The parallels between Scotland and Canada, both
physical and social, are striking and important. The new country is
larger, but it sprawls along the same inhospitable latitudes. To the
south in both cases there is a large, powerful, and domineering
neighbour. In Canada, as in Scotland, two languages, two religions, and
two cultures have co-existed.
Little wonder that in the nineteenth century Scottish
cultural models transplanted so easily. Given our climate, Burns made
more sense than Wordsworth. In the brief Canadian springtime, Canadians
could relish the small detail of flower or stream, rather than the
Wordsworthian vista of lake or mountain. Given the need for energetic
social interaction as a defence against isolation, Canadians responded
to Scott's eventful bustling plots, rather than to the misty paradoxes
of Poe or Hawthorne. As the century moved on, Canada remained the scene
for manly action, sport, physical adventure: Robert Louis Stevenson's
tales of adventures and escapes, of hardy travel and daring encounters,
were closer to Canadian reality and Canadian dreams than were the
spidery finenesses of a Henry James or the depressing naturalism of a
George Moore or a George Gissing. And for those Canadians not facing the
frontier, but settling into the quieter patterns of Brantford or Orillia,
Ormstown or Fredericton, there was more to be admired and recognized in
a Kailyard novel, an "Auld Licht Idyll," than in the bleaker negativism
of American novels about dusty main streets or about the dreary
main-travelled roads of the countryside.
In 1911 George Bryce proclaimed the creed of many
Canadians, including many not of Scottish origins: "The world's greatest
lyric singer [was] Robert Burns; the world's greatest novelist, Sir
Walter Scott; the two greatest historians, Macaulay and Carlyle." He
might have extended the credo, and still expressed a Canadian consensus
in the early twentieth century, by adding: "The greatest writer of
adventure stories for young people was Robert
Louis Stevenson; the greatest writer of sentimental
regional idylls, and the most tender and whimsical of dramatists was J.M.
Barrie."
The Canadian education system and Canadian publishing
houses, largely dominated by Scots in the nineteenth century,
promulgated and perpetuated this creed. The results are clear in
nineteenth century Canadian poetry and prose, arts and architecture.
Love for Burns set the bounds of theme, metre, tone, and length of
Canadian poems from McLachlan to Carman. Devotion to Sir Walter
established the dominance of historical romance in Canada, from
Richardson and Kirby to Gilbert Parker, at the expense of other possible
models such as Dickens or Hawthorne, George Eliot or Melville. "Great
Man" history, thesis history, following the examples of Macaulay and
Carlyle, flourished in Canada - witness the tremendous acceptance of
works like the "Makers of Canada" series - though again at the
expense of more scientific or sociological approaches that might have
been learned from German, French or American models. The influence of
Stevenson and Barrie in the later part of the century produced an
over-abundance of children's books and of regional idylls. Canadian
names on this list of later Scottish-dominated romancers would include
Ralph Connor, Marshall Saunders and L.M. Montgomery.
Lowland influences should also be similarly noticed
as predominant in the graphic arts. Wilkie and Landseer rather than
Constable or Whistler in turn dominated the style of the Canadian
academies. Abbotsford inspired the worst of our architecture, and the
Adams' influence perhaps generated our best. In theatre, in choral
music, in folklore and dancing, the pressure of Scottish models has been
constant. Study of the reasons for this preponderance of influence by a
single culture, imported as one among many, clarifies many facets of the
needs and nature of the importer.
The physical, social and economic similarity between
Canada and Scotland, added to the large number and the power of the
Lowland immigrants, made the Scottish strain in Canadian art appropriate
as well as pervasive and persistent. I propose to examine the extent of
this borrowing and adaptation, first in early Canadian poetry and in
pre-Confederation fiction, and later in the early productions of the
Dominion after Confederation and during the extended national growth in
the railroad era. Such an examination will lead to speculation as to the
price paid by Canadian culture for this century-long habit of
importation.
BEFORE BURNS
A glance at any Canadian song-book or keepsake album
or literary anthology of the nineteenth century will show how great was
the influence of Burns on Canadian writers. But in Canada as in Scotland
the love for Burns came as culmination of a taste developed earlier in
the eighteenth century. Ramsay in 1724, Fergusson in 1774, had revived
the native tradition of the "makaris." In the years after 1707, although
Scotland's political and economic autonomy had been ended, her literary
and intellectual life had taken on new lustre. Now vernacular poetry
achieved new respect, joining the folk songs which had been kept alive
in the Lowland dialect. Scotland in the late eighteenth century
contributed three major works to the popular literature of all
English-speaking people, on both sides of the Atlantic: Bishop Percy's
Reliques, Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, and James
Macpherson's Ossian.
Scots who came to the Canadas or the Maritimes in the
eighteenth century brought a taste for the austere border ballads, for
the occasional verse cleverness of mock elegies and last testaments, and
for satiric lovers' oaths in the Ramsay-Fergusson manner. They brought a
liking for the misty grandeurs of Ossian, and for the sentimentalities
of The Man of Feeling. They also brought a pride in the
intellectual glories of the Edinburgh schools, in philosophers like Hume
and Reid, economists like Adam Smith, Blair and Karnes and Robertson.
Scottish culture centres in the Maritimes predated the American
Revolution: Windsor, Saint John, Moncton, Saint-Andrews-by-the-Sea
flourished as "little Edinburghs" with interest ramifying into history,
theology, and belles-lettres, long before the New England Loyalists
added their store of bookish interests in the 1780s and 1790s.
Eighteenth century Montreal merchants also built a
culture similar to Edinburgh's: neighbourly, bourgeois, bastioned
against both a wilderness to the north and an alternative culture to the
south. These Quebec-based businessmen sent fellow Scots into the
commercial network being cast westward. From 1670 the Hudson's Bay
Company had been placing hardy Scots among its factors, and Scots
continued to dominate fur trade and exploration throughout the century,
climaxing the dominance with the formation of Montreal-based groups
rivalling the HBC and dominated by the Frasers, the McTavishes, and the
Mackenzies. These men had brought with them from their Scottish schools
a taste for science. They moved through the northwest as amateur
geologists, ornithologists, and anthropologists, making notes as if in
preparation for delivering a paper at some literary and historical
society back in Ayrshire or Paisley. The American frontiersman - the
Davy Crockett type - is pictured in legend as illiterate, almost
inarticulate except in tall tales and bawdy anecdotes. The Canadian
frontiersman could be correctly pictured as serious, cautious,
observant, a man simply but sensibly educated, keeping his journal in
clear, statistical order. Early in Canadian records appear not tall
tales but the travel narratives of Mackenzie, Fraser, Henry. All reflect
the impact of the Scottish renascence on Canadian style, tone, and
content.
Besides the fur traders, Lowland Scots had come as
tradesmen and independent farmers throughout the eighteenth century,
many of them in the wake of economic or military failure at home. They
brought conflicting attitudes: a sense of recent defeat, of present
difficulties, plus a national pride, a belief in free enterprise and an
insistence on education and theology as prerequisites of each new
community. The basis of their culture was carried over from the Scottish
"moral sentiment" school: "sentiment as a principle, rationality as a
method" - leading to the warmth of Scottish family life, and the
hard-headed enterprise of Scottish business. The villages they clustered
into were tribal, not feudal or hierarchic. Kinship led to family
bluntness in speech as well as to hovering concern over courtships and
illnesses. The family feeling was no doubt strengthened when the Scots
came up against the prejudice and disdain carried from England by the
Johnsonian English administrators.
In the older Canadian towns and the new frontier
settlements, then, the Lowland presence was strong, distinct, colourful
and conspicuous.
THE CULT OF BURNS AMONG CANADIAN PIONEERS
Burns's themes and assumptions, as well as the forms
of his poetry, became a powerful part of Canadian pioneer art and life.
They may have blocked the growth of alternative styles as the country
moved toward Confederation. In the hands of Scottish-Canadian poets of
the 1830s to 1850s, Burns's themes undergo interesting modifications,
but the phenomenon of McLachlan's poetry, for instance, is one of many
examples of the essential survival of a poetic tradition, after the
cause and manner of its emergence are no longer relevant.
Burns himself at one time contemplated emigrating to
America. This was a nearly inevitable choice facing men of his time and
place. Of his contemporaries in Ayr and Paisley, Tweeddale and
Dumfriesshire, many of the liveliest, most patriotic, most enterprising,
were being forced by pressure of competition to leave home. By the
1820s, emigration societies, mostly operating in the Lowlands, were
arranging mass export of manpower. In the chattels on those emigrant
ships went many a copy of Burns; and in the emotional baggage went many
an attitude that guaranteed transplanted fondness of Burns's work. The
Lowland workers brought with them the tensions, the habits, and the
aspirations from which Burns's songs had sprung, and which had reached
their apotheosis in his songs.
"Bad habits," for instance those of gambling,
drinking, nostalgic inertia, and shiftlessness, had been among the
legacies of hard times in the border counties. These were among the
major stimuli of Burns's songs. They were carried to Canada, all too
often to intensify there. Brandy and whiskey continued necessary for
endurance, for survival. The convivial "drappie" carried with it to
Canada the poetic ratification of Burns. So did the social energy,
manifest in fighting, brawny sports contests, vigorous dances, raw
jokes.
