Defiant Spirits (42 page)

Earlier, Harris had celebrated Canadian industry in works such as
The Eaton Manufacturing Building
and
The Gas Works.
A decade on, he was less sanguine about belching chimneys, seeing them as monuments to greed that poisoned both the air and the soul. His poem called “Tall Stark Chimneys,” probably written about this time, described “the aspirations of men / going up / in soot and smoke and flame / and God be damned.” Another described the “black smoke, poison fumes and mad, intensified fires” of chimney stacks.
14

The age's most famous painting of tenement life was George Bellows's 1913
Cliff Dwellers,
a snapshot of bustling immigrants in the slums of the Lower East Side. Harris used the same oblique angles as Bellows but showed none of the laundry-festooned, handbill-
plastered, fire-escape-thronged overcrowding that makes
Cliff Dwellers
so enthralling. Harris's Halifax scenes expose a terrible vacuity and stillness from which virtually all animate life is drained (only a few children appear in
Black Court
). Whereas Bellows's painting carried a strong social indictment (it was based on an illustration called
Why Don't They Go to the Country for a Vacation?
done by Bellows for the socialist journal
The Masses
), art historians have been swift—undoubtedly too swift—to discount any reproachful comment in Harris's urban scenes.
15
Although Harris's paintings might not have had the same agenda as the members of The Eight, he clearly wanted his paintings—like his poems—to throw a light on deplorable social conditions in Canada, whether the British immigrants in Earlscourt or the even more impoverished residents of Africville. One of his friends, Doris Mills, claimed such scenes of poverty profoundly distressed Harris, a “wealthy young man” who was “frightfully sensitive.” He wanted, she claimed, “to reform the whole world.”
16

Harris's social concerns arose in tandem with his interest in theosophy, whose system of beliefs overlapped with reform movements like socialism and feminism. Their otherworldliness might have made theosophists seem strange bedfellows for radicals and reformers, but in fact many theosophists could be found among the ranks of socialists, suffragettes and other reformers. The socialist and freethinker T. Phillips Thompson joined the Toronto chapter of the Theosophical Society in 1891, firm in the belief that theosophy offered a coherent philosophy for socialism. His magazine
Labour Advocate
published articles with titles such as “Theosophy Considered in Relation to the Great Social Problem.”
17
The links were also apparent in the case of the president of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, a former worker for the trade union movement and a campaigner against child and female labour. “I do desire to suggest to you,” she wrote, “that a profound economic change is absolutely necessary, that unless that change is brought about the civilization cannot last, nor ought it to last with the canker of poverty eating out the very life great masses of our people.”
18

Yet theosophy did not stop at economic change: a job still remained to be done once the canker of poverty was healed. As Besant wrote in a 1912 article called “The Future Socialism,” economics alone “are not enough to make a nation prosperous and free. Important as economics may be and are, behind economics lie men and women, and unless these men and women are trained into a noble humanity, economic schemes will fail as hopelessly as any political scheme can possibly do.”
19

The material view of history, for theosophists, was incomplete. They believed human spiritual development—the progress towards a noble humanity—was the true motive force of history. Concerns about the “canker of poverty” led to wider and graver concerns about spiritual impoverishment, or what Harris called “the soul's degradation.”

FROM NOVA SCOTIA, Harris went to Newfoundland, its shoreline cliffs and small fishermen's huts the perfect combination for him of rugged scenery and humble domestic architecture. Such views recently drew a number of American painters to Newfoundland. The Post-Impressionist Dodge Macknight (a one-time friend of Van Gogh) painted the huts and fish houses in 1906 and 1909. Then Rockwell Kent, craving “the golden North,”
20
moved to the fishing village of Brigus and created powerful northern seascapes such as
Ice Floes, Newfoundland
and
Newfoundland Ice
before being deported in 1915 as a suspected German spy.

The fact that Harris went to Newfoundland in springtime suggests he too was hoping to paint icebergs, later to become one of his (as well as Kent's) favourite subjects. Icebergs were prominent in the news in the first months of 1921. A mild winter meant more drifted down to Newfoundland in any year since 1912 when the
Titanic
was sunk. But Harris had no luck sighting icebergs, or at any rate none appeared in his work in 1921. He was awed nonetheless by the majesty of the ocean as seen from Newfoundland's coast. It was around this time that he wrote the poem “The Sea Wind,” which contrasted the “soul-stirring voice” of the sea to the crude and ugly civilization built by man, with its “steel and sweat and grime” and the “life plundering rhythm of a billion machines.” Not only was the natural world compared favourably to the brutal processes of the machine age, but also the sea was described as the repository “of many bygone, golden ages—/ Wondrous, lost golden ages,” that slumbered “beyond the far horizons” and awaited their “radiant resurrections” when men would again become great.

