Read Online Defiant Spirits by Ross King - Free Book Online

Northern Ontario as a “world of winter and death” where “the mighty surf is grinding / Death and hate on the rocks.” Lampman offered no more irresistible a view, with many of his poems evoking the bitter cold: “winds that touch like steel” (in “Winter Evening”) and “frost that stings like fire upon my cheek” (“Winter Uplands”).
    Worse than the cold, according to the poets, was the loneliness and isolation—the lack of any other human presence. Lampman’s poem “Winter–Solitude” sums up the Canadian experience of “a world so mystically fair, / So deathly silent—I so utterly alone.” Another of his works, “Storm,” describes “eerie wildernesses / Whose hidden life no living shape confesses / Nor any human sound.” It is usual to point out that the Ojibwa lived in this supposedly empty wilderness, but the theme of the “vanishing Indian” had been common in Canadian writing for at least a half a century. Catharine Parr Traill noted as early as the 1850s that the “poor Indians” in her part of Ontario (the Kawartha Lakes) were “dying out fast” thanks to the white man, who had brought them “disease and whiskey and death.” 6 The Native population of Ontario was no doubt also growing scarcer because their ancestral lands in the Georgian Bay watershed had been ceded to the Crown in the 1850 Robinson Treaties. Then, in 1905, the James Bay Treaty (also known as Treaty No. 9) stated with brutal pragmatism that “activity in mining and railway construction” in Northern Ontario “rendered it advisable to extinguish the Indian title.” The Aboriginal people still accounted, however, for some three-quarters of the population of Northern Ontario. 7
    Empty of people or not, the northland was something whose terrors and intractability—as well as its paradoxical nearness to civilization’s fragile stretches of road and rail—haunted Canadians. Even Stephen Leacock’s sense of humour deserted him when he turned his attention northwards. “Here in this vast territory,” he wrote in 1914, “civilization has no part and man no place.” 8 The statistics seemed to bear out this observation: the Government of Ontario reported in 1909 that, of the province’s 116 million acres, 40 million remained “virgin forest.” 9
    Perhaps the most disturbing presentation of these barren lands was found in Lampman’s 1888 poem “Midnight,” in which the wilderness instills in the poet a cosmic terror similar to that felt on the Prairies by T.E. Hulme. Five years before Edvard Munch painted The Scream, Lampman describes “some wild thing” that calls from the depths of the snowy night, an unsettling “crying in the dark” that is neither man nor beast nor wind. This unnerving sound pervades the wilderness and resounds in the poet’s head in a Canadian version of what Munch (another northerner) would soon call “nature’s great scream.” 10
    IT WAS FROM these “eerie wildernesses” that Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald—like so many others before them—were hoping to forge their vision of Canada. They entered this frozen and supposedly menacing hinterland in January or February of 1912. The two men pressed north through the fashionable Muskoka Lakes, sensible, perhaps, that this region, with its picturesque shorelines and quaint mills, had been well represented over the years in Canadian art exhibitions. Nor was Muskoka either eerie or a wilderness. For the best part of four decades, Canadian and American nabobs of finance and industry, such as Harris’s father-in-law, Frank Phillips, had been building ever more grandiose estates for themselves along its lakefronts. (In an illustration of the dangers lurking in the eerie wilderness, Phillips drowned in a lake in 1910—though in Michigan