One of the more distorting screens that has frequently been interposed between readers and the works of Mackenzie, Crawford, and others who wrote in and about Canada in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the aesthetic of organic and affective unity. Beginning near the end of the Victorian period, Canadian literary critics and creative writers alike began to endorse the idea, traceable through Poe and Coleridge to the German Romantics and subsequently refined into a pseudo-science by I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, and their fellow New Critics, that works characterized by a tight unity of means and ends are preferable to what Ben Jonson calls "workes of divers nature"—works characterized by variety or miscellany. While both the aesthetic of unity and the aesthetic of variety were operative in early Canadian writing, they were not equally distributed across all artistic genres and media. On the contrary, lyric poems and short stories, for example, tended to fall on the side of unity and long poems and non-fictional prose works on the side of variety. Not surprisingly, close readings of lyric poems such as Desmond Pacey’s of Archibald Lampman’s "Heat" ([1888]; Pacey, Ten Canadian Poets 130-32) have been among the major successes of Canadian scholarship since the arrival of New Criticism, while the anachronistic projection of the aesthetic of unity onto miscellaneous works such as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852) has produced some of its more spectacularly distortive failures.

A literary work that arises from the aesthetic of variety will, by definition, contain a diversity of elements. These may include different media (prose and poetry), dissimilar subjects (contemporary, classical, romance), miscellaneous forms or genres (hymns, heroic couplets, lyrical, and narrative elements), and even a medley of voices or authors. It is easy to think of examples in each of these categories from nineteenth-century Canada. Mackenzie’s Voyages contains narrative accounts of his expeditions of 1789 and 1793 and a "General History of the Fur Trade" which may have been written by his cousin Roderic. Roughing It in the Bush contains material in both verse and prose by three distinct and acknowledged authors, Moodie herself, her husband John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, and her brother Samuel Strickland. Malcolm’s Katie combines narrative and lyrical elements, as do a number of other long poems, including The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856) by Charles Sangster (Spenserian stanzas, hymns, a madrigal…) and The Emigrant (1861) by Alexander McLachlan (octosyllabic couplets, ballads, songs…). A medley of subjects is also present in these poems, and continues as a prominent characteristic of post-Confederation poetry. As its title suggests, Charles G.D. Roberts’s In Divers Tones volume of 1886 intentionally incorporates a variety of literary forms and subjects, as does Lampman’s Among the Millet, and Other Poems (1888). The matter of intention can be stated with some certainty not only in the case of Roberts (whose title alludes to Tennyson’s perception of Goethe as a writer proficient in "many different styles"[864]), but also in the case of Lampman, who explicitly championed the idea that the ability to write in a variety of "styles" and on a "variety of subjects" is a poetic virtue. "The perfect poet… would have no set style," writes Lampman in his essay on "Poetic Interpretation" (circa 1892); "[h]e would have a different one for everything he should write, a manner exactly suited to the subject" (Essays and Reviews 127).

Why, it might be asked, did writers as historically and temperamentally diverse as MacKenzie, Moodie, Crawford, Sangster, McLachlan, Roberts, and Lampman deliberately choose to publish works that are marked by some form or other of miscellany? An answer to this question might appear to be in the realm of models— for instance, in the debts of Malcolm’s Katie and The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay to such medley poems as Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (1810) and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), and in the influence of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and Maud (1855) on In Divers Tones and Among the Millet. No doubt the miscellany of many Canadian works is at least in part a reflection of the miscellany of their models. But the matter of a weak or secondary poet’s reliance on the practice of a strong or primary author (Bloom), though certainly an important factor in the area of generic choice, skirts and conceals the more interesting question of why so many writers in nineteenth-century Canada and Britain chose to produce more-or-less miscellaneous works.

Two answers to this larger question come readily to mind, the first involving post-Romantic ideas about the relation of art to the transcendent and the second concerning the more practical— indeed, mercenary—matter of making books as attractive and engaging as possible to a diverse reading audience or, as it may be, a reader with diverse interests. A full answer of the first sort (which is neither possible nor necessary here) would entail a lengthy discussion of Romantic and post-Romantic thinking about the relationship between a symbol (or signifier) and what it symbolizes (the transcendental signified), with special emphasis on the way in which the high Victorians of the Coleridge-Carlyle-Tennyson line viewed the literary symbol as an actual but partial embodiment of the idea or entity that it represents—as a real presence or open secret (Carlyle 1: 173-80) that is both a part of and a gesture towards something that cannot be wholly communicated. The aesthetic consequences of this view were historically and artistically various, and included the use by writers well into the present century of fragmentary, fractured, and multifarious forms whose superficial incompleteness and miscellany betokens an underlying or transcendental wholeness. Such ideas and practices are important for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian literature, particularly for a full understanding of such writers as Bliss Carman, A.M. Klein, and Sheila Watson, but they are probably less important across the full range of early writing in Canada than the matter of audience or readerly appeal. Few writers and publishers in the Colonial and Confederation periods gave much thought to theories of symbolism, but, as indicated by the documents generously assembled by Douglas M. Daymond and Leslie G. Monkman in the first volume of Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos (1984), many were greatly concerned with the question of how to cater lucratively to the various needs of a wide—and, therefore, diverse—readership in a relatively small population.

