Board, 1933) and Charles Clay (Young Voyageur, 1938, and Muskrat Man, 1946). Adventure stories for girls were attempted by Muriel Denison (Susannah, a Little Girl with the Mounties, 1936 and Susannah of the Yukon, 1937) and Grace Leonard (The Canadian Family Robinson, 1935.) Perhaps the most successful writer for girls in the period, apart from Mazo de la Roche, was Marjorie MacMurchy (d. 1938), whose The Child's House (1923) and The Longest Way Round (1937) are sensitive evocations of the moods and fancies of small children, written in a clear and simple style. There was no humorous writer who even approached the achievement of Stephen Leacock in the preceding period. The chief of the small and mediocre group was Madge Macbeth, who wrote two satirical novels about Ottawa and the Canadian Parliament under the pseudonym of "Gilbert Knox." Her The Land of Afternoon (1924) and The Kinder Bees (1935) both occasionally land telling blows on the targets of our social pretensions and hypocrisies, our political compromises and corruptions, but they both frequently veer off into farce on the one hand or melodrama on the other. They lack the clearly articulated positive values which must underlie first-rate satire, and they exaggerate the vices they attack to the point of incredibility. A similar inconsistency and uncertainty bedevils the two comic novels by J. E. Middleton (18721960), Green Plush (1932) and The Clever Ones (1936). Both purport to be satires on Toronto business methods, but their author seems unable to decide whether he really approves or disapproves of the respectable, acquisitive life of that city. Other satires on Toronto (an obvious butt) were Fred Jacob's Peevee (1928), Leslie Bishop's The Paper Kingdom (1936) and Francis Pollock's Jupiter Eight (1936). The central character of Peevee is Pierre Vincent Macready, a budding Canadian writer who is diverted into journalism and politics and dies without fulfilling his early promise. The satire at the expense of Canadian literary self-consciousness, social hypocrisy, religious insincerity, and political corruption is often quite shrewd, but its effect is blurred by the multiplicity of characters and sub-plots. The novel is best in its early pages: as it proceeds it grows increasingly diffuse and directionless. The Paper Kingdom deals with an immigrant Irishman's attempt to establish a monthly literary magazine, The New Conquest, in Toronto. This theme might have formed the basis for a strong satirical or realistic novel, but Bishop's effort is merely farcical. There is a little incidental satire at the expense of Toronto's materialism and pretentiousness, but its edge is blunted by the incredibility of

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almost all the events and characters. Jupiter Eight is the best satire of the group. Francis Pollock, an Ontario bee-keeper, had published in 1935 an unusually sophisticated version of the regional idyll in Bitter Honey, a curious book in which the parts descriptive of the Ontario countryside and of the routine of bee-keeping are very well done but in which the characters are stereotyped and the plot is overly involved. Jupiter Eight is a good if a trifle indeterminate satirical novel about the artistic pretensions of Toronto residents. The tone throughout is that of light raillery, and it is well sustained. The title refers to a sports car, the symbol of the aggressive, materialistic, death-dealing society which Pollock conceives Toronto really to be. The last satire worth noting was set in British Columbia: Magnus Pyke's Go West, Young Man, Go West (1930). The story of a young English immigrant, it begins as a fairly realistic, sceptical study of Canadian society, but deteriorates into inconsequential farce. The short story fared much better than humour in this period, but here as in the novel the great bulk of the production was romantic in tone and emphasis. Some good short stories of contemporary life appeared in the pages of the Canadian Forum, especially by J. D. Robins, Raymond Knister, J. R. Fisher, Mary Quayle Innis, and Luella Bruce; when Queen's Quarterly began to print short stories in 1931 it secured some excellent ones from Frederick Philip Grove, Leslie Gordon Barnard and, above all, from Sinclair Ross; and during the depression of the thirties there were some powerful if too obviously propagandist stories in such left-wing magazines as the New Frontier and Masses. The great bulk of magazine stories, however, as printed in quantity during these two decades in Maclean's and the Canadian Magazine, were purely escapist efforts about the Far North, true love and domestic bliss. Books of short stories were rare in the period and, with a few conspicuous exceptions, of low quality. Their generally escapist quality is suggested by the popularity of stories about the old days in rural Quebec: of some twenty-five books of stories published between 1920 and 1940, at least six were collections of legends of French Canada: James E. LeRossignol's The Beauport Road (1928), The Flying Canoe (1929) and The Habitant-Merchant (1939); Duncan Campbell Scott's The Witching of Elspie (1923), P. A. W. Wallace's Baptiste Larocque (1923), and Legends of French Canada (1931) by the Reverend E. C. Woodley (1878-1955). Closely allied to these stories were nostalgic tales of the Maritime Provinces, as in Old Province Tales (1924) of Archibald MacMechan (1862-1933) and Stories of the Land of Evangeline (1923) by Grace McLeod Rogers (1865-1958). Even when the writers chose contemporary life as their subject, they usually turned it into sentimentality, farce, or melodrama. These three elements are the chief ingredients, for example, in P. A. W. Wallace's The Twist and Other Stories (1923) and M. Eugenie Perry's The Girl in the Silk Dress and Other Stories (1931).

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There were only about five reputable books of short stories produced in Canada in this period: Morley Callaghan's A Native Argosy (1929) and Now That April's Here (1936), Jessie G. Sime's Sister Woman (1920), Leslie Gordon Barnard's One Generation Away (1931) and Mazo de la Roche's The Sacred Bullock (1939). Perhaps we should add to this list Raymond Knister's anthology, Canadian Short Stories (1928), which gathered together some of the best stories which had appeared hi the magazines up to that time. The stories of Morley Callaghan (b. 1903) are by far the best of the group. Profiting from the example of three writers who were transforming the short story in English while he was a student at Toronto—Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest Hemingway—Callaghan looked closely at the people about him, and in a simple, stripped, suggestive prose style recorded the small triumphs and tragedies of their ordinary lives. As Callaghan himself has put it, "I try to be honest, to give an insight or illumination of the character, to place the character in life, to give a higher kind of truth to it [the story] in terms of my own emotion for the character." This emotion is seldom a merely simple or straightforward one: Callaghan's stories usually intrigue us by their subtle combination of tenderness and irony, faith and scepticism. His stories are good by any standards, but by comparison with most of the romantic tales being spun in Canada in the twenties they stand out like pyramids in the desert. Leslie Gordon Barnard's stories have not the astringency of Callaghan's, nor their compressed style, but they are characteristically gentle, quiet, and restrained, fragments of remembered experience held up, in Conrad's phrase, "in the light of a sincere mood." Only very occasionally does the author's detached objectivity give way to sentimentality. The same flaw weakens some of the stories in Sister Woman by Jessie G. Sime (b. 1880). This is a book of short stories about women, mostly working-class immigrants to Canada, and their relations with their lovers and husbands. The stories all seem to be modelled on Flaubert's "Un Cceur Simple"—they are tender, wistful, and ironic. The point of view is that of "the new woman," wanting to be free by virtue of earning her own living, but also wanting a man to love and be loved by. Many of the sexual relationships described are unconventional, but Miss Sime is careful not to condemn them. She does not, however, consistently maintain Flaubert's objectivity or irony. Furthermore, the stories are all so similar that, read consecutively in book form, they grow monotonous. Miss Sime, a Scotswoman who settled in Montreal during World War I and lived there until 1945, was also one of the pioneers in introducing the realistic novel to Canada. Her Our Little Life (1921) was the first novel to deal fully and accurately with the contemporary life of a Canadian city. This novel, set in Montreal during the latter years of World War I, applies the rather grey,

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drab photographic realism of George Gissing's Demos or Arnold Bennett's Old Wives' Tale to the lower middle class life of Montreal. The main characters are a middle-aged seamstress, Katie McGee, and a young English immigrant and would-be writer, Robert Fulton. This queerly assorted pair live in the same run-down apartment house, and a great friendship, with curious sexual undertones, develops between them. Fulton is working as a clerk in a store and writing a book on Canada which he reads to Miss McGee in the evenings. They occasionally go out to a concert or a lecture, but most of the time their life is a boring routine enlivened only by their evenings together. At the end of the book, Fulton completes his book and dies in the 'flu epidemic of 1918. The novel combines drab urban realism with the immigrant theme which was to become so popular in Canadian novels of the twenties and thirties: Fulton's book is a study of the immigrant and of the effect of Canada upon him. Our Little Life strikes one as a terribly honest book, but it is too long and uneventful, the main characters are a little too sweet to be wholesome, and the whole story has a tone of patient wistfulness which eventually becomes cloying. But the historical importance of the novel, as the first sustained effort at urban realism in Canadian fiction, cannot be denied. Realistic Fiction Realism, and especially urban realism, was a very unusual commodity in Canadian fiction between the wars. Such realism as there was developed almost exclusively on the prairies, where there was a distinctive pattern of life which could be clearly differentiated from that of Europe and even from that of the United States, and where the conditions of pioneer life were so forbidding that it was almost impossible to idyllicize them. It was prairie writers such as Robert J. C. Stead (1880-1959), Martha Ostenso (b. 1900), and above all Frederick Philip Grove (1871-1948) who began the systematic transformation of Canadian fiction from romance to realism. R. J. C. Stead had begun his career as a novelist during World War I, but it was with Neighbours (1922), The Smoking Flax (1924), and especially Grain (1926) that he really established his claim to be the pioneer realist of Canadian rural life. Neighbours is perhaps closer to being a regional idyll of the West than a truly realistic novel, although even in it there are detailed descriptions of actual pioneer processes and hardships which give it more substance than we usually find in the idyll. It is a pleasant, humorous novel about two young men and their sisters who move out from a small Ontario village to neighbouring homesteads on the prairie near Regina. Jack Lane and his sister Jean form one household, Frank Hall and his sister Marjorie the other, but Jack is in love with Marjorie and Frank with Jean, and the romantic side of the plot is provided by the vicissitudes of these love affairs and the eventual marriages

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of the two couples. Forming the backdrop for this romantic action, however, is the arduous business of finding desirable land and establishing a homestead upon it, and of breaking the soil and raising the first crops. The prairie landscape is described accurately if a trifle romantically, and the few settlers on adjoining properties are characterized distinctly and wittily. As in almost all Canadian novels of this period, there is some discussion of Canada's search for identity, of its desire to distinguish itself from the United Kingdom on the one hand and from the United States on the other. On the whole, the novel is unpretentious and charming. The Smoking Flax (1924) introduces us to the Stake family, who were also to appear in Grain. Cal Beach, a young eastern university graduate, goes out West in search of improved health, taking with him his small nephew, Reed, the illegitimate son of his deceased sister. He finds work on the Stake farm, and falls in love with the daughter of his employer, Minnie Stake. By a glaring coincidence, the eldest Stake son, Jackson, turns out to be the father of Reed, and causes a good deal of trouble until he is killed by a fall from a train. The novel ends happily with the marriage of Cal and Minnie. Thus baldly summarized, the novel sounds like a romantic melodrama. The fact is, however, that for all its conventionality of plot the novel is convincing. Like Neighbours it gives us many descriptions of farming operations, makes credible most of its rural characters, and provides documentation of the early social life of the West. Grain, however, is a much more consistently realistic novel than either Neighbours or The Smoking Flax. Its central character was a minor character in the latter novel—Gander Stake, the villainous Jackson's younger and more dependable brother. The plot of Grain traverses some of the same ground covered in The Smoking Flax—the marriage of Cal and Minnie occurs near the end of Grain—but it goes farther back, to the birth of Gander in 1896. The early part of the novel is written in the light, chatty, humorous style of Neighbours, and deals in an interesting and lively way with the ordinary incidents of a boy's life on the prairie: his early experiences as a schoolboy, hunter, harvester, and farm hand, and the first stirrings of sex. When war breaks out in 1914, however, the tone of the book grows much more serious. Gander is shy, and the thought of being herded together with scores of other men in barracks terrifies him. He determines to evade military service, and tries to find refuge in heavy work, but he is ill at ease and draws more and more into himself. This part of the novel, carefully analysing Gander's motives and state of mind, is extremely well written. The last section of the novel, however, dealing with the early post-war years, is less satisfactory: the plot concerning Jackson Stake, Cal and Reed Beach, and Minnie Stake, intrudes on Gander's story, and makes the last chapters unnecessarily difficult to follow.

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Each of these novels by Stead has obvious faults, but together they do give us a basically accurate picture of prairie life in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In some ways the picture is more accurate than that which emerges from Grove's novels: Stead deals with the lighter moments of prairie life, such as hunting, dancing, and baseball playing, which Grove almost totally ignores. Grove's novels, however, have a power and consistency which Stead's lack. With Martha Ostenso we encounter an example of that problem which so often confronts the Canadian literary historian: is the author properly considered a Canadian? For Martha Ostenso was born in Norway, grew up in Minnesota and North Dakota, and lived in Manitoba only from 1915 to 1921, when she left for permanent residence in the United States. The answer is, I think, that Martha Ostenso is an American novelist, but that her first novel, Wild Geese, set in Manitoba and the product of her Manitoba experiences, is a Canadian novel. Wild Geese, which its author originally entitled "The Passionate Flight," received the prize of $13,500 offered by the Pictorial Review, the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, and Dodd, Mead and Company, for the best first novel by a North American author; 1,389 novels were reported to have been submitted for the competition. The novel is set in a remote pioneer district of Manitoba. The new young schoolmistress, Lind Archer, arrives in the spring and becomes a boarder with the family of Caleb Gore, a flax farmer. The family consists of Caleb and his wife Amelia, their two daughters Judith and Ellen, and their two sons Charlie and Martin. Caleb is a tyrannical husband and father, who keeps his wife in subjection by threatening to reveal "a dreadful secret" about her former life: the fact that she had an illegitimate son, Mark Jordan. Various neighbours play minor roles in the story, but the main lines of the plot follow the relationship between Lind Archer and Mark Jordan, Judith and Sven Sandbo, and Caleb and Amelia. At the end of the novel, Amelia is released from Caleb's tyranny when he dies fighting a fire in his flax crop, and the two young couples are married. Although the novel thus has a modified happy ending, its prevailing tone is sombre in the extreme. The primitive characters and their primitive setting are described powerfully and vividly, and the atmosphere is one of relentless tragic pressure. The unities of time, place, and action are scrupulously observed: the time is a single summer season, between the arrival and departure of the wild geese; the setting is confined to the flax farm and its immediate environment; and the action concerns almost exclusively the members of a single family. The physical appearance of the characters, the farmhouse, and the landscape are described in great detail, and the three elements are fused into a single amalgam of harsh power. Martha Ostenso's later novels—The Dark Dawn (1926), The Mad Carews

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(1927), The Stone Field (1937) and many others—were almost all set in the northern United States, and were more or less unsuccessful attempts to repeat her own achievement in Wild Geese. But Wild Geese itself is the single most consistent piece of western realism to appear before the novels of Frederick Philip Grove, and has a niche of its own in the history of this phase of our literary development. Frederick Philip Grove Frederick Philip Grove would have been the first in time as well as the first in quality among the prairie realists if his first novels had been published when they were written. He would, indeed, have been the pioneer realist in North America, pre-dating Theodore Dreiser whom he in many ways resembles. For Grove tells us in his autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), that he wrote his first novels in the 1890's, that between 1892 and 1912 he had written no less than twelve of them, but that they were all consistently rejected by publishers until the publication of Settlers of the Marsh in 1925. As the novels were, in their original manuscript versions, very long, and written in longhand on both sides of the paper, it is not surprising that they were rejected. As a result of assiduous and imaginative research by Professor D. O. Spettigue—see his FPG: The European Years (1973)—the version of Grove's early life which he gave us in his two semi- or pseudo-autobiographical books, A Search for America (1927) and In Search of Myself (1946), can now be corrected. Rather than being brought up in Sweden, Grove was brought up in eastern Germany, and his real name was Felix Paul Greve. His birth-date was not 1871 or 1872, but 1879. He did indeed, however, attend school in Hamburg and university in Bonn and Munich, and he was a young writer of considerable promise and not insignificant achievement before coming to America around 1909. He had published novels, poetry, and plays, and in particular had been a prolific translator of English, French, and Spanish books into German. He was especially interested in Oscar Wilde, translating several of his works as well as writing several pamphlets about his life and work. His emigration and change of name were apparently motivated by the facts that he had been convicted and jailed for fraud in Bonn in 1903, and had subsequently got into further financial and personal difficulties. He disappeared from Germany in 1909, and all the German biographical dictionaries give this as his date of death. Presumably he emigrated to America in that year. We are not yet aware of his activities between 1909 and 1912, but from 1912 to 1929 he lived in Manitoba as a schoolteacher in small towns, and from 1929 to 1948 lived in Ontario, where he owned a small farm near Simcoe. Grove was thus almost ideally equipped to become the chronicler of prairie settlement. Unlike Stead and Ostenso, both of whom had grown up in the Midwest, Grove knew something

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of other places, and so was able to see prairie life in perspective; as a young man in Europe he had read widely and had met many of the European writers of the late nineteenth century; his university training, which was mainly in the field of archaeology, provided him with scientific and historical background and enabled him to consider the processes of pioneer life in the context of world history and prehistory; and his many years of experience as a smalltown schoolteacher gave him the necessary personal knowledge of midwestern society. Grove's writing career, as we have seen, extended over half a century, but his books were published in the last twenty-five years of his life. Between 1922 and 1947 he published twelve books, including the three volumes of essays Over Prairie Trails (1922), The Turn of the Year (1923), and It Needs to be Said (1929), his autobiography In Search of Myself, and eight novels: Settlers of the Marsh (1925), A Search for America (1927), Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life (1930), Fruits of the Earth (1933), Two Generations (1939), The Master of the Mill (1944), and Consider Her Ways (1947). In addition, he published half a dozen short stories, mainly in Queen's Quarterly, three poems in the Canadian Forum, several autobiographical essays, and a number of articles on literature and on education. Some critics would give pride of place among Grove's productions to his essays, especially to those contained in Over Prairie Trails and The Turn of the Year. The primary interest of these books lies in Grove's effort to capture the spirit of the northwestern climate and landscape, and to record with accurate detail and in exact tone the varied manifestations of nature's activity. His success in catching this spirit, its curious combination of hostility and friendliness, of starkness and fragile beauty, is remarkable. There is no doubt that he was thoroughly at home in this kind of writing, perhaps more at home than he was in the novel. The style of the essays has fewer lapses into pomposity, the manner is easier and more assured, the load of philosophical commentary is carried more lightly. The passages of pure description contained in these essays are the finest writing Grove ever produced, packed as they are with exactly observed details and with phrases and images that are tremendously evocative. But on the whole, for all the merits of these essays, I should rank them below Grove's prairie novels. The novels may not achieve their aim so completely, but their aim is considerably higher. Grove's autobiography, In Search of Myself, is also a fine book that may outlast his novels. Although Grove has to some extent fictionalized his early life in Europe, he is uncompromising in his determination to record the truth of his Canadian experiences, and he sets down the record of his strange and often tragic career as a writer in Canada with great candour. He spares neither himself nor his fellows; the result is that he and they emerge from the page as living human beings, compounds of good and evil, wisdom and weakness. His candour may have offended some, but his honesty must impress all. In Search

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of Myself is in many ways a painful book, but it will survive as a record of unusual but credible personal adventures, as a document shedding light upon the development of North American society, as a detailed and convincing account of the special difficulties which beset the artist in a pioneer community. It is by his novels, however, and especially by his five prairie novels, that Grove's status will probably be judged. The three non-prairie novels—Two Generations, which is a chronicle of Ontario farm life in the early decades of this century, The Master of the Mill, which traces the fortune of a flour-mill and its owners from the 1890's to the 1930's, and Consider Her Ways, a satirical fantasy in which comments are made on North American society by means of the behaviour and discoveries of an invading colony of South American ants—each has its merits, but they do not have the sustained power of the prairie group. Two Generations is the most successful attempt yet made in fiction to capture the apparently elusive nature of Ontario rural life, it embodies one of Grove's favourite themes of the necessary antagonism between fathers and sons, and it is satisfying in structure and style, but it strikes us as the novel of an outsider whereas the prairie novels are unmistakably the products of an insider. The Master of the Mill is technically the most ambitious of Grove's novels, making use of temporal discontinuity, multiple points of view, and a technique closely resembling stream of consciousness; it is also his most thorough-going attempt at political and sociological analysis and commentary, concerning itself with the problems of labour and management and with the effect of the machine upon human society; but the characters are often obscure, the plot is marred by touches of melodrama, and the total effect is one of some confusion. Consider Her Ways is a clever and disturbing book. In the ants' secure conviction that they are the very apex of creation, Grove mocks at human pride in making the same assumption; the account of a slave-holding tribe of ants is used to satirize capitalism and its by-products, imperialism and war; another tribe has a peculiar caste of creatures which have obvious, and unflattering, resemblances to authors and critics; and masses of ants die in their frantic efforts to acquire "the scent of royal favour." All this is clever; the book is also erudite, full of scientific information about ants, their species, and their ways. But this clever satire, on one reader at least, has the opposite effect of that intended: it makes me rally to man's defence against the cold, superior, all-wise probing of the ants' sharp poisonous gasters. The five prairie novels are more fully satisfying than any of these. Settlers of the Marsh, the first to be published but not the first to be written, suffers somewhat from the fact that it is, in Grove's phrase, "a garbled extract" from a much longer work projected in three volumes under the general title of "Pioneers." Especially in the first half of the book there are many scenes and sentences which trail off into a row of dots, presumably indicating ruthless abridgement. A few of the episodes, moreover, hover on the verge of melo-

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drama, and there are some improbabilities in the relations of the three main characters, the shy young farmer Niels Lindstedt, the neurotically virginal Ellen, and the exuberantly lusty Clara. But the processes of homesteading in the bush country of northern Manitoba, and the landscape of that region, are described with brilliant fidelity, and in general the psychological analysis of Niels's motives is acute and profound. Over the whole novel broods Grove's conception of tragic inevitability, of human behaviour controlled by forces which man himself cannot comprehend; Niels is "a leaf borne along in the wind . . . a fragment swept away by torrents." This was the first novel to introduce into Canada the naturalism which, finding its chief source in Emile Zola, spread over the whole Western world in the late decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. A Search for America, once regarded as a largely autobiographical novel, is now regarded as preponderantly fictional and imaginative. It records the efforts of one Phil Branden, a European immigrant, to come to terms with North American civilization. In its early pages, Grove describes the Toronto restaurant in which Branden obtained his first job, his activities as an itinerant book salesman in the eastern United States, and his short-lived period of employment in a midwestern furniture factory; but the bulk of the book is concerned with his experiences as a hobo in the Midwest. Grove has many perceptive comments on the plight of the immigrant, and on the nature of American society. The novel is in the picaresque tradition, and is thus a succession of lively episodes, unified to some extent by the omnipresence of its hero, Phil Branden, and by Grove's deterministic philosophy of life. Its chief strength, however, is in the vivid details of its descriptions of persons, places, and things: its panoramic sweep is frequently interrupted by close-up shots of an old man's face, the interior of a restaurant kitchen, the buildings of a prairie farm. A Search for America was Grove's most popular novel, but it lacks the concentration of his best. The choice of his best novel must rest among the three remaining items in the prairie series: Our Daily Bread, The Yoke of Life, and Fruits of the Earth. These three novels, all set wholly in the rural West and each concentrating on a small group of characters in a restricted area of time and space, admirably complement one another. Our Daily Bread is primarily the story of an old man who, having built up his farm and established his family, sees them both gradually disintegrate; The Yoke of Life is the story of a youth who struggles futilely to establish himself and dies before he has accomplished anything; and Fruits of the Earth is the story of a man's middle years, when he is establishing himself but is beginning to see that his establishment cannot long endure. All of the novels have weaknesses, especially a certain cumbersomeness of style and structure, but they all have great strengths: characters who are strong-willed and yet who cannot withstand the corrosive acid of

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time and the bleak indifference of nature; plots which confine themselves almost exclusively to events which are representative of the processes of life in a pioneer community; and settings which are at once true to the realities of the western landscape and symbolic of Grove's conception of nature's indifference to human aspirations. Frederick Philip Grove, vulnerable as he is to certain sophisticated types of criticism, is the one novelist of this period in Canada who has a thoroughly worked out and consistent philosophy and a technique which is fully adapted to his intentions. In a passage of his autobiography describing the effect upon him of a song heard from the lips of some Kirghiz herdsmen, Grove wrote: "It was a vast, melancholy utterance, cadenced within a few octaves of the bass register, as if the landscape as such had assumed a voice: full of an almost inarticulate realization of man's forlorn position in the face of a hostile barrenness of nature, and yet full, also, of a stubborn, if perhaps only inchoate assertion of man's dignity below his gods." This is an apt description of Grove's own prairie novels. They portray man in conflict with a forbidding land and a forbidding climate, in conflict with his own inchoate impulses and with the often contrary impulses of his fellows, and in conflict always with time which quickly eats away that which he builds; and yet man retains his dignity even in defeat. Technically, Grove's novels embody the strengths and the weaknesses of that school of naturalists who dominated the European and American novel from roughly 1880 to 1914. Like the novels of Zola and Dreiser and Hamsun, Grove's have strength and solidity, present masses of accurate sociological detail, and embody in plain prose a deterministic view of human character; but like those novels, too, they are somewhat deficient in flexibility and subtlety, in grace and wit. They are perhaps rough hewn, but they are hewn from granite. Some Minor Realists By the time of the publication of Fruits of the Earth in 1933, the school of prairie realism had largely lost its momentum. Stead had given up writing to confine his attention to his duties in the civil service, Martha Ostenso had moved to the United States, and Grove had moved to Ontario. Occasional realistic novels have since appeared from the prairie region—one thinks, for example, of the sombre and strange Think of the Earth (1936) by Bertram Brooker (1888-1955), John Herries McCulloch's Dark Acres (1935), a rather odd combination of realism and romance concerning English immigrants on an Alberta farm in the early thirties, and Wilfred Eggleston's The High Plains (1938), which similarly combines authentic documentary material with a somewhat melodramatic plot—but no other novelist has sought in any systematic way to chronicle the prairie way of life. Perhaps this is because by 1930 the pioneer process had virtually ended, and the life

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of the prairie farmer and small town resident had settled into a routine which was not markedly different from that in other parts of Canada and the United States. This group of prairie realists, however, did while it lasted constitute something more nearly approaching a school than did any other Canadian novelists of this period. Realistic accounts of rural and urban life in other parts of Canada were sporadic and intermittent. The Maritime Provinces, perhaps because their culture is so nostalgic, produced almost nothing except historical romances and regional idylls. The only partial exception was "Pierre Coalfleet" (Frank C. Davison, 1893-1944?), a native of Hantsport, N.S., a graduate of McGill and Harvard, and a journalist and international civil servant who is believed to have been killed during World War II while working for the French resistance movement. Davison published four novels under his pseudonym of Pierre Coalfleet: Sidonie (1921), Solo (1924), The Hare and the Tortoise (1926) and Meanwhile (1927). The only one of these that is really significant is Solo. Sidonie is set in London, and is the story of a woman of many lovers: it is a modern Moll Flanders prettified for the circulating library trade. The Hare and the Tortoise is a novel of Alberta farm life written in a totally inappropriate style, making a western ranch sound like a large English country estate. Meanwhile is better than either of these, though it too suffers from some superficiality. Probably autobiographical in basis, it is the story of a young Harvard-trained dilettante who dreams of becoming a great painter or writer but ultimately decides that his talent is only sufficient for the role of an advertising illustrator. Solo is also presumably autobiographical, and is more consistent in its realism. The first part of the novel, dealing with the hero's boyhood in a small Nova Scotia village, is detailed and convincing; the latter part, dealing with the young man's adventures as a sailor, his refusal to enlist in World War I, and his years of poverty and illness in Paris as a struggling young pianist, often becomes either melodramatic or sentimental. Apart from Jessie G. Sime's Our Little Life, there were no realistic novels set in the province of Quebec during this period. The poetic movement which developed in Montreal in the twenties had, rather curiously, no counterpart in fiction. It was not until the 1950's in the later novels of Callaghan, the novels of Mordecai Richler and Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey that Montreal became the setting of credible stories of Canadian life. Ontario did produce a few realistic novels during this period, but even its fiction continued to be dominated by the historical romance and the regional idyll. There was, of course, Morley Callaghan; but before we look at his work we should glance at that of some minor writers. Hansen: A Novel of Canadianization by Augustus Bridle (1869-1952), elicited a good deal of approving comment when it appeared in 1924. It is the long and involved story of Olaf Hansen, a young Norwegian immigrant

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who acquires an education in a small Ontario town, graduates from the University of Toronto, becomes a reform-minded newspaperman, goes out West where he disgustedly views the land speculation in Edmonton, and is eventually elected as an Independent Liberal in the new Alberta legislature in 1905. Interwoven with all this are Hansen's love affairs with three women, one of whom he eventually marries. The theme of the novel, as its sub-title suggests, is the emergence of a distinctive Canadian national type, and some of its social and political comments are shrewd. It is not successful as a novel, however: it attempts to cover too much space and time, it has too many characters, and it is too jerky in style. It is an honest book, but it is not sufficiently integrated to be a real work of art. The two novels by Beaumont S. Cornell (b. 1892), Renaissance (1922) and Lantern Marsh (1923), also received much praise from Canadian reviewers in the early twenties. Renaissance does not repay re-reading today —it is a political melodrama involving a mysterious Russian musician who is promoting a communist revolution in Britain—but Lantern Marsh is still of some interest. The novel is biographical, telling the story of a young man's upbringing on an Ontario farm, his education at the University of Toronto, and his disillusioning experiences as a teacher in a small Ontario city. Like Coalfleet's Solo, however, its early chapters are much stronger than its later ones, which frequently indulge in melodrama. Both Solo and Lantern Marsh give us fairly authentic pictures of Ontario rural life at this period, but the best attempt at this subject, with the possible exception of Grove's Two Generations, was White Narcissus (1929) by Raymond Knister (1900-1932). Knister was born and brought up on an Ontario farm, graduated from the universities of Toronto and Iowa State, and was for a brief period an editor of the midwestern American literary monthly, The Midland. His death by drowning in 1932 cut short a most promising career: he was the author of some experimental short stories of Ontario rural life, of some strikingly straightforward poems on the same subject, and of two novels, White Narcissus and My Star Predominant (1934). The latter novel won for Knister, ironically enough after his death, a valuable prize offered by Ottawa's Graphic Press, but it is not the equal of his first novel. My Star Predominant is a biographical novel about John Keats, and is a quite successful effort to recreate a past time and place by the use of contemporary documents. There is nothing forced or romantic about it—this is an historical novel, not an historical romance—but its weakness is its rather cluttered episodic structure. There are too many minor characters, too many briefly sketched events: the novel needed shaping and moulding. White Narcissus is also far from perfect, but its treatment of Ontario farm life, and especially its capacity to recreate the atmosphere of the Ontario rural landscape, makes it more memorable. The plot is involved and sometimes incredible, the characters are weird but powerful, and the style is a curious combination of simple

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directness and pretentious double-talk. We feel in this novel as in Knister's short stories that he is wrestling with language, trying to put it into the posture which will be suitable for his own purposes. He can, at his best, write as directly and simply as this: "He went with swinging steps and one arm held out, toward the pig-pen, a swill-pail brushing his bulky, stiffened overalls at every step." On the other hand, Knister can be guilty of such over writing as this: "His rather bashful smile was not belied by the freshet of reminiscential inquiry with which such meetings are accompanied"; or this: "Richard Milne had never ceased to admire the peripety of life, its myriad fugaceous shadings like lake tints which become more intricate to the sight with care in scrutinizing them." Knister, in short, resembled Keats in his uncertainty of taste, but unlike Keats he never achieved true greatness. His early death was a heavy loss, for there were few other writers to take up the task he had laid down, that of describing honestly the Ontario rural scene. One writer who attempted the task with some success was Angus Mowat (b. 1892). His two novels Then I'll Look Up (1938) and Carrying Place (1944) are both largely set in islands in the Great Lakes. Mowat has considerable descriptive power, and is able to build up powerful suspense, but he is too imitative of previous writers to be taken in full seriousness. Then I'll Look Up borrows very heavily from Conrad's Lord Jim in both theme and technique, and Carrying Place mingles the technique of Conrad with a theme very reminiscent of Wuthering Heights. There are some good passages in both novels, but one wishes that Mowat had had the courage to undertake Knister's independent struggle with language. Mowat's books are too slick to be convincing. Philip Child (b. 1898) also made an early attempt at the task of describing the Ontario rural scene in the opening chapters of his God's Sparrows (1936), but the bulk even of that novel is set elsewhere—in France during World War I—and his later novels are set in the city rather than in the country. Day of Wrath (1945) has its setting in Nazi Germany, and is the moving story of a little man's attempt to preserve integrity, dignity, and love in the midst of Hitler's barbaric regime; and Mr. Ames against Time (1949) describes the efforts of a rather similar hero to preserve some modicum of decency in the Toronto underworld. In his concern with the preservation of human values in a decadent society, Child is somewhat like Morley Callaghan in outlook, although he writes in a more formal and more explicit style. Child is a Christian humanist who believes—as the title God's Sparrows would suggest—that every individual is supremely important in the eyes of God; his novels are rich in compassion and in a sense of the necessity of human brotherhood and love. He has himself stated the theme of all his work in this sentence from his early historical novel, The Village of Souls: "Only in the consummation of love can a man share his loneliness with another and make for himself a dust-speck world within the infinite wilderness, forgetting

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for a little its pressure which never entirely ceases upon a man's spirit." There can be no quarrel with Child's ideas, but his skill as a novelist is not quite commensurate with the splendour of his ideals. A professor of English at Trinity College, Toronto, Dr. Child tends to be too didactic in his fiction, to be unwilling to rely upon indirection and implication and to preach his Christian humanism too obviously. A much more glaring example of excessive didacticism, however, but still interesting because of its unusualness in the context of Canadian fiction of this period, is the work of Claudius Gregory (1889-1944). Gregory was born in England, came to Canada at the age of seventeen, and lived in Toronto and Hamilton. He was the author of three novels: Forgotten Men (1933), Valerie Hathaway (1933), and Solomon Levi (1935). All of these novels are much too long—by judicious pruning they could have been cut down at least by half—and much too obviously propagandist. They are, however, among the few items of Canadian fiction which attempt to deal seriously with the social problems of the depressed era of the 1930's. In Forgotten Men, Christopher Watt, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a Hamilton steel magnate, gives up his leisurely life to devote himself to the cause of the unemployed. A Christ-like figure, he founds the Society of Forgotten Men, has twelve disciples who meet in an upper room, is arrested for sedition when betrayed by Jude Braithwaite, and dies of pneumonia resulting from prolonged imprisonment. A kind of Christian socialism is the doctrine preached, but it is preached too often and is made to appear too easy. The allegory is too transparent, and the characters are not developed in any depth. However, beside the mass of romances being turned out in Canada at this time, the novel is an interesting experiment. Valerie Hathaway is even more repetitive and didactic, and deals with a less manageable subject: the survival of the spirit after death, and the possibility of establishing a contemplative, Brook Farm type of community as an escape from contemporary materialism. But Solomon Levi, although it too is often redundant, is almost as interesting as Forgotten Men: the careful, well-documented study of the boyhood, youth, and manhood of an American Jew, it becomes an impassioned plea for racial tolerance and an attack on the policies of Hitler's Germany. Gregory's propagandist novels were clearly the products of the social and economic disorder of the 1930's, and we might have expected these conditions to provoke a large number of novels of social protest. Canadian poets had reacted quickly to these conditions, and such verse writers as F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, and Dorothy Livesay produced many poems of social protest in the period. Novels of this kind, however, were rare and of low quality. An early example was Douglas Leader Durkin's The Magpie (1923), which is set in a western city (Winnipeg?) at the end of World War I and is a bitter commentary on the failure of the post-war society to realize the ideals for which the war had been fought. Strongly pro-communist in its

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sympathies, The Magpie is a fairly good picture of social upheaval, but its propaganda is too explicit and its characters are stereotyped. Another early novel of this type was The Gleaming Archway (1929) by Alexander Maitland Stephen (1882-1942), who also wrote poetry, plays, and the historical romance of early British Columbia, The Kingdom of the Sun (1927). The Gleaming Archway is the story of a Vancouver newspaper man who becomes interested in the labour movement, joins a radical paper, and eventually uncovers a government spy in the labour ranks. The reporter stands for evolution rather than revolution, and he comes to the conclusion that it is by changing individuals rather than by mass action that society must be reformed. The story is written in a romantic style, the plot is melodramatic in the extreme, and the characters are caricatures. The novel is really only topical journalism, tricked out with a lot of over-rich description and pseudo-profound philosophizing. The only other novels of social propaganda came near the end of our period: Ted Allan's This Time a Better Earth (1939) and Irene Baird's Waste Heritage (1939). The former is one of the most readable novels of this period: brisk, clear-cut, a succession of closely observed and exactly described scenes. A realistic novel of the Spanish Civil War, it incorporates a leftist point of view but not in an obtrusive way: it is mainly a close description of air-raids, skirmishes, and of intrigues behind the lines. Ted Allan (pseudonym for Alan Herman) (b. 1916) has since become a playwright of some distinction, but has unfortunately not written any more novels. Irene Baird had written John (1937) two years before she produced Waste Heritage, and she published a third novel, He Rides the Sky, in 1941. Neither of these books, however, is the equal of Waste Heritage. John is a domestic romance set on Vancouver Island, and is chiefly distinguished by its charming descriptions of the British Columbia landscape; He Rides The Sky is an epistolary novel in which a young Canadian airman writes home his impressions of life in the Royal Air Force immediately before, and in the early stages of, World War II. Both these novels were marked chiefly by tenderness; Waste Heritage is much tougher and more substantial. Its focal point is the violence that broke out in Hastings Street, Vancouver, in 1938, during a sitdown protest by the unemployed, and it succeeds very well in evoking the mass fury which resulted from long years of unemployment and frustration. The novel suffers somewhat, however, from its imitativeness: the two main characters, Matt Striker and his timid friend Eddy, are reminiscent of the two friends in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and other parts of the novel strongly resemble The Grapes of Wrath. The minor characters are lacking in clarity, and the style is rather repetitive and hackneyed. But the novel does give us a clear picture of conditions in Vancouver and Victoria at that terrible tune, it does enable us to share the frustration and sense of alienation

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of the unemployed, and it is often acutely ironic in its treatment of the public attitude to the strikers. There were then, in the period between the wars, a few examples of realism in Canadian fiction apart from the prairie realists such as Stead and Grove. The record would be a very weak one, however, if it were not for the contribution of Toronto's Morley Callaghan (b. 1903), whose work is in many ways the urban counterpart of Grove's rural realism and who was the only real rival to Grove's pre-eminence in Canadian fiction in this era. Morley Callaghan Morley Callaghan is in some senses a bridge between this era in our fiction and the one that followed it. In an obvious sense he is such a bridge, since his career as a novelist began in the twenties and has continued into the sixties. But he is also a bridge in a more subtle sense: he began his career as a fairly straightforward realist or naturalist, and has steadily progressed to a more complex and symbolical way of writing. Callaghan was born in Toronto, educated there at St. Michael's College and the Osgoode Hall Law School, and has spent most of his life in that city. The only significant interval in his Toronto residence was a few months spent in Paris in the late twenties, when he associated with such expatriate writers as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald. His association with Hemingway, which had begun in Toronto when the American writer was temporarily on the staff of the Daily Star, was particularly influential: his early stories and novels are very similar to those of Hemingway, both in style and in subject-matter. In style, he began by appropriating Hemingway's spare manner of understatement and simplification; and in matter he wrote, especially in his first novel Strange Fugitive, of "tough guys," loose women, and violent action. Another important early influence was that of Sherwood Anderson, whose bewildered, pathetic, "1 want to know why" characters often crop up in Callaghan's stories. A later and more permanently decisive influence was that of Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher, whom Callaghan came to know well in Toronto in the winter of 1933 and from whom he may have derived the philosophy of Christian humanism or personalism which dominates his later fiction. Callaghan has so far published eleven novels (including Luke Baldwin's Vow, 1948, for juvenile readers), a privately printed novella, No Man's Meat (1931), three collections of short stories, and an autobiographical reminiscence of his early career, That Summer in Paris (1963). The short stories contained in A Native Argosy (1929), No Man's Meat (1931), Now That April's Here (1936) and Morley Callaghan's Stories (1959) have already been briefly described: they are admittedly fine examples of that genre, and easily the best short stories to be written by a Canadian in the first half of

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this century. Although his stories have their limitations, they are almost perfect within those limits: there is no doubt that in the short story Callaghan is quite at home, and that he is in at least a minor degree a member of the great modern short story tradition which includes Flaubert, Maupassant, Chekhov, Mansfield, Anderson, and Hemingway. There is far less unanimity about Callaghan's stature as a novelist. Each of his novels has had a mixed reception from the critics, and recent attempts to sum up his work have ranged from Edmund Wilson's dicta that he is "the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world" and "a writer whose work may be mentioned without absurdity in association with Chekhov's and Turgenev's," to descriptions of him as "an outstandingly dull writer" whose books are "oddly leaden." His ideas have been praised as profound expressions of Christian thought and damned as confused sentimentality, and his style has been described as beautifully simple and clear on the one hand and as indistinguishable from that of the Ladies' Home Journal on the other. There is no doubt that there was a certain degree of confusion in Callaghan's early novels. His Catholic education had impressed on him the idea that man was a morally responsible, freely choosing son of God; his reading of and association with naturalist writers had suggested to him the idea that man was a rigidly determined creature of heredity and environment; the social disorder of the late twenties and early thirties brought him into contact with the Marxist thesis that man is the product of his economic environment but that that environment can be changed by social revolution; and either through his reading or through conversations with such writers as Joyce, Callaghan became aware of the Freudian interpretation of man as to a large extent the product of childhood traumas and the prey of irrational desires. The early novels reveal Callaghan trying to find a modus vivendi among these four irreconcilable philosophies, tending on balance to accept the naturalistic thesis but not finally rejecting any of the alternatives. In Strange Fugitive (1928), the somewhat melodramatic account of the descent of an ordinary lumber-yard worker into bootlegging and other forms of crime, the naturalistic element is certainly uppermost: there is much stress on the weakness of Harry Trotter's heredity and on the barrenness of his environment. At the same time there are a number of references to the Catholic Church, and one critic has even suggested that Trotter's wife Vera, whom he deserts, is a symbol of Christian truth and love. A bow is made towards the Marxist interpretation when Trotter goes to the Labor Temple and is "interested in the lively way speakers talked of direct action, solidarity, mass action." The Freudian influence has its play when we learn that Trotter slept with his mother until he was nine, and is accused by a friend of still being in love with her. In theme, then, this first book is confused, and it is only by its crisp style, its brisk clear-cut descriptions of the Toronto scene,

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and its patently honest groping after truth that it makes a claim on our admiration. It's Never Over (1930) and A Broken Journey (1932) are similarly melodramatic in plot and indecisive in thought. In the former novel, the story is of the effect upon a man's family and friends of his being involved in a murder. The very title of the novel suggests that here too the naturalistic hypothesis is dominant: it suggests the uninterrupted chain of cause and effect which is "never over." The killer's sister, Isabella, feels the inevitability of her degradation, and she drags her former lover and his new mistress down with her. Unfortunately, Callaghan does not succeed in convincing us of the inevitability of the successive steps downward: we derive rather the impression of weak characters who make circumstances the scapegoats of their own vacillation. A Broken Journey, the story of an unusual love triangle involving the joint love of a mother and daughter for the same man, is only slightly clearer and more consistent in thought. The general tone, as hi the first two novels, is of bewildered compassion for the inevitability of human suffering, and the naturalistic hypothesis is apparent in the stress that is laid on the daughter's inheritance of her mother's weakness of character. The characters are all seeking a faith to live by but none of their alternatives seem very satisfactory: Catholicism is the mother's chief solace, but its representatives, Father Sullivan and a young Anglo-Catholic parson, are hardly such as to give us much confidence in it; humanism is suggested, but in a half-hearted way, when Marion Gibbons says "Yes, you've got to admire loyalty, and believe that it's in people, or nobility, or courage, even when you wonder whether such virtues touch your life at all." We are left with an impression of human futility, to which the only reliable response is pity: almost every character in the story expresses pity for the other characters at some stage. Peter Gould's feelings for his mistress Patricia are representative: "But now, as he glanced at her, he was full of sympathy, for the uneasiness that was so deep in her life and in her soul seemed but a part of the vast discontent and unrest in his own soul, and on this afternoon at least it was as though they were being drawn closer together by the force of the agitation that was all around and within them too." A clarification of Callaghan's thinking resulted from his long conversations with Jacques Maritain at the Institute of Mediaeval Studies—a fact which Callaghan acknowledged by dedicating his fourth novel Such is My Beloved (1934) in these words: "To those times with M. in the winter of 1933." From this time forward, Callaghan gave up the negative futility which had marked the early novels, made a clear but not simple choice of the Christian rather than the naturalistic, Marxist, or Freudian interpretations of experience, and concentrated upon the spiritual lives of his characters rather than upon their physical appetites. His philosophy becomes that of Christian humanism

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or personalism: probably in his case Christian personalism would be the more accurate phrase, since humanism puts much stress on reason and moral discipline, whereas Callaghan's stress is rather on intuition and moral freedom. His Christian personalism amounts to this: the supremely important thing on earth is the human person, and the supremely important thing in the person is his soul or spirit; the soul finds its fullest earthly development in selfsacrificial love, through the exercising of which it plays its proper role in God's design; playing the proper role in this divine scheme of things may, and usually will, involve collisions with such earthly schemes as the state, society, and even the church in its earthly establishment; hence the individual soul will frequently be defeated, derided, or destroyed on earth, but will have a triumph which is not of this world. The true destiny of the individual, in other words, will be sainthood; and the saint will often seem uncommonly like a sinner and will always be something of a puzzle and an embarrassment from any merely logical or human point of view. This is the conception of man, the outlines of which will be found in Jacques Maritain's The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1945), which domina.es all of Callaghan's later novels. Certainly this is the conception which dominates Such is My Beloved, perhaps the most fully satisfying of all of Callaghan's novels. In Father Bowling's attempts to save the souls of the prostitutes, Callaghan found an ideal objective correlative for his theme of self-sacrificial love. The priest's attempts bring him into conflict with society and the hierarchy of his own Church, and are in earthly terms a failure since the girls are driven from the city by the police and Father Dowling himself is temporarily housed in a mental asylum. But at the end of the novel the priest has a moment of illumination in which he realizes the eternal Tightness of his actions no matter what the temporary effects may be: "There was a peace within him as he watched the calm, eternal water swelling darkly against the one faint streak of light, the cold night light on the skyline. High in the sky three stars were out. His love seemed suddenly to be as steadfast as those stars, as wide as the water, and still blowing within him like the cold smooth waves still rolling on the shore." The symbolism of this passage is not unique: the whole novel, as Malcolm Ross has cleverly demonstrated in his recent introduction to the New Canadian Library edition of the book, has an elaborate (but not obtrusive) symbolic framework, relating Father Bowling's experiences to those of Christ on earth. The novels which followed Such is My Beloved, with the exception of The Varsity Story (1949), a rather slight book in which Callaghan seeks to find the "soul" of the University of Toronto, have all been efforts to find equally persuasive objective correlatives for Callaghan's Christian personalist theme. In They Shall Inherit the Earth, Michael Aikenhead has his moment of illumination when he realizes that the true way of life is not that of self-

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realization and the cherishing of personal ambition but that of meek selfsurrender, the way of his sweetheart Anna: "She went on from day to day, living and loving and exposing the fullness and wholeness of herself to the life around her. If to be poor in spirit meant to be without false pride, to be humble enough to forget oneself, then she was poor in spirit, for she gave herself to everything that touched her, she let herself be, she lost herself in the fullness of the world, and in losing herself she found the world, and she possessed her own soul. People like her could have everything. They could inherit the earth." In More Joy in Heaven (1937) the closeness of the saint to the sinner is emphasized: the hero is the reformed bank robber, Kip Caley, who on his release from jail is at first worshipped as a hero and then destroyed by a society which cannot really believe in his reformation. To the Church hierarchy, Caley is a sinner, whose remains the bishop orders to be buried in unconsecrated ground; but to Callaghan, it is clear, he is something of a saint, for he has exercised charity, has given to others in a spirit of selfsacrificial love. Callaghan's three most recent novels—The Loved and the Lost (1951), The Many Colored Coat (1960), and A Passion in Rome (1961)—all give us variants of this same theme, but the theme is embodied in a more complicated plot and expressed by means of a more complex technique. There was a certain amount of symbolism and allegory in Callaghan's earlier novels, but in these later ones these elements are much more prominent and much more carefully worked out. The Loved and the Lost, for example, uses as thematic motifs a toy leopard (symbolic of violence and terror), a tiny church (symbolic of purity and reverence), falling snow (the white world of death and evil), and a white horse (symbolizing material prestige and possessions), and weaves them into a complex pattern of meaning. The Many Colored Coat has a number of analogies with the biblical story of Joseph and his brethren, and A Passion in Rome works out its plot against the elaborate symbolic and ritualistic background of the election and installation of a new pope. I am not sure that this elaboration of structure, challenging as it is for those critics who delight in symbol-hunting, is a gain in Callaghan's fiction: his characters tend to be ambiguous and multifaceted in any case, his plots are always intricate, and his ideas are subtle, and when to these is added a deliberate multiplication of symbolic motifs the result is often baffling. The record of Callaghan's development thus far has been one of a gradual clarification of theme and complication of technique. In my view he most fully succeeded when these two elements were in equilibrium, In the three novels of the mid-thirties. His early novels were too confused in thought, and his later novels have been too consciously complex in technique. But it would be false to exaggerate the change in his work: from the first he has retained certain constant qualities. His chief strengths have always been his capacity

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for concrete, exact description of persons and places, his generally restrained and controlled style, and his abundant sympathy for suffering human beings. His chief faults are tendencies to indulge in a kind of misty mysticism, a vague all-forgiving tolerance which blurs essential ethical distinctions, and to attempt to suggest a profundity of meaning which he cannot fully contain in the fictional situations he devises. But he is by far the most complex and challenging novelist of his Canadian generation.

11. Fiction 1940-1960 HUGO McPHERSON*

IN THE YEARS since 1940 Canadian fiction has shown a vitality which Canadain-excelsis patriots too frequently describe as "a coming of age"; but that analogy must be resisted, for it leads directly to another biological (or mythological) misunderstanding of the "Child of Nations, giant-limbed" variety. The prosaic facts are that the great majority of Canada's novelists have reached no sudden metaphorical maturity; they still dream of Green Gables, northern adventures, rustic or suburban triangles, and the thrust and rut of historical romance. And though such writers now deck themselves in the mail-order finery of book club or Good Housekeeping patterns, they are yet more vapid than their predecessors; escapist romance and innocent self-celebration may have been the normal fictional expression of a pioneer community, for the pioneer needs diversion and reassurance rather than criticism; but in a complex and self-conscious society the artist must reassume his traditional roles of critic or visionary. What "maturity" there may be in recent Canadian fiction belongs to a very few writers who, flying the nets of nostalgia, parochialism, and naive nationalism that fetter the imagination, have confronted their experience with critical independence and have recorded their insights with a new subtlety and technical power. Following upon the stuttering promise of Grove and the April glories of the early Callaghan, these few persuade us that the Canadian novel has begun to find its tongue; has begun, indeed, to "create" Canada in the way that Hawthorne, a century earlier, helped to create New England. Underlying the new independence and articulateness of such writers as MacLennan and Richler, Davies and Wilson, is a larger phenomenon, the most important psycho-social event of Canada's history: bruised by the mischances of economic depression and war, and brought face to face with the world by space-destroying advances in communications, Canada in the forties began to find its identity—not the extravagant pro patria maple-leaf-waving *Assisted by Douglas Spettigue of Queen's University, Kingston, and Miss Miriam Leranbaum.

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of the twenties, but an objective awareness of its name and nature. However inchoate and amorphous the national mind appeared, there could no longer be any doubt that Canada had acquired a distinct consciousness that could be felt in the street, could be documented and described by statisticians and analysts in government, industry, and higher education. For the perceptive writer, this Gestalt in the nation's development proved infinitely liberating: freed simultaneously from the demands of an artificial Canadianism and the equally artificial notion that he should somehow duplicate the achievements of Dickens, Faulkner, or Joyce, he could begin to be simply himself. Canadian identity was not a matter of patriotism but a fact of geography and experience; and whether the writer mocked his country, praised it, analysed it or ignored it, he recognized that his prime concern-—using whatever materials he could command—was to be a good writer. "The centre of reality," as Northrop Frye has said, "is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of." This is the intuition which has informed the best fiction of the recent period. I

Before turning to the articulate few whose imagination is thus expanding Canadian consciousness, we must notice the verbose and deciduous many whose leaves are swept together by the social and literary historian if not by the critic. First, a summary of the total production for the period. In the twenty-one years from 1940 to 1960, 350 writers produced 800 volumes of fiction and belles-lettres (not to mention an uncounted number of children's books and their authors). Of these, approximately 75 per cent were novels, 15 per cent belles-lettres (a term which in Canada refers principally to the reminiscences of journalists, clergymen, and professors) and 10 per cent short stories and humorous pieces. These figures contain no surprises. After nonfiction, which in Canada as elsewhere has now become the principal means of social documentation, the novel reigns supreme. The economics of publishing and the simpler economics of the writer's bread and butter discourage essayists and short story writers alike, but the novel maintains its prestige as "major" work, and entices the would-be writer with extravagant dreams of fame and fortune. Moreover, the pressures of the market account in part for the dominance of stereotyped forms among the 570-odd novels published. In this group, 15 per cent were detective novels or thrillers, written to formula for a mass audience and published more often than not in the United States; 20 per cent were historical romances or frontier adventures (three-quarters of which used North American settings); and the remaining 65 per cent were contemporary narratives ranging in setting from Bombay and Accra to Montreal and Penticton, and in manner from pseudo-Shaw through Sherwood

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Anderson to any of the American ladies with three names. Though this large group contains almost all of the significant novels of the period, its bulk consists of domestic romances, often honest or earnest in intention, but abjectly imitative of the stereotypes of magazine fiction. J. R. MacGillivray's summation of the year's work in "Letters in Canada: 1940" could be applied without qualification to over 80 per cent of the fiction of the next two decades: There has been, with only trifling exception, no imaginative study of our Canadian life and society, no looking out upon the world, no interest in fiction as a fine art, no apparent awareness of ideas and events, but a perfect isolation from place and time. . . . Where else is there the equal to that ivory tower, soundproof, windowless, air-conditioned, and bombproof, in which these novelists tap at their typewriters undisturbed by the falling heavens?

For such writers, the only exit from the ivory tower was a door hopefully opening on the market-place. Of the patent forms which make up the bulk of recent fiction, the historical romance has had the greatest vogue with both writers and public. Evelyn Eaton, Thomas B. Costain, W. R. Bird, and Thomas Raddall have each published a half dozen or more works in the genre (Costain's total for the period is eleven), and a score of others have explored subjects as diverse as Genghis Khan and General Wolfe, Hippocrates and William Lyon Mackenzie. Not unexpectedly, a number of writers return to the period of Christ or to Old Testament materials, and another group recall with equal piety the events of various Jacobite risings; but the subjects which outdistance all others are the history of Acadia and New France (Nova Scotia and Quebec), the saga of the United Empire Loyalists, and the rebellion of 1837. Yet despite this natural preference for materials which are close to their traditions or to Canada's history, and despite the painstaking research which their work often displays, these historical novelists have contributed very little to literature. Deceived by the apparent simplicity of a form which requires a high degree of skill and control, they have regularly stumbled into one or other of the traps of historical distortion, mechanical characterization, or wildly improbable plotting. Even more important, they have not clearly understood whether their aim was simple entertainment as in Stevenson, historical reconstruction as in Robert Graves, or historical-philosophical analysis as in Hawthorne. In the face of such divided purposes, Kirby's chien d'or dozes on in comfortable security. Several writers, however, deserve mention for particular qualities in their work, and one, Thomas Raddall, transcends the preceding generalizations. Thomas H. Raddall (b. 1903), born in England and raised in Nova Scotia, is the best of the numerous Maritime novelists who have made Canadian history their garden. Rooted in a community where tradition is long by North American standards, and the urban tangles of Montreal and Toronto remote,

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he has absorbed the history, landscape, manners, and accent of his region with a completeness that amounts to possession. In addition, he has an unusual ability to recreate moments of dramatic action, and a vigorous, fluent, highly sensory style. After publishing a collection of stories which attracted the attention of John Buchan, The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek (1939), he produced in 1942 the best historical novel of the period, His Majesty's Yankees, the story of David Strange, a revolutionary agent and soldier in the turbulent days of 1774 when Nova Scotia had to choose between the dubious alternatives of Boston Whiggery and London Toryism. Crammed with the excitement of intrigue, imprisonment, escape, battle on land and sea, and amorous involvement, the action mounts to a rousing picture of the attack on Fort Cumberland; and though the pace slackens in the final section, the author's control does not falter. In subsequent works, Roger Sudden (1944), Pride's Fancy (1946), etc., the formula of historical romance diminishes the reality of the illusion; but Raddall's power remains unimpaired in two further volumes of tales, Tambour (1945) and The Wedding Gift (1947). In The Nymph and the Lamp (1950), a tale of life at a wireless station on Sable Island, and Warden of the North (1949), a history of Halifax, he shows himself to be at ease in two new areas. Raddall's principal weakness, one realizes, is his inability to penetrate deeply into the psychology of his characters, but since action, the vivid recreation of personality, and the memorable use of landscape are central to his work, the reader does not demand more. For Raddall, above all, is a gifted entertainer; and when he evades the stereotypes which mar the average narrative of derring-do, he is superbly satisfying. Equally prolific but less accomplished than Raddall is Will R. Bird (b. 1891), chronicler of the eighteenth-century Yorkshiremen who emigrated to Nova Scotia. Evelyn Eaton (b. 1902) and Thomas B. Costain (b. 1885), both living in the United States, have had wide popular success, Mrs. Eaton with stories of Acadia, and Costain with tales of Christ, Attila the Hun, Napoleon, and the rulers of New France, which have gained him an international reputation as a manufacturer of literary placebos. Two other strains in the historical novel, though not yet strongly developed, offer hopeful alternatives to the standard formula. Grace Campbell (1895-1963) in Thorn Apple Tree (1942) and The Higher Hill (1944), recreates the pioneer experience of Glengarry Township, Ontario, with a loving attention to details of daily life, and a generally disarming unpretentiousness. This approach to history, rejecting with tranquil firmness both the sentimental excesses of a Ralph Connor and the romantic absurdities of a Major Richardson, is akin to the low-keyed beauty of such American regional writers as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Gather. In another direction, Louis Vaczek's River and Empty Sea (1950)—a chronicle of the voyage of two Jesuit fathers to Hudson's Bay in 1672—charges a scrupulously recorded historical event with

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the significance of parable. Vaczek is the only historical novelist of the period who has seen in the genre the possibilities of meaning which E. J. Pratt realized so powerfully in his historical poems. Unfortunately Vaczek has not followed up this initial success. Analogous to the historical romance in both impulse and conventional artifice are contemporary stories of adventure (5 per cent of the period's production) and detective stories or thrillers (15 per cent). Given the new ubiquity of the aeroplane, the adventure writers take us to such exotic or barren places as Malaya, the Labrador coast, the West Indies, and the Yukon, and they introduce us to the standard cast of prospectors, fatal ladies, police, Indians, Esquimaux, sky-pilots, and rogues. But without exception their work is inferior to the non-fiction "I-was-there" adventures of documentary writers and foreign correspondents. A remark made in the Times Literary Supplement about one of Nicholas Monsarrat's many stories applies to the semi- or subliterary nature of all this work: "If he would write with greater care, his nonsense would be greater fun." The detective story, by sticking closer to its recipe of suspense, violence, and narrative ingenuity, spiced with sex or recondite information a la Time magazine, is generally less offensive. Frances Shelley Wees and Margaret Millar, who now lives in California, are competent professionals in the field, and such writers as Brian Moore, Louis Vaczek, and Douglas Sanderson have produced thrillers for the paperback trade. Arthur Hailey, a literary business man who began by writing simple stories of suspense—aeroplane crews afflicted by food poisoning, etc.—has become wizard-king of the pops by transforming one narrative from TV play to radio play to film script to novel. Of such, for the average Canadian author, is the kingdom of heaven. In contrast to the clear formulae of these works, the final group of patent narratives—the contemporary romances—present a problem of definition. And since they constitute more than half of the fiction produced since 1940, one must press beyond the wondering awe and the ennui which they inspire in an attempt to lay bare their corporate heart. In "Letters in Canada: 1959," C. T. Bissell distinguished such works sharply from the American romances of Hawthorne and Melville which, in Richard Chase's phrase, possess "a certain intrepid and penetrating dialectic of action and meaning, a radical skepticism about ultimate questions." The typical Canadian romance, far from this radical and inquiring exploration of experience, clings to familiar people and situations, finds moral edification in the workings of adversity, and reconciliation in the rituals of courtship and marriage. The writer of this kind of novel, Dr. Bissell concludes, can have no genuine theme: "He is not analysing experience; he is sentimentalizing it. Instead of a theme, instead of a passionate apprehension of experience, a reader gets at the best a moralistic reflection." These works, in short, belong in the ivory tower described

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by J. R. MacGillivray, that chamber from which there is no genuine "looking out upon the world," no real "interest in fiction as a fine art, [and] no apparent awareness of ideas and events." The heart of the Canadian romance is, in fact, a folk-story or fairy-tale, deeply coloured by the Sunday-school pieties of Protestant morality, and resolutely anti-intellectual. And though it has documented the experience of Canadians in every province and in every walk of life from the Cabinet to the callhouse, it has rarely brought action and setting into living relation with meaning. In fairy-tale the "they" who oppose the hero (whether trolls, ogres, or nasty stepmothers) need not be analysed, but when the novelist enters the contemporary world and makes a "they" of employers, stuffy parents, unions, bureaucrats, or crass business men, he cannot allow his hero to transform or escape that world with one flourish of a magic wand. The romance pattern itself, of course, is not suspect; we see it shaping the conflict of such varied works as Wuthefing Heights and Conrad's Victory. But the writer must be faithful to the manner which he adopts, whether it be unflinching realism, or the spice and sentiment of Arcadia. Hence and not unexpectedly, the most successful practitioners of the romance form have been Mazo de la Roche at one extreme, and Hugh MacLennan and Mordecai Richler at the other. Mazo de la Roche, by refusing to heed even the detonation of Hiroshima, preserved her world of Jalna as a country of the heart. (The information that in 1960 she was, with A. J. Cronin, the favourite author of French school children, is recent evidence of her peculiar appeal.) On the other hand, Hugh MacLennan, as we shall see below, has made the romance an instrument of social analysis, and Mordecai Richler has given it ironic bite by allowing both the friends and the enemies of the hero an ambivalent value. Between these poles stretches a long file of nai've romancers who, in this study at least, must remain anonymous. For many of them, perhaps, the novel is primarily an instrument of rationalization, for they raise ugly realities and subdue them with implausible ease. In homage to Grace Metalious, one might best describe their work, for all its variety in setting— as patent people in patent places. II

The stereotyped forms noticed above reveal the opposing pulls of the market and the private dream on the average Canadian novelist; the sections which follow will study that small group of writers who in various ways have expanded the Canadian consciousness of the self, and its relation to ideas, imagination, and events. Since there is nothing in this body of work that can be described as a "school" or "movement" in the sense that applies to a more substantial and mature literature, and little that can be classified usefully by

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such labels as "realism" or "social consciousness," the discussion will avoid the conventional groupings of literary criticism and consider the themes which have preoccupied the novelist, and the technical means which he has found to express them. Such subjects as national identity, the quest of the imagination, the discovery of self, the meaning of war and social change, and the impact of other cultures, will thus shape this chapter as they have shaped the best fiction of the recent period. Roy Daniells, in his outline of Canadian literature in The Culture of Contemporary Canada (Julian Park, ed., 1957), sees Hugh MacLennan (b. 1907) as the representative novelist of the contemporary period, and though criticism has not judged any one of his novels an unqualified success, this claim for his centrality has not been effectively challenged. On the debit side MacLennan has been charged with a habit of allegorizing and theorizing which at once over-simplifies the social and psychological issues that he explores, and deprives his characters of independent life. On the credit side, however, he has been commended for his breadth of vision, his vitality in narrative writing, and his urbane style. But whatever the final artistic verdict, he stands out in historical terms as the first novelist to subject the Canadian mind to a searching and informed scrutiny. MacLennan's background and training gave him unusual qualifications for the pioneer task of exploring the terrain inconnu of the Canadian consciousness. Born in Cape Breton Island, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, took a Ph.D. in Classics at Princeton, and travelled widely before embarking on a teaching career. Wearied of the unreality of Canadian fiction, just as Hawthorne had wearied of the "damned scribbling women" of his day, he adopted the popular romance form and, like Hawthorne, transformed it into an instrument of social analysis and criticism. Barometer Rising (1941) is the key work for an understanding of his purposes and method. Unlike romances which use reality as a backdrop for daydream, this work fuses a superbly realized account of the Halifax explosion of December, 1917, with a classic plot reminiscent of the Perseus legend. Neil MacRae, a falsely discredited army officer, returns to Halifax to accomplish two things: vengeance upon his Anglophile uncle, Colonel Wain, the author of his disgrace; and reunion with the Colonel's daughter Penny, who has borne him a child. At the moment when Neil's vengeance becomes possible, the city is blasted by the explosion of a munitions ship. In the nightmare of rescue work which follows, Neil realizes that he "has changed too much to care for ... [the revenge] he had a right to enjoy." Freed of the tyranny of the older generation, he and his Penelope, with the child who now bears their name, are ready to begin a new life. As the well-ordered time sequence of these events unrolls, MacLennan keeps the image of the city so carefully in focus that we finally see it in the relation of macrocosm to the microcosm of Colonel Wain and his circle:

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both typify the decadent colonial society whose callous self-seeking has betrayed an innocent generation into the pain and horror of war. And both, having sown the seeds of sin, reap the wild wind of death and disaster. In Hugh MacLennan's hands, then, the Halifax explosion becomes a parable of Canadian history: it marks the end of the colonial era and heralds the beginning of a Canadian nation. As this brief summary may suggest, the task which Hugh MacLennan set himself was to write not a fairy-tale but a critique of Canadian society. In doing so he was forced more than once to sacrifice both plausibility and fullness of characterization to the demands of theme; and his subsequent work reveals his search for new means of reconciling the opposed elements of realism and symbolic statement. Two Solitudes (1945) studies a major social problem, the distrust and animosity that separate different racial groups within the community—in this instance the French-English conflict in Quebec. Again, the characters and the settings take on symbolic weight, but Part I of the novel—the account of Athanase Tallard and Captain Yardley, the elderly men of good will, who fail equally hi their attempt to heal the schism in Canadian life—is so fully and richly executed that the symbolic and realistic elements sound in resonant harmony. (This section, indeed, is one of the best things in Canadian fiction.) Unfortunately the final sections, which chronicle the problems of the younger generation, and end in a FrenchEnglish "marriage," are threadbare and theoretical, though carefully designed. In The Precipice (1948), a study of Puritanism and its effects on Canadians and Americans, MacLennan's symbolic method breaks down, for psychic states resist the kind of personification which makes possible the dramatization of social forces. In Each Man's Son (1951), however, MacLennan pursued the same theme with more success. Here, within the circumscribed life of a Cape Breton mining village, he was able to explore the traumas of Puritanism in depth, and to find for his hero, Dr. Ainslie, and the "son" whom he inherits, a promise of rehase. Still dissatisfied with what he calls the "clinical" method, however, MacLennan turned in The Watch That Ends the Night (1959) to a first-person narrator, George Stewart, whose reflections and analyses at once lay bare his inmost heart and give the action a new immediacy. Stewart is a political commentator and professor whose frail wife Catherine has suffered since childhood from heart disease (someone remarks that she is a symbol of "our sick civilization"). Catherine's first husband was an idealistic doctor who, after a childhood of violence and a youth of Christian piety, embraced in manhood political causes which took him progressively to Spain, Germany, Russia, and China. In the decade of "the bomb" this almost mythical figure returns to Canada, maimed and broken, but glowing with an existential knowledge which he believes can end the gloom of the long night watch—

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the darkness of self, or of history (again the microcosm-macrocosm pattern is implied). "Life is a gift," he affirms, and man, faced with the ultimate disaster (whether Catherine's death or the holocaust of the bomb), must cherish it in wonder and in love. This simple but difficult intuition floods the darkness of the self with light—with a new and tranquil assurance. Armed with this credo for an atomic age, George Stewart, the doubter and worrier, can now live fully in the present. The broadly religious implications of this theme make The Watch That Ends the Night the most ambitious of Hugh MacLennan's novels, and the new narrative method makes it his most finished work, but at the same time its freight of didactic commentary is unnecessarily bulky; one feels, indeed, that the essayist at this point is crowding out the novelist—that MacLennan is ultimately more comfortable with discursive statement than with dramatic rendering. And this speculation is in large degree confirmed by his three volumes of essays, Cross Country (1949), Thirty and Three (1954), and Scotchman's Return (1960). In these urbane and often warmly personal discussions of subjects as varied as the St. Lawrence River, Ernest Hemingway, and student life at Oxford, we find narrative serving as the handmaiden of thought, and feel that this paternal relation is perhaps the truest image of Hugh MacLennan's gifts. He has endeavoured, above all, to see the shape and meaning of Canadian experience, and if other writers have now gone beyond his position, his trail-blazing has helped them—whether positively or negatively—to find their direction. With Return of the Sphinx (1967), Hugh MacLennan took a second look at the "two solitudes" in Canadian life, the English-French dichotomy that now appeared to threaten a great political-economic-cultural crisis. Alan Ainslie (son of the failed boxer, and adopted son of the doctor, in Each Man's Son), has become federal Minister of Cultural Affairs. His son, Daniel, has become a Quebec separatist; his daughter, Chantal, has fallen in love with his closest wartime friend, "Uncle" Gabriel, French born; and his earth-mother Quebec wife, Constance, has died in a "senseless" accident. Ainslie himself is dominated by a powerful anglophone minister, Bulstrode (who may resemble the late C. D. Howe). Son Daniel's separatist activities effectively ruin his father's position in Ottawa; and Bulstrode, who thinks that the solution is a three-year Royal Commission on cultural rights, fails to understand Ainslie's sense of urgency. MacLennan extends this conflict by suggesting that people the world over feel themselves in some way orphaned—ignorant of their past, and unable to find humane solutions for the present. Perhaps the riddling Sphinx has returned to blight civilization. Ainslie has done his best, but lacks power and energy to unravel the enigma. In this case, the country itself is our main hope: "He thanked God he had been of it, was of it."

