| Duncan
Campell Scott (1862-1947) is best known as one of the
“Confederation poets,” the group that achieved
international prominence in the last years of the nineteenth
century, and as an administrator and ultimately (from
1913-32) the Deputy Superintendent General of the Department
of Indian Affairs. His prose has received less attention,
though In the Village of Viger is an important
early instance of the story cycle (see Lynch; New, Dreams
177-86); “Labrie’s Wife” has been
singled out by anthologists (Knister; Lucas; New) and
critics (Waterston; Dragland, Floating 143-53);
and W.H. New calls Scott “the chief short-fiction
writer in Canada at the turn of the century, the one
writer who turned the genre into its modern form”
(History 129). Of a total of forty-five stories
(Groening 501-03), Scott collected ten in In the
Village of Viger (1896), twelve in The Witching
of Elspie (1923), and ten in The Circle of
Affection (1947). Because Glenn Clever and Stan
Dragland draw exclusively from Scott’s collections
in their editions of his short fiction, these thirteen
stories are collected here for the first time.
All of these stories were published
between 1887 and 1907, when Scott was most active, when
his attention was almost equally divided between prose
and poetry, and when American literary journals were
more interested in Canadian writing than they have ever
been since (Brown 79). In 1887, he published a story
in Scribner’s before he published his
first poem, which appeared in the same journal in the
following year (Doyle 104). Writing in 1895, Allan Douglas
Brodie expected Scott to turn increasingly to fiction:
I understand
he intends in future to devote more time to prose
work than he has hitherto done, and, though he will
always live in the hearts of the Canadian people as
one of their first poets, as a short-story writer
he will be thrice welcome. (339)
Brodie knew
what he was saying, for Scott published In the Village
of Viger and five new stories in the following
year. Although he did not sustain [Page ix]
that pace, he published stories regularly until 1907.
As Dragland writes, Scott’s life “almost
bends in two” because of the death of his daughter
that year (Floating 68). He would not publish
another book for ten years (Floating 85). No
story appeared until Scott collected twelve in The
Witching of Elspie in 1923, and seven of these
had appeared in periodicals before 1907.
Dragland
argues that Scott’s best stories, like his best
poems, “almost fall into two categories along
a North-South axis” (Floating 132). That
generalization works well for the familiar selections
in anthologies, but it is less helpful with Scott’s
canon in its entirety. Only four of these stories qualify
as Northern, and two only in a trivial sense. A better
approach is suggested by Dragland when he writes that
an “interesting study might be made of the pressures
of popular genres on Scott’s fiction, collected
and uncollected” (Floating 133). The
uncollected stories can be divided into five groups:
four romances, which tend to be set in the past and
/ or Quebec (“The Ducharmes of the Baskatonge,”
“The Triumph of Marie Laviolette,” “Their
Wedding Eve: A Story of the War of 1812,” “A
Sacred Trust: A Story of the Upper Ottawa”), two
tales of the supernatural (“Coiniac Street,”
“Sister Ste Colombe”), three detective stories
(“The Mystery of the Red Deeps,” “John
Greenlaw’s Story,” “The Nest of Imposture”),
two psychological studies (“John Scantleberry,”
“Ends Rough Hewn”), and two comic stories
in rural dialect (“The Stratagem of Terrance O’Halloran,”
“How Uncle David Rouse Made His Will”).
As Dragland writes, “in the variety of subjects
and fictional stratagems Scott employed, one might detect
a search for a fictional niche that he never quite found”
(Introd. 10). More charitably, we can say with Gary
Geddes that Scott is a “piper of many tunes”
whose fiction needs to be approached in various nineteenth-century
contexts (165).
