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THE NATIVISTIC LITERATURE OF CANADA—THE HISTORICAL ROMANCERS—JOHN RICHARDSON—ROSANNA MULLINS—AND OTHERS. THE POETS—GOLDSMITH—SANGSTER—MAIR.

Nativistic romantic fiction in Canada begins with the historical novels of Major John Richardson. In 1832 he published his Wacousta; or, The Prophecy; and in 1840 its sequel, The Canadian Brothers; or, The Prophecy Fulfilled. These are authentic novels of the romantic type, having, as they do, respectably constructed plots, and being filled with the romance of the passion of love, heightened with thrilling adventure and incident, and colored with pictures of aboriginal character and life against a background of Nature in the wild.

Richardson was born near Niagara Falls, in 1796 (in the same year as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and seven years after James Fenimore Cooper). He spent his childhood and early adolescent days, till he was sixteen years of age, that is, up to the outbreak of the War of 1812, in the vicinity of the Falls and in Detroit. Then, although but a mere lad, he enlisted in Brock’s army. Up to that time young Richardson, during his most impressionable and receptive years, was entertained by his grandparents and parents with tales of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit, and with stories of the thrilling, romantic, and tragic events in the history of the Niagara and Detroit districts—events which were surely amongst the most enthralling and stirring in the vividly romantic history of Canada and the United States. Those early days of Richardson’s were thus replete with rare and unique formative influences. They created in him the love of romance, of the heroic past of his own country, and, later, when he came to write, furnished him with the inspiration and the material for authentic Canadian historical novels or romances.

Two other formative influences, besides those exercised over his heart and imagination by his grandparents and parents, determined Richardson’s genius, inspiration, and creative method. In the war of 1812 he had fought side by side with the noble Indian warrior Tecumseh. Further: Richardson, on his own confession, had, as he put it, ‘absolutely devoured three times’ Cooper’s Indian romance, The Last of the Mohicans. Some critics, therefore, hold that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper; that, first, Richardson studied the mind, and character, and ways of Indians at second-hand in the pages of Cooper’s romance; and that, secondly, Richardson acquired from Cooper’s novel the art or craft, the mechanics, of writing fiction.

For the view that Richardson got his knowledge of Indian mind and character from Cooper, there is no ground in historical fact. The War of 1812, during which Richardson fought side by side with Tecumseh and his Indians, began fourteen years before the publication of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), or long before Richardson could have read a page of Cooper. Richardson’s imagination was romantically formed in his early days when, during his association with Tecumseh, he came to know Indian psychology and character at first-hand. That is indisputable fact. For the view that Richardson acquired the technique of novel-writing from reading Cooper, there is some justification. It is highly probable that by his reading of The Last of the Mohicans, Richardson really got some ‘coaching’ in the mechanics of writing romance. But this concession fails to prove that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper and not a genuinely independent creator. Internal evidences point to independence. For when we compare the diction, the sentential structure, the descriptive epithets and imagery, and the general style of the two romancers, Richardson appears, except as a plot-maker, the superior of Cooper as a craftsman and stylist. It is proof presumptive that on the whole the Canadian romancer developed independently his literary technique. Moreover, in the fine art of character-drawing, Richardson is more veracious and incisive—a better artist—than Cooper. When we compare the American novelist’s Indian characters with those of the Canadian, we discover that Cooper’s are more like ‘studies’ from books than pictures from real life, whereas Richardson’s Indians are very near to the real Indian, very lifelike. The heroic in them is heroic enough; that is to say, human and natural. Richardson’s Indian characters, then, are original creations—absolutely his own. Also his own are his other characters (soldiers, fur-traders, French-Canadians, and the rest of the motley), his plots, all the stirring incidents, and the ‘color’ of the Canadian background from nature.

Of his romances, Wacousta, and The Canadian Brothers, the only aesthetic criticisms worth while making are that not infrequently Richardson forces the dramatic in them into the melodramatic, that he puts into the mouths of his characters utterances which are unnatural or not in keeping with the position and circumstances of the speakers, and that he suits his historical facts to his own purposes. Sometimes, too, construction and development are sacrificed to the ‘theatrical’ in situation, to over-drawing of character, and to ‘color-writing.’ The Canadian Brothers has these defects in a larger degree than Wacousta. Yet, on the whole, Richardson’s two chief romances are aesthetically satisfying, and are clean, strong, wholesome, and engaging—quite deserving of a place in permanent creative literature.

