Ram Mohan Roy, as a pioneer of English education in India, Keshab Chandra Sen, as a religious propagandist, Kashinath Trimback Telang the Maratha, as a judge, scholar and translator, Bahramji Malabari the Parsi, as a social reformer, and hundreds of other Indians used our language for their own purposes almost as if it had been their mother tongue; but, of those who attempted imaginative literature in English, very few succeeded in writing anything of permanent interest. Michael Madhu Sadan Dutt lives by his Bengali poems rather than by his Captive Ladie, an attempt, so early as 1849, to tell in English verse the story of Prithwi Raj, king of Delhi. Malabari, besides ardently advocating social reforms through the medium of English writings, wrote The Indian Muse in English garb, with, however, indifferent success. Lal Behari Day's Govinda Sámanta: or The History of a Bengal Ráiyat and his Folk Tales of Bengal were pieces of work well worth doing and competently carried out, though exhibiting ability rather than genius. In Torulata Dutt, however, we meet a different order of intellect. The daughter of Govind Chandra Dutt, who himself wrote tasteful English verse, and related to Sasi Chandra of the same family, a voluminous writer of English, she was in close contact with English or continental culture throughout most of her short life. She wrote a novel in French, which was published posthumously in Paris. Her English poetry displayed real creative and imaginative power and almost faultless technical skill. In her English translations (A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields), and in her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, she so nearly achieved a striking success as to make one regret that our language is essentially unsuited to the riot of imagery and ornament which form part of the natural texture of the oriental mind. Her early death in 1877 at the age of twenty-one was a loss both to her own and to our race, but her life and literary achievements were an earnest of the more remarkable results which were likely to ensue, and are ensuing, from the fusing of western and eastern culture. The educational policy of the government of India is destined, given continuity of development, to react upon English literature in a manner realised even now by but a few, and certainly undreamt of by those who entered upon it. But, until its full results are made manifest, Anglo-Indian literature will continue to be mainly what it has been, with few exceptions, in the past-literature written by Englishmen and Englishwomen who have devoted their lives to the service of India. B CHAPTER XI English-Canadian Literature Y the scheme of this History the writer is constrained to confine his investigation to the ranks of the illustrious dead. Now, whereas a moderately favourable case may be made out for our current literature, our dead are neither numerous enough, nor sufficiently illustrious to stimulate more than local enthusiasm, and our few early writers of distinction inevitably suffer in a discussion that fails to link them with their living descendants. It is a reasonably safe surmise that the names of not more than three of our deceased writers are known even to professional students of literature in Europe, and two of these names belong to the present generation. Judge Haliburton (Sam Slick) enjoys at least a modest measure of cosmopolitan reputation, and the poetry of Drummond and of Lampman has received recognition not alone upon its own intrinsic merits, but as being characteristically and distinctively Canadian in its quality. The mention of Drummond's name suggests a difficulty that must be disposed of on the threshold of the discussion. To what authors writing within or without her borders may Canada justly lay claim? Some arbitrary test must evidently be employed. Drummond was born in Ireland and partly educated there, yet we include him inevitably among our Canadian writers; Grant Allen was born in Canada, yet we exclude him from the list; and Goldwin Smith, who lived in Toronto for forty years, can only by an unjustifiable extension of the definition be included in an account of Canadian literature. The criterion in these doubtful cases must surely be an identification with the interests of the country so complete that a Canadian character is stamped upon the work, or, in default of that, a commanding influence exercised by the author upon the development of the country's literature. There is obviously nothing Canadian about Grant Allen in motive or intention. A residence of forty years would constitute an ordinary individual a Canadian; but Goldwin Smith came among us with his habits of thought unyieldingly fixed, and lived and died in our midst a philosophical radical of sixty years ago. His interests in pure literature were never extensive, and his influence upon our literature may be said to have been negligible, or to have been confined to our newspapers, which, doubtless, received some benefit from the purity and pungency of his journalistic style. It is not necessary to apologise for, but merely to explain, the paucity of our literary performance. Canada has many advantages; but it has the disadvantage, in the literary sense, of being a young country, born in the old age of the world. All that tradition counts for in the literature of a European country we must forgo. Our literary past is the literary past of England; we have not yet had time to strike root for ourselves. Older countries have a progressive tradition and a harmonious evolution little interrupted by artificial considerations; whereas, with us, literature is compelled to be almost completely artifice. England had her spontaneous ballad and epic beginnings, her naïve miracle plays that responded to an imperative need of the time, her share in the exhilaration of the renascence, when even imitation was an exercise of the original creative faculty; and, upon these broad foundations, she built her great self-conscious modern literature, each new generation of writers urged on by impulses from the past, reinforcing its lessons here, violently reacting from its opinions there and always excited by contact with the vivifying ideas that the present hour engenders. It may be said that this is too flattering a picture, that England periodically goes to sleep, and that lethargy, rather than excitement, characterises her normal condition. But the statement was not made in flattery, and, if it does not always correspond with the facts, it may serve, at least, to point a contrast with colonial conditions. The raw material of literature we have here in abundance; but this material does not seem to germinate. Our activites are physical, and our mental needs do not require to be supplied by our own exertions. When London began to build her theatres, plays had to be created to employ them. We build theatres freely; but why should we go to the exertion of supplying the text or even the actors, when the United States and England are within such lazy reach? And so with the novel, and so, also, with poetry, but with this saving consideration that poetry, being an affair of impulse, can live, if not flourish, without a public. It might be supposed that fiction has every opportunity to develop in a country where the conditions of life must, necessarily, be novel and the types of character widely diversified by emigration. But the story of our fiction is as brief, almost, and inglorious as is the story of our national drama. Certain living writers are using this new material to good purpose; but it is still necessary to account for the dearth of native novels in a novelreading country. In partial explanation, it may be urged that, even if frivolous in intention, a novel is still a serious undertaking, and is rarely entered upon by a sheer amateur. Now, by reason of the conditions of life in Canada, and in view of the fierce competition to which a Canadian novelist would be subjected, we have not yet developed a professional literary class, and our great novels still lie ahead of us. Hitherto, the little fiction that has been produced has been principally historic in character, the glamour of our early colonial period, with its picturesque contrast of races, naturally suggesting the type. Historic fiction is, momentarily, out of fashion the world over, and our racial peculiarities are, perhaps, not yet sufficiently consolidated to afford suggestive material to the novelist whose commanding interest is in human character. We have AngloCanadian types, Irish-Canadian types, Scottish-Canadian types who are transplanted and scarcely altered Englishmen, Irishmen, or Scotsmen. The genuine Canadian type probably exists somewhere a fusion of all these with a discreet touch of the Yankee-but he is so shadowy in outline that no novelist has yet limned his features for us. Efforts in this direction by distinguished outsiders have not been convincing. Of our native-born writers, the desultory humourist Haliburton alone possessed the shrewd insight into character that might have given us our Canadian Tristram Shandy; but he contented himself with giving us a Yankee Sam Slick, whom certain |