Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse was edited by Albert Durrant Watson and Lorne Pierce and published by Ryerson Press in 1922. The anthology is significant because it was the first Canadian collection to include works of prose as well as poetry, and also because it was the first literary anthology to appear after the First World War. (Approximately four hundred volumes of fiction were published between 1880 and 1920, but none of it had been collected or excerpted in book form [Roper 276].) Simply by virtue of the fact that their anthology included both poetry and prose, Watson and Pierce promoted the idea—radical for their time—that poetry was not the only means of evoking national consciousness. Because it was the first anthology to include prose, it contributed enormously to the establishment of a Canadian fiction canon and to the type of fiction that would be admitted to this canon in the future.¹ It solidified a vision of Canadian poetry that held sway in Canada in the postwar years, a vision that younger Canadian poets writing in the late twenties and thirties would so strongly react against. And because Our Canadian Literature united poetry and prose in this way, it also provides the first book-length example of the comparative value accorded these genres by the two editors, whose task it was to show readers how Canadian poetry and prose functioned in the representation of nation. Since the anthology was the product of two editors with very different views of art, it is also a record of the dynamic—or the absence of a dynamic—that results when two distinct editorial visions govern the architecture of a single volume devoted to a representative vision of the country.

There is no doubt about the commercial success of Watson and Pierce's book. Notes on the typescript for the third edition of Our Canadian Literature indicate that the first edition, published in December 1922, sold out immediately. A second edition was printed in January 1923, followed by a third edition (revised and enlarged) as well as a deluxe edition in August 1923. A two-volume edition and a school edition were issued in September of the same year.² The collection was designed with the school market in mind, and was the first Canadian anthology to gain wide usage in Canadian classrooms.

The original edition brought together fifty-three poets and forty-three writers of fiction and prose. Correspondence in the Lorne Pierce Papers at the Queen's University Archives reveals that Watson was responsible for making the poetry selections and for writing an introduction to them, while the prose section, including its introduction, was handled by Pierce.³ The two sections were very different in their contents. Watson included a sprinkling of nineteenth-century poems by such figures as Jean Blewett, Bliss Carman, William Wilfred Campbell, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Archibald Lampman, Charles Mair, Theodore Rand, D. C. Scott, and Charles G. D. Roberts, but he kept his distance from earlier poets, omitting such previously anthologized figures as Henry Alline, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Heavysege, Rosanna Leprohon, Agnes Maule Machar, Alexander McLachlan, Jonathan Odell, Charles Sangster, and Pamelia Vining Yule.⁴ His main interest was in poets who came to prominence since 1900, and he drew heavily on the works of many of the figures who had appeared in an earlier influential anthology, John Garvin's Canadian Poets, published in 1916.

Although it may seem, in retrospect, that Our Canadian Literature was simply another expression of the celebration of Canadian nationalism that had inspired so many earlier collections, it strikes me as a much more troubled narrative than those produced by earlier editors. In many ways, Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse is about Watson and Pierce's anxiety-ridden attempt to come to terms with the very idea of representativeness in Canadian literature. As such, it records their own insecurities about the relationships between poetry, prose, anthology construction, democracy, mimesis, and nation. Watson and Pierce each had doubts about the value of their undertaking and about their individual roles as literary proponents of Canadian culture.

Most people get mystical at christenings and at funerals; they admit heavenly realities at the beginning and the end of life, but it is the span between that really matters! Now it is the spiritual superstructure which Watson raises that perplexes some, terrifies others, and renders many indifferent. Being unusual it is queer, and queerness, outside the Midway and our usual sources of amusement, is not allowed. We eat queer foods, are entertained by queer people, submit to queer initiations and court queer methods of obtaining social and financial advancement, but when it comes to queerness in matters of religion we are first and last for the established order.
                                                                                      (Albert Durrant Watson 5)

Pierce's comment was intended as a defence of Watson, whose theosophical involvement with psychics, as well as the seances held in his Toronto home, had been called fraudulent by James Mavor, a professor of political economy whose 1919 attack on Watson created a heated exchange in Toronto newspapers.⁶ The attack on Watson's theosophical beliefs—beliefs that he shared with other prominent Torontonians—led Watson to reject his "spiritism" in 1923, but theosophical values certainly informed his selection criteria in Our Canadian Literature, which is in many ways an expression of Watson's occultist convictions about the nature of God and creation. In Pierce's own words, Watson was a "fanatic"⁷ who perplexed many of his contemporaries in his relentless pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Yet he fascinated Pierce, who confided in a diary entry dated 17 September 1923 that "I should like to settle the question of Watson. I want very much to tell the world about him. He has suffered because of his spiritistic experiments." By "experiments" Pierce meant the seances that Watson conducted for the Toronto Theosophical Society. Watson was also involved with other spiritualist organizations: he was president of the Association of Psychical Research for Canada and the founder and president of the Canadian Ethology Organization, a society aiming to create loftier national ideals. A reading of Watson's output suggests that Pierce was correct in concluding that "No man entertains so many strange faces, tongues, sects, systems, enthusiasms, artists, poets, fanatics, and sages as he does" (7). This may explain why Pierce felt that Watson had a "far, quiet, detached look" about him.

