Is There a Canadian Literature?
Bush, Douglas
12 THE COMMONWEAL . . . . . . . important psychological methods is the "verbal report fully worded to include only exact science and mechan- method" which looks so dangerously like pure intro-...
...Then came the bishop...
...their political Raymond Knister...
...men appear to possess the faculty of keeping their sympathies broad and their interests wide...
...Looking back over the last quarter of a century one Mr...
...flat and monotonous world he chooses to inhabit...
...For the present, is no such thing as consciousness...
...Watson makes fun of the Schoolmen, imperceptible movement of the larynx still goes on, but surely his hypothetical scion of the Pharaohs and says Watson, and that's what we are doing when we his sub-vocalizing child are far inferior to the one think we are thinking...
...and if we had instruments fine about the angels on the point of a needle, which is enough, and if they showed such movements during generally supposed in the modern world to have been alleged thinking, we should be able to prove that there the high spot of Scholastic dialectics...
...When I grew into a boy he and I became constant companions...
...and see character in the round--as he does once in a Sometimes we do not even get credit for writers who while--we should be less conscious of the artificially stay at home...
...of romantic episodes in Canadian history...
...Mr...
...Callaghan has abjured the idyllic whence no traveler returns except for a visit...
...Months before the arrival of that dig- everything modern...
...Such a critical attitude is developing in Canada, and it is our chief need, both in the arts and in public affairs...
...It is also an excellent picture of Onkind...
...Canadian material handled with skill and imagination...
...tale concerning the indiscreet and indiscriminate vocal- We can well afford to stay with him on the safe izing of infants, and how it is gradually repressed by ground of physiology, but when he turns to metaparents and teachers until it subsides to a mutter, a physics, most of us will prefer men trained in the mere moving of the lips, and then silence...
...French things had devils in them, nitary, Grandfather talked about the event...
...they can Mr...
...passed through a hard apprenticeship, which is recorded in his Search for America, a chronicle of Americanization somewhat different from Mr...
...Poetry has trickled abundantly from a tap of tario life--and Canada is not, in spite of the movies thin and diluted romanticism...
...Grandfather and I waited on the such a fine word sketch of a stranger that he embraced balcony of the schoolhouse, both of us eagerly looking in the direction from which the holy ambassador was to come...
...Marius Barbeau (witness the older writers were in touch with the modern mind, the latter's recent Downfall of Temlaham) and others...
...Bogo- he said...
...Merrill Denison, may be commended to those for comium, who has been a Cabinet Minister and yet has whom the title recalls the celebrated chapter on snakes...
...In general, he has brought us back to Aristotle and Bacon, to the outside world, the peSo the truth is out" Watson is really a speculative As a last resort, the reader turns to the discussion of human thinking---"sub-vocal talking," as Watson calls it...
...The work of a Street...
...GRANDFATHER'S EYES By STOYAN CHRISTOWE T HE night I was born, Grandfather Bogomir, my child," he replied sadly, "I have never seen a who had been blind for several years, had a bishop...
...But while purveyors of and cheap magazines, dominated by half-breed trappers sweetness continued to make lollypops and extol the and the mounted police...
...One cannot mention Ontario virtuousness of virtue and find God in stars and sunsets life without recalling Mr...
...All my life I have wished to see one...
...Hemingway...
...However, there have been two main parties in the dispute whose views, consisting of variations on "Yes" and "No," are somewhat difficult to reconcile...
...Perhaps that is why his system is so popular begging definitions of science and psychology (care- "in partibus infidelium...
...For a decade the Canadian Forum has been trying to nadian novelist, since he has lived in Manitoba over foster a spirit of intelligent criticism in literature and thirty years...
...But Martin Burrell's excellent volume of essays Betwixt Canadian fiction has needed realistic grit more than Heaven and Charing Cross, remarks: "These English- anything, and an excess can do no harm...
...Everybody was dressed in especially after I had been told of his dream on the Easter clothes...
...Academic persons and some others have been aware that a reputation in Canada does not constitute an entry into world literature, while fervent patriots of more heart than head have diligently acclaimed one another as important figures...
...Names of fiction writers also sug- way's own work, and Mr...
...In the forefront is rich and meltion in Europe, though an eminent art critic of the low comedy peopled with characters who, despite comic United States not long ago made the sage remark that exaggerations, are both Canadian and universal...
...But the latter field...
...Bishops are so rare, BogoNor was this hope on the part of my grandfather mir, the very earth where they set foot is consecrated...
...In many respects, therefore, we are in the same position as the United States a generation ago, before a cultivated and critical opposition arose to appraise the quality of American civilization...
...Further, while wealth is increasing the producdon o f Babbitts is increasing too, and the mass of people are still absorbed mainly in the business of making a livelihood, so that we have a combination of comfortable materialism and pioneer drabness...