Scott discusses
the uses of romance in his Mermaid Inn column
of April 9, 1892. Aware that Dollard Des Ormaux may
not have been as heroic as he once seemed to be, Scott
nonetheless argues that “the story in its romantic
form has come to live with us, and it is well. There
is probably as much foundation for it as there is
for the majority of the romances of history, and these
are amongst the dearest possessions of the race”
(Davies 49). In “The Tercentenary of Quebec
1608-1908,” he contrasts past and present: we
look up from the absorbing task of nation-building
when every one seems drugged with the idea that material
progress means every desirable thing; we try to cast
the film from our eyes and reconstruct the older,
romantic time . . . . It is well to do so, for a bit
of play now and then in the midst of work sweetens
the work and puts heart into it. Especially for such
a young people as ours, it is wise to [Page
x] perpetuate old deeds and to treasure what
is, after all, our chief possession— the actions
of those who were all unconsciously framing our destiny.
(Circle 154)
All four
of Scott’s romances participate in what D.M.R.
Bentley calls a “discourse of anti-modernity that
valorized pre- and undercivilized spaces as realms of
emotional and spiritual intensity anterior or adjacent
to the materialistic and artificial world of the modern
city” (28). Thus the pioneer stage that Scott
celebrates in “The Ducharmes of the Baskatonge”
has vanished with the wilderness: “The stalwart
trunks have gone to cover homes in the south, and to
shelter the heads of happy children from the storms
which they learned to resist on their native hills in
the north.” The Laviolettes (in “The Triumph
of Marie Laviolette”) have fifty acres of land,
“but most of it was covered with timber,”
and “there was not a happier home on the Lievres
than Gabriel Laviolette’s.” “Their
Wedding Eve: A Story of the War of 1812,” is told
by “a dignified old man” who turns out to
be the son of the hero and heroine of his story. And
“A Sacred Trust: A Story of the Upper Ottawa”
makes another contrast between the urban and the wilderness
when a Toronto doctor seems “strange to the woodsmen,
strange with the hint of a life unknown, turbulent,
weary, out there beyond the storm.” It is noteworthy
that the two Quebec romances appeared in the first issues
of Scribner’s, in the company of such
writers as William James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Robert
Louis Stevenson; as James Doyle writes, Scribner’s
made a “particular specialty” of the “local
colour story” and published several stories and
articles on “French Canada” (104-05). As
both Gerson (Purer 130-31) and New (Dreams
48) argue, Scott’s best Quebec stories provide
much more than “local colour,” but in these
four romances, “all is written more to satisfy
a taste for grand gestures than out of any commitment
to their credibility” (New, Dreams 46).
Nonetheless, those who share Misao Dean’s interest
in the construction of a “national community”
and how “this community has constructed its racialized
other” (xiv) will find some suggestive material
here, although they might be surprised that “Their
Wedding Eve” is the only story in this collection
with a Native character.
The
two stories that I have designated, with some misgivings,
as “supernatural” are the slightest in this
collection, and it is revealing that both appeared in
the Toronto Globe. Neither story would have been likely
to elicit interest from more prestigious and lucrative
journals. Their existence reminds us that an interest
in the occult pervades Scott’s early work (Bentley
30). In “Coiniac Street,” the story of Elise’s
enchantment of Alexander is vitiated by lame dialogue:
“I’m a perfect killjoy,” says he;
“I’m a [Page xi] bit of a witch,”
says she. The emphasis on her supernatural powers clashes
with her involvement in counterfeiting, and the story
moves to an abrupt ending. “Sister Ste Colombe”
tells two simple anecdotes of an angelic Québécoise
nun, in contrast to the Viger stories, which
“quite pointedly downplay” the presence
of the Catholic Church, as New argues (Dreams
179).
Perhaps the biggest surprise
among these uncollected stories is the three detective
stories, all from the “short-lived” Massey’s
Magazine in 1896 (Gerson, “Piper’s”
138). Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, and by
1892 he was so familiar that he was parodied in Robert
Barr’s “The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs”
(Knight x). With Holmes apparently drowned according
to a story published in 1893, and not revived until
1902, Scott addressed a demand that Arthur Conan Doyle
was not meeting. His three stories evince a wide reading
in the genre and a preference for a less cerebral detective.