In fact, it is at the juncture of marketing and aesthetics that the concept of variety makes its earliest and most explicit appearances in colonial Canada, and in contexts that point to eighteenth-century newspapers like The Spectator (1711-1714) and The Rambler (1750-1752) as among its direct antecedents. "Originals, both in Prose and Verse, as will please the Fancy, and instruct the judgement…shall…be…interspersed with chosen pieces, and curious essays," proclaim William Brown and Thomas Gilmore in the July 21, 1764 issue of The Quebec Gazette, "so that blending Philosophy, with Politics, History, etc. the youth of both sexes will be improved, and persons of all ranks agreeably and usefully entertained. Upon the whole, we will labour to attain to all the exactness that so much variety will permit; and give as much variety as will consist with a reasonable exactness" (1: 8-9). "It is not our intention," reiterates John Howe in the January 1791 number of The Nova-Scotia Magazine, "to diminish the miscellaneous part of our collection, which is generally admitted to be the most useful and entertaining" (1:13). Howe adds that it is part of his magazine’s mandate to compensate for the lack of "extensive Collections of Books" in the colony: "[t]o adapt this Publication to the taste of all descriptions of our Readers," he continues, "we have endeavoured so to mix the utile and dulce, that instruction and pleasure might by no means be separated, and that, by the variety of matter, the want of many books might in a great measure be supplied" (1:13-14). In his Introduction to The Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository (1823), David Chisholme approaches much the same position by a slightly different route, committing his magazine to the publication, for the benefit of "readers of various tastes and feelings," of all manner of instructive and uplifting items from "the philosopher, the poet, the essayist, the historian…the traveller" (1:18-20). Similar aims and programmes are advanced by John Gibson in his Introduction to the new series of The Literary Garland (1843) and by George Stewart in his "Introductory" to Stewart’s Literary Quarterly Magazine (1870). In these and other publications of the early to mid-Victorian period, however, there is a decreasing emphasis on trying to appeal to "all classes of society" (Chisholme 1:20) and an increasing insistence on avoiding the supposedly corrupting influence of cheap novels, a species of writing in which instruction and entertainment were deemed to have given way to mere stimulation (see Stewart 1:91) and—contrary to Mikhail Bakhtin’s perception of the novel’s dialogic polyphony—the improving richness of miscellany was felt to have been lost to a potentially unbalancing, because unbalanced, singularity.

Since the typical reader, publisher, and, by extension, writer implied by the remarks of Brown, Gilmore, Howe, Chisholme, Gibson, Stewart, and many others in the century and more between 1764 and 1870 was an "all-rounder"—someone with broadly varied interests and gifts—the onset of specialization in Canadian literature in the 1880s and 1890s was regarded with considerable hostility by conservative critics and reviewers. To Gordon Waldron, writing in The Canadian Magazine in 1896, contemporary Canadian poetry seems lamentably "narrow" in its "range of feeling" by comparison with the "wide and varied" poetry of the "past" (1:157). Among the Millet has an "earnest tone" that wins Waldron’s "sympathy" and partly compensates for a "range of ideas [that]…is not very wide" (1:150), but works by Roberts and Carman do not fare as well. As a "series of sonnets dealing with aspects of outdoor life" (Roberts, "Prefatory Note"), Songs of the Common Day (1893) exhibits to Waldron the "grey monotony" typical of contemporary Canadian poetry and fails to "suggest either ideas or action" (1:151, 148). As a collection unified by "a single theme" and a "similarity of tone" (Carman, "Prefatory Note"), Low Tide on Grand Pré seems to him to sacrifice "human interest" and poetic talent on the altar of uniformity:

