DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT AS LITERARY
EXECUTOR FOR ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN:
"A LABOUR OF LOVE"

Stan Dragland

He lingered a moment, looking at her, and then turned away and left the room, treading very gently - he had taken off his boots and put on slippers before he came upstairs. Whoever remembers how many things he has declined to do even for himself, rather than have the trouble of putting on or taking off his boots, will not think this last detail insignificant.

George Eliot, Adam Bede

You may not be aware that all the clerical, as well as the critical work on Lampman from the first has been done by me without assistance, and I say this now merely to account for delays and not to claim credit; the work as you weil know was brightened by the love of it and by a friendship which is as dear as it ever was.

Duncan Campbell Scott to Lorne Pierce, March 20, 1945

If we balance Scott's words to Pierce with some deeply felt remarks addressed to Lampman almost fifty years earlier, we have almost the whole of Scott's custodianship of Lampman's literary (and other) affairs put into something like parentheses. It is worth remembering that, in 1898 when the following words were written, Lampman's health was precarious. In fact he was months away from his death on February 10, 1899:

Your words of discouragement may have been only the result of a passing depression and if so, I would not call them to your mind. They gave me a great shock of pain however you meant them. I feel keenly that you should be so attacked and should be made to feel that your life is endangered. I know you have every resource for solace within yourself so I will only cry Courage! and endeavor to hold up your hands and sustain you and give you what hope and trust I can from a friendship that has been ours for years unbroken and will always remain so, if we lived close to one another for a hundred years. Be brave my dear old friend, and things may be better than we have reason to expect.

Between the letter addressed to Lampman's depression and the one to Pierce lies nearly half a century of service by Scott to Lampman's poetry and his memory. Scott lived a long time, and every year he lived, Lampman's reputation grew in some way, small or large, because Scott was an active literary executor. That is to say, the smallest part of his obligation, as he saw it, was what literary executorship usually brings to mind - the handling of the matter of rights to republish. Scott did this sort of work for Lampman until he was relieved by Mrs. T. R. Loftus MacInnes, Lampman's daughter Natalie, sometime before 1940. But it was the services Scott went out of his way to perform for Lampman that were so important in the making of Lampman's literary reputation.

My task is to draw together threads of the already quite well known story of Scott's devotion to Lampman's memory, to add to them where I can, and to set them in relief with a warp of details of Scott's other activities through a lifetime. The idea is simply to record as fully as I can what Scott did for Lampman.

This is a study of Scott's activities on behalf of Lampman, on whom it bears only indirectly, but the idea ought to be dispelled at once that Scott "made" Lampman, and that the story of Scott's devotion begins after Lampman's death. It is worth underlining that Lampman inspired the friendship in Scott that was to last so long after his death. Scott thought Lampman was a good poet, but there is as much affection as respect in Scott's writings about him, formal and informal. It was the friendship that supplied the fire in Scott's later-years undertakings, and it is not hard to find evidence of that while Lampman was alive. Among the most tangible signs are the Christmas card poems the Scott and Lampman familles sent in Christmas greeting to their friends. One knows, too, of occasions that drew the two poets together, sometimes with others, such as the readings of' poems and papers which took place at Sir John Bourinot's house in Ottawa. There was their collaboration with Wilfred William Campbell on At the Mermaid Inn, a literary column which appeared in the Saturday Globe during 1892 and 1893. The two friends spent a good deal of time hiking together in the environs of Ottawa, or canoeing on Lake Achigan or the Lievre River or on the lower St. Lawrence. Scott introduced Lampman to the canoeing which inspired some of his best poems, though it may also have been partly responsible for his death at the age of 37. Scott remarked to E. K. Brown in 1945 "if [Lampman] had been reasonable about [his] fetish of exercise he would have lived for many years."

