Literature Compass 9/1 (2012): 6679, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00864.

The Romantic Aesthetics of Settlement in

19th Century Canada
D. M. R. Bentley*
The University of Western Ontario

Abstract

During the Settler Revolution of the pre-Confederation period (17591867) in Canada and for
some time afterwards, perceptions of the Canadian landscape were filtered through the aesthetics
of the sublime and the picturesque. In addition to seeking out and describing sublime and picturesque sites such as Niagara Falls and the Thousand Islands in what is now Ontario, writers used
and adapted the two aesthetics to suit the needs of settlement, deploying the sublime to depict,
for example, the clearing fires that were deliberately set to deforest large tracts of land, and the
picturesque to identify areas of profitable beauty that is, areas whose fertility, terrain, and climate were amenable to successful agricultural settlement and, hence, to the eventual realization of
the utopian ideal of independence and freedom based on prosperity. Works such as Thomas
Carys Abrams Plains (1789), John Howisons Sketches of Upper Canada (1821), Oliver Goldsmiths
The Rising Village (1825), Catharine Parr Traills The Backwoods of Canada (1836), and Susanna
Moodies Roughing It in the Bush (1852) contain passages in which the picturesque aesthetic especially is used to give shape to the landscapes of central and eastern Canada and, indeed, to the
country that emerged in 1867.

In vain does the imagination try to roam at large amidst cultivated plains, for everywhere the habitations of mankind oppose its wish; but in this desert region the soul
delights to bury and lose itself amidst boundless [] forests [] to hover on the roaring gulf of terrific cataracts to fall with the mighty mass of water to mix and confound itself, as it were, with the wild sublimities of nature. The passage from the Une
Nuit dans les deserts du Nouveau Monde chapter in Chateaubriands Genie du Christianisme (1802) that John Howison used as an epigraph in his Sketches of Upper Canada (1821)
brings to the North American landscape an age-old dichotomy that was potently invigorated by the Romantics: on the one hand, lie cultivated and more-or-less populous
agricultural and urban landscapes that stifle or darken the imagination, and on the other,
lie landscapes whose vertical and horizontal sublimities both open and overwhelm the
mind and, in doing so, generate a sense of human insignificance in face of the vastness of
Nature and or the power of its Creator. In two of the seventeen letters, purportedly
written to a friend in Britain, that make up Sketches of Upper Canada, Howison provides
lengthy descriptions of Niagara Falls and its surroundings that bear the unmistakable hallmarks of Chateaubriand and, moreover, suggest his familiarity with other well know
responses to the Falls in such texts as Thomas Moores Poems Relating to America
(1806) and Isaac Welds Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of
Upper and Lower Canada, During the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (1799). Precisely because
of these similarities, Howisons response to Niagara Falls is less important to the history
of the transference and adaptation of Romantic aesthetics to the Canadian environment
(and vice versa) than are his descriptions of the agricultural landscapes of Upper Canada
(later Canada West and then Ontario): both in and of themselves and through their
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Romantic Aesthetics of Settlement in Canada 67

influence on the ways in which the Canadian environment was seen and manipulated by
British immigrants to Canada, these descriptions are a significant component of the Settler Revolution that, as James Belich has recently argued, created and shaped the
Anglo-World of North America, Australasia, and South Africa from 1783 to 1939 and
beyond (see 9, 58 and passim).
I.
[] swains returning as the day declines
Exult oer prostrate oaks and burning pines,
A pleasure greater far than the conqror knows. []
John Strachan, Verses [] 1802 (1013)

The aesthetic component of the Settler Revolution consists of multiple elements that
came to prominence in the second half of the 18th century and underwent various modifications in the ensuing decades and later. As already evident, foremost among these was
the sublime as formulated by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), theorized by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment (1790), and both sought and described by countless writers and artists,
including several in Canada.1 In Abrams Plains (1789), for example, Thomas Cary precedes his commemorative celebration of General James Wolfes momentous victory and
operatic death on the Plains of Abraham thirty years earlier with a locodescriptive survey
of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River system that uses alliteration, spondee, a
triplet (the only one in the poem), and other devices in an attempt to convey a sense of
the sublimity of Niagara Falls:2
The streams [] rushing with tremendous roar,
)
Down thy dread fall, Niagara, pour;
Back foaming, in thick hoary mists, they bound,
The thundring noise deafens the country round,
Whilst echo, from her caves, redoubling sends the sound.
Twixt awe and pleasure, rapt in wild suspense,
Giddy, the gazer yields up evry sense.
So have I felt when Handels heavenly strains,
Choral, announce the great Messiah reigns:
Caught up in sound, I leave my earthly part,
And into something more than mortal start. (2939)

With inevitable variations of subject and tone, passages parallel to this appear in numerous later poems and prose works by visitors and immigrants alike. In the former category, Anna Jamesons expression of disappointment in Winter Studies and Summer
Rambles in Canada (1838) that Niagara Falls failed to live up to expectations (entry for
29 January) is an exception that merely throws into relief the extent to which writers
and artists who were already textually familiar with Canadas scenery responded as convention required to the regions sublime sights, be they the terrific cataracts of Niagara, the boundless forests of Ontario or, in the case of the immigrant Susanna
Moodie in Roughing It in the Bush (1852), the long range of lofty mountains stretching
away to the east of Quebec City until their blue summits are blended and lost in the
blue of the sky (27). (As intimated by the alliterations alone in Moodies description,
sublime features of the Canadian landscape elicited purple patches from prose and poetry
writers alike.)
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A considerably less conventional application of sublime principles and language to

