The country is crowded where the train branches off into the woods toward Ottawa. The bell of the diesel rings continually for stations and crossings, and when one reaches the wide Ottawa River and sees the green copper-roofed granite of the capital on its cliff above the water, one exclaims with affectionate recognition. This is not Durham; it is not Aberdeen; but in its determinedly Victorian way, it has character. Here at last is a city with a skyline. And if one grins at the French château architecture mixed in with the Victorian, at the general air of Balmoral and granite, one remembers that this is a sign of how much later most Canadian architecture is than American architecture. Canada began to build when, alas, the lovely classical architecture of the American Revolutionary period was going out.
There is one exquisite Victorian thing in Ottawa. It is in the Parliament House, where Scots burst into tears of patriotism when they see the Trooping of the Color. I am thinking of the library, with its little pink-sugar columns in the dome and the delicate carving of the bookcases. The inside of the Parliament House has a miniature charm; the outside is forbidding and Presbyterian, redeemed only by the picturesque folly of the green copper roofing.
The Canadians have a genius for making parks of all sizes—the Gatineau Park at Ottawa is as fine as any wild park one can visit near a civilized city. Even the great rafts of logs, that remind one of the realities of Canadian life, seem to drift down the river in silent, dreaming islands of blameless utility. But the trees and the timber here begin to belong to another Canada, which one had first seen as an outpost in Winnipeg: the Canada of the French. Here the Canadien, as distinct from the Canadian, makes himself felt. People think little of Hull, the suburb just across the river, blocked out of view by the mountains of logs in the timberyard, but it has the best restaurant in the city, one of the most charming on the whole continent, and it is totally French.
Hull is a modest suburb of red-brick houses with green-painted doors and windows—red and green are the signals of the Canadien—and with curious outside staircases of iron or wood that make any row of houses look like a set of cages. These outside staircases are general throughout the French part of Montreal, also, and they are the mark of the immovable frugality, economy and attention to custom that set the Canadien off from Americans and Canadians alike. The staircases are outside to save interior space and to conserve the heating of the houses. Once he has conceived a system the Canadien, like the French, sticks to it forever, as to a logical proposition.
In the streets of Hull, and in the street market of Ottawa, one hears Canadien French—seventeenth-century French, in some respects, in which English mingles. There was a strike on when we were there, and the pickets carried signs inscribed in the mixed jargon that Canadiens scornfully call jonal:
STRIKE, PROFIT DE LA COMPAGNIE. 13 MILLION.
RIEN POUR LES EMPLOYEES.
As one travels along the Saint Lawrence to Montreal through the pretty, crowded country, the French character of the towns becomes strong. At Rigaud, the fine seminary takes one’s mind to Tours or Poitiers. “What is that building?” I asked my Canadian waiter. “A classical college,” he replied respectfully. The word “classical” defines the Canadien ideal. It conveys the idea of authority, and in that, Canadien and Canadian have something in common. There were wine drinkers on the train. At Vaudreuil one might have been on the Seine, for the beautiful lake passes into little channels flecked by the mirrored birch and maple; in the gardens the beans were neatly growing. Monet could have painted the watery scene, as if the intimacy and the light of France had been brought here.
In Montreal, the most exciting city of Canada, one arrives at the mass confrontation of two races. One has entered the vast province of Quebec, and Montreal is the metropolis of Canada. An industrial port, it has a Londonish air about it, as it lies under the smoke of the liners in the docks. It is a place of weight. At night, the high buildings are slabs of electricity in the sky. By day the traffic surges across the great bridges of the superb Saint Lawrence, the streets are packed. You climb up to the hill that stands like a volcano in the middle of the city, through streets that are alive with interest. In the French part of the city, the outside staircases, the crowded balconies where families sit on rockers in the shade of the maples, give an originality to the architecture. There are fine churches, and there are two famous universities.
