Читать книгу It Needs to be Said - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 3

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T is only natural that a nascent literature, arising in a young country which is on every hand surrounded by older civilizations, should, from a spirit of self-assertion, emphasize those features, conditions, mental and spiritual attitudes which distinguish its life and its nationals from those of other and older countries. The spirit of youth is hope; its driving force is confidence in its own powers; its reaction to life is that of an unbounded optimism. This country has a future, a great future; and whether that future is going to be one of mere wealth, or of a mere purveyor of raw materials, will depend to a large extent upon ourselves. Yet, you say, we feel the strength of our muscles, the vigour of our enterprise: what should spring from it but glory and prosperity and happiness? We feel competent to cope with any problem. So long as that spirit, that confidence, that optimism are naive and unsophisticated, they are perfectly legitimate. But are they? Is there not a pose in much that is being said along these lines? Is not the boast of our youth often deliberately assumed to cloak a deplorable impotence?

That this is a young country is, of course, perfectly true. Manitoba, my home province, is, as a political unit, scarcely older than myself. I know people still living who came to Winnipeg when the present great city was a village with a handful of inhabitants—a marvel of development. Even those who may not unreservedly approve of the direction which this development has taken cannot but admire its swiftness and resistless strength—in spite of the fact that it is by no means the first time in the history of colonial settlements that such a marvel of development has taken place. As I have said, it remains but natural that this young country should feel like David before the battle with the Philistine.

But it is also true that, mentally and spiritually, this young nation forms a mere bud on the larger growth of the great Anglo-Saxon Empire. Many of us came to this country saturated with the spiritual achievements of the older parts of that Empire, saturated with the great British tradition; many others imbued themselves with that tradition as their true intellectual and spiritual food—by studying its policies, its thought, and its marvellous literature, unequalled or at least unexcelled by that of any other of the younger nations of Europe as opposed to those which we call ancient.

This great Anglo-Saxon tradition forms one of the directing and living influences at work on our literature in the making. It has this in common with the other great traditions of Europe that, being born from a blending of the greatest artistic urge which the world has seen, that of ancient Greece, with the greatest religious urge which the world has seen, that of Judah, its aim is still that of a final evaluation of life; of a recognition of man's true place in nature; of a determination of the balance, so far attained, between man's beasthood and man's godhead.

Over against this determining influence of a literature sprung from the mother civilization stands a newer, younger, accessory influence which, in spite of its newness and its accessory nature—from its purely accidental geographical and chronological nearness and immediacy—is exceedingly powerful: the influence of a materialistic, mechanistic, almost brutal spirit which tries either to ignore deeper problems or to solve them by the power of force or gold; a spirit which at the present moment flouts its very origins by attacks insensate in their fury: attacks on puritanism and all spiritual seriousness, in fact, on everything that made it what at one time in its history it was. What this national spirit of the larger sister nation, the spirit of shallow optimism, of a narrow, mistaken, fanatical patriotism—it calls the object of its eulogies the "champion nation of the world"—what this spirit has, during the last generation, produced as the expression of itself, in the form of a literature, is there for everyone to see who has eyes to look and ears to listen below the surface.

Not, of course, that within a great nation like the United States, there is not even now a reaction and an attempt at a revision of its standards. The fact remains that, to a first, searching look—I mean, of course, into what the majority of United States Americans read—there is revealed an almost unconditional adoration of a purely external success in life: the two topics which, in a hundred thousand milieus and disguises, United States fiction seems to recognize, with few exceptions, being success in "business" and the winning, by the man, of the girl: both topics, in a wider view of the Greek, Hebraic, and Anglo-Saxon traditions, which seem profoundly uninteresting, ephemeral, inessential. For what, in a deeper sense, does economic success or, in other words, a high standard of living mean? What but that we have fed our transient appetites with costly foods—or that we have been, as Sallustius says of Catilina, "addicted to the belly"?[2]

There are, of course, many other influences at work on our slowly shaping, specifically Canadian literature; but I believe I am right when I say that these two are preponderant. Which of them is going to carry the victory?