Canadian landscapes and experiences begins to appear early in the 19th century in writings aimed at celebrating settler achievements and encouraging immigration. Perhaps the
earliest instance appears in Adam Hood Burwells Talbot Road (1818), a long poem about
the settlement of the north shore of Lake Erie, where Burwell was born circa 1790 and
where, some 9 years later in The Pleasures of Hope (1799), Thomas Campbell would envisage flocks on thymy pastures and the glittering haunts of men (1:329, 332). Probably
taking his cue from Welds account of a fire that was deliberately started by settlers to
clear land in Virginia,3 Burwell presents the firing of brushwood and heaped logs as a
moment of what may be called settler sublimity:
Amongst the leafy brushwood fast [the Woodman] plies,
When lo! a hundred brilliant spires arise,
Columns of flame, and denser smoke that shrouds
The mid-day sun, and mingles with the clouds,
Wide wasting conflagration []
[ ]
[] through the shades of the autumnal night,
The flaming log-heaps cast a glaring light;
In contrast deep the clouds, of sable hue;
Spread their dense mantle oer the ethereal blue;
Above is pitchy blackness all below
Wide flashing fires Around, far other show
Majestic trees, whose yet unfaded bloom,
In pale reflection, gives a sylvan gloom
A dubious maze, which leads th uncertain sight
To the drear confines of eternal night,
As it might seem: While [] raging fires
[] upward shoot a thousand [] spires. []4 (2659, 27990)

A debt to Weld may help to explain the similarities between these lines and a passage in
The Backwoods of Canada (1836) in which Moodies sister Catharine Parr Traill, who also
immigrated to Upper Canada in the early eighteen thirties, uses the terminology of the
sublime to describe a spectacular clearing fire:
It is [] a magnificent sight to see the blazing trees and watch the awful progress of the conflagration, as it hurries onward, consuming all before it, or leaving such scorching mementoes as
have blasted the forest growth for years. [] Of a night the effect is more evident; sometimes
the wind blows particles of the burning fuel into the hollow pines and tall decaying stumps;
these readily ignite, and after a time present an appearance that is exceedingly fine and fanciful.
Fiery columns, the bases of which are hidden by the dense smoke wreaths, are to be seen in
every direction, sending up showers of sparks that are whirled around like rockets and firewheels in the wind.5 (1589)

Nearly 50 years later in Malcolms Katie (1884), Isabella Valancy Crawford imagines the
Ontario settler whose daughter is the eponymous heroine of the poem guiding the ripping beak of his moldboard plough Thro torturous lanes of blackend, smoking
stumps; And past great flaming brush heaps and then envisages his future son-in-law
Max repeating the process, probably in eastern Ontario or Manitoba:
Soon the great heaps of brush were builded high,
And, like a victor, Max made pause to clear
His battle-field, high strewn with tangld dead.

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Romantic Aesthetics of Settlement in Canada 69

Then roard the crackling mountains, and their fires

Met in high heaven, clasping flame with flame.
The thin winds swept a cosmos of red sparks
Across the bleak, midnight sky; and the sun
Walkd pale behind the resinous, black smoke.6 (1:789 and 2:17481)