The Anglo-French mixture in Montreal is bizarre. It is curious to lunch at a French-Canadian club which looks entirely English in its conduct and decorum. It is a pleasure to see tavernes instead of the forbidding Licensed Premises of the rest of Canada. An elderly man came out of a taverne near the Place d’Armes, having wined rather well, and he made a fine flourish with his hand and shouted, “Vive la France!” at us, with all the esprit moqueur of his people. The theater is always active and in a state of change and agitation. There are some excellent actors. I saw Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso in a little outlying theater, and the performance was superior to one I had seen in London years before. The family audience loved it; no sluggish Puritans there. Montreal has something of American luxury, the sagacity of London, the briskness of New York, the sans-gêne of Europe.
The very tension between the two cultures and religions is exciting to the mind even though, outside of political and business circles, the two peoples interpenetrate very little. They are like separate currents of two rivers that have been joined by events that happened two hundred years ago—indeed, if one goes back to the fur trade, much longer than that. The French Canadians are a third of the country’s population, the oldest historically established in the northern part of the continent and—here’s the rub—they have nothing like a proportional share of economic power. Until only a few years ago they were resigned to this. Now they are not. The race of peasant farmers who had formed a frugal, stagnant community, the only true peasantry on the European model in North America, who had scarcely changed a custom or an opinion since the seventeenth century, whose politics were rhetorical and corrupt and whose education, directed by religion, equipped no one to live in the modern world, has been transformed since World War II and is likely to force great changes in the balance of Canadian life. Quebec has become the most interesting province in the country.
Perhaps the critics of French Canada in America and Anglo-Canada ought to take a second look at French-Canadian “stagnation.” For two hundred years the French Canadians have successfully resisted Anglo-Saxon influences, by sheer passivity. They have stuck, unmoved, to their beliefs and habits. The North American restlessness has not touched them. And they have been able to resist because of their language and religion, and above all by the invisibly powerful influence of the French family system. One day I was chatting in Quebec with Jean-C. Falardeau, the historian; we were looking from the Citadel to the enormous expansion of the city, and he said that the French Canadians were really “a vertical people,” like the Jews; that is, they conceive life not as a relation to society, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, but as the relation of an individual to his destiny. The French Canadian, like the Jew, is deeply rooted in his cultural heritage. He belongs to the pre-Revolutionary past of France, and his insularity has intensified the separateness of his life.
The Canadien has always been an awkward member of the Canadian nation. The symptom of his unease lies in the fact that, while he is bilingual in a theoretically bilingual state, very few Anglo-Canadians are. To be fair, they are trying to alter this among the young. What really woke up Quebec was the sudden industrialization of the province during and after World War II. The peasant went to work in the factories, the old system run by the parish priest broke up. The success of the very radical Social Credit Party is a sign of the confusion that the change has caused. Now the Canadien is asking why he is still a second-class citizen when it comes to the leading positions in industry. When Maurice Duplessis, the political boss who had run French Canada, died a few years ago, his elaborate political machine broke down, and there was an outburst of self-criti
cism among the Canadiens. Clericalism, the old “classical” education, had failed to train them for industry and science: that was largely why they had not had their share of economic power. There has always been a strong strain of cultural nationalism in the Canadien; but now it has sharpened into an attack on the Anglicized jargon that has crept into his French. But the more able and less rigid Canadiens now begin to work beside Anglo-Canadians, especially on the university level, instead of standing aloof; and they are discovering that the two mistrustful peoples have many things in common.
“What about separatism?” one asks people in Montreal. Do the French want to become a new independent state? There is always a separatist movement among the French-Canadian young in every generation, and so far it has always faded. But the Algerian movement has offered an example, and in the past year extremists have shown an ugly hand with the bomb. (There has also been some gangster violence in Montreal in the last few years, and it has always had the reputation of being a violent city.)
