From "Conclusion to A Literary History of Canada"*
N&rikrop Frye
■Some years ago, a group of editors met to draw up the first tentative plans for ■p. history of English Canadian literature. What we then dreamed of is substantially what we have got, changed very little in essentials. I expressed at the "time the hope that such a book would help to broaden the inductive basis on which some writers on Canadian literature were making generalizations that ^bordered on guesswork. By "some writers1' I meant primarily myself: I find, however, that more evidence has in fact tended to confirm most of my intuitions on the subject
:-■ To study Canadian literature properly, one must outgrow the view that evaluation is the end of criticism, instead of its incidental by-product. If evaluation is one's guiding principle, criticism of Canadian literature would become only a debunking project, leaving it a poor naked ahmstte plucked of every feather of decency and dignity. True, what is really remarkable is not how lit-tle but how much good writing has been produced in Canada. But this would not affect the rigorous evaluator. The evaluative view is based on the conception of criticism as concerned mainly to define and canonize the genuine classics of literature. And Canada has produced no author who is a classic in the sense of possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers (Canadians themselves might argue about one or two, but in the perspective of the world at large the statement is true). There is no Canadian writer of idiom we can say what we can say of the world's major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference. Thus the metaphor of the critic as "judge" holds better for a critic who i& never dealing with the kind of writer who judges him.
This fact about Canadian literature, so widely deplored by Canadians, has one advantage. It is much easier to see what iiterature is trying to do when we
* Literary History of Canada: Canadian. Literature in English, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: U of Toronto F, 1965), 821-49; rev. and rpt. in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagtnaium (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 213^51. [Editor's note: I have chosen Frye's revised version of the Conclusion, published in The Bush Garden, as my copy text, in part because Frye's revisions make the text more readable as a self-stauding essay.]
10 A-ntSrColimud Nationalism
J J from "Conclusion to A Literary History of Canada"
are studying a literature that has not quite done it If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary cape- ■ rience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting. The conception of what is literary has to be greatly broadened for such a literature, The literary, in Canada, is often only an incidental quality of writings which, like those of many of the early explorers, are as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon. Even when it is literature in its orthodox genres of poetry and fiction, it is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature. [.. .J
The question; why has there been no Canadian writer of classic proportions? may naturally be asked. At any rate it often has been. Our authors realize that it is better to deal with what is there than to raise speculations about why something else is not there. But it b clear that the question haunts their minds. And we know so little about cultural history that we not only cannot answer such a question, but we do not even know whether or not it is a real question. The notion, doubtless of romantic origin, that "genius" is a certain quantum that an individual is bom with, as he might be born with red hair, is still around, but mainly as a folktale motif in fiction, like the story of Finch in thejalna books. "Genius" is as much, and essentially, a matter of social context as it is of individual character. We do not know what the social conditions are that produce great literature, or even whether there is any causal relation at all. If there is, there is no reason to suppose that they are good conditions, or conditions that we should try to reproduce. The notion that the literature one admires must have been nourished by something admirable in the social environment is persistent, but has never been justified by evidence. One can still find books on Shakespeare that profess to make his achievement more plausible by talking about a "background" of social euphoria produced by She defeat of the Armada, the discovery of America a century before, and the conviction that Queen Elizabeth was a wonderful woman. There is a general sense of filler about such speculations, and when similar arguments are given in a negative form to explain the absence of a Shakespeare in Canada they are no more convincing. Puritan inhibitions, pioneer life, "an age too late, cold climate, or years"—these may be important as factors or conditions of Canadian culture, helping us to characterize its qualities. To suggest that any of them is a negative cause of its merit is to say much more than anyone knows. [...]