Whereas Traill follows her description by expressing misgivings about the destruction of
large areas of forest,7 Max has no such scruples: he car[es] [] little for the blotted sun,
And nothing for the startld outshone stars (2:1823) because his love for Katie has placed
him in a heterocosm with its own sun, [] moon, [] [and] stars (2:187) and, more to
the present point, because he is utterly dedicated to the task and ideology of settlement.
A perceptive gloss on these and other instances of the settler sublime is provided by
John Strachan (an immigrant from Scotland who later became the first Bishop of
Toronto) when he remarks pseudonymously in A Visit to the Province of Upper Canada in
1819 (1820) that the sight of burning masses [of logs] at night [] through a large
extent of country present[s] a brilliant spectacle that becomes powerfully interesting
when it is considered that these are the first steps towards reducing the wilderness into a
fruitful country (76). With this last statement, Strachan introduces a conceptual component to the sublimely brilliant spectacle of a clearing fire by situating it in the narrative
of settlement, thus supplementing the sight, not just with powerful [] interest, but
also with a teleological dimension that is particular to settler culture. Unlike those strains
of the sublime that affirm the grandeur of natural spectacle[s] such as Niagara Falls and
the corresponding incapacity and insignificance of the individual observer, the settler sublime speaks to the capacity of humans to develop the natural world in accordance with
Gods injunction to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1.28: Be fruitful and multiply, and
replenish the earth and subdue it. The brilliant spectacle was powerfully interesting
to Strachan and others precisely because it was the first stage in the transformation of the
wilderness into a fruitful agricultural land. There is [] a peculiar charm in the
excitement of improving a wilderness for the benefit of children and posterity, writes
Moodie; there is in it, also, that consciousness of usefulness which forms so essential an
ingredient in true happiness. Every tree that falls beneath the axe opens a wider prospect,
and encourages the settler to persevere in his efforts to attain independence (2523).
The words usefulness and happiness in this statement bespeak the presence of Utilitarianism in Moodies thinking, but otherwise the statement is a typical instance of the
settler conception of land clearance as a preliminary and prefiguring stage in the realization of an ambition to be financially and socially independent an ambition that has
some of its roots in the desire for freedom that fuelled the American and French revolutions and, much to the dismay of Moodie and many others, found later expression in the
rebellions of 18371838 in Upper and Lower Canada.
While settler writing is not devoid of the sorts of responses to external Nature that are
popularly associated with Romanticism, these invariably occur as spots of time within the
narratives of settlement and improvement, one theme of which is that the settler subject
can never be in more than fleeting harmony with the Canadian environment until it has
been modified in accordance with settler goals and ambitions. Only when that modification has occurred or progressed substantially can the settler take pleasure in the environment and, moreover, indulge in satisfying reflections about what has been achieved and
what the future holds. When Burwells Woodman has completed his days work, he
watches over his fireheaps while regaling his wife and sons with schemes for future
happiness that include the building of a barn, the clearing of new land, the planting
of an orchard,8 and the purchase of a separate farm for each deserving son (296
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316). Later in the poem, the narrator looks forward to the day when every farm in
what is now southwestern Ontario will be graced by a stately mansion from which the
farmer [can] contemplate [] The little Eden that he calls his own (6158). The sections that follow the Burning of the Log-Heaps in The Backwoods of Canada are entitled
Crops for the Season, Farming Stock, Choice Land, and Relative Advantages,
and Clearing Land (157). [I]n the glow of forest pyres and amid the blackend
stumps in Malcolms Katie, Max imagines a future home with snowy walls, deep
porches, and vines about the door and his fellow settlers a lean weaver and a
pallid clerk (probably immigrants from Britain) look[ing] [] forward with
hope to the ploughing of [] [their] field[s], And to the rose of Plenty in the
cheeks Of wife and children (2:2478, 21324). In each of these instances and in
many like them in settler writing, the clearing of land and the stages that follow are landmarks that simultaneously celebrate the marking of the land in accordance with settler
ambition and serve as prefigurations of a realized utopian condition of independence and
freedom based on prosperity and Plenty a society in which the abundance of agricultural land in theory permits every family to own a farm and to exist in the condition of
parity that led John Kenneth Galbraith to pronounce Ontario the most democratic region
on earth.
In Maxs case, the disjunction between his sustaining vision of a prosperous future with
Katie and the preliminary stage of settlement in which he is engaging leads the women
with whom he confides his hopes and plans to refer to the black slope all bristling with
stumps that he is in the process of clearing as Maxs house (2:2523). The basis of the
humour here is not merely the disjunction between dream and reality, but also the aesthetic contrast between the snowy-walled, vine-clad (and, in this, resonantly English)
house that Max plans to build and the black slope that his felling and burning of trees
has left bristling with objects burnd and earlier blackend (2:211) stumps
that were both an impediment to agricultural development and a violation of aesthetic
expectations, especially to settlers and travellers who were accustomed to seeking and
enjoying scenes considered picturesque (more of which in a moment). After the burning
is over, writes Traill, the ground [is] perfectly free from all encumbrances, excepting
the standing stumps, which rarely burn out, and remain eye-sores for several years and
necessitate the use of a queer sort of harrow that is made in the shape of a triangle for
the better passing between [them] (159). In earlier letters, Traill describes a fine cleared
farm whose green pastures [] [are] rendered more pleasing by the absence of the odious stumps that disfigure recently cleared areas and anticipates the happy day when her
own farm will not be encumbered by horrid black stumps (93, 108). In her final letter,
however, she remains true to her overall goal of allaying the misgivings of the wives
and daughters of emigrants of the higher class (9) about life in the backwoods of Canada
by stating that she has become inured even to its eye-sores:
I daily feel my attachment to [the country] strengthening. The very stumps that appeared so
odious, through long custom, seem to lose some of their hideousness; the eye becomes familiarized even with objects the most displeasing, till they cease to be observed. Some century hence
how different will this spot appear! I can picture it to my imagination with fertile fields and
groves of trees planted by the hand of taste; all will be different; our present rude dwellings
will have given place to others of a more elegant style of architecture, and comfort and grace
will rule the scene which is now a forest wild. (2501)

In the meantime, black stumps, like rude dwellings, are tolerable not merely because
familiarity has rendered them (almost) invisible, but because they are the residue of a stage
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Romantic Aesthetics of Settlement in Canada 71

