American nights entertainment
Rock_, the first novel by Ralph Connor, that was read everywhere.
iii
I’ll not have to be telling you what it was in _Black Rock_ won so
many readers for Ralph Connor. Humour and pathos are bound up in the
lives the young minister of St. Stephen’s was writing about; ye could
lay hold quickly of his sympathy for those men who were in some
ways as helpless as bairns and were half-brutalised by their work
and surroundings. It’s the effect they have on each other, too. Them
picking up _Black Rock_ to read were struck with something fresh and
wild and clean, withal. They sensed a tenderness about the feeling of
the story, like heather softening the bare hillside, and more than a
morsel of the everlasting hope in which men endure hard and lonely
toils. The same held true of the books that followed _Black Rock_;
for there had to be other books. Ye mind _The Sky Pilot_ and _The Man
From Glengarry_ and _The Foreigner_ and _Corporal Cameron_ and _The
Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail_. Take _The Foreigner_. On the edge of
Winnipeg, Charles Gordon found a Settlement of Slavs--Ruthenians,
Russians, Galicians and who not. They lived in a grim little collection
of huts, a dozen in a room, all huddled up, drinking and dirty and
violent; and on them was still the shadow of tyrannies in the Old
Country. Drinking and dirty and violent with a violence dark and
beautiful, Charles Gordon found them. Aye, he found the huts and the
men, and Ralph Connor that was in him found a story. Ralph Connor
took the splendid young heart in Kalmar, the son of a nihilist, and
brought it to fight its way out of the ruck of aliens and make for the
new country beyond the Saskatchewan, where there is prairie and where
the lakes lie on the surface of the prairie like jewels on a woman’s
breasts. Then, in _Corporal Cameron_, was Connoring the first grand
tale of the North-West Mounted Police, by a man who kenned them, as
followers in his tracks scarce can be said to. A richt fine love story
is this of the lad who was born in a Scottish glen and came to ride out
in the Canadian blizzards; it’s furthered in _The Patrol of the Sun
Dance Trail_, which makes use of the half-breed and Indian rebellion
of Louis Riel. But there’s a muckle I love in the book besides the
adventure--Cameron and his gold-haired, plucky wife and the hesitant
wonder of the first fine feeling of the lover. It fashes me how a man
says what’s down in the hearts of such a many other men and women. Give
me to understand how it’s done! Here’s the Reverend Charles Gordon
dwelling this quarter century and longer in Winnipeg, building up St.
Stephen’s and seeing it transformed from a plain chapel of wood into
a handsome church of stone, with a church house where the young men
without homes can live, and where there’s sewing and amateur acting and
films and bowling every night of the week. In the daytime the Reverend
Gordon will maybe attend court to help get some boy straightened
out and become a guardian to him; or he’ll be at meetings in his
church where revolutionary agitators are spouting the downfall of all
institutions and then voting thanks to the preacher because, as they
put it, he has given us an absolutely square deal. And after supper you
would find him in his home at evening prayers with the three youngsters
who appeared to enjoy their devotions. There’s no stiltedness in the
man at all. He reads from Scripture concerning Paul taking Timothy with
him to learn what were the problems of that day. And he closes the book
on his finger to remark what a sensible, canny thing for Paul to do.
Some of our theological seminaries, adds the father, shut a man out
from contact with life, shut him up with professors, and when he comes
out of his cloister he canna recognise a social problem if it walks
up to him on the street. The trouble with me, he finishes, when I had
gotten out of the seminary.
But he’s generous to a fault sore in a son of Scots folk. If his right
hand is earning moneys with a pen, his left hand is spending lavish
and free. There’s his salary as minister to the kirk goes flowing out
several times over in gifts and helpings to people. I mind the year
quite long back when the Presbyterian General Assembly of Canada was
meeting in Toronto and Doctor the Reverend Gordon put down $10,000 so
every missionary minister and his wife in the breadth of Canada might
attend the General Assembly, expenses paid. Some of these men and their
wives hadn’t been out of the woods in years. Ralph Connor knew what
this meant.
iv
Then, when the Great War came thundering, our sky pilot stood up and
said Canada must send a half million men. Many scoffed at him; but he
was right, and we sent the half million and over sixty thousand didna
come back. From St. Stephen’s there was an enlistment of close on four
hundred, including the minister and five members of the Session. The
dominie went in the spring of 1915 after the congregation had confirmed
his leave of absence--Major Charles W. Gordon, chaplain to the
Forty-third Battalion Cameron Highlanders of Canada. Many St. Stephen’s
men were enrolled in this battalion and one of the members of the
Session, Robert McDonald Thomson, was their first colonel. It was the
Western Front--from the Ypres Salient, Sanctuary Wood, the bloodshed
of the Somme and back again to Arras. In that time Ralph Connor saw
the regiment shrunk from full strength to two officers and sixty-five
men. He knelt down amid the roar of guns and the hailing of machine
gun bullets to do last rites for his own men and comrades. Among them
was Colonel Thomson. On the eighth day of October, 1916, the outfit
stormed the Regina Trench on the Somme. Unable to advance, they wouldna
retreat. So they died where they stood.
v
_The Major_ and _The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land_ are books ye’ll verra
well recollect; likewise the novel of twa years back, _To Him That
Hath_. Since ye hanna read it, it’s the new novel from the pen of Ralph
Connor, I’ll just speak a word of to ye. He calls it _The Gaspards of
Pine Croft_ and explains it is “a romance of the Windermere Valley.”
