THE
GLOBE will in to-morrow's issue begin a new feature
which is altogether
unique in Canadian journalism and has been seldom attempted
anywhere. It is the establishment of a literary column
or department
to consist of contributions from three of the brightest
lights of
Canadian literature, viz., Messrs. W.W. Campbell, A.
Lampman and Duncan
Campbell Scott. These gentlemen need no introduction
to readers
of THE GLOBE, which has on several occasions had the
pleasure
of printing and commending their different productions
in prose
and poetry. They have made names for themselves as representative
Canadian writers, and the public will doubtless be pleased
to be brought into contact with them oftener than has
hitherto been
possible. The department will be known by the title
"At the Mermaid
Inn," a name chosen by the authors themselves.
It will be started
to-morrow, and will form a permanent feature of THE
SATURDAY
GLOBE.
With this
statement on February 5, 1892 the Toronto Globe
announced the imminent appearance of the column that
represents the most sustained collaboration among members
of the Confederation group. "At the Mermaid Inn"
appeared on every Saturday but one (May 27, 1893) from
February 6, 1892 to July 1, 1893. Although written only
by the Ottawa contingent of the Confederation group,
it contains columns about all three of the other members
(Bliss Carman, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Frederick George
Scott) and, as Barrie Davies remarks in his Introduction
to At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald
Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The
Globe, 1892-93 in the University of Toronto
Press's Literature of Canada; Poetry and Prose in Reprint
series, provides "one of the best guides we have
to prevailing intellectual tastes and currents"
in Canada in the early eighteen nineties (vii).
Three days
after the appearance of the first "At the Mermaid
Inn," The Globe congratulated itself by
reprinting an article from the Hamilton Herald
that praises it for "doing good work in encouraging
young Canadian writers and interesting our people in
the literary efforts of those who live among us yet
who have heretofore been better known in the States
than in our own country" (February 9, 1892). At
the time of the column's inception, all three of the
poets contributing to it had indeed achieved international
recognition—Lampman for Among the Millet,
and Other Poems (1884), which had received extravagant
praise from one of America's most highly regarded men
of letters, William Dean Howells; Scott for "The
Reed-Player," which had been singled out by the
New York Independent as the best poem published
in an American periodical in 1891; and Campbell for
"The Mother," which had been praised in the
April 5, 1891 issue of the Chicago Inter-Ocean
as "[t]he nearest approach to a great poem which
has cropped up ... for many a long day."1
The "At the Mermaid Inn" in column, then,
was part of a trajectory of international and national
recognition that was to make 1893 an annus mirabilis
of achievements and accolades for the Confederation
group: a "Canadian Literature Evening" in
Toronto on January 10, the publication in the April
1 issue of The Globe of Edward William Bok's
fawningly laudatory "Young Canadian Writers from
an American Standpoint," the appearance of substantial
selections of their work in J.E. Wetherell's Later
Canadian Poems, and, of course, the publication
of individual volumes by every member of the group except
Lampman, whose Lyrics of Earth did not appear
until 1896.
But even before
the annus mirabilis had begun there were intimations
that Campbell was setting himself on a path that would
lead in two years to the bitter attack on other members
of the Confederation group that quickly escalated into
the so-called "War among the Poets." Writing
darkly of the presence in Canada of a "bundle of
cliques" in his column of December 10, 1892, Campbell
accuses the country's "literary critics and journals"
of failing to judge works of Canadian literature on
their "real merits" and, instead, "booming"
the work of their "personal friends." By February
4, 1893, Campbell was writing of "a fraternal system
of back-scratching ... and back-biting" among prominent
Canadian writers and by March 18 he was disparaging
the sonnet—a form in which Lampman and Roberts
excelled—as being "over-much abused in these
latter days of artificial writing." In the ensuing
months, the barbs continued to fly as Campbell added
literary "polish," inauthentic imitativeness,
a lack of human sympathy, and other characteristics
to the catalogue of poetic sins from which he, by implication,
was immune (see, for example, his columns of May 20
and June 17). His final column of July 1 may not have
been the only cause of the cessation of "At the
Mermaid Inn," but it was surely a contributing
factor: an attack on the "pseudo-poetry that is
marking these times," it contains a sonnet and
excerpts from a lyric by "John Pensive Bangs"
that receive praise in the column from an equally fictitious
critic for their "Millet-like realism"—a
reference to the French painter Jean François
Millet that in all probability also encompasses Among
the Millet, and Other Poems. In the March 16,
1894 issue of The Week (Toronto), Campbell
went on the offensive again, and on February 28 and
June 6, 1895 he accused the Confederation group of "log-rolling"
(that is, mutual "back-scratching") and Carman
of egregious plagiarism. The "War" was on
and the disintegration of the Confederation group increasingly
imminent.
Of course
"At the Mermaid Inn" is of interest and value
for much more than its escalating conflict and premonitions
of war. In its pages can be found discussions of a wide
spectrum of topics that bear more-or-less directly on
the work of its authors in other genres and modes. All
three poets discuss the work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
and Percy Bysshe Shelley (the former died in 1892; 1893
was the centennial of the birth of the latter). Lampman
and Campbell discuss Matthew Arnold, Lampman and Scott
discuss A.C. Swinburne, Scott and Campbell discuss Wordsworth.
Lampman reveals his admiration for the American nature
writer Bradford Tory, Campbell for the American dialect
writer John Hay, Scott for the dramas of Henrik Ibsen.
There are discussions of Nature and the natural environment,
on the nature of Beauty and creative originality, the
social position of women, the national importance of
education, the pervasive influence of American periodicals,
the pernicious effects of class distinctions.... As
might be expected from Campbell's increasingly pointed
barbs, there are admiring remarks by Lampman and Scott
on Carman and by Lampman on Frederick George Scott.
Less predictable perhaps are Lampman's reservations
about aspects of the work of Roberts, Campbell's arguments
in favor of forming an association of Canadian authors,
Scott's appreciation of Harriet Monroe as a master of
the sonnet, and the number of European as well as American,
British, and Canadian writers mentioned and discussed
in the course of the column's existence. In short, the
literary personalities and positions represented by
"At the Mermaid Inn" are complex and shifting—a
"guide to prevailing intellectual tastes and currents"
certainly, but also an index of the convergences and
divergences that characterized the Confederation group
at the height of its fame.
|