What about Pierce? He was much more earthbound than Watson. I suspect that he had to engage in a considerable amount of diplomacy in order to keep Watson on track. Yet it is important to remember that Pierce's view of literature was, in many ways, as restricted as Watson's. Its foundation was deeply religious. The largest part of Pierce's university training was theological: he grew up in a Methodist household, was ordained a Methodist minister in 1916, and graduated from Wesleyan College in Montreal in 1922,⁸ two years after he became the editor of Ryerson Press, which was an outgrowth of the Methodist Book and Publishing House, established in 1829 to publish a variety of materials for the Methodist Church, including the Methodist Magazine. He was also a regular contributor to the "Book Steward's Corner" of the Christian Guardian.⁹ Pierce inevitably saw Ryerson Press as a quasi-religious vehicle, and, since Ryerson was part of the Methodist Book and Publishing House, it was also seen by the Methodist Church in this light. Pierce's devotion to Canadian nationalism inevitably took on the qualities, if not the rhetoric, of a religious quest. The search for Canadian literature would be redemptive, and Ryerson, via Pierce, would provide the means to salvation.

In many respects, Our Canadian Literature can be read as a document that is profoundly Methodist, both in its aims and in its aesthetic. As such, it embodies many of the forces of Methodist progressivism that emerged after World War I and the General Conference of the Methodist Church, held in 1918. In this postwar era, the Church began to emphasize the importance of spreading a social gospel and finding ways of converting groups, rather than individuals, to the ideals of social Christianity. Yet it is important to remember that spiritualism and methodism often flourished together, a fact which may help to explain Watson and Pierce's decision to enter into their joint venture, even though their visions of nation were finally quite different and led them to endorse different aesthetic ends. David Bentley observes that although Watson is remembered mainly for his mystical pursuits, many of his prose works "can be separated into relatively orthodox studies in the idealist and Methodist vein," including The Sovereignty of Ideals (1904), The Sovereignty of Character: Lessons from the Life of Jesus (1906), and Three Comrades of Jesus, which he published in 1919, two years before he began to work with Pierce (Bentley, Bliss Carman’s Letters 2). Both editors were really searching for a secular means of expressing what were fundamentally theological values. Their engagement in this process embodies a crucial transformation that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada, which Ramsay Cook describes as "the substitution of theology, the science of religion, with sociology, the science of society." The turn toward realism—problematically endorsed by Pierce and ultimately resisted by Watson—was part of "a modernist theology which insisted that Christianity was not separate from modern culture but rather should be adapted to it." In this context, modernist theology was "founded upon a denial of God's transcendence and an insistence upon his immanence in the world. It followed that a society in which God was immanent was one that could eventually become the kingdom of God on earth" (4-5).

The teaching and promotion of literature played an important part in this socialization process and reinforced the connection between cultural and religious salvation. For the Methodist editor, literary selection and religious election were forces that could merge. One of the most influential Methodist thinkers of this period—S. D. Chown—developed a form of philosophical idealism that stressed "the complete substitution of sociological concerns for theological ones" (McKillop 225). Although Pierce did not entirely support such a complete form of substitution, he did endorse the postwar Methodist emphasis on practicality, empiricism, and the Methodist belief in the "sacrificial service and involvement in public life as an expression of religious commitment" (Airhart 116). At the same time, he remained faithful to many late nineteenth-century Methodist beliefs, many of which were promoted by an earlier anthologizer of Canadian literature—Edward Hartley Dewart—the Methodist editor of the Guardian from 1869 to 1894 and the editor of Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), a book well-known for its formative assertion that "a national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character. It is not merely the record of a country's mental progress: it is the expression of its intellectual life, the bond of national unity, and the guide of national energy" (ix). Like Dewart, Pierce believed that there was a fundamental relation between literary and national identity. He also shared Dewart's idea that social reform began with individual conversion, a spiritually transformative activity that Pierce enacted in his role as literary editor and critic.

Our Canadian Literature includes separate introductions to its poetry and prose sections. These tell us a lot about the critical-editorial values informing the selection and collection process.

Watson's introduction plays out the ironies inherent in this question. Here he is, almost in the middle of his introduction, and he is writing it, so there must be some value to what he finds himself writing about: toboggans and things physical. But he needs a concept that will rationalize this "industrial art." The concept he discovers is imperialism. Just thinking about material things—about property—calls up for Watson the imperial idea that sustains him, mainly because imperialism provides an intellectual framework through which he can rationalize ownership and capital as the means to spiritual and national advancement. In evoking this framework, Watson aligns himself with many other imperialists of his time. As Carl Berger observes in The Sense of Power, these imperialists "believed that a weak or diminished empire meant the subversion of Canadian nationalism because the imperial system was the vehicle through which she would attain nationhood" (260). Berger goes on to show that this argument for imperial unity was also religious in inspiration. It was rooted in the assumption that "the character of nations and individuals was shaped by obeying the Christian injunction to self-sacrifice and work" (262). The correlation between Christianity and imperialism appears in Watson's "A Hymn for Canada," which he included in the anthology. Watson prays that God will protect Canada and the empire:

If you are arguing, as Watson does, that it is valuable for new nations to speak, but you find what they say or how they say it intolerable and uncouth, you have little choice but to seize this unruliness and civilize it by reducing it to a few domesticated sounds that have been cured of their association with the dog-train or the toboggan. The poetry section of Our Canadian Literature is the civilizing act, the imperial solution that silences the rowdies. This may be one reason why Watson refers to "the unspeakable beauty of reality." In the end, Watson's poetry selections could not acknowledge everyday reality, simply because such an acknowledgement would position the idea of representativeness in relation to particular material conditions that flew in the face of the spiritized, ethereal, imperial universe Watson wanted to inhabit.

