The Interpreters of Canada

LIEUT.-COLONEL GEORGE A. DREW, President, introduced the speaker.

MR. STRINGER: During the recent election in England, a candidate for parliament in the North of England began his nightly spell-binding by pointing to the Union jack and saying: "I was born an Englishman, I have lived an Englishman; and I hope to die an Englishman." Whereupon a Scotchman at the back of the hall said: "Hoot man, hae ye no ambitions." (Laughter.) Now, as your Chairman has told you, I was born in Canada and I have lived in Canada and if I did not remember what Dr. Johnson has said about patriotism being the last resort of a rogue, I would say that I hoped to die in Canada. (Laughter.) But ,coming as I do from the land of the bootlegger- (laughter)-and if I did not weigh a little over 200 pounds, I would say that coming back to my native country made me feel like a whale who was coming up to breathe. (Laughter. ) It also makes me feel like a desert camel who has at last reached its oasis- (laughter) -and having been in this fair city of Toronto for a couple of days brings home to me what was really troubling Robert Barr when he complained that Canadians were willing to spend more money on their whiskey than they did on their authors. Speaking of whiskey, I am reminded that my literary career really began in the city of Toronto, for it was here, with the simple faith of the young, 1 took a sheaf of manuscripts to a sad-eyed editor and asked him why 1 could not sell them, what was the matter with them. And that sad-eyed old editor looked them over, and then sat back in his chair. "There is an idea or two here, Stringer," he said, "but ideas, you know, are like whiskey-they should be left to ripen in the wood."--(laughter) -"So what I advise you Stringer, is really for quite a long while to keep these ideas in your head." (Laughter.)

This Dominion of ours in, the earlier days of Robert Barr did not spend much money on her authors. She did not spend much time on them either. She had enough troubles, and those authors, if they wanted to remain authors, had to look for markets outside their native country. For you know, no matter how romantic we may be about the rights of the author, the aesthetic equipment is not always an assurance of commercial prosperity or earthly well being, which recalls to me the story of the huge negro who had been tried for a particularly atrocious crime. The presiding judge asked him if before the execution of the sentence he had anything to say, whereupon he replied: "Yas sir, 1 thinks I has, I has just one thing to say-if youse hangs me, judge, youse hangs the best singer in all Tennessee." (Laughter.) 1 recall how some cynical Dernosthenes of the daily press once put the rhetorical question--I do not know whether it was Hector Charlesworth or not-Where are our Canadian poets? And a new cynical Toronto editor said: "On the train to New York." (Laughter.)

Now, it seems at first almost a fine thing to have a foreign metropolis to send your poets and authors to. Plato pointed that out to us two thousand years ago when he wrote his Republic, and he suggested that while it might he expedient to honor the man of the pen, to anoint him with oil and crown him with bayleaves, if you had to it might be equally expedient to pass him quietly on to the next town. (Laughter.) So we bought them a ticket for New York and gave them our blessing and went back to the serious work of building up a brand new country, and it was fine and noble work of conquering a wilderness, of creating new cities and making homes and roads and bridges, and throwing a double line of steel across a continent, and pushing the frontier up towards the pole, amalgamating a country that stretched from the Maritimes to the Mackenzie into one unified confederation. It was a great job. It is something we are all proud of, but we sit back and wonder now and then just how that pride is going to express itself. For as Earl Grey said when he was GovernorGeneral of this Dominion: "Canada has been too busy writing her history with the gun and the axe and the plough to bother about writing it with the pen." Or, to quote his exact words when speaking of Canadians: "Their energies are so much absorbed in this task that it would be unreasonable to expect them to be in the van of movements which aim at the realization of the higher and nobler life."

You know that is not such a tag to put on a nation. I have seen a great many authors who could not be pointed out as walking examples of the higher and nobler life. (Laughter.) But at the same time I would like to remind you of three or four lines that I am particularly fond of, and often quote, that were written nearly two thousand years ago, lines from the Ninth Ode of the fourth book of Horace:

They missed their chieftains And their sages' pride; They had no poet And they died. In vain they planned, In vain they bled; They had no poet And they died.

Or I might recall to you a line or two of Shakespeare. 1 refer to that scene where the pigheaded old Polanius stands beside Hamlet and blinks at the visiting play, marvelling that such vagabonds could take their parts seriously enough to weep over them. Hamlet, you may remember, turns to Polonius and says: Will you see the players well bestowed. Do you hear? Let them be well used; They are the abstracts and chronicles Of the times.

Now, Horace never built a Roman arch or a Roman road, though his voice is a living voice two, thousand years after Rome has crumbled into the dust, and Hamlet is no man of action, though he remains the greatest example of a man of thought ever created by a human brain, and they are both announcing by implication that a great nation must have a great voice, that there is not much use in doing a big thing unless it is recorded in a big way, and the recording is done, obviously, by a motley company of ink slingers and canvas daubers who, while engaged in the solemn task of holding mirrors up to nature are confronted by the equally solemn obligation of earning their daily bread.