the reduc[tion] [of] the wilderness into a fruitful country in Canadas progress towards
the prosperity represented architecturally by dwellings [] of a more elegant style.9
Although the stumps of trees that had been felled were less of an eye-sore than
charred stumps, they too were condemned for both aesthetic and economic reasons, as in
Nova Scotia were the cradle hills that studded every field reclaimed from the forest, each with the trunk of a tree at its centre (Young 4078). Like the shallow cavities that also present[ed] themselves in [] field[s] reclaimed from the forest, cradle
hills were inimical to beauty because they lacked harmonious symmetry and they
were an impediment to agriculture because they militate[d] against the correctness and
expedition of all field operations: [t]he plough cannot throw off a furrow of equal
depth and breadth, when it is perpetually ascending and descending these hillocks [and
cavities]; at one time plunging into the ground, and at another skimming the surface.
[] The [] motions are not unlike those of a vessel in a storm, alternatively rising and
falling with every heaving billow (Young 4079). These are the words of Robert
Young in The Letters of Agricola on the Principle of Vegetation and Tillage (1822), a series of
essays first published in the Acadian Recorder (Halifax) in 1818 and 1819, that lies centrally
in the background of The Rising Village (1825, 1834), a topographical poem about the
settlement of Nova Scotia by the namesake and great-grand nephew of the author of The
Deserted Village (1770). To Young, a field studded with cradle hills resembles a lake
blown upon by conflicting winds and the evils arising from [] [them] the more to
be regretted because the remedy a plough that would scoop [them] up after they
were too loosened [] and transport them to wherever the earth was wanted to fill up
the cavities is neither laborious nor expensive (408, 411).10 Bent on celebrating
the reduction of a wilderness of trees into a farm that will provide the nucleus of a
thriving village, the Canadian Oliver Goldsmith ignores the elimination of cradle hills
and cavities and focuses entirely on the near-alchemical transformation of the forest by
fire:
See! From their heights the lofty pines descend,
And crackling, down their pondrous lengths extend.
Soon from their boughs the curling flames arise,
Mount into air, and redden all the skies;
And where the forest once its foliage spread,
The golden corn triumphant waves its head. (6772)

Nevertheless, a note to these lines explains that, after the remnants of the trees have been
collected into heaps, and reduced to ashes, [t]he grain is [] sown between the
stumps [], which remain, until the lapse of time, from ten to fifteen years, reduces
them to decay (72n). The very fact that Goldsmith relegated this information to a note
bespeaks his recognition that the idea and image of grain sown around slowly decaying
stumps must be peripheral to a celebration of Nova Scotias rapid agricultural, aesthetic,
and, ultimately, political development into a place to rival Britain.
II.
We must put far from us [] all poetry [] as has its source and nutriment in the picturesque
alone. For order, regularity, and a certain amount of uniformity, which are essential conditions
of a nations welfare, constitute the greatest enemies of the picturesque, and are utter abominations to a poets fancy. The straightest road from one point to another is the best for all the
practical purposes of locomotion. Yet it is certainly the least attractive to the eye. The line of

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rectitude is rarely the line of beauty. [] The pursuits of commerce afford few materials to
gratify a superficial fancy, however grand or beneficent their results may be.
William Rathbone Greg, Resources of an Increasing Population (1843) (106)

As intimated a few moments ago in the discussion of the charred stumps that remained
after the firing of land, the second major aesthetic component of the Settler Revolution in late 18th and early 19th century Canada was the picturesque, a mode of seeing
and depicting that had literary roots in the work of Alexander Pope, James Thomson,
and others, and was given influential theoretical expression for the Romantics and their
successors by Uvedale Price (in his Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with The Sublime
and the Beautiful [1794]) and Richard Payne Knight (in The Landscape: A Landscape Poem
[1794]). Distinguished as a category by a harmonious combination of different colours,
textures, and physical features, the picturesque as practiced at Blenheim, Stourhead, and
other English country estates by such landscape architects as Lancelot Capability Brown
and Humphry Repton, was tainted by the enclosures with a profound pessimism
whereby, as Anne Bermingham has shown in Landscape and Ideology: The English Tradition,
17401860, the most pleasing landscapes and occupations were those that had become
anachronistic and economically [un]productive (15, 66, 81). In Canada, this was also
the case when the subjects were French Canadian habitants and the supposedly vanishing
Native peoples, but in settler writing profound pessimism is replaced by buoyant optimism and the most pleasing landscapes are those that indicate achieved or potential
productivity and prosperity. The Scots writer, agent of the Canada Company, and founder of Guelph, Ontario John Galt, captures the difference between British practice and
settler practicality in a description of the Thousand Islands in Bogle Corbet; or, the Emigrants, his 1831 novel about the trials, tribulations, and ultimate success of a group of
Scots immigrants to Canada West:
I was a good deal shattered [] by the beauty of the scenery, which, as the vessel [] meandered among the islets, opened innumerable vistas of pleasing nooks and sylvan bowers, beautiful as if they had been the artificial ornaments of some Blenheim or Stowe, adorned by a
Capability Brown, and not the unpremeditated graces of Nature in her Playfulness. [] [But]
except in a few places, the picturesque in th[is] romantic wilderness of cliffs, and trees, and
glassy waters, is certainly obtained in contempt of all profitable beauty. (3:23)

Crucial to the settler picturesque because it was capable of identifying the signs of existing
and potential agricultural success and prosperity was a gaze in search of prospects or outlooks in both the pictorial and the economic senses of the two terms. On every side fair
prospects charm [] [the] settlers] eyes, enthuses the narrator of The Rising Village as
The arts of [agri]culture produce crops, with rich luxuriance crowned and as the
cottages of other settlers By slow degrees [form] a neighbourhood (113, 1216). In
such passages, where the word prospects refers to appealing scenes or vistas and to
financial expectations, the settler is cast as the creator of both picturesque beauty and the
agricultural prosperity that will produce a thriving society and province. As the wide
clearing brightens to the skies, wrote Galt in The Settler (1834), hopes ascend, and
fairer fancies rise (216). While the displacement of Native peoples that the process of
settlement involved was seen as cause for celebration by Goldsmith and like-minded writers, it generated feelings of pathos and guilt in others, who drew the figure of the Noble
Savage from the Romantic imaginary to express their misgivings and, in doing so, helped
to create the myth of the vanishing Indian that, ironically, served to assuage those misgivings by casting the eventual extinction of North Americas Native peoples as inevitable.