Canada began as an obstacle, blocking the way to the treasures of the East, to be explored only in the hope of finding a passage through it, English Canada continued to be that long after what is now the United States had become a denned part of the Western world. Oue reason for this is obvious from the map. American culture was, down to about 1900, mainly a culture of the Atlantic seaboard, with a western frontier that moved irregularly but steadily back, until it reached the other coast. The Revolution did not essen-
; Bally change the North Atlantic that had London and Edinburgh on one side of it and Boston and Philadelphia on the other. But Canada has, for alt practical purposes, no Atlantic seaboard. The traveller from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the Straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country, with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent
it is an unforgettable and intimidating experience to enter Canada in this way. But the experience initiates one into that gigantic east-to-west thrust which historians regard as the axis of Canadian development, the "Laurent-ian" movement that makes the growth of Canada geographically credible. This drive to the west has attracted to itself nearly everything that is heroic and romantic in the Canadian tradition. The original impetus begins in Europe, for English Canada in the British Isles, hence though adventurous it is also a conservative force, and naturally tends to preserve its colonial link with its starting-point Once the Canadian has settled down in the country, however, he then becomes aware of the longitudinal dimension, the southward pull toward the richer and more glamorous American cities, some of which, such as Boston for the Maritimes and Minneapolis for the eastern prairies, are almost Canadian capitals. This is the axis of another kind of Canadian mentality, more critical and analytic, more inclined to see Canada as an unnatural and politically quixotic aggregate of disparate northern extensions of American culture—"seven fishing-rods tied together by the ends," as Goldwitt Smith put it
The simultaneous influence of two larger nations speaking the same language has been practically beneficial to English Canada, but theoretically confusing. It is often suggested that Canada's identity is to be found in some via media, or via mediecrisi between the other two. This has the disadvantage that the British and American cultures have to be defined as extremes, Hal-iburton seems to have believed that the ideal for Nova Scotia would be a combination of American energy and British social structure, but such a chimera, or synthetic monster, is hard to achieve in practice. It is simpler merely to notice the alternating current in the Canadian mind, as reflected in its writing, between two moods, one romantic traditional and idealistic, the other shrewd, observant and humorous. Canada in its attitude to Britain tends to be more royalist than the Queen, in the sense that it is more attracted to it as a symbol of tradition than as a fellow-nation. The Canadian attitude to the United States is typically that of a smaller country to a much bigger neighbour, sharing in its material civilization but anxious to keep clear of the huge mass movements that drive a great imperial power. The United States, being
12 Anti-CoioriialNatiimalism
-1
founded on a revolution and a mitten constitution, has introduced a dedoc rive or a prion pattern into its cultural life that tends to define an America way of life and mark it off from anti-American heresies. Canada, having ase| on the sidelines of the American Revolution; adheres more to the inducts and the expedient The Canadian genius for compromise is reflected in tHl existence of Canada itself. [...] | Cultural history, we said, has its own rhythms. It is possible that one of the$ rhythms is very like an organic rhythm: that there must be a period, of a oeg tain magnitude, as Aristode would say, in which a social imagination can call root and establish a tradition. American literature had this period, in tf$ north-eastern part of the country, between the Revolution and the GvilVfe^ Canada has never had it. English Canada was first 2 part of the wildeniess| then a part of North America and the British Empire, then a part of thcT world. But it has gone through these revolutions too quickly for a tradition oj writing to be founded on any one of them. Canadian writers are, even novs? sdll trying to ass initiate a Canadian environment at a time when new tedvj tuques of communication, many of which, like television, constitute a verbal-market, are annihilating the boundaries of that environment This foreshort! ening of Canadian history, if it really does have any relevance to Canadian atf^ cure, would account for many features of it: its fixation on its own past, te' penchant for old-fashioned literary techniques, its preoccupation with the; theme of strangled artlculateness. It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has: been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle: as "Where is here?"
We are obviously not to read the mystique of Canadianism back into the pre-Confederation period- Haliburton, for instance, was a Nova Scotian, a Bluenose: the word "Canadian" to him would have summoned up the figure of someone who spoke mainly French and whose enthusiasm for Haliburton'j own. political ideals would have been extremely tepid. The mystique of Can* dianism was specifically the cultural accompaniment of Confederation and the imperialistic mood that followed it. But it came so suddenly after the pioneer period that it was still full of wilderness. To feel "Canadian" was to feel part of a no-man's land with huge rivers, lakes, and islands that very few Cant dtans had ever seen. "From sea to sea, and from the river imto the ends of the earth"—if Canada is not an island, the phrasing is still in the etymological sense isolating. One wonders if any other national consciousness has had so large an amount of die unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested, $0 built into it Rupert Brooke speaks of the "unseizable virginity" of the Canadian landscape. What is important here, for our purposes, is the position of the frontier in the Canadian imagination. In the United States one could choose to move out to the frontier or to retreat from it back to the seaboard.