Will you permit me to be perfectly frank? During the few decades preceding the last I have made five trips to various countries in Europe, to England, Sweden, France, Germany, and Italy; the last time in 1909. In all of these various countries I have friends, nearly all of them engaged in the work of writing, nearly all of them engaged in what I personally consider the good fight; nearly all of them viewing the phenomena observable in any given country from the wider view-point of a leadership on earth of the white race, as opposed to the leadership of this or that special nation within that race. Most of them call themselves "Good Europeans"—"de bons Européens". Is not that in itself significant? America is left out of their consideration. Not because, culturally, it is a mere bridgehead of Europe; but because, in a deeper sense, they consider America as not yet grown-up, as not yet having faced the true, the fundamental problems of human life—those problems which someone, perhaps half ironically, has called the "great commonplaces"; those commonplaces which, in the last resort, make up the topics of all really great creations in the realm of art.

Well, what about Canada? I remember a conversation with a French writer of world repute. In refutation of something he had said I remarked, "America is a continent, not a country." "Ah, oui", he replied with a deprecating smile, "vous êtes Canadien—you are a Canadian. But then," he added after a slight pause, "permit me to use your very words. Culturally, America is a country, not a continent." To me, this was profoundly revealing. He meant, of course, that, in the eye of the European, there is no difference between the United States and Canada. There may be trifling differences of a political or economic nature, or of an administrative nature—inessential, trivial, temporary differences; but, in the sense of, for instance, literary expression, if such a difference exists, it is negligible; it is imperceptible to the eye from a geographical distance. Why should that be? Vast is the difference in that respect between Norway and France; yes, between Norway and Sweden; between Germany and the southern peninsulas of the European continent.

Please observe that I do not give you these remarks as my own opinion. They represent the opinion of another who, however, in my humble view, is competent to judge—from a distance; that is, superficially.

Now it goes without saying that in all countries and at all times there is a literature of the day, concerned only with the task of supplying a more or less illiterate public with reading matter for sale. This reading matter, as far as the author is concerned, serves only one single purpose, to supply him with the means which buy the ease of life. Naturally, then, such an author will exploit recognized and generally acknowledged sentiments; he will use forms which have been proved to appeal to the general taste; he will carefully avoid saying the only thing which he at bottom should say, namely that which only he can say and with which it would perhaps take the public a few years or a few decades or a few centuries to catch up. As far as the public is concerned, such reading matter serves the same purpose which most of the appliances of what we call our great material civilization serve, namely the purpose of killing its time and of insuring it against the one thing needful, yet the one thing which, to an observer from distant climes or times, we all seem to dread more than anything else, namely the being alone with ourselves and the facing of the fundamental facts of our lives.

The situation is, of course, slightly complicated by the publisher who, as a middleman, stands between public and author. An English writer once answered a question of mine as to why, having certain things to say of which he had told me during a long walk on the chalk cliffs of Dover, he had never said them and, instead, had put forth book after book of fantastic ineptitudes—he answered, I say, this question by the—to me—astonishing remark that his publishers demanded something in the vein of....; and he named a book of his which had "sold" by the hundred thousand. I have sometimes flattered myself with the very probably mistaken idea that, if this English writer has since produced two or three books which will endure beyond the day, for a little immortality of two or three decades, it might just be that in my profound amazement he glimpsed the fact that there may be a recognition worth more than the enormous notoriety which he derived from the highly profitable sale of his pot-boilers which were and are the derision of those who know what sort of thing he was capable of.

Few publishers anywhere are interested in the value of a book; though there are a few. But even those who are interested frankly and exclusively in its saleability are just as fallible in judging that saleability as anyone else; and that holds good of all publishers no matter what country or period we select for examination; for publishers, even as business men, are naturally only fallible humans.

But every publisher thinks he knows what the public wants; and so the enslavement of the publisher by an imaginary public and the enslavement of the author who allows himself to be enslaved—both of which have existed since there has been a publishing trade—have become general. But never, in the history of letters, has that double enslavement been so universal and absolute and so cynically proclaimed as it has been in the United States of America during the last fifty years, up to a comparatively very recent time when a marked improvement has set in. When that imaginary public was found not to exist, it had to be created; and thus the art of advertising was called in; which art is, properly speaking, the art of making the public buy what it does not want and persuading it at the same time that it wanted that very thing. There is a serious side to this situation; for the taste of no general reading public has, to my way of thinking, ever become so degraded as that of the general reading public of the United States of the last fifty years.