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III

Hugh MacLennan's work is typical of the main development in recent Canadian fiction, but it does not dominate. If other novelists share with him the major themes of the self, the nature of Canadian society, and the religiophilosophical question of "how to live," as well as the technique of combining social documentation with symbolic patterning, they nevertheless speak with great individuality. Morley Callaghan, Gabrielle Roy, Robertson Davies, Ethel Wilson, Mordecai Richler, and Brian Moore have all mapped out important areas of the Canadian terrain inconnu, and a dozen other figures have contributed individual works of interest. The majority of these authors have been concerned with what is best described as "the discovery of self," a theme which will be treated in the next section; proceeding from Hugh MacLennan, however, we must now consider a number of writers whose approach to society ranges from a quest for ultimate value to highly specific analysis and criticism. The most prolific and technically gifted of these writers, Morley Callaghan (see chapter 35 for a full discussion of his work), though related in style to Sherwood Anderson and the American group of the twenties, is fundamentally a religious novelist whose study of the contradictions between temporal and eternal values brought him in The Loved and the Lost (1951)— and again in The Many Colored Coat (I960)—to the perplexing question of the fate of the innocent in the conventional world of a modern city. In earlier novels Callaghan had used Canadian settings as unobtrusive backgrounds to his spiritual quest, but in The Loved and the Lost he portrayed Montreal as a fully articulated community which (like Alexandria or Paris or London) epitomizes mankind's spiritual dilemmas. In this tangled urban setting—with its unyielding black mountain, home of the rich whites, opposed to the fluid, snow-covered whiteness of the lower town, home of negroes and paupers—in this ambiguous world he placed Peggy Sanderson, a wilful innocent who refused to recognize colour bars of any kind; and in her painful history he revealed dramatically how temporal institutions, white, black, or grey, finally crush the individual who flouts their rules. The novel is not without flaws in both style and structure, but it stands as a landmark in Canadian writing. In The Many Colored Coat, Montreal is again the background of a parable on the nature of innocence; but though its angry, idealistic hero, Harry Lane, is a memorable creation, the story lacks the warmth of the earlier work. Free of the somewhat theoretical tone of The Many Colored Coat, and of the discursive commentary which diminished the power of MacLennan's Two Solitudes, The Loved and the Lost had the double gifts of a vivid sense of place and an action which speaks to all men.

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Because she writes in French, Gabrielle Roy (b. 1909) might appear to be even farther than Callaghan from the provincial Canadian heart, but her work, in translation, has been so influential that it cannot be ignored. In Miss Roy's vision, the growth of Canada from a pastoral, if austere, childhood to the anguish of the urban present, is associated with the progress of the race and the individual from innocence to experience. Thus in Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute, 1947) she studies with excruciating immediacy the career of a Montreal slum family, the La Casse brood—the "boxed" ones. For such as these, the terrible meek, there is no escape from the pain of experience: one cannot retreat to the sugar-maple grove of youth, or to a nunnery, or to the bogus glory of the army; and riches, imaged in the exclusive steel fences of Westmount gardens, are equally delusive—another trap. There is, indeed, only one solution—love, the humane devotion of a Gandhi who, in a later novel, becomes the idol of Miss Roy's caged hero, the bank teller Alexandre Chenevert (The Cashier, 1955). Gabrielle Roy's style, an uneasy combination of Victorian descriptive techniques and a colloquialism which catches the last syllable of the market vendor's cry and the vagrant's tragic rhetoric, is far removed from the echoes of Donne, George Eliot, and Galsworthy which ring through Hugh MacLennan's work, and the calculated flatness which is Callaghan's triumph and cross. But all three writers, while unmistakably viewing experience from a northern perspective, come close to the springs of human action and feeling that flow through literature everywhere. Two very different writers—Robertson Davies and Sinclair Ross—look at society with a similar clarity and intensity, and offer fresh evidence of stylistic eclecticism: Davies leans heavily on such wits as Swift and Dr. Johnson, Shaw and Samuel Butler, and even on Mencken and Sinclair Lewis; and Ross gives us something of the clenched power of D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Wolfe. But these two writers introduce a theme new to Canadian fiction, though central in our poetry—the absorbing problem of the imagination, of the artist. Robertson Davies (b. 1913), raised in Ontarian comfort and educated in Canada and England, came to the novel with wide experience in journalism and the theatre (see chapter 34), and with a background of reading which included both the monuments and a good deal of the curiosa of Western literature. In The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947) and The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks—both based on columns published in the Peterborough Examiner—he created an irascible character who attacked Canadian and American provinciality in all its manifestations; no one, from the brigadier's spinster daughter to the solicitor's clerk or the chocolate-stuffed child, escaped his lash. Marchbanks was a caustic Johnsonian eccentric who would neither permit the folkways of his community to infringe on his privacy, nor

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forgive their public gaucherie. But though Davies continued this energetic whacking of the nation's backside in his fiction, he also formulated, in action rather than talk, some positive solutions to the problem posed. Tempest-Tost (1951), the first of three novels dealing with the historic town of Salterton (or Kingston), Ontario, exposes mercilessly the ignorance, pretentiousness, and materialism which pass for "love of the arts" in old Ontario. Davies' satirical device is to cast a Little Theatre production of The Tempest with the best equivalents to Shakespeare's characters that Salterton can offer. In the travesty that results, Prince Ferdinand becomes a lustful young officer from the Royal Military College who is intent on seducing Ariel, the gilt-edged heiress of a local manufacturer; the wise councillor Gonzalo is a tongue-tied Presbyterian schoolteacher; Caliban is an irresponsible employee of the government liquor commission; and Prospero, the great intellectual, is a pedantic classics professor whose glum and repressed daughter Pearl is the unloved Canadian Miranda. In this dismal affair, the producer of the play, Valentine Rich (recalled from the United States as a professional expert) is finally driven from the field. Salterton is clearly more interested in a military ball, with its storm of uniforms, decorations, dowagers, and dignitaries, than in Shakespeare's Tempest and its sweet affirmation of the power of imagination. But if the imagination is routed in Tempest-Tost, it gains a partial victory over the forces of convention and genteel taste in Leaven of Malice (1954). In this ingeniously plotted satirical romance, Davies looks with deadly candour at the pomposities of old families, academics, journalists, lawyers, and culture-loving ladies; but the book ends in a marriage between Pearl Vambrace, Salterton's neglected Miranda, and Solly Bridgetower, a young English professor who yearns to create a Canadian literature rather than study the fossils of such too-well-named writers as Heavysege. The malice of the Victorian "old guard" against this couple, and against Gloster Ridley, the editor of the local newspaper, paradoxically enables all three to escape the "Dead Hand" of the provincial past. The native imagination may yet come into its own. In A Mixture of Frailties (1958) Davies attacks the same theme from a new angle, and finds new technical means to express it. In the first novels, despite their wealth of comic invention, wit, and satiric observation, the characters do not come fully to life; they are caricatures whom the omniscient narrator mocks so effectively that his deeper purpose is obscured. A Mixture of Frailties, by contrast, gives us a fully developed heroine, Monica Gall, a nai've member of Salterton's Heart and Hope Gospel Quartet, who is sent to England to train as a concert singer; all the satiric elements of the previous books are still present, but they now take on new meaning, for they reveal drama-

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tically, existentially, what Monica is. Thus Monica's mother comes to represent the spoiled and soured imagination, the artist manque; the British voice-coach Murtagh Molloy, who attempts to seduce Monica, and the composer Giles Revelstoke who makes her his mistress, suggest the opposing claims of technical virtuosity and inspiration on the young artist. And since music, for Davies, is regularly associated with the imagination, the completion of Monica's training and her happy return visit to Salterton suggest that her community has at last found its voice. Davies' technical control in this novel is still too uncertain to save him from implausible moments of melodrama or farce, but his copiousness, his new psychological focus and his imaginative insight into the problems and prospects of his culture, make the book his most important achievement. In setting, tone, and method, the work of Sinclair Ross (b. 1908) is totally unlike that of Davies: where the latter, shy of inner probings, attempts to spank his smug Ontario neighbours into self-awareness, Ross plunges straight to the parched and anguished heart of his prairie community. But like Davies—and like Ernest Buckler, who will be treated in a different context—Ross's central theme is the imagination and its failure in Canada. Born in Saskatchewan, Ross published a number of distinguished short stories before the appearance of his first novel, As for Me and My House (1941). Written in diary form, this work records the experience of the Reverend Philip Bentley and his wife hi the desolate town of Horizon, one of the many wasteland parishes in which they have struggled during the twelve years of their marriage. The narrative, as told in Mrs. Bentley's compressed, elegiac style, is a relentless record of frustration, spiritual atrophy, and desperate hope which charts the very pulse and temperature of the prairies during the depression years, and endows the entire action with the richness of parable. Thus Horizon, a dot on an apparently endless railway line, becomes finally a timeless image of spiritual travail. Here the Bentleys are assailed by the scourges of wind and dust, suffocating heat and piercing cold; they are bruised by the sadism or the indifference of small-town minds and hearts, and inwardly tormented by the spectres of a religion which they practise without belief. In this barren setting, music, painting, literature, and thought all wither or freeze; Mrs. Bentley's hands stiffen and her piano takes on a honky-tonk tone; and Philip sits in his study drawing faceless people and bleak sketches of the false store-fronts that line the main street. But the twelve-year ordeal ends in a springtime of qualified hope. The Bentleys adopt a child and prepare to move to a small university town where Philip will open a bookstore; the journey from emptiness and pain to a somewhat more humane society is beginning, but there is no suggestion that the goal is at hand.

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The rigidly limited point of view and the rhythmic use of repetition in As for Me and My House support the meaning and mood of the novel admirably; Ross does not always escape the trap of a reiteration which is merely reflex, yet in technique his book remains one of the most finished works that Canada has produced. Regrettably, Ross's production diminished after 1941. Short stories of great merit continued to appear occasionally, but a second novel, The Well (1958), concerned with a young criminal's development towards moral awareness, failed to match the intensity and resonance of the Bentleys' odyssey. The Well brings us again to the central theme of recent Canadian writing— the discovery of self, but several other works which deal with specific social problems should first be mentioned. Perhaps the most professional of these is Gwethalyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven (1944), a study of antisemitism in Montreal. Alert, fluent, ironic, this story contrasts social hatred and its vocabulary of jargon and cliche, with true love and its passionate search for communication. Although Miss Graham's very -articulate lovers quote poetry instead of living it, her rendering of their problem is clearsighted, and that in itself is an achievement. Similarly competent and forceful is Selwyn Dewdney's Wind without Rain (1946), an attack, with Orwellian overtones, on modern education. When teachers deliberately adopt the tactics of business men's service clubs and value massed choral recitations of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" above more orthodox literary studies, education is subverted; and when a principal instals a two-way public address system which enables him to spy on teachers and interrupt classes, the advent of Big Brother is at hand. John Cornish's The Provincials (1951) satirizes Vancouver's culture-buying elite in a style more notable for exuberance than control, and Hugh Garner's Cabbagetown (1951) records with naturalistic energy the case histories of residents in Toronto's worst slum. Three other novels record with some success the stories of embattled individuals caught up by social or political situations beyond their control: radio and TV playwright Len Peterson's Chipmunk (1949) chronicles bleakly the experience of a Toronto bakery worker in his regimented, spiritless world; Don MacMillan's Rink Rat (1949) follows the career of a professional hockey-player; and poet Earle Birney's Down the Long Table (1955) recalls, with the hindsight of the post-McCarthy era, the left-wing political struggles of the thirties in Ontario. Snatching up more bombastic weapons, Ralph Allen's The Chartered Libertine (1954) brings into range such targets as Canadian politicians, broadcasters, censors, and do-gooders; his Peace River Country (1958) records the semi-picaresque journey of a mother and her two children across the prairie provinces. However, this latter work, though it looks with genial sharpness at such phenomena as the country fair, the small-town baseball

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hero, and the Moose Jaw boarding house, is finally concerned with the individual's search for equilibrium and meaning. Here as elsewhere in Canadian fiction, the railway line is an image of the inward journey; but Allen, unlike the popular romancers, knows that the episodes of the journey are more important than the idyllic goal; that the Peace River country, indeed, may never be reached: as a C.P.R. conductor assures the travellers, "It's further than anybody thinks." IV

The regional nature of the bulk of Canadian fiction is rather a fact to be observed than a useful basis for critical classification. Unlike nineteenthcentury America, in which genuinely regional idioms did develop, twentiethcentury Canada is too close to articulate neighbours and too urgently pressed by international responsibilities to enjoy either the leisure or the isolation which produces distinct regional movements. Even such unmistakably regional novels as Tamarac (1957), Margaret Hutchison's romance of British Columbia, suggest an expansive impulse—a need to establish an active rather than passive identity. And "identity," however much it may upset our fashionable critics, is the right word, for the plain fact is that Canada's most gifted writers are in the throes of self-disco very; their struggle (whether in Davies, Ross, Wilson, or Richler) has been to reject the stolid provincial mask and, in Warren Tallman's phrase, "come into presence." And if this presence is still naive—still hesitant and awkward—it may finally produce (as R. E. Walters has argued) not a skilful imitation of other literatures but an original new vision. In any case, this common impulse towards self-discovery now transcends and obviates regional distinctions. Each of the works to be discussed in this section speaks less for a region or group than for individual and communal consciousness. Putting aside, then, such distinctions as geographical and racial background, such labels as "immigrant novel" and "adult western," and such stylistic categories as realism and stream-of-consciousness, we meet a group of writers whose first purpose is to discover the meaning of their own experience, but who—because their centre of consciousness is Canadian—also reveal pattern and shape in the snow-covered expanses of their community. The most serene and mature of these is Ethel Wilson; the most youthful and daring is Mordecai Richler. Ethel Wilson (b. 1890) has been variously described as the most traditional, experimental, artless, and sophisticated of Canada's novelists, and in a curious way all of these contradictory labels stick. They stick because Mrs. Wilson is an odd mixture of artist and sibyl who tells her tales with delicacy and astringent sympathy; who knows that life is without plot though instinct with meaning; and who believes that the artist must, above all, con-

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vey a personal impression of life, whatever the cost to unities and decorums. In short, Mrs. Wilson's art is erratically objective and personal, traditional and adventurous, but the reader is never in doubt that he has met hi her pages a person of extraordinary sensibility and wisdom. Her first novel, Hetty Dorval (1947), establishes in epigraph the themes (all from Donne) which dominate her work: "No man is an Hand, intire of it selfe"; ". . . makes one room an everywhere"; "Good is as visible as greene." And from these themes, naturalized in British Columbia, she develops recurring images—birds in flight; flowing, branching streams; the sea; the islanded self (Conrad, too, is a major influence on her thought); and the cycle of time and the seasons. In these terms the circumscribed area of Vancouver and the Fraser River valley is a world in microcosm; and England, a sea-change away, is simply another "part of the maine." In this world of correspondences Hetty Dorval, a coquette whose unvarying variety is known from Hong Kong to London, is a kind of anti-heroine. She becomes the idol of a warm-hearted British Columbia girl, but—luxuriously islanded in self—betrays this last chance for genuine friendship and disappears, golden and blind, into the darkness of Dollfuss's Austria. Extending this theme of human interdependence, The Innocent Traveller (1949) covers the centurylong life of Topaz Edgeworth from the childish day when she examined Mr. Matthew Arnold's shoes under the family dining-table in England, to her volatile death in Vancouver. Deliberately episodic and unplotted, this work, by telling almost nothing, somehow reveals "the buried life" which the infantine Topaz first encountered in Mr. Arnold's mundane shoes. The Equations of Love (1952) and Swamp Angel (1954) are Ethel Wilson's major works; Love and Salt Water (1956) develops the established themes named in its title, but falters in control. In the first of the Equations of Love ("Tuesday and Wednesday") we get a centripetal view of the nature of love, fate, and human inadequacy as revealed in a dozen characters; in the second ("Lilly's Story") we get a linear view of the forms which love takes in a single life. These equations certainly do not exhaust the subject, but within their compass they are at once sensitive and profound. Lacking the metaphysical chill of Hardy and the supersensitive longeur of Proust, they somehow remind us of both; and they recall at the same time the independence of Gertrude Stein and the decorum of James. Swamp Angel, a novel which calmly mixes experiment and tradition (with little regard for consequences), gives us Mrs. Wilson's two best characters: Maggie Lloyd, a thwarted housewife who rejects the sterility of her marriage for a precarious but genuinely engaged life; and Mrs. Severance, a retired and worldly circus queen whose fearless juggling with death (a talismanic "Swamp Angel" re-

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volver) helps her friends to face life. Mrs. Severance, indeed, is an almost mythical figure whose saving power is her knowledge that the virtues and the verities are not identical. What has been said above applies equally to Ethel Wilson's short stories, with the difference that the uncontrolled element—the province of the sibyl— is not obtrusive in the best of them. Set in Vancouver or London or Munich or on the banks of the Nile, they are more cosmopolitan than Callaghan's, while the contrast between the first and last stories in Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961) suggests a wider range of mood than even Callaghan commands. Although "Mrs. Golightly and the Convention" is the most frequently reproduced of Ethel Wilson's stories, "The Window" is perhaps more representative. Its title image, the window framing by day the empty scene and mirroring by night the sterile life of the protagonist, is central not only to hers but to much modern Canadian fiction. This seems to be the vision of contemporary life which our fiction has been recording, and it is not impossible that both Morley Callaghan and Ethel Wilson will be judged finally to have recorded it as convincingly in their short stories as in their novels. But in all this excellence there is a disturbing flaw; the artist and the sibyl in Ethel Wilson are never quite in harmony, and though both are delightful, their impulses are often in conflict. The artist sketches in delicate details of scene and character—frail, beautiful water-colours—but the sibyl, uncertain of this communication, interrupts parenthetically or cuts the artist off before the rendering is complete. The result is an uncertainty in point of view and an abruptness in narrative method which (though consonant with Mrs. Wilson's vision of the real discontinuity of life) diminish the spell of her art rather than augment it. But the spell is potent nevertheless, for if the image flickers erratically, the light behind it is steady and bright. In four very different works the quest for the self takes us, as in Mrs. Wilson's novels, across the Atlantic, but the backgrounds here are Continental—Germany, Austria, the Ukraine, and Israel. In each of these works (all are first novels), the hero undergoes an ordeal in isolation; he is cut off from his old culture, yet feels an outsider in the new. Reduced to the poor, forked creature he is, stripped of the garment of his amour propre, he ends by discovering his involvement "in mankinde." It is impossible to escape the sense that the four protagonists are tragic witnesses, that they increase in spiritual stature as they shrink in the realm of worldly prestige. In The Rich Man (1948), Henry Kreisel tells the antiheroic story of an immigrant who leaves his factory job in Toronto to visit his family in Vienna, posing as a rich man. His imposture is revealed when he is called upon to help those whom he had wanted only to impress. His

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two absurd (and symbolic) purchases, a white suit and a livid painting, are soiled or wantonly destroyed as he learns through pain to accept the limitations of the human condition. The central character of How Many Angels (1956) by Charles E. Israel is the doctor in charge of a very small hospital in the Sudetenland in 1943. Middle-aged, meek, his marriage barren, his profession and his adopted daughter his only passions, he is compelled by a humanitarian spirit he has tried to ignore to conceal refugees from the Nazis. His daughter betrays him to her lover, a Nazi informer. Deported from Germany, he is deserted by his wife, who becomes the mistress of a rising socialist leader. Finally, bereft of every personal and social support, he is accidentally reunited with his wife; neither wishes to live, but fate launches them again into the world—a world which may, perhaps, raze some of the domestic, social, and political walls that cut men off from the recognition of their common humanity. This is a nightmarish yet darkly affirmative work. A second novel, The Mark (1958), studies the rehabilitation of a sex deviate. Here, Israel displays all the gifts which make him a leading writer of documentary films and socio-historical dramas for radio and television: the social and psychological patterns are sharply drawn; the humane, anti-didactic conclusion is clear. But the Dostoevskian passion and commitment which the subject cries for are missing. Israel, an American citizen who has lived in Toronto since 1953, exhibits a professionalism too seldom seen in Canadian writing. When his imaginative vision takes command of his intelligence and skill, he may produce works of exceptional power. Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice (1956) records with humour and dramatic power the story of a Jewish-Ukrainian family in Winnipeg. Echoing the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, the action contrasts the rigorous piety and ambition of immigrant parents with the changing attitudes of their children and grandchildren. Abraham, the father, has in some sense made a human sacrifice of his son Isaac; and then, still failing to understand the parable, he slaughters a ewe-like woman, his image of sterility and despair. Finally, confined in a madhouse, he understands that Life and Love are God's supreme commandments, and transmits this painfully won intuition to his grandson. The poet Abraham Klein's only novel, The Second Scroll (1951), draws near one of the limits of the novel's range in the direction of the "anatomy," and near another in the direction of poetry. It has the rhetorical power, the exuberance in handling words observable in the best of Klein's poems, and it includes sections of poetry in the glosses that make the novel, with its five books from "Genesis" to "Deuteronomy," not only a parallel to the "First Scroll" but also to the sacred commentaries upon it. From the pogroms of 1917 to the State of Israel in 1949, it records the exile, exodus, and return of the chosen people as a young Jewish-Canadian journalist, in search of his

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multiform and Messianic uncle, Melech Davidson, comes to understand that miracle. Stylistically brilliant, The Second Scroll may be, like Under the Volcano, an exotic in the Canadian field, though its author is Canadianborn. But here it is worth noting that in one respect Klein is not alone: if we except MacLennan, Callaghan, Davies, Wilson, and Richler (and such transAtlantic imports as Walker and Moore), all the writers to be reviewed at any length in this chapter have produced only one novel of consequence; and many of them have produced one novel only. The Second Scroll had its place in the corpus of Klein's poetry, but as a novel it appears as another of those brief and flaring candles which at once inspire hope and reveal with new force the unilluminated reaches of Canadian fiction. In contrast to the four preceding works, which look towards Europe and towards the past in their search for value, is a group bound closely to the Canadian environment and concerned with recording the equally painful effort of young people to come to terms with, or rise above, the provincial mentality of their families and communities. In Under the Ribs of Death (1957) John Marlyn portrays the abortive struggle of a Hungarian immigrant's son in Winnipeg to escape his origins by climbing the slippery ladder of commercial success. The faithful rendering of the boy's growing awareness of his surroundings and of the vulnerability of the young, the poor, and the alien, makes the first half of the book promising indeed; it is the sort of thing—the shrewd and sensitive recasting of what is essentially one's own early emotional experience—that Canadian writers have learned to do well. The second part, showing the collision of his desperate materialistic ambition with the more humane tradition he is trying to deny, becomes increasingly academic. His financial ruin and resultant spiritual rebirth are unconvincing. One sees again the failure of the Canadian writer to integrate the individual experience with the larger pattern. W. O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) describes the encounters of a small-town Saskatchewan boy, Brian O'Connal, with "the realities of birth, hunger, satiety, eternity, death." Like Mark Twain looking back on his boyhood in Missouri, Mitchell sees the dark forces of his community as humorous or melodramatic figures; but though Brian's experience is frequently moving, it lacks the satirical bite of Huckleberry Finn. There is cruelty in both, but the humour that intensifies the Mississippi setting sugarcoats the actualities of the Saskatchewan town (potentially the grimmer setting of the two), so that Brian never encounters those "realities" in any significant way. He learns less how to face life than to avoid it by making it a fantasy of humour characters. The charm of Mitchell's recreation of boyhood, as well as this inevitable bias of his humour towards formula comedy, account for the popular appeal of his subsequent radio series "Jake and the Kid." Mitchell's multiple activities in fiction, radio, editorial work, and television

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THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION produced five more books: The Alien (1953), Jake and the Kid (1961), The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon, The Kite (1962), and The Vanishing Point (1973), in which a white, Indian Affairs agent on a Stony reserve south-west of Calgary falls in love with a student whom he has raised from elementary school to senior matriculation. This tale is essentially a reworking of the material of The Alien, but now the forest of symbols has closed in. The reserve is "Paradise"; the ancient of the tribe is Esau (who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage?) now dying of T.B. The Indian agent has Presbyterian hangovers which divide him between the "white" guts of his background and the "red" guts of the natives. Minor characters, including Indians and an American evangelist, "Heeley" Richards, come alive through Mitchell's proven skill for caricature; but the protagonists remain almost unknown—locked up within inhibitions that the author is unwilling or unable to probe; and the style is at times reminiscent of "Towards a More Picturesque Language." But in the end, the agent Carlyle Sinclair (or St. Clair?) is reunited with his beloved student, and hopes to marry her. But will this union reconcile the parallel lines which, in art, appear to meet at the vanishing point? Probably not. David Caanan, the hero of Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley (1952), maintains at least a consistent, if terrible, relation to his Nova Scotia environment. A mute artist, hyperconsciously aware of the vividness and multiplicity of experience, David escapes the abrasive rub of ordinary life by retreating to a private world of his own. His sister (his spiritual alter-ego) marries a sailor and commits herself to the world of war and chance. Then, in final anguish, David climbs the mountain, where the colourless all-colour of snow drowns his intensities in its total ubiquity. In style, this novel reflects David's sensibility in an unrelenting search for the exact image to describe a neglected orchard in autumn, or a train streaking through the valley towards Halifax. Never, one feels, has rural Nova Scotia been more vividly recreated. Yet this intensity—like David's inability to risk the travail of either art or life —is at length disconcerting, for it has only one feverish note to sound. Buckler's novel is the cruellest picture of "the buried life" in Canadian fiction. A continent away, and even more isolated than the valley of Buckler's novel, the British Columbia farming community of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook (1959) achieves something of the universality of a Walden or Winesburg, Ohio. Here, in a world which is still shadowed by the tyrannical Indian spirit Coyote, a pioneer family plays out the ageless drama of denial and self-discovery—discovery that darkness and glory, fear and joy, are complementary aspects of the human condition; "that when you fish for the glory you catch the darkness too." This is the double hook. James Potter, after seducing a neighbour's daughter and striking down his mother, flees in fear to the nearest village; but the spectacle of deceit and perversity which he

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encounters there leads him to return to his valley and embrace the fear and the glory which are man's destiny. This story, as simple as a medieval folk ballad, is told with a poetic compression and allusiveness, and a vividness of imagery that make its regional setting both a sharply realized here and "an everywhere." Repeatedly the style kindles echoes from Eliot and Faulkner, Job and the New Testament, and Anglo-Saxon poetry, but Mrs. Watson is so fully in control that idiom and action never gape apart as they sometimes do in Ethel Wilson's work. The Double Hook, indeed, is the most literary, and probably the most sophisticated novel of the period. Two other writers who have taken up this search for individual or communal identity deserve mention; they are Roderick Haig-Brown, the Vancouver Island nature writer (The Highest Hill, 1949) and Saskatchewan English professor Edward McCourt (Music at the Close, 1947, Home is the Stranger, 1950, and Walk through the Valley, 1958). The writer who stands farthest from Ethel Wilson's quiet affirmation, however, is Mordecai Richler. His brash rejection of Canada's imported and inherited pieties brings to a close one phase of the Canadian quest for self, and in a flurry of fireworks launches another. The uniqueness of Mordecai Richler (b. 1931) is easy to explain. Like Thoreau, who decided that Harvard taught all the branches of knowledge but none of the roots, Richler wants to get at the prime meanings of experience—to drive life into a corner and see whether it is a good thing or bad. But Richler does not live at Walden; his reality lies somewhere beneath the encrusted hypocrisies and orthodoxies of urban culture; and though in burrowing towards this reality he is often na'ive, cranky, and even short-sighted, he is determined (in the words of his best critic, Peter Scott) "to keep to the experience at hand and to the truth which is available." Far from the reflective or analytical mood that has been characteristic of Canadian fiction, Richler's spirit resembles that of the "angry" young Englishman and the "beat" writers of "the great American night"; but though, like them, he strips away the world's pretences, he does not end as an outsider, in alienated or intoxicated freedom. Richler belongs (as Brian Moore does) in society, and he has enough verve to refuse alienation. If orthodox frauds reject him, he will simply bypass them and create his own order—a crude one, perhaps, but bracing in its directness, and electric with energy. Since 1954, when he was twenty-two, Richler has produced a tide of film and television scripts, short stories, articles for British, American, and Canadian journals, and four novels which, though flawed individually, constitute in sum the most promising asuvre of the recent period. The Acrobats (1954) and Son of a Smaller Hero (1955) might both be described as "first novels"; both deal with a hero obsessed by self and hi reckless opposition to a world which is stifling, corrupt, and Protean in its deceit. The Acrobats recounts

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the spiritual agony and eventual death of Andre Bennett, a young Canadian painter in Spain—the symbolic arena of shattered ideals, lost causes, and vain hopes. In this shadowy post-war limbo, Richler's hero learns two truths: "that the poor should have more because they were human and no human should be ugly"; and that the individual must act on what he knows, for "not to act would mean nonliving." Yet when Andre does act—striking out drunkenly against the ugliness of a former Nazi officer—he is destroyed. He succumbs because of his inexperience, but he does act; and the novel ends in a symbolic birth. Andre's mistress bears a child (fathered by the Nazi) whom she names Andre; then, counselled by a sage and benevolent restaurateur, Chaim, she embarks for a new life in America. As Chaim, the humanitarian whose passport is revoked by state after state, affirms: "there is always hope. . . . There has to be." The forced symbolism of this ending is only one of The Acrobats' shortcomings: the festival of San Jose glitters like the fireworks which conclude it, but falls short of the structural significance which similar rites achieve in Hemingway or Mann; the narrative method flickers uncertainly because the narrator is not sufficiently distinct from his hero; and the echoes of Hemingway, Sartre, and others are more often reflexes than conscious devices. But though the book is not, as one critic claims, "a guide to intelligent, contemporary pastiche," it has a nervous, exploratory power. Son of a Smaller Hero (1955) is in effect an earlier chapter in fictional autobiography. But if Richler is on firmer ground in the Jewish community of Montreal than he was in Spain, he is still uncomfortably close to his hero's anger and confusion; the family and community described come magnificently to life, but the hero, Noah Adler, is such an unreliable guide to his own experience that the closing ambiguity of the novel appears inadvertent rather than deliberate. The step from this to A Choice of Enemies (1957) and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) is the enormous stride from denial to assertion, from rejection to deliberate choice. As in battle, the technical units lag behind the attack forces in both of these works, but the objectives are taken and held. In A Choice of Enemies, the hero is a left-wing expatriate, Norman Price, who has sought refuge in London's Hampstead bohemia, only to discover that his friends, Fifth Amendment heroes (mostly writers and film-makers) are no less ignoble than their bourgeois enemies, and perhaps even more exclusive in their group orthodoxy. As in The Acrobats, the central problem concerns a Nazi (this time a refugee from East Germany). In the course of defending this young man's right to strip off the labels with which society has marked him, Norman clashes with his friends and is himself stripped of every mark of prestige which he had enjoyed as an

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insider. In the nuclear age, Norman realizes, the real enemies are not communism, fascism, or capitalism but the ancient scourges of pride, covetousness, and the lust for power. Finally, after an attack of amnesia (the symbol is awkward) Norman "dies into life"; he chooses to marry a very ordinary English girl and to return to disinterested scholarship; to live not for prestige or power but for unheroic, humane values. Then, sensing perhaps a hint of complacency in this easy-difficult choice, Richler gives the reader a final jab: Norman's "ordinary" wife, it appears, is dazzled by the prestige of his former friends, and begins ingratiating herself with them even before the honeymoon begins. In A Choice of Enemies, Richler the film-writer occasionally interferes with Richler the novelist; suspense is introduced whether meaning requires it or not, and dialogue is often geared to the film editor's cut. In The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz the novelist is again in control, but a new problem, the relation between realism and comedy or farce, presents itself. Duddy's apprenticeship—his chequered progress from a Montreal slum to a shaky status as landowner—is a story by turns comic, pathetic, bawdy, and farcical; and though the exuberant reality of Duddy himself is never in doubt, the modulation of other characters from pathos to farce makes the reader's suspension of disbelief something less than willing. But these flaws are principally evidence of the rapidity of Richler's artistic development. The theme of Duddy Kravitz extends the quest for value of the earlier books, but this time Richler dares a hero whose background is hard knocks and whose only capital is his ability to charm, twist, dream, calculate, and work. And since Duddy has none of the training or experience of Norman Price, the ironies of his experience are presented without comment; everything is kaleidoscopic, headlong action, and everything is indispensable to the total statement. Hacking his way through the urban jungle of hypocrisy and chicane, Duddy outsmarts enemies and exploits friends, but he finally gets his land, an untouched tract of lake and fields in a high Laurentian valley. In doing so he has sacrificed the respect of his zeyda and his sweetheart; both are worthy people, but their codes would bind Duddy permanently in the nightmare of modern urban life. Thus the conclusion of Duddy's ascent is a beginning rather than an end; unlike Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby, however, he possesses not a corrupt Long Island but a virgin tract of Canada from which he raucously dismisses his deformed and vicious rival, Dingleman. Richler does not pose a final question, but one hangs in the air: Will Duddy reproduce on his own land the nightmare which he has escaped? Mordecai Richler has asked piercing questions on issues which involve the self, the nation, and mankind, and he has dismissed the stock replies that

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religion, politics, and the polite social sciences and humanities customarily offer. His exuberant style and intellectual toughness make him the most exciting and promising of Canada's younger novelists. v There can be no question that Canadian fiction has profited immensely since 1940 from the experience of writers who have gone abroad, and from the fresh vision of writers who have come to live in Canada. Service in World War II and subsequent duties as occupation units and in international organizations have taken unprecedented numbers of Canadians abroad in this period; prosperity, mass air travel, and the communications systems of the "jet age" have made the outside world immediate to most Canadians; immigration has not only brought colour and variety to Canada's urban centres but has made the encounter with other languages and other customs part of the day-to-day experience of most of our people. Inevitably the provincial Canadian has resisted the change, but inevitably, too, a cultural expansion has occurred. As a result, the discovery of Canada now demands of the artist a discovery of the wider world, and such writers as Margaret Laurence (her This Side Jordan, 1960, is a distinguished story of life in Ghana), Mavis Gallant, Graham Mclnnes, and others, are documenting that discovery with skill and insight. Fiction based on the experience of World War II, however, reveals that this expansion of consciousness is still embryonic. Writers who attempted to deal with the major issues of the war and the peace had not done enough homework in history and philosophy, and writers who made the conflict an occasion for personal exploration, lacked the power to get outside their own experience. The best works, not unexpectedly, were those which recreated the soldier's experience graphically, without indulging in summit generalizations or muddy introspection. In these terms, Storm Below (1944) by Hugh Garner, is the most impressive Canadian novel of World War II. Less committed and more colloquial than Conrad as an observer of life at sea, Garner brings the world of a corvette on the North Atlantic convoy route into mundane yet mysterious life. Nature and fate and man himself, as Garner sees them, are inscrutable, but man develops curious loyalties and animosities in the process of adapting to life, even if his adaptation is no more than a tropism. Storm Below is thus an unheroic but oddly warming record of an encounter of nature, fate, and man during six days at sea in 1943. The corvette's crew does not choose to go to sea, but when storms without and storms below-deck face them, "they'll be there, and they know what to do." Execution (1958) by Colin McDougall matches Hugh Garner's realism and occasionally rises to poetry, but the philosophical truth which the author attempts to rescue from his war experi-

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ence in Sicily and Italy sinks finally, if melodiously, to muddy death. In various ways McDougall's protagonists learn that war, execution, and sadism are one extremity of a spectrum which terminates in friendship, sympathy, and love. But the brutal facts of execution weigh so heavily that McDougall's spiritual intuitions appear as gossamer theory. He understands the love-pain paradox of Billy Budd but lacks the passion which invests Melville's work with its authority. Douglas LePan's The Deserter (1964) is an initiation myth—the account of a soldier who deserts his unit in London at the end of the war, and learns through anguish and love and memory that there is no escape from the burdens of humanity: "There would always be the taste of perfection in his mouth; he would never be rid of it, he would never recapture the source from which it came; sometimes it might lead him to folly, sometimes . . . to wisdom and rare transitory triumphs." Three novels by Lionel Shapiro (1908-1958), The Sealed Verdict (1947), Torch for a Dark Journey (1950), and The Sixth of June (1955), deal skilfully and at times movingly with the Allied occupation of Germany, the ideological dilemma of a Czech scientist in post-war France, and the great offensive that ended the war; but though Shapiro's concern over the moral and intellectual issues which he raises is genuine, his work is closer to expert journalism and scenario-writing than to the autonomous patterns of art. Ralph Allen's Home Made Banners (1946) lacks the patina of Shapiro's work but is somehow truer. His criticism of the recruiting system and of military training rests on sharp observation, and his distinction between propaganda and personal or "home made" banners raises a major issue; the title, however, promises more than Allen delivers. Earle Birney's "military picaresque," Turvey (1949), laughs with uneasy heartiness at the dilemmas of man regimented, but misses the universality at which it aims; and Norman Levine's The Angled Road (1952) is an erratic and groping account of an airman's search for value. Complementing the fiction produced by Canadians abroad, the work of immigrant writers—some of them, like Malcolm Lowry, long-term residents who came, conquered, and departed—has further extended the circumference of Canadian reality. A writer like Brian Moore, for example, is closer to Joyce's Dubliners and to the vigorous young Englishmen of the so-called "angry" group than to any Canadian pattern, but the fact that Moore is here rather than in Belfast gives him a special importance for Canadian readers and writers alike. The vision that talented young novelists bring to Canada, indeed, may affect the whole development of Canadian writing. Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), who lived intermittently in British Columbia from 1939 to 1954, is the richest and most exotic novelist who has associated himself with Canada. Born in England and educated at Cambridge, he found in Canada a world as yet unspoiled by the delirium that had overtaken Europe; and it was here that he wrote Under the Volcano (1947) and a

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matchless collection of short stories of British Columbia life which his executors have prepared for publication under the title Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. In effect, Under the Volcano is a twentiethcentury Inferno, compounded of images from Joyce and Mann, Dante and The Cabbala, and from Lowry's own saisons en enfer. Its protagonist, Geoffrey Firmin (the infirm one) is a British consul in Mexico who plays out in a symbolic landscape the last agonies of an individual (and a civilization) that has abused its magic powers. Firmin drinks mescal, not for its visioninducing properties but as an escape from the demands and pressures of modern life. Unfortunately the "linked analogies" which universalize Firmin's experience proliferate in such dizzying circles that the complex structure of the work is obscured. Like Melville, Lowry is a "possessed" writer; the range and intensity of his imagination are extraordinary, and the simultaneous vividness and allusiveness of his style make every page a prose poem. He lacks the control which would complete these gifts, however, and though he avoids the excesses of a Mardi, he does not achieve the grandeur of Moby Dick. A native of Belfast who now lives in Montreal and New York, Brian Moore (b. 1921) sounds a note new to Canadian fiction. Combining high humour with shrewd social observation, authentic dialogue with fluent narrative, and moral toughness with real tenderness, his work at once recalls the bitter-sweet atmosphere of Joyce's "Clay" and the moral agony (minus the literary decor) of Eliot's "Prufrock." Each of his three novels is a variation on a single theme—the struggle of the individual to commit himself to life, to abandon protective disguises or self-deceptions and, like "a drop of water joining an ocean," embrace his humanity. Moore's triumph is to give both his protagonists and the world in which they exist a palpable reality. Thus in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956) we enter the world of an aging Belfast spinster who drowns the knowledge of her aloneness in alcohol, and ends in a hospital for indigents where her unassailably lifeless realities are a photograph of her dead aunt and a chromo of her dead God. This bleak but moving work was followed in 1957 by The Feast of Lupercal, the history of Diarmuid Devine, a Belfast schoolmaster whose fear of giving offence to anyone causes him to betray the one woman (Una) who might have released him from spiritual and physical barrenness. In style this work is an advance on Judith Hearne, where effects borrowed from Joyce and Eliot are not fully assimilated; but though its dramatic scenes are superb, its use of repetitive devices is somewhat obvious. In overcoming these difficulties, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960) adopts a manner almost too relaxed, too chary of images which might thicken the surface texture; but it is an excellent novel nevertheless. Ginger Coffey, a self-deluding Irishman who has followed a dream of success and prestige to Montreal, is gradually stripped of every one of his illusions, but unlike Judith Hearne and Devine, Coffey—after hilarious

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and humiliating experiences as diaper deliveryman, proofreader, and prisoner at the bar of a Montreal court ("a fait pisser juste dans la grande porte du Royal Family Hotel")—Coffey finally recognizes that he may "die in humble circs: it did not matter." And with this recognition he is suddenly free to embrace life for what it is. Because Moore's central theme is a timeless ethical problem, the sea-change from Ulster to Canada has been easy for him. His response to Canada, seen through the rueful eyes of Ginger Coffey, is at once exuberant and sharply in focus. One hopes that some of his freshness may be communicated to more solemn Canadian writers. David Walker, born in Scotland in 1911, served a term in Canada as aide to the then Governor-General, Lord Tweedsmuir, waited out most of World War II in a German prison camp, and spent some time in India before settling in Canada in 1947 to write. Since then he has published six novels revealing not only his wide travels and varied experiences but also his easy exploiting of the popular types of fiction. The Storm and the Silence (1949) describes a manhunt in Scotland; Harry Black (1956) a tiger-hunt in India. Geordie (1950—Walker's most popular work) and Digby (1953) combine "escapist romance . . . sprightly comedy, and . . . moral tale." In The Pillar (1952) Walker draws on his own POW experience for a highly dramatic and suspenseful tale of self-discovery according to the Stalag 17 formula. Walker's only novel having a Canadian setting is Where the High Winds Blow (1960), a combination of northern adventure, domestic romance, and a rugged-enterprise thesis which again illustrates both Mr. Walker's competence in fiction and his reluctance to risk that competence on less popular themes. Perhaps it is enough to be grateful for, that there has been, in recent Canadian fiction, the leaven of professional "know-how" from visiting and immigrant novelists. This, of course, takes, us back to the beginnings of our literature, to The History of Emily Montague and Roughing It in the Bush; but with all the difference that comes of there being, now, a native lump to leaven. VI

What remains to be noticed—short stories, works of humour, and belleslettres—is such a spindly harvest that one is more inclined to ponder the reasons for its failure than to study individual straws. Canada's cultural climate in the post-war period is certainly responsible in part for this failure, but the brutal realities of the market bulk even larger; and the two factors, climate and market, usually appear in combination. Belles-lettres, for example, demands a soil rich in ideas and a bracing air of controversy, but Canada, even in the fifties, shunned controversy, and regarded ideas as a disease of professors and eccentrics. At the same time, there is still no daily press and no substantial periodical press which provides a forum for expert

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and literate opinion. In this situation, academics devote themselves, for intellectual and economic reasons, to scholarship, and publish as often in British and American learned journals as in Canada; journalists, dependent on what press there is, almost inevitably descend to well-worn formulas of wit or impudence, to the superficial glance at issues and events, or to controversy for its own sake. And between these extremes of the academy and the pressclub there is almost nothing of interest. Superannuated clergymen and professors collect their reminiscences and scattered "thoughts"; newspapermen select—but never strictly enough—their best columns; and poets, novelists, and after-dinner speakers publish occasional essays. Belles-lettres, in short, does not flourish in Canada. There are signs, however, that the unique combination of grace, wit, and humane learning which characterizes the literary essay is known and valued by a few writers. Such varied works as Emily Carr's reminiscences of sketching trips in British Columbia, Klee Wyck (1941), Pierre Berton's informal history, Klondike (1958), and the best essays of MacLennan and Davies point in the right direction. Periodical articles by Millar MacLure, John W. Graham, Peter Scott, and Kildare Dobbs —to name only four of a growing number—achieve that happy balance of wit and erudition, vigour and grace, which is one of our greatest unclaimed legacies from English literature. And finally, George Woodcock's editorial activities, and his numerous books and articles on travel, literature, and social criticism demonstrate that the man of humane letters, if not yet an indigenous figure, can at least survive and even flourish in contemporary Canada. Apart from Robertson Davies, the record of humorous writers is much less encouraging—so unpromising, indeed, that the prematurely established Stephen Leacock Medal for humour was in the fifties an annual embarrassment. As we have seen above, one vein of Leacock's genius—-the gently sardonic observation of society—developed into full-scale satire in Davies' work. Another—the spectacle of the "little man" torn between necessity and desire, real and ideal—has been reduced by Eric Nicol and others to a pale shadow of Thurber's Walter Mitty; and the plain style appropriate to this figure has been abandoned for chattering wisecracks a la Bob Hope. Apart from these directions, W. O. Mitchell developed a superior formula for "Western" humour in his tales of Jake and the Kid; Robert Fontaine's The Happy Time (1945) turns the experience of his Ottawa childhood into formula comedy of the "family entertainment" variety familiar on radio and television; and Paul Hiebert's Sarah Binks (1947) satirizes Canada's literary nationalism and academic criticism with such weightiness that the author himself barely escapes the baleful eye of travesty. The short fiction of novelists has been noted above, but a resurgence of this genre developed in the 1960s, and for purposes of continuity it has been thought more useful to advance this discussion to a later chapter.

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In looking at the transcontinental sweep of Canadian fiction, critics from Northrop Frye to Warren Tallman have seen its development as a struggle against the violence, or the snowy indifference of nature—as an effort to humanize and give articulate shape to this vast landscape; to encompass it in imaginative terms, and in so doing, to discover the self. In these terms, the fiction of the recent period reveals that the process is still far from complete. The majority of writers still inhabit romantic worlds which have very little to do with the realities of Canadian life in the post-war period, while others, conscious of the limitations of their community, seek to escape it by becoming American or British or something else that seems to them to be superior. Ironically, this attempt at escape cannot succeed, but the stretching of the imagination which it entails is the best thing that can happen to Canadian writing, for what the writer who goes abroad learns is that he cannot simply slough off his Canadian experience. By establishing a relation with other cultures he may gain a great deal that is valuable; but even more important, he will learn something of his Canadian uniqueness. As both Emerson and James recognized in the last century, the passion for foreign experience proved, finally, to be a potent "Americanizing" force. Unquestionably, Canadian fiction is now in a similar expanding phase. It is not too extravagant to imagine that in the period upon which it now enters it will truly establish "an original relation to the universe."

12. Poetry 1920-1935 MUNRO BEATTIE

I THROUGH THE FIRST THREE DECADES of this century the impulses that had animated Canadian poets in the eighties and nineties slackened and deteriorated. By 1920 the romantic-Victorian tradition was at its last gasp. Yet, during the 1920's, its conventions persisted in thousands of mediocre lines published annually in Canadian magazines, on the home-makers' and bookeditors' pages of Canadian newspapers, and in the flimsy volumes issued by Briggs or Musson or other Toronto presses. This was a body of verse that, almost without exception, modelled itself upon the lesser works of the nineteenth-century masters of English poetry and upon such minor Americans as Lanier, Riley, Whittier, Cawein, and Bayard Taylor. In the years following World War I other voices as well began to echo through Canadian verse: the voices of Symons, Thompson, Housman, Kipling, Rupert Brooke, Masefield, Alfred Noyes, the early Yeats, and the Georgian poets of pre-war England. This Canadian poetry derived its metaphysics from the eighteenth-century reconciliation of the Newtonian universe with a belief in a Creator, from the nineteenth-century synthesis of evolution and faith, and from the transcendentalism of New England—not so much from the tragic insight of Hawthorne and Melville as from the more optimistic transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. In diction it was unremittingly "poetic." One touch of the colloquial would have been disastrous, for this was writing in a style that, in T. S. Eliot's words, "aspired to the elevation of verse" before having become "assimilated to cultivated contemporary speech." Its prosodic patterns were conventional: sonnet, quatrain, octosyllabics, rhyme royal, the Spenserean stanza in various adaptations and disformations, the "Lady of Shalott" stanza, the "In Memoriam" stanza, and countless variants and repetitions of forms originally signed with the individuality of Keats, Poe, Browning, or Swinburne. In metre it was oppressively and

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inflexibly iambic; or if trochaic, with cadences straight out of "Locksley Hall"; if anapaestic, with a lilt reminiscent of something by Scott or Moore. Worst of all, the versifiers of this arid period, having nothing to say, kept up a constant jejune chatter about infinity, licit love, devotion to the Empire, death, Beauty, God, and Nature. Sweet singers of the Canadian out-of-doors, they peered into flowers, reported on the flittings of the birds, discerned mystic voices in the wind, descried elves among the poplars. They insisted upon being seen and overheard in poetic postures: watching for the will-o'the-wisp, eavesdropping on "the forest streamlet's noonday song," lying like a mermaid on a bed of coral, examining a bird's nest in winter, fluting for the fairies to dance, or "wandering through some silent forest's aisles." John Garvin's anthology, Canadian Poets (1916, revised 1926), in which appear most of these instances, abundantly demonstrates that poetry hi Canada as the 1920's opened was dying of emotional and intellectual anemia. By the mid-thirties signs of revitalization—infrequent but unmistakable signs—had appeared. The twenties was a time of fresh beginnings in Canada and of receptivity to stimulus from without. The forces of modernism—the "new poetry" of England and the United states—gradually re-invigorated writers and writing in Canada. Anyone who searches diligently through the 1912-25 files of the Winnipeg Free Press, the Toronto Globe, Saturday Night, the Canadian Magazine, the Canadian Bookman, and the Canadian Forum (founded in 1920, at the right moment to be of service to new attitudes and new methods), will discover evidence that a few Canadians were reading the new poetry and reacting to it. They were coming upon, in the pages of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago), poems, strange and exciting poems, by Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. They were being exhilarated by books by these poets, and books by Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, and D. H. Lawrence. They were learning to prefer the successive Imagist anthologies to the volumes of Georgian Poetry. They were threshing out in the correspondence columns of "literary" pages such agitating questions as "Is the reign of Tennyson over?" and "Is free verse really only shredded prose?" The modern movement in poetry was a threefold revolution: first, prosodic experiment—free verse, conformity to none of the conventions of metre, line-length, stanza form; secondly, the use of language and imagery appropriate to a modern sensibility; thirdly, the enlargement of subject-matter to take in areas of behaviour, attitude, and milieu neglected or shunned by most poets of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Experimental verse was the aspect easiest to argue about, and to imitate. Free verse became a shibboleth among reviewers and newspaper correspondents. The Canadian Authors' Association (founded in 1921) split nationally and in all its branches,

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although the first president of the association, John Murray Gibbon, enthusiastically sponsored free verse and wrote for the first issue of the Canadian Bookman a sensible and well-informed article about vers libre. Canadian readers in general—at least, the minuscule minority who read any poetry at all and who were aware that Canadian poets, a few of them, were poised on the verge of violence—were assured by the Globe's complacent literary editor that, "We usually write in metre and dislike poetical as well as other kinds of Bolshevism." Several poets, however, were un-Canadian enough to try their hands at experimental verse. The earliest was Arthur Stringer (1874-1950) whose book of poems Open Water came out in 1914, when vers libre, even in the United States, was still the concern only of a few "little" magazines. Stringer, a prolific and versatile writer of third-rate quality, produced during his career a number of novels and fifteen books of verse that ranged from poetic dramas on classical themes to facile and sentimental "Irish" songs. His preface to Open Water was a carefully worked out manifesto: to express the feelings of a new era, the poet must emancipate his writing from stereotyped rhythms and out-moded forms. The sixty poems of Open Water go some distance towards justifying the preface and the method. They are almost wholly unmarred by "poetic diction." They display the virtues of economy and directness. Their scope of mood and material is wider than other Canadian books of the period show. But they fail to realize the peculiar kind of impetus and unity that good free verse can attain to. They are mostly gatherings of prose sentences arbitrarily divided into lines of varying length, as illustrated by this example, "One Night in the Northwest": When they flagged our train because of a broken rail, I stepped down out of the crowded car, With its clamour and dust and heat and babel of broken talk. I stepped out into the cool, the velvet cool, of the night, And felt the balm of the prairie-wind on my face, And somewhere I heard the running of water, I felt the breathing of grass, And I knew, as I saw the great white stars, That the world was made for good!

Frank Oliver Call, less competent than Arthur Stringer as a literary journeyman, was equally doctrinaire. "Vers libre, like the motor car and aeroplane, has come to stay whether we like it or no." This is the thesis of the foreword to his small volume of verse, Acanthus and Wild Grape (1920). The title refers to a double purpose. The acanthus poems illustrate conventional modes, and manage to be as inane and hackneyed as most other Canadian poems of the period. The wild grape poems are intended, on the other hand, to demonstrate the superiority of free verse, but they have only

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the interest of novelty. Novelty is to be preferred to repetition, but only success justifies prosodic novelty. Not one of these wild grape poems forms a satisfying whole. Four years later, F. O. Call published in Blue Homespun a group of pleasant and perceptive sonnets about French Canada. His gift did, after all, belong to the traditional and conventional rather than the experimental. Among the few Canadians who took note, between 1915 and 1925, of the new English and American poetry no one wrote more sensibly and sympathetically about it than Arthur L. Phelps (b. 1887). As well, he contributed several poems of his own in free verse to the Canadian Magazine. Of these the most accomplished was a sequence published as a chapbook in 1919, Bobcaygeon: A Sketch of a Little Town. The diction is scrupulously unadorned and the rhythms are matter-of-fact. The short poems of the group project with a fair degree of skill the moods of nostalgia and quiet joy. Like Leacock's "The Train to Mariposa," Phelps's poems develop a double theme: the life of the little town beside the lake and the city-dweller's sense of it as a haven and a home. Phelps had a better understanding than most of his contemporaries of the nature of free verse. He perceived that it must realize a new rhythm and not merely distort old rhythms. Lawren Harris (b. 1885), whose paintings are an important part of the artistic renaissance of the twenties, ventured into verse in Contrasts (1922), a collection of Whitmanesque notations on Canadian life. The poems are insistently "realistic"; that is, they emphasize squalor and mention forms of conduct not discussed by nicely brought up Canadians. Harris's scorn for an industrial and commercial civilization, his scepticism of "bourgeois values," and his indignation over the ugliness of Toronto and environs come through with crude force. As poetry Contrasts is undistinguished in diction and awkward in rhythm, but its colloquial directness here and there calls to mind Lawrence's Nettles and Pansies. Lawren Harris's pictures do a better job of recording his vision of city life in the 1920's. Other books of free verse were published which, like those already mentioned, are of historical rather than literary interest. Louise Morey Bowman (1882-1944) sounded the more contemplative tones of free verse in two books: Moonlight and Common Day (1922) and Dream Tapestries (1924). The usefulness of irregular verse for exotic effects was exploited by a Canadian missionary to China, Florence Ayscough, who, in collaboration with Amy Lowell, produced an attractive little book of little poems, Fir-Flower Tablets (1922). Considerably more skill and insight appeared in the freeverse adaptations of west coast Indian songs that Constance Lindsay Skinner (1879-1939) had begun publishing in 1913 and 1914 in Poetry and the London Bookman and which were brought together into the collection entitled Songs of the Coast Dwellers (1930). Miss Skinner's irregular

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cadences splendidly re-create the verbal and emotional effects of primitive poetry. The interest of her poems is literary as well as anthropological. Careful search discovers a number of mediocre poems in free verse scattered through magazines and newspapers. One virtue sets them off from the conventional poems among which they appeared, the trite sonnets and insipid lyrics: a more direct way of looking at and speaking about reality. They avoided, on the whole, inflated diction, flights into the empyrean, pressure on the picturesque. The practice of free verse helped to clear away some of the literary clutter of the period. Otherwise, this small flurry of freeversifying in the early twenties is of importance only to the literary historian, as symptom and portent. Free verse as a battle cry has never had much meaning for the practising poet, who is not so much interested in freedom as in finding the way to devise lines and patterns that will most effectively compose his perceptions into poems. Even some poets who certainly would have been claimed by the "conservatives" in the debate over the new poetry departed, when it suited their purposes, from conventional metrics and stanza forms. Some of Duncan Campbell Scott's finest poems (for instance "At Gull Lake: August 1810," "The Forsaken," "The Height of Land") were composed in lines that eschewed traditional prosody, though not in a way that would astonish readers of Matthew Arnold. Marjorie Pickthall, too, depended on her excellent ear rather than on a careful count of syllables for the rhythms of "Pere Lalement," "The Little Sister of the Prophet," and "The Pool." Furthermore, a poet whose attitudes and themes were thoroughly "traditional" might discern in free verse the most efficient method of handling his material. Arthur Bourinot (b. 1893) is an example. Early in his career Bourinot discovered that he could best put down his delicate impressions of nature in short irregular lines. In the frequent collections that he has published since Laurentian Lyrics and Other Poems (1915), his most successful poems of mood and description have been of this fashion. Such vigour as his narrative poems attain to is worked up by the rapid succession of short strongly accented lines (Collected Poems, 1947). Almost all poetry written in Canada since the 1920's might be called free verse. Each poem takes the shape dictated by the movement of feeling and thought; every poem must appear to be the first of its kind. Even in the "rage for order" that impelled poets following the Second World War to compose strict and sinewy stanzas, the stanzas were new creations in lines of diverse lengths and rhythms, rather than re-creations of traditional forms. Modern poets had learned that the value of free verse does not reside in its superficial novelty and visual stimulus, but in its fidelity to the essential rhythm of the poem. This was a prosodic wisdom learned by only two of the early writers of

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modernist verse in Canada, and the best work of both was completed in the twenties: Eustace Ross and Raymond Knister. W. W. E. Ross (b. 1894) in the title of his 1930 collection, Laconics, implied a temperamental aversion from the looseness and garrulity—"all this fiddle," as Marianne Moore, one of his preceptors, put it—of the usual magazine verse of the era. Some few of his own poems betray a tendency to wordiness, poems composed in longish, Whitmanish lines like those of Lawren Harris: "Sunnyside," "Wind Conquest," "Sprightly Young Woman" (a charming poem, however), and "High Park." Ross also made translations from Catullus and Euripides that did not wholly avoid current weaknesses of metre and diction. His Sonnets (1932) are intellectually interesting in an angular fashion, but ungainly as verse. The poems by Ross that count are the free-verse poems in Laconics, those that show his characteristic method: to reduce a poem to its essentials, its bare bones, and to give it typographical distinctiveness. Prosodically, this is less audacious than it looks. A rhythmic unit of four lines generally prevails, quatrains from which everything has been eliminated but the minimum words for the statement of a succession of images: "Fish," "The Dawn; the Birds," "A Death," "The Diver." Ross had a gift for looking directly at a place or an object and recognizing the things about it that gave it identity. Since he usually recorded impressions gathered in the Canadian countryside, his best poems—those already cited and others, such as " 'The saws were shrieking,' " "In the Ravine," and "The Walk"—perfectly create the effect that he said he wished to create: something "North American"— and something of the sharper tang of Canada.

Poets of a later generation recognized the merits of W. W. E. Ross's work. Experiment, published by the Contact Press in 1956, was both a gathering of the verse he had composed in the twenties and a salute to his integrity and skill as a writer. Raymond Knister (1900-1932) wrote short stories and novels as well as poems, and it is probable that, if his career had been prolonged, his greatest achievement would have been in fiction. The qualities that mark all his work, however, are precisely those most vividly brought out by free verse: honesty in reporting experience and a flair for the rhythms of speech. Knister's poems, almost without exception, came out of his years on his father's farm, first in Essex, and later in Kent county in Ontario. The drudgery of farm labour, the counterpoint of the seasons and the chores, the loneliness and silences, the closeness of animal to human life, the sacrifices imposed by the resolve to study and to write—these were the decisive

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elements in Knister's youthful experience and the subjects of his poems. His Collected Poems were published in 1949 with a useful chronology of his writing and a sympathetic memoir and critical study by Dorothy Livesay. His objective in writing was "to make things real," to present rather than to interpret: Birds and flowers and dreams are real as sweating men and swilling pigs. But the feeling about them is not always so real, when it gets into words. Because of that, it would be good just to place them before the reader, just let the reader picture them with the utmost economy and clearness, and let them move him in the measure that he is moved by little things and great.

This is the effect of Knister's best poems, which are direct, short, and in uncomplicated verse and plain diction. Sometimes a poem does no more than round off a succession of details with the intimation of a mood or the hint of an impression. Sometimes the places and activities of the farm provide pretexts for bits of bucolic sagacity that, ingratiatingly, avoid an excess of the cracker-barrel or the homespun. Knister was well read in contemporary poetry and fiction. Moreover, at certain periods he lived and worked among writers of an avant-garde sort. His tone often suggests the poems of William Carlos Williams. "The Plowman" and "Ambition" and "White Cat" have something of the accent of Robert Frost. The portrait gallery of horses in "A Row of Stalls" calls to mind Spoon River Anthology. "The Hawk" employs the technique of Imagism, but is more interesting in content than Imagist poems ordinarily are. Knister had his own distinguishing qualities. He had learned—almost alone among Canadian writers of the twenties—the principal requisite of free verse: that cadence and feeling must be thoroughly fused, as, for instance, in "The Colt": Through the gate The boy leads him, Turns him, expectant, Around; Slips off the halter: He whirls, is gone— Boy brandishing The halter at his going, Clapping his handsUnnecessary— In long lopes he speeds, Rising and dipping, Down the rolling lane. Such beauty, see, Such grace, Moving (diversely!) Never was.. . .

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Although his intentions as a poet were modest, Knister had positive aspirations for the poetry, the literature and culture, of his native country: . . . we might feel differently about many . . . common things if we saw them clearly enough. In the end we in Canada here might have the courage of our experience and speak according to it only. And if we trust surely, see directly enough, life, ourselves, we may have our own Falstaffs and Shropshire Lads and Anna Kareninas. During his lifetime Knister's poems did not appear in Canadian magazines, but in Poetry, Voices, This Quarter, and especially in Midland, a little magazine of some importance published in Iowa. In 1932, about the time of his death, the Canadian Forum reprinted a group of these poems accompanied by an article on Knister's life and work by Leo Kennedy. This represented a joining of the forces of modernism. For Kennedy was one of a group of young poets who, while Knister and Ross and a few other Canadian writers were making their experiments, were carrying on an intensive campaign against the forces of conservatism. The scene of their endeavours was Montreal.

