Nature

HUMANITIES 437 connoisseurs and collectors who, with their books, collections, loans, and gifts to public institutions, add to public awareness of distinct Canadian artefacts reRecting a distinct Canadian civilization. Until recently, Canadian academic and intellectual circles generally have failed to recognize three hundred years of Canadian arts, letters, and traditions as enlightening evidences of Canadian history and civilization. As yet not one university in Canada offers serious undergraduate or post-graduate courses in Canadian civilization. University studies of Canadiana, where they exist, are usually incorporated as footnotes to European and American civilizations. Meanwhile, the meaning, indeed, the very existence of Canada as a distinct culture and state today commands more and more time at political levels. The lack of understanding by many Canadians of their own culture as Canadians presents a serious barrier and key to the understanding of other cultures within the Canadian nation. William Morris, the nineteenth-century essayist and espouser of craftsmanship, considered the decorative arts along with the great art of architecture to be "a great part of the history of the world, and a most helpful instrument to the study of that history." Until such time as there is scholarly spade-work along with public and academic recognition of Canadiana as a serious field of study, Canadians will fail to have all the material to make up their national minds about Canadian civilization. In their brief to the Massey Ccmmission over a decade ago, the Canadian magazine publishers held that their duty was "to reveal the nation to itself." This motto could well serve the scholarly community in Canada this decade. (JUNE BrGGAR) NATURE When you open the cover of Many Trails by R. D. Symons (Longmans Canada, pp. xx, 202, $5.50) you enter into the Canadian past. Though the author came out from England in 1914, so young is this land of ours that every year of his life in the prairies, in the Rockies, in the northern woods has been lived as a pioneer. There are the evocative memories of a man who came from an old settled society to live in a fresh new COuntry , to enter it and to dwell therein always with a keenly sensitive awareness of its endless beauty, its manifold opportunities, its ever-interesting people. Only an unusual person could have lived the lives of a cowboy, a 438 LEITERS IN CANADA: 1963 prairie farmer, a cattleman, and a ranger so creatively, in such harmonious relationship with his surroundings, physical and human. The author is, indeed, such a person. Son of an eminent English artist and a musician-mother he was raised in a home where the emphasis was upon creative individuality, self-reliance, and a feeling for the wonder and beauty of God's world. That Mr. Symons should dedicate his book of memories to the memory of his father "who equipped me for the track of life" is not surprising. Along all the many trails that he has followed in his life he has always found the way cleared and the gates opened by the keys that were placed in his hands by his upbringing. With this fortunate equipment for life he has been able to make the best of all sorts of situations, to get along with all kinds of people and to grow into a wonderfully wealthy person, rich in mind and soul. This book is a revealing document of life in the opening west, all the more revealing for being seen through eyes like these. You will, in fact, as the author hopes, "feel the soft chinook on your cheeks, hear the laugh of water mingled with the cries of the night birds, or catch a Sight of the bull moose feeding in the alder thickets. . . ." His imaginative deSCriptions, his own line drawings will bring these sights and feelings to you. But, above all else, you will find in these pages the mark of that rarest of beings in these troubled days, a truly happy man. In W. Phillip Keller's Splendour from the Land (Nelson, Foster & Scott, pp. 331, $5.95) we again find a book of reminiscences, in this case the autobiography of a settler on the land in British Columbia...