There are two overwhelming arguments against separatism in the minds of the Canadiens. One is the fear and dislike of everything the United States stands for, especially of America’s attitude to its own minorities and the principle of Americanization—the melting pot. Someone said to me in Quebec: “The Americans and the Anglo-Canadians are naïve; les businessmen are just boys who have not grown up. And abnormal boys at that.” But however much a French Canadian may criticize the British and the Anglo-Canadians, he invariably ends with the same sentence: “We owe a debt of gratitude to British tolerance.” And indeed they do. In what they most valued, the British left them alone. The second argument is more subtle. It is based on a fear of themselves. A shrewd, young, ebullient and very successful Canadien brusquely denied there was any real revival in Quebec. He said it was just a lot of talk among a few intellectuals and that the masses had merely been addled by television. There may be something in that, but his key sentence was: “Give us independence and we would have a military dictator on the South American model at once—and he would sell us to the Americans.”
Canadien anti-Americanism has its half-baked aspects. There are many French Canadians in New England who are very happy there; they frequently reproach Quebec for its ignorance and provinciality. And, after all, like the rest of Canada, the French have become conscious of a Canadian nationality, or rather of the reality of a dual nationality. Even the worry about their identity as a nation, their lack of a flag, and so on, is comfortably shared by both parties, and the lack of decision is seen as virtue:
“Our nation has become adult through patience and without color,” Falardeau has written. “It has had the sober beginning of a ‘mariage de raison’ between two parties who did not choose to live together. Consequently we should not make the effort to create artificially the symbol of a national life which history has refused us…. Perhaps, in a not too distant future, in a world where national boundaries will have become meaningless and national arrogance catastrophic, we may be envied by many other nations as ‘the country without a flag.’”
So the Canadien and the Canadian rub along as best they can, divided by the Anglo-Canadian possession of the biggest share of the wealth and the rival moralities of Anglo-Saxon and Latin. The situation is exacerbated by the company towns along the Saint Lawrence, the towns created for the paper mill or the mining products, where the workers are not allowed political action. Mining, in all the Americas, seems to be run very often indeed on this paternalistic system, and where the executives are Anglo-Saxons and probably Protestants, and the owners often not even Canadian, one can see why the Canadien resents his situation. In my twenties I spent a little time in one of these company lumber camps. It was run more or less on military lines. The French lumbermen were a glowering lot. Their only pleasure was to get leave to go to Quebec and get drunk. The company arranged even that and collected them later from the jails.
But the city of Quebec has one advantage: it is almost entirely French. The tiny Anglo-Canadian minority go to their church in the middle of the city and have little contact with the Canadiens; though I have met people in the university who do make contacts. I find the Québecois excellent company, very genial and far from insular. The charge that the French Canadian is humorless is nonsense; he has a good deal of the vieille gaieté française. I do not know if there is a Canadien tradition of the tall story, but I know one rumbustious man in Quebec who can tell many a good one about wolves and girls.
What a contrast there is between Vancouver and Quebec. Here Canada, and the Saint Lawrence that now takes ships one thousand miles into the inland seas, are guarded by a fortress that was strengthened every generation until the nineteenth century. A real fortress in the old European style. Quebec is the only really European city in North America; its life is untouched by the tourists who flood in in search of the picturesque. It is as European as Poitiers, and only the citadel of Cartagena in Colombia can compare with it. From its cliff, the sight of the wide, forested river is stirring to the imagination. The gray stone of the city has rudimentary colonial primness and harshness. The appearance is a mixture of the severe and gracious, and the trees are tall and fine.
Above all, old Quebec does not look excessively preserved or even preserved at all. There is no “ye olde” note in the tavernes, nor, for example, in the shabby little square on the quays where the sailors’ church of Notre Dame des Victoires stands. The famous seminary of Laval, founded in 1663 and externally altered in 1820, is a fine classical object; but the most attractive thing is the intimacy of Quebec’s shops and restaurants. But if one comes away from Quebec with the impression that it is simply a picturesque spot that leads to the playground created in the Laurentians in the last thirty or forty years, one is quite wrong. The industrial region outside is full of life.