Summarily: since Richardson had his genius romantically formed, and had engaged in the art of fiction, long before he had read Cooper, the only possible influence Cooper could have had on Richardson was to incite him to emulate the American romancer. Emulation incited by a contemporary author does not imply imitation, and has no significance in original literary creation. Taken, then, by and large, John Richardson had first-rate powers of invention, and was a respectable literary craftsman. He was not a great novelist, but he was sufficiently great as a creator of historical romances to produce novels which have been read during almost a century since publication, and are still read, along with Kirby’s and Sir Gilbert Parker’s historical romances of life and love and heroism in far-off days in Canada.

Moreover, if not in Wacousta, at least in The Canadian Brothers Richardson embodied in romantic fiction, as Sangster and Mair did in poetry, the first incipient expression of the spirit of Canadian nationality. Both on account of the superior inherent qualities of Richardson’s romances as creative fiction, and on account of their containing the earliest expression of the embryonic spirit of Canadian nationality, Richardson must be marked as of first-rate importance in the literary history of Canada. He was indeed the creator of the Canadian nativistic historical romance as Haliburton was the creator of the nativistic fiction of satiric comedy and comic characterization. In truth it may be said that if all Canadian imaginative prose were lost, save the romances of Richardson and the satiric comedy of Haliburton, Canada would still have a literature.

The Literary Garland (1838-51) had considerable to do with promoting letters in Canada, especially by encouraging native-born writers. Amongst those who contributed to The Literary Garland was a young girl, Rosanna Eleanor Mullins, a native of Montreal, who, in time, became the wife of J. L. Leprohon, also a native of Quebec. Rosanna Mullins’ first novel, Ida Beresford, was written when the author was but sixteen years of age, and was published serially in The Literary Garland, in 1848. In 1859 she published The Manor House of de Villerai, and in 1864, Antoinette de Mirecourt, and has several other novels to her credit. Her characters, properties, and settings are largely Canadian, and she evidently set out consciously to create a nativistic literature by writing romances which should definitively portray life and manners in the society of the Old French Régime and after the Fall of Quebec and Montreal.

In fact, Rosanna Mullins, much more than Richardson, was inspired by a desire to express the incipient national spirit of Canada. In The Canadian Brothers Richardson disclosed an awakening consciousness in himself of a sense of the spirit of nationality. Miss Mullins, on the other hand, was the first Canadian novelist to have a distinct consciousness of that spirit and to desire to express it for its own sake. It is from this point of view, rather than from the point of view of intrinsic literary merit, that Miss Mullins’ romances have a right to a permanent place in the nativistic literature of Canada. Technically she wrote with a finer pointed stylus than Richardson—with more grace and a finer limning of character, and with a more engaging urbanity. In fact, her style was informed by an Irish and French humaneness that made her work as popular with the French-Canadians (for whom several of her novels had been translated into French) as with the English-Canadian people.

Rosanna Mullins is entitled to another distinction. On the side of nationality she disputes with William Kirby the right of primacy in calling the attention of the later Canadian romancers, especially Sir Gilbert Parker, to the wealth of novelistic material that lay in the life and manners and culture of society under the old French Régime and the Occupation. For Kirby was foreign-born, whereas Rosanna Mullins was native-born. As a matter of fact, however, it was Kirby’s romantic fiction that opened the eyes of later Canadian novelists to the abounding material for novelistic treatment that lay in the social and political history of the Canadian past.

William Kirby was born in England, but came to Canada in 1832, the year which saw the publication of Richardson’s Wacousta. He was then but fifteen years of age and his mind unformed. He lived for the greater part of his life at Niagara. So that from his fifteenth year onwards, having taken a deep and special interest in Canadian history and civilization, Kirby really formed his mind and imagination on Canadian ideals and absorbed the Canadian nationalistic spirit.