II In the history of twentieth-century Canadian poetry two Montreal publications are documents of peculiar importance. Sixteen issues of the McGill Fortnightly Review, a literary supplement of the McGill Daily, came out between November 1925 and April 1927. Its successor was the Canadian Mercury: A Monthly Journal of Literature and Opinion, which made six appearances through the winter and spring of 1928-29. The aims of the young editors and contributors were both critical and creative. They were bent upon showing up the degenerate poetic tradition, and they were determined to lead the way to better things. They would strive unflaggingly for "the emancipation of Canadian literature from the state of amiable mediocrity and insipidity in which it now languishes." Symbolic of their spirit was the drawing upon the cover of the first issue of the Canadian Mercury: a rambunctious godling with his thumb to his nose. These "restless, dissatisfied, and, on the whole, sceptical young people" (as Leo Kennedy described himself and his fellows) perceived the involvement of Canadian writing with Canadian life. It was not enough to denounce the kinds of poetry currently prevalent ("sired by Decorum out of Claptrap"); they must denounce with equal vigour the forces that were hostile to creative freedom, to spontaneity and joy, forces which they described as Victorianism, puritanism, and colonialism. They disdained the agencies which, by marshalling these forces of reaction, imposed a killing conformity upon society and literature alike: ". . . we have no affiliation whatsoever: we own no allegiance

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to the Canadian Authors' Association, the Canadian Manufacturers' Association, the Young Communist League of Canada, the I.O.D.E., the Y.M.C.A., the U.F. of A. or C.P.R." More positively, they pointed the way to salvation. Canadian poets must put themselves to school to the new poets of England and the United States: "If a living, native literature is to arise we must discover our own souls, and before that can happen a mass of debris has to be removed. No better helpers in this task can be found than among our contemporaries in England and America." They would be, these young critics and poets of Montreal, the importers of new influences, and they would demonstrate in their own writings how the new influences might reinvigorate Canadian poetry. In Montreal they inaugurated the second phase of modernism in Canadian poetry. They saw deeper than the free-verse enthusiasts into the true inwardness of modernism: that to be modern, poets should aim not only at simplification but even more at concentration and evocation. They understood that the most successful new poetry was strengthened by symbolism, irony, myth. They grasped the central paradox of the modern movement, that twentieth-century sensibility might best find the way to express itself by studying certain poets of nineteenth-century France and of seventeenthcentury England. In these matters the clearest sighted and most articulate of the Montreal poets was A. J. M. Smith (b. 1902). When the McGill Fortnightly Review began publication, Smith was already well acquainted with what had been going on in contemporary poetry. He completed in 1926 a Master's essay on the poetry of W. B. Yeats; during his doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh his special interest was metaphysical poetry. Smith has over the years done much service to Canadian letters as one of the first exponents of modernism and as editor of two of our most discriminating and comprehensive anthologies. He has practised as well as expounded the art of poetry and has published three volumes of his own verse: News of the Phoenix (1943), A Sort of Ecstasy (1954), and Collected Poems (1962). In three articles in the McGill Fortnightly Review, Smith acknowledges gratefully the pre-war English and American poets whose achievement was "to bring the subject-matter of poetry out of the library and the afternoontea salon into the open air, dealing in the language of present-day speech with subjects of living interest." But his affinities were patently with three strains of modernist poetry: the symbolist ("the use of a conscious technique based on evocation and suggestion, and the deliberate determination not to tell all"); the metaphysical, which stretched from Donne to T. S. Eliot; and the work of such poets as Edith Sitwell and Wallace Stevens, who "have constructed their own artificial, beautiful and cubist world." Year in and

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year out, Smith admonished the Canadian poets of his generation and the next to be fastidious: Set higher standards for yourself than the organized mediocrity of the authors' associations dares to impose. Be traditional, catholic, and alive. . . . Remember that poetry does not permit the rejection of every aspect of the personality except intuition and sensibility. . . . It is an intelligent activity. (University of Toronto Quarterly, January 1939)

Practice supported precept. Clearly Smith has refined and polished his own poems with unremitting care. His subtle imagination and skilful craftsmanship most strikingly display themselves in the poems ("Shadows There are," "Ode: The Eumenides," "The Bridegroom," "News of the Phoenix," "Like an Old Proud King in a Parable," and "The Plot against Proteus") which most clearly derive from the poetic strategy learned, through Eliot, Stevens, Edith Sitwell, and the later Yeats, from the Symbolistes. If a few of these poems produce an effect of airlessness, that may be because they seem to have been composed on the same principle as some of Mallarmé's sonnets: imagery, rhythm, and incident evoke the emotional quality of an experience without defining it. A small narrative is stated or implied in words and images which contrive to be at once precise and mysterious— "an artificial, beautiful, and cubist world." In a few slightly later poems, particularly in several contributions to New Verse in the early thirties ("Noctambule," "Poor Innocent"), he pushes his imagery in the direction of fantasy, achieving an effectively surrealistic quality. Other and more impressive poems, on the whole—such as "Sonand-Heir," "The Common Man," "The Face," and "Far West"—comment cryptically and ironically on some twentieth-century perils and aberrations. His finest symbolist poem is his "Ode: On the Death of William Butler Yeats." One manner he essayed in his earliest years as a poet he has not, unfortunately, returned to. This is the descriptive-evocative landscape poem in short, sensitive free-verse lines. "Sea Cliff," "The Creek," "Swift Current," and "The Lonely Land," poems which are technically akin to W. W. E. Ross's, are all admirable. "The Lonely Land" in its first appearance, in the McGill Fortnightly Review, January 1926, carried a sub-title "Group of Seven," which interestingly spoke of a meeting between the new Canadian poetry of the 1920's and the new Canadian painting. A less genial meeting, between the new poetry and the conventional kind, provided the inspiration for "The Canadian Authors Meet" by F. R. Scott, a poem which also first appeared in the McGill Fortnightly Review (April 1927). Frank Scott, born in Quebec City in 1899, the son of Archdeacon Frederick George Scott, is now professor of constitutional law at McGill

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University. A long, thorough, and critical acquaintance with Canadian affairs, a leading part in the creation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and a period as a United Nations representative in Burma have qualified him for incisive and authoritative comment on contemporary problems. Better still, the informed mind has been perfectly co-ordinated with the civilized heart. His finest poems proceed from a whole personality, which makes itself heard with clarity and force in their cadences. His style is almost always colloquial in its diction and conversational in its rhythms. From the beginning, at McGill, Scott's poems have been as direct and "public" as Smith's have been complex and hieratic. The works of the two writers typify the double development of poetry in Canada during the past four decades: on the one side, the lineage of symbolism, the "metaphysicals," Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens; on the other, the verse of spoken commentary, its antecedents Whitman and Pound (with some hints from Samuel Butler), and such contemporaries as William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Fearing. Two collections—Overture (1945) and Events and Signals (1954)-—contain the body of Scott's work, the best of which has been reprinted in The Eye of the Needle: Satires, Sorties, Sundries (1957). As this sub-title indicates, Scott is a satirist and social critic whose tone ranges from amusement through scorn to cold rage. His career as a poet does not show development so much as an increase and diversification of targets. Wherever his eye has lighted upon an injustice or a folly he has struck hard. He has the knack of saying precisely enough and no more and with the most telling use of quotation, illustrative anecdote, and rhythmic mockery. Even when the events commented on have become part of the past, the poems retain most of their vitality; some ultimate loss of relevance is the penalty the satirist pays fcr immediate local impact. Canadian conditions, however, will have to have altered inconceivably before Scott's most pungent satires and sorties become entirely outdated. Time, certainly, has taken something away from his best-known poem, "The Canadian Authors Meet," but not its essence. It is the indispensable defiance, in satirical terms, of the literary "establishment" as it struck a rebellious generation in 1927; hence its persisting vitality derives less from its literary qualities—not that they are to be disdained—than from its impudent wholeness as a symbolic action. Scott's poetry as a whole has kept alive— and been kept alive by—a splendidly undergraduate forthrightness of opinion, combined with the restraint and wisdom of the experienced man. He has remained faithful to the undergraduate's certainty that a never-ending conspiracy among the rich and powerful is the explanation for the injustice he sees in society, the undergraduate's confidence that the good life can be brought to pass in this world by the benign co-operation of natural and social scientists. This is the significance of the poem to which he chose to

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give the climactic final place in Events and Signals: "Eden." This is the source of his indignation against stupid or opportunist politicians (both Mr. Bennett and Mr. King, for instance), greedy entrepreneurs and landlords, misuse of public resources, and inequity in the legal system—an indignation which, fortunately, he has always been able to turn to satire and to poetic form. From the time of the Fortnightly Review and the Mercury F. R. Scott has written poems in other modes than the satirical. In his McGill days these poems, sometimes signed "Bernard March," were little more than the kind of literary doodlings of which we have seen too many in our time: tiny nature sketches after the model of the Imagist, fragments of Eliotic wistfulness, the verse of a sensitive young man with an eye on the seasons and a tendency to come a cropper in love. But this side of Scott's talent has also produced some fine poems, especially when the emotions of deprivation could be fused with a sense of a larger loss than the merely personal ("A Grain of Rice," "On the Death of Gandhi"), or with the feeling that society in general has been diminished by the loss ("For Bryan Priestman," "For Pegi Nicol"). To feel with the intensity that makes a poem memorable, F. R. Scott, it would appear, must be engaged intellectually as well as emotionally in his theme. "Last Rites," which beautifully achieves this equipoise, is possibly his best poem. The third of the "Montreal group" was Leo Kennedy, born in England in 1907, educated in Montreal, apostate from Roman Catholicism, author of short stories as well as poems, now resident in the United States. As an editor, and as a contributor to the two McGill periodicals and later to the Canadian Forum, Kennedy was considerably more pugnacious than his colleagues—gave promise, indeed, of becoming Canada's own Mencken— but less talented as a poet. The verse which he contributed to the magazines was more obviously "poetic" than Smith's or Scott's, showing large indebtedness to Emily Dickinson, the gloomier side of Pre-Raphaelitism and the Decadence, to Housman, Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, and, most of all, T. S. Eliot (Eliot, of course, stamped all that generation, Scott in his "Burlap" poems, Smith pervasively). Kennedy's numerous mortuary pieces, abounding in images of death, burial, decay, and resurrection, are mostly composed in well-knit stanzas. In the year that his one volume of verse was published-—The Shrouding (1935)—he served as inspiration for an essay by W. E. Collin, "Leo Kennedy and the Resurrection of Canadian Poetry" (Canadian Forum, October 1935). Collin celebrated Kennedy as the discoverer of something Canadian poets had always been in want of, something such poets as Lampman would have been immeasurably improved by: a myth. Kennedy's emotions, according to Collin, had been "permeated" by the

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Myth of the Cycle, Life-Death-Life, and so he had found the word to suit the Myth; thus had been "engendered all his poems; which are the living figures of his unified sensibility." In Canada, where nature must be of dominating interest to poets, the most compelling nature poetry will be, or so it seemed to Collin, that which, like Leo Kennedy's, deepens and enriches the poet's treatment of nature by the integration of phenomena and timelessness. "A new Myth had to blow over our frost-bound Canadian fields that a new Poet might marvel at the miracle of 'water slurring underground' and chant the unfailing quickness of Beauty and Love." This would be enlightening if Kennedy's poems had any discernible relation to Canadian nature. But his tansy sprouts out of, his moles burrow through, his bulbs split their caskets in, a plot of cemetery already staked out by John Webster and Elinor Wylie. The landscape over which his Myth blows is the landscape of the international wasteland of the twenties; and the Myth is no more than enfeebled whispers of immortality. Now and again Kennedy strikes out a memorable image or sequence of images. A few of his poems show competence in handling forms and rhythms that would not have abashed Bliss Carman. He had much less to contribute to the modern movement as a poet than as a journalist. By far the most gifted of the Montreal poets, and one of Canada's four or five finest, is Abraham Moses Klein. Montreal, where he was born hi 1909, has been his home all his life. There he has practised as a barrister and occasionally lectured at McGill University. A. M. Klein came into his strength as a poet at the opening of the thirties. His first considerable poems came out in the Canadian Forum, three especially: "Out of the Pulver and the Polished Lens" (September 1931), "The Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet" (May 1932), and "The Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger" (August 1932). Klein's persona in at least two of these poems was a young Prufrock of the Montreal wasteland. The rhythms and images of Eliot's usage served to create a mood of disgust over the banalities and sordidness of the modern city. Hamlet, The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Sonnet XXIX and "Hark, Hark, the Lark," and Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd" provided quotations for ironic counterpoints to the urban awfulness of the poem. The Beatitudes, the Psalms, and the Book of Common Prayer comment indirectly on the commercial horrors of twentieth-century Montreal. But Klein is utterly unlike Eliot and comes out of a different tradition. His mind is stored with Jewish lore, his temperament has been formed and stimulated by life in a Jewish family in a Jewish community. His lovely poem "Autobiographical" celebrates his "nonage days," recalling the "Torahescorting band," the "synagogal hum," the "rabbi patting a coming scholarhead," his father's "tall tales about the Baal Shem Tov," the "Torah-dance on Sinchas-Torah night," the "kindergarten home . . . full—Saturday night—

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with kin and compatriot." His studies for the rabbinate, a vocation which he did not fulfil, sent him journeying into the rich and exotic countries of the Talmud and the Cabbala. The particular timbre of such poems as "Autobiographical" and "Heirloom" is unique. Other Canadian-Jewish writers do not sound these almost Wordsworthian notes of piety and remembered bliss. As the 1930's passed into the 1940's, Klein engaged with a monstrous theme. Several of the poems in his first collection, Hath Not a Jew . . . (1940), as well as the longer poem published separately as The Hitleriad (1944), respond, in satire or in lament, to the iniquities of anti-Semitism. The second collection of his shorter poems, the Poems of 1944, contains such stern pieces as "In Re Solomon Warshawer," and Psalm VI of "The Psalter of Aram Haktani" ("A psalm of Abraham, concerning that which he beheld upon the heavenly scarp"). In these poems he is more convincing than in the poems of social protest he wrote during the Depression for the Canadian Forum and New Frontier ("Barricade Smith" and "Of Daumiers a Portfolio"). Since the Second World War, Klein's devotion to Jewish history and to the welfare of contemporary Jews—a devotion which has had extraliterary aspects as well—has expressed itself in The Second Scroll (1951), an eloquent and ingeniously composed novel, the narrative of a quest for a Jewish messiah and a homeland. A. M. Klein's post-war poetry has come out of his own Canadian time and place. The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (1948—Governor-General's Award) contains his best work. A clear-eyed and patient observer, Klein has caught the look and feel of Quebec, the province and the state of mind, in such poems as "The Snowshoers," "The Sugaring," "Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga," "The Break-Up," "The Notary," and "The Spinning Wheel." These are not loose clusters of impressions but exquisitely wrought structures in which rhythm, tone, and image both embody and interpret a broad vision of a way of life. The rocking-chair symbolizes this ancient way of life: static, secure, traditional, grounded in authority. But Klein also perceives that this agricultural, home-centred, river-orientated folk has been industrialized, urbanized. The rocking chair has yielded to the filling-station, the spinning-wheel to the power mill. The descendants of the habitant have been learning to be factory-workers, office-workers, entrepreneurs, investors, suburbanites. Several of the poems, most notably "Filling Station," express the theme of change. Klein is aware, too, that the province must cease, and is ceasing, to be a geographical outpost, a historical backwater. In its six deft lines, "Air-Map" places Quebec right where the routes of aerial travel and warfare criss-cross. The Rocking Chair poems are liveliest and tenderest when they find their material in that enchanting metropolis, Montreal, city of two traditions and two sets of attitudes. Klein's difference from either enables him to participate

248 THE REALIZATION OF A TRADITION in the life of the city and yet observe it without restriction, maintaining a point of view apart from it and distinctly his own. He can, for example, respect a kind of religion sharply unlike that in which he was instructed; as in the moving little poem admiringly and affectionately addressed to the nuns who serve as nurses in a great Montreal hospital: "For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu." He can understand the faith which impels thousands of cripples to the renowned oratory and up the many stairs to the shrine where miraculous cures have happened and may happen again. But the most memorable of the Montreal poems are those in which the poet looks on at the doings of ordinary French-speaking Montrealers. Benignly, for example, he watches the horse-play of the jaunty young law-students ("Universite de Montreal") and reflects on how their youthful exuberance portends the banked fires of middle age, when they will have settled down to being men with offices, large responsibilities, and large families. He is amused by the enterprising M. Laberge ("Annual Banquet: Chambre de Commerce") who combines business with fidelity to the old French-Canadian way of fathering numerous sons and daughters: "O love which moves the stars and factories. . . ." He sketches, without sentimentalizing, the plight of the "Filles Majeures," who, lacking a vocation, are condemned to loneliness. He re-creates the excitement of the political meeting and the sinister power of the speaker who can sum up in his person as in his words the resentment of his compatriots: "The whole street wears one face." He powerfully suggests ("Monsieur Gaston") the odour of municipal corruption. Gaston, engaging vaurien turned racketeer, represents one pole of Klein's range of feeling about the city. At the other is the sense of beauty, dignity, and mystery with which he evokes the city, in the poems about Mount Royal and in that linguistic tour de force, "Montreal": O city metropole, isle riverain! Your ancient pavages and sainted routes Traverse my spirit's conjured avenues! . . .

The society which the poems present, a society in many ways despicable, is not despised by the poet. When in the role of poet he transcends his society ("Portrait of the Poet as Landscape") it is precisely so that, from above, he may take another and different look at it. Much modern poetry voices a feeling of deprivation, the loss of faith or the withering of traditional assumptions. Klein's writing about Quebec never for long tends towards the elegiac. To be sure, his account of his world is at times mordant or melancholy, but irony and amusement keep breaking in. The Jewish vision of life and history provides a salutary perspective. Those qualities which might be thought of as peculiarly Jewish—a sombre sort of wit, a mellowed scepticism, a resignation that is never flaccid—are just the qualities that have best served A. M. Klein

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in his dealing with the world of his poems, even where his subjects have been least Jewish. in

Creativity was not confined to Montreal. In Toronto during the 1920's several poets began careers that have been among the most important of the modem period: Robert Finch, Dorothy Livesay, and, most impressive of all, E. J. Pratt. From the beginning the poems of Robert Finch (b. 1900) have implied a modern sensibility. They are the creations of a subtle wit, a flair for style, and an alertness to psychological insights. They show a fresh handling of standard metres and verse forms. The poems of Finch's that count begin with "Egg and Dart," published in the April 1929 issue of the Canadian Forum. Here, as in his other most characteristic poems (not gathered together until Poems of 1946), Finch deploys a technique novel to Canadian verse-making: the interweaving of word, image, and rhythm into a texture so intricate as to become at times almost riddling, suggestive a little of certain poems by William Empson. Like Empson—and his followers of the "Movement" in British poetry of the 1950s—Finch uses a conversational, lowpitched but intense tone, shaded by irony, in a diction stripped of all ornament, and a kind of versification that seems quite unexperimental but on closer examination shows itself to be exceedingly crafty and ingenious. "Over" and "Egg and Dart" both display these traits, and both show how efficiently his technique sets forth as much as he wishes to reveal of the poet's somewhat disenchanted and self-mocking view of life. The dynamism of the earlier poems is a zest for patterns and similitudes. The patterning is both verbal and visual. Hence the poet's devotion to symmetrical forms, the quatrain and the sonnet in particular, which emphasize balance and antithesis, and to such devices as internal rhymes, repetitions, and echoes. There is almost no free verse in Finch's earlier collections. He abounds in puns, another kind of verbal patterning, and in interlocking syntax. His nature poems especially display his delight in design. Sometimes the pattern is within the landscape, waiting for the poet to identify its outline. In "Window-Piece," for instance, The hedge, the driveway, mock in counterpoint The inverted canon of the winding creek . . .

and in "Etobicoke, Thanksgiving," The scarecrow Shanks in snow Is parody to the bridge's skeleton Whose iron legs quiver in the whitewashed stone.

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Sometimes the pattern is in the events that constitute the little "plot" of such a poem as "The Statue" or "The Sisters" or "The Lost Tribe." But, almost as often, the pattern exists first in the poet's perception and he transforms nature to match the inner geometry. Like Wallace Stevens, Finch composes poems of metamorphosis. "Train Window," one of his most successful poems, is a succession of metamorphoses. Many of the poems are presentations of scenes looked at from a human or humane locus, a window particularly; in this they are unlike Lampman's poems of nature description, for instance, which profess to have been written on the spot, in the woods or on the water. In bringing about his transformations Finch employs probably more synaesthetic metaphor than any other poet. It is hard to understand why his poems should have been described (by A. J. M. Smith) as "sensuous"; the interplay of sense impressions is so complicated, and exhilarating, that the reader receives no sense impression at all. Frequently also images drawn from the life of reading and writing are fused with images of nature: The round pond is the fiction of a lake . . . A jay to prove this silver silence true Startles the marvel with a word of blue . .. During a snow the page has been erased . . . The ironic incense of the bonfire smoke Describes upon a wall of air like ice The victory of an old conservative . . . The white rope net of the rails fences this gouache geometry ship-shape, straight as a string, clean tilted through a plane of sun on a table of green glass, toward a blue paper thumbtacked with a moon. Sometimes an entire poem, or most of it, consists of an extended metaphor or conceit: The lake has drawn a counterpane of glass On her rock limbs up to her island pillows And under netting woven by the swallows Sleeps in a dream and is a dream. . . . Snow especially provokes Finch's virtuosity as an analogist. One poem about snow is entitled "Similes" and is composed of one simile after another. If snow can be likened to a host of other things, the device can be reversed, as it amusingly is in "Teacher":

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Examinations snow between our meeting: my burning pencil melts the white hindrance.

Finch's most valuable work appears in his first two collections: Poems (1946) and The Strength of the Hills (1948). The poems of two later books, Dover Beach Revisited and Ads at Oxford (both 1961) have been praised by reviewers, and the latter volume received a Governor-General's award (as had Poems in 1946). These contain poems that are the work of a mature and perceptive artist. As occasional pieces, reflective and descriptive, some of them have an almost eighteenth-century "Georgian" charm. The Dover Beach suite adds a few novelistic appercus to Arnold's famous poem. Nine pieces under the heading "The Place Revisited" graphically describe the invasion operations out of Dover against Dunkirk in late May and early June of 1940; detail and diction combine to bring about a documentary plainness and authenticity of effect. But a pervasive relaxation of tensions, both in feeling and in rhythm— reflected in the looser verse forms—marks most of these later poems. To some of his admirers Robert Finch's most durable work will continue to seem those poems which reminded readers in the twenties and thirties that poetry need not be the enemy of wit and elegance. Dorothy Livesay's first success came early. This was "City Wife," for which, during her second year as a student at the University of Toronto, she was awarded the Jardine Memorial Prize. In 1928, when she was nineteen, Macmillan published a small collection of her poems, Green Pitcher; four years later, in 1932, appeared Sign Post. These poems give testimony that Dorothy Livesay belonged to the new dispensation. She had felt the effects of the free-verse movement and of the work of several American poetesses. Affinities of attitude rather than imitation explain the echoes of Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Emily Dickinson. (This is made clear in Alan Crawley's informative essay in Leading Canadian Poets, 1948.) Later, in her postgraduate years at the Sorbonne, Miss Livesay deepened her understanding of the French symbolist poets and their influence on twentieth-century writers. Probably, in first working out her own way of writing, she had no conscious intention more deliberate than to be unlike the Canadian poetesses of her mother's generation. This required, for one thing, complete avoidance of facile metrical effects. Dorothy Livesay never indulged in the glib appeal of lilting stanza or coy anapaest. She learned early to use muted rhymes, broken rhythms, tentative stanza forms; all these expressed a particular temperament and vision of

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life, but they were signs, as well, that she shared the determination of the other new poets to deny to their writings the mannerisms of an outworn tradition. No Canadian poet of the past four decades has been more consistently loyal to the principle of organic form. The other main quality of her work, from the beginning, has been her devotion to actuality. Her first considerable piece of writing, "City Wife," shows that she was learning to be modern in the fashion of Robert Frost or Edward Thomas, by precisely rendering a group of realistic details in the tones of the speaking rather than the singing voice. Other small achievements in that vein were "Prince Edward Island," "Old Man," and "Vandal." Less successful poems—"Sonnet for Ontario," "September Morning"—draw what strength they have from this same commitment to honesty of observation and statement. The reader of Sign Post readily understands her sympathy with the work as well as the personality of Raymond Knister. Day and Night (1944) took its title from the poem which established Dorothy Livesay's reputation when it first appeared in the opening issue of Canadian Poetry Magazine in January 1936. "Day and Night" was a product of the most hateful decade of modern times and of Dorothy Livesay's rage and grief over what she saw in the world about her. Her opportunities for observation were ample. She studied at the School of Social Work in Toronto, served in the Family Welfare Agency in Montreal and in a relief office in New Jersey, participated in conferences of angry young men and women, witnesses to and victims of the misery brought about by wide-scale unemployment. In the same years she was responding to the poems of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis, to their message as to their manner. Like them she became a poet of protest and revolution. But she shared also their limitations. The poet of social protest cannot bear to write as an outsider. He must become the chum as well as the spokesman of the worker, a role which class, education, and sensibility make implausible. At the emotional centre of "Day and Night" there speaks a gentle suffering spirit which is clearly the poet's and not the factory-worker's. But the poem powerfully evokes the violence and oppressiveness of industrial labour; anguish and aspiration are expressed in two-stress lines in quatrain, strain in passages in free pentameter. This effective alternation of rhythms and tones is the structural principle of other poems in the 1944 collection: "Prelude for Spring," "Serenade for Strings" (later re-titled "Nativity"), and "Lorca." This last poem most convincingly .combines the rage with the grief. Fortunately, in the books that followed the sensitive reverberator has prevailed over the agitator. The most rewarding way for the expression of her talents is illustrated by "Fantasia" (in Day and Night): the communication of private sensations in precise images and delicately shifting cadences. This is the way that has made for success in the best poems of her later

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volumes: Poems for People (1947), Call My People Home (1950), and New Poems (1957). The Selected Poems (1957) displays chronologically the evidence of a widening and deepening sensibility with which her powers of expression have admirably kept pace. Poems which most clearly show her sensitivity and craftsmanship are "London Revisited," "Page One," "Lament," "Bartok and the Geranium." For two of her books Dorothy Livesay has received Governor-General's Awards and for her services to Canadian letters, creative and critical, she was awarded in 1947 the Lome Pierce Medal.

13. Poetry 1935-1950 MUNRO BEATTIE i. E. J. PRATT EDWIN JOHN PRATT was born in Newfoundland—at Western Bay on February 4, 1883—and there he lived his first twenty-four years. In Toronto and at Victoria College, where in 1920 he began a notable career as a teacher of English, his life and work found a propitious centre. The city and the college provided unlimited opportunities for congenial and stimulating encounters with all sorts of people. They helped to focus and release a creative power unmatched in the whole range of Canadian letters. By 1953, when he retired from teaching, E. J. Pratt had brought out eighteen books of poetry. Newfoundland Verse was published by the Ryerson Press in 1923. On many of its pages the virtues that were to distinguish Pratt's writing over the following three decades were muffled by the idiom and metrics of the early 1920's. He had simply taken over the modes available: lyrics in the late-romantic fashion, nondescript blank verse, meditative and descriptive pieces in random rhyme-schemes and line lengths, vers libre in the manner of Sandburg, Masters, and the Imagists—the kinds of verse it might almost have been said that the Canadian Authors' Association had been founded to perpetuate. Nevertheless, the virtues shone through magnificently. Reviewers were properly enthusiastic. "Such maturity and strength and beauty are in these poems," exclaimed William Arthur Deacon (Saturday Night, April 21, 1923), "that the day of their publication is a date to be remembered hi the annals of Canadian literature." High among the new poet's virtues stood accuracy of observation and representation. Nothing in the book better displayed this than "The Shark," a poem in free verse that adds detail to detail at precisely the rate of perception and from a point of view that shifts revealingly; rhythm and line-divisions are flawlessly matched to the movement of the shark: His fin, Like a piece of sheet-iron,

Three-cornered, And with knife-edge, Stirred not a bubble As it moved With its base-line on the water.

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And as he passed the wharf He turned, And snapped at a flat-fish That was dead and floating. And I saw the flash of a white throat, And a double row of white teeth, And eyes of metallic grey, Hard and narrow and slit. That strange fish, Tubular, tapgred, smoke-blue, Part vulture, part wolf, Part neither—for his blood was cold.

A kind of magnanimity and robustness that succeeding books were to reconfirm showed up in Newfoundland Verse in the jovial and colloquial poems of the section headed "Monologues and Dialogues." The best of these, "Carlo," whimsically eulogizes, in easy octosyllabics, an heroic dog in whose line somewhere "a dam / Formed for the job by God's own hand, / Had littered with a Newfoundland." The rescue that inspired "Carlo" prefigured the situation of a later poem, The Roosevelt and the Antinoe. The dog illustrated the view of heroism that pervades all Pratt's poems: heroic action derives not only from knowing what must be done but, even more important, from knowing how it can be done. The verve and energy of the poet were most manifest in Newfoundland Verse—as through all his career—when he had a story to tell. "The great things are the narratives," wrote R. S. Knox in a review (Canadian Forum, June 1923) more measured than Deacon's but every bit as laudatory; and he singled out a poem that most of Pratt's admirers still count among his masterpieces, "The Ice-Floes." The impetus of events in this narrative combines with exactitude of detail to produce a poem that is extraordinarily moving, graphic, and believable. The rhythm draws its power from four-beat lines along which anapests and spondees are cunningly distributed. The chief source of strength, however, is the poet's masterful grasp of his subject. He thoroughly knew the life and work of the seal-hunters. He was expert in the jargon of their calling. He had learned as a boy and a young man what life was like in Newfoundland. Above all, his youthful sensibility had been shaped by the sea—by the way it incessantly and uncaringly invaded the lives of men. The best poems in this first collection—"The Ice-Floes," "The Ground Swell," "Overheard in a Cove," "Sea Variations," and "Newfoundland"—drew their rhythms from the movements of the sea and their most memorable images from the life of sea-farers: reef, breaker, cape, gale, fog, jetsam, grapnel hook, the pounding and booming of the surf, the scream and howl of the nor'-easter, the foghorn, the warning bell on the buoy, the low and insistent note of the ground-swell.

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The decorations for Newfoundland Verse were designed by Frederick Varley, a reminder that since 1910 painters had been endeavouring to do justice on canvas to what was rugged and violent in the beauty of Canada. Pratt in poetry likewise expressed a new vision. It was not in technique or form that Pratt made his contribution to the modern movement. For the most part, he has done his work in conventional and traditional modes, always refashioned for his peculiar purposes. His was the break-through in tone and subject-matter. He extended our knowledge and understanding, made us see new faces of Canada, hear new voices. The dominant voice was the sound of the sea. The action of The Witches' Brew (1925) takes place in and under the sea. This extravaganza relates how three witches, perched on a submarine volcano peak, concoct a gargantuan cocktail to make all the fishes drunk. An amphibious Cretan blacksmith of the line of Vulcan fashions for them a copper punch-bowl capacious for gallons upon gallons of food and drink. To a stock of liquor the witches add sea-foods and delicacies traditionally necromantic. The stench resuscitates the inhabitants of Hades and troubles St. Peter at his postern wicket. In motley procession all follow their noses, but are prohibited from sharing the brew intended for the finny tribe. The cauldron is patrolled by Tom, a monstrous cat from Zanzibar, who, after he has been ladled enough of the potent mixture, makes onslaught on his kin and kindred. Tom is seen as the story ends bound at meteoric speed, his tail electro-tipped, for the Irish Sea. The poet has spun this fantastic yarn with untiring vivacity in rapid and witty octosyllabics. (His wife has recalled how when he was composing it— for a wedding anniversary—he would chuckle and laugh aloud.) Can The Witches' Brew be interpreted allegorically, as a Rabelaisean protest against anti-drink laws in Canada during the thirsty twenties? Not likely. The hell broth of the three witches is strikingly unfit for consumption, human, piscine, or feline. The poet, with a resonance almost Miltonic, rehearses the names of renowned brewers and distillers. Schlitz, Seagram, and Gordon are all very fine, but what have they to do together in a punch-bowl? (Similarly, a later and shorter poem, "The Depression Ends," describes an apocalyptic dinner, not one plateful of which would tempt the palates of the guests, "the shabby ones of earth's despite"— . . . all the gaunt, the cavern-cheeked, The waifs whose tightened belts declare The thinness of their daily fare; The ill-starred from their natal days, The gaffers and the stowaways, The road-tramps and the alley-bred Who leap to scraps that others fling, With luck less than the Tishbite's, fed On manna from the raven's wing.)

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Seeing social justice established or routing the forces of prohibition would seem to Pratt second, by a long way, to the demands of a lively story. Exultation over the exorbitant was always more likely to animate his writings than concern for the thirsty or the hungry. Titans (1926) brought together two longish narratives of the sea. "The Cachalot" was the first of his poems to receive the kind of acclaim that was to make Pratt the most popular of Canadian poets. The November 1925 issue of the Canadian Forum, in which it first appeared, was sold out with unprecedented rapidity, and hundreds of requests for copies had to be denied. It is one of Pratt's most consummate works, again in the octosyllabics that he handled so skilfully and distinctively. The management of the enjambment is masterly, the momentum of the rhythm springing forward irresistibly from line to line. The initial action is a mammoth conflict between the cachalot and a kraken—cetacean against cephalopod. The story is lucid and vigorous, the subject-matte^gruesome. The main incident is the battle between the cachalot and a Nantucket whaling barque, the Albatross. In the concluding sequence of images Pratt shows his power of evoking transcendent terror begotten by the mystery of the deeps: In a white cloud of mist emerged— Terror of head and hump and brawn, Silent and sinister and gray, As in a lifting fog at dawn Gibraltar rises from its bay.

"The Great Feud," which is the companion poem, is sub-titled "A Dream of a Pleiocene Armageddon." It recounts the waging of battle between the denizens of the ocean and the hordes and flocks of the land, where the Australasian shore sloped into the sea. The poem, repellent in its details, is a work of breath-taking virtuosity, most of all in its cataloguing of creatures terrene and aquatic. Out of the vast and varied carnage emerge representatives of the three cardinal and enduring principles of life as Pratt sees it. Sheer animal size and strength are embodied in the gigantic lizard, Tyrannosaurus Rex. The great volcano, whose eruption marks the climax of the narrative, stands for the unpredictable and non-partisan violence of nature. Intelligence—memory, cogitation, anticipation—shows itself in the female anthropoidal ape who musters the forces of the land and with whose crooning and breast-beating the poem concludes. The action of The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930) is modern and the actors are human. This is a stirring account of how a ship of the Hoboken line rescued the crew of the British freighter Antinoe, battered into helplessness by the fierce North Atlantic storm of January 1926. Pratt tells the story with untiring competence. There is no sag, no drift, in the narrative. The passage of time, the ordering of events, the data of seamanship, weather, and mood—all are managed with complete effectiveness. The measure is

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iambic pentameter in ever varying arrangements of rhyme. Most impressive is the thoroughness of the poet's research. He is entirely at home with the incidents of the sea-rescue. Unmistakable is his zest for the way things work, the marvels of science, the resourcefulness of man. (When he was a college student in Newfoundland, in 1901, Pratt was among the onlookers at Signal Hill when Marconi received the first wireless message from across the ocean—the most dramatic day in the poet's memories of his life.) The means and methods of communication had a fascination for him, peculiarly relevant to a poet in a country so situated as Canada. Yet the crucial incidents in The Roosevelt and the Antinoe depict sailors in open boats barehandedly pitting against the sea their strength and perseverance. The most affecting moment of the poem occurs when a Roman Catholic priest, pronouncing final absolution for two drowned seamen of the Roosevelt, confronts the tumult of the sea: But no Gennesaret of Galilee Conjured to its level by the sway Of a hand or a word's magic was this sea, Contesting with its iron-alien mood, Its pagan face, its own primordial way, The pale heroic suasion of a rood.

Climactic moments in Pratt's writings, however, declare his faith in the rood as a source of strength for man in his never ending struggle against the mechanical hostility or indifference of the universe. In "The Truant," man fiercely cries out against the demiurge, the Lord of Hosts as distinct from the Lord of Love ("Cycles"): "We who have met With stubborn calm the dawn's hot fusillades; Who have seen the forehead sweat Under the tug of the pulleys on the joints, Under the liquidating tally Of the cat-and-truncheon bastinades; Who have taught our souls to rally To mountain horns and the sea's rockets When the needle ran demented through the points; We who have learned to clench Our fists and raise our lightless sockets To morning skies after the midnight raids, Yet cocked our ears to bugles on the barricades, And in cathedral rubble found a way to quench A dying thirst within a Galilean valley— No! by the Rood, we will not join your ballet."

Enactments of this philosophy of human defiance were the themes of Pratt's next two major poems.

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The Titanic (1935) far surpassed the narratives that preceded it. Its superiority is not due to the story only, a story that has cast a spell over men's imaginations for five decades. It draws upon a deeper source of tension than the earlier narratives: from the sharply defined conflict between human values and the blind menace of the sea. The iceberg more imposingly embodies man's eternal foe than either the cachalot or the North Atlantic storm. His students at Victoria College remember with what relish Professor Pratt used to read them Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the Loss of the Titanic.'" Pratt's poem, though it at no single point has the shocking impact of Hardy's, is more terrifying in its detail, more agonizing in its specification of disaster. One of his aims, perhaps the foremost, was to show the many ironies interwoven with the events of the disaster—"as if some power with intelligence and resource had organized and directed a conspiracy" (notes to Ten Selected Poems, 1947), a conspiracy against the pride of man manifested in the unsinkable ship. The reader is bound to marvel at the exhaustiveness of Pratt's documentation, the creative skill with which he has made use of detail, particularly the dramatic snatches of dialogue, the variations of pace and pitch, the complete accommodation of the verse to the demands of the story. For many readers it is likely to stand as one of his three or four supreme achievements. For many readers—among them thousands of school children—it must count as the most engrossing poem written by a Canadian. By the end of the 1930's no one doubted that E. J. Pratt was the greatest of living Canadian poets. His almost laureate position is exemplified by the longer poems that he wrote during the Second World War: Dunkirk (1941), They are Returning (1945), and Behind the Log (1947). Of these the last is the best. Behind the Log is a verse documentary-—not unlike similar projects by the National Film Board—of the perils and triumphs of a North Atlantic convoy shepherded by four ships of the Canadian navy, a destroyer and three corvettes. Once more, the research was impeccable. The poet brought complete understanding to the treatment of every aspect of the subject. As in his earlier narratives of the sea, human courage and skill have clearly inspired the story-teller; even more, the resourcefulness of man in devices of communication. Here the scientific wonder is asdic: antisubmarine detection. All these poems of the thirties and forties, except possibly The Titanic, are overshadowed by Brebeuf and His Brethren, published and widely acclaimed in 1940. Much study and contemplation went to the making of this poem, much reading in the Jesuit Relations, much talk with historians and theologians. The poet visited Midland and its environs, the scene of Father Brebeuf s martyrdom in 1649. The poem aspires to an amplitude of theme and organization far beyond anything attained in the narratives that

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preceded it. By means of a prelude ("The winds of God were blowing over France . . . ") and an epilogue ("Three hundred years have passed, and the winds of God / Which blew over France are blowing once more . . ."), the poet has not only given his story an aesthetic framework, but has also enhanced its significance. The missionary ardours of the Old World find fulfilment in the New; the past makes a splendid claim upon the understanding and gratefulness of the present. The plan of Brebeuf is large-scaled. The main line of narrative, which recounts the adventures of Brebeuf from his novitiate in Bayeux to his terrible death at the mission of St. Ignace, is interspersed with episodes—for instance, the appalling story of Father Jogues —that extend and illuminate the central story. To re-tell these glorious and heart-rending deeds of faith was an heroic undertaking for which Pratt was, by training and by temperament, uniquely qualified. Certainly, no other writer of our times could have so unmistakably perceived, and so stirringly proclaimed, the ultimate source of Brebeuf's power: In the bunch of his shoulders which often had carried a load Extorting the envy of guides at an Ottawa portage? The heat of the hatchets was finding a path to that source. In the thews of his thighs which had mastered the trails of the Neutrals? They would gash and beribbon those muscles. Was it the blood? They would draw it fresh from its fountain. Was it the heart? They dug for it, fought for the scraps in the way of the wolves. But not in these was the valour or stamina lodged; Nor in the symbol of Richelieu's robes or the seals Of Mazarin's charters, nor in the stir of the lilies Upon the Imperial folds; nor yet in the words Loyola wrote on a table of lava-stone In the cave of Manresa—not in these the source—• But in the sound of invisible trumpets blowing Around two slabs of board, right-angled, hammered By Roman nails and hung on a Jewish hill.

There is nothing existential in Pratt's conception of human behaviour. His characters are always men committed to a course of action: the code of the sea or the drive of Christian faith or the determination (voiced in "The Truant") to explore and exploit the whole range of human experience. Towards the Last Spike (1952) is the third of Pratt's long poems inspired by man's struggle against those inveterate opponents, time and space. Here the challenge is issued by the rugged breadth of a continent; the poem is subtitled a "Panorama" of the building of the first transcontinental railway. It is the sort of anomaly that sometimes comes late in a long career, a narrative poem that dispenses with the two chief virtues of the earlier narratives: a closely knit continuum of motive and action, and a systematic exposition of the process by which a task is carried out. The

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narrative, indeed, is curiously fragmented; the story gets told in discrete episodes and scenes. Did the subject—the political, financial, geological, and technological difficulties in the struggle to build the first Canadian transcontinental railway—resist organization into a coherent and unified story? Did the poet, rather, decide to subordinate—by a principle almost Jamesian— the orderly unfolding of events to an arrangement that would confer special effects of emphasis, point of view, climax, and dispersal of centres of interest? The poem will have baffled many readers, and by some of them will have been judged a failure. Yet every reader must have recognized in Towards the Last Spike some of Pratt's most sinewy and weighty blank verse. His mythmaking powers never more strikingly exhibited themselves than in the vision of the mammoth lizard of the North Shore. In no other poem had Pratt shown such vigour and insight in his presentation of human personality as here in his portraits of Macdonald and Van Home. In The Titanic man's ingenuity and audacity had been frustrated by the inscrutable forces pent up in the inanimate world. That poem fades out on one of the most terrifying images in modern poetry: And out there in the starlight, with no trace Upon it of its deed but the last wave From the Titanic fretting at its base, Silent, composed, ringed by its icy broods, The gray shape with the palaeolithic face Was still the master of the longitudes.

But in the concluding lines of Towards the Last Spike man—having more wisely taken the measure of his opponent—has been the conqueror: And somewhere in the middle of the line Of steel, even the lizard heard the stroke. The breed had triumphed after all. To drown The traffic chorus, she must blend the sound With those inaugural, narcotic notes Of storm and thunder which would send her back Deeper than ever in Laurentian sleep.

Understanding of Pratt's philosophy of life and recognition of his technical range cannot be achieved without careful reading of many of his shorter poems. These have been brought out in Newfoundland Verse (1923), Many Moods (1932), The Fable of the Goats and Other Poems (1937), Still Life and Other Verse (1943), and the Collected Poems (the second edition, 1958, includes both the long and the short poems, and an introduction by Northrop Frye that is the best short study ever made of Pratt and his writings).

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Several of the poems display, on a smaller scale, his gifts for story-telling and myth-making: especially 'The Submarine," "The 6000," and "The Dying Eagle." These poems work by analogy between natural creatures and manmade instruments of motion—the submarine and the shark, the locomotive engine and the fabulous bull, the eagle and the aeroplane. Others of the shorter poems reflect Pratt's obsession with language and distance, and the means of communication: "The Baritone" and "The Radio in the Ivory Tower." Still others, a most significant group, evoke the terror of an atavistic swing from the primitive to the modern or from the present to the primordial: "The Prize Cat," "From Stone to Steel," "Father Time," "Cycles," and "Come Away Death." Except by indirection, Pratt has not often written of twentiethcentury fears and dilemmas. But his system of values gives special force to such poems as "Still Life," "The Old Organon" and "The New," "Autopsy on a Sadist," "Myth and Fact," and that poem towards which all his work points and which sheds light on all his poems, "The Truant." In a class by itself, and surely one of the most memorable poems of the century, is "Silences." In Canadian literature the poems of E. J. Pratt are an isolated splendour. Neither in theory nor in practice has Pratt declared himself part of the modernist movement. Yet in the revitalization of Canadian poetry in the decades since 1920, Pratt's work has counted for more than any other man's—counted by virtue of its craftsmanship, its breadth of subject-matter, its competence in dealing with the devices and phenomena that engage the interest of twentieth-century men and women, its uninhibited and exhilarating vision of life. II

By the mid-thirties the new poetry was well established in Canada. This was confirmed by the Canadian Forum in an ingenious bit of editorial strategy. Through the monthly issues of two years, from February 1930 to December 1931, the Forum ran a series of articles under the heading, "The New Writers": articles about D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others. The issues of 1932 put forward, in even ampler essays, a series called "The New Writers of Canada." Then, having identified and bestowed its approval upon the Canadian writers of the new era, the Forum, during 1933, craftily surveyed, and cut down to size, the "Canadian Writers of the Past." Dorothy Livesay was the first of the new Canadian poets in the 1932 series. W. E. Collin's essay was devoted chiefly to making clear her kinship with the most recent literary movements in England and the United States. He explained why her poetry ought to be called "metaphysical" rather than "romantic." He traced the parts played by T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot in the

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"revolt against the romantic spirit in literature." Dorothy Livesay's "way of feeling" Collin likened to H. D.'s; her manner he described, not altogether accurately, as imagist. "She abhors words which are supposedly poetic." Leon Edel in his essay on A. M. Klein (May 1932) undertook to define the "exotic rich note among the younger Canadian poets of his time" which Klein had derived from his profound studies in the Bible and the Talmud. Edel's essay made plain the connection between the new poetry and the "Montreal group" (of whom Edel himself had been one). He pointed out that Klein's "individual" poems bore "the imprint of that arch-realist Eliot," that they "verge[d] at moments on the metaphysical," and that, above all, Klein had shown himself "well-equipped to give us some real Canadian poetry—whatever that may be." L. A. MacKay, in discussing the work of Audrey Alexandra Brown for the June 1932 issue, was dealing with a young poetess (b. 1904) who had recently been praised for her Keatsian diction and prosody in The Dryad of Nanaimo (1931). Her technique and choice of theme, however skilfully handled, were sharply at variance with the mood of the anti-romantic critics of MacKay's generation, and with his own sophisticated, frequently sardonic verse. He admitted to admiration for her work but stressed its difference from the kind of poetry being written by those "most promising younger poets" who, as he put it, "are being irrigated with very invigorating results by the more extreme and emphatic revolutionaries among contemporary English and American poets." Miss Brown's talent for adapting various nineteenth-century influences in vocabulary and metrics he could concede, but he made plain his preference for the poets of other affiliations. Canadian recognition came at last to Raymond Knister in the study of his work contributed by Leo Kennedy to the September 1932 number of the Forum. Kennedy recognized in Knister a poet of the new order, one who had broken with the post-romantic native tradition and who, as a consequence, had not been acceptable for publication in Canada. Knister's poems had anticipated, so it seemed to Kennedy, the movement to free Canadian poetry from a sterile confinement to a particular range of themes and effects. In the same issue of the Forum appeared nine poems by Raymond Knister which well exemplified his virtues and the virtues of the new poetry. The Canadian Forum articles of the following year, "Canadian Writers of the Past," were probably what E. K. Brown had in mind when ten years later he wrote in On Canadian Poetry: "Against the elder poets the sad young men rose in angry revolt." These young men were not, however, sad; they gaily charged into battle. It is true that the essay by E. J. Pratt on the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall was neither angry nor destructive. He recognized the distinction of her writing, however much it owed to the examples of Swin-

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burne and the earlier Yeats. But he could not deny that her limitations, as they now appeared to be, alienated the new poets: Her expressed dislike of Ibsen and his school, the absence of any analysis of life on the side of its civilized contradictions, her complete immunity to cynical and satirical moods, reveal a temperament which, common enough twenty-five years ago, seems . . . far removed from contemporary psychology. More trenchant by far was Robert Ayre's essay on Pauline Johnson. "A pretty legend," he termed the Indian poetess and elocutionist, "nothing more nor less than a very genteel lady in a bustle who had nice thoughts about Nature and the proper sentiments toward love and yearning, motherhood, and the manly virtues." In February 1932, L. A. MacKay happily assailed Bliss Carman. The bardic role had seduced Carman into the peculiar failings of that role: flabbiness, repetition, glibness. It was significant that MacKay's obliteration of Carman—whom, just a few years before, the Canadian Authors' Association had crowned as Canada's unofficial laureate—was undertaken in accordance with the criteria of modernism and by comparison of Carman, to his great disadvantage, with three of the new poets: E. J. Pratt, Dorothy Livesay, and A. M. Klein. In November, MacKay turned with equal zest upon W. W. Campbell, labelled him "minor," condemned his prestige as an important Canadian poet, and pointed out his dependence for manner, theme, and vocabulary upon the romantic poets. "The great names seduced him from the literary cultivation of the senses to the literary cult of the soul. If he had paid less attention to his soul and more to his senses, he would have written better verse." What was left standing of the romantic tradition by the late spring of 1933 was demolished and swept off into limbo by Leo Kennedy in his Forum article on Archibald Lampman. Kennedy's aim was to discredit the kind of Canadian poet that Lampman's admirers, according to Kennedy, had erected as the ideal: " . . . the conventional poet of the last century, a hater of cities, crowds, etc., a worshipper of nature, an advocate of extremely simple and very high ideals, a solitary dreamer of dreams which are never defined or described." Lampman's admirers had encouraged Lampman to be insular, to write without ever displaying interest in contemporary activity and developments, without ever reflecting "Canadian politics of the 90's." Now, in the thirties, Lampman must be shelved and Canadian readers must learn to respect other poetic modes and later poets: The current generation of Canadian poets, of whom I am a hobbling member, has chucked him out, neck, crop, and rhyming dictionary. Our quarrel is, perhaps, not so much with Lampman as with his time and poetic tradition. The potbellied serene Protestantism of Victorian England which . . . underlay Lampman's spiritual make-up causes us to chafe. We are impatient of reading into the face of nature the conservative policies of an Anglican omnipotence. We are

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principally concerned with the poetry of ideas and emotional conflicts. . . . We reject Lampman and his fellows as exponents of a second-hand inheritance which does not stand the harsh light of our day.

Crammed as it was with misinformation and misunderstanding, Kennedy's study of Lampman was less a piece of criticism than a manifesto on behalf of the new generation of poets. Their cause was better served in the early thirties by the frequent appearance of their own poems. In making that possible the Canadian Forum did more for native literature than by its succession of funeral services over Canadian poets of the past. Even more significant as a literary milestone was the publication in 1936 of New Provinces, a small anthology organized by F. R. Scott and containing poems by six writers: Finch, Kennedy, Klein, Pratt, Scott, and Smith. New Provinces marked a turning point, "the emergence," as E. K. Brown recognized (University of Toronto Quarterly, April 1937), "of a group of poets who may well have as vivifying an effect on Canadian poetry as the Group of Seven had on Canadian painting." The slim anthology celebrated and exemplified the two main achievements of the new poetry: "a development of new technique and a widening of poetic interest beyond the narrow range of the late Romantic and early Georgian poets." But it was intended to be something more than a literary signpost. For, as the preface went on to declare, "the search for content was less successful than had been the search for new techniques, and by the end of the [twenties] the modernist movement was frustrated for want of direction." In short, the preface repudiated the poems it was meant to introduce, and summoned Canadian poets to serious labours. The methods of modernism— the straightforward diction, the colloquial rhythm, the imagery drawn from contemporary life—must be applied to the social and international issues of a troubled decade. These were years of profound concern to Canadian intellectuals. In Europe, in Africa, and in Asia, outrages had been committed against civilization and worse threatened. Civil liberties in Canada, especially in Quebec and on the prairies, had been violated. The sufferings of the Depression had thrown into harsh relief the economic inequities of Canadian society. It was plain, moreover, that the new poetry was splendidly equipped to deal with the actualities of the contemporary wcrld. In 1936—the year of New Provinces—Leo Kennedy in a vehement article in New Frontier called upon Canadian poets to recognize "immediates" and serve the social good with their pens. The response was curiously sparse (all round, in fact, the thirties was the most barren period in the history of modern Canadian poetry): apart from F. R. Scott's short satirical pieces, Dorothy Livesay's "Day and Night," The Wind Our Enemy by Anne Marriott, A. M. Klein's small sketches in verse for the Canadian Forum and New Frontier, and a sixteen-line poem by Frederick E. Laight entitled "Soliloquy" (quoted in full, and with strong

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approval, in the University of Toronto Quarterly's annual review of letters in 1937)—apart from these, nothing that deserves disinterment. Even E. J. Pratt's "The Depression Ends" is not an indictment of an age or a social system but an account of the apocalyptic dinner that the poet would serve to all those who had for a decade been wearing their belts too tight. Canadian poetry of social protest was written after the depression was over, by the young poets of the next generation. The most diverting poetic souvenirs of the thirties are some of the poems of L. A. MacKay (b. 1901), who under the pseudonym "John Smalacombe" published a Ryerson chapbook winningly entitled Viper's Bugloss (1938); some of its contents with additional poems made up The Ill-Tempered Lover and Other Poems (1948). That title well indicates MacKay's temperamental range. The collection opens with poems addressed to a beloved woman (or to several beloved women) which pass from adoration through disillusionment to bitterness and regret. These are unabashedly romantic in their ardour but couched in stanzas and language that impose a firm classical control, not surprising in a poet who was also a professor of classics. Classical too are the poems of satire that follow the love poems, though in the neo-classical manner of Pope, most of them, rather than the Roman style. MacKay is not altogether plausible as a satirist, for all his incisiveness, which at times achieves the epigrammatic. He too obviously enjoys laying about him in fiercely rhythmic couplets. Nostalgia is the mood most likely to be evoked by a backward look at the scoldings he delivered in the thirties, by three poems particularly: "And Spoil the Child" (1931), which energetically parades before the reader representatives of the major faults in Canadian poetry of that period; "Fidelia Vulnera Amici" (1931), a lecture to Canadians on such fatuities as nationalist aspirations, preferential tariffs, the unguarded frontier, and economic mismanagement that brought unemployment and depression; and "Prelude and Ballade: For the Dissolution of the Canadian Forum Committee, April 1934." Generously, the poet concludes the first two poems with prescriptions for reform. "Frankie Went Down to the Corner" is a glancing blow at the shabby gentility of Ontario's beverage rooms. Several of L. A. MacKay's excellent shorter poems will survive as long as anthologies of Canadian poetry are compiled: "Admonition for Spring," "Hylas," and "Battle Hymn of the Spanish Rebellion." in

Modernism came also to the Maritimes, even there where the themes and vocabulary of Carman and Roberts might have lingered on most obsessively. Three writers in particular began their work as poets under the influence of those themes and that vocabulary, but completed, each in his own fashion, the passage from convention to individuality.

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Kenneth Leslie (b. 1902) has published four books of verse: Windward Rock (1934), Such a Din and Lowlands Low (1935), and By Stubborn Stars and Other Poems (1938—Governor-General's Award). Leslie is a minor writer who now and again surpassed himself. His successes are the poems in which, by instinct or a more than usual artistic austerity, he has put away the trappings of poetic soulfulness in favour of more colloquial rhythms and words. He perceived, evidently, that the kind of poem he could best do would be built out of specific feelings and details. Above all, he saw through the heresy that, since the turn of the century or longer, had hampered Canadian poets: that when a poet took up his pen he must anaesthetize his intellect. As well, he learned a good deal from his reading of post-war American poetry, especially the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. But what counted most, as far as the reader can surmise, was that Kenneth Leslie's emotional life supplied him with some highly usable data at a time when his skill and intelligence were capable of coping with it. These opportunities and qualities brought into being his half-dozen most interesting poems. "The Shenachie Man" is an insubstantial and slightly facile piece, but it creates some musical and mysterious effects by fairly traditional means. "Lowlands Low" illustrates his way of handling free verse, and shows how he could make a feeling statement without slipping into bathos. His wit and mental dexterity best display themselves in a remarkable piece called "Cobweb College." Leslie's highest level of achievement is a group of twenty-six sonnets, "By Stubborn Stars." The sequence, reminiscent of "Modern Love," somewhat obscurely tells a story of triangular passion; both substance and treatment are entirely novel in Canadian literature. Two or three of these sonnets (the typography is novel, too, the lines beginning in lower case except where they coincide with sentence beginnings), those in which feeling and imagery and rhythm are perfectly composed, are certainly Leslie's most enduring work, notably "The chart is doubtful for the course I take," "The waters of my life, lying so still," and "The silver herring throbbed thick in my seine." Charles Bruce (b. 1906) first published a book of poems in 1927—Wild Apples; then came Tomorrow's Tide (1932). In the pages of these first two books may be glimpsed occasionally what was to be the most praiseworthy quality of his later collections, Personal Note (1941), Grey Ship Moving (1945), The Flowing Summer (1947) and The Mulgrave Road (1951— Governor-General's Award). This quality is a sober and straightforward way of recording his observations of, and affection for, the sea and the coastlands of Nova Scotia. His manner, at its best, is perfectly in keeping with the subdued colouring of Guysborough County and with the quiet nostalgia which, evidently, it inspires in the Nova Scotian who, for the sake of money or career, is compelled to spend most of his adult life in Toronto, Ottawa, or Montreal.

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Bruce is most successful in short descriptive poems that present a landscape, a personality, or an impression, especially in several of the poems that make up the first section of The Mulgrave Road ("Biography," "Coast Farm," "Eastern Shore," and "Back Road Farm"). These lines from "Nova Scotia Fish Hut" exemplify the sureness of detail and control of tone that mark these poems: Bare as the bare stone of this open shore, This building grey as stone. The filtered sun Leaks cold and quiet through it. And the rain, The wind, the whispering sand, return to finger Its creaking wall, and creak its thuttering door. Old as the shore is. But they use the place. Wait if you like: someone will come to find A handline or a gutting-knife, or stow A coiled net in the loft. Or just to smoke And loaf; and swap tomorrow in slow talk; And knock his pipe out on a killick-rock Someone left lying sixty years ago. The same kind of Maritimes material is similarly handled in the longer pieces. Since Bruce is a poet of low temperature, he often makes his impression gradually, through the clustering of numerous small details of place and feeling. The Flowing Summer is an account, in iambic pentameter, of a Toronto boy's vacation visit to his grandfather's sea-side farm. The narrative substance is almost too tenuous and the style almost too prosaic, but they both come across with a restrained agreeableness and even combine, by the end of the narrative, to enforce a moral. "Words are Never Enough" is an expository poem, an apologia for the lives, the labours, and the feelings of fishermen; with considerable effectiveness, Bruce employs the resources of the realistic method—concrete and colloquial diction, well supplied with technical terms and the jargon of jobs, specific place-names and names of people, sympathetic insight into the thoughts and emotions of men who do not naturally put these into fluent words, and concern for the hardships of the workers and wrath for the exploiters. The risk in such writing is that the line may be crossed from poetry to propaganda. Several of his poems, indeed, remind us that Charles Bruce has been an eminent Canadian journalist. In the title poem of Grey Ship Moving the scene is a transport ship crossing the Atlantic eastward during the Second World War. The emotional centres of the situation are four Canadians, from Toronto, the Okanagan Valley, the Eastern Townships, and Saskatchewan. The poem provides a guide to the Canadian temperament under stress, the kind of project undertaken by the CBC during and just after the war years. The documentary details are well handled and the involvements of the chief characters are treated convincingly; the sense of wartime shipboard life is well communicated; but the "socio-

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logical" intent has called forth a script rather than a poem. Now and again, however, responding with greater intensity to a "current event," Charles Bruce has struck out a real poem of social significance: "Words are Never Enough," of course, and "Immediates," a poem inspired by a controversy of the angry thirties. Of the Maritime poets, Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey (b. 1905) has made the longest journey, in technique and sensibility, from his first two collections, Songs of the Saguenay and Other Poems (1927) and Tdo (1930), to Border River (1952). Like Leslie's and Bruce's, Bailey's early poems manifested the Carman syndrome. They showed a preference for firmly patterned quatrains, an addiction to raptures about Love, Nature, and Beauty, and a predilection for "poetic" diction. In a few of these early poems, although the gamut of feeling and language is still pretty conventional, the versification shows a pull towards something new: the chances for expressiveness that might be opened up by breaking down the standard metrical patterns and creating lines and stanzas in which the rhythm would grow out of a system of dispersed stresses rather than from a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. As well, Bailey began to show a strong attraction to the single-line cadence (a few of the Border River poems eschew enjambment almost entirely). These tendencies make for discomfort in stanzas with decisive rhythmic patterns. The result in these early poems is unattractive but suggestive (for example, "Urbs Antiqua Fuit"). What would have been metrical audacity—and something to be commended—if it had been sustained by intellectual and verbal force, sounds like prosodic uncouthness. The prosody in Border River is not uncouth, but it is gnarled and stubborn, with an effect admirably in keeping with the idiom and the play of fancy. Discarding completely the metrical and thematic paraphernalia of his earlier poems, Bailey emerged in the 1940's as one of the most individual of Canadian poets. His method is audacious and sometimes misses the target. A few of the poems in Border River are signally bad, but bad according to an interesting principle. His poems make a kind of assault upon their subjects and upon the reader's imagination and intelligence. The meaning issues gradually, if at all, out of a wrestle with a complication of images crowded along a tortuous line of narrative, as in the opening stanza of "The Unreturning": Blue is my sky peter and white my frayed gull. We had begun to sail into the milky magma, the gull's cry and the moon's tail beyond the glassy ports and the squeaking cordage where the long waves leap and the crests of wind reform their ragged continents.

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This stanza, and the poem as a whole, might be contrasted with several of the Saguenay poems ("Night on He des Alouettes," "Trinity Bay," "Child of the Waves," and "Night") which were composed out of somewhat similar descriptive and emotional material. It is a difference not of prosody only but even more of perception. The later poems—"Miramichi Lightning," for example—deal less with appearances and events than with their power to produce a subtle and sometimes exciting interplay among the various elements of subject and feeling. Such poems ask for alert reading, and their riddling method does not always escape obscurity. The reward for the effort is a considerable amount of wit and insight. The method has produced a number of excellent poems, Canadian in grain though cosmopolitan in technique. These might be thought of in three groups. First, the poems of sophisticated play: for example, "Variations on a Theme," which takes off from a line of T. S. Eliot's. Second, the poems in which the poet seems to be cerebrating on philosophical and social matters: "Shrouds and Away," "Regression of the Pelasgians," and "Whistles and Wheels." The third and most important group includes "Border River," "Colonial Set," "Hochelaga," and "Algonkian Burial." These make use of Canadian material, but in ways never beheld before. As an historian Dr. Bailey understands that some subjects yield their chief significance only through a shifting of times and tones. His Canadian places are made present to our imaginations chronologically and historically rather than, as with most other Canadian "historical" poems, geographically or scenically. He manages in these poems—above all, in that admirable composition, "Border River"—to achieve an effect of double vision: what the past was like when it was past, and what it means to someone contemplating it from the present. IV

Far off on the other side of the country, Floris Clarke McLaren (b. 1904) also was learning through the thirties how to give poetic life to her vision of familiar and beloved scenes—for her, Alaska and British Columbia. In 1937 she published a collection of thirty poems in a volume entitled Frozen Fire. The collection possesses more unity than slim volumes of verse usually have. Almost every poem is devoted to an impression of the West Coast mountain country or the Pacific. In general, Mrs. McLaren, like her contemporaries in the Maritimes, recognized that the most direct and memorable way of re-creating a landscape is to make it present through a few vivid essential details. To many of her poems, furthermore, she added force by dramatizing rather than merely presenting her material. A variety of persons utter, in a variety of tones, reactions to the mountain country: longing ("The Northerner," "Exile"); resistance ("Transplanted," "Mountain Dread,"

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"Gene's Bride"); disenchantment ("The Reflexions of Constable Peters," "Stampede Bill"). Although it is a country that demands fortitude and patience, most of the speakers—and this includes the poetess herself— admit, half grudgingly, half ecstatically, that this country must always be their hearts' home ("Hill Water," "Shadow of Mountains," "Bits of the Pattern"). "Frozen Fire," the title poem, the most powerful in the book both in feeling and in versification, communicates that dual sense of dread and delight that has been the matrix of much Canadian poetry. Apart from the title poem, Frozen Fire is not a greatly accomplished book, but it is a quietly satisfying collection. Its author was to continue to develop in skill and in the power to find words and images for her own way of feeling and observing. During the forties and fifties, Floris Clarke McLaren published further poems in several periodicals (including Contemporary Verse, which she devotedly served as business manager). These later pieces are unquestionably more subtle in rhythm, more sophisticated and "cosmopolitan" in the handling of language and imagery than the poems of Frozen Fire. Especially attractive are "Visit by Water," "Crusoe," and "No More the Slow Stream." In these poems she continued to make effective use of mountain and wildwood material, and thus was able to resist the drift towards allegory that is the bane of several of her other later poems. The first book by Anne Marriott (b. 1913) has remained her best. This is the Ryerson chapbook, The Wind Our Enemy, published in 1939. A sequence of ten short poems inspired by the prairie drought, unemployment, and misery of the 1930's, this work shows that no poet has better understood how to make the methods of modernism yield full value. The verse is free: that is, its lines follow the rhythms of speech and feeling rather than a repeated design. The language is appropriate to the subject and the speakers, with scarcely a literary or "romantic" touch. Carefully chosen details are preferred to extensive passages of description. Feelings are dramatized, projected through a little cast of characters rather than as proceeding from the author. What has counted most, however, has been the poet's intense concern over the land and the people. Miss Marriott could hardly hope to find another donnee so compelling. The Governor-General's Award was conferred upon her second chapbook, Calling Adventurers (1941), which consists of the choruses from Payload, a radio documentary. A crisp and graphic use of details is its most commendable quality. For its medium it is effective in rhythm and diction. But Calling Adventurers has neither the impetus nor the poignancy of the earlier sequence. In Anne Marriott's two succeeding chapbooks—Salt Marsh (1942) and Sandstone and Other Poems (1945)—a few poems draw their strength from her principal virtue as a writer: to find images and epithets for her careful observations of objects and places. A few of these poems

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carry intimations that make the details coherent and significant. This is true of "Woodyards in the Rain," "Business Man, War Year," "Portrait," and, most of all, "Prairie Graveyard," which begins thus: Wind mutters thinly on the sagging wire binding the graveyard from the gouged dirt road, bends thick-bristled Russian thistle, sifts listless dust into cracks in hard grey ground. Empty prairie slides away on all sides, rushes toward a wide expressionless horizon, joined to a vast blank sky.

Roy Daniells (b. 1902) included in his collection of poems, Deeper into the Forest (1948), a meditation in rhymed and assonanted elegiac quatrains entitled "Farewell to Winnipeg." This poem movingly evokes not only the feeling of the place but something of its historic associations. The poem derives its memorable quality from the finely handled fusion of mood and weather, and the skilful use of Riel and his rebellion as a point of reference from which the poet's intensely wrought musings expand into a larger consideration of Canada and the world in the present era. The poem recalls, without echoing, both Coleridge's "Dejection" and Yeats's "Coole and Ballylee," and is none the worse for that. Daniells is not, however, primarily a regionalist. The poems of his which most readers are likely to remember with affection are several of the sonnets which make up the sequences entitled "Deeper into the Forest" and "Anthony," especially the former in which narrative, mostly derived from myth or fairy-tale, combines with imagery to produce delicate and haunting effects of enchantment, happiness, and terror. These are charming slight things that contain a thousand subleties of prosody, even though they lack the substance and power of "Farewell to Winnipeg." Earle Birney (b. 1904) is a western poet, too, by birth and by residence for the greatest part of his life. But his experiences have related him to many parts of Canada as well as to Europe, Mexico, and Japan; and he has derived his data not only from British Columbia but from the world at large and from the problems and aspirations of modern international man. Yet, the most cosmopolitan of our poets in ideology and experience, he is in several senses the most Canadian of them all. In his writings Birney comes back, again and again, to the questions: What is Canadian? What is a Canadian? Poems by Earle Birney first appeared in various periodicals at the end of the thirties and the beginning of the forties. His first book was David and Other Poems, published in 1942 and winner for that year of the GovernorGeneral's Award. It has been followed by four other collections of verse, two

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novels, and a number of stories, essays, and radio plays. He has edited an anthology, Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry. As well, he acted as literary editor of the Canadian Forum from 1936 to 1940 and, for two lively years, 1946-48, as editor of the Canadian Poetry Magazine. He served with the Canadian Army during the Second World War, was supervisor of Europeanlanguage broadcasts for CBC's Radio Canada, and since 1946 has taught English literature and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. "David," the title poem of Earle Birney's first book, has several times been called a minor classic. It is a narrative poem, effectively structured in both incident and symbol, in interlinked quatrains of four or five stress lines subtly assonantal. This interesting verse combines narrative inclusiveness and rhythmic impetus. The story of the mountain climb and its consequences is supremely well told; moreover, it conveys significance that goes beyond the narrative. The poet skilfully builds his story to a climax that drives the narrator into an extremity of dread and decision; he has entered upon a new phase of his emotional and narrative life: I said that he fell straight to the ice where they found him And none but the sun and incurious clouds have lingered Around the marks of that day on the ledge of the Finger, That day, the last of my youth, on the last of our mountains.

The 1942 volume also contained a score of short poems in a variety of forms. The most striking are two that illustrate the poet's eye for details that recreate a scene and a mood ("Dusk on English Bay" and "Hands") and an ingenious adaptation of Old English alliterative verse to modern squalid urban subject-matter ("Anglo-Saxon Street"). His second book, Now is Time (1945—also a Governor-General's Award), is organized in three sections: "Tomorrow," "Yesterday," and "Today." The first sub-section of "Yesterday," sub-titled "Canada 1939-1942," reprints five poems from the David collection and adds one new poem. The sub-section entitled "Europe 1942-1945" comprises poems about the lives and thoughts of Canadians killed in the war ("Joe Harris," "For Steve") and the reflections of the poet among scenes of war ("Invasion Spring," " 'And the Earth Grow Young Again,'" "D-Day," "This Page My Pigeon," "The Road to Nijmegen," and "VE-Night"). Three of the poems in the collection ("For Steve," "Joe Harris," and "On a Diary") handle narrative material. None of them quite comes off, but all three are interesting both in their methods and in their substance. Birney's determination to understand other people and to express compassion without condescension or sentimentality is one of his most likable traits. All these wartime poems have a documentary as well as an artistic value—"the most powerful expression of a Canadian's reaction to the Second World War" (A. J. M. Smith)—and one of them, "The Road to

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Nijmegen," is almost wholly excellent. What spoils it is a tendency, manifested in the closing lines, to worry about the world. Such concern is appropriate, of course, and almost inevitable for a poet of Birney's temperament and experience. But he has never quite succeeded in making poetry of it. Anxiety and anger are the emotions also of the other two sections of Now is Time: "Tomorrow" and "Today." The main defect of all these poems shows up most clearly in the longest of them, "Man on a Tractor." The intimate and knowledgeable particulars that are the source of Birney's strength here and in other poems, and his accurate sense of spoken language, quarrel with his urge to editorialize. But it is churlish to censure a poet for wishing to place his skill at the disposal of decent aspirations. The collection closes with "World Conference": The quiet diesel in the breast propels a trusting keel whether we swing toward a port or crocodiles of steel. The compassed mind must quiver north though every chart defective; there is no fog but in the will, the iceberg is elective.

Also schematic is the third of Birney's books, The Strait of Anian (1948). Part One is headed "One Society"; Part Two, "One World." The second part is almost entirely of poems which appeared in the two earlier books, arranged chronologically and with places of composition indicated, to form a survey of the poet's experiences. Two of the five poems not hitherto published ("Man is a Snow" and " . . . Or a Wind") impressively fuse feeling and rhythm. Part One comprises seventeen poems in a trans-Canada sequence, opening with "Atlantic Door" and closing with "Pacific Door," companion poems with significant differences. The other poems take the reader on a sharp-eyed and sharp-witted tour of key points across the continent. The range of tone is considerable, from the sophisticated ironies of "Montreal" (which should be compared with A. M. Klein's "Montreal") to the crude idiom and objects of "Prairie Counterpoint." For the British Columbia stage of the tour, "David" is once more reprinted, along with "Reverse on the Coast Range," "Slug in Wood" and two new poems. The pathos and tawdriness of the life that has come to Canada with settlement and the spread of population contrast with the natural strength and beauty of the land. The poet makes out a telling case against man and his dwellingplaces: in "Montreal" by a constant juxtaposition of magnanimous past and meagre present; in "The Ebb Begins from Dream" by the accumulation of dreary detail in the daily life of Toronto; in "Prairie Counterpoint" by an alternation of lyric-descriptive prairie passages with passages spoken by a

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disillusioned westerner. The Pacific zone comes more creditably out of the survey, represented by such untainted things as mountain-climbing, trees, driftwood, and again the ingratiating "Slug in Wood." In the pure waters of the Gulf of Georgia, poet, or reader, can wash away entirely the contamination of life in Canada: Dive from the shining fluted land through the water's mesh to the crab's dark flower and the starfish. Trail the laggard fins of your flesh in the world's lost home and wash your mind of its landness.

