Remaining Material

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1937 IV. REMAINING MATERIALl THE EDITOR' In this essay the purpose is threefold: to exhibit the range covered by writings which lie outside the three major genres treated in the foregoing essays; to call special attention to works valuable for a study of the Canadian scene; and to attempt some judgment of the level of literary or scholarly performance reached in the different departments examined. A.MISCELLANEOUS PROSE Among the advantages accruing to Canadian letters from the presence of Lord Tweedsmuir as Governor-General is the temporary possession of one of the most accomplished of living m,en of letters. His Augu:rtus is a worthy successor'to the Montrose, the Cromweii, and that slighter masterpiece, the study of Scott. Not unnaturally, then, the Augustus is easily the year's most distinguished example of interpretative biography. It has already been reviewed in the QUARTERLY a'an.) 1938), with unqualified pr~ise for the .author's mastery of his material and his skin in setting, it fo'rth, and with a penetrating comment on the view of politics implied; and it will be briefly mentioned again in the note on classical ~tudies. Another work, this time Canadian in subject as well as authorship, has been reserved for the specialist, the first volume of Professor Sissons' Egerton Ryerson. It is proper, however, that the books sh~uld be' named at this point as the two outstanding b'iographies of 1937., A model also, in its briefer compass, is Chancellor Harris's' Charles Inglis) Missionary, Loyalist) Bishop, which adds to its biographical a social and historical interest. From its compact and ordered narrative, with liberal quotations from the Bishop's own journal, one receives a clear impression of the man who ~as som~thing of a saint and very much of an eighteenth-century gentleman, as well as statesman' arid ecclesiastic, of the aims which inspired the effective founders ofAnglicanism in America, and of the conditions, physical and cultural, amid which they worked. Not less admirable is the sketch of William Tyrrell ojWeston by E. L. Morrison ana J. E. Middleton. It is a bi~graphy not of a public figure such as Inglis, but of a private citizen of Upper Canada a lSection B was in the main supplied by Professor A. Brady. On a number of the books the aid of experts has been sought. Their contributions are introduced at the appropriate points, and wi"th"due acknowledgment. 369 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY hundred years ago. But extensive' knowledge and a restrained and proper use of the historical imagination make it a very valuable picture of life in that remote day and of the activities of the' men who laid the foundations of Ontario as we know it. Dr. J. C. Webster's Thomas Pichon, "The Spy of Beausejour" is perhaps less important in subject than the two former volumes. But it tells the story ofone who has his place in the very beginnings of Canadian writing with his Genuine Letters and Memoirs relating to Cape Breton and St. John (first published in French in 1760, but qui,ckly translated into English). ,Dr. Webster's quest for more information has carried him from the Archives of Nova Scotia to Windsor Castle and the Huntington Library, and the result has been to uncover material which, as Professor Wrong has suggested,~ might well engage the attention of some Canadian novelist. The year's most' succe~sful autobiography is With the West in Her Eyes, by Kathleen Strange. In 1920 a demobilized British 'Officer, his war-bride, and three children of a former marriage arrived at Fenn in Alberta, the last frontier of agricultural settlement , and Mrs. Strange presents in simple, 'unaffected, and (in general) readable narrative, the story of their life there during the next decade. The fortunes of the family, are set against asufficient background, natural and social, to give the book real value as a document, as a supplement (shall we say?) to Mrs. McClung's chronicle of an earlier day, Cleafing in the West (1935). Mrs. Strange's volume is a faithful record of an experience really worth recording. But only one coming to it from...