Now, this young nation of ours did not need to bother much about its authors and artists. When they got too hungry at home we shipped them away to some other country, and when we put down the hammer and the axe and forget about ploughs and power plants and stood back from our work and wondered what it was all about. and nursed a human enough hunger, not only for a little entertainment but also for a little enlightening as to what we were really heading for, we remembered that we had a big and benevolent neighbor right beside us who could give us all the ready-made amusement we wanted, and it looked like a lucky break to have a kindhearted Uncle Sam, ready to shovel out to us all the motion pictures and the theatrical entertainment and the Saturday Evening Post that we seemed to need. But it had its drawbacks. Take, for example, the case of the stage. We know the noblest and truest expression of a nation's life has been through its drama. We remember with a thrill of pride that England produced Shakespeare, but we must also remember that this great Dominion of ours, flung from sea to sea, with a national life as bounding in vigour as it is defective in character, with the stamp of bigness on both its accomplishment and its promise, is without a stage of its own, is without a school of dramatists, is without one dramatic composition in, any way expressive of its wider issues. In other words, Canada is the only country in the world of continental dimensions which depends on foreigners for the spiritual refreshment and inspiration coming to us, or supposed to be coming to us, by way of the theatre. We take what is offered us by the Hebraic and kindhearted gentlemen along that canyon of noise and vulgarity known as Broadway, the gentlemen who in crossing the line sometimes forget to substitute the Union jack for the grand old rag known as the Stars and Stripes in the last act finale.

Then there is the problem of the motion picture. Whether we like them or not we have to face the fact that the movies stand for a new art in this mechanized age of ours, that they tie up in one oddly mongrelized sheaf the earlier activities of the sculptor and the painter and the musician and the poet and the dramatist. It is the new way of interpreting life, of holding the mirror up to nature. It has captured the world and it would seem the one vehicle that could and should interpret to the world the beauty and splendor of our Dominion. But I have just used the word "mechanized", and that is where the catch is. For the movies, even before becoming an art, have become an industry. The screen world has set up a kingdom of its own-aa goldplated principality known, as Hollywood, and to that celluloid kingdom most of the outside world is merely a series of calumnies. It may have begun, I admit, as an accident of climate and scenery, since the sunlight of Southem California is particularly rich in attnic rays and the landscape is as variegated as the whims of its leading stars, but they are a shrewd organization of mechanical inventiveness and the cancellation of the distribution agencies and iniquities of block booking, which have just been legalized by the Court of Appeal in Washington two days ago, and perhaps by the blind good luck of getting off to an early start, Hollywood is even more monopolistic than the stage of Broadway. It is today. And if we as Canadians do not like the two million dollar picture it dumps at our doors, we can lump it, or we can try making our own pictures and, having made them, sit down and wonder whether we can get into a theatre to show them. Now, it is plain, of course, that the machinery for the exploitation of the movie venture, like the exploitation of the modem dramatic effort, is a complicated and costly matter, and since co-operation and combination of interests is the tendency of the times, it may look like a good thing to have a sort of central clearing house for the weeding out of the incompetents on the one hand and distribution of the hits and successes on the other. But the system has its flaws. Some of those flaws you have seen with your own eyes from Hollywood's idea of a Royal Mounted Police in Knight of Pythias uniform- (Laughter) -to the ubiquitous gang leader who really has a heart of gold, and the crooning tenor who apparently has adenoids--(laughter)--and its hair-oiled heroes who ought to he picking pansies and its platinum blonde heroines who ought to he back at the ribbon counter. But it has flaws of more insidious drawbacks-it has the defect of being a foreign product. It leaves us passive and subservient to something outside our own experience. It always fails to express our nationality, but it carries with it a persistent tendency to Americanize public sentiment, to cram down Canadian throats a type of character with which the Canadian does not sympathize and to impose upon Canadian youth an attitude, a rather Smart-Aleck attitude, towards both language and life. It involves the continuous danger of denationalization. It leaves us parasites and passive in a most vital cultural issue, and the mere toleration of un-Canadian sentiments like the mere endurance of characters and situations that are exotic to us can have its fatal insidious effect% for it adds little to the richness of Canadian national life, for the children of the Maple Leaf sit in patient silence through those patriotic passages which George M. Cohan can so unctiously festoon with the Star Spangled Banner.