The title of the fourth book threatens a more stringent treatment of the west coast: Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952). "Trial of a City" (originally a radio drama entitled "The Damnation of Vancouver") is a fantasy-drama in mingled verse and prose of both present and future idiom. The situation is a hearing to determine whether Vancouver should be annihilated. Witnesses are materialized from among the dead: Captain George Vancouver, the headman of the Indian nation that formerly occupied the site, Gassy Jack Deighton, and the author of Piers Plowman. Living witnesses are a professor of geology and a Vancouver housewife. There is much excellent fooling, a great deal of good sense, and a thorough treatment of two of Birney's principal themes: the squalor of contemporary urban life and the need for hopeful decisiveness about the next stage of human history. His versatility as a prosodist is strikingly demonstrated. The professor couches his geological erudition in a bleak four-stress rhythm with deep caesuras and emphatic alliteration; the housewife speaks in lyric stanzas; and Langland utters his condemnation in a version of fourteenth-century alliterative poetry. The superb achievement of "Trial of a City" is the sequence of passages spoken by the Salish chief summoned to describe for the officials "a way of life that died for yours to live." These sturdy and shapely lines, abounding in vividly realized details, are as splendid as any of Birney's. The book contains, besides "Trial of a City," thirteen shorter poems— under the heading "North Star West"—in which once again the poet escorts the reader across the continent, once more in search of the unifying "Canadian" principle. Again, in spite of numerous local insights, it eludes him, and it is only in a geographic sense that he can exult, as the plane puts down at Vancouver: Yet for a space we held in our morning's hand the welling and wildness of Canada, the fling of a nation. Once more, the best poems are evoked by the West Coast: "Bushed," "Takkakaw Falls," "Images in Place of Logging," and "Climbers":

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Above the last squeak-squeal of wheels stench of the highest backlot lithe climbers escape. . . . This brings us back to the opening of "David": We climbed, to get from the ruck of the camp, the surly Poker, the wrangling, the snoring under the fetid Tents. . . . The cleansing water of the gulf or the clear air of the mountain peak: these are the ways of escape from Canada, or from Canadians and what they have made of the country. In his fifth collection of poems, Ice Cod Bell or Stone (1962)—a most accomplished, and physically handsome, book that shows in a clear light Earle Birney's great gifts of craftsmanship and understanding—the poet seems to have turned his back upon Canada as a source of subject-matter. The East, Mexico, and the plight of the world in our time offer more incitement to his mind and more scope to his creative powers. The book includes, however, a poem which appears to sum up the deficiencies of Canada as a theme for poetry (as, in an earlier book, "Canada: Case History" had summed up the shortcomings of the country as a setting for a sane adult life): Since we had always sky about, when we had eagles they flew out leaving no shadow bigger than a wren's to trouble our most aeromantic hens. Too busy bridging loneliness to be alone we hacked in trees what Emily had in bone. We French, we English, never lost our civil war, endure it still, a bloodless civil bore: no wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted. It's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted. The poem is entitled "Can. Lit." V

In the nineteen-forties, when the Depression was over and World War II had broken out, modern Canadian poetry came into its full force. The "renaissance" of the forties—and this was not the first "renaissance" in the history of Canadian literature—was the culmination of the modernist movement which had begun shortly after the end of World War I. The inaugurators of that movement—the "elder" poets as they might now be considered—Scott, Smith, Livesay, Klein, and Pratt, not only served as mentors for the new generation but contributed to the creativity of the forties. Not until then, indeed, did most of them attain to publication in book

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form: Klein's Hath Not a Jew (1940), Smith's News of the Phoenix (1943), Scott's Overture (1945), Finch's Poems (1946), Knister's Collected Poems (1949). Another sign of achievement was the publication of anthologies that gave full recognition to these and other newer poets: Ralph Gustafson's Penguin collections, Anthology of Canadian Poetry (1942) and Canadian Accent (1944) and, for New Directions, Canadian Poets (1943); A. J. M. Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry (1943, revised 1948 and 1957); and several small anthologies in the shape of special Canadian issues published by the American periodicals Poetry and Voices, and the British Outposts. These books, anthologies, and Canadian issues confirmed what had already been accomplished. The most vital indication of new vigour was the appearance in the early forties of new Canadian periodicals devoted principally to the theory and practice of poetry. An older periodical continued to serve the cause. During the middle years of the thirties, the Canadian Forum had seemed relatively indifferent to poetry. Only an occasional poem of note— usually by E. J. Pratt, or A. M. Klein—showed a persisting care for Canadian literature as compared with Canadian social and economic problems. Towards the close of Earle Birney's term as literary editor, however, Canadian writing and criticism of Canadian books again began to receive something like the emphasis of 1928-33. Moreover, most of the poets who were to found their reputations in the forties and fifties made their first, or very early, appearances in the receptive, in the main discriminating, pages of the Forum, pages in which, as well, critical standards for Canadian writers were scrupulously maintained—a service rendered also, from 1935 on, by the annual survey of letters in Canada by the University of Toronto Quarterly. The poetic flowering of the forties manifested itself chiefly in several new periodicals. Contemporary Verse: A Canadian Quarterly, published in British Columbia, from September 1941 to March 1953, was mainly the creation of a devoted and gifted editor, Alan Crawley, assiduously aided by four poetesses: Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Doris Feme, and Floris Clarke McLaren. To read through the files of this small, neat magazine is to feel sustained respect for Mr. Crawley's judgment and catholicity, and astonishment at the number of good Canadian poets who sent him their poems. In these pages we find mature writings from the best of the Canadian poets whose careers began in the 1920's, and we find, as well, some of the earliest (in a few instances, the first) poems in print by writers who were to come into their prime during the decade. Furthermore, a chronological reading of Contemporary Verse seems to show a steady increase in poetic craft and power. As an editor, Alan Crawley, although never weakly impersonal, was almost entirely free from bias. His aims consistently were to stimulate the writing and reading of good poems, and to provide a means of publication that would be free from the restrictions of politics, prejudices,

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and personalities, to keep his pages open to poetry that was "sincere in thought and expression and contemporary in theme, treatment, and technique." When he believed that his job had been completed, Alan Crawley ceased the publication of Contemporary Verse, after twelve years of useful life, in 1953. More local and more doctrinaire were two little magazines issued in Montreal, still headquarters for the modern movement in Canadian poetry: Preview and First Statement. These periodicals came out, not with perfect regularity, between 1942 and 1945, and then were merged with, or absorbed by, Northern Review. Preview (March 1942-January 1945) professed to be not a magazine but a periodic selection of works in progress by a small group of writers who shared certain literary and political convictions: they were socialist and anti-fascist; they believed in, and practised, creative and experimental writing; they were bent upon achieving a synthesis "between the lyric and didactic elements in modern verse, a combination of vivid, arresting imagery and the capacity to 'sing' with social content and criticism" (March 1942). A few flimsy sketches in inept prose figured as the chief endeavour towards proletarian realism. The most notable feature of Preview was the number of interesting poems it printed, by several poets, who (like the "Montreal Group" of the 1920's) were to be spoken of, for some years to come, as a group, the "Preview group." The best poems were those by P. K. Page, Patrick Anderson, and F. R. Scott; an occasional piece of some merit came from Ronald Hambleton, Bruce Ruddick, Neufville Shaw, Miriam Waddington, and Kay Smith. An impulse towards exegesis was evident; from time to time the members of the group commented on one another's poems. The editors of Preview, for all their stress on "cosmopolitanism" and scorn for "colonialism," were by no means beyond the fervours of patriotism. During the summer of 1943, in a Victory Broadsheet published as a special supplement, Patrick Anderson devoted four war songs to the cause of the United Nations and Canada, "to bring poetry to the people" and "to stimulate morale by explaining the issues of the war and the problems of the peace in terms of Canadian history and life." At the same time, the editors affirmed their belief in international ideologies and literary standards. "We have lived long enough in Montreal to realize the frustrating effects of isolation." And they had lived long enough in Canada to realize the narrowness of Canadian subject-matter hitherto and, on the whole, the conventionality of Canadian verse. To-day the poet is no longer silent. He has yet to come to grips with himself and stop crying "Help" from the prairies and woods and mountains. If instead he will hitch-hike to the towns and identify himself with people, forget for awhile the

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country of his own head, he may find his age and consequently his belief. (P. K. Page, October 1942)

First Statement: A Magazine for Young Canadian Writers, the first issue of which appeared only six months after the first issue of Preview, cared less about cosmopolitanism, more about native achievements and possibilities: For a number of generations, Canadians have been writing and expressing themselves in literary forms. In that time they have produced a literature with enough breadth and scope to be called Canadian. . . . [It is] the business of a Canadian magazine . . . to serve Canadian writers only. . . . Our desire [is] to exhibit . . . the various modes and types of writing as we find them in Canada. We would like to become the mirror of this variety and so provide the Canadian reader with the freedom of choice that he requires. (September 26, 1942)

The three poets principally introduced by First Statement were Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and Raymond Souster. The most significant fact about First Statement is that its editorial board included, and was to be dominated by, John Sutherland. Sutherland, a wretched poet but an excellent editor, was, until his death in 1956, the most stimulating and least inhibited of Canadian editors and critics. His quality made itself manifest in Northern Review. Whereas its Montreal predecessors have a merely historical interest, Northern Review remains valuable as a repository of poems, fiction, and critical essays. Its poetry is not as uniformly good as the poetry printed in Contemporary Verse, but its critical articles make it one of the small number of indispensable literary periodicals published in this country. Sutherland encouraged the unbiased and searching study of Canadian writers of the past as well as the present. He himself acted as arch-critic, taking on all comers zestfully and, most of the time, victoriously. It was nothing for him to collate in one article (October-November 1947) the views of most of the established commentators on Canadian literature—E. K. Brown, Lionel Stevenson, W. E. Collin, Lome Pierce, Northrop Frye, A. J. M. Smith et al.—extract the few notions he was willing to commend, and dismiss the bulk of their opinions as anachronistic: "These critics are on the defensive because they cling to a past world in order to deny the excitement of the present one. Genuinely afraid of science, of socialist experiment, of characteristic tendencies in twentieth-century life. . . ." Sutherland himself was about to become an anachronism. The poetry of social protest was going out of fashion. He might have discerned that the best poetry he was publishing in Northern Review did not conform to his prescription. The shift in emphasis is clear in the introduction that Dudek and Layton wrote in 1952 for Canadian Poems 1850-1952. Paradoxically, Sutherland's conversion in 1953 to Roman Catholicism, which transformed the magazine, and the critical method he exercised

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in his book on the poetry of E. J. Pratt, brought Sutherland into sympathy with the younger poets of Canada at a time when he appeared to have lost the desire to publish them. But in its ten years (1946-56) Northern Review had thoroughly fulfilled the classic function of the "little magazine," as proclaimed in its first editorial: to publish serious work, to make no concessions, to maintain critical and artistic standards. Those tasks might have been carried out by other agencies—perhaps the universities? No, retorted Sutherland: "Valuable as the universities are in the field of history and scholarship, they have only rarely shown themselves capable of sympathetic and intelligent understanding of the aims and accomplishments of our younger poets and story writers." The literary facts of the 1950's seem to suggest that Sutherland was in error. Here, however, in an elementary and moderate form, is the conflict that Irving Layton a decade or more later was trying to substantiate. These "little" magazines of the 1940's and early 1950's—and Direction and Contact, though less important, ought to be mentioned also—exhibited the new vigour of Canadian writing. Books followed to confirm the triumph. In 1944 was published a slight but interesting anthology, Unit of Five, which contained poems by Louis Dudek, Ronald Hambleton, P. K. Page, Raymond Souster, and James Wreford. In 1947, John Sutherland published, as the fifth book in the "New Writers" series, Other Canadians: An Anthology of the New Poetry in Canada 1940-1946. Sutherland included among his "other" Canadians the poets of Unit of Five and added to them Patrick Anderson, Margaret Avison, Irving Layton, James Reaney, Bruce Ruddick, Neufville Shaw, Kay Smith, Miriam Waddington, and a few others. Other Canadians came out almost exactly ten years later than New Provinces. The two anthologies, in their similarities and their more frequent differences, conveniently display two phases of modernism in Canadian poetry. Why "other" Canadians? Other, as John Sutherland's polemic introduction makes clear, than the poets represented in A. J. M. Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry published in 1943; Smith had failed to do justice to the new poetry of the 1940's. Other Canadians, accordingly, would serve as appendix to Smith's book and its introduction as corrective to Smith's criteria of inclusion and classification. Smith, the rebel of the 1920's, now figured as the bishop of tradition. His deficiencies, by Sutherland's count, were three. He insisted on distinguishing in Canadian poetry a double tradition—native and cosmopolitan—that simply was not there. He sponsored and represented the "movements of the twenties and thirties which have either proved abortive or been superseded by something else." He judged by aesthetic and religious rather than social standards; his prestige words were "classical" and "metaphysical." The new poets, on the other hand—"the Preview group" and "the First Statement writers"—were, according to Sutherland,

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"concerned with the individual and the individual's reaction to society. . . . If God still talks to these poets, in private, he carries less weight than Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud." Smith made the necessary adjustments for the second edition of his anthology. But by that time the younger poets in Canada bore no resemblance to the group described in the introduction to Other Canadians, and John Sutherland himself had begun to be a different person. So rapidly does stage succeed stage in the short crowded history of modern Canadian poetry! The most highly gifted of the poets who contributed to Preview and collaborated in Unit of Five was P. K. Page (b. 1917). Miss Page has published a novel, a number of short stories, and two collections of poems: As Ten As Twenty (1946) and The Metal and the Flower (1954— Governor-General's Award). The poems of the earlier book came in part out of the Auden-Isherwood-Spender era, the period of the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front, the struggle against fascism, but their author has clearly listened more attentively to Sigmund Freud than to Karl Marx. A few of her earliest poems, several not reprinted in As Ten As Twenty, show that her sympathies were not with the Anglo-Canadian "establishment," show it wittily, for example, in "Election Day": and in the polling station I shall meet the smiling, rather gentle overlords propped by their dames and almost twins in tweeds, and mark my X against them and observe my ballot slip, a bounder, in the box.

But there is nothing in these poems politically more radical than the general desire to do the decent thing as a member of a society, as "A Generation" suggests, and the poem that gives the book its title. On the contrary, P. K. Page's poems are intensely, almost oppressively, private. Her frequent theme is separateness, the incapacity to escape from the self or to communicate with others. The direction in most of the poems is from the outer objective world of typewriters and snowfall to the world of fantasy, nerves, complexes, madness. She takes a virtuoso's delight in delineating a neurosis ("Round Trip," "Magnetic North," "If It Were You," "Only Child"; and, in the second volume of verse, such chillingly precise studies as "Man with One Small Hand," "Portrait of Marina," and "Paranoid"). Even more striking are the poems in which she has composed a montage of imagery to suggest the horror or the mystery that lies behind the phenomena of the commonplace world ("Adolescence," "The Stenographers," "The Bands and the Beautiful Children"). Script-writing for the National Film Board was for a while Miss Page's occupation, and it is easy to recognize in her work a flair for cinematic

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treatment. Several of her poems might serve as scripts for little experimental films meant for "art" theatres. Action flows into action, image melts, "by a slow dissolve," into image: Bell rings and they go and the voice draws their pencil like a sled across snow; when its runners are frozen rope snaps and the voice then is pulling no burden but runs like a dog on the winter of paper. . . . yet they weep in the vault, they are taut as net curtains stretched upon frames. In their eyes I have seen the pin men of madness in marathon trim race round the track of the stadium pupil. ("The Stenographers") Sometimes these metamorphoses of imagery are unforgettably effective, as in two fine poems of The Metal and the Flower, "T-Bar" and "Photos of a Salt Mine." Occasionally the reader's patience is tried by an excessive, Dylan Thomas kind of clottedness: "bugles of breath," "Niagaras of blood," "the milk of sheets," "the boy-friends of blood." Yet sometimes the grotesquerie has a surrealistic appropriateness: She walked forever antlered with migraines her pain forever putting forth new shoots until her strange unlovely head became a kind of candelabra—delicate— where all her tears were perilously hung and caught the light as waves that catch the sun. ("Portrait of Marina") The poems of the second collection show a remarkable increase in skill and subtlety. Like the earlier poems, they achieve their effects through a series of brief precise statements set down in lines of varying lengths that unite to form stanzas of many shapes. The diction is less extraordinary for its grace or music than for the exactness with which it presents images. These poems are the exquisite patterns of meaning and suggestion composed by a rare and fastidious sensibility that never quite discloses itself or comes too near to the objects of its observation. P. K. Page has somewhat resembled her own "Permanent Tourists," although she has used a cine-camera with lenses of surpassing keenness, slightly out of focus and aimed from odd angles and through glass or water. Patrick Anderson (b. 1915) was also a leading contributor to Preview. Anderson can be counted as only temporarily a native poet. Born in England, he came to Montreal, after a time in New York, in 1940, and by the end of the decade had moved on. In Montreal he was caught up in the lively artistic and intellectual life of the war years, engaged tentatively in the leftist

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political activities of the time, and wrote a good deal of poetry, collected in two books, A Tent for April (1945) and The White Centre (1946). A later collection, The Colour as Naked (1953), although it reflects also his life in Malaya and in England, derives in large part from his years in Montreal. "The Dylan Thomas of Canada" was a label that even Anderson himself accepted as apt. He has been described perceptively as "a kind of tea-drinking Dylan Thomas." He lacks Thomas's fierce imagination and irresistible rhythmic force, but his treatment of words was learned from Thomas and his use of imagery is similar, a technique of multiple, constantly shifting images that pass from sense to sense and from scale to scale of size. He unlocked an apple first, then lifted the latch of the ancestral tree, whistled amongst the tall corn gaily like a scythe of birds: on the shore the lion waves lay down on their paws and above the trodden sand a storm of gulls made sadness as white as April does: ... He called to the hunting morning then to shoot his blood, he asked the seamstress of the woods to stitch his manhood . . . To every spar and nerve he set his orchard sails and in the fleet of love his eyes were sea-blue admirals, while at his telescope of brass she lulled her palms lay level to his pride, lay still to his rocked rigging. . . . ("Summer's Joe")

These lines show Anderson's principal gift—an extraordinary fluency of image-invention—which is also the source of his principal defect. In some poems he goes on adding image to image with the effect of a tape transmitted by a metaphor-machine into which the poet has fed his raw material. Although his poetic method resembles that of P. K. Page, his subjectmatter is entirely different. He revels in sensuous experience, encounters, people, landscape. The poems that he wrote during his sojourn in Montreal have, for this reason, a documentary value. Coming from another part of the world he looked with fresh acuteness at things and situations that Canadians had seen so often they had stopped seeing them. Such poems as "Winter in Montreal," "The Pines: Christieville," "Brome Lake," and "Ski Train" not only give verbal shape to specific times and places; they betray

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a rather charming eagerness on the poet's part to become a participant, a Canadian too in his understanding and response. Indeed, Anderson shows almost everywhere a tendency to identify with his material, whether it is landscape ("Camp"), experience ("Sleighride"), or a person ("Summer's Joe," "Portrait"). He discloses particularly an intense awareness of boyhood, the appearance and sensations of teen-aged youths who are less conscious of their budding sexuality than their observer is. While this interest, or obsession, can be troublesome, as in "Boy in a Russian Blouse," it has also been the inspiration of some of his most satisfying poems, especially "Mother's Boy" and "My Bird-Wrung Youth." Anderson's "Poem on Canada" (The White Centre), a long reflectivenarrative composition in five sections, is an attempt to define the characteristics and the genesis of the "Canadian experience" by means of a selective historical survey and an analysis of the present feeling about Canada by inhabitants and visitors. Because it has been, of necessity, worked up from books, "Poem on Canada" does not have the authenticity of the Montreal poems, but it communicates several flashes of truth. The most suggestive passages are the account of the arrival of the white men, the diverting vignette of Aunt Hildegard and her Canadian lakes, and several parts of the "Cold Colloquy" of section five, a dialogue between Canada personified and those who would question her identity. At one point Canada replies: I am the wind that wants a flag. 1 am the mirror of your picture until you make me the marvel of your life. Yes, I am one and none, pin and pine, snow and slow, America's attic, an empty room, a something possible, a chance, a dance that is not danced. A cold kingdom.

"A something possible"—one day Patrick Anderson, whose gifts and insight were surely waxing strong when he left Canada, will return to seek further into the meaning of this country. The Second World War made few appearances in Canadian poetry, the most extensive being in certain poems by Earle Birney, Douglas LePan, and Raymond Souster. Patrick Anderson in Montreal wrote a few pieces about the grief and dismay that war causes to civilians ("Railway Station," "The Wives," "Order Medical Examination") and, relying upon his imagination and the war news, several episodes of the war-front ("Bombing Berlin," "The Airmen," "Arnhem"). Closer to the actuality of war came Bertram Warr (1917-1943), a Toronto boy who crossed to London as a stowaway in 1938 and five years later was killed in action in a Royal Air Force engagement over Germany. In 1941 a pamphlet of his poems, Yet a Little Onward, was published in London in the Resurgam Younger Poets series.

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Bertram Warr at his best convincingly communicated the insight and compassion with which he had been observing London life, especially in the poorer quarters of the city. His style is straightforward and thoughtful, frequently conversational, rarely rising above the level of sober fact; his forms are free and various. His kind of writing is at almost the opposite pole to the image-spinning technique of Patrick Anderson and P. K. Page. The chief sources of his poetic strength—and it was considerable, even though he had barely crossed the threshold of a career as a writer—were his desire to be honest and his sense of the poet's vocation. Contemporary Verse published, in October 1945, a sympathetic article about the life and work of Bertram Warr, along with a bibliography of his writings. The first book of poems by Miriam Waddington (b. 1917), an alumna of Preview and First Statement, was Green World (1945). Many of the poems of Green World celebrate in sinuous cadences the joyous life of the senses, but the collection closes with a sequence entitled "Morning until Night" that laments the onset of age with its threat to innocence and spontaneity: Gradually I enter solitude, I open the door and where I thought to see Green meadows flowering with my name Miriam written in wind, a star on the sea, I meet only the broken face of pain That dogged me all day and now has found the way To my secret self. . . . Oh God deliver me from that sad and broken face The crippled laugh and slow relinquishing Of life, I would be transformed swift As lightning, my evil discovered utterly And proclaimed in its own season.

The pervasive theme of her next book, The Second Silence (1955), is the constriction of adult life. The second silence ("Worlds") is the world of dreams where the grown-up, however hardened or disillusioned, may sometimes recapture the simplicity and completeness of the child's communion with reality. More often, however, the adult is overwhelmed from within by guilt and regret ("Morning until Night," "Night in October"). But The Second Silence is not all melancholy. The compensations of maturity are affirmed by several of the poems: the complex satisfactions of adult love ("At Midnight," "Thou Didst Say Me"); the perspective that experience brings ("Interval," "Lovers," "Catalpa Tree"); most of all, the satisfaction of becoming helpfully related to the lives of others. Mrs. Waddington has served a good many years as a social worker in family and children's agencies, in prisons and hospitals. Her poems of work are among the best in The Second Silence ("Investigator," "Foundling," "Journey to the Clinic"). Many pages

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of the book record, too, the quiet pleasure of recognizing, as she moves about her adult world of loss and burden, the scenes and people that await the sympathetic observer. "Music Teachers," although the diction and rhythms are slovenly, illustrates this kind of insight. "Wonderful World," the happiest poem in the book, proclaims that her lyric gift has not been so deeply eroded as she might have feared. The harvest of mature perception and craftsmanship ought to have come in her third book, The Season's Lovers (1958), but it is a blighted harvest. Certainly, her considerable powers of phrasing and shaping stanzas, which sometimes have not been entirely under control, are at their finest in several of the lyric pieces in the fourth and final section of the book ("Exchange," "Song (Paint me a bird upon your wrist)," "In the Sun," "The Season's Lovers," "An Elegy for John Sutherland"). But the poems in the third section, "To Be a Healer"—the products of her encounters as a case-worker and prison visitor—poems potentially of great strength, are aesthetically disappointing. The poetess's own harrowed reactions to the miseries poured into her ears almost drown them out. Moreover, the reader detects, or suspects, a kind of exasperation with the very processes of art (perceptible, also, in "The Exhibition: David Milne"). The poetess can scarcely, one might surmise, endure all the bother of transforming this material, which she finds so compelling in its raw state, into images and lines, stanzas, poems. She is much more scrupulous about making poems out of her own sardonic view of life and these are the most important in the book. The disenchantment of the middle-aged leftist intellectual speaks out with almost shocking clarity in "When World was Wheelbarrow." This poem, along with the elegy to John Sutherland, puts a period to the political and poetic ferment of Montreal in the forties that gave impetus in the early stages of their careers to this writer and her contemporaries. "The Young Poet and Me" brings together their generation and the next; the poetess finds that she can barely make the effort to communicate, feeling that it is doomed in advance: But love must be endured in long experiment; until he knows what makes our love mean hate our life be death, he'll have no proof of it, however long he lingers at the gate Of busy paradise, nor will tears clarify this rendered question; he has come too early to dine on answers, and I, ill served by fate, dug up from scullery, have come too late.

The most memorable poems in The Season's Lovers are two, in the first part of the book, in which the centre of consciousness is a woman alone in a city

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and oppressed by the lonely agonies she feels about her ("The City's Life" and "Poets and Statues"). These two are extraordinary among Canadian poems for their tone, the intensity with which real anguish has found expression. Two other contributors to Unit of Five deserve mention: Ronald Hambleton, who edited it, and James Wreford. A. J. M. Smith has described Ronald Hambleton (b. 1917) as "one of the younger poets who are approaching the proletarian theme from an intellectual and metaphysical standpoint." Hambleton's work, as a whole, however, has touched only occasionally on proletarian subjects. "Metaphysical" and "intellectual" may be the aptest terms for his method of making poems; this appears to have been an almost perverse insistence on subduing all emotion or lyricism to an arid discourse that comes as close as it can to prose without quite ceasing to be verse. Sometimes he displays surprising skill in making viable stanzas out of such recalcitrant prosodic material. The method goes about as far as it can in such poems as "Letter to Francis" and "A Lover and His Lass"; justifies itself, despite some presumptuous touches, in "Elegy on the Death of Virginia Woolf"; and yields considerable pleasure in a few poems where meaning and feeling break through the verbal and cerebral apparatus, notably in "Her Body is in the Trees" and "Last Night, When Fevered Minutes." The anthologists have decided that his best poem is "Sockeye Salmon." Since the publication of his sole book of verse, Object and Event (1953), Ronald Hambleton has become a proficient writer for radio and television, and has published a novel. When one turns to the poems of James Wreford (b. 1915) one perceives the usefulness of Hambleton's stringency. Several of the poems that Wreford (a Scot temporarily resident in Canada in the 1940's) contributed to Preview and to Unit of Five have something to say and say it with some strength and technical expertness. But the work collected in Of Time and the Lover (1950 —Governor-General's Award) is marked by a sapless grandeur of language and metaphor, a style that takes up where the Georgians left off, but tricked out with "modern" touches of "metaphysical" wit and "contemporary" imagery: "the termite of indifference in the house of passion" . . . "the love which like a blackout screams" . . . "the eugenics of the heart" . . . "Her breasts like towers of Parliament / set on a hill, rise up. /• There all my members go to sit." These snags apart, Wreford has devised a verse medium for his musings on love and mutability that has flowed glibly from the pen and slips readily from the reader's mind. Louis Dudek (b. 1918) was also a contributor to Unit of Five. Since 1944 he has written many poems, has co-edited (with Irving Layton) an admirable anthology—Canadian Poems 1850-1952—and has worked as diligently as any man on behalf of new Canadian poetry, principally by helping with various little magazines: not only First Statement in the early forties,

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but also, during the fifties, Contact, CIV/n, and Delta. The first book of poems by Louis Dudek was East of the City (1946). In 1952 he joined Irving Layton and Raymond Souster in a happily titled collection, Cerberus, designed to refute the rumour that the poetic "renaissance" of the forties had petered out by the end of the decade. In 1952 Dudek put forth, as well, Twenty-Four Poems and The Searching Image. Europe—a sequence of ninety-nine poems provoked by the events and observations of a journey across the Atlantic and through England, France, Italy, Spain, and Greece— was published in 1954. The Transparent Sea (1956), En Mexico (1958), and Laughing Stalks (1958) have brought the total of his books of verse to seven, most of them published by the Contact Press. Prolific and uneven as a writer, Dudek has probably published too much. In the dedicatory poem of Laughing Stalks he half facetiously admits the charge. His career might serve as paradigm of the quandary of the contemporary lyric poet: how to exploit the possibilities of poetry as a craft while remaining faithful to the theory of poetry as the spontaneous announcements of epiphanies? The poem that stands on the first page of East of the City describes his mode of operation: Hanging over a rail of the harbour bridge, knocking mud out of the corners and angles of shoes, diverting traffic I am walking full of poems; I make them hitting home runs, taking the sun, worrying, looking at people. I am breathing under the excitement. ("Making Poems")

He functions as a poet by detecting in an object or an episode the particular intensity or beauty or significance that marks it as a piece of experiential poetry. A poem entitled "Woman" begins, "These are poetry which would be sung— / the budding genitals, the fearful phallus. . . ." Charles Chaplin's film Limelight inspired a poem that opens, "The poetry in it is what gets me." It is the poetry in things that meet his gaze as he looks around his world that gets Dudek, that prompts him to communicate the perception in terms of the delight it has given him. He has composed a number of poems according to this principle with complete success; they are brief, direct, satisfying in cadence and shape. "Making Poems" well typifies them. But to dozens and scores of such notes in free verse the reader may feel tempted to reply merely "So what?" The method would seem to preclude the building of larger and nobler structures. Simple amplification is ruinous to poetry of this sort. One can fancy the poet endeavouring by various sorts of composition to circumvent the limitations of his poetics.

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The problem solves itself when his data offer sufficient substance, especially when the sensuous elements will support a narrative movement or a considerable amount of interfused commentary. Several of Dudek's finest poems combine "body" with insight in this fashion: for instance, in The Transparent Sea, "Upstate Tourism," "Coming Suddenly to the Sea," and "The Sea at Monhegan." Similarly the poet may record the train of reflections inspired by his observations. "Meditation over a Wintry City" (The Transparent Sea) is more effective than "East of the City" because it derives unity and coherence from the presence of the elaborating intellect as well as the scanning eye; but both poems tend to go on rather than to develop. Stanzaic construction glaringly shows up this kind of weakness. Stanzas must not merely succeed one another but should show an ever shifting tension between the discourse and such constant elements as line-length, rhyme-scheme, and rhythmic pattern. In a poem by Dudek, however, everything happens at once; the stanzas all operate at the same level of intensity; there is no progression ("The Sea" in Unit of Five, "Mr. Gromyko" in East of the City "Autumn" in The Transparent Sea). Occasionally, technical devices, dramatically employed, may create an effect of development ("Garcia Lorca" in East of the City and "Midnight" in Twenty-Four Poems), but Dudek has never cared to depart for long from the lines of varying length which follow the rise and fall of the speaking voice. Variation of tone would be another means of extending his range. When he tries the "tough-guy" style or sophisticated invective (as in Laughing Stalks), he fails to be convincing. He is pretty well restricted to his own voice—sober, civilized, and candid— which is completely suited to the kind of subject he handles most successfully. So far Dudek's most rewarding way of putting his talents to work on a larger scale has been the sequence or journal poem, which brings together a group of reflections on a related topic or situation. In The Transparent Sea, "Keewaydin Poems" and "Provincetown" illustrate this method. The former group, however, produces an involuted effect; the things seen and heard count for less than the strangely congested state of the poet's mind. "Provincetown" more persuasively catches the quality of place, combining observation with comment, although the observation of American life is superficial and the images selected to represent it are too obvious. Europe and En Mexico, book-length travel-diary sequences, are more ingratiating because of the greater variety of scenes and the broader range of moods and topics. Both demonstrate a workable method of achieving expansion and development within a unifying framework. To a reader who wishes to enjoy Louis Dudek's gifts at their fullest stretch these are the two books, along with The Transparent Sea, that should be recommended. In spite of some irksome echoes of Ezra Pound, the tone and the temperament are unmistakably Dudek's. This means that, although the language may sometimes be flat and the

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ideas banal, we are listening to the voice of a poet who can be depended on to sound always like a decent and honest human being. Still another poet whose career has grown out from a debut in Unit of Five is Raymond Souster (b. 1921). Joining forces with Dudek and Irving Layton in Cerberus, he has also been associated with Dudek as editor of the mimeographed magazine Contact and in the work of the Contact Press. His own books of verse appeared in steady sequence: When We are Young (1946), Go to Sleep, World (1947), City Hall Street (1951), Shake Hands with the Hangman (1954), A Dream That is Dying (1954), For What Time Slays (1955), Walking Death (1955), Crepe-Hanger's Carnival: Selected Poems 1955-58 (1958), and The Selected Poems, edited by Louis Dudek in 1956. The dates of these books, it will be recognized, make Souster as much a poet of the fifties as of the forties, and suggest that sooner or later the historian's arbitrary groupings must break down. At the same time, Souster's work from first to last has maintained a marked consistency of tone and texture. In some of the more recent poems one may discern a tendency to compacter rhythms and even a greater amount of objectivity; more surprisingly still, touches of humour and irony and a touch or two of verbal sportiveness. Such new departures cannot conceal, however, that the voice is, gratifyingly, still the voice of the young poet of Unit of Five. In that period of his life Souster wrote several poems about his wartime experiences and observations. Some are raffish, some elegiac, but most of them utter a longing for a beloved person and for the city that inspires in him a mixture of feelings, something not far from love predominant: the city of Toronto. Souster is much more the poet of Toronto than Dudek or Layton is the poet of Montreal. It is not always the wasteland city. Souster's city people, bound and inarticulate though they are, have it in them to make one more spirited gesture of rage or defiance—even the old men "bumming cigarettes on Queen Street," even the zany prostitute Jeanette. The nightside of Toronto, the derelict quarters of the city, have so often served as settings for Souster's poems that the reader may have failed to notice that the gaiety and vitality of the city, its afternoon and evening charm (perceptible, it may be, only to inveterate Torontonians), its parks and its streets alive with young women, its islands and waterfront, the coarse festivities of Sunnyside—these too have figured prominently in the poet's impressions and memories. For the range of moods in Souster's city poems is considerable. The disenchantment of "Lower Yonge Street" is at a far remove from the quiet exultation of "Sunday Night Walk." The restlessness of "Yonge Street, Saturday Night" contrasts with the wry excitement of "First Spring Day in the Canyons." Certainly, he may reach out in memory and touch some spot of earth or water unsoiled by the city ("Lagoons: Hanlan's Point" and, an especially

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moving poem, "North of Toronto") as though they were amulets against the destruction of the spirit. Yet the city abounds with joys as well as with sorrows and anger: jazz, people to watch, tavern conviviality, above all love and recollections of love. His poems have plenty of talk about sex, wholehearted and harmonious sex, the best in Canadian literature. When he sounds a censorious note, it is provoked by a frivolous or destructive use of sex ("O Young Men O Young Comrades," "World Traveller at 21," "Ersatz"). The reader may suspect that Souster is less knowledgeable than he would appear; his notion of the lives of "chorus girls" ("Post Mortem" and "Nice People") suggests a naive outsider's view of sophisticated decadence. But he never puts a foot wrong when he is writing about the kind of loving he knows. Love is set off against the city ("The Hated City," "You Do Not Belong Here"); again, the home in the city is often the scene of blissful memories. In the earlier poems there are only a few intimations of mortality ("The Penny Flute," "When I See Old Men," "Not Wholly Lost") but in later collections (even in their titles: For What Time Slays, Walking Death, Crepe-Hanger's Carnival) the cold breath of time can be felt. Even so, life remains good and love bountiful. Souster would never be guilty of the instant sociology of such a poem as Dudek's "Provincetown." He is aware of the tawdriness and oppressiveness of a good deal of life in our times, particularly in the city, but he never forgets that the people fumbling about in the labyrinth are people, not merely users of canned beer, Kleenex, and Tasti-Freez. His compassion is without condescension, his fidelity to fact without cynicism. This emerges even from so slight a poem as "The Collector": What she collects is men as a bee honey. leaving out the subtlety of that swift winger. There's little in the way her eyes look into theirs (O take me), her body arches forward (possess me now). At her age (other women say) it's ridiculous: but how much envy mixes with fact? They will say, none, but we know better, watching their faces. Still, admit, what she collects finally is pain.

Souster shows special insight and spirit in his pictures of women ("Study: The Bath," "Jeanette," "The Negro Girl"). Perhaps his only false notes are in the poems of protest against "intellectuals." In form his poems have changed scarcely at all over the years since 1944. And properly so, since Souster early recognized the contours of his own speaking voice and devised the cadences to reproduce them. Critically scrutinized, the style does disclose occasional lapses, especially a sprinkling

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of cliche. This kind of poetry may, however, make its peculiar effect, since it is so close to ordinary speech, through suitable cliches. The poems as a whole have a hit-and-miss quality that, again, for the purpose, may be indispensable. At any rate, Souster appears to have escaped, most of the time, the particular disability of his sort of versification: disjointedness. He admirably manages to achieve coherence and articulation of rhythm without loss of actuality and immediacy. Not all his poems come off successfully— far from it—but none of them lacks interest of some sort, and the best of them are as satisfying as any in our literature. Of all the Canadian poets whose careers began when the thirties were passing into the forties, Irving Layton (b. 1912) possesses the richest talents and the greatest capacity for development. His three principal gifts are a matchless ease and spontaneity of phrasing, an acute ear for line and stanza cadences, and the power to declare himself with indomitable authority on many topics. The authority derives from the most superb self-confidence in Canadian literature and from total faith in a handful of pseudo-ideas adapted from Nietzsche and Lawrence. Most of these views belong to the stock-in-trade of the anti-bourgeois writers from Sherwood Anderson to Alan Ginsberg. From this base Layton has been able to denounce a considerable proportion of his fellow humans as philistines, pharisees, puritans, and pedants. The denunciatory Layton, bent upon uttering "a loud nix to the forces high-pressuring us into conformity or atomic dispersion" (Cerberus, p. 45), emerged in the fifties. His earlier poems—first gathered together in Here and Now (1945) and Now is the Place (1948) and in the anthologies Other Canadians (1947) and Cerberus (1952)—are mostly descriptive. Only a few poems (for instance, "The Swimmer," a distinctive and delightful piece) resemble the imagistic writings of P. K. Page and Patrick Anderson. Layton in the forties was satisfied to act as the camera, recording with clarity and force scenes with which he had been familiar from childhood. His relation with this milieu, Montreal and Jewish, is mostly visual. He succeeds by his selection of details in communicating his loathing of economic inequity, racial intolerance, institutional religion, commercialized pleasures, and middleclass mores ("DeBullion Street," "Compliments of the Season," "Excursion," "Jewish Main Street"). During the fifties the "indestructible egotist" ("Trumpet Daffodil") took over, convinced that the enemies of creativity, "gentility, propriety, respectability . . . this genteel tradition preserved by clergymen, underdeveloped school-marms, university graduates, and right-thinking social workers," might be routed by the "barbaric yawp" of a Canadian Whitman. Layton's vision of Canadian society, however, had only minimal likeness to reality, as he would have realized if he in the least resembled Whitman in his way of looking

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at the people around him. Possibly, Layton was working out a strategy. Rather than endlessly adding poem to poem, like Dudek and Souster, he would find a way of integrating the elements of his career. He would devise a myth: the myth of the poet-outsider at odds with his society. On the one side, the poet, unconventional, unacademic, uninhibited, the darling of nature, the favourite son of Eros, one of the fine warty fellows; on the other side, a society mostly middle-class, repressed and repressive, hypocritical, dedicated to profits and status, bulwarked by an unjust economic system and an obsolete educational theory. Such a confrontation was of excellent ancestry; better, it was practicable and fructifying. It has several defects. It leads the poet into repeating stereotypes rather than taking a new look for himself. Even worse, it is an attitude that leads to satire and Layton has little talent as a satirist. Nevertheless, the poet's admirers did not despair. Even in the little collections that the poet-outsider stance produced—The Black Huntsmen (1951), The Long Pea-Shooter (1954), The Blue Propeller (1955), and Music on a Kazoo (1956)—appeared poems of memorable dignity and insight. The day would come when the poet would be overwhelmed by his poems. This hope was encouraged by the publication of Love the Conqueror Worm in 1952 and fulfilled by The Cold Green Element and The Bull Calf and Other Poems in 1956. The Improved Binoculars: Selected Poems (1956), a rigorous garnering from ten years and eight books, made clear that at last Layton's evaluation of his poems was beginning to coincide with his critics'. The Improved Binoculars contains poems as good as any ever written in this country. The rhetoric had become less obtrusive, the sound of an authentic voice speaking of believable things could be clearly heard. Quite properly, the GovernorGeneral's Award was conferred in 1959 on A Red Carpet for the Sun, a more generous selection of the earlier poems and with the addition of pieces from A Laughter in the Mind (1958) and seven new poems. A Red Carpet for the Sun contained "all the poems I wrote between 1942 and 1958 that I wish to preserve." The foreword went on to announce that the man who had written those poems was now dead. Thus the poet completely submitted to his true genius—a genius not for satire or social criticism but for giving elegant and powerful expression to man's awareness of the intermingled beauty and horror of his condition. The best poems of Irving Layton encompass many themes and moods. The poet sees the fatal conflict between body and spirit ("Seven O'Clock Lecture"), the terror that haunts the most ordinary existences ("Metzinger: Girl with a Bird," "Summer Idyll"), man's partial or complete complicity in the destruction of life ("Cain," "The Bull Calf," "The Improved Binoculars"), in the thwarting of vitality ("The Puma's Tooth," "Mr. Ther-Apis," "The Paraclete"), and in annihilation of the self ("Letter from a Straw Man,"

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"The Comic Element"). Several of the poems express a large sense of the poet's own being and function as poet: his identity with nature ("The Cold Green Element," "Metamorphosis," "Garter Snake"), his power to transcend reality ("Enemies," "Winter Fantasy," "Paging Mr. Superman," "Venetian Blinds"), his impulse to unify experience ("The Birth of Tragedy," "The Poetic Process"), his readiness to accept the fact of human differences and divisions ("Berry Picking," "Mildred," "Early Morning in Cote St. Luc"), his proneness to apprehend in the joy and beauty of the moment the threat of time and death ("Boys Bathing"). Even, in a few of the poems, he acknowledges the buffoon side of the poet's nature—particularly in a poem that borrows imagery from three poems by Yeats, "Whatever Else Poetry is Freedom." Yeatsian, also, are the lines, in "Orpheus," that speak of the poet's faculty for reconciling life and death: . . . the poet's heart Has nowhere counterpart Which can celebrate Love equally with death Yet by its pulsing bring A music into everything.

The career of Ralph Gustafson (b. 1909) has traversed the same three phases of development as the careers of other Canadian poets of his generation: infatuation with the mannerisms of late romanticism; response to the possibilities of modernism; and creation of his own style. His first book, The Golden Chalice (1935) resolutely embraces the traditional, in Keatsian narrative and in sonnets of the sort transmitted from Shakespeare by Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, and Edna St. Vincent Millay; and spurns modern poetry, as represented by Those modern poem-mongers, new, inane— To psycho-analytic tags confined, To super-clever vagaries inclined, Who splutter phrases reasonlessly sane Or intricate obscurities. . . .

This is not far from the sort of reaction to the new poetry that was represented by the reviewer who dubbed T. S. Eliot "a drunken helot." A longish verse-meditation, "A Poet in Exile," deplores the passing of an age hospitable to "simple loveliness," "noble passion," and "high endeavour," to be replaced by "an age of grovelling cynicism" when "Small praise awaits the poet who believes / That life is not identical with sex / Nor that sincere emotion but relieves / What its neurotic ganglion effects." Gustafson's next two publications, Epithalamium in Time of War (1941) and Lyrics Unromantic (1942) persevere in "traditional" postures, although

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with an access of the sardonic that may have owed something to the background of the Second World War, and with a new audacity of expression that certainly owed a great deal to the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lyrics Unromantic (title inaccurate) exhibits also considerable variety and competence in stanza forms. The contents of these two slim volumes were incorporated with other poems into a sizable collection Flight into Darkness (1944). The new poems display unmistakable signs of conversion to modernism. Images from contemporary life appear. An occasional intonation suggests an ironic or an ambiguous intent. Worms, skulls, dust, bones, and graves remind us of the potent spell cast in those years by "Whispers of Immortality" and the revived interest in Webster. "April Eclogue" betrays the impact of The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. The inflections of Auden and Spender murmur in the background. The most modish of ancient personae—Icarus, Theseus, and the Minotaur—re-enact their story ("Mythos"). In several of the poems of the final section, "Of Places and Sarcasm," the poet feels free to juxtapose neologisms, and learned derivatives, and words of lyric connotations. In short, Gustafson had yielded to the seductions of an era of verse-making whose slogan may be said to be "anything goes." His best poems of that period, however, show a well-advised admixture of old and new in their vocabulary and metrics ("On the Struma Massacre," " 'S.S.R., Lost at Sea'—The Times," and "The Fish"). This poet became fully himself only in his most recent collections, Rocky Mountain Poems and Rivers among Rocks (both 1960). The latter especially, a handsomely mounted collection, shows how astonishing is his range of manners and themes. Indeed, it is easier to enjoy such a book of poems than to summarize it. In spite of some show of organization—the poems are grouped into three divisions each with its motto (two from Job, one from Romeo and Juliet)—the system of arrangement is not readily discerned. The reader is best advised to browse, making an entry where he can. Many of these poems are excessively arcane. Gustafson might blush to recall his scolding, a quarter of a century earlier, of modern poets who dealt in "intricate obscurities." His own kind of obscurity is associated with his title. Rivers that force their channels, carrying life through inert and hostile matter, represent the poet's very syntax, which cuts its own exuberant way through the usual conventions of language: ellipses as stunning as Browning's at their boldest; pell-mell succession of sentence elements; brevities that are more cryptic than witty; baffling alternations of concrete and abstract. These, added to mannerisms learned from Hopkins, make for strenuous reading. Usually, the effort is justified, for in many of these poems Gustafson draws on a substantial amount of insight and wisdom as well as an extraordinary command of verbal and prosodic effects. Three kinds of poems he does particularly well: poems celebrating sexual

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love or recreating the mood and setting of an act of love-—that is, most of the poems in the second section of Rivers among Rocks, as well as "Armorial" in the first; poems that vividly present a scene and an action, either actual or subjective ("Legend," "Ophiography," "The Little Elderly Lady Visits the Old Ladies' Home"); poems that capture the sense of place ("Quebec Winterscene," "On the Road to Vicenza," "Quebec, Late Autumn," and most of the contents of Rocky Mountain Poems).

14. Poetry 1950-1960 MUNRO BEATTIE

IN THE NINETEEN-FIFTIES Canada had become veritably "a nest of singing birds"—as one of the birds was heard to say. Looking about, indeed, a Canadian concerned about such things might well reflect that this country was, by per capita estimate, as well supplied with proficient poets as any country in the world. Periodicals of poetry were no more numerous or long-lived than in the forties—in fact, with the death of Northern Review Canadian poets lost their sole reliable outlet—but the quantity and quality of publishable poetry had never been so high. Moreover, poets could be heard reading their own or their friends' poems in coffee houses, with or without the accompaniment of jazz, in college auditoriums, and over the air on the admirable C.B.C. programme "Anthology." Most of the poets whose origins went back to the beginning of the modern movement in the 1920's continued in the fifties to be occasionally creative. A. J. M. Smith published A Sort of Ecstasy in 1954; F. R. Scott, Events and Signals in the same year; Dorothy Livesay her Selected Poems in 1957. In 1956 the Contact Press brought out a collection of the 1920's poems of W. W. E. Ross under the title Experiment. The most impressive book of the decade was E. J. Pratt's Towards the Last Spike, published in 1952. Of the First Statement and Preview poets of the early forties, James Wreford and Patrick Anderson had departed from Canada. P. K. Page ceased to write verse after the publication of The Metal and the Flower in 1954. Other poets of that generation continued to flourish, especially Raymond Souster, Louis Dudek, Miriam Waddington, and Irving Layton. Earle Birney, Charles Bruce, and A. G. Bailey also contributed to the poetic abundance of the 1950's. What was most gratifying in this decade (or the years, rather, between 1948 and 1960) was the appearance of a greater number of first books by Canadian poets of talent than at any other period in our literary history. Chronologically, to be sure, some of these poets belonged to the same generation as those who first appeared in the Montreal magazines of the early forties; several of them had contributed to these periodicals and to Contemporary

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Verse. But their first books belong to the fifties and stand with the other books on the small shelf of excellent new Canadian poetry—a shelf of extremely comely books, many of them, for in this decade Canadian publishers of verse took unprecedented pains over the design of books, jackets, and typography. A summary view of Canadian poets of the 1950's is provided by Pan-ic: A Selection of Contemporary Canadian Poems (New York, 1958), edited by Irving Layton, or by a Queen's Quarterly pamphlet, edited by Milton Wilson, entitled Recent Canadian Verse (1959). These may be compared with collections made in the two preceding decades: Other Canadians (1947) and New Provinces (1936). If the comparison includes entire books of verse it will strike the reader at once that Canadian poets have been becoming more sophisticated in their prosody, more ingenious in verbal play, more venturesome in choosing themes and techniques. Certainly, poetry as a craft has been taken seriously by more poets than ever before. Also evident is a new kind of intellectual toughness. The lyric impulse has been by no means inhibited. But this new generation of poets has shown a power to think feelingly over a broad range of objects and concepts. They do not fear such epithets as "academic" and "erudite," recognizing that a valid part of a poet's experience, and so a legitimate source of subject-matter, is his encounters with books and ideas. A mingling of sorts of experience has been accompanied by a broadening of usage; the editorial policy of the latest edition of the Webster dictionary would receive ample support from the practice of recent Canadian poets. The fusion of speech-levels sometimes produces a jarring effect, but most of the poets of the fifties have shown great skill in assimilating prose rhythms and colloquial turns of speech into poetic discourse. They have followed a more fruitful method than the poets of the forties who, modelling themselves upon Auden and Spender, often in the end wrote neither prose nor verse. Few of the poets represented in Recent Canadian Verse appear to live in the city. It may be significant that, of the two poems by Raymond Souster in the anthology, one recounts an incident of Toronto in 1885, the other takes as its point of view the thirty-fifth floor of a Toronto skyscraper from which the reader's gaze is led out over the city and beyond to where "A lone Mountie / In his bloodier-than-red jacket / Was chasing three Eskimos and a walrus / Across the frozen ice-cubes / Of Real Gone Valley." The consciousness of Canada as a vastness sparsely settled and only tenuously attached to the world of literature has concerned the critics more than the poets; only a few poets have brought bits and pieces of the vastness into an expressive state. But the city, so compelling a subject or field of observation for the poets of the forties, appears to have lost its appeal. Nor do most of the new poets care about social issues as the preceding generation, for a while at least, did. Such detachment is rather a

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sign of the times—good times for Canada-—than of numbed consciences. If Karl Marx no longer speaks to these poets, neither does Sigmund Freud. The deep pools of imagery are the Bible, Blake, Bulfinch (or Graves), Kafka, and Lewis Carroll. As for objective reality, whether of city or country, place or person, it has never since the twenties come so close to being entirely out of fashion. It may be that metamorphosis and analogy rather than direct transcription are the poet's way of staking out his own realm in an era when the novelist seems dominated by external phenomena. Canadian poets appear to have been pondering of late upon two problems. One is the problem of "aesthetic distance." The poet of lyric impulse continues to be content to be overheard digesting experience in his own person. But for other poets the indispensable "I" may be an encumbrance. They have shown various shrewd ways of projecting personae that speak in voices not necessarily proceeding from the poet himself. The other problem is the creation of larger and more comprehensive poetic unities. The long narrative or narrative-descriptive poem seems unworkable in this age. Only E. J. Pratt, on his own special terms, has succeeded in narrative; Earle Birney (in David) and Philip Child (in The Victorian House) are the only other poets who have shown narrative competence, and both of them on a more confined scale than Pratt's major poems. Another sort of unity is the assemblage of short poems about a central theme or situation: as in Earle Birney's collections, Now is Time and The Strait of Anian, and Louis Dudek's Europe and En Mexico. Several of the most notable books of verse of the fifties have achieved, in diverse ways, integration and articulation of their contents. Some poets, however, remain content with the book of poems on a variety of themes and in a variety of forms and moods among which the reader may, if he wishes, discern patterns of relationship for himself. Margaret Avison, for instance, when she assembled her book Winter Sun (1960), "arranged her poems for readers who like to skim through a book when they first take it up"—in this, according to the dust jacket, resembling the author herself, who "approaches a new book of poetry in this way and would rather find her own groupings than have the poems already grouped for her." The following survey of poetry in the fifties opens with poets who have, on the contrary, been intensely conscious of the value of articulation within a collection of poems. The first book of poems by James Reaney (b. 1926) was a book for skimming and browsing. The poems gathered together in The Red Heart (1949— Governor-General's Award) formed a unity, however, because of the quality of the author's imagination and his feeling for the part of Canada that served as setting for his reminiscences and fancies: Stratford, Ontario, and the adjacent countryside. Such engaging pieces as "The Katzenjammer Kids" and "The School Globe" reproduce with extraordinary clarity the sights and

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feelings of childhood. "The Chough," "The Plum Tree," "Mrs. Wentworth," "The Gramophone," "Anti-Christ as Child," and the "Great Lakes Suite" manifest Reaney's peculiar angle of vision, his highly personal kind of verbal music, and his skill in blending the actual with the fantastic or the macabre. For his second book of verse, A Suit of Nettles (1958—also winner of a Governor-General's award), Reaney found an enclosing and controlling form in the rare device of a set of twelve eclogues, on the model of Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar. The setting is a farm not far from Stratford and the characters are mostly geese. In the bucolic tradition, the sequence includes dialogues, dissertations on love and its hardships, singing competitions, a pastoral funeral, incidental narratives, and a tenuous plot that moves forward or stands still at the author's convenience. The convention is flexible enough to make room for a variety of themes and diversions: a child's picture-book history of Western philosophy, a riddling synopsis of Canadian history, a sermon, and disquisitions on educational methods and literary criticism. These are ingeniously integrated into the total form, but some of them sort oddly with a dramatis personae of geese. Like Spenser, Reaney uses his eclogues as a showcase for his proficiency and versatility as a prosodist. The first three are mainly in stanzas of ten mostly iambic lines, a compendious unit admirably suited to the discursive and descriptive matters these eclogues deal with. A long and entertaining passage in "May" is composed in long doggerel rhythms with almost regular couplet rhymes. Another narrative, in "March," is cast in octosyllabic couplets. Most of "December" is in somewhat haphazard blank verse. Branwell, the principal goose, in "February" sings a sestina. A variety of lyric stanzas appear in the other months: three-lined, quatrain, and in the modes of traditional songs. In spite of considerable waywardness of metre and rhyme (some of which may serve the purposes of imitative harmony), the poet handles these forms with great competence. The satiric intention of the work, announced by an "Invocation to the Muse of Satire," is not so successfully realized. Certainly, the inanities on birth control, on some species of education not identified in the poem, and on the critical methods of Dr. Leavis (or so we are informed by the gloss) do not fulfil any current definition of "satire." Reaney, indeed, would appear to have a mind completely innocent of satiric insight. His more natural gift for capricious whimsy finds plenty of scope throughout the twelve sections. Jay Macpherson (b. 1931) first published poems in several periodicals and in two charming chapbooks, Nineteen Poems (1952) and O Earth Return (1954). When she brought out The Boatman (1957—Governor-General's Award) it became apparent that these poems and groups of poems belonged to a larger scheme. The Boatman is the most intricately unified book in Canadian poetry. It is a collection of lyric poems grouped under six sub-titles. The poems are short, a few of them almost epigrammatic, exquisitely moulded

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and carefully polished, but without any loss of lyric impetus. The forms are traditional—or suggest traditional measures—and call to mind (without duplicating) such models as popular ballads, carols, Elizabethan songs, nursery rhymes, hymns, and the shorter poems of George Herbert, William Blake, and William Gilbert. The diversity of tones, within so consciously limited a range of metres and stanzas, is astonishing. But the supreme achievement of the book is the enhancement of significance in individual poems by the interplay within a whole network of references and counter-references. The poetess has undeniably made a "Cosmos of a miscellany." This result is partly brought about by the use of several recurrent and interlinking symbols: phoenix, unicorn, fish; and in part from the development of a group of themes through individual poems and poems in groups. It is clear that for sections two and three ("O Earth Return" and "The Plowman in Darkness") she has taken a hint from Blake's songs of innocence and experience. Most of the poems in these two sections are counterparts whose subjects are certain female figures of crucial significance in the mythic history of man: Eve, Euronyme, the Sibyl of Cumae, and Mary Magdalene. These "fallen women" are presented in two moods and two tones, the tragic and the colloquial. For instance, we hear two voices of Mary. In "Love in Egypt" the voice is solemnly exultant: Love, here are thorns, and here's a wilderness —And yet you visit me? I have a cell, your rod— No more to see. A spring restores these sands, Pouring its rocky basin full. Love, will you drink from my hands, Or rather from my skull.

By contrast the voice of Mary in the corresponding poem of "The Plowman in Darkness" is gay and ribald: ... In a far-off former time And a green and gentle clime, Mamma was a lively lass, Liked to watch the tall ships pass, Loved to hear the sailors sing Of sun and wind and voyaging, Felt a wild desire to be On the bleak and unplowed sea. Mamma was a nice girl, mind, Hard up, but a good sport and kind— Well, the blessed upshot was, Mamma worked her way across From Egypt to the Holy Land, And here repents, among the sand.

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Similarly, the Queen of Sheba in "O Earth Return" represents mystery and grace; in "The Plowman in Darkness" the corresponding poem depicts a Beggars' Opera wedding scene in which a harlot is the central figure. In the fourth section, "The Sleepers," men of archetypal significance— Adam, Endymion, and the heroes associated with Circe, Psyche, and Helen —provide the personae. In the fifth section, "The Boatman," Noah, without a woman but with his ark, moves into the foreground of the anagogic scene and sets in motion the main theme of the final part of the book: the theme of cosmos within cosmos. Section six, "The Fisherman," resolves the various motifs of the preceding sections and concludes with the vision of a fisherman who is several things, one of them the poet as a type of creator. If we compare this fishing figure with the forlorn fellow behind the gashouse in The Waste Land, Miss Macpherson's fisherman seems to suggest that, rather than shore up our ruins with fragments of other men's poems, we must make poems of our own—or, better still, accept Miss Macpherson's offer of a vade-mecum from our world of delusion and separateness to the poet's world of enlightenment and wholeness. Anne Wilkinson (1910-1961) writes from a single point of view—her own consciousness looking out upon the natural world and listening to the intimations of her spirit—and, accordingly, in a more consistently personal tone. What she shows in common with Miss Macpherson (and with some other poets) is an absorbing interest in the poet's special way of assimilating and interpreting his experience. One of her central poems is "Lens": The poet's daily chore Is my long duty; To keep and cherish my good lens For love and war And wasps about the lilies And mutiny within. . . . In my dark room the years Lie in solution, Develop film by film.. ..

Here are her two themes, as well as their setting and purpose. The poems in Mrs. Wilkinson's two collections—Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and, a strikingly mature book, The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955)—are the records of encounters: between the senses and the world of nature ("Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe, Ottawa," "A Poet's Eye View," "In June and Gentle Oven"); between the individual and the diversity of experience ("I was a boy and a maiden . . .," "Easter Sketches, Montreal," "The Red and the Green," "Tigers Know from Birth," "Christmas Eve," "Three Poems about Poets"); between present awareness and intimations from the past ("Summer

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Acres," "Once upon a Great Holiday," "Greek Island"); between the transforming imagination and the commonplaces of existence ("After Reading Kafka," "A Child Can Clock," "Items of Chaos"); and, most poignant of all, the conflict between exultant life and prefigured death ("Time is Tiger," "On a Bench in a Park," "Carol"). It will be seen that Anne Wilkinson's subject-matter was the proper and usual stuff of lyric poetry. But her very special powers of perception bestowed on these commonplaces both freshness of handling and novelty of insight. Her rhythms and forms were as individual as her response to experience. In the earlier of her two books she appeared at times to struggle, without complete success, to say what she had to say in the way she had chosen. Most of these problems were solved in her second book, most gratifyingly wherever she yielded to the attraction of traditional patterns, particularly the patterns of nursery rhyme, carol, and popular song. Even when most traditional, however, she followed her own ear for rhythm, her own knack of word-play, and her own imaginative way of looking at things. The unity in her books is the unity of a rare sensibility. Wilfred Watson (b. 1911) belongs with these three poets, because he shares their liking for traditional forms and their feeling for popular modes. But the poems in his first book, Friday's Child (1955—Governor-General's Award), are, unlike Mrs. Wilkinson's, apocalyptic; unlike Miss Macpherson's, expansive in form; and, unlike Reaney's, fervent in tone and frequently incantatory in rhythm. The unifying principle of his collection is dual awareness: of the natural world where beauty and chaos contend and of a world of enlightenment and exaltation. The delusions of the natural world may be cleared away by the will working on behalf of love. Works of art may provide us with instances of the misuse of the will: the shooting of the albatross ("The White Bird"), the rape of Lucrece ("Tarquin"), the instability of Aeneas ("Invocation"), the lover's impulsiveness ("Orpheus and Eurydice"), and the lover's obduracy ("Yeats and Maud Gonne"). But art may, on the contrary, teach wisdom by making clear the disciplinary effects of experience ("Yeats and Maud Gonne," "Of Hendrickje as Bathsheba"). Moreover, art may take as its function the illumination of reality, not so much by vividly representing it as by interpreting it through various kinds of transformation—as, he declares in one of his most exciting poems, Emily Carr did: Like Jonah in the green belly of the whale Overwhelmed by Leviathan's lights and liver Imprisoned and appalled by the belly's wall Yet inscribing and scoring the uprush Sink vault and arch of that monstrous cathedral, Its living bone and its green pulsing flesh— Old woman, of your three days' anatomy Leviathan sickened and spewed you forth In a great vomit on coasts of eternity.

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Then, as for John of Patmos, the river of life Burned for you an emerald and jasper smoke And down the valley you looked and saw All wilderness become transparent vapour, A ghostly underneath a fleshly stroke, And every bush an apocalypse of leaf.