“The Mystery of the Red Deeps” may be slightly
marred by its initial dependence on Nicholas Thompson’s
dream, as Gerson argues (“Piper’s”
140), but otherwise the conventions of detective fiction
are used well: after the confusion caused by the switched
identity of the two sisters, the madness of Alberta
Westwick, and the enigma of the secret room, the story
moves to a violent climax and a postscript, in which
Oliver Arahill reveals that he ended his apprenticeship
by marrying his “fair pupil.” “The
Nest of Imposture” is less successful. Although
Oliver Prest is called a “young man who can find
out things,” he spends most of the story recovering
from falling off his horse. The trick of the switched
sibling identity is used again, but less happily, since
the reader sees through it before Oliver does. The mystery
of the Savona family, shown in the “intricate
spirals” of the handkerchief design that represents
the generations, is solved, but not by Oliver, and his
client is murdered. If Scott was growing uncomfortable
with the genre, he found a way to modify it in the other
uncollected story from Massey’s. Combining
detective fiction with another genre that “flourished”
in the 1890s (Leithauser 142), “John Greenlaw’s
Story” is an unusual ghost story. Perhaps it is
suitable that a detective’s failure occurs in
such a story, for as Brad Leithauser argues, “the
reader comes to the ghost story for that uncertain,
skittery sensation that arises when the laws of science
no longer seem to apply but nobody can say what has
supplanted them” (130). As a man who is in his
own words “loath to this day to place a supernatural
interpretation upon the facts which I vouch for,”
Greenlaw is puzzled by the deaths of Harriet Westbrook
and Mrs. Mannix. He ends by “unconsciously”
adopting his client’s [Page xii]
belief in a supernatural agency, and the story never
resolves the question of who is really responsible for
the murder of Harriet.
Gerson places “Ends Rough
Hewn” with the detective stories, which she calls
“undistinguished” (“Piper’s”
140). I have grouped it with “John Scantleberry,”
which both Gerson (“Piper’s” 141)
and New regard as “the best of the uncollected
stories” (Dreams 46). Because both stories
bring a critical perspective to an urban setting, they
are exceptions to what Gerson calls the “virtual
absence of the contemporary city and its problems from
pre-modern Canadian fiction” (Purer 142).
And both stories are of more than sociological interest.
In “Ends Rough Hewn,” we follow the Pangmans
in their move from the picturesque village of Sedgeford
to the growing city of Toronto. But instead of contrasting
rural virtue and urban vice, as the opening paragraphs
encourage us to do, the story traces the consequences
of the crime the father commits when he was the village
postmaster. That crime is the source of the family’s
wealth and the cause of the son’s absence after
he is framed by his father. Convinced of her brother’s
innocence, the daughter slowly realizes that her father
must be guilty. Gerson is uneasy with the way the daughter
achieves her insight in a series of visions, but Scott
is careful to state that the visions are aided by memory
and deliberation. After he is confronted by his daughter,
the father is torn between his conscience and his greed:
“The horrid life he had led stood beside him like
a character in a play. He knew the part was hateful,
but he loved the character he had made.” In a
final twist, Pangman decides to confess, but dies before
he can do so. The ending becomes all the more unsettling
when the narrator muses on the “bright power”
that holds out “the cup of expiation” and
then “snatches it away, and hides his face darkly.”
In writing this account of a man whose public charity
conceals a private hell, Scott has moved from romance
to what he once called “the outcome of the old
stern laws of life” (Davies 3).
