Defiant Spirits (23 page)

MacDonald concluded his letter by addressing Ahrens's suggestion that the painters should be fighting the Hun. He pointed out that A.Y. Jackson was serving in France and then, ignoring the case of Thomson, claimed the others had “domestic obligations
. . .
They are doing what they can for the cause, even though,” he finished with a sharp ad hominem thrust, “they may resent being prodded on by critics with foreign names.”

Ahrens's name was indeed “foreign.” His German grandfather, Carl von Ahrens, immigrated to Berlin, Ontario, in the 1830s. He dropped the aristocratic “von” and became a successful member of the community, working as a millwright, opening a general store and buying a foundry that made stoves and threshing machines.
40
In pointing out his critic's foreign name at a time when the businesses of German-Canadians were being ransacked across the country, when Jackson's friends the Breithaupts were facing suspicion and recrimination because of their German ancestry, and when thousands of “enemy aliens” were interned in camps, the ordinarily wise and gentle MacDonald had stooped to Ahrens's own level of debate.
41
It was possibly this remark that gave him second thoughts about posting the letter to the
Daily Star.

A week later, MacDonald published an article, equally spirited though showing more self-restraint, in the
Toronto Globe.
Lamenting the low standard of journalism in Toronto, he attacked critics with their “windy bladders” who offered a “ribald and slashing condemnation without justifying analysis.” After a swipe at Charlesworth (“better acquainted with the footlights than with the sunlight”) he ended, as usual, by playing the patriotism card. His paintings were, he declared, “but items in a big idea, the spirit of our native land.” He promised that he and his colleagues would “keep on striving to enlarge their own conception of that spirit.” As in his defence of Jackson during the Hot Mush controversy in 1913, patriotism and fidelity to the “dramatical elementalism” of the Canadian landscape were used to justify a style of art that, ironically, owed much to foreign lands.
42

THE CONTROVERSY OVER the 1916
OSA
exhibition boosted the number of visitors. Some four thousand people filed through the galleries before the exhibition closed in the middle of April, almost a thousand more than in previous years. There is no indication that any of the tumultuous scenes sometimes played out in the Paris Salon—puce-faced men brandishing walking sticks at canvases or else doubling up in paroxysms of forced laughter—took place at the Public Reference Library. Sales, though, were slight. MacDonald had priced
The Tangled Garden
at an ambitious $500, the most he had ever asked for a painting—but it remained conspicuously unsold. Despite the severe restrictions to both its budget and its exhibition space, the National Gallery did, however, buy six paintings from the exhibition, including
Spring Ice,
for which Thomson received $300.

Another of the works purchased by the National Gallery was a landscape by Lawren Harris, who was making his own experiments with colour. After seeing the exhibition at the Albright three years earlier, Harris dedicated himself to reproducing the ornately beautiful landscapes and dazzling snows of Gustaf Fjaestad's canvases. The introduction to Fjaestad's entry in the Albright's exhibition catalogue stated that he painted “the fantastic and varied shades and shapes the snow can assume.”
43
In his own copy of the catalogue, MacDonald wrote, next to a black and white reproduction of Fjaestad's
Hoarfrost,
the phrases “blue purple” and “warm pink,” as if marvelling at the daring touches of colour added by the Swede to the snow.
44

Sometime in 1915, likewise inspired by Fjaestad's blue- and purple-
tinged snow, Harris painted two almost impossibly luminous snowscapes, simply entitled
Snow
and
Snow
II
.
Both showed fir trees with their boughs weighted down by fresh snow that Harris painted with strokes of azure, mauve and cornflower blue, highlighted with touches of salmon pink. Radiantly decorative—not to say somewhat artificial—portraits of the winter woods, they showed “courageous and thorough experiment” but little of the dramatical elementalism that MacDonald claimed the painters were seeking to depict. But for one critic at least, Harris had moved to the forefront of snow painters. In 1912 the editor of the
Canadian Magazine,
Newton MacTavish, had praised Maurice Cullen as the interpreter par excellence of the Canadian winter. But now Harris exceeded even Cullen, attacking the winter landscape, MacTavish exulted, with “more brilliant, even prismatic colours.”
45

Harris received $600 from the National Gallery for
Snow
II
.
His personal wealth meant he did not share the financial hardships of the other painters in the Studio Building, but in 1916 he was facing the same quandary as every other young Canadian. His younger brother, Howard, a University of Toronto graduate, had already volunteered for service. After resigning his job with a firm of bond traders in April 1915, Howard sailed for England and obtained a commission in the 11th Battalion the Essex Regiment; in the spring of 1916 he was preparing to cross the Channel into France. Meanwhile, their twice-widowed mother, a devout Christian Scientist, was establishing a convalescent home in London, the “Massey-Harris Convalescent Hospital,” intended to treat wounded Canadian soldiers.

