From the watch-towers of patriotism: Theories of literary growth in English Canada, 1864–1914

From the watch-towers of patriotism: theories of literary growth in English Canada, 1864-1914 S. M. BECKOW In 1916, when the war in Europe occupied the minds of most of his contemporaries, Principal Robert Alexander Falconer of the University of Toronto paused to reflect on the changes he had witnessed in his lifetime . In Falconer's estimation, the era had been ''an optimistic [one], a confident age, a hopeful period on which the idea of Progress shone like a fixed luminary." 1 Those who had reached maturity during the period had had the comforting feeling that NineteenthCentury Man was quickly rendering human phenomena predictable through the application of "natural laws." But the war in Europe had destroyed that illusion. "Ever since [1914]," Falconer sadly wrote, "the comfortable home that we had reared tor ourselves out of our axioms, opinions and assumptions has been swaying so violently that broad fissures are appearing in its walls."2 This paper is concerned with developing the "axioms, opinions, and assumptions" of a particular group of Falconer's predecessors and contemporaries, who wrote, for the most part, between 1864 (the year in which Rev. Edward Hartley Dewart published his Selections from Canadian Poets) and 1914 (the year in which the global war undermined the basis for English-Canadian optimism ). The group included historians, novelists , poets, journalists, editors, publishers, teachers, and ministers. What united each was a commitment - in fact, a "duty" to quote Professor James Edward Wells, principal of the Woodstock Collegiate Institute - common to "every patriotic citizen" to study "the tendencies of this critical period in [the] country's history" and inquire "what is to be the distinguishing type of the Journal of Canadian Studies developing national character."3 None would have construed this as the duty of the literary critic per se. On the contrary, pursuing these lofty themes required reflective minds, minds of a philosophical cast; in recognition of this the men and women who undertook the inquiry characterized themselves as "student [s] of the philosophy of literature"4 or "student[s] of [the] signs of the times."5 Moreover when they turned to their high themes, the literary philosophers focussed on one vital question: what were the "influences operating everywhere in Canada," to quote James Douglas, Jr., writing in 1875 on 'The Intellectual Progress of Canada During the Last Fifty Years," which were "detrimental to literary culture and literary production."6 Some of their common answers are reproduced below. However to point to a convergence of thought on selected problems requires more than the discovery of converging strands; it requires also the discovery of normative principles encouraging convergence. What were the normative principles which influenced English-Canadian literary theorists to move in the direction of general convergence of thought on literary topics? It would appear that two philosophical attitudes were regarded as proper or sanctioned by writers on these topics in English Canada - the attitudes of temporocentrism and of ethnocentrism . In 1900 Walter J. Brown testified to the theoretical persuasiveness of temporocentrism when he wrote in the Canadian Magazine that "the literature of each century indicates the intellectual progress and rise in the scale of civilization made during the period."7 If history tended in the general direction of advancement or improvement, as a large number of literary philosophers maintained that it did, then no period's literature would remain unsurpassed by the next, and the "distinct and characteristic literature" of "each period of the world's history"8 alone would generate the proper ways of seeing and doing things for men and women of that 3 4 generation. It required no great imaginative leap to translate these pseudo-scientific musings into a credo having the force of compulsion behind it. This is precisely the type of statement which one writer, John Henry Long, attempted to produce in 1877 in an article in the Canadian Monthly and National Review entitled "The Age in Which We Live and Our Duty Towards It." Long was both echoing and creating orthodoxy in his article when he declared that "notwithstanding all that may be said to the contrary, the present age is the best in which we could possibly have lived."9 Long exceeded...