| I
was surprised the other day to come upon a passage which
convinced me that we Canadians as a people had passed
into literature, in at least one instance, as a rough
and a rude nation. The reader of Sir R.F. Burton's "Ultima
Thule" will find in his section devoted to Society
in Iceland these words, "Yet the Icelander, fraklin
or pauper, has none of the roughness or rudeness of
the Canadians and of the Lowland Scotch." Sir R.F.
Burton was a wide traveller, and at the time he wrote
these words (1875) he had visited nearly every country
on the face of the globe, and, as he was an acute and
careful observer, one must take some notice of his remark.
It must have some foundation in fact. We have always
considered Iceland and the Icelanders as out of all
comparison with other nations, and here we find a noted
traveller telling us very plainly that we are behind
them in courtesy and fine manners. I hope we have improved
since the time when Burton formed his opinion of us,
and if it were possible for him to visit again the "glimpse
of the moon" he might find it possible to say that
we were a little softer, a little more civilised. There
is some doubt in my mind of the fairness of travellers
generally to the countries and peoples they visit; it
is so hard to be exactly just, and still more difficult
to arrive at the absolute truth or to strike an average,
when considering the characteristics of a people. It
is impossible to do that fairly until you become thoroughly
familiar with their home life and habits. To view a
country from the hotel window or even from the smoking
room of a club or to judge finally of the people by
the specimens one meets on a railway train are all hazardous
and untrustworthy. All the atrabilarious people may
have taken a melancholy holiday and be travelling on
the same train, or the club-room may be haunted by the
local "crank," or the meals at the hotel may
not be what one would care to praise. But a people should
hardly be judged by these casual impressions; the home
life should be the test, and in Canada we are developing
a standard of home life which is different from either
the English or American, and which may in the end be
better and more enjoyable than either. I am bound to
say that amongst our rural population there is a good
deal of surliness and heaviness of mind. I do not think
it is by any means general, but it is certainly present,
and it may be passing away. But its presence is not
to be wondered at; we must remember the hardships which
the settlement of this country brought on those who
determined to live here, hardships that will never have
to be gone through again and of which our Manitoba settlers
can know nothing. And among the worst of them was the
isolation, the absence of society, in its wider sense;
this, with the severity of the climate, was sufficient
to breed distemper and moroseness, to say nothing of
rudeness and roughness. But, as I said before, I hope
we have improved. We can never be a light-hearted, careless
people, but there is no reason why we should not be
kind-hearted and considerate.
[L.?]
It
has been claimed by many critics that a man cannot be
a truly great writer unless he pictures what is hopeful
in humanity and passes over what is dark and tends to
despondency and despair. We hear so often of what is
called the healthy imagination, which is essential to
and is found in all the greater writers. All the literary
works from those of Shakespeare and Milton to Browning
have been scoured for extracts carrying out this theory.
But I would just here like to note that the very opposite
is true, and that, strange to say, all that is strongest
and most lasting in literature depicts not the bright
and joyous side of life, but rather what is gloomy,
despairing the critics of to-day, the poets who have
endlessly sung life is happy because I am happy have
been of the weaker and more ephemeral class. The work
of a great poet, like that of any other great man, is
not to hypnotise the world into a false or fancied dream
of security and selfish indifference, but rather to
show life as it is in all its reality—but as a
god would show it. The great man is he who truly knows
life but still sees the divine back of the most hideous
manifestations of its existence. Were the season always
springtime and the day always morning, we all would
be lotus-eaters. But it is the struggles and the longings,
the memories and the might-have-beens that make us great.
This wonder and awe of the greatness of life in its
sombre aspects is impressed on us by the greatest writers
of all ages.
Beginning
with Homer, called the greatest epic poet of any age,
we find him depicting almost wholly endless battle,
which, with all its good side, is perhaps the most awful
spectacle humanity can dwell upon. Battle and deceit,
rapine and despair is what he gives us. The downfall
and destruction of a great people, the Trojans, is his
chief theme. Virgil, the noble Roman who followed him,
is certainly greater in his epic, which is largely influenced
by the Iliad, than when he described piping shepherds
and fleecy flocks. Dante, the next great poet, has dedicated
his whole magnificent genius to the description of hell.
Milton, the literary descendant of the Greek, the Roman
and the Florentine, and the greatest English poet after
Shakespeare, made the fall of man and the attendant
evils the subject of his great epic, which has rendered
him immortal. Shakespeare has four or five masterpieces
among his marvellous dramas, and what are the subjects
of the greatest? We will name them:—"Macbeth,"
"Lear," "Hamlet," "Othello,"
"Julius Caesar," "Richard the Third,"
"Juliet." I have named seven, which include
all of his greatest works. Now what are the bare subjects
of these dramas? The hideous murder of a king and the
attendant horror and punishment of the murderers. The
despair and death of a despised old king ruined by his
own children. Madness, death, graves and spooks are
the stock in trade of "Hamlet," and so on
through all of these remarkable productions. The dark,
the hideous, the tragic side of life is shown in these
plays, if they have ever been depicted in literature.
Surely if any poet ever lived in the weird, the awful
and the despairing in humanity that man was Shakespeare.
And yet we hear so much about the healthiness of the
minds of the greatest poets. All that is great in literature
will always be connected with the tragedy of human sin
and human despair as long as the humanity we are walks
this earth. In this lies the greatness of genius. And
true genius must always be sad, because it sees the
true state of things so acutely. "The man who went
down into hell," it was said of the great Florentine
as he walked the streets, and so it will be unto the
end—greatness must suffer.
C.
It
is a great question whether literature can be taught;
that is, taught in schools. It seems to me that every
man must learn his literature for himself, and that
all that ought to be done for him to that end is to
teach him to read—to read in English, French,
Latin, Greek, or whatever one will. After that if we
have an inclination toward any particular literature,
he will follow it of himself in the most natural and
fruitful manner. If he have no instinct for literature
it is waste time to endeavor to force it upon him. In
our Canadian schools we undertake to teach literature,
and we certainly do teach it with a vengeance. We have
bulky grammars, awful and discouraging to the eye; elaborate
books, instructive of the art of composition; carefully
prepared editions of classical English writings, with
explanatory notes, historical notes, glossaries, critical
introductions and so forth. Armed with these, our literature
classes are set upon the study of some particular masterpiece—say,
a book of "Paradise Lost." They read it; they
declaim it rhetorically; they get it by heart; they
analyse it sentence by sentence; they parse it word
for word; they study its language syllable by syllable,
following each word to its remotest kindred in Latin,
Greek, Saxon, old high German, Lithuanian or Sanscrit;
they turn it into prose and back again into verse; they
hunt up all the allusions; they make themselves acquainted
with parallel passages; they discuss it historically,
geographically, critically; they tear and worry and
torture the lines of the great poem till they are littered
out as dry and innutritive as a worm-eaten codfish.
When all this had been done the student's mind is perhaps
the accuter for the mental training, but he wishes never
to hear the name of "Paradise Lost" again.
It is indeed a Paradise Lost for him. And not only have
the power and beauty of one English masterpiece been
destroyed to his ear, but the chances are that his faculty
of appreciation generally has been robbed of its natural
freshness and permanently blunted. Whatever may be the
merit of this system as an intellectual exercise for
the young, it is decidedly not the way to cultivate
a book of literature or the power of producing it. Indeed,
it seems to me that to teach literature in schools by
classes is as impossible as it would be to teach morality
in the same way. The love of literature is a natural
gift, and if not strong enough to develop itself can
only be drawn out by the influence of a certain surrounding
intellectual atmosphere and the magic of literary companionship.
L.
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