All nationalisms, it has been argued, need the concept of a golden age—a mythical period of heroism and creativity that is key to understanding and recouping a people's “true self.”
21
But Harris's poem, with its evocation of a wretched and repulsive civilization turning helplessly to a long-lost golden age, paints a bleak picture of Canada sharply at odds with the optimism and idea of progress underpinning the country's nationalist temper after the Great War.

THE SECOND GROUP of Seven exhibition, which opened on
May 6, 1921, featured only eighty-nine works, some fifty fewer than the inaugural show a year earlier. The reviews for the most part were, if unenthusiastic, at least respectful and judicious. Sympathetic critics like Augustus Bridle and Fred Jacob covered the exhibition in, respectively, the
Daily Star
and the
Mail & Empire;
M.O. Hammond wrote it up in the
Globe.
No review appeared in
Saturday Night:
Hector Charlesworth continued to keep his powder dry. The painters were nonetheless expecting criticism to turn hostile. A few weeks after arriving back from Cacouna, Jackson wrote to Eric Brown that he expected a backlash. “The 7 Group are not loved very much by their confrères,” he wrote on April 24, “and it will only be a matter of time before opposition takes a definite form.”
22

Jackson's prediction proved correct, though the first real attack came from a politician rather an artistic colleague. Three days after he wrote his letter to Brown, a Liberal
mp
from Ottawa named Charles Murphy rose in Parliament to condemn the purchasing policy of the National Gallery. A colleague described the fifty-eight-year-old Murphy as “a fighting Irishman, whose shillelagh very seldom slipped in his hand.” To a historian he was a man who “loved, hated and schemed with narrow, provincial intensity.”
23
In 1921 his hatred was fixed on Sir Edmund Walker, whom he accused in Parliament of turning the National Gallery into “a haven for special pets” and “a place where genteel graft is handed out.”
24

Murphy objected, like Senator Boyer, to the National Gallery's patronage of the Group of Seven. The three works bought from the 1920 exhibition were merely the latest in a long line of the Gallery's acquisitions from artists in the Studio Building. Brown and Walker were staying true to their word that the gallery would support the younger artists. Four years after Harris made his (unfair) complaint about the gallery ignoring Canadian painting, MacDonald could note with satisfaction that the trustees “have shown themselves keenly interested in the movement.”
25

MacDonald knew whereof he spoke. One of his works had departed for Ottawa each year from 1914 through 1918, and by the time of the first Group of Seven exhibition no fewer than six of his paintings were in the national collection. Every member but Carmichael was represented. Budget constraints and closed doors in 1918 did not prevent the gallery from acquiring Thomson's
The Jack Pine
and
Autumn's Garland
as well as twenty-seven of his sketches. And the patronage was ongoing: MacDonald's
The Solemn Land
was purchased from the 1921
osa
exhibition, along with a portrait by Varley of his son John. It was probably the announcement of these last two purchases—and the fact that
The Solemn Land
went for $700—that brought the obstreperous Murphy to his feet.

Murphy's complaint, like Harris's in 1914, was unjust. The National Gallery did buy three paintings from the 1920 Group of Seven exhibition, though in the same year it acquired a hundred other works of art. The greatest beneficiary of “genteel graft” was Walter J. Phillips, a thirty-six-year-old English-born painter and printmaker who immigrated to Winnipeg in 1913 (and who would soon become a harsh critic of the Group of Seven's “stark and unfriendly pictures”).
26
The gallery purchased a total of twenty-one of his works in 1920, mostly colour woodcuts poetically depicting Manitoba's winter landscape and the area around Lake of the Woods. The English artist Charles W. Bartlett was another artist patronized by the National Gallery in 1920. Sixteen of his woodcuts of India, Pakistan and Japan found their way into the collection. Two habitant scenes by the painter William Raphael (who died in 1914) were bought by the gallery, along with a Krieghoff self-portrait, two works by Mary Cassatt and one by Anders Zorn. Other purchases showed how Brown did not limit himself to the Canadian landscape: scenes of Stonehenge, Derbyshire, Florence, Martigues, a Scottish cathedral, an English inn; all were welcomed into the gallery.

