| No
one can meet Mr. Gilbert Parker, our young fellow-countryman
who has been so successful in the London literary world,
without feeling that he deserves all his success and
will have more. There is a reserve of force which one
becomes, somehow or other, aware of, which inspires
a feeling or confidence that Mr. Parker, with his assiduity,
his great ability and his opportunities, will achieve
a yet higher reputation. He has already seen much of
the world, and he seems to have the devouring eye which
will not let any fact or color or circumstance escape
him. It is an almost absolute necessity to have command
of several locales for success in modern storywriting,
and Mr. Parker has Canada, with which he is thoroughly
familiar, and Australia and the South seas, where he
has spent some time, to draw upon. The former field
has furnished him already with matter for several of
his most successful tales, and he is now engaged in
the pastoral and Arcadian Quebec in collecting fresher
knowledge of the ways and speech of the people for future
use. Australasia has provided him incidents for a volume
of South sea stories, which is to appear in May next.
In the meantime, "Pierre and His People" has
gone into its second edition, and in February Messrs.
Methuen are to publish a novel, "Mrs. Falchion,"
which will also been issued by the United States Book
company. Mr. Parker has also been successful with his
dramatic productions. "The Wedding Day" is
now being produced in England, and Geo. Alexander of
the St. James' theatre, London, has accepted a one-act
play from Mr. Parker's pen. All this means an extraordinary
output of energy, and if our young Canadian continues,
and there is no reason why he should not, he will soon
occupy a place in the literary firmament which many
have coveted and but few obtained. There is about Mr.
Parker a freedom from disguise, a perfect, genial open-heartedness
and a helpful belief in his art and the worthiness of
it which stamp him, as I said before, as a man bound
to succeed, and these qualities make us wish him success
for his own sake as well as ours. It will be a bright
day for Canada when men of such ability can find it
to their advantage to remain at home and exercise their
faculties in helping to build up the country in which
they were born and to which they must often turn with
longing. Emerson says somewhere that a man being born
in a place means that he has some work to do there;
and there is plenty of work for every Canadian to do
in Canada. But, at present, it is not the Utopia of
authors, except, perhaps, in appreciation—for
I hold that there is a great deal of genuine appreciation—and
when a man feels that letters is his calling he must
depart from our shores and be a sojourner in an alien
land.
S.
One
of the most fascinating studies is that of history.
To see the past through the glasses of a Gibbon or a
Hume, a Hallam or a Froude, is not alone entertaining
and instructive, but it is also inspiring. But how much
more realistic and important becomes the study when
you have a chance thrown in your way to read the past
life of a people through its public, every-day affairs.
It is like the power of reading between the lines of
a letter. We are not only able to see and hear the actors
as they strut the stage, but also to discover the secret
motives and circumstances that influenced their actions.
I have very little faith in biographies as a whole.
They are very often but the funeral trappings and trimmings
of a life that in its grim realities was a very different
matter altogether. So it is with history. Even when
that bias is dead which influences contemporary opinion,
other public motives and prejudices are at work to prevent
a true depiction of the past in its entirety. I am sorry
to say that for this reason we have few great historians.
And we ourselves know how common a thing it is to have
even the greatest historians tampered with in the interests
of certain existing institutions. Under this head nothing
can be of greater interest to Canadians to-day than
anything that may throw light on the early days of old
Upper Canada. It can easily be admitted that we have
as yet no important chronicle of that period, with the
exception of what Mr. Kingsford is doing in that direction.
We have been instructed as schoolboys in certain dates
and attendant events in connection with old provincial
history. But, beyond this and certain patriotic remembrances
acquired in a general way, we know little or nothing
as a people of our immediate ancestors of old Upper
Canada. The U.E. Loyalist and other biographies, for
they are nothing more, give us but a small and, for
the most part, a false idea of the real history of those
days. How interesting, I repeat, is it, then, to be
able to see our predecessors, not through any biased
eye, but in the light of their own daily acts and ideals,
both as private citizens and through their civil institutions.
How different do things appear. The hideous appears
in all its unvarnished reality, and if there is anything
that strikes us as heroic in the period it appeals to
us by its very unconsciousness of being anything out
of the common. You can fancy the surprise that would
come over a man, who, having perused the biography of
a dead man, written by some friend or relative, suddenly
comes into possession of all his private paper giving
the key to the motives and actions of his whole life.
If the student were not already a man of the world and
accustomed to accept such things with a grain of salt,
how many illusions would there not be destroyed for
him under the circumstances? In dipping into the early
life of old Upper Canada, the truth of these cursory
remarks appears almost at every step. And if plain documents
of a year or a decade tell anything of the life of a
people, the elements of sordidness and personal ambition
played no small part in the general impulse. It is almost
laughable to read the long-winded preambles of the commons
and legislative assembly of that date, and especially
the former, and the extreme iteration of loyalty is
remarkable. And the constant recurring phrase, "Our
one desire is the freedom and happiness of man,"
which, if we read the people of that period through
the utterance of its corporate representatives, seemed
to be the one ideal and aim of the age, sounds very
funny side by side with the chronicle of the daily acts
of the said body, which many of them would lead us to
believe to be the acts of those mysterious personages
proclaimed in these public documents as the enemies
of justice and the freedom of man rather than those
of a body whose ideals were so lofty and unselfish in
their aim. As to-day the great struggle is for money,
so in those days, when money was scarce and of little
account in a colony with little trade and no commerce,
land was the one standard of power and position, and
the greed for the acquisition of that solid representative
of material wealth is quite surprising even to the mind
of this most degenerate present age. The rapidity with
which public officials acquired large grants, some to
the immense amount of ten thousand acres, is shown in
contradistinction to unavailing efforts of really deserving
families to even acquire the common allotment of from
one hundred to two hundred acres. Of course we do not
go to public documents to learn the heroic in any age,
and I doubt not but that our Upper Canadian ancestors
were not devoid of this essential quality in a nationality,
but at the same time we must not forget that the acquirement
of wealth was no small element in the national inspiration
of our immediate past, and that if we are wise to-day
we will not forget in our hunt for a national feeling
to rely largely on the practical every-day interests
of an intensely practical people, rather than on any
amount of gush and mock sentiment, which is of no more
importance to-day, and gives no more true idea of the
real life of the age than did those hypocritical and
high-sounding documents with their long phrases about
"justice and the happiness of man" give of
the real motives and actions of our old Canadian ancestors.
C.
At
a time when literary men are credited with an unusual
aptitude for money-making and a most keen eye for the
main chance, it almost a satisfaction to hear that Ernest
Renan, a writer surely of great popularity and exquisite
charm, died poor. It is even said that Madame Renan
is obliged to sell her husband's library in order to
maintain herself until the national pension, which it
is proposed to confer upon her, has been granted. Renan
sold all the copyrights of his books, and lived upon
the proceeds of his salary as professor in the college
of France and his earnings from occasional writings.
Altogether at the time of his death his income appears
to have been about $3,000 a year, certainly a very moderate
sum for a man of his fame. As he was not of a saving
temperament he easily consumed all of this, and left
nothing behind him. It was Renan who said to the minister
of Napoleon III, who offered him a lucrative government
post, "Sit tecum tua pecunia." Renan was great,
and had the poet's sovereign indifference to wealth.
L.
If
a man were to be exiled to some inaccessible island
or cast into prison and given the choice of half a dozen
books which he might carry with him to be his solace
and support, which books do you think would he choose?
No doubt every man much given to reading and thought
has amused his fancy at one time or another with some
such speculation as this. If it were my case I should
choose the Bible, the poems of Homer, the plays of Shakespeare,
the poems of Wordsworth, the autobiography of Goethe
and the Don Quixote of Cervantes; the Bible as the most
fervid and fruitful expression of the religious and
prophetic spirit, the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer as
the most perfect narrative of human effort presented
in the clearest simplicity of beauty, the plays of Shakespeare
as the picture of human life made for us by the world's
highest union of intellect, heart and imagination, the
poems of Wordsworth as the noblest presentment of the
influence exerted upon the soul by the beauty and grandeur
of outward nature, the autobiography of Goethe as the
record of the development of an insatiable and most
vital mind uniting the scientific and artistic spirits
each in an extraordinary degree, and the Don Quixote
as the world's book of the sweetest and most humane
humor. From these six books a man might draw sufficient
strength, knowledge, inspiration, delight and humanity
to last him a life time, and leave him with a soul fitted
for eternity with all its chambers draped and furnished
and all its windows open.
L.
Now
that I am upon such fancies as this—and coming
down to a subject which is perhaps of interest only
to the more curious student of letters—I have
been trying to make out which is the most beautiful
sonnet in the English language, not from the artistic
sonneteer's point of view, but from the purely human
one. After passing in review the sonnets of Shakespeare,
Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Rossetti and all the other
famous ones, I come to the conclusion that the last
sonnet of Keats which he wrote on shipboard in the British
channel not many months before his end is the loveliest
and loftiest of all. Here it is:—
"Bright
star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone
splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's
patient, sleepless Ereonite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution
round earth's human shores,
Or gazing at the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon
the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon
my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever
in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live
ever—or else swoon to death."
How
tender, how eloquent, how serene! Surely no young poet
ever took leave of this troublesome life—this
skein of so sweet and bitter destinies—with a
purer or sweeter note upon his lips.
L.
|