In the opening paragraph of
“John Scantleberry, Working Merchant Tailor, Great
Specialty of Pantaloons,” Scott writes that the
protagonist’s sign “embodies in an obscure
way the peculiar cast of his personality.” Noting
that “scantle” means “small portion”
or “to make scarce,” “’tailor’
suggests ‘cutter,’ ‘pantaloons’
derive from the Italian ‘mask-wearer,’ Pantaleone,”
New argues that “the mask Scantleberry wears is
that of reclusiveness and passivity when in fact he
harbours an extraordinary impulse to violence”
(Dreams 47). In New’s fine analysis,
Scott modifies “the sketch of character, this
time making the drama internal, and requiring the form
of language itself, more than the intricate twists of
intrigue and adventure, to establish the tensions of
narrative” (Dreams 47). [Page
xiii] Scantleberry is not as purely monstrous
as New implies, however; another aspect of his internal
drama involves an impulse to kindness that is more unexpected
than his “impulse to violence.” Foreshadowed
by Scantleberry’s obscure and fleeting memory
“of some moment in childhood,” the impulse
to kindness flourishes when he takes an interest in
the poor girl in the courtyard, as Silas Marner takes
an interest in Eppie in the novel that Scott called
“a work of genius” (“To Brown”
201). Again Scott focusses on language when he writes
that this memory leads Scantleberry to “throw
off the only simile that ever occurred” to him.
Scott then juxtaposes the antithetical impulses: “So,
strangely enough, a sweet human feeling had taken root
there [at his heart], and was striving for life; while
in the gloom of his mind he was nourishing that noxious
pallid plant.” After the benevolent impulse and
the death of his tormentor free Scantleberry from his
violent obsession, “he sank into his old lethargy.”
At the end as at the beginning of the story, the tailor’s
“mental scenery” is as oppressive as his
various residences: “he walked from one room of
life into the next, and knew only the four walls and
the floor.” He lives in a world of “obscure
brokers’ dens” and predatory bailiffs, and
Scott makes no attempt to locate it outside of Canada.
It is not surprising that Scott
did not collect his two stories in comic dialect, since
he did not collect his comic verse either, not even
the fine “Byron on Wordsworth” (Dragland,
“Byron”). He may have been diffident about
his own and his contemporaries’ work, but Scott
was certain that comedy held an enduring value: “If
it be a fact that humour in literature is on the decline,
there is certainly no doubt that this world is as anxious
to laugh today as ever it was” (Davies 277), according
to his Mermaid Inn column of March 18, 1893.
“The Stratagem of Terrance O’ Halloran”
has its moments, but it is partially vitiated by an
excessive use of dialect and a reliance on ethnic types.
It is therefore a relief to end both this introduction
and this edition with “How Uncle David Rouse Made
His Will,” a tale of the deception of a selfish
couple told in the voice of Mutton Corners: “It
was never much of a place for things to happen, anyway;
everybody was that set in their ways, a scandal would
have got starved out before it got started, our people
was naturally so inquisitive.” Here the passage
of time since the original publication of the story
has enriched its language by defamiliarizing it, as
in these two descriptions: “Jake was mean enough
to get up in the night and bite his mother”; Dave
“looked about like the last run of shad.”
Of course Dave is as far from a fortune as he is from
a Tory vote in this Liberal stronghold, and so his will
is purely a comic ruse that comes at the expense of
the humourless couple and the young lawyer. As [Page
xiv] the narrator explains, this lawyer “had
just come to Mutton Corners and didn’t know much
of anythin’, and you couldn’t expect him
to, as he hadn’t been riz here.” Looking
back to Twain and ahead to Leacock, “How Uncle
David Rouse Made His Will” is the last story that
Scott would publish for sixteen years.
I have printed these stories
as they appear in their original publications, following
the style of the time and the journal. Only the most
obvious errors have been corrected, with square brackets
where possible. The stories are arranged chronologically,
and they are followed by notes that provide bibliographical
details and explain obscure references and allusions.
[Page xv]
Works Cited in the Introduction
Bentley,
D.M.R. “‘The Thing is Found to Be Symbolic’:
Symboliste Elements in the
Early Short Stories of Gilbert Parker, Charles G.D.
Roberts and Duncan Campbell
Scott.” Dominant Impressions: Essays on the
Canadian Short Story.