In fact, when I look for the most striking difference between English and American literature during the half century from, let me say 1870 to 1920, I find nothing quite so significant as the number of English writers of the first importance who, regardless of immediate recognition, laboured on in comparative obscurity and poverty, ceaselessly and strictly endeavouring to express just what they had to say—a thing the public, so it seemed, would not hear and yet at last has heard. I will mention only three names: Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Algernon Swinburne. Between these and the great names of an hour or a year, since forgotten, there stand innumerable others who exhibit a mixture of that eternal and heroic spirit of humanity and the commercial spirit of every age in countless shades of gradation. There is, for instance, Arnold Bennett who, to save his immortal soul, wrote The Old Wives' Tale and These Twain; but who, to feed his mortal body and to buy high-powered motor cars, wrote countless other books that are like chaff before the wind. And let me add that nobody can serve two masters; nobody can first "make his pile" and then create the things that mirror his uniquely-fashioned soul. It has been tried again and again; and nobody has ever succeeded in doing it. Even Bennett, perhaps the most gifted among all those who have ever served Mammon, has had to realize that the taint of the one sort of work carries over into the other.

If, next, I look into American literature, I find very little of that tenacity of purpose, of that contempt for mere notoriety which distinguished Hardy and Meredith—that is to say, since Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson have been dead. In Thoreau's diaries there is a passage in which he says, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." For he had to buy back his Week from the publishers because it did not "sell"; yet to-day it is being printed in many cheap editions to satisfy the demand of those who know. He adds, in the above passage, "Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labour?... This is authorship; these are the work of my brain.... I believe that this result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less and leaves me freer."[3] And perhaps it is precisely because he could take that stand that he lives to-day when his freedom can no longer be trammelled. But then, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson stood in the great English tradition, not in any American one; in fact, they have hardly yet been assimilated in the country of their birth.

"This, indeed," says Hazlitt in the eighth lecture on the English poets, "is one test of genius and of real greatness of mind, whether a man can patiently and calmly wait for the award of posterity, satisfied with the unwearied exercise of his faculties, retired within the sanctuary of his thoughts; or whether he is eager to forestall his own immortality and mortgage it for newspaper stuff." One of the strangest things to me is how rarely, to-day, we bear the word posterity.

But I fear I am wearying you. I started out to say that there is a function of this association which, in addition to the one for which it was founded, it might well assume and which, from my short experience as a member, it has perhaps not fully assumed so far. This association is a Canadian one; that is, in contradistinction to similar associations in the United States of America, it is recruited entirely from British North America, the affiliation of which is still with the mother country on the western edge of Europe. It is concerned with Canadian Literature which so far has been a bud on the tree of the great Anglo-Saxon tradition. Let it, then, always uphold that tradition in which achievement ranks higher than success. Let its members create a new spirit on American soil—new and yet old: the spirit of those who can patiently wait "for the award of posterity".

I realize that the spirit of the age militates against such a tendency. Among ourselves, as in the great nation to the south of us, there is a tremendous urge for immediacy of reward; there is a fierce fight for recognition; the moment is all; we little care for that which will endure. But if, in a truly national economy, there is a function for the writer, it is that of taking the long view of things, not the short one. Business men and exploiters of the material wealth of the country we have galore; politicians there are, the gods of the day. They "have their reward". But the writer, if he wants to be true to a god-given trust and a god-imposed task, by the mere fact that a book is something not so readily produced or destroyed, must take a long view and not work hastily. "Nonum prematur in annum." If he does, he will be able to earn the admiration of the world to come, on those very grounds on which Euripides, in Aristophanes' comedy, claims an honoured place in the commonwealth for the artist, namely "for his skill, his good counsel, and because he makes men better in their cities". After all it is he who, on a wide view of things, has in the past, as Dionysius of Halicarnassus expressed it, "made gentle the ways of the world".

In the reports of the activities of this or that local branch of this association I find now and then an admonition put forth by one of its members and addressed to the others to spare no effort in order to have as many articles, poems, short stories, plays, novels printed as possible; I should like to see and hear almost the contrary admonition: Nonum prematur in annum! Hesitate, delay; boil down, concentrate, perfect; above all, swim against the current in order to strengthen your muscles! Never say what he who listens wants to hear: he has heard that before, in the voice of his weakness; say what you have to say with your strength; say it again and again till the strength of the listener hears it and responds. I should like to see imprinted above the entrance of every room in which the members of this association meet these words borrowed once more from Hazlitt, "Genius is the heir of fame; but the hard condition on which the bright reversion must be earned is the loss of life. Fame is the recompense not of the living but the dead." Or these, "Fame is not popularity, the shout of the multitude, the idle buzz of fashion, the soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable."