Watson had to do more than rationalize his involvement in a representative anthology in which the very word "representative" seemed to clash with the special, heightened status of individuals and psychics involved in mystical pursuits. He had to come to terms with his involvement with Pierce, who saw the older Watson as a potentially embarrassing father figure whose experience he nevertheless embraced. Watson's preoccupation with mysticism was matched by Pierce's profound interest in Methodist teaching. Watson's interests undoubtedly influenced Pierce, who actually knew very little about Canadian literature when he assumed the editorship at Ryerson in 1920; in fact, his initial responsibility at Ryerson as the firm's literary critic was to advise other ministers on appropriate reading material. The Pierce Papers do not help clarify whether the idea of the anthology was originally Watson's or Pierce's. What is clear, however, is that when Pierce began to work on Our Canadian Literature in 1921, he had no solid grounding in the scope of the material he was collecting. His first forays into Canadian literature appeared in late 1921. Like many of his generation, he seems mainly to have been inspired by his belief in the relation between spiritual and cultural development, a notion grounded in nineteenth-century European romantic nationalism. In an interview with Ronald Hambleton, he recalled that when he began at Ryerson "my own literary interests could scarcely have been less attuned to Canada's own literary needs. . . . All my chief interests were non-Canadian" (qtd. in Campbell 137).

It must have been difficult for Pierce to make the fiction selections. Ten years after he completed the anthology, in a survey of English-Canadian literature, he argued that "Regarding our novelists and short story writers there is little to say. . . . Knister's anthology preserves the best of our stories. They are nearly all regionalist and superficial" (English-Canadian Literature 60). Pierce's comment suggests why he was so determined to celebrate the national (a trope of the universal) at the expense of the local (an expression of the materially based particular).

The political traditions of Canada are lost in the dim dawnings of the histories of England and France. The roots of Canadian culture are buried in the soil that produced Caedmon, the songs of the Nibelungs, the sagas of Ossian and Cuchulain and the chansons of Gaul.
                                                                                                                         (124)

Claims such as these pose a problem. The more Pierce aligns Canadian literature with non-Canadian influences, the more he undermines his ability to claim that Canadian literature is the expression of a national ideal. How will he resolve this dilemma? The first response is to argue that Canada is unique because of its cosmopolitanism, because it is built on French and English literary sources, and, as Pierce says, "A real history of the literature of Canada must include an appreciation of the contribution of the French" (125). Although Pierce sees Confederation as the turning point that marked "the solidification of the political life of Canada" and "the crystallization of her spiritual life," he has trouble reconciling the French presence in Canada (a presence barely mentioned by Watson) and soon drops the claim to French importance, omitting all French authors from the prose section except Louis Hémon, a gesture that repeats Watson's implicit claim that Canada means English Canada, and that English Canada is fundamentally British.¹¹

At this point in his career, Pierce was unable to conceive of Canada as a bicultural entity. He was having enough difficulties thinking of it as a cultural entity. Instead, his vision of the country is one of a nation formed by dependence and inheritance. He reminds us again that "There is not yet in our literature a national epic like that of Ossian, the Nibelungenlied or the Chanson de Roland. We are rather the heirs of these" (127). As it turns out, we are the heirs of everybody, including the Americans. Pierce states: "it is no idle statement that the literature of the United States was at one time and still is the literature of Canada" (128).

The effect of such a multifaceted inheritance might be, as Pierce says, to create a literature that is as "colorless as water" (128). But Canadian literature avoided this problem, because "the Canadian soul" came into existence at Confederation, and "From that date our literature took on a distinctive form" (128) and began to "think for itself." By articulating this thought, the nation can "instruct its citizens in the spiritual ideas of race" (128). No doubt the anthology serves a similar function—that of transmitting "ideas of race," which necessarily involves the conceptualization of what racial ideals are worth transmitting, and the even scarier idea that instruction in racial ideals is an innocent task that an editor might consciously pursue. By the end of his introduction to the prose section of Our Canadian Literature Pierce seems to have forgotten the implications of his anthology's title. It is "our" literature only insofar as it is owned by white Anglo-Saxons; it is "representative" only insofar as it represents the views of people like Watson and Pierce, people who:

may listen rapturously to those who have mastered the meaning of our life and thought, who have discerned with unclouded eye the inner meaning of our spirit and who alone, of all those within our borders, are qualified to explain us to ourselves and to interpret us to others.
                                                                                                                        (128)

Amid the richness of its variety of cadences and colors, amid the teeming wealth of its imaginative splendor, and the triumphant joyousness of its throbbing, expanding, up-soaring life and thought, stand out splendid mountain peaks, some of which are entitled to be accorded a place among the masterpieces of the literature of the world.
                                                                                                                        (129)

