Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists by Brian Trehearne (review)

HUMANITIES 155 demand, his relations with his father, without whose power parenting Francis would have been (perhaps happily) marginalized even out of the Canadian Encyclopedia. Here Nicol also refers in passing to Charles Dickens's 'biographers, Hastings and Main;' but overlooks the criticism offered by StGeorge and Harbord about the 'nutritional link between the baby's being suddenly plunged into pasta and the later afflictions of deafness and stuttering.' Throughout the volume one is encouraged into belief by footnotes giving biographical evidence and references (alas lacking in specificity) to the collections of the National Archives. One hopes that in a later edition - and one will surely be called for - more precise information will be given, along with, of course, the actual location of the manuscript letters. (It can be inferred that they are in the UBC library, whose collections do not all run on the Pacific rim.) Are there still sceptics? The final proof is on the copyright page, a source much under-utilized by scholars. There we find the cataloguers' guarantee (with my added italics): 1. Dickens, Francis, 1844-1886- Correspondence. 2. Royal Canadian Mounted Police - History - Anecdotes. 3· Northwest, Canadian - History - 1870-1905 - Anecdotes. 4· Royal Canadian Mounted Police- Biography. 5. Police - Prairie Provinces - Correspondence. These doubt-quelling descriptors are assigned by the National Library of Canada (which presumably checked with the co-domiciliary National Archives). The definition of 'anecdotes' they use is this: 'Collections of brief narratives of true incidents from the individual's life.' A little further down this unread page you will find the informative Library of Congress descriptors: FC3216.3, 971.2'o2'0924, and Fto6o.9.D52A4, which signify, respectively, 'Northwest Mounted Police- Individual biography; 'Canada - History- Prairie Provinces, 1869-1945- Biography of individual'; and 'History- Canadian North-west.' As the back of the dust-jacket says, 'Canadian history will never be the same again.' No faux monnayeur, this Nicol! (JOHN M. ROBSON) Brian Trehearne. Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists MeGill-Queen's University Press. x, 370. $34.95 Few indeed are the studies of our literary history that assume the status of seminal works. And the field of Canadian poetry studies is a particularly unpopulated area. There are, of course, E.K. Brown's classic On Canadian Poetry (1943; rev 1944); the authoritative collection on The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English (1970) edited by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski; and a number ofessays and/or collections ofessays usually on individual poets. Now this relatively vacant Shelf receives the important addition of Brian Trehearne's Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists. Building on the kind of literary influence described by Walter Jackson Bate in The Burden ofthe Poetand the English Past (1970), by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety ofInfluence: A Theory ofPoetry (1973), and by Goran Hermeren in Influence in Artand Literature (1975), Trehearne develops the convincing argument that Canada's modernist poets were strongly influenced by the EnglishAesthetes and Decadents. Examiningbriefly the majorfeatures of the aesthetic movement, itself a late version of English Romanticism, he sees aestheticism as 'a serious aesthetic theory in which the arts are removed from other forms of human commerce in an effort to preserve theirbeauty and integrity' and decadence as'an inevitable modification of that theory to the point where the poetry demonstrates little but woe, rejection, and failure.' His fine knowledge and understanding of these English movements in art allow him to trace their themes, attitudes, and even verbal echoes in major and minor Canadian modernists. Trehearne is a careful and sensitive reader of poetry. His exhaustive account of A.J.M. Smith's career as poet, critic, and anthologist, for example, is both compelling and convincing. Although Smith never acknowledged his indebtedness to the Aesthetes, Trehearne shows that aestheticism offered him 'principles of craft, artistic perfection, impersonal detachment, poetic intensity, which were to form the essence of his later doctrines.' In this chapter, as elsewhere in the book, he relies not only on works in the recognized canon, but also on uncollected and unpublished writings, revealing his extensive reading of journals, manuscripts, and private papers. Through Trehearne's insightful study, F.R. Scott is seen absorbing the...