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Some three decades earlier (and some 5 years before the seminal publications of Price
and Knight), Cary prepared himself for the composition of Abrams Plains by reading The
Deserted Village and Popes Windsor-Forest (1713) with the view of endeavouring, in
some degree, to catch their manner of writing (Preface to Abrams Plains 3841). In
Popes poem, he would have found not only the proto-picturesque concept of Order in
Variety (15), but also the Here There convention for bringing order to variety that
he uses in Abrams Plains to present the evidence of Lower Canadas agricultural prosperity:
There, on thy banks, Saint Charles, rich meadows vie,
In vivid green, to ease the dazzled eye.
[ ]
Here milch-kine lowing leave the grazing field,
And glad to man their milky homage yield. []
[ ]
Next Charlebourg, blest in a bounteous soil
Where plenteous harvests pay the labrors toil.
Thy beauties, Beauport, open on mine eyes,
There fertile fields and breezy lawns arise;
Far as Montmorenci, thy pleasing stream,
Romantic as a love-sick virgins dream.
Beyond the vales, still stretching on my view,
Hills, behind hills, my aching eyes pursue.
Till, in surrounding skies, I lose my way,
Where the long landscape fading dies away. (3989, 4089, 41827)

Up and down the St. Lawrence River from Quebec, bounteous soil ensures plenteous harvests and ample grazing, and Beyond the vales lies a landscape of bewildering indeed, sublime extent and potential. The Montmorenci River is pleasing
and [r]omantic but the area around the village of Beauport is beautiful because of its
visibly fertile and breezy (and, hence, open and extensive) fields and pastures: a
structuring equation of aesthetic appeal, agricultural development, and economic potential
permeates the passage and the poem as whole, prefiguring a future in which even more
beauty and prosperity will exist in a state of harmonious interdependence.
In the decades following the publications of Price and Knight, travel in search of
picturesque scenery increased dramatically in Canada as elsewhere, yielding such classics
as George Heriots Travels through the Canadas, Containing a Description of the Picturesque
Scenery on Some of the Rivers and Lakes [] of These Provinces (1807) and culminating in
the two volumes of George Monro Grants Picturesque Canada; the County as It Was
and Is (18801881). Between these works lay the period of Canadian hyper-colonization (Belich 279) that began after the War of 1812 and continued with fluctuations in
intensity until approximately a decade before Confederation (1867). Embedded in these
years of explosive colonization was a discourse of improvement and progress (Belich
179 and see 177218) whose core aesthetic component is the settler picturesque of
profitable beauty that puts in an early and perhaps seminal appearance in Sketches of
Upper Canada when Howison turns his attention westward from Niagara Falls and the
settled areas of the Niagara Peninsula to the north shore of Lake Erie and the burgeoning Talbot Settlement. Along the Niagara River and around the town of St. Catherines, long-established apple and peach orchards ornament the sides of the road[s], and

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are, every season, loaded with a profusion of delightful fruit (67), but to the west lies
the vast area of land that Campbell had envisaged in The Pleasures of Hope and, probably unbeknownst to Howison, Burwell had celebrated in Talbot Road.
I shall now lead you a ramble through Long Point, which is a tract of country different in appearance from any I have yet described, writes Howison at the beginning of
the first of four letters (XXIII) devoted to his journey to the western end of Lake Erie:
When I first visited this part of the Province, the sudden change which took place in the aspect
of nature seemed like magic. The soil became light and sandy, the forests had dwindled away,
and natural groves and copses met the eye in their stead. The fields were beautifully level, and
the uncultivated lands had more the appearance of a pleasure-ground than of a wilderness. The
trees being small and few in number, and distributed in beautiful clumps, did not at all suggest
the idea of a forest, but added charms to the country and variety to the prospect. The day was
warm and bright, and the autumn had already begun to dye the leaves with tints the most
glowing and exquisite. As I travelled onwards, I was at one time encircled with lovely woods,
and refreshed by the fragrance of wild flowers, which clustered in profusion around the root of
almost every tree; and at another, attracted by the level and beautifully cleared farms, the fronts
of which were generally occupied by extensive orchards. (1545)

