Читать книгу The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions - R. E. Vernede - Страница 6

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Quebec city is full of charms and memories. I am no lover of cities when they have grown so great that no one knows any longer what site they were built on, or what sort of a country is buried beneath them. Their streets may teem with people and their buildings be very splendid, but if they have shut off the landscape altogether I cannot admire them. Quebec will never be one of those cities, however great she may grow. Quebec stands on a hill, and just as a city on a hill cannot be hid, so too it cannot hide from those who live in it the country round, nor even the country it stands on. Always there will be in Quebec a sense of steepness. The cliffs still climb even where they are crowded with houses. And the air that reaches Quebec is the air of the hills. Always too—from Dufferin Terrace at least—there will be visible the sweep of the St. Lawrence, the dark crawl to the north-east of the Laurentian Mountains, and the clear and immensely lofty Canadian skies.

I spent the whole of my first day in Quebec on Dufferin Terrace, except for that journey down to the docks. Once I was on the terrace, I forgot how bad the roads had been. You might drive a thousand miles through stones and mud, and forget them all the moment you set foot on Dufferin Terrace. Everything you see from it is beautiful, from the Château Frontenac behind—surely the most picturesque and most picturesquely situated hotel in the world—to the wind on the river below. Most beautiful of all the things I saw was the moon starting to rise behind Port Levis. It started in the trees, and at first I thought it was a forest fire. There was nothing but red flame that spread and spread among the trees at first. Suddenly it shot up into a round ball of glowing orange, so that I knew it was the moon long before it turned silver, high up, and made a glimmering pathway across the river.

During this moonrise the band was playing on the terrace, and all Quebec was strolling up and down or standing listening to the music, as is its custom on summer evenings. The scene on the terrace has often enough been described—with its mingling of many types, American tourists and Dominican friars, habitants from far villages, and business men from the centre of things, archbishops and Members of Parliament, and ships' stewards and commercial travellers, and freshly arrived immigrants and old market women. The fair Quebeckers love the terrace as much as their men folk, and I saw several pretty faces among them and many pretty figures. They know how to walk, these French Canadian ladies, and also how to dress—the latter an art which has still to be achieved by the women of the West.

CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC, FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS.

The terrace besides being gay is very friendly too. My two companions of the voyage had gone on that morning, being in a hurry to reach the prairie; but I found several new friends on the terrace in the course of the day. One was a young working man from England, who had brought his child on to the terrace to play when I first met him. He was so well-dressed and prosperous looking that I should never have guessed he was only a shoe-leather cutter, as he told me he was. But then he had been out in Quebec for five years, and he was making twenty-five dollars a week instead of the thirty-two shillings a week he used to make in Nottingham at the same trade. He said he had been sorry to leave England, but you were more of a man in Canada. There were not twenty men after one job—that was the difference. Consequently, if your boss offered to give you any dirt, you could tell him to go to Hell. I suppose we should have counted him a wicked and dangerous Socialist in England, but there is no doubt that he is a typical Canadian citizen, and the kind of man they want there. Another acquaintance I picked up was a commercial traveller from Toronto—a stout tubby energetic man, who asked me, almost with tears in his eyes, why England would not give up Free Trade and study Canadian needs? He was particularly keen on English manufacturers studying Canadian needs, and he put the matter in quite a novel light as far as I was concerned. His argument was that we made things in England too well. What was the use, he demanded, of making good durable things when Canadians did not want them? It only meant that the States jumped in with inferior goods more suited to the moment. He assured me that Canada was a new country, and Canadians did not want to buy things that would last hundreds of years. Take furniture, machinery, anything—Canadians only wanted stuff that would last them a year or two, after which they could scrap it and get something new. That kept the money in circulation. Anyway, he insisted, a thing was no good if it was better than what a customer required. I had not thought of things in that way before, and it was interesting to hear him.

My third acquaintance was a member of the Quebec Parliament, who started to chat quite informally, and having ascertained that I was fresh from the old country took me to his house, that I might drink Scotch whisky, and be informed that French Canadians loved the King and hated the Boer War. I think when a French Canadian does not know you well, he will always make these two admissions—but not any more—lest you should be unsympathetic or he should give himself away.

That is why, since the position of French Canadians in Canadian politics will some day be of the greatest importance, we ought all to be thankful for the existence of Mr. Bourassa. Mr. Bourassa is represented—by his opponents—as the violent leader of a small faction of French Canadians, as a trial to moderate men of all sorts, including the majority of his own French-Canadian fellow-citizens. All this is very true. In Canadian politics, as they stand at present, Mr. Bourassa stands for just that and very little more. Politically he is an extremist and a nuisance. But disregarding for a moment immediate practical politics, Mr. Bourassa stands for much more than that—stands indeed for the real essence of French Canada. He is the French Canadian in action, shouting on the house-tops what most of them prefer to dream of by the fire-side, insisting upon bringing forward ideas which the others would leave to be brought forward by chance or in the lapse of time.