Works of art do not, after all, furnish the only sources of wisdom. Certain kinds of experience, especially those that demonstrate the power of love— "Friday's child" is, we remember, "loving and giving"—may show us how to redeem our time. For human love is the link between the fallen world and the world of divine presence; Eve and Mary are the polar symbols ("Love Song for Friday's Child"). Wilfred Watson's finest poems, then, are the poems that in simple and ardent diction, frequently of a religious cast, proclaim the dogmas of the wrought-up imagination: that death is a terrible certainty ("In the Cemetery of the Sun," "The Windy Bishop," "For Anne, Who Brought Tulips"); that every human pleasure and consolation is under sentence of death ("Ballad of Mother and Son"—a tremendous achievement in the ballad manner); but that, gloriously, eternity strikes through time not to destroy but to clarify and exalt ("Canticle of Darkness"). Watson treats with considerable power a number of traditional themes and symbols. His professional schooling declares itself, perhaps too conspicuously, through echoes of Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and, most obsessively, Dylan Thomas, to whom he dedicates two poems, one an "admiration" and the other a "contempt." Thomas's way with metaphor is almost too plainly Watson's model. But even when he uses the other poet's idiom, Watson usually succeeds in making something of his own, as he has done with the moving "Lines: I Praise God's Mankind in an Old Woman," one of the most memorable pieces in Friday's Child. Although Dylan Thomas served as genesis, the revelations are almost wholly Watson's. For sustained power of expression on an intense imaginative level, the poems of Wilfred Watson cannot be matched among Canadian poems of the decade of the fifties. Phyllis Webb (b. 1927) is yet another of these sensitive explorers of the regions between experience and expression. Her first collection of poems was published under the title "Falling Glass" as one of the three sections of Trio (1954). Discarding some of these poems (with commendable selfcriticism) and adding others, she put together her first book, Even Your Right Eye, in 1956. As the subjective experiences she has drawn upon have been even more private than those of the poets already considered—for she takes no bearings from religion, myth, or folklore—so her forms are more thorough-going in their novelty and individuality. She refers to no conventional patterns, not even the flexible modes of nursery rhymes and popular songs. Every sensation, every perception, is unique and demands a unique

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form of utterance. This is a risky procedure. Some of her poems do not sufficiently realize the insights that evoked them. But when they do communicate they are capable of producing in the reader a glow of recognition. If Phyllis Webb's poems seem almost unnecessarily subtle, it is not so much because she has sought to be secretive as that she has assumed the difficult task of bringing into a verbal condition a range of subjective states not rare but rarely communicable: the overlapping of appearance and reality, the minute shifts of comprehension brought about by minute shifts of time or mood, the perceptive elements in the experiencing of loneliness, pain, sexual ardour, and grief. To do poetic justice to her chosen data, the poetess must compel language in various subtle ways (even the syntax carries a burden of implication—study the conjunctions in the refrains of "Sacrament of Spring"). Forms must correspond to the patterns of feeling, even sometimes to the point of typographical expressionism. Her organizations of words work as they should more often than not, and her forms encompass a variety of effects, from the tentative notations of "Fragment" to the bravura of "Standing." Moreover, in spite of so much idiosyncrasy of form she produces a surprising range of tone, from the cerebral playfulness of "Earth Descending" to the quasi-philosophical toying with a group of notions in "Marvell's Garden," "Poetry," and "Double Entendre"—a delectable piece of work. Even if the example of Marianne Moore is the taking-off point for several of these engaging little rambles from object to object and from image to image, the ultimate effect is entirely personal. Illustrative of Miss Webb's mode of operation is "Fantasia on Christian's Diary," which was inspired by the C.B.C. documentary, "Death in the Barren Grounds," but does not undertake to retell the story. "It attempts rather to give a shape to the atmosphere of that story." Similarly, in most of her poems Phyllis Webb is sparing of narrative or connective material, supplying the reader, rather, with the ingredients of a poem that he must co-operate with the author to bring into complete being. The most striking section of Trio is a group of "Minotaur Poems" by Eli Mandel (b. 1922). The protagonist of these haunting narratives is an IcarusTheseus figure fused with the modern man who speaks in the person of the poet. The same method is at work in most of Mandel's other Trio poems, particularly "Orpheus," "Leda and the Swan," "Aspects in a Mirror" (in which Icarus and Theseus again figure, along with Narcissus), "Not Poppy nor Mandragora" (a restatement of Desdemona's undoing in terms of international peace and betrayal), and a poem about the poet's natal town, "Estavan, Saskatchewan," in which mood and locale are given emotional tone by themes from Hamlet. The impulse to re-interpret myth in contemporary terms—and, at the same time, to impart to contemporary subject-matter overtones of timelessness and universality—has evoked also the principal

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poems of Eli Mandel's first book, one of the finest of recent years, Fuseli Poems (1960). Motifs from the work of Fuseli provide imagery and tone for several poems. The subtlest and strongest of these is "Fuseli: Girl Combing her Hair Watched by a Young Man," in which the theme evolves from the image suggested by Fuseli (complicated by suggestions from Keats's Eve of St. Agnes), through a moral and metaphysical interpretation, to its bearing upon the condition of the poet—the persona, more properly, of this and several other poems in the collection: "Notes from the Underground," "Biopsy," "Two Part Exercise on a Single Theme," and "The Professor as Bridegroom." This persona, whom it is difficult to resist associating with the poet's own personality and experience, is a diffident and sardonic creature, with a sharply developed sense of the ironic and the grotesque. Parts of him are clearly recognizable in other poems, for example in both the hunchback and the wizard of "A Castle and Two Inhabitants," the quixotic dotard in "Conversation Overheard between a Knight and a Girl," the Old Testament nomad of "Pillar of Fire," and the townsman who incisively and suggestively reports the sinister occurrences of "Prologue" and "Epilogue." All these poems, like the Minotaur suite, owe their distinctive power to the skill with which the poet has combined and counterpointed a rich assortment of elements: the "personal" and the mythic, the melodramatic and the commonplace, the actual and the fantastic. Among contemporary Canadian poets, none is more consummately the "maker" of poems. As well, he can scarcely be bettered in his command of a middle style of discourse. However phantasmagoric his subject-matter, his choice and order of words are almost unfailingly precise, decorous, civilized, touched with wit, and with a sure feeling for the placing of the single telling word or image. Occasionally, in striking the attitude of the folktale-teller, he slips beyond the colloquial into the slovenly, as in the first two stanzas of "A Castle and Two Inhabitants," or he forsakes his comely syntax to whore after modish perversities, as in the group of "Val Marie" poems in Trio, but his writing in general provides again and again the peculiar delight of hearing the elusive thing phrased with grace and clarity. There is, moreover, a special piquancy in the interplay between the Canadian scenes and attitudes of several of his poems and the romantic imagination and "Jewish" humour of the poet. Gael Turnbull (b. 1928), the third of the Trio poets, is the least ambitious in the choice of themes and technique. His field is actuality, his most usable gifts keen observation, a wide range of sympathies, and an engaging resoluteness to make the reader share his visual and emotional perceptions. His descriptive pieces, accordingly, are far more successful than the poems that deal with moral or political problems. His virtues are most plainly to be recognized, among the Trio poems, in "Lumber Camp Railway," "Industrial

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Valley (Northern England)," and "In a Strange City." His little book Bjarni (1956) shows considerable competence in narrative and in the re-creation of medieval heroic episodes and characters, especially in "An Irish Monk on Lindisfarne." The poems in The Knot in the Wood (1955) are slight but reveal remarkable power of compression and suggestiveness in the handling of colloquial idiom. Specially worthy of mention are Gael Turnbull's translations in collaboration with Jean Beaupre, of poems by the French-Canadian poets Saint-Denys-Garneau, Paul-Marie Lapointe, Roland Giguere, and Gilles Renault (published in four mimeographed collections, 1955). The poetry of Kay Smith (b. 1911) is considerably more declamatory. Her poems were published during the 1940's in Contemporary Verse, the Canadian Forum, and Northern Review: she was well represented in John Sutherland's Other Canadians in 1947; and her only book of poems was published in the New Writers Series of the First Statement Press, Footnote to the Lord's Prayer (1951). This collection is remarkably consistent in tone and rhythms. The point of view is isolated and subjective, the theme is human existence in its beauty and horror, but the treatment is strangely impersonal—the poetess seems to speak in her own person only once in the entire book. Although it contains eleven short lyric-contemplative poems, each about a page long, three-fifths of its space is occupied by two poems organized on "public" principles. "Conversations with a Mirror" presents successively the soliloquies of a girl, a harlot, a spinster, a wife, a soldier, and Death; each expresses an emotional involvement with war. The poem is one of the few civilian records of the period in Canada of World War II. The other poem is the work that gives a title to the collection, "Footnote to the Lord's Prayer." It takes the form of commentaries in verse on each clause or petition in the prayer, a sequence of improvisations on a set of themes. Because of her power to convey her intense earnestness, her resourcefulness in imagery, and her skill in alternating long and short rhythms, the poetess carries out with fair success her rather daunting assignment. Almost all the poems in The Wounded Prince (1948), the first book brought out by Douglas LePan (b. 1914) are sensitive and accomplished, but in several of them a certain slackness of rhythm and blurriness of imagery betray a lack of central intensity of theme. It is surely not mere chauvinism that singles out as more successful, because more serious, the poems made out of Canadian material: "Coureurs de Bois," "Canoe Trip," and "A Country without a Mythology." This country is the untrammeled and untravelled wilderness of northern Ontario or Quebec. LePan shows considerably more force in making its quality actual to the reader than he does in gathering together his impressions of the landscapes of the mind of other poems in the collections. Moreover, in these three poems, which discourse of the loreless tracts of uninhabited country, the poet joins certain of his

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compatriots in the co-operative enterprise of bringing Canada, acre by acre, street by street, into the world of poetry. The masterpiece of The Wounded Prince is a longish poem called "Image of Silenus." This too may be considered "Canadian," both in its beautiful realization of the blue heron of the first stanza and in its poignant evocation, in its closing passages, of an urban society longing hopelessly for the world of wonder to which the heron flies away, where men may be free to emulate the archetypes contained in the statue of Silenus and splendidly enact "all the other roles that men have pictured for themselves." In the first book the Canadian landscape contains no Canadians. In Le Pan's second, and greatly superior, book of verse, The Net and the Sword (1953—Governor-General's Award), Canadians do appear, act, think, and feel—but in a foreign landscape. The poems in this book derive from the author's experiences in the Italian campaign of World War II. Distance in time from the events and the emotions that they contemplate has given these poems a wholeness of vision and the special intensity of focus that memory creates. The title poem suggests the unifying image of the book, an image drawn from gladiatorial contests. The sword is symbol of the Canadian, the North American, consciousness opposed to the net of war, of Europe, of alien experience. Two things the poet manages with particular skill. One is the graphic presentation of an isolated episode and the actor in it ("Persimmons," "An Incident," "One of the Regiment," "The New Vintage"). The poet finds exactly the right tone and the right details for bringing before our mind's eye the young Canadian soldier, disciplined and determined to make the best of an ugly assignment, not essentially a warrior in spite of his well-kept rifle and "bronzed rigidity," ignorant or heedless of the long history of the farms and villas destiny has brought him to, a temporarily displaced person whose senses do not falter in their response to warmth and light and the lusciousness of persimmons, and whose memory dwells upon "the boyhood that he left at home / Skating at Scarborough, summers at the Island," although his intellect only partially understands the larger meaning, if there is one, of the "crusade" in which he is participant. LePan's other poetic strength lies in the extended contemplation of a situation or a mood ("Tuscan Villa," "Field of Battle," "Elegy in the Romagna"). In such poems he works on an ample scale, composing his impressions, memories, and feelings into full-bodied poems of meditation and recollection. There is some truth in the remark that Irving Layton intended as a quip: "A Lampman on a battlefield" ("Prologue to the Long PeaShooter"). Precisely Lampman's kind of sober fidelity and fullness in recording his observations and reactions is what makes LePan's poetic essays satisfying. True, Yeats could have made to them the same objection he made to Wilfred Owen's poems. The suffering is futile, the misery without issue—

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but how else do justice to the terrible truth? These poems may have a peculiar value because they are among the few poetic records of the Canadian experience in the Second World War. Arrange the scene with only a shade of difference And he would be a boy in his own native And fern-fronded province With a map in his hand, searching for a portage overgrown With brush. . . . Who alone by the worm-holed flower of the rose-pink house Bears the weight of this many-ringed, foreign noon, Shadowless, vast and pitiless. Notched by the wedge of his frown, it takes no notice.. .. What is he waiting for As he studies a map the colour of his youth? .. .

In the poems of John Glassco (b. 1909) we again confront Canadian scenes, and again the Canadians are missing or almost so. The Deficit Made Flesh (1958) draws much of its strength from the author's intimate acquaintance with farm life in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, a milieu and a way of life ("no way of living but a mode of life" the first poem calls it, with bitter realism) that he has observed over many years, and from the special vantage point, during World War II, of the rural mail-carrier. The book's central and recurrent images are decaying farmhouses and jolting roads that lead nowhere. This poet is unstinting in his use of descriptive detail, and his reports on the externals of farm life will carry complete conviction to readers in many parts of Canada, where such an image as "this heaven-riving road thrown / Like a noosed lifeline to five worthless farms" ("The Brill Farm") or such a bucolic vignette as this stanza from "Gentleman's Farm" presents: And where the regional serf, time out of mind, Morning and evening, blind with sweat and fury, Hollaed his shaggy tyke After the peaked-arse cows in the hummocky pasture Till they buckjumped to the dislocated barn, Their slack bags black with muck,

will sharply produce the shock of recognition. John Glassco is not a simple regional realist, but a sophisticated artist. His prosody is skilful and ingenious; he has a special flair for the handling of blank verse and the composition of stanzas both rhymed and unrhymed. His most characteristic effect of style is the long sentence—intricately involved, with many parenthetical elements and wide separations of verbs and

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subject—that straddles two stanzas and densely interweaves its rhythm with the rhythm of the verse-pattern. Clearly, he is less bent upon accumulating the data of rural sociology than upon communicating a peculiar kind of consciousness. When the reader looks more closely at these poems he discerns in some of them an attitude to life that is both compelling and repulsive. In the constant struggle between the rank and unresting forces of nature and the energies and hopes of men, the speaker in most of these poems has put his money on nature—and with a frightening kind of relish. It is almost indecently inappropriate in speaking of these sardonic elegies to invoke such names as John Clare and Edward Thomas. "Stud Groom" is addressed to a man who has confined his entire life to his job: the care and training of horses for racing at annual fairs. He has abstained from every sort of profound or permanent human association. This remarkable poem is ambiguous and ironic but its general intent seems congratulatory: this is a smart way of dealing with such frailties as wanting a wife and children who, in any event, would be doomed at birth to the pangs of being human. Where the will is not powerful enough to carry through the process of mutilation, nature will provide the means. In "The White Mansion" the house itself, a handsome burden demanding for its upkeep more than the owner can provide, is the agent of destruction. In this poem the speaker is the mansion itself: Two hearts, two bodies clove, knew nothing more. Ere I was done I tore them asunder. Singly They fled my ruin and the ruin of love. I am she who is stronger than love.

"Noyade 1942" is a confession of the unreliability of human fidelity assaulted by the natural appetites of frail flesh. The "natural" ambitions of a hardworking farmer ("The Entailed Farm") have ruined his son—"the bearded man that walked like a bear, / His pair of water-pails slung from a wooden neckyoke, / Slipping in by the woodshed"—and destroyed the farm: ... the mute, sealed house,

Where the spring's tooth, stripping shingles, scaling Beam and clapboard, probes for the rot below Porch and pediment, and blind bow-window . . . Where the stone wall is a haven for snake and squirrel The steepled dovecote for phoebe and willow-wren, And the falling field-gates, trigged by an earthen swell, Open on a wild where nothing is raised or penned, On rusty acres of witch-grass and wild sorrel Where the field-birds cry and contend.

Any endeavour to thwart the process of disintegration ("Gentleman's Farm")

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the poet mordantly attributes to "the structural mania of the heart" and condemns in advance to failure: See that the wreck of all things made with hands Being fixed and certain, as all flesh is grass, The grandiose design Must marry the ragged matter, and of the vision Nothing endure that does not gain through ruin The right, the wavering line.

"The right, the wavering line" is celebrated in "Deserted Buildings under Shefford Mountain." In a strain oddly reminiscent of the tone and rhythms of In Memoriam the poet discourses of the pleasures to be got from ruins— "Some troubled joy that's half despair." He cannot, or will not, identify this joy; the final stanza fobs us off with the flimsy notion that the ruins prove once more the defeat of "progress and its emmet plan." The true quality of his joy that's half despair comes through clearly enough in the two closing lines: Dark houses that are void of man, Dull meadows that have gone to seed.

After these poems it comes as no surprise that the poet should in another poem have built an Eastern Townships farmhouse for a perverse Penelope, and that, in an admirable sonnet, he should salute the painter Utrillo for recognizing that the empty streets of his paintings make the same corrosive commentary on human feelings and aspirations. Pessimism so inordinate is not new, of course, to literature. Some readers will consider it a valid "philosophy of life." Others, however, may regard these poems as splinters from a damaged sensibility. Some of the makeweight poems in the collection—interesting though not wholly worked out ("A Devotion," "Didactic," "Hail and Farewell," "The Whole Hog")— provide a few clues, as do two quite successful but troubling poems: "Villanelle" and "Shake Dancer." So does "The Burden of Junk," read not simply as a parody of the Evangeline metre but with attention to what is said—and said, it seems, in total seriousness: Mine is a burden of junk that ought to be left with him also: This is where it belongs, with the wheels and the beds and

the organ, With all the personal trash that the spirit acquires and abandons, Things that have made the heart warm and bewildered the senses wih beauty Long ago,—but that weakened and crumbled away with the passion Born of their brightness, the loves that a dreary process of dumping Leaves at last on a hillside to rot away with the season.

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Elizabeth Brewster (b. 1922) also has a well-developed sense of place— her place being rural New Brunswick—and considerable insight into local folkways. Her poems speak with the authentic voices of the region and its people. Miss Brewster's first collection was East Coast (1951), six short poems, the most notable of which is the title piece. Its theme is the isolation —geographical, cultural, and personal—which is reinforced by, and symbolized by, the fierce incessant wind. "River Song" captures the sense of a vitality that has become part of the province's past; and "London Fog" contrasts, through the eyes of the poetess far from home, the bleakness of the great city with the remembered loveliness of her Maritime landscape by starlight. Lillooet (1954) is the picture of a small New Brunswick town. The touch seems very sure with which the poetess selects the details of place, personality, and idea to recreate the life of the town. She completely individualizes this particular place, Lillooet, yet intimates that in many respects it stands for life in general in rural New Brunswick—or even, in some aspects, small towns everywhere. Spoon River and Winesburg have been suggested as analogues, but Miss Brewster's treatment is less objective than Masters', less subjective than Anderson's; her attitude combines affection, entirely devoid of sentimentality, with amusement entirely without bitterness. Next to the handling of specific detail, the main achievement of the poem is its tone, which seems, interestingly, to represent both the people of Lillooet and their historian. Tone is sustained by style: a competent, seemingly off-hand, kind of doggerel, with many unexpected felicities that distinguish Lillooet from other treatments, in verse or prose, of the same kind of material. Elizabeth Brewster's third chapbook of verse, Roads and Other Poems (1957), derives only part of its contents from her New Brunswick insights and observations. Observation and recollection give her the substance of the poems entitled "Roads," "Canon Bradley," "Louise," and "Home for the Aged." These four poems show considerable range in rhythm and feeling; they demonstrate, even more convincingly, that gift for recording actuality that marked the two earlier books. Roads, however, includes another kind of poem, represented in East Coast by "In the Library," an effective evocation of a moment of doubt about self-identity, and in Roads by "Supposition" and "To Hanai." These subjective, non-representational poems suggest that the next phase of Elizabeth Brewster's development may be towards a less local point of view, a tendency to look out over a larger world of people and ideas, or into the even vaster world of the self. Another poet of New Brunswick is Fred Cogswell (b. 1917), who has published five books of verse: The Stunted Strong (1954), The Haloed Tree (1956), The Testament of Cresseid (1957), Descent from Eden (1959) and Lost Dimension (1960). Something in this poet's temperament or his

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breeding inclines him to sententiousness. This has fathered a number of proficient little poems of a satiric and epigrammatic sort, each dexterously scoring a hit on a large thematic target: death, birth, love, bigotry, spiritual nakedness, sexual instability, conventions, racial discrimination in Fredericton. A reader's sensibility may at time be grated by the semantic snip-snap with which an ingenious image or turn of phrase points up a significance. More pleasing, because less emphatic, are two or three ballads and the grim little anecdotes that rehearse the consequences of lust. The poet also realizes with some success certain forms of inner distress and longings ("Death Watch," "The Seed I Sowed, Believing," "Snake Shadow," "Within My Templed Flesh"); and creates analogues for various kind of religious experiences ("A Christmas Carol," "The Idiot Angel," "The Web: For Easter"). Fred Cogswell's most interesting poems, however, are his sonnets about New Brunswick characters. Sixteen of these sonnets make up The Stunted Strong, most of which are reprinted in Descent from Eden. They are wholly conventional in style and metrics, in a manner that pleasantly recalls Goldsmith, Crabbe, Whittier, and E. A. Robinson, but their subjects are grim: seduced small-town girls, illegitimate babies, feeble-minded aunts, scandalmongers and gossips, drunkards, sadists, runaway farm girls who become burlesque queens. Extra-provincial readers may wonder how statistically sound this sonnet sociology is, but the poet makes most of it seem convincing —mainly by the strategy of placing himself as observer and confidant among the people of his fictional community. Moreover, he does not condemn his compatriots and contemporaries for their frailties. He understands them and recognizes them as the warped products of a stern tradition and a harsh setting, as he shows in "Valley-Folk," "The Jacks of History," and "The Stunted Strong": Not soft the soil where we took root together; It grew not giants but the stunted strong, Toughened by suns and bleak wintry weather To grow up slow and to endure for long; We have not gained to any breadth or length, And all our beauty is our stubborn strength.

Fred Cogswell is completely au courant with "modern" poetic modes (he has been co-editor and business manager of that estimable Fredericton magazine of verse, The Fiddlehead) and he does not shrink from handling subjectmatter that one suspects would horrify conservative New Brunswick readers. Yet he is not as far removed from his provincial progenitors as might be expected. His ballads recall some of the narrative lyrics of Duncan Campbell Scott; his stanzaic poems bear resemblances to Carman's, though his are more precise in diction and audacious in imagery; his "realistic" pen-portraits and bleak bucolics are stylistically akin to some of Roberts's Songs of the

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Common Day, though shorn of poetic fiddle-faddle and determined, as Roberts's poems never were, to celebrate the fornication, gore, and frustration that have shaped the psyches of New Brunswick. The first book of poems by Alden Nowlan, born in Nova Scotia in 1933, was The Rose and the Puritan, published in 1958 in the Fiddlehead Poetry Book series. Some of the poems in this collection would look at home in Cogswell's, notably "The Brothers and the Village," "Hens," "All Down the Morning," and "Child of Tabu"; for these poems take the same mordant view of Maritime life and deal with such phenomena as feeble-mindedness, illegitimacy, farmyard bloodshed, and feminine forwardness. But Alden Nowlan's more memorable poems have their own identifying traits. Chief among these is the tenderness, only slightly tinged with self-pity, that colours the poet's recollections of episodes and persons belonging to his childhood ("Cattle among the Alders," "When Like the Tears of Clowns," and "A Poem to My Mother"). In other poems he shows the power to project, through narrative and imagery, those subjective crises when the self is temporarily aware of its naked weakness and its susceptibility to evil and good ("Two Strangers" and "The Rose and the Puritan"). In the third place, his rhythms show a tendency to slide out of the conventional pattern into new effects in keeping with mood or theme. Nowlan's subsequent books—A Darkness in the Earth (1959), Under the Ice and Wind in a Rocky Country (both 1961)—repeat and enlarge on these qualities. He has continued to prefer the short poem that decisively delivers a single perception, memory, or scene. His data are supplied by his observations or recollections of small town types in the Maritimes: the escape from the aridity of their lives into the excitements of evangelical religion ("Marian at the Pentecostal Meeting," "Baptism"); the release afforded by fraternal masquerades ("The Lodge," "Our Brother Exalted") or by an interlude of masculine time-wasting ("Homebrew"); tiny vignettes of nature ("Pussywillows in March," "Summer," "Purple Trilliums"); rueful contemplation of the ways man has contaminated nature and, sometimes, nature's way of revenge ("These are the Men Who Live by Killing Trees," "St. John River," "Abandoned House"); the means by which feelings find outlet in spite of years of repression and discipline ("Poem for the Golden Wedding of My Puritan Grandparents," "The Coat"); the thwarting and warping of ordinary sexual life ("Beginning," "Cousins," "Father," "Rosemary Jensen," "This Woman's Shaped for Love," "Georgie and Fenwick"). To a considerable extent the poems in Alden Nowlan's four books are more successful as sociology than as literature. When they are extremely brief, as many of them are, they frequently lack an ultimate intensification of style. When they venture to a greater length they lack cohesion and impact. A commendable number of them, however, perfectly fuse matter and medium,

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and a few add a particular touch of magic and energy—for example, "A Letter to My Sister," "A Night Hawk Fell with a Sound like a Shudder," and the unforgettable poem of which the first half goes thus: God sour the milk of the knacking wench with razor and twine she comes to stanchion our blond and bucking bull, pluck out his lovely plumbs.

R. G. Everson (b. 1904), a Montreal lawyer and editor who, after twentyfive years' abstention, returned productively to the writing of verse, has published two collections: Three Dozen Poems (1957) and A Lattice for Momos (1958). These two attractive books consist of short pieces of verse, most of them between six and twelve lines in length, each, elegantly set upon a single page, just the length of an observation or an insight. The great majority of them are composed in the kind of vers libre that was in vogue in the 1920's. But, when he wishes to, Everson can deftly turn a stanza or a set of stanzas. "The Abbe Lemaitre's Universe" ingeniously pivots its quatrains on three rhymes, and "After Evening Milking" sports dexterously with alternate halfrhymes. Short though they are, few of these little poems are epigrammatic in tone. The effect they are after is not of smartness but of understanding. This poet revels in the powers of the poet—to recognize significant pattern in the flux of daily existence, to clarify an insight by communicating it through the operative rhythm and phrasing, to perceive metaphor. He particularly revels in the metamorphic work of the imagination: Paint me a fallacy: the surf as frieze of children at a soda-fountain greeting noisily (hands in air and heads gyrating) pistachio sundaes of in-coming seas.

So begins "Peggy's Cove," one of his friskier pieces; and a fine parade of images leaps from his pen, as though he were demonstrating to the wielders of cameras and brushes at that noted beauty-spot the superior flexibility of his re-creation of reality. He shows, in more serious poems, a knack for bringing together out of a scene the details that will realize the mood. Frequently the mood is one of well-being ("Elevator Ride," "When I'm Going Well"), for this poet seems to find plenty of causes for contentment even in the wasteland of the modern metropolis, seems aware that the wasteland is only in the imagination of modern man: A large wild animal prowls outside my office. I chant Audograph incantations and, bowing, drum the typewriter.

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These hold away the creature, but the kind face of my old cleaning woman is bitten by loneliness. The nightwatchman, nomadic, wandering barren floors, cries out, "Monsieur, bon soir." The large wild animal prowls at all my doors, crowds my empty streets, howls across my quiet city. ("Working Late")

Other poems ("Laprairie Hunger Strike," "One-Night Expensive Hotel") powerfully suggest those nightmare images that rise from the unconscious or hover in the radioactive atmosphere. His chief gift is the perception of analogies. Several of the poems use this method of making a commentary on human nature or behaviour: boys playing in the city streets equated with men in various occupations and conditions ("'All Wars are Boyish . . .'"); the fishduck and the brilliant actress ("Flying in from Ecuador at Dawn"); the dung beetles strolling under the electrified fence that inhibits the horses ("Letter from Underground"). In this flair for analogy lies Everson's most notable significance as a poet using Canadian material. Nothing about his work is more striking than the way his mind flashes off from an object or an apperyu to link up a correspondence in literature, history, or philosophy. Themistocles racked with envy of Miltiades, Landor nobly refraining from strife, and generations of contentious Canadian legislators are all contrasted with the self-completed lovers in the first of the three dozen poems: Under the Parliament and medaled only with leaves lovers possess the world while overthrown.

Gathering wood for a campfire brings to mind other kinds of blazing-up of energy: . . . dazzlements that rear Strange as in Lincoln who—middle-aged—-awoke, Or that one century when Athens blazed, Florence but half that long, and in the mind Of Keats the one great year when seas would burn. .. .

Watching the moths flying against the lighted window of a friend's studio suggests an image for the terror of creative fury in the experience of a Coleridge or a Van Gogh. Returning to the snow-cumbered streets from a performance of The Tempest, he finds his perceptions still alert to mystery:

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The whole town had been silenced. A deep nap Of sidewalk plush kept up a whispered count Of their footsteps. In a dark house that they passed A telephone hunted with magical empty sounds. Snow bleached the hung long bones that were the elms. Across the frozen quiet, far away A motor car was swelling out its chest And a tantrum of steam engine started a train.

Marvell suggests a way of responding to the drama of Montmorency Falls. In "To My Father" the Parthenon and the Acropolis on their large scale stand for the intensity with which the poet regards the trivial things that stir his memory. The metaphor of a flashfire for maple-trees in autumn brings in the burning of great ancient cities. Alcibiades is involved with an X-ray examination. The eddies and spray of the French River inspire a corrective memorandum to Heraclitus. A figured pebble spaded up in his garden shares the glamour of the Rosetta stone. A startling historical analogy serves for a solacing toast, "To the Works Superintendent on His Retirement": Old Age, like mainland Romans of Venetia whom wild Hun years harass down from golden villas, may contrive great Venice in sea grass.

By means of this kind of analogy he puts contemporary Canada into relation with the past ("Quebec City Real Estate," "Last of the Batoche Metis," "Fall of the City") and brings present time in Canada into relation with cosmic relativity ("Flight 421, over Oshawa," "June 21," "Fish in a Store-window Tank on Rue Ste. Catherine"). George Johnston (b. 1913) is in most respects a more accomplished craftsman in verse than R. G. Everson, but the two poets are alike in their affection for the commonplaces of life and hi their power to make poetry out of these realities. George Johnston's first book, The Cruising Auk (1959), is a cunningly integrated and unified collection of short poems mostly in formal measures. They are organized into three parts. Part One, "The Pool," and Part Three, "In It," may be called the "personal" parts—made up, that is, of poems in which the speaker seems to be the poet himself. An engaging serenity of tone and the deftness of the workmanship prevent us from realizing, until we are well into the book, how decided a tilt towards melancholy most of the poems take. They tell us, in stanzas of exquisite wit and precision, that the certainties of childhood do not endure, that no man can wholly communicate with another, that a thin partition divides bliss from disaster, that the quest for permanent happiness can never be fulfilled. These topics are voiced again, with variations and resolutions, in Part Three, and provide the

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thematic framework for the poems of Part Two. As well, a symbolic framework relates part to part and poem to poem by two sequences of imagery: images of water and images of flight. The water images modulate in Part One from pool through river to rain and tears and on to "the everlasting swishing of the whitecaps." The image of flight that appears at the close of Part One is a crow that, aimless and lugubrious bird though it seems to be, the poet yearns to emulate: Me too! I would like to fly Somewhere else beneath the sky, Happy though my choice may be Empty tree for empty tree.

Part Two is the triumph of the book. Most of the poems hi this part are about other people. Thirty or so are referred to, many of them are named, and several appear frequently and vividly enough to establish identities. The people of the poems constitute a small society, in a run-down quarter of centre-town. They represent what we call the real world, but at random, as individuals and not schematically. Their relation to the real world is about the same as that of the people in Stanley Spencer's paintings: ordinary people, perhaps on the verge of an apocalypse but without knowing it, busy being themselves. They include Mr. Murple, who Splendid on skates comes forth to spin the night Upon his arms outstretched and whirling eyeballs,

or goes noctambulating with his "dog that's long / And underslung and sort of pointed wrong," or brings his mother a bottle of gin for Mother's Day; and Edward reading detective stories by the trilight until he has scared "his inner workings / Into a fluid state / And his outer same to jerkings"—Edward whose hat, while the poet "looks along the darkening bank," makes on the water towards the sea; and Mrs. Murple with her "nice red rose to show I'm still alive," and Bridget with her bulge, Elaine in her bikini (again, the poet watches "on the bright shore / Waiting for darkness"), Miss Knit with her cutting pliers, Mrs. Beleek, one of the wondrous aunts, baffling the bugs and being baffled by the children round her flower bed. Certainly these are "characters" and many of the poems are "funny." But there is a steady undermurmur of doom. The birds and squirrels in the poem "Cats" of Part One should have forewarned us: Life is exquisite when it's just Out of reach by a bound Of filigree jaws and delicate paws. ...

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The people of Part Two live hi a world that is, on the whole, full of contentment, but they live dangerously—as we all do. Death is ever at hand. Edward actually drowns, leaving behind, besides his hat, a twenty-dollar debt to the poet. From a corner of the kitchen the ghost of Mrs. Belaney's soldier son looks on while his mother and her friends tearfully take their tea and ominously eye "the encroaching fat." Mr. Murple cannot quite put his three questions into word, however much the poet aids him, but they undoubtedly have to do with ultimate things. Mr. Smith, "at the moment of wild escape / In the telephone booth," is poised not simply between "bliss and fear" or "fire and rape," but between this world and the next, as Mrs. McWhurtle also is, and as the aunts are—all of them: .. all my aunts, however full in sight, However giant-bowelled, -breasted, -sinewed, Will founder, as the suns behind the chimneys....

As for Mr. Goom, for whom "Earth fills her lap ... with gifts": Always round the door he knows The brink of darkness drops away And sure enough the door will close After him over it one day.

Though Mr. Goom's "dilettant attention shifts / From tune to time to mortal ends," they seem to be in the poet's mind most of the time. Not that the certainty of death is the worst thing he has to contemplate. More appalling is the touch of time and mutability on everything youthful, hopeful, splendid. The poet's contemporaries, as sketched in the middle stanzas of "Music on the Water," demonstrate this dismal truth, and so does the auk itself. The point about the auk is that it is extinct. We can never hope to see it again. The sequence of the images of flight closes in Part Three with the image of airborne man, the airman: Nightly the lonely diesel that mourns among the fields Calls to me in my bedroom till my compassion yields; Nightly the wee jet aircraft that search the dreadful sky Draw the tears to my pillow that has so long been dry. My room is floored with pity, my walls are shored with grief, My roof is wide to Heaven, my door invites the thief; Why am I not then airborne? They mock me, night and day, The clock and the blundering diesel and the wee jets far away. ("This Way Down")

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These "funny" poems are full of the tears of things. Well may Mrs. McGonigle deliver her maternal little lecture to Mary Anne ("Mrs. McGonigle on Decorum"): Carry a little water can To catch the quiet tear. . . . Don't be nervous, Mary Anne, Everyone else, you know, Carries a little water can And doesn't let it show.

George Johnston's poems are not only wise and witty but enchanting to read—or to hear, especially if the reader is the poet himself. His technical skill rests firmly on two qualities: a nearly flawless ear for ordinary speech rhythms and an expert control of traditional metres. He is capable of a remarkable variety of verbal effects. By drawing on sub-literary locutions he achieves, when it is appropriate, a cosy smallness of effect, the quiet chuckle in a corner. Also, without sounding in the least pompous or pretentious, he can slip in a Latinate polysyllable—divaricate, lenticulate, inscrutable, incalculable, disconsolate—which, meshing splendidly with the metre, confers both impetus and resonance. His prosody, too, is highly individual within its conventions; by slight pushes of pause or accent in one direction or another he gives the reader's ear a constant succession of delicious little shocks. Although poems by Margaret Avison (b. 1918) have been appearing in periodicals and anthologies since 1939, her first book came out in 1960. Winter Sun (Governor-General's Award) contains some of the most stimulating and endearing poems ever written in this country. The mind of the maker—an energetic, life-loving, boldly ranging mind—vitalizes the poems and informs their imagery and rhythm. Comparisons with other poets suggest themselves. No doubt, the sensibility of Emily Dickinson has been an incitement, and the technique of Marianne Moore has been instructive. A reviewer once spoke of her as a disciple of E. E. Cummings and of W. C. Williams; erroneously, for her way with both words and concepts is more subtle than Cummings', her idiom much less colloquial than Williams'. Margaret Avison is very much her own woman, though it is possible to recognize in her the one true heir, in her generation, of E. J. Pratt. Like Pratt, she loves to grapple with time and space on a heroic scale; she shares his zest for the wonder of things as they are; although, unlike him, she rarely employs regular metre, her handling and selection of words resemble his. Miss Avison revels in the scrutiny of reality, even more in speculations on the encounter between the individual mind and the phenomena of space and time. "The optic heart," a phrase from a poem entitled "Snow," epitomizes the interplay of cerebration and feeling that carries her from object to object,

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from hypothesis to hypothesis through the course of a characteristic poem— "Perspective," for example, or "Neverness," two poems not collected in Winter Sun. In "Perspective" she debates the difference between the ordinary way of perceiving distance and her way: But do you miss the impact of that fierce Raw boulder five mile off? You are not pierced By that great spear of grass on the horizon? You are not smitten with the shock Of that great thundering sky? . . . In the end she concedes that her mode of experiencing space, however invigorating it may be, is somehow frightening: Your fear has me infected, and my eyes That were my sport so long, will soon be apt Like yours to press out dwindling vistas from The massive flux massive Mantegna knew And all its sturdy everlasting foregrounds. In another poem, however, she refuses to acquiesce in the flattening of the landscape that the coming of night seems to effect: In this clear twilight contour must contain Its source, and distances with contour come Opening peacock vistas that can no man entomb. ("Rigor Viris") In "Neverness" her mind swings into the remotest reaches of time, back to the present, then on into the conceivable future, in an endeavour to reconcile the concept of time as sequence with the concept of time as plurally scattered among countless worlds. "Prelude" hauntingly considers light as shape occurring at a variety of points in time and place. One of her wittiest poems, "Grammarian on a Lakefront Park Bench," represents her mind as for once quiescent, her consciousness a "gill that sloughs and slumps / in a spent sea." Even on such a holiday from distinction-making and perception-registering, her mind continues to take in large draughts of actuality and to organize them into images and appropriate sounds (notice the superb alliteration). Such mental travels as these poems report frequently arrive at no destination. The poet betrays, indeed, a dread of finality and fixity: . . . the fix, the frill precision can effect, brilliant with danger.... ("Butterfly Bones; or Sonnet against Sonnets")

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Ultimate understanding would spoil the fun for a mind so insatiably speculative. The first poem in her book, "The Apex Animal," fancifully nominates as "the ultimate Recipient / of what happens, the One Who is aware" the Head of a Horse. The last poem, "The Agnes Cleves Papers," might be thought of as Miss Avison's "Gerontion," for it organizes its personae and incidents as elements catalysed by memory, and evokes the pathos of opportunities missed and meanings perceived too late. It renders the life and temperament of the nostalgic speaker as a series of projections and extensions from her immediate present, into the past and back to the present, between here and elsewhere. The musings are drawn to a close that is not a conclusion at some undefined point between Moscow and Lima, between the images of a yacht putting out to sea and children playing hopscotch. Throughout Winter Sun other poems similarly evade finality. "Voluptuaries and Others," for instance, contrasts two kinds of illumination. Unmistakably, the poet's preference is for the "eureka" of Archimedes, which figures as . . . a particular instance of That kind of lighting up of the terrain That leaves aside the whole terrain, really, But signalizes, and compels, an advance in it.

On the other side, the Russian experiment by which a dog's head was kept alive exemplifies . . . that other kind of lighting up That shows the terrain comprehended, as also its containing space, And wipes out adjectives, and all shadows (or, perhaps, all but shadows).

Paradoxically, yet understandably, Margaret Avison's dynamic imagination is touched off, beyond the measure of any other Canadian poet's, by the satisfactions and observations of everyday existence. Their value, doubtlessly, is enhanced by their being interludes in the mind's cosmic forays, and because like all mortal things they are under the threats of transience and destruction. "Chronic," for all its wry comedy, registers the mind's struggle to retain its identity among the shiftings of time. "Intra-Political" and "Our Working Day May be Menaced" also take into account, each in its own delightfully fanciful way, the mystery underlying and surrounding our lives, that now and again makes us wonder, as the poet does in "November 23," why Stillness glimmers beyond there—just beyond the senses—That makes me sweat with vertigo On this peculiar shelf Of being?

In spite, however, of these and other poems ("From a Provincial," "The

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Swimmer's Moment," "Rondeau Redoublie," "The Mirrored Man," "Identity," "Mordent for a Melody") that diversely allude to the matchwood partition between security and terror, the predominant tone of Winter Sun is beatific. The poems celebrate not only the excitement of sharing in the exuberance of the natural world ("Birth Day," "Apocalyptic?" "Far off from University"), but even more the quiet satisfaction of having a room of one's own: Gentle and just pleasure It is, being human, to have won from space This unchill, habitable interior Which mirrors quietly the light Of the snow, and the new year, ("New Year's Poem")

of having the help of friends to resolve the suspense between moving and feeling at home in one's rooms ("Hiatus"). She is constantly surprising in the breadth of her sympathies, even for milieus and types that would strike most of her compatriots as beyond the poetic pale. What other contemporary poet would deal so compassionately with the young man in "September Street" who by bettering his business prospects has somehow worsened his human position? Who else, again, would write of suburbia as she has done in "Trie World Still Needs," giving it a likable genesis and blessing it in the closing stanza with a lovely image? She descends lower in "Apocalyptics," into the world of public rinks and swimming pools, viewing their frequenters with womanly concern, taking over as the poet's field of activity the "jungle jim" of the city. Above all, whatever her doubts about the inflexibilities and inconsistencies of the physical universe, she never ceases to hope for the human future—as in the upbeat conclusion of "Apocalyptics": Each broods in his own world But half believes Doctrines that promise to, After some few suppressions here and there, Orchestrate for all worlds;.... In Bowles Lunch, in the passage to the washrooms and the alley exit, They have an old piano, in case of a wedding, or 30-years-medal party for one of the ones who lope and sway and pick at things on any of the Twenty-four (24) levels above. Don't you suppose Anything could start it? Music and all? Some time?

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If a reader in the 1960's would realize summarily the variety and potentiality of Canadian poetry, let him compare the works of two of the most talented among the younger poets. Daryl Hine (b. 1936) has published four books: Five Poems (1954), The Carnal and the Crane (1957), The Devil's Picture Book (1960), and Heroics (1961). Leonard Cohen (b. 1934) has published two: Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and The Spice-Box of Earth (1961). These two writers appear to have nothing at all in common except that both were born and grew up in Canada—Hine in Vancouver, Cohen in Montreal—and that each has had a volume published in the McGill Poetry Series. In no respect whatever is Daryl Mine's poetry "Canadian." His context is resolutely European, with particular devotion to Augustan Rome, seventeenthcentury England in its pastoral-metaphysical phases, and late nineteenthcentury France; his principal masters have been Virgil, Donne, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Stevens, and Auden. The reader is likely to be struck first by the remarkable charm of language and cadence that this poet can command. Then by an astonishing lack of "presence" in the poems—either of personality or of location. Nothing is there but words seductively put together, images, rhythm. Poetry could scarcely be more "pure." One result of the method (and most of the poems do seem to have been fabricated by a poetic machine of superb delicacy and subtlety, as a master craftsman might produce rolls of exquisite wallpaper or lengths of tapestry) is the intense obscurity of almost all of the Five Poems and about the first half of The Carnal and the Crane. The reader who patiently resists being irritated by this obscurity, and by a baroque stateliness of utterance, will perceive with some admiration the ingenuity with which the poet has animated and diversified his material. Intricate and ambiguous syntax sets up titillating eddies of doubt and certainty about what the lines literally mean—these lines, for instance, the opening stanza of "In Praise of Music in Time of Pestilence": The fall which twisted love to lust, unfranchising the physical, and made pleasure barren, lost innocent magnificence, and all things change, man and animal, air and countryside, and temporal forms change and are lost in flux. Again, he refracts reality into images seen as in a mirror or reflected on the surface of water or gazed at from its depth: . . . reversed world where trees fall, blue and intricate and classical, a glass for mirror and a grave for love. . . . ("The Boat")

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Similarly, the poet subjects traditional themes to new and surprising adaptations—by distributing the matter among several speakers ("A Masque of Kings," "The Year One"), by placing the interpretative emphases at novel points ("At Pompey's Statue," a pentad of well-turned sonnets), by elaborating and distorting familiar stories (observe what becomes of the Owl and the Pussy-cat, of the twa corbies, and of the fox and the crow, in "Four Pabulary Satires"). Several poems (for example, "Lines on a Platonic Friendship," "The Lake," "Poem for Palm Sunday," "Epithalamium") generate a species of cerebral excitement by seeming to discourse of major topics; but they leave in the end the impression of neither caring much nor expecting the reader to care much about their theses. The treatment of sexual subjects and activities is of the same sort. A good deal of erotic behaviour seems to be going on, or to have been going on— satiety and remorse are two discernible moods in a few of the poems—and the words "vice" and "lust" recur as words; but syntax and imagery combine to veil from the reader exactly what is happening. The poet can, however, convey the quality of a tender relationship, as in these haunting lines: Remember that you thought me beautiful and praised the muscled flesh above the bone, the angle of the head, and used to call my skill the body's silent falconry that could release and call the falcon home. I'm hunter, hawk, and hunted, and I shine in the apocalyptic landscape as I shone amid the simple views of Arcady. ("Cain and Abel and the Armed Head") The third of Daryl Mine's collections, The Devil's Picture Book, is more straightforward in style ("I am more facile and articulate" runs the last line of the first poem), but less impressive as poetry. With decongestion of the medium much of the magic has evaporated. The reader is confronted by a charmless Circe, an enervate Proserpine, a rarefied Sodom. "Osiris Remembered" and "Osiris Dismembered" are returns to the intricate tapestry technique of the previous books, but the effect is superficial. The whole book, indeed, gives off an aroma of the nineties, of the succession of authors, from Baudelaire to Tennessee Williams, who have handled the roses and regrets of evil. "Under the Hill" is a pallid summary of Beardsley's once notorious little work. "The Acclamation" suggests "The Harlot's House." "Nox Nocti Indicat Scientiam" suggests Lionel Johnson. At least one line in "The Destruction of Sodom" might have come from the lips of Lady Bracknell. A sense of self-division (the Jekyll-and-Hyde, the Dorian Grey theme) has begotten at least three of the poems: "The Suitor," "The Devil's Picture Book," and "The Double-Goer." However thin and jaded this pretty little book may be,

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it everywhere provokes the reader's respect for proficiency in the use of words, the composition of stanzas, the variegation of rhythm. Leonard Cohen's poems happen in the context of the contemporary world and of Montreal. Like A. M. Klein and Irving Layton, Cohen has drawn upon Jewish-Canadian experience, one of the most fruitful sources in our time for both poetry and fiction. Many of Cohen's poems allude to streets, milieus, attitudes, and moods that belong to Montreal. Many of them are composed in the language of street conversations or of tabloid narratives: There are so many cities! so many knew of my lady and her beauty, Perhaps he came from Toronto, a half-crazed man looking for some Sunday love; or a vicious poet stranded too long in Winnipeg; or a Nova Scotian fleeing from the rocks and preachers. .. . ("Ballad") The cultural blending that has made Cohen alert to the excitements and squalors of the big city has also given him that peculiar mixture of irony, tenderness, and harshness with which the American Jew usually contemplates his life and his past. Cohen's tradition also finds expression in his poems. The first piece in Let Us Compare Mythologies makes an obeisance to the other tradition by being about Orpheus. Elsewhere in his two books, however, he derives his narratives, his images, even his rhythms, from the Bible and from the plights and alternatives forced upon the Jew in the twentieth century. "Exodus," "Before the Story" (David, Bathsheba, Absalom), "The Adulterous Wives of Solomon," "Isaiah"—these poems and references in other poems testify to the vitality that the ancient persons and situations retain for the imagination of the poet. Several of the poems take the Crucifixion for their theme ("For Wilf and His House," "Ballad (He pulled a flower)." "Saviors"). In the last of these poems the significance of the Crucifixion as an historical and religious symbol is extended to Jewish heroes: Nailed high on a mountain Moses stares beyond the Jordan beyond the giants and crumbling walls and sighs an Egyptian curse Job hangs in a burnt field unable to frighten the crows his friends still talking at his feet and no whirlwind disturbs the quiet desolation David swings from his roof and the people say that in his mind he and his warriors build a great temple And all the saints and prophets are nailed to stakes and desert trees. . . .

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Cohen's interest in the stories of his people is neither mythic nor antiquarian. He fiercely fuses past and present, finding in episodes from history analogues or intimations of contemporary anguish ("The Song of the Hellenist," "Credo," "Letter," "Pagans"). This power to relate one era to another, one order of experience to another order, is Cohen's most promising characteristic. The horrors of the purge and the pogrom may yield an episode of love, as in "Lovers"; and as a tribute to love, the poet offers, in "The Genius," to take on at request all the humiliating and grotesque roles that the Jew has had to assume in the modern world. Sexual passion is the most pervasive of the other themes in Cohen's books. His erotic poems run through a wide range of moods: apprehensiveness in "Song of Patience," arrogance in "Song (The naked weeping girl)," disillusionment in "Folk Song," horror and grief mingled in "Ballad (My lady was found mutilated)," overwhelming delight in "On Certain Incredible Nights," "You Have the Lovers," "When I Uncover Your Body," "Celebration," and "Beneath My Hand," doubts and velleities in "Had We Nothing to Prove" and "Poem (I heard of a man)," renunciation and fatigue in "The Flowers that I Left in the Ground," and bitterness in "The Cuckold's Song" and "The Unicorn Tapestry." These difficult and dangerous subjects Cohen manages almost always to make convincing and appealing. He can venture even into fantasy: My lover Peterson He named me Goldenmouth I changed him to a bird And he migrated south

or into cosmic certitude:

My lover Frederick Wrote sonnets to my breast I changed him to a horse And he galloped west. .. ("Song")

With your body and your speaking you have spoken for everything, robbed me of my strangerhood, made me one with the root and gull and stone, and because I sleep so near to you I cannot embrace or have my private love with them. You worry that I will leave you. I will not leave you, Only strangers travel. Owning everything, I have nowhere to go. ("Owning Everything")

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The love poems, intense and intimate, counterpoint the poems evocative of the florid, exotic, and exuberant quality of the Jewish memory. But all the poems of Leonard Cohen seem to occur in the very forefront of experience, with an effect that to some readers will seem almost sensational or brutal. This effect is enhanced by the colloquial emphasis of the diction and the energy of the verse in many of his poems; other poems, however, achieve a quite different effect of quietness and tenderness. Obviously, for all his gifts, Cohen is a poet who has not yet entirely organized his talent. Poetry continues to be the most flourishing branch of Canadian literature. The creative energy that so notably manifested itself during the 1950's has diminished very little in the 1960's. New books, every one of them abounding in characteristic virtues—with, here and there, characteristic shortcomings— have been brought out by most of the senior or established poets: A. J. M. Smith's Collected Poems (1962); Ice Cod Bell or Stone by Earle Birney (1962); The Chequered Shade by Roy Daniells (1963); Twelve Letters to a Small Town by James Reaney (1962); The Sea is Also a Garden by Phyllis Webb (1962); from Irving Layton, three collections—A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959), The Swinging Flesh (1961), and Balls for a One-Armed Juggler (1963); from Raymond Souster, two of special note—A Local Pride (1962) and Place of Meeting: Poems 1958-1960 (1962); and a volume which only in part belongs in a record of Canadian literature, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (1962). It is proper to mention also poets of promise rather than clearly denned fulfilment. Several collections of poems published in the late fifties and early sixties suggest that out of their midst may come some of the best things of the decade. Of these the most distinctive are The Brain's the Target by Milton Acorn (1960); Frost on the Sun (1957) and The Sun is Axeman (1961) by D. G. Jones; The Drunken Clock (1961) by Gwendolyn MacEwen; This Citadel in Time by John Robert Colombo (1958); The Wandering World by Ronald Bates (1959); Within the Zodiac by Phyllis Gotlieb (1964); The Crafte So Longe to Lerne by Alfred W. Purdy (1959). The reader who would thoroughly savour the range and copiousness of Canadian poetry at the approach to the centenary of Confederation should augment this list with other names: Dorothy Roberts, Peter Dale Scott, David A. Donnell, Joan Finnigan, Margaret Eleanor Atwood, Heather Spears, Norman Levine, George Walton, Edward Yeomans, Kenneth McRobbie, Douglas Lochhead, Fred Swayze, John Paul Harney, Marya Fiamengo. Such a reader would be well advised to look for these poets, and for others still younger, in the pages of the literary magazines. From year to year the level of accomplishment remains high in the magazines that have always made poetry welcome: the Canadian Forum, Queen's Quarterly, Fiddlehead,

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and Tamarack Review. Little magazines, those mayflies of the publishing world, still proliferate in Canada, never more numerously than in the early 1960's; of special interest, for varying reasons, have been Alphabet, Prism, Tish, Mountain, Evidence, and Cataract. Anthologies provide a measure of achievement. The Blasted Pine (1960) adduced evidence that satire has been a fruitful mode among Canadian poets. Love Where the Nights are Long (1962) edited by Irving Layton, although it scarcely validates its thesis—that Canadian poets have a peculiar talent for love poetry—brought together an assortment of admirable poems. A Canadian Anthology: Poems from "The Fiddlehead" 1945-1959, however uneven the quality of its contents, demonstrated beyond doubt that poetry has been thriving in Canada since the Second World War. This zealous and indefatigable reader would discern in all these books and magazines various tendencies that he might take for signs of the times; a closer look at some of them, however, would make clear that they were developments out of the forties and the fifties. In one quarter he would be struck by an obsession with mythography, in another by concern about the oppressiveness of "bourgeois" values. On some pages he would find erudite whimsy, on others a colloquialism more determinedly tough than ever before. He would observe a growth in speculative poetry, in typographical peculiarity, in versified exchanges of personalities. He would perceive the influence of the latest American vogues in theme and style, and in the same magazines he would read poems that appear to renounce the modernist movement altogether and to return to standards that are Romantic and even Georgian. In short, the reader of contemporary Canadian poetry would recognize the sort of literary fermentation—exhilarating, exasperating, and diversified—that may promise well for the next "Renaissance."

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CONCLUSION

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Conclusion NORTHROP FRYE

IT is NOW SEVERAL YEARS since the group of editors listed on the title-page met, under Carl Klinck's leadership, to draw up the first tentative plans for this book. What we then dreamed of is substantially what we have got, changed very little in essentials. I expressed at the time the hope that such a book would help to broaden the inductive basis on which some writers on Canadian literature were making generalizations that bordered on guesswork. By "some writers" I meant primarily myself. I find, however, that this book tends to confirm me in most of my intuitions on the subject: the advantage for me is that this attempt at conclusion and summary can involve some selfplagiarism. The book is a tribute to the maturity of Canadian literary scholarship and criticism, whatever one thinks of the literature. Its authors have completely outgrown the view that evaluation is the end of criticism, instead of its incidental by-product. Had evaluation been their guiding principle, this book would, if written at all, have been only a huge debunking project, leaving Canadian literature a poor naked alouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity. True, the book gives evidence, on practically every one of its eight hundred odd pages, that what is really remarkable is not how little but how much good writing has been produced in Canada. But this would not affect the rigorous evaluator. The evaluative view is based on the conception of criticism as concerned mainly to define and canonize the genuine classics of literature. And Canada has produced no author who is a classic in the sense of possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers (Canadians themselves might argue about one or two, but in the perspective of the world at large the statement is true). There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world's major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference. Thus the metaphor of the critic as "judge" holds for the Canadian critic, who is never dealing with the kind of writer who judges him. This fact about Canadian literature, so widely deplored by Canadians, has one advantage. It is much easier to see what literature is trying to do when we are studying a literature that has not quite done it. If no Canadian author

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pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting. The conception of what is literary has to be greatly broadened for such a literature. The literary, in Canada, is often only an incidental quality of writings which, like those of many of the early explorers, are as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon. Even when it is literature in its orthodox genres of poetry and fiction, it is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature. So far from merely admitting or conceding this, the editors have gone out of their way to emphasize it. We have asked for chapters on political, historical, religious, scholarly, philosophical, scientific, and other non-literary writing, to show how the verbal imagination operates as a ferment in all cultural life. We have included the writings of foreigners, of travellers, of immigrants, of emigrants—even of emigrants whose most articulate literary emotion was their thankfulness at getting the hell out of Canada. The reader of this book, even if he is not Canadian or much interested in Canadian literature as such, may still learn a good deal about the literary imagination as a force and function of life generally. For here another often deplored fact also becomes an advantage: that many Canadian cultural phenomena are not peculiarly Canadian at all, but are typical of their wider North American and Western contexts. This book is a collection of essays in cultural history, and of the general principles of cultural history we still know relatively little. It is, of course, closely related to political and tc economic history, but it is a separate and definable subject in itself. Like other kinds of history, it has its own themes of exploration, settlement, and development, but these themes relate to a social imagination that explores and settles and develops, and the imagination has its own rhythms of growth as well as its own modes of expression. It is obvious that Canadian literature, whatever its inherent merits, is an indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada. It records what the Canadian imagination has reacted to, and it tells us things about this environment that nothing else will tell us. By examining this imagination as the authors of this book have tried to do, as an ingredient in Canadian verbal culture generally, a relatively small and low-lying cultural development is studied in all its dimensions. There is far too much Canadian writing for this book not to become, in places, something of a catalogue; but the outlines of the structure are clear. Fortunately, the bulk of Canadian non-literary writing, even today, has not yet declined into the state of sodden specialization in which the readable has become the impure. I stress our ignorance of the laws and conditions of cultural history for an obvious reason. The question: why has there been no Canadian writer of classic proportions? may naturally be asked. At any rate it often has been.

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Our authors realize that it is better to deal with what is there than to raise speculations about why something else is not there. But it is clear that the question haunts their minds. And we know so little about cultural history that we not only cannot answer such a question, but we do not even know whether or not it is a real question. The notion, doubtless of romantic origin, that "genius" is a certain quantum that an individual is born with, as he might be born with red hair, is still around, but mainly as a folktale motif in fiction, like the story of Finch in the Jalna books. "Genius" is as much, and as essentially, a matter of social context as it is of individual character. We do not know what the social conditions are that produce great literature, or even whether there is any causal relation at all. If there is, there is no reason to suppose that they are good conditions, or conditions that we should try to reproduce. The notion that the literature one admires must have been nourished by something admirable in the social environment is persistent, but has never been justified by evidence. One can still find books on Shakespeare that profess to make his achievement more plausible by talking about a "background" of social euphoria produced by the defeat of the Armada, the discovery of America a century before, and the conviction that Queen Elizabeth was a wonderful woman. There is a general sense of filler about such speculations, and when similar arguments are given in a negative form to explain the absence of a Shakespeare in Canada they are no more convincing. Puritan inhibitions, pioneer life, "an age too late, cold climate, or years"—these may be important as factors or conditions of Canadian culture, helping us to characterize its qualities. To suggest that any of them is a negative cause of its merit is to say much more than anyone knows. One theme which runs all through this book is the obvious and unquenchable desire of the Canadian cultural public to identify itself through its literature. Canada is not a bad environment for the author, as far as recognition goes: in fact the recognition may even hamper his development by making him prematurely self-conscious. Scholarships, prizes, university posts, await the dedicated writer: there are so many medals offered for literary achievement that a modern Canadian Dryden might well be moved to write a satire on medals, except that if he did he would promptly be awarded the medal for satire and humour. Publishers take an active responsibility for native literature, even poetry; a fair proportion of the books bought by Canadian readers are by Canadian writers; the C.B.C. and other media help to employ some writers and publicize others. The efforts made at intervals to boost or hard-sell Canadian literature, by asserting that it is much better than it actually is, may look silly enough in retrospect, but they were also, in part, efforts to create a cultural community, and the aim deserves more sympathy than the means. Canada has two languages and two literatures, and every statement made in a book like this about "Canadian literature" employs the figure of speech known as synec-

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doche, putting a part for the whole. Every such statement implies a parallel or contrasting statement about French-Canadian literature. The advantages of having a national culture based on two languages are in some respects very great, but of course they are for the most part potential. The difficulties, if more superficial, are also more actual and more obvious. Some of the seminal facts about the origins of Canadian culture are set down with great clarity near the beginning of this book. Canada began, says Mr. Galloway, as an obstacle, blocking the way to the treasures of the East, to be explored only in the hope of finding a passage through it. English Canada continued to be that long after what is now the United States had become a defined part of the Western world. One reason for this is obvious from the map. American culture was, down to about 1900, mainly a culture of the Atlantic seaboard, with a western frontier that moved irregularly but steadily back until it reached the other coast. The Revolution did not essentially change the cultural unity of the English-speaking community of the North Atlantic that had London and Edinburgh on one side of it and Boston and Philadelphia on the other. But Canada has, for all practical purposes, no Atlantic seaboard. The traveller from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the Straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country, with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. It is an unforgettable and intimidating experience to enter Canada in this way. But the experience initiates one into that gigantic east-to-west thrust which, as Mr. Kilbourn notes, historians regard as the axis of Canadian development, the "Laurentian" movement that makes the growth of Canada geographically credible. This drive to the west has attracted to itself nearly everything that is heroic and romantic in the Canadian tradition. The original impetus begins in Europe, for English Canada in the British Isles, hence though adventurous it is also a conservative force, and naturally tends to preserve its colonial link with its starting-point. Once the Canadian has settled down in the country, however, he then becomes aware of the longitudinal dimension, the southward pull toward the richer and more glamorous American cities, some of which, such as Boston for the Maritimes and Minneapolis for the eastern prairies, are almost Canadian capitals. This is the axis of another kind of Canadian mentality, more critical and analytic, more inclined to see Canada as an unnatural and politically quixotic aggregate of disparate northern extensions of American culture—"seven fishing-rods tied together by the ends," as Goldwin Smith, quoted by Mr. Windsor, puts it. Mr. Kil-

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bourn illustrates the contrast in his account of the styles, attitudes, and literary genres of Creighton and Underbill. The simultaneous influence of two larger nations speaking the same language has been practically beneficial to English Canada, but theoretically confusing. It is often suggested that Canada's identity is to be found in some via media, or via mediocris, between the other two. This has the disadvantage that the British and American cultures have to be denned as extremes. Haliburton seems to have believed that the ideal for Nova Scotia would be a combination of American energy and British social structure, but such a chimera, or synthetic monster, is hard to achieve in practice. It is simpler merely to notice the alternating current in the Canadian mind, as reflected in its writing, between two moods, one romantic, traditional and idealistic, the other shrewd, observant and humorous. Canada in its attitude to Britain tends to be more royalist than the Queen, in the sense that it is more attracted to it as a symbol of tradition than as a fellow-nation. The Canadian attitude to the United States is typically that of a smaller country to a much bigger neighbour, sharing in its material civilization but anxious to keep clear of the huge mass movements that drive a great imperial power. The United States, being founded on a revolution and a written constitution, has introduced a deductive or a priori pattern into its cultural life that tends to define an American way of life and mark it off from anti-American heresies. Canada, having a seat on the sidelines of the American Revolution, adheres more to the inductive and the expedient. The Canadian genius for compromise is reflected in the existence of Canada itself. The most obvious tension in the Canadian literary situation is in the use of language. Here, first of all, a traditional standard English collides with the need for a North American vocabulary and phrasing. Mr. Scargill and Mr. Klinck have studied this in the work of Mrs. Moodie and Mrs. Traill. As long as the North American speaker feels that he belongs in a minority, the European speech will impose a standard of correctness. This is to a considerable extent still true of French in Canada, with its campaigns against "joual" and the like. But as Americans began to outnumber the British, Canada tended in practice to fall in with the American developments, though a good deal of Canadian theory is still Anglophile. A much more complicated cultural tension arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Debussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to encounter so incongruous a collision of cultures. Cultural history, we said, has its own rhythms. It is possible that one of

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these rhythms is very like an organic rhythm: that there must be a period, of a certain magnitude, as Aristotle would say, in which a social imagination can take root and establish a tradition. American literature had this period, in the northeastern part of the country, between the Revolution and the Civil War. Canada has never had it. English Canada was first a part of the wilderness, then a part of North America and the British Empire, then a part of the world. But it has gone through these revolutions too quickly for a tradition of writing to be founded on any one of them. Canadian writers are, even now, still trying to assimilate a Canadian environment at a time when new techniques of communication, many of which, like television, constitute a verbal market, are annihilating the boundaries of that environment. This foreshortening of Canadian history, if it really does have any relevance to Canadian culture, would account for many features of it: its fixation on its own past, its penchant for old-fashioned literary techniques, its preoccupation with the theme of strangled articulateness. It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?" Mr. Bailey, writing of the early Maritimes, warns us not to read the "mystique of Canadianism" back into the pre-Confederation period. Haliburton, for instance, was a Nova Scotian, a Bluenose: the word "Canadian" to him would have summoned up the figure of someone who spoke mainly French and whose enthusiasm for Haliburton's own political ideals would have been extremely tepid. The mystique of Canadianism was, as several chapters in this book make clear, specifically the cultural accompaniment of Confederation and the imperialistic mood that followed it. But it came so suddenly after the pioneer period that it was still full of wilderness. To feel "Canadian" was to feel part of a no-man's-land with huge rivers, lakes, and islands that very few Canadians had ever seen. "From sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth"—if Canada is not an island, the phrasing is still in the etymological sense isolating. One wonders if any other national consciousness has had so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested, so built into it. Rupert Brooke, quoted by Mrs. Waterston, speaks of the "unseizable virginity" of the Canadian landscape. What is important here, for our purposes, is the position of the frontier in the Canadian imagination. In the United States one could choose to move out to the frontier or to retreat from it back to the seaboard. The tensions built up by such migrations have fascinated many American novelists and historians. In the Canadas, even in the Maritimes, the frontier was all around one, a part and a condition of one's whole imaginative being. The frontier was primarily what separated the Canadian, physically or mentally, from Great Britain, from the

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United States, and, even more important, from other Canadian communities. Such a frontier was the immediate datum of his imagination, the thing that had to be dealt with first. After the Northwest passage failed to materialize, Canada became a colony in the mercantilist sense, treated by others less like a society than as a place to look for things. French, English, Americans plunged into it to carry off its supplies of furs, minerals, and pulpwood, aware only of their immediate objectives. From time to time recruiting officers searched the farms and villages to carry young men off to death in a European dynastic quarrel. The travellers reviewed by Mrs. Waterston visit Canada much as they would visit a zoo: even when their eyes momentarily focus on the natives they are still thinking primarily of how their own sensibility is going to react to what it sees. Mrs. Waterston speaks of a feature of Canadian life that has been noted by writers from Susanna Moodie onward: "the paradox of vast empty spaces plus lack of privacy," without defences against the prying or avaricious eye. The resentment expressed against this in Canada seems to have taken political rather than literary forms: this may be partly because Canadians have learned from their imaginative experience to look at each other in much the same way: "as objects, even as obstacles," to quote Miss Macpherson on a Canadian autobiography. It is not much wonder if Canada developed with the bewilderment of a neglected child, preoccupied with trying to define its own identity, alternately bumptious and diffident about its own achievements. Adolescent dreams of glory haunt the Canadian consciousness (and unconsciousness), some nai've and some sophisticated. In the naive area are the predictions that the twentieth century belongs to Canada, that our cities will become much bigger than they ought to be, or, like Edmonton and Vancouver, "gateways" to somewhere else, reconstructed Northwest passages. The more sophisticated usually take the form of a Messianic complex about Canadian culture, for Canadian culture, no less than Alberta, has always been "next year country." The myth of the hero brought up in the forest retreat, awaiting the moment when his giant strength will be fully grown and he can emerge into the world, informs a good deal of Canadian criticism down to our own time. Certain features of life in a new country that are bound to handicap its writers are obvious enough. The difficulties of drama, which depends on a theatre and consequently on a highly organized urban life, are set out by Mr. Tait. Here the foreshortening of historical development has been particularly cruel, as drama was strangled by the movie just as it was getting started as a popular medium. Other literary genres have similar difficulties. Culture is born in leisure and an awareness of standards, and pioneer conditions tend to make energetic and uncritical work an end in itself, to preach a gospel of social unconsciousness, which lingers long after the pioneer conditions have

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disappeared. The impressive achievements of such a society are likely to be technological. It is in the inarticulate part of communication, railways and bridges and canals and highways, that Canada, one of whose symbols is the taciturn beaver, has shown its real strength. Again, Canadian culture, and literature in particular, has felt the force of what may be called Emerson's law. Emerson remarks in his journals that in a provincial society it is extremely easy to reach the highest level of cultivation, extremely difficult to take one step beyond that. In surveying Canadian poetry and fiction, we feel constantly that all the energy has been absorbed in meeting a standard, a self-defeating enterprise because real standards can only be established, not met. Such writing is academic in the pejorative sense of that term, an imitation of a prescribed model, second-rate in conception, not merely in execution. It is natural that academic writing of this kind should develop where literature is a social prestige symbol, as Mr. Cogswell says. However, it is not the handicaps of Canadian writers but the distinctive features that appear in spite of them which are the main concern of this book, and so of its conclusion.

II The sense of probing into the distance, of fixing the eyes on the skyline, is something that Canadian sensibility has inherited from the voyageurs. It comes into Canadian painting a good deal, in Thomson whose focus is so often farthest back in the picture, where a river or a gorge in the hills twists elusively out of sight, in Emily Carr whose vision is always, in the title of a compatriot's book of poems, "deeper into the forest." Even in the Maritimes, where the feeling of linear distance is less urgent, Roberts contemplates the Tantramar marshes in the same way, the refrain of "miles and miles" having clearly some incantatory power for him. It would be interesting to know how many Canadian novels associate nobility of character with a faraway look, or base their perorations on a long-range perspective. This might be only a cliche, except that it is often found in sharply observed and distinctively written books. Here, as a random example, is the last sentence of W. O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind: "The wind turns in silent frenzy upon itself, whirling into a smoking funnel, breathing up top soil and tumbleweed skeletons to carry them on its spinning way over the prairie, out and out to the far line of the sky." Mr. Pacey quotes the similarly long-sighted conclusion of Such is My Beloved. A vast country sparsely inhabited naturally depends on its modes of transportation, whether canoe, railway, or the driving and riding "circuits" of the judge, the Methodist preacher, or the Yankee peddler. The feeling of nomadic movement over great distances persists even into the age of the aeroplane, in a country where writers can hardly meet one other without a social organization that provides travel grants. Pratt's poetry is full of his fascina-

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tion with means of communication, not simply the physical means of great ships and locomotives, though he is one of the best of all poets on such subjects, but with communication as message, with radar and asdic and wireless signals, and, in his war poems, with the power of rhetoric over fighting men. What is perhaps the most comprehensive structure of ideas yet made by a Canadian thinker, the structure embodied in Innis's Bias of Communication, is concerned with the same theme, and a disciple of Innis, Marshall McLuhan, continues to emphasize the unity of communication, as a complex containing both verbal and non-verbal factors, and warns us against making unreal divisions within it. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see this need for continuity in the Canadian attitude to time as well as space, in its preoccupation with its own history (the motto of the Province of Quebec is \e me souviens) and its relentless cultural stock-takings and self-inventories. The Burke sense of society as a continuum—consistent with the pragmatic and conservative outlook of Canadians—is strong and begins early. Mr. Irving quotes an expression of it in McCulloch, and another quotation shows that it was one of the most deeply held ideas of Brett. As I write, the centennial of Confederation in 1967 looms up before the country with the moral urgency of a Day of Atonement: I use a Jewish metaphor because there is something Hebraic about the Canadian tendency to read its conquest of a promised land, its Maccabean victories of 1812, its struggle for the central fortress on the hill at Quebec, as oracles of a future. It is doubtless only an accident that the theme of one of the most passionate and intense of all Canadian novels, A. M. Klein's The Second Scroll, is Zionism. Civilization in Canada, as elsewhere, has advanced geometrically across the country, throwing down the long parallel lines of the railways, dividing up the farm lands into chessboards of square-mile sections and concession-line roads. There is little adaptation to nature: in both architecture and arrangement, Canadian cities and villages express rather an arrogant abstraction, the conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it. The word conquest suggests something military, as it should—one thinks of General Braddock, preferring to have his army annihilated rather than fight the natural man on his own asymmetrical ground. There are some features of this generally North American phenomenon that have a particular emphasis hi Canada. It has been remarked—Mr. Kilbourn quotes Creighton on the subject—that Canadian expansion westward had a tight grip of authority over it that American expansion, with its outlaws and sheriffs and vigilantes and the like, did not have in the same measure. America moved from the back country to the wild west; Canada moved from a New France held down by British military occupation to a northwest patrolled by mounted police. Canada has not had, strictly speaking, an Indian war: there has been much less of the "another redskin bit the dust" feeling in our historical imagination, and only

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Riel remains to haunt the later period of it, though he is a formidable figure enough, rather like what a combination of John Brown and Vanzetti would be in the American conscience. Otherwise, the conquest, for the last two centuries, has been mainly of the unconscious forces of nature, personified by the dragon of the Lake Superior rocks in Pratt's Towards the Last Spike: On the North Shore a reptile lay asleep—• A hybrid that the myths might have conceived, But not delivered.