13 From." Conclusion, to A literary History of Canada"
intensions built up by such migrations have fascinated many American nov-Fij£and historians. In the Canadas, even in the Mariumes, the frontier was pjxmnd one, a part and a condition of one's whole imaginative being. The tier was primarily what separated the Canadian, physically or mentally, J Great Britain, from the United States, and even more important, from _er Canadian communities. Such a frontier was the immediate datum of s imagination, the thing that had to be dealt with first [...] Mlture is born in leisure and an awareness of standards, and pioneer con-^oas tend to make energetic and uncritical work an end it itself, to preach ^gospel of social unconsciousness, which lingers long after the pioneer con-SjjhioES have disappeared. The impressive achievements of such a society are l&etfto be technological. It is in the inarticulate part of communication, rail-$ays and bridges and canals and highways, that Canada, one of whose sym-JjtJoJs is the taciturn beaver, has shown its real strength. Again, Canadian cul-%ret and literature in particular, has felt the force of what may be called Emerson's law. Emerson remarks in his journals that in a provincial society it ts extremely easy to reach the highest level of cultivation, extremely difficult itb take one step beyond that In surveying Canadian poetry and fiction, we feel ronstandy that all the energy has been absorbed in meeting a standard, a self-defeating enterprise because real standards can only be established, not ■met. Such writing is academic in the pejorative sense of the term, an imitation of a prescribed model, second-rate in conception, not merely in execution. It is natural that academic writing of this kind should develop where literature is a social prestige symbol. However, it is not the handicaps of Canadian writers but the distinctive features that appear in spite of them which are our main concern at present. [...]
Civilization in Canada, as elsewhere, has advanced geometrically across the country, throwing down the long parallel lines of the railways, dividing up the farm lands into chessboards of square-mile sections and concession-line toads. There is little adaptation, to nature; in both architecture and arrangement, Canadian cities and villages express rather an arrogant abstraction, the conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it The word con-. quest suggests something mibtary, as it should—one thinks of General Brad-dock, preferring to have his army annihilated rather than fight the natural man on his own asymmetrical ground. There are some features of this generally North American phenomenon chat have a particular emphasis in Canada. It has often been remarked that Canadian expansion westward had a tight grip of authority over it that American expansion, with its outlaws and sheriff and vigilantes and the like, did not have in the same measure. America moved from the back country to the wild west; Canada moved from a New France held down by British nulieary occupation to a northwest patrolled by mounted police. Canada has not had, strictly speaking, an Indian war there has been much less of the "another redskin bit the dust" feeling in our his-
if  Aritj-i^oioiiiaiNationalism
toxical imagination, and only Riel remains to haunt the later period of it, though he Is a formidable figure enough, rather like what a combination rf John Brown and Vanzetti would be in title American conscience. Otherwise, the conquest, for the last two centuries, has been mainly of the unconsciatu forces of nature, personified by the dragon of the Lake Superior rocks in Pratt's Towards the Last Spike
On the North Shore a reptile lay asleep—
A hybrid that the myths might have conceived, ■ But not delivered.
Yet the conquest of nature has its own perils for the imagination, in a country where the winters are so cold and where conditions of fife have so often been bleak and comfortless, where even the mosquitoes have been described as "mementoes of the fall" I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature, a theme to which we shall return. It is not terror of the dangers or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror cf the soul at something that these things manifest The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems an unanswerable denial of those values. A sharp-witted Methodist circuit rider speaks of the "shutting out of the whole moral creation" in the loneliness of die forests.
If we put together a few of these impressions, we may get some approach to characterizing the way in which the Canadian imagination has developed in its literature. Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological "frontier," separated from one another and from their American and British cultural sources: communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting;—such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality. In the earliest maps of the country the only inhabited centres are forts, and that remains true of the cultural maps for a much later time. Frances Brooke, in her eighteenth-century Entity Montagus, wrote of what was literally a garrison; novelists of our day studying the impact of Montreal on Westmount write of a psychological one.