He has been called the Parnell of Canada, but these international metaphors are generally calculated to mislead. The most that Parnell ever demanded was Home Rule for Ireland—that small part of Great Britain, that fraction of the Empire. Mr. Bourassa does not only want Home Rule for Quebec. He wants it for Canada; only the Canada he sees thus self-ruling is a Canada permeated by French Canadianism. If Parnell had wanted Home Rule, so that England, Scotland, and Wales might be ruled from Dublin, he would have attained to something of the completeness of Mr. Bourassa's policy. Mr. Bradley, whose book on Canada in the Twentieth Century is as complete as any one book on Canada could be, and as up-to-date as any—allowing for the fact that Canada changes yearly—declared in in it, some years ago, that the French Canadians realised that for them to populate the North-West was a dream to be given up. It may be a dream, but I doubt if it is given up: and the dreams of a population more prolific than any other on the face of the earth may some day become realities. What is against these dreams? The influx of English immigrants? The rush for the land of American farmers? But these are only temporary obstacles. The Americans may go back again. They often do. The English immigrants are largely unmarried young men, and there are no women in the West. They are making ready the land, but the inheritors of it have yet to appear. It is not strange if Mr. Bourassa sees those inheritors among his own people—only it is not yet their time, not for many years yet—not for so many years yet that it seems almost unpractical and absurd to look forward to it. Even such a faith as that which Mr. Bourassa has confessed to in regard to the Eastern provinces—Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick—that 'In fifteen years they will have become French in language and Roman Catholic in faith,' seems highly unpractical. Ontario is not likely to become Roman Catholic any faster than Ulster. But on the other hand it will only increase in its anti-Frenchness and its anti-Roman Catholicism in so far as it is upheld and influenced by Imperialism. Imperialism to Mr. Bourassa is that bogey which goes about linking up all those small non-conforming, hustling, militant and materialistic communities which unaided would come into the Catholic French-Canadian fold. It is that odious system which prevents other nations within the Empire—such as French Canada—from developing along their own natural lines. It is something which easily causes Mr. Bourassa to forget that England and Englishmen—representing a distant sovereignty which keeps the world's peace—have been a boon and a blessing to French Canadians rather than otherwise; and causes him to remember that they may in a moment become an imminent sovereignty—imposing conscription, war, chapels (things that the Ontarian takes to like a duck to water) upon the whole Canadian community. Such impositions would not only strengthen the non-French Canadians, and ruin the natural progress-to-power of the French Canadians; but they would topple down like a house of cards those splendid dreams which might in a French-Canadianised Canada become realities. What dreams? Rome shifted to Montreal for one, and the Vatican gardens of the future sweeping down to the St. Lawrence. The whole vast wealth of the Dominion diverted to the carrying out of those traditions which are neither French nor English but Canadian ... started four hundred years before by the captains and the priests, voyageurs and martyrs, who in an age of unbelief went forth in response to miraculous signs for the furtherance of the glory of God.

CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC.

I said that Quebec was full of memories. It is well to remember that most of these are French-Canadian memories. The Englishman, at home or touring, thinks most naturally of Wolfe in connection with Quebec, and thinks with pride how that fight on the Plains of Abraham marked, in Major Wood's words, 'three of the mightiest epochs of modern times—the death of Greater France, the coming of age of Greater Britain, and the birth of the United States.' The splendid daring climb of the English army, the romantic fevered valour of its general, the suddenness and completeness of the reversal of positions, unite to make us think that never was a more glorious event, or one better calculated to appeal to men of the New World. But do not let us forget that for French Canadians—great event as it was, severing their allegiance to France for ever on the one hand, leaving them free men as never before on the other—it was only one event in a new world that was already for them (but not for us) three hundred years old. 'Here Wolfe fell.' But here also, long before Wolfe fell, Champlain stood, and French captains led valiant men on expeditions against strange insidious foes, and the Cross was carried onwards by the priests, and amid mystic voices and divinations, and slaughterings and endurances, the faith prevailed and the character of the people was formed. They have no hankering for France—these people to whom Wolfe's battle seems but one out of many. France, they think, has forsaken the Church. But they are French still—these people—and amazingly conservative in their customs and their creed. We may tell them that England—which sent out Wolfe—has given them material prosperity, equality under the law, the means of justice. They will reply, or rather they will silently think, and only an occasional Nationalist will dare to say:—

'We owe nothing to Great Britain. England did not take Canada for love, or to plant the Cross of religion as the French did, but in order to plant their trading posts and make money.'

Gratitude is not a virtue nations take pride in possessing; they are indeed seldom nations until they have forgotten to be grateful. I suppose French Canadians are on their way to forgetting to be grateful to England for what she did in times past, but it is not because they have any real quarrel with England, or desire to injure her. Merely because they feel that from England exudes that Imperialism which appeals in no way from the past, and menaces, they think, their future.