Yet the conquest of nature has its own perils for the imagination, in a country where the winters are so cold and where conditions of life have so often been bleak and comfortless, where even the mosquitoes have been described, Mr. Klinck tells us, as "mementoes of the fall." I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature, a theme to which we shall return. It is not a terror of the dangers or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror of the soul at something that these things manifest. The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems an unanswerable denial of those values. I notice that a sharp-witted Methodist preacher quoted by Mr. Cogswell speaks of the "shutting out of the whole moral creation" in the loneliness of the forests. If we put together a few of these impressions, we may get some approach to characterizing the way in which the Canadian imagination has developed in its literature. Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological "frontier," separated from one another and from their American and British cultural sources: communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting—such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality. In the earliest maps of the country the only inhabited centres are forts, and that remains true of the cultural maps for a much later time. Frances Brooke, in her eighteenth-century History of Emily Montague, wrote of what was literally a garrison; novelists of our day studying the impact of Montreal on Westmount write of a psychological one. A garrison is a closely knit and beleaguered society, and its moral and social values are unquestionable. In a perilous enterprise one does not discuss causes or motives: one is either a fighter or a deserter. Here again we may turn to Pratt, with his infallible instinct for what is central in the Canadian imagination. The societies in Pratt's poems are always tense and tight groups engaged in war, rescue, martyrdom, or crisis, and the moral values

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expressed are simply those of that group. In such a society the terror is not for the common enemy, even when the enemy is or seems victorious, as in the extermination of the Jesuit missionaries or the crew of Franklin (a great Canadian theme, well described in this book by Mr. Hopwood, that Pratt pondered but never completed). The real terror comes when the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself far subtler than the struggle of morality against evil. It is much easier to multiply garrisons, and when that happens, something anti-cultural comes into Canadian life, a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow. The intensity of the sectarian divisiveness in Canadian towns, both religious and political, is an example: what such groups represent, of course, vis-a-vis one another, is "two solitudes," the death of communication and dialogue. Separatism, whether English or French, is culturally the most sterile of all creeds. But at present I am concerned rather with a more creative side of the garrison mentality, one that has had positive effects on our intellectual life. They were so certain of their moral values, says Mr. Cogswell, a little sadly, speaking of the early Maritime writers. Right was white, wrong black, and nothing else counted or even existed. He goes on to point out that such certainty invariably produces a sub-literary rhetoric. Or, as Yeats would say, we make rhetoric out of quarrels with one another, poetry out of the quarrel with ourselves. To use words, for any other purpose than straight description or command, is a form of play, a manifestation of homo ludens. But there are two forms of play, the contest and the construct. The editorial writer attacking the Family Compact, the preacher demolishing imaginary atheists with the argument of design, are using words aggressively, in theses that imply antitheses. Ideas are weapons; one seeks the verbal coup de grace, the irrefutable refutation. Such a use of words is congenial enough to the earlier Canadian community: all the evidence, including the evidence of this book, points to a highly articulate and argumentative society in nineteenthcentury Canada. Mr. MacLure remarks on the fact that scholarship in Canada has so often been written with more conviction and authority, and has attracted wider recognition, than the literature itself. There are historical reasons for this, apart from the fact, which will become clearer as we go on, that scholarly writing is more easily attached to its central tradition. Leacock has a story which I often turn to because the particular aspect of Canadian culture it reflects has never been more accurately caught. He tells us of the rivalry in an Ontario town between two preachers, one Anglican and the other Presbyterian. The latter taught ethics in the local college on weekdays—without salary—and preached on Sundays. He gave his students, says Leacock, three parts Hegel and two parts St. Paul, and on Sunday he

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reversed the dose and gave his parishioners three parts St. Paul and two parts Hegel. Religion has been a major—perhaps the major—cultural force in Canada, at least down to the last generation or two. The names of two Methodist publishers, William Briggs and Lome Pierce, recur more than once in this book, and illustrate the fact that the churches not only influenced the cultural climate but took an active part in the production of poetry and fiction, as the popularity of Ralph Connor reminds us. But the effective religious factors in Canada were doctrinal and evangelical, those that stressed the arguments of religion at the expense of its imagery. Such a reliance on the arguing intellect was encouraged by the philosophers, who in the nineteenth century, as Mr. Irving shows, were invariably idealists with a strong religious bias. Mr. Irving quotes George as saying that civilization consists "in the conscience and intellect" of a cultivated people, and Watson as asserting that "we are capable of knowing Reality as it actually is. ... Reality when so known is absolutely rational." An even higher point may have been reached by that triumphant theologian cited by Mr. Thomson, whose book I have not read but whose title I greatly admire: The Riddle of the Universe Solved. Naturally sophisticated intelligence of this kind was the normal means of contact with literature. Mr. MacLure tells us that James Cappon judged poetry according to whether it had a "rationalized concept" or not—this would have been a very common critical assumption. Sara Jeannette Duncan shows us a clergyman borrowing a copy of Browning's Sordello, no easy reading, and returning it with original suggestions for interpretation. Such an interest in ideas is not merely cultivated but exuberant. But using language as one would use an axe, formulating arguments with sharp cutting edges that will help to clarify one's view of the landscape, remains a rhetorical and not a poetic achievement. To quote Yeats again, one can refute Hegel (perhaps even St. Paul) but not the Song of Sixpence. To create a disinterested structure of words, in poetry or in fiction, is a very different achievement, and it is clear that an intelligent and able rhetorician finds it particularly hard to understand how different it is. A rhetorician practising poetry is apt to express himself in spectral arguments, generalizations that escape the feeling of possible refutation only by being vast enough to contain it, or vaporous enough to elude it. The mystique of Canadianism was accompanied by an intellectual tendency of this kind, as Mr. Daniells indicates. World-views that avoided dialectic, of a theosophical or transcendentalist cast, became popular among the Canadian poets of that time, Roberts and Carman particularly, and later among painters, as the reminiscences of the Group of Seven make clear. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness, though not mentioned by any of our authors so far as I remember, is an influential Canadian book in this area. When minor rhetorically-minded poets sought what Samuel

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Johnson calls, though in a very different context, the "grandeur of generality," the result is what is so well described by Mr. Beattie as "jejune chatter about infinity," and the like. Mr. Watt's very important chapter on the literature of protest isolates another rhetorical tradition. In the nineteenth century the common assumption that nature had revealed the truth of progress, and that it was the duty of reason to accommodate that truth to mankind, could be either a conservative or a radical view. But hi either case it was a revolutionary doctrine, introducing the conception of change as the key to the social process. In those whom Mr. Watt calls proletarian social Darwinists, and who represented "the unholy fusion of secularism, science and social discontent," there was a strong tendency to regard literature as a product and a symbol of a ruling-class mentality, with, as we have tried to indicate, some justification. Hence radicals tended either to hope that "the literature of the future will be the powerful ally of Democracy and Labour Reform," or to assume that serious thought and action would bypass the creative writer entirely, building a scientific socialism and leaving him to his Utopian dreams. The radicalism of the period up to the Russian Revolution was, from a later point of view, largely undifferentiated. A labour magazine could regard Ignatius Donnelly, with his anti-Semitic and other crank views, as an advanced thinker equally with William Morris and Edward Bellamy. Similarly, even today, in Western Canadian elections, a protest vote may go Social Credit or NDP without much regard to the difference in political philosophy between these parties. The depression introduced a dialectic into Canadian social thought which profoundly affected its literature. In Mr. Watt's striking phrase, "the Depression was like an intense magnetic field that deflected the courses of all the poets who went through it." In this period there were, of course, the inevitable Marxist manifestos, assuring the writer that only social significance, as understood by Marxism, would bring vitality to his work. The New Frontier, a far-left journal of that period referred to several times in this book, shows an uneasy sense on the part of its contributors that this literary elixir of youth might have to be mixed with various other potions, not all favourable to the creative process: attending endless meetings, organizing, agitating, marching, demonstrating, or joining the Spanish Loyalists. It is easy for the critic to point out the fallacy of judging the merit of literature by its subjectmatter, but these arguments over the role of "propaganda" were genuine and serious moral conflicts. Besides helping to shape the argument of such novels as Grove's The Master of the Mill and Callaghan's They Shall Inherit the Earth, they raised the fundamental issue of the role of the creative mind in society, and by doing so helped to give a maturity and depth to Canadian writing which is a permanent part of its heritage.

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It is not surprising, given this background, that the belief in the inspiration of literature by social significance continued to be an active force long after it had ceased to be attached to any specifically Marxist or other political programmes. It is still strong in the Preview group in the forties, and in their immediate successors, though the best of them have developed in different directions. The theme of social realism is at its most attractive, and least theoretical, in the poetry of Souster. The existentialist movement, with its emphasis on the self-determination of social attitudes, seems to have had very little direct influence in Canada: Mr. Beattie's comment on the absence of the existential in Pratt suggests that this lack of influence may be significant. During the last decade or so a kind of social Freudianism has been taking shape, mainly in the United States, as a democratic counterpart of Marxism. Here society is seen as controlled by certain anxieties, real or imaginary, which are designed to repress or sublimate human impulses toward a greater freedom. These impulses include the creative and the sexual, which are closely linked. The enemy of the poet is not the capitalist but the "square," or representative of repressive morality. The advantage of this attitude is that it preserves the position of rebellion against society for the poet, without imposing on him any specific social obligations. This movement has had a rather limited development in Canada, somewhat surprisingly considering how easy a target the square is in Canada: it has influenced Layton and many younger Montreal poets, but has not affected fiction to any great degree, though there may be something of it in Richler. It ignores the old political alignments: the Communists are usually regarded as Puritanic and repressive equally with the bourgeoisie, and a recent poem of Layton's contrasts the social hypocrisy in Canada with contemporary Spain. Thus it represents to some extent a return to the undifferentiated radicalism of a century before, though no longer in a political context. As the centre of Canadian life moves from the fortress to the metropolis, the garrison mentality changes correspondingly. It begins as an expression of the moral values generally accepted in the group as a whole, and then, as society gets more complicated and more in control of its environment, it becomes more of a revolutionary garrison within a metropolitan society. But though it changes from a defence of to an attack on what society accepts as conventional standards, the literature it produces, at every stage, tends to be rhetorical, an illustration or allegory of certain social attitudes. These attitudes help to unify the mind of the writer by externalizing his enemy, the enemy being the anti-creative elements in life as he sees life. To approach these elements in a less rhetorical way would introduce the theme of self-conflict, a more perilous but ultimately more rewarding theme. The conflict involved is between the poetic impulse to construct and the rhetorical impulse to assert, and the victory of the former is the sign of the maturing of the writer.

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III There is of course nothing in all this that differentiates Canadian from other related cultural developments. The nineteenth-century Canadian reliance on the conceptual was not different in kind from that of the Victorian readers described by Douglas Bush, who thought they were reading poetry when they were really only looking for Great Thoughts. But if the tendency was not different in kind, it was more intense in degree. Here we need another seminal fact hi this book, one that we have stumbled over already: Mr. Hopwood's remark that the Canadian literary mind, beginning as it did so late in the cultural history of the West, was established on a basis, not of myth, but of history. The conceptual emphasis in Canadian culture we have been speaking of is a consequence, and an essential part, of this historical bias. Canada, of course, or the place where Canada is, can supply distinctive settings and props to a writer who is looking for local colour. Touristwriting has its own importance (e.g., Maria Chapdelaine), as has the use of Canadian history for purposes of romance, of which more later. But it would be an obvious fallacy to claim that the setting provided anything more than novelty. When Canadian writers are urged to use distinctively Canadian themes, the fallacy is less obvious, but still there. The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature. What the Canadian writer finds in his experience and environment may be new, but it will be new only as content: the form of his expression of it can take shape only from what he has read, not from what he has experienced. The great technical experiments of Joyce and Proust in fiction, of Eliot and Hopkins in poetry, have resulted partly from profound literary scholarship, from seeing the formal possibilities inherent in the literature they have studied. A writer who is or who feels removed from his literary tradition tends rather to take over forms already in existence. We notice how often the surveyors of Canadian fiction in this book have occasion to remark that a novel contains a good deal of sincere feeling and accurate observation, but that it is spoiled by an unconvincing plot, usually one too violent or dependent on coincidence for such material. What has happened is that the author felt he could make a novel out of his knowledge and observation, but had no story in particular to tell. His material did not come to him in the form of a story, but as a consolidated chunk of experience, reflection, and sensibility. He had to invent a plot to put this material in causal shape (for writing, as Kafka says, is an art of causality), to pour the new wine of content into the old bottles of form. Even Grove works in this way, though Grove, by sheer dogged persistence, does get his action powerfully if ponderously moving.

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This brings us nearer the centre of Mr. Hopwood's observation. Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images. He often has the feeling, and says so, that he is not actively shaping his material at all, but is rather a place where a verbal structure is taking its own shape. If a novelist, he starts with a story-telling impetus; if a poet, with a metaphorcrystallizing impetus. Down to the beginning of the twentieth century at least, the Canadian who wanted to write started with a feeling of detachment from his literary tradition, which existed for him mainly in his school books. He had probably, as said above, been educated in a way that heavily stressed the conceptual and argumentative use of language. Mrs. Fowke shows us how the Indians began with a mythology which included all the main elements of our own. It was, of course, impossible for Canadians to establish any real continuity with it: Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions. Certain elements in Canadian culture, too, such as the Protestant revolutionary view of history, may have minimized the importance of the oral tradition in ballad and folk song, which seems to have survived best in Catholic communities. In Canada the mythical was simply the "prehistoric" (this word, we are told, is a Canadian coinage), and the writer had to attach himself to his literary tradition deliberately and voluntarily. And though this may be no longer true or necessary, attitudes surviving from an earlier period of isolation still have their influence. The separation of subject and object is the primary fact of consciousness, for anyone so situated and so educated. Writing for him does not start with a rhythmical movement, or an impetus caught from or encouraged by a group of contemporaries: it starts with reportage, a single mind reacting to what is set over against it. Such a writer does not naturally think metaphorically but descriptively; it seems obvious to him that writing is a form of self-expression dependent on the gathering of a certain amount of experience, granted some inborn sensitivity toward that experience. We note (as does Mr. McPherson) how many Canadian novelists have written only one novel, or only one good novel, how many Canadian poets have written only one good book of poems, generally their first. Even the dream of "the great Canadian novel," the feeling that somebody some day will write a Canadian fictional classic, assumes that whoever does it will do it only once. This is a characteristic of writers dominated by the conception of writing up experiences or observations: nobody has enough experience to keep on writing about it, unless his writing is an incidental commentary on a non-literary career. The Canadian writers who have overcome these difficulties and have found their way back to the real headwaters of inspiration are heroic explorers.

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There are a good many of them, and the evidence of this book is that the Canadian imagination has passed the stage of exploration and has embarked on that of settlement. But it is of course full of the failures as well as the successes of exploration, imaginative voyages to Golconda that froze in the ice, and we can learn something from them too. Why do Canadians write so many historical romances, of what Mr. McPherson calls the rut and thrust variety? One can understand it in Mr. Roper's period: the tendency to melodrama in romance makes it part of a central convention of that tune, as Mr. Roper's discerning paragraph on the subject shows. But romances are still going strong in Mr. Pacey's period, and if anything even stronger in Mr. McPherson's. They get a little sexier and more violent as they go on, but the formula remains much the same: so much love-making, so much "research" about antiquities and costume copied off filing cards, more love-making, more filing cards. There is clearly a steady market for this, but the number of writers engaged in it suggests other answers. There is also a related fact, the unusually large number of Canadian popular best-selling fiction-writers, from Agnes Fleming through Gilbert Parker to Mazo de la Roche. In Mr. Roper's chronicle not all the fiction is romance, but nearly all of it is formula-writing. In the books he mentions that I have read I remember much honest and competent work. Some of them did a good deal to form my own infantile imagination, and I could well have fared worse. What there is not, of course, is a recreated view of life, or anything to detach the mind from its customary attitudes. In Mr. Pacey's period we begin to notice a more consistent distinction between the romancer, who stays with established values and usually chooses a subject remote in time from himself, and the realist, who deals with contemporary life, and therefore—it appears to be a therefore —is more serious in intention, more concerned to unsettle a stock response. One tendency culminates in Mazo de la Roche, the other in Morley Callaghan, both professional writers and born story-tellers, though of very different kinds. By Mr. McPherson's period the two tendencies have more widely diverged. One is mainly romance dealing with Canada's past, the other is contemporary realism dealing with what is common to Canada and the rest of the world, like antique and modern furniture stores. One can see something similar in the poetry, a contrast between a romantic tradition closely associated with patriotic and idealistic themes, and a more intellectualized one with a more cosmopolitan bias. This contrast is prominently featured in the first edition of A. J. M. Smith's anthology, The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943). This contrast of the romantic and the realistic, the latter having a moral dignity that the former lacks, reflects the social and conceptual approach to literature already mentioned. Here we are looking at the same question from a different point of view. Literature, we said, is conscious mythology: it creates an autonomous world that gives us an imaginative perspective on the

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actual one. But there is another kind of mythology, one produced by society itself, the object of which is to persuade us to accept existing social values. "Popular" literature, the kind that is read for relaxation and the quieting of the mind, expresses this social mythology. We all feel a general difference between serious and soothing literature, though I know of no critical rule for distinguishing them, nor is there likely to be one. The same work may belong to both mythologies at once, and in fact the separation between them is largely a perspective of our own revolutionary age. In many popular novels, especially in the nineteenth century, we feel how strong the desire is on the part of the author to work out his situation within a framework of established social values. Mr. Roper notes that in the successstory formula frequent in such fiction the success is usually "emotional," i.e., the individual fulfils himself within his community. There is nothing hypocritical or cynical about this: the author usually believes very deeply in his values. Moral earnestness and the posing of serious problems are by no means excluded from popular literature, any more than serious literature is excused from the necessity of being entertaining. The difference is in the position of the reader's mind at the end, in whether he is being encouraged to remain within his habitual social responses or whether he is being prodded into making the steep and lonely climb into the imaginative world. This distinction in itself is familiar enough, and all I am suggesting here is that what I have called the garrison mentality is highly favourable to the growth of popular literature in this sense. The role of romance and melodrama in consolidating a social mythology is also not hard to see. In romance the characters tend to be psychological projections, heroes, heroines, villains, father-figures, comic-relief caricatures. The popular romance operates on Freudian principles, releasing sexual and power fantasies without disturbing the anxieties of the superego. The language of melodrama, at once violent and morally conventional, is the appropriate language for this. A subliminal sense of the erotic release in romance may have inspired some of the distrust of novels in nineteenth-century pietistic homes. But even those who preferred stories of real life did not want "realism": that, we learn, was denounced on all sides during the nineteenth century as nasty, prurient, morbid, and foreign. The garrison mentality is that of its officers: it can tolerate only the conservative idealism of its ruling class, which for Canada means the moral and propertied middle class. The total effect of Canadian popular fiction, whatever incidental merits in it there may be, is that of a murmuring and echoing literary collective unconscious, the rippling of a watery Narcissus world reflecting the imaginative patterns above it. Robertson Davies' Tempest-Tost is a sardonic study of the triumph of a social mythology over the imaginative one symbolized by Shakespeare's play. Maturity and individualization, in such a body of writing, are almost the same process. Occasionally a writer is individualized by acci-

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dent. Thus Susanna Moodie in the Peterborough bush, surrounded by a halfcomic, half-sinister rabble that she thinks of indifferently as Yankee, Irish, native, republican, and lower class, is a British army of occupation in herself, a one-woman garrison. We often find too, as in Leacock, a spirit of criticism, even of satire, that is the complementary half of a strong attachment to the mores that provoke the satire. That is, a good deal of what goes on in Mariposa may look ridiculous, but the norms or standards against which it looks ridiculous are provided by Mariposa itself. In Sara Jeannette Duncan there is something else again, as she watches the garrison parade to church in a small Ontario town: "The repressed magnetic excitement in gatherings of familiar faces, fellow-beings bound by the same convention to the same kind of behaviour, is precious in communities where the human interest is still thin and sparse." Here is a voice of genuine detachment, sympathetic but not defensive either of the group or of herself, concerned primarily to understand and to make the reader see. The social group is becoming external to the writer, but not in a way that isolates her from it. This razor's edge of detachment is naturally rare in Canadian writing, even in this author, but as the twentieth century advances and Canadian society takes a firmer grip of its environment, it becomes easier to assume the role of an individual separated in standards and attitudes from the community. When this happens, an ironic or realistic literature becomes fully possible. This new kind of detachment of course often means only that the split between subject and object has become identified with a split between the individual and society. This is particularly likely to happen when the separated individual's point of view is also that of the author, as in the stories of misunderstood genius with which many minor authors are fascinated. According to Mr. Tait this convention was frequent in the plays put on in Hart House during the twenties; it certainly was so in fiction. But some of the most powerful of Canadian novels have been those in which this conflict has been portrayed objectively. Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley is a Maritime example, and Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House one from the prairies. Mr. Conron quotes B. K. Sandwell as saying: "I follow it [society] at a respectful distance . . . far enough away to make it clear that I do not belong to it." It is clear that this is not necessarily any advance on the expression of conventional social values in popular romance. The feeling of detachment from society means only that society has become more complex, and inner tensions have developed in it. We have traced this process already. The question that arises is: once society, along with physical nature, becomes external to the writer, what does he then feel a part of? For rhetorical or assertive writers it is generally a smaller society, the group that agrees with them. But the imaginative writer, though he often begins as a member of a school or group, normally pulls away from it as he develops. If our general line of thought is sound, the imaginative writer is finding his

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identity within the world of literature itself. He is withdrawing from what Douglas LePan calls a country without a mythology into the country of mythology, ending where the Indians began. Mr. Tait quotes John Coulter's comment on his play, or libretto, Deirdre of the Sorrows: "The art of a Canadian remains . . . the art of the country of his forebears and the old world heritage of myth and legend remains his heritage . . . though the desk on which he writes be Canadian." But the progress may not be a simple matter of forsaking the Canadian for the international, the province for the capital. It may be that when the Canadian writer attaches himself to the world of literature, he discovers, or rediscovers, by doing so, something in his Canadian environment which is more vital and articulate than a desk. IV

At the heart of all social mythology lies what may be called, because it usually is called, a pastoral myth, the vision of a social ideal. The pastoral myth in its most common form is associated with childhood, or with some earlier social condition—pioneer life, the small town, the habitant rooted to his land—that can be identified with childhood. The nostalgia for a world of peace and protection, with a spontaneous response to the nature around it, with a leisure and composure not to be found today, is particularly strong in Canada. It is overpowering in our popular literature, from Anne of Green Gables to Leacock's Mariposa, and from Maria Chapdelaine to Jake and the Kid. It is present in all the fiction that deals with small towns as collections of characters in search of an author. Its influence is strong in the most serious writers: one thinks of Gabrielle Roy, following her Bonheur d'occasion with La poule d'eau. It is the theme of all the essayists who write of fishing and other forms of the simpler life, especially as lived in the past. Mr. Conron quotes MacMechan: "golden days in memory for the enrichment of less happier times to come." It even comes into our official documents-—the Massey Report begins, almost as a matter of course, with an idyllic picture of the Canada of fifty years ago, as a point of departure for its investigations. Mr. Bailey speaks of the eighteenth-century Loyalists as looking "to a past that had never existed for comfort and illumination," which suggests that the pastoral myth has been around for some time. The Indians have not figured so largely in the myth as one might expect, though in some early fiction and drama the noble savage takes the role, as he does to some extent even in the Gothic hero Wacousta. The popularity of Pauline Johnson and Grey Owl, however, shows that the kind of rapport with nature which the Indian symbolizes is central to it. Another form of pastoral myth is the evocation of an earlier period of history which is made romantic by having a more uninhibited expression of passion or virtue or courage

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attached to it. This of course links the pastoral myth with the vision of vanished grandeur that comes into the novels about the anclen regime. In The Golden Dog and The Seats of the Mighty the forlorn little fortress of seventeenth-century Quebec, sitting in the middle of what Madame de Pompadour called "a few arpents of snow," acquires a theatrical glamour that would do credit to Renaissance Florence. Mr. Klinck gives a most concise summary of the earlier literary romanticizing of this period, and Mr. Pacey studies its later aspects. The two forms of the myth collide on the Plains of Abraham, on the one side a marquis, on the other a Hanoverian commoner tearing himself reluctantly from the pages of Gray's Elegy. Close to the centre of the pastoral myth is the sense of kinship with the animal and vegetable world, which is so prominent a part of the Canadian frontier. I think of an image in Mazo de la Roche's Delight, which I am encouraged to revert to because I see that it has also caught Mr. Pacey's eye. Delight Mainprize-—I leave it to the connoisseurs of ambiguity to explore the overtones of that name—is said by her creator to be "not much more developed intellectually than the soft-eyed Jersey in the byre." It must be very rarely that a novelist—a wideawake and astute novelist—can call her heroine a cow with such affection, even admiration. But it is consistent with what Mr. Pacey calls her belief in the "superiority of the primitive and the instinctive over the civilized and conventional." The prevalence in Canada of animal stories, in which animals are closely assimilated to human behaviour and emotions, has been noted by Mr. Lucas and Miss McDowell particularly. Conversely, the killing of an animal, as a tragic or ironic symbol, has a peculiar resonance in Canadian poetry, from the moose in Lampman's Long Sault poem to the Christmas slaughter of geese which is the informing theme of James Reaney's A Suit of Nettles. More complicated pastoral motifs are conspicuous in Morley Callaghan, who turns continually to the theme of betrayed or victorious innocence—the former in The Loved and the Lost, the latter in Such is My Beloved. The Peggy of The Loved and the Lost, whose spontaneous affection for Negroes is inspired by a childhood experience and symbolized by a child's toy, is particularly close to our theme. The theme of Grove's A Search for America is the narrator's search for a North American pastoral myth in its genuinely imaginative form, as distinct from its sentimental or socially stereotyped form. The narrator, adrift in the New World without means of support, has a few grotesque collisions with the hustling mercantilism of American life—selling encyclopaedias and the like— and gets badly bruised in spirit. He becomes convinced that this America is a false social development which has grown over and concealed the real American social ideal, and tries to grasp the form of this buried society. He wants to become, to reverse Mr. Lucas's clever phrase, a Rousseau and not a Crusoe of his new world. In our terms, he is trying to grasp something of the

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myth of America, the essential imaginative idea it embodies. He meets, but irritably brushes away, the tawdry and sentimentalized versions of this myth —the cottage away from it all, happy days on the farm, the great open spaces of the west. He goes straight to the really powerful and effective versions: Thoreau's Walden, the personality of Lincoln, Huckleberry Finn drifting down the great river. The America that he searches for, he feels, has something to do with these things, though it is not defined much more closely than this. Grove drops a hint in a footnote near the end that what his narrator is looking for has been abandoned in the United States but perhaps not yet in Canada. This is not our present moral: pastoral myths, even in their genuine forms, do not exist as places. They exist rather in such things as the loving delicacy of perception hi Grove's own Over Prairie Trails and The Turn of the Year. Still, the remark has some importance because it indicates that the conception "Canada" can also become a pastoral myth in certain circumstances. Mr. Daniells, speaking of the nineteenth-century mystique of Canadianism, says: "A world is created, its centre in the Canadian home, its middle distance the loved landscape of Canada, its protecting wall the circle of British institutions . . . a world as centripetal as that of Sherlock Holmes and as little liable to be shaken by irruptions of evil." The myth suggested here is somewhat Virgilian in shape, pastoral serenity serving as a prologue to the swelling act of the imperial theme. Nobody who saw it in that way was a Virgil, however, and it has been of minor literary significance. We have said that literature creates a detached and autonomous mythology, and that society itself produces a corresponding mythology, to which a good deal of literature belongs. We have found the pastoral myth, in its popular and sentimental social form, to be an idealization of memory, especially childhood memory. But we have also suggested that the same myth exists in a genuinely imaginative form, and have found its influence in some of the best Canadian writers. Our present problem is to see if we can take a step beyond Grove and attempt some characterization of the myth he was looking for, a myth which would naturally have an American context but a particular reference to Canada. The sentimental or nostalgic pastoral myth increases the feeling of separation between subject and object by withdrawing the subject into a fantasy world. The genuine myth, then, would result from reversing this process. Myth starts with the identifying of subject and object, the primary imaginative act of literary creation. It is therefore the most explicitly mythopoeic aspect of Canadian literature that we have to turn to, and we shall find this centred in the poetry rather than the fiction. There are many reasons for this: one is that in poetry there is no mass market to encourage the writer to seek refuge in conventional social formulas. A striking fact about Canadian poetry is the number of poets who have

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turned to narrative forms (including closet drama) rather than lyrical ones. The anthologist who confines himself wholly to the lyric will give the impression that Canadian poetry really began with Roberts's Orion in 1880. Actually there was a tradition of narrative poetry well established before that (Sangster, Heavysege, Howe, and several others), which continues into the post-Confederation period (Mair, Isabella Crawford, Duvar, besides important narrative works by Lampman and D. C. Scott). It is clear that Pratt's devotion to the narrative represents a deep affinity with the Canadian tradition, although so far as I know (and I think I do know) the affinity was entirely unconscious on his part. I have written about the importance of narrative poetry in Canada elsewhere, and have little new to add here. It has two characteristics that account for its being especially important in Canadian literature. In the first place, it is impersonal. The bald and dry statement is the most effective medium for its treatment of action, and the author, as in the folk song and ballad, is able to keep out of sight or speak as one of a group. In the second place, the natural affinities of poetic narrative are with tragic and ironic themes, not with the more manipulated comic and romantic formulas of prose fiction. Consistently with its impersonal form, tragedy and irony are expressed in the action of the poem rather than in its moods or in the poet's own comment. We hardly expect the earlier narratives to be successful all through, but if we read them with sympathy and historical imagination, we can see how the Canadian environment has exerted its influence on the poet. The environment, in nineteenth-century Canada, is terrifyingly cold, empty and vast, where the obvious and immediate sense of nature is the late Romantic one, increasingly affected by Darwinism, of nature red in tooth and claw. We notice the recurrence of such episodes as shipwreck, Indian massacres, human sacrifices, lumbermen mangled in log-jams, mountain climbers crippled on glaciers, animals screaming in traps, the agonies of starvation and solitude— in short, the "shutting out of the whole moral creation." Human suffering, in such an environment, is a by-product of a massive indifference which, whatever else it may be, is not morally explicable. What confronts the poet is a moral silence deeper than any physical silence, though the latter frequently symbolizes the former, as in the poem of Pratt that is explicitly called "Silences." The nineteenth-century Canadian poet can hardly help being preoccupied with physical nature; the nature confronting him presents him with the riddle of unconsciousness, and the riddle of unconsciousness in nature is the riddle of death in man. Hence his central emotional reaction is bound to be elegiac and sombre, full of loneliness and fear, or at least wistful and nostalgic, hugging, like Roberts, a "darling illusion." In Carman, Roberts, and D. C. Scott there is a rhetorical strain that speaks in a confident, radio-announcer's voice

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about the destiny of Canada, the call of the open road, or the onward and upward march of progress. As none of their memorable poetry was written in this voice, we may suspect that they turned to it partly for reassurance. Mr. Daniells remarks of D. C. Scott: "The imprecision of his views is in part the result of having nothing specific to oppose." The riddle of unconsciousness in nature is one that no moralizing or intellectualizing can answer. More important, it is one that irony cannot answer: The gray shape with the paleolithic face Was still the master of the longitudes. The conclusion of Pratt's Titanic is almost documentary: it is as stripped of irony as it is of moralizing. The elimination of irony from the poet's view of nature makes that view pastoral—a cold pastoral, but still a pastoral. We have only physical nature and a rudimentary human society, not strong enough yet to impose the human forms of tragedy and irony on experience. The same elegiac and lonely tone continues to haunt the later poetry. Those who in the twenties showed the influence of the death-and-resurrection myth of Eliot, notably Leo Kennedy and A. J. M. Smith, were also keeping to the centre of a native tradition. The use of the Eliot myth was sometimes regarded as a discovery of myth, as Mr. Beattie notes, but of course the earlier poets had not only used the same myth, but were equally aware of its origins in classical poetry, as Carman's Sappho indicates. The riddle of the unconscious may be expressed by a symbol such as the agonies of a dying animal, or it may be treated simply as an irreducible fact of existence. But it meets us everywhere: I pick up Margaret Avison and there it is, in a poem called "Identity": But on this sheet of beryl, this high sea, Scalded by the white unremembering glaze, No wisps disperse. This is the icy pole. The presence here is single, worse than soul, Pried loose forever out of nights and days And birth and death And all the covering wings. In such an environment, we may well wonder how the sentimental pastoral myth ever developed at all. But of course there are the summer months, and a growing settlement of the country that eventually began to absorb at least eastern Canada into the north temperate zone. Pratt's Newfoundland background helped to keep his centre of gravity in the elegiac, but when he began to write the feeling of the mindless hostility of nature had largely retreated to the prairies, where, as Mr. Pacey shows, a fictional realism developed, closely related to this feeling in mood and imagery. The Wordsworthian sense of nature as a teacher is apparent as early as Mrs. Traill, in whom Mr. Lucas

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notes a somewhat selective approach to the subject reminiscent of Miss Muffet. As the sentimental pastoral myth takes shape, its imaginative counterpart takes shape too, the other, gentler, more idyllic half of the myth that has made the pastoral itself a central literary convention. In this version nature, though still full of awfulness and mystery, is the visible representative of an order that man has violated, a spiritual unity that the intellect murders to dissect. This form of the myth is more characteristic of the second phase of Canadian social development, when the conflict of man and nature is expanding into a triangular conflict of nature, society, and individual. Here the individual tends to ally himself with nature against society. A very direct and haunting statement of this attitude occurs in John Robins's Incomplete Anglers: "I can approach a solitary tree with pleasure, a cluster of trees with joy, and a forest with rapture; I must approach a solitary man with caution, a group of men with trepidation, and a nation of men with terror." The same theme also forms part of the final cadences of Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night: "In the early October of that year, in the cathedral hush of a Quebec Indian summer with the lake drawing into its mirror the fire of the maples, it came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence." It is the appearance of this theme in D. C. Scott which moves Mr. Daniells to call Scott one of the "ancestral voices" of the Canadian imagination. It is much stronger and more continuous in Lampman, who talks less than his contemporaries and strives harder for the uniting of subject and object in the imaginative experience. This union takes place in the contact of individual poet and a landscape uninhabited except for Wordsworth's "huge and mighty forms" that are manifested by the union: Nay more, I think some blessed power Hath brought me wandering idly here. Again as in Wordsworth, this uniting of individual mind and nature is an experience from which human society, as such, is excluded. Thus when the poet finds a "blessed power" in nature it is the society he leaves behind that tends to become the God-forsaken wilderness. Usually this society is merely trivial or boring; once, in the unforgettable "City of the End of Things," it becomes demonic. The two aspects of the pastoral tradition we have been tracing are not inconsistent with each other; they are rather complementary. At one pole of experience there is a fusion of human life and the life in nature; at the opposite pole is the identity of the sinister and terrible elements in nature with the death-wish in man. In Pratt's "The Truant" the "genus homo" confronts the "great Panjandrum" of nature who is also his own death-wish: the great Panjandrum is the destructive force in the Nazis and in the Indians who martyred

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Brebeuf, the capacity in man that enables him to be deliberately cruel. Irving Layton shows us not only the cruelty but the vulgarity of the death-wish consciousness: as it has no innocence, it cannot suffer with dignity, as animals can; it loses its own imaginary soul by despising the body: Listen: for all his careful fuss, Will this cold one ever deceive us? Self-hating, he rivets a glittering wall; Impairs it by a single pebble And loves himself for that concession. We spoke earlier of a civilization conquering the landscape and imposing an alien and abstract pattern on it. As this process goes on, the writers, the poets especially, tend increasingly to see much of this process as something that is human but still dehumanized, leaving man's real humanity a part of the nature that he continually violates but is still inviolate. Reading through any good collection of modern Canadian poems or stories, we find every variety of tone, mood, attitude, technique, and setting. But there is a certain unity of impression one gets from it, an impression of gentleness and reasonableness, seldom difficult or greatly daring in its imaginative flights, the passion, whether of love or anger, held in check by something meditative. It is not easy to put the feeling in words, but if we turn to the issue of the Tamarack Review that was devoted to West Indian literature, or to the Hungarian poems translated by Canadians in the collection The Plough and the Pen, we can see by contrast something of both the strength and the limitations of the Canadian writers. They too have lived, if not in Arcadia, at any rate in a land where empty space and the pervasiveness of physical nature have impressed a pastoral quality on their minds. From the deer and fish in Isabella Crawford's "The Canoe" to the frogs and toads in Layton, from the white narcissus of Knister to the night-blooming cereus of Reaney, everything that is central in Canadian writing seems to be marked by the imminence of the natural world. The sense of this imminence organizes the mythology of Jay Macpherson; it is the sign in which Canadian soldiers conquer Italy in Douglas LePan's The Net and the Sword; it may be in the foreground, as in Alden Nowlan, or in the background, as in Birney; but it is always there. To go on with this absorbing subject would take us into another book: A Literary Criticism of Canada, let us say. Here we can only refer the reader to Mr. Beattie's able guidance and sum up the present argument emblematically, with two famous primitive American paintings. One is "Historical Monument of the American Republic," by Erastus Salisbury Field. Painted in 1876 for the centennial of the Revolution, it is an encyclopaedic portrayal of events in American history, against a background of soaring towers, with clouds around their spires, and connected by railway bridges. It is a prophetic

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vision of the skyscraper cities of the future, of the tremendous technological will to power of our time and the civilization it has built, a civilization now gradually imposing a uniformity of culture and habits of life all over the globe. Because the United States is the most powerful centre of this civilization, we often say, when referring to its uniformity, that the world is becoming Americanized. But of course America itself is being Americanized in this sense, and the uniformity imposed on New Delhi and Singapore, or on Toronto and Vancouver, is no greater than that imposed on New Orleans or Baltimore. A nation so huge and so productive, however, is deeply committed to this growing technological uniformity, even though many tendencies may pull in other directions. Canada has participated to the full in the wars, economic expansions, technological achievements, and internal stresses of the modern world. Canadians seem well adjusted to the new world of technology and very efficient at handling it. Yet in the Canadian imagination there are deep reservations to this world as an end of life in itself, and the political separation of Canada has helped to emphasize these reservations in its literature. English Canada began with the influx of defeated Tories after the American Revolution, and so, in its literature, with a strong anti-revolutionary bias. The Canadian radicalism that developed in opposition to Loyalism was not a revival of the American revolutionary spirit, but a quite different movement, which had something in common with the Toryism it opposed: one thinks of the Tory and radical elements in the social vision of William Cobbett, who also finds a place in the Canadian record. A revolutionary tradition is liable to two defects: to an undervaluing of history and an impatience with law, and we have seen how unusually strong the Canadian attachment to law and history has been. The attitude to things American represented by Haliburton is not, on the whole, hostile: it would be better described as non-committal, as when Sam Slick speaks of a Fourth of July as "a splendid spectacle; fifteen millions of freemen and three millions of slaves a-celebratin' the birthday of liberty." The strong romantic tradition in Canadian literature has much to do with its original conservatism. When more radical expressions begin to creep into Canadian writing, as in the poetry of Alexander McLachlan, there is still much less of the assumption that freedom and national independence are the same thing, or that the mercantilist Whiggery which won the American Revolution is necessarily the only emancipating force in the world. In some Canadian writers of our own time—I think particularly of Earle Birney's Trial of a City and the poetry of F. R. Scott—there is an opposition, not to the democratic but to the oligarchic tendencies in North American civilization, not to liberal but to laissez-faire political doctrine. Perhaps it is a little easier to see these distinctions from the vantage-point of a smaller country, even one which has, in its material culture, made the "American way of life" its own. The other painting is the much earlier "The Peaceable Kingdom," by

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Edward Hicks, painted around 1830. Here, in the background, is a treaty between the Indians and the Quaker settlers under Penn. In the foreground is a group of animals, lions, tigers, bears, oxen, illustrating the prophecy of Isaiah about the recovery of innocence in nature. Like the animals of the Douanier Rousseau, they stare past us with a serenity that transcends consciousness. It is a pictorial emblem of what Grove's narrator was trying to find under the surface of America: the reconciliation of man with man and of man with nature: the mood of Thoreau's Walden retreat, of Emily Dickinson's garden, of Huckleberry Finn's raft, of the elegies of Whitman, whose reaction to Canada is also recorded in this book. This mood is closer to the haunting vision of a serenity that is both human and natural which we have been struggling to identify in the Canadian tradition. If we had to characterize a distinctive emphasis in that tradition, we might call it a quest for the peaceable kingdom. The writers of the last decade, at least, have begun to write in a world which is post-Canadian, as it is post-American, post-British, and post everything except the world itself. There are no provinces in the empire of aeroplane and television, and no physical separation from the centres of culture, such as they are. Sensibility is no longer dependent on a specific environment or even on sense experience itself. A remark of Mr. Beattie's about Robert Finch illustrates a tendency which is affecting literature as well as painting: "the interplay of sense impressions is so complicated, and so exhilarating, that the reader receives no sense impression at all." Marshall McLuhan speaks of the world as reduced to a single gigantic primitive village, where everything has the same kind of immediacy. He speaks of the fears that so many intellectuals have of such a world, and remarks amiably: "Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time." The Canadian spirit, to personify it as a single being dwelling in the country from the early voyages to the present, might well, reading this sentence, feel that this was where he came in. In other words, new conditions give the old ones a new importance, as what vanishes in one form reappears in another. The moment that the peaceable kingdom has been completely obliterated by its rival is the moment when it comes into the foreground again, as the eternal frontier, the first thing that the writer's imagination must deal with. Pratt's "The Truant," already referred to, foreshadows the poetry of the future, when physical nature has retreated to outer space and only individual and society are left as effective factors in the imagination. But the central conflict, and the moods in which it is fought out, are still unchanged. One gets very tired, in old-fashioned biographies, of the dubious embryology that examines a poet's ancestry and wonders if a tendency to fantasy in him could be the result of an Irish great-grandmother. A reader may feel the same unreality in efforts to attach Canadian writers to a tradition made up of

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earlier writers whom they may not have read or greatly admired. I have felt this myself whenever I have written about Canadian literature. Yet I keep coming back to the feeling that there does seem to be such a thing as an imaginative continuum, and that writers are conditioned in their attitudes by their predecessors, or by the cultural climate of their predecessors, whether there is conscious influence or not. Again, nothing can give a writer's experience and sensitivity any form except the study of literature itself. In this study the great classics, "monuments of its own magnificence," and the best contemporaries have an obvious priority. The more such monuments or such contemporaries there are in a writer's particular cultural traditions, the more fortunate he is; but he needs those traditions in any case. He needs them most of all when what faces him seems so new as to threaten his identity. For present and future writers in Canada and their readers, what is important in Canadian literature, beyond the merits of the individual works in it, is the inheritance of the entire enterprise. The writers featured hi this book have identified the habits and attitudes of the country, as Fraser and Mackenzie have identified its rivers. They have also left an imaginative legacy of dignity and of high courage.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES CONTRIBUTORS INDEX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Bibliography and Notes GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY (Selected books in print, 1975) A. BASIC REFERENCE BOOKS

Walters, Reginald Eyre (compiler). A Checklist of Canadian Literature and Background Materials, 1628-1960 [Canadian Literature in English] (compiled for the Humanities Research Council of Canada). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959; 2nd edition, revised 1972 Walters, Reginald Eyre and Inglis Freeman Bell (compilers). On Canadian Literature, 1806-1960: A Check List of Articles, Books, and Theses on English-Canadian Literature, Its Authors, and Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966, reprinted with corrections and additions, 1973 B. BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Amlmann, Bernard, Inc. (booksellers). Catalogues. Monlreal: 1948See A Catalogue of the Catalogues Issued since 1948 (1964). Brodeur, Leo A. and Antoine Naaman (compilers). Repertoire des theses litteraires canadiennes (Janvier 1969-septembre 1971). Index of Canadian Literary Theses (January 1969-September 1971). Sherbrooke: Centre d'Etude des Litteratures d'Expression franc, aise, 1972 Canadian Historical Review (quarterly). Toronto: Universily of Toronto Press, 1920Contains (quarterly) a list of "Recent Publications Relating to Canada." (Abbrev. C.H.R. Canadian Literature (quarterly). Vancouver: University of British Columbia 1959Contains annual "Check List" Canadian Periodical Index. Toronto: Toronto Public Libraries, 1929-1932, and 1938Canadiana: A List of Publications of Canadian Interest. Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1951Dominion Drama Festival. Canadian Full-Length Plays in English: A Preliminary Annotated Catalogue. Edited by W. S. Milne. Ottawa: The Festival (200 Cooper St.), 1964 Gnarowski, Michael (compiler). A Concise Bibliography of English-Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973 Journal of Canadian Fiction. Montreal, Bellrock Press, 1972. Contains an annual list of post-graduate theses in Canadian literature: English and English-French comparative Lande, Lawrence (collector and compiler). The Lawrence Lande Collection in the Redpath Library of McGill University. Montreal: Lawrence Lande Foundation for Canadian Historical Research, 1965

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———• (collector and compiler). Rare and Unusual Canadiana. First supplement to the Lande Bibliography. Montreal: McGill University, 1971 Naaman, Antoine. Guide bibliographique des theses litteraires canadiennes de 1921 a 1969. Montreal: Cosmos [1970] Peel, Bruce (compiler). A Bibliography of the Prairie Provinces to 1953: With Biographical Index. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956; revised 1973 Priestley, F. E. L. The Humanities in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964. See "Appendices," pp. 93-246 Smith, A. J. M. The Book of Canadian Poetry. Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1948; 3rd edition, revised and enlarged, 1957. Pp. 505-21 Staton, Frances M. and Marie Tremaine (editors). A Bibliography of Canadiana. Toronto: Public Library, 1934. First Supplement by Gertrude M. Boyle, assisted by Marjorie Colbeck, 1959 Story, Norah. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967 Toye, William. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Supplement. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973 Tremaine, Marie. A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751-1800. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952 University of Toronto Quarterly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, from 1931Contains an annual review of "Letters in Canada" (since the review for 1935) Walters, R. E. (compiler). "Bibliography" in C. F. Klinck and R. E. Walters (editors), Canadian Anthology. Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1955, 1957; revised 1965; revised 1974

C. GENERAL STUDIES AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972 Baker, Ray Palmer. A History of English-Canadian Literature to the Confederation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920. Reprinted, New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 Bourinot, John George. Our Intellectual Strength and Weakness. Thomas Guthrie Marquis, 'English-Canadian Literature.' Camille Roy, 'French-Canadian Literature.' Introduction by Clara Thomas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973 Brown, E. K. On Canadian Poetry (edited by G. Clever). Ottawa: Tecumseh Press, 1973 Canadian Literature (quarterly). Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia 1959Critical articles on Canadian literature Canadian Writers [a series of New Canadian Library "original" handbooks on selected writers (general editor, Malcolm Ross).] Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Canadian Writers and Their Works [a series of handbooks on selected writers (general editor, William French).] Toronto: Forum House Collin, W. E. The White Savannahs. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936. Reprinted by the University of Toronto Press 1975, introduction by Germaine Warkentin Critical Views on Canadian Writers [a series of anthologies of selected criticism on selected writers (general editor, Michael Gnarowski).] Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. A series of volumes, of which four have been published: I, 1000-1700 [1966]; II, 1701-1740 [1969]; III, 1741-1770 [1974];X, 1871-1880 [1972]

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Dudek, Louis and Michael Gnarowski (editors). The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1971 Egoff, Sheila A. The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children's Literature in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1967; 2nd edition, 1975 Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971 Fulford, Robert et al. (editors). Read Canadian: A Book about Canadian Books. Toronto: James Lewis and Samuel, 1972 Gibson, Graeme (interviewer). Eleven Canadian Novelists. Toronto: Anansi, 1973 Jones, Douglas G. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970 Klinck, Carl F. and Reginald E. Walters (editors). Canadian Anthology. Toronto: W. J. Gage 1955; 3rd edition, revised and enlarged, 1974 Lande, Lawrence. Old Lamps Aglow: An Appreciation of Early Canadian Poetry. Montreal: author, 1957 Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint [general editor, Douglas Lochhead]. Cloth and paperback reprints of Canadian literary works with introductions for each volume by Canadian scholars McDougall, Robert L. (editor). Our Living Tradition. Carleton University and University of Toronto Press, 1957, 1959, 1962, 1965 (1957 volume edited by Claude T. Bissell) Mandel, Eli (editor). Contexts of Canadian Criticism: A Collection of Critical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971 Marquis, Thomas G. English-Canadian Literature. See Bourinot, John George Matthews, John P. Tradition in Exile: A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962 Moss, John. Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974 New, William H. Articulating West: Essays on Purpose and Form in Modern Canadian Literature. Toronto: New Press, 1972 New, William H. (compiler). Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays. Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 1972 New Canadian Library Series [general editor, Malcolm Ross]. Paperback reprints of Canadian literary works with introductions for each volume by Canadian scholars Pacey, Desmond. Creative Writing in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson, revised and enlarged, 1961 Ten Canadian Poets. Toronto: Ryerson 1958 Essays in Canadian Criticism 1938-1968. Toronto: Ryerson, 1969 Park, Julian (editor). The Culture of Contemporary Canada. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957 Rashley, R. E. Poetry in Canada: The First Three Steps. Toronto: Ryerson, 1958 Rhodenizer, Vernon Blair. Canadian Literature in English. Montreal: Quality Press, 1965 Ross, Malcolm. The Arts in Canada. Toronto: Macmillan, 1958 Roy, Camille. French Canadian Literature. See Bourinot, John George Royal Society of Canada. Proceedings and Transactions Smith, A. J. M. The Book of Canadian Poetry. Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1948; 3rd edition, revised and enlarged 1958 Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays, 1928-1971. Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 1973

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Stephens, Donald (editor). Writers of the Prairies. Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 1973 Studies in Canadian Literature [a series of studies of selected Canadian writers (general editors, Hugo McPherson and Gary Geddes)]. Toronto: Copp Clark Sutherland, Ronald. Second Image: Comparative Studies in Quebec/Canadian Literature. Toronto: New Press, 1971 Sylvestre, Guy, Brandon Conron, and Carl F. Klinck. Canadian Writers/Ecrivains canadiens. Toronto: Ryerson, 1964 Thomas, Clara. Our Nature — Our Voices: A Guidebook to English-Canadian Literature. Toronto: New Press, 1972 Twayne's World Author Series [biographical and critical books on selected Canadian writers (general editor, Joseph Jones) ]. New York: Twayne Publishers University of Toronto Quarterly. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1931. "Letters in Canada" (critical articles), annual surveys since 1935 Wallace, W. Stewart. The Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Toronto: Macmillan, 1926; 3rd edition 1963 Waterston, Elizabeth. Survey: A Short History of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Methuen, 1973 Woodcock, George (editor). A Choice of Critics. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966 (editor). The Sixties: Canadian Writers and Writing of the Decade. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Publications Centre, 1969

SPECIAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES BY CHAPTERS EDITORS' NOTE : As a general rule, footnotes to the chapters were avoided in favour of inclusion in the text of all relevant material and an indication of the sources of most references and quotations. For some chapters, therefore, no additional notes are supplied. For others, the reader will find in this section the contributors' lists of the most useful printed sources which they have consulted, together with their suggestions for further reading. The appropriate items in Walters' Check List and in our "General Bibliography" should be consulted for each chapter of this Literary History: abbreviations in the notes (e.g. Staton and Tremaine) refer to such items. CHAPTER 2. I, THE WRITING OF CANADIAN HISTORY

A useful general survey is Robin Winks's booklet Recent Trends and New Literature in Canadian History (Washington, 1959). It is designed as a bibliographical guide for teachers of Canadian history and while it is by no means exhaustive, it provides a fuller and more comprehensive outline of historical scholarship on Canadian subjects than is attempted in this essay. There is a brief article on the writing of history in Canada, with a list of the best articles on Canadian historiography, by W. L. Morton in the Encyclopedia Canadiana. The articles by Careless and Easterbrook cited in the text contain references to all the important books within the scope of their subjects up to the time the articles were published. For the most complete consideration of Canadian historical writing, one must turn to the Canadian Historical Review, which has reviewed all the significant

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historical works written by Canadians since 1920. There have been many penetrating and brilliant reviews and review articles in Canadian Forum (1920— ), and a number of useful pieces in the Queen's Quarterly during the same period. The Canadian Annual Review (1960) and the annual review of Canadian literature in English published by the University of Toronto Quarterly since 1935 provide useful surveys. The Canadian Historical Association annual reports for the past forty years include several estimates of the state of Canadian historical writing, particularly in a number of the Presidential Addresses. There is, however, no recent one-volume bibliography of Canadian historical writing comparable to R. G. Trotter's bibliography for an earlier period. Walters' Check List does not attempt to cope with several historical fields and also omits many important titles within its scope. F. E. Priestley's The Humanities in Canada (1964) includes the names and publications of many historians; supplements are to follow. The book, however, does not cover historical writing by those who are not now in Canadian universities. Unfortunately few of the reviewers of Canadian historical writing have shown either a disposition or an ability to subject the works at hand to the serious literary criticism which many of them deserve. The sort of penetrating and brilliant review article "Historians' Viewpoints" undertaken by Margaret Ormsby in Canadian Literature, No. 3, Winter, 1960, has been all too rare. A few other historical reviews of merit are to be found in the Waterloo Review (1958—61), and, occasionally, in the book pages of the weekly sections of such newspapers as the Globe and Mail and the Montreal Star. There is one fine general essay on history as literature, "The Art of Narrative," by W. L. Morton, in the periodical Culture, which occasionally uses the style of Canadian historians, notably Creighton, Lower, and Mclnnis, to illustrate its argument. CHAPTER 4. RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS (TO 1960)

The main sources are: Collections of Canadian theological writing at the Archives of Divinity Hall, McGill University, Montreal, and Victoria University, Toronto; also the libraries of theological colleges; Bibliography of Canadian Imprints by Marie Tremaine; Walters' Checklist; H. H. Walsh's The Christian Church in Canada (Toronto, 1956), the only single comprehensive history; the main histories of particular churches mentioned in the text; Canadian Journal of Religious Thought (1924-32), Canadian Journal of Theology (1954-70), and Studies in Religion (1971). CHAPTERS. PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE (1910-1960)

See the notes for 'Philosophical Literature,' Chapter 5 of Volume III of the Literary History of Canada, for a list of publications also relevant to this chapter. CHAPTER 9. DRAMA AND THEATRE

There is as yet no comprehensive history of Canadian theatre. Useful short articles and studies include: William Angus, "Theatre," in Encyclopedia Canadiana (Ottawa: Grolier Society of Canada, 1958) X, 61-67. John Ball, ed., "Theatre in

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Canada: A Bibliography," Canadian Literature No. 14 (Autumn, 1962), 85-100; Nathan Cohen, "Theatre To-day: English Canada" Tamarack Review, XIII (Autumn 1959), 24-37; Robertson Davies, on the Stratford Shakespearean Festival: Renown at Stratford, Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded, Thrice the Brlnded Cat Hath Mew'd (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1953, 1954, 1955); W. S. Milne (editor), Canadian Full-Length Plays in English: A Preliminary Annotated Catalogue (Ottawa: Dominion Drama Festival, 1964); James Mavor Moore, "The Theatre in English-speaking Canada," in Malcolm Ross (editor), The Arts in Canada; A Stock Taking at Mid-Century (Toronto: Macmillan, 1938), 77-82; Herbert Whittaker, "The Theatre," in Julian Park (editor), The Culture of Contemporary Canada (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957), 163-180; Herbert Whittaker, "Canada—Theatre," in Encyclopedia Americana, Canadian edition (Toronto: Americana Corporation of Canada, 1958), V, 436-40; Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays, ed. W. H. New (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972).

Contributors ALFRED GOLDSWORTHY BAILEY, former Professor and Head of the Department of History (1938-69), Dean of Arts (1946-64), and Vice-President (Academic), 1965—70, all at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick, and now Professor Emeritus of History. Author of four collections of poems including Border River (1952) and Thanks for a Drowned Island (1973), and also of works in history and ethnohistory, notably The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures 1504-1700 (1937, 2nd edition, 1969) and Culture and Nationality (1972). MUNRO BEATTIE, Professor of English, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. Co-author, with Elizabeth Waterston, of Composition for Canadian Universities (Toronto 1964) and author of an article on Archibald Lampman (in Our Living Tradition, 1957) and on Henry James (Dalhousie Review, 1959—60). S. Ross BEHARRIELL, Associate Professor of English, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario. Author of introductions to Ralph Connor's The Man from Glengarry (Toronto 1960), Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels (Toronto 1963), and Ralph Connor's Glengarry Schooldays (Toronto 1975). CLAUDE BISSELL, University Professor, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario; President of Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, 1956-8; President of the University of Toronto, 1958-71. Author of two books on higher education: The Strength of the University (Toronto 1968) and Halfway Up Parnassus (Toronto 1974). Editor of Great Canadian Writing (Toronto 1966). Author of articles on Victorian literature, Canadian literature, and various aspects of higher education. FRED COGSWELL, Professor of English, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Ex-editor of The Fiddlehead and The Humanities Association Bulletin, publisher of Fiddlehead Poetry Books, author of ten books of poetry, the latest of which is Light Bird of Life (1974), and four books of translations. BRANDON CONRON, Professor of English, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Author of Morley Callaghan (New York 1966) in Twayne World Authors series and of articles on Canadian and Commonwealth literature. Editor of the Latin pieces in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior (Oxford 1959, rev. 1971), of Gabrielle Roy's Streets of Riches (Toronto 1967), and of Morley Callaghan (Toronto 1975) in Critical Views on Canadian Writers series. Co-editor, with Guy Sylvestre and Carl Klinck, of Canadian Writers/Ecrivains canadiens (Toronto 1964, rev. 1966). ROY DANIELLS, University Professor of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. Author of books of poetry, Deeper into the Forest (Toronto 1948) and The

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Chequered Shade (Toronto 1963), of a volume of criticism, Milton, Mannerism, and Baroque (Toronto 1963), of a biography, Alexander Mackenzie and the North-West (London 1969), and of articles on seventeenth-century literature and on the Canadian literary tradition. ALICE VIBERT DOUGLAS, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Author of Arthur Stanley Eddington (Edinburgh 1956), scientific papers, 1921-42, articles and reviews in the Hibbert Journal, Atlantic Monthly, and university quarterlies, etc., 1925-73. SHEILA A. EGOFF, Professor, School of Librarianship, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. Author of The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children's Literature in English (Toronto 1967); associate editor and co-author of Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature (Toronto 1969); and author of numerous articles on children's literature. EDITH FULTON FOWKE, Associate Professor of English, York University, Toronto, Ontario. Co-author of Folk Songs of Canada, Folk Songs of Quebec, and More Folk Songs of Canada (Waterloo 1954, 1957, 1967), and Canada's Story in Song (Toronto 1960). Author of Traditional Singers and Songs from Ontario (Philadelphia 1965), Sally Go Round the Sun (Toronto 1969), Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods (Austin, Texas 1970), and articles in journals. NORTHROP FRYE, University Professor and Professor of English, Victoria College, University of Toronto. Author of Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton 1947), Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton 1957), The Well-Tempered Critic (Bloomington 1963), Fables of Identity (New York 1963), The Educated Imagination (Toronto 1965), The Modern Century (Toronto 1967), The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (London 1970), The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto 1971), and The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington 1971). Author also of numerous other books and articles and editor of many volumes of literary criticism. DAVID GALLOWAY, Professor and Head, Department of English, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Author of Shakespeare (Toronto 1961), editor of The Tempest (Toronto 1969) and three volumes of the Elizabethan Theatre (Toronto 1969, 1970, 1973), and author of articles on Shakespeare and early Canadian literature, and of short stories. THOMAS A. GOUDGE, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Author of The Thought of C.S. Peirce (1950), The Ascent of Life: A Philosophical Study of the Theory of Evolution (1961), Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics, edited with an introduction. Member, Editorial Board, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967). JOHN WEBSTER GRANT, Professor of Church History, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Author of Free Churchmanship in England (London 1955), God's People

CONTRIBUTORS

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in India (Toronto, London, and Madras 1959), The Canadian Experience of Church Union (London 1967), The Church in the Canadian Era (Toronto 1972). Editor of Die Unierte Kirchen (Stuttgart 1973). HENRY PEARSON GUNDY, Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Author of Early Printers and Printing in the Canadas (Toronto 1957), Book Publishing and Publishers in Canada before 1900 (Toronto 1965), The Spread of Printing . . . Canada (Amsterdam 1972), 'Development of Trade Book Publishing in Canada' in Royal Commission on Book Publishing, Background Papers (Toronto 1972). Editor of Historic Kingston (Transactions of the Kingston Historical Society). VICTOR GEORGE HOPWOOD, Associate Professor of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. Editor of David Thompson's Travels and Margaret McNaughton's Overland to Cariboo. Author of articles on Canadian literature, the theory of literary criticism, and occasional poems and short stories. Contributor to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Former co-editor of New Frontiers magazine and publication. Writing a biography of David Thompson. WILLIAM KILBOURN, Alderman and Member of the Executive Committee, City of Toronto; Professor of History and Humanities (on leave), York University, Toronto, Ontario. Author of several books on Canadian history, including The Firebrand (Toronto 1956), The Elements Combined (Toronto 1960), and Pipeline (Toronto 1970); editor of Canada: A Guide to the Peaceable Kingdom (Toronto 1970). CARL F. KLINCK, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Author of Wilfred Campbell (Toronto 1942), and, with H. W. Wells, of Edwin J. Pratt (Toronto 1947); editor of Tecumseh (Englewood 1961) and of books by Frances Brooke, John Richardson, William Tiger' Dunlop, Susanna Moodie, Samuel Strickland, and Rosanna Leprohon; co-editor with J. J. Talman of The Journal of Major John Norton (Toronto 1970), and with R. E. Walters oi Canadian Anthology (Toronto 1955, rev. 1974). ALEC LUCAS, Professor of English, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. A former editor of the Bulletin of the Humanities Association of Canada, Dr. Lucas has long been associated with the study of Canadian literature and has spoken and written extensively on it. His recent books on the subject are Hugh MacLennan (1970), The Best of Peter McArthur (1970), and Great Canadian Short Stories (1971). MILLAR MACLURE, Professor of English, Victoria College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly (1960-5), and with F. W. Watt of Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse (Toronto 1964); author of The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534-1642 (Toronto 1958), George Chapman: A Critical Study (Toronto 1966); editor of The Poems of Christopher Marlowe (London 1968); contributor to A Theatre for Spenserians, ed. Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither (Toronto 1972), and the Sphere History of Literature in the

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English Language, ed. C. Ricks (London 1970). Other articles and reviews, chiefly on Renaissance literature and the twentieth-century novel. A founding editor of The Tamarack Review (1956— ). JAY MACPHERSON, Professor of English, Victoria College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Author of two collections of poetry, The Boatman (Toronto 1957) and Welcoming Disaster (Toronto 1974), and of a highschool textbook, Four Ages of Man: The Classical Myths (Toronto 1962); and of some articles on mythology and romance. HUGO McPHERSON, Professor of English, Director of Graduate Programme in Communications, McGill University. Commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada, 1967-70; author of Hawthorne as Myth-Maker (Toronto 1969); editor of three volumes in the New Canadian Library series (Toronto 1958-60); general editor of the Studies in Canadian Literature series (Toronto 1969- ), author of articles on Canadian and American novelists, painters, and sculptors, and on government regulation of the media. DESMOND PACEY, late University Professor of English and Vice-President (Academic) , University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Author of Frederick Philip Grove (1945), Creative Writing in Canada (1952; enlarged edition 1967), Ten Canadian Poets (1958), Ethel Wilson (1967), Essays in Canadian Criticism (1969), and of several books of short stories and children's verse. Editor of several anthologies and of The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove (1975). Author of many critical articles and reviews on Canadian literature. GORDON ROPER, Professor of English, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. Editor of The Scarlet Letter and Selected Prose Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York 1949), Gabrielle Roy's Where Nests the Water Hen (Toronto 1961), and Robertson Davies' Samuel Marchbank's Almanack (Toronto 1968); co-editor of Omoo: The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Library Edition, Vol. n (Evanston and Chicago 1968). Author of "Nineteenth Century Literature" in Read Canadian (Toronto 1972) and of articles on American and Canadian fiction. MATTHEW HARRY SCARGILL, Head, Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia. Author of Three Icelandic Sagas (with M. Schlauch; Princeton 1950), An English Handbook (Toronto 1954), and Dictionaries of Canadian English (with W. S. Avis and R. J. Gregg; Toronto 1962-4), Modern Canadian English Usage (Toronto 1974), and of articles on the English language. RUPERT SCHIEDER, Professor of English, Trinity College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Editor of Martin Allerdale Grainger's Woodsmen of the West (Toronto 1964), John Buchan's Prester John (Toronto 1964), and Francis William Grey's The Cure of St Philippe (Toronto 1970); author of articles on British and American fiction. MICHAEL S. TAIT, Associate Professor of English, Scarborough College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Author of articles on Canadian theatre and drama.

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JAMES J. TALMAN and RUTH DAVIS TALMAN. James J. Talman is Professor of History and retired Chief Librarian, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Co-authors of Western, 1878-1953 (London, Ont. 1953). James Talman is author of Huron College, 1863-1963 (London, Ont. 1963), editor of Loyalist Narratives from Upper Canada (Toronto 1946), co-editor, with Carl F. Klinck, of The Journal of Major John Norton (Toronto 1970), and author of numerous articles on Canadian history. M. ELIZABETH WATERSTON, Professor and Chairman, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario. Author of Pioneers of Agriculture (Toronto 1961), Survey: A History of Canadian Literature (Toronto 1973), and On Middle Ground: Landscape and Life in Wellington County, 1841-91 (Guelph 1974); co-author of Composition for Canadian Universities (Toronto 1964); editor of Gilbert Parker's Seats of the Mighty (Toronto 1971) and Canadian Children's Literature (Guelph; Spring 1975), and author of articles on Canadian, Scottish, and Victorian literature. FRANK W. WATT, Professor of English, University College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. Editor (1960-5) of "Letters in Canada" ("Fiction" reviewer, 1960-6) in the University of Toronto Quarterly and author of Steinbeck (Edinburgh and London 1962) and many articles on Canadian literature and history. KENNETH NEVILLE WINDSOR, Assistant Professor of History, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick. Author of the articles on "Religion" in the Canadian Annual Review 196170.

Acknowledgments ABELARD-SCHUMAN CANADA LIMITED, Toronto 3, for quotations from Daryl Mine's The Carnal and the Crane (1957) and The Devil's Picture Book (1960). GEORGE ALLEN AND UNWIN LTD., London W.C.I, for a quotation from O. S. Brett's History of Psychology (1912-21), II, 6-7. AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Washington, D.C., for quotations from John A. Irving's "George Sidney Brett 1879-1944" in the Psychological Review, LIV (Jan. 1947), 52-58. Miss MARGARET AVISON, Toronto, for a quotation from "Perspective," (Poetry, Chicago; and from Poetry of Mid-Century 1940/1960, ed. Milton Wilson, McClelland and Stewart, 1964). G. BELL & SONS LTD., London W.C.2, for a quotation from G. S. Brett's The Government of Man (1913). ERNEST BENN LIMITED, London E.C.4, for quotations from the Collected Verse of Robert W. Service (1930). Professor EARLE BIRNEY, Vancouver, for quotations from David and Other Poems (Ryerson, 1942), Now is Time (Ryerson, 1945), The Strait of Anian (Ryerson, 1948), Trial of a City and Other Verse (Ryerson, 1952), and Ice Cod Bell or Stone (McClelland & Stewart, 1962). THE BODLEY HEAD LTD., London W.C.2, for a quotation from Arthur Stringer's Open Water (1914). Mrs. PAULINE CAMPBELL, London, Ontario, for her service as principal typist and secretary of the project and recorder of items in the Index. The CANADA COUNCIL, Ottawa, for grants-in-aid of research to Fred Cogswell, David Galloway, F. E. Gattinger (assisting C. F. Klinck), V. G. Hopwood, Alec Lucas, Henry Pietersma (assisting John A. Irving), Gordon Roper, Michael Tail, Hugo McPherson (assisted by Miriam Lerenbaum and Douglas Spettigue), Desmond Pacey (assisted by John Ripley), Ross Beharriell, William M. Kilbourn, Frank Stiling (assisted by Donald Hair and succeeded by Brandon Conron), M. H. Scargill, A. Vibert Douglas, and Elizabeth H. Waterston. CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW (University of Toronto Press), for quotations from Donald Creighton's "Sir John Macdonald and Canadian Historians," CHR, XXIX (March 1948), 1-13; and from John A. Irving's "The Development of Philosophy in Central Canada from 1850 to 1900," CHR, XXI (Sept. 1950), 252-287. CLARKE, IRWIN & COMPANY, Toronto 10, for a quotation from Douglas Le Pan's The Net and the Sword (1953). Mr. LEONARD COHEN, Montreal 6, for quotations from Let Us Compare Mythologies (McGill Poetry Series, 1956) and The Spice-Box of Earth (McClelland & Stewart, 1961). CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., for quotations from John A. Irving's "Philosophy" in The Culture of Contemporary Canada (1957), edited by Julian Park. PETER DAVIES LTD., London W.C.I, for a quotation from Grey Owl's Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936). J. M. DENT AND SONS (CANADA) LTD., Toronto, for quotations from Peter McArthur's In Pastures Green (1915), and from Samuel Wood's Rambles of a Canadian Naturalist (1916). J. M. DENT AND SONS LTD., London W.C.2, for a quotation from Samuel Wood's Rambles of a Canadian Naturalist (1916).