A garrison is a closely knit and beleaguered society, and its moral and social values are unquestionable. In a perilous enterprise one does not discuss causes or motives: one is either a fighter or a deserter. Here again we may turn to Pratt, with his infallible instinct for what is central in the Canadian imagination. The societies in Pratt's poems are always tense and tight groups engaged in war, rescue, martyrdom, or crisis, and the moral values expressed are sim-
15 From * Cotukaien to A Literary History of Canada"
"ply those of that group. In such a society the terror is not for the common ienemy, even when the enemy is or seems victorious as in the extermination •of the Jesuit missionaries or the crew of Franklin (a great Canadian theme that Pratt pondered but never complered). The real terror comes when the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself far subtler than the struggle of morality against evil. It is much easier to multiply garrisons, and when that happens, something anti-cultural comes into Canadian life, a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow. [...]
Canada, of course, or the place where Canada is, can supply distinctive settings and props to a writer who is looking for local colour, Tourist-writing has its own importance (e.g.r Maria Chapdelaine), as has the use of Canadian history for purposes of romance, of which more later. But it would be an obvious fallacy to claim that the setting provided anything more than novelty. When Canadian writers are urged to use distinctively Canadian themes, the fallacy is less obvious, but still there. The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature. What the Canadian writer finds in his experience and environment may be new, but it will be new only as content: the form of his expression of it can take shape only from what he has read, not from what he has experienced. The great technical experiments of Joyce and Proust in fiction, of Eliot and Hopkins in poetry, have resulted partly from profound literary scholarship, from seeing the formal possibilities inherent in the literature they have studied. A writer who is or who feels removed from his literary tradition tends rather to take over forms already in existence. We notice how often critics of Canadian fiction have occasion to remark that a novel contains a good deal of sincere feeling and accurate observation, but that it is spoiled by an uncormncmg plot, usually one too violent or dependent on coincidence for such material. What has happened is that the author felt he could make a novel out of his knowledge and observation, but had no story in particular to tell. His material did not come to him in the form of a story, hut as a consolidated chunk of experience, reflection, and sensibility. He had to invent a plot to put this materia) in causal shape (for writing, as Kafka says, is an art of causality), to pour the new wine of content into the old bottles of form. Even Grove works in this way, though Grove, by sheer dogged persistence, does get his action powerfully if ponderously moving.
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images. He often has the feeling, and says so, that he is not actively shaping his material at all, but is rather a place where a verbal structure is taking its
own shape. If a novelist, he starts with a story-telling impetus; if a poet, with a metaphor-crystallizing impetus. Down to the beginning of the twentieth century at least, the Canadian who wanted to write started with a feeling of detachment from his literary tradition, which existed for him mainly in hii school books. He had probably, as said above, been educated in a way thai heavily stressed the conceptual and argumentative use of language. We hare been shown how the Indians began with a mythology which included all the", main elements of our own. ft was, of course, impossible for Canadians to' establish any real continuity with it Indians, like the rest of the country, were, seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions. Certain elements in Canadian culture, too, such as the Protestant revolutionary view of history, may haw minimized the importance of the oral tradition in ballad and folk song, which seems to have survived best in Catholic communities. In Canada the mythical: was simply the "prehistoric" (this word, we are told, is a Canadian coinage), and the writer had to attach himself to his literary tradition deliberately and voluntarily. And though this may be no longer true or necessary, attitudes sur-. viving from an earlier period of isolation still have their influence.