In At The Mermaid Inn and elsewhere, both Scott and Lampman wrote about the sense they shared of the lonely task of the Canadian artist during their era, of "building bricks without straw,"¹ without much tradition behind them. That is why the coexistence of Scott and Lampman in Ottawa must have been a mutual comfort and encouragement. It also had its practical side. Scott's letters to E. K. Brown suggest that he was approached by Lampman for criticism. Probably that went both ways. There is little doubt that Scott was grateful for such literary community as the country could boast. He acknowledged the country's first significant literary "group" in his dedication of a poem each in The Magic House (1892) to Lampman, Carman, Campbell and Roberts.

Besides Scott's personal and literary friendship with Lampman, there is a closeness to the Lampman family suggested by the fact that Scott was once engaged to Archibald's sister Annie, who, like Scott, was a talented musician.² The two were cordially in touch as late as July 8, 1947, when Annie (now Jenkins) wrote welcoming Scott's gift of a copy of the Selected Poems. Scott was "groomsman" at Lampman's wedding.

Friendship must say a lot about Scott's devotion, but it is also possible that he was partly paying back a debt. Scott was only a poet in potential when he arrived in Ottawa in 1879, and it was the encouragement and example of Lampman, whom he met probably in 1883, that got him going. More than this, E. K. Brown noticed the "mark of Lampman," "in pictures and aural suggestions of nature," in some of the poems in The Magic House, Scott's first volume. ³

Whatever evidence one brings to suggesting why Scott worked as hard as he did for Lampman, it ought to be clear that it is Lampman himself who stands at the beginning of the story of Scott's efforts on his behalf. Brown puts it this way: "To the end of his life no man ever filled the place that Lampman had held for almost fifteen years."⁴

Some letters Scott wrote to W.D. Light hall, a friend of Lampman's and editor of Songs of the Great Dominion, show that Scott had begun to work behind the scenes for Lampman before he died. One, dated March 29, 1898, mentions the heart trouble that was finally to catch up with Lampman:

Do you know our friend Lampman is seriously ill with a heat trouble. He has been in the house since the middle of Decr. And can hardly move yet. A few of us here want to send him away for a trip wh. he cannot afford to pay for himself. Do you know of anyone in M. [Montreal] with money who knows and admires his work sufficiently to aid in a financial way. We want to reach men who can give without feeling it.

One of Scott's first services to Lampman was in the line of securing a patron, or patrons.

Lighthall was again contacted in 1910, after the death of Lampman's wife, to participate with "a few of the most intimate friends" of the family in "making up a little purse to assist in defraying the funeral expenses." It was not the first or last time Scott went our of his way to help members of Lampman's family. He had "helped Maud Lampman to find employment in the Parlimentary Library; later he helped Natalie to find a secretarial job in the civil service. He encouraged [Archibald Jr.] to enter the Royal Military College in Kingston as a cadet during the first world war."⁵

Scott's most visible aid to the Lampman family after Archibald's death was his editorship of the memorial edition of Lampman's Poems. When he died, Lampman's small self-sponsored volume Alcyone had been in press, and was near enough completion for Scott to have a few copies bound. But instead of releasing Alcyone as Lampman had planned, Scott made the poems into one section of the larger volume, rather submerging them in a fairly weighty and various tome. The idea was that the proceeds would go to the support of Maud Lampman and her two young children. To this end Scott signed his name to a circular appealing for subscriptions, alond with S.E. Dawson, who mainly wrote it, and William D. LeSueur, Lampman's superior in the Post Office. The plan was successful; a good deal of money was raised. It must have been a delicate matter for Scott then to have to handle to the plea of Lampman's mother to be included among the beneficiaries of the fund, saying she needed the money and deserved it, but would "starve and freeze sooner than" ask her daughter-in-law for a share.⁶ This was not to be the last touchy situation in which Scott found himself with Lampman's relatives.