His historical romance The Golden Dog, which was published in 1877, or ten years after Confederation, really belongs to the émigré literature of Canada. But because of its constructive and inspirational influences on certain members of the Systematic School of Canadian fictionists, in particular on Sir Gilbert Parker, and because Kirby, though foreign-born, was in spirit essentially a genuine Canadian man of letters, we must regard The Golden Dog as more important in the development of Canadian fiction than are Richardson’s and Rosanna Mullins’ romances, and as worthy of a more significant status in Canadian creative literature.

Summarily: Wacousta and The Golden Dog were the literary progenitors of a series of romances which have a Canadian historical basis and which are Canadian in incident and color. As to his creative and artistic powers, Kirby was a finer artist than Richardson, in plot-making and character-drawing. But, in view of certain faults—a somewhat too theatrical grand manner in character-drawing and a too great indulgence of his notable gifts in color-writing, Kirby and Richardson may be classed as equal sinners.

The Golden Dog is, aesthetically and artistically, that is, in plot-making, character-drawing, and in sustaining interest, superior to Wacousta as an historical romance. Still The Golden Dog is a genuinely great novel—great inherently as an imaginative and artistic creation, and great as the progenitor of the romantic fiction of Parker, Roberts, Campbell, Saunders and other creators of the native and national fiction of Canada.

James De Mille, who was born in New Brunswick, also must be considered as a creator of Canadian Nativistic Literature. De Mille was a prolific writer of mysterious, thrilling, extravagant, and sentimental fiction, showing the influence of such masters in those genres as Poe and Wilkie Collins. De Mille certainly possessed a creative imagination of his own, was considerable of an artist in plot-making and in sustaining interest, and had a distinct sense of dramatic values, which saves such an extravagant tale of adventure as his A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder from developing into the merely grotesque and sensational. But because the settings of his novels and tales are not Canadian, and because they in nowise express anything of the growing sense of the Canadian national spirit, they are not, on that side, significant in the literary history of Canada. They merely increase the quantity of Canadian Nativistic Literature.

If we have regard for the historic process in all spiritual and social achievements, and ask: What was it that, on the psychological or spiritual side, brought about Responsible Government in the various Provinces that came to form the original Dominion of Canada, and What was it that brought about Confederation? we must answer that the people in the British North American Provinces were gradually coming to see themselves, their country, civilization, and institutions from the Canadian point of view, and were gradually expressing, with more and more of conscious fervor and power, in prose and poetry, their growing interest in and love of Canada and the Canadian point of view. The nativistic prose writers expressed the growing spirit of ‘Canada First,’ as in the writings of Haliburton and Howe, and also in the romances of Richardson, Rosanna Mullins, and Kirby. We turn to observe how the spirit of national ideals was gradually expressed in the work of the nativistic poets.

Nativistic poetry in Canada did not take form till the last year of the first quarter of the 19th century. In 1825 Oliver Goldsmith, a great-nephew of the author of The Deserted Village, published his idyll or descriptive poem, The Rising Village. Oliver Goldsmith was born at Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1781, and died at Liverpool, England, in 1861, after a long official service in his native country. The Rising Village, in substance or theme, aimed to describe the habitat, sufferings, achievements, and prospects of the Loyalist settlers. As regards its matter, therefore, the poem has the semblance of a genuine Canadian poem. But the form, the metre, rhythm, and rhyme, the diction and imagery, the characters and the settings, and even the ‘properties,’ are in slavish imitation of the elder Goldsmith’s idyll of ‘Sweet Auburn’ in Ireland. That is to say, the Nova Scotian’s Muse is not the Nova Scotian or the Canadian but the British Muse transplanted. Moreover, The Rising Village is to be distinguished from Howe’s Acadia in that Howe, though imitating the form and manner of the elder Goldsmith, expresses his love of his homeland, Nova Scotia, whereas the younger Goldsmith, though a Nova Scotian, fills his poem with an unpatriotic nostalgia. He loves the land where there is some ‘Sweet Auburn,’ not his native land which he describes as ‘bleak and desert.’ The nostalgia is real and pervasive—so much so that he removes to England and there dies. But since it is a poem of the habitat and experiences of the Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia, and since it is correct in versification and is musical and possesses naturalistic truth, The Rising Village may be regarded as a genuine poem of documentary value, and as the beginning of Canadian nativistic poetry.

