Defiant Spirits by Ross King Page B

Toronto. Harris certainly maintained an interest in urban subjects, and in future years Sheppard would create ambitious and magically beautiful Toronto cityscapes. But the experiment at the foot of Bathurst Street would never be repeated. Harris and MacDonald seem to have concluded that there was no real “Canadian tang” in paintings of chimney stacks and gasometers: such works could as easily have been done in Berlin or Amsterdam or London.
    There was, of course, only one direction to go in order to paint Canada “in her own spirit.” Soon afterwards, with snow still on the ground, the two men set off for the bush.

4EERIE WILDERNESSES
    IN 1884 A Montreal surgeon named William Hales Hingston published a treatise called The Climate of Canada and Its Relation to Life and Health. The relation, as Hingston saw it, was a happy one: the country’s northerly latitudes gave its citizens good health, long life and “increased muscular development.” 1 The Grand Trunk Railway may well have been justified, therefore, in promoting itself as the “Highway to Health and Happiness.” For many people, however, Canadians and immigrants alike, the physical benefits of a northerly climate were offset by some inconvenient realities. For them the Canadian north presented a more discouraging prospect.
    North is, of course, a relative term. From Algonquin Provincial Park, situated between the 45th and 46th parallels of latitude, the North Pole and the equator are virtually equidistant. The park shares the same latitude as Venice, Milan and the wine-growing region of Bordeaux in southwest France, and it is only a few degrees of latitude higher than Provence, extolled by French writers at exactly the same time as a “southern” Eden. 2
    But the Canadian “north” is a concept concerned less with degrees of latitude than perceptions of remoteness, underpopulation, lack of cultivation and, above all, harsh winter weather. Whatever its beauty and grandeur, whatever its appeal for boating enthusiasts, fly-
fishermen and ozone-gasping valetudinarians, the forested wilderness beyond the bounds of Ontario’s cities and towns was regarded by many who visited it, especially in winter, as alien and dangerous. Even Grey Owl, a man who lived closely and apparently harmoniously with nature, wrote of the “brooding relentless evil spirit of the Northland” that sought “the destruction of all travellers.” 3
    Many volumes of writing affirmed this bleak view of the Canadian north, from early stories of the despairing Portuguese explorer’s lament, Cà nada (“here nothing”), to the numerous accounts of Franklin’s failed quest to find the Northwest Passage. The popular adventure stories of Robert M. Ballantyne and J. Macdonald Oxley catalogued with gusto the ever-present dangers of Canada’s northlands. Oxley’s 1897 novel The Young Woodsman, or Life in the Forests of Canada confirms the hero’s mother’s “dread of the woods” with references to people freezing to death or getting dashed against the rocks or eaten by wolves. 4
    At the opposite end of the literary spectrum, equally harrowing portraits of spectral woods and frigid winds came from the pens of the Confederation poets Wilfred Campbell and Archibald Lampman. Campbell, who finished high school in Owen Sound in 1879, two years after Tom Thomson’s birth, was known as the “laureate of the lakes” (and he would become one of Thomson’s favourite writers). In 1905 he wrote that the cure for “our modern ills and problems” was “a return to the land,” and five years later he published a guidebook, The Beauty, History, Romance and Mystery of the Canadian Lake Region. 5 Anyone reading his poetry would wish to reconsider plans for a return to the land or a visit to the Ontario lake region. His 1889 poem “The Winter Lakes” piled up relentless images of