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DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT'S FICTION MORAL REALISM AND CANADIAN IDENTITY GLENN CLEVER Duncan Campbell Scott has been the odd man out amongst authors of the Confederation period of Canadian literature. Archibald MacMechan, in his 1924 survey, overlooked him entirely. Malcolm Ross in Poets of Confederation (1960) includes his poems but excludes Scott from his "Introduction." The journal Canadian Literature, during its first eighteen years up to 1978, accords Scott a bare seven entries but such casual Canadians as Wyndham Lewis seventeen, Malcolm Lowry forty. And if more recently accorded more critical attention, still the University of Toronto reprint series does justice to Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, even Alexander McLachlan and Charles Mair — but not to Scott. Indeed, until the University of Ottawa Press produced Selected Stories in 1972, and Tecumseh Press Selected Poems in 1974, Scott had not made the press in a major way since 1951, in E. K. Brown's Selected Poems. Perhaps Scott just lived so long he became an anachronism, or perhaps the facelessness of the civil servant image veiled the features of the author. Whatever, the writer who first showed us Lampman's importance, who with Lampman and Campbell in the series "At the Mermaid Inn," in the Toronto Globe in 1892-1893, inaugurated the first consistent literary column in Canada, who, incidentally, helped found the Ottawa Little Theatre and provided its opening play, "Pierre," in 1923, merits more than casual comment even about his fiction. Indeed, my contention is that now, in 1979, we should have the past of English literature in Canada adequately enough in perspective to state without further hedging that Duncan Campbell Scott is a primary author of the consciousness of Canada and a watershed author between the old ways and the new in our literature, and that his fiction by itself shows his innovative qualities in matter and manner as well as his part in helping to establish the northern/ western frontier realities in the Canadian sensibility. 85 Let me briefly recapitulate the state of fiction at the time Scott began to write. The popular novel in his day was derivative, displaced only geographically from Europe, as in Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty (1896). Those who, like Ralph Connor in The Man from Glengarry (1901), tried to come to grips with a Canadian sensibility were misled by didactic intent, or, as in the case of Lucy Maud Montgomery in Anne of Green Gables (1908), by sentimental vision. Writers who avoided these tendencies, for example Sara Jeannette Duncan in The Imperialist (1904), tend instead to produce portraits of the Krieghoff type — they show us the externality only, although of a clearly perceived and readily apprehended Canadian scene. Amongst such novelists stereotypes and poetic justice prevail over psychological or moral realism. The characters act out their roles to conform to imposed design, not to inform the process of interacting lives. The short story was not an accepted genre in English literature until about the time Scott was born, short narrative until then still appearing mostly in verse form as in Byron and Scott's metrical romances. About the mid-century, prompted by a logarithmically expanding demand for reading material on the part of the general public as distinct from the relatively few educated readers of poetic narratives, and by the rise of the popular magazine and newspaper as a medium for its appearance, short prose fiction soared in popularity in a welter of kinds. This shows plainly enough in the Canadian scene: sketches of people and incidents, often satirical in tone, as in the work of Susannah Moodie; tales of adventure, superstition, or horror, usually melodramatic in tone, as in Gilbert Parker's stories in Pierre and His People; realistic accounts of episodes from everyday life, as in E. W. Thomson's tales; the well-made story of the O'Henry type, as in Robert Barr's; fiction fairytales such as Isabella Valancy Crawford's; and other kinds as well, all generally moralistic, pious, didactic, and often local colour in nature. Scott's attitude differed from this literary tradition. In his Presidential address, "Poetry and Progress," delivered before the Royal Society of Canada in 1922, he clearly expresses his far-reaching concern and cosmopolitan knowledge about literary matter and manner . He defines modernity in literature — although speaking specifically of poetry — as "the feeling for actuality." He asserts the need for change, saying: "revolt is essential to progress." He speaks of that "essential, in which the power...

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