Sir Charles G. D. Roberts and His Time

SIR CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS AND HIS TIM£1 PELHAM EDGAR MISS POMEROY'S adequate and entertaining narrative biography possesses and lacks many qualities that we usually associate with the organized story of a great man's life. It would be possible to cavil at its lack of critical discrimination, its failure to relate Roberts in any large way with the movements of his time, its episodic fullness and its dearth of general conclusions. Yet these negative features in the book do not seem greatly to matter. A living and lovable figure emerges from her pages, and we attune ourselves readily i:o the full confidence of the author's assumptions and to her unquestioning belief in the high importance of her theme. For the future will recognize even more than we are willing to do that Roberts was a pivotal figure, a musical hinge around which our poetry first began to revolve. Our younger poets of today may not recognize their debt, for it is the time-honoured privilege of youth to repudiate its own ancestry and overleap the generations; but in the long perspective of history the pervasive quality of Roberts' influence will be recognized at its true importance . I The relation between great performance and its engendering causes remains obscure. We observe the results, and at best we can make some sort of rough equation between these and the known facts of a career. There are shaping causes of course, but these presuppose material t~at is capable of being shaped; and here all the complexities of heredity confront us, involving also the quality of the brain, the nervous system, the glands, and all that concatenation of physiological and spiritual circumstance which finds its consummation in the total personality. We do not propose to weigh down this slight study of a man's work by such far-reaching considerations. The difficulties of a;sessing them are much too great, and we must satisfy ourselves with a less ambitious attempt to estimate the importance of Roberts' achievement and the circumstances that governed his development. Our initial pren11se 1 Sir Cho.rlu G. D. Roberts: A Biography, by E. M. PoMEROY. Toronto, Ryerson, 1943, $4.50. 117 118 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY is that in the child of eight months who was moved from the parish of Douglas to the Westcock parsonage in 1860 there was malleable and sensitive clay that was capable of being shaped into significant form. Roberts' father, Canon George Goodridge Roberts, was a man of genuine distinction in everything but the worldly sense, and he was without question the . most potent personal influence that entered into the son's life. He sympathized to the full with his early developed literary ambitions, and lived far down the years of his mature achievement. In 1936, thirty-one years after his death, the son ended a biographical note in a commemorative volume with these words: "These are the bare statistical facts in the life of a man who, by virtue of his intellectual and spiritual gifts supported by outstanding physical vigour, might have achieved any degree of worldly advancement. But he was without worldly ambition. The endless and absorbing duties of a parish priest left him no time to cultivate his personal talents, except his supreme talent of helpfulness. · He took no thought for his own advantage. He stood firmly for the right as he conceived it, but he was without taint of bigotry or intolerance. He was strong,-no one ever leaned on him to be let down. He was gentle, compassionate,none came to him in trouble to go away uncomforted. He held the almost passionate devotion of his family, the love and esteem of all who came in contact with him. To me, his eldest son and through life his closest friend, intimate to his every strength and weakness, he has left the memory of the wisest, kindest, most wholly admirable man whom I shall ever know." Writing blood flowed in the veins of his mother, who was by descent of the Concord family of Bliss from which Ralph Waldo Emerson was sprung. Her older sister Sophie was the mother of Bliss Carman, and...