The separation of subject and object is the primary fact of consciousness, for anyone so situated and so educated. Writing for him does not start with a rhythmical movement, or an impetus caught from or encouraged by a group of contemporaries: it starts with a reportage, a single mind reacting to what is ., set over against it. Such a writer does not naturally think metaphorically but -. descriptively; it seems obvious to him that writing is a form of self-expression ' dependent on the gathering of a certain amount of experience, granted some inborn sensitivity toward that experience. We note how many Canadian novelists have written only one novel, or only one good novel, how many Canadian poets have written only one good book of poems, generally their first Even the dream of "the great Canadian novel," the feeling that somebody some day will write a Canadian fictional classic, assumes that whoever does it will do it only once. This is a characteristic oFwriters dominated by the conception of writing up experiences of observations: nobody has enough experience to keep on writing about it, unless his writing is an incidental commentary on a non-literary career. [.,,]
Reading through any good collection of modern Canadian poems or stories, we find every variety of tone, mood, attitude, technique, and setting. Bui there is a certain unity of impression one gets from it, an impression of gentleness and reasonableness, seldom difficult or gTeatiy daring in its imaginative flights, the passion, whether oflove or anger, held in check by something medifadve. It is not easy to put the feeling in words, but if we turn to the issue of the Tamarack Review that was devoted to West Indian literature, or to the Hungarian poems translated by Canadians in the collection The Hough and the Pea, we can see by contrast something of both the strength and the limitations of the Canadian writers. They too have lived, if not in Arcadia, at any rate in
j? From "Gmclusum to A literary History of Canada"
a land where empty space and the pervasiveness of physical nature have Impressed a pastoral quality on their minds. From the deer and fish in Isabel-'la Crawford's The Canoe' to the frogs and toads in Layton, from the white narcissus of Knister to the night-blcoming cereus of Reaney, everything that g central in Canadian writing seems to be marked by [he imminence of the natural world. The sense of this imminence organizes the mythology of Jay Macpherson; it is the sign in which Canadian soldiers conquer Italy in Douglas LePan's The Net and the Swc«k it may be in the foreground, as in Alden Jtowfan, or in the background, as in Birney; but it is always there. - To go on with tins aborning subject would take us into another book: A Literary Criticim of Canada, let us say. Here we can only sum up the present argument emblematically, with two famous primitive American paintings. One is. "Historical Monument of the American Republic," by Erastus Salisbury Field. Painted in 1876 for the centennial of the Revolution, it is an encyclopaedic portrayal of events in American history, against a background of soaring towers, with clouds around their spires, and connected by railway bridges. It is a prophetic vision of the skyscraper cities of the future, of the tremendous tech-aological will to power of. our time and the civilization it has built, a civilization now gradually imposing a uniformity of culture and habits of life all over the globe. Because the United States is the most powerful centre of this civilization, we often say, when referring to its uniformity, that the world is becoming Americanized. But of course America itself is being Americanized in this sense, and the uniformity imposed on New Delhi or Singapore, or on Toronto and Vancouver, is no greater than that imposed on New Orleans or Baltimore. Anarion so huge and so productive, however, is deeply committed to this growing technological uniformity, even though many tendencies may pul! in other directions. Canada has participated to the fulS in the wars, economic expansions, technological achievements, and interna! stresses of the modem world. Canadians seem well adjusted to the new world of technology and very efficient at handling it. Yet in the Canadian imagination there are deep reservations to this world as an end of life in itself, and the political separation of Canada has helped to emphasize these reservations in its literature.