Despite his domestic obligations—he and his wife, Trixie, had a young son—Harris decided that he too would join the war effort. In the spring of 1916 he joined the Canadian Officers Training Corps (
COTC
) as a private. Three weeks after the
OSA
exhibition closed, on May 5, he received his “Infantry Certificate.” It recommended him for an appointment as a lieutenant in the 10th Regiment the Royal Grenadiers.

THROUGHOUT THE SPRING of 1916, the Canadian 3rd Division was engaged in trench warfare in defence of Ypres. Their position, marking the deepest penetration of the Ypres salient into German territory, included ridges allowing them to observe the enemy trenches. Determined to capture this high ground, at six o'clock in the morning of June 2 the Germans began a ferocious bombardment of Canadians occupying a knoll called Mount Sorrel. A German eyewitness described the complete annihilation of the Canadian trenches: “The whole enemy position was a cloud of dust and dirt, into which timber, tree trunks, weapons and equipment were continuously hurled up, and occasionally human bodies.”
46
Among the dead, killed by shrapnel as he lay wounded from a bullet, his eardrums shattered from the heavy bombardment, was the 3rd Division's commander, Major General Malcolm Mercer, the patron of Carl Ahrens.

That same day, A.Y. Jackson's 60th Battalion took part in the counterattack as the Canadians tried to recapture the territory taken by German troops. Thus far, like many soldiers, Jackson had been finding life in the trenches more tedious than anything else. “It isn't exciting,” he told his mother. “Not half as much so as painting a Georgian Bay squall or climbing up eight thousand feet to get a sketch of Mt. Robson.” The trenches were so foul smelling that, although habitually abstemious in matters of alcohol and tobacco, he told his mother he took up smoking to “counter attack the trench odors.”
47
He was probably not telling the full story. Harold Innis wrote of his own experiences that many soldiers turned to alcohol and tobacco to combat the terrible stress. “A heavy bombardment of an hour's duration,” he reflected, “immeasurably increases the consumption of cigarettes.”
48

Jackson and his company were five miles from the front line when they received their orders to move forward. “Early in the afternoon,” he later wrote, “we got orders to move up a couple of miles and await further orders. We didn't take things very seriously. We had often been told to hold ourselves in readiness before. But after eating a few biscuits for supper we moved off in small parties.”
49

The roads were full of other Allied troops also moving forward. Airplanes passed overhead and guns burst in the distance as Jackson and his company crossed open fields, using the young crops as cover. As darkness fell and they came to within a mile and a half of the front line, the Germans released tear gas. “The Huns were dropping tear shells at random, and as there was no breeze the beastly stuff just hung around and got us all weeping.” They took shelter in a reserve trench, and at midnight, after “an infernal noise” of machine guns, “the whole place burst into light, and the rattle of rifles and machine guns became a prolonged roar.”

When the noise and showers of flares and shrapnel died down, Jackson's company was ordered to advance. Following a bombed-out railway track, they reached a zigzagging sandbag fortification known as the “China Wall”; once there, they were instructed to continue along its length to reach and support a trench some distance away. They made the crowded trench at dawn, dodging machine-gun bursts and passing the bodies of soldiers killed hours earlier. As on the previous day, at 6
am
the Germans unleashed another fierce bombardment. “I saw our lieutenant turn pale and fall in a huddled heap, and then the boy beside me looking in dismay at a great spurt of blood coming from his arm, which was only hanging by a few shreds of flesh
. . .
We lost over sixty men in those few minutes.”

Ordered to proceed along the reserve trench, what was left of Jackson's company advanced slowly towards the front line. “In places the parapet was so beaten down we had to crawl to avoid being seen, other places to dash quickly across the open. Then when the shelling got very severe we would crouch down and wait.” The men reached the front line at exactly the same time that “the Huns started in to blow the place to pieces
. . .
Again and again we were nearly buried in dirt, the shells just skimming the parapet and bursting about twenty or thirty feet behind us, till we were deaf with the awful roar. Then the whole parapet suddenly jumped right at us.”

The man beside Jackson, a signaller named Doyle, was killed instantly, his body never recovered from the debris. Jackson himself emerged miraculously unscathed until another mortar round struck the trench. “I got a smash on the back that knocked me senseless. I really thought I was blown all to pieces, and was much relieved to find that my arms and legs were still on.” Wounded in the hip and shoulder, he managed to return along the trench to a dressing station. He was bandaged and given hot cocoa and a sandwich, “and among a whole lot of other poor wretches I rolled up in a couple of blankets and went to sleep on the floor. And thus ended the 3rd of June.”

