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rfmcdonaldLast Saturday's Historicist feature at Torontoist by Kevin Plummer described the 1913 visit Rupert Brooke, poet and martyr in the First World War, to Toronto. What did he think of that British Canadian metropolis?
Go, read the whole story.
in Toronto—or "T'ranto," as he put it—in the midst of a July heat wave. "It has an individuality, but an elusive one," he wrote. "It is a healthy, cheerful city (by modern standards); a clean-shaven, pink-faced, respectably dressed, fairly energetic, unintellectual, passably sociable, well-to-do, public-school-and-varsity sort of city." He anthropomorphized the city, describing it as an upper-middle-class personage[.]
[. . .]
The arch-Imperialist Brooke noted the devoutly pro-British patriotism in Ontario. He observed: "A Toronto man, like most Canadians, dislikes an Englishman; but, unlike some Canadians, he detests an American. And he has some inkling of the conditions and responsibilities of the British Empire. The tradition is in him. His fathers fought to keep Canada British." He praised the rapidly growing city's excessive Britishness—resurgent with the recent 1911 federal election and centenary of the War of 1812—but noted "the cheery Italian faces that pop up at you out of excavations in the street."
Toronto, he said, was "liberally endowed with millionaires, not lacking its due share of destitution, misery, and slums." However, as Martin and Hall point out, Brooke's view of North America was limited because his own life experience had been limited. Although he'd been active in Fabianism, Brooke had always been insulated from the realities of unemployment or poverty. While he would lament the lack of a literary culture in Canada, Martin and Hall add, he missed that, for many newcomers, the country represented "hope and opportunity and a chance to make good."
described the skyscrapers of the business section as being "in the American style without the modern American beauty," and particularly noted the Canadian Pacific Building, which was at the time the tallest building in the British Empire. He described the "quiet streets, gardens open to the road, shady verandahs, and homes" of the residential district. But it was the city's relationship to Lake Ontario that elicited Brooke's most extended comment:It is situated on the shores of a lovely lake; but you never see that, because the railways have occupied the entire lake front. So if, at evening, you try to find your way to the edge of the water, you are checked by a region of smoke, sheds, trucks, wharves, store-houses, 'depôts,' railway-lines, signals, and locomotives and trains that wander on the tracks up and down and across streets, pushing their way through the pedestrians, and tolling, as they go, in the American fashion, an immense melancholy bell intent, apparently, on some private and incommunicable grief.
Throughout his trip, Brooke was searching for the Canadian "soul," by which he meant "a cultural identity, a unifying emotional principle that could never be found in statute books and Acts of Parliament," according to Martin and Hall. He came closest to finding it in Toronto, which he called the "soul of Canada." Brooke admitted that the city housed "what faint, faint beginnings or premonitions of such things as Art Canada can boast." With an air of English condescension, he added: "Most of those few who have begun to paint the landscape of Canada centre there, and a handful of people who know about books. In these things, as in all, this city is properly and cheerfully to the front." These brief comments on the arts in Toronto—as they appeared in the Westminster Gazette—don't amply demonstrate how thoroughly Brooke had inculcated himself in the artistic community during his brief stay in the city.
Go, read the whole story.
