French-Canadian Letters

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1943 Edited by A. S. P. WooDHOUSE PART II IV. FRENCH.CANADIAN LETTERS W. E. CoLLIN · The six sections of this essay deal respectively with: (i) philosophy , sociology, and the problems of collaboration; (ii) literary, dramatic and art criticism; (iii) fiction and narrative sketches; (iv) drama and poetry; (v) history and biography; and (vi) miscellaneous works. The arrangement in the check-list 'is alphabetical. I The writers of 1943, apart from the poets, were agitated by the philosophy of personalism, of .which we spoke last year, and the problems created by a changing society, by the need of a deeper knowledge of physical and human environment, and by the question of co-operation between the French and English populations of Canada. Professor Charles de Koninck's De Ia Primaute du bien commun contre les personnalistes is an aggressive attack on the personalists. Cardinal·Villeneuve writes in the preface: "At the moment personalism has become fashionable. Some very sincere minds extol it. They exalt the dignity of the human person; they want the person respected; they write for a personalist order; they labour to create a civilization which will be for man . . . . That is all very well, but too short; for the person, man, is not an end in itself nor the end of all. Man has God for end." The book is in part, then, a reply to Fran~ois Hertel's Pour un Ordre personnaliste. The personalists , it appears, have given a tendentious interpretation to passages they have taken from St Thomas Aquinas. The author claims to replace these Pone which "'xtends between life an'd d"'ath .. : , Baudd::~ire spoke of the surreal, even if hi! did ~ at know the word. Figures de danse, by the musical critic Jean Dufresne, who writes under the pseudonym of Marcel Valois, studies the careers of .the dancers of the Russian ballet (Fokine, Massine, Nijinsky~ Lifar), the German School (Kreutzberg, Ruth Draper, Trudi Schoop, Angna Enters), the Orientals (Uday Shan-Kar, Ruth StDenis ), and the Spanish School (Escudero, La Argentina). It is a companion work to M. Raymond's study of modern dramatic theory. There is a bit of everything in Mgr Maurault's Aux Louisianais,·which is made l!P of four addresses, two in French, two in English ("Un peu d'histoire," "French as it is spoken in Canada," "La vie et la litterature fran~aises au Canada," "Canada at war"), and three other chapters ("Deux Canadiens fran!;ais," "Art canadien," and "Un Canadien en Louisiane en 1943," this last, published also in the eighth Cahiers des Dix, being a reconstruction of the French atmosphere of Louisiana as he felt it during his trip). They are interesting synopses. Of the picturesque speech of the "habitants," he remarks: The Norman pioneers were, in the beginning, very numerous and they have stamped their mark on the whole stock. Many o( them, I suppose, were IHlvigators . This would explain the many maritime expressions which doc the language of their descendnnts. At a railroad station, for instance, they embark and disembark: embarquer u dibarquer. Speaking of the sides of the highway, they do not say les dills, but In bords; consequently cluwgrr de coil becomes. oirer dt bord. A well-dressed girl will be said hie~ vUe, as ifspeaking of a schoontr. Mgr Maurault is not very happy when he speaks of the young generation of artists: They went to Paris, these young painters. There they found the masters of · deformation and surrealism, for, as you imagine, our School of Fine Arts has remained "traditionalist." They brought back a new art that we know very . well but wnich is not for export. They are trying to acclimati2e it under our skies. Well, they· h~ve really a great de~] of talent. I shall name two of them established in Montreal: Borduas and Pellan. The two French Canadians he speaks of are M. Montpetit and the Abbe Groulx. He repeats what he has said about them in other places and illustrates his sket.ches with extracts from their.writings. No one among us writes better than M. Montpetit .... Jf we often quote him it is because he has a gift for mnking...