by Jan Morris
7
An English Canadian, W. H. Drummond, looked upon these people that summer, and drawing upon reserves of patriotic optimism, wrote the following Jubilee tribute on behalf of an imaginary habitant:
I read on de paper mos’ ev’ry day all about Jubilee
An’ grande procession movin’ along, an’ passin’ across de sea,
Dat’s chil’dren of Queen Victoria comin’ from far away
For told Madame w’at dey tink of her, an’ wishin’ her bonne santé.
Onder der flag of Angleterre, so long as dat flag was fly—
Wit’ deir English broder, les Canayens is satisfy leev’ an ’die.
Dat’s de message our fader giev’ us w’en dey’re falling on Chateaugay,
An’ de flag was kipin’ dem safe den, dat’s de wan we will kip alway!
Mr Drummond was dreaming. The French Canadians did not much resent the festivities of Empire, but they hardly celebrated them, either. If the mass of habitants were numb to politics, an active minority was developing a French Candian nationalism of its own. This was one of the very few countries in the British Empire where there was, that Jubilee summer, resentment of the imperial domination. Much of the French Canadian emotion had attached itself to the martyred figure of Louis Riel, a French-Indian half-caste who had rebelled against imperial rule in the West, and had been hanged at Regina in 1885. Riel was scarcely a French nationalist himself. His supporters were half-breeds and Indians, semi-wild men from the settlements along the Red River, fighting for the right to own the land they cultivated, and live in their own prairie style. But the French Canadians adopted Riel as their symbolic champion, the champion of minority rights, and when the Confederate Government hanged him they recognized the gesture for what it was—a declaration of English-speaking supremacy, and a warning that the imperial culture, while it might tolerate dissent, would brook no opposition.
It really was an imperial culture, and the English presence in Quebec was almost a colonial presence. In Montreal, boldly at the head of the Place Jacques Cartier, Lord Nelson stood upon an obelisk: and if the south side of the Place d’Armes was still French and Catholic around the church of Notre Dame, the east side was dominated by the imperial classicism of the big British banks. Quebec City was still recognizably a capital occupied in war. Physically it was the supreme expression of Frenchness in North America—the Kyoto or Toledo of Nouvelle France. It stood heroically on a bluff above the St Lawrence, girded in grey walls, cramped, higgledy-piggledy, picturesque, with narrow cobbled streets and squares, and nuns down every alley. Carved episcopal mitres guarded great gateways, across the dark courtyards of hostelries floated fragrances of onion soup and coq au vin.
But upon this ancient tumble an imperial damper had been laid. Of the 68,000 people of Quebec City only about 10,000 were English, but they triumphantly dictated its tone. The grand old citadel on the hill above the river was hung about with British trophies: along the road, beside his battlefield, Canada’s conqueror lay beneath a kingly epitaph—Here Lies Wolfe Victorious. The Lieutenant-Governor’s mansion, Spencerwood, was a lovely old house in the best colonial manner, all creeper and colonnade, and deliberately dominating the Place d’Armes was the Anglican Cathedral, built by the Royal Engineers to the pattern of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, with a royal pew in it, and the graves of a Fellow of All Souls, a Duke of Richmond and a Private Secretary to a Viceroy of India. The vast Château Frontenac Hotel, at the apex of the city, looked like a medieval French fortress, but was really a railway hotel, where nobody deigned to speak French outside the kitchens. The more expensive shopping streets were full of terribly British shops, posh saddlers, deferential family apothecaries, London-trained tailors and dressmakers By Appointment to Her Grace. The social life of the upper crust was exquisitely English: some distinguished families disclaimed knowledge of even the most elementary French. The Garrison Club was almost exclusively Anglo-Canadian, only a few French gentlemen of ancient lineage and cosmopolitan tastes escaping the black-ball. Beside the quays the big waterside houses of the British lumber merchants exuded a glow of private comfort, and the famous boardwalk along the bluff, on the site of the palace of the French Governors, looked with its bright parasols and its ornamental kiosks astonishingly like something out of Anglo-India. The imperial presence was inescapable. The British Canadians talked of the French simply as ‘Canadians’; as one might say natives.1
The French generally suffered it all in silence. London felt exceedingly remote to them. They recognized that British imperial policy had not been ungenerous, and they doubtless realized that if ever Canada were absorbed by the United States their racial identity would be much less secure—one could not imagine an antique form of provincial French as a recognized medium of debate in Washington. But they certainly cherished no love for England: not even the exuberant Laurier, Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, would care to claim so much. They often respected British justice. They sometimes copied British ways. But at heart they felt themselves to be on opposite sides of an indestructible fence. Sometimes they dreamt that, with their far higher birth-rate, they might one day re-establish France in Canada. More often they simply cherished their antipathy privately, or sublimated it in Mass and folk-song.
8
They did not, for example, throw squibs at the Jubilee processions on June 22. The Archbishops and Bishops of Quebec, indeed, sent loyal messages to the Queen, and the most respected French Canadian poet, Louis Frechette, accepted a C.M.G.—he was already a member of the Académie Française. Laurier had gone off to London with the good wishes of the nation: the British thought he was putting up a thundering good show, though a Canadian, and the French thought he must know what he was doing, because he was French.