For a long time Scott's writings on the subject of Archibald Lampman and his poetry were more numerous than anybody else's. They begin with his memoir in The Poems of Archibald Lampman (1900, reprinted in the Selected Poems, 1947). The memoir, and the introduction to Lyrics of Earth (1925), Scott's selection from the earlier book which he says he assembled when "the critical faculty was in suspension,"⁷ are his major reflections on Lampman and his poetry. Scott characteristically devoted a good piece of his 1922 Presidential Address to the Royal Society of Canada to Lampman's memory and his poetry, about which he says, "I would hardly have been as competent to speak of him and his work then [1900] as I am now." Scott was referring to the added objectivity that time gave him, but he still welcomed E. K. Brown's Introduction to At the Long Sault, "because it is free from the personal attachment which must ever colour anything I say about these poems and brings them in review before a highly qualified and unprejudicedjudge."⁸ I will have something to say about Scott's own objectivity in a moment.

Scott wrote articles and delivered addresses on the poetry of Lampman after 1925, but most of these go over the same ground covered in his Memoir and Introduction. They fall into the category of "spreading the word." Typical in this way was a sketch on Lampman written for The Educational Record of Quebec in 1943, at the request of W. D. Percival. Scott wrote to Brown about it in 1945:

My purpose was to arouse some interest in the minds of benighted students and teachers of the protestant persuasion which might actually lead them to read or even go so far as to buy Lampman.

Scott never lost a chance of exploiting any avenue that might enlarge Lampman's fame. His name, in fact, appeared so often in front of the public linked with Lampman's that he wrote to Brown in 1944, "I'm sure people must be getting tired of the association." It was partly self-effacement that had made him ask Brown the year before to reduce to a minimum the references to himself in the Introduction to At the Long Sault.

Scott wrote much more from a personal point of view about Lampman than he did as a critic, though his critical remarks are perceptive, based as they are on a thorough knowledge of the poems. However, more than what he said, it was the characteristic restraint of his writing on the poetry that probably helped to establish Lampman's credibility as a poet. Both Scott and Lampman knew that the country needed no more uncritical adulation of its writers. It was fortunately not in Scott's character to gush over Lampman, as he felt Elsie Pomeroy had over Roberts in her biography.⁹ In fact, whatever Scott says about his lack of objectivity, his remarks about the poetry, as distinct from the person, are always restrained. I would say that Scott knew Lampman was not, perhaps had not had time to become, a major poet. He expresses his reservations about certain strains in Lampman's work more than once. Even in quite an emotional context, such as the closing sentences of his speech over Lampman's cairn at Morpeth, Ontario, he did not allow his critical faculty to relax:

Monuments of stone are not enough; the true monument of a poet is builded in the affections of his countrymen. Let us then build him a fane in some untrodden regions of our minds. If those of us who read poetry will read widely and admire with true catholicity, we will find ourselves returning to the poems of Archibald Lampman with, it may be, power to see his limitations but also with power to enjoy his beauties and his felicities."¹⁰

Far from being unhandsome at such a ceremonial moment, this is Scott revealing himself as thinking advocate, resisting the temptation to romanticize Lampman. He wrote very fully in 1947 to Ralph Gustafson, commenting on Gustafson's (as Scott felt) erroneous comparison of Lampman's life to Keats's in Northern Review.¹¹ He had earlier, in 1945, tempered some remarks of Brown's along the same line, in a letter that contains one of my favourite passages of Scott on Lampman:

A. L.'s frogs were Toads. I have confirmed this fact from a naturalist. He came to know that but found it impossible to be accurate. That long trill we hear in Spring is the Love-call of the male toads. There are several kinds of frogs including bull-frogs and they all have voices but moderate and unromantic and therefore not available for Poetry.

This may serve as a footnote to Lampman's "The Frogs." I think Scott was right not to make much of Lampman's substitution of frogs for toads. It does not reduce my own admiration for the very fine sequence, however much it qualifies the impression of Lampman as naturalist. At the same time, Scott's comment is a very level-headed one. As clearly as anything he wrote about Lampman it shows that he was unwilling to be carried away either by appreciation for Lampman's poetry or by romanticism of his friend as a person.

E. K. Brown deserves the credit for discovering "At the Long Sault" and other poems in unfinished form in a notebook of Lampman's. One wishes that Brown, or somebody like him, had appeared much earlier than the last few years of Scott's life, to share his enthusiasm for Lampman and, just as important, some of the load of Scott's self-imposed task of keeping Lampman before the public. It is too bad, for instance, that Rowley Frith, the Ottawa florist, was a florist and not a critic. Frith was one of Lampman's first admirers, and made sure that Lampman's grave was never without flowers. That is a sign of devotion too, and not to be belittled as an insubstantial gesture. But Brown was more practical, and soon after he became engaged with Lampman's poetry, he showed himself to bejust as zealous on Lampman's behalf as was Scott. It was he who, in 1944, offered Lampman's essay "Two Canadian Poets" to A. S. P. Woodhouse for the University of Toronto Quarterly. Woodhouse agreed to print it. In 1946 Brown had the idea of suggesting a commemorative stamp for 1949, the fiftieth anniversary of Lampman's death. (Nothing came of this.) And he spent a good deal of time listing Lampman's poems in order of their date of composition, a task for which he solicited Scott's aid.

To put Brown's lively collaboration with Scott into the context of Scott's essentially solitary management of Lampman's affairs, there is a letter to Pelham Edgar, in 1914, about one of the Lampman "evenings" Scott organized, which reveals that Scott was sometimes disgruntled at being the only one willing to work for Lampman:

You know all the arrangements for Lampman concerns have fallen on me always. Last year the idea for the celebration originated in another mind and I was simply asked to help - so soon as I had promised however the originator and everybody else involved retired from the preliminary arrangements with the usual remarks. - we know things are in good hands etc. etc. and left me alone to do every thing. I didn't like it.

If Scott's feeling for Lampman is absent frorn these lines it is because they were written by a man being put upon. It was easy to find enthusiastic supporters for projects like the Lampman evening. It was something else to get people to commit time and energy, which was what Brown was willing to give. No doubt that was partly what made Scott and Brown fast friends for the last few years of Scott's life.

One of the issues that arose out of Scott's collaboration with Brown on the volume that became At the Long Sault and Other New Poems has been dealt with already by others,¹² so I will merely sketch it in. Among the poems the two wanted to publish for the first time were some sonnets, "Love's Progress" (as they became known), addressed to Katherine Waddell, an extra-marital interest of Lampman's. Brown and Scott were afraid they might prove offensive to Natalie (Lampman) MacInnes and her husband, who were consulted about the volume. The fears were groundless; no objection was made.

Scott's letters to Brown reveal that he did some basic editing of the new poems, mainly, as Brown commented, "to strengthen something that was left without the last scrutiny of the author." It was an activity that caused Scott some pain. He wrote, "it seems profane to be laying hands on these poems and suggesting changes and the reading and thinking of them has often been painful." Perhaps feeling the spirit of Lampman emanating from the unpublished poems, Scott wrote in his Foreword to At the Long Sault, "he had not reached his limit or his perfection and to recall and adapt some words of Sturge Moore, he was turning pages in some book that death forbade him to write.¹³

One can understand that Scott would not want to "meddle too much." What he did he tried to do in the spirit of Lampman. He supplied the non-existent punctuation, about which he wrote to Brown, "A. L. did not favour much scattering about of commas and I think I know what he would do." In certain instances, and particularly for "At the Long Sault," there was more than punctuating to do:

I am very keen about "At the Long Sault." As I studied it I felt a certain looseness about it which detracted frorn its force and beauty. I have ventured to make a very few cuts and a rearrangement of the lines from "so Daulac turned him anew". I used town instead of burg in the 26th line of the lyric; I didn't like burg. I have done nothing I would not have suggested to A. L. if we had been together....

One suggestion, unadopted, though Brown applauded it, was to put the lyric in italics. (Perhaps Scott was thinking of his own "At Gull Lake: August 1810," in which Keejigo's lyric is italicised.) In short, Scott had quite a lot to do with the poem as we know it today. In that last line to Brown there is a picture of Scott being to Lampman, as Lampman no doubt was to him, not only fellow poet, but critic - that is, a reader hard to please and therefore worth attempting to satisfy. E. K. Brown became that kind of reader of Scott, but after most of his work had been written.

As a footnote to Scott and Brown's cooperation on At the Long Sault one might mention that after the project was finished a manuscript of ninety-three poems that Lampman had assembled for Katherine Waddell in 1889 turned up in the hands of Miss Waddell's niece, a Miss White. It was bought by the University of Toronto on the advice of Brown, supported by Scott. The appearance of the manuscript was startling enough, but not because there were new poems in it. It was, as Scott wrote to Brown, "the selection of Poems by A. L. for the girl he loved by which he wanted her to know his worth and the depth of his feeling for Nature and the truth of his feeling for her." ¹⁴

In the years before Scott began to work with Brown, there were other Lampman affairs that occupied his mind and his time. Scott's earliest contact with Lorne Pierce, who became a correspondent for over twenty years, seems to have been to charge him $25.00, in 1922, for permission to anthologize three of Lampman's poems, "The Thunderstorm," "The Wind's Word," and "The Violinist." Scott's relationship with Pierce was always cordial, though Pierce occasionally provoked Scott to small outbursts of annoyance about his business dealings. He wrote to at least two people telling them, in capital letters, to be sure to keep copies of all correspondence with Pierce. But as early as 1925 he thought well enough of Pierce to send him one of the few copies of Alcyone that he had had printed when the scheme of the memorial edition supplanted it.

One of the most interesting pleces of correspondence relating to Scott's executorship is preserved among the Lorne Pierce letters in the Queen's University Douglas Library Archives, because Scott enclosed it in a letter of his own to Pierce in 1926. Lampman's son had sent Scott a volume of his poems for comment. Scott's reply is addressed to "My Dear Archie":

I have given very careful attention to the poems you have sent me under date of October 27th [1925]. I know that you are greatly interested in seeing these in print, but I want you to exercise consideration before you decide to publish these verses. I think you should remember that you are the son of a celebrated poet, and unless you could show very decided talent, and in a style that was not derivative from your father, I think you should hesitate to publish at all. I would be indeed lacking in true friendliness and interest in you if I did not say that I cannot find that the lines that you have sent me conform to either of these standards, and seriously I would advise you not to publish them. I know this may seem rather blunt and unexpected, but it is my very candid opinion; do think it over!

I expect these were not easy words to write. Possibly they put a strain on Scott's friendship with young Lampman. Margaret Coulby Whitridge, in her introduction to Lampman's Kate, cites evidence to the effect that young "Archie" might not have taken kindly to the invocation of his father in such a sensitive area. He seems to have considered the bearing of his father's name something of a stigma. That the manuscript was sent to Pierce suggests that Scott's well-meant words were not exactly taken to heart.

Much less tricky, and more impersonal, was Scott's correspondence with W. Sherwood Fox, President of the University of Western Ontario, and coordinator of plans for the proposed erection of the Lampman cairn at his birthplace, Morpeth, Ontario. As the country's leading authority on Lampman, Scott was consulted on the location of the house in which the poet was born (he sent a photograph of it, from M. O. Hammond, a friend then on the staff of the Toronto Globe), on details of Lampman's life, on a suitable inscription for the cairn, on whether there were any of Lampman's lyrics set to music (he thought not), even on the most delicate way to handle an offer made by one Mower Martin to present one of his paintings to Lampman's nearest relative. Fox was afraid that the quality of the gift might not be a match for the generosity of the intention. Scott's advice:

I think that Mrs. T. R. L. MacInnes would be the proper recipient of this gift. She is Lampman's eldest child and is well able to appreciate the value of the gift and quite strong-minded enough to keep it dark if it were not good piece of work.

At Fox's invitation Scott sent a $25.00 subscription towards the erection of the cairn. He said in the covering letter he would be "interested to see how many of the sixty members of the Lampman family [Fox had tracked down] contribute." Fox got no contributions "of importance" from them, and Scott wrote that he was not surprised.

The cairn was finished and ready for unveiling in September of 1930, and Scott lent his presence to the occasion, along with that of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Raymond Knister, Florence Randall Livesay and Wallace Havelock Robb. Scott also delivered the address, already mentioned.

If Scott had been doing nothing but minding the affairs of Archibald Lampman, and literary matters of his own, during the period between Lampman's death and his own, during the period between Lampman's death and his own, his record in Lampman matters might be less impressive and there would be less to explain his occasional irritation at being the Archibald Lampman man in the country. Spread over a good part of Scott's long life, perhaps the activities I am about to cite were less onerous than they seem when compressed into a few paragraphs. Nevertheless, is clear that Scott was an exceedingly busy man in many directions, not all of them literary.

For one thing, Scott was not, as Lampman had been, a minor civil servant. He rose to the position of Deputy Superintendant of Indian Affairs, the highest civil service position under the then Ministry of the Interior. Through E. K. Brown suggests in his memoir of Scott¹⁶ (in Selected Poems, 1951) that he was always able to keep his work at Indian Affairs in perspective, and not to bring too much of it home with him, the position was still not exactly a nine to five job. In the earlier days it entailed long canoe journeys into the north, like the one to negotiate what he calls, in his article on it, "The Last of the Indian Treaties." In later years there were overseeing trips across the country to visit Indian Agencies. There were stretches of time on the canoe trips, because Scott was a passenger and not a paddler, when he could actually compose, but generally speaking what one would expect to happen to a man in a position of high responsibility is confirmed by this sentence from a typescript in the Aylen/Scott papers, dated Nov. 2, 1947:

I continued to be a contributor both in verse and prose to Scribner's and other American magazines until my official duties became responsible and I had no strength after office hours for constant production.¹⁷

Scott was busier when the House was in session than at other times. He had to crowd his visit to London for the unveiling of the Lampman cairn because, as he put it to Fox, "although the house will not do any Indian business, still I know that I shall have a great many calls from members."

Scott's professional life, by itself, may have been enough to make serious inroads on his literary productions. But the Canada of his era was not a place where one was likely to make a living by one's pen, and Scott never expected that. The mind only begins to boggle when it looks at the number and variety of Scott's "extra-curricular" preoccupations.

The Royal Society of Canada was one body that claimed a good deal of time. Scott was, presumably, a much more active member than he needed to be. He was not only, at various times, Secretary, Vice-President and President of the Society, but also served on many committees, like the Advisory Comrnittee on Nominations and the Committee to award the Flavelle Medal. He was, with the Honorable Rodolphe Lemieux, speaker of the House of Commons, appointed to deal with Lorne Pierce's offer of a medal to the society in 1924. In 1929 he was Chairman of the Society's Endowment Fund. Anyone who has had to do with the organization of a conference will know what Scott means when he mentions in a 1916 letter to Pelham Edgar that he was too busy "as usual" running about at the annual meeting to hear the papers that interested him. (With Edgar, Scott had done the huge task of editing the Makers of Canada series, a project which included his own writing of a book on John Graves Simcoe.)

As one might expect, Scott was prominent in the nation's literary leagues. He was Vice-President of the Canadian Society of Authors in 1903, and later active in the Canadian Authors' Association. He was president of that body in 1931. He was also a member of the Board of Governors of a philanthropic organization called the Canadian Writer's Foundation, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1937.

There are letters to Scott's friend George Herbert Clarke, Head of the Department of English at Queen's University, asking him to judge poems and essays in the Willingdon Arts Competition, under the auspices of the Governor General, which Scott appears to have been handling. Scott wrote to E. K. Brown in 1945 about his own reading of twenty-two one-act plays for an Ottawa Drama League Competition ("l am surely a fool to undertake this sort of slavery."). In fact Scott was President of the Drama League for a long unbroken string in the twenties, and still Honorary Vice-President in 1947.

