Review:Canadian Forum single paragraphs/1920-11

Review:de la Mare:Poems, 1901 to 1918 (Fairley)

Single paragraph reviews written by J. D. R.

The Canadian Forum/Trade and Industry/1920-11

From The Canadian Forum, November 1920, p.58

The Cross-Bearers of the Saguenay, by W. R. Harris, (Toronto, J. M. Dent and Sons). Dean Harris has in this volume performed a very real service to his Canadian fellow-citizens. While most of us bear from public school days in thrilled remembrance the heroic exploits of the Jesuit missionaries, yet our knowledge of the early efforts of these pioneers of civilization and of their predecessors, the Franciscans, is in most cases very fragmentary, and as unrelated as a childhood lightning-flash of memory. The Dean's account gives us the beginnings of this fascinating chapter in our history. We shall hope for a companion volume tracing the later phases of the work. The book is popular in style with the glamour of old discovery in the compelling description of the Saguenay's gloomy grandeur, and the romance, strange in Canada, of vanished greatness in the story of that Tadoussac, so well-known in the 16th, so forgotten in the 20th century. There is a wealth of information concerning the Indians, as seen through the eyes, not of Fennimore Coopers, but of men who lived whole years in the Indian encampments.

A Son of Courage, by Archie P. McKishnie (Toronto, Thomas Allen). The title of this story of old Ontario, with the scene laid in a rural community along the Lake Erie shore, is apt to mislead the reader. Billy Wilson deserves better of his author than to be thus advertised. It would embarrass him, as well as the other boys whose pranks and adventures play such a prominent and entertaining part in the book. There is a will mystery and an interesting set of circumstances surrounding the discovery of oil in the community, with the resultant attempts at crooked dealing. A very pretty love theme enters into the story. While there are some excellent delineations of character, the chief interest, as in most Canadian prose fiction, is in the action. It may be that Canada is too young yet to probe into the sterner problems of the battling soul. The bits of description are excellent. The author has conveyed the feeling of the Canadian out-of-doors, and few have done that.

The Trek of the Mounted, by Ralph S. Kendall (Toronto, S. B. Gundy). It was inevitable that, with the popular interest so strongly bent towards Western adventure stories, the R.N.W.M.P. should come in for a share of attention. The danger was that the proud traditions of that splendid force would be prostituted to the demands of hysterical sentimentalism. In this book, however, the story rings true, the "Mounty" tells his own tale. The author is an ex-Sergeant of the force, gifted with the knack of telling a thrilling story in a convincing way. The book is full of the delightful realism that is conveyed in the happy little touches, the familiarly inconsequential details that tell of long and loving acquaintance. It does not need to be impressionistic. Altogether, an exciting, well-told two-part story — without a woman in it.

The Chapbook, A Monthly Miscellany (London, The Poetry Bookshop). Have you, wandering homelessly about in your memory, some three or four lines of an old folk-lilt heard once or twice in boyhood, and cherished in these fragments? There was one such sung by a very rolling stone from "The States" to the accompaniment of the saw-filing in an Ontario portable saw-mill some twenty-five or thirty years ago, that was recovered when the September Chapbook arrived. This was because the September issue was an Old Broadside Ballads number. A glance at the contents of some preceding numbers — Twenty-three New Poems by Contemporary Poets, Decoration in the Theatre, Some French Poets of Today, Rhymes for Children, Four Songs, Modern Prose Literature, A Critical Survey, A Bibliography of Modern Poetry, Some Contemporary American Poets, Aria da Capo; A play in one Act, — gives some idea of the table set out by this attractively edited and excellently illustrated year-old magazine.

J.D.R.