In Ottawa the enthusiasm was unlimited. Mr G. H. Mcgloughlin, at the corner of Sparks and Bank, announced that he would be straining every effort ‘in not only commemorating THE EVENT OF EVENTS but in making you feel that this is the most economic dry goods store in Ottawa’, while Kern’s piano warehouse bore the motto ‘Victoria Is Queen But Kern Is King’. At twelve minutes past six on Jubilee morning—twelve after noon in London—Canada’s reply to the Queen’s message was put on the electric telegraph, and soon afterwards the capital was awoken by a cacophony of church bells, factory hooters and locomotive whistles. During the morning some 10,000 children assembled outside Parliament holding Union Jacks and waiting for the Mayor of Ottawa, who failed to show up. Lord Aberdeen was there, though, and made a nice little speech to the children (‘we need not be high and mighty in order to have a good influence, and be faithful in our work’), and told them to give three more cheers when the first ones did not go too well. In the afternoon there was a singsong on Parliament Hill—Land of the Maple, Hearts of Oak, The British Sailor’s Toast—and in the evening a comic bicycle parade, with cyclists dressed as goblins and Turkish soldiers, and Mr Jardine Russell a popular success in the character ‘Sweet Enough to Kiss’. ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Dieu Sauve La Reine’ went up in fàiry lights, and to judge from the local papers the only disconcerting feature of the day, if you forgave the Mayor, was the arrival in Ottawa, by C.P.R. from the west, of a gang of pickpockets—led, so the papers said, ‘by the Gold Tooth Kid from Kentucky, whose mouth is one mass of gold, and who is one of the sharpest pick-pockets in America’.
Probably the jolliest Jubilee procession anywhere in the Empire took place in Montreal, where the celebrations were dominated by Buffalo Bill and his entire outfit, including Indians, Bedouin, Cossacks and Annie Oakley—The Peerless Lady Wing Shot. On the other hand no Jubilee photograph could be much more poignant than a snapshot of the procession at Utterson, Muskoka, a lumber settlement in the lake country east of Georgia Bay. This appears to have been a lugubrious fête. Utterson was evidently not one of Canada’s proudest municipalities, for its main street seems to be ankle-deep in mud and is lined only with dilapidated huts, either not quite finished or not altogeth
er collapsed. The day looks brownish-grey, though that may be something to do with the emulsion, and the pavements are utterly deserted. Not a single soul is there to wave as the procession passes. Only the celebrants themselves give a macabre animation to the scene, a single file of dispirited-looking men, not a woman among them, trailing morosely down the centre of the street. They are wearing hats and fustian Sunday clothes, and have a determined set to their faces, as though it is only British grit that will see them through the funeral.
9
It was not a contented country. Canada was the most thoroughly emancipated of the British colonies, but it was riddled with ambiguities. It had just recovered with remarkable resilience from an economic recession, and now its trade was increasing faster than anyone else’s: but it was a half-way country, a hybrid or compromise, neither this nor that. It was not a colony in the ordinary sense, nor a nation in the word’s full meaning. It was British in one way, but not in another. It was vast, but it was empty: rich but excessively uncomfortable. The British Canadians were proud to share the glory of the British super-nation, but not anxious to share its responsibilities—‘Why should we waste men and money in this wretched business?’ demanded Macdonald, when invited to send Canadian soldiers to the Sudan. ‘Our men and money would be … sacrificed to get Gladstone and Co out of the hole they have plunged themselves into by their own imbecilities.’ The French Canadians hardly felt themselves to be part of the Empire at all. ‘With courage, with perseverance, with union, with effort, and above all with a constant devotion to our religion and our language,’ wrote Faucher de Saint Maurice in 1890, ‘the future must be ours. One day we shall be Catholic France in America.’
Most disturbingly of all, the Canadians, British or French, were not exactly Americans. The gold sovereign was legal tender in Canada, but so was the gold American ten dollar coin. The gigantic fact of the United States next door overshadowed Canada always, and made the Dominion feel, in this as in so much else, not quite the real thing. British Canada had come into being in reaction against the existence of the United States, and in 1897 it still lived by reflex—its attitudes, its purposes, its prosperity, even the way it talked and lived, decreed by the presence of the Americans so near and so very large. ‘Repricocity’—free trade with the United States—was a dominant issue at every Canadian election, and it was only thirty years since the Irish rebels known as the Fenians had unsuccessfully invaded Canadian territory from across the American frontier, some thought with Washington’s connivance. American money, skill and intellectual influence crossed the border more insistently each year, and in response the Anglo-Canadians became more stuffily Anglo, the French Canadians more darkly French. Canada was distracted by the United States—sometimes repelled, sometimes magnetically attracted, now up in arms at a frontier dispute, now talking fulsomely about blood-brethren and family resemblances. Lord Salisbury once compared Canada to a coquette, flirting sometimes with the Americans, sometimes with the British, and certainly neither Power could be altogether sure of Canadian reactions. This was an uncertain nation, often tart and nervous. ‘We are part, and a great part, of … Greater Britain’, the New York Times had announced, in a generous access of Jubilee emotion, but the Ottawa Free Press replied waspishly: ‘Quite correct. Come right back into the fold. You will be welcome, though some of the bad elements you are afflicted with will not be very palatable.’