It looks as if Scott's administrative ability must have got him executive positions which then begot other executive positions, some a little surprising. He was a temporary member in 1922 of the Board of Governors of Ottawa Film Producers, interestingly, because he has very little to say about film in his letters, except that he went to see Olivier's Henry V twice, and was tempted to go a third time. In 1930 he was elected President of his Ottawa Country Club. "What folly," he wrote to Pelham Edgar, "when I ought to be dreaming or thinking of something else."

All of this takes on a new light when it is realized that Scott was not naturally a public man. "This public life is highly distasteful," he wrote in 1914 to Pelham Edgar. In fact Scott was a very reserved person, and one feels for him when one reads that Scott was solicited to deliver "a course of Public Library lectures on the younger British poets - in March [of 1914]," or finds Scott cited as addressing the Vagabond's Club of Vancouver in June 1916, or the Montreal Canadian Club in November 1923, or the Poetry Society of Canada in April 1925.

What goes before is likely the tip of the iceberg. But even this fairly sketchy account ought to make it clear that there were many more demands made on Scott's time than those claimed by Lampman's affairs. Perhaps a good deal of the story is told, most simply, this way: Duncan Campbell Scott C.M.G., L.L.D., D.Litt., F.R.S.C. F.R.S.L.

I am not sure whether the picture I have been presenting is complicated or qualified by saying that Scott found time to travel widely even while he was with Indian Affairs, that he read prodigiously, that he listened to music in his beloved music room and elsewhere, that he played lawn bowls and golf, the latter occasionally with Sir Robert Borden, and of course that he was a prolific correspondent. It does seem likely that the pressures of public life were considerably diminished after his retirement from Indian Affairs. At about the same time (1931) he resigned from the Rideau Club and from the Royal Ottawa Golf Club, and in 1937 he could write to Pelham Edgar that

the [Ottawa] journal got me (after pressure) to do [Martin] Burrell's column when he was away ill and I did five weeks, 2400 words each. Now he is home and takes it up and I miss the compulsion. I feel that if I had a task I might do some more work but I haven't - so!

My sketch of Scott's activities is meant to provide some perspective on his Lampman work, to suggest that his "labour of love" was not simply a hobby. While Scott was no saint (he had occasional lapses into touchiness or even intolerance) I believe that his custodianship of the affairs Archibald Lampman, with all I have tried to suggest that meant, was typical of the man. His generosity was not isolated. I might simply mention that Scott acted as sales agent for etchings and paintings of Clarence Gagnon from 1925 to 1931, while his painter-friend was in France and elsewhere, and that he was active in the same way for Gagnon's widow as late as 1944. But Scott served no one as long and assiduously as he did Lampman. Perhaps not even himself.

It would be absurd to say that Scott's efforts on behalf of Lampman put his own literary career in the shadow. For one thing, he was always too reticent to push himself. He left that sort of thing to people like William Wilfred Campbell, whose self-puffery in the Canadian Who's Who he chuckled over. For another, it was not only Lampman matters that took his time. There was much else, as I have pointed out. It may be safe to conclude that to some extent Scott was a victim of his efficiency, his sense of duty and his visibility. Quite likely the fiction suffered more than the poetry. Scott wrote Raymond Knister in 1928 to thank him for the dedication to him of Knister's anthology of stories:

I might have written more fiction, maybe, under other conditions and even now my mind is full of the fictional and dramatical. But the essential stretches [?] of time are absent now as they ever were, and so the characters and plots go "up the chimney" where Tennyson said so many of his fine lines went.

Scott's literary executorship may not be entirely to blame for the shortage of time to pursue his own literary affairs, then. And Scott did manage to see his own The Circle of Affection into print in 1947, the year of his death. But he also put the editing of Lampman's Selected Poems ahead of the attention that E. K. Brown urged him to give his own. Characteristically, he also gave a good deal of time and energy to the writing of a pamphlet on Walter J. Philips, the painter, also published in 1947 - more of both than he would have expended if he hadn't felt "a sincere admiration for [Philips's] work" and therefore felt obliged to write the pamphlet for Lorne Pierce.