Although the publicity surrounding Murphy's objections failed to usher more visitors through the doors of the Group of Seven's second exhibition (attendance was again under three thousand), it also failed to deter Brown and Walker from further acquisitions. Carmichael's
The Hilltop
was bought for $250, ensuring that he, too, was finally represented in Ottawa. A further two of Jackson's works were bought,
Quebec Village
and
Early Spring, Georgian Bay,
each for $300. The big purchase was Varley's
Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay,
praised in the
Toronto Daily Star
as “a smashing epic in bravura style” and acquired for $750.
27
Its addition ensured that corkscrewed pine trees on
granite-bouldered shorelines could vie for space in the gallery with scenes of the Taj Mahal or the Ponte Vecchio.

A fairly typical comment on the 1921 exhibition came from Hammond, a journalist and talented amateur photographer who was once the
Globe
's parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa. He believed the small
plein-air
sketches were more convincing—presumably, more “realistic”—than the larger studio-produced canvases, which strove for decorative effects. These little sketches were, he wrote, “full of atmosphere and of poetic stimulus,” and the larger works “suggest an imagination running riot in a city studio far away from the sane sway of the out-of-doors.”
28
Such were the wages, for Canadian artists, of having a parliamentary correspondent covering their exhibitions. Hammond was even less complimentary in his private diary, complaining that apart from a few paintings such as Varley's
Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay,
he could see little but “multiples of ugliness that weary one.”
29

Most of the visitors seem to have agreed with Hammond. The Toronto collectors remained as reticent as ever towards the painters in the Studio Building. No sales were made apart from those to the National Gallery. The prediction from the foreword to their 1920 catalogue that their work would be accepted only by a “very small group” was holding dismayingly true.

WHAT IS A Canadian? Where does one find one? What does he look like; how does he act and react; what is distinctive about him? How does he differ from an American or an Englishman, a Scotsman or Irishman?”
1

This “puzzling problem,” as he called it, was addressed in the spring of 1921 by a twenty-seven-year-old former architecture student from the University of Pennsylvania and an old friend (since their days in Philadelphia and then New York City) of Frank Johnston. Merrill Denison was uniquely placed to tackle the problem. He had been born in the border city of Detroit to a mother who came from Loyalist stock and a father descended from American Revolutionaries. He was also a combination, in what was becoming a typically Canadian mélange, of the backwoods and the boulevards. Recently he had abandoned his architectural practice in New York because office work gave him “a terrible nostalgia for the Ontario backwoods” of his childhood.
2
On his return to Canada he began working with Roy Mitchell at Hart House Theatre, and in April 1921, on the eve of the second Group of Seven exhibition, he presented his play
Brothers in Arms.
A one-act farce set in the Northern Ontario backcountry, it was the theatre's first production of an original Canadian work, and one of the first plays in English Canada to make use of a Canadian setting and characters.

Brothers in Arms
was Denison's attempt to probe the all-too-
familiar question, “What is a Canadian?” His conclusion was not entirely flattering. The play depicts a young urbanite, Dorothea Browne, whose romantic view of the Canadian wilderness and its handsome frontiersmen has been instilled by American films. In reality, the laconic and unsociable backwoodsmen that she and her time- and money-obsessed husband encounter fall somewhat short of the cinematic ideal.
Brothers in Arms
is a clever satire on the familiar preconceptions of visitors to, and settlers in, the Canadian backwoods. The Wordsworthian nature poetry that inspired (and ultimately failed) the immigrating Susanna Moodies of the nineteenth century is replaced by the enticing illusions of Hollywood—which are, Denison suggests, equally unfaithful to a reality at once harsher and more prosaic.

Brothers in Arms
was influenced by Denison's experiences with visitors to his own patch of the Ontario backwoods, the Bon Echo Inn on Mazinaw Lake. Found in the Addington Highlands, 130 kilometres southwest of Ottawa, the inn and its extensive lands were bought in 1910 by his mother, the theosophist and pioneering feminist Flora MacDonald Denison. She and her American husband began billing it (against much competition) as the “most picturesque spot in Canada.” Mazinaw Lake's main attraction, Bon Echo Rock, was sublime rather than picturesque: a Gibraltar-like granite cliff, inscribed with prehistoric, red-ochre pictographs, rising one hundred metres above the surface of the lake.
3