A story of the life and moulding of Paul Gaspard, it is. Here’s a mon
with two powerful strains mixed and fighting for mastery of him. From
his mither, Paul inherits a rare sense of the presence of God; his
father gifted him with a fine artist sense, and a bounding spirit,
a passion for life to the full. The clash of the two men in the boy
grows with him to manhood, so that after the death of his mither he
stands between two women, who beckon different ways. Then when a great
decision is put before him the mon takes upon himself a burden and
a responsibility that test him body and soul. ’Tis a life and death
struggle set in the grand country Ralph Connor makes his own. There’s
the valley of the Windermere before you with the Gaspard ranch, Pine
Croft, flanked on one side by a great bend of the Columbia River and
on the other by a mountain wall of virgin forest. In this mysterious
wilderness, the figures of Indians do come and go, touching the lives
of the white people with disaster, with dread--with an unco beauty as
well.
Books by Ralph Connor
_Beyond the Marshes_
1898 _Black Rock_
1899 _The Sky Pilot_
_Ould Michael_
1901 _The Man from Glengarry_
1902 _Glengarry School Days_
_Breaking the Record_
1904 _The Prospector_
_The Pilot of Swan Creek_
_Gwen_
1906 _The Doctor of Crow’s Nest_
_The Life of Dr. James Robertson_
1909 _The Foreigner; A Tale of Saskatchewan_
_The Angel and the Star_
_The Dawn by Galilee_
_The Recall of Love_
1912 _Corporal Cameron of the North-West Mounted Police:
A Tale of the MacLeod Trail_
1914 _The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail_
1917 _The Major_
1919 _The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land_
1921 _To Him That Hath_
1923 _The Gaspards of Pine Croft_
Sources on Ralph Connor
_Ralph Connor, the Well-Beloved._ Booklet published in 1914 by George
H. Doran Company. Now out of print.
_Silver Jubilee, 1895-1920, of St. Stephen’s, Winnipeg._ Booklet
published by the congregation of St. Stephen’s Presbyterian Church,
Winnipeg, Manitoba.
_II. Here, There and Everywhere_
i
In his new book, _The Humanizing of Knowledge_, the author of that
fascinating study, _The Mind in the Making_, James Harvey Robinson,
says: “Personally I have reached the conclusion, after many years
of teaching, that one should choose for instruction, whether one be
dealing with young or old, _some phase of human interest rather than
some field of scientific investigation_”--and he goes on with force
and plainness to point out the defect of an educational scheme in
which knowledge is imparted by going in and out of great numbers of
pigeonholes. He is really pleading for methods of instruction that
shall take account of the ordinary man’s interest in his world, and
shall proceed by the natural process of mental associations instead
of by artificial and arbitrary tetherings to the post of this and
that “subject.” Seldom has the difficulty been put with more brevity,
simplicity and general sweetness of temper, or in a way to give such
decent courage to individual self-respect. “We are not many of us
interested in isolated scientific facts of any kind. That species of
interest, as we have seen, is reserved for the few. But all of us are
open to the effects of such new knowledge as gets under our skins.
And the great art is not to exhibit our own insight and learning but
really to influence those whom we are aiming to influence.” There could
be no better text or opening for a chapter devoted to books of many
varieties, inasmuch as books have always taken, except where restricted
by school formulas, the lines of human interests and the path of some
natural association of ideas. In this sense, though teaching may need
to be humanised, knowledge has never been without its humanisation. A
James Harvey Robinson cannot write about science without being led into
the absorbing history of the mind that is slowly achieving science. A
Camille Flammarion, discussing astronomy, finds it above all things
natural to relate his knowledge with man’s religious ideas. An L. P.
Jacks, analysing religious doubts, moves directly over the border of
so-called psychology into the sphere of conduct and behaviour, because
the answer lies over there. A George Santayana employs poetry to state
those portions of his philosophy which prose can scarcely embody with
sufficient expressiveness; bases criticism on his philosophy and
distils or re-distils philosophical ideas from all the varieties of his
learning.
To take M. Flammarion, for example. His new work, _Dreams of an
Astronomer_, could without any essential inaccuracy be styled “A
Humanisation of Astronomy.” Here is a book produced in this French
scientist’s eighty-first year, at an age where “isolated scientific
facts” had lost all fanciful meanings and were seen only in their warm
and present human significance. The point with M. Flammarion was not
that we live on a poor little world in a vast universe composed of
worlds within worlds and flaming suns and revolving planets, nor that
this universe so immense is but an item of larger immensities. The
point was in the significance of these facts to the heart and mind of
a man or a woman. What does it mean as regards our attempt to know
God? In what perspective does it place our aspirations and our efforts
toward what we sometimes call “righteousness”? Flammarion gives the
richness of his physical knowledge in untechnical language; in words
that summon the imagination he constructs pen pictures of other worlds
than ours. That we may have the value of comparison, he describes Venus