We share with the United States many of the social and economic problems of the century. We speak the same language and participate in the same business depressions, and with friendly and fraternal candor point out each other's weakness. But Canada is Canada and our flag is not the flag of the United States. The natural thing to do in such a dilemma would he to turn to England, to go back to our mother country and draw on the accummulated glories of the British stage from the sublimities of Shakespeare down to the smartness of George Bernard Shaw, but while duly grateful for the grandeur of the past even the colonist nurses a rather active appetite for the novelties of the present, and in his journey back to the imperial land he finds his path blocked again by the American manager. He discovers that Galsworthy and Shaw and Parker have not been thinking of their kindred beyond the sea as actively as they thought of the general terms of their American ,contracts, for it is still a fixed practice to throw Canada in with the United States when signing up with an American producer. The result is that Canadian audiences are denied the privilege of witnessing some 90 per cent of English stage successes until and unless presented to them through the kindly offices of Broadway. Even Cyril Maude when he toured Canada was compelled to undertake the tour through the booking office of Liebler Bros. of New York, and if they reach Toronto and Winnipeg and Vancouver a trifle flat and off colour, remember we are mere suburbanites on the milk routes of international amusement- (Laughter.) And if they are not enured with loyalty and applauded with determination we are also compelled to remember that they are not distinctly Canadian, that they are without the endearing homeliness and horniness which is achieved only through the academic effort and that they are without the zest and freshness most appealing to you and, above allnational.

But let us shut the door on that dark scenic of the drama and movie and turn to the field of the actual literary effort-to the function of poetry, which can be produced without a booking syndicate and a five million dollar canning factory. But before closing that door let me remind you that there is a ray or two of hope. The problems I outlined are not problems peculiar to Canada. Other countries are facing them and trying to solve them. The degradation of the commercial theatre, for example, has given birth to a little theatre movementa movement that is more and more permitting the hand of the amateur to carry on the torch of true dramatics, and Canada, I rejoice to say, is taking an active and honest part in, this movement. (Hear, hear.)

But Canada, I am told, is proud of her authors and proud of her poets, though on more than one occasion, .after bringing out a book, I stopped to wonder why pride should so express itself in wallops where it hurts most, but we now have a Canadian Authors Association and some magazines of our own, and an effort is being made to keep the Canadian author at home and not send himself across the line to luxuriate in the abysmal rootlessness of the expatriate. In the things of the mind as in the things of commerce an effort is being made to encourage and to justify a demand for the made-in-Canada label. You will become more proudly and more passionately Canadian. You are looking for something of your own., racy of the soil-something with the tang of Maple sap in it, something sinewed with the strength of the North. You cannot, of course, hope to produce a great Canadian novel over night. Our cousins across the line, with their population of one hundred million, are still forlornly looking for the great American novel, and remembering the age and character of this Dominion I very much doubt if you will ever have the great Canathan novel, for the author of any such master-piece would have to have the geographical restlessness of a Casey Jones and the lyric fervour of an Archibald Lampman and the diligence of an Arnold Bennett and the humour of a Cervantes and the realism of a Zola and the fantasticism. of a Wilson MacDonald and the scholarship of a Charles G. D. Roberts. But if and when that great Canadian novel comes along, I hope you will remember the trail blazers and the sod breakers, the men who proceeded the masters, for they are the pioneersthe pioneers of the pen, just as there have been pioneers of the plough, and it takes courage and insight and power to blaze a literary trail throughout a new country. It is easy to follow in the footsteps of others. It is easy to grow romantic about a country already festooned with romance and find glamour where a hundred voices have already rhapsodized over it, but the man who first writes a novel that interprets to you the bigness and beauty of your wondrous prairies, for instance, must both be a good Canadian and a good artist. (Hear, hear.) For Canada is a great and growing nation, and a great and growing nation must have a great and growing voice. It must be a voice of your own, and not the borrowed voices that come to you with the cultured emptiness of the literary ventriloquist who lives in one country and directs his voice at the purse strings and heart strings of another,, and that does not mean me either. (Laughter.) In so far as this country is alert and aspiring she must be vocal and selfexpressing. It is an inside job, and your authors themselves want something more than pink teas and a pat on, the back and that parochialism which is proud of second best work, just because it is a local product. They want a market, because unless you belong to today you have a slim chance of belonging to tomorrow. They want a working wage. They want wool enough to cover their backs, no matter how they keep bumping to cover themselves with glory, but before they can do that they must be recognized as part of your national life. They must be given a new and adequate copyright law to begin with. Their property rights must be defined and respected, and they must he regarded as the abstracts and brief chronicles of their times, and after your death better have a had epitaph than their ill report. And since the finite word, which is also the finished word, must come from these same chroniclers, lean the closer to those who are giving their lives to express what they live and know, whether they speak in stone or form or phrase--lean closer if they are the interpreters of your soul, and in showing them you have a soul you will create not only an art and a literature of your own but an audience to breathe back into that art and that literature the breath of national life. I thank you. (Great applause.)