Although Our Canadian Literature was completely new in its double focus on poetry and prose, the material chosen for these two sections reveals the problems faced by the editors in negotiating their two-sided editorial form. Watson and Pierce were operating on very different assumptions when it came to determining the kind of literary values they wanted to endorse. Caught within the covers of Our Canadian Literature is a conflicted narrative about the nature of literary appreciation and the social function of art. While Pierce finally (and with difficulty) endorsed a model that was promodern and sometimes even radical in its engagement with political and material questions about Canada as a real place that was named, particularized, regionally focused, and open to celebration, tension, and doubt (even as he worried about the moral values implicit in this model), Watson's selections were warm, fuzzy, sentimental outpourings about love and loss and potential, most of which were inspired by romantic spiritual and theosophical leanings that prompted him to choose the elevated expression over the mundane, eternity before the here and now. For example, Frederick George Scott describes "realms beyond our mortal reach" and speaks of how his soul "hath pastured with the stars" ("Dawn"). Beatrice Redpath tells us that "I think God sang when He had made / A bough of apple bloom, and placed it close against the sky / To whiten in the gloom" ("The Star"). Isabel Ecclestone MacKay follows "the curving sky's blue hollow, / Those thought too fleet / For any save the soul's swift feet!" ("When As a Lad"). Duncan Campbell Scott's unadorned, sparse poems are ignored in favour of the more romantic diction to be found in his "Ecstasy": "Mount, my soul, and sing at the height / Of thy clear flight in the light and the air." For Katherine Hale, the pursuit of God allows her to realize that "heaven was one vibrating call" ("The Answer"). Virna Sheard discovers that "in peace, comes that great Lord of / rest / Who crowneth men with amaranthine / flowers; / Who telleth them the truths they have but / guessed, / Who giveth them the things they love the best, / Beyond this restless, rocking world of ours."

If these assertions are true, one is naturally led to wonder about Watson's understanding of the term "representative," especially because it is in Our Canadian Literature that the term is used for the first time within a Canadian anthology's title or subtitle. Did Watson think of his anthology as fulfilling some kind of democratic function, in which case its representative agency would be to describe the present-day reality confronting many different types of people throughout the country? Did he think of "representative" in historical terms, meaning that the anthology would collect poems that were representative of different poets writing in different periods? Or did he mean that the works gathered in the anthology were the best examples of many like them, and that together they gave voice to a relation between the country's peoples?

None of these descriptions seem to fit the idea of representativeness endorsed in the poetry section of the anthology, which is a derivative collection of verse by middle-aged and older writers who were reluctant to engage in new forms of poetry or to explore new ideas. Our Canadian Literature selected shorter poems over longer ones because they were cheaper to produce. It omitted well-known older poems while admitting less well-known ones, mainly in response to issues concerning length and permission costs (a prefatory note to the volume complains about copyright restrictions imposed on the editors by—"in most cases"—non-Canadian firms, while in his introduction Watson notes that "We have not stressed the older poets" and that "C. G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman and others are not represented here in their greatest works as these are too lengthy for our purpose" [10]). In the poetry section of the anthology, then, "representative" meant this: very few experimental poems, no long poems, no costly poems, no very old poems, no unwholesome poems, no working-class poems, no poems by immigrants, fewer poems by women, no poems in French, no political poems, no poems of social critique, no poems about science, no poems about money, no poems in which the self was not subordinated to the idea of spirit or God. The effect of these exclusions was to homogenize Canadian poetry, to present it as a body of work written by a group of poets who appeared to be both timeless and ageless (none of the poems are dated and no dates are provided for any of the authors selected for inclusion, even though this had been the practice in many earlier anthologies).

In Our Canadian Literature, then, "representative" seems to mean "generally recent" but it is reluctant to admit the fact. It seems to mean conservative and preferably spiritual, just like Watson. He was sixty-three years old when the book was published. Two years before the anthology's publication he edited another anthology—of psychic writings—entitled Birth through Death: Ethics of the Twentieth Plane. Actually, Watson did not edit the anthology. He presented himself as one who "reported" the "revelation" received through the "psychic consciousness" of another. As Watson the reporter put it: "The matter contained in this book was received psychically. It was spoken in a trance by one whose own thought did not direct his speech" (10). Watson explains that the material was recorded stenographically "by two members of the Inner Circle." Then "the reporter read the chapters aloud, in the presence, usually, of some members of the Inner Circle, and the entranced Instrument whose voice was the medium of correction, as it had previously been the medium of dictation" (10). Watson then explains that he employs these psychic revelations in his medical practice with notable results, so notable that "Many letters from all over the world earnestly praying for further teaching from the same source have led the reporter to believe that this is by far the most important work of his life" (2-3).

The reporter's testimony indicates a strong relation between his psychic and editorial pursuits at the time he was working on Our Canadian Literature. What was Watson thinking about when he was selecting this representative verse? Birth through Death provides some answers to this question. Watson reports that his concept of the Twentieth Plane is connected with such recurring terms as "love," "illumination," "light," "path," "God," "physical plane," "earth plane," "astral body," and so on. He called for "a reallegiance of the finite personal soul to the Infinite Mind of God" (3). He was distressed by the evils brought on by what he called "the industrial age" (by which he meant the contemporary) and sought an answer to those evils through religious faith, which he regarded as "the most precious heritage of the race" (10). Because Watson believed that "the materialism of the nineteenth century brought the world-tragedy to our doors," he argued that such materialism had to be repudiated, and replaced by the healing intervention of "a new divine voice." Or as he put it just two years before Our Canadian Literature appeared: "The Mother-God took humanity by the hand, and is now leading her child into a more spacious house of life,— into a spiritual age" (9). As the allusion to Dante Gabriel Rossetti makes clear, this spiritual age had little to do with the twentieth century.