[B]eautifully level is an obvious marker of the agricultural potential that is already

being realized in the beautifully cleared farms, as, perhaps less obviously, is the observation that, because they are small [] few in number, and distributed in beautiful
clumps, the trees [] d[o] not at all suggest the idea of a forest, but add [] charms
to the country and variety to the prospect: clumps of trees are beautiful and render
the prospect picturesque, but if they were of sufficient size and density to suggest a forest they would make the area unattractive both aesthetically and agriculturally a point
that Howison makes explicit in subsequent statements about the Long Point area:
no one can attain a correct idea of its charms, or form an estimate of its advantages, unless he
makes a journey through it. The land is so little overspread with timber, that if the brushwood
is cleared away, it may be cropped without cutting down a single tree. The soil is [] inferior
[] to that in various other places, but th[is] deficit [] [is] compensated for by easy tillage,
and the facility of clearing it. [] [N]o other part of Upper Canada possesses so many natural
advantages, or is so well suited to the idea and taste of Europeans, as Long Point. (159)

While aesthetically sophisticated settlers such as Traill held to the view that clumps and
carefully chosen and sited specimen trees enhance the appeal of agricultural land, many
possibly most settlers apparently regarded all trees as impediments to progress and as
blemishes on the ideal of a perfectly cleared field. In the section of his Travels devoted to
the United States, Weld observes that his admiration for uninterrupted woods and
beautiful cascade[s] was not shared by [t]he generality of Americans:
[t]o them the sight of a wheat field or a cabbage garden would convey a pleasure far greater
than that of the most romantic woodland. They have an unconquerable aversion to trees, and
whenever a settlement is made, they cut away all before them without mercy. (1:39)

After pondering various explanations for this, Weld concludes:

the fact of the matter is, that from the face of the country being entirely overspread with trees,
the eyes of the people become satiated with the sight of them. The ground cannot be tilled,
nor can the inhabitants support themselves, till they are removed; they are looked upon as a
nuisance, and the man that can cut down the largest number, and have the fields about his
house most clear of them, is looked upon as the most industrious citizen, and the one that is
making the greatest improvements in the country. (1:401)

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Some 40 years later, Welds analysis is echoed by Jameson as she describes the journey
from Niagara Falls back to Toronto: [a] Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his
natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any
means. The idea of useful or ornamental is seldom associated here even with the most
magnificent timber trees (64).11 In the aesthetic economy of profitable beauty, the
only beautiful tree is an absent tree.
Intensifying the aversion and hate observed by Weld and Jameson was the depressing psychological effect of extensive and unbroken forests. En route from Toronto to the
Talbot Settlement through a seemingly interminable line of trees, Jameson comments
astutely that the silence, solitude, mysterious depths, and other features of the
wilderness are all either exciting to the fancy, or oppressive to the spirits, according
to the mood one may be in (137). Intent on emphasizing the positive aspects of life in
the backwoods, Traill stresses the infinite satisfaction with which she and her husband
regard [] the few acres that are cleared around the[ir] house and covered with crops:
A space of this kind in the midst of the dense forest imparts a cheerfulness to the mind, of
which those that live in an open country, or even a partially wooded one, can form no idea.
[]
If we feel this so sensibly [] what must those do whose clearing is first opened in the depths
of the forest, hemmed in on every side by a thick wall of trees, through the interminable shades
of which the eye vainly endeavours to penetrate in search of other objects and other scenes; but
so dense is the growth of timber, that all beyond the immediate clearing is wrapped in profound
obscurity. A settler on first locating on his lot knows no more of its boundaries and its natural
features than he does of the northwest passage. (1612)

Despite her resolute cheerfulness (and perhaps remembering remarks by Howison on

the appalling loneliness and depressing monotony of the boundless forest [186]), Traill
concedes that there is [] a monotony in the long and unbroken line of woods, which
insensibly inspires a feeling of gloom almost touching on sadness (63). More inclined to
such feelings than Traill, Moodie found herself see-sawing between the extremes identified by Jameson: at one point, for example, she states that the novelty of woods
assuaged her melancholy in spite of their monotonous character, and at another:
how my spirit tires, In the dark prison of th[e] boundless woods [] Turn where
we will, the landscapes still the same. [] [C]ultivation unimproved by art, [] sheds
a barren chillness on the heart (90, 163). That chillness will not entirely disappear,
she repeatedly implies, until familiarity and cultivation have beautified the landscape
and rendered it an object of affection (see 163, 2236, 258, 4823, 5289).
The suggestion by Moodie, Traill, and others that developed landscapes generate personal and patriotic affection but unbroken and boundless woods do not is made
explicit in The Letters of Agricola when Young draws on Archibald Alisons Essays on the
Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) and Walter Scotts The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)
to argue that tracts of land that exhibit [] throughout the same uniform appearance
can never take[] a strong [] hold on the mind or awake[n] [] vivid and thrilling emotions:
In Nova Scotia [] [Scotts] emphatic and high-meaning words,
This is my dear, my native land
can never be uttered with appropriate glow and enthusiasm, till we can fully and uninterruptedly survey its general aspect, with its hills and dales, its ravines and glens, its rocks and caves,
its springs and rills, its uplands and meadows, now hidden under an uninteresting mantle of

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76 Romantic Aesthetics of Settlement in Canada

foliage. The wilderness is a term of cheerless import, and involves whatever is repugnant to the
human heart. When the lineaments of the country have become distinct and visible, it will win
our affections, and consolidate our patriotism. (4034)

