APPENDIX A LUI 



class is not without honour, the other is precious beyond valuation. 

 As time passes we shall find in this country, no doubt, a growing 

 corpus of stimulating thought that will still more tend to the nourishing 

 and support of creative genius. 



While we do not wish to part Canadian Literature from the main 

 body of Literature written in English, we may lay claim to the posses- 

 sion of something unique in the Canadian literary life, — that may be 

 distinguishable to even casual perception by a peculiar blend of 

 courage and discouragement. In truth, there is such lack of the 

 concentration that makes for the drama of literary life that it is almost 

 non-existent. But, nevertheless, our resident authors, those who 

 have not attempted to escape from this environment, have done and 

 are doing important work in imaginative literature. I have thought 

 to touch briefly upon two such lives typical of the struggle for self- 

 expression in a new country. 



If there had existed in our Society a rule that is observed in the 

 French Academy, it would have been my duty to have pronounced, 

 upon taking my chair, a eulogy on Archibald Lampman, who had 

 died the year previous to my election, and to whose chair I succeeded. 

 I would hardly have been as competent then to speak of him and his 

 work as I am now, for both were too near to me then, and now I 

 have the advantage of added experience, and, after a lapse of twenty 

 odd years, poetic values shift. But what is poetic truth does not 

 change, and it is a high satisfaction to find that there was so much of 

 poetic truth in the work of my friend, our colleague, truth that 

 fortifies, and beauty that sweetens life. He felt the oppression of the 

 dullness of the life about us more keenly than I did, for he had fewer 

 channels of escape, and his responsibilities were heavier; he had 

 little if any enjoyment in the task-round of every day, and however 

 much we miss the sense of tedium in his best work, most assuredly it 

 was with him present in the days of his week and the weeks of his 

 ♦year. He had real capacity for gaiety and for the width and atmo- 

 sphere of a varied and complex life, not as an actor in it perhaps, but 

 as a keen observer, and as a drifter upon its surface, one in whom the 

 colour and movement of life would have created many beautiful and 

 enchanting forms. But he was compelled to work without that 

 stimulus, in a dull environment and the absence also of any feeling 

 of nationality, a strong aid and incitement to a poet, no matter how 

 much we may talk nowadays about the danger of national feeling. 

 This lack made sterile a broad tract of his mind; it was a discourage- 

 ment that he could not know that he was interpreting the aspirations 

 and ideals of a national life. We still feel that lack of national 



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