Читать книгу In the Heart of Old Canada - William Charles Henry Wood - Страница 3

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A country, like a man, is a triunion of body, soul and spirit.

Everyone knows Canada as a giant body for all the world to wonder at. But how many know her as the home of an infinitely greater soul and spirit, the inspiration of all who heed her best appeal?

This is her age of exploitation; and most ears are deafened to everything else by the ceaseless roar of her clamorous statistics. The higher call is only heard at large during some rare interlude between the acts of the drama of dollars and cents. And yet this higher call is the one essential element that can make any human drama really live.

"Business is business" is an excellent definition of a most excellent thing. And, using the word "business" to cover every form of honest money-making, the definition becomes still better by reason of its implications. We can no more exist without business than we can without food. Business is always and everywhere indispensable for every people and, to a greater or less extent, for every individual man, woman and child in the world. Moreover, it supplies the necessary material basis for all higher things. So I have nothing whatever to say against business here, although I look at the life of our country from quite a different point of view. On the contrary, I am always ready to cry "business is business" with the best of them. But I do this because I believe that business is really business, pure and simple—the root of existence, not the flower of life.

The flower of life is Service—the service of God in Religion, and the service of Man in Statesmanship, War and the Intellectual Life. Service is greater than business, immeasurably greater; for it is the soul and spirit of life, not the mere body of existence. But it is mainly done on behalf of business people, who naturally form the bulk of mankind. It is sometimes done by them; and then they deserve greater credit, other things being equal, than people habitually engaged in service, because they must first rise above their business, while service itself exalts its devotees. Besides, there are kinds of applied business which rise into service by virtue of their application. So it is quite plain that service and business are as intimately correlated in human affairs as mind and body are in the individual man.

This may seem an absurdly trite and obvious point to argue in a preface; little more than a formal way of saying that it takes all sorts to make a world. But the point is worth some elaboration, since devotion to any kind of service, and especially to the intellectual life, is thought a poor "business proposition" in a generation so materialized as to think one sort alone—and that a purely commercial sort—will make any world worth having. Our people are apt to forget what they owe to the sword and the cross, and what they may still owe to the pen and the brush. And they are equally apt to be heedless of the fact, and resent it when brought to their notice, that the service of genius is the only thing that ever has or ever can make any people great.

Most of them think a whole nation can live on business alone and that it can buy service like any other "goods." But every people forms a body corporate of all the human faculties; and the health of this body depends on the due exercise of all its vital organs. There is evolution by atrophy downwards as well as upwards. And disuse of our higher organs will assuredly bring the Nemesis of reversion to a lower type. Business is the food and stomach, service the head and heart. We cannot exist without the one, nor live without the other. If Canada was to be lost to-morrow, what inspiring memory of her would remain the day after? Not her material wealth, natural and acquired: material wealth is nothing, except in so far as it forms part of things above and beyond itself. Not her millionaires: only two names are known for their mere riches—Crœsus, who, like some other men to-day, thinking that victory could be bought, was defeated and slain; and Midas, who turned everything he touched to gold, and was the King of Asses too. Not even the most wonderful inventors of commercially applied science would remain: they never do and never can: the original and creative works of pure science alone remain: one Darwin, one Newton will outlive a world of Edisons. But the heroes, saints and statesmen would most certainly remain: Jacques Cartier and Champlain; Laval and La Mère Marie de l'Incarnation; Frontenac, Montcalm, Wolfe, Carleton and Brock; the Fathers of Confederation; the South African Contingents; and the one great national work of art we have as yet achieved—the Tercentenary of Quebec.

Body, soul and spirit—we ought to have all three to glory in. But perhaps there never was a country so tempted as Canada is now to pamper the body of life and starve its soul and spirit. For a hundred years we have been protected from the international struggle for existence by an armed and guardian Mother Land. And the sheltered life has never yet been good for any grown-up child. We are revelling in peace and plenty to-day; and we are exploiting our natural resources more eagerly than ever. But the heroic age of pioneers is almost over. And in an age of mere "development" a people is apt both to become materialized and to find self-satisfaction in becoming so. Nothing but a "divine discontent" can better us. The true intellectual life can only grow out of a national yearning for it. It can not be bought: if it could the United States and Argentina might have an intellectual productiveness bearing some slight proportion to their trade returns. But it can be stunted, deformed and starved to death in stony places. Imagine Shakespeare in Chicago! Yet, imagining this, remember also that Canada is not the most fertile spot in this intellectually sterile New World. I know the phrase, "this intellectually sterile New World," would be thought mere nonsense unless it was duly qualified by proper definition. So I hasten to define the essence of the Intellectual Life as being the production of original and creative work in pure science and the five great branches of art—music, literature, architecture, sculpture and painting.

But while we can only look forward with hope to the day when Canada will yearn to express her soul and spirit by means of the Intellectual Life, we can look back with pride on the days when many a glory was won for her in those other three great forms of Service—Religion, Statesmanship and War. These glories are the jewels of her history. How gladly would I set them in her diadem to-day! But, since the power lags too far behind the will, I merely try to make this book a thread on which some few of them may be strung together, until the time when abler hands than mine, working in a happier future, may set them in her crown of life.