Echoes of this analysis can be heard in The Rising Village when, after 50 years of agricultural development, Nova Scotia has been transformed from a disconcerting and depressing
wilderness of trees into a picturesquely varied landscape of verdant meads, smiling
orchards, broad marsh[es], wood-bound Lake[s], and farmers cottage[s], bosomed
mong [] trees (604, 45174) in short, transformed into an A(r)cadia capable of
generating affection, and consolidat[ing] patriotism. An almost Heideggerian sense of
dwelling(Buan) [c]ultivating [] caring and belong[ing] poetically to a locale
(147, 2178) permeates the poems most lyrical passage:
How sweet to hear the murmuring of the rill,
As down it gurgles from the distant hill;
The note of Whip-poor-Will how sweet to hear,
When sadly slow it breaks upon the ear,
And tells each night, to all the silent vale,
The hopeless sorrows of its mournful tale.
Dear lovely spot! Oh may such charms as these,
Sweet tranquil charms, that cannot fail to please,
Forever reign around thee, and impart
Joy, peace, and comfort to each native heart. (47584)

The word sweet (delightful, charming) and its cognate sweetly, which appear no
fewer than five times in the passage and the surrounding lines, and the sensitively rendered call of the Whip-poor-Will, which is further explained in a footnote,12 bespeak an
intensity of emotional attachment that reaches its apogee in the phrase Dear lovely
spot!, where the adjectives Dear (beloved, costly, highly valued) and lovely (extremely beautiful, exciting love and admiration) reflect in small the complex of aesthetics,
economics, and desire that led to the adaptation of the sublime and the picturesque to a
new place and the implication of the two aesthetics in the shaping and future of that
place. It is no exaggeration to say that, by helping settlers to appreciate and shape the
landscapes of Canada, the sublime and the picturesque worked hand-in-hand with the
drive towards prosperity and independence that, when circumstances dictated, permitted
Canada to emerge and continue as an independent nation.
By the final decade of the 19th century, the settler sublime and the settler picturesque
had all but disappeared, partly because the settler period in eastern and central Canada
was very largely over and partly because the settlement of the western provinces was proceeding under assumptions and in landscapes that were very different from those
described by Thomas Cary, Adam Hood Burwell, Oliver Goldsmith, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, and even Isabella Valancy Crawford. Vast areas of forest did not
need to be cleared and only in places did the terrains of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta,
and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia call for the adaptation of the sublime and the
picturesque to the needs and aspirations of settlers. During the century in which they
flourished the settler sublime and the settler picturesque had reflected the priorities of the
people who, more than anyone before or, arguably, since, shaped forever their portion of
the Canadian landscape, and, indeed, environment by felling and burning immense tracts
of forest to create places to live and prosper and to be enjoyed and loved. Like the
importation and imposition of place names such as Halifax and London, Kingston and

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Romantic Aesthetics of Settlement in Canada 77

Yarmouth, the reterritorialization of the sublime and the picturesque was part of the Englishing or Britishing of Canada that (to borrow a term from cognitive linguistics) created
the emergent structure of British North America, an entity that was both British and
North American and, as such, something distinct from both. To many twenty-first century sensibilities the literally earth-changing and ultimately nation-building transformations of the environment that took place during the Settler Revolution are ethically
and politically abhorrent, but this, surely, makes the thought styles and myths of nature (Douglas 8390) of those who brought them about more rather than less interesting
for the light that they can cast not only on the Canada that was, but also on the Canada
that is and will be.
Short Biography
D. M. R. Bentley is a Distinguished University Professor and the Carl F. Klinck Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. He holds degrees from
the University of Victoria, Dalhousie University, Carleton University, and the University
of London (Kings), with specializations in Victorian literature and art and Canadian literature and culture. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has earned numerous other awards and distinctions for research and teaching, including the Maxwell
Cummings Distinguished Lectureship at McGill University, the 3M Teaching Fellowship
for Excellence in Teaching and Instructional Development, and the Ontario Premiers
Discovery Award, the first to be awarded to scholar in the Arts and Humanities. His
recent publications include: Canadian Architexts: Essays on Literature and Architecture in Canada, 17592006 (2009), The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 18801897 (2004),
A Very Clever and Finished Piece of Writing: William Michael Rossettis Mrs.
Holmes Grey, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (2011); Charles G.D. Robertss Tantramar: Towards a Theory of the Literary Possession of Place and Its Implications, Canadian Poetry (2010); Intellectual, Spiritual, Super-Subtle, Aesthetically Pleasing: Dante
Gabriel Rossettis Roman Widow, British Art Journal (2009); Pre-Raphaelite Typology,
University of Toronto Quarterly (2009); and Jumping to Conclusions: Northrop Frye on
Canadian Literature, Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old (2009).
Notes
* Correspondence: Department of English, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6A 3K7.
Email: dbentley@uwo.ca
1

