(grant] presidential ADDRESS S 



intelligence work in France so admirable has not been idle in 

 Canadian fiction. But it is on the whole true to say that since Sir 

 John Bourinot's time few if any of our novelists have aimed high, 

 have built on a grandiose plan; that we have no very great names, 

 and that most of our work has been descriptive rather than inter- 

 pretative. A paper presented to this section last year ; "The Canadian 

 Novel, its Future," by J. M. Gibbon, and since republished in "The 

 Canadian Bookman" for July, 1919, ventures the prophecy that 

 Canada is soon to have "her prophet, in time likely her group of 

 prophets who shall interpret her many-sided but always vigorous 

 life to her own people and to the nations who have accepted her as 

 come of age." Another article in the same number of The Canadian 

 Bookman, "The Canadian Novel, its Achievements," by Mr. E. J. 

 Hathaway, shows that we can add a long list of names to those given 

 by Sir John Bourinot. Gilbert Parker had in 1893 hardly swung above 

 the horizon; Ralph Connor and Isabel Ecclestone Mackay had not 

 described Scotch-Canadian life; for the west we were still dependent 

 upon the great travellers and fur traders of the XVIII and early XIX 

 centuries, or upon the historians; Norman Duncan, and Frederick 

 William Wallace and W. Albert Hickman had not given us the thrill 

 and terror of the Northern Atlantic and of the Labrador fisheries. 

 Since then they have done so, though to compare them with Joseph 

 Conrad is to see the difference between description and interpretation; 

 and the time would fail me to tell of Stephen Leacock, and of Arthur 

 Stringer and of Charles Roberts in his later role. 



Yet when very sincere praise for good workmanship and real 

 insight is given to them all the fact remains that there is as yet no 

 school of Canadian fiction to compare with such a British school as 

 that of Hugh Walpole and D. H. Lawrence and Compton Mackenzie, 

 and the many others who trace their descent through Wells and Shaw 

 to Samuel Butler. We have nothing to compare with the amazing 

 wealth of the British novel since the later nineties. Our production 

 is sporadic, unrelated, save perhaps in the case of the sea-stories of 

 Duncan and Wallace and Hickman. 



In poetry we are in still worse case. The Acadian School is 

 dissolved. C. G. D. Roberts has published his collected works, and 

 bidden farewell to Erato and Euterpe; Bliss Carman is fighting a 

 gallant fight against disease, and has scant leisure for song; of the 

 Ontario School Lampman died long years ago, and the fierce Highland 

 heart of Wilfrid Campbell has found port after stormy seas. Of our 

 newer poets John Macrae died leaving us one immortal lyric; from 

 those still living we have from time to time verses which show that the 

 fire still burns upon the altar; but two names only seem to me worthy 



