PART 1 Biographical Notes - Isabella Valancy Crawford
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ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD
LIBRARY EDITION
Canadian Literature
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Lome Albert Pierce
Editor
Victor Morin
Associate Editor
French Section
lo fhc writers o,
Canada ---past and present-
ihe real H/aster -Guilders and
interpreters of our areat
Ttominion* in fhc hope ihat:
our People, equal heir5 in
fhe rich inheritance, may learn
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ISABELLA VALANCY
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CRAWFORD
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KATHERINE HALE
(Mrs. John Garvin)
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TORONTO
THE RYERSON PRESS
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COPYHIGHT IN ALL COUNTRIES
SUBSCRIBING TO THE BERNE CONVENTION
CONTENTS
Biographical
Anthology 1?
Appreciation 93
Bibliography HI
Index. , - - 123
BIOGRAPHICAL
ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD
FLAMING but solitary figure, singing through the sombre Ontario of the 7o s and 8o s of the last century strange and brilliant songs. The songs were alien to the day and place in which they were sung. It was as though a vendor of foreign fruits were, by some trick of fate, set down to sell his wares in bazaars whose crowds were too unsophisticated to recognize their flavours.
It is perhaps inevitable that what the Irish call a "trouble" should exist between the mystical and the actual life of every artist. In the case of Isabella Valancy Crawford this conflict began generations before her day, for she was of the fatal Celtic origin that gathers trouble to itself as naturally as it gathers joy. The Crawfords were of Highland, and later of Irish, descent, and it was in Dublin, on Christmas Day, 1850, that there was bora to Sydney Scott, and Stephen Dennis Crawford,
ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD
her husband, a daughter, whom they named for a maternal relative, Isabella Val-ancy. Dr. Crawford was a man of wide experience and literary culture. There was much to claim his interest and affection in sophisticated Dublin, but the tales of wealth in British North America were fabulous, and his family was large, and the children were delicate. In 1858 they migrated to Canada, and, of all places, to a little Ontario village just emerging from the bush, the village of Paisley upon the Saugeen River. Here, instead of golden guineas, ordinary farm produce was exchanged for medical service, and there was hardship for them all. But from the first the family lived true to its traditions, and even yet hi Paisley one may hear echoes of the Craw-fords dignified hospitality.
For six years this village existence was con tinued, formative years of a child s life. The Crawfords were unlike the other young people of the settlement. The girls were not sent to the public school, but were carefully grounded in Latin and English by their parents, and in French, which they spoke fluently. Isabella Valancy was especially fond of reading, and attached to the kind of books that no young
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girl in an Ontario village in the early sixties had studied translations of Horace and of Dante, for instance. But to offset all this education there was the splendid and primitive drama of the bush going on around them ; the rush of its streams, the life of its trees, then- death, too, as they fell crashing in the forest under the woodsman s axe. Even more than her sisters did Isabella love the forest; it was her mightiest book, and she possessed a vigorous young body which nature loved and called. Nature was unkind to the others. There were twelve children when they came to Paisley, and only three when, eight years later, the family removed to Lakefield.
Their fatal love of beauty irresistibly drew the family to a romantic rather than a prosperous village. Lakefield, on the borderland of the Kawartha Lakes district was, and is, picturesque. Of its early pioneer life Susanna Moodie and her sister, Catherine Parr Trail, have written fascinating stories. When the Crawfords arrived it was something of a place. Paisley was Scotch and the Kirk predominated. Lakefield was English and here, in the now unused Christ Church, Isabella was confirmed. There were several old English families living
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in or near the village and hence congenial
society.
But it was the lakes that lured the poet. The Kawarthas have been likened to a miniature Muskoka, but are far more nearly akin to certain Scottish lakes, with their clear blue waters and many islands accentuated in beauty by the hills of the shore line which cast across the water a wild charm, and on which one may watch the play of sun and shadow all day. There were no summer cottages, but Lake- field families then, as in the earlier days of the Moodies, used to take canoes and camping supplies up the lakes. Stony Lake, near Bur-leigh Falls, has always been loved by the Indians, many of whom were living on its shores when Isabella Valancy Crawford spent her summers there.
It seems, through what may be gathered from the few survivors who still remember her, and the still scantier records of her history, that these were enchanted days in the brief life of the poet. They were tip-toe days of youth. In spite of her natural reserve, and a sort of bitter pride that was the heritage of her birth and her poverty, when she did join the village doings and the merry-makings of
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the young people, a Lakefield contemporary (and I here quote from an article written to the Globe, of Toronto, in 1905 by Maud Miller Wilson) recalls the fact that she became the life of the party, "electrifying us with her flashes of fun and repartee."