Flora Denison, who died in Toronto during the 1921 Group of Seven exhibition, was a suffragette and a spiritualist, a devotee of both Whitman and Ouija boards. Born in a logger's shanty north of Belleville in the year of Confederation, she was working as dress buyer for Simpsons in the 1880s when a series of visions of her dead sister, Mary—a mathematical prodigy who died at twenty-two—led her onto the misty path of spiritualism. Her curiosity about the supernatural did not stop her from succeeding at more earthly pursuits. She became a columnist for the
Toronto Sunday World,
a member of the Toronto Progressive Thought Club and president of the Canadian Suffrage Association. In the same year she established the Whitman Club of Bon Echo and then, in 1916, the Whitman Fellowship of Toronto. Three years later, to mark the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, she arranged for lines from “Song of Myself”—“My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite / I laugh at what you call dissolution / And I know the amplitude of time”—to be carved into the face of the cliff above Lake Mazinaw. The massive rock, christened “Old Walt” in the poet's honour, was dedicated to the “Democratic Ideals of Walt Whitman.” The inscription even had the posthumous blessing of Whitman himself: the great poet spoke to Denison at a seance in Toronto earlier that year, assuring her that “whatever you do at Bon Echo will be welcomed by me.”
4

Mazinaw Lake's natural beauty and mystical associations made it a natural draw for members of the Group of Seven. Arthur Lismer first met Merrill Denison at Hart House, and the pair worked together, soon after
Brothers and Arms
was staged, on the set for Shakespeare's
Cymbeline.
The production was commendably avant-garde. Hart House made the first use in North America of the Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia's neutral screens and projections of coloured light. Denison and Lismer's
Cymbeline
marked the most successful employment of the technique. Influenced by how Gauguin, Van Gogh and other Post-Impressionists used colour to express emotion, Appia experimented with the affective qualities of colour and light. Through the Appia screens, Denison explained, he and Lismer explored “the possibilities of mobile coloured light, which may be changed in chroma, value and hue with the mood of the play, not only on stage but in the auditorium itself.”
5
This link between colour and emotion had another source. Besides Appia, they were undoubtedly influenced by theosophical writings such as Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater's
Thought-Forms.
First published in 1905,
Thought-Forms
argued that colours expressed emotions or states of being that could be seen projected in “the cloud-like ovoid, or aura, that encompasses all living beings.”
6

In August 1921, little more than a month after
Cymbeline
closed, Lismer and his family were invited by Denison to holiday at the Bon Echo Inn. Flora Denison had worked hard to attract writers and artists, partly in the hope of turning it into a community of like-minded people and partly in the hope of seeing it celebrated in their writings and immortalized on their canvases. Visitors in her time included
J.W. Bengough and F.M. Bell-Smith, whose
The Silent Sentinel of the North
had appeared at the 1912
osa
exhibition. Her son hoped to continue the tradition, using his contacts in Hart House and the Arts and Letters Club to lure artists to his Bon Echo retreat. Frank Johnston was already an occasional visitor, sometimes earning his keep by designing the resort's tourist publicity.

Lismer and his family took the
cpr
to Kaladar, where guests were traditionally met by the inn's factotum, an Iroquois named Johnnie Bey. A veteran of the Great War, Bey was “mighty economical of words and hopelessly bankrupt in laughter”
7
—the prototype, perhaps, of the saturnine backwoodsmen of
Brothers in Arms.
A two-hour northward journey was endured before guests were deposited at the log-built inn, within sight of the granite amplitude of Old Walt. They could fish in Mazinaw Lake, bathe or boat from the wharf, hike in the surrounding hills, berry-pick in the late summer or snowshoe in winter. “Bon Echo is for those who love nature at her best, and who enjoy the great out-of-doors,” exclaimed its publicity. Tamer pleasures also awaited. The hotel featured a library (a hollowed-out tree trunk fitted with shelves), a croquet lawn, a tennis court and a crease for quoits. Most of the guests were affluent city dwellers in search of outdoor recreations to enjoy in reasonable comfort. The gentility of the environs was emphasized by Flora's beloved Cadillac.

Flora once wrote that visitors to Bon Echo were “under no obligation” to join the Whitman Club or read Whitman's poetry.
8
But Lismer, having studied Whitman with the Eclectics and immigrated to Canada with a copy of
Leaves of Grass
in his trunk, would not have chafed under such obligations. He was equally well disposed to admire Old Walt. Hardly had he unpacked than Merrill Denison rowed him beneath the enormous cliff. “Arthur Lismer came up today,” he wrote to his fiancée, Muriel Goggin, “and I took him out under the Rock
. . .
a great artist's reaction. He looked and looked and could do nothing but gurgle uneffectual nothings. He is one of the elected because Old Walt silenced his tongue.”
9
Silencing the voluble Lismer was indeed a feat.

