| In
its issue of the 19th September last The Week devoted
one of its editorial paragraphs to a comment upon the
general obscurity of the younger verse writers of Canada,
and a special request for light upon a poem of Mr. Bliss
Carman. The writer is so frank in setting forth the
generous disposition which he brings to the subject,
and so candid in his admission that the fault or misfortune
is his own, that he disarms criticism. For my own part,
I have no desire to criticise or find fault with the
paragraph itself, for there is much in it which can
only give pleasure to a Canadian writer, even if he
finds himself weighted with the charge of obscurity.
"In common with other loyal Canadians, we have
felt and still feel a legitimate pride in the success
with which so many of our gifted young men and women
have courted the muse during the last few years."
This sentence is almost compensation enough for any
stripes that come after, for there is nothing so gratifying
to a writer of whatever standing as to know himself
admired by his fellow-countrymen. I think it would be
impossible to find a more loyal group of men in Canada
than her writers. Although from no fault which can at
present be remedied our country furnishes for the literary
man absolutely no chance of living by his art, the desertions
from her ranks of the men of letters have been small
indeed, probably the severance was not of the spirit
at all. If a man is forced to live by his pen in Canada,
or wilfully determines to do so, there is only one refuge
for him—journalism—and if all my journalistic
friends tell me is true, even that field is not covered
very thickly with clover. So that it happens that all
our country can bestow upon her writers is in some cases
only a very modest (or, perhaps, a prudish would be
the better word) income, in others, no income at all.
But it is a source of pleasure to all the writers alike
to be appreciated in their own country; and when we
have advanced a step further, and when it is possible
to have a criticism, genial but not flattering, just
but not envious, the lot of a Canadian literary man
will begin to be not undesirable. I have no intention
of presenting a commentary upon Mr. Carman's poem, for,
with the majority of the readers of The Week, I am unfortunate
not to have had the opportunity of reading it, and what
that journal now owes to Mr. Carman and its readers
is to publish his poem in full. It was hardly what would
have been expected, from the chivalrous tone of the
paragraph, to find it ending with two verses only of
a poem of nine, which, from the extract, must contain
some story, lyrically hinted at, after Mr. Carman's
manner. It was, I am sure, unintentionally unfair to
give only an excerpt from a poem which should be judged
in its entirety. I am tempted to answer the question
as to the italicised words, which I have no doubt have
been many times ere this explained. It will hardly satisfy
the questioner to be told that they do not mean anything
in the sense of conveying a definite idea, like the
words, "the bird is a thrush," and that from
this point of view they were not intended to mean anything.
But poetry is an art by which impressions are conveyed
as well as ideas, and this translation into words of
the cadence and pause of the thrush's song must be judged
successful or unsuccessful, as it conveys an impression
of the song itself. This must be decided by each individual
reader, but no one can be expected to form any definite
opinion without the possession of the whole poem; at
present what he is requested to do is similar to the
task imposed if a definite meaning were asked for a
shred torn from one of Corot's landscapes, which in
its proper place led the eye from a foreground of hazy
sunlight into the deeps of a forest, with only vestiges
of light dappling the amber pools.
S.
The
New York Critic has the following note in connection
with the death of G.W. Curtis:—
"The
Athenæum is the leading literary journal of England—the
leading literary journal of the English-speaking world.
The United States is an English-speaking country containing
some 65,000,000 inhabitants, whose authors' names are
known and their books read in England as well as in
America. Yet when one of the best-known men of letters
in America, our most distinguished orator, the political
editor of our most influential weekly newspaper, the
writer of an editorial department in an old-established
magazine widely read not only here but in England, and
the leader in the movement for civil service reform
in the United States Government offices—when this
eminent American passes away, still in the active discharge
of all his duties, The Athenæum finds only this
to say of him:—'Dr. Curtis, the editor for 34
years of Harper's Magazine and a high authority on educational
questions, died on Wednesday last at New York, in his
69th year.'
"George
William Curtis was never known as 'Dr.' Curtis; he was
never the editor of Harper's Magazine; and while he
held the (almost honorary) post of chancellor of the
University of the State of New York and was well informed
on matters pertaining to education, he was not generally
known as 'a high authority on educational questions.'
It is as if The Critic should note the death of Mr.
Morley (may it be long before it has occasion to do
so) in some such wise as this:—'Mr. Morley, literary
editor of The Pall Mall Gazette and a high authority
on the subject of copyright (or church history, or French
poetry, or what not) died' etc."
This fact
is strangely significant in its bearing on current English
literary periodicals and their attitude towards American
and even colonial literature. The leading English literary
journals are The Athenæum, The Academy, The Spectator
and The Literary World, all published in London, and
the common characteristic of these journals is their
intense stupidity as to American literature. It would
be wrong to call it wilful neglect. Stupidity is the
best word that meets the case. The fact is there is
no place in the world more insulated and provincial
than literary London. The literary people there are
at what is considered vulgarly to be the centre of intellectual
thought, but such is not the case nowadays. As Mr. Howells
pointed out a short time ago in Harper's, the American
literary centres have lost their one-time greatness,
and much of the best and promising work is done by writers
far removed from such centres. And so it is in London.
There was a day when we might have looked up with awe
to these thunderers, who made or unmade a writer by
a paragraph. But the true genius to-day lives his own
life and works out his own ideals, careless as to the
opinions of such dethroned gods. When we realise that
each of these journals is surrounded by a small clique
of ambitious and often disappointed literary men and
women, who know nothing of the great development of
literature as it really is, we cannot wonder that these
journals are not worthy the notice of a sincere worker.
These circles have their prejudices and vain likings,
and are often influenced by the dislike or likings of
a rival journal. Then all these hangers-on have their
rising literary friends, whom they have to foist on
the public. So that no one can place any real value
on a critique he may see in these papers. All the same
it is a shame that this condition of things should exist,
a condition which is rapidly spreading to America, so
that very little literary work goes on its face value;
hence the literary man needs to be a politician in a
sense, and try and get in with these cliques, which
are the vermin of our literature. They are made up of
small men who build up false reputations for themselves
and friends by occupying the literary journals. Under
the existing circumstances it is no wonder that a growing
contempt is rising in respect to the so-called literary
centres and literary journals. If the young writer,
who is dazed by finding himself patted condescendingly
on the back by one of these journals, only knew who
the real writer was, and his real standing, his self-exaltation
would soon evaporate. Until we have a humble desire
to know the real growth of true literature at our so-called
literary centres, we may expect many of our much over-estimated
critical periodicals to be the immense frauds that they
are at present.
C.
It
is a fact which we all know, that the commonest pursuit
among men is the pursuit of wealth—the accumulation
of riches—either for the sake of the splendor
which it enables them to assume or the power with which
it arms them, or, in the lowest case of all, for the
mere sake of watching the pile grow—a purely brute
instinct. This importance attached to the possession
of wealth is due to a species of madness or mental blindness
which is endemic in no particular country, but has been
a universal pestilence affecting every age and every
climate. People of almost all religions assert this
life to be but a period of sojourn, a period of probation
in which we shall prepare the soul for the better use
of an after existence, and yet most of them employ it
in a pursuit from which the least possible good can
accrue to the soul—from which indeed the result
can be no good at all, but only degradation. Those who
spend their lives in the acquisition of knowledge, in
the cultivation of art or of any intelligent industry
for its own sake, in prosecution of political or social
reform, not to speak of the more intimate works of benevolence,
these are indeed increasing and deepening and expanding
the capacities of the soul and rendering it a fitter
inhabitant of a purer world. But what shall we say of
the men who have merely accumulated vast wealth and
concentrated it under the roofs of glittering palaces—and
that in the presence of all the hungering despair and
misery which we know to be the lot of thousands to every
one of these? All this vanishes like smoke at the touch
of death, and they carry nothing with them, if it be
true that there is a life beyond the grave, but the
hardened, distorted and attenuated soul. There is only
one excuse for a life of money-making—an excuse
which has just saved some of our wealthy neighbors of
the United States from the reprobation under which they
must fall with every really wise man—and that
is that it furnishes the power to do good. Even this
is an echo of the old plea that the end justifies the
means.
If, all at
once, through some strange moral awakening, men could
be got to see the miserable emptiness and vulgarity
of this desire for riches, the work of the social and
political reformer would be made beautifully straight
before him, and all things would adjust themselves to
the ideal plan; for, as we have been told many times,
and most truly, "gold is the root of all evil,"
and the real enemy of mankind is that emissary of Satan
who says with the Cyclops in Euripides: "Wealth,
my little man, is the wise man's god; all other things
are mere boasts and refinements of words."
L.
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