I have said at the outset that, apart from our own, special, and personal interests, we have, or should have, that common interest which we may summarize in the words Canadian Literature.

Whether, in any given book of fiction, let me say, the setting is that of the Canadian East or West, matters little, though matter it does. But whether, in a deeper sense, in our ultimate aims and our spiritual outlook, we align ourselves with that glaringly new and purely material civilization of our neighbours to the south, or with that older, grey-haired, yet fiery-hearted tradition of Britain, matters much: it matters much whether the books we produce mirror and and body forth a new, a Canadian outlook on life, whether they do so with that ancient and almost fanatical or Biblical seriousness or not. The Canadian outlook, as it is lived to-day—if the opinion of one who for decades has earnestly striven to understand it counts for anything at all—the Canadian outlook is still, so it seems to me, though tinged with a newer-world hopefulness, essentially British, in as much as it tends to take a long view of things, a thoughtful view, with this final aim; to determine man's place in nature, or, if you want to express it that way—and a good way it is, rightly understood—to determine man's relationship to God rather than to Mammon or to Ashtoroth.

In any young writer who joins your ranks there is the potentiality of greatness. No man is born great; he becomes so. What he will do will depend on his aim and outlook. His aim and outlook will, at least in part, depend on the aim and outlook of those with whom he associates. If their outlook be serious, bent on eternal things and values; if their aim be to utter only what in the depths of their hearts cries for utterance; then he will learn to listen into himself rather, in order to discover that which only he can say, than to listen to the clamour of a public or a press which is frantic to hear what flatters its prejudices and its mistaken vanities. Like Shakespeare, Milton, Keats—though perhaps on a vastly smaller scale—he will say what he wants to say, in spite of the fact that perhaps it does not reach the ears of any contemporaneous public; or, if it reaches any ears at all, perhaps only those of the few who, though living in the present, listen with the ears of the future. That young writer of whom I am speaking and who joins your ranks should, in your meetings, hear less of E. Philips Oppenheim, Zane Grey, and Arthur Stringer; and more of Lamb, Hardy, Meredith, Hazlitt, Milton, Shakespeare, to mention at random a few whose names come to mind. The word success should sound less resonantly in his ears than the word art; the word recognition, less than the word fame.

For the eternal function of art and more especially of literature is to define the emotional attitude of man to that which is not he. Literature makes the individual as well as the nation articulate. What, to the members of other nations, does Canada stand for? So far, very little. Does that mean that our unrivalled sea-shores, our proud mountains, and our boundless prairies, unique on earth, have not tinged man's attitude to life and the world, or to God, whatever you care to call it? Does it mean that our broad slice of the universe as it was settled has not engendered a new human reaction to the outside world? I do not believe it.

In fact, I believe that such a new reaction is to-day crying for utterance in verse and prose; for only by being uttered can it be born. Let us, then, aim at supplying a future generation with its expression.

There are many moods in me of which I should have remained entirely unaware had not music made them conscious, had not poetry made them articulate. A human being, especially in the early, formative period of the awakening soul, is to himself an unexplored continent: and its exploration is, for the individual, of infinitely greater importance than the exploration of any Africa however rich and fabulous it be. And it is the same with nations. But even a nation can explore itself only by its reaction to moods, thoughts, feelings already uttered. To utter them is the function of the writer who, therefore, cannot live the life of the day. Not success, not recognition must be his aim: his aim must be to say as nearly as can be done without residue, what only he can say: that, to my mind, summarizes what I have already called the spirit of the great Anglo-Saxon tradition.

That I am right in this, I will, in conclusion, confirm by quoting lines known to you all. They will bear repetition. "Alas," says Milton:

"Alas, what boots it with incessant care

To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?

Were it not better done, as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade

Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit does raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights and live laborious days.

But the fair guerdon when we hope to find

And think to burst out into sudden blaze,

Comes the blind fury with the abhorred shears

And slits the thin-spun life. "But not the praise,"

Phoebus replied and touched my trembling ears:

"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil

Nor in the glistening foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,

But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes

And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.

As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed."