A Survey of English-Canadian Letters

A SURVEY OF ENGUSH·CANADIAN LETIERS' I The need for a complete and comprehensive literary history of Canadaone that should also be something of a cultural history-has been felt for a long time. A number of handbooks and outlines were published in the twenties, but the studies of "headwaters" and "highways" produced by the academic critics of that time were lacking in discrimination and were vitiated by a sort of schoolmarmish primness and coyness. Somewhat better was the less pretentious Houtline" by Lorne Pierce, and some good fragmentary work was done by R P. Baker in his English·Canadian Literature to the Con· federation (1920) and Lionel Stevenson in Appraisals of Canadian Literature (1926), but it was not until the literary revival of the forties that a modern approach to "the problem of Canadian literature" was begun by E. K. Brown and continued by the university writers who collaborated in the an!lual survey of "Letters in Canada" published in this journal. Apart from some studies of poetry and of the western novel very little was attempted in the way of historical criticism, and the field was left, as far as any synoptic survey was concerned, to Professor Desmond Pacey, who contributes two important chapters to the present volume. Until now, Pacey's Creative Writing in Canada: A Short History of English·Canadian Literature has been the most complete and up to date handbook available to the student and the general reader. The book is not written with any particular distinction of style, and a few of its judgments are of doubtful validity; nevertheless its general consis· tence and singleness of purpose give it a certain value which is not greatly diminished by the appearance of this new large, ambitious volume, which aims at virtues of another kind. These are the virtues of catholicity, variety, and fullness. There is to be a new look at the whole of Canadian literature in English and the society and culture that produced it; and the new look will be based upon fresh, original research, a good deal of digging into sources, and a good deal of reading of the unreadable. The task, I fear, could not always have been congenial. In any case, it was felt at once to be beyond the scope of a single scholar. "The programme," as the Introduction states, {'for basic research ... which led to this book has taken six years to complete and has been carried out by many hands. .. . The book now being published has in fact been written by the editors [Carl F. Klinck, general editor, Alfred C. Bailey, Claude T. Bissell, Roy Daniells, Northrop Frye] and twenty·nine other scholars. ..." These collaborators are drawn from every one of the leading Canadian universities, except those in the three prairie provinces, with Toronto, Western Ontario, and New Brunswick predominating. "The divisions and periods of this history," to quote again from the Intra- "'Carl F. Klinck and Others, Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1965. Pp. xiv, 945, $18.00. Volume xxxv, Number I, October, 1965. 108 A. J. M. SMITH duction, "have not been arbitrarily imposed, but have rather been discovered in the light of the evidence." The contributors were given the freedom and responsibility "to dictate the approaches, methods of classification, critical concepts, and descriptive styles most appropriate to the truth as the respective authors saw it.. . . Flexibility, freshness, and authenticity were placed in the balance against strict orderliness, but an order emerged...." This has a fine scientific ring, but if such a method and so much freedom are to be ultimately successful in an undertaking as ambitious, comprehensive, and new as this one, certain conditions are demanded, only some of which obtain here. First, there must be a powerful, dominating, and unifying mind at the editorial helm; and secondly there ought to be an equality of distinction among the contributors-all require alike the virtues of both scholar and critic: industry, patience, discrimination. taste, intelligence. and a sense of style-powers difficult enough to find in a single author and next to impossible in an editorial committee. There also should be, I think, a general agreement among...