Scott seems to have carried the agreeable burden of a debt to Archibald Lampman throughout his life, both the personal sort that arises out of deep friendship, and the more impersonal but no less real debt that any man inspires who has written poetry of enduring appeal. In fully discharging that obligation Scott created another, equally agreeable, which we owe to him. I am not the first to acknowledge that debt, so it may be appropriate to finish with the words of another, one who was in a position to communicate his gratitude to Scott himself. This is Lorne Pierce writing to Scott on June 5, 1947, about The Selected Poems of Archibald Lampman:

This, in a way, completes your long and distinguished service on behalf of your old friend. No literary executor could have been more faithful to his trust. There is no way that we have of compensating you adequately for this but the heirs of Archibald Lampman as well as this house [Ryerson] wish to express their great appreciation in a tangibleway and they ask you to accept the enclosed cheque for $100 .00 with their profound thanks.

The $100.00 is, to me, an anticlimactic note in Pierce's testimonial. The money gave Scott some pause before he decided it would seem ungrateful not to accept it. Nevertheless, Pierce's letter may be endorsed as a timely and fitting gesture towards recognizing Scott's noble record of activity on behalf of Archibald Lampman.

Notes

¹Scott, "A Decade of Canadian Poetry," The Canadian Magazine XVII (1901), 158.

²Margaret Coulby Whitridge, Lampman's Kate (Ottawa, 1975), 12.

³Brown, Selected Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott (Toronto, 1947), xv.

⁴Ibid., xx.

⁵Whitridge. 20

⁶The letter is amongst a substantial residue of D. C. Scott's papers retained by Mr. John G. Aylen, of Ottawa, as literary executor for the estate of his aunt, Elise Aylen Scott. These papers are currently in the custody of Professor R. L. McDougall, of Carleton University, who is authorized to use them in the preparation of editions of Scott's letters and, eventually, the writing of a biography. I am indebted to Professor McDougall for giving me access to thern in the course of my research for this article. Where I have quoted frorn the Aylen/Scott sources, as above and in what follows, I have asked for the appropriate copyright permission.

⁷Scott, Introduction to Lyrics of Earth (Toronto, 1925), 3.

⁸Scott, Foreword to At the Long Sault (Toronto, 1943), viii.

⁹Elsie Pomeroy, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts: A Biography (Toronto, 1943).

¹⁰Scott, "Archibald Lampman," in Addresses Delivered at the Dedcation of the Archibald Lampman Memorial Cairn at Morpeth Ontario (London, Ontario, 1930).

¹¹Gustafson, "Among the Millet," Northern Review 1 (l947), 26-34. Scott's letter to Gustafson appeared in Fiddlehead 41 (1959), 12-14.

¹²Margaret Coulby Whitridge in Lampman's Kate and Bruce Nesbitt in "Lampman and Life," Canadian Literature 50 (1971), 35-40.

¹³Scott, viii.

¹⁴In A. S. Bourinot ed., Some Letters of Duncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman and Others (Ottawa, 1959), 42, the phrase-for the girl he loved" is deleted. The omission may have helped exaggerate the partly justified feeling in some quarters that Scott was reluctant to face up to the poetic results of Lampman's extra-marital love. The uncensored letter is in the E. K. Brown papers in the National Archives, which provide most of the raw material for an edition of the Scott/Brown correspondence under preparation by Professor R. L. McDougall.

¹⁵In a letter to the author, Margaret Whitridge puts the young Lampman's attitude to his father in perspective: "Lampman's son was six months old when his father died; he never knew a father and could not help but know he was missing somebody! Lampman's daughter was only six years old and must also have been bereft. How do you resent someone important whom you never knew or cannot remember?"

¹⁶Selected Poems, xxxiii.

¹⁷Emphasis is Scott's.