Jackson was one of eight thousand Canadians killed or wounded during the first two weeks of June. He was evacuated from Belgium on a hospital train. He endured a “long, miserable” journey to the French coast, where he was treated at the No. 1 Canadian General Hospital. The brown canvas tents of the hospital, with its operating theatres and dozens of nurses, were situated among sand dunes and clumps of pine.
50
Jackson recognized his location immediately: he had arrived in the resort of Étaples-sur-mer where, in another life, he had painted his misty landscapes.

*
The symbol of the white feather comes from a 1902 novel by A.E.W. Mason,
The Four Feathers,
in which the hero receives the contemptuous gift of white ostrich feathers from his fiancée and his fellow soldiers after he resigns his commission rather than ship out to fight in Sudan. In 1915 the book was turned into a silent film directed by
J. Searle Dawley.

LAWREN HARRIS WAS sent, along with thirty thousand other new recruits, to Camp Borden, a large training base newly established in Simcoe County, seventy-five kilometres north of Toronto. The primitive camp, with its dirt roads and rough-sawn huts, looked like a sprawling shantytown. One recruit called it “a terrible place—nothing but sand.”
1
Conditions were so harsh that it was quickly dubbed “Camp Horror,” and in July 1916, at the official opening, the recruits jeered the visiting minister of militia and defence, Sir Sam Hughes: “Take us out of this rotten hole!” There followed a riot in which a major general was struck by a brick. Two battalions of the Simcoe Foresters were required to suppress the mutiny.
2

Tom Thomson must have been dismayed that Harris, like Jackson, was now “in the machine.” The two men did manage to spend time together before Harris was sent to Camp Borden. In April Harris and Dr. James MacCallum, along with Harris's forty-one-year-old cousin Chester, visited Thomson in Algonquin Park. Harris regularly travelled and painted in the Laurentians and the Haliburton Highlands, usually with MacDonald. This was his first-known trip to Algonquin as well as his first-known sketching expedition with Thomson. Rather than meeting Thomson at Canoe Lake, Harris, his cousin and Dr. MacCallum probably caught the train from North Bay and disembarked at the small town of Brent, a divisional point on the main line of the Canadian Northern Railway. With Thomson, the party then canoed westward through Aura Lee Lake, Laurel Lake, Little Cauchon Lake and Cauchon Lake.

On one of the smaller lakes in this labyrinthine waterway, Thomson commemorated his friend in a rare figure drawing.
Little Cauchon Lake
featured a small grey-clad figure casting his fishing line near the foot of a tumbling waterfall. The tiny figure—almost certainly Harris—was positioned at the centre of the falls as a kind of reprise, whether consciously or not, of Jackson's contrast of force and fragility in
The Red Maple.
The war, an inescapable subject in 1916, must have been on the minds of all the men as they travelled through the park, not least because by this point Harris had undergone his training as a cadet in the
COTC
.

Thomson did another sketch on Little Cauchon Lake. According to Harris, the pair was painting beside the lake when a thunderstorm forced them to take refuge in an abandoned lumber shack. “There was a wild rush of wind across the lake,” Harris wrote, “and all nature was tossed in a turmoil.” Undaunted by these conditions, Thomson “grabbed his sketch box, ran out into the gale, squatted behind a big stump and commenced to paint in a fury.” Artists had previously put themselves in peril to get a good picture. The best example was J.M.W. Turner, who once lashed himself to the mast of a storm-tossed ship off the Suffolk coast to make sketches for his 1842 painting
Snowstorm—Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth.
Turner claimed he “did not expect to escape,” and Thomson, too, might have thought he was painting his last sketch when, according to Dr. MacCallum, a pine tree, the subject of the sketch, was “blown down” on him. Harris at first thought Thomson had been killed, but “he soon sprang up, waved his hand to him and went on painting.”
3

As narrated by Harris and Dr. MacCallum, Thomson's actions beside Little Cauchon Lake—scrambling from primitive cover to complete his task in hostile and hazardous conditions, nearly losing his life in the process—read like one of the citations for “conspicuous bravery” being awarded to Canadian soldiers for their heroics on the Western Front. If Thomson was abused in Toronto as a shirker and a hermaphrodite, Algonquin Park, for Harris and MacCallum, was the place where he could attest his true courage and masculinity.