English Canada began with the influx of defeated Tories after the American Revolution, and so, in its literature, with a strong anti-revolutionary bias. The Canadian radicalism that developed in opposition to Loyalism was not a revival of the American revolutionary spirit, but a quite different movement, which has something in common with the Toryism it opposed: one thinks of the Tory and radical elements in the social vision of William Cobbett, who also finds a place in the Canadian record. A revolutionary tradition is liable to two defects: to an undervaluing of history and an impatience with law, and we have seen how unusually strong the Canadian attachment to law and history has been. The attitude to things American represented by Haliburton is not, on the whole, hostile: it would be better described as non-committal, as
when Sam Slick speaks of a Fourth ofjujy as "a splendid spectacle; fifteen mj lions of freemen and three millions of slaves a-celebratin' the birthday of hi* ertv." The strong romantic tradition in Canadian literature has much to d| with its original conservatism. When more radical expressions begin to creep into Canadian writing, as in the poetry of Alexander McLachlan, there is stii much less of the assumption that freedom and national independence a» the same thing, or that the mercantilist Whiggery which won the American' Revolution is necessarily the only emancipating force in the world, fn soai Canadian writers of our own time—I think particularly of Earie Birney's Trial of a City and the poetry of F.R. Scott—there is an opposition, not to the demw. cratic but to the oligarchic tendencies in North American civilization, not liberal but to Laissez-faire political doctrine. Perhaps it is a little easier to set these distinctions from the vantage-point of a smaller country, even one which has, in its materia! culture, made the "American way of life" its own. \
The other painting is the much earlier "The Peaceable Kingdom," Edward Hicks, painted around 1830. Here, in the background, is a treaiy between the Indians and the Quaker settlers under Perm. In the foreground is a group of animals, lions, tigers, bears, oxen, illustrating the prophecy of Isaiah about the recovery of innocence in nature. Like the animals of die Douanier Rousseau, they stare past us with a serenity that transcends w sciousness. It is a pictorial emblem of what Grove's narrator was trying to find under the surface of America; the reconciliation of man with man and of man with nature: the mood of Thoreau's Walden retreat, of Emily Dickinson's garden, of Huckleberry Finn's raft, of the elegies of Whitman, This mood is closer to the haunting vision of a serenity that is both human and natural which we have been struggling to identify in the Canadian tradition If we had to characterize a distmctive emphasis in that tradition, we might caH it a quest for the peaceable kingdom.
The writers of the last decade, at least, have begun to write in a world which is post-Canadian, as it is post-American, post-British, and post everything except the world itself. There are no provinces in the empire of aeroplane and television, and no physical separation from the centres of culture, such as they are. Sensibility is no longer dependent on a specific environment or even on sense experience itself. A remark of one critic about Robert Finch illustrates a tendency which is affecting literature as well as painting: "tbt interplay of sense impressions is so complicated, and so exhilarating, that the reader receives no sense impression at all." Marshal! McLuhan speaks of the world as reduced to a single gigantic primitive village, where everything baa -the same kind of immediacy. He speaks of the fears that so many Intellectuals have of such a world, and remarks amiably: "Terror is the normal state ofanj1 oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time-" The Canadian spirit, to personify it as a single being dwelling in the country from the early voyages to the present, might well, reading this sentence, feel that tills
^w? where he came in. Li other words, new conditions give the old ones a new
P** jortance, as what vanishes in one form reappears in another, The moment t the peaceable kingdom has been completely obliterated by its rival is the foment when it comes into the foreground again, as the eternal frontier, the [jjrst thing that the writer's imagination must deal with. Pratt's "The Truant," llready referred to, foreshadows the poetry of the future, when physical pajtnre has retreated to outer space and only individual and society are ieftas ^ecrive factors in the imagination. But the central conflict, and the moods Sn which it is fought out, are still unchanged
Pi One gets very tired, in old-fashioned biographies, of the dubious embryol-pSgjrthat examines a poeťs ancestry and wonders if a tendency to fantasy in ^Jm could be the result of an Irish great-grandmother. A reader may feel the feme unreality in efforts to attach Canadian writers to a tradition made up of šsariier writers whom they may not have read or greatly admired. I have felt [this myself whenever I have written about Canadian literature. Yet I beep com-iihg back to the feeling that there does seem to be such a thing as an imagi-Jnative continuum, and that writers are conditioned in their attitudes by their "predecessors, or by the cultural climate of their predecessors, whether there ;is conscious influence or not Again, nothing can give a writer's experience land sensitivity any form except the study of literature itself. In this study the 'ijjjeat classics, "monuments of its own magnificence," and the best contemporaries have an obvious priority. The more such monuments or such cons' temporaries there are in a writer's particular cultural traditions, the more for-luaate he is; but he needs those traditions in any case, He needs them most Mall when what faces him seems so new as to threaten his identity. For prelát and future writers in Canada and their readers, what is important in Canadian literaturet beyond the merits of the individual works in it, is the inheritance of the entire enterprise. The writers of Canada have identified the habits and attitudes of the country, as Frasei and Mackenzie have Identified its rivers. They have also left an imaginative legacy of dignity and high courage.