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DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, New York 16, for quotations from The Complete Poems of Robert W. Service (1940). Mr. R. G. EVERSON, Montreal, for quotations from Three Dozen Poems (Cambridge Press, Montreal, 1957), and A Lattice for Momos (Contact Press, Montreal, 1958). FABER AND FADER LIMITED, London W.C.I, for a quotation from Wilfred Watson's Friday's Child (1955). FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, New York, for a quotation from Wilfred Watson's Friday's Child (1955). Professor RALPH GUSTAFSON, Lennoxville, for a quotation from The Golden Chalice (Nicholson & Watson, London, 1935). Dr. DONALD HAIR, University of Western Ontario, for research assistance to Brandon Conron. HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL OF CANADA, for financial support and encouragement, especially to these officers of the Council: Dr. Roy Daniells, Dr. J. A. Gibson, Dr. J. R. Kidd, Dr. Maurice Lebel, Dr. Francis Leddy, Dr. John E. Robbins, Dr. G. O. Rothney, the late Dr. R. M. Wiles, the late Dr. A. S. P. Woodhouse. Mrs. W. A. IRWIN (P. K. PAGE), Victoria, B.C., for quotations from As Ten as Twenty (Ryerson, 1946) and The Metal and the Flower (McClelland & Stewart, 1954). CHIEF LIBRARIANS and their assistants in the following Libraries: the Public Archives, Ottawa; the Provincial Archives of British Columbia and Ontario; the Toronto Public Library; the Provincial Libraries of British Columbia and Manitoba; the university libraries of British Columbia, Dalhousie, McGill, New Brunswick (and Bonar Law-Bennett collection), Queen's, St. Michael's, Victoria (Toronto) and Western Ontario; the Glenbow Foundation in Calgary; the Divinity Library, McGill, and the University Library, Cambridge, England; the Hudson's Bay Company (microfilms); the National Library of Scotland; the British Museum. MCCLELLAND AND STEWART LIMITED, Toronto 16, for quotations from Alfred G. Bailey's Border River (1952); Earle Birney's Ice Cod Bell or Stone (1962); Bliss Carman's Poems (1922); Leonard Cohen's The Spice-Box of Earth (1961); A. W. Eaton's Acadian Ballads and Lyrics (1930); Robert Finch's The Strength of the Hills (1948); John Glassco's The Deficit Made Flesh (1958); Frederick Philip Grove's The Turn of the Year (1923); John A. Irving's "The Achievement of Thomas McCulloch" in The Stepsure Letters, New Canadian Library (1961); Irving Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959); P. K. Page's The Metal and the Flower (1954); The Complete Poems of Marjorie Pickthall (1936); Charles G. D. Roberts's The Haunters of the Silences (1905); Poetry of Mid-Century 1940/1960 (1964), edited by Milton Wilson. The estate of Mrs. HELEN J. MACKENZIE, Montreal, for a quotation from W. H. Blake's Brown Waters (Macmillan, Canada, 1925). ROBERT MACLEHOSE & Co. Ltd., Glasgow W.3, for a quotation from John Watson's The Interpretation of Religious Experience (James Maclehose & Sons, 1912). Mrs. ANNE MARRIOTT MCLELLAN, North Vancouver, B.C., for a quotation from Anne Marriott's Sandstone and Other Poems (Ryerson, 1945). THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED, Toronto 2, for quotations from Charles Bruce's The Mulgrave Road (1951); Donald Creighton's Dominion of the North (1944, 1957) and The Story of Canada (1959); Grey Owl's The Men of the Last Frontier (1932) and Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936); The Collected Poems of E. J. Pratt (1958); Frank Underbill's In Search of Canadian Liberalism (1960); Anne Wilkinson's The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955); W. H. Blake's Brown Waters (1915). MIDDLESEX COLLEGE, former Principal Brandon Conron and Principal D. G. G. Kerr, for providing assistance to the General Editor. THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LTD., Toronto 17, for quotations from Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather. THOMAS NELSON AND SONS (CANADA) LIMITED, Don Mills, Ontario, for a quotation from Ethelwyn Wetherald's Lyrics and Sonnets (1931). Mr. ALDEN NOWLAN, Saint John, N.B., for a quotation from Under the Ice (Ryerson, Toronto, 1961).

378

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, Don Mills, Ontario, for quotations from Robert Finch's Poems (1946); George Johnston's The Cruising Auk (1959); Jay Macpherson's The Boatman (1957). Mr. RALEIGH PARKIN, for the use of the William Lawson Grant Papers. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Professor M. Farber, editor), for quotations from John A. Irving's "Philosophical Trends in Canada between 1850 and 1950," P & PR, XII (Dec. 1951), 224-245. PONTIFICAL INSTITUTE OF MEDIAEVAL STUDIES, Toronto, for information kindly supplied by the Very Rev. L. K. Shook and Professor Armand Maurer, C.S.B., and by Dr. L. E. M. Lynch, Professor of Philosophy, St. Michael's College, Toronto. E. J. PRATT'S estate, for quotations from The Collected Poems of E. J. Pratt (Macmillan, 1958). Dr. JOHN D. RIPLEY, Dalhousie University, for research assistance to Desmond Pacey. Professor MALCOLM Ross, Trinity College, Toronto, for quotations from Thomas McCulloch's The Stepsure Letters (McClelland & Stewart, New Canadian Library, 1960). ROUTLEDGE and KEGAN PAUL, Ltd., London E.C.4, for quotations from Margaret Avison's Winter Sun (1960). THE RYERSON PRESS, Toronto 2B, for quotations from Patrick Anderson's A Tent for April (1945) and The White Centre (1946); Earle Birney's Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952); Louis Dudek's East of the City (1946); The Poetical Works of Wilfred Campbell (1923); Donald Creighton's The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937); John A. Irving's "Philosophical Trends in Canada" in Science and Values (1952); Selected Poems of Raymond Knister (1949); Selected Poems of Archibald Lampman (1947); Selected Poems of Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1955); Selected Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott (1951); Complete Poems of Robert W. Service (1940); Complete Poems of Francis Sherman (1935); Raymond Souster's The Colour of the Times (1964); Miriam Waddington's The Second Silence (1955) and The Season's Lovers (1958). CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York 17, for quotations from Rupert Brooke's Letters from America (1916); Grey Owl's Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936); Ernest Thompson Seton's Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). SIDGWICK AND JACKSON LTD., London W.C.I, for a quotation from Rupert Brooke's Letters from America (1916). The J. B. SMALLMAN RESEARCH FUND of the University of Western Ontario for a grantin-aid of research for chapters 8 and 9, and to Dean Frank Stiling (now retired) for his assistance. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, the President's Committee in Aid of Research, for assistance to Gordon Roper and others writing on "Fiction, 1880-1920." UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS, for quotations from Margaret Avison's Winter Sun (1960); John A. Irving's Philosophy in Canada: A Symposium (1952); Chester Martin's Foundations of Canadian Nationhood (1955). UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY (University of Toronto Press), for quotations from John A. Irving's "One Hundred Years of Canadian Philosophy," UTQ, XX (Jan. 1951), 107-23; and "The Achievement of George Sidney Brett," UTQ, XIV (July 1945), 329-65. UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO, London, for secretarial assistance. Sir BYRON EDMUND WALKER'S estate, for permission to see his papers. ANNE WILKINSON'S estate, for a quotation from The Hangman Ties the Holly (Toronto, Macmillan, 1955).

Index Aberhart, William 112 Acadia Bulletin 60 Acadian Recorder (Halifax) 73 Acanthus and Wild Grape

(1920)236-7

Account of the Work of God, in Newfoundland, North America, An (1776) 75 Ads at Oxford ( 1 9 6 1 ) 251 Acorn, Milton 20, 328 Acrobats, The (1954) 225-6 Across My Path (1952) 62 Across the Prairie (1922) 110 Adair, E.R. 42 Adams, S.M. 66 Advent Sermon, An (1851) 59 Adventures of Billy Topsail, The (1906) 138-9 Adventures in Error (1936)

125-6

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain) 39, 223, 354, 360 Adventures and Misadventures ("Lofty," 1922) 110, 111

Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People, The (1935) 140 Aelfric (Eng. churchman) 69 Aelfric's De Temporibus Anni (1942) 69 Agrarian Age: A Background for Wordsworth (1950) 68 Agrarian Socialism (Lipset, 1950) 49 Aikins, Carroll 147, 163 Aitken, Hugh 32 Akins, T.B. 78 Alabaster, William 65

Anderson, Clara Rothwell 178 Anderson, Fulton H. 101, 103 Anderson, Patrick 15, 16, 278, 280, 282-4, 285, 292, 297 Anderson, Sherwood 185, 199,200,206-7,214,292, 312 Andrews, Elias 90 Angled Road, The (1952) 229 Anglican Church in Canada, The (1963) 92 Anglin, Margaret 161 Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1927) 68 Angus, H.A. 50 Anne of Green Gables (1908) 138,352 Anstensen, A. 63 Antennae (1926) 169 "Anthology" (C.B.C. radio programme) 297 Anthology of Canadian Poetry (ed. Gustafson, 1942) 17, 277 Apology (Plato) 155 Apostle of the North (1908) 85 115 Apostle's Creed, The American Literature (1958) (Bishop MacDonald) 69 84-5 Amy, William Lacey ("Luke Apostolic Age, The (1957) Allan") 169, 170 90 Anatole France, the Parisian Apples of the Moon (1933) (1927) 99 178 Anatomy of Criticism (1957) Applied Philosophy (1950) 61 100 AncreneRiwle (c.1200) 66 Appraisals of Canadian LitAnd All Your Beauty (1948) erature (1926) 10,72 115 Apprenticeship of Duddy And the People Cheered Kravitz, The (1959)226, (1940) 114 227

Alberta Folk Lore project 149 Albertus Magnus 102 Alcibiades (Athenian statesman) 317 Alexander, Henry 64 Alexander, W.H. 64 Alexander, W.J. 58 Alien, The (1953) 224 All the Trumpets Sounded (1942) 172 Allan, Andrew 17, 144, 160, 165 "Allan, Luke" (William LaceyAmy) 169, 170 Allan, Martha 149, 163 "Allan, Ted" (Alan Herman) 144, 198 Allen, Ralph 218-19, 229 Alline, Henry 75, 77, 94 Allison, W.T. 121 All's Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare) 167 Alphabet (London, Ont., magazine) 20, 329 Ambush (1920) 170 American Adam, The (R.W.B. Lewis) 35 American Book Collector (1960) 69 A merican Journey ( 1 943 )

380 Aquinas, Saint Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint. Arbiter of Elegance (1954) 67 Archaia (1860) 80 Archibald, Edith J. 178 Archibald Lampman (1929) 11 Archimedes (Greek physicist) 322 Arctic Bride (autobiography) 126 Are Canadians Really? (1954) 116 Argument of Plato, The (1934) 101-2 Aristophanes (Greek poet) 66 Aristotle (Greek philosopher) 96,101,102, 104,338 Arliss, George 161 Armstrong, Maurice W. 93 Arnold, Matthew 17, 62, 67, 153,220,238,251 Arnup, J.H. 86 Art of the Possible, The: Government and Foreign Policy in Canada (1961 ) 50 Artificial Bastard, The (1953) 68 Artist at War (autobiography) 126 Arts in Canada, The (1958) 21 Arts and Letters Players Club (Toronto) 163 As for Me and My House

INDEX Atlantic Monthly Prize 10, 180,181 Attila the Hun 208 Atwood, Margaret Eleanor 328 Auden, W.H. 15, 156, 252, 281,295,298,324 Augustine, Saint 21, 62, 89 Austin, B.F. 80-1 Autobiography: Gait (1833) 127; Goldsmith (1943) 127-8 Avenue Theatre (Toronto) 165 Avison, Margaret 20, 280, 299, 320-3, 356 Ayre, Robert 264 Ayscough, Florence 169, 237

Barth, Karl 88, 99 Basket, The (Jacob) 148 Bates, Ronald 20, 328 Battle of Wits and Protest, A (1956) 154 Baudelaire, Charles 324, 325 Bayley, C.C. 42 Beach, E.F. 47 Beach of Strangers, A: An Excursion (1961) 156-7 Beard, Charles 26 Beardsley, Aubrey 325 Beare, F.W. 91 Beattie, Jessie L. 178, 179 Beaubien, Irenée 92 Beauport Road, The (1928) 184 Beaupre, Jean 307 Beautiful America (Quinn) 109 Babbitt, Irving 59 Beautiful Canada (Quinn, Bacon, Francis 101, 102 1925) 109 Bagnani, Gilbert 42, 67 Beautiful Joe (1894) 136 Bailey, Alfred Goldsworthy Beautiful Mexico (Quinn) 20, 269-70, 297 109 Baillie, John 8 1,83 Beaverbook, Lord 32 Baird, Rev. Frank 183 Beck, J. Murray 48 Baird, Irene 14, 198 Beck, Lily Adams ("E. BarBaker, R.P. 10, 72 rington"; "Louise MoresBaldwin, Harold 113 by") 5, 169, 170-1, 176 Baldwin, Robert 25, 31 Beckett, Samuel 61 Baldwin, Dr. W.W. 25 Beckwith, John 158 Ballantyne, R.M. 135 Bedford-Jones, H.J.O. 171-2 Balls for a One-Armed Beginnings of the Church, Juggler (1963) 328 The (1914) 82 Balm (1926) 144-5 Behind the Log (1947) 259 Banquet (Xenophon, trans. Behn, Aphra 53 Todd) 66 Belaney, Archibald Stansfeld Baptiste Larocque (1923) (1941)217-18,351 ("Grey Owl") 140,352 184 As Ten As Twenty (1946) Bell, Andrew 63 Baptists of Canada, The 281-2 Bella Coola Indians, The (1911) 87 Ashes of Murder (1935) 169 (1948) 51 Barbeau, Marius 51, 141 Ashley, W.J. 44 Bellamy, Edward 345 Barber, Clarence 47 Ashton, Harry 70 Bellan, R.C. 47 Barker, A.E. 67 At the Gates of the Bells, The (Eng. drama) 149 Barker, A.F. 108 Righteous (1949) 152 Belshaw, Cyril 51 A t My Heart's Core ( 1 950 ) Barley and the Stream, The Bemister, Margaret 139 (1955)32 151, 152-3, 154 Bennett, Arnold 186 Barnard, Leslie Gordon 173, Bennett, Ethel Hume 13 At the Long Sault, and 184, 185 Other Poems (ed. 1943) Bennett, R.B. 11, 112, 245 Barometer Rising ( 1 94 1 ) 353 Benson, Nathaniel A. 13 211-12 Athenian Tribute Lists, The Beowulf (8th century) 69 "Barrington, E." See Beck, (1938-53)64 Bergson, Henri 96 Lily Adams. Atkin, Grace Murray 169 Bernard, Sylvia 20 Atlantic Monthly (u.s.) 179 Barrymore, John 161 Bernhardt, Sara 161

INDEX

381

(Pacey, 1947) 17,20 Bladen, V.W. 46, 47 Book of Common Prayer Blake, Cameron 183 Blake, Edward 39 246 Book of Small, The (1942) Blake, William 61, 68-9, 132 299, 301 Book of the West, The Blake, William Hume 123, (1925) 109 125 Bookman (London, Eng.) Bland, Salem 87 Blasted Pine, The (1960) 329 237 Boorman (travel writer) 114 Blewett, G.J. 83 Booth, Edwin 161 Blishen, R.B. 52 Borden, Sir Robert 3 Bliss Carman (Shepard, Border River (1952) 269-70 1924) 11 Bosanquet, Bernard 96, 98 Bliss Carman and the Literary Currents and InfluBosanquet, Mary 115 (1951)45,341 Boss of Wind River, The ences of His Time (CapBible under Higher Criti(1911) 170 pon, 1930) 13,73 cism, The (1900) 80 Boswell, James 64 Biblical Criticism and Mod- Blissett, William 56, 62, Bourinot, Arthur 23 8 67-8, 104 ern Thought (1909) 81 Bovell, James 77-8, 79 Bibliography and Reference Bloomsbury Group, The B.O.W.C.,The (1869) 136 Guide (to Keats) (1949) (1954) 68 Blue Homespun (1924) 237 Bowering, George 20 63 Blue Pete: Half Breed (1921) Bowman, Louise Morey 237 Bibliotheca Canadensis Boy I Left Behind Me, The 170 (1867) 58 Blue Pitcher, The (1926) 148 (1946) 131 Bicknell, M.E. 151 Boy in the House, A (1952) Blue Propeller, The (1955) Big Fisherman, The 182 (Douglas) 84 293 Boat Who Wouldn't Float, Boyle, Harry 144, 165 Bill, I.E. 78 Bracknell, Lady 325 The (1969) 142 Billy Budd (Melville) 229 Bird, Will R. 207, 208 Boatman, The (1957) 300-2 Braddock, Gen. Edward 341 Bradley, Francis Herbert 96 Birmingham Repertory Bobcaygeon: A Sketch of a Brady, Alexander 47, 49 Little Town (1919) 237 Theatre 147 Brae Manor Theatre Bodsworth, Fred 137 Birney, Earle 17,20, 165, (Knowlton, Quebec) 164 218,229,272-6,277,284, Boehme, Jacob 75 Brain's the Target, The Boeschenstein, Hermann 297, 299, 328, 358, 359 (1960) 328 Bishop, Leslie 183 69-70 Brébeuf, Father Jean de Bissell, Claude T. 72, 160, Boggs, Jean 42 Bogle Corbet (1831) 127 259-60, 358 209 Brébeuf and His Brethren Boleyn, Anne 171 Bitter Honey (1935) 184 Bompas, Bishop William (1940) 94,259-60,357-8 Bjarni(l956) 307 Carpenter 85 Brebner, J.B. 23, 34, 55 Black, Mrs. George 127 Black, Rev. John 85 Bonaventure, Saint 100, 102 Brecher, Irving 46 Bond Triumphant, The Brett, George Sidney 58, Black Beauty (1877) 136 95-8,101,103,341 Black Bonspiel of Will lie (1923) 173 MacCrimmon, The (W.O. Bone Spoon, The (1930) 148 Brewster, Elizabeth 20, 312 Bonheur d' occasion (1947) Bride of Quietness (1933) Mitchell) 224 Black Canyon, The (1927) (trans. The Tin Flute) 179 173 215,352 Bridle, Augustus 194 Book of Canadian Poetry, Black Gold (1924) 169 Brief View of the Religious Black Huntsmen, The (1951) The (A.J.M. Smith, 1943, Tenets and Sentiments ... 293 1948,1957) 16-17,20, in ... Two Mites, A (1784) Black Joke, The (1962) 142 75 72,73,277,280,281,349 Black Lace (1938) 177 Book of Canadian Prose and Brieger, Peter 42 Black Opal ("Luke Allan") Verse (Broadus, 1923) 10 Briggs, William (publisher) 169 Book of Canadian Stories 234, 344 Berry, E.G. 66 Berry, Herbert 65 Berton,Pierrell6, 121, 141, 232 Beside a Norman Tower (1934) 182 Bessborough, Earl of 164 Bessinger, J.B. 64 Best of Gregory Clark, The (1959) 121 Best One Thing, The (1926) 178 Beveridge Report (Eng.) 14 Bias of Communication, The

382 Britanno-Roman Inscriptions (1863) 59 British Columbia (1959) 33 British Commonwealth, The (1956) 39 British Museum 65 Britnell, G.E. 46 Broadus, E.H. 10 Broadus,E.K. 10, 119, 124 Broken Journey, A (1932) 201 Brooke, Frances 342 Brooke, Rupert 234, 294, 388 Brooker, Bertram 193 Brothers in Arms (Merrill Denison) 145, 146 Brown, Audrey Alexandra 263 Brown, E.K. 13, 16-17, 62, 67,71,73,263,265,279 Brown, George 3 1 Brown, George W. (historian) 33 Brown, John 342 Brown of the Globe (Careless) 31 Browne, Sir Thomas 67 Browning, Robert 58, 65, 68, 234, 295, 344 Bruce, Charles 267-9, 297 Bruce, Luella 184 Bryce, George 85 Bryden, W.W. 88 Buchan, John 208 Buchanan, M.A. 63 Buck, Tim 1 12 Bucke, Richard Maurice 80, 94, 344 Buckler, Ernest 20, 217, 224,351 Buckley, Helen 47 Buckley, Kenneth 47 Building the Nation (1922) 86 Buitenhuis, Peter 69 Bujila, Bernadine 66 Bulfinch, Thomas 299 Bull Calf, The, and Other Poems (1956) 293 Bulletin (Charles Lamb Society) 65 Bulletin of the Comediantes 63 Bullock-Webster, L. 149

INDEX Burke, Edmund (Eng.) 25, 341 Burke, Bishop Edmund 77-8 Burlap Bags (Peterson) 160 Burnet, Jean 5 1 Burney, Fanny 65 Burnham, John Hampden 138 Burt, A.L. 27, 34 Burton, Jean 6 Burwash, Nathaniel 83 Bush, Douglas 6, 119,347 Butler, Samuel 2 15, 244 By Stubborn Stars and Other Poems (1938) 267 Byron, Lord 61, 171

Canada, Coast to Coast (1955) 116 Canada, the Golden Hinge (1952) 116 Canada, the Great River, the Lands and the Men (1927) 109 Canada, Land of Opportunities (1959) 116 Canada: New World Power (1945) 115 Canada: A Political and Social History (Mclnnis,

1947)30,34"

Canada: A Story of Challenge (Careless, 1953) 30 Canada: A Study of Cool Cabbage town (1951) 218 Continental Environments Cabbala, The 230, 247 (1947) 115 Caird, George B. 90, 92 Canada, Tomorrow's Giant Cairns, John 42 (1957) 117 Caliban, the Missing Link Canada as a Career (1927) (1873) 61 110 Call, Frank Oliver 236-7 Canada and the British Army Call My People Home 1846-71 (1938, 1963) 34" (1950)253 Canada Council 19, 20, 21, Callaghan, Morley 12, 14, 55, 166 17, 94, 144, 165, 168, Canada and her Northern 185, 194, 196, 199-204, Neighbors (1946) 115 205,214,215,221,223, Canada Looks A broad 345, 349, 353 (1938) 50 Calling Adventurers (1941) Canada Made Me ( 1 95 8 ) 271 117-18,132 Calvinism, the Doctrine of Canada Ride (1944) 115 the Scriptures (1849) 77 Canada and the United Cameron, Margaret 70 Nations (1956) 50 Cameron, W.A. 94 Canada Votes (1962) 49 Cameron Matthews English Canada West (1930) 113 Players 162 "Canada and World Affairs" Campbell, Grace 208 (C.I.I.A. series) 34, 50 Campbell, Marjorie Wilkins Canada and World Affairs 32, 141 (1 950-7 )(Eayrs, 1958)34 Campbell, Robert 86-7 Canada's Century (1951) Campbell, W.Wilfred 11, 116 17,71,264 Canada's Soldiers (1954) 34 Campbell of the Mounties Canadian Accent (1944) 170 17,277 Camus, Albert 117 Canadian Annual Review Can Faith Survive? (1964) (ed. Hopkins) 171 91 Canadian Anthology Canada: Brady (1932) 47; (Klinck and Walters, Siegfried (193 7) 52; Lady 1955) 20 Tweedsmuir (1941) 115 Canadian Anthology, A: Canada, An American Poems from "The FiddleNation (1935) 51 head" (1945-1959) 329

INDEX Canadian Authors' Association 6-10 passim, 12, 148, 163,181,235-6,242,254, 264 Canadian Book Week 8 Canadian Bookman (191939) 5, 6-10 passim, 171, 180-1,235,236 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (C.B.C.) 13, 17-18,21,28,55, 160, 165,166,268,273,297, 305, 335 Canadian Bureaucracy, The (1949) 48 Canadian Catalogues (Toronto Public Library) 138 Canadian Cities of Romance (1928) 110 Canadian Classical Association 66 Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1852) 135-6 Canadian Dictionary, The (1962) 64 Canadian Dualism ( 1 960 ) 52 Canadian Economic History (1956) 32 Canadian Economic Thought (1961)47 Canadian Economy in the Great Depression, The (1959) 46 Canadian Fairy Tales (1922) 139 Canadian Family Robinson, The (1935) 183 Canadian Forum (Toronto) 5-6,8, 10, 12,15,19,33, 54,58,61,72,119, 171, 174,175, 184, 190,235, 241,245,246,247,249, 255, 257, 262-5, 273, 277, 307, 328 Canadian Frontiers of Settlement (9 vols.) 45 Canadian General Election of 1957, The (1962)49 Canadian Government (series) 35,48 Canadian Government and Politics (1944) 49

Canadian Historical Association 40, 41 Canadian Historical Review (formerly Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada) 5, 6-7, 24, 29,31,33,72 Canadian House of Commons, The: Representation (N. Ward, 1950) 48 Canadian Identity, The (1961)28-9,50 Canadian Institute of International Affairs 34, 50 Canadian Japanese and World War II, The (1948) 51 Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 49 Canadian Journal of Religious Thought (1924-32) 84,93 Canadian Journal of Theology 93 Canadian Journey (1939) 113 Canadian Library Association 21 Canadian Library of Religious Literature, The (scries) 81-2 Canadian Literature (Vancouver journal) 20, 71 Canadian Literature Club (Toronto) 181 Canadian Literature Today (E.K. Brown, 1938) 13 Canadian Magazine (Toronto, 1893-1939) 121, 184,235,237 Canadian Mercury: A Monthly Journal of Literature and Opinion (Montreal, 1928-9)7-8, 119, 241, 245 Canadian Monthly and National Review (Toronto, 1872-8) 54 Canadian Municipal Government (1954) 48 Canadian Naturalist, The: A Series of Conversations on the Natural History of Lower Canada (1840,

383 1971) 135 Canadian Panorama, A (1929) 110 Canadian Players 163, 167 Canadian Playwright Series 149 Canadian Poems 18501952 (ed. Dudek and Layton, 1952) 17, 279, 287 Canadian Poetry Magazine 12, 252, 273 Canadian Poets: ed. Garvin (1916,1926) 11,72,235; ed. Gustafson (1943) 277 Canadian Political Parties (1957) 40 Canadian Repertory Theatre (Ottawa) 165 Canadian Short Stories (ed. Knister, 1928) 10, 11,185 Canadian Slavonic Papers 63 Canadian Society: Sociological Perspectives (1961) 52 Canadian Tour, A ( 1 921 ) 110 Canadian Trails Revisited (1926) 110 Canadian Wonder Tales (1918,1974) 139 Canadians in the Making (1958)32,51 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 246 Canzone d'Amore (Cavalcanti) 70 Capek, Karel 163 Capital, Interest and Profits (1959) 47 Cappon, James 13, 73, 344 Captain Salvation (1925) 169 Card, Raymond 149 Careless, J.M.S. 20, 29, 30, 31,32 Carleton Library (series) 35 Carlyle, Thomas 99 Carman, Bliss 8, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17,73,181,246,264, 266,269,313,344,355, 356 Carnal and the Crane, The (1957) 324-5

384 Carnap, Rudolph 106, 107 Carnegie, C.K. 114 Caron, Maurice B. 178 Carpenter, Frances 115 Carr, Emily 132, 133,232, 303,340 Carr, W.G. 113 Carrasquilla, Thomas 70 Carrington, Philip 90, 91, 92 Carroll, John 78 Carroll, Lewis 299 Carruthers, C.E. 148 Carrying Place (1944) 196 Cartier, Jacques 3 6, 37 Case, William 78 Case of Constable Shields, The 170 Case and His Cotemporaries( 1867-77) 78 Case for a New Reformation Theology, The (1959) 88 Cashier, The (1955) 215 Castle in Andalusia (1935) 169 Cataline (Roman politician) 172 Catalogue of Italian Plays, 1500-1700, in the Library of the University of Toronto (1961) 65 Catapult (Montreal magazine) 20 Cataract (Montreal magazine) 20, 329 Gather, Willa 62, 208 Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario (1964) 93 Catholic Education and Politics in Upper Canada (1955) 93 Catholic Problems in Western Canada (1921) 86 Catullus (Latin poet) 239 Cauchon, Bishop Pierre 156 Cavalcanti, Guido 70 Cawein, Madison 234 Celestial Cycle, The (1952) 60 Century of Anglo-Catholicism, A (1929) 99 Cerberus (1952) 288, 290, 292 Chalmers, R.C. 90, 92

INDEX Champlain, Samuel de 36,37 Champlain Road, The (1939) 173 Change of Pace, A (1956) 121 Changing Concepts of Time (1952) 45 Chapin, Miriam 5 1 , 116 Chaplin, Charles 288 Chapman, Ethel 178 Charles Hampden's British Players 162 Charles Lamb Society 65 Charlesworth, H.W. 121 Chartered Libertine, The (1954) 218 Chase, Richard 209 Chatterton, Thomas 61 Chayevsky, Paddy 160 Check List of Canadian Literature (1959) 168 Chekhov, Anton 200 Chequered Shade, Tlie (1963) 328 Child, Philip 173, 196-7, 299 Child's House, The (1923) 183 Chinese Culture and Christianity (1926) 86 Chinese Mirror, A (1925) 169 Chiniquy, Charles 77 Chipmunk (1949) 218 Chisholm, A.M. 170 Chittick, V.L.O. 1 1 Choice of Enemies, A (1957) 226-7 Choquet, Joseph P. 173 Chris in Canada ( 1 925 ) 138,178 Christian Church in Canada, The (Walsh, 1956) 33,93 Christian Doctrine (1953) 83 Christian Guardian (Methodist magazine) 80 Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, The (1956) 100 Christian Unity (1899) 86 Christianity and Classical Culture (1940) 41,62,89 Christianity and Humanity (1883)86

Christianity and Idealism (1897) 83 Christian's Knowledge of God, The (1940) 88 Chronique du PseudoTurpin (1936) 66 Church and the Age of Reason, The (I960) 91 Church and Sect in Canada (1948) 33,51,93 Church and State in Canada West (1959) 93 Church and State in Canadian Education (1959) 93 Church Union in Canada (1933) 87 Churchill, Charles 65 Churchill, Sir Winston 14 Church's Confession under Hitler, The (1962) 88 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 59, 66, 172 Cigarette Maker's Romance, A (drama) 161 Cities of Canada ( 1 95 1 ) 116 City Hall Street (1951) 290 City of Libertines (1958) 172 Civic Square Theatre (Toronto) 165 Civil Service of Canada,Tlie (1929)48 CIV /n (Montreal magazine 19,288 Claims of the Churchmen and Dissenters of Upper Canada (1828) 76 Clare, John 3 10 Clark, A.F.B. 54, 70 Clark, Catherine Anthony 141-2 Clark, Gregory 121, 122 Clark, Robert M. 47 Clark, S.D. 27, 32-3,51, 52,93 Clark, W.C. 46 Clarke, George Frederick 138, 178 Classics of the Soul's Quest (1922) 83 Claudel, Paul 163 Claudian (Latin poet) 25 Clay, Charles 183 Clearing in the West (1935) 129, 133

INDEX Genesis and Growth Cleaver, Elizabeth 139 (1905) 83 Cleopatra (Egypt) 171 Complaint and Satire in Clever Ones, The (1936) Early English Literature 183 (1956) 68 Clokie, H. McD. 49 Complete Bible, The: An Close Up: On Writing for American Translation Television (Hailey) 160 Clune, Frank 116 (1939) 94 Complete Prose Works of Coady, M.M. 87 "Coalfleet, Pierre" (Frank John Milton (ed. 1959) 65 Compositor in Canada, A C. Davison) 194, 195 Coast to Coast in a Puddle(1921) 110 Jumper (1930) 114 Comiis (Milton) 60 Conacher, D.J. 66 Cobbett, William 359 Coburn, Kathleen 64-5 Conacher, J.B. 42 Concept of Languages, The Cochrane, A.C. 88 Cochrane, C.N. 41,62, 89 (1959) 106-7 Cochrane, Rev. William 59 Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (SalverCode of the Northwest (1940) 170 son, 1939) 131-2,177 Conibear, Kenneth 170 Cody, H.A. 85 Connor, Carl Y. 11 Cogswell, Fred 20, 312-14 "Connor, Ralph" (Charles Cohen, Leonard 20, 324, W.Gordon) 5,84,85,94, 326-8 129,132,137-8,145,182, Colbert, Jean Baptiste 36 Cold Green Element, The 208, 344 Conover, Dora Smith 148 (1956) 293,294 Conrad, Joseph 58, 185, 196, Cole, G.D.H.39 Cole, Taylor 48 210, 220, 228 Consider Her Ways (1947) Coleridge, Samuel T. 64-5, 190, 191 272,316 Coleridge and Sara Hutchin- Constitutional Amendment in Canada (1950) 48 son and the Asra Poems Constitutional Issues in (1955) 65 Collected Poems: A. BouriCanada, 1900-31 (1933) not (1947) 238;Knister 48 Contact (Toronto magazine) (1949) 240, 277; Pratt (1958) 61,261;A.J.M. 19,280,288,290 Smith (1962)242,328 Contact Press 239, 288, 290, 297 Collin, W.E. 13,70,71,73, Contemporary Canada 245-6,262-3,279 Colombo, John Robert 328 (1959) 51,116 Colonial Office and Canada, Contemporary Verse: A 1867-87, The (1955) 34 Canadian Quarterly (B.C., Colony to Nation (1946) 1941-53) 15,271,277-8, 17,30 279, 285, 297-8, 307 Colour as Naked, The Contrasts (1922) 237 (1953) 283 Cook, Britton 146-7 Coloured Spectacles (1938) Cook, G.Ramsay 33 130 Cooper, J.I. 33 Come True (1926) 149 Cooper, James Fenimore 70 Commercial Empire of the Corbett, B.C. 48 St. Lawrence, The (1937) Cornell, Beaumont S. 195 27, 35-7 Cornish, John 21 8 Comparative Religion: Its Corrigan, Beatrice 65

385 Corry, J.A. 49 Cosmic Consciousness (1901) 80,344 Costain, Thomas B. 207, 208 Coughlan, Lawrence 75 Coulter, John 150-1, 157, 165,352 Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) 302-3 Coupland, Sir Reginald 25 Court for the Trial of AntiTraditionalist, A (1783) 75 Courting of Marie Jenvrin, The (Gwen Pharis Ringwood) 149, 150 Cox, F.J. 110 Crabbe, George 3 13 Crafle So Longe to Lerne, The (1959) 328 Cragg, G.R. 91 Craig, Gerald 27 Craig, John 141 Crawford, A.W. 58 Crawford, Isabella Valancy 73,355,358 Crawford, Kenneth G. 48 Crawford, Marion 161 Crawley, Alan 15,251, 277-8 Crawley, E.A. 76 Creative Writing in Canada (1952,1961)21,73 Creighton, Alan 13 Creighton, Donald G. 17, 20,22,27,28,30,31, 35-9, 337, 341 Crepe-Hanger's Carnival: Selected Poems 1955-58 (Souster, 1958) 290,291 Crerar, Thomas A. 3 Crest Theatre (Toronto) 166 Crestwood Heights (1956) 52 Critical Study of In Memorwm(1898) 57 Critique of Paradise Lost, A (1960) 68 Crito (Plato) 155 Cronin, A.J.210 Cronmiller, C.R. 92 Crosscountry (1949) 122, 213 Crossing Canada (1940) 115 Cruising Auk, The (1959) 317-20

386 Culture and Conscience (1936) 82 Culture of Contemporary Canada, The (\951) 21, 51,56,211 Cummings, E.E. 235, 320 Cunningham, Louis Arthur 173,177 Cure of St. Michel, The (1925) 178 Curious Annals (1956) 65 Currelly, C.T. 127 Currie, A.W. 46 Currie, Sir Arthur 109 Curtis, C.A. 46 Curve, Co Slow: A Romance of the Pacific Coast (1927) 169 Cutten, G.B. 83

INDEX Davison, Frank C. ("Pierre Coalfleet") 194, 195 Dawson, C.A. 51 Dawson, Sir J. William 80, 82 Dawson, R. MacGregor 20, 35, 47-8, 49 Dawson, S.E. 57 Day, Frank Parker 178 Day, Margaret 15 Day and Night (1944) 252, 265 Day of Wrath (1945) 196 Day before Yesterday, The (1925) 179 Days of Lome (1955) 31 Deacon, William Arthur 120, 254, 255 "Death in the Barren Grounds" (C.B.C. documentary) 305 Death of Pierrot, The (1926) 148-9 Debussy, Claude 337 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (E. Gibbon) 89 Deeper into the Forest (1948) 272 Deficit Made Flesh, The (1958) 309-11 Defoe, Daniel 136 Deirdre of the Sorrows (libretto, Coulter) 151, 352 De Koninck, Charles 90 De la Roche, Mazo 10, 17, 149, 168, 178,179-82, 183, 185,210,349,353 Delight (1926) 180,353 Delta (Montreal magazine) 20, 288 Demetrius (Greek critic) 66 DeMille,James9, 135, 136 Democracy in Alberta

Denison, Muriel 183 Denomy, Father A.J. 65 Dent, J.M., and Sons (publisher) 12, 174, 175 De Saint-Denys Garneau

(1949)70

Descent from Eden ( 1 959 ) 312,313 Deserter, The (1964) 229 Desire under the Elms (E. O'Neill) 146 Desportes, Philippe 66 Deutsch, John 47 Developing Canadian Community, The (1962) 51 Development of Dominion Status, 1900-1936, The

(1937)48

Devil's Mantle, The (1927) 169 Devil's Picture Book, The Dafoe, John W. 33, 39, 51 Daily Star (Montreal) 174 (1960) 324,325-6 Daily Star (Toronto) 199 Dewart, Rev. E.H. 72, 80 Dewdney, Selwyn218 Dale, Mrs. R.J. ("V.V. Dewey, John 26 Vinton") 178 Dalhousie Review 5, 7, 19, De Witt, Norman W. 104-5 Diamond Feather, The 62,71,119,175 (1962) 142 Daly, G.T. 86 Daniells, Roy 20, 53,68, Diary of Samuel March211,272,328 banks,The (1947) 123, Dante (Italian poet) 230 215-16 Dark Acres (1935) 173, 193 Dickens, Charles 129, 182, Dark Dawn, The (1926) 206 Dickinson, Emily 245, 251, 188-9 Dark Harvest (Gwen Pharis 320, 360 Dictionary of Canadian Ringwood) 149, 150 Dark Weaver, The (1937) Biography: ed. W.S. Wal177 lace (Macmillan) 24; ed. Darkness in the Earth, A G.W. Brown (U.T.P./ (1959)314 Laval) 33 D'Artagnan (1928) 171 Diefenbaker, John G. 41 Dartmoor Mystery, The Digby (1953) 231 (1935) 169 Direction (magazine) 280 Darwin, Charles 79, 87, 345, Divine Lady, The (1924) 170, 171 355 Davey, Frank 20 (1953)49 Divine Mission, The (1958) David and Other Poems Democracy in the Dominions 92 (1942)272,273,299 (1947) 49 Dix, Maurice B. 169 Democracy and Marxism Davidson, John 44 Dobbs, Kildare 232 Davies, Robertson 20, 122, (1955) 50 Dobson, W.A.C.H. 63 123-4,151-4,159,165, Democratic Government Doctrine of Being in the 205,214,215-17,219, and Poll tics (1946) 49 Aristotelian Metaphysics, 223,232,350 Demos (Gissing) 186 The (1951) 104 Davis, Donald 166 Denison, Merrill 32, 144-6, Doctrine of the Christian Davis, Murray 166 148, 152, 159, 163 Ministry (1959) 92

INDEX

Doctrine of the Church in the New Testament, The (1943) 90 Dodd, Mead and Company (publisher) 10, 188 Dog Who Wouldn't Be, The (1957) 142 Dominion Drama Festival 149, 164 Dominion of the North (1944) 17,30,35,36,37 Donald, P. 110 Donne, John 68, 215, 220, 242, 324 Donnell, David A. 328 Donnelly, Ignatius 345 Donnelly, Murray S. 48 Donovan, Peter 121, 122 Dorien, Ray 116 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 222 Double Hook, The (1959) 224-5 Dougall, Lily 84 Doughty, CM. 61 Douglas, Lloyd C. 84 Doukhobors of British Columbia, The (1955) 51 Dove, The (1933) 176-7 Dover Beach Revisited (1961) 251 Dow, John 92 Down the Long Table (1955)218 Drama of Euripides ( 1 94 1 ) 66 Dray, William H. 105 Dream Tapestries (1924) 237 Dream That is Dying, A (1954)290 Dreams (1956) 154 Dreiser, Theodore 189, 193 Drum of Lanoraye, The (1932) 173 Drums are Out, The (Coulter) 150 Drunken Clock, The (1961) 328 Dryad of Nanaimo, The (1931) 263 Dryden, John 335 Du Bartas, Guillaume de S. 70 Du Bartas en Angleterre (1908) 70

387

Edel, Leon 263 Edgar, Pelham 62, 69, 181 Edge (Edmonton magazine, 1963-9)20 Edinborough, Arnold 7n Edinburgh Festival 167 Eggleston, Wilfrid 116, 193 Eichner, Hans 65 Eisendrath, Rabbi M.N. 91 Elder, William 76 Elegy (T. Gray) 353 Elements Combined, The (1960) 32 Elements of Metaphysics (A. E. Taylor) 99 Elements of Political Science (1906) 50 Elgin, Lord 25 Eliot, C.WJ. 66 Eliot, George 215 Each Man's Son (1951) Eliot, T.S. 7, 70, 156,225, 212,213 230, 234, 235, 242-6 Earl Grey Music and Drapassim, 262, 263, 270, matic Trophy Competi294, 304, 347, 356 tion 162 Earle Grey Players (Toronto) Elizabeth I, Queen 335 Ellenbogan, George 20 165 Elliott, A.C. 113 Early Christian Church Ellis, M.B. 70, 71 (1957) 91 Early Traditions of Genesis, Elson, JohnM. 177 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 66, The (1907) 82 70, 233, 234, 340 Earth and High Heaven Emerson's Plutarch (1961) (1944) 218 East of the City (1946) 288, 66 Emperor Jones, The (E. 289 O'Neill) 148 East Coast (1951) 312 Empire and Communications Easter Egg, The (drama, (1950) 45 Reaney) 158,159 Empress of Hearts, The Easterbrook, W.T. 32, 46 Eaton, Lady 127 (1928) 171 Empson, William 249 Eaton, Evelyn 207, 208 En Mexico (1958) 288, 289, Eayrs, James 34, 50 Ebb Tide ( I K S ) 150 299 Eby, C.S. 86 Endicott, N.J. 67 England's French Dominion Ecclcs, William 3 1 E.C.K. (B.C. Kyte?) 175 (1932) 112-13 Economic Background of English Association of Dominion-Provincial Toronto 58, 73 Relations, The (1939) 46 English Bloods (1930) 113 Economic Problems of the English Repertory Company Prairie Pro vinces ( 1 93 5 ) 162 46 Enquiry into Goodness and Economics in a Canadian Related Concepts, An Setting (1959) 47 (1958) 106 Economics for Canadians Epicurus (Greek philosopher) 104-5 (H. and K. Buckley) 47 Dubliners (Joyce) 229 Dudek, Louis 15, 17,20, 279,280,287-90,291, 293, 297, 299 Duke University series (political) 49 Dumbells (entertainers) 161 Duncan, Alastair R.C. 105 Duncan, Dorothy 1 15-16 Duncan, Norman 138 Duncan, Sara Jeannette 344, 351 Dunham, Mabel 177 Dunkirk (1941) 259 Durham, Lord 24, 25 Durkin, Douglas Leader 169, 197 Duvar, John Hunter- 355

388 Epicurus and His Philosophy (1954) 104-5 Episcopacy and Reunion (1952) 92 Epithalamium in Time of War (1941) 294-5 Equations of Love, The (1952) 220 Erasmus (Dutch humanist) 99 Ericson, Leif 176 Ericsson, S.S. 116 Eros at Breakfast (1949) 151,152 Essays on Enripidcan Drama (1954) 59 Etliical Idealism of Matthew Arnold, The (1959) 67 Etymologizing in Greek Literature (1928) 66 Euboian League and its Coinage, The (\956) 64 Euripides (Greek dramatist) 59,66,239 Europe (1954) 288,289,299 Evangeline (Longfellow) 311 Evans, D.O. 71 Eve of St. Agnes (Keats) 306 Even Your Right Eye (1956) 304-5 Events and Signals (1954) 244, 245, 297 Everson, R.G. 315-17 Everyman Theatre (B.C.) 165 Evidence (Toronto magazine) 20, 329 Evolving Canadian Federalism (1958) 49 Ewart, J.S. 39 Examiner (Peterborough) 123,215 Execution (1958) 228-9 Experiment (ed. 1956) 239, 297 Explorations (journal, 19537)62 Explorers of the Dawn (1922) 179 Exquisite Perdita, The (1926) 171 Eye of the Needle, The: Satires, Sorties, Sundries (1957) 244 Eyes of a Gipsy (1926) 169

INDEX Fable of the Goats, The, and Other Poems (1937) 14,261 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) 60,67 Faint Amorist (1927) 169 Fairbairn, A.M.D. 150 Fairley, Barker 60-1, 69 Fairweather, E.R. 92 Falconer, J.W. 82 Falconer, Sir Robert 54, 81, 82, 126, 181 Falloon, Daniel 76 Family Portrait, The (Coulter) 151 Famous Players-Lasky Corporation 188 Paris, J.T. 109 Farm for Two Pounds, A (1935) 113 Farquharson, Mary 149 Farquharson, Walter 94 Farr, David 34 Father Abraham (1935) 172 Faulkner, William 206, 225 Fearful Symmetry (1947) 61 Fearing, Kenneth 244 Feast of Lupercal, The (1957) 230 Ferguson, G. Howard 10, 181 Ferguson, Wallace 42 Fergusson, Francis 159 Feme, Doris 277 Fewster, Ernest 124 Fiamengo, Marya 328 Fiddlehead, The (Fredericton magazine) 16, 19,313, 328, 329 Fiddlehead Poetry Book series 3 14 Field, Erastus Salisbury 358 Field, G.W. 56 Fife and Drum at Loiiisbourg (1899) 136 Fifty Years with the Baptist Ministers and Churches of the Maritime Provinces of Canada (1880) 78 Fifty Years in the Church of Rome (1885) 77 Finch, Robert 6, 13, 16,20, 249-51,265,277,360 Finnigan, Joan 328 Fir-Flower Tablets (1922) 237

Firebrand, The: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada (1956) 31 Fires in the Vine (1942) 178 Firestone, OJ. 45 First Epistle of Peter, The (1945) 91 First Statement: A Magazine for Young Canadian Writers (Montreal, 19425) 15-16,278,279,280, 285, 287, 297. See also, Northern Review, First Statement Press 307 First Winter, The (1935) 113-14 Fisher, J.R. 184 Fisher, John 120 Fisher, Peter F. 69 Fisherman's Spring ( 1 95 1 ) 125 Fisherman's Summer (1959) 125 Fisherman's Winter (1954) 125 Fiske, Minnie 161 Fitch, E.R. 87 Fitzgerald, Scott 199 Fitzroy, Yvonne 110 Five Poems (Hine, 1954) 324-5 Flaubert, Gustave 185, 200 Fleming, Agnes 349 Flenley, Ralph 42 Flight into Darkness ( 1 944 ) 295 Flowing Summer, The (1947)267,268 Flying Canoe, The (1929) 184 Flying Years, The (1935) 174 Foley, Pearl 169 Fontaine, Robert 232 Footner, Hulbert 169 Footnote to the Lord's Prayer (1951) 307 For What Time Slays (1955) 290, 291 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston 161 Forgotten Men (1933) 14, 197

INDEX

389

German Novel 1939-1944, From Apostle to Priest The (1949) 69-70 (1900) 82 From Our Town (1959) 121 Germanic Review 56 Forsey, Eugene 48 Gerontion (T.S. Eliot) 322 From Their Own Place Forster, E.M. 62 Ghost Murder, The ("Luke (Merrill Denison) 145 Forsythe, Bertram 163 Allan") 169 Frontenac, Count 3 1 Fortune My Foe ( 1 949 ) Gibbon, Edward 30, 89 Frontenac: The Courtier 151, 152", 153, 165 Gibbon, John Murray 114, Governor (1959) 31 Fortune Turns Her Wheel 169,236 Frontenac and the Maid of (1929) 169 Gibson, J. Douglas 46 Forty Years in Labrador the Mist (1927) 173 Frontier Riders, The (1925) Gielgud, Sir John 163 (1934) 86 Gifford,W.A. 91 Foster, Thomas 181 173 Foundation and Constitution Frost, Robert 235, 240, 252, Giguere, Roland 307 Gilbert, William 301 of the Christian Ministry, 267 Frost on the Sun (1957) 328 Gilson, Etienne 56, 89, 95-6, The (1826) 76 Frozen Fire (1937) 270-1 Foundations of Canadian 100-1, 102 Nationhood, The (1954) Ginsberg, Alan 292 Fruits of the Earth (1933) Girl in the Silk Dress, The, 190, 192-3 24-6 and Other Stories ( 193 1 ) Frye, Northrop 54, 57, 61, Fowke, V.C. 46 Fox, W. Sherwood 33, 66 69,72-3,206,233,261, 184 FPG: The European Years Gissing, George 186 279 Glaser, Vaughan 162 Fulford, Robert 7n (1973) 189 Glass Menagerie, The (T. Fur Trade in Canada, The France, Anatole 99 Francis Bacon, His Career (1930) 27 Williams) 154 and Thought (1962) 102 Glassco, John 309-11 Fuseli, Henry 306 Glazebrook, George P. de T. Franklin, Benjamin 25 Fuseli Poems (1960) 306 Franklin, Sir John 141, 343 34,35,50 Franklin of the Arctic Gleaming Archway , The Gallant, Mavis 228 Galsworthy, John 215 (1949) 141 (1929) 198 Fraser, Annie Ermatinger Gait, John 127, 128, 131 Glendinning, J.C. 110 Glengarry Schooldays 173 Gandhi, Mohandas 245 Fraser, Simon 361 (1902) 138 Garden of Vision, The Frechette, Louis 70 Glimpses of the Unseen (1929) 169 Frederick Philip Grove Gardner, Helen 65 (1898) 81 (1945) 17 Globe (Toronto), later Garneau, (Henri de) SaintFree Press (Winnipeg) 121, Globe and Mail 71, 121, Denys 70, 307 235 Garner, Hugh 17,218,228 235,236 Freedom of Jean Guichet, Glooskap's Country and GarrickClub (Hamilton) The (1927) 147 Other Indian Tales (1955) 162 Freeman, John 178 139 Garvin, JohnW. 8, 9, 11, Glorious Apollo (1925) 171 French, D.G. 10, 72 72, 73, 235 French, G.S. 33 Glover, T. R. 58, 84 Garvin, Mrs. John W. French, Samuel, Limited Go to Sleep, World ( 1 947 ) ("KatherineHale") 110, (publisher) 149 181 290 Go West— Go Wise! (M. French Canada in Transition Gassendi, Pierre 96, 97 Harrison, 1930) 113 (1943) 51 Geddie, John 86 French Canadian Outlook, Go West, Young Man, Go Genghis Khan 207 The (1946) 52 West (Pyke, 1930) 184 Genius of Shakespeare, The, French Text of the Ancrene God Forsaken (1930) 148 and Other Essays (1908) Riwle (ed. 1958) 66 God of Gods (1927) 147 58 God's Green Country (1922) Freud, Sigmund 200, 201, Geordie (1950) 231 281,299,346,350 178 George, James 344 Friday's Child (1955) 303-4 George v, King 109 God's Sparrows (1936) 196 Friendship (1943) 124 Georgian Poetry (Eng.) 235 Godwin, A. H. 108 Fripp, E.F.G. 113 Godwin, William 53, 65 Gerin-Lajoie, Paul 48 Forms of Value, The (1950) 106

390 Goethe, J.W. 60, 62, 69, 163 Goethe and Scott (1950) 62 Goggio, E. 63, 70 "Going Home" (drama, Callaghan) 165 Going Places (1939) 113 Golden Chalice, The (1935) 294 Golden Dog, The (W. Kirby) 11,207,353 Golden Phoenix, The, and Other French-Canadian Fairy Tales (1958) 141 Golden Pine Cone, The (1950) 141,142 Golden Scarab, The (1926) 169 Golden Trail, The: The Story of the Klondike Gold Rush (1954) 141 Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse, The (1928) 10 Goldsmith, Oliver (Canadian) 127-8 Goldsmith, Oliver (AngloIrish) 127,313 Goldwin Smith, Victorian Liberal (E.Wallace, 1957) 31 Gomery, Percy 109, 169 Gontcharov, Ivan 150 Goodwin, Craufurd D.W. 47 Gordon, A.R. 81, 82 Gordon, Rev. Charles W. See "Connor, Ralph." Gordon, H. Scott 47 Gordon, R.K. 68 Gordon, Walter 46 Gordon Commission (on Canada's economic prospects) 46 Gosse, Philip Henry 135 Gotlieb, Phyllis 328 Goudge, Thomas A. 103 Gourlay, Robert 44 Governor-General's Award 10, 13, 173, 247, 251, 253, 267,271,272,273,281, 287, 293, 299, 300, 303, 308, 320 Government of Canada, The (1947) 49 Government of Man, The

(1913)98

Government of Manitoba,

INDEX

The (Donnelly, 1962) 48 Government of Nova Scotia, The (J.M. Beck, 1957)48 Government of Prince Edward Island, The (MacKinnon, 1951)48 Gowan, Elsie Park 149 Gowans, Alan 32 Graff, W.L. 63, 69 Graham, Angus A. 178 Graham, Gerald 34 Graham, Gordon Hill 173 Graham, Gwethalyn 218 Graham, J.W. (classics writer) 66 Graham, John W. 232 Graham, Victor E. 66 Graham, W.C. 82 Grain (1926) 186, 187 Grand Theatre (London, Ont.) 163 Grant, Douglas 65 Grant, George Monro 9, 86 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) 198 Graphic Press (Ottawa) 12, 195 Gras, Norman S.B. 42 Graves, Robert 207, 299 Gray, John 144 Gray, Thomas 3 53 Grayson, Ethel Kirk 178 Great Awakening in Nova Scotia, The (1948) 93 Great English Poets (1929) 58

Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) 227 Great Stories of Canada (children's series) 141 Greek Critic, A: Demetrius on Style ( 1 9 6 1 ) 66-7 Greek Point of View, The (1925) 57 Greek Tragedy (1920) 59 Green, H. 149 Green, Thomas Hill 83, 96 Green Pitcher (1928) 251 Green Plush (1932) 183 Green World ( 1945) 285 Greene, E.J.H. 70 Gregg, William 78 Gregory, Lady 151 Gregory, Claudius 14, 197 Grenfell, Sir Wilfred 86

Greve, Felix Paul. See Grove, Frederick Philip. Greville, Fulkc 68 Grey, Earl 25, 162 "Grey Owl" (Archibald Stansfeld Belaney) 140, 352 Grey Ship Moving (1945) 267, 268-9 Grierson, John 18 Grome Mine Mystery, The (1933) 169 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 105 Group Settlement (1936) 51 Group of Seven (painters) 6, 8, 80, 132, 148, 243, 265, 344 Grouped Frequency WordList of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, A (1957) 64 Grove, Frederick Philip (Felix Paul Greve) 9-10, 12,17,119,124-5,131, 133,184,186,188,18993,195, 199,205,345, 347, 353-4, 360 Growing Pains (1946) 132 Growth of a Man (1938) 182 Grube, George M.A. 66-7, 104 Guesses at the Riddle of Existence (1897) 81 Guest, L.M. 110 Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love (1948) 70 Guillet, Edwin 33 Gunn, W.T. 86 Gustafson, Ralph 17, 277, 294-6 Gutenberg Galaxy, The (1962) 42,62 Guthrie, Sir Tyrone 166, 167 Habitant-Merchant, The (1939) 184 Haig-Brown, Roderick Langmere 125, 137, 140, 141, 142, 225 Hailey, Arthur 160,209 "Hale, Katherine" (Mrs. John W. Garvin) 110, 181 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler 9, 11, 337, 338, 359

INDEX

Hawthorn, Harry B. 51 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 69, 205,207,209,211,234 Hayes, John 141 Hayne, D.M. 70 Hayward, Victoria 110 He Dwelt among Us (1936) 84 He Rides the Sky (1941) 198 Head, Sir Edmund 3 1 Headwaters of Canadian Literature (MacMechan, 1924) 10,73 Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (Lowry) 230 Heart of an Immigrant, The: or, "Just Life" in Canada (1931) 113 Heart of a Peacock (1953) 132 Heathen World, The (1884) 86 Heavysege, Charles 216, 355 Hebbel, Friedrich 69 Hebrew Origins (1936, 1950, 1960) 62, 82 Hegel, G.W.F. 79, 343, 344 Heichelheim, P.M. 42, 64 Hell! I'm British (1938) 113 Helleiner, Karl 42 Hemingway, Ernest 185, 199,200,213,226 Hemlow, Joyce 65 Henault, Gilles 307 Hendel, Charles W. 70, 102-3 Henel, Heinrich 69 Henry, Walter 127 Henry V (Shakespeare) 167 129 Henry James, French Harris, Eric 151 Writers and American Harris, Lawren 163, 237, 239 Women (Buitenhuis, 1961) Harris, W.R. 85 Harrison, M. 113 69 Henry James, Man and Harron, Donald 165 Author (Edgar, 1927) 62, Harry Black (1956) 231 69 Hart House Theatre 1 1 1-12, 144, 145, 146,163, 165, Henson, Josiah 78 351 Hepburn, Mitchell 112 Hasell, Miss (travel writer) Her Majesty's Theatre 110, 112 (Montreal) 162 Hatch, Edwin 79 Heraclitus (Greek philosoHath Not a Jew ... (1940) pher) 317 247, 277 Herbert, George 301 Hauptmann, Gerhart 69 Herbin, J.F. 178

Haloed Tree, The (1956) 312 Hambleton, Ronald 17, 278, 280, 287 Hamil, F.C. 33 Hamilton, Lady 171 Hamilton, A.C. 67 Hamilton, Alexander 40 Hamilton, Harold 82-3 Hamilton, Kenneth 92 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 58, 66, 161, 246, 305 Hamlet, an Ideal Prince (1916) 58 Hamsun, Knut 193 Handbook of Canadian Literature: A. MacMurchy (1906) 72; Rhodenizer (1930) 10 Handbook of Christian Ethics, A (1908) 83 Hands across the Pacific (1951) 116 Hangman Ties the Holly, The (1955) 302-3 Hansen: A Novel of Canadianization (1924) 194-5 Hanson, Eric 47 Happy Time, The (1945) 232 Hardy, E.R. 92 Hardy, Thomas 99, 220, 259 Hardy, W.G. 172 Hare and the Tortoise, The (1926) 194 Harland, Gordon 88 Harney, John Paul 328 Harper of Heaven: A Record of Radiant Living ( 1 948 )

391

Here and Now (Toronto magazine, 1947-9) 16 Here and Now (Layton, 1945) 292 Here's to Canada! (1941 ) 115-16 Heresy of Courtly Love, The (1947) 65 Heritage of Western Culture, The (1952) 90 Herklots, H. 113 Herman, Alan ("Ted Allan") 144, 198 Heroics (1961) 324 Hesse, Hermann 56 Hettlinger, R.F. 92 Hetty Dorval( 1947) 220 Hicks, Edward 360 Hicks, Seymour 161 Hiebert, Paul 232 High and Dry (1938) 113 High Hazard (1928) 170 High Plains, The (1938) 193 Higher Hill, The (G. Campbell, 1944) 208 Highest Hill, The (HaigBrown, 1949) 225 Highways of Canadian Literature (J.D. Logan andD.G. French, 1924) 10,17,72 Hill Top (1935) 178 Hilliard, Albert L. 106 Hincks, Sir Francis 31 Hind, Cora 112 Hine, Daryl 20, 324-6 Hines, Duncan 113 Hippocrates (Greek physician) 207 Hirsch, John 166 His Dominion (1917) 86 His Majesty's Yankees (1942)208 Historical View of the Church of England, An (1830) 76 History of Ancient Western Philosophy, A (1959) 104 History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1923) 32 History of the Canadian People (1943) 17 History of the Catholic Church in Western Canada (1910) 87

392 History and Character of Calvinism, The (1954) 91 History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955) 100 History of Emily Montague, The (novel, 1769)231,342 History of English-Canadian Literature to the Confederation, A (Baker, 1920) 10,72 History of Fanny Burney (1958) 65 History of the Jews in Canada (1945) 92 History of the Lutheran Church in Canada (1961) 92 History of the Presbyterian Church in the Dominion of Canada (1885) 78 History, Prophecy and the Monuments (1896-1911) 82 History of Psychology (1912-21)97-8 History of the Roman World from 30 B.C. to A.D.138.A (1944) 63 History of Transportation in Canada (Glazebrook) 35 Hitler, Adolf 14, 40, 196, 197 Hitleriad, The (1944) 247 Hodder and Stoughton (publisher) 81 Hodgetts, J.E. 35, 48 Hoeniger, F.D. 68 Holiday in Canada, A (1924) 110 Hollow Universe, The (1960) 90 Holy Manhattan (Coulter) 151

Home Made Banners (1946)229 Home is the Stranger (1950)225 Home Theatre (B.C.) 163 Homer (Greek poet) 53, 57, 67,79 Homesteaders, The (1936) 178 Hood, Colin 113 Hood, Hugh 20

INDEX

Hood, Robert Allison 1 69 Hood, William C. 47 Hooker, J.H. 113 Hope, Bob 232 Hope Deferred (1949) 152 Hope of the Gospel, The (1951) 92 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 295,304,347 Horace (Latin poet) 59, 62, 66 Hordern, William 88 Hornyansky, Michael 141 Houde, Camillien 112 House of All Sorts, The (1944) 132 House in the Quiet Glen, The (Coulter) 151 Housman, A.E. 234, 245 How Many Angels (1956) 222 Howe, CD. 213 Howe, Joseph 25, 355 Huckleberry Finn. See, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hudson Review 61 Hudson's Bay (1855) 78 Hughes, Everett C. 5 1 Hugo, Victor 7 1 Huldowget (1926) 173 Hulme, T.E. 262 Humanities in Canada, The (1947) 54 Humanities Research Council 54, 55 Hunter and the Medicine Man, The (1966) 142 Hunter-Duvar, John 355 "Hunting Stuart" (drama, R. Davies) 151 Huntingdon, Countess of 75 Huston, Walter 161 Hutchison, Bruce 114, 116, 117 Hutchison, Margaret 219 Hutton, Maurice 57, 120-1

Character (1920) 126 Idylls of the King (Tennyson) 58 Iliad (Homer) 57 Ill-Tempered Lover, The, and Other Poems (1948) 266 Image of Canada (1953) 116 Imitation and Design (MacCallum, ed. 1953) 62, 104 Imperfectly Proper (1920) 121

Impressions of the Mind, The (1835) 76 Improved Binoculars, The: Selected Poems (Layton, 1956) 293 In Memoriam (Tennyson) 57,58,234,311 In Search of Canadian Liberalism (1960) 39, 40-1, 50 In Search of Myself (Grove, 1946) 131, 133, 189, 190-1, 193 In the West (1935) 113 Incomplete A nglers (Robins) 357 Index Aristophaneus (Todd) 66 Indians of British Columbia, The (1958) 51 Infant Baptism (1823) 76 Inferno (Dante) 230 Infinite Moment, The (1950, 1964) 68 Influence des saisons de Thomson sur la poésie descriptive en France, 1759-1810, L' (1927) 70 "Inheritance, The" (drama, Boyle) 165 Inman, M.K. 47 Innis, Harold A. 27, 28, 32, 39, 42, 45, 62, 341 Innis, Mary Quayle 6, 184 Innocent Traveller, The (1949) 220 Ibsen, HenrikJ. 63, 163,264 Instincts and Religion (1940) 83 Ice Cod Bell or Stone ( 1 962 ) 276, 328 Institute of Canadian Studies Idea of a Theater (CarletonU.) 56 (F. Fergusson) 159 Institute of Mediaeval Idealism in National Studies. See Pontifical

393

INDEX

Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Interpretation of Religion, The (1928) 83 Interpreters' Bible (1951-7) 91 Introduction to Democratic Theory (1960) 50 Introduction to the Old Testament (1905) 82 Introduction to the Poetry of Robert Browning, An (1889) 58 Introduction to Political Economy, An (1941) 47 Irving, Henry 149, 161 Irving, John A. 51, 90, 95n, 97, 106 Irving, Washington 70 Irwin, Violet 139 Irwin, W.A. 82 Isherwood, Christopher 281 Israel, Charles E. 20, 222 It Needs to be Said (1929) 119, 190 Italians in Early American History (1930) 70 It's Never Over (1930) 201

Citizen of Geneva (1937) 103 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist (1934) 70-1, 103 Jeffers, Robinson 235 Jen of the Marshes (1921) 178 Jenness, Diamond 51 Jesuit Fathers 94, 208, 343 Jesuit Relations, The ... (1896-1901) 259 Jesus of History, The (1919) 84 Jesus the Messiah in Prophecy and Fulfilment (1891) 80 Jewett, Sarah Orne 208 Jewish Community in Canada, The (1970, 1971) 92

Jewish Spirit Triumphant, The (1944) 91 Jig for the Gypsy, A (1954) 151, 153-4 Jocz, Jacob 90-1 Joerg, W.L.G. 45 Jogues, Father Isaac 260 JohannLind (1928) 176 John, Saint 82 John (1937) 198 John Black, the Apostle of Jack, Donald 144 the Red River (1898) 85 lack Ralston; or, The OutJohn Holden Players 164 break of the Nauscopees: John Locke and English A Tale of Life in the Far Literature of the North-East of Canada Eighteenth Century (1903) 138 (1936) 68 Jackson, A.Y. 132 John Matheson (1923) 178 Jackson, George 81, 82 John Paul's Rock (1932) Jackson, Harold 34 178 Jacob, Fred 147-8, 179, 183 Johnson, A.H. 95n, 100, Jacques Maritain (1937) 103-4 102 Johnson, Emily Pauline 5, Jake and the Kid (1961) 139, 264, 352 223, 224, 232, 352 Johnson, Harry G. 47 Jalna (1927) 10, 17, 179, 180-2, 335 Johnson, Lionel 325 Johnson, Dr. Samuel 123, James, Henry 62, 69, 220, 215, 344-5 233 Johnson, Skuli 66 James, William 96 Johnson, W.S. 124 James the Lord's Brother Johnston, Charles 33 (1906) 82 Jamieson, Stuart, 45, 46, 51 Johnston, Franz 148 Johnston, George (poet) Janets (1935) 173 317-20 Jardine Memorial Prize 251 Johnston, George Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

(theologian) 90 Johnstone, J.K. 68 Joliat, E.A. 70 Jones, C.M. 66 Jones, D.G. 20, 328 Jones, F.E. 52 Jonson, Ben 163 Jordan, L.H. 83 Jordan, W.G. 81 Joseph Andrews (Fielding) 68 Josephine, Empress (France) 171 Joudry, Patricia 144, 154-5 Journal (G.J. Mountain, 1845) 78 Journal of Economic History 32