THOMSON REMAINED IN the park after his friends returned south. Rather than risk the wrath of the regulars by seeking work as a fishing guide, he took a job as a fire ranger in the eastern end of the park. Ontario had first established fire rangers in 1885 in response to the fires, caused by the increasing habitation of the bush, that regularly decimated the province's timber wealth. Work was difficult, since the rangers patrolled the bush on foot and climbed trees or built “crow's nests”—elevated platforms in the forest—to scour the horizons for smoke. Firefighting was primitive, since the men were equipped only with shovels, axes and canvas water pails. The gravity of the task was made clear that July when a forest fire burned 500,000 acres of land and killed 250 people near Lake Abitibi, 220 kilometres north of Sudbury.

Thomson reported to the park station at Achray, one of the stops on the Canadian Northern line. He shared with another fire ranger, Edward “Ned” Godin, a log cabin known as the “Out-Side Inn” that Godin built some years earlier on the north side of Grand Lake. Thomson painted above the primitive veranda a signboard in Gothic lettering. Godin might not have appreciated all of Thomson's artistic efforts (the natives of the park, he complained to Dr. MacCallum, “can't see what we paint for”),
4
but otherwise the two men seem to have become good friends. Godin described Thomson as “a very fine fellow. Easy to get along with and always in good humor. He was very fond of fishing and spent quite a lot of time at this sport.”
5

This annual retreat into the bush offered Thomson not only subjects for his painting but also, in the soothing and reverential rituals of pitching camp and catching fish—the “pleasant labour” praised by Izaak Walton—the tranquility, order and simplicity missing from his life in the city. He felt at ease in the company of the rangers, outdoorsmen such as Ned Godin, Mark Robinson and Tom Wattie, who shared his love of “masculine” pursuits such as fishing and canoeing. Their campfire cookouts and fishing lines draped over gurgling streams conjure images of Hemingwayesque bonds between men disillusioned by, and fleeing from, the complications of modern civilization.

In August Thomson and Godin canoed along the south branch of the Petawawa River—scene of his sketching in the spring of 1914—to the Barron Canyon, then along the north branch to Lake Traverse. Thomson complained to Dr. MacCallum that he was unable to do much sketching because “there's no place for a sketch outfit when you're fireranging.”
6
At least there were no fires, and in fact he did manage some sketches of the spectacular gorges through which he and Godin passed. “This is a great place for sketching,” he wrote to MacDonald, “one part of the river (south Branch Petawawa) runs between walls of rock about 300 feet straight up.”
7

Thomson painted remarkable sketches of these flanks of rock towering above the river. His sketch
Petawawa Gorges
was an attempt to capture the physical majesty of the gorge, but these rearing, claustrophobic presences between which he passed in his frail canoe were a reminder of other menacing forces that loomed large in his mind. Thomson must have known that this voyage took him within a few miles of Camp Petawawa, a large military base that for the previous eighteen months had housed hundreds of German and Austrian prisoners of war. In the summer of 1916 the base had begun training thousands of Canadian recruits for service overseas. The Great War was casting its shadow even across Thomson's beloved park.

BY THE END of the summer of 1916, the “young school” fragmented still further as yet another member left Toronto. When the post of principal came open at the Victoria School of Art and Design in Halifax, both Lismer and MacDonald became candidates to fill it. Lismer already had experience in art education, having worked the previous year as an instructor at the Ontario College of Art's summer school in York Mills. MacDonald, though, was easily the more qualified. He served on the
oca
's examination committee and ran its summer school in 1914 and 1916. He also did low-paid work as supervisor of the art department for the Shaw Correspondence School, for which he designed a course and graded examinations in commercial design. Furthermore, unlike Lismer, he had a strong connection in the Maritimes. One of his oldest friends, Lewis Smith, a former Grip colleague and the principal of the Victoria School of Art and Design between 1910 and 1912, lived in Halifax.

No doubt MacDonald would have welcomed the regular (if slightly stingy) salary of $900 per year as well as the chance for a reunion with Smith, whom he called “the best friend I ever knew.”
8
In the end, owing to his upbeat and garrulous personality, the job went to Lismer. Sir Edmund Walker's doubts about MacDonald's suitability for the post scuppered the older man's chances. “J.E.H. MacDonald is a more accomplished artist at the moment and, I should think, a more interesting man,” he wrote in a letter of reference. “He is, however, a shy eccentric person and would not be as useful in a community as Mr Lismer.”
9
Calling MacDonald an “accomplished artist” in the aftermath of the lacerating reviews of
The Elements
and
The Tangled Garden
indicated a rare open-mindedness. And if Walker made an overly harsh appraisal of MacDonald's fitness to teach, his choice of Lismer would at least prove wise and worthy.

