Our Living Tradition

Again Carleton University’s important lecture series has produced a stimulating volume in which leading figures in the history of Canadian letters and public affairs are seen in the light of today by a group of distinguished scholars and writers.

Professor J. M. Beck, Royal Military College of Canada, begins the volume with a view of Joseph Howe, the colour and dynamic "tribune of the people" who led the movement for reform and responsible government in Nova Scotia in the 1840’s. Professor Pacey, University of New Brunswick, takes a fresh look at the achievement of Sir Charles G. D. Roberts and includes in his estimate an evocative description of the university which was the heart of the literary life of Fredericton during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. M. Andre Laurendeau, editor-in-chief of Le Devoir, gives an account of Henri Bourassa, who was the founder and first editor of M. Laurendeau’s newspaper and an outstanding political figure in French Canada; it is a perceptive study of a leader too little known in English-speaking Canada whose blend of Canadian and French-Canadian nationalism made him a controversial figure in his day. Professor Stanley R. Mealing, Carleton University, brings John Graves Simcoe into sharp focus in a deft and occasionally ironic treatment of the career-soldier who was lieutenant governor of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1796. M. Robert Elie, director of L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, and well known as a novelist and critic, presents a moving re-creation of the inner life of Saint-Denys Garneau, whose intensely personal poetry has had a profound influence in French Canada since his tragic death in 1943 at the age of thirty-one. Professor M. S. Donnelly, University of Manitoba, discusses the most emphatic and revered of our journalists, John W. Dafoe, whose editorial campaigns on most o the great issues that have affected Canada in the twentieth century reached a wide audience through the Winnipeg Free Press. Professor Roy Daniells, University of British Columbia, closes the volume with a sensitive and gracefully written essay on Emily Carr which illuminates this artist’s discovery of herself, of her west-coast environment, and of how she must paint and write.

The lecture series, of which the fourth is printed in this volume, grew out o fa larger programme at Carleton University for postgraduate studies in the cultural history of Canada, now embodied in the Institute of Canadian Studies, established at Carleton in 1957 to take advantage of the University’s proximity to the National Library, the Public Archives of Canada, and the many other sources of information which Ottawa makes available to it. The Director of the Institute, Robert L. McDougall, is also the Editor of the series. The Concern of the sponsors of the Series has been to secure a creative view of the ideas and values of the past from the vantage point of the present through a happy conjunction of speaker and subject. That this has been accomplished will be appreciate by a sampling of the contents.

Publication of the first series of Our Living Tradition in 1957 was warmly received by readers and reviewers, leading to a prompt reprint. The second and third series, published in 1959 in one volume, of even broader scope, also found an interested audience. The fourth series should be equally popular.