When Waldron observes a few sentences further on that Carman’s "narrative" in Low Tide on Grand Pré must be "largely supplied by the reader, and with painful effort," he emerges clearly as one of those people whom writers of the aesthetic-decadent-Modern tradition deliberately ignored or satirically targeted: a reader who expects to be effortlessly entertained by poetry, who wants art to remain the uncomplicated handmaiden of society, who, like Ralph Connor’s muscularly Christian heroes, prefers action to thought, manliness to mysticism. Waldron does not level the charge of decadence at Roberts, Carman, and William Wilfred Campbell (whose Dread Voyage [1893] volume also causes him great imaginative pain), but the thought was probably not far from his mind when, towards the end of his essay, he delivered himself of the arch-Victorian accusation that contemporary Canadian poets lack "moral enthusiasm…[and] the inspiring energy of new ideas and large hopes of human progress" (1:155).

To the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, Canadian critics continued to stress the need for variety in the reading materials of the great Dominion. More perceptive and telling than most is John A. Cooper, who, in "The Strength and the Weakness of Current Books" (1899), proceeds from the observation that "the steam-driven ocean carriage" has created a broader base of knowledge than ever before upon which "to erect our thought and action" to argue that the modern reader has access not merely to "new land and new peoples," but also to "the accumulated books of the centuries" as well as to the works of his contemporaries (1:160). All this and, in addition, the prodigality of contemporary publishers (who were increasingly restricting themselves during the post-Confederation period to specialized fields and subjects under a single masthead) would satisfy the burgeoning demands from a "variety of tastes" for a "variety of books" (1:160). What once was supplied within the covers of a single magazine, or anthology, or yearbook, or volume of poetry and/or prose would now be supplied by a miscellany of books—a library compiled from the offerings of a variety of publishers or, as anyone who has inherited a collection of books from a late Victorian or Edwardian ancestor knows very well, assembled by a single publisher from among the great works of the past and present. One especially regrettable result of this was that poetry, once prominent among the offerings even of newspapers in Canada, could easily be avoided entirely by the average reader— relegated to the narrow province of the specialist in favour of genres such as the historical novel that combine romance and realism, escapism and verisimilitude, ease of reading and access to information, in proportions that appealed to the expanding middle classes.

It is in the nature of Modernism as both a reaction against and an aspect of modernity that the aesthetic of unity that begins seriously to challenge the dominance of the aesthetic of variety in Canada in the eighteen-eighties looks very like a mirror-image of its culture: a reflection and reversal of the individualism, the "earnest tone," the "inspiring energy" (Waldron) of the late-Victorian period. Of course, the origins and characteristics of Modernism are very numerous and complex, but one of their common denominators is the quest for wholeness and authenticity outside the geographical and historical bounds of post-Renaissance Europe that became strikingly apparent in England around 1850 in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. With their preference for pre-Renaissance art and their avant-garde little magazine (The Germ), the literary Pre-Raphaelites and their principal associates—Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, William Morris, A.C. Swinburne, and George Meredith— constellated a thoroughly Modern anti-modernism that exercised a formative effect on Pound, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and other major Modernists. Not fortuitously, they also pioneered the enclosed, self-contained, and, as the century progressed, increasingly unified series or volume of poems—the sonnet-sequence (The House of Life [1870, 1881]), the medieval or mythic heterocosm (The Defense of Guenevere [1858], The Earthly Paradise [1868-70]), the book organized about a single idea or mood (Modern Love [1862], Poems of the Roadside [1862], Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth [1883]). These are the works that, with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1857), Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), and a handful of other books, established what Sally Gall and M.L. Rosenthal call The Genius of Modern Poetry (1983)—the "Modern Poetic Sequence"—and their influence begins to be strongly felt in Canada in the early ’nineties when, as at roughly the same time in Europe and the United States, the unified volume of poetry became almost de rigeur in advanced artistic circles. It was at this time that Lampman—a poet schooled in the classics and thus, it could be argued, initially disposed towards the aesthetic of variety (variatas)—moved as far away as he ever would from miscellany with Lyrics of Earth (1895-1896), as did Roberts (another classically-educated poet) with the Songs of the Common Day (1893) "series" and, later, with the New York Nocturnes (1898) and Book of the Rose (1903) sequences. It was also at this time that Carman published Low Tide on Grand Pré and began working on other unified groups of poems including, with Richard Hovey, the three volumes of the Vagabondia series (1894, 1896, 1901). The uniform appearance of the Vagabondia volumes, coupled with the fact that the poems in them are not identified by author, indicates how far some writers and publishers had moved away from the aesthetic of variety by the end of the Victorian period.