Because he saw his values anchored in a spiritual past that he wanted to re-create, Watson shied away from new poetry and from the depiction of social conflict. He was especially resistant to poems that referred to class and capital. No wonder the poetry section of the anthology was so derivative. A comparison of the poetry selections in Our Canadian Literature and those in the two most influential anthologies to precede it—John Garvin's Canadian Poets (1916) and Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918)—demonstrates Garvin's profound influence: Watson adds eleven poets to the earlier anthologist's selections, but very tentatively, since he admits only one of each newcomer's poems (with the exception of Hilda Hooke, whose work is selected twice).¹⁴

Worst of all, the versifiers of this arid period, having nothing to say, kept up a constant jejune chatter about infinity, licit love, devotion to the Empire, death, Beauty, God, and Nature. Sweet singers of the Canadian out-of-doors, they peered into flowers, reported on the flittings of the birds, discerned mystic voices in the wind, descried elves among the poplars. They insisted upon being seen and overheard in poetic postures: watching for the will-o'-the-wisp, eavesdropping on "the forest streamlet's noonday song," lying like a mermaid on a bed of coral, examining a bird's nest in winter, fluting for the fairies to dance, or "wandering through some silent forest's aisles."
                                                                                                                         (235)

In many ways literary taste in postwar Canada remained faithful to the ideals of the Victorian neoclassicism so prominent in Canadian poetry at the turn of the century. Claude Bissell observes that the widespread defence of these ideals made it clear "what in poetry the Canadian literary world mainly disliked: technical experimentation, the intellectual, any suggestion of the commonplace and the realistic" (248). Yet there is evidence some Canadians in 1920 and 1921 "were reading the new poetry and reacting to it" (Beattie 235). The Canadian Forum was founded in 1920, "at the right moment to be of service to new attitudes and new methods," and at least a few poets were aware of imagist experiments and of the work of such writers as e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stevens (Beattie 235). E. J. Pratt got his imagism from these sources. Some Canadian writers—including Arthur Stringer and Frank Oliver Call—were acquainted with such anthologies as Pound's Des Imagistes (1914), Amy Lowell's three-volume Some Imagist Poems (1915, 1916, 1917), and Alfred Kreymborg's Others (1916, 1917, 1919). A. J. M. Smith read The New Poetry, edited by Harriett Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (1917) when he was in England in 1918. It contained works by Aiken, Eliot, H. D., Pound, Stevens, and Yeats. As Alan C. Golding observes, these anthologies shared a "central assumption . . . that has become almost a critical article of faith: that the best American poets react against rather than support the poetic and cultural values of their times" (295). Therefore "most modern anthologists were revisionists. . . . all used their anthologies to propose a canon written in defiance of inherited poetic norms" (296).

This assessment of American wartime anthologies could hardly be applied to Our Canadian Literature. It did include the work of Canadian poets who were challenging traditional poetic norms, but, significantly, it did not include the specific poems that concretized this challenge. For example, in 1914 Stringer published Open Water, which contained a preface that called upon poets to adapt to a new era by freeing up rhythm and form and by replacing conventional poetic diction with more natural and direct free verse. Call, another poet included in Our Canadian Literature, also endorsed free verse, as did Phelps. Call and Phelps do not get much play, and what they do get remains sentimental; their more radical work is bypassed. Stringer has four poems in the anthology. Yet of these, only one is in free verse, and the volume opens with a Stringer poem that is heavily and mechanically rhymed ("I pass where the pines for Christmas / Stand thick in the crowded street, / Where the groves of Dream and Silence / Are paced by feverish feet" [’Northern Pines']). Perhaps this was one way in which Watson expressed his disdain for free verse, which he described as "amorphous prose" that could seldom, "by any euphemism, be called poetry" (12).

"The Soul of All is beautiful, then why
Should Nature anywhere in earth or sky
 Fall from her high estate? If it should be
 One wild flamingo by an unknown sea
 Found God unbeautiful, no God were He!"

I emphasize the postwar period during which Our Canadian Literature was constructed because the poetry section of the anthology makes it so easy to forget that the book was a product of an era marked as much by sorrow and violence as by a renewed sense of national purpose. Of course it includes a number of poems that make reference to the war, but there is no sense that Watson wanted to present a realistic view of the war's carnage, no sense that poetry was an appropriate medium for such realism, no sense that poetry could focus on strife and violence and dissent, no sense that everything was changing. There were many such poems in print. Garvin's collection of war poems had been out for three years, and Carrie Ellen Holman's anthology, In the Day of Battle, was published in 1916. It contained several poems by Canadian writers.

For Watson, however, the poet remained divorced from contemporary, earthbound reality, for he or she "has subtle antennae" that are "trembling outward to the mountains and the stars . . . startling the soul and kindling it to the life undying" (Watson, Robert Norwood 10). Most of these antennae were apparently possessed by men: 22.5 percent of the authors in Our Canadian Literature were female, and their work occupied 25 percent of the text; in contrast, 40.5 percent of the authors in Garvin's earlier anthology were female, and their work occupied 34 percent of the text (71).¹⁶

Unlike Watson, Pierce identified the postwar years with a new sense of national purpose that demanded new forms of literary expression. In An Editor's Creed he writes that "Canada had paid a terrible price for national sovereignty in the winnowing of the nations and never looked back. In 1920 there was born the Group of Seven, and in 1922 the Canadian Author's Association. . . . The whole country seemed to be outward bound, conscious of its emerging destiny" (2-3). Pierce wanted to offer Canadians a print version of the nationalism that inspired the Group of Seven. Our Canadian Literature represents the first concerted postwar effort in this direction.