Humour was another defence against the indignities of
the new life. Again Burns provided the wry tone, the mock-heroic note,
that had helped overcome melancholy in the Old Country, and would keep
the exile's melancholy in proper perspective.
Family warmth, combined with intense personal
independence, expanding into a rich sense of national identity - these
good elements too were imported in augmented strength into the Canadian
frontier. In particular, the kind of patriotism that Burns had hymned -
defiant, irrational, surviving the absence of state help or sympathy -
became the basis of a fondness for the new country blending easily with
the tenderness for the Scot's "ain countree."
Lowland settlers moved into the new Canadian terrain,
finding at every point a snatch of Burns's song that could release the
tensions of experience. Here, as at home, flowers were frail and
precious, winters sudden and cruel. As at home, men and animals lived
close together, dogs, cattle, horses almost becoming part of the family,
and certainly felt as personalities. As at home, the warmth of the
house, the shelter of love, was in sharp contrast with the "cauld blast"
outdoors. When it came to putting these things into song, Burns's tight
forms were appropriate channels for the brief creative gusts possible in
an energy-draining life. Burns's forms, as well as his themes, made
appropriate transplants.
By the 1820s, Lowlands Scots in the Maritime
provinces were producing and publishing verse strong in "pith and
realism" (to quote Fred Cogswell's account in the Literary History of
Canada). Andrew Shields, "the Cape Breton Blacksmith," William
Murdoch of Partridge Island, John LePage of PEI, Robert Murdoch, John
Steele - all produced direct, clear verse, humorous, much of it, though
with a melancholy undercurrent. The same simple strength appears in
imitations of Burns produced in Lower and Upper Canada by such poets as
McQueen, 1836. Numbers of these poems were printed in local journals
whose presses as well as editorial desks were largely manned by Scots:
Hugh Thomson of Kingston, David Chisholme, A.J. Christie, Andrew Armour
of Montreal.
Early Canadian poets made simple local substitutions
in Burns's flora and fauna. "To a Dandelion" supplements "To a Daisy" in
a poem by Miss Johnson, and the owl replaces the mousie in John Massie's
"Hoot awa, hoolet, alane in the tree." Bonnie Doon gives way to
innumerable Canadian banks and braes, in acceptable lyrics written with
one eye on the stream and the other on the standard Habbie verse form of
Burns.
These poems are not merely harmless imitations; they
are a healthy transplant of a vital tradition. In these early days such
poetry, unsubtle as it was, served well to reflect and to entertain all
settlements in the Canadian bush, whether or not dominated by Scots. The
presence of such verse, and of a press to purvey it, must be considered
a major contribution made by Lowland Scots to the emerging Canadian
nation. Burns was a valuable and appropriate model in early days in
Upper and Lower Canada and in the Maritimes, wielding an influence which
would differentiate all early Canadian literature from contemporary work
in the United States. The yearning for a lost homeland was a note that
could be struck within the empire's bounds in a way impossible in the
republic. So the sentimental imitations of Burns's patriotism could be
appropriately entwined into all Canadian song. There is nothing in
republican literature to equate with the plethora of Canadian
publications with titles like "My auld Plaid," "My Birth-place," "Our
Mither tongue," "White Heather," "The Old Scottish Songs," "The Burn's
answer." Songs thus titled would stir fellow-feelings in exiles from
other parts of the British Isles, as well as in Burns's compatriots.
Yearning for a lost homeland was a shared sentiment; "Strange earth we
sprinkle on the exile's clay" (in the words of McGeorge, 1858). The
sense of enduring a life-long exile was a strong, and a strongly-shared,
Canadian sentiment.
Voicing the sense of exile was not the only way in
which Burns's imitators served to release Canadian feelings. The
immediate contact with details of environment - single flower or animal
- was a natural topic for the consciousness harshly limited by the
monotonous, pressing forest. Poems titled "To------", with their assumed
convention of personal song, overheard by a small intimate circle of
friends, would be appropriate poems for a village audience in Burns's
own society. They would also be appropriate for what was virtually an
extended village - the thin-spread settlements of the frontier. The
author's stance of familial intimacy, so much a part of Burns, was a
tenable convention for the small though scattered coterie of readers and
listeners in Canada. Burns's subjects served to catch and record
central, simple Canadian social occasions - church meetings, drinking
parties, funerals, courtship-directed dances.
Burns's stance suited the early Canadian taste too
well perhaps. The ironic downrightness of "a man's a man for a' that"
permeated the working class, spreading from the nucleus of Scottish
artisans into the whole early Canadian community. Its acceptance
curtailed the desire for subtlety and elegance, and made laughable the
finer social forms and conventions. In poetic form, downrightness
resulted in simple adherence to Burns's simple forms: Standard Habbie,
for instance, with its rigid rhyme scheme (a, a, b, a, b, with the last
line curtailed) has a kind of blunt reductiveness, a refusal of any
expansiveness in the concluding movement. The refrains many of them
inherited by Burns from Ramsay, Fergusson, and even older models, are
simple and blunt: "He's dead;" "That day." Such refrains have a
finality, a tight-lipped honesty that inhibits subtlety or fantasy.
In general, early Scottish poets in Canada wrote more
patriotic songs but fewer love songs than Burns, more egalitarian songs
but fewer drinking songs; more on nature's details (flowers, animals,
waterways), but fewer satires on people; more songs of sentiment, fewer
of passions. But in all these categories there is an amazing bulk to be
noted. In all, the influence of Burns is very strong, in rhythm, rhyme
scheme and phrasing, as well as in tone and content.
The climax of the Burns tradition in Canada is the
work of Alexander McLachlan, a poor boy who came from Glasgow in 1840,
and became the best known of the Scottish poets before Confederation. He
published Lyrics in 1858, The Emigrant in 1861, Songs and Poems, 1874.
His work appears in all early anthologies as a major representative of
Canadian poetry in the early nineteenth century. Dewart, in Selections
from Canadian Poets (1864), called McLachlan "the Burns of Canada" both
for "his racy humour" and for his "moral grandeur and beauty." McLachlan
himself reports the pioneer love of the Lowland poet. On the Sabbath,
McLachlan says, writing of a pioneer's life,
Even Burns he puts aside
Burns! his weekday joy and pride
Burns! so human, wild and wide . . .
The Canadian Scot, like his Lowland cousin, adds a
greater literary idol:
And he brings from out its nook,
That great Book of Books, the Book!
The Pioneer's prayer is Burnsian:
Break! O Lord! the spell of birth,
Haste the time when moral worth
Shall take highest rank on earth. (96)
A brief look at McLachlan's Songs and Poems (Toronto:
Hunter Rose, 1874) shows how widely the range of Burns has affected his
Canadian follower. Best known of his poems is, "We live in a Rickety
House," with its sardonic attack on the Holy Willies of the new country:
Ye clog the soil of nature
With your wretched little creeds,
Then hold up your hands in wonder
At the dearth of noble deeds.
Another Burns theme, manly independence, sings in
"Acres of your own." The "cauld blast" note of realism in "The rain it
falls" presents dour recognition of the incomprehensible harshness of
nature, fate, and death. McLachlan can also sing blithely of the flowers
and buds in May." He is nostalgic on love:
The faith and the friendship
The rapture of yore
O shall they revisit
This bosom no more?
Some of McLachlan's poems integrate echoes of Burns
into more Victorian notions. "Britannia," for instance, strikes an
imperial note - but even here the rhythm is derived from "Scots wha hae":
Great mother of the Mighty Dead,
Sir Walter sang, and Nelson bled
To weave a garland for thy head,
Britannia . . .
And Bacon's head and Burns's heart
Are glories that shall ne'er depart,
Britannia.
McLachlan extends some of Burns's themes in adapting
to the new country. To the satire of the "unco guid" he adds the satire
of new butts -Americanized Scots, the "unco money-minded:"
Talk not of old cathedral woods,
Their gothic arches throwing,
John only sees in all those trees
So mony saw-logs growing.
He laughs at all our ecstasies
And he keeps still repeating
You say 'tis fair, but will it wear?
And is it good for eating? (103)
Some of the ironies of "rising in the world" are
Burnsian in spirit though not echoing any particular Burns song.
Burns's melancholy strain is given a new twist by the
absence of continuity with the past: In "pic-nic,'' McLachlan muses by
the stream,
Still at the song, it sang so long
To Red Men gone for ever!
And it will leap and laugh along
As gay and happy-hearted
And it will sing this happy song
When we too, have departed.
Elsewhere McLachlan speaks of the "deeper joy of
sadness" in a new world. The sense of discontinuity leads from nostalgia
to terror, the terror of finding change everywhere, even in the beloved
remembered scenes of home: "I'll no gae back, I'll no gae back."
In McLachlan, Burns's love of animals is directed to
new fellow-creatures: Buck and Bright the oxen, or Old Hoss and Young
Hoss. Independence can become the restlessness of the frontier: "This
settlement is getting old, and just a leetle crowdy" (135). "Heroes!"
cites intellectuals, teachers and preachers in a new pantheon. Burns
would hardly worship at these shrines, but certainly McLachlan's
reverence is in keeping with the Lowland values of his own day.
The Canadian poet, as has appeared in all these
quotations, imitates Burns's metres as well as his themes. He loves a
rollicking rhyme:
If roughs assembled at a bar
And steaming with the barley-braw
They raged and roared and staggered,
As soon as e'er his face they saw,
It held in reverential awe
The most regardless blackguard.