With the entrenchment of Modernism both as an artistic movement and as a critical school (New Criticism) in Canada and elsewhere in the middle decades of the present century, the aesthetic of unity, together with its extensive verbal and conceptual support system (coherence, ambiguity, archetypal pattern, underlying myth, structuralism, and so on), were firmly ensconced in the Canadian academy. So, too, was the Modernist hostility to the Romantics and the Victorians, an attitude that changed somewhat with the discovery that, with the help of such redemptive devices as irony and persona, many poems of these periods could be rendered respectably unified, and their authors forgivably schizoid—that is, detached from at least part of themselves and their culture and, in this sense if not others, understood as partly authentic and partly Modern precursors of the kinds of teasing fragmentation and mythic coherence valued by the high Modernists. Works and authors that were not easily amenable to high Modern/New Critical retrieval were ignored, denigrated, or, if they were lucky, assimilated to Modernist assumptions by being made to appear more alienated from their culture than their adherence to the aesthetic of variety might suggest that they actually were. A short list of cases in point would include James Reaney’s perception of Crawford in Our Living Tradition (1959) as a mythopoeic writer whose works, when viewed as a totality, constitute a "Cosmos" rather than a "miscellany" (Macpherson 7); Margaret Atwood’s reconstruction of Moodie in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) as at once an alienated schizophrenic and the personality at the centre of a tightly unified poetic sequence; and the debate among Barrie Davies, L.R. Early, and others about whether Lampman is to be credited with possessing a unified vision (see Bentley, "Watchful Dreams") or castigated for his "diverse impulses," for lacking a "drive towards ultimate synthesis" (Early 29).

Perhaps the most damaging consequences of the failure to recognize and respect variety and unity when they occur in early Canadian writing can be found in the realm of scholarly editing. In ways that are not always fully apparent even to some academic readers, the act of editing can radically alter the content and perception of a work and an author. Especially when editorial interventions are extensive, a given piece of writing may partly or wholly disappear to be replaced by a textual arrangement that creates a distorted and anachronistic impression of its author(s). This is exactly the effect of several scholarly editions of Canadian writers that have appeared in recent decades, glaring examples being the The Collected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (1985), the Complete Poems of A.M. Klein (1990), and the first New Canadian Library and subsequent Virago editions of Roughing It in the Bush (1962, 1986).

In addition to omitting the portions of Roughing It in the Bush that were written by Moodie’s husband and brother, Klinck follows Briggs in deleting sections by Moodie herself, describing them, not a little dismissively, as "reports of pleasant excursions, and…pathetic experiences" (x). Klinck’s rationale for extending Briggs’s practice to other portions of the "padded" edition of 1852 and to "[t]he outdated accretions of 1871" is a latter-day version of Poe’s insistence on the virtues of brevity as well as unity:

Modern readers apparently have limited powers of concentration and no time for the Moodies’ happier and more sentimental episodes. Their needs and tastes will therefore be met by a compressed version of Roughing It in the Bush, a version that "enhance[s]" the originality ("unique effect") of the work by silencing all but Moodie’s own voice and then shaping its narrative into something acceptable to modern sensibilities. The "unity" or "essential canon" of Roughing It in the Bush, maintains Klinck,

For the "public of the 1960s" (x) for whom the 1962 NCL edition of Roughing It in the Bush was ostensibly intended, Moodie’s miscellaneous work became a condensed book, a Bildungsroman, a displaced romance, and a quasi-novel of one (contradictory) character whose "trials" lead to "(partial) salvation" (xiv) in a Bush that sounds very much like an antecedent of Eliot’s Waste Land. It become, in effect, a (partial) answer to one of the most insistent cravings of Canadian Modernists: the craving for great works of Canadian fiction, for the great Canadian novel.

With the virtual deletion of J.W. Dunbar Moodie’s voice from the Virago edition of Roughing It in the Bush and, with it, of Susanna Moodie’s gracious acknowledgment of her husband’s assistance and achievements, there appears in her place a more independent figure—a Moodie liberated from some of her Victorian constraints by the feminism of a later century. A reader unfamiliar with the first edition of Roughing It in the Bush and "attracted by Virago’s reputation for restoring to attention neglected works by female writers" would certainly, as Julie Beddoes observes, "find some of the characteristics of a feminist" in this new Moodie (374). Once again, an opportunity for accurate understanding and assessment has been compromised by the anachronism of a narcissistic ideology.