The strictly Canadian ‘note’ in nativistic poetry is first clearly heard in the verse of Charles Sangster. He was born near Kingston, Ontario, in 1822, and published The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems, in 1856, and Hesperus and Other Poems in 1860. The title poem of the first volume is in the Spenserian stanza as employed by Byron and is also otherwise imitative. But it is distinctly Canadian in its lyrical interludes, in which there is a poetic abandon, to the beauty and magic of Nature in Canada, as, for instance, in Sangster’s Lyric to the Isles, beginning:—

Here the spirit of Beauty keepeth

Jubilee for evermore;

Here the voice of Gladness leapeth,

Echoing from shore to shore

••••

Here the spirit of beauty dwelleth

In each palpitating tree,

In each amber wave that welleth

From its home beneath the sea;

In the moss upon the granite,

In each calm, secluded bay,

With the zephyr trains that fan it

With their sweet breath all the day.

On the waters, on the shore,

Beauty dwelleth evermore.

Faulty as Sangster’s first poems are in versification and derivative in diction, we must mark his lyrical interludes, as in the foregoing example, as expressing a new note, the Canadian note in Canadian poetry. It is, however, a nature note, not or hardly the national note—clear and confident and strong. In Sangster’s second volume, Hesperus and Other Poems, published just seven years before Confederation, we hear the Canadian national note loudly vocal and inspiring. We catch it unmistakably in Sangster’s Brock—a really noble hymn to the memory of a national hero, who had ‘saved Canada’ for the Canadians, but a hymn that much more expresses the deeply felt unity of the Canadian people:—

One voice, one people, one in heart

And soul and feeling and desire.

Relight the smouldering martial fire

And sound the mute trumpet! Strike the lyre!

The hero dead cannot expire:

The dead still play their part.

Raise high the monumental stone,

A nation’s fealty is theirs,

And we the rejoicing heirs,

The honored sons of sires whose cares

We take upon us unawares

As freely as our own.

We observe for the first time in Canadian poetry, the consciously felt sentiment of national unity—the first express utterance of the ideal of Canada and its people as a political and spiritual entity apart—in Sangster’s line, ‘A nation’s fealty is theirs.’ Henceforth we shall often hear this distinction—Canada and its people as a nation—in the verse of Canadian poets. Sangster, then, is important as the poet who, in aesthetically and artistically respectable verse, first uttered, consciously and clearly, in Canadian nativistic poetry the people’s sense of a national spirit and destiny.

Again: Sangster, in The Rapid and in The Falls of Chaudière, is the first nativistic poet to express in verse that close or intimate kinship with Nature which we discover much more profoundly expressed in the poetry of Roberts, Lampman, and Carman. Sangster utters this new naturalistic note in these authentically inspired lines from The Falls of Chaudière:

I have laid my cheek to Nature’s, placed my puny hand in hers,

Felt a kindred spirit warming all the life-blood of my face.

I have laid my cheek to Nature’s! We shall observe Lampman lay his cheek to Nature’s with more intimacy, with a more profound sense of spiritual companionship than Sangster. We shall note Carman ‘place his puny hand’ in Nature’s—and have Nature as Mother April ‘make him over’—with a far more intimate giving of self to the ‘heart of the world’ than Sangster. Nevertheless, we must remark Sangster’s priority—in spirit as well as in actual poetic production—in expressing that special and singular kinship with Nature which must be denoted as peculiarly Canadian. Still, in this respect, he is only the first forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott.

A much more lyrically eloquent and influential forerunner is Charles Mair. He was born at Lanark, Ontario, in 1838, and published, in 1868, his Dreamland and Other Poems. Technically, Charles Mair is a much finer craftsman than Sangster; for the latter was self-educated, whereas Mair was a university graduate who was well read in the modern English poets and had studied the forms of verse and the mechanics of versification. What, however, really constitutes Mair as the authentic forerunner of Roberts, Lampman, Carman and Pauline Johnson as nature poets, is not the fact that he was an artistic poet of Nature in Canada, but that his method of treating Nature was a new method with Canadian poets.