McLachlan's intricate rhyme schemes, and the craft of
his internal rhymes as well as the rollicking swing of his metres, all
show the influence of Burns. They show too the resistance to
alternatives; to, for instance, the slower dignity of Wordsworth's
metres. The Scottish poet sufficed. Burns' simple, independent vigour
and his tight crafted verses served as a useful, expandable model for
McLachlan in particular; they served with equal dominance for the vast
majority of early Canadian poets including many not of Scottish
extraction. In all we see the dangers of a too-exclusive response to the
single model. Burns suited Canadian needs too well. Loving his work,
finding it applicable, Canadian poets settled for his range, and sent
out few feelers into the realms of experience more complicated than his.
THE AGE OF WALTER SCOTT
The same sort of story can be told about fiction in
Canada before Confederation. Here the first powerful name is that of Sir
Walter Scott. Like Burns, his influence fell on ready soil here; unlike
Burns, it was closely followed by the influence of a second major
Scottish novelist, John Galt. From 1814 to 1832, the author of
Waverley dominated popular sales in Canada as in the United States
and the United Kingdom. His work was particularly acceptable in Canada
because of its moral tone, its sense of the tissue of the past (dear to
an exiled generation), and its heroic action and pageantry (vicarious
enrichment for the bare life of subsistence in the settlements).
Scott avoided Burns's bawdry, but maintained Burns's
feeling of homeliness and warmth, humour and gusto, especially in the
treatment of Lowland characters such as Baillie Nicol Jarvie. For the
settlers in farms and villages in the Maritimes, in English-speaking
areas of Lower Canada, and in Upper Canada, Scott's border farmers, his
fishermen, his gypsies were a reminder of home: Dandy Dinmont, McAulay,
Dalgetty, and Edie Ochiltree aroused affection, sentiment, and laughter.
Their qualities were much like those that the new colony fostered and
intensified: eccentricity, doggedness, ingenuity. Even when, back home
in Scotland, these qualities had begun to blur under the impact of
increasing industrialization, they endured in the newer, more open
economy of Canada.
And for those (fewer) members of the Canadian
audience who were striving for garrison gentility, Scott offered a
second level of characters in most of his novels - those rather wooden
heroes and maidens and fine old gentlemen, whose imagined company must
have sweetened many a lonely evening for the legion of Mrs. Moodies,
"roughing it" in the 1820s and 1830s. The stiff "unreal" conversation of
Scott's ladies and gentlemen served as a pattern for writing and
speaking among those desperately clinging to propriety and decorum.
Scottish critics of Scott remind us that the bulk of
his readers at home in the United Kingdom were neither fisher-folk nor
aristocrats, but rather the new urban bourgeoisie of Edinburgh, and
Glasgow, Manchester, and London. Such a mercantile middle class
represented a much smaller proportion of Canada's population and of her
reading public. The audience here perhaps read more for a sense of
identification than for a sense of illusion and escape. What could be
read in Scotland and England as romance could be read in Canada as
realism. Scott's ineffectual heroes, those innocent travellers on whom
the wilder natives act, became an obvious prototype for the Canadian
gentleman, travelling through a strange uncivilized land. A
characterization that seemed to European critics an imaginative ideal
becomes a realistic report on a normal state of mind, a role being acted
out everywhere in Canada in the first decades of the century. Scott's
"hero" - whether he was Waverley, Lovel Brown, or Osbaldistone - would
be swallowed by British readers as a helpful device for getting the
story going. For Canadian readers, these portraits were a report on a
very present reality: the genteel traveller, the man who had lost his
identity, the young fellow who had been set against an older generation
back home. This was not a fantastic fairy tale but an exciting report on
a commonplace of Canadian experience.
When early Canadian writers copied - and over-copied
- Scott's plots and characterizations, they were copying not for the
romantic escapist qualities but as a response to realities effectively
and accurately captured. Scott recreated an imagined border country
filled with uncertainties about law and duty; he presented melodramatic
contrasts of old and new ways of life. In Canada, these fantasies were
observable as fact. Physical pain and torture scenes were used by Scott
to give a frisson of terror to his safely-housed Edinburgh
friends; travel books on Canada show how close was the anguish of cold,
hunger, fire in real life here. Again Scott's fiction fitted in with the
life of his Canadian readers, not as illusion, but as confirmation,
report, documentary.
Scott's real world was an urban one; his imagined
world is half wilderness. But the reader who had vicariously experienced
this imagined world was prepared to cope with a world full of events
such as Fergus's gathering, of places like Bane Lane cave, a world
literally of smugglers and caves and brigand-infested marshland.
Did having a "literary prototype" help soften
travellers' feelings? Did the presence of a surrogate - a "genteel young
man, of genteel appearance travelling" - run through one's mind as one
found a place in the Montreal coach, or the bateau at Coburg, or the
canoe at Les Chattes? Scott's fiction seemed peculiarly relevant to the
deep facts of Canadian life, to the mythic pattern, as well as the daily
drift. Scott's fiction was accepted by Canadian readers, so powerfully
accepted as to become an all-pervasive influence on Canadian writers,
over-exclusive of other points of view, and almost exclusive of native
experiments.
In the first chapter of Waverley, Scott lists
the kinds of novels he could have written. It is an amusing catalogue of
all the sub-species of fiction in vogue in 1814: the Gothic, the German
romance, the sentimental tale, the fashionable sketch of society.
Waverley, of course, was to add a new subspecies: the romance, in
which historical fact could be intertwined with adventure and homely
comedy, all set against a landscape of strange and rugged grandeur.
Titles of the Canadian novels published in the post-
Waverley period may suggest that the novelists had early,
pre-Scott models in mind. For instance, Hart's Saint Ursula's Convent
(1824) sounds as though it would be more indebted to "Monk" Lewis
than to Scott; Lane's The Fugitives in 1830 suggests a romance
plot of disguised identities; Cheney's Rivals of Acadia (1827)
conjures the sentimental vein. But examination of any of them shows the
power of Scott's manner to overflow into every category of fiction.
When Scott moved from near-contemporary stories to
concern himself with earlier days in Scotland, and then to earlier times
in the lands of Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and Talisman,
Canadian writers followed willingly. The feeling that the past is more
rich, more mysterious, and at the same time more satisfying as a subject
for reverie than the present was a natural feeling in "this barren
wooden country." The "lack of a past" disturbed many early writers; the
assumption that the sense of the past is a rich and essential part of
human experience animates the early Canadian leap into historical
fiction. In 1824, Cushing's Saratoga, A Tale of the Revolution,
took readers back "sixty years since," as Waverley had done, and
Cheney's A Peep at the Pilgrims followed Sir Walter into remoter
eras. The year 1826 added Cushing's York Town: A Historical Romance,
and Cheney's Rivals of Acadia. A much more successful
Canadian follower of Scott was Major John Richardson: Wacousta
(1832) is an excellent example of the transplanting of the Scott
tradition. Professor Carl Klinck, in introducing a New Canadian Library
edition of Wacousta says, "Here is stock material of Scottish
romance in the age of Sir Walter Scott, effectively but unexpectedly
introduced in the war tent of a savage."
A second Scottish influence came to supplement that
of Scott. John Galt had been hailed in Scotland as the man likely to
succeed to Scott's romantic mantle (and rewarding sales record). But
Gait's more sociological approach, his dour realism, failed to hold the
popular Scottish audience. These very qualities constituted his appeal
in Canada. The novels of the '20s, set in the Lowlands and in London,
were reminders of the commonplace aspects of the life left behind by
immigrants; the two novels with American settings, Lawrie Todd
(1830) and Bogle Corbet (1831), added vigorous, anti-heroic
portraiture of Scottish expatriates, and an ironic, reductive plot of
grudging acceptance of the new frontier life. Galt's own life in Canada
was very colourful and controversial, but his fictional account of life
in the settlements established a strain of wry, low-keyed reporting of
undramatic, unaccented "roughing it."
Galt democratized Canadian fiction twenty years
before Uncle Tom's Cabin did this job for American best sellers.
He democratized it in a way distinct from Dickens's way - in a way
divested of caricature or exaggeration. No doubt it was a way more
appropriate for a country where eccentricity was never encouraged, and
where "leveling" (vide Mrs. Moodie) was rigorous. This Galt
strain of robust ironic realism was paralleled in the writings of
another Scottish Canadian, Thomas McCulloch. The Letters of
Mephibosheth Stepsure (1821-22) predated and may have influenced
Haliburton's "Sam Slick" (1836-1860). Here the dour self-mocking tone
may owe something to Galt, and the comic portrait of a jaunty
opportunist may sound echoes of Scott's Andrew Fairservice and Dugald
Dalgetty; or one may say that Haliburton's kind of irony is simply a
drawing on the joint-stock of Scottish humour - a humour based on the
enjoyment of smartness or "canniness,'' wry
laughter, without rancour.
A third Scottish-born novelist who exercised enormous
influence on Canadian fiction in pre-Confederation years was R.M.
Ballantyne. In an unceasing flow of books for young readers, Ballantyne
capitalized on the image of the Canadian frontier. Hudson's Bay
began the series in 1843. Canadian novelists for years continued to feed
the demand for boys' books established by Ballantyne. The Ballantyne
school helped fix the image of the Canadian barrens as barren indeed -
barren of social or intellectual interest fit for adult consumption.
Ballantyne's work made familiar the great stretches of Canada controlled
by the Hudson's Bay Company and administered largely by Hudson's Bay
factors who were young Scots, like Ballantyne himself. This image of the
adventurous North supplemented the more domestic settlement scenes
scrutinized by Galt. Together these two Scots, Galt and Ballantyne,
added to the influence of Scott himself, dominated the work of Canadian
fiction writers up to the Confederation period.
PERSISTENCE OF LOWLAND INFLUENCE IN MID-CENTURY
Once again it is the story of an influence that
lasted too long. Gait's annals of Canadian parishes, like Ballantyne's
tales of boyish northern adventures and Scott's swashbuckling historical
romances, satisfied audiences that might well have been turning to the
new Canadian realities of urbanization, new ethnic tensions vis-a-vis
French Canada and the States, or to the subtler social and
psychological probings of the age of Hawthorne and Melville. The
Scarlet Letter in 1850 and Moby Dick in 1851 were apparently
by-passed by the Canadian novelists, who went on grinding out such
pseudo-Scottish romances as Richardson's The Monk of Saint John
(1850); Somerville's The Life of Robert Mowbray (1853);
McDougall's Lady of the Beacon of Aheera (1857); Noel's The
Abbey of Rathmore; Fleming's Sybil Campbell, or the Queen of the
Isles (1863); Daniel's William and Anne, A Tale of Love and War
(1864).
Professor John Matthews, in Tradition in Exile,
offers a feasible thesis. Literary forms of the Old Country - in
this case, forms of Lowland Scotland - would transplant to Canada
because the terrain and the social patterns in early days were
comparable. These transplants assuaged the need for imaginative
expression. In the States, and in Australia, the inappropriateness of
songs about moors and crags and of stories of genteel travellers led to
early cultural uneasiness on the part of the exiles, and consequently to
an earlier development of new folk forms. Canada stayed with Scottish
models because of the continuing closeness of physical and social forms.
Another major reason that the taste for Lowland
themes and measures dominated Canadian readers was the preponderance of
Scots in the printing, publishing, and book selling business. From the
very first phase of Canadian history, publishing matured under Scottish
direction. Many of the first printers in the Maritimes and Quebec were
Scots, such as William Brown and James Robertson. Early journal editors
included John Strachan (Christian Examiner, 1819); Hugh Thomson
(Upper Canada Herald, 1872); David Chisholme (Canadian
Magazine and Literary Repository, 1823, and Canadian Review and
Magazine 1824); A.J. Christie (Canadian Magazine and Literary
Repository, taken over in 1824); George Stewart (Literary
Magazine) and Alex Spark (Quebec Gazette, 1792, and Quebec
Magazine). These editors were complemented by Scottish book
publishers such as Andrew Armour and Hew Ramsay of Montreal in the
mid-30s, G. Mercer Adam of Montreal and Toronto, Robert Middleton of
Quebec, Thomas Maclear and Hunter and G.M. Rose of Toronto, and A. and
W. Mackinlay of Halifax. Bookstores were often run as an adjunct to a
press or a journal. These added further Scottish bias. Publishers were
John Neilson in Quebec, James Lesslie in Toronto and later in Kingston
and Dundas, John McMillan of Saint John, Samuel Thomson in Toronto and
James Campbell in the same city. All were well-established between 1824
and 1850. And all were naturally well-disposed towards the acceptance of
books with a Scottish flavour.
Lowland Scots in Canada moved into other areas where
their taste exercised a crucial influence on the continuing development
of Canadian culture. They dominated the Mechanics' Institutes and the
literary and historical societies; they led the militia; they rallied
the temperance movements and presided over the Free Masons. James
Rattray in The Scot in British North America provides long lists
of the Scots in all these positions: the long lists add up to
illumination of the way Scottish motifs and tastes continued to dominate
Canada even after the percentage of Scots in the total number of
immigrants began to dwindle. Above all, Scots dominated Canadian schools
and politics in the pre-Confederation period. Sir Daniel Wilson is one
good example among many of those who exercised strong educational
leadership.
Learned societies based on Scottish models reflected
Scottish interests and intellectual ambitions. Law, medicine, science,
architecture - in all Scottish taste and values were imprinted, all with
influence both direct and indirect on the growth of Canadian literature.
The influence of Scots as governors-general must be noted too, from
Dalhousie to Lorne, as a pressure on cultural development.
Scottish-flavoured work continued to be published.
Following Scottish models, and imbued with Scottish love of historical
research, regional histories flourished: from John Ross, 1819, to Alex
Ross, 1848, from George Simpson to Thomas Simpson, 1843, from Gourlay,
Haliburton and Fisher in 1836 to Atkinson, Murray and McGregor in 1844.
Statistical methods culminated with Christie's six volume History of
The Late Province of Lower Canada in 1855, but regional histories
continued with Beamish Murdock, 1865; Duncan Campbell, 1873; Alexander
Begg, 1871; James Hannay in 1879. Accounts of the War of 1812 and the
search for Franklin engaged two other Scottish Canadians, Auchinleck and
McClintock.
Memoirs and light essays of the Noctes Ambrosianae
ilk appeared from Tiger Dunlop to Alex Rae Garvie's Thistledown,
1875. More vigorous, and more topical, was the work in journalism of
William Lyon Mackenzie, Neilson, Richardson and others. In all,
comparison with Scottish journals will show a source for tone and topic.
Journalism and history were the genres in which the
most impressive Canadian work was done between the 1830s, when
Haliburton and Richardson reached the peak of work in fiction, and the
1880s, when the poetry of Roberts and Lampman began to appear. The
period from 1840 to 1880 represented lean years in the creative arts in
Canada.
Meanwhile, back in Scotland, a similar story of a
long hiatus marks the middle years of the nineteenth century. In the
'40s, '50s, and '60s, when such ex-Scots as Carlyle and Ruskin were
helping to animate the great mid-Victorian flowering in London, Scottish
writers in Scotland were turning out school-of-Scott novels,
school-of-Burns poems. This long dull period in Scottish letters lasted
until the dramatic emergence of Robert Louis Stevenson. When Stevenson
did appear, he found a Canadian audience very ready to respond.
THE INFLUENCE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
In Scotland during the cultural low between the
period of Burns and Scott and the emergence in the 1880s and '90s of
Stevenson and the Kailyard School, followers of Galt such as Hugh Miller
and William Alexander continued to publish parochial idylls. Among
Scottish expatriates in England, Thomas Carlyle and George Macdonald did
most to keep Lowland themes and values before the general public, but
Carlyle's interests were increasingly retrospective, and Macdonald's
focus swung from the contemporary worlds of David Elginbrod
(1863) and Robert Falconer (1868) to the fantasy worlds of At
the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the
Goblins (1872) and their successors. Such writings, taken with the
persistence in Scottish poetry of imitations of Burns and Scott, may be
interpreted as sad and dangerous, as escapist, and as a negation of the
changing economy and the structure and direction of real life in the
industrializing, centralizing, and secularizing Lowlands. In this
literary interregnum, Scottish genius directed itself largely into
technology: the great names of the '50s to '70s are those of engineers
and business magnates.
In Canada, the same persistence of parochialism and
romantic adventure in literature is less escapist. Canadians still lived
out the life that Scott and Carlyle hymned. Canada was reliving a
Scottish stage long gone by, in the still-rural, still-atomistic
settlements of the pre-railroad era, as well as in the northern barrens
and in the barely accessible northwestern plains. So, even though some
non-Scottish literary influences began to be strongly felt - Tennyson
and Whitman, David Copperfield and Uncle Tom's Cabin - the
Scottish themes remained appropriate as well as powerful. Lowland
machinists manning the printing presses, Lowland clerks working in and
buying out the bookselling shops, Lowland journalists moving into
publishing and editorial positions, all ensured that these appropriate
themes would also remain widely available.
It was into a society still clearly attuned to
Scottish tastes that the sense of a new renascence in Scottish letters
moved swiftly and pervasively. Robert Louis Stevenson began publishing
his short stories in 1878, with "Lodging for the Night" and "The Sire de
Maletroit's Door." His essays, first appearing in British periodicals
from 1877, soon drew wider attention: Virginibus Puerisque, for
instance, appeared in book form in 1884. His frivolous travel books such
as Travels with a Donkey and The Amateur Emigrant, began
to be widely read from 1878-9. Of his novels, Treasure Island
appeared in book form in 1883, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886,
and Kidnapped in 1887. In every one of these areas he found a
Canadian audience very ready to respond, and a group of Canadian writers
very ready to imitate. Through him, a new pressure of Scottish tensions
was felt, first directly from his own books, later through the works of
Canadian imitators.
Stevenson caught some of the traditional Scottish
relish for romantic adventure, quest and quarrel, and epitomized also
the nineteenth century revolt against some of the trammels of Calvinism.
His own rebellion a-gainst the values of his father and mother in
Edinburgh focused the aesthetic, joyful reaction against the
soul-searching gloom of orthodoxy. It was not a Burnsian revolt;
Stevenson erupted not into passions for women, for native land, or for
drinking; instead he flung back into the freedoms of the child-world, of
far away places, and into experiments in the macabre. But these too,
like Burns's avenues, were native paths for the Scottish soul in its
mood of revolt. Stevenson's sea-going romances, his children's poetry,
his vagabond lyrics, are all rooted in Scottish traditions. Transplanted
to Canada, they flourished with equal charm, equal colour -and equal
shock value.
