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Some fair show of the fact of an authentic Canadian Literature may be evident from the following considerations. Let it be granted, as axiomatic, that verse and prose rise to the dignity of literature when they express and promote existence ideally—by delighting the aesthetic senses, by consoling the heart, by inspiring the moral imagination, by exalting or transporting the spirit. Judged by this four-fold test, the best Canadian poetry and imaginative prose will compare favorably with the admittedly authentic poetry and prose of many of the significant British and United States authors in the mid-Victorian era. In Canadian verse in English are genuine ‘gems’ of poetry, which, for vision, imagery, passion, lyrical eloquence, verbal music, and mastery of form and technique, are hardly, if at all, surpassed by the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne.

If this is doubted, in part or in whole, then apply this concrete pragmatic test:—For exquisite tenderness and simple pathos: with Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break, compare Charles G. D. Roberts’ sweetly sad lyric, Grey Rocks and Greyer Sea. For delicacy or for poignancy in expressing the passion and meaning of love: with Swinburne’s These Many Years, compare Roberts’ O Red Rose of Life, or with Browning’s Evelyn Hope, compare Roberts’ A Nocturne of Consecration. For power to visualize the ghostly and ghastly: with Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner compare the vivid, uncanny pictures of a spectral ship and crew in Bliss Carman’s Nancy’s Pride. For beauty of descriptive imagery, verbal music, and expressive correspondence of emotion with the mood of the season in nature-poetry: with Keats’ Ode to Autumn, compare Archibald Lampman’s lovely lyric of earth, September. For dignity of thought and mastery of technic: with the finest sonnets of Wordsworth, compare Roberts’ The Sower, or those noble sonnets by Lampman, beginning, ‘Not to be conquered by these headlong days,’ ‘Come with thine unveiled worlds, O truth of Night,’ and ‘There is a beauty at the goal of life.’ For dramatic power in sounding the depths of elemental passion and emotion: with Tennyson’s Rizpah, compare Campbell’s profound utterance of the heart of woman in The Mother, or with the more subtle of Browning’s dramatic monologues compare Campbell’s psychological revealments in Unabsolved, and in The Confession of Tama the Wise. For the dainty, piquant expression of all those experiences which delight and console us in our humaner moments of reflection and reverie, let these pure lyrics be a daily rosary:—F. G. Scott’s The Cripple, Van Risen, and A Reverie; Campbell’s The Hills and the Sea, Vapor and Blue, and Lake Huron; Lampman’s We, too, Shall Sleep, The Weaver and The Passing of Autumn; Carman’s Spring Song, commencing ‘Make me over, mother April,’ The Ships of St. John, and The Grave Tree; Roberts’ The Lone Wharf, Lake Aylesford, Afoot, Kinship, and Recessional; Duncan Campbell Scott’s The End of the Day, and A Lover to His Lass; and Pauline Johnson’s In the Shadows. Consider, too, that the satiric humor and comic characterization of Thomas Chandler Haliburton are not only in some respects unsurpassed by the art of Cervantes, Dickens, Daudet, and Mark Twain, and that Haliburton’s comic epigrams and moral maxims and certain of his comic characters have become part of the warp and woof of English literature. It is also indubitable that the two volumes of short stories of Duncan Campbell Scott—In the Village of Viger and The Witching of Elspie—are not excelled either in originality of conception or in technical artistry, and certainly not in spiritual beauty and pathos, by the short stories of Maupassant in France, of Stevenson or Hewlett in England, of Cable or Mary Wilkins Freeman in the United States.