...He on instinct, however (the battleground of the ages) has shown us how very early learning begins, and how he finds the objective scientist mixing his experimental very much can be learned, and thus he has snatched data with much theorizing and "anecdotal psychol- us from the arms of the pessimistic eugenists and ogy," and finishing with a list of instinct-types purely turned us toward the doctrines of the more hopeful speculative and quite conventional...
...He had a dislike for me and said, "Splendid, Bogomir" (I was named after my grandfather) in the same breath he asked, "Now, tell me something about this man's soull" except his shoes and his calpac, the latter of genuine Still Grandfather Bogomir had never been so franti- black astrakhan...
...son promised to do, but did not do...
...and other precious stones...
...Barker Fairley, a new spirit in Canadian fiction, and others might be an Englishman long domiciled in Canada, and there added, such as Major Acland, whose novel of the war, is the illuminating Henry James of Professor Pelham All Else Is Folly, has just appeared with an appreci- Edgar, who, incidentally, has done more than any other ative preface by Mr...
...most identify them with the United States...
...Canada has trained so many more known in the United States as one of the most devout men and women than she can make use of that tens of disciples of Mr...
...IS THERE A CANADIAN LITERATURE ? By DOUGLAS BUSH p ROPOUNDING tion has been for years and discussing a favorite this pastime great among ques- canized, area, with and cultural a small oases population at long scattered intervals, over has a large not Canadian literati...
...very successfully...
...Leacock's almost perfect and sentinel pines, Canadian painters had struck out Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, an early book on their own path, with their own eyes and their own much less known in the United States than his later and Mr...
...More- Michael's College in the University of Toronto, over, the United States has absorbed a good deal of achieved celebrity with a bound, and has become well Canadian brain...
...Morley Callaghan, a graduate of Saint hardly escape from imitation to originality...
...All his life he wore the gabardine-like woolen mir," he would exclaim, "it will be a glorious sight glurdia...
...He taught me the art of expression are they born just as we are...
...the humdrum emptiness and triviality of life number of Canadian artists has won critical recogni- are only suggested...
...He has done good and the instincts...
...Callaghan cherish and express a fond if somewhat amused regard would give less attention to exploring the not very profor their native land, like Mrs...
...His question- pretenses...
...the first study of chial to the local and universal, and it can increasingly Charles Doughty has come from a professor of Get- be judged by other than domestic standards...
...Knister has lately published a novel of his own, sees that in intellectual and artistic matters generally, White Narcissus, which perhaps does not quite come Canadians have been too easily and piously content off, but is, among Canadian novels, a more seriously with effete tradition...
...seen an archimandrite...
...The groundwork is laid with a long fairy- riphery, as a starting-place...
...It was the first time a bishop Such was my anxiety to help my grandfather see things, had set foot on our soil...
...It is a kindlier Main treatment both mature and modern...
...No...
...Everything about Grandfather was white, clothes," as he called them...
...The best Cahistory, except to say that such permanent contribu- nadian writing is moving away from the local and parotions are increasing in quantity...
...They are born from mothers, same as we, were still inarticulate I had acquired a vocabulary and but there is something divine, unearthly, about them I" a fluent diction that became the envy of grown-ups...
...F. P. Grove may perhaps be claimed as a Cahands, and painting was the first of the arts to receive more mechanical productions...
...Miss de la Roche's Jalna stories have cast off the burden of the Canadian heritage, though the second has the usual defects of sequels...
...yet they are There is no need to speak of scholarly and critical in general dealing more and more with the material work, ranging from Virgilian exegesis to constitutional they know, which is as it should be...
...The popular mode in Canadian ambitious work than one would have though possible a fiction has been soft sentimentality of the "wholesome" few years ago...
...12 THE COMMONWEAL . . . . . . . important psychological methods is the "verbal report fully worded to include only exact science and mechanmethod" which looks so dangerously like pure intro- istic psychology) might have been expected to pull him spection that Watson himself is dubious, and takes through, as they have many another, but dat ole debble four pages to explain the difference to himself, not metaphysics got him in the end...
...The inadequacies of the Another young man who has fresh sincerity is Mr...
...Indeed I once took a modest possessed--except in parts of Quebec and the marlpart in it myself, inditing, in the innocence of youth, a "plea for original sin" which traced Canada's literary backwardness to the dominance of a dull and parochial morality...
...And so through three chapters of Why criticize him, then, for what he has not done, straight physiology to the treatment of the emotions and his system for what it is not...
...I have dream that his eyesight had come back to him...
...Urban life in Canada has been thoroughly AmeriNovember 6, I929 i | t , J i l l , , u times--that stable, homogeneous, deeply rooted tradition which is the nursery of literature...
...Ford Madox Ford...
...Knister's anthology, Canadian life is not narrowing in the American sense...
...Professor MacMechan's re-creation literature...
...rehearse several descriptions...
...Since Short Stories, containing specimens ranging from Sir Canadian political life is not exactly broadening, it is Gilbert Parker and Mr...
