Columns and
Controversies Among the Confederation of Poets
At the Mermaid lnn: Wilfred
Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892-93.
Edited, and with an Introduction, by Barrie Davies. University of Toronto Press,
1979. xxiii + 353 pp.
The complete At the Mermaid
Inn column, selections (and often confusing excerpts) of which were published in 1958
by Arthur Bourinot, makes easily accessible at last what is collectively one of the most
sustained and controversial forays into prose by the Confederation poets or, more strictly
speaking, by the Ottawa group of Lampman, Scott, and Campbell.
Quantitatively, the volume is impressive. The columns number well over two hundred,
and some of them cover several sides of the long pages of the University of Toronto's Literature
of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint volume. Professor Davies,
and, with him, Patricia Kennedy must be thanked for undertaking the herculean and blinding
task of transcribing the text from microfilms of The Globe. Their errors
are few, though as W.J. Keith has pointed out ("Letters in Canada," University
of Toronto Quarterly, 1980), one or two of them are significant and misleading.
For the most part, however, the text presented by Davies is reliable; certainly it
inspires more confidence than Bourinot's Selections or, indeed, than Davies' own Archibald
Lampman: Selected Prose (Tecumseh, 1975).
Before
turning to some of the issues raised by the At the Mermaid Inn column now that it
can easily be seen steadily and seen whole, some attention must be given to the volume's
Index. No compiler for the Index is listed in the Acknowledgements, so
responsibility for its shortcomings must be taken as residing, in a general way, with the
University of Toronto Press. These short comings are serious enough to render the
Index a frustrating and unreliable means of access to the At the Mermaid Inn
column, particularly to the many references by Lampman, Scott, and Campbell to various
authors, artists, and composers. For instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti is mentioned
and quoted several times by the Canadian poets, but only one page reference appears in the
Index. And while Pater, Mozart, and the painter Millet are mentioned in the text,
they are not entered in the Index. There are other eccentricities too: Sidney
Lanier the American poet appears as Sydney Lamer; Henrik Ibsen is not given a Christian
name; and we are told that Arthur Hugh Clough is an "English Poet" but not that The
Youth's Companion is a Boston journal. As this sampling of omissions,
inaccuracies, and inconsistencies shows, the Index to the At the Mermaid Inn
volume functions less as a means of access to its contents than as a means of ensuring
that the volume will be read in its entirety by anyone interested in any of its
facets. That may be a worthwhile end, by the means of achieving it are of course
unjustifiable.
In his
lengthy and detailed "Introduction" to At the Mermaid Inn Professor
Davies, himself one of Lampman's most skilled and sensitive critics, does a fine job of
placing the column in a context that illuminates its genesis and demise, the central
concerns and relative merits of its authors, and its importance as a window on the
literary and intellectual world of Canada in the 'nineties. No one would dispute
Davies' claim that "At the Mermaid Inn is important because it reflects many
of the issues, conflicts, and general temper of the age." But some might wonder
whether in the squabbles between Campbell on the one hand and Lampman and Scott on the
other which brought the column to a rancorous conclusion in July, 1893 there really is
present "in microcosm, the symptoms of national fragmentation which are a major
concern of these writers in the column as a whole." By his own admission Davies
makes "no attempt to exhaust the rich diversity of the material" in At the
Mermaid Inn; he does, however, offer a great many insights regarding the issues
discussed in the column by Lampman, Scott, and Campbell and, moreover, offers provocative
speculations regarding the relationship among the three poets and between them and their
late-Victorian society.
Each
reader of At the Mermaid Inn will find items in the column that are of particular
and special interest. As Davies says: "now that At the Mermaid Inn
is finally available, much more will be written about it." Of course, the
column has always been accessible to those interested enough in Confederation poetry to
read it in the original or on microfilm. Now that it is accessible in one volume,
the issues, specific and general, that it raises come flooding forward. On March 5,
1892 Lampman, in meditating on the appeal and limitations of Shelley, mentions Roberts and
Carman as being "of this poet's cult" while making no mention of his own earlier
essay on The Revolt of Islam. "In Shelley,'' writes Campbell on August 20,
1892, "we have . . . the greatest lyric poet in the language." It would be
interesting to see Shelley's influence on the Confederation writers examined in
detail. Several of Lampman's columns for instance those of February 20, 1892,
April 30, 1892, May 14, 1892, and July 9, 1892 seem to indicate an emblematic
tendency in his reading of the Book of Canadian Nature, a possibility which has not, to my
knowledge, been explored with reference to his poetry. On April 29, 1893, Scott
calls attention to Archibald Geikie's article on "Scenery and the Imagination"
in that month's issue of The Fortnightly Review (vol. 53, pp. 547-573).
