Social Studies

LETTERS IN CANADA, 1955 313 III. SOCIAL STUDIES Alexander Brady Much Canadian history is written in biographies. This has been the case in the past, and remaios the case in the present. Early in the twentieth century was published the first ambitious series on the country's development entitled "Makers of Canada" (1904), where in twenty volumes the course of history was surveyed in the careers of leading men, from Samuel Champlain to Sir Charles Tupper. A few years later another and bolder publishing venture, "Canada and Its Provinces," . attempted in part to redress the balance: in its portly volumes institutional , economic, and regional history was dealt with extensively, and great men fell into their appropriafe background. From the early twenties scholars began to investigate with wider references and different interests the Canadian past, but biographers were still notably to the fore, pursning the careers of explorers, fur-traders, governors, politicians , and railway builders. In the first quarter of the present century the leading historians, such as Wrong, Shortt, Skelton, Morton, Martin, and Wallace, whatever else they may have written, also wrote biography, for they were disposed to see history in terms of men. We need not and cannot explore here the meaning of this fact. However explained, the writing of national history through the lives of individuals is still with us, despite the expanding stream of monographs on economic and institutional growth, and it is specially evident in the studies of 1955. A distinguished addition to our knowledge of the past is Donald Creighton'S lohn A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftain (Macmillan , xii, 630 pp., $5.75). This work completes a two-volume biography, which we may bracket with the two equally stout volumes of C. B. Sissons on Egerton Ryerson: His Life and Times (the last of the volumes on Ryerson appeared in 1947) as constituting perhaps the two finest biographies we have, and certainly the finest to appear in the last quarter of a century. Both are rich additions to the history of Canada. The first volume of Donald Creighton's work had an excellent reception in 1952, and the second deserv~s an even more generous welcome. It is more tightly knit, on the whole better written, more urbane in judgment, and deeply revealing in the light that it throws on the beginnings of the Canadian nation. It has the interest of treating Macdonald in the twenty-odd years when he more than any other individual dominated the politics of the country. He had moved on from coping with the parochial and often frustrating issues of the united provinces to the larger 314 SOCIAL STUDIES and more stimulating problems of a continental state, and he now demonstrated his capacity in all its maturity. We need not attempt here the detailed review to which this book is entitled in historical journals. But one feature of it deserves special commendation: it is literature as well as biography and history. Donald Creighton is a stylist with a sense for the dramatic, and stylistS are all too few among modem Caoadiao scholars. For him ao effective sentence is something significant, and a well-designed chapter leading to a climax is worthy of effort. He borrows freely from the arts of the novelist. He skilfully introduces facts about weather, scenery and the clothes worn by men aod women to give pictorial background to human action. His incidents are rigorously snbordinated to a design. He seeks to portray Macdonald, not merely as a Prime Minister, but as a human being beset with private as well as public troubles. At first a reader may wonder whether it is relevant to be told about Sir John's pallor and Lady Macdonald's headaches, but before he is half-way through the volume he ceases to wonder. Even trivial details have their place in the portrait. There are ornate literary embellishments here, and few of them a reader could afford to miss. While scrupulously attending ,to the facts of biography, Donald Creighton does noLnegiect the facts of history, and these were of major importance between 1867 and 1891. In this period, amid doubts and fears, the foundations of modem Canada were laid. "The whole of...