Introduction: The Canadian Short Story

At the outset of a new era there is opportunity to look back upon the old; and in nothing have we more clearly passed an epoch than in the short story, here in Canada. Literature as a whole is changing, new fields are being broken, new crops are being raised in them, and the changes apparent in other countries show counterparts in our development.

The short story has shared in the disadvantages of other types of literature and of culture as a whole in Canada. It is vain to say that it might have sprung from the soil as a new variant of the traditional form. There has been no national Burbank to create a Canadian subspecies of the short story as there was to breed Marquis wheat. It emerged, as the short story in the United States did, in a spirited emulation at best, or a shallow imitativeness at worst, of foreign models. This was natural in the case, unless we had managed without a literature for a few hundred years until we evolved a national consciousness of our own. But the pioneers did what was possible, in raising the old crops on new fields. Literature in the United States is only lately emerging from the imitative stage, and there are signs that it is doing the same thing here.

Obviously it has been harder for us to attain to anything like originality. Conventions have held sway with the compulsion of a tradition of romantic externals they have been maintained as hardened patterns in a commercial exploitation of a last frontier. Some of these conventions are almost as remote from the life of Canada as the Latin-inscribed scrolls of monks and scholars were from the life of Mediæval Europe. The result is that much of our writing has seemed mechanical, and the literary flowering whereby it may be seen that the roots of a nation’s life are sound has often had the aroma of wax and paper.

These are generalizations made from the facts. It is with the more or less successful exceptions that we are dealing in this book. There are difficulties enough in the way of high expression in any country and in any age. What is wanted is a few talents strong enough to overcome all such things. Criticism á these, sociological criticism particularly, when applied to literature, may be more than usually futile, human wisdom being finite in its application. But it is not unreasonable to assume that Canadian literature might have been different if Canada’s status and condition among nations had been different. We had a new country but old peoples; wealth collectively and in the future, but individual poverty; a store of tradition and a prevalent illiteracy and so much to be done that we had little time to study how we should do it.

Assuredly it was a momentous work, this making of a nation on the material side. And since we were necessarily consecrated to the task, we were bound to feel, whether we knew it and admitted it or not, inferior to those nations which had done their building, or which possessed developed resources and more fully utilized wealth. Only by being self-contained and true to our individuality could we have attained to an indigenous literature. How could we be so? It took a more than usually vigorous talent to achieve any sort of adequate expression, in face of the difficulties. Not many very successfully attempted it, but of some of these men it is not unfair to claim that in happier circumstances they might have been great.

The general materialism had imposed a false æsthetics, on this continent. A permissible view of the history of literature shows the singer as being at first merely one of his tribe, singing unconsciously its grief or triumph in times of stress; later the poet had assumed his office, and was the bard, delegated to sing by whatever powers there were; still later the poet became himself, and wrote only of what concerned himself and his inmost soul. The poets achieved this evolution earlier than other workers in literature, because it became patent that unless the poet and his subject were one, neither amounted to anything. But prose writers have been consciously striving to revert to the tribal era, with their appeals to mob feeling and vulgar interests. Hence the barren nature of much of the multitudinous flotsam of periodical literature and best-sellers. The tendency has been upheld curiously, if only indirectly, by the classical theory of objectivity. In an absolute sense there is no objectivity. When Flaubert is bringing some undeniable picture to your recognition, he is doing it only to impose upon you some emotion which is part of his plan and the outgrowth of his own emotion. What is known realism is only a means to an end, the end being a personal projection of the world. In passing beyond realism, even while they employ it, the significant writers of our time are achieving a portion of evolution. But most tale-spinners did not even achieve realism, and were willing to forego their possibilities in the interest of material rewards bestowed as a result of such a course in other countries.

Possibly it was a necessity for something more than material rewards which pulled our most gifted men away from their country, and perhaps Canada would be prepared to grant that something—appreciation, mainly—now when they return full of years and honours. But if it was not money which took him away, it was acceptance of materialistic standards which proved the ruination of the writer entering competitive conditions in England and the United States. Not content with an escape from poverty, which has been the lot of the singer since David plucked his harp before Saul, he has insisted upon his deserts, and tried to vie with the luxury of the Sauls of this day himself—a course fatal to his self-respect and his sense of a calling. It is a “standard of living” to which many writers feel called more imperatively than to their professed art. Something of the guild spirit might be helpful. It has been said that the English writers of the Nineties embodied this in a sort; they did not have wives, homes, lands, or motor cars, but they had an inalienable sense of professional integrity, and they brought into being works of real merit, if of a minor order: and from the Rhymers’ Club came William Butler Yeats. The little” Group of the Sixties” here partook in a degree of this advantage in their early poetry. But for the most part our men had to begin in a non-conducting sort of atmosphere, a sort of vacuum of poor acoustic properties, whence they passed to one where they were deafened by the noise of the mob. Our loss in the case of a writer of such endowment as Arthur Stringer’s is perhaps proportionately greater than that sustained by American literature when Jack London became a victim of American criteria of success.

In this general state of affairs the short story has had to take its chance. But it has come out better than most other forms of literature, for a variety of reasons. (Because of brevity, most obviously and plausibly. Many people, given the right opportunity and circumstance, might produce a meritorious lyric or brief tale.). We have had no national drama because, more than fiction, drama is a communal art, and there has not been a body of people interested enough, moved enough, by Canadian life to appreciate its “counterfeit presentment” on the stage. We could not even have poetic drama which signified much, because that, and its writers, must be rooted in the soil. Shakespeare might write of Rome or Denmark, but his imagination was England, and the people responded. For similar reasons the novel has been forbidden to us. Not enough people had the courage and tolerance of life to face its implications in the large, or enough love to endure seeing it carried to its esthetic and emotional heightening and logical ends in sustained art. Isolated exceptions like Maria Chapdelaine, where the creator was cut off from any influence between himself and his subject, but was supported in his own power by the strength derived from an old and powerful, but still fresh and vital tradition of art, prove this contention.