Quebec ought, in a poetic way, to be the terminal point of the transcontinental journey across this bilingual nation. But it is no longer the fortress commanding the entrance to the interior. The real Land’s End of Canada, the end of the transcontinental railway, is the port of Halifax—by sea the closest point to Europe. If sea war is a test of importance, the vast harbor of Halifax was the assembly point of Atlantic convoys in the last war; and for eastern Canada it has the added importance of being, along with Saint John, the only port open when the Saint Lawrence is closed by winter. Halifax has some character as a Victorian Anglo-Scottish town; it has fine hospitals, Dalhousie University and many colleges, and its environs are romantically pretty. There are many lakes and rivers among the forests and farms of Nova Scotia.
But Canada is all paradox, and once again, in these Maritime Provinces, the Canadian Difficulty appears. These provinces, and Nova Scotia particularly, are a natural continuation of Maine, but they are at once the most deeply British and the most anciently American part of Canada. The inhabitants speak of Canada as if it were foreign to them. They were not ardently for the Confederation, which (they say) has ruined them. They are on their own pursuing an un-American and un-Canadian, unmodern British way of life. They are living still in something like the easygoing colonial existence of the early eighteenth century. Money counts for nothing—except inherited money; caste, not cash, gives a man distinction. To be poor is no disgrace, indeed it is a matter of respect. Nova Scotia strikes one as being rather like Ireland, the Scottish highlands or the eccentric parts of Cornwall.
The Maritimes represent a happy indifference to everything North America stands for; these provinces boast that they produce more men of brains, more leaders, than any other part of Canada, that their culture is deeper and that theirs is the happiest place on the harassed continent. The little ports and villages are peaceful, the rocky shores are wild. A little Dutch-German town like Lunenburg, with its white frame churches, its droll charm and its small boatbuilding yards, is a gem. The frame villas have their verandas and balustrades; occasionally, on an older one, one sees the widow’s walk. All through here is the land of the lobster and the famous Gaspé sal
mon; fishing—incredible to European ears—often is free. True, the temperature drops to 25° below in the winter, but there is sun.
Now in spring the lupines were growing wild in the fields, the late lilac was in the gardens. More than 150 years ago William Cobbett wrote with fervor of this country, where he fell in love with a local beauty and wanted to work a farm when he was a younger man. It is probably less prosperous and less populated than in his time, but it pleases. Six stocks, unmelted by the New World, live here side by side; the old Highland Scots, still speaking Gaelic on Cape Breton Island (it is taught in the schools), a few French, German-Dutch, the descendants of the old Loyalists, the Irish and the British. What the earliest settlers—refugees from New York and the Revolution—wanted to do was to perpetuate colonial life; the only thing wrong was that the exquisite classical period of New England architecture had passed. Victorian architecture—that unaristocratic style—had come in. But apart from that, Americans find here the New England past.
The Maritimes and the Atlantic provinces have depended on the Newfoundland fisheries and their own, as well as on trade with Great Britain; both have declined. The enterprising have gone west, immediately to rise to the top of the Canadian tree. They take with them more feeling—the fruit of a well-rooted culture—than is common among Canadians; a passionate, well-wrought character. The recurring undertones of their voices are more Irish, Scottish and English than is usual in Canada. The prospects of the Maritimes are not bright—perhaps that is a blessing in disguise—though there is long talk of cutting a canal from the Saint Lawrence to Saint John, which would shorten the sea journey to New York. But that would not please Halifax. There is a quiet war of ports going on all around North America: San Francisco competes with Seattle and Vancouver; Winnipeg would be vastly tempted to send its grain, not to Vancouver but to the summer port they talk of enlarging in Hudson Bay. The Seaway traffic, which has not had the tonnage so optimistically expected a few years back, would feel the competition.
At Home and Abroad Page 30
