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

Vincent Massey is a figure both monumentalized and pilloried in Canadian culture, a culture he did much to promote despite regarding the term culture as a 'naughty word' and making efforts to excise all use of it from the earliest drafts of the report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences – better known through his chairship as the Massey Commission. Unsuccessfully as it turns out; 'culture' kept creeping back in to the report, something like the way the flickering spectre of his younger brother Raymond still creeps back onto tv screens in the old movies on the late, late show. Karen Finlay's The Force of Culture: Vincent Massey and Canadian Sovereignty is devoted to exploring the historical and intellectual roots as well as the evolution of Massey's perspective on the nature and function of culture, and to his considerable impact on cultural institutions and cultural public policy in Canada. She attempts, with much success, to steer between the Scylla of the sort of hagiography which might be reserved for high-ranking diplomat and former governor-general, and, a much more academically respectable and thus tempting course these days, the Charybdis of the hermeneutics of suspicion for a figure who has, as Finlay writes, 'been maligned, as much by innuendo as by outright criticism, as an elitist and an unmitigated Anglophile.'

The first, as well as the most engaging and enlightening, part of the book traces the development of Massey's conception of culture back to his strongly Methodist upbringing. From Methodism, Finlay argues persuasively, Massey inherited a strong faith in the ultimate good both of non-conformist individualism and of community, particularly of the nationalist variety. He also inherited a zeal for education characterized chiefly by a commitment to humanistic learning, and he took up, at least partially, the mission of 'the social gospel,' the goal of perfecting society, ultimately even creating a classless society. Finlay works knowledgeably with the established work on the influence of Methodism on Canadian culture but contributes to it significantly with her own detailed research into Massey's published writings and archived papers. Furthermore, she is surely correct to suggest that the subject is deserving of further exploration. I was struck in numerous places with resonant similarities, particularly in respect to an indelible commitment to the social function of art, between Massey's views on education and culture and those of an albeit rather more profound thinker from a subsequent generation, Northrop Frye, an individual if anything even more steeped in Methodism and very much a product of Victoria College, whose long history of patronage from the Massey family Finlay records.

In documenting the impact and sheer breadth of Massey's engagement in the cultural sphere in Canada, which included lobbying and direct financial support for the creation, or better maintenance of, a range of cultural institutions now recognized as integrally important, such as the National Art Gallery, the work approaches in places a catalogue of sums of money donated to different individuals and institutions for various cultural causes, rather like an alumni magazine. One is also struck in the course of following Finlay's trajectory of Massey's aesthetic education by the wonderful opportunities the subject matter presents for exploring the imbrication of culture, industry, technology, money, and power. Such explorations need not take the form of the sorts of crude reductions of Massey's thought and work to Anglophile elitism – reductions which Finlay refreshingly counters in a balanced fashion. It seems, for example, a fascinating paradox worth contemplating that two of the most influential figures in the first half of the twentieth century in terms of promoting Canadian art, Vincent Massey and Lawren Harris, lifelong friends who exchanged views on the nature and function of culture and national culture in particular, were the sons of the Massey-Harris Company, manufacturers of farm machinery. The former, indeed, ran the company for a number of years. Yet both decried...