Halifax, with a population of some fifty thousand people, was an important seaport and rail terminus. Freighters laden with lumber, fish and apples ordinarily steamed out of its harbour. But with Halifax an embarkation point for Canadian troops bound for Europe, the ships were now exporting young soldiers. Halifax was vitally important to the wartime effort. In October 1916, within a month of Lismer's arrival, a single German U-boat a few miles off Nantucket torpedoed six Allied ships. Henceforth all Europe-bound merchant ships would assemble in Halifax to cross the Atlantic in convoys. A flotilla of a dozen ships constantly patrolled the harbour, which was also protected by a quick-fire battery and a floating anti-submarine net that each night was lowered into place. Meanwhile the vast shipyard was busy with the construction of a dozen anti-submarine trawlers.

The Victoria School of Art and Design stood on Argyle Street, a few streets west of the dockyards and a few streets east of the massive, star-shaped Citadel, heavily garrisoned with troops. The school had been founded in 1887 by benefactors that included Anna Leonowens, otherwise notable for her six-year spell in Bangkok as English teacher to the children of King Mongkut of Siam (her 1870 memoir
The English Governess at the Siamese Court
would inspire the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
The King and I
). The school presented an unprepossessing aspect. A one-hundred-year-old former schoolhouse, it was a four-storey clapboard building that Lismer found “dull, dirty and sordid.”
10
Enrolment stood modestly at twelve students. The previous principal, Georges Chavignaud, found their efforts so haphazard and incompetent he began teaching them boxing instead.
11
The governors, who included a bank manager and a Presbyterian minister, Lismer thought “dead in spirit” and, like almost everyone else in Halifax, “stuffy and chilly.”
12
If Toronto was a drab city of materialistic philistines, Halifax, on first impression, was considerably worse.

The dearth of students at the Victoria School of Art and Design indicated no lack of interest or enthusiasm on the part of Halifax youth. Enrolment was intentionally kept low because, as Lismer complained to Eric Brown, the governors believed art to be “an exclusive & cultured subject for the edification of the few.”
13
Lismer certainly did not regard art as the exclusive domain of an elite class. He was a product of the English tradition of John Ruskin and William Morris that believed art could dignify and exalt all members of society, especially the poorer classes in a time of mechanization and industrialization. Art education, for Ruskin, was absolutely crucial to the health and happiness of a society. He wrote that “every man in a Christian kingdom ought to be equally well educated,”
14
and to that end Ruskin gave art lessons to labourers at the Working Men's College in London and to the girls of Winnington Hall, a finishing school in Cheshire.

Although enormously influential across Britain and America, Ruskin's ideas were especially powerful and popular in the Sheffield of Lismer's youth. In 1871 Ruskin had founded the Guild of St. George to provide working-class men with a liberal education as well as what he called a “beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful” way of living.
15
In 1875 the guild's museum, ultimately known as the Ruskin Museum, was established in a Sheffield suburb. It housed Ruskin's collection of paintings, drawings and manuscripts, but also minerals, ornithological prints and architectural mouldings—all assembled by Ruskin to stimulate the eyes and minds of working-class men and women.

Lismer owned copies of Ruskin's works,
16
and as a young man he must have visited the Ruskin Museum. In any case, he approached his task in Halifax with the same evangelical zeal as Ruskin, making himself, as Sir Edmund Walker correctly predicted, “useful in a community.” Within a few months he was reporting to Dr. MacCallum that things were “going pretty fair,” and that the school was “shaping a little into some recognized appearance of an art school.” He missed the comradeship and excitement of the school of artists coming together in Toronto, however, and quickly realized the scale of his mission in a city that seemed to care little for the arts, particularly in wartime. As he repined to Dr. MacCallum, “The town is provincial and wholly inartistic.”
17

In fairness, wartime Toronto scarcely offered better prospects. Lismer's nostalgia for Toronto must have been jolted when he received a letter from MacDonald at Christmas. Unable to sell his paintings and still in the financial doldrums, the controversial author of
The Tangled Garden
was reduced to designing an exhibit for Simpsons on the theme of “Mother Goose's Village.” He was planning and painting, he told Lismer, 280 feet of “quaint house fronts” to go around the store's toy section. The task involved designing fifty figures from Mother Goose: painted wooden cut-outs with moveable arms and legs attached. The display would include “a windmill in motion” and “a waterfall of real water.” He explained how he had pressed his son, Thoreau, into service, and how Roy Mitchell—the “Prankmeister” of the Arts and Letters Club who specialized in directing avant-garde drama—was arranging for an actress dressed as Mother Goose to recite nursery rhymes to passing Christmas shoppers.
18