But the father was elderly, the son a mere lad, the Canadian promise of affluence still unfulfilled and so another move was made. This time to Peterborough, then a thriving town. Dr. Crawford took a house which was one of a row of several facing on the market square, at that time the centre of the town s activities. The front windows looked on shops and busy stalls where week after week the farmers came in to sell their produce. But the back windows looked on beauty on the rushing Otonabee River, silver-stiff in winter, and in summer the channel for great drives of logs sent through to Lake Ontario from the timber stretches of the North. And in this house the young woman, who for years had been studying and experimenting in verse forms, now set her self deliberately to take stock of her resources. There was need to plan her future, for even in a larger field Dr. Crawford s practice was not adequate to their actual needs.
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ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD
Paisley had taught her the woods and the spirit of the pioneers, and Lakefield had shown her northern lakes and Indian life. "Malcolm s Katie," that long-sustained narrative of farm life and western woods, a magnificent poem, at first sight dwarfed of its stature by a foolish name, was thought out and written here, and so was the famous western cowboy poem, " Old Spookses Pass," a gorgeous living, moving thing carried through with a man s touch and a man s imagery, again pathetically marred by its name and an attempt to make the glowing lines popular by an Ameri canized cowboy jargon. She tried to anticipate her audience. Financial success was necessary, and her hope lay in a compelling theme. Everyone was talking of the North west, the great new country just then coming out of its solitude. The young poet had never been west of Ontario, but she listened to travellers tales and her vivid imagination caught fire. Her account of a stampede of cattle hi "Old Spookses Pass" is still considered a remarkable tour force from a realistic as well as a poetic standpoint.
At this time she attacked also the writing of short stories, and was almost instantly success-
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ful. Her work was accepted by Frank Leslie s and other American magazines. But the payment was so small that even the discount on American money, then fifteen per cent., was a sad loss. An editorial in Varsity, of Toronto, January 23rd, 1886, on the subject of "the encouragement of native literature," contains one of the few comments to be found on the prose work: "The novel by Isabella Valancy Crawford in the Globe is vastly superior to the ordinary run of newspaper fiction." The concluding lines of the editorial are a naive comment on the attitude of the day.
"We hope that Canadian editors will endeavour to do their best to encourage native talent. They should also pay for it."
On the death of Dr. Crawford the support of her mother and invalid sister devolved upon Isabella, the brother having left for the district of Algoma. They moved to a little roughcast cottage hidden behind lilac bushes on Brock Street. Two pathetic incidents stand out in this period. The delicate Emma Naomi, the younger sister, was always busy with beautiful and intricate designs in embroidery. On one piece she had worked fora year, and sent it, in hopes of a sale or a prize,
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to the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia. It was lost in the mails. At the same time it was announced that Isabella had won a six- hundred dollar prize in a short story competition. This meant financial salvation. But on the heels of the first cheque for a hundred dollars came the news that the prize-giving corporation had failed and nothing more was to be expected from them. It is not improbable that this double blow, so tragic for the two sisters, should have hastened the heart disease which afflicted Emma Naomi, as it had the other ill-fated children, for she died, leaving Isabella and her mother alone.
They left Peterborough and went to live in Toronto, taking lodgings over a grocery shop at the corner of King and John Streets, kept by Mrs. Charles J. Stuart, who was a sincere friend to the young poet and her mother. The two were very lonely. The spirit which in Peterborough had been too proud to admit visitors because there was "no fire in the drawing-room to keep them warm" was not that which beckons those friends and acquaintances who pass on the legend of one s work. Single-handed, Isabella fought her battle for recognition. She would take her poems to
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the Globe and the Telegram and sell them for little or nothing. They gleamed there for a day in their strange foreign beauty and were forgotten. She made them of subjects far and near, sometimes of roses in Madrid, sometimes of a little French laundress, washing out her clothes on the bank of a river that she had never seen, sometimes of Toronto in September, and once when the soldiers were returning after the Battle of Batouche, in 1885, she made a beautiful song of welcome for them, which appeared in the Toronto Telegram, and is called "The Rose of a Nation s Thanks."
There were no clubs and associations then to advise the public that it would be well to admire this work. There were, however, a few discerning critics and, oddly enough, the critics were with the poet.
Down the lane-like Jordan Street, in a certain dingy building, there was installed a brilliant journal called The Week, which existed for over a decade and became a decided literary influence. It was founded by Goldwin Smith, with Charles G. D. Roberts as its first editor. A study of the files shows such names as those of Archibald Lampman, Bliss Carman,
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W. W. Campbell and others equally well known to-day. It is interesting also that in these comparatively early days a woman editor was already in evidence, for we find that Mrs. J. W. F. Harrison (Seranus) was the musical, and then the literary, editor of The Week, and that Sara Jeanette Duncan was also an editor. It was at this time, while Mrs. Harrison was its literary editor, that a new writer climbed those dingy stairs. "A tall, dark young woman," says Mrs. Harrison, "one whom most people would feel was difficult, almost repellant in her manner. But her work charmed me, though I had to tell her," she declares, still regretful after all the years, "that we didn t pay for poetry."
