POETRY AND PROGRESS 



I have the honour to deliver this evening the forty-first pre- 

 sidential address of the Royal Society of Canada. It is the custom 

 of our Society that the presidency shall devolve in turn upon each 

 of our Sections, and the Section of English Literature last year 

 claimed the privilege of nominating the president of the Society. 



I have thought to speak on this occasion of ideals and progress: 

 first, and briefly, on the ideals of the Society, — those who formed it 

 and gave it body and constitution, and then, in a more discursive 

 fashion, about ideals in poetry and the literary life, and their relation 

 to progress. There is, I claim, something unique in the constitution 

 of a society that comprises Literature and Science, that makes room 

 for the Mathematician and the Chemist, the Historian and the 

 Biologist, the Poet and the Astronomer. Every intellectual type can 

 be accommodated under the cloak of our charter, and we have sur- 

 vived forty-one years of varied activity with a degree of harmony 

 and a persistence of effort towards the end and purpose of our creation 

 that is worthy of comment. We are unique also in this, that two 

 languages have equal recognition and authority in our literature 

 sections, and that the premier place is occupied by the first civilized 

 language heard by the natives of this country, which is ever the 

 pioneer language of ideals in freedom and beauty and in the realm 

 of clear logic, criticism and daring speculation. It here represents 

 not a division of race, but a union of nationality, and joins the com- 

 pany of intellectuals by the dual interests of the two great sections of 

 our people. We find our scientific sections welcoming essays in the 

 French language and our literary sections interchanging papers and 

 holding joint sessions on folk-lore and history. The ideal which 

 possessed the founder of this Society and its charter members was 

 undoubtedly that such an organism could live and flourish, that it 

 could become a useful institution in Canadian life. We have pro- 

 gressively proved that, we prove it to-night, and we shall, I am 

 confident, continue our demonstration in the future. Is it too fanciful 

 to think or say that the element of cohesion which made this possible 

 is idealism, or that gift of ideality which all workers who use Mind 

 as an instrument possess in varying degree? The mental process by 

 which a poet develops the germ of his poem and perfects it is analogous 

 to the process by which a mathematician develops his problem trom 

 vagueness to a complete demonstration, or to the mental process 

 whereby the shadow of truth apprehended by the biologist becomes 

 proven fact. The scientist and mathematician may proceed in diverse 



