(1962)
The subtitle of this book, “A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century,” indicates the highly amorphous nature of the material. Any author who attempts to grapple this subject is threatened by engulfment, as if by a giant amoeba, and Dr Matthews is to be congratulated on the degree to which he imposes form on such a sprawling mass of tenuously related data. It is perhaps not his fault that he has had to snip and stretch a little to fit the past neatly into his Procrustean structure.
Comparative studies have a way of becoming invidious, and this one is no exception. Dr Matthews establishes two opposed sets of categories. “Colonialism” is seen in two aspects: one ignores the indigenous and strives to emulate the mother country, the other reacts against its parent and turns in upon itself. There are two corresponding kinds of poetry: the Academic and the Popular. These contrasts are acceptable, but they are made to imply doubtful value judgements: Popular Nationalism per se is a Good Thing; Australia has always had, for historical, social, and geographical reasons, more of it; therefore Australian poetry is potentially “better” than Canadian poetry, which has always attempted to lean on its English heritage and to deal with universals rather than particulars. Dr Matthews’ attitude is best illustrated by a metaphor: “… those who would avoid the growing pains and the unsightly pimples of adolescence by trying to jump prematurely to precocious maturity must pay some price for their action.” He sees Nineteenth Century Australia as a healthy normal growing boy and Canada as a miniature mimicking adult; but better pimples than overgroomed priggishness. The image of the Bushman, virile, lawless, unwashed and above all virile, composing four-line ballad verses with irrepressible gusto, is set up against a pale straw-man of a nail-gnawing Canadian intellectual, smothered in Englishness, bleating and effete.
A Canadian reader is apt to be puzzled by some of this. Why is the Academic, as represented, for instance, by Lampman, necessarily worse than a Robert W. Service Popularity? “Aha!” Dr Matthews would snort. “You see, that’s just the kind of question an Academic Canadian would ask!” Still, he doesn’t really answer the question. The undesirability of all the qualities he lumps under “Academicism” is, for him, axiomatic rather than hypothetical.
Such an approach has its drawbacks. Confined by his rigid a priori two-category system, Dr Matthews sometimes has difficulty finding pigeonholes that fit the particular clay pigeons he singles out for potting. Thus, “Souster, Dudek, and Layton have denounced Academic poetry in Canada, but they have not become, in any sense, Popular poets. Theirs is a cerebral poetry, intellectual in conception and not concerned with reaching a mass audience.” (The picture of Irving Layton coyly retiring into an ivory tower is, to say the least, naive.)
However, apart from its suppressed flag-waving, Tradition in Exile is informed, thoroughly documented, and comprehensive. Dr Matthews’ skeleton-in-the-closet clutching the somewhat flaccid vitals of modern Canadian poetry is overdrawn but nonetheless relevant: Canadians need to be reminded from time to time that their poetry did not spring fully-formed from the head of A. J. M. Smith. The book is well-organized though inclined to be repetitious; the prose smacks of Ph. D. thesisisms but manages to make itself palatable; and the many quotations, often from little-known sources, are of considerable value. Whatever else it does, and despite the my-daddy’s-better-than-your-daddy attitude, Tradition in Exile ought to encourage Canadian interest in Australian literature.