Two ‘features’ mark and distinguish the treatment of Nature in the poetry of Charles Mair—impressionistic painting of the face of Nature and the choice of the commonplace or the lowliest creatures in Nature as the subjects of his poetry. The first may have been inspired by Keats, and may be regarded as in the manner of Keats. But the second feature of Mair’s lyrical poetry—his conscious attempt to give distinction to the Commonplace in Nature in Canada;—that is original with Mair himself, and appears for the first time in Canadian poetry in Mair’s work. It is Canadian in and by itself.

Wilfred Campbell has alleged that Mair influenced Roberts and Lampman as Nature poets. All three were influenced by Keats, and certainly Roberts and Lampman knew the poetry of Keats more intimately than that of Mair. At least, Mair in a sense did but anticipate Roberts and Lampman in actually treating Canadian Nature. But Mair’s treatment of the commonplace was objective—being mostly a sort of philosophical or religious reflection on the meaning of the commonplace, whereas Lampman’s treatment of the same kind of subject was psychological. Mair merely looked on and interrogated Nature, Lampman communed with his lowly companions, such as the trees and the frogs, entered into their hearts, and spoke out for them, expressing their moods, feelings, and reflections.

The passage from the objective treatment of Nature to the subjective interpretation of the commonplace in Nature by Canadian poets, has its termini marked by Mair at the one end and Lampman at the other. Mair merely interrogates and wonders what the answer ought to be to his questions. Lampman communes with his lowly and animate companions in Nature, and, by imaginative sympathy, answers for them.

These distinctions between Mair as an impressionistic Nature-painter and an objective interrogator, and Lampman as a subjective interpreter of Nature, are nicely illustrated in Mair’s exquisitely beautiful and sensuously lovely poem, The Fire-Flies:—

I see them glimmer where the waters lag

By winding bays, and to the swallows sing;

And, far away, where stands the forest dim,

Huge-built of old, their tremulous lights are seen.

High overhead they gleam like trailing stars,

Then sink adown, until their emerald sheen

Dies in the darkness like an evening hymn,—

Anon to float again in glorious bars

Of streaming rapture, such as man may hear

When the soul casts its slough of mortal fear.

And now they make rich spangles in the grass,

Gilding the night-dews on the tender blade;

Then hover o’er the meadow-pools, to gaze

At their bright forms shrined in the dreamy glass

Which earth, and air, and bounteous rain have made.

One moment, and the thicket is ablaze

With twinkling lamps, which swing from bough to bough;

Another, and like sylphids they descend

To cheer the brook-side where the bell-flow’rs grow,

Near, and more near, they softly come, until

Their little life is busy at my feet;

They glow around me, and my fancies blend

Capriciously with their delight, and fill

My wakeful bosom with unwonted heat.

One lights upon my hand, and there I clutch

With an alarming finger its quick wing;

Erstwhile so free, it pants, the tender thing!

And dreads its captor and his handsel touch.

Where is thy home? On what strange food dost feed,

Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night?

From what far nectar’d fount, or flow’ry mead,

Glean’st thou, by witching spells, thy sluicy light?

Is not that poem Canadian definitively and through and through—and is it not also authentic poetry, far in advance, aesthetically and artistically, of any poetry previously written in Canada? They who, with master artistry, write delineative poetry, shall hardly achieve, in short and single phrase, so apt and clear and vivid a picture of the Canadian firefly as Mair’s incisively realistic and genuinely poetical line:—

Thou fairy hunter of the moonless night.

That is masterly, and yet how it fails before such a tremendously pregnant crystallization of the subjective treatment of Nature as Bliss Carman’s pervasive thrall of the senses and the imagination in his imperishable line:—

The resonant far-listening morn.

The glory that is Carman’s in pure poetry, is not Mair’s, and the glory that is Lampman’s in the sympathetic interpretation of the moods and thoughts of lowly animate Nature, is not Mair’s. Yet unquestionably Mair is the authentic forerunner of those perfervid Nature-worshippers, Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Pauline Johnson, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott, the creative Poets of the Systematic School, who wrote the first native and national literature of the Dominion of Canada, and wrote it so that the world heard and has acclaimed them Master Poets and their poetry authentic Literature!

The Fireflies is quoted from Dreamland and Other Poems by Charles Mair.