The Force of Culture: Vincent Massey and Canadian Sovereignty (review)

Karen Finlay gives us Vincent Massey as Canadian cultural hero. The 'force of culture' of the title refers to Massey's belief that it was through nurturing Canada's cultural life that continentalizing 'forces of geography' could be countered and a separate nationality cultivated. She finds that the liberal humanist nationalism of the Massey Commission was rooted, in Massey's case, in his intellectual formation in the Methodist milieu of his family, particularly in its emphasis on education as a process of character formation. It was supplemented by the Chautauqua movement (a kind of summer camp for religious education co-founded in western New York state by a Methodist uncle of Massey's), which gave him an un-Methodist-like exposure to the fine arts. As previous authors have noted, Massey's belief in culture was further stimulated by his reading of Matthew Arnold. In Massey's mature thought these influences were liberated from their sectarian context to emerge as a faith in the arts and humanities as the best means of developing good Canadian citizens and building the Canadian nation.

The Force of Culture presents original research that provides insights into Massey's thought and action on matters cultural. For an extended appreciation of its contributions, I direct the reader to a review in the November 2003 Literary Review of Canada, against which this review will serve as a critical counterweight. To begin, though I have great respect for Massey, Finlay does not convince me that he was a systematic or original thinker. This is not a surprising position to take, given the widespread influence of the Methodist teachings from which his ideas were derived (and the ubiquity of the character-formation approach to education, which Finlay somehow thinks was unique to Methodism). Massey's ideas were important because he was wealthy and well-connected. For example, as a young man he was interested in the role of built environments in moulding the character of young university men. Through his family foundation he was able to construct buildings, such as Hart House at the University of Toronto, to test his ideas. Others may have shared his enthusiasms, but few others could a stately pleasure dome decree.

Finlay's focus on Methodism leads her to give us more than we need to know about various Methodist education commissions or the content of Massey corporate magazines years before Massey was born, and rather less on the broader context of his life and times. Imperialism, for example - which one might expect to be a significant factor in the shaping of Massey's world view, given his connections with the Grants and the Parkins - gets little more than passing mention. Its absence becomes significant when she later argues that Massey was not anglophilic throughout his life, but rather switched to a pro-British stance in the 1930s to form a 'postcolonial cultural alliance' against growing continental influences in Canada.

Finlay considers the Massey Commission to be Massey's tour de force. She credits him with introducing into Canada the arm's-length principle, which she effusively describes as 'perhaps the most important transformation of the moral imperative in Canadian culture.' There are other tenuous assertions. She claims that the commission did not shun mass culture, as other scholars have noted, because it dealt with the mass media in its recommendations, but to say so is to be disingenuous: the commission addressed the latter in a manner designed to limit the influence of the former. Furthermore, she overestimates the significance of the Massey Commission because it suits her valorization of Massey's work, blithely ignoring other scholars' attempts to qualify its enduring status as Canadian culture's creationist myth. By this late stage in her book, Finlay's narrative and research base are thinning, and she winds things up prior to Massey's years at Rideau Hall, leaving us without any insight into how the first Canadian governor general perpetuated the tradition of vice...