Geikie's argument for the influence of "conditions of climate and variations of
topography" on the imaginative response to landscape has resonances which wait to be
explored, not only in Scott's poetry, but also in the work of other Canadian poets,
notably Lampman. And surely the following, from Scott's column for February 4, 1893,
has ramifications for "The Piper of Arll":
All art, as Walter Pater points out, is
constantly striving towards the condition of music, and perhaps Flaubert was born with a
musician's idea of form and was constantly searching for the absolute fusion of form and
context [sic] which is found in no other art. This implies that he might
have been challenging the impossible. . . . And so Flaubert. . . takes his place as a type
of the artist who will not be distracted by the intractableness of his material, but who
works at his God-given task without despair.
While there is a good deal
of 'filter' in At the Mermaid Inn, there is also much very much more than
can be even mentioned here that illuminates the three contributing poets and
suggests lines of investigation for the scholar and critic.
One such
line of investigation is that which links the demise of At the Mermaid Inn, after
a series of what Davies calls "embittered entries" by Campbell, with the
eruption, a little less than two years later, in the Summer of 1895, of what was variously
called "The Battle of the Poets," "The Poets' Controversy," and
"The War Among the Poets." Angered by the fact that he had been given
shorter shrift than Carman, Lampman, Roberts, Scott and others in an article entitled
"The Singers of Canada" by an American journalist, Joseph Dana Miller, in the
May, 1895 issue of Munsey's Magazine, Campbell published a lengthy and anonymous
article in the Toronto Sunday World accusing Carman of being "the most
fragrant imitator" i.e. plagiarist "on this continent."
In attempting to justify his charge by juxtaposing excerpts from Carman's poems with
excerpts from poems by Rossetti (upon whom he "evidently made his first levies")
and, amongst others, Whitman, Stevenson, Kipling, Lampman and himself, Campbell succeeds
in shedding light on both his own paranoia and Carman's poetic practice. In his
various responses, Carman, in addition to coining the word "Campbelligerent" and
satirizing its referent as "little Willie" in The Chap Book, allowed that
the reappearance of the line "With small innumerable sound" from Lampman's
"Heat" in his own "The Eavesdropper" Are "due . . . to . . .
unconscious (or, better, subconscious) appropriation." He also noted that the
line had been excised and replaced in the second edition of Low Tide on Grand
Pré. "The War Among the Poets" raged for several weeks in the
correspondence, editorial, and gossip columns of newspapers in Toronto (including The
Globe and The Week) and elsewhere; moreover, it found poetic expression, not
just in Carman's lampoons in The Chap Book, but also in the Byronic stanzas of C.G.
Rogers' "Bards of the Boiler-Plate" (1895), the Popean couplets of A.C.
Stewart's The Poetical Review (1896), and in numerous other satirical verses by
Campbell and others. When Campbell resumed the attack in an open letter to the
Toronto Globe printed over his own name it was to accuse Carman and Roberts of
literary log-rolling, of enhancing their own reputations at the expense of Scott's and his
own. Needless to say, this salvo from Ottawa at the Fredericton cousins in New York
was also the occasion for Public controversy and satirical verse. In his study of
Wilfred Campbell, Carl Klinck characterizes "The War Among the Poets" as "a
tempest in the Canadian teapot." And so it was.
Yet it
is an episode which, like the 'Fleshly-School' controversy and the Wilde trial, is
curiously revelatory of a social and cultural milieu. For surely it is significant
that "The War of the Poets" was occasioned, not by the issues of fleshliness and
viciousness (manifestations of the aesthetic-decadent movement which Glassco would
subsequently import), but by a piqued Canadian poet taking exception to an American
critic's characterization of his colleagues as "not mere echoes" but authors of
"strong unfettered verse . . . of no transplanted origin." The nature of
originality, the place of imitation, the integrity of pastiche (Campbell's word is
"mosaic"), the relation between 'subconscious appropriation' and imaginative
invention these are issues which, willy-nilly, must continue to surface in
discussions of a poetry which, like Canada itself, has drawn so much from outside
itself. The ease of the transition from Campbell's embittered columns in At the
Mermaid Inn (and Davies is certainly right when he says that Campbell "came to
feel that literary prominence in Canada had more to do with politics and cliques than
talent") to the broad considerations raised here is surely one indication of the
place of the Globe column, not just in the literary and intellectual history of its
period, but also in the continuity of Canadian poetic and critical concerns.
Professor Davies is correct: much more will be written about At the Mermaid Inn
near is available, 'filler,' squabbles, warts and all, in its entirety.
D.M.R. Bentley |