The fact that the short story has fared as well or perhaps better than other forms in Canada is, however, largely owing to the nature of its appeal, which is elemental. People like to listen to an interesting tale, whatever its canon. And if the coincidence occurs that a vigorous, strongly coloured, even adventurous life is available to the tale-teller, his appeal is immediate and direct. So we find that these early fragmentary delineations could have a measure of truth and vitality impossible to the novel, which followed the course and destiny of years in a way inoffensive to a hopeful people. Within the limits of entertainment there was little need for glossing details.

Yet in typical Northern stories there is no actual acceptance of life and hence, paradoxically, a frequently disinterested gusto and ease in evoking it. The Wilds are grim, yes, the Barrens may claim your life; bad men and wild animals abound. But yet there is youth, health, virtue, above all, luck. These talismans forbid tragedy, and if there is death, it is only a possible death, and that too is a matter of luck. Such an attitude precludes a tragic philosophy, and makes of life a game: it is a survival perhaps of biological necessity in Northern peoples. In older civilizations, where life has been easier for many generations, there is an acceptance of fate as necessity inhering in character, which results in a different conception of art. Hence it is that the work of Sir Gilbert Parker is at its best when it is avowedly Canadian, though his talented and imperialistic globetrotting has taken him into many lands. His warm-blooded, courageous tales and his theatrically urbane hero, Pierre, have had a definite part in forming a Canadian tradition. Sheer imaginative gusto and magnanimity can impart to materials of any sort a real value, while a cheap commercialism will lower them to a species of wish-fulfillment to which any high view of life, partaking of tragedy or of comedy, is impossible.

In the literature of older lands, animals were regarded as domestic servants, even as comrades, or simply as quarry. It remained for Canadian writers to visualize wild beasts as individuals, motivated by sense appeals and reasoning intelligence; and the result has been not a new form, but a hybrid of subject-matter. The freshened point of view made possible by the use of animals (or household furniture, if you will) as characters was in the main neglected, and reactions were shown in fixed patterns dictated by sentiment or moral prejudice. And this when the freedom should have permitted a naturalistic acceptance and a poetry of the real, or a phantastic humorous or satirical expression. A genuine sense of continuity, a few finely objective stories, notably the early ones of Charles G. D. Roberts, the innovator of this type, were followed by many, many tales containing more or less valuable information in natural history, and no value as art.

A most significant circumstance in the development of the Canadian short story has been the dearth of editors to encourage and discover writers of value. A patient reading of our magazines will reveal a plain delinquency, more especially in recent years than in the days when writers of any kind were scarce enough, and the best ones were less easily evaded. But of our better writers of the last generation, practically all have been obliged to adjust their contributions to foreign markets, and having won fame in other countries, were complaisantly recognized at home. Meanwhile magazines were being run with the avowed intention of discovering native talent; instead of which they were encouraging, in the main, third-rate imitators of third-rate foreign models. Still, times are changing, and if we do not get the two or three editors of genius whom we need, conditions will improve anyway. If editors refuse to lead the public, the public quite possibly will lead the editors, for the grade of even some of the most popular foreign weeklies and women’s journals is good enough to force a kind of improvement by their competition. Many thousands of Canadians are learning to see their own daily life, and to demand its presentment with a degree of realism. This may result, opportunely, in the upbuilding of great popular magazines, and finally an appreciative and representative audience may stand ready to welcome the best that our most gifted writers can create. The long neglect of such a writer as Will E. Ingersoll, almost the only one to depict our farming millions, may then be impossible.

But we shall not need to wait for such a development before we shall have able interpreters. Our best writers in the past accomplished what they did against the stream of the populace in other countries, and within something like a backwater of indifference in their own. But there has been a sudden growth of consciousness. It is, paradoxically, just when the rest of world literature is suffering a reversion to aristocratic standards that such writers as Merrill Denison and Morley Callaghan can appear. We can’t lift ourselves by our bootlaces, and not until other nations have done so do we arrive at the stage where it is recognized that each creative book is not to be read by every person who can read—which was the case as recently as the time of Dickens. Whatever the gifts of the new men may prove to be, they should have less trouble than their forerunners in making them effective.

Obstacles detrimental to a truly indigenous literature have made more salient, however, the actual achievement of our Writers. There is such a thing as a Canadian spirit, and perhaps in no other department of literature is it so vivid and indubitable. Stephen Leacock and Marjorie Pickthall, who were born in England, show it. Albert Hickman’s Canadian Nights, in spite of limitations and derivations, could have been written by a Canadian only; nor could his irrepressibly wrestling and idealistic young drunkards of good family have been the same in another country. There are the inspired phantasies of Norman Duncan; and there is that story of E.W. Thomson, in which a lumberman of property discovers a former employee stealing provisions after having rejected unsatisfactory wages. The lumberman takes him back, making him a loan of what he needs for his family, and heartens him with words—a story which in an American or English magazine, or in one of ours now, would seem completely and viciously sentimental, and which was simply a true vision of pioneer virtue and that neighbourliness necessary in a new country. And a perfect flowering of art is embodied in one volume, In the Village of Viger, by Duncan Campbell Scott. It is work which has had an unobtrusive influence; but it stands out after thirty years as the most satisfyingly individual contribution to the Canadian short story.

RAYMOND KNISTER
Toronto, April, 1928.