Nevertheless, the friendship and support of a fellow-worker, herself a true poet, must have meant much to Miss Crawford. At this time she was launching on a perilous adventure, that of her first book. It was a cheaply-bound little paper volume, having for the name poem "Old Spookses Pass." Its writer was forced to bear all expenses of publication, and the book, now one of the most eagerly sought volumes of the collector of Canadiana, never
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even paid for itself. It was Mrs. Harrison, chiefly, who called attention to this book in The Week and elsewhere. Though the Canadian public ignored the work, in justice it must be said that this was not the case in England. The London Athenaeum compared certain of the poems with the work of standard English poets ; the Spectator referred to Miss Crawford s blank verse as "indeed of no ordinary kind vigorous, powerful"; the Illustrated London News described her verse as "abounding in picturesque narrtion, glowing language and pathetic touches, combined with simple, impressive dignity"; the Graphic declared the humorous poems "equal to anything Colonel Hay had ever published," and characterized the book as "throughout a delightful one." Lord Dufferin, in a letter written to the poet from the British Embassy at Constantinople, says: "It is time now that Canada should have a literature of its own, and I am glad to think that you have so nobly shown the way."
Through the vivid recollections of two friends remarkable impressions have been given to the writer.
Mrs. A. J. Heffernan, formerly Miss Stuart,
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says: "I was a young girl at the time of her death, but how could I forget one like Miss Crawford! She seemed to me like a being from another planet. There was some thing about her that the world in general could not be expected to understand. She and her mother lived almost completely by themselves during the years that they lodged with us, except for one or two friends. But they had theirown pursuits. They were deeply interested in English and European literature, and would speak French together constantly. Miss Crawford always liked me to practise my school-girl French with her. I used to watch her make her wonderful Irish potato cakes in our kitchen while she described the whole process to me in the language I was trying so hard to learn. I think she was really gay at heart, but at times seemed sad and depressed. Her passion for music was almost as great as her love for books and poetry. She studied the piano and played very well indeed, collecting a good deal of music, a part of which she gave to me.
. . . And there were things to charm a young girl in the two little rooms upstairs. I remember a flounce of precious old lace, and chintzes, and quaint ornaments, and an In-
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dian prayer rug, Miss Crawford's special treasure, sent to her by her uncle, Dr. John Irwin Crawford, a naval officer who was much on the Indian seas .... Miss Crawford was not exactly beautiful, but I shall never forget the wonderful animation of her face at times, and its sadness in repose."
Mrs. Donald Urquhart, of Toronto, at whose hospitable house the Crawfords were always at home during the years they lived in Toronto, remembers "as though it were yesterday" this girl whose life was always creative, and always drawn to far-away and exquisitely suggestive things. "She would forget all her failures and discouragements when she was at the piano, or composing poetry or stories.
Then there was a strange thing! she had a great delight in cutting out and making the most unique and beautiful little foreign figures, tiny dolls, always of oriental types, made out of vivid coloured silks or satins; Rajahs and Mandarins and Hindoo priests in their robes and turbans, with their attendants perfectly costumed. She would spend hours over these things, making every detail correct. They were arranged on a silk-covered cardboard stage hah* the size of my dining-room table."
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ISABELLA VALANCY CRAWFORD
"She could not afford to have her poems well bound," continues Mrs. Urquhart, "so she made a special cover for ours, knowing how much my husband and I appreciated her work." And I held in my hand "Old Spookses Pass" in faded peacock blue satin, covered with fine rose-point lace.
And against this a recollection, faint with age, of the young woman whom "as a child I used to watch in church wondering what a poet was like."
It was in Peterborough that Katherine Wallis, the well-known Canadian sculptor, recalled the scornful attitude of the people of the town, who thought that a somewhat detached manner on the part of the poet was a mere affectation. Miss Wallis also remembers the fact that children would follow her to call out the, to them, fantastic and unfamiliar name "Valancy." "Even yet," she says, "you may ask in vain in the public library here for a copy of her Collected
Poems ."
Perhaps the struggle was too hard. Perhaps an ardent flame burns too fast. Practical people will say that a woman with an inherited
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heart disease courts death by overwork. At any rate there was no premonition of her swift end, which occurred in Toronto on the 12th of February, 1887.
Her body was taken to Peterborough and there, where the Otonabee encircles the beautiful Little Lake Cemetery, she lies, and over her grave is a Celtic cross erected by a group of friends.
"In Toronto," says Mrs. Heffernan, recalling a bitter winter s day, "several people sent flowers. But one tribute was nameless. It was a great white bloom bearing the message, "The Rose of a Nation s Thanks ."
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Next - Crawford, Isabella Valancy Part 2 - Ontario Poet Anthology
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