The North Atlantic Ocean and the period from the fall of Quebec (1759) to the middle-to-late 19th century are
thus, in Edward Saids terms in Travelling Theory, the distance traversed by the aesthetics from their point of
origin to their sites of transplant[ation] and transform[ation] by [] new uses [] [and] new position in []
time and place (2267).
2
See my Introduction to Abrams Plains xxiixxxiii for a detailed analysis.
3
About five oclock, the horizon towards the north became dark, writes Weld, and a terrible whirlwind arose.
[] It carried with it a cloud of dust, dried leaves, and pieces of rotten wood, and in many places, as it came along,
it levelled the fence rails, and unroofed the sheds for the cattle. [] On looking round immediately after the whirlwind had passed, a prodigious column of fire now appeared in a part of the wood where some brushwood had
been burning; in many places the flames rose considerably above the summit of the trees, which were of a large
growth. It was a tremendous, and the same time sublime sight (1:1601).
4
Burwell also treats of large numbers of felled trees as a sublime sight: In heaps on heaps the shivered timbers lie,
A scene of terror to the astonishd eye (9212). See my Introduction to Michael Williams edition of Talbot Road
xvixlii for Paradise Lost as a central presence in Burwells poem, an aspect of it that is partly attributable to his religious caste of mind (he became a minister of the Church of England) and to the fact that in three of its principal

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78 Romantic Aesthetics of Settlement in Canada

settings (Hell, Chaos, Eden) and in its characterization of the world into which Adam and Eve descend after the
Fall, Miltons poem contains passages that would have resonated with Canadian settler experience: in Hell (a realm
of extreme cold as well as heat), Satan and the fallen angels acclimatize themselves and build a city; in Chaos, Satan,
Sin, and Death construct the equivalent of a road as they make their way towards Eden; and in Eden itself, Adam
and Eve make their home in an unfamiliar place and Adam gives names to components of the environment, as presumably he will on the subjecte Plaine (12:640) below, an activity continued by Traill and others.
5
Traill adds that there is no work [] more interesting and exciting than that of tending the log-heaps, rousing
up the dying flames and closing them in, and supplying the fires with fresh fuel (159). See also Howison 1389
for a description of a magnificent forest fire that was caused by a few sparks, blown from an oven, having kindled the brushwood beneath them: [i]mmense volumes of black smoke rolled from different parts of the forest,
and, when the wind divided these, the flames were seen raging on every side, and ascending to the tops of the tallest trees. [] Large burning splinters of timber [] were sometimes projected high into the air like rockets, and
descended again, leaving a showery train of glowing sparks behind them. [] [T]he vast glare of the conflagration
overspread the heavens, with a copper colour most dismal and appalling.
6
Crawfords description may be indebted to Moodies account of a fire set to a fallow (a piece of land left
untilled or unsowed for a year or more to recover its fertility): the heavy wind was driving a dense black cloud of
smoke directly towards us. [] [W]e could not [] see [] our way through the dense canopy of smoke. [] I
[] watched the awful scene in silence [] and it presented a spectacle truly appalling. From out of the dense folds
of smoke, the blackest I ever saw, leaped up continually red forks of lurid flame as high as the tree tops. [] A
deep gloom blotted out the heavens from our sight. The air was filled with fiery particles. [] [C]ould we have
escaped the flames [in the direction of a lake], we should have been blinded and choked by the thick resinous
smoke (3078).
7
Although many portions of Traills writings are proto-ecological in their attitude to the natural world, in this
instance her misgivings are primarily aesthetic: the total absence of trees about [] houses and cleared lands
(162, and see 1634) is a violation of the picturesque principles to be discussed above.
8
Here, as elsewhere in early Canadian writing, orchards are indicative of a well-established farm or settlement for
the obvious reason that they require years to mature.
9
When Moodie visited the Traills log hut in the middle of winter, she found the prospect from the windows
[] not very prepossessing. [] The clearing round the house was very small, and only just reclaimed from the
wilderness, and the greater part of it covered with piles of brushwood, to be burnt the first day of spring. The
charred and blackened stumps of the few acres that had been cleared the preceding year were anything but picturesque, and I concluded, as I turned, disgusted, from the prospect before me, that there was very little beauty to be
found in the backwoods (274, and see also 91 and 107).
10
Young also observes that the presence of cradle hills and cavities hinders the uniform sowing of seed and
the uniform exposure of the ground to rain and sun (410).
11
There are two principal methods of killing trees in this country, besides the quick unfailing destruction of the
axe, continues Jameson; the first by setting fire to them, which sometimes leaves the root uninjured to rot gradually and unseen, or be grubbed up at leisure, or, more generally, there remains a visible fragment of a charred and
blackened stump, deformed and painful to look upon: the other method is slower, but even more effectual; a deep
gash is cut through the bark into the stem, quite around the bole of the tree. This prevents the circulation of the
vital juices and by degrees the tree droops and dies. This is technically calling ringing timber. Is not this like the two
ways in which a womans heart may be killed in this world of ours by passion and by sorrow? But better far the
swift fiery death than this ringing, as they call it! (645). What would be the conceptions of an uninformed
Canadian, wonders Howison, were he told, that the Agricultural Society in England give a reward, annually, to
the person who plants the greatest number of trees? (13).
12
The Whip-poor-Will (Caprimulgus vociferus) is a native of America. On a summers evening the wild and
mournful cadence of its note is heard at a great distance; and the traveller listens with delight to the repeated tale of
its sorrows (477n.). [T]he traveller here may refer to Weld, who also comments on the plaintive air of the
Whip-poor-Will (see 1:1967).

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Bermingham, Anne. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 17401860. Berkeley: U of California P,
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Burwell, Adam Hood. Talbot Road: A Poem. Ed. Michael Williams. London: Canadian Poetry Press, 1991.
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