NO EVIDENCE SUGGESTS that Lismer, Harris or MacDonald, despite their passion for the American poet, ever joined the Whitman Fellowship of Toronto. The fellowship boasted a hundred members even though
Leaves of Grass
was banned from the open shelves of the city's libraries, and the booksellers regarded Whitman (so MacDonald claimed) as “that smutty old man.”
10
But all three painters were highly sympathetic to the Whitmania prevailing in Toronto (and elsewhere) in the first decades of the twentieth century. The publication in 1902 of the ten-volume
The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman,
a decade after the poet's death, followed by three volumes (1906, 1908, 1914) of Horace Traubel's
With Walt Whitman in Camden,
stimulated exhilarated worship of the sort normally reserved for cult leaders. Flora Denison was far from unique in her belief that Whitman was a prophet; many regarded him as a demigod offering proof of the evolution of a higher state of consciousness distinctive to the North American continent. Spiritualism met patriotism and nationalism as he became the symbol of a “New America,” or what a journal of the day (in an article proclaiming the emergence of a “new spiritual America”) called “nothing less than that mystical and spiritual America which centers predominantly about the recognition of the new and hitherto unrecognized powers of Mind.”
11

Since, in Whitman's formulation, America included “Kanada,” a number of Canadians regarded their country as part of this new higher consciousness that was sloughing off the outdated European one. One of Whitman's closest friends and most enthusiastic disciples had been the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke. A graduate of McGill University, Dr. Bucke was a professor of nervous and mental diseases at the University of Western Ontario and subsequently the superintendent of the Asylum for the Insane in London, Ontario. One of the first to hail Whitman's genius, he befriended the poet and ultimately became his biographer and personal physician. Bucke's research into insanity led him to believe humankind was progressing through a “mental evolution” similar to the physiological one described by Darwin. The most perfect example of this progress towards mental and spiritual perfection was, in his opinion, Whitman, herald of a new and heightened phase of perception that Bucke (borrowing a term from his friend and fellow Whitman aficionado Edward Carpenter) called “cosmic consciousness.”
12
Dr. Bucke found dedicated readers in the Studio Building. Harris (who was “very, very interested” in Whitman) called Bucke's 1901 magnum opus,
Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind,
the best book ever written by a Canadian.
13

The painters in the Studio Building might not have held Whitman in the same exaggerated veneration that Bucke did. In a public lecture, however, MacDonald called him “a great specimen of humanity, divinely humane
. . .
He draws our attention widely and speaks deeply for all from the soul of Man.” As a young man in Toronto he had gone through the ritual of applying to the chief librarian to read
Leaves of Grass
and undergoing the obligatory cross-examination “before being allowed to sit in his room to read the book under his general supervision.” The experience proved a revelation. He came to regard Whitman as “a liberator of the soul” and “the patron saint of the modern artist.”
Specimen Days
was, he believed, a book “that any landscape painter might well carry with him as a model, an inspiration or a commentary. It should be given as a prize in Art Schools, a true handbook for the Spirit of Art.”
14

Whitman was indeed an inspiration for artists: Marsden Hartley in 1918 called him the “precipitant” for American painting.
15
Many American poets and painters found him appealing because he embodied rebellion against predecessors (“I nourish active rebellion,” the poet thundered in “Song of the Open Road”) and the search for the “soul of America.” In the case of the Canadians, there was a fine irony in this enthusiasm and esteem for Whitman, whose favourite artist was the Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet, and whose
Specimen Days
eagerly anticipated the day when “Canada entire” became “equally and integrally and indissolubly” part of the United States.
16

IF LISMER'S TONGUE was silenced by the sight of Old Walt, his brush at least was active. During his stay at Bon Echo he made several sketches of the cliff, including
The Big Rock, Bon Echo,
a canoe-level view of the rock near the section, called “Egyptian Head,” where the Whitman inscription was carved. Fresh from his work with Denison at Hart House, Lismer appears to have been mesmerized by the visual effects of sunlight and reflections on the face of the cliff. In his work, the rock looms like a giant Appia screen, turning a myriad of colours—from green to deep ochres—as sunlight and reflections play across it.

The financial security of his post at the Ontario College of Art, combined with generous holidays, made Lismer a habitual traveller through Ontario by the early 1920s. Barely had he returned from Mazinaw Lake than he departed on another Algoma excursion, once again with Jackson and Harris. It was their second expedition in four months, as the trio had camped for a few days on the Agawa River in May. They took the
acr
as far as Sand Lake, 220 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie and almost 40 kilometres north of Canyon. Lismer then returned to his duties in Toronto, while Jackson and Harris pressed north on the
ACR
. After so many trips into Algoma—seven in little more than three years—Harris was beginning to exhaust its possibilities. He found the Algoma landscape “too opulent” and wanted instead “something bare and stark.”
17
Catching a westbound
cpr
train at Franz, he and Jackson followed the rugged and austere northern coast of Lake Superior some 250 kilometres to the fishing village of Rossport.