Stevenson himself was a legendary figure: his
Bohemian life, his agnosticism, his marriage to a divorcee, his quest
for life in the South Seas, all jumbled together in the world's
imagination to make him seem the epitome of revolt against convention.
His warmth, sincerity and optimism made the revolt appear wholesome
rather than effete. He appeared frivolous and charming rather than
dangerous, even to orthodox elders. Altogether, Robert Louis Stevenson
offered an attractive model of innovation to the rather timid rebels
among Canadian artists of the 1880s and 1890s.
His eloquence and devotion to style made him a hero
to short story writers like Duncan Campbell Scott and Gilbert Parker.
His emphasis on the romance of life, and the value of an art set against
the practicality of an industrializing scientific age, stirred such
poets as Isabella Crawford, G.F. Cameron, and Wilfred Campbell. Bliss
Carman was encouraged by his example to play with the notion of
vagabondage, and to experiment with poems of childhood and with short
singing verse forms. In the novel, Stevenson's lead was followed by Lily
Dougall, A.C. Laut and Charles G.D. Roberts, among others, in their
flippant, fanciful play with history, their cast of characters - rogues,
charmers, sensible young men caught in perilous quests - and in their
emphasis on action and chance in plotting. Essays in late nineteenth
century Canadian journals show a stylistic elegance, a radical loosening
from Confederation pomposity in manner; they too have been touched by
the rather dandified charm of Robert Louis Stevenson. Children's novels,
always a major genre for Canadian writers since Ballantyne, swelled in
numbers and in strength: Marshall Saunders wrote both in this genre and
in the historical romance. Finally, Stevenson pointed the way for
experiments in the macabre; Duncan Campbell Scott's work in such a tale
as "The Witching of Elspie" owes more to Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde than to the earlier
models provided by Poe.
Of all these Canadian writers, Bliss Carman shows
most clearly, Isabella Valancey Crawford least clearly, the influence of
Robert Louis Stevenson. Carman had spent two years at Edinburgh
University in 1881 and 1882, years when Virginibus Puerisque, A
Gossip on Romance, and other essays were creating a great stir. In
Carman the influence of Stevenson transfigured his earlier dependence on
the Pre-Raphaelites and on Tennyson. "A Seamark," a threnody published
on Stevenson's death, acknowledges the influence of Stevenson as man and
as poet on the young Canadian. Songs from Vagabondia and most of
the later volumes implicitly contain the same acknowledgment of debt, in
their themes, rhythms and tone. In Carman, the legendary, the
sensational, the mystic and the marvellous combine with grimmer ironic
tones in a mix very much like Stevenson's. Pairs of lines rise in the
mind: "Under a wide and starless sky" / "Here by the gray north sea";
"Shovel them in, shovel them in, shovel them in to shore . ..." /
"Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"; "When I was sick and lay a-bed." /
"When I was just a little boy, Before I went to school Among the
novelists, the writer most strongly influenced by Stevenson was Gilbert
Parker. Here was a young man from Napanee, in that part of eastern
Ontario dominated in politics and in education by the Scottish powers at
Queen's University. Parker's early tales deal with Scots and voyageurs
in the Northland. The greatest of his mature novels, The Seats of the
Mighty (1896), parallel to Stevenson in style and tone and in
inventiveness, is also parallel in its basic plot: the canny, honorable,
Whiggish hero, Major Stobo, has been "kidnapped" into an alien, romantic
world. He is both attracted and repelled by the dashing, bragging,
witty, and amoral Doltaire - a French-Canadian variant of Alan Breck
Stewart. Parker's romance is almost as inhibited and sexless as
Stevenson's. Its central adventurous voyage down the St. Lawrence has
the dash, the sensationalism, and the essential cruelty of Stevenson's
fight-filled stories.
Stevenson was popular in the United States. F.L.
Mott, in Golden Multitudes, a study of best sellers in America,
shows him as rivalling the sales of F. Crawford, W.D. Howells, Mark
Twain, and Marie Corelli in the 1880s. But in Canada, the vogue for
Stevenson outstripped all contemporary rivals. To me this indicates not
only the particular popularity of Stevenson's manner here, but also the
persistent openness to Scottish work. For Stevenson, in spite of his
rebellion against Scottish orthodoxies of business and theology,
re-introduces essentially Scottish materials. Response to a grey huddle
of hills and a bright thread of river, tenderness and laughter, respect
for the past, pleasure in rhythmic song, love of a voyage or of a good
fight - Stevenson's trademarks are stamped on most Scottish characters.
In the plethora of Canadian novels from the late
1880s on, many of the titles bear witness to the Stevenson influence in
particular, and to the Scottish bias in general. Marshall Saunders, who
had been educated in Scotland and France, began professional writing
with My Spanish Sailor, 1889, and added other Stevensonian
adventure stories over the years, such as Rose a Charlitte, 1898.
Lily Dougall, educated at Edinburgh University, published Beggars All
as the first of a long series of novels in 1891. John Campbell, a
graduate in theology from Edinburgh after earlier education at Toronto,
published Two Knapsacks in 1892, reminiscent in subject and tone
of Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey. Parker, in The Chief
Factor, also 1892, presented a Scottish company factor, one of the
staples of fiction about the adventurous North. Parker's portrait was in
part a recognition of the local fact, in part an exploitation of the
vogue for Scots dialect which Stevenson had revived. John Mackie,
turning to the new West for adventurous setting, also made vivid use of
Scottish elements in Devil's Playground
(1894) and other novels featuring the Mounted Police. Robert Barr's
In the Midst of Alarms, 1894, a comic version of the time
of Fenian raids in the Detroit district, exploited some of Stevenson's
pace and the rush of incident familiar from Treasure Island.
Barr, who later became a prolific novelist, had come to Canada from
Glasgow. Agnes Laut in 1900 began her concern with Canadian historical
writing with the romantic, adventurous Lords of the North,
featuring rival groups of Scottish fur traders in the Montreal of
McTavish, Fraser, and Mackenzie. Miss Laut, daughter of the Principal of
Queen's University, got her Scottishness at second hand, but her early
novels in particular show the persistence of Scott, refreshed by
Stevenson. William McLennan published Spanish John in 1898 and
The Span of Life in 1899 in collaboration with Jean McIlwraith. Miss
McIlwraith, a graduate of Glasgow, went on to publish her own novel,
The Curious Career of Roderick Campbell in 1901, the same year as
Ralph Connor's Man From Glengarry. Roderick Campbell, a turncoat
before Culloden, is an engaging Falstaffian figure, an opportunist, who
stirs memories in his readers of a long roll of literary prototypes from
Scott to Stevenson. A Nova Scotian, W.A. Fraser, exploited the
conventional antithesis of the canny Lowlander, dashing Highlander in
Blood Lilies (1903). In the opening years of the new century, titles
reminiscent of this same strain continued to appear: e.g. in
Richardson's The Cam-erons of Bruce and W.W. Campbell's Ian of
the Orcades (both 1906). Imitations of Kidnapped, designed
for child readers, appear as late as Frank Baird's Rob MacNab, a
Story of old Preston (1923).
THE IMPACT OF THE KAILYARD SCHOOL
The elegant romanticism of Robert Louis Stevenson
thus provided a very powerful model and stimulus from the 1890s on for
Canadian novelists, many of them Scottish by inheritance and by
education. A different and even stronger Scottish influence began to be
felt within Stevenson's last years. This was the influence, also in the
'90s, of the "Kailyard School" of Scottish fiction.
The Kailyard writers - J.M. Barrie, S.R. Crockett,
Ian MacLaren - are usually considered by Scottish critics as a debased
and deleterious group of writers. These novelists, "hankering for a
homely rural past," presented faint caricature versions of a picturesque
and disappearing way of life. Village humour, village pathos, sentiment
and whimsy were all presented in a way that seems to most modern
Scottish critics vulgar, bathetic and basically dishonest. The motives
for writing such fiction in Scotland were bound up in the displacement
from rural, familial, and religiously orthodox life, into the
fragmentation of the turn-of-the century period. Barrie's Auld
Licht Idylls (1888), Sentimental Tommy (1889), and
A Window in Thrums (1891) came out of his own dislocation from home,
village, mother and native land. Crockett's The Lilac Sunbonnet
(1894) and the novels of "Ian MacLaren" (John Watson), Beside the
Bonnie Brier Bush and Days of Auld Lang Syne, satisfied
demands for more about "the auld name, the wee hoose, and the whaups
crying on the moors" - and added the other elements which became the
stock of these homely novels: sentimental treatment of the "Dominie" and
the minister, plot manipulation of poignant family losses and the
inhibition of passion, graveyard tremors and coy glances at inebriation.
Immensely popular in Great Britain, these books
{Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush in particular) also outsold such
contemporary rivals as The Prisoner of Zenda and Trilby in
the United States. In Canada, the impact of the Kailyard novels was
greater still. Canadian cities had perhaps not produced a reading public
needing such exotic escapism as Trilby and Zenda. Canadian
readers had not developed a taste complex enough for the niceties and
nuances of Henry James, or on the other hand distressed enough to
welcome the muckraking wrath of Frank Norris and his school. The
Canadian society, predominantly middle class, still predominantly rural
and Protestant in mores, had maintained a taste not ranging beyond
regional dialect annals. The Scottish parochial sentimental romances
found an avid readership in Canada, and a group of writers all too ready
to imitate.
Why not? There was hardly a Canadian village
throughout the later nineteenth century without its dominating Kirk, its
Scottish schoolmaster and its Scottish-trained printer and journalist.
The Lowland thread was much more visible and significant in Canadian
towns than in those of the United States. And the Kailyard values, seen
in a kindly rather than a satiric light, were still really present in
many Canadian villages, perhaps long after they had disappeared in the
homeland. Humour, gossip, sweetness, sentimentality - these were the
values, presented in annals of the parishes from John Galt on, still
present and possible in Canadian town life. So when, at the end of the
century, the Lowlands produced the new popular idylls, Canadian taste
was quickly responsive.
"Ralph Connor," like "Ian MacLaren" a minister
writing village fiction under a pseudonym, had a Kailyard fondness for
chronicling regional detail; and like Barrie, Crockett and MacLaren,
Ralph Connor is most effective when retrospective, when hovering with
loving accuracy over the "bees," and wakes, the tavern fights, the Bible
classes of Glengarry, rather than when moving into the emerging tensions
of city society or political manoeuvres. His hero is a current version
of the Robbie Burns type, with fine instincts, powerful passions,
natural intelligence, a beautiful singing voice, and magnificent
physical strength. Ralph Connor adds the "mother figure" popularized in
the A Window in Thrums in his hero's patroness, the minister's
wife. He modifies the anti-city hysteria of the Scottish Kailyard
stories: his hero meets success in Montreal business, although he
whimsically realizes the ultimate impossibility of converting real
worldlings to his own moral values. (Here he is closer to the hard core
of Scottish common sense in Barrie's plays, such as The Admirable
Crichton and A Kiss for Cinderella, with their anti-idyllic
recognition of the impenetrability of social and economic barriers, even
by a Burns type.) The Lowland strain appears everywhere in Ralph Connor,
in spite of his initial choice of Highlanders for his cast - Macdonald
Dhu, Macdonald Bain, the MacRaes and the McGregors. He soon turns to the
Lowland pleasures of endless debates on predestination, and the
application of a Calvinist conscience to the exigencies of Montreal
commerce, and of a romance involving a sophisticated charmer and also a
simpler, more pious maiden.
Ralph Connor was soon joined in the Canadian Kailyard
by R.L. Richardson, with Colin of the Ninth Concession, 1903.
Here are memories of schoolyard fights, of a sadistic dominie, and of
the warmth of a Scottish Canadian farm home - all capped with a romance
ending more in the manner of Disraeli than of MacLaren. W.A. Fraser in
The Lone Furrow, 1907, presents the story of a village minister
and his wife set against the narrowness of village morality. He works
his dialect with accuracy and charm.
More strongly marked by the mawkish mannerisms of the
Kailyard is the work of "Marion Keith" (minister's wife, this time).
Duncan Polite (1905) presents a Highlander and a Lowlander as two
old friends keeping an eye on the life of the village of Glenora. Piety,
temper, and affection characterize the Lowlander, "splinterin' Andra"
Johnstone. The plot of young romance and of theological changes
(broadening, softening, secularizing) lacks tension. But in this too the
author follows the desultory sequence of Barrie's Idylls, or of
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush. Perhaps we see here a continuance
of the "statistical" method so dear to the annalists as a rejection of
fanciful artistic manipulating. Perhaps there is a link still with the
unorganic plotting of Scott. Perhaps a combination of such theological
and aesthetic concepts is reinforced in Marion Keith by Canadian and
feminine timidity.
The same qualities may appear effeminate in R.E.
Knowles's Saint Cuth-bert's (1905). Here the dour Old Testament
rigidity of the village Scot is sentimentalized, and connected with an
idyllic rehash of the parable of the Prodigal Son. "Only those who
understand the Scottish temperament would have known there had been a
struggle," the book announces in its opening sentence, and proceeds to
exploit the Kailyard cliches about the stern Scots father, the delicate
suffering mother, and the wandering boy. Knowles's The Dawn at Shanty
Bay (1907) continues the moral and sociological strain; so do many
other popular Canadian novels in the ensuing years. The best in the type
is Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's Mist of Morning (1919).
Didacticism, sentiment and whimsy mark all these
novels. Perhaps the high incidence of ministers among the producing
novelists is responsible. Religious bias among the publishers, plus the
successful examples in Canada and Scotland of clerical authors, fostered
these ministerial efforts. The results show the presence of some
occupational hazards: vapid moralizing, blindness to ironies, and
censorship of moral and psychological blasphemies.
There were some ironic counterblasts among the
Canadian novelists, presaging the anti-Kailyard tone of Brown's The
House with the Green Shutter. There is the anti-idyllic humour of
E.E. Sheppard's Dolly the Young Widder (1886), the farcical
humour of Arch McKishnie's Gaff Linkum (1907) and the wider
ethnic range of John MacLean's Warden of the Plains (1896), in
which a Scots missionary hero tackles vices other than those of Ontario
villages. Robert Stead's Bail Jumper (1914) presents life on the
western farms, where only Scottish names remain as reminders of
heritage, and where no use of dialect or Lowland mannerisms seems
significant enough for record.
But Kailyard strains at their best survive in the
work of Sarah Jeanette Duncan, fused there with a Jamesian fineness of
technique and an ironic tone which reminds us of the best of John Galt.
There are two Scottish ministers in The Imperialist (1904),
representing perhaps two generations of Lowland theology, or else
representing a Scottish newcomer and a Scot tempered and restructured by
Canadian experience. The heroine's father, Mr. Murchison, represents
another Lowland type, the type that had in fact ensured the dominance of
Scottish ways and values in Canada throughout the first years of the
life of the Dominion. In Duncan's novel, the Kailyard qualities still
appear - gentleness and humour and family tenderness - but leavened by
wit and a bit of malice. Henry James may have shown her the basis of her
fictional technique, but she added to James, not from Hamlin Garland or
Theodore Dreiser, and not from Conrad or Hardy, but from Barrie and Ian
MacLaren. The world these Scottish writers pictured, and the tone they
chose, was not only pleasanter but also actually closer to Canadian
reality than the American or English alternatives.
POETS AFTER CONFEDERATION
To turn from fiction to poetry, before moving on to
the consideration of non-literary aspects of Canadian culture, is to
enter an area where influences from the Lowlands are more nebulous.
Here, as in fiction, there is a striking preponderance of Scottish names
among the writers: Campbells and Camerons and Macraes join the Dougalls
and Frasers and Gordons and Duncans.
Every year saw volumes of verse by Scots or
descendants of Scots, a few in Gaelic, but mostly in dialects of the
Lowlands. We could start with McLachlan's volumes in 1855 and 1858, and
then skim through the following list:
1858: MacGeorge, Tales, Sketches and Lyrics
1861: McLachlan, The Emigrant
1863: Ascher (not a Scot but using the popular dialect) Voices of
the Hearth
1860: William Murdock, Song of the Emigrant
1868: Charles Mair, Dreamland and Other Poems
1867: Alexander Muir, "The Maple Leaf Forever"
1874: Machar, For King and Country
1875: Alex Rae Garvie, Thistledown
1878: Hunter-Dewar, Emigration of the Fairies
1866: Lachlan MacGoun, "Tramp Tramp Tramp" (anti-Fenian song)
1880: W.W. Smith, Poems
1881: K.S. MacLean, Coming of the Princess, the Lady of Lome
(1883: Evan MacColl, Poems and Songs in Gaelic)
1884: I.V. Crawford, Malcolm's Katie
1887: G.F. Cameron, Lyrics on Freedom
1887: Mary Morgan ("Gowan Lee"), Woodnotes in the Gloaming
1889: W.W. Campbell, Lake Lyrics
(1889: W.D. Lighthall, ed., Songs of the Great Dominion)
1890: D. Anderson, Lays of Canada
1891: G. Murray, Verses and Versions
1891: John Imrie, Songs
1893: Elizabeth MacLeod, Carols of Canada
1893: D.C. Scott, The Magic House
1893: J.D. Edgar, This Canada of Ours
1894: Robert Reid, Poems Songs and Sonnets
(1895: D. Anderson, Scottish Folklore)
(1895: J.A. Lockhart, Beside the
Maraganeywa
(1896: W.W. Smith, New Testament in Broad Scots)
1897: John Macfarlane, Heather and Harebell (R.L.S. echoes)
1899: A.M. Machar, Lays of the True North
1902: J.W. Bengough, Echoes of Drumtochty (includes "To Ian
MacLaren")
1900: F.G. Scott, Poems
Names of authors, and titles of their publications
prepare us for the predominance of echoes from Scott, Burns and Carlyle.
The Literary History of Canada comments that "a direct connection
between the best poems [of this period] and contemporary events hardly
exists." The conventions in Burns which had been valid for the poets of
the '40s and '50s remained as artifice in the '60s and '70s. The stance
of the village poet voicing in a common vernacular the shared joys and
sorrows of a tightly-knit community became a pose in the poets - and
poetesses - of greater sophistication. These poets chose to write in
"braid Scots" for sentimental effect. The range of poetry in this vein
appears best in Selections of Scottish Canadian Poetry, edited by
William Campbell (1913). Much of it is third-rate, bathetic and
sentimental. It is not popular art or folk art - much too self-conscious
for that. But it has an interest as revelation of mass taste, a taste
still dominated by one ethnic strain, even though that strain had became
numerically less and less significant.
Major poets of the late nineteenth century - Lampman,
Carman, Roberts, Campbell, Crawford and Duncan Campbell Scott - do not
work in this blatantly "auld hame" vein. But they too show the remnants
of Lowland attitudes, inculcated through family ties, educational
system, the press, and politics. Essentially they are bourgeois poets,
writing in a vein of moderate commonsense gentility. The Scottish
educational ideal might point to these poets as its best products.
Knox's dream of a school in every parish, a college in every city had
come close to fulfilment in the young Dominion. Such a system guaranteed
a freedom from class divisions, reinforcing the kinship or clan feeling
of the early days, when bonds were
strong enough to counteract economic separations or
stratifications. There is consequently a level homogeneous tone in
Canadian expression in the decades after Confederation. The Canadian
poets manifest neither the sparkle of the aesthetic aristocratic wits,
the Wildes and the Beardsleys, nor the hammer of the new proletarian
language of Whitman, the early Frost, or E.A. Robinson. The dignity of
the Canadian tone also reflects the Scottish strain in school
discipline, and the Scottish balance between respect for technology and
respect for poetic gifts. The poet trained in such a school - different
both from the classicism of the best English education, and the
levelling practicality of contemporary American schools - might be
expected to manifest a modest self-confidence, self-respect in the face
of scientific contemporaries, and no need to withdraw into effete
aestheticism, nor to align with assertive mass movements. The stance of
self-respecting bourgeois gentility, which differs from the posture of
poets of the '90s both in England and in the States, is noticeable in
all the turn-of-the-century Canadians (with the possible and rather
self-conscious exception of Carman).
Related is the pallor of these poets' works. Their
propriety, their gentility, their poetic thinness, may come also from
the very decency of their upbringing. The upright, fair-minded Scottish
school masters, inculcating a taste for the spare, the sparse, the
controlled, left their mark on this generation of poets. Again it is a
mark differentiating them from the more opulent tone of English
decadence, and from the greater angularity of American
conflict-conscious muckrakers (to mention contemporary non-Canadian
alternatives in poetic tone). We see the effect in Lampman's "November"
poems, in his taste for a decorous pastel beauty, in his choice of tight
forms like the sonnet. There is a kind of poetic thrift in this pallor.
The same tone - honest, affable, controlled, rather pale - appears in
the New Brunswick poems of Charles G.D. Roberts.
Mentioning Roberts and Lampman we remember another
quality of their work which seems rooted in the Scottish inheritance.
This is localism, a focus on regional detail. In that
turn-of-the-century period, so stirred by nationalisms in Europe and
America, Canadians achieved (by Yeats's definition) "provincial" rather
than "national" poetry. The orientation to small culture pockets in
Scotland had been especially strong in old days when water channels and
spurs of hill effectively separated each little plain or glen from its
neighbours. In Canada this local differentiation survived, even after
transportation had erased much of it in Scotland. So Lampman in Ottawa
and Roberts in the Maritimes focused on local patches of landscape in a
way reminiscent of an earlier day in Scotland. And the landscape,
whether in the Gatineau hills or on the Tantramar shores, still
resembled Scotland in its dun colouring and its angularities.
Lampman's strongest note is his sense of reaction
against an idyllic romantic response to the landscape. Lampman, set
against nature, wrapped in thought, "draining the heat," creates his own
"nameless and unnatural cheer, a pleasure secret and austere." It is a
mood familiar to the Scot, who husbands his resources and preserves his
identity by drawing in to his own fire.
The need to preserve identity is a constant theme in
Roberts and Lamp-man. Canada in the post-Confederation period was
feeling the pressures of a border state - a position familiar in Scots
tradition. In the new nation, buffetted by counter-ideologies British
and American, a kind of dogged resistance emerged, individual as well as
national, not flaming or passionate, but close to the mood long
sustained in Scotland during centuries of political and economic
orphanage. Lampman's focus on his own moods, in the face of the
impinging realities of nature, suggest the dour insistence on identity
of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Scot. Examination of the
conscience, self-help, ironic downrightness and honesty - these are the
marks also of many of Lampman's compatriots, and especially of George
Frederick Cameron.
One of the qualities honestly recognized and explored
by these poets was their pleasure in retrospect. Nostalgia for a passing
world was strong in fiction at this time, as has already been suggested
in reference to The Man From Glengarry. Leacock's "Mariposa" and
L.M. Montgomery's "Avonlea" rose to popularity on the same nostalgic
thrust. In the poets, the hankering back, the longing for a remembered
world of childhood, a countryside of pre-industrial simplicity, is
endemic. "Yet will I stay my steps," Roberts says in "Tantramar
Revisited," "... Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see."
This corresponds to the contemporary Kailyard longing for childhood and
countryside and continues the emigrants' cry of longing for the old
home. The theme of displacement -displacement in time, in place, in
sociological and theological values - is dominant in Canada as in
Scotland, and to an extent unequalled in the States or in Europe or
England.
In the poetry of Roberts, Lampman, Carman, Scott, and
Campbell, there are many qualities other than these I have mentioned.
But these qualities - thrift, pallor, nostalgia, independence,
self-assertion against nature - seem to be important traits, and they
seem to be arguably Scottish ones. I do not mean that the qualities
emerging at the end of the nineteenth century were merely late marks of
the Scottish heritage. I do mean that nothing in the Scottish
heritage impeded the direction Canadian poetry was taking - and many
elements in that heritage implemented the development, and cleared a
path for it.
Although there is much that is admirable and
interesting in these poets, they did not create a body of outstanding
poems, any more than their contemporaries in Scotland did. Nor did they
play an appreciable part in voicing or directing national culture, in
the way Burns or Scott or even Stevenson had done. The major cultural
force in the last quarter of the century may be said to have inhered not
in a single writer or in a coterie of writers, but in the strong,
serious, popular press.
GENERAL INFLUENCES ON POPULAR TASTE
An army of newspapers, grinding out editorials,
reviews, essays, short stories, and occasional verse, kept the taste for
reading widespread, and kept the readiness for a national literature
apparent. It directed the cultural as well as the political and economic
growth of the country along lines alien to American democratic forms,
even while deviating from British principles. And that popular Canadian
press still found its editors, its writers, its printers and its
publishers largely among the Hunters and the Roses, the Andersons and
the Middletons, the Browns, the Dougalls, the Stewarts and the
Christies. All these men from Glasgow and Aberdeen and Paisley were
trained to be practical and hard-headed. But they were ready, like their
unsung predecessor at Kilmarnock, to take a chance on local talent and
popular taste. Particularly were they ready, of course, to recognize a
new poetic voice when it spoke with a Scottish burr.
Contributing to the tendency to patronize and push
Scottish trends was the incredible roll-call of Scottish Canadian
success stories. A tradition that produced so many successes carried its
own validation. The success of such men as Strathcona and Macdonald was
itself a cultural force. Scottish values had given Canadian railroading
its creators, from Strathcona to Sandford Fleming; had produced merchant
powers like Renfrew and Simpson, lords of the liquor and tobacco empires
like Seagram and Macdonald, educational leaders like George Grant,
politics from George Brown and John A. Macdonald to Alexander Mackenzie
and Alexander Galt. Who could argue with a set of assumptions and a code
of behaviour that produced such performances? The percentage of Scottish
immigrants dwindled, but the power of Scottish mores waxed.
Diminution in the numerical proportion of Scottish
immigrants was particularly noticeable out West. After the 1880s, when
we speak of Canadian culture we must look beyond Lake Superior to
include the life of the prairies and the west coast. Throughout the
early years of the nineteenth century, hardy travellers who pushed
beyond the Sault had recorded a passage from one Hudson's Bay factory to
the next. It was a record of a chain of isolated Scottish families,
offering warmth and friendship, and creating a myth of Canadian western
hospitality that has its base in Scottish conventions. As towns grew up
in the West, many focused around the established "first family" of the
Scots factor. Such a family at the core of new settlement gave a social
tone, decent, law-abiding, and hard-working, to the Canadian West. The
tone is recorded in travel accounts from Sladen to Kipling; and most
accounts add glimpses of the Scots from whom the tone emanates. After
1886, new settlers flooded in, many of central European, Slavic, or
Scandinavian background; but the early tone persisted. Bryce's The
Scot in the North West summarizes the extent of influence.
East and west, the continued Scottish
dominance in Canadian schools ensured continuing relish for literature
and for the national past. Scottish teachers also inculcated respect for
the creative man, a tradition rooted in the idolatry of Burns and Scott,
and one that marked a sharp difference from the increasingly irreverent
anti-creative bias in the States (the bias which forced Mark Twain into
the pose of non-poetic "funny man" for so many years). The respect for
learning in Canada had as a negative result -a rather pretenious erudite
style, even in the semi-learned.