Joyce, James 7, 199, 200, 206, 229, 230, 262, 347 Joyous Adventure, A (1928) 108 Julie; or, La Nouvelle Heloise (1949) 71 Jung, C.J. 61 Jupiter Eight (1936) 183, 184 Juvenal (Roman poet) 66 Kafka, Franz 299, 303, 347 Kak the Copper Eskimo (1924) 139 Kane, Paul 9 Kant, Emmanuel 79, 83, 105 Kean, Edmund 161 Keats, John 63, 195, 196, 234, 263, 294, 306, 316 Keirstead, B.S. 47 Kennedy, H.A. 109 Kennedy, Leo 6, 7, 14, 197, 241, 245-6, 263, 264-5, 356 Kennedy, W.P.M. 24, 48 Kermode, Frank 42 Kerr, Donald 31 Kerr, W.B. 34 Key, Archibald 148 Key of Dreams, The ( 1 922 ) 169 Keynes, J.M. 46 Ki-Yu: A Story of Panthers (1934) 137, 140 Kilbourn, William 20, 31, 32 Killdeer, The, and Other Plays (1962) 145, 158-9

394 Kinder Bees, The (1935) 183 Kindred of the Wild, The (1902) 137 King, "Basil" (Rev. William Benjamin) 5 King, Rev. John 57 King, William Lyon Mackenzie 3, 40-1, 112, 245 King Decides, The (1956) 154 "King Phoenix" (drama, R. Davies) 151 Kingdom and the Messiah, The (1911) 82 Kingdom of the Sun, The (1927) 173, 198 King's Fool, The (1931) 173 Kingsley, Harold 169 Kingston International Players 165 Kinniburgh, James 113 Kipling, Rudyard 234 Kirby, William 9, 11, 207 Kirkconnell, Watson 54, 60 Kite, The (1962) 224 Kittredge, George Lyman 59 KleeWyck (1941) 132,232 Klein, Abraham Moses 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 197, 222-3, 246-9, 263, 264, 265, 274, 276, 277, 326, 341 Klinck, CarlF. 17, 20, 71, 333 Klinck, G.A. 70 Klondike (1958) 232 Knister, Raymond 6, 10, 11, 184, 185, 195-6,239-41, 252, 263, 277, 358 Knot in the Wood, The (1955) 307 Knox, Alexander 179 Knox, F.A. 46 "Knox, Gilbert." See Macbeth, Madge. Knox, R.S. 255 Knox College Monthly 81 Kong (1927) 169 Kosa, John 51 Kreisel, Henry 17, 221-2 Kristli's Trees (1948) 177 Kriztjansson, A. 113 Kropotkin, Peter 53 Kyte, E.G. 175

INDEX

Laurentian Lyrics and Other Laconics (1930) 239 Ladies' Home Journal (U.S.) Poems (1915) 238 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid 3, 24, 31, 200 40 Lady of Shalott, The Laut, Agnes 5 (Tennyson) 234 LaViolette, F.E. 51 La Fayette, Madame de 70 Law, Robert 82 Lafontaine, Sir Louis Law, William 75 Hippolyte 25 Laight, Frederick E. 265 Lawrence, D.H. 215, 235, Lake Dore (1930) 148 237, 262, 292 Lamb, Charles 65 Lawrence, Margaret (religion writer) 81 Lamb, W. Kaye 35 Lambert, Richard S. 141 Lawrie Todd (1830) 127 Lampman, Archibald 11, 17, Laws and Explanation in History (1957) 105 245, 250, 264-5, 308, 353, Layton, Irving 15, 17, 20, 355, 357 Land of Afternoon, The 279, 280, 287, 288, 290, (1924) 183 292-4, 297, 298, 308, 326, Land of Choice: The 328,320,346,358 Hungarians in Canada Leach, W.T. 59 Leacock, Stephen 5, 9, 33, (1957) 51 Land and People of Canada, 50, 113, 129, 131, 183, The (1947) 115 232, 237, 343, 351, 352 Landon, Fred 27, 33 Leading Canadian Poets Langford, Cameron 137 (1948) 251 Language and Languages Leaven of Malice (1954) (1932) 63 216 Lanier, Sidney 234 Leavis, F.R. 300 Lansdowne Theatre LeBourdais, D.M. 116 (Toronto) 165 Lecture on Education, A Lantern Marsh (1923) 195 (1864) 59 Lapointe, Paul-Marie 307 Lectures on the Millenium Lark Ascending (1932) 182 (1844) 77 Larsen, Thorleif 63 Legends of French Canada (1931) 184 Laskin, Bora 48 Last of the Curlews, The Legends of Vancouver (1955) 137 (1911) 139 Late Archaic Chinese: A Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Grammatical Study 96 (1959) 63 Leo, Ulrich 70 Latin Dual and Poetic Leonard, Grace 183 Diction, The (1923) 63 LePan Douglas 229, 284, Lattice for Momos, A 307-9, 352, 358 (1958) 315-17 Leprohon, Mrs. J.L. 172 Laud, William 62 LeRossignol, James E. 184 Laughing Buddha, The Lescarbot, Marc 162 (1925) 169 Leslie, Kenneth 267, 269 Laughing Queen, The Let Us Compare (1929) 171 Mythologies (1956) 324, Laughing Stalks (1958) 288, 326-8 289 Letter of Instruction to the Laughter in the Mind, A Roman Catholic (1958) 293 Missionaries of Nova Laurence, Margaret Scotia and Its Depen(novelist) 228 dencies (1804) 77

INDEX

Letter to the Right Honour- Lloydminster, or 5000 Miles with the Barr Colonists able Thomas Franklin (1929) 111 Lewis, M.P., A (1830) 76 "Letters in Canada" (U.T.Q. Lobstick Trail, The (1921) annual review) 13, 70, 71, 169 Local Pride, A (1962) 328 72, 207, 209, 266, 277 Letters of Mephibosheth Lochhead, Douglas 328 Stepsure. See, Stepsure Locke, John 68, 101, 102 Locksley Hall (Tennyson) Letters. Letters of Sara Hutchinson 235 (ed. 1954) 64 Lodge, Rupert Clendon 95_6, 99-100 Levine, Norman 20, 117-18, Lodging for a Night (1939) 127, 132, 229, 328 Levy, Kurt L. 70 113 Lewis, C. Day 252 Loeb series (classics) 66 Lewis, R.W.B. 35 "Lofty" (travel writer) 110, Lewis, Sinclair 215 111 Lewis, Thomas Franklin 76 Logan, H.A. 46, 47 Liberal Party in Alberta, The Logan, J.D. 10, 72 (L.G. Thomas) 49 Lonely Passion of Judith Life (J. Henson, 1849) 78 Hearne, The (1956) 230 Life in the Clearings (1853) Long, Morden H. 17 128, 133 Long Pea-Shooter, The Life is a Jest (1924) 110 (1954) 293,308 Life and Letters of Egerton Long Return, The (1959) Ryerson (1937, 1947) 33 141 Longest Way Round, The Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, The (1937) 183 Longfellow, Henry (1921) 24 Lighthall, William D. 9 Wadsworth 70 Lillooet (1954) 312 Looking at Architecture in Lily of Fort Garry, The Canada (1958) 32 (1930) 174-5 Looking Forward (1913)87 Limelight (Chaplin film) Looseley, Elizabeth 52 Lord Durham (1929) 24 288 Lincoln, Abraham 354 Lord Jim (Conrad) 196 Lindsay, A.D. 39 Lord of the Rings, The Lindsay, Vachel 235 (Tolkien) 142 Line, John 88, 92 Lord of the Silver Dragon Lipset, S.M. 49 (1927) 176 Lome, Lord 3 1 Lismer, Arthur 163 Literary Notebooks, 1797Lome Pierce Gold Medal (Royal Society of 1801 (Schlegel, ed. 1957) 65 Canada) 10, 253 Little Theatre (movement) Lost Atlantis, The (1892) 61 Lost in the Barrens (1956) 6, 111, 144, 146, 148, 149, 162-4, 216 142 Littlewood, Joan 166 Lost Dimension (1960) 312 Livesay, Dorothy 6, 14, 20, Lotze, Rudolph Hermann 96 197, 240, 249, 251-3, Louis xiv, King 172, 177 262-5 passim, 276, 277, Louis xv, King 173 297 Love the Conqueror Worm Livesay, Florence Randal (1952) 293 179 Love and Salt Water (1956) Lloyd, Cecil Francis 6, 124 220

395 Love Where the Nights are Long (1962) 329 Loved and the Lost, The (1951) 203,214,353 Low, F.B. 108 Low Life( 1926) 149 Lowell, Amy 235, 237 Lower, Arthur R.M. 17, 20, 22,27,30,32,49,51 Lowry, Malcolm 17, 229-30, 328 Lucien (1938) 178 Luck of Ginger Coffey, The (1960) 194,230-1 Luck of the Mounted, The 170 Luckyj, G. 63 Ludwig, Jack 20 Luke Baldwin's Vow (1948) 199 Luscombe, George 166 Lyon, George Francis 134 Lyon, Peyton V. 50 Lyrics Unromantic (1942) 294-5 Macara, Mudie 57 McArthur, Peter 124 Macaulay, Thomas 22, 43 Macbeth, Madge ("Gilbert Knox") 127, 149, 169, 183 MacCallum, Reid 62, 104 McCarthy, Joseph 19, 218 McCaul, John 59 McClelland and Stewart (publisher) 35 McClung, Nellie 94, 129, 133, 137-8 McCorkell, E.J. 56 McCormick, D.H. I l l McCourt, Edward A. 176, 225 McCulloch, John Herries 173, 193 McCulloch, Thomas 73, 77, 94, 341 McCurdy, J.F. 82 McDiarmid, O.J. 45 MacDonald, Bishop Alexander 84-5 Macdonald, Sir John A. 3 1 , 35, 37, 40, 261 McDonald, V.C. 48 MacDonald, W.L. 68 MacDonald, Wilson 8, 9

396 McDougall, Colin 228-9 McDougall, D.J. 42 McDougall, E. Jean ("Jane Rolyat") 174-6 McDougall, John 85 McDougall, R.L. 56 McDowell, Franklin Davey 173 MacEwen, Gwendolyn 328 McFadyen, J.E. 81, 82 MacGibbon, D.A. 46 McGill Daily (Montreal) 241 McGill Fortnightly Review (Montreal, 1925-7) 7-8, 241, 242, 243, 245 McGill Poetry Series 324 McGill-Queen's University Press 56 MacGillivray, Miss C.H. 177 MacGillivray, J.R. 63, 207, 210 McGillivray, James 173 MacGregor, D.C. 46 MacGregor, M.F. 64 McGregor, Malcolm 42 McHenry, Dean E. 49 Mcllwraith, T.F. 51 Mclnnes, Graham 228 Mclnnis, Edjar 30, 34, 50 Mclvor, R. Craig 45 Mclver, R.M. 50 MacKay, Isabel 149 MacKay, L.A. ("John Smalacombe") 67, 147, 175, 263, 264, 266 MacKay, Robert A. 47, 50 McKelvie, B.A. 173 Mackenzie, Alexander (explorer) 36, 361 MacKenzie, F. Scott 92 Mackenzie, William (economist) 47 Mackenzie, William Lyon 31,37,38,207 MacKinnon, Frank 48 Mackintosh, W.A. 45, 46, 47 McLachlan, Alexander 359 McLaren, Floris Clarke 270-1, 277 Maclean, H.N. 68 Maclean, John 85 MacLean, Kenneth 68 Maclean's (magazine) 184

INDEX MacLennan, Hugh 17, 94, 122, 205, 210, 211-14, 215, 223, 232, 357 McLeod, A.W. 76 McLuhan, Marshall 42, 62, 341, 360 MacLure, Millar 67, 232 MacMechan, Archibald 10, 58, 73, 124, 184, 352 Macmillan, Cyras 139 MacMillan, Don 218 Macmillan of Canada (publisher) 35, 251 MacMurchy, Archibald 72 MacMurchy, Marjorie 183 McNab, John 92 McNaught, Kenneth 32 Macnaughton, John 58, 119 MacNaughton, Sarah 111 McNeill, James 141 McNeill, John T. 87, 91 MacNutt, W.S. 31, 33 Macphail, Sir Andrew 58 McPhee, Janet 149 Macpherson, C.B. 49, 50 McPherson, Hugo 69 Macpherson, Jay 20, 300-2, 303,358 Macready, Charles 161 McRobbie, Kenneth 328 McTavish, Newton 121 McTavish, Simon 36 McWhinney, Edward 48 MadCarews, The (1927) 188-9 Madame de la Fayeite (1922) 70 Madden, J.F. 64 Maeterlinck, Maurice 163 Magic Road, The (1925) 178 Magnificent Obsession (1929) 84 Magoun, P.P. 64 Magpie, The (1923) 197-8 Main Currents of American Thought (Parrington) 12 Mair, Charles 157, 355 Makers of Canadian Literature (series) 11, 72 Malherbe, Francçois de 66 Mallarmé, Stéphanc 243 Malloch, A.E. 68 Mallory, J.R. 48, 49 Malvern Essays (1930) 124

Man Forbid, A (1935) 177 Man from Margaree, The (1971) 87 Mandel, Eli 20, 72, 305-6 Manitoba (1957) 33^ Manitoba Theatre Centre 166 Manitou Portage (1930) 148 Mann, Stanley 144 Mann, Thomas 56, 226, 230 Mann, W.E. 51 Mansfield, Katherine 185, 200 Manson, William 81 Mantegna, Andrea 321 Mantell, Robert B. 161 Manual of Christian Theology on the Inductive Method (1900) 83 Many Colored Coat, The (1960) 203, 214 Many Moods (1932) 261 "March, Bernard" 245. See also Scott, Frank R. Marches of the North (1931) 113 Marconi, G.M. 258 Mardi (Melville) 230 Maria Chapdelaine (Hemon) 347, 352 Marie Antoinette 171 Maritain, Jacques 89, 102, 199, 201,202 Maritime Provinces of British North America, The... (W.B. Kerr, 1941) 34 Mark, Saint 90 Mark, The (1958) 222 Marlowe, Christopher 68, 246 Marlyn, John 20, 223 Marriott, Anne 14, 265, 271-2, 277 Marryat, Frederick 135 Marsden, Joshua 78, 94 Marsh, D.B. 47 Marsh Hay (Merrill Denison) 145, 146, 148 Marshall, Joyce 17 Martin, Burns 65, 175 Martin, Chester 24-6 Martin-Harvey, John 161 Martyrdom and Miracle (1950) 91

INDEX

Marvell, Andrew 317 Marx, Karl 16, 200, 201, 281, 299, 345, 346 Marx Brothers (entertainers) 161 Mary, Queen (England) 109 Mary, Queen of Scots 171 Masefield, John 234, 294 Masque of Aesop, A (1952) 151, 153 Mass Culture (1957) 62 Masses (magazine, 1932-4) 12,184 Massey, Raymond 161 Massey, Vincent 41, 120, 126, 146, 163. See also Royal Commission. Massey Commission. See Royal Commission. Massey Report. See, Report of the Royal Commission. Master of the Mill, The (1944) 190, 191, 345 Master Works of Canadian Authors (series) 11 Masters, D.C. 35, 42 Masters, Edgar Lee 235, 254, 312 Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict (1948) 62 Maude, Cyril 161 Maugham, Somerset 150 Maupassant, Guy de 200 Mavor, James 44 Maxwell, J.A. 47 May, H.C. 82 Mayer, C.F. 69 Mayo, H.B. 50 Meaning of Christ for Paul, The (1949) 90 Meanwhile (1927) 194 Measure of the Year (1950) 125 Mechanical Bride, The: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) 62 Mediaeval Studies (journal) 89 Medieval Drama in Chester (1955) 60 Mediums and Mystics (1923) 81 Meek, Theophile J. 63, 82, 94

397

Mitchell, W.O. 17, 223-4, Mehlberg, Henryk 106 232, 340 Meighen, Arthur 3 Mixture of Frailties, A Meisel, John 49 (1958) 216-17 Melville, Herman 209, 229, Moby Dick (Melville) 230 230, 234 Modern Canadian Poetry Mémoires intimes (ed. Benson, 1930) 13 (Fréchette, ed. 1961) 70 Modern Humanism and Memoirs of a Canadian Christian Theism (1939) Merchant (auto90 biography) 126 Modern Language Club 57 Men of Kildonan, The Modern Language Associa(1926) 173 tion (M.L.A.) 57 Mencken, H.L. 215, 245 Mercantile Library Associa- Modern State, The (1926) 50 tion of Hamilton 57 Modernism Past and Present Merchant of Venice, The (1932) 99 (Shakespeare) 167 Moir, John 33, 93 Meredith, George 62 Merry America (1939) 114 Moiseiwitsch, Tanya 166 Molière (French dramatist) Messianic Prophecy Vin70, 152, 163 dicated (1899) 80, 81 Molière (1930) 70 Metal and the Flower, The Moll Flanders (Defoe) 194 (1954) 281, 282, 297 Molson family (Montreal) Metalious, Grace 210 32 Middleton, J.E. 148, 183 Midland, The (u.s. journal) Monsarrat, Nicholas 116, 209 195,241 Montaigne, Michel 124 Mill, John Stuart 64 Montgomery, Lucy Maude Millar, Margaret 209 5, 137-8, 140, 183 Millay, Edna St. Vincent Montreal: A Brief History 245, 251, 267, 294 (J.I. Cooper) 33 Millman, T.R. 33 Montreal, Seaport and City Milne, W.S. 149 (Leacock, 1942) 33 Miltiades (Athenian Montreal Group (poets) 7, general) 316 15, 241-9, 263, 278 Milton, John 6, 53, 60-9 Montreal Repertory Theatre passim, 256 Milton and the Puritan 163 Montrealer (journal) 122 Dilemma (1942) 67 Moodie, Susanna (née Milton's Royalism (1943) Strickland) 11,128-9, 62 133,337,339,351 Mine Inheritance (1942) Moonlight and Common 174 Day (1922) 237 Miraculous Birth of Language, The (1937) 63 Moore, Brian 20, 194, 209, 214,223,225,229,230-1 Misadventure of a Working Moore, Dora Mavor 165 Hobo in Canada (1930) Moore, Marianne 239, 305, 113 Mr. Ames against Time 320 Moore, Mavor 144, 165 (1949) 196 Mrs. Golightly and Other Moore, Thomas 235 Moorhouse, Hopkins 169 Stories (1961) 221 More, Sir Thomas 64 Mitchell, John ("Patrick More Joy in Heaven (1937) Slater") 179 203 Mitchell, Roy 163

398 "Moresby, Louise." See Beck, Lily Adams. Morgan, Henry J. 58 Morice, A.G. 87 Morley, John 3 9 Morley Callaghan's Stories (1959) 199 Morris, William 345 Morrow, T.M. 148 Morton, A.S. 27, 86-7 Morton, Guy E. 169 Morton, William L. 20, 28-9,33-4,43,50 Mosaic Tradition, The (1949) 90 Moscovitch, Henry 20 Mother Lode (1930) 148 Motor Scamper 'Cross Canada, A (1922) 109-10 Mountain, Bishop G.J. 76, 78 Mountain (journal) 329 Mountain, The (drama, 1956) 154 Mountain Playhouse (Montreal) 165 Mountain and the Valley, The (1952) 224, 351 Movements of Political Protest in Canada, 1640-1840 (1959) 51 Mowat, Angus 196 Mowat, Farley 137, 141, 142 M. Tulli Ciceronis Pro A . Cluentio Oratio (1899) 59 Muckle, J.T. 56 Mulgrave Road, The (1951) 267, 268 Murray, James (governor) 25 Murray, John Clark 79, 83, 95 Murray, Robert 85, 94 Museum Theatre (Toronto) 155, 165 Music at the Close (1947) 225 Music on a Kazoo (1956) 293 Muskrat Man (1946) 183 Mussolini, Benito 40 Musson (publisher) 234 My Canadian Memories (S. MacNaughton, 1920) 111

INDEX My Discovery of the West (1937) 113 My Neighbor ( 1 9 1 1 ) 86 My Star Predominant (1934) 195 My Vision of Canada (1933) 120 Mysterious North, The (1956) 116 Naegele, Kaspar 52 Napoleon, Emperor 171, 208 Napoleon Tremblay (1939) 178 Narrative of a Mission to Nova Scotia (1816) 78 "Narrow Passage" (drama, A. Allan) 165 Nashe, Thomas 62 National Film Board (N.F.B.) 18,21,55,259,281 National Library 19, 21 National Policy and the Wheat Economy, The

(1957)46

Native Argosy, A (1929) 185, 199 Nature and the Bible ( 1 875 ) 80 Naylor,T.E. 110 Neatby, Hilda 34 Needier, G.H. 61-2 Neighbours (1922) 186-7 Nelson, Lord 171 Nelson, Harold 34 Net and the Sword, The (1953) 308-9,358 Nettles (D.H. Lawrence) 237 Neue Mensch, Der: Die Biographie im deutschen Nachkreigsroman (1958) 69 Never Cry Wolf (1963) 137, 142 Never-failing Stream, The (1939)91 New, Chester 24, 42 New Arden Series (Shakespeare) 68 New Brunswick: A History 1784-1867 (MacNutt) 33 New Canadian Anthology, A (A. Creighton and Ridley, 1938) 13

New Canadian Library (series) 73, 202 New Christianity, The (1920) 87 New Church Faces a New World, A (Arnup, 1937) 86 New Church in the Old Dominion, The (Vernon, 1925) 87 New Directions (New York) 277 New Empire Company (repertory) 162 New Frontier (magazine, 1936-7), 12, 184,247, 265, 345 New Harvesting (1938) 13 New Play Society (N.P.S.) (Toronto) 165 New Poems (D. Livesay, 1957) 253 New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith, 1936) 13,14,265,280, 298 New Verse (magazine) 243 New Writers Series 208, 307 New York Public Library 65 Newbigin, M.I. 109 Newcomer in Canada, A (1924) 110 Newfoundland: A History (Rothney) 33 Newfoundland Verse (1923) 254-6, 261 Newman, Basil 115 News of the Phoenix (1943) 242, 243, 277 Newton, Sir Isaac 234 Newton, W.D. 108 Next Year Country ( 1951 ) 51 Nicol, Eric 121,232 Niebuhr, Reinhold 88 Niemoeller (German churchman) 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich 292 Night Blooming Cereus (1962) 158 Nineteen Poems (J. Macpherson, 1952) 300 Ninth Circle, The (1928) 170

INDEX

Ninth Vibration, The (1922) 5,171 Niven, Frederick 113, 130, 133,168,174 Nixon, Larry 115 No Man's Meat (1931) 199 Norman, Herbert 42 Norris, John 42 North American Summer (1939) 114 North Atlantic Triangles: The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain (1945) 23 North of 55 Degrees (1954) 116 Northern Review (Montreal, 1946-56) (successor of First Statement and Preview) 15, 16,72,278, 279-80, 297, 307 Northland Footprints (1936) 170 Northwest Company, The (1957) 32 Northwest Territories, 1870-1905, The (L.H. Thomas) 33 Norwood, Gilbert 6, 57, 59-60, 66, 121 Norwood, Robert 5, 84, 94 Now is the Place (1948) 292 Now is Time (1945) 273-4, 299 Now That April's Here (1936) 185, 199 Nowlan, Alden 20, 314-15, 358 Noyes, Alfred 234 Noyes, John Humphrey 76 Nymph and the Lamp, The (1950) 208 O Earth Return (1954) 300 Object and Event (1953) 287 Oblomov (drama, Coulter) 150 O'Driscoll, Herbert 94 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 167 Of Irony, Especially in Drama (1935, 1948) 60 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) 198

Of Time and the Lover (1950) 287 Office of Lieutenant-Governor, The (1957) 35,48 Official History of the Canadian Army in the Second World War ( 1955-60) 34 Oh! Canada (1921) 110 O'Hagan, Thomas 5 O'Hara, M.L.I 14 Old Chieftain, The (D. Creighton, 1955) 31,35, 37 Old French Lives of St. Agnes (1938) 65 Old Province of Quebec, The (A.L. Burt, 1933) 34 Old Province Tales (1924) 184 Old Testament, The: Keystone of Human Culture (1952) 82 Old Testament Criticism and the Christian Church (1903) 81 Old Wives' Tale (A. Bennett) 186 Oleson, T.J. 42 Oliver, E.H. 87 Oliver, Michael 50 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 129 On Canadian Poetry (E.K. Brown, 1943) 16-17,62, 73,263 On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy (1957) 67 On the Uses and Abuses of Phrenology (1846) 59 Once and Future King, The (T.H. White) 142 One A ct Plays by Canadian Authors (1926) 148 One Generation Away (1931) 173, 185 One Thing after Another (1948) 121 One Third of a Bill (Jacob) 147-8 One-Winged Dragon, The (1955) 142 O'Neill, Eugene 146, 148 O'Neill, James 161 Only Men on Board ( 1 93 3 ) 183

399 Open House (1931) 120 Open Water (1914) 236 Opening of the Canadian North, 1870-1914, The (Zaslow) 33 Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859) 79 Origin of the World, The (J.W. Dawson, 1877) 80 Orion and Other Poems (1880)355 Ormsby, Margaret 33 Orwell, George 218 Osborne, W.F. 58 Ostenso, Martha 10, 176, 186,188-9, 193 Other Canadians: An Anthology of New Poetry in Canada 1940-1946 (ed. Sutherland, 1947) 17, 280-1, 292, 298, 307 Ottawa Drama League 163 Our Canadian Literature: ed. B. Carman and L. Pierce (1935) 13;ed. A.D. Watson and L. Pierce (1922) 72 Our Daily Bread (1928) 190, 192-3 Our Heritage and Our Faith (1950) 92 Our Little Life (1921) 185-6, 194 Our Living Tradition (series) 56, 61 Our Sense of Identity (1954) 20, 120 Ourselves in Canada (1960) 116-17 Outcasts of Canada, The: Why Settlements Fail (1932) 113 Outline of Canadian Literature (1927) 10 Outlines of Natural Theology for the Use of the Canadian Student (1859) 77-8 Outposts (British magazine) 277 Over Prairie Trails (1922) 125,190,354 Overlaid (1949) 152 Overton, Richard 42 Overture (1945) 244,277

INDEX

400 Owen, Derwyn R.G. 90, 104 Owen, E.T. 57, 67 Owen, Wilfred 308 Owens, Joseph 104 Owls in the Family (1961) 142 Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, The (Campbell, 1913) 11; (Smith, 1960) 73 Oxley, James Macdonald 136 Pacey, Desmond 17, 20, 21, 54, 71-2, 73 Pacific Coast Tragedy, A (1935) 150 Packard, Frank L. 169 Pagan Love (1922) 169 Page, Denys 67 Page, P.K. 15, 17,20,278, 279, 280, 281-2, 283, 285, 292, 297 Painter's Country, A (1958) 132 Pall Mall Gazette (Eng.) 39 Palmer, George 149 Pamela (S. Richardson) 68 Pan-ic: A Selection of Contemporary Canadian Poems (ed. Layton, 1958) 298 Pansies (D.H. Lawrence) 237 Paper Kingdom, The (1936)

183-4

(1913) 170 Passion in Rome, A (1961 ) 203 Pastoral Epistles, The (1937) 82 Paterson, Isabel M. 172 Patrick, William 82 Patterson, George 86 Patterson Limit, The (1923) 169 Paul, Saint 82, 90, 91, 104, 105,343,344 Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534-1642, The (1958) 67 Pause (1953) 132 Payload (radio documentary) 271 Peace River Country (1958) 218-19 Peat, Louisa M. 115 Pedley, Hugh 87 Peele, George 63 Peep at the Esquimaux, A; or, Scenes on the Ice. To which is annexed, A Polar Pastoral (1825) 134 Peevee (1928) 179, 183 Pegis, Anton C. 102 Peggy (1924) 111 Pelts and Powder (1929) 173 Penguin (Pelican) Books (publisher) 17,61,277 Pens and Pirates (1923) 120 People of God, The (1912)

82-3

People and Its Faith, A Paradise Lost (Milton) 60, (1959) 92 People's Life of Christ 68 (1920) 84 Park, Julian 21, 51, 211 Pericles (Shakespeare, ed. Parker, Dorothy 251 Hoeniger) 68 Parker, Gilberts, 9, 172, 349 Perry, Aaron J. 58 Parker, J.H. 63 Perry, J.H. 45, 47 Parkman, Francis 22 Perry, M. Eugenie 184 Parmenides (Greek phiPersonal Note (1941) 267 losopher) 67 Peter, John 68 Parrington, V.L. 12 Parson John of the Labrador Peter, Saint 91 Peterson, Len 144, 160, 218 (1924) 183 Peterson, Sir William 59, 64 Parsons, Vivian 178 Party Politics in New Petronius (Roman satirist) 67 Brunswick (Thorburn, 1961)48 Phaedo (Plato) 155 Pharis, Gwen (Ringwood) Pascal, Blaise 62 Passing of Oul-l-But, The 7, 149-50

Phelan, Gerald B. 102 Phelps, Arthur L. 125, 144, 237 Philology and Literature (U. ofT. series) 65 Philosophical Basis of Idealism, The (1907) 83 Philosophical Lectures (Coleridge, ed. 1949) 64 Philosophical Society 57 Philosophy of Francis Bacon, The (1948) 102 Philosophy of Gassendi, The (1908) 96,97 Philosophy of Plato, The (1956) 99 Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure, The (1938) 100 Phoenix (classics journal) 57,66 Pickford, Mary 161 Pickthall, Marjorie 145, 238, 263-4 Pictorial Review 188 Pidgeon, George C. 94 Pied Piper of Dipper Creek, The( 1939) 208 Piepenburg, W.W. 42 Pierce, C.S. 103 Pierce, Lome 9, 10, 11, 13, 72, 119,279,344 Pierre (1926) 146-7 Piers Plowman (14th century) 275 Pillar, The (1952) 231 Pindar (Greek poet) 60 Pindar (1945) 60 Pioneer Books (series) 35 Pioneer Public Service (1955) 35,48 Pirandello, Luigi 163 Place of Christ in Modern Theology, The (1929) 83 Place of Meeting: Poems 1958-1960 (Souster, 1962) 328 Plato (Greek philosopher) 67, 99-104 passim, 155, 156 Plato's Theory of A rt (1953) 99 Plato's Theory of Education (1947) 99' Plato's Theory of Ethics (1928) 99

INDEX

Plato's Thought (1935) 67, 104 Plays from Hart House Theatre ( 1926, 1927) 145-7 Plays from the Pacific Coast (1935) 150 Playwrights' Studio Group (Toronto) 163 Plough and the Pen, The (trans. Hungarian poems) 358 Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory (1945) 129 Plummer, Christopher 167 Plumptre, A.F.W. 46 Poe, Edgar Allan 234 Poems: Finch (1946) 249, 251, 277; Klein (1944) 247 Poems on Methodism (1848) 94 Poems for People (1947) 253 Poetic Process (1953) 65 Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (ed. 1956) 65 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago) 235, 237, 241,277 Poetry Book series (Fiddlehead) 314 Poetry in Canada: The First Three Stages (1958) 73 Poetry and Dogma (1954) 62,90 Poetry of E.J. Pratt, The (1956) 72 Policy Question, The (1963) 50 Political Economy in the Modern State (1946) 45 Political] 'ustice (Godwin, ed. 1946) 65 Political Leaders of Upper Canada, The (1931) 24 Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, The (1962) 50 Politics of John W. Dafoe and the Free Press, The (1963) 33 Pollock, Francis 183, 184 Pomeroy, Elsie 17

Pompadour, Madame de 353 Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto) 56,64,89,95, 100, 102, 201 Pope, Alexander 68, 266 Pope and His Critics (1951) 68 Popery Again Condemned (1810)77 Popery Condemned by Scripture and the Fathers (1808) 77 Porter, John 52 Portrait of Canada, A (1943) 115 Portrait of a Dog (1930) 182 Possession (1923) 180 Postscript to Adventure (1938) 129 Poteen (1926) 120 Poule d'eau, La (G. Roy) 352 Pound, Ezra?, 235, 244, 289 Poutrincourt, Sieur de 162 Powell, E.A. 113 Powell, S. Morgan 174 Powicke, M.R. 42 Practical Reason and Morality (1957) 105 Pratt, Edwin John 6, 13, 14, 20,61,72,73,94, 119, 249, 254-62, 263-6 passim, 276, 277, 280, 297, 299, 320, 340-3 passim, 346,355,356,357,360 Precipice (1948) 212 Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875-1925, The (1925) 87 Presbyterian Witness (journal) 85 Preston, R.A. 42 Preview (Montreal, 1942-5) 15-16,278-9,280,281, 282, 285, 287, 297, 346. See also, Northern Review. Price, Marjorie 149 Pride's Fancy (1946) 208 Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional, The (1874) 77 Priestley, F.E.L. 53, 54, 62, 65

401

Primitive Christian Calendar, The (1952) 90 Primrose, Hilda S. 114 Princess, The (Tennyson) 57 Principe, Walter H. 89 Principle of Official Independence, The (R.M. Dawson) 47 Prism (Vancouver magazine, Sept. 1959- ) 20, 329 Privacity Agent, The, and Other Modest Proposals (1928) 123 Prizewinner, The (1928) 145-6 Pro Christo et Ecdesia (1900) 84 Problem of Ezekiel, The (1943) 82 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada 56 Progressive Party in Canada, T/!e(1950)28, 49 Pronunciation (1930) 63 Propaganda and Psychological Warfare (1962) 50 Prophet in Politics, A (1959) 31-2 Prospectin' Fools (1927) 170 Protestant Spirit, The (1955) 92 Protestant Way, The (1956) 92 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 53,71 Proust, Marcel 220, 347 Proverb in Ibsen, The (1936) 63 Provincials, The (1951) 218 Prudentius (Latin poet) 25 Psychological Phenomena of Christianity, The (1908) 83 Public Purse, The: A Study in Canadian Democracy (N.Ward, 1962) 48 Purdy, Alfred W. 20, 328 Puritanism and Liberty (1938, 1950) 60 Pyke, Magnus 184 Pyper, C.B. 121 Pyper, Nancy 163

402 Qualter, Terence H. 50 Quebec, 1759 (Stacey) 34 Queen's Quarterly 7, 19, 54, 58, 119, 175, 184, 190, 298, 328 Quest of Alistair, The (1921) 169 Questioning Mind, The (1937,1947) 100 Questions of the Day (Bishop MacDonald, 1905) 85 Questions of the Day in Philosophy and Psychology (H.L. Stewart, 1912) 99 Quinn, Vernon 109 Raabe,Wilhelm61 Raabe (1961) 61,69 Rabelais, Frangois 256 Racine, Jean 70, 159 Racine (1939) 70 Raddall, Thomas H. 33, 141,207-8 Radisson Society 1 1 Rae, John (economist) 44 Rain (Maugham) 150 Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet (1957) 69 Ramsay, Allan 65 Rashley, R.E. 73 Ray, J.E. 109 Raymond, W.O. 68 Reach of Science, The (1958) 106 Reaney, James 20, 73, 145, 158-9, 280, 299-300, 303, 328,353,358 Rebel, The (U. of T. magazine, 1917-20) 73 Recent Canadian Verse (ed. M.Wilson, 1959) 298 Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, The (D.C. Masters) 35 Red Barn (summer stock company, Lake Simcoe) 166 Red Bill (1929) 170 Red Carpet for the Sun, A (1959)293,328 Red Heart, The (1949) 158, 299-300 Red Wilderness (1938) 170

INDEX

Redgrave, Michael 163 Reed, Elsie Porter 177 Reeves, John 156-7 Reid, J.H.S. 42 Reid, Leslie 147 Reid, W.S. 42 Relations of the Churches (1913) 87 Relevance of the Prophets, The (1947) 90 Relief (Bicknell) 151 Religions of the World, The (1894) 86 Remarks on a Pamphlet entitled Popery Condemned by Scripture and the Fathers (1809) 77 Renaissance (1922) 195 Renison, RJ. 94 Report: Canadian Historical Association 40; Humanities Research Council 55 Report of the Royal Commission: Canada's Economic Prospects (W. Gordon, 1957) 46; DominionProvincial Relations (Rowell-Sirois, 1940) 14,46; National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (V. Massey, 1951) 18-19,21, 55,352 Representative Poetry (textbook) 9 Resurgam Younger Poets (Eng. series) 284 Resurrection of Christ, The (1920) 83 Return of the Immigrant, The (drama, de la Roche) 149 Return of the Sphinx (1967) 213 Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada (1897-1919) 6. See also, Canadian Historical Review. Reynolds, Lois 149 Rhodenizer, V.B. 10 Rhythm in the Novel (1953) 62 Ricci,V.H. 110 Rice, Elmer 163 Rich Man, The (1948)

221-2 Richardson, Major John 9, 11,127,208 Richler, Mordecai 20, 194, 205,210,214,219,223, 225-8, 346 Riddell, W.A. 50 Riddell, W.R. 181 Riddle of the Universe Solved, The (W.J. Penton, 1890) 344 Ridley, Hilda M. 13 Riel, Louis 34, 37, 38, 157, 272, 342 Riel (1962) 151,157, 165 Rights of Man and Natural Law, The (1945) 202 Riley, James Whitcomb 234 Rilke, Rainer Maria 69 Ring and the Book, The (Browning) 65 Ringing the Changes (1957) 182 Ringwood, Gwen Pharis 17, 149-50 Rink Rat (1949) 218 Rise and Progress of the Church of England in the British North American Provinces, The (1849) 78 Rise of Toronto, The (1947) 42 Rising Village, The (Goldsmith) 127 Risk, Sidney 165 Ritchie, C.S. 12 River and Empty Sea (1950) 208-9 River Never Sleeps, A (1946) 125 River of Strangers ( 1 926) 178

Rivers among Rocks (1960) 295-6 Roads and Other Poems (1957) 312 Roaf , John 77 RobMcNabb (1923) 183 Robb,J.A. 11 Robbins, William 67 Robe, The (Douglas) 84 Robert Harding (1938) 179 Roberts, Charles G.D. 5, 8, 9,10,16,17,73,137, 140, 181,266,313-14,340,

INDEX

344, 355 Roberts, Dorothy 328 Roberts, Leslie 116 Roberts, Lloyd 9 Roberts, Richard 84 Roberts and the Influences of His Time (1905) 73 Robertson, James 76 Robertson, John Charles 120-1 Robertson, T.B. 121 Robins, John D. 6, 119, 124, 184,357 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 267,313 Robinson, James Harvey 26 Robinson, Perdita 171 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 68 Robson, J.M. 64 Rockbound (1928) 178 Rocking Chair, The, and Other Poems (1 948) 247-S Rocky Mountain Poems (1960) 295,296 Rodomont: A Romance of Mont St. Michel in the Days of Louis XIV (1926) 171-2 Roger Sudden (1944) 208 Rogers, Grace McLeod 184 "Rolyat, Jane" (E. Jean McDougall) 174-6 Romantic Canada (1922) 110 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 295 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 14 Roosevelt and the Antinoe, The (1930) 255,257-8 Roper, Gordon 69 Rose, Albert 92 Rose and the Puritan, The (1958) 314 Rosenberg, Stuart E. 92 Ross, Frances Arlecn 115 Ross, Malcolm 20, 21, 62, 73,90, 120,202 Ross, Sinclair 17, 184,215, 217-18,219,351 Ross, W.W. Eustace 239, 241,243,297 Rothney, Gordon 33 Roughing It in the Bush (1852) 11,128,231

Rouillard, C.D. 70 Rousseau, Douanier 360 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 70-1, 103, 353 Rowat, D.C. 48 Rowell-Sirois Commisison. See Royal Commission. Rowell-Sirois Report. See, Report of the Royal Commission. Roy, Gabrielle 214, 215, 352 Royal Alexandra Theatre (Toronto) 162 Royal Commission: Canada's Economic Prospects (W. Gordon) 46; Dominion-Provincial Relations (Rowell-Sirois) 4, 14, 46, 48; National Development in the Arts, letters and Sciences (V. Massey) 18-19,21,46,55,352 Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, The (1943) 48 Royal Society of Canada 10, 40,54,55,56,71,171 Rudd, W.J.N. 66 Ruddick, Bruce 15, 278, 280 Rule of Life, The (1909) 82 Ryerson, Egerton 33, 76, 127 Ryerson, John 78 Ryerson Press 10, 72, 254, 266,271 Sack, Benjamin G. 92 Sacred Bullock, The (1939) 182, 185 Sacrifice, The (1956) 222 Sacrifice of the Mass, The (1905) 85 Saddle, Sled and Snowshoes (1896) 85 Saddlebags for Suitcases (1942) 115 Safarian, A.E. 46 Saint-Denys Garneau, Henri de. See Garneau, (Henri de) Saint-Denys. Saint Joan (G.B.Shaw) 156 St. Lawrence, The (1959) 141 St. Paul and Epicurus (1954)

403 104, 105 Saint-Simon (French social philosopher) 71 St. Thomas and Analogy (1941) 102 St. Thomas and the Future of Metaphysics (1957) 104 St. Thomas and the Greeks (1939) 102 St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Century (1934) 102 Salmon, E.T. 42, 63 Salt Marsh (1942)271-2 Salter, P.M. 60 Saltwater Summer (1948) 140 Salverson, Laura Goodman 131-2, 133, 168, 174, 176-7 Sandburg, Carl 235, 254 Sanderson, Douglas 209 Sandiford, Betti 148 Sandstone and Other Poems (1945) 271-2 Sandwell, Bernard Keble 7n, 116, 119,122-3, 124,351 Sangster, Charles 3 55 Sappho (Carman) 356 Sarah Sinks (1947) 232 Sartre, Jean Paul 226 Saturday Night (Toronto magazine) 7n, 121, 122, 123,235,254 Saturday and Sunday (1935) 124 Satyricon (Petronius) 67 Saunders, Marshall 136, 140, 181, 183 Saunders, R.M. 42 Savage, Richard 68 Savour of Salt (1927) 179 Saywell, John T. 35, 48 Scadding, Rev. Henry 57 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne, ed. 1949) 69 Scarlet Sash, The (1955) 177 Scarrow, Howard A. 49 Schlegel, Friedrich 65 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 79 Schnitzler, Arthur 163 Schull, Joseph 141, 144 Schweitzer, Albert 82

404 Science and the Modern World (Whitehead) 104 Science and Values (1952) 106 Sclent ism, Man and Religion (1952) 90, 104 Scotchman's Return (1960) 122,213 Scotsman in Canada, A (1935) 113 Scott, Anthony 47 Scott, Duncan Campbell 5, 17,146,171,184,238, 313,337,355,356,357 Scott, E.F. 81,82 Scott, Frank R. ("Bernard March") 6,7,13,14,15, 20,48,49,197,243-5, 265, 276, 277, 278, 297, 359 Scott, Frederick George 243 Scott, Jack 121 Scott, Jonathan 75 Scott, Peter 225, 232 Scott, Peter Dale 328 Scott, R.B.Y. 87, 90, 94 Scott, Sir Walter 62, 69, 235 Scottish Text Society 65 Scriven, Joseph 94 Sea is Also a Garden, The (1962) 328 Sealed Verdict, The (1947) 229 Search for America, A (1927) 131, 189, 190, 192, 353-4 Searching Image, The (1952) 288 Seasons, The (J. Thomson) 70 Season's Lovers, The (1958) 286-7 Seats of the Mighty, The (G. Parker) 353 Second Scroll, The (1951) 222-3, 247, 341 Second Silence, The (1955) 285-6 Sect, Cult, and Church in Alberta (1955) 51 Sedgewick, G.G. 60 See America First! (L.Nixon) 115 See Canada Next (Nixon, 1940) 115

INDEX

See the Christ Stand (1945) 92 Seeing Canada (Paris, 1924) 109 Seeing the Middle West (Fans) 109 Seeing the Sunny South (Paris) 109 Seekers, The (1954) 91 Seeley, J.R. 52 Selected Odes of Horace (ed. 1952) 66 Selected Poems: D. Livesay (1957) 253,297;Lowry (1962) 328; Souster (1956) 290 Selections from Canadian Poets (ed. Dewart, 1864) 72 Selkirk, Lord 34 Seneca (Roman dramatist) 64 Seneca's Dialog! (1943-5) 64 Serial Publication in England, before 1750 (1956) 68 Serious and Pathetic Contemplation (Traherne, ed, 1941) 68 Service, Robert 129-30, 145 Servos, L.C. 173 Set Stormy (1931) 183 Seton, Ernest Thompson 130, 137, 140 Settlement of the Peace River Country, The (1934) 51 Settlers in Canada (1844) 135 Settlers of the Marsh (1925) 189,190,191-2 Sewell, Anna 136 Shadow of Tradition, The (1927) 177 Shake Hands with the Hangman (1954) 290 Shakespeare, William 6, 57, 58,61,67,68,69,159, 163,166-7,216,246,294, 335,350 Shakespeare Quarterly 68 Shakespeare the Seer (1 864) 57 Shakespearean Festival:

Earle Grey Players 165; Stratford 165, 166-7 Shanghai Jim (1928) 169 Shapiro, Lionel 229 Shaw, George Bernard 39, 63,99,149,156,163, 206,215 Shaw, J.E. 70 Shaw, J.M. 83 Shaw, Neufville 15, 278, 280 Sheard,Virnal69 Shepard, Odell 1 1 Shepheard's Calendar (Spenser) 300 Shook, L.K. 64 Short Dictionary of AngloSaxon Poetry (1960) 64 Shortt, Adam 44 Shrouding, The (1935) 245 Sidelights on Canada (1936) 113 Sidney, Sir Philip 58, 62 Sidonie (1921) 194 Siegfried, André 52 Sign Post ( 1932) 25 1,252 Silcox, Dr. (Normal School principal) 5 Silcox, C.E. 87 Silver: The Life of an A tlantic Salmon (1931) 140 Silver Man, The (1958) 142 Sim, R.A. 52 Sime, Jessie G. 185-6, 194 Sinclair, Lister 144, 155-6 Sinden, Margaret 69 Singing Season, The (1924) 172 Sir Barry Jackson Trophy 149 Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (1943) 17 Sir Edmund Head (1954) 31 Sir John's Suckling's Poems & Letters from Manuscript (ed. 1960) 65 Sirluck, Ernest 65 Sissons, C.B. 33, 93 Sister Woman (1920) 185 Sitwell, Edith 7, 242, 243 Six Canadian Plays (1930) 148 Sixth of June, The (1955) 229 Skelton, O.D. 24, 46 Skilling, Gordon 50

INDEX

405

(E.L. Masters) 240,312 Skinner, Constance Lindsay Socrates (1957) 155-6 Sprigge, Elizabeth 169 Soldiering in Canada 237-8 Spring Thaw (annual stage (autobiography) 126 Sky Pilot, The (1899) 85-6 review) 165 Solo (1924) 194, 195 "Slater, Patrick" (John Stacey, Charles P. 20, 34 Solomon Levi (1935) 197 Mitchell) 179 Stage (C.B.C. series) 17, 160 Son of a Smaller Hero Sleep My Pretty One Stage Society (Ottawa) 165 (1955) 225,226 (Coulter) 151 Songs of the Coast Dwellers Stalag 17 (Bevan and "Smalacombe, John" 266. Grzcinski, 1951) 231 (1930) 237-8 See also MacKay, L.A. Stalin, Joseph 14 Songs of the Common Day Smart, James D. 88 (C.G.D. Roberts) 313-14 Stampede (Gwen Pharis Smethurst, S.E. 66 Ringwood) 149 Songs of the Saguenay and Smith, A.J.M. 6,7, 13, 14, Other Poems (1927) 269, Stanley, G.F.G. 20, 34 16-17,20,72,73, 119, Starbuck Valley Winter 270 242-3,245,250,265,273, (1943) 140,142 Sonnets (W.W.E. Ross, 1932) 276,279,280,281,287, Stead, Robert J.C. 176, 239 297,328,349,356 186-8, 189, 193, 199 Sonnets of William A labaster Smith, Donald 38 Steele, Harwood 170 (ed. 1959) 65 Smith, Goldwin31,81, 127, Sophocles (Greek dramatist) Stefansson, Vilhjalmur 113, 336 125-6, 139 66, 159 Smith, Joseph 76 Stein, Gertrude 220 Sophocles the Playwright Smith, Kay 278, 280, 307 Steinbeck, John 198 (1957) 66 Smith, Marion B. 68 Steinhauser, H. 69 Sordello (Browning) 344 Smith, William (1859Stembridge, J.H. 115 Sort of Ecstasy, A (1954) 1932) 24 Stephen, Alexander Maitland 242, 297 Smith, William George 10, 173, 198 Souster, Raymond 17, 20, (1872-1943) 86 279, 280, 284, 288, 290-2, Stephen, George 37-8 Smoking Flax, The (1924) Stephen Leacock Medal (for 293,297,298,328,346 186, 187 humour) 232 Soward, F.H. 34, 50 Smollett, T.B. 70 Stepsure Letters, The (T. Smollett et la France ( 1935 ) Sowing Seeds in Danny McCulloch, 1821-2, 1860, (1908) 138 70 ed. 1961)73,94 Sparshott, Francis E. 106 Smyth, John Paterson 84 Stern, Rabbi H.J. 91 Spears, Heather 328 Snowflakes and Sunbeams; Sterne, Laurence 68 Spencer, Robert 34 or, The Young Fur TradStevens, Wallace 61, 235, Spencer, Stanley 318 ers (1856) 135 242, 243, 244, 250, 324 So Near is Grandeur (1945) Spender, Stephen 252, 281, Stevenson, Lionel 10, 72, 279 295,298 173 Stevenson, Robert Louis 207 Spengler, Oswald 6 1 Social Approach to EcoStewart, C.J. 94 Spenser, Edmund 60, 234, nomics, A (1939) 47 Stewart, Herbert Leslie 7, 300 Social Credit in Alberta 95-6, 98-9, 101, 103 Spettigue, D.O. 189 (series) 33,49,51 Stewart, James Livingstone Spice-Box of Earth, The Social Credit and the Fed86, 169 eral Power in Canada (1961) 324,326-8 Still Life and Other Verse Spirit of Iron (1923) 170 (1954) 49 (1943) 261 Social Credit Movement in Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, The (1936) 100, 101 Still Stands the House (Gwen Alberta, The (1959) 51 Pharis Ringwood) 149-50 Social Development of Can- Spirit of Thomism, The Stone, Edgar 1 63 ada, The (1942) 51 (1964) 101 Stone Field, The (1937) 189 Social Purpose for Canada Spiritual History of Israel, Stories of the Land of The (1961) 90-1 (1961) 50 Social Romanticism in Evangeline (1923) 184 Splendid Renegade, The Storm Below (1944) 228 France 1830-1848 (1928) 173 Storm and the Silence, The Spoilers of the Valley, The (1951) 71 (1949) 231 (1921) 169 Socrates (Greek philosopher) Story, G.M. 65 Spoon River Anthology 38, 155-6

406 Story of Canada, The (1959) 37-8 Story of the Faith, The (1946) 91 Story of the Iliad as Told in the Iliad, The (1946) 57 Story of Lambert, The (1955) 182 Story of Our Language, The (1940) 64 Story of Troilus, The (1934) 68 Strachan, John 76 Strack, Lilian H. 115 Strait of Anian, The (1948) 274-5, 299 Strange Fugitive (1928) 199, 200-1 Strangers within Our Gates (1909) 86 Stratford Shakespearean Festival 166-7 Straw Hat Players 166 Stream Runs Fast, The (1945) 129 Strength of the Hills, The (1948) 251 Strickland, Samuel 129 Strickland sisters 135. See also Moodie, Susanna; Traill, Catharine Parr. Stringer, Arthur 236 Structure of Allegory in the Faerie Queene, The (1961) 67 Studio Varia (Royal Society, 1957) 71,72 Studies in Econometric Method (1953) 47 Studies in the Humanities (u.w.o. series) 65 Studies in the Old Testament (1907) 82 Studies in the Renaissance (journal) 65 Study with Critical and Explanatory Notes of Lord Tennyson's Poem, The Princess, A (1884) 57 Study of Goethe (1947) 60 Study of Nature and the Vision of God, The (1907) 83 Stunted Strong, The (1954) 312,313

INDEX

Substance of a Journal, The (J. West, 1824) 78 Such a Din and Lowlands Low (193 5) 267 Such Harmony (E. Harris) 151 Such is My Beloved (1934) 201-2, 340, 353 Suckling, Sir John 65 Suit of Nettles, A (1958) 300, 353 Sullivan, Alan 169-70, 173 Summer school (Canadian Authors' Association) 8-9 Summer Tour through tlie Textile Districts of Canada and the United States, A (1920) 108 Sun Horse, The (1951) 142 Sun is Axeman, The ( 1961 )

Tail, M.D.C. 67 Tallman, Warren 219, 233 Talman, James 33 Talmud 247, 263 Talon, Jean 36 Tamarac (1957) 219 Tamarack Review (Toronto magazine) 19-20,65,329, 358 Tambour (1945) 208 Tanghe, R. 63 Tâo( 1930) 269 Tartuffe (Moliere) 152 Tasso, Torquato 70 Tate, Frank J. 170 Taylor, A.E. 99 Taylor, Bayard 234 Taylor, Griffith 46, 115 Taylor, K.W. 46 Teach Me How to Cry 328 (1955) 154-5 Sun and the Moon, The Teachers' Trails in Canada (1962) 158 (1925) 108 Sunken City, The, and Other Tecumseh (Mair) 157 Tales from Around the Teeling, William 113 World (1959) 141 Telegram (Toronto) 124 Sunlight and Shadow (1928) Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 124 61,216,316,350 Susannah, a Little Girl with Tempest-Tost (1951) 216, theMounties (1936) 183 350 Susannah of the Yukon Ten Canadian Poets (ed. (1937) 183 Pacey, 1958) 21 Sutherland, John 15-16, 17, Ten Selected Poems (Pratt, 72, 279-81, 286, 307 1947) 259 Swamp Angel (1954) 220-1 Tennyson, Alfred 15, 57, 62, Swayze, Fred 328 235 Sweeney Agonistes (T.S. Tent for April, A (1945) Eliot) 295 283-4 Swift, Jonathan 123,215 Terence (Roman dramatist) Swinburne, Algernon 234, 59 263-4, 324 Terry, Ellen 161 Swinging Flesh, The (1961) Testament of Cresseid, The 328 (1957) 312 Symbol of the Apostles, The Textes littéraires francais (1893) 84-5 (series) 66 Symonds, Herbert 86 That Summer in Paris Symons, Arthur 234 (1963) 199 Symons, H.L. 124 That Which is Passed ( 1923 ) Symposium (Plato) 155, 156 169 Synge, J.M. 151,163 Theatre of Action (Toronto) 164 Theatre under the Stars Table Talk of Samuel (Vancouver) 165 Marchbanks, The (1949) Theatre Studio Group 123,215-16 (Toronto) 163

INDEX Theatre Workshop (Toronto) 166 Themistocles (Athenian statesman) 316 Then I'll Look Up (1938) 196 Theology of the Hypostatic Union in the Early Thirteenth Century, The (1963-75) 89 Theory of Economic Change, The (1948) 47 They are Returning (1945) 259 They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935) 14,202-3,345 Things Seen in Canada (Ray, 1927) 109 Things Seen in Constantinople (Ray) 109 Think of the Earth (1936) 193 Thirty Indian Legends of Canada (1917, 1973) 139 Thirty and Three (1954) 122,213 This Citadel in Time (1958) 328 This is Our Faith (1943) 92 This My Son (1923) 178 This Quarter (French magazine) 241 This for Remembrance (1949) 121 This Side Jordan (1960) 228 This Time a Better Earth (1939) 198 Thomas, Dylan 156,282, 283, 304 Thomas, Edward 252, 310 Thomas, L.H. 33 Thomas, Lillian 149 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 88-9, 100, 101, 102, 104 Thomas Chandler Hallburton (1924) 11 Thompson, C.W. 110 Thompson, Francis 234 Thompson, H.P. 113 Thompson, Homer 66 Thomson, D.F.S. 66 Thomson, J.S. (theologian) 90,92 Thomson, James (Eng. poet) 70

Thomson, Tom 1 1 1, 340 Thorburn, Hugh G. 48 Thoreau, Henry David 124, 133,225,234,354,360 Thorn Apple Tree (1942) 208 Thornton, A.P. 42 Thought of C.S. Pierce, The (1950) 103 Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr,The (1960) 88 Three Boys in the Wild North Land (1896) 136 Three Came to Ville Marie (1941) 173 Three Dozen Poems (Everson, 1957) 315-17 Three Measures (1938) 178 Thrown in (1923) 121 Thunderer, The (1927) 171 Thurber, James 232 Time (U.S. magazine) 209 Times Literary Supplement (Eng.) 209 Timlin, Mabel 46 Tin Flute, The (1947) (trans, from Bonheur d' occasion) 215, 352 Tish (Vancouver magazine, 1961-9) 20, 329 Titanic, The (1935) 259, 261,356 Titans (1926) 257 To the Greater Glory (1939) 178 "To Ride a Tiger" (drama, N.Williams) 154 Todd, O.J. 66 Token, The (\93Q) 178 Tolkien, J.R.R. 141-2 Tomorrow's Tide (1932) 267 Torch for a Dark Journey (1950)229 Toronto Public Library 138 Torquato Tasso (1951) 70 Totem Theatre (Vancouver) 165 Towards the Christian Resolution (1936) 87 Towards Christian Unity in Canada: A Catholic Approach (1956) 92 Towards the Last Spike (1952)260-1,297,342 TowardsSodom (1927) 177

407 Toye, William 141 Tracy, Clarence 68 Tracy, H.L. 66 Tragedy of Tanoo, The (1935) 150 Traherne, Thomas 68 Trail of an Artist-Naturalist (1940) 130 Trail of the Conestoga, The (1924) 177 Trail of the King's Men, The (1931) 177 Traill, Catharine Parr (née Strickland) 129, 134-6, 337,356 Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 40, 67 Translation of John Snaith, The (1926) 147 Transparent Sea, The (1956) 288, 289 Transplanted, The (1944) 174 Treasure of Ho, The (1924) 169 Treatise on Baptism, A (E.A. Crawley, 1835)76 Treatise on the First Principles of Christianity, A (1810) 77-8 Treatise on Infant Baptism, A (James Robertson, 1836) 76 Trespassers (1927) 147 Trethewey, W.H. 66 Trevelyan, Kathryn 112 Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952) 275-6,359 Trio (Webb, Mandel, and Turnbull, 1954) 304-7 passim Trotter, Reginald 24 Truth of the Apostolic Gospel, The (R. Falconer, 1904) 81 Truth of the Gospel, The (G.B.Caird, 1951) 92 T.S. Eliot et la France (1951) 70 Turgenev, Ivan 200 Turk in French History, Thought and Literature, 1520-1660, The (1940)70 Turn Back the River (1938) 172

408 Turn of the Year, The (1923) 125, 190, 354 Turnbull, Gael 306-7 Turner, Frederick Jackson 27 Turvey (1949) 165,229 Twain, Mark 39, 69, 223 Tweedsmuir, Lady 115 Tweedsmuir, Lord 10, 231 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 167 Twelve Letters to a Small Town( 1962) 328 Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry (ed. Birney, 1953) 20, 273 Twenty-Five Cents (E. Harris) 151 Twenty-Four Poems (Dudek, 1952) 288,289 Twist, The, and Other Stories (1923) 184 Two Generations (1939) 190,191,195 Two Little Savages ( 1 903 ) 137 Two Mites on ... Divinity (1781) 75 Two Saplings, The (1942) 182 Two Sermons on Family Prayer (1814) 94 Two Solitudes (1945) 212, 214 Two on a Trip (1930) 114 Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe) 78 Under Canadian Skies: A French-Canadian Historical Romance (1922) 173 Under the Ice (1961) 314 Under Milk Wood (D. Thomas) 156 Under the Northern Lights (1926) 170 Under the Ribs of Death (1957) 223 Under the Volcano (1947) 223, 229, 230 Underbill, Frank H. 12, 20, 22, 23, 27, 33, 38-42, 50, 119,337 Unfulfilled, The (1952) 172

INDEX Unharboured Heaths (1930) 112 Unheroic North, The ( Merrill Denison) 145 Union Nationale, The (H.F. Quinn) 49 Unit of Five (ed. Hambleton, 1944) 17,280,281,287, 289, 290 Unity of Philosophical Experience, The (1937) 100 Universal Difference of the Everlasting Gospel, Tlie (1846) 86 UniversaUsm in Its Modern and Ancient Form (1837) 76 University Magazine (McGill, 1901-20) 7, 58 University of Toronto Press 35,56,64 University of Toronto Quarterly (U.T.Q.) 7, 12, 19, 56,57,60,63,67,69,73, 243, 265. See also "Letters in Canada." Unknown Country, The (1942) 116 Unreformed Senate of Canada, The (1926, 1964) 47 Ups and Downs in Canada (1922) 110 Urbanism and the Changing Canadian Society (1961) 52 Utrillo, Maurice 3 1 1 Vaczek, Louis 208-9 Valerie Hathaway (1933) 197 Valley of Vision, The (1961) 68-9 Van Gogh, Vincent 316 Van Home, Sir William 261 Vancouver, Capt. George 275 Vancouver Sun (newspaper) 121 Vanishing Point, The (1973) 224 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 342 Vardon, Roger 113 Varley, Frederick H. 60, 256

Varsity Graduate (U. of T. magazine) 56 Varsity Story, The (1949) 202 Vaughan, Henry 337 Venturing to Australia (Dorien) 116 Venturing to Canada (Dorien, 1955) 116 Venturing to New Zealand (Dorien) 116 Vernon, Canon C.W. 87 Very House, The (1937) 182 Vickers, Stephen 42 Victorian House, The (P. Child) 299 Victory (Conrad) 210 Vie de sainte Marie I'Egyptienne,La (1949) 66 Viking Heart, The (1923) 176, 177 Village of Souls, The (1933) 173, 196-7 Vincent (Ritson), Lady Kitty 114 "Vinton, V.V." (Mrs. R.J. Dale) 178 Viper's Bugloss (1938) 266 Virgil (Roman poet) 324, 354 Vlastos, Gregory 87 Voaden, Herman 148, 163 Voice from the Attic, A (1960) 123-4 Voice of the Church, The (1962) 92 Voice of the People, The (1949) 152 Voices (u.s. magazine) 241, 277 Wacousta (Major Richardson) 11,352 Waddington, Miriam 278, 280, 285-7, 297 Wade, Allan 65 Wade, Mason 52 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 44 Walden (Thoreau) 133,224, 354, 360 Walk through the Valley (1958) 225 Walker, David 20, 223, 231

409

INDEX

Well, The (1958) 218 Wetland Canal Company, The (1954) 32 Wells, I.E. 54 Wells, Kenneth McNeill 124 Welsh, R.E. 83 West, Bruce 121 West, John 78 Westbury, G.H.I 13 Westropp, E. 116 Westward with the Prince of Wales (1920) 108 Whalley, George 65 Wheat Economy, The (1939) 46 When Sparrows Fall (1925) 176 When the Steel Went Through (autobiography) 126 When We are Young (1946) 290 Where the High Winds Blow (1960) 231 Which We Did (1936) 122 White, Mary 42 White, T.H. 142 White, Samuel Alexander 170 White Centre, The (1946) 283-4 White Narcissus (1929) 195-6 White Savannahs, The (1936) 13, 73 Whitehead, A.N. 103 Whitehead's Philosophy of Civilization (1958) 104 Whitehead's Theory of Reality (1952) 103-4 Whiteoaks (drama, de la 87 Roche) 149 We Keep a Light (autobiog- Whiteoaks ofJalna, The raphy) 126 (1929) 182 Weather Breeder, The Whitman, Walt 73, 80, 234, 237,239,244, 276,292, (Merrill Denison) 145 360 Webb, Phyllis 20, 304-5, 328 Webling, Peggy 1 1 1 Whittier, John Grecnleaf Webster, John 246, 295 234,313 Wedding Gift, The (1947) Who Has Seen the Wind 208 (1947) 223,340 Week, The (Toronto, 1883- "Who's Who" (drama, 96) 72, 126 Mavor Moore) 165 Weekend Magazine 121 Wickens, G.M. 63 Wees, Frances Shelley 209 Wiebe, Rudy 94

Walker, Eldred 1 10 Walker, F.C. 63 Walker, Franklin A. 93 Walker, J.H. 113 Walking Death (1955) 290, 291 Wallace, Elisabeth 31 Wallace, F.W. 169 Wallace, Malcolm 58 Wallace, P.A.W. 184 Wallace, W.P. 64 Wallace, W. Stewart 24 Walsh, H.H. 33, 93 Walton, George 328 Walton, Izaak 125 Wandering World, The (1959) 328 Ward, Norman 48 Warden of the North (Raddall, 1949) 33,208 Wardrums of the Skedans, The (1935) 150 Warr, Bertram 284-5 Waste Heritage (1939) 14, 198-9 Waste Land, The (T.S. Eliot) 295, 302 Watch That Ends the Night, The (1959) 212-13, 357 Waterloo Review 20 Watson, A. Durrani 72, 81 Watson, John 79, 83, 95, 106,344 Watson, Robert 169, 170 Watson, Sheila 20, 224-5 Watson, Wilfred 20, 303-4 Watson, William R. 115 Watt, E.W. 110 Walters, R.E. 20, 63, 168, 219 Way to Union, The (1912)

Wild Animals I Have Known (1898) 137 Wild Apples (1927) 267 Wild Geese (1925) 10,188, 189 Wilde, Oscar 53, 189 Wilderness Walls (1933) 175-6 Wiles, R.M. 68 Wilfred Campbell (C.F. Klinck, 1942) 17, 71 Wilkins, E.H. 70 Wilkinson, Anne 20, 302-3 Wilkinson, Bertie 42 Willa Gather: A Critical Biography (1953) 62 Williams, J.R. 49 Williams, Norman 154 Williams, Tennessee 154, 325 Williams, William Carlos 240, 244, 320 Willow Smoke (1928) 178 Willson, David 75-6, 94 Wilson, Clifford 116 Wilson, Sir Daniel 61 Wilson, Edmund 200 Wilson, Ethel 17, 20, 205, 214,219-21,223,225 Wilson, H.S. 67 Wilson, Milton 298 Wilson, Neil L. 106-7 Wilson, R.A. 63 Wind Our Enemy, The (1939) 14,265,271 Wind in a Rocky Country (1961) 314 Wind without Rain (1946) 218

Winds of Life (1930) 148 Windward Rock (1934)267 Winesburg, Ohio (S. Anderson) 224, 312 Winnett, F.V. 90 Winning of the Frontier, The (1930) 87 Winnipeg Free Press 121, 235

Winnipeg Tribune 121 Winter, Elspeth 116 Winter, Gordon 116 Winter, Jack 144 Winter of the Fisher, The (1972) 137 Winter Sun (1960) 299, 322-3

410

INDEX

Yeomans, Edward 328 Yet a Little Onward ( 1941 ) 119,256-7 284-5 Witching of Elspie, The Yoke of Life, The (1930) 190, 192-3 (1923) 184 With Flame of Freedom Young, Egerton Ryerson 136 (1938) 178 Young, George Paxton 79 Young, J. Peat 110 Within the Zodiac (1964) 328 Young Canada Book Week 8 Wolfe, Gen. James 34, 207 Young Emigrants, The; or, Wolfe, Thomas 215 Pictures of Canada. CalWoodberry, L.E. 67 culated to Amuse and InWoodcarver's Wife, The struct the Minds of Youth (1922) 145 (1826) 135 Woodcock, George 20, 53, Young Fur Traders, The 71,232 (R.M. Ballantyne) 135 Woodhead, W.D. 58, 66, 1 19 Xenophon (Greek historian) Young Politician, The (D.G. 66 Creighton, 1952) 31,35, Woodhouse, A.S.P. 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 67 37 Year Book for the Arts in Woodley, Rev. B.C. 184 Young Voyageur, The Woodsworth, J.S. 3, 31-2, Canada (1929) 144 (1938) 183 39,86 Yeats, W.B. 65, 73, 163, 234, Your Local Government Woolf, Virginia 262, 287 242-5 passim, 264, 272, (1955)48 Word of God, The (1959) Yvon Tremblay (1927) 177 294, 303, 304, 308, 343, 90 344 Wordsworth, William 68, Yellow Briar, The (1933) Zaslow, Morris 33 247,356,357 179 Zola, Emile 192, 193 Wiseman, Adele 20, 222 Witches' Brew, The (1925)

Workman, George C. 80, 81 Works of Allan Ramsay (ed. 1953) 65 Worlds Apart (1956) 154 Wounded Prince, The (1948) 307-8 Wrath of Homer, The (1948) 67 Wreford, James 17, 280, 287, 297 Wrong, George M. 6, 9 Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë) 196,210 Wylie, Elinor 245, 246, 251