Ed. Gerald Lynch and Angela Arnold Robbeson. Reappraisals:
Canadian
Writers. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1999. 27-51.
Brodie, Allan Douglas. “Canadian Short-Story Writers.”
The Canadian Magazine
of Politics, Science, Art and Literature 4 (1895):
334-44.
Brown, E.K. “To the North: A Wall Against Canadian
Poetry.” Saturday Review of
Literature 29 Apr.: 9-11. Responses and Evaluations:
Essays on Canada.
Ed. David Staines. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland
and
Stewart, 1977. 78-82.
Clever, Glenn, ed. Selected Stories of Duncan Campbell
Scott. The Canadian Short
Story Library. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1972.
Davies, Barrie, ed. At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred
Campbell, Archibald Lampman,
and Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892-93.
Literature of
Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint. Toronto: U of Toronto
P, 1979.
Dean, Misao. Introduction. Early Canadian Short
Stories: Short Stories in English
before World War I. Ed. Dean. Canadian Critical
Editions. Ottawa: Tecumseh,
2000. xi-xvii.
Doyle, James. “Duncan Campbell Scott and American
Literature.” The Duncan Campbell
Scott Symposium. Ed. K.P. Stich. Reappraisals:
Canadian Writers.
Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1980. 101-09.
Dragland, Stan. “Byron on Wordsworth: Light and
Occasional Verse in the Scott/Aylen
Papers.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents,
Reviews 22 (1988):
49-67.
——. Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell
Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9. Concord,
ON: Anansi, 1994.
——. Introduction. In the Village of
Viger and Other Stories. By Scott. Ed. Dragland.
New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1973. 9-16.
Geddes, Gary. “Piper of Many Tunes: Duncan Campbell
Scott.” Canadian Literature
37 (1968): 15-27. Duncan Campbell Scott: A Book
of Criticism. Ed.
Stan Dragland. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1974. 165-77.
Gerson, Carole. “The Piper’s Forgotten Tune:
Notes on the Stories of D.C. Scott and
a Bibliography.” Journal of Canadian Fiction
16 (1976): 138-43.
——. A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading
of Fiction in Nineteenth- Century
Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1989.
Groening, Laura. “Duncan Campbell Scott: An Annotated
Bibliography.” The Annotated
Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors. Vol.
8. Ed. Robert Lecker
and Jack David. Toronto: ECW, 1994. 469-576.
Knight, Stephen. Introduction. The Triumphs of Eugène
Valmont, by Robert Barr.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. ix-xxiii.
Knister, Raymond, ed. Canadian Short Stories.
Toronto: MacMillan, 1928.
Leithauser, Brad. Penchants and Places: Essays and
Criticism. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1995.
Lucas, Alec, ed. Great Canadian Short Stories.
Toronto: Dell, 1971.
Lynch, Gerald. “‘In the Meantime’:
Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of
Viger.”
Studies in Canadian Literature 17:2 (1993):
70-91. [Page xvi]
New, W.H., ed. Canadian Short Fiction. 2nd ed. Scarborough:
Prentice Hall, 1997.
——. Dreams of Speech and Violence: The
Art of the Short Story in Canada and
New Zealand. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987.
——. A History of Canadian Literature.
Macmillan History of Literature. London: Macmillan,
1989.
Scott, Duncan Campbell. The Circle of Affection
and Other Pieces in Prose and
Verse. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1947.
——. “To E.K. Brown.” 2-8 Sept.
1947. Letter 182 of The Poet and the Critic: A Literary
Correspondence between D.C. Scott and E.K. Brown.
Ed. Robert L.
McDougall. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1983. 199-201.
——. In the Village of Viger. Boston:
Copeland and Day, 1896. Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1996.
——. The Witching of Elspie: A Book of
Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1923. [Page xvii]
Waterston, Elizabeth. “The Missing Face: Five
Short Stories by Duncan Campbell
Scott.” Studies in Canadian Literature
1:2 (1976): 223-29.
|