The combination of bookshop, printing establishment
and newspaper office in small towns and in the rising cities continued
to be another channel through which Lowland ideas were diffused. The
Canadian Monthly and National Review, for instance, so powerful an
intellectual influence, was the brain child of a Scot, Graeme Mercer
Adam. Associated in this enterprise as in so many of national importance
was Stevenson; the printers were Hunter and Rose. (George McLean Hunter
had moved into this venture from earlier work with the Montreal
Witness.) The great city journals continued to be dominated by
Scottish Canadians like George Brown of the Globe, David
Chisholme of the Montreal Gazette, Dr. A.J. Christie who went
from the Gazette to the Canadian Magazine, and John Ross
Robertson of the Toronto Telegram. In smaller centres, from a
profusion of Scottish names one might select Thomas McQueen of the God-erich
Huron Signal, James Innis of the Guelph Mercury, James
Somerville of the Ayr Observer, Robert Sellar of the Huntingdon
(Que.) Gleaner. Histories of Canadian journals sound like a
directory of Aberdeen or Glasgow: Hugh Scobie, Hugh Graham, J.A.
Macdonald, David Creighton - the Lowland names are legion.
Domination over politics was another means by which
Scottish cultural values were made to prevail in Canadian communities as
the nineteenth century drew to its close. Traces of this bias appear in
the whole spectrum of political life - a curious alternative to the
story of Tammany domination in the United States, and without comparable
undertones of corruption by an ethnic group.
Finally, the pressure of Scottish values can be seen
in the English-Canadian view of history. In the first Makers of
Canada Series, how many Scottish names appear among the historians,
as well as among the men who "made" history! As Canada moved into the
twentieth century, two massive studies summarized the effects of the
Scot in this country: James Rattray's The Scot in British North
America (1884) and W.W. Campbell's The Scotsmen in Canada
(1911). Both authors catalogued Scottish success stories in every
conceivable field; both also attempted to generalize on the Scottish
qualities that emerged from these stories. Campbell specified elements
dominant in Scottish character, and persistently successful in the
Canadian scene: "dour, kindly, dignified, stubborn, strenuous." Daniel
Clark, in Selections from Scottish-Canadian Poets, concocted
another list: "reticent, slow, purposeful, philosophic, grim in humour,
given to melancholy ... but preserving an inward chuckle." Both lists
sum the Scottish strain in nineteenth century art and life.
In cultural terms, the story of the nineteenth
century might now be summarized: an early direct imitation, followed by
long continuance of Scottish themes and styles in the mid-century, and
culminated by a late return to direct imitation. The Lowland stream had
reached its fullest expression in Canadian art early, when Canadian
conditions made its use possible, successful and satisfying. The
Scottish stream became narrow and thin, but Canadians persisted in
following a less-and-less appropriate tradition. By the end of the
century Canadian writers, though refreshed by the facile flavour of the
new sentimental and escapist Scottish art, wandered into an illusory
land, a parched terrain. Yet the solider values of the earlier tradition
remained powerful in Canadian folk and popular culture.
INTO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
As the world moved towards World War I, no single new
Scottish voice caught the Canadian ear. Writers and painters of the
Celtic Renaissance such as "Fiona MacLeod" stirred little response.
Duncan Campbell's "Piper of Arll" is probably the most important of
Canadian attempts at the mystic qualities of the "Celtic twilight."
Art nouveau prettiness and the swing into symbolism and fairy tale
magic sat uneasily on Canadian poets. Perhaps Presbyterianism had
established too strong a distrust of illogic, too great a defence
against the luxury of stained glass, incense and jewelling. In Canadian
symbolism when it did emerge, more important poetic influences were to
be felt from American, Irish and English contemporaries, and from
earlier poets like Donne and Blake.
Glasgow played its part in stirring the experiments
of emerging Canadian painters of the '20s. William Cruikshank and
William Wood are among many Scots who brought new infusions of talent in
the early century, and one may speculate on the deep-grained effect of
Scottish attitudes toward art on the life of Tom Thomson at Leith, and
of others growing up in still-Scottish communities in rural Canada. But
one would see this Scottish strain as very minor compared to
Scandinavian, German, and French influences on the Group of Seven and
their successors in Canadian art.
In less serious art terms, the same diminution of
influence appears. In escapist fiction, although some Scottish novelists
have been very popular (notably John Buchan and A.J. Cronin, and more
recently Michael Innis, J.I.M. Stewart) the days of dominance seem over.
Modern historical novelists such as Neil Munro, James Lorimer and D.T.H.
McLellan have made little impact. The genre has remained popular with
Canadian writers like Thomas Costain and Thomas Raddall, however, and
perhaps the Scottish flavour in these Canadian names suggests that this
is one of many examples of a different growth, but from a common root -
the old Scott tradition.
Similarly, Scottish dialect humorists such as Eric
Linklater have had little sale, now that the Scottish rhythm and
localisms are no longer familiar (in the literal sense of family
nearness) to Canadian ears. But Canadian writers as diverse as Earle
Birney and Sheila Watson still catch the flavour of dialect for ironic
effect - a persistence of the old near-scientific pleasure in linguistic
oddities.
The literature most controversial in modern Scotland
has fostered little following in Canada. We have found our own forms of
irony, of irreverence, of radicalism; but we have not followed the lines
of George Brown or "Hugh MacDiarmid " or Louis MacNeice. We have had
innovative political movements but they have not shown much debt to Dr.
Grieve's form of nationalism or communism. We have had our own kind of
reaction a-gainst the regional idyll, in writers like Ernest Buckler,
Margaret Laurence, and Sinclair Ross, but the reaction shows little
trace of being aroused by Brown's The House with the Green Shutters.
Canadian poets have danced mockingly around our own "blasted pine,"
but the ironists like A.J.M. Smith and Frank Scott show little affinity
with MacNeice, though they may be echoing the essence of his cry, "It's
no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh."
Now Buckler grew up in Dalhousie West, Nova Scotia;
Margaret Laurence's Neepawa was Scottish-founded and Scottish-dominated;
and Sinclair Ross and Frank Scott bear testimony to the Scottish
influence in their very names. But the range in ethnic backgrounds of
contemporary Canadian writers is actually very great. The Canadians who
have achieved "best seller" status include Pierre Berton, Morley
Callaghan, Leonard Cohen, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, W.O.
Mitchell, Hugh MacLennan, and Mordecai Richler. Even so condensed a list
suggests how little the contemporary Canadians can be said to follow a
subsidiary stream from a Scottish source. Yet Klein, Layton, Gustafson,
Cohen - as well as Ross, MacLennan, and Graeme Gibson - seem most
Canadian when they strike notes closest to the Lowland strain. Love of
home, tenderness for children, combined with dour recognition of the "cauld
blast" in the universe, and a self-mocking reductiveness - these
qualities remain strong in most major Canadian artists. For even when
the Lowland groups no longer predominate at immigration points, and even
when Lowland names no longer sound most persistently in the roll call of
poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, painters, musicians,
architects and sculptors, values and tastes which we recognize as
Scottish still permeate Canadian life and art.
Love of the land is still a major theme. This is not
a paradisal land, but it is a land that can be tamed and possessed. It
appears still in terms Burns would recognize. Grove, Ostenso, Buckler,
and Laurence anatomize the hard work, frugality and independence of
Canadian farm life in ironic terms. Realistic animal stories also
persist: a direct line seems to run from Burns to C.G.D. Roberts to
Farley Mowat, in tenderness, humour and sympathy, presenting honest
encounters with our "fellow mortals." Irreverence and impropriety, also
taken from Burns's book, mark contemporary love songs, but in Canadian
lyrics the other strand of Burns's manner persists also - tenderness,
gentleness, sentiment.
Dualistic psychology, which critics of literature see
as characteristic of the Scottish outlook, still dominates Canadian
novels. Critics have attributed Scott's double focus - on genteel hero
and pawky follower - to the divided loyalty of the Scot, the sense of
Highland and Lowland alternatives, or to a Calvinist sense of duality.
Critics have added Stevenson's dichotomies - Jekyll and Hyde, David and
Alan - to the dualistic scheme. If such dualism is indeed peculiarly
Scottish, it has been thoroughly adopted in Canada. In MacLennan's
The Watch that Ends the Night George and Jerome offer such a double
focus; the twin theme recurs in Buckler's David and Anna in The
Mountain and The Valley; and one might add for an obviously
non-Scottish Canadian example the double hero-villain of Cohen's
Beautiful Losers. Such a duality appropriately represents the
bicultural strains in Canada, just as it once reflected the double
culture of Scotland.
Today, Canadians dream of a flowering of native
literature. Our situation is not unlike that in Scotland in the opening
years of the nineteenth century, a time of frustration because of
economic and cultural encroachments by a rich and powerful neighbour,
and of determination to resist "cultural imperialism" by rediscovering
national essences. Lockhart in those days exhorted his fellow Scots, in
terms that could be modified to fit Canadian needs:
Scotland should learn to consider her own national
character as a mine of intellectual wealth, which remains in a great
measure unexplored .....She should by no means regard English literature
as an expression of her mind, or as superseding the examination of what
intellectual resources remain unemployed within her own domains.
Adapting this exhortation to Canadian terms, we might
suggest that Canadian culture may now. be ready to free itself from
dependence on any imported models as a "mine of intellectual wealth," or
"expression... mind." We may also however further explore the notion
that many of our "intellectual resources" remain as a naturalized form
of Scottish values. These values are powerful here both as a heritage
from a day when Scottish threads were the strongest inweavings of the
Canadian fabric, and also as a continuing, inevitable and appropriate
response to an environment similar to Scotland in geographic forms, in
climate, and in politico-sociological structures.