There was no ignoring the strike and the attention it drew to the realities faced by working-class Canadians everywhere. Yet, within the poetry section of Our Canadian Literature, there is no sign of this momentous event, no recognition that the innocent days of peering into flowers or discerning mystic voices in the wind had been replaced by days of hunger, rioting, and bloodshed. Perhaps this is because experimentation in poetry was often seen as a sign of subversive political activity; or, as the literary editor of the Globe put it at the time, "We usually write in metre and dislike poetical as well as other kinds of Bolshevism" (qtd. in Beattie 236). Because the media also equated the Winnipeg General Strike and the labour movement with Bolshevism, the rejection of experimentation in poetry was linked to the public perception that such poetry was a threat to social order.

What was "representative" in 1921 was verse that reinforced the idea that certain forms of poetry—those not concerned with social and political issues of the day—were more worthy than others. It is precisely because publishers and editors supported this idea that so few examples of social and political poetry can be found in books published during this period, although there were some revealing poems in labour newspapers such as the Western Star, Western Labor News, the Searchlight, and the Industrial Banner. Many of these poems are about the Winnipeg General Strike or other labour struggles. For example, H. Corinth was the author of the following opening lines in "The Time To Strike":

In addition to these poems about the Winnipeg General Strike, there are many earlier examples of poetry about working conditions, labour, and the spread of socialism in Canada (a selection appears in Davis's anthology). If they missed these earlier poems in books and periodicals, Watson and Pierce might well have encountered a book of poetry published closer to their time: Wilfred Gribble's Rhymes of Revolt (1912) compares favourably with much of the poetry collected in Our Canadian Literature. But his, and earlier examples of working-class poetry going back to Alexander McLachlan, were never represented in Watson and Pierce's work. The more one dwells on the collective and democratic title of their anthology—Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse— the more one realizes how ironic a title it is.

The contrast between Pierce's missionary approach and Watson's mystic fervour becomes evident in the very first prose piece that Pierce selects, an excerpt from R. G. MacBeth's The Romance of Western Canada, originally published by Ryerson in 1920. It presents a brief, straightforward historical analysis of the origins and development of the Hudson's Bay Company that is only slightly romanticized. MacBeth was a Presbyterian minister and an enormously popular writer whose detailed descriptions of western Canadian expansion had a messianic flavour. (His influential volume, Our Task in Canada [1912], was published by the Home Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church.)

The true extent of the substitution is greater than can be accounted for by the simple description of criticism as a "substitute religion." It is less religion as religion than religion as occupant of a privileged "pinnacle" in relation to other kinds of ideology that Arnold and his followers tried to replace with literary discourse, creating a substitute moral philosophy and a substitute social analysis as much as a substitute religion. Poetry was to become a kind of linchpin for a whole range of other social habits, moral values, and assumptions, confirming them and reflecting them back in harmonized, self-consistent, and emotionally appealing form. If it could fill the gap vacated by religion, literature could offer its own principles of internal consistency, completeness, and regularity of form as a shaping and governing principle for all the conscious and unconscious affairs of society.
                                                                                                                        (230)

Pierce's religious training made it impossible for him to ignore the idea that poetry was a means of achieving these principles, tied as they were to the development of national consciousness. Beyond Arnold, however, and beyond the Methodists' developing emphasis on practicality and social cohesion, there were other factors that encouraged Pierce to equate language, religion, and nation. Soon after the war there was a push in Britain for increased professionalism and education in English studies. The war victory was also seen as a victory for the English language, and politicians sought ways of preserving and promoting the language as an instrument of national consciousness. The Newbolt Report of 1921, entitled The Teaching of English in England, had a profound effect on this desire to further English studies as a means of asserting national consciousness and unity. The book became a best seller in England and was widely quoted. It "helped to keep alive Arnold's belief in the civilizing mission of literature during the interwar period" by proposing "to counter the social disorder of post-war England by uniting the social classes in a shared pride in their literary heritage" (Jasen 562). It would have been very difficult for Pierce to ignore this influential document, published a year before he began work on Our Canadian Literature, his own attempt to promote English as a vehicle of national self-recognition. And Pierce would likely have identified with Newbolt's view that the educator was a missionary who had specific obligations: "propaganda work, organization and building up a staff of assistant missionaries" (qtd. in Baldick 96-97). When Pierce looked at English-Canadian writing in 1922, he inevitably equated it with this missionary perspective.

The idea that new forms of writing could embody and promote new countries inspired many of Pierce's selections. For example, the narrator in the excerpts from J. G. Sime's Our Little Life argues that the artist in "the Newer Worlds" will "have to take his pleasure in feeling that he has attained the power of looking things straight in the face and so has got into truer relation with essentials" (134). Specifically, the Canadian artist must "cast away a great many of his preconceived ideas." Although the Canadian artist occupies the role of a "worker" travelling a new and difficult road, he or she is in many ways engaged in a process of transformation that has religious implications.

The irony at the heart of Our Canadian Literature is that its pursuit of individualism and social liberation is thwarted by its self-replicating bourgeois form, precisely the form that inspires most anthologies. No wonder Pierce bypassed many of the available prose accounts of the Winnipeg strike, just as Watson bypassed the protest poetry written in response to the same event. One explanation of why the editors ignored the strike is provided by Richard Allen, who observes that although "the social gospel movement had won the denominations to progressive social policies and to a new level of sympathy with organized labour, especially in the Methodist church. . . . the progressive leadership in Methodism had by 1921 totally rejected the sectarian religion of labour . . . and had served notice that they could not give unqualified support to radical labour tactics such as the general sympathetic strike" (175).¹⁷

For the editors, and especially for Pierce, the anthology raised a central question: Was it possible to rationalize the exclusion of certain classes? One of Pierce's selections, former Prime Minister Borden's "The Future of Our Country," dwells on some of these issues in the context of the great war and shows that Pierce was anxious to acquaint his readers with the differing concepts of nationalism being vigorously debated in his time.¹⁸ He was also determined to show that similar issues regarding nationalism had been debated over time; to this end, he included political commentary by earlier figures, including Lord Dufferin, Lord Lorne, George Munro Grant, and Edward Blake, each of whom presented a different version of how Canada evolved, and what promises it held for its citizens.