All critical and scholarly editions are monuments, especially those bound in hard covers and destined for research libraries like the editions of Pacey, Pollock, and the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (which include Carl Ballstadt’s 1988 edition of Roughing It in the Bush). But to the extent that any edition becomes a vehicle for the biases and prejudices of its editor and time it is like a statue of a historical personage dressed according to the whims of the sculptor rather than in period costume. No less than sculptors and historians, editors have the responsibility of ensuring, "so far as possible, [a] reasonable harmony" between the products of their editing and the view of their subject that has been established through "historical research" and "reliable sources" (Becker 156-57). To do otherwise, as is unfortunately the case with the Virago edition of Roughing It in the Bush, is to produce the equivalent of a statue of Laura Secord dressed as a yuppie. It is also a manipulation of the past for present purposes, a wielding of the scissors, the glue, and the airbrush to "reconstruct the past," that recalls in its own petty way the activities of Winston Smith and his revisionist colleagues in the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There, it will be recalled, "the past was brought up to date" "[d]ay by day and almost minute by minute" and "no…item of news, or…expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, [was] ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary" (Orwell 39, 36).

The similarities between this passage and the opening episode of The Clockmaker are striking, and, to say the least, suggest that Haliburton derived part of his initial inspiration for the interaction of his narrator and Sam Slick from Howison.

If this is so, then the possibility cannot be overlooked that the very name of Haliburton’s Clockmaker derives from Howison’s Sketches. Shortly before the incident just quoted, Howison records an exchange between "a woman afflicted with acute rheumatism" and "one of the doctors of the [Talbot] settlement." "‘How d’ye do, my good lady, how d’ye do?’" begins a dialogue that continues: "‘Oh, doctor…I was wishing to see you—very bad—I don’t calculate upon ever getting smart again.’—’Hoity, toity,’ returned the doctor, ‘you look a thundering sight better than you did yesterday.’—’Better!’ exclaimed the sick woman, ‘no doctor, I am no better—I’m going to die in your hands.’—’My dear good lady,’ cried the doctor, ‘I’ll bet a pint of spirits I’ll raise you in five days, and make you so spry, you’ll dance upon this floor.’ ‘Oh,’ said the woman, ‘if I had but the root that used to attend our family at Connecticut; he was a dreadful skeelful man’" (195). As Howison’s own italics indicate, part of the purpose of this exchange is to illustrate the peculiarities of North American speech. As the concluding portion of the exchange also indicates, humour at the expense of the quack doctor, the bibulous woman, and her "credulous" husband is also a purpose of the exchange:

In a footnote to this passage, Howison glosses the meaning of the word "slick" as "Soon." Even without this word, the language, the tone, the comic characters, and the pace of the dialogue throughout the exchange anticipate The Clockmaker. Here, and in the meeting on horseback of the squirarchical Howison and the truculent American, surely lie some of the raw materials that Haliburton brilliantly shaped to his own satirical purposes.

Is it true to say, then, that Haliburton knew Howison’s Sketches? The answer is less straightforward than the preceding evidence suggests, because knowledge of Howison’s book may have come to Haliburton indirectly through a lengthy review of it in the December 1821 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a periodical much appreciated and imitated in pre-Confederation Canada for its "academic wit [and]…practical joking" (Klinck "Literary Activity in the Canadas, 1812-1841" 132). Originally published anonymously but now known to have been written by John Galt (see Groves), the review in question calls attention to the "literary character" of the Sketches, and praises Howison for both "his quiet and temperate views of men and manners…and his most rich and imaginative descriptions of external nature" (Galt, "Howison’s Canada" 540-41). It also notes that "[t]hroughout the…book, are scattered little characteristic sketches of domestic manners, which exhibit a sort of quiet tact and native humour, which unfortunately has come to be of but rare occurrence in our modern English literature" (543). As examples of this aspect of Howison’s work, the review then quotes in its entirety the second of the sketches discussed above (including the gloss on "‘slick’" as "Soon"), as well as a lenghty account of an "incident [that] occurs…after Mr. Howison has passed the frontier of the United States" (544):

As a final illustration of Howison’s skill at sketching "domestic manners," the review quotes his description of an American tavern:

The resemblance between the horseracing incidents in the Sketches and The Clockmaker indicates that Haliburton’s knowledge of Howison extended beyond the material quoted in Blackwood’s, but perhaps it was Galt’s review that drew the Novascotian author’s attention to a rich and inspirational compendium of first-hand "observation of the state of manners on the New Continent, both in Canada and in the United States" (Galt, "Howison’s Canada" 545).