...If we had some then, the common criticisms of behaviorism may be ham," the old vaudeville jokesters used to say, "we'd dismissed, since they are criticisms of things that Wathave ham and eggs--if we had some eggs...
...Hemingrecently appeared...
...Callaghan, who to be sure gest the magnetic and not wholly beneficial influence of has only begun, has naturally acquired more of the American magazines in luring men of some degree of external technique than of Hemingway's real if intercompetence away from home...
...Paterson of Books, the found or illuminating processes of the subnormal mind, amiable and ubiquitous authority on literary teas...
...the best Canadian art was in the surviving totem-poles...
...Some expatriates do mittent power of tragic suggestion...
...Jalna had the merit of a large con- ful honesty which mark the dominion's arrival at ception, the whole patriarchal or rather matriarchal majority in fiction...
...Are they big, Grandfather...
...They were shaped like gonwould ask me to describe this to him, just how would dolas and had pompons of multicolored yarn blooming I do it so he can see it as I see it ?" And I would then like sunflowers upon their pointed toes...
...If Mr...
...Leacock to Mr...
...Little theatres have multiplied with rapidity in several literatures, Mr...
...It was made of choice white wool which had been washed at the stream and when the bishop comes 1" I asked him once if he had ever seen a bishop...
...On this sole occasion he put on the one he was saving "for his coffin...
...They carry silver-capped staffs, meaning that the new-born was his recovered vision, and wear vestments and robes of gold and silver and the medium through which henceforth he would look mitres studded with beads of onyx, opal, turquoise at the world...
...But he thereby missed the provinciality into which the Canadian is born and from which he has to escape...
...plays...
...He never wore pantaloons, "French cally eager and excited as on the day the bishop came to the village...
...All the people of the village except the beadle, who But the more I tried to please Grandfather Bogomir stayed in the cupola to ring the bell, went far out to the more exacting he became...
...newer ones are not provincial in outlook...
...Callaghan and rather a pity that a man who receives such an en- Mr...
...Canada is not one country but half a dozen...
...But a bishop, Bogomir, you In the morning when he was told that the family had don't always see a bishop...
...Even more than Miss thousands have come south to that bourne from de la Roche, Mr...
...He led us to expect demonstrations, but gave us dogma instead--philosopher, a theorizer...
...The critic reads of Watson's famous work in genetic psychology by bringing us back to the experiments---objective enough~to show that only actual infant and showing us what that infant does, three types of emotional response (fear, rage and where we were inclined to be satisfied with recalling love) are possible for the infant...
...There is no individual in unwearying encouragement of promising space for discussion of other departments of literature writers and in intelligent criticism of Canadian ---poetry...
...There are only a few grown with a male child, he interpreted his dream as bishops in the world...
...There remains only and modernly to be an objective scientist, though his the peccadillo of offering goods for sale under false logic was wrong from the first page...
...My mother let me wear the pair of night of my birth, that if I viewed an unusual scene, red leather shoes which my father had brought to me I would say to myself, "Now, suppose Grandfather as a gift from Albania...
...a cultivated mind, should not be recognized as a Ca- Here is not only promise but achievement, authentic nadian of many years' standing...
...Without going into irrelevant problems of "post hoc" and "propter hoc," I may say that my article was followed by the almost complete repeal of prohibition from sea to sea...
...The proximity of the United States of course has had a potent effect upon Canadian writers as well as 13 THE COMMONWEAL November 6, I929 insipidity of Canadian fiction...
...November 6, I929 THE COMMONWEAL x4 These are some names which suggest the advent of man in the University of Toronto, Mr...
...Sentiment and affection turn their household, and the characters were vivid until the plot eyes to England, likeness of manners and material al- took hold of them...
...D. C. Scott, Mr...
...Once when I gave him meet the bishop...
...wholly unfounded...
...Scores of names might be listed such as that of G. R. hard-boiled method are more obvious in imitator than Elliott, whose distinguished Cycle of Modern Poetry in master, though apparent enough in Mr...
...Bok's...
...He started out manfully dogma mixed with mythology...
...Grove as an immigrant from coast to coast...
...An American journal, reviewing Mr...
...upon Canadian life...
...Of Scottish-Swedlsh extraction, versed affairs...
...Grove's best work, beginning with Settlers of the Marsh, has qualities of depth and breadth and thoughtWhen a new energy was moving in such directions, it was only a matter of time until the writing of fiction should develop talents strong enough to emancipate themselves from the popular convention...
...While only a few of the Mr...
...Even when everybody "How foolish you talk, Bogomir, you never heard from the house went to the fields to labor under the of a small bishopl" scorching sun, I was allowed to stay home with Grand- "Are they much like human beings, Grandfather, father Bogomir...
...the excellent Thus creative and critical work has quickened its use made of Indian and French-Canadian material by pace in the last few years...
...in my early youth, and while most age-mates of mine "Oh, yes...
...With the chapter the mythical infant each one of us thinks he was...
...euthenists, who place the burden on education, where it belongs...
...I asked...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 1
