Читать книгу Highways of Canadian Literature онлайн

12 страница из 84

More particularly, it is important to note that the struggle of the British North American Provinces to realize the ideals of Responsible Government, which the Puritan settlers brought with them and which were effected in 1848 in three of the Provinces later confederated, caused the first awakening of the literary spirit, and the actual creation of the first nativistic literature, in Canada. This struggle for Responsible Government and of other higher spiritual interests and ideals before 1848 and afterwards, including the later struggle for political union (Confederation) of the Provinces, not only incited Canadian poets and prose writers to literary expression during the period, but also largely determined the form, substance, and mood or temper of that literature.

A distinction must be drawn between (1) the literature written in or about Canada by British authors, visiting or sojourning in the Canadas and the Maritime Provinces, as, for instance, Tom Moore’s Canadian Boat Song (1804) and much other verse and prose down to Louis Hémon’s realistic romance of French-Canada, Maria Chapdelaine (1922), all of which will be noted but will be denominated the ‘Incidental’ Literature; and (2) the literature which was written by permanently resident émigrés and by native-born citizens in the separate (unconfederate) Provinces, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Canadas, up to the year of Confederation, which will be designated the ‘Nativistic’ Literature; and (3) the literature, after Confederation, written by native-born Canadians, which will be called the ‘Native and National’ Literature of Canada. These literary distinctions themselves are demanded by an important demarcation in the social groups which, from the Fall of Montreal in 1760 and the Puritan Migration from New England in the same year up to the last Loyalist Migration, in 1786, from New England and the other revolutionary States, formed the social and cultural units of the Anglo-Saxon civilization in what, after the acknowledgment of American Independence and up to the Confederation of the Canadian Provinces, was known definitively as British North America.