from her came the motive-power for every step we made on our Imperial road. She is the leader of the movement for the unity of the British race by a Divine right which is unquestioned. It is not the Canada of bursting granaries and a prosperity unparalleled which holds a commanding position in the British Empire, but the Canada whose national character was formed in adversity. "Lest we forget" should be the prayer of every Canadian to-day, when the newspapers devote more and more space to accounts of the material progress of his country. It is indeed marvellous, but it should never be regarded except as the outward expression of the moral strength which made it possible. The foundation for it was laid in the long years when Canada was a poor relation, when all England's frowns were for her and all her smiles for the United States; when the ideal, to defend which her boundaryline was dyed red with the blood of her sons, was the laughter of shallow statesmen at home. But the faith that was in her never faltered until her future under the Crown was secured by the British North America Bill of 1867, from which Imperialism as we know it now may be said to date. For Canada by this means saved herself from political extinction. What a stupendous task it was may be learned from the memoirs of Macdonald. England was indifferent; the Provinces were poor, struggling, and torn by local jealousies. There were two races to conciliate, divided by religious differences. And on the frontier was a great Power whose ambition to include Canada in the Union never slept. In such circumstances the Confederation could never have been carried without the stimulus of the United Empire Loyalist tradition. If too much has been said about the American Constitution, too little has been said about the British North America Act. The genius of Hamilton created a force antagonistic to British power, the genius of Macdonald created one in harmony with it. He successfully adapted the federal idea to British institutions, and thereby brought the federation of the Empire as a whole into the realm of practical politics. He was, moreover, able to avoid the defects of the American Constitution, the most marked of these being the idea of State sovereignty, which is a source of the growing lawlessness in the Republic. There the Provincial Governments delegate authority to the Federal Government, whereas in Canada it is just the reverse. It is at least suggestive that one of the advantages which American settlers find across the border is the prompt and impartial administration of justice; neither is it denied that the Cabinet system gives greater elasticity to government, and lends itself less to monopoly than the executive system of the United States. With Canadians it is an article of faith that their Constitution endows them with all the benefits of both British and American experience. But political union was not enough to save Canada for the Empire; until the Canadian Pacific Railway was built the danger of annexation was ever present in the minds of Canadian statesmen. It was not by legislative means that the sentiment of nationality could be developed, but by rapid communications; and to connect the Pacific seaboard with the Atlantic Canada had to carry steel rails across a vast wilderness. She was warned that the undertaking would not pay for its own axlegrease, while she was incurring a heavy burden of debt on its behalf. But her faith in herself and the Empire proved equal to a task which might have tried the resources of a great Empire, let alone a struggling Colony. When it was finished England had an alternative route to the East, and the chain of her world communications was com plete. But Canada's fight to remain a part of the British Empire was not yet over. She was confronted by the danger of commercial absorption. This, she was told by fanatical Cobdenites, was her inevitable destiny. Not only was it her interest to unite with her great neighbor, but geography gave her no choice. The Dominion's answer to these cowardly counsels was the adoption of the national policy on which rests the commercial prosperity of the present day. So far from being ruined, her progress is on a scale that recalls a similar stage of development in the United States and in another ten years she will be able to produce enough wheat to feed the people of this country. As for geographical necessity, nothing has been heard of it since Canada, in 1897, gave this country a preference. She has thus led the way in demonstrating that the unity of the Empire may be attained by both commercial and political means. As it was with Germany, so it is to be with us. It is the proud boast of Canadians that what the United States was to the Nineteenth Century the Dominion will be to the Twentieth. Already the Americans have admitted that their dream of annexation is over, and that British North America is a formidable rival. England, however, has it in her power to unite the new nation in the Western hemisphere in indissoluble bonds with herself under the Crown. The Outlook. To Canada it will be the triumphant realization of the ideal which has been her inspiration for a century and more. To England it will be the opening of a new and splendid era, since she will then have thrown aside a worn-out creed which is paralyzing her intellect and draining her resources. Under the present conditions of the world she cannot long maintain the burden of Empire alone. Her only chance of holding her Imperial position is to place herself at the head of her daughter States and present a united front to her enemies. The future of the race, therefore, lies with Canada, the greatest, richest and strongest of them all, for without her the Empire is unthinkable. But the benefit is not all on one side. The Dominion is a nation because her existence is guaranteed from foreign aggression by the British navy. Here then is the basis for agreement. England must give her the preference which Sir John Macdonald desired a generation ago; she, on her part, must assume larger responsibilities for defence. That there will be difficulties in the way as great as those she has already surmounted no one who knows her history will believe. ago Canadian federation promise except in faith. Forty years held little But it has been nobly justified by time. To-day it is Imperial Federation which finds encouragement only in the counsels of the few. Will not they, too, achieve immortality in the same way? THE POETRY OF MODERN PANTHEISM. The English poets of nature of the eighteenth century were children of an age of landscape-gardening and humanitarianism. For them the fair aspects of the world and the generous emotions of mankind were the things that really existed. To the novelists they relin quished the task of depicting the dubious actions of men. "The outward shows of sky and earth," and the gentler movements of the human heart were the sources of their inspiration. Passion they wanted, it is true, and without passion no great poetry can be conceived: but they did not lack either ideas or the faculty of exquisite observation. Above all, they had a fund of poetic instinct sufficient at least to enable them to infuse life and warmth into the frigid philosophy of their contemporaries and to transform it into a sort of religion. Underbuilders in the temple of English poetry, they laid the strong foundations upon which "Tintern Abbey" and other splendid works were erected. They were men with original powers of mind. By combining a realistic description of the phenomena of nature wtih an idealistic interpretation of its spirit, they elaborated a form of mysticism of a peculiarly poetic type. In the universe of the ancient mystics there was little matter for poetry. Everything there was a symbol for something else: nothing retained that independent significance which enables the imagination to create for its ideas a solid and definite body. The revolt of the poets of nature of the eighteenth century was, however, more especially directed against the deist's conception of a universe of mechanical forces. In this there was not left even a subject for the mystical allegories which Oriental writers weave unceasingly out of the phantasmal pageantry of their strange world. The deists invalidated the implicit feeling of a relation between man and nature. Thomson, the first of modern descriptive poets, restored to that feeling all its force and made it explicit. The pantheism of his "Hymn on the Seasons" is not, perhaps, remarkable for any subtlety of thought, but it is informed by genuine sentiment: These as they change, Almighty Father, these Are but the varied God. The rolling year Is full of Thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring Thomson, like Cowper, who followed him in proclaiming that: There lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God, wanted the vehemence of emotion which creates for itself an original and striking way of expression. He was only the obscure progenitor of a famous race. Sluggish of mind and indolent of temper, he left in the rough the notions to which later writers of genius gave a more brilliant form. His idea of the power and beneficence of nature kindled in the fiery soul of Rousseau a blaze of passion in which the spirit of a new age was born: his idea of the divinity of the actual universe quickened in Goethe and Wordsworth, in Shelley and Victor Hugo the faculty: To see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower; which enabled them to combine the primitive sentiment of universal sym pathy and the modern sentiment of universal curiosity in a feeling for natural beauty of an incomparable intensity and breadth. The range and variety of the poetry of nature inspired by the pantheistic movement are indeed extraordinary. The only connection between some of the writers is a common sense of the mysterious affinities between man and his earthly surroundings. In Goethe and Wordsworth, however, the idea of the harmony of all things predominates. Under the inspiration of this idea they weave together the world of emotions and the world of objects in verse with a subtle power of suggestiveness. Sometimes a frame of mind is expressed in the form of a landscape: Ueber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh; In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Sometimes a landscape is depicted in the form of a frame of mind: I cannot paint What I was then. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite, a feeling and a love. But this is done without endowing natural scenery with human qualities, or despoiling the mind of man of them. The relation between nature and man, on which this poetry rests, is a real relation. To Byron's question: Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part Of me and of my soul, as I of them? Wordsworth would have replied that the human soul was not a part of the mountains, waves and skies, but that these things might become a part of the human soul. The connection was a one-sided one, arising from the influence exerted on the imagination by natural objects: Ah Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live. The later poets of the pantheistic school do not appear to have so definite a point of view. Victor Hugo and Shelley, for instance, vacillate between contrary beliefs. In "L'Abime" the French writer gives one of the grandest expressions in literature of the awe aroused by the thought of the unity, vastness, and sublimity of the universe of modern science. But in other poems by him all idea of the order and gradation of things is veiled by the primitive mystery of blank ignorance. Everything that stirs or seems to stir is regarded with reverence. The movement of some frog in the sedge, the action of some human soul impelled by an heroic impulse, provoke the same rudimentary sense of godlike power. This can scarcely be called pantheism: it is mere animism. In Hugo it sometimes to be only extravagant rhetoric. Shelley vacillates in the same manner: but it is his pantheism which seems to be rhetorical: his animism is a genuine superstition. Shelley was a man with a divided mind. In regard to the idea of religion he was a narrow and hasty sceptic, who adopted as the most philosophic form of religious indifference a cold, glittering sort of pantheism which he borrowed, like Byron, from Wordsworth, and, like Byron, emptied of all real meaning in the borrowing. He said of Keats: seems He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb to stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with neverwearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. But he himself never fell on his knees in adoration of that Power. In regard to the sentiment of religion, however, he was as susceptible as a savage. He was the most sceptical and the most superstitious of men. Finding in his vision of a universe of mechanical forces no divine, creative Spirit to worship, he turned in moods of deep feeling to some striking object in nature, and prayed to that. His "Ode to the West Wind" is surely the strangest hymn in the language of any civilized people: If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O, uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! was The passion there rings true. The sincerity of Shelley's animism is the source of all that is new and wild and lovely in his poetry of nature. To him, when he surrendered himself to mere feeling, the world a fairyland. Every natural object there was animated with an eerie life of its own, which he sometimes depicted in myths that have the glow, the freshness and the simplicity of the legends of primitive races. There is, for example, the exquisite chorus in "Prometheus Unbound": The pale stars are gone! For the sun, their swift shepherd, Beyond his blue dwelling, "This is just the way," as the author of "Primitive Culture" remarks, "in which early barbaric man would talk.” In fact, the one great poet of the romantic school who tried to adopt a naturalistic conception of the universe was compelled by his own starved heart to reject it for another quite as fan As then, when to outstrip thy skiey tastic, but, fortunately, far more speed The Academy. beautiful. Edward Wright. |