Pierce's selections gave new value to realist pursuits, and authorized the shift toward realism that would characterize Canadian fiction for the next fifty years, although the impact of Pierce's work emerged within the decade. After Our Canadian Literature was published, it became acceptable to anthologize realistic fiction. Editors such as E. K. Broadus and A. M. Stephen included fiction in their 1923 and 1926 anthologies. By the time Raymond Knister edited the first anthology devoted exclusively to Canadian short stories, in 1928, he observed that "many thousands of Canadians are learning to see their own daily life, and to demand its presentment with a degree of realism" (xviii). The realism originally endorsed by Pierce was largely responsible for this growing demand and contributed enormously to the learning process that Knister describes.

Although Pierce's contribution to Our Canadian Literature established the link between nationalism and realism that would colour the canonization of Canadian literature, his conception of fiction was, finally, a troubled one. He believed that his mission as an editor and publisher was to promote the nation, and he felt that the fidelity to local and particular experience provided one of the best means of achieving this objective. But at the same time, he recognized that there was a tension between regional and national consciousness, a tension that his anthologizing desire to represent region and nation could not logically resolve. No one has resolved this tension; perhaps it doesn't need to be resolved.

In his biographical profile of Pierce, C.H. Dickinson remarks that "Lorne's heart was with the poets" (42). Ten years after Our Canadian Literature appeared, Pierce published a critical overview entitled English Canadian Literature 1882-1932, in which he argued that early Canadian realism reflected "doubt, disillusionment, and the universal unrest." He concluded that "the best of our poetry challenges comparison with the best in the world; our fiction is far below in artistry, ideas and truth to life. It shows lack of care and discipline. It is satisfied with picturesque aspects of the surface of our frontier life" (61). Could these words have been written by the same man who, ten years earlier, had described the prose section of his anthology as "a mansion of the mind" in which "we may listen rapturously to those who have mastered the meaning of our life and thought, who have discerned with unclouded eye the inner meaning of our spirit and who alone, of all those within our borders, are qualified to explain us to ourselves and to interpret us to others" (128)?

This act of compromise, which lies at the very heart of Pierce's selections, is also an expression of his need to mediate between the past and the present, to negotiate a settlement between traditional forms of poetry aligned with religion and empire and new forms of prose aligned with realism and nation. Because this pull between the established and the new was simultaneously a tension between genres, Pierce's attempt to resolve his involvement with prose must be seen as one aspect of his desire to promote a new vision of Canadian distinctiveness while remaining acutely conscious of "the imperious sweep of our colossal heritage" (129). To remain aligned with this heritage—centred in conventional poetry—was to remain constant to his Methodist traditions. To align himself with the new world—generically associated with fiction—was to break with tradition and to commit a symbolic act of religious renunciation. It is not surprising to find this conflict embedded in the narrative comprising the prose section of Our Canadian Literature, for it embodies the tension between secularity and spirituality that Pierce confronted throughout his career, and especially in his early years at Ryerson.

In Our Canadian Literature the father still precedes the son. Watson's poetry section is placed before Pierce's collection of prose. The poetry section invokes empire, eternity, transcendence, the baggage of Victorianism. Britain is there before Canada, which struggles to assert itself as a realistic, verifiable, New World force. The spokesman for this force—Lorne Pierce—paradoxically desires everything he has abandoned through his anthology-making, everything that Watson represents. Through its very structure and modes of selection, then, Our Canadian Literature enacts a love-hate relationship between authority and liberation, poetry and prose, genesis and evolution, faith and doubt, played out by two editors whose differing ages and values frame them as cooperative antagonists, struggling with themselves, and with each other, in the confines of their double-sided book.

Notes

I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding that enabled me to complete the research leading to this essay. I am grateful to Beth Pierce Robinson for allowing me to quote from her father’s diaries and letters and to the Queen’s University Archives for allowing me to consult the Lorne Pierce Papers. I owe a huge debt to the following people who read and commented on a draft version of this essay: David Bentley, Neil Besner, Russell Brown, Sandra Campbell, Graham Carr, Nathalie Cooke, Michael Darling, Renée Hulan, Philip Kokotalio, John Lennox, Peter Lipert, Cynthia Sugars, Brian Trehearne, and Mary Williams.

1. While Our Canadian Literature was the first Canadian collection to combine works of poetry and prose, there were some British models that might have inspired Watson and Pierce, notably the three volume Oxford Treasury of English Literature, edited by G. E. Hadow and W. H. Hadow (1907) and W. H. Hudson’s Representative Passages from English Literature (1914). [back]

2. File 2, box 39, Lorne Pierce Papers, Queen’s University Archives. [back]

3. Moore to Chapman, 6 Dec. 1922, file 12, box 1, Lorne Pierce Papers, Queen’s University Archives. [back]

4. Since Campbell, Carman, Roberts, and Scott continued to write well into the twentieth-century, it is worth determining how many of the poems selected by Watson were strictly "nineteenth-century" poems. Watson obviously thought of Campbell as a nineteenth century poet, since he includes none of his twentiethcentury verse (the three Campbell poems in Our Canadian Literature were first published in 1888 and 1889). With Carman the reverse was true: although Carman published several volumes of poetry prior to 1900, all of the poems in the anthology are 1909 or later. In this way, Watson "modernized" Carman. He seemed to be divided about Charles G. D. Roberts, in that he included three poems from very different periods in Robert’s career: "The Potato Harvest" (1886), "A Song of Growth" (1890), and "The Summons" (1919). Scott was represented primarily as a twentieth-century poet. Only one of the five poems included in the anthology was originally published before 1900 (this was "The Voice and the Dusk," which first appeared in the Independent [New York] in 1892). [back]

5. For an excellent discussion of Canadian theosophical movements and the post-war period see Lacombe, who notes that "The years 1920 to 1930 were the heyday of Theosophy in Canada. In 1921 membership in Toronto alone amounted to 240, and by 1922 there were three thriving lodges in the Toronto region" (102). See also the first chapter of Thomas and Lennox, William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life, for an account of theosophical interests in postwar Toronto. [back]

6. The controversy is described by Lacombe, who provides the following references: James Mavor, "Notes on the Twentieth Plane," February 1919, James Mavor Papers, University of Toronto; James Mavor, "Prof. Mavor on the Watson Dates," letter to the editor, Toronto Star, 10 Jan. 1919; and "Crusts and Crumbs," Toronto Sunday World, 5 Jan. 1919. Lacombe notes that Watson’s books, The Twentieth Plane (1918) and Birth through Death (1921), "record esoteric knowledge revealed to ’the earth-plane inner circle of Toronto’ by Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus Christ, Walt Whitman, R. M. Bucke, and other notables during seances held at Watson’s home" (104). [back]

7. Lorne Pierce Diary, 17 Sept. 1923, Lorne Pierce Papers, Queen’s University Archives. [back]

8. Most standard reference works cite 1920 as the year of Pierce’s graduation, but Sandra Campbell, Pierce’s biographer, assures me that the correct year is 1922. [back]

9. These details are extracted from Dickinson’s useful biographical sketch of Pierce. [back]

10. The only French authors included (in translation) are Louis Fréchette for poetry and Louis Hémon for fiction. [back]

11. By presenting Hémon (and Fréchette) in this light, Watson and Pierce were initiating a stance adopted by many anthologists of Canadian literature. In a survey of French-Canadian writers appearing in English-Canadian literary anthologies, Cynthia Sugars observes that:

    Many anthology editors bluntly state that they do not include any French selections, yet when the contents of the anthology are examined, one finds that they do. The editors’ overlooking of this fact, particularly in instances where the anthology is overtly identified as an English Canadian collection only, suggests that they consider the translated or "Englished" texts to be just that, English—and hence part of the English Canadian canon. (11) [back]

12. This language may owe a debt to W. J. Alexander, perhaps the most prominent English professor at the University of Toronto between 1890 and 1925. Alexander was heavily influenced by Arnold, and he taught his students to read the "living and throbbing" texts for themselves (Jasen 558-59). [back]

13. For example, in Edward Hartley Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), Dewart includes occasional bibliographical and biographical notes, which serve to position some of the contributors and selections in relation to dates and events. William Douw Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), includes a critical-historical introduction as well as biographical notes on all contributors. E. A. Hardy’s Selections from the Canadian Poets (1909) dates all of the poems in the collection. Garvin’s Canadian Poets (1916) provides biographical notes. [back]

14. The poets added by Watson are J. Bathurst, J. D. Edgar, Helen M. Egerton, John J. Ferguson, Hilda Mary Hooke, J. E. H. MacDonald, Wilson MacDonald, Arthur Phelps, E. J. Pratt, Theodore Rand, and Robert Stead. [back]

15. See Bentley "Preface." [back]

16. The first compilation of these figures was made by Gerson. The higher inclusion rate for women in Garvin’s anthology may reflect the influence of Katherine Hale, who was a prominent poet at the time, as well as Garvin’s wife. [back]

17. It is significant that Pierce and Watson were compiling their anthology at precisely the time that "the progressives of the social gospel were faced with an eruption of industrial conflict in the most compromising place possible—the church printing establishments" (Allen 175). In June 1921 the printing trade unions called a strike against Toronto printers. The largest of these was the Methodist Book and Publishing Company. When S. W. Fallis, the new head of the Book and Publishing departmetnt, agreed to chair the Employers’ Defence Committee, his acceptance seemed to imply an alignment between Methodist interests and capitalism (an alignment the Methodists had formally rejected) at the expense of labourers. The contradiction undermined the progressivist, social gospel ideology of postwar Methodism and ensured that the subject of labour discontent would remain anathema to Methodist critics, who, like Pierce, were formally and informally associated with the publishing houses. [back]

18. Kenneth McNaught observes that the "renewed Canadian nationalism" that emerged after the war "was loosely defined—if indeed it had been defined at all":

    To some it was reasserting Canada’s right not to be American, while to others it was almost a question of Canada’s right to be American. Sometimes the new spirit demanded a flowering of provincial rights and powers. For French Canadians nationalism was French-speaking and a matter once again of survival. To the broad mass of English-speaking workers and farmers nationalism was expressed in daring demands for new modes of social justice. To federal Liberals, particularly sensitive to the political isolation of Quebec, nationalism meant a growing independence of London. To English-speaking Conservatives it means seeking Canadian status well within the empire. (219) [back]

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