The nineteenth century was America’s century, Laurier once said, the twentieth would be Canada’s. The Canadians were proud of their achievements so far—the C.P.R., the settlement of the West, the great Weiland Canal, the creation of a confederation at all in such unpromising circumstances: but behind their pride was a kind of loneliness. The oldest British settlements in Canada were those in Nova Scotia, along the bays and little gulfs of the lovely Atlantic shore. There the Empire Loyalists, trekking northwards from New England at the Revolution, had enriched the original settlements with loftier architecture and more spacious husbandry. There were few more attractive villages in the British Empire than Mahone Bay, say, down the coast from Halifax. It lay delectably around a creek, with three small churches, side by side, reflected in the harbour as on a souvenir tea-tray. Its houses were white clapboard, its green swards ran down to the water’s edge, its colours, in the golden fall or the green spring, were water-colours, clean and pure off the sea.
Yet even to Mahone Bay and its peers of Nova Scotia there was a strain of melancholy. This was Maine without the Yankees, or perhaps Kent without the squires. There was an isolation to these Canadian shores, on the rim of a half-inhabited continent, that was only partly physical. Self-doubt contributed to it also, and nostalgia, and every sweep of the Atlantic tide, rolling up the Bay of Fundy, lapping the old wharfs of Digby or Bridgewater, only seemed to make the solitude more nagging, and the purpose of the Dominion cloudier:
News from nowhere—vague and haunting,
As the white fog from the sea.
In the emancipation of Queen Victoria’s Canada we may detect some prophetic glimpses of the anxieties that occur, when great Empires disintegrate at last, and leave their distant children to evolve identities of their own.
1 Though the best-known pictures of all are of the Chilkoot Pass, the next gap to the north, through which 22,000 people were to travel in the following year. Over the White Pass itself there now move the shiny stainless steel container cars of the White Pass Railway, taking supplies to the town of Whitehorse, and bringing down to the container ships at Skagway the mineral products of the booming interior.
1 Old-fashioned Americans still sometimes talk of Canada as a British colony, and it is true that in theory the Canadians cannot alter their own constitution without the consent of Westminster.
1 It has been getting steadily more British ever since, as the tourist advantages have grown more apparent, and now even has its own replica of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. ‘Havin’ a rippin’ time, old bean’, says the slogan on a souvenir card they sell there, and there is a picture of a man with walrus moustaches and a topee, holding a cricket bat.
1 Now renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties are still intensely British in style, and the Regina depot is like a British regimental headquarters of the swankiest and most civilized kind—the phrase ‘Members Only’ on its doors refers simply to members of the force, troopers or commissioners. The men still wear red jackets, originally adopted because all over the world red had become the symbol of British imperial authority, and was recognized as such by Indian tribes who trusted the Queen’s soldiers more than the President’s. The Mounties’ horses are now used only on ceremonial occasions, but in the slang of the Canadian underworld a cop is still called a horseman.
2 The Scotch and their villages have not greatly changed, and were astringently described in 1953 by John Galbraith the American economist, who was one of them, in his book The Scotch. A man I met at Iona Station in 1966, wearing blue denims and a railwayman’s hat, and leaning against a pillar outside the village store, told me that the book was not generally popular in the community. ‘Not true?’ I surmised. ‘Too true’, was the reply.
1 Sixty years later Britishness has almost disappeared from Quebec City. The Garrison Club is overwhelmingly French, Spencerwood has been renamed Château des Bois, lift-boys at the Château Frontenac are reluctant to talk English, the old-school English shops have almost all vanished and only a few elderly British ladies remain to tell the tale. Wolfe’s memorial was destroyed once by vandals, and when they rebuilt it they removed from its epitaph the word ‘Victorious’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
On Guard
At this door
England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill
Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze,
And at the summons of the rock gun’s roar
To see her red coats marching from the hill!
W. S. Blunt
21
THE Pax Britannica was not a boastful frau
d. Thanks largely to British power, since the Napoleonic Wars the Western world had enjoyed one of its more tranquil periods. There had been the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, but there had been no general international conflict, such as had inflamed the nations on and off for 300 years before. With half the key fortresses of the world in British hands, with the communications of the world at Britain’s mercy, with a British naval tonnage greater than that of any likely combination of enemies, Queen Victoria really was the first arbiter of the world, and had imposed a British peace upon it.
It could scarcely be described, however, as a peaceful century for the British themselves. ‘If we are to maintain our position as a first- rate Power,’ wrote the Queen herself, with sundry underlinings and sudden capitals, ‘we must, with our Indian Empire and large Colonies, be Prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other, CONTINUALLY.’ She was right. The cost of Empire was an almost ceaseless running battle against reluctant subject peoples, so that a professional soldier in the 1890s could have spent almost all his working life on active service. There was no discharge from